Month: January 2018

The Grief Exception: Diversity Causes Depression

At The Guardian, buried deep within an article on depression lurks a shocking admission of its causes, including diversity.

Then, as the years and decades passed, doctors on the frontline started to come back with another question. All over the world, they were being encouraged to tell patients that depression is, in fact, just the result of a spontaneous chemical imbalance in your brain – it is produced by low serotonin, or a natural lack of some other chemical. It’s not caused by your life – it’s caused by your broken brain. Some of the doctors began to ask how this fitted with the grief exception. If you agree that the symptoms of depression are a logical and understandable response to one set of life circumstances – losing a loved one – might they not be an understandable response to other situations? What about if you lose your job? What if you are stuck in a job that you hate for the next 40 years? What about if you are alone and friendless?

The grief exception seemed to have blasted a hole in the claim that the causes of depression are sealed away in your skull. It suggested that there are causes out here, in the world, and they needed to be investigated and solved there. This was a debate that mainstream psychiatry (with some exceptions) did not want to have. So, they responded in a simple way – by whittling away the grief exception. With each new edition of the manual they reduced the period of grief that you were allowed before being labelled mentally ill – down to a few months and then, finally, to nothing at all. Now, if your baby dies at 10am, your doctor can diagnose you with a mental illness at 10.01am and start drugging you straight away.

…We act like human distress can be assessed solely on a checklist that can be separated out from our lives, and labelled as brain diseases. If we started to take people’s actual lives into account when we treat depression and anxiety, Joanne explained, it would require “an entire system overhaul”. She told me that when “you have a person with extreme human distress, [we need to] stop treating the symptoms. The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let’s get to the deeper problem.”

The grief exception points out that depression cannot be purely chemical because people experience it in response to grief, which is an external stimulus. If grief can cause the effects of depression, then we cannot universally say that those effects cause depression, because that is a cause-effect error. If when it rains, the sidewalk is wet, it does not mean that the if the sidewalk is wet, it has rained; there are other ways in that the sidewalk can become wet.

As it turns out, that is not all. Instability caused by diversity causes people to fear for their future, and this makes them depressed and paranoid:

We all know that every human being has basic physical needs: for food, for water, for shelter, for clean air. It turns out that, in the same way, all humans have certain basic psychological needs. We need to feel we belong. We need to feel valued. We need to feel we’re good at something. We need to feel we have a secure future. And there is growing evidence that our culture isn’t meeting those psychological needs for many – perhaps most – people. I kept learning that, in very different ways, we have become disconnected from things we really need, and this deep disconnection is driving this epidemic of depression and anxiety all around us.

…Professor John Cacioppo of Chicago University taught me that being acutely lonely is as stressful as being punched in the face by a stranger – and massively increases your risk of depression. Dr Vincent Felitti in San Diego showed me that surviving severe childhood trauma makes you 3,100% more likely to attempt suicide as an adult. Professor Michael Chandler in Vancouver explained to me that if a community feels it has no control over the big decisions affecting it, the suicide rate will shoot up.

As time goes on, we are seeing that diversity is destructive to all groups involved and that our attempts to fix the situation only make it worse. Like any other crusade against a condition of life itself, this one is doomed to fail because it has no condition for stopping, thus will continue to accelerate in manic intensity until it self-destructs.

Why Invasive Species Prosper: Less Specific Knowledge, Fewer Enemies

A new study on the genomes of reeds gives us an insight into what gives invasive species an upper hand over native ones:

“Smaller genomes are more nimble,” she said. “They can grow in variable environments and at almost all latitudes.”

The findings of the research team raise the question of why plants with small genomes are more likely to become invasive. She thinks they have the answer.

“The main theoretical reason has to do with minimum generation time,” she explained. “The idea is that a smaller genome can be replicated more quickly than a larger genome. So if a plant is in a stressful environment, it can be replicated more quickly than if it had a larger genome. It needs fewer resources and can use its resources quickly to reproduce before its luck runs out.

“On the other hand, a smaller genome also means that it may lose genes that are potentially beneficial,” added Pyšek, the first author of the paper. “So there may be a trade-off.”

Smaller genomes means fewer instructions, which means a generalist — “can grow in variable environments and at almost all latitudes” — with fewer genes coded to specific adaptations such as would anchor a plant in one environment. This generalist status means that the plant has a lower burden of fitting into an ecosystem and therefore, more energy to reproduce, and a simpler form to reproduce as well.

As time goes on, such plants become adapted because the ones that develop specific adaptations become more efficient. They therefore have more energy than their less-specialized cousins, and gradually genetically predominate. The same will be true of invasive animals, including humans. The ones that are least adapted to their specific country of origin, and therefore most generalized and simplest, will arrive in new lands and out-reproduce the natives, displacing them and eventually, genetically absorbing them.

In effect, this is a “race to the bottom” where simpler species constantly overwhelm and destroy more complex ones, unless the environment is hostile enough that generalists do not thrive in it because they lack the specific adaptations.

Invasive species have another advantage, which is that they lack the predators and enemies that they had back in their homelands, while invasive species must contend with such others, meaning that all of the energy which would have to go to defending the invasive species can instead be invested in reproduction:

“Our native Phragmites in North America is getting hammered by both native and introduced insects, whereas the invasive Phragmites in North America suffers far less herbivory than it does in its native Europe,” she said. “That’s partly because when invasives are introduced to a new place, they leave their enemies behind and can devote their resources to greater growth.”

The same applies to immigration. People of simpler genomes, with fewer specific adaptations, can abandon their enemies at home and gain an easy foothold abroad. At that point, the only thing that holds them back is xenophobic elitism on the part of the natives, who will recognize assimilation in progress and resist it, at least if not restrained by government and media.

How The Hippies Made A Once-Thriving Society Into Idiocracy

Back in 1968, a seismic shift occurred across the West as we transitioned to the values system of individualism instead of social order:

In 1968, the baby boom generation came of age and started making its mark. The “Me Generation” had arrived. The men, sons of the “Greatest Generation,” did not want to fight communism in Vietnam as their fathers had fought fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan. The women wanted new social equality and freedom concerning sex, marriage and work that their mothers had never dreamed of.

The “Protestant ethic” of self-discipline and personal responsibility was rejected by many boomers. In its place was thrust forward a culture of entitlement and “self-actualization” as the New Jerusalem for America. Duty to family and country was old-fashioned, not “hip,” while “if it feels good, do it” became a norm for progressive minds to embrace.

Instead of responsibility to an order — social, natural, divine, logical — instead there was only individualism. Whatever the individual desired was right, and this replaced the notion of the individual adapting to its environment and having a civilization so that order could prevail. Not surprisingly, this caused people to revert to monkey behavior, essentially fornicating wildly, being parasitic, ganging up on non-conformists, and otherwise reverting to primal urges.

Sexual liberation led to a lack of trust between people, because when you are lover #64 you know that you are kept as a matter of convenience, not the eternal love that your grandparents had. That in turn led to divorce, which created unstable children from Generation X onward who spent most of their free time wondering how they could know if anything was real, true, good, or important, because they never really had any examples or stability in their lives.

The ethnic, class, and racial liberation also produced more hybrids, brought forth many ill-considered genetic mixes, and destroyed the notion of having culture at all. The hippie emphasis on drugs created not just a society strung out on weed, but a mentality from “big pharma” that there was a pill for anything. Better living through chemistry. We also cannot forget how the hippie ethos of personal laziness and the dogmatic pursuit of art, music, hedonism, and “new” ideas put us into a cycle of novelty-seeking culminating in Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).

Even worse, the hippies introduced the idea that having the “correct” ideas was more important than being actually correct. This set us adrift from reality entirely, so that all that matters is the approval of our peers at the voting box, in the pub, at the cash register, or around the water cooler. Not surprisingly, now, insanity predominates in the West:

A group of Democrats in Congress held briefings on Capitol Hill with a Yale professor named Brandy X. Lee who, in admitted complete violation of the ethics governing her profession, has edited and contributed to a book claiming President Donald Trump is losing his mind. What’s the point of ethics when you have a product to sell?

Lee found a receptive audience among the more unstable liberals in Congress, including Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, who regaled CNN with tales of his “concern” for Trump’s mental health. Raskin, looking like he’d recently slept in a bag of potato chips, told CNN of his concern that the President was crazy.

What’s really crazy is advocating for policies that have failed throughout the world, as Raskin and his fellow travelers often do in government. Unstable is the mind calling for socialized medicine and extol the virtues of the UK’s National Health Service without acknowledging the fact that all non-emergency surgeries have been canceled for the month of January because their system is simply overwhelmed. That’s straightjacket-level insane.

Straightjacket-level insane is what happens when you destroy the breeding stock of your nations, shatter families, turn education into propaganda, bedazzle and befuddle minds with mental gymnastics to support a ludicrous ideology, and then saturate those people in propaganda through entertainment while working them into tedious oblivion with soul-sucking jobs. The West is no longer a civilization; it is an insane asylum, ruined by its own “well meaning” policies that culminated in the radical individualism of 1968.

Let us be clear: the rot had been coming for long before that. If the appalling carnage of WW1 did not wake us, and the grotesque waste of the Civil War did not snap us out of the daydream, then surely the horrors of WW2 and the Cold War would not either. That was the case; we slept through those, living in grim terror and denying it with all of our might, only to find that when the Cold War ended, we had no purpose left and so there was nothing to keep us from rushing headlong into full socialism.

And that rot was explainable back to the origins of democracy, which as Plato warned us, is not so much a bad system of government as it is a system that makes people go insane. Without orientation and boundaries, purpose and meaning, they drift into an oblivion of solipsism, navel-gazing as they self-destruct. This loss of character also leads to a loss of genetic integrity, which begins the gradual degradation of the group in ability. We are already seeing genetic degeneration:

In sum: at one time the best of Britons (aged 12–14) could cope with items on the formal level and blended into a smooth curve of performance. Now these items are beyond many of them and register as a huge decimation of high scorers.

Piagetian gains at the bottom of the curve should not be dismissed as simply a phenomenon that offsets losses at the top. Consider the British results for Equilibrium and Pendulum. The decimation of top scorers means that by the age of 12 to 14, fewer British schoolchildren attain the level of formal operations. This means that fewer could think in terms of abstractions (without concrete examples), which limits their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning. However, the fact that these losses are made up by gains over the rest of the “curve” means that far more of them are at the concrete generalization level. They are better at on the spot thinking (e.g. in playing demanding computer games). Their understanding of the physical world is limited to simple causation between two variables, but they can draw inferences from observations to make generalizations.

The Piagetian results are particularly ominous. Looming over all is their message that the pool of those who reach the top level of cognitive performance is being decimated: fewer and fewer people attain the formal level at which they can think in terms of abstractions and develop their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning. They also reveal that something is actually targeting that level with special effect, rather than simply reducing its numbers in accord with losses over the curve as a whole. We have given our reason as to why the Piagetian tests are sensitive to this phenomenon in a way that conventional tests are not.

Massive IQ gains over time were never written in the sky as something eternal like the law of gravity. They are subject to every twist and turn of social evolution. If there is a decline, should we be too upset? During the 20th century, society escalated its skill demands and IQ rose. During the 21st century, if society reduces its skill demands, IQ will fall.

In a civilization where stupidity, insanity, and narcissism are the norm, there is zero reward for intelligence, self-discipline, moral character, and insight, so those things will die out, being replaced with the ability to be funny at the bar, the capacity to memorize large amounts of disorganized information, and a creative impulse toward new sexual positions. 1968 cut us free from reality; we have found, to our surprise, that what was left — ourselves — was not only not that fascinating, but a path to stupidity.

Cosmopolitan Mentality Uses Tokens Of Identity To Exclude Others

David Brooks wrote a great book about how the 1968 generation became our new false elites in America. He also reveals to us the nature of cosmopolitanism:

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

Lacking a culture in common, cosmopolitans instead invent a series of tokens of identity based on what they do share, which is shopping, media, pop culture, the public arts, and knowledge of fine varieties of food, alcohol, cigars, and other luxuries. They then use these tokens of identity to create a social hierarchy where the people who are “in the know” or “in the in-group” have the latest tokens and everyone else follows them as tastemakers and leaders.

They also use these tokens offensively, equating ignorance of cosmopolitan culture with ignorance in general, and using that to shame people who have not joined the cosmopolitan clique. This enables them to dominate others through social means instead of by actually being natural elites, or those who are in power because of higher ability.

Clarence Thomas: Race Is More Important Than Politics

From Daily Caller, an interview with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas:

In an epic speech some 20 years ago to black judges in Memphis, Thomas boldly stated that he came not to defend his views, “but rather to assert my right to think to myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black.” He wrote that speech, he says today, to draw attention to, “the right, among blacks, to think for themselves, the right to be that invisible man, to be the one who lays claim to his own thoughts.”

While this is a positive statement, it asserts the importance of race above all else, which is especially necessary as a thought process when one is from a minority ethnic group. Although he is rebelling against being defined by his race, he is also affirming it, because he sees blackness as essential to his choice of how to interpret his views. This rare honest insight into the ethnic crisis in America shows us how it is impossible to be “post-racial” even when thoroughly accepted.

The War On Racism Will Cause Collapse And Genocide

Over at Legitimate Grievances, a site whose tagline is “the only way to win the war on racism will be to end it,” Al Stankard points out that the war on racism is a death spiral because it perpetuates the problem it seeks to solve:

As the war on racism wears on intractably, as it has our whole lives and with the mirage of success receding perpetually from view, the alt-right has descended onto the scene like a black swan. While for many of us it serves as a convenient scapegoat for the ongoing failure of the war on racism, it could just as well be interpreted as a by-product of that same war on racism, and a sign that we are at an historical crossroads and that there may well be more black swans to come. When an ideology, such as Antiracism, creates its own bogeyman, then it has entered into a negative feedback loop that ensures its own demise.

Most people prefer to live with those like them, not just in terms of race but ethnic group, caste, religion, culture, class, and even political orientation. To make us all get along, we have to abolish those things, but they are also the parts of hierarchy and social order necessary to keep a first world society — as opposed to a third world style one — operating.

The war on racism throws us into a doom loop. The more we crusade against racism, the more we find, and the more we create racial animus through clumsy and unjust attempts to equalize. This will only end when any groups that have risen above the level of equal — high Asians, whites, and Jews — are eliminated and we are all a uniform brown with an average IQ in the mid-90s, at which point social Darwinism will end because competition will end and pacifism will rule.

Even The Atlantic has noticed the autumnal death cycle of diversity which plays out through Leftist desires for funding for their socialist-style entitlements programs:

As the birth rate has declined in the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, and Japan, the immigrant share of their populations has increased…These countries have high median incomes, which are attractive to international migrants, plus their economies need new humans to sustain both GDP growth and government services…as the children of immigrants find jobs and pay taxes, immigrant families wind up being a net contributor to the government over many decades, according to a 2016 report from the National Academy of Sciences.

…But there is a growing body of evidence that as rich majority-white countries admit more foreign-born people, far-right parties thrive by politicizing the perceived threat of the foreign-born to national culture. That concept will sound familiar to anybody who watched the 2016 U.S. presidential race, but it’s a truly global trend. A 2015 study of immigration and far-right attitudes in Austria found that the proximity of low and medium-skilled immigrants “causes Austrian voters to turn to the far right.” The effect was strongest in areas with higher unemployment, suggesting that culture and economics might reinforce each other in this equation. Last week, the far-right Austrian party triumphed in the nation’s election.

This is where the story finally connects with welfare and the future of liberalism. Rich countries tend to redistribute wealth from the rich few to the less-rich multitude. But when that multitude suddenly includes minorities who are seen as outsiders, the white majority can turn resentful and take back their egalitarian promises. Take, for example, the Twin Cities of Minnesota. They were once revered for their liberal local policies—like corporate-tax redistribution from rich areas to poor neighborhoods and low-income housing construction near business districts. But since the 1980s, as the metro area attracted more nonwhite immigrants, the metro has become deeply segregated by income and race and affordable-housing construction has backtracked. Or take Finland, that renowned “Santa Claus State” of cradle-to-grave social services, where the welfare state is being “systematically dismantled.” The far right has emerged in the last few decades, just as foreign-born population has suddenly grown.

…But an unavoidable lesson of the last few years, from both inside and outside the U.S., is that cultural heterogeneity and egalitarianism often cut against each other. Pluralist social democracy is stuck in a finger trap of math and bigotry, where to pull on one end (support for diversity) seems to naturally strain the other (support for equality).

This remarkably blunt article exists to conceal a simple truth: when people experience diversity, they do not like it, despite the happy faces of celebrities and professors telling us that we should eat our damn vegetables and start appreciating diversity already. In fact, this is the classic feedback loop. As diversity grows, so does opposition to diversity, mainly because diversity is having negative effects. What are those? Think about the inverse relationship between “equality” and “diversity” when you read Robert Putnam’s research findings:

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

…Putnam claims the US has experienced a pronounced decline in “social capital,” a term he helped popularize. Social capital refers to the social networks — whether friendships or religious congregations or neighborhood associations — that he says are key indicators of civic well-being. When social capital is high, says Putnam, communities are better places to live. Neighborhoods are safer; people are healthier; and more citizens vote.

…Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle,” Putnam writes.

Further research has shown stronger connections between diversity and social collapse, including the role of diversity as division in American politics. Some have looked further into why diversity is so destructive, finding a number of reasons from antiquity onward suggesting that not just racial but ethnic diversity is destructive to social order and precedes civilizational collapse.

Empathy Does Not Help Us Make Better Decisions

A new study reveals the lack of importance of empathy in how we make decisions:

Iacoboni and his colleagues hypothesized that people who had greater neural resonance than the other participants while watching the hand-piercing video would also be less likely to choose to silence the baby in the hypothetical dilemma, and that proved to be true. Indeed, people with stronger activity in the inferior frontal cortex, a part of the brain essential for empathy and imitation, were less willing to cause direct harm, such as silencing the baby.

But the researchers found no correlation between people’s brain activity and their willingness to hypothetically harm one person in the interest of the greater good—such as silencing the baby to save more lives. Those decisions are thought to stem from more cognitive, deliberative processes.

The Left tells us that the problem in society is not incompetence or solipsism, but that people are anti-social or cruel, which usually means that they rise above others through competition or are unmoved by the “problem” of inequality. The solution that the Left proposes, as always, is destructive: empathy, or the thought that if we just “felt their pain” we would see why we have to “help” other people rather than let them face the consequences of their choices as in natural selection.

The Leftist “argument from suffering” ignores the role of individuals in their own suffering and how people think when they actually have to make a decision. Instead of using empathy, they use logic, because that is how they survive as individuals. In conversation, however, they use empathy because that is how you make other people like you, and by doing that, the self-interested individual succeeds in a socially-driven society like our own.

Hippies Destroyed America

From the Star Tribune, an analysis of what actually ails America:

When the complete history of the decline and fall of the American nation comes to be written, the turning point toward failure will not be recorded as the election of Donald Trump in 2016. It will be found among the events of 1968.

…Forces unleashed back then by angry protesters and resentful defenders of traditional ideals culminated decades later in the division of our people into “red” and “blue” warring tribes, with no cultural intermediaries left to speak of.

…The “Protestant ethic” of self-discipline and personal responsibility was rejected by many boomers. In its place was thrust forward a culture of entitlement and “self-actualization” as the New Jerusalem for America. Duty to family and country was old-fashioned, not “hip,” while “if it feels good, do it” became a norm for progressive minds to embrace.

In other words, we had a Socialist takeover. By allying with the Communists in WW2, America made herself open to the idea of Socialism, but paired it with a thriving capitalist state and applied it through “Great Society” and “New Deal” programs, which applied the Socialist subsidy state through tax-and-spend wealth transfer. This accomplished the goal of egalitarianism, which is always to reduce the higher so that the lower can thrive.

During the 1968 years, America shifted from a civilization founded on the idea of opportunity to one based on the idea of subsidy, or that “we” the people would subsidize each other, which always means taking from the productive and gifting to the unproductive. It took another twenty years to take effect fully, and during the intervening two decades, we have seen the destruction that it has wrought in the style of Soviet Communism.

Included among its many tentacles is the idea that a majority population such as Caucasian must be replaced because of their inherent rank in ability above third-world groups. This has manifested itself as a government agenda to destroy Caucasians through affirmative action, taxes, lawsuits, subjugation, and other forms of control. The hippies enjoy their final victory, but they do so at the expense of the land they inherited. “We had to destroy the village to save it, sir.”

Mainstream Media Has Not Yet Realized That Trump Is A Moderate

From USA Today, a sensible analysis of Donald Trump the moderate:

I served in Ronald Reagan’s White House and managed his reelection campaign in 1984. Then, like now, the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was more than a transformative political figure — he was the face of a national revolution. President Reagan won more than 54 million votes in 1984, carrying 49 out of 50 states. Americans overwhelmingly trusted him to roll back government bureaucracy, unleash economic prosperity and pursue peace through military strength.

More than three decades later, Trump ran and won on similar promises. He too vowed to hold Washington accountable, jumpstart sluggish economic growth, and rebuild America’s military to protect our nation’s interests first and foremost. His message resonated in corners of the country where the liberal media and political punditry thought it impossible.

Trump offered a simple platform: he would back off from the ideological agenda of Leftists and their hope of globalism, and instead focus on function. That means reducing taxes and regulation, centering America on some idea of what we are trying to do, and restoring the confidence and faith people have in their nation-state. However, this conflicts with the Leftist agenda of conformity, so it is provoking squawks of discontent from the Establishment formed informally of Leftists in government, media, industry, academia, and entertainment.

Anti-Diversity Means No More Ethnic Conflict

The Jersusalem Post opines that racial animosity arises from conflicting interests even in neutral, pacifistic, diversity-worshiping America:

Though US President Donald Trump is a philosemite and has proven to be a major ally of Israel, many of the issues that he has advanced – anti-immigration, America First, anti-globalism – are shared by blatantly antisemitic conservative politicians. Indeed, a number of political pundits have noted that, leaving aside Patrick Buchanan’s anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric, there are remarkable similarities between Trump’s campaign and the issues championed by Buchanan during his unsuccessful 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns.

As a result, the supporters of men like Buchanan have shown thrown their support behind Trump and have been emboldened by Trump’s victory. Because Trump is dependent on this constituency for its support, he cannot easily disassociate himself from them or openly criticize them.

The tragedy here is that ethnic interests conflict: the Western European substrate of America wants to have its own nation, and the Jewish people surely need theirs. While Donald Trump is not anti-Semitic, he recognizes the primal rule of nations. One ethnic group defines one nation. Only when two or more overlap do we see the horrors of racial resentment, pogroms, Holocausts and other outward signs of ethnic conflict.