Bloody Shovel 4

Tabbarok summarizes a study on differences in attitude toward collectivism and competition between rice and wheat farmers in China, using a kind of unnatural experiment, in which de-mobilized soldiers...

“So what do you stand for?” I've been asked... surprisingly few times. There used to be a tradition of intellectual debate; adversarial, but polite. With clear rules so people didn't abuse their time to shill their own stuff instead of contributing to the actual debate. But we don't do debates in these parts; we never have. Which is unfortunate. Understandable, though, to the extent public debates are still a thing they've become an incredibly stale, cringe, Reddit-ish spectacle (I wish we h...

This is something I haven't written at length, but I've talked often with friends in person.

I've long been a proponent of hapamaxxing. I like yellows but they lack some spark in them which white gene...

So our good Russian friend Anatoly Karlin had this take on his blog

http://www.unz.com/akarlin/climate-bioleninism/

I paste the complete link because the URL is quite ominous, "climate bioleninism". Imagine that. Karlin there makes a point that ideas that flatter the upper-class, like global warming, become entrenched, while ideas that they find inconvenient, like the genetic load of IQ or HBD more generally get killed or ostracized, no matter how solid the science behind them.

https://twitter.com/

Tl;dr. It really is that simple.

Long version:

I’ve never voted. Well, I lie, I voted once. I was 18, and my mother sorta forced me. It also felt like some rite of passage, you know, you grow to 18 and you get to do grown-up stuff like voting, having a voice in the political process. I’ve never been into rituals though, and I felt stupid immediately after putting my vote in the box. I didn’t even like the guy! I thought he was retarded. All of them, really. I still do.

Of course ever time the...

So my last post on Nassim Taleb's mental retardation has triggered quite a lot of laughs and chuckles, and also some criticism. Some people say I was not rigorous enough when writing about Nassim Taleb's books.

To those people I say: hold my beer. Seriously, people, this is a blog. A free blog, which I write under a pseudonym. I seek nothing from my writing, besides it being an avenue to make interesting friends. Which I have, dozens of them, and God bless them. But surely in this little place of...

Happy New Year folks, welcome to the 8th (!) year of Bloody Shovel. Let me start this sure to be eventful year with one of these posts which just need writing. A quick internet search didn't come out with any article with this title; so if I'm lucky this post will at some point become viral on Google. You think Taleb is retarded? You heard this exact phrasing here first.

What am I talking about? Most of you should know who Nassim Taleb is; a finance man turned maverick public intellectual by virt...

A few weeks ago, a great artist who runs the blog Parallax Optics was kind enough to ask me for an interview on Bioleninism, to follow up on a great piece he published recently where he interviewed the man responsible for the Twitter account Woke Capital. That interview was great, and I had never done an interview before, so I thought it could be a good idea to try this new format. As it happened, the interview went great, and I very much enjoyed the process.

What follows is the whole text of the...

Happy New Year everyone. I left a bit of a cliffhanger on my last post, which I intended to resolve in a few days, but I've been pretty busy, not really in the mood to write long form.

I am sorry about that, but do note, this blog is a free service, so I hope you understand it doesn't quite take the priority of my time. Again, there's a Bitcoin address at the sidebar, so if you want me to write more, I'm sure we can arrange something.

2017 has been a quite eventful year. I guess the overall mood w...

Some things I said in Twitter yesterday. Man, 280 characters feel *way* better.

https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/940732305265610752

Bronze Age warfare used to be about great lords going around in their chariots, shooting arrows here and there, then getting on foot and engaging in Single Combat. Early Samurais also did that. They'd go around on their horses, shouting who they were, their house, their pedigree.

But eventually somebody figured out that winning a war is really profitable. So the...

It's 100 years now since the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Leninism. It's been 100 years already, but you realize how present the whole thing remains when you look at the press these days. People are still praising or damning the revolution. As if it mattered anymore. As if it were something more than history. As if the left and right of today had remotely anything in common with the left and right of Lenin's day.

I won't praise Lenin, an evil man. But great men ...

The United States is the world empire since, at least, 1991. There's no question about that. This hegemony has started to crumble in recent years. First, China refused to surrender to the Western-supported students in Tiananmen square, in 1989. Then Russia fell, some thought for good, but since 1999 Putin rebuilt the Russian state and its sovereignty, leading to very tense relations with USG. China also waivered between accommodation to the USG led order, signing all those UN human rights treati...

This is on the news:

yuri-kochiyamas-95th-birthday-5723472594468864-hp2x

Who's this bitch? Nobody knew until today. Before the Internet nobody would have ever known and nobody would have bothered to check. But now we have Wikipedia, which knows everything. And apparently this bitch is Yuri Kochiyama, a  Japanese-American psycho-bitch whose father was killed by the FBI after interrogating him about Pearl Harbor. As the good daughter of a samurai, she swore vengeance against the United States.

That'...

Sailer quoted Disraeli  (d'Israeli, originally) saying "all is race". I got curious and Googled the guy, and damn.

I don't know if England has lost 15 IQ point on average since that time, as Charlton says. But Parliament speeches have lost even more than that.

Some samples from en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli

Heh. Prince Rupert being famous for being the best general to lose the English Civil War.

Probably true. Not a good thing though.

It did eventually become that anyway, though.

Again, it ...

This one's not about IQ. Listen up.

All human traits are normally distributed, with few people on each extreme. I don't know to what degree character is inherited, but it sure as hell is innate.

A human trait, like any other, is the thirst for power. Call it sociopathy to get a better image. It's probably not the same thing, but think of the evil striver who lies, fools, scams and does any manner of evil in order to climb the ladder of power and get to lord over others and enjoy riches gained thro...

Good old Mencken said:

(pause your adblock or Ghostery or similar extensions to see embedded Tweets)

https://twitter.com/HLMenckenBot/status/680636693829951488

Well, as I always say, there are no mysteries in life. Reality isn't strange, you just have a bad model. Not that I'm innocent of that mistake. I'm known of chanting how the truth will always prevail, even when most people obviously prefer bullshit, and have always done so. I, like Mencken, like Orwell, also used to pick my brains out about...

It's hard to argue that modernity sucks when people are so mesmerized by their iphones and air conditioners, but there are some aspects of modernity which are quite easy to argue against. One being the aesthetic violence it inflicts on all of us with ugly architecture and the public promotion of sexual deviancy. And the other being low fertility. Funny how we live in the greatest era of all time, we are the smartest and holiest and happiest people the earth has ever seen, yet people can't seem t...

If you've read some history you'll probably know about the Needham Question, i.e. why China didn't have an industrial revolution. Personally my favorite answer is the High Level Equilibrium Trap, which is a theory saying that China had developed medieval technology so efficiently that it just never had a need to develop machinery and high density energy sources.

It is perhaps unrelated, but one does have the impression that Asians generally do more with less. The Confucian exhortation to self-imp...

Surfin' the web yesterday, I come across this:

Penile implants?

What the hell? That must hurt like a bitch. Why would they do that?

Romantic. Right. The Brazilian hookers are thinking about your frankendick aaaall day for months. They just can't have enough of ya li'l Asian dick. But well what can you expect. These people were doing head hunting there until yesterday. What's the average IQ over there, 85? Stupid people do stupid things. They just can't see the world as it is, objectively. Fortunate...

It looks like Radish was quitting, but it seems they're staying in the end. Quitting is lame, if you can't find the time or inspiration you can always do like Eric Falkenstein and simply slow down a bit.

I, on the other hand have been neglecting the blog lately. I've been busy with work and family, and I must say this Snowden business has disturbed me quite a bit. I've been thinking a lot. I've also been playing Civilization a lot. The new expansion is amazing.

Anyway, I've been visiting family a...