October 9, 2015 Why can’t we talk about IQ? Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Why can’t we talk about IQ?

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Luke Ford

“IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore,” the Guardian’s Ana Marie Cox wrote back in May. It was a breathtakingly ignorant statement. Psychologist Jelte Wicherts noted in response that a search for “IQ test” in Google’s academic database yielded more than 10,000 hits — just for the year 2013.
But Cox’s assertion is all too common. There is a large discrepancy between what educated laypeople believe about cognitive science and what experts actually know. Journalists are steeped in the lay wisdom, so they are repeatedly surprised when someone forthrightly discusses the real science of mental ability.
If that science happens to deal with group differences in average IQ, the journalists’ surprise turns into shock and disdain. Experts who speak publicly about IQ differences end up portrayed as weird contrarians at best, and peddlers of racist pseudoscience at worst.
I’m speaking from experience. My Harvard Ph.D. dissertation contains some scientifically unremarkable statements about ethnic differences in average IQ, including the IQ difference between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites. For four years, the dissertation did what almost every other dissertation does — collected dust in the university library. But when it was unearthed in the midst of the immigration debate, I experienced the vilification firsthand.
For people who have studied mental ability, what’s truly frustrating is the déjà vu they feel each time a media firestorm like this one erupts. Attempts by experts in the field to defend the embattled messenger inevitably fall on deaf ears. When the firestorm is over, the media’s mindset always resets to a state of comfortable ignorance, ready to be shocked all over again when the next messenger comes along.
At stake here, incidentally, is not just knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but also how science informs public policy. The U.S. education system, for example, is suffused with mental testing, yet few in the political classes understand cognitive ability research. Angry and repeated condemnations of the science will not help.
What scholars of mental ability know, but have never successfully gotten the media to understand, is that a scientific consensus, based on an extensive and consistent literature, has long been reached on many of the questions that still seem controversial to journalists.
For example, virtually all psychologists believe there is a general mental ability factor (referred to colloquially as “intelligence”) that explains much of an individual’s performance on cognitive tests. IQ tests approximately measure this general factor. Psychologists recognize that a person’s IQ score, which is influenced by both genetic and environmental factors, usually remains stable upon reaching adolescence. And they know that IQ scores are correlated with educational attainment, income, and many other socioeconomic outcomes.
In terms of group differences, people of northeast Asian descent have higher average IQ scores than people of European lineage, who in turn have higher average scores than people of sub-Saharan African descent. The average score for Hispanic Americans falls somewhere between the white and black American averages. Psychologists have tested and long rejected the notion that score differences can be explained simply by biased test questions. It is possible that genetic factors could influence IQ differences among ethnic groups, but many scientists are withholding judgment until DNA studies are able to link specific gene combinations with IQ.
How can I be sure all of this reflects mainstream thinking? Because, over the years, psychologists have put together statements, reports, and even books aimed at synthesizing expert opinion on IQ. Many of these efforts were made in explicit response to the periodic media firestorms that engulfed people who spoke publicly about cognitive science. It’s worth reviewing some of those incidents and detailing the scholarly responses — responses that are invariably forgotten before the next furor begins. I’ll place my own experience in that context.
Let’s start 25 years ago, with the publication of The IQ Controversy, a book by Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman. The authors surveyed more than 1,000 experts in the field of cognitive science to develop a picture of what the mainstream really looks like. It was very similar to the description I’ve supplied above.
Snyderman and Rothman then systematically analyzed television, newspaper, and magazine coverage of IQ issues. They were alarmed to find that the media were presenting a much different picture than what the expert survey showed. Based on media portrayals, it would seem that most experts think IQ scores have little meaning, that genes have no influence on IQ, and that the tests are hopelessly biased. “Our work demonstrates that, by any reasonable standard, media coverage of the IQ controversy has been quite inaccurate,” the authors concluded.
In conducting the expert survey and contrasting the results with media depictions of IQ research, one would think Snyderman and Rothman had performed a valuable service. Surely public discussion of IQ would now be more firmly grounded in science?
It didn’t happen. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve was published in 1994, and real science was hard to find in the media circus that ensued. Herrnstein and Murray’s central claim about IQ differences shaping class divisions continues to be the subject of reasoned debate among social scientists. But non-experts in the media questioned whether IQ is even a valid concept. Intelligence research – psychometrics — is a pseudoscience, they said. The tests are meaningless, elitist, biased against women and minorities, important only to genetic determinists. And even to discuss group differences in IQ was called racist.
In short, the media did everything Snyderman and Rothman had warned against six years earlier. As a consequence, the interesting policy implications explored by Herrnstein and Murray were lost in the firestorm.

Jason Richwine: All of my public statements on the media controversy surrounding my dissertation are collected on this page.

May 13, 2013: A talk with Jason Richwine: ‘I do not apologize for any of my work’
(interview with Byron York of the Washington Examiner)

May 20, 2013: About that dissertation
(article in National Review)

May 21, 2013: Race and IQ at Harvard
(radio interview on Boston NPR)

May 24, 2013: Jason Richwine responds on race, IQ, and his dissertation
(article in Think Progress)

May 30, 2013: Response to Peter H. Irons
(unpublished letter to the Harvard Crimson)

August 9, 2013: Why can’t we talk about IQ?
(article in Politico)

June 3, 2014: Run out of the think tanks
(radio interview with Vicki McKenna)

October 12, 2014: Dr. Jason Richwine on human intelligence and American politics
(radio interview with Joseph Cotto)

October 5, 2015: IQ and immigration policy
(radio interview with Stefan Molyneux)

To learn about my professional background and my personal experiences during the firestorm, I specifically recommend “About that dissertation.” For a more detailed discussion of the dissertation’s content and approval process, see “Jason Richwine responds on race, IQ, and his dissertation.” For a critique of the media’s handling of IQ issues, please read “Why can’t we talk about IQ?”

Posted in IQ, Jason Richwine | Comments Off

The Costs Of Immigration

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Luke Ford

Jason Richwine writes: A recurring theme of my writing is that, first, immigration has both benefits and costs, and, second, that the costs are systematically downplayed by immigration boosters. For example, back in the spring I wrote about the fiscal cost of immigration in “The Amnesty Numbers Game”:

Consider a congressional hearing held March 17 by the House
Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The purpose was to determine
the fiscal impact of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration,
specifically the granting of work authorization via executive order to
millions of illegal immigrants. Witnesses opposed to amnesty presented
serious reasons why the president’s actions could impose a cost on
taxpayers. At every stage of the hearing, however, Democrats responded
with dismissive grandstanding and appeals to authority.

Earlier this summer I discussed the cultural cost of immigration in a piece for Real Clear Policy called “Are Low-Skill Immigrants Upwardly Mobile?”:

The desire to increase social mobility has taken center stage in
recent years, as lower-skill workers and their families struggle to join
the middle class. A recent New York Times poll
found that only 35 percent of Americans agree that “everyone has a fair
chance to get ahead in the long run.” The explanations for insufficient
mobility are many and varied…. But whatever the root causes of class stratification, the political
class tends to ignore a major policy that worsens the problem — namely,
the mass immigration of low-skill workers.

Two of my most recent pieces focus on the distributional costs of immigration. Increasing the supply of labor lowers production costs, but the savings come in the form of lower wages for the workers competing with immigrants. The direct connection between the economic benefits (lower consumer prices) and distributional effects (lower wages) is sometimes denied by immigration boosters. But, as I wrote in a National Review piece, other times they are honest — perhaps inadvertently honest:

The [farm lobby’s] report is clear about the … desire to keep wages low
by increasing the supply of labor. It describes wage increases as “a
strain on many U.S. farms” that other industries have managed to avoid.
It shows that real wages for food preparers, housekeepers, cashiers, and
other low-skill workers outside farming have decreased since 2002. The
reason, according to the report, is that “employers in non-agricultural
industries have been able to find enough workers to fill job vacancies
without upward pressure on wages.” Farm owners wish they had the same
privilege.

Finally, I wrote about an important new paper from George Borjas (my advisor in graduate school), who has re-examined the wage impact of the Mariel boatlift:

There is perhaps no economic study more often cited by immigration
advocates than economist David Card’s 1990 analysis of the “Mariel
boatlift.” After Fidel Castro announced in 1980 that anyone wishing to
leave Cuba could do so via the port of Mariel, 125,000 Cuban immigrants
came to Miami in a matter of months that summer. The sudden influx of
young, able-bodied workers generated an unusually good test of how
immigration affects wages. Economic theory predicts wages should have
declined in Miami after the boatlift, but Card was surprisingly unable
to detect any wage impact at all.

Borjas found that there was a decline in wages, concentrated among the least skilled natives.

Posted in Immigration | Comments Off

Political Debates Ignore The Facts

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Luke Ford

Jason Richwine writes: Do teachers earn less than the minimum wage?

When “teaching hours” are quantified, one may argue that teachers’ salaries are adequate for the hours they work. But I can attest that if anyone ever quantified the hours that I, and many of my colleagues, submit to create and maintain cutting-edge instruction, we would be making less than minimum wage and we’d be better off flipping burgers.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/community-voices/article37779582.html#storylink=cpy

That quote comes from Laurie Futterman, a middle-school science teacher who published an op-ed in the Miami Herald calling for raising teacher pay. I hope her exaggeration was intentional, but, for the record, a teacher making the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour would need to work about 21 hours per day, 365 days a year, to reach the average annual teacher salary of $56,000.

But what’s bothersome isn’t the exaggeration. It’s this part: “…if anyone ever quantified the hours…” If? People have been quantifying teacher working hours for years. (See our working paper on the topic, and note the literature review in particular.) Instead of repeating the talking point that teachers work some extremely large but unknowable amount of time outside of the classroom, why not look into the research? We actually have data that measure teacher work time as
definitively as anyone could hope for, and the paper linked above has all of the details. (TL;DR: Teachers work about 41 hours per week during the school year.)

I’ve noticed a depressing pattern in Washington. Even as the literature advances, politicians and reporters still have the same old debates featuring the same old talking points. Sometime soon, there will be another person who says that teachers have it easy because the school day is less than eight hours. Then someone like Ms. Futterman will respond that teachers work a lot at home. And then the debate will stagnate, without anyone bothering to investigate whether those work hours at home could be quantified. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s true of so many issues. (Don’t get me started about a certain topic in psychology.) Each side has their talking points, and the reporters seem uninterested in moving beyond them. Another example is the Cato Institute’s new report on federal pay, which mentions that Feds make 78 percent more than private-sector workers before any adjustment for skill differences. Predictably, critics responded that the greater average education and experience of federal workers could explain the difference. And then… stalemate.

I’ve seen this movie before. Five years ago, the same events transpired, and no one in the media seemed interested in testing whether education and experience actually do account for the difference. Andrew Biggs and I decided to do that analysis, and it inspired several other reports that compare similarly-skilled workers in each sector, including one from the CBO and a summary of each report from the GAO. The new literature established that federal workers do receive, on average, greater compensation than their private-sector counterparts.

Posted in Jason Richwine | Comments Off

Why do more U.S. women study abroad than men?

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Luke Ford

Washington Post:

Nearly 300,000 U.S. college students will study abroad this year…65 percent of students leaving the United States will be women…The St. Lawrence Kenya program is one of the oldest study abroad programs in Africa and more than 70 percent of the 2,000 plus alumni who participated have been women. In recent years the program has been nearly 80 percent women…78 percent of the participants on programs in at least 15 different African countries were women…with percentages reaching as high as 90 percent women.
How can one explain this disparity overall and for Africa in particular?…Are women inherently more adventurous?…

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* To have sex with foreigners. These thoughts might be conscious or subconscious. But being creatures of instinct, this is why they are going abroad.

* My niece took a semester abroad to study puppetry at the University of Cape Town. About halfway through, the professor told the students he had run out of things to teach them and the class fizzled out. She and her classmates spent their days on the beach till the time came to return home. She got full credit for the class and the African credential must look great on her resume for the SJW type jobs she pursues. BTW, she’s a lesbian.

* While Africa study abroad might be 80% female, I bet China, Korea and SE Asia are 80% male.

* My sister and an ex-girlfriend each did a semester in East Africa. Neither of them was taught anything, but it was useful networking for work in nonprofits for both of them. They also got to play the savior to poor African children and take lots of vanity pictures in exotic places. I think “useful” is the key word. My friends who studied in Germany were getting a semester in engineering, and my friends who studied in Russia were in a language immersion program. All of them were men.

* Adventurousness or adventuressness has little to do with it; it’s frivolity. Most study abroad is useless career-wise. You go to Dublin to study Irish poets, or some other liberal arts fluff.

How many Cal Tech or MIT students do study abroad?

* Women are more likely to study the sort of liberal arts subjects that better lend themselves to study abroad.

* Studying abroad is fun but, for the most part, frivolous. Males are more practical and career-minded than females, and the kinds of careers most of them pursue are less likely to give them points for glorified traveling.

COMMENTS AT THE CHATEAU:

* The hilarious part is many of these girls will experience real sexual assault in Africa—unsexy stalking, real rape, and real gang rape—and then, ironically, never report it, or if they do specifically blame colonialism, as that evil bi tch in Hati did.

Africa literal rape!

[CH: eatpraycuck by american white women is a combination of extreme naivete and slutty mudsharking adventurousness. which motivation dominates is up for debate.]

* This is part of my criteria now. If a gal’s studied abroad, no dice.

Then again, reminds me of my second college go-round. All the girls who had taken that semester in France. All their poetry was about older men fucking them.

* When I meet a new woman I ask if she traveled abroad, where and with whom,

if it was with the (ex) boyfriend, then ok…

if it was with her mother, then maybe she is not a slut…

if it was with another female friend; possible slut…

if it was alone, I lose interest completely.

* “They’re not there to fuck Africans.”

… Unless, of course, “it just happens.” Very few women go anywhere or do anything with the primary conscious intent of fucking anyone but as we all know, things inevitably “just happen.”

So I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t kid yourself.

* My new theory: The cock carousel causes Autism. Autistic kids inherit the 1000-cock stare. It’s very un-PC but until someone discovers what causes Autism, this is what I’m going with.
I got the idea after spending time with a *friend’s* Autistic kids and reading CH’s bit on the microjizzome. The mother is an anti-vaxxer and kept giving me the slut eye behind my friend’s back.

* I’ve said in other places that I believe that there is a correlation between highly inbred groups and sexual perversion/deviancy/outgoingness.

That is to say that the more inbred your ethnic group is versus another, the more likely you engage in sexual practices most people find disgusting.

Why? Simple: inbreeding is an unnatural act. Sexual attraction to siblings, parents, your own children, aunts, uncles is greatly inhibited by nature. CHildren who are raised together but are not blood related nonetheless feel little to no sexual attraction to their non-blood relate siblings.

So for a group to constantly inbreed, it needs a sexual perversion gene that allows them to over come the natural ickiness of inbreeding.

Now, it is a stone-cold fact that the two most inbred ethnic groups in America today are blacks and Eskimos. For Eskimos, the constant inbreeding of Ashkenazi has made the stereotype of “every ashkenazi being a 3rd cousin to every other” a joke amongst Jews. For blacks, their relative small numbers in the U.S. and the dislike of non-black gentiles of breeding with them and Jim Crow has compounded on the natural sexual overhorniness noted in blacks since the 1600s. (and let’s not get into the amount of rampant child sexual abuse and “down low” behavior amongst blacks today that is little reported).

So the idea that Eskimo and black perversion would be projected onto non-black gentiles is to be expected from leftist blacks and eskimos.

* Breaking down study abroad locales by major and GPA would probably be awfully clarifying. The chicks going to Africa are all social “science” majors aka daddy’s six figure debt whores, with a smidge of Anthropology students doing some semi-legit stuff.

* if you think women are easy on vacation…wow…they get easy as soon as the plane door closes.

Do not ever let your woman go on a flight alone…if she’s next to me, she will cheat. Nevermind a vacation; she’s gonna get fucked.

Muslim “insanity” is a lot less insane when you actually are on the doing end of what they’re trying to prevent. On consecutive flight legs I made out with women with boyfriends and even one with a husband. And by made out in some cases I got blown, for all I at least spent 400nm with my hand down their pants.

It didn’t matter what row we were in, or whether the plane was empty or relatively full. Nor what the destination was. GRU, PHL, GVA, IAD…no matter. The only one who mostly resisted my charms was nearly 60 and had been married for 40 years. Even she was abuzz with the attention. The rest ranged from 18-30.

Muslims appear to know how slutty unattended women are, which I will vouch for that they’re not as nuts about it as they seem.

Women greatly enjoy being seduced.

* I’ve come to regard female virtue as 90% consisting of effort to avoid temptation. Watch a married woman you consider less than morally stellar around any vaguely attractive man, and see her banter in response to his opener.

A good woman, on the other hand, will either instinctually or consciously understand that the player’s opener can lead to nothing good and she will leave the scene (and certainly not expose herself willingly to it in the first place by going to a bar with single girlfriends). If she’s captive audience, she will talk with dead-eyed monosyllabic replies.

* Dated a Churchian girl back in the early summer who had a “heart for Africa”. She’d take short term mission trips their to villages with some water project. Her Facebook was filled with pictures of her dancing with tribal people.

She stopped dating me because I didn’t have a “heart for Africa” and would rather focus my efforts in a place where people are productive and build a home for myself and a family.

Apparently, taking care of 80-IQ savages who can’t even water themselves is more important than taking care of your own kind and raising your own family. But that’s just Churchian logic.

* Women traveling to a new place and finding “romance” has long been a staple of fiction women enjoy. The “mysterious, never to be seen again lover” syndrome—emphasis: whom the women ever have to see again, or admit to sleeping with—was a popular trope. Even goody-two-shoes Betty Smith in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has a chapter devoted to a young, mysterious, handsome WW1 draftee whom she sleeps with (losing her virginity) just before he is shipped off to Europe (and dies implicitly)—before she gets married.

It’s also why a woman “traveling alone” raised a ton of eyebrows during healthy times in society. It was assumed she was a slut. Or a prostitute (some prostitutes literally AND figuratively used to (and still do) “ride the circuit” as part of higher end call-girl chains—they would travel from town to town so that men wouldn’t grow tired of their wares). Those notions were right.

A long long time ago your loyal rapist whorefinder studied in a foreign land or two. The VAST majority of the women in his program(s) weren’t there for the history, the culture, the language, etc; they were there to find a foreign boyfriend and get banged. Only. First and foremost.

Keep in mind these were programs of higher education with women of middle and upper-class backgrounds. I, in my youthful naivete, at first thought everyone was there to absorb the local history and culture, and was shocked and disgusted at finding the cock carousel so blatantly to be their true reason. I ended up traveling the nations alone, for the most part, too disheartened and disappointed in these women to bother engaging them as travel companions, and too beta (then) to take advantage of their sluttiness.

Sad nostalgia rape!

P.S. I recently started banging a late-20s chick who “travels alone” every 2-3 years to a foreign land. And, of course, she’s now making noise about how she wants to “settle down” and “get serious” (while giving ol’ whorefinder her best puppy dog-innocent eyes). I just laugh.

* That’s the thing: it was/is our job as white men to protect our civilization from foreign invaders (and parasites within who have already infiltrated), and part of that is protecting women from the “freedom” to follow their own hypergamous worst instincts. Women and fat 350 pound negro women on welfare are biologically INCAPABABLE of avoiding solipsism; they literally cannot worry about anything other than their own perspective and their own personal welfare. They, therefore, should not be given a vote. Think about it. It is beyond obvious that it is unfair to you and I that the 350-pound Sheniqua, who resembles a gorilla very much, living here in our land that was civilized by white Christians, who has 8 kids and is on welfare, has the same one vote as you and I. It’s madness. She is able to “gimmedat” vote to steal the wealth of the productive members of society. This is why communism is the natural fate of governments over time.

Women are not “sick”, but they are what they are. Given the “freedom” they have been given since 1970, they will and have contributed to destroying civilization. And we get the new Miley Cyrus as a role model for our daughters. We get a lost generation (Gen X) of bitchy, unmarried, childless catwomen who will (wrongly) go to their graves thinking their men “were afraid of a strong woman” and all the other Jew lies that were part of an attack on our civilization, families, children, and women.

Women’s job is to provide love, support, and comfort for their men, who then go out and build things and guard the walls. Even the Jewish propaganda TV show The Walking Dead (even though it’s main purpose is to make white men look bad and do all the other Jewish propaganda — miscegenation promotion, gun control, etc), and even though a man should have no time to waste watching TV, that show is worth watching because perhaps 40% of it actually illustrates some things. Even though it shows feminist grumbling in the first few episodes, it shows the reality of civilization building. When shit hits the fan, women know that their job is to stay home and take care of the babies and laundry and that their strong men go out and do the dirty work of providing food and safety.

A democracy or “republic” that gives everyone over 18 a vote is obviously not fair, especially when everyone is given leftist brainwashing in school all day.

The Jews’ latest move, by the way (it’s all over the Disney channel) is to push to lower the voting age, so that they can have totally-controlled 16-year-olds or perhaps 14-year-olds voting leftist (of course).

Robin Hood system does not work. A generation of white men has been left fully unsupported by our women. Even if we have them in our lives, they battle us at every turn instead of being supportive. They are aggressive and hypercompetitive. I don’t blame the women. They were told to be this way by Jewish TV and Jewish education system, which was an intentional attack on Anglo civilization and families. All you have to do is look at the latest exponential increase in the speed from “gay marriage” to “tranny rights” to not only “leave them alone” but full on “trannies are heroes”. As usual, the good news is that the Jew has overplayed its hand, as always. They simply cannot stop themselves, apparently.

We born in the 1970s were given this world, and only now are we waking up to what was done to us.

* Seems like sluttery with random men is rite of passage nowadays. I had a gf back in the day who went to South Africa. Needless to say we broke up as a result of some of her adventures there.

* Young women have been convinced that they have to have that sexual adventure, that that is part of “being a (modern) woman.”

Women need to be convinced that their value is in their future families and children. In order to convince them of that, it has to be true!

* There could be a wide variety of reasons why more women than men study abroad. One possibility, and I think it plays a huge role, is that studying abroad has greater “meaning” and more importance for the women than it does for the men, because “traveling” is one of the many feminist merit badges she has to earn in order to “have it all” and become a truly strong, independent woman. Also, these “merit badges” must be earned prior to marriage, or else the woman must earn them later (maybe we now know why they’re really unhaaaaappppy) after they divorce via the Eat Pray Cuck ritualistic process.

Notice that women, never men, talk about “finding themselves,” particularly while traveling. Men may have just as much fun; they may learn new languages, see incredible architecture, discover new literature, make long-life friends, meet gorgeous women they never forget; but they don’t “find themselves,” and they’re not considered less of a man if they decide to pull a Good Will Hunting instead and learn all about the country at the cost of $1.50 in late charges at the local library.

This quote from the article seems to indicate this: “Others have suggested that men have less interest in leaving their peer groups on campus, they have lower GPAs than women, they avoid studying foreign languages, and simply view study abroad as something which is frivolous and will not benefit their long-term professional goals.”

As for the disparity with women in African study programs, I chalk it up to the messianic complex rather than hypergamy; the women want to “save the children” by helping out the poor or learning how they can help out or something like that. This streak is really strong in my specific soviet, the People’s Republic of Seattle.

I can see no reason why any man, especially one studying STEM or business, would want to “study” in Africa unless he wants to study first hand the causes for why the continent can’t apparently develop on its own without idealistic WASPs to show them every step of the way. And then he doesn’t need to travel there; he can just turn on the cable news and watch it unfold.

* In South Africa they (the whites) have a joke that the difference between a tourist and a racist is ten days.

* On the Christian side, the wrong kind of altruism, and status signaling… there are plenty of people in the USA that are broken and need help – but going to the rural South and trying to help people stay off meth, or fixing up the old widow’s house one town over, is not as “righteous” as flying 36 hours to some diseased tropical hellhole, and helping out people who haven’t figured out basic sanitation.

Posted in Africa, Christianity, Dating | Comments Off

Michael Lewis Profiles Tom Wolfe For Vanity Fair

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Wolfe will remain a despised and mocked (poorly reviewed) figure by our elites for having the temerity to a) notice what was really going on during the catastrophic 60s and 70s , and b) portraying the shifts in elite power/philosophy/demographics that didn’t exactly “stand athwart history yelling stop !” But did say “what the f%@?”

I saw Mr. Wolfe coming out of the Yale Club in NYC a few weeks ago. Unmistakable from a distance with his signature white suit. I stopped to shake his hand, he was (as you’d expect) a perfect gentleman and engaging in small talk. He seemed sharp, enthused for his next book (about language) but is showing his age.

* Wolfe’s remembrance from NR’s memorial issue for Billy Buckley, “To tell you the truth, I didn’t really get it.” Lol:

Why does no one mention the subtlest of all Buckley’s rhetorical ploys, the rebuke dans l’escalier? Beats me. It was such beautiful stuff. Everybody is familiar with l’esprit de l’escalier. Some smug wit has cut you to the quick in repartee before an entire room, but it is only now, hours later, as you climb the stairs, l’escalier, to go to bed that you hit upon the withering comeback your poor brain was churning so desperately to find at the time. But in the rebuke dans l’escalier it is only now, hours later, as you climb the stairs to go to bed, that you even realize you’ve been skewered.

I’ll give you an example. I was serving as the interviewee for one of a series of audiotapes Buckley was recording for the humanistic nourishment of physicians. (Please, don’t even bother asking.) We were in a moldering sound studio in the crumbling WeVar (west of Varick Street) section of New York. Buckley is about three minutes into the interview when a voice from inside a glass booth says over a speaker system, “Oh, for chrissake . . . Stop!” Weary sigh. “You gotta start over! You gotta try again.”

Buckley looked toward the glass booth. He parted his lips and began tapping his front teeth with a ballpoint pen. With a certain icily languid delivery of his — in an accent precisely — but precisely — like Prince Charles’s, he said, “The imperative you present is debatable, but that you won’t do it again is the given.”

The imperative you present is debatable, but that you won’t do it again is the given. To tell the truth, I didn’t really get it. I reckon the man in the booth didn’t, either. Yet the malignant odor of a figure of speech known as charientism stole throughout the studio — and not another word was heard from the man in the glass booth until Buckley completed the session.

The next morning I wondered how far up the stairs the poor guy had made it last night before he realized he was bleeding.

* I predict Sailer will end up being far more disruptive and perhaps even far more influential on the course of coming events than either Wolfe or Lewis. In terms of textual output both of those authors are lazy slackers compared to Sailer. And also, neither of those even come close to the breadth of subject matter Sailer covers.

And neither of those two is the voice in the head of the most important counter culture movement since 1968.

I have read much that those two authors have written and have a lot of respect for both. They are my second and third most favorite authors.

There is a tactic on twitter where you retweet something with almost no extra commentary. It works better if the person doing this is known, their “theme”, views known. The tactic mocks the original tweet, sometimes because the tweet says something patently stupid, or the opinion contained in the tweet is cheap, inherently short sighted, “cute” snark. Perhaps a few words are quoted to highlight and direct the mockery. Here is an example:

“block quote NY Times articles”

I often skim the “block quoted Times articles” to read Sailer’s verbage on them. The NYT is the flagship of the Cathedral. When you mock it, when you defeat it, when you point out the financial gain for its owners in its bias, you unsettle the entire Cathedral, and you educate people on how to attack it.

Take this small statement here:

If you ask me, newspaper reporters are created at age six when they first go to school. In the schoolyard boys immediately divide into two types. Immediately! There are those who have the will to be daring and dominate, and those who don’t have it. … But there are boys from the weaker side of the divide who grow up with the same dreams as the stronger … The boy standing before me, John Smith, is one of them. They, too, dream of power, money, fame, and beautiful lovers.
…

Hey, that’s what liberals are! Ideology? Economics? Social justice? Those are nothing but their prom outfits. Their politics were set for life in the schoolyard at age six. They were the weak, and forever after they resented the strong. That’s why so many journalists are liberals! The very same schoolyard events that pushed them toward the written word … pushed them toward “liberalism.”

That statement will be repeated if not in actual text, but in intent, over and over in the Alt-Right counter-culture. Once more Sailer forms the words, make concrete the thoughts of the raw feelings of the Alt-Right.

It is recognized that the sexual energy that the left took, reframed, owned that pushed them through the last 50 years has now shifted to the youth of the Alt-Right. It began with Game, with Roissy, Roosh, Rollo, with an attack on the current narrative to replace it with Sexual Dimorphism, and a theory that pushes masculinity, destroys liberal ideas of “how new men should be”. We know that women, despite politics, despite narrative, are driven by attraction to masculinity and eschew, reject, despise the useful fools that espouse their liberal ideas.

And the marching song of the Alt-Right is “Follow us if you want to get laid”. And this song says to women, “We are the ones you want. Not those liberal wimps jealous of our sexual power and sexual success.”

If you think that is small potatoes, fine. Sailer’s block quoting is a larger scale of the Twitter tactic of retweeting.

Both work.

* Wolfe’s style may be an acquired or an innate taste, but I find its immersion in his subjects’ vernacular, right into the subjects’ thought-processes as ants doing their grind in the human social anthill, endlessly illuminating and entertaining. The man has an uncanny brilliant knack of boring picturesquely down to the marrow of human motive.

Posted in Steve Sailer, Tom Wolfe | Comments Off

Forward: It’s Not Quite a Third Intifada — Yet

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Luke Ford

J.J Goldberg writes:

The ostensible reason for the violence is a widespread belief among Palestinians that Israel intends to change the status quo on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and create a Jewish religious presence there, a desecration to many Muslims. The plateau is holy in both Judaism and Islam, but has been an exclusively Muslim-controlled sanctuary for centuries. Israel preserved Muslim control after capturing the Mount in 1967. Formal Jewish prayer is banned inside the compound.
Israel denies the charge that it’s out to change the rules, calling it slander and incitement to violence. But the growing popularity of a Temple Mount revivalist movement among Jewish religious nationalists, featuring ostentatious visits to the site by government ministers and Knesset members, has created intense suspicion and sporadic Palestinian violence. The latest round broke out September 13, the eve of the Jewish new year, when Muslim youths on the mount attacked Israeli police with rocks and pipe bombs, apparently protesting anticipated Jewish visits on the holy day. Violence spread from there to East Jerusalem, and then throughout the West Bank.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is caught between two opposing camps. On one side is his right-wing political base, led by West Bank Jewish settlers and the right flank of his own Likud party, pushing for an iron fist to crush the Palestinians. On the other side is a diverse constellation of interests pushing for caution and restraint. It includes the army, the international community — principally Washington and Europe — and the Palestinian Authority.
The settlers, living on the front line, are bearing the brunt of the stone-throwing and firebombs, and they’re furious. They’re grieving for the dead — four extremely popular personalities in the Orthodox community, as it happens. They suspect that Netanyahu and his defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, are soft on terrorism and are tying the army’s hands. Ten thousand rallied outside the prime minister’s official residence in Jerusalem on October 5, demanding a severe crackdown on West Bank Palestinians and their leaders in the P.A. Settler leaders are also calling for the establishment of new settlements, to show the Palestinians and the world that Israelis won’t be uprooted.

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Forward: French Jews Need To Stand Up for Muslims Right Now

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Luke Ford

I don’t sense any enthusiasm among normal Jews (as opposed to activists) for Muslim immigration.

Robert Zaretsky writes:

nce discovered recently that Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme right-wing Front National, has a kindred spirit. Her name is Nadine Morano.
Like Le Pen, Morano is an immigrant-baiting and blunt-talking politician. A leading figure of the conservative Les Républicains, Morano is very close to the party’s leader, the once (and so he hopes) future president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Like the stale odor of a Gauloise cigarette, Morano trails behind her a long history of choice remarks on immigration in France, including comparing refugees to invaders and warning that they are “submerging” the nation.
But all this changed, and changed dramatically, on September 26, when she was the guest on the popular news show “ On N’est Pas Couché .” In the give and take on the subject of the refugee crisis, Morano announced not only that France’s roots were Judeo-Christian, but also that it was a “country of the white race, one where foreigners are welcomed.” To the general stupor of her interviewers and audience, she then doubled down on her claim: “I want France to remain French. I don’t want to see France become Muslim.”
It is beyond dispute that Christianity has deeply marked France. But as the historian of religion Henri Tincq drily noted, it doesn’t take a historian of religion to know this is not Morano’s point. Instead, her point is that Muslims have no business being in France. Tincq might have added that it does take a history degree to know that, all too often in France’s past, the emphasis on the country’s Christian roots has served as a reminder that the Jews had no place there, either.
Fortunately, France remained recognizably French in the political firestorm sparked by the interview. In the National Assembly the following day, Ericka Bareigts, a black representative from the island of La Réunion, rose to speak. “The France described by Madame Morano,” she declared, “is not mine.” Prime Minister Manuel Valls — himself a naturalized French citizen — followed with a fiery speech. Flanked by his government’s ministers, several of whom are offspring of North African immigrants, Valls turned toward Bareigts: “Yes, Madame, Marianne [France’s symbol of liberty] has neither race nor color, and you incarnate her today.”
Bareigts’ address spurred standing ovations from the ranks of the left — a heartening but also predictable response. Less predictable, given the divide between socialists and conservatives in France, was that several representatives of Les Républicains also applauded her remarks. In fact, there was an explosion of dismay and denunciation among conservatives immediately after Morano’s declarations. Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, Sarkozy’s second-in-command, asserted that France does not “operate on the ideological basis of apartheid,” while another conservative leader, Jean-Christophe Lagarde, affirmed that if Morano wants to run in December’s regional elections, she should do so as “spokesperson for the Ku Klux Klan.”
In light of the general dismay and disgust, Morano’s days as an L.R. candidate seemed numbered. In the days that followed the interview, when Morano reaffirmed her original remarks, Sarkozy seemed ready to sanction his close friend and replace her come the December elections. But will his readiness be translated into action? While furious in private over Morano’s declarations, Sarkozy has said little in public, apart from bland exhortations that his party’s members “watch their words.” (Belatedly, the L.R. announced that Morano, having refused to apologize for her declaration, would not be allowed to run in the December elections.)…
Such calls should set off fire alarms among French Jews, but there has been only a tweet or two. The day after Morano’s interview, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) noted on Twitter, “Stupidity does not have a color.” The organization has since been silent on the subject.

Here are some of the comments on Forward.com:

* I agree with “I am my brother and sisters keeper” but I have yet to find a Muslim organization in America that publicly condemns suicide bombings that have happened on Israeli busses, and in Israeli schools, marketplaces, restaurants, nightclubs, and supermarkets. They refuse to call Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups even though the U.S. government has designated them this way for the past twenty-five years.

You can be against the current Israeli government, the settlers and support a two State solution but supporting the murders of innocent Israeli men, women, and children and refusing to call them terrorism is something no one should accept. I would be much more tolerant and much more supportive of Muslims in America and in Europe if a major Muslim organization would stop either remaining silent or supporting the murder of innocent children in Israel.

They not only refuse to condemn the murder of innocent Israeli men, women, and children but are strangely silent against the thug in Syria who has used chemical weapons against his own people, killed more than 200,000 and made more than five million of them refugees, the indiscriminate bombing of Yemen by Saudi Arabia, and the murder and imprisonment of thousands in Egypt. They seem to reserve their criticism for Israel and only Israel.

You want me, as a Jew, to support you and condemn discrimination against you in Europe, America and everywhere else in the world? How about you do the same for me?

* Jews Need to Emigrate to Israel To Avoid The Race/Religion War that’s brewing in Europe.

There, Fixed the title for you.

* Better idea, why not speed up the process of Jewish eradication favoured by so many Muslim and commit mass suicide (choice of death up to each individual, beheadings a little difficult to handle alone)?

* Muslims present a far greater threat to the Jews of France than any French conservative. Not only do they identify exclusively with the Palestinian cause, but they present a very visible opposition to the French concept of secularism.

Posted in France, Islam | Comments Off

What Men Want

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Luke Ford

I have soft skin
In my bubble bath
I bedabble myself
I’m cracking up about it
My goldfish fish
In my bubble bath
I’m wrapping him up
I tell him:

I don’t have a problem
I’m just being lazy
I’m not feeling unwell
I’m just being lazy
In water I’m bathing
That’s important
I’m feeling at ease the way things are

My skin is soft
In my bubble bath
I’m lazing around in the shadow
of bombs
Everything is a pleasure
Obidient offenses
I’m making a list of things that annoy me

I’m fed up with people who are always whining
Who roll at only 2 miles per hour
Who are comlaining and who are stuck
On the idea of a fixed idea
I’m fed up with those who keep nagging
Useless terrorists
Who keep painting everything black
Who call me a hypocrite
I’m fed up with the big sister
Who complains about everything and who keeps crying
Fed up with rain, fed up with courgettes
Which make me throw up under my blanket
I’m fed up with cynics
And near saffron meadows
I’m fed up with being fed up

I have soft skin
In my bubble bath
No seismic vibrations
I’m relaxing
And I’m unwinding
In my bubble kingdom
There’s only one catch

Posted in Dating | Comments Off

Where does Obama get his lovely sense of rhythm?

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Luke Ford

Washington Post:

11 times world leaders danced awkwardly

For a world leader, Obama seems pretty comfortable dancing: In 2007, before he was even president, he danced on the Ellen Degeneres Show. This is probably down to the fact he’s actually a pretty good dancer, as he showed earlier this summer when he danced with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and pop group Sauti Sol, who recently re-popularized the traditional Lipala dance.

Posted in Blacks | Comments Off

Let’s Import More Muslims, What Could Go Wrong?

Posted on October 8, 2015 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: “NYT op-ed columnist Roger Cohen argues for importing vast numbers of anti-Semites into Europe as payback for Christendom’s past anti-Semitism.”

Comments:

* How dare Hungary appoint itself the arbiter of its own policies, that job rightfully belongs to the Cohens.

* It is intellectually offensive to compare the current migrant invasion to the Holocaust. It is time to call out these charlatans who are using a tragic historical event to advance their own perverse ideological cultist view.

BTW, according to a supposedly secret document, Europe is planning to deport thousands of failed refugee claimants. Cue the “tear-jerking” saturated media coverage of how that is evil.

* Jews are often saying that the Holocaust was met with indifference.

But actually the Holocaust is one of the few genocides which was put a stop to by armed force, and those responsible put on trial and punished.

Compare that to the Holodomor, where the world truly did nothing, and Kaganovich was allowed lived to the age of 97. Or to the Armenian genocide, where most of those responsible were released without punishment and only a couple of the top perpetrators later killed by Armenian vigilantes. Or the Great Leap Forward, for which Mao never suffered.

Jews complain as if they had it especially bad, when in fact they are one of the only victims of genocide to ever have seen justice. And that justice was achieved because of the efforts and sacrifices of gentiles in fighting the Nazis. Tens of millions of whom gave their lives, with the result that Jews may live and see a measure of justice, and Cohen calls that indifference.

Maybe he is the one indifferent to gentile lives.

* In 2017, after entire regions become ungovernable, hostile colonies and the mass attacks on native Europeans in the cities begin in earnest, all abetted by a corrupt, degenerate elite:

US President Donald Trump declared that white Europeans should embark on a “mass immigration” to the US. “America is your home. We are preparing and calling for the absorption of mass white immigration from Europe.”

Trump said his government was to adopt a $145 million plan “to encourage the absorption of however many white Europeans take up the offer. “To the whites of Europe and of the world I say that the United States is waiting for you with open arms.”

* This Cohen Schmuck is not an American; I think he’s still a Brit though he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children. He’s a typical Jewish lefty liberal bleeding heart who dislikes the US and the whites Americans who make his life comfortable, an ingrate like the rest of the elites. He should return to his native South Africa along with his wife and live among its vibrant citizenry with his kids. If he doesn’t want to do that, return to London and live there.

Either way, get the fuck out of here. I am sick of ingrates who are essentially the same as illegals who refuse to assimilate.

* People like Cohen are very indifferent to what happens to the Europeans, including what will happen to the European Jews. And yes, he is right – that indifference will kill. It has already killed many including a 6 year old Jewish girl in Toulouse. Liberal media and “elite” indifference to what happens to ordinary people who cannot afford to live on Martha’s Vineyard will kill those ordinary people. But Roger is indifferent and indifference kills.

* Cohen put the world on notice about his wishes. To what extent are his views shared and acted upon by his landsmen?
Now no one can say later that they didn’t see it coming. Then the world went back to sleep.

* Listen Cohen, I’ll give you all the exemptions that you want regarding Ashkenazim or British Sephardim with immigration policy. But requiring Europeans to admit the world’s detritus because in your neuroticism you equate free movement of Jews with the free movement of another 6 billion people… my god, what an a$$hole. Our countries and our people are the reason Hitler didn’t complete his mission so STFU and show some respect.

* I agree its hypocrisy for Roger Cohen, but it’s certainly not for Netanyahu or the Israeli government. Likud actively supports most European right-wing and immigration restrictionist parties. The Israeli man on the street certainly don’t want Jihadi refugees in Tel Aviv, but neither do they in Paris. They recognize that having people actively rooting for your country wiped off the map make up a significant portion of the electorate of a nuclear power and permanent Security Council member is a pretty bad thing.

Posted in Holocaust, Islam | Comments Off