Interview with Heather Mac Donald

Posted on May 23, 2018 by Luke Ford

John Derbyshire wrote in 2006 for National Review’s The Corner:

This is 3 years old but I hadn’t seen it before. It’s an interview that blogger Luke Ford had with one of my favorite conservatives, and one of the most interesting people around, Heather Mac Donald. Samples:

[On being a California girl]

Luke: “Did you like Los Angeles growing up?”

Heather: “I loved it. I spent a lot of time in the Santa Monica Mountains. The smell of the dry chaparral in the summer time and the eucalyptus and the wild mustard plants and the light… There are so many smells that I associate with the land around here, from both the natural Southern California environment and the urban forest that has been brought in over the century.”

[On being an automobile-phobe]

Heather: “Here the car culture is a big challenge for me.”

Luke: “Did you ever find your right-hand view mirror?”

Heather: “Yes, the Captain of the Ramparts Division adjusted it for me. I realized that part of the reason I haven’t been able to use it was that I had completely maladjusted it. I would look in it and see the side of my car…”

[On Hollywood]

Luke: “How has the dream factory, Hollywood, affected you?”

Heather: “Not at all. A lot of Hollywood kids went to my grammar school growing up. I’m completely unmoved by it. I don’t have a fondness for movies, which leaves me stranded when it comes to cocktail party chat, but I prefer language and books. Growing up in LA inoculated me against any sense that it is glamorous or special.”

[On being a Gentile in the world of American letters]

Luke: “Has anyone called you a shicksa and has it offended you?”

Heather: “It hasn’t offended me. I assume it was said affectionately.”

[On being irreligious]

“I don’t understand how people of intelligence can reconcile what I see as constant proof of divine indifference to human outcomes with a reverence for God. To me it’s a mystery.”

[On liberalism]

“Unless you think hard about political questions in our culture, you are liberal by default. You have to think your way out of liberalism.”

COMMENTS
[On her explorations in the underclass]

“I was in Watts the other night at an outreach by various ministers, lay people and police who were trying to create a political backlash against gang violence. … We went to recent homicide sites. The people I were with were chanting and preaching and trying to get people to join them. I walked around the housing project talking to people. They were very hostile. Obviously some white girl coming up to talk to them, I don’t expect them to greet me with open arms, or even welcoming. They seemed untouched by civilization. It was disturbing.”

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What’s Good For The Jews?

Posted on May 23, 2018 by Luke Ford

An Orthodox rabbi friend who’s been studying the Alt Right for a couple of years says to me: “I now notice that all Jewish arguments revolve around what is good for the Jews. More or less secular education? What is good for the Jews. Jews in positions of political power? What is good for the Jews? West bank settlements? What is good for the Jews. These arguments are not about abstract principles of right and wrong. They all boil down to different perspectives on group interests. My job as an Orthodox rabbi is to deepen Jews’ in-group identity. When I hear anti-semites such as Patrick Little and Tanstaafl, I’m now sympathetic to them because they are looking out for the interests of their group as I look out for my group. I never thought I’d be here. It’s weird.”

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Stereotypes Are Usually Accurate

Posted on May 18, 2018 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I wonder if any of my fellow Unzions harbor nasty and unacceptable stereotypes about particular groups of people?

Well, if you do, chances are those stereotypes are accurate.

But, please, don’t take my word for it.

Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all social psychology.

Don’t believe me? Read all about it here and here.

The hilarious part here is that actual research on stereotypes have found that they are true much more often than they are untrue, that they are very useful tools for understanding the world when you have limited information, and that when new information is obtained people cheerfully abandon the stereotype.

* Many years ago, as a first year student at a certain New England Ivy League professional school, the more senior student appointed to be the sort-of residence hall proctor in my part of the residence hall was an gentleman of African American heritage. I therefore assumed he was likely to be below-par academically, due to affirmative action, and an above-average risk for committing criminal mischief, due to ‘that’s how things are’ in the African American community.

I was not entirely shocked, therefore, when he suddenly disappeared from the residence hall mid-year — apparently stripped of his role after being arrested for beating his girlfriend, or something like that.

I must therefore admit that I never gathered enough evidence to validate or disprove the assumption I made about his academic record. Clearly, that makes me a terrible Racist or something.

One of my few black classmates at the same institution turned out to be the marijuana supplier to virtually the entire part of the student body that was into such things, so there’s that as well.

* The problem with trying to convince people that they need to discard their stereotypes is that eventually they get slapped good and hard with reality. So instead of learning to determine which people of a certain group clearly fit the stereotype and who the outliers are, we have too many people in active denial of reality who dismiss the utility of stereotypes and when that gets shattered they end up angry, bewildered, and ashamed.

I grew up going to schools with plenty of class and racial diversity in a large city, so by the time I was an adult I had no illusions about how different groups were likely to act, particularly lower class whites and blacks. In contrast, many of my coworkers – mostly liberals who had grown up in lily-white environments who had been raised to believe ‘we’ are all the same – after several years of living in DC would dispairingly admit after a few beers that they felt like after living there they had become incredibly racist after living up close and personal with the people they had been told were just oppressed versions of themselves. To once again recover their sympathies, they basically had to move back to places where they didn’t have to interact with the people they were supposed to care so much about.

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5 Tips for Recovering Without a 12-Step Program

Posted on May 18, 2018 by Luke Ford

Beth Leipholtz writes:

Here are a few pieces of advice for recovering without a 12-step program.

1. Find your tribe. I can’t stress enough how important it is to find peers who understand the journey you are on and who have been where you are. When you are feeling down or as if your sobriety is in jeopardy, you need to have people you can reach out to and talk it through with. These can be people you know in real life or online. There are so many resources on the internet and on social media for connecting with other people in recovery…

2. Use technology. Embracing technology is incredibly beneficial when it comes to recovery. Simply googling recovery resources turns up many results, including groups to join or blogs to read. There are various smartphone apps that can track your sober time, connect you to other people in recovery, and provide other helpful information. Many even deliver an inspirational quote each day. There are newsletters you can sign up for, readings you can relate to and learn from, chat rooms to talk with other sober people…the list goes on. The internet and technology in general are fantastic resources for those of us in recovery.

3. Have an outlet. It’s important for everyone to have a way to burn off steam, but it’s especially important for those in recovery. Chances are that if you are sober, you probably relied on a substance as a way of letting go, escaping, and as a place to channel negative feelings. In recovery, that is no longer an option. However, there are plenty of healthy outlets to choose from. Two of the ones I have found most helpful are writing and working out.

4. Find another program. Believe it or not, 12-step programs are not the only recovery programs out there for people struggling with substance misuse.

5. Share your story. This has been the best tool for my own recovery. There is something about telling your story to other people — and them telling their story in return — that makes you feel like you are holding one another accountable and sharing in both the successes and the struggles.

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Music Attracts & Repels

Posted on May 18, 2018 by Luke Ford

From comments at Steve Sailer:

* A jazz musician being interviewed on NPR mentioned that he hated Bach. The interviewed affects shock and asks why, and the jazz man’s reasons are redolent of Wagner’s complaints about Mendelssohn: it’s like a tuning-up exercise that goes on for too long, technical specificity without blood. “Ditta ditta da, up here, and then it goes ditta ditta da down there. Why do I need to go up here and then down there?”

* I wonder if this is because of the heavy use of the harpsichord and organ in Baroque music. The harpsichord and organ are kind of unsettling and have an eerie quality to them. They tend to make you uncomfortable unlike the more mellifluous piano of later Classical and Romantic music. Much more solemn. Makes you think of church, funerals, vampires, etc.

* In Kansas City, it was considered scandalous that in certain Westport discos, when too many blacks were seen in the place, they’d play Aerosmith or REO Speedwagon , which was apparently negro repellent, and the blacks would leave as it was considered hokey and undanceable. This made the national news and it was a couple of months after that Aerosmith collaborated with Run-DMC.

* Now that Starbucks has chosen to rebrand itself as America’s public toilet, overtly, they will covertly turn to tactics such as this to remain a safe space for their paying customers.

* Sailer: Mathematicians famously love Bach. It would be interesting to see where on the Asperger’s scale is the optimum for loving Bach.

* Sailer: The NYT covers Mexico somewhat, but I suspect they lose money on it. NYT subscribers would likely rather read more about Israel than more about Mexico.

* On his pocast, Adam Carolla has mentioned, that when he supervised construction, mistakes plummeted when he switched from blaring rock music to classical at a site.

* Companies have all kinds of subtle tricks to scare away troublesome yuffs.

Starbucks: bathrooms locked and only accessible to paying customers + sell expensive products lower class proles consider “gay” and don’t want to be associated with

Chick-fil-a: locate restaurants in middle-class areas so they can recruit “the right people”; demand servers be extra cheery so as to scare away bad attitude “wrong people.”

Pizza joints: take-out, so they don’t have to bother with it

Chinese restaurants: goofy, low-volume Chinese music and televisions tuned to CNN

Wal Mart: “security, scan all aisles” …yeah, those cameras are on all the time, so it’s just a reminder to yuffs that they are being watched…they even have cameras that show you your image at eye-level at the automated register.

+ promote breast cancer awareness, women’s this and that, play classical music, and do all manner of other things that tuff guys consider sissy or gay and don’t want to be associated with (low-class progressives aren’t really that socially progressive, they’re just racists who vote democrat because they hate whitey).

* Sometimes I’m driving and listening to BBC Radio 4, and I hear something particularly objectionable to do with gender, diversity, inclusivity, or how awful white people are, in particular middle-aged English white people like me, and it all gets too much, and I change the station to Radio 3, the classical music channel. All at once I am in a different and much better world of beauty, intricate order and structure combined with ever-changing discovery, and (it seems to me) cheerful tolerance, good humour and magnanimity.

* Mexicans working in the USA like to play their Mexican music wherever they work—nice and loud, and the more the gringos get annoyed, the better they like it.

* If you record a bird-singing with a high fidelity recording and play it back the bird thinks his territory is being invaded and he swoops down to drive off the invader.

* I sometimes listen to classical music on CBC FM, which between 10 am and 2 pm has well-selected classical music with fairly minimal commentary that avoids politics. Unfortunately, every 60 minutes the music stops for a “news” broadcast that is the Two Minute Hate of Orwell’s 1984 come to life, with Donald Trump in the role of Emmanuel Goldstein. I’m not exaggerating — sometimes every one of the four or five news items denounces Trump.

A typical broadcast will go something like, “This is CBC News. Today Donald Trump threatens North American trade agreements. Next, Donald Trump attacks defenceless refugees, causing them to flee to Canada. Moving on, here’s an oppressed African-American talking about the emotional devastation Trump has wrought on her community. In environmental news, the survival clock of the planet is now at one minute to midnight because of Trump’s pandering to primitive coal interests. And lastly, Trump’s boorish behavior has offended sensitive people so badly they’re forming emotional support groups. And that’s the CBC News.” It’s nearly the same thing in French on Radio-Canada Ici Musique from 5 am to 7 am (although not on their really excellent classical program from 8 pm to 10 pm, which doesn’t have news).

* If it’s blacks you’re trying to keep away, and let’s face it, that’s who it is most of the time, heavy metal works quite well too.

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