We’re fortunate that no campaigning is allowed on Election Day – if there was, it would just be the candidates throwing feces at each other
There’s a psychological heuristic about the effectiveness of logical arguments compared to emotional ones. In essence, rational arguments weigh more heavily in the long term, often producing permanent changes, but emotional arguments weigh more heavily in the short term, often producing immediate action. This simple rule explains why the quality of political discourse has degraded so sharply in recent weeks, and why it will degrade further in the next two.
This human tendency was demonstrated with a study that examined tooth brushing habits. Two groups listened to two different lectures from dental health professionals. The first lecture used calm, reasonable, logical arguments to explain why people should brush their teeth, the second used fire and brimstone and tried to scare the listeners into doing so.
Although people who heard the first lecture only made a small increase in how regularly they brushed their teeth, the change in behaviour lasted for a long time. This was in stark contrast to the emotional lecture. People who heard this one made a sharp increase in tooth-brushing behaviour immediately after the lecture but, over the long term, this then fell away to much lower levels than the people who had heard the logical arguments in the first lecture.
Our political class and their advisers, highly sophisticated in the art of psychological persuasion, know all of this and are using this knowledge against the plebs right now. The rule they are operating by is: the closer we get to the day of the election, the less effective logical arguments become, and the more effective emotional arguments become.
One year out from an election, there’s no real reason to get emotional. The voters themselves have not yet been whipped into hysteria by the mainstream media, and so any politician that noticeably becomes emotional will look unstable and lose support.
That far out, it’s much better to focus on calm, logical arguments that a potential voter can ruminate over at their leisure before making a solid commitment to a party on the basis of reason. This is because, as with the toothbrush study, this influence will be minor but permanent.
The day before an election, by contrast, is not the time for calm and logical arguments. It doesn’t make psychological sense to aim for a moderate but long-term gain when the election is the next day and the preferences of voters in one year’s time doesn’t count for shit. At this point, it only makes sense to appeal to the heart (and almost always to fear), in the hope that this wave of raw emotion will not have subsided by the next day.
Right now, two weeks out from Election Day, fewer logical arguments are being made. “Let’s Do This!” is not a logical argument, and that is why we have seen expressions of it much more often over the past week. Neither is whipping up fears about being taxed into the poorhouse.
Here the political discourse can already be seen to have degraded, but things will only get worse over the next two weeks as the miserable calculus of persuasion shifts the balance ever-further towards whipping up hysteria and fear.
In two weeks’ time, the discourse will have degraded so far that National supporters will simply be yelling “COMMUNISM!!!”, Labour supporters will be screaming “SOLD DOWN THE RIVER!!!”, New Zealand First supporters will be bellowing “NEOLIBERALISM!!!” and Greens supporters will be shrieking “POO IN THE WATER!!!”
And it will take us three years to get over the shame of how low we all stooped before we can do it again.
Psychopaths make for fascinating characters in creative writing because they are dangerous, ruthless and unpredictable
The psychopath, sociopath or person with Antisocial Personality Disorder has for centuries been one of the most interesting subjects for creative writers. Something about their nature reliably invokes a sense of horror in the reader – perhaps the ruthlessness, perhaps the callousness, perhaps the deep and smouldering hatred for life. This article looks at how you can believably portray a psychopathic character in your own creative fiction.
It’s important to note that ‘psychopath’ and ‘psychotic’ are two entirely different things. A psychopath is seldom a madman – there is usually a distinct logic and methodology to their actions, even if those actions are considered abhorrent by the majority of people around them.
Psychopaths are primarily characterised by a lack of shame or remorse. Essentially this means that they don’t feel bad about causing suffering to other sentient beings. If they do cause suffering to another person or animal they will rarely accept that they shouldn’t have done so, and even when they do they are never sincere.
A striking lack of remorse after the psychopath did something that harmed someone might be the clue that lets other characters realise that they’re dealing with someone who is a bit different up top. The psychopath might be unaware that they’re supposed to feel remorse (depending on their level of sophistication) and may appear to become confused when another character acts as if remorse would be expected.
Lying is another essential characteristic of the psychopath. From the perspective of the author, this presents an interesting challenge, because the characters that interact with the psychopath are unlikely to realise (at least, not initially) that they are being lied to.
This isn’t just a question of telling a lot of lies. Psychopaths are good at lying as well. They stay cool when telling lies – even if initially disbelieved, and this means that the microsignals that people subconsciously use to detect liars are present less often.
A character who encountered a psychopath might find themselves slowly figuring out that they’re being lied to. They might be so taken in by the glib charm of the psychopath character that they are reluctant to accept that that character has been misleading them, and only by thinking hard about the facts do they realise that something doesn’t add up.
These two traits combine as well, in remorseless lying. The psychopath does not care about the consequences of telling lies, neither when it comes to the suffering caused or the risk of being caught out. The lack of shame means that even if they are caught with indisputable proof that they are lying, they might continue to insist that their accuser must be mistaken, possibly mentally ill, or that they should just “get over it”.
These characteristics might be of more interest to psychological fiction than a psychopath who is just a remorseless killer. Although, if they are a remorseless killer, they no doubt will have developed a fantastic web of lies to divert attention from the fact. Keep in mind that some serial killers were even able to keep their streak of murders a secret from their own wives!
Another personality trait that typifies the psychopath is a constant need for stimulation. It seems that psychopaths do not derive the same satisfaction from everyday activities that non-psychopaths do, and this has leads to an increased incidence of risk-taking behaviours, such as sexual promiscuity, violence and drug use. The psychopath tends to be impulsive, on account of that they don’t have much in the way of inhibitions.
This means that a psychopath character will almost certainly not practice meditation, for example. Neither will they be fond of long walks on the beach, hiking, chess, Test cricket, gardening etc. They wouldn’t be able to sit still for long enough to partake in pastimes such as these.
A history of irresponsibility also characterises the psychopath. It’s common for psychopaths to be incapable of holding down a stable job or relationship because of the need for constant stimulation and because their lies and callous behaviour tends to limit social opportunities. Some other characters in your story might find this history a warning sign.
Another decision that the author will have to make is whether their character is a psychopath or a sociopath. Although both conditions generally fall under the rubric of Antisocial Personality Disorder, there is a distinction in that psychopathy is innate whereas sociopathy is a learned condition from the environment.
Depending on the needs of the story, the character might have been “born bad” or they might have lost their natural empathy as a consequence of massive physical, sexual or psychological abuse. The author will have to decide this once they decide what emotional reaction they want to reader to have, because a character who has had everything good beaten out of them in childhood will be more engaging to some readers, particular those with a higher demand for psychological realism.
Taking these considerations into account when writing a psychopathic character should allow the author to make an accurate portrayal of someone with the condition while avoiding the common cliche of mindless, uncalculating sadism.
In this section (c. pages 776-847), titled “A Declaration of Pre-emptive War”, Breivik discusses how “Christian/conservative/nationalist” forces can organise themselves to best resist the coming chaos. Here he is particular about making sure that the work is seen as hypothetical and fictional, apparently for the reason that he is concerned about potential legal consequences from being too explicit.
Here again Breivik demonstrates that he is not a neo-Nazi, at one point by demanding that the national governments of Europe issue a statement in support of Israel against Muslim aggression, at another by calling Hitler a “twisted mass murderer.”
Here also he holds European politicians accountable for every single crime committed by Muslims in Europe, a crime rate that he describes as “an average 1000 atrocities per 100 000 Muslims annually.” The line of reasoning Breivik pursues here is that, without Muslims being in Europe, none of these crimes would ever have happened. This is perhaps the most untenable of all the claims in this document.
Although it’s literally true that none of the crimes committed by Muslims against Europeans would have happened if there were no Muslims in Europe, the absolute numbers of crimes in a particular country is primarily a function of the absolute numbers of people – after all, America manages to maintain an extremely high rate of crime (by developed world standards) with far fewer Muslims than Europe.
Breivik tends to conflate all genuine criticism of European traditions and institutions into the category of the great Marxist/feminist conspiracy against Europe. He does this with the nature of the Church’s influence on European society – here Breivik can not tolerate any criticism of the Church on libertarian or humanist grounds. All criticism of the Church is a Marxist plot to destroy Europe.
The paranoid nature of some of the earlier parts of the document resurfaces when Breivik details a media-led conspiracy to deny the truth about historical Islamic violence. This also misses the mark.
The media doesn’t educate anyone, ever – it sells advertising. Breivik considers it a kind of bias for the media to be silent on, for example, the genocide of Hindus and Buddhists in the Hindu Kush, but that degree of historical detail is reserved for special and academic interests, not for a mainstream media which speaks to a twelve-year old intellect.
There is an eerie foreshadowing of the future when Breivik cites Jefferson as saying “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Indeed, later on in this section he goes as far as declaring that “The time for dialogue is now over. The time for armed resistance has come.”
The legal measures suggested in this section are those that Breivik appears to believe should be instituted by any genuinely patriotic European front, should any take power. Curiously, one of the policy points allows for the immediate release of all “patriotically-minded” individuals from Western European jails.
Perhaps Breivik himself, incarcerated as he is for life, is counting on such a policy in order to get out of jail himself.
When he writes that “Norway and Sweden are two of the world’s most repressive Marxist regimes,” he echoes a sentiment that is common among Scandinavian conservatives, especially Christian ones. This sentiment is grounded in a disbelief that the conservatives are in a genuine minority. Where majority opinion does not agree (and it’s far from agreeing with Breivik’s demands that all Muslims be deported on pain of execution), this is considered evidence of brainwashing.
Interestingly, Breivik lists all of Communism, Cultural Marxism, Islam and Nazism as “hate ideologies” which must be opposed by any European male who wishes to be accepted into what he hopes might become a renewed European chivalric order.
It’s apparent that anyone who thinks like this in contemporary European society is bound to experience a certain degree of social isolation. This might ultimately help to explain the reasoning that led Breivik to take the actions he did.
The concept of white genocide, as popular as it currently is in some quarters, doesn’t make sense if seen from a biological perspective
The discourse in some quarters of the Internet appears to be obsessed with race rhetoric. Some hysterical people are talking about “white genocide” and “white replacement” – the idea that nefarious forces have conspired to completely rid the world of white people forever. As this essay will demonstrate, there are three major reasons why the entire concept of getting rid of white people doesn’t even make biological sense.
The first reason is natural selection. Because race is such a taboo subject in our societies, relatively few people are aware of the basic biological reality that the different races are merely different adaptations to different environmental conditions.
For example, everyone knows that black people tend to live near the equator and white people tend to live further away from the equator. The reason for this is that people whose ancestors lived in Africa evolved to have black skin on account of that black skin is much less likely to get damaged by the intense heat and light that characterises that continent.
The exact opposite is true of people whose ancestors lived in Northern Europe. In Scandinavia there is very little heat and very little sunlight. This has led to people whose ancestors lived there evolving to have white skin because white skin is much more sensitive to the light and therefore absorbs more of it.
The highest rates of skin cancer in the world are in Australia, New Zealand and the Southern USA. The reason for this is because these countries are mostly populated by descendants of Northern European immigrants, whose skin has evolved for much lower levels of sunlight. As a consequence, becoming sunburned is a very common experience for white people in these countries, and sunburn leads to skin cancer.
Black people who live in Northern Europe run a much higher risk of developing rickets, for the reason that the human body needs Vitamin D to stave off rickets and Vitamin D is mostly gained from absorbing sunlight. Because black skin has evolved to be insensitive to sunlight on account of there being so much of it in Africa, the low levels of sunlight in Northern Europe can mean that the bodies of black people don’t create enough Vitamin D to be healthy.
What all this means, from the perspective of natural selection, is that if you took millions of black people and moved them all into Europe, their descendants would evolve to be white, because black skin will always provide a relative selective disadvantage in latitudes with low levels of sunlight.
A “great replacement” is therefore impossible on account of that it goes against the will of Nature. People with black skin in Northern Europe will get sick relatively more often, which means they will die before reproducing relatively more often, and so over time the gene pool will whiten. This is, of course, very similar to what will happen to white people in Australia and New Zealand.
There is absolutely nothing that puny humans can possibly do to stop this from happening. The Will of Nature will out.
The second reason is sexual selection. Even people who know about natural selection often don’t understand sexual selection very well. The short of it is that any phenotype that is more sexually attractive to the people around them will have an evolutionary advantage as long as that perception of sexiness exists.
Let’s say that the white nationalist’s nightmare scenario came to pass, and Europe opened its borders entirely to the third world, which led to hordes of Muslims and Africans males flowing into Europe to inseminate white women. Not only would this fail to wipe out the white race, but it could actually backfire completely, thanks to something called genetic drift.
If the borders between Europe and Africa were erased overnight, and black people and white people started intermixing, the result after two generations would be a population of strongly varying phenotypes. There would be people with light skin and light eyes, people with dark skin and dark eyes, people with light skin and dark eyes and people with dark skin and light eyes.
Sexual selection would mean that the most attractive of the resulting offspring would come to reproduce at a higher level, on account of having a wider range of mating opportunities.
It’s possible that blue eyes have a selective advantage over brown eyes for reasons of sexual attraction. When a person becomes sexually aroused by another person, their pupils usually dilate. This dilation is one way that humans signal a readiness for mating. This means that the more noticeable the dilation, the more likely it is that any such dilation will be picked up by a potential mating partner and lead to copulation.
Because the contrast between the dark iris and the pupil is greater for blue eyes than for brown, sexual arousal is more apparent in a blue-eyed person than in a brown-eyed one. As detailed above, this increased ability to communicate sexual arousal leads to a greater number of instances of copulation, which – all other things being equal – leads to more offspring and therefore genetic drift that will increase the proportion of blue-eyed people in the population.
Essentially what this means is that increased instances of interracial reproduction will simply lead to increased opportunity for any phenotype with a meaningful selective advantage to drive out the other phenotypes.
This process doesn’t necessarily favour white people, even if it did favour blue eyes. For example, it could be that white skin has a selective disadvantage compared to black skin because it makes it easier for an onlooker to notice the presence of disease, so that diseased lighter-skinned people would come to reproduce less than diseased dark-skinned people, leading to genetic drift that favoured the dark-skinned phenotype.
It’s even possible that these two processes are both occurring simultaneously. This might mean that increased racial mixing will simply create a new race of dark-skinned, blue-eyed people.
Ultimately, much like the case of natural selection, the will of Nature will out. There’s nothing that the will of malicious anti-white racists could do about this because the sexual response to physical signs of fertility occurs almost entirely at a subconscious level.
Genetic engineering is the third reason why the idea of a race war doesn’t make sense. Technology is already at the point where designer babies are starting to become possible. Although genetic engineering has so far been mostly limited to aborting fetuses that have genetic diseases, there’s every chance that future technology will allow parents to make more specific decisions about how their children look.
When this technology becomes advanced enough, it will become possible for parents to essentially choose the race of their offspring, even if this meant that the child was a different race to either of its parents.
What would likely happen in a scenario like this is an increase in people choosing the phenotype of their offspring for reasons of fashion.
It’s already common among South Korean and Eastern Chinese women to have a procedure called a blepharoplasty, which is surgery to change the shape of the eye fold to look more Western. This suggests it isn’t long until parents get the procedure done for their children before birth by genetic engineering.
Once such things start happening then the entire concept of race will start breaking down. After all, when a phenotype can simply be chosen out of a number of faces in a catalogue, then it no longer represents any kind of link to one’s genetic ancestors. Indeed, the idea of genetic ancestors stops making sense after a certain degree of genetic engineering.
This could even mean that as-of-yet unknown races will show their faces in the human phenotype in the future. It could be that future environmental conditions mean that human skin becomes engineered to be capable of photosynthesis, as this would mean much less pressure on the environment for agricultural land, and so all skin colours are replaced with green.
We could easily end up with a world where the majority of us have blue eyes, green skin and a wide range of different hair styles depending on what was fashionable to who that month, and it would be an entirely logical and natural progression from where we currently are.
In summary, thinking in terms of white genocide is not meaningful for reasons of biology. Nature will select those who she favours, and any human schemes to the contrary are destined to fail.
