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Our esteemed editor and programmer-in-chief here at the Unz Review, Ron Unz, has recently announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in California in the June primary.
[UPDATE: I forgot that California now has nonpartisan open primaries for Senator, so the top two vote-getters, no matter what their party IDs, then meet in the general election.]
Ron was motivated by both parties of the Sacramento legislature voting quietly to put on the ballot in 2016 a ballot measure in effect repealing his signature Proposition 227. This 1998 measure switched the default in California schools from bilingual education to English immersion, passing with 58% of the vote.
Ron’s intervention, although strongly opposed by the Spanish language TV network Univision, successfully ended the bizarre but worrisome possibility that the state of California was subsidizing its own Quebec-style language imbroglio by encouraging Spanish-speaking students to postpone grappling with learning English until they were too old to pick it up easily.
Small children quickly learn languages that they are immersed in, so the old bilingualist orthodoxy perversely (or intentionally) weakened English acquisition.
The government subsidizing massive levels of public school teaching in Spanish sent the message that the powers that be wanted Hispanics to remain linguistically isolated, much as the government of Quebec sends that message to Quebec residents. As we’ve seen with Black Lives Matter, ethnic activists tend to demand most loudly what the government, with its tax dollars to spend, is hinting it wants them to demand.
It turns out, however, that when the government tells the children of immigrants to learn how to speak English, they learn how to speak English.
After all, all over the 21st Century world, speaking English is cool. I’ve often pointed out that even in heavily Spanish-speaking Van Nuys, CA, the Plant 16 movie complex rarely shows a movie dubbed into Spanish or with subtitles. I don’t have to give a single thought to whether a movie playing there will be in Spanish or English. The throngs of Latino teens who show up to watch, say, Oscar Isaac (a Latino who speaks English superbly) in The Force Awakens almost all comprehend English well enough that they would never do anything so awkward as admit they’d rather see the latest blockbuster dubbed.
But even though the English-dominant system molded by Ron in 1998 is popular with the children of California, it’s unpopular with ethnic activists. So the legislature decided to encourage voters to break what doesn’t need fixing. But they did it in a very understated manner to keep the public from noticing what’s going on.
So that’s why Ron decided to jump into the Senate race at the last moment: to draw publicity to what the profiteers of linguistic divisiveness are up to.
Interestingly, Ron’s previous campaign for office – his run in the 1994 GOP primary against incumbent governor Pete Wilson — was strikingly successful. Ron earned 34% of the vote challenging Wilson, who was strong enough to go on to defeat Kathleen Brown by 15 points (one of only two defeats in eight runs for governor suffered by the Brown dynasty of California; the only other politician able to beat a Brown for governor was Ronald Reagan).
I gather Unz does not support Trump.
---The Saudis, Assads and Kims of this world must have thought they understood US democratic values in action when they looked at the Browns the Bushes and the Clintons. I doubt the Jewish community will be long be unaware of Ron's no-nonsense analysis of elite universitys' mass exclusion of Asians. Will Asians dare to support him?
Why is he running for the U.S. Senate to protest a state law? What good will that do to actually change the law?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to put a 227 clone (with some language repealing whatever the legislature did) back on the ballot in June, 2018 and raise holy hell between now and then? (I’m assuming it’s already too late to put anything on either 2016 ballot, but maybe not.)
Unz will be crushed by Kamala Harris. That’s no reflection on Unz, just the reality of California’s demographics and the woeful, and lengthy, track record of California’s self-financed political neophyte Republicans who run for statewide office. A track record that stretches back at least to Huffington in 1994. Not a single one of them has ever won, unless you want to count Ah-nold, who was not self-financed and who is a movie star.
And what will being crushed by Kamala Harris in a run for a non-Sacramento office do to save Prop 227? I just don’t get it.
If the point of this run is to raise awareness, why not raise awareness through a ballot initiative–that would have the added benefits of 1) possibly actually winning; and 2) being designed to accomplish precisely what Unz wants to accomplish–i.e., save English immersion.
There is a guy from Georgia on YouTube, who among other reasons, ran for US Senate in 2014 because his nephew, who was on the honor roll, got 650/1600 on the SAT. The guy lost in 2014 but is trying to get on the ballot for 2016. http://www.grayson2016.com/
Education has changed a great deal in the last 20 years with charter schools and dual-language programs. Education reform is bipartisan with billionaires like Gates, Zuckerberg, and the Walton family getting involved. Both social justice warriors and for-profit entrepreneurs are able to simultaneously push their own education agendas by lying and saying that everyone can learn at the same level.
Andre Agassi, a high school dropout, has his own mostly black charter school and has just started an education-based investment fund. There is a ton of money to be made dealing with low-performing children. The fewer English speakers in California, the easier it will be to get into the University of California.
No way. He doesn’t even support the isteve commentariat.
Here’s the problem:
Given the state of the CA GOP Unz could win the nomination.
Then his call to pay attention on one specific CA state matter while while running for the US Senate will look silly.
Or if he changes tack and broadens his campaign to other issues his crushing defeat by Harris will make it look like his issues have no support.
Is Ron famous in California?
Mr. Unz,
Oppose any federal legislation to solve the “Flint Water Crisis ”
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/flint-water-crisis
Let the state and local idiots deal with it.
Ron should borrow the strategy which worked for Pete Wilson, campaign against illegal aliens. He would be wise to campaign with Trump and advocate for a wall along the Mexican border.
classic campaign commercial by Wilson which helped him get 20% of the Black vote in California.
Not to mention the face that it's pretty shameful for Unz to spend the past decade first at TAC and then here pouring down criticisms on the GOP and then pursue the party nomination.
He was 20 years ago. As Steve notes, he ran for governor in 1994 and lost. But he got a third of the vote against an incumbent of his own party despite never having held office himself. That’s not bad.
Then in 1998 he backed Prop 227 which banned bilingual education and mandated English immersion. Unz was the principal financial backer and public face. It passed. Some time in 1999 or 2000 or thereabouts, The New Republic had him on the cover as the man who runs California or something like that.
But then when the Gray Davis recall happened in 2003 and the whole state ran for governor, Unz didn’t. I don’t think Unz has been famous in California for a long time.
Ah, but Pete Wilson beat Jerry Brown in the 1982 U.S. Senate race — which is, to my recollection, the only election in California that Jerry Brown ever lost.
Found another one: Bill Clinton beat Jerry Brown in the 1992 California Democratic presidential primary.
Not all the iSteve commentariat supports Trump, either.
Good luck Ron. To think, all of us here are either one (correspond with Ron) or two (correspond with Steve) degrees separated from a Senate candidate. I guess that makes us “elite.”
We can pat ourselves on the back, but even a slob like me can get in. That's because Ron and Steve create an open environment.
There's no food and lots of golf, but anyone can join.
I wish I could vote in California, for Ron and against the new ballot measure.
What’s the point of the never-ending struggle against the introduction of Spanish language education in California schools? It makes more sense to halt Mexican and Central American immigration into the south-western United States and expelling illegals from California.
Part of the reason Unz challenged Wilson was because of Wilson's heroic support for Prop 187. Unz's opposition to the proposition that aimed to stem the flow of social largess was extremely Zuckerbergian- he claimed Silicon Valley would run out of imported labor if the Proposition passed. It's hard to think of a position more diametrically opposed to the Sailer Strategy on immigration.
Hollywooders and the like should leave fairly soon or else they'll find themselves being accused of living in an apartheid state. It can't be more than a decade or two before the left forgets how they created Californian society and looks at it afresh and declares that having a bunch of old rich white people on top of a brown majority is evil. Then they'll blame the Republican legacy of Reagan and Wilson, of course neglecting the left's almost total control of the state, and they'll start demanding some sort of reparations or quotas or whatever.
More info on the race:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_California,_2016
Good luck to Ron, and he has my vote, but sadly this is a one party state. The only good thing about the California political situation is that we are ahead of where the rest of the country will be going once the demographic changeover is complete. We are a laboratory showing how a single party system in a majority non-White USA might function. On the encouraging side so far, we aren’t at Brazil or Blade Runner levels of dystopia, but I don’t know if that is because we are part of a larger country, or the changeover isn’t complete enough, or we have a higher functioning underclass than Brazil.
Even though I live in CA, the state is a lost cause for any to the left of Hillary. The demographics changes over the last 20 years have ended the state as politically viable for whites.
And running on a single that most whites don’t give a rats ass about is silly. We know the southern half of the state is a defacto part of Mexico given the demographics.
https://twitter.com/JMNR/status/710862162281902080
No. That requires barriers to entry. There are none here. It just seems that way because so few people are interested enough to come in.
We can pat ourselves on the back, but even a slob like me can get in. That’s because Ron and Steve create an open environment.
There’s no food and lots of golf, but anyone can join.
I wish I could vote in California, for Ron and against the new ballot measure.
Maybe because it’s a statewide office?
I left California 59 months ago, almost to the day, but if I were still a registered voter, I would gleefully vote for him. I voted “Yes” on Proposition 227, back in ’98.
Not very. The leading Dem candidates won’t even bother campaigning against him. Of course if he becomes even the remotest bit of a threat they’ll destroy him by mentioning some of the people he publishes at unz.com.
Then again I am probably overestimating the desire and ability of many Dems to separate a man's beliefs from the beliefs of people he associates with.
Apparently, that Right Side of History's a bit of an MSM echo chamber.
Well, given the ultra-last-minute nature of my decision to get into the race, you can imagine I’m pretty preoccupied with all sorts of things right now, including building a simple but utilitarian campaign website. I’m also hoping to publish a column on my decision by early in the week. But meanwhile, here are a few responses to some of the points raised by various commenters:
(1) I *really* don’t like Trump at all, but as of right now I’d probably be leaning towards him over Hillary. Then again, maybe I’ll just write in Ron Paul’s name like I have in the last couple of presidential elections.
(2) California has a top-two primary system, so there’s a pretty good chance no Republican will even make it to the general election. Rep. Loretta Sanchez is a relatively weak and not highly-regarded Democrat, but the last statewide poll had her at 15% (with Kamala Harris at 27%), while the two Republicans in the race were tied at 3%. Neither of the latter has ever held elective office or had significant name-recognition, and they’d each raised only about $50,000 after a full year of campaigning, so I do think I have a much better chance of making it to November than either of them.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-rocky-chavez-senate-race-20160207-story.html
Therefore, I think the main question is whether I can beat Sanchez in the primary. I’d probably put the odds at less than 50-50, but I do think I have a reasonable shot.
(3) Except for Arnold Schwarzenegger—who’s obviously a special case—no Republican has won a top-ticket statewide race in California in over 20 years, a patch of “remarkably bad luck” that perhaps coincidentally began immediately after Pete Wilson’s Prop. 187 campaign. Usually, the Republican candidates lose by 20-25 points, sometimes after spending many millions or even tens of millions, and virtually all down-ticket Republican candidates generally lose by similar margins. So I certainly don’t expect to win even if I do make it to November, but I’d have a great opportunity to raise all sorts of important issues most candidates don’t.
Since I’m pretty likely to lose, I don’t want to feel guilty about taking peoples’ money for a hopeless campaign, so I won’t accept any donations over $99. I’ll be some saying things and taking some positions that very few candidates do, so donors can mentally budget their $99 contributions as providing “ideological entertainment value.” And it’s certainly a very strange election year, so I suppose that anything could happen…
(4) The crucial thing to keep in mind is that the real importance of a major statewide campaign sometimes has relatively little connection to the actual vote on election day. Instead, if used properly, a campaign can become a focal point for large amounts of media coverage on under-examined issues. And that media coverage might have major long-term impact, win or lose.
(5) Just as a small example, the 65 valid voter signatures I filed on Wednesday afternoon have already generated a bit of media attention on the November attempt to repeal Prop. 227. Nothing significant so far, but even so I’d still guess that probably 10x as many Californians are now aware of the repeal effort as was the case a week ago. And the fact that the Senate race is federal while the ballot measure is state matters not a bit. There’s also a possibility that once the consultants for Harris and Sanchez poll the issue and examine the cross-tabs, they’ll decide it makes more sense for their candidates to come out publicly against the repeal, which obviously would alter the political dynamics.
(6) In 1998, our Prop. 227 was publicly opposed by President Bill Clinton, the Chairman of the California Republican Party and the Chairman of the Democratic Party, all four leaders in the State Legislature, all four candidates for Governor, nearly every newspaper, every political slate, and every union, and we were outspent on advertising by 25-to-1. Yet we won with 61% of the vote, probably about the biggest landslide of any contested initiative since Prop. 13 in 1978, and easily outscoring both Prop. 187 and Prop. 209, which were each backed by many millions in TV advertising. So the “English” issue is potentially a pretty strong one. Indeed, a few years later I’m pretty sure my MA initiative accidentally launched Mitt Romney’s political career:
http://www.unz.com/article/how-i-made-mitt/
Anyway, thanks for the supportive words, and it’s now back to work for me, including getting started on building my new campaign website.
Good luck to you, Ron. May Trump, like 'em or no, have long coattails this November!
Finally, thanks for running a top-notch website. We are all in your debt.
I suppose you could test this though, if you're conducting polling as part of your campaign. Maybe have pollsters first ask a multiple choice question to determine whether a voter actually know what prop. 187 is, and then, for the ones who answer correctly, ask them how it has affected their voting since then.
Ron is envious of the smarter, way-richer guy who is super successful on his first run at political office. And the Presidency no less. Here's my armchair Lewandowsi advice to you Ron: try to emulate Trump as much as you can. Go over videos of Trump's speeches like a JFK conspiracy nut goes over the Zapruder film. And if you return to Harvard Square for another tuition abolition stumping, let us know. I live nearby and will come over and heckle you.
Btw, Ron, every day here in Boston I read stories like this one in today's paper:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2016/03/illegals_held_in_vicious_framingham_rape
All with multiple prior arrests, two deported within the last 2 years and return no problemo.
If you expect anyone outside of this website to care, don't start off talking about how you'll lose. That is textbook cuckservatism. "Well I'm gonna lose to the democrats, but at least I employ a whole lot of writers!".
Spend more time thinking and talking about how you'll win, Ron. Because no matter how right you are about something that happened in 1998, it will all be a big waste of time if good people like you continue to lose elections. Go for the win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLIzzs2HHgY
classic campaign commercial by Wilson which helped him get 20% of the Black vote in California.
I’d take a guess and figure that Ron would rather move to an Israeli West Bank trailer park with no utilities, than endorse Trump.
(1) I *really* don't like Trump at all, but as of right now I'd probably be leaning towards him over Hillary. Then again, maybe I'll just write in Ron Paul's name like I have in the last couple of presidential elections.
(2) California has a top-two primary system, so there's a pretty good chance no Republican will even make it to the general election. Rep. Loretta Sanchez is a relatively weak and not highly-regarded Democrat, but the last statewide poll had her at 15% (with Kamala Harris at 27%), while the two Republicans in the race were tied at 3%. Neither of the latter has ever held elective office or had significant name-recognition, and they'd each raised only about $50,000 after a full year of campaigning, so I do think I have a much better chance of making it to November than either of them.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-rocky-chavez-senate-race-20160207-story.html
Therefore, I think the main question is whether I can beat Sanchez in the primary. I'd probably put the odds at less than 50-50, but I do think I have a reasonable shot.
(3) Except for Arnold Schwarzenegger---who's obviously a special case---no Republican has won a top-ticket statewide race in California in over 20 years, a patch of "remarkably bad luck" that perhaps coincidentally began immediately after Pete Wilson's Prop. 187 campaign. Usually, the Republican candidates lose by 20-25 points, sometimes after spending many millions or even tens of millions, and virtually all down-ticket Republican candidates generally lose by similar margins. So I certainly don't expect to win even if I do make it to November, but I'd have a great opportunity to raise all sorts of important issues most candidates don't.
Since I'm pretty likely to lose, I don't want to feel guilty about taking peoples' money for a hopeless campaign, so I won't accept any donations over $99. I'll be some saying things and taking some positions that very few candidates do, so donors can mentally budget their $99 contributions as providing "ideological entertainment value." And it's certainly a very strange election year, so I suppose that anything could happen...
(4) The crucial thing to keep in mind is that the real importance of a major statewide campaign sometimes has relatively little connection to the actual vote on election day. Instead, if used properly, a campaign can become a focal point for large amounts of media coverage on under-examined issues. And that media coverage might have major long-term impact, win or lose.
(5) Just as a small example, the 65 valid voter signatures I filed on Wednesday afternoon have already generated a bit of media attention on the November attempt to repeal Prop. 227. Nothing significant so far, but even so I'd still guess that probably 10x as many Californians are now aware of the repeal effort as was the case a week ago. And the fact that the Senate race is federal while the ballot measure is state matters not a bit. There's also a possibility that once the consultants for Harris and Sanchez poll the issue and examine the cross-tabs, they'll decide it makes more sense for their candidates to come out publicly against the repeal, which obviously would alter the political dynamics.
(6) In 1998, our Prop. 227 was publicly opposed by President Bill Clinton, the Chairman of the California Republican Party and the Chairman of the Democratic Party, all four leaders in the State Legislature, all four candidates for Governor, nearly every newspaper, every political slate, and every union, and we were outspent on advertising by 25-to-1. Yet we won with 61% of the vote, probably about the biggest landslide of any contested initiative since Prop. 13 in 1978, and easily outscoring both Prop. 187 and Prop. 209, which were each backed by many millions in TV advertising. So the "English" issue is potentially a pretty strong one. Indeed, a few years later I'm pretty sure my MA initiative accidentally launched Mitt Romney's political career:
http://www.unz.com/article/how-i-made-mitt/
Anyway, thanks for the supportive words, and it's now back to work for me, including getting started on building my new campaign website.
Sounds like a win-win. Even if you lose the general, you’ve moved the Overton Window.
Good luck to you, Ron. May Trump, like ‘em or no, have long coattails this November!
Finally, thanks for running a top-notch website. We are all in your debt.
OT: But protesters in Salt Lake City tried to shut down the Trump rally there. Fox13 reports rocks were thrown at attendees as they left after Trump’s speech.
I assume if this is reported at all, it’ll be more evidence that Trump supporters are violent. After all, they attacked some peaceful rocks with their Trump-loving faces.
http://fox13now.com/2016/03/18/protesters-clash-with-slc-police-outside-trump-rally/
The whole report is quite worrying in the way that it equates the supporters of Trump with the protesters, as if they were two sides of the same coin. One group has come to silence the other, for goodness sake!
Unfortunately, the more they protest, the higher they raise Trump's profile and his status as the alpha male.
It's politics 101, don't let your opponents gather into groups. Goes way back, thousands of years.
My children both speak Spanish as their first language, but they love to learn English too as it gives them a sense of achievement and “coolness”. All children should learn to speak at least two languages as it is good for brain development, and since no one learns Latin any more, Spanish is clearly the next best thing since it is a bastard descendant of Latin. Knowledge of Spanish also helps one to understand English.
Knowledge of both languages is a definite advantage. I speak fluent Spanish and find it pretty useful at times here in Florida, even though my knowledge of English is not too shabby.
I often think that one of the disadvantages that most African Americans have is that they don’t learn a second language, and this puts them at a linguistic disadvantage in understanding vocabulary and the meanings of words in English.
Hell, most African Americans don't learn a first language - not English, that is.
I am black and grew up on the Mexican border. The kids I grew up couldn't really speak English or Spanish. They would say things like "moveate" or make a statement in the form of a question. Yesterday, I went to the store? They like some of the black people you encounter simply do not pay attention to word patterns, have no curiosity, and are not interested in improving their speech.
The main reason black children have difficulty speaking English, their only language, is that their parents do not talk to them except to give an order or yell at the child. I managed a decent vocabulary from reading a lot, watching high-brow TV programs like the news and PBS, and listening to talk radio as a kid. I also paid close attention in 7th grade grammar class. I don't remember ever having a lengthy conversation with either parent.
Yeah, I imagine some of the articles and comments at The Unz Review would not be very helpful if Ron were to seriously challenge the other candidates.
I wish Unz well in his race, but he's just throwing away his money... unless his real objective is just to force people to talk about the ballot initiative...
“The Price of Hulk Hogan’s Privacy: Here’s How Much of the $115 Million He’ll Probably Get”
http://www.eonline.com/news/750146/the-price-of-hulk-hogan-s-privacy-here-s-how-much-of-the-115-million-he-ll-probably-get
Not bad for, what, 15 minutes of work.
Felicitation to Mr. Unz for his brave decision.
Off-topic though while I think English is good for California; I would deeply mourn the loss of French in Quebec..
Being the disingenuous double-talker that he is, Ron Unz is a perfect fit for the California GOP. Why, he might even break 40% of the vote!
Off-topic though while I think English is good for California; I would deeply mourn the loss of French in Quebec..
Yeah I don’t know why they feel the need to drag Quebec into this as an example of what can go wrong. For California to have the equivalent of what we have around here, the original Spanish would have had to stay on and played a major role in California life. It’s really a case of apples and oranges to compare the two places.
Ron Unz wants the children of millionaires and billionaires to attend Harvard tuition free.
There is a guy from Georgia on YouTube, who among other reasons, ran for US Senate in 2014 because his nephew, who was on the honor roll, got 650/1600 on the SAT. The guy lost in 2014 but is trying to get on the ballot for 2016. http://www.grayson2016.com/
Education has changed a great deal in the last 20 years with charter schools and dual-language programs. Education reform is bipartisan with billionaires like Gates, Zuckerberg, and the Walton family getting involved. Both social justice warriors and for-profit entrepreneurs are able to simultaneously push their own education agendas by lying and saying that everyone can learn at the same level.
Andre Agassi, a high school dropout, has his own mostly black charter school and has just started an education-based investment fund. There is a ton of money to be made dealing with low-performing children. The fewer English speakers in California, the easier it will be to get into the University of California.
Then there won't be a disadvantage to Spanish speakers (even those who don't speak or write English all that well) trying to earn a BA degree in most fields.
The demographic change in California is so extreme, with no real end in sight, that we should expect Spanish to fairly quickly become a co-equal official language here. I resent that, yet our children are learning Spanish at a fairly young age - it's inescapable, and not just out here.
Go TRUMP -
Go for it! You had everybody from God on down against you in ’98 and won big. The elites don’t want their lumpen proles to ever get successful; they have a tendency to wonder off the plantation if they can support themselves, and the elites need them on the farm. The non-elites still appreciate how speaking English is a way out of the underclass.
Knowledge of both languages is a definite advantage. I speak fluent Spanish and find it pretty useful at times here in Florida, even though my knowledge of English is not too shabby.
I often think that one of the disadvantages that most African Americans have is that they don't learn a second language, and this puts them at a linguistic disadvantage in understanding vocabulary and the meanings of words in English.
“…one of the disadvantages that most African Americans have is that they don’t learn a second language…”
Hell, most African Americans don’t learn a first language – not English, that is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLIzzs2HHgY
classic campaign commercial by Wilson which helped him get 20% of the Black vote in California.
Ron Unz was the face of the campaign to derail Pete Wilson’s attempt to exclude illegal aliens from state welfare programs. Unz is a complete Trojan horse on immigration worse than Rubio in many ways.
Not to mention the face that it’s pretty shameful for Unz to spend the past decade first at TAC and then here pouring down criticisms on the GOP and then pursue the party nomination.
I don't follow your logic...only people who tow the RNC line should ever run in a GOP primary? Perhaps we should've just nominated Jeb Bush, and been done with it?
Overall, most of the articles published at The Unz Review are pro-Trump and anti-immigration.
Well Ron’s quite fond of that steady stream of immigration.
Part of the reason Unz challenged Wilson was because of Wilson’s heroic support for Prop 187. Unz’s opposition to the proposition that aimed to stem the flow of social largess was extremely Zuckerbergian- he claimed Silicon Valley would run out of imported labor if the Proposition passed. It’s hard to think of a position more diametrically opposed to the Sailer Strategy on immigration.
Ron I think he no longer supports mass immigration. And the fact how liberal he is with all the opinions on his own site I'd give him some credit. Even if a huge chunk of what he's publishing here is nonsense crackpot.
Off-topic though while I think English is good for California; I would deeply mourn the loss of French in Quebec..
It seems that, in Steveland, the government of Quebec should make it its job to erase its own people. Maybe they could recruit Merkel, she should be looking for a new job soon.
Knowledge of both languages is a definite advantage. I speak fluent Spanish and find it pretty useful at times here in Florida, even though my knowledge of English is not too shabby.
I often think that one of the disadvantages that most African Americans have is that they don't learn a second language, and this puts them at a linguistic disadvantage in understanding vocabulary and the meanings of words in English.
I assume that you are a recent immigrant since your children are learning English and you are explaining to us that Spanish is useful in Florida.
I am black and grew up on the Mexican border. The kids I grew up couldn’t really speak English or Spanish. They would say things like “moveate” or make a statement in the form of a question. Yesterday, I went to the store? They like some of the black people you encounter simply do not pay attention to word patterns, have no curiosity, and are not interested in improving their speech.
The main reason black children have difficulty speaking English, their only language, is that their parents do not talk to them except to give an order or yell at the child. I managed a decent vocabulary from reading a lot, watching high-brow TV programs like the news and PBS, and listening to talk radio as a kid. I also paid close attention in 7th grade grammar class. I don’t remember ever having a lengthy conversation with either parent.
Unlike Steve, I don't really think that the problems is so much that blacks are born with lower intelligence, but that many of them get socialized as small children into a dialect or pidgin that is a limited subset of English, and this handicaps them later in life when it comes to dealing with the written language or more formal communications needed in the workplace. Some, like yourself, manage to overcome this.
Children need to be coached in language from a very young age if they are going to maximize their potential.
To Americans it often seems that Brits are articulate and superior in use of language, which actually they are not, but in my opinion this effect is largely the result of having grown up with the British Broadcasting Corporation radio and TV as a co-parent and learning to parrot that style of speech.
Part of the reason Unz challenged Wilson was because of Wilson's heroic support for Prop 187. Unz's opposition to the proposition that aimed to stem the flow of social largess was extremely Zuckerbergian- he claimed Silicon Valley would run out of imported labor if the Proposition passed. It's hard to think of a position more diametrically opposed to the Sailer Strategy on immigration.
Spot on.
There’s little difference between Unz and Zuckerberg or even Gates and Ellison. All the geeks seem to be for unlimited immigration and turning the U.S. into a 3rd world nation.
Still this site is political poison for him. The MSM will tear into him like a fat man set lose in a doughnut shop.
So where is this website?
And running on a single that most whites don't give a rats ass about is silly. We know the southern half of the state is a defacto part of Mexico given the demographics.
Related: how about this guy?
It is now inevitable that California will have Spanish language schools. Good luck to Ron but he’s not going to win with those demographics. And if he does win, he will just lose a decade later.
Hollywooders and the like should leave fairly soon or else they’ll find themselves being accused of living in an apartheid state. It can’t be more than a decade or two before the left forgets how they created Californian society and looks at it afresh and declares that having a bunch of old rich white people on top of a brown majority is evil. Then they’ll blame the Republican legacy of Reagan and Wilson, of course neglecting the left’s almost total control of the state, and they’ll start demanding some sort of reparations or quotas or whatever.
Elite Dems would get autonomy and local control in exchange for giving up some of California's electoral votes to its successor states.
https://twitter.com/JMNR/status/710862162281902080
Why is every anti-Trump Internet person either a skinny bearded AIDS patient or a pudgy blob of dough like that guy? It’s becoming frighteningly consistent.
(1) I *really* don't like Trump at all, but as of right now I'd probably be leaning towards him over Hillary. Then again, maybe I'll just write in Ron Paul's name like I have in the last couple of presidential elections.
(2) California has a top-two primary system, so there's a pretty good chance no Republican will even make it to the general election. Rep. Loretta Sanchez is a relatively weak and not highly-regarded Democrat, but the last statewide poll had her at 15% (with Kamala Harris at 27%), while the two Republicans in the race were tied at 3%. Neither of the latter has ever held elective office or had significant name-recognition, and they'd each raised only about $50,000 after a full year of campaigning, so I do think I have a much better chance of making it to November than either of them.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-rocky-chavez-senate-race-20160207-story.html
Therefore, I think the main question is whether I can beat Sanchez in the primary. I'd probably put the odds at less than 50-50, but I do think I have a reasonable shot.
(3) Except for Arnold Schwarzenegger---who's obviously a special case---no Republican has won a top-ticket statewide race in California in over 20 years, a patch of "remarkably bad luck" that perhaps coincidentally began immediately after Pete Wilson's Prop. 187 campaign. Usually, the Republican candidates lose by 20-25 points, sometimes after spending many millions or even tens of millions, and virtually all down-ticket Republican candidates generally lose by similar margins. So I certainly don't expect to win even if I do make it to November, but I'd have a great opportunity to raise all sorts of important issues most candidates don't.
Since I'm pretty likely to lose, I don't want to feel guilty about taking peoples' money for a hopeless campaign, so I won't accept any donations over $99. I'll be some saying things and taking some positions that very few candidates do, so donors can mentally budget their $99 contributions as providing "ideological entertainment value." And it's certainly a very strange election year, so I suppose that anything could happen...
(4) The crucial thing to keep in mind is that the real importance of a major statewide campaign sometimes has relatively little connection to the actual vote on election day. Instead, if used properly, a campaign can become a focal point for large amounts of media coverage on under-examined issues. And that media coverage might have major long-term impact, win or lose.
(5) Just as a small example, the 65 valid voter signatures I filed on Wednesday afternoon have already generated a bit of media attention on the November attempt to repeal Prop. 227. Nothing significant so far, but even so I'd still guess that probably 10x as many Californians are now aware of the repeal effort as was the case a week ago. And the fact that the Senate race is federal while the ballot measure is state matters not a bit. There's also a possibility that once the consultants for Harris and Sanchez poll the issue and examine the cross-tabs, they'll decide it makes more sense for their candidates to come out publicly against the repeal, which obviously would alter the political dynamics.
(6) In 1998, our Prop. 227 was publicly opposed by President Bill Clinton, the Chairman of the California Republican Party and the Chairman of the Democratic Party, all four leaders in the State Legislature, all four candidates for Governor, nearly every newspaper, every political slate, and every union, and we were outspent on advertising by 25-to-1. Yet we won with 61% of the vote, probably about the biggest landslide of any contested initiative since Prop. 13 in 1978, and easily outscoring both Prop. 187 and Prop. 209, which were each backed by many millions in TV advertising. So the "English" issue is potentially a pretty strong one. Indeed, a few years later I'm pretty sure my MA initiative accidentally launched Mitt Romney's political career:
http://www.unz.com/article/how-i-made-mitt/
Anyway, thanks for the supportive words, and it's now back to work for me, including getting started on building my new campaign website.
I thought Steve refuted this claim, and argued that the reason Republicans are haven’t been competitive at the state level in California was demographic change.
I suppose you could test this though, if you’re conducting polling as part of your campaign. Maybe have pollsters first ask a multiple choice question to determine whether a voter actually know what prop. 187 is, and then, for the ones who answer correctly, ask them how it has affected their voting since then.
Though Republicans have better records in more liberal states than CA, like Massachusetts, this is because California (like Washington State) still has a lot of very conservative voters who tent to kill electable moderates in the primary.
I suppose you could test this though, if you're conducting polling as part of your campaign. Maybe have pollsters first ask a multiple choice question to determine whether a voter actually know what prop. 187 is, and then, for the ones who answer correctly, ask them how it has affected their voting since then.
Ron Unz lies constantly about the effects of immigration. This has been documented many times.
http://www.eonline.com/news/750146/the-price-of-hulk-hogan-s-privacy-here-s-how-much-of-the-115-million-he-ll-probably-getNot bad for, what, 15 minutes of work.
That doesn’t include the punitive damages, which the jury hasn’t determined yet.
Not to mention the face that it's pretty shameful for Unz to spend the past decade first at TAC and then here pouring down criticisms on the GOP and then pursue the party nomination.
Unlike Rubio, though, Ron has advocated for a higher minimum wage, against the wishes of the cheap labor lobby.
Where do we all provide our invaluable campaign advice to Ron?
After Unz & Trump win their respective races, we're all going to be receiving medals, gentlemen!
Actually, Spanish is a lot cooler than English. Far greater literature has been written in Castilian than English. Besides, English is one ugly-sounding language. I rate it above only Dutch and just marginally less ugly-sounding than German. All the Romance languages are vastly more beautiful than the Germanic languages like English. Even the Slavic languages sound nicer than English.
Steve Sailer does not see this because he is a biased ethnocentric imbecile.
Not that too many people down here even bother to read. The book stores are few and far between. You have to go to Argentina to find actual readers south of the border. Maybe Chile.
(Yes, sarcasm).
While I won't get into which languages are 'prettier', English has a much larger body of literature at the present time.
But when poets are able to mold the English language into rhyme and meter and express all sorts of new and subtle thoughts they produce the greatest poetry in the world.
Hollywooders and the like should leave fairly soon or else they'll find themselves being accused of living in an apartheid state. It can't be more than a decade or two before the left forgets how they created Californian society and looks at it afresh and declares that having a bunch of old rich white people on top of a brown majority is evil. Then they'll blame the Republican legacy of Reagan and Wilson, of course neglecting the left's almost total control of the state, and they'll start demanding some sort of reparations or quotas or whatever.
One alternative to an apartheid state is to have separate states. There’ve been proposals to break up California into multiple states for years. Hollywood and Silicon Valley could get their own state — say, a coastal strip including Los Angeles and San Francisco. Maybe Republicans could get a state including Orange County and San Diego County. The Central Valley and Inland Empire could be a lumpen Dem state. North of the Bay Area could be South Oregon, etc.
Elite Dems would get autonomy and local control in exchange for giving up some of California’s electoral votes to its successor states.
Meh. While he allows a number of un-PC bloggers and very un-PC commenters to post here, Mr. Unz himself is very much a lover of Mexicans.
Then again I am probably overestimating the desire and ability of many Dems to separate a man’s beliefs from the beliefs of people he associates with.
Not to mention the face that it's pretty shameful for Unz to spend the past decade first at TAC and then here pouring down criticisms on the GOP and then pursue the party nomination.
So Republicans can’t disagree with the GOP?
Elite Dems would get autonomy and local control in exchange for giving up some of California's electoral votes to its successor states.
The result there would be a Democrat-leaning swing state. The median population of a US state is 4.6 million, so San Diego and Orange County ought to each become states. You put Imperial and southern Riverside county in with San Diego and northern Riverside County in with Orange and you’d have about 4.4 million in each. Probably the far southwestern corner of San Bernardino County has more in common with OC and could be moved there.
I suppose you could test this though, if you're conducting polling as part of your campaign. Maybe have pollsters first ask a multiple choice question to determine whether a voter actually know what prop. 187 is, and then, for the ones who answer correctly, ask them how it has affected their voting since then.
You are correct.
Though Republicans have better records in more liberal states than CA, like Massachusetts, this is because California (like Washington State) still has a lot of very conservative voters who tent to kill electable moderates in the primary.
Then again I am probably overestimating the desire and ability of many Dems to separate a man's beliefs from the beliefs of people he associates with.
So is Mr. Sailer. He just thinks they’d be better off in Mexico, as would the Americans he loves if they were.
There's only one United States, though, and plenty of Latin countries. I don't think we need another one to make the world a better place.
Part of the reason Unz challenged Wilson was because of Wilson's heroic support for Prop 187. Unz's opposition to the proposition that aimed to stem the flow of social largess was extremely Zuckerbergian- he claimed Silicon Valley would run out of imported labor if the Proposition passed. It's hard to think of a position more diametrically opposed to the Sailer Strategy on immigration.
And Kevin B. MacDonald started out as a leftist…
Ron I think he no longer supports mass immigration. And the fact how liberal he is with all the opinions on his own site I’d give him some credit. Even if a huge chunk of what he’s publishing here is nonsense crackpot.
No. But I think it’s not beyond the pale to mention that Canada’s bilingualism is bad for the rest of Canada. Perhaps in some ways even for Quebec: separation might be better for both. And were Quebec to be created from scratch in an all-Anglo Canada, it’d be extremely foolish to advocate for making it Francophone.
As for California, I gave this some thought this morning. For the Californian situation to be like the one in Quebec, the Spanish speakers would have to be overwhelmingly the direct descendants of these folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californio . They're not, so let's put that to one side. They're also not like the descendants of Ellis Island immigrants. Steve and others have covered this in detail. So what are the Spanish-speakers in California most like? Ironically they're most like one of the parties in one of the many Old World points of friction where Greek meet Turk, Maghreb Arab runs into Frenchman, Serb into Albanian etc, etc. I say it's ironic because California is thought to be the ultimate land of fresh starts, where Old World hangups and hates are washed away by the sea and sunshine. It's supposed to be America's America. I get the sense that many Latinos see it differently. The song, Somos Más Americanos by Los Tigres del Norte is some Old World irredentism you can tap your toes to.
Also bilingual schools are just a form of reconquista that pays because Spanish speaking teachers will get jobs and new bureaucracies of Spanish speakers will be set up to administer. So more money and jobs for those of Hispanic origin and fewer for non-Hispanics.
Steve Sailer does not see this because he is a biased ethnocentric imbecile.
Not everyone can be a smart universalist like the commentator Nick Diaz.
To say ‘police clash with protesters’ really is to miss the point, presumably on purpose. Those protesters were only clashing with the police because the police were preventing them getting to the supporters. Otherwise you might as well say the kids who carried out the Columbine school shootings died after ‘clashing with the police.’ That’s certainly not the full story.
The whole report is quite worrying in the way that it equates the supporters of Trump with the protesters, as if they were two sides of the same coin. One group has come to silence the other, for goodness sake!
While he’d probably make a good senator, I am concerned he would make the serious problem of Jewish over-representation and merit-adjusted Asian under-representation in Congress worse.
A key step in defending Prop 227 is to make sure the ballot language is not loaded in favor of the measure to repeal it. You all may want to hire a lawyer to sue the state for not using fair language.
Is there a work of Spanish literature outside Don Quixote that ranks in, say, the top 1000 works of world literature? I can’t think of one.
Hey, I’ve been trying to think of an angle that could lead SJW’s to protest Steve’s views by pouring bottle water on his lawn. Maybe his association with Ron’s high profile, anti-Spanish propaganda could be used. Say with Othello, “I quench thee, thou flaming minister.”
We can pat ourselves on the back, but even a slob like me can get in. That's because Ron and Steve create an open environment.
There's no food and lots of golf, but anyone can join.
I wish I could vote in California, for Ron and against the new ballot measure.
So we will be elite slobs! Hooyah!
Steve Sailer does not see this because he is a biased ethnocentric imbecile.
Yawn. I see Nick upDiaz is back.
Let me be the first to say: God mit Unz!
I wouldn’t be much concerned about Jewish over-representation if it was all Jews like Paul Gottfried.
Unz has written extensively and dubiously about how Harvard supposedly has too many Jews and too few Asians, and him winning is going to make the Senate more Jewish (well, maintain Jewish over-representation rather than let it fall with Kamela Harris's impending coronation.)
Steve Sailer does not see this because he is a biased ethnocentric imbecile.
Far greater literature has been written in Castilian? Dream on. I was in a book store in South America only yesterday and all the bestsellers are English translations.
Not that too many people down here even bother to read. The book stores are few and far between. You have to go to Argentina to find actual readers south of the border. Maybe Chile.
I love Mexico, too. And I have tons of Latino friends. I’m living in South America at the moment.
There’s only one United States, though, and plenty of Latin countries. I don’t think we need another one to make the world a better place.
(1) I *really* don't like Trump at all, but as of right now I'd probably be leaning towards him over Hillary. Then again, maybe I'll just write in Ron Paul's name like I have in the last couple of presidential elections.
(2) California has a top-two primary system, so there's a pretty good chance no Republican will even make it to the general election. Rep. Loretta Sanchez is a relatively weak and not highly-regarded Democrat, but the last statewide poll had her at 15% (with Kamala Harris at 27%), while the two Republicans in the race were tied at 3%. Neither of the latter has ever held elective office or had significant name-recognition, and they'd each raised only about $50,000 after a full year of campaigning, so I do think I have a much better chance of making it to November than either of them.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-rocky-chavez-senate-race-20160207-story.html
Therefore, I think the main question is whether I can beat Sanchez in the primary. I'd probably put the odds at less than 50-50, but I do think I have a reasonable shot.
(3) Except for Arnold Schwarzenegger---who's obviously a special case---no Republican has won a top-ticket statewide race in California in over 20 years, a patch of "remarkably bad luck" that perhaps coincidentally began immediately after Pete Wilson's Prop. 187 campaign. Usually, the Republican candidates lose by 20-25 points, sometimes after spending many millions or even tens of millions, and virtually all down-ticket Republican candidates generally lose by similar margins. So I certainly don't expect to win even if I do make it to November, but I'd have a great opportunity to raise all sorts of important issues most candidates don't.
Since I'm pretty likely to lose, I don't want to feel guilty about taking peoples' money for a hopeless campaign, so I won't accept any donations over $99. I'll be some saying things and taking some positions that very few candidates do, so donors can mentally budget their $99 contributions as providing "ideological entertainment value." And it's certainly a very strange election year, so I suppose that anything could happen...
(4) The crucial thing to keep in mind is that the real importance of a major statewide campaign sometimes has relatively little connection to the actual vote on election day. Instead, if used properly, a campaign can become a focal point for large amounts of media coverage on under-examined issues. And that media coverage might have major long-term impact, win or lose.
(5) Just as a small example, the 65 valid voter signatures I filed on Wednesday afternoon have already generated a bit of media attention on the November attempt to repeal Prop. 227. Nothing significant so far, but even so I'd still guess that probably 10x as many Californians are now aware of the repeal effort as was the case a week ago. And the fact that the Senate race is federal while the ballot measure is state matters not a bit. There's also a possibility that once the consultants for Harris and Sanchez poll the issue and examine the cross-tabs, they'll decide it makes more sense for their candidates to come out publicly against the repeal, which obviously would alter the political dynamics.
(6) In 1998, our Prop. 227 was publicly opposed by President Bill Clinton, the Chairman of the California Republican Party and the Chairman of the Democratic Party, all four leaders in the State Legislature, all four candidates for Governor, nearly every newspaper, every political slate, and every union, and we were outspent on advertising by 25-to-1. Yet we won with 61% of the vote, probably about the biggest landslide of any contested initiative since Prop. 13 in 1978, and easily outscoring both Prop. 187 and Prop. 209, which were each backed by many millions in TV advertising. So the "English" issue is potentially a pretty strong one. Indeed, a few years later I'm pretty sure my MA initiative accidentally launched Mitt Romney's political career:
http://www.unz.com/article/how-i-made-mitt/
Anyway, thanks for the supportive words, and it's now back to work for me, including getting started on building my new campaign website.
Ron, in the past decade I’ve gained a good deal of insight into the Latino political corruption that is now the entrenched rule in south Florida. Given the similar demographics in SoCal (if not statewide), I’m curious about the level of corruption you see down south. Are the illegals voting? Does the FBI have permanent public corruption field offices there yet (S FL has three)?
I don't think California is especially corrupt, at least the bribery type open corruption. We are probably worse than Iowa and better than Illinois.
I'll bet it is very hard to bribe a cop here since they often get paid like $200,000+ a year when you account for the value of their pensions. (As in, if you get a pension with a present value of $2.5 million after working for 25 years, that is like making an extra $100,000 a year).
$1000 cash in an envelope to make a charge go away is a pretty big risk when you are making that much at your day job.
I am black and grew up on the Mexican border. The kids I grew up couldn't really speak English or Spanish. They would say things like "moveate" or make a statement in the form of a question. Yesterday, I went to the store? They like some of the black people you encounter simply do not pay attention to word patterns, have no curiosity, and are not interested in improving their speech.
The main reason black children have difficulty speaking English, their only language, is that their parents do not talk to them except to give an order or yell at the child. I managed a decent vocabulary from reading a lot, watching high-brow TV programs like the news and PBS, and listening to talk radio as a kid. I also paid close attention in 7th grade grammar class. I don't remember ever having a lengthy conversation with either parent.
I think this is partly true, but it gets passed from generation to generation. At one time I supervised several black workers in my employment, who were at the lower end of the educational scale. What I found was that they had a very limited vocabulary and one almost had to treat them as English-as-a-second-language employees and stick to short, common words and avoid any kind of figures of speech like similes and metaphors.
Unlike Steve, I don’t really think that the problems is so much that blacks are born with lower intelligence, but that many of them get socialized as small children into a dialect or pidgin that is a limited subset of English, and this handicaps them later in life when it comes to dealing with the written language or more formal communications needed in the workplace. Some, like yourself, manage to overcome this.
Children need to be coached in language from a very young age if they are going to maximize their potential.
To Americans it often seems that Brits are articulate and superior in use of language, which actually they are not, but in my opinion this effect is largely the result of having grown up with the British Broadcasting Corporation radio and TV as a co-parent and learning to parrot that style of speech.
Another problem is that Zuckerberg is heavily behind "personalized" or computerized learning. Making a disadvantaged child sit at a computer all day then go home to the hood at night isn't going to do much to benefit the child.The school's website is inactive; apparently they received more than enough applicants.Britain is more ghettoized than the US. There are dozens of reality series and documentaries on YouTube about Brits on benefits. I highly recommend "Don't Cap My Benefits". "Skint" is another eye-opener. If you want to watch Finnish teachers in ghetto London schools be sure to watch both episodes of "Finland Comes to England". These people don't speak BBC English.
Good luck to him. Have Unz try to get on the Adam Carolla show.
The comedian has grasp on the degeneracy of California almost as firm (and even funnier) than our esteemed host.
Here’s his interview with Gavin Newsom.
Be that as it may, this announcement shows Trump has already had a very positive impact on US politics, he surely would not support the roll back of Ron Unz’s education reforms.
—
The Saudis, Assads and Kims of this world must have thought they understood US democratic values in action when they looked at the Browns the Bushes and the Clintons.
I doubt the Jewish community will be long be unaware of Ron’s no-nonsense analysis of elite universitys’ mass exclusion of Asians. Will Asians dare to support him?
Given the state of the CA GOP Unz could win the nomination.
Then his call to pay attention on one specific CA state matter while while running for the US Senate will look silly.
Or if he changes tack and broadens his campaign to other issues his crushing defeat by Harris will make it look like his issues have no support.
Last time one of his platforms was a popular increase in minimum wage. If he can assure enough non-minimum wage workers that prices won’t go up it could be a good combo. He could add common sense immigration restrictions as I doubt he would support a ban.
A lot of us feel this way. A strong Mexican economy and stable country to the South would be really great for hundreds of millions of people.
What?
Our government is sending the same message to its unenlightened populace as most western governments do: accept the replacement of your people and shut up.
The PM just decided that we should now take in 60000 immigrants a year, up from 50000 now. 0.73% a year, isn’t great? (The USA yearly flow of immagrants is about 0.31 % of its population, if I am correct).
I am raising my kids in French because that’s our language. I would let my kids use another language as their main one (like immigrants do) if I had moved somewhere else, but that’s not what we did. We stayed home. Believe me, we are assimilating and disappearng fast enough. I’m doing most of my work in English as does my wife. My kids are picking up English fast and that’s fine, but in a way, it’s sad. I don’t want my mother to have great-grandkids who can’t talk to her…
Can we die peacefully, whitout being urged to disappear faster by conservative people?
Steve Sailer does not see this because he is a biased ethnocentric imbecile.
That’s really odd, because it’s a scientific fact that many non-Welsh people fail to realize the superiority of Cymraeg, my ancestors’ native tongue, because of blinkered ethnocentrism.
Steve Sailer does not see this because he is a biased ethnocentric imbecile.
Maybe, but not the people speaking it in this hemisphere, they’re not so cool. Indian dwarves don’t produce much in the way of literature.
Word.
Not to mention the face that it's pretty shameful for Unz to spend the past decade first at TAC and then here pouring down criticisms on the GOP and then pursue the party nomination.
“…it’s pretty shameful for Unz to spend the past decade first at TAC and then here pouring down criticisms on the GOP and then pursue the party nomination.”
I don’t follow your logic…only people who tow the RNC line should ever run in a GOP primary? Perhaps we should’ve just nominated Jeb Bush, and been done with it?
Steve Sailer does not see this because he is a biased ethnocentric imbecile.
Cathtilian Thpanith thoundth thtupid.
You know, I'm Dutch and I don't know anybody who thinks the Dutch language is among the most beautiful. With this in mind I'm really surprised how anybody could be so deluded to think that Spanish sounds good. Also Spain was a cultural and scientific backwater even during their golden age.
Elite Dems would get autonomy and local control in exchange for giving up some of California's electoral votes to its successor states.
Given the underlying dynamic of local politics, you’d be doing what the corporate raiders do to companies: separating the tax positive, wealthier areas from the areas they subsidize. Kind of like taking the healthy people and the ones with houses in an area not prone to disasters out of a risk insurance pool.
A good thing sometimes when you’re talking about an ineffective company, but there’s no way you can liquidate a non-performing state the way you do with a company branch that isn’t profitable. You shouldn’t have ruined it in the first place through thoughtless immigration. So, out of California, a mixed-bag state, you’d be getting a New Hampshire and a Mississippi. With the caveat that the newly created third world states would immediately become a federal concern, involving more transfers.
PS Lol, it just hit me. You can call the Orange County promoted to statehood the Orange Free State. Instead of an ethnic Volksraad, it can have a class based franchise system like Prussia’s Landtag.
“Where do we all provide our invaluable campaign advice to Ron?”
After Unz & Trump win their respective races, we’re all going to be receiving medals, gentlemen!
(1) I *really* don't like Trump at all, but as of right now I'd probably be leaning towards him over Hillary. Then again, maybe I'll just write in Ron Paul's name like I have in the last couple of presidential elections.
(2) California has a top-two primary system, so there's a pretty good chance no Republican will even make it to the general election. Rep. Loretta Sanchez is a relatively weak and not highly-regarded Democrat, but the last statewide poll had her at 15% (with Kamala Harris at 27%), while the two Republicans in the race were tied at 3%. Neither of the latter has ever held elective office or had significant name-recognition, and they'd each raised only about $50,000 after a full year of campaigning, so I do think I have a much better chance of making it to November than either of them.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-rocky-chavez-senate-race-20160207-story.html
Therefore, I think the main question is whether I can beat Sanchez in the primary. I'd probably put the odds at less than 50-50, but I do think I have a reasonable shot.
(3) Except for Arnold Schwarzenegger---who's obviously a special case---no Republican has won a top-ticket statewide race in California in over 20 years, a patch of "remarkably bad luck" that perhaps coincidentally began immediately after Pete Wilson's Prop. 187 campaign. Usually, the Republican candidates lose by 20-25 points, sometimes after spending many millions or even tens of millions, and virtually all down-ticket Republican candidates generally lose by similar margins. So I certainly don't expect to win even if I do make it to November, but I'd have a great opportunity to raise all sorts of important issues most candidates don't.
Since I'm pretty likely to lose, I don't want to feel guilty about taking peoples' money for a hopeless campaign, so I won't accept any donations over $99. I'll be some saying things and taking some positions that very few candidates do, so donors can mentally budget their $99 contributions as providing "ideological entertainment value." And it's certainly a very strange election year, so I suppose that anything could happen...
(4) The crucial thing to keep in mind is that the real importance of a major statewide campaign sometimes has relatively little connection to the actual vote on election day. Instead, if used properly, a campaign can become a focal point for large amounts of media coverage on under-examined issues. And that media coverage might have major long-term impact, win or lose.
(5) Just as a small example, the 65 valid voter signatures I filed on Wednesday afternoon have already generated a bit of media attention on the November attempt to repeal Prop. 227. Nothing significant so far, but even so I'd still guess that probably 10x as many Californians are now aware of the repeal effort as was the case a week ago. And the fact that the Senate race is federal while the ballot measure is state matters not a bit. There's also a possibility that once the consultants for Harris and Sanchez poll the issue and examine the cross-tabs, they'll decide it makes more sense for their candidates to come out publicly against the repeal, which obviously would alter the political dynamics.
(6) In 1998, our Prop. 227 was publicly opposed by President Bill Clinton, the Chairman of the California Republican Party and the Chairman of the Democratic Party, all four leaders in the State Legislature, all four candidates for Governor, nearly every newspaper, every political slate, and every union, and we were outspent on advertising by 25-to-1. Yet we won with 61% of the vote, probably about the biggest landslide of any contested initiative since Prop. 13 in 1978, and easily outscoring both Prop. 187 and Prop. 209, which were each backed by many millions in TV advertising. So the "English" issue is potentially a pretty strong one. Indeed, a few years later I'm pretty sure my MA initiative accidentally launched Mitt Romney's political career:
http://www.unz.com/article/how-i-made-mitt/
Anyway, thanks for the supportive words, and it's now back to work for me, including getting started on building my new campaign website.
Steve, when are you gonna ban this Hispandering asshole Ron Unz from posting??
Ron is envious of the smarter, way-richer guy who is super successful on his first run at political office. And the Presidency no less. Here’s my armchair Lewandowsi advice to you Ron: try to emulate Trump as much as you can. Go over videos of Trump’s speeches like a JFK conspiracy nut goes over the Zapruder film. And if you return to Harvard Square for another tuition abolition stumping, let us know. I live nearby and will come over and heckle you.
Btw, Ron, every day here in Boston I read stories like this one in today’s paper:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2016/03/illegals_held_in_vicious_framingham_rape
All with multiple prior arrests, two deported within the last 2 years and return no problemo.
Anyone know why Unz hates Trump, is it the usual establishment reasons ?
Thanks Ron Unz! Ron is truly a great man. Kind of a Ben Franklin of the modern age.
Go Unz!
Hip Hip Hooray!
Hip Hip Hooray!
Canada’s official bilingualism may be bad for the rest of Canada but its de facto bilingualism in many regions simply is what it is and people can like it or lump it.
As for California, I gave this some thought this morning. For the Californian situation to be like the one in Quebec, the Spanish speakers would have to be overwhelmingly the direct descendants of these folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californio . They’re not, so let’s put that to one side. They’re also not like the descendants of Ellis Island immigrants. Steve and others have covered this in detail. So what are the Spanish-speakers in California most like? Ironically they’re most like one of the parties in one of the many Old World points of friction where Greek meet Turk, Maghreb Arab runs into Frenchman, Serb into Albanian etc, etc. I say it’s ironic because California is thought to be the ultimate land of fresh starts, where Old World hangups and hates are washed away by the sea and sunshine. It’s supposed to be America’s America. I get the sense that many Latinos see it differently. The song, Somos Más Americanos by Los Tigres del Norte is some Old World irredentism you can tap your toes to.
Elite Dems would get autonomy and local control in exchange for giving up some of California's electoral votes to its successor states.
But then who will pay deadbeat San Francisco’s bills?
“Actually, Spanish is a lot cooler than English. Far greater literature has been written in Castilian than English. ”
I think this is wrong. In fact, I know by objective and quantifiable methods that it is wrong. Just look at the number of works in English lit that have been translated and become influential in other tongues. And look at the number of authors whose works have been translated. Cervantes is the only Spanish author who has made a lasting, deep impact on world literature, and that only in one language. Shakespeare and Dickens to name just two have had more impact, and via a wider variety of works.
As for aesthetics, it may be true that Spanish is more pleasant sounding than English, but it is the least ‘pretty’ of the Romance languages. French has it beat by a mile, and even Italian with its lack of closed syllables whips Castilian (and lets not even mention Mexican Spanish).
But Carioca Portuguese is the best. Like Russian with all soft consonants. Listen to Carlos Lyra or Paula Morelenbaum sometime.
I suspect Pete Wilson, moderate Republican, lost 34% of the primary voters in 1994 because
1) he violated GOP chamber of commerce orthodoxy and raised some taxes
2) he was a moderate on abortion, thus making enemies with the Xians bitter enders.
Unz’s 34% wasn’t for Unz, it was against Wilson. But of course Wilson won the state handily.
The demographic changes that Unz was so sanguine about led inevitably to the situation his proposition is in right now. While it may — just may — be true that most ‘Latinos’ want their kids to learn English and don’t care about Spanish, the Latino political cadre certainly want ‘bilingual’ education. And the rank-and-file Latinos support that cadre.
Not too many people celebrate mensiversaries. Not after their second birthday, anyway.
If he’s serious about running, one assumes the ‘user-comment’ section here will join all the others recently packed off to Limbo (if only to protect them from the relentless and bloodthirsty Dossier Compilers of the Far Left)
Apparently, that Right Side of History’s a bit of an MSM echo chamber.
As someone who left California 20 years and 8 months ago, I think you don’t understand the power of the experience. Imagine having a headache every moment of your life, then one day, it stops.
People should not waste their money on Unz’s campaign. Many mexicans harbor a bitter grudge against the US for the Mexican American war. Rudy Acuna, a former professor at Cal State Northridge compared the Mexican American war to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. La Raza racists are openly contemptuous of American sovereignty over the southwestern United States. Advocating a higher minimum wage and waging campaigns against Spanish language instruction in California schools are sisyphean efforts to fight the symptoms of the problem rather than the attacking the root of the problem.
Not to mention the face that it's pretty shameful for Unz to spend the past decade first at TAC and then here pouring down criticisms on the GOP and then pursue the party nomination.
Ron has said that he had basically no influence on what got published at TAC, and that he was primarily just paid the bills.
Overall, most of the articles published at The Unz Review are pro-Trump and anti-immigration.
Steve Sailer does not see this because he is a biased ethnocentric imbecile.
And English speaking cultures have always lagged behind Spanish speaking cultures in nearly every kind of achievement.
(Yes, sarcasm).
Check this one out. An outlandish percentage of the Canadian Federal bureaucracy especially in Ottawa is Quebecois. Why? Due to bilingual job requirements and obviously more French speakers will learn English as a second language than the other way around.
Also bilingual schools are just a form of reconquista that pays because Spanish speaking teachers will get jobs and new bureaucracies of Spanish speakers will be set up to administer. So more money and jobs for those of Hispanic origin and fewer for non-Hispanics.
It seems to me that Ron Unz is one of the most forthright and straightforward advocates of mass Hispanic immigration. Unz has forcefully said over and over that he is happy that Large numbers of
Hispanics are moving to the
US. At the same time Unz provides a wonderful forum for writers who are against the influx. I disagree with many of Unz’s views, but he conducts himself with real class
My guess, based on his statements about 'American Pravda', is that he wants to give voice to viewpoints excluded from the mainstream media as a sort of balancing act. This would explain why the writers on Unz often appear like a photographic negative of the MSM--anti-immigration, anti-Israel, for example.
I suppose you could test this though, if you're conducting polling as part of your campaign. Maybe have pollsters first ask a multiple choice question to determine whether a voter actually know what prop. 187 is, and then, for the ones who answer correctly, ask them how it has affected their voting since then.
Are the democrats winning because they are getting a majority of the white vote, or because they are getting a good chunk of the white vote and an overwhelming majority of the non-white vote? If it is the former, then one can speculate prop. 187 tarnished the GOP brand. But if it is the latter, then one could speculate it has more to do with demographic change. Of course if it is the latter than it is probably a combination of prop 187 and demographic change given that the demographic changers are probably offended by the notion of prop 187 in the first place.
Steve Sailer does not see this because he is a biased ethnocentric imbecile.
Troll…
While I won’t get into which languages are ‘prettier’, English has a much larger body of literature at the present time.
For that matter, Spain has historically been an underperformer. Even its Golden Age is not very impressive when measured against what was going on elsewhere in Europe. As Murray notes in his HUMAN ACCOMPLISHMENT, “its [Spain's] output even during its best years was not remarkable compared to the other major contributors [in Western Europe] “(338). What’s more, Spain’s period of flowering was remarkably brief:
Spanish is suitable for less intelligent people. It has far fewer exceptions than English and a less rich vocabulary.
English is for the more intelligent.
what is the best example of Mexican literature (fiction.)
He thought a bit and suggested "Pedro Páramo" by Juan Rulfo (1917 - 1986),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Rulfo
I bought the book in English translation and read it in whole.
You can call me whatever names you want,
but my impression was: rave, bullshit.I read in childhood Don Quixote by Cervantes (1547 - 1616),
also in translation.
I read (may be three or four) books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in translation.
He is good and solid, but not in my personal taste.
Our daughter studied Spanish in Middle and High Schools,
participated in Spanish club---amateur-theater,
but I never heard any comments about Spanish fiction from her. My favorite are Somerset Maugham and George Orwell.Best to you, Science Fiction Guy.
Well, Ron would probably be the smartest senator CA’s ever had.
Good luck, Ron! Wish I lived in CA so I could vote for you!
However, I am looking to move.
Quebecois repeatedly voted down separatism, albeit by small margins. I remember Jacques Parizeau of the Parti Quebecois imploring young francophones to learn English, lest they be abandoned by the economy. Strong point.
Hollywooders and the like should leave fairly soon or else they'll find themselves being accused of living in an apartheid state. It can't be more than a decade or two before the left forgets how they created Californian society and looks at it afresh and declares that having a bunch of old rich white people on top of a brown majority is evil. Then they'll blame the Republican legacy of Reagan and Wilson, of course neglecting the left's almost total control of the state, and they'll start demanding some sort of reparations or quotas or whatever.
No, they should stay and enjoy what their politics has wrought.
Steve Sailer does not see this because he is a biased ethnocentric imbecile.
Dunno, dear fellow. Jorge Luis Borges felt that English Lit was superior to Spanish Lit. And he also believed that the English language itself was better than Spanish….
While I won't get into which languages are 'prettier', English has a much larger body of literature at the present time.
And it also has a much longer list of masterpieces. Top-tier Hispanophone lit was virtually non-existent during the 18th and 19th centuries.
For that matter, Spain has historically been an underperformer. Even its Golden Age is not very impressive when measured against what was going on elsewhere in Europe. As Murray notes in his HUMAN ACCOMPLISHMENT, “its [Spain's] output even during its best years was not remarkable compared to the other major contributors [in Western Europe] “(338). What’s more, Spain’s period of flowering was remarkably brief:
Steve Sailer does not see this because he is a biased ethnocentric imbecile.
The internal logic of the English language does not cohere as well as the Romance languages. Words do not sound as they are spelled, too many different sets of rules and exceptions to those rules. and word loans from all sorts of different languages.
But when poets are able to mold the English language into rhyme and meter and express all sorts of new and subtle thoughts they produce the greatest poetry in the world.
“Are the democrats winning because they are getting a majority of the white vote, or because they are getting a good chunk of the white vote and an overwhelming majority of the non-white vote? If it is the former, then one can speculate prop. 187 tarnished the GOP brand. But if it is the latter, then one could speculate it has more to do with demographic change. Of course if it is the latter than it is probably a combination of prop 187 and demographic change given that the demographic changers are probably offended by the notion of prop 187 in the first place.”
I am a California resident and I have personally never met a Conservative Mexican.
The Conservative Hispanic I do know personally is a legal immigrant from Chile. She is trying to decide if she should vote for Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in the GOP California primary, as she likes them both.
Too many Mexicans in this state have definitely hurt the California branch of the GOP.
(1) I *really* don't like Trump at all, but as of right now I'd probably be leaning towards him over Hillary. Then again, maybe I'll just write in Ron Paul's name like I have in the last couple of presidential elections.
(2) California has a top-two primary system, so there's a pretty good chance no Republican will even make it to the general election. Rep. Loretta Sanchez is a relatively weak and not highly-regarded Democrat, but the last statewide poll had her at 15% (with Kamala Harris at 27%), while the two Republicans in the race were tied at 3%. Neither of the latter has ever held elective office or had significant name-recognition, and they'd each raised only about $50,000 after a full year of campaigning, so I do think I have a much better chance of making it to November than either of them.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-rocky-chavez-senate-race-20160207-story.html
Therefore, I think the main question is whether I can beat Sanchez in the primary. I'd probably put the odds at less than 50-50, but I do think I have a reasonable shot.
(3) Except for Arnold Schwarzenegger---who's obviously a special case---no Republican has won a top-ticket statewide race in California in over 20 years, a patch of "remarkably bad luck" that perhaps coincidentally began immediately after Pete Wilson's Prop. 187 campaign. Usually, the Republican candidates lose by 20-25 points, sometimes after spending many millions or even tens of millions, and virtually all down-ticket Republican candidates generally lose by similar margins. So I certainly don't expect to win even if I do make it to November, but I'd have a great opportunity to raise all sorts of important issues most candidates don't.
Since I'm pretty likely to lose, I don't want to feel guilty about taking peoples' money for a hopeless campaign, so I won't accept any donations over $99. I'll be some saying things and taking some positions that very few candidates do, so donors can mentally budget their $99 contributions as providing "ideological entertainment value." And it's certainly a very strange election year, so I suppose that anything could happen...
(4) The crucial thing to keep in mind is that the real importance of a major statewide campaign sometimes has relatively little connection to the actual vote on election day. Instead, if used properly, a campaign can become a focal point for large amounts of media coverage on under-examined issues. And that media coverage might have major long-term impact, win or lose.
(5) Just as a small example, the 65 valid voter signatures I filed on Wednesday afternoon have already generated a bit of media attention on the November attempt to repeal Prop. 227. Nothing significant so far, but even so I'd still guess that probably 10x as many Californians are now aware of the repeal effort as was the case a week ago. And the fact that the Senate race is federal while the ballot measure is state matters not a bit. There's also a possibility that once the consultants for Harris and Sanchez poll the issue and examine the cross-tabs, they'll decide it makes more sense for their candidates to come out publicly against the repeal, which obviously would alter the political dynamics.
(6) In 1998, our Prop. 227 was publicly opposed by President Bill Clinton, the Chairman of the California Republican Party and the Chairman of the Democratic Party, all four leaders in the State Legislature, all four candidates for Governor, nearly every newspaper, every political slate, and every union, and we were outspent on advertising by 25-to-1. Yet we won with 61% of the vote, probably about the biggest landslide of any contested initiative since Prop. 13 in 1978, and easily outscoring both Prop. 187 and Prop. 209, which were each backed by many millions in TV advertising. So the "English" issue is potentially a pretty strong one. Indeed, a few years later I'm pretty sure my MA initiative accidentally launched Mitt Romney's political career:
http://www.unz.com/article/how-i-made-mitt/
Anyway, thanks for the supportive words, and it's now back to work for me, including getting started on building my new campaign website.
So here Ron says he doesn’t like Trump, then details why he’s likely to lose his Senate race. Consider those two mindsets linked.
If you expect anyone outside of this website to care, don’t start off talking about how you’ll lose. That is textbook cuckservatism. “Well I’m gonna lose to the democrats, but at least I employ a whole lot of writers!”.
Spend more time thinking and talking about how you’ll win, Ron. Because no matter how right you are about something that happened in 1998, it will all be a big waste of time if good people like you continue to lose elections. Go for the win.
Boxer got 52% in her last Senate race. 52%!! She’s not some untouchable Queen with a mass majority behind her. Start talking about a win, or nobody will care.
Good luck, Ron! Wish I lived in CA so I could vote for you!
Well, I do live in the Peoples Republic of Northern Mexico, so I will vote for him.
However, I am looking to move.
While I won't get into which languages are 'prettier', English has a much larger body of literature at the present time.
Look at it this way.
Spanish is suitable for less intelligent people. It has far fewer exceptions than English and a less rich vocabulary.
English is for the more intelligent.
Everybody in the southern United States headed for much fun if bilingualism comes. Almost weekly stories like this from Quebec and elsewhere in Canada. The latest upset over transporting English and French speaking students on the same bus to school.
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/marni-soupcoff-students-have-a-right-to-a-french-language-education-but-language-segregated-transportation
(1) I *really* don't like Trump at all, but as of right now I'd probably be leaning towards him over Hillary. Then again, maybe I'll just write in Ron Paul's name like I have in the last couple of presidential elections.
(2) California has a top-two primary system, so there's a pretty good chance no Republican will even make it to the general election. Rep. Loretta Sanchez is a relatively weak and not highly-regarded Democrat, but the last statewide poll had her at 15% (with Kamala Harris at 27%), while the two Republicans in the race were tied at 3%. Neither of the latter has ever held elective office or had significant name-recognition, and they'd each raised only about $50,000 after a full year of campaigning, so I do think I have a much better chance of making it to November than either of them.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-rocky-chavez-senate-race-20160207-story.html
Therefore, I think the main question is whether I can beat Sanchez in the primary. I'd probably put the odds at less than 50-50, but I do think I have a reasonable shot.
(3) Except for Arnold Schwarzenegger---who's obviously a special case---no Republican has won a top-ticket statewide race in California in over 20 years, a patch of "remarkably bad luck" that perhaps coincidentally began immediately after Pete Wilson's Prop. 187 campaign. Usually, the Republican candidates lose by 20-25 points, sometimes after spending many millions or even tens of millions, and virtually all down-ticket Republican candidates generally lose by similar margins. So I certainly don't expect to win even if I do make it to November, but I'd have a great opportunity to raise all sorts of important issues most candidates don't.
Since I'm pretty likely to lose, I don't want to feel guilty about taking peoples' money for a hopeless campaign, so I won't accept any donations over $99. I'll be some saying things and taking some positions that very few candidates do, so donors can mentally budget their $99 contributions as providing "ideological entertainment value." And it's certainly a very strange election year, so I suppose that anything could happen...
(4) The crucial thing to keep in mind is that the real importance of a major statewide campaign sometimes has relatively little connection to the actual vote on election day. Instead, if used properly, a campaign can become a focal point for large amounts of media coverage on under-examined issues. And that media coverage might have major long-term impact, win or lose.
(5) Just as a small example, the 65 valid voter signatures I filed on Wednesday afternoon have already generated a bit of media attention on the November attempt to repeal Prop. 227. Nothing significant so far, but even so I'd still guess that probably 10x as many Californians are now aware of the repeal effort as was the case a week ago. And the fact that the Senate race is federal while the ballot measure is state matters not a bit. There's also a possibility that once the consultants for Harris and Sanchez poll the issue and examine the cross-tabs, they'll decide it makes more sense for their candidates to come out publicly against the repeal, which obviously would alter the political dynamics.
(6) In 1998, our Prop. 227 was publicly opposed by President Bill Clinton, the Chairman of the California Republican Party and the Chairman of the Democratic Party, all four leaders in the State Legislature, all four candidates for Governor, nearly every newspaper, every political slate, and every union, and we were outspent on advertising by 25-to-1. Yet we won with 61% of the vote, probably about the biggest landslide of any contested initiative since Prop. 13 in 1978, and easily outscoring both Prop. 187 and Prop. 209, which were each backed by many millions in TV advertising. So the "English" issue is potentially a pretty strong one. Indeed, a few years later I'm pretty sure my MA initiative accidentally launched Mitt Romney's political career:
http://www.unz.com/article/how-i-made-mitt/
Anyway, thanks for the supportive words, and it's now back to work for me, including getting started on building my new campaign website.
Good luck to you; you are head and shoulders above the rest!
PS: I’ll be your lieutenant governor.
There is palpable fear that Trump will be the next president. If those against him are so certain that he won’t be elected, why do they protest so vehemently? They are so certain that he will win, that they are resorting to increasingly desperate measures.
Unfortunately, the more they protest, the higher they raise Trump’s profile and his status as the alpha male.
Best of luck to Ron. Really hope that he can make it out of primaries. If it happens, expect lots and lots of attention to this site and to iSteve specifically.
Hell, the isteve commentariat doesn’t support the isteve commentariat.
protesters in Salt Lake City tried to shut down the Trump rally there.
It’s politics 101, don’t let your opponents gather into groups. Goes way back, thousands of years.
Best wishes to the gracious host of our gracious host.
Man, nobody got my joke which I was quite pleased with for thinking up.
Unz has written extensively and dubiously about how Harvard supposedly has too many Jews and too few Asians, and him winning is going to make the Senate more Jewish (well, maintain Jewish over-representation rather than let it fall with Kamela Harris’s impending coronation.)
Harvard has too many Asians and not enough guys who racially look like the cast of Black Mass, The Town, and The Departed, you know from blue collar areas like Southie.
What did happen to all those Texicans and their counterparts in California anyway?
Hell, most African Americans don't learn a first language - not English, that is.
He obviously discounts the value of Ebonics.
Orange Free State would be an excellent name! SoCal actually does have a fair number of South African whites. I have even met a couple Rhodesians!
The only way you’d get a “New Hampshire” out of anywhere in California is if you made it a very tiny strip along the coast plus a few inland mountain areas. Steve has written about this.
Hispanics can’t afford to live near the coast or on the mountains, and Asians don’t like to pay a premium for these areas, they’d rather have for the same price a newer, bigger house without the dramatic view and nearby beach/hiking. Classic contrast in OC is very asian and high income Irvine a bit inland v. very white, rich, and coastal Newport Beach.
For San Diego, compare and contrast expensive, dramatically beautiful La Jolla and the similarly high-income and expensive inland Carmel Valley, which is flat, newly built, and a cookie cutter high income 4000sf tract housing on small lots. For more middle class areas, compare the people living on Mt. Helix in La Mesa with the people living in the similarly priced nearby but very flat Mira Mesa.
You can get a New Hampshire out of Santa Cruz and Monterey.
I wish there was not such a huge Asian population in Orange County. They are going to turn that county blue with their increasing numbers.
If Hildabeast wins Orange County, I am going to blame it on the county's Chinese and Vietnamese voters.
There is a reason you never see any Asians at pro-Donald Trump rallies. You are more likely to bump into a Black person than an Asian person among his supporters.
While I won't get into which languages are 'prettier', English has a much larger body of literature at the present time.
I had once asked a colleague (who is American STEM scientist born in Mexico),
what is the best example of Mexican literature (fiction.)
He thought a bit and suggested “Pedro Páramo” by Juan Rulfo (1917 – 1986),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Rulfo
I bought the book in English translation and read it in whole.
You can call me whatever names you want,
but my impression was: rave, bullshit.
I read in childhood Don Quixote by Cervantes (1547 – 1616),
also in translation.
I read (may be three or four) books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in translation.
He is good and solid, but not in my personal taste.
Our daughter studied Spanish in Middle and High Schools,
participated in Spanish club—amateur-theater,
but I never heard any comments about Spanish fiction from her.
My favorite are Somerset Maugham and George Orwell.
Best to you, Science Fiction Guy.
That was my question before reading halfway thru Steve’s post. If he does not, then it’s near impossible for him to win. In the future, I don’t suppose that Unz could perhaps move to say, WA or OR where he’d have a more realistic chance at winning? WA at least greatly supports his one great cause, namely, raising the minimum wage; WA has one of the highest state minimum wages in the US. Both states have plenty of SWPL and fewer immigrants (compared to CA) so he could actually persuade some to vote for him and if Unz is pro-environment, he would definitely have a pretty good chance.
I’m still not sure why he couldn’t support Trump in CA. As virtually the only candidate in the state who would, he might get some support in return albeit CA is such a ginormous state. And Trump isn’t vs the minimum wage. In fact he’s for eminent domain and other beneficial statewide policies that could help states such as CA.
It couldn’t hurt his candidacy. If anything’s possible, it might actually help him a little bit.
I’m definitely in for a hundred, but I’m pretty sure Ron realizes that the U.S. Senate is like a PhD program in corruption. Paging Dr. Cruz, Dr. McCain, Dr. Graham… Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard.
This site is more impressive than anything the hundred-clown circus has ever accomplished. Worthless Bastards! P’tui!
You must be one of those who reminded the teacher before class ended that she forgot to assign homework. You sound like an Unz voter. The ever-crucial apple-polishing demographic
The whole debate about immersion vs. bilingual is absurdly out of date. If Unz wants to get somewhere, he might mention that over half of all ELLs are born in this country, and a third of long-term ELLS (basically, those that enter kindergarten as ELL and are still ELL in high school) are THIRD generation natives—that is, their grandparents were immigrants.
It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether we use bilingual programs or immersion, since in most cases, Hispanic or Asian, kids become fluent within 2-5 years of starting school, no matter what the method. Asian kids get fluent quicker, obviously.
The problem is really nothing to do with the manner of education, but the manner of classification. Native kids who grow up thinking of English as their native language check “a language other than English is spoken in my home”, which classifies them automatically as ELL, even if English is their native language. Once they are classified as ELL, they are checked for “academic language fluency”, and if they have low scores, they are classified as ELL.
In other words, as I put it here:
So here’s the dirty secret of ELL classification: Students fluent in English who are nonetheless classified as ELL are unlikely to ever reach that goal, because the classification tests are capturing cognitive ability and confusing it with language learning. All the nonsense about “academic vocabulary” and “writing support” is not so much useless as simply indistinguishable from the differentiation teachers use to support low ability students, regardless of language status.
Long-term ELLs in high school, fluent in English but not in writing or reading, are simply of below average intellect. That’s not a crime.
As for Ron’s run, I suspect he’s going to make a heavy play for Asians, talking about his recent effort to get on the Harvard board, or whatever. Asians tend not to vote, though.
what is the best example of Mexican literature (fiction.)
He thought a bit and suggested "Pedro Páramo" by Juan Rulfo (1917 - 1986),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Rulfo
I bought the book in English translation and read it in whole.
You can call me whatever names you want,
but my impression was: rave, bullshit.I read in childhood Don Quixote by Cervantes (1547 - 1616),
also in translation.
I read (may be three or four) books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in translation.
He is good and solid, but not in my personal taste.
Our daughter studied Spanish in Middle and High Schools,
participated in Spanish club---amateur-theater,
but I never heard any comments about Spanish fiction from her. My favorite are Somerset Maugham and George Orwell.Best to you, Science Fiction Guy.
Oh, I wasn’t implying there was *no* Latin American fiction, just not as much as English-speaking, and was a response to a troll. Probably, I’d guess, due to the lower levels of literacy in the Hispanosphere vis-a-vis the Anglosphere.
Pedro Paramo is the sort of nonlinear fiction with Marxist overtones university professors go nuts about.
Two writers I think people here might enjoy are Mario Vargas Llosa and Jorge Luis Borges; neither was left-wing.
Vargas Llosa wrote a lot, but I think ‘Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter’ is probably the easiest to get into, has a moral about not writing only highbrow fiction, and contains low comedy and a few ethnic jokes (all at the expense of Argentines).
Borges would be enjoyed by a lot of the nerdy people here, his stuff borders on science fiction and there’s even a Lovecraft tribute. He also has lectures on, yes, English literature you can find; it’s funny to read him analogizing stuff we find familiar to points of comparison people from a Spanish-derived culture would recognize.
Remember, you can read this stuff without supporting unrestricted immigration from the countries of origin.
Eventually I wold like to give Llosa a try.
My best to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLIzzs2HHgY
classic campaign commercial by Wilson which helped him get 20% of the Black vote in California.
Ha ha!!! You should look on YouTube for videos of Mr. Unz speaking about Mexican crime rates… this probably why he thinks Trump is a buffoon… he’s probably right…
No disrespect to Mr. Unz, but if you watch the IQ2 debate on immigration, it’s pretty clear that people will try this smear tactic (they did against his minimum wage argument) and also that Unz is either too high-minded or too daft to deal with it. Really, although he won that debate, it was not a winning political debate performance.
I wish Unz well in his race, but he’s just throwing away his money… unless his real objective is just to force people to talk about the ballot initiative…
“The only way you’d get a “New Hampshire” out of anywhere in California is if you made it a very tiny strip along the coast plus a few inland mountain areas. Steve has written about this.”
You can get a New Hampshire out of Santa Cruz and Monterey.
And running on a single that most whites don't give a rats ass about is silly. We know the southern half of the state is a defacto part of Mexico given the demographics.
Wow. Even rod1963 can’t save California? Truly, we are doomed…
“Classic contrast in OC is very asian and high income Irvine a bit inland v. very white, rich, and coastal Newport Beach.”
I wish there was not such a huge Asian population in Orange County. They are going to turn that county blue with their increasing numbers.
If Hildabeast wins Orange County, I am going to blame it on the county’s Chinese and Vietnamese voters.
There is a reason you never see any Asians at pro-Donald Trump rallies. You are more likely to bump into a Black person than an Asian person among his supporters.
Unz has written extensively and dubiously about how Harvard supposedly has too many Jews and too few Asians, and him winning is going to make the Senate more Jewish (well, maintain Jewish over-representation rather than let it fall with Kamela Harris's impending coronation.)
“Unz has written extensively and dubiously about how Harvard supposedly has too many Jews and too few Asians”
Harvard has too many Asians and not enough guys who racially look like the cast of Black Mass, The Town, and The Departed, you know from blue collar areas like Southie.
If Boston College and Holy Cross aren't as impressive as Harvard, well, make them so. Holy Cross's townmate, Clark U., is near the top rank in two fields, psychology and geography, and Clark doesn't have that much more to work with than HC. So it can be done, at least in one's specialties.
Spanish is suitable for less intelligent people. It has far fewer exceptions than English and a less rich vocabulary.
English is for the more intelligent.
That Spanish was repeatedly modernized and rationalized by the Spanish government from the Enlightenment onward seems like it ought to be counted in Spanish’s favor.
Thank you for advice. I have read some Borges, but not Llosa.
Eventually I wold like to give Llosa a try.
My best to you.
But when poets are able to mold the English language into rhyme and meter and express all sorts of new and subtle thoughts they produce the greatest poetry in the world.
A lot of the irregularities in English spelling exist to facilitate oral poetry and oratory: e.g., the silent n at the end of “solemn” makes “solemnity” sound much better than “solemity” would.
The comedian has grasp on the degeneracy of California almost as firm (and even funnier) than our esteemed host.
Here's his interview with Gavin Newsom.
Carolla and Unz both grew up in North Hollywood, a few years apart in age (I’m guessing).
Carolla has mentioned in his book "Not Taco Bell Material" and with Dennis Prager that parents determined whether a child from his high school would be academically successful. (Actress Mayim Bialik '93 earned a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA.)
https://youtu.be/xIFpw8qfRIc
Adam Carolla (born May 27, 1964)
Marquez’s “100 Years of Solitude” and Borges’s “Ficciones” would likely be top 20 for the 20th Century. Add in names like Neruda, Bolanos, and the Peruvian libertarian novelist whose name I’ve forgotten.
Borges will endure for the same reason as Poe and Kafka: they appeal to bookish, introverted youths.
Rich open borders cuckservative. He’ll do great in this year of Trump. I’d rather have a democrat. At least then we’d know which direction we need to watch for knives.
The French language and the cold are the chief weapons of the Quebecois to keep unwanted intruders away from their idyllic corner of North America.
http://www.veq.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/Analysis_Immigration-in-Quebec-2014.pdf
Oh and he makes excuses for illegal alien murderers. Thank God he wasn’t a senator earlier. It would have been a Gang of Nine.
Mario Vargas Llosa
If Ron Unz runs as a Republican how many Conservatives would actually vote for him? This guy is so far to the Left he makes Mitt Romney look like Pat Buchanan.
Ron Unz is too pro-open borders/pro-amnesty to get any Donald Trump supporters to vote for him and he is too pro-abortion/pro-gun control to get any Ted Cruz supporters to vote for him.
And he won’t get many Hildabeast supporters to vote for him because most of them are partisan Democrats who would never vote Republican under any circumstance. He is better off running as a Democrat. Running as a Republican is a lose-lose situation for Ron Unz.
Always a tricky business, figuring out which authors will stand the test of time. That said, Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude seems like a safe bet, if for no other reason than something will be needed to represent the “magical realism” movement. Personally, though, after having read it twice (as an undergrad and in graduate school), I think that it’s a tad overrated .
Borges will endure for the same reason as Poe and Kafka: they appeal to bookish, introverted youths.
The National Post is frankly nothing more than a neocon rag that’s bad for a person’s mental health if taken in large doses over time. They want Quebecers speaking English only because its the Esperanto of our time. These sorts of stories are also just them throwing a bone to the Legion hall guys so they’ll stick around to hear how Bibi Netanyahu is the new Churchill and that they should all cry themselves to sleep about how Obama won’t let us bomb Iran and Russia. It’s Conservatism Inc in print form for Canadians. I’d rather have Lucien Bouchard as PM than have anyone at the National Post be given any important job in government. News outlets like that have created these freaks who wander the Canadian landscape wearing hockey jackets but babbling like some lost Likud supporter. They’re literally bad news.
I was about to make a comment about how gay the spanish lisp sounded.
You know, I’m Dutch and I don’t know anybody who thinks the Dutch language is among the most beautiful. With this in mind I’m really surprised how anybody could be so deluded to think that Spanish sounds good. Also Spain was a cultural and scientific backwater even during their golden age.
You know, I’m Dutch and I don’t know anybody who thinks the Dutch language is among the most beautiful. With this in mind I’m really surprised how anybody could be so deluded to think that Spanish sounds good. Also Spain was a cultural and scientific backwater even during their golden age."
If you are single and want to get laid a lot than learn French. Plenty of women think French sounds like the most beautiful language in the world.
That’s not bad. Yeah, good luck to Ron Unz in his run for office.
do you even read? the entire purpose is to draw attention to the repeal of a law he helped pass in the past.
ron fights the good fight. how many of you guys would do something like this? zero.
Hispanics are moving to the
US. At the same time Unz provides a wonderful forum for writers who are against the influx. I disagree with many of Unz's views, but he conducts himself with real class
It also makes no sense, from a political point of view, for Unz to publish a webzine were 80 % of the contributors and 90 % of the commentariat hold totally opposite ideas from his own.
Nick Diaz exemplifies some of the myriad problems with immigration. He was an A-hole of no accomplishment in Cuba. He then comes to the US to be an A-hole immigrant of no accomplishment. Life is now worse for more people than otherwise.
Eventually I wold like to give Llosa a try.
My best to you.
I like Spanish partly because it reminds me of English – there are parts of Spain that look more like England than some parts of England do … Borges wrote lots of poetry that is really good in translation, as he had more of a chess player’s (translatable) view of how to put words together than most poets do. Learning Spanish lets you read in the original really good stuff like the Cid, the poetry of John of the Cross and Sor Juana, Cervantes, Rosalia Castro and Juan Ramon Jimenez (one of the best animal books I have ever read is Platero y Yo – Juan Ramon writes about his home village and countryside and what life is like for him and the people and the animals there, one of those animals being his donkey Platero (Silver in English ) ). All European languages should sound good to someone growing up speaking a European language, one should be grateful to one’s civilization. If someone doesn’t like the way Dutch or English sounds it is their fault, nobody else’s. Holland is a beautiful country and the people there have lots of beautiful things to say about it. England too.
Ron Unz, has recently announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in California in the June primary…
If Ron keeps getting his information from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, then he is the Silly Candidate.
You know, I'm Dutch and I don't know anybody who thinks the Dutch language is among the most beautiful. With this in mind I'm really surprised how anybody could be so deluded to think that Spanish sounds good. Also Spain was a cultural and scientific backwater even during their golden age.
“I was about to make a comment about how gay the spanish lisp sounded.
You know, I’m Dutch and I don’t know anybody who thinks the Dutch language is among the most beautiful. With this in mind I’m really surprised how anybody could be so deluded to think that Spanish sounds good. Also Spain was a cultural and scientific backwater even during their golden age.”
If you are single and want to get laid a lot than learn French. Plenty of women think French sounds like the most beautiful language in the world.
“Is there a work of Spanish literature outside Don Quixote that ranks in, say, the top 1000 works of world literature? I can’t think of one.”
This only reveals your ignorance. Latin America alone has produced more great writers than England and the U.S combined It is just your ethnocentric Anglo bias that precludes you from realizing that. I can name out of the top of my head several Hispanic writers and poets that far surpass any American or Englush writers: Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marques, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriela Mistral, etc. You don’t know about them because you are an IGNORAMUS. Don’t pass on your ignorance about Hispanic literature as evidence for a lack of great Hipanic literature.
And, of course, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was hugely indebted to his master, William Faulkner....
And Borges readily acknowledged the superiority of English to "mere Spanish" (his phrase, not mine). Not to mention the fact that Borges' masters were largely Anglo: Poe (of course), Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Welles, ....
“Troll…
While I won’t get into which languages are ‘prettier’, English has a much larger body of literature at the present time.”
F-ck you. You call me a troll because you have no arguments. Even Latin America alone has a much larger body of literature than the entire Anglosphere. Including Spain is overkill.
Here is a hint: Shakespeare alone is not enough to make English literature the greatest ever. Dramaturgy is a lower form of literature anyway. You are just an ignorant Anglo-centric moron.
Figure Index score
William Shakespeare 100
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 81
Dante Alighieri 62
Virgil 55
Homer 54
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 48
Voltaire 47
Molière 43
Lord Byron 42
Leo Tolstoy 42
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 41
Petrarch 40
Victor Hugo 40
Friedrich Schiller 38
Giovanni Boccaccio 35
Horace 35
Euripides 35
Jean Racine 34
Walter Scott 33
Henrik Ibsen 32
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment
MMMM, Russians, Anglos, Frenchmen, Italians/Romans, Greeks, Germans....But not a single Hispanophone.....
@Bomag
“Nick Diaz exemplifies some of the myriad problems with immigration. He was an A-hole of no accomplishment in Cuba. He then comes to the US to be an A-hole immigrant of no accomplishment. Life is now worse for more people than otherwise.”
The only a-hole here is the one you came out from when your mother gave birth to you. I am not Cuban. As for accomplishments, dont even go there. No, seriously: you’ll be humiliated. I earned a masters degree in chemical engineering from a top university at age 21, and I could have entered university at 14 if the law allowed it. I also hold two other degrees, in biology and computer science. I also can write in 8 different languages.
What about YOUR accomplishments? Let’s see: angry white man who feels disenfranchised by meritocracy and a competitive job market and will vote for Donald Trump. That’s probably a good guess.
I know my achievements are not unique among iSteve commentators. Dude, you failed to impress us.
Doctored in mathematics, I could have been a don"
Not according to Murray’s Human Accomplishment, dear boy.The Anglosphere far surpasses the Hispanic world.
Don’t think that they surpass Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Joyce, Melville, etc, etc
And, of course, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was hugely indebted to his master, William Faulkner….
And Borges readily acknowledged the superiority of English to “mere Spanish” (his phrase, not mine). Not to mention the fact that Borges’ masters were largely Anglo: Poe (of course), Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Welles, ….
They are like expensive wine that has gone a little sour, people are told it should be excellent and really believe it tastes great since they believe, if they have good taste which they of course do, that it should taste good.
"Troll…
While I won’t get into which languages are ‘prettier’, English has a much larger body of literature at the present time."
F-ck you. You call me a troll because you have no arguments. Even Latin America alone has a much larger body of literature than the entire Anglosphere. Including Spain is overkill.
Here is a hint: Shakespeare alone is not enough to make English literature the greatest ever. Dramaturgy is a lower form of literature anyway. You are just an ignorant Anglo-centric moron.
Murray’s list of Giants in Western Lit:
Figure Index score
William Shakespeare 100
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 81
Dante Alighieri 62
Virgil 55
Homer 54
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 48
Voltaire 47
Molière 43
Lord Byron 42
Leo Tolstoy 42
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 41
Petrarch 40
Victor Hugo 40
Friedrich Schiller 38
Giovanni Boccaccio 35
Horace 35
Euripides 35
Jean Racine 34
Walter Scott 33
Henrik Ibsen 32
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment
MMMM, Russians, Anglos, Frenchmen, Italians/Romans, Greeks, Germans….But not a single Hispanophone…..
For "combined science", he has Robert Hooke (who?) ahead of Leibniz, Euler, Darwin, and Euclid.
After that, Spaniards were less influential.
But the Spanish literary philosopher or philosophical literati (e.g., Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, and, writing in English, the Spanish-American Santayana) were good.
Latin Americans emerged in the 20th Century and the best are impressive. Borges, who figures as Osberg, the narrator's south of the equator doppelganger in Nabokov's "Ada," is repetitious, as VN's Van Veen finally concludes. But Borges's best 8 or 10 philosophical short stories are as original as, say, Poe's best, and are highly useful cultural references.
I'm not a fan of Marquez's magical realism because the plot's lack of rules didn't persuade me to finish "100 Years of Solitude," but the half of the book I read was delightful and original.
"Troll…
While I won’t get into which languages are ‘prettier’, English has a much larger body of literature at the present time."
F-ck you. You call me a troll because you have no arguments. Even Latin America alone has a much larger body of literature than the entire Anglosphere. Including Spain is overkill.
Here is a hint: Shakespeare alone is not enough to make English literature the greatest ever. Dramaturgy is a lower form of literature anyway. You are just an ignorant Anglo-centric moron.
Don’t tell that to Hispanophone admirers of Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega, dear boy……
I think it was a reference to the fact that Ron Unz, in the comments on this blog, has explained that he basically torpedoed immigration reform (of the good kind) in the 1990′s.
Ron, I second this question.
Thank you indeed.
got mittens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Time
Figure Index score
William Shakespeare 100
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 81
Dante Alighieri 62
Virgil 55
Homer 54
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 48
Voltaire 47
Molière 43
Lord Byron 42
Leo Tolstoy 42
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 41
Petrarch 40
Victor Hugo 40
Friedrich Schiller 38
Giovanni Boccaccio 35
Horace 35
Euripides 35
Jean Racine 34
Walter Scott 33
Henrik Ibsen 32
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment
MMMM, Russians, Anglos, Frenchmen, Italians/Romans, Greeks, Germans....But not a single Hispanophone.....
Those scores seem pretty arbitrary.
For “combined science”, he has Robert Hooke (who?) ahead of Leibniz, Euler, Darwin, and Euclid.
As for why Hooke ranks so highly in combined science, Murray calls that "the triumph of the polymaths."
And Leibniz, Euler, Darwin, and Euclid all do quite well in their main main categories. Darwin, for example, is number one in biology.
His secret strategy is to wait until Steve is just about to go mainstream and take unz.com offline, figuring the commentariat won’t be able to find Steve’s new website. Don’t worry Steve, my google-fu will be up to the task when the time comes.
And, of course, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was hugely indebted to his master, William Faulkner....
And Borges readily acknowledged the superiority of English to "mere Spanish" (his phrase, not mine). Not to mention the fact that Borges' masters were largely Anglo: Poe (of course), Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Welles, ....
Other than Wordsworth, your whole list there ranges from overrated to awful. Faulkner and Joyce I’d put on the bottom, just torture to read.
They are like expensive wine that has gone a little sour, people are told it should be excellent and really believe it tastes great since they believe, if they have good taste which they of course do, that it should taste good.
Don't know what I can do for you, dear fellow. A person who can't appreciate Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, and Joyce is truly in a wretched state.
They are like expensive wine that has gone a little sour, people are told it should be excellent and really believe it tastes great since they believe, if they have good taste which they of course do, that it should taste good.
Seriously, making 19-year-olds read Joyce’s garbage should be a crime. If you never had to suffer through it, here’s a completely random example:
No, it doesn’t make any sense. No, it isn’t clever or pretty. No, it doesn’t rhyme.
Here’s some typically awful Faulkner, a random selection from one of his most famous works:
RE: Faulkner,
Quite a bit of dross in his oeuvre (you couldn't pay me to read A Fable a second time) but his best work is outstanding: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!.
And who, now has time for the Irishry & Roman Catholicism of a hundred years ago?
No. Mexican-American citizens don’t vote much either.
I don’t think California is especially corrupt, at least the bribery type open corruption. We are probably worse than Iowa and better than Illinois.
I’ll bet it is very hard to bribe a cop here since they often get paid like $200,000+ a year when you account for the value of their pensions. (As in, if you get a pension with a present value of $2.5 million after working for 25 years, that is like making an extra $100,000 a year).
$1000 cash in an envelope to make a charge go away is a pretty big risk when you are making that much at your day job.
Unz has written extensively and dubiously about how Harvard supposedly has too many Jews and too few Asians, and him winning is going to make the Senate more Jewish (well, maintain Jewish over-representation rather than let it fall with Kamela Harris's impending coronation.)
I got your joke, but I didn’t like it.
Elite Dems would get autonomy and local control in exchange for giving up some of California's electoral votes to its successor states.
Let’s call it the Elysium strategy. It also means a lot of new senators which probably is nice.
They are like expensive wine that has gone a little sour, people are told it should be excellent and really believe it tastes great since they believe, if they have good taste which they of course do, that it should taste good.
A teenage wannabe pundit has just declared that Shakespeare and Milton are overrated. Savour the moment.
Benito Pérez Galdós says hi.
One in 8 people in Quebec is foreign born
http://www.veq.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/Analysis_Immigration-in-Quebec-2014.pdf
Eenglish needz too hav uh similur rashunulizashun reformashun.
Figure Index score
William Shakespeare 100
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 81
Dante Alighieri 62
Virgil 55
Homer 54
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 48
Voltaire 47
Molière 43
Lord Byron 42
Leo Tolstoy 42
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 41
Petrarch 40
Victor Hugo 40
Friedrich Schiller 38
Giovanni Boccaccio 35
Horace 35
Euripides 35
Jean Racine 34
Walter Scott 33
Henrik Ibsen 32
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment
MMMM, Russians, Anglos, Frenchmen, Italians/Romans, Greeks, Germans....But not a single Hispanophone.....
But clearly Cervantes deserves a spot for more or less inventing the novel.
After that, Spaniards were less influential.
But the Spanish literary philosopher or philosophical literati (e.g., Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, and, writing in English, the Spanish-American Santayana) were good.
Latin Americans emerged in the 20th Century and the best are impressive. Borges, who figures as Osberg, the narrator’s south of the equator doppelganger in Nabokov’s “Ada,” is repetitious, as VN’s Van Veen finally concludes. But Borges’s best 8 or 10 philosophical short stories are as original as, say, Poe’s best, and are highly useful cultural references.
I’m not a fan of Marquez’s magical realism because the plot’s lack of rules didn’t persuade me to finish “100 Years of Solitude,” but the half of the book I read was delightful and original.
Try novelists Pio Baroja and Ramon Del Valle-Inclan, the latter also a playwright, and poet Antonio Machado. Forget about Lorca: he was just a minor poet and a forgettable playwright. But yes, he was really gay and a wealthy communist.
As for how good it is....Again, as I said upthread, it strikes me as being a bit overrated. I've read it twice (once in college, once in grad school) and it dragged a bit the second time around.
I think this is wrong. In fact, I know by objective and quantifiable methods that it is wrong. Just look at the number of works in English lit that have been translated and become influential in other tongues. And look at the number of authors whose works have been translated. Cervantes is the only Spanish author who has made a lasting, deep impact on world literature, and that only in one language. Shakespeare and Dickens to name just two have had more impact, and via a wider variety of works.
As for aesthetics, it may be true that Spanish is more pleasant sounding than English, but it is the least 'pretty' of the Romance languages. French has it beat by a mile, and even Italian with its lack of closed syllables whips Castilian (and lets not even mention Mexican Spanish).
You are wrong – you are biased because you know mostly english literature. I do not know DIckens, while I read a lot of Spanish authors, starting with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cortazar. And they did influence a Polish literature quite a bit.
How your comment relates to mine is about as clear as a San Francisco morning, or a smog-alert afternoon in LA.
I think this is wrong. In fact, I know by objective and quantifiable methods that it is wrong. Just look at the number of works in English lit that have been translated and become influential in other tongues. And look at the number of authors whose works have been translated. Cervantes is the only Spanish author who has made a lasting, deep impact on world literature, and that only in one language. Shakespeare and Dickens to name just two have had more impact, and via a wider variety of works.
As for aesthetics, it may be true that Spanish is more pleasant sounding than English, but it is the least 'pretty' of the Romance languages. French has it beat by a mile, and even Italian with its lack of closed syllables whips Castilian (and lets not even mention Mexican Spanish).
No, Continental Portuguese is the “least pretty” major Romance tongue. Like Russian with all hard consonants.
But Carioca Portuguese is the best. Like Russian with all soft consonants. Listen to Carlos Lyra or Paula Morelenbaum sometime.
https://youtu.be/JAmf6IsHjOw?t=1m57s
"Nick Diaz exemplifies some of the myriad problems with immigration. He was an A-hole of no accomplishment in Cuba. He then comes to the US to be an A-hole immigrant of no accomplishment. Life is now worse for more people than otherwise."
The only a-hole here is the one you came out from when your mother gave birth to you. I am not Cuban. As for accomplishments, dont even go there. No, seriously: you'll be humiliated. I earned a masters degree in chemical engineering from a top university at age 21, and I could have entered university at 14 if the law allowed it. I also hold two other degrees, in biology and computer science. I also can write in 8 different languages.
What about YOUR accomplishments? Let's see: angry white man who feels disenfranchised by meritocracy and a competitive job market and will vote for Donald Trump. That's probably a good guess.
I earned my PhD at age 12 (the law didn’t allow me earlier even though my university petitioned at age 3 already), I won three Nobels in physics and two in chemistry, not to mention my three Olympic gold medals (one in judo, another in weightlifting, a third in freestyle wrestling), Purple Heart as a member of the Navy Seals, and I built a multi-national company with thousands of employees and tens of billions in market cap. I have a supermodel wife who just gave birth to my eighth child.
I know my achievements are not unique among iSteve commentators. Dude, you failed to impress us.
After that, Spaniards were less influential.
But the Spanish literary philosopher or philosophical literati (e.g., Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, and, writing in English, the Spanish-American Santayana) were good.
Latin Americans emerged in the 20th Century and the best are impressive. Borges, who figures as Osberg, the narrator's south of the equator doppelganger in Nabokov's "Ada," is repetitious, as VN's Van Veen finally concludes. But Borges's best 8 or 10 philosophical short stories are as original as, say, Poe's best, and are highly useful cultural references.
I'm not a fan of Marquez's magical realism because the plot's lack of rules didn't persuade me to finish "100 Years of Solitude," but the half of the book I read was delightful and original.
Spain did produce some outstanding if little known authors (in the Anglosphere ) last century.
Try novelists Pio Baroja and Ramon Del Valle-Inclan, the latter also a playwright, and poet Antonio Machado. Forget about Lorca: he was just a minor poet and a forgettable playwright. But yes, he was really gay and a wealthy communist.
But Carioca Portuguese is the best. Like Russian with all soft consonants. Listen to Carlos Lyra or Paula Morelenbaum sometime.
This is a joke right?
By the way, having mentioned Cervantes as worth reading, I should add that almost nobody should read the Quixote straight through unless they plan to be a teacher or scholar of some kind. The magnificent details of the reported conversations and descriptions and Christian musings are what is important, not the arc of the plot, as interesting as that is.
Hispanics are moving to the
US. At the same time Unz provides a wonderful forum for writers who are against the influx. I disagree with many of Unz's views, but he conducts himself with real class
Unz’s motivations puzzle me too, but we know he reads these things and he no doubt has his reasons for remaining mum.
My guess, based on his statements about ‘American Pravda’, is that he wants to give voice to viewpoints excluded from the mainstream media as a sort of balancing act. This would explain why the writers on Unz often appear like a photographic negative of the MSM–anti-immigration, anti-Israel, for example.
They both went to Walter Reed Jr High and North Hollywood High. Due to the large number of baby boomers back then, North Hollywood High only had grades 10-12, so Carolla ’82 and Unz ’79 did not attend high school together. Carolla can barely read so he never would have been in Unz’s advanced classes anyway.
Carolla has mentioned in his book “Not Taco Bell Material” and with Dennis Prager that parents determined whether a child from his high school would be academically successful. (Actress Mayim Bialik ’93 earned a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA.)
My guess, based on his statements about 'American Pravda', is that he wants to give voice to viewpoints excluded from the mainstream media as a sort of balancing act. This would explain why the writers on Unz often appear like a photographic negative of the MSM--anti-immigration, anti-Israel, for example.
However, sometimes they also contradict contrarian wisdom. For example, the series by whoever on the IBO/IGBO.
Thanks for the suggestion. Looks like an interesting guy whom I’d never heard of.
Man, I agree that most of Joyce and all of Faulkner are not worth the hassle.
But busting on Shakespeare?
Unlike Steve, I don't really think that the problems is so much that blacks are born with lower intelligence, but that many of them get socialized as small children into a dialect or pidgin that is a limited subset of English, and this handicaps them later in life when it comes to dealing with the written language or more formal communications needed in the workplace. Some, like yourself, manage to overcome this.
Children need to be coached in language from a very young age if they are going to maximize their potential.
To Americans it often seems that Brits are articulate and superior in use of language, which actually they are not, but in my opinion this effect is largely the result of having grown up with the British Broadcasting Corporation radio and TV as a co-parent and learning to parrot that style of speech.
I agree. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife are starting a private school for poor kids in East Palo Alto. Since the school accepts kids from birth, I had mistakenly assumed that full-time daycare staffed with early childhood professionals would raise the children and give them the intellectual stimulant that their parents can’t provide. Unfortunately, the school will only offer healthcare and a few parenting classes until the child starts preschool at age 4, by which time most of the damage will have been done.
Another problem is that Zuckerberg is heavily behind “personalized” or computerized learning. Making a disadvantaged child sit at a computer all day then go home to the hood at night isn’t going to do much to benefit the child.
The school’s website is inactive; apparently they received more than enough applicants.
Britain is more ghettoized than the US. There are dozens of reality series and documentaries on YouTube about Brits on benefits. I highly recommend “Don’t Cap My Benefits”. “Skint” is another eye-opener. If you want to watch Finnish teachers in ghetto London schools be sure to watch both episodes of “Finland Comes to England”. These people don’t speak BBC English.
There is a guy from Georgia on YouTube, who among other reasons, ran for US Senate in 2014 because his nephew, who was on the honor roll, got 650/1600 on the SAT. The guy lost in 2014 but is trying to get on the ballot for 2016. http://www.grayson2016.com/
Education has changed a great deal in the last 20 years with charter schools and dual-language programs. Education reform is bipartisan with billionaires like Gates, Zuckerberg, and the Walton family getting involved. Both social justice warriors and for-profit entrepreneurs are able to simultaneously push their own education agendas by lying and saying that everyone can learn at the same level.
Andre Agassi, a high school dropout, has his own mostly black charter school and has just started an education-based investment fund. There is a ton of money to be made dealing with low-performing children. The fewer English speakers in California, the easier it will be to get into the University of California.
Like your comment. Just want to quibble with the final comment, though: we will see the university of California system start offering classes in Spanish.
Then there won’t be a disadvantage to Spanish speakers (even those who don’t speak or write English all that well) trying to earn a BA degree in most fields.
The demographic change in California is so extreme, with no real end in sight, that we should expect Spanish to fairly quickly become a co-equal official language here. I resent that, yet our children are learning Spanish at a fairly young age – it’s inescapable, and not just out here.
Go TRUMP -
Ron is envious of the smarter, way-richer guy who is super successful on his first run at political office. And the Presidency no less. Here's my armchair Lewandowsi advice to you Ron: try to emulate Trump as much as you can. Go over videos of Trump's speeches like a JFK conspiracy nut goes over the Zapruder film. And if you return to Harvard Square for another tuition abolition stumping, let us know. I live nearby and will come over and heckle you.
Btw, Ron, every day here in Boston I read stories like this one in today's paper:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2016/03/illegals_held_in_vicious_framingham_rape
All with multiple prior arrests, two deported within the last 2 years and return no problemo.
You want Steve to ban the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of The Unz Review ?
Ron Keeva Unz (born September 20, 1961)
Adam Carolla (born May 27, 1964)
"Nick Diaz exemplifies some of the myriad problems with immigration. He was an A-hole of no accomplishment in Cuba. He then comes to the US to be an A-hole immigrant of no accomplishment. Life is now worse for more people than otherwise."
The only a-hole here is the one you came out from when your mother gave birth to you. I am not Cuban. As for accomplishments, dont even go there. No, seriously: you'll be humiliated. I earned a masters degree in chemical engineering from a top university at age 21, and I could have entered university at 14 if the law allowed it. I also hold two other degrees, in biology and computer science. I also can write in 8 different languages.
What about YOUR accomplishments? Let's see: angry white man who feels disenfranchised by meritocracy and a competitive job market and will vote for Donald Trump. That's probably a good guess.
You should retire from MMA. You’ve taken too many punches to the head.
For "combined science", he has Robert Hooke (who?) ahead of Leibniz, Euler, Darwin, and Euclid.
Murray put a lot of thought into his methodology. For Western Lit, he attempted to avoid intra-linguistic bias (Anglo critics over-rating Anglo authors, Francophone critics over-rating Francophone authors, etc) by only looking at critical sources that are not in the same language as the authors being evaluated.This gives us a sense of how influential writers have been outside their home languages.
You don’t know who Robert Hooke is?
As for why Hooke ranks so highly in combined science, Murray calls that “the triumph of the polymaths.”
And Leibniz, Euler, Darwin, and Euclid all do quite well in their main main categories. Darwin, for example, is number one in biology.
Yes. His scores were anything but "arbitrary." He went to great lengths to be as objective as possible.
After that, Spaniards were less influential.
But the Spanish literary philosopher or philosophical literati (e.g., Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, and, writing in English, the Spanish-American Santayana) were good.
Latin Americans emerged in the 20th Century and the best are impressive. Borges, who figures as Osberg, the narrator's south of the equator doppelganger in Nabokov's "Ada," is repetitious, as VN's Van Veen finally concludes. But Borges's best 8 or 10 philosophical short stories are as original as, say, Poe's best, and are highly useful cultural references.
I'm not a fan of Marquez's magical realism because the plot's lack of rules didn't persuade me to finish "100 Years of Solitude," but the half of the book I read was delightful and original.
Cervantes is clearly the greatest and most influential Hispanophone writer.Murray gives him a score of 29 in Western Lit.
As Murray points out, Spain comes close to dropping off the map after the Golden Age:
Since Santayana was writing in English (and was educated at the Boston Latin School, Harvard,and King’s College, Cambridge), I don’t really think that we can count him as a Hispanophone writer .
I agree. Of course Borges was an Anglophile and was of Anglo descent (his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was half English). And he first read Cervantes in an English translation. And most of the authors who shaped his work were Anglo: Poe, Welles, Stevenson, Kipling, etc
As I said upthread, Marquez will endure. After all, something has to represent the “magical realism” movement in Hispanic lit.
As for how good it is….Again, as I said upthread, it strikes me as being a bit overrated. I’ve read it twice (once in college, once in grad school) and it dragged a bit the second time around.
I’m beginning to doubt your critical faculties. I’ve read Ulysses four times, and it is a truly magical book. And I first read it when I was 18.Never could get into Finnegan’s Wake, though
RE: Faulkner,
Quite a bit of dross in his oeuvre (you couldn’t pay me to read A Fable a second time) but his best work is outstanding: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!.
They are like expensive wine that has gone a little sour, people are told it should be excellent and really believe it tastes great since they believe, if they have good taste which they of course do, that it should taste good.
“Other than Wordsworth, your whole list there ranges from overrated to awful.”
Don’t know what I can do for you, dear fellow. A person who can’t appreciate Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, and Joyce is truly in a wretched state.
I don’t think Mr. Unz’s motivation is to win the election. He seems to have a rather old-fashioned and idealist view that the goal in politics is to get one’s policy preferences enacted. Thus if he fails to win office but manages to defeat the roll-back of his preferred education policy, I doubt he will be too disappointed.
Harvard has too many Asians and not enough guys who racially look like the cast of Black Mass, The Town, and The Departed, you know from blue collar areas like Southie.
There’s actually a very good, and valid, reason why Catholics should be underrepresented in the Ivies and state flagship universities. They took the trouble to found their own institutions. Their kids should go to those.
If Boston College and Holy Cross aren’t as impressive as Harvard, well, make them so. Holy Cross’s townmate, Clark U., is near the top rank in two fields, psychology and geography, and Clark doesn’t have that much more to work with than HC. So it can be done, at least in one’s specialties.
Joyce’s influence on later writers was undoubtedly disastrous. But the particular passage you single out for ridicule is actually pretty brilliant. Trouble is, you’ve got to be thoroughly steeped in the Irishry & Roman Catholicism of a hundred years ago for it come across as anything but gibberish.
And who, now has time for the Irishry & Roman Catholicism of a hundred years ago?
As for why Hooke ranks so highly in combined science, Murray calls that "the triumph of the polymaths."
And Leibniz, Euler, Darwin, and Euclid all do quite well in their main main categories. Darwin, for example, is number one in biology.
“Murray put a lot of thought into his methodology.”
Yes. His scores were anything but “arbitrary.” He went to great lengths to be as objective as possible.
Nick:
And you aren’t biased and ethnocentric? Your whole argument is biased and ethnocentric.
Mr. Unz might want to take a closer look at the bilingual seal that schools are giving out in CA. That program there is a major factor in trying to bring back bilingual education.
But Carioca Portuguese is the best. Like Russian with all soft consonants. Listen to Carlos Lyra or Paula Morelenbaum sometime.
I disagree. I think European Portuguese is very beautiful. Maybe beauty in languages is subjective. Ya’ think?
"Nick Diaz exemplifies some of the myriad problems with immigration. He was an A-hole of no accomplishment in Cuba. He then comes to the US to be an A-hole immigrant of no accomplishment. Life is now worse for more people than otherwise."
The only a-hole here is the one you came out from when your mother gave birth to you. I am not Cuban. As for accomplishments, dont even go there. No, seriously: you'll be humiliated. I earned a masters degree in chemical engineering from a top university at age 21, and I could have entered university at 14 if the law allowed it. I also hold two other degrees, in biology and computer science. I also can write in 8 different languages.
What about YOUR accomplishments? Let's see: angry white man who feels disenfranchised by meritocracy and a competitive job market and will vote for Donald Trump. That's probably a good guess.
You humbly forgot to add:
“You can tell I’m educated, I studied at the Sorbonne
Doctored in mathematics, I could have been a don”
@Syonredux
“Murray’s list of Giants in Western Lit:
Figure Index score
William Shakespeare 100
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 81
Dante Alighieri 62
Virgil 55
Homer 54
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 48
Voltaire 47
Molière 43
Lord Byron 42
Leo Tolstoy 42
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 41
Petrarch 40
Victor Hugo 40
Friedrich Schiller 38
Giovanni Boccaccio 35
Horace 35
Euripides 35
Jean Racine 34
Walter Scott 33
Henrik Ibsen 32
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment
MMMM, Russians, Anglos, Frenchmen, Italians/Romans, Greeks, Germans….But not a single Hispanophone…..”
Who cares? This list is entirely subjective. It is just his opinion. Some of the authors listed are so awful they shouldn’t be listed even in a top #1,000 list.
This list is 100% irrelevant, as you cannot “rank” people that are competing in something for which it is impossible ot device an objective criteria for who is “better”.
And, if you want something that's much less prone to bias, here are Murray's lists in the sciences:
Astronomy
Figure Index score
Galileo Galilei 100
Johannes Kepler 93
William Herschel 88
Pierre-Simon Laplace 79
Nicolaus Copernicus 75
Ptolemy 73
Tycho Brahe 68
Edmond Halley 57
Giovanni Domenico Cassini 53
Hipparchus 49
Walter Baade 47
Edwin Hubble 45
Friedrich Bessel 39
William Huggins 38
George Ellery Hale 37
Arthur Eddington 37
Ejnar Hertzsprung 35
Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers 33
Gerard Kuiper 32
Johannes Hevelius 30
Biology
Figure Index score
Charles Darwin 100
Aristotle 94
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck 88
Georges Cuvier 83
Thomas Hunt Morgan 75
Carl Linnaeus 59
William Harvey 51
Theodor Schwann 48
Stephen Hales 48
Jan Swammerdam 47
Marcello Malpighi 45
Claude Bernard 45
Hugo de Vries 44
Karl Ernst von Baer 43
John Ray 42
Ernst Haeckel 41
Lazzaro Spallanzani 38
Gregor Mendel 38
Pliny the Elder 37
Albrecht von Haller 37
Chemistry
Figure Index score
Antoine Lavoisier 100
Jöns Jacob Berzelius 67
Carl Wilhelm Scheele 53
Joseph Priestley 49
Humphry Davy 46
Robert Boyle 42
John Dalton 38
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac 37
Joseph Black 33
William Ramsay 31
Justus Liebig 31
William Crookes 30
Claude Louis Berthollet 29
Linus Pauling 27
August Kekulé 27
Dmitry Mendeleyev 25
Jan Baptist van Helmont 25
Frederick Soddy 25
Martin Heinrich Klaproth 23
Robert Bunsen 22
Earth Sciences
Figure Index score
Charles Lyell 100
James Hutton 77
William Smith 55
Georgius Agricola 51
Abraham Gottlob Werner 46
Roderick Murchison 40
Matthew Fontaine Maury 40
Louis Agassiz 37
Jean-Étienne Guettard 37
Carl Gustaf Mosander 37
Horace-Bénédict de Saussure 35
Nicolas Desmarest 33
Alfred Wegener 33
Alexandre Brongniart 31
Adam Sedgwick 31
Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin 29
Vilhelm Bjerknes 29
Eilhard Mitscherlich 29
Per Teodor Cleve 29
Maurice Ewing 26
Physics
Figure Index score
Isaac Newton 100
Albert Einstein 100
Ernest Rutherford 88
Michael Faraday 86
Galileo Galilei 83
Henry Cavendish 57
Niels Bohr 52
J. J. Thomson 50
James Clerk Maxwell 50
Pierre Curie 47
Gustav Kirchhoff 43
Enrico Fermi 42
Werner Heisenberg 41
Marie Curie 41
Paul Dirac 40
James Prescott Joule 40
Christiaan Huygens 39
William Gilbert 37
Thomas Young 37
Robert Hooke 36
Mathematics
Figure Index score
Leonhard Euler 100
Isaac Newton 89
Euclid 83
Carl Friedrich Gauss 81
Pierre de Fermat 72
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 72
René Descartes 54
Georg Cantor 50
Blaise Pascal 47
Bernhard Riemann 47
David Hilbert 40
Jakob Bernoulli 40
Diophantus 39
Gerolamo Cardano 37
François Viète 36
Adrien-Marie Legendre 36
John Wallis 36
Augustin-Louis Cauchy 35
Fibonacci 34
Archimedes 33
Medicine
Figure Index score
Louis Pasteur 100
Hippocrates 93
Robert Koch 90
Galen 74
Paracelsus 68
Paul Ehrlich 59
René Laennec 54
Elmer McCollum 49
Alexander Fleming 47
Ambroise Paré 46
Emil Adolf von Behring 44
Joseph Lister 43
Kitasato Shibasaburō 42
Thomas Sydenham 40
Andreas Vesalius 38
Gerhard Domagk 36
Alexis Carrel 36
Sigmund Freud 34
John Hunter 34
Ignaz Semmelweis 34
Technology
Figure Index score
James Watt 100
Thomas Edison 100
Leonardo da Vinci 60
Christiaan Huygens 51
Archimedes 51
Guglielmo Marconi 50
Vitruvius 43
John Smeaton 37
Henry Bessemer 34
Thomas Newcomen 33
Charles Babbage 33
Carl Wilhelm Siemens 32
John Wilkinson 32
Benjamin Franklin 32
Charles Wheatstone 32
Alfred Nobel 32
Michael Faraday 31
Denis Papin 31
George Stephenson 30
Samuel Morse 30
As you can see, the Hispanophone level of performance in the sciences has been quite pathetic.
@Syonredux
“Not according to Murray’s Human Accomplishment, dear boy.The Anglosphere far surpasses the Hispanic world.”
Murray is an Anglo-Saxon, with an Anglo-centric bias. His list is entirely subjective. I don’t think why this simple concept eludes you. Why is it so surprising that an Anglo-Saxon man would judge the accomplishments of the Anglosphere greater? You know, just like we all use Leibniz’s notation for integral calculus and yet Newton gets all the credit for inventing calculus. Anglos are thives.
“Don’t think that they surpass Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Joyce, Melville, etc, etc”
Oh, yes, they do. As for Shakespeare, he was a dramaturgist. I have been over this.
“And, of course, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was hugely indebted to his master, William Faulkner….”
Marquez was influenced by many writers. He was also a communist, so you can be sure that he didn’t have Americans and Anglo writers in high regard.
“And Borges readily acknowledged the superiority of English to “mere Spanish” (his phrase, not mine). Not to mention the fact that Borges’ masters were largely Anglo: Poe (of course), Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Welles, ….”
Borges had Anglo ancestroy, so of course he was biased. But notwithstanding, his works were mostly in Castellaño and not English. So his works count as Hispanic literature. And I personally rate Borges as one of the lesser writers on my list. The reason why he is so popular in the Anglosphere is because he was an Anglophile and also partly Anglo. So, naturally, Anglos prefer him over the many communist writers of Latin America.
And, using those criteria, Hispanophone lit is inferior to French lit. And to Anglo Lit. And to German lit.And to....., etc, etc, etc,And he also says that the French, Italians, Germans, and Russians are superior to the Hispanophone world....The rest of the world disagrees with you, dear boy.Yes, your queer theory that Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Molière, Racine, Pirendello, Racine, etc, etc, are inferior. Suffice it to say, dear boy, it's a fringe opinion. At best.Dear fellow, Faulkner's influence on Marquez is well-documented.And he also had Iberian ancestry....Yet he still came to the conclusion that Anglo lit was superior.Of course, dear boy. And his contributions are all marked by the influence of Anglo authors....Once again, you reveal your exceedingly poor taste....
"Murray’s list of Giants in Western Lit:
Figure Index score
William Shakespeare 100
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 81
Dante Alighieri 62
Virgil 55
Homer 54
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 48
Voltaire 47
Molière 43
Lord Byron 42
Leo Tolstoy 42
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 41
Petrarch 40
Victor Hugo 40
Friedrich Schiller 38
Giovanni Boccaccio 35
Horace 35
Euripides 35
Jean Racine 34
Walter Scott 33
Henrik Ibsen 32
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment
MMMM, Russians, Anglos, Frenchmen, Italians/Romans, Greeks, Germans….But not a single Hispanophone….."
Who cares? This list is entirely subjective. It is just his opinion. Some of the authors listed are so awful they shouldn't be listed even in a top #1,000 list.
This list is 100% irrelevant, as you cannot "rank" people that are competing in something for which it is impossible ot device an objective criteria for who is "better".
And yet you wrote:
So which one is your opinion?
You don’t sound like someone who is familiar with Murray’s methods. He thought hard about excluding ethnocentric bias, so he excluded English works from calculating the English authors’ score, French works from calculating French authors’ scores, etc. His results could be debated, but they weren’t the result of ethnocentrism.
As for why Hooke ranks so highly in combined science, Murray calls that "the triumph of the polymaths."
And Leibniz, Euler, Darwin, and Euclid all do quite well in their main main categories. Darwin, for example, is number one in biology.
Hooke plays a big role in Neal Stephenson’s “Baroque” series. He’s sort of the guy who more than anybody else gets the future, although he gets overshadowed by Newton’s genius, kind of like how Diderot was the best of the philosophes but Rousseau overshadows him.
My guess, based on his statements about 'American Pravda', is that he wants to give voice to viewpoints excluded from the mainstream media as a sort of balancing act. This would explain why the writers on Unz often appear like a photographic negative of the MSM--anti-immigration, anti-Israel, for example.
As far as I can tell, Ron is one of the few people who feels, deep down, that argument is good.
The whole report is quite worrying in the way that it equates the supporters of Trump with the protesters, as if they were two sides of the same coin. One group has come to silence the other, for goodness sake!
Not to go OT, but the Columbine massacre is a perfect example of how *not* to handle a spree shooting.
The cops who rushed to the scene treated the massacre as a hostage situation. Hundreds of armed men in uniform stood outside the school for several hours, doing nothing.
Shortly after the shooting began, the school resource officer did trade a few shots with one of the killers, but gave up after he was grazed by a bullet. And a few cops on the ground, crouching behind their cars, did return fire for a brief time after the boys shot at them while standing beside the shattered library windows. But that was it.
No one ever gave the order to storm the school – to charge inside, find those punks, and take them down. The police officers were not about to risk their lives, not even when hundreds of unarmed teenagers were in mortal danger from two of their homicidal gun-toting peers.
At one point, a sniper lying on the roof of a nearby house had one of the boys clearly in his sights. He was ordered not to shoot.
Harris and Klebold’s plan was to blow up the first-floor cafeteria in the middle of the lunch period, killing hundreds of people. They hoped the explosion would be strong enough to send the second-floor library directly above the cafeteria, and maybe even the rest of the school, crashing down to the ground. They planned to mow down as many kids fleeing the smoldering wreckage of the school as they could.
Thankfully, their homemade pipe bombs did not go off. (The timers were laughably badly made.)
The boys spent over a year working on Plan A, but they had no Plan B. So they ended up opening fire and shooting at random, more or less. They wandered around outside for a while, firing at anyone and everyone; walked into the school, still firing (but with a very low hit count); and then made their way to the library.
The one adult who died – a teacher named Dave Sanders – ran into the cafeteria after hearing the first shots and screamed at the kids to get the hell out of there. Thus, by the time the killers walked into the building, the cafeteria was empty. (They lingered there for a minute, trying to get the bombs to go off.) Sanders’ actions likely saved dozens if not hundreds of lives.
He was shot in the hallway leading to the library. He’d been going room-to-room, warning teachers to lock their doors.
(He bled to death over a period of several hours. After being shot, he crawled into a nearby classroom. He was still alive when the paramedics took him away. As he lay dying, the kids in the room with him wrote signs reading “Man Inside Bleeding to Death” and put them up against the window, hoping that it would prompt the rescuers to hurry. Still, the cops stood outside and did nothing.)
When the woman in charge in the library realized that the killers were heading her way – she could hear the gunshots getting louder and louder – she, unlike Sanders, told the kids not to run, but to hide. (The library had a fire escape – a back door leading to a staircase. Everyone could have fled to safety.) Her decision, justifiable or not, led to the library’s becoming Ground Zero.
After storming into the library, the boys began wrecking it. They fired bullets into display cases, into computers, into bookcases. They shot out the windows, and (as I said) briefly traded fire with the cops below. Then they turned their guns on their fellow students. They took their time taunting their cowering victims – shooting some, sparing others.
The first kid they shot – a mentally-challenged special-needs student – was not even hiding, but merely sitting on the floor with his back against a table. He died where he sat.
Another boy – a bespectacled freshman nerd – chose to fight back. He leapt up from his hiding-spot and tried to throw a chair at his attacker. Harris rewarded his courage with a bullet to the head.
The killers ended up killing more girls than boys.
(The famous “She said yes” moment never happened. The killers did ask one girl whether she believed in God, but only *after* she’d been shot, and this girl lived. The girl who was alleged to have said yes never said anything before she was killed.)
They had enough ammunition to kill everyone in the room, and then some. But most of the folks hiding in that room survived. There were kids who were taunted, and insulted, and mocked, and threatened, and then spared. One kid – a friend of one of the killers – was even allowed to get up and leave.
Harris and Klebold were not at all like Seung-Hui Cho or Adam Lanza, autistics who carried out their ghastly crimes with grim, humorless efficiency.
(Cho said nothing to any of his victims – he let his gun do all the talking. He killed 32, while Harris and Klebold “only” killed 13 and wounded 24.)
After tiring of murdering kids at point-blank range, the boys left the library, went down to the cafeteria for a while, tried again to get the bombs to go off, and then, after they realized that the bombs were never going to explode, went back upstairs.
When they returned to the library, it was nearly empty, except for the bodies. (As soon as the killers left, nearly everyone rushed out the back door.)
Only two of those who’d been inside the room when the killers first arrived were still inside (and alive) when they returned. One was the teacher who had told everyone to hide – ironically, she was still following her own (bad) advice and was crouched in a cupboard. The other was the famous “boy in the window,” who later escaped from the library by crawling out one of the shattered window and falling onto the roof of a SWAT van. At the time that the killers returned, he was still lying on the floor where he’d been shot in the head, drifting in and out of consciousness. No one had tried to help him because he’d looked like he was dead. (Despite the horrific nature of his injuries, he made a miraculous recovery.)
Shortly after coming back upstairs, the killers sat down on the floor and blew their brains out – together, within a few seconds of each other. They died about an hour after firing the first shots.
After Columbine, police departments changed their tactics. Nowadays, if a nut walks into a building and starts shooting up the place, they go after him right away.
But the cops who stood outside that school on that day, doing nothing while 14- (and 15-/16-/17-/18-) year-old kids were being shot to death like dogs, were worse than useless. How they can even sleep at night is beyond me.
I agree. But I think he’s also worried that problems are going unaddressed because of the MSM’s biases, so he’s got his website.
He also did an amazing job of scanning in all these old Weird Tales issues, which is going to be a lot of fun for me in the retirement home if it’s still around in whatever successor to the Web they’ll have then. Thanks! (No, not sarcastic. I think I’m one of the few guys in his 30s who thinks about what he’s going to do in the retirement home.)
Another problem is that Zuckerberg is heavily behind "personalized" or computerized learning. Making a disadvantaged child sit at a computer all day then go home to the hood at night isn't going to do much to benefit the child.The school's website is inactive; apparently they received more than enough applicants.Britain is more ghettoized than the US. There are dozens of reality series and documentaries on YouTube about Brits on benefits. I highly recommend "Don't Cap My Benefits". "Skint" is another eye-opener. If you want to watch Finnish teachers in ghetto London schools be sure to watch both episodes of "Finland Comes to England". These people don't speak BBC English.
Small children absolutely love games on tablet computers and cell phones. At 18 months old my daughter knew how to play music on a cell phone and select a favorite game on a tablet computer. The learning activities can be built into games, for example learning to sing the ABC song, nursery rhymes, Doh a deer, etc.
Shakespeare virtually created the modern English language, so it is almost impossible to evaluate his work. It is a bit like asking if mother’s breast milk tasted good or whether the Bible is a Good Book.
Another win for the iSteve comment section.
George Washington University just awarded full-ride Trachtenberg scholarships to 10 publically educated DC high school seniors. At least six of the 10 are immigrants or the children of immigrants. One student learned English when he came to the US by himself three years ago from Guatemala. Another learned English five years ago when he arrived in the US from Bangladesh with his family.
Three of the 10 are Asian. The public schools in DC are only about 1-2 percent Asian. Of the four who don’t appear to be immigrants, one is a white male and the other three a black females.
It is a Ron Unz dream: free tuition, an overrepresentation of Asians, and rapid English immersion.
It’s not. As I noted upthread, Anglo authors are scored according to what non-Anglo critics have said.French authors are scored according to what non-French critics have said. And Hispanophone authors are scored according to what non-Hispanophone critics have said. That’s the most bias-free methodology that I can think of.
And, using those criteria, Hispanophone lit is inferior to French lit. And to Anglo Lit. And to German lit.And to….., etc, etc, etc,
And he also says that the French, Italians, Germans, and Russians are superior to the Hispanophone world….
The rest of the world disagrees with you, dear boy.
Yes, your queer theory that Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Molière, Racine, Pirendello, Racine, etc, etc, are inferior. Suffice it to say, dear boy, it’s a fringe opinion. At best.
Dear fellow, Faulkner’s influence on Marquez is well-documented.
And he also had Iberian ancestry….Yet he still came to the conclusion that Anglo lit was superior.
Of course, dear boy. And his contributions are all marked by the influence of Anglo authors….
Once again, you reveal your exceedingly poor taste….
That must be a thing, right? Maybe he was influenced by Trump.
And, using those criteria, Hispanophone lit is inferior to French lit. And to Anglo Lit. And to German lit.And to....., etc, etc, etc,And he also says that the French, Italians, Germans, and Russians are superior to the Hispanophone world....The rest of the world disagrees with you, dear boy.Yes, your queer theory that Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg, Molière, Racine, Pirendello, Racine, etc, etc, are inferior. Suffice it to say, dear boy, it's a fringe opinion. At best.Dear fellow, Faulkner's influence on Marquez is well-documented.And he also had Iberian ancestry....Yet he still came to the conclusion that Anglo lit was superior.Of course, dear boy. And his contributions are all marked by the influence of Anglo authors....Once again, you reveal your exceedingly poor taste....
Well, it could be that he is anti-Hispanic.
That must be a thing, right? Maybe he was influenced by Trump.
"Murray’s list of Giants in Western Lit:
Figure Index score
William Shakespeare 100
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 81
Dante Alighieri 62
Virgil 55
Homer 54
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 48
Voltaire 47
Molière 43
Lord Byron 42
Leo Tolstoy 42
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 41
Petrarch 40
Victor Hugo 40
Friedrich Schiller 38
Giovanni Boccaccio 35
Horace 35
Euripides 35
Jean Racine 34
Walter Scott 33
Henrik Ibsen 32
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Accomplishment
MMMM, Russians, Anglos, Frenchmen, Italians/Romans, Greeks, Germans….But not a single Hispanophone….."
Who cares? This list is entirely subjective. It is just his opinion. Some of the authors listed are so awful they shouldn't be listed even in a top #1,000 list.
This list is 100% irrelevant, as you cannot "rank" people that are competing in something for which it is impossible ot device an objective criteria for who is "better".
But it’s not “his opinion.” The index scores are based on what critics and scholars have written.
Don’t be silly.
There’s always a subjective aspect to aesthetic judgement, dear boy. That’s why Murray uses multiple sources.
And, if you want something that’s much less prone to bias, here are Murray’s lists in the sciences:
Astronomy
Figure Index score
Galileo Galilei 100
Johannes Kepler 93
William Herschel 88
Pierre-Simon Laplace 79
Nicolaus Copernicus 75
Ptolemy 73
Tycho Brahe 68
Edmond Halley 57
Giovanni Domenico Cassini 53
Hipparchus 49
Walter Baade 47
Edwin Hubble 45
Friedrich Bessel 39
William Huggins 38
George Ellery Hale 37
Arthur Eddington 37
Ejnar Hertzsprung 35
Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers 33
Gerard Kuiper 32
Johannes Hevelius 30
Biology
Figure Index score
Charles Darwin 100
Aristotle 94
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck 88
Georges Cuvier 83
Thomas Hunt Morgan 75
Carl Linnaeus 59
William Harvey 51
Theodor Schwann 48
Stephen Hales 48
Jan Swammerdam 47
Marcello Malpighi 45
Claude Bernard 45
Hugo de Vries 44
Karl Ernst von Baer 43
John Ray 42
Ernst Haeckel 41
Lazzaro Spallanzani 38
Gregor Mendel 38
Pliny the Elder 37
Albrecht von Haller 37
Chemistry
Figure Index score
Antoine Lavoisier 100
Jöns Jacob Berzelius 67
Carl Wilhelm Scheele 53
Joseph Priestley 49
Humphry Davy 46
Robert Boyle 42
John Dalton 38
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac 37
Joseph Black 33
William Ramsay 31
Justus Liebig 31
William Crookes 30
Claude Louis Berthollet 29
Linus Pauling 27
August Kekulé 27
Dmitry Mendeleyev 25
Jan Baptist van Helmont 25
Frederick Soddy 25
Martin Heinrich Klaproth 23
Robert Bunsen 22
Earth Sciences
Figure Index score
Charles Lyell 100
James Hutton 77
William Smith 55
Georgius Agricola 51
Abraham Gottlob Werner 46
Roderick Murchison 40
Matthew Fontaine Maury 40
Louis Agassiz 37
Jean-Étienne Guettard 37
Carl Gustaf Mosander 37
Horace-Bénédict de Saussure 35
Nicolas Desmarest 33
Alfred Wegener 33
Alexandre Brongniart 31
Adam Sedgwick 31
Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin 29
Vilhelm Bjerknes 29
Eilhard Mitscherlich 29
Per Teodor Cleve 29
Maurice Ewing 26
Physics
Figure Index score
Isaac Newton 100
Albert Einstein 100
Ernest Rutherford 88
Michael Faraday 86
Galileo Galilei 83
Henry Cavendish 57
Niels Bohr 52
J. J. Thomson 50
James Clerk Maxwell 50
Pierre Curie 47
Gustav Kirchhoff 43
Enrico Fermi 42
Werner Heisenberg 41
Marie Curie 41
Paul Dirac 40
James Prescott Joule 40
Christiaan Huygens 39
William Gilbert 37
Thomas Young 37
Robert Hooke 36
Mathematics
Figure Index score
Leonhard Euler 100
Isaac Newton 89
Euclid 83
Carl Friedrich Gauss 81
Pierre de Fermat 72
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 72
René Descartes 54
Georg Cantor 50
Blaise Pascal 47
Bernhard Riemann 47
David Hilbert 40
Jakob Bernoulli 40
Diophantus 39
Gerolamo Cardano 37
François Viète 36
Adrien-Marie Legendre 36
John Wallis 36
Augustin-Louis Cauchy 35
Fibonacci 34
Archimedes 33
Medicine
Figure Index score
Louis Pasteur 100
Hippocrates 93
Robert Koch 90
Galen 74
Paracelsus 68
Paul Ehrlich 59
René Laennec 54
Elmer McCollum 49
Alexander Fleming 47
Ambroise Paré 46
Emil Adolf von Behring 44
Joseph Lister 43
Kitasato Shibasaburō 42
Thomas Sydenham 40
Andreas Vesalius 38
Gerhard Domagk 36
Alexis Carrel 36
Sigmund Freud 34
John Hunter 34
Ignaz Semmelweis 34
Technology
Figure Index score
James Watt 100
Thomas Edison 100
Leonardo da Vinci 60
Christiaan Huygens 51
Archimedes 51
Guglielmo Marconi 50
Vitruvius 43
John Smeaton 37
Henry Bessemer 34
Thomas Newcomen 33
Charles Babbage 33
Carl Wilhelm Siemens 32
John Wilkinson 32
Benjamin Franklin 32
Charles Wheatstone 32
Alfred Nobel 32
Michael Faraday 31
Denis Papin 31
George Stephenson 30
Samuel Morse 30
As you can see, the Hispanophone level of performance in the sciences has been quite pathetic.
A raw score is determined based on how many sources mention and on how much space in each source is devoted to a person. Then these raw scores are normalized so that the lowest score is 1 and the highest score is 100.
So let's say that we read 100 sources and we find that each source mentions Mozart and the aggregate number of words Mozart receives is, say, 80,000 words. Then 100% mentions and 80,000 words appears to be the Gold Standard of Accomplishment = "100". That appears to be the method.
What that means is that "Accomplishment" is assumed to be coequal to "reputation" on the one hand, and verbosity in reference work articles on the other. So, in fact, it comes down to opinion, or, more precisely, Murray's attempt to generate concrete value by quantifying a bunch of opinions by how many mentions and how many words. I am surprised people would consider this somehow authoritative.
What it really looks like is that "Human Accomplishment" is being measured, not only by # of articles and # of words, but by recent (or relatively recent) reference works. At this point, before going further, we would need to know just which reference works Murray consulted.
And, if you want something that's much less prone to bias, here are Murray's lists in the sciences:
Astronomy
Figure Index score
Galileo Galilei 100
Johannes Kepler 93
William Herschel 88
Pierre-Simon Laplace 79
Nicolaus Copernicus 75
Ptolemy 73
Tycho Brahe 68
Edmond Halley 57
Giovanni Domenico Cassini 53
Hipparchus 49
Walter Baade 47
Edwin Hubble 45
Friedrich Bessel 39
William Huggins 38
George Ellery Hale 37
Arthur Eddington 37
Ejnar Hertzsprung 35
Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers 33
Gerard Kuiper 32
Johannes Hevelius 30
Biology
Figure Index score
Charles Darwin 100
Aristotle 94
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck 88
Georges Cuvier 83
Thomas Hunt Morgan 75
Carl Linnaeus 59
William Harvey 51
Theodor Schwann 48
Stephen Hales 48
Jan Swammerdam 47
Marcello Malpighi 45
Claude Bernard 45
Hugo de Vries 44
Karl Ernst von Baer 43
John Ray 42
Ernst Haeckel 41
Lazzaro Spallanzani 38
Gregor Mendel 38
Pliny the Elder 37
Albrecht von Haller 37
Chemistry
Figure Index score
Antoine Lavoisier 100
Jöns Jacob Berzelius 67
Carl Wilhelm Scheele 53
Joseph Priestley 49
Humphry Davy 46
Robert Boyle 42
John Dalton 38
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac 37
Joseph Black 33
William Ramsay 31
Justus Liebig 31
William Crookes 30
Claude Louis Berthollet 29
Linus Pauling 27
August Kekulé 27
Dmitry Mendeleyev 25
Jan Baptist van Helmont 25
Frederick Soddy 25
Martin Heinrich Klaproth 23
Robert Bunsen 22
Earth Sciences
Figure Index score
Charles Lyell 100
James Hutton 77
William Smith 55
Georgius Agricola 51
Abraham Gottlob Werner 46
Roderick Murchison 40
Matthew Fontaine Maury 40
Louis Agassiz 37
Jean-Étienne Guettard 37
Carl Gustaf Mosander 37
Horace-Bénédict de Saussure 35
Nicolas Desmarest 33
Alfred Wegener 33
Alexandre Brongniart 31
Adam Sedgwick 31
Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin 29
Vilhelm Bjerknes 29
Eilhard Mitscherlich 29
Per Teodor Cleve 29
Maurice Ewing 26
Physics
Figure Index score
Isaac Newton 100
Albert Einstein 100
Ernest Rutherford 88
Michael Faraday 86
Galileo Galilei 83
Henry Cavendish 57
Niels Bohr 52
J. J. Thomson 50
James Clerk Maxwell 50
Pierre Curie 47
Gustav Kirchhoff 43
Enrico Fermi 42
Werner Heisenberg 41
Marie Curie 41
Paul Dirac 40
James Prescott Joule 40
Christiaan Huygens 39
William Gilbert 37
Thomas Young 37
Robert Hooke 36
Mathematics
Figure Index score
Leonhard Euler 100
Isaac Newton 89
Euclid 83
Carl Friedrich Gauss 81
Pierre de Fermat 72
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 72
René Descartes 54
Georg Cantor 50
Blaise Pascal 47
Bernhard Riemann 47
David Hilbert 40
Jakob Bernoulli 40
Diophantus 39
Gerolamo Cardano 37
François Viète 36
Adrien-Marie Legendre 36
John Wallis 36
Augustin-Louis Cauchy 35
Fibonacci 34
Archimedes 33
Medicine
Figure Index score
Louis Pasteur 100
Hippocrates 93
Robert Koch 90
Galen 74
Paracelsus 68
Paul Ehrlich 59
René Laennec 54
Elmer McCollum 49
Alexander Fleming 47
Ambroise Paré 46
Emil Adolf von Behring 44
Joseph Lister 43
Kitasato Shibasaburō 42
Thomas Sydenham 40
Andreas Vesalius 38
Gerhard Domagk 36
Alexis Carrel 36
Sigmund Freud 34
John Hunter 34
Ignaz Semmelweis 34
Technology
Figure Index score
James Watt 100
Thomas Edison 100
Leonardo da Vinci 60
Christiaan Huygens 51
Archimedes 51
Guglielmo Marconi 50
Vitruvius 43
John Smeaton 37
Henry Bessemer 34
Thomas Newcomen 33
Charles Babbage 33
Carl Wilhelm Siemens 32
John Wilkinson 32
Benjamin Franklin 32
Charles Wheatstone 32
Alfred Nobel 32
Michael Faraday 31
Denis Papin 31
George Stephenson 30
Samuel Morse 30
As you can see, the Hispanophone level of performance in the sciences has been quite pathetic.
The index scores are based on what critics and scholars have written. Yes, but all that means is that Murray is pebble counting encyclopedia entries; as per your source:
A raw score is determined based on how many sources mention and on how much space in each source is devoted to a person. Then these raw scores are normalized so that the lowest score is 1 and the highest score is 100.
So let’s say that we read 100 sources and we find that each source mentions Mozart and the aggregate number of words Mozart receives is, say, 80,000 words. Then 100% mentions and 80,000 words appears to be the Gold Standard of Accomplishment = “100″. That appears to be the method.
What that means is that “Accomplishment” is assumed to be coequal to “reputation” on the one hand, and verbosity in reference work articles on the other. So, in fact, it comes down to opinion, or, more precisely, Murray’s attempt to generate concrete value by quantifying a bunch of opinions by how many mentions and how many words. I am surprised people would consider this somehow authoritative.
What it really looks like is that “Human Accomplishment” is being measured, not only by # of articles and # of words, but by recent (or relatively recent) reference works. At this point, before going further, we would need to know just which reference works Murray consulted.
There are a few biases in this. For example, Berlioz's name comes up more often than comparable composers in the reference works because he was also a hard-working music critic for the Paris press, so his opinions of other composers are quoted more than most other composers' opinions, thus boosting the number of pages Berlioz shows up on in the reference work's index.
A raw score is determined based on how many sources mention and on how much space in each source is devoted to a person. Then these raw scores are normalized so that the lowest score is 1 and the highest score is 100.
So let's say that we read 100 sources and we find that each source mentions Mozart and the aggregate number of words Mozart receives is, say, 80,000 words. Then 100% mentions and 80,000 words appears to be the Gold Standard of Accomplishment = "100". That appears to be the method.
What that means is that "Accomplishment" is assumed to be coequal to "reputation" on the one hand, and verbosity in reference work articles on the other. So, in fact, it comes down to opinion, or, more precisely, Murray's attempt to generate concrete value by quantifying a bunch of opinions by how many mentions and how many words. I am surprised people would consider this somehow authoritative.
What it really looks like is that "Human Accomplishment" is being measured, not only by # of articles and # of words, but by recent (or relatively recent) reference works. At this point, before going further, we would need to know just which reference works Murray consulted.
Murray used all the major reference works (e.g., the Grove on music, etc.)
There are a few biases in this. For example, Berlioz’s name comes up more often than comparable composers in the reference works because he was also a hard-working music critic for the Paris press, so his opinions of other composers are quoted more than most other composers’ opinions, thus boosting the number of pages Berlioz shows up on in the reference work’s index.
A raw score is determined based on how many sources mention and on how much space in each source is devoted to a person. Then these raw scores are normalized so that the lowest score is 1 and the highest score is 100.
So let's say that we read 100 sources and we find that each source mentions Mozart and the aggregate number of words Mozart receives is, say, 80,000 words. Then 100% mentions and 80,000 words appears to be the Gold Standard of Accomplishment = "100". That appears to be the method.
What that means is that "Accomplishment" is assumed to be coequal to "reputation" on the one hand, and verbosity in reference work articles on the other. So, in fact, it comes down to opinion, or, more precisely, Murray's attempt to generate concrete value by quantifying a bunch of opinions by how many mentions and how many words. I am surprised people would consider this somehow authoritative.
What it really looks like is that "Human Accomplishment" is being measured, not only by # of articles and # of words, but by recent (or relatively recent) reference works. At this point, before going further, we would need to know just which reference works Murray consulted.
Well, the only area where I have any real claim to authority is English Lit, and I did initially find his top scoring Anglo authors a tad odd. Few would dispute Shakespeare’s position (of course), but Byron and Scott are not exactly standard picks for number two and number three in the canon of Anglo authors. Heck, pretty much no one would even place Byron first among the Romantic poets.
However, my concerns vanished once I learned how Murray’s methodology works ( ranking authors according to how influential they have been outside their native language). Scott and Byron have been hugely influential outside the Anglosphere .Hence, their high scores now make perfect sense.
Since the linguistic barrier does not exist where music and painting are concerned, their scores are derived in a more conventional fashion.
Dunno. I’ve shown Murray’s Western Music list to colleagues at my university’s music dept., and they found it quite reasonable. Ditto for the art dept. The only real quibbles were about the relative positions of some of the lower scoring creators.
That must be a thing, right? Maybe he was influenced by Trump.
Given Murray’s methodology (deriving scores via the analysis of standard reference works)that must mean that everyone is anti-Hispanic…..
Ok, then please direct us to a book on the same topic by a Spanish speaking scientist concerned about the same issues, and we can have some balance. Extra credit if their is a Spanish forum on HBD we could discuss it on.