[adapted from a blog comment]

“This comment section is the high-achieving son of Silver Blaze. It’s not as long, but it’s attracting equally crazy people. Hopefully we’ll get some more Nazis showing up, there’s been disappointingly few this time around.

The argument I keep hearing is that we can fix humanity’s problem du jour…by breeding our way out of it.

Essentially, that the Arab world could get back on track by banning cousin marriage, or importing European/Chinese women. That we could make Western women have children again by axing the welfare state (or whatever the argument is. Coherency is a good thing, guys. Clarity of thought, too). I see this idea everywhere on this blog. “Breeding got us into this mess, and breeding will get us out!”

But selection is very slow.

A eugenic solution would take decades or hundreds of years (if it works). Evolution is faster than Gould believed, but it’s absolutely NOT a solution to any short term geopolitical or demographic issue. You might as well propose a solution to the PNG/Indonesia border dispute that relies on continental drift. I don’t plan on living that long. Do you?

Furthermore, where are the examples of planned, controlled eugenics actually working? What cultures in human history have consciously said “hey, we’re selecting ourselves for something bad, let’s turn this around and select for something good…” and succeeded?

Yes, we’ve accidentally selected ourselves for various things. But every attempt I’ve seen to “put chlorine in the gene pool” (as a friend says) has turned into a horrifying clownfuck of a disaster. Egypt’s dynasties wed brother to sister to preserve the royal bloodline – they got King Tut. The Habsburgs let recessive alleles pile up until they looked like Halloween masks. In 1934, Germany’s schizophrenia rate was 2.0 per 1000. The Nazis came to power and sterilized and/or killed nearly every schizophrenic in the country. Forty years later, Germany’s schizophrenia rate was re-tested. 1.5. D’oh!.

I’m able to take a lesson: we are not good at doing this.

A third fly in the ointment: do we really have much time left? I’m not some hardcore lesswrongfag who thinks the Singularity’s five minutes away, but the 10,000 year explosion never stopped happening, and soon accelerating technology (CRSPR/Cas, etc) might make the process of breeding obsolete. There’s no reason to rely on traditional methods for creating smart people. Greg has some ideas here. Or perhaps you want to get on Stephen Hsu’s crazy train. What’s the point of shuffling around recombinant DNA in the hopes lucking into a few IQ points when we could isolate all the variants involved in higher IQ, and then stack the deck? Are we really sure this won’t happen in the next hundred years or so (a paltry 3-4 generations away?)

We spend lots of time kicking around nurturists. Ironically, this might be an area where they have us by the balls. If you want to fix any kind of short term disaster hanging over our heads, it HAS to be through environmental measures. Selection just doesn’t work fast enough.

What if no environmental measures are possible? What if we’re just screwed?

Well, has anyone seen Star Trek: TNG, specifically “The Lower Decks”? Worf challenges Sito Jaxa to pass an ancient Klingon test. He blindfolds her, and they spar. She gropes in the dark, while he pummels her defenseless body. It’s hopeless. How can you fight a person you can’t see?

Eventually, Sito gets frustrated, pulls off the blindfold, and refuses to fight any more. Worf tells her she’s passed the test.”

This is a 1997 CD by shock jock duo Opie and Anthony, containing clips from their WAAF show in Boston.

At their best, O&A had a sense of nastiness and cruelty that was cathartic. Opie once said that he didn’t give a fuck if guests on the show cried, all he cared about was the ticking clock on the wall. He had to fill four hours per day with funny material, and if you weren’t entertaining, he’d make you entertaining, god save your soul. Countless guests fell prey to that clock. They’d screw up, get slow and boring, and then the knives would come out. Whether you were a Hollywood A-lister or a no-name author with a book to promote, Opie and Anthony had one law. “Bring us food, or become food yourself.”

…But that was at their peak (2005). In 1997, they were mostly doing stupid fucking hack (they themselves admit it. As they grew more sophisticated, they spent a lot of hours riffing on their WAAF era). “100 Grand” pretty much sets the tone. An eye-rollingly fake prank call where they trick some guy into thinking he won $100,000. The big reveal: he actually won a 100 Grand candy bar. Hahaha! KERR-RAY-ZEE!!!

Sometimes its nostalgic, in a rotary telephone kind of way. This kind of radio was almost like the internet before there was an internet: sliced-up, rapidly consumable “content kibble” that can be enjoyed with little thought or effort. Sometimes its just embarassing and cringeworthy. All you can say about early O&A is that, by the standards of the time, they were not an exceptionally bad radio show.

Let’s talk about the term “shock jock”. In computer programming, it’s usually bad practice to name files “new” or “latest”. The code will eventually become obsolete, you’ll probably forget to change the name, and soon you’ll have a file called LATEST-NEW-UPDATED25314.c that was created during the K-T extinction event and has been replaced ten times.

Likewise, it’s probably a bad idea to call yourself “shocking”. The waterline of shock rises higher each year, and a person raised on the internet will only be “shocked” to the extent that this stuff was once considered edgy. Prank calls. Parody songs. Bra bombing. How old would you have to be to find this stuff offensive? Are there even that many years on a calendar?

Opie’s voice is disturbingly different – he sounds like he’s been huffing helium. Anthony is far quicker and more energetic than he is now – firing off lines like rabbit punches instead of drawling them out. This is years before meaty-breasted third mic Jim Norton entered the picture, and you really feel his absence. All those little pauses really cry to have Jim filling them with lines.

It’s fascinating relic for the hardcore O&A fan. But honestly, nearly everything O&A did in their “classic” period is unlistenable in 2016. Partly it’s the lack of Jim. Partly it’s the FCC’s jackboot on their neck (this stuff should be way filthier than it is). Mostly it’s just that 1997 was twenty years ago, and that zany 90s vibe now seem like transmissions from a distant planet.

Although a modern day O&A fan will hardly recognise the b-b-boys, it’s an interesting look back at the days when radio was ruled by Howard Stern. Speaking of obsolete terms, here’s another one…”the king of all media.”

“Never put a period where God has put a comma” – Ross Douthat

“Back in the year 960, Christian missionaries invaded Scandinavia and threatened the Vikings: if you persist in your pagan customs you will end up in hell where eternal fires burn. The Vikings welcomed the good news. They trembled from cold, not fear.” – Eduardo Galeano

“They proved that if you quit smoking, it will prolong your life. What they haven’t proved is that a prolonged life is a good thing” – Bill Hicks

“Secondly, what unites the liberals attempting to demonise Bruenig – Sady Doyle, Joshua Foust, Jordan Kay, and others you’re probably very lucky to have never heard of – is their total uselessness at good, vicious political invective. It’s just not their natural terrain. […] Case in point is Doyle, who once wrote that ‘trying to parse Hillary Clinton without also parsing Hillary hate is like trying to drink water without touching the glass,’ apparently having never heard of the popular invention known as a ‘straw.’” – Sam Kriss

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” – Adam Smith

“The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations.” – Adam Smith

“Fascism no longer exists. It’s as dead as Odinism. You can reinvent Odinism, but it’s not Odinism, it’s fake Odinism. Unless it’s a joke (and don’t get me wrong, Nazi Microsoft chatbots are funny), it’s pathetic. Actually, the fact that /pol has made Hitler funny is the best possible evidence that Hitler is completely dead. What’s alive is the ideological system that defeated fascism — which committed plenty of atrocities of its own. Of our own. When we think about crimes from the last century, it seems more relevant to think about the crimes we committed, not those they committed.” – Curtis Yarvin/Mencius Moldbug

“No Vietcong ever called me a nigger.” – Muhammad Ali

“Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die?” – Nick Land