Comments at Steve Sailer:
* If Ms. Zhang needs an organ transplant we will see how quickly she believes in race.
* Humans and chimpanzees share 99% of the same genes. And I share 99.99% of the same genes with someone with Down’s Syndrome.
As you can see, Down’s Syndrome individuals are merely experiencing a social construct and is every bit as capable of earning a Noble Prize as anyone else might.
* Fortunately the real biologists are not being dissuaded from understanding how differences in ancestry relate to differences in biology, despite the pablum that well-meaning liberals can sneak into editorials in Nature Genetics and the utter bullshit that a non-scientist can write in The Atlantic. For instance there was a whole flurry of papers in Cell this year about how Africans and Europeans differ in their innate immune response to pathogens, and how some of this appeared to be shaped by adaptive introgression of neanderthal variants, for example this paper and this one along with some others.
* Look at the mileage Bill Nye and deGrasse have gotten being leftist rubberstampers.
* On a color wheel, there is no specific point where blue turns into green, so colors don’t exist.
* For some reason she chose not to touch on some of the interesting things going on in China with regard to eugenics. Are there scientists running around China saying things like “race isn’t real”?
* Zhang seems to be smart but has no agency. Asiancy isn’t the real thing.
I’m sure she was a bright student, but her racial personality made her dutifully study, study, and study without asking tough questions. She went for good grades, status, and approval.
So, she just parrots standard PC crap.
I see more Asians in journalism and think tanks, but it is so different from Jewish rise in same fields in 20th century.
Jews challenged the prevailing Narrative and established a new one, for good or for ill.
With Asians, it’s just doggy tricks. Zero originality, just Red-Guard-like adherence to the prevailing Narrative already installed by Jews and homos.
So, we got two seoul bros and one ‘we wuz zhang’ sistah.
* Bingo. She would concur:
I suddenly longed for the days when I knew exactly what to learn and received a grade that reflected exactly how much I had learned. I wouldn’t say I was good at organic chemistry, but I was very good at taking it—taking notes and exams, attending office hours. Being a student was what I knew—really all I knew.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/08/intermission
She has written a piece or few for usual lefty sites (Atlantic, Wired, Mother Jones, Gizmodo, poliSci Am…) whose stock has fallen considerably since November 8. I guess getting wound up about Nazis and showing closely cropped photos of half a dozen folks with swastikas and flipping Roman salutes still draws writing gigs, however.
I wondered who signs her paychecks. Foundation or family money was my guess. Then I realized: she’s probably working for free. Perpetual internships, basically.
The “Berta Greenwald Ledecky Fellow” mentioned at the above link pays undergrads at Harvard to do little stints at the university’s magazine:
http://harvardmagazine.com/donate/special-gifts/ledecky
More in her own words, including whether or not, as a Harvard grad who couldn’t find a job, she could get welfare:
http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/07/messy-questions-messy-answers
Elsewhere in the pages of Harvard Magazine, she contemplates girl shoes.
Did I mention she wrote an absolutely dynamite piece as a Seattle Times intern a couple years back on using dummies to teach the administering of pelvic exams?
I wondered who sent her to Israel to study Drosophila. The Booth Fellowship she drops here and there is a short-term post-grad thing, $15,000 or under to help defray travel/lodging costs.
She often drops little hints about “having studied neurobiology at Harvard” or organic chem or whatever, but it’s window dressing.
Ergo her maunderings on science aren’t even worth reply.
This budding propagandist in an echo echo echo chamber likely doesn’t yet know who she works for…or more accurately is shopping herself around waiting for her big break. Could picking on the vast legions of alt-right Nazis be it!?!?! Imagine being the David to take down Goliath Sailerovsky!
But here’s my punch line:
The entire profile reminds me of Slate‘s Ibo scribbler fellow a couple weeks ago–the one revealing those “shocking” Stephen Miller undergrad quotes. Who, on his sixth or seventh scribbling internship after an elite education, launched from Tim Kaine’s 2012 Senate campaign, still might get introduced by Dems as the guy who studied calculus at U. of Chicago. While handing around the canapes and doing office grunt work. That it was largely remedial high-school level arithmetic matters not.
This is the new generation of Magic Affirmative Action grads.
2016/17 was supposed to be a bonanza year for them–right through 2025 and beyond.
Instead, it looks like that just may go to white guys with robust trades and tech skills and no, or modest, college degrees. Guys who have been working since they were kids, for money, building real things and mission critical systems/structures, usually with increasing skill sets and responsibility. Guys who only work for free for people they love, and providing for others as well.
How very unfair, unjust, racist, and nazi it all is. But it’s nothing some Zhangsplaining can’t fix.
* Andrew Anglin’s master trolling has “power”?
Gee, what one misses being away for a couple weeks…. Somebody clue me in!
Did he get that post as head of the Fed? The Ford Foundation? Or was it president of Sarah Zhang’s alma mater, Harvard, where she:
Sarah Zhang is a former senior online fellow at Mother Jones. Before working at MoJo, she wrote for Discover Magazine and did research on fruit flies in Israel.
* One of the dumber fallacies that leftists deliberately fall into is the notion that the degree of genetic separation is the precise indicator of relevant genetic differences on any given trait.
But genetic separation — roughly an index of how many generations populations have been separated — represents only the potential for genetic differences on any given trait. If that trait has not been selected for differentially between the populations, their genes may well not differ significantly on that trait. Thus, even if different groups in SubSaharan Africa have been separated for long periods of time — perhaps as long as those between some populations outside of SubSaharan Africa and some of those within SubSaharan Africa — they may not differ much genetically on certain traits of interest, because they all live in basically similar environments in SubSaharan Africa.
Thus, all such groups are quite black in skin color, because they all live in the tropics. And this is likewise true for socially important traits: if their environments are all pretty similar in what they select for, they won’t differ much genetically on those traits. It becomes reasonable to aggregate them together as a race if in many of the salient traits they are all the same — pretty much as we do with other kinds of animals.
On the other hand, groups that have gone out of Africa may have evolved tremendously on any number of salient traits, separating them by a good distance from all SubSaharan African groups, and perhaps from each other. In that case, distinguishing them as separate races is pretty much obligatory, if we have any real interest in understanding this world we live in.
* Well, the eggheads could always storm Stormfront, and set the horribly wrong ethnonationalists right. That’s how these things are usually handled; with open inquiry and discussion. I got news for ‘em though – their arguments had better be tight. Faulty logic will be exposed, just like here.
* As Zhang reports, if sociologists have warned us, then we better pay heed to the warning…
* So, the article quotes two sociologists to refute the claims of genetic scientists. Anybody else see the disconnect here?
Sociology is not a science. Frankly, I don’t think it should even be accorded status as an academic discipline in the humanities. Sociology, along with Cultural Anthropology, are the two academic majors most infected with subjective bullshit and Cultural Marxism.
Would any respectable publication quote a sociologist to refute an astronomer?A physicist? A geologist? “Astronomers believe that the Earth orbits the Sun, but sociologists contend that the Igbo people do not adhere to this belief.”
Well, why in hell would they quote sociologists to critique the science of genetics, which has been known by animal breeders for probably the last three or four millenia? Recent advances in mapping of the genome has created empirical, scientific data. There are genetic tests available that can prove or disprove the genetic heritability of many diseases, and DNA tests that can absolutely identify individuals suspected of crimes. Sociology is not a science because it has no objective standards, and no ability to conduct tests to prove or disprove hypotheses.
* I love how the lying bitch works around the fact that eugenics was a “Progressive” thing.
Of course, if she is not a lying bitch then she is totally ignorant…
It was not “Progressives” who were into eugenics, you see. It was Americans.
* Along these lines, from WaPo:
23 and me in the classroom
Might not these tests backfire, as people come to realize that the results of the DNA test accords pretty well with the way that people self-identify or identify others?
* Ms. Zhang and her editors have crammed an impressive number of falsehoods, misrepresentations, and instances of flawed logic into a single article. But I think her central premise is correct.
“Yet since the dawn of the genomic revolution, sociologists and historians have warned that even seemingly benign genetics research can reinforce a belief that different races are essentially different.”
Ms. Zhang’ lineage is the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution. For this neo-Bolshevik, biology is an obstacle to be overcome in the quest for a perfect anti-racist society. Lysenko had his Triumph of the Will, Zhang must have hers.
* Asian Americans lack originality because they are the least creative racial group in America. Asian Americans even suck at cultural appropriating Black culture. Asian Americans love Hip Hop but their community has produced no Asian version of Kanye West and Lil Wayne for example.
Asian Americans love the NBA but their community has produced no Asian version of LeBron James and Stephen Curry.
When Asian Americans appropriate Black culture they produce vastly inferior results. MC Jin and Jeremy Lin is the best they can do, pathetic really.
Who is the Asian American community’s version of Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson? John Cho from Harold & Kumar and George Takei. What a joke.
* That two races are 0.1% or even 0.001% genetically different is irrelevant. It all depends on which gene or genes are different.
As geneticist Wendy Chung discovered, one genetic “alphabet letter” in 3 billion can cause profound developmental problems. Wendy Chung studied a severely autistic girl named Nika. Nika was unable to speak and suffered frequent seizures. Chung compared all 3 billion of Nika’s genes to Nika’s parents’ genes and found that Nika’s genome contained one genetic error. Nika — severely autistic and unable to speak — was genetically 0.00000003% different from normal.
* I could see an argument that, say, Dallas Cowboy middle linebacker Dat Nguyen, who was 2nd team all pro in his best season of 2003, was phenotypically more like, say, Chicago Bears middle linebackers Mike Singletary (black) and Dick Butkus (white) than he was like the average Vietnamese.
There are so few East Asian NFL players that they sort of have to be compared to guys of other races. But with, say, black quarterbacks or white running backs or white NBA players there is a tendency to compare them to others of their race rather than perhaps more overall similar players of other races.
For example, I naturally compare baseball player Mike Trout to Mickey Mantle, and looking him up, Mantle indeed turns out to be statistically most similar to Trout through his current age. But the next three most similar players, Ken Griffey Jr., Hank Aaron, and Frank Robinson, are black, but they don’t come to mind as readily.
* If race is a human construct and really irrelevant since we only .1% different, let’s offer the Left the logical end to this process; a race free world in full. End all racial set asides, a complete and total ban on all affirmative action programs. No reparations or any other such nonsense. Let’s have the 14th Amendment mean what it says; everyone equal under the law for ever more. How about it?
* The obvious analogy for races of humans is to breeds of horses or dogs or chickens or whatever.
All dogs are clearly the same species, all can interbreed, all share a significant (99.9%+) portion of DNA. Yet nobody denies that different breeds have different appearances, characteristics, temperaments & behaviors.
And everyone can agree that the fact that there are mutts & hybrids & very closely related breeds with fuzzy boundaries does not change any of that.
In the case of dogs, these breeds were created in a relatively short time by deliberate isolation & selective breeding for desired traits. In humans, these races were created over a longer time by accidental geographic isolation & Darwinian selection for traits that gave survival or reproductive advantages. But it was obviously more or less the same process.
Whenever I’ve made that analogy with a race-denier, I’ve never heard anyone give an explanation why it isn’t valid.
Usually they just mentally short-circuit & say that”People aren’t dogs!”
But IS there a substantial difference between animal breeds/sub-species & human races?
* What I find most amusing about the article is the writer is apparently of Chinese ancestry and there is no group more convinced that they are genetically (and culturally) superior than are the Chinese. The Chinese would be insulted if she would write in a Chinese paper about how they are closely linked with Africans whom some Chinese refer to as “farm animals.”
But we aren’t supposed to think about that.
* Why did the cretinous Ms. Zhang decide that she would target the intellectual midgets at Stormfront, rather than, say, Steve or more generally Unz.com?
Answer: because, for all her “education”, she can defeat only strawmen.
* Yeah, that is going to be a heckuva sight when someone decides to tangle w/iSteve and leaves their comments section open and fairly moderated.
* These “genetics will always be abused by the right” folks fail to mention that blank slate theory can be equally brutal and extreme. Blank slaters of extreme persuasions are quite happy to throw gays off buildings, force physical weaklings to break rocks in gulags, and starve to death upwardly mobile peasants.
It would be better if liberals focused more on not messing up the economy. When people need a wheel barrow of money to pay for a loaf of bread they are more likely to start doing brutal extreme stuff like throwing people they don’t like in concentration camps.
* We can thank the diversity supremacists who promoted racial quotas because of the alleged differences that demographics make.
Black, women, LGBT, “voices” are supposed to be inherently different because of their demographic differences. That political con game has convinced the general public of substantive differences.
In reality, diversity was invented as an excuse to rig the hiring process so that institutions didn’t have to be fair, just look statistically fair. It turned out that being fair to every individual often times meant some demographic groups were underrepresented. “Diversity” was the scam that justified treating people differently to purchase litigation insurance.
So now Stormfront and the public has bought into the diversity scam and believe in racial stereotyping. Thanks cowardly institutions! You shall reap what has been sown.
* No, she would be routed at Stormfront. There are a lot of two-digit IQ-ers at Stormfront but also enough smart folks to refute her six ways to Sunday.
She would never dare go there to debate for the same reason the US women’s soccer team would never play a men’s college team. The danger of humiliation is too great.
* I can’t speak directly for either group, but the folks at Breitbart consider themselves alt-right (with a few exceptions) and you’ll search far and wide before you’ll find a group more monolithic (and vitriolic) in their support of Likud et al. That’s a pretty fundamental clash.
The Breitbart denizens want war with each and every one of Israel’s enemies, they want it now, and this includes potential enemies and imaginary enemies, etc etc. “Alt-Right” is either a very large umbrella now or, as has been suggested above, has lost much of its meaning.
* The Breitbart crowd is pretty much all-around more moderate. The other day Breitbart ran a puff piece on the girl who’s singing at Trump’s inauguration, where she mentions at one point that she has a (presumably MtF) transgender sister.
When I read them the first couple pages of Breitbart comments were all praise for the singer with nobody mentioning the sibling. Whereas there’s no way that wouldn’t have been the main (and overwhelmingly negative) topic of the comments here at Sailer’s, and still more so at any of the places that still embrace the term “alt-right.”
* Best Hollywood movie stars in recent years from more obscure racial / ethnic groups:
American Indian – Graham Greene (e.g., stole “Maverick” from Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, and James Garner — not the English Catholic novelist)
Maori – Cliff Curtis
Samoan – The Rock
Mexican-American – The best guy in his prime right now is Michael Pena
Arab-American – Tony Shalhoub; Vince Vaughn is 1/4th Lebanese
Puerto Ricans — Benicio Del Toro
Armenian-Americans: Oddly, there don’t seem to be many at present. Among actresses, Cher is half Armenian and won an Oscar, but that was three decades ago
Gypsies — You see a lot of different claims for actors being part Roma, most notably Charlie Chaplin. Maybe the most plausible is that the late Bob Hoskins was 1/4th Gypsy
* …an African man may be more closely related to an Asian than to another African.
Yes, Miss Zhang. Explain it to your Chinese mom after you bring home a black African boyfriend, and declare to her your intention to have his baby in order to continue the clan. Let us know what she says about it. Then take him to China in order to show off what you’ve done. I’m sure you will receive a warm reception from the locals. Just another “educated” youngster denying reality.
* LF: According to Greg Johnson (the Editor of Counter-Currents and the most formidable philosopher in white nationalism today), the Alt Right is an innocuous-sounding entry vehicle into white nationalism, which is, as its critics allege, inherently racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic.
* In the WP article, race can exist because it reveals that most students have racially mixed ancestry. This has the effect of breaking down perceived divisions, and leads to discussions implicitly praising diversity and condemning considerations of racial differences.
In the Atlantic article, the biological existence of race is denied and obscured under an avalanche of scientific mental gymnastics, because white supremacists use it to defend their own identitarian efforts, and ideas about racial purity and differences. In short, race is permitted to be real and meaningful when it serves the right narrative.
Leaving aside for a moment that both articles are written by people of the same worldview**, how will either group – racial isolationists/supremacists and the “diversity is our strength” crowd – manage to deal with genetic discoveries that go against their sacred values? And how have they managed to reconcile dissenting information so far? Selectively denying or obscuring the existence of race is bound to blow up in their faces big-time.
