There's a significant problem with that study (Pham et al): 55% of the dementia-patient data had no record of race - from p953 -

Among those diagnosed with dementia, 36,439 (55%) individuals had missing ethnicity; for those whom ethnicity was known, 28,672 (97%) were in the white ethnic group, 480 (2%) in the Asian ethnic group, 315 (1%) in the black ethnic group, and 177 (<1%) in the mixed/other group.

 

A question for those playing at home: what does the race carve-up of that 'no-race' 55% have to be, in order for the black dementia rate to have an IRR with a 95% confidence interval that includes 1? (That is, makes black dementia rates statistically indistinguishable from white rates).

The answer involves a wee bit of tedious algebra (we should all be suspicious of algebra - it's a Muzzie concept, the dusky blighters).

You need to know the race proportions of that portion of the total sample (i.e., dementia and non-dementia) whose race was not recorded; that was 53%.

So now we have 2df (degrees of freedom aka degrees of fakery): the racial makeup of the missing dementia patients, and the racial makeup of the missing non-dementia patients.

Given that there are only 315 black datapoints in the dementia patients, a 1% disparity between the 'dementia, no race but actually black' and the 'no dementia, no race but actually black' would overturn the conclusions.

Sadly, this is not the peg on which to hang Rushton's hat.

As it happens, I am of the view that Rushton was on to something (I am also of the view that it doesn't matter a damn anyhow).

Anyone who has met any decent number of Polynesians has abundant evidence of chunky, happy, short-horizon folks who kark it relatively early.

Conversely, anyone who's met enough sourpusses from the Ice People (Scandos, Saxons, Rus, Celts etc) has equally-abundant evidence of people prepared to grit their teeth and eke out a gruelling life of want, for fuck-all return.

Let's face it: in any society, the overwhelming majority of people are peasants (or their socioeconomic equivalent).

Would you rather have 50 or 60 years as a Polynesian 'peasant' where a hard day involves a coconut that is particularly hard to reach, or 70 years as a Russian peasant, where a hard day means everybody dies within a week? Fuck that.

Maybe 75 years as an American or UK peasant - surrounded by shit you can't afford, stuffed to the gills with food that comes in colours that don't occur in nature? Fuck that, too.

If you're just a normal schlub, what are you going to do with those extra 20 years?

If you're a Yank, Pom, Aussie (you get it - Western), he answer is 'fuck all: complain that the grandkids never visit, or that they have shit tattoos'.

For the Russkie, the answer is - scrabble away on relatively infertile ground, eking out a subsistence level of output that results in adult male BMIs of 13 - i.e., if everyone takes their shirt off they could re-enact a Holocaust photo.

We get a brief spark of existence between two unimaginably gigantic voids - billions of years passed before we coalesced into a knot of complexity; we get to play games that we pretend are crucially, existentially important for 100 years, tops; then we kark it and billions of years will pass afterwards.

In two hundred years the only people who will know (or care) who we were, will be descendants with personality disorders; in ten thousand years it's absolutely guaranteed that nobody will give a fuck whether Rushton was right.

Replies: @UnzReader, @Wizard of Oz, @blythesylph

The decline of the business suit and necktie is part of the Flight from White.

The business suit is derived from the European military officer's uniform of the period when European-American civilization enlightened (or at least inspired) the world. It became the civil uniform of the discretion-exercising classes of that civilization (hewers and drawers wore coarser clothes to work).[1]

The suit makes all men look good (thank you, shoulder pads), but it also makes them all look like middle-to-upper-class Europeans from the colonial or Cold War eras. In today's argot, the suit makes all men look white. Even black men look white in a business suit. Since suits impose a high degree of uniformity, the tie (as I explained previously) is used to send subtle social signals, and subtlety in signaling is a "white" (including East Asian) thing.

James Bond always wears a suit, even under his SCUBA-diving or parachuting togs, because he is the whitest of all recurring cinema heroes and represents the ideals and power of Western civilization. Notice how frequently Bond villains abjure the suit. Blofeld abhors the necktie.[2]

Euro-Communists wore suits to display their claim to lead Western civilization while Chinese Communists wore Mao jackets to show that they were anti-colonialists, staunch rejectors of European civilization. In Western countries, anti-establishment types wore dashikis or surplus army jackets and jeans to display their disdain for civilization. But all around the world, respectable men of Western-type civilization have worn the suit. East Asians, who are proud of bringing their countries rapidly into the First World, still wear the suit. Chinese leaders and businessmen (making up for lost time) wear the suit today with real gusto.

Men are doffing the suit in the post-civilized EU and USA precisely because it is the sartorial symbol of advanced civilization. That civilization is now committing suicide in its original home. "White" is now a term of opprobrium so far as the mainstream media are concerned and wearing a business suit is "acting white." Some politicians still wear suits the way priests wear clerical collars, to claim an ancient authority by wearing its ceremonial vestments, but non-office holders are increasingly eager to disavow their own membership in the once-dominant group.

Today the highest aspiration of most young people in the EU or USA is to be praised on TV. TV praises noisy queers and men who wear dresses and falsies. It praises young black muslims who bring hoax bombs to school. TV praises illegal aliens from the Philippines who claim to speak for illegal aliens from Mexico. But TV vilifies white men in business suits. The bad guy in nine out of ten TV shows is a white man in a business suit.

Few people can change their skin color, few are willing to "change" their sex, but anyone can dress down. EU politicians who pose for photographs with open collars are advertising their abdication of authority. "Look," they assert, "I can't keep African migrants out of Marseille because I am even more feckless than the migrants. I am such a churl I don't even know how to knot a tie."

Though many NAM's like to wear the suit ironically, or even as a trophy (as a tribal chieftain might wear a leopard's pelt), a white man needs a lot of self-confidence to step out in one nowadays.[3]


[1] Men of the lower classes customarily wore suits to church services or public ceremonies to signal their family authority and their civic pride in equal political citizenship. "Frank" might wear a boiler suit to work and call the factory manager "sir," but at a town meeting, in a coat and tie, he was Mister Smith even to the Mayor. Boys had to wear suits when their fathers did to train them in civilized mores.

[2] Of course there are many Bond villains. The ones in suits are usually traitors of some kind (sometimes just because they are petty criminals, all of whom are disloyal to civilization), or commies.

[3] I suspect that many men who claim "suits are uncomfortable" are sweating more from fear of being mocked by the lowly than from overly-tight collars.

Replies: @Blythesylph

Lending support to the It Came from Silicon Valley hypothesis, my perception is that "sock diversity" is just part of the larger "Nerd Cool" trend, as illustrated by this pair of caped Superman socks RGIII wore the night he won the Heisman.

http://sports.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/robert-griffin-iii-rocks-superman-socks-on-his-way-to-the-heisman-trophy?urn=ncaaf,wp11343

In general the embrace by superstar athletes is quite jarring. I have to admit though, I have a soft spot for a nice pair of argile socks.

Replies: @snorlax, @Blythesylph