Abortion

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

I don’t talk much about abortion. It’s not a big issue for me, but my thinking on it has been fairly consistent: Most abortions are immoral and abortion should be legal for the first trimester. I like what France does – you have to indicate that you are in distress to get an abortion.

When I hear women celebrating their abortions, that disturbs me. When I hear women say that abortion is just something that every woman goes through, that disturbs me. But what primarily disturbs me in these conversations is the painful recognition of my own moral weakness.

I identify as a sex and love addict, and as an addict, I recognize that when I am in the throes of addiction, I’ll use everyone I can to meet my addictive needs.

My stepmom has a good nickname for me – “User!”

I first had sex in February of 1989 and that relationship lasted until I moved to Australia that September.

Once down under, I decided to convert to Judaism, and as part of that commitment, I determined to not just abstain from sex, but to abstain from behavior and situations that made sex more likely. Eventually, to get my wild self under control, I quit masturbation for over a year and as much as possible avoided touching women. This monk life was accompanied by isolation and depression as I struggled with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I spent about 20 hours a day in bed.

In 1992, a Seventh-Day Adventist scholar counseled me that my greatest need was for community. I agreed with him. I began placing and responding to single ads and a trickle of women came to visit me in Newcastle, CA 95658. My commitment to chastity weakened in the presence of attractive women, and in the face of one woman’s outrageous curves (E-cup breasts), I plunged into sin. I enjoyed my plunges so much that at times I decided to up their intensity by going in raw and pulling out before my climax.

“I can’t believe you did that,” she said. “You’re normally so disciplined.”

“What would you do if you got pregnant?” I asked.

“I’d get rid of it, and I wouldn’t even tell you,” she said.

The sex addict in me was thrilled while the thoughtful considerate part of me was appalled.

Once launched into my fuckathon (by 1993 I had regained enough of my health to live two-thirds of a normal life), I tried to reassure myself that I was doing my promiscuity ethically. This was a delusion. I think most women regret sex that does not lead to marriage. I’d tell myself that I’d never touch a married woman. Then I repeatedly encountered married women who delighted in leading me on for the attention highs and then springing “I’m married” once I began my final march to intercourse.

I don’t believe I’ve ever had sex with a married woman, but way too much of the reason for that was luck.

To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never impregnated anyone nor ever caught an STD. I’ve never broken the law, though there was that time when I was shagging in the back of my girlfriend’s station wagon in the empty synagogue parking lot and the police rolled up on us and we got off because the officer recognized me as the guy who’d opened the door for him at the synagogue a few days previous.

At the time, I lived across the street from the shul. There was a mixed race couple next door (black guy, white woman). To demonstrate my non-racist credentials, I showed the guy around the synagogue one day. Shortly thereafter, he disappeared and the police showed up looking for him due to charges of assault on his girlfriend. She told us that she was afraid of him.

At least two girlfriends (I was first with Beverly Hills adjacent Woman A for a few weeks and then I had a pre-arranged trip to New York for a month to stay with Woman B, then I came back to stay with Woman A until she wised up, lent me $500 to repair my car, which I paid back within two months) broke up with me in 1994 because their friends, family and therapists told them that I was using them. At the time, I was desperately poor and living out of my car. It was a blessing to stay in their nice apartments. Both women were five years older than me and they were ready to settle down. My two previous girlfriends were 8 and 11 years older than me.

The more sex I had, the more positions and scenarios I tried, the more partners I had, the more I thought about sex. I became intoxicated and then addicted. Twelve-step programs and growing older helped me get better. I’ve been emotionally sober in this arena since 2012 (meaning that I respect my behavior over the past 12 years with women as I have not acted like a pig, and I have not engaged in mortifying self-destructive and socially destructive behavior such as promiscuity and cheating and lying).

Kamala Harris reminds me of the many women who’ve scolded me. Yes, I’ve usually deserved the scolding, but on those occasions when the scolding was over the top, I did not appreciate it, man. Remember when senators interrogated Brett Kavanagh over his drinking? I hope someone interrogates Kamala Harris over her drinking.

Posted in Abortion, Addiction, Personal | Comments Off on Abortion

The Price Of Anti-White Racism

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Helen Andrews writes:

Government programs tend to funnel money from white taxpayers to non-white beneficiaries. White students are a tiny fraction of public school enrollment in cities like New York and San Francisco, about 15%, but white parents are disproportionately among the cities’ wealthiest taxpayers. Sixty percent of Medicaid recipients are non-white, as were the majority of people who gained health coverage under Obamacare between 2010 and 2015, “which might help explain the white animus to Obamacare,” Carl writes. “It’s yet another government healthcare program disproportionately paid for by whites and disproportionately benefitting minorities.”

The migration of white families from cities to the suburbs in the second half of the 20th century—the phenomenon known as “white flight”—represented a huge financial cost, Carl observes. “Whites fled inner-city neighborhoods and the homes and businesses they had built there, losing billions of dollars of capital that their ancestors had worked decades and even centuries to accumulate.” Between 1950 and today, the white share of the population has plummeted in cities such as Milwaukee (97% to 33%), Philadelphia (87% to 34%), Chicago (89% to 31%), Boston (95% to 44%), New York (90% to 31%), and Akron (94% to 55%). Behind those numbers are millions of tragic stories of families who fled streets no longer safe to walk down and schools no longer safe for their children to attend. Carl’s own forebears were among them.

In March 2024, the salaries of hundreds of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats at the University of Virginia were revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request. The highest paid made $587,340; the total cost of all DEI staff was $20 million.

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Trump-Proofing Is Anti-Democratic

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

The same people who argue that Donald Trump represents a mortal threat to democracy are also doing everything they can to Trump-proof and render the election of Donald Trump as meaningless as possible.

Christopher Caldwell writes:

European diplomats and their advisors boasted of how they planned to “Trump-proof” the international order, starting with aid to the Ukrainian war effort. On one hand, European leaders were recognizing the immovable democratic reality that the present-day Republican Party represents: none failed to swear loyalty to the Trumpian proposition that Europe ought to pay more for its defense. On the other hand, they continued to cast Trumpism as a “threat to democracy,” albeit one that could be neutralized with the help of a few political tricks. They proposed a $100-billion five-year funding plan for the Ukrainian war effort, shifted authority over the arms-contributing nations from the U.S. to NATO itself, and declared Ukraine’s path to NATO membership “irreversible.”

Even in the best of circumstances, “Trump-proofing” would appear to be a counterproductive strategy. Leaders do not get to lay out the policies of their elected successors. Were NATO to reconfigure itself in such a way as to stymie the verdicts of American democracy, it would alienate many more Americans from the alliance than President Trump has thus far managed to. And the roll-out was poorly timed. A few days after the summit, a gunman in Butler, Pennsylvania, would try to Trump-proof the West in his own way: by sending the former president to kingdom come.

But Europeans are less worried than one would think by that kind of threat to democracy. Wrapped up in a collection of American-style arguments over corruption and populism and ethnic strife, they have adopted a style of politics that a decade ago seemed unique to the United States: mixing up domestic and foreign policy, constitutionalizing policy differences, suppressing dissent over dubious experimental policies, failing to distinguish between loyal opposition and treason, refusing to surrender power when they surrender power…

In an extraordinary essay published in Le Figaro in mid-July, the political philosopher Pierre Manent described a situation in which the rhetoric of “defending democracy” was itself becoming a threat to democracy. The excommunication of the National Rally creates a powerful governing tool for the political class, “a means of social and moral control that it uses to undermine the sincerity and the freedom of the civic conversation.”

In a functioning democracy, Manent points out, voters choose between competing visions for the community. But in today’s hyper-moralized democracy the choice is between “the legitimate community and those excluded from the legitimate community.” The ruse is self-defeating. If one party to the elections is illegitimate, then the government is, too: We didn’t vote to install it, voters will say, but to exclude the alternative. That is why the National Rally has been able to attract voters without ever having developed a coherent plan for governing. The establishment’s attempt to delegitimize the main party of the French working class has boomeranged back on the establishment itself.

…the most truculent members of NATO tend to be the most lightly armed. Between them, he notes, the Baltic states—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—have fewer than 50,000 soldiers and not a single main battle tank.

Pierre Manent wrote first for Le Figaro and then had his essay translated into English:

Perhaps the dissolution of the National Assembly, along with its consequences, will turn out to be the “extrinsic accident” that, according to Machiavelli, requires cities to “become aware of themselves” and to refound themselves. In the confusion and the lightning flash of this summer, a light has been lit: we must return home. Salvation will not come from “Europe,” which withdraws as soon as an emergency knocks on the door, and still less from the people-humanity that finds unity and energy only in hatred. Salvation will come only from “us,” from the French people governing ourselves according to the representative republic, the regime whose authority our higher courts have time and again obscured and whose functioning they have hindered. No one will come to our aid if we do not want to govern ourselves.

Posted in Christopher Caldwell | Comments Off on Trump-Proofing Is Anti-Democratic

The New York Times Displays Contradictory Attitudes Towards IQ

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

When IQ scores advance the New York Ties left-wing agenda, it promotes the value of IQ scores. When IQ scores undercut the New York Times agenda, it casts doubt on the validity of IQ scores.

If you optimize for truth, you don’t operate like the New York Times.

If you enter “iq most replicable social science” (without quotes) into Google today, you get this as the first answer (generated by its AI):

According to current research, IQ testing is considered one of the most replicable findings in the social sciences, meaning that studies on intelligence consistently produce similar results when replicated across different populations and research teams, even amidst the broader “replication crisis” within social science research.

Key points about IQ and replicability:
High consistency:
Studies on IQ tend to show a high degree of consistency in their findings, particularly when using standardized intelligence tests.
Strong correlations:
IQ scores are demonstrably correlated with various life outcomes like educational attainment and occupational status, further supporting their reliability.
Twin studies:
Research using twin studies has provided evidence for a significant genetic component to intelligence, adding to the understanding of IQ’s stability.

The first academic article suggested by Google is from the Journal of Intelligence, published Nov. 19, 2020:

Despite intelligence research being among the most replicable bodies of empirical findings—a Rosetta stone across the social sciences—the communication of intelligence research with non-intelligence researchers and the public remains a challenge, especially given ongoing public controversies throughout the history of the field. Hunt argued that “we have a communication problem.” This article is a call for intelligence researchers to consider communication at multiple levels—communication with other intelligence researchers, communication with non-intelligence researchers, and communication with the public, defined here as policymakers, practitioners, students, and general readers. It discusses ongoing tensions between academic freedom and social responsibility and provides suggestions for thinking about communication and effective research translation and implementation of intelligence research from the frameworks of science and policy research communication. It concludes with some recommendations for effective communication and stresses the importance of incentivizing more scholars to responsibly seek to educate and engage with multiple publics about the science of intelligence.

The research on intelligence, from a purely scientific perspective, is among the most robust literatures in all of the social sciences (Arvey et al. 1994; Carroll 1997; Deary 2020; Jensen 1998; Neisser et al. 1996). At least within the community of researchers around the world who openly acknowledge this enormous body of evidence accumulated to date, then, whether intelligence or cognitive abilities are measurable and have real world consequences is not, at least in my view, the most crucial debate. Of course, there remain healthy disagreements in the field about various aspects of intelligence, and we still have much to learn about intelligence and how it might be most fruitfully applied. Yet, intelligence researchers often find themselves facing many people outside of the field (including the general public) holding strong misconceptions or even distorting the facts about intelligence. Thus, this article seeks to build from Hunt’s (2009) point that the field has a communication problem as a way of expanding the list of challenges or problems that intelligence researchers face in conducting scientific inquiry and stressing that communication has been a neglected topic for the field.

Because intelligence research is multidisciplinary and the construct—especially when conceptualized and measured as general intelligence or g—can be considered a Rosetta stone across the social sciences (Jensen 1998, 2006), it (should) have influence in numerous other fields. Some fields, such as industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology (e.g., Schmidt and Hunter 2004; Kuncel et al. 2004), are one step removed from intelligence research but have incorporated it into their discipline and training (they just call it general mental ability, or GMA). Other fields, such as gifted education, are somewhat accepting of intelligence as a core aspect, but still it remains a minority perspective (e.g., Thompson and Oehlert 2010; Wai and Worrell 2015; Warne 2015). On the flipside, there are other fields, such as epidemiology (e.g., Gottfredson 2004) and education (e.g., Wai et al. 2018) in which there has simply been little to no integration of intelligence research at all, and even strong resistance or just open absence of acknowledgment throughout history (e.g., Maranto and Wai 2020). In the field of psychology, beyond the I/O subdiscipline, it does not appear that intelligence research is really fully accepted as indicated by the number of jobs in traditional psychology, education, or other departments who employ intelligence researchers. Moving outside psychology to the broader social sciences or other areas of science does not necessarily show intelligence research being integrated strongly in a systematic way. One indicator intelligence research is not well accepted by mainstream psychology is the relatively low number of faculty positions, at least in the U.S., recruiting for intelligence as a specialty (e.g., in the U.S. the Psychology Job Wiki (psychjobsearch.wikidot.com), throughout recent years in particular, almost uniformly does not have any positions explicitly asking for intelligence as a specialty). Additionally, though not typically seen this way by intelligence researchers, the lack of accuracy of how intelligence research is represented in general psychology textbooks (Warne et al. 2018) is another indicator of mainstream acceptance within the field of psychology broadly. However, more systematic research on the representation of intelligence as mainstream in psychology has also not yet been conducted and would be useful information.

The history of intelligence research has been simultaneously filled with enormous empirical advancement alongside a number of resurfacing public controversies (see Jensen 1969; Gottfredson 2010a; Herrnstein and Murray 1994; see Carl and Woodley 2019; Rindermann et al. 2020 for recent reviews). Some intelligence researchers have argued that given how intelligence research has the potential to be misused due to its complicated and sometimes unfortunate history, that it is crucial to be careful about how such research is conducted and disseminated (e.g., Martschenko et al. 2019). This type of concern about the history of intelligence research may have even prompted the Journal of Intelligence (2020) editors to openly state on their “aims” page that certain types of research questions, as determined at the discretion of the editors, will not be accepted: “The journal will not consider manuscripts that present results or conclusions with mixed language, with misleading wording or with insufficient supporting data that may therefore lead to or enhance political controversies; and the editors will judge whether that is the case.” Haier’s (2020) editorial stance in Intelligence states that “Our responsibility is to publish the best quality studies we can to elucidate all aspects of human intelligence research. In our view, publishing empirical data, along with clear explanations of what the data mean and what they do not mean, is the only basis for reasoned discussions about what intelligence is and why it is important.”

Thus, there is debate within the field of intelligence itself on what are acceptable topics to conduct research on and what are not and what should even be communicated. Some intelligence researchers believe that all questions should be openly pursued and communicated (e.g., Carl and Woodley 2019; Jensen 1998). Other researchers have noted that certain questions in intelligence research are a bit like playing with fire (e.g., Hunt and Lubinski 2005; Martschenko et al. 2019; Sternberg 2005). It is clear that intelligence research often comes under attack for reasons that have nothing to do with the integrity of the science, but more to do with the possible social implications and misuse when it comes to policy (Martschenko et al. 2019)…

At a time when psychology and the broader social sciences are struggling with a replication crisis (Open Science Collaboration 2015), the research on intelligence and its implications for society is among the most replicable domains across the social and behavioral sciences. Thus, the fact that intelligence as a field remains under fire at present for identical issues as those that continue to resurface across the decades suggests that Hunt (2009) is correct, we very likely have a communication problem. The goal of this short piece has been to provide a framework to think about communication of intelligence research at multiple levels, and how that might shed some light on the historical issue of intelligence not being well integrated into other academic disciplines and also not well understood or accepted by the general public. As a field, it is true that our first priority should be to ensure that we seek to build our scientific understanding of intelligence, but this does not preclude the need to ensure the institutional and public support for new researchers to be able to pursue intelligence research for their careers. For example, we need mainstream psychology, education, or other departments to hire and support the next generation of intelligence researchers, which comes from adjacent more mainstream fields (e.g., social/personality, developmental, health, educational, quantitative, I/O, cognitive) accepting the current empirical findings from intelligence and not being turned off by the public and academic controversies.

Steve Sailer writes:

One of the most controversial things Donald Trump ever said was to suggest that, judging by the state of their respective countries, Norwegians would tend to make better immigrants than Haitians.

Now another Trump is in trouble over Haiti.

From the New York Times’ news section:

Donald Trump Jr. Piles On With Racist Comments About Haitians

After former President Donald J. Trump spread debunked claims that immigrants from Haiti were eating pets, his son cast more aspersions on Haitian immigrants.

By Simon J. Levien

Sept. 14, 2024, 1:54 p.m. ET

Amid fallout from Donald J. Trump’s debunked claim about immigrants from Haiti stealing and eating people’s pets in a small Ohio city, the former president’s oldest son weighed in with his own aspersions on Haitians.

Donald Trump Jr. suggested on Thursday that Haitian immigrants were less intelligent than people from other countries, and claimed that there was demographic evidence to back this up. He provided none.

“You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q. — if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Charlie Kirk on Real America’s Voice, a conservative broadcasting network. “That’s just basic. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.”

Claims inherently linking race, nationality and intelligence have long played a role in scientific racism, which uses pseudoscience to try to justify false claims of racial inferiority or superiority. And intelligence quotient testing, a commonly used measure of intelligence, has long been criticized as unreliable. …

The National Haitian American Elected Officials Network, a nonpartisan group for Haitian American politicians, rejected Mr. Trump’s comments about Haitians and intelligence.

“That is so sad,” said Mary Estimé-Irvin, the group’s chairwoman. “The campaign is desperate.”

The New York Times adds: “Donald Trump Jr. has emerged as a key campaign surrogate for his father. They have both advanced the false claim that Haitian migrants are stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio.”

How do they know that is false?

Here are three New York Times articles about lead and low IQ:

C.D.C. Lowers Recommended Lead-Level Limits in Children

High lead levels in young children have been found to affect cognitive development and may lead to a lower I.Q.

One in Three Children Have Unacceptably High Lead Levels, Study Says

Nicholas Rees, a policy specialist on climate and environment at UNICEF and one of the study’s co-authors, said the consequences are dire.

“When you’re talking about a third of the world’s children, you’re talking about a potential loss of learning opportunities, an impact on future wages, you’re talking about a tremendous burden on society,” he said.

Lead-Poisoning Harm Held to Be Partly Reversible

Performance on standardized tests for cognitive development improved significantly six months after the children were treated to reduce the levels of lead in their blood and their homes were cleaned to reduce their exposure, the study found.

I found many New York Times articles about low IQ scores can help murderers escape the death penalty, including the following three:

On Death Row With Low I.Q., and New Hope for a Reprieve

His intellectual disability was even obvious to a Florida judge, who found him “mentally retarded” and took him off death row 18 years after his original sentence.

I.Q. Cutoff Ruling May Spare Some Inmates on Death Row

MIAMI — A Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday throwing out Florida’s strict I.Q. cutoff in death penalty cases could increase the number of inmates exempt from execution because they are deemed mentally disabled, legal experts said Wednesday.

Low I.Q. and the Death Penalty

The Supreme Court will be asked today to decide ”whether the execution of mentally retarded individuals convicted of capital crimes violates the Eighth Amendment.” The case involves Daryl Atkins, who was sentenced to die in Virginia for a 1996 murder and kidnapping. Mr. Atkins has an I.Q. score of 59, below the score of 70 that is commonly used to identify mental retardation.

When it becomes a tool for murderers to avoid the death penalty, invoking retardation is cool.

If low IQ is so bad that people suffering from it are not fully responsible for their actions, then why would you want to import people with low IQs?

Posted in Haiti, IQ | Comments Off on The New York Times Displays Contradictory Attitudes Towards IQ

‘Everyone is numbing out’

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

If you have strong bonds, if you have children, I don’t believe you are numbing out and I don’t believe you lack meaning and I don’t believe you have the following problems.

What kind of person with children to support practices quiet quitting?

Catherine Shannon wrote:

Life has gotten very chaotic incredibly quickly. It has become increasingly difficult to parse anything from the static. People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even nihilists have a sincere belief system; they just sincerely believe that life is meaningless.) What we’re dealing with is worse than nihilism. People are checking out of life in their 20s and 30s without reaching any profound conclusions about the point of it all.

“People are so worn down,” my friend told me on a recent phone call. She’s right: there’s a real lack of palpable ambition and vitality these days, a stunning lack of life force in the world. Another friend told me that “this has been going on for so long that people wouldn’t know meaning if it walked up and bit them in the ass.” It’s true—so many of the things that once gave the average person’s life real meaning are now treated with sarcasm and contempt: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of your life, getting married is just a piece of paper, having kids is a nightmare, family is a burden, hobbies are merely quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is cringe, leaving the house is exhausting, religion is for idiots, the list goes on. If you allow yourself to internalize this perspective, eventually everything becomes a dumb joke.

We’re so saturated in this environment that people are not only numbing out, they’re kind of making a spectacle of it: from TikTok’s “quiet quitting” trend to Vetements entire “ironic” aesthetic. You know it’s bad when the corporations get on board. The detachment is so widespread that most companies don’t even have the genuine confidence to market their own products. Everything is delivered with a wink from one eye and an eye-roll from the other. We live in a mud puddle of memes, ironic hot takes, and self-conscious self-reference.

Posted in Guru | Comments Off on ‘Everyone is numbing out’