Nice. WordPress is much better than blogger. Glad you have some people handling tech for you so you can concentrate on writing.

About China: if you know traditional Chinese culture, philosophy, and religion you know that China is probably the most unreligious culture in world history. Christianity has no real chance there.

-Norman Ravitch

That’s ridiculous. Chinese are as superstitious as any people I’ve ever come across. And Christianity – or a Christian heresy if you will – almost brought down the Qing dynasty in the mid-19th century, and may well have done so if it weren’t for Western military aid to the empire.

The one thing that most sets Chinese apart from Christian cultures is that they have a shame rather than guilt based culture. But these things can and do change; the Germanic peoples prior to conversion to Christianity also had a shame based society, but who could seriously claim that characterizes them today?

Hillary has always been outwardly tough on illegal immigration. Her older, white middle and working class female supporters are most definitely not fans of millions of foreign women and their children coming in to the US to compete for benefits/handouts. Not At All.

Women are much brighter than men in this regard.

I compiled thousands of reports from these Baathists as they fought a low-level insurgency in the Sunni strongholds. They are nationalists, anti-Islamist and, I must admit, relatively humane and sophisticated compared to, say, Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

That they have joined forces with ISIS simply tells me that they threw their hands up and said “what the hell — at least the Saudi-funded jihadis won’t kill us in our beds for being Sunni.” Less than a decade ago they were bitter enemies.

I’m pretty impressed, Steve, that you have actually identified the importance of this. Very few Americans are capable of teasing these things out.

The most brazen misrepresentations of child/partner abuse have been carried out by refusing to recognize “biological father” in statistics. This trend goes back at least thirty years.

Biological fathers are even less likely to commit criminal child abuse or murder their children than biological mothers.

Married men with underage children are less likely to beat their “partners” than anyone but married men without children at home (i.e. old married men).

But feminists have been lying about the dangers posed by ordinary husbands for decades by omitting key statistics and facts and doing things such as counting live-in boyfriends “fathers” just the same as married biological fathers who live with their kids.

And this is no laughing matter. No, it isn’t funny at all when you’re one of these biological fathers and the courts treat you the same as, say, some guy who just got out on parole for an aggravated assault conviction and is shacking up with your kids’ mother.

The problem with the Northern CA model is that you have to keep raising the bar until it isn’t only immigrants who are unable to afford it, but some 90% of ordinary young Americans as well (an SF house costs about a million bucks these days). And eventually you’ll have to let the immigrants in anyway, because there won’t be any young Americans left to keep the city running.

Kids are what, 10% of SF’s population now? And the ones left are increasingly only the children of the rich or the poor NAMs. I’ve been talking a lot with young family people in Washington state, which has gone the Norcal route, and their attitude toward city living is a lot more hostile than it was some ten years ago. The expense is a serious affront to young families, not to mention the cultural dominance of the freaks who run around naked at every opportunity without a thought in the world as to whether it’s appropriate to do so around children.

Something’s got to give one way or another. Neither California model is sustainable for much longer.

@Michael J

That model has only been in place for about twenty years. That isn’t long enough to say “it works.” In Seattle, I grew up around rich legacy kids and very bright middle class kids, both of whom had a shot at inclusion in the ranks of the elite.

Today, the middle class kids are shut out, which eliminates the bulk of the productive potential. This “cognitive elite” doesn’t only spring from the loins of the 1%. Most brilliant kids come from relatively modest backgrounds.

The idea that these very bright children of the middle class will naturally migrate to the shark pools of cities like San Francisco and Seattle is naive at best. Twenty or thirty years ago they could put in the time to prove themselves without sacrificing family and the other fundamentals that upwardly mobile young people strive for. Today, they cannot. It’s myopic to assume that most talented young men will forego marriage and family for the privilege of being Jeff Bezos’ slave for a few years.

If my sons turn out to have potential along those lines, I’ll tell them it isn’t worth it to blow their prime family formation years in a moral cesspool like SF — I do want grandchildren eventually, after all. Better they sacrifice some income and lead normal lives in humbler places than end up over 40 with no kids and a frigid, materialistic wife.

@Lloyd Wong

Come on now, Lloyd. Last time I was in Dublin there were a lot more Chinese living and doing business there than there were Irish in Beijing. That says something, and you know it.

I like and admire Chinese, but in comparison to Irish they fall short in several important ways themselves:

1. Irish cities and restaurants are cleaner

2. Irish houses are more spacious and more comfortable

3. Irish are more polite in public

4. Irish children behave better in public (this despite the fact that there are a lot of them)

5. Ireland is quieter

6. Ireland is not plagued with toxic waste sites.

etc.

I think the Chinese living there would agree with me.

BTW, Chinese tea is better, the food is tastier, and the nightlife far more exciting. The women are thinner, too. Culturally, China has a lot more to offer (but it also includes some of the lowest-class kitsch I’ve seen anywhere).

Finally, I’d even hazard to guess that it’s safer to be drunk and lost in a Dublin neighborhood than in Beijing. Ireland’s violent crime rate is about a quarter of America’s today. So much for the “violent Irish” stereotype…

Independence has been a blessing for the Irish people, and they haven’t wasted it.

Hopefully, we Americans will regain independence some day ourselves.

Gives me an idea about the conquest of Mexico by Aztecs. Maybe they were displaced by climate fluctuations prior to heading south and taking over.

As for numbers in North America, one bit of evidence I’ve seen cited for higher precolumbian numbers is the change in woodland habitat. Evidently, Indians practiced a form of forest management with fire. The relatively low-density eastern woodlands were largely created by repeated burning, which created more fodder for game and therefore more turkey and deer.

In order to maintain this on a large scale, there would have had to be a lot more people in the area than settlers encountered in the 18th century. Presumably, they were decimated by disease before Anglo settlers made it to the east side of the mountains.

I know that some Indian tribes in the inland west used fire to manage forests, but I’m not sure to what extent. One of my professors held that the reason wildfires became so common in the region starting in the 19th century was that the Indians died off, and the fuel built up for a century or so. According to him, that was evidence that there had been a lot more people in the region prior to the arrival of European settlers.

There could be other explanations, but humans obviously have an important environmental impact. The Clovis people did kill off most of the megafauna, after all, and then there’s the better documented case of the Maoris in New Zealand.

The majority of people earning six figures are 50+ — well past family formation time. The remainder usually don’t have time for marriage and kids. Of those I grew up with in Seattle who stayed, maybe one out of three has children and we’re about 40. These are bright, competent people with professional degrees, BTW. They made the rational choice. I got married young and had kids and have paid a very heavy price for it (still think it’s worth it — my happy-go-lucky little ones beat a nice house and car IMO).

What this means is that the overwhelming majority of young American families are working class or below by baby boomer standards.

We’re surviving, but it ain’t the 80s anymore. Incidentally, I wonder how the parasitic professional class will stay in business. The divorce lawyers, and real estate pushers aren’t going to find much in the way of fattened prey in coming years.

I seem to remember a similar situation in the Soviet Politburo in the 1980s.

In other news, P&G is relying on adult diapers to shore up profits in the US. Perhaps someone should send a truckload to the CA Democrats.

@Tetrapterix

Sorry, but my advice to interested young men would be to avoid wasting time fighting political battles over Wikipedia entries.

Start a business, develop your own brand, raise a family, engage in real world activism or simply enjoy life. Every hour spent fighting someone like mathsci is an hour you’ll never get back and, more importantly, an hour you’ll never get paid for.

Wikipedia is useful, but when it isn’t people will turn to something else. Let’s not ascribe too much importance to these petty struggles over a few words on articles that are subject to organic change in any event.

One of the biggest weaknesses of intellectually inclined young men is their tendency to blow most of their productive time on what are essentially childish pursuits, such as electronic video games or fantasy. Wikipedia is simply an extension of this.

Stop wasting your time. Learn to interact with and influence the physical world on a grander scale.

why is duke showcasing the work of a graduate student? there appears to be a general trend in showing off graduate student work rather than established or tenure-track faculty. Why is this?…

Senile dementia, perhaps.

It’s an effective ad, I’m sure. After my ex bailed because budgeting was just too damn hard (she hooked up with a much older man whose wife was a fiscally responsible banker — poor woman), I had to clean the place out myself. I found enough Nordstrom shoes to fill an entire Hefty bag. I am not exaggerating!

That’s when I finally understood why we were broke at tax time every year despite making a middle class income.

Then, after the family court lawyers and judges had their way with me and I ended up as a dirt poor and desperate divorced dad, I noticed that the women picking their kids up at the elementary school where I went to get my kids were totally on the prowl. Hot mamas in heels with tight sweaters and hip-huggers were all over the place. It was a cornucopia for guys who were so inclined. It was so shameless it would take your breath away. I felt like I was back in an expat bar in Beijing.

If you want an easy lay, young mothers are your best bet. I never did it myself, because after what I and my kids went through I was so disgusted by the idea, but for those guys who just don’t give a damn – and there are a whole lot of them – it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

Feminism is largely responsible for this, but it is also responsible for the current young male attitude that supporting a woman is a sucker’s game. In the final tally, I think women end up losing. They’re just now starting to figure that out. I predict that feminism will be abandoned by all but the lesbian fringe of young women within a decade. Unless, of course, lesbians are willing to buy Hefty bags full of designer shoes so that their girlfriends can confidently court men whenever and wherever they please.

There’s little demand for stories about cops shooting white teens. It’s a big country and bad stuff happens every day.

In Washington state police shoot people on a regular basis. In most cases it’s over domestic disputes, and second place is probably mentally disturbed/intoxicated young men. There’s a lot of overlap between the two categories.

However, these shooting are nothing more than a footnote in the news unless they happen to involve minorities. Less than a year ago, the police shot and killed a disturbed young man wielding a bat in his parents’ driveway. Not too long before that, they shot and severely wounded a despondent widower in Seattle whose crime was calling his parents to tell them he couldn’t handle it anymore after his wife died. His parents made the nearly-fatal mistake of calling the cops to check on their son. My friend’s father, during a police confrontation over a domestic dispute back in the 90s, took his own life when confronted by a bristling line of rifles. It happens all the time. I was almost shot and killed by police myself during divorce, because my ex’s feminist mother encouraged her to call the police and say I was armed and dangerous during a custody dispute.

When liberals go on about how it’s blacks who are the main targets in this police state we’ve created, I wonder what planet they are living on. When the police kill white people, and they do so with alarming frequency, there’s barely a peep of protest.

When police wrongfully kill whites, they are very rarely held accountable by the community. In fact, “conservatives” generally cheer them on for it. Because of this attitude, a lot of whites are inclined to side with black rioters. The effects of measures we’ve adopted to deal with black criminality are insidious. Whites are doubly victimized. First by black crime, and then by the heavy-handed police presence.

As someone who always got along fairly well with black neighbors (aside from the obvious problem types), since I’ve left for a less diverse community one of the greatest sources of relief for me is the far more muted police presence one encounters in homogenous white neighborhoods. To me, more blacks means not only more crime, but more cops, and quite honestly I’d rather not have to deal with either.

That whole Vermont whitopia thing isn’t really working out as well in practice as in theory. You see, one of the things that keeps the Vermont socialist engine going is families and children, which Vermont residents don’t like to have. So what they’ve been doing is importing refugees from Africa – Somalia in particular – to keep their schoolteachers and social workers employed.

The same thing is happening in other really white cities and places, like Seattle and Minneapolis, for some time.

Now, as commenter David has pointed out, nearly a quarter of Burlington’s kids and half of Winooski’s kids are “English learners.” If you’re from most parts of the US you might think “ah, so they have Mexicans there.” Not so. They have Somalis. And not just any old Somalis, but Somali Bantus. These are people who, prior to coming to the US, didn’t even know how to use indoor toilets or doorknobs.

They also breed like rabbits, especially when compared to whites in their settlement areas. When my kids were in kindergarten in Seattle, about a quarter of the kids were Somalis, and this was in a school on the periphery of their territory. If current trends hold, the Seattle school district will be something like 10% Somali within a few years, and perhaps a plurality Somali within a generation (there were almost none twenty years ago). That may be an underestimate.

Politicians love them because they vote en bloc, and all you have to do is ignore the welfare fraud to gain their support. They shamelessly promote candidates at mosques, when Christian churches would lose their nonprofit status for doing the same. White teachers tolerate them because otherwise cities would have abysmal fertility rates and they’d be out of work.

Somehow, though, it doesn’t strike me as a particularly enlightened long-term strategy.

@Syon

Somalis don’t do the census — lots of them are illegals and they’re a lot more paranoid than Mexicans (understandably — who wants to go back to Somalia?). Anyway, you’d be surprised how fast the war of the cradle can be lost. Burlington apparently has 1,500 Africans, most of whom are probably Somali. That’s over 3-4% of the population. Seems small, right?

Well, white Vermonters have an average of 1.5 kids. Somalis have about 4 (in the US — they have 7 in Somalia). This means that some 2% of the Burlington population has about 5% of the kids. Fast forward a generation, when the current kids in kindergarten put their kids in a Burlington kindergarten. Add natural Muslim increase and chain migration, and suddenly lily-white Burlington ends up like a pint sized version of Minneapolis today.

You want to see something depressing? Read this:

Somali women in kaleidoscopically patterned wrappas or colorless hijabs have become an everyday sight in the Old North End. Scores of African kids now attend the Wheeler and Barnes schools in the same neighborhood, where Shea butter soap and fufu flour can be purchased at grocery stores opened by Somalis and Congolese. Displaced citizens of Sudan, Burundi and Liberia frequent suburban shopping malls. And the Vermont Frost Heaves’ championship basketball season was made possible in part by Issa Konare, a Senegalese who was recruited not in his native country but at UVM’s Patrick Gym.

The presence today of some 1500 Africans in the Burlington area is only the most prominent point of intersection between Vermont and Africa. A growing number of young Vermonters are traveling to Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania and other sub-Saharan countries on service-learning trips sponsored by St. Michael’s College and other local academic institutions. In addition, Africa-focused programs at churches and in elementary schools around the state are introducing Vermonters to the cultures and histories of countries that are at once horrifyingly poor and enviably rich…

You see, most people posting here don’t have elementary school age kids in public schools. Out of sight, out of mind and all that. I do. You’d be surprised how insulated most whites are from the demographic reality.

Oh, I just had to add this quote from the above link:

Mike Sheridan, a former Peace Corpsman who served in Kenya, offers an anthropological take on Vermont’s open-heartedness. “The state’s rural ethic of community interdependence, of helping out, has been transferred to this refugee population,” observes Sheridan, who teaches anthropology at Middlebury College. “Vermonters used to build barns for one another. Now they build cribs for the babies of refugees.”

That says it all right there. I’m sure the Somalis appreciate that fine New England craftsmanship.

Bill P, do you think one day Burlington, Vermont will have as many mosques per capita as London and Paris ?

Malmö would be a better comparison, and yes, I do think they will someday unless there’s a political paradigm shift in the West.

To go from the 3% or so of the population that is currently Muslim to 20% could easily happen in a generation in a town as small as Burlington. All you need is generous welfare, refugee resettlement programs and lots of Mainline Protestant white liberals. I was in Malmö in 1985 on my way to Oslo. Didn’t see a single Muslim anywhere. Today they comprise 20% of the population.

The children of several generations of white good boys are disproportionately liberal, homosexual and effeminate. I’m using upper-middle-class as a proxy for “good boys,” because their behavior reflects good boy values.

We might want to pause and reflect on the fact that good boys are obedient, conflict-avoidant and conformist. Instead of open and straightforward, they tend to be passive aggressive. In contemporary America, this is not such a blessing as people might think.

We need more white “bad boys”; people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. What we don’t need is more Stephen Colberts and Conor Friedersdorfs.

I changed my handle (by one letter) because this is a bigger site than iSteve and I found my name was being used by others. Wouldn’t surprise me if the same is true in some other cases.

It’s because black men go where they can get jobs (they don’t qualify for nearly as much in welfare as the women), and naturally the women follow them. Liberals put up multiple barriers to employment (e.g. credentialism, green policies, high taxation) that disproportionately affect blue collar workers, and now even small business owners (Seattle’s $15/hr minimum wage).

Actually, this has gone beyond being a minority thing. Young white males are fleeing liberal white areas too. Take Massachusetts for example. Young people are abandoning the state like never before.

Throwing mechanics resemble catapulting more than pushing. You wind up to store the energy in the tendons, then let them “snap” like a rubber band to accelerate and release the ball. It’s really, really rough on tendons. Pitchers put their arms through hell.

Estrogen loosens tendons, which makes the snap less powerful. Steroids don’t help much, because they strengthen muscles without doing much for ligaments.

I was a pitcher as a kid. Clocked in at 75mph my freshman year in high school. Not bad for that age. I was one of those kids who had a hell of a time touching his toes, even though I had long arms. That’s why I could throw pretty hard.

At that age, girls’ hormones are prepping them to give birth without straining and popping their abdominal and pelvic muscles and ligaments. Having the kind of physiology that contributes to throwing fastballs defeats the purpose of all that.

This is not that new. The women coming across the border months ago were claiming spousal abuse, because some Spanish-speaking shyster in Guatemala told them about the fact that some judge ruled that Guatemalan spousal abuse could qualify them for refugee status because Guatemalan women (in particular) can be considered a “social group” due to alleged high rates of domestic violence in Guatemala.

It’s a technicality unique to Guatemala (so far), and it will be a very expensive technicality for us, because this status means their cases are subject to special attention in court.

This is purely a child of university-baked feminist quackery, which continues to be indulged beyond all reason in the United States, often by men who “don’t see the harm in it” until it hits them, personally, in the pocketbook.

Muslims need more books.

-Steve Sailer

If you take a look at the history of printing, it’s amazing how long it took for the Muslims to even begin to make any use of the technology at all. Even the Ottoman Empire only had a couple presses by the time there were thousands throughout Europe.

One other piece of technology that was neglected under Islam was the wheeled vehicle. Following the Islamic conquest of North Africa, the wheel fell out of use for some reason (some blame the camel, but some inventor could easily have figured out how to harness a camel).

If you leave Muslims to themselves and keep them out of your lands, they will eventually cease to be a competitive threat due to the very nature of their society.

Not going to happen. The academic left abandoned testing over a generation ago so as to hamstring their less-connected, less urban and wrong-thinking competitors’ children.

I come from a family with a lot of educators. One thing people don’t realize is how much academics and administrators try to game things for their own children, and even to some extent for their friends’ and extended families’ kids. This corrupts the system as much as anything.

We shouldn’t underestimate the power of academic nepotism.

What we need isn’t to discourage high parental investment in those likely to give it and to encourage irresponsible breeding,. What we need to do is to ruthlessly suppress breeding by the underclass.

-Glaivester

Are you prepared to crack down on women who pump out bastards? If not, give up. It takes one man to impregnate hundreds of women. No matter how much you go after dumb thugs who impregnate women there will always be one who can slip through the cracks and pick up the slack.

The only way to suppress underclass fertility is to go after the women, just like how game wardens shoot does when the deer overbreed.

I dare anyone anywhere in the US today to try that. Go ahead, see how it works out.

Aside from that, I’ll only say that you should leave fathers the hell alone, because the guys who end up getting shafted are those of us with a sense of responsibility and some income. You think lawyers and judges give a damn about LeShaun who doesn’t have a dime in the bank? No, they’ll just lay the smackdown on working and middle class men whose wives bailed for whatever reason, and justify it by saying they’re cracking down on “deadbeat dads.”

Personally, I think those who crack down on fathers ought to be cracked down on themselves, because they’re profiteers, parasites and sadistic control freaks hiding behind a mask of social responsibility. Mind your own damn business, and let the babymommas who screwed up and chose the wrong men fend for themselves. As for the women who need child support to feed the kids, turn the kids over to their fathers and let the women feed themselves. That will solve the problem in a month.

A traveller must be freed from all apprehension of being murdered or starved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich tints of the hills. He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled…

And yet, ironically, one is more likely to be mangled, or beheaded as it may be, in civilized London than in Scotland today.

Most of those Colonial-Americans considered today to be “rednecks” would not be Scottish Highlanders, or even Scotsmen at all, many were English colonists of Ulster.

-Colonial-American

The most Irish of my grandparents – my maternal grandmother – was also the most English by blood (about half). Her family was from Ulster, and they were CoI (Anglicans).

Redneck, BTW, is an old political term denoting Presbyterian Covenanters in Scotland.

The “ethicist” in bioethicist is akin to the “constitutional” in constitutional lawyer.

2016 is going to be the first time in decades that the 60 million white midwesterners, and their diaspora in the rest of the country, will have the chance to vote for one of their own for president.

-Lot

The Midwest is politically tepid. Maybe it’s the Germanic/Nordic influence.

I found that if you look at the regions that have the most political influence they are those with the highest proportion of English Americans in the white population.

Neither New England nor the Deep South have all that many people, but they sure do dominate the debate.

The Norwegians did the same thing to the Progress Party until last year. Something apparently precipitated a change of heart in the years immediately preceding the 2013 election.

It’s hard to take Goldberg seriously much of the time. The above mentioned “bend the Jew” and “Irish pogromists” nonsense is also clearly BS. Is his wife Irish? With a surname like Reeves she could be, so maybe it was an inside joke.

His irreverence can sometimes approach that of Sacha Barone Cohen, who has a pretty, Celtic wife himself. And similar politics.

While all this stuff is kind of amusing on a superficial level, the sad thing is that a lot of people take it seriously even as many of our “thought leaders” act as though it’s all a big joke.

My old neighbor – a middle-aged black lady – ran a wig and extensions business out of her house. I don’t know how well she did, but people were coming and going all the time. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t any contraband involved, either — the clients were too normal and classy for that.

But I wouldn’t make it a black vs. Korean thing, necessarily. The biggest advantage Koreans have is their better habits when it comes to pushing paper, and I know they don’t like doing it much either. This is actually one area where blacks, Koreans, Indians and even whites could all be happier with something that benefits blacks. Chinese, on the other hand, seem to thrive off the paper pushing (and forging). Not all by any means, but Chinese have already staked a claim in the legal business themselves. Not really a good sign — that’s the kind of “assimilation” we could do without.

There will always be cults, because as soon as people start to figure things out and understand that there is “nothing new under the sun,” they die shortly thereafter to be replaced by the young and naive. The reason we’re not seeing many of them out in the open these days is that the Branch Davidian incident and other crackdowns from that era are still relatively fresh in our minds, and they genuinely scared people. Starting a cult seems like a much higher-risk enterprise than it used to. But now that people who were born after that are entering adulthood, the fear will dissipate.

In retrospect, I think the 90s will be seen as the beginning of a very repressive period in American history.

If one looks to the early Germanic sagas for some evidence, it doesn’t appear as though guilt was a strong feature of pre-Christian NW Europe. Shame, on the other hand, was paramount. The last vestiges of shame based society in Anglo tradition come directly from this culture. Public trial by peers, for example, and dueling.

So it’s doubtful that guilt was all that well-developed — at least in Germanic cultures. Perhaps it’s a British invention, and was carried into the continent by Anglo Saxon missionaries, who did the most important work converting the German heathen in the Dark Ages.

When one takes shame to the absurd lengths some pre-Christian Irish did (e.g. fasting on someone’s doorstep), it may be that it is then seen as noticed by the gods themselves. Don’t the fairies allegedly see all sorts of things and take notice when slighted?

In any event, modern man has only a very crude concept of what faith meant to pre-Christian peoples. For example, the Jesuits in early Quebec put a great deal of effort into trying to understand the Iroquois religion and whether it had a concept of good and evil and God. By our standards, it doesn’t appear that it did, but the Iroquois clearly thought that there was a right and wrong way to do important things, and that’s what religion is really concerned with. Whether or not the manitou (a kind of Indian fairy/spirit) passed judgment on the actions of mankind isn’t established, but it seems to me that the sense of being under the watchful eye of local spirits would be the origin of guilt.

So, going out on a limb here, maybe the native paranoia about spirits that characterized the pre-Christian Isles combined with the new religion AND a powerful shame culture to produce a particularly potent guilt society. If God is everywhere and sees everything (not much of a stretch for a people who believed there’s a fairy behind every tree), and is all powerful and always right, then you should always be deeply ashamed of yourself if only in comparison. It’s a potent formula. I’m not even sure whether the concept of original sin is necessary for it to work, and as you suggest it may simply have been a convenient explanation for this phenomenon.

East Asian cultures get around this by making God (who remains largely undefined) more or less uninterested in the lives of ordinary mortals, who have to deal mainly with subordinate spirits with limited spheres of influence. But there’s another aspect of Chinese culture in particular that undermines guilt: the idea that the ideal and temporal world are parallel, and one dwells in both at the same time. What you do in the temporal world may not always be good, but that is just the nature of that world. In the other world, it didn’t really happen.

@Peter

I also suspect that there’s a tendency toward what we’re referring to as guilt in NW Europeans that goes deeper than Christian ideology. But that’s a hunch without any solid evidence, so I think it’s important to define what exactly differentiates guilt from shame so as to identify what’s unique about this culture.

Is guilt different from shame only in that witnesses other than humans (such as God or spirits) are also considered important? If so, then isn’t it fundamentally the same thing?

If guilt is a heightened ability to be ashamed of oneself over one’s moral failures, is it then something akin to the weakling who wishes he were strong and is frustrated by his shortcoming? Again, how is that qualitatively different from ordinary shame?

Or, could it be that guilt is just enhanced anxiety and/or fearfulness? Those of a more neurotic, introspective nature may simply be more inclined to dwell on things than others. Those who are by nature fearless and lacking in anxiety seldom seem to display much regret.

You suggest that guilt + empathy is what made the difference in NW Europe, but maybe guilt isn’t as important as we think.

This is the problem here, as I see it: when you speak of guilt, it’s easy to find other examples of people all over the world who could fit the definition of shame without witnesses. In some cultures, breaking a taboo could lead to suicide, which is the ultimate in self-punishment.

However, there may be a more highly developed sense of empathy in some populations, and this is at least as important as guilt in determining social outcomes (or else guilt means shame caused by empathy).

So maybe what we are looking at in NW Europe is not so much a “guilt culture” as it is a population with uniquely high levels of empathy and anxiety. I’d even go so far as to speculate that at least the latter is a relatively archaic trait that is bred out in long-established agricultural societies, so the more recent civilization of NW Europeans could account for higher than usual levels of anxiety in the Eurasian context.

If my experience in Seattle and San Francisco – the two American cities with which I am most familiar – is any indication, the cognitive elite isn’t doing much mating at all (it’s even worse in China).

One or two kids after 35 is about the best they seem to be able to do, aside from the truly rich, and lots of them aren’t that lucky — fertility treatment seems the rule rather than the exception with this set, and sadly it often fails. You can’t really blame them, because the cost of marrying the wrong person is incredibly high these days, so there are reasons besides education and career for waiting. This is something I rarely see in discussions of assortative mating: the nurse or secretary now has an incentive to destroy the marriage if it strikes her fancy to do so, whereas the professionally employed wife does not.

My friends and acquaintances who stayed in or returned to the city are generally the bright ones, and they are the least fertile. Female doctors and lawyers have abysmal TFRs, not to mention academics. Corporate management types don’t seem to do any better. And if you think educated young men will settle for a college-educated wife who stays at home, think again: they need the double income to keep a middle class lifestyle.

If anything, assortative mating has been a failure. All I saw in Seattle was more and more Somali kids with each passing year while bright young men and women I grew up with just kept putting off kids until they found themselves in a doctor’s office discussing blastocyte transfer. And now we’re middle-aged.

Some elite. Some mating…

Thanks for the informative article — it was a pleasure to read.

It does not take a leap of imagination to wonder if Sufi mysticism may have been influenced by Indian practices and beliefs (some early Sufi mystics do report Indian, or perhaps more accurately Turanian Buddhist, mentors). And there are curious currents in the other direction, “Greek medicine” as transmitted by Central Asians is still practiced in India.

So would the Greco-Bactrians be considered “Turanian?” I know that their Greek-trained sculptors spread their classical style of Buddhist art throughout Asia, their influence reaching even as far as Japan. The sophistication of their work is something that really made an impression on me when I visited Central Asia myself and saw some of it firsthand.

Wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that this culture’s descendants had a considerable impact on Islam.

It appalls me that we don’t do what other countries do and ban anonymous donor materials. It wasn’t right for my parents and their doctor to deny me a part of my history. The problem is, when donors must be known to the children they create, the donor pool plummets, and homosexuals in particular dislike that.

-meep

I agree that it’s morally questionable to deny children the right to know who their biological parents are. The desire to know one’s origins is a distinctly human trait that is tied to our religious instinct. It’s part of what makes us unique on this earth.

At the very least, children over the age of, say, 14 or so, ought to be entitled to know something about their bio mothers and/or fathers.

If it makes it that much more difficult for lesbians to procure sperm, well, maybe we ought to ask ourselves why lesbians’ emotional needs outweigh those of the children they choose to rear.

Intel didn’t stand up for white males; it stood up for itself. How could it possibly be in Intel’s interest to support publications that alienate its customers?

The real story isn’t Intel, but rather the fact that young white males are standing up for themselves more vigorously and effectively than they have in some fifty years.

Compared to how easy it has been to get young men on board, it’s amazing how much work and sacrifice it’s taken to drag those born before 1965 or so kicking and screaming to acknowledge that, yes, feminism is a real problem for our young men, and not just some silly joke to be indulged with a dismissive wink and grin (“oh, these bad things only happen to losers, as opposed to those of us who never had to live with Bradley and VAWA at our most vulnerable”).

But maybe it has only happened recently because that age cohort is starting to worry about its sons. Yes, you should be worried. Your sons have targets on their foreheads, and don’t think some lesbian feminist wouldn’t be happy to mount their skins up in a trophy room given the opportunity.

Korean food was a welcome respite from the usual fare when I lived in Beijing. One of my childhood friends is half Korean, so I grew up occasionally eating various Korean dishes, drinking barley tea, etc. In a happy surprise, I found that Beijing has a huge Korean community – the largest outside of Korea proper – and Korean restaurants and groceries were ubiquitous.

There’s a fair amount of crossover between northern Chinese and Korean food, for example zha jiang mian (one of my favorites), but there are important differences, the most relevant to me at the time being the cleanliness factor.

Koreans are simply more concerned with hygiene than Chinese, so one doesn’t worry so much about what’s going on in the kitchen, or whether it’s safe to eat the raw vegetables that show up in Korean food (unlike Chinese cuisine). However, habitual consumption of some Korean foods is tied to cancer, particularly of the stomach. Both gossadi (sp?) and kimchi seem to be pretty rough on the gut, but I loved them all the same.

Too bad there’s no Korean to speak of where I live now, but I can always go back to Seattle from time to time.

I find it interesting that the “death penalty for apostates” position seems to be quite marginal in the Central Asian countries surveyed; I wonder if that’s some kind of deep-seated characteristic of the region, or did the Soviets’ “modernization” (horrifyingly brutal as it was, at least during the 1920s to 1940s) actually “work”?

-German_reader

In general, the Turks have always been liberal in their interpretation of Islam. This predates Bolshevism by centuries. In Qing China, for example, they were known to ignore prohibitions on pork and alcohol.

Even today, I’d like to see a Saudi imam show up in a Khazak village and try to ban kumis. That would be amusing.

However, this doesn’t mean Turks are peaceful by nature. In fact, they may be one of the few peoples whose excesses were moderated by Islam. Interestingly, today their Mongol cousins are increasingly adopting Orthodox Christianity. Practically every Mongol I met in NE Asia was an Orthodox Christian. I’m curious to see how that will influence their culture.

@Razib Khan

I’m not arguing that there’s something special about Turks that makes them more liberal Muslims, but rather that it’s a general characteristic of Turkish-dominant regions. Personally, I think it’s largely an environmental phenomenon — strict Islam is maladaptive for tribal northern peoples for a number of reasons. So it makes sense that Turks, once ensconced in settled, civilized countries like Iran, take on more of the attitudes and practices of their neighbors than they do in more primitive Turkic societies.

As for Islam’s moderating influence, even Timurlane wouldn’t have gone as far as his non-Muslim predecessors, e.g. the Siege of Baghdad. Genocide was the rule in interethnic conflict in Central Asia up to the modern era, so it could hardly have been any more savage in Muslim societies to the south.

Not much info out there on Kalmyk Christians, at least not in the Roman alphabet. Where Mongolia is concerned, I have a hard time trusting the stats because they are mainly supplied by missionaries.

@Razib Khan

I don’t really trust the missionaries. It’s a business, you know. Inflating sales reports is standard practice.

traditionally africans have been more moderate too. also south asians (who are mostly hanafi). and indonesians. your argument here isn’t too persuasive. that being said, what about islam do you think makes it unsuited to northern climes? what are your reasons?

Survival. Ramadan during harvest season would reduce harvest during a critical time. Do you think it’s possible to effectively harvest oats or barley after the short, critical northern growing season while fasting every day? Refusal to drink grains preserved as alcoholic beverages would have denied Muslims a significant source of calories and minerals during winter. Refusal to eat pork would also cut out a good deal of game (wild boar) as well as domestic swine that can grow fat off of inedible (without laborious processing) acorns, roots and such.

Islam has a lot of rules that northern peoples find stupid and crazy, to be frank about it. Here are just a few:

No fish roe

No shellfish

No blood products (blood pudding, sausage, haggis, etc)

No marine mammals

No dog meat (NE Asians and Amerinds eat/ate a lot of dog)

Have to say “Allahu akbar” out loud before shooting game (animals will hear you and get away)

No scavenging

No wild furs

That’s just a few of the rules. Surviving in pre-modern northern Eurasia or N. America requires ignoring at least a couple of them in every single culture I can think of off the top of my head.

In these places, Islam is a luxury, and so is Judaism. Christianity is much more forgiving and practical.

@Razib Khan

You only get one harvest north of 45 degrees or so, and it usually roughly coincides with Ramadan. In Yemen or Egypt they might have three throughout the year, and at least two. The Catholic Lent happens to fit perfectly with the “starving time” that northerners often face in winter/early spring. I doubt it’s an accident. Putting it in autumn would be disastrous.

I read that Bangladeshis got some special dispensation for shellfish. Usually, it’s haram AFAIK.

BTW, I forgot one point that may interest this site’s reader’s more than most: covering women.

If northerners insisted on covering their daughters at all times they’d grow up with rickets, i.e. stunted and unattractive. Getting lots of full-body sun is essential during summer months for northern people.

One funny historical anecdote about Norway has the men and women of a fishing village dressing very modestly in church on Sunday morning, and then immediately thereafter shedding all their clothes and heading down to the beach stark naked.

Heh, you probably know more about the finer points than I do. Maybe shrimp is OK, but would they eat oysters on the half shell like we do up in the Pac NW? Would they drink clam nectar (used by Amerindian and pioneer women as a supplement during pregnancy)?

Or, perhaps more provocatively, would they eat a geoduck?

I’m not sure I could trust the opinion of a layman on such important matters as that! 🙂

Just a hint: if an American knows little about halal/haram, it doesn’t mean he’s a troll; it means he’s normal. I happen to know a bit more than most, but that doesn’t mean I have “native fluency.” Learning to be Catholic was enough for me growing up.

And Boston oysters: seriously? Their oysters taste like rubber compared to an olympia (the small, native West Coast oyster from NorCal up to SE Alaska, named after WA’s capital). I know Oregon is more clam country (littlenecks, butters and razors), but in Puget Sound and the San Juans we have oysterbeds all over. Our preferred method of eating them is straight from the sea with a drop or two of lemon juice before sliding them raw and alive down our gaping maws. They are said to promote virility. It’s a good enough excuse for me.

What could be so uplifting about a brood of vipers?

I, for one, am not impressed by skillful liars.

We should give American species a little credit. The raccoon (in Japan and continental Europe) and gray squirrel (Britain) have both become invasive species, as has the lodgepole pine (New Zealand). Oh, also the signal crayfish, which has colonized Sweden and parts of the east Baltic region, and the king crab in the Murmansk/Svalbard area.

And finally, my favorite: the rainbow trout in Afghanistan.

Perhaps the ultra-competitiveness of the eucalyptus tree impoverished the rest of Australia’s biodiversity by forming monocultures

The monocultures are probably a result of aborigine hunting techniques. They’d set the forest on fire and kill everything they could catch that was running out. Amerindians regularly used a similar – if somewhat more sophisticated – technique in eastern woodlands.

Primitive humans didn’t exactly live in “harmony” with nature. Before people showed up with dogs, fire and projectile weapons Australia had a great deal more biodiversity.

It’s a bit of a bummer for me. Gone are the days when my schoolteacher parents could buy a nice house in a marginal neighborhood for a low price. Today, that house is worth half a million.

One of the ignored consequences of gentrification is that not only are the blacks being pushed out, but young middle middle class whites as well. What used to be affordable for young teachers is now out of reach for most young doctors and lawyers.

Despite the hype, most gentrification is driven by the 50+ demographic. The white urban family with young children is a sort of exotic hothouse flower with total fertility rates probably on the order of Japan’s. Honestly, I think this explains a lot of the resentment from other white urbanites (myself included until I did the math and gave up on it). For most youngish urban white writers or similar low to middling professionals, probably including Gavin Mueller, the upper middle class lifestyle with a house and children is entirely unattainable in liberal cities.

This “bodies” term is liberal dog-whistling for “raped.”

It comes straight from women’s studies jargon, which may be the ugliest form of English yet invented. Lesbians (I hesitate to use the appropriate term here) are not only aesthetically challenged when it comes to personal appearance, but language as well.

One of these days, conservatives are going to have to acknowledge that so-called “gender equality” is anathema to even the pretense of civilized society.

Without sex on campus, what’s the point of coed schools?

Some may think I’m joking, but really, it’s a serious question. Unless there’s some romantic goal in mind, mixing adolescent males and females on campus is counterproductive.

If you don’t want them to have sex, separate them. Or, maybe administrators are mainly eunuchs and freemartins who are so obtuse that they are not aware of the consequences of putting young males and females in close proximity without nocturnal adult supervision.

I really feel sorry for and bemused by these sexual halflings.

The silliness about repeated explicit consent seems to mostly be confined to 2nd tier far-left private liberal arts colleges like Occidental, or Antioch College, which was the first place to adopt such a policy back in the early 1990′s. But people shouldn’t be going to such schools anyway. Indeed, if you can’t get into at least Cornell or Dartmouth, public college is the way to go.

-Lot

You haven’t heard the news about California schools, I take it.

If any child can be your child, then there’s nothing special about your child, so why bother with all that troublesome parenthood business?

Aristotle gets into this in Politics in his criticism of Plato’s Republic:

Each citizen will have a thousand sons who will not be his sons individually but anybody will be equally the son of anybody, and will therefore be neglected by all alike…

People who dismiss the importance of biological ties just aren’t thinking that hard.

This doesn’t mean adoption isn’t real parenthood, or donor-conception. Just the opposite, actually: the conscious, deliberate act of adoption or choosing to have a child by a donor confirms the underlying desire to have a child of one’s own. In other words, it’s a reflection of a biological imperative — not a repudiation.

The difference from the Victorians is that men are now held responsible for their actions even while drunk; women are not held responsible for their actions while drunk (and are assumed never to make false allegations).

It is highly hypocritical, and it harms innocent men.

-SimoninLondon

This is also the one serious problem with MacDonald’s article:

She appears to suggest that men shoud bear primary responsibility for chaste behavior, even while admitting that it comes more naturally to women.

That’s not only unfair, it’s unwise. How could one reasonably expect an adolescent male to turn down a young woman who offers herself to him?

And think of what some women might do if rejected. Anyone recall the story of Potiphar’s wife?

The only thing that made the belief in the primacy of environment possible was widespread social segregation. Now that the generations that grew up after that ended are coming into their own, the fallacy will die a natural, quiet death. But I suspect it will be more than ten years before people stop lying about it.

I got my hands on The Bell Curve when it first came out, and nothing in it came as a surprise to me, even though I was all of 20 years old at the time. On reading it, I had the impression that the book was really written for disillusioned former believers, as a book on evolution might have been written for progressive Anglicans in the 19th century. All of the data seemed superfluous, as I’d seen it all first-hand from early childhood.

The Bell Curve already seemed dated to me at the time, believe it or not.

I was at a school professional development on closing the gap a few days ago. The presenter began with Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man saying that it discredited the pseudoscience of the past. Then she brought up the Bell Curve and said basically it was the pseudoscience of the present. There are no differences between the races and that everyone’s “hardware” is the same.

-David

And I’ll bet you kept your mouth shut like everyone else.

This is the real problem we have today. Not enough people are willing to take even the slightest risk for the ideals of truth and intellectual freedom. And to think millions of men in our short history as a nation volunteered to face death in war.

This is what says to me that our time has come and gone.

In general, women from Northwest Europe have more masculine digit ratios, whereas women from farther east and south have more feminine digit ratios.

But wait a moment here. Men of NW European heritage have more masculine digit ratios than Eastern European men as well. If by region you compare men to men and women to women I suspect the difference evens out.

And East Asian women are morphologically less distinct from men than Europeans. Also, it appears that they are cognitively more masculine than NW European women (check US math test scores by race — white males test significantly closer to Asian males than white females to Asian females).

Northern European gender equality is a myth supported by the great indulgence shown to Nordic women. Feminine weakness and foibles are tolerated in Scandinavia to a degree that would seem absurd to Asians or Africans. Scandinavian women’s participation at the highest levels is possible because of the extreme deference shown to women in these countries, which would be unthinkable in the rest of the world. I’d argue that this demonstrates higher levels of sexual dimorphism: if women were really treated “equally” then they would be marginalized as they are in most of the world.

America 2 stands in contrast to America 4, Appalachian whites, who are the whites with the lowest life expectancy.

-John Emerson

Actually, look closely and you will see a thin blue line running exactly along the Appalachian range dividing patches of deep red in the piedmont and lowlands. It appears that the true mountain people live longer than their neighbors in the valleys, and they are almost certainly some of the poorest whites in the US (if not the poorest of all).

How could this be? Visit the area in the summer and it makes sense. Anglo whites aren’t built to tolerate the subtropical climate of the South (or even the humid continental climate of the mid-Atlantic from the looks of it), but the mountains are cool and pleasant with fresh air and clean water.

It isn’t only unhealthy habits that separate the whites with short lives from those with long ones. North Dakotans, for example, are among the heaviest drinkers in the US, yet they have some of the longest male lifespans in the country. Significantly longer than the dry Southern Baptists, it appears.

I’m pretty sure environment continues to exert significantly more influence on our health than people think. For example, if I were a dark-skinned person in my neck of the woods (Salish Sea environs), I’d be sure to take vitamin D supplements from September through June.

However, America 4 is specifically Appalachian.

-John Emerson

Not to be nitpicky, but America 4 included “low income whites in Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley,” which probably also includes the Piedmont. True Appalachia is considerably different from the Mississippi Valley, and I’d be willing to be that within that subgroup poor whites in the mountains live longer than those in the valley. The map strongly suggests that to be the case.

The shift to more whites being killed by cops is, I suspect, a result of more aggressive police reactions to domestic disputes. That started right after the OJ Simpson murder case.

I was almost killed by police in a fabricated domestic dispute. In fact, nothing had happened at all, but there was a custody court hearing coming in a couple days, and prompted by my former MIL, who has a number of lesbian “friends,” my ex falsely accused me of making death threats and being armed. While I was talking on the phone with my mother, I saw cops racing down the street and wondered “what’s that all about?” Next thing I knew there were police in body armor with AR-15 rifles surrounding my house, and they were under the impression that I had a gun and was homicidal.

As this unfolded, my ex admitted under questioning that she hadn’t been entirely honest, and the police left suddenly without telling me anything — I didn’t fully grasp what had happened until it was over. It took me weeks to get a report, and it took me months before I stopped having anxiety attacks. I found out that PTSD is very real.

People are killed in these circumstances all the time, and I have no doubt that if I’d twitched and been shot full of holes, the report would have stated something along the lines of “suicide by cop” and it would have been rubber stamped by some official. The only thing that saved my life was the professionalism and better judgment of the Seattle Police Department. While I’m grateful for that, it doesn’t really inspire confidence in American policing methods.

I’m skeptical of these “suicide” claims. I think in a significant number of cases it is in fact murder by proxy.

BTW, Cecil is wrong on the numbers. He seems to think that they represent all police homicides, but that isn’t the case. From what I understand, there is no reporting requirement specifically for justifiable homicide by cop, so most of these police killings fall through the cracks and are identified only as unspecified “justifiable homicide.” Only departments that voluntarily share this information are counted.

My guess is that in all justifiable homicides, police killings account for a significantly higher proportion of white than black decedents.

@Syon

It isn’t so much that reading makes you myopic as it is that it puts a lot of stress on the muscles that control focus. Eyestrain from reading is well-documented, and causes difficulty in focusing and degraded vision. It isn’t necessarily permanent, but reading before a game – or even during the season – would be unwise, as the effects can last for a while, and at that level of play even a slight decline in visual acuity makes a significant difference in the batter’s box.

@Scharlach

And you might be credulous and complacent if you believe that law enforcement agencies are entirely forthcoming and honest when asked to report how many people they kill each year. Would you say that people who don’t trust medical institutions’ reported stats on fatal physician error/malpractice had a paranoid personality disorder, because “events that leave dead bodies are nearly impossible to sweep under the rug”? Probably not, because that would be pretty dumb, right?

Nobody knows how many Americans the police kill each year

I was assuming people would read more than the title.

From the article:

“In North Dakota, where the second most alcohol is consumed per adult…”

To be fair, whites aren’t the only people who do this.

I stepped in a few times when I was younger and nobody else was doing so. Once, in broad daylight on a busy street, I came across an Indian having rum fits on the sidewalk. He was frothing at the mouth and in very bad shape. Everyone else was ignoring him, so I called an ambulance and waited until they showed up.

Another time I broke up a mugging wherein a skinny white guy was getting his ass kicked by a short but heavily built black. The black walked away claiming he “didn’t do nuthin’,” and the white ran off at high speed.

What I’ve come to realize is that I did these things because I had a sense of ownership of my city that most people don’t share. In another town, I wouldn’t have interceded. But I grew up in the city, walking the streets with my grandparents there as a child after going to mass, so when I saw something wrong, I felt it was my place to do something about it.

But cities change, and as friends and family are replaced by strangers, that sense of ownership goes away even for those of us who grew up in them. These changes that happened in NY in the 60s probably happened in the 20s, the 1890s, 1840s and so on back to the beginning. A change is happening right now, more strangers are coming in, people are being pushed out, communities are being redefined and destroyed.

If an East Indian or Chinese software worker saw me being beaten on the streets of Seattle or San Francisco, would he intervene? Would he even bother to call the cops? I doubt it. There is no place for real, on the ground community in cities today, unless you are at the top of the heap. It’s by design.

No, the term “serial killer” wasn’t really in use until about 1970. The police resisted the concept until late in the 1970s, according to Bill James.

Around 1979, when I was in kindergarten, the bogeyman was “The Man From Atlanta.” I remember it clearly. We were all afraid of this man, but we had no idea who he was. We had this idea that we were supposed to avoid men in vans.

My kindergarten was mostly black, so I suppose the paranoia made sense: much later in life, I learned that this playground bogeyman was actually Wayne Williams, a homosexual black serial killer who preyed on black boys and young men.

Maybe he was one of the first of the sensationalized serial killers.

Later, of course, we had Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer. One of my schoolmates found a naked female corpse in some blackberry brambles back in the mid 80s. I think it was determined to be one of Gary Ridgway’s victims, but that might have been a schoolyard legend (the corpse, however, was very real).

You get paid when people click out of the article, so it probably does generate revenue by provoking annoyance, which prompts people to click out to another paid link.

It’s like those terrible ads that feature disgusting but “have-to-see-this” photos. People click on it out of morbid curiosity, then are immediately presented with links to paid ads.

Perhaps, the more neutered the conscious mentalities of heterosexual white college students, male and female, become by the constant feminist indoctrination, the more they need to binge drink to get disinhibited enough — to get up the courage — to act like normal males and females.

Ethanol does effectively medicate for stress. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be so widely used for that purpose.

If normal youthful behavior is curtailed, then it stands to reason that heavy drinking would not only serve to loosen inhibitions and take the place of prohibited activities, but to blunt the stress-provoking effects of days of saying the opposite of what one thinks, which is hard work and requires a lot of mental energy.

As far as I know (mainly from reading translations of Russian authors), the extraordinarily heavy drinking of the late Soviet period was not the historic norm for Russians. It was so bad during the “stagnation” (zastoi) period that Andropov tried to introduce some form of prohibition, which backfired. Drunkenness was essentially a form of social anesthesia or anxiolytic that people turned to in order to blunt the stress of living with the ubiquitous contradictions of Soviet life.

And it should be pointed out that other forms of social disorder that proliferated later during the post-Soviet era, such as violent crime, prostitution and theft, were far less prevalent during this period, despite widespread, severe alcohol abuse. This leads me to speculate that it wasn’t drunkenness that was responsible for the decline in men’s lifespans in the post-Soviet era, but other disruptions.

I care passionately about the inhabitability of our planet from an environmental perspective, but until it’s fully inhabitable by women who can walk freely down the street without the constant fear of trouble and danger, we will labor under practical and psychological burdens that impair our full powers. Which is why, as someone who thinks climate is the most important thing in the world right now, I’m still writing about feminism and women’s rights…

In other words:

In order to heal the planet, we must free the world from psychological burdens, the kryptonite that prevents women like Rebecca Solnit from attaining powers that will save us from climate change!

War Nerd’s boosterism for YPG is painful to see. The People’s Party of Kurdistan, YPG’s political wing, is a Bolshevik party despised by Kurdish nationalists, possibly secretly supported and heavily infiltrated by Turkey to discredit Kurdish independence. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the Kurdish nationalist party that fields the forces known as Peshmerga, has actually gone to war against PPK. Does War Nerd know this?

War Nerd goes on about how important the CNN war is here, citing videos that may discourage recruits. I’ve seen videos put out by YPG of women fighting in Kobani who can’t even handle a kalashnikov’s recoil. I’ve seen pictures of smiling ISIS jihadis holding the severed heads of young female YPG recruits.

In our backward world, are we somehow supposed to see the side that sends farm girls to die in urban combat to gain western sympathy as morally superior? When PPK operatives hide out in Turkish mountains while hapless girls die for them are we supposed to herald this as progress?

I don’t think the Croats and YPG are remotely comparable. There’s a reason the Peshmerga sent precious few fighters to Kobani. It would be a waste of resources, and the destruction of a YPG force is not exactly a calamity from their point of view. For the Turks, this is the best of all worlds. Let YPG discredit itself and the cause of Kurdish independence by sacrificing Kurds’ daughters on the front lines while the USAF destroys ISIS armor, neutralizing any future threat to the southern border.

As an American, I have to take the Turks’ side here. YPG’s cynical use of western feminism in this “CNN war,” which war nerd seems to think is a good idea, may not rise to the level of ISIS mass murder, but it’s bad enough that it would be for the best if both ISIS and YPG fought each other to exhaustion. Evidently, American officers feel the same way; if they know that some of the supplies they dropped ended up in ISIS hands they must surely be aware that some of the bombs they’ve dropped have hit YPG positions.

@anon

thanks for correcting me on the acronym — it’s been a while since I worked in this field.

I know PKK (a designated terrorist organization) has long been fielding women, much like MEK (also terrorist), but what gets me is the recent adulation coming from our press over this abhorrent practice of using girls who can hardly fight as cannon fodder.

Now, they seem to have picked up on the dumb feminist contingent stateside and are making even more of a spectacle out of these girls from mountain villages. If these are our most important “allies” in the region, and unfortunately it looks as though they are, we’ve already lost this battle.

Not much of a contest, really.

The war on women rhetoric never really worked except as a way to put Republicans on the defensive with media pressure.

Because there are no real single-sex communities aside from homosexuals, there is no true women’s or men’s vote. Racial politics are far more important, and will only be more so in the future. Both black men and black women have reasons to vote for Democrats, and white men and women have reasons to vote Republican. The biggest gender gap is actually among Hispanics, probably because so many Hispanic women are single mothers on welfare, EIC, WIC and child support and so many Hispanic men work blue collar jobs, and are thereby impoverished by feminist policies (high taxes for non custodial parents combined with wage garnishments). When Hispanics settle into a stable social role of one sort or another as their population matures the gap will likely shrink considerably.

The only women who really care about abstract feminist issues, as opposed to purely practical ones like free stuff, are the over-50 white feminists whose vote is guaranteed anyway. Therefore, the war on women rhetoric has limited utility in motivating swing or apathetic voters. You’d do better offering stipends for clothing and beauty products.

Incidentally, it always struck me as odd that older, presumably infertile women are more likely to vote on abortion than young ones, but I guess that just proves that people’s politics are set early in life and don’t change all that much.

@Ozymandias

Are you the same Ozy who used to blog out of Oregon?

Amanda Marcotte is such a raging psycho that Republicans should do whatever they can to keep her opinions front and center. She’s the one who said that the falsely accused Duke LaCrosse boys didn’t deserve any sympathy for their ordeal after the truth came out. Guilty or not, she would have had them lynched just for being white jocks.

She says in public what your typical radical feminist keeps in the gender studies class, the women’s shelter or in chambers in family court.

Amanda is a real golden goose.

According to my family’s painstakingly crafted genealogy book, I am descended from Pocahontas. My first American direct male-line ancestor arrived in Jamestown in 1610, and within a few generations one of Pocahontas’ descendants married into the family.

This connection seemed as much a point of pride to the family genealogist as anything else in the book. So, yes, Holy Grail.

Of course, I found that interesting, but what really surprised me was how many of my ancestors were killed by Indians, which is often noted in remarriages of widows, children raised by others, etc. I’m not sure moderns can imagine the apparently casual brutality of the American frontier.

I don’t look Indian at all, BTW. Well, at least nothing like the local Indians here on the NW coast.

That was a great post-election article. Too bad it’s too “edgy” for mainstream publications, because it’s the kind of piece that would be understood and widely appreciated beyond your usual fan base.

I hope it makes it out there anyway.

Ever notice how restaurants still use “Bombay” and “Peking” in their names, rather than the native moniker? That’s keepin’ it real.

Beida, China’s most prestigious university, still calls itself “Peking University” in English.

“Not for the faint of heart”?

RevYJ is right: that isn’t hiking.

That’s just a little walk up a hill in sunny SoCal.

Try a 4,000 foot climb in the North Cascades, through forests, alpine meadows and across talus and snowfields with 50lbs on your back. And that’s just “intermediate.”

Going to the outdoors is basically a european thing, even a northern european thing at that. I always thought this has to do with the lack of dangerous animals in European forests (save bears and wolves, but you don’t have to do with crocodiles, venomous reptiles, insects, etc, that you do in Africa, Asia or Central and South America). White Americans of course inherited this from Europe, but to a lot of minorities this outdoor thing might seem downright weird.

-andy

If there’s any tradition of hiking from Europe it comes from pilgrimages. Medieval Europe was full of pilgrimage trails. Some of these predate Christianity, leading to pagan holy sites like Anglesy in Wales, Mt. Brendan in Ireland and Mt. Sleza in Poland. These existed in Greece and Italy, too, but now they’re mostly Christianized. It’s always interesting to find that one or another of these Christian shrines turns out to be far older than the Christian religion, just as the shrine in Mecca predates Islam.

So people have always gone hiking, but they called it something else in the old days. Nevertheless, the purpose was roughly the same as today: to find spiritual fulfillment in some awe-inspiring place of dramatic scenery. And even here in the US, when one gets into the history of popular hiking destinations, it often turns out that they were Indian holy places, or said to be dwelling places of gods, or actual deities themselves such as Mt. Rainier, known as the god Tahoma (origin of city of Tacoma’s name) to local Indians.

If you think about it, hiking is really just white people going on a pilgrimage, even if they aren’t fully conscious of the spiritual motivation behind it. Everyone around the world would understand it if you put it in those terms.

Nolan is a totally Irish surname. Gaelic in fact. Whether these Nolans are Catholic or not is a different matter, but they probably are. I was going to correct you when you called them Anglos in a previous post, but I thought “what’s the point — we’re all ‘Anglo’ to them anyway.”

Or maybe we’re all Nazis, Cossacks, Amalekites or whatever…

Anglo is a more expansive term than English; it encompasses those regions that are culturally part of the Anglosphere (America, Canada, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, etc).

Maybe so, but as a mainly non-English person who is also mostly of British descent, it sounds foreign and obnoxious to me. I grew up around a lot of real Anglo-Saxons; they were clearly culturally and ethnically different from me and my family in important ways. I don’t dislike them by any means, but they are not the same, and they made that clear to me from an early age. What’s more, they are a relatively small minority in most of the U.S.

It’s still a moderately influential part of the country because of its colleges and high cultural standards. So it would be great if anybody could figure out how to penetrate their cognitive cocoons and get these post-Puritans to grasp that those horrible people in Arizona aren’t objecting to mass immigration just to annoy them.

they would change their tune within a fortnight if hundreds of thousands of foreigners started walking through their fields dropping trash as they go.

Their “liberalism” is simply result of a myopic small-mindedness — nothing more.

Because you can’t have an iSteve post without mentioning it, a *lot* of these Yankees seem to be married to Jews, Asians, or Indians, at least in the big cities. It may be the continuation of the old Yankee belief in eugenics and selective breeding in another form; nobody says you can’t take your breeding stock from disparate populations, after all. Why not try to take the smartest people from *all* nations?

-SFG

That’s an stute and correct observation, but the motivation isn’t what you suggest. They don’t intermarry for the brains, but for the money. When I was a boy, I went to a majority Anglo private school, and the next largest ethnic group was Jews, many of whom affected Episcopalianism.

There was a remarkable amount of intermarriage between the rich Anglos and rich Jews that wouldn’t have occurred between, say, Italians and Jews.

If you read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, it’s obvious that an overriding concern among the English was marrying into wealth, which seems – and can have the side effect of being – eugenic, but isn’t always or even deliberately so.

This idea of the “love marriage” being the norm among the English aspiring class is pure fiction — an after-the-fact justification of what is little different in practice from Hindu matchmaking.

If GMO labeling and legal marijuana were to result in a windfall for rural counties, both would have been very popular there. That is not the case, so they voted against them (we had the same proposal in WA with similar results).

You might ask why urban counties would then support them. I propose that the answer is malice, which is the flip side of altruism.

Many urban Americans support GMO labeling and legal pot because they think it will harm those bad, homophobe, misogynist, racist Republican Christians who live in the hinterlands.

Europeans, on the other hand, support GMO labeling because they think (American-owned) GMOs hurt their humble peasant folk. They also tend to oppose legal marijuana for similar reasons.

Personally, I support GMO labeling because, well, I’m just curious about things, and I assume that the more I know the better for me (If I were a farmer I might have a different take on it). I’d still buy GMO food if it were labeled — maybe even preferentially if it had some quality I was looking for.

But really, it’s all about self-interest, despite the rationalizations pro or con on either side. People aren’t actually as dumb as the explanations they come up with for their behavior.

Nice article. I guess golf is more than a walk in the park after all.

But the ending was uncanny to me:

A future article, for example, may explore the Friedan-Steinem-Firestone-Abzug generation of feminists from this subversive perspective.

I was thinking about exactly the same thing today on my walk back from the library after reading Pinker’s Blank Slate. In particular, the fact that the ghosts of the prophets and patriarchs could cause a lot of disturbances in minds like Firestone’s, and projecting that psychic angst onto the population at large could be problematic.

Sure, I’d be happy to share an idea. Here’s the short version:

I was pondering the enormous influence religion has on our psyche, and thinking about the fact that mentally ill peoople tend to hallucinate religious figures such as angels, God, saints, etc. It seems that this isn’t a case of a defect that makes them more prone to religious feeling, but rather that the means by which ordinary people suppress these subconscious thoughts isn’t fully developed, so we’re all subject to them to some extent.

This is relevant to culture because the content of one’s religion has a very strong influence on the subconscious religious feelings. Ritual, worship, stories and festivals all reinforce this.

In an important sense, religion also mirrors family and social life. Gods take on parental roles as authorities, or even literally as “our Father,” Mary “mother of God,” and so on. Pagans created entire interrelated pantheons that reflected the families and clans most people were familiar with because they were congruent with our innate religious sense.

Judaism, on the other hand, evolved during a time of intense warfare and displacement during which spiritual warfare (idol/god killing) was an important component of interethnic conflict. One of the first things you’d do on overrunning a settlement or city was smash the idols and burn the temple, and rape the gods’ consorts (virgins/priestesses). Obviously, this wasn’t unique to Jews, as it happened to them on a number of occasions.

This crucible created a lean, mean faith stripped of liabilities like idols, goddesses, priestesses, etc. The storm god Yahweh became the one true god, defender of the people.

It kept the people and the faith alive, but at a cost. The rich, textured elements of faiths like Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and even contemporary Islam (worship of Miriam and Mohamed’s consorts) were systematically removed, much as many of the accoutrements of civilian life are removed in an army. One notable absence was the feminine aspect of religion, which ordinarily should be proportionate to its very large place in society and our hearts.

My idea is that this poverty of feminine objects of worship and veneration places a great strain on religious Jews, and women in particular. Mothers may take on an outsized, overwhelming role as they are deprived of spiritual analogues (e.g., mother becomes a “goddess” herself because there is no mother goddess to stand in for her). Women without feminine religious archetypes may feel lost and alone, or may turn to inventions such as an “earth mother.” While sensitive Catholic girls have Mary and saints to worship, the Jewish equivalents are either long since banished or play much diminished roles. I can only imagine the terror and anguish of a psychologically fragile Jewish girl like Firestone who had no spiritual mother to turn to, but only stern, frightening patriarchs and prophets haunting her dreams, and in her case perhaps condemning her through auditory hallucinations.

So, essentially, Jewish women’s embrace of feminism is at its origin a spiritual movement to restore a yearned for femininity to their spiritual lives.

As for how it’s relevant to non-Jews, the Enlightenment provided a new form of religious thought grounded in social theory that promised fulfillment to all people. It was appealing in its rejection of Abrahamic spirituality, and provided both relief and hope. Naturally, not only their own repressive Abrahamic religion, but all Abrahamic religion, became the enemy to adherents of the new, progressive faith. “Patriarchy” became the catchphrase that stood for the scary storm God and fierce, judgmental prophets. Hence you have a new dualistic faith with an angelic vision of an attainable progressive utopia contrasted with demonic patriarchs trying to prevent “society” from reaching its goal.

That’s the germ of the idea.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. But I hadn’t thought of the second part. Nice touch.

“this poverty of feminine objects of worship and veneration”: but Protestants don’t worship Mary either.

-dearieme

Right, and compare and contrast feminism in northern and southern Europe. You’ll find a continuum from Lutheran Sweden all the way down to the tip of the Italian Catholic boot.

Jews’ immediate predecessors clearly worshipped goddesses.

Judaism may be “old” by Christian standards, but not much older than Christianity compared to Islam. It’s actually only a middle-aged religion if we go back to the beginning of civilization. And, on the contrary, it isn’t right to call it primitive, because it was revolutionary by the standards of its time. Even today we haven’t really evolved past it. Maybe the only really archaic aspect is the ethnically exclusive part (but that could simply be a presumption on my part, and Christian/Muslim universalism might actually be the reactionary position). Otherwise, cognitively speaking Judaism is a radically modern faith that most of us (including perhaps most Jews) haven’t caught up to yet.

As for the early WASP feminists, I think they were just feminine acolytes of the fashionable gentile Enlightenment (as epitomized by John Stuart Mill), and a lot of Jews, eager proselytes that they are by nature, joined them with great enthusiasm when liberated from the authority of their rabbis. The Catholic ones (to answer Art Deco) are what I’d characterize as ambitious apostates.

I have no idea why anyone is intimidated by these online mobs. What are they going to do, surround your house and burn it down?

Honestly, men have a lot more to fear from the women living in their houses than from this telescopic hysteria.

Matt Taylor could have defused the situation merely by saying “get a grip on yourselves; it’s just a shirt.” Maybe a few more articles would have ensued, but he could have safely ignored them and let the loudmouths have it out among themselves.

But it is a terribly ugly shirt, and he should at least be a little ashamed of himself for wearing it on TV.

Consider this 2011 blog post by George Mason University economist Robin Hanson. Hanson writes that “gentle, silent rape” of a woman by a man causes less harm than a wife cuckolding her husband…

Wait a minute, I overlooked that part.

This was the subject of one of Roissy/Heartiste’s more memorable posts: Cuckoldry vs. Butt Rape (12/09).

I’ll bet Hanson read that. Heartiste actually started the discussion back in 2007, when he first began calling cuckoldry “female rape,” which is pretty accurate from a biological perspective. Hard to believe it now, but it was kind of a novel idea back then.

Maybe all this recent acting out is a sign that feminism no longer has the same broad support it had as recently as the Bush administration. Things have changed considerably over the last decade in that regard.

That’s nice and all, but when I was a kid white guys may have saved my life on two occasions that I know of. In one case pullling me out of the street before I got hit by a car, and another yanking me out of a river just as I was being swept away. Being swept away by a river is terrifying, by the way. The force of the water is overwhelming, and you are as helpless as a doll.

I may have saved a couple black girls’ lives when they got too far from shore on their flimsy plastic tube and started to panic because they couldn’t swim. I yelled at them to not let go, stripped to my tighty whities, swam out and towed them back. I wonder, where were mom and dad at the time?

A friend of mine who was a lifeguard throgh college probably saved at least a dozen of them. The guy – really a wonderful man and dear friend named Scott Lyons – died suddenly of a freak stroke at 29, God rest his soul.

For white guys, saving people is just what you do, and usually you don’t get a reward — often not even a “thank you”. But lest I sound bitter, the reward is in the doing; in fulfilling your purpose in this life as a man.

When black men do this stuff and nobody thinks it’s worth giving them an award or saying “thank you,” then I guess we will have reached at least one form of equality. If it happens some day, I’ll call it a good day.

No, she exists, she’s a leading personality in the UVA rape crisis support group. The other women in the support group look up to her because she has the most awesome story about being raped.

The reason “Jackie” hasn’t gone to the police is that anonymity is awesomer than actually going to court to get an attacker convicted.

As an anonymous accuser, she can say whatever the hell she wants without being cross-examined. In court, even if the papers didn’t put her name out there, she’d have to back up her story, and she’d be named. This is why I take women who actually take a rape accusation to trial seriously: they are on the public record and they are willing to face the defense.

Nevertheless, rape charges result in more false convictions than any other category of crime — by far.

The Innocence Project might as well be named the “Relief Society for the Wrongfully Convicted of Rape.” Last I checked over 60% of the exonerated prisoners had been convicted of rape. Unfortunately, many innocent men will never be exonerated because there’s no physical evidence and it all came down to he said she said.

Really disappointing to see Rod Dreher so credulous where these matters are concerned. Maybe if he’s so worried about his daughter he should teach her not to go unattended into men’s rooms during drinking parties. Back in the old days, at least girls and their parents knew what it meant to hang out in a sexually integrated drinking establishment, AKA a saloon.

Today, it seems, no God-fearing man’s daughter should be kept out of one.

According to the article a long time later on separate occasions guys harassed her, calling her “feminazi bitch” etc., and one of those guys “flung a bottle at Jackie that broke on the side of her face, leaving a blood-red bruise around her eye.” Maybe my English is bad, does this mean that the bottle broke on the side of her face, or only the flinging movement? Also, how plausible is it that a guy flings a bottle at someone’s face and there is only a bruise around the eye as a result? I would expect more serious damage even if the bottle doesn’t break. Or do I misunderstand something? Please help.

-Reiner Tor

I have some experience with breaking glass myself, once with my own head in an auto accident. I was knocked out cold and woke up covered in blood and seeing stars (a scintillating scotoma to be precise). And, in a traffic altercation, I was once involved in a fistfight with a guy, and won. But that wasn’t the end of it. He came back with a baseball bat and smashed out my driver’s side window while I was at a stoplight, spraying glass into my face but missing my head with the bat. The tiny flying glass fragments cut up my face so badly that it was entirely covered with blood, and I had to pick slivers out with tweezers, including one from my eye! On another occasion, a black hit a friend of mine over the head with a champagne bottle at a high school party (for no discernible reason), causing my friend to fall to the ground and go into a seizure. A few years later, I saw a guy get hit in the face with a glass beer mug in a bar fight in Beijing, and the result was blood spattered all over the table and adjacent window. Every single time I’ve witnessed people forcefully collide with glass the result has been, at the very least, a bloody mess.

So, to answer your question, getting smashed in the face by a glass bottle can really mess somebody up. As for being smashed through a glass table with a big guy on top of you, you’d be cut up very badly, possibly have a concussion and/or broken bones, and could plausibly die from blood loss even with prompt medical attention if you got cut or stabbed in an unlucky place, like the side of your neck.

This woman is lying through her teeth about the glass smashing. My bet is she saw the movie “Boys Don’t Cry” and riffed off it. I believe there’s a similar scene in that movie, and a gang rape.

Torn and Frayed may be on to something here. Chloe Sevigny starred in both “Shattered Glass” and “Boys Don’t Cry.” There’s often a common cultural theme or character behind the stories people make up — dishonest people like to borrow from other people’s stories. Come to think of it, Sabrina Rubin Erdely herself may have come up with some of the details.

Hey, when I clicked on the Reason story that Jezebel linked to, it popped up with this nifty little thing called “donotlink.com.” Apparently it’s a website that allows you to link to a site without boosting its rank on Google.

-Mr. Blank

That’s for dummies who don’t know how to use the “nofollow” tag.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t intended to catch readers’ attentions. The mayor, the police chief, and the editor of the newspaper are all telling everybody to move along, nothing to see here, so the reporter slipped in something awkward, but not something he could get in trouble over. Or maybe I’m all wrong about this.

Looked that way to me.

It’s deadpan, which if delivered correctly leaves quite an impression.

Reporters know how and what they are supposed to write these days, but people have limits. This how you bend the rules without quite breaking them. A few more Fergusons, and we’ll see people breaking them.

Given the fact that the democrats are doubling down and apparently hell-bent on starting a real racial insurrection, I’m half expecting to see a significant number of outer party professionals rebel for the first time in my life before the decade is over.

It costs them nothing. They live in cities with few black people (Portland 6.3%, Seattle 8.4%, St Louis 49.2%), and the black people who are there are more likely to be professionals.

-tsotha

The coastal Pacific NW is isolated from the rest of the country by distance and mountain ranges. Even driving from Seattle to California you go through really long stretches of pretty much nothing from Portland to the Central Valley, and headed east, well, you’ve got to drive some 1,500 miles and over two mountain ranges before you get to another major city (Minneapolis). Because of this, its people tend to see things in the rest of America almost as foreigners, hence the similarity to the clueless Europeans protesting Ferguson.

I’m not sure whether this is an example of overreach or the beginings of a cultural shift. For decades, feminists have been getting away with lies that you’d think normal people would be terribly embarrassed to be associated with. First, the idea that men and women are identical from birth, and only differ later on because of patriarchal conditioning. Then the stories of women hiding out in a sort of underground railroad to protect themselves from monstrous ex-husbands. Turns out on closer examination that many of these women simply weren’t satisfied with court judgments, and subsequently abducted their children and vilified their ex-husbands as a cover story to avoid prosecution.

Finally the rape hysteria, ongoing since the 90s, that makes fantastic claims about how many women are raped and how few men prosecuted. After reviewing one claim about how few guilty men are convicted that made the rounds a couple years ago, I calculated that, according to feminist statistics, 40 million American men – one in four of us – should be in prison for rape. I suppose that would leave the other three to pick up the tab for incarceration, or perhaps slave labor is the idea here (more likely). I came up with that figure by multiplying the number of men currently supervised by the criminal justice system for sex crimes (does not include those who are merely registered sex offenders — only those in prison, on parole or on probation), which is already enormous, and comprises a higher percentage of our population than people under supervision for all crimes in many other countries.

Feminists have been getting away with outrageous lies for so long that perhaps Rolling Stone and Erdely saw no need to fact check the story, assuming that nobody would dare question it, especially if it stayed out of criminal court, which probably appeared likely. It must have come come as a rude shock, then, that people have begun to do so.

However, it is not right to assume that this litany of lies is confined to the liberal media and parts of academia. It has permeated society to the extent that it occurs every single day in family courtrooms across the nation. I suspect that this is where it began, because it has been going on ever since divorce became a civil matter in American courts in the late 19th century.

I often tell men who don’t believe me to spend a morning or afternoon in family court – which is a grotesque chimera made up of various parts of criminal and civil courts stitched together into a lucrative mostrosity – to watch proceedings. Vicious accusations that beggar belief roll easily off the tongues of attorneys and their clients. Perjury hangs like a fog in the courtrooms, obscuring any clear truth, and judges accordingly rule in the most arbitrary manner.

It is this fog of lies, I think, that has made its way into journalism and academia from below rather than the other way around.

However, it’s long been known that divorce courts are filled with slander and bogus allegations, so nobody takes the accusations seriously enough to do more than use them as leverage to extract concessions. I can’t say it’s an encouraging sign, but perhaps people are starting to feel the same way about this kind of journalism. While that may not reflect well on our standards and culture, it’s probably appropriate at this point.

* Sunni Turkey has had female political leaders, while Shia Iran has not. Protestant Northern Europe has had at least as many, if not more, political leaders than Catholic Southern Europe.

This is mainly a post-Christian phenomenon, so I don’t think Marian devotion figures into it either way. Compare prewar to contemporary Scandinavia and the social attitudes about a woman’s proper station are worlds apart. Not to say women weren’t respected, but restrictive gender roles were very much the norm. My great grandmother, for example, found that the United States offered her a lot more opportunities to live and work as she pleased than her hometown of Bergen, which would have been part of the Kingdom of Sweden back then. Even so, she raised her American-born daughter in the traditional Lutheran manner, and my grandmother never wore pants or drove a car in her entire life.

But what was probably more important than goddess worship in old European apex political families is how the religious rules governed family relations. Catholic rulers could not divorce their wives, which gave their wives significantly more power, most famously in the case of Henry VIII, who split England from Rome just to get rid of his Spanish wife, who wouldn’t back down and give up her rightful place as queen. Queens, therefore, truly were co-rulers, as in the case of Ferdinand and Isabel. When Protestants legalized divorce, this caused a significant erosion of aristocratic women’s power, because back then one couldn’t exactly take the king to family court and sue for the palace and tax revenue if he decided to divorce.