Agree completely that is a d-bag comment.

Yes, the reason Im not dating Hollywood startlets is that I’m just not asking them. The reason the median guy isn’t asking the median girl out is that the median girl wants nothing to do with the median guy.

I think the current dating market — characterized by the rise of feminism, massive income inequality, and technology (the Pill and social media) — is a disaster for a majority of men and women.

O/T, but not really.

According to the NYT, and in peak female journalist solopcism, Oppenheimer was really about the girls:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/magazine/oppenheimer-movie-girls.html?smtyp=cur&smid=fb-nytimes&fbclid=IwAR2L6coK2kYEq8NwefeBf6mUG6-0UNHfIM6xWJ37n7jg1Tn5sIPYZNA65lk

If you google a photo of the author you will not be surprised.

I like Rufo, but this essay is a big miss. He draws the conclusion that “psychological disorders are job qualifications” based on a single anecdote. No, it is not actually the case that disclosing mental disorders improves the chance of you being hired.

His discussion of the valorization of victimhood is correct but no different than what you’d find on Rush or National Review circa 2005. Basically conservative conventional wisdom for about 20 years.

It is true that Cluster B types are more prominent than before. Here’s my better take on this:

1. Social media amplifies them and is structured to play to their strengths: dishonesty and drama-queening.

2. “Mental health parity” mandates for health insurance coverage resulted in a huge expansion of the mental health industrial complex. Unlike doctors and RNs, most workers in it are themselves dysfunctional, are paid poorly despite their string of credentials, and resent normal straight men.

“Therapist” of some sort is the big career goal of mentally ill obese 95-110IQ white asian and hispanic women all over America.

3. Expansion of the mental health complex isn’t limited to just Cluster B. As I noted before, 8-10% of young boys now are being formally diagnosed with “autism spectrum disorder.”

I generally find Twitter pretty inane, but have just spent 30 minutes obsessively reading this rule3O3 guy. Worth it.

Obviously, this guy is shockingly stupid for somebody running a research center at even in mid-level university like BU.

$10MM is typically the minimum bid for a “center” (an “institute is usually over $25MM, and a “project” is over $1MM or so). He (or somebody) did raise at least a little money from Raikes, Rockefeller, etc. (about $200K that I saw from Form 990s).

When you get $10MM, one strategy is basically to shoot-the-moon, spend most of it in a couple of years, and hope you can parlay this into more fundraising because of your profile and momentum. It’s closely analogous to the venture-backed start-up strategy of spending your A-round in 12 months to gain mindshare and going for a big B-round. It sure seems like Kendi tried this (as did a bunch of start-ups in 2020 / 2021). For all I know his SV backers pushed him in this direction.

But in the end, it’s just kind of sad that he doesn’t have the smarts to see any of this. It’s like putting me up against major league (or for that matter D-III college) pitching and seeing me miss every pitch.

Of course, he’ll presumably continue to get paid a ton of money for mouthing whatever slogans he does.

It reminds me of what fellow grifter (but she of the feminazi variety) Anita Sarkeesian said a few years ago about how much she hated doing fundraising and gladhandling for her feminazi “charity” that she ran.

Fundraising for a 501(c)(3) or think tank is actually quite difficult and tediuous. You have to eat shit and like it, understand the way-undertoned sub rosa pay-for-play promises you’re making for the gifts, and then deliver the goods. Imagine a mafioso protection racket but in tuxes and evening gowns and “teach-ins” and such, but with far more subtlety —so much so that most of the mafioso don’t realize they’re in a mafioso, but actually think they’re good guys in a Persecuted Persons Protection Program.

A true believer type gets wise and cynical, and a lazy grifter type like Kendi or Sarkeesian gets, well, lazy and miserable. The latter is much happier doing 20 minute YouTube rants about Evil White Men and $50,000 and hour speeches and “debates.” Alas, the donations must flow and the protection must be gained or no one will hire you or promote your nonsense speechifying fluff.

Kendi/Sarkeesian types grafted onto their particular Hate Whitey Men schpiels because they really want to be celebrities spouting off nonsense nonstop and being worshipped for it, and the politics of their times allowed this avenue for such fame. But that can only be a part-time gig if the system allows; the way to sustain your fame after you take the ticket is protecting the system and fellow ticket-takers.

I really would not be too surprised if either Kendi or Sarkeesian ended up doing OnlyFans if their fame dried up more. Both are merely fame whores.

So, it’s all very complicated.

A big of the complication you are referring to is that most Americans are used to using “black” as equivalent to ADOS, because those are the blacks they’ve seen all their lives..

But as pendants keep pointing out, there is incredible genetic diversity within Africa as compared to most populations outside Africa, presumably because of the grand “out of Africa” genetic bottleneck. American slaves were mostly Bantu or from various parts of west and Gold Coast Africa. While there were certainly Igbo slaves, the Nigerian-Americans are of notably different genetic ancestry that most ADOS.

So, when SJWs start lecturing you about how ‘there is more genetic difference within Africa…’ blah blah blah, they’re really just taking advantage of the way normal Americans have used the word ‘black’ to mean ‘the kind of black who is an ADOS’. You should actually agree with them that, yes, we can see different ancestry groups that all come from Africa, and all have somewhat darker skin than northern Europeans, but isn’t it interesting that some of these groups show persistent success in a wide variety of environments and others don’t.

That’s certainly plausible in the long-run, but according tot he survey Steve cited, both Latinos and Asians are more supportive of reparations than are whites.

There’s a lot of installed wealth to be looted in America before the looters turn on one another.

You’re just repeating that there is no argument other than animus, without addressing the argument being made.

You write:

All same-sex marriage did was allow homosexuals to change their next-0f-kin just like heterosexuals.

And all giving a parade to a winning baseball team or a collection of child rapists does is to give some people a free ride down the street.

Valorizing behavior X via public celebration changes attitudes.

I absolutely agree that no-fault divorce, ubiquitous streaming porn in 4K, feminism, etc. have undermined the once near-universal marriage norm already, but that doesn’t mean that shooting a guy who’s already been stabbed twice isn’t a bad idea.

Legalizing gay marriage did not take away anything from everyone else.

And my neighbor printing counterfeit money in his basement doesn’t take anything away from me either, but it is does further devalue my currency.

A nearly-universal norm of lifetime monogamous marriage is IMO essential for the long-term health of a functioning, stable Western society of the kind I want to live in. Lifetime monogamous marriage also cuts against evolved human nature, and therefore like many important aspects of civilized life requires all kinds of social, legal and educational support.

It’s certainly true that no-fault divorce, ubiquitous streaming porn in 4K, feminism, etc. have undermined this norm already, but that doesn’t mean that shooting a guy who’s already been stabbed twice isn’t a bad idea.

The big push to normalize homosexuality started in the early ’90s. Actually, it started a lot earlier than that, but it kicked into high gear around 1993.

Exactly correct, just as the push for reparations started way before 2023. But by 2004, public opinion on gay marriage was pretty much exactly where public opinion on reparations is in California today. It took less than 20 years from 2004 to get to not only formal legalization, but gay marriage as an unassailable fact of life accepted by everybody in power anywhere in America.

A new poll of 6,000 Californians finds that cash reparations payouts to blacks are opposed 59%-28%.

For now.

In 2004, gay marriage was opposed in the US by an almost identical margin: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/

But then there was 20 years of academic legitimization, then endless cheerleading articles in The New Republic and The Atlantic, then Broadway plays, then edgy movies, then mainstream TV, then explicit New York Times op-eds, then a series of of failed ballot initiatives, and then — after years of indoctrination at universities — a couple of crucial Supreme Court decisions. Gay marriage is now a fact of American political life that nobody who is going to get elected to anything significant, become president of any major university, or become CEO of any large public company will oppose.

That took less than 20 years. If this is a regime priority, how long would this take?

So, our government can’t defend the southern border of the US, but we draw the line at Oklahoma.

That is for the University of California, CalTech and a handful of other competitive schools. It’s not true for any of the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, UChicago, Duke, Vanderbilt, ….. and the vast, vast majority of competitive colleges.

They are if you’re white or Asian, not a recruited athlete, and want to get in.

The whole ‘SAT optional’ thing is to allow colleges to admit AA candidates without lowering their reported 25/75 SAT numbers.

Steve, I think your post has the implicit premise of ‘I prefer some Republican candidates over others, but what matters a lot more is having a Republican rather than a Democrat win’. But for a lot of Trump voters it doesn’t work that way at all. Many of them aren’t ‘Republicans’ (at least not by choice and conviction). Sure, gun-to-head, they would likely prefer DeSantis or whoever to Biden, but not by a lot.

Given that the 2024 race is up in the air (no matter what anybody says who asserts they ‘know’ who’s going to win), it’s a rational calculation for them to roll the dice on the guy they prefer to any other realistic candidate of either party, even if they think he has a slightly worse chance of winning.

“Access” literally means “ability to enter a place.” So it’s an ideal weasel word for conflating “equality of opportunity” and “equality of outcome.” For example, you can say someone is denied “access” to a job because they aren’t even allowed to apply (which everyone agrees is unfair). Or, you could say they are denied “access” because they aren’t as qualified as the other candidates (which normal people would agree is fair).

Using the word “access” thus allows one to pretend they are talking about the first definition (i.e., unfair discrimination), when reality is actually the second definition (i.e., fair meritocracy).

I don’t think the immigration scandal is news to anybody here, but it’s what finally based me.

As far as I understand the historical sources (which are really inexact), the percentage of the population moving into the US now is pretty comparable to rate at which barbarians migrated into the western Roman Empire in the period during which all the sophisticated historians describe as ‘well, it wasn’t really invasion in the way we use that word now’.

My reaction to America now is like meeting somebody with my late mother’s name. Sure, it stirs a slight feeling of recognition and affection, but it’s just a different person who happens to have the same name.

I usually agree with you on things, but I think this is very likely wrong.

Until and unless something like China developing fully effective missile defense, the US nuclear arsenal will act like the walls of Constantinople before the invention of effective cannons. It will prevent external aggression and allow a very long period of decline. The US military doesn’t really have to defeat foreign enemies, all it will need to do is maintain a monopoly on large-scale violence within the US. And I suspect it will be able to do that for a long time. But I could be wrong.

I saw School Daze with my very blonde, very preppy girlfriend in an otherwise all-black theater in 1988. It was somewhat uncomfortable, but was saved by this amazing closing number:

… Just as things seemed ready to spin even further out of control, the followers were hustled back into Room 104.

Was Room 101 occupied, or would holding the meeting there be too on the nose?

Beyond the obvious point that this study simply assumes that ‘perceived’ conflict is a mis-perception, rather than an accurate reflection of reality, this in the summary stuck out to me:

A team of researchers led by a Virginia Commonwealth University professor found that teachers, regardless of race, perceived the most conflict with Black boys and the least conflict with white girls in their classrooms. …. While teachers’ ratings of closeness with all students decreased from kindergarten to second grade, their level of closeness with white girls remained highest, followed by Black girls, white boys and finally Black boys.…Rudasill said the study isn’t about individual teachers’ bias; it instead uncovers how systemic racism and white privilege in society unfold in the U.S. educational system. … “We found evidence that teacher perceptions of their relationships with Black and white children in early elementary U.S. classrooms systematically advantaged white children and demonstrated an anti-Black racial bias representative of the structural and systemic racism endemic to the U.S.,” Rudasill and her co-authors wrote in the paper.

Note that there is no concept of anti-male bias presented by the authors, despite the fact that both sex and race are correlated with teacher closeness.

PS: Just saw all the other comments making the same point. Hopefully a straw in the wind for cultural change.

The huge difference is who smokes.

In France, you can still find a lot of professionals who smoke, whereas in America it’s like wearing a huge plebeian sign.

Yes, I agree that not many people argue today for ‘100% heredity’.

My point was not far off from yours. The intellectual battle was won — in the minds of the general educated public — by 100% environmentalists, in part because they were arguing against a strawman. And the ethnic composition of the two blocks was very strongly WASP (hereditarians) vs Jewish (environmentalists).

When sociology majors or whomever today yell that ‘race is not a scientifically valid category’, they are arguing whether they know it or not, against the racial categorizations that were asserted to be scientific 100 years ago. They are right about that, but they’ve been living on this negative victory for many years.

Xuxa was once Brazil’s biggest TV star. Now many are wondering whether a thin, blond, white woman was the right idol for such a diverse country.

By Ana Ionova
Reporting from Rio de Janeiro

A photo of Ana Ionova: https://twitter.com/ana_ionova/photo

Sailer’s First Law of Female Journalism, vindicated again. (I’ll admit I was a little nervous when I saw her Slavic-ish last name.)

It’s amazing how closely these current debates parallel those of almost exactly 100 years ago between Charles Davenport and Madison Grant on one side and Boas and his followers on the other.

Both the hereditarians and the environmentalists were passionately arguing for half-truths. Even at the time, there were prominent scientists making the sensible argument that it’s genes + environment, not one or the other (HS Jennings is a clear example), but the complete revulsion at Nazi eugenics plus the general triumph of the cultural Left by the 1930s meant that the “it’s all environment” guys had a free hand to control the academic journals, tenure boards and so on. And here we are.

Those “reaction” videos are IMHO clickbait, I assume for money.

1. To (re)state the obvious, the drive-by thing never happened. IMHO, what’s interesting about it is whether she consciously thought ‘nobody in my editorial chain at the NYT has the balls to ever challenge me on this’ when she submitted her draft. My guess is yes, and it illustrates why not holding people to standards tends to produce such crappy work.

2. I lived in Paris for years, and the reason she got a seat outside is because she’s a moderately attractive woman who was likely dressed appropriately, and the people in front her were likely unappealing monolingual American tourists that would degrade the image of the cafe. She knows this, and knows that her readers know it. It’s the I-went-to-Yale version of complaining about all the catcalls you’re getting.

3. I’ll bet anybody any amount of money that within five years, she will write a piece about how unfairly she’s been treated by somebody in Paris.

Exactly. Whenever somebody says massive country X will ‘never’ attack country Y because of One Weird Trick Z, you should realize they have zero understanding of human history or human nature.

Me too 😉 but I decided to focus on the positive possibilities. I responded to Achmed here. In short, I absolutely understand that there are rational reasons why people choose to stay in a relationship. I just want guys to know that things are not quite as terrible on the other side as folk may fear.

As for children, well it is in fact too complicated to discuss here at length but it’s worth noting that a great many fathers have better relationships with their children from outside their marriages than from inside – particularly if they (the fathers) left of their own volition rather than having been forced out by the kids’ mother.

In addition, kids are generally much better off having divorced parents than parents who dislike each other.

I don’t like talking about this stuff because it’s sad when love turns into an emotional prison cell. But I am very happy to remind everyone in such a situation that you do have options.

Even if you decide that you would rather stay (because of the kids or any other reason) it’s good to realize that you could leave but are choosing to stay.

Nothing bad comes grom recognizing that you have a choice and are making a decision.

I was going to leave exactly the same comment.

Up until the nineteen sixties women voted Republican at about the same rate as men. Then a small group of radical feminist writers turned feminism away from fighting for equal rights for women towards a pro-statist man hating form that viewed men as evil oppressors who women would be better off without. “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”, as Gloria Steinem said. At the same time, changes started to be made to the welfare system to make it easier for women to survive without a husband.

The number of unmarried women then started increasing and the voting gap between men and women started to appear. The commonality of interests they shared when they were married ended when they were no longer married. Only a few highly sexually desirable men who were drifter types with no interest in education or a career benefitted from the new era. A lot of radical feminism, at its root, was a revolt by women against their boring, average looking, hard-working husbands they depended on for financial support to take care of them and their children.

The underlying belief these women held was this group of men would continue to work hard and pay taxes to help support women they weren’t married to and children who weren’t theirs. When increasing numbers of men showed no inclination to do this, liberal women then derided them as immature lazy Peter Pan types who refused to grow up. The actual group here who refused to grow up were liberal women who wanted big daddy government to take care of them.

Is today white boy day?

Harvard has a substantially higher percentage of black students than peer schools, presumably because it doesn’t really have any peer schools.

Pretty much exactly my reactions.

The only additional comment was that playing Truman as a hick moron was both criminally ahistorical — the famous, and arguably partially apocryphal, put-downs Truman made to Oppenheimer were actually much more subtle and cunning — and a criminal waste of Oldman’s acting talent.

I’ve been posting here since reading the arguments in the case, months before the verdict, that (i) it was going to be decided for SFFA and (ii) almost nothing was going to change.

Last year Harvard’s entering class was ~14% black. Harvard’s internal estimate, revealed by discovery for the trial, was that if it had zero explicit AA decision weight, it would be about ~6% black, and a decade ago estimated that if it used only academic merit, it would be <1% black.

I'll bet the number admitted next year on an apples-to-apples basis will be a lot closer to 14% than 1% — importantly combined with redefinitions and changes in reporting to manage the PR, especially since the PR advantage used to go to 'get the black number as high as possible' and now goes to 'optimize the number to one that retains elite credibility, but doesn't wave a red flag in front of the bull' . Is the candidate with the Nigerian uncle still recorded in the black number in 2024 vs 2023? Will Harvard decline to report the racial breakdown of its class that it has trumpeted until now? Will the classification scheme become different and now report 'percent of the class that is ADOS' rather than 'percent of the class that is black'? And on and on and on.

Your complaint is that McKinsey has better starting salaries.

My point is that your odds of making >$1MM per year of comp by the time you are 40 are something like 10 – 20% if you go to work as a core professional at McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Oliver Wyman, Davis Polk, K&E, Sullivan & Cromwell, Simpson Thatcher, Wachtell, Cravath, Skadden, Lazard, Evercore, KKR, etc.

At most major corproations like PNC, Truist, etc. it is <<0.1%

I'm not celebrating this fact, and don't think it's good for America, but it's still true.

CEOs of public companies represent a tiny group of people. If you’re talking about the Fortune 500, obviously 500 people. In its most capacious meaning, a few thousand. There are many more partners at ‘six firms’ than that.

Most important, ex ante, going to work as a new graduate at the median large public company is a much lower expected value bet than at McKinsey, Goldman, KKR or Cravath, because the odds of becoming one of the very, very few people at that company who make more than $1MM per year are (i) extremely low, (ii) enormously dependent on luck no matter how talented and hard-working you are, and (iii) will likely require 20+ years, even if it does happen. In contrast, at firms like the examples I’ve given, all it takes is working really hard for ~10 years and not having terrible luck.

Not a lot of people turn down McKinsey to go work at Ford, and it’s not because they’re all fools.

The Ivy-discarded Asians and flyover whites were as good as those accepted and graduated by Ivies. The differences were

1) there were a lot of the former,

2) they mostly fit two particular demographic profiles, and

3) the latter usually didn’t accept our offers, if they even bothered applying to us on their way to hedge fund and consulting firm interviews. The former actually would apply to us and accept offers if made. The terrible irony was that just as they were cut out of the hedge-fund-consult-gig charmed circle by being denied Ivy admission, many were again cut out of our well-capitalized multinational charmed circle by our lunatic worship of the DIEversity religion, so their misfortune compounded in a downward chain-reaction, just as the unearned good fortune of the regime-favored compounded in an upward chain-reaction.

As Chetty/Deming are perhaps inadvertently demonstrating, for elite strivers, the acceptance letters you receive at age 18 really do have lifelong, life-altering consequences. That the elite academy has so long engaged in massive subterfuge to redirect these acceptance letters to where they objectively don’t pertain has consequences, both for individuals and society.

This post hits the nail on the head, but misses one thing: if you’re a girl who goes to HYPSM, your lifetime economic consumption is vastly more likely to be determined by who you marry than by whatever job you have. Nobody wants to say it out loud to the princesses who compete like hell to get into these schools, but the MRS degree is alive and well. And everybody in the game knows it.

So, you’d really want to think about this segmented by sex + major. The fact is that if you are a guy who goes to one of those five schools, majors in something serious, gets at least decent grades, has decent people skills and is money-motivated, your odds of making at least half-a-million per year (and maybe a lot more) are really pretty high. If you’re a woman at one of those schools and at least pretty good-looking and agreeable, the odds of you doing that aren’t great, but the odds of nabbing a guy who will are pretty good.

Having been a consultant and participated in recruiting for an MBB firm, it’s not as simple as you think to get good economics recruiting from Ohio State, despite the fact that if you could immediately know with certainty who the best three guys were in the class that year, you would hire them gladly.

Picking people for interviews isn’t as simple as ‘rank-order by GPA’. Everybody knows that course selection dominates GPA, and the ‘school team’ doing resume screening for a given school are usually all alums and know the difficult of individual classes and sub-majors, how to interpret participation in specific activities etc. Further, the really expensive resource is consultant time to do the presentations and interviews, and it’s not something you can outsource. The pass rate from ‘selected for interview’ to ‘job offer’ is something like 15% at a good school, and much lower at the more marginal schools in the target group (usually around 20 schools or so total). That’s the big problem at Ohio State (or wherever) which will have an even lower pass rate — you put in a ton of time doing resume reviews, multiple on-campus presentations, interviewing etc., and you end up getting 0-2 people for all that work. It’s much more effective to just bump your target by one kid from the core schools.

That is correct. When people talk about the Ivies, they usually mean Harvard-Princeton-Yale. Stanford and MIT are usually included in that group as well. The next tier is Penn, Columbia, CalTech Duke, and U. of Chicago.

I read about someone who had a good idea that interested a venture capitalist. The VC said if you come in do you have any capital or is it just your idea. The idea man said: “I could put in maybe $ 250,000.” The VC said: we’ll put you down as no capital – that is less than my monthly Amex bill.

I’ve had to pitch a number of household-name VC firms in my career, and subsequently raised and ran a VC fund. I am skeptical that any legitimate VC ever said anything like this.

Let’s see; cocaine, hookers, illegal weapons, illegitimate children, extorted money, and now a mean dog.

That sounds like an inner-city ghetto family to me.

Next we’ll see Hunter out on the White House front lawn with a forty and a blunt hangin’ with his homies, with a huge boom-box thumping away.

Pennsylvania Avenue is going ghetto! Sell your property now before the bottom falls out!

Erronius

Are we still calling institutions that take in hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the Federal Government private?

I guess so. But let’s attach a mental asterisk.

If it’s anything like when I was there, ~100% of the 1.1% of music majors were double majors who also did a degree in a STEM subject. Same for at least a majority of the liberal arts and PoliSci majors. The architecture people were their own bizarre cult, and likely mostly did not do another major.

The easy major was management. That’s what people tended to do who decided they couldn’t or just didn’t want to do the work for a STEM degree.

In my experience, there is a lot more of (iii) on the Continent, especially in France.

The issue with the subset of Brits that I’m describing is that the reasons they think Americans are stupid and lucky are very likely almost the exact opposite reasons that I think you and CageyBeast have for thinking that.

Same, in detail

When I clicked on the original tweet, literally the next tweet in this guy’s timeline is one where he explains how awesome it is to be see the confused looks on white peoples’ faces when he is in a mix-raced group and speaks to other blacks in African-American vernacular (aka, jive).

Shocking that white people don’t especially want to be in a mixed-race group with this nimrod.

I think that the social significance of Game (by whatever name) for young men in 2023 is completely under-rated by people that are the age of those who run the country, its universities, media, etc.

As far as I can see, it is the way that young men connected by the internet have reacted to several interconnected phenomena:

(1) Feminism (obviously), but also the broader female-centric nature of the West. Female earnings have, very roughly, caught up with male earnings. Combined with female hypergamy, this means that most women are uninterested in most men, which in turn means, that the most appealing guys have sexual access to more women than ever before, but the average guy has much less. This growing male sexual inequality is example of growing inequality across spheres….

(2) …and economic and social inequality increasingly impacts every aspect of society — and not just income inequality. For example, we live in a time when the average American is overweight, but the hottest women are hotter than ever, and the most fit guys are jacked to a level impossible without PEDs.

(3) The effects of this are exacerbated by new digital technologies, preeminently social media, that have globalized and liquified the sexual marketplace.

(4) The death of Christianity as anything other than a private eccentricity, and with it, the pre-rational support for lifetime monogamous marriage that would otherwise buffer these effects.

In many ways, we are simply returning to what has been the norm in most human societies throughout history — elite polygamy. Game is the attempt to figure out how to manage your life as a guy in this world without pretending that we still live in the America of 1970.

Having spent years living in Britain, there are a ton of Brits (though very far from a majority) who won’t say it out loud, but basically consider Americans (i) to be quite stupid and (ii) to have lucked into an extremely powerful position, in which we don’t share power, but run things (for now). Generally, these people are white, have graduate degrees, live in London and are kind of pissed off about their station in life.

Growing up in smalltown USA, TULOB seemed like a window into this sophisticated world where I could hang out in cool cafes and hook up with hot European women by being smart and mentally quick on my feet. It turned out to be pretty relevant to the construction of my life.

Definitely agree that it is not taught in a theory-intensive way, even in college. But I think that if what you want to do is prepare people even for very good data science jobs, the theory is really irrelevant for 99% of them, and it will turn off the vast majority of people who could do well at data science (I say this as someone who did theoretical math in college and has employed a lot of data scientists).

The basis of competition in Asian-American school environments tends be grinding out better performance in highly structured activities — SAT scores, AP scores, grades in high school classes that are the object of ridicule by the smartest kids in any school, repetitive practice on stringed instruments, etc. It’s endless drudgery for at least 6, and usually more like 10, years of childhood and adolescence. I’d be disappointed in my kids if they didn’t revolt against that.

And kids who spend their time diving deep into math and science somewhat on their own, reading interesting novels, getting into arguments with their friends about Freud or Aristotle, etc. end up much better educated, and if you’re willing to take the bet that you do have smart kids, will likely end up not only being more interesting people, but making more money and being more conventionally successful in the end anyway.

White Flight from Asian Immigration: Evidence from California Public Schools

Leah Platt Boustan, Christine Cai & Tammy Tseng

— Leah Platt Boustan: By own telling, she is 100% Jewish by origin, and quite proud of it. (BA, Princeton, 2000; PhD, Harvard, 2006.)

— Christine Cai: Chinese origin; born ca.1993. (BA, Sciences Po [Paris], 2013; MA, same, 2015; as of 2023, nearing end of PhD track, Princeton.) Languages: “French (native), Chinese dialect of Wenzhou (native), English (fluent), Spanish (advanced), Mandarin Chinese (intermediate), Korean (notions).”

— Tammy Tseng: Chinese origin. (BA, Princeton, 2019.) Hometown: Fremont, California. This city, in the Bay Area, has had more Asians than Whites since the late 1990s already. On the 2000 census, Fremont ‘clocked’-in at: 37% full-Asian, 35.5% White. By the late 2010s, Fremont was down to 25% White, up to 60% Asian (depending on how you count). The latest census estimate, applicable to the early 2020s, puts Fremont — a city of 230,000+ residents — at around 65% Asian (61% full-Asian, several-% part-Asian) and down to 19% White non-Hispanic. Incredible! (What say ye, advocates of White–Asian mutual assimilation?)

Professor Boustan credits Tammy Tseng with the idea to study the “White Flight” problem away from Asians when Asians begin to ‘tip’ places; the idea dating back in the late-2010s. Tammy Tseng’s idea with this study was to confront and grapple with the harmful stereotype “that white families like this ‘model minority’,” in Prof. Boustan’s words. These academic-papers tend to take time to go through the pipeline, and one suspects the “Stop Asian Hate” movement of 2021-2022 (rather inorganic, except in self-serving terms) to be involved.

Three Woke-women; no White-Christians involved except as objects of study about how bad they supposedly are for White-Flighting again, which oppresses (?) Asians. “American academia.” “Our institutions.” Interesting…

Are Tammy Tseng and Christine Cai, and to some extent maybe the Jewish-woman lead here, =engaging in a form of triumphalism? Whatever it is, with the purported idea-girl Tammy Tseng, it’s actually thinly veiled biography. The story of the pushing-out of Freemont, California, of about half its Whites since around the late 1990s; the achievement of a two-thirds Asian majority by the early 2020s. This is an extreme case but the phenomenon can be found all over the place.

Fremont, California, census 2000
– White non-Hispanics: ca. 72,500
– Asians: ca. 81,500 (incl. ‘full’ and ‘part’-Asians)
– Others: ca. 49,500

Fremont, California, early 2020s census estimate
– White non-Hispanics: ca. 42,500 [-41.5% absolute decline]
– Asians: ca. 155,000 (incl. ‘full’ and ‘part’-Asians) [+90% absolute increase]
– Others: ca. 32,500 [-34% absolute decline]

Agree, and it can’t go on forever, but it might go on for a very long time.

I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say this what imperial decline looks like. Rome went on like this for hundreds of years. I don’t think that’s the smart-money bet for America, but who knows?

The Covid of 2022 was not really the same as the Covid of 2020 and 2021. A milder and more transmissible variant became dominant. This type of thing tends to happen with this type of virus. A virus that becomes less transmissible and immediately kills its host soon dies out, so these viruses usually evolve in the opposite direction. People don’t die in large numbers from Covid now for the same reason they don’t die in large numbers from the 1918 Spanish flu, 1957 Asian flu or 1967 Hong Kong flu now.

People know the disease is not really the same disease, which is why demand for the vaccines has cratered and many governments find themselves sitting on large stockpiles of vaccines that they will need to throw away. These same governments are now trying to squirm out of contracts with big pharma to buy even more of them.

Things are never going to return to normal after this. We locked down the country and printed up and passed out trillions of dollars to try to offset the negative economic effects for a disease where the average age of death was 78 and which 99.7% of those under sixty survived. It caused high inflation, which we will ultimately fail to get under control, and a contracting economy. Incomes adjusted for inflation have dropped 26 months in a row. A collection of parasitic special interests has fastened itself on the country and is slowly sucking it dry. One of these parasitic special interests is the big pharma/medical cartel/government health regulatory agency combo which brought us economically damaging lockdowns, killed large numbers of people in hospitals with ventilators and Remdesivir, forced young people to get vaccinations that may have done more harm than good, and threatened to take the licenses of doctors who were trying to develop and implement early home treatment programs that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

I think that immigration into the US is like salt in a stew: a little bit adds flavor and is a positive, but too much is poison.

Obviously, deciding “how much” is the open political question, but I don’t think any attractive country on earth has a policy of literally zero legal immigration. I think that whatever number of immigrants we allow, we should pick them based on who will most improve the lives of the existing citizens.

We obviously can’t know for sure what SE European immigration would have been say 1930 – 1939 because of legal restrictions, but we do know that (i) Congress had to set up the final national origins restrictions in 1929 that had been conceptually agreed to in 1924,, after a multi-year process t set the final numbers; (ii) all quotas were filled very year (to my knowledge) from SE European countries through the 1930s; and (iii) immigration from Canada and Mexico (according to the act, actually anywhere in the Western Hemisphere) was not restricted in the 1924 act (basically because this concession was required to get Southern Democrats to support it), and there was large-scale immigration from both countries until it was further restricted, partially because some Europeans were using it as a loophole, by “moving” to Mexico and then rapidly immigrating into the US.

Again, I’m neither saying nor implying that any of these laws were good or bad, just that all the evidence I’m aware of indicates that there was significant demand to immigrate into the US at least through WWII.

Real question: Is there any 22-year period in the 20th century in which boring old whitebread America accomplished less than vibrant, diverse America 21st century America has so far?

For example, 1930-1952 might have been the most unpleasant 22 years in the 20th century — including the Great Depression and the carnage of WWII and then Korea — but America certainly achieved an enormous amount over this period.

Just a specific point that there was massive immigration into the US of eastern European Jews in the early twentieth century that was only halted by a series of immigration laws culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924 (the so-called National Origins Act, or Johnson-Reed Act) that severely restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe. So a large number of Polish, Russian, Hungarian, etc. Jews almost certainly would have emigrated prior to 1939 had that law not been in effect. (I’m not arguing for or against that law.)

I think the Australian and Canadian skills-based systems are vastly superior to our own, but agree that selecting for skills is not as good as selecting for talent. One simple approach would be to have some basic standards (no criminal record, physically and mentally health, etc.) and then give an IQ test and select the highest-scorers. (And yes, I know this will never happen.)

I’ve been pounding away in these comments about this point exactly. Not much is going to change in college admissions becuase of this decision.

I stand corrected.

Hypothetically grant everything every Guardian writer and black activist claims.

Doesn’t anybody ever wonder why it is that the same people are harassed and held back, put in prison, etc. in America, the UK, France, Canada, Japan, Australia, Sweden, South Korea, China, Switzerland, and on and on? They aren’t saying the French are racist, they’re saying that every successful society is racist.

And if you accept that, then what?

I suspect you think this comment makes you seem smart.

Sexual promiscuity is falling for men and rising for women.

(https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-04-women-loosening-sexually.html#:~:text=In%20a%20study%20of%20sexual,3%20percent%20to%207%20percent.)

At the same time that the average male sexual promiscuity has declined, male sexual inequality has risen. The top 5% of guys are swimming in it, the next 20% of guys are doing well and the remaining 75% are struggling. A little less than 30% of males 18-30 have not had sex in the past year.

This sucks for most men, and actually is no great shakes for most women, as what it means is that women are increasingly sharing the top guys and not getting commitment. Welcome the slow arrival of de facto polygamy.

‘Why aren’t Episcopalians listed here? Not enough of them in this study?’

Off the chart. We’d point that out to the Jews, but it would be in bad taste.

What’s the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Decision Going to be?

Inconsequential.

I read through the transcripts of the SCOTUS arguments, and I don’t think that even a decision in this case that accepts the plaintiff’s position in toto would do very much.

The lawyers arguing against affirmative action accept over-and-over that race can be used in all kinds of ways as long as in some metaphysical way that they can’t define it isn’t used as the sole factor. Here’s a representative example, of which there are many (Strawbridge is the lawyer arguing against affirmative action):

JUSTICE ALITO: Mr. Strawbridge, let
me give you a hypothetical along the lines of
some of what you’ve been questioned about
already. Suppose that a student is an immigrant
from Africa and moves to a rural area in western
North Carolina where the population is
overwhelmingly white. And the student in an
essay doesn’t say I was subjected to any kind of
overt discrimination, but I did have to deal
with huge cultural differences. I had to find a
way of relating to my classmates who came from
very different backgrounds.
Would that be permissible?
MR. STRAWBRIDGE: I think that that
would generally be permissible because the —
the preference in that case is not being based
upon the race but upon the cultural experiences
or the ability to adapt or the fact of
encountering a new language in a new — in a new
environment.

Universities will be able to drive a truck through that.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_audio/2022

Excellent analysis in general.

As someone who has seriously considered it (and may still do it), and knows other people who have done this, the biggest advantage of of tax-free status is generally the straightforward one of not paying any income tax. There are million legal pretexts for the US government to look into your business if they want to.

All statistics I have seen indicates Zoomers are far more pozzed in every possible way than prior generations. Gayer, lefter, trannyer, woker.

Definitely true on average, but smart white and just-edgy-enough-to-get-laid-without-blowing-the-Goldman-internship males under about 20 are increasingly based. They are thought leaders who other guys look up to and girls “look up to”. Being woke is increasingly seen as downscale and “mid”.

Fair enough.

It just that if it weren’t for the f’cked up affirmative action and related elite social and media norms, I think that they would be on the normal path to their grandchildren being regular upstanding citizens. I’m not saying that I would expect proportional representation in theoretical physics, but I don’t see that from, say, the Irish or Italians either (my background). But I’m still glad to have them in a war. It would also be a problem if they were too high a percentage of the population, but again, it’s really hard for me to hold that against people who bust their asses working.

Agree completely.

I also think it’s plausible (though far from certain) that in 50 years, lots of hispanics will be in what I consider to be ‘my’ ethnic group.

Part of the delta is because while Latinos as a group may not be world beaters in terms of academic or white collar achievements, they do occupy useful positions in the labor force and are quietly respected for that so there is less cultural impetus to convince everyone that they are essential.

Exactly. People have eyes. Those guys out busting their asses at 7am doing construction work? The ladies cleaning up your office? The teenage guy who gives the old lady a seat on the subway? Basically everybody who works in every restaurant kitchen? They’re not speaking Swedish.

I assume that the point is that they are correlated not causal. It’s not that person X is not more likely to have crazy kids if they have them younger rather than later in life, but that crazy chicks are more likely to have more kids than sane women.

I find the idea of making some (I guess) crazy assertion that this hispanic guy invented the flamin’ hot flavor kind of funny and charming. How can something ending with an apostrophe really be something to get too uptight about?

Admittedly, I don’t spend a lot of time around MS-13 or bangers with neck tattoos or whatever, but my interactions with hispanic people are generally really good. They’re way more likely to give an old lady a seat on the bus, I hear a lot more Spanish than anything else spoken when I’m at the coffee shop early in the morning before work, and hispanic women still know how to feminine. It’s not like I want a bunch of Mexican immigrants in charge of NASA or something, but as immigrant groups go, they seem pretty good to me.

Geez, this was a great column. Astonishing tone. People carp about “mansplaining” but I could read this stuff all day. Makes me wish Jim Murray had been my dad or grandfather.

The NYT needs to stop putting down America!

Our chicks are mucho grosso too: according to the CDC the average self-reported height and weight of an American woman is 5′ 4″ and 171 pounds. That’s right, a 5 weighs 170.

Also, they’re pretty awesome at getting divorced.

I was! Had no idea anybody even knew much about this anymore.

A lot of the time, it’s just easier to keep the worker.

As someone who has had to fire a lot of people, it’s always easier just to keep the worker (unless you’re a sociopath with lots of time on your hands).

It requires the somewhat brutal dedication to making money to motivate people to bite the bullet and do it. A huge problem with any organization that isn’t itself motivated by winning is that it doesn’t force people to do this. This is not just government vs. not — successful military units in real wars they are afraid they might lose tend to do this, but “private” non-profits not so much.

Being mad that other people are sentient humans and recognize bad behavior is about as useful as being mad at gravity.

‘

I was with you right up until that. The problem is that in America in 2023, it’s often extremely useful to get mad at people for using stereotypes to judge you. It’s so useful, that it’s even useful to make up stories about it.

The hallmark of Lees first handful of movies is that they start off strong and then just fall apart about 80% of the way through. Malcolm X was probably his most coherent movie and Washington was great – probably did deserve an Oscar for that, certainly more than Pacino in Scent of a Woman, which I think shows Pacino at his over-acting worst, similar to Heat. I did like him as Jimmy Hoffa in the Irishman, though.

Anyway, Lee seems like one of those guys whose awareness of his own talent is what sabotages his output.

There’s a huge inside-baseball Uber element to this (unsurprisingly).

Travis, who’s a total wildman, created Uber. The basic approach was to enter a major metro market in a legal gray zone, because taxi and limousine regulations had never anticipated something like Uber, and then once everyone who mattered had started using Uber, dare politicians to try and force them to close. It worked. Even uber-liberal (ha ha) cities like Austin, London and Paris that tried to ban Uber after introduction eventually cracked under massive public backlash. It took somebody with his personality to be willing to execute this strategy.

Also unsurprisingly a guy like this was a horndog who hated rules and tended to hire other senior executives who were like that. Eventually this created a bunch of PR problems as they got big enough and SV reacted to MeToo and the whole American cultural revolution, and he was forced out and a cultural revolution was forced on the company, including hiring the bulk of the characters in this story. Nikki (who you’re correct is white) was hired in from Expedia as part of this, and she brought in a bunch of people whom she had worked with previously.

They are now living with the consequences of giving these nice HR ladies a lot of power in the company. Welcome to the Estrogen Zone. Also, don’t loo to Uber for any further innovations.

Steve, your headline says “NYT: Black Lives Matter Got 15 Times More Blacks Murdered Than It Saved”

But if I’m reading the article correctly, it says that BLM got 15 times as many people (of all races combined) killed than it saved. Which is what you say in the body of your commentary: “So Black Lives Matter during the Ferguson Effect era got 15 times as many people killed as it saved. Sounds about right.”

I’ve seen others summarize this the same way, and I think it’s an interesting psychological tic. I suspect part of it is the urge to say “Look, BLM didn’t even really help black people”. But I think the bigger part is the unwillingness to say, basically, “Policy X might be good for blacks but is definitely bad for everyone else, and that makes it a bad policy because blacks are only 13% of the population and I don’t see why everybody else should subsidize them.”

There is very humorous anthropological research in which the researcher interviewing the young males of an Amazonian tribe who still lived like this asked them about these raids, and their answer for why they did this was very close to: ‘The village elders demand cattle to let us do it, but we all go for the women.’

In terms of female reactions to polygamy, low-status women are generally (silently) for it, as it means they get access to much higher-quality sperm and sex than they otherwise would. It’s actually higher-status women who can no longer monopolize one high-status male who become most bitter about it.

I was going to make more or less this comment, so fully agree.

Males across mammal species have higher variance on many, maybe most, genetically-entangled traits (e.g., average male and female IQs are almost identical, but a high proportion of geniuses and morons are male). In a natural environment, men live in a much more winner-take-all reproductive situation than do women. About 80% of human females appear to have achieved competed reproduction over the past 10,000 years, as compared to about 40% of men. Most human males in history have likely died as virgins. That is, elite polygamy in which a small number of males have wide sexual access to women, and most males have none, is the natural state of humans. Ultimately, this is all due to the costs of pregnancy to women vs men, which is why men have higher variance and mutation rates, as one man can realistically breed a large number of women, while a woman hits hard biological limits before 20 children.

A social norm of widespread monogamous marriage is sexual socialism among males. As the Christianity and social cohesion that make such a thing acceptable recede in the West, the pressure for this to return to its natural state is becoming irresistible. Many younger people are living in de facto polygamy now: almost 1 in 3 18 – 30 year-old men have not had sex in the past year, but high-status men are swimming in it.

One of the things that I don’t think a lot of guys of the age (I think) of typical iSteve commenters is how massive the Red Pill is among younger men. Ever heard of Andrew Tate? At one point last year, he was literally the most googled human on planet earth. They are re-discovering the pagan way of life in a post-Christian America in which men who excel in traditionally masculine ways get to sleep with enormous numbers of hot women, and the average guy is left with scraps.

Presumably, the legal system will eventually recognize this (very depressing) reality.

This is obviously an extreme (and maybe fictional) example, but it’s just so indicative of how crappy marriage is for professional class men in America. External factors like family law and the media are stacked against you, but most significant is that men in that class have mostly internalized feminism, or really, a female-centric view of private life. What is in women’s interests is seen as being simply right.

These can be a ton of individually trivial things: “It’s more convenient for me to leave the toilet seat down; it’s more convenient for you to leave it up.” Conclusion, “Why aren’t you considerate enough to leave the toilet seat down? It’s so irritating to have to tell you this all the time.”

Or can be much more significant: “I want you to sign this legally binding agreement at age 32 after I’ve had a lot of fun and you were building wealth, and you need to agree to be monogamous to me now that you are at your sexual market peak, and I am no longer at mine. And, also, I can at will terminate this agreement and you must give me half of ‘our’ money that you made. And also, I don’t owe you sex. And I’m not your cook or your maid. But if you stop providing money, I will leave. And you’re an obvious dirtbag if you attempt to the negotiate any of the terms of this agreement I have put in front of you.”

3) Nebula Fox said it, but let me elaborate.

Women marriage counselors will side with the woman of the couple. Her side is the only one they see, as they have no idea, and can’t have an idea, of what the whole thing is about for the man.

Men marriage counselors will give the woman in the couple special treatment because in the back of their lizard brain sections, they figure that this marriage may not work out, and they could easily get into the woman’s pants if not.

Women marriage counselors won’t fall for the man of the couple, because he is a loser for a) having a bad marriage which is his fault and b) being so weak that he got dragged into marriage counseling.

Don’t ever go! (See your pastor, visit a fortune teller with a crystal ball, smoke a big bowl together, ANYTHING, but, men, don’t ever go!