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Life has been busy. Very busy. The company I’m working for is ramping up on releasing product…as in on the order of weeks, not months. We’ve already released results to a few early beta testers, and are taking reservations for orders (basically you are in the front of the line for notification when the orders are being taken, and I’m 99% sure that the turnaround is going to be faster than later on when the analysis pipeline will be crowded).
The details of the test are pretty straightforward, at least for a reader of this weblog. 224,000 markers on the SNP-chip, a reference panel of thousands, with 150 populations. Yes, we have wolves and coyotes, so we should be able to pick up admixture/introgression. It’s mostly a breed focused product at this point when it comes to ancestry, but we’ve got a large number of village dogs in there too. In terms of functional characteristics, the current focus is on diseases, but we’ll be expanding into traits soon. Really there are many directions we could go with this.
I’m making one public plea to Chris Chang of plink to allow us to be able to use his tool without always having to specify that we’re not using a human data set.
The New York Review of Books has a piece up, Who Was David Hume? It’s reviewing Hume: An Intellectual Biography. Of course I purchased it…I could do no other. God knows when I’ll get to read it.
Speaking of books, I also purchased Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World. Crone is known more broadly in the public for her work in the revision of the history of early Islam, but as a scholar she was much more than that. Her Islamic revisionism didn’t make much of an impression on me, but God’s Rule – Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought, did. She’s a thinker who everyone should have paid more attention to in my opinion, as she was a humanistic scholar in the older tradition, genuinely striving toward the truth as opposed to fixating on the power relations of the present.
As some of you recall I’m following Game of Thrones now via the internet. The whole idea of a “fork” is somewhat liberating, and, the reality is that I’m not patient enough to wait until Martin completes the series when my daughter is in high school. Speaking of series, I left T Greer of Scholar’s Stage totally dispirited when I informed him that Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive is projected to run to 10 books. At his current pace that means Sanderson will complete the series in 21 years assuming that he hits his mark…
Speaking of a long time, this August A Song of Ice & Fire will will be 20 years old! It seems highly implausible to me that George R. R. Martin can wind up all his plot threads in two final books, even if both are 1,500 page monsters. I think we’ll be lucky if he manages to accelerate publication rate again and tie things up in the middle-2020s, when he’s in his late 70s.
A note on comments. If you begin a comment by pointing out some presumed detail of my ethnicity you’re probably getting deleted immediately (I state presumed because 3/4 of the time people are wrong). I don’t prevent assholes from reading what I have to say, but I can make sure assholes don’t leave comments.
How Austin Residents Are Getting Around In A Post-Uber World. Keep Austin primitive?
Eske Willerslev Is Rewriting History With DNA.
Top scientists hold closed meeting to discuss building a human genome from scratch. My prior is to be against closed meetings. Makes scientists seem like they’re part of a cabal.
Interesting map.
Share of European children born out of wedlock. You can see that Finno-Ugric admixture line in Russia. pic.twitter.com/CTzCrqIgFX
— Anatoly Karlin (@akarlin88) May 16, 2016
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I have read Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies and thought it was quite good as a basic overview, but it is not much more than that–someone who has read as much as you probably knows most of the facts in the book. It’s strange to me that there are not more general overviews on agricultural societies like this book, when there are so many books about hunter-gatherers. This fact makes books like Crone’s valuable.
Interesting how West and South Germany stand out from every surrounding c0untry save Switzerland in that map. In Russia, former F-U zone actually extends south of that wedlock line – Mordovia, the ethnic republic of the most numerous Uralic speaking minority in Russia, is completely south of it for one. Croatia-Slovenia border is surprisingly abrupt.
I’d suggest a pan-European North-South division but that has hard time explaining France and Bulgaria. Divisions of Christian denomination don’t really do it either…
I'd suggest a pan-European North-South division but that has hard time explaining France and Bulgaria. Divisions of Christian denomination don't really do it either...Replies: @Razib Khan
the areas of poland which have elevated rates are the areas that used to be part of prussia & prussian silesia. the areas of belorussia and ukraine that have lower rates used to be part of pre-1939 poland.
Areas around Nizhny Novgorod with extant Finnic populations are south of the divide, but Smolensk in West, of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and not known to have had any Finnic groups for a millennium, is towards the North of the line.Replies: @Anatoly Karlin
It would be nice if you could get some dingo samples some time. It’s probably a fairly big ask, though.
Some people with dingos will send samples to determine how pure their own dingo's genetics are, in return for diagnostic proof of that fact. They would proudly send them.
They might be disappointed by the results, but maybe someone actually has a 100% pure dingo in their house. It could actually happen. In any case, you would get a ton of low cost dingo genetic info.
Maybe I will do it myself.Replies: @John Massey
Children born out wedlock seems to map to a few variables like ‘cultural depression’ and low rate of religious-traditionalist people. Murder rates, drug abuse and HIV seem to correlate with the former while perhaps somewhat avoiding the latter. The HBD crowd is a bit naive and lazy sometimes when it comes to explaining things.
Germany makes it difficult for mothers to work since the elementary schools are only half day. The Italian birth rate plummeted when women realized their husbands weren't going to help with child rearing and daycare costs were nearly the same as a woman's salary.
I think the eastern portion of Germany and the other Eastern European countries with high out of wedlock birth rates do suffer from the ills that you mentioned.
I’m gonna send in my kit ASAP.
Does anyone know if there is a way to not have the size of tweets be so large? Twitter increased the size of each tweet and now 2 posts take up my entire screen – it’s making it take longer to scroll through hundreds of tweets. (I’m talking about square inches, not character length.)
Why is that a big ask? You can just do a marketing campaign for the company, to find ‘the most dingo of all the dingos!’
Some people with dingos will send samples to determine how pure their own dingo’s genetics are, in return for diagnostic proof of that fact. They would proudly send them.
They might be disappointed by the results, but maybe someone actually has a 100% pure dingo in their house. It could actually happen. In any case, you would get a ton of low cost dingo genetic info.
Maybe I will do it myself.
Some people with dingos will send samples to determine how pure their own dingo's genetics are, in return for diagnostic proof of that fact. They would proudly send them.
They might be disappointed by the results, but maybe someone actually has a 100% pure dingo in their house. It could actually happen. In any case, you would get a ton of low cost dingo genetic info.
Maybe I will do it myself.Replies: @John Massey
Go on, then.
But I still need a genetics company to actually finance my dingo genetics marketing campaign.
I will start looking. I hear that pets.com is pretty good. It has besn getting some press lately.
But seriously. Australians are actually very serious about their history. They want 100% dingos like Yosemite wants 100% buffalos.
Hell Yeah! Doin’ the dingo!
But I still need a genetics company to actually finance my dingo genetics marketing campaign.
I will start looking. I hear that pets.com is pretty good. It has besn getting some press lately.
But seriously. Australians are actually very serious about their history. They want 100% dingos like Yosemite wants 100% buffalos.
The map is fascinating. Bulgaria and the former DDR stick out like sore thumbs. And I do agree with the previous poster that the near-white area around Poland / Belarus / Ukraine seems to roughly trace out the borders of Poland as it existed in the inter-war years.
The caption states “children born out of wedlock” — I wonder how the survey data was actually collected. (I.e., children currently under the age of 13 who were born to unmarried parents vs. total fraction of the population whose parents were unmarried at the time of their birth)
My guess is that the “dividing line” in Russia correlates better with rural depopulation and urbanization. In Russia’s North and North-West, with its unfertile soils, the “graying” of the countryside has been nearly complete for two generations. In Russia’s South and South-East, young people generally have parents or at least grandparents in the village, so the traditional moorings of the marital life are still in place.
Areas around Nizhny Novgorod with extant Finnic populations are south of the divide, but Smolensk in West, of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and not known to have had any Finnic groups for a millennium, is towards the North of the line.
Just a few examples:
* More alcoholism in the north
* Lower life expectancy
* Lower fertility rates
* Ergo, continuing significant natural population decrease, while the rest of Russia has now achieved demographic equilibrium more or less.
* Less corruption
* Fewer electoral falsifications
* More political liberalism (they voted for Yeltsin over the commies in the 1990s, and relatively more of them voted for the liberal candidate/against Putin in the 2000s and 2010s)Replies: @Shaikorth
Kosovo (96% Muslim) really stands out too compared to its neighbors. This was unexpected to me.
where is the data for the map anyway? Timeframes? Methodology? It was on reddit originally, but nothing is said about the source data there either.
(Kosovo, Albania, and Turkey are apparently “optical illusions” not colored at all due to lack of data)
Greece, Albania and Macedonia are white. White means 0-10%, not "no data", read the legend, although I can accept that white may mean "no data" (Turkey, e.g.). Serbia and Montenegro are light pink provinces, with a few redder provinces in Serbia, which means most is 10-20%, the few provinces up to 40%.
Sweden is really weird with its massive rate for out-of-wedlock births…something seems to be really wrong with that country.
I’m surprised at the fairly high rates in France, wouldn’t have expected that.
The really fascinating part about is that its so hard to establish a link between this, conservatism, and fertility rates.
The “Polish Commonwealth” region is a case in point. Both Poland and West Ukraine are very conservative. But Poland has one of the very lowest TFRs in Europe, while West Ukraine (until recent events) was the region with one of the highest TFR in Europe along with Ireland, Iceland, and France. The latter two are of course very liberal with high out of wedlock births.
Letting companies dictate terms to electorates that say “No” probably isn’t an optimal solution either.
Anyhow, this is a short-term problem, alternatives to Uber and Lyft that run on fundamentally different principles – more democratic, more resilient, more market based – will be coming online literally within weeks.
But lest we get too excited about the alternatives, I lived in China for a couple years, and gypsy cabs were a part of the economic environment there. I fail to see why there's anything special about American gypsy cabs.
Why doesn't someone monetize massage parlors/hair salons in the US? In China, prostitution was usually carried out behind the "hair salon" front, and it could be here, too. I remember how confused I was when I saw all these middle-aged guys going into hair salons. Today, it just reminds me how young and naïve I was back then.
Maybe I could get a few guys together and create some "massage parlor" app and make a shit-ton of money. Something like an AirBNB for the old "in and out". But somehow that strikes me as sleazy and against my principles. Uber and Lyft may not be that low class, but they're pushing the boundaries of decency as well when you take the post-expense pay of the drivers into account.
Areas around Nizhny Novgorod with extant Finnic populations are south of the divide, but Smolensk in West, of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania and not known to have had any Finnic groups for a millennium, is towards the North of the line.Replies: @Anatoly Karlin
I plan to have a post on this, but there’s very real sociological differences between “Finno-Ugric” north Russia and the rest of Russia.
Just a few examples:
* More alcoholism in the north
* Lower life expectancy
* Lower fertility rates
* Ergo, continuing significant natural population decrease, while the rest of Russia has now achieved demographic equilibrium more or less.
* Less corruption
* Fewer electoral falsifications
* More political liberalism (they voted for Yeltsin over the commies in the 1990s, and relatively more of them voted for the liberal candidate/against Putin in the 2000s and 2010s)
Re the Map
1. Interesting that none of the fault lines that have led to strong regional autonomy movements in the U.K., Spain and Italy are very noticeable on the map.
2. The high figure for France is in part a function of the availability of opposite sex civil unions which are a very popular alternative to marriage in France that is not available in most other European countries.
3. Interesting that the Cold War divisions of Europe are not good predictors of out of wedlock births.
4. Interesting that Germany does break out on former West German v. former East German lines, rather than historical Protestant-Catholic lines in which the north was mostly Protestant and the south was mostly Catholic. Likewise, Catholic France is not in line with Catholic Italy and Catholic Spain and Portugal are in between.
5. There is likewise no consistency within historically Orthodox Christian nations in Europe.
6. Out of wedlock birth is more common in rural Scandinavia than in urban Scandinavia. But, in Russia there isn’t a strong urban-rural divide and the biggest urban areas have more out of wedlock births.
Conclusion: Out of wedlock birth rates appear to be strongly driven by formal national policies which are not strongly predetermined by historical religion or a history of communist government. Policy rather than culture seems to drive the results.
I'm surprised at the fairly high rates in France, wouldn't have expected that.Replies: @ohwilleke
Sweden and Norway and Denmark and Iceland and to a lesser extent Finland are a long known phenomena. Basically, the social safety net is so good that women having children are not economically dependent upon their partners so they don’t marry.
France may have a lot to do with people who might marry if only having the choices of marriage or not marriage, instead opting for opposite sex civil unions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_solidarity_pact
Don't really know about Scandinavia, your explanation may be correct...I still think it's strange, and to some degree decadent.Replies: @ohwilleke, @Triumph104
In Sweden, “sambo” is an official category of long standing. Means “shacked up”.
Didn’t know that France had such civil unions (we’ve got something similiar in Germany, but as far as I know only for homosexuals), interesting.
Don’t really know about Scandinavia, your explanation may be correct…I still think it’s strange, and to some degree decadent.
The American blogger "Danielle in Brazil" spoke about her civil union.
Don't really know about Scandinavia, your explanation may be correct...I still think it's strange, and to some degree decadent.Replies: @ohwilleke, @Triumph104
About 40% of new opposite sex formally recognized couples in France have civil unions rather than marriage, and the 3 year break up rate for marriage in France is quite a bit higher for marriage (33% v. 10%). Since people tend to have new born children early in their relationships, this recent trend greatly distorts the statistics. It isn’t entirely clear to me which legal responsibilities of marriage v. civil unions are different and part of the strength of civil unions may be that people enter into them with lower expectations that are focused on economics rather than assuming some sort of magic from the status alone will support their relationship.
Low rates of out of wedlock marriage in Japan can likewise be attributed to a weak social safety net there with corporate welfare states (and a cultural distaste for firing employees) filling much of the role that public sector welfare states have in Scandinavia (although Japan does have universal healthcare), which places a lot of responsibility on a primary wage earner and makes a non-working spouse highly dependent. Intense job discrimination against working mothers in Japan (coincident with almost zero job discrimination against working childless women) also plays a part in low levels of non-married child bearing in Japan.
Others have also accurately mentioned that places with high levels of out of wedlock births don’t necessarily imply high levels of single parent households.
It would be interesting to compare the maps, one showing the out-of-wedlock birthrate, the other rates of single parent households.Replies: @Razib Khan, @Bill P
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/4jj07z/share_of_children_born_out_of_wedlock_in_europe/(Kosovo, Albania, and Turkey are apparently "optical illusions" not colored at all due to lack of data)Replies: @p3
Kosovo is bright red. You should learn your geography.
Greece, Albania and Macedonia are white. White means 0-10%, not “no data”, read the legend, although I can accept that white may mean “no data” (Turkey, e.g.). Serbia and Montenegro are light pink provinces, with a few redder provinces in Serbia, which means most is 10-20%, the few provinces up to 40%.
Taxes may also play a role for whether people marry before having kids. E.g. in Germany married couples are taxed jointly, while in Austria incomes are always taxes separately, which reduces the incentive to marry.
From a social policy perspective, I think the more salient statistical information is the latter, i.e. rates of single parent households, especially when comparing across different countries and cultures.
It would be interesting to compare the maps, one showing the out-of-wedlock birthrate, the other rates of single parent households.
So my guess is that legitimacy rates in Europe are explained by attachment to the traditional church, whereas single parent households are directly a result of government policy in regards to taxes, child support, subsidies, etc. It's very easy to create single parent households. All you have to do is give mothers cash incentives to do so. This is probably one of the most culturally fickle and policy-dependent indices of all. It is, therefore, one of the few things we can accurately blame on politicians and judges during their terms, because the effects are almost immediately apparent.Replies: @Twinkie
It would be interesting to compare the maps, one showing the out-of-wedlock birthrate, the other rates of single parent households.Replies: @Razib Khan, @Bill P
see post above.
Compared to the out-of-wedlock rate, the lone parent familiy rate is better in France, eastern Germany, and the Balkans.
Northern Norway is still high as are the Baltic states.
Ah, thank you for that. I did see the map on “lone parent families” rate (2.4.).
Compared to the out-of-wedlock rate, the lone parent familiy rate is better in France, eastern Germany, and the Balkans.
Northern Norway is still high as are the Baltic states.
It would be interesting to compare the maps, one showing the out-of-wedlock birthrate, the other rates of single parent households.Replies: @Razib Khan, @Bill P
Yeah, I looked at the above post and Germany is pretty much uniform when it comes to single parent families. The lower rate of marriage is due to falling away from religious tradition, most likely. When I see the extremely low rate of children born into wedlock in western Norway it makes me chuckle a bit, because I know my Lutheran great grandparents (my paternal grandmother was a Norwegian American), who were from Bergen and Trondhjem, would have been aghast at such a statistic without further explanation. However, if they saw that the churches were empty, as they are today, I think they would have understood what was going on.
So my guess is that legitimacy rates in Europe are explained by attachment to the traditional church, whereas single parent households are directly a result of government policy in regards to taxes, child support, subsidies, etc. It’s very easy to create single parent households. All you have to do is give mothers cash incentives to do so. This is probably one of the most culturally fickle and policy-dependent indices of all. It is, therefore, one of the few things we can accurately blame on politicians and judges during their terms, because the effects are almost immediately apparent.
Just a few examples:
* More alcoholism in the north
* Lower life expectancy
* Lower fertility rates
* Ergo, continuing significant natural population decrease, while the rest of Russia has now achieved demographic equilibrium more or less.
* Less corruption
* Fewer electoral falsifications
* More political liberalism (they voted for Yeltsin over the commies in the 1990s, and relatively more of them voted for the liberal candidate/against Putin in the 2000s and 2010s)Replies: @Shaikorth
How uniform are these trends though? Just a look at fertility rates:
Fertility rate of Komi Republic is high in 2014, as it is in Mari-el and Udmurtia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_subjects_of_Russia_by_total_fertility_rate
The average growth in fertility rates of Northwestern, Central and Southern federal districts from 2004 to 2014 looks similar. Vologda, Kostroma and Archangelsk Oblasts, part of the formerly Finno-Ugric north, have clearly higher rates than the aforementioned federal districts average, though not as high as Komi Republic.
Mordovia is a Finno-Ugric ethnic republic with low fertility, but IIRC relatively high support of United Russia and Putin, and it is south of the “wedlock line”. Fertility rates are most comparable to Tula and Voronezh oblasts in this case, excluding the (ex)capital regions.
Countries like France, Sweden, and Norway have strong social nets and high quality state-run child care facilities. Single mothers in France receive preference for crèche placements.
Germany makes it difficult for mothers to work since the elementary schools are only half day. The Italian birth rate plummeted when women realized their husbands weren’t going to help with child rearing and daycare costs were nearly the same as a woman’s salary.
I think the eastern portion of Germany and the other Eastern European countries with high out of wedlock birth rates do suffer from the ills that you mentioned.
Razib,
As you know well, the motivational belief of the social conservative faction is this country is the notion that society is somehow decaying or declining. Yet, objective metrics of such decay – crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse – have either improved dramatically or at least remained flat over the past 20-30 years. This suggests that, far from decaying, society is actually improving.
Some years ago you did a series titled “previous generations were more depraved”. Perhaps its time for a encore.
Don't really know about Scandinavia, your explanation may be correct...I still think it's strange, and to some degree decadent.Replies: @ohwilleke, @Triumph104
Brazil has opposite sex civil unions. Their out-of-wedlock birth rate is 65 percent. It was 56 percent in 2000. I don’t see how the two could be connected. Out-of-wedlock births are common in Latin America. Brazil is rapidly becoming non-Catholic.
The American blogger “Danielle in Brazil” spoke about her civil union.
The "Polish Commonwealth" region is a case in point. Both Poland and West Ukraine are very conservative. But Poland has one of the very lowest TFRs in Europe, while West Ukraine (until recent events) was the region with one of the highest TFR in Europe along with Ireland, Iceland, and France. The latter two are of course very liberal with high out of wedlock births.Letting companies dictate terms to electorates that say "No" probably isn't an optimal solution either.
Anyhow, this is a short-term problem, alternatives to Uber and Lyft that run on fundamentally different principles - more democratic, more resilient, more market based - will be coming online literally within weeks.Replies: @Anonymous, @Bill P
What exactly are you referencing when you say alternatives to Uber and Lyft are coming out “within weeks”?
So my guess is that legitimacy rates in Europe are explained by attachment to the traditional church, whereas single parent households are directly a result of government policy in regards to taxes, child support, subsidies, etc. It's very easy to create single parent households. All you have to do is give mothers cash incentives to do so. This is probably one of the most culturally fickle and policy-dependent indices of all. It is, therefore, one of the few things we can accurately blame on politicians and judges during their terms, because the effects are almost immediately apparent.Replies: @Twinkie
When I was stationed in Norfolk, my family and I went to a Norwegian-founded (!) Catholic parish in a nearby town called… Norge (I think the parish was called St. Olaf’s, named after the Patron Saint of Norway).
I spent some time in Sweden to visit college friends when I was younger. One, in particular, was from a very elite background, and I heard someone in her family sneer about “country Swedes” to the north. I gathered they were poorer, less educated, and less “sophisticated” than those Swedes who lived in the economically much more developed southern coastal areas. I guess it is somewhat akin to cavaliers in coastal Virginia knocking hillbillies in Appalachian West Virginia.
I think in Nordic-worshipping circles, a lot of people don’t realize that much of Scandinavia was quite backward until recently in history.
Here's another St. Olaf in Poulsbo WA, which was settled in large part by Norwegian loggers and fishermen.No, people don't realize it at all. It's pretty amazing to me how people tend to assume that Scandinavia was always some sort of utopia. Nordic neighborhoods were considered "slums" as recently as the 1960s in the Pacific NW. A few pockets of Scandinavian poverty remain today (including one Icelandic community I go by at least a couple times a week while at work), but Nordic people tend to work hard and spend little, so in the long run they end up middle class, but that could easily change if parts of our culture are inverted.
Scandinavians are very much people of nature, like Africans (and anyone else, really). They are a reflection of where they came from, for better or worse. It's a mistake to see them as some kind of uniquely civilized people. They are just as capable of error and folly as anyone else, but their characteristics tend to make them better suited to adapting to NW European norms (for obvious reasons). However, put them in a Middle Eastern or South Asian environment, and they will come unmoored as sure as the sun sets in the evening.
And that's something everyone ought to think about. For all this dumping on white people that's so fashionable today, one important consideration is lacking: restraint. Northern Europeans are not by nature peaceful people. That only came about because we built a civilization that keeps us that way. Wreck it, and there will be hell to pay. I know these people. I am one of these people. We are warlike. You don't see it in San Jose or Portland or Seattle so much, but as Charles Murray recently pointed out only about 10% of us live in these places today (probably significantly less if you subtract Mediterranean whites like Italians, white Hispanics and Jews as well as the homosexuals who fled our communities), and that's a carefully selected group of highly compensated professionals who are on their best behavior.
I work with guys who would send a wave of terror through your typical urban office if only a half dozen of them innocently walked in wearing work clothes. To me they are sentimental, caring people, rough in frame and aspect but gentle at heart (Walt Whitman captures this sentiment well in his notes on the Civil War), but it's all relative -- I'd be a brute, too, by cosmopolitan standards. When we no longer see eye-to-eye in this country they will present a big problem, not least because everyone has relied on these guys to keep the peace not only at home but throughout the world. And in the meanwhile arrogant, raving idiots think they can be dispensed with by means of a trickle of edicts from our rarefied institutions. What folly. This will not end peacefully.
/endrantReplies: @Twinkie
The "Polish Commonwealth" region is a case in point. Both Poland and West Ukraine are very conservative. But Poland has one of the very lowest TFRs in Europe, while West Ukraine (until recent events) was the region with one of the highest TFR in Europe along with Ireland, Iceland, and France. The latter two are of course very liberal with high out of wedlock births.Letting companies dictate terms to electorates that say "No" probably isn't an optimal solution either.
Anyhow, this is a short-term problem, alternatives to Uber and Lyft that run on fundamentally different principles - more democratic, more resilient, more market based - will be coming online literally within weeks.Replies: @Anonymous, @Bill P
All you’d need to pull the rug out from under Uber and Lyft is an open-source automated dispatching app. I’m looking for one now for a client. Do you have any suggestions? (Really — I could use one)
But lest we get too excited about the alternatives, I lived in China for a couple years, and gypsy cabs were a part of the economic environment there. I fail to see why there’s anything special about American gypsy cabs.
Why doesn’t someone monetize massage parlors/hair salons in the US? In China, prostitution was usually carried out behind the “hair salon” front, and it could be here, too. I remember how confused I was when I saw all these middle-aged guys going into hair salons. Today, it just reminds me how young and naïve I was back then.
Maybe I could get a few guys together and create some “massage parlor” app and make a shit-ton of money. Something like an AirBNB for the old “in and out”. But somehow that strikes me as sleazy and against my principles. Uber and Lyft may not be that low class, but they’re pushing the boundaries of decency as well when you take the post-expense pay of the drivers into account.
Not odd at all. Several of the Norwegians in my family, including my grandmother and her brother, ended up as Catholics. This is because the Irish, who ran the Catholic Church in the cities at the time, could relate to them much better than the Episcopalian elites who dominated the upper class back then.
Here’s another St. Olaf in Poulsbo WA, which was settled in large part by Norwegian loggers and fishermen.
No, people don’t realize it at all. It’s pretty amazing to me how people tend to assume that Scandinavia was always some sort of utopia. Nordic neighborhoods were considered “slums” as recently as the 1960s in the Pacific NW. A few pockets of Scandinavian poverty remain today (including one Icelandic community I go by at least a couple times a week while at work), but Nordic people tend to work hard and spend little, so in the long run they end up middle class, but that could easily change if parts of our culture are inverted.
Scandinavians are very much people of nature, like Africans (and anyone else, really). They are a reflection of where they came from, for better or worse. It’s a mistake to see them as some kind of uniquely civilized people. They are just as capable of error and folly as anyone else, but their characteristics tend to make them better suited to adapting to NW European norms (for obvious reasons). However, put them in a Middle Eastern or South Asian environment, and they will come unmoored as sure as the sun sets in the evening.
And that’s something everyone ought to think about. For all this dumping on white people that’s so fashionable today, one important consideration is lacking: restraint. Northern Europeans are not by nature peaceful people. That only came about because we built a civilization that keeps us that way. Wreck it, and there will be hell to pay. I know these people. I am one of these people. We are warlike. You don’t see it in San Jose or Portland or Seattle so much, but as Charles Murray recently pointed out only about 10% of us live in these places today (probably significantly less if you subtract Mediterranean whites like Italians, white Hispanics and Jews as well as the homosexuals who fled our communities), and that’s a carefully selected group of highly compensated professionals who are on their best behavior.
I work with guys who would send a wave of terror through your typical urban office if only a half dozen of them innocently walked in wearing work clothes. To me they are sentimental, caring people, rough in frame and aspect but gentle at heart (Walt Whitman captures this sentiment well in his notes on the Civil War), but it’s all relative — I’d be a brute, too, by cosmopolitan standards. When we no longer see eye-to-eye in this country they will present a big problem, not least because everyone has relied on these guys to keep the peace not only at home but throughout the world. And in the meanwhile arrogant, raving idiots think they can be dispensed with by means of a trickle of edicts from our rarefied institutions. What folly. This will not end peacefully.
/endrant
"Slum" Scandinavians wouldn't terrify the descendants of the hardscarbble Scotch-Irish in Appalachia. Not. One. Bit.Replies: @Bill P
I’d love to see how much of my one son’s Aussie Cattle Dog is wild dingo. She’s kind of nippy…a little wild, very headstrong, but mostly trainable. (grin)
Mr. Khan’s other thread on Asians/Whites/Blacks highlights an intractable problem: As long as politics controls the distribution (and redistribution) of wealth on the current scale, racial and ideological factions will predictably attempt to pull as much of that loot as possible in their direction.
Expecting people to be dispassionate about the burdens this produces is probably overoptimistic. Never have people lived their lives so constrained and determined by political policies. They determine who gets taxed, who gets the taxes, who gets scales tipped in their favor for jobs, education, business contracts, etc., where people will live, how their property can be used, all the way down to how much water their toilet is allowed to use for each flush.
Given how much of our lives is being controlled by all this, it’s a wonder we’re not shooting each other at polling places. Come to think of it, that may not be far off, given the protests in CA when Trump had a rally.
I wonder what Mr. Khan’s successors in 500 years will put in maps describing the coming few decades.
On the other hand, High impulse/low future-orientation people - even if armed - tend to be poorly trained, that is, they are generally poor shots. People who shoot better tend to win battles.
As an off topic thing (this seems like the best blog to post it on), this Nature Comms seems like it has some potential to help resolve the question of why the East Asian derived variant of EDAR is so frequent – http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160519/ncomms11616/full/ncomms11616.html
In their mice, they found mice engineered for a gain of function EDAR variant (like the Northeast Asian variant) tended to exhibit reduced length of the mandible.
So if that repeats for the 370A variant in East Asians, it could marry up with the tendency for more northerly East Asians to have faces which, although quite large and taller and broader, are less prognathic than southerly East Asians. In turn that fits with prognathism being more common in many warm, wet climate adapted populations due to integrating with a broader nasal cavity (http://dienekes.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/why-did-neanderthals-have-broad-noses.html, although Neanderthals were not adapted to warm wet climates, so did not have relatively broad noses as much as very long and wide ones). That also explains the prevalence in the Amerind New World, where the variant presumably swept to fixation among the Siberian populations for climatic reasons, then stayed like that once they migrated to the Americas, even when they moved to warm climates.
(The variant would also be less relevant in West Eurasia, where less prognathic faces would already have evolved by other means, meaning less advantage for EDAR 370A and no selective sweep).
Well, it all depends on who’s showing up to vote (or carrying guns). Low impulse/high future-orientation people + guns = little problem. High impulse/low future-orientation people + guns = lots of problems.
On the other hand, High impulse/low future-orientation people – even if armed – tend to be poorly trained, that is, they are generally poor shots. People who shoot better tend to win battles.
Here's another St. Olaf in Poulsbo WA, which was settled in large part by Norwegian loggers and fishermen.No, people don't realize it at all. It's pretty amazing to me how people tend to assume that Scandinavia was always some sort of utopia. Nordic neighborhoods were considered "slums" as recently as the 1960s in the Pacific NW. A few pockets of Scandinavian poverty remain today (including one Icelandic community I go by at least a couple times a week while at work), but Nordic people tend to work hard and spend little, so in the long run they end up middle class, but that could easily change if parts of our culture are inverted.
Scandinavians are very much people of nature, like Africans (and anyone else, really). They are a reflection of where they came from, for better or worse. It's a mistake to see them as some kind of uniquely civilized people. They are just as capable of error and folly as anyone else, but their characteristics tend to make them better suited to adapting to NW European norms (for obvious reasons). However, put them in a Middle Eastern or South Asian environment, and they will come unmoored as sure as the sun sets in the evening.
And that's something everyone ought to think about. For all this dumping on white people that's so fashionable today, one important consideration is lacking: restraint. Northern Europeans are not by nature peaceful people. That only came about because we built a civilization that keeps us that way. Wreck it, and there will be hell to pay. I know these people. I am one of these people. We are warlike. You don't see it in San Jose or Portland or Seattle so much, but as Charles Murray recently pointed out only about 10% of us live in these places today (probably significantly less if you subtract Mediterranean whites like Italians, white Hispanics and Jews as well as the homosexuals who fled our communities), and that's a carefully selected group of highly compensated professionals who are on their best behavior.
I work with guys who would send a wave of terror through your typical urban office if only a half dozen of them innocently walked in wearing work clothes. To me they are sentimental, caring people, rough in frame and aspect but gentle at heart (Walt Whitman captures this sentiment well in his notes on the Civil War), but it's all relative -- I'd be a brute, too, by cosmopolitan standards. When we no longer see eye-to-eye in this country they will present a big problem, not least because everyone has relied on these guys to keep the peace not only at home but throughout the world. And in the meanwhile arrogant, raving idiots think they can be dispensed with by means of a trickle of edicts from our rarefied institutions. What folly. This will not end peacefully.
/endrantReplies: @Twinkie
That’s very poetic of you, but I don’t think that’s true.
Neither were the Japanese for most of their history. Now they can’t even put the name “army” to their “self-defense forces.”
Did I tell you I own a farm in rural West Virginia (no cell phone coverage).
“Slum” Scandinavians wouldn’t terrify the descendants of the hardscarbble Scotch-Irish in Appalachia. Not. One. Bit.
But just imagine an army of Scots Irish commanders with Germanic soldiers. That would be something like the Union Army, wouldn't it? Quite a force to be reckoned with, Scots Irish General Ulysses Grant's army. An army of sheep led by a lion is formidable indeed.
And that, my friend, is what we shall have again.
Hume is my favourite philosopher as well. I’m probably going to upset a lot of people by saying this, but Hume’s thought is very Chinese in a way, very Eastern. He came very close to articulating a concept of anatta, or non-self, which is honestly should be incorporated into philosophical foundations at this point, now that we are in the age of materialism and contingency. The centrality of sentiment to notions of morality could have come straight out of the mouth of Mencius.
I’m gonna paint with a broad brush here, but he’s not as hysterical or as addicted to dramatic abstractions as all these other Europeans, and displays the habitual mildness and practicality of the British mind very well. No other European nation could have produced a philosopher like him, methinks.
"Slum" Scandinavians wouldn't terrify the descendants of the hardscarbble Scotch-Irish in Appalachia. Not. One. Bit.Replies: @Bill P
Of course they wouldn’t. That’s why Scots Irish patronize them. I’m only a quarter Norwegian — the rest is Scots Irish (half), then Welsh and Kerry folk. We like our Scandinavians as workers, soldiers, friends and wives. The really difficult, stingy bastards are the Dutch (meant with some degree of respect).
But just imagine an army of Scots Irish commanders with Germanic soldiers. That would be something like the Union Army, wouldn’t it? Quite a force to be reckoned with, Scots Irish General Ulysses Grant’s army. An army of sheep led by a lion is formidable indeed.
And that, my friend, is what we shall have again.
I see this data and I am concerned. Marriage is merely an expression of commitment. If two people can’t make that commitment they really aught not to have children. I am always baffled when people say they can’t get married because they can’t ‘afford it’s or they are are unsure about their partner, but are quite willing to have children with this partner despite the fact that children are more permanent than marriage.
If people are substituting civil unions for marriage – that’s alright. But I believe in Sweden they very much are not. And people there toss their partner on a whim – consequences to their children be damned.
There is a class aspect to this where higher social economic status people with more education are more likely to marry. Perhaps they have a better mastery of delayed gratification – something that is quintinsential to marriage.