Let me offer a perspective as an ethnic Korean who graduated from Stuyvesant a quarter century ago and who subsequently went on to an Ivy League university and a top ten Ph.D. program in my chosen field.

“Education realist” quoted a commenter on his website thusly:

“Leaving out the technical jargon, the Chinese and Koreans are definitely gaming and cheating tests overseas. When you read of recent Asian immigrants acing the NY tests despite limited English, it seems likely they’re doing the same thing over here.”

I arrived in the United States as a middle schooler 1 1/2 years before I took the test for Stuyvesant (and for Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech). At the time I had very limited English skills, but I could tell that in most other subjects (including history, which has been a passion for me since childhood), I was ahead of my peers by at least a year or two. In math, I was probably ahead by three or four. I realized right away that my lack of English ability was holding me back greatly.

So during the following summer, I went to the local library daily for about 8-10 hours a day (excluding Sundays which were for church and related activities). During this time, I looked up every word in an English dictionary. Then I looked up every definition for that word in an English-Korean dictionary. You could imagine what a tough slog this was. It was painfully boring, but I did it because I thought I needed to overcome my crippling weakness. By the third month, the edges of the pages of the English-Korean dictionary (made with very thin paper) had been completely worn and I had to purchase a second copy.

The only things I did during the awaking hours this summer were: studying English, reading, playing sports (I have been an athlete always and was specially selected for volleyball, rifle shooting and baseball in Korea; as well I have been a martial artist all my life and have trained in Judo, Tae Kwon Do and boxing since childhood). My parents allowed me to watch television occasionally, but only on the condition that I repeated after every word uttered on TV, including jingles (“Have you driven a Ford… lately” still rings in my brain). My parents wanted to ensure that I had no “Asian accent.” In this they were largely successful — my accent is a combination of Queens, NY and the Midwest (whence my ethnically German wife of nearly twenty years hails and where I spent much time).

Throughout this period and thereafter in high school, I also read voraciously in English. When Paul Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” came out to great acclaim and popularity, I read this cover to cover, looking up every word I did not understand — and they were legion. I also ended up reading many of the books cited in that book.

I was not the only middle schooler at this library. During the same summer, roughly 25 other students my age were dropped off by their parents most days. Even though Asians were not numerous in my neighborhood at the time, all but two of my library compatriots were Asian. The remaining two were Russian immigrants who appeared to be as intensely academic as the Asians.

Although I do not doubt that some Asian students engage in cheating, my experience and observation are that cheating does not explain the phenomenal rate of Asian acceptance at Stuyvesant. Relatively high IQ and very intense work ethic likely explain the situation more than cheating.

In any case, I was rewarded with high scores. Reputedly, I scored in the top twenty among all test takers my year (subsequently I tested 99 percentile for both the SAT and the GRE; I never took the LSAT or the GMAT, but my prep testing also placed me in the top 1% of those tests as well).

There were two significant scandals during my time at Stuyvesant. One was, indeed, a cheating scandal. The ringleaders of the cheating scheme were mostly Jewish (they were only lightly punished — more on this below). The other scandal was a computer hacking scandal. One of my friends was actually arrested by the Feds and had his computer confiscated. Of the three I knew who were arrested, two were white (one Jewish, one gentile) and third was Asian. They all cut some sort of a deal with the Feds and the Air Force. I heard at the time that one of them went to work for the Air Force part time through high school and college and later full time professionally.

Among my peers at Stuyvesant, cheating was considered a high risk, low reward endeavor. In the first place, quite a few of my Asian peers were intense Evangelical Protestants and wouldn’t dream of cheating. It was considered extremely sinful. Also, for many lower and lower middle class (or “fresh off the boat”) immigrant Asian students without any connection or safety net, the potential consequences of cheating were catastrophic. It simply wasn’t worth the risk. Frankly, the largely white (including many Jewish) teachers and administrators were not likely to (and did not) look kindly upon cheating Asian students.

Those who engaged in cheating regularly at Stuy were more likely to be upper middle class students. They weren’t quite upper class enough to not care about academics entirely (most such types went to private schools, but there were some of those at Stuy). They had highly educated parents who put a lot of pressure on them. But having grown up affluently and easily, they often did not have the “do or die” attitude or work ethic of the immigrant Asian students. Some of them — gasp — did drugs and had sex, unthinkable among my Asian peers. Quite a few of them were more interested in drama and theater (SING! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SING!) than academic work.

Crucially, their parents were influential and aware enough to dig them out when they faltered at school, including cheating. (My own parents would have broken my legs if I had cheated.) Most such students were Jewish, not Asian, at least during my years there. One quite notorious example went on to be one of the “top” students at Stuy. But we all knew that she was a frequent cheater, only took very easy courses (“History of Science”) to maintain a perfect GPA while the rest of us were taking Dr. Irgang’s very tough AP American History, studying differential equations, and taking computer science courses at NYU. She was a joke to us. But both of her parents were Harvard alums, her parents had friends inside the Harvard administration and, unsurprisingly, she went on to Harvard.

I should also note that Asians were not the only economically down scale but intensely academic group at Stuy. There was a sizable Russian immigrant population who exhibited very similar “tiger” characteristics. They were also often poor, but their parents were extremely education-oriented as Asian parents were (the father of one Russian friend of mine was a scientist in Russia but drove a taxi cab in NYC). He would be beaten savagely by his father for minor mistakes on tests.

Finally, there have been several attempts to introduce “affirmative action” for blacks and Hispanics at Stuyvesant. All failed. Usually students and prominent or otherwise politically active parents — rarely Asian, usually Jewish — rallied to the anti-affirmative action cause and stopped it cold. During much of this time, the majority and subsequently plurality of students at Stuy were Jewish. Now that Stuy is overwhelmingly Asian, perhaps it will prove less immune to the political pressure. Or perhaps Asians of NYC today are more political and less “keep your heads down and just study and work” than during my time there. Only time will tell.

NYC did introduce free remedial and test prep programs for “underprivileged minorities” aimed at blacks and Hispanics over the years. I understand, however, that the rate of acceptance for that population has declined despite the free program. Certainly money not well spent from the cost-benefit point of view.

As a post-script, let me note that *I* personally would not encourage my own children to attend institutions like Stuyvesant. I think they serve a wonderful conduit for bright, but economically down scale students who do not have many other options. But for my own children, who have basked in the success and affluence of their parents and who have been thusly privileged and blessed, I have emphasized self-discipline and virtue (in the Aristotelian sense). My children will likely attend military schools or very traditional parochial schools that emphasize God, truth and beauty through a classical education program for their secondary schooling.

I posted this comment on the Sailer thread, but perhaps it might be worthwhile to reproduce it here as well since “Education realist” seems to be raising the specter of Asian cheating everywhere:

Let me offer a perspective as an ethnic Korean who graduated from Stuyvesant a quarter century ago and who subsequently went on to an Ivy League university and a top ten Ph.D. program in my chosen field.

“Education realist” quoted a commenter on his website thusly:

“Leaving out the technical jargon, the Chinese and Koreans are definitely gaming and cheating tests overseas. When you read of recent Asian immigrants acing the NY tests despite limited English, it seems likely they’re doing the same thing over here.”

I arrived in the United States as a middle schooler 1 1/2 years before I took the test for Stuyvesant (and for Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech). At the time I had very limited English skills, but I could tell that in most other subjects (including history, which has been a passion for me since childhood), I was ahead of my peers by at least a year or two. In math, I was probably ahead by three or four. I realized right away that my lack of English ability was holding me back greatly.

So during the following summer, I went to the local library daily for about 8-10 hours a day (excluding Sundays which were for church and related activities). During this time, I looked up every word in an English dictionary. Then I looked up every definition for that word in an English-Korean dictionary. You could imagine what a tough slog this was. It was painfully boring, but I did it because I thought I needed to overcome my crippling weakness. By the third month, the edges of the pages of the English-Korean dictionary (made with very thin paper) had been completely worn and I had to purchase a second copy.

The only things I did during the awaking hours this summer were: studying English, reading, playing sports (I have been an athlete always and was specially selected for volleyball, rifle shooting and baseball in Korea; as well I have been a martial artist all my life and have trained in Judo, Tae Kwon Do and boxing since childhood). My parents allowed me to watch television occasionally, but only on the condition that I repeated after every word uttered on TV, including jingles (“Have you driven a Ford… lately” still rings in my brain). My parents wanted to ensure that I had no “Asian accent.” In this they were largely successful — my accent is a combination of Queens, NY and the Midwest (whence my ethnically German wife of nearly twenty years hails and where I spent much time).

Throughout this period and thereafter in high school, I also read voraciously in English. When Paul Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” came out to great acclaim and popularity, I read this cover to cover, looking up every word I did not understand — and they were legion. I also ended up reading many of the books cited in that book.

I was not the only middle schooler at this library. During the same summer, roughly 25 other students my age were dropped off by their parents most days. Even though Asians were not numerous in my neighborhood at the time, all but two of my library compatriots were Asian. The remaining two were Russian immigrants who appeared to be as intensely academic as the Asians.

Although I do not doubt that some Asian students engage in cheating, my experience and observation are that cheating does not explain the phenomenal rate of Asian acceptance at Stuyvesant. Relatively high IQ and very intense work ethic likely explain the situation more than cheating.

In any case, I was rewarded with high scores. Reputedly, I scored in the top twenty among all test takers my year (subsequently I tested 99 percentile for both the SAT and the GRE; I never took the LSAT or the GMAT, but my prep testing also placed me in the top 1% of those tests as well).

There were two significant scandals during my time at Stuyvesant. One was, indeed, a cheating scandal. The ringleaders of the cheating scheme were mostly Jewish (they were only lightly punished — more on this below). The other scandal was a computer hacking scandal. One of my friends was actually arrested by the Feds and had his computer confiscated. Of the three I knew who were arrested, two were white (one Jewish, one gentile) and third was Asian. They all cut some sort of a deal with the Feds and the Air Force. I heard at the time that one of them went to work for the Air Force part time through high school and college and later full time professionally.

Among my peers at Stuyvesant, cheating was considered a high risk, low reward endeavor. In the first place, quite a few of my Asian peers were intense Evangelical Protestants and wouldn’t dream of cheating. It was considered extremely sinful. Also, for many lower and lower middle class (or “fresh off the boat”) immigrant Asian students without any connection or safety net, the potential consequences of cheating were catastrophic. It simply wasn’t worth the risk. Frankly, the largely white (including many Jewish) teachers and administrators were not likely to (and did not) look kindly upon cheating Asian students.

Those who engaged in cheating regularly at Stuy were more likely to be upper middle class students. They weren’t quite upper class enough to not care about academics entirely (most such types went to private schools, but there were some of those at Stuy). They had highly educated parents who put a lot of pressure on them. But having grown up affluently and easily, they often did not have the “do or die” attitude or work ethic of the immigrant Asian students. Some of them — gasp — did drugs and had sex, unthinkable among my Asian peers. Quite a few of them were more interested in drama and theater (SING! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SING!) than academic work.

Crucially, their parents were influential and aware enough to dig them out when they faltered at school, including cheating. (My own parents would have broken my legs if I had cheated.) Most such students were Jewish, not Asian, at least during my years there. One quite notorious example went on to be one of the “top” students at Stuy. But we all knew that she was a frequent cheater, only took very easy courses (“History of Science”) to maintain a perfect GPA while the rest of us were taking Dr. Irgang’s very tough AP American History, studying differential equations, and taking computer science courses at NYU. She was a joke to us. But both of her parents were Harvard alums, her parents had friends inside the Harvard administration and, unsurprisingly, she went on to Harvard.

I should also note that Asians were not the only economically down scale but intensely academic group at Stuy. There was a sizable Russian immigrant population who exhibited very similar “tiger” characteristics. They were also often poor, but their parents were extremely education-oriented as Asian parents were (the father of one Russian friend of mine was a scientist in Russia but drove a taxi cab in NYC). He would be beaten savagely by his father for minor mistakes on tests.

Finally, there have been several attempts to introduce “affirmative action” for blacks and Hispanics at Stuyvesant. All failed. Usually students and prominent or otherwise politically active parents — rarely Asian, usually Jewish — rallied to the anti-affirmative action cause and stopped it cold. During much of this time, the majority and subsequently plurality of students at Stuy were Jewish. Now that Stuy is overwhelmingly Asian, perhaps it will prove less immune to the political pressure. Or perhaps Asians of NYC today are more political and less “keep your heads down and just study and work” than during my time there. Only time will tell.

NYC did introduce free remedial and test prep programs for “underprivileged minorities” aimed at blacks and Hispanics over the years. I understand, however, that the rate of acceptance for that population has declined despite the free program. Certainly money not well spent from the cost-benefit point of view.

As a post-script, let me note that *I* personally would not encourage my own children to attend institutions like Stuyvesant. I think they serve a wonderful conduit for bright, but economically down scale students who do not have many other options. But for my own children, who have basked in the success and affluence of their parents and who have been thusly privileged and blessed, I have emphasized self-discipline and virtue (in the Aristotelian sense). My children will likely attend military schools or very traditional parochial schools that emphasize God, truth and beauty through a classical education program for their secondary schooling.

“The Last Real Calvinist,”

While I keep hearing and reading that Christianity is growing explosively in China, I do not have much personal experience with Chinese Christians in China, so I cannot offer anything insightful.

However, I am much more familiar with the world of Asian-American Christianity at elite and major universities here. What many people don’t realize is that over the last several decades, elite American universities have become more, not less, actively Christian on average. There is a rather simple and somewhat astonishing reason for this — a sizable proportion of Asians in America are Christian, often intensely “Evangelical Protestant” or to a lesser extent, but still significantly, devoutly traditional-Catholic. I believe more than 50% of Korean immigrants are Christians, many quite active ones at that.

At places like Yale, for example, campus Christian organizations, long the refuge of austere, religious middle class WASPs in a sea of elite upper class liberal morality in the past, are now either entirely or mostly dominated by Asian students. This creates a stark constrast as the rest of the elite university population has become increasingly non-Christian and/or militantly atheist. I have to say, from my experience, the administration of such places often seems to sympathize with the latter rather than with the “AAEPs.” Indeed, the sense I have from my personal experience is that there appears to be a growing antipathy toward AAEPs from elite university administrations. Such an odd development, given how religiously oriented America’s top schools were at their founding.

On another note, Midwestern Anglo-Scandinavian-Germans are my wife’s people. So they are my children’s people and thus by marriage and assimilation, mine as well. As much as I think Asian-Americans are given the cold shoulder by elite university administrations and grudgingly admitted in many cases, I also think that blue collar rural Germanic types are not looked upon kindly by the same. I lived for many years in the rural Midwest. It is filled with many bright, hardworking (argh, farm hours!) and morally modest children. There is usually little to no recruiting among these talented kids by elite institutions. In that sense, they are very neglected indeed. What a terrible loss of human potential.

Still, many of these kids end up with the military, pick up useful skills and leadership qualities and later head to public universities of good reputation. They usually end up well as modest upper middle class folks in their home areas. Or they often go into specialized farming or profitable trades and end up running independent, small to medium businesses. But I wish our elite institutions would make greater use of this neglected pool of talent. Sometimes I feel as though I was a part of the last generation to be educated by professors from such areas at the Ivy League. My most significant mentor in college hailed from a tiny farming town in Iowa. A classic, bright farm boy athlete-scholar from a modest economic background who thrived academically. I understand that was much more common decades ago than it is today. One hardly runs into real rural types at the Ivy League now.

My erstwhile mentor passed away some years ago to my great sorrow. He seemed to have been one of the last of his kind at my alma mater.

“Education Realist,”

Sure, this might have been over 25 years ago, but I actually attended Stuyvesant. I speak from personal experience about the very institution, which is reputedly the topic of discussion in this thread. I have directly relevant experience to contribute to this topic. Your comment seems to comprise of unproven and general assertions about widespread cheating by Asian-Americans (including implications that cheating explains the high Asian acceptance rate at Stuyvesant in the main) and some nebulously connected points therefore that Asian immigration should be curtailed.

I won’t address your second point regarding Asian immigration here, except to state in passing that I am politically paleo-conservative mostly and lean immigration-restrictionist (but that has nothing to do with the allegedly widespread Asian cheating as asserted by you). My main point in providing my personal story here was to rebut your contention that cheating provides the significant explanatory variable to the phenomenon of the Asian majority at Stuy, my alma mater. I also wanted to provide some individual texture to an article like this that tends to treat students like so many numbers and matrices without faces and histories.

And, for the record, my parents did not push assimilation. They weren’t immigrants. My father was a mid-level Korean diplomat stationed in NYC and merely wished to expose me to the American education system and return to Korea eventually. *I* on my very own decided to forsake the land and language of my birth and become an immigrant and subsequently a naturalized American, because I fell in love with this country and its people very deeply. Yes, some Asian children do disobey their parents. Even some only sons (I am an only child, the last male of my line in my extended clan — and like Amy Chua’s unusual father, I am also a bit of a rebel).

You should stop assuming things about other people based on whatever axes you have to grind. I also don’t know what the fact that I am married to a white woman has to do with this specific line of inquiry, other than to suggest that like many other Asians, I am assimilated (which is not unusual among Asian-Americans, especially American-born ones, among whom even about a third of men intermarry).

It appears you cast doubt and by implication aspersions on my experience (“not credible”) simply because my experiences and observations lie outside your own preconception. I don’t mean to be boastful, but, yes, I was very atypical. BUT many, perhaps even most, students at Stuyvesant were (and likely are today) atypical. Stuy is, by some measures (under 3% acceptance rate), more selective than the Ivies. It admits many gifted children. Children who become chess grandmasters, successful actors, renowned computer hackers, and so on in addition to the usual debate champions, science nerds, and math competition winners. Gifted children — less than 3% of the general population — are atypical by definition.

In elementary school in Korea, I loved reading Sun Tzu and Luo Guanzhong (the author of the Chinese classic “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms”). My Korean teachers used to be annoyed, because I’d hide books under my desk and read them during lectures. While studying at Stuy, I became fascinated with military history and began to obsess about writings and ideas of men like B. H. Liddell Hart, Heinz Guderian, Erich von Manstein, and Mikhail Tukhachevsky. In college I became something of an expert on “Deep Battle” and Russian/German military operational theory between the two world wars). When my university’s library proved inadequate I visited Newport and Carlisle Barracks (homes to the Naval War College and the Army War College, respectively). One summer I sought out Col. John Waghelstein, a premier theorist (and practitioner in El Salvador) of counter-insurgency/low-intensity warfare. Another time, I sought out Bill Lind who is now mostly known for his paleo-conservatism, but was at the time a prominent theorist of the Fourth Generation Warfare (thankfully, both men were remarkably approachable and were extremely generous with their time).

So, yes, I was quite unusual and precocious. But I was hardly unique among STUYVESANT students and graduates. Several of my friends, who also went on to the Ivy League and top shelf Ph.D. programs, were similarly advanced and driven to knowledge. My best friend at Stuy spent much of his free time reading Greek and Roman writings in the original languages (our Latin teacher, Dr. Blake, physically resembled Horace, especially when he put on a toga: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace#mediaviewer/File:Quintus_Horatius_Flaccus.jpg). He’s a well known physicist now and makes his living “smashing atoms together.” Another friend whose understanding of robotics at Stuy rivaled that of graduate students in the field is today an international expert on robotics. While not everyone from Stuy became world beaters, it was certainly a collection of atypical students.

I am quite speechless that you view my hard work and intense efforts by other similarly gifted students as “gaming the system.” You write “I’d rather the slots went to kids who spend a reasonable amount of time studying, having a life, not being obsessive.” Do you mean to suggest that kids who spend their time drinking, doing drugs, having sex, hanging out at malls, and playing video games — “having a life” as you put it — and get moderately good grades should have academic precedence over children who delay gratification and put themselves through an intense, self-disciplined pursuit of academic achievement? Do you speak from personal experience? Did you “have a life” as a youngster and feel that you should now stand above these “cheating” (i.e. hardworking) Asians? Forgive me, but you strike me so much as Matthew Broderick’s envious teacher character in the film “Election” (which has the then unknown Reese Witherspoon’s finest performance as an overachieving student from a modest background in the Midwest; as a side note, Alexander Payne capture the Midwest like no ther filmmaker in movies like “Election,” “About Schmidt,” and “Nebraska”).

Perhaps I am stereotypically Asian in this regard, but I tend to view the time of youth as a time of rigorous academic and physicial preparation and moral inculcation, a modern day Agoge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agoge). Time to “have a life” as you put it should be delayed. There is time enough later once one is established in life to engage in frivolous and indulgent pursuits.

On a final note, I taught and graded undergraduate students for several years while working on my Ph.D. Every year, I caught a few students cheating. Mostly they were athletes. The remainder were almost always upper middle class kids, usually white (but never the scions of the super rich and powerful — those kids just seem to float through life living large and dating extremely attractive peers). The common denominator among academic cheaters in my experience was a sense of entitlement, that they “deserved” to have good grades, but didn’t have to work for them.

Aside from the athletes (on whose behalf the university administration usually intervened), the cheaters also invariably had influential or otherwise “vociferous” parents who were all too willing to bail out their children from sticky situations. It was clear to me that the vast majority of cheaters came from environments who seldom experienced consequences for their transgressions. This was very consistent with my experience among my peers at Stuyvesant. I don’t think this fits Asian-Americans, especially recent immigrants, all that well. Of course, the story may be very different in Asia itself where I gather there are plenty of Asians with influential parents who can manipulate their systems.

I can’t get beyond the cognitive dissonance of these stereotypes about Asians that 1) on the one hand, Asians are drone-like grinders who conform and do not take risks and 2) on the other hand, they get ahead, because they cheat, i.e. break rules and incur the attendant risks that could be catastrophic for their future careers.

“Educational Realist” writes “I’d note that the academic probation rate and attrition rate for Asians (reported mostly by public universities) is in some cases higher than whites, in most cases just surprisingly high, and could reflect exactly the sort of problems that come from faking.”

There is a lot of “mostly,” “some cases,” “most cases,” “surprisingly,” “could” — a lot of qualifiers that render the sentence meaningless in an exact sense. The sentence seems designed to illicit a certain feeling (“Asians cheat!”) while leaving an avenue of logical escape (“I didn’t say ‘all Asians’!”).

In any case, may I please see the relevant data? Or at least the citations to the same that assert this? Probation and attrition rates are very specific words. I assume ER can make this data that he has seen available to the rest of us, so we can elect to ignore our lying eyes and believe his claims.

Since we seem to be handing out personal anecdotes, here is the relevant portion of my response to ER on Sailer’s thread:

On a final note, I taught and graded undergraduate students for several years while working on my Ph.D. Every year, I caught a few students cheating. Mostly they were athletes. The remainder were almost always upper middle class kids, usually white (but never the scions of the super rich and powerful — those kids just seem to float through life living large and dating extremely attractive peers). The common denominator among academic cheaters in my experience was a sense of entitlement, that they “deserved” to have good grades, but didn’t have to work for them.

Aside from the athletes (on whose behalf the university administration usually intervened), the cheaters also invariably had influential or otherwise “vociferous” parents who were all too willing to bail out their children from sticky situations. It was clear to me that the vast majority of cheaters came from environments who seldom experienced consequences for their transgressions. This was very consistent with my experience among my peers at Stuyvesant. I don’t think this fits Asian-Americans, especially recent immigrants, all that well. Of course, the story may be very different in Asia itself where I gather there are plenty of Asians with influential parents who can manipulate their systems.

Sorry, I meant “elicit,” not “illicit.” A thousand apologies.

Sorry, I meant “elicit,” not “illicit.” Mea culpa.

Ooops. Wrong thread. Moderator, please delete my comment no. 46 and this message. Thank you.

“Educational realist,”

You write, “My purpose is not to *prove* anything. I can’t. Nor, as I’ve said many times, do I think that Asians (specifically Chinese, Koreans, and Indians) are *all* faking/cheating/gaming…”

This is pure sophistry. You are knocking at a straw man. Were you to suggest that “all” Asian academic success were contingent upon cheating, I would not be arguing with you but simply dismissing you as a lunatic or some sort an obsessive, irrational anti-Asian.

Your previous comments leave a strong impression that you suspect a large explanatory variable for Asian achievement is pervasive cheating (or moderately higher IQ PLUS pervasive cheating). You make a series of unproven assertions based on this assumption of large-scale cheating and, when challenged to provide evidence, retreat to the wiggle room you left for yourself: “well, I did say, ‘not all Asians cheat.’”

You stated this: ““I’d note that the academic probation rate and attrition rate for Asians (reported mostly by public universities) is in some cases higher than whites, in most cases just surprisingly high, and could reflect exactly the sort of problems that come from faking.”

Well, that’s a pretty specific statement. Please show us where you obtained these probation and attrition rates for Asians being higher than those of whites.

“The Last Real Calvinist,”

Where in Iowa were you born? Here is a little related trivia — the most prominent Asian-American who grew up in Iowa today is probably Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the first Asian-American head of an Ivy League university (Dartmouth) and currently the president of World Bank: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Yong_Kim

“Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1959, Jim Yong Kim moved with his family to the U.S. at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. His father taught dentistry at the University of Iowa, while his mother received her PhD in philosophy.[6] Kim attended Muscatine High School, where he was valedictorian, president of his class, and played both quarterback for the football team and point guard on the basketball team. After a year and a half at the University of Iowa, he transferred to Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in 1982. He was awarded an M.D. at Harvard Medical School in 1991, and a PhD in anthropology at Harvard University in 1993.[7] He was among the first enrollees of Harvard’s experimental MD/PhD program in the social sciences.”

As for your earlier question of whether being half-white or half-Chinese would be a greater detriment to your daughter being accepted by Harvard, I would suspect the answer would depend on what kind of “white” half she has.

Personally, I think an obsession with Harvard and the like is unhealthy for obtaining a real education (my legendary AP American History teacher at Stuy, Dr. Irgang, would rail frequently against visiting Ivy League recruiters so “You are the problem! You make my job of educating my pupils difficult!”). I have nothing against Harvard. I have many friends who are Harvard graduates (I chose another Ivy). It’s the premier and possibly the oldest university in the country (I say possibly, because I heard claims that The College of William and Mary in Williamburg, VA could be the oldest). However, more than anything else, Harvard along with other elite universities, including my alma mater, has become a marker of elite status, rather than an assurance of a highly educated young person in the traditional sense. I very much doubt most recent Harvard or other Ivy League graduates could read their own diplomas, which are inscribed in Latin.

In my view, this country is still full of opportunities for those who do not carry this elite marker. As an example, take my neighbors — husband and wife are both children of Korean immigrants — both graduated from the same mid-ranked public university. The husband was a civil servant but is now a founder and partner of a small intellectual property law firm and the wife is a very successful realtor. They live in a seven-figure house and live very affluently but reasonably frugally in many ways (no flashy cars, clothes or ostentatious luxuries aside from the expensive house, par for the course in our zip code). They are very pleasant, sweet neighbors and send their children to a Christian school. Predictably the children are polite and respectful as well. They are very rich indeed in friends and family, as there is usually a stream of visiting cars nearly every weekend (they frequently invite my family to these gatherings). Not a single Ivy League degree between them, but by most measures they seem to lead happy, satisfied and prosperous lives.

Mind you, I am not necessarily holding them up as exemplars of lives well lived. My own conception of that involves service to both God and the community at large; to be virtuous, chaste, and honorable. I merely present them as an example that with dedication and hardwork a Harvard or another elite degree is not necessary to attain material prosperity in this country. Certainly in the moral realm such a degree is absolutely unnecessary. So I would recommend against viewing this topic through the prism of “what would be more likely get my daughter into Harvard .” Okay, enough lecturing on that.

StuyGrad,

How’s the new building? I’ve never been inside that gleaming structure. Is it true that you get a panoramic view of the water from the cafeteria? How lucky you are to have had that. I attended the old building which was practically crumbling and in a sketchy area too! (A couple of my classmates were stabbed by druggies outside the building one year.)

As for this: “Most of the individuals I knew who have gone to do exceptional things are white Europeans, but of course my sample is biased. Time will tell.”

I think one can argue time has told where Asian-Americans are concerned. See the science and technology section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_American#Science_and_technology

This is obviously not an exhaustive list. But not bad for a segment of the population that is under (and in the past greatly under) five percent of the general population.

By the way, I know quite a few Stuy grads who studied science at graduate schools and eventually went “quant.” They do very well indeed even through the past recession… though I wish some of them had stayed on the academic track. Several are quite brilliant, world class brains, really, but were lured away by the Midas touch. I think very few men could resist the prospect of such enormous opulence with which they were presented. Pity, but of course it’s easy for me to say sitting pretty in my nice house all “fat, happy, and dumb.”

Good luck to you in your new direction.

Anonymous (51),

Am I not allowed hobbies after I’ve established my career? Or must I devote 100% of my waking hours until death for the glorious benefit of white Americans? Do you devote 100% of all your waking hours for the glorious benefit of fellow white Americans or is merely being born white by chance achievement and contribution enough for you?

Ivy League universities are privately funded (though they do take federal money for research, which presumably benefits all Americans, including whites). My family and I spent over $250,000 in tuition, fees, books, room and board and so on for the privilege of attending one of these institutions. As my parents were not rich (they were middle class in Korea), this entailed extreme sacrifice on their part (they had to sell their apartment and empty out all their savings) and not inconsiderable effort on my part.

As for tax and benefit, I probably pay considerably over 10 times the taxes of what median white American families pay (more like over 20 times due to progressive taxation) while drawing almost no marginal government benefits (aside from those we all benefit from such as national defense and so on). Does that mean my children should have over 1000%-2000% of the chance that the median white family’s kids have in qualifying for the Ivy League?

I don’t see why you take what “Lagertha” and ER’s claims about the lack of Asian-American innovators at face value without a little research. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_American#Science_and_technology

“Asian Americans have made many prominent and notable contributions to Science and Technology. Chien-Shiung Wu was known to many scientists as the “First Lady of Physics” and played a pivotal role in experimentally demonstrating the violation of the law of conservation of parity in the field of particle physics. Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical work demonstrating that the conservation of parity did not always hold and later became American citizens. Har Gobind Khorana shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in genetics and protein synthesis. Samuel Chao Chung Ting received the 1976 Nobel Prize in physics for discovery of the subatomic particle J/ψ. The mathematician Shing-Tung Yau won the Fields Medal in 1982 and Terence Tao won the Fields Medal in 2006. The geometer Shiing-Shen Chern received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1983. Andrew Yao was awarded the Turing Award in 2000. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics and had the Chandra X-ray Observatory named after him. In 1984, Dr. David D. Ho first reported the “healthy carrier state” of HIV infection, which identified HIV-positive individuals who showed no physical signs of AIDS. Charles J. Pedersen shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his methods of synthesizing crown ethers. Steven Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research in cooling and trapping atoms using laser light. Daniel Tsui shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998 for helping discover the fractional Quantum Hall effect. In 2008, biochemist Roger Tsien won the Nobel in Chemistry for his work on engineering and improving the green fluorescent protein (GFP) that has become a standard tool of modern molecular biology and biochemistry. Yoichiro Nambu received the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the consequences of spontaneously broken symmetries in field theories. In 2009, Charles K. Kao was awarded Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication” and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the prize in Chemistry “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”. Ching W. Tang was the inventor of the Organic light-emitting diode and Organic solar cell and was awarded the 2011 Wolf Prize in Chemistry for this achievement. Min Chueh Chang was the co-inventor of the combined oral contraceptive pill and contributed significantly to the development of in vitro fertilisation at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. David T. Wong was one of the scientists credited with the discovery of ground-breaking drug Fluoxetine as well as the discovery of atomoxetine, duloxetine and dapoxetine with colleagues.[62][63][64] Michio Kaku has popularized science and has appeared on multiple programs on television and radio.”

I am pretty sure some of these scientific achievements count as innovations. Considering that the Asian population in this country has been 5% or below, this is not bad, I think. And this list is hardly exhaustive or complete. There are countless more “ordinary” Asian-American innovators whose contributions and inventions are not covered here. Speaking of hobbies, one of mine is to collect LED flashlights. I am fascinated by them. The leading brand of flashlights in the world is probably Surefire, which is widely used by the military, police, and EMT personnel in this country, for the benefit of Americans, including whites. Guess who one of the the major technical innovators of this brand of flashlights was: http://blogs.militarytimes.com/gearscout/2013/01/12/paul-p-k-kim-leaves-surefire/

“Paul Kim has been the Vice President of Engineering since the earliest days of the company. He holds over 40 patents dating back to the 1980s, and many of his innovations are integrated into just about every modern flashlight. He was a pioneer in the industry, and has created some of the best-engineered and most revered illumination products ever made.”

Slava,

You write:

“With a lot of East Asians/Indians I think the virtue of achieving so outweighs everything else there is never really a conflict with cutting corners or evens rules of laws.”

And you know this how? East Asians and Indians in this country have much lower crime rates than every other racial group, including whites. Even American-born Asians (there is this strange paradox of assimilation in crime — foreign borns, whether white, yellow, brown, black, all have lower crime rates than their native-born counterparts) have substantially lower crime rates than whites. No less a race-realist and white nationalist as Jared Taylor has documented this: http://colorofcrime.com/.

You also write:

“I always thought test prep was a mild form of cheating.”

Studying for a test is cheating? Do you feel that pupils should be tested completely au-naturel? In other words, I suppose they should be tested without any teaching or education, eh? Just pure IQ only? Should we also hand out jobs this way? Just selection based on IQ, hardwork be darned? Select for that 1% inspiration only and ignore the 99% persperation?

Given the pervasive bias toward “nurture” in our society, I understand why hereditarians constantly under siege (among which I count myself) might summarize the data presented in this post as “reading to newborns is probably useless.”

But useless for what? I agree that there is a rather widespread, grandiose illusion about the extent to which parents can control the destinies of their children, particularly among the economically upscale. I am open, and indeed partial, to the probability that reading early on may not influence later academic outcomes in the main. Any observant parent with multiple children (among which I again count myself) can tell that siblings often have dramatically different personalities and aptitudes (not to mention different levels of life successes) despite being given similar upbringing.

Nonetheless, despite the probability that reading to very young children may not produce much of a material difference later on in life, I find there is something beautiful about reading to young children and even to babies. One of my earliest memories is my mother reading the Iliad to me (in Korean) as I fell into slumber every night. She made a ritual of it. I did not understand but odd words here and there, but mostly I remember being very comforted by it and recall this very fondly to this day.

I have read to all my children since day one (I’ve also sang the Marian Antiphons to them in Latin since birth — I sing them to my children every night before their nightly prayers). Yes, I read them the Iliad (in English) and still do. I do not expect this will make a whit of difference to their later reading ability, academic success or life achievements. I do it because I enjoy it greatly in the first place and because the children seem to enjoy it as well. It has become a lovely tradition, which I hope my children will remember very fondly, as I did with my mother’s reading.

Useless? Hardly. It’s the stuff of family tradition and even myth, a thing of beauty and romance to anchor families and children, beyond grades, degrees or career successes.

Read away to your newborns!

Steve Johnson,

This was after my time. What does this particular scandal have to do with “rampant cheating by Asians”? Were the perpetrators all or mostly Asian?

And if that were the case, does this one episode, therefore, demonstrate that there is rampant cheating by Asians as a whole in the United States?

By that logic, do these scandals, as linked on another thread, (http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/13/us/an-inquiry-finds-125-cheated-on-a-naval-academy-exam.html and http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/07/12107246-78-air-force-academy-cadets-accused-of-cheating-on-math-test?lite) demonstrate that there is rampant cheating by whites or cadets at military service academies?

Come now, as Eugene Volokh observed years ago, Asians have become not just white, but “lily white” for the purpose of leftist demography.

Steve Johnson,

Let me get this straight. *You* cheated with a group of Asian friends of yours, so there is rampant cheating by Asians in America?

It seems to me this anecdote of yours says little else but that you had unethical friends (who are Asian) and that you (who are presumably not Asian) were also equally unethical.

Were the cadets in the links I provided all or mostly Asian as well? And if not, what unwarranted inferences do you draw from those episodes?

D. K.,

You wrote, “Thus, a workforce that is literally 0% White-male is considered 100% “diverse!”

You clearly did not read the article. Under the current diversity regime, if a work place is 0% white male, but also 100% Asian male, it is most certainly considered 0% diverse, not 100%. In other words, the only “real” diversity is black, Hispanic, and/or women.

Try this: http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/asian.htm. This is from 1998!

Now this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/05/29/how-the-asians-became-white/

Same story, same author, different industry, different year (2014).

Mozart? Ugh, only for poseurs.

I played Schumann for my babies while they baked. Only crazy (literally) composers for a crazy family with a crazy dad.

Early reading is useful. My five year old read the nutrition label for his Kefir today and declared that henceforth he will not drink it because “it has too much sugar (’13 grams per serving!’), and sugar is not good for you.” He overheard his mommy talking about not consuming too much sugar earlier somewhere. She laughed and said “Good, he’s only five, but he is already neurotic like the rest of us.” Crazy, as I said.

I don’t know much about Arabic or Farsi, but has there not been a lot of Persian-influenced loanwords in Arabic since they belong to a sprachbund?

Steve Johnson,

You wrote: “The test was canceled so, no, I didn’t cheat.”

But you obtained answers prior to the test and intended to use them on the test. You were merely prevented from doing so because the test was canceled. You, sir, are a cheater, plain and simple. You can blame Asians or Martians, for that matter, but as a person with independent will and moral agency, *you* did something unethnical no matter how much you attempt to shift the blame to others.

You also wrote: “Everyone who knew people knew that to get the answers you went to the Asian kids…”

Oh, so now you speak for “everyone”? Who appointed you the omniscient arbiter of what “everyone” believes or knows?

Finally, you wrote: “Only chumps don’t cheat when you’re in school with Asians is the lesson here.”

The excuse of frauds, cheaters, and losers everywhere: “Everyone is doing it and only chumps don’t cheat!”

I guess I must be a chump then. I never cheated and never will. Not on a test, not on my wife, not on friends. Not on anybody. I do not care if 99% of the population cheats. I never will. And I only keep company with those who share my ethics, regardless of their ethnicity or race. Ancient Persian nobility is said to taught their young “to ride well, to shoot straight, and to speak the truth.” That is the motto I follow in life.

You obviously feel that your irrational and unwarranted prejudice toward Asians allows you to be unethnical, so as not to be “a chump.” Goodbye is all I can say about that.

Paul,

I am sorry, but I do not share my private contact information with those online.

Might I suggest you seek mentors among those you know and interact in person? I would also recommend that you not limit the search to men of your own ethnicity. Good luck to you.

JSM,

I already acknowledged that there may indeed be mass cheating or corruption in Asia itself (especially in developing countries like China; certaintly so in even less developed countries in Southeast and South Asia, but still present even in Northeast Asia, including my birth country of South Korea).

However, we are discussing Asian-Americans here, not foreign students.

I also note the complete silence regarding the cheating scandals at service academies, which most likely involve very few or no Asians, as well as the widespread cheating by athletes (mostly black or white) at universities, a subject with which I am personally very well-acquainted, unfortunately.

On Razib Khan’s threads, there have been dicussions on how statistically the allegation of “wide spread Asian cheating” could be validated or falsified — mismatch of results. If indeed a lot of Asians cheated and attained entry to institutions for which they were unqualified, there would be high attrition (failed to graduate) rates as well as high failure rates to advance to the next levels of education and their success thereafter. That evidence is not there. Asian-Americans are overwhelmingly represented in fields like STEM and medicine (medical school is roughly 22% Asian) where “faking to know” is extremely difficult so as to make the effort not worthwhile.

Prior to age 50, women of color have virtually no wealth at all.

I see yellow is no longer a color. Yellow is the new white?

In a slightly related note, I have been looking forward to Luc Besson’s new film, “Lucy.” I have not seen it yet, but apparently the protagonist is a woman (a victimized woman, but that’s redundant), the baddies are numerous faceless Asian men (again, redundant), the wise scientist is black, and the empathetic ally of the protagonist is some sort of a brown policeman (Hispanic? Arab?).

Now I know who the good guys (actually gals) and bad guys are in today’s America.

“The Brown police officer lives in France, so he is most likely Arab and not Hispanic.”

I suspected that he’d be a Francophone North African of some sort, but did not want to assume, you know, because assuming is racist.

“Minor Ivies like Penn/Columbia/Brown are not above non-Ivies like Chicago and Stanford in many people’s minds.”

“Minor Ivies” are niche brands for elites who pretend to disdain “big corporate” Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and so on. Brown and Dartmouth in particular take pride in being the only undergraduate teaching Ivies instead of giant hedgefunds + research grant factories like the bigger Ivies and other top twenty universities with serious graduate programs. You can, gasp, actually talk to your profs for a few hours as a lowly first year.

So, yes, ask an average person and he is more likely recognize U. Chicago and Stanford over Brown and Dartmouth. But go to a cocktail party in Manhattan and ask and you’ll get a different response.

I’m ethnically NE Asian and my wife is white (Midwestern German-English-Swedish stock). We met at an Ivy League university and both attended top ten doctoral programs. We are both very paleo-conservative (she and I are both opposed to mass immigration, legal or otherwise, and strongly prefer the Anglo-American civic culture and governing tradition). We both abhor our alma mater (except for the saving grace that we found each other there).

We don’t plan to send our children there or to another Ivy if we could help it (if our children insisted, we’d have to help albeit reluctantly).

Our preference for our boys are military academies and for our girls somewhere like Thomas Aquinas College. We don’t care whether our children become elites or 1 percenters. We care about them leaning about truth, beauty, and God. We also inculcate them about patriotism, honor, duty, fidelity, and chastity.

For that matter, although affluence and elite status are nice, they do not make you happy as having close family and friends do. Being “the top dog” is extremely stressful. You always have to watch out for those knives in the back. Having kind, loving, and good family and friends make you happy and relaxed. You can’t buy those with money and status. In fact, the latter are counterproductive because they attract the wrong types of people.

“Both Brown and Dartmouth have major, serious grad schools. Dartmouth especially with its biz school and Brown with its med school. They just don’t have law schools.”

I consider business, law, and medical schools professional schools rather than full-fledged graduate schools that produce Ph.D.’s and draw massive funding for research.

Dartmouth’s business school is respected, but hardly “high power.” Brown’s med school is geared toward primary care physicians and does not generate high income, high status specialists. Both have other graduate programs, of course, but unlike other Ivies they do not form a significant part of the institutions, both in terms of student numbers and material resources.

My original salient points were that 1) both Brown and Dartmouth’s stated and actual advantage is that they are, in the main, undergraduate teaching universities unlike the larger Ivies and 2) they may be less well known amongst the general public but have higher prestige over the likes of Chicago and Stanford among the Northeastern elites who allegedly disdain “big schools.” In other words, to repeat, they are niche brands for elites.

I was heavily recruited by both MIT and Cal Tech while attending Stuyvesant more than a quarter century ago. I chose an Ivy instead. Why? Cal Tech’s brochure had on its cover a photograph of two very nerdy looking boys (one white, one Asian) doing experiments with chemistry test equipment. And both of them had that “just got out of the bed” hair.

The Ivies had on their brochure covers very WASPy looking kids (attractive blonde girls!) stylishly hanging out on grassy fields, throwing Frisbies and what not, and generally looking happy and cool. Since I did not wish to repeat my Stuyvesant experience of being surrounded by Asian-Jewish science nerds, I declined both MIT and Cal Tech (Cal Tech, in particular, was extremely aggressive and wouldn’t leave me alone).

I might have tested at 99.99 percentile in IQ as a child but I was also a red-blooded young teenage male (I was a three sport athlete). So that was that. And, of course, I did meet my wife where I went.

When I read the various alumni publications and e-mails and such now and look at the photographs, I see a sea of dark faces/hair and the campus photos no longer look like the brochures I saw all those years ago.

“This is certainly the case with Chicago, but not with Stanford. Stanford impresses everywhere, and most people say HYPS when referring to the most elite tier.”

You must not have spent much time with Northeastern elites, especially older WASPs. *I* think Stanford is certainly a very prestigious university, one that clearly deserves its top ten and likely top five status, if you cared about such a thing.

But there is still a very strong Northeast- and history-centric attitude among Northeastern elites, and Stanford is not viewed the same way among them as even “minor” Ivy League universities are. Nothing in California is. And certainly not a university that was founded in the late 19th Century. Brown and Dartmouth were founded in 1764 and 1769 respectively, that is to say, prior to the foundation of the Republic.

Ever see the movie “Where the Boys Are?” (1960) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Boys_Are (summary: Midwestern college girls go hunting for Ivy Leaguers vacation; some get hurt, but some make out.)

By the way, all this name dropping about Bill Gates and such misses the point. These billionaires are extremely rare oddities and do not represent the typical Ivy League or Top Ten graduates who are typically doctors, lawyers, financial professionals, non-profit execs, political operatives, professors, and so on. You have to understand that this isn’t the good old days of a few dozen at pedigree clubs running the country over drinks.

While the middle class has shrunk as an overall percentage, the absolute number of people in the upper class has increased dramatically as meritocracy has risen (per David Brooks and Charles Murray). In a way, the country is no longer an oligarchy bound by common breeding, but one run by a very large, diffused, and generally meritocratic professional class (American Whigs?) held together by SWPL ideology. And the Ivy League degrees are *a* marker of that status, implying both genetic advantages and adherence to that SWPL culture/ideology.

What is happening in the United States today and has happened in the past forty years or so remind me very strongly of the story told in David Cannadine’s dense but interesting “The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy,” basically a history of how meritocratic professionals overran the aristocrats of breeding via a war of politics (and ensuing economic disposession) in the name of Liberty.

To answer the original question, yes, by all means enroll your children at Harvard, Yale or Princeton, or even Brown or Dartmouth or Stanford, if you desire your children to become a part of this class. My wife and I experienced this in abundance and found the experience greatly wanting. We will be doing our best to send our children to military schools or colleges with a Great Books curriculum. We want our children to be gentlemen and ladies who care about the permanent things in life.

“Chicago has a Great Books curriculum, but I wouldn’t send your children there if you want them to become gentlemen and ladies with lasting values.”

No. Try Thomas Aquinas College as an example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas_College

“Sorry, but you’re wrong here.

And I’ve spent plenty of time with ‘Northeastern elites.’”

I suppose I should just take this “but what am I?” at face value, but per Reagan I shall trust but attempt to verify.

During your attendance at an Ivy League university, on which island did you summer? And tell me which race week is your favorite and why.

“Those six private research institutions comprehend 0.6% of the student body at baccalaureate granting institutions. Private universities in general comprehend perhaps 8%; throw in private colleges with a certain amount of cachet – Amherst or Swathmore or the University of the South or the Claremont collection – and you might speak of 13% of the enrollment.”

“Comprehend 0.6% of the student body”? “Comprehend perhaps 8%”? Perhaps it is because English is not my first language, but someone is going to have to translate that for me.

I understand that we are not writing for peer-reviewed journals here and are exchanging largely inane banter in a tiny corner of the internet, so a bit of grammatical and spelling errors is expected, but, in all seriousness, that entire comment is incomprehensible to me… as in, I do not comprehend.

As the immortal Inigo Montoya said, “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

By the way, judging from the way many commenters here defend and argue about the reputations and educational qualities of this school or that and the vocational prospects attendance at these institutions allegedly offer (invoking everything and everyone from Bill Gates to scientific awards), I get the impression that many of you here desperately want your children to enroll at these universities and colleges.

So it appears that all this handwringing about the SWPL upper class or the 1% or what have you is largely motivated, not by principled opposition to the cultural and perhaps genetic decay, but by simple envy.

This rather reminds me of what the mother of Christopher Hitchens reputedly said early on in his life: “if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it.” Ah, the days when grasping middle class Britishers were tiger parents.

“Only Western White men are capable of pure evil hatred towards women.”

Have you seen Luc Besson’s latest “Lucy”? Hollywood seems quite happy to portray hordes of Asian males as purveyors of pure evil hatred toward women. (But Asian women, on the other hand, are angels on earth per “The Joy Luck Club”; maybe these Hollywood exec did not wish to anger their wives.)

“If you think the politics of New Hampshire are superior to the politics of Mississippi, then maybe you ought to consider the demographics of New Hampshire.”

I like the demographics of Maine and Oregon even more! And I am not even white! Alas, I don’t think the politics of Maine and Oregon are all that superior.

“I think you exaggerate the possibility of serious friction between “Asians” and other members of the anti-White coalition: they’ll always side with the other invaders due to the sheer genetic and cultural gulf between them and Europeans.”

Except NE Asians are even farther on the genetic map to Africans than most whites are. Genetically, NE Asians (esp. those with high Siberian genetics) are closer to Northern Europeans than they are to Africans. That goes the same for civilizational terms.

“The blacks, Hispanics and Asians have their differences but will be held together by anti-white animosity encouraged by the left. They are all taught that their problems are the result of white malevolence. They might not like each other much, but they will go for the Hitler-Stalin solution: agree to disagree and carve up Poland.”

Asians are not so much allies of the black-brown anti-white coalition (see LA Riots) as allies of the SWPL whites. They tend to be conformists and want to assimilate into the dominant ruling paradigm. They don’t go all Tiger Mom to go to school with blacks and browns, but to hobnob with WASP legacies and the children of Jewish powerbrokers. Don’t forget that Asians used to vote for the alleged white party at higher rates than whites themselves until the mid 1990’s. Fix the cultural-ideological rot with the upper crust whites and the Asian opposition problem as such will disappear. Blacks and browns, on the other hand, are a different issue altogether.

Check out the handy interactive census map at the University of Virginia. It shows every single person (per Census) in the country by race. Vast swathes of rural America is still predominantly white. Blacks are increasingly conconcerated in the South. Most “hip” urban areas are now divided between white/Asian area and a smaller Hispanic area (which has displaced the traditional black part of town). Asians are heavily concentrated on the West Coast (and NYC/Boston/suburban metro-DC), but they are typically intermixed with whites in most urban areas.

Sorry, the editing function seems not to work. Here is the map: http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/Racial-Dot-Map

First of all, I am a man. So, looking at the male version of that vide0 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R42iz17qoAU), I am probably a mix of the “6. Bad Ass Asian Guy” and “7. Yappie.”

One of my SWPL neighbors calls me “the Yellowneck Jedi.”

This is a very thoughtful set of observations.

Of course, observations are easier done than prescriptions, especially efficacious ones. What would be your policy prescriptions if you were the American Caesar?

“As long as the GOP remains the party of Christianity and aspirational whiteness, it will attract mestizo and asian immigrants.”

This statement depends on what are meant by “Christianity,” “whiteness,” and “Asian.”

As some commenters here can gather, I am ethnically Northeast Asian (was born and partly raised there). My idea of white-ness is not SWPL (which is the dominant elite paradigm today), but very 50’s in pop terms. My parents were very pro-American and pro-white. My father was partly educated in Texas and revered the place. I grew up on classic Westerns until the 70’s revisionist versions ruined the genre. I find that, culturally, I identify far more with those white Americans aged 70 and up than I do with those of my own age or even moderately older. Forget the younger ones.

Young Asian immigrants and Americans of Asian descent today are increasingly not of this mold. They have no idea about anti-communism. Except for a dedicated core of evangelical Protestants, they are largely atheistic. They do not revere the Anglo-American civic and political traditions and heritage as I do. They don’t have the same sense of gratitude I feel toward this country. They have been indoctrinated by SWPL apologist nonsense for decades now. For that matter, demographically, they are increasingly more South Asian/Indian (pagan or Muslim) or Chinese (atheist/Chinese nationalist) and less dissident Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Taiwanese, meaning they are less likely to respect and assimilate into the traditional Anglo-American culture.

Frankly, I am not optimistic that increased Asian immigration would benefit this country, even if Asians commit fewer crimes than whites and are academically more successful. Like Derbyshire I do think number is of essence. I think a small percentage of Asians (say 5-10% at most) can be assimilated relatively easily and would add some new vigor and “spice” (literally — I love Asian food) to the existing population. Anything beyond that is problematic, I think, from a social harmony perspective.

As for immigration from places more troubled such as Latin America and Africa, I think the assimilation difficulty rises exponentially still. Others have written to that topic, so I will not elaborate further, except to say that I sympathize with economically downscale whites who would be the most adversely affected by such immigration (while I can sit pretty in my “super zip code” with highly educated, affluent neighbors, socio-economically walled off from trouble spots).

In summary, I count myself a “patriotic minority” who opposes large scale immigration, legal or otherwise. But I swim against a huge tidal wave.

“What about Confucians, Buddhists, and Taoists?”

Confucianism is largely a philosophy, not a religion. I think it is moderately compatible with American paleo-conservatism. Both Buddhism and Taoism are very new age-y in this country.

There is quite an odd duality as regards religion among Asians in this country. A sizable number is highly evangelical Protestant, especially Koreans and some Chinese. As have been reported before, Ivy League universities have become more, not less, evangelical in recent years because of the Asian students who now dominate the campus Christian organizations that have been abandoned by WASPs. There is also a substantial number of Catholics (those from Vietnam and the PI) who tend to be much more orthodox than white and Hispanic ones. Highly Christian Asians tend to vote as highly Christian whites do.

However, a large plurality and possibly majority of recent Asian immigrants are either atheists or religiously “the other.” Indians, in particular, are likely to become the New Jews in political terms — well-educated, affluent, and increasingly influential all the while being fearful, and possibly derisive, of conservative Christian whites, and will likely vote almost exclusively for the non-Christian white party, i.e. the Democrats.

With the recent Chinese immigrants, there appears to be a different dynamic with similar results. Older Chinese immigrants fled communist oppression and the resulting poverty and were more likely to be loyal and patriotic to their adoptive country. New ones, especially the more educated ones, now tend to be quite Chinese nationalist, if not in the political sense, then in an ethnic sense. They tend to see America, not so much as a shining beacon of freedom, but a place of economic opportunity. At worst, they are likely to be Fifth Columnists. At best, they will be what Samuel Huntington called “Dead Souls” (http://nationalinterest.org/article/dead-souls-the-denationalization-of-the-american-elite-620), a denationalized global elite.

Religious fellowship can be a powerful force of assimilation even in the face of racial differences, but when race and religion (and perhaps even class and education) are all different, the differences may be insurmountable. (One bright spot in this regard is the massive rise of Christianity in China.)

As with the Romans of the old, I believe paleo-con whites and SWPLs are fighting a cultural civil war, and the latter have enlisted and settled large cohorts of foederati inside the empire to help their cause. Now the foederati will be “legalized” and become citizens and settled upon the lands of the native citizens upon whose backs they will be supported (modern incarnation: affirmative action and wealth transfer). I fear this will consume first the paleo-con whites and their allies (the immediate losers) and then eventually the SWPL too.

Not only do I love and revere this country greatly, I also dearly love my own children, who are half white and are native-born Southerners, geographically and culturally. I do not wish to inflict upon them and other Americans the fate of the old Romans in the face of the Voelkerwanderung.

I appreciate the sentiment. But “loving our country” means loving the Founders and their progeny, the people who conceived, fought for, and built this country. To be a bit funny about it, you cannot really love this country without loving white people, at least conceptually (in my case, I loved American whites so much that I married one – I suspect my children will likely marry mostly white partners, and I look forward to the prospect of being the one crazy Asian grandparent and perhaps, inshallah, great grandparent to my mostly white descendants, rather like the mythical and cool “Injun” ancestor every other Oklahoman or Plains white seems to claim).

I agree that most political goals are best achieved incrementally, which is the tactic our political opponents have used on everything from taxation to guns to immigration with great success (and on the gun front, the incremental counter attack has been spectacularly successful of late).

Without a doubt, the two most important priorities right now are the absolute opposition to any form of amnesty and the absolute support for border security. I do not think it is impossible to achieve these two although it will be extremely difficult. But the window is closing fast with each million of migrants who cross the border. The leftist press is already heralding President Obama as the “New Lincoln” of the illegal aliens. I have no doubt the latter will see him as emancipated blacks saw Lincoln.

“Basically, patriotic minority Americans have more of an interest than most in ensuring that the nation’s core ethnic and historic identity is not so aggressively leveraged by the nice but ethereal doctrine of Citizenism that the social contract collapses under the strain. (I say this as the son of a patriotic immigrant who married into Core America. The thing is, there’s only so much Core America to go around.)”

Therein lies the rub. Indeed, there is only so much Core America to go around. And this is so precisely because Core Americans seem to refuse to breed properly, under traditionally correct conditions. Even restricting immigration is only a short- to medium-term medicine. What is there to be done? Turn all whites into Mormons? Traditional Catholics?

Even with “affordable family formation” policies, would white fertility really ever be able to overcome the demographic bomb that is Hispanic fertility?

White supremacist types will argue for a Goetterdaemerung, an apocalyptic race war to “cleanse” the land, but that is a horrific prospect to anyone even remotely educated in history. Others less bloodthirsty such as Jared Taylor might argue for institutionalized separatism, but I can’t see how that would end up much better than the former, given enough time and the demographic problem mentioned earlier.

“Why did Asians stop voting for the GOP? I always just assumed they were republicans until 2012 when I found out they were part of the Obama coalition, which completely shocked me. 100 percent of the Asians I have known in real life were the exact opposite of all the feminist and racist msnbc style crap. I know why Hispanics and blacks vote for the Dems, but why would the people who are honestly more “white” than most white Americans these days?”

I can give you a lengthy, rigorous answer with multiple causations (demographic changes, educational indoctrination, etc.), but, really, the simplest reason is that they are turning SWPL, because that is the dominant elite cultural paradigm in most hip areas. Asians still vote with whites in less hip areas (parts of Texas and Virginia come to mind in recent elections), but they increasingly vote as urban, educated and affluent whites do… for the Democrats.

As for the GOP’s “outreach” as such, it has been comically inept. The party seems to alternate between outright hostility (or the appearance of the same; see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkQAalcsg5E)
Video Linkand cartoonish desperation and obsequiousness (see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/in-virginias-10th-congressional-district-republicans-focus-on-minority-outreach/2014/07/20/fe16efb4-0d62-11e4-b8e5-d0de80767fc2_story.html).

“I believe Vermont does not even require a license to conceal carry, just like Wyoming and Alaska.”

It does not, but VT also does not have a state pre-emption law, I believe, so localities can enact all sorts of restrictions.

“Just imagine if millions of eastern euros were immigrating here illegally! Having been around a few of then, they are like American men from the 1950s.”

That, again, depends on which Eastern Europeans, no? Czechs and Poles are rather like the 1950’s American whites in many ways, but do you really want millions of Albanians and Romanians here? I don’t think the latter are fertile Burkean grounds.

Though I am yellow-skinned, I hold the same biases that my WASP educators evinced (and who in turn received this wisdom from their English forefathers): “the wogs begin at Calais.”

“The muslim population of France amounts to 6% of the total. There may be municipalities (“communes”) which have muslim majorities, but you will not find a full metropolitan settlement in France which does.”

I agree that the whole “France is turning Muslim” thing is a bit overdone, but there are banlieues away from rich elite urban cores that are becoming heavily Muslim. To borrow what Ashraf Barhom’s character says in “The Kingdom” in an understated manner: “This is not a good neighborhood.”

“Me, too. The number I advocate is zero… I say, none at all.”

The country is already 5% or so Asian. Are you advocating ethnic cleansing?

“My lovely young blonde daughter has to compete for a smart capable “nerd” (which is the kind of guy she likes) husband with Asian chicks. My highly gifted son has to compete with Asians for grad school fellowships in universities built by previous generations of White Americans, for White American kids.”

Yes, but your lovely blonde daughter might have a bigger pool of nerd husbands with Asian guys at the top schools. If I may so immodestly pat myself on the back, my wife thinks I am a great husband.

“BUT, if you truly love us and appreciate our continued existence, take your family back to Asia and let us have a country where we can continue to propagate our own people. ”

My family is composed of me (a paleo-con American of NE Asian descent), my wife (a highly conservative white native Midwesterner of German-English-Swedish background) and our native Southern-born children who are half white and look mostly white (they are tall, have brown hair, big grey, green, yellow eyes, and fair skin; mostly their Asian features are the high cheek bones and wide faces; they are quite beautiful if I may so boast), and who, far more importantly, are being reared to love this country and its Anglo-American heritage. My wife and I are also Ivy League-educated with doctorates. If you prefer that we leave this country that we love so dearly, so that there might be fewer economic competitors for your allegedly brilliant children while Browns and Blacks with high fertility overrun the economically downscale neighborhoods around you and displace poorer whites, you have highly misplaced priorities.

“Or, at the very least, help us advocate for ZERO immigration, Asian or otherwise. Because if the millions of Han Chinese and Japanese who also love us, continue to come here and interbreed with us like you did, there won’t BE enough White folks left to turn your progeny White.”

First of all, I think you may need to read the news a bit beyond 1907. There are no “millions of Japanese” who “continue to come here.” Japanese immigration to the U.S. is miniscule today and the Japanese-American population, including those admixed with mostly whites, is about 1.3 million, a mere 0.4% of the population.

I oppose mass immigration. I support highly restricted immigration. I think zero immigration is unrealistic and not necessarily desirable. Furthermore, people like you who advocate zero immigration give me more than a pause. You clearly consider race to be everything. You seem to be advocating some sort of ethnic cleansing (“zero Asians”). And one wonders why so-called “race realist” whites have so few allies (“I think all of you should go back to where you came from, but in the mean time, will you vote for us? What? You are not going to vote for us? You are all so anti-white! Go back to Japan!”).

“Five percent Asian immigration is ok, you say? Rubbish. White folks are under siege.”

I wrote that if the Asian population in the U.S. is 5-10% of the total population, it can be assimilated without a problem. I did not say “five percent Asian immigration” whatever that means. Asians are currently the plurality of legal immigrants while Hispanics are the vast majority of illegal immigrants.

And while I agree that the current politics and mass culture seem to favor policies that are anti-downscale/conservative whites (which should and must be corrected), I do no think “white folks are under siege” which veers into the realm of the paranoid. The vast, overwhelming majority of whites in this country continue to marry each other. Intermarriage, though on the rise, is not the main problem behind the white demographic decline. It is their own very low fertility. And, for the record, NE Asians have even lower fertility than whites do. So NE Asians are not an existential threat to White Americans. The main threat is massive Hispanic immigration and the very high fertility of the latter.

“I’m not willing to be turned into a kulak because you think you aren’t appreciated enough. Just like I’m not going to consent to a modern jacquerie because a lot of Paleocons can’t get cute girls to talk to them.”

That was bitingly funny. And anyone who uses the term “jacquerie” in a class warfare discussion should get a gold star for good, evocative history.

“For the Milbanks of the media, the immigration schmaltz they churn out is never really about the Chinese or the Hondurans or whomever. Those folks are just clubs that happen to be at hand. It’s really about finally getting revenge for great-grandpa not getting into that country club. That’s what really matters in the 21st Century.”

I wrote this before and I write it again. What is happening here seems to me to be a cultural and economic civil war between paleo-con whites and SWPL. And the latter seems to be winning on most fronts today, having successfully ejected the former from most formal national institutions of power and prestige. To cement their victory, they have successfully settled a large number of Hispanic (and increasingly Asian) foederati on American soil, using them as “clubs,” as Mr. Sailer puts it, against paleo-con whites, a trend that President Obama will exacerbate if the rumors about unilateral immigration “reform” during the congressional recess are to be believed.

However, I disagree with Mr. Sailer on one point. Many SWPLs today descend from the country club great-grandpa set. Our upper crust today is a highly admixed lot of the Mayflower and Ellis Island, rather like many European aristocratic families.

“My social circle is made up almost entirely of douches from the Northeast…”

“Douches”? Judging from this, I still do not think you surrounded yourself with WASP *elites” very much. But I concede, sir, that you were near some. And you are absolutely right that Block Island is a blast. It’s my favorite island in that area.

“Again, Stanford is seen by pretty much everyone (even “Northeast elites”) these days as being in the top tier along with HYP. This is not a controversial statement. (That said, I’d choose Dartmouth over Stanford in a heartbeat, and still sometimes regret not going there out of high school.)”

And I acknowledged Stanford was rightfully considered top five and that the general public is more aware of it than they are of the “minor” Ivies. But the argument is over what Northeastern elites, especially older WASP elites think of Stanford compared to the “minor” Ivies. If you looked at enrollment numbers, you will find that I am correct about their preferences. Even today there are considerable regional preferences and biases and that includes the realm of elite education.

Thank you for the clarification. I still prefer the explicit state pre-emption my locality has. Makes things crystal clear for the law enforcement.

“I welcome all high-IQ people, as long as they wish to assimilate and are on the side of the countries they join.”

Obviously we should prefer high-IQ immigrants to low-IQ immigrants. Agreement there. But I do think assimilation is the key. Of course, for assimilation to occur smoothly the overall number of those to be assimilated cannot be too high at any given time. So I advocate a considerably lower level of immigration even for high-IQ immigrants.

“Blacks in America don’t have high fertility. The black birthrate is low and would be even lower without immigrant births (same problem whites have).”

True, but given their demographic proclivities, do you want further African immigration? In any case, the real demographic time bomb is the Hispanic migration. They start early and have very high fertility, which leads to multiplicative growth in population.

“Chain migration means those additional Asians you want to immigrate until they are 10% of the population of United States are absolutely an existential threat to us. Because “just those few” Asians YOU want to let in will advocate to raise the immigration limits…and raise them…and with well over a billion Han Chinese in the world, low fertility doesn’t mean few of you.”

First of all, I agree that chain migration should be discouraged. But you are incorrect to assume that it is *my preference* that we allow Asian (or any) mass migration until their proportion reaches 10% of the total population. What I actually said (and not what you wish me to say as a straw man) is that the country can probably easily assimilate *up to* 10% of population being Asian *at most.* That doesn’t mean I want Asians to immigrate in large numbers until their proportion doubles to 10% from the current 5%. Far from it. But clearly you have made up your mind and don’t want to be confused by facts.

Second, as I pointed out earlier, there is virtually no immigration from Japan, Taiwan and Singapore. Korean immigration has diminished greatly (it’s a trickle now compared to Hispanic migration). As China’s economy continues to grow, immigration from China will decline substantially as well. Nonetheless, let me repeat. I do *not* want mass immigration from Asia.

Third, you have got your priorities mixed up. The real existential threats to American whites are not Asians. They are Hispanic migrants. They may not pose an economic or sexual competition to your particular children, but they pose a HUGE economic threat to downscale whites.

“OR, just on the outside chance you really do mean what you say about caring about White Americans, go back and read all Steve’s old stuff on Affordable Family Formation and how it affects White fertility. And then think long and hard about what your elite-college educated co-ethnics are doing to housing prices in safe White neighborhoods.”

Fourth, note the presumption of insincerity (“outside chance you really do mean…”). This is sheer paranoia. You already assume that I am lying about my preferences. If *I* — a strongly paleo-conservative ethnic Asian — am repelled by your statements (how could I not be — you want my children who have only known their beloved American South, and half of whose ancestors settled and built the American Midwest, to move to alien Asia so that your precious blonde daughter might have higher sexual competitive advantage), imagine how SWPL Asians would react to this type of thinking. Of course you don’t care what they think, but you’ll wait about how everyone is anti-white and nobody allies with whites.

Finally, your obsession with “housing prices in safe White neighborhoods” tells me that your real interest isn’t the national well-being or even the well-being of other white Americans. It appears to be the well-being of fellow white *elites* and their ability to buy into the super zip codes on the cheap.

“Nah. Asians will put their tribal interests first because that’s the nature of human beings.”

Maybe that’s your nature, and you shouldn’t project.

I am ethnically Asian, but I don’t really care at all about Asian tribal interests. You see, that’s the beauty of intermarriage. My wife is white and my children are half-white. I care about them. I care about my wife’s family who welcomed me with open arms. I inherited my wife’s grandfather’s war trophies (because, frankly, I am the only one who cares about his war history and enjoys shooting historical guns in her family, and I make sure my children, his great grandchildren, know about his heroic service overseas). I cried the most when my wife’s grandmother died because I absolutely adored her. She was a kind, loving, smart, hardworking, tough farm lady, a real lady in the old mold, from the rural Midwest. And she cooked really amazing Swedish meatballs I loved!

When their granddaughter married me, they gave me a note, which I carry with me to this day. The note says how they knew the first time she brought me to meet them that I was “the one” for her and how happy they were that I was now formally a part of their family. How could I not care for and defend such people?

You see, my wife’s people *ARE MY PEOPLE* now and I care far, far more about them than some random Asians. For that matter, my closest friends are whites with whom I break bread, drink beers, shoot deer and birds, and take Communion together. They are godparents to my children and my wife and I to their children. I’d take a bullet for them and not for my “co-ethnics.” And they would take a bullet for me and I would raise their children as my own.

When I visit Asia now, I find it so very alien. I guess that’s what happens now that I have been in this country much longer than in Asia.

But you go ahead and keep believing what you want to believe — that all Asians “put their tribal interests first.”

“Second, clearly, she did not advocate a 0% Asian population in this country. She advocated zero Asian immigration. That’s not ethnic cleansing.”

Read again. She asks me to move my family to Asia (including my white wife and half-white children) because we wants her blonde daughter to have her pick of nerdy white boys.

Then “failing that,” she asks that I support zero Asian immigration. From that construction, it seems pretty clear to me that she prefers (soft) ethnic cleansing first and then “only failing that,” prefers zero immigration as the next best solution.

I personally don’t think JSM or her type are the main reason why Asian immigrants may or may not put their tribal interests before the nation’s interests. But I do think that she engages in a self-fulfilling prophecy by advocating “Go back to Asia! Oh, and if you don’t, please vote for my side. Oh, no, you are not going to vote for me? Then go back to Asia, you anti-whites!” type of rhetoric.

“Yellow girls will choose sexual over tribal. They no likey dorky yellow boys.”

Although there is a very high disparity in intermarriage rates between Asian males and females (15% and 70%, respectively), that disparity shrinks greatly among American-born Asians (roughly 36% or so for males and 45% or so for females marry white partners).

This means the drastic difference in intermarriage rates is largely a fresh-off-the-boat phenomenon and declines dramatically with the second generation and on. It’s assimilation.

I know “nobody wants nerdy yellow boys” meme is strong among the nerdy white boys with chips on their shoulders, the actual stats tell a different story.

I’d like to think that I am very unique (and I am in some ways), but not in this regard.

Alas, these inland areas seem to be attracting the poor, not just the middle class:

http://www.businessinsider.com/cities-poverty-soaring-2014-8?op=1#ixzz39nMVfPKs

I am far more comfortable with the U.S. customary units. BUT I must acknowledge that the metric system seems more rational and appears to be more conducive to scientific endeavors and math literacy. I wish we would just bite the bullet and convert once and for all. The armed forces did (for NATO inter-operability?) and that worked out fine.

Maybe “small” languages spoken by attractive people will stay alive, but those spoken by the less attractive will not.

I have a neighbor who is an ethnic Chinese from a small town that had a dialect of its own. I once asked him whether he taught that to his children. He said “No. My kids speak mostly English and a little bit of Mandarin.” I asked whether he ever visited his hometown and could still communicate with the townsfolk. He said “Only with the old folks. All the young people seem to speak only Mandarin.”

When I told him (in a SWPL-manner) that it was sad to see such a minority language disappear, he shrugged and said “That’s just the price of civilization.”

Personally, I too want everyone in my country to speak one language, American English, but I am still sad that many minority languages are in the process of extinction, as they are a fascinating window into history.

“I have heard of lower class Whites in those states having a hard time getting jobs like custodian for example, because businesses prefer to hire Hispanics to clean toilets and mop the floor.”

It’s not just custodians and floor-mopping jobs. In areas of increased Hispanic immigration, many previously decently-paying trades tend to be taken over by “cheaper” Hispanic workers: automechanical, H/VAC, pest control, plumbing work and so on.

“Do you have any thoughts on if it varies between siblings, or if it’s all about how the parents’ genes combine?”

Who knows? It’s all a bit mysterious. When my wife and I ask our friends and family they all say that our kids look very white. And they blend in rather well with children who look very Nordic (say, in the upper Midwest) and look far more so than children with Mediterranean ancestry. BUT when asked whom they resemble the most, everyone also says resoundingly that they resemble me, their Asian father.

There are other oddities. For example, some of my children have very curly hair with dark reddish spots. People who do not know us assume that’s from my wife’s side of the family, but that trait is actually from my mother (and, no, she is not mixed — she looked very NE Asian, but had curly dark brown hair with a reddish tint, which she colored black when she was young to avoid being teased, and she also pretended to have a perm). Meanwhile one of the my kids has very light brown hair, almost blond (and has very blond body hair). My wife and I, of course, recognize all these different traits among our children, but to others they all have a certain common look and we are asked constantly whether some of them are twins.

Although NE Asians have a certain stereotypical look, people shouldn’t forget that the major racial groups are also ancient admixtures and have considerable genetic variety that does not always manifest itself transparently. For example, I have my father’s jet black hair but carry the genes for my mother’s red tinted hair. I also manifest my father’s so-called “double eyelid” looks and genes (people in Asia think I have very large eyes because I don’t have that epicanthic fold look — some people think I had a plastic surgery because that is apparently very popular there).

“Maybe in 25 years, adults will be able to change their alleles for hair and eye color. That means people with those traits who have an emotional desire to pass them on (including myself) are freed to prioritize other traits in a spouse. Our future will probably have more blue eyes and blondes than today.”

I tend to be a “naturalist” and I am also religious, so I am against genetic manipulation. Let God work his mystery, I say!

“What percentage of the population is made up of Asians where you live ?”

My zip code today is roughly 75% white, 15% Asian, 5% mixed and 5% black/Hispanic (95% high school graduates, 65% college graduates and 35% graduate degrees). It’s one of Charles Murray’s “super zip codes.” High education, high affluence, high life expectancy, low obesity and very, very low crime (about a quarter of the national average).

When I first moved here Asians were about 7-8% of the population, mostly Koreans and some Vietnamese who voted strongly Republican.

Now, the Asian population is slightly more than half Indian from the huge influx for the IT industry. And they overwhelmingly vote Democrat, easily 95%+. The Asian vote is still majority Republican (about 55-45 split) because the Koreans and the Vietnamese are more likely to be citizens and vote (and vote Republican) than the Indians. The white vote was also strongly Republican at one point, but SWPLs have moved in, and the white vote also splits around 55-45 for the Republicans today.

Some of the surrounding zip codes that were heavily white when I moved here now have huge minorities of Hispanics, from less than 5% to easily 15-25% Hispanic. One locality has gone from less than 3% Hispanic to over 40% Hispanic in ten years. It’s the least desirable part of the area with pretty much all the violent crimes for the larger region.

And, yes, the area has become too “vibrant” for my taste and my family and I are seriously contemplating moving to a less diverse area.

I find it mildly amusing and more than annoying that the likes of Dana Milbank wants to use me (an ethnic Asian) as a rhetorical club with which to beat my wife and her people (whites). Contrary to the constant urgings of the leftist race baiters, I’ve experienced hardly any racism toward me from gentile whites in this country. Most have been down right welcoming.

Maybe it’s because I grew up partly in NYC and spent much time in academia, but most ethnic unfriendliness I encountered has been from blacks and Jews. From blacks I encountered outright hatred and violence. From Jews (often my academic colleagues) suspicion, tribal exclusion, and minor hostility, combined with constantly being asked if I had any sisters they could date.

Pretty much this: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204076204578076613986930932

“Some of the more vehement attacks on Amy Chua’s deliberately provocative 2011 memoir of child rearing, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” were perhaps fueled by resentment of Asian-American ascendancy, especially in the context of raising “perfect” children. Confession: I was one of the book’s more vocal detractors. Was I, a Jewish-American writer, driven to pique, in part, by a member of a group that threatens Jewish-American cultural domination, just as American Jews once threatened the WASP mandarinate? Well, maybe.

The subtle vying for success in various realms of American life between Asian-Americans and American Jews makes one wonder what mores and tastes will look like when Asian-Americans begin to exert their own influence over the culture. Will the verbal brio and intellectual bent of Jews, their edgy irony and frank super-competitiveness give way to Asian discretion, deference to the community, and gifts for less verbal pursuits like music, science and math? Will things become, as they once were under WASP hegemony, quieter?”

It seems at least some Jews are quite concerned that Christian Asians might common cause with their erstwhile rivals, the WASPs.

“Your white beauty preferential oxytocin levels are high.”

Well, maybe because my wife is mostly German-English and Swedish and my kids look pretty Nordic.

My father was a HUGE fan of Ingrid Bergman (he lived in Sweden for a couple of years and spoke Swedish decently; he also spoke German fairly well). I grew up watching just about every film with Bergman. But my real beauty type is more along lines of Audrey Hepburn. My wife has a strong resemblance to the latter.

“Not only is the cheating rampant, but Chinese, Koreans, and Indians (to a lesser degree) are incredibly uninterested in actually learning the material, so even when they actually memorize the answers, they don’t really understand the subject.”

I know the educational mantra today is “teach to think, not for rote memorization or testing,” but without a huge “database” memorized facts, children don’t learn to think, that is, relate one fact to another. For young minds, abstract concepts don’t exist on their own, but must be founded upon a large base of facts that are memorized.

In fact, testing itself is a valuable teaching/learning tool. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/science/21memory.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

If your oft-repeated but never proven claim that East Asians simply cheat or memorize to pass tests but don’t retain knowledge were true, there would be a great deal of “mismatch” between their standardized test scores and their performance in graduate school, especially in very difficult STEM fields with advanced problem solving. That mismatch is just not there.

I note that you never respond to the lack of the “mismatch” issue when confronted with it and then simply disappear, only to reappear somewhere else with the tired old “Asians cheat” mantra again.

I think the German style segmentation of education from early on has many merits. It may be time to consider this model for the U.S. now:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303665904577452521454725242

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-19/german-vocational-training-model-offers-alternative-path-to-youth

But, of course, anything that overtly smacks of hiearchy/class is verboten in America’s notionally egalitarian culture, so maybe it’s a no go.

Wherever there is significant contact between blacks and Asians, there is usually violence directed from the former toward the latter.

See: http://www.wnd.com/2012/06/stunning-dirty-secret-about-racism-in-america/

Those few Asian race hustlers who wail against “white oppression” should go talk to some blacks once in a while. Or just walk down black neighborhoods. At night. Holding iPads.

“the real reason Whites will become a Minority in the U.S is because of open borders, liberal immigration policies, and the fact that so many White women have no interest in wanting to have children.”

THIS.

“And it’s pretty easy to estimate whether something is heavier or lighter than water: does it float?”

What else floats on water?

A very very small rock?

A WITCH!

My earlier comment was apparently too radical and was moderated, so I’ll try again.

If President Obama were to do this, I would consider it an act of treason.

And on a lighter note, we apparently need more Hispanics in movies: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/few-roles-for-hispanics-in-top-hollywood-movies/2014/08/04/d47f2e9c-1b99-11e4-9b6c-12e30cbe86a3_story.html

This part was especially amusing: “Black males were more likely than those from any other group to be shown in a committed relationship, at 68 percent. Asian males were the least likely, at 29 percent.”

In other words, in this fantasy world that Hollywood wish to construct, blacks males are monogamous doctors and scientists and Asians are villainous baby daddies.

You might wish to read the studies you cited again.

From the first link, here are the probation rates at UCB among freshmen:

African American: 10%
Chicano/Latino: 6%
Asian: 4%
White: 3%
CA Resident: 4%
Out of State (domestic): 6%
International: 3%

(Excludes athletes who were 11%).

This is your evidence that Asians cheat and result in “mismatch”?

Also a large majority of international students are Asian and they have essentially the same probation rate as domestic whites at 3%.

This confirms my own college teaching experience that the bulk of cheating is from athletes, on whose behalf universities frequently intervene to shield them from actual academics.

Now, the same study shows that the international *transfers* have the highest rate at 12%. I can totally see this, because these are international students taking a second bite at the entrance and are likely to have worse academic qualifications in the first place. They were likely those who were rejected the first time they tried to be accepted, likely those with considerably worse vernacular English skills than the select international (majority Asian) students who were accepted at the first go (with the lowest probation rate of 3% along with whites).

Your second cited study from UC Davis shows these rates of leaving early by ethnicity:

NAM: 5.4%
Asian: 3.5%
White: 3.4%

Again, where is the mismatch? This is hardly evidence for Asian cheating.

By the way, the same study shows some interesting sub-divisions. The leave-early rates for Chinese students were 2.5%, for Filipinos and Japanese at 3% (all lower than white rates). Koreans and Vietnamese were very high at 6.5% and 5.1% respectively. American Indians were exceptionally low at 2.7%.

Not surprisingly “stayers” had higher high school GPA than “leavers.”

From your third citation, you might find this:

“Asian Americans (41.5%) and European Americans (43.9%) were more likely to have graduated or completed college within six year after high school than Hispanics (20.4%) and Blacks (23.9%). Also, Asian Americans were least likely to leave in the critical first semester or year of college, especially those attending public institutions. Less than 10% dropped out in the first year of college compared to almost 25% of Blacks, approximately 27% of Hispanics, and approximately 20% of Whites.”

How interesting that Douthat used the word “Caesarism.”

Whatever happened to that guy? Someone look up the state motto of Virginia.

“My experience, and the facts bear this out, is that previous Mexican immigrants to the USA tended to be mostly causcasoid and mestizo. These Mexican Americans and their current descendants have little in common in terms of interest with the current crop of rural indio and zambo Mexicans.”

Yes, but that doesn’t stop conquistador Hispanics from rabble-rousing and co-opting Indios to benefit the elite-within-the-minority. After all, all this affirmative action rabble-rousing from black activists does not benefit ordinary blacks, but very white-looking black activist class.

“Must be that Southern hospitality.”

I love my wife’s Midwestern folks dearly, but culturally I find myself the most drawn to Southerners. I truly appreciate the old manners. And, contrary to the hateful redneck racist stereotype, *I* personally and subjectively have found that Southerner whites are far more likely to judge people based on their character and actions than Northern liberal “anti-racist” whites.

About the only racial comment directed at me in the South was when I went back to a store for a backordered item. The older woman at the front yelled at another woman at the back office “Hey, that guy who was here yesterday for that item is here!” The response from inside was “Who? The really good-looking Chinaman?”

There was a couple of seconds of silence while the woman at the front got a little red-faced, and my wife broke what little tension there was with “Well, he IS good-looking and that’s why I married him.” We all laughed and that was that.

Of course, I heard so so much worse in the urban Northeast, usually from blacks. And sometimes more than just words.

“No, they’re not too stupid to realize that. It’s just that the impact of immigration is diffuse, and — like Whites — Blacks are easily distracted and will focus on whatever the TV’s talking about.”

Sadly, public policies that result in benefits that are concentrated while costs are diffused have high chances of success, because the beneficiaries fight tooth and nail for those very personal benefits while the cost-bearers shrug off the individually minor costs.

I hope we can change that dynamic about immigration in general and this coming amnesty in particular.

That depends on the number of intermarriages though. Whites still INTRA-marry at exceedingly high rates. As Derbyshire pointed out, if a few thousand or even tens of thousands of whites want to marry, say, Asians, nationally that’s not going to change the genetics or culture all that much if at all. But if the country is 20-30% Hispanic and they have considerably higher fertility rates than whites, the country is going to change quickly, because the mechanics of the “compounding interests” apply.

We’ve had Hispanics in the southwestern parts of the country for a few hundred years, and they weren’t much of a problem so long as they didn’t breed at much higher rates and they *assimilated.*

The problems now are several fold. Whites, intermarried or not, have very low fertility. We have mass migration of both uneducated, hard-to-assimilate Hispanics and highly educated, but “globalist” Asians with little allegiance to their adoptive country. And the dominant native SWPL paradigm has become completely hostile to assimilation of newcomers.

Simply barring any substantial immigration may buy some time as occurred in the early 20th Century after the flood of non-WASP European immigration (and it’s certainly worthy of pursuing in my view), but the other problems of both the native anti-assimilation culture and the low white fertility remain. White nationalism or separatism does not really address those issues. You can’t and shouldn’t coerce people to have more children (I understand Mr. Sailer’s affordable family formation theory and, while that may explain a part of the low white — and, for that matter, Asian — fertility, I do not think that explains the bulk of the reasons why white and Asian fertility is so low) .

By the way, on a personal note, my white in-laws were Nelson Rockefeller Republicans when I met my wife (and my wife voted for Clinton before we met). In large measure because of my tireless evangelization, they are now much more conservative and have not voted for a Democrat or a liberal Republican since that time. But they are strongly repelled by *explicit* white separatism or nationalism. They are far more amenable to arguments about the economic viability of the native (or “citizenist” to borrow the Sailerian term) workforce and the continuation of the Anglo-American culture. They agree with me that the preservation of that culture requires a substantial and enduring native white population, but an explicit identification of that culture with *only* whites and a complete exclusion of any assimilated non-whites is a bridge too far for them. I suspect most whites in this country are similar.

“That’s like saying Britain could have developed in China.

Then they are just simply stupid.”

Um, yeah, ok. Because my in-laws believe a country that is 90% white and 10% Asian can sustain the traditional Anglo-American culture while you believe that the requirement for that is 100% white population doesn’t mean my in-laws are “just simply stupid.” That remark is both unwarranted and, frankly, impolite. You don’t even know them.

And believing that a heavily white majority country can sustain the Anglo-American civic culture does not equate to believing that “Britain could have developed in China.” (By the way, setting aside the Han Chinese culture, even the Han ethnicity is not “pure” — it has assimilated a lot of “northern barbarians” through the centuries.)

Genes are very important and highly influential, but it is most certainly not everything. The intellectual, scientific conflict between environmentarians and hereditarians is not one between people who believe 100% of the causation in human affairs is due to environment vs. those who believe that genes account for 100% of the causation. It’s a conflict between those who attribute 100% (or nearly 100%) to environment and those who believe both heredity and environment exert powerful influences. Both the author of this blog and I are in the latter category.

As an example, Finns are reputedly roughly 5-15% Siberian/North Asian genetically and they seem to look and act “white” just fine, only with high PISA scores.

While culture and genes coincide *mostly,” the two have never been completely identical. “British” culture has been, at core, an English-dominated culture that has assimilated some elements of Scottish, Welsh, and Irish genetic and culture influence to varying degrees (with very minor contributions from genes and cultures from farther still).

By your logic, the Anglo-American culture in this country was doomed the moment first German, Nordic, Irish, and French settlers/immigrants merged with the English.

Returning to my in-laws, I don’t know what you mean by “do they believe in intermarriage?” but I can tell you that they think that a modest number of intermarriages between whites and East Asians is not a bad thing for the country. Obviously they are quite comfortable with my marriage to their daughter.

“This is it. Right here. This is it.

This is the intellectual flaw, the suicide pill

Right here.”

Well, if you are going to stick to the internet equivalent of chanting bumper sticker slogans rather than engaging in a reasoned discussion, I guess there is no point in further continuing this line of inquiry.

I just hope that you are 100% certain that your genetics entirely 100% hail from England, because you are going to have to deport yourself or commit some sort of a European version of an internet seppuku right here otherwise.

And while we are debating the finer of points of whether a minute number of white-Asian intermarriages are all right or not, our southern border regions are being Hispanicized massively.

“I got little problem with Asians, but if you’re a white dude marrying an Asian chick, it’s cause you couldn’t get an attractive white girl.”

Good grief.

1. What do you make of an Asian male who could and did “get an attractive white girl” (a woman who was also a phenomenal collegiate athlete and an Ivy League graduate to boot)?

2. Though I am not fond of Mark Zuckerberg or his politics (to be highly understated about it), do you suppose he married Priscilla Chan as a consolation prize because he could not “get an attractive white girl”?

Finally, 3. Is there some sort of a point system for women of different ethnic group (assuming similar attractiveness) and, if there is, how many Asian, Hispanic or Black women are each white woman worth? Is it possible to trade, for example, two attractive Asian girls for one attractive white girl? Or are there absolute, discrete boundaries on the hierarchy whereby a white girl is worth an infinity of Asian girls?

I am entirely, perfectly fine with subjective beauty preferences.

But I find the notion that only loser whites pick Asians both asinine and unreflective of reality.

Wow. “SMV.” I learned a new term today. I must admit I am repelled by the idea of “a market place” for love. I guess I am a hopeless romantic. When I saw my wife for the first time, I felt like I was struck by a lightning bolt.

Is “plain” the term now for obesity?

Having said all that, I do agree with the notion that a slim figure, a smiling, pleasant demeanor, and chastity go a long way toward making a woman attractive. Toss in good education and even those without the super model facial bone structure would do well attracting desirable husband material.

Whether there are many men who deserve such women today is another matter entirely. The mass culture seems to celebrate male promiscuity as well as female whorishness. I don’t understand these website that purport to teach “gaming” women.

What? No narco-cartelism?

Per John Boyd “people first, ideas second, hardware third.”

Weather is far down the list.

Unlike the people who work my lawn, the Hispanics I ran into in elite academia looked like they came straight out of the cast of “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” which is to say, they looked Southern European (but with “patriotic” Mexican names like Tenoc as in the film — yes, white people with Indio names). I even dated one.

Then I realized the director of the film is Alfonse Cuaron, of “Gravity,” “The Children of Men,” and “Harry Potter: the Prisoner of Azkaban” fame: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_Cuar%C3%B3n

Married to an Italin and lives in London.

By the way, this was in The National Review recently: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/385035/homogeneity-their-strength-kevin-d-williamson#!

To quote from the article:

“In Sweden, diversity is not their strength. Homogeneity is.

How much of this is social and how much is biological is unclear — as, indeed, are the boundaries between the social and the biological. But in political terms, Sweden’s more liberal policy toward immigrants may be judged in no small part by the Stockholm riots of 2013, whereas the much sterner Danish model has enjoyed more success with its active cultural-integration campaign, its insistence on Danish cultural norms and practices, and its emphasis on economic self-support. Though much remains to be seen, there is evidence to suggest that the Nordic welfare state is something that only really works in a society that is 98 percent Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish.

The striking counterexample is the case of Japan, which, like 1960s Norway, is concerned about a demographic trend — a baby bust — that threatens to undermine its welfare state. But Japan is a very closed culture, and the country historically has not been very open to immigrants. As Zeynep Tufekci notes, “Hundreds of thousands [of] ethnic Koreans who have been in Japan through multiple generations, for example, do not have Japanese citizenship and can only assimilate if they more or less give up their Korean identity.” Professor Tufekci writes as if that were a self-evidently bad thing — as if Japan’s rejection of multiculturalism and its insistence upon its own cultural identity were inherently malevolent. Japan places a very high value on Japaneseness, and there is no self-evident reason for believing that it is wrong to do so. There are real benefits to diversity — and there are real costs.”

I have considerable personal experience dealing with black violent crimes.

I do carry (legally, of course), but I am under no illusion that my travails would be over the moment I put down a violent aggressor who happens to be black. I have no doubt that I would be instantly portrayed as a trigger happy yellow racist intent on murdering blacks.

So, on top of carrying, I now record. Yes, I carry an electronic recorder, which is on whenever I carry (which is just about all the time except in the prohibited areas). My particular locality is one party recording (meaning, as long as I am there, I can record). And, yes, it’s so very sad that we have come to this.

I don’t know the whole story about Ferguson, except the Narrative, as such, seems to be crashing down bit by bit with each discovery. I just feel terrible for the officer who had to put down another human being (which can be traumatic by itself) and doubly sorry for him that now he has been characterized by the media and the mob as a blood-thirsty racist killer who must be “vigorously prosecuted” even before a thorough investigation has been completed.

And all this for politics. The mob on the street and its political enablers have blood on their hands.

“I don’t read that passage as implying that lots of writers don’t know who St Augustine is.”

Good grief. What educated man does not know about St. Augustine? I was a freaking immigrant and I was taught about St. Augustine when I was elementary school age in Asia! He is beloved by even Protestants as an alleged “proto-Protestant”!

And this fellow, who is ignorant of one of the foundational figures of Christian Western society, is supposed to be some sort of a public intellectual?

I am so glad I home school my children, but I fear their interactions with their “peers” in the future.

“When Ice Cube recorded an anti-Asian rap song during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, nobody in the liberal media labeled him a racist because supposedly Blacks are not capable of being racist against Asians. Only White people are capable of being racist against Asians. That is the Liberal mantra.”

I think even the “liberal media” knew about the burning of Koreatown during the riots. Of course, the news reports during that time portrayed those gun-toting Korean merchants defending their stores against black gangs and arsonists and Hispanic looters as vigilantes who posed threats to the police and the National Guards.

“Catholic school in Asia, right?”

No, sir. I was first taught about St. Augustine at a Protestant Sunday school (just Augustine, then) and later by a “Western History” teacher at a public school in Asia.

On a loosely related note, my Asian history teacher in elementary school was a devout Christian. She taught my class about the foundation myth of my birth country per the history curriculum. Once finished, she then said “Of course, this is all just an unscientific myth. The only real Lord in the world is Jesus Christ, the Son of the True God. That’s what we should all believe.”

Try to imagine that at a public school in this country. On top of that, she was one mean old disciplinarian. She would beat me and my fellow students mercilessly for the most minor of transgressions.

“Maybe Twinkie is Filipino.”

No, sir. I’m ethnically Northeast Asian, as Oriental as they come. And an American by choice and effort and, by the Grace of God, a father to proud Southern-born children. Dixie forever!

“Asian males have their own form of dangerous psychology. A lot of murders have been done by Asian males towards white females. Watch for it on DailyMail.”

What’s “a lot”?

Asians, especially East Asians, have some of the lowest rates of arrest and incarceration in the country, substantially lower than even whites. The very low crime rates in East Asia also attest to their low criminality. That does not mean there aren’t (very few) criminals and the insane among them.

The Virginia Tech shooter, for example, was mentally ill and admired the two white Columbine killers whom he referred as martyrs.

“Hokkien or Fujian Filipino. Tsinoy or Sangley. Amy Chua’s background. Tiger Dad with a pistol.”

Nay to all.

I am not much of a “Tiger Dad” since I care more about my children being gentlemen and ladies and rather less about test scores and becoming elites.

But, yes, my children are all trained in the use of various firearms as well as bushcrafting skills.

“Humans tend to imprint on the landscape where they lived at puberty and they both grew up in Manhattan landscape.”

Several American foreign service officers who raised children all over the world told me that their children consider where they attended high school as their “home” towns. So there appears to be some anecdotal evidence about geographic imprinting during puberty.

Of course, in my own case, I went to Stuyvesant High School in NYC, but I now absolutely, positively loathe NYC. In fact, I dislike all cities, Yankee cities especially. Instead I adore small Southern towns, especially those in horse country. Throw a few interesting hills on top of that, and I am in heaven on earth!

My relatives (who live in NE Asia) think that I am quite deranged. They all think that with the kind of money I have, I should be living large on the top floor of a pre-war building in NYC. I guess I am a bit of an outlier.

“Black people have a different definition of what constitutes a “nerd” than Asian and White folks.”

In my mother tongue (a NE Asian language), there is no equivalent to the American English term “nerd.” There is a word that is roughly translated as “bookish” or a “bookworm,” but without the negative connotation present in the English language. I suppose it has something to do with the traditional Confucian reverence for scholars. Indeed, my parents desperately wanted me to become a scholar rather than pursue a profession or a business that led to wealth.

When I first came to this country and ran into the anti-intellectual derision heaped on “nerds,” I was quite perplexed: “Why is it such a bad and unpopular thing to be studious and learned?” I’d ask myself. You see, whence I came scholarly students were popular and respected, not denigrated as social pariahs to be scorned and bullied. It was really quite shocking.

But, I assimilated quickly and learned to become popular (and, to be frank, a bit feared) — I punched and knocked out the first black kid who cursed at me and shoved me right in front of all his friends, and made friends rather quickly with white and Asian children at school.

And eastern Loudoun County which was in the boonies back then is now Little Bangalore. Ashburn-Sterling-Herndon area is now one of the most densely populated areas in Northern Virginia.

“There’s a joke that there’s a 20-year lag time between DC’s foreign policy and its cab drivers.”

Alas, the lag time between foreign policy and ethnic restaurants is considerably shorter. I recently had some kebobs at an Afghan-run restaurant in metro-DC where the proprietor (a Tajik, I gathered from the Dari he spoke) indignantly told me how the American invasion led to a corrupt government that stole all his family businesses and money and forced them to flee… to America.

He said, finally, “There was order with the Taliban. They didn’t go around stealing people’s business and money.”

I guess he forgot about decapitating school girls at soccer stadiums and such. This episode lends further evidence to two lessons. First, most people crave security, not freedom. Second, liberators from oppression are rarely appreciated (or as the mysterious Frenchman in the film “Ronin” says “At the end of the day, we are likely to be punished for our kindness”).

Thanks for that history.

Does that signify transformation of anti-intellectualism in America since 1950-60 or so? From a garden variety, mild disdain of the bookish to something much more derisive?

After all, had there not been a fine tradition of devout athlete-scholars in America until the relatively recent past? (American versions of, say, Eric “The Flying Scotsman” Liddell, so memorably portrayed in “The Chariots of Fire.”)

As I typed the above, I just recalled that Liddell was born and died in China.

“How many Afghans has the U.S. murdered with its bullets and bombs? How many has it tortured?”

How many?

Also, is decapitating a little girl at a soccer stadium as a public spectacle morally equivalent to death by combat or unintentionally collateral damage in war?

“Twinkie how do you feel about the British government lumping in Pakistanis and Afghanis into the same racial category as your people the Orientals ?”

First of all, “my people” are my wife, my children, her folks and our friends and neighbors, who are by and large white. I do not feel any kinship or sense of belonging toward other Orientals. I suppose that’s rather like an American of Irish descent not feeling any camaraderie toward Germans or Russians.

Technically Pakistanis and Afghans are Asians as they hail from Asia. But the Brits should be more precise and call them South Asians (or Central Asians for the Afghans especially if they are Tajik or Uzbeks and perhaps East Asians for Hazaras).

“Do you feel the same way about Pakis being classified as ‘Asian’ as White feels about darker skin Hispanic criminals being classified as ‘White’ by the FBI ?”

I think Pakistanis being classified as Asian in Britain is simply imprecise and confusing. The lumping of Hispanics with whites statistically in this country, I suspect, is politically motivated and I find it greatly egregious. My wife’s Midwestern Anglo-Germano-Swedish descended folks are very different from even the whitest of rich Mexicanos from Mexico City. Wogs begin at Calais and all that (although technically Germany and Sweden are to east of Calais, you get the point).

I am a herediterian, which is to say that I believe both genetics and environment matter. Some folks here seem to mirror the error of the environmentarians who assign everything to “nurture” and similarly attribute causation entirely to one thing, genetics. In my view, genes and heredity are extremely important, but culture matters too. Even though I am reasonably well-to-do, I’d rather drink canned beer with Scotch-Irish Appalachians than spend time with astronomically rich white Mexicans (which I have done). I just don’t care for the people who are elites in a highly exploitative and corrupt culture… neither do I feel much affinity for the sheep-like exploited in the said culture.

“Afghans are hardly the best population to extrapolate that from. Most Afghans are pious Muslims, who are hardly going to feel much gratitude for dhimmis, no matter what the dhimmis do.”

This particular Afghan appeared not to be religious at all. He just seemed rather perturbed that our government’s policy resulted in an an unstable, corrupt government that destroyed his family’s wealth.

Of course the Kosovars love us. We sided with them against the Serbs in an ethnic war. We also did not occupy their country. Still, I wonder how long that “love” will last.

Frogs don’t seem grateful at all and the last time I checked most are not pious Muslims, at least not yet. Indeed, even at the time of their liberation, some GIs were dismayed to find that some of the good folks of Normandy grumbled about the said liberation, because a good number of them actually had it rather good under the Nazi occupation and were not too keen on their farms and businesses being disturbed by the invasion of Fortress Europa.

Curiously enough, the folks who genuinely seem the most helpful in the world to our cause seem to be 1) the Brits with whom we fought two wars (one of them quite existential on our side) and who burnt our capital and 2) the Japanese whose two large cities were pulverized by us in what remain to be the only two instances of nuclear weapons use in history.

Although I should mark the Singaporeans with an honorable mention. They really seem to love having our fleet around and show gratitude in every way possible. I guess they like having a big brother who guarantees their independence.

“I travel frequently to Rust Belt towns and the difference is night and day. I think the “American People” would be shocked to see the wealth in DC. Something like 7 of the 10 richest counties are in the DC area, which produces nothing but paperwork and regulations. The number of Beemers, Mercedes, and other high end cars is astonishing.”

You don’t have to drive very far from Arlington to see the difference. Just take a quick day trip to Winchester.

Also, the “7 of the 10 richest counties” bit is highly misleading. The metro-DC areas has 7 of the 10 counties with the highest median family income. Yes, the area is very affluent, but the Gini coefficient is relatively flat, meaning there is a lot of upper middle class folks in those counties with relatively fewer very poor or super rich families. This is very different from other super rich areas that are often surrounded by considerably poorer regions. In that regard, DC suburbs are rather bland than glitzy.

It is a bubble, of course, but a rather giant one with a relatively balanced distribution of income.