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From my new book review in Taki’s Magazine:
by Steve Sailer
January 29, 2020
Social scientists tend to be leftists, but the bulk of their findings have long tended to support rightists.
Charles Murray, a rare man of the right in the social sciences, has been pointing out this paradox since his 1984 book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980.
Now 77, Murray began planning to write his new book Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class four years ago.
The title Human Diversity is impertinent because we are supposed to simultaneously worship diversity and pretend it doesn’t exist. Humanity is proclaimed to be both a rainbow of diverse delights and a beige putty that is wholly molded by arbitrary social injustices.
But would writing an honest book entitled Human Diversity be worth the abuse? Murray’s wife was skeptical.
Read the whole thing there.
A good example of a left-wing social scientist who published “right-wing” findings is Oscar Lewis. That work was attacked by other leftists as “blaming the victim”, and his defenders mostly stuck to noting that Lewis’ Marxism was indisputable.
He’s 77. Why not say what you always wanted to?
Why do your Taki’s articles always seem to end in the middle of a thought?
All the rest more than make up for it though!
Ends on a question I don’t know the answer to but I’d like others to think about.
Steve Sailer is social injustice personified. He’s a snob who no doubt wears expensive yet badly coordinated outfits and has a polygenic propensity for being a boring boor. He also has to meddle in the lives of others to keep from boring himself into a stupor. But, hey, I think Charles Murray likes him.
Especially people who care about strangers
Who care about evil and social injustice
Even if it scans perfectly, it still seems shoehorned in. A poor shadow of "Paris Original", for which this line Stephen Sondheim said Frank Loesser deserved a medal:
Some irresponsible dress manufacturer...
One of us should massively endow Sailer
Maybe affirmative action is responsible for the relative drop in smart blacks’ income? First AA in colleges puts blacks over their heads, so they get low end degrees like sociology or the drop out. Second, stronger AA in government than the private sector means blacks accumulate in government, which has a lower top end compensation. What AA there is in corporate America means blacks accumulate in executive Vice President (ipad makes me capitalize that) of blackness, which has lower compensation than the real jobs intelligent whites have. Finally, the best colleges IQs average 120, but the affirmative action recipients average lower, and there are no super-elite 140 average IQ colleges for the 120 IQ blacks to attend, so they get mixed in with much dumber blacks, and companies can’t discriminate on black IQ like they can on white IQ, so the smartest blacks don’t end up in the top tier jobs.
Why are you here? How did you get off my ignore list?
This reads like a completed madlib.
How do we email Steve with material he might find interesting?
As in, “Islam is right about women.”
Human Diversity = Ivy minus hatred.
No, they care about your submission. To them. The content is irrelevant.
We’ll have to get our Gretas from Togo, Timor, and Tuvalu? If there is a Tuvalu then.
(It’s rather ironic that a country that derives a large portion of its revenue from renting its domain suffix to video production companies will be washed under thanks to the data storage requirements of those companies.)
…who are selected not for intelligence so much as for ambition.
Islam is right about Miss Marple.
First I think you are on to something. Immigrants and kids of Immigrants, like say Barack Obama, out compete the Talented Tenth who have to go into Whitey-baiting to move ahead. Which to be fair was always seen among the Tenth as downscale thuggish/boorish trash Farakhan level idiocy. You can see that in the Wayans 1990s ridiculing the gangsta movies and Farakhan and the early work of Chris Rock as well as Eddie Murphy.
Lack of escape at the top end particularly for the higher IQ but not well connected White guys leads them into figuring the cost of maintaining anti-White male behavior has become too high.
And as to who is right? Caldwell. Because of the money. Already to pay for the ever increasing burden of diversity noted by commenter after commenter in the Wokeplace post about Buttgig’s campaign staff, the cost is becoming so high our elites are demanding we deplorable White men (but not vibrants, immigrants, or such like):
A. Eat only bugs and beans to save the planet.
B. Stop all air travel.
C. Stop all private ownership of all motor vehicles, including motorcycles, cars, and especially trucks.
D. Turn in all guns, even including hunting firearms.
E. Live in abandoned sewer pipes (KTLA-5 had a story on this a month ago) or shipping containers.
F. Pay ever more in taxes.
G. Grovel before illegals and other protected classes who can drunk drive and do other things forbidden by law to deplorables.
The money cost of the massive bureaucracy found not just in all levels of government but all companies, public and private, all churches, NGOs, charitable groups, etc. supports, not better lives for American Indians or Blacks whose living standards have arguably declined since 1970 … but the bureaucracy itself.
Look at Obama’s career, the son of a highly connected foreign bigshot with money, connections, and power to other foreign big shot no ordinary smart Black person could match, he went from one make-work NGO to another as a useless diversity hire.
The only way the ever growing bureaucracy which not only must support Ta Nehisi Coates and Delray McKesson but half of India, China, Africa, Central America, and Mexico, in a permanent make-work middle class that does nothing productive and actually is a dead weight economically — the only way that pencils out in even the short term is seizing ever more of White men’s property and giving it to the bureaucracy. Which is the real power: not Presidents or the Supreme Court or Senators, but permanent bureaucrats who are all related and hold hereditary power. Its a new Feudalism, based on bureaucracy and the administrative/managerial state not castles and men at arms supported by peasants. But enserfdom of the peasants is well underway.
Will White men simply go along with bugs, beans, shipping container houses, no cars and trucks, no guns? Virginia says otherwise and as the civil war heats up there as Northam drives to seize houses/property to give it to his bureaucrats who run him, well so goes the nation.
I keep suggesting having an open threads where we can send in material that Steve and/or readers of the list will find interesting. Sailer does not want to do this, so when I have material that he might like to know about I start the post with “unrelated but of interest”
OT: The Soviet’s legislature decides to join WWH…
“https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/hair-discrimination-afros-dreadlocks-law-protection/281-0de6cbac-5e4c-4994-9ef1-bfb10a76a895
Sponsors website:
https://housedemocrats.wa.gov/morgan/
Murray’s co-author for the Bell Curve, Richard Hernstein, was the first guy to claim Jews have the highest IQ. Since he was himself a Jew he had to drag in Murray as a co-author to give his claim legitimacy. Since then that mantra’s been rinsed and repeated a thousand times, mostly by other Jews, until it becomes a fact.
But I digress…let’s talk about his new book:
It dawned on me today how many female CEOs, esp. in tech, are *Jewish* women: Marissa Mayer(Yahoo), Sheryl Sandberg(Facebook), Susan Wojcicki (YouTube), Ann Wojcicki(23andMe), Mandy Ginsberg(Match group), Adena Friedman (Nasdaq), Jan Singer(J. Crew)…the list goes on. It’s like a secret club of Jewesses.
So you're saying it's not true?
What about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates
Is it just a coincidence that a group which constitutes .1% of the world population has produced 20% of all Nobel laureates?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherry_Lansing
She went to the now all Black Parkside Elementary School in Chicago.
I see no mystery why Asians with the same 120 IQ as Whites earn 54% more. That difference results purely from cultural differences, where Asian parents (no matter their own education) press their children to achieve their full potential, while White parents of only the highest classes do the same. It also supports Ron Unz’s findings that, based on standardized testings, Whites were underrepresented at the Ivy colleges.
The US White population of 120 IQ vastly outnumbers (by an order of magnitude) the US Asian population of 120 IQ.
E.g. the 5 Asians average income is 54% greater than the average income of 50 Whites with 120 IQ. Nothing particularly unusual here--the opposite would be unusual.
Obviously there are other factors/variables to consider as the income-IQ correlation isn't = 1.
Things will be easier for you and Murray if you just believe what The Party says, Mr. Sailer.
Charles Murray has gone to the bilderberg meetings – twice. Latest was in 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Bilderberg_Conference
I remember when he advocated against affirmative action, he only mentioned Asians but avoided talking about whites. I don’t think he’s trying to be politically savvy. He just doesn’t care. He has an Asian wife and hapa kids after all.
What he did is provide a more detailed analysis of something which was known to the Arabs and Chinese 1,000 year ago.
However, he has riled the gatekeepers by factoring racial differences into these like James Watson on Africa.
Murray advocates the total elimination of the welfare state, affirmative action and the Department of Education, arguing that public policy cannot overcome the innate deficiencies that cause unequal social and educational outcomes.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/charles-murray
I thought Tom Brady was social injustice personified.
If all this talk about the coronavirus puts “Me and Julio” (and Rosie) into my head, this phrase does the same for “Easy to Be Hard”:
Especially people who care about strangers
Who care about evil and social injustice
Even if it scans perfectly, it still seems shoehorned in. A poor shadow of “Paris Original”, for which this line Stephen Sondheim said Frank Loesser deserved a medal:
Some irresponsible dress manufacturer…
Quick Ctrl-F on “Human Diversity” shows zero mentions of Steve Sailer, HBD, “human biodiversity”, and almost all prominent modern psychometrists.
He does mention Richard Lynn, but only on sex differences in IQ, and in an endnote. Rushton gets one citation on a co-authored article, also on sex differences. So it seems that he steered well clear of the really interesting (and politically explosive) topics.
While I expect it to be a good and comprehensive primer on the subject (I haven’t read it yet), it seems that Murray is still very much invested in remaining “handshakeworthy.”
II Slow down, don't move too fastWhat you write about John Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn (and this Steve Sailer guy and HBD, too) is interesting. Seen from Charles Murray's perspective, it might boil down to: First things first. One step after the other.IIILots of things to write about for - the younger ones - people like you, Anatoly Karlin!
On Twitter Murray mentioned he is getting no interest in interviews on the book from any TV programs, including FOX. All mainstream publications consider him a hate thinker and most Conservatism, Inc. media still want him tucked in the corner.
Seems like Murray, Pinker, and Cofnas are engaging in a fighting retreat to protect genetic science from being suppressed before it becomes mainstream and starts dropping blockbusters about HBD issues.
Rushton’s a body that unfortunately has to be left on the battlefield in this action.
What? I’ve been wondering if Tom Brady’s kids count as Hispanic and figure they probably do.
He does mention Richard Lynn, but only on sex differences in IQ, and in an endnote. Rushton gets one citation on a co-authored article, also on sex differences. So it seems that he steered well clear of the really interesting (and politically explosive) topics.
While I expect it to be a good and comprehensive primer on the subject (I haven't read it yet), it seems that Murray is still very much invested in remaining "handshakeworthy."
A section of Murray’s new book was turned into a lengthy op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. I’m sorry to say that, to this lay reader at least, it was a bit of a snooze. (So thanks to Steve for presumably getting through the entire book.)
Lack of escape at the top end particularly for the higher IQ but not well connected White guys leads them into figuring the cost of maintaining anti-White male behavior has become too high.
And as to who is right? Caldwell. Because of the money. Already to pay for the ever increasing burden of diversity noted by commenter after commenter in the Wokeplace post about Buttgig's campaign staff, the cost is becoming so high our elites are demanding we deplorable White men (but not vibrants, immigrants, or such like):
A. Eat only bugs and beans to save the planet.
B. Stop all air travel.
C. Stop all private ownership of all motor vehicles, including motorcycles, cars, and especially trucks.
D. Turn in all guns, even including hunting firearms.
E. Live in abandoned sewer pipes (KTLA-5 had a story on this a month ago) or shipping containers.
F. Pay ever more in taxes.
G. Grovel before illegals and other protected classes who can drunk drive and do other things forbidden by law to deplorables.
The money cost of the massive bureaucracy found not just in all levels of government but all companies, public and private, all churches, NGOs, charitable groups, etc. supports, not better lives for American Indians or Blacks whose living standards have arguably declined since 1970 ... but the bureaucracy itself.
Look at Obama's career, the son of a highly connected foreign bigshot with money, connections, and power to other foreign big shot no ordinary smart Black person could match, he went from one make-work NGO to another as a useless diversity hire.
The only way the ever growing bureaucracy which not only must support Ta Nehisi Coates and Delray McKesson but half of India, China, Africa, Central America, and Mexico, in a permanent make-work middle class that does nothing productive and actually is a dead weight economically -- the only way that pencils out in even the short term is seizing ever more of White men's property and giving it to the bureaucracy. Which is the real power: not Presidents or the Supreme Court or Senators, but permanent bureaucrats who are all related and hold hereditary power. Its a new Feudalism, based on bureaucracy and the administrative/managerial state not castles and men at arms supported by peasants. But enserfdom of the peasants is well underway.
Will White men simply go along with bugs, beans, shipping container houses, no cars and trucks, no guns? Virginia says otherwise and as the civil war heats up there as Northam drives to seize houses/property to give it to his bureaucrats who run him, well so goes the nation.
That last phrase is certainly right. The downside of democracy is how readily it may be hijacked. Dems figured out how to manipulate the electorate by importing new voters and replacing the people who didn’t vote for them.
Along with techniques like enfranchising felons and running the mass media as a 24/7/365 Hate-Whitey propaganda machine…well, as they say, the rest is history.
At some point we need Repubs to being publicly calling the Democratic party what it is - a criminal organization.
In terms of worldly success, the traits of ‘self-discipline’ and ‘conscientiousness’ matter as least as much as IQ.
The suspicion must be that both of these traits are genetic and therefore racially linked, and the genetics favor Orientals over whites in this regard.
This thesis would make a good deal of sense in what we can see in the rise and rise of China.
China has been 'civilized' a lot longer than any tribe, country or area in the West. Presumably Western Civilization was the last to lay down roots as farmers and actually build cities. Same with India. Both of these civilization are thousands of years older than Western Civilization. We were actually destroyed by offshoots of their population explosions in the Huns attacking Europe and entered a Dark Age for about 1,000 years, yet ultimately we were the people who crawled back and invented electricity, automobiles, trains, airplanes, space travel, the internet, green revolution, medical advances. I can't even think of everything we have contributed to the world that has made it a better place.
China (and India too) has piggy-backed off of our many advances in everything and I am happy for them. I want the entire world to have as good a life as possible; but, the question still remains why, with their high IQ, did they have to wait for Western Civilization to do all of these wonderful things.
That's the puzzle.
They were hardcore isolationist who *absolutely* did not want to mix with westerners. Rightly, they intuited that the westerners/missionaries etc were the thin edge of a fat wedge which would inevitably resulting in colonization, as happened in India. Whites, in those days were pretty self confident, tough and unrepentant, believe it or not. This was China's coping strategy - carry on as 'usual' and pretend the western world did not exist.
Also, China was very tightly controlled by a conservative neo feudalist system which eschewed change.
Finally, Chinese ingenuity and industry *did* show its hand in that Chinese agriculture could support a bloated population with the techniques of the time - no mean achievement. Also, most of the world's silver eventually ended up in China - they must have been doing something right.
Steve is unique. When his dishwasher broke he used paper plates instead of rinsing crockery in the sink.
He does mention Richard Lynn, but only on sex differences in IQ, and in an endnote. Rushton gets one citation on a co-authored article, also on sex differences. So it seems that he steered well clear of the really interesting (and politically explosive) topics.
While I expect it to be a good and comprehensive primer on the subject (I haven't read it yet), it seems that Murray is still very much invested in remaining "handshakeworthy."
Is it preoccupation with social acceptability or strategizing for effectiveness? Overton Window for IQ stuff has decidedly shifted since the 90s. Baby steps required to reach many.
He does mention Richard Lynn, but only on sex differences in IQ, and in an endnote. Rushton gets one citation on a co-authored article, also on sex differences. So it seems that he steered well clear of the really interesting (and politically explosive) topics.
While I expect it to be a good and comprehensive primer on the subject (I haven't read it yet), it seems that Murray is still very much invested in remaining "handshakeworthy."
I
Charles Murray might be no hero. But wise and tough? – Yes, he is.
II
Slow down, don’t move too fast
What you write about John Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn (and this Steve Sailer guy and HBD, too) is interesting. Seen from Charles Murray’s perspective, it might boil down to: First things first. One step after the other.
III
Lots of things to write about for – the younger ones – people like you, Anatoly Karlin!
OT – new Chinese flag, courtesy of irreverent Danish paper Jyllands-Posten. Chinese government is a bit miffed, apparently it crosses the ‘ethical boundary of free speech‘.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7938107/Danish-newspapers-virus-cartoon-angers-China.html
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPaczgtUEAE3LFl
On a related note, Chinese-Canadians are complaining that the coronavirus outbreak has increased racism against them.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/canada-chinese-community-battles-racist-backlash-amid-coronavirus-outbreak
I didn’t get an Advance Readers Copy like Steve. But early on in the book he mentions both Howard Gardner’s wacky “multiple intelligences” theory and “emotional intelligence,” two genuine examples of pseudoscience, or, as they say, neuromyths. I haven’t gotten far enough to learn if he takes them seriously.
As with any Charles Murray book the footnotes lead you down so many interesting rabbit holes that I think I’m going to have to enforce a no footnote reading policy just to get through a first reading.
Murray is researching a history of the takeover of pro poker by math brainiacs, and it looks like some of his subjects may boycott him as a racist. He needs to learn the Bob Woodward trick of responding, “No problem, I have a couple of other sources who were there, so I’ll get the story from them.”
I don’t see anything worthwhile here. Murray is trivial. These are platitudes, which may be of some importance considering the circumstances.
It’s like saying, during the Soviet era: Marx sucks & his theories are simply – fake. True, it takes courage, but, nevertheless- it’s trivial.
He does mention Richard Lynn, but only on sex differences in IQ, and in an endnote. Rushton gets one citation on a co-authored article, also on sex differences. So it seems that he steered well clear of the really interesting (and politically explosive) topics.
While I expect it to be a good and comprehensive primer on the subject (I haven't read it yet), it seems that Murray is still very much invested in remaining "handshakeworthy."
There are levels of ‘handshakeworthy’. He gets chased off college campuses, but Quillette still talks to him. Hachette published his book, n’est-ce pas?
You have to keep the whole range of opinions leading to what you want intact. If everyone in the IDW goes full 1488 (which would never happen anyway given their ancestry), lots of people in the middle would just conclude you can’t deviate from the left without becoming a Nazi and become junior-grade SJWs.
Murray (much like Pinker to his left) is probably figuring out what he can and can’t say to maintain his credibility among his readers (I’d guess educated conservatives and liberals willing to tolerate a little heterodoxy to get to the truth, even if they can’t say it out loud).
His hope is in the Counter-Reformation they eventually spur.
I expected to see a drawing of a bat.
On a related note, Chinese-Canadians are complaining that the coronavirus outbreak has increased racism against them.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/canada-chinese-community-battles-racist-backlash-amid-coronavirus-outbreak
“society shifted very rapidly on women working during the feminist 1970s”
Why was the USA so slow off the mark? By contrast, the key British legislation was an Act of 1919.
Yale first admitted female undergraduates in 1969, Oxford in the 1870s. I suppose that partly explains why it was thought wise to open more jobs to women in Britain in the early 20th century. That plus the WWI experience, perhaps.
If left to the Conservatives, none of this, including female suffrage would ever have occurred.
The irony is that once granted the franchise, British women tended to vote Tory. In fact, if the females franchise was never granted, Labour would have held continuous and total political power in the UK since year 1945(!).
The character of such a Britain can only be imagined, but it's safe to assume it would be be pretty hardcore socialist, if not overtly Marxist.
Yet another example of policy choices coming back to haunt the originators big time.
Although this fact is typically hushed up in Britain, because it doesn't fit the lefty 'women as victims/martyrs' trope.
Was that not what “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010” was about.
Brazil is not a Spanish speaking country.
Because he’s not particularly interested in the fate of White people. He just wants to talk social science. I have to admit, I find it chilling when a man is more interested in being invited to elite social parties than sticking up for his own people.
Charles Murray is anti-Trump and doesn’t sound too keen on the unwashed White masses getting engaged in politics. To be honest, what he said in the Bell Curve was known by everyone’s great-grandmother: Blacks had lower intelligence. Is this a revelation?
What he did is provide a more detailed analysis of something which was known to the Arabs and Chinese 1,000 year ago.
I have to admit, this doesn’t make Murray’s latest sound like much of a page-turner. I remember trying to read Wilson’s Consilience, and once you got past his Big Idea that everything is related, the rest was a bit of a slog.
Wilson was far more entertaining when writing about the specifics, like ant behavior. Maybe if Murray likewise has some particular insights on how genetics relate to specific social science topics, these might make good discussion topics for future posts.
But when the typefont is raised as a positive factor, I can’t help thinking that perhaps it’s a form of diplomatic faint praise for the content.
How old are you? I'm roughly Steve's age, and I haven't read a non-Kindle book in 15 years. The Kindle, with its ability to enlarge fonts and adjust their boldness, saved my bacon. Even eyeglasses don't help unless you have single focus reading glasses in addition to normal progressives.
When you review books you get stuck with paper advance reader copies, unless the book is ebook only. Good graphic design is nice, but the main thing is a big font with sufficient linespacing.
Behind the flexible font, Kindle books let you highlight passages, add notes, and access all that later. Kindles are perfect for book reviewers -- or would be if review copies came in ebook form.
College Board’s National Hispanic Recognition Program requires eligible students be at least one-fourth Hispanic. Students with ancestors from Brazil, Belize, and Guadeloupe, a region of France, are eligible.
funny how it works. The Pope is considered hispanic , although all 4 of his grandparents were born in Italy , as were both his parents. following this logic , if Steve Sailer's children were born and raised in Mexico they would be considered Hispanic and qualify for affirmative action in the United States.
Would you mind to name a few non-trivial writers ca. 2000 ff.?
I cannot think of those still alive, but- including some deceased, I would put Stanislaw Lem, as a thinker, in that category; also, Freeman Dyson- he's still alive; then, historian Peter Brown, Indologist David Gordon White, Judaist Moshe Idel, philosopher Thomas Nagel, Stuart Kauffman, Stanislav Grof (with reservations), Paul Feyerabend, Leszek Kolakowski and Ioan Culianu (deceased, but livelier than most technically "alive"), George Steiner, Ricardo Duchesne ...
Wilson was far more entertaining when writing about the specifics, like ant behavior. Maybe if Murray likewise has some particular insights on how genetics relate to specific social science topics, these might make good discussion topics for future posts.
But when the typefont is raised as a positive factor, I can't help thinking that perhaps it's a form of diplomatic faint praise for the content.
But type fonts and decent graphics etc. make books readable in the first place – and likable in the second. Steve Sailer’s remark is on the spot! – As is the lovely illustration of his post with the pencils and the light bulb. Books accompany me at times for decades and it is very pleasing, to have nice ones around.
What a depressing waste of brainpower. Intellectuals like this keep “discovering” what the rest of the world already knows. Oh really? Men and women aren’t exactly the same? Natural selection doesn’t stop at skin?
Seems like pretty efficient social warfare. You browbeat everyone into believing obvious nonsense, keeping all the smart people who oppose you busy debunking that, leaving no time to make progress coming up with new beneficial ideas.
He likely doesn’t consider working class whites as his people.
People often just post stuff in the comments. Steve seems to read them pretty diligently and sometimes uses material from them in his posts.
I’d never heard of Oscar Lewis but those books look interesting. Bryan Caplan’s reading of them doesn’t seem to have affected his support for open borders, though. 😏
The New Republic …
https://newrepublic.com/amp/article/156330/charles-murray-never-going-away/
You think you’re reading a very negative book review, and then you re-scan it and there is no indication that the guy has even read the book. He doesn’t even bother to do Steve’s occasional trick of skimming the book and pulling out a couple of quotes to make it look like he read it.
Oh, wait, he says the publisher wouldn’t send him a pre-publication copy. Take that, Hachette!
Worth a skim for the funny quote from Andela Saini juxtaposed with the disclosure that Murray has no scientific credentials, and the fact that law school graduate/journalist Charles Lane destroyed The Bell Curve, so Murray is cancelled.
He thinks he’s Titania McGrath or Godfrey Elfwick. Don’t tell him he’s not let him have his delusions.
You will find it was the Labour Party – and the Labour Party only – despite a few measures by the Liberals in the early 20th which really pushed for ‘women’s lib’, for purely ideological reasons. Perhaps the analogy here is with mass immigration.
If left to the Conservatives, none of this, including female suffrage would ever have occurred.
The irony is that once granted the franchise, British women tended to vote Tory. In fact, if the females franchise was never granted, Labour would have held continuous and total political power in the UK since year 1945(!).
The character of such a Britain can only be imagined, but it’s safe to assume it would be be pretty hardcore socialist, if not overtly Marxist.
Yet another example of policy choices coming back to haunt the originators big time.
Although this fact is typically hushed up in Britain, because it doesn’t fit the lefty ‘women as victims/martyrs’ trope.
His people aren’t white.
The suspicion must be that both of these traits are genetic and therefore racially linked, and the genetics favor Orientals over whites in this regard.
This thesis would make a good deal of sense in what we can see in the rise and rise of China.
My question is then: What took China so long to rise if their IQ was so much higher and IQ mattered that much in the general scheme of things.
China has been ‘civilized’ a lot longer than any tribe, country or area in the West. Presumably Western Civilization was the last to lay down roots as farmers and actually build cities. Same with India. Both of these civilization are thousands of years older than Western Civilization. We were actually destroyed by offshoots of their population explosions in the Huns attacking Europe and entered a Dark Age for about 1,000 years, yet ultimately we were the people who crawled back and invented electricity, automobiles, trains, airplanes, space travel, the internet, green revolution, medical advances. I can’t even think of everything we have contributed to the world that has made it a better place.
China (and India too) has piggy-backed off of our many advances in everything and I am happy for them. I want the entire world to have as good a life as possible; but, the question still remains why, with their high IQ, did they have to wait for Western Civilization to do all of these wonderful things.
That’s the puzzle.
> What took China so long to rise
You could argue that China had been a dominant power for thousands of years, and only for 2 or 3 centuries suffered a loss of power compared to European powers and Japan. So it's just returning to its usual position at the top of the world. For much of its history, China exported more ideas and products than it imported.
> we were the people who crawled back and invented
What are the chances that "we" will continue to invent and dominate one hundred or two hundred years from now? Demographically "we" are already in a strong downturn. So being smart and inventing stuff is no guarantee of continued domination and prosperity. History seems to indicate the opposite, in fact.
Depends on the topic.
I cannot think of those still alive, but- including some deceased, I would put Stanislaw Lem, as a thinker, in that category; also, Freeman Dyson- he’s still alive; then, historian Peter Brown, Indologist David Gordon White, Judaist Moshe Idel, philosopher Thomas Nagel, Stuart Kauffman, Stanislav Grof (with reservations), Paul Feyerabend, Leszek Kolakowski and Ioan Culianu (deceased, but livelier than most technically “alive”), George Steiner, Ricardo Duchesne …
Wilson was far more entertaining when writing about the specifics, like ant behavior. Maybe if Murray likewise has some particular insights on how genetics relate to specific social science topics, these might make good discussion topics for future posts.
But when the typefont is raised as a positive factor, I can't help thinking that perhaps it's a form of diplomatic faint praise for the content.
“But when the typefont is raised as a positive factor, I can’t help thinking that perhaps it’s a form of diplomatic faint praise for the content.”
How old are you? I’m roughly Steve’s age, and I haven’t read a non-Kindle book in 15 years. The Kindle, with its ability to enlarge fonts and adjust their boldness, saved my bacon. Even eyeglasses don’t help unless you have single focus reading glasses in addition to normal progressives.
When you review books you get stuck with paper advance reader copies, unless the book is ebook only. Good graphic design is nice, but the main thing is a big font with sufficient linespacing.
Behind the flexible font, Kindle books let you highlight passages, add notes, and access all that later. Kindles are perfect for book reviewers — or would be if review copies came in ebook form.
Real books are the only books.
No, those ten points are throwing down the gauntlet. This is Murray’s 95 Theses. No one in the established Church will be shaking that hand going forward, and he knows that.
His hope is in the Counter-Reformation they eventually spur.
The suspicion must be that both of these traits are genetic and therefore racially linked, and the genetics favor Orientals over whites in this regard.
This thesis would make a good deal of sense in what we can see in the rise and rise of China.
If this is true, why did China fall to such a low point during the 19th century and most of the 20th?
That and just plain bad leadership.
China was the most advanced civilization for thousands of years. The trouble is, during that time they never came up with an easily readable written language (they invented the printing press, but much harder with thousands of characters compared to 26 letters), nor did they come up with the scientific method.
The Chinese got complacent fell to the Manchus in the 1600s. The Manchus were great at conquering, but not so good at innovation. They found Han Chinese innovation rather threatening.
The Manchus wound up with many of the worst aspects of Chinese leadership. They considered China to be the center of the earth, and felt they had nothing to learn from the barbarians. The West passed them by, especially when the Industrial Revolution came about.
By some point in the 1800s, China was now hopelessly backwards and divided, but refused to accept that fact.
China finally turned to the West in the 1900s. Sadly, the biggest thing they got from the West was communism. There was infighting among the Chinese for most of the 20th Century, whenever they weren't fighting the Japanese or the UN (in Korea).
While China improved during Mao's leadership, he made mistakes that killed many tens of millions of people. China improved mostly because they weren't killing each other.
China didn't have even remotely competent leadership -- as in leaders who weren't actively destroying the country -- until at least the 1970s. And then things took off, and they haven't looked back.
https://youtu.be/THvfQ-XfP6Q?t=1001
The rise in Ivy League IQ since 1930 is not (fully) explained by assortative mating. Ivy enrollments have not significantly increased since then but the US population has almost tripled and the value of an Ivy degree (and the # of people who, with financial aid and loans, can afford to attend and who want attend rather than stay home and attend State U or work in the family business/farm) has significantly increased. Coeducation alone has doubled the applicant pool.
In 1930, a significant portion of Ivy enrollment was made up of “gentlemen” – traditional rich WASP families who sent their sons to prep schools and on to alma mater. These guys were not always the sharpest knives in the drawer. By 1930, the Ivies had successfully implemented their “suppress Jewish enrollment” campaign – Harvard was back down to 10% from almost 25% in the early 1920s. Lots of high IQ kids out in the heartland never even considered applying – it was just not in the cards for them to go off to the East. Their parents couldn’t afford the train ticket let alone 4 years of tuition.
I don’t find it surprising that white earnings have decreased (relative to earnings of similar iqs from other races). There has been systematic hiring racism and promotion racism for the last 35 years, in an attempt to even the score. In the company I work for in Cali, most of upper management are people of color or women, with only the CEO and legal groups holding for whites. The same with middle management.
The suspicion must be that both of these traits are genetic and therefore racially linked, and the genetics favor Orientals over whites in this regard.
This thesis would make a good deal of sense in what we can see in the rise and rise of China.
Cultural reasons:
They were hardcore isolationist who *absolutely* did not want to mix with westerners. Rightly, they intuited that the westerners/missionaries etc were the thin edge of a fat wedge which would inevitably resulting in colonization, as happened in India. Whites, in those days were pretty self confident, tough and unrepentant, believe it or not. This was China’s coping strategy – carry on as ‘usual’ and pretend the western world did not exist.
Also, China was very tightly controlled by a conservative neo feudalist system which eschewed change.
Finally, Chinese ingenuity and industry *did* show its hand in that Chinese agriculture could support a bloated population with the techniques of the time – no mean achievement. Also, most of the world’s silver eventually ended up in China – they must have been doing something right.
Mismatch plus AWFLs snaking their affirmative action (original meritocratic definition). Set up for failure.
Brain drain inordinately hurts communities short on brains to begin with.
Self-discipline and conscientiousness are necessary but not sufficient conditions. (I used to think having a high-trust society was one of those conditions too, but, once again, China.)
I think China has two very large hurdles to overcome if they want to dominate the mid-late 2000s, and onward.
1. Transparency. I think having a high-trust society is a HUGE advantage. The West became strong to a very large extent because of the rise of science and capitalism, both of which depended on high trust. The question becomes, how innovative can China be in a low-trust society? They can only steal jobs and intellectual property from the West for so long. The Qing Dynasty shows how a very low-trust society can destroy scientific and technological innovation.
Look at the Asian currency crisis in the late 1990s. The relatively higher trust Asian nations, such as Japan, were barely damaged. The lowest trust Asian countries, such as Indonesia, were devastated.
2. No decent alphabet. Pinyin can only get you so far, with a tonal language and all that. Maybe they will all learn English?
Sorry, but this all is, perhaps not a pseudo-science, but something like science in infancy (or worse).
Basically, all psychometry is just a tad better than psychoanalysis. Controversial issues (IQ & race & sex/gender & …) seem now to be of huge importance. Considering their role in social engineering, they are.
But, cognitively, they’re not such a big deal. People differ; groups differ in their abilities for various areas of human endeavor, behavior & interest; and we knew that all the time. It’s lunatic leftist liberalism that has made such trivia controversial.
Psychometry is good, I think, for averages & career choices. Beyond that, it’s worthless (originality, creativity, social pressures, right time & place, pure luck… matter more). More- people, without psychometry, know what they’re good at.
Murray is, give or take, a good numbers cruncher. Just, he’s not a significant thinker. I don’t see anything new resulting from his works (which I enjoyed). He writes about white America- just, there are not real insights what this “white America” actually is. It’s like talking about “Europeans” without distinguishing between Italians & Danes.
His book on human accomplishment is also entertaining- and useless. The very methodology is questionable, and it is not Murray’s fault. You simply cannot measure accomplishment. If you follow Murray’s method, you get that Byron is greater writer than Tolstoy & that Rutherford is more important physicist than Maxwell- which is patently absurd. The entire approach is wrong.
IQ controversy looms large now. But, it will, I think, turn out to be as important as the difference between transubstantiation & consubstantiation.
The ancient Greek playwrights could answer that one. Hubris.
That and just plain bad leadership.
China was the most advanced civilization for thousands of years. The trouble is, during that time they never came up with an easily readable written language (they invented the printing press, but much harder with thousands of characters compared to 26 letters), nor did they come up with the scientific method.
The Chinese got complacent fell to the Manchus in the 1600s. The Manchus were great at conquering, but not so good at innovation. They found Han Chinese innovation rather threatening.
The Manchus wound up with many of the worst aspects of Chinese leadership. They considered China to be the center of the earth, and felt they had nothing to learn from the barbarians. The West passed them by, especially when the Industrial Revolution came about.
By some point in the 1800s, China was now hopelessly backwards and divided, but refused to accept that fact.
China finally turned to the West in the 1900s. Sadly, the biggest thing they got from the West was communism. There was infighting among the Chinese for most of the 20th Century, whenever they weren’t fighting the Japanese or the UN (in Korea).
While China improved during Mao’s leadership, he made mistakes that killed many tens of millions of people. China improved mostly because they weren’t killing each other.
China didn’t have even remotely competent leadership — as in leaders who weren’t actively destroying the country — until at least the 1970s. And then things took off, and they haven’t looked back.
Very interesting.
I think China has two very large hurdles to overcome if they want to dominate the mid-late 2000s, and onward.
1. Transparency. I think having a high-trust society is a HUGE advantage. The West became strong to a very large extent because of the rise of science and capitalism, both of which depended on high trust. The question becomes, how innovative can China be in a low-trust society? They can only steal jobs and intellectual property from the West for so long. The Qing Dynasty shows how a very low-trust society can destroy scientific and technological innovation.
Look at the Asian currency crisis in the late 1990s. The relatively higher trust Asian nations, such as Japan, were barely damaged. The lowest trust Asian countries, such as Indonesia, were devastated.
2. No decent alphabet. Pinyin can only get you so far, with a tonal language and all that. Maybe they will all learn English?
Pinyin with tone marks is a fairly comprehensive substitute for characters - it is already the method of input on computers and is used in teaching Mandarin pronunciation in regions where the native dialect differs. The characters however carry more information and cultural weight and so they are probably never going to get rid of them. Vietnamese (an even more tonal language than Chinese) made the switch to a pinyin-like system of Romanization with added diacritic marks to convey the tones and it is perfectly serviceable, but they adopted it at a time when very few people were literate in a character based system.
I asked why I hadn’t heard of this and he said a lot of this has happened recently. He’s 40, so it’s not that recent.
> with a tonal language and all that. So far to do what?> Maybe they will all learn English?That's utterly absurd. But if we want to make ridiculous predictions, it's more likely we'd all end up using Chinese writing. The Chinese language is often more simple, rational, and elegant than our bastardized Western languages with their obscure etymologies made of layers of Greek, Latin, French, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. mixed with local dialects.
He does mention Richard Lynn, but only on sex differences in IQ, and in an endnote. Rushton gets one citation on a co-authored article, also on sex differences. So it seems that he steered well clear of the really interesting (and politically explosive) topics.
While I expect it to be a good and comprehensive primer on the subject (I haven't read it yet), it seems that Murray is still very much invested in remaining "handshakeworthy."
I think Murray’s beliefs are genuine, but they don’t always make sense given what he writes. For example, he continues to engage in absolute gushing praise of Neocon lightweight Jonah Goldberg. Yet I rarely see anything positive about Murray from Goldberg, he hasn’t plugged this book on his Twitter feed or his new website.
On Twitter Murray mentioned he is getting no interest in interviews on the book from any TV programs, including FOX. All mainstream publications consider him a hate thinker and most Conservatism, Inc. media still want him tucked in the corner.
He has no idea who the bad guys are or why.
What are the non-stupid left critiques of the bell curve?
A lot of liberals seemed to humiliate themselves with emotional, non-technical “reviews” of a non-emotional, technical work.
I remember Noam Chomsky being smart enough to not embarrass himself with logical self-refutation or disproved empirical claims. The tack he took was to say Murray’s claims weren’t wrong but “uninteresting” to him.
“Assuming you’re not a racist, why would it matter if there are different distributions of IQ across whatever dividing lines you’re stipulating? It’s certainly possible such differences could be found, but why would I find that scientifically interesting? When I come into work at MIT, I don’t ask myself whether the latest paper on computational linguistics was written by a woman or a Jew; I just ask myself whether it’s interesting….”
I think Pinker later gave a version of this argument as a description of how he is both a human diversity realist and a liberal.
Edit: I remember Chomsky specifically saying “of course I ‘believe’ in a genetic basis for intelligence under the assumption human beings are not rocks or trees or honeybees…”
Most people aren't Noam. I'm not a linguist but I was in adjacent field at Harvard when Noam was running MIT. Of course, academics are terrible gossips and in Boston Noam was legendary for not giving a shit about who you were or where you came from.
A lot of people say they're not judgmental but Noam legitimately gave the same attention to a poor black kid from a Boston high school as he did to a billionaire aristocrat philosopher from Oxford. He genuinely only cared about what you had to say, not "who you are."
But in my experience that's super rare. And my experience includes a lot of people who profess that principle...
I think China has two very large hurdles to overcome if they want to dominate the mid-late 2000s, and onward.
1. Transparency. I think having a high-trust society is a HUGE advantage. The West became strong to a very large extent because of the rise of science and capitalism, both of which depended on high trust. The question becomes, how innovative can China be in a low-trust society? They can only steal jobs and intellectual property from the West for so long. The Qing Dynasty shows how a very low-trust society can destroy scientific and technological innovation.
Look at the Asian currency crisis in the late 1990s. The relatively higher trust Asian nations, such as Japan, were barely damaged. The lowest trust Asian countries, such as Indonesia, were devastated.
2. No decent alphabet. Pinyin can only get you so far, with a tonal language and all that. Maybe they will all learn English?
Great example!
Edit: I remember Chomsky specifically saying "of course I 'believe' in a genetic basis for intelligence under the assumption human beings are not rocks or trees or honeybees..."
But that’s the thing about “assuming we’re not racist or sexist, it wouldn’t matter…”
Most people aren’t Noam. I’m not a linguist but I was in adjacent field at Harvard when Noam was running MIT. Of course, academics are terrible gossips and in Boston Noam was legendary for not giving a shit about who you were or where you came from.
A lot of people say they’re not judgmental but Noam legitimately gave the same attention to a poor black kid from a Boston high school as he did to a billionaire aristocrat philosopher from Oxford. He genuinely only cared about what you had to say, not “who you are.”
But in my experience that’s super rare. And my experience includes a lot of people who profess that principle…
He does mention Richard Lynn, but only on sex differences in IQ, and in an endnote. Rushton gets one citation on a co-authored article, also on sex differences. So it seems that he steered well clear of the really interesting (and politically explosive) topics.
While I expect it to be a good and comprehensive primer on the subject (I haven't read it yet), it seems that Murray is still very much invested in remaining "handshakeworthy."
Are Lynn and Rushton publishing the best articles on these topics still?
Seems like Murray, Pinker, and Cofnas are engaging in a fighting retreat to protect genetic science from being suppressed before it becomes mainstream and starts dropping blockbusters about HBD issues.
Rushton’s a body that unfortunately has to be left on the battlefield in this action.
Lynn released this in 2015 (the second edition):
https://www.amazon.com/Race-Differences-Intelligence-Richard-Lynn/dp/159368052X
And this in 2019 (hard to find an Amazon link that is not mixed up with the former book):
Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality: An Evolutionary Analysis
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/race-differences-in-psychopathic-personality-richard-lynn/1132479986
So I think it is safe to say the answer is yes for Lynn. The latter book is based on this 2002 paper AFAICT:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222191018_Racial_and_ethnic_differences_in_psychopathic_personality
Anatoly Karlin reviews it at https://www.unz.com/akarlin/lynn-race-differences-in-psychopathy/
I didn’t expect this level of sense from people so well-educated (witness how Murray still makes a point of snubbing Steve, presumbly due to the belief that this will earn him some sort of de-Nazification points), but, yeah, that’s the deal with disregarding Nazi babble right there. You are going to be called a Nazi, there is no discovery and no appeal, and once you’re called a Nazi the college educated and the institutions tolerate physical violence against you (and the media and the foundations encourage it). It’s less to do with finding actual Nazism and more to do with John Kenneth Galbraith bluffing his superior into thinking WWII-era America had an already-discussed, already agreed upon totalitarian “rubber order.” Imagine on your way up to the podium an enemy solemnly informs you that the microphone doesn’t work (that would at least be less slimy and have a more serious chance of working).
I attended a small high school in Nebraska as a senior. There were eleven students in my class, one of whom was a Brazilian exchange student. He taught us some basic Portuguese.
I think China has two very large hurdles to overcome if they want to dominate the mid-late 2000s, and onward.
1. Transparency. I think having a high-trust society is a HUGE advantage. The West became strong to a very large extent because of the rise of science and capitalism, both of which depended on high trust. The question becomes, how innovative can China be in a low-trust society? They can only steal jobs and intellectual property from the West for so long. The Qing Dynasty shows how a very low-trust society can destroy scientific and technological innovation.
Look at the Asian currency crisis in the late 1990s. The relatively higher trust Asian nations, such as Japan, were barely damaged. The lowest trust Asian countries, such as Indonesia, were devastated.
2. No decent alphabet. Pinyin can only get you so far, with a tonal language and all that. Maybe they will all learn English?
While it’s true that learning to read and write in Chinese requires a large investment (even for native speakers), once that investment is made the character system is perfectly useful and even possesses some advantages. For example, China has many local dialects but only one writing system. Since the characters are not phonetic, they have the same meaning in every dialect. So all Chinese (even if they don’t know Mandarin) can communicate with each other in writing.
Pinyin with tone marks is a fairly comprehensive substitute for characters – it is already the method of input on computers and is used in teaching Mandarin pronunciation in regions where the native dialect differs. The characters however carry more information and cultural weight and so they are probably never going to get rid of them. Vietnamese (an even more tonal language than Chinese) made the switch to a pinyin-like system of Romanization with added diacritic marks to convey the tones and it is perfectly serviceable, but they adopted it at a time when very few people were literate in a character based system.
Well, here’s “gender, race, and class for you”, a Minaj-à-trois:
Nicki Minaj’s brother sentenced to 25 years to life
The family is Dougla, which means mixed-race in their native T&T, and mixed-caste on their ancestral subcontinent.
Jobs Americans won’t do. Diversity is our strength. Through no fault of their own.
Any more fitting clichés come to mind?
Simply put, no self respecting higher caste Indian would ever leave Bharat to work as the Englishman's bitch.
120 IQ black = Has government job. Zero savings and considerable debt. Whatever he makes he spends and more.
120 IQ Asian. Starts out owning a small business (Chinese restaurant, dry cleaner, etc.). Saves every penny. Uses savings to open a 2nd branch and then a 3rd, 4th, etc. Doesn’t get much sleep or take any vacation.
II Slow down, don't move too fastWhat you write about John Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn (and this Steve Sailer guy and HBD, too) is interesting. Seen from Charles Murray's perspective, it might boil down to: First things first. One step after the other.IIILots of things to write about for - the younger ones - people like you, Anatoly Karlin!
Maybe Germans shouldn’t be defining “tough.” Tough doesn’t mean trying to appease and failing, nor does it mean holding back to get invited somewhere, nor does it mean letting a woman next to you get wrecked. There’s nothing tough about Murray. He’s definitely detail-oriented, intelligent, wise, and capable of masterful analytics.
Which makes the term go from meaningless to absurd.
What about Portugal?
"National Hispanic Recognition Program - Wikipedia" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Hispanic_Recognition_Program
It's very much like a modern English speaker being handed a facsimile 1611 authentic King James Bible. There are not only different spellings but different whole words and even different letters-the English alphabet no longer contains some of the letters they had then.
In spoken form not so much, though Portuguese speakers do better with Spanish than vice versa.
The largest problem is that 1) Brazilians are very insular, parochial and monolingual (Portuguese, being in Europe, less so) and tend to stick their butts up at attempts to speak Spanish to them and 2) most of the world's Portuguese speakers and the vast majority of monolingual Portuguese speakers are Brazilians.
Brazilians have many of Americans' vices and less of their virtues when dealing with the rest of the world. I was involved in some ministry activities (we bought a tractor for a village, which had to be an overpriced and not very good Brazilian tractor because of import restrictions, and did some electrical work, which similarly turned into a mess) and also helped a man get a couple of collectible cars OUT of Brazil which wound up requiring bribery and deceit. Brazil is corrupt and many government workers are exceptionally stupid and pigheaded, which is one reason their manufacturing is having a tough time exporting higher value goods. Argentina is about as bad, although Spanish is way easier to do business in than Portuguese for Americans, and the likelihood of finding people speaking decent English and being willing to do so is much higher.
Nicki Minaj’s brother sentenced to 25 years to lifeThe family is Dougla, which means mixed-race in their native T&T, and mixed-caste on their ancestral subcontinent.Jobs Americans won't do. Diversity is our strength. Through no fault of their own. Any more fitting clichés come to mind?
I realize sexual assault of an 11 year old is a serious crime, but 25 to life? In Europe people get much less for murder. Wouldn’t 10 or 15 years suffice?
Summary: Adult man has intercourse with 11 year old girl multiple times, at least once while her brother can see. This should clarify the sentencing for you.
On a related note, Chinese-Canadians are complaining that the coronavirus outbreak has increased racism against them.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/canada-chinese-community-battles-racist-backlash-amid-coronavirus-outbreak
United States Mint to the rescue:
Back-door deportation?
John McWhorter has little love for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language directs thought, but in one of his TED Talks (and both are good) he concedes that it is valid, albeit trivially so, and uses the example of gender. He mentions a study that showed that when people were asked to imagine an inanimate object, say, a table, speaking, they were statistically more likely to envision (enaudiate?) the sex of the voice to match the gender of the object in their language.
He compared French to English, which long ago discarded gender. I wish he had used German, where table is masculine, but he didn't do the study.
Even better, Flemish and Dutch, essentially the same language, in which differing words for table differed in gender. In a similar (non-TED) talk, Gaston Dorren claimed that the conversation "She has nice legs", "Yes, he does" would make sense were the legs those to a table, and the speakers a Fleming and a Hollander.
Seems like Murray, Pinker, and Cofnas are engaging in a fighting retreat to protect genetic science from being suppressed before it becomes mainstream and starts dropping blockbusters about HBD issues.
Rushton’s a body that unfortunately has to be left on the battlefield in this action.
It’s already both suppressed and mainstream. She’s jumped the levee and is digging a new channel.
We live in interesting times.
His hope is in the Counter-Reformation they eventually spur.
But I digress...let's talk about his new book:It dawned on me today how many female CEOs, esp. in tech, are *Jewish* women: Marissa Mayer(Yahoo), Sheryl Sandberg(Facebook), Susan Wojcicki (YouTube), Ann Wojcicki(23andMe), Mandy Ginsberg(Match group), Adena Friedman (Nasdaq), Jan Singer(J. Crew)...the list goes on. It's like a secret club of Jewesses.
Marissa Mayer isn’t Jewish and she’s no longer the CEO of Yahoo. Sandberg never was the CEO of Facebook.
That and just plain bad leadership.
China was the most advanced civilization for thousands of years. The trouble is, during that time they never came up with an easily readable written language (they invented the printing press, but much harder with thousands of characters compared to 26 letters), nor did they come up with the scientific method.
The Chinese got complacent fell to the Manchus in the 1600s. The Manchus were great at conquering, but not so good at innovation. They found Han Chinese innovation rather threatening.
The Manchus wound up with many of the worst aspects of Chinese leadership. They considered China to be the center of the earth, and felt they had nothing to learn from the barbarians. The West passed them by, especially when the Industrial Revolution came about.
By some point in the 1800s, China was now hopelessly backwards and divided, but refused to accept that fact.
China finally turned to the West in the 1900s. Sadly, the biggest thing they got from the West was communism. There was infighting among the Chinese for most of the 20th Century, whenever they weren't fighting the Japanese or the UN (in Korea).
While China improved during Mao's leadership, he made mistakes that killed many tens of millions of people. China improved mostly because they weren't killing each other.
China didn't have even remotely competent leadership -- as in leaders who weren't actively destroying the country -- until at least the 1970s. And then things took off, and they haven't looked back.
Your line of reasoning could be used to explain away the relatively poor performance of the African continent, but I bet you wouldn’t do that…
You say China was the most advanced civilisation for thousands of years, but then again, Africa was the most advanced civilisation for thousands of years as well, everyone else was still starving in the cold. And do tell me what great wonders China has contributed? I hear a lot about the Four Great Chinese Inventions but it seems that they didn’t actually make use of them in effective ways, a bit like someone inventing a gun and using it to club people to death.
And regarding China’s change since the 70s, would they have come this far of the West hadn’t exported their manufacturing and IP to China? Could they have have started up their own industries and made them competitive in the world market had it not been for the West?
Regardless of past accomplishments and how the Chinese reached their present state (and you are wrong about both of these), you ignore them in the present at your peril. Every great race and civilization reaches a point where the fire that may have smoldered for centuries bursts into flame. The Jewish contribution to Western science before the 19th century was nil but their contributions in the 2oth century were invaluable. Before late 19th century, the US was not considered to be a major player in world affairs. Before the Age of Exploration, Britain was a small island most famous for its sheep production - the New Zealand of Europe.
In the last 3 years, the Chinese used as much cement for construction as the US used during the entire 20th century. The speed and scale of their current accomplishments has to be seen to be believed (and to really understand them you have to have seen China 30 years ago).
For the guy who cannot get off without destroying a child’s mind and body, no sentence suffices which includes the word “life.”
OT – UK news anchor gets involved in an Twitter argument, quotes Shakespeare at opponent. I can see the point of his quote, “Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d“.
Opponent is black, complains, news anchor is fired.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7943667/Alastair-Stewart-steps-ITV-News-presenting-duties.html
Nicki Minaj’s brother sentenced to 25 years to lifeThe family is Dougla, which means mixed-race in their native T&T, and mixed-caste on their ancestral subcontinent.Jobs Americans won't do. Diversity is our strength. Through no fault of their own. Any more fitting clichés come to mind?
In reality, the Indian part of her ancestry simply must be from the lower castes. This must hold true for all Info Trinidadians and Guyanese.
Simply put, no self respecting higher caste Indian would ever leave Bharat to work as the Englishman’s bitch.
But I digress...let's talk about his new book:It dawned on me today how many female CEOs, esp. in tech, are *Jewish* women: Marissa Mayer(Yahoo), Sheryl Sandberg(Facebook), Susan Wojcicki (YouTube), Ann Wojcicki(23andMe), Mandy Ginsberg(Match group), Adena Friedman (Nasdaq), Jan Singer(J. Crew)...the list goes on. It's like a secret club of Jewesses.
Ashkenzic Jews having the “highest” (or among the highest) IQ is one of those things where, even if it’s a lie, it is at most half a lie. The real lie is when goalposts are moved to include all Jews (or even all AJs, who give birth to morons like anyone else), or to count Jews against all goyim, or to expect that high IQ will not give you a high IQ serial killer or traitor spy. The funny thing is that the truly brilliant Jews are consistently not activists, famous people, self-promoters, or in the more popularly accessible fields. The genius Jews celebrated in the media are not only often frauds, they’re probably not that bright (or else, why the fraud?). And as Steven Pinker illustrated with his brave foray into ideology, even genuine brilliance cannot protect against mistakes or pride.
The suspicion must be that both of these traits are genetic and therefore racially linked, and the genetics favor Orientals over whites in this regard.
This thesis would make a good deal of sense in what we can see in the rise and rise of China.
Of course, they’re important and largely genetic. However, that’s nopt the difference. The difference is the East Asians’ risk-aversion and preference for the safe and well-defined career paths as opposed to whites’ greater interest in free-form experimentation, creativity, and well-roundedness.
I cannot think of those still alive, but- including some deceased, I would put Stanislaw Lem, as a thinker, in that category; also, Freeman Dyson- he's still alive; then, historian Peter Brown, Indologist David Gordon White, Judaist Moshe Idel, philosopher Thomas Nagel, Stuart Kauffman, Stanislav Grof (with reservations), Paul Feyerabend, Leszek Kolakowski and Ioan Culianu (deceased, but livelier than most technically "alive"), George Steiner, Ricardo Duchesne ...
Thanks, interesting. I prefer Lec to Lem, and Peter von Matt to Steiner. Thomas Nagel I’ve tried reading but could not find much. Grof is a wild one – and I understand your reservations, too. I’ll have a look at Ioan Catalescu.
?
Andrzej Stasiuk, The White Raven, The World Behind Dukla
Emanuel Carrère Limonow
Viktor Jerofejew, The Good Stalin
Viktor Pelewin Generation P, Omon
No.
Shifted which way?
But I digress...let's talk about his new book:It dawned on me today how many female CEOs, esp. in tech, are *Jewish* women: Marissa Mayer(Yahoo), Sheryl Sandberg(Facebook), Susan Wojcicki (YouTube), Ann Wojcicki(23andMe), Mandy Ginsberg(Match group), Adena Friedman (Nasdaq), Jan Singer(J. Crew)...the list goes on. It's like a secret club of Jewesses.
Jews like Kevin McDonald?
So you’re saying it’s not true?
What about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates
Is it just a coincidence that a group which constitutes .1% of the world population has produced 20% of all Nobel laureates?
Around 2000, I worked with a former Herrnstein grad student. The Bell Curve never came up. I wasn’t particularly interested, but now I wonder if my colleague was playing it cool a decade and a half before the Great Awokening.
Mismatch is certainly plausible. How prevalent it was in the early 1980s ( when the 1979 NLSY cohort would have been in college) vs. in the late 1990s, I don’t know with any confidence.
But I digress...let's talk about his new book:It dawned on me today how many female CEOs, esp. in tech, are *Jewish* women: Marissa Mayer(Yahoo), Sheryl Sandberg(Facebook), Susan Wojcicki (YouTube), Ann Wojcicki(23andMe), Mandy Ginsberg(Match group), Adena Friedman (Nasdaq), Jan Singer(J. Crew)...the list goes on. It's like a secret club of Jewesses.
Don’t be silly. It’s been proverbial among Jews since time immemorial that a goyische kopf is inferior. 😉
But I digress...let's talk about his new book:It dawned on me today how many female CEOs, esp. in tech, are *Jewish* women: Marissa Mayer(Yahoo), Sheryl Sandberg(Facebook), Susan Wojcicki (YouTube), Ann Wojcicki(23andMe), Mandy Ginsberg(Match group), Adena Friedman (Nasdaq), Jan Singer(J. Crew)...the list goes on. It's like a secret club of Jewesses.
Former CEO of Paramont Pictures Sherry Lansing was raised in a “Jewish household.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherry_Lansing
She went to the now all Black Parkside Elementary School in Chicago.
To steal a famous line from Kingsley Amis: if there ever was a sequel that deserved the title “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools”, it was Coming Apart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest
Gender is not a social construct, unless you consider linguistic constructs “social”.
John McWhorter has little love for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language directs thought, but in one of his TED Talks (and both are good) he concedes that it is valid, albeit trivially so, and uses the example of gender. He mentions a study that showed that when people were asked to imagine an inanimate object, say, a table, speaking, they were statistically more likely to envision (enaudiate?) the sex of the voice to match the gender of the object in their language.
He compared French to English, which long ago discarded gender. I wish he had used German, where table is masculine, but he didn’t do the study.
Even better, Flemish and Dutch, essentially the same language, in which differing words for table differed in gender. In a similar (non-TED) talk, Gaston Dorren claimed that the conversation “She has nice legs”, “Yes, he does” would make sense were the legs those to a table, and the speakers a Fleming and a Hollander.
But I digress...let's talk about his new book:It dawned on me today how many female CEOs, esp. in tech, are *Jewish* women: Marissa Mayer(Yahoo), Sheryl Sandberg(Facebook), Susan Wojcicki (YouTube), Ann Wojcicki(23andMe), Mandy Ginsberg(Match group), Adena Friedman (Nasdaq), Jan Singer(J. Crew)...the list goes on. It's like a secret club of Jewesses.
And none of these are productive industries. Perhaps I should put “industries” in quotation marks. They are merely squid “industries.” When will someone invent, I don’t know, a better way of getting around, or better heart cures. Don’t hold your breath. More nothing type-on-computer crap will make more billionaire women and our lives will deteriorate.
From Taki article…
Then there’s this…
Gallup: Race Relations Better Under Donald Trump Than Barack Obama.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/284033/americans-improved-mixed.aspx
There are 27 metrics tracked since 2001. The balance of improvements is in Trump's favor. The two declines which surprise me are:
- The level of immigration into the country today
- The nation's policies regarding the abortion issue
Any thoughts? Is it a matter of disappointed expectations or are people saying things are actually worse in those areas?
That is an interesting article. Thanks!
P.S. The linked PDF has results for each year for all of the questions. It also has crosstabs for the 2020 version of all of the questions. The race relations question is Q14N (page 28 crosstabs). Conservatives were much more satisfied than liberals. I wasn't able to find the 2017 crosstabs. I suspect they would cast some light on the change.
How old are you? I'm roughly Steve's age, and I haven't read a non-Kindle book in 15 years. The Kindle, with its ability to enlarge fonts and adjust their boldness, saved my bacon. Even eyeglasses don't help unless you have single focus reading glasses in addition to normal progressives.
When you review books you get stuck with paper advance reader copies, unless the book is ebook only. Good graphic design is nice, but the main thing is a big font with sufficient linespacing.
Behind the flexible font, Kindle books let you highlight passages, add notes, and access all that later. Kindles are perfect for book reviewers -- or would be if review copies came in ebook form.
Books on computers are disgusting.
Real books are the only books.
1. The Kindle and it's interface is not a computer: it's a very lightweight, hospitable reading environment. The screen is gently illuminated for reading in the dark. You can look up words and you can pull up Wikipedia articles on e.g. people and places mentioned in the book. You can search the full text of a book, and highlight passages as with a highlighter.
2. The reality of "real" books is that:
3. They are not accessible to those with weak eyesight
4. As physical artifacts they are cheaply made, with acid paper, and use a sort of binding called perfect binding," originally developed for paperbacks, but now also the standard for hard cover books. Perfect bound books have their pages gathered in signatures and then the entire back of the book is ground down and glue is applied. In the past signatures were saddle sewn, and the sewn signatures were gathered and glued. You can visibly see the threads every 32 or so pages in such books. Perfect bound books crack open at the spine; books sewn in signatures don't. Eve reference books like dictionaries are perfect bound these days.
5. To sum up: Yellowed, smelly pages with cracked bindings.
I can agree that audio books are disgusting.
His email is listed down the sidebar–if you look. I’ve emailed with iSteve occasionally over the years.
“Physics rests on mathematics, chemistry on physics, biology on chemistry, and, in principle, the social sciences on biology,” wrote evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. If so, this century should be an exhilarating time to be a social scientist.”
This was excerpted from iSteve’s Taki review. I read Bell when it first came out. It was hard-going going but impossible to put down. Notwithstanding that I thought Murray and Herrentstein’s proposals to be perfectly reasonable, still I always felt that they leaned too much upon social science data (particularly experimental psychology) and not enough–indeed hardly at all as I recall–upon data produced by the hard sciences (biology, particularly evolutionary biology, and, especially, genetics). It’s interesting now that Murray quotes just such a “hard scientist”, so hopefully my little quibble can be put to rest this time around.
Anne Wojcicki– or should it be Wójcicka, in proper Polish?– switched from figure skating to ice hockey as a girl. That would suggest her Slavic side is dominant over her Jewish.
Hes the larry david if david had spent time ” doing the work ” as my old man used to say
One of us should massively endow Sailer
Small populations always contain outliers. I’d expect iSteve to know that.
The US White population of 120 IQ vastly outnumbers (by an order of magnitude) the US Asian population of 120 IQ.
E.g. the 5 Asians average income is 54% greater than the average income of 50 Whites with 120 IQ. Nothing particularly unusual here–the opposite would be unusual.
Obviously there are other factors/variables to consider as the income-IQ correlation isn’t = 1.
By Jewish standards no one is sharpest. Even if they hadn’t been excluding them, the WASPs were not intelligent enough to be attracted to Jewish girls for their brains. Meritocratic enrollment brought in smart gentiles who were much more likely to associatively mate with Jewish girls I dare say. When the Nazis dismissed many Germany’s most accomplished scientists and mathematicians the number who were gentiles fired because they had married Jewish women was striking.
Assortative mating would explain Flynn Effect and a massive increase in Jewish wives of the smartest gentiles would be a big part of the new intellectual elite that Murray sees as not having pulled away from the rest of the white population. Even the relative fall in Jewish achievement may be partially due to many top students pegged as white gentiles by name analysis having had Jewish mothers and thus on average the most intelligent half-Jews are hidden in the statistics because there are relatively many genes linked to intelligence, especially verbal IQ, on the X chromosome.
For the future, it is so competitive among Chinese to get into Harvard that the ones who are successful must up there with full Jew students or exceeding them in pure brainpower. There already is associative mating of Chinese girls and nerdy Jewish men in the intellectual elite. It has been found that there are very high levels of associative mating for autistic traits (linked to genes for IQ and associated with technical subjects). Tech Jews will be doubly attracted (personality and intelligence) to Chinese girls I think. My prediction would be more of a Chinese, WASP, and Jewish mix of ancestry in the increasingly high IQ individuals making up the elite knowledge class ruling America as time goes on.
Hmm. How did a WASP/Ashkenazi ruling elite turn out for the median American?
I made no attempt to defining what is tough.
What I think though is, that a 77 – year-old man, willing to confront the stress and hassles and hatred that will undoubtedly come towards him with the publication of this new book – with the word RACE on the cover, is something which – I admire – and am grateful for. So: What Charles Murray does is way above average, as far as courage is concerned.
Murray is more concerned about social policies.
However, he has riled the gatekeepers by factoring racial differences into these like James Watson on Africa.
Murray advocates the total elimination of the welfare state, affirmative action and the Department of Education, arguing that public policy cannot overcome the innate deficiencies that cause unequal social and educational outcomes.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/charles-murray
I always felt Herrnstein took the easy way out.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3a/e3/8a/3ae38a7301fff1251de76808457fecf8.jpg
If you read the link you might have your question answered. The 11 year old his stepdaughter. The sexual abuse – let’s call it “rape” – was an ongoing practice, not some one-time thing. Her brother was a witness, an eye-witness.
Summary: Adult man has intercourse with 11 year old girl multiple times, at least once while her brother can see. This should clarify the sentencing for you.
John McWhorter has little love for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language directs thought, but in one of his TED Talks (and both are good) he concedes that it is valid, albeit trivially so, and uses the example of gender. He mentions a study that showed that when people were asked to imagine an inanimate object, say, a table, speaking, they were statistically more likely to envision (enaudiate?) the sex of the voice to match the gender of the object in their language.
He compared French to English, which long ago discarded gender. I wish he had used German, where table is masculine, but he didn't do the study.
Even better, Flemish and Dutch, essentially the same language, in which differing words for table differed in gender. In a similar (non-TED) talk, Gaston Dorren claimed that the conversation "She has nice legs", "Yes, he does" would make sense were the legs those to a table, and the speakers a Fleming and a Hollander.
It would also sometimes make sense here in L.A., if you know what I mean.
As far as i can tell, Steve does wear pants and shirts. He doesn’t seem to have gone to the West Asian track suit look.
In other words- freak show.
I think China has two very large hurdles to overcome if they want to dominate the mid-late 2000s, and onward.
1. Transparency. I think having a high-trust society is a HUGE advantage. The West became strong to a very large extent because of the rise of science and capitalism, both of which depended on high trust. The question becomes, how innovative can China be in a low-trust society? They can only steal jobs and intellectual property from the West for so long. The Qing Dynasty shows how a very low-trust society can destroy scientific and technological innovation.
Look at the Asian currency crisis in the late 1990s. The relatively higher trust Asian nations, such as Japan, were barely damaged. The lowest trust Asian countries, such as Indonesia, were devastated.
2. No decent alphabet. Pinyin can only get you so far, with a tonal language and all that. Maybe they will all learn English?
My buddy is from Hong Kong. He told me that China has basically adapted the Roman alphabet and has whole dictionaries of equivalent words. It’s how they are using computers nowadays. They are required to learn that in school.
I asked why I hadn’t heard of this and he said a lot of this has happened recently. He’s 40, so it’s not that recent.
Amy Harmon Retweeted:
Publishing house is forced to cancel book tour for widely praised novel about violence in Mexico, due to fear of violent protests because author is too white.
‘American Dirt’ Latino backlash part of long publishing war
https://apnews.com/eee7dc157f1b3fb0ee1cdcb2376719cb
Author tour for controversial ‘American Dirt’ is canceled
https://apnews.com/971db8e2487ab58337218d2ddfdcce5e
https://postimg.cc/ftD3rthW
I always figured both would rely on Herrnstein‘s Jewish credentials to deflect charges of racism and successfully counterattack it as anti-semitism. But he unfortunately passed away leaving Murray exposed to the elements. So he went into a maelstrom without any kind of shielding.
You can't trust these Jews. They do stuff like that without warning.
The Democratic party has become a criminal organization. The fact that this criminal organization controls huge swaths of permanent government (Justice department, the “intelligence community”, etc) is a huge problem and directly impacts the legitimacy of government.
At some point we need Repubs to being publicly calling the Democratic party what it is – a criminal organization.
Smartest blacks are affirmative action all the way, like President Mulatto
At some point we need Repubs to being publicly calling the Democratic party what it is - a criminal organization.
The National Socialists are banned in Germany in the grounds that they are a criminal gang, not a political party.
China has been 'civilized' a lot longer than any tribe, country or area in the West. Presumably Western Civilization was the last to lay down roots as farmers and actually build cities. Same with India. Both of these civilization are thousands of years older than Western Civilization. We were actually destroyed by offshoots of their population explosions in the Huns attacking Europe and entered a Dark Age for about 1,000 years, yet ultimately we were the people who crawled back and invented electricity, automobiles, trains, airplanes, space travel, the internet, green revolution, medical advances. I can't even think of everything we have contributed to the world that has made it a better place.
China (and India too) has piggy-backed off of our many advances in everything and I am happy for them. I want the entire world to have as good a life as possible; but, the question still remains why, with their high IQ, did they have to wait for Western Civilization to do all of these wonderful things.
That's the puzzle.
good questions, here’s some possible responses or at least caveats:
> What took China so long to rise
You could argue that China had been a dominant power for thousands of years, and only for 2 or 3 centuries suffered a loss of power compared to European powers and Japan. So it’s just returning to its usual position at the top of the world. For much of its history, China exported more ideas and products than it imported.
> we were the people who crawled back and invented
What are the chances that “we” will continue to invent and dominate one hundred or two hundred years from now? Demographically “we” are already in a strong downturn. So being smart and inventing stuff is no guarantee of continued domination and prosperity. History seems to indicate the opposite, in fact.
They might dominate the world in the future, I don't doubt it; however, anything they might accomplish in the future will be built upon the foundations that the West built from scratch...they will add to that possibly...
Even though everybody keeps telling me how much higher their IQs are.
I think China has two very large hurdles to overcome if they want to dominate the mid-late 2000s, and onward.
1. Transparency. I think having a high-trust society is a HUGE advantage. The West became strong to a very large extent because of the rise of science and capitalism, both of which depended on high trust. The question becomes, how innovative can China be in a low-trust society? They can only steal jobs and intellectual property from the West for so long. The Qing Dynasty shows how a very low-trust society can destroy scientific and technological innovation.
Look at the Asian currency crisis in the late 1990s. The relatively higher trust Asian nations, such as Japan, were barely damaged. The lowest trust Asian countries, such as Indonesia, were devastated.
2. No decent alphabet. Pinyin can only get you so far, with a tonal language and all that. Maybe they will all learn English?
> 2. No decent alphabet.
How does Japan manage with “no decent alphabet”? Or would you claim the kana give them some massive advantage that China does not share?
> Pinyin can only get you so far,
> with a tonal language and all that.
So far to do what?
> Maybe they will all learn English?
That’s utterly absurd. But if we want to make ridiculous predictions, it’s more likely we’d all end up using Chinese writing. The Chinese language is often more simple, rational, and elegant than our bastardized Western languages with their obscure etymologies made of layers of Greek, Latin, French, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. mixed with local dialects.
https://twitter.com/JacobPhD/status/1221871528129724417
https://twitter.com/JacobPhD/status/1221871529270697987
Does Dr Tennessen have a son named Tennessee?
if your grandfather was born in Spain do you qualify as Hispanic ? I suspect not.
funny how it works. The Pope is considered hispanic , although all 4 of his grandparents were born in Italy , as were both his parents. following this logic , if Steve Sailer’s children were born and raised in Mexico they would be considered Hispanic and qualify for affirmative action in the United States.
Portugal is not included but Spain is. Back in the 80s some Hispanic programs did not include Spain.
“National Hispanic Recognition Program – Wikipedia” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Hispanic_Recognition_Program
I find Sailer’s prose style and dry wit great and very amusing, and I devour all of his content except for golf and baseball, but concluding a written piece is a talent he does not possess.
All the rest more than make up for it though!
Perhaps Tanehisi?
Gotta mind the verbal blackface terms.
https://postimg.cc/ftD3rthW
Edit: I remember Chomsky specifically saying "of course I 'believe' in a genetic basis for intelligence under the assumption human beings are not rocks or trees or honeybees..."
“Assuming you’re not a racist, why would it matter if there are different distributions of IQ across whatever dividing lines you’re stipulating?”
I’ve heard Murray himself say pretty much this same thing. “Just treat everyone as an individual” and all that. I used to think that way. I didn’t see why having a large brown underclass would be a problem (good for the economy!). What (eventually) did it for me was realizing two key things.
First, you can proclaim all you want that people “shouldn’t” care about race and race differences, but, let’s be real, people are going to care. Big differences in IQ, time preference, etc. will mean vast differences in outcomes, standards of living, and so forth. And if you have big differences in outcomes between groups that are easily distinguished physically (e.g., different skin colors), it’s naive to think nobody will notice. (Especially when liberals themselves point it out constantly!!!) Inevitably, the low performing group will feel oppressed and will assume Whitey isn’t giving them a fair shake (again liberals tell them this constantly). And then to mollify them, Whitey will have to dole out lots of welfare (which debases them further) and give them jobs they can’t do (which leads to incompetence and misallocation of resources).
Second, there is something to be said for having a strong cohesive community with a robust public sphere. I want parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, clean streets, and so on. I want a robust middle class. I don’t want to be living in a mansion in a walled off neighborhood surrounded by housing projects and tent cities. When the brown underclass moves in, things go to shit, then there is always a withdrawal from public spaces, and then everything REALLY goes to shit. You can still get some of the nice stuff people used to take for granted, but only if you sell out to Globohomo for that big professional salary.
More hysterical against genetic hypothesis. Cancel Culture wasn’t a thing…
When Bell Curve came out, there was at least some serious consideration of it. Like The New Republic publishing the excerpt. That would never happen today in a “respectable” outlet.
It was published, but there was a revolt by the writers of the magazine against it, demanding their editors publish a massive preemptive denunciation of it in the same issue. Now they would just demand it not be published at all. So it was really just the beginning of PC cancel culture.
He does mention Richard Lynn, but only on sex differences in IQ, and in an endnote. Rushton gets one citation on a co-authored article, also on sex differences. So it seems that he steered well clear of the really interesting (and politically explosive) topics.
While I expect it to be a good and comprehensive primer on the subject (I haven't read it yet), it seems that Murray is still very much invested in remaining "handshakeworthy."
Except at Middlebury College.
Most people aren't Noam. I'm not a linguist but I was in adjacent field at Harvard when Noam was running MIT. Of course, academics are terrible gossips and in Boston Noam was legendary for not giving a shit about who you were or where you came from.
A lot of people say they're not judgmental but Noam legitimately gave the same attention to a poor black kid from a Boston high school as he did to a billionaire aristocrat philosopher from Oxford. He genuinely only cared about what you had to say, not "who you are."
But in my experience that's super rare. And my experience includes a lot of people who profess that principle...
Billionaire aristocrat philosopher from Oxford? Well, Russell was an Aristocrat. But he was a Cantab. And probably not a billionaire. Wittgenstein came from a very wealthy (((Austrian))) family. But he, too, was a Cantab. I know a bit about Oxford philosophy, and have been acquainted with a couple of Oxford philosophers. No aristocrats and no billionaires that I know of.
But I am familiar with Oxbridge philosophy and there were certainly many aristocrats who had millions they didn't make themselves, and class was certainly part of the culture in that field...
So what I was saying was that Noam was notable for not genuflecting to to the class hierarchy in his academic fields (and especially at institutions he worked at like Harvard and Oxford which are especially classist)
Asians of equivalent 120 IQ earn 54% more than whites because the practical minded Asians tend to major in higher paid fields like Computer Science, Finance, Engineering, Medicine or Law, while whites tend to follow their interests. It’s why most innovations came from whites, because they only major in tech/medicine if they are truly interested in it, whereas Asians only major in those fields for the money, not real interest.
I cannot think of those still alive, but- including some deceased, I would put Stanislaw Lem, as a thinker, in that category; also, Freeman Dyson- he's still alive; then, historian Peter Brown, Indologist David Gordon White, Judaist Moshe Idel, philosopher Thomas Nagel, Stuart Kauffman, Stanislav Grof (with reservations), Paul Feyerabend, Leszek Kolakowski and Ioan Culianu (deceased, but livelier than most technically "alive"), George Steiner, Ricardo Duchesne ...
I’d be interested to know what you think is so non-trivial in Feyerabend. He’s provocative, certainly. You might even call him a bleep-stirrer. I gather he got the Berkeley co-eds excited. A bit of a fun read, but if you want serious philosophy of science, I’d take Peter Galison over Feyerabend any dsy.
Seems like Murray, Pinker, and Cofnas are engaging in a fighting retreat to protect genetic science from being suppressed before it becomes mainstream and starts dropping blockbusters about HBD issues.
Rushton’s a body that unfortunately has to be left on the battlefield in this action.
I think your fighting retreat analogy is on target.
Rushton died in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton
Lynn released this in 2015 (the second edition):
And this in 2019 (hard to find an Amazon link that is not mixed up with the former book):
Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality: An Evolutionary Analysis
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/race-differences-in-psychopathic-personality-richard-lynn/1132479986
So I think it is safe to say the answer is yes for Lynn. The latter book is based on this 2002 paper AFAICT:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222191018_Racial_and_ethnic_differences_in_psychopathic_personality
Anatoly Karlin reviews it at https://www.unz.com/akarlin/lynn-race-differences-in-psychopathy/
The freedom of being old and IDGAF!
Gallup: Race Relations Better Under Donald Trump Than Barack Obama.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/284033/americans-improved-mixed.aspx
And it’s even a big change (fourth largest in survey). 22% satisfied with race relations in January 2017 vs. 36% satisfied in January 2020.
There are 27 metrics tracked since 2001. The balance of improvements is in Trump’s favor. The two declines which surprise me are:
– The level of immigration into the country today
– The nation’s policies regarding the abortion issue
Any thoughts? Is it a matter of disappointed expectations or are people saying things are actually worse in those areas?
That is an interesting article. Thanks!
P.S. The linked PDF has results for each year for all of the questions. It also has crosstabs for the 2020 version of all of the questions. The race relations question is Q14N (page 28 crosstabs). Conservatives were much more satisfied than liberals. I wasn’t able to find the 2017 crosstabs. I suspect they would cast some light on the change.
Real books are the only books.
Here’s why I disagree:
1. The Kindle and it’s interface is not a computer: it’s a very lightweight, hospitable reading environment. The screen is gently illuminated for reading in the dark. You can look up words and you can pull up Wikipedia articles on e.g. people and places mentioned in the book. You can search the full text of a book, and highlight passages as with a highlighter.
2. The reality of “real” books is that:
3. They are not accessible to those with weak eyesight
4. As physical artifacts they are cheaply made, with acid paper, and use a sort of binding called perfect binding,” originally developed for paperbacks, but now also the standard for hard cover books. Perfect bound books have their pages gathered in signatures and then the entire back of the book is ground down and glue is applied. In the past signatures were saddle sewn, and the sewn signatures were gathered and glued. You can visibly see the threads every 32 or so pages in such books. Perfect bound books crack open at the spine; books sewn in signatures don’t. Eve reference books like dictionaries are perfect bound these days.
5. To sum up: Yellowed, smelly pages with cracked bindings.
I can agree that audio books are disgusting.
I asked why I hadn’t heard of this and he said a lot of this has happened recently. He’s 40, so it’s not that recent.
Not really. There’s no easy way to input characters directly so they use pinyin (Chinese written phonetically in Roman letters) to type but the software immediately converts it to Chinese characters.
Love yah. Will you want your ashes buried (on the beach) with me, my dogs & 1/2 of my husband, hahhahahahhahaaaa in a far off land in the Baltic? – you have time; get back to me. You can bring any cremain.!
Shit..I am so morbid! – half of my husband needs to go to TX…not now, but, yah.
Lynn released this in 2015 (the second edition):
https://www.amazon.com/Race-Differences-Intelligence-Richard-Lynn/dp/159368052X
And this in 2019 (hard to find an Amazon link that is not mixed up with the former book):
Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality: An Evolutionary Analysis
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/race-differences-in-psychopathic-personality-richard-lynn/1132479986
So I think it is safe to say the answer is yes for Lynn. The latter book is based on this 2002 paper AFAICT:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222191018_Racial_and_ethnic_differences_in_psychopathic_personality
Anatoly Karlin reviews it at https://www.unz.com/akarlin/lynn-race-differences-in-psychopathy/
“ Race Differences in Psychopathic Personality: An Evolutionary Analysis”
The freedom of being old and IDGAF!
half of my husband is tethered to this country. It is so sad that Coastal overlords disparage the interior of this country – it is weird, as an immigrant.
any of you: I will take your ashes to my family space – it is beautiful. If you have no family, this is the most beautiful space. i will pay for your urns to go to the most amazing cemetery in Helsinki.
On Twitter Murray mentioned he is getting no interest in interviews on the book from any TV programs, including FOX. All mainstream publications consider him a hate thinker and most Conservatism, Inc. media still want him tucked in the corner.
He was still sucking up to the Middlebury Admin after the President herself about got him killed by egging on a crowd to attack him right in his face as he said nothing to defend himself.
He has no idea who the bad guys are or why.
Also, the ‘nerdy’ techie types of white male, men generally more cerebral than physical, for whatever reason find the soft, gentle ‘porcelain-doll’ type facial features of Oriental women, their willowy figures, light tan skin and black hair, attractive.
“Furthermore, it is of my opinion that pedophiles must be exterminated.” – Nebulafox.
I know of only one way to absolutely guarantee someone won't do something that is within their physical capacity to do.
China has been 'civilized' a lot longer than any tribe, country or area in the West. Presumably Western Civilization was the last to lay down roots as farmers and actually build cities. Same with India. Both of these civilization are thousands of years older than Western Civilization. We were actually destroyed by offshoots of their population explosions in the Huns attacking Europe and entered a Dark Age for about 1,000 years, yet ultimately we were the people who crawled back and invented electricity, automobiles, trains, airplanes, space travel, the internet, green revolution, medical advances. I can't even think of everything we have contributed to the world that has made it a better place.
China (and India too) has piggy-backed off of our many advances in everything and I am happy for them. I want the entire world to have as good a life as possible; but, the question still remains why, with their high IQ, did they have to wait for Western Civilization to do all of these wonderful things.
That's the puzzle.
>My question is then: What took China so long to rise if their IQ was so much higher and IQ mattered that much in the general scheme of things.
1) It is not the penultimate factor in everything. Does it matter? Yes. But it isn’t everything: you can have a high IQ-ed populace like North Korea that is utterly stunted by a dysfunctional political system. And if you have over a billion people, you are going to have a lot of dummies and a lot of smart people by sheer law of numbers, regardless of what the average is.
2) IQ is not immune to flux over the centuries. I think it is quite plausible that China suffered from a massive dysgenic hit in the 1800s, much like Western Europe did during the Dark Ages, and has only bounced back in the past half century or so.
3) China has been a massive civilizational power, largely parallel to and distinct from the West, for the majority of its history. They just had an uncommonly rough 150 years from 1830-1980 which happened to coincide with the Industrial Revolution fully reaching its zenith in a Europe whose seeds of greatness, planted long ago, had bloomed. Modern China’s rise is more about things getting back to normal than anything novel, looking at the broad scheme of human history.
So you're saying it's not true?
What about this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates
Is it just a coincidence that a group which constitutes .1% of the world population has produced 20% of all Nobel laureates?
No one questions that Ashkenazi Jews are very intelligent on average. What many do question is whether it’s a good idea that they should be allowed to determine the fates of every other people on the planet. If it’s wrong for whites to control negroes even though whites are on average smarter, have more discipline and future time orientation, and so forth, isn’t it wrong for Ashkenazim to control everyone else using the same logic?
I also disagree with the idea that Jews are somehow running the world. This is straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and is just plain false.
Since “pedophile” is not a biological species or subgrouping, “extermination” in the sense that the dinosaurs or the passenger pigeon were exterminated is not a feasible concept. But genuine proven pedophiles should be treated in a way that will absolutely ensure they can never repeat their offense.
I know of only one way to absolutely guarantee someone won’t do something that is within their physical capacity to do.
I know of only one way to absolutely guarantee someone won't do something that is within their physical capacity to do.
Child molesters, pedophiles, I don’t care what you want to call them: some crimes are just that beyond the pale. Even hardcore gang members with multiple murders and a life sentence on their records are disgusted by such a reprehensible act. There’s a reason they are kept in segregation in prison. It’s the only way to keep them alive.
Moreover, even if limiting the discussion to cases where an actual crime is involved, just what are the parameters of what should be considered as such? The mere determination of that can be quite ambiguous, certainly highly subjective, and even downright capricious. Granted, if the summary of the specific case that was cited here that was provided by one or more of those who commented upon it is accurate, then there would probably be pretty wide, if not nearly unanimous consensus concerning said case. (At least among reasonable and decent individuals. I would think that Jack D would retract his questioning of the severity of the sentence in said case.) But the lines are not always that clearly or neatly drawn.
Certainly, by the time we are dealing with those already well into adolescence, considerable ambiguities and areas for potential legitimate disagreement among reasonable and decent people arise. Remember that under the law, at least, a term such as child molester can apply even to cases such as the following. And that even when referring strictly to cases such as them, it is quite common for people to indiscriminately throw around such epithets as pedophile and child molester despite how clearly misleading and gratutiously incendiary such terms are in cases such as the latter; such as those I enumerate below.
- An eager, virile, adolescent male being indulged by an affectionate, even loving woman.
(And even where such a woman had acted with the intent of steering the lad toward a more wholesome direction than he appeared to have been heading, and/or it could be proven that said buck would have otherwise defiled a still-relatively-pristine maiden.)
- An adolescent male who was not only eager and virile but who also would otherwise be sodomized by someone of character and scruples that were at best dubious, being instead lovingly indulged by a fundamentally decent, conscientious, gentle man; with the form of this indulgence taking, at most, what is a vastly safer, cleaner, painless, non-brutal, non-penetrative, masculinity-affirming alternative to sodomy such as the fully-egalitarian FROT (GRAPHIC CONTENT).
(And even where such a man had so indulged such a youth only after trying but failing to dissuade him from engaging sexually, at least until he is older, with anyone. Perhaps even after having gone so far as to make an attempt to persuade the still-impressionable lad to make an effort to redirect himself toward heterosexuality.)
Now, you may argue that even such cases should be subject to the penalty of law. But would you place either in the same category (or even anywhere near the same category) as you would one who desecrates an innocent, hapless prepubescent child? It is difficult for me to imagine that you would.
Then there is the whole area, a minefield of sorts, of that which is known as child pornography and related legal categories. Suffice it to say that I have long been convinced that the prevailing approach to the matter likely does more harm than good on balance. (But it sure can be great for signaling virtue and moral superiority.) Specifically, to criminalize and stigmatize the mere viewing and possession of mere images to the extent we have seen done in this area inevitably results in effects and consequences that are undesirable, counterproductive, and even fundamentally unjust. These include the following.
- The creation of strong incentives to hide and destroy evidence of crimes-- evidence that would often be invaluable in removing dangerous predators from where they can do harm.
- The squandering of limited, already-strained public resources on the pursuit and prosecution of individuals for nothing more than viewing/possessing images that they had absolutely no part in producing.
- Any number of violations and potential/arguable violations of civil liberties-- starting with the very idea of criminalizing the mere viewing of an image.
- The criminalization of thought.
Consider the case of images that are not inherently sexual or exploitative, such as innocent nudity, and therefore were not illegal to produce. In many jurisdictions, an individual can be prosecuted for viewing or possessing such images based on nothing more than a determination that his intent in doing so was to obtain sexual gratification. This, it must be remembered, is true even in cases where there is no question that any of the actions of the individual-in-question ever extended beyond the mere viewing and possession of images-- even images that, again, were legally produced.
Note, as well, that the images over which individuals have been prosecuted have not been limited exclusively to to those that involved actual minors; in some cases at least, such images have included even cartoon-style drawings of completely fictional subjects.
I realize that there are those, perhaps even many, who would seem to care little about any of the distinctions, complexities and nuances that I have just drawn, enumerated and addressed. But I would not, from what I've read of your comments here, have thought you to be such an individual. Quite the contrary, in fact. You have struck me as one of the more thoughtful and comprehensive of those who comment here; one of the least reflexive, doctrinaire, simplistic or mono-focused.
Portuguese and Spanish are different languages, though both are derived from Latin, and in written form are sort of mutually intelligible, if the reader has some intelligence.
It’s very much like a modern English speaker being handed a facsimile 1611 authentic King James Bible. There are not only different spellings but different whole words and even different letters-the English alphabet no longer contains some of the letters they had then.
In spoken form not so much, though Portuguese speakers do better with Spanish than vice versa.
The largest problem is that 1) Brazilians are very insular, parochial and monolingual (Portuguese, being in Europe, less so) and tend to stick their butts up at attempts to speak Spanish to them and 2) most of the world’s Portuguese speakers and the vast majority of monolingual Portuguese speakers are Brazilians.
Brazilians have many of Americans’ vices and less of their virtues when dealing with the rest of the world. I was involved in some ministry activities (we bought a tractor for a village, which had to be an overpriced and not very good Brazilian tractor because of import restrictions, and did some electrical work, which similarly turned into a mess) and also helped a man get a couple of collectible cars OUT of Brazil which wound up requiring bribery and deceit. Brazil is corrupt and many government workers are exceptionally stupid and pigheaded, which is one reason their manufacturing is having a tough time exporting higher value goods. Argentina is about as bad, although Spanish is way easier to do business in than Portuguese for Americans, and the likelihood of finding people speaking decent English and being willing to do so is much higher.
“my prediction would be more of a Chinese, WASP, and Jewish mix of ancestry in the increasingly high IQ individuals making up the elite knowledge class ruling America as time goes on”
Hmm. How did a WASP/Ashkenazi ruling elite turn out for the median American?
“the soft, gentle ‘porcelain-doll’ type facial features of Oriental women, their willowy figures, light tan skin and black hair”
On the other hand, have you ever heard a Chinese lady bawling out her restaurant staff for some error, in front of all the diners? I have, on more than one occasion, and it’s not nice.
Over the years I’ve often complimented the looks of Murray’s books so that others would imitate them.
https://twitter.com/itsbirdemic/status/1222721743514742784
John McWhorter has little love for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language directs thought, but in one of his TED Talks (and both are good) he concedes that it is valid, albeit trivially so, and uses the example of gender. He mentions a study that showed that when people were asked to imagine an inanimate object, say, a table, speaking, they were statistically more likely to envision (enaudiate?) the sex of the voice to match the gender of the object in their language.
He compared French to English, which long ago discarded gender. I wish he had used German, where table is masculine, but he didn't do the study.
Even better, Flemish and Dutch, essentially the same language, in which differing words for table differed in gender. In a similar (non-TED) talk, Gaston Dorren claimed that the conversation "She has nice legs", "Yes, he does" would make sense were the legs those to a table, and the speakers a Fleming and a Hollander.
What would neuter sound like?
Simply put, no self respecting higher caste Indian would ever leave Bharat to work as the Englishman's bitch.
This is not true. For example Naipaul was a Brahmin (as he would never tire of telling you). When the British brought low caste Indians over to replaced the newly freed slaves on the sugar and cacao plantations of Trinidad and Tobago, the Indian indentured servants kept their religion and they brought over Brahmin priests to operate their Hindu temples.
You say that no one questions it but JUSA in fact seemed to be questioning it, which is why I responded. JUSA seemed to be saying that Jewish intelligence was not real – it was just a lie that had become true thru repetition.
I also disagree with the idea that Jews are somehow running the world. This is straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and is just plain false.
> What took China so long to rise
You could argue that China had been a dominant power for thousands of years, and only for 2 or 3 centuries suffered a loss of power compared to European powers and Japan. So it's just returning to its usual position at the top of the world. For much of its history, China exported more ideas and products than it imported.
> we were the people who crawled back and invented
What are the chances that "we" will continue to invent and dominate one hundred or two hundred years from now? Demographically "we" are already in a strong downturn. So being smart and inventing stuff is no guarantee of continued domination and prosperity. History seems to indicate the opposite, in fact.
I am not talking about the future as no one can predict that with any certainty. I am talking about the past. Why has China not contributed anything of real substance to our modern day world other than being the most populated country on the planet.
They might dominate the world in the future, I don’t doubt it; however, anything they might accomplish in the future will be built upon the foundations that the West built from scratch…they will add to that possibly…
Even though everybody keeps telling me how much higher their IQs are.
But the West did not start from scratch!
It benefited greatly from trade in products and inventions throughout its history.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPdQXDeVUAANZi_.png
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPdQXDfUwAA1sWy.jpg
I think a transition is coming soon. He already has the strident academic-Stalinist transman personality.
This is just plain false. For millions of years, there was nothing that could be called civilization anywhere, but there was never a period where Africa was “the most advanced”.
Regardless of past accomplishments and how the Chinese reached their present state (and you are wrong about both of these), you ignore them in the present at your peril. Every great race and civilization reaches a point where the fire that may have smoldered for centuries bursts into flame. The Jewish contribution to Western science before the 19th century was nil but their contributions in the 2oth century were invaluable. Before late 19th century, the US was not considered to be a major player in world affairs. Before the Age of Exploration, Britain was a small island most famous for its sheep production – the New Zealand of Europe.
In the last 3 years, the Chinese used as much cement for construction as the US used during the entire 20th century. The speed and scale of their current accomplishments has to be seen to be believed (and to really understand them you have to have seen China 30 years ago).
Though not always. But pay attention to the dates at this link and how these examples compare to contemporary non-African civilizations.
https://listverse.com/2016/07/15/10-african-civilizations-more-amazing-than-ancient-egypt/
https://twitter.com/itsbirdemic/status/1222721743514742784
That’s funny. I had the same thought in the other thread. Either Kevin is LARPing as an academic Stalinist in order to save his career/genitals or else he is on the verge of transitioning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq0aeEYLkIE
I also disagree with the idea that Jews are somehow running the world. This is straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and is just plain false.
Where in the Protocols are hate crimes laws, hate speech legislation proposals, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, deplatforming, demonetization, shadowbanning, ex-Mossadniks gaslighting sexual assault victims for money, gun control, immigration advocacy to include physical trafficking, lawfare, the mighty wurlitzer, and AIPAC summits?
"Bend the Arc" (as in, distort that same long arc Martin talked about which would normally bend toward justice) is looking to hire a Strategist.The description goes on to make clear that this is Correct The Record/CREW/ShareBlue, policing thought on social media and programmatically spreading disinformation, but explicitly as Jews.
http://archive.is/fTahF
ACT.il is still acting up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYleadaZ8vM
JIDF is still around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dGJDJoeAok
And there are still dozens more groups that are the same as or overlapping with these.
4chan thread with many more links, not linking all because some are old:
http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/241639434
Regardless of past accomplishments and how the Chinese reached their present state (and you are wrong about both of these), you ignore them in the present at your peril. Every great race and civilization reaches a point where the fire that may have smoldered for centuries bursts into flame. The Jewish contribution to Western science before the 19th century was nil but their contributions in the 2oth century were invaluable. Before late 19th century, the US was not considered to be a major player in world affairs. Before the Age of Exploration, Britain was a small island most famous for its sheep production - the New Zealand of Europe.
In the last 3 years, the Chinese used as much cement for construction as the US used during the entire 20th century. The speed and scale of their current accomplishments has to be seen to be believed (and to really understand them you have to have seen China 30 years ago).
People who say things like that are generally referring to ancient Egypt.
Though not always. But pay attention to the dates at this link and how these examples compare to contemporary non-African civilizations.
https://listverse.com/2016/07/15/10-african-civilizations-more-amazing-than-ancient-egypt/
I wasn’t referring to anyone specific when I said “billionaire”
But I am familiar with Oxbridge philosophy and there were certainly many aristocrats who had millions they didn’t make themselves, and class was certainly part of the culture in that field…
So what I was saying was that Noam was notable for not genuflecting to to the class hierarchy in his academic fields (and especially at institutions he worked at like Harvard and Oxford which are especially classist)
I agree.
I was quoting Chomsky/Pinker bc I think they took the only anti-Murray line that is not *immediately* self-refuting
But I do think it’s ultimately wrong. Pinkers position that men and women aren’t different but just have different statistical distributions is not the right way to look at it imo.
When will Kevin be a bird?
Though not always. But pay attention to the dates at this link and how these examples compare to contemporary non-African civilizations.
https://listverse.com/2016/07/15/10-african-civilizations-more-amazing-than-ancient-egypt/
Can you mention some of the great works of literature which arose in these civilizations? No, you can’t because no sub-Saharan civilization ever developed reading or writing. When your ability to pass knowledge down is limited to oral tradition, then your “palaces” are made of mud and logs like the ones in the pictures.
follow-up:
“Bend the Arc” (as in, distort that same long arc Martin talked about which would normally bend toward justice) is looking to hire a Strategist.
The description goes on to make clear that this is Correct The Record/CREW/ShareBlue, policing thought on social media and programmatically spreading disinformation, but explicitly as Jews.
http://archive.is/fTahF
ACT.il is still acting up.
JIDF is still around.
And there are still dozens more groups that are the same as or overlapping with these.
4chan thread with many more links, not linking all because some are old:
http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/241639434
I guess my skepticism about the second link did not come through. I agree with you.
So much of a “boring boor” that you, apparently, just can’t help yourself from coming back to see what he’s saying…
Thanks for providing some comedic relief, though, from the pressures and grind of daily life.
As for the “badly coordinated outfits”, perhaps you, being obviously a man of impeccable tastes, could offer your services as a consultant.
It’s a great line, but I believe it belongs to Robert Conquest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Conquest
But I am familiar with Oxbridge philosophy and there were certainly many aristocrats who had millions they didn't make themselves, and class was certainly part of the culture in that field...
So what I was saying was that Noam was notable for not genuflecting to to the class hierarchy in his academic fields (and especially at institutions he worked at like Harvard and Oxford which are especially classist)
Austin, Ryle, Hart, Strawson, Anscombe, all solidly middle-class. Parents often professionals. Perhaps one or two of them acquired millions by some means or other, but I’m not aware of such a thing.
They might dominate the world in the future, I don't doubt it; however, anything they might accomplish in the future will be built upon the foundations that the West built from scratch...they will add to that possibly...
Even though everybody keeps telling me how much higher their IQs are.
> the foundations that the West built from scratch
But the West did not start from scratch!
It benefited greatly from trade in products and inventions throughout its history.
https://ricochet.com/podcast/remnant-jonah-goldberg/gender-and-race-and-class-oh-my/
The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg #170
Gender and Race and Class, Oh My!
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3a/e3/8a/3ae38a7301fff1251de76808457fecf8.jpg
Damn that Jew, dying on Murray!
You can’t trust these Jews. They do stuff like that without warning.
I have the impression that in the 70s, Asians English skills were poorer than now. So their IQ measurements may have been artificially low, just by testing error. (Recall that the SAT-V is supposedly twice as g-loaded as the SAT-M.) In addition to testing error, the course of time, could have just allowed the class longer to get better at the language here.
1. The Kindle and it's interface is not a computer: it's a very lightweight, hospitable reading environment. The screen is gently illuminated for reading in the dark. You can look up words and you can pull up Wikipedia articles on e.g. people and places mentioned in the book. You can search the full text of a book, and highlight passages as with a highlighter.
2. The reality of "real" books is that:
3. They are not accessible to those with weak eyesight
4. As physical artifacts they are cheaply made, with acid paper, and use a sort of binding called perfect binding," originally developed for paperbacks, but now also the standard for hard cover books. Perfect bound books have their pages gathered in signatures and then the entire back of the book is ground down and glue is applied. In the past signatures were saddle sewn, and the sewn signatures were gathered and glued. You can visibly see the threads every 32 or so pages in such books. Perfect bound books crack open at the spine; books sewn in signatures don't. Eve reference books like dictionaries are perfect bound these days.
5. To sum up: Yellowed, smelly pages with cracked bindings.
I can agree that audio books are disgusting.
Books are actually much more archival than electronic media.
I know this thread is quite old by now but while returning to it to see a new comment that I noticed it had received, my attention was caught by this comment of yours.
This is no mere question of semantics; there are fundamental, absolutely critical differences between the terms-in-question– differences with profoundly consequential implications. The definition of child molester involves an action/behavior, one that is usually a crime. The proper definition of pedophile, in contradistinction, concerns feelings only.
Moreover, even if limiting the discussion to cases where an actual crime is involved, just what are the parameters of what should be considered as such? The mere determination of that can be quite ambiguous, certainly highly subjective, and even downright capricious. Granted, if the summary of the specific case that was cited here that was provided by one or more of those who commented upon it is accurate, then there would probably be pretty wide, if not nearly unanimous consensus concerning said case. (At least among reasonable and decent individuals. I would think that Jack D would retract his questioning of the severity of the sentence in said case.) But the lines are not always that clearly or neatly drawn.
Certainly, by the time we are dealing with those already well into adolescence, considerable ambiguities and areas for potential legitimate disagreement among reasonable and decent people arise. Remember that under the law, at least, a term such as child molester can apply even to cases such as the following. And that even when referring strictly to cases such as them, it is quite common for people to indiscriminately throw around such epithets as pedophile and child molester despite how clearly misleading and gratutiously incendiary such terms are in cases such as the latter; such as those I enumerate below.
– An eager, virile, adolescent male being indulged by an affectionate, even loving woman.
(And even where such a woman had acted with the intent of steering the lad toward a more wholesome direction than he appeared to have been heading, and/or it could be proven that said buck would have otherwise defiled a still-relatively-pristine maiden.)
– An adolescent male who was not only eager and virile but who also would otherwise be sodomized by someone of character and scruples that were at best dubious, being instead lovingly indulged by a fundamentally decent, conscientious, gentle man; with the form of this indulgence taking, at most, what is a vastly safer, cleaner, painless, non-brutal, non-penetrative, masculinity-affirming alternative to sodomy such as the fully-egalitarian FROT (GRAPHIC CONTENT).
(And even where such a man had so indulged such a youth only after trying but failing to dissuade him from engaging sexually, at least until he is older, with anyone. Perhaps even after having gone so far as to make an attempt to persuade the still-impressionable lad to make an effort to redirect himself toward heterosexuality.)
Now, you may argue that even such cases should be subject to the penalty of law. But would you place either in the same category (or even anywhere near the same category) as you would one who desecrates an innocent, hapless prepubescent child? It is difficult for me to imagine that you would.
Then there is the whole area, a minefield of sorts, of that which is known as child pornography and related legal categories. Suffice it to say that I have long been convinced that the prevailing approach to the matter likely does more harm than good on balance. (But it sure can be great for signaling virtue and moral superiority.) Specifically, to criminalize and stigmatize the mere viewing and possession of mere images to the extent we have seen done in this area inevitably results in effects and consequences that are undesirable, counterproductive, and even fundamentally unjust. These include the following.
– The creation of strong incentives to hide and destroy evidence of crimes– evidence that would often be invaluable in removing dangerous predators from where they can do harm.
– The squandering of limited, already-strained public resources on the pursuit and prosecution of individuals for nothing more than viewing/possessing images that they had absolutely no part in producing.
– Any number of violations and potential/arguable violations of civil liberties— starting with the very idea of criminalizing the mere viewing of an image.
– The criminalization of thought.
Consider the case of images that are not inherently sexual or exploitative, such as innocent nudity, and therefore were not illegal to produce. In many jurisdictions, an individual can be prosecuted for viewing or possessing such images based on nothing more than a determination that his intent in doing so was to obtain sexual gratification. This, it must be remembered, is true even in cases where there is no question that any of the actions of the individual-in-question ever extended beyond the mere viewing and possession of images– even images that, again, were legally produced.
Note, as well, that the images over which individuals have been prosecuted have not been limited exclusively to to those that involved actual minors; in some cases at least, such images have included even cartoon-style drawings of completely fictional subjects.
I realize that there are those, perhaps even many, who would seem to care little about any of the distinctions, complexities and nuances that I have just drawn, enumerated and addressed. But I would not, from what I’ve read of your comments here, have thought you to be such an individual. Quite the contrary, in fact. You have struck me as one of the more thoughtful and comprehensive of those who comment here; one of the least reflexive, doctrinaire, simplistic or mono-focused.
https://twitter.com/AngelaDSaini/status/1224707983516540928