Where Do Rock Stars Come From?

Posted on September 8, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: It would be interesting to do a big statistical study of the background of rock stars. I suspect they tend to come from fairly high achieving if sometimes self-destructive backgrounds.

The most memorable background for a rock star is perhaps Clash frontman Joe Strummer’s, who pretended to be working class by never brushing his teeth. But Strummer’s dad’s cover story was he was a British diplomat, but was actually MI6 — he was the code keeper at the British embassy who translated incoming and outgoing messages for the James Bonds. Joe’s dad was good friends with Soviet spy Kim Philby.

Joe was head boy or whatever it’s called at his boarding school in England

The more I learn about Joe, the less I think about Joe’s ostensible leftism and the more the name “Rudyard Kipling” comes to mind. Joe’s dad was born in Lucknow, India, where Kipling’s protagonist Kim went to boarding school.

Joe’s last released song during his lifetime was “Minstrel Boy,” which plays over the credits in Sir Ridley Scott’s Somali war movie “Black Hawk Down.” “Minstrel Boy” is what Sean Connery sings on the rope bridge at the end of John Huston’s adaptation of Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King.”

The minstrel boy to the war is gone,
In the ranks of death you’ll find him

His father’s sword he hath girded on,
And his wild harp slung behind him

“Land of Song!” cried the warrior bard,
(Should) “Tho’ all the world betrays thee,
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise thee!”

The Minstrel fell! But the foeman’s chain
Could not bring that proud soul under

The harp he loved ne’er spoke again,
For he tore its chords asunder

And said “No chains shall sully thee,
Thou soul of love and bravery!

Thy songs were made for the pure and free
They shall never sound in slavery!

* Punk depended on young men, and young men being rewarded for being rebellious, shocking, and kicking dirt right in the face of respectability. Attitude mattered more than virtuosity and the music was fast and aggressive; music to mosh to not dance like a disco inferno. And yes it was very anti-Black and anti-Gay, the two linked in gayer than gay and Blacker than Black disco.

Can the same dynamic work today? I dunno. Maybe. It will depend on how many alt-righters are seen to be rewarded. By sex, bluntly.

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MaNishtana: Growing up, I was taught not to pledge allegiance to America, a country built on a promise of racial equality that’s crumbled in front of our eyes

Posted on September 8, 2016 by Luke Ford

Someone growing up black and Jewish in America is unlikely to be enchanted with the country. It is basic Social Identity Theory. Whites and Chinese growing up in Ghana are probably not wrapped up in Ghana. It is normal and natural for minorities to be unhappy with the majority culture and that has nothing to do with the majority culture being bad.

The same type of disaffected article could be written by an Arab growing up in the Jewish state or a non-Japanese person growing up in Japan or a Seventh-Day Adventist growing up in Australia.

From Tabletmag.com:

Growing up, I was taught not to pledge allegiance to America, a country built on a promise of racial equality that’s crumbled in front of our eyes.

Some “real Americans” have been in a patriotic tizzy over Colin Kaepernick’s recent protest of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” during which the NFL quarterback sat, and then took a knee (in deference to the sacrifices of veterans), in order to demonstrate his discontent over the treatment of African Americans in general, and disproportionate police brutality in particular. Kaepernick’s continuous protest has inspired others, whether they share the field with him or not, to do the same as the 49ers QB.

(Just to show some numbers, black males make up 6 percent of the American population, but an astounding 40 percent of unarmed victims killed by police. A very odd statistic given that 71 percent of police deaths this year alone, were committed by white males).
Kaepernick’s actions have brought to the surface many unsettling truths about our country, from our national anthem actually being hella racist, to the hypocrisy of Americans, many of them white, who decry the demonstrative tactics of Black Lives Matter in favor of quiet, more peaceful protests—yet also decry said quiet peaceful shows of protest (see: Kaepernick) without delving, with equal intensity, into the reasoning behind such actions. The ironic icing on a this very sad cake is the Santa Clara Police Union’s recent threat not to provide security for future 49ers games, which only underscores Kaepernick’s point.

Kaepernick’s decision has reminded me of my own relationship to this country, as both an African American and a Jew. It reminds me in particular of my first days in public school. As the firstborn son of two New York school teachers, I was home schooled until I was seven years old. See, yeshiva wasn’t (and sometimes still isn’t) a terribly welcoming place, racially speaking, in the ’80s, nor was the public education system particularly stellar. As a result, I wasn’t unleashed upon the formal educational houses of the world until I had more than a fair grasp of both secular knowledge and Jewish identity.

Funny thing my parents neglected to inform me about on my first day of school, and every day thereafter: Hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” blared over the loudspeakers, during which you were expected to stand and sing, with hand over heart. Of course, my parents—who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War—weren’t particularly nationalistic, so the oversight is thoroughly understandable in retrospect.

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Andrew Tobin: Why Do Donald Trump’s Worst Tweets Come on Jewish Holidays — or Shabbat?

Posted on September 8, 2016 by Luke Ford

From the Forward.com:

(JTA) — After the shooting death of Dwyane Wade’s cousin in August, Donald Trump tweeted, “Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!”

The previous month, he posted to Twitter a six-pointed star containing the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” stamped on an image of Hillary Clinton and hundred-dollar bills.

A few weeks before that, the Republican presidential nominee responded to the Orlando nightclub massacre with a tweet saying, “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.”

These tweets have more in common than just being ill-advised. They were also all blasted into the public discourse on Jewish holidays: Shabbat, Shabbat and Shavuot, respectively. And they suggest to at least one friend of Trump’s family that when the Republican candidate’s Orthodox Jewish daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are off observing the holy days, Trump loses two of his most important filters.

In her profile of Ivanka Trump published Wednesday in the Huffington Post Highline magazine, Hannah Seligson credits the theory to an anonymous friend of the would-be first daughter and her husband. (Seligson’s list also includes the example of a Shabbat tweet of an image of Donald Trump as a train, a meme “tangentially” associated with the white supremacist alt-right movement.)

According to Seligson, the friend’s observation was that “some of Donald’s worst tweets of the campaign” came on Jewish holidays when Ivanka Trump and Kushner were “off the grid.” The couple observes the rabbinic laws that proscribe work or the use of electronic devices, among other things, on Shabbat, Shavuot and other holidays.

“It could be a big problem if the people who make our president not crazy aren’t available one day a week,” the friend told Seligson.

Of course, Trump has sparked outrage on days with no special Jewish significance. This summer alone, he has said gun rights supporters could take action if Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, is elected; called President Barack Obama the “founder of ISIS”; suggested the mother of a Muslim-American soldier killed in action was not “allowed” to speak at the Democratic National Convention, and accused a “Mexican” federal judge of being biased by his background.

Amid public outcry, Trump went on to tweet about all these subjects, in some cases repeatedly. But the controversies didn’t start on Twitter.

If the theory about Jewish holidays is true, then, Ivanka Trump and her husband are most effective at reining in Donald Trump specifically before he gets himself into Twitter trouble. Ivanka Trump “is extremely scared of her father, like everyone else,” an anonymous Trump adviser tells Seligson. “She knows you can’t push him. She knows once he goes off on these things, he won’t back down.”

Kushner, a real estate tycoon in his own right, is “deferential” to Donald Trump too, according to Seligson.

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A Danish school now separates children by ethnicity

Posted on September 8, 2016 by Luke Ford

It seems that Danes have more commonsense than anyone else in their region.

Washington Post: Nearly a year after the influx of migrants into Europe reached its peak, the repercussions can now be felt in thousands of classrooms across the continent as a new school year begins.

Whereas most other schools are focused on assimilating migrant children, one Danish school in the city of Aarhus has decided to separate them. The idea has drawn criticism from human rights advocates who question the legality of segregating children based on their ethnicity.

Many countries provide separate schooling for newcomers in efforts at quicker assimilation. In special “international classes” in Germany, for example, migrant and refugee children receive intensive language training in an attempt to move them into normal German classrooms as soon as possible.

The Danish school’s approach, however, is somewhat different because it was not originally designed to integrate migrant children better. Instead, it seeks to allow children to avoid classes with more migrants than ethnic Danes, according to the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, which first reported the story. There are now four classes for migrant children and three mixed classes in which the ratio between migrants and ethnic Danes is equal. The policy does not only apply to refugees or children born abroad, but also to pupils who grew up in Denmark but have parents who migrated from abroad.

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LAT: How Airbnb is addressing its racial-bias problem

Posted on September 8, 2016 by Luke Ford

There’s not a hint in this article that discrimination is commonsense, that not all races and religions act equally, and that there may be practical reasons that people might not want to rent to members of groups with high crime rates (such as people under age 25).

The sharing economy (AirBNB, Uber, etc) is not going to work well when you deal with low trust, high crime groups.

Los Angeles Times:

In response to growing complaints of racial bias among its users, Airbnb will beef up its nondiscrimination policy, do more to diversify its own workforce and offer implicit-bias training to its hosts, according to a report released Thursday after a three-month review by the company.

But the short-term rental site will not, for now, concede to critics one of their chief requests: abandoning the user photos that make it easy to identify online who is a minority.

“After thoroughly analyzing this issue, I came to believe that Airbnb guests should not be asked or required to hide behind curtains of anonymity when trying to find a place to stay,” Laura Murphy, a former longtime American Civil Liberties Union official who was brought on as an advisor to lead Airbnb’s review, said in the report. “Technology can bring us together and technology shouldn’t ask us to hide who we are. Instead, we should be implementing new, creative solutions to fight discrimination and promote understanding.”

By the end of the year, the San Francisco company is vowing instead to experiment with reducing the visibility of photos on booking pages and promoting in their place other reputation information, such as reviews. The issue has been a thorny one for the company, which argues that photos — as well as real names — are necessary to create trust and ensure safety on a platform where millions of strangers rent space in one another’s private homes.

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