Mr. Unz, thank you for being so tireless in bringing truth and justice to Harvard. The ferociousness of their attacks on you is a sign of how well you are doing! Do you have any measure of your chances?

Bringing up your old comments on the “Gay Germ”, you say:

Since prostitutes might have hundreds of times as many sexual partners each year as married women, the gains to the transmission-vector of such a sterility-inducing STD would be absolutely enormous, providing exactly the sort of powerful selective pressure able to balance that operating on the host population. Thus, such a “Divorce Germ” makes perfect evolutionary sense in the way a Gay Germ seemingly does not.

Don’t you see that if “Chlamydia victims have hundreds of times as many sexual partners each year” is a good selective pressure for chlamydia to cause sterility, then “[Unidentified gay germ] victims have hundreds of times as many sexual partners each year” is a good selective pressure for the gay germ to cause homosexuality?

It’s really quite out of character for them to refuse . When I was a crimed and published a piece that put a nasty saber-rattling piece of legislation in bad light, it attracted some media attention, so they gave an establishment conservative a full Op-Ed article to rebut it, and subjected me to an internal inquisition. But there were no errors of fact or emphasis in my piece: simply a case for the law, and a case against it. By those standards, they should retract their smears against you and publish your full refutation.

In retrospect, I suppose the problem with what I wrote was that the law was supported by the Israel Lobby, and a fortiori by a solid majority of the newsroom. I was fairly naive about such things at the time.

I agree that the rebuttal has a defensive tone ( the thoroughness of your follow-ups often make you look defensive), but now that they have published half of it, comparing what they published to what they left out makes them look extremely foolish and deceptive.

>Some conservative Christian Asian Americans can identify with Republicans because of their religious ties, but socially conservative Indian Americans, to give one example, naturally have a difficult time identifying with a party which wears evangelical Protestantism on its sleeve as modern Republicans often do.

But cf. http://www.pewforum.org/2012/07/19/asian-americans-a-mosaic-of-faiths-overview/

42% of Asian-Americans are Christian. Asian-Americans are much more fervent about their Christianity than whites: e.g. 72% of evangelical AA’s say their religion is “the one true faith” vs. only 49% of evangelical whites. (This leads me to think that secular AA’s are more like to say “unaffiliated” than whites of similar religious indifference.) 40% of US-born AA’s have switched religions, vs. national average of 28%, and the net effects of this movement are shared between Protestant and Unaffiliated.

What you’re saying would be more valid in post entitled “not your Indian-American political sidekick.” Your experience with Indian-Americans is biasing your perception. Indian-Americans have the lowest % protestant (11%), the lowest % conversions (16%), and the lowest % intermarriage (6% for Hindus) of all Asian-American groups.

Regardless of what the explanation is and whether the percentage of Protestant Indian-Americans will rise over time, I don’t think Protestant identity politics play poorly with Asian-Americans collectively.

It’s “fashy” as in “I was always pretty right-wing, but since Obama I’ve gotten downright fashy.” Right Wing Death Squad Entertainment records fashy songs, Teichmuller was a fashy mathematician, the ADL tries to hunt down fashy goys, and everyone on the AltRight is getting a fashy haircut.

In other news, the formal social-justice edict on pygmies seems to be to call them “Mbuti”, but here you can push back in horror and ask how anyone could be so insensitive as to use the name of one pygmy tribe to label all of the dozen-or-so pygmy tribes that are out there.

It’s absolutely nutty. No disrespect intended, Steve – you have been fighting a lonely and important fight for a very, very long time. You were the only “raycisss” I ever read when I was a leftist, a decade or more ago, and you surely qualify as one of the intellectual godfathers of the AltRight. (I don’t even know, were you writing for Spencer/TakiMag back when he was originally trying to make the term “Alternative Right” happen?)

But you have little to do directly with “neo-reaction”. No one he mentioned has anything to do with neo-reaction. Not only was the Douthat essay he cited not about neo-reaction, I wouldn’t be surprised if Douthat has never heard of neo-reaction. It seems like Tyler Cowen has vaguely heard the term a few times, got a mistaken understanding of what it went, and ran with it.

Do you think that’s about accurate, Steve?

What does that have to do with anything? We are talking past each other, and I am not sure why honestly.

I imagine Abraham might have said the same thing when God offered to spare Sodom if he could find a single righteous Sodomite.

The big increase in (non-black) Muslims in Chicago is due partly to numbers and partly to mores, I would say. The reason I say so:

1. A decade ago, the absolute numbers of Muslims, at ANY level of cultural assimilation/non-assimilation, in Chicago was very, very low. So I assume that what we are seeing now is either more Muslim immigrants, or a previous generation of Muslim immigrants growing exponentially by importing wives and inflicting Sharia on their now-adult children, or Muslims from elsewhere in the US congregating in a few cities. (Boston also has vastly more muslims now than it did ten years ago; I want to say the same is true of SF and LA, although there I’m less sure). Demography has to be part of the explanation.

2. A decade ago, there was a very rare begging… ruse? stratagem? technique? where a woman would go out in a full burqa on the Magnificent Mile, with a baby and a sign claiming that she was a good Muslim and needed help. (Sometimes her husband would lurk nearby.) A decade ago this was a fairly rare thing and I think there was only one woman (person?) doing it. Now, you can see multiple people engaging in Muslim-style begging in the Loop/River North area each day. What that says to me is that whatever cultural feedback led Muslims to avoid overt Muslim-style begging a decade ago has collapsed/transformed to the point that many more people think it makes sense. Mentally I’m modeling Muslim-style begging as the kind of behavior you see at the extreme right-tail of the “unassimilated” normal curve, so if an extreme behavior has become seen as acceptable, that implies that many less extreme behaviors are now seen as much more acceptable as well.

So, my vote is for some of each.

>Hyde Park

I have spent time in Chicago’s Hyde Park intermittently over many years and I would say there were very few a decade ago, and still very few today. You’re more likely to see NOI women (who wear a scarf around their heads, a la Milan) rather than a true hijab.

Any chance of your creating twitter account that is only notifications of new posts, Razib? Thanks!

Been thinking about creating a “Razib’s greatest hits” sort of page, with links to all your best posts over the years… it would be a lot of work though. Perhaps other commenters could help compile it?

This would be valuable in its own right but also (a) to help fight linkrot, (b) if organized with an analytical index, to bring new readers to years of past insights, and (c) to keep people pointed at the most thorough/summative posts, rather than the ones most deeply anchored in search engines. It’s especially important since GNXP is in some ways unique; when a clique of blogs go into hivemind mode they start ritually linking to one another’s best posts over and over again, so the clique becomes auto-indexing.