Interesting take on Harris’s thoughts. I admit that I started “The End of Faith” and am only through the first couple chapters, so my own take on Harris’s thoughts may not be as informed as others who have read his two books. That said, I have closely followed the exchange you quote above (between Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris) and I’ve listened to a handful of talks that he has given in recent months – at the Salk Institute and at Caltech,,for example.
I wonder if this hesitation on Harris’s part to outright deny the worth of understanding religious experience reflects his own stance as a student in neurology (he’s a PhD candidate, right?) Others – from Dennett to Ramachandran – also seem to be very curious about the neurological explanations for religious experience. Reading the above bold sentence (at least the first one), I’m sure that Harris ‘s name is on that list. In one of his earlier letters to Sullivan in the same exchange (the one dated 1/29/07) Harris says that he is very hesitant to draw metaphysical conclusions about the nature of his own spiritual experiences.
I do agree with your point that he cares a great deal about the dangers poised by modern religious belief (both in its fundamental and moderate forms), but I’m struggling to see how he would make the argument that another mystical/supernatural belief system could act as a surrogate for any of the Western religions.

Miles [my imaginary English friend for purposes of explaining football here], what you must understand is how very American football is, both as a game, and, with regard to what we call high school, as a teenage phenomenon.

As a game, first observe the emphasis on taking the other guy’s land, gaining yardage we call it. It’s very warlike in that fundamental. Like rugby only more so. Whether by pushing, running over, jumping over, or via aerial attack (paratroopers perhaps), the idea is to move your team further and further into the enemy’s territory and make it your own. Second, the field itself: a lovely little grid. None of this fake nature roundish Australian rules pitch or cricket pitch or overly wide Football pitch. America’s a big country, but we are going to control it, lay some math down onto it, flatten it where necessary, and play. Again with the math, we like to measure things; we don’t like to word our way to success. Real success has a number: acres, children, head of cattle, barrels of oil, cards, hell, wives where some of us can get away with it! And that number, those numbers, trump all class distinctions. We admire virtue, and so what if someone has a lot of money, he can still be a jerk. But still, we like to face reality. We don’t have a nobility; we don’t grovel before a poorer noble, or even a greater noble. We buy, we sell, we measure out and measure in. No shame in losing if you gave it your all, but don’t stand on your one yard line with your back to the wall and tell me you’re better than me because of style. And another thing. This is a long game. We break up all the plays. We stop and measure all the time. It’s inexorable. It’s constant. Style rarely counts. We make a virtue of grinding things out where necessary. But of course emotion plays a part. Basically we are beating each other up. One of our big coaches said dancing is a contact sport, but football is a hitting sport. So it’s a fight. Don’t expect the faster, smarter, better trained team to win if they can’t give and take pounding. Now, note here for a moment a little American contradiction. Or at least something that make me wonder. The equipment. The Aussies brag about their lack of padding and helmets. My dad still talks about a hurling match he saw where some guys teeth got knocked out –batted out really. And in Rugby there’s not much padding or helmets. We, on the other hand, don’t hesitate to use the latest designs from NASA, the latest in material science from Stanford and MIT, and a whole truckload of money to get the best in helmets and padding. No one seems to notice how the better the protective equipment, the more daring the hitting becomes. Now, I didn’t play, so maybe I’m speaking out of school, but it just seems an odd American blind spot to try to tech-away the injuries and the potential for injury, rather than adjust the rules or try to stay traditional. Alright, so that’s a start on the game as America thing. Shall I go on about it’s importance to teenage culture, or the teenage subculture?

I’m glad this discussion is happening, because at base the assertion of some here — that if it doesn’t happen, the whole thing will be co-opted by those with an agenda — is, I think, correct. 
 
In the spirit of open debate, I’ll add this: 
 
1. So those studies that show that merely exposing children of one race or another to discriminatory statements can negatively or positively affect their performance on a test are irrelevant? 
 
In a system of coupled gene-environment interactions, we should be weary of self-fulfilling prophecies.

@gc – thanks for tipping me off to the original research, whose substance but not provenance I recalled in my last comment. 
 
Since we’re (quite happily!) going to the source literature, I’ll quote from the exact same critique that you do, i.e. Sackett et al.: 
 
“Steele and Aronson clearly demonstrated a very interesting phenomenon in a series of persuasive and carefully conducted experiments. They have shown that stereotype threat can affect the performace of some students on some tests, an important finding worthy of careful exploration. What they have not done, and do not purport to do, is to offer stereotype threat as the general explanation for the long-observed pattern of subgroup differences on a broad range of cognitive tests.” 
 
What Sackett said was not that this was bad research, or at all invalid — what Sackett et al. said was that *this research was widely misinterpreted.* 
 
I would agree with Sacket: I would not dream of proposing that stereotype threat is a complete explanation for differneces in test scores between races. 
 
I merely bring it up to inspire a thought experiment which does not require very much imagination, and one which I would argue has about as much evidence to its credit as the genetic-deterministic arguments being slung about here: 
 
Imagine that the stereotype threat effect were not being exercised in a laboratory setting, but that it pervaded everyday life. Imagine that you were told, from birth, even implicitly, not to expect too much from your own abilities on account of your race — what effect would that have on your desire to engage in the activity you were told you would fail at? And how would that effect look when multiplied across generations, and throughout an entire sub-culture? 
 
It seems glib to imagine that discrimination is irrelevant in the context of performance; and that culture, whose advancement we imagine is so all-important to the progress of the human race, isn’t as persistent and as powerful, in many contexts, as its genetic underpinnings. 
 
* Just to throw out another wrinkle: The Flynn effect says that your mean IQ, regardless of race, is significantly higher than that of your great-grandparents. Do you really believe that’s so? And if not, what does that say about the fact that even tests designed to target g can, in essence, across whole generations, be taught?

Dollars to donuts its a maternal effect. I mean, having older brothers makes you more likely to be gay. And female mice who are in between brothers in the womb have masculinized behavior when they’re grown. Isn’t it obvious by now?
This would mean, of course, that it could be a) not genetic but b) still determined by biology.

Is there a place that lists all of the races? I’m especially interested in how people in border areas are treated. Ethiopians, Eskimos, etc. It has always seemed odd to me that people from England are considered the same race as people from Serbia. Someone must have broken down people from every region of the world by race. It seems beyond belief that it could be done just by looking at someone’s skin color since that is just one genetic variant.

No no no, it’s “it takes two Arabs to get the better of a Jew in a trade [by the way, from context I would guess all of this is a bit untranslatable; it’s not entirely derogatory, but a combination of admiration for, and jealousy of, the stereotypical commercial savvy of the other]; but four Jews to get the better of an Armenian.”

Let me get this straight: there’s a tight-knit merchant minority traditional group that, in contrast to contemporary US mores, encourages its young men to seek their fortunes in sole proprietership, partnership, or small business form, and some of those young men, in an early foray, went astray, spectacularly so.

I’m looking at those mugshots and thinking, man, I wasted my 20’s! It’s like that goof on Darth Vader vs. Luke Skywalker:

Darth Vader: Yes, it is true.. and you know what else? You know that brass droid of yours?
Luke: Threepio?
Darth Vader: Yes… Threepio… I built him… when I was 7 years old…
Luke: No…
Darth Vader: Seven years old! And what have you done? Look at yourself, no hand, no job, and couldn’t even levitate your own ship out of the swamp Dagobar…
Luke: I destroyed your precious Death Star!
Darth Vader: When you were 20! When I was 10, I single-handedly destroyed a Trade Federation Droid Control ship!
Luke: Well, it’s not my fault…
Darth Vader: Oh, here we go… “Poor me… my father never gave me what I wanted for my birthday… boo hoo, my daddy’s the Dark Lord of the Sith…waahhh wahhh!”
Luke: Shut up…
Darth Vader: You’re a slacker! By the time I was your age, I had exterminated the Jedi knights!
Luke: I used to race my T-16 through Beggar’s Canyon…
Darth Vader: Oh, for the love of the Emperor… 10 years old, winner of the Boonta Eve Open… Only human to ever fly a Pod Racer… right here baby!

Some people are good credit risks and, as a result, can get mortgage (loans). Some ain’t and can’t. So you get your uncle or someone to sign off as the buyer, under a gentleman’s agreement that you’ll pay. The thinking is: as long as the bank gets it’s monthly payments, why would they make a stink?

Even with good intentions, things can go wrong. http://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/pdfs/2008/2008_31054.pdf “Though none of the matters contained in the moving papers are a sufficient defense to the foreclosure this Court does not pass on any financial breach of contract claims [non-legal buyer and resident -c] may wish to assert against Defendant [alleged straw buyer -c] upon proper substantiation of the same in a separate proceeding. Parties should be aware of the risks they take when they try to circumvent existing procedures and statutes enacted for their protection.”

Cash-back refers to immediately taking out a home equity loan so there is cash-back at the closing. Of course, as long as you’re pretending stuff anyway, you might add some other permutations (impersonation, fake ID’s etc.).

I read the last chapter of Webb’s book in Barnes & Noble yesterday. Yawn. Was it me or did that chapter, entitled something like “What is to be done?” seem like a whitewash; no specifics? Immigration? Nothing. Get out of Iraq? ***crickets*** Did he cover the specifics in other chapters. Someone get him an editor. Better yet, get him Pat Buchanan’s editor; close with bullet points in your last chapter. Give me the executive summary.

Meanwhile, Hillary: “We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall campaign at the Convention and on TV and radio; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength via the internet and specifically YouTube. We shall defend our reputation and my husband’s reputation whatever the cost may be; we shall protest on streets, airport lounges, book signings and stereotypical middle american fast-food establishments. We shall never surrender and, even if, which I do not for the moment believe, we get kicked out of the convention and ignored by the main stream media, then our contacts beyond the scenes, rich and famous, will carry on the struggle until in good time White Middle Class America with all its remaining power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the me, and Bill, and, er, yeah, America!”

What if we can’t afford those NW Euro or NE Asia garrisons anymore? Does the deterrent still work if our guys are mercenaries, i.e. if the Euro’s and Asia’s pay a tax to support them, or is it one of those only-works-if-we’re-honest-about-it things?

Notice that (except for the electrical and software engineers) that engineers lean towards the GOP as well. I think it comes down to two factors.
First, the percentage working in industry. The Republican Party has, throughout its history, been the party of business; thus people working in industry (well, at least the management) would be more GOP-friendly.
But that wouldn’t explain the chemists or the computer experts, who probably work in industry at rate as high (or higher) than geologists and engineers. I think it may have to do with the culture common with geology and engineering. I notice , in my limited experience (undergraduate Earth Sciences), that the geology and engineering undergraduates seem to be more conservative than the student body at large. Also, many of the geology majors start in engineering.

Well, the GOP has been as unfriendly to the academy as its been friendly with mammon.
As an aside, I also suspect that the geoblogers lean leftward, and are probably disproportionally academics.

I read and hear little that’s in favour of the sort of commission action being discussed in this item. I don’t expect the commissions to last much longer. To portray this sort of thing as somehow representative of views in Canada is well off the mark, in my view.

I don’t think there is enough political will to get them abolished. I think most people (including me) would be happy if they lose their censorship provisions removed. The most appalling part of the whole affair isn’t the hate laws themselves, it the quasi-courts that they are held in.

Even with the few data point, I am still interested in how pop seems to rule in Canada, too.

To expand on the more-straight-guys-reluctant theme, let us address the punitive aspect. For the sake of argument, let’s agree it’s punitive for a good many men in the ceremony. But it is, or at least must be in the perception, rewarding, for some men in the marriage. What do I mean? The day might be a drag, but lotsa mediocre guys make out ok with a monogamous traditional marriage set of rules. To the extent gay marriage weakens that overall system, then, there’s a marginal increase of high-prospect men who might use that weakening as a way to avoid taking part, with the commensurate knock-on effects of serial monogamy, hypergamy, frustrated betas, used-up women. Basically, in an anything goes system, why would a great catch of a man settle down? Why would a decent woman settle for lifetime commitment to a mediocre man? The old answers were: ’cause if he pissed off one more brother of a sister (course we have only children these days so that’s another thing) there’d be a whole posse after him; ’cause all the good ones are taken and mediocre is better than nothing, ever; and, the whole community supports this too.

On a possibly more Steve-ish note, check out Michael Johnson’s commentary after the race. He, Mr. Johnson, an african-american, gets to at least partially allude to, by innuendo, without apparent fear of reprisal or challenge, the common knowledge about dominance in sprinting by West Africans. “This goes back to what I was saying before… that was the best in the world; there’s nobody out there, there’s no, you know what I mean? [unless?] there’s somebody out there, you know [?] in the jungles or somewhere…” http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mo6pHs0-3bQ

12 out of 107 Stuffs White People Like here. And I’m half-white/half-Filipino, so maybe that’s it.

“The international financial system is in the midst of a Republican-enabled meltdown, and this is what you find to be an important election issue?”

Why is the international financial system melting down? Look up the term “moral hazard” for part of the answer. I agree the Republicans are less than ideal. I posit that the Democrats are also partly to blame. I disagree that Mr. Wright’s failings and his relationship to Mr. Obama are completely meaningless in context but, rather, should rightfully be taken into consideration when evaluating Mr. Obama’s fitness for the office of the presidency. Plus it’s just a blast to hear about the s*** these guys try to pull.

This is the problem: that the office of the President is now so powerful that it is actually important to examine things a candidate said 7 years ago, in a radio interview… as a novice low-level politician…. That the two major and only two major parties are so alike and in agreement on this point and so many others, that such exegesis is almost necessary.

“Fraud, including unwitting fraud, is always a big risk in finance.”
Under the common law, there’s no such thing as ‘unwitting fraud’ as one of the elements of fraud is the speaker’s knowledge of the falsity of the representation. What you mean by unwitting fraud sounds like just giving your money to idiots or otherwise misallocating it; too bad so sad. We can include our government representatives and their boondoggles within the rubric of idiots and misallocations. It’s our own damn fault.
The risk of denying this is that we may be tempted to impute fraud to whole categories of financial agreements a la the commies. Me, I’d invest with guys like Jim Rogers and Peter Schiff, who called these things years ago.

Excellent point Steve. The Japenese were economic nationalists (or how about just plain nationalists, with the idea that such would have an economic policy implied), so they could be dealt with as such. Fire with fire and all that. The Chinese, if I read you right, are not so much. They’re free-marketeers. They could care less; probably even about their own countrymen. They’re like water; they’ll just go with the flow. So, with all that implies… Uh, actually, what does that imply? Crappy stuff forever? Or until globalism schmeers everything level?

ironrailsironweights’ comment is just the sort that roissy most tends to respond to, and which responses are one of the best parts of his blog.

From the perspective of a ‘global citizen,’ neither step is acceptable. From the perspective of any universalist viewpoint, even one decidedly non-liberal, e.g. Christianity in the form of Roman Catholicism, both steps are more akin to acts of war –permissible but to be avoided if possible.

Real mitigation, real lessening of the ill effects of Global Warming such as it’s claimed, is obvious: everyone, all together now, (1) cut emissions and (2) move towards the poles. The first won’t happen because the emerging third world economies won’t agree to it –can’t agree to it. And the second won’t happen for similar reasons.

I blame Canada.

No thanks. We're Americans. We have rights. We'll just fornicate, masturbate, abort, drown our sorrows, etc. etc., thank you very much.

Hey "wake up," what? We ain't philosophizing here!?!

Brilliant! As the English say.

Dude's got a five page Amazon wish list. What's up with that?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/PIBBI29EORHA?ie=UTF8&%2AVersion%2A=1&%2Aentries%2A=0

He had to go back to bragging about his Regent's Scholarship. Have fun looking into that one Steve.

Shite! You had me. Even interrupted my 2:30 a.m. Sinead O'Connor assisted barbell workout.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLGobWuiYuc

testing99 is for real. He's really busy though. He's got a standing Saturday afternoon game of Risk with Ritholz.

As an assimilated American Irish Catholic, let me partially correct your description of my assumptions, and anticipate and address at least one self-righteous BS argument that my Korean, Armenian, Jewish and so forth friends might make. No, I didn't skip the fine print because I'm too lazy or too dumb to figure it out. I skipped it for the same reason I haven't read Das Kapital: I have it on good authority that it's crap and I don't want to waste time dealing with it. I'd rather read Tolstoy, thank you very much. So the not dealing with this stuff is a kind of "here, take my coat too" attitude.

Maybe that's just a Roman Catholic distinction. Or Irish stubbornness and love of penance. Maybe the Protestants really do believe there's an all-to-the-good rationale somewhere in these wild-card poker rules.

Maybe it's even plain revolutionary; Chechen as Solzhenitsyn might say. Test case: which Americans will follow Rep. Michele Bachmann in not fully filling out their US census form next year?

Slightly off-topic, but is there any other job where a guy is less likely to have to take orders from a female then the NYFD? Cops, even if they work mostly with other males on the beat, often work with women when the case gets to court. Construction guys maybe, but then there are female set-asides in bids, and female architects, managers, etc. In the military maybe, in special operations or something, or the French Foreign Legion, but they still have the upper level situation akin to cops and construction workers. The only others I can think of that might be close would be monks or friars or some other religious.

What were they thinking?
Natural light for quality photographs, what else?

If one didn't want to work with or for women, would there be any other job as good as fireman? Cf. construction worker — overwhelmingly male on the worksite but probably some females at the upper level management, architects, design, bid, lawyers stage; cops, similar and see article; military, ditto.

"Another difference is that firemen want to be cops but cops don't want to be firemen."

This would be belied, in NYC at least, by the number of guys who get on the job as cops so they have a better chance of transferring into the department. I've heard of guys going from the cops to the department, but not the other way around.

Further, the mission, task, and role disputes between both since approximately the 60's, also puts that statement in doubt. I'm talking about, especially, NYPD's Emergency Services units. At best you could say this was a toss-up between cops and fireman and more properly the reserve of a third institution: hospitals. At worst you could say, as the NYFD veterans I know would say, that thanks to the civil unrest in the 60's the cops, in an effort to boost morale and better their PR, totally muscled in on the more universally admired rescue work that had been formerly the province of the FDNY. In a nutshell, the cops got sick and tired of doing cop work.

Cops and Firemen still get into scuffles over these role/jurisdictional problems. See, e.g. Ground Zero recovery history.

I'd be curious to see the stats on cop to fireman vs. fireman to cop transfers.

I'd also be curious to see any stats on incidents between cops and fireman. My knowledge is only anecdotal and, as you can probably tell, sourced from, and therefore probably biased in favor of, firemen.

Jason Malloy,

I think I have a problem with premise 1):

1) Men and women have different, but overlapping innate mating preferences….

Doesn't mating involve reproduction?

I take your point to be that where the sex-ratio favors the women, they will choose DADS. Doesn't this assume that sex and reproduction are linked? That the procreative aspect is necessarily part of the mating? What if they're not linked? What if the procreative aspect can be separated out? Would that change, even temporarily, who the women would choose?

In light of Novaseeker's comment, I think I can be more precise.

1) Men and women have different, but overlapping innate mating preferences….

When?

Pretenders to the throne?! Great stuff. The Birthers should be reading up on that stuff for precedent.

No disrespect, as they say, but, is it just me or did the dead kid take a swing at some other kid just before getting whacked?

Why is anything illegal?

Because it's immoral. (Malum in se.) Or because it just makes things run better if we set it up to prevent that thing. (Malum prohibitum.)

http://lasalettejourney.blogspot.com/2005/03/gossip-and-slander.html

I was at Nevada Smith's today watching some of the World Cup qualifiers. http://www.nevadasmiths.net/ Obama was definitely the best fan there. He drank more beer but yet stayed the wittiest and soberest, picked up more of the mere dozen chicks there, and was way cooler and multilingual then all the other dudes. Everyone loved him. He, like, brought everything together. He even called Argentina's second goal. Amazing. What a guy! Everyone brought him beers. It was so cool.

I like the show, and think the last episode took it to a whole 'nother level –like, you know, eleven. I find it interesting how the different characters act in different situations, how the context changes, who makes moves and who doesn't and why. Also, the time period is very interesting because it's not so long ago –my parents' cohort lived through it, and of course the general culture of the time contributes or affects how people react –what their options are, what they think their options are, etc. Finally, as for the whole 'nother level thing, and this probably has something to do with what Ismael said. The main character had a chance to be a different person, and went with it. Fascinating. And maybe it's easier to create a whole new character than to be oneself. But the truth is still there.

Whiskey,
I could go for a walk right now and beat the hell out of some little kid hanging out in the park. Or maybe destroy some baby in a pram. Is that be the kind of strength projection you're talking about? [Kudos to Martin van Creveld for the analogy.]

Phase one didn't go as planned due to 'heavy traffic' –someone tell The Onion!

And we're worried about these guys?! Like strategically militarily worried about these guys?! We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here and they're… stuck in traffic!!?! Who is more insane?

Nah, this one calls for beers AND shots. I suggest Red Rocks West.

"They are there."

Whiskey, God love your celibate micro-dick ass, but there's no way in fuck the Paki's can deliver a nuke to NYC or any other meaningful fucking American place in the next 20 years –unless we stamp their visas. a

Fuck yourself re the 3,000 New Yorkers. You didn"t know dick and you still don't know dick.

Minaret moms. The soccer moms of the 2-teens.

Back when was more irreligious and hostile to religion, I frequented an ex-Christan website, with most people going from Christianity to irreligiousity, so I understand where you are coming from.
Myself, I’ve brief moments of religious feeling and atheism & secularism. I mellowed out to apathetic agnosticism now.

Udolpho's middlebrow comment was devastating.

Here's my theory, FTBGL (facts to be googled later). Middlebrows love Cormac because his character do stuff, get stuff done, and Cormac describes it all in detail. Like how to rope a calf. Or take apart and store a burner from a stove. It's cool to middle-brows in America cause we're all max 2 generations away from men like that. And we're pissed off. Like no one in America says, "Why, we've been mid-level clerks for 6 generations!" Neither in shame or pride. Because it just never happens. Happened? Anyway, middlebrow mid-level management dudes stuck in their cubicles taking orders half the time from chicks love the Corm because his dudes don't take shit from nobody and could basically go out into the wilderness and survive and come back and cuckhold them. And then go back and do it all again on the opposite coast. Or die trying. With their boots on.

Hofstra, on Long Island (Nassau County, about a 30-45 train ride from the City) drops its program:
http://tinyurl.com/yd8t7hn

"a father by 21"

God bless him. Everything else is fixable.

Malex Jodriguez?

Crap. Why can't we just be like the French, have cool buildings, discrete quality mistresses, and adorable babes like Alizee? Hell, they even won the world cup for soccer or whatever a while ago. And I understand the English consider them decent enough to compete in Rugby.

Prediction: record attendance and TV audience at the Masters this year ('cause a white guy might win?).

"was a major Wall Street victim"

I've heard something similar about suffering at Goldman Sachs and other finance houses, and so I propose we get a new definition for 'major Wall Street victim': Just brainstorming here, but maybe bankrupt/unemployed/in-debt could be a good starting point. Is Harvard now in any of those categories? Sure, gross, it lost a lot, but in the land of the blind….

MarAkin,

Who cares? Do you want to live in an America where the only solvent company is Goldman Sachs and the only stable job is minion for the Fed?

Vibrant playa neighborhoods are great places to raise families, right?

"women are the main consumers of local news,"

Retirees.

Steve: "Not surprisingly, Cameron, who was born and raised through age 16 in Canada, can’t be bothered with Heinlein’s contortions, so Avatar is politically simpler than its sources in the Heinlein canon."

Peter A: "All that commentary and you never mention that Cameron is Canadian?"

Would someone please explain this?

Google News results vs. some objective metric could be an interesting blog. E.g. results for Calum Davenport in January, 2010; his trial date did get pushed back to mid-January right? But zero on my google.

In other news, I'm waiting for the Google by syllable function.

Mass transit?! How about transit itself. In NYC one can _roll_ home. At 4:30 a.m.
Case f-ing closed.

This comment has been removed by the author.

The note on the Dutch word for clitoris reminds me of an article about Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the chief revivalist of the Hebrew language.:

Dola lit up when I asked her if Ben-Yehuda had a sense of humor when he created the modern language. “Oh, yes, definitely! There are many examples of whimsy in his choice of words.” For example? She laughed. “Clitoris. He decided on dagdegan, from the root l’dagdeg, to tickle.”…

Let's get back to the dancing. Does your anthropologist friend have anything to say about leading and body contact? In Ceili and square dancing and all that, the steps are pretty much set, pardon the pun. This means, in my experience, that a knowledgeable capable female can, in fact, lead/guide. So I'm thinking dancing ranges from segregated by gender, to mixed gender but very formalized steps with limited touching, to today's really informal somewhat free form to… Hey, it just occurred to me now that the free form stuff started with non-touching, but now features touching, which, by the way, can be fairly, uh, 'playful.'

And then, of course, there's tango –male lead required + significant touching.

Re trust: As a native NY'er –suburbs + city, a word. There might be a difference between regions vis a vis legal and extra legal sanctions and enforcement. Thus, homogeneous West Virginians might have very little trust for their legal institutions but great trust in their extra-legal enforcement (read, culture, social sanction, word of mouth); this might result in great trust towards their own and great distrust towards outsiders. On the other hand, NY'ers might have great trust in their collections attorneys, er, excuse me, their legal institutions, but have very little in their extralegal multi-cultural environment. Hence with just a few cues or clues, or excuse points really, such as plausible social security number, credit card number and address, NY'ers might seem way more willing to do business with anyone, even a martian, as compared to the West Virginian. Thus, strictly speaking, the NY's would be way less trusting but, since they have the opportunity to deal with _so many more people_ have established more sophisticated methods of artificially establishing enforceable trust. Not looking at the whole picture, and cherry picking statistics, this might make the NY's appear more trusting when in truth they are not.

Speaking of the Bush dynasty, why did Laura Bush put out a book? Nowadays a book means a book tour, and coverage like the cover of Lady's Home Journal with the two daughters. Barbara Bush: A Memoir, appears to have been published in late 1994, almost two years after HW Bush left office. Laura Bush's book is out a year and a few months after her man left office. Is there a Bush Wife playbook?

I wonder about suicide squeeze participants –players, coaches, managers –on both sides, and birth order.

The Derb in Taki: "The Gazans? I’ll care about them right after I start caring about the Congo."

A case of a catchy phrase getting the better of a writer. By ALL of his own standards mentioned earlier in his essay –ethnicity, religion, the Gazans are closer to him than the tribes in Congo. Gazans are semites. Islam takes from the Jewish and Christian religion (call it a heresy if you will). Their homeland, such as it is, is far more significant, historically and at present, to Western Civilization than the Congo. And finally, in fact, there are, whether Derb wants to believe it or not, Christians in Gaza.

Can we graph this against single-parenting and latch-key kids and day care? Maybe having an encouraging mom present longer has something to do with it.

Anonymous said…
"What could possibly motivate your protectionist anti-globalist view other than your insistence that some people are more morally worthy than others??

"hm??

"just come out and say it."

Say what? Who is more morally worthy to me than others? My mom? My brother? My relatives? My neighbors? Who are these others? Can there be no moral ranking, no prioritizing by me amongst my fellow humans?

And more morally worthy of what exactly? My taxes? My charity?

Come out and say it, you ask? You first.

The Expendables would burn her house down.

“I voted “do not ostracize.” It’s unnecessary, he will never get anything through peer review again, and my understanding is he’s not allowed to have grad students or postdocs, so that pretty much means nothing will happen in his lab anyway. Who cares if he writes popular books? There is an asterisk by his name forever. ”

I think being unable to have graduate students or peer reviewed paper published seems like a good definition of “ostracization” from the scientific community.

I probably got the lowest grade here, 12/15. 🙁

It wouldn’t surprise me if similiar polls testing various areas of knowledge found the same result, i.e. most people don’t know much about anything (like polls of political knowledge, iirc).

“But they also attend university. This hybrid between the modern and the pre-modern is totally new. One of the problems I have with Muslim women who assert that their religion demands that they veil their face in all sorts of public situations is that in the pre-modern context where this was demanded women did not have a public life.”

Yeah, I’ve see women in various degrees of cover attending my secular Canadian university and I have mulled it over. I think, in nations with Muslim immigrant minorities at least, it allows those women to accentuate their own specialness in an atomistic, individualistic liberal society while taking the advantages of that society affords them, e. g. the right of women to an education.

Moreover, I can help but think this points towards a problem with multiculturalism, at least how it’s defined and implemented in Canada. It’s not so much that it is evil or it is bad, but that it is mostly empty talk. I suspect that “multiculturalism” and “intergrationism” (i.e. the melting pot) are much closer to each in practice, towards the intergrationist pole. Multiculturalism just makes a bigger deal about the outwards manifestations of other cultures, like names, food or indeed, dress. But there’s probably the same amount of social and cultural pressure to align and conform to the culture at large, as to make those manifestations a mere façade.

Most of my reading is non-fiction. I would say most of the fiction works I consume is television or webcomics.

When I read written fiction, it’s mostly science fiction.

"What exactly is Israel "doing"?"

– According to the MSM reverse logic accounting of things, they are our dear friends who are paying the price for our friendship by being on the receiving end of the anger of their Middle East neighbors who are actually angry at the US. So giving them a few billion a year is the least we can do for them, right?

Everything negative that could impact public views of the dirty and outright criminal things Obama had his hand in, mysteriously disappeared. It really shows the influence, reach and power of those who wanted their John Doe in the White House to be elected.

@none of the above

"at least get the foreigners pay us directly, instead of paying someone else."

Not a bad idea.

If immigrants are willing to pay coyotes thousands of USD, we should just undercut them and sell a temp visa for those thousands and let 'em come in a nice safe air conditioned bus.

The Nepalese monarchy was abolished in 2008 (IIRC) by the Maoists.

I don’t know, they probably have their own dynamics from actual monarchies.

Can't wait for that beer with Peggy Noonan on the steps of Federal Hall….

cut'em off. stop immigration from pakistan, pressure britain to do the same.

develop world's most awesome cricket team and throw all games but those against pakistan.

In each of your three sets of examples, the motivation for the first is also a mitigating factor, while the motivation for the second is either so tenuous as to not only fail, but to be under our current anti-racist mindset, an aggravating factor, or to constitute a separate, elevating crime.

In all three, in the first we want or at least expect people to be naturally upset at and respond to the wrong they are suffering (adultery, merely alleged adultery, possibly misguided sense of disrespect).

The second of the first set (armed robber becomes witness murderer) is really an odd case out. It is really malice aforethought.

However the second of the other two sets fall in between, in that they represent racial prejudice, which could in other instances be understandable, or, as I think the tenor of your writing this past decade or so suggests, should at least be discussed and comprehensible, even if it is not necessarily 'understandable' in the sense of being condoned. They could be, even though too tenuous to think about, crimes of passion.

The problem with the racial hate crime as an aggravating factor, IMHO, is that it skews these possibilities –e.g. immature males with a natural albeit undeveloped 'hey we was just defending our neighborhood' attitude, etc. etc. etc., and invariably adds another complicating factor which favors those groups most able to deal with, or, really, game, the system.

"Name a blogger under 35 or even under 40 who is more influential."

Roosh V.

Possibly Roissy (he might be over 40 by now).

But good point; I hardly read anyone under 40. What do those guys read?

Hold it, she knows from buying _records_? Kurt Cobain records? Dude, records are so 80's. Cobain was on CDs. How old is she?

Because while you might see the witness, you wouldn't be able to 'look' at him; there'd be no interaction between the witness, the interlocutor, the judge, etc.

Also, and I'm serious here, not that I know, but, smell.

On bookstores: in Ottawa, a local independent bookstore actually expanded, taking over an adjacent lot and pulling down the wall. Meanwhile, Indigo (a Canadian big box chain bookstore – the only one, AFAIK) expanded it kids section in various locations. I’m guessing they are seeing the writing on the wall, and are expanding into a market that can’t be so easily digitized.

Given that he will be retiring from Congress, Paul has nothing to lose politically, should he fail to win the Republican nomination, by running as a Libertarian or Constitution Party candidate in the general election. I believe that either party would bend whatever rules necessary to make a Paul nomination possible.

Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them… Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong …”

The real tragedy, if it's the case, of Obama having his autobiographies ghost-written.

Actually, my ninth grade math teacher was apparently inspired by Escalante. He wore the same kind of glasses, and had the same kind of briefcase. He showed us Stand and Deliver the last day of class, which if I remember correctly, was also the year he retired. Granted, this wasn't the mean streets of LA, but the largest English high school in Quebec, located in the non-Lower Class suburbs of the South Shore, but still …

Lillith. The question isn’t what you can or can not do with your body. It is about WHO should be forced to pay for it. I believe birth control is about $20 per month without insurance. Why give up your liberty in order to get that for free? Big Government wins the argument when you act selfishly. It’s about CONTROL, Lillith, not freedom.

"I am a Golden God" is from Robert Plant as quoted in _Hammer of the Gods_ by Stephen Davis.

Dear Anatoly.

Thank you for the article. It was informative. (I found it via Sailer.)

My wife and I are in the middle of the process of adopting a Russian girl.

Since I have been have recently been in a Russian orphanage and have read as much as I can on the topic, I thought I might share a little anecdata and answer any questions that anyone might have. (I freely own my ignorance. Some months of reading aren’t going to make me an expert, but I know more than some.)

* The girl we are in the process of adopting has a medical condition which, as best I can tell by reading and talking to Russians, makes her unlikely to be adopted in Russia (especially when coupled with her age). According to (US) physicians we have consulted, it does not appear that her course of treatment is going as well as it could, but we have very limited data overall on that front at this point.

* She is over the age of four.

* The orphanage is in decent condition. She looked well fed, the facility was clean if spartan, and the staff seemed friendly, competent, and compassionate toward the children (as much as they could be given the demand on their time). That said, caretakers were few and children were many. The caretakers seemed fond of the girl and were eager (it seemed to me) to see her adopted before she is “graduated” to a more “hostile” orphanage for older children.

* She is clearly both active and bright and at the same time developmentally delayed. The developmental delay is apparently nearly universal with orphanage children and is easily reversed on adoption. She couldn’t count in Russian but picked up “1 2 3” in English quickly.

* She was abandoned and legally repudiated by all of her known living relatives. She had never been visited before we arrived. Her mother is still alive. The father is unknown.

* We didn’t go looking for a Russian child. We went looking for a child with disabilities and found her in Russia.

So, that said, I’d be happy to answer any questions (if any) you have about our experiences.

Please understand that I won’t be giving any medical or any other personally identifiable information about the girl.

Additionally, I’ll likely decline to discuss the politics of the case, aside from observing that instituting policies which have the effect of trampling the downtrodden is simply what governments do.

If you’ve read this far thanks for your time.

“For a combination of demographic and ideological reasons few topics in American public life are more explosive than those involving race.”

Also, you know, slavery? The Nazis? Eugenics? These mean anything to you?

Theories of inherent racial inferiority are taboo because, among other reasons, they supported and justified some of the greatest atrocities of at least the last three centuries of human history.

Sometimes when people step on the minefield of racial difference, 6 million Jews blow up.

There is a tendency for people pushing modern scientific racism to act as though racism is taboo for the same reason a topless woman is, or the same reason we close the door when we use the bathroom: a sort of arbitrary squeemishness that springs from nowhere in particular. I find this immensely frustrating.

Also, John Derbyshire is an admitted racist.

I want to unequivocally state that I oppose all genocides, be they directed at whitey or anybody else.

'Richard Feynman … only had IQ reportedly of 125'

Bunk.

I know, I know, it's completely out of character for Feynman to joke around. And no one would ever underplay their natural talent in order to make their corresponding achievements seems more impressive.

My guess: he took many tests throughout his life, almost all of which would indicate a much higher IQ than 125, but he enjoyed (for whatever reason) reporting the outlier.

"Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton."

This chart caught my attention:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2014/02/09/why-pussy-riot-failed-in-one-chart/

It shows steady increase in Orthodox identification, at the expense of Non-believing identification in Russia since 1989 (which would make it, if I’m not mistaken, contrary to trends in the West, i.e. the USA).

Does anybody have good explanations for this trend? I’m guessing that Russians who were weakly attached to Communism (and with it, ‘official’ atheism) became attracted to Russian nationalism, and with that switched to a (nominal) profession of Orthodox faith to which Russian nationalism is attached to. But I don’t know.

On a related note, “The Boondocks”, an adult-oriented animated show on the Cartoon Network based on Aaron McGruder’s comic strip of the same name, aired an interesting episode last night. In it, one of the black main characters is caught on video calling a male classmate “gay” after seeing him twerking on the lunchroom table. This gets him in hot water with the LGBT community who demand an apology and a large donation. An Al Sharpton-like character comes to the rescue out of concern that the “gays” are horning in on his racket. Ultimately, several other interests groups are offended and an argument ensues over who is the most oppressed and deserving of all that grievance money.

This is the clearest evidence I’ve yet seen that you are spot on about blacks getting upset that gays are stealing their thunder (and special interest money).

I suppose black widow spiders themselves aren’t responsible for my arachnophobia but I can’t help but think I wouldn’t be afraid of them if they weren’t venomous.

November 20th: Oh my goodness! What a terrible story! It’s almost like something out of a movie… I can’t believe this kind of thing still happens in real life!

December 1st: OK, it’s clear this story was punched up a little for the press but it’s clear something awful, if not necessary cinematic, happened to this poor girl on that dreadful autumn night.

December 5th: All right, lot’s of inconsistencies… her friends, supporters and Rolling Stone itself are backing off. Still! The girl was abused and mixed up or conflated several details. That happens with trauma.

December 10th: Wait- is it possible this entire effing thing was made up to garner the attention and sympathy of a particular classmate?

John Darwin’s (author of After Tamerlane) The Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britian is a good history of the British Empire and how it worked, although it’s thematic not chronological in organization (i.e. one chapter deals with rebellions and how they were dealt with, another with missionary activities, etc.).