@JayMan471 @matthewherper @David_Dobbs @jason_pontin @charlesmurray The Bell Curve has been well refuted. I am dismayed that you cite it.

— Karen James (@kejames) December 2, 2014

Politically incorrect research, however solidly established, is especially singled out for this treatment. Some approved (i.e. Leftist) authority somewhere has provided the excuse to dismiss awkward findings, so that the painful stimulus can be suppressed, and — just to be safe — even the pretext for suppressing it is best forgotten, leaving only the permission to be undisturbed in public circulation. All crime-think has been ‘well refuted’ (sociologically a priori) as far as these people are concerned. “It’s been well refuted” means exactly “wouldn’t it be nice if this didn’t exist?” (or “nice people have told us we don’t need to worry about that”).

Refuted where?

@DocCLAR @JayMan471 @pseudoerasmus This is ridiculous. You can google just as well as I can.

— Karen James (@kejames) December 2, 2014

Amused yet?

ADDED: A banquet of ‘well refuted’ science at Slate.

Social evolution is just a modern myth. No scientific theory exists about how the process is supposed to work. There’s been much empty chatter about memes — units of information or meaning that supposedly compete with one another in society. But there’s no mechanism for the selection of human concepts similar to that which Darwin believed operated among species and which later scientists showed at work among genes. Bad ideas like racism seem to hang around forever, while the silly idea of social evolution has shown an awesome power to mutate and survive.

(Gnon laughs.)

Once the fertility transition to controlled fertility occurs in a population, its fertility generally continues to decline until it is below replacement. The benefits of the new pattern are increased material wealth per person, a reduction in disease, starvation, and genocide, and upward social mobility. The main drawback is the onset of a dysgenic phase that may end civilization as we know it.

(Admit it, you’re hooked …)

There are a lot of very lethal viruses in the world, and Ebola is not the most lethal or most easy transmittable, but the main thing which makes me worry about it is the steadiness of its exponential infection curve. … The main stunning feature of it is that the curve is moving straight forward (small downward bump in May-June may be explained by the efforts of existing medical services in Africa to curb the epidemic before services had been overwhelmed). This exponential growth must be stopped, or humanity will face a global catastrophe, and it may start a downward spiral towards extinction; moreover, some estimates suggest that pandemic doubling time is actually two weeks (because of underreporting of actual cases), so in five months, seven billion will be infected: total infection, by July 2015. … Such catastrophes may not mean total human extinction, as only around 70% of people infected currently die from Ebola (and even less because we don’t know, or share, asymptomatic cases), but still, this means the end of the world as we know it. This virus is the first step towards the road of full extinction … If the virus will mutate quickly, there will be many different strains of it, so it will ultimately create a multi-pandemic. … Some of the strains may became airborne, or have higher transmission rates, but the main risk from multi-pandemic is that it overcomes defenses provided by the natural variability of the human genome and immunity. (By the way, the human genome variability is very low because of the recent bottle neck in the history of our population. …) … We are almost clones from the view point of genetic variability typical for natural populations. […] The Human race is very unique – it has very large population but very small genetic diversity. It means that it is more susceptible to pandemics. […] Also, a large homogenous population is ideal for breeding different strains of infection. … If the genetic diversity of a pathogen is bigger than human diversity, than it could cause a near total extinction, and also, large and homogenous populations help breed such a diversity of pathogens feeding on the population. … [embedded link] … “The Ebola virus can survive for several days outside the body” [link] … “It is infectious as breathable 0.8 to 1.2-μm laboratory-generated droplets” … “Also many of the greatest plagues mankind has ever known were not airborne: e.g. smallpox.” …

… Another problem is the lack of adequate responses from global authorities; they are half a year behind the situation. You can’t react to exponential threats “proportionally”. You must be several steps ahead. […] Everything they do now should have been done half a year ago. […] Unlimited exponential growth is a mark of potential global catastrophe: self-improving AI; nuclear chain reactions; self-replicating grey goo from nanobots; all examples are especially dangerous in a naïve environment. A large human population without immunity to Ebola, or any other Marburg style viruses, is fuel for exponential viral growth. … Ebola is mostly transmittable only in hard cases when a person shits and bleeds uncontrollably, but it is also contagious from non-symptomatic people, so Ebola is not naturally selecting for mildness; it may do just the opposite. It may be selected for extreme and “fluid-like” dying. … Also Ebola seems to influence behavior zombie style, as late stage patients attack medical personal, run from quarantine or even bite someone — it happened in Nigeria and Liberia — the same can be said of rabies and toxoplasma. … Here we also should mention the meme aspect of the Ebola virus, which is the psychological stigma and fear associated with the disease. The fear has led to riots in Liberia, which additionally helped spread the virus. (See for example rumors that dead Ebola patients had resurrected [link]) … So Ebola is also mimetic [sic] hazard, and the fear of it prevents rational control of the epidemic: people flee it, destroy hospitals, or they live in denial of it.

If Ebola slaughters most of the human population, hundred of millions of people will still survive the pandemic itself (if it will not become multi-pandemic with many different strains of Ebola-like viruses). […] It will end technological civilization as we know it, and it probably start the self-sustainable process of destruction, which is the consequent failure of different institutions and technologies as well as wars and general disorder. It may be a long term degradation process, which has its own logic and its bottom may be very far from now.

Many more links at the original.

So to summarize this argument: Ebola really is a zombie plague, it could sweep the earth in under a year (with ~70% lethality), human evolutionary history adds peculiar biological vulnerabilities, its virulence might be far higher than commonly understood, and the catalytic global process thus unleashed has the potential to cascade forward all the way to full X-risk. There might be a way to mash down harder on the ‘scream’ button, but right now I’m not seeing how.

Seizing the opportunity for an Ebola fest (doubtless already behind the curve):

It could already be in Britain.

Turning it into a national security issue has made it more dangerous.

Libertarian responses from Stefan Molyneux and Ron Paul.

The mathematics of contagion elucidated by Gregory Cochran.

Racism is the real threat.

ADDED: Institutional Breakdown in a Time of Ebola. (Epic.)

ADDED: Quality Ebola commentary from SoBL, Dampier, and Thompson. Dreher on Castillo. Escalating concern at Nature and the NYT. Chris Brown and 8chan try to be helpful. Dialing it up another notch. Where next? Polls, preparations, protocols, politics … Blame the Bilderbergers.

Ezra Klein is on my unbelievably annoying people list, but he was only a kid when he got there, and this (interview) is really good work. Some additional recent articles, in escalating order of panic, plus some geopolitical complication.

Then there’s the weird stuff. We all know where that road leads …

ADDED: Ebola-Chan and teleological discipline.

ADDED: Even Chris Matthews is getting agitated. Still, USG is remaining calm. Thanks to Manticore for getting this started:

@ad_bestias Good Luck Obama-Chan! #thankyouObamachan

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) October 1, 2014

The US capital should not be named after some old dead cishet white male. Rename it "Obamagrad" — for great social justice! #RenameDC

— Karl F. Boetel (@RadishMag) June 20, 2014

The Zeitgeist demands that Cathedral Central be called #ObamagradDC #DistrictOfChavez (HT @williamsbk).

ADDED: Gregory Hood is in the zone. (This is where it began. See Karl’s comment below.)

The Cathedral is above all a meta-story, a secular-revolutionary usurpation of the traditional Western ‘Grand Narrative‘ (inherited from eschatological monotheism), and its survival is inseparable from the preservation of narrative credibility. As it frays, alternative stories obtain a niche. The Strauss & Howe account of rhythmic historical pattern is highly competitive in such an environment. Events subtracting from the plausibility of progressive expectations are exactly those that strengthen omens of an impending cyclic ‘winter’. Winter is coming, as popularized by Game of Thrones, might have been designed as a promotional tool for The Fourth Turning.

Anarchopapist begins his most recent musings on ‘The Neoreactionary Project’ by asking “What is a meme?” It is a better starting point, in this context, than the question: How correct are Strauss & Howe? Memetics subsumes questions of factual application (as aspects of adaptive fitness), but it reaches beyond them. The successful meme is characterized by aesthetic features irreducible to representational adequacy, from elegance of construction to dramatic form. Even more importantly, it is able to operate as a causal factor itself, and thus to produce the very effects it accommodates itself to. A society enthralled by its passage through the winter gate of a fourth turning would in very large measure be staging the same theatrical production its ‘beliefs’ had anticipated.

Among the greatest memetic strengths of the Strauss & Howe story is its remarkably concrete sense of timing. It offers prospective dates, within a tight predictive range that alternative narratives are hard-pressed to match, in keeping with its claim to have identified historical ‘seasons’. The anticipations of contemporary Marxist, Singularitarian, or Eco-catastrophe story-lines are unmistakably nebulous in comparison. (Notably — NRx has, as yet, no formulated theory to support dated predictions at all.)

Among the most significant memetic latch-functions is a confidence graft. Any cultural virus communicating a definite sense of what is coming finds host tolerance relatively easy to obtain. The history of (precisely dated) millenarianism attests to this overwhelmingly, with the rider that vulnerability to subsequent falsification is necessarily entailed. To some definite extent, such sensitivity to empirical contradiction also has to apply in the Strauss & Howe case, despite the complicating factors of contagious auto-confirmation already noted.

As S&H prophecy in the book:

Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II. […] The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and efforts — in other words, a TOTAL WAR.

It is this admirably determinate forecast, in combination with the ominous content, that lends this work its purchase upon the apocalyptic imagination of our time.

Gathering ‘Fourth Turning’ expectations are part of the memetic landscape in which NRx finds itself, and thus an involved, strategically-relevant fact. A consistent and compelling story about them would be valuable — and almost certainly, in the relatively short-term at least, increasingly valuable.

ADDED: Double doom

… and it looks as if we’re stealing the Black Sun too:

ADDED: Brett Stevens visits the Stirner comment, and annotates it.

I also liked this:

Let's be honest: "Apocalypse Now" was the founding of the NRx, DE, etc.

— Brett Stevens (@amerika_blog) May 16, 2014

ADDED: History being made.

ADDED: Then this —

America lost its Empire the day Captain America killed Colonel Kurtz.

— Albert Brenner (@AlbertBrenner1) May 16, 2014