As an atheist who used to be a fairly strong believer, I’m often pretty apalled by the anti-religious behaviours of other atheists. Over at H&R, for instance, and on a few other blogs, it’s common to see declarations that religion in general and Christianity in particular have caused nothing but suffering for humanity. Of course, this ignores the positive points about religion in general and Christianity in particular.
The point is that the intolerance street goes both ways, and I think it’s very important for those of us who don’t believe in God or gods to recognize that, for the most part, a belief in something like that is in no way harmful to the believers so as long as they leave us alone about it there’s no reason to be particularly hostile to them. Hell, my girlfriend is an Episcopal.

That’s a hard question to answer, as society doesn’t exist.

Hey now, not all of us young guys like them toothpick thing. She was always easy on the eyes, but she does look better with a little more curve. Sort of like how Kelly Clarkson looked better before she lost a bunch of weight, or how Lindsay Lohan was quite fetching before going on the all cocaine diet.

I think Dan makes a pretty good point, but people are extremely attached to the sunk cost fallacy. Hell, I have an econ degree and I’ve done it before: “Well gee, I paid for the tickets, so I might as well go to the movie eventhough I don’t really want to anymore.” That kind of thing.

Thanks for that eloquent post, Razib. I’m an atheist who was formerly a quite fervent religious believer, so maybe my perspective is a bit different than yours, but I am driven crazy by exactly the same thing. The major religions of the world have had a major influence on culture and philosophy over the centuries, and to ignore that is foolish. It’s hard to understand the world without paying attention to large swaths of it. Further, there are bits of Christianity and Judaism (and I’m sure for Islam as well, but I am not very personally familiar with it as I am a former Christian) that actually present fairly useful ideas (parts of Paul’s letters come to mind). To not learn what things are worth learning from them, realizing what they are in historical context, is akin to ignoring Aristotle because the Greeks believed in Zeus. Well, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but you take my meaning.

Because handing governments that much information and power has never gone awry. Nope, perfectly safe, we can trust them to not misuse the information. The governments of the world have never abused their authority before, if you can’t trust them who can you trust?

The best arguments against a database of this type are the same as the best arguments against a national ID card, domestic spying, keeping of your phone records, or just wandering into your house to see if you’re doing anything illegal without a warrant. 
 
Their utility in criminal investigations is inconsequential so far as being required to submit DNA samples absent of any criminal charge violates at least your fourth and fifth amendment rights. Fourth because it is an unreasonable search (warantless, involuntary), fifth because it undermines due process and, I’d argue, forces one to testify against oneself. It further violates the, admittedly, court-interpreted right of privacy.  
 
There’s little evidence that government can be trusted with any power granted to it: we’ve seen this over and over through history, and even the best governments go power mad (emminent domain abuse, the War on Drugs, McCain-Feingold) given enough time and resources. Just handing them what amounts to a pile of free evidence is a monumentally bad idea. Further, one has a right to be presumed innocent, and a DNA database says “we presume you’ll commit a crime, so we need to have your DNA in case you do”.

Scientists by their nature seem to follow the rules, so change the damn rules!
Indeed. I’m one of those crazy libertarians who thinks entering into the country ought to be an easy, straight-forward process for pretty much anyone who wants to come here. My concerns about letting in “the terrorists” aren’t non-existant, but then I remember that the 9-11 guys had entered the country legally, think about how the government can’t even seem to finish off a bunch of untrained peasants armed with old soviet equipment, and then realize that no matter what they do some number of shady characters are going to get into the country.
So screw it, I’m more likely to be hit by lightning than I am to get killed by one of those feared terrorists from a rogue state or whatever, and I’m not sure giving in to xenophobia is productive from a security standpoint. We might as well just start letting people in, can’t hurt us. There will always be bad actors in the world, there’s little you can do without incredibly draconian measures to stop all of them, just have to learn to live with it.

At the risk of sounding defensive, could you please name a social science mandarin, you know, for those of us out of the loop?
TangoMan will remember her, JDM Prof and Queen of Moonbats: Deborah Frisch!

Well, according to the UUA Jefferson was certainly no supersitious fundamentalist.

The primary problem with the anti-evolutionsists is all of them think “evolution” has some sort of goal or ultimate purpose. That’s stupid: it’s more an accident of circumstance. Some things live longer and breed more than other things of the same species, over time this leads to species that are better suited for their environments. It’s not like evolution is sitting out there all: “Damn, which fuzzy critter will be best adapted to this environment? I know! Platypus!”
They can’t conceive of a world where anything happens by accident, and they have a world-view where everything is connected…so naturally the Big Bang must have something to do with planet formation, which must relate to abiogenesis, which must be connected to evolution, therefore Big Bang = Evolution! It’s all “science” right? It makes me want to purposefully confuse different religions to make a point.

Ok, Steve, we’ve got the message. You’ve got the hots for Kelly.

Well, I wouldn’t say no, either.

I was somewhat surprised to discover that the Catholic population of my state has doubled in the past decade from 4% to 8% of the population. Over 50% of Catholics in our state are now Hispanic. I recently attended Catholic holy week services in Spanish at a Catholic Church that has added two Sunday services in Spanish to accomodate the influx of Hispanic Catholics in the area.
I’ve also read that many, if not most, Hispanic Catholics are unregistered, so accurate numbers are not available.
God bless…

Much of the anthracite is located in hard-to-reach areas, including under sea beds, and North Korea lacks the equipment to safely extract it. The brown coal is of very poor quality, as we know from having taken some back to the US for analysis. http://www.nautilus.org/DPRKBriefingBook/energy/DPRK_Energy_2000.pdf

I dont give a rats flying ass about xerxes or his "white persians". They are not european, and I reject them. Leonidas saved white europe from the asiatics…including the whiter looking ones.

How pathetic are the dissenting responses? People invested in the current system have yet to realize that droning on about "holistic" admissions is about as serious as a Republican repeatedly invoking "equality of opportunity" as a defense of yawning income disparities.

Data for high school students nationally such as the College Report’s publicly available statistics on programs like AP Calculus (a very good benchmark for overall merit of high school students) suggests that Jewish students are about 10% of high-performing whites who would be qualified to attend institutions like Harvard. This does mean Jewish students perform at higher levels than the raw percentage of the population they make up, much like Asians. However, if Harvard is in fact more than 10% Jewish, that simply would be a significant overrepresentation compared to academic merit. Legacy and athletic favoritism might factor into admittance for both Jewish and non-Jewish whites, accounting for some discrepancies. (Of course the same measures are relevant for males vs females but one can at least plausibly defend the policy of Ivy League institutions like Harvard to be close to 50-50 male female rather than the roughly 70-30 they would be by merit).

So the only debate on that matter is how Jewish Harvard actually is. It could simply not be true that students of Jewish ethnicity are anywhere close to 20% of students at Harvard or similar Ivy League institutions, but if so then they are being shown favoritism. Harvard refuses to officially gather or release statistics on demographics like that and anyone’s estimates produced so far are shoddy at best so it’s premature to call it concluded.

The same data still strongly indicates Asians are being discriminated against as Asian Americans really should be 25-30% of Harvard and similar institutions unless significant causes of differing application rates can be proven to exist.

To go along with the search for A Moral Equivalent to War, secularists have been searching for a Social Equivalent to Religion ever since the storming of the Bastille. They occasionally hit on promising leads (Communism, Hitlerism) but nothing really suffices as a substitute in the long run.

This quest will only get more relevant. Despite all the post-89 talk about the return of religion, we increasingly find ourselves, as Damon Linker pointed out, in world in which liberalism serves as a comprehensive view of reality and the human good. None of the major liberal theoreticians (Mill, Tocqueville, Madison, Jefferson, even James if you want to call him that) thought that liberalism ought to — or needed to — serve in such a bloated capacity. It was supposed to be an organized communal garden plot for the flourishing of other meanings, especially religious ones.

HBD in The Social Network:

EDUARDO

It’s not that guys like me are generally attracted to Asian girls. It’s that Asian girls are generally attracted to guys like me.

DUSTIN

I’m developing an algorithm to define the connection between Jewish guys and Asian girls.

EDUARDO

I don’t think it’s that complicated. They’re hot, they’re smart, they’re not Jewish, and they can’t dance.

….

MARK (V.O.)

Did you know there are more people with genius IQ’s living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?

I dig absolutely.

The late historian Tony Judt once wrote, “An intellectual by definition is someone temperamentally inclined to rise periodically to the level of general propositions.”

This idea of an “intellectual” is basically synonymous with what joey means by a “curious” person.

When you think about this definition, it becomes clear that a lot of elite undergraduate education is literally “anti-intellectual”: a lot of time and effort is spent making young people reflexively obtuse about the validity of generalizations.

Immanuel Kant was born in 1724. Is he the supreme example of geezer creativity?

(1775) On the Different Races of Man (Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen)
(1781) First edition of the Critique of Pure Reason[115] (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)[116]
(1783) “Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics”[117] (Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik)
(1784) “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?)[118]
(1784) “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht)
(1785) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)
(1786) Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft)
(1786) Conjectural Beginning of Human History
(1787) Second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason[119] (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)[120]
(1788) Critique of Practical Reason[121] (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft)[122]
(1790) Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft)[123]
(1793) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft)[124]
(1793) On the Old Saw: That may be right in theory, but it won’t work in practice (Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis)
(1795) Perpetual Peace[125] (Zum ewigen Frieden)[126]
(1797) Metaphysics of Morals (Metaphysik der Sitten). First part is The Doctrine of Right, which has often been published separately as The Science of Right.
(1798) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht)
(1798) The Contest of Faculties[127] (Der Streit der Fakultäten)[128]
(1800) Logic (Logik)
(1803) On Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik)[129]
(1804) Opus Postumum
(1817) Lectures on Philosophical Theology

As I once heard an Ashkenazi American say about Ashkenazis, “We’re just like other people, only more so.”

I doubt it, this comes from former Congressman John G. Schmitz, by way of Robert Welch.

“Jews are like everybody else, only more so.”
Cf. “[A] secret Communist looks and acts just like anybody else, only more so…” – Robert Welch, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society (1961)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_G._Schmitz

“Jews are like everybody else, only more so.”

Apparently this quote predates Schmitz. Heinrich Heine supposedly said it, among others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Games_(TV_series)

Similar.

It’s worth noting that the original neocons were repelled by *actually existing* Israeli society in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In those days their support for Israel was pretty abstract. Here’s Franklin Foer writing a few years ago in the New Republic:

[Irving Kristol’s] interest in religion had nothing to do with the recent triumph of Zionism. Israel’s socialistic ethos alienated Kristol. “Truth to tell,” he later recalled, “I found Israeli society, on the whole, quite exasperating.” He was not alone. In 1951, he received a copy of a letter from a Columbia student named Norman Podhoretz. This missive had circulated to Kristol by way of Cohen [editor of Commentary], who had received a copy from its original recipient, Lionel Trilling. The letter was an account of Podhoretz’s first visit to Israel. “I felt more at home in Athens!” he told Trilling. “They are, despite their really extraordinary accomplishments, a very unattractive people, the Israelis. They’re gratuitously surly and boorish…. They are too arrogant and too anxious to become a real honest-to-goodness New York of the East.” On the basis of Podhoretz’s chilly response to the Jewish state, Kristol recruited him to write for Commentary.

Judging by Brooks’s yearly sojourns to Tel Aviv, Jewish Americans feel increasingly at home in modern Israel. It’s a significant development.

high IQ Jewish kids, especially college grads, would be highly desirable for officer candidates to help lead our forces. To actually get high IQ personal with the physical skills to be soldiers would be a huge benefit for our military. It would also be beneficial for the Jewish kids to be able to meet fellow Americans who come from different walks of life that they might not otherwise ever encounter. You form close working relationships in the military, and it might help Jewish kids understand the very diverse citizens of this nation.

LOL, from the same Foer article I quoted above:

After [Irving Kristol’s] highly mythologized Arguing the World years at City College—where his alcove in the cafeteria contained other soon-to-be-famous anti-communist intellectuals—the army drafted him into a unit filled with “thugs or near-thugs from places like Cicero (Al Capone’s old base).” His fellow soldiers were “inclined to loot, to rape, and to shoot prisoners of war.” Observing these animal instincts up close deeply disturbed Kristol. “My wartime experience,” he wrote, “did have the effect of dispelling any remnants of anti-authority sentiments (always weak, I now think) that were cluttering up my mind.” Within a decade, he began writing laudatory essays about the virtue of conformity.

“Animal instincts”: what does that remind me of?

Very early in life [Kramer] had picked up the knowledge that the Italians and the Irish were animals. The Italians were pigs, and the Irish were mules or goats.

Whites will be relegated to historical footnote, just like in Latin America. Oh, wait…

It’s less white obsolescence than the slow, steady Hollywood Hills-ization of American whites. Depressing.

“are they SWPL anti-white or mocking SWPL anti-white?”

both.

i thought blacks were supposed to have an advantage at split-second decision-making, a la preaching and jazz.

OT: this is a pretty amusing Kinsley gaffe by Sam Harris.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/im-not-the-sexist-pig-youre-looking-for

A woman asks him why he has so many more male readers than female, and he walks right into the trap by answering the question honestly.

For the unenlightened, the journalist Michael Kinsley famously defined a “gaffe” as when a public figure tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.

“What happens when a linchpin of political correctness becomes scientifically untenable?”

It’s not that nothing will happen. It will just be gradual, grudging, and piecemeal. I think Murray is kidding himself that he’ll live to see the day when some peer-reviewed article prompts his erstwhile enemies to say, “Gee, Charles, we can’t argue with the Science. We’re really embarrassed and sorry.”

Over the next 20 years you’ll have some obscure coverage of The Science that reports, more or less, “Well, this seems to indicate V, but there’s no evidence for WXYZ.” “Sure, you might reasonably conclude VW, but let’s not forget we have no grounds for XYZ.” “It may be true that VWX, but what’s really important is YZ…”

This process will take decades, and nobody who toed the blank slate line will be subject to some grand moment of mortification. Just think of how excited some misguided people were about the imminent publication of Wade’s book.

“The main driver for high intelligence seems to be cold weather”

I would agree that this seems to be the main factor, which makes the case of South Indians, or at least the South Indian elite, really interesting. Because they obviously have high intelligence.

My first grade class hatched some mallard ducks, and I took two of them home. (This seems completely bizarre to me now, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. Kudos to my parents for going along with it.) After several months my family drove to a lake about 30 miles away and let them go. A year later some ducks made a nest under a bush directly adjacent to our front porch. There were 8 or so ducklings. The mother must have been one of mine, because ducks never made nests in our neighborhood. To this day I can’t wrap my head around the pinpoint accuracy of migratory flight navigation. Science doesn’t fully understand it either.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=835373029816450

Speaking of birds…this video is unreal.

It would be amusing to have one of those YouTube super-compilations of all the white muggers in movies from the 1970s to the 2000s. Don’t walk down the wrong alley in Chicago or else some sort of John Malkovich look-alike might shoot your parents!

I’ve noticed that the savvier filmmakers try to square the circle (realism vs. sensitivity) by casting two muggers as an interracial crime team, one white and one black.

“I think it might have more to do with the change in drinking age from 18 to 21.”

Except much of Europe has higher rates of alcoholism than the United States.

I don’t know the data, but binge drinking doesn’t seem to have increased in the past 30-40 years. It doesn’t seem to have decreased either.

“You should basically stop using gendered nouns”

What Upworthy hath wrought. This is the Washington Post, for heaven’s sake, and they are deliberately writing dumb-downed headlines to make them seem like a peppy, precocious 16-year-old girl wrote them. They should basically stop. Do I have to point out the irony of how the adverb choice is gendered; it’s signaling “female”? Basically.

“Ethnic pronouns like Latina, however, don’t seem to carry the same stigma as other gendered words.”

LOL, take a trip to the garden of academe. You will find papers in which every latino is rendered “latino/a,” every chicano a “chicano/a.” For 50 pages, basically. I basically don’t understand why the masculine ending takes precedence, even above alphabetical priority.

“No, we need a hipper name that is more representative and inclusive for modern users. Modern International? Common International?”

Ah, but you can already see the jacobin-wing SMJW counteroffensive. “Modern/Common International” is imperialist. It’s trying to wrap the hegemonic English language — it’s just a dialect with smart bombs! — in the cloak of normativity. I’ll see your sensitivity and raise you, good sirs.

“dumb-downed”

Well, that was an own goal as far as typos go. Sheesh.

@whorefinder

Those kinds of hypotheticals are unhelpful. And Churchill would have been a member of the BNP!!! Probably not, if you could have transferred his embryo to a womb circa 1980.

re: 1984, I learned something recently that should have leapt out at me when I read the book: Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism is pretty clearly James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941).

I had no idea that “Kolkata” was now insisted upon. The Wikipedia page for Calcutta redirects you to the PC name. Why do we need to write Kolkata but it’s perfectly acceptable to write Spain instead of Espana? There’s no consistency, at first blush. This demand that we de-anglicize an anglicization is very strange, until you think about it: cumbersome anglicizations exist, more or less, to annoy and humiliate the old colonial powers.

It reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin. The comedy of the book consists in the unpronounceable main character, an expat Russian professor, mangling the English language and getting hopelessly snarled up in American mores. It’s all very funny until you try to reference the book in conversation: PIN? POO-NIN? PUH-NEEN? PUNION? Nabokov lets this abused fictional creature take a kind of petty vengeance on the reader.

OT – “black bodies” update. From WaPo

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/13/im-a-beautiful-black-woman-with-a-white-husband-people-assume-im-a-prostitute-all-the-time/?tid=sm_fb

“With that national attention centered on Ferguson, Mo., over the past few weeks, the topic of black bodies in public spaces has permeated the media. While this important discourse must continue, it must also expand from men’s experiences alone to include the unique ways African American women are targets of racial profiling and harassment.”

Steve, do realize you like to mock Marin County, on the one hand, and Yglesias’s desire to transform places like Marin County on the other. It’s facile stuff.

What does Steve think Marin County and Malibu ought to look like? He mocks their hypocrisy but counsels his readers to learn how to emulate it.

“My prejudice is that concentric loyalties are more reasonable and best for the world as a whole”

Yeah, but, as you say, concentric loyalties are fairly natural and therefore were more common throughout human history than leapfrogging loyalties. Pinker’s book on the recent multi-century decline in violence gives pride of place to leapfrogging loyalties, though he describes them in other terms. The problem, as Razib described it in a recent post, is that leapfroggers have to search for ever more exquisitely unusual minorities… in numerical descending order, women > blacks > gays > trans.

At any rate, we shouldn’t discount the importance of obscure continental philosophy in the rise of leapfrogging loyalties. Emmanuel Levinas is sort of like Rotherham.txt

“she was anti-pornography, a battle she appears to have lost overwhelmingly.”

Right, and that’s a giveaway that a lot of rape “culture” hysteria is disingenuous. Adolescent boys immerse themselves in a daily bath of internet pornography; it’s the dark matter of twenty-first century male sexual development. If you judge by what they write about, this doesn’t terribly concern feminists, especially not third-wave feminists at Jezebel whose salaries are subsidized in part by the porn sites owned by Nick Denton. They’d rather talk about more pressing issues like damsel-in-distress tropes in video games or the problematic nature of Robin Thicke lyrics. It’s strange because a lot of internet porn scenarios would in fact constitute rape in the real world, and impressionable young men consume this stuff with compulsive repetition. But it’s not that strange: the need to affirm the sexual revolution, beginning to end, means that porn ultimately can’t be condemned. Plus, when you get down to it, reservations about porn are too prudish, too Christian, and hence — for college-educated young women — déclassé.

The Renaissance is one of those tedious historiographical muddles, and I don’t want to get into it. I’ll just point out that dna turtles is conflating the Renaissance with late medieval humanism, which isn’t the whole story. A canonical history of the Renaissance like Burckhardt’s from the nineteenth century is more concerned with Renaissance Italy as a constellation of agonistic societies, societies of competitive individualism. Societies dominated by princes who, unlike the feudal princes of the North, owed nothing to tradition, inheritance, consecration: they were illegitimate, usurpers, sometimes de facto warlords who could command no customary loyalty. They had to keep, by the constant exercise of their wits, the illegitimate power which they had acquired by force or fraud. In other words, the new Italian princes, by their very illegitimacy, were driven to make a virtue of an individualism which had destroyed the fabric of inherited society…. You can see with Burckhardt you are very far afield from a “gee, wasn’t Lucretius grand?” understanding of the Renaissance.

Also, this bit, from Charles Nauert’s fantastic little book on Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, is pretty amusing:

“What is hard for modern people to grasp but seemed obvious to Italians of the Renaissance is that education in the humanistic subjects appeared practical while education in logic and natural science, the dominant subjects in the medieval liberal-arts curriculum, seemed to breed idle debate about purely speculative issues that were useless for real life.”

Heh.

it must be the lack of blond hair

The embarrassing events of recent weeks have reiterated another problem the Democrats face with trying to assemble peripheral people into a majority (beyond the obvious difficulties of reconciling the interests and values of, say, black church ladies and Wellesley College gender-queers).

Such reconciliation is child’s play compared to what the Democrats used to have to do: reconcile Southern populists and Midwestern Germans with New England WASPs and New York Jews. They managed to do it for decades, and were the dominant political party of the 20th century. And there’s nothing discernible on the horizon that comes even close to the coalition-cracking power of the Civil Rights movement.

Bailyn not readable? Huh? I haven’t read his “Peopling of North America” books but The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, The Origins of American Politics, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson — all of them are a joy to read. Bailyn writes with economy and verve.

One thing that’s great about Ideological Origins (1965; 67) is that it offers a highly sophisticated “discourse analysis” of colonial literature before historians and literary academics became awfully solemn and ponderous and Foucauldian about everything having to do with discourse. What’s more, Bailyn implicitly beat Quentin Skinner to the idea that a mass of mediocre writers and thinkers, more than the outstanding, seemingly “exemplary” figures of the day, offers a surer guide to the ideological reflexes and conscious deliberations of a certain period.

I’m not sure H’s early novels about the sexual revolution would have been ignored in the US. It’s true that American Psycho (1991) was probably the last truly “edgy” and shamelessly unPC novel published to a broad reception (almost 25 long years ago), but that is more of a reflection on the cultural homogeneity of our literary class and its own self-censorship, tendencies which the internet has exacerbated. H’s early novels, as English originals, would have gotten a publisher here. Probably been widely discussed, too. However, a novelist just starting out with the American equivalent of Submission would’ve been universally turned down.

There are interesting similarities between Brett Easton Ellis and H., and I think Ellis was an important influence on H. They’re both equal parts sentimental and nihilistic, luridly verbalizing an attitude that was already implicit in Hemingway. But H. is cannier, more broadly educated in Western intellectual history, and has wider interests. However, I still don’t believe your Francophone reader that he is a master of French prose. Perry Anderson is right: H. is flat, pedestrian prose combined with scandalously vital ideas.

I think Ellis was an important influence

Yes, now I remember where I got this. It was from James Wood’s typically fine review-essay on Houellebecq.

http://www.powells.com/review/2006_09_14.html

Denis Demonpion, in his journalistic biography … Houellebecq Unauthorized: Inquiry Into a Phenomenon, reports, rather dismayingly, that Houellebecq is a great admirer of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Demonpion writes that in the course of a dialogue with Ellis, arranged by Der Spiegel, Houellebecq asserted that he found most frightening in Ellis’s book the fact that the protagonist feels nothing during the sexual act: “That’s where there is a connection with my own books.”

Frustrating that Éric Zemmour and Thilo Sarrazin aren’t in English yet. Pretty ridiculous that Americans can’t read the most popular book on politics by a German in over a decade. (We’re Americans!!!1 after all.) Alt Right: guerilla translations, plz.

By the way, an interesting thing about Zemmour’s book is that he regards political correctness and free market liberalism as twin American viruses, imported to France.

“A few years ago, he was an obscure poet and recovering mental patient with a single novel under his belt and a day job debugging computers at the French parliament. Then in 1998, he published Les Particules Elémentaires (The Elementary Particles)…”

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/nov/19/fiction.michelhouellebecq

My own answer to ““how does he get away with it?” is that Houellebecq is a philosemite who prefers to blame the common man for his plight rather than explore the causes of the modern malaise….

The same goes for Bret Easton Ellis also a writer of despair-porn who refuses to go to root causes and prefers to attribute blame to a spiritual debasement in his protagonists

Houellebecq’s main concern, in most of his work, is the sexual revolution. It was not “caused” by Jews. More broadly, the “root” of our center-left, center-right globalist Western political consensus is, again, not “Jews.” A “large number of free-thinking Jews” is a contributing factor, but not this mysterious ROOOT cause that you speak of. How do you explain the evolution of modern Britain, to the left culturally of our bluest of blue states, in terms of Jewish influence?

A flippant response, pathetically plagiarized from Sailer’s blog. A bad habit on the Alt Right is to conclude that since mainstream discussion of Jewish cultural agitation in any kind of negative light is swiftly punished, Jews must have had an underdetermining involvement in anything they don’t like.

I don’t have a comprehensive knowledge of Houellebecq’s interviews and public statements, but I think you are naively taking everything he says at face value when he’s under hostile or at least critical questioning. Do you really believe that Houellebecq, given all that he has written, profoundly admires Islam? He said so in the pages of the Paris Review!

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/01/06/do-immigrants-take-jobs-from-american-born-workers

OT: new NYT Room for Debate on immigration.

There is also the problem of France’s secularism. A ban on head scarves in public schools and on full-face veils feels to many Muslims like an unfair constraint on their religious freedom. Some also find it hard to accept that blasphemy is not a crime in France, and that Charlie Hebdo and other publications have a right to satirize religious leaders. Some students in French schools with large immigrant and Muslim populations refused to participate in the national minute of silence following the Charlie Hebdo attack because they objected to what they had heard about the magazine’s depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.

C’mon France. You gotta let Muslim clericalists get in on French republican values like anticlericalism.

Agree with Anon. Post titles looked better before.

Well, trapped is kind of the point of prison, isn’t it?

The social-scientific breakthrough of 1975, no joke.

I think Gregory Clark has claimed (and so has Murray) that social mobility is much less now than it used to be.

No, the counterintuitive argument in Clark’s The Son Also Rises is that social mobility is consistently low across different countries and time periods, regardless of social expenditures to counteract class privilege.

Clark explicitly criticizes Murray for exaggerating the novelty of assortative mating.

She* won a gold medal, bigot.

I guess “kinderarchy” was taken. It’s catchier.

I’m not sure what to think about tracing helicopter parenting back to the early modern Netherlands. I’m more struck by the novelty of current practices. For example, it’s a newfangled phenomenon (~20-30 years old) that middle-class married couples feel obligated to commit Social Seppuku when they start having children. One of Matthew Wiener’s subversive yet largely ignored points in Mad Men was that parents in 1960 were just as interested in socializing with other adults as they were in raising their children. You get the same sense when you read John Cheever’s stories about mid-century suburbia. Cheever’s intention is to give you shivers, but he has the opposite effect on me. A robust community of nosy neighbors, gossiping about my life, seems like social paradise in comparison with life in an anonymous apartment complex.

The dissipation of white ethnic loyalties hastened this process along. Much of my grandparents’ social life in the 50s and 60s centered on German Clubs, most of which are now extinct. Nothing quite as communally robust replaced them in the lives of my parents.

Magical Thinking: The Non-Gathering

(aka the dork enlightenment)

LOL, the Dark Enlightenment is basically a guy with Joseph de Maistre’s Wikipedia page on one tab, porn on five other tabs, all accessed through a great new Apple consumer product he excitedly waited in line for.

I don’t get this wave of consternation over internet comments. Slate and Gawker, among others, have already solved this “problem” by making comment-writing and comment-reading tedious and pleasure-free. The “link leading to cumbersome mini box with comments,” which the NY Times also uses, puts precisely the moat between article and unwashed flyover opinion-givers that the Columbia School of Journalism seems to want.

To be fair, I remember the glory days, 5-6 years ago, when The New Republic only permitted subscribers to comment on most articles. The comment section on the latest Jonathan Chait article would be a civil discussion involving some precocious undergraduates and a couple of old Jewish guys in New York named “Artie” and yours truly.

Right, think of Leon Wieseltier’s arts section circa late 90s, early 2000s as an ideologically similar space, except not quite as ruthless. Adam Kirsch is a fairly representative Tablet contributor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Kirsch

Incidentally, there’s an interesting phenomenon in which youthful Jewish writers have an encounter with NOTORIOUS ANT-SEMITE TS Eliot which turns out to be the most formative of their intellectual lives. What Kirsch describes applies equally well to a guy like Harvard Prof and New Yorker contributor Louis Menand.

“[The Obama era], which never became as post-racial as many predicted.”

Honestly, who was predicting that? Who was writing in 2008 that we were about to enter a post-racial America?

What happened was that Obama eschewed the traditional (i.e. Jesse-Jacksonian) hallmarks of black politicians, a few political writers called his campaign style “post-racial,” and then lazy commentators in need of a hook transformed this into one of the greatest strawmen in the history of journalism.

John McWhorter provided a rare (i.e. actually existing) paean to a post-racial America.

http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/30/end-of-racism-oped-cx_jm_1230mcwhorter.html

Surprisingly , it makes for relevant reading in the waning days of the Obama era:

It’s not an accident, however, that increasingly, alleged cases of racism are tough calls, reflecting the complexity of human affairs rather than the stark injustice of Jim Crow or even redlining. A young black man is shot dead by three police officers and only one of them is white. A white radio host uses a jocular slur against black women–used for decades in the exact same way by black rappers celebrated as bards.

The issue, then, is degree. When it comes to racism, too many suddenly think in the binary fashion of the quantum physicist: either there is no racism or there “is” racism, which, no matter its nature or extent, indicts America as a land with bigotry in its warp and woof.

He’s almost 60. Successful meal ticket was a success.

http://www.salon.com/2011/03/29/most_segregated_cities/slide_show/10

Similarly, Salon blames Milwaukee’s hypersegregation on Scott Walker.

Jason DeParle of The New York Times said essentially the same thing that Steve is saying in his investigative book on the consequences of welfare reform. Self-described socialist and esteemed academic sociologist Christopher Jencks reviewed the book in the NYRB and essentially agreed with DeParle. (Alas, no apologies to Charles Murray were forthcoming.) How frustrating that liberals have had these high-profile come-to-Jesus moments, which are now utterly forgotten because the Internet and its innumerable brigades of angry tweeters have managed to prop up the fainting body of the 1970s racial orthodoxy.

I think you’re downplaying the extent to which Obama was influenced by liberal Christianity. In the early days of his administration he used to select Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead for various favorite book lists (such as his early facebook page). I doubt this was chosen by his handlers. To me this was evidence that he wasn’t the godless opportunist alleged by Christian critics and atheist supporters such as Bill Maher. Gilead will bore you to tears if you don’t have a fairly pronounced spiritual sensibility. The man has great respect for the liberal Protestant tradition in this country.

Steve, what do you make of the Eric Garner incident?

As Laettner points out in the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, the only truly entitled starting Duke player on the famous Hurley/Laettner lineup was … Grant Hill. The rest of them were blue or lower-middle class.

What made it even more iStevey were the pervasive rumors that Christian Laettner was gay. Hostile crowds would chant “ho-mo-sex-u-al” and “fag-got,” mainly because he looked like a movie star.

Also, watch the footage from the NBA draft when Laettner is picked third. Has anyone else been booed at the draft like that? Ever? Honest question.

I believe Steve is given to complaining about Tech people hyping the novelty of their startups (which are often essentially traditional, e.g. a taxi service) in order to get around customary regulations. Which is part of what she is saying.

It’s revealing that Pete Townshend wrote “My Generation” at 20 while Nate Ruess (of the band Fun) wrote the millennial anthem “We Are Young” at 30.

God forbid they make a token concession to the majority culture of the country that made them richer than the Sun King.

PMan, formerly Udolpho, nee Nancyboy, wrote an entertaining takedown all the back on November 20. He should be given some credit.

NSFW

http://mpcdot.com/forums/topic/8194-rapes-that-didnt-happen-dot-txt/

Does Ron Unz read Douthat consistently? This is just absurdly unfair to Douthat and frankly bizarre. He’s the most intellectually substantial writer the NY Times has. Sailer has a very low threshold for banality and he is a great admirer of Douthat.

Maybe if I just APPRECIATED the FOUR SEASONS like Ron Unz I would have a different perspective on Ross Douthat.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/11/ross-douthat-keeps-getting-better-and.html

Mockery aside, you shouldn’t move to Hyde Park if crime is actually your main concern. UCPD makes the neighborhood livable, and yeah, there aren’t many murders, but if you live in Hyde Park you will inevitably get to know a bunch of people who have been mugged. Occasionally it happens right in the middle of the university library.

UC crime emails are arrive to everyone’s box remarkably regularly and frequently and they are exactly what you’d expect them to be – “the suspect is a young black male”, etc.

Actually, they tend to expurgate the racial descriptions of the suspects in these “Security Alerts.” (They are sent so haphazardly it seems the function of the alerts is not really information but enabling the UC to say it does X to look out for students’ safety.) The thinking appears to be: well, everyone knows what race the muggers are, so it would be tacky to describe them as black. However, this creates problems on the rare occasions when the suspect isn’t black, and on those occasions the UC just shamelessly and comically adds a racial description to the alert.

e.g.

6:00 p.m., Sunday, September 7 – A University student walking on the sidewalk at 54th Street and Ellis Avenue was approached by two suspects. One suspect implied he had a handgun, but no weapon was seen. The suspects took the victim’s property before fleeing westbound on foot. The victim was not physically injured and declined medical attention.

6:45 p.m., Sunday, September 7 – Two University students walking westbound on 54th Street between Ingleside Avenue and Ellis Avenue were approached by two suspects. One suspect implied he had a handgun, but no weapon was seen. The suspects took property from the victims and fled in an unknown direction. The victims were not physically injured.

6:50 p.m., Sunday, September 7 – A University student walking northbound on University Avenue between 54th Street & 55th Street was approached by two suspects, one of whom implied he had a handgun, but no weapon was seen. The suspects demanded the victim’s cell phone, however fled southbound on foot when a witness approached. The victim was not physically injured.

In two of the incidents the victims indicated one of the suspects had a tattoo on his face.

VERSUS

The suspect is described as a male, white, 19-20 years-of-age, approximately 6’0”, short blonde hair, fair complexion, wearing a dark polo shirt and dark pants.

Tattooed-American vs white guy

Right, Rahm Emanuel’s kids go the Lab School. It’s great because there is a reasonably amount of face-saving diversity in the school, but they’re all the children of rich people and UC professors.

Formerly known as the John Dewey school. Progressive education works pretty well if you have a class full of the children of economists and literary scholars.

Obama friend and lifelong resident Valerie Jarrett puts it this way: “Hyde Park is the real world as it should be. If we could take Hyde Park and we could help make more Hyde Parks around our country, I think we would be a much stronger country.”

One, two, many UCPDs is what this country needs. Double bubbles for everyone.

Case in point:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/03/actress-jada-pinkett-smiths.html

Little did those Harvard students realize that Jada Pinkett Smith and her husband Will are heroically non-normatively polyamorous in their marriage.

Anyone remember when Salon used to have a regular column by Camille Paglia? LOL. That was before the SJW clickbaiters and tweet-slingers turned the internet into one big gray-gooey pile of “problematic.”

Can you explain what the golden border means?

Right, based on the elliptical gestures at new European anti-Semitism in this piece, you could make a crack about how Frum is following a version of what Derrick Bell called “interest convergence.” (“Whites will promote racial advances for blacks only when they also promote white self-interest.”) But that would be unfair, because he is equally sensible about hispanic immigration to the US, which has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

Part of Daley and Rahmbos plan to move out blacks has to do with Chicago’s pension crisis. If they do not revitalize the city by displacing the low-rents and encourage rich yuppies to move in then the city will quickly resemble Detroit. Perhaps they are purposefully destroying the suburbs but it seems as though they are moving most blacks further than that – Rockford, Joliet, etc.

The next big Daleyesque plan I think they are going for is to yuppify the neighborhoods on the south lakefront. They even converted an old steel mill area into a gorgeous lakefront park. Next step is a Whole Foods and new, high rise, lake view properties. I wouldn’t be surprised if a light rail were built along the lake front. (Near certainty because yups hate hate HATE buses).

You should give “Wreckers” a hyperlink for the benefit of readers not yet fluent in Sailerese.

But isn’t low-density public housing in the suburbs better than the Cabrini version, even if we all get to smile at the rich people benefiting personally while congratulating themselves on their generosity of spirit? You said yourself, Steve, that the chief problem with being poor is that you have poor neighbors. The Cabrini model increases that problem by an order of magnitude. Is there no way to disperse poor blacks into areas where middle-class behavior can be modeled for them without turning those areas into Ferguson, MO? We should try not to let those areas arrive at the poor black density of Ferguson.

This is a founding population, who were here long before most of our ancestors were. They deserve some measure of sympathetic attention, no matter how seemingly intractable their problems.

Caldwell’s lengthy review of The Bell Curve in the (I think) American Spectator is really something. It’s the kind of piece by a respected, mainstream journalist that was only possible in the freer intellectual climate before the internet. He calls them out for not being pessimistic enough and for shirking the full depressing logic of their own research.

That’s why you’re not a politician. It was a shrewd way to frame it for someone running for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

“Body” crops up far more often in postmodern feminist literary theory than in Foucault. There it is (rather surprisingly) conceptualized as the ultimate reality, in contrast to the abstractions beloved by Enlightenment thinkers.

Here’s a related book: “In Bodies That Matter, renowned theorist and philosopher Judith Butler argues that theories of gender need to return to the most material dimension of sex and sexuality: the body. Butler offers a brilliant reworking of the body…”

Flip to the introduction. Who do you find on the very first page? Foucault.

Pretty sure they got the tic from him and repackaged it, naturally, for their own purposes.

Yes, Fanon as well. But flip through a book like George Yancy’s Black Bodies, White Gazes and the Foucauldian component to the meme is hard to miss: “Although Michel Foucault did not have Black bodies in mind when he wrote that…”

That moment when Rand Paul ostentatiously rolled his eyes at Christie’s talk of hugging family members of 9/11 victims was startlingly “post-post 9/11.”

What are the liabilities of a Paul presidency besides his libertarian dopeyness on immigration?