The most revolting writer in America is Charles Pierce.
Bernard Goldberg writes: It’s a safe bet, I think, that most of you have never heard of Charles Pierce. If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky. Charles Pierce, technically, is an opinion journalist. But mostly he’s an angry liberal partisan who revels in showing off his nastiness. Something terrible must have happened to Charlie along the way, perhaps when he was a small defenseless child, because no one could turn out to be so vile by mere bad luck alone. In fairness, he’s not always nasty. Sometimes he’s only ridiculous.
Like the time he wrote a magazine piece about one of his liberal heroes, Senator Ted Kennedy. Here’s a line from it that would be funny, in a dark way, if he weren’t serious. “If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.”
Priceless! Teddy Kennedy would have brought comfort to Mary Jo if only she had reached her 60s, but she didn’t because Kennedy drove off a bridge and left her to die a horrible death in his car while he swam to shore trying to figure out how the crime he had just committed wouldn’t derail his political career.
Congratulations, Charlie. Your homage to Senator Kennedy may include the stupidest paragraph ever written in the English language.
Now, Charlie is at it again. This time he has Donald Trump – and everyone who doesn’t think Donald Trump is Hitler – in his sights.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Donald Trump and the Man Who Would Be Howard Beale
REPORT: Scientists from King’s College London have used a new genetic scoring technique to predict academic achievement from DNA alone. This is the strongest prediction from DNA of a behavioural measure to date.
The research shows that a genetic score comprising 20,000 DNA variants explains almost 10 per cent of the differences between children’s educational attainment at the age of 16. DNA alone therefore provides a much better prediction of academic achievement than gender or even ‘grit’, a personality trait thought to measure perseverance and passion for long-term goals.
Published today in Molecular Psychiatry, these findings mark a ‘tipping point’ in predicting academic achievement and could help with identifying children who are at greater risk of having learning difficulties.
Previous research on twin studies has found that 60 per cent of differences between individuals’ educational achievement are due to differences in DNA. Whilst this may seem far from the 10 per cent predicted in this study, the authors note that twin studies examine the sum total of all genetic effects, including common and rare variants, interactions between genes, and gene-environment interactions. Twin studies can therefore tell us the overall genetic influence on a trait in a population.
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But what about Hitler and Stalin? That’s the rejoinder one usually gets when you praise white Western civilization. My answer: Every people produce genocidal tyrants, only the West has pioneered advanced civilization (much of it adopted by East Asia in the past 60 years).
Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, questioned the historical contributions of nonwhite “subgroups” during an appearance on MSNBC on Monday, igniting swift backlash online.
Mr. King spoke during a panel discussion, led by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, about the racial makeup of the Republican Party on the first day of the party’s convention.
“If you’re really optimistic, you can say this was the last time that old white people would command the Republican Party’s attention, its platform, its public face,” Charles P. Pierce, a writer at large at Esquire magazine, said during the panel discussion.
In response, Mr. King said: “This whole ‘old white people’ business does get a little tired, Charlie. I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”
“Than white people?” Mr. Hayes asked.
Mr. King responded: “Than Western civilization itself that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization.”
Frantic yelling ensued, with the panelists speaking over one another. “What about Africa? What about Asia?” April Ryan, a reporter on the panel, said.
This is one of those Emperor’s New Clothes moments. As anthropologists Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger pointed out, a mob that was bullied into believing they’d lose their jobs if they admitted the truth isn’t going to listen dispassionately to somebody tell the truth. Instead, they’d get very, very angry at the one who dares to say the obvious.
Here, of course, we see three professional talkers who can only sputter with mindless rage at Rep. King.
Of course, Rep. King’s statement has been scientifically tested in Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment. In my 2003 review, I wrote:
Dead white European males dominate his inventories, despite Murray reserving eight of his 21 categories (including Arabic literature, Indian philosophy, and Chinese visual art) for non-Western arts. Murray, who was a Peace Corp volunteer in Thailand and has half-Asian children, began this project wanting to devote even more attention to Asian accomplishments but found he couldn’t justify his predisposition.
In the sciences, 97 percent of the significant figures and events turned out to be Western. Is this merely Eurocentric bias? Of the 36 science reference books he drew upon, 28 were published after 1980, by which time historians were desperately searching for non-Westerners to praise. Only in this decade has the most advanced non-Western country, Japan, begun to win science Nobels regularly.
The irony is that modern progress over the last 600 years has been overwhelmingly the achievement of the hate object of modern progressives: dead white European males. Most other great civilizations were stuck in conservative stasis even before the European gunboats showed. Only Japan was making a modest degree of progress.
COMMENTS AT STEVE SAILER:
* Whenever I hear someone say some bold statement like this, I always get very very worried. Worried that they will apologize. Which almost always follows the bold statement, unfortunately.
I usually find it difficult to talk to a voicemail or answering machine, I need to prepare what I’ll say in advance, otherwise it sounds pretty incoherent.
* King can be a badass sometimes… I remember reading Robert Novak a dozen years back on the Iowa re-gerrymander, who described it as a “Frankenstein” district inadvertently created by shoring up the state’s Democrats. The downside of the invincible right-wing boroughs is you get pols who are a bit outré for taking out into primetime like Todd Akin or Michele Bachmann. It’s a double standard since congresscritters from Oakland CA or Seattle can act bonkers all week without “exemplifying” Democrats– oh well, in a polyglot party does speaking in tongues even matter?
* They were also going nuts about how King keeps a miniature Confederate Flag on his desk. King really knows how to trigger SJW’s/leftists/Obama’s coalition of the fringes. Is it too late to make him Trump’s VP?
* I love the obvious lameness of the “counterexamples” thrown out to refute King.
As dumb as his attackers are, they can’t be so dumb as not to be embarrassed that that’s the best they can do.
* That took a lot of guts to say. I know he’s on msnbc in this instance to provoke liberal outrage but damn, he dropped a nuke on ‘em. The black female panelist was clearly the most upset by it. Her behavior shows, once again, that blacks really believe the crap cynical liberals tell them about themselves.
* I found that clip pretty hilarious. King is not all that articulate, but Charles Pierce is so odious and hopelessly self-loathing he was dumbstruck.
* I wondered how long it would take the media to blame the latest black cop killer’s actions on badwhites: “The former Marine who killed three Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officers identified with a growing movement that originated among white supremacists…
* You bring up a good point about him not being articulate. There appear to be no pols with alt right leanings that are good speakers except for Trump. That’s a problem. If I said what King said to some of my conservative relatives and friends they would think it’s racist too. The reason is we just don’t have good speakers who can get these ideas across, or in this case just get facts across.
* It’s very hard. Actual political views/speech content aside, you need someone who’s quick-witted (i.e. who can recognize and seize opportunities); who’s articulate (i.e. who speaks in complete sentences, with a bit of subtlety and cunning); and who can keep his cool and/or use anger tactically and effectively in the face of sputtering outrage and ad hominem attacks coming at him from all sides, especially from the ‘neutral’ moderator who holds the metaphorical mic and can cut him off. And then he’s got to have the perseverence/endurance to come back and do this again and again and again without slipping up.
Mark Steyn has all the rhetorical skills I’ve set out above, but there are few like him around.
* It is perhaps unfortunate that the computer industry developed during an era when terms and nomenclature became acronyms or bland academic jargon instead of being given the name of the discoverer or developer. This is in contrast to an earlier era where old white men like Volta, Watt and Ohm were honored by having their names used to describe the fundamentals of the fields they pioneered.
Had the previous method been used it would be impossible for the anti white male legions to reference computers technology and software without having to mention the names of the old white men who created the field.
* Normally, leftists are able to muster some sort of frenzied counterargument, even if it’s just viciously denouncing their foes. In this case, they’re practically speechless. Truly amazing.
* That’s why Hayes immediately cut off the conversation. On any other controversial topic or supposed gaffe by a conservative, MSNBC’s mouths would water . But there can’t be a conversation (oh, the irony) b/c it’s there is absolutely no contest as to who wins the argument.
* Pat Buchanan was fantastic on MSNBC and his earlier TV gigs when he talked about immigration and race but the conversations almost never went in that direction. Even so he was still too dangerous and got booted off. “No platform” indeed.
* Peter DeVry: Rep. Steve King shouldn’t be allowed to use any inventions created by people who are not white. No elevators, no microphones, no pacemakers.
* Elisha Otis, a White man, invented the elevator.
Wilson Greatbatch, a White man, invented the pacemaker.
In 1962, after nearly a century of invention and improvement by White men, Gerhard Sessler, a White man, and his sidekick James West, a quadroon, developed a new type of microphone at Bell Labs.
Pretty slender reed, Mr DeVry.
* The most in demand microphones are still the Neumann/Telefunken U-47, U-87, and similar variants thereof, and the 1930s and 1940s RCA ribbon mics such as the 44 and 77.
All designed by white guys.
* Steve Sailer: Steyn’s hugely gifted, but he lives in New Hampshire so he can’t do big time TV all that regularly. You pretty much have to live in New York or Washington (or Atlanta if you are on CNN) or L.A. (if you are more entertainment than news).
A long time ago I was counting up how many times I’d been on TV and I came up with around ten. I estimated back then then I’d need to be on TV at least 100 times to make any progress toward being recognizable, and I now think that was an underestimate.
And TV appearances generally don’t pay.
* More seriously, the Steve King clip reveals the utter inability of most panelists in these TV discussions in our country to think on their feet or reply with a zinger, however flimsy.
I’ve been watching quite a bit of the British Parliament’s question hour lately thanks to Brexit events, and I must say that the art of debate, wit and repartee has withered significantly in a generation on this side of the Atlantic.
We were never a match for the Brits in my living memory, and in any case it was never fully our style, but we used to be better, a lot better.
In terms of verbal skills, most intellectuals and public figures these days are dull plodders, with neither wit nor whimsy at their command. I blame management speak and focus group processed political press release language for this, at least in the political arena.
And in these talk shows, a babble of semi-coherent outraged noises are the usual answer to something like Steve King’s statement. That figures. Outrage is what is taught in our fine, fine liberal arts universities these days, not the arts of rhetoric.
* Imagine human life on Earth ends tomorrow. A Martian historian lands and takes preliminary notes on a study of Earthling life. I know I’m setting up a very crude, surely biased straw man here, but how could a Martian historian not notice that peoples in the following continental groupings share common characteristics and are distinguishable from peoples of other continents.
Group #1 – Australia, North America, South America, Europe, Antarctica
Group #2 – Asia
Group #3 – Africa
My point, of course, is that Western civilization (or Western Christendom), is something of an 800 lb. gorilla. No one in his right mind can ignore it and its good influences. Even the ability of TV personalities to trash “dead White European males” without risking death or banishment is something of a Western innovation in how people ought to live together. Even Black Americans who openly despise Whites seem to not want to hop a jet for a new life in Africa.
By Western civilization, I do include the peoples who’ve become part of that civilization by various assimilative processes. I. e., American Indians, Africans, Western Asians (think Imperial Rome).
Put more crudely: how do you not give the White guys (mostly) credit where it’s due?
* Representative Steve King could’ve said something very simple but effective, for example, “You take away trains, planes, automobiles, refrigerators, radio, television, movies, computers, telephones, microscopes, telescopes, rockets, antibiotics, washing machines, etc – all invented by white men – and what have you got? Not much.”
* Do you remember the viral video of Rand Paul running away from the collegiate (illegal) immigration activists at in Okijoba, IA in 2015?
The guy who stuck around to clean up Rand’s mess was Steve MF’ing King.
Posted inAmerica, Blacks, Europe|Comments Off on Rep. Steve King Mentions the Empire Has No Clothes
Watching Melania Trump speak, it was hard for me to imagine that anyone would leave her address feeling anything but more favorably inclined toward her husband. That’s a big win for Team Trump. [Update: Or at least, it was a big win for the brief stretch between that genuine convention speech and the moment much of the internet realized they’d heard a good chunk of that same genuine convention speech before. Eight years before, to be precise.]
* Rudy Giuliani: Sure, the former New York City mayor shouted most of his speech. But I found him to be a very effective advocate for Trump; he talked about Trump’s anonymous charitable giving, he talked about Trump as a father and a friend. Giuliani’s broadside against the threat posed by terrorism and the need for Trump’s strength had the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand. In what was a generally sleepy night, Giuliani brought it.
* Donald Trump’s entrance: I have always wished that politics was more like pro wrestling. Increasingly, I am getting my wish. Trump’s entrance into the Republican convention — he offered a brief introduction for Melania — was epic. Backlit. Fog/smoke machine. “We are the champions” blaring through the speakers. It had everything.
* Marcus Luttrell: The former Navy SEAL — and subject of the book and film “Lone Survivor” — delivered an impassioned and raw appeal to patriotism during the first hour of the nighttime program. It’s hard to command a room at that hour — people are shuffling around and just getting settled in for the night — but Luttrell did it.
Posted inAmerica|Comments Off on Trump’s Amazing Entrance
The stronger your in-group identity, such as black, the more likely you are to have negative feelings about out-groups. Strongly identifying blacks are bound to have ambivalence about the United States of America and any white-majority or non-black majority country. It’s basic social development theory.
In order to increase our self-image we enhance the status of the group to which we belong. For example, England is the best country in the world! We can also increase our self-image by discriminating and holding prejudice views against the out group (the group we don’t belong to). For example, the Americans, French etc. are a bunch of losers!
Therefore, we divided the world into “them” and “us” based through a process of social categorization (i.e. we put people into social groups).
This is known as in-group (us) and out-group (them). Social identity theory states that the in-group will discriminate against the out-group to enhance their self-image.
The central hypothesis of social identity theory is that group members of an in-group will seek to find negative aspects of an out-group, thus enhancing their self-image.
Prejudiced views between cultures may result in racism; in its extreme forms, racism may result in genocide, such as occurred in Germany with the Jews, in Rwanda between the Hutus and Tutsis and, more recently, in the former Yugoslavia between the Bosnians and Serbs.
Henri Tajfel proposed that stereotyping (i.e. putting people into groups and categories) is based on a normal cognitive process: the tendency to group things together. In doing so we tend to exaggerate:
1. the differences between groups
2. the similarities of things in the same group.
We categorize people in the same way. We see the group to which we belong (the in-group) as being different from the others (the out-group), and members of the same group as being more similar than they are. Social categorization is one explanation for prejudice attitudes (i.e. “them” and “us” mentality) which leads to in-groups and out-groups.
The succession of high-profile killings of black men by the police in recent years — in Ferguson, Mo.; North Charleston, S.C.; Baltimore; New York City; and most recently in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights — has touched off protests across the nation and given growing prominence to a movement, Black Lives Matter, dedicated to addressing inequities and discrimination in the criminal justice system.
The movement’s often boisterous denunciations of police violence have prompted a backlash from police unions, politicians and some rank-and-file officers, who accuse it of sowing hatred against men and women in uniform. Some have even blamed the movement for inspiring the gunmen in Dallas and Baton Rouge.
It is the same sentiment that slowed the movement’s campaign in New York City after two police officers were killed in an ambush in December 2014 by a mentally ill black man. The man, who killed himself shortly after killing the officers, had cited on social media the deaths of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man killed by the police in July 2014, and Michael Brown, the man killed in Ferguson in August 2014.
Black police officers said that when the topic was race and policing, they often sidestepped talking in public, and even talking with their co-workers.
In downtown Cleveland, where Republican convention-goers frequently cheered officers patrolling in groups on Monday, an eight-year veteran of the city’s transit police said the strain around race and policing had become so great, he had taken to completely avoiding the subject at work.
Posted inAmerica, Blacks|Comments Off on NYT: Black Police Officers Feel the Inner Tug of a Dual Role
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
