Taking Offense

Posted on February 8, 2017 by Luke Ford

I’ve never been offended in my life so I’m always amused when I meet smart successful people who take offense at the noting of obvious truths.

If I say, “Wow, blacks run really fast!”, people I’ve known will get angry and accuse me of stereotyping because “Not all blacks run really fast.”

If I say, “Blacks tend to be more out-going and more in the moment and more skilled at improvisation than other groups”, people I’ve known will warn me that that kind of talk leads to genocide.

At college, I said to this asian girl next to me on the first day of class, “You look smart”, she got offended. “So you think all asians are smart, do you?” she replied and wouldn’t talk to me the rest of the semester.

Other times, I’ve said, “Seventh-Day Adventists waste a lot of energy and burn up a lot of friendships arguing about theology”, and that offends Christians who regard theology as the most important calling on earth.

I had a Jewish girlfriend who told me she encountered anti-Semitism constantly.

“Could you give me an example?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I worked for this woman and one day she said to me, ‘You people are good at business.'”
“So this person saying that Jews tend to be good at business felt anti-Semitic?”
“Yes.”

Perhaps the thing I’m happiest about over the past five years is that I have entirely avoided feuds. I am no longer at war with anyone I know. I live at peace with people. I stand up for my values, but somehow I’ve learned to do this while getting along with others. I carry no resentment. It will flare up for an hour or two, or occasionally as long as a day, but it never lasts longer than that.

I think it is obvious that different groups have different gifts. I see nothing wrong with noting that high verbal IQ and a propensity for verbal aggression makes Jews great lawyers. Jews, on average, don’t tend to be as good as blacks at basketball and football and rap and other things that put a premium on improvisation. Yet, for many smart people I know, people far more highly accomplished than myself, these remarks are highly offensive and anti-Semitic.

The first time I went to synagogue, I was struck by how most of the Ashkenazi Jews there were shorter than the people I knew and heavier. That first experience corresponds with my general experience in this regard. I’ve read that diminished height among many Ashkenazi Jews is a result of centuries of living in the ghetto. When I say this aloud, however, I’m told that the observation is anti-Semitic.

No group only has beautiful traits. No group has members who are not below average in some things. No group dominates every category. No group is objectively marked out by the universe as superior. These points to me are elementary and yet they offend.

I also don’t get how behaving differently in different contexts makes one a “liar.” Such a charged term and yet so freely thrown around. I feel like a different person with everyone I talk to at any depth. I’m affected by those around me. They bring out different sides of me, they encourage different perspectives and opinions and behaviors. Perhaps I lack a core?

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Personal | Comments Off on Taking Offense

Babylonian Talmud is now free online in English and Modern Hebrew translation

Posted on February 8, 2017 by Luke Ford

Talmud link here.

Tabletmag.com:

One of the most accessible Hebrew and English translations of the Babylonian Talmud is going open source. Today, Sefaria, an online nonprofit bringing traditional Jewish texts to the internet, announced that it will be posting the entire compendium with the crisp bilingual translation of Jerusalem polymath Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Even-Yisrael.

A multi-decade scholarly effort first published in Israel, the Hebrew Steinsaltz Talmud has long been a print staple of the beit midrash, while the English edition has been distributed by Random House and Koren Publishers. Now, however, both translations will be available to anyone with an internet connection, thanks to a grant from the William Davidson Foundation.

Sefaria has already posted the Talmud’s first 22 tractates in English; the rest, along with the modern Hebrew translations, will be rolling out through 2017. Unlike previous attempts at translating the ancient Jewish legal-literary corpus like the Soncino Talmud, the Steinsaltz edition is prized for its clarity and accessibility, making it ideal for public and not just academic consumption.

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How can a race realist support school vouchers?

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* How can a race realist support school vouchers? It means blacks and Latinos get to attend white parochial schools for free. Having money is what separates Whites from the rabble… do you really want to forfeit that advantage? My Catholic school was great precisely because blacks and lower class Latinos were priced out.

Vouchers do nothing but pile the ineducable and unruly into better schools…for which I’m already being reamed thousands of dollars per year in real estate taxes.

All they can contribute is the disorder, stupidity, and criminality they bring with them, which was the cause of their former schools being latrines.

If teachers could remove the disruptive from their classrooms, where would they go?

All you’d end up with is formerly good schools and the same set of problems we have now. And a bazillion more expensive dolt-wrangling Programs.

We need to attack this entire problem from its supply side: r-strategy reproduction, low-IQ reproduction, and immigration from low-IQ nations/peoples.

Humanity does not evolve and thrive where the worst are full of passionate intensity (so to speak) and the best lack all conviction.

* I have a different theory to explain why conservatives support school choice. It’s because, in politics, you have to have a solution to offer. It doesn’t have to be a practical solution, just plausible enough so you have to have a response when the question comes up.

Q: Education?
A: School choice!

You can’t very well expect an American politician to respond, “Our schools aren’t ‘broken.’ Blacks are doing about as well as can be expected considering their lower IQ and lack of impulse control.”

This was illustrated in the 2012 campaign by Obama. He had proposed a jobs program–Stimulus 2.0–that was so unpalatable that Harry Reid wouldn’t even support it. However, what was important was that when Obama was campaigning, and a reporter asked what he was going to do about unemployment, he could say, “I’ve put forth a jobs bill but the Republican congress won’t even consider it, so you should ask them.”

The jobs bill performed its only actual intended function, providing Obama with a way to answer the unemployment question.

* The City Journal article was utterly silent on the Somali black versus American black versus Mexican problem. From other accounts of school violence in the Twin Cities, a lot of the trouble stems from intra-NAM race war. You get some American brutha who hits on some Somali sista and all hell will break loose when the young Somali males react.

Being hard-line Muslims, Somalis are generally disgusted with the sluttish and sexual behavior of American blacks and more than perhaps anything else wish to have their own hardline Sharia-based schools in the Twin Cities.

Why didn’t City Journal even dip its toe into that stream? Is it incompatible with their pro-immigrant ideology?

* The wisdom of Prussia’s three-class franchise is more apparent than ever.

Wikipedia: The Prussian three-class franchise system (German: Dreiklassenwahlrecht), after the revolutions of 1848 in the German states, was introduced on 30 May 1849 by the government of the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, for the election of the lower house of the Prussian parliament. It was completely abolished in 1918. The system was used in Prussia, Brunswick, Waldeck and (until 1909) Saxony.

Those eligible to vote were men over 24, divided by their direct tax revenue into three classes. The three classes were calculated according to how much tax one paid, by dividing the entire range of taxes into thirds. The first class ranged from the highest tax payer on down until one third of total tax revenue was reached; the second was for those with a lower income until another one third of total tax revenue was reached; the third was for the bottom third of tax payers. While the last were generally poor people paying little to no tax individually, it could happen that a rich person living in a particularly rich tax district ended up in the third class, which happened to chancellor Bernhard von Bülow in 1903.

Voting took place in public and was oral; there was no secret ballot. It was also indirect; representatives known as electors (Wahlmänner) were voted for, each class electing a third of all the electors. The classes of course contained widely differing numbers of people even though the number of electors was the same for each one. In 1849, the first class constituted 4.7% of the population, the second class 12.7% and the third class 82.6%. The distribution meant that a first-class vote had 17.5 times the value of a third-class vote. A three-class franchise system was also used for local elections in parts of Prussia, one result of which was that the industrialist Alfred Krupp was the only person able to vote for the electors in the first class in Essen.

Prussia’s controlling position in the German Empire meant that the system was at the heart of debates about reform. Extending suffrage would, however, have meant the downfall of the ruling conservative politicians, elected by the wealthy voters favoured by the three-class system. Thus, despite popular dissatisfaction, the Prussian franchise persisted.

* A Short Story: Victimization as a way of life became institutionalized in the United States in the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. In the intervening decades, more “identity” groups saw the social and economic advantages of victimization and jumped aboard. In the name of justice, calls for affirmative action, equity, and reparations spread across ever larger classes of people. For example, all People of Color became a victim class. Indeed, all females — infants, girls, women, the aged — found themselves defined as a victim class.

Then Hussein Obama, a street pimp from Chicago, sweet talked his way into the White House. Under him, the spreading Cult of Victimization accelerated as national and international policy. In time, up to 70 percent of the population of the United States claimed victim status based on one criterion or another. The infection quickly spread to Europe and the Third World, where entire populations started claiming victimization that could only be addressed by open borders and massive immigration to Western Europe and the United States. The new victims asserted new-found human rights as immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers; they sought redress for the harm done to them.

But victims require victimizers. Who were they? The only non-victim class of candidates left to fill this ideological role were White Males and the patriarchy and Western Civilization they created. Cultural Marxism (a thinly veiled spinoff of classical economic Marxism, a.k.a. Communism) became the ideological glue that held this new-found class warfare … this fetid mess … together.

The global victim classes found commonality and class solidarity in what they called the intersectional oppression they had suffered at the hands of White Males at some time in their personal, cultural, or national histories. But they had to act quickly. The lines were becoming longer and longer as the victimized masses queued up at the pay window to claim redress. At some point, the victim classes realized that Western Civilization would be “cashed out” and there would be nothing left for them. They had to act while there was still time.

* Unfortunately, in a society where public schools are abysmal, all a private school needs to do is be ok in order for it to stay in business and be considered good.

Private school, or a public school in a “good” district, will get your kids away from violence and chaotic classrooms, but the education is unlikely to be excellent, even at the so-called “good” ones.

That’s the problem with generally lowered standards in a society. It has a way of dragging everything down.

I heard a saying once: “If you spend time with cripples, you start to limp.” We’re seeing this in our education system. The bad schools are the cripples, and the good schools are limping along.

I don’t know what the solution is, except to have higher quality people. Enforce law and order, encourage stable two-parent families, outlaw immigration except for geniuses, and maybe within 2 or 3 generations we can turn this around.

Posted in Education | Comments Off on How can a race realist support school vouchers?

What Steve Bannon Wants You to Read

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Luke Ford

From Politico:

If Taleb and Yarvin laid some of the theoretical groundwork for Trumpism, the most muscular and controversial case for electing him president—and the most unrelenting attack on Trump’s conservative critics—came from Michael Anton, a onetime conservative intellectual writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus.

Thanks to an entree from Thiel, Anton now sits on the National Security Council staff. Initial reports indicated he would serve as a spokesman, but Anton is set to take on a policy role, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. A former speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani and George W. Bush’s National Security Council, Anton most recently worked as a managing director for BlackRock, the Wall Street investment firm.

Hiring Anton puts one of the key intellectual forces behind Trump in the West Wing. In his blockbuster article “The Flight 93 Election,” a 4,300-plus-word tract published in September 2016 under his pseudonym, Anton strikes many of the same notes as Taleb and Yarvin. “America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad,” he writes. He blasts conservatives as “keepers of the status quo” for refusing to take account of the need for “truly fundamental” change—especially a crackdown on immigration that he argues is promoting “ethnic separatism” and risks entrenching a permanent Democratic majority.

Anton is no blind Trump supporter—the analogy in his essay’s title suggests that electing the Manhattan mogul was merely an alternative to the certain civilizational death of choosing another member of the “bipartisan junta” that he says is driving America “off a cliff.”

“2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die,” he writes. “You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.”

Will Trumpism work, Anton asks? He’s not sure—but he argues that it’s worth trying, given the alternative: “[T]he ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”

Anton’s real target is his fellow conservative intellectuals, who by opposing Trump are “objectively pro-Hillary”—a choice he warns will lead to “Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see.”

If that sounds like a highbrow expression of Trumpism—his inaugural address ripping the “establishment” in both parties for allegedly selling out the American people to foreign interests—it’s because it is. Hiring Anton speaks to Bannon’s ambition to displace traditional American conservatism with the sort of populist nationalism that Trump rode to office, and that his allies say is merely a return to the country’s original ideals.

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‘Will Trump Follow the Belichick-Brady Playbook to Make America Great Again?’

Posted on February 5, 2017 by Luke Ford

This is the best explanation I’ve read for how the Patriots won and the Falcons lost.

Highlights from the thread at Steve Sailer:

* Here’s the real HBD question: How come New England always seems to succeed with short, white wide receivers?

How good is Brady that he makes these guys look like all-pros? Or is it Belichick just that good at creating offensive schemes? Or both?

I always route for the team with the most white guys, so I’d suspect that I’ll be cheering for the Patriots, though I don’t know that for sure.

* The Superbowl is the one time of year when we get commercials that aren’t explicitly anti white male. Too many people are watching and analyzing them, rather than just consuming. If anyone noticed the pattern in the commercials they might start noticing things.

* We’ve already had the first cultmarx, huddled massses piece of propaganda from Coca-Cola before the coin toss. Someday no one will realize that American women once didn’t wear hijabs.

* Highly politicized commercials for #Superbowl put the rootless cosmopolitan ideal of America front & center. Whites are depicted as minority.

* Actually there are loads of people on the left who endlessly analyze the demographics and implications of commercials and raise a fuss if they’re insufficiently anti-white male. The only difference is the right-wing is starting to do it now too.

ANOTHER THREAD:

* That game was eerily reminiscent of the election.

* Belichek is good at appraising undervalued talent. Interestingly, these players seem to disproportionately be white.

There’s a perception that black players have more raw athleticism, but whites are better team players. I wonder what Belichek would have to say on this issue.

* Stats:

N.E., Atl.

1st downs 37, 17

total yards 546, 344

time of possession 40:31, 23:27

3rd down conversions. 7/14, 1/8

The wonder is the game was as close as it was.

* He’s not the greatest natural talent, but he’s among the most disciplined QBs of all time, which coupled with one of the greatest coaches has made him one of the greatest QBs of all time.

ANOTHER THREAD:

* With one possible exception, Belichick never has the most talented team on the Super Bowl field. He essentially fired his most talented defensive player mid season this year because the guy kept going rogue. He is the master of putting his talent into situations where the player’s talent can play and his limitations will not be exposed. Thus opportunity arises for white players as well as second tier black talent. We hear “Do your job” over and over again.

* Should we expect to see the following headline in the NYT anytime soon: “Unleashing the Power of Whiteness: Will Trump Follow the Belichick-Brady Playbook to Make America Great Again?”

* Bill Belichick has been playing Moneyball for years, and much more successfully than Billy Beane.

Belichick has no problem signing flashy black receivers- he made great use of Randy Moss, after all . But he has a big problem with overspending on any player not named Tom Brady. He’d rather have one highly paid stud QB surrounded by 47 well paid, smart, functional players than 12 highly paid superstars surrounded by 35 minimum wage losers.

That means Belichick will take 3 good, undervalued white receivers in the fourth round rather than one All-SEC receiver in the first round. More bang for his buck.

What may be going on with the white receivers is a phenomenon I first saw articulated by Keith Norris, a trainer out of Texas. He played college football and while fast, wasn’t the absolutely fastest guy on the field. His experience was that the ridiculously fast guys, the very top end elite sprinters, had two things that worked against them in football. First, was that they have a tendency to be injury prone. The second is that they don’t seem to have as much endurance as the guys on the next level. They will absolutely beat you on a limited number of sprints but oftentimes they fade and their speed drops off due to fatigue. What Norris noted from experience is that there are some players who are really fast, though not necessarily the fastest in a single sprint, who can maintain that speed all afternoon. They seem to make the best football players.

To put it into real numbers the three white receivers for the Patriots all run in the 4.5 range in the 40 which is fast but not the ridiculous numbers some of the defensive backs put up in the combines. Alford, for Atlanta, was listed as a 4.39 with a 40” vertical. What we may have seen in the 4th quarter is that by the end of the game the Patriots receivers were actually the fastest guys on the field. It certainly looked that way. Belichick may not look at it this way, he may simply see that they can get open and catch the ball when it’s thrown to them.

* It’s very similar to how Gregg Popovich pointedly avoids loading his roster with American ghetto blacks. Most of his players were in a different environment in their formative years, many of them overseas. The terrible basketball habits of American blacks are something we sports fans can’t talk about. Everybody in the media now raves about Gregg’s methods, but virtually nobody tries to emulate them.

* It’s also a–mild–rebuke to the notion that “women and minorities” are “underrepresented” in for example Silicon Valley tech, because of discrimination. Sure, there may be–no doubt is–some bias based on (true) stereotypes. This case suggests that’s possible–at least if the bias is toward blacks. But it also suggests that even in a very limited market (32 firms), *someone* will take advantage. Some firm in Silicon Valley would be snapping up all these un\under-employed genius women programmers … if they in fact existed. In fact, by analogy some woman run firm, should be sort of waving the welcome mat, and filling their skilled tech positions with these underappreciated women.

* Belichick fielded a SB team a few years back that had 10 white starters on offense. Belichick finds players that fit the Patriots system and discards with impunity any players that don’t or won’t play his way. Jamie Collins and Chandler Jones were All-Pro level defensive players that were traded this year pre and mid season. Amendola, Edelman and Hogan will go across the middle of the field, just yards from the line of scrimmage, and Brady hits them with a low fading pass that gains a first down and minimizes the hits they take. Hogan played two years in Buffalo and his Patriot playoff stats are better than his career stats with the Bills. Belichick and his staff don’t seem to overthink the game, unlike Jon Gruden who analyzes every play like it was a quadratic equation. Rex Ryan, the recently fired, and deservedly so, coach of the Bills, had 29 assistant coaches on his staff. I personally think Belichick gets close to the SB with Brady, Offensive Coordinator Josh Mc Daniels, Defensive Coordinator Matt Patricia and the rosters of most NFL teams.

* One of the unique things about football as a sport — and which makes it the most interesting for me — is its inherent complexity. It deploys 11 men on each side in every play, and bad play by any of them can be a disaster. It has many more moving parts, and each part has to “do his job” precisely for the team to succeed on any given play. Sports IQ plays a bigger role in football than in any other sport.

As critical as speed may be, higher Sports IQ can easily become the winning factor.

I think Belichick understands this, and chooses his players accordingly.

* I have always suspected that Roger Goodell actually did Brady a big favor by suspending him for the first four games of this season. This no doubt gave Brady legs in the brutal NFL season, especially considering his age. One thing that seems to be a consistent sign of an aging quarterback is that they play less well toward the end of the season than at the beginning.

In general, one thing that seems surprising to me is that more substitution isn’t done in football. Obviously, the Atlanta defense at the end of the game wasn’t playing at the level it did at the beginning of the game. Why don’t teams routinely swap players in and out?

* Jester, in December when the Bills played the Browns, Cleveland’s starting QB was Robert Griffin the III, who sadly is a shadow of his former self. The Buffalo News printed an interview with the Bills corner back, Nickell Robey-Coleman and I will quote his take on RG III. “He wasn’t just a regular African-American Quarterback, I felt like when he came into the league, he had the mental capacity as a Tom Brady type guy, when you hear him talk, he’s so articulate, he’s very intelligent…” Nickell, whose name rhymes with Michelle, is black, so this is an interesting perspective. Buffalo News, Sports section, Dec.17,2016.

* A couple of years ago on Inside the NFL, Jason Whitlock caused an uproar when he pointed out that the Patriots specifically look for players who grew up with a male in the home. Their rationale was that such players respond better to having older men yell at them and tell them what to do all day. Obviously this meant a disproportionate number of black players would be excluded. The male role models didn’t have to be fathers, but stepfathers, uncles, older brothers, coaches who would fill a similar role. I guess they still do this. I’d like to see them draft Christian McCaffrey.

* Pats have ridiculous schemes requiring adjustments at the line and after the snap depending on the positions and actions of every player on the line and the backers. You have to be highly intelligent to play slot/wideout/offensive lineman on the Pats because every defensive look is different and you have to pick it up and when he goes to where you should be, you better BE THERE, or else. Top that off with every opponent requires extensive film study and you come to the final reason Blacks don’t succeed in complicated themes: hard work. Failure to pick up the system has led to the cutting and awarding of a sandwich and a road map to many a Black wide receiver at the Pats.. They just don’t seem to have the smarts to play McDaniel’s system. I suspect Michael Floyd, picked up from Az. a few weeks back is a case in point. Percy Harvin from Indy came to camp, took one look at the playbook, retired. Ocho-Sucko, was another one. No good. Many Blaxx have passed through, they mostly don’t have it. And rest assured, when Belichick uses Blacks, they are high-football-IQ that at least grasp fundamentals.

The Pats and Brady and the White receivers are playing Chess, the Falcons with their Black receivers were playing checkers, the Falcon’s schemes a bit more complicated than high school offense, but just barely. Matt Ryan is stuck with them, HE could do better, but his receivers, Black all, will never.

* Green Bay is often the second whitest team in the NFL. They have had great success as well and won a Super Bowl with a half white team in 2011. Shame they did not meet New England in the SB this year.

But the league is getting blacker as formerly white positions like QB and O-line become “caste” (meaning most coaches, owners and fans believe only blacks should play these positions because they are supposedly better athletes).

Example? The LA Raiders had exactly 5 whites and 47 blacks on their roster this year. Even their punter was black. Of the whites, 3 were QBs and 1 was a kicker. They had exactly 1 white starter (QB). Their white coach, Jack Del Rio, did something similar at Jacksonville a few years earlier.

Did you see any worried articles on this? No?

I played a bit and the black players lobby the coaches to play “they boys” at QB and other positions even if a white athlete is better. Sometimes far better. White athletes are the same as whites everywhere. They know it and see it but keep their heads down. Better not to make trouble and hope for the best.

And no coach or owner will ever get anything but plaudits from fans – including most white fans – for starting an almost entirely black team.

* We Raider fans know how many penalties we incurred too. This year, we survived them; usually, we don’t.

GM Reggie McKenzie has made every effort to hire “good citizens” and many of them are very involved Christians, like him.

* Makes me wonder how high Randy Moss’ “football IQ” is. I can’t say he’s an idiot in regular life, but he does lack impulse control, which correlates with low-IQ. He often showed poor impulse control on the field, as well, but he also blew the game wide open and was one of top 5 best wide receivers ever to play. That couldn’t have been all natural talent.

Moss made it in the Belichik system, for a while at least. Is that because Brady, Belichik, and the coordinator Moss-ified their playbook, or did he catch on to that notoriously complex system? If so, how can there be such a wide apparent gap between football IQ and regular IQ?

* Generally speaking, defenses tire quicker than offenses. The Patriots controlled time of possession. As bad as they looked on the scoreboard in the first half, they had plenty of long drives that wore on the Falcons’ gastank.

* It should be noted that Lady G was political. She started singing God Bless America. Then she went into This Land is Your land. Old former lefties know that this land was a rebuttal to the God bless song. After jumping off the roof, at some point she sang Born this way.
This song is her excuse for the gay lifestyle.
She was very subtle. You had to know the symbolism to understand her.

Posted in Football | Comments Off on ‘Will Trump Follow the Belichick-Brady Playbook to Make America Great Again?’