Category Archives: Intelligence

UPDATED (4/25): LETTER: Quite A Few Conservatives Agree That J.D. Vance Is Vile

America, Celebrity, Conservatism, Critique, Intelligence, Literature

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I love my readers. They get it. Writes Mr. K, a longtime reader and a lawyer, about the column, “On The Backs Of Poor Whites? How J.D. Vance Elites Become Elites“:

Thank God. You are the FIRST person I have seen with the courage to call J.D. Vance out for what I also saw when reading his book years ago: His unbelievable willingness to throw anyone, including his family, etc., under the bus also to serve his, ultimately by definition, desire for self-promotion.
And in general, I have NEVER gotten what people saw in that book that elevated it so high. [Indeed. He’s nothing great.] As you kind of say, he found a niche in demand, I guess, that also was not too particular about the quality of what it would celebrate.

As for conservative TV hosts who’ve dubbed J.D. Vance “one of the smartest people around.” That’s hilarious. This says all you need to know about conservatism’s intelligentsia.

James Burnham, Hans Hoppe, Samuel Huntington (A Democrat, actually) of the brilliant, unequaled Clash of Civilizations fame, and Samuel Johnson, Russell Kirk, Clyde Wilson, von Mises, Rothbard, Chris Matthew Sciabarra (what a writer he is!): They all live happily on the shelves of my library, pictured above. It would be sacrilegious—and an affront—to place Vance in their literary vicinity. Stupid, too.

READ: “On The Backs Of Poor Whites? How J.D. Vance Elites Become Elites“:

…Vance is a sellout. Not that they were asked for their take, but the archetypical folks depicted in Hillbilly Elegy contend, justifiably, that “Vance [is] not an authentic hillbilly or an example of the working class.”

Cassie Chambers Armstrong’s Aunt Ruth, for example.

Aunt Ruth didn’t think much of Vance’s endeavor. Her niece is an Appalachian and author of a redeeming tale, Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains.

“Hillbilly Elegy’s portrayal of Appalachia,” explains Chambers, “is designed to elevate Vance above the community from which he came … it seeks to tell his story in a way that aligns with a simplistic rags-to-riches narrative. Think critically about how that narrative influences the way we are taught to think about poverty, progress, and identity.” …

UPDATE (4/25): Jeff Deist: “Agreed. For a more thoughtful defense of Appalachia and poor whites this is a great read– by former US Senator Jim Webb.”

East Asian Countries Believe In, OMG, Ability (IQ, Too), Not Equity

Affirmative Action, America, Asia, China, Education, Egalitarianism, Government, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence

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While America is working at propelling the dumbest people to the top, in the name of equity, the latest buzzword for such an idiotic endeavor; while the US is cultivating a slumdog culture—the East Asian countries are sticking to more Confucian principles, like … merit.

Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and China have “one feature in common.” Via The Economist:

… a belief in strong government institutions run by the best and the brightest. This emphasis on meritocracy also has deep roots in Confucian culture. The entry bar to the Chinese Communist Party is set very high: only the top graduating students are admitted. Equally importantly, the rising levels of competent governance are both fuelled by, and contribute to, rising levels of cultural confidence. All this is gradually eroding the deference to the West that used to be the norm in Asia.

Government is always coercive. America’s has the added “benefit” of being both dumb and coercive. See this week’s column: “Systemic, Institutional Rot: From Big Freeze In Texas To Fires In Cali.”

MORE by KISHORE MAHBUBANI (Apr 20th 2020)

MATH: The Problem With Conservatives? They Run From Racial Reality

Affirmative Action, Ancient History, Conservatism, Education, Intelligence, Race, Racism, Reason, Science, The West

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The problem with math is that it can be—how shall we put it?—mean to certain minorities. The problem with conservatives? They run from such racial realities.

Math as racist is not a new angle in the war for egalitarianism in aptitude.

Some people can do math well; others less so. Still others not at all. There are aggregate discrepancies between the sexes and between the races in the facility with mathematics.

(There has been a link to the work of La Griffe du Lion, on the ilanamercer.com Resources page (Junk Science category), since the website’s inception. His explosive work was allowed back then.)

These days, however, kids are being taught that, given enough Kale, care and instruction from formative figures—everyone has a chance at achieving a similar aptitude. “You can do anything you put your mind to,” goes the parental and pedagogic refrain.

No wonder anger rises among the less proficient when reality bites and puts the lie to the fiction of an egalitarian distribution of talent.

If some fail miserably in certain fields, why, the deficit is said to be not in the child but in the “system,” the teacher, the topic, or the particular discipline.

And if patterns of failure correlate with racial groupings; voila! It’s systemic. See, “‘Systemic Racism’ Or Systemic Rubbish?” Video included (for those who, unlike me, do not prefer text).

Anti-white activists—let us call them what they are, please—are now claiming math is a white supremacist discipline, not least because it is also an objective science with right or wrong answers. There is no relativism to it; no, “Hey Johnny, that’s an interesting answer, why don’t you try that new equation in the next bridge you design?”

Trust conservatives to never cop to the fact that complex math was the invention of Westerners. Oh, no!

As is the wont of conservatives, they apologize for any white involvement in such greatness as is math.

Tucker Carlson’s guest takes the tired conservative tack. Denounce and deprecate Western achievement:

“Math is not a white discipline, how absurd,” says Tucker’s guest.

Okay, Miss obsequious.

More advanced mathematics can be traced to ancient Greece over 2,500 years ago. Ancient mathematician Pythagoras had questions about the sides of a right triangle. His questioning, research, and testing led to a basic understanding of triangles we still study today, known as the Pythagorean Theorem.
Most experts agree that it was around this time (2,500 years ago) in ancient Greece that mathematics first became an organized science.

If it’s me, I’m owning it.

Beginning in the 6th century BC with the Pythagoreans, with Greek mathematics the Ancient Greeks began a systematic study of mathematics as a subject in its own right. Around 300 BC, Euclid introduced the axiomatic method still used in mathematics today, consisting of definition, axiom, theorem, and proof.

Wikipedia.

Next, Miss Millennial parrots the exhausted cliche about “the soft bigotry of lowered expectations,” namely the “myth” that students of color can’t achieve to standards, and therefore the standards must be lowered.

Both host and guest feel safe in their sanctimony, ignoring the well-established and enduring “racial achievement gap in the United States” in mathematics.

 

UPDATED (2/22): NTSB, so nerdy and white.

 

Hilaria Baldwin: An American Prototype Infests The World

Aesthetics, America, Gender, Intelligence, Pop-Culture, Sex

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Whatever their ethnicity, the defining quality about today’s woman—and Hilaria Baldwin is a prototype proliferating around the world—is their mind-numbing banality, asininity, audacity, vacuity; ignorance, narcissism and self-adoration unwarranted.

The Silly Sex around the world even speaks the same:

“This piss-poor, teenybopper English comes with sound effects. …[these] tarts all speak in insufferable, grating, staccato tones. At least, that is how I have always described the gravelly voice of the tele-ditz. And yet, believe it or not, such a depiction is no longer politically proper. The voices from hell have been dignified”:

Two vocal features are associated with young women: vocal fry and uptalk. Uptalk, as the name suggests, is the rising intonation that makes statements sound like questions? And vocal fry – often said to be typical of Kim Kardashian, an American celebrity – happens at the ends of words and phrases when a speaker’s vocal chords relax, giving the voice a kind of creaky quality.

FROM: “The TV Tarts’ Reign of Terror.”

The Hilaria in the above clip is unfazed—she knows her audience all too well. As does her husband. In days of old, such fraud would have been met with ostracization, as in when the character of Glenn Close, from “Dangerous Liaisons,” was booed at the opera for her machinations.

In a culture built on Big Lies and saturated with phoniness—shunning doesn’t happen and neither does any meaningful expiation.

The liar just reconstitutes herself or himself afresh for the camera.

(Only with bigger, phonier eyebrows: What’s with the tattooed, “fat caterpillar” eyebrows on Mrs. Baldwin? I see a lot of women are inking their foreheads in place of eyebrows. Is that a “Spanish” thing, too?)

Some see this phenomenon as a Right/Left thing. Fake and foolish is worse on the Left, no doubt. But I don’t see it as Right/Left. Where are all the decent, cultured women and men around? Men and women with manners, proper etiquette; who’re able to correspond, relate adaptively in a fun way; speak and think coherently, read? With few exceptions, I see horrid manners and boorish mannerisms pervading among the Left and the Right, in men and women alike.