Benjamin Douglas

@johnthenoticer So why did you capitalize ‘black’ but not ‘whites’? @johnthenoticer

White leftists refuse to 'believe the science' when it comes to group differences in intelligence: they claim that Black people are, on average, more intelligent than whites. Yet IQ gaps favoring whites have been consistently measured and stable for over 70 years.

@beffjezos As a quick example, I don't buy that we need to import STEM talent on the basis that we "don't have enough" here when we don't even 1.) universally screen our own students for IQ or 2.) have a national system of advanced STEM secondary schools for the top potential talent. (4/4)

@beffjezos The best way to evaluate an idea is to weigh its merits. If you believe closing the border would decrease our power, I would argue that there are a million domestic policy improvements we could undertake to more than make up for it. (3/4)

Woke right and woke left are both the product of ideological subversion.

& OFC the primary reason behind US decline is congressional incapacity, itself a direct consequence of immigration's splintering of the population and its varied interests into an incoherent jumble that forecloses the possibility of national planning, total systems, etc.

If this were so obviously true, then China would be accepting more immigrants than it currently does, which is to say... 750x fewer than the US, while having 3x our population.

@Jason @beffjezos Also, sports teams are oriented toward achieving external goals (e.g., winning a tournament) whereas the primary purpose of the nation is internal: Preserving itself, its people, and their tradition. Apples-to-oranges.

@Jason @beffjezos What is "winning" in this context? & Do you not wonder why China seems not to share your view that high-skilled immigration is necessary to do it?

Ok, gloves off. Fuck it. CCP wants US open borders to dissolve the US and render it dysfunctional. FSB wants US closed borders to maximize multipolarity / break ties with allies in their backyard. Anybody pushing for any of these extremes is a useful idiot to foreign agents.

@Smirkley Of course there are cultural problems among the lower, working, and middle classes, but those can be addressed without the subtle anti-proletarian bias inherent in just saying “look at how much television they watch lolz”.

@Smirkley And it’s also easier to spend your free time doing things other than sitting on a couch when you have energy left over after the workday to do so. And of course high-earning people skew urban and have more third spaces, and so on and so forth.

Poor people don’t have time to cook is cope.The poorest work 33 hours a week and watch 20 hours of TV. The richest work 47 hours and watch 14.

@muddletoes @sterasmas @reconfigurthing How is it scientifically obsolete?

@sterasmas @reconfigurthing It’s scientifically obsolete but politically attractive. “Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate.” This is fascism.

I just found out Nick Land's main blog, Xenosystems, was deleted a few years ago. I was never a fan, but there was one post that I really liked. It engages in an act of myth-making that I haven't seen done this well anywhere else:

I mostly avoid commenting on what President Trump says from day to day, while pulling no punches in my assessments, whether positive or negative, of his policy. His Iran ultimatums feel different. Making such threats is a policy. If he were to follow through on them, the consequences would be immediate, irreversible, and catastrophic on a world-historical scale. So while some will inevitably insist he should be “taken seriously rather than literally,” or that he is executing a sophisticated “madman” strategy in a complex game of 5-D chess, or that he needs everyone’s steadfast support to maximize his leverage, now rather than later seems the time to say that the actions that he is proposing would be a disaster for our country, both strategically and morally, which makes the remarks themselves a terrible mistake. Simply put, what’s the point of all this? If these are empty threats that we all know he will not carry out, then they are ineffective threats (the Iranians are on X too!), merely making the president and our nation look foolish. If they are not empty threats, then the president is asserting the American position that such actions are acceptable in this situation and ones we are willing to take. We are not living in some quantum thought experiment where he simultaneously is and is not serious. We cannot expect the Iranians, but only the Iranians, will believe him. Whether the threats are empty or not, we should be willing to say: This is wrong. We should not establish a pattern of threatening escalation from a blockaded strait to elimination of a civilization. We should not launch strikes intended to devastate the lives of millions of people and take our nation to total war without indisputable justification, or before the American people have deliberated upon and assented to the path with full understanding of what total war might mean for them. Those principles are vital to our Republic, independent of whether the strategy could “work.” But it’s also worth emphasizing that the strategy is a dead end. This war is actively weakening American power, increasing the danger to American citizens, and frustrating the president’s important efforts at addressing our many domestic challenges. It has closed a strait that was previously open, strengthened the incentive for other nations to pursue nuclear weapons, and in this most recent rhetoric made more plausible their use. Our choices for continuing the war appear to be catastrophic escalation of the air war or extensive deployment of ground troops, neither of which were planned or had support at the outset. Stepping back from these threats and admitting such actions do not offer a path to resolving the conflict may be unpalatable, but it is by far the least unpalatable option available. Let us all hope cooler heads prevail.