Will We Reach Peak Stupidity Before Peak Corruption And Does It Really Matter? Western Civilisation Is Crumbling

It’s often the case that several things leap out at you all at once and upon closer inspection, they all seem to be connected in a meaningful way. Jung called it synchronicity. This morning is one such occasion. Firstly, I noticed this article by John Leake:

How Did the West Become So Stupid?

This morning, while reading that Russian intelligence intercepted a phone conversation between ranking German military officers about blowing up the Crimea Bridge, I realized that much of the West, including Bonhoeffer’s native Germany, is now officially stupid.

I think we can agree that this is far more stupid than it is corrupt. We all know by now that the corrupt elite need their wars to keep their finances in tip top condition and to tighten their grip on society via the imposition of emergency legislation to control the populace and to control the supply of food, energy and merchandise. But that aside, all bets are off if they spark all out nuclear war. We all fall down. Mutual assured destruction (MAD) they called it back in the day. Even those who hide away in their bunkers built with stolen taxpayers’ money lose out. What world have they got to return to when they eventually step outside into the light, bleary-eyed and bloated from their six month champagne and freeze-dried caviar binge? Not much of one I imagine. A post apocalyptic ruined wasteland doesn’t seem much like the flower of opportunity even for your most ardent fascistic control freak. Stupid! Really, really stupid.

But stupid people don’t like being called stupid. In fact, they are extremely sensitive about it. This is part and parcel of being stupid too; you lose control of your emotional responses and you get triggered very easily. As John Leake says:

We live in an era in which patent nonsense is widely accepted by most of our political class and media, and (apparently) by at least half the adult population. And it’s not the garden variety stupidity of being distracted and not paying attention. What we are now seeing is a reversion to the intellectual and emotional life of a 7th grader—a perfect storm of emotional dysregulation, lack of perspective, truculence, and gullibility.

As it happens, the perfect example of stupid people reacting emotionally to being called stupid has appeared on my Wordpress feed this very morning:

At Frontiers in Psychology, it seems that users on X are now part of the peer review process.

On January 4th, the paper “Meta-analysis: On average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average,” was accepted to the journal. That same day, the abstract was published with the notice that the “final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.”

Soon thereafter, the paper went viral, quickly accruing over 54,000 views, wide discussion on X and Reddit, and coverage in popular media (including RCS). It garnered this attention for its intriguing yet simultaneously obvious finding: over the past 80 years, as a far greater proportion of North Americans attended college, the average IQ of college undergraduates dropped from around 120 to 102, just slightly above the average of 100.

It’s not a matter of debate really. We all know that the vastly increased access to higher education has resulted in a general dumbing down of the academic intake. It was virtually inevitable, especially when selectors decided that ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ was to take priority over academic excellence among candidates. But pointing out the bleedin’ obvious is not popular these days and thus the massed ranks of the moronic snowflakes got triggered and terribly upset and the paper has now been retracted.

A little over a month after Uttl, Violo, and Gibson’s paper was accepted and the abstract published, they were abruptly notified by email that it was rejected. They were apprised that Specialty Chief Editor Eddy Davelaar, a Professor of Psychology and Applied Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London, overrode the three peer reviewers who approved the paper and even his own handling editor. His reasons were subsequently forwarded to Uttl and his colleagues.

While Davelaar raised a couple of issues with the paper’s methods, the vast majority of his focus was on its tone. He wrote that the use of the word “merely” in reference to college students’ just-above-average IQ was “demeaning.” He also noted that the authors’ critiques of other scientists’ works “could have been packaged more sensitively.” He also called unfounded the authors’ opinion that the widening participation policies of universities were the cause of undergraduates’ falling IQs.

Uttl was curious what brought on the sudden rejection of his already accepted paper, so he asked representatives at Frontiers. He was told that “several posts” on X triggered Dr. Davelaar’s review. As readers were only able to view the abstract, and thus weren’t able to assess the authors’ methodology, it seems clear that they complained purely about the authors’ tone and provocative conclusions. Davelaar only found ‘problems’ with Uttl, Violo, and Gibson’s methods afterwards.

Remarkably, another academic paper was recently retracted soon after publication, but not because the stupid were offended by its conclusions; rather the corrupt were offended by its conclusions. Also by John Leake:

"Stunning Act of Scientific Censorship"

In a stunning act of scientific censorship, a little known publication integrity staffer Tim Kersjes has retracted a manuscript authored by epidemiologist M. Nathaniel Mead, MSc, after the paper drew global attention to the Springer Nature Cureus platform with record views/reads/downloads.

The paper called for a halt in COVID-19 mass vaccination based on a valid evaluation of the evidence. It topped >330,000 views/reads/downloads in a month as compared to an average Cureus-promoted paper which has only ~2700 in a year.

The paper was clearly retracted unethically, for very spurious and fake reasons simply because it upset not idiots, but corrupt Big Pharma plus the entire medical industrial complex consisting of captured political and academic institutions.

Science is under attack. Truth is under attack. Hard data is under attack. The very foundations of rational, Western civilisation are being undermined, by the corrupt and by the stupid. Who will get there first? Does it really matter? The end result is the same.