RSS
The Cerulean Decade?
The 1890s is known as the Mauve Decade. I don’t know why it took so long for mauve to sweep the world of fashion; a fabric dye for the color was actually discovered (invented?) in the 1850s. These are the mysteries of sociology.
I’m developing a theory that this decade, the 2020s, may be the Cerulean Decade. I haven’t gotten very far with the development yet, so I’ll give you the theory half-baked.
Color me confused
If you say the word “cerulean” in company, everyone starts reminiscing gleefully about that scene in The Devil Wears Prada when Meryl Streep humiliates Anne Hathaway for the color of her sweater.
Hathaway, says Streep, fondly imagined she was exercising an inspired act of autonomous free choice when she bought the sweater; in fact, the choice had been made for her years before by the fashion industry. Cerulean, ha!
It’s a great scene, but … what exactly is cerulean?
There seems to be a lot of latitude in the definition, at least as given by my 1993 edition of Webster’s Third.
cerulean adj 1 : somewhat resembling the blue of the sky 2 : of the color sky blue
But then
cerulean n the color of the sky on a bright cloudless day : deep blue or azure
And then
cerulean blue n 1 a : a variable color averaging a strong greenish blue that is bluer and duller than grotto or cobalt blue and bluer and lighter than indigo carmine b : a strong blue that is greener and stronger than Sèvres and greener, lighter, and stronger than Victoria blue—called also coelin 2 : a stable light greenish blue pigment consisting essentially of oxides of cobalt and tin and used as an artist’s color
Now I’m thoroughly confused. Who knew there was so much to be said about a color? Well, I bet that Meryl Streep character (said to be based on Vogue editrix Anna Wintour) knew. I didn’t, though, and I’m not keen to learn. In what follows I’ll use “cerulean” to mean any lightish shade of blue that thrusts itself on my attention.
Chromatic creep
It started this Spring in my morning walk of Basil, the Hound of the Derbyshires. One of my neighbors, I noticed, had redecorated the front of his house. The shutters and the front door were now all cerulean. Looks nice I thought. Basil passed comment in his own doggish way, although fortunately in the gutter, not on my neighbor’s lawn. We walked on.
A few weeks later I saw that another neighbor, a few houses further along, had repainted his front door … cerulean. And then, somewhat later, another.
What was up with all this cerulean? Even the local utility firms seem to be in on the act, to judge by their road markings.
Not even my own domestic interior is safe, I learned. As designated dishwasher for the Derbyshire family I have for years—decades!—been a user of Scotch-Brite heavy-duty green-and-yellow scouring pads. Then, passing through the kitchen on my way to the refrigerator one day in mid-July, I happened to glance into the sink. Eeek!
Does cerulean have the staying power to get a whole decade named after it? As I write, 35.6 percent of the way through the 2020s, I wouldn’t venture a prediction. Perhaps we could ask Anna Wintour … or Elon Musk.
Bye-bye cerulean birdie
A big push factor in the rise of cerulean has surely been Twitter.
That little cerulean bird logo attained its present familiar form in 2012. There are depths of meaning in it that I wasn’t aware of until ten minutes ago, along with some neat geometry.
The shape is much more circular than a real bird—in fact, the design was formed by 15 circles superimposed in layers on top of each other, creating perfect curves in the beak, head, wings and chest. The bird is looking upwards, to represent hope, freedom and development, while the circles used to create it are said to represent connecting people and ideas.
That’s a lot of American idealism packed into one logo.
The Twitter bird has certainly penetrated our national consciousness. Drudge Report recently frontpaged a story about the Zuckerberg-Musk feud in cerulean type.
However, as you have been hearing this last week of July, that little Twitter bird, that cute little cerulean symbol packed with idealism, will shortly be hanging in Elon Musk‘s game larder. Musk is replacing it as logo with a crude uppercase white-on-black “X”.
Will Musk’s rebranding slow, perhaps stop, possibly even reverse the advance of cerulean? I won’t venture to speculate.
The rebranding may itself be reversed. It’s been meeting resistance from Twitter users and has been widely pooh-poohed by people who know way more than you and I do about this stuff.
Marketing experts said that the move was an unnecessary gamble on a hazy future, coming from a platform with wide brand recognition. Though Twitter has weathered a year’s worth of bad news—its ad revenue is down 50 percent, alternatives are springing up, and regulators are circling—they said it would not make sense for the company to dodge by changing its handle …
“For most users and advertisers and folk in the tech world, the product itself is the problem,” said Boston College communications professor and branding expert Michael Serazio. “Putting a new name on it doesn’t change that in any material way.”
Furthermore, there are difficulties in registering a letter of the alphabet as your company’s trademark.
In the world of trademarks, the letter “X” is far from unclaimed territory. In fact, it is so extensively used and cited that it could become a hotbed for legal disputes. “There’s a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” trademark attorney Josh Gerben told Reuters. He further revealed that there are “nearly 900 active U.S. trademark registrations that already cover the letter X in a wide range of industries.”
Architecture in black and white
All that said, it is just possible that Elon Musk is ahead of the style trend with his new black and white logo. It may be—I hope it’s not, but it could be—that the 2020s will be remembered not as the Cerulean Decade but as the Black and White Decade.
In support of that possibility here is another house in my middle-middle-class suburban neighborhood, and here’s yet another. Both are recent refurbishments.
Possibly this is just a Long Island thing. Are sales of colored—other than black and white—exterior paint and siding slipping downwards nationwide? Someone must know.
How do I feel about this style? I hate it. It looks … I dunno … defiantly anti-human somehow, like Musk’s new logo. Color me cerulean.
Movie moments
Apropos that Meryl Streep monologue in The Devil Wears Prada: Ms Streep is also on my list of favorite movie one-liners for “May I have the car keys?” after smacking Jack Nicholson in the face with a key-lime pie in Heartburn.
It’s a short list; I don’t have good movie memory. If I sweated it I could probably come up with a dozen, but all I can offer just now are:
Sean Connery to Jill St. John in Diamonds Are Forever: “Providing the collars and cuffs match.”
James Mason to Edward Fox in The Shooting Party: “You weren’t shooting like a gentleman, Gilbert.”
Is love dead?
I spotted this sad little note from a teacher of literature on Twitter the other day.
Teaching Romeo and Juliet for a while now, and the most disturbing emergence and generational shift in the last handful of years is that kids no longer believe in love.
This is a catastrophic development.
Just underneath this is the inability for faith itself.
I think I know what he means. My son and daughter are both Millennials, ages 28 and 30. They are normal—physically and mentally healthy, thank God, smart and sociable, better-than-average looking. Neither, however, so far as I can tell, is the least bit romantic.
Has either of them ever felt the tender passion? If so, I saw no outward sign of it, and I don’t know a properly parental way to ask. At their ages I had been deeply in love two or three times, and I think the same is true of most of my generation.
All right, sample of two. I have other data points, though. The recent death of Tony Bennett reminded me of a conversation I had with a non-Derbyshire millennial two or three years ago. I had praised the Great American Songbook, of which I’ve been a devotee all my life. The other party replied with a sneer (well, I may have imagined the sneer) that those old lounge-singer numbers were “sappy.”
And then there’s this teacher of literature, who has close contact with way more of the post-boomer generations than I have. One commenter posted in the tweet’s comment thread that:
Romantic love is a unique European cultural creation, a spiritual elevation of the passion for sex and reproduction into a foundational institution of civilization. It depended on a certain understanding of the proper relation between man and woman, which is no longer taught.
That commenter’s first assertion is just false. There is nothing uniquely European about romantic love. Chinese people were writing love poetry way before China’s engagement with Europeans—more than two thousand years before in the case of some poems.
Love is a human universal, and has always been present. What I was feeling for my teenage crushes, and feel today for Mrs. Derbyshire, is the same thing Jacob felt for Rachel, Pyramus for Thisbe, and Liáng Shānbó for Zhù Yīngtái.
If this be error and upon me prov’d, I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
That commenter’s second sentence is not so compehensively wrong, but it needs some qualification. Our commenter seems to be channeling whichever Frenchman it was who said that: “Nobody would ever fall in love if he hadn’t read about it first.”
Nonsense. Love is part of human nature. Like other components of our nature, it may be encouraged or stifled, but it doesn’t need to be “taught.” If that first tweeter is correct, romantic love is being stifled among the younger generations. How? Why?
Ideology may be the reason. It may be that angry ideologies like Wokeism, and the sternly puritanical style of religious belief that is close kin to ideology, draw somehow on the same deep mental resources as romantic love. If that’s the case, it’s difficult for passionate adoration of another person to coexist in the same psyche with the desire to burn witches.
Perhaps that is why the stricter kind of Totalitarian government always targets romantic love. The Khmer Rouge believed it to be a loathsome bourgeois aberration and shot people who displayed love’s symptoms.
Totalitarians hate human nature. “In class society there is only human nature of a class character; there is no human nature above classes,” declared Mao Tse-tung. There are only “social constructs” forced up us by our enemies—capitalists, foreigners, white supremacists, the Jews.
That’s pretty much the mentality we have sunk into this past thirty years. Is it any wonder that romantic love is out of fashion?
Handgun saga: the conclusion
The long saga of my encounter with New York State’s Red Flag law reached a final sweet conclusion this month. Yes, I bought myself a handgun.
It’s nothing glamorous, just a second-hand Colt .38 detective special, fourth issue.
The main thing I had in mind was to get to work depleting the stock of .38 ammo that’s been sitting on a shelf in my attic this past 4¼ years.
I’m enjoying the feeling of completion, though; and of course the knowledge that if civilization were to collapse next month, at least I and my family wouldn’t be confronting barbarism totally defenceless.
Fiction of the month
Writing about our expedition to Texas in my April Diary, I recorded my discovery (well, I must have known about it, but not in any depth up to then) of the western frontier’s child captives—white American children, that is, captured and raised by Indians.
I registered my surprise at learning that:
The ones longest in captivity were the most reluctant to return to the white world. When they were forced to, as the tribes were hustled off into reservations in the 1870s, they were usually miserable. (Neither of the females, by the way, recorded anything but kindness from their Indian captors.)
The two females in that parenthesis were among just nine children covered in Scott Zesch’s book The Captured. They were aged eight and ten at capture. For the fate of an older female, stay with me.
Several readers emailed in to recommend books, both fiction and nonfiction, about the child captives. After some light research I purchased and read Lucia St. Clair Robson’s 1982 novel Ride the Wind, an account, based closely on known facts, of the life of Cynthia Ann Parker.
Parker was kidnapped by Comanche raiders at the taking of Parker’s fort in 1836, when she was eight or nine years old. She grew up among the Comanches, learned their language and ways, and married a dashing young brave named Wanderer. She lived as a Comanche for 24 years before being forcibly returned to her family. She died after a further eleven years of deep unhappiness and inability to adapt to the white world.
I suppose the author has taken some liberties with the facts. (The novel makes much of Parker being blonde, but in all the photographs her hair is black.) Novelists have a license to do that. It makes a good story, though, and sets to you pondering the question I posed in the April Diary: Is civilization better than barbarism?
I come down on the side of civilization, as I did in April. Lucia Robson, while giving a sympathetic account of Cynthia Ann Parker and the Comanches she lived among, doesn’t spare us the horrors of barbarism.
For example: she tells the story of Parker’s cousin Rachel Plummer, captured by Comanches at the same time as Parker, but unfortunately too old—she was seventeen—to be eligible for happy absorption into Comanche life. Instead they made her a slave. You can read Rachel’s story at Wikipedia, if you have the stomach for it.
All that said, there is deep melancholy in the story of a people with an established way of life—territories, folkways, customs, traditions, lifestyles—having it all taken from them by hordes of incoming aliens and being corraled into drab reservations to drink themselves to death.
Sure, the pioneers committed some horrors, too. Ms. Robson doesn’t spare us that, either. The settlement of the West is not a pretty story from either side. I think George Macdonald Fraser captured it well in Flashman and the Redskins. Harry Flashman speaking:
When selfish frightened men—in other words, any men, red or white, civilised or savage—come face to face in the middle of a wilderness that both of ’em want, the Lord alone knows why, then war breaks out, and the weaker goes under …
Usually I just sit and sneer when the know-alls start prating on behalf of the poor oppressed heathen, sticking a barb in ’em as opportunity serves … I know the heathen, and their oppressors, pretty well, you see, and the folly of sitting smug in judgement years after, stuffed with piety and ignorance and book-learned bias. Humanity is beastly and stupid, aye, and helpless, and there’s an end to it. And that’s as true for Crazy Horse as it was for Custer—and they’re both long gone, thank God.
Depths of pettiness
This is really petty but I want to get it off my chest.
I had the annual check-up with our family doctor a few weeks ago. I left his office with the usual list of specialist appointments—urologist, cardiologist, dermatologist, … based on the numbers I’d generated in various routine tests.
So now I’m plodding through that list. I make an appointment with the ologist, show up at his office, check in at the desk, sit and wait in the waiting-room to be called, along with a scattering of other patients.
In the fullness of time a young woman appears at the door to the inner sanctum and calls out: “John?”
I guess the idea is to suggest cheerful informality. Not infrequently, however, there are two or more Johns in the waiting-room. The effect on them—us—is annoying. Which John is being summoned?
What is so difficult about calling out the entire name? Why is this almost never done? Have these people really arrived at adulthood not knowing that “John” is a very common name for members of the male sex?
Cheerful informality? In a doctor’s office I would actually prefer stiff professionalism.
There: It’s off my chest.
Moved by Voov
We’ve all heard of the conference app Zoom by now, but until this month I’d never heard of Voov.
I was introduced to it by my wife’s graduating class, a class I taught in China 1982-3. July 9th was the fortieth anniversary of their graduation ceremony; a dozen or so of them wanted to do an online conference-chat to commemorate the event. Voov was the app they used.
I see here that Voov is the international version of Tencent Meeting, a Chinese app. I guess that’s why Mrs Derbyshire’s classmates chose it, although a good proportion of them now live in the U.S.A. and Canada. I further guess it’s a good reason to keep Voov at arm’s length, if you’re thinking of trying it out.
The classmates are now mostly sixty-something retirees. It was fun to see them chattering away onscreen after so many years. Also embarrassing, as I couldn’t remember the English names I’d awarded them at the start of my engagement, having no confidence in my ability to retain dozens of Chinese names in my head. (I had other classes, too.)
And I felt a bit ashamed. Chinese people are very good at keeping up these lifelong friendships. The classmates chat with each other on social media all the time. I haven’t kept up acquaintances like that; I don’t think many Westerners do.
I spent three years in my math class at University College, London sixty years ago, yet now I remember only two of my classmates’ names. I haven’t seen either since the 1980s, nor engaged with them on social media.
Is it just me? I hope not. I prefer to think it’s cultural; we Anglos just aren’t sociable in the way Chinese people are, across decades without any personal meeting. Watching that happy chatter on the July 9th Voov call, I think the difference (if there is a difference) is our loss.
Change of the wind in China. Speaking of Chinese social media, Mrs. Derbyshire had something curious to report mid-July.
She is a devotee of WeChat, the main Chinese messaging/social-media app. There is, she tells me, a facility within WeChat for downloading and listening to audiobooks.
She particularly favors Chinese translations of Western authors—she knows way more of Ernest Hemingway’s work than I do, having listened to it all in Chinese.
Digging back into Eng. Lit., she was listening to Pride and Prejudice in a Chinese translation (Àomàn yŭ Piānjiàn) … until one day she wasn’t. The whole audiobook had been dropped from WeChat, along with a mass of other Western literature.
I suppose there might have been some commercial reason for that; but my lady thinks it’s more likely a sign of the wind changing direction, as they say: China’s cultural wind turning more anti-Western.
Perhaps things will go all the way back to when I was teaching Eng. Lit. there. I got a published article out of the experience. In it I noted that the standard college textbook for the subject was A Short History of English Literature by someone called Liú Bĭngshàn. I observed that:
Mr Liú shows his colours right away, in the preface. “Efforts have been made to apply the basic views of Marxism,” he declares. He’s not kidding. Engels is quoted four times in the first five pages. On page 17 Stalin is quoted. The relevance of the opinions of German businessmen and Russian despots to the study of English Literature is nowhere explained.
I still have my copy of Mr Liú’s Short History; so if you want to know the orthodox early-1980s ChiCom line (which will perhaps also be the late-2020s line) on Thomas More, Charlotte Brontë, or Thomas Hardy, drop me an email.
Race, education, and fertility. A friend tells me that the bell curves for IQ are drifting leftwards … but at different speeds for whites and blacks.
He deduces this from a bar chart posted at statistica.com, which is a website for statisticians. The bars on the chart show total fertility rate in 2019 for women in the U.S.A. aged 15-49, broken out “by education and ethnicity of mother.”
A couple of points before proceeding.
- “Ethnicity” includes race. There are three categories: non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, and Hispanic
- The references to “mothers” are to the females 15-49 years old generating the fertility stats, i.e. the ones having the babies, not to the mothers of those females. This is normal usage in fertility studies but it’s confusing if you’re not used to it.
- The mother’s education is broken out as seven ascending categories, from “12th grade or less, no diploma” to “doctorate or professional degree.”
- In that last, highest category there is no bar for non-Hispanic blacks. The reason given is that the figure submitted “did not meet NCHS standards of reliability.” They don’t tell us why it didn’t.
Bottom line: At the high-school dropout level, blacks lead whites in fertility, 2.688 children per woman v. 2.509. On the other end of the mother’s-education scale, master’s degree, whites are way ahead of blacks: 1.508 v. 1.308. The crossover point is somewhere between associate’s degree and bachelor’s degree.
To put it somewhat crudely: dumb blacks have more kids than dumb whites, but smart blacks have fewer kids than smart whites.
Obviously educational attainment is well-correlated with IQ. It’s also well-established that American IQ scores have been declining for at least a decade: the Reverse Flynn Effect or Woodley Effect. It is equally well-established that educational attainment is to some degree heritable, indeed genetic.
So (my friend argues) if the daughters of black high-school dropouts are having more children than their white equivalents while the daughters of black and white masters-degree holders are vice versa, the black IQ bell curve must be drifting leftwards faster than the white one.
Sounds reasonable. If it’s true, the coming Idiocracy will be even more race-stratified than today’s U.S.A.
Eh, perhaps AI will rescue us … somehow.
Mysteries of oriental phonology
I know next to nothing about the Korean language, have never even engaged with its alphabet, the Hangul.
Our church, though, has for some years had a Korean gent as its musical director. He’s been in the U.S.A. many years, but still speaks with a strong accent.
July 30th he left us, moving to New York City. Sorry to see him go, we all gave him good-luck cards and small parting gifts. My gift was a book: the Korean translation of Prime Obsession.
The book’s dust cover has the title in big Hangul characters, with below it a string of much smaller characters which presumably say “by John Derbyshire,” but of course transcribed in Hangul.
On an impulse I asked him to read out that string so that I could hear what my name sounds like in Korean. (In Chinese, as I found out when teaching there in 1982, Tennyson is pronounced “Dingnisheng” and Shakespeare “Shasibiya”.) Squinting at the characters, he read out in what sounded like perfectly-enunciated upper-middle-class British English: “John Derbyshire.”
So it’s as I’ve long suspected: Koreans are one of the ten lost tribes of Anglo-Saxon Britain.
Math Corner
Dr. Peter Winkler at the National Museum of Mathematics concluded his series of “Mind-Benders for the Quarantined” two years ago as the covid panic faded away. This was his last puzzle, and it’s a rather neat one.
Brainteaser: Subtracting Around the Corner.
Write down four integers between 0 and 100, in a horizontal line. Now perform the following operation: Compute the (absolute) difference between the first and second, and write it under the first; then write the difference between the second and third under the second; then the difference between the third and the fourth, under the third; finally, the difference between the fourth and the first, under the fourth. You now have a new line of four integers, still between 0 and 100.
Example: If you start with 41 22 6 93, your new line will be 19 16 87 52.
If you repeat this operation you will eventually reach 0 0 0 0. (Why? Note that with five numbers instead of four, this might never happen.) Your score is the number of operations it takes to reach this sorry state.
For the example above, you end up with
41 22 6 93
19 16 87 52
3 71 35 33
68 36 2 30
32 34 28 38
2 6 10 6
4 4 4 4
0 0 0 0for a score of 7 (pretty crummy).
What’s the highest score you can achieve?
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
.jpg){kind=link}
Even though I’m over 5’10”, I might be accused of being a gigantasophobic. But I believe the decline of Western civilization can be largely attributed to adoration of tall people. Tall people are not the most intelligent. Just a quick glance at the height of the greatest minds over the last century it is apparent the most intelligent people tend to be not tall:
Yet we have worshipped height and given power to the taller and the naturally less intelligent:
Bizarre and civilizationally-destructive height adoration happens in business, politics, marriage.
When men were shorter and therefore had IQs higher and there wasn’t this adoration of tall people like we have today, Western civilization was at its zenith:
There’s lots of interest to me in this one.
I’ll start with cerulean. I like the color of the deep blue cloudless sky, but when I think of the word cerulean, it makes me thing of The Ocean Blue. No, not the actual ocean but the great 1990s alternative rock band out of Hershey, Pennsylvania. I can tell you this band’s ’89 self-titled album and their ’93 Beneath the Rhythm and Sound are both great albums. I never got the ’91 album Cerulean but I need to.
Regarding your point on romantic love, I just read something interesting about romantic love as a bit of evolutionary psychology. A writer named George Gilder wrote an anti-feminism article 50 years back that Mr. E.H. Hail recently posted and commented on, on his Hail to You blog – George Gilder’s essay “Sexual Suicide” (1973), a landmark attack on feminism and warning for the future, revisited and reappraised at its 50-year mark. Here’s the paragraph by George Gilder:
There’s a lot more there, but that’s good stuff.
Oh, and you’re saying the cops never gave you back your property, your old gun, that is? Screw New York State!
I feel I’m beating a dead horse here, as I’m pretty sure I mentioned the Sam Gywnne book Empire of the Summer Moon when you wrote about your trip to Texas. Peak Stupidity had a 3-part review: Part 1 – – Part 2 and Part 3. It relates stories of Comanche Indian kidnappings, murders, and torture, pretty well. The book is fair to both sides.
Regarding your pet peeve here, that’s also a corporate pet peeve of mine. The big wigs just go by their first names when news is announced. We’re surely supposed to know their last names and executive positions. However, in my position, I don’t have to. So “Message from Greg!” is on top of the internal web page. My responses: “Who the hell is Greg?” and “Glad I don’t have to keep up with who Greg is – not my day to watch him.”
.
Finally – for now ;-} – I want to comment on the most important segment, the dysgenic fertility, caused inarguably by the last 60 years of the American Welfare State.
It’s nice to see stats, but I could have told you this years ago. First of all, what would you expect to happen when the irresponsible (and which of those color bars contain the biggest proportion of them?) are allowed to flourish, breeding more, by genetic chances, irresponsible people with the use of money confiscated by the responsible Americans? That was baked in the cake in the mid-1960s.
My own experience has borne this all out. I’ve worked with 3 very professional (light-skinned) black women over the last 5 years. Of the 3, only one had a child, just the one woman, and just the one child. All 3 were just about too old to have any, or any more. Then you go to the grocery store and see who’s swiping that EBT card.
I’m sure Mr. Hail, linked to above, will not be upset if I link to another of his posts here. He has a long analysis post called A study on America’s demographic-national crisis — Early-2020s birth-data by race; and developments in the White birth-share in the USA, 1920s to 2020s of 3 weeks back that Unz Review readers might want to check out. He has historic data by year.
Speaking of colours … John Derbyshire will no doubt appreciate the new proposed UK flag, more inclusively reflective of the Indian and Pakistani communities so ascendant in Britain now … Quite colourful enough that the lgbt crowd should be content as well
Here’s an interesting article about Thomas Sowell’s memoir.
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/31-lessons-i-learned-from-thomas
a. 4 integers between 0 and 100 inclusive or exclusive? IOW, are 0 and 100 in play or not?
b. 4 integers or 4 unique integers?
c. You can’t trademark a letter of the alphabet but you can trademark its depiction.
d. Cerulean = 天藍色的.
Assertions like this seem amenable to testing: did the actual Puritans have a lower level of love than contemporary cultures? Did areas where witches were harassed have lower rates of love?
I always thought doctor’s offices used just first names for reasons of privacy/HIPAA. As you say, there are a lot of folks named “John”; many fewer named “Mr. Derbyshire”.
Naah…those pipsqueeks are merely directing their intellects toward endeavors that threaten the annihilation of mankind due to the inferiority complexes brought on by their inability to see over a steering wheel, reach items on store shelves, or look a high-heeled babe in the eye.
The Twitter bird is already dead, once the Ukraine flag becomes unfashionable (soon), cerulean is out. We’ve plenty of time in the 20s for a better color choice.
What I find interesting in that chart is that White women with PhD’s have higher fertility rates that White women with Masters degrees, who in turn have higher fertility rates than White women with Bachelor’s degrees or any amount of college. I wonder what the reason for that would be?
Cerulean and soccer shirts:-
Manchester City are called the Sky Blues; Glasgow Rangers play in Royal Blue and Dundee in Navy Blue, I believe; Southend confess to Dark Blue. Sutton United’s away strip is Turquoise; Wycombe Wanderers claim Dark Blue and Light Blue. The dullards at Chelsea lay claim only to Blue.
The Italian national side are the Azzuri meaning, I assume, that they play in Azure though google tells me it’s called Savoy Blue.
In rugby Scotland have always played in Dark Blue until recently when a dash of purple seems, to my eye, to have been added. Italy wear Savoy Blue. For France it’s simply a case of “Allez les Bleus”.
Nobody yet seems to use Teal. Jolly good colour, teal.
Show them what love is, and they won’t have to “believe” in it. Show them what love is, and their faith in existence, and their own love, will blossom.
Stop calling them “kids”. They are children! Then they are apprentice Men and Women.
“Kids” are the ones that get sacrificed by the elders of Zion, and others of that ilk.
Best regards,
Kali.
We’ve got “Hooked on Phonics” here, but with a more practical 26-letter-based language, there’s no need for or benefit from, Phonology. For words in which we CAN make the sounds, we can just spell the names/places accordingly. For those in which we can’t (like the multiple sh, ch, and c sounds) there’s nothing that’ll help besides a teacher with a yardstick.
The guy may have gotten lucky. If the foreign character-based language in question doesn’t have particular sounds, they make do, but it’ll always sound foreign. Seattle is “See-at-too” for Chinese people. (They can use the tones to help out the accented sylable, though.)
My question is could the guy have made the characters to faithfully represent the American pronunciation, “Der-bee-shy-er”, rather than “Dar-bih-shir”?
‘Cerulean’ seems to be one of the many words with meaning shifted by the ignorant and forgetful, with the Internet and bad choices by some idiots making it worse.
For example, the asterisk is properly centred on the line, to refer to a footnote, it has to be explicitly made superscript at the point of reference, it is in-line at the start of the referral.
However, some morons at Microsoft and I would guess also Apple, chose to make the asterisk superscript in the default font, making use of the old system of symbols (asterisk, dagger, double dagger, section mark, paragraph mark) for per-page footnotes in text too difficult, since the asterisk was totally fucked up.
The asterisk remains in-line in Japanese fonts, but is not generally the symbol for linking to footnotes.
I tend to believe that a choice like the fucked-up always superscripted asterisk is not a product of simple ignorance alone, but also malice, since someone had trouble remembering the sequence of symbols, so wanted to destroy it at the root, the asterisk.
‘Cerulean’ is also subjected to displacement by pretentious ignoramuses, the third definition cited by Mr. Derbyshire is correct, the word particularly applies to light greenish-blue bird’s eggs, or a sky or sea of similar colour. Same with paints or pigments, as that definition states.
The other two are by imperceptive and semi-literate morons. As is the usage by Meryl Strepp’s scriptwriter.
this is my favorite use of the word cerulean.
Video Link
Cerulean or not, if you travel in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia you’ll see a lot of doorframes and shutters painted a distinct shade of blue. It’s to keep the evil spirits away.
Called “haint” (for “haunt”) blue.
I tried low powers of two.
2 4 8 16
14 2 4 8
6 12 2 4
2 6 10 2
0 4 4 8
8 4 0 4
4 4 4 4
0 0 0 0
As with the example, eight iterations.
Tried with the smallest integers.
1 2 3 4
3 1 1 1
2 2 0 0
2 0 2 0
2 2 2 2
0 0 0 0
Six iterations.
Random set of primes
97 13 17 47
50 84 4 30
20 34 80 26
6 14 46 54
48 8 32 8
40 40 24 24
16 0 16 0
16 16 16 16
0 0 0 0
Nine iterations.
There are some rules there, but (-.-)Zzz・・・・
Sounds like the comments written by a silly little man that’s been envying tall men all his life, but he say’s he’s over 5 foot ten, so we have to take him on his word. If you can’t have something you trash it or deride it in words. If the envious man is jealous of his neighbor’s wife because she is more beautiful than his, he’ll call her stupid, a slut or a whore. He thinks that there’s no way she could love him, or want to be with him. In this useless line of commentary, this commentator says that our society has an adoration of tall people and that it’s unfair that CEO’s tend to be taller than the average man and that tall people are actually less intelligent than average. He then goes on to give us a list of cherry picked scientists and their heights, to “prove” that smarter people tend to be shorter. Of course he picks the “greatest genius” of them all, Albert Einstein, which in itself is laughable.
It’s pretty simple, society values tall men because height is associated with physical strength and genetic fitness and most heterosexual women are attracted to men that are perceived to be strong (they’re instincts make them want to mate with a man with the fittest genes) . Heterosexual women have a tremendous influence on our society’s preferences so that’s the way society goes. Height inheritance is heavily influenced by genetics and if one has a certain genetic background that tends to be from a country with people who are taller than average, the chances are that you’ll be taller than average. People have been getting taller all around the world in countries with improving nutrition. A perfect example of this is in North and South Korea, with the South Koreans being substantially taller than the North Koreans.
CEO’s are generally picked for their ability to do the job, (make the most money for the company) and these people tend to be type A personality types. Achievement-oriented, competitive, fast-paced ,impatient. Most of the men who I’ve known with these traits tend to be shorter men, but that’s only my experience of course.
Name some great genius from the past hundred years who stood 6’+. And who wouldn’t be the odd man out in the above listed names (Gödel, Einstein, Von Neumann, Wittgenstein, et al.). But if you don’t consider Einstein a great mind your list might be odd. I can only think of one mathematical genius who could be considered tall and that is John Nash at either 6’ or 6’1”.
“Those high on the Dark Triad traits are dissatisfied with their height and are short”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886922004950
Breaking news: Scientists have created a new shade of white – the “whitest white”.
So. F*cking. White.
Source: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/scientists-have-developed-the-whitest-white-paint-ever-made-so-reflective-it-can-cool-surfaces-2338779
Hangul was invented by a Korean King in the sixteenth century that predates direct contact with the West. I don’t recall his name but his image is the most prominent in South Korean currency. He was King of Chosun which is the North Korean name for Korea. The South Korean Government repudiated the name and gave the official name of Korea, Hankook. I always feel that sounds like a car tyre. Hangul is entirely phonetic. That explains its excellent adaption of Derbyshire.
I can see a few problems with this particular graph (apparently produced by Statista):
.
A lot of women have children before completing their final educational level. So what, exactly, is being measured here, anyway? If a woman at age 23 has a child, then completes a BA at age 24, then completes a Master’s degree at age 30, to which bin is her child assigned for purposes of this graph? And what if the same woman has another child at age 31? Are both children assigned to MA? One to High School, one to MA?
To bypass this and related problems, a study of completed fertility would be necessary. For example for women in the decade-cohort age 46 to 55 at a certain year. By age 46, almost every woman has completed both final-fertility and final-education.
And: All these numbers, whatever they’re supposed to be measuring, could be an artifact of the methodology. It’s not clear how the data was obtained, but it’s immediately suspicious, to me, that the TFRs are given to three significant digits east of the decimal point, as if the data-set were something that has been counted so precisely in its entirety for an entire population under study, like number of apples in every stall of a farmers market, or number of ballots in a set of voting-bins assembled by the town council.
In reality, this is going to necessarily be a degree of an estimate and error bars would have to be applied. A lot of the patterns we think we see in such a data-set as this might not be real. That’s why it’s so much safer to try to work with completed fertility if we want something like this level of precision.
Regarding the IQ decreasing, it is caused by the open borders policy, now every year millions of immigrants entering USA have IQ lower than 89, they are coming from Latin America, Africa, and
islands from Caribean Sea. Rulers of USA are idiots or are doing that on purpose, so when those low IQ people breed with American whites, the average IQ of new generations will be maybe 8 to 10 points lower than that of the the current population.
In Streetcar, Blanche quips “I wore della Robbia blue.” Della Robbia had used this cerulean color in his art for the robes of his Madonnas. Thus, the connotation of this color was virginity. Blanche is thus showing us the contrast between her actual lived self and her ideal but only superficial self. Ho hum, just a quick line and it’s gone; move onto the next one. Yes, Tennessee Williams was that good.
Regarding the medical-waiting-room informality of using the first name only, this is not as bad as the galling harshness of using only the surname. This is the ethos of boot camp; the drill instructor in effect reminding you he (putatively, in his case) has no affection or respect or dignity for you. To make it worse, this comes from a blood pressure nurse whose expertise is putting a BP cuff on you and registering the results for the chart. The drill instructor by contrast has a whole range of skills I can respect.
so does that make the north koreans, the true chosun one’s?
Here are some humble attempts of mine, form twelve years ago, to quantify dysgenics in the USA:
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/usa-white-fertility-and-intelligence-or-dysgenics-quantified/
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2011/09/25/dysgenic-fertility-trends-in-generation-x/
—
This is for final fertility figures for White women, born 1900 to 1949 (see “USA: White Fertility and Intelligence, or, Dysgenics Quantified,” 2011):
.
.
Note how the lifetime TFR for the highest-scoring, highest-IQ women born 1900 to 1949 were a few tenths of a TFR-point below the total-population TFR of 2.45.
The findings are that there is evidence for a mild dysgenic effect (not an alarmingly rapud dysgenic effect) ongoing among Whites. It is in line with Richard Lynn’s estimate of genotypic IQ-decline among White Americans of -0.3 points per decade ongoing through much of the 20th century.
In other words, if he was right, you are statistically likely to be about 3 genotypic IQ-points less intelligent than a given ancestor born one century before you. Phenotypic effects and the Flynn Effect swamp this in what we see on the surface, but a sustained genotypic IQ decline holding over a long-enough period is almost inevitably associated with, or a main cause of, declining civilizations.
—
This one is near-final lifetime fertility figures for born-1965 to born-1970 women in the USA, by highest level of completed education, as of mid-2010 (see: “Dysgenic Fertility Trends in Generation X,” 2011):
All women:
.
.
White women:
.
.
Four-word conclusion at the time for White-American fertility:
“Numbers: Declining. Quality: Steady.”
You might be “over 5’10”” – i.e., very slightly taller than the current male average for the US, which is 177cm or 5’9⅔” – but height’s not the only metric in which you’re decidedly average.
“not tall” requires a comparison to the population at the relevant time and place; the average height of men at important locations at various historical periods in the late 19th/early 20th century is reasonably easy to obtain, and everyone on your list was taller than the relevant average, except Enrico Fermi – who was born in Italy: average height of Italian males born in 1901 was 165cm (5’5″).
That said: Fermi was born in Rome, so he was a Terrone – the Northern Polentini bias the Italian average upwards.
This stuff in something of an interest of mine because my mentor used to have a ‘bit’ that he performed in the first lecture of his 3rd year Computable General-Equilibrium Economics course; the first lecture was all about the importance of getting the data right.
Dicko – who stood about 5’6″ – would say that he was ‘average height‘, and then ask the class whether the statement was true or false. (The correct answer is “It depends which average is used“).
Dicko would go on to point out that he used the average from WWI military recruitment data – despite being born in the late 1940s. (That was the entire basis for the joke).
In 1914 the average British man was 5’2″; the average British officer was 5’6″; the average Yank was 5’7”. The relevant average, as far as Dicko was concerned, was for Australia; the average Australian was 5’6″ in 1914.
I’ve always liked the meme-like nature of the old joke:
Tall people are smarter than average – but that’s not saying much.
Oops… forgot to include the link to OurWorldInData: Average male height by year of birth.
(FWIW I confess a bias; I’m 4½” taller than my birth cohort, and my Dad’s 5¾” taller than his birth cohort).
True-ish. Chosŏn was the name of the ruling dynasty for quite a while. And the country name was Joseon or words to that effect. But the renaming came long before the partition of Korea into North and South after WWII.
5’10” here too. So, taller than average but not quite TALL.
Funny, that’s pretty much the whole story. I’m smarter than average but no genius. I’m making more money than average but I’m not affluent. I’m better looking than average but not quite a panty dropper. I can do a number of things quite well, but truly becoming a master of any of them has so far eluded me.
I’ve also had moments where I felt compelled to prove that those grapes are sour, but I’m no Fox.
Don’t be a Fox.
In the fullness of time a young woman appears at the door to the inner sanctum and calls out: “John?”
==
Issue number one is using, unbidden, the Christian name of someone who is 2-3x her age. She should have been instructed, upon being hired, never to do that.
Boris & Natasha were masquerading as “art critics” in one series. His name was Cerulean Blue.
Her’s was better…Rose Madder. My mother was a serious oil painter and laughed her head off.
Read the letters home from WWI Diggers to their families, and the illiterate scrawl and mumbling incontinence of present-day Austfailians where eloquence is heartily disdained as ‘smart-arsery’ and you can see the decline. It’s accelerating, too.
A Colt .38 Special? Surely you can do better than that old police popgun, Mr. D.
Derb must be one of the most useless columnists here. Even worse than Sailer. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t see the point or the interest of his columns. Perhaps to math nerds, or to boomers obsessed with “ChiComs”. I don’t know. To each his own.
Nicola Tesla was 6′ 2″. https://bodysize.org/en/nikola-tesla/
I might later try to actually solve your math brainteaser but one can possibly get a grip on how to solve it by using matrix methods. If one considers your initial set of numbers as a vector (for instance [41, 22, 6, 93] in your example), then the operation you are performing is the matrix multiplication on that vector of:
[ 1 -1 0 0
0 1 -1 0
0 0 1 -1
-1 0 0 1 ]
But of course THEN you need to apply the absolute value to the result of that multiplication. So the result is a power of the above matrix – but applying the absolute value to the resulting multiplication at each step.
It’s not coming to me how to handle that right away. It isn’t simply trying to get a matrix of ones – or nilpotency or anything like that. I have to think about it further. But for those wondering about this, I think this is the way to go about it. Just don’t know the twist to use.
I wrote that too soon! The way to go is to put the vector in the matrix itself of course.
[ a -b 0 0
0 b -c 0
0 0 c -d
-a 0 0 d ]
Find largest idempotency for something like this – but taking absolute value after each power taken of it. I’ll get on that later … gotta run for now
Plato was 6 ft 3
Euclides was 7 ft
Aristotle was 6 ft 2
I’m 6 ft 3
Tesla 6 ft 2
Da Vinci 6 ft 8
Collosus of Rhodes 108 ft
Other jealous, sub 6ft tall geniuses, Billy Barty, Gary Coleman, Mickey Rooney, Tom Cruise, oh and you.
Einstein, Wittgenstein and Turing were frauds.
Wittgenstein, btw, killed one of his pupils during the period when he was pretending to be a poor schoolteacher rather than one of the riches men in Europe. Being one of the richest men in Europe, he was never charged.
In 1939 the German Reich denoted 12 individuals as “honorary Aryans”. Six were named Wittgenstein.
I thought Trump was “King of the Chosen.” Or was it Netanyahu?
You must be fun at parties.
Amiable looking daughter. She appears sweet, and not afraid to show affection for her less than affectionate presenting brother.
But Putin is 5’7.
Maybe you protest too much, and misread the OP too. Of course, height and good looks are roughly correlated with health and all that. But how many geniuses and billionaires are good looking? Zuck? Musk? Taleb? And obversely, Trudeau? Biden? Comey?
I think the OP is saying that when there is an over-fetish for height, it can crowd out the thing that is actually desired.
Metric fixation, Campbell’s law, Goodhart’s law, and surrogation may be instructive here.
In short, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Google has it that:
— Zelensky is 170 cm tall.
— Putin is 169 cm tall.
Google has it that Zelensky is the bigger man. But both are, in fact, small men.
While it might be true that there is a correlation between taller height and higher IQ, it is apparent super geniuses over 5’11” are outliers (I wonder if massive-functioning cortical neurons requires a more compact stature?).
Another super-genius with an IQ of 214 who studied physics at Harvard, Cambridge, and Stanford and whose eponymous webzine we’re on now is probably the same height as Einstein, judging from this photo below. Note: Kamala Harris is 5’3.5” but wears some major high heels).
Lie Told By A Mental Patient says what?
Generally alright, but only in Japanese, since I haven’t been to a party-like event in English from before coronamania times.
As for ‘cerulean’, I am 100% correct, the third definition listed by Mr. Derbyshire is correct, know it is from much reading in English.
Also, it’s wrong to play along with what one knows to be wrong for popularity in a social situation.
Well, at least the now most famous of the three listed was a fraud. (^.^)
Both are short, but only Putin is great. Neither is particularly good looking, but only Zelensky arouses recoil.
Zelensky proves the rule, but Putin is proof greatness cannot be measured with a ruler.
By conventional rules, the Bidens are tall and a good looking family. But they’re dumber than sand.
Agree. But Hapas usually are.
I got a high score of 13.
3-10-23-47
7-13-24-44
6-11-20-37
5-9-17-31
4-8-14-26
4-6-12-22
2-6-10-18
4-4-8-16
0-4-8-12
4-4-4-12
0-0-8-8
0-8-0-8
8-8-8-8
0-0-0-0
No “maybe” about it–it is.
I would say the truth may be somewhere in the middle …. there is probably a small positive correlation between height and IQ that can’t be simply explained by nutrition, but there is also some actual discrimination in the workplace whereby tall men are perceived as more leaderlike and thus are more likely to attain promotions even when their accomplishments are merely equal to those of some shorter employees in the same workplace. (This is also part of why I, unlike most conservatives, actually believe that women are being discriminated against in the workplace.)
It’s clear that height is not a good predictor of IQ differences between large populations, however. Africans and Europeans are about equal in height, but not in IQ. Asians are shorter than both, but tend to have high IQ’s. The most successful Amerindian civilizations were those of the tropics, where people tend to be short as well.
Regarding the math puzzle (not having read the others’ replies yet) … it’s just a guess, but maybe you can get stuck with five numbers because if you ever get to a situation like “2 0 2 0 2”, the 2’s just keep moving around the string, whereas if you have “0 2 0 2” your next line will be “2 2 2 2” and then become all zeroes.
It may just be the continuation of an ancient trend …. those with more money don’t need to worry so much about providing an ample inheritance for their children, so they’re more likely to have large families. Before modern welfare, this was the widespread pattern all across society, but now it’s only restricted to those classes for whom modern welfare systems have little meaning.
Two other confounding variables that might affect the predictions of IQ shift …. I’ve read once, though it’s been awhile, that blacks have a narrower bell curve than whites, which makes sense if assuming they have less genetic variation in those genes that affect IQ. Another confounding factor is that if we’re looking at mothers only, we can’t see the effects of interracial marriage. All across the IQ scale, white women are giving way to mixed-race babies, but offhand I don’t know whether interracial marriage is more common at the high end or the low end, or if there isn’t much difference. By contrast I would expect that black women who give birth to mixed-race babies tend to be those with high IQ’s. If we categorize these babies as black, the black IQ will rise, but if we exclude them from the category, the black IQ will fall.
That’s 14. That’s the highest possible and there are 2817 sets of numbers (inclusive of 0 and 100) like this. The first is 0-7-20-44 and the last is 100-93-80-56. This is my result from a brute force computer program but it is very difficult to show the general case.
I tried going about it by representing the transformation as (I – M) times the vector of numbers where M is the matrix
[ 0 -1 0 0
0 0 -1 0
0 0 0 -1
-1 0 0 0 ]
M^4 = I, M^2 shifts the ones diagonal over one diagonal and changes sign … etc.
You’d think I’d be able to prove something with such representation of simple sparse matrices but it turns out to be quite a bear. Somewhere along the line it must boil down to the binomial theorem on (I – M) and always taking the absolute value. Above my pay grade though!
Sadly Mr. Derbyshire never answered my questions in #7 and I don’t know from matrices but where do the -1’s come from?
Ack, I wrote that wrong. the ones are positive in the M as I wrote it. I was thinking about (I + (-M)) not (I – M) as a miswrote it. M^n shifts the ones to the right n times (mod 4 of course). M^4 = I. There’s gotta be some twist in this representation that should give me what I want but I don’t know it?
Impossible that those numbers are correct. That’s a fake chart.
Matrix multiplication is SUM(a(nm) * x(n)) where the a(nm) are the elements of the 2-D matrix (row n column m) and the column vector x.
So the product of
[ 1 -1 0 0
0 1 -1 0
-1 0 1 -1 ]
with
[ a
b
c
d ]
would be
[ a – b
b – c
c – d
d – a ]
Which is the iteration described. Multiply the numbers by that matrix, take positive values for vector element at each iteration until all elements are 0.
That matrix can be written as:
[ 1 0 0 0
0 1 0 0
0 0 1 0
0 0 0 1 ]
minus
[ 0 1 0 0
0 0 1 0
0 0 0 1
1 0 0 0 ]
Which is the identity matrix I minus what I called M.
M^2 shifts the ones over 1 column, M^3 2 columns, etc. M^4 gives I.
Applying (I – M) multiple times gives the binomial distribution of M (since I is commutative in multiplication). But the twist is the taking of only absolute values at each multiplication.
@blake121666
To avoid confusion I’m going to use 13 as the solution. The brainteaser asked for the number of operations, not the number of rows. After the initial numbers, in my example, 3-10-23-47, there were 13 operations (resulting in a total of 14 rows if you count the start row) required to terminate the sequence at the all-zeros case 0-0-0-0.
The maximum number of operations occurs exactly 352 times among all possible cases, if duplicate starting cases are omitted. There are 8 duplicate starting cases for each set of 4 numbers, consisting of 4 cyclic rotations
3-10-23-47
47-3-10-23
23-47-3-10 etc
and a reversal followed by 4 cyclic rotations
47-23-10-3
3-47-23-10 etc.
Note that this is not the same as the number of permutations of the 4 numbers. Each of these 8 cases has the same absolute difference sequence between the 4 numbers (either cyclic forward or reversed) and thus each propagates to zero in the same number (13) of operations.
If you allow duplicate starting cases there are 8×352=2816 starting cases that require 13 operations to terminate the sequence. This result is from a simple computer program to count all duplicate and non-duplicate cases and numbers of operations for each case. The general case is difficult to solve, although there are patterns that may provide a clue, such as the relationship between the absolute differences of the 4 numbers.
Where do the gazintas figure into this?
And, yet, the horrible fact is, a bunch of conservative and moderate old white ladies in swing states in the Eastern Time Zone might vote to make Gavin Newsom president based on the presumption that because he is tall agreeable looking, he is therefore trustworthy. Hopefully, the truth about him will filter east in the event Joe Biden has to not run again and Newsom is the nominee.
The truth about him is not complicated. He is an empty suit, a mediocre created man, and tool of more radical forces. The one thing I credit him with is cancelling the absurd high speed rail project. His great discredit is how he responded to the recall vote he was subjected to during his first term. The recall went on the ballot in 2021 and was defeated by a 2-1 margin. What Newsom did not seem to realize is that the recall failed on a party line vote. It was not a personal vindication for him as he seemed to believe.
The recall of Grey Davis in 2003 succeeded in part because everybody was burned out on the colorless and appropriately named Grey Davis and in part because the compelling alternative of Arnold Schwarzenegger was on the ballot.
And empty suits are usually long on height. Granted, height is an aid to bullying, but at the same time the tall who rise to leadership positions often get there because they are appointed by someone else.
Got into it with someone once who pointed out that in pink collar offices, it is often tall women who are the supervisors. Again, I made the same point, that they are leaders because they are appointed by someone else. I then referred to the film A League of Their Own as a study in how a small person (Mae Mordabito played by Madonna Ciccone) could take over leadership of a group when that role was up for grabs instead of being under the control of some outside authority. Never heard from that person again.
In the bad old days, often, it was a tall woman of Anglo-Celtic descent who was appointed office supervisor. Today, it often may be a black woman who is considerably older than the people she is supervising. But the theory is the same in both cases.
In my social theory, I argue (and I am not alone in this belief) that the workplace functions better the more homogeneous it is. By appointing someone as supervisor who is manifestly different than the people being supervised, you are leveling the supervisees and creating a greater sense among them that they are a homogeneous group.
By the way, diversity is a paradoxical way of accomplishing the same thing. There is a theory called “Third Culture” which posits that people who have been raised in two cultures, no matter they are, see themselves as having more in common with each other than they do with monocultural people even of their own descent. This, I think, explains the scramble on the part of white middle and upper middle class parents to breed “Third Culture” characteristics into their otherwise hopelessly homogeneous herds of privilege white American children. They do this by having carefully selected non-European descended “disadvantaged” students in the schools their children attend and by giving their children other “enrichment” experiences which assimilate them into the Third Culture as much as possible.
As usual, the mass of lower middle class, working class and underclass whites are triangulated out in this synthesis.
In America, we elect the tallest man president. How does that work out? In other countries, they elect the shortest man president. How does that work out?
I think there is a message here, if only we could discern what it is..
There is an excellent book, Empire of the Summer Moon, by SC Gwynne about the Comanche.
A good part of the book focuses on Cynthia Ann Parker
Video Link
Most automobiles now are black, white, silver or grey