Slate: A Conversation With Neil Strauss: “I look back on The Game and cringe.”

By Christina Cauterucci:

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Critics of The Game have waited a decade for Neil Strauss to issue a mea culpa. Plenty of readers saw his 2005 embedded investigation of the pickup-artist industry as an instruction manual on how to cajole beautiful women into bed. Strauss did, too: He seemed to morph from journalist to self-help guru, following up The Game with a step-by-step guide to best practices from the “seduction community” and a fee-based coaching system to teach eager men his sex-securing tricks, with regular “field reports” of each new notch on his bedpost.

Now, as Strauss puts it on his website, “The Game has changed.” With a new book, The Truth, and a new set of self-help materials, Strauss is re-branding himself as a relationship authority. After his infidelity almost cost him his then-girlfriend, now-wife Ingrid, he was compelled to face the demons that drove him to seek sexual novelty in place of true intimacy. This reckoning took him to a French orgy, a masked Las Vegas sex party, and a Tantric puja in Northern California, all described in graphic, field-report-worthy detail in his book.

The Truth also contains some real talk about the roots of Strauss’ insecurity and me-versus-them outlook on women. His father was an amputee fetishist (!), and his mother smothered him in what his therapist deems “emotional incest” (!!), leaving him with internalized trauma and a “love avoidant” disposition. By the end of the book, after lots of expert help, Strauss has rejected non-monogamy and convinced himself and Ingrid that he’s kicked the pickup addiction for good.

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Grantland: ‘Game’ Met Match: Pick-up Artist Godhead Neil Strauss’s Subtle, Surprising New Book

Steve Sailer wrote in 2009:

The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

Technically, it might seem highly possible that somebody named “Teresa Wiltz” has naturally straight hair and is just writing out of a disinterested interest in the topic. But, decades of reading female journalism at its most passionate suggested to me that Ms. Wiltz’s own looks would turn out to highly germane.

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By Lux Alptraum:

To begin with, I should tell you that I did not expect to like this book.

I was a single twentysomething when The Game was published. For years, the only thing I knew about Neil Strauss was that he was responsible for ushering concepts like negging and peacocking into the cultural lexicon. So when I got word that the man who’d popularized PUAs had written a new book that involved him exploring the world of swinging and attempting to create his own harem, I was underwhelmed…

The weekend that I spent reading The Truth, I was sorting through some emotional turmoil of my own. Nothing on the order of what Strauss went through — no one ended up in rehab or moved to San Francisco to found a sex commune — but my domestic bliss was nevertheless feeling shaky.

I have a terrible track record when it comes to picking partners. I used to make a joke about relationship red flags: For some people, an emotionally distant partner is a red flag; for others, it’s one who’s overly needy. For me, the merest flicker of attraction is an automatic warning sign. If I want to sleep with you, I probably shouldn’t. My dating history is filled with bad ideas: relationships that I knew were going nowhere, but for which I nevertheless stuck around; people whom I dreamed I could will into loving me, despite their obvious emotional shortcomings.

But my current relationship is nothing like any of those. Early on I knew that I had found something really special because — for the first time — I finally felt able to commit, with no qualifications. I didn’t feel like I was waiting for something to change; I didn’t feel like one of us needed to be fixed or to grow up or to be more present or any of that. I was, for once, content with the status quo.

But two and a half years in, something inside of me started to shift. I could say it was about one of the superficial details that worked its way into our arguments, but really it was something buried inside me that had finally started to crack.

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WP: 10 years ago, Neil Strauss was a pickup artist. Now he’s a committed husband.

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I notice that the plainer the woman, the more threatened she is by game. On the other hand, hot chicks seem stimulated and intrigued by it. I’ve never met a woman who was an 8 or higher who hated game. The hotter the chick, the more she approved of game. The plainer the chick, the more she was threatened by game.

The hotter the woman, the less likely she is to be a feminist. I’ve never met a hot feminist. I’ve never met a happy feminist.

You can usually tell the tone of a woman by looking at her picture. Ugly and short men also tend to have a chip on their shoulder, but looks don’t play as important a role for men as they do for women.

You can usually tell the tone of a woman by looking at her picture. Ugly and short men also tend to have a chip on their shoulder, but looks don’t play as important a role for men as they do for women. It seems like many, perhaps most, female writers are driven by resentment. Hot women have other things to do aside from write such as take tribute from men. They coast through their young life on their looks.

Every new article about Neil Strauss that I’ve found over the past few days has been by a woman.

Lisa Banos writes:

If you’ve been to a bar or club at any point in the past 10 years, you’ve probably met them: followers of “The Game,” Neil Strauss’s 2005 bro-bible for seducing women. These men might “neg” on women, putting them down while trying to pick them up, or otherwise position themselves to have the upper hand in a conversation.

“To me, the book was about male insecurity,” or fear of women, Strauss says in a phone interview.

Now, with 10 years of perspective — which included cheating on his model girlfriend and a trip to rehab for sex addiction — he’s back with a different message. If “The Game” was a book about behavior, Strauss says his new book, “The Truth,” is about beliefs — “which are much harder to recognize much less change, but the results you get, you can keep for life.”

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The Game At Ten

The best way to understand the interviewer (Kathy Gilsinan) is to see her picture:

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From The Atlantic:

Strauss: That’s exactly it. And I’ll go one deeper. To me, the biggest shock of my life, was how, myself who wrote The Game, Robert Greene who wrote The Art of Seduction, Tucker Max, who, well, is Tucker Max—what do we all have in common?

Gilsinan: What?

Strauss: We all have narcissistic mothers. So what happened? What happens when you grow up with your identity being squashed by this mother who never sees you but only sees herself, is you grow up with a fear of being overpowered by the feminine again.

Gilsinan: Whoooaa.

Strauss: Right? And so at that level you realize The Game was about being in this power relationship—ok, you’re safe because you’re in control, you’re not being vulnerable. Even the relationships you get in are maybe with people you feel safe with because you’re in control. There’s no way you can have intimacy from that. So when I would do seminars [about The Game], I would say, let me ask you, how many people here were raised with a narcissistic or dominant mother figure? Every time it was about 80 percent of the room. And then when you start to realize, ok, this has nothing to do with the world, it’s just me, I’ve got to get over it—that’s when everything kind of changes.

Gilsinan: How did you come to that realization? Was that a product of therapy?

Strauss: Yeah. I’ll never forget the moment. I met a great woman and we were in a great relationship. And I cheated on her. I got caught. And I felt so bad. I thought I was a nice guy, I really did, you know? And I thought, how can I break the heart of, how could I hurt somebody who loves me and be so selfish? So I checked into sex addiction rehab. And that’s what The Truth is about. Even when I was there, I was cynical about it. Of course there was a dominant therapist to quote unquote emasculate me, so of course it was rough for me. And then there was a moment where I told her the story of my childhood. And she said, “Well no wonder you can’t be in a relationship.” And I said, “Why?” And she goes, “Because you’re in a relationship with your mother.” When she said that a whole wind blew over me. It was like a movie. All of a sudden your whole past story just snaps into line and I saw who I was. Before that I really thought I was healthy, I had parents who loved me, they were never divorced, I had a good childhood, and all of a sudden she saw the story I didn’t. And that was the moment everything changed.

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Steve Jobs – Psychopath

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Seems to me Jobs was a high-functioning Psychopath. Most psychopaths never see jail, and many do very well for themselves in business life. I think if you’re a psychopath with a high IQ, you have what it takes to do well in business life.

I think a social marker for the psychopath might be if those around him boast or complain of his “reality distortion field.”

I think that explains Jobs stealing from Woz when he didn’t have to, intimidating his girlfriend when he didn’t have to, berating Apple employee’s when he didn’t have to.

Distorting reality isn’t a gentleman’s game. You have to be willing to get in there and get your hands dirty psychologically every day. Those who revel in it are probably psychopaths.

Whether it’s Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, George Patton, or Hillary Clinton, they all revel in pounding out reality for the consumption of their devoted minions and beyond, and many of the intelligent ones actually get things done.

* I’ve noticed that the casting in the recent films for Wozniak’s character tends toward the cretinous in contrast to the casting for the Jobs role. I remember Wozniak being an articulate, inspiring and likable Apple spokesman back in the 1980′s, not some socially awkward nerd. For many of the early years Woz was the public face of Apple much more than Jobs.

* There’s an interaction effect between early sabermetrics and steroids: by emphasizing the value of homers and walks, it encouraged players to juice. It’s not a coincidence that the Oakland franchise was a historical leader in both stats and steroids.

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Was 1960s Feminism A Front?

I’ve never met a hot feminist. I’ve never met a happy feminist. Feminists are invariably ugly and bitter.

Steve Sailer writes:

If you look closely enough, you’ll notice lots of examples of this Jewish tactical genius for transmuting intra-Jewish hostilities into rage against society as a whole. (Society as a whole, of course, never figures out what’s really going on). The Jewish Socialist wife was secretly resentful of her Jewish Communist but patriarchal husband for forcing her to keep an elegant home (at least, in the telling of her Jewish radical feminist daughters), and pretty soon nice Lutherans in Duluth are feeling vaguely guilty about how they somehow must have oppressed this poor rich woman in New York City.

Similarly, the social divide between German Jews and Eastern European Jews in America (which was exemplified by problems the Eastern Jews had in getting into German Jews’ country clubs) has been forgotten due to American Jews adopting the myth that their great-grandfathers really wanted to get into gentile country clubs.

Along somewhat similar lines, Henry Kissinger’s conclusion after years of negotiating with Israeli politicians was that Israel’s foreign policy was basically a front to give Israelis somebody to hate besides each other. Considering the horrific toll taken by civil wars in neighboring Syria and Lebanon, this strategy of redirecting animosities outward seems prudent.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Assuming that she hasn’t twisted her perceptions of her mother’s experience to fit her own ideology, I’d argue that there’s nothing particularly unique about individuals starting from their own personal gripes and rationalising them into a critique of society.

I think that the best counter to this is to point out that her personal experiences make her biased and ill-equipped to dispassionately evaluate our society on this issue.

* The Jews who came to the US were practitioners of a conservative, backward, patriarchal religion.

Yup, that conservative, backward, patriarchal Communist International in Vienna, that well known religious backwater.

Jews brought their radicalism with them. They learned nothing new in America, other than how easy it is to roll a high-trust, goy society.

* IMO a secondary motivation, after “screwing the goyim,” was ugly Jewish women not wanting their men to chase shiksas.

* But wasn’t the anglo puritan feminism of the 1870s far different in nature from the radical jewish/atheist feminism of the 1960s?

Anglo feminism gave us prohibition, a very conservative and reactionary movement while jewish feminism gave us the bra burning 60s sexual revolution, a very liberal and progressive movement. It’s almost as if they were two very different feminist movements supported by two very different ethnic groups, but hey that would be noticing, and as we all know noticing is a crime.

* “This is the kind of trash that make guys like David Brooks ashamed to admit they read you. This is why you will never be respectable. Your odd allergy to Jews, which makes you say garbage things like this, with no basis in reality.”

Actually a universal trait but more amplified among Jews because of their power and personality.

We can see it in Coates whose main troubles growing up were black bullies but who turned it into a case of black ‘bodies’ being violated by the Eternal White Man(or, to put it more brilliantly, a man who thinks he is white).

We also see it among Hispanics. There are lots of tensions among various groups in Mexico, but they channel their frustrations out on the yanqui. So, white Hispanics turn into people of color, and non-white Hispanics project their resentment of white elite Hispanics onto gringos.

We also see it among American conservatives. They feel a lot of repressed rage about other Americans but dare not say anything lest they be accused of bad thoughts. So, their rage is directed outwardly at foreign nations.

* For example, the story of Hannukah is traditionally a tale of noble Jews throwing off the irrational, antisemitic hatred and oppression of the Greek Seleucids and re-establishing their religion. However modern scholarship is revealing that the real story was almost certainly a conflict between Hellenizing urban Jews and conservative rural Jews, with the Seleucid powers intervening to stop the bloodshed.

This sort of internecine Jewish warfare is more clearly recorded in Josephus’s Jewish War, which describes the various factions within Jerusalem literally slaughtering one another while the Romans waited outside to take the city.

There is indeed a strong element of ideological purity, fanaticism and intolerance in the Old Testament. It was transmitted to Christianity and Islam, giving rise to crusaders and jihadis, and perhaps even to the disease of ideology itself.

So no, Sailer is not making things up.

Jews have given a lot of great things to the world, but nobody bats a thousand all the time. There are elements of Jewish culture that bear investigation.

* Jews were way over-represented among the ranks of early 20th-century communists as well as radical feminists. Jewish radicalism is as kosher as matzoh ball soup.

I think that communism and feminism were, in part, crypto-Jewish movements (like today’s neo-conservativism) that were designed (perhaps subconsciously) to upset the staid, Christian status quo while they provided entry and influence for Jews in cultures where Jews were excluded. And it worked!

* Gloria Steinem was a director of the Independent Research Service in the late 50′s which was actually a CIA front. She was also in their empty as a delegate to the 1959 World Youth Festival. Rather suspicious, much like the CIA being exposed as having secretly promoted the modern art movement. Betty Friedan, in turn, had a strong communist past. Some conspiracy minded people have claimed that feminism was really a capitalist trick to harness and tax twice the number of people as was previously possible as well as lowering wages overall. Lots of strange ducks seem to have gathered together in the early days.

* A Jewish historian made the comment that many Jews – like Einstein – retained their sympathy for Soviet communism after WW 2, primarily because it was seen as a “punishment” for the Germans and Eastern European antisemitism.

Certainly, many Jews became Communist during the 1933-1945 period because Stalin and the Communist Internationale were seen as the most reliable anti-Nazi in politics.

* More dangerous is Jewish tendency to Germanize or Nazify all their rivals, enemies, and perceived enemies.

So, whenever they hear criticism of Jews or Israel, it’s WW II and Holocaust all over again.

* Jews are the impressionable sheep of humanity, always shucking off their religion to fall under the sway of the crafty Gentile’s ideas (look how little Judaism is left after a mere 4000 years!).

* In general, WASP leftism and Jewish leftism aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re complementary. The WASP Puritan says, “We are all sinners!” while the Jewish leftist says, “You are all sinners!” Two very different philosophies, same result.

That’s not to say that WASP liberals’ schoolmarm piety is always a high-minded thing. There’s a strong element of passive-aggressive status-signalling, same as in the days when Calvinists strove to demonstrate their electness. Meanwhile, Jewish anxiety about the gentile majority’s ethno-cultural norms is as natural and understandable as it is anachronistic and obnoxious.

I think Steve is less interested in casting blame on this or that group than he is in understanding how things work and offering constructive criticism where it’s due. I don’t see why a group as culturally important as the Jews should be exempt.

* I suspect that the question that troubles David Brooks while he’s reading me is not whether he respects me, but whether he respects himself.

* A case makes itself that the USA has a “hostile elite” with Jews being the most significant subgroup thereof. Aggression, ethnocentricism, and talent, combined with their influence within the elite, should make Jewish power a subject of discussion, at least.

The thing is, it’s not at all. Nary a peep. No one, but no one, talks about it in a respectable medium, despite its obvious importance. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to talk to a politically-aware non-Westerner (not just Muslims), many will mention Jewish power when discussing America readily.

(On CNN, only one person [Rick Sanchez], a host, has ever implied anything near the above and he was promptly fired. He was a Cuban-American.)

The Jewish issue is the Great Taboo in the USA, and political taboos are a form of lying. “Live not by lies,” as Steve’s original blog said proudly at the top.

* Feminism: the modern day ideology of the girl who refuses to grow up.

Of course women never used to be forced to fully grow up. They used to move from children’s things when they were children straight to children’s things when they were full time mothers, except the rich who were waited on hand and foot anyway.

It’s obvious that girls reach maturity much earlier than boys, but organisms that reach maturity quicker tend to end up less mature once all growth is done.

After all, girls get taller quicker but end up significantly less tall in the end.

Perhaps there’s a naturally large fraction of women for whom the modern day requirement to act in a certain adult manner is an unfair modern imposition that they’re unsuited for? And feminism is a coping mechanism against this trauma.

It certainly explains a lot of the actions of feminists, their high incidence of mental illness, odd sexual attitudes and tendency towards pre-adolescent attention seeking behaviour.

* From his biography on The Einstein College of Medicine web site. The pediatric department is named after him, Lewis M Fraad Depart of Pediatrics. The notable fragment from the bio:

“Dr. Fraad collaborated on Dr. Spock’s landmark book “Baby and Child Care”

I like to look at feminism from a biological perspective. I do this because I want to and not out of any particular data patterns other than my own particularly biased viewpoint.

To me, the driving aspect of feminism is “Keep those creepy betas away from me.” Cisheteropatriarchal hegemonic monogamy has this particular rule that bugs the crap out of 80% of the women, “For every boy there is a girl”. Since Pareto’s rule says about 80% of men will not be desirable alpha-ish fellows, then 80% of the women would have to “settle” for them.

The issue for Jewish Women is their men. Most of them will fall outside of that 20% when compared to the global population of men. Jewish female sexual dysfunction is famous, noteworthy, the subject of jokes, a cliche: Jewish Bed Death. “What is Jewish Doggy Style?” “He sits up and begs; she rolls over and plays dead.” It is the stuff that the manosphere, particularly Roissy and Rollo write about: Loss of Genuine Desire leading to Dry Vag condition and hence, Bed Death.

And this is egregious for many Jewish women. Biologists note that female offspring will assume the traits of the males that are reasonably sexually successful. In most Jewish groups over the past 2000 years or so, Jews were somewhat cut off from the greater population. And the traits imposed on the Jewish women by family driven matches were toward the more cerebrally suited matches and less on the physical. Take this trend for many many generations, smart men over attractive men, and Jewish women are often considered less attractive then their Gentile counterparts. Especially on the fringes given the standard distribution of “Jewish Beauty”. A Jewish 6.5 is a Gentile 4.9. Yes, there are many attractive Jewish women for sure, but drop down into the bottom 80% and you start to have a sort of “bell curve” comparison with Gentile females that rivals the White IQ curve with blacks. Then combine this with the intelligence of the males inherited by daughters. Lots of Smart, ugly daughters compared to the general population. Among Gentiles, often Smart women are attractive women due to smart, capable fathers marrying attractive women. Not always so, among the Jews.

And you have the core of feminists, ugly smart angry women, angry that the hot guys ignore them, angry that the men that will go with them, in very short order, will look like Louie De Palma from the sit-com Taxi or or some nebbish like Woody Allen.

And Jewish women are as sexual, if not more, than any other women. In fact, they are somewhat notorious for libertine attitudes about sex (when single). But when they marry, they historically marry Jewish due to family pressure and habit of choice. And then the Bed Death sets in and thus, another old Jewish Joke:”How do you keep a Jewish girl from having sex?” “You marry her.” And Jewish women have much disdain over the sexual nature of the Jewish men. The Yiddish name for a penis? “Schmeckel”. “Schmeckel”, not exactly a reverent term, one of the words from Yiddish beginning with “Schm”, all derogatory: Schmoo, Schmooze, and one of everyone’s favorites, Schmegma.

I could only find two photos of Louis M. Fraad online.

In the second, he looks like some sort of burn victim years after recovery. He is liver spotted, blotchy, bald, with a seagull chin. Hard to say, but toss in a Jewish doctor body from “back in the day”, and it is easy for me to see that the former Irma London probably deeply resented being stuck with him, cloistered away from the sexy alphas she wanted but was denied. My wife once made a comment on some women’s site about women getting abortions when the father was a beta; their attitude towards the baby was entirely different than when the father was that hot alpha. Also my wife says, “A woman that loves her husband is never out past 8 pm.” And also “If a woman is out at all, other than what is absolutely necessary, she is probably ovulating.”

So I agree with the prime assertion of this post, that Jews are genius at foisting intra-Jewish conflict out onto the rest of the world. In this case, its Jewish women hating Jewish men and forcing feminism down the throats of normal men and women, all because they are ugly.

* Steve, wrong again. While there is no question that high IQ Ashkenazi Jews are as over-represented in Radicalism and Feminism as they are every other High IQ endeavor, including nobel prizes for science and writing Hollywood movies and TV shows, they certainly did not start, or even become even minor players in feminism, until very, very late in the game. When their feminist radicalism was a FUNCTION of INHERITED WEALTH.

Steve you look for radicalism and see Jews. I see INHERITED WEALTH. Working class Jews who have to scrap for a living don’t have time for utopian radicalism. It takes either a flock of believers to fleece (Karl Marx, Morris Dees) or mostly, INHERITED WEALTH. Wow big surprise 1960s Jewish feminists NEVER HAD TO WORK and INHERITED or MARRIED Wealth!

In that, they were no different from the vastly larger number of non Jewish feminists. It is worthy to note that Jews were completely absent from the Seneca Falls movement, the Oneida movement, the Suffragette Movement, and other 19th Century feminist movements. While they certainly were active in socialism and communism in the 19th Century, but even there were overshadowed by non-Jewish violent radicals who were much, MUCH better at killing than they were. [Eric Ambler’s “Care of Time” focuses on a MacGuffin fake biography of one such Russian, non Jewish radical under the Czar, a notorious killer.]

Indeed Marx and the 1848 Movement were part and parcel of the greater Christian and Scientific Christian movements to abolish slavery, give women the right to vote (done in Wyoming and New Zealand in the 1860s), reform marriage laws, liberalize divorce, and generally abolish the old way of doing things PARTICULARLY the Nuclear Family which was considered since the 1780s by Mary Wollstonecroft and that most Christian of Poets, William Blake, to be a prison. Why, Blake even wrote an epic poem about how marriage was a prison!

Ashkenazi Jews are highly intelligent, and like most highly intelligent Europeans fall prey to:

*Status mongering.
*Radical, universal, utopianism.
*Social engineering and hubris.
*Exalting women above all else.

I’ll remind you that the SPARTANS did in fact, long before Jews came on the scene, radically re-order the nuclear family to avoid domestic tyranny and create an elite fighting force. Some guy named PLATO wrote extensively on the above themes particularly about “noble lies” and the need for elite rule of the masses in some obscure treatise no one ever read called “the Republic.”

Feminism was on the face of it, bad and very bad for Jews, by reducing the birth rate, availability of young women for Jewish men, and population inside the United States at a time when increased third world immigration made Jewish survival a numbers game, and most of European Jewry had been wiped out by some German guy.

However, like most High IQ groups, Ashkenazi Jews are suckers for radical universal utopianism of any variety, just like Scandinavians and Germans (see Frau Merkel’s tingles and Merkel Youth) and ENArchs in France. Or the Oxbridge group in Britain.

Any street hustler could see that the USSR was nothing but a gangster regime run by brutal con men, with nothing but Capone-style grandeur and often not even that. But the “Apostles” like Kim Philby and Guy Burgess and Anthony MacLean fell for it like rubes. Because they were smart, they “wanted to believe.”

Ashkenazi Jews fatal flaw is wanting to believe in universal utopianism. That there can be heaven on earth. But they are no different from say, Germans embracing half of Africa and the ME.

* A major goal of feminism is to limit men’s sexual options or even criminalize male sexuality.

* Blame the Jews? Heavens no. While we can all take pride in the American Jews winning multiple Nobel Prizes, representing 1/3 of all Billionaires. 1/3 of SCOTUS judges, 1/6 of all US Senators, and 2/3 of TV and Movie executives, we have to agree that if there’s anything wrong in the USA they are completely blameless and powerless.

* Nobody’s mentioned that her first husband, Lee Baxandall, was perhaps the primary figure (pardon the expression) in second-wave nudism.

He published a major, very glossy guide to free beaches. Of course, it ascribed Yugoslavia’s leadership in the movement to its common-sense socialist beliefs, rather than to a crafty marketing strategy in a crowded beach tourism industry.

Isn’t Baxandall the perfect name for a free-beach pioneer? A euonym!

I remember an old Commie professor ruing in print that his best students ended up disappointing him. One, whose name he didn’t supply, had been distracted by the nudist cause. That had to be Baxandall he was talking about.

* The Assad dynasty always tried to hold Syria together via hostility to Israel as a unifying emotion.

This case of redirecting resentments outward is just one example of a general pattern that you see across all cultures in all history. In general, redirecting resentments outward is useful for maintaining group solidarity. Ibn Khaldun defined decadence as when a group stops doing that and falls to backstabbing. It’s natural. For example, when the military dictatorship in Argentina was starting to topple in 1983, they immediately seized the Falklands to rally domestic support.

It’s like how when feminists can blame men for something, they blame “men.” But when they would have to blame women for something, they blame “society.”

The Jewish knack for doing this is important in understanding recent history, such as the resurgence of feminism in the 1960s-early 1970s, because Jews are important in understanding recent history, as the names of prominent feminists of that era, such as Friedan, Dworkin, Firestone, Ginsburg, Abzug, and Steinem etc., would suggest.

One little known fact today is that socially prominent Jewish families, such as this woman’s — her father a doctor from Vienna, her mother the niece of a Congressman elected over 100 years ago — had fallen behind Yankee families of similar standing in women’s independence. It was only natural for some Jewish women to notice that, for example, their parents were more biased toward their brothers than was seemly in Protestant families of equal sophistication.

I can recall a Jewish comedienne’s joke a few decades ago that the two favorite phrases of Jewish mothers when bragging to other Jewish mothers are:

1. “My son, the doctor”

2. “My daughter drove me”

And Eastern European Jews tended to be cruder toward women than Protestants were. The history of Hollywood, for example, shows Mary Pickford becoming a studio owner back in the D.W. Griffith days almost a century ago, but once Hollywood became dominated by rather crass Jewish immigrants, women rapidly lost opportunity.

So by the late 1960s it was only natural for some Jewish women to want to reform Jewish attitudes toward women in a country where the Protestant majority was more advanced in this regard.

But all this history is almost forgotten because Jews have a talent for redirecting spats among Jews outward into assaults on society in general. Sure, the daughter may resent her father being sexist toward her mother. But there’s no need to air your ethnic dirty laundry in public when you can denounce the public and get them to pay you to denounce them. Making money off denouncing Society for being sexist is something her wealthy Communist father can be proud of his daughter for doing.

The feminist complained that her Communist doctor father stifled her mother’s law career because of his sexism.

Americans don’t have categories like “Jews mad at other Jews: Society at Fault” in which to file away examples of these kind of patterns.

But they’re pretty funny to notice once you get the hang of it.

In the middle of the 20th Century in the U.S., Jews tended to be significantly more male chauvinist than Protestants, especially adjusted for education and leftism. Nobody can remember that anymore because nobody is supposed to remember that kind of thing anymore.

* “In general, redirecting resentments outward is useful for maintaining group solidarity.”

The genius of Christianity being that it directs them to God in Christ on the cross, who bears them for us and our salvation. Thus is He rightly called the Prince of Peace.

* I learned about this at first from ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who in the end of his book “On Aggression” (1966 = “Das sogenannte Böse” 1963) used a married couple as example: they are bonding by redirecting anger (which stems from conflicts inside) to other humans outside.

* I think anybody who knows even the slightest bit of HBD, should know that Syria, Lebanon and Palestine are dumps because they’re filled with Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians. The only difference if the State of Israel was never formed would be Tel Aviv and Jerusalem would also be dumps because they’d be currently filled with Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians. In fact we don’t even need to imagine a historical counterfactual. Just look at all the other places, far out of reach of Israel, but still filled with Muslim Arabs. Yemen: dump. Sudan: dump. Algeria: dump.

Surprise, surprise! Everywhere (with the exception of the places where you can hit the ground with a stick and have trillions in fossil fuels burst out) is a wretched wasteland. Heck, even the small pockets of Muslim Arabs in magnanimous, highly efficient Western democracies are also hyper-violent dumps! So when Muslim Arabs live next to Israelis they don’t get along. When Muslim Arabs live next to Swedes they also don’t get along. Israelis and Swedes, when in proximity, seem to live, work and mingle together just fine. But then Muslim Arabs also don’t get along when they live next to Christian Arabs, black animists, Hindus, Kurdish Muslims or for that matter really even other Muslim Arabs. There’s seems to be a common denominator here…

* Is this partially a very old strategy that goes back to the Neolithic? It makes sense in a shame-based culture to deflect. The Tsarnevs relatives do it, Jorge Ramos does it as well.

There are certain features that seem shared by many of the cultures stretching from Southern Europe through the Middle East into southern Central Asia and Northern India that were “urbanized” (big villages and small towns for most) during the Neolithic by arguably related groups. Carleton Coon et al, back when one could talk about such things, referred to the “Mediterranean” race and its offshots which covered this area. Less HBD, more poetic and more geographically restricted was Braudel.

1.) Sexual neurosis about women and family honor seems a common bug, combined with a tradition of womanizing machismo (not that everyone in these cultures approves or condones such behavior). These cultures have also produced sexual rejection or sexual puritanism and bodily mortification, sometimes with strong sexual overtones, from the self-gelders of Antiquity down to the Qalandars. Is this Universal? Are there parallels of such profound sexual contradictions in any other groups not influenced by these cultures?

2.) Which brings us to “I’m not gay, but the guy I bugger is”; the stories from the book of Genesis about Lot’s guests and the anonymous guy in the book of Judges who let a bunch of rowdies rape his concubine rather than himself have parallels in 19th-century Samarkand where it was dangerous to walk around at night because of roving bands who were capable of man rape. For an interesting discussion on “avoidance”, i.e. ignoring such behavior within the culture, which makes sense in a shame-based culture, see Murray’s “The Will Not to Know”. Was this common in other cultures? Based on Ibn Fadlan, the still-nomadic Oghuz Turks were not man-boy love tolerant and much more relaxed about having women in public than the sedentary Iranian peoples of what’s now Uzbekistan.

3.) And most appropriately here, deflect that shame. It’s a common, and natural (more natural than Western Masochism) human reaction to deflect blame/shame, but these cultures are much better at it than say a Chuckchi or a Saami or a KhoiKhoi or a German Lutheran. There is a level of sophistication to the blame-shifting which reflects a great appreciation of the uses of ideology and language, which makes sense when you think about how individuals in these societies have much longer histories of dealing with clerical traditions, ideologies, internal and external opponents and haggling in the market-place.

* I see a lot of passion and sincerity in Jewish paeans to liberalism. I also see Jews acting out their beliefs through sky high intermarriage rates and their other SWPL life-style choices. I am sure that there is a degree of loyalty towards team Judaism, but young Jews are more likely to attend pride parades than synagogues, and in this you can see where the bulk of their loyalties lie.

If ethnically puritan types (WASPs?) had an Israel, I’m not sure what would happen, after all it would have to share some key characteristics with Israel, such as:

1. Founded after a very large proportion of worldwide WASPs had been killed.

2. The only nation where WASPs might claim a majority in the last two thousand years.

3. It was the subject of prayers and hopes in all WASP rituals for 2000 years.

4. It was always thought of as the homeland.

5. It was not a straight up WASP country but actually a hybrid with Arab Christians, and was totally intermixed, probably about fifty fifty.

So you see Rhodesia doesn’t cut it. The fifth point is the most modern and relevant today.

* So there are left-wing Jews and right-wing Jews? The right-wing Jews who run Israel actively support the European parties trying to keep Muslims out. These minority parties have much higher approval rates in Israel than they do in their own country.

Link

And the left-wing Jews in Israel are just as enthusiastic about absorbing tons of Syrian refugees as the left-wing Jews of Europe.

Link

This is no more a shocking discovery than finding out that the Scandinavians in Europe are trying to bring in a whole bunch of Muslims, all the while knowing that the Scandinavians in the plain states of America don’t want America to bring in a bunch of Muslims.

Surely there must be some Nordic conspiracy to bring down Europe from afar. Or it could simply be that there are left-wing Scandinavians and right-wing Scandinavians.

* I often wonder with the Feminist and other Marxists intellectuals (critical race theorists, etc) if it isn’t about having a massive chip on one’s shoulder and seeking IMPORTANCE. The stupidity of the gentile when it comes to the various revolutionary causes (race baiting, feminism, class struggle) makes it easy for the intellectual to sidle in and become very influential and IMPORTANT (and rich) by pushing their revolutionary agenda’s.

JI:”You are being oppressed”
G: “I am? Oh my God, I am, thank you.”
JI: “No prob, buy my book.”

Time Wise being a perfect example.

* Israel was one of the only countries in the world to support Rhodesia in the 1970s after it became an international pariah state. When the New York Times was telling everyone that Mugabe was just a brilliant magnanimous reformer, the IDF was arming and training the RSF.

There’s a similarly little known history with Singapore as well. After being thrown out of Malaysia, Lee Kuan Yew went to Israel for a military alliance. The IDF trained with the new Singapore army, and Israeli generals and strategists set up Singapore’s doctrine and defense infrastructure. It makes sense as both are small, organized, rich countries, surrounded on all sides by hostile Muslim hordes. Without Israeli support, it’s likely that Singapore would have been forcibly “re-absorbed” into Malaysia, particularly once there became more Chinese wealth for the Muslims kleptocrats in Kuala Lumpur.

* The NY Times is utterly untrustworthy in pretty much everything they write, something the host has noticed in the past, why would he care to think this obit is anything but the normal agenda driven nonsense? You cannot believe the NY Times even about the weather. But to psychoanalyze based on a New York Times obit? That is like psychoanalyzing Batman. He is a fictional character.

I do have a question though for all the posters who are so vehement on the topic of the Jews. What do you propose to do? Be honest. Jews are rapidly intermarrying, so the question may be moot in a generation but from the comments on the about the physiognomy of certain gentiles, I am not sure about even that. As someone noted, American Jews have won multiple Nobel Prizes, represent 1/3 of all Billionaires. 1/3 of SCOTUS judges, 1/6 of all US Senators, and 2/3 of TV and Movie executives. Jews at 2% of America are very influential, way beyond their numbers (and productive and intelligent) and no person gives up what he has voluntarilly. No Jew is going to say: I think I will earn less money so the Gentiles are not made at the Jews. Jews contribute and detract – like everyone – and more than everyone.

(I for one would like to halt all muslim immigration to the US. I actually would prefer to halt all third world immigration to the US but certainly all muslim immigration. That is a plan. As the host has noted, better we bring up everyone’s school test scores than try and close a racial gap which is not ever going to be closed. That is a plan.)

* Once upon a time the Jewish Civil War (the Haskala) was openly recognized as a titanic battle. In recent years it has been suppressed and (as Steve notes) has been projected on goyim.

It is very hard, emotionally and psychologically, for Jews to even notice the daily oppression of Jewish women by Jewish men, Jewish law, and Jewish culture. It is doubly hard for them to say anything about it where the goyim can hear.

Tens of thousands of Jewish children are denied an education in NYC in violation of the law, Jewish girls suffering worst of all, yet the “Annies” and other Jewish feminists have never made an issue of this. These poor girls are brainwashed and grow up in utter isolation from the greater culture. They bear 6-10 kids apiece and live in poverty their whole lives.

But racial solidarity trumps everything. No mention of these poor Jewish children. It is the happy Utahn wives and Duggars who are oppressed by Evil Goy Patriarchy that must be “liberated”.

* If gentile nations are so anti-Semitic why don’t Jews just leave? It seems that even when the Jews get their own country – Israel – they still prefer to live in the “anti-Semitic” gentile nations.

* “If you look closely enough, you’ll notice lots of examples of this Jewish tactical genius for transmuting intra-Jewish hostilities into rage against society as a whole.”

That’s the impression you quickly get from reading Karl Marx – he’s a Jewish intellectual who really hates economically successful Jews – especially if they made money in finance rather than industry. One of Marx’s biggest pet hates was the tendency for ugly rich guys to score attractive wives. He had a strong belief that attractive people should marry other attractive people and believed capitalism was aesthetically/physically dysgenic (probably some self-loathing there as he was pretty ugly himself).

If he were around today he would no doubt blame capitalism for all the third world immigrants moving to the West.

* In “As Good as it Gets” Jack Nicholson’s character describes women this way:

“First, I think of a man, then remove reason and accountability.”

* To be fair it should be recognized that Sailer is a hall monitor by nature, who in my own time reading him has like any B-list stand-up comic tsk-tsked the behavior of the panoply of official NAMs including but not limited to: blacks, Caribbean blacks, Arabs, Saudi Arabs, sybaritic Persians, Afghan perverts (a twofer), vibrant Caucasians, Armenians, Roma, Somalis, mestizo Mexicans, Castillian Mexicans, Texicans, Puerto Ricans, melanin-bleaching mulattoes from Brazil, Australian aborigines, and Muslim Indo-Chinese and Inuit to the extent those aren’t NNAMs. But he also clucks like a Bullingdon wannabe at the unclubbability of Pacific Islanders, Hmong, greasy-grind Koreans, two-faced mercantilist Chinese, drunk Scandinavians, and overly procreative Italians (last one is the strangest and oddly archaic). You can argue about the proportionality of his whining at the comings & goings of Jews — obviously, studying them 24/7 to ferret out any lapse no matter how strained — but the difference is *they* always pay attention & angrily reply to his prodding, while the other groups just ignore him. Just be thankful that the comment section is apparently thus far invisible to put-upon emotionally stunted gays, with their incensed heartfelt reaction to literally everything that happens on the f-ing planet — after 1 week you’d plead for the good old days of irritable anti-anti-Semitic squabbles.

* While some people on the alt-right are obsessed with Jews, not everyone is – probably not most of them. You may simply percieve that to be the case because you are used to the status-quo; in which Jews are never blamed (as a group) in the way that white gentiles are, and in which it is never pointed out how prominent Jews are among those who have undermined white gentile society.

Even David Horowitz admitted that the second-wave feminism of Betty Friedan and her allies was in fact largely a left-wing project. The fact that Friedan, Abzug, Steinem and many others of that movement all happened to be from one particular ethnic group was a further admission he was unwilling or unable to make. Steve isn’t so unwilling or unable.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Feminism, Israel, Jews | Comments Off on Was 1960s Feminism A Front?

When Do Political Affairs Come To Light?

Steve Sailer writes: “Have you ever noticed the sex scandals that tend to befall Republican Speakers of the House and would-be Speakers ever since the House impeached Bill Clinton in 1998? First Newt, then Bob Livingston, recently Denny Hastert, and now Kevin McCarthy. Just sayin’ …”

Comments to Sailer:

* My conjecture is that the most such affairs would be known in a matter-of-factly way by the congressmen and staffers on the Hill. How could it be otherwise, really, in such a cloistered, competitive, back-stabbing environment? Affairs are merely “secret” to the public–and kept that way by a “balance of terror” among the congressional aparatchniks, who essentially blackmail each other by threat of mutual public exposure.

In a more speculative vein: When one of these things does come out into the light of day, there is usually a “coincidental” purpose behind it–that is, the revelation is rarely gratuitous, but serves a larger political end to disqualify a given person at a vulnerable time (e.g., during an attempted ascent in the hierarchy) or to bring discredit on the party overall (e.g., the revelations about that Florida Republican congressman in 2006, in the run-up to a midterm election).

I imagine there must be a lot of backroom consultation going on just before one of these sacrificial lambs is exposed, to make sure any thoughts of retaliation are contained. With few exceptions, the “lambs” seem to do pretty well for themselves afterwards, so perhaps that’s part of the deal, too.

* When I was teenage I dismissed “Conspiracy theories” but today with the Internet and knowing how the Elites actually think and act being paranoid and suspicious is a obligation.

* I think a great app or program would be one which makes random searches while the owner is not using it. It would create so much information and disparate information that it would render any analysis (marketing or intelligence) useless. It would have restrictive search parameters, e.g., no searches for anything illegal or red flagging.

Look, you’re never too old to learn from the wisdom of James Michael Curley, the four-time mayor of Boston and later governor of Massachusetts. Curley won his first political victory in 1904 while in prison for fraud (his campaign slogan was, “He did it for a friend”). Curley taught his protégés that the first rule of politics is, “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”

Assume everything is being read and everything is being recorded and you’ll only have to worry about the stuff that will be fabricated against you.

* My go-to proof of this is the whole Petraeus affair.

The official story: a local FBI agent is tasked to track down some kind of harassment/prestige abuse between civilian socialites at the local military base. In the process, he gets clearance to read the email of the HEAD OF THE CIA -unquestionably one of the 5 most classified individuals on the planet, and stumbles onto evidence of an affair.

This is so preposterous it is simply unbelievable that it was even proposed as the official explanation. But the affair actually happened, so there was no interest in exploring how or why it was discovered in the first place.

* I wonder how our post-privacy world will affect the careers of future politicians that are growing up in it? Will the search histories, comments, facebook statuses, etc. prove to be goldmines for oppo research or will the ubiquity of it force candidates into a reciprocal respect/indifference for each others’ past? Of course, it will also likely be a goldmine for blackmailing special interest puppeteers…

* If the picture Snowden portrays of the access to information and lax controls that NSA analysts have, it is inevitable that private information is being collected and used routinely by private actors–given the number of people with access, it couldn’t be any other way. Lots of this is probably personal stuff, like getting dirt on an ex-wife to use in a custody hearing. Some is probably insider trading stuff, or checking up on people you want to do business with. Some is probably leaking embarrassing information about people whose politics you don’t like.

I strongly suspect it is also being used to influence policy related to the war on terror and domestic spying. Blackmail wouldn’t work well for that–once three prominent politicians said they were being blackmailed on TV, there would be a big public scandal. But simply giving leads to opposition research types or reporters to knock out potentially problematic congressmen would work pretty well. And the unspoken threat of blackmail is probably pretty powerful–if you’re on the oversight committee, every time you want to ask a hard question of the NSA director, you think about what happened last month in the hotel with the hot 19-year old campaign volunteer, and decide that maybe civil liberties are just less important than keeping us safe from terrorists.

* Wouldn’t it be amusing if this site was simply a baited trap to capture the identity of dissidents from the conventional wisdom to make it easier to round them up when the proper time arrives?

Could “Steve Sailer” be a fictional character?

* I assume the FBI and NSA are keeping close tabs on the people on this site just in case. Of course, as a result, they’re not watching ISIS-cells, but hey, what harm could that cause, right, Pam Geller?

* I, too, once discounted conspiracy theories. Then the LIBOR-fix story came out. Literally hundreds to maybe a thousand people knew an index utilized to price countless trillions of dollars in assets is being regularly was regularly and systematically rigged. In 2007 if you posited that, you would have been labeled as a tin-foiler.

I believe in conspiracy theories now.

* Sydney Biddle Barrows told her girls, “Never say anything over the phone that you wouldn’t want your mother to hear in court.”

Timeless advice.

Posted in Adultery, Privacy | Comments Off on When Do Political Affairs Come To Light?

Can Magnets Reduce Belief In God & Racism?

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* So previously there have been studies done on how drugs and sleep hypnosis can reduce racism

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9129029/Blood-pressure-drug-reduces-in-built-racism.html

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/28/gender-and-racial-bias-can-be-unlearnt-during-sleep-new-study-suggests

Now they are graduating to magnets that deactivate parts of the brain.

When you read things like this, remember that over the past century more people have been killed and enslaved in the name of egalitarianism (communism) than in the name of any kind of supremacism, racial or religious or otherwise.

We should ask, why is egalitarianism so inclined to fanaticism? I think it may be because they cannot compromise. Any compromise between equality and inequality will still result in inequality.

Also equality is totally unnatural. With the huge diversity of cultures that exist across the world, the possibility that they would all be equally good at everything is impossible.

And equality requires regulating every possible source of inequality. Which is everything.

And egalitarians have to blame every inequality on oppression rather than genetic or cultural differences. But such a strategy is high stakes, because if those accusations turn out to be wrong, they amount to comprehensive pattern of libel of the so called oppressors (whites). So therefore they can’t admit to being wrong. There is no middle ground, they are either fighting oppression or engaged in libel.

And this constant stream of libel cultivates hatred, even if they didn’t start out with the intention of hating. That’s just how human nature works. If you scapegoat a group of people (whites) often enough, people will develop prejudiced attitudes towards them.

And people who are convinced that they are egalitarian will not suspect themselves of being prejudiced, so their own hatreds (such as anti-white bigotry) will grow without any internal limits.

I’m sure there are other reasons too.

* Pro-immigrationism is easy to induce because it just requires turning off part of the brain.

Posted in Immigration | Comments Off on Can Magnets Reduce Belief In God & Racism?

Steve Sailer: Steve Jobs: Nature, Nurture, And Apricot Orchards In Silicon Valley

Steve Sailer writes in 2012:

Slugger Yogi Berra liked to say, “You can observe a lot by watching.” And you can observe a lot about what modern Americans actually value just by watching their heroes.

Nobody in recent memory earned more lavish obituaries than Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Inc. He was immediately beatified as a secular saint following his death on October 5th of cancer at age 56.

A middle-class white Baby Boomer, a child of the Sixties, Jobs vastly appealed to the middle-class white Baby Boomers who still dominate culturally.

Yes, I realize we Baby Boomers are insufferable. But you are going to miss us when we are gone. The “diverse” America of the future is going to be a lot less interesting.

For example, in an upcoming CNN documentary Black in America, scheduled to air November 13, Soledad O`Brien exposes the scandal that few blacks have been allowed to found their own successful high tech firms.

Blogger Michael Arrington has gotten himself in lots of trouble for admitting in an interview with O`Brien that he doesn`t think this is caused by discrimination. Vivek Wadwha and Anil Dash piled on Arrington. (Of course, nobody mentioned the similar lack of Mexican-Americans in Silicon Valley.)

Ironically, in his new authorized but frank and judicious biography, Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson lets slip this about the seven executives of the hugely successful new management team that Jobs built at Apple in the last decade:

“Even though there was a surface sameness to his top team—all were middle-aged white males—there was a range of styles.”

Of course, it`s hardly a surprise, at least to VDARE.com readers, that Apple under Jobs didn`t employ many blacks or Hispanics in high-level positions. What`s more intriguing is that East Asian or South Asian names are also rare throughout the 630 pages of Steve Jobs.

Posted in Computers | Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Steve Jobs: Nature, Nurture, And Apricot Orchards In Silicon Valley

Race Is Real

Francis Collins writes in Nature magazine in 2004:

“Well-intentioned statements over the past few years, some coming from geneticists, might lead one to believe there is no connection whatsoever between self-identified race or ethnicity and the frequency of particular genetic variants1, 2. Increasing scientific evidence, however, indicates that genetic variation can be used to make a reasonably accurate prediction of geographic origins of an individual, at least if that individual’s grandparents all came from the same part of the world3. As those ancestral origins in many cases have a correlation, albeit often imprecise, with self-identified race or ethnicity, it is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection. It must be emphasized, however, that the connection is generally quite blurry because of multiple other nongenetic connotations of race, the lack of defined boundaries between populations and the fact that many individuals have ancestors from multiple regions of the world.”

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* That’s why sites like 23andme are able to determine if you had a black African ancestor hundreds of years ago, on the basis of a few gobbets of spittle.

* The point needs to be conveyed succinctly that comparison of genomes is not just a numbers game, but a more complicated process where a small number of unevenly distributed differences can have outsize impact.

The following analogies are a great way to deal with this modern geocentrism regarding race:

There is no such thing as cystic fibrosis. If you examine the genomes of those socially construed to have cystic fibrosis, the differences between them and others are on the order of 3 nucleotides out of 3 billion, which is negligible compared to the difference within the socially constructed cystic fibrosis and normal communities.

Similarly Huntington’s disease is the variation of a few trinucleotide repeats which is nugatory in comparison with the variation in repeat length across other genomic loci.

There is no scientific basis for the existence of a group called the Neanderthals, as the so-called Neanderthal genome is 99.7% identical to humans, which is less variation than between so-called modern humans, who have a single nucleotide polymorphism rate of about 1 in 200.

* A more compelling case can be made that humans ARE subject to evolution based on environmental factors, supported by a long and growing list of local genetic adaptations such as different vulnerabilities to diseases, different ways of processing proteins, different capacities for surviving environmental stresses such as altitude and heat/cold. Then there are the legendary differences in IQ. If there are only small variances in DNA among human populations, those small differences must carry a lot of weight … and YES, express themselves as different races with different, genetically tuned dispositions that express themselves as differences in social organization and culture. Dog and pigeon breeders know how to do this via selective breeding that also drives evolution. Why would humans be exempt?

* Near the article’s conclusion, reporter Natalie Angier notes, “Scientists say that while it may be easy to tell at a glance whether a person is Asian, African or Caucasian, the differences dissolve when one looks beyond surface features and scans the human genome for DNA hallmarks of ”race.”’

For readers new to Steve’s writing on this topic, here (again) is a link to a map that Razib Khan reposted a couple of weeks back. It shows the fine grain of the correspondence between the genetics of Europeans and the physical geography of Europe. Similar patterns emerge from analyses at larger scales (major human races) and smaller scales (e.g. the inset panel showing German-, French,- and Italian- speaking Swiss).

Fifteen years later, most of the quoted scientists are still professionally active (even the ones who sound a bit like latter-day Lysenkoists). It would be interesting to ask each:

* Were you properly quoted (does the quote reflect your beliefs at that time)?
* Do you hold to those same views today?
* At the time, did you agree with the major assertions of the article?
* Given what you now know, do you agree with these claims?

* Natalie Angier is also the reporter who got it completely wrong in the NYT about the predictable consequences of Nafta and Gatt. I remember interviewing her for an article I was working on, “Gatt Justice: Who Gets the Gains of Trade.” She thought she “knew” everyone would benefit from these new trade agreements, including ordinary American working people, because that’s what she learned in college and because all the big names in the field of international trade — Paul Samuelson and Paul Krugman most notably — were telling her so.

I answered that modern free trade theory did not support that conclusion and that anyway trade theory was irrelevant because it assumes no capital mobility between rich and poor countries, whereas both Nafta and Gatt allow free capital mobility around the world. All you needed to know, I explained, was plain old neoclassical economics in Econ 101: capital/population ratios would fall globally and therefore workers in advanced industrial economies with a high capital/population ratio would see their wages decline.

But, alas, the notion that free trade will automatically make everyone better off was the only “politically correct” position in the economics profession at that time — as it remains to this day — never mind that it is not supported in the literature. So here again as with the “consensus” that climate change threatens all human civilization or that race is not real, we see a truly dumb idea which truly does threaten future of civilization being endorsed by intelligent people because they care more about the good opinion of their friends and colleagues than the future welfare of the societies they live in.

Intellectual conformity, it turns out, is the most powerful force in the world. Given the history of religious orthodoxy I guess it should be no surprise.

* I’ve been seeing the “There is no scientific basis for the concept of race” mantra increasingly, with museums leading the way. The problem, though, is that this statement does not have its roots in science, but in politics. In the 19th through early 20th century, scientists were studying the differences between races and accumulated the results now derided as “scientific” racism. Then anthropologists Franz Boas and Ashley Montagu began to attack the idea of classification by race on the basis of “phenotypic plasticity” and other factors. But were they primarily motivated by scientific evidence or a desire to delegitimize racism by denying the reality of race itself? At any rate, the result was the liberal dogma that “there is no such thing as race” as well as the stigmatization of any further scientific study of racial differences.

This is from the Wikipedia entry “Historical race concepts”:

Several social and political developments that occurred at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century led to the transformation in the discourse of race. Three movements that historians have considered are: the coming of mass democracy, the age of imperialist expansion, and the impact of Nazism. More than any other, the violence of Nazi rule, the Holocaust, and World War II transformed the whole discussion of race. Nazism made an argument for racial superiority based on a biological basis. This led to the idea that people could be divided into discrete groups and based on the divisions, there would be severe, tortuous, and often fatal consequence. The exposition of racial theory beginning in the Third Reich, up to the Final Solution, created a popular moral revolution against racism. In 1950, and as a response to the genocide of Nazism, UNESCO was formed and released a statement saying that there was no biological determinant or basis for race.

* Right, so a chihuahua and a Great Dane are exactly the same thing, as are a pygmy and a Dane – these are merely “social” concepts. Who are you going to believe – me or your lying eyes? Now you can see where this is going – race/ breed is social in the sense that if we FOR SOCIAL (IST) reasons, choose to ignore all the visual and genetic markers that differentiate different breeds/races and proclaim that all dogs/humans are the same, then they ARE the same, socially speaking.

There is no bright line between “races” or “breeds” as there are between species but that doesn’t mean that they are purely socially defined concepts either. This is just like colors – in some languages there is no separate word for yellow and orange. Scientifically, there is no exact point in the frequency scale where “yellow” ends and “orange” begins. But this doesn’t mean that we can say that “color” is a completely social concept and that there is no such thing as color, only “visible light”.

* UNESCO proclaimed the non-existence of race as early as 1950 – this was a backlash against Nazi racial theories. “Race” is a socially defined concept to the extent that we attach any social importance to it. The Nazis believed that Germans and Poles were of different “races”. Now in fact there are genetic markers that can identify pretty well whether you are a Slav or a German (and maybe these markers even translate to measurable differences in appearance, temperament, etc.) but it is purely a social matter if we even consider the differences to rise to the the level of being “races” or some lesser subcategory (ethnicity) or no category at all (e.g. there are probably markers that differentiate S. Germans from N. Germans if you looked hard enough, but nobody bothers) and as to what the consequences are of belonging to one category or another.

Extremism of one kind tends to lead to an equal and opposite extremism. The Nazis attached extreme, irrational importance to race and so the backlash was to attache extreme, irrational UNimportance to race, to the point of even denying its existence. Neither is a sensible position. Likewise, the US in the pre-Civil Rights era, also attached high importance to race, and so we had our own denialist backlash.

In modern American life, we take this one step further and jump thru the looking glass – liberals say that race does not exist, except WHEN WE WANT IT TO – e.g. for purposes of affirmative action benefits. But at other times, they deny its existence even when it may lead to people dying – there have been drugs that were found to work better on blacks, but because it would be racist to even admit that “black” exists, these drugs caused an outcry.

A Martian looking the this clusterfark would just laugh and shake his head in puzzlement, but once you understand the history and the fact that race denial can’t be view in isolation but rather as a political backlash to race over-emphasis , then it makes sense in its own crazy way even though it has nothing to do with “science”. Liberals have a touching faith in the ability of “science” to settle political questions, as long as the answer that “science” gives favors their position.

* Do newspapers differ? Not really, mass spectrometers show. Different newspapers do not exist because because more than 99% of every newspaper’s molecules are wood pulp, not ink. While it may seem easy to tell at a glance whether a newspaper is leftist, very leftist, or communist, the ease dissolves when one probes beneath surface characteristics…

Posted in Race | Comments Off on Race Is Real