December 1, 2015 Putin – The Quintessential Realist Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Putin – The Quintessential Realist

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

John J. Mearsheimer writes in December of 2014:

…To argue that Russia’s reaction to NATO expansion was based on “resentment,” as Sestanovich does, is to trivialize the country’s motives. Fear is at the root of Russia’s opposition to the prospect of Ukraine becoming a Western bastion on its border. Great powers always worry about the balance of power in their neighborhoods and push back when other great powers march up to their doorsteps. This is why the United States adopted the Monroe Doctrine in the early nineteenth century and why it has repeatedly used military force and covert action to shape political events in the Western Hemisphere. When the Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba in 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, risking a nuclear war, insisted that they be removed. Security fears, not resentment, drove his conduct. The same logic applies to Russia. As its leaders have made clear on countless occasions, they will not tolerate Ukraine’s entry into NATO. That outcome scares them, as it would scare anyone in Russia’s shoes, and fearful great powers often pursue aggressive policies. The failure to understand that Russian thinking about NATO enlargement was motivated by fear-a misreading McFaul and Sestanovich still embrace-helped precipitate the present crisis…

…the United States was encouraging the opposition to Yanukovych before and during the protests. Such actions included the National Endowment for Democracy’s decision to ramp up support for
anti-Yanukovych groups and the active participation of top U.S. officials (such as Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs) in the public protests in Kiev.

These events alarmed Putin, not only because they threatened his relations with Ukraine but also because he may well have thought that the Obama administration was bent on overthrowing him, too. As I noted in my essay, Carl Gershman, the president of the National Endowment for Democracy, said in September 2013 that “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe” would promote Russian democracy and might eventually topple Putin from power. And when McFaul was the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, he openly promoted democracy in Russia, behavior that led the Russian press to accuse him of, in his words, “being an agent sent by Obama to lead another color revolution.” Such fears may have been exaggerated, but imagine how U.S. leaders would react if representatives of a powerful foreign country were trying to alter the United States’ political order.

McFaul argues that differences between individual leaders explain Russia’s alternating policies of cooperation and confrontation: everything is hunky-dory when Dmitry Medvedev is president, but trouble comes when Putin takes charge. The problem with this argument is that these two leaders hardly disagree about Russian foreign policy, which is why Putin is widely regarded as Medvedev’s “realist mentor,” to use McFaul’s words. Medvedev was president when Russia went to war against Georgia in 2008, and he has fully supported Putin’s actions over Ukraine this year. In September, he went so far as to criticize Putin for not responding more forcefully to Western sanctions on Russia. And even during the “reset,” Medvedev complained bitterly about NATO’s “endless enlargement,” as he put it in a 2010 interview.

There is a better explanation for Russia’s oscillating relations with the West. When the United States and its allies take note of Moscow’s concerns, as they did during the early years of
the reset, crises are averted and Russia cooperates on matters of mutual concern. When the West ignores Moscow’s interests, as it did in the lead-up to the Ukraine crisis, confrontation reigns. Putin openly welcomed the reset, telling Obama in July 2009, “With you, we link all our hopes for the furtherance of relations between our two countries.” And two months later, when Obama abandoned plans to put missile defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland, Putin praised the decision, saying, “I very much hope that this very right and brave decision will be followed by others.” It is unsurprising that when Putin returned to the presidency in May 2012, McFaul, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, said that he expected the reset to continue. In short, Medvedev’s replacement by Putin was not the watershed event McFaul portrays it as-and had Medvedev remained president, he would probably have reacted to events in Ukraine the same way Putin has…

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What Is The Purpose Of America?

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Professor John J. Mearsheimer, my favorite political scientist, writes October 2015:

The purpose of American power is to keep the United States safe so its people can prosper economically and live in relative freedom. There is little agreement, however, on how to achieve that goal.

Since the Cold War ended, and especially since 9/11, the ruling elites in Washington have believed that the best way to protect the United States is to dominate the world and remake it in America’s image. They have relied upon military power and other forms of big-stick diplomacy to topple unfriendly governments and promote democracy. Thus, it is unsurprising that the United States has fought seven wars since 1989.

Unfortunately, this strategy has led to a string of disasters and is the main cause of the growing instability around the globe. Take the greater Middle East. The George W. Bush administration initiated unsuccessful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost many thousands of lives, destroyed the regional balance of power and helped create the Islamic State. The Obama administration has foolishly prolonged the war in Afghanistan and launched a war against the Islamic State that it cannot win. It also helped topple Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, which produced a failed state,
and its policies have helped prolong Syria’s devastating civil war.

In Europe, Washington and its European allies precipitated a major crisis with Russia by trying to peel Ukraine away from Moscow’s orbit and make it a Western bulwark on Russia’s doorstep. The key ingredients of this boneheaded policy were nato and eu expansion, coupled with democracy promotion, which effectively means installing pro-Western leaders in countries like Ukraine—and maybe even Russia itself. Not surprisingly, Russia has fiercely resisted the West’s efforts to win over Ukraine, which is now engulfed in a civil war.

Trying to dominate the globe and push democracy on other countries does not work, as the United States has proved over the past twenty-five years. It is also unnecessary. The United States—because of geography, its sheer power and its nuclear arsenal—is remarkably secure. There is no need to pursue global domination, much less try to manage the domestic politics of other countries.

There is one meaningful threat to the United States: the appearance of a potential hegemon in Asia or Europe. The purpose of American power should be to ensure that the United States remains
a hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, and that there is no regional hegemon in Eurasia. This rationale led the United States to help prevent Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union from becoming regional hegemons in the twentieth century, and it remains relevant today.

Regional hegemons are dangerous to the United States, because dominating their own neighborhood would give them freedom to intervene elsewhere, just as the American military is free to roam the planet today. The great danger is that a distant hegemon would eventually start to meddle in the Western Hemisphere, which could present a serious threat to the United States. Fortunately, there is no potential hegemon in Europe, but there is one in Asia: China. Accordingly, the principal purpose of American power should be to maintain U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere and prevent China from achieving regional hegemony in Asia.

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Disability – The New American Dream

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Getting a check for “disability” is the new “American dream.” Florida is crawling with former NY firefighters and cops collecting disability while waterskiing or remodeling condos. They’re otherwise fairly agreeable chaps (hardworking, politically conservative). Same goes for ex-military. If you drove a truck during Desert Storm or something you can now claim a 25% impairment to your back and get a check from Uncle Sam. No one speaks out against this sort of thing because a) “Support the Troops” and b) nearly everyone believes that an MRI showing a “herniated disc” is proof of a real injury (it isn’t).

* Our society has dedicated a large portion of its energy and resources to creating and promoting “firewatchers” from among our female populous. We have combat watchers, and crime watchers, work watchers and thought watchers.
A vast army of female watchers infest our halls of academia. Entire “disciplines” on campus are composed of a plurality of women whose intellect is below average, and the supermajority cluster about average, far below that required for college level learning. The advanced and terminal degree holders which emerge from that stew, cluster at the low edge of intellect required for basic degrees in real and challenging areas of learning. Yet hold tenure, and sway the content and direction of scholarship in general.
PMAFT has busied himself pointing out and criticizing the emergence of female tech-watchers who are now infesting STEM and attempting to drive its content and direction. He correctly predicts the dead hand of feminism grinding the gears of technological progress to a halt. As the scholarship-watchers have done to the humanities and the pseudoscience disciplines already.

* If you can’t be fired why move around some poor employees to a bad team or try to motivate others to work so they can belong? Do you just have some abstract reason to get your job done when nothing whatsoever will be different if you don’t get the job done? Is it like the people with hobbies, they just want to build a great miniature train set for their own personal satisfaction?

Whenever I had a job I exerted effort because it was important to my employer (generally involving directly or indirectly satisfying a customer who could take their money elsewhere) or I could forward my career by helping my employer function better or at least I could keep my job as long as my employer made money with my assistance. I worked to satisfy other people’s wants and needs. The money I earned could be used to satisfy my wants and needs as long as other people worked for the same reason.

Of course in government work, the customer pays at the point of a gun with no choice (taxes), and you produce whatever you want. Why bother to drive your workers to produce – nothing will be different if they do not produce except you work harder than you have to for no reason. I don’t understand these other incentives like higher status positions – why not give them out by lottery.

* Pensions and disability are a scam as currently constituted.

Double and triple dipping should be banned. You should get one pension, period. And disability should be contingent on the idea that one really cannot work, so working-at least in a similar capacity should be barred.

Teamster truckers used to be barred from barred from commercial driving of trucks whole retired. That was to keep Teamster retirees from competing with active Teamster drivers. An exemption was made for being a truck driver school instructor or a school bus driver in a rural area if the district was not Teamster or one they wanted to be.

In my area, the cops all retire in twenty years and then go to work as court bailiffs or parks and recreation security and get a second pension. Plus social security and lifetime medical. This should stop.

* I’ve been a French civil servant for three decades. There’s a one year probationary period in France. If you’re unfit for the job, the probationary period can last up to one year longer. It’s almost unheard of for someone to be fired during their probationary period (and after the probationary period, it is simply impossible). A French civil servant can be fired only for “faute lourde“, that’s to say, committing a crime while on duty, or being not only utterly incompetent, but also seriously antagonizing every one else (in other words, being a sociopath. I’ve known a few). Absolute incompetence is not a faute lourde.

The system works fairly well, actually. It’s great to go to work every morning, knowing that even if you perform poorly you can’t be fired. You can work serenely, which actually increases performance. Performing agents are given higher status positions (but usually, not higher salaries). It’s incredible how people can work their asses off for status.

I was for several years in charge of a team of people who had, for some reason, incurred the wrath of their bosses. I managed to make them work by playing on their need for inclusion: if you want to really belong to the team, you must do your work. Every team leader did exactly that. It works best, of course, with the losers who have no life outside of the workplace. It also works well with married fathers, who are usually proud enough to resent being labelled lazy. There are people who won’t work for any reason, and you can’t fire them. Punish them by having them sent to work in a unit headed by a psychopath, especially a female psychopath.

The worst of the worst are those who are incompetent, lazy, and who think that if they don’t get promoted, and faster please, it’s because of institutional racism / sexism / antisemitism, etc.

Lazy, incompetent bosses think that everyone else is like them, therefore they don’t trust their subordinates. They’ll always be on your back because they are very insecure. And, being lazy and ineffectual, they’ll go for the easy targets: the guys who actually work, because those are the workers whose self-esteem depends on their hard work being acknowledged.

A friend of mine, a white guy, had the silly idea of getting transferred to one of the French Caribbean islands, in order to be closer to his Venezuelan wife’s country. He was appalled by the laziness and incompetence of the local, Black civil servants. Actually, it was him who felt excluded: who’s that white guy who wants to make us toil? He lasted a couple of years and asked to be sent back to continental France.

I think that the private sector will devise methods to select good workers. Hire people for short term contracts, and only renew the contracts of the workaholic few. People who are natural workaholics work their asses off even when they know that they can’t be terminated even if their productivity decreases sharply.

Angela Merkel thinks that the riff-raff of the Third World will turn into superb German engineers and factory workers, when they have a chance to get a German education. Nope. They’ll turn Germany into what it’s already becoming: a decadent nation which cheats on its customers and lives off the reputation of former, smarter generations. So, what will they get in the end? Multiculturalism, which works so well in Syria. All the Germans of the future will have, is a country dependent on imports for energy and food, and whose two-digit IQ workforce can’t produce top-notch products anymore, let alone conceive them. Looks like poverty, crime and ethnic tensions to me.

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The Plight Of Aborigines

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Australian urban anthropologist and ethologist Frank Salter wrote:

Evolutionary theories of Aboriginal disability are rejected outright by an Australian social science still crippled by the culture wars of the last century. Not so in medical science. Dr Alan Barclay of the Australian Diabetes Council attributes the early onset of diabetes in Aborigines to an evolutionary history that did not include agriculture.[42] John Boulton, a medical researcher specialising in Aboriginal paediatrics, believes that we need to draw on evolutionary biology to better understand and treat the health disaster that has afflicted outback Aboriginal communities for generations.[43] The proximate causes include poor nourishment of children as well as fetal undernourishment, itself due to mothers consuming alcohol while pregnant, domestic violence and stress. Despite massive medical interventions, twice the proportion of Aboriginal babies are born underweight than non-indigenous babies. This and other factors have cascading impacts on health, leading to babies that fail to thrive who become adults with high rates of kidney failure and diabetes. Boulton attributes a role to epigenetics, in which early stresses are carried to the next generation by alterations in gene expression. Rat experiments indicate that five generations are needed to overcome accumulated epigenetic effects. Other research directed by Jim Penman, a Melbourne historian, implicates epigenetics in cycles of work behaviour and child rearing over the last four millennia. Penman reports rat experiments indicating that epigenetics can affect alcohol consumption.[44]

Work and social behaviour may also have been selected by millennia of agriculture. Farming, especially in societies governed by rule-of-law, appears to select for behaviour promoting goal-directed work and weeds out violent temperaments.[45]

One egregious omission in the Report is IQ, which is the single strongest predictor of educational outcomes and is associated with many social and biological indicators. Australian Aborigines have relatively low IQs by international comparison. Cognitive psychologist Richard Lynn estimates the average IQ of mixed-race Aborigines to be 80 compared with an Australian average of 98.[46] IQ is certainly an innate feature in the sense of being partly inherited. Twin studies indicate that about 75 per cent of the variance in IQ is due to genetic factors. A new technique for measuring heritability, developed with the help of Australian scientists, confirms that estimate, ending a half-century of disputation about heritability of IQ. The new method—called “genome-wide complex trait analysis”—is based not on twins but on hundreds of thousands of DNA markers assayed from unrelated individuals. It yields a heritability of 73 per cent.[47]

IQ is one factor underlying the extraordinary and persistent gulf between white and Aboriginal standards of living. Noel Pearson tries to convey the magnitude of that gulf: “It is as if there is a Third World country in the middle of the First, one showing few signs of development.”[48] The situation is worse than that, despite costly assistance programs.[49] Before China embraced capitalism its people were the largest Third World society in the world. Most lived in rural villages subsisting on medieval agriculture. Levels of alcoholism, child abuse and family breakdown were low. The villagers maintained a hard work routine. Economic development was impeded by communist rule despite the population having one of the highest IQs in the world. The proof? When Chinese people emigrate to free societies they flourish in education, business and the professions. Mainland China is rapidly assimilating science, technology and industry at the most sophisticated levels.

The importance of understanding racial differences is illustrated by considering the OECD target of having 40 per cent of young people graduate from university. This benchmark is set by states most of which have high average IQs by global standards. To achieve this for white Australians it will be necessary to set the entrance threshold at the equivalent of an average IQ of about 102.[50] This is a bit low for university studies, according to the American educational psychologist Linda Gottfredson. From this perspective, if policy-makers insist on the 40 per cent target it is likely to result in universities lowering their standards to prevent excessive rates of failure.[51] The situation is worse for Aborigines. For a population with an average IQ of 80 only 7 per cent exceed the 102 IQ threshold. For this population the top 40 per cent of IQs fall above an IQ of 84. Reducing entry standards to this level would still not produce equality of outcomes, because over 80 per cent of whites would then qualify for entry. And of course the situation would not be improved by raising entrance standards, as advocated by some commentators. If the effective entrance IQ to universities were raised to 110, then about 25 per cent of whites would qualify compared to 2.3 per cent of Aborigines.

Australia is not alone in showing poor educational and socioeconomic outcomes for its indigenous peoples. White New Zealand students are near the top of OECD educational measures while Maori students rank 28th. Half of Maori students fail to complete high school, compared to one quarter of Anglo and 13 per cent of Chinese New Zealanders.[52] Many factors are involved but the substantial IQ gap, though only half that in Australia, is in the same direction.[53] Maoris suffer many of the same disabilities as Aborigines, though less severely, including a high imprisonment rate, more health problems, more abuse of alcohol and drugs, a shorter life expectancy and greater domestic violence. Contrary to the Expert Panel’s expectation for Australian Aborigines, Maoris suffer these disabilities despite having been granted the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and gaining special parliamentary representation as early as 1867. It is therefore puzzling that the New Zealand example prompted the Expert Panel’s sympathy for a treaty given that alleviating Aboriginal disability is a main goal. There is no evidence that a treaty, or agreement-making power in the Constitution, or parliamentary representation, would have an appreciable effect on indigenous health, imprisonment rates or employment.[54]

IQ alone explains more than half the variation in per capita GDP around the world, a monumental discovery resulting from the collaboration of Richard Lynn and Finnish sociologist Tatu Vanhanen in 2002. [55] Its significance to international relations and the economics of development is compounded by the fact that IQ also correlates with invidious social indicators: unemployment, divorce, children born to single mothers, poverty, incarceration, chronic welfare, and dropping out of school. To these can be added poor health and reduced support by families and communities. Note that these outcomes are not foretold; there are other causes, resulting in substantial variation. Community culture and access to services can make a big difference.

The clustering of behavioural and social indicators is well known among cognitive psychologists. “Intelligence in childhood, as measured by psychometric cognitive tests, is a strong predictor of many important life outcomes, including educational attainment, income, health and lifespan.”[56] According to “life history theory”, also mainstream in evolutionary psychology, this clustering is due to reproductive strategies that were selected over many generations.[57] The constellation of traits around intelligence, what the late psychologist Arthur Jensen called the “g nexus”, has been confirmed many times over decades of research.[58]

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Google Denies Deal With Israel To Police YouTube For Incitement

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Forward: Google has denied an Israeli government claim that it has agreed to jointly monitor YouTube videos that incite attacks on Israelis.
Google, which owns YouTube, denied that it had made such an agreement at a meeting last week of the company’s executives with Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Tzipi Hotovely.
A statement about the meeting released by the ministry last week, which remains on its website, quoted Hotovely as saying, “We are engaged daily in confronting incitement to violence, a task which can benefit greatly from the cooperation of those companies that are involved in social media.”

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Women Against Suffrage

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Helen Andrews writes:

When the fight in Britain over women’s suffrage came to an end with the passage of the Representation of the People Act 1918, which enfranchised property-holding women over 30, Mary Augusta Ward was almost relieved to have been defeated. For nearly forty years she had been the public face of the anti-suffrage campaign: head of the Woman’s National Anti-Suffrage League, editor of the Anti-Suffrage Review, author of the League’s founding manifesto, which attracted 104 signatures including Gertrude Bell’s, Beatrice Webb’s, and Virginia Woolf’s mother’s. In her capacity as the famous novelist “Mrs. Humphry Ward,” she had published Delia Blanchflower, a social problem novel about a feminist virago who comes to grief after burning down a cabinet minister’s house as an act of protest.

But all of this campaigning had come at a cost. Old friends had cut ties. Her college at Oxford had quietly disavowed her in 1909, although she had been one of its founders—the name “Somerville Hall” had been her suggestion. Sales of her novels suffered, or so she believed to the end of her life. Nor was Mrs. Ward the only one to pay a price for her involvement. Her son Arnold, a Unionist MP for eight years, was rejected by his party before the following election because women in his constituency objected to his family’s well-known anti-suffrage stance. The nomination instead went to a 71-year-old rubber tycoon whom Mrs. Ward called “the stupidest man I know, and a perfectly incompetent speaker.”

Mrs. Ward also had reason to feel bitter over the way the suffrage fight had ended. It had all come down to the House of Lords. The suffragists wanted them to pass the Commons’ bill, and the antis wanted them to reject it and call for a referendum on the suffrage question. Ward believed, probably correctly, that any referendum in which women themselves voted would yield a negative, as such plebiscites had in the United States. The leader of the House of Lords was then George Curzon, an Anti-Suffrage League board member and the man who had approached Mrs. Ward about becoming involved in the cause in the first place. She therefore assumed that the vote was likely to go their way, even if her referendum proposal did not get through.

But Curzon let her down. On January 10, at the end of an exceptionally long speech, he declared that although he personally opposed the suffrage bill, as leader of the house he felt obliged to abstain from the vote. The reason he gave was the looming threat of “Lords reform,” which, if the upper house picked the wrong moment to be recalcitrant, might result in its complete abolition. But of course Mrs. Ward did not see his point. She saw only cowardice and a stampede of skittish Nays. When she complained of Curzon’s betrayal to the pro-suffrage campaigner Millicent Fawcett, Mrs. Fawcett is said to have replied, “That’s what comes of trusting to your men friends.”

As she contemplated the future, Mrs. Ward could not help but feel pessimistic—about the prospects for British politics, and British womanhood, and about her own future. But however pessimistic she was then, she could not possibly have predicted just how complete would be the oblivion to which history would consign her and her friends.

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Politically Correct Holy Rollers: The New Campus Revival

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Helen Andrews writes: Leftism has become a religion, and what we are seeing now is a revival. The revivalists testify from behind megaphones instead of pulpits and in “safe spaces” instead of country churches, but they stand squarely within the American tradition of converts who spread their gospel by bearing their witness. The way they keep bursting into tears is a clue. The Yale chalkers cried when they confronted the dean, the ranting girl cried when she confronted Christakis, audience members cried during a perfectly ordinary Yale Political Union debate on affirmative action. Ferguson was the same way. “There were a lot of people who were angry, a lot of people crying,” one protester recalled of Michael Brown’s funeral week. “There were a lot of people with backpacks and books saying the revolution is starting.” (That final dash of millennialism is entirely appropriate.) This is not a sign of fragility; this is part of the attraction.

Like the First and Second Great Awakenings, this revival spreads like a contagion on the strength of remarkable stories. In the days of Jonathan Edwards, a preacher could set the Connecticut River valley aflame by telling of mass conversions up in Northampton or a miraculous healing in Plainfield or a notorious free-thinker who had suddenly arrived at salvation over in Braintree. Edwards himself got a lot of mileage out of the incredible conversion story of his youngest congregant, Phebe Bartlet, age four. Some of these stories omitted certain deflating details (the mass conversions had been prompted by an outbreak of disease, say), and some are hard to credit. But there is not a single story in the annals of either Great Awakening, not a blind man restored to sight or a cripple made to dance the Highland jig, that strains credulity as much as the idea that on October 24, 2015, the Ku Klux Klan snuck into the third-floor bathroom of a Mizzou dormitory in order to paint a poop swastika on the wall. The enthusiasm for personal denunciation that sets the present eruption apart from the usual PC background noise is a trademark of American revivals, too.

When colonial congregations invited George Whitefield to preach for them, they quickly learned to ask in advance that he not sow dissension by denouncing local worthies by name. No one bothered asking Charles Grandison Finney to stick to generalities. One reason Finney was the most popular revivalist of the Second Great Awakening was that his audiences derived a certain frisson from knowing he would call out by name any deacon he’d heard was an adulterer and any shopkeeper he’d heard saying “dammit” in the street. An ordinary preacher who noticed an overdressed woman in the pews might pointedly take the day’s reading from Proverbs 31 and leave it at that. Finney glared at the unfortunate woman and asked her, in front of everyone, “Did you come in here to divide the worship of God’s house, to make people worship you?” Recounting the story in his memoir, he notes, “This made her writhe.”

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Declining Standards in Racial Hate Hoaxes

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* You have a high quality school like HLS admit students on the basis of affirmative action, and you somehow expect and demand high quality hoaxes from those students. When Alabama or LSU lowers their academic standards to get quality football and basketball players, they certainly don’t expect Rhodes Scholars. If you want quality hoaxes, raise, don’t lower, your standards.

* Probably nowhere is the IQ gap more obvious than at elite law schools. The black-white gap on admissions indexes calculated from LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA is about two SDs in very elite schools, and, unsurprisingly, black students end up at the bottom of the class (these data are from the 1990s, but there’s no reason expect that it would be better today). There’s a cognitive chasm between black and white (+Asian) students in law schools, and the fact that the latter nevertheless must kowtow to black demands must be very frustrating.

* As far as I can tell the hoaxes are working as propaganda. Hoaxers are winning concessions, getting enemies fired, providing drama and animal satisfaction to the mob. The targets of the hoax are getting the worst of it.

The question is when do they stop being politically effective? Until that moment comes you’d better get used to them.

* It’s not just blacks.

The UVA story was pretty dumb too.

And Sulkowicz with the mattress.

When idiots and louts are praised and encouraged for their hoaxes–and there’s no punishment for such hoaxes (Sabrina Rubin still has her job)–, why would there be any incentive to be smarter?

And Americans are plenty dumb. They’ve been fooled on the WMD hoax, the Putin is Hitler hoax, Gaddafi Must go hoax, and Assad Must Go hoax.

* I thought I recognized the author (Helen Andrews) and sure enough it’s the gal that had a rather public dust-up with an ex live on CSPAN’s BookTV. Spending hungover weekends watching CSPAN was once a favorite pastime of mine.

* What is quite amazing is that the Royall Asses blog linked to Amren. Not polite Isteve but an actual white power website. Perhaps the Alt-right is reaching further than I thought.

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How To Police Baltimore

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Progressive whites have never been able to accept, in fact they can’t accept, that tolerating a certain level of organized crime in the ghetto (including the great white ghetto) limits the amount of disorganized crime. Because “fixing the ghetto” is a spiritual exercise and not a civic one, Progressive whites fixate on the organized elements, thus making the ghetto less organized. The resulting chaos makes building any useful social structures impossible.

Baltimore is a good example. Way back in the day, Peanut King ran the ghetto. He was the heroin baron of the city. He also sponsored local basketball tournaments where college recruiters would show up to watch the original midnight basketball.

It was far from perfect, but it gave the cops and politicians some chance to keep a lid on the ghetto. When the nice white people busted up these gangs, they got famous and saw their careers take off. Now they all dream of having the big presser. The result has been an endless assault on the only organizing force in these areas, the gangs. Baltimore is now an urban game park and the cops are the game wardens. When the cops backed off, nature took its course.

* I annoy family, friends, and some of the people on this blog, no doubt, when I go on about the ridiculously stupid and degrading effects of being a white-fan-of-hip hop, but there it is. You become a writer, and make it to the front cover of NY Magazine, and then dignify a low-brow ghetto dog fight with the rappish, sympathetic-to-either-side elocution of “it had become a situation”. Maybe the writer is friends with the nice white woman coop board member so upset over the “clocking” of her peep tenants by “at-risk marauders”. So why not the use of passive voice and de-anthropomorphizing metaphor for inner city violence? Didn’t you just recently rave to all your friends what a brilliant album GOOD KID, M.A.A.D. CITY** was? Funny thing is the biggest white-fans-of-hip-hop tend to be upper middle class boys like those at the private school in Seattle who for the rest of their lives will have nightmares of coming to school naked, and all those girls snapping fingers at them, snapping fingers, FINGERS!

* Long ago and not so far away I resided in an oh-so-slowly gentrifying neigh(white guys say ‘neigh’).
I lived next to a family who had a son named Pee-Wee but he was not there when i first moved in as he was doing six years at Lorton out in Va. on a coke bust.
When Pee-Wee returned from jail he was treated like royalty. Everyone loved him, everyone came up to talk to him and kiss his ring. He demonstrated his nobility by occasionally parking in front of my house and distributing goods to the poor…say a trunkful of frozen chickens or some overly warm polyester Hawaiian shirts(I still have one in the closet).
The neigh loved the guy. He was usually upbeat and friendly, even after he had been spread eagled and searched by the cops at the intersection in front of us(and the cops found guns in the engine…in the engine!!..under the hood). Sounds like a bad man.
But to the neigh Pee Wee had done time at Lorton. He was the real deal.
Anyway the point is the values in the neigh are completely reversed from the values the SJWs espouse but they are too naive to see that. Pee-Wee’s Lorton degree had more value than a Harvard degree. The connections he had made at Lorton helped him in his ten square block world which had no connection to the world of the articulators at the Washington Post.
I do not think the people who write these articles about a city like Baltimore really appreciate(grok?) how different the value system is in these places.

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The Collapse Of Japan

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: “As we all know, Japan is an economic black hole with a stagnant, aging, unvibrant population. Except as various graphs by Jason Bayz suggest, Japan has been doing a pretty good job keeping the Japanese at work.”

Comments:

* And an unemployment rate of 3.1%. What a basket case of a country!

* I have speculated that if Japan can resist the (admittedly tantalizing) temptation to diversify themselves with potentially hostile hordes of fecund foreigners, that their demographic situation may well fix itself.

The story is that Japan lacks working-age young people who are needed to keep their economy going, right? Supply & demand suggests that if something is scarce and necessary, then the value of that thing should rise, right? So the young workers in Japan should be competed for by Japanese businesses by increases in wages. At the same time, aging Japanese should be leaving their family homes and going into (even) smaller apartments. So the supply of family housing should rise, and prices consequently fall, right?

In theory, these higher worker wages plus more affordable houses should stimulate family formation, and possibly generate a new baby boom there. I wonder if there are any studies of that restoration of equilibrium effect happening to societies in the past.

* What exactly is the downside to the Japanese path? Cultural cohesion is maintained, human resources are used in a more economically efficient way, welfare constituencies are reduced. All that seems to be lost is the ability to enjoy lazing around on welfare/disability.

Come the Age of Robots, Japan is going to have less dead wood to support and so each person that is supported by government can enjoy a larger piece of the total welfare pie.

* Firstly, unfortunately there is a subconscious or even conscious desire amongst many commentators to ‘do Japan down’ motivated out of feelings of pure envy and spite and nothing else. Basically, these people *hate* the fact that Japan remains a successful ethno state, whilst their own nations are ruined multiracial cess-pits.
So they do their damndest to ruin Japan too. A sad reflection on human nature, but a true one.

Secondly, it’s the pure herd instinct amongst not too terribly well informed journalists. ‘Japan is greeting old!’ is the trendy meme. So they too, to be trendy, must parrot it at every opportunity.

* Despite Japan having a low fertility rate, lower and upper class Japanese women reproduce at similar levels so there are few poorly educated single mothers in Japan.

In contrast, western countries have higher fertility rates but a big proportion of babies are being born to low IQ mothers. Hence, the fertility rate of high IQ women in the US is probably similar to what it is in Japan.

* The reason that Japan gets bad press is that most economics journalism is written with investors in mind. This is no conspiracy; investors are who reads the business page.

From the standpoint of investors, Japan has delivered very low returns. Interest rates have been near zero for twenty years. Japanese real estate prices have continued to fall. The stock market has been about as bad. So, journalism written from that point of view is negative.

The reason for these poor returns is basically that the size of the workforce is shrinking. The average Japanese worker/person has not done too bad over the last 15 or so years; not worse than the average American worker*. Capitalists like immigration for a reason.

*Obviously, there are fiscal problems, though I personally think these are overstated. Japan never really needed to borrow internationally, so resolving their fiscal problem will involve an internal political settlement.

* I heard a local segment during NPR’s “All Things Considered” dealing with the efforts of a man seeking to get Hispanics in the Miami area to become American citizens. Apparently, there is a large number of people living legally in the Miami area who are content with their legal status and have not pursued the naturalization process. His aim was to make many of them U.S. citizens, with the obvious consequence that they could then vote legally in U.S. elections. One of his selling points to his “prospective customers,” which struck me, was that becoming a U.S. citizen would result in the person qualifying to get money back from the U.S. government that he was otherwise “leaving on the table” by virtue of not being a citizen. Since he was talking in the range of several hundreds of thousands of people, the number he threw out about the total amount of money getting refunded (so to speak) was in the billions. (The number that comes to mind was $12 billion.) Although it was not mentioned and the interviewer did not press him for details, I am sure he was alluding to the Earned Income Tax Credit, which pays back to qualified applicants more money than they actually paid in income taxes. As far as I am concerned, that is simply welfare by another name. It’s one thing to exempt lower income people from having to pay any income tax, but, imo, it’s a total perversion to give those people refunds for income taxes they didn’t pay. The notion that the Republicans and Bill Clinton “ended welfare” in the 90′s is a big joke, once you recognize that it merely changed names. It merely opened up shop under a different sign.

BTW I am sure that the EITC is behind the recent uptick in agitation to make Puerto Rico a state. As a territory of the U.S., Puerto Ricans are deemed to be U.S. citizens but aren’t subject to the U.S. income tax. The downside for Puerto Ricans is that exemption from the U.S. income tax means that Puerto Ricans don’t qualify for the EITC. Unless the EITC is changed, admitting P.R. to the union would simply represent one more drain of federal dollars. P.R. might benefit, but the rest of the country would be paying for that benefit.

* Is there any way anyone could possibly see America’s and Europe’s immigration systems as a solution for any economic problem?

They import people whose countries are basket cases, and allow them to bring in dependent family members. Simple arithmetic is all you need to see how many of them are net recipients of government money and services, quite apart from their changing the ethnic composition of the population.

There is little or no control of what a “temporary” immigrant does once he’s inside your borders. Even if he doesn’t slip off the radar, he may become a parent, which is all but a cast-iron guarantee of permanent residence (the European Court of Human Rights recognises the “right to family life”, i.e. any child you have is an anchor baby).

When economists extol immigration as a solution to anything, they’re using the kind of calculations that would land them in prison if they were doing the accounts of a private company.

* Population is falling in Japan, as is the number of people employed, despite the rise in labor force occupation. Yet per capita GDP has been growing. No one says they are not heading for a painful adjustment, but they have very good chances of weathering it successfully and keeping their nation in the process. Germany is simply kicking the demographic can down the road by promising the country to fecund foreigners of dubious worth.

Besides, GDP is not everything. Lots of unsavory things go into it. Sure, the Germans will have an uptick because of refugees consuming toilet paper and the like, but the costs of policing are reflected in GDP, the cost of prosecution, of crime labs, of rape kits, of more weapons and pepper sprays, of more private security, of buying better locks for their doors etc etc.

* Once you “convince” an organized and civilized people to disengage from total war, then your problems are done. They won’t even cross the street in an unmarked place. But low intensity violence as a way of life is a steady killer that fades into the background noise. All the Nankings and Stalingrads cannot compare with the unknowable toll of the machete and the raid in backwoods Africa. The first are exceptional and have taken a spiritual toll, the second are a way of life and their perpetrators sleep very well at night, and their descendants won’t think twice about it, if they even know.

* My personal experience with family members and other elderly in my developing society is that retirement is a killer of wits and faculties, especially for men, since women naturally find positions as nurturers for the (extended) family and opportunities to engage them socially. Unless you are rich enough to travel the world and maintain hobbies, the moment you disengage from the responsibilities and demands of a job, even an easy one, then your mind starts going. There is less reason to get out of the house, to keep in touch with people, to read etc. Impairments also take their toll and you give up trying to do things. It starts slowly and then accelerates. The only way you avoid it is by staying mentally active at all costs. A former International Relations professor of mine who was also a Diplomat keeps a blog at 102 and is still churning out books by himself (though he writes in pen and has someone transcribe it). With a few exceptions, we have not learned to age well. Barring debilitating illness, I plan on working till I drop, assuming my work is meaningful and enjoyable. Someone has to pay the share of taxes for the burgeoning Roma population.

* I lived in Yokohama, Japan for about two and a half years. I’ve never enjoyed a better quality of life.

Zero crime, wonderful mass-transit, fantastic food – the only negative that I would hear from my fellow ex-pats was that Japan can be “racist”. Read “racist” as having pride in your country and heritage.

* Thanks to technology people can be productive longer so Japan can weather any demographic problem by just making the elderly provide for more of their own care, this is a big difference from the past. In the old days a manual laborer really was broken down, you just couldn’t take them to the rendering plant like a plowhorse. He had to have family or a way to support him.

The Japanese owe the money to themselves and their people have a great attitude toward shared sacrifice. I doubt the Japanese would trade places with us.

* There is a scarcity value to things on this planet. More open space is valuable.

We could use fewer schools; businesses; rental properties; civic properties; and consumer goods. Fewer people is less of a burden on our resource base. We need to question this mantra of “more”, especially when dealing with population, which is an arbitrary figure when you industrialize feeding the womb.

* Still the island nation continues on, without bothering to listen to all the conventional wisdom from the West. They don’t do free trade (for the most part); they protect their home markets (for the most part); they don’t seem to insource via a H-1B Visa type of program; they aren’t outsourcing their jobs to say, 1 million Koreans or Indians. And they’re not about to any time soon agree to take in 10k-100k refugees from who knows where halfway across the world.

Japan actually has a good firm grasp on common sense and what works for their own nation.

Example: say 50,000 Mexicans, devastated by an earthquake suddenly showed up at the Japanese embassy in Mexico City to apply for asylum while simultaneously 100k Nigerians and 50,000 Hmongs all decided that they too just “needed” to emigrate to Japan because of, you know, its really really important that they go there, just cause they want to. They’re refugees, or they’re victims of war, famine, Ebola, etc. take your pick.

They’re not getting in. They have to take that song and dance act someplace else ’cause Japan’s not buying what they’re trying to sell. Maybe that’s the result of a nation with a mean IQ of around 105 whereas a nation with a lower mean IQ tend to fall for it.

Refugees? Nope, not getting in.

Immigrants? Nope, not coming thru.

Need to insource/take away native born Japanese jobs and replace them with Indians or Filipinos? Are you kidding. Really? Seriously?

Amazing.

Like the time I was at a convention and there were two dozen Japanese in attendance. They were given tea and refused to drink it. Finally got hold of the answer. “It’s Korean tea.”

The problem was eventually fixed and they were given a different beverage more to their liking.

Have to say in all fairness that Sencha makes a good cuppa.

Well done, Japan. Keep up the good work on preserving your culture, your people, and ultimately, your future.

* Another industrialized, perennially crowded island nation took the opposite track. The British economy looks worse than Japan.

I bet the Japanese are sorry they missed out on the vibrancy of modern Britain.

* Europeans are fierce nationalists at heart.

Not all of them. The problem is that most “nations” in Europe are fairly new. It is true that most Europeans take fierce price in their regional identity – as Catalans, Bavarians, Tuscans, Carinthians, Welsh, etc. But many national identities – “German”, “Italian”, “Spanish”, even “British” – are actually pretty weak. Clearly “Yugoslav” nationalism didn’t have a long shelf life even though the idea of a “Yugoslavia” wasn’t much more absurd than an “Italy” that includes Sardinians, Sicilians, Romans and Piedmontese in one “nation”. The strongest nationalists are in some of the smallest most coherent countries – Hungary, Slovakia, Denmark – but good luck to them defending themselves against the hordes of immigrants that Germany, France and the UK have welcomed.

* You are defining nationalism too broadly. I mean an attachment to blood and soil, not the contrived allegiance to a 19th century flag and a 19th century border.

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