The Theological Origins Of Modernity

Posted on August 16, 2020 by Luke Ford

Michael Allen Gillespie writes in this 2009 book:

Petrarch asserts unequivocally in The Solitary Life that public life is incompatible with virtue. At the heart of this claim is his conviction that social life is dominated by the opinions and values of the multitude, who are invariably slaves to their passions. Man in society is thus not a free being who seeks his own good but a slave who desires the praise and fears the blame of others and who consequently wants only what others want.

Those engaged in public affairs, are ruled by the power of another man’s nod and learn what they must do from another man’s look. Th ey claim nothing as their own. Their house, their sleep, their food, is not their own, and what is even more serious, their mind is not their own, their countenance not their own. They do not weep and laugh at the promptings of their own nature but discard their own emotions to put on those of another. In sum, they transact another man’s business, think another man’s thoughts, live by another man’s grace.

The multitude thus merely follow one another, which is to say, they are dominated by the lowest desires and turn the satisfaction of these desires into objects of praise. Under such circumstances, virtue is impossible and man necessarily becomes vicious, prey to envy and resentment. The busy man’s heart is wholly fi xed on treachery, and he becomes pernicious, unstable, faithless, inconstant, fierce, and bloody. The intellectual life also disappears in the public sphere, for public life is devoted to the cultivation of estates and not minds. In fact, minds are deadened under such circumstances by the mania for talk, noise, and disturbance. Petrarch admits that there are some saintly active men (such as Scipio), but he believes that they are very few and that they are not happy.
In his view a noble spirit will never find repose save in God or in himself and his private thoughts, or in some intellect united by a close sympathy with his own.

It is only in private life, only in what Petrarch calls solitude or retirement, that man can be true to himself and enjoy his own individuality.

Petrarch does not mean that everyone should simply follow his whims: “Each man must seriously take into account the disposition with which nature has endowed him and the best which by habit or training he has developed.” In the plan to reform our lives, we should be guided not by idle wishes but by our character and predisposition. It is thus necessary for man to be particularly honest and exacting in passing judgment on himself and to avoid temptations of eye and ear. This is only to say that each man should undergo the kind of self-examination undertaken in the My Secret. Once one has come to the bottom of oneself and grasped one’s peculiar nature, warts and all, he or she should follow the path that this nature demands. As Petrarch puts it, “Each person, whether saint, soldier, or philosopher, follows some irresistible call of his nature.” In his view, however, we generally do not do this because we are guided not by our own judgment but by the opinions of the crowd. This distortion of judgment is the great danger that makes the private life, or the life of solitude, necessary. Independence of mind is possible only in solitude, in private away from the crowd, away from politics. Only there is it possible “to live according to your pleasure, to go where you will, to stay where you will . . . to belong to yourself in all seasons and wherever you are to be ever with yourself, far from evil, far from examples of wickedness!”

…the immoderate desire for fame (the unresolved problem of the My Secret) can be satisfied only by withdrawal from active life and the proper use of leisure. Only in private will it be possible to win the war over our passions, “to expel vice from our borders, put our lusts to flight, restrain our illicit propensities, chastise our wantonness, and elevate our mind toward higher objects.” “Let some govern the populous city and others rule the army. Our city is that of our mind, our army that of our thoughts.” Humans in this way remain political but only because they become autarchic cities with laws and customs peculiarly their own.

…Petrarch seldom tells us anything that we don’t already know, and as a result he seems superfluous to us.

Posted in Theology | Comments Off on The Theological Origins Of Modernity

Theses On Method

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Luke Ford

Professor Bruce Lincoln writes:

1. The conjunction “of” that joins the two nouns in the disciplinary ethnonym “History of Religions” is not neutral filler. Rather, it announces a proprietary claim and a relation of encompassment: History is the method and Religion the object of study.

2. The relation between the two nouns is also tense, as becomes clear if one takes the trouble to specify their meaning. Religion, I submit, is that discourse whose defining characteristic is its desire to speak of things eternal and transcendent with an authority equally transcendent and eternal. History, in the sharpest possible contrast, is that discourse which speaks of things temporal and terrestrial in a human and fallible voice, while staking its claim to authority on rigorous critical practice.

3. History of religions is thus a discourse that resists and reverses the orientation of that discourse with which it concerns itself. To practice history of religions in a fashion consistent with the discipline’s claim of title is to insist on discussing the temporal, contextual, situated, interested, human, and material dimensions of those discourses, practices, and institutions that characteristically represent themselves as eternal, transcendent, spiritual, and divine.

4. The same destabilizing and irreverent questions one might ask of any speech act ought be posed of religious discourse. The first of these is “Who speaks here?”, i.e., what person, group, or institution is responsible for a text, whatever its putative or apparent author. Beyond that, “To what audience? In what immediate and broader context? Through what system of mediations? With what interests?” And further, “Of what would the speaker(s) persuade the audience? What are the consequences if this project of persuasion should happen to succeed? Who wins what, and how much? Who, conversely, loses?”

5. Reverence is a religious, and not a scholarly virtue. When good manners and good conscience cannot be reconciled, the demands of the latter ought to prevail.

6. Many who would not think of insulating their own or their parents’ religion against critical inquiry still afford such protection to other people’s faiths, via a stance of cultural relativism. One can appreciate their good intentions, while recognizing a certain displaced defensiveness, as well as the guilty conscience of western imperialism.

7. Beyond the question of motives and intentions, cultural relativism is predicated on the dubious–not to say, fetishistic–construction of “cultures” as if they were stable and discrete groups of people defined by the stable and discrete values, symbols, and practices they share. Insofar as this model stresses the continuity and integration of timeless groups, whose internal tensions and conflicts, turbulence and incoherence, permeability and malleability are largely erased, it risks becoming a religious and not a historic narrative: the story of a transcendent ideal threatened by debasing forces of change.

8. Those who sustain this idealized image of culture do so, inter alia, by mistaking the dominant fraction (sex, age group, class, and/or caste) of a given group for the group or “culture” itself. At the same time, they mistake the ideological positions favoured and propagated by the dominant fraction for those of the group as a whole (e.g. when texts authored by Brahmins define “Hinduism”, or when the statements of male elders constitute “Nuer religion”). Scholarly misrecognitions of this sort replicate the misrecognitions and misrepresentations of those the scholars privilege as their informants.

9. Critical inquiry need assume neither cynicism nor dissimulation to justify probing beneath the surface, and ought probe scholarly discourse and practice as much as any other.

10. Understanding the system of ideology that operates in one’s own society is made difficult by two factors: (i) one’s consciousness is itself a product of that system, and (ii) the system’s very success renders its operations invisible, since one is so consistently immersed in and bombarded by its products that one comes to mistake them (and the apparatus through which they are produced and disseminated) for nothing other than “nature”.

11. The ideological products and operations of other societies afford invaluable opportunities to the would-be student of ideology. Being initially unfamiliar, they do not need to be denaturalized before they can be examined. Rather, they invite and reward critical study, yielding lessons one can put to good use at home.

12. Although critical inquiry has become commonplace in other disciplines, it still offends many students of religion, who denounce it as “reductionism”. This charge is meant to silence critique. The failure to treat religion “as religion”–that is, the refusal to ratify its claim of transcendent nature and sacrosanct status–may be regarded as heresy and sacrilege by those who construct themselves as religious, but it is the starting point for those who construct themselves as historians.

13. When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which they will be understood, suspends one’s interest in the temporal and contingent, or fails to distinguish between “truths”, “truth-claims”, and “regimes of truth”, one has ceased to function as historian or scholar. In that moment, a variety of roles are available: some perfectly respectable (amanuensis, collector, friend and advocate), and some less appealing (cheerleader, voyeur, retailer of import goods). None, however, should be confused with scholarship.

Posted in Religion | Comments Off on Theses On Method

Kamala Harris – The Affirmative Action Candidate

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Luke Ford

From comments at Steve Sailer:

* I don’t understand the logic here.

I would think Whitmer, Warren, Klobucher, etc. as VP would guarantee a Biden win at this point.

Black women aren’t going to vote Trump just because Biden chose a white VP. Whereas blue collar whites in swing states might be wary of Kamala.

* To the extent that Obama was ever accepted as authentically black by African Americans, it was because of his marriage to Michelle. And Barack looks kinda sorta like an American black. Kamala does not look African American and she’s married to a Jewish guy. Do African Americans identify with her?

BTW, when Obama ran against Bobby Rush, blacks told “Obama so white” jokes about him. One was, “Obama so white, when the riots start he run out and buy hisself a TV.” I also liked, “Obama so white he say the whole word,” and “Obama so white when he read Malcolm X, he say Malcolm the Tenth.”

* Sheesh. This reads like a cry for help or a secret message being sent out in Morse code from a POW.

Basically, the between-the-lines message is Biden and his family don’t like or trust Harris, realize that she doesn’t really bring that much to the ticket, and get that she’s eventually going to stab him in the back for her own self-interest again. But they’re basically stuck with her because blackety-black-black.

It’s a sad but almost too perfect microcosm of what the rest of us live with.

This really is the ticket of flaccid boomer cuckery. If Biden can be pushed around this easily now on race, how much worse will it be as he ages in office, he’s a self-admitted “transitional” caretaker figure to the woke tide represented by his Veep, and BLM has just come off of an election-year-long exercise in moral and literal extortion?

* Obama made an earnest and dedicated (if often rather ridiculous) effort to connect with African-American culture. In addition to the marriage to Michelle, there was the moving to Chicago to be a community organizer and the church with the wacky pastor. It may have been a largely unrequited love for the first 25 years of his career, but we can’t say it didn’t pay off eventually (albeit in a triple-bankshot way that saw him winning over white liberals before he did blacks). Our esteemed host on this blog wrote a book all about this journey.

Kamala never made that effort, and stuck with being a sort of unplaceable Amerimutt by way of California. She also definitely does not have Obama’s rare “blank screen” gift that allowed him to seem sunny, uplifting, and messianic while still letting the public project whatever they wanted to see onto him. As hard as they might be trying to coach her, the human costume doesn’t fit her well.

I’d be interested to see how black women versus black men react to her. I can’t pretend to any insider insights. But I could see black women wanting to see themselves in her: wildly successful in a government job, having using that WAP for all it’s worth from day one, married to a rich white guy and not stuck with some useless black bum, having another white man who might be titularly the most powerful man in the world next year as her bitch, not having to ever be stuck with any man’s kids, and, to top it all off, having the good hair without having to work for it.

Black men supposedly already are supportive of Trump somewhere in the 30% range (which isn’t to say they’ll vote that way, just that they poll with that kind of approval). And they might say to themselves “she wouldn’t marry one of us but she put plenty of us in jail.”

* One of the funniest parts of the “Rising Star” biography on Obama was his typically white reaction to the OJ Simpson verdict.

“Three days later, everyone’s attention turned to California when a Los Angeles jury astonishingly acquitted former football star O. J. Simpson of murdering his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, with many African Americans celebrating that verdict. Barack was crestfallen, later remarking that it “was pretty clear that O.J. was guilty, and I was ashamed for my own community to respond in that way.””

Also, he favored typical cocaine, not the crack-cocaine strongly favored by the brothas. If Obama had to choose between micro-brews and Old English Malt Liquor, you know what he’d choose. Red wine.

Posted in America | Comments Off on Kamala Harris – The Affirmative Action Candidate

Kamala Harris Slept Her Way To The Top

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* By fucking her way up the ladder of success, Harris is the mirror opposite of the meeeeee-too movement.

* So they coached her up for the big reboot today…

Go watch the video. It’s a lot of awkward hand motions and fake smiles. Both will just reinforce her reputation as phony.

Older people can’t learn new body language. She wants to squirm while speaking so the coaches gave her a few hand/arm motions to release the urge but it isn’t natural at all.

The plastic surgery makes her look less tired but RBF is a facial muscle thing triggered by anger inside the person. The surgery and the forced smiling don’t fix the hardness especially in the eyes. Her inner bitch can’t just hide away.

Posted in Kamala Harris | Comments Off on Kamala Harris Slept Her Way To The Top

Get Another Job

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Luke Ford

Nicholas Nassim Taleb writes in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder:

As we saw with the Voltaire story, it is not possible to stamp out criticism; if it harms you, get out. It is easier to change jobs than control your reputation or public perception.
Some jobs and professions are fragile to reputational harm, something that in the age of the Internet cannot possibly be controlled—these jobs aren’t worth having. You do not want to “control” your reputation; you won’t be able to do it by controlling information flow. Instead, focus on altering your exposure, say, by putting yourself in a position impervious to reputational damage. Or even put yourself in a situation to benefit from the antifragility of information. In that sense, a writer is antifragile, but we will see later most modernistic professions are usually not.
I was in Milan trying to explain antifragility to Luca Formenton, my Italian publisher (with great aid from body language and hand gestures). I was there partly for the Moscato dessert wines, partly for a convention convention in which the other main speaker was a famous fragilista economist. So, suddenly remembering that I was an author, I presented Luca with the following thought experiment: if I beat up the economist publicly, what would happen to me (other than a publicized trial causing great interest in the new notions of fragilita and antifragilita )? You know, this economist had what is called a tête à baffe, a face that invites you to slap it, just like a cannoli invites you to bite into it. Luca thought for a second … well, it’s not like he would like me to do it, but, you know, it wouldn’t hurt book sales. Nothing I can do as an author that makes it to the front page of Corriere della Sera would be detrimental for my book. Almost no scandal would hurt an artist or writer. 6
Now let’s say I were a midlevel executive employee of some corporation listed on the London Stock Exchange, the sort who never take chances by dressing down, always wearing a suit and tie (even on the beach). What would happen to me if I attack the fragilista? My firing and arrest record would plague me forever. I would be the total victim of informational antifragility. But someone earning close to minimum wage, say, a construction worker or a taxi driver, does not overly depend on his reputation and is free to have his own opinions. He would be merely robust compared to the artist, who is antifragile. A midlevel bank employee with a mortgage would be fragile to the extreme. In fact he would be completely a prisoner of the value system that invites him to be corrupt to the core—because of his dependence on the annual vacation in Barbados. The same with a civil servant in Washington. Take this easy-to-use heuristic (which is, to repeat the definition, a simple compressed rule of thumb) to detect the independence and robustness of someone’s reputation. With few exceptions, those who dress outrageously are robust or even antifragile in reputation; those clean-shaven types who dress in suits and ties are fragile to information about them.
Large corporations and governments do not seem to understand this rebound power of information and its ability to control those who try to control it. When you hear a corporation or a debt-laden government trying to “reinstill confidence” you know they are fragile, hence doomed. Information is merciless: one press conference “to tranquilize” and the investors will run away, causing a death spiral or a run on the bank. Which explains why I have an obsessive stance against government indebtedness, as a staunch proponent of what is called fiscal conservatism. When you don’t have debt you don’t care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.
And we are blind to this antifragility of information in even more domains. If I physically beat up a rival in an ancestral environment, I injure him, weaken him, perhaps eliminate him forever—and get some exercise in the process. If I use the mob to put a contract on his head, he is gone. But if I stage a barrage of informational attacks on websites and in journals, I may be just helping him and hurting myself.

From Quillette:

I’m an attorney representing a professor at the University of Central Florida who is being subjected by the university to what can only be called an inquisition after expressing opinions on Twitter that led to widespread calls for his firing. UCF is a public institution—an instrument of the state—and is now bringing its full power to bear against a man who dared to question the prevailing orthodoxy that has quickly descended over so many of this country’s institutions. I cannot bear witness to what the university is doing to this man without speaking out against it. If we do not challenge this egregious abuse of power, things will only get worse.

Professor Charles Negy is a wonderfully eccentric man, someone who teaches extraordinarily controversial subjects—Cross-Cultural Psychology and Sexual Behavior—with bluntness and humor. He is exactly the kind of professor you want in college: someone who is passionate about his subject, who will challenge your deeply-held assumptions, and who encourages free and open discussion in the classroom. Negy’s bluntness has occasionally ruffled feathers over the years, but throughout his 22-year career at UCF he has received consistently superior performance reviews. For the past four years, for example, he has received an evaluation rating of “Outstanding” for his instruction and advising.

In June, however, things changed overnight for Negy after he posted a characteristically blunt tweet to his personal Twitter account…

Immediately, #UCFfirehim began trending on Twitter and people began to protest both on UCF’s campus and outside Negy’s home.

UCF president Alexander Cartwright understood, but was clearly disappointed, that the university could not fire Negy for his constitutionally protected tweets, telling the Orlando Sentinel: “The Constitution restricts our ability to fire him or any other University employee for expressing personal opinions about matters of public concern. This is the law.”

So Cartwright chose a different strategy: He publicly announced a witch hunt into Negy’s classroom speech.

From comments at Steve Sailer:

* I remember about 25 years or so ago I applied for an adjunct teaching position at a college with an overwhelmingly high percentage of minority students. The head of adjuncts and the department chair in that department were minorities themselves.

At one point in the interview I was asked my opinion about minority education. I went on a rant, saying minority education was a racist concept which implied minority students weren’t capable of learning. The head of adjuncts took me to the department chair and had me repeat my rant. I was hired.

Not only that, but when I caught some minority students cheating a few years later I was permitted to punish them. Not all colleges allowed that for certain ethnic groups.

So yes, even many of us liberals don’t want students coddled no matter what the ethnic background, and that includes liberal minorities as well.

Posted in Economics | Comments Off on Get Another Job

Joe Biden Picks Kamala Harris

Posted on August 12, 2020 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* People magazine 1996: “‘Brown reserves some of the swagger for his social life. Named one of the world’s 10 sexiest men by Playgirl magazine in 1984, he “has had a succession of girlfriends,” according to James Richardson, a Sacramento Bee reporter whose biography of Brown hits stores next fall. “The measure of his flamboyance is he’ll go to a party with his wife on one arm and his girlfriend on the other.” As for Brown, he only requests that his date “absolutely be the best-dressed woman in the room.”

* Maxine Waters got her start as a bag man (bag woman? bag lady?) for Willie Brown. She was just bright enough to follow orders, not ask questions, and never peek inside the packages she delivered. Big rewards eventually followed. As Maxine demonstrates a career as a bag man (bag woman? bag lady?) offers golden opportunities for low IQ individuals to achieve financial and limited political* success.

* The moment Joe publicly tapped Kamala and Willie said she’d work her backside off for Joe just like she had for willie, I knew it would be a happy ending, because she’s the type to just put her head down and work her way to the top.

* Kamala is Willie Brown’s most successful girlfriend. He has had a lot of them though. There was a good kerfuffle a few years ago. At that time, City College wanted to expand to on-line. The president of the board (an ex- girlfriend of Willie) gave a no-bid contract to a head hunter (who was also an ex-girlfriend of Willie) who found a third ex-girlfriend of Willie to head it. My guess is that any Bay Area Democratic women over 45 probably is Willie’s ex-girlfriend.
On the other hand, Willie was a really good mayor. He managed the homeless better than anyone else, he fixed Muni, he put in a good chancellor for the SF school system (later fired because she had cracked down too much on corruption), got the new Giant’s stadium built and was instrumental in creating the new UCSF/biotech corridor in the previously slummy Dogpatch area. It has been all downhill since then.

* The fact that Kamala screwed her way to success (despite feminist doctrine, still the best way for a woman to succeed – ask Hillary Clinton) does not seem to have hurt her with the California electorate.

* Most men are too gallant and most women too embarrassed to make an issue of this. I wonder if Trump will try, and what the result will be. Heck, I wonder if Biden might slip up and drop an unscripted reference to it somewhere.

* Most well-adjusted men are white knights at heart. How many men say: the smartest person I know is my wife? We know that isn’t the literal truth, but it’s a polite fiction everyone agrees with.

* I get the impression that a lot of black women see sex as inherently transactional, so maybe they won’t be bothered by that aspect of Kamala’s career. I think her prosecutor reputation could potentially be a problem if BLM doubles down on both the looting and the looting-as-reparations theme. She may have to walk a fine line assuring blacks she’s on their side, while reassuring nervous middle-class white Dems that she’s still a prosecutor at heart.

* I hadn’t realized Kamala had had a very recent facelift. OMG, the results are ghastly. Seriously, if I were a voter, I’d run away from her as fast as possible. Considering she’s from California, she should have been able to find a better doctor. Maybe he was a Republican. Actually, since a lot of doctors in many states haven’t doing elective procedures because of Covid, maybe she got a back-alley facelift. This is going to be a major campaign disaster for the Democrats. Her facelift is going to be the equivalent of Thomas Eagleton’s mental illness problems. No one will be able to unsee it.

Posted in California | Comments Off on Joe Biden Picks Kamala Harris

Will A COVID-19 Vaccine Change The Game?

Posted on August 11, 2020 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* No vaccine “works.”

1. There is no vaccine that stops the infection in 100 percent of cases … 50 percent would be really good.

2. Vaccines only target specific variants, so they have to be constantly updated and will always be behind and imperfect.

3. Vaccines are less effective on certain population groups, including the elderly and the obese, two particularly vulnerable groups for Covid.

4. Hopefully a lot of people will get one or more Covid vaccine shots, but even with conpulsory vaccines like childhood vaccines, many don’t get them. With Covid you’re going to see a leveling off where people hope to coast in the glide stream of others. And it may be that you need so many boosters that people will tire of the vaccines.

5. Something that gets lost in the understandable attempt to deplatform crazy antivaxxers is that no vaccine is completely safe and every vaccine is a risk-benefit tradeoff. Which you already know if you’ve ever read the fine print on the thing you signed prior to any vaccine you have received.

In the end vaccines will help reduce the chances of getting the disease, and treatment regimes and drugs will make recovery safer. (The whole “chronic Covid” thing is still an unknown … maybe you never really recover.) So the odds that you balance when you decide you want to get out in the world a little more will be more in favor of going out if there are vaccines.

I think way too much emphasis is being put on vaccines and drug treatments, over the cold, hard truth that the world is permanently changed and certain things are not coming back, like eating out, concerts, and live sports. People and businesses that adapt as soon as possible to the new, permanent reality will be better off.

* Russia took Corona very seriously very early. They ramped up production of Corona tests early in the year, while US fumbled. You can say that Russia won the test race, and, as a result, took a large chunk of the world market. Indeed, according to this Newsweek article, over a third (!) of the Covid tests administered in the US through July were imported from Russia.

* Putin is a risk taker (with other people’s lives). If it works, he gets to claim that Russia was the first on the market with a vaccine.

Being #1 is very important for Russians with a Soviet mentality like Putin. The Soviet Union was obsessed with being 1st or claiming to be first. Remember that Putin orchestrated a massive doping and drug test cheating scheme so that Russia could win the most Olympic medals at Sochi. The Soviets dropped their moon program like a hot kartoshka the minute they lost the space race – if they couldn’t be first, what was the point of spending billions to visit a worthless rock? Russians are deeply insecure that they are inferior to the West and are always looking for confirmation that they are not inferior, they are actually better.

Posted in Covid | Comments Off on Will A COVID-19 Vaccine Change The Game?

Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019

Posted on August 11, 2020 by Luke Ford

From the Journal of the American Heart Association:

* The AAMC “Project 3000 by 2000” began in 1990.24 The goal was to enroll 3000 “underrepresented in medicine” students per year in medical schools by the year 2000.31 Despite additional “pipeline” efforts, the program failed as year 2000 acceptees consisted of 1168 blacks, 1082 Hispanics, and 126 American Indians.32 Nationally, it was felt that progress had been attained only by lowering admissions standards for objective academic achievements.2

* In 2009, the US Department of Education’s LCME issued diversity standards MS-8 and IS-16.13 This marked a seismic transformation. Previously, racial and ethnic preferences were voluntary; created and implemented at the state or institutional level; limited to the premedical and medical school stages; and, in theory, temporary. Although AAMC initiatives were national, it was limited to advocacy. The distinguishing features of the “diversity” programs are that racial and ethnic preferences are mandatory; created and implemented at the national level; imposed throughout all stages of academic medicine and cardiology; and intended to be permanent.

* At George Mason University Law School, racial preferences were gradually phased out between 1996 and 2000.45 In 2000, the American Bar Association issued a warning for failure to comply with Standard 211, a diversity provision, thereby risking loss of accreditation. As reported, there was a “lack of progress in achieving student diversity. The number of minority students, especially African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students, continue[d] to be extremely low.” The school was ultimately forced to reinstate racial preferences until black matriculants were “more than 13 times as likely to be dismissed for academic cause, and almost twice as likely to fail the bar exam on their first attempt” when compared with students who did not receive preferences. After receiving reaccreditation, Dean Daniel Polsby stated, “What did become quite clear to us during
the ordeal was that our efforts to attract minority students would never satisfy the Committee until they produced some unspecified increase in minority enrollment, especially of certain groups. But we were never told how many students of which races and ethnicities we had to enroll to satisfy the [American Bar Association]… this process was unfair to us, as well as to some of the students whom we were pressured to admit, and who later failed out of the law school at great cost to them in terms of time, money, and emotional distress.”

* Using data from the AAMC and the US Census, marked differences for applicants per 100 000 people in the 20-to 29-year age band exist between racial and ethnic groups: 105.4 for whites, 62.9 for blacks, 46.6 for Hispanics, and 373.4 for Asians.58,59 Second, blacks and Hispanics have greater unadjusted odds for medical school acceptance when compared with whites and Asians when considering applicants with total Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores of ≥21 (Table 2) (a total MCAT score of 21 was the 27th percentile for exams administered between January 2012 and September 201463). Third, they do not account for differences in academic qualifications. Fourth, targeting population parity of medical school graduates would necessitate “overrepresentation” of black and Hispanic acceptees, given higher attrition rates.

* The MCAT has been shown to correlate with unimpeded progress through medical school…

* Blacks and Hispanics are overrepresented and whites and Asians are underrepresented in the lenient model. This is attributable to substantial numbers of Hispanics and blacks in the ≤23 group (Figure 3). The effect is accentuated further in the strict model.

Considering the qualified applicant pool has added importance because of concerns that implicit bias, or subconscious racial or ethnic discrimination, contributes to the low numbers of blacks and Hispanics.69 National data refute this hypothesis, given medical school acceptance rates for racial and ethnic groups when MCAT scores are considered.55 More refined analyses of institutional data, such as the 2001 University of Maryland report,35 provide indisputable evidence that medical schools are going to great lengths to recruit and support blacks and Hispanics. The qualified applicant pool is simply too small.

* Differences for MCAT scores by racial and ethnic groups have been long been observed, even when accounting for parental income.34 Racial and ethnic bias has been investigated, but its existence has not been supported…

* There exists no empirical evidence by accepted standards for causal inference to support the mantra that “diversity saves lives.”

* Healthcare disparities may be due to clustering of biological risk factors for disease and socioeconomic conditions…

* Continuation of racial and ethnic preferences for 5 decades results from the small pool of qualified black and Hispanic medical school applicants.

* An evolving theory for low numbers of blacks and Hispanics in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) and professional fields revolves around the paradoxically harmful effects of affirmative action known as mismatch. Racial and ethnic preferences at both the undergraduate and professional school levels for blacks and Hispanics result in relatively weak academic starting positions in classes. This has been postulated to lead to poor performance through compounding “academic mismatch,” stress-related interference, and disengagement.95 Many do not complete their intended programs or do not attain academic success to be attractive candidates for subsequent educational programs or employment.

* Most medical schools now require students to pass the US Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 to advance.68 Introduced in 1992, poor performance of blacks and Hispanics on the US Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 was described as early as 1996. First-try passing rates for the graduating class of 1994 were 93.4% for whites, 58.2% for blacks, 77.5% for Hispanics, and 86.8% for Asians. In fact, 11.8% of blacks had not passed both Steps 1 and 2 by May 1996.

The American Heart Association then announced:

The Wang paper has rightfully drawn criticism for its misrepresentations and conclusions. As an organization focused on the relentless pursuit of longer, healthier lives for everyone everywhere, the American Heart Association (AHA) denounces the views expressed in the article and regrets its role in enabling those views to be promoted. Those views are a misrepresentation of the facts and are contrary to our organization’s core values and historic commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion in medicine and science.

The American Heart Association remains committed to equity, diversity and inclusion as foundationally essential to its mission. The Association invests in helping to build a diverse health care and scientific research community and actively works to eliminate barriers and increase opportunities in science for people from historically-excluded communities and those impacted by race, ethnicity and class disparities.

The American Heart Association takes the concerns about the Wang paper seriously. We have launched a formal investigation to better understand how a paper that is completely incompatible with the Association’s core values was published. While the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) and the other AHA scientific journals are editorially independent of the Association, we take our responsibility to ensure factual accuracy seriously. The independent editors of JAHA and the American Heart Association are reviewing the journal’s peer-review and publication processes to ensure future submissions containing deliberate misinformation or misrepresentation are never published. The journal can and will do better.

The Association believes much more – not less – needs to be done to increase diversity, equity and inclusion in science, medicine and cardiology. The volunteer and staff leaders of the American Heart Association remain resolved to improve the actions and investments across the organization as well as within the editorially autonomous journals that bear the Association’s trusted name.

From the New York Times today:

After years of training in predominantly white emergency departments, Dr. Otugo has experienced many such microaggressions. The term, coined in the 1970s by Dr. Chester Pierce, a psychiatrist, refers to “subtle, stunning, often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges which are ‘put downs’” of Black people and members of other minority groups; “micro” refers to their routine frequency, not the scale of their impact. Dr. Otugo said the encounters sometimes made her wonder whether she was a qualified and competent medical practitioner, because others did not see her that way.

Other Black women doctors, across specialties, said that such experiences were all too common. Dr. Kimberly Manning, an internal medicine doctor at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, recalled countless microaggressions in clinical settings. “People might not realize you’re offended, but it’s like death by a thousand paper cuts,” Dr. Manning said. “It can cause you to shrink.”

…Discussions about lack of diversity in medicine resurfaced in early August, when the Journal of the American Heart Association retracted a paper that argued against affirmative action initiatives in the field and said that Black and Hispanic trainees were less qualified than their white and Asian counterparts.

That’s the only mention of affirmative action in the Times article. There’s no mention of the astronomical rate of malpractice lawsuits against black doctors.

Here are some comments to the Times:

* Easily, the scariest episodes in my life surround when me or my loved ones are under medical care. These are life and death situations. I try to research the doctors providing care, as best I can.

What this article says is that we need to bend medical care to make it politically correct and use the medical system, particularly how we treat doctors, as a social engineering tool.

We entrust doctors with our lives. They are the most highly trained and vetted professionals. It is absolutely true, that this vetting has been hindered by affirmative action. Now the NYTimes wants further hindrance in the name of political correctness…

Doctors are people, but they are people who have our lives in their hands. If “microaggressions” affect them, then they shouldn’t be doctors. Doctors run medicine, only a select few of us are worthy of that burden. As a patient, I demand no less.

* “Microaggressions” ???
Pull-ease !!!

As an Ashkanazie I have been dealing with these “Microaggressions” since kindergarten and I’m now over 60…

I call it “Dealing with Life as it is, has been and always will be.”
I deal with it and them, make the best of it, turn it to my advantage if possible, turn the other cheek and GET ON with my life…..

File this article under the heading SNOWFLAKES.

* If you can’t handle or accept that everyone is not going to like you, than stay home and find a job where you don’t have to interact with people.

* Read the retraction. It does not factually dispute any of the paper’s assertions. Only that it runs counter to the AHA’s “values”. Scary. The medical community should have the opportunity to evaluate the paper for themselves.

* “When she was first admitted to her residency, at Harvard, a medical school classmate suggested that she had had an “edge” in the selection process because of her race.” Is this untrue? Harvard does use affirmative action, correct?

* The reason is because Black applicants to medical school who are relatively less qualified, are admitted over more qualified candidates, by a large margin.

Data:

Specifically: “black applicants were almost 4 times more likely to be accepted to US medical schools than Asians” with the same MCAT score.

And black applicants were “2.8 times more likely [to be accepted] than white applicants”

Just seems fundamentally unfair, esp. because most people want the most qualified doctor operating on them.

* Between 2013-2016 an African American medical school applicant with 3.40-3.59 GPA & 27-29 MCAT had an 81% likelihood of acceptance to a U.S. M.D. program. Considering those same statistics, a white student had a 29% chance. Asian applicants had it even worse at 20.6%. These statistics don’t account for gender.

* If admissions standards are lower for certain groups, I think it’s understandable why some people might question implicitly or explicitly whether someone deserves to be in a certain position.

I have no doubt that many of these incidents are faux pas as humans are clumsy and some can be insensitive jerks. That said, I’d guess that in some instances, the feeling of being “microaggressed” is simply insecurity on the part of the microaggressed, and that’s on them.

Posted in Affirmative Action | Comments Off on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America From 1969 to 2019

Talmudic Secrets To Wealth

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Luke Ford

Billionaire Hershey H. Friedman writes about how to get rich according to the Talmud:

Unlike the Christian Bible, which largely is dismissive of wealth and the wealthy, the attitude of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud towards wealth is quite positive since it enables one to help others. God blesses those that use their wealth to help the poor (Deuteronomy 15:10; Isaiah 1:17-19; Proverbs 19:17). Wealth, peace, and/or long life are rewards from God for obeying His laws (Leviticus 26: 3-13; Deuteronomy 11: 13-16; Deuteronomy 25:15; Proverbs 22:4). There is nothing wrong with enjoying one’s wealth in a modest, unostentatious manner. There is a Talmudic view that one will be punished for not indulging in permissible pleasures (Jerusalem Talmud, Kiddushin 4:12).

The Talmud stresses the dignity of honest work. Rav told Rabbi Kahana: “Flay a carcass in the street and earn a wage and do not say, ‘I am a great person and this job is degrading to me ’” (Babylonian Talmud, Baba Bathra, 110a). They suggested, “There is no occupation which can disappear from the world [i.e., all are useful and important] …The world requires both perfumers and tanners; fortunate is he whose occupation is that of a perfumer, and woe to him who works as a tanner” (Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 82b).

The sages of the Talmud worked at many diverse occupations. They spoke not as theoreticians, but as people who understood what it meant to work for a living. For instance, Hillel was a woodchopper before he became the Nasi (President of the Sanhedrin) and Shammai the Elder was a builder. Abba Chilkiyah was a field laborer; Rabbi Yochanan b. Zakkai was a businessman for forty years; Abba Shaul was a gravedigger; Abba Chilkiyah was a field worker; Abba Oshiya was a launderer; Rabbi Shimon P’kuli was a cotton dealer; Rabbi Shmuel b. Shilas was a school teacher, Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Chananel were scribes; Rabbi Yosi b. Chalafta was a tanner; Rabbi Yochanan HaSandlar was a shoemaker….

Posted in Talmud | Comments Off on Talmudic Secrets To Wealth

Why Does The MSM Hate The Dissident Right?

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes that “elites…got exposed to criticism when they went on Twitter, and thus went crazy. For example, the insanity in the mainstream media of the last 4 years about the threat supposedly posed by the Alt-Right (compared to the complete lack of attention to the much larger Antifa) may be largely due to journalists being laughed at on Twitter. A lot of people can’t deal well with criticism. They feel like they are about to be attacked by a mob and murdered when they get a few dozen tweets making fun of them.”

Comments:

* As an aside, The Oregonian newspaper (in Portland) disabled all comments on articles a few months back. The reason given was to no longer provide a platform for “hate speech” However a friend on staff shared that the real reason was writers were growing angry that commenters were not just poking holes in the “facts” of their stories, but blowing large gaps in their entire narrative. It was making them feel unsafe.

* Even though the victim was far from ideal, the released footage was tailor-made for tugging at the heart strings of female SJWs, negroes, and others who are all about “feels” and impervious to facts and logic.

Why was the more illuminating footage suppressed, along with the toxicology report?

* Because it felt personal, the most violent emotions were aroused. Floyd seemed like a member of one’s private circle: an idealized friend.

* This is what happens when you accept George Floyd into your life as your savior and you begin to have a personal relationship with Him.

* There is no shortage of horrific, violent crime visited upon white people, and incredibly enough a fair amount of it is available for view on YouTube and similar platforms. At least until the site moderators find out about it. The reason a criminal like George Floyd is made into an international media sensation–while no one’s even heard of John Geer, for instance–isn’t a matter of technology. It’s a matter of which examples the owners of the mass media decide to select and amplify. And in that, a pattern exists.

* Most SJWs have a personality disorder, and they don’t deal well with the internet. The interesting thing is, the rioters are the ones who grew up with the internet. Even though they’ve had years to learn how to handle it and set emotional barriers between it and themselves, they can’t. Everything that happens on the net is personal to them. They internalize someone else’s outrage, and launch attacks on perfect strangers because of this. Trying to get people fired, or physically attacking them for their opinions, or trying to blind a stranger with lasers because you don’t like their politics, is crazy stuff.

* women are really involved in intellectual and political “conversation”. Sure they were–to some extent–reading the paper or watching the news and having opinions. But they were not a significant part of the feedback and churn. They weren’t the people writing the letters to the editor or engaging in any actual debate. With social media, now women are driving our political and “intellectual” “conversation” … isn’t it great?

* Of course, the public did not “experience a digital murder”. They experienced a “digital drug overdose”, marketed by minoritarians as “murder”.

* Anyone who wishes to know whether journalists can take a joke need only look at the heavily censored (or outright banished) comment sections of mainstream news websites. Do not even dream of criticising these people, because they have no sense of humour at all, let alone the capacity for self-reflection.

Modern-day “journalism” is a “conversation” in which reporters tell the masses exactly what they should be thinking – or else. All the excitement over the interactive nature of the online world went away the moment it became clear that the Great Unwashed might derive a great deal of pleasure from the discomfiture of political hacks being called out as political hacks rather than being deferred to as the journalists they so fondly imagine themselves to be.

Criticism, dissent, and (heaven forfend) mockery are, clearly, holdover institutions of White Privilege (boo!), so just nod your head, mouth the officially-approved platitudes, and put another BLM sign in the window, you racist lout!

* I think personalization of the internet via social media is like the La Brea Tar Pit for many people with mental health problems. An early 20’s female college student of my acquaintance posted nude photos of herself weekly on Twitter and Instagram, often with the Pansexual Pride flag in the background. She was a SJW online as well. Having lots of internet followers makes them crazier than they were when they first aspired to having followers. How do these kids ever free themselves from social media’s dopamine vicious cycle?

* The Dayton shooter, Conor Betts, killed nine. His twitter feed showed he identified as Antifa. Since Antifa doesn’t give out membership cards (Actually, like the Mafia, they claim they don’t even exist as an organization) that’s all the proof you need.

* People have always responded to stories on a personal level. Uncle Toms Cabin helped start the Civil War. The TV pictures from Vietnam strongly affected people back home.
What has changed isn’t that we have too many stories overloading our Dunbar circuits.
What has happened is that the Dunbar circle of 150 real life acquaintances no longer exists for many millenials.
The live all their life online. They literally don’t have flesh and blood friends. They rarely look up from their cell phones to acknowledge any real person’s existence.
Instead of expanding their Dunbar circle of reality to include distant stories, they’ve replaced reality with stories.

* Up until the World Wars, in the US cities and towns were run by women’s clubs. The clubs ensured the quiet environment for marriage and children that the women needed. It also ensured that anybody the women disliked ran onto severe trouble — men who hit their wives, women who violated the moral/sexual code, men who wouldn’t marry their pregnant girlfriends, and so on. Plus giving relief to people they thought worthwhile but unlucky. The women’s clubs included (of course) the wives of just about every economically important person in town, and were thus adequately funded and had adequate informal enforcement available.

Eventually the whole women’s club phenomenon was destroyed by the bureaucratization of “social work”, which is government paid, funded, and controlled.

* We all know what sparked the 2020 riots, and it’s neither racism nor the stupid Dunbar number. They weren’t organic, and I refuse to even call them the George Floyd riots as that’s just the legacy media’s cover story. It’s a left-wing insurrection, spearheaded by Antifa, funded by “philanthropists” like Soros and woke-capital DIE largesse, protected from prosecution or retaliation by astoundingly corrupt city officials seeking high status and/or reelection, and sanitized for public consumption by a “mainstream” media which long ago abandoned even the flimsiest pretense of caring about the facts, bolstered by “intellectuals” from college and university departments that should never have existed.

Like every other “revolution”, it’s all completely top-down. There is no need or purpose to explain the “nation’s outrage” because there isn’t any such outrage, it’s all made up.

And anyone who publicly uses the term “Floyd protests” is part of the group that’s behind it.

U.S. Cities with the Highest 2020 Violent Crime Rates (2010 Census Percentage of Black Residents)
1. Detroit (82.7%)
2. Memphis (63.3%)
3. Birmingham, AL (73.4%)
4. Baltimore (63.7%)
5. Flint (56.6%)

* Or look at how fast journalist moved to shut down the caustic “Learn to Code” meme that was directed at laid-off journalists.

The media came to hate the internet for permitting their version of “The News” to be challenged. That’s why media outlets are increasingly shutting down comment sections or making it more difficult to post un-PC opinions online.

* The “George Floyd” reaction was pre-planned. It all happened too quickly in too many places around the globe to suppose otherwise. Can you believe that the media from the Costco Magazine to the Smithsonian Magazine to my local credit union had all black advertisements in place within days?

Antifa photos.

* Self-appointed Guardian of Conservatism David Brooks demands that the Republican Party adopt the Anti-Sailer Strategy:

“To have any shot of surviving as a major party, the G.O.P. has to build a cross-racial alliance among working-class whites, working-class Hispanics and some working-class Blacks. None of this works unless Republicans can deracialize their appeal — by which I mean they must stop pandering to the racists in the party and stop presenting themselves and seeing themselves as the party of white people.”

* One of my favourite MSM “suggestions” of recent years was that of requiring news websites to be licensed by the government. No doubt these theoretical licenses would be administered with the able assistance of the ADL (or some other anti-crimethink organisation).

I think it may have taken as long as two seconds for people to start slagging it off as a crap idea.

Can’t you just see Ron Unz applying for one of these rarely-granted licenses and being told that his application was “under active review,” they were working very hard on rushing his license to to him, and that he could expect to receive it in the post “any day now, honest.”

Posted in Alt Right, Antifa | Comments Off on Why Does The MSM Hate The Dissident Right?