* What’s so magical about 12 month periods of time? Cultural shifts may take time to sink in and spread out. They act like a ‘Ferguson Effect’ is as a light switch that gets snapped on or off. That black homicide has reached a high pitch of frenzy seems indisputable (Chicago has 72 homicides so far this year, total of 338 shot, just as of the 7th of Feb, almost all black). Ferguson was just a symptom and not a cause of what’s been changing. What it is is the legitimation of a criminal lifestyle as just another way for a black person to support themselves. Trafficking in drugs, shoplifting, burglary, robbery, car theft, occasional carjacking and other forms of low-mentality criminality are accepted by most blacks as being a justifiable lifestyle which is now considered legitimate; the ‘man’ won’t give him anything so a guy has to take it. Their rap music celebrates this; it’s being announced through their music loud and clear if anyone would bother to notice. The violence is a by-product of the thug lifestyle whereby their ‘honor’ has to be protected and they can’t afford to ‘lose face’; unfortunate but the price of doing business. What they’re doing is to try to create a safe space around these forms of criminality, to make them mere ticket offenses in recognition of it being a legitimate lifestyle on a par with others. In this view people like the thug Brown haven’t really done anything wrong or if he did it’s minor and should be given a pass. Standards are being pressed to change and accommodate the new reality of large numbers of blacks living in this gray area.
* This data is congruent with Goldstone’s well received state-centric model of revolution/breakdown, which focuses on the interaction of fiscal duress, intra-elite division, and potential for mass mobilization. The establishment of any city that’s around 1/4 or more black will have include black patrons in uneasy tension with the police and business elite, and of course persistent fiscal problems. There’s a perennial possibility of “creating space for violence”, especially when there’s a similar configuration at the national level.
* It’s the Sixties all over again regarding law enforcement and criminal justice. The babyboomers either don’t remember their own and their parents’ mistakes, they are happy with the results of hundreds of thousands more dead, or they are embarrassed by their mistakes and thus will say nothing. It’s not as if this hasn’t happened before.
Miranda was a serial rapist. Terry v. Ohio was determined because experienced police officers actually can spot a criminal by his body language and actions, locking up criminals is the only thing that keeps them from committing crimes.
If you clamp down on the police you free the criminals. If you support the criminals you embolden the criminals. If you make them victims they will responsibility for nothing and create more criminals. Half of them already believe in “The Plan” and “The Uprising”. The question is not why they are acting like they’re “half devil and half child” it’s why more of them are not joining them in their collective wilding.
Posted inBlacks, Crime|Comments Off on The Ferguson Effect
Ann Althouse predicts a cascade of smart, educated Trump supporters in the coming months. I am kinda sorta in the ballpark of smart and educated–for a teacher, anyway—and came out early for Trump. So I thought I’d take a break from my usual education beat1 and add my voice to the many efforts to explain my people.
Why do I support Trump?
I want another forty year pause in immigration, putting a near-total block on every possible means of legal or illegal access. In part because I’m a teacher who sees no opportunities for far too many of my students thanks to immigration, network hiring, and the constant wage pressure of a never-ending unskilled labor supply. In part because the government is incapable of enforcing the laws so necessary to our national security and well-being, since even the best-intentioned state and federal employees see themselves as providing customer service, rather than ensuring taxpayer and citizen interests.
Finally, I want to turn the flood of immigrants to something less than a sprinkle because the influx is fraying America’s cultural fabric. Immigrants sensibly exploit our cultural and political mores to their advantage, usually without malice or intent to harm. They are supported by legal interpretation of laws that simply weren’t written with any consideration of non-Western cultures. Few of the countries sending us immigrants share Americanvalues.
I’m willing to negotiate. But in order to negotiate, shutting down access through visa restriction and border enforcement (land, sea, or visa overstay) has to be speakable. For the past twenty years, the cosmopolitan elite, as Sean Trende calls it, has deliberately shrunk and shifted the Overton window for immigration by punishing opinion violators with social and economic devastation. Ordinary people like me who come out for immigration restriction could lose their jobs. I don’t mind anyone opposing my immigration goals. I mind the attempts to shut down and ruin those who support them.
I don’t hate immigrants. Like all people, they range from fantastic to criminal to every possible characteristic in between. But their merit is not the issue.
Americans deserve a vote on every aspect of immigration. For thirty years or more, the public has opposed the generous federal immigration policy, rarely getting a chance to register their disapproval—and on the rare occasion when they were given a chance to express their opinion, the courts consistentlyoverturned their effort.
The government and the media also conspire to present immigration as a shiny wonderful gift to the country, opposed only by a few nativists and xenophobes, withholding unpleasant facts and generally operating as cheerleaders and gatekeepers.
At present, 25% of the country support deportation and a wall with no immigration at all, with another 30% supporting a wall and very limited immigration, with deportation optional. Yet no major media outlet, no politician joins Trump in catering to that view. Why not? Doesn’t the media want eyeballs, the politician votes? I’ve concluded that the wall of silence is partly ideological, partly fear of repercussions from the powerful. But I don’t know.
What I do know is that Trump comes along, supports just the tiniest fraction of my agenda, and the media and political world goes wild trying to shut him down. They fail, and in that failure, everything changes.
Immigration wasn’t expected to be anywhere on the horizon this election. And certainly, the media has done everything to keep it out of the debates. The topic barely made it into the GOP debates, on weak-tea issues that barely scratch the surface. We saw Rubio and Cruz arguing not about reducing immigration, but which one had flipflopped on amnesty—which they both supported until quite recently, along with all the other GOP candidates, in the world Before Trump.
On the other hand, immigration hasn’t made the platform much at the Democrat debates, either. No rhetorical flourishes on Republican iniquity towards immigrants, no yammering about the Dream Act, no long tirades on the plight of Syrian refugees. The Democrats looked at Trump’s poll numbers and other recent events (Eric Cantor’s unemployment, for example), and got the hint. They’re worried enough that Trump’s immigration and trade talk might peel away their union vote. No one’s making big promises about immigration on the Democratic side.
I’m well aware that Trump’s actual beliefs on immigration, as reflected in his stump speech and, presumably, his private views, are considerably more welcoming than his satisfactory official policy position, but think it unlikely he’ll do a general election pivot. If he were to win the nomination and pivot against restriction, he’ll lose the general. Full stop. The Donald doesn’t need me to point that out.
He probably doesn’t feel this way, but from my standpoint, Trump has already won. From the moment his polls rose after NBC fired him, after Frank Luntz’s idiotic focus group said Trump crashed and burned, after many experts declared him a nuisance,a clown, a bad deal, a a false conservative and through the re-evaluations of his appeal (but not his chances), Trump has understood the strength of and reason for his appeal. He never worried about the media, didn’t give a damn about elite approval. Every additional day puts the hammer on the media and the political elite who have suppressed any discussion, much less a vote, on the issues so many Americans care about.
So Trump’s willingness to court social and economic punishment has already paid off by giving Americans a chance to show how utterly on board they are with limiting immigration. He has kicked the Overton window several notches back to center, and I’ll be forever grateful.
Excellentanalyses of Trump’s success abound, but they all suggest Trump’s rise is due to a variety of factors. I believe this is wrong.
Without immigration, Trump is nowhere.
His call to “bring jobs back home” wouldn’t be nearly as appealing if voters were worried all those jobs would go to cheap immigrant labor. Yes, his ferocious assaults on political correctness and elite sensibilities are attractive, but more importantly, they are essential for withstanding the media and political assault that followed his proposal. Hit him, and he’ll hit right back, upping the ante and distracting attention from the original charge with increasingly outrageous insults. Had Trump stoically stayed on message, politely trying to explain his way through the outrage, he’d have been gone before Labor Day. I’m delighted that he’s rendered the media helpless in its self-appointed task of destroying people for the wrong opinions, but that’s not why he’s doing so well.
Without immigration, Trump is just a billionaire dilettante politician with good timing, a populist touch and big hair.
This election has been amazing.
For the past six or seven months, I’ve been watching, waiting for Trump to cavil or backtrack on the essentials, holding my breath. And instead of disappointment, I’ve had the ….really, the only word for it is elation…as I watched the frustration, the astonishment, the fury at Trump’s success. Watching George Will’s head explode is—forgive me—exhilarating. Watching the Republicans–some I count among my favorite writers and thinkers–who called me stupid and desperate eat crow time and again after their earlier assurances of the desperate idiocy of Trump supporters and his imminent decline has brought me so much joy.
Posted inDonald Trump|Comments Off on Note from a Trump Supporter: It’s the Immigration, Stupid!
I’ve written about my adoption by the Network and have nothing to change–it’s not something I consider myself part of, per se, but they apparently find my writing helpful. I’m fine with that. I would refer Jamie Bartlett to the above image to reinforce what seems to me to be obvious: the “dark enlightenment” is not characterized by political objectives and has very little unity of purpose.
hbd chick wrote a detailed response to the Jamie Bartlett column which, to the extent I understand it, I agree with. But I would refer someone trying to figure this thing out to read the comments, particularly this one by T. Greer:
The many voices in the ‘dark enlightenment’ do not harmonize. They don’t share the same ideals, aims, or even impulses. They defined by a shared enemy; were this enemy to disappear then so would all talk of a cohesive ‘dark enlightenment.’
…
The major strand that unites the entire community is a willingness to frankly state opinions polite society does not accept (but in many cases once did) and listen to others do the same.
That is, as I say in response, the defining element of the Dark Enlightenment is not political, philosophical, or cultural views, but a shared loathing of “The Cathedral”. Unfortunately, I can’t find one clear definition of the Cathedral that doesn’t involve reading all of Mencius Moldebug, who I don’t really understand and makes me feel Hemingway brusque. I use the term Voldemort View to characterize the most likely reason for the achievement gap; the Cathedral can be thought of as the Canon of Modern Anathema, the official dogma of views that must not be spoken. Some of the views are actual truths, others are opinions. But if they are uttered, the speaker must be cast out into the darkness and, more importantly, economically ruined.
I can think of no common objective the nodes in that diagram share, but we all hate and despise the Cathedral. Our touchstones are not racial purity, male dominance or a derailing of democracy (all objectives I unreservedly oppose) but the expulsion of James Watson, Jason Richwine, and John Derbyshire—whether we agree with them or not. I almost never hate people. But I hate the Cathedral. Probably in part because I trusted it a couple decades ago, and there’s nothing like a reformed ex-smoker. Screw you if you want me to righteously disassociate. Take my ideas on their own merit or don’t, never assume I agree with any idea unless I say so. But if you’re the sort who demands indignant condemnation, it will be my considerable pleasure to deprive you of that satisfaction. In short–but why be short when English has so many words?—I will not disavow on principle.
I suggest that if the “dark enlightenment” is spreading, it does so not because of any distaste for democracy, much less some weird white guy radicalization, but because the general public is slowly becoming deeply tired of the elites getting exercised about exorcising yet another heretic.
And so to Duck Dynasty, a show I vaguely knew of before the fuss. Phil Robertson opines, identity groups cluck, and all the pundits write cynically about the outrage, secure in the knowledge that the machine will roll over and crush Robertson. But then, glory be, the Robertson clan doesn’t just refuse to back down, it refuses to apologize, and for once, the cultural segmentation of American society turns out to be a net positive. Christians everywhere have time to make their displeasure known, and A&E realizes that the money move lies in keeping Phil, leaving GLAAD out in the cold. Truly a great day. And if you can’t understand why an agnostic with no interest in denying the reality of pre-civil rights America would celebrate that outcome, you don’t understand how much I hate the Cathedral.
Patton Oswalt quoted Steve Sailer’s pithy statement “Political correctness is a war on noticing”. A few of his followers disapproved. The resulting twitter fest is very funny, as a couple of Oswalt’s followers try to alert him to the evils of Sailer, and Oswalt remains blithely unconcerned. Money quote, from Oswalt: “I’ve never been scared of ideas. I can hear all kinds & still keep my feet. Think I’ll call this stance ‘diversity’”.
But then you’ve got the earnest, well-meaning Michael Pershan, one of the only actual math bloggers I read. Pershan is Jewish, I think, although he never mentions it on the site (I remember his wedding announcement vaguely), and I mention this only because when I read this twitter mess my first thought was “he’s Jewish, he went to Harvard, he lives in New York City, and he didn’t see this coming?” But I think he’s a particularly observant Jew (not like noticing things, like observing Jewish custom), and until recently taught at a Jewish boys’ high school, so perhaps he doesn’t get out much.
Anyway, he takes gentle issue with a PoC teacher blogger who makes what would normally be called racist statements were he talking about anyone but white folks, and gets “schooled”, literally, in a key plot point: in the identity culture, all whites are the same. Michael Pershan, like many reflexive progressives (the sort who haven’t really thought it through but hey, all their friends are doing it) wants race and gender warriors to accept that there are “good” whites and “bad” whites. He wants to be able to point fingers and shame bad whites, but is troubled that the PoC and women seem to paint all whites and all males as the same. The identity divas will have none of that, and kick him around for a while. Pershan has retired from both the fray and Twitter, which is too bad. Not that I sympathize with his point of view. If you want to walk the identity path, baby, then all whites are equally undeserving of their largesse.
Posted inDark Enlightenment|Comments Off on The Dark Enlightenment and Duck Dynasty
Ted Cruz confirms that “New York values” is code for “Jewish.”When Cruz accused Donald Trump of having New York values, there was a debate about whether this was an anti-Semitic dog whistle. Writing in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik insisted that Cruz’s words were innocent of bigotry against the Jews, arguing, “One thing that is striking is what Cruz did not mean. For decades, centuries, the accusation of being ‘very New York’ or ‘too New York’ or ‘having New York values’ meant, simply and frankly, too Jewish. … For the first time in modern history, a right-wing opportunist has attacked New York values without being even subliminally anti-Semitic.”
Perhaps Gopnik had a point in saying that in the absence of other evidence, Cruz deserved the benefit of the doubt from accusations of using an old anti-Semitic trope. But now Cruz has clarified what New York means in his mind. Again, talking about Trump at recent New Hampshire event, Cruz said, “For him to make this attack, to use a New York term, it’s the height of chutzpah.” Chutzpah is a Yiddish word, so a “New York term” means one inflected by a dialect associated with Jewish immigrants and their descendants. And that can also only mean that Jewish values—sorry, New York values—are inimical to the good conservatives of the American heartland.
About 80% of American Jews vote for the Democratic party, so yeah, I think there’s a disconnect between these particular left-wing Jewish values and the values of white non-Jewish America.
Posted inAnti-Semitism|Comments Off on Is The Phrase ‘New York Values’ Code For ‘Jewish Values’?
It’s a well-known fact that intelligence corresponds to various kinds of life outcomes at the individual level, such as income, education, drug abuse, criminality etc. A little less known is the fact that national average IQs correspond to similar outcomes on the national level. This has been shown by among others psychologists Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, who have found staggering correlations between national IQ and things like health, education, income, crime, corruption, democracy. To give you a rough idea, here are some of the findings,
Educational measures like TIMSS and PISA correlate 0.79-0.92
Number of scientists and engineers correlate 0.61
Measures of per capita national income (GDP, GNP, GNI) correlate 0.51-0.89
Poverty and unemployment: -0.63 and -0.76 respectively
Crime in the form of homicide, assault and rape: -0.21 to -0.82 with distinctly higher correlations for the more accurate measure of homicide
Corruption: -0.27 to -0.68, all but one study above -0.54
Democracy: 20 of 22 measures show correlations around 0.60
Life expectancy: 0.51-0.82, expect for one study that found a negative correlation (possibly a typo)
Anyway, you get the picture. All the basic requirements for modern civilization – democracy, education, wealth, health and (lack of) crime and corruption – are strongly related to national IQs.
IQ 97: The Breaking Point
Seeing these correlations, it’s easy to assume that national IQ averages would correspond to specific degrees of development – that South Korea with an IQ of 107 would be much more civilized than Australia at 98, which in turn would be fairly similar to Russia or some other country at 97. But looking at the stats this is far from the case. Instead it seems like there is a point, somewhere around 97, above which a modern civilization can be maintained and below which things abruptly begin to fall apart. To illustrate this I’ll review some of the correlations mentioned above.
GDP (PPP) Per Capita
You can’t have civilization without money. It pays for education, healthcare, police etc. If we use the national IQs from Photius.com, who appear to have the updated version of Lynn and Vanhanen’s data set (correct me if I’m wrong), and compare them with the GDP/PPP that takes local purchase power into account, we find clear support for the idea of a breaking point at 97 or thereabout. If we exclude oil nations, the top 20 with populations over one million, according to Wikipedia/IMF are,
Singapore, Hong Kong, USA, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Austria, Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, Taiwan, Belgium, Denmark, UK, Finland, Japan, France, Israel and South Korea.
In these top 20, there are nine nations in the 98-99 range, but only two countries below 98 – Israel and Ireland. Both can be partly explained by the fact that they receive plenty of financial aid from USA and the EU respectively. And it’s unlikely that Ireland will stay in the top 20 given its huge public debt and very high unemployment.
And if we look at more “normal” countries with IQs below 98, those without oil or rich friends, we find Slovenia with an IQ of 96 at 24th place, then Cyprus with an IQ of 91 at 26th, and Greece with an IQ of 92 at 27th. And Greece may well have lost this spot as I write this. So at 98 there are plenty of wealthy countries, but at 97 it suddenly seems to evaporate. And this isn’t just about money; if we turn to corruption we find a very similar picture.
Corruption
According to the Corruptions Perceptions Index (CPI), the top 20 countries (again with a population of over one million) most free of corruption are,
Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Singapore, Switzerland, Australia, Norway, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, Hong Kong, Belgium, Japan, UK, US, Chile, Uruguay, France, Austria and Ireland.
Strictly speaking this is 21 nations since Austria and Ireland share the 20th spot and it seemed a bit random to exclude the one or the other. Anyway, we find 10 countries in the 98-99 range – including the top 4 and 6 in the top 10. The only three countries below 98 are Ireland (see above), Chile with an IQ of 90 and Uruguay with an IQ of 96. Again we see how everything is fine at 98, but at 97 and below things go south.
Crime
Turning to crime, so to speak, we find the top 20 countries with the lowest homicide rates (and more than one million inhabitants) according to Wikipedia/UNODC are,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Bahrain, Norway, Austria, Oman, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Spain, Germany, Qatar, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, China, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Australia.
This clearly breaks the pattern since we have five nations in the 98-99 range and just as many low-IQ nations, all from the Arab world. However, if we are looking for a point at which modern civilization begins to crumble, then we shouldn’t look at dictatorships at all. They can keep the murder rate low with social control and oppression, but at in doing so they disqualify themselves as candidates for civilized societies. So if we limit our sample to at least somewhat civilized countries we get a different picture. This is of course a rather subjective method but I think we can all agree that the countries above can’t be a part of it. I have included Hong Kong but excluded China so that’s where I draw the admittedly somewhat arbitrary line. The top 20 at least moderately civilized countries with the lowest homicide rates then become,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Norway, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, Australia, Poland, France, Netherlands, Ireland, UK, Portugal and Serbia (IQ 89).
Again, this became 21 countries because the two last share the 20th place. We find nine nations in the range 98-99 and four countries below that. The anomaly here is Slovenia at 6th place, a country that was also a mild anomaly with 24th on the GDP per capita list. But overall, this confirms the previous findings in that there are plenty nations in the 98-99 range but at 97 or less they are few and nowhere near the top of the list.
Indeed looking at where the sub-98 countries are on these lists we find that they made places 9 and 18 on the GDP list; 17, 18 and 20 on the corruption list and 6, 18, 20, 20 on the homicide list. So they are not only few but mainly at the bottom.
Democracy
Finally, let’s have a look at the Economist Democracy Index for 2012. The top 20 nations with more than a million people are as follows,
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Finland, Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Germany, UK, Czech Republic, Uruguay, Mauritius, South Korea, USA, Costa Rica and Japan.
As you might expect by now, around half of these, nine, are in the 98-99 range whereas only four are below that. Again, Ireland is breaking the pattern, as are Uruguay, Mauritius and Costa Rica with IQs of 90 and 89 respectively. We also find that four of the top five have 98 IQs whereas those below this level are at 11, 15, 16 and 19.
An Index of Civilization
So what happens if we add these measures up? I did this by scoring point in reversed rank order starting from 100 for each measure to create an civilization index. A statistician can probably come up with something better, but it will give a rough idea of the overall picture. The chart below shows the result,
As expected, there is a general pattern of higher degrees of civilization as intelligence increases. But the most civilized countries are all in a cluster with IQs between 98 and 101. Below 98 the level drops dramatically as can be seen by the lack of dots in the upper left part of the chart. The only distinct anomaly left is Ireland which scores 360 points for the 12th spot and, less striking, Slovenia at 20th with 335. Or, given what I’ve mentioned about the Irish economy, it may be Slovenia that is the more genuine anomaly here – clearly not as horrible as it’s portrayed in the Hostel movies. At any rate, combining these factors eliminates anomalies and further strengthens the support for an idea of a breaking point at approximately 97.
Posted inHBD, IQ|Comments Off on IQ 97: The Breaking Point
let me point out that with notably few exceptions, so-called “HBD” (or “human biodiversity”) is a movement that exists largely within the confines of the internet. This, of course, has done absolutely no favors to its dispersal within society at large, because if technology has taught us anything, it is that the anonymity of the web tends to bring out the crazy and stupid in everyone, Surely there was a time when people actually tried to research certain topics before launching a slurry of half-baked and inchoate opinions with an audacious (and entirely unwarranted) degree of self-confidence — not so much because people were any better informed in yesteryear than they are today, but because certain structural barriers posed an impediment to the crazy and incompetent expressing their ideas in lofty places. Now that (most of) these have been safely dismantled, we’ve got nutters from Stormfront sparring tête–à–tête with anthropology professors over elementary facts that anybody can look up in a linguistics textbook. How splendid is that.
This is a most sudden and hilarious change of affairs. Thanks to the almighty web, we’ve got “white genocide” nutters, “red pillers”, devotees of Asatru, Sedevacantists, keyboard warriors, “neo-reactionaries”, social justice warriors, 4chan experts, and bedlamites of every stripe and fashion littering the comments section of every blog about human biodiversity. [JayMan: and we sure do!] They’re not only shockingly ill-mannered and coarse, but many of them have yet to absorb all of the facts about “HBD” that have been settled science for several decades — you try explaining to any of these “Dark Enlightenment” lunatics that single mothers are not responsible for adverse outcomes in bastard children, as is proven by a wealth of longitudinal adoption studies.
I can’t decide whether or not I like it at all, for the life of me — but it’s here to stay!
“not responsible” as in single parenting is not responsible for X, Y, etc.
Also, regarding mass immigration, be careful where you draw your lines.
The whole point of Charles Murray’s Human Acccomplishment is not just that Europeans have accomplished a lot more than other races over the past five hundred years, but that certain subgroups within western Europe proper have proven themselves to be vastly more creative than the others. Just what exactly have the Portuguese contributed to physics recently? Average IQ varies considerably among white European populations, roughly 10-12 points from the highest to the lowest, from the highest to the lowest, as does a host of other psychological dimensions such as conscientiousness, social trust, empathy, etc.
There is no such thing as a singular “white” race, and there never has been — selective pressures operate a lot faster than people often imagine, and so there goes Duchesne’s crackpot Indo-European theory. Yes, human races do exist, but selection pressures are different everywhere in the world, not just on opposite sides of a continental divide. The high accomplishments of Brunelleschi, Marconi, and da Vinci are hardly reflective of the creativity of the typical lazzarone in the mezzogiorno, any more than it is possible to extrapolate directly from sharpeis to lhasa apsos.
There are rational and sensible reasons to advocate for a strict moratorium on immigration to every developed nation (not just Europe and the Anglosphere), but if you seriously want to turn back the clock at this point, why don’t we be consistent here and just kick out every single Sicilian, Irishman, or eastern Slav from the United States, considering the poorer intellectual achievement of these European populations. After all, who are they to sap the creative juices of the master race?
Thank you brother!
I don’t know if there’s just something in the air or what, but “misdreavus” managed to get out everything that has been really irking me all day long. (And believe me, I’m not the only one who felt that way, just today even!) We’ve seen “misdreavus” unload on the nutty garbage that percolates in this sphere before. One time recently was against health/obesity rubbish that is largely taken as gospel. Look, I understand that for the reasons stated above, we are going to have crazies and craziness in the HBD-sphere. And many of the more prominent individuals among these do offer quite a bit of insight, at times. Nevertheless, it often feels like I am doing double duty not just counteracting the standard PC dogma, but addressing the right-wing crazy that rails against it (who are emboldened by the wrongness of the PC liberals to believe that all of their fanciful musing is correct). This in addition to the detestable outright White supremacists in this space (or whatever you want to call yourselves – if you feel comfortable in KKK robes or wearing a Nazi uniform, you fit the mold), who, really, aren’t any more desirable to have around than, say Islamic radicals.
If the facts about heritable human differences are to be ever taken seriously, it needs to be extricated from such utter nonsense, as well as from the mean-spirited sentiment.
COMMENTS:
* HBD tells us that British accomplishment is, to a significant degree, the result of British genes. Similarly, Nigerian, Pakistani and Polish accomplishments (or lack there of) are, to a significant degree, the result of their respective genes. (Not knocking the Poles here, just sayin’.)
So, if you want the kind of accomplishments that Britain produced in the past to keep occurring (and most people do), then the ongoing demographic replacement of the British population should strike you as a very, very bad thing.
So, assuming you like technological progress and stuff like that, HBD does basically say “There are rational and sensible reasons to advocate for a strict moratorium on immigration to every developed nation (not just Europe and the Anglosphere),” misdreavus said it, I believe it.
And if you support a strict moratorium on immigration, your political views on this topic are as extreme or more extreme than the National Front. And let’s not kid ourselves, this is the topic that people are going to judge you by, not your views on petty issues like social welfare or gay marriage.
So, people who believe what misdreavus believes about immigration are already plenty Nazi enough to get a beating from the antifa.
* Telling immoral people to just be more moral without changing the environmental conditions that allow them to produce more children than moral folks simply doesn’t work. The immoral folks will just keep ignoring you. Bill Cosby has been trying this tactic for decades, and it hasn’t worked.
I highly doubt cultural condemnation was ever the driving force preventing large scale single motherhood; rather, the abysmal survival rates for unwanted and unplanned children and high death rates for the poor in general simply prevented these kids from existing and bad planning genes from getting passed on.
If you want to change that, then you have to change the environment in which homeless people feel more confident about bringing children into the world than Harvard grads, not yell at people about how they ought to get married. Even when single mothers do try to get married, they marry the men they find attractive, which doesn’t actually change the genetic situation. Even if you could force them to marry IT guys, or the deadbeats to marry fat women with nice personalities, these still wouldn’t be “stable two parent homes” because the dumb people in the equation are not capable of long-term stability.
* I don’t understand why you think that HBD is needed to justify an ethnostate; to my mind, you merely need an ethnos and a willingness to affirm the principle of national self determination. I don’t recall the Southern Sudanese calling upon HBD to justify their succession; why would the situation be any different for e.g., White nationalists? That said, to some extent, one could draw upon HBD. For example, when arguing against race based immigration policies, you state: “why don’t we be consistent here and just kick out every single Sicilian…”.
Your reasoning: since selective immigration must be justified based on capacity, and since many of a given race are less capable than many of another, one can not justify an exclusively race based policy. But, of course, bioethnonationalists don’t draw upon human capital -HBD, for justification, they draw upon ethnic genetic interest –HBD; they, seeing a nation as an extended biological family, propose to discriminate on the basis of overall genetic relatedness. In doing so, when preferring a low capital Sicilian to a high capital Korean, they exhibit no inconsistency.
Now, I don’t recall what the whole-genome pairwise relations were, but I suspect that Europeans tend to form a nested cluster within the Caucasoid race (which includes indigenous Europeans, many Central/South Asians, North Africans, and Middles Easterners) and that this region of genetic space forms the basis of the “white race”, biologically understood. That is, I suspect that one could carve out of multidimensional genetic space a natural population which loosely overlapped with geographically defined indigenous Europe while excluding many other caucasoid populations. Maybe not. To the extent not then either our bioethnonationalists would need to boot the less related European populations, include the more related non-European (Caucasoid) populations, or take into account other considerations such as culture relatedness. Generally, they do the last. Whatever the case, this is a marginal problem for them — like Israeli Jews deciding who precisely qualifies as a Jew.
So, yes, Stormfronters and others can draw upon HBD to some extent when it comes to justifying their proposed ethnostate. Of course HBD can never justify the principle of national self determination. It can just be employed to construct a defense of the idea and ideal of a bioethnos. Now, while I stand in defense of their position, I don’t back it for various, largely selfish, reasons (e.g., I’m a miscegenator). The position is important to defend, though, because it represents a more or less coherent application of genetic interest-HBD, which, itself, represents, more or less, a logical extension of foundational HBD principles (e.g., Hamilton’s rule).
Also, it’s worth defending because it is one of the core types of applied HBD for which anti-HBD was developed to undermine. Some here might see ethnic-genetic interest-HBD and applications thereof as too dangerous or too problematic — just as many elsewhere see IQ-HBD. If so, I think that’s a mistake.
* HBD largely exists outside of conventional moral horizons; and it has not rigorously developed norms. Misdreavus is correct that this situation represents, at very least, a marketing problem; the attempt to draw lines is appreciated — I could use some guidelines myself; the problem is the manner. HBD is politically neutral; the lines need to be politically neutral. Misdreavus seems to section of the Dark Enlightenment, Neoreaction, and Alt-Rightism; yet these positions are not — at least from my perspective — categorically morally problematic, despite being anti-egalitarian; rather, they suffer from the same problem as HBD regarding morales and norms. Generally, lines should be drawn but drawn in the most politically and morally inclusive way palatable; caution should be taken when labeling “nutters”.
* Jayman and Misdreavus are just trying to create the Cathedral for HBD thinkers. You can wrap it up in judicious morality, you can make it about Us and Them, but at the heart of it, misdreavus was saying man, these people over here need to Shut Up, and Jayman was like, preach it, man! We need to clean things up around here! We can’t have people with the wrong opinions! We need *science*, man!
But to the extent *this* exists, this thing, whatever it’s called, whatever I have a node on, it is little other than a stand against the notion of the unspeakable. So once you violate that, there’s nothing left.
* Judith Harris explained this in her book. Parental treatment affects the child’s behavior temporarily (so long as the parents are able to physically overbear in the child’s life), and it affects the relationship between parent and child. That’s one reason it’s wise to not be a dick to your kids: they will remember it.
Posted inHBD, Race|Comments Off on Jayman: The Problem with HBD, the Dark Enlightenment, Neoreaction, Alt-Rightism, and All That Jazz
Chanda Chisala has been producing pile after pile of nonsense for quite some time. At first, I was content with simply leaving comments at his posts refuting his rubbish because it was rather easy to point out where he was full of baloney. Since then, I’ve been banned by him, mostly for my signature flair.
I intended to continue to ignore his nonsense since it was such obvious rubbish that it didn’t seem to be worth my (now very precious) time. But then I realized the value of having nonsense essays picked apart for the nonsense they are. Rebuttals are highly valuable to skeptical readers who doubt nonsense but can’t quite put their finger on the problems themselves. So, in that service, I write this rebuttal to Chisala’s latest piece.
Chisala’s theory is that different human groups differ in the degree of genetic canalization, and that explains the differences in average IQ between groups. It seems he lifted the concept of genetic canalization from Greg Cochran, who I’ll let describe the phenomenon. From Survival of the Flattest | West Hunter :
Genetic canalization is the extent to which an organism is buffered against the effects of mutations. Waddington said “developmental reactions, as they occur in organisms submitted to natural selection…are adjusted so as to bring about one definite end-result regardless of minor variations in conditions during the course of the reaction”. Canalization can act to buffer against environmental perturbations, and selection for resistance to such environmental noise may also produce resistance to genetic noise. But right now I’m thinking about genetic canalization.
Up to some point, the effects of not too many, not too serious mutations would be buffered: those mutations wouldn’t change the phenotype. In the same way, your typical tractor is not designed to nanometer tolerances: parts can be somewhat out of spec – up to some limit – without messing up performance.
…
Canalization is a product of natural selection. There would be stronger selection for efficient canalization in a species with more genetic load
…
It might explain why load doesn’t seem to have much effect on IQ over most of the range, why we haven’t seen general IQ depression in the children of old men.
There are global differences in brain size. Brain size is certainly related to intelligence, both on the individual level (Pietschnig et al 2015) and (even more so) on the group level (though the both the group level and individual level correlations are less than 1.0). In order for Chisala’s idea to work, these environmental insults must also cause certain racial group differences in brain size.
But, as we know, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that environmental insults can affect brain size (see the Zika virus). And sure, sub-Saharan Africa is loaded with pathogens and other environmental insults. But racial differences in brain size are seen between people of European, African, and Asian ancestry in the United States (from Rushton & Jensen, 2010):
(At this point, of course, we cue the sociologist’s fallacy invoking the poorer environments of Blacks even in the U.S.) But, Chisala is claiming Blacks are more susceptable to environmental insults that supposedly affect IQ – insults that (save perhaps iodine deficiency) have not been shown to actually impact IQ in any way. I’ll go into more detail in a future post, but there is little solid evidence for a negative impact of most supposed environmental insults on IQ.
We hear that poverty can sap brainpower, reduce frontal lobe function, induce the fantods, etc. But exactly what do we mean by ‘poverty’? If we’re talking about an absolute, rather than relative, standard of living, most of the world today must be in poverty, as well as almost everyone who lived much before the present. Most Chinese are poorer than the official US poverty level, right? The US had fairly rapid economic growth until the last generation or so, so if you go very far back in time, almost everyone was poor, by modern standards. Even those who were considered rich at the time suffered from zero prenatal care, largely useless medicine, tabletless high schools, and slow Internet connections. They had to ride horses that had lousy acceleration and pooped all over the place.
In particular, if all this poverty-gives-you-emerods stuff is true, scholastic achievement should have collapsed in the Great Depression – and with the miracle of epigenetics, most of us should still be suffering those bad effects.
But somehow none of this seems to have gone through the formality of actually happening.
Of course, it’s also worth mentioning that brain structure differs detectably by race, as previously discussed:
a new paper, Fan et al 2015, that the details of cortical surface structure of the brain is highly predictive of genetic ancestry. Indeed, as Fan et al put it:
Here, we demonstrate that the three-dimensional geometry of cortical surface is highly predictive of individuals’ genetic ancestry in West Africa, Europe, East Asia, and America, even though their genetic background has been shaped by multiple waves of migratory and admixture events. The geometry of the cortical surface contains richer information about ancestry than the areal variability of the cortical surface, independent of total brain volumes. Besides explaining more ancestry variance than other brain imaging measurements, the 3D geometry of the cortical surface further characterizes distinct regional patterns in the folding and gyrification.
Indeed, an earlier paper from this team (Bakken, Dale, and Schork, 2011) found that this works within racial groups as well, as the case with Europeans (see also the section Intraracial Group Variation below):
In our group’s previous study, we found that area measures of cortical surface and total
brain volumes of individuals of European descent in the United States correlate significantly with their ancestral geographic locations in Europe…See also Brain Topography | West Hunter and Psychological comments: Racial brain differences
Then there is the work David Piffer on polygenetic score. Basically, the known genomic hits to IQ vary in frequency between the different populations highly according to average IQ. From Piffer 2015:
Published Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS), reporting the presence of alleles exhibiting significant and replicable associations with IQ, are reviewed. The average between-population frequency (polygenic score) of nine alleles positively and significantly associated with intelligence is strongly correlated to country-level IQ (r = .91). Factor analysis of allele frequencies furthermore identified a metagene with a similar correlation to country IQ (r = .86). The majority of the alleles (seven out of nine) loaded positively on this metagene. Allele frequencies varied by continent in a way that corresponds with observed population differences in average phenotypic intelligence.
…Going even beyond this, if we follow Chisala’s logic and assume that somehow adverse reactions to the environment are responsible for the size, structural, and performance differences of African brains relative to other groups, then we have another problem: the performance difference between different human groups isn’t a 20th and 21st century phenomenon only – it goes back for the entirety of recorded history.
We assemble a dataset on technology adoption in 1000 B.C., 0 A.D., and 1500 A.D. for the predecessors of today’s nation states. We find that this very old history of technology adoption is surprisingly significant for today’s national development outcomes. Although our strongest results are for 1500 A.D., we find that even technology as old as 1000 B.C. is associated with today’s outcomes in some plausible specifications.
It’s not like the poor performers and the strong performers of today are a new thing. They’ve been poor performers and strong performers throughout history (by and large). Indeed, in sub-Saharan Africa (emphasis mine):
Why this meandering reminiscence of mine about a random ruin in Turkey? Because sub-Saharan Africa has remarkably few ruins for its immense size.
This fact is not well known. It is so hazy in the contemporary mind that Henry Louis Gates managed to sell PBS on a six episode miniseries about African ruins called The Wonders of Africa without, apparently, anybody in PBS management calling his bluff about the lack of wonders that his camera crew would wind up documenting in one of the most boring documentary series of the 21st Century.
As Staffan put it, “we can’t adjust for their entire history.”
In any case, this recent nonsense idea of Chisala, aside from running afoul Occam’s Razor, is his attempt to undercut the rebuttal to the deprivation argument. That is, it is a common argument of blank slatists that poverty and other forms of deprivation are responsible for differences in average IQ and national performance. Aside from emptiness of the whole deprivation argument, as noted above, there is the fact (as pointed out by me in Welcome Readers from Portugal!) that outliers to this pattern of deprivation and IQ all perform in accordance to their measured IQ, not according to their level of deprivation. Poor rural Chinese perform nearly as well in IQ and scholastically as the other East Asian societies do. Citizens in wealthy Arab oil states perform as badly as those in poorer ones which lack oil. I’m sure Chisala doesn’t like this particular uncomfortable fact, so I suspect he concocted his feeble theory in part to try to nullify this unwelcome reality.
And finally, there is the fundamental problem that Chisala doesn’t understand either evolution or the formula that guides it, the breeder’ s equation. There is no reason to suspect that human groups that have been separated for tens of thousands of years in vastly different environments would be the same in all their cognitive and behavioral qualities. In fact, a priori we should expect them not to be, since such equivalence after so many generations of separate evolution is nigh impossible.
I expected most of this to be obvious, which is why I haven’t paid too much attention to Chisala’s posts. But, I may have overestimated both his impact and people’s ability to spot the obvious, hence, this writing.
COMMENTS:
* Thank you for dealing with this person’s drivel. I waded through his first two efforts and felt afterwards that it had been an exceptional waste of my time. He really did not seem to understand, among other things, that there are obvious filters operating when migrations occur. I appreciate that you’ve been willing to sacrifice your time to save that of the rest of us. Also your prose is like crystal spring water compared with Chisala’s muck.
* I think a basic understanding of biology would lead one to think that, a priori, populations separated for thousands of generations in widely different environments would develop significant genetic differences in cognition and behavior between the populations. Real world experience would appear to corroborate this to a great extent. If anything I think the differences between races are greater than a dry mathematical model would probably predict.
* Genes matter, as does culture, as does history, as does free will. They all interplay in a manner that makes it very difficult to give the proper diagnosis and prescription to any given social problem. We all have agency but some of us have more agency due to genetic and cultural factors.
Posted inRace|Comments Off on Rebutting Chanda Chisala
“Every man loves to watch documentaries about the Nazis,” says a friend in Australia. “If there’s one on the tele, I can’t help watching it. I’m fascinated. Appalled but fascinated.”
Chaim Amalek writes: “I would prefer to watch documentaries about the lives of the Gedolei Yisroel (Learned Elders of Israel), but the antisemites at the History Channel refuse to provide any.”
TheOnion: “NEW YORK—The History Channel confessed Monday that it used Nazi footage to fatten its coffers. “The time has come to bring our network’s shameful legacy to light,” History Channel president Warren Brabender said. “Over the past 10 years, more than $300 million in ad revenue has been generated through the airing of Nazi documentaries.” The channel will likely be required to pay reparations to Americans who viewed the atrocities.”
For many years, The History Channel has been dubbed “The Hitler Channel” by wags for the seemingly endless programming devoted to Adolf Hitler and World War II.
So, when I received a copy of the DVD version of “The Third Reich” (A & E Home Entertainment) in the mail last week I wasn’t sure if I would bother to watch it.
How many times can I go down that road?, I thought to myself.
But a friend who saw the three-hour special when it debuted on The History Channel last year told me it was extraordinary so I decided to see if I could make it through another account of the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler.
“The Third Reich” is indeed a spectacular piece of work, a new take on Hitler and the impact of the Nazi regime on average Germans (who may or may not have been aware of the evil that was being done in their names).
Directors Nicole Rittenmeyer and Seth Skundrick have built the documentary around newly discovered footage, much of it home movies shot by Germans before and during the war.
The home movies are combined with recently unearthed tourist promotional films — for the 1936 Olympics and other supposed glories of the Hitler regime — that now have a ghastly ironic tone for what they were not saying about what was going on under the Nazi regime.
“The Third Reich” also includes new angles on the filming of two of the most famous Hitler-glorifying documentaries — “The Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia,” both directed by Leni Riefenstahl — showing us the trickery and stage-craft that helped to embellish the Nazi image.
The documentary is especially interesting on the popularity of the Hitler Youth and the insidious way the Nazis tore apart family life and traditional sexual behavior as they brainwashed kids into believing they were part of a “master race” and were duty-bound to reproduce that species as quickly as possible.
We hear tales of parents who were horrified to learn that teen girls and boys were being pushed into sex so that the girls would become pregnant with “perfect Aryan” babies. When one mother went to a Hitler Youth camp to bring her daughter home, she was told to shut up and go home or face being sent to a concentration camp.
I am with the Daily Caller now. Check out my Washington Gadfly column on bottom right.
The mascot is a chimp; that is a strong rebuke to many powerful conservatives in DC. They are still profoundly embarrassed by the whole thing.
I added the purge to former AEI editor Karl Zinsmeister’s wikipedia page and within hours somebody who had edited lots of his entries took it down. If you want to confirm Zinsmeister is kzinsmeister at the Philanthropy Roundtable. But look up the article about how he deceptively edited an article about him on the AEI website. It came out when he joined the Bush White House.
Tucker Carlson called me and offered me a job after a few great hit pieces I did for them last February. He knew all about the Weyrich thing and thought it was disgusting. But he did not know about Karl Rove getting me fired and Chimpstein taking the fall for him. When I explained it he was even more disgusted with what happened.
But anyway, that is water under the bridge. Now, I feel like I am 30 years old and working for the late New York Post editorial page editor Eric Breindel again. I had never met Carlson or even been in the same room with him or communicated via phone or electronically. But when we met we bonded instantly. It reminded me how I bonded with Eric Breindel.
Plus, I finally listened to Weyrich and forgave all the people who harmed me.
Remember Michael Horowitz? The guy who harassed and yelled at and lied to my father to cover up for Hudson, Weyrich and the White House. I was seething with rage towards him for years. Now, we schmooze all the time now about my stories like nothing ever happened. It is just like before the fight when he took me to a steak dinner and offered to get me a White House job.
Posted inEvan Gahr|Comments Off on The Return Of Evan Gahr
Just as it looks good for a vape company to have Leonardo DiCaprio sampling its product, it looks good for Israel to have Leo walking around the streets of Tel Aviv. It’s great marketing, because it implicitly ties Leo’s brand to Israel’s. It telegraphs to the world that our cultural elite sees nothing wrong with Israel — a message that the country desperately needs at a time when artists are increasingly being called upon to boycott it.
While it’s easy to imagine Leo taking Israel up on the offer (even if it’s just to try to find Bar Refaeli 2.0), it’s harder to imagine others jumping on the bandwagon — or El-Al flight. As Haaretz points out, Best Supporting Actor nominee Mark Ruffalo, who tweeted his support for the people of Gaza during the 2014 war, will probably sit this one out. He might even tweet criticism of the swag bags under the hashtag #Oscarwashing.
But the Israeli marketing move may well appeal to some of the fence-sitting nominees whose politics lie somewhere in between those two actors’. Even if it attracts just a couple of them, that will make it “worth it” from Israel’s point of view.
Posted inIsrael|Comments Off on Here’s Why Oscar Nominees Are Getting Free Luxe Trips to Israel
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
But, as we know, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that environmental insults can affect brain size (see the 