April 23, 2002

Vijay Singh and race


Race is not Color: There's a general assumption among Americans that skin color determines race. Consider, though, golfer Vijay Singh, the 2000 Masters Champion and second round leader this year. Singh is of Asian Indian descent (and born in Fiji.) Yet, Singh is very dark (a lot darker than Tiger Woods, as you can see below), but he's obviously not sub-Saharan African. As you can see, Singh has Caucasian features. Further, the media doesn't treat him as if he is "black" ((i.e., having a significant number of fairly recent ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa). Nobody cared when he won his two major championships. If he was African, there would have been no end of whoop-tee-do. The point is that when you wonder what race somebody is, you are in fact asking not what his skin color is, but who is in his family tree. Skin color can be one clue to genealogy, but it's a very crude one.

Diversity Nook


An Alert Reader writes:

Here's something you might have missed...because it's away up in Maine.

"Professor Accused of Racist Remarks" His crime? Saying, "Do you know that on average blacks have a lower IQ than whites?" [Of course, that's the one thing in the Bell Curve Debates that all informed controversialists agree upon.]

It has been picked up by the Boston papers, which of course want this guy hung from his thumbs for uttering something every liberal knows can't be true, there are differences among races. The truly amusing bit is that the prof doesn't really seem to believe it particularly... he was just provoking the students (successfully, I guess). A committee of diversicrats is on the case, so in due course "justice" will ensue. Hope he's working on his thumb exercises.

And here's something predictable: the complaining student is a worker from the university's Diversity Nook or whatever they call it there. She is stumbling through a lightweight course ("majoring in communications") at age 36. What a pity and a loss to society, that discrimination has held her so far back. Why, she might have been a towering giant in education policy or something.

Neoconservative Creationism

Can you guess where this quote appeared? (You may have to read it twice because the prose style is intentionally oracular.)

"Although more powerful by far than astrology, molecular biology is not appreciably different in kind, the various celestial houses having about as much to do with human affairs as the various genes."

Ms? Mother Jones? Tikkun? Nope, it was in the Weekly Standard (3/18/02), in a book review by creationist David Berlinksi. Yo, Dave, have you ever met identical twins? Yo, Bill K., are you trying to make conservatives into laughing-stocks by publishing high-brow fools like Berlinksi?

"Dog Bites Man! Kenyan Wins Boston Marathon!"

Kenyan Rodgers Rop fended off fellow Kenyan Christopher Cheboiboch at the finish line "Dog Bites Man! Kenyan Wins Boston Marathon!" Running offers one of the clearest ways to study human biodiversity as I pointed out in National Review.




The Running Tribe of Kenya

The Running Tribe of Kenya - Here's John H. Manners' fascinating article about the three million member Kalenjin tribe of the Kenyan Highlands. They win about 3 of every 8 medals awarded in world-class distance running. Manners, who has lived and run among the Kalenjin, offers an evolutionary explanation.

Derbyshire on Dinesh D'Souza

John Derbyshire's near-rave review for Dinesh D'Souza's new 9-11 book What's So Great About America seems pretty much on the money: "I therefore stand in awe of him for having done so brilliantly well what I do not think I could have done." Unfortunately, Derb's caveat is accurate as well:

"... this book does not contain any striking or original insights. Most of what the author has to say will be familiar to anyone who reads conservative magazines or visits websites like this one. What's So Great is not pioneering political science: It is pop-political science. That's OK. There is hardly any work a writer can more usefully engage in than to bring to a large, general audience ideas that have been worked over and polished smooth by small cliques of interested parties."

Still, as talented as Dinesh is at this, I think he's got more in him than that. His is one of the most lucid voices in the Conservative Echo Chamber, but, especially since 9-11, it's getting awfully crowded in there, with countless guys creating blogs to tell you - for free! - why America is better than, say, Iraq. Dinesh has reached a point in his life - pushing 40, a husband, a father - where he's seen enough of the world to take a deep breath and write that Big Book that would stake out some new perspective beyond the Echo Chamber.

"Murder by Numbers"

Here's my review of Sandra Bullock in "Murder by Numbers." It's a laborious, visually gloomy, and generally distasteful police procedural. Eventually, though, it shines an interesting light on how the existence of the death penalty helps ruthless cops bring bad guys to justice.

Are gays cool?

Gay libertarian Jonathan Rauch argues in The Atlantic that "social conservatives should support same-sex marriage" because the contemporary coolness of gay men is making marriage unfashionable among straights. Maybe. But are we all that sure gays are really becoming cooler? Sure, everybody says so. But are straight men actually acting that way? There is a lot of evidence that since about 1969, when a riot by bereaved drag queens at the Stonewall Bar who were drowning their sorrows following Judy Garland's funeral launched the Gay Lib era, straight men have been increasingly fleeing from gay-heavy pastimes and institutions. "Not that there's anything wrong about that," as Seinfeld and Costanza would nervously proclaim when protesting they weren't gay.

Consider the musical. This was widely perceived as the Great American Art Form until the American public's increasingly sophisticated gaydar detected its disproportionate appeal to gay men. Of course, plenty of the great figures in the history of the musical - Richard Rodgers, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse, Fred Astaire, P.G. Wodehouse, and the like - were straight. Yet, over over the last three decades, the musical has increasingly become a gay ghetto as no longer clueless straight guys have taken to avoiding it.

Therefore, I've long suspected that allowing gay men to get married (in what will, no doubt, often be elaborately theatrical ceremonies) will make weddings even more distasteful to straight men than they are now. And that would be bad for society since the character of a society is determined overwhelmingly by its straight men, especially by their attitudes towards marriage

This suggests, by the way, that the long term threat to the American Catholic Churched posed by its youth-fondling scandal is that it is exposing the extent to which homosexuals pervade the Church hierarchy, thus alienating straight men. (Even the gay-dominated New York Times - where 75% of the people sitting around the table deciding what goes on the front page are homosexual, according to its top reporter Rick Berke - has finally admitted that the scandal is driven not by pedophiles but by fairly conventional male homosexuals feeling up adolescent and teenage boys.

There are lots of countries like Italy and Mexico where the male population largely shuns the Church, in part due to the perceived effeminacy of the priesthood. The U.S. Catholic Church was spared this for a long time due to the high masculinity levels of Irish priests, but that era appears to be well over. This does not bode well for the influence of the American Catholic Church. In any society, straight men will always provide most of the leaders.

why are gay men more prevalent as actors in the theatre than in movies?

So, why are gay men more prevalent as actors in the theatre than in movies? Lots of reasons, no doubt, but one that stands out is the title of that Sondheim musical: Applause. Generally speaking, straight male actors don't mind doing the same take 26 times in row in front of a bunch of bored Teamsters, as long as they ultimately get paid off in terms of money, fame, women, and power. Gay actors, in contrast, tend to place a much higher value on adulation from a live audience.

Jenin and Black Hawk Down

Jenin and Black Hawk Down - In my review of the ultra-realistic war movie last January, I pointed out the inherent dilemma that a superior military has when invading a city whose armed men are willing to fight from their own homes with their women and children by their sides. Do you send in lightly armed infantry to spare the non-combatants, but suffer a lot of losses yourself (as we did in Mogadishu in 1993)? Or do you go in heavy and flatten their homes, but suffer a PR disaster? In my review, I discussed these alternatives in the context of an assault on Baghdad, but, clearly, the Israelis ran into this same tough choice in Jenin. They appear to have started out light, but after losing men, switched to heavy tactics, using bulldozers to flatten Palestinians' homes so they could avoid the boobytrapped streets. Israel won the battle, of course, but at the cost of diplomatically catastrophic TV coverage. We need to think hard now about which we would choose in case the Iraqis use Somalian-Palestinian methods to defend Baghdad.

Number 2 Pencil, psychometrician Kimberly Swygert's blog

Number 2 Pencil, psychometrician Kimberly Swygert's blog, is devoted to defending standardized testing.

Le Pen and Muslim immigration

In a supposedly huge upset, France's far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has driven the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin into retirement by beating him for the second spot in the May 5th runoff with incumbent President Jacques Chirac. Of course, it shouldn't have been a surprise: Le Pen always does better in elections than in polls, where the vast prejudice again him intimidates some of his supporters into telling pollsters they will vote for somebody else. Further, on one huge issue - Muslim immigration - Le Pen has been proven right. The disgusting pogroms against French Jews and the pusillanimous response of the French state is a direct result of the massive immigration of North Africans.

To amuse yourself, note how few articles about Le Pen's showing draw any connection between Muslim immigration and the current pogroms. In the American media establishment eyes, any Europeans against immigration must be incipient Nazis. After all, proper-thinking people know that the only solution for European anti-Semitism is massive immigration. Of course, it's worked out exactly the opposite, with Jew-hating Muslim immigrants now holding the whip hand in many French cities, where the gendarmes worry that if the North African youth are not permitted to run amok against the Jews, they'll riot against everybody, as the Muslims did in Britain last year. But don't expect ugly reality to interfere with the popularity among American media elites of such a beautiful theory.

The Scorpion King and The Rock


The Scorpion King is # 1 at the box office. It's not bad, but the only thing special about this medium budget sword and sorcery movie set in ancient Canaan (not Egypt) is wrestler The Rock, who looks well-poised to become the next action superstar. The bad guy in The Scorpion King is - prepare to die of surprise - an English-accented white man with Hitlerish-sounding intentions to impose "order for 1,000 years" on the "free tribes." The tribes, oddly enough, are each internally multiracial, which must be a surprise to anthropologists. Fortunately, The Rock is around to lead America (oops, I mean the free tribes) to victory over the English Nazi toff. Although it embodies the same racial conventions as other recent adventure films like The Time Machine and Atlantis - noble Tiger Woodsian multiracials battle Northern European oppressors - it's less schematic and more of a good-natured pastiche of ancient legends from all over.

I wrote an article last summer on wrestling, race, and The Rock (I know an awful lot more about professional wrestling that I care to, courtesy of my sons). An excerpt: "Race, of course, remains a potential danger spot in any American enterprise. Fortunately for the World Wrestling Foundation, it has found the perfect post-racial man in its biggest star, "The Rock," the wrestler who bills himself as "the most electrifying man in sports entertainment." A third generation pro wrestler, The Rock (born Duane Johnson) is a hybrid offspring of America's two most muscular racial groups. His maternal grandfather, Chief Peter Maivia, was the first Samoan star, while his father Rocky Johnson was the WWF's first African-American Tag Team champion. Yet, The Rock looks neither Samoan nor black. Instead, he gives the impression of being some sort of future human, a superbly handsome specimen from a race that will someday evolve from all that is most formidable in existing humanity."

Guess who's gay the Andrew Sullivan way!


Guess who's gay the Andrew Sullivan way! - It's always fun to speculate on which prominent conservatives are closeted homosexuals. One method I've found is to watch whom Andrew Sullivan extols. It's far, far from fool-proof, but when Andy gets all fired up over somebody for several days, the odds that the object of his enthusiasm is gay are definitely greater than random. For example, he chose for his Book Club, The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg, who is an out homosexual. It's kind of a Gay Rightwinger Mutual Admiration Society over at AndrewSullivan.com. Not that there's anything wrong with that! (The only thing Testosterone Andrew likes more than promoting his fellow gay conservatives is denouncing identity politics, especially when blacks are guilty of favoritism toward their own kind.) Hey, doesn't it seem like Sullivan writes a lot about the wonderfulness of Matt Drudge?

Hernando de Soto

I met Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, at the annual Milken Institute shindig tonight. He's one helluva guy. He gave me some ideas for how America really could help Mexico by getting it to put in place the property rights structures needed to allow Mexicans to make a decent living at home with their families.

Le Pen and Sharon: Separated at birth?

Check out the letter in VDARE giving a nicely balanced view of what's behind Jean-Marie Le Pen's electoral success. Also, in my introduction I included a link to a fascinating interview of Le Pen by the excellent leftist Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. What I'm struck by is how similar in personality Le Pen and Ariel Sharon are. If they had been accidentally exchanged at birth, Le Pen would no doubt be sending bulldozers into Jenin these days while Sharon would have horrified all establishment opinion by making it to the finals of the French election.

mass immigration into European countries

Advanced opinion has long advocated mass immigration into European countries to prevent a rebirth of anti-Semitism by diluting their homogeneity and thus making nationalist sentiment impractical. Well, like the guns of Singapore, this policy proved to be pointing 180 degrees in the wrong direction - the real anti-Semites in countries like France turned out to be the immigrants. Plus, the anti-nationalist EU-loving mainstream politicians of Europe have shown an anti-Israeli streak that borders on anti-Semitism. Why? I suspect because Israel represents the opposite of what the European Union is trying to accomplish: the emasculation of the nationalist impulse. The Jewish State is a pre-1914-style heredity-based nation-state, with some of the same kind of territorial fears and ambitions that brought nationalism into disrepute in contemporary Europe.

Le Pen's sympathy for Sharon

Lots of good stuff on Le Pen from UPI. James Bennett's Anglosphere column points out:

The greatest danger with Europe is not from the little Le Pens seeking to return to inward-looking national protectionism and hatred of foreigners. It is from Eurocrats seeking to construct a grand Euro-Lepenisme of inward-looking continental protectionism and contempt for non-"Europeans" [i.e., European Union supporters]...In the search for enemies, it's pretty obvious who will be Candidate Number One. America, already a favorite whipping boy economically, politically, and culturally, will be further elevated as Europe's main rival. As for internal enemies, the European Union is defining a class of "xenophobes" whose xenophobia is evidently exhibited primarily by opposition to the European Union. Ironically, openly Zionist Jews may soon find themselves categorized as "xenophobes."

Veteran analyst Marty Sieff, a former speechwriter for Bibi Netanyahu, predicts that Le Pen could actually win next Sunday:

That 28 percent of [far left] voters who rejected Jospin in the first round because they thought he was going to sell out French national interests to the EU are certainly not going to swing behind Chirac in the second round when they know he embraced those policies all the more enthusiastically. On the contrary, they are far more likely to rally round Le Pen because he has unabashedly championed restoring the French national currency, the franc, and putting national interests ahead of the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels as well as the imagined sinister corporate American masterminds in New York and Washington.

Well, maybe, but I'll predict Chirac will win 66-34. [Shows what I know about French politics!] You have to realize how much the French Left hates Israel (see Chris Caldwell's new cover story in the Weekly Standard). Le Pen is far more sympathetic to Israel they are. Here's what he told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz:

"In my judgment, there is a basic popular sympathy for Israel in France, but the demonstrative sympathy tends to go to the other side. In the current conflict, the French media is pro-Arab for two reasons: The large Arab and Islamic presence in France combined with the weight of the billion Muslims in the world, and the fact that Sharon is a rightist. The hostility would be less if a leftist prime minister was pursuing exactly the same policy. The government would have preferred not to take a stand, but the constant presence of the Israeli-Arab conflict on our television screens made it an issue that could no longer be avoided. The result is that you [Israel] are now experiencing what we experienced in the war in Algeria: The Israeli government says that it is a victim of terrorist activity, but this activity is less visible than the military strikes. I belonged to the 10th paratroop division that was ordered to destroy the terror in Algiers. This was after a series of terror attacks against civilians in public centers. The division did wipe out terror, and it didn't do this by being gentle with the terrorists. A war on terror is a brutal thing... I completely understand the State of Israel, which is seeking to defend its citizens." - Le Pen

Of course, Israelis are not going to appreciate being compared to France's defense of its huge settlement in Algeria (now extinct), but the comparison seems apt. Further, the Jewish State is something of a model for what Le Pen would like the French State to be. Israel keeps tight control over who gets to immigrate; encourages Jewish culture, religion and the Hebrew language; privileges Jews over non-Jews in terms of property rights (most of the land of Israel is off-limits for purchase by its Arab citizens) and political rights (the unwritten law has been that Arab MPs can't be used to form a majority in the Knessett); unilateralist in foreign policy; and so forth. Finally, as I've mentioned before, Le Pen and Sharon are men cut from the same rugged cloth. One difference between Sharon and Le Pen, though, is that the Frenchman has no obvious territorial ambitions.