I’ve been planning an expedition into horror, for which the Kurtz of Conrad and of Coppola is an essential way-station – perhaps even a terminus. The mission is to articulate horror as a functional, cognitive ‘achievement’ – a calm catastrophe of all intellectual inhibition — tending to realism in its ultimate possibility. Horror is the true end of philosophy. So it counted as a moment of synchronicity to stumble upon Richard Fernandez quoting (Coppola’s) Kurtz — and it had to be passed along immediately. There is, of course, only one passage that matters, so it is no coincidence that Fernandez selects it:

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The witch-craze seems to be running out of juice, according to some  thought-provoking Ngram data organized by Brad Trun.

The charge of “Racist!” is losing its sting as its overzealous hurlers increasingly render it farcical. “Racist” is, for the first time since the neologism’s inception 80 years ago, starting to fall out of favor. Zooming in on the post–1930 period in Google Ngram Viewer and eliminating smoothing reveals that “racist” references topped out as the calendar switched to the new millennium.

My welcome news receptors are so corroded, that I can’t help wondering: what’s wrong with this story?

(In other news, Peak African is still some way off. Caplan will no doubt be thrilled. Does anybody sensible think that a billion Nigerians by 2100 sounds like a future that might work? It’s probably a racist question, but you have to do what you can for dying traditions.)

ADDED: “We’ve set up a system where the world’s most easily offended people get to decide what’s offensive and what’s not …”

So – does Mecca get nuked? For the purpose of this series, that’s a reasonable candidate for the terminal question.

A direct assault on this question stumbles quickly into a paradox of stimulating profundity. Of all the geopolitical and religious agencies determining the outcome, the one most theologically predisposed to the vaporization of Islam’s spiritual center is the Wahhabi sect, which presently controls it. The case can easily be made that, within the limitations set by peacetime conditions, this objective has already been pursued with spectacular ardor. (If you noticed the Iranian media links there, save that observation.) Also worth mentioning: it’s a necessary antecedent to the Islamic Apocalypse (al-Qiyamah) that Mecca and the Kaaba be destroyed.

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Jason Richwine on structural media dishonesty:

What causes so many in the media to react emotionally when it comes to IQ? Snyderman and Rothman believe it is a naturally uncomfortable topic in modern liberal democracies. The possibility of intractable differences among people does not fit easily into the worldview of journalists and other members of the intellectual class who have an aversion to inequality. The unfortunate — but all too human — reaction is to avoid seriously grappling with inconvenient truths. And I suspect the people who lash out in anger are the ones who are most internally conflicted.

But I see little value in speculating further about causes. Change is what’s needed. And the first thing for reporters, commentators, and non-experts to do is to stop demonizing public discussion of IQ differences. Stop calling names. Stop trying to get people fired. Most of all, stop making pronouncements about research without first reading the literature or consulting people who have.

Good luck with that.

When old white racists attack.

Look, a squirrel aliens!

(via)

ADDED: Pouring oil on the water (or something): “Christendom has moved on since 1546 when the college [Trinity] was founded. If Islam has not moved on during the same period, perhaps Muslims might consider asking why, and whether something could be done about it.”

Bryan Caplan has had two epiphanies, which sum to the conclusion that — bad as tribalism is — misanthropy is the real problem. His ineradicable universalism betrays him once again.

It matters little whether people are uniformly judged good or bad. Far more important is whether such judgment is discriminating.

The central argument of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals is clarifying in this regard, not least because it explains how radical mystification came to dominate the topic. How could there ever come to be a moral quandary about the value of discrimination? Considered superficially, it is extremely puzzling.

Differentiation between what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ requires discrimination. This is a capability no younger than life itself, which it serves as an indispensable function. As soon as there is behavior, there is discrimination between alternatives. One way leads to survival, the other way leads to death. There is nourishment, or not; reproduction, or not; safety or predatory menace. Good and bad, or the discrimination between them (which is the same thing), are etched primordially into any world that life inhabits. Discrimination is needed to survive.

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Bryan Caplan passes on the news that “The Open Borders blog is sponsoring an Open Borders logo contest.” Everyone should get involved — it’s time to make an impact.

This is my recommendation:

(If there was an obvious symbol for selectivity I’d have preferred it.)

Kevin Williamson channels Foseti:

… the United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama’s view of the world. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics.

ParaPundit captures America’s game of political chicken with exceptional acuity:

The sorts of people who can generate the incomes (and therefore tax revenues) to pay all these [pension] liabilities are becoming rarer. Of course this means the Republicans are road kill. But the demographic ascent of the Democrats into power will give them something like command of the Titanic as it hits an iceberg. In fact, the Democrats decided to head for the iceberg as their sure fire way to get permanent control of the ship.

One dark and fearsome crag, half-lost among the Himalayan mountain range of uncleared obligations stretched out before this blog, is a promise to devote a post (or several) to Mencius Moldbug’s Neocameral regime model. The opportunity to make a small payment against this debt having arisen, I am eagerly seizing it.

A relatively marginal but consistent feature in Moldbug’s model is the tendency of Neocameral tax rates to approximate to the Laffer maximum. Since Moldbug aims to rationalize the theory of government, under the presumption of its ineliminably self-interested nature, this suggestion scarcely requires an argument (and in fact does not receive one). Government will always tend to maximize its resources, and Arthur Laffer’s graph of optimum revenue-raising tax rates seems to show the way this is done. A Neocameral regime tends the economy of a country exactly as a farmer tends a herd of animals — without ever forgetting that ultimate redemption occurs in the abattoir.

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