May 7, 2018 Signal To Noise Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Signal To Noise

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

Can you dismiss an argument because the originator is a bad person? Obviously not. But if the originator lies a lot, or simply doesn’t know jack about anything, the probability that the argument is worth anything can be low, so that it might not be among the first 100,000 things on your must-read list.
I mean, it’s perfectly possible to have a valid mathematical theorem emerge from Johnson noise, but what are the odds?

Comments:

* Pinker’s old article on Kevin MacDonald makes this argument. Basically “I have limited time and don’t owe anyone a hearing, and MacDonald gives many indications of not being worth my time.” Nathan Cofnas revisited that argument recently and said Pinker might have been right then, but that MacDonald is still being talked about so maybe now is worth giving a hearing to.

* Greg’s (and all ours really) time is the constraint. Every minute he spends listening to a nut (even a brilliant nut) is a minute he didn’t spend listening to a brilliant non-nut.

* Dismissing the opinions of a liar or evil person is prudent. It is not that they are incapable of saying something useful. It is that their dishonestly and evilness makes the search for truth more difficult in the generality. Whatever they can add to the stock of human knowledge or your stock of knowledge, is outweighed by the cost.

* Vox Day on Greg Cochran: I looked at it. I also read his paper “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence”. He is better informed than I am concerning the genetic details. I am without question smarter than he is and would easily destroy him on the subject.

* Greg Cochran: The neat thing is that if you look at the correlates, stuff like income and college graduation rates and Nobel prizes etc, everything else you can think fits an average IQ of about 112. Perhaps they’re faking it – if so, doing a good job.

I’ve looked at all the IQ studies. I have no reason to think it’s any lower for actual Ashkenazi Jews in Israel.

I don’t think Flynn-effect changes are real. Math abilities aren’t changing much.

* Looking at the correlates as a reality check is sensible, but the same correlates do not reflect all that well upon Israeli born Jews. Israel is a pretty good chess country overall, but this is almost entirely due to Soviet immigrants. The top Israeli born Ashkenazi player is Avital Boruchovsky, who is 467th globally. They’ve got four native born science Nobelists (all in chemistry) and one Fields Medalist, which is very good but not overwhelmingly so.

This is all of a way of saying that Israelis seem to have a level of achievement in line with their mediocre PISA results. I don’t think Lynn’s estimate of a 103 IQ is too far off for Israeli Ashkenazi, which makes it more likely that American Jews are 0.5 standard deviations above the mean as opposed to 1. This is about what you’d expect from the GSS surveys that show their vocabulary scores to be roughly equal with that of Episcopalians, although their incomes are much higher.

Kevin MacDonald once estimated that Jewish Verbal IQ was 125, which was so stupid that I didn’t bother to read him any further. It is possible to overpraise these people.

* Detecting BS in yourself is definitely harder and less fun than detecting it in others.

I think a really good first step to that is to ask yourself, when you’re just sure something must be true because it just has to be, how you’d know if it were false. How would the world look different? What evidence would you expect to see? What observations or experiments would disprove it.

Just as with some one else’s dumbass innumerate story or moral panic, if you just try looking for some numbers and engaging System 2 instead of System 1 (thinking things through logically, writing down logical statements and arguments and equations), you can often find fuzzy thinking that you were accepting.

The other thing I can recommend is to try to find smart people with intellectual integrity who disagree with your basic worldview, and read what they have to say. Even when they’re wrong, they’re likely to teach you something.

PODCASTS:

* There are quite a few YouTubers with decent subscriber counts (10k to 50k) who openly engage in wrongthink but never appear on camera and manage not to get doxxed. The guys from the very popular The Right Stuff podcast only got identified when they pissed off a guy in their own circle – someone trusted who’d known their identities from the beginning – who doxxed them as revenge.

The guy who was alleged to have doxed the others were Ghoul. A panel member who got doxed himself after showing his face in videos. When that happened one of the leftie sites that published his info also published emails alleging he had offered the others’ info in exchange for taking his own down. Which is probably how that rumor got started

The version that seems most plausible to me is that, the TRS people got doxed through having really poor operational security and that the allegations of one of their own betraying them were antifa disinfo to cause infighting.

They were all friends on public facebook accounts (doing cheeky stuff like listing standard poolco as employer), had one of their own show his face in youtube videos, pseudonyms with identifiable info (mike enoch being pretty similar to mike peinovich), prior history writing under their real name in the libertarian sphere, having personal email on early archived versions of their web page for paypal donations, some of them having usernames that were connected with their IRL identity on other boards. And having poorly screened meetups and going to conferences. So them being exposed really was inevitable once they got popular.

* Listen to Cochran and Company, watch disasters. Avalanches, flash floods, tidal waves, planes crashing into explosions, sprinkle in idiots painfully hurting themselves, be eclectic. Brain salad for the ears, youtube junk food for the eyes.

* Seriously though multitasking is what bright folks on the internet are doing all the time. Listening to music, reading, whatever. For years I was accused of being impatient when listening to people present ideas. What was really happening was reading spoiled me. I can read the same information 5 times as fast as I can listen to it. I thought blogging heads was a good idea but they screwed it up by have dolts explain science and having bar room bullshitters babble on about politics from their ideological standpoint. Find interesting people and talk way. The listeners will decide what if anything they multitask on. Might I suggest providing links to more detailed information if the listener is so interested.

* The podcast haters gonna hate but I am lucky enough to be able to work and listen which is much more efficient than work and read. In fact it’s not possible to read a transcript and do my work they are mutually exclusive. I’m not alone here either. I know several manual labor guys out there that consume large quantities of audio books while driving a forklift or something else. You can pretty easily get a transcript but it’s much harder to get good quality audio. I smell some new killer app in this domain. You’re welcome.

* I use a silly name on twitter, Facebook and other sites as my place of employment is a ‘political organization’ that isn’t supposed to be a political organization. I found out the hard way when I was told by my supervisor that my posts on Facebook were not appropriate for an employee even though nowhere in my profile does it say where I work. I ‘unfriended’ everyone I work with, but my wife has an ‘open page’ and so I don’t say or do anything there. My nom de guerre is easy to figure out with a quick search, but few bother. It’s funny to see right-wing people flip because I use the word ‘comrade’ and progressives follow me because of my twitter ‘profile’. It’s an interesting window into personal bias and shows that everyone has one, even me. Hey, I only have a few more years to work and then I can say what I want.

Posted in Gregory Cochran, IQ, Jews | Comments Off

David Reich’s New Book

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

Greg Cochran writes about David Reich’s new book:

The people Reich dumps on are saying perfectly reasonable things. He criticizes Henry Harpending for saying that he’d never seen an African with a hobby. Of course, Henry had actually spent time in Africa, and that’s what he’d seen. The implication is that people in Malthusian farming societies – which Africa was not – were selected to want to work, even where there was no immediate necessity to do so. Thus hobbies, something like a gerbil running in an exercise wheel.
He criticized Nicholas Wade, for saying that different races have different dispositions. Wade’s book wasn’t very good, but of course personality varies by race: Darwin certainly thought so. You can see differences at birth. Cover a baby’s nose with a cloth: Chinese and Navajo babies quietly breathe through their mouth, European and African babies fuss and fight.
Then he attacks Watson, for asking when Reich was going to look at Jewish genetics – the kind that has led to greater-than-average intelligence. Watson was undoubtedly trying to get a rise out of Reich, but it’s a perfectly reasonable question. Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than the average bear and everybody knows it. Selection is the only possible explanation, and the conditions in the Middle ages – white-collar job specialization and a high degree of endogamy, were just what the doctor ordered.
Watson’s a prick, but he’s a great prick, and what he said was correct. Henry was a prince among men, and Nick Wade is a decent guy as well. Reich is totally out of line here: he’s being a dick.
Now Reich may be trying to burnish his anti-racist credentials, which surely need some renewal after having pointing out that race as colloquially used is pretty reasonable, there’s no reason pops can’t be different, people that said otherwise ( like Lewontin, Gould, Montagu, etc. ) were lying, Aryans conquered Europe and India, while we’re tied to the train tracks with scary genetic results coming straight at us. I don’t care: he’s being a weasel, slandering the dead and abusing the obnoxious old genius who laid the foundations of his field. Reich will also get old someday: perhaps he too will someday lose track of all the nonsense he’s supposed to say, or just stop caring. Maybe he already has… I’m pretty sure that Reich does not like lying – which is why he wrote this section of the book (not at all logically necessary for his exposition of the ancient DNA work) but the required complex juggling of lies and truth required to get past the demented gatekeepers of our society may not be his forte. It has been said that if it was discovered that someone in the business was secretly an android, David Reich would be the prime suspect. No Talleyrand he.
He doesn’t just slander, he lies. He says “most stereotypes will be disproved.” Want to bet? Most stereotypes are true – true everywhere. In what country do the Chinese disproportionately fill up the special ed classes? If we we’re talking cognition and personality, the behavioral geneticists keep finding that A. genetics matters, and B. The usual suspects, like family environment, don’t matter much.
There may be a few exceptions to ” what you see is what you get”, and understanding them might be very valuable: if some pop appeared to have a lot on the ball ( genetically) but isn’t doing well, there might be another cheap, simple solution, like iodine supplementation. And there will be differences that are fairly subtle and not much noticed, say in liver enzymes or the immune system, that might be highly relevant to disease prevention and treatment.
Reich’s position is that we don’t know anything until someone (him !) has analyzed it with modern genomic techniques. That’s ridiculous. Reich found that on average, given similar diets, northern Europeans are about a standard deviation taller than southern Europeans. But I already knew that, well before Reich was born. Seneca knew it: Tacitus knew it. There’s a reason the Byzantines hired plenty of Scandihoovians (including 7-footer Harold Hardrada) into the Varangian Guard. Mark Twain knew that Ashkenazi Jews were smart: he didn’t need IQ tests or GWAS for that.
COMMENTS:
* If you looked at the people of medieval Europe anyone could immediately see the differences between the gentry and the peasants. The son of the Lord of the Manor grew up eating meat and fresh vegetables. While the peasant’s son ate gruel and had no toys in his crib. The noble was tall, healthy and smart. The peasant was short,sickly and stupid. Peasants were reviled by the people at court and they were right to do so. Better fed and nurtured people were indeed better people.
* Steve Sailer: By the way, making the Olympics 100m dash men’s finals is not solely a West African thing: a South African sprinter finished 5th in 2016 and back in the 1990s, Frankie Fredericks of Namibia in southwestern Africa won silver medals twice. Everybody who has made one of the eight finalist slots in the last nine Olympics has been, as far as I know, at least half-Sub-Saharan by ancestry
It is true that East African highlander countries like Kenya and Ethiopia that produce a lot of longer distance medalists have not made the finals in the 100m (although Kenyans have medaled in distances as short as 400m).
* SS: But who brings you up has a lot of effect on what religion you follow, what cuisine type you like, a lot of your cultural attitudes and customs, what kind of small businesses you might go into, what ethnicity you identify with…
* SS: Lots of people care about traits other than IQ and personality. Who brings you up, for example, will have a big impact on your class-related behaviors. In Britain, for example, you are unlikely to grow up to speak with a Public School Accent unless your parents are the type who want to pay Public School (i.e., private schools like Eton) tuition.
Similarly, who brings you up likely matters for which sports you pursue.
* SS: My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim twice a week.
I just learned that these are a genre: the Balliol Rhyme:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balliol_rhyme
* What’s remarkable about Samoans is not that many are fat — lots of peoples are pretty fat these days — but how many are extremely strong, NFL strong. Samoans are vastly over-represented in both pro American football and in pro rugby.
* SS: Germans got really fat from about 1955-1965 or so. It was likely a reaction to the lean years after the war. But after awhile they stopped eating so much more than other Europeans.
* Jayman: In the case of the effects of family environment, the matter is not “absence of evidence.”; there is evidence of absence. Namely, the shared environment component of behavioral genetic studies routinely comes out to insignificant to plain old zero when we look at adults. People who grew up together are no more similar than people who grew up apart, when you take genetics into account.
* I think Greg is mostly talking about heritability estimates from twin studies. A very common finding from these is that the component of variation due to family environment is negligible. (Jayman explicitly mentions this.)
In other words, if you ask “why are people so different with respect to trait X?”, the answer usually is not “because they were raised in different households.” Usually it’s “because they have different genes, plus some residual random effects that we don’t understand.”
Does this mean you can’t have an effect on your child? No. I could depress my kid’s IQ long term, no problem (lead flakes for breakfast). So why doesn’t this contribute to phenotypic variance in IQ in the twin studies? Because lead poisoning is very rare in the US, so it contributes virtually nothing to the differences observed between people. (Raising IQ is a lot harder. I don’t know of any intervention that would do it, long term.)
Nor do these results prove that some new method doesn’t have an effect. If there is some new parenting or teaching method out there that does in fact boost IQ or conscientiousness, but it’s very rare, then it will again contribute approximately 0 to the shared environmental variance. That’s why you need to test particular treatments with randomized studies. (My impression is that nothing has really stuck.)
Question: do adoptees to rich families do better than adoptees to poor families? I’ve seen studies that go both ways.
* Old joke: An economist, a physicist, and a mathematician are taking a train to Scotland. As they cross the border, they see a black cow. “Look, ” says the economist, “the cows in Scotland are black.” “How imprecise,” says the physicist. “All that we can really say is that there is one black cow in Scotland.” “Actually,” says the mathematician, “all that we can really say is that there is one cow in Scotland, and one side of it is black.”
* Tom Wolfe writes somewhere, it’s risky to be ahead of one’s time, even if by just 10 minutes.
* Flynn effect addresses phenotype, not genotype. The genetic raw materials available are getting worse, but we’re helped by the fact that most people e.g. no longer are iodide deficient or starve during critical periods of brain development. Environmental factors mask the dysgenic trend.

I don’t remember seeing many aborigines with hobbies.

Greg Cochran writes:

Graur says “For selection to operate and counteract the effects of random genetic drift, the effective population size should be large.” Well, it would be nice if the effective population size were large, but that is by no means necessary. German Shepherds were created in the 1890s, by interbreeding several breeds of dogs ( and wolves !), followed by selection for desired traits. That didn’t require tens or hundreds of thousands of dogs. Thoroughbreds are the fastest horses in existence: their effective population size is around 100. Dachshunds are smaller than they were in the 1970s – but then everybody knows they’re contrary enough to violate the laws of genetics. Born that way, probably.
I could go on – and on, and on. Every example we have of selection on domesticates is a counterexample to what Grauer is saying here. No farmer he. Does he think that some ancient geneticist corralled a million aurochsen in order to breed the domesticated cow?
…Graur is making a very basic mistake: he is perfectly happy making an argument to which there are many counterexamples. They don’t bother him. Even one counterexample should bother you. As I said, every domesticate is a counterexample to what he’s saying. We know of many genetically caused differences between human populations, such as height, skin color, disease resistance, ability to efficiently utilize certain foods, tolerate high altitude, low temperatures, high levels of arsenic, etc etc. By ‘we’ I mean anyone who can read. Some of those genetic differences are caused by new forms of one or a few genes (like sickle-cell), others by small shifts in the frequency of many alleles that influence the trait.
* Smarter men father about the same, smart women less. The net trend is negative: that’s been known for maybe 60 years. Suspected for at least 90.
* I’ve been reading a tome in which the author says that many of the groups we think of as races are fairly recent formations (a few thousand years ago). Europeans are a mix of three groups ( hunter-gatherers, Anatolian early farmers, and Indo-Europeans off the steppe) that were originally about as genetically distant from each other as Germans and Chinese today. He seems to think that somehow invalidates thinking of Europeans today as a race. Or maybe he’s just blowing smoke. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter at all. Europeans would be what they are, act as they do, be as different and as similar to each other as they are, if they’d been manufactured ( to the right spec) in a test tube 6022 years ago. The same is true for everyone else: Amerindians are mostly a mix of Sibermen and Chinesians (quite a long time ago), but although that is interesting, it hardly means that “Amerindian” isn’t a real category.
* Richard Lynn has an article out claiming that men have a 0.5 standard deviation edge in general knowledge. That fits with what I’ve seen, for example in terms of basic science knowledge. Or back in my College Bowl salad days: I ran into many teams, and very few of the top scorers were women. By ‘very few” I mean 1.

Posted in Aborigines, Africa, Evolution, Genetics | Comments Off

LAT: ‘STDs in L.A. County are skyrocketing. Officials think racism and stigma may be to blame’

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Luke Ford

From the Los Angeles Times:

But the picture is more complicated when it comes to the high STD rates among minorities. Gay and bisexual men make up the vast majority of new syphilis cases. In L.A. County, syphilis rates among African American women are six times higher than white women and three times higher than Latina women.
Northover said that officials need to evaluate what’s called structural or systemic racism, the way housing or education policies may negatively impact people and their health. Studies have found, for example, that people with HIV who had low levels of literacy were less likely to follow their treatment, and that poorer Americans were more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior, increasing their risk of STDs.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a white paper in 2010 saying the country could not close disparities in STD rates without addressing “the interpersonal, network, community, and societal influences of disease transmission and health.”
But that’s a tall order given how entrenched many social problems are.
Poverty or a lack of opportunity may be forcing women to exchange sex for resources, leading to the spread of STDs, Northover said. There also tends to be a mistrust of the medical system among African Americans, making them reluctant to seek care. Certain neighborhoods may be excluded from access to healthcare because of geography or finances, she said.

Posted in STDs | Comments Off

Matt Forney Interviews

Posted on May 6, 2018 by Luke Ford

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off

The Alt Right’s Trajectory

Posted on May 4, 2018 by Luke Ford

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off

Fatherhood: A Panel Discussion (5-3-18)

Posted on May 4, 2018 by Luke Ford

Comments:

* The Daily Shoah has definitely suffered in quality due to their legal troubles. It seems like they spend a lot more time bitching at each other, getting on each other’s nerves. Especially Sven and Mike. They aren’t getting the paywall subscribers they need to make this thing work. And they vent about legal woes on nearly every episode. In my opinion, the lawfare has had a deleterious effect. Anyone who would deny that is simply trying to cope with a depressing fact.

* I thought I’d gauged your level of humour with the comments concerning the mysterious disappearance of the lady in your photo. But yesterday I honestly thought you’d lost it there for a while. You should have persisted with the acting as you certainly had me fooled. Kudos to you…

* Luke, you do a tremendous job and I’m a fan of your work. Keep grinding and he subscribers and viewers will continue to come. I do not subscribe to the alt-right views on everything, especially not the blanket anti-semitism or some of their other more juvenile views on race. My only piece of constructive criticism is that I wish you would call some of your guests on some of their motivations. I have a theory that some, most, of these people are projecting insecurities or attempting to rectify personal failings with their radical views…Enoch with his failed marriage, JF and Spencer with their departures from academia, etc. But I understand that if you were to do that your audience may turn on you or your guests may decline future appearances. You know your role better than I do, all I can say is keep up the good work. I’m a white gentile dude from the middle of nowhere in America and find myself, my family, and friends often flirting with these people’s ideas either full WN or at least becoming fellow travelers in a way. Deplatforming and silencing only strengthens the appeal of those ideas. Your calm, rational approach, and willingness to simply examine these ideas out in public…to give them the air they need to rot or flourish…is incredibly important for our greater society. Well, you probably won’t read this and I’m rambling but thank you. Best wishes to you.

* Luke, why not a new Hebrew study group: Talmud and Zohar? Organizing Jews to analyze geopolitics to advance Zionism? The alt-right do not want us(Hebrews) in the alt-right. Every lay Jewish acquaintance I know would benefit from more Hebrew wisdom. We need more Jewish k-12 private schools!

* You convert from a seventh day adventist to a jew and you let go of jesus but you bring your SDA traditions of veggie burger worship to judaism?. Your gas attacks should be due to the beans in the meat cholent. Ditch the buddhist, hindu, SDA eating habbits and sink your teeth into a kishke. For god sake you’re a yid!

* I don’t want us to have martyrs. Yet, no larger movement ever succeed without having them. That goes for ancient Christians, for Communists and for Nazis. Displays of courage, confidence and power are necessary, although they may be instantly repulsive to 90% of the people who see them or hear about them. Getting 2% of audience on board is still a victory. We cannot win in a swift manner, we need to slowly boil the frog. No one will follow us if we display cowardice. Although sacrifices should be minimized, they will have to be made and we have to be willing to go all the way

* I’m sorry, but I’m terribly disappointed by both Enoch & JF.

Their little boy, playground like responses to Ford’s actual statements & sentiments were a real stab in the back.

Jeeze, I know I’d want the advice of a battle worn & proven ally if I was trying to build up momentum & support for a nascent, dissident, political movement hated by the majority of the population that I was supposedly trying to convince & co-opt.

Their responses were juvenile & utterly unproductive.

I don’t get it at all. It’s enough to say ‘well FU’. Let’s see how far they get by ignoring the wisdom of those who’ve had their best interests at heart.
Unbelievable!

I’m not going to lie – I really heard the hurt in Luke’s voice. It’s horrible & heart breaking. It’s like a male version of a ‘mean girls’ high school drama. Ford has explicitly said he’s NOT an Alt-Righter. Why’s this so hard to comprehend? It’s sad as all hell that he’s being mis-characterised this way.

Are Enoch & JF just playing this game for the giggles? Do they really give one sh*t about these issues or not? I’m really not sure now.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off

Termites

Posted on May 3, 2018 by Luke Ford

A goy tells me: Termites are eating away at the foundation of my home. Already ate 1/8th of an inch off my floor joists. We have to spray. Will cost us $1300, but be really bad for the termites. Will kill them all. Also, not great for me: we have to tear-out our herb garden, because you can’t grow anything within ten-feet of the foundation of the home after spraying. But… I’m not mad at the termites. It’s just their nature. But still, I can’t let them keep ruining my house, so, I’m spraying. Sad!

Posted in HBD | Comments Off

What Accounts For Jewish Success?

Posted on May 3, 2018 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Cochran figures a 12 point IQ gap fits well with the achievement distributions. Maybe the IQ gap is actually only 10 points and other traits account for the other 1/6th of the achievement gap?

* The key to understanding modern America is to forget about race and religion and look at IQ instead. In raw numbers, Jews are “over-represented” in the elites but if you adjust for IQ, they are just where you would expect them to be. Instead of “Jews” say “high IQ elites” – high IQ elites are disproportionately Jewish but not just Jewish – they are WASP and Asian too. And instead of blacks say “low IQ” and instead of “whites” say “middle IQ”. Modern America is based on a high-low coalition against the middle. The elites provide the intellectual leadership and the low provide the voting masses (in exchange for goodies) and they squeeze the middle to pay for it all.

* IQ plays a huge role but so does geography (Jews are more over represented than IQ alone would predict). Roughly 2/3rds of US Jews live in the Bos-Wash, Chicago, LA, and SF metro areas. 30% live in the NYC metro area by itself. US Jews are a high IQ group (110ish) that culturally values economic/academic success, and they overwhelming reside in premier metro areas where paths toward that success are both highly visible and more numerous. Those two factors lead to the over representation that exists.

By contrast only roughly 16% of US non Hispanic whites live in those metros. The horizons of a smart person growing up in the NYC or SF metro areas is going to be far different than someone growing up in Ohio or Tennessee.

* In addition to IQ there are certain network effects involving certain high profile industries. Just as Cambodians dominate the donut trade, Jews just happened to be in the right place at the right time to dominate the film industry, which has a higher profile than the donut business. Jews are also concentrated in large coastal cities which set the tone for the overall culture and are interested in sending their kids to high profile national universities. There are a lot of high IQ Midwesterners who are perfectly happy attending their flagship state university and then going back home to run their family farm/business/the local bank/ local law firm, etc. and Jews are UNDER represented in those places. Likewise, Jews are underrepresented in certain other businesses – in America they were mostly absent from aerospace/auto manufacturing and other heavy industry (but they were present in light manufacturing – e.g. the garment business). Possibly because these industries were centered in places that the Jews weren’t.

* When it comes to elite college admissions, Jews (and not just Jews but other “plugged in” elites) have an advantage. As I mentioned earlier, many otherwise qualified non-elite whites are just not interested in playing the game to begin with. They will attend their flagship state U, get a fine education and go on to fine careers in their home state.

BUT, even among those who want to attend, coastal elites are especially networked in. There is a whole network of college consultants who will help you to polish your application, tell you what summer internships you should do, maybe get you untimed testing on the SAT, etc. Maybe you know some prof. at that university who will write you a recommendation. Just going to an elite private school is already an advantage – these places remain feeder schools for the Ivies. Worst comes to worst (Jared Kushner) daddy may just make a huge donation and buy you into Harvard. If you are a rich person (Jewish or not) living on the Upper East Side or in some Superzip, there are a ten different angles that you can use to get your kid into an elite college and some parents begin plotting these from the moment of birth.

The average farm family in Iowa doesn’t even know that these things even exist (and if they did, they aren’t in a position to pay for them anyway). Their SAT study advice is “get a good night’s sleep and bring a #2 pencil.” On the other end, you have Asians who are first generation. Their idea of getting an advantage is cramming for a 1600 on their SATs. They (again not being plugged in) don’t understand that Ivy admissions officers LOVE to throw (not all – gotta keep those averages up so you can let in more minorities) Asians with 1600 SATs in the reject pile. Should have started that charity for the children of Rwandan coffee bean pickers – THAT would have impressed the readers, not playing 1st violin in the school orchestra.

Again, ALL coastal elites benefit from this network effect – it’s not just Jared Kushner, it’s Chelsea Clinton too. It just so happens that Jews are disproportionately plugged into this network already.

* Unz makes large numbers of basic factual errors in that article.

Kind of like his multiple attempts to show hispanics don’t have a higher crime rate than whites.

In both cases you get an overwhelming sense he started with his conclusion and looked for any possible justification for it and ignoring any possible contrary evidence.

Sure, antisemitic stereotypes, like stereotypes in general, rarely come out of nowhere. I can go even further and say I agree that Jews are disproportionately responsible for nearly all of the destructive cultural Marxist trends that are ruining America.

The problem with right-wing anti-Semites is even the less nutty ones exaggerate the disproportion, minimize the non-Jewish responsibility, never seek to weigh the damage caused by the cultmarx Jews with the benefits bestowed by others, and wink-and-nood their approval of genocide.

* In a complex transaction, it’s just not true that both sides would be better off if they did not hire a lawyer. We live in a complex world where no two business people have the time or the specialized knowledge needed to enter into a complex transaction. Say you are buying a used car and you have a professional mechanic look at it and talk to the dealer’s mechanic – have you both “lost” because you hired an expert?

Ignorance is only bliss until you find out what it is that you don’t know. Say that two businessmen follow your advice and don’t hire lawyers. Instead they write up some crappy two page agreement on the back of a napkin – I’ve seen it done. At first everything seems great – they didn’t have to “waste” money on legal fees and fight over all sorts of issues that might get covered in a complex contract and will probably never come up anyway. But then, stemming to “bad luck” one of those issues does come up – say you get a letter from the state sales tax people asking you to pay the business’s unpaid sales taxes from 2015. They are telling you that you are liable for this even though you only bought the assets of the business and not the seller’s corporation – they tell you that you should have gotten some kind of clearance certificate and you didn’t know that you were supposed to do this. Or maybe one of the company’s suppliers is saying that there are unpaid invoices and they won’t keep shipping to you unless you pay them. Or maybe someone pulls up with a truck and says they are here to repossess some machine – they show you that they have a recorded security interest on it and you didn’t know that you can look these things up. You don’t even know what a “security interest” is. You open up the 2 page agreement that you did with the other guy and you realize the contract doesn’t say anything about any of these things – you never even considered that they might happen. What do you do now? (That’s when you call me and I tell you that you should have called me BEFORE you signed that contract).

* Yes, Hollywood was great before the Jews ruined it. Mind you, it was just a bunch of orange groves before then, but they were great orange groves.

* Hitler permanently changed the stakes on anti-Semitism, even on American anti-Semitism which was never genocidal (or even close to genocidal). Before the Holocaust, it was possible to be a “polite” anti-Semite and make rational arguments about whether the Jews were in all respects 100% nothing but good for America and all Americans and should be included in every possible sphere (club, private business, etc.). People (especially Jews) might disagree with you but it was a valid (if somewhat controversial) POV. Henry Ford was openly anti-Semitic and remained a well respected figure. Lindbergh too.

But, the Holocaust changed everything for American Jews. They perceived (rightly or wrongly) that “polite” anti-Semitism might lead to the not so polite kind and that the stakes involved potentially were not just membership in golf clubs but literally life and death. Say you have some dandelions in your lawn – you might choose to live with them or fight it with half-hearted measures. But one day you realize that those weeds are not dandelions, they are really poison ivy. Suddenly you are not willing to tolerate them at all, even a little and will do everything in your power to stomp them out.

* Ron Unz: “The problem with dealing with fanatic Jewish-activist types like Gelman and Mertz (and “Lot”)”

* Lot: I am a Christian of a bit less than half Jewish heritage, was raised going to church semi-regularly in small metro areas that were under 1% Jewish and not knowing a single practicing Jew other than a single elementary school classmate. I have never been to Israel, have never been part of any Jewish organization, and know maybe three Hebrew words. I am also not an activist of any sort, though when I was in HS and college I was involved, at a low level, with Republican politics. And I am quite sure that you spend at least ten times the amount of time on these issues than I do, and with far more passion.

Same with Gelman. Looking at his website, there appears to be only a very minor interest in these issues, so low there are no topic categories nor a single reference on the front page to them, while on yours there is an enormous focus on the supposed misdeeds of Israel and Jews. I mean, you just mentioned you listen to Red Ice radio! While I don’t think there is anything wrong in being interested in these issues or writing about them to the extent that you do, it is pretty rich for you to throw around the word “activist” and “fanatic.”

I took (as did Gelman) Unz’s core point to be that there was evidence of the top colleges discriminating in favor of Jews compared to white non-Jews. In fact, the opposite is true, for two main reasons. First, there is a geographic diversity preference that results in an admission bump to the heavily non-Jewish residents of the low-population Western states, plus a few more states that produce few very high scoring students like WV and MS. Second, there is an athletic preference, which is strongest for men’s basketball, football and hockey, but exists to a smaller extent in many other sports.

I have no objection to these preferences by the way, but they both certainly exist, and work against Jews and to an even greater extent Asians in favor of non-Jewish whites.

At least on what I took to be his core point, the sloppy Jew counting, including taking Hillel’s absurd and internally contradictory estimates of Jewish student scares screwed up the rest of the work. As does the idea that you can measure talent at the population level with competitions like IMO and Putnam. You might as well conclude that 90% of the most qualified high school students are South Asian based on spelling bee results. The PSAT presents a better method, but the problem is that being a NMS semifinalist is below what you need to get into the very top schools, and also Unz’s Jew-counting was sloppy or biased there too.

* Ron Unz: I’d guess that roughly 80-90% of high-IQ American whites are non-Jewish.

Lot: Depends on where the cut-off for “high IQ” is. Using your 110 Jewish mean and a 25-1 ratio, at the 160+ IQ level the breakdown will be 64.8% non-Jewish and 35.2% Jewish.

At the 170 level it becomes 54.7% non-Jewish and 46.3% Jewish. And there are still hundreds of Americans at that 170+ level, and they likely are well represented in science Nobel winners and founders of large computer companies.

* Jews maximize the brains that they have and push for success in a way that non-Jews don’t. And, of course, some of their success might be looking out for each other at opportune times.

* I don’t mean to use antisemite pejoratively, and agree it is used too readily. But we do need a word to describe people whose negative opinions on Jews inform a lot of their worldview. You must agree it is a distinct group?

A couple months ago someone objected to the term, and I switched to their preferred “countersemite” without complaint, and have used it a few more times since when I thought it would be preferred.

If you don’t think they almost all wink and nod about the holocaust (while blogrolling those who explicitly approve) you’re either missing not very subtle jokes or we are thinking of different people.

* Sailer: 3-d cognitive skills are less correlated with the g factor than anything else. It’s kind of like in PCs that have a CPU chip and a separate 3-d graphics processor chip.

Posted in IQ, Jews | Comments Off

Do Jews Belong In The Alt Right?

Posted on May 3, 2018 by Luke Ford

Comments:

* The “Alt-Right” is more of a philosophy and an ideology than it is an exclusive membership club. If Jews want to be Alt-Right can anyone prevent them? Can anyone prevent Christians from being Zionists?

* explicitly jewish organizations have done everything they can to antagonize and slander people like mike enoch and white nationalists in general…and on top of that, the tactic actually works…as you have admitted yourself. Resentment over this issue is just rather predictable.

* I’m very weary from the binary thinking of many on the Alt Right. They don’t seem to want any ally who offers a smidgeon of a different perspective, and they are dead-set on pursuing the perspective that is as far-removed from mainstream lines of reasoning as possible. There are plenty of mainstream lines of reasoning to wield as weapons to shift the discussion in favor of white interests and culture, but there are many who prefer the path of marginalization to the path of true Sieg. We must become humble enough to want this victory and stay on the true Kampf of recognizing the reality around us. We can strongly advocate for our interests and refuse to cuck while also not pursuing the path of self-alienation. Sieg heil means nothing without victory.

* The issue is that ‘smidgeon [sic] of a different perspective’ is coming from a hostile out-group. We’re not playing games here Thomas, the survival of our people is the only thing we care about. How it comes off, we don’t really care – so they can offer all the advice they want, we don’t want it.

* Privada Machina Again, this seems like either-or thinking that involves thinking that any attempt to reconcile survival with recognition of the outside world will itself lead to demise. But you don’t know that trying to reconcile to certain aspects of the outside world will lead to demise. It doesn’t seem to be controversial to me to want to have a good message and ethos to present to those who have yet to join the fight for survival. You don’t charge the gates of Mordor until you have had a good recruitment campaign, and our recruitment is not very powerful so far. That means a period of self-reflection to figure out a good recruitment campaign is necessary to ensure the survival of our people and a future for white children.

* When we face any criticism, it is important not to misunderstand the criticism or we won’t be able to understand reality. When I was becoming disillusioned with the Left, I noticed time and time again black activists saying that they didn’t want to hear criticism from their oppressors. This seems to be a phenomenon very similar to the one we face now. I don’t think that any movement insulated from criticism is a good thing, and I think that all movements are capable of spiraling out of reality just as the Left did when they started to dismiss any criticism from a white man.

* I truly value Mr.Ford’s channel. I think that he’s highly entertaining and his ongoing struggle with faith an phenotype is fascinating as it unfolds amidst his livestreams…

I frequently comment underneath his videos, leaving observations I doubt he would often support and he has yet to block me. So I have to give credit. In a culture consumed with status he is remarkably candid and seemingly prepared to indulge in levels of introspection that most of his “fellow Jews” would recoil from…

* Let’s face it Luke, it wouldn’t matter what you said on JF’s stream. As soon as the crowd hears you are jewish and sees your yarmulke, they are going to savage you. It’s not personal. It’s just the nature of the beast. I know I also go hard on you in the sperg chat and my fan cuts, but it is not intended as a personal attack. I use the characters on your shows as foils to bounce ideas off of. I think you are doing God’s work with your streams, but even Jesus had Satan as a scrutineer of his conscience.

Keep your chin up you degenerate Aussie.

* I think there’s a resurgence of traditionalism because at this point in time Whites are learning to reject multiculturalism, and I think the Alt-Right is part of the throes of that transformation, which must take place. Europe is not going to be the multiracial societies that they have become over the recent decades. The Alt-Right is at the center of that. It’s a huge transformation for Europe to make. Whites are now going into purification mode, and nationalists are resented because of their leading role. But without that leading role, and without that transformation, Europe will not survive.

* I think the guest who recommended you call others on their motivations is dead wrong. This sort of pop psychoanalyzing and ad hominem – well, ok, it has its place. But its place isn’t you. I think that would be a bad move.

Let others do that if it is to be done. Keep your focus on the things you have been focusing on (and you actually do that *some,* but you don’t let it derail you, and mostly you do it with respect to whether people are letting their views improve their lives or drag them down, which I think has its place).

If that commented wants to engage in that, let him do that. If you do it, it is far more likely to simply backfire. You will lose, rather than gain, receptivity. It will be more difficult, not easier, to attract such people as guests and they will listen to what you have to say even less than they do now.

It would also be a jerk move. In my opinion.

* I was red-pilled when I was 16 and I am currently 18 now. The red-pill has made me an incredibly hateful person against basically everyone. I was raised by a single-mother and have personally seem some of the awful female behaviors that I have learned about from this movement. This has made me very anti-women emotionally although I try to fight this hatred with logic (very difficult to do). I hide my new knowledge/emotions and don’t speak about it, but the hate is always there in the back of my mind. I isolated myself from all my friends because I am too afraid to talk to them about what I know, but I have nothing else to talk about. I tried going to a therapist but she kept pushing me on what my hobbies were and I couldn’t tell her about this movement and what I was learning (so I stopped going). I was a straight A student who was finally losing weight and improving myself, but the red-pill has thrown me into a vicious cycle of depression and anti-social behavior. I don’t regret learning about what I have learned about, but I always wonder what it would be like to be blissfully ignorant again.

* Travis’s songs are always a highlight. For white identity culture to become something coherent rather than a pipe dream, a folk music revival is imperative.

* My girl was sharing some comments on vegan YouTube videos with me…and it’s shocking the kinds of things that vegans and leftists get away with saying.

Outright incitements to violence and property crime, people saying ‘google and Facebook deserve more mass shootings on account of suppressing our views. Next time I hope a man shoots up YouTube because this way he’ll actually kill people.’

I can’t imagine someone getting away with that on an AltRight channel.

They also post videos of themselves breaking into farms and ‘liberating’ animals.

Sometimes, I think they do good work here. They often get tipped off by people who work at these factory farms because the owners are being grossly negligent about how they keep the animals. There are some truly horrifying things that they’ll come across — and to some extent I buy the notion that it’s in the public interest to know that these people are selling diseased, horribly mistreated animals to the public as food…

But, honestly, the fact that they get away with as much of what they do is astounding.
Symptom of how we’re living in a society where a harm-based hyper-feminized infantile pseudo-morality trumps the rule of law.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off

Nathan Cofnas: Kevin MacDonald won’t accept evidence supporting alternative theories about Jewish influence

Posted on May 3, 2018 by Luke Ford

Here are some of Nathan’s latest tweets:

* Since I think MacDonald’s theory is wrong, obviously I think it has a “non-educative effect” on people who buy into it.

* Setting out to understand Jewish behavior without being committed to distorting the facts to fit a preconceived anti-Jewish theory = legitimate interest.

* I agree. That’s why my argument isn’t that I can find one or two exceptions to MacDonald’s rule. I’m saying MacDonald’s rule doesn’t predict anything.

* I say here that “many educated white nationalists [have become] anti-Semitic.” Ergo anti-Semitism can affect educated people.

* What exactly does MacDonald’s Judaism-as-a-group-evolutionary-strategy theory explain if it’s consistent with Jews being leaders of the most influential anti-liberal, anti-multicultural movements? This is exactly what the DH predicts. Don’t see how MacDonald predicts it.

* Leonard Cohen: “The point is this that peoples, races, bloods have vocations. That people have geniuses. If you don’t believe it then you wipe out the variety and the beauty of the world.”

* I’m satisfied with having made the point that he [Sean Last] didn’t understand my hypothesis, thus didn’t respond to it at all. There are many issues in his video, but most of his misrepresentations aren’t relevant to my original paper.

Nathan Cofnas writes:

Kevin MacDonald now says that his “central goal has been to describe intellectual and political movements that were influential. The participation of individual Jews, such as the Jewish speakers at American Renaissance…, does not make AmRen a Jewish movement, nor does it make it influential.” He says he is only “concerned about where the power lies.”

Editor’s note: Nathan Cofnas is writing about the essay Kevin MacDonald responds to criticism of his theory of Jewish ethnocentrism and influence. Cofnas’s original piece was Analyzing Kevin MacDonald’s ‘Culture of Critique’ and the alt-right’s embrace of anti-Jewish ideology.

Notice the implication: Even if Jews are vastly overrepresented in leadership positions in anti-liberal, anti-multicultural movements (which they are), it won’t matter for MacDonald because these movements haven’t been “influential” and the “power” doesn’t lie with them. This effectively means that he will refuse to accept evidence that supports the obvious alternative to his theory, namely the “default hypothesis”: Because of their above average intelligence and concentration in influential urban areas, Jews will be overrepresented in all intellectual movements and activities that are not overtly anti-Semitic.

The case of American Renaissance is a good example of how Jews are overrepresented among the whole range of (non anti-Semitic) political movements. AmRen is the only major white nationalist organization that is not anti-Semitic. Jewish involvement in AmRen has gone far beyond the “participation of individual Jews.” Jews were 40% of the invited speakers at its first conference, and many of the most prominent people who have been associated with AmRen have been Jews. There are currently eleven books and pamphlets for sale on AmRen’s website (including three by founder Jared Taylor). Two of these are by Jews: Why Race Matters by Michael Levin, former professor of philosophy at City University of New York, and “The Color of Crime”—probably the most influential AmRen publication—by Edwin S. Rubenstein. (Ironically, Jewish involvement in AmRen seems to have dropped off in recent years in large part due to the increasing influence of MacDonald’s work, which has turned many educated white nationalists anti-Semitic.)

MacDonald says that he “can’t think of any prominent populist Jewish intellectuals.” It’s not clear what he means by “populist” or “intellectual.” Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were both described as “populists,” but I assume MacDonald is referring to a white nationalist populism. If that’s what he means, it’s not clear that there are any prominent populist intellectuals in America today, Jew or gentile.

MacDonald says that “there is a sprinkling of Jews among paleoconservatives.” This is misleading. The term “paleoconservative” was coined by a Jew, Paul Gottfried (whom alt-right leader Richard Spencer described as a “mentor”). As I wrote in my first rejoinder to MacDonald, according to the “Prominent people” section of the Wikipedia entry for “Paleoconservatism,” 1/6 prominent paleoconservative politicians, 1/9 philosophers and scholars, and 1/5 journalists is Jewish. This makes Jews vastly overrepresented among prominent paleoconservatives despite the fact that many self-identified paleoconservatives are (at least implicitly) hostile to Jews. Once again, we find the pattern predicted by the default hypothesis and not predicted by MacDonald.

One final point. MacDonald keeps repeating that the Jews he discusses are “strongly identified Jews.” I have pointed out in both my paper and my rejoinder that, in almost all cases, he has no evidence for this other than the fact that these people were Jewish and (in some cases) spoke out against anti-Semitism, which does not actually prove that someone is a “strongly identified” Jew. For MacDonald, however, it seems that the only reasons to oppose anti-Semitism are that one is a strongly identified Jew, under the control of Jews, or alienated from society because of physical unattractiveness. (He recently offered the following explanation for why Jean-Paul Sartre fought against anti-Semitism: “Sartre was ugly by all accounts and 5-feet tall. No surprise growing up he felt rejected & had low social status. He turns this resentment into philosemitism (Jews are also rejected outsiders), hatred of traditional institutions, & into [the] theory [that] anti-Semitism is psychopathology.”)

In his reply, MacDonald claims that the figures he mentions, who espoused universalism and rejected Jewish nationalism, “often had complex and even self-deceptive Jewish identities.” This is a roundabout way of admitting that these figures never gave any indication that they cared about being Jews. Nevertheless, MacDonald concludes that their apparent apathy was “self-deceptive” because unconsciously they were strongly committed Jews. The practice of reinterpreting obvious counterexamples to a theory as supporting evidence is the essence of pseudoscience.

Posted in Alt Right, Jews, JF Gariepy, Kevin MacDonald | Comments Off