The Levers of Sociobiology: Power Laws from Stalin to Starlings

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They strut, they chatter, they gleam with gem-like colours: starlings are one of the joys of summer right across Europe. You could spend a lifetime studying them, but one thing is already certain. There has never been a starling Stalin.

Khans and canals

In other words, no individual starling has ever been millions of times more powerful or influential than the average starling. No starling has ever exercised power over a vast number of other starlings like Josef Stalin (1878-1953) or left a genetic legacy like that of Genghis Khan (c. 1162-1227), who is the ancestor of about 16 million men in modern Eurasia, according to DNA analysis. By exploiting certain aspects of human sociobiology, Genghis Khan achieved huge political success and thereby won sexual access to vastly more women than the average man. Stalin pulled the levers of sociobiology in a comparable way but, at a later period and in a different culture, didn’t translate his political success into offspring as Khan did.

Stalin vs Starling

But the similarities between the two men are more important than the differences. Josef Stalin and Genghis Khan were clearly exceptional members of their species, Homo sapiens, in a way that no starling ever has been of its species, Sturnus vulgaris. It’s interesting to ask what aspects of biology permit human Stalins and prevent starling Stalins. Human beings and starlings are alike in that no individual in these species is, as an individual, vastly more intelligent or physically powerful than other individuals. Stalin could not have dug the White Sea Canal or designed and built the T-34 tank by himself. Nor could any other individual human. Those were collective endeavours, but they expressed the will of the individual known as Stalin or of the small number of individuals at the top of Soviet society.

Flight is not might

Starlings too engage in a collective endeavour known as flocking, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual birds behave as a single coordinated entity. But there is no guiding mind in a flock, no controlling will, and no individual starling could exploit the power of a flock to win itself vastly increased social and reproductive success. Why not? Well, try a thought experiment and imagine that you were an omniscient biologist who could completely control the behaviour of an individual starling. How would you turn it into a starling Stalin or starling Genghis Khan? You couldn’t, because certain levers are missing in starling biology.

The most obvious missing lever is language. Starlings can’t give or follow orders. In a hierarchical species, language is the key to what you might call force-multiplication. Stalin was dominant in more than a crudely physical sense: he was also charismatic, that is, he could beguile and dominate people with his words and manner. That is how he was able to rise steadily in an organization that enabled him to give orders and have them obeyed. He was able to translate his individual will into collective action against those individuals who opposed him. In Mongol society, Genghis Khan must have been charismatic and dominant in a comparable way. A warrior nation like the Mongols could not have been led by a weakling or a mild-mannered scholar. Read more

Thoughts on the Sky King

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On August 10th, 2018, Richard Russell, 29-years-old and married, a baggage handler at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, who had no training as a pilot, and who as far as anyone knows had never flown a plane before, took an empty 75-seater twin-turboprop Bombardier Q400 plane and flew it for about an hour over Puget

Richard Russell

Sound, executing wild, dangerous, and highly impressive maneuvers, rolls and such, all the while engaging in a self-effacing chat with an air traffic controller, before—in all likelihood with suicidal intent–plunging into sparsely populated Ketron Island 25 miles southwest of the airport, demolishing the plane and ending his life.

White advocacy social media and websites picked up on the story in a big way, depicting Russell as a kind of folk hero in a time of whiteness under siege, white manhood in particular.  Three Twitter posts quoted in an article in this publication:

I think he feels the pain of an entire race being exterminated but can’t quite articulate his depression. 

Literally this was the whitest hijacking ever. The guy just flew around the water and crashed so others wouldn’t be at risk. 

The blue checkmarks will hate Rich because in the last moments of his life he was free and that terrifies them more than anything else. 

Very quickly, Richard Russell became a meme: “The Sky King.” Read more

Civic Nationalism and the Diaspora Question: Asians plug into non-White coalition of the aggrieved

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East Asians who migrate to America have been historically seen as the “model minority” — so much so that Asians and the country of Singapore are both commonly-used examples of civic nationalism “working.” It occurred to me that if there was ever a group of people who could be considered “naturally conservative,” that title would most certainly apply to Asians, long before it would apply to Hispanics.

Asians in the United States do indeed appear to be model citizens at first glance. Asians use welfare at a slightly lower rate compared to Whites (21.8% and 23.1%, respectively), have a lower rate of single-parent families, higher rate of obtaining college degrees, and higher average incomes. Asians also boast the highest level of entrepreneurship in the U.S., with the highest ratio of businesses to population size.[1]

The recent trend of Asians becoming increasingly liberal/Democrat-leaning over the past twenty-five years, along with issues of social cohesion among groups that seem to have assimilated well, leads us to what I call the “Diaspora Question.”

In 1992, 55% of Asian citizens were Republican voters. By 2012, 73% were Democrat. In the 2016 presidential race, Clinton garnered 65% of the Asian vote. The cause of the majority of Asian voters swinging so wildly to the left appears to be the issue of immigration becoming prominent. Data and election results show that Asians vote against candidates with anti-immigration platforms, even if all other issues are in-line. Although Asians currently make up 4% of the U.S. population, they are now the fastest growing population segment. With that, we are seeing a heightened level of ethnic activism and the behaviors of a diaspora population.

The fact that Asian citizens have begun to favor open-borders candidates once immigration became a high priority is extremely subversive and duplicitous behavior. East Asian nations tend to be among the most traditionalist, xenophobic, nationalist, protectionist, and closed-border of anywhere on Earth. The Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese all have ethnically-defined homelands that do not accept hordes of outsiders — whether economic migrants, refugees, or any other type. Asians, like Jews, have the advantage of an ethnic homeland, yet as a diaspora population, they vote and advocate for open borders in their host nation.

One such example of this diaspora dynamic is Cecillia Wang, an ACLU legal director who has made a career of fighting to keep America’s borders open and to protect criminal aliens. One wonders why Wang does not fight to open China up to the world’s indignant. Surely the Han Chinese, who make up over 90% of China, could use some “enrichment” from Somalis, Afghans, and Algerians. Shanghai deserves their Halal carts too, do they not? Read more

Reply to Nathan Cofnas’s Comments on Edward Dutton

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I have decided to upload my latest reply to Nathan Cofnas to Research Gate as a preprint so that it might reach a broader audience with only very minor changes from the version that appeared here. Comments can still be made here.

Burkas and Buffoons: Boris Johnson, Baroness Warsi and the War on White

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Have you ever seen a scorpion try to sting a stone? Me neither. But I’ve seen something very like it. It was an article in the Guardian with the headline: “‘They’ve brought evil out’: Hungary’s poll on migration divides a nation.” The article excoriated the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán for “whipping up xenophobic sentiment,” “spreading hate,” “sowing tension,” “spreading poison,” and making “Hungary’s small minority population even more uncomfortable.”

Foot-soldiers in the War on White

With articles like that, the Guardian has been trying to inject verbal venom into Hungarian politics. It wants to paralyse Hungary’s natural and healthy desire to put its own people first and preserve its unique ethnic character, culture and history. But the Guardian is a scorpion trying to sting a stone. Its verbal venom dribbles harmlessly away, because shrieking about “racism” and “divisive politics” simply doesn’t work in Hungary. Why not? Well, the article itself mentioned one central reason: the “small minority population” there. Thanks to its sensible refusal to accept Third-World immigrants, Hungary doesn’t have large numbers of resentful outsiders ever-ready to condemn native White Hungarians for their ideological sins and to demand harsh laws against hate speech and discrimination.

Sadly, Western nations like Britain, Australia and the United States are no longer like Hungary. They all have fifth columns of resentful outsiders imported by the hostile elite to serve as foot-soldiers in what might be called “The War on White” – on White people, culture, history, traditions, self-confidence and self-worth. Sometimes the foot-soldiers are literally violent, like the Pakistani Muslims who stabbed and burned a 15-year-old White boy to death in Scotland or the Blacks who raped, tortured and stabbed a 16-year-old White girl to death in England. But sometimes the foot-soldiers are ideological, like the Korean SJW Sarah Jeong, whom the New York Times has happily accepted onto its editorial board despite her long history of spreading “hate and poison” against Whites.

The Brown Baroness

Another ideological foot-soldier in the “War on White” is the vacuous but vindictive Muslim peer Sayeeda Warsi, who was once appointed by David Cameron to serve as nominal co-chair of the British Conservative party. The real boss was the Jewish businessman Lord Feldman. Like Cameron’s meddling in Libya, the appointment of Warsi backfired spectacularly. She did not meekly accept her intended role of ethnic token and tried to get the Tories to follow Muslim interests. That was unacceptable: like Labour under Blair, the Tories are a wholly owned subsidiary of Zion Incorporated. Warsi noisily resigned in a dispute over Israel and began to wage a guerrilla campaign on the Tories from the House of Lords. In June 2018 she claimed that the party is “poisoned by Islamophobia at every level.” In August she joined the chorus of execration that greeted an “Islamophobic” newspaper column by the Tory politician Boris Johnson. He wrote that, while he did not agree with a ban on burqas recently imposed in Denmark, he thought that women who wore them looked like “letter-boxes” and “bank-robbers.”

The Brown Baroness, Sayeeda Warsi

Read more

A Reply to Jordan Peterson

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Celebrity intellectual Jordan Peterson has written a blog post, “’On the So-Called ‘Jewish Question’,” the inner quotes indicating he doesn’t think this is a real issue—something that only “reactionary conspiracy theorists” would propose.  His blog includes a link to Nathan Cofnas’s criticism of The Culture of Critique. No links to my replies—which may provide a clue about his intellectual honesty.

Indeed, one must wonder about the seriousness of someone who thinks he can settle an issue that has gotten the attention of some of the most celebrated thinkers in Western history with an 1100-word blog post.

Peterson has become popular because of his courage and knowledge in opposing political correctness. He stands up for men and for individual responsibility. To his credit he achieved celebrity status via social media, not as a creature of the mainstream media. Much of his stature rests on his use of scientific data in his arguments.  I and many others certainly appreciate this approach; he is particularly cogent in discussing sex differences and gender politics. There is not enough of this in public discourse.

However, my confidence in Peterson’s trustworthiness was shaken by his shoddy treatment of the Jewish Question, including name-calling directed at my own work. This is part of his broader offensive against identitarians, people who defend their group interests. For Peterson there are only individual interests (a bit strange for someone who approves of evolutionary biology, a subdiscipline that encompasses kin selection theory and, for humans, cultural group selection). For Peterson to admit there is a Jewish Question would be to concede the reality of group interests—not only families but religions, ethnic groups, and nations.

In the West, failure to acknowledge group interests is suicidal for its traditional European-derived populations. As a result of the imposition of massive non-White immigration and multiculturalism by elites unresponsive to popular attitudes, the traditional populations of these societies are slated to become minorities in lands they have dominated for hundreds, and in the case of Europe, thousands of years. In the West, these migrants have typically established identitarian groups intent on pursuing their group interests and with increasing power to do so as the traditional European-derived populations (which uniquely produced individualist societies) dwindle. While I would love to live in a European-derived individualist society, under such circumstances it is suicidal to pursue an individualist strategy as things are now. And unless there is drastic change, it will only get worse in the future.

Those preaching an individualist ideology fly under the radar of political correctness because they eschew White identitarianism. But, if present trends continue, the individualist culture of the West will become a distant memory as these new peoples assume power in collaboration with White social justice warriors who are already championing the very policies that Peterson abhors. Already in the U.S. the non-White voting share of the Democrat Party is 44%, and this will only increase in coming years as the Congressionally approved yearly influx of more than one million continues. The faith of the individualist is that these newcomers will readily become good Westerners and that the ethnic politics that looms so large now will become a thing of the past—a fateful gamble that will end in disaster as politics becomes increasingly racialized (~60% of Whites vote Republican, and Whites account for 90% of GOP votes), achievement differences among the various groups become a potent source of political friction, and there are declines in social cohesion and willingness to contribute to public goods. These changes are disastrous for the traditional White majorities of the West. Read more

James Edwards Responds to New York Times’ Request for Comment

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I have received several interview requests from reporters who were seeking my comment on the “Unite the Right 2” event that took place on Sunday. Most regular listeners of TPC know that I have very little patience for so-called journalists and have had a longstanding tradition of rejecting almost all inquiries from the establishment media unless they involve live television or radio.

Serge Kovaleski of the New York Times, however, is one of the few reporters with whom I am willing to speak. We’ve had a couple of pleasant exchanges over the years and he’s always been courteous and fair. I was happy to oblige when Serge contacted me yesterday to get a quick comment for an upcoming article.

You can read a partial transcript below.

Serge Kovaleski:

Hi James,

Hope you have been well since we last communicated.

For a story for tonight, I am hoping you could share some insights into why turnout, as reported, was low for yesterday’s Unite The Right event in DC. What’s going on within the alt right?

Please feel free to email me your thoughts like last time.

Thank you again, James.

Best regards,

Serge

James Edwards:

Serge,

I was able to get back to this more quickly than I originally anticipated.

Here is my quote:
“I think a couple of things are going on in the Alt Right. We discovered at Charlottesville that our free speech rights would not be protected and that the police would allow Antifa to attack us with impunity, putting us in an impossible position. If we defend ourselves, or someone does something crazy in response to the chaos, we get blamed for the violence. Also, many of us now understand that there are some genuinely unhinged elements that will show up for a public event without careful vetting. Any dissident movement attracts a mix of the highest quality, most principled people who take a stand despite social ostracism, but also a minority of those whose primary motivation is attention and shock value. That’s why most people stayed away from the second event. Because all of us know the pain of being socially ostracized, we often are too soft and accommodating to those who would do reputational damage to our movement. We are growing up, becoming more professional in our approach, and I think you see that with the more measured, controlled demonstrations from groups like Identity Europa over the past year.”

Thanks for reaching out.

James

Had I been asked the same question on cable news I would have gone on to double down and say that the lessons from Charlottesville are clear. We were denied police protection by express orders of the police chief. He made it clear why the police were not to enforce the law: the government was looking for a pretext to prevent the rally. This was all documented in the Heaphy Report, a report by a former federal prosecutor hired by the City of Charlottesville. The police chief had to resign. None of this was news in the mainstream media which continued with its fake news narrative blaming the victims of Antifa violence.

We live in a nation of cities like Charlottesville, a reverse mirror image of Maycomb, the fictional city in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Violent Antifa activists are documented as having maced and teargassed participants in the Charlottesville rally. One of them threatened people with a home-made flamethrower. Another attacked an elderly man with a club. None of these people were prosecuted. Instead, the victims are being tried for defending themselves and the hate-crazed bigoted jurors of Maycomb-Charlottesville are convicting the victims who are being sentenced to outrageously savage sentences. These lessons have been taught us by a System that has forfeited any right to respect. The Alt Right has not gone away. It has simply learned what can and cannot be done in a country that is not free.

Now we’ll just wait and see if any of that makes it to print. I can tell you that the final product that was published after my first interview with Kovaleski – a collaborative front page article in December 2016 that featured several authors – was what one would naturally expect any piece from the New York Times to be. However, two of the very few paragraphs that were fair and objective were the two that involved yours truly. I give him due credit for that.

The New York Times logo

See also: Full Transcript of the December 2016 New York Times Interview with James Edwards