From comments to John Derbyshire:
* Statistically speaking, if I am recalling correctly, differences in our personality and behavioral traits appear to be explained roughly one half genetically (i.e., our individual DNA profiles at conception), one quarter congenitally (i.e., our gestational environments), and one quarter environmentally (i.e., what we experience from birth onward). Along with the rejection of half to three quarters of that influence, a priori, the adherents of the contemporary orthodoxy also misconstrue the post-natal environment to be essentially synonymous with sociological and social-psychological factors alone, especially one’s socio-economic status and interpersonal relationships, particularly intrafamilial ones. In fact, our post-natal environment is all that we experience from birth onward, including our diets, how much sunshine we endure, what quality of air we inhale, what chemicals and germs we are exposed to, how much physical trauma our bodies, and especially our brains, endure– and even the genetic mutations that we can experience during our lifetimes. Our respective socio-economic statuses and interpersonal relationships actually account for surprisingly little in how we each turn out, beginning with the fact that we are conceived about half-baked already, and then born about three-quarters-baked. If we demand to blame our respective parents–which is an overwhelmingly useless exercise– we should asign most of the blame to what they did (or did not do) before we ever drew our respective first breaths!
* The Minnesota Twin Study which included following identical twins separated at birth, finds that there is no difference between identicals separated at birth and raised in different environments, than identicals raised in the same family/environment.
From comments to Steve Sailer:
* And people wonder why Islam has a certain appeal. It’s one way to stuff the nuts back in the jar.
* Turing was a genius. And a war hero. Two impressive things.
Of course, he also was unwilling to keep his hands off teenage boys. The teenager he finally got caught with was 19. The rumors I always heard was that 19 was definitely the upper end of the age range that Turing liked his boys to be.
I’m guessing Hollywood won’t be exploring that aspect of Turing’s life.
* The modern left is a bit like Hinduism.
You are born into your caste. Your caste depends on your karma. Your karma is determined by actions of your forebears. Nothing you do affects your karma..you are stuck with it for life. Now in the leftwing victim caste system there are two sorts of karma..the good sort of karma is from how much oppression your caste supposedly receives. Lets call this “victim karma”. The more victim karma you have, the more inherently moral you are. You can also have negative Karma..lets call it “Privilege”. The more “Privilege” you have the worse you are. Your caste is determined by the difference between the two.
* What’s sort of amusing is that it seems like just about the only thing these DNA markers really predict at this point is race and gender. Eye color and skin color and hair curliness too, they say, but I don’t think that knowing the race of someone who’s mostly SubSaharan African is going to make any of those characteristics hard to predict.
So, basically, it sounds like if it finds a black male was the perpetrator, with the standard amount of admixture for most blacks in the US, it will just produce a generic black male face.
* Race is a social construct in the same sense that species is a social construct. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “species is controversial in biology and philosophy. Biologists disagree on the definition of the term ‘species,’ and philosophers disagree over the ontological status of species. Yet a proper understanding of species is important for a number of reasons.”
That sounds an awful lot like race.
* Blacks were more grossly over-represented in this year’s Oscar broadcast than they have been at any Democratic National Convention! (The sole exception– besides the acting nominations that already had drawn such widespread condemnation– was in the orchestra that they had tucked away in the Capitol Tower– ironically nicknamed, back in the day, “The House that Nat [‘King’ Cole] Built.”) Of course, there was no shortage of homosexuals, this year; but, what really surprised me, as someone who stopped going to the movies in the 1990s, was the outsize number of Brits!
* Selma wound up winning a minor Oscar (original song). In the acceptance speech, actor John Legend and rapper Common claimed that there are more black men in prison today than there were black people that were ever enslaved in the United States.
Any one with brain can pick that argument apart. That was just a matter of two fools saying something to a crowd of even bigger fools, and everyone in the room thought that something brilliant was just uttered. There are around 40 million black people today, so it stands to reason that there’s a chance that the number of black men incarcerated right now is more than the number of black people that were ever slaves between 1776 and 1865.
Unfortunately for dumb and dumber, the 1860 Census listed 3.9 million black slaves. The total American prison population at the moment is 2.3 million, and not all of those are black men. So, as a matter of fact, frick and frack were wrong. But then again, I don’t think of a (c)rapper and an actor as authoritative sources on American history.
* I have this question sometimes, “What if there never were blacks in America?”‘
Or if there was some genie that popped and offered to just make them go away, and there was a secret ballot, then ???
I found this article somewhere where a black pro athlete levied a charge of a racial slur against a Boston police officer.
He said the guy used the term “Monday”.
I looked it up and it apparently is quite common in Boston,
“Nobody likes Mondays.”
* Fran Drescher was raped at gun point by a Black man.
And Kelly McGillis was raped by two Black men
* A thought I’ve had: maybe that’s the best thing about liberalism. It’s so absurd and so anti-human nature, that as an official ideology it will never be able to compel millions to die for it the way that nationalism did in the two World Wars and religion did centuries ago. Imagine men going off to war to make sure Bill and Steve can get married, or so little girls won’t get to pretend to be princesses. For all the faults of modern elites, they’ve at least kept the world relatively peaceful.
* Big men thrive on revolution — not the status quo. Mao’s cultural revolution was a political maneuver in which he reignited revolution to put himself back on top after technocrats had politely shoved him aside.
Our politically correct classes are inherently paranoid about any man who might have populist appeal. They are dyed-in-the-wool anti-populists and effete by nature. They are constitutionally incapable of creating a strongman.
The populists have an enormous window of opportunity right now. We are at a philosophical turning point, and it’s one of our own who could seize the moment.
* Hugo Schwyzer, anti-male writer for Jezebel, tried to murder a girlfriend, cheated on his wife, and all through his career used his male feminist cred to get poon. I don’t recall who said it, but one of the PUA bloggers had suggested that alpha male feminists are just using specialized game to get a certain type of girl. Schwyzer admitted as much in his last meltdown.
Ben Kuchera, a particularly vengeful game “journalist” (repeatedly has tried to get people fired for various perceived wrongs, and all-around prickly jerk) who has been prominent in Gamergate, likes to play up the innocence angle on the Twitter. For example, recently expressed horror upon discovering that the term “hugbox” that he’d been using was an ableist slur against autism. The problem is that you can easily derive his character from about 15 years of public posting on the forum of a site he used to work for. Including those dark years before the discovery of social justice when he was like every other Internet Tough Guy, ye olde 2007AD.
In the last week, prominent skeptic and founding member/attackdog for AtheismPlus (atheism PLUS social justice, seriously) Richard Carrier “came out” as having been struggling with discovering he has an alternative sexual orientation: polyamorism. It turns out that Richard Carrier has a strong urge to have multiple sexual relationships with women at the same time. Weeeird, right? This discovery of his sexual orientation has resulted in the dissolution of his marriage–well, that and the affairs. But that was part of the personal discovery process. Keep in mind, this is all after he went on Holy Jihad against atheist archbishop Michael Shermer for an alleged rape (without proof, some things skeptics don’t need to be skeptical about) all while calling him sleaze for allegedly sleeping around at conventions cheating on his wife and preying on women. Awkward!
* Another thing that many Westerners don’t get about why Mao is so popular to this day is that he unified China. Chinese history is one dynasty following another, sometimes when a dynasty crumbled it split China into smaller parts. The call this “splitism” and it is a very big deal in Chinese history, this is more of a disaster than losing a few millions in famines or wars. Mao was not just about some personality cult, it goes to the core of Chinese civilization and values.
Just like Americans who behave like blundering oafs with regards to the Russia/Ukraine history, one day there will be a McCain like idiot who wants to grant Taiwan full independence. The Chinese will treat this beyond what even Lincoln did with regards to independence from the US, they will view this a threat to their civilization. I pray to never see the day when this happens, because things will get nuclear very fast.
* My read on Dohrn is she never stopped being the little Jewish girl trying to get her father’s attention. Her contemporaries at the time all report that she was mostly interested in bagging the high status males, drawing attention to herself and getting a rise out of middle-class burghers like her old man.
Collier and Horowitz both describe Ayers and a dork who used radical politics to get women. He was one of those guys who conveniently went missing when things got too serious, but he was front in center when it was time to take credit.
Radical politics of the New Left has always had that whiff of a middle-class tantrum to it. You see that with Obama. He is by far the most petulant politician in my lifetime. The guy should have a pacifier around his neck. He has a vague idea of what he wants, but is mostly focused on his being vexed by not getting it.
* The Weathermen held critic sessions, ripping into one another for their weaknesses. A few of the men were ticked off that they had to share their girlfriends with the others but they never got to bang Bernardine Dohrn. Dohrn usually was linked to the leader of the movement and he usually refused to share her with the rank and file. Of course, at Dohrn’s whim she would have other men, just that she refused to do so at the command of others.
Here’s a quote from a book “Destructive Generation”:
Speaking of Dohrn, Jim Mellen, a fellow radical, said of her: “She used sex to explore and cement political alliances. Sex for her was a form of ideological activity.”
Mark Rudd, a Weatherman leader, “was piqued by Bernardine’s elitist disdain for the non-monogamy code [a Weatherman rule]. “Power doesn’t flow out of the barrel of a gun,” he challenged her at a Weather Bureau meeting. “Power flows out of Bernardine’s cunt.” He was challenged for being sexist so the statement was changed to “Bernardine’s cunt goes to wherever the power is.” Everyone agreed on that.
* The Germans were quite dangerous. The Weathermen were mostly only a danger to themselves, being rather careless in handling explosives. The Baader-Meinhof Gang and their derivatives were pretty adept at planting bombs (and prolific, I visited Germany for two days in the mid-70s and got stuck at the airport while they defused a bomb, apparently it was just another day at the office in the Bundesrepublik) and fairly ruthless in gunning down their targets. I suppose you can chalk it up to German efficiency & ruthlessness.
