University makes submission of standardized test-scores “optional” for applicants.
It seems likely this game will catch on if, as expected, the Supreme Court’s decision to re-take the University of Texas case results in a ruling against overt affirmative action in University admissions next year.
I suspect the game will work like this: While SAT scores will be “optional” de jure, they will be required, de facto, if the applicant lacks sufficient “vibrancy.”
* Ta-Nehisi Coates–among many others–insists that the American Civil War was solely about slavery. I haven’t read enough Civil War history to know whether that’s the case. One of the things that puzzles me about that view, however, is that its own proponents don’t behave as though they believe it. When I visited the Netherlands a few years ago, I was embarrassed to be fervently thanked for the role my Canadian forebears played in liberating that country, even though I was clearly decades too young to have served personally. This experience was not an anomaly–see, e.g., this recent WaPo feature.
Compared to American slavery–which, in the American public imagination, is a moral horror rivaled in human history only by the Holocaust–the German occupation of Holland was a comparatively slight oppression from which to be saved. But I’m not aware of any kind of ongoing recognition/appreciation by black America of the +500,000 casualties the Union ostensibly incurred solely for their sake.
That’s a question of etiquette, or ethics, however. The question I’m more interested in is a historical one: if the orthodox view of the Civil War is correct, is there any greater example of inter-racial altruism in history? Anything that even comes close? I can think of similarly substantial instances of intra-racial sacrifice, or inter-racial sacrifice involving mixed motives of principle and self-interest (WWII obviously contains examples of both categories), but no instance of pure inter-racial self-sacrifice that’s anywhere close in magnitude to what TNC and others contend occurred in the American Civil War. Any ideas?
Luke: Gratitude and empathy, like most moral virtues, depend on the ability for abstract thought, which is measured by IQ. High IQ people like the Dutch are more likely to be grateful than low IQ people.
Also, the Dutch come from a Protestant heritage and these people tend to be particularly altruistic and nice. They don’t make major in-group vs out-group distinctions.
* Boston did not have a facility problem as much as it has a logistics problem. Under ideal conditions, getting around eastern Mass is unpleasant. Holding big events like a convention can make daily life unbearable. An Olympics would shut down the state for a month.
Then there is the fact the political class would probably all end up in Federal prison by the time it was over. Mass can tolerate the grubby corruption it has because the stakes are small. Something like the Big Dig or an Olympics means a dozen years of FBI investigations.
* As a resident of the Boston metro area, I am so happy we dodged this bullet. There’s no way we could host it with our 3rd world infrastructure and politics.
As Israel is the Jewish state, how could Jews around the world not become targets of those who dislike the behavior of Israel?
The behavior of Jews and of the Jewish state profoundly affects how Jews are treated by non-Jews.
Actions have consequences. When Jews assert themselves in ways that harm non-Jews, non-Jews push back. This is popularly called “anti-Semitism.” How come there is no term for anti-Gentilism? Just as many non-Jews hate Jews, so too do many Jews hate non-Jews. You may argue that Jews are tiny and powerless. Well, any look at a Fortune 500 list shows you that Jews aren’t powerless (they usually comprise about a third of that list, for instance).
The real shocker of the cabinet meeting, though, was what wasn’t covered in the briefing: namely, the most explosive of the assessment report’s 12 chapters, “Relations of the Communities and Israel.” It describes dramatic changes detected in the past year, mostly for the worse, in Diaspora Jewish attitudes toward Israel, its government policies and its military actions.
In part the changes reflect shock at Israel’s behavior, both in the domestic arena and in warfare. In part they’re due to discomfort and inability to explain Israel’s actions when asked by non-Jewish friends and family. And in part they’re due, particularly among European Jews, to the increase in “frequency and severity” of anti-Jewish attacks whenever Israel takes military action against its neighbors.
…The report has a lot more to say about the other factor affecting relations with Israel: fallout from last summer’s Gaza war. This is reflected in several spheres, but most important are the strains placed on Diaspora Jews’ relationships with their “environment,” as the report puts it. These strains are serious and growing…
Far more alarming, the report says that Israel’s wars have a strong, direct impact on the relationships of Diaspora Jews to their surrounding communities and societies. Mainstream Jewish community leaders in several countries told the institute that there is an “automatic tendency” for the surrounding non-Jewish society to “view Jews as representatives of the pro-Israel position.”
This has the direct result — as the institute initially noted last year, the current report points out — of “increasing the frequency and severity of harassment/attacks on Jews in various places around the world.”
“This insight was particularly emphasized this year in light of the bloody incidents in the Jewish community of France,” the report says. It quotes a Jewish community leader from France saying: “Every time [Israel uses force] synagogues are burned.”
Curiously, the report avoids the word “anti-Semitism” when describing these attacks as consequences of Israeli actions. No less curious, there’s an earlier chapter in the report, Chapter 8, that’s devoted exclusively to the rise in European anti-Semitism, essentially referring to those same attacks. But Chapter 8 never mentions the testimony by European Jewish leaders in Chapter 9 about a link between Israeli actions and attacks on European Jews. “Anti-Semitism” and “Israeli actions” don’t appear in the same chapter.
In a way, the reticence is understandable. Drawing a causal link between European anti-Semitism and Israeli behavior — between any anti-Semitism and any Jewish behavior, for that matter — is taboo in current Jewish discourse, to the point that suggesting it is itself treated frequently as an anti-Semitic act. It must have been frightening for scholars operating in this environment to stumble across first-hand testimony that the link is real. Even more frightening when they’re preparing to face an Israeli cabinet some of whose ministers view criticism of Israeli military actions as tantamount to treason…
The Jewish People Policy Institute was founded in 2002 at the initiative of the then-chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, Sallai Meridor. In an interview at the time he told me that one of his major goals was to set up a channel to help the Israel government consider the needs and interests of Diaspora Jews when it makes decisions that might affect them.
Meridor said he’d been profoundly shaken up by the bombing in 1994 of the AMIA building, the headquarters of Argentina’s main Jewish organizations. Israeli intelligence believed it was carried out by Hezbollah and Iran in retaliation for Israel’s assassination in 1992 of Hezbollah’s founding leader, Sheikh Abbas Musawi. Meridor had been present as a senior aide in Israel’s Defense Ministry at the time the decision was made in 1992 to “take out” Musawi, he said, and it never occurred to anyone at the time to wonder whether the action might blow back onto Diaspora Jews.
Since then, the recommendation that Israel develop a channel to consult with Diaspora Jewry before taking actions that might affect them has appeared in nearly every one of the institute’s annual assessments. Never, though, was it driven home as powerfully as it was this year.
In a podcast, veteran teacher Robert Rickover says to fellow teacher Mark Josefsberg: “One answer is that the student got what he needed, so why come back for more lessons? I’ve had students who had a specific issue that was bothering them and it was quickly sorted out with some basic Alexander work and often within a few minutes.”
Mark: “Most of the time, students that make dramatic changes return but there’s a percentage who don’t.”
Robert: “When we help people to change their patterns and we do it by engaging their thinking and observation skills about themselves, they are forced to confront something that might not be comfortable — that to some extent, they were responsible for their previous issues (pain or discomfort). For some people, it is not pleasant to confront that. I tell my students that they are responsible for themselves. There is a wonderful quote in the old comic strip Pogo — ‘We have met the enemy and they is us!’ You could look at that as good news or bad news. It could be bad news in that you have to own up that at some level you were responsible. On the other hand, it also tells you that you have the power to change it. There are some people for whom that responsibility is scary and they just may leave for that reason.”
Mark: “I came into the Alexander Technique for extreme neck pain and when my teacher told me I was responsible, it was incredibly empowering, uplifting, and powerful. Because finally it said I could do something about this and that felt great to me.”
Robert: “Alexander work does ask people to see things about themselves more clearly and some of those things, they may not be too crazy about.”
“I’ve had students who’ve come with specific conditions that have names and they’ve been diagnosed and they are sometimes active members of support groups for those conditions and I’ve had examples where the condition changed dramatically and quickly with some Alexander work and the student comes back for a second lesson but the thing they came for has faded out and they don’t want to talk about it much any more. It could be because it undermines their identity in that group.”
“Your identity or your social network is disrupted if you no longer have symptoms that that network is based on.”
“It doesn’t have to be a social network of other people with that condition, it could be a social network such as a marriage where part of that relationship has shifted to one spouse looking after the other because of their condition. If that condition changes for the better, then there is some rearrangement that has to go on in that relationship.”
“Another reason is that though student has great results, there is something about you, the teacher, that they can’t stand.”
Deathwish went out of its way to show racially mixed criminal gangs. Taxi Driver was altered to make the pimp white.
Lawrence Auster wrote in 2007:
Like Ahab’s search for the Great White Whale, liberals’ search for the Great White Defendant is relentless and never-ending. When, in 1988, Tawana Brawley’s and Al Sharpton’s then year-old spectacular charge that several white men including prosecutor Steven Pagones (whose name Brawley had picked out of a newspaper article) had abducted and raped the 15 year old was shown to be completely false, the Nation said it didn’t matter, since the charges expressed the essential nature of white men’s treatment of black women in this country. When the Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper last year, liberals everywhere treated the accusation as fact, because, just as with the Nation and Tawana Brawley, the rape charge seemed to the minds of liberals to reflect the true nature of oppressive racial and sexual relations in America.
To see the real truth of the matter, let us take a look at the Department of Justice document Criminal Victimization in the United States, 2005. (Go to the linked document, and under “Victims and Offenders” download the pdf file for 2005.)
In Table 42, entitled “Personal crimes of violence, 2005, percent distribution of single-offender victimizations, based on race of victims, by type of crime and perceived race of offender,” we learn that there were 111,590 white victims and 36,620 black victims of rape or sexual assault in 2005. (The number of rapes is not distinguished from those of sexual assaults; it is maddening that sexual assault, an ill-defined category that covers various types of criminal acts ranging from penetration to inappropriate touching, is conflated with the more specific crime of rape.) In the 111,590 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was white, 44.5 percent of the offenders were white, and 33.6 percent of the offenders were black. In the 36,620 cases in which the victim of rape or sexual assault was black, 100 percent of the offenders were black, and 0.0 percent of the offenders were white. The table explains that 0.0 percent means that there were under 10 incidents nationally.
The table does not gives statistics for Hispanic victims and offenders. But the bottom line on interracial white/black and black/white rape is clear:
In the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man.
What this means is that every day in the United States, over one hundred white women are raped or sexually assaulted by a black man.
The Department of Justice statistics refer, of course, to verified reports. According to the Wikipedia article on rape, as many as half of all rape charges nationally are determined by police and prosecutors to be false:
Linda Fairstein, former head of the New York County District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit, noted, “There are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about half simply did not happen…. It’s my job to bring justice to the man who has been falsely accused by a woman who has a grudge against him, just as it’s my job to prosecute the real thing.”
No wonder there was such absolute belief in the guilt of the Duke students among the leading sectors of liberal America. A drug-addled, half-deranged, promiscuous black stripper accused three young white men of raping her. There are virtually zero rapes of black women by white men in the United States, and half of all rape charges against specific individuals turn out to be false. But in the gnostic, inverted world of liberal demonology, the white students had to be guilty.
Meanwhile, in the real America, week after week, the newspapers report the rapes of white women by black men—though, of course, without ever once using the words, “a white woman was raped by black man.” Just last week in the New York Post there was a story about a serial black rapist who invaded women’s apartments on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; you knew the rapist was black from a police drawing accompanying the story, and you knew the victims were most likely white from the neighborhoods where the attacks occurred. But even when news media’s reports of black on white rape make the race of the perpetrator evident (which the media only does in a minority of instances), no explicit reference is ever made to the racial aspect of the case. Each story of black on white rape is reported in isolation, not presented as part of a larger pattern. There is never the slightest mention of the fact that white women in this country are being targeted by black rapists. In the inverted world of liberalism, the phenomenon does not exist.
Michael Scheur writes: The frenzied attacks on Donald Trump by the U.S. governing elite and their slavish media/academic mouthpieces for his harsh but entirely truthful assessment of Senator McCain must leave you wondering if there is a possibility the America’s governing elite does not know how deeply and savagely it is hated by the citizenry?
This seems too much to believe, but the attacks on Trump surely suggest that the elite’s collective authoritarian head is thicker and dumber than stone. If these men and women need a starting point to learn why most Americans would prefer to see their pictures on a bull’s eye at point-blank range, rather than on a grinning-like- Hillary selfie, they could consider the following dozen items.
–1.) The elite’s shredding of the 4th Amendment via the use of a national government agency to monitor the private electronic communications of all Americans.
–2.) The elite’s crippling of the 1st Amendment by using hate-speech laws and the doctrine of political correctness to silence dissent and force Americans to submit to the insanity of accepting its demand that they believe all forms of sexual deviancy; legal, educational, and employment preferment for non-whites; same-sex marriage; and nearly sixty million murdered-for-profit infants are simply legitimate, alternative kinds of normal behavior for human beings and a supposedly rule-of-law society.
–3.) The elite-inflicted tragedy for so many parents who see their qualified children unable to get into colleges of their choice because seats are reserved for the elite’s preferred categories: women, several score of ethnic, sexual, and racial minorities, and foreigners who are brought in to further disunite the country.
–4.) The elite’s eagerness to keep the United States involved in an endless and losing war with Islam because members of both parties are being bought off by U.S. weapons makers; the U.S.-citizen advocates of Israel; and/or wealthy Arab princes.
–5.) The elite’s fanatic support for unlimited and illegal immigration and destructive free-trade deals, which (a) have destroyed U.S. manufacturing and thereby largely closed access to an ever-narrowing middle class, and (b) have created the income inequality the elite weeps and prates about, but which its trade and immigration policies have caused.
–6.) The elite’s war on the U.S. constitution by supinely allowing presidents to illegally exercise powers they do not possess, such as going to war without a congressional declaration of war; choosing which laws will be enforced and which will not; refusing to cooperate in investigations of obvious governmental corruption; using government agencies for partisan political purposes; and unilaterally altering laws passed by Congress.
Steve Sailer writes: A. I don’t have anything against Sandler since I mostly just avoid his movies (although I can think of three I enjoyed). But he’s the bane of people whose job requires them to see every movie that comes out and write 800 words about his latest extrusion. Although American critics have long looked forward to the end of Adam Sandler movies, his secret weapon appears to be that Hispanics identify with him…
The movie tastes of Latin Americans, there and here, are pretty much terra incognita for American cultural commentators.
You might think that they would be a question of some relevance, what with the immigration demographic tidal wave and all that, but the vast majority of white American film critics don’t appear to have ever even considered that Hispanics have likes and dislikes.
COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* Shouldn’t that be reason enough to restrict immigration?
* It’s impossible to believe people who get paid to watch tv/film have never tuned into Univision even for a few minutes. Thirty seconds of Sabado Gigante! in its primetime slot would clue even the dimmest observer into the fact that Latinos’ viewing preferences are vastly different from Americans’. This is another instance of refusal to notice. Noticing Latino TV seems to be written for five year olds is badthinking although I suspect it’s ok to notice Japanese TV appears to have the same childish bent.
* I used to work at a company with an all Mexican factory work force and the TV shows they had on in the break room during lunch were eye-opening. The favorite seemed to be a comedy variety show that was vaguely reminiscent to me of the old Hee Haw show, in that it featured an all White cast most of whom were in costumes, and the women’s tended to be scanty. The main difference between the two shows was that in terms of comedic sophistication, and musical quality the Mexican show made Hee Haw look like The Marriage of Figaro.
The dumb kids aren’t going to help us much. So we might as well concentrate our resources on the smart kids.
Why This 14-Year-Old Kid Built a Nuclear Reactor
In his quest to better the world,Taylor Wilson captured the interest of Homeland Security and ended up with radioactive pants.
* The Eye of Sauron has now turned to Prairie View, Texas:
“Texas County’s Racial Past Is Seen as Prelude to Sandra Bland’s Death”
Prairie View was so racist in the past that their government funded a college for black people there 140 years ago, but never mind. In other countries with oppressed minorities, the government funds colleges for them also – there is the University of Gypsies in Romania, Rohingya U. in Burma, etc.
Apparently, white people harm black bodies even when said black bodies string themselves up – a virtual lynching for a virtual age.
If you listen to the tape, the traffic stop goes reasonably well until the trooper asks Bland to put out her cigarette and she refuses. You would think by now that all black parents have had The Talk with their kids and that part of the Talk is that if a cop makes a reasonable request that you do not invite trouble on your head by disobeying him. Failing to do so displays a lack of common sense. Maybe Sandra Bland wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box, but I think this goes beyond that – there is some sort of willful desire to push the limits to see how much you can get away with due to your “racial immunity” and sometimes the racial immunity fails and you reap the whirlwind. All she needed to do was put out the cigarette and 5 minutes later she would have been on her way but she couldn’t bring herself to do that much.
