I see a terrific amount of ink spilled talking about how Newt is 'smart', or Romney is intelligent and highly competent in a managerial way. These things are nice to have in a leader, but they are not the elephant in the room.
Before I can care about how much a prospective leader knows, I need to know WHO he actually cares about. Are me and mine part of his who, are are we rather the WHOM?
In that regard I view neither Romney nor Newt as acceptable, although Romney is probably a little closer to tolerable than Newt. If Palin was actually solid on demographic hegemony (which unfortunately, she is not), I'd happily support her despite the fact that she's likely on the very low end of the Second Sigma or near the high end of the middle of the First Sigma. Intelligence is only a discriminating factor between candidates if they can pass the Who...Whom test. If the candidate is your enemy at the existential bottom line, honestly, a reasonable man would prefer that they be stupid and of dubious competence.
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Well said. The men I would trust most to lead are probably clustered around +2SD.
Jehu, what's your position on the Obama-IQ-Question? A lot of digital 'ink' has been spilled over the past 3-4 years on the Internet on this, especially at Steve Sailer.
We have no known test scores from Obama. He did get into Harvard, which would put a lower-bound on IQ, but affirmative action muddies the waters there considerably.
Hail,
My guess is that Obama has a similar IQ to GW Bush and Kerry---which is to say around 120-125. If he had a higher IQ than that, I am fairly confident we'd know about it (we'd know that he was a National Merit Scholar for one). Everything about him also screams Second Sigma who is smart but not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.
Eumaios,
We're more or less stuck with the Second Sigma as a leadership caste. The problem is that capability of deception peaks in the Second Sigma, both because of two reasons:
The Second Sigma is close enough to the mean that they can plausibly pose as normal and,
The Second Sigma is usually not self-aware enough to realize their own self-deception
It's way easier to convince people of things when you have no doubt whatsoever of their veracity yourself. Greater self-awareness hurts you quite a bit when the goal is persuasion rather than objective truth.
Yes. Loyalty is indeed the (or just one?) elephant in the room. Competence matters little if it's aligned towards the wrong ends.
I believe this is one of the reasons why, for example, Vladimir Putin is so popular among Russians, despite Russia not doing so well by many civilizational measures. Yes, he's in bed with plenty of transnational interest groups, and he's got that Machiavellian strongman aura going for him but in the end the Russian people identify with Putin because they sense he's on their side. It's easy to pledge loyalty to a leader when you trust him to make decisions that are in your own best interests.
RE Obama's IQ. As far as I remember, Sailer and other heavyweights have come to a similar conclusion as you have above. (I recall the perennial pest/blowhard/idiot "Whiskey" suggesting that Obama's IQ was "not over 105").
When is the last time White-Americans had a president who fit the 'loyalty' criteria?
KK,
Yes, I'd prefer a seriously corrupt leader who is loyal at the demographic level to what we've got now.
Hail,
I could see it being as low as 115, but not 105. 105 is the level of the average education school graduate ;-)
Silent Cal qualifies I think. Eisenhower gets an honorable mention for his 'Operation Wetback'. Andrew Jackson had off the charts loyalty to White Americans by modern standards.
Nixon?
Nixon: On intelligence he was likely north of 145, being probably among the smartest presidents we've ever had. On loyalty he gets really mixed marks. Man created affirmative action, which is a massive negative (he also created Medicare and the EPA, he was emphatically NOT a conservative despite the way he's painted by the media). On the other hand, he did successfully split China from the USSR and managed a very dangerous time during the Cold War (nuclear war was also an existential issue, along with demographic hegemony). I give him a D. Eisenhower would get a C, maybe a C+ if one was feeling generous.
There is a case to be made that Nixon was an implicit American-nationalist, but that circumstances forbade him from acting on his loyalties.
The diaries of Nixon insider H.R.Haldeman, published in the mid-1990s, record what Nixon said and believed in private, and reveal Nixon's unmistakeable racialist and nationalistic sympathies. The Nixon Oval Office tapes, released more recently, offer confirmation after confirmation of the same.
Nixon, in the oval office, speaking to an aide shortly after "Roe v Wade" in 1973, said something curious. Firstly, Nixon expressed his opposition to abortion for the potential deleterious social implications. Then he said something that one cannot imagine any president after him saying, even in the strictest confidence. Nixon: "There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape."
'When you have a black and a white'. Nixon apparently believed it was necessary for a white woman impregnated by a Black to abort.
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