Rap sucks. It needs instruments. And then it would still be music with awful rapping on top. If only the hip music with those stupid kids today was nerdy prog rock. They’d still likely make awful music, but it would at least be a failed attempt at something good.

I have always wondered what “justice” meant. When I was a child I thought it meant that the law was carried out as written. I was initially confused by the idea of “unjust” laws. Many people seem to use it as a synonym for “fairness” but what is fair is rather uncertain. Sometimes I think people are using it as a synonym for “goodness”.

It sounds like we’re talking about fans of the Danimal (danimal.blogspot.com) here, which I first heard of from the Finnish blogger at Sixteen Volts.

I thought one of Dawkins’ points was that we aren’t conscious that we are doing what our genes want. But there have been so few Popes throughout human history (and a lot of them actually had a lot of kids themselves) that I don’t think genes would have adapted themselves for that situation.

John Brown was a nut. As Nathaniel Hawthorne said “Nobody was ever more justly hanged”.

Not all Eskimos are Inuit either. The non-Inuits prefer to be called Eskimos. Similarly, we’ve taken to calling Bushmen, “San”, which is actually what their enemies call them and is about as offensive as the n-word. So they actually prefer to be called Bushmen, but that isn’t PC.

Natural law is pretty popular with Rothbardian austrian anarcho-capitalists, many of whom (like Rothbard himself) are agnostic or atheist. I’m a utilitarian minarchist (like Mises), which doesn’t go over well with a lot of commenters at the mises.org blog.

I thought in the original “History of the Kings of Britain” there wasn’t any sword in the stone, and that was added in later by French story-tellers, along with the knights of the round table (every nationality had to one of their one to it). I remember finding the whole work online once, but the best I could find recently is here: http://www.celtic-twilight.com/camelot/hrb/index.htm , which is still plenty more than most would care to read. I have to say I prefer the good-old ethnic conflict stories to all that chivalry.

Razib, I’m confused by your talk of 2nd gen. Do you mean that there are fewer recent immigrants from one country vs. the other, so that group is overwhelmingly 2nd or later gen? And what does that by itself say about integration? Integration is hard to measure, but when it is language, income, marriage, crime/incarceration and geographic concentration are usually referenced.

I remember seeing another survey of political beliefs that found four “clusters”. Establishment liberals, radical/”new” leftists, conservatives and libertarians. In the general public there are far fewer libertarians than conservatives, but in academia they are about equal. Oddly enough, the radical left was closer to the libertarians in many respects than the establishment liberals.
A lot of people think economists are right-wingers, but apparently they (at least the academic ones) are moderate democrats. It should be remembered that Marxism was basically a method of analysis focusing on economics and that many people went into the economics field as socialists (from Ludwig von Mises to Thomas Sowell) because they wanted to fix what seemed to be obvious defects in the free-market.

Here is the pdf I discussed before: http://www.sofi.su.se/wp/WP05-8.pdf
What big changes has Bush made? I view him as rather ineffectual. He hasn’t vetoed a single bill, even ones he speaks out against before they’re passed. He did try to do something about Social Security, but that went nowhere. He did have some impact in that he nominated some Supreme Court judges, but that was by virtue of being there and I don’t know how differently any other Republican President would act.

Apparently the fertility of Mexicans in the U.S (I’m not sure for which generations) is higher than in Mexico. It could be that the higher living standards make kids more affordable, but there isn’t enough of a boost to turn them into say, Europeans or Japanese.

Chomsky’s “linguistics” are obviously part of the sinister plot he carries out on the behalf of the C.I.A in enabling the New World Order through undermining the social justice anti-globalization movement: http://prisonplanet.com/articles/april2006/060406Chomsky.htm 
 
Sorry if it’s off topic, but it made me laugh and I figured it might do the same for some of you.

It’s not novel at all, but I have a similar example to the throwing-up-olives one that involves conscious vs. unconscious thinking. 
 
When I was very young and my mom would go grocery shopping, she would often buy rolls of pepperoni to cook with. Like a greedy little piggy I would sometimes grab the roll and consume the whole thing before anyone else got a chance. She was not very pleased with this and told me that it was full of cholestorol and that if I ate too much it would clog up my veins and stop my blood flow and I would have a heart attack. I didn’t understand cholestorol or heart attacks (or anything for that matter) very well and it scared the heck out of me. I didn’t eat any pepperoni for years. As I got older and (marginally) wiser I knew that pepperoni would not kill me, but even though I knew that it was fine to eat and I had enjoyed the taste (too much, I would say) I found it very unpleasant later on. I couldn’t simply tell my tongue, or brain “This is good! Start making it taste good!”. I had simply associated it very firmly with “bad”. Now I’m rather apathetic toward it.

Bryan Caplan says that increases in wealth have little effect on political orientation. If politics are mostly about social issues (which apparently used to be the norm and may be again) he might have a point. 
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/05/how_does_winnin.html 
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/04/a_little_eviden.html#000841

During the “blood feud” era in Iceland, it was actually much more peaceful than modern America or continental europe in their era. David Friedman held it up in “Machinery of Freedom” as an example of a well-functioning anarchist society, although he admits it wasn’t completely anarchist. 
 
A good article on it here. 
 
Before anybody starts assuming anything, I’m not an anarchist, it just seems to me that Iceland wasn’t so bad, relatively speaking. Somalia got better without a central state, but that was because they had an exceptionally (by Western standards) bad state, which might be returning (the most glaring flaw in anarchism) with the Islamic Courts Union.

The guy who converted the goths to Arian Christianity was Ulfilas or Wulfila (same guy, different names). I believe the only Germanic people that went directly from paganism to Catholocism without stopping at Arianism were the Franks. Except for the odd case of the Icelanders, who missed out on Arianism and had their official religion decided by this guy after some political deliberation.

We can declare victory in Iraq, in fact we have a better case for doing so than in Vietnam as the North Vietnamese government was still around. The problem with declaring victory in the War on Terror is that Osama declared war on us and will probably simply re-declare war with another attack as soon as he gets the chance. You are right that they don’t have the power to accomplish anything in America other than killing a lot of people (I’m glad there was a big ocean between us and the Napoleons, Hitlers and Stalins of history), but we’d still rather that not happen either. 
 
I’m rather uncommon among libertarians in that I don’t care if the “right to privacy” gets sacrificed in the GWOT, even if the benefits toward fighting it are negligible. I’d welcome David Brin’s “transparent society” whatever the circumstances, and I’m glad it appears inevitable. 
 
Speaking of Afghanistan, I remember once reading an article by a high-ranking Special Forces officer who expressed the opinion that it was a good thing we had so few troops in Afghanistan, and that we had too many in Iraq. The idea that the presence of American troops serves to destabilize things has a certain ring of sense to it, and while Afghanistan isn’t currently a model of law’n’order, Afghanistan has never been. 
 
A bit off-topic, but I remember cringing when John Kerry campaigned against Bush’s decision to “outsource” the Torah Bora encirclement to local forces. Partly because of how it conflated the outsourcing of private sector jobs with military operations for no reason other than the unpopularity of the former, but also because local forces would seem to have an inherent advantage in an area as ripe for guerrilla action as the Afghan mountains. Of course, being a non-voter, I am free to disparage all the faults I can pick out in political candidates without having to attach myself to one and experience regret when they screw up and embarass all their supporters.

North associated with anarchists (like Rothbard, who was ethnically Jewish but agnostic), but I don’t think he ever considered himself to be an anarchist. He has a problem with the governments that currently exist, not the idea of government itself. 
 
The warlords that held authority in central-government-less Somalia were the opponents of the Islamic Courts Union, which seems to be a centralizing force. Similarly, the Taliban arose as a reaction to the chaos of Afghanistan under warlords. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are different things (in captured communications the former often mock the latter, which makes sense considering they are generally highly educated while many of the latter are illiterate), but in both cases the theocrats can be considered ANTI-anarchists (archists?).

I remember Cochran supporting the idea that schizophrenia is caused by an infection that occurs in the womb (resulting in a higher frequency among winter births). I’d like to hear what he has to say about this. As an ignorant layman, the significance of this is beyond my ken.

Some argue that American politics are creeping back TO civil-war era politics.

I avow no loyalty to anyone other than myself. I’m not even loyal to the “me” of last week. I make new years resolutions and break them immediately just to spite myself. That’s how I’m supposed to find freedom in an unfree world, right?

Wouldn’t the real Jesus have been rather swarthy, at least by European standards? He lived in the Middle East, after all. A google image search for goan jesus or goa jesus shows mostly the standard depictions.

That rdos site is really out there. 
If I ever have my own website, I’ll have a banner on it that says “A war on diabetes is a war on diabetics” or something like that.

I don’t understand the big uproar about right-wing Japanese politicians. What have they done? Visit a cemetery? I’m unapologetic about us nuking them, but I don’t see anything wrong with them honoring their dead. After the U.S civil war those who served in the Union army came together and said the defeated Confederates should be able to do so, and that was when the violence was still rather fresh in everyone’s mind and politics consisted of “waving the bloody shirt”. Very few people around during World War 2 are still here. Move on already.

The order violates Rushton’s Rule of Three, although that always struck me as far too crude to be very reliable.

I mentioned at Mixing Memory that cost of living should have been factored in when discussing income and geographic differences. 
 
How many different variants of “What’s the matter with [insert here]?” are there? I think WTMW Kansas was first (both in the sense that the old agrarian populist movement caused that reaction and a recent book commented on the change), Tim Wise asked WTMW White People (which seems odd to ask when analyzing a country where they make up the vast majority of the population) and now this on Connecticut. I wonder what’s the matter who keep asking what the matter is.

What about Barry White? He’s almost the archetypical example of a guy that gets the ladies’ blood flowing, and he’s deep as the Marianas Trench.

Catholics were pretty much the only Christians for a good deal of time, and the split between west and east was more about politics (whether the pope of rome is a position equal to bishops of other cities) than theology. I don’t know if there are any surviving Christian groups that trace their beliefs back to Arianism. So whether they are “really” Christian seems kind of besides the point when they defined Christianity for so long.

Aziz, are you the same blogger that Robert Spencer was so upset about referring to him as “Roobart Sbunsar”? To me his over-reaction to that slight against what he does know of Arabic seems to indicate a sensitivity to his larger lack of knowledge of it.

It is such great persons who have made the past full of history!

Reale: I don’t think your argument is going to fly well with Muslims. 
 
Regarding Italians, didn’t Steve Sailer use them as an example of the “jealousy belt”? More than northern europeans (you can tell a Finn is interested in a woman when he stares at her shoes instead of his own), but less than Arabs. Sub-saharan Africans in contrast have polygamous societies where adultery on the part of wives is somewhat expected and tolerated.

“No Irish Need Apply” signs were a myth.

Matt, apparently that idea is not so self-evident to some. Perhaps if I wasn’t a callous non-bleeding-heart libertarian I’d be more persuaded by arguments for paternalism but as it is I don’t see it as possible for the government to really know anyone’s self-interest better than they know it themselves and even if they did I don’t view it as the government’s job to look after anyone else’s self-interest, but to prevent the (negative) rights of citizens from being violated.

albatross, this might be a trivial point resulting from my misreading of you, but in possibility b as long as genes contribute some of the variance, removing that factor should result in lower overall variance or a smaller standard deviation, although in addition we would expect the curve to be shifted to the right. I’m not talking specifically here about group differences although it could be relevant.

I don’t watch tv either, but last time I was home my brother hijacked my computer (the family one was being repaired) to watch “The Office” at tvlinks.voodeedoo.org 
but checking now I see it is down. A mirror site at tvlinks.co.uk seems to be working though. Someone at the forum googling brought me to while searching just now for tvlinks said they regularly went to dailymotion.com to watch Dexter, which Bryan Caplan from econlog first brought to my attention. The first two episodes were on Showtime’s site. I’ve never gotten Showtime so I figured that was it. I’m not sure how regularly it would be on dailymotion since the site seems sort of youtube-esque.

My next door neighbors back home were Lebanese Maronite Christians. Nice people. 
 
I remember a while back being surprised by a stat I read that 75% of Arab-Americans are non-Muslim. Some people distinguish Copts and Maronites from Arabs, but I think in most demographic stats they are put together. Anyone know the stats for what percentage of Arab Americans belong, respectively, to the creeds above? 
 
The Lebanese diaspora has been noted as a “middleman minority” by people like Thomas Sowell. Is is this mainly the Christians, or do others follow the same pattern. I noted that a lot of them perform this role in Africa, which is deficient in other common middlemen minorities (Ashkenazi jews, overseas Chinese, Armenians), and where Arab/Islamic civilization looks comparatively more impressive than in the first world. On the other hand, a lot of being a middleman minority seems to depend on the attitude of a culture and I don’t know how likely it is that the diaspora would be significantly different from the folks back home.

I heard smaller sizes tend to be found among species of animals with more monogamy. So maybe they could claim the moral high ground or something, although it would really be their ancestors responsible for their current state.

Peter, is that truly discriminating against whites? If what (certain) whites want is the status that comes from buying and owning a fancy expensive car, doing this is heeding the rule that “the customer is always right”. Perhaps if the dealers were leading whites away from Camrys to prevent them from making a comparison but not trying to prevent others from purchasing Camrys you’d have a case. However, that would still be the dealers discriminating rather than “the auto industry”. It would seem somewhat difficult for the industry to discriminate against people they aren’t going to actually encounter just through their car design.

I remember reading recently that the reason we eat grains and milk might be because they are (slightly) addictive. I’ll try and find the link 
 
Ah, here we go: 
http://membres.lycos.fr/xbeluga/originsofagriculture.html 
 
I know there was another related site that led me to it, but I can’t remember what it was. For all I know it might have been gnxp.

Well I guess all the cool people are fessing up to their virginity, so I’ll do it too! I suppose I’ve got issues beyond simple nerdity though. Looking back I’ve made for a rather shitty regular friend, so I’d make for about as bad a boyfriend as possible barring any sort of criminal type of activity (and I wouldn’t even have the type of battered woman deluding herself into thinking “He does it ‘cuz loves me!”). I’d have to really dislike a girl to subject her to me. Coincidentally, I’m somewhat misanthropic, especially when it comes to my peers (I’m a second year university student). So those two factors might cancel out to an extent, but then there’s my extensive apathy, puritanical religious prudishness (despite my lax church attendance), and libido deficiency.
Like some of the virgin dudes above I believe I could have popped my cherry, but it’s really always just a matter of how much you are willing to lower your standards and/or put in the effort. I’m in better shape than I have any right to be in considering I never exercise and have a horrible diet. I suppose it’s good genes as many of my older relatives stayed in great shape with minimal work while they were young before crashing headlong into diabetes and serious weight problems after middle age. I don’t put any effort into appearing presentable either as I’m not looking for a job right now and have no one I need to please.
Nevertheless I occasionally hear from old classmates that this or that girl dug me, which I’ve found very odd because in each case the girl in question could certainly do better The only explanation I can come up with is they found me funny, and since girls tell themselves a sense of humor in a guy is important to avoid thinking of themselves as shallow they ended up saying as much to their friends and the grapevine brought that to me, because I was never drunk with any of them and that’s the only time I’m sociable enough to be likable. Aside from just not being a “party guy” (I’m a nerd, remember) I can’t really hold my liquor and broke my elbow very badly doing something stupid on something like the fifth occasion I’ve been drunk, so I’ve limited myself to just a few nights of drinking since then.
Some who are reading this might get the impression that I’m some sort of miserable, depressed whiner. On the contrary, I feel my life is a pretty much non-stop (the aforementioned elbow breaking is an exception) series of highs with no lows that less fortunate (read: normal) folks seem to frequently experience. My only concern is how unprepared I’ll be to deal with the inevitable disappointments that will accompany my graduation and entry into the real world, when I’ll have to be concerned with people other than myself and face the consequences of not meeting certain responsibilities. However, I feel the period of time in which I don’t have to worry about that is a precious thing I should savor. It might seem odd that savoring life to me means doing things like reading gnxp but I can barely comprehend how happy the Amish can be without everything I’d consider essential to “the good life”.
Bengali, it isn’t cool now, it never has been cool and never will be cool to be a nerd. I can’t stand the self-indulgent geeksturbation of “nerd culture” in its various forms, and I am a nerd. It’s just nerds enviously imitating cooler types by declaring their subculture to be hip in a manner transparently lame to all but the most deluded.
Chet, don’t let wusses dissuade you from a having a laugh. Dorks could use a good kick in the pants to get their act together and anyone sensitive enough to feel hurt by such mild mockery deserves more where it came from just for being such a baby.

What’s a “wannabe-virgin”? Is that like that “King of the Hill” episode where a church group allows sinners to become “re-virgins”? People who are attempting to emulate Isaac Newton in every way but screwed up on the not-having-sex part?

Qrious, if we put aside the issue of evolution and genes for a moment and just focus on IQ, even James Flynn would say the average is significantly lower in Africa than Europe. Flynn is not a fascist, paleoconservative, libertarian or even a liberal but a self-described socialist.

Babelfish says it means “dredgers”, but I still don’t quite understand what he’s getting at.

Great post! I remember once hearing that Shiites seem disproportionately concentrated near the center of Islam (whereas Sunnis may be found all over the place), but I was surprised to see no Ismailis (that’s what Aziz of City of Brass is, right?) on the map. Are they all in Central/South Asia?

The term “shock therapy” arose from reforms in areas of eastern europe like Poland and Estonia, though it did not become very well known until Russia, but the reforms of Russia were quite different from the places it had been more succesful earlier. I don’t think a Weberian cultural explanation would be good at explaining the difference between Russia and the other former Soviet countries, but a public choice model could probably work. One of the most interesting comparisons I’ve seen of Russia and other former Soviet countries in post-Soviet economic performancy is Comparing Apples (it’s a pdf, not a book I’m encouraging you buy from Amazon) by Peter Leeson and William Trumbull. If you are deathly afraid of graphs, spending too much time reading about Russia or formats other than html, this excerpt from a longer piece by Anders Aslund makes many similar points (though the take-away message is the optimism the other argues against).

I’m more out of my element than anywhere else on this sort of thing, but isn’t male and female circumcision fundamentally different? One is a flap of skin and the other, uh, isn’t? 
 
I guess I’m a pretty sheltered American. As far as I know (though it’s not like I investigate) I’ve never met any uncircumcised guys personally or seen what that looks like (note: that’s not a request for pics). So if it’s something that leaves you less than a full-man that no sane person would willingly undergo, I could be completely unaware of it.

Theo Musher: “It also interesting to me that australian aboriginies have blond children. Their skin is only black if they spend lots of time out in the sun.”
Really? I know that the early settlers of America from England believed the natives were heavily tanned and dirtied whites, at least according to Thomas Woods’ “Politically Incorrect Guide to American History”, and that there are a considerable number of blonde and redhead Aborigines, especially deep in the outback. I’ve seen pictures of blondes, but not redheads. However, I had never heard before that the skin color of Aborigines’ is darker than Europeans due to sun. They’ve lived together for a while now in Australia without (I am guessing) much difference in sun, so wouldn’t that result in similar appearance by now?

“They aren’t African. I bet they are connected to archaic proto Europeans. I have seen the photos you are talking about, with the big brow ridges. Early European explorers described their features as being “familiar” to Europeans.”
They are certainly part of the Out-of-Africa portion of humanity (by an even larger distance than Europeans), but I was under the impression that genetically they are still quite a ways away, even if they aren’t close to Africans either.

So, the Out-of-Africa descended populations are “humanity as we know it”? I know that’s not what they intended to say, but it sounds poorly worded to me.
I’m not as up to snuff on this as I’d like to be, but are all the Out-of-Africa descended populations inheritors of Neandertal introgression, including native Americans, the Aborigines of Australia and the Negritos of the Andaman islands? Or is it just what Jared Diamond would lump together as “Eurasia”?

Anonymous: “So Razib’s a misogynist while his alter-ego is a “radical-feminist”?!?

Imagine the cat fights that must go on when those two are in the same room! Which is all of the time, of course. Meow!”

I thought I was the only one who suspected they were the same person. Razib also sometimes pretends to be a fundamentalist muslim or a brown identity politics nutball.

Mencius: “What, for example, did he mean by “They thought they could grow rich by always selling and never buying”?” 
 
That sounds something like mercantilism, although it also reminds me of the Protestant Work Ethic. 
 
Over at Overcoming Bias there is a really good post/linked paper on the fear of death and the irrationality that results.

It’s not just the elite, college educated, African immigrants that are like that. I’ve worked entry level retail with some from Ghana, and they were a hell of a lot more pleasant to be around than the average middle class white. It’s not “deference to whites” either, because I observed them behaving the same to everyone. Some possible explanations are the high religiosity they displayed (Christian, which might be the majority in Ghana but I don’t know) and how relatively well off they might have thought themselves, whereas many in retail have just started their first job and feel entitled to something better.

I’ve never really felt much moral distinction for different species of non-human animals. So for “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy” I only disagree morally on the last part. When an animal says “Don’t kill me” I’d reconsider.

Copied from gnxp since I’m too lazy to write something original:
The term “shock therapy” arose from reforms in areas of eastern europe like Poland and Estonia, though it did not become very well known until Russia, but the reforms of Russia were quite different from the places it had been more successful earlier. I don’t think a Weberian cultural explanation would be good at explaining the difference between Russia and the other former Soviet countries, but a public choice model could probably work. One of the most interesting comparisons I’ve seen of Russia and other former Soviet countries in post-Soviet economic performance is Comparing Apples (it’s a pdf, not a book I’m encouraging you buy from Amazon) by Peter Leeson and William Trumbull. If you are deathly afraid of graphs, spending too much time reading about Russia or formats other than html, this excerpt from a longer piece by Anders Aslund makes many similar points (though the take-away message is the optimism the other argues against).

Africa might “need” these people, but Africa isn’t utilizing them very well at the moment. It’s a really lousy deal for them as well. Even if the immigrants I knew stayed in retail their whole lives (and they seemed to ambitious and hardworking to do that) it’s a better outcome than getting their arms and legs hacked off with a machete, which has been known to happen in Africa. I think Samuel Huntington noted in Who Are We that African immigrants to the U.S are more likely to hold desk jobs than native whites. How many of those jobs even exist in Africa? How many of them are just government posts that leech off the citizens rather than doing anything productive?

I’m surprised nobody mentioned Ronnie James Dio, who is 5’4″ (and according to Wikipedia had to stand on a ledge in a photo appearance to reach the same height as other Black Sabbath members) or Glenn Danzig who, according to celebheights.com, is also 5’4″ but doesn’t at all fit the skinny, high-pitched rocker mold. He wrote songs for Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison though, which might take him out of the pure-rock camp.

Alexis, what should be selected for? What is the analog to “playing basketball well” that would be better than “doing well on tests” or “getting good grades”?

I like this on punishment and neuroscience. 
 
Apologies if I’ve already posted that here before.

When I was taking geometry “=” always meant equal in identity. If you wanted to say two things were equal in value you had to have a “~” symbol above the “=”. In most programming languages “=” assigns equality and “==” tests it, but what with pointers and all it can get tricky.

I’ve long been something of an Anglophile, regarding the dominant culture of England and the American colonies (especially the northern compared to southern ones, as documented by Thomas Sowell) to be superior to others. I’m a Minnesotan raised as a conservative Protestant (though I was baptized Catholic), so that might be one reason. It also just seemed apparent to me that the English way WORKED. Why support ideas or ways of life that get beat by the English, whether in war or economically? The immigration of non-Westerners to Western countries (especially the US) really cements in my mind the superiority of those countries. I’ve moved a bit away from that due to my exposure to mises.org and lewrockwell.com. I don’t agree with Hans Herman Hoppe on the superiority of monarchy in preserving liberty (and especially not that democracy is worse than any other form of government). I still prefer the English and Northern US way, but I don’t approve as much of the English behavior toward the Scottish and Irish (or the Catholic minority in England) or the invasion of the South by the North, and I’ve also moved away from considering the Allied Powers in World War 1 to be the “Good Guys” while the Central Powers were the “Bad Guys”. Superiority of one culture just doesn’t seem to justify imposing it on or warring with others to me.

I know Peter Frost has theorized that certain environments made polygamy difficult (possibly resulting in Steve Sailer’s “jealousy belt”). It doesn’t seem implausible that those memes could be sucesfully spread to people with a history of polygamy.

Luke Lea, I’m sure the Inductivist would be happy to confirm your suspicions if you asked him. Or he might dispel them, in which case confirmation bias might indicate that you should do no such thing.

I never would have heard of this film if it hadn’t been for Sailer. After watching it my family was almost ready to forgive me for renting a string of stinkers because the American Film Institute said they were great. Thanks Steve!

I was disappointed that the only special features on the DVD were a few deleted scenes, with no directors commentary. Office Space had one and it only became a cult hit years after its theater release, so perhaps the same thing will happen with Idiocracy and a better DVD will be released.

Hey, Steve, I thought you were only adopted by the Swiss family Sailer. Were your birth parents related to your adoptive ones?

One problem I notice is that in order to come up with a situation in which you can benefit lots of distantly related people you use a large scale modern political example, and then in order to avoid free-riding you bring back small scale hunter-gatherer times. It seems to me that the two conflict and that the larger the numbers of people and the more distant the relation the less important you personally are with regards to their fate.

Ron, it wasn’t Iwka who identified “conservatives” as being skeptical of both evolution and global warming. Chait did it and then Iwka just quoted him with a few alteration.

I didn’t know what ANOVA was. Thanks Razib, for my learning experience of the day.

Why can’t jody just admit he/she has nothing to contribute to any discussion beyond his hangups with blacks? It would be one thing if you cited some data and compared some explanatory theories as Sailer does here, and the Inductivist and the folks at Gene Expression do, but all you ever seem to say is “Hurr, black people suck”. The first time you do it we all learn that jody does not like black people. The next time, we see that jody does not like black people, but we already knew that. I think we can remember that well enough without you having to remind us over and over.

Peter Frost has noted that aside from blonde aborigines, there are also “brown hair among the Yukaghir of eastern Siberia, and fair hair among some Inuit bands of the western Canadian Arctic”. I’ve never seen any pics of these. Additionally, I’ve heard of red-hair among aborigines mentioned on this site, but while I’ve seen pics of blond hair among them, I have not seen any reds.

Thanks, John. All the pictures of blond aboriginals I’ve seen have been from sites pointing out “Hey, there are blond aboriginals!”. Your link doesn’t make any note of it, so it would have been tough to find with a search engine.

I’m as tired of Obama-mania (a malady only members of the media appear vulnerable to) as the next person and I don’t mind seeing his shining star tarnished (the phrase “Audacity of Hope” along makes me want to retch), but I found the article rather sleazy. His dad is dead and their connection seems to consist solely of genetics. Rather than dredging up embarrassing stories about his relations, it would be better if we learned some actual substance about this guy who is aiming for the presidency on nothing but surface.

That’s my college, but I don’t recognize anyone from the previews. At any rate, go Illini!

The Clark paper says that “Genetically modern English males are 50-100% Anglo Saxon, despite the fact that Anglo-Saxon migrants to England in the fifth century AD are now believed to have constituted no more than 0.5% to 10% of the population”. I have read several other places that genetic tests show the English to still by far be the same genetically as they were when the Britons (or Welsh) dominated the area and that there is very little genetic contribution from the Angles, Saxons or Jutes. A parallel might be the “Arabization” of the Egyptians culturally but not genetically, which I only learned about thanks to the folks here. So what’s the real deal with the English?

Razib, that’s pretty much the impression I had been under: just a few locations with a high genetic input from Germanic settlers. Clark didn’t specify “East Anglia” or “Northeast England”. East Anglia is supposed to be where most of the Puritans came from, and they are usually highlighted as the archetype of Weber’s “Protestant Work Ethic”. David Hackett Fischer argued in Albion’s Seed though that the Quakers from the North Midlands had the most influence on American capitalism.

I’m not asserting that Obama actually did face horrible racism in his hardscrabble Hawaiian youth, but by concluding that it was not the case due to the relative lack of whites in his prep school, aren’t you repeating the myth that only whites can be racist?

stirner: A lot of asian immigrants were from the bottom-of-the-barrel in the continental United States as well, but they still tended to be very successful and upwardly mobile. It seems that white Hawaiians are no dynamos, so I would think an explanation based on Hawaii would make more sense than on its immigrants.

Speaking of attending class for free, I go the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in the last semester my partner in one of my programming courses had been unable to pay for even her previous semester, and as a result was unregistered, but the T.As and so on were willing to ignore that on the assumption that it would all get sorted out before the end of the course. She ended up dropping the half-semester quantum mechanics course we were both enrolled in after having completed everything except the final exam, and went for a good while longer in other courses before dropping out completely. If education was especially valuable in its own right there’d be a lot more people free-riding, but the relative lack of people doing so indicates it primarily has signalling value.

Is it actually the case that use of tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, heroin etc are evolutionarily harmful? Tobacco doesn’t kill you until well after your prime baby-making years, and even if alcohol does cause temporary impotence I have a hard time believing it doesn’t result in more pregnancies. Diamond just seemed to think all that stuff is OBVIOUSLY bad so there’s no way it might be selected still today just like long-tailed birds and hot-dogging gazelles, but I’d like some evidence.

My side’s Science can beat up your side’s Science.

That magicdragon dude really had me chuckling. Run for your life before Chimpy McHitlerburton gets you!
Cochran has the right idea.

Jupiter, you are fantastically ignorant. When Mao tried this idea you trumpet, it was disastrous. The only reason I can fathom anybody calling for Mao’s policies after hindsight showing us how horrifically they turned out is if you hate your countryment and want them to suffer. Considering the vitriol contained in your other posts, that does not seem entirely out of the question.

Thanks for the heads up, C.M. I can’t believe how much time I wasted here before you showed me the light.

I find a lot of what Dawkins and Dennet say to be interesting, but Harris comes off as laughable. Perhaps I should shell out for his books before coming to that conclusion though.

I had been under the impression that eastern europe had less pluralism and tolerance than the west. Perhaps it was primarily jews (which westerners then heard stories from) who were kicked around, and we never heard about the treatment of Tatars and Kalmyks. It also seems to me that people more familiar with history think of empires as tolerant/cosmopolitan out of necessity compared to nation states (discussed here), while to the average person an empire is a big bad thing stomping on its subjected peoples (as this jokingly points out in cliche #133, the empire are always the bad guys, the kingdom good guys). 
 
Different ethnicities are often lumped together as just Muslims, but we should expect variability in their behavior. Gary Brecher describes Berbers as being much more tolerant/easy-going than Arabs. People seem divided on Shia vs Sunni. Sometimes the Shia/Persians are known as extra-crazy suicidal “We love Pepsi-Cola and you love death” or “There is no fun in Islam” types, at other times they are remembered as once being rather secular, highly educated/intelligence and behaving cautiously (they didn’t fight the Taliban despite some of their officials being killed, and while they fought Iraq they were clearly responding to an attack) while the Sunnis are the ones behind al Qaeda/Wahabbi islam that we need to look out for. Is there a major difference in what one Muslim statesmen referred to as the “indigestibility” of Muslims among different ethnic groups? The immigrant Turks in Germany don’t seem as problematic as the South Asians of Britain (I think Razib has highlighted a poll showing how out-of-it some of them are) or the Africans of France (though some claim that the Algerians/Berbers were less involved in the recent riots than others from the Maghreb that identified more as black/poor than muslim) or the Lebanese of Australia. I’ve got a pretty fuzzy grasp of this, but it seems at least as important as whether or not Syria has a Sunni regime.

That is pretty ridiculous. I was astounded when I got to the part about Taiwan and Sweden.

I wonder what you and the gnxp folks have to say about the Dead Reckoning blog (which has been critical of Murray’s WSJ op-eds on NCLB) and the recent study about telling kids intelligence is not innate causing them to do better.

How many people here are left-handed? I am, and I’ve noticed that a disproportionate number of intelligent people also seem to be (I hear it is especially high among scientists). 
 
I’ve also never understood why your brain was considered a mitigating circumstance rather than grounds to be kept away from society.

I think I might have posted this before, but here is “For the law, neuroscience changes everything and changes nothing“, which I found quite good.

My thoughts exactly. What is Bill Scher doing on there? He seems to have never had an original thought in his head and is completely unaware of how dumb he sounds.

Mullah, who would you consider to be the most important critiquers of Islam from within Islam? If I had to think of some of the top of my head it would be some from the Koran Only movement (I guess because it seems similar to the Protestant Reformation, which as a westerner I am apt to compare religious reforms to), but I certainly don’t expect them to cause any withering. I think it is a bad p.r move to talk about “moderate” or “secular” islam. I wouldn’t especially want to refer to myself as moderate or secular even though that’s just what I am. I didn’t come up with it, but I think “humanist islam” is a much better term. 
 
Statements that a certain way of thinking does not “seem sufficient” on an intuitive level is not likely to make much of an impression on the crowd here, since for most of humanity religion is necessary, and many here reject not only religion but various secular substitutes to fill that void. 
 
I’m of Irish descent myself, but I think there was truth to the complaints nativist americans made. Ireland proper was rather late in getting its act together, so it shouldn’t be surprising that its people did not immediately fit very well in American society. 
 
Your description of a particularly offensive form of speech as “not freedom of speech” indicates to me that your concept of “freedom of speech” is radically different from that of the Bill of Rights.

Mullah: It seems to me that Native Americans SHOULD have emulated intolerant nativist whites. That is what they did to the Vikings, so the Vikings left and never returned. They were more hospitable to the Pilgrims, so they wound up dying or being put on reservations. I prefer to avoid national suicide, thank you very much. 
 
Right-wing nativist types today “pick on blacks” because of the social dysfunction and high crime rate within the black community. It is certainly true that blacks did not choose to come here but were forced, but that does not change the facts today. Similar social trends are exhibited by immigrant groups (most notably those from Mexico), and just as prohibiting the slave trade would have averted the social problems we still face today, restricting immigration would help to prevent creating another instance of similar problems. 
 
I don’t know of any people who still “have the audacity to complain about Native Americans”. To paraphrase Chris Rock, most Americans virtually never see multiple native americans anywhere. Complaining about them would be a bit like complaining about martians. 
 
Let me rephrase my question: Who do you consider to be the most prominent critiquers of “Muslims behaviors, actions and methodologies using Islam”? 
 
Just why is it “rightfully so” that “secular Enlightenment development” has a bad name attached to it? You are certainly correct that western societies do not emulate islamic ones, because that would be idiotic and we largely consider those to be dysfunctional societies. The net migration of non-westerners to the west indicates the revealed preference of people for the “secular enlightenment” society. Nobody would want islamic law unless they were a muslim, and the deficiencies of islamic law in comparison to english common law are apparent to the muslims that have lived under both (which is why they don’t go back), even if given the option they might vote to enact sharia in the countries they immigrated to. 
 
America would allow cartoons making fun of blacks and jews. There are racist organizations here that are allowed to promote their viewpoints as long as they do so in a non-violent manner. It is true that Europe has idiotic hate-speech and genocide-denial laws because they do not have the same tradition of free speech. The Jyllands Posten had previously declined to publish a cartoon featuring jesus, but their reasons were that it was not especially funny as they felt it was not offensive at all. Before that they had published a cartoon of jesus, and during the cartoon controversy numerous other newspapers published cartoons with jesus.

Mencius, I haven’t read much Burnham, but you sound an awful lot like him. Would I be correct in guessing you got some these ideas from him?

I was under the impression that the Sistani faction was more popular than Sadr, and that the Badr Brigades were larger than the Mahdi Army.

It’s harder to mock D.C for not kicking out Marion Barry when you’re a Chicagoan. I guess a lot of people think Tammany Hall was just dandy.

It is extremely doubtful that the practice of “dry sex” is genetic, and the slaves brought to America were separated enough from the culture (not to mention the supplies used) of their old continent that I think Steve’s claim that the practice is less common in the West than the East & South is on quite shaky ground.

I get the sense that they would have had screwed up kids even with people they weren’t related to. 
 
Steve Sailer recently linked to some very good pieces on cousin marriage from Stanley Kurtz. 
Part 1 
Part 2. 
 
How common is cousin marriage among hunter-gatherers?

Jeff W., I think the Khoi-San or Oceanic/Australoid people have lower scores than sub-Saharan blacks. The former came as a surprise to Henry Harpending (and to a lesser extent me because of the S.E.S of the “Cape Coloureds” relative to blacks) and the latter would to Jared Diamond if he ever payed attention to IQ scores.

“the relatively low average IQ of humans” 
 
Relative to what? Aren’t humans the highest IQ critters we know of?

I figure I should note that you guys (as well as others) are partly the cause of my recent admitting to myself that I’m an atheist, which I suppose I had not done earlier out of simple pig-headedness. So that’s an extra sentence in purgatory for you corrupting heathens. 
 
I had always laughed at the idea of “atheist Catholics” or Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Wafa Sultan style atheist muslims, but I guess my thinking was too platonic and based on prepositional logic because despite my lack of belief I’m still in some sense the same American Protestant or Calvinist (I was never very spiritual), enough so that I wouldn’t present myself otherwise in meatspace.

“Rootless cosmopolitan”? What is this, Stalinist Russia?

By the way, when the NATIVE BORN WHITE CHRISTIANS take over in an orgy of throat-slitting, what are you going to do to NATIVE BORN WHITE ATHEISTS (not ethnically jewish, in case that’s what’s damning)? I’d just like to know if I have to flee to New Zealand or something.

I would say Card & Krueger is more along the lines of the German children of Af-Am army guys study, in the sense that Charles Murray described it. There have been tons of studies on the subject and the one thing that makes that study special and people reference it so much is the result.

Jupiter, you cretinous idiot, it’s spelled “megalomaniac” not “megalamaniac”. Oh, and one more thing:

NATIVE BORN WHITE CHRISTIAN
NATIVE BORN WHITE CHRISTIAN
NATIVE BORN WHITE CHRISTIAN
NATIVE BORN WHITE CHRISTIAN
NATIVE BORN WHITE CHRISTIAN
NATIVE BORN WHITE CHRISTIAN
NATIVE BORN WHITE CHRISTIAN
NATIVE BORN WHITE CHRISTIAN
NATIVE BORN WHITE CHRISTIAN
NATIVE BORN WHITE CHRISTIAN

I think that’s enough. You don’t need to keep repeating that phrase over and over, nor does it need to be capitalized.

Earth to anti-semite iSteve readers: Sailer is half-jewish by birth, identified with jews when he discovered that fact and at one time even though of himself as a neo-con because they seemed to be the most sensible.

Of course Hitler was one of the worst things to ever happen to white people. That racists adore him is just proof of their purposeful ignorance. Who has killed more white people than Hitler? Only Stalin. What was the major non-white belligerent in that war? Japan. Who was allied with it? Hitler. And for those who think because jews are semitic that makes them non-european (no matter how long they’ve lived there or all they’ve done for western civilization) and only europeans are white, Hitler also courted muslims (the only non-German SS battallion was made up of them). He ran a vampire economy disturbingly similar to communism. Hitler got a bunch of Germans killed, his country split and occupied, part of it by the Bolsheviks he was supposed to protect them from, and tainted with association (even tenuously) all sorts of stuff the p.c crowd shouts down. There simply is no sensible way to spin Hitler as anything but a disaster, as the paint-drinking shit-for-brains obviously was.

For the record I’m Scottish/Irish, baptized Catholic, think the U.S should have stayed out of World Wars 1 (which Germany gets a bum rap for) and 2 and I think Charles Lindbergh was a great American hero.