The myth of human rationality

Jun 17th, 2010
by Steve Harris.
5 comments

As a species, we like to think we make rational decisions. More likely is that we pick comforting mental images and demand them from the world, then invent backward rationalizations for our actions and their unintended consequences.

Whenever you’re on a project and things go wrong for you, it makes sense to stop what you’re doing and re-trace your steps.

As part of that, you’re going to eventually question the assumptions you made in approaching the project.

With the demise of the 20th century, we saw some of the roughest times for humanity fade away — except they’re still here.

The last 100 years has been a time of the most radical change since humanity’s inception, for us. We’ve had some great heights (air travel, space flight, DNA, digital computing) and also some great lows (two world wars, genocides, dumbing down of culture).

Although the signs are still faint, there’s evidence that our future may run into trouble. Particularly, there’s the troubling convergence of these factors:

  • Our population keeps growing.
  • Our politics keep getting more deceptive and corrupt.
  • Pollution keeps increasing.
  • We keep using more land for more humans.
  • With globalization and the loss of culture, the international corporations and big media keep getting more powerful.
  • Despite being liberal democracies, our governments have now become a form of “soft fascism”: the Nanny State.

Some uninformed people will tell you that “slippery slope” arguments, or the idea that letting one thing slide leads to more things sliding, are a logical fallacy. To my mind it’s more accurate to say that slippery slope arguments are often misapplied.

One area they’re not is increase. When laws requiring us to wear seatbelts were passed, we were told they were not going to be used as an excuse to pull over motorists and profit by ticketing them. Can anyone claim that’s the case anymore?

Our population increases. Our economies increase. Each time we legalize some oddity, for example medical marijuana, the onrush of people forces the policy to expand even more. Soon we’re on that slippery slope.

This blog exists to question an important myth, which is that we are rational as a species. We are not — mainly because it’s unclear if we’re (a) in charge of ourselves, in any meaningful sense and (b) actually intending the results of our actions.

To an informed observer, it seems more likely that we are reacting to changes in our reality, and striking back against it monkey-style with assertions of what we’d like to believe. Then to make ourselves sound competent, we invent as many rational reasons (“justification,” “rationalization”) as we can — thinking backward from effect to cause.

I’m going to tackle a series of our big myths, starting in this post with the myth of our rationality itself. But you can look forward to me tackling:

  • Equality
  • Consumerism
  • Diversity
  • Free speech
  • Profit motive
  • Eco-stewardship

Let the blood of sacred cows renew the grass beneath our feet which, we are surprised to find, exists independent of our conscious minds.

Posted in: Politics.

Triteness o’ the Greens

Jun 16th, 2010
by Doug Vance.
2 comments

They just don’t want to consider the possibility that there are just too many people in the world. Like doomsday church people waiting for Messiah to show up, they are sure the right technology or social program will fall out of the sky just in time for salvation.

But don’t mention the possibility that we are blundering into disaster, one following another, caused by ever increasing consumer demand from adding more of us. You see, we just aren’t engaging in the correct kind of consumption is all.

greenmanYou can get some of them, not most, not all, to comprehend finite space, finite habitat for man and the lifeforms he relies on and crowds out. But even this minority, will without realizing what’s implied, unwittingly propose whittling consumerism to ever tinier slices of the collective pie for each person as our numbers continue to grow.

How far does the slippery slope slide? Not to infinity, which would make the slope argument fallacious. But, some propose regression to paleolithic society, a place humans have already been. Will 11 billion mud huts and caves suit 22nd Century Mankind?

Without any advanced form of preserving history and managing society, no one will understand, much less have the means to stop all the thousands of future curious inventors, using their advanced human brains, from reinventing modern consumer society again from scratch.

Overpopulation remains taboo for the green people, yet it is the factor, as we increase its value on the other half of the equation that makes any form of consumerism whatsoever more burdensome on the environment.

All sort of products, from cars to consumer durables to consumer electronics used to have much longer average lives in service. More frequent trade ins/ups seem to have been foisted upon consumers by playing on status-seeking and a desire for novelty.

nakedcapitalism

Environmentalism for many greens is a means to political ends, what humans want,  like selling green goods or votes, not the goal itself, which is what the non-human life we depend on to exist needs.

Make room for nature. This needs to be our litmus test for separating the ecology conservationist from the products and politics utilitarian.

Posted in: Conservation.
Tagged:

Bad science, for profit

Jun 16th, 2010
by Brett Stevens.
1 comment

We don’t lack for examples of bad science. But I picked this one because it is backward rationalization, or finding the result you want to achieve, and then faking the data to back it up.

They did it in this case with (a) valid data and (b) an invalid interpretation of that data.

Headline: Murder rates affect IQ tests scores: study

Reality:

If a murder occurred in a child’s neighborhood — an area of roughly six to 10 square blocks as denoted by the U.S. Census — the children’s test scores fell by an average of half a standard deviation, Sharkey reported.

On an IQ test using 100 as the average or norm, one standard deviation is 15 points. So if a child took the test within a week of a local murder, his or her score was 7-8 points lower on average than the score of a similar child in a similar neighborhood where there was no murder. – Reuters

If you look at the above, you’ll see some salient facts:

  • There was no before/after comparison. They worked from an average of 100 IQ points, and found that in areas near where murders occurred, the IQ of children was generally lower.
  • There is no actual causation suggested. In fact, the question is left open. But through the wording of the article — it’s “science” remember, our new religion — we’re left to assume that there’s a causal relation.
  • Finally, they tell you the real reason why they wanted these results: “black U.S. children score about one standard deviation lower on standardized tests than white children. This finding accounts for half that difference”

Think about how absurd this is. They’re taking a statistic, basing it on the idea that everyone scores a “normal” IQ score of 100, and then assuming that people who score lower are missing points because a murder occurred nearby.

They didn’t test them before the murders.

Yet they make the assumption that the murder caused the low IQ score, and not the other way around: something else groups low IQ people and murders in the same neighborhood.

They also quickly leapt to the universal justification — “this reduces the black/white IQ gap, and therefore increases equality!” — without pointing out all the black success stories who have higher IQs, or all the white failure stories who have lower IQs.

Since leftists specialize in accusations of racism, I think I’ll turn this around on them — this article, which clearly hopes to pander to the vast Crowd of leftists who want to believe we’re all equal because we’re equal inside (our souls, although they can’t use such religious language) is flamingly racist, and here’s why:

  1. It assumes that because someone is black, they must be affected by the test scores of the lower echelon black households.
  2. It assumes that black people need others to help them by making excuses for IQ scores, which are magically valid in this article although lots of other populist “science” talks about IQ as if it were irrelevant.
  3. It wants us to believe that murders cause IQ changes, and that trauma causes IQ changes, instead of having us face the simple fact that IQs differ within racial groups as well as between them, and we need to work with that fact instead of denying it.

In short, there’s a whole lot of bad, angry, and grossly stupid thinking going on here, in the name of “science,” which we like to assume is infallible, even though as this article demonstrates “science” is created by individuals, many of whom pander to the desires of the crowd.

Look for articles in the future proving that if you’ve failed in this life, in a quantum universe there’s a parallel world in which you’re rich, smart, successful and having sex with supermodels. As soon as it occurs to these “scientific” idiots, I’m sure they’ll publish it.

Posted in: Social Reality.

Cycles make the world go round

Jun 16th, 2010
by Robert Martin.
1 comment

Cycles of everything are infinite, they create round shapes instead of flat progress. In modern civilization our science suffers from linearized logic, a flat progression and atomisation in its ‘reduction’ and through this anything which cannot be reduced into smaller atoms becomes ‘unprovable’. This is also a reflection of the times we live in, as we see everything as a constant progression from primitive toward advanced and the thought of these crossing over and creating a natural cycle is simply unthinkable heresy.

So now let’s forget the flatlanders and all the headaches and circles they run around trying to find an end to their ‘progressive’ straight line! These idiots will run around in circles forever trying to find an end to their incessant empirical march unto death and meaningless theories.

Reworking the standard model, I can understand a cycle that reinforces the original nature of reality through firstly evolution and secondly reworking the original materials through creation to create new life in an old cosmos, thus new forces emerge to spread information over a higher threshold with greater ease.

From quantum magma, upon collectivising something from nothing, everything forms and erupts in a ‘big bang’, vectors come into the universe through whiteholes and quasars which are volcanos that erupt what I call ‘something’.

This means that vectors from the void, or the bulk (hyperspace medium) clumps together to create a trough where further vectors can clump together on this where it gets easier each time a new dimension is added. The trough is like a moat, or a basin of negative pressure where opposite charges are attracted and sink into the ‘quasi-particle’ hole that externally moulds around every particle.

Likewise, our fundamental physical forces, each in their own dimension can build upon one another and attract one another. First there is the gravitational force, then the strong force; and through a symmetry breaking here we then have the the weak force and finally the electric force. These are the causal mediums of all the particles:

On difference between Causal and Acausal

Concerning the wave-particle duality problem, we can divide this into two philosophies; causal and acausal. Causal is internalization and acausal is externalization, causal creates particles and acausal creates waves. In an everyday situation, a causal ‘thing’ creates a sound, this sound is not made of any unique particles yet exists, it mediates the wave and has no physical substance, thus the sound is acausal and exists beyond the individual into a collective wave able to transmit information between one ‘thing’ and the other.

Dualities do not exist except in things which are directly correlated with each other, otherwise they leave each other alone. Similarly, natural selection is most fierce between two species which are almost identical and are competing for the same niche, we could call it the haves vs the have nots and is prevalent in nature vs nurture arguments by mediocre humans.

What matters is the chance at procreation for all ‘things’; therefore the outcome is of which one survives. This is, strangely yet understandably the explanation for our paradoxes such as the wave-particle duality and the nature-nurture duality.

A wave is a collective force, it is above the particles of individual forces beneath it. A wave passes through a collective of individual particles. Common mistakes are that photons are ‘a wave and a particle’, this is bullshit. Every decent scientist has seen the quanta of photons hitting the lens of a camera in a dark room, photons are therefore a particle only forming waves when they come in higher quantities.

If we had a slit expriment with only one photon, then it would hit in only one place, it would not go all over the place and create multiple wave patterns because there would be nothing for the wave to divide into that form. When many particles are together, then the wave patterns emerge, else it is a single point and nothing else.

The wave phenomena is a socialization of these particles into a collective, trends are set and laws are made to govern their collective behaviour – if one heads in one direction, the path behind it is easier for the latter generation of photons to follow as a niche has been created and a path to be followed – It’s easier for them to follow the crowd then wander into the darkness alone. So much for wave-particle duality.

Spin and the mixture of multiple dimensions

If a point at a centre was a particle and the spin it carried influenced the environmental, the macrocosmic acausal, then the ‘socialization’ of the surrounding particles would cause a ‘force’ to emerge through the warping of isolated parallel dimensions (points). Let’s take a look at one of Einsteins equation.

Einstein’s equation E=mc² is, in acausal-causal terms means simply that the wave energy (E) is the result of a set of particles (m) enclosed by their highest common velocity denominator which is light, squared itself to gain the highest potential of its superposition, therefore (c²).

To me this is only a slice of bread and I require a loaf, meaning, although this is predominantly correct, it is only relevant to ordinary matter as we know it – if we stretch beyond this small slice of local reality we can derive from this equation acausal waves (which do not exist as a being, but act between many beings) and causal manifestations of these waves, self sustained upon their foundations as to condense into a higher form.

The lowest form of a slice of physics is, in ordinary matter’s case, is light (important). Light was created through the electric force, it is emitted through the electrons and the electrons were created through quantum molecule decay in the weak force.

Smaller things evolve and propagate fastest which echoes throughout biology and everything that evolves independently. Now, highest form is the mass of ordinary matter (of which Einstein was concerned of) and lowest form is the photons, as these are the most abundant and has little complexity compared to higher quantum particles, photons carry tiny mass and are very slightly affected by gravity,  but eject and repulse it the most, therefore can attain the highest velocities and least gravity friction of this species of causal particles.

Acausal waves are from a spectrum of frequencies reflected from a causal support niche, resonated from the particle. This means that the cosmos operates in cycles of evolution, with each revolution this allows from a high frequency and low wavelength of a species of particle that emits an acausal wave between itself and other like particles, it does this ever more successfully until it is able to triumph over the individual particles and form a collective on a higher form – the acausal wave becomes more inclusive and therefore lower frequency and greater wavelength; a higher particle is created when this inclusive particle group is successful in surviving.

This process continues indefinitely required the energy is sustained, thereby allowing them to finally fuse in when the frequency reaches a boundary low and wavelength a boundary high – thereby a gradient in opposition is overcome and fusion has occurred, evolution.

Further still this does not stop at ordinary matter, these evolve with mechanization further in our future to then create a down-going whereby new fundamental forces are cultivated to overcome the material limitations of ordinary matter with exotic matter specifically fused according to their physic-genetic-engineering guided by such physics idealism similar to string/superstring/M theory and other idealistic theories, any ‘thing’ is possible if reality is understood enough to create it.

And even greater still, this goes below gravity and throughout dark energy, gravity-dark matter is condemned to be sustained by a lesser form of causality to mediate its waves. Therefore a dark energy spectrum exists with a whole sub-stratum of lesser spectrums all building upon themselves to recreate new alternatives to dark matter, with new gravitational particles. And below these too, the multiverse has prerequisites for membership, our localised universe is evolved upon this ever more ethereal medium and corporeal quintessence than dark energy itself.

E=mc² can be replaced by a more universal acausal mediator. Therefore; Acausality = Total causality involved in mediating the acausal wave multiplied by the highest velocity (evolutionary force in rotating the revolutionary process of physical evolution BUT localised toward that specific species of physics that it is concerned with – then amplified onto itself to achieve the highest degree of acausality in causal manifestation, so highest waves out of the wave creators, perhaps). A=cv

To focus on life, specifically toward organic matter, evolution = the species in question, multiplied by the highest momentum of its lowest common denominator, that then amplified by wholeness including itself, to then allow higher species sustenance upon them – and thus, speciation. Rate of evolution (velocity of speciation) = prole x elite, prole being a negative number and elite being a postive number, increase the proles and speed becomes so slow that the surrounding macrocosm ends up evolving faster than the whole of the species and then is crushed, positive vice -versa.

Potential implications of this, putting this into use.

Light as we know it cannot exist in a total vacuum, it may be that it is only thanks to dark energy and smaller variants of dark matter that photons have an ocean to swim within – perhaps why we cannot observe type one parallel universes – it dissolves and sediments into smaller vectors when it falls off of the universal cliff of higher quintessence – lower dark energy surrounds this in pitch black like a last breathe of atmosphere before the brutality of space, whereby no light can survive as it is too hostile and unsupportive of it – having no universe to light up it sinks into darkness, into nothingness.

Perhaps some smaller particles do exist in the void, perhaps extremophile particles and a few ordinary masses on some small islands bubbling around the observable universe like islands around a continent – from there onwards, though, it is the megaverse (this boundary of the universe ensures localisation and diversification of universes, without which all would clump together and devolve into more primitive expansions of ancient universes long extinct.

I think Einstein was mostly valid in pointing out that normal, earthly, ordinary matter cannot exceed the speed of its lowest denominating particle, which is photons and therefore it cannot usually exceed its own microcosm – it is the evolutionary niche that we exist upon and the limit to the speed is the boundary of localised reality.

However, by increasing the speed of light via physics cultivation feeding the ‘dark matter’ or whatever it is sustaining it, into sustaining artificial warps, curves, whirlpools and wormholes around the ordinary, natural ‘gravospheres’ of cosmic bodies. It is possible for anything to become self sufficient from the surrounding environment to then subjectively overcome the local limitations by obeying natural patterns and increasing the product of them – thereby becoming streamline and independent of surrounding environments – essentially creating new realities.

By injecting more ‘dark matter’ into the photons it slows them down and increases the drag, but by ejecting surrounding mass away from the beam, photons are able to avert the kinetic dragging into potential energy. This dragging occurs when light loses its total kinetic energy into the surrounding environment via dark matter drag (or expansion as it tries to cool down and slow the total velocity and thus potential energy increases greatly toward gravitating bodies).

To avert this nagging of gravity, it must slip through it, to absorb the energy between the dark matter, that is, the quintessence and emit this away toward the opposing direction to which it is being opposed to then increase its velocity much as an animal (humans included) will kill its enemy so it can thrive with the spoils and survive to reproduce without their enemy to threaten them.

Light dies in a total vacuum, a total void as it is starved of sustenance, but light travels fastest in a dark energy vacuum and thrives on the feast, therefore attains much higher velocities than the anthropocentric ‘law’ of the ‘the total speed of light being only 186,000 miles per second!’ That’s holistically false, but is correct to general relativity between objects in our solar system where there is higher densities of gravity wells – other than this, light doesn’t give a damn what humans think. Light therefore does travel at relative speeds in a dark matter vacuum which is symbolised c and only relative to our stellar locality, light travels below c throughout the rest of ordinary matter, the more massive the medium, the slower it travels until at least it completely stops and is absorbed as a whole.

In conclusion, this means that we can increase the speed of light through altering its environment, through environmental influence – a physics eugenics to select and nurture a stronger particle, more specified through altering the localised macrocosm.

By using the other forces that influence light, for instance, gravity, we can thrust the speed of light into a dark matter-less vacuum causing the photons of light to sink or rise (whatever preference) around the sea of dark matter therefore, like tachyons, imaginary, idealist, acausal mass and a causal speed instead of the ‘cisnatural’ casaul mass and acausal speed.

That gains casual controllability and almost, supernatural domestication (powerful ethics and responsibility is needed here or the galactic gods will come and kick your ass and eat your soul, for threatening the good of the galactic community).

Therefore the life of physics can evolve to manoeuvre this alternating, this adapting survival tactic for the species of earth to spread these here gene-seeds across various planets and cosmic bodies across the galaxy. It may require great energy however, such migrations are at the endings of the mechanization.

Elemental rhythms

Position = Microcosm x macrocosm

Time = Dark matter x dark matter heat exchange (the amount of dark energy heating it)

Time = total dark mass x total change in quintessence, t=d∆q

Speed of light = matter pressure (the density of the mediating mass, gravitational field + mass) x highest influx of quintessence amplified onto itself which is lowest vacuum energy/highest kinetic velocity that can possibly sustain a photon alive without it decaying into lesser vectors through decay, C=mq²

With each additional dimension added onto the macrocosm it may be that instead of a square number, you would require a cubed or quad or etc. Squared is for a thread of physical reality, for the total macrocosm of our universe it would most likely be 10, 26 or even an infinitude of dimensions instead of 2. To square is to abstract only a slice of our universe and will only give localised results limited to the selected physics you intend to understand.

Our universe position, as a ‘particle’ = Causal dimensions x Acausal dimensions, string theory (‘the socialization of physics’ theory) would say 10 to 11 for spatial and anything up and beyond 26 dimensions for all the various ‘quasi-particles’ as they call them – we have no idea that these exist, they hang around like a puff of air.

Recap

The causal particles then, reflect outwards and create further niches for quasi-particles to form acausally as if a wave. Reconnecting with the cycle, they eventually fuse into the next force, the quasi-particles of electronuclear evolve into the strong force when their polarity is overcome. Following in this theme:

  • Gravity (causal) > Electronuclear (Acausal)
  • Strong (causal) > Electroweak (Acausal)
  • Weak (causal) > Electromagnetic (Acausal)
  • Electric (causal) > Magnetic (Acausal)

After the electric has formed, electrons then passed through all of these and created another generation, another generation of quantum particles over the other.

Everything in the universe follows these similarities between the macrocosm and the microcosm – the evolution of life on earth follows a similar pattern of naturalization through to mechanization.

Now let’s just cross this over with a few other ideas;

  • Naturalization (causal) > Socialization (acausal)
  • Nature (gene) > Nurture (meme)
  • Fact (Physical) > Faith (Metaphysical)
  • Matter (postive space-time curvature) > Antimatter (negative space-time curvature)
  • Dark Matter (Gravity) > Dark Energy (Anti-Gravity)
  • Baryogenesis (Fusion Evolution) > Leptogenesis (Fissure Creation)

Baryogenesis is responsible for the emergence of matter, gravity and the great big wells for fusion reactors to occur, leptogenesis is for the emergence of antimatter, antigravity and major creator of everything negative. The first is absorption of energy, the second is repulsion of energy, in the ‘empty’ space between galaxies (galaxies are dense dark matter holes) is the accumulation of antimatter and also an anti-time that evolves oppositely to our time, time as the heat of gravity, a gravitational enthalpy.

Therefore Baryogenesis > Leptogenesis, one reason why matter (predominantly dark matter) is more abundant than antimatter, is because antimatter is parasitic internally through matter and is dependent on it for it to exist as ‘anti’. When through leptogenesis particles, which, like bacteria dissolving rock in a process  releases gases for future fauna to breathe, it evolves the dark matter rock into higher dark matter, into less dense, more puffy molecules of it, less dense yet higher quality allowing more information to be evolved into it, and antimatter is created.

It’s similar to why there are more lesser things than higher things in existence, there are more proles than elites, more mindless idiots than geniuses, more life than death. A ‘slight’ imbalance that evolves new dimensions for interaction to occur.

A higher species of physics that is able to domesticate the entire universe with electrons to create ordinary matter, which reinforces the dark matter, coming down like rain onto a dry, dead planet, adding a medium inbetween the sky and the rock for an ocean of life to emerge from. The electrons emit light between them and acts as information transfer between the electric machines.

It is all thanks to the electrons around the protons, in a super quantum particle, called the atom, that we can observe the ‘observable universe’ The diagram represents this wholeness as [2] and the dark matter/dark energy as [1]. Over time everything decays if its to slow, weak force captures them and tears them apart for its own gain. The cycle continues, the surface dark matter, much like surface rock toward the atmosphere, around the outskirts of galaxies is eaten away and released as further gases, as dark energy bubbles that increase the volume of space between each galaxy – furthering speciation and isolation.

Each galaxy then, from ordinary matter, evolves life and that life cultivates the physical laws and recaptures the dark energy to create further mass and exotic particles that are buoyant and immune to decay over the brief period after its creation, further cycles are initiated and the cultivated reality implodes into a seperate realm where a new universe begins.

Posted in: Reality.

Abandoning reality

Jun 15th, 2010
by Doug Vance.
1 comment

restrain_modernity

I’m just going to dive right in with this one. Here is how the mendacious semantics we are offered destroys the credibility of the liberal democratic views of our time. The following popular statements and assertions deserve exposure:

  • blend humanity to end all conflict

Implication: race is hereditary.
Why then are we asked to celebrate diversity if it is the cause of conflict, such conflict is to be avoided, and conflict is avoidable by eliminating diversity?

  • race is a social construct

Implication: race is only appearances.
Are we then to value or to shun these social construct appearances called diversity?

  • it is racist to mention race, a social construct
  • a cruel triviality, diversity, is our greatest strength

Implication: only select positions regarding race, which is either hereditary or appearances by definition as convenient, are acceptable.

Let’s assume race is trivial criteria, meaning race is little more than image or aesthetic appeal. Then, choosing McDonald’s rather than Burger King is about as trivial, but strangely this choice provokes no controversy.

Stranger still, we certainly aren’t required by the central government, by way of a non-discrimination act, to select McDonald’s, Burger King, and several other diverse fast food restaurants during the same lunch hour!

Failing to choose all during the same lunch hour logically means the remainder are left out. The implications of everyone leaving out all but the same of these trivial fast food choices then are likely manifold.

People would be harmed by unemployment. Fast food business discrimination is therefore an economic problem for society at large and harmful to the owners and employees victimized.

These trivial fast food discriminations then lead to the very same consequences offered as justifications when race is the selection criteria.

But, back in reality there are people who favor McDonald’s, others who favor Burger King, and still others who choose the less known competitors. Fast food selections in reality occur in parallel and are not uniform with only one ever chosen.

Nonetheless, there’s a supreme victor, a runner up, and several other surviving contenders. It’s economic natural selection and supremacism at work in another form.

Because people are directly involved, the same human consequences of success or mass suffering occur should any of these businesses rise or fail as a result of discrimination. For this example, we’re just swapping the labels for races for the names of fast food businesses.

Next, we come to the growing conflict between established science and the inconsistent public reality outlined above.

Paradoxically, while the Religious Right engages in attacks on Darwin’s theory of what animals evolved from, the left and center clamps down upon Darwin’s theory of what humans evolved to.

Nor do many liberal commentators know that much of Darwin’s second most important book, The Descent of Man, consists of an evolutionary explanation of human racial differences.

vdare

We can easily move beyond human biodiversity to examine the consequences of sheer numbers. Once again we witness a consistent parting of company between public reality embodied in liberal politicians and the facts that science bears out.

SUPER-sizing Australia’s population may have grave consequences on our health, boosting rates of obesity, asthma and depression, a new study warns.

The findings, published online in the Medical Journal of Australia, come amid a debate on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s call for a “Big Australia”.

heraldsun

In the midst of ongoing financial stress threatening to curtail vital public services, our dangerously out of touch humanitarian idealists simultaneously encourage thousands of new arrivals.

Science with economic reality and public opinion are completely out of contact with one another even as they share the same society. It is as if the presently irreconcilable dynamics of Dionysian and Apollonian flavored metaphysics overshadows all modern civilization.

Posted in: Politics, Social Reality.
Tagged: · · ·

The entropy of Reddit

Jun 13th, 2010
by Steve Harris.
19 comments

You’ll never find as good a metaphor for the modern time as social news aggregators (SNAs) like Digg, Reddit and Fark.

On these, news items are posted, and users vote on them — with the pretend-I’m-a-Roman-Emperor thumb up or down — and the most popular ones rise to the top of the homepage.

When first founded, these services at first attract people who want actual news and informative reading. They know that big media news panders to the dummy audience that wants bread and circuses. Instead, they want to be ahead of the curve.

If you’re starting a business, or just trying to stay interested in life, finding good news is important and a social news aggregator can do it for you — if the audience is game. But over time, as word spreads, entropy strikes.

What happens is familiar to anyone who knows our modern cycle of trend-product-decline-conform:

  1. A new idea rises and people like it;
  2. Since people liking it means it can be elected or sold, it soon is to great profit;
  3. In doing so, the people owning it dumb it down or otherwise kill its essence;
  4. Consequently, the audience leaves.

What happened at Reddit was the flip side of this: while the process was the same, it wasn’t done for dollars — in fact, it’s amazing Reddit is solvent. Instead, it was done for popularity, because there’s no use to having an SNA if your links aren’t popular.

Popular links means high Google rank, which means that indirectly, you influence the market by determining what comes up when Joe Consumer goes to a browser and types in keywords.

At some point, the Crowd found Reddit — and by the Crowd, I mean that large group of people who have no point in life but to please themselves. Smart people have a purpose, whether selfless or otherwise, but it generally involves achievement: inventing technologies, making music, painting art, climbing mountains, running non-profits, you name it.

The Crowd has nothing but their day jobs, a pattern of acting for their own pleasure only, and to compensate for how low that makes them feel, an axe to grind against society. They’re drones who like to find some reason to “be important,” which since they do nothing, is unrelated to what they produce. Instead, it’s related to the opinions they have, the memes they know, how clever they are and so on.

Douglas Haddow says it best in Adbusters:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society. – Adbusters

In pursuit of popularity, Reddit went from being a community of leaders and smart people to a playground for the Crowd. The Crowd don’t want cutting-edge news; they want ideas that make them comfortable being themselves. A partial list:

  • Memes you can feel witty for repeating
  • Angry articles about how it’s not your fault you’re failing at society
  • Any rhetoric that tears down those who have risen above
  • Clever and trite documentaries about lifestyles of the failed
  • Emotional, tear-jerking or despondent articles
  • Calls to group revenge, such as against animal abusers

More specifically, the Crowd likes anything that is both inclusive and selective, meaning that you need to know the password to enter. Want to be cool in indie rock circles? Talk about Deerhoof. Want to be accepted on the far left? Talk about Alinsky. Want to have the guys like you at the local sports bar? Talk about how Roethlisberger is innocent.

In other words, the Crowd is like other in-groups in that it is a social group with implications beyond socialization between individuals. For example, people base their political, economic and personal lifestyle decisions on social influences, and these in turn have influences in the society at large.

Kuran begins with a simple, even mundane point: social pressures can make people say that they want and believe something that they really don’t want or believe. In a Communist regime, for example, almost everyone may talk about the enormous wisdom and virtue of the leaders of the Party, even though almost everyone thinks that the leaders are scoundrels and fools. In a small town in America, nearly everyone may attend and pray in church, even if many people are unsure whether they believe in God. The result of social pressures is to produce what Kuran calls “preference falsification,” a phenomenon that occurs when you make an inaccurate public statement about your actual preferences (or beliefs). Falsified preferences might be described more simply, of course, as lies; but they are a distinctive, and distinctly interesting, kind of lies, with particular social implications. – TNR

I don’t think this process is unique to Reddit. I think it’s human entropy, which is a subset of entropy, which is that over time organization is lost. Things decay and break down. In the case of human systems, we forget what our symbols mean, and start acting to gain symbolic power instead of achieve things in reality.

To demonstrate this, one Redditor did a did a little experiment.

He or she compared the replies to the exact same article with a four-year gap between submissions. The 2006 version of the thread could be compared side-by-side with the 2010 version. The result? The 2006 thread had insightful mathematics, historical comparisons and analysis; the 2010 version, a competition to repeat as many clever memes and familiar jokes as possible.

On Reddit, when people stopped caring about being an informative news source, the 4chan-style memes, lolcats, stupid preaching to the choir articles, and other chaff floated in, destroying what made Reddit a great resource.

Now what’s left is a Crowd of people who want to see things that confirm what they already believe. I call it the Reddit Hivemind Groupthink (RHG) because it has attributes of all of these buzzwords. It’s an in-group based not on who you know, but what opinions and likes/dislikes you have, geared toward the manchild or other dependent of the entertainment economy.

It’s sad because it eliminates a news source, but inevitable because once anything gets popular, it becomes a trend and then people get onboard who have no idea what made it originally valuable. They then make it into what is convenient for them, which since they lack direction and live in denial, is whatever doesn’t offend their lifestyles.

While today’s Redditors want you to think they’re enlightened savants bringing us the truth against the wishes of an oppressive right-wing government, the truth is that they have declined much like “Anonymous” did at 4chan. They lost their impetus because they became inward looking. On the internet, they’re superstars. In reality they’re boring people with boring jobs, selfish hobbies, inflated self image and an unquenchable anger toward anyone who has more than they do.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a community sink this way. In fact, it’s how all communities sink, barring getting outright confiscated by the FBI (as happened to several of the communities I frequented in the 1980s). They get crushed under their own weight, lose sight of what made them valuable, and become like every other played-out trend, more detritus of a society moving too fast for its own good.

Posted in: Hacking.

Who wins at equality?

Jun 12th, 2010
by Doug Vance.
1 comment

sucking_the_flowThe primary component in the equality game is ideology. Ideology is the default winner, similar to the house in a casino. Ideology manages all of the other components in the game, delegating authority through the bureaucracy.

The secondary component is the bureaucracy. As ostensibly impartial arbiters accountable to an ideology which is by definition quite partial, the bureaucracy wields authority over the tertiary components on a transactional basis. The bureaucracy wins by default as well, as a kennel full of curs each win scraps from the king’s table.

Bureaucratic Rational Grounds – resting on a belief in the ‘legality’ of patterns of normative rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands (legal authority).

nmsu

The third component is you people. You people are divided into us and them.

The us half provides continuous energy to the equality process. To choose otherwise is to default at the “negotiating” table before the “impartial” bureaucratic mediators and thereafter incur penalty.

The them half provides the endless stream of justification for the equality process.

Plus, and minus. Haves, and have nots.

Altogether then, ideology creates the rules all will play by and bureaucracy directs the flow of the game pieces. New generations of us come about and are automatically assigned to the positive, giver side. Simultaneously, a steady flow of thems are brought in to the game as well and assigned the negative, taker side.

One might reasonably ask if Title II at least did no harm since it only codified what was already happening. The case can be made that it was harmful. The effort to pass the Act diverted the grassroots movement from self-help, mutual aid, and independent community action to lobbying, legislation, and litigation – that is, dependence on the white ruling elite. Direct efforts undertaken by free individuals were demoted to at best a supporting role.

That was a loss for freedom, justice, and independence. Our country is the worse for it.

csmonitor

Thus with positive and negative in proximity, or living under the same system, a flow of energy is established. The flow first stops at the second layer, typically as a general tax for public services everyone uses.

Yet, some of the tax is siphoned off to keep our equality game operating and much of this siphoned output stops at the bureaucrats and their zealots in the form of salaries. The remainder is released to the have nots who otherwise, we are told, would not have as much as us.

Since ideology isn’t a tangible thing, it exists over the secondary and tertiary layers invisibly. But as a whole, ideology is nearly always out of mind for all but the ideologues who act as managerial elite zealots among the bureaucrats.

Ideology in the equality game is powered by the negative side from which justification is drawn. Like taxes, justification flows up to the second layer where it is tailored, using the makework hours of liberal arts majors, into public decree which is then sent down to us in official documents pinned up on public billboards.

Like ideology, justification is not a tangible thing. Justification is unlike a steady flow of payments which are actually tangible and accountable. Ideology and justification alike simply require embodiment in the mind of a bureaucrat or a zealot among them.

For us however, the input required is a function of both material and time called labor that for each of us cannot be reclaimed once spent. But happily enough for the ideologue beneficiaries in the layers above, the justifications received by us, like an approving smile to a child for not being naughty, are for us an investment well made and lifetime that was well worth living.

Posted in: Politics, Reality, Social Reality.
Tagged: · ·

Are political choices intentional at all?

Jun 12th, 2010
by Brett Stevens.
3 comments

We have a founding illusion, us humans, and it’s that what we do is deliberate. Not only do we intend to do things fully knowing how they will work out, but we can re-program ourselves at will, and with the right amount of education or training, become anything we want.

Really?

If we pay attention to the science that doesn’t make it to the front page of CNN — because the only science that they want to publish is science that will be popular, and sell television news — we’ll see that the idea of us as autonomous decision-makers is dubious at best. That is of course the ultimate unpopular view. It tells people that they are big bundles of nerves that reactions, not godlike intellects that choose from some divine insight.

Researchers at UofT have shown that the psychological concern for compassion and equality is associated with a liberal mindset, while the concern for order and respect of social norms is associated with a conservative mindset.

“Conservatives tend to be higher in a personality trait called orderliness and lower in openness. This means that they’re more concerned about a sense of order and tradition, expressing a deep psychological motive to preserve the current social structure,” says Jacob Hirsh, a post-doctoral psychology student at UofT and lead author of the study. – ScienceDaily

These attributes — openness, orderliness — aren’t political choices. They’re personality traits. As in hardwired like a preference for light and open rooms versus dark and closed ones, or placing a greater value on being near the beach than near the woods. Hardwired. They don’t discuss a correlation with IQ or other abilities, but since traits tend to cluster because of evolutionary advantage to their interaction and not singular existence, it’s surely there.

Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic and I considered the 4,835 respondents’ (all American adults) answers to eight survey questions about basic economics. We also asked the respondents about their political leanings: progressive/very liberal; liberal; moderate; conservative; very conservative; and libertarian.

Rather than focusing on whether respondents answered a question correctly, we instead looked at whether they answered incorrectly. A response was counted as incorrect only if it was flatly unenlightened.

…

In this case, percentage of conservatives answering incorrectly was 22.3%, very conservatives 17.6% and libertarians 15.7%. But the percentage of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly was 67.6% and liberals 60.1%. The pattern was not an anomaly. – WSJ

Here we see the correlation between abilities and personality traits. These people aren’t bad at economics because they are liberals; they became liberals because they’re bad at economics, and have related personality traits. If you’re not good at orderliness, you’d better not have a personality geared toward it — in addition, you’re unlikely to have that personality, since appreciation for orderliness only comes with an ability to do it well (this is a restatement of the Dunning-Kruger effect).

People like to believe in “nurture,” or social conditioning and education, over “nature,” or inherent traits, but that’s basically an illusion. It makes us feel good to think we choose how to be, we choose our decisions, and that we plan our lives. Sounds like we’re in control, doesn’t it? But time and again, the results returned are that we act as we are wired by nature, and then invent a nurture excuse to justify or explain it.

Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience.

…

Moreover, as the psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons show in their new book “The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us,” the effects of experience are highly specific to the experiences themselves. If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find hidden words), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else. Music doesn’t make you better at math, conjugating Latin doesn’t make you more logical, brain-training games don’t make you smarter. Accomplished people don’t bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields. Novelists read lots of novels, scientists read lots of science. NYT

You can train yourself to do a task, but you can’t rewire your brain to make you better at any such task. This is why conceptual geniuses are ranking higher than virtuosos, because a virtuoso can be a case of someone who spent the mythical 10,000 hours to develop an ability, but it doesn’t put them on par with someone who has an inborn genius for creating music.

In fact, if you look at popular research — like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers — you’ll see that it comes down on the “nurture” side of the equation, because that is what makes it popular thus sells books/magazines/TV, but the more in-depth researchers like the three cited above are the exact opposite, coming down on the “nature” side of the equation:

Studies suggest that the key to success in any field has nothing to do with talent. It’s simply practice, 10,000 hours of it — 20 hours a week for 10 years.

Indeed, a scientist would suggest that both are true. To make a talented person, nature requires some nurture, but achieves results nurture without nature cannot. As Pinker put it above:

Accomplished people don’t bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields. Novelists read lots of novels, scientists read lots of science.

This entirely collides with how we, thinking machines, like to see ourselves, which is as autonomous thinking machines that make their decisions a priori or without previous input or conditioning. Reality looks like that is a miscalculation by our thinking machine, in part as it tries to understand itself; we are not autonomous, but self-reflective, and that self-reflection can lead us astray.

Posted in: Social Reality.

Living for the weekend

Jun 11th, 2010
by Robert Martin.
16 comments

The weekend, a wonderful time for all the insects to crawl out of the woodwork and onto the streets of Britain – loud noise and lots of excitement as an entire generation prepares to burn its meaninglessness out in a brainless boozed, cumfest of a culture.

Most of the weekends for my generation start off like this, speaking from common experience the story is the same everywhere in the urban west.

So basically it’s friday night in the great multicultural utopia called Britain and the weekend has just begun, tonight after a long week of boring stuff like college and work we’re going to hit the town and party till we puke. We gather up and meet our mates to chill out with a few beers down the pub before the night ahead and bicker about some socialized nonsense, who is cool and why that guy over there looks funny, constantly talking about other people, hipster music, how interesting our lives obviously are.

We drink down our beers and head out a few hours before midnight, laughing and mocking random underlings who aren’t as cool as us on our way. Next stop, the club – outside a couple of ogre-like security guards stand outside the door aggressively demanding ID to filter out the preteens and body searches for any weapons to prevent anyone getting stabbed. Massive ques span halfway down the street filled with popularly dressed hipster whores and stereotypical clubbers all eager to feel just that tiniest sensation that they actually exist. Lost inside and frustrated with the 9-5 they await the entry, where they get ready to destroy themselves to escape from the harsh, empty reality that is our mundane society.

We’re in… slightly tipsy we enter this dark labyrinth and the ugly machinery blurts music to our ears resounding the latest ghetto hip-hop and techno thrills, albeit the fiftieth remix of a ten year old pop song with added squeaky voices for overall ‘originality’. We meet up with various other people we have never seen in our lives and present ourselves as extrovert without a care in the world, the life of the party because, well, we’re cool right?

Drowning in a few more beers our frontal lobes begin to bubble in toxicity, that region of the brain responsible for social awareness and behavioural restraint now defenseless – a room full of brainless zombies now appears before us.

The strobe machines mockingly flare at our faces as the smoke from the DJ stand fills the room with fake air – we’re on fire, burning all our energy like an animal freed from its little cage, burning out to the latest tunes desperately after some attention toward ourselves that might actually hint toward our existence beyond our own subjectivity. The decadent mechanization collapsed in upon itself, parasitizing the living with domestic noise and lasers – all fuel to psyche-up the monkey clubbers as the tough-guys come in and start throwing random fists and beating the living crap out of each other in the mosh pit.

Drunk and knowing no restraint, fights break out consistently with security throwing them off the premises. Out into the streets, where, if the police didn’t find them, they follow any individual that comes close to their drunken social ‘territory’ thus provoking more outbreaks of violence for no apparent reason.

Back in the club, there many people just lay around the edges of the dance area, just being excluded in general from anyone else in the room, sitting around in a near-suicidal trance with their 3-5 friends inclusive groups not really doing much – so much for their idea of ‘a good night out’. These people in general lie to themselves that they actually enjoy this filth, only the so called ‘elites’ of the social world; the pop tarts have a shallow enough conscience to actually manoeuvre this void of empty beings. Driven by lust and desires, they pick a few aesthetically pleasing shag-rags and burn out their frustrations, only to run away from it in the morning as they realise their beer brains picked up something quite unlike first anticipated.

Our multiethnic domestic ‘culture’ is a complete failure of existence. All this cheap tacky music filling the void of meaningless, culturally defunct masses, filling their heads in sync with averaged, popular songs containing unconscious memes about the pains of being a ghetto whore and how, no matter how hard they try, they cannot, they just cannot maintain any relationships because they throw their feelings around like they mean nothing.

Aside from those who are over 16 and are out fucking the night away, or pretending that they are, we can now look at those preteens who arn’t old enough – so what do these guys do?

Get pissed on the street corner, in the parks, they get lost in the bushes in the middle of the night with each other with massive bottles of cheap cider. All smoking, shouting, swearing, pissing, puking, in their swarms of about 50 guys sitting in the pitch black with a few lighters and mobile phones glowing and blurting out hipster music.

These are, like, losers dude - some actually have houses to go to, and in them they smash up the house with a hundred zombies they have never talked to in their life, like, ever! OMG

The alcohol cabinet from the middle class parents is emptied in an hour, the bath tub is full of drunk people, and the stereo and ipods have been stolen along with beer on the carpets and on the walls with the telly now officially smashed by some chavs who have just invited themselves in to crash the ‘party’.

Just a harmless night out? Rightttttt LOL! (hipsterdom intended)

Anyways, simply put, if this fire is not stopped, it will burn itself out – possibly in the form of nuclear fallout as pissed off foreign cultures render the west useless and hostile to intelligent life. The west is being stabbed from within through this drunken stupidity, the west is spiritually exhausted and must embrace the natural reality to kill this social-taint parasite before it kills all the remaining sense.

And as I was saying to some of these guys - WHERE IS OUR CULTURE? our common sense, our sense of future? A will to make something better than this! And of course, alienated, they ignored and didn’t give a shit – hardly anyone does.

Posted in: Social Reality.

Helen Thomas and the case for Israel

Jun 7th, 2010
by Brett Stevens.
6 comments

In many ways, the world is still fighting World War I, over and over again. That was after all the war where we decided to defend the idea of the nation-state, which is a country united by politics and not ethnicity, against the tensions such artificial groupings created.

Helen Thomas said what most of the Left is currently thinking: Israel is being a brute to the poor innocent Palestinians, so we should dissolve Israel.

Like most leftist rhetoric, that idea focuses too much on the immediate and misses the big picture. Yes, some are suffering; however, in the long term, the concept of Israel (and the necessary deportation of the Palestinians to their ethnic homelands in Jordan, Egypt and Syria) will avoid greater suffering. It is the most logical move.

Nesenoff: Any comments on Israel? We’re asking everybody today–

Thomas: Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.

Nesenoff: Ooh. Any better comments?

Thomas (cackling): Remember, these people are occupied, and it’s their land, not German and not Polish.

Nesenoff: So where should they go? What should they do?

Thomas: They should go home.

Nesenoff: Where is home?

Thomas: Poland. Germany.

Nesenoff: So you’re saying the Jews should go back to Poland and Germany?

Thomas: And America, and everywhere else. – WSJ

Her comments touch on something uneasy in our modern society: we here in America assume that us normal whitebread types are the majority everywhere, mainly because we’re solipsistic thanks to our individualism and consumerist outlook. Therefore, we cannot imagine what it would be like to be part of an ethnic group that wants to preserve itself. After all, we are the world… or so we think, even though whitebread Caucasians are a minority worldwide.

In fact, in the West we get nervous about identifying Jews as anything but members of a religion. After all, the last group that started talking about Jews as a race did something really horrible involving mass executions and labor camps. We don’t want a Holocaust II, do we?

Here’s the catch: Jews are an old-school population. By that I mean pre-1789, when we chucked out the aristocracy and the idea of a nation being one group, one culture, one religion and one ethnicity (like “French” or “German”). Science shows us that Jews are not only a religion, but an ethnic group, and a distinctive culture:

Atzmon and his colleagues studied the DNA of 237 Jews from New York, Seattle, Athens and Rome, representing Ashkenazi, Turkish, Greek, Italian, Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi groups. They searched for genetic similarities among these populations, and compared them with the DNA of 418 non-Jews.

The study compared 2 million distinct DNA markers known as SNPs spread across the entire genome. That’s four times the number of markers used in previous studies. “We are the first to analyse genome-wide differences,” says Atzmon.

Atzmon’s team found that the SNP markers in genetic segments of 3 million DNA letters or longer were 10 times more likely to be identical among Jews than non-Jews. – NewScientist

Jews are a race. That’s the ancient use of the word race, meaning distinct ethnic group, which we today supplant with the term “ethny” or “ethnicity” to distinguish a specific ethnic group from the root races that form its constituent components, e.g. Euripid, Mongoloid, Australid and Negroid.

In addition to being an ethny, Jews are a culture, or rather, Jewishness is. This includes Judaism, the religion blood-bound to this culture and its ethny. Jews are unique, Jewish culture is unique, and Judaism is unique, and we cannot separate any one part of the equation from that ethnic group.

We need a place for these people where they will be safe. In Germany and in Poland, they experienced pogroms and discrimination leading up to The Holocaust. It’s an illusion to think that in Poland, as in Russia and other territories conquered by the Nazis, that the local population did not rise up and help murder its Jews, often before the Germans got there.

Jews were resented for (a) not being part of the majority population (b) being successful and (c) being associated with the ruling liberal parties, most often communist ones. It’s an illusion to think that any government could carry out a holocaust without having the complicity of some large part of the local population in identifying, isolating and executing Jews.

This was what Theodor Herzl observed exactly a century ago:

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was unjustly accused of treason, mainly because of the prevailing anti-Semitic atmosphere. Herzl witnessed mobs shouting “Death to the Jews” in France, the home of the French Revolution, and resolved that there was only one solution: the mass immigration of Jews to a land that they could call their own. Thus, the Dreyfus Case became one of the determinants in the genesis of Political Zionism.

Herzl concluded that anti-Semitism was a stable and immutable factor in human society, which assimilation did not solve. He mulled over the idea of Jewish sovereignty, and, despite ridicule from Jewish leaders, published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896). Herzl argued that the essence of the Jewish problem was not individual but national. He declared that the Jews could gain acceptance in the world only if they ceased being a national anomaly. The Jews are one people, he said, and their plight could be transformed into a positive force by the establishment of a Jewish state with the consent of the great powers. He saw the Jewish question as an international political question to be dealt with in the arena of international politics. – JVL

Herzl’s point is this: the cause of anti-Semitism is Jews being a minority in foreign lands, where they are resented for being different, and for being successful or nepotistic, and that the only way to end this is to create a majority-Jewish nation.

If we look through Herzl’s lens at history, we’ll see that majority-minority relations are always bad, and that history offers us no examples of “diverse” nations lasting very long or being stable — they always collapse to third-world status through internal fighting, specifically about the different class statuses of majority and minority. One group will rise above the other, and the result is endless recrimination, guilt, violence and hatred:

Never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a problem. Look at Ireland with its Protestant and Catholic populations, Canada with its French and English populations, Israel with its Jewish and Palestinian populations.

Or consider the warring factions in India, Sri Lanka, China, Iraq, Czechoslovakia (until it happily split up), the Balkans and Chechnya. Also look at the festering hotbeds of tribal warfare — I mean the beautiful mosaics — in Third World hellholes like Afghanistan, Rwanda and South Central, L.A.

“Diversity” is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought. True, America does a better job than most at accommodating a diverse population. We also do a better job at curing cancer and containing pollution. But no one goes around mindlessly exclaiming: “Cancer is a strength!” “Pollution is our greatest asset!” – Ann Coulter

Coulter puts it mildly. Diversity is a cancer. The problem isn’t blacks, or whites, or Jews, or gentiles. It’s diversity. It’s a stupid idea to group different things together and force them, through benevolent moral authoritarian states, to “just all get along.” They cannot all get along. To do so would require they compromise the cultures, values and heritages that make them unique.

Modern liberals are caught in the illusion that “us all getting along” is the highest good. That way, the lion lies down with the lamb and so on. But the cost of that getting along is that we lose who we are. We lose culture. We lose religion. We lose heritage. And what’s left? A Nanny State government, shopping malls and lots of TV, of course!

You can’t blame Jews for wanting to avoid that fate. If the gentiles are so cow-stupid that they elect to destroy their own culture through an ethic of convenience, well, it’s not Jews’ problem or fault. But if one is a Jew who likes one’s heritage and culture, it’s important not to follow that example.

Jews aren’t the only ones. In relatively ethnically homogenous Finland, it’s shocking to us cultureless gray racers to find out that diversity doesn’t work — in fact, you get higher performance without diversity:

In 2006, Finland’s pupils scored the highest average results in science and reading in the whole of the developed world. In the OECD’s exams for 15 year-olds, known as PISA, they also came second in maths, beaten only by teenagers in South Korea.

”The Finnish system supports very much those pupils who have learning difficulties but we have to pay more attention also to those pupils who are very talented. Now we have started a pilot project about how to support those pupils who are very gifted in certain areas.” – BBC

(We can’t mention it in the article, of course, because someone might be offended, but the hidden factor here is not that Finland does what other European nations do, plus focuses a bit more on the talented. It’s that unlike other European nations, Finland has kept diversity at arm’s length and refuses to dumb its schools down to the lowest common denominator so that no one is offended. Jewish schools in the USA follow the same example, with similarly excellent results.)

Helen Thomas has just become a victim of this liberal dogma. In it, the idea of a nation like Israel is anathema, but we replace it with this gray race homeland like America where everyone shows up, no one keeps their culture, and the result is a dumbing-down to the lowest common denominator.

However, this liberal view is a vestige of the past. 1789-1945 represents one continuous strip of bad luck through Western history because we kept trying to force a round peg (organic culture, heritage, ethnicity) into a square hole (laws, the nation-state, the Nanny State) and were shocked, shocked I tell you, to find out it didn’t work.

The new view is the old view: we’re going back to the nation, not the nation-state, in order to preserve the parts of life that are organic, not artificial like the Nanny State, Big Media, corporate values and a shopping mall culture of convenience. Until more of us recognize that, we’re going to see more tragedies and acrimony like this.

Posted in: Politics.
Tagged: ·

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