DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Souq.com, an online retailer based in the United Arab Emirates, said on Monday that it had raised $275 million from international investors. It was a vote of confidence for digital commerce in the Middle East, which has made little headway compared with elsewhere.
Souq, the largest e-commerce company in the Middle East, was founded in 2005 on an eBay-like online auction model, but it subsequently evolved into more of an Amazon-style set-price retailer. It has been a rare success story in a region where online businesses face logistical problems, political challenges, stifling bureaucracy and regulations that vary greatly from country to country.
Souq’s latest round of funding included money from the New York-based investment firm Tiger Global Management, as well as from Standard Chartered Private Equity and the International Finance Corporation, which is an arm of the World Bank.
Souq, which means market in Arabic, did not provide details on what the funding round meant for its overall valuation, and it has not released details on its annual sales or profit. The $275 million funding round was, however, the largest ever disclosed by a technology start-up in the Middle East and North Africa, according to Wamda, a research firm based in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates.
The reason the Arab world produces little technological innovation is that Arabs have an average IQ of around 85, that is just 15 points above retarded and is the same as African-Americans. African-mMericans don’t produce a ton of technology either.
Posted inArabs, Israel|Comments Off on Israel Is Not Part Of The Middle East?
Conan: “Donald Trump. Do you think a businessman like Trump has a chance to be president?”
Bill: “No, because nobody would work with him. Republicans and Democrats would be babies and they would pout because they’re bought and owned and it’s like how come this guy is free and can say what he wants? I’ve enjoyed the hell out of him. I wish more politicians would say what they’re thinking.”
Posted inDonald Trump|Comments Off on Bill Burr on the Illuminati, Bilderberg, and Trump
* Was all this David-Duke-KKK stuff the ‘atomic bomb’ meant for Trump?
* … and all it took was a savvy and quick-witted, independently wealthy, independently famous, uninhibited billionaire reality TV star willing to finance his own campaign and with a gift for using the new media to thwart the old one. Who says the system’s rigged?
The Aryan Vulgarian is forcing the mainstream political class to finally have to take some shots a little bit rather than assume they get to just dish them out for decade after decade. This is happening now because of Trump but it’s much bigger than just the Republican Party in the US or even the whole of counterfeit conservatism throughout the Anglosphere.
I almost feel sorry for these pundits and consultants who were sure they were famous because they were the smartest people in the country, rather than because they worked for the guys with a media network and knew how to play the game of kiss up and kick down on TV.
These guys have had a scare put into them so, if Trump’s campaign fails, these mainstream conservatives will join with the social justice warriors to crack down on so-called internet hate and domestic terrorism. Their Trotskyite side will be turned on the rest of us, rather than just on people in faraway countries. That’s why Trump has to go all the way now.
* Drudge and Breitbart are nearly single issue now. Trump has shown that being right on immigration means you can be wrong from their perspective on everything else. It’s an open question where this all goes from here.
* I used to think that I was a Republican and a conservative. No longer. This election season made me realize I’m neither. Maybe just an American realist. I’m embarrassed when I think that I once had subscriptions to TNR, First Things, et al., and used to give money to conservative groups. Fuck that, I now hate the conservative establishment with a red-hot passion and want nothing but doom upon them. For me it’s Trump or nothing. Never, ever again.
President Calvin Coolidge: “The business of America is business.”
Marco Rubio: “Donald Trump is a con-man.”
Robert Kraft, billionaire owner of the Patriots: “Donald Trump is a financial genius.” (7/20/2015, TMZ)
Marco Rubio: “Donald Trump’s not a good businessman.”
Billionaire business titans who have known Trump for decades, have spoken to Trump’s business acumen, and support Trump for President:
Carl Icahn
Steve Wynn
Phil Ruffin
Elie Hirschfeld
* I can’t help recommending Anne Applebaum’s Twitter feed as a great source of just this sort of impotent rage and hand flapping. Because she and her husband have their thumbs in pies on both sides of the Atlantic, her tweets are a one-stop shop for those of us looking for news on the collapse of this lousy “end of history” era.
* Trump derangement syndrome. Half this self-important loon’s tweets are about Trump being a Brownshirt.
* David Frum writes: As the governor of Florida, Bush had cut taxes and balanced budgets. He’d challenged unions and championed charter schools. At the same time, Bush passionately supported immigration liberalization. The central event in his life history was his reinvention as an honorary Latino American when he married a Mexican woman, Columba Garnica de Gallo. He spoke Spanish at home. He converted to Catholicism. He sought his fortune with a Cuban American business partner. In his most quotable phrase, he described illegal immigration as an “act of love.”
Bush’s update of Conservatism Classic had made him a hit with the party’s big donors. He had won accolades from Karl Rove (“the deepest thinker on our side”) and Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute (“a top-drawer intellect”). Yet within five weeks of his formal declaration of candidacy on June 15, Bush’s campaign had been brutally rejected by the GOP rank and file.
Something has changed in American politics since the Great Recession. The old slogans ring hollow. The insurgent candidates are less absurd, the orthodox candidates more vulnerable. The GOP donor elite planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war.
The premise of the past few thousand words is that the Republican donor elite failed to impose its preferred candidate on an unwilling base in 2015 for big and important reasons. But maybe that premise is wrong. Maybe Jeb Bush has just been a bad candidate with a radioactive last name. Maybe the same message and platform would have worked fine if espoused by a fresher and livelier candidate. Such is the theory of Marco Rubio’s campaign. Or—even if the donor message and platform have troubles—maybe $100 million in negative ads can scorch any potential alternative, enabling the donor-backed candidate to win by default.
Perhaps some concession to the disgruntled base is needed. That’s the theory of the Cruz campaign and—after a course correction—also of the Christie campaign. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.” True, Cruz’s carefully selected words on immigration leave open the possibility of guest-worker programs or other pro-employer reforms after a burst of border enforcement. But Cruz and Christie have seen the reaction to Donald Trump’s message, and appear to appreciate the need to at least seem to do something to redress the grievances of the Republican base.
Yet a narrow focus on immigration populism alone seems insufficient to raise Republican hopes. Trump shrewdly joins his immigration populism to trade populism. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders’s opposition to open borders is logically connected to his hopes for a Democratic Socialist future: His admired Denmark upholds high labor standards along with some of the world’s toughest immigration rules. Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters. In a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot, any national party must compete more broadly than that.
Which brings us to …
Option 3: True Reform
Admittedly, this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class. Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it. Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle. Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them. Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation. Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuition. Remember that Republican voters care more about aligning government with their values of work and family than they care about cutting the size of government as an end in itself. Recognize that the gimmick of mobilizing the base with culture-war outrages stopped working at least a decade ago.
Such a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard infrastructure—bridges, airports, water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in center-right.
* Well it’s about time we turn our back on Frum and the rest of his “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” Thanks to them we’re bankrupt and the Middle East is burning. And he wonders why his ilk is so hated.
* When is Frum going to denounce the mainstream republicans as unpatriotic? Recall his denunciation of Patrick Buchanan and others who did not support the Iraq War as the unpatriotic conservatives. I would like to see him write something similar about these GOP turncoats.
* Time to get over Frum’s nasty 2003 article in National Review [on unpatriotic conservatives who oppose the invasion of Iraq]. For the past 5 years or more, his has undertaken the difficult and thankless task of selling immigration restriction to elite centrist types.
His Twitter feed is full of him hitting back on attacks on Trump:
* Trump’s rise would not have been possible without the visibly inept and corrupt GOP elites. They spent much of their credibility on neocon foreign policy and donor-friendly domestic policy, and turned our to have nothing to offer most of their voters besides ineffectual rage about social policies like gay marriage and abortion. (Their opposition hasn’t been effective enough to stop either of those things, but has done well at raising money and keeping religious in line when it came to support for bombing more peasants or bailouts for the banks or lowering taxes at the top.
Steve Sailer writes: To me, Europe suddenly got very interesting around January 3, 2015 with word of the imminent publication of Houellebecq’s novel Submission. Within a week, Houellebecq was on the cover of Charlie Hebdo and much of the staff was murdered. The Camp of the Saints built all spring, with Hillary-wrecked Libya as the prime leak. Then, suddenly in late summer, came Dr. Merkel’s own goal against the German people. More memorable incidents followed in Paris and Cologne.
The endurance of the Trump Phenomenon has something to do with the one car crash of the Anti-Trump, Dr. Merkel: experienced, boring, time-tested … and yet suddenly she turned viciously on her own people and was praised for it by everybody respectable until Paris and Cologne.
COMMENTS:
* This brought to mind all of the recent articles about objections to Trump from Mexican politicians. Interesting, but what does that have to do with the decision of Americans about who their next president will be?
It seems in many countries we are reaching a fork in the road. What is the purpose of a state? Is Germany for the welfare of Germans? Or is it also for looking after refugees (granted, the plight of many of these people is tragic?) What is the purpose of the US state? To look after the welfare of US citizens? Or to also accommodate as many immigrants as manage to enter the country, legally or illegally?
This will be decided in the US in November, which makes it a critical election.
* A woman who has clawed/is clawing her way up to the leadership of her country is congenitally unable to admit she’s ever been wrong. Female leaders are a lot worse about this than the men who have held the same jobs. It’s a female trait made worse by the rock-solid arrogance and belief in yourself that you need to compete in politics. Hillary Clinton has never admitted she’s been wrong, Margaret Thatcher never admitted that she’d been wrong, and I could go on and on. Indira Gandhi, Evita, Isabel Peron, Golda Meir, etc.
* Culturally left wing Germans including Merkel want to change Germany by making it a mixed race society. Through race mixing Germany can become homogeneous with the rest of Europe by becoming more mediocre. It will be the end to the Nordicism that they’ve learned to hate so much.
Today Donald J. Trump received the endorsement of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. Senator Sessions is widely recognized as the nation’s most highly respected official on the issue of illegal immigration.
Mr. Trump stated, “I am deeply honored to have the endorsement of Senator Jeff Sessions, leader of congressional conservatives. He has been called the Senate’s indispensable man and the gold standard. He led the fight against the Gang of Eight, against Obama’s trade deal, against Obama’s judges, and for American sovereignty. He has stood up to special interests as few have. There is no more respected man in Congress and we are closely aligned on many issues, including trade and illegal immigration, and I am proud to consider Jeff Sessions an advisor, friend and ally.”
Mr. Trump and Senator Sessions surprised the massive crowd at the frontrunner’s Alabama rally just days before Super Tuesday Primary contest.
Senator Sessions added, “I am thrilled today to offer my endorsement of Donald J. Trump for President. This election is our last chance to save U.S. sovereignty and to end the domination of the political establishment over the interests of working Americans. Trump alone has rejected the donor class, defending America’s jobs and wages from open borders, uncontrolled immigration and the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership that will cede U.S. authority to foreign powers. Trump’s trade and immigration plans will revitalize our shrinking middle class, keeping jobs and wealth and income inside the United States of America. Trump understands that a nation must always place the interests of its own people first.”
Senator Sessions continued, “We are nearing fast the point of no return. The people are hurting. Their wages are declining. Their schools are overburdened. Their hospitals are stretched past the breaking point. Crime is up, and community confidence is down. Americans of all backgrounds and ethnicities, immigrant and US-born, are crying out for leadership that puts their needs first, that takes care of those living and dreaming here today, leadership that understands that there is no constituency other than the American constituency. Mr. Trump is that leader.”
* I think the contrast between Merkel and Putin worked in Trump’s favour. Merkel looked like a fool while Putin looked like the man with a plan, especially on Syria. All the craziness coming out of Paris, Cologne and a dozen other places in Europe only added to the sense that the West’s leadership has no clue what it’s doing and someone new is worth a try.
* Merkel has been bad on pretty much ALL the big issues:
Shutting down nuclear reactors after Fukushima was flat out stupid (even if you don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change).
On Greece she wasn’t the worst, but she should’ve done more to reign in the macroeconomic madness of Herr Schauble and the myopic creditors.
And now on immigration, an absolute disaster.
I love and respect Germany, but I’m afraid its fate is to find ever new ways to destroy Europe.
* Most PC Oscars ever, where sodomy and bardashery were celebrated, World War T was waged (“gender confirmation surgery”), blacks’ rioting was encouraged, open borders were affirmed, and global warming was sung.
* Chavez famously had some sort of TV show every week during his rule where he would extemporaneously speak for hours. I wonder if a President Trump will have something similar. Trump loves going on diatribes on TV against his enemies.
* The generous explanation is that immigration is the easiest way to shed the Holocaust burden. At some level Merkel and many other Germans just want to live in a normal country and not have to be confronted with the Nazi past every 5 minutes. One way to do this is to make Germany a multiracial society full of people whose ancestors weren’t there. Mesut Özil and Sami Khedira can’t be shamed with Nazi guilt. A Germany full of Özils and Khediras can start swinging its weight around Europe and the world again with a little more swagger. I can sympathize a little even if I think the policy is wrong headed and naive.
* Then the question becomes: will taking in refugees actually relieve Germany of the Holocaust Burden?
Dr. Merkel should consider that it’s not clear that defeating Hitler in the biggest war of all time has fully relieved America, Russia, and Britain of the Holocaust Burden.
* An economist would simply apply a holocaust/benefit analysis.
* If you start counting with Charlemagne, the Third Reich constitutes 1% of the history of the German nation.
* Did anyone just see the Chris Rock Oscar monologue? Holy crap, I was not expecting that all! It had some of the most “HBD-influenced” commentary I have ever seen in a mainstream media event. I never thought I would hear that Rocky/Star Wars joke on TV! Are we living through the death throes of PC?
* I wonder how this angst-ridden, American racial drama plays out around the world. American blacks want to see more movies with blacks but the world wide box office probably doesn’t.
I’m getting pretty fatigued with all this diversity being shoved into my face everywhere I go.
* I liked it because:
1. Rock explicitly stated that “lack of diversity” isn’t quite as bad as your grandmother getting lynched.
2. It’s always nice to see preachy left-wingers get called out on their massive hypocrisy.
3. Once again, “diversity” only meant “black”. I’m sure Chris Rock was bummed by the lack of Latino and Asian nominees. But he wasn’t bummed enough to mention it.
* Lynching? Something like 3500 blacks were lynched in the history of the US, and about 1500 whites were lynched too, so it’s hardly a black experience. Also, rape? White men simply don’t rape black women, probably due to black women not being all that attractive. We all know the statistics.
* I’m getting tired of paying for what I expect to be entertainment, and then finding out I’ve paid to receive a moral lecture about what a shitty person I am for wanting my children to have a future. No more. I refuse to support anything that is based on the promotion of minorities or feminism.
It would seem that the decades of propaganda seeking to convince me that I’m a racist have worked.
* Hispanics, Asians and others are not complaining. The way blacks carry on you would think 50% of the population claims it is being cheated, not 12%. It’s crazy and they better get their licks in now because they will get lots less attention after January 20th. I’ll bet 50% of blacks are embarrassed by this gaudy, ghettoish displaying, preening and bitching that never ends.
* I’m happy to watch movies with Samuel L. Jackson or Dwayne Johnson. I also like movies with Matt Damon or Harrison Ford. I suspect most blacks feel the same way: we want to see interesting — or at least fun — movies.
* NYT 1998: Last year ”Seinfeld,” the top-rated television show in white households, ranked 50th in African-American homes, according to Nielsen Media Research, while the comedy ”Between Brothers,” No. 1 in black households, ranked 112th among whites.
Similarly, according to Nielsen, in the first two months of the current prime-time season, ”The Steve Harvey Show,” a comedy, ranked No. 1 in black households, but 118th in white households, while ”Friends,” the No. 1 comedy and No. 2 show overall in white households, ranked just 91st for blacks.
* Ah yes. The 1960s. A hotbed of lynchings. All those grandmothers swinging from trees in 1962. So tragic.
* What no one wants to acknowledge is that Chinese and other non-American people, who make up a huge slice of Hollywood film viewership, don’t really want to see blacks. Just like most Americans don’t really want to see aboriginals in Australian films.
* Like the swan in Clooney’s ass, I have an impacted ass full of getting lectured on racism. Those cucks sat quietly and took their medicine.
* Who cares what one whiny rich lefty entertainer said to a bunch of other whiny rich lefty entertainers at their annual lefty industry award show?
The Oscars are over. The tokenism will burn it down, which is why, 10-15 years, writers will lament how the Oscars “aren’t glamorous” anymore and have somehow become “cliche” and “déclassé” all other sorts of euphemisms for complaining about affirmative action taking over.
Pass the popcorn, though. I love to watch a good disaster flick in the middle of the destruction. Especially when the players so richly deserve their fate.
* I thought Mr. Rock’s monologue made a lot of sense. It certainly wasn’t the idiotic rant I’ve come to expect from other Negroes put in his position. That said, there has been a mutual drifting apart of the races in this country. One place it shows up is in the utterly different racial tastes in movies, television, radio, and music. I don’t think there is any way to heal this rift. An official and detailed separate but equal policy is probably the best bet at this point.
* The portion of the Oscars I watched was a continuance loop of pet project grievances. Climate change, sexual harassment, immigration, whatever the acronym for homosexuals, etc is now, and, of course, RACISM. An industry circle jerk has morphed into an ideological circle jerk. Hard to watch before, like a train wreck now – hard to turn away it’s so bad.
A DNC infomercial with some gold statues and cool grab bags thrown in for good measure.
Posted inBlacks, Hollywood|Comments Off on Chris Rock’s Oscar Monologue
There is no distinction between hate speech and free speech. If free speech does not protect hate speech, there is no free speech. One man’s hate speech is another man’s Torah. The Torah commands the Jews to commit genocide against Amalek. Is that not hate speech? Much of Torah could be condemned as hate speech.
Opposing the celebration of homosexuality was long a normal form of speech in the West. Even liberals 30 years ago did not want their kids to grow up to be gay.
News: INDIO (CBSLA.com) — Students displaying anti-LGBT stickers at a high school in Indio have touched off a debate: is that free speech or hate speech?
The stickers show a rainbow — the symbol of the gay community — with a line crossing through it. Officials said the stickers have increasingly shown up over the past two weeks on some students’ school ID badges at Shadow Hills High School, as well as on social media websites.
The increasing number of the stickers caused an outcry at the school among students and faculty. Many called it hate speech. Shadow Hills senior and vice president of the Gay Straight Alliance Michelle Bachman said on Twitter that the stickers were “definitely hate speech, but legally, we can’t do anything until these students start to physically harass us, which I believe is an injustice.”
School district administrators said the students have the right to display the stickers, just as pro-LGBT students would.
In an email sent to staff Wednesday, Desert Sands Unified School District administrators wrote, “After consulting with district level personnel and our legal counsel, it was determined that these students do have the protected right to freedom of speech, just as students portraying rainbows in support of the LGBT would.”
Posted inHomosexuality|Comments Off on Anti-Gay Stickers At Indio High School Touch Off Debate: Hate Speech Or Free Speech?
* What always amazes me is how the Mestizos and Indios eagerly wear the “Hispanic” or “Latino” persona. It’s analog would be “African-Americans” cheering for their Anglo-Saxon identity. The Spaniards and Portuguese *brutally* subjugated the Indios and Negros throughout the Americas. The Indians and Africans who were born in or shipped to the United States really hit the lottery, yet their descendents are filled with hate and jealousy while those born or sent South pretend to be of the oppressor class even while they’re currently oppressed. The psychology of this is fascinating.
* NYT now has some very high standards for whiteness, I notice. Have the Nordic-centric types taken over? Are they going to kick the Italians and Greeks out of the club next?
* Tom Flores won 2 Super Bowls a coach of the Raiders and was backup QB on the Chiefs’ Super Bowl 4 (to hell with Roman numerals!) and is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Ron Rivera could have been since he was also a member of the 1985 Bears.
But in neither case was anyone making a big deal about it as with Tony Dungy. And Dungy had a very good team in Tamps that never got over the top because he had some backward ideas about offense. He was brought into Indy to “coach” the Colts only to make the defense decent enough to give Peyton Manning and Tom Moore, who ran the offense,a shot. Dungy had nothing to do with the offense at all. And his old Tampa team under Jon Gruden quickly won a title.
Shaun King has gotten himself in the soup with many sports media types who usually line up with PC cause by dredging up a settled lawsuit vs Peyton Manning and the University of Tennessee. Manning claimed he was mooning another player, female trainer says he was quite a bit more obnoxious, but either way settled out of court several decades ago. But such luminaries as Mike Lupica and Jason Whitlock have taken King to task. Would appear the New York Daily News is desperate for attention and is using the lightning rod that is King for quick empty attention.
* What intrigues me more than someone’s biological ancestry is the fact that socio-economic class tends to be rather well conserved from generation to generation. How many RCA salesman from the Canary Islands were there in Cuba in 1939?
I’ve always been keenly conscious of this, having been rather base-born myself. Wealth and status have to be built up from one generation to the next. I think the hardest thing any family lineage has to accomplish is completing the transition from wage-slavery to petite bourgeoisie, i.e. the middle class. It is the most difficult step on the whole spectrum, as it involves a fundamental shift in one’s basic notions of money, property, honor, and a host of other things. The gap between the middle class and the variously described poorer classes beneath them is the widest gap in the world.
However, once that step is taken, it’s relatively easy to see how a child who begins his life in a middle class milieu has a reasonable chance at climbing into the professional class—e.g. the MBAs, doctors, lawyers, accountants, FIRE trades, and other credentialed professions—provided that his own talents and intelligence are worthy of the the task. But if you start out in the lower class, it sometimes doesn’t matter how hardworking and intelligent you are. The barriers to entry really are quite high. Your early formative experiences will not condition you to function in the middle class world, exemplars will be lacking, and family support will be nonexistent. The best a man can do is hope to make enough money to shield his children from the harsher realities, and to send them to a school were children from the next higher rung up the ladder go, in the hopes that new milieu will take over in them, and it’s a very hard task. It presupposes a great deal of patience and long-term thinking which the daily realities of a lower class life are constantly attempting to subvert. It requires the choice of a good and sympathetic woman as a wife, and such women are hard to find anywhere, especially among the lower classes. It also requires a strong Church to serve as the moral governance of the community. If I didn’t already think Ted Cruz to be a truly nasty individual, I would disqualify him from further consideration solely on the ground that his father apostatized from the Catholic faith.
Anyone who feels at home in the middle class needs to recognize that he is in possession of a great inheritance that was dearly bought with the labors, tears, and humiliations of an earlier generation. If you’ve never been without it, you will never realize what a sweet thing it is to grow up with that background, that culture, and those opportunities. I know this sounds a lot like the “White Privilege” argument, but it I am not intending to tear anyone else down or advocating for any kind of redistribution. I’m just saying that, considered in the broad sweep of human history, a middle class lifestyle is a rare thing indeed and it ought to be cherished.
I never spent much time thinking about gypsies. I had assumed that gypsies were gypsies, lived in caravans, bred horses and played violins in restaurants. People do stuff. It is probably better to earn money in a restaurant than to spend it there. With the passage of time I became more curious, particularly when definitional battles began to rage about travellers, itinerants, and the Romany peoples, with various spokespersons claiming priority in representing their interests, which often seemed in direct contradiction to other more settled people’s rights. Although all peoples are as ancient as other peoples in chronological fact, the Roma sometimes seemed to be claiming chronological priority, at least as far as their nomadic way of life was concerned.
So, it was with interest and some trepidation that I opened Jelena Cvorovic’s “The Roma: A Balkan Underclass” Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2014…
Cvorovic concentrates on the Serbian Roma, with whom she has worked for 10 years. I had previously seen a film she had produced, in which different gypsy leaders spent much of their interview time explaining that their particular group were the real thing, and that the other gypsy groups lacked racial purity, and were giving the true Roma a bad name. Somehow, this clashed with the narrative I was expecting, and was possibly willing to support, that they were a minority who had been given a hard time. The film showed disordered settlements, and children living in severe poverty, some giving every appearance of mental backwardness.
Books are a better medium than film to get into details (though the film certainly had an impact). Cvorovic gives the quick background: the Roma are socially excluded (and exclude themselves) with life expectancies 10 to 15 years lower than the European norm, high infant mortality, and an 80% unemployment rate. The Roma, Gypsies, Travellers, Cigani, Manouches, Sinti showed up in Europe from the North West of India between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. No-one knows why. There are an estimated 10 to 12 million living on the margins of European society, either in niche occupations or “living off the land” which in some cases means living off other people’s property. Their code of conduct minimizes contact with non-gypsy people, and particularly abjures marriage with non-gypsies.
With great craftiness they found that Europeans in the Middle Ages received them with Christian charity, and deduced that these kind Europeans would sympathise with Egyptians, who after all had left Egypt searching for the promised land, as the Bible explained. Hence, they called themselves Egyptians, from which eGypt-sies derives, and cast themselves as dispossessed dukes, kings and princes from that land. Christians required documentary proof that these early asylum seekers were legitimate, and the gypsies willingly proffered a forged document from King Sigismund of Hungary, which represented them as penitent pilgrims atoning for their ancestors in Egypt who had rejected Christianity. As a result of the sins of their ancestors they were reduced to wandering the earth as pilgrims seeking charity.
Call me naive, but I think this an intelligent strategy, deficient as it may be in a moral sense. Incidentally, Roma morality is flexible on these sorts of matters: Non-Roma are seen as unclean and polluting, interactions with them are to be avoided, and theft and crimes against non-Roma are not morally wrong…
Assume, if only for a moment, that the Roma are not, as they are painted, a dependent lot of good–for-nothings, but a plucky minority who have been set upon by Europeans, though not set upon so badly that they wish to return to India. In terms of cultural theory, if the locals despise you and won’t let you participate, then you stick to your own kind and your own ways, and do the jobs the locals will not do or cannot do, and charge them the highest prices they can afford. On that account, the Roma should have gone on to great things: specialist crafts, entertainment, controlling the music business, money-lending, gambling, casinos and the like. Their schools should have been hothouses of talent. Indeed, they should have turned out like European Jews.
On the contrary, assessments of their abilities are uniformly low. Cvorovic explains that Roma children are assessed pre-school, and about two thirds diagnosed with “light mental retardation”. She gathers together published intelligence results, mostly using Wechsler tests, on reasonably sized samples and with local populations as comparison groups. After some 8 centuries one ought to be able to put aside the notion that the results are due to delayed acculturation. Adult Roma have intelligence scores very similar to the South Asian stock from which they separated centuries ago. Integration was not sought, and successfully rejected when imposed, programs of improvement failing to have any impact, even under strict Communist command.
For a wide variety of samples the average adult IQs are in the IQ 70 range. There is variation in terms of the countries assessed but as a rule of thumb the scores appear to be two standard deviations below the local norms. This is a very sizeable difference….
Scholastic attainments are usually 1 standard deviation below the mean. However, Roma children seem to be street wise, particularly on their home territories, and observation not investigated further. Their poor scholarship seems to be due to a mixture of low ability and a strong belief that education beyond primary school is of no interest or benefit. Their behaviour in school is often very disruptive. The table below shows English data for school exclusion…
To my mind it shows that if a group of immigrants stick to their own extended family for marriage partners, restrict contact with the host population to the absolute minimum, and stick to their own cultural practices, there is almost zero impact from living in Europe for almost 8 centuries. The climate has done nothing detectable to them for 32 generations, nor has the spurned European culture rubbed off on them by some osmotic process.
The contrast with European Jews is instructive: both are minorities with distinctive cultures and world views; both have inbred to some degree; both have been subject to prejudice, ostracism and very much worse; both have struggled to find a niche in Europe, and yet both have (mostly) remained in Europe. However, there the similarities end, and the differences multiply. European Jews venerated scholarship, the Roma cannot see its purpose. Jews made themselves useful at the highest levels of the economy, barely tolerated but sourly respected for their financial and scholarly acumen. Gypsies made themselves resented at the lowest levels of the economy (though some recently became metal recycling millionaires after the fall of Communist heavy industry) and little respected for wheeling and dealing. Here is a thematic apperception test: what made the difference?
Perhaps it was only a difference in root stock: Roma from India, Jews from Italy.
Although they have made very modest contributions to European culture, and even less to the economy, there is one way the Roma have met with contemporary approval: they have maintained their genetic and cultural purity for roughly 32 generations, the essence of multiculturalism.
Posted inGypsies, Jews|Comments Off on Gypsy Intelligence
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