Gravity Is Racist

Posted on June 11, 2020 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Trump’s upper middle class blue state tax increase caused a complete meltdown of the GOP in Southern California.

OC’s congressional delegation went from 4-2 GOP to 0-6 Dem from 2016 to 2018.

San Diego is going from a GOP mayor to not even having a GOP candidate because the top-2 primary was won by two Dems, though both are pro-biz moderates. The same is happening to a GOP seat in the county board of supervisors, which was for a long time all GOP.

Last year in Mayor Falconer’s old district a GOP incumbent was defeated by a corrupt lesbian doctor who was sued by an insurance company for a false disability claim. She claimed to be so disabled she couldn’t work, but then ran for public office!

I agree the local police are underpaid. Starting salaries are half what they are in the bay area.

The bright side is the GOP is surviving still in the suburbs, and the new crop of Dems like Bry and Gloria are woke in word but conservative in deed. The reactionary NIMBY element is strong, as their base are still older white and asian homeowners.

* The Woke choke hold on information available to the public has got to be the single biggest problem in our nation today. My Google News feed is all non-news Narrative propaganda from CNN, USA Today, and NYT about NASCAR banning confederate flags, Trump refusing to rename military bases, and attempts to restart the discredited Covid hoax.

Meanwhile, totally blacked out by the MSM, a designated domestic terrorist group has seized control of a large chunk of Seattle and declared an “Autonomous Zone,” like some kind of ISIS Caliphate. They are armed and extorting money from the residents, while the police cower and retreat like the Iraqi army at Mosul.

How in God’s name is that not headline news! Will all this insanity finally wake up the normies to the utter corruption and dishonesty of the media?

* For some reason Orange County, 3.2 million people, 2% black, has been heavily targeted for protests. I think we had 30 going on in various cities on Saturday. Huntington and Newport Beach seem to be a favorite targets so maybe Newsom put us on a hit list. Things seemed to have calmed down the last few days, though. Maybe the 90 degree heat has deterred people or the kids got too many blisters from all their marches. Orange County juries tend to side with cops so not sure what the organizers thought they’d accomplish after their defund the police position came out. What they did accomplish is make a lot more people even more determined to vote any Democrat on the ballot out of office in the upcoming election.

* I think a lot of [the apologizers] are just normal middle-class Americans who do not know what they are up against.

Ever been in that situation in the grocery store when you almost collide with another cart, you are pretty sure that it was the other guy’s fault, but you still say “Sorry”?

Normal middle-class behavior tries to smooth over social interaction. If the other guy smiles and says, “Oh hey, I’m sorry,” then he is middle-class, too. Middle-class people (of all races) are future-oriented: they avoid minor social mishaps so they can focus on important things.

I.e., normal middle-class people are not concerned about “micro-aggressions.” They start off assuming the other guy is a person of good will.

And so they are disarmed when they have to deal with people who do not have good will for their fellow man.

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Clausewitz: His Life and Work

Posted on June 9, 2020 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2014 book:

* The French Revolution… unleashed what Clausewitz would later call the “passions of the people.” Now the energy of the nation’s inhabitants—especially their willingness to support and sacrifice for the war effort—became a critical element of its ability to wage war, as well as the manner. “Looking at the situation in this conventional manner,” Clausewitz wrote about the French Revolution’s alteration of the nature and practice of European warfare, “people at first expected to have to deal only with a seriously weakened French army; but in 1793 a force appeared that beggared all imagination. Suddenly war again became the business of the people—a people of thirty millions [sic], all of whom considered themselves to be citizens.” This distinction is critical,
as the people of the other European states were subjects—not citizens—which gave them less of a vested interest in the affairs of their ruling state, and sometimes even its very survival. Clausewitz continued: “The people became a participant in war; instead of governments and armies as heretofore, the full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance.” “War,” he wrote, “untrammeled by any conventional restraints, had broken loose in all its elemental fury. This was due to the peoples’ new share in these great affairs of state; and their participation, in turn, resulted partly from the impact that the Revolution had on the internal conditions of every state and partly from the danger that France posed to everyone.” The French Revolution intensified warfare by unleashing the passion of the people so long contained by governments that had sought only limited aims. The impact of the French Revolution upon Europe in this era and upon Clausewitz was profound, and proved the critical catalytic event for his theories on warfare.42

* armies also increased nearly exponentially in size, reaching a scale almost impossible to maintain under the old system.

* “Those who have never been through a serious defeat will naturally find it hard to form a vivid and thus altogether true picture of it: abstract concepts of this or that minor loss will never match the reality of a major defeat . . . . When one is losing, the first thing that strikes one’s imagination, and indeed one’s intellect, is the melting away of numbers. This is followed by a loss of ground, which almost always happens, and can even happen to the attacker if he is out of luck. Next comes the break-up of the original line of battle, the confusion of units, and the dangers inherent in the retreat, which, with rare
exceptions, are always present to some degree. Then comes the retreat itself, usually begun in darkness, or at any rate continued through the night. Once that begins, you have to leave stragglers and a mass of exhausted men behind; among them generally the bravest—those who have ventured out farthest or held out longest. The feeling of having been defeated, which on the field of
battle had struck only the senior officers, now runs through the ranks down to the very privates. It is aggravated by the horrible necessity of having to abandon to the enemy so many worthy comrades, whom one had come to appreciate especially in the heat of battle. Worse still is the growing loss of confidence in the high command, which is held more or less responsible by every subordinate for his own wasted efforts. What is worse, the sense of being beaten is not a mere nightmare that may pass: it has become a palpable fact that the enemy is stronger. It is a fact for which the reasons may have lain too deep to be predictable at the outset, but it emerges clearly and convincingly in the end. One may have been aware of it all along, but for the lack of more solid alternatives this awareness was countered by one’s trust in chance, good luck, Providence, and in one’s own audacity and courage. All this has now turned out to have been insufficient, and one is harshly and inexorably confronted by the terrible truth.”

* Whether or not Clausewitz shared the Christian believer’s faith in Jesus Christ is something for which he left little definitive evidence. A French biographer of Clausewitz doubted he had faith in a personal God…

* Marie was in every way Clausewitz’s intellectual equal, and, one could argue, a better writer.

* “Tactics organizes the army in combat such a way as to employ it appropriately for the purpose of obtaining a victory, while
strategy does the same thing in war in order to make the best use of the individual engagements.”

* “Since war is no longer decided by a single battle as in barbarous nations, the Art of War is divided into two parts distinguished from one another by purpose and means. The first is the art of fighting. (Tactics). The second part of the Art is to combine several individual battles into a whole (for the purpose of the campaign, the war). (Strategy). The distinction between offensive and defensive war applies to both elements, and extends even into politics. The defense can thus be tactical, strategic, political.”

* “War is the manifest use of violence against others in order to force them to conform to our will, in other words it is the use of the available means applied to the aim of the war. The theory of the art of war is the science of the use of available means for the aim of the war.”

* “The conduct of war resembles the workings of an intricate machine with tremendous friction, so that combinations which are easily planned on paper can be executed only with great effort.”

* He also told her about the Jews he encountered, commenting upon their “incomprehensible German,” and the fact that they married so young that they would be grandmothers in their thirties. What followed was a description that, in the light of more recent German history, is deeply troubling: “Filthy German Jews, who teem like vermin in filth and misery, are the country’s patricians. A thousand times I have thought, if only fire would destroy this entire crop, so this impenetrable filth would be transformed
by the cleaning flame neatly into ashes. That I have always found a salutary notion.”27

* For Napoleon, strategy boiled down to massing an overwhelming force against the Russian armies, defeating them—as quickly as possible—and then forcing a peace upon Alexander. He planned for a short war and believed he could break the Russians in a matter of weeks by fighting the necessary battles close to the frontier.

* He believed Kutusov had to choose between saving Moscow or the army and made the right choice, as a second battle would have
likely meant a total Russian defeat. Kutusov preserved the Russian army. Because he did, the war went on.

* All of his youth Clausewitz dreamed of distinguishing himself on the battlefield in a manner that would set him apart from other men—a dream that never came true. The most important military achievement of his life was his action at Tauroggen, an action fought with words, not with his sword. And it is because of his words that we remember him today.

* In 1804 Clausewitz had written in Strategie that “if Bonaparte should ever reach Poland, he would be easier to defeat than in Italy, and in Russia I would consider his defeat to be a foregone conclusion.”

* “Bonaparte is as tough as a Jew and just as shameless.”

* First, consider each side’s political aim; then evaluate the strength of the enemy and compare the character and abilities of its government and people against one’s own; and finally, examine the political inclinations of other states and the effect of the struggle upon them.

* “War can be of two kinds, in the sense that either the objective is to overthrow the enemy to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent, thus forcing him to sign whatever peace we please; or merely to occupy some of his frontier-districts so that we can annex them or use them for bargaining at the peace negotiations.”

* “All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.”

* Along with “chance” and “intelligence,” another factor that makes absolute war an impossibility is “friction,” which has come up earlier. Friction is “the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult.” In other words, friction is essentially any difficulty that can arise. Clausewitz insists that it cannot “be reduced to a few points,” and that it “brings about effects that cannot be measured, just because they are largely due to chance.” The weather provides an example: fog can prevent an enemy from being seen, the effects of which then ripple over the combatants. Fear is also a form of friction. When someone is trying to kill you, it can affect the efficient performance of the task at hand.54

What can overcome all of the problems of friction? To Clausewitz there is only one thing: “combat experience.” “If one has never experienced war,” he writes, “one cannot understand in what the difficulties constantly mentioned really consist, nor why a commander should need any brilliance and exceptional ability. Everything looks simple.” And indeed, he cautions, “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.”55 Also important in his enumeration of external forces is interaction with the enemy. To Clausewitz, war was an interactive process, and fighting something alive, organic. This is one of the contentions distinguishing his thought from many other military theorists. He points out that the enemy will not be static; they will react. This reaction will then cause a counteraction.

Rather than being an “exercise of the will directed at inanimate matter,” the will in war is directed at “an animate object that reacts.” The results of this can also sometimes push the combatants to extremes.56 How does one deal with these forces? Clausewitz emphasizes good staff work, experience, and, as we shall see, genius.

* “War is thus more than a mere chameleon, because it changes its nature to some extent in each concrete case. It is also, however, when it is regarded as a whole and in relation to the tendencies that dominate within it, a fascinating trinity—composed of: (1) primordial violence, hatred, enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; (2) the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and (3) its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason.”

* “No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”

* “It is easier to hold ground than take it. It follows that defense is easier than attack, assuming both sides have equal
means. Just what is it that makes preservation and protection so much easier? It is the fact that time which is allowed to pass unused, accumulates to the credit of the defender. He reaps where he did not sow.”

* “One must keep the dominant characteristics of both belligerents in mind. Out of these characteristics a certain center of gravity develops, the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends. That is the point against which all our energies should be directed.”

* The key, therefore, is determining what an enemy’s center of gravity is. It is often the army, but this is not true in every case. For small dependent states, it is generally their ally’s army. In alliances, the center of gravity is found in “the community of interests,” and in popular revolts it will be found in public opinion and the temperament of the leadership. In states subject to “domestic strife,” Clausewitz notes, “the center of gravity is generally the capital.” When this center is determined, Clausewitz writes, it is “the point on which your efforts must converge.” As always, however, Clausewitz offers an exception: “The principle of aiming everything at the enemy’s center of gravity admits of only one exception, that is, when
secondary operations look exceptionally rewarding. But we repeat that only decisive superiority can justify diverting strength without risking too much in the principal theater.” The difficulty, of course, lies in identifying these various centers and their relative importance. Clausewitz brands this “a major act of strategic judgment.”

* Generally, however, in On War, Clausewitz defines tactics (Taktik) and strategy (Strategie) in relation to each other: “tactics teaches the use of armed forces in the engagement; strategy, the use of engagements for the object of the war.” “Tactics,” he said, “are chiefly based on fire power.” Clausewitz believes that strategy is harder than tactics because you have more time to act and thus more time to doubt. Also, in tactics you can see what is going on, in strategy you have to guess. “The best strategy,” Clausewitz argues,” is always to be very strong; first in general, and then at the decisive point. Apart from the effort needed to create military strength, which does not always emanate from the general, there is no higher and simpler law of strategy than that of keeping one’s forces concentrated. No force, for example, should ever be detached from the main body unless the need is definite and urgent.” He also writes that “strategy is the use of the engagement for the purpose of the war. The strategist must therefore define an aim for the entire operational side of the war that will be in accordance with its purpose. In other words, he will draft the plan of the war . . . shape the individual campaigns and, within these, decide on the individual engagements.”

* After one has defined the enemy’s center of gravity, Clausewitz tells us how to proceed: “The first principle is that the ultimate substance of enemy strength must be traced back to the fewest possible sources, and ideally to one alone.” From here, “the attack on these sources must be compressed into the fewest possible actions—again, ideally, into one. Finally, all minor actions must be subordinated as much as possible. In short the first principle is: act with the utmost concentration.” After
concentration, Clausewitz suggests the second most important principle is speed.

* Not only must the largest possible force be employed, but all available forces should be utilized simultaneously.

* In the nineteenth century Clausewitz was generally viewed as a historian, not a theorist, partially because seven of the ten volumes of his collected works contain historical treatises. On War occupies only the first three volumes. Today, this view is
reversed.

* Philosophy professor W. B. Gallie writes: “If, as has been said, the idea of a literate general defeats the Anglo-Saxon imagination, what can we hope to make of the Prussian officer who was to become the world’s first—and, as it may turn out, also its last—philosopher of war?”

* “The probability of direct confrontation increases with the aggressiveness of the enemy. So, rather than try to outbid
the enemy with complicated schemes, one should, on the contrary, try to outdo him in simplicity.”

* No one remembers Frederick William III, the king he served for most of his life. Only historians and specialists remember his mentors and friends Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The fame Clausewitz hoped to win for himself—with sword in hand—he won with his pen.

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Why Have Stocks Shot Up While The George Floyd Riots Went Down?

Posted on June 9, 2020 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* The riots pretty much heralded the end of the lockdown so they presume asset prices and stocks went as low as they were going to and are buying back the dip.

* Most wealthy people I know have decided that the Covid 19 plague has ended. The theory goes that people learned how not to get it or hardened at risk populations against the virus. I will just say I know some very wealthy people who are betting it all on the country being more or less back to normal within a few weeks.

* 1) Companies are going to be more work-from-home for their white collar staff. Not exclusively, of course, but you’ll get people WFH 3-4 days a week. This will enable companies to reduce the amounts they spend on office space, although this is years down the roads. Office space is usually a multi-year lease, and companies need to get better at figuring out how to support people at home when their PC speakers don’t work or whatever, and will also want to track their workers’ more on their PCs at home. But companies will be able to get rid of a lot of the excess cost, and will probably be able to operate with fewer employees as well.

2) There’s going to be less business travel. People realize you don’t really need to jump on a plane, go to a business meeting, and then stay a night, and fly back home. A zoom meeting is basically free. This applies to internal meetings and meetings with customers / potential customers. There’ll still be some of this, of course, but I think companies are seeing it’s not always necessary. This will help companies save more money. These savings will continue to be realized because few people are going to want to fly 2-3 hours in a metal tube before there’s a cure for the virus. Industry conferences will probably eventually make a comeback though, so people can all network in one place.

3) There’s going to be a mass exodus from the cities among the professional class. Backyards, baby. Particularly if people don’t have to commute more than 1-2 days a week and can work from home the rest of the time. Restaurants in downtown Philly, Chicago, NYC, Atlanta, and so on are going to have a hard time.

* Also has anyone looked into if the per capita death rate might also be correlated with the percentage of poorly paid and motivated foreign staff in nursing homes. In my experience the people who own and operate nursing homes tend to be spivs.

* Small businesses don’t issue stock. The rioting destroyed mainly small businesses. Rioting in cities doesn’t affect the stock market because with the small businesses gone, the big national chains that have issued stock can now get the customers that used to patronize those small businesses. Riots are an overall gain for big national chains.

Secondly, riots are old hat to the stock market. The stock market knows how to trade a riot. Investors were waiting to see how much damage the pandemic was going to cause, and now they have an idea where to put their money.

* The Fed has created a completely artificial market by 1) imposing a zero-interest rate (or near-zero) policy since 2009, which means you can’t make any interest by putting your money in the bank, so you’re incentivized to put it into equities, and 2) Congress has artificially incentivized people to put their money in the market by creating deferrals in the tax code such as Roths and 401(k)s.

* 1. The economic fundamentals remain strong. Corona was just a short term event.
2. Had governments not replied properly with lots of liquidity, this could have led to a longer term economic downturn. But the liquidity will help to bridge the pause in the economy caused by Corona.
3. There will be disruption to the economy, but only certain segments. You might even be able to credibly argue that the disruption will result in a more efficient distribution of capital, which would help the economy and equity markets. For example, retailers like JC Penney were doomed, it was just a matter of when. Corona could be the nail in the coffin that accelerates the growth of companies like Amazon, etc.

* There’s only 3,500 public traded companies in the US (20 years ago it was 7000). These 3500 companies don’t reflect the majority of employment of labor in the United States.

If anything, the trend towards digitization (e-commerce, work from home, data analysis on the cloud, etc) is accelerating the trend toward big companies becoming more efficient and profitable.

The covid analysis accelerated this trend by 5-10 years than it would’ve happend. No way could a CEO or CFO have told his employees to test out working from home. Now that the cat is out of bag, all the trends benefit large companies. The only ones that have suffered are travel, leisure, entertainment companies but they are now getting better (a little too fast, maybe will fall back down);

The end result is that the large public corporations, especially technology, medical tech, healthcare, and to a degree industrial companies are not dependent on the low wage workforce that works in the mom and pop stores all over america. This includes a significant black and Latino and white population. Could be 50-70% of the US population…

* The destruction from the black rioting has been relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, it hasn’t affected production or distribution of goods and services on the US and the cost is orders of magnitude below the Corona stimulus.

* Sanctuary cities created housing shortages. I know of one guy in particular who owns, last I checked, 10 rental properties. He only rents to illegals. He charges lower than market rents, and allows as many tenants per unit as the tenants can stuff into them, should they choose. In return, they don’t ask for repairs. It’s agreed upon that they will fix anything that isn’t major themselves. They do the yard work. He visits all these properties once or twice a year. Totaled, he’s taking around 45 units off the general market by renting this way.

ANOTHER SAILER THREAD:

* “calling the police when your house is broken into comes from a place of privilege.”

Well, Wittgenstein would point out that she is technically correct: if you have stuff in your house that is valuable enough to be worth stealing (hence the burglary), then you have a pronounced value-differential relative to the thieves; hence your home, where the phone call is originating from, is literally a place of privilege.

Now you know why nobody ever made Wittgenstein the chief of police.

* We need to talk about the original sin of boomer cuckservatism: giving in to the civil rights movement.

As someone who of came of age around the time of 9/11 it was shocking for me to discover the “civil rights” movement was evil bullshit. Nobody on the right ever said that. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and anyone “conservative” at the WSJ or NYT loudly proclaimed how they loved MLK and how evil Southerners were for Jim Crow laws. Someone might say Pat Buchanan gave some pushback but I am too young for his ’92 campaign. By the time I was old enough to remember anyone “conservative” enough to offer even mild criticism of MLK had been banished to the fringes which I later did discover (obviously).

Evil? My mother grew up working class in the urban deep south. She was completely safe in her not rich neighborhood and got to attend 100% white schools. That’s not evil. That’s making the correct policies for your people.

The people who came to the South to dismantle our democratically erected institutions–including Jim Crow–are evil people who hate us and want us to suffer. It is outrageous I grew up around boomers who *saw this happen*–the destruction of Detroit, the Paris of the Midwest–and just shrugged their shoulders and said the “civil rights” people were right.

How on Earth could a soi-disant conservative literally see this happen and give in to these nasty thugs? When I was growing up Detroit was already gone. But boomer conservatives saw it happen! They saw the civil rights thugs were wrong. Proof by demonstration. Detroit was great and then it was awful. That’s the end of the argument. One might hypothesize that the civil rights thugs have a point but then we got the evidence: they were not.

So why did every Republican and conservative commentator I grew up act like this was all a good thing and we were the bad guys?

You can’t win an argument if you concede you’re wrong from the start. Why shouldn’t they keep putting the boot on our necks when we told them they were justified?

* Dating is tough in ‘Man Diego.’

Too many fit guys out at the clubs. Big male presence from the military too.

Ratios are horrendous. Too many dudes.

San Diego women look half as good as LA, but have twice the attitude.

As a guy, expect to date down.

Minneapolis has better ratios.

* Why has San Diego pretty much always been much nicer and safer than Los Angeles? Do the bad Mexicans skip SD and just head straight to LA?

* Tucker’s opening monologues have become night after night impressively brilliant and courageous.

* But I also must compliment Nancy Pelosi. Genuflecting on knees of her age is no mean feat!

* She needed help to get up. There’s video of it.

It’s also funny that the execrable Jerry Nadler didn’t kneel — the fat slob would never be able to — yet even standing he was about the same height as those kneeling.

The Dem party really is the party of freaks, degenerates and psychopaths.

* I’ve seen both Steve Bannon and Newt Gingrich acknowledge Pelosi’s skill and effectiveness as House Speaker.

She’s sort of intolerable to me to watch (as are many politicians), but apparently she’s still got her chops.

* I was skimming journalist Lara Logan’s Twitter feed and she is pretty much full on deplorable. Have her politics always been like this? Or did her assault in Egypt or something else red pill her?

* the blowhard do-nothing President can be re-elected

* The iSteve black-pillers love to describe Trump this way. Yes, Trump , with little support from his party and relentless, traitorous subversion from the opposition, has not done as much as we would like. At the same time, has actually accomplished a good deal that a conservative should like–you should be able to think of at least ten significant things. If can’t acknowledge that, I believe you just want to wallow in your black-pilledness.

* New York and Washington are both bad places for ordinary men to find women. Too much competition from Alpha Males in finance and government, respectively. Boston is supposedly a good choice, as all the academic institutions in the area attract many women.
For a woman looking for men, San Francisco is an excellent choice, but only if she’s willing to accept males (high tech types) who usually aren’t masculine but have a lot of money.

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Steve Sailer: Will Black Anti-Semitism Once Again Short-Circuit the Latest Peak Black Moment?

Posted on June 8, 2020 by Luke Ford

Sailer writes:

Black people periodically go through boom eras when white people can’t seem to get enough of them, such as in the late 1960s and then in the late 1980s-early 1990s. But blacks then overplay their hand and step on the wrong toes, usually Jewish ones. Black anti-Semitism launched neo-conservatism in the late 1960s (along with Israel’s victory in 1967) (see Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic for how Leonard Bernstein’s fundraising party for the Black Panthers foundered upon Jewish resentment of Black Power shakedowns of their shopkeeper relatives). Black anti-Semitism later brought a media backlash against the Spike Lee-gangsta rap-Minister Farrakhan era 30 years ago.

Now, one of the founders of gangsta rap, movie star Ice Cube of NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” fame, who used Black Muslim’s Fruit of Islam bodyguards to battle the Easy-E/Jerry Heller axis’s employment of Rabbi Kahane’s Jewish Defense Force, is airing out his resentments of Jews again:

This mural was known as Freedom for Humanity. Only two of the six old-time financiers depicted are Jewish (Lord Rothschild and Paul Warburg) but the general style is pretty Weimar/Nazi-ish. It was painted by a white guy pal of Shepherd Fairey (of blue-red Obama poster fame) who calls himself Mear One.

We’ll see what happens next, but, much as everybody is currently forgetting, we have been down these paths before.

Tom Wolfe says:

But if the Bernsteins thought their main problem at this point was a bad press, they were wrong. A controversy they were apparently oblivious of suddenly erupted around them. Namely, the bitterness between Jews and blacks over an issue that had been building for three years, ever since Black Power became important. The first inkling the Bernsteins had was when they started getting hate mail, some of it apparently from Jews of the Queens-Brooklyn Jewish Defense League variety. Then the League’s national chairman, Rabbi Meir Kahane, blasted Lenny publicly for joining a “trend in liberal and intellectual circles to lionize the Black Panthers . . . We defend the right of blacks to form defense groups, but they’ve gone beyond this to a group which hates other people. That’s not nationalism, that’s Naziism. And if Bernstein and other such intellectuals do not know this, they know nothing.”

The Jewish Defense League had been formed in 1968 for the specific purpose of defending Jews in low-rent neighborhoods, many of which are black. But even many wealthier and more cultivated Jews, who look at the Defense League as somewhat extremist, Low Rent and gauche, agreed essentially with the point Kahane was making. One of the ironies of the history of the Jews in America was that their long championship of black civil liberties had begun to backfire so badly in the late 1960s. As Seymour Lipset has put it, “The integrationist movement was largely an alliance between Negroes and Jews (who, to a considerable extent, actually dominated it). Many of the interracial civil-rights organizations have been led and financed by whites, and the majority of their white members have been Jews. Insofar as a Negro effort emerged to break loose from involvement with whites,from domination of the civil-rights struggle by white liberals, it meant concretely a break with Jews, for they were the whites who were active in these movements. The Black Nationalist leadership had to push whites (Jews) ‘out of the way,’ and to stop white (Jewish) ‘interference’ in order to get whites (Jews) ‘off their backs.’”

Meanwhile, Black Power groups such as SNCC and the Black Panthers were voicing support for the Arabs against Israel. This sometimes looked like a mere matter of black nationalism; after all, Egypt was a part of Africa, and black nationalist literature sometimes seemed to identify the Arabs as blacks fighting the white Israelis. Or else it looked like merely a commitment to world socialism; the Soviet Union and China supported the Arabs against the imperialist tools, the Israelis. But many Jewish leaders regarded the anti-Zionist stances of groups like the Panthers as a veiled American-brand anti-Semitism, tied up with such less theoretical matters as extortion, robbery and mayhem by blacks against Jews in ghetto areas. They cited things like the August 30, 1969, issue of Black Panther, which carried an article entitled “Zionism (Kosher Nationalism) + Imperialism = Fascism” and spoke of “the fascist pigs.” The June, 1967, issue of another Panther publication, Black Power, had carried a poem entitled “Jew-Land,” which said:

Jew-Land, On a summer afternoon, Really, Couldn’t kill the Jews too soon,
Now dig. The Jews have stolen our bread
Their filthy women tricked our men into bed
So I won’t rest until the Jews are dead . . .
In Jew-Land, Don’t be a Tom on Israel’s side
Really, Cause that’s where Christ was crucified.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Jews have survived as a people and will continue to do so. Others who disparage them ought to look at their own people and ask if they also can likely make that claim, and, if not, perhaps first get their own house in order.

Israel is, in essence-translated into English-based on a simple concept: We must secure the existence of Jewish people and the future of Jewish children. They seem, for all their flaws and eccentricities and the occasional outrage, to be succeeding at that.

* I think Steve is referring to Podhoretz Sr.’s notorious 1963 article “My Negro Problem & Ours”, were he famously alluded to his ‘insane rage’ at Black antisemitism. While one can dispute its significance, it’s not crazy to consider it one of the earliest manifestations of neo-conservatism. I seem to recall the teachers strike of 1968 and the concomitant rift between Blacks and Jews as being an epiphany for some neo-conservatives as well.

* CrossFit CEO Gregg Glassman was just canned (or will be shortly) for irreverence to the cult of St. Floyd. The gist of his sinning Tweet or Instagram or whatever was calling the current riots FLOYD-19 in a play on the claim that racism is a public health crisis.

In related news, the head of the NYT Op-Ed department was liquidated after a mutiny of Fragile-American staff over his decision to publish a hum-drum GOPe, muh law-and-order Tom Cotton opinion piece.

Jewsish tradition has a notable streak of irreverence and backtalk toward the divine; I think it therefore likely, more than anti-Zionism, that the stifling, revival tent-style of cow-eyed conformity required by the Great Awokening is what will turn off Jewish people . I can imagine a based, 13 year old Stephen Miller wannabe out there hand-crafting his I own black “I can’t joke!” facemasks in a suburban basement somewhere.

Here are comments on another Steve Sailer thread about gay pride organizers wanting to hold a Black Lives Matter rally:

* Blacks pulled rank, and showed who’s boss among the “oppressed.” What’s more interesting is how blacks will react to the multitudinous hordes of white ” allies” who are busy out-hystericizing their black idols. I expect the blacks will sharply put them in their place soon – and then what will those “whiggers” do, who have staked their entire identity on rejection of the “bad guys” in history, their brother whites?

* Whites legally requesting a parade permit is racist. Blacks looting injuring killing and committing arson is virtuous and admirable. We’ve been told that since the 1964 Watts riots What else is new?

* Trannies include that subset of drug-addicted prostitutes, who are disproportionately black.

Homosexuals, at least since the end of “fruit patrols” in the distant past, have long been friendly with law enforcement. Natural allies in gentrification. Female police would barely exist without a heavy lesbian contingent. And gay men are always going to be well-disposed to clean-cut fit men in uniform.

* A lot of gays in Europe are beginning to realize that mass Muslim immigration is going to mean that they will get it in the neck sooner or later. Like Jews, they will never get above 2% of the population so they opt to try to turn the demographics into a plurality to where no one group, including the indigenous population can dominate. But mass immigration brings other problems and that strategy turns out to spoil a good thing. Worse, they end up being seen for being the traitors they are and lose the good will of the majority of the population earning them worst of both worlds.

Being the stupid party, the Republicans will probably end up taking these refugees in from the Democratic coalition only to be rewarded with betrayal and a knife in the back. The old white liberals that run the Democratic party are through. In fact, I don’t see how Biden can hang on for even this election cycle. Perhaps if he kisses the feet of Negroes every day they will tolerate him for a while but eventually they will want more free shit then he can give them and he will have to walk the plank.

In a Machiavellian sense, Gays have been wise not to split their vote and they have picked their side. They don’t get caught up on infighting or dilute their vote which gives them power but it also subjects them to catastrophic failure if things go wrong. In the Prince, Machiavelli wrote that a small country between two much larger ones will not benefit by being neutral. Neither of the larger countries will respect their neutrality and when that country is inevitably occupied, it won’t receive any mercy from the victor or the loser. There is no reason for the right to try and help the splinter groups on the left or accommodate them. They will be fleeing from the Democrats soon enough and will just be happy not to have been made into a bar of soap.

* This sort of bullying of gay organizers from blacks has been a long time coming, I started noticing it a few years ago when black lives matters groups would randomly interrupt gay pride parades and demand that the police not be allowed to march. Of course the spineless twits who have assumed leadership in most LGBTXENU organizations bowed down to their demands. Well, they made their bed and now they get to lie in it. They should’ve put their foot down and told them to F off, gays are supposed to be one of the protected sacred groups, they had a shot at standing their ground and making sure their turf was respected. Too late now, the negroes smelled blood and now they have an excuse to really express how much they are disgusted by us in a socially acceptable way. Bye bye dumb parade.

* Gay men have lost most of their “protected status”, using anti-gay slurs and making jokes about gays hardly gets a reaction in comparison to the meltdown insulting blacks would cause. Gays are just perceived as too white to often too middle class to warrant much benefit from political correctness.

* Think Globally. Steal Locally.

* The most ‘red-pilled’ people I’ve ever met were from Brussels. Even young liberal women from upper middle class backgrounds. I’d never considered it but they’re genuinely scared in a city like that. She told me a story of once getting trapped in a cinema when some arabs went riot outside. She was 17 at the time. She and her friends were terrified about what might happen if they’d stepped outside before the police broke it up.

To put this in perspective, I did not lead her into this conversation, such lines with people you don’t know are dangerous. She told me, despite it being highly likely from my background that I’d be horrified at her ‘racism’.

* Circa 1988 when the anti-nuclear/anti-military/anti-US protests in Europe were running out of steam, there was a news photo from, I think, West Germany that showed how riot police had contained a bunch of protesters and then compressed them into a human square about 100′ on a side. As I remember it, the police were holding the perimeter with just a single thin black line of riot troops, while the surplus officers who were no longer in contact with the protesters just chatted and smoked amiably on the sidelines.

It was a very arresting and comic image, because it had so many themes going on at once:

• the extreme efficiency of German/Euro law enforcement
• the strong German will to Order: not only were the protesters contained, they were contained in a dense, perfect square
• the bored look on the faces of the disengaged, lounging officers: yeah, just another at the office…
• the dogged idealism of the protesters, who were still holding their signs and shouting their slogans even as their highly contained circumstance made the whole exercise absurd, to which the protesters seemed oblivious
• the visual implication that whatever complaint it was the protesters had, it was a spent force
• the casual way life continued as normal around the human square, even as the unkempt protesters continued their disorder within the square, which spoke to the way that in crowded Europe, orderly Europeans compartmentalize, contain and bypass disorder

* Man arrested for wearing blackface in Toronto.

* If you’re an ally of a movement whose premises defame your people, your country, and your history those on the business end of that defamation have no obligation to give you the benefit of the doubt.

* The opening sentence of the NY Post article you linked is highly misleading.

Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community registered its outrage over the racially charged police-custody death of George Floyd Sunday,

The very next paragraph begins,

More than 200 demonstrators, nearly all of them Orthodox Jews,

Even if the total number of demonstrators were double that, i.e. 400, it would still be but a minuscule fraction of Brooklyn’s total Orthodox Jewish population. Said population, like Orthodox Jewry in general, is actually composed of many different and even quite distinct communities. There is much fractionation and multiple layers of subsets.

Note that in the photos of the demonstrators that accompany the article, one can clearly see women dressed in a manner that flagrantly violates even the most lenient of the standards of modesty that vary across the Orthodox spectrum. While one can find such individuals who are affiliated with a synagogue that is at least nominally Orthodox, in lifestyle and outlook they are actually closer to non-Orthodox Jews than to serious, devout, rigorously Orthodox Jews.

Posted in Blacks, Jews | Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Will Black Anti-Semitism Once Again Short-Circuit the Latest Peak Black Moment?

This Is Your Brain on Sports: The Science of Underdogs, the Value of Rivalry, and What We Can Learn from the T-Shirt Cannon

Posted on June 7, 2020 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this book:

* We like our signal-callers handsome. The quarterback may not have existed before Camp and his contemporaries descended upon the Massasoit House 135 years ago, but his brainchild has since evolved into the most glamorous position in all of sports (North American jurisdiction, at least).

The storied lineage spans from Broadway Joe Namath to Joe Montana and Dan Marino to Brett Favre to Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, and Russell Wilson. The polarizing, short-lived cult of Tim Tebow? Even his biggest detractors must concede: not the worst-looking guy. As we write this, the attractiveness of Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury is an Internet meme. (Hot Kliff Kingsbury Flirts with Moms of Recruits.) Naturally, Hot Kliff Kingsbury is a former college quarterback.*1

Pop culture has cemented this image. Name a leading man (Burt Reynolds, Kurt Russell, Warren Beatty, Keanu Reeves, Dennis Quaid, Jamie Foxx) and odds are good he has played the role of a quarterback. There are examples of the reverse, too. Before he was Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS, Mark Harmon was a quarterback at UCLA.

In fact, the allure of being an alluring QB can be enough to motivate a position change. Brad Grayson—father of Garrett Grayson, a Saints rookie as we write this—described his son’s decision several years ago to switch from running back to quarterback as a calculated one. “Gotta consider the ladies,” explained the elder Grayson with a smile.

The inevitable question, then: Why are quarterbacks so damned good-looking?

As he tends to do, radio host Colin Cowherd offers a theory that is based less on specific research studies and more on the effort to play provocateur. Cowherd reckons that quarterbacks are good-looking because of natural selection. As he once put it, “When boys growing up are picking teams and positions, they always pick a good-looking kid to be quarterback. They never pick an ugly kid. That…sets up the pattern.” In other words, the best-looking kids in the schoolyard are selected for the glamour position. They are put on a “quarterback track,” and by the time they begin playing organized football, they are experienced at the position. It’s akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

* researchers found that the more symmetrical a QB’s face was, the more money he made.

* VAN GILDER, the economist, nailed it when she said, “Socially, we’ve been trained to think that the quarterback is the most beautiful person on the team.”

* Quarterbacks are likely groomed for the job. Except this isn’t based on the perceptions of their attractiveness; it’s based on perceptions of leadership. When we, collectively, talk about how good-looking QBs are, we are probably, thanks in no small part to the halo effect, conflating looks with leadership.

* 1. We always think we’re the center of attention. We’re convinced that every slight variation in our appearance or performance is immediately noted by everyone around us. Researchers have dubbed this the spotlight effect, and it’s the reason many of us spent junior high convinced that that cafeteria table full of kids breaking up in laughter was doing so at our expense—that they must have noticed that giant pimple on our nose, our latest bad hair day, or the ridiculous new pants Mom made us wear. Even when, in fact, no one was actually paying us much attention at all.

In one clever study, researchers at Cornell put participating students in the unenviable position of reexperiencing those adolescent insecurities. Each subject was forced to march into a group of peers wearing something embarrassing: in this case a T-shirt with a gaudy Barry Manilow photo (as if there were any other kind) splashed across the front. The student then had to sit and complete a written survey while surrounded by conventionally clad peers. Afterward, the Manilow wearers were asked how many people around them had noticed what they had on. They wildly overestimated how noticeable and memorable the embarrassing shirt had been.

As the researchers concluded, “People tend to believe that the social spotlight shines more brightly on them than it really does.” Welterweight boxers and tyrannical rulers aren’t the only ones who think the world revolves around them. Most of us do—it’s a consequence of spending much of our day engaged in internal conversation but lacking insight into the monologues everyone else is producing.

2. We think we’re more powerful than we are. We regularly succumb to the illusion of control, overconfident in the role we play in outcomes around us.

* We can’t help but see ourselves as the center of attention and as masters of our own fates, despite rational evidence to the contrary. These and a variety of other egocentric biases help us stay optimistic even when the going gets tough. In fact, some psychologists argue that illusions like these are essential components of mental health—that looking at life without such ego-friendly lenses is a recipe for despondency.

In much the same way, the athlete’s belief that “no one respects me” plays an adaptive psychological role. That’s why it persists: A false narrative must serve a function in order to perpetuate itself.

* I’m not as good as people say I am; our opponents are much better than you think they are—is another false narrative that serves a clear psychological function. Several functions, in fact. For one, it’s a close cousin of “nobody respects us” as a motivational ploy that competitors use to keep themselves sharp and that coaches employ to maintain their players’ focus. As Nadal explained, it’s a way to make sure you don’t drop your guard.

* THE false narrative told well is an invaluable tool for motivation and ego protection. It can help us ward off complacency as well as pressure. It can preempt disappointment and magnify success. The trick is figuring out for each scenario the right combination of psychological ingredients to produce the desired outcome.

* The better we get at a task, the worse we often become at articulating what we’re doing. So it is that the Great Ones are often beset by what is sometimes called the curse of expertise: They struggle to communicate what has always come naturally to them.

* human nature is surprisingly state-dependent. That is, depending on the circumstances, we think and act like very different people. (Or, to invoke the title of Sam’s previous book, Situations Matter.) For example, we operate in a “hot state” of mind (and body) when we’re angry, hungry, in pain, or generally aroused. Other times we’re in a “cold state.” Our thought processes and behavioral tendencies vary dramatically from one state to the other, often in ways that we don’t fully appreciate. Cold-state self has a hard time predicting how hot-state self will react, and vice versa.

* “Even the most brilliant and rational person, in the heat of passion, seems to be absolutely and completely divorced from the person he thought he was. Moreover, it is not just that people make wrong predictions about themselves—their predictions are wrong by a wide margin.”

* Asked what he would have been if not a soccer player, the British striker Peter Crouch paused for a moment. Then he replied memorably, “A virgin.” Jason Giambi, the baseball slugger, had a slightly less decorous take on the considerable overlap between sex and sports. While playing for the Oakland A’s, he wore a T-shirt underneath his No. 16 jersey that bore this bit of (horn)doggerel: Party Like a Rock Star. Hammer Like a Porn Star. Rake Like an All-Star. When Wilt Chamberlain famously boasted of having slept with 20,000 women, it triggered a round of guffaws—as well as a memorable Saturday Night Live sketch starring M.C. Hammer. (“I remember Cheryl. Number 13,906. But in my heart she was number 2,078. Cheryl was so full of life, love, and laughter.”)

* In 2012 [Timothy Olson] wrote a post for the site irunfar.com titled “My Path to Contentment: From Addict to Awakened Ultrarunner.” In it he told his deeply confessional story with bracing candor: “Running was my lifesaver. I first started back running to detox, clean out my body and pass that fun, pee-in-a-cup drug test. I ran to forget, I ran for peace, I ran because it was all I could do and it healed me. Running helped me look inside myself, forgive myself, trust myself, and learn from my past. Running let out all sorts of emotions; I found myself crying, laughing, screaming and puking through this road of recovery.”

* Spend only a few moments online going down the endurance-sports rabbit hole, and it’s hard not to be struck by the high incidence of recovering addicts. Blake Anderson of Chico, California, is a star on the Ironman triathlon circuit. He also speaks about his past, starting with experimentation with marijuana that led to experimentation with cocaine, which led to full-blown drug and alcohol addiction. He didn’t connect with a formal recovery program, but as he told his local newspaper, he found a different path to sobriety. He says, “My meetings are every time I lace up my running shoes; every time I clip my cleats into the pedals on my bike; every time I crush those laps in the pool.”

Rich Roll was a former college swimmer and a successful litigator at a prominent law firm in southern California—until he developed what he calls “a mean case of alcoholism.” His days began with a vodka tonic in the shower. “What started out as all fun and games,” he writes on his website, “morphed into scenes out of Leaving Las Vegas.” Why does he have a website? Because, after spending 100 days in an Oregon treatment center, he became one of the top endurance-sports athletes. A veteran of the Ultraman (a three-day event on the Big Island of Hawaii consisting of a 10K ocean swim, a bike ride of more than 260 miles, and a double-marathon run), he was named one of the “25 Fittest Men in the World” by Men’s Fitness…

It doesn’t take a licensed psychologist to suggest that many ultrarunners seem to be swapping one addiction for another (albeit far healthier) one. Here’s Timothy Olson’s take: “I’ll use this as an addiction instead of that wasn’t my [conscious] thought process, but subconsciously it felt good. I’d go for a big run and I’d come back feeling pretty damn high. It was natural. It was a good thing.”

* Confronted with tragic or painful events, we humans often cope well. Really well. Within days, even hours, of trauma, we can regain our equilibrium and baseline function. Grief is not always the paralyzing force it’s built up to be.
When we encounter an emotionally turbulent event such as a death in the family, a primitive set of brain and hormonal responses is activated. We get a surge of cortisol, the stress hormone. This can be disorienting; after a rush of cortisol, people describe a feeling akin to an altered state of consciousness, as the brain/body system kicks into emergency mode. This feeling subsides after a few hours, however, allowing us to continue with life as we know it fairly quickly. “There’s that emergency response state, and then it’s kind of done and we can think clearly again,” explains George Bonanno, a Columbia University professor who specializes in trauma and grief. “Durability is the norm, not the exception.”
How so? Bonanno has proposed and found evidence of four distinct trajectories of response in the wake of a potentially traumatic event (chart, below). There’s chronic distress, an immediately high level of dysfunction that never really goes away. There’s delayed reaction, whereby an individual initially experiences only a moderate level of grief and disruption but then gets worse rather than better as time goes by. There’s recovery, the gradual process of working through acute distress, in the “let nature run its course” manner. And, finally, there’s resilience, the absence of major symptoms or dysfunction. Those first three types of response—chronic, delayed, and recovery? None is as common as resilience. In fact, resilience is more common than the other three types combined. In the typical bereavement case, research indicates that no more than 15 percent of people experience chronically elevated states of grief that disrupt regular functioning.

* the vast majority of New York City residents showed no symptoms of trauma in the months after the [9-11] attacks. Even among those who lost loved ones, rates of resilience were high.

* Grief doesn’t move in a straight line or arc. It comes and goes. It oscillates. During bereavement it’s actually quite normal for people to smile or laugh as they talk about their loved one. In fact, this is one of the main reasons for the high rate of resilience: Grief usually isn’t static or relentless. If it were, it wouldn’t be as tolerable. Here’s Bonanno again: “Fluctuation is adaptive because it allows us to engage in contrasting activities. We can’t inhale and exhale at the same time, so we breathe in cycles.” So it is with grief. “We can’t reflect on the reality of a loss and engage with the world around us at the same time,” he writes. “So we do that in cycles too.”

* In one study, college students in dating relationships were asked to imagine how they would feel two months after the relationship ended. Their predictions overshot the mark dramatically: They thought they’d be far more miserable than they really would be. Which we know because the researchers compared their emotional forecasts to the reported happiness levels of other college students whose relationships had ended months earlier.

* The same goes for positive life events. That old yarn about people who win the lottery being no happier than the rest of us? It’s usually tied to a 1978 study of 22 lottery winners, who reported happiness levels that were no greater than those of a control group (and who rated a variety of ordinary daily activities as less pleasurable than did the comparison group). Recent research tells a more complicated story: Lottery winners are at least a bit happier than the rest of us, and people with higher incomes typically report better mood than those who make less, but the differences are much smaller than you’d expect. Even with a positive event such as winning money, we return to emotional equilibrium much sooner than conventional wisdom suggests. “Winning the lottery is a happy event,” writes Daniel Kahneman, author and Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist. “But the elation does not last.”
That even our intuitions about what makes us happy are flawed is a sobering realization. After all, so many of the choices we make—what neighborhood to live in, whom to marry—are largely based on such assumptions. Similarly disconcerting is the idea that even the greatest of life’s spikes in happiness can be short-lived.

* The brain works backward from the finish line, calculating—and recalibrating on the fly—how hard to let the body work, depending on how much more work remains to be done.

* If you don’t know the finish line, you can’t allocate the physical resources to do the job effectively.

* “You hear about these teams of programmers…who end up pulling, say, five all-nighters in a row in order to get a new piece of software to ship on time. It’s knowing that the software has to ship on a certain date that allows them to draw on these previously unimagined reservoirs of effort, capacity, and talent.” On a regular basis, seemingly ordinary people pull off feats like these—it’s just that Al Michaels isn’t there to do the play-by-play.

* goals are powerful in small doses but have been dangerously overprescribed. In a paper titled “Goals Gone Wild” (that’s right, even academics have a sense of humor), researchers identify a litany of problematic side effects when organizations become too goal-happy. For example, goals narrow your focus and can promote risk-taking and even unethical behavior. The auto executive concerned about hitting a release date might overlook safety-test results in the rush to get a car to market.

* Our general sense of morality is, in a word, flexible. One of the clearest examples is that we cut ourselves a great deal of slack when evaluating our own morally ambiguous behavior.

Posted in Sports | Comments Off on This Is Your Brain on Sports: The Science of Underdogs, the Value of Rivalry, and What We Can Learn from the T-Shirt Cannon