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Charles Murray’s FACING REALITY
If you belong to the fast-dwindling demographic that believes in objective truth, you will like Charles Murray’s new book, pub date June 15: Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America.
Murray writes two distinctly different kinds of book, long and short. In the long books (most recently Human Diversity) Murray gives full rein to his passion for data, and for the deep truths hidden in big datasets. The shorter books, like his 2008 Real Education, are more journalistic and less challenging for a reader not well-acquainted with statistics.
(And I just noticed, looking up Real Education for the link, that its full title includes the word “reality,” just as this new book’s title does. Charles Murray, like your genial diarist, clings to a fusty, absurdly old-fashioned belief in objective reality quite independent of our feelings, wo wo wo feelings.)
This latest Murray book is one of the shorts: 125 pages of main text, with three pages of introduction, twenty pages of endnotes, four pages of maps, and a five-page index. There are several tables and a small handful of graphs (this one my favorite);
but not much heavy-duty quantitative analysis—little enough that a math-challenged reader can skip over it without serious loss.
Neither of the two truths in Murray’s title will surprise VDARE.com readers. In the author’s own words, from the book’s introduction:
The first is that American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The second is that American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime.
Our public culture seems incapable of dealing with these facts other than by denial and dishonesty: “The assailant was described as a heavy-set male of about thirty, wearing a red jacket …” Hence the social stresses and strains we are all wearily familiar with.
What is to be done? Murray’s prescription is civic nationalism. We can all get along, he says, if we will just stay true to the principles on which our nation was founded and face reality.
You can applaud that—and I do—as coming from a generous, good-hearted patriot and seeker after truth. You can also mock it—and many on our side of the fence surely will—as a naive civ-nat “bravery signaller” murmuring emollient words into a howling gale of unreason.
What, after all, will be the united response to Murray’s two truths, assuming they deign to notice them, from all the commanding heights of our culture—from the media, the academy, the churches, all three branches of government? SYSTEMIC RACISM! LEGACY OF SLAVERY! SOCIAL CONSTRUCT! WHITE SUPREMACY! PRIVILEGE! BIGOT! BURN THE WITCH!
The great mass of people don’t share Murray’s enthusiasm for data, for facts, for careful empirical inquiry. They have no patience with z-scores and correlation coefficients. They are not interested in objective reality unless it grows their food or powers their gadgets. They want magic and religion. They want drama: saints and martyrs, heroes and villains, Good versus Evil.
In the Western world today those universal inclinations are directed by the widespread desire among white people, especially white women, to kneel and abase themselves before other races, to denounce their own ancestors and belittle all their achievements.
In the human realm, that is reality.
A dramatic rise in risk aversion
As mentioned in my May 14th podcast, I get emails grumbling that I don’t say half as much as I should about the covid pandemic.
I put it down to my native fatalism, which (I said) I think is common in people of my generation, perhaps especially English people.
Flu pandemics are, to those of our inclination, just part of the unavoidable background of life, like the weather. You don’t take foolhardy chances with them, any more than you go out without an umbrella when it’s raining, but you get on with your life and don’t make a fuss about them.
Whatever the reason, I can’t be much bothered with the pandemic. When I do my morning scan of the news sources after breakfast, I skip over the covid news. It’s not interesting to me.
In a spirit of commentatorial duty I bought a copy of Nicholas Christakis’ book about covid shortly after it came out a few months ago. I dutifully read a little more than half of it, according to the bookmark, and … it’s been sitting on my shelf untouched ever since. Not everybody is interested in everything. Even we big-brained polymaths have our can’t-be-bothered zones.
I’m the same with abortion, concerning which there is something or other going on newswise this month. I couldn’t care less. Free abortion booths at Walmart; capital punishment for abortionists; I’m fine either way. In my National Review days I had a regular email correspondent who insisted that abortion was the paramount issue and should be a deal-breaker for every voter. Good luck to him: it’s just not on my list.
Likewise UFOs. I generally catch Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, and cheer him when he takes a stand against the anarchist mobs and nation-wreckers. (Although I wish he’d stop saying “skin color” as a euphemism for “race.” Yo, Tucker, Check this out.) When he starts on the UFO stuff, though, I take a break and play with the dog. My interest in UFOs peaked around 1955 and has been declining asymptotically ever since.
And, circling back, there’s that generational thing, too. I have not yet read this new book by Brit historian Niall Ferguson (not to be confused with epidemiologist Neil Ferguson). The title is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, but it’s mainly concerned with epidemics, especially covid.
(I should like to have been a fly on the wall in Ferguson’s meetings with his publisher’s editors. His last book had come out in 2018, so I’d guess the proposal for this one was being considered in 2019. Did it have lots of stuff about famines, floods, earthquakes, Chernobyl, and such, with just a chapter or two about epidemics? And then, when covid was all over the news early last year, did the editors press him to expand the epidemic material and reduce the rest? Don’t know, just speculating.)
As I said, I haven’t read the book yet. I did, though, read the review of it by a different British historian, Jonathan Sumption, in the May issue of Literary Review. From which, concerning America’s response to the Asian (1957-58) and Hong Kong (1968-70) flu epidemics:
The federal government’s interventions were limited to supporting vaccine research. The death rate was high, but the economic damage was minimal. No one complained at the time, and Ferguson himself appears to approve of the US government’s approach. He observes, rightly, that the main difference between these outbreaks and the current pandemic is a dramatic rise in risk aversion among Western populations in the intervening decades. [Prime Minister versus Pathogen]
Betting on covid
Eighteen years ago I reviewed a book titled Our Final Hour by Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal. From my review:
In Britain the book sells under the title Our Final Century, which expresses its theme a bit more precisely. Sir Martin doesn’t think that we—the human race—are going to make it alive through to 12/31/2099, and he has given a bookful of reasons for his opinion.
Sir Martin is still among us, now 78 years old, and he is still Britain’s Astronomer Royal. (Which is not an empty honorific: He has had a distinguished career as a working astrophysicist.)
In my review I quoted this passage from Sir Martin’s book:
I staked one thousand dollars on a bet: “That by the year 2020 an instance of bioerror or bioterror will have killed a million people.” Of course, I fervently hope to lose this bet. But I honestly do not expect to …
Let’s leave aside the ambiguity of “by the year 2020.” Did he mean that inclusive of the actual year 2020, or exclusive? I’ll assume inclusive. Then by December 31st, 2020 covid surely had killed a million people worldwide.
So now, to settle Sir Martin’s bet, we need to know whether covid is “an instance of bioerror or bioterror.” Unfortunately, as I’ve argued on my podcast, while there is good circumstantial evidence favoring bioerror, and a case can be made for bioterror, we may never know for sure.
Does Sir Martin have an opinion on the matter? Has he made any attempt to claim a win? The post of Astronomer Royal only pays £100 per annum; but after such a long and glittering career, Sir Martin should be pretty well off from other sources. Has he thought of funding a private inquiry into the origins of covid, just to settle his bet?
Trying St. Aubyn
Last month, after passing some comments on Jojo Moyes 2019 novel The Giver of Stars, I lamented the absence of honest reactionaries from the ranks of today’s British novelists.
A reader emailed in with a suggestion: “How about Edward St. Aubyn?”
I had never read any of St. Aubyn’s novels, so I thought I’d try one. Not willing to spend my fast-depreciating dollars on an unknown quantity, I headed down to my municipal library, now re-opened. They had three of St. Aubyn’s novels on the fiction shelves, none of them belonging to the set of five Patrick Melrose novels, 1992-2012, that made St. Aubyn famous (although obviously not to me). I picked one of the three at random, took it home, and read it.
This was St. Aubyn’s 1998 novel On the Edge, a send-up of New Age flapdoodle, set mostly at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. All but one of the characters are middle-class malcontents seeking spiritual fulfillment via pasted-together bits of oriental mysticism. The exception is an Englishman chasing a girl he knows to be a New Age-ist.
So spoken utterances tend to go like this:
“The thing you notice that you haven’t noticed that you don’t have is the thing that really matters,” said Jerome, beaming vibrational energy at Peter. “Think about it.”
St. Aubyn gets some good Waughish fun from the Englishman lost among Americans:
Gosh, thought Peter, these California girls are amazing. He felt his own Englishness and stiffness and inability to decipher Crystal’s candour. If an Englishwoman told you about an orgasm the second time you chatted together, you knew that she either wanted sex straight away, or that she’d been educated at a convent. Over here, one had no idea what it meant.
The New York Times reviewer thought that St. Aubyn’s mocking of American manners was the reason the book wasn’t published over here until 2014. I’m not so sure. I thought there was something a bit musty, a bit dated about the scenery that might have put publishers off.
I mean, New Age? Really? Is that still a thing worth lampooning? Was it, even in 1998? I read Powers of Mind by “Adam Smith” (real name George Goodman) when it came out in 1975, and laughed all the way through. By 1998, however, anything to do with New Agery had sunk down into the sludge at the bottom of my mind, making it pretty spoof-proof.
And then, sex. The last thirty or so pages of the novel concern a weekend workshop in Tantric sex … lots of it, very explicitly described. Again, is that still a thing in novels? I thought that vein had been thoroughly worked out by 1993, the year Literary Review initiated its annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for “the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel.”
Perhaps St. Aubyn had actually won the award in 1998. I checked the list of winners on Wikipedia: no, no St. Aubyn at all.
Probably there is some level of irony here I’m not appreciating. Probably these quaint 1970s-ish themes are the main point of the novel in some way that’s over my head. I’m a bit too literal-minded to be deeply literary.
Well, at least I finished On the Edge, which puts it in the top tercile of novels I try. On my next trip to the library I’ll ask if they can get me the Patrick Melrose pentalogy. And I’m glad to have learned “soft-on.” I didn’t know there was a word for that.
The only truth is subjective truth
My lament about there being no honest reactionaries writing novels was committed to pixels in late April and posted online May 3rd. I mention that because Bruce Oliver Newsome issued a related lament at American Greatness, posted May 15th, title: “Where Is Anti-Woke Literature?” Lament:
Where are today’s equivalents of the widely published conservative novelists of the 20th century, such as Evelyn Waugh and G. K. Chesterton?
So my complaint was not merely an echo of Dr. Newsome’s. I don’t think his was an echo of mine, either: He takes a different approach. So no-one’s cribbing from anyone here. This is an instance of great minds thinking alike.
“Contemporary fiction is dominated by left-wing themes,” Dr. Newsome tells us. It’s not just the themes, either: If you want to publish a novel with all the tremendous advantages of doing so through an established publisher (experienced advertising staff, media connections, generous advance, etc.), you had better not be a white male … although if you’re woke and homosexual, they might give you a break.
Even if you are female, Hispanic, and woke, you may not be authentic enough to write a story “about a woman and child fleeing violence in Mexico for America, via the illegal route.” That was Jeanine Cummins’ 2020 novel American Dirt. Ms. Cummins, who has one Puerto Rican grandparent, was widely criticized for being too white and law-abiding to write about Mexican illegals. Her book tour was canceled.
We are heading rather fast towards a place where the only thing you may write about is yourself. As I noted in my May 14th podcast:
Flaubert wouldn’t find a publisher for Madame Bovary nowadays, nor Tolstoy for Anna Karenina, nor, to complete the adultery set, Fontane for Effi Briest
“Write about what you know,” is the advice given to young writers … The only thing you’re supposed to know nowadays is your own precious self, your—what’s the cant expression? oh, right—your “lived experience.”
(In some email exchanges with a friend, I wondered what would happen to historical fiction under this dispensation. After all, I observed, Robert Graves was not a Roman Emperor. My friend, who is better-read than I am, trumped that with Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. Not only was Ms. Yourcenar not an Emperor, she was a different sex from her subject—”A complete impostor!”)
It’s the same in the performing arts, as explained in a terrifying essay by Heather Mac Donald at City Journal, May 23rd. She is writing about the very prestigious Juilliard School of music, drama, and dance in New York City. Juilliard is deep in the throes of an anti-racist hysteria that is upending all their instruction. Writes Mac Donald:
It is taboo to question claims of racism-inflicted disability, since such a challenge denies someone his subjective “truth.” When it comes to race, subjective truth is now the only allowable truth.
From what Dr. Newsome told us about fiction publishing, it is not only race that’s at issue. For a suitable inscription on the tombstone of Western civilization, you just need the last eight words there:
SUBJECTIVE TRUTH IS NOW THE ONLY ALLOWABLE TRUTH.
Curse of the Woke bimbos
This one properly belongs in the Math Corner. I have a head of steam up on these Cultural Revolution issues, though, so it belongs here equally well. I already have two items scheduled for the Math Corner; if I put this one in with them it’ll be more like a Math City Block.
The topic is the collapse of discipline and good sense at the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). I’ve tackled this issue before, in both my podcast and diaries.
This month’s outrage, like the second of those links, concerns Focus, the MAA monthly newsletter. Here is the Table of Contents page for the April/May issue.
As you can see, “in this ISSUE” there are three long-form articles, at pages 18, 22, and 30. Their actual lengths are 2½, 6½, and 3 pages respectively. So that second main article is longer than the other two together. It dominates the issue—it’s one-sixth of the issue’s 40 pages.
What’s it about? “How (and How Not) to be Anti-racist in Mathematics.” As you can divine from that title, it is warmed-over Kendi-ism: “embrace the discomfort,” “white supremacy culture,” “take off your mathematical hat and adorn [sic] a socially conscious one,” et cetera, et cetera, et drivelling illiterate cetera.
And that’s not even all of the Kendi-ism in the issue. Here’s the last half page of the first article, the 2½-page one.
Sample:
Why is the periodical of a prestigious mathematical society dominated by this poisonous dreck? I think there’s a clue on the first page, the one facing the Table of Contents page. Check out the picture of the editor there, Jacqueline Jensen-Vallin, and her accompanying mini-editorial. Nice White Lady, or what? In just 300 words she manages to include “reimagine,” “equity,” and “#StopAsianHate.”
The strong suspicion has to be that MAA Focus has fallen into the hands of woke bimbos. To be sure, the Editorial Board has a Matt, a David, a Michael, a James, a Nicholas, and a Matthew keeping company with Jessica, Dandrielle, Audrey, Jennifer, and Hortensia. (Jamylle and Hwayeon could be either sex—or, as they would probably prefer me to say, “any gender.”) The story I hear from friends in the media, however, is that once woke bimbos have any kind of authority, the rest of the newsroom trembles before them. As Orwell taught us a lifetime ago:
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of orthodoxy …
As a supplementary to which, you can add Steve Sailer’s observation over at Taki’s Magazine, May 26th:
Moreover, every year, less influence in our society is in the hands of semi-well-informed family men like [Matthew] Yglesias and [Ezra] Klein. The younger generation has been marinated in doctrines of black moral, aesthetic, and sexual supremacy, and young women are persuasive at getting whatever the latest fad tells them to want.
I’m going to try to fend off despair, though. The MAA got a new president in February, for a two-year term. This is Jennifer Quinn, a female (of course!) but a grown-up female—not, by appearance at any rate, a bimbo. She likely has clear adult memories of life before the Great Awokening of the early 2010s, before our public discourse tipped over into insanity. Her introductory remarks on taking up the MAA presidency include a few of the cant words—”community,” “inclusion”—but in a somewhat perfunctory way that gives me a glimmer of hope.
I hereby, with all proper respect, issue the following plea to Professor Quinn.
Please, I beg you, conduct a thorough purge of the editorial staff at MAA Focus. Restore the magazine to what it was intended to be: a survey of current mathematical events and topics for undergraduate and high school math students, not an anti-white propaganda sheet dominated by 6½-page effusions of ideological gibberish.
Math belongs in the realm of reason; Critical Race Theory does not. It is a politico-religious cult, like the Albigensians, the Taiping, or Communism—nothing to do with mathematics.
Thank you.
A funny feminist!
My most entertaining read of the month was Jill Tweedie’s memoir Eating Children. I say that with a measure of guilt, as the book is a chronicle of misery and failure.
Tweedie (1936-1993) was a British opinion journalist. I have dim recollections of seeing her byline in The Guardian, Britain’s furthest-left daily broadsheet newspaper, around 1980. I don’t think I ever actually read any of her stuff. I didn’t take The Guardian (although my sister did, and still does), and only engaged with it when bored in other people’s houses, dentist’s waiting-rooms, and such. I thought of Jill Tweedie, to the degree I thought about her at all, as just another sour feminist Guardianista.
Then last month, as reported in my Diary, I read Alan Brien’s sort-of novel about Lenin. Doing some peripheral browsing, I noticed that Brien was married to Tweedie from 1973 until she died from motor neurone disease twenty years later. (Eating Children includes a touching memorial tribute from Brien.)
Being a fan of Brien’s, I thought there must have been more to Tweedie than I’d supposed, so I bought her book. It is, as I said, a chronicle of misery and failure. The miseries are those of a mid-20th-century upper-middle-class English gal: not famine, plague, enslavement, or gang rape by invading barbarians, only unhappy childhood (Tweedie hated but feared her father, loved but pitied her mother), a disastrous marriage, loss of a child, under-employment, loneliness, a failed suicide attempt.
So why did I enjoy the book so much? Was it Schadenfreude, a callous gloating over the misfortunes of someone I dislike? If it was that, I’d be ashamed to write about it.
I’m not at all sure that I would have liked Jill Tweedie in person, but she was a very good writer, and stirred my sympathies in proper degree at the appropriate places. It was her frank self-knowledge that kept my attention, and the unillusioned honesty with which she describes the various social and personal messes she got into.
And she is funny. Here she was in the early 1950s, aged about sixteen, at a finishing school in the Swiss alps with a gaggle of other late-adolescent girls. They were all infatuated with M. Bernard, the young, handsome, tanned ski instructor. He did not reciprocate their interest, leading them to conclude that he was homosexual, although he probably just thought that a liaison would cause more trouble than his job was worth.
Skiing itself, the fear, the loneliness, the whistling speed, the blissful swish of blade on snow, was very heaven. Down we whizzed one after the other, slaloming grandly from side to side while in and out between us wove M. Bernard in a shower of snow, the bobble on his cap wobbling madly, his voice floating thinly back to us.
“Gardez les genoux ensemble, jeunes dames! Toujours les genoux ensemble!”
That classic instruction to young ladies, keep your knees together, caused instant and dangerous wobblings in the ranks and Margaret Tulley, quite unbalanced by laughter, promptly closed with a tree, which doomed her to a Christmas in plaster, a casualty of love.
Catching up with Classic Lit
I have never read Moby Dick, nor The Last of the Mohicans, nor The Red Badge of Courage. I mean, I have not read the actual books. I know the plot lines pretty well, though, from having read the Classics Illustrated versions in my teens.
I just learned this month that Classics Illustrated are now online at the Internet Archive. Moby Dick? Check. The Last of the Mohicans? Check. The Red Badge of Courage? Check.
Where the classics are concerned, I think I was a typical mid-20th-century bookish English-speaker. By the time I reached adulthood I had read a creditable number of classics in the flesh, as it were—plain text, with at most an occasional illustration. I’d read some for pleasure, having been gifted them by adults as suitable reading for youngsters; others from having had my interest piqued by a movie; others as school tasks.
Outside that core of read books was a penumbra of famous works, like the aforementioned, that I knew only from Classics Illustrated.
(Now I come to think of it, in fact, American authors were over-represented in that penumbra. Nations, even cousin nations, favor their own writers, I guess. The books adults gave us, and the ones forced down our throats at school, were nearly all British. I think the only American titles ranked high up in every list of approved books-for-kids in 1950s Britain were Tom Sawyer and Little Women.)
Beyond the penumbra lay the great dark territory of Never-Read-It. In subsequent decades I’ve pushed the darkness outwards considerably, but of course have not eliminated it. Nobody’s read everything, although I think Tony Daniels, alias “Theodore Dalrymple,” has come close.
Contemplating that darkness now, and knowing that Classics Illustrated are available online for free, I may do some quick’n’dirty catching-up on literary classics I’ve missed.
Math Corner
Reading back over this diary, it’s way too bookish. I really should get out more. Having taken the theme this far, though, it’ll hardly notice if I close with one more book-related item.
Both my kids attended college and I was always stunned at how much they paid for second-hand textbooks—as much as I pay for new non-textbook books.
I was stunned again this month. An engineer named Naji Arwashan has written a book about the Riemann Hypothesis. He read my 2003 book on that topic, and had kind things to say about it. We have exchanged several cordial emails.
Dr Arwashan’s book, The Riemann Hypothesis and the Distribution of Prime Numbers, is out now from Nova Science Publishers. You can see the table of contents at that link and purchase a copy if you want to. From some short extracts I have seen, it is very well done, and ventures wider and deeper in the math than my book did.
The book sells for $160!
No, that’s not factorial 160 dollars (which would be $471 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion and change), although where my book-buying budget is concerned, it might as well be.
What’s going on with the price of a book here? I consulted a friend, a retired academic, at a dinner we were both attending. He gave me a detailed explanation. We were three or four glasses of wine into the dinner, though, and my faculties were not at their sharpest. When I tried to retail his explanation to Mrs. Derbyshire a day or two later, it went like this:
Me: “See, for academic books that college lecturers can insist their classes buy every year, the secondary market has totally taken over. Every student in class buys a used copy at the beginning of the semester. Then, at the end of the semester, he sells it back to the used-book dealer. Publishers get nothing from all that. To cover their costs, they have to charge high prices for a new book.”
She: “But then, who gets the wheel turning? Who buys the book new at the high price?”
Me: “Uh …”
Mysterious thing, commerce.
Brainteaser. I have parked two semicircles inside a circle, as shown. What looks to be the case, is the case: AB and CD are parallel, E is a single point of contact.
Prove that, within the larger circle, the shaded area is equal to the non-shaded area; in other words, that the sum of the areas of the two semicircles is half the area of the big circle.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
[ITEM 1:]
I don’t think the two views are completely contradictory. One can hold both.
I assume a Constitutionalist would be considered the former. Sure, we SHOULD be able to all get along, but as for the reasons of the huge conflicts, some can hold views of nurture being responsible and others nature. Either way, it’s not ours and the Feral Gov’t’s jobs to fix these things. A Civic Nationalist can argue in good conscience against almost any lawmaking out of the Feral and most States’ governments since the mid 1960s. The alt-right scoffers would be glad to hear “turn it all back to 1964.”
My point is that one doesn’t have to play nice as a Civic Nationalist. The alt-right is correct in noting that the right will have to play hardball to win. That doesn’t mean that after the troubles coming are over we shouldn’t forget what made America great. Both groups see the anarcho-tyranny and the Orwellian State arrayed against us in every institution. We can work within the system, but our system is different from what the ctrl-left’s current version is. If they won’t play in OUR system, THEY are the ones off the rails and should be dealt with with extreme prejudice. Nice guys will not win this one.
[ITEM 3:] I agree on “who cares?!” Bioerror or Bioterror is not the big issue. The issue is how planned out was the PanicFest that has been set up to take away even more rights of Americans and implement 1984-with-better-electronics in China, who planned it out, and how did Americans (at least) get so hysterical and cowardly that they willing went into LOCKDOWNs and are TO THIS DAY, walking around IN BROAD DAYLIGHT with face diapers on? “Menopause Nation, better run and hide. So scared to live. So scared to die.”
[ITEM 6:] You did mention at the end that the situation may improve with that math magazine. You’ve already let it go too long. Some people need to put up with this stuff because it’s part of their jobs. Steve Sailer, for instance, reads the NY Times so we don’t have to. It’s part of his job to point out the stupidity. You, Mr. Derbyshire, may like math, but it’s not your job. Why had you not cancelled your subscription at the first sign of this? That magazine will have no reason to stop this, if people like you don’t quit paying them to treat you like this. I doubt it’s gonna get any better.
[ITEM 9:] I think I’m getting somewhere! (In my head, at least – not on paper yet.)
Regarding catching up on the classics the easy way, here you go:
Correctly noted Mr. D’shire – the worst-of-the-worst White fools are women, probably by a large margin. And furthermore, if White women (who make the babies you see) turn their backs on civilization, not all the George Washingtons or Robert E. Lees who ever lived can save us.
I’ll just use this as an excuse to paste in an opinion from a week back on the subject.
https://www.unz.com/anepigone/agree-and-amplify/#comment-4674616
Which hopefully enlarges the context to which many even red-pilled westerners remain kind of blind.
**
The average Albanian has the average IQ of a US Negro (different figures are available, but it’s always around 80+).
BTW excellent dispatches right now being written from there by Mr. Dinh.
https://www.unz.com/author/linh-dinh/
Likewise Montenegro, charming little Slavic Orthodox place on the Adriatic, has the same average IQ.
Bosnia.
Iran and Pakistan are also there. Sri Lanka has an average IQ of 79, and is an absolutely splendid little place.
It is perhaps impossible to contribute anything serious to modern civilization with an average IQ around 80, but it’s more than possible to maintain a normal basic level of civilization circa 1970.
This is IQ-wise. Now let’s see behavior-wise.
If we look at the homicide data for sub-Saharan Africa, then in places in which there’s no actual war or famine, which today thankfully means the majority of the continent, we’ll see that the only African blacks who behave like US blacks are the South African blacks.
They too are surrounded by the crumbling remains of the best infrastructure on their continent, they too try to convince themselves “I built this”, and they too are constantly encouraged to spend their lives not taking responsibility, lashing out, and blaming the remaining 10% whites for everything.
And getting back to Russia, here is their eruption into South Africa/Guatemala levels of homicide, between the collapse of the USSR and Putin’s system retaking control.
It doesn’t even matter if the more peaceable levels are the “natural state” and the explosion of violence was an “aberration”, or if the violence is the “natural state”, and the peaceable levels are “suppression”. What matter is that either way it is possible to control it, when there is political will. And when this happens, it takes about a single generation to fix things.
So we’ve got:
1) US black IQ level countries doing OK
2) Most African blacks being less violent (in peacetime) than South African and US blacks
3) The post-Soviet example of the reality of halting and reversing the slide into Mad Max
The thug subclass of the US Negro is no doubt “subhuman” in the sense of dimwit sadistic scum, but white English Chavs, Slavic gopniks, and almost every society has a class of subhuman sadistic dimwits. Sometime this class overlaps with a specific ethnicity (just like in some place specific professions also overlap with specific ethnicities–taxi drivers, shopkeepers, bankers etc), and sometimes it goes across ethnic lines and is truly a “socioeconomic class” phenomenon.
Thus, the US Negro may have severe hardwired limitations concerning cognition and processing speed, but these limitations are also present in South East Europe and a bunch of other countries which are either doing fine, or on the verge of doing fine. Especially if, like Cuba and Iran, certain world powers give them a break.
So from the IQ point of view, having a US Negro chunk of the population is equal to having a South Slavic or Persian or Cuban chunk of the population.
From the impulsivity and violence point of view, this is more a question of the environment. In the “normal black African” places, they’ve got a functioning cultural substrata (family, neighborhood, village, church) community social structures, which in the west have been dismantled, and replaced either with made up “identity groups” or with prison gang culture.
This organic substrata is one half of what keeps sadistic dimwits in check. The other half is an external structure of law and order enforced by state institutions.
Additionally you’ve got the informational media context: does TV and other media encourage subhuman behavior in the relevant demographic group, or does it discourage it?
Upon the collapse of the USSR, you had the perfect storm:
1) the organic social substrata had been dismantled by the Soviet state, which took upon itself these functions, but then collapsed, leaving a barren landscape
2) the external institutional enforcement of law and order became for a while almost non-existent due to general demoralization, disorganization, and corruption
3) the media environment focused on building up the image of the heroic gangsta
It took Putin some time to be able to quietly reverse all three: to plan the seeds of new organic substrata; to reorganize the law and order enforcement; and to get the media to stop celebrating antisocial behavior.
Also, concerning blacks, in England, for example, there is still no concentrated push that expecting blacks to do well in school is “racist”, thus they do way better than US blacks.
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/11-to-16-years-old/a-to-c-in-english-and-maths-gcse-attainment-for-children-aged-14-to-16-key-stage-4/latest
Right now, globohomo maintains US blacks in an artificially amplified copy of the 1990s Russia situation: encouraging them to have no organic social structures aside from gang such; discouraging law and order to control them; celebrating everything antisocial and immoral.
The moment this starts getting reversed, the US blacks will begin gradually piping down, and ten years later will be just boring assholes. But until this happens, they will be a lethal tool for their handlers.
LOL!
(But thanks for spoiling Don Quixote for me – I hadn’t read that yet!)
My school teacher parents gave me a hundred Classics Illustrated comic books as a Christmas present as a child to try to improve my reading taste a little by luring me away from the Batman and Superman comic books I was reading all the time. I think it worked. The selections were pretty good as far as appealing to a boy, much better than what is forced on boys these days. Some of them have faded away as being considered classics like King of the Khyber Rifles or Under Two Flags but were entertaining. Many of them seemed to have been taken as much from the old Hollywood movie versions of them as the books themselves.
My other childhood exposure to literary classics were a couple dozen Mr. Magoo versions that ran on television in the nineteen sixties. These had Mr. Magoo playing characters in Don Quixote, A Christmas Carol, Moby Dick and so on. After having read the Classics Illustrated version of Moby Dick and watched the Mr. Magoo version of Moby Dick I feel like I don’t need to read the book.
I’m not going to try to read a novel by an Englishman named St. Aubyn until I am sure how his name is pronounced.
Sometimes you see an English name like that and find out the pronunciation is nothing like the spelling. I don’t want to embarrass myself by trying to tell people I read a good novel by so-and-so, only to find out my pronunciation is laughably wrong, and St. Aubyn is pronounced as “Swan” or something like that.
Roger Ebert, concluding his review of “About Schmidt”:
“Most teenagers will probably not be drawn to this movie, but they should attend. Let it be a lesson to them. If they define their lives only in terms of a good job, a good paycheck and a comfortable suburban existence, they could end up like Schmidt, dead in the water. They should start paying attention to that crazy English teacher.”
Good advice. But that was written in 2002. These days, most likely that English teacher uses a curriculum that has been, to use Harvard’s absurd term, “refreshed.”
By the way, Mr. Derb, your self-appraisal is probably correct when you write that your brain is probably too formally structured to highly excel at comparative literature. The superior comparative-literature brain possesses, to use the term that neuroscientists sometimes use, “exuberant synapses.” But nonetheless, your columns are highly loose-brained when it comes to culture and politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_St_Aubyn#Personal_background_and_education
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_St_Aubyn#Patrick_Melrose_series
I know Murray’s done some excellent work, but I still don’t like him. The snotty bitch ran his mouth a while back, trying to deflect, saying that he’d rather be living in a Hispanic slum than a similar “white bread” community. Yeah right.
Meanwhile, Bitch Boi actually lives in a community in rural Maryland that’s 99.3% White per the latest census.
Having read both the Classics Illustrated version and the actual book, I can recommend not bothering with Moby Dick in either form. A very long walk for a drink of water.
I re-read O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels when I hanker for some beautifully written reactionary fiction.
For the math problem, call the upper circle’s radius r1, the lower r2, and the larger r3. Translate the r1 and r2 circles to common axes (r2-r1 away from the r3 circle y-axis). Consider the r2 on the translated x-axis and r1 on the translated y-axis. The hypotenuse of that right triangle is r3. So r1^2 + r2^2 = r3^2. And therefore:
1/2 * pi * r1^2 + 1/2 * pi * r2^2 = 1/2 * pi * r3^2
q.e.d.
I meant 1/2 * (r2 – r1). r1 + epsilon = r2 – epsilon = r3 (where epsilon is the center of the circle for r3). So I meant 1/2 * (r2 – r1) for the common y-coordinate of the 2 semicircles.
“Prove that, within the larger circle, the shaded area is equal to the non-shaded area; in other words, that the sum of the areas of the two semicircles is half the area of the big circle.”
I don’t have the math to prove it, but looking at it intuitively, if I had to guess true or false whether the shaded area was equal to the non-shaded area, I’d have to guess “true”.
Whenever you have two semi-circles within a circle and they have parallel lines and a single contact point, as long as A, E and D form a straight line, and B, E and C form a straight line, then they are equal.
Is my intuition wrong?
Wuthering Heights was one of the first classics I read. It was a tough slog at first, but I loved the story. And the theme song from the movie is beautiful.
Is that two birds kissing, or the profile of the Jetsons’ housemaid?
But it brings up a question I have for any geologists or structural engineers who may be reading: Would a perfectly round basement be stronger, weaker, or just the same as a rectangular one?
A handyman who specializes in basement repair on Long Island wrote how a number of his clients had curved walls in theirs. They told him the original owners built them that way to repel witches. He didn’t say where those owners were from; he assumed they’d come through Ellis Island. But weren’t the Puritans and Dutch who settled the Island just as superstitious?
Jill’s last appearance in the top 1000 names given to American newborn girls was in the 20th century. Jillian and Gillian, once very rare here, have appeared more recently. How are they faring in the UK?
The Cosby allegations resurfaced after a 12-year hiatus when a comedian, Hannibal Buress, used them in his night-club act. Was Barbara Bowman a ditzy blonde in her reaction, or just being careful?
Only after a man? Or only after a black? True, a third of Coz’s victims were black, or at least mulatta, but how many of them were out front about it in 2005?
That term certainly exhibits more euphony than Steve Sailer’s citizenism. How about turning it around, like a gem in the hand? National civics has a nice ring to it.
Hell, in some circles “it’s still a thing” in real life. Check out Jamie Morgan’s 2007 documentary The Workshop, about a seminar held in northern California (where else?) by some elderly Brummie guru named Paul. A disturbing number of those attending are English.
Pontius Pilate was right on the button: “what is truth?”
It’s not just lefties but people on the economic right also need to face reality.
For example in his book Dead Aid Niall Ferguson believes that countries south of the Sahara can be as prosperous as Chinese-dominated Singapore if they made better “choices” i.e., adopted free market enterprise according to the gospel of Adam Smith.
Civic nationalism is silly. Aside from Northern Europeans nearly every other group is into kith and kin.
This is how America’s founding stock was dispossessed by organized Jewry. Upper caste Indians are following the same script in areas like Silicon Valley.
The fundamental problem with women is misplaced empathy which under normal Darwinistic conditions is for offspring. With the decline of traditional religions this is increasingly being directed towards social justice causes.
Thanks to technological advances it takes also a few farmers to feed millions. You have even fewer boffins inventing creature comforts powered by “cheap” energy from fossil fuels. As a result people have lots of time for self-indulgence be it feminism, sexual perversions or climate change fanatism.
You can contrast the above with most third world countries where kids, especially males, are consider a pension plan and impotence is a social stigma.
Unlike tough white men who kneel and abase themselves before Jews.
Video Link
Crime and Punishment- Dude whacks a porn granny, then feels guilty. He hooks up with a teen pro, but a cop gets him. Actually, he’s a loser and soy boy , so who cares …
War and Peace- French invade Russia, like in “Panzer General”. Russkies are tough, so French get their asses whipped. It’s cold and snows all the time, and ppl are talking about some weird stuff on whys of that all and sometimes have sex.
The Old Man and the Sea – Some Hispanic guy goes on fishing, and fishing, and fishing, and fishing …..
Ulysses- A Jewish slob goes around in Dublin, Ireland and snoops on everything. His bitch is banging another dude, and some loser townie guy always rants about church and stuff. Slob and loser become friends, and you don’t understand anything because the book is written by a fucked up Mick.
Moby Dick- A Yankee loon puts together a crew of third world coons and some Yankee meatheads and they go after a whale that had taken a snack of loon’s leg. Whale smashes them, like Godzilla vs any city. They deserve it because they talk all the time about sea, fishes and stuff. No broads abroad, so no action.
The Iliad- A Greek gold-digging slut goes with another Greek dude, but from another town. Her ex mans up and goes to war with that city to punish the bitch and get some plunder. The story is mostly about some dude who is Brad Pitt and the guy from the city had whacked his homie, so Pitt, who is gay, cannot get laid anymore.
Don Quijote- A crazy tall skinny guy goes with fat short fellow in search of something. They are beaten by local rednecks, but they won’t give up. All the time they talk shit and at the end tall guy dies, just to finish this goddamn book. There is Rosie O’Donnell in this book, but she is a horse.
Who buys the high cover price academic texts? Easy, academic libraries and departments all over the country, and probably all over the world. They have huge budgets and price is no issue to them. Professors have allowances to buy books in many schools and they order them up.
You know, it’s a big industry flipping textbooks for college students. I’ll go to my old college which is in my hometown every once in a while to use the library and see how things have changed and hang out, and I’ve noticed there’s actually a little van that goes around at the end of each semester and they set up a little booth and students come and sell their books to them and they give them prorated prices for books, depending on what they think they can sell them for on the internet. It’s a full blown business model!
I myself have made a cottage industry of selling Pharr’s Aeneid online. That’s the Premier Latin version of the Aeneid for learning students. There are a lot of Catholic schools where I live, and Latin is still part of the curriculums so these books sort of trickle into the used bookstores in the area. I typically pick them up for a few dollars and then flip them online for $30-$50 depending on the condition. I’ve always thought about that, that if I were particularly strapped the thing to do would be to go and buy them from the students at the end of the semester or year as they were getting out.
Great diary as usual.
Princeton eliminates Greek, Latin requirements for Classics majors to combat ‘racism’
https://thepostmillennial.com/princeton-eliminates-greek-latin-requirements-for-classics-majors-to-combat-racism
It’s not really a euphemism — it’s a deliberate rhetorical fallback position. The motte to the social constructivist bailey. “OK, perhaps there are certain very minor differences between the races, but they’re literally skin-deep and have no larger significance.”
Yep. The woke rationalization for that starts with what is now old-time “standpoint epistemology”. Wiki says that this is:
…the notion that the perspectives of marginalized and/or oppressed individuals can help to create more objective accounts of the world. Through the outsider-within phenomenon, these individuals are placed in a unique position to point to patterns of behavior that those immersed in the dominant group culture are unable to recognize.
In other words, from the anti-White standpoint, officially-designated “victim” groups [say, females or indigenous non-White subalterns] have an “epistemic advantage” relative to officially designated “oppressor” groups [like males or White “colonizers”]. Because of their “outsider” position, “victims” are able to analyze the behavior of oppressor groups in an relatively objective manner, while “oppressors” who attempt to analyze the behavior of victims are not only hopelessly subjective, but are clearly “anti-victimites” who are motivated solely by a dangerous form of hatred termed “anti-victimism.”
Hey, this kind of sounds familiar — almost as if it’s a reworked version of a trope that dates back to well before 3rd wave feminism. I wonder if Palestinians in Israel have much of an “epistemic advantage?” Or is there an unprincipled exception for that particular case?
Anyway, standpoint theory has been superseded by the currently-hegemonic anti-White doctrine of intersectionality, which differs in at least 2 major ways from standpoint theory:
1. While standpoint theory is largely one-dimensional/ binary — male/ female, indigenous/ colonizer, etc., intersectionality looks at multiple axes [male/ female, White/ non-White, tranny/ normal, etc.] for each person in order to generate an overall victim point total.
2. Standpoint theory admits the possibility of objectivity, while intersectionality goes full Foucault everything is subjective “discourses.”
But it retains the concept of “lived experience,” and it’s central to ideological enforcement/ suppressing heresy. By definition, of course, the “lived experience” of White male goyim is automatically invalid. But what if you are a member of an officially-designated victim group, but you happen to disagree with important aspects of the One True Ideology?
Well then, clearly you’re suffering from “false consciousness”, i.e. internalized oppression internalized racism/ internalized sexism/ internalized whiteness or whatever… and your lived experience doesn’t count either.
If this sounds to you like an elaborate maze of pilpul intended to disguise a simple, straightforward concept like: “Anyone who disagrees with our ideology is automatically wrong; their opinion is invalid and must be suppressed”… then clearly you’re just not woke enough, bigot.
White women are substantially less likely to be woke than white men. Wokeness threatens white women and pedestalizes nonwhite women. Kind of like white men do.
LOL and Thanks, Bardon. The thanks is for saving me a trip to the library.
;-}
Happy, there’s more to it than that, and since I forgot to add some info. to Mr. Derbyshire’s take on textbook inflation, I will now.
Look, there are editions of engineering Statics/Dynamics book that have nothing different from their predecessors than the homework problems. It ain’t like Newton’s laws have changed since the last one, and BTW, even the homework problems are not different, but just in a different order. (i.e. problem 6 is now problem 21, etc…) You’d think, with the internet and the software we have, there’d be great sites for trading, making much better deals than back in the day, when you’d get less than 50% the book stores for your once-used book, then pay 75-90% back on the re-sale of others back in the day.
Why can’t this happen? It’s because the publishers use computer codes to lock you out. See, you get a DVD with the book that has some extra work of some sort. That thing has a code. The professor requires one to work the problems or do assignments that are DVD based. You need to use that DVD, or you can’t get a good grade. Next semester, code no workey! Why does the professor require the DVD then? That’s because he’s part of that system, and maybe even the author of some of these. Peak Stupidity discussed all this in “The Great University Textbook Scam” a few years back.
There’s a Pappus Chain in there somewhere ….and even a Coxeter Loxodr0mic Tangent Sequence….all you need are three semicircles….don’t forget the beautiful Arbelos…
And, if I may, one final word on White Supremacy:
yes.
The Han People of China let an Obama Official at a Chinese Airport know about Han Race Power and Han Supremacy….God Bless the Chinese Nazi People in China!!!
Native White Folks in America need to be no more…no less RACIST than the wonderful Nazi Chinese People of China….if they were…they would never have allowed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to be repealed….and never have to experience the wrath of Chinese race power in US Election Voting Booths on Nov 3 2020…
Did Ted Kennedy think there were too many White People in America in 1965?
Kennedy had been in Congress for just three years when that legislation was passed. He was also a lightweight. The principal senate sponsor of the bill was Sen. Philip Hart.
With the greatest of respect, that’s the stupidest (but also the funniest) thing I’ve ever read. Today.
Speaking as an English literature graduate (and all-round nice guy), I’m happy enough to help to put you out of your misery. Old-fashioned as it may be, the name is correctly pronounced (at least, by me) exactly as it looks – “saint-OR-bin”.
You’re welcome.
do you really think you could go back; or some other of your live-long friend’s goes back to pick up mistakes?!? – wtf!!!- grow up if you are younger than me or Steve or several other substantive, very young reporters!!!!!!grrrrrr I am just a housewife, so whatevah!!! hahhahahaha
fuck you. JFK Kennedy (Edward had some serious daddy/brother issues) never felt there were issues that were alarming to cause riots in the early 60’s – his baby brother, loser, drinker, pedo, womanizer, the traitor, stirred those up – it is all about money – who gave you the money to buy/restore/salvage your property.
Senator Edward Kennedy, Jr. is to blame FOR EVERYTHING SINCE DONALD TRUMP. PROGRESSIVES NEED TO BE HUNG AND QUARTERED BY THEIR OWN POLICIES. Democrats need to be killed en masse by fire – they tortured children and they need to die.
oops, I really hate, hate, hate people!!! – but they are mean and probably are pedos, so, whatever. Democrats and many Republicans need to be executed. They do not deserve to live because they killed and tortured children or ingested the blood of tortured children – we have the photos and film – Surprise!!!!
I thought it was “Speaking your truth.”
As for the MAA, perhaps it is time to appoint “Math is hard” Barbie as its executive director.
Try reading Moby Dick when you are angry and depressed- While trying to sell your house – It’s much better in that atmosphere.
Whoa, lady. How many martinis have you had today?
I think you’re holding out on us. C’mon, spit it out. Don’t hold back. Tell us what you really think.
I’m willing to take your word for it. If it took me as long to sell my house as it did to read Mr. Melville’s Opus, I’d be angry and depressed too. I hope things are much sunnier for you now.
Is this a close depiction of your life?
Your logic is flawed. South African blacks should be boring assholes too then. If they were given a separate part of america where they wouldn’t interact with whites and thus maintain an inferiority complex you might possibly be right if you ignore all other indicators about africa but the murder rate (which I’m not going to bother to look up but ill just assume you are correct), but that’s very unlikely to happen. They would also need to have their memories erased. Sadly this technology does not yet exist.
Interesting. That’s quite a departure from the Britain of Orwell’s childhood. In his day, Brit kids were surrounded by Yank kid-lit:
Of course, Orwell felt that that earlier American tradition was far superior to what was being produced in his own day:
https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/bangor/english/e_bangor
UK Blacks are much more violent than UK Whites:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/25/killings-of-black-people-in-england-and-wales-at-highest-level-for-decades
Derbyshire says, “Prove that, within the larger circle, the shaded area is equal to the non-shaded area; in other words, that the sum of the areas of the two semicircles is half the area of the big circle.”
In other words, prove that r1^2 + r2^2 = (1/2)*r3^2, where the r’s are radii.
blake1266 says. “1/2 * pi * r1^2 + 1/2 * pi * r2^2 = 1/2 * pi * r3^2”, which reduces to r1^2 + r2^2 = r3^2.
Blakes’ equation is incorrect. His equation sets the sum of the areas of the two semicircles equal to the area of the circle, instead of half the area.
How to solve the equation pi*r1^2 + pi*r2^2 = pi*(1/2)*r3^2 ?
Let r1 = r2 = (1/2)*r3, noticing that (1/2)^2 = 1/4.
Then pi*(1/4)*(R1)^2 + pi*(1/4)*(r2)^2 = pi*(1/2)*r3^2 , half the area of the circle with radius r3.
Here’s the first YouTube posted segment of the Glenn Loury & Charles Murray discussion:
The Coming Backlash | Glenn Loury & Charles Murray | The Glenn Show
none of you, or any of you, should respond to my June 5th post. The game is over.
Here’s the next posted segment:
Grappling with Genetic Variation | Glenn Loury & Charles Murray | The Glenn Show
…and here finally is the entire discussion:
Facing Reality | Glenn Loury & Charles Murray | The Glenn Show
Also can be seen at Bloggingheads.tv:
https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/61888
Coleman Hughes and Charles Murray:
The Consequences of the Race & IQ Discourse with Charles Murray
Facing “Facing Reality” | Glenn Loury & John McWhorter | The Glenn Show
…and here finally is the entire episode:
Coleman Hughes on The Perils of Race Science with Charles Murray [S2 Ep.21]
…and here, from within the entire episode, is a link to the last segment, where Glenn Loury offers a qualified defense of Charles Murray’s book to counter John McWhorter’s critique:
Rejecting Racial Determinism | Glenn Loury & John McWhorter | The Glenn Show
The data from other African countries are not always trustworthy. South Africa still has a first world level of reporting data. I was told by a Ghanian that Nigeria was more dangerous than South Africa. Maybe South Africa uses “White standards”.