What makes IQ almost entirely dismissible for me is it doesn't measure social intelligence, writing ability, creativity, or musical talent.

Massive components of human experience thrown out as not quantifiable, and therefore, not real.

— Dr Kareem Carr (@kareem_carr) January 10, 2026

There’s a reason why most anti-social, violent behavior is carried out by people in the lowest IQ groups. Low IQ means you can’t appreciate or predict consequences. It means you don’t know how to create mechanisms to keep impulsivity in check or that you don’t even know why it’s necessary to do that. It means you can’t comprehend the perspective of other people or figure out that it exists and that it’s different from yours.

Low IQ means experiencing a constant, daily, grinding frustration because people around you keep saying and doing things that you just don’t understand. If you ever traveled to a foreign country where you don’t speak the language, that’s how a low-IQ person feels always. Like you are in a group where everybody understands the in joke except for you. Living like this eats up so much energy that very little is left to control the already very weak system of checks over one’s impulsivity.

A low IQ is not anybody’s fault exactly like one’s height or eye color aren’t. It’s not a moral flaw. It’s a physical reality and denying it doesn’t help. It’s not kind to pretend that people don’t exist who under no circumstances will be able to perform the cognitive operations that we carry out without noticing.

The only real kindness is to recognize that this is real, it’s not anybody’s fault, and we need to help low-IQ people to handle their largest problem which is impulsivity. There are many completely physical factors that weaken impulse control. Processed food, sugary beverages, light pollution, certain types of medications, disordered living. Interestingly, people who have pretty excellent impulse control avoid all of this on their own initiative.

The saccharine pieties of the quoted tweet are completely counterproductive. Because we collectively refuse to accept the physiological reality of intelligence, we make things a lot worse than they need to be. Think about the students who have been told their whole lives that you can only flunk out of college if you don’t try hard enough. They try their hardest and still have absolutely no idea what the textbook is saying. They end up feeling terrible when this whole time they had as much change of understanding the textbook as I have of reaching the top shelf of my kitchen cabinet without climbing on a chair. These are people who get into debt to acquire an education they will never be able to complete. We are defrauding them. I recently saw the statistics for people with college debt and no degree. It should be criminal to do this to people.

The guy who can get it up for this has the potency of a herd of young bulls:

Can you imagine being married to this person? pic.twitter.com/xstQWrZkw6

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) January 8, 2026

Or maybe he’s extremely hard of hearing and perceives her as a cute little monkey jumping up and down randomly.

Somebody asked for a link to my old review of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom because the old link is broken. It’s a great review, and I’m happy to oblige.

Here’s part 1.

Here’s part 2.

A hundred years from now, the planet has been ravaged by natural disasters and nuclear wars. Most of what used to be England is submerged under water. The rest is inhabited by “brown people” (this is not my language, of course, but the way it’s put in the novel). The world is mostly ruled by Nigeria, and it’s a miserable, degraded existence. White people are a tiny minority, abused by the “we are honey, we are golden” brown people (again, this is a direct quote from the book. I have nothing to do with it.)

Most of the brown people exist in a state of bovine indifference to the lost civilization. A few, however, do understand that something precious perished. They try to imitate the literary and scholarly life of the departed world in a clumsy glass-bead game type of fumbling. But they simply lack the capacity to understand what a life of the mind is. Their efforts to make contact with the intellectually and culturally rich life of 2014 fail. All they manage to uncover from the past is a long, self-serving narrative by a whorish, narcissistic woman from a century before their time whose smug stupidity and utter immorality mirrors their own.

What We Can Know has two parts. The first one is narrated by a “scholar” of literature in 2120 who is obsessed by a poet’s wife from 2014. The second part is narrated by that wife. The novel plays a bit of a trick on the readers. Primitive minds with no knowledge of how to read a literary text will look at the text from the same limited perspective as the fake “scholar” from the future. They will take first-person narratives of the scholar from the future and the poet’s wife from the past completely literally. To people who do have a bit more of an understanding of how literature works, McEwan’s novel offers great surprises.

I’m not sure if I can recommend What We Can Know because McEwan takes quite a gamble, dedicating the whole first half of the novel to the painfully earnest mewlings of the future “scholar”. I barely got through it, to be honest. But once you hit the 50% mark and the story switches into the poet’s wife’s narrative, it gets good and you start figuring out what the point of everything is. But only if you have the capacity to figure it out, as I said before.

I don’t like futuristic dystopian narratives but What We Can Know isn’t really about the future. It’s about the need to appreciate art and intellectual pursuits because most people are tragically incapable of either, and if you are blessed with the rare capacity to do it, make sure you treasure it. Also, if you are not a vapid whore, treasure that, as well.

During the Biden administration, the FBI shot dead in his home a disabled elderly man for posting offensive messages about Biden on Facebook. Curiously, his name didn’t become widely known and nobody has expressed much interest in how justified the FBI was in claiming they were threatened by him. Clearly, some expansions of federal powers are more acceptable than others.

Somebody asked about Iran but, people, I won’t be commenting. I don’t know anybody from there, I haven’t spoken to anybody and have no insight. All I can say is that social media are filled with egregious falsehoods and fabrications. Only trust people whose path to knowledge on the subject is clearly visible to you.

Why are the Democrats suddenly switching gears on this, all at once and all together? https://t.co/XAf3OVB9Fp

— James Lindsay, anti-Communist (@ConceptualJames) January 10, 2026

Because they like winning elections and they observed that this is a wedge issue that is splitting Republicans. They will use everything to get Republicans to talk about Israel and Jews to deepen the split.

This is what it means to have will to power.

In Canada, a 26-year-old man with diabetes and depression stemming from a botched surgery was euthanized.

Remember how I said yesterday that you can have either socialized medicine or open borders? Here’s proof. Young people with treatable conditions are being put down because there are no resources to treat them.

The people who are protesting ICE in the US seem to have no understanding that if they are successful, Social Security and Medicare will be gone. Canadians are closer than we are to this result, and it would behoove us to observe what is happening and draw conclusions.

In a fully post-national state, there are no meaningful national borders. There are also no welfare protections. And by the way, if you are opposed to Trump’s comments about Greenland, you should be equally opposed to the anti-ICE protests. If the borders of Denmark shouldn’t be fluid, neither should be those of the US. If nationals borders are extremely important and must be respected, then act like it. If not, then also be consistent. Trump is being very consistent in that he doesn’t understand the need for national borders, which is why nobody is getting deported.

Are these ideas extremely complicated? Because I wouldn’t think so, yet there are large numbers of people who sincerely proclaim “hands off Greenland and illegal immigrants”. And large numbers of people who proclaim “yes to national borders but only sometimes.” People who see the contradiction at the heart of this position are very few.

Nothing will ever help me better to understand people. I don’t get them. Their way of thinking is strange.

Next week is the first week of class. This is a crazy time for department chairs. It’s almost as bad as the last week of class. There is a ton of work. There’s one crisis after another.

Suddenly, people hear a rumor that there might be a reallocation of secretaries. The department chairs decide to have a two-hour meeting on Tuesday to discuss our proposal to the administration regarding this.

By absolute accident, I happen to know that the reallocation already happened. Paperwork was signed. Contracts were redrawn. It’s a done deal.

Like the eternal innocent that I am, I tell the other chairs about this. A meeting will be a waste of time, I tell them. Unfortunately, it’s too late. It was all decided while we were off campus for the holidays. We can save ourselves the trouble of taking out time on an unusually busy day. We can concentrate on our many daily tasks instead.

Of course, as anybody with a bit less going on in the naiveté department could predict, exactly zero people agree with me. No, we should still have a meeting, they argue.

But why? For what purpose? The secretaries are gone anyways. Reallocated. Removed.

Because, the other chairs respond, it’s going to be a good experience to come together in solidarity and mutual care even if nothing practical comes out of it.

Everybody looks at me like I’m weird for not understanding this. There’s a collective agreement that coming together in solidarity and mutual care for a 2-hour unnecessary meeting is a great idea. These are people who are perpetually overworked to the point of public crying jags versus the very well-rested me who spends part of each working day reading, snoozing, or doing German exercises in the department lounge.

Definitely, somebody is weird in this situation.