March 30, 2016 Ashley Rae Goldenberg: ‘So this was a thing I guess.’ Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Ashley Rae Goldenberg: ‘So this was a thing I guess.’

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

She posts this picture with Alt-Right vlogger Ramzpaul on March 5 from the latest NPI conference:

From her Twitter bio: “Ashley Rae Goldenberg, AKA Communism Kills. Jew with an econ degree who works in the media.”

She posts about Jewish stuff and she’s a proudly identifying Jew.

Normally, 99% of white nationalists hate Jews and vice versa so the two groups don’t mix much.

* You two will make beautiful Kosher African trans vegan babies together.
* eww, he’s old enough to be your dad! Gross!!
* Oh jesus christ. At this rate the alt right will have more jews and gays in it than the SPLC.
* Hey Ashley, since small government is all that matters, what do you think of Socialist/collectivist Israel?
* Was that at CPAC or NPI? All Jews need to go. Zionism= cosmopolitanism for whites, Nazism for Jews.
* Ashley: My name is in my bio. I post about challah bread, Yiddish, God. You’re kinda dumb if you have to make “connections” to “prove” I’m Jewish.

I’ve been Facebook friends with Ashley on Facebook for about five years. I remember her posts as solid conservative. I didn’t realize she was Alt-Right. When did this happen?

About a year ago, I posted a link to an article on Matthew Heimbach and Ashley Rae, who rarely posts on my threads, wrote that he was not a good person and he did not deserve publicity.

I also remember her posting around this time that she was getting divorced and that her ex-husband was a loser who didn’t work hard.

Goy: “You should look into the phenomenon of Jewish honeypots and write about it. For example it seems that Communism Kills became a honeypot to RamZPaul and his ideological purity quickly collapsed.”

From Rightpedia:

Ashley Rae Goldenberg✡ is Jewish dissident in the alt right who goes by “Communismkills”/”Communism Kills”, which is the name of her blogs. The blogs’ names refer to the Red Holocaust. She also writes articles for several newspapers and blogs.

Education
She was an economics major at George Mason University[1][2] and graduated in 2014.[3]

Politics
Her politics tends to be conservative, libertarian, and nationalist.

She supports Donald Trump and her Twitter photo is a picture of herself wearing a hat with his slogan, “Make America Great Again.”[4]

She has criticized Michael Brown with a poem, although the poem was nowhere near as funny as Morrakiu’s song Violent Mike.[2]

She is a Zionist who defends Israel.[5] However she has less of a mainstream view where the thinks stopping US foreign aid to Israel would strengthen Israel and it is the case that many times foreign aid weakens its recipient country.[6] Unlike her, most Jews think that without foreign countries (especially the USA) to protect Israel, then the angry Muslims would overrun and conquer Israel within days and the surviving Israeli Jews would fire off the Samson Option in revenge.

She has defended Ann Coulter.[7]

Persecution by Marxists
Ashley started her Tumblr blog Communismkills in 2011. Yes it was on Tumblr of all places, which is full of Cultural Marxists/SJWs. The Cultural Marxists stalked up the personal information of Ashley’s entire family, posted it everywhere, and engaged in a real life harassment campaign against her. She cannot even have her phone turned on because of the sheer amount of harassing phone calls. They also posted her school, work, parent’s home and work, and more all of them getting harassment. She and her entire family receive frequent threats of being raped, burned, tortured, and/or murdered. Some Cultural Marxists even do physical violence just like old-fashioned Communists in the 20th century. SJWs will target anyone of any race who disagrees with them.[8]

Dating a white nationalist
From 2011 through August 2012, she dated Matthew Heimbach. This was when Matthew Heimbach was only alt right. The two shared believes in the alt right of opposing Marxism, opposing Cultural Marxism, supporting Nationalism, supporting smaller government, and conservative beliefs. Heimbach also had a gentile girlfriend at the time and his relationship with Goldenberg was not that serious. They eventually broke up. During the few weeks leading up to the first semester of his senior year, Heimbach grew jew-wise and white nationalist. Despite him having a strong dislike of jews as a whole, the two remained on friendly terms although never in a relationship again.[9]

She also went to a Nationalist conference with Ramzpaul and took a photo. Ramzpaul was criticized because she was a Jew.

References

↑ https://insomniaclibertarian.wordpress.com/category/ashley-rae-goldenberg/
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/conservative-blogger-racist-ferguson-poem/
↑ http://fffcuk.tumblr.com/post/103857296417/7453409-ashley-rae-goldenberg-daughter-of
↑ https://archive.is/20160403075652/https://twitter.com/Communism_Kills
↑ “Genocide, apartheid and theft?”—debunking Israel’s harshest critics
by Ashley Rae Goldenberg on July 21, 2014
↑ How ending American foreign aid to Israel would strengthen Israel by Ashley Rae Goldenberg February 25, 2014
↑ http://religiopoliticaltalk.com/in-defense-of-ann-coulter-ashley-rae-goldenberg/
↑ How Social Justice Warriors Are Creating An Entire Generation Of Fascists by Joshua Goldberg (Joshua Goldberg who wrote it is a Jewish neo-national socialist who has written articles for The Daily Stormer and was the Jew who first began altering Ben Garrison‘s artwork into being antisemitic)
↑ Streicher’s Ghost. Matthew Heimbach pursued a Jewess [undated] Destroy Zionism. January 19, 2014. Accessed April 22, 2014.
↑ http://www.dailystormer.com/antifa-protesters-create-effigies-of-richard-spencer-ramzpaul-and-kevin-macdonald/
↑ White Nationalism is a Cult
↑ https://twitter.com/ramzpaul/status/706447852462071808

Ashley mocks Mattress Girl, Emma Sulkowicz✡, who is a con-artist who sent a gang of Cultural Marxists to sexually harass an innocent man because he broke up with her.

Ashley with Ramzpaul at an alt right conference in March 2016

Ashley doing her impression of Hillary Clinton doing a Happy Merchant pose as seen here and here.

Ashley does a bit of mocking of feminism. “I need feminism because having STDs should be a badge of honor not a stigma.” This image has been sent around the internet like she was serious when she actually opposes feminism. The bottom photo in the image is her being serious.

Posted in Jews, Matthew Heimbach, Nationalism | Comments Off

An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Breitbart: A specter is haunting the dinner parties, fundraisers and think-tanks of the Establishment: the specter of the “alternative right.” Young, creative and eager to commit secular heresies, they have become public enemy number one to beltway conservatives — more hated, even, than Democrats or loopy progressives.

The alternative right, more commonly known as the alt-right, is an amorphous movement. Some — mostly Establishment types — insist it’s little more than a vehicle for the worst dregs of human society: anti-Semites, white supremacists, and other members of the Stormfront set. They’re wrong.

Previously an obscure subculture, the alt-right burst onto the national political scene in 2015. Although initially small in number, the alt-right has a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore.

It has already triggered a string of fearful op-eds and hit pieces from both Left and Right: Lefties dismiss it as racist, while the conservative press, always desperate to avoid charges of bigotry from the Left, has thrown these young readers and voters to the wolves as well.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off

What Causes Terrorism?

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments:

* The common denominator is Islam. That is the take home message. No Muslims, little or no terror. So let’s not waste time trying to figure out who among the Muslim population is likely to blow people to bits. Instead, focus on keeping them out of our countries and repatriating those who are already here back to their ancestral desert kingdoms. My God, we dropped an atomic bomb on a civilian population in Japan. How morally difficult would it be to send the Muslim population back home safely?

* I’m late to this thread but IMO this reporter is putting his very career on the line by writing consecutive paragraphs like this:

“When researchers do come up with possible answers, the government often disregards them. Not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for instance, Alan B. Krueger, the Princeton economist, tested the widespread assumption that poverty was a key factor in the making of a terrorist. Mr. Krueger’s analysis of economic figures, polls, and data on suicide bombers and hate groups found no link between economic distress and terrorism.

More than a decade later, law enforcement officials and government-funded community groups still regard money problems as an indicator of radicalization.”

That is way way outside the box of NYT thinking, far beyond the pale of what is acceptable to progressives. They could dump him in a heartbeat for that alone, notwithstanding the protective camouflage of the rest of the article.

* Chris Patten, the chancellor of Oxford University, told students campaigning to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes in January that they might like to “think about being educated elsewhere”.

Roger Scruton’s latest piece in the Spectator is in the same vein:

“To show real respect for our Muslim citizens is to hold them to the same standard as we hold ourselves. And to those who seem to reject that standard we should put the vital questions: do you wish to belong to a civilisation in which women are in the public arena on equal terms with men? Do you wish to live under a shared rule of law, with those whom some of you regard as infidels? And what does your faith tell you about women and how they should be treated? Those questions should have been asked a long time ago and our welcome should have depended on the answers. But that is no reason not to ask them now and respect for our Muslim fellow citizens surely demands that we do so.”

* Scruton has gone full cuck. There was a time when he used to at least hover around the edges of race realism. What’s wrong with saying we like our country the way it is, and don’t want people who will change it? Non-whites will always change it, even if they promise “to live under our shared rule of law”, etc. First it was Americans that bought into this proposition nation nonsense, but now Europeans are also denying that their heritage has anything to do with race.

* Now take a look at the readers top pick, and note 167 Facebook recommendations.

Mark B Toronto 1 day ago
This article clearly — and painfully —avoids the elephant in the room. To say that there are no clues to uncovering potential terrorists is completely disingenuous. We know who *not* to be worried about.

Should we be worried the Amish? Jains? 5-year-old Icelandic girls? No, no, and no.

Most terrorists today are jihadists. 100% of jihadists are Muslims who really believe in doctrines such as martyrdom and Paradise. Beliefs are what matter. Not education, wealth, nationality or skin color. Beliefs.

Is it really so difficult to be this intellectually honest?

Posted in Islam, Terror | Comments Off

How Is Israel So Good At Eavesdropping?

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments:

* BBC is reporting that an Israeli firm was the key player in the unlocking.

* Anybody ever notice that Israel’s economy seems to have a comparative advantage at snooping on other country’s phone calls?

* The fact that we supply Israel with all of our raw data collected on Americans seems to be slowly disappearing from search results. The rest of what Snowden laid out is still acceptable for discussion but not that little tidbit.

* It is only because of anti-Semitism in Europe. For thousands of years, the ancestors of the Israelis traditionally were not allowed to own land or join the military so their only way to make a living was, sadly, electronic eavesdropping.

* Despite the alt-right holding onto it like it’s forbidden knowledge, it’s no open secret the kind expertise Israel has, where it came from, and how they continue to maintain their ability.

* This “War on Terror” has become a bad joke. They won’t profile Muslims or bug Mosques, but they want the keys to crack all the iPhones? Its pretty obvious at this point that this War is a complete fraud, and they’re using terrorism as an excuse to violate our privacy. They haven’t caught anyone before they hit. Not one. They’re not spying on Al Queda, they’re spying on you!

* When a federal judge, against two millennia of Roman, canon, and common law, and against nature itself, ruled that the state must marry two men or two women, Tim Cook was all in favor of it.

But when a federal magistrate ordered Apple to comply with a lawfully issued search warrant, he clutched his pearls and felt the very Republic imperiled.

* Drudge reports that Hamas has hacked Israeli drones for years and used the eye in the sky for among other things, targeting of rockets. So Israeli technical prowess is a bit over-done and over-hyped. What does make Israel different is that they do a good job of commercializing the ideas that smart tech people attacking the enemy come up with in conjunction with the military and tech industry. As various writers covering American intelligence noted, that simply does not happen very much in the US intelligence community, where such efforts are more one-off types rather than rapidly commercialized. Of course the US is a much bigger country than edge-of-the-seat Israel, which has a thin margin of survival.

I tend to think that the FBI is *VERY* interested in the contents of the cell phone, particularly text messages and instagram images and what have you. Why?

TATP.

ISIS has been very successful in the European bombing attacks, and that involved TATP, made from acetone and hydrogen pyroxide. It is not nitrogen based so it is hard to detect, and does tend to explode in “work accidents” hence its jihadi name of “Mother of Satan.” None of the Belgium/Paris bombers had the know-how to cook it up with blowing themselves up. TATP is essentially a crystallized gas — it “explodes” by instantly converting to gas form i.e. 500% of former volume, hence the pressure wave. It is assumed that ISIS had an expert who helped both sets of jihadis cook up and deliver their TATP, without blowing themselves up in cooking it up or in transit.

My guess is that the FBI strongly suspects that the SB people had someone who helped them cook up TATP, for some reason did not deliver it — hence the unexplained two hour disappearance where apparently the couple drove around vainly seeking IMHO a meet-up with the bomb expert. This is someone the FBI **strongly** wants to find hence the court case. Most likely some White Hat hacker found a vulnerability and assisted the FBI for various reasons.

Note that Apple is a major backer of both Obama and Hillary! and you’d expect the Big Foot of Attorney General Lynch to come crashing down on anything impacting the beloved Apple; that this did not happen suggests a real strong possibility that the FBI for once was semi-straight up; after a key ISIS bomb supplier and no one wanted to get the blame if some other attack led to a horrific bomb aftermath. CYA being strong in DC.

And indeed I’d suggest that the key to the whole thing is Lynch NOT deep sixing the FBI request which since Apple is so tied into Obama-land and Hillary-land is weird in and of itself.

* Every phone/computer is vulnerable to hacking. There is no other phone or device that is invulnerable. If you don’t want to be vulnerable, then go live in a shack off the grid like Bernie Sanders circa 1964 (or like the Unabomber) . It is an endless race between the software developers and hackers – hackers find a hole, the developers patch it, the hackers find another hole, etc.

Most other software houses are willing to pay hackers for finding flaws but Apple (for reasons of arrogance or whatever) refuses to do so, so instead a private market for security flaws has developed – if Apple won’t pay, then government security services and criminals will. Apparently a “zero day” exploit (one that no one else knows about so that you can penetrate even a device running the latest patched version of the software) such as the one just used by the FBI can be worth millions on the market. Apple is unique in that they refuse to pay hackers but otherwise their stuff is no worse than anyone else’s and probably better than most.

The only interesting question is whether Apple will be able to figure out what the FBI/Israeli exploit was so they can patch it. If the FBI was not so stupid (the NSA isn’t) they would have hacked into the phone without ever alerting Apple so they could have kept using the exploit. I’m sure the FBI is in no mood to share the exploit with Apple but there are probably enough clues now that Apple will be able to figure out what it was and fix it in the next update. If it is a hardware vulnerability, they can fix it in the next version of the iPhone.

Posted in Israel | Comments Off

Muslims are Jews’ natural allies in Europe – Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

The rabbi (president of the Conference of European Rabbis) writes in favor of inclusivity and diversity in 2014 (though he does not push for these values in the Jewish state of Israel):

Some outlets have reported that moderators on French forums have had to censor up to 95% of all comments, whilst some 25% of those comments have had to be blocked completely. Using the anonymity of the internet, people are expressing a type of hatred that I had hoped extinct.
Perhaps worst of all, I have heard anecdotes of ambulances whose staff are not willing to venture into boroughs of major European cities for fear of their own lives. Every European with even a modicum of awareness can see that if the status quo remains we will end up with a Europe that is vastly different to the Europe we know today.
When I visit South Africa and I see communities sheltering from gangs in walled complexes. When I see private security firms patrolling the streets and ordinary citizens who are afraid to travel to some neighbourhoods, I feel lucky to live in Europe.
For me Europe is inclusive. Cities like London, Milan and Berlin are multicultural metropolises. The cities are enriched by the many and varied communities who live within them, each with their own unique smells, sights and sound who have come together from all different parts of the world. We are naturally inclusive and placid; our societies are open and free.

The rabbi writes in 2015:

As the representative of one of the oldest European minority faiths on this continent, I want to reach out to the diverse Christian communities, the diverse Muslim communities, secular groups, governments and politicians, to help us stop this growing trend of antagonism and conflict. I believe that we have the responsibility to recreate an atmosphere of tolerance and mutual respect between the secular modern state and religious movements, in order to make sure that the experiment, which we call Europe, is not going to fail.
Islam is practiced peacefully by millions of people who are calling Europe their new home. The ones to be targeted, if we want to live without fear of attacks such as who perpetrated the attacks in Paris, are extremists. The distance between radical Islam as practiced by Isis, Hamas and Al Qaida and mainstream Islam, is as far as the distance between moderate nationalism and National Socialism.
Instead of alienating the great majority of peaceful Muslims, who live peacefully in Europe, with broadside attacks against the soft target religious symbols of Islam such as halal, and the burka. Radical Islamic preachers, websites, movements and cells should be diagnosed, isolated and destroyed. The cheap point scoring of the extreme right against Muslim immigration not only fails to solve the problem, but pushes the moderate immigrant into the claws of the extremists.
We have to isolate and stop the extremist among us and we propose that the EU and the member countries work to create a core set of basic European values all faiths can subscribe to, similar to the program which has been released as the “Manifesto for Combating Religious Extremism” by the Conference of European Rabbis. Religious leaders must take the lead and they have a unique responsibility to preach an ideology of peace and tolerance.
There is no hope for humanity, if we do not tolerate each other, and if we do not respect each other’s differences. Europe is not going to be saved by European countries adapting Middle Eastern practices of intolerance towards minorities, but by introducing new Europeans to the values of pluralism and mutual respect, expelling from our midst those voices which call to destroy our common home.
The voice, which calls the faithful in a mosque to bomb planes, and the voice, which calls on ending freedom of religion in Europe, are both equally dangerous to the future of Europe. Let us stop both trains and tell the people to step out engage in dialogue and respect each other.

I wonder if the rabbi has ever read the Torah? I don’t recall much in there promoting the virtues of inclusion and tolerance.

Terrorism is just the tip of the spear of the Islamic threat to the West.

Posted in Europe, Islam, Jews | Comments Off

The 24 Types Of Anti-White

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

Posted in Whites | Comments Off

Conservative Female Media Ask Trump to Fire Campaign Manager

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

Mike Cernovitch tweets: “The gender card is being played. It’s wrong, but we are used to this. Now “conservative” women are doing it!”

REPORT: Donald Trump should immediately fire Corey Lewandowski following the battery charge lodged against his campaign manager for allegedly roughhousing journalist Michelle Fields, a group of 15 conservative female writers are urging.

In an explosive letter delivered to the Republican presidential front-runner on Wednesday, 16 women, considered key members of the right-leaning female media elite, write:

“The press is to have an adversarial, yet civil approach to those in, or running, for elected office. Never in this line of work is it acceptable to respond to reasonable and legitimate questioning with use of physical force.
“The photographs, audio, videos, and witness accounts documenting the treatment of Michelle Fields by Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, are inexcusable and unprofessional. Donald Trump should immediately remove Lewandowski from his campaign.”

The letter goes onto say that the Trump campaign has stated Lewandowski will not be fired even if he is convicted.

“However unlike the Trump campaign, we believe in making a statement on the record to clearly highlight the difference between right and wrong,” it concludes.

The note is signed by:

Dana Loesch (Radio America, Blaze TV); Katie Pavlich, (Townhall, Fox News); Meghan McCain, (America Now Radio, Cosmopolitan, Fox News); S.E. Cupp, ( New York Daily News, Glamour, CNN); Mary Katharine Ham, (CNN, The Federalist); Christine Rosen, (New Atlantis, Commentary); Christina Hoff Sommers, (American Enterprise Institute).

Bethany Mandel, (The Federalist, Acculturated); Emily Zanotti, (American Spectator); Elisha Krauss, (AM 870 The Answer); Karol Markowicz, (New York Post); Kristen Soltis Anderson, (Washington Examiner); Mona Charen, (Ethics and Public Policy Center, Creators Syndicate); Sarah Rumpf, (freelance); Brooke Rogers, (National Review); and Mary Chastain, (Breitbart).

Posted in Donald Trump | Comments Off

Intelligence Is Largely Heritable

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

Dr. James Thompson writes: Differences between countries with the lowest and highest ability levels are large. For example, in TIMSS 2011, 4th grade Yemeni pupils achieved 209 student assessment study (SAS) points, whereas South Korean pupils achieved 587 SAS points. If SAS points are converted to IQ points, the Yemeni would have an IQ of 56 and the Koreans would have an IQ of 113, a difference of 11 years of schooling. Psychometric IQ studies show similar results. For example, Malawi has an estimated IQ of 60, whereas Singapore and Hong Kong have estimated IQs around 108, a difference that translates into SAS≈233 and 555 or 16 years of schooling.

When authors give ability differences as “years of schooling” this always provokes the response that countries with lower levels of ability need more schooling. It really means “despite schooling, as if they permanently required 16 more years of schooling”. The main reason that intelligence is not a popular subject is that it has been shown not to be very malleable. At a rough estimate, anyone of IQ 93 and below finds it difficult to earn good wages.

Comments:

* My precise prediction is that such research will be funded in China and will produce the result that (almost) everyone knows to be true but many dread to admit.

That will be followed by a wonderful display of anti-racists saying you can’t believe any result published by Chinamen.

* Anatoly Karlin: My impression is that at least 80% of the US B-W difference is due to genetics, probably 90%, and possibly even all of it. A larger percentage of Blacks live in urban areas, which is one of the main factors found to be reliably associated with higher IQs, and they actually score relatively lower in “culture fair” tests than whites.

Internationally, I would put it at 50% – at least for the most extreme case, the difference between Sub-Saharan Africa and the developed world. The logic is pretty simple: The IQ average there is 2.S.D below the developed world, versus the 1S.D. difference that is the B-W gap within a single developed country. OECD adult skills surveys results for Korea imply that there is an approximately 1.S.D. increase associated with transitioning from being a Third World country to the First World. Naturally, the genetic component will be larger for most regions, other than the most destitute ones such as SSA and to a lesser extent the Indian subcontinent. It is an irony that the more the world develops in general, the larger the extent to which purely genetic factors will start explaining national IQ differences.

If it remains the case that the progress of science tends to privilege more accurate models of reality versus less accurate ones, I would expect this figure to creep steadily up. Razib Khan and Charles Murray are on the record expecting a revolution in the genetics of IQ in the next 5 years, so I think a rise from 20% to 30% or even higher is plausible.

Posted in IQ | Comments Off

The Heartbeat Of Crime

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

Dr. James Thompson writes: The conclusion was that adolescents with low resting heart rate were more likely to go on to commit crimes, including violent crimes, possibly because they did not get too fussed when attacking others. Cool, calm, collected and lethal. All this takes place in the city of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil…

Conclusions: Low resting heart rate predicted violent and non-violent crime for males, and was cross-sectionally associated with crime for females. Biological factors may contribute to individual propensity to commit crime, even in a middle-income setting with high rates of violence…

The key finding of this study is that lower heart rate was a robust predictor of male violent and non-violent crime.

So, something raises the level of violence in Brazil 30 times above Sweden, and 21 times above England and Wales. In the grizzly list of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world, Brazil accounts for 21 of them and Pelotas, violent as it is at 19 homicides per 10,000, is not one of them…

First, there is some evidence that heart rates vary by racial background…

From Richard Lynn’s The Global Bell Curve:

Statistics on race differences in crime indexed by rates of imprisonment are given by Telles (2004, p. 169) who reports that in Sao Paulo in 2000 blacks were 5.6 times over-represented in the prison population, while mulattos were 1.5 times over-represented, as compared with whites. Further statistics on race differences in crime were collected in the 1988 National Household Survey, a study of a representative sample of approximately 80,000 citizens. The survey asked the respondents whether they had been assaulted during the last year and if so, by whom. The results have been analyzed by Mitchell and Wood (1998), who calculated that compared with whites, mulattos were 1.2 times more likely to have been assaulted and blacks 1.5 times more likely to have been assaulted. Most of the assaults were perpetrated by acquaintances or police. In regard to assault by acquaintances, mulattos were 1.2 times more likely to have been assaulted than whites, and blacks were 1.9 times more likely to have been assaulted. Because most people’s acquaintances are of the same racial group as themselves, this indicates that assault rates are highest among blacks, lower among mulattos, and lowest among whites. In regard to assaults by police, blacks were 2.4 times more likely to have been assaulted than whites. There was no difference between mulattos and whites in the reported rates of assault by the police. The results suggest that police violence is much more strongly directed against blacks than against whites and mulattos.

Convictions for homicide in 2000 in Sao Paulo have been reported as 56.5 per 100,000 population for whites and 94.4 per 100,000 for blacks and Mulattos combined (Kilsztajn et al., 2000). The percentages of the races convicted of homicide for 2003 for the whole of Brazil have been given by Lopes (2006) and are shown in Table 4.10, together with their percentages in the population in 2000. It will be seen that the Asians have the lowest homicide rate at 0.4 percent drawn from 1 percent of the population; whites also have a relatively low homicide rate at 39.7 percent drawn from 53 percent of the population. Mulattos have a relatively high homicide rate at 49.9 percent for 40 percent of the population, while blacks have the highest homicide rate at 9.8 percent drawn from 6 percent of the population.

Posted in Blacks, Crime | Comments Off

There Are Probably No Cognitive Benefits to Bilingualism

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Luke Ford

Razib Khan writes: About one week ago I wrote about bilingual education, and I admitted my mild skepticism about the research about the benefits of bilingualism. A friend emailed me and wondered why I was only “mildly skeptical.” Partly I didn’t want the comments to get sidetracked, but recently friends on Facebook have started to get exercised that Ron Unz is running for the Senate, and how bad he is for not giving the children the opportunity to be bilingual. And of course all the research that confirms how great bilingualism is referenced.

So here’s an article from last month that my friend sent me. I’ll quote the appropriate section, you’ve seen this movie before, The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism: For decades, some psychologists have claimed that bilinguals have better mental control. Their work is now being called into question:

But a growing number of psychologists say that this mountain of evidence is actually a house of cards, built upon flimsy foundations. According to Kenneth Paap, a psychologist at San Francisco State University and the most prominent of the critics, bilingual advantages in executive function “either do not exist or are restricted to very specific and undetermined circumstances.”
Paap started looking into bilingualism in 2009, having spent 30 years studying the psychology of language. He began by trying to replicate some seminal experiments, including a classic 2004 paper by Bialystok involving the Simon task. In that task, volunteers press two keys in response to colored objects on a screen—for example, right key for red objects, left for green. People react faster if the position of the keys and objects match (red object on right half of the screen) than if they don’t (red object on left). But Bialystok found that twenty Tamil-English bilinguals from India were faster and more accurate at these mismatched trials than twenty English-speaking monolinguals from Canada. They were better at suppressing the location of the objects and focusing on their color—a sign of superior executive function.
“It was a really exciting finding and one that I thought would be easy to study with my students,” says Paap. “But we just couldn’t replicate any of the effects.” After years of struggling, he published his results in 2013: three studies, 280 local college students, four tests of mental control including the Simon task, and no sign of a bilingual advantage.“That broke the dam,” he says. “Others started submitting negative results and getting their articles published.”
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, was one of them. In two large studies, involving 360 and 504 children respectively, he found no evidence that Basque kids, raised on Basque and Spanish at home and at school, had better mental control than monolingual Spanish children. “I am a multilingual researcher working in a multilingual society,” says Duñabeitia. “I’d be very happy to see an advantage for bilinguals! But science is what it is. We find no difference and we have replicated it several times, in older adults, kids, and young adults at university.”
…
For example, one group of researchers analyzed 104 abstracts on bilingualism that were presented at scientific conferences. They found that 68 percent of abstracts that found an executive-function advantage were eventually published in journals, compared to just 29 percent that found no advantage. This publication bias, a common problem in psychology and science as a whole, means that the evidence for the phenomenon seems stronger than it actually is.
But Paap doesn’t think much of the published evidence either. He found that a bilingual advantage only shows up in one in six tests of executive function, and mostly in small studies involving 30 or fewer volunteers. The largest studies, involving a hundred or more, all found negative results.

The proponents of bilingualism as a cognitive benefit have reacted angrily. Read the whole thing. But it’s probably not a real strong effect if there is any at all. Just another battle in the replication wars….

Comments:

* I always get annoyed a bit when some Tiger Mom or Dad goes on about the supposed “IQ-raising benefits” of early total immersion in a second language. They just don’t seem to be able to be upfront and admit that they do this for their kids, because “it’s cool” for their kids to start speaking another language in front of their peers and show off.

Posted in Health | Comments Off