‘The Siege’

Comment: “The Siege was a good movie, and was prescient in terms of future Islamophobia concerns, but not in terms of how the U.S. and other Western societies would react to terrorism. IIRC, the triggering terrorism in The Siege caused fewer deaths than 9/11, but after 9/11 nothing like The Siege happened. Not only didn’t we intern American Muslims, but we imported more Muslim immigrants over the next 10 years than we had in the 10 years leading up to 9/11.”

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USC’s Polygenic Prediction and its Application in Social Science Conference

Comment: “Last week’s USC polygenetic social science seminar. I have only got through the first two sessions. Pure iSteve candy. Watch the tapdancing during the comments when a woman started to discuss the implications of the data for genes and educational attainment. Also discussed vaguely is one of the million n polygenetic study of IQ out there.”

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Guardian: “”Alt-Right’ Have Stormed Mainstream Consciousness by Using ‘Humor'”

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* There’s quite a cottage industry in deconstructing 4chan threads and Pepe twitter memes for shock horror presentation to the masses. A few people perhaps hoping to find it a way to tenure, following Matthew Goodwin in the UK, who parlayed being the go-to media talking head on “right-wing extremists” into a professorship at Kent (UK).

* This [Hillary Clinton] speech was a boon for the alt-right. What better way to show that your movement is cool and hip than getting denounced by Hillary Clinton? It was like the cool kid in high school getting scolded by the boring and old principal.

* Why the (alt) right produces the best memes: They’ve survived the rigors of a free marketplace of ideas, and risen to the top of the heap. Competition simply works better!

Why the left produces crappy memes: Centralization never produces the best results. Socialism simply doesn’t work!

* The article was written by Nina Burleigh – who said she and all women should fellate Bill Clinton for having protected their “right” to an abortion – and it cites Mikey Weinstein – who “alleged that Christians in America could “pose the same kind of threat” as the terrorist group ISIS does in the Middle East”*.

These people are rogues and would have been put on trial in a healthy polity. Weinstein is particularly odious. His life’s mission is concern trolling the military. Every GI who attends a service appears to him as a “crypto-Nazi”.

* All those left wing comedians (Oliver, Colbert, Amy Schumer) are representatives of the ruling elite, all they do is sell the the ideas of the ruling elite. Then you have all your mainstream sitcoms, again, all they reflect is a lifestyle that the ruling elite would endorse (or at the very least tolerate as non threatening).

* The irony and humor gets people to look at the arguments and data, which are ironclad and true but which cover taboo topics like race, racial interests and so on. No one’s actually hiding their true beliefs. They’re just using irony and humor to ease people actually getting into reading it and thinking about it; and it’s a winning strategy since the arguments are better.

* Picking sides in the 1400 year old conflict over “who” rightly succeeds Mohammed has brought the US no end to grief, and cost in treasure. It’s not our business. By sticking our nose in their business, the Mohammedians have made us their business.

* One of the more obscure “alt-right” idea that I hope will go mainstream, and which I am in complete agreement with, is support for Middle East Christians, as well as the Druze and Assad’s Alawite tribes, who are crypto-Christians. To a lesser degree I support the Kurds, who take Islam much less seriously than their neighbors, and the Yazidi, who have a bizarre ancient religion that over time incorporated Christian, Persian, and Greek elements.

I am super happy Putin and Assad are winning the Syrian civil war together. And likewise to see the Kurds doing so well in both Iraq and Syria.

As a general guide, our Middle East policy should favor in disputes the lower numbered group from this list:

1. Christians and Jews
2. Kurds, Druze, Alawites, Yazidi and secular Arabs (no compulsory beards on men, no face covers on women)
3. The small Gulf States (as long as they stay pro-USA, which they probably will do)
4. Jordan
5. The Saudis and Sunni Lebanese
6. Turks and Azeris
7. Military dictators who usually stay in line (Qadaffy)
8. Iran and its proxies
9. ISIS and Al Qaeda

The most extreme support should therefore be to the Iraqi Christians who over the past five years were massacred, enslaved, and driven from the cities they have dwelled for more than 1500 years by ISIS.

Economic aid and military aid should be flowing heavily to them, and we should put at their disposal some of our elite grounds troops and advisors who will call in bombing and drone strikes for them.

* All comedy is essentially a counter-politics.

No matter which of the many forms it takes, from the buffoonish lampooning of tradition, to the embittered sniping of the offended, to the arrogant snark of the cynics, to the studied irreverence of kitsch, comedy is the political activity of those who cannot act politically. It is in a sense the guardian of the ego, for the psyche cannot bear the radical nullification of complete impotence.

Thus, comedy skates close to the edge of civic disorder. The cathartic experience shared by the audience at a comedy show is a substitute for, and sometimes a prelude to, mob violence. Enthralled by the antics of the comedian—whose jokes are always cryptic indications of the fundamental injustice of their state, and affirmations of their frustrated will—the crowd is transformed, subtly and subliminally, into a “faction.” To laugh is to be converted, indeed to be suborned. It is the reflexive confession of the soul that it now belongs to the new party.

There is no greater divide than between those who laugh with the crowd and those who do not. Such is the fundamental, the soul-deep indication of what side of life you belong to. “The attire of the body, and the laughter of the teeth, and the gait of the man, shew what he is.” (Sirach 19:27) Those who love their traditions, and their country, and their people, and their God, cannot laugh while these things are being mocked. Those who hate them cannot refrain. “Woe to you that now laugh: for you shall mourn and weep,” saith the Son of Man. (St. Luke 6:25)

It is always possible to discern the operations of a political agenda behind the comedy routine, and it is always an agenda of revenge. Contrarily, the un-embittered man, against all popular opinion, becomes graver, more serious, less amused. Transient moments of mirth, wit, or transcendent joy—these he knows. But he is not a laugher. He will not be moved from his place by the prattle of fools.

Herein lies the secret of much treachery and disappointment. When has someone ever amused you, but that you took him as an authority and coveted a share of his power? When have you not felt others’ laughter at something you abominated, as anything but betrayal? Anyone has simply to put this to the test to observe the truth of it.

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How some Southern California drug rehab centers exploit addiction

How would you like to live next to a drug addiction center?

This is a horrifying series from the Orange County Register:

Chronic drug users like Solomon are commodities, exploited by a growing world of drug and alcohol rehab operators who put profit ahead of patient care. Everything from the opioid epidemic and Obamacare to prison realignment and legal loopholes has created conditions in which unethical operators can flourish, using addicts to bilk insurance companies and the public out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Though many legitimate centers remain, critics and long-time insiders say a darker version of the industry is emerging, built around an illicit world of patient recruiters, fraud-driven clinics and drug-testing mills.

Southern California, where the implementation of Obamacare makes it easy for recent arrivals to sign on for insurance, is on the front line of the conflict.

Malibu has 47 licensed rehab centers and a population of fewer than 13,000 people, making it the city with the highest per-capita concentration of rehab centers in California, according to state data. No. 2 is Costa Mesa, with 102 centers and a population of about 110,000. And those cities aren’t distant outliers; Pasadena, Murrieta, San Bernardino, Woodland Hills, Long Beach – all are among the dozens of communities in Southern California where 10 or more rehab centers have opened shop.

In all, the region is home to 1,117 licensed rehab centers, a number that doesn’t include thousands of unlicensed sober living homes where addicts live as families.

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Justin Murphy’s “The psychology of prohibiting outside thinkers”

Murphy is a man of the left. He writes: “Because we know deep down inside that our life’s work is only half of what it could have been had we the courage to not ask for permission, if there ever arise people who are doing high-level intellectual work on the outside, exactly as they wish to without anyone’s permission or money, then not only are we naturally resentful, but we secretly know that at least some of these outsiders are likely doing more interesting, more valuable, more radically incisive work than we are, because we secretly know that we earn our salary by agreeing to only say half of what we could.”

Justin Murphy writes:

First, it seems to be a fact that the genuinely intellectual wings of the alt-right or neo-reaction (NRx) or whatever you want to call it, are probably too intelligent and sophisticated for bourgeois intellectual workers to engage with, let alone compete with. … So if those essays are actually pretty smart and a legitimate challenge to your institutional authority as a credentialed intellectual—you are functionally required to close ranks, if only with a silent agreement to not engage.

Now, as soon as anyone from this non-institutional world produces effects within the institutional orbit, it is actually a really serious survival reflex for all institutionally privileged intellectuals to play the morality card (“no platform!”). If all these strange, outside autodidacts are actually smart and independently producing high-level intellectual content you don’t have the time to even understand, let alone defeat or otherwise control, this is an existential threat to your entire livelihood. Because all of your personal identity, your status, and your salary, is based directly on your credentialed, legitimated membership card giving your writings and pontifications an officially sanctioned power and authority. If that door is opened even a crack by non-credentialed outsiders, the whole jig is up for the respectable bourgeois monopoly on the official intellectual organs of society.

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