December 5, 2004

The Decline and Fall of the American Teenybopper:

For about a quarter of a century in the middle of the last century, adolescent girls had a superb sense for recognizing the next big thing in pop musical greatness, going crazy over Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Michael Jackson long before any other demographic segments did . For example, back in 1944 when my late mother-in-law was 14, she put on her bobby-sox and took the El down to the Chicago Loop at 9am to see Sinatra sing for 15 minutes. Sinatra was so popular with bobby-soxers then that he did something like eleven shows a day.

Then, something happened and teenyboppers stopped being able to sense greatness: they were into Bobby Sherman, the Bay City Rollers, and the Backstreet Boys. I think there were several causes:

First, teenyboppers' judgment was at its best during stylistic innovations such as the invention of rock and roll in the mid-Fifties and the British Invasion in the mid-Sixties. In contrast, there has been little stylistic innovation since the second half of the 1970s, which saw the popularization of disco, rap, punk, and the various "new wave" styles. My son listens to LA's "New Rock" station KROQ, but just about everything they play could have been created in 1982.

Second, the way you become a legend with the people who write about popular music -- who are, overwhelmingly, adult males -- is by making music for adult males. Thus, Sinatra took control of his music-making in 1953 and ascended to a new level of sophistication, as did the Beatles in 1965-1967, and the Stones, too, lagging, as always, a little behind the Beatles. As an artist, Presley's weakness was the he was just too nice a guy, too polite and compliant, and never took control of his own artistry, allowing himself to be pushed around by Col. Parker and other mediocrities, although his brief 1968 comeback, which produced "Suspicious Minds" and "Burnin' Love" indicates what he was capable of.

Bob Dylan, however, showed that you could bypass the teeny-bopper stage of your career and go right for the critics.

Third, various impresarios discovered that rather than wait around for some raw genius to strike sparks with teenyboppers, you could manufacture bands that would push young girls' buttons in a Pavlovian fashion.

Fourth, as the search intensified for male singers who could function as unthreatening "practice boyfriends" for young girls, regular guys like Sinatra, who was in his mid-20s when the teeny-boppers discovered him and was definitely not the ideal "practice boyfriend," were shunted aside for more specialized types. What impresarios look for in teenybopper idols are males who seem younger than they actually are, but they are less likely to grow up to appeal to adult males.

A reader writes:

I dunno bout your theory but I have my own observations. Somewhere in the 70s there started increased specialization. Whereas in the past both boys and girls listened to the same bands. Like in the 80s you had hair bands that strongly appealed to guys but not so much girls. And this trend only got stronger culminating with Nirvana. Which is ironic because Kurt Cobain hated the people who loved his music the most, that is, testosterone addled teen males. But also rap, doesn't appeal much to girls, but a lot of guys love it.

I think it would be impossible to have a super-act like the Beatles today. The market is segmented too much to have such a band dominate. Is this good or bad? I dunno, it just is.

Right. A band like The Clash, which has the #8 album on Rolling Stone magazine's Top 500 albums of all time, with London Calling, has a very specific market niche -- high IQ males interested in politics as well as music, which pretty well defines rock critics. But it's hard to get girls interested in The Clash. The gender divisions have only gotten deeper since then. For example, back in 1982 KROQ played lots of girl groups, like The Go-Gos, including some goofy novelty hits, like Toni Basil's cheerleader chant "Hey, Mickey," but today, even though, the general style of the music has barely changed, the only girl group on the regular rotation is No Doubt, and the mix is aimed overwhelmingly at boys.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 1, 2004

Nuland vs. Cosh over "House, M.D."

Sherwin Nuland slams Fox's "House, M.D." for portraying a doctor who is a jerk and Colby Cosh slams back -- The premise of the new show starring Hugh Laurie is: Wouldn't it be cool if every hospital had a Greg Cochran on staff for diagnosing the really hard cases -- an irascible genius who has personally been burned by other doctors' incompetence at diagnosis and now won't let anything, including reputation, civility, and other people's self-esteem -- get in the way of figuring out what the damn disease is?

Everybody has stories abut doctors' incompetence at diagnosis. Personally, back in 1997 I had a board-licensed M.D. feel a hot dog-sized tumor growing out of my armpit and tell me, "Don't worry about it. It's probably just a muscle pull." But he was a nice guy! In contrast, the non-Hodgkin's lymphoma expert I eventually went to who had access to a life-saving cutting edge experimental monoclonal antibody treatment was a jerk, but I'm alive today, seven years later. Thank you, Dr. Jerk!


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 21, 2004

Africa, AIDS, and multiple concurrent relationships

New and Improved, with the magic ingredient: proofreading! --


Needed Role Model: O.J. Simpson? -- Discover Magazine runs an interesting article (not online) on the big improvement that Western statisticians finally realized they had to plug into their models to explain why HIV spreads so much faster in sub-Saharan Africa -- "multiple concurrent relationships." Originally, American computer whizzes assumed that the sexual behavior of Africans resembled to one degree or another various American models -- monogamy, serial monogamy, promiscuity, mistress-keeping, prostitution, etc. But they missed the key difference between Africa and much of the non-tropical world: a large proportion of both the men and women of Africa are involved in simultaneous long term relationships with two or more members of the opposite sex.


The author of the Discover article fails to pick up on the cause, but it leaps out from her interviews with African men: the lower level of male jealousy in Africa. The men the journalist interviewed drinking beer in a Botswana bar one morning all claim to have more than one long-term girlfriend. There's nothing surprising in this. What is very surprising for Westerners, though, is the complacency with which they assume that their multiple girlfriends probably have multiple boyfriends, as well. Feminists should be delighted by their enlightened commitment to sexual equality, their assumption that what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, too.


An anthropologist friend of mine living with an African tribe went off on a multi-day trip with some of the men of the tribe. They were supposed to be back, say, Wednesday morning but on Tuesday evening they were making such good time that he suggested they drive onward and get home late that night. His hosts were dismayed at this ungentlemanly suggestion. A good husband, they explained, never unexpectedly showed up late at night. It could create the most embarrassing scenes with his wife and her lover.


In contrast, O.J. Simpson assumed it was perfectly reasonable for him to have many women, but the notion that his ex-wife was fooling around with a younger version of himself, USC Heisman Trophy winning running back Marcus Allen, drove him nuts -- a much more American than African response.


Evolutionary psychologists explain why men are more sexually jealous and women are more romantically jealous (i.e., a man more hates the idea of his wife sleeping with another man, while a woman more hates the idea of her husband caring for another woman) by reference to the old rhyme:


Mother's baby

Father's maybe


In other words, a man has to police his wife's sexual fidelity in order to not get saddled working like a dog for 18 years to support another's man's child. But what happens in the large swathes of the world where the husband doesn't expect to slave away to support his wife's children, legitimate or not? Evolutionary psychologists aren't very good at thinking about diversity. They simply assume that humanity is so homogenous that they can understand the whole human race by giving questionnaires to their UC Santa Barbara students.


Indeed, African men are more likely to insist than to object to their women going out into the workplace. By one estimate, women do not just 50% of the work, but 80% of the work in sub-Saharan Africa.

And that seems to be the key to explaining the AIDS epidemic in Africa: on average, African men aren't jealous enough to do what it takes to keep their women faithful. Why not? Because they are less likely than men in the rest of the world to support their women's children, so getting handed cuckoo's egg kids by adulterous wives is less skin off their noses than it would be for men in cultures where husbands are expected to make higher degrees of paternal investment in their nominal kids.


Thus, you see in African cultures tendencies both toward hyper-polygamy and matrilineal/matrilocal family structures. Outside of the tropics, you have to be the Emperor of China or the equivalent to be able to afford a huge number of wives. But, in systems of tropical agriculture where most of the work is gardening (e.g., weeding), which women, with their nimble fingers, can do better than men, you sometimes see handsome men with 100 or more wives. Of course, he can't afford to keep them locked up in harems, so he puts them to work in the fields, where they can produce enough to support themselves and their children. Now, the 99 local bachelors who are left over are going to spend a lot of effort to lure the polygamist's wives out of the fields and into the bushes, so, many of the children born to the local Big Man's wives are not going to be his genetic offspring. But their mother's can support them, so it's no big deal to him.


Likewise, it's much more common for tropical folks like Africans and Melanesians than elsewhereto have social structures where there is so little certainty of paternity that the mother's brother plays a major role as the adult male in the lives of the mother's children. After all, he knows for sure that he's at least the half-uncle of his sister's kids, while her husband might have no genetic relationship to them. These sometimes are "matrilocal" families where the brother lives with his sister and her children, while her husband and other lovers may live with their sisters.

Another time, the anthropologist was once about to go off on a dangerous trip into lion country. The tribespeople were very worried about him, and asked what to do with his possessions in case he gotten eaten. He said, "Just send them to my wife." They were shocked at this immoral reply: "Don't you want us to send them to your family?" (i.e., to his sisters) they asked in disbelief.


(Of course, polygamy and matrilocalism are somewhat contradictory in practice. A man with 100 wives who lived in 100 different villages would be as exhausted as the traveling salesman in a 1920s joke. So, there is a wide vary of African family structures. But, the overall bell curves of kinship systems in Africa are significantly shifted in directions implied by the relatively higher ability of African women to fend for themselves and their children without males as providers.


This lack of male jealousy makes Africans particularly susceptible to the spread of venereal diseases like AIDS.

By this analysis, O.J. Simpson would represent assimilation toward the non-tropical norm of high male jealously

April 23, 2002

West Bank Wall: The Cyprus Solution

The Cyprus Solution: The reason Palestinian suicide bombers can blow up Israeli citizens is because Israel lets them walk up and stand next to its citizens. The nearby island of Cyprus had nonstop violence between Greeks and Turks until a wall was built dividing the island into two separate spheres. In the quarter century since, there have been very few killings. To paraphrase Robert Frost, good fences make non-homicidal neighbors.

Sure, Palestinians could blindly lob mortar rounds over a wall, but with the kind of radar tracking artillery suppression technology that Israel has now, that could be stomped out. Plus, the Israelis are working on an exciting missile defense system using armed drones to blast enemy ballistic missiles during their slow and vulnerable boost phase.

A wall would be expensive for the Israeli economy in the short run, since the Israelis rely on the Palestinians to be low wage hewers of wood and drawers of water. But, it would be truer to the original Zionist conception of building a separate economy where Jews performed all the jobs, not just the middle man minority jobs that Jews specialized in elsewhere. Anyway, the Israelis can always bring in less dangerous immigrants from places like Thailand to do the grunt work.

Hegemony and Israel

Better Be Careful What You Wish For Dept.: Apparently, it never occurred to the neocons that if they persuaded the U.S. to smite their foes in the Middle East, such as Iraq and Iran, then America's special relationship with Israel would have to be cranked down, as Dick Cheney's recent trip to the Mid East to find bases for an Iraq invasion and the accompanying tilt away from Israel showed. (See this Weekly Standard editorial for a classic example of Don't-Get-Itness.) Back in September I wrote:

The neo-conservatives need to wake up to realize that if America really takes up the Imperial Burden in the Middle East like the Wolfowitz Wing is demanding, then America's special relationship with Israel is history. Support for Israel is purely a matter of domestic idealism. The American institution that thinks in the broad picture - the State Department - has always found Israel to be a nuisance.

The more the U.S. becomes responsible for running the whole Mid East, the more of an inconvenience Israel becomes. Republics can indulge warm and idealistic commitments precisely because their foreign entanglements are limited in number; empires must be cold and calculating because their burdens are so manifold.

Chris Webber's $280,000

NCAA Madness! - Court testimony shows that former U. of Michigan star B-Baller Chris Webber was paid $280,000 by a Wolverine "supporter" from the 8th grade through his sophomore year, when he took Michigan to th e Final game. I say: good for Webber! The University made millions off him. Whites seldom get it, but African-Americans generally understand, in so many words, that the NCAA is a monopsonistic wage-fixing cartel. Here's my article on how to fix this scam: "What Lenin Knew About College Sports."

"A Beautiful Mind," Alicia Nash, Hispanic

The Other Shoe Drops for "A Beautiful Mind" - In my Oscar wrap-up last week, I wrote, "Oddly enough, however, the Best Picture victor did not suffer from any political controversy over its failing to mention that Nash's long-suffering wife, Alicia, is Hispanic." Well, surprise, surprise, in the LA Times on Monday, a functionary for La Raza ("The Race") wrote an article entitled "Why the Whitewashing of Alicia Nash?" With a straight face, the LAT illustrated with a picture of the very white-looking Alicia Nash (unfortunately, not on the web). Her uncle Enrique claims they are the bastard offspring of the Archduke Rudolf. Here's a suggestion for why the movie failed to mention Alicia is from El Salvador: upper class Salvadorans don't exactly have the best of reputations in liberal Hollywood circles (or any circles, for that matter). For elaboration, see Ollie Stone's enormously entertaining Salvador, with James Woods in his greatest role.

"Is Love Colorblind?"

Publisher Addison-Wesley just asked me for permission to reprint my most popular article "Is Love Colorblind?" (on interracial marriage) as a reading in an upcoming college textbook entitled The Craft of Argument. It's a little humbling to realize that I did my best work five years ago, while finishing chemotherapy and wondering what the bone marrow biopsy would show. As Dr. Johnson suggested, apparently such circumstances can wonderfully concentrate the mind.

Big Trouble

My Review of the new movie version of Dave Barry's "Big Trouble."

Cochran and Harpending: "In Our Genes"

The Human Biodiversity Reading Club: I thought I would start to periodically list important articles and books I'm reading in order to generate discussion about them. Andrew Sullivan's been doing this for a few weeks and is making rather a lot of money off the little kickback that Amazon gives you for touting books. Good for Andrew. It's one of the best ideas yet for making money off personal web journalism.

I'm going to start off, however, with something free, a 7-page article called "In Our Genes," which proposes a "model system for understanding the relationship between genetic variation and human cultural diversity." A rather interesting and important topic, no?

It's by two friends of mine, Henry Harpending of the U. of Utah, who is a rare combination of mathematical geneticist and field anthropologist (inventor of the important Dad vs. Cad distinction), and by Greg Cochran, the brilliant rocket scientist turned evolutionary theorist. The title is a pointed rejoinder to Not in our Genes, the famous anti-sociobiological tract by the neo-Lysenkoist scientists Richard Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Leon Kamin, although it's also an attack on the evolutionary psychology party line handed down by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, which Steve Pinker enthusiastically summed up as "differences between individuals are so boring!" (I've since managed to persuade Steve that differences between individuals are a tiny bit interesting.)

Harpending and Cochran's paper starts off rather technically but it soon turns into a wild ride through some of the biggest questions out there about humanity.

No Permanent Enemies

No Permanent Enemies: Much of the conservative war party in the press has been pushing the idea recently that Arabs and/or Muslims are America's permanent enemies. A quick look at the historical record, however, shows that in the 104 years since American became a world power in the Spanish-American war, we have had dozens of temporary enemies, but not a single permanent one. Here is an incomplete list of all the countries that have been our enemy at some point over the last 104 years:

Afghanistan - 2001; Angola - 1975 CIA involvement; Austria - WWI, WWII; Bulgaria - Cold War; Cambodia 1975-1979; China - 1949 - 1972; Croatia - WWII; Cuba - 1959 on; Czechoslovakia - WWI, Cold War; Finland - WWII; France - WWII Vichy; Germany - WWI, WWII, East Germany in Cold War; Grenada - 1983; Guatemala - 1954; Hungary - WWI, WWII, Cold War; Iran - 1954, 1979-on, Axis of Evil; Iraq - Desert Storm, Axis of Evil; Italy - WWII; Japan - WWII; Laos - 1975 -; Libya - 1986; Mexico - Pancho Villa Raid; Mongolia - Cold War; Nicaragua - 1980s Cold War; North Korea - Korean War, Axis of Evil; Panama - 1989; Philippines - Insurrection of 1900; Poland - Cold War; Romania - WWII, Cold War; Russia - Cold War; Somalia - 1993; Spain - Spanish War, sort of during WWII; Syria - 1970-on; the rest of the Soviet republics - Cold War; Turkey - WWI; Vietnam - Vietnam War.

I'm sure I'm missing a few.

Permanent friends over that period? Well, as Lord Palmerston would have predicted, not many: basically just Britain and its offshoots of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

I doubt that there is anything that dooms us to be permanently at daggers drawn with Islamic nations. In fact, the nation that has enjoyed cordial relations with America longer (at least when it wasn't colonized) than any other is Arab - that's Morocco, which was exchanging ambassadors with us since long before Britain burned down the White House. And we get along swimmingly with Oman, a Muslim country that was in the Dark Ages until about 1970.

Obviously, there is something to this clash of civilizations stuff, but the trendy notion that we must be at permanent war with a billion Muslims sounds like an idea that will seem terribly outdated in a decade or two.

Robbery Under Law

Long lost Evelyn Waugh book reissued! The greatest prose stylist of the 20th Century's 1939 travelogue on Mexico, Robbery Under Law, has been reissued, finally. Buy it here.

Birth of GNXP


Razib,
my expert on South Asian population genetics, has a new human biodiversity-oriented blog. It's quite interesting, but, Razib, please, lose the white-text-on-light-blue-background format.

Iraq unlikely to become democracy

Mark Steyn might be the best all-around pundit in the English language, since he understands the interactions among politics, popular culture, and what Camille Paglia calls sexual personae. But even Steyn has fallen for a direly silly new fad among conservatives with bad cases of war fever: lionizing the Iraqis. He writes, "The Iraqi people are secular, tolerant, literate, the antithesis of those wacky fundamentalists in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. ... Once you've got rid of the ruling gang, it's the West's best shot at incubating a reasonably non-insane polity."

I see this assertion more and more frequently, as the febrile logic takes ever greater hold of the once impressive intellects of the conservative press. With a straight face, we are assured that, while the rest of the Arabs are a bunch of savages, Iraq is the Germany of the Middle East. It just needs a U.S. imposed democratic government to resume its high rank among civilized nations. Iraq then will become a light unto the gentiles and lead the Arab world out of barbarism. You don't believe anybody could say that without giggling? The WSJ editorialized, "This is why we believe the best chance for peace in Palestine, and for stability throughout the entire Middle East, goes through Baghdad. Iraq is a serious country with a proud history ..."

Iraq? A proud history? What is the WSJ talking about - Sumer? Babylon? Haroun al-Rashid's Baghdad back in Charlemagne's time? Guatemala, with its Mayan ruins, had a prouder history in the last millennium than Iraq. Iraq has a proud history of backstabbing and cowardice.

Is there any evidence that the Iraqis are the most likely candidates in the Arab world for restrained self-rule or is this just a delusion to justify a war? I mean, if you are going to consider the "sophistication" level of the Arab populations, wouldn't Lebanon be at the top of the list? Wouldn't the Palestinians be up there too? At least before they launched their on-going "war of the cradle" that is swamping the sophisticated elites with hordes lower-class youngsters? Wasn't Egypt a be a beacon of culture and tolerance, with a Nobel Prize-winning writer, before the peasants outbred the sophisticates? Isn't Syria also secular? Doesn't Jordan at least have a sane monarchy? Isn't Morocco the favorite destination of French fashion designers looking for boys? Isn't the Sultan of Oman a huge Gilbert & Sullivan fan?

Maybe, I'm wrong about Iraq because I've been reading Bedouinphiles like T.E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger who despised the Iraqis, but I don't have a good feeling about Iraq's future prospects. But are there any Iraqophiles? (At least among people who have been there?) If not, what does that say about Iraq? Am I missing something?

One measure of a country's capacity for self-rule is its warmaking capability. Paradoxically, nation-states that are good at killing their foreign enemies tend to be be cohesive and harmonious at home. So, how good is Iraq at fighting its enemies? According to Greg Cochran, war-gamers assign a man-for-man power rating to the armies of the world. Iraq has the lowest rating. In one war, a whole bunch of Iraqi soldiers surrendered to an Italian journalist.

This delusion could have disastrous consequences after an American invasion. Which Iraq are we talking about? We could easily shatter Iraq into three or more pieces, but if we invade with the notion of making Iraq into a model nation-state, we're going need more than all the king's horses and all the king's men to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. Do we want to fight the Kurds and the Shi'ites to keep Iraq whole, so it can be a good example to the rest of the Middle East?

I suppose the Kurds of northern Iraq could rule themselves (although they fought a civil war in 1995), except that an oil-rich Kurdish state would inevitably get into a war with Turkey by supporting Kurds inside Turkey. The Turkish army would invade and crush independent Kurdistan in order to preserve Turkish national unity. The slaughter, though, would undo much of Turkey's vaunted (and exaggerated) progress toward being an Islamic "normal country," and send Turkey reeling away from its European aspirations and into the Middle Eastern morass.


Maybe the Shi'ites of the south could rule themselves, but how clear-cut are the demographic borders between Shi'ites and Sunnis? If the two groups overlap, you are headed for trouble. A Shi'ite state on the Iranian border would tempt Iran - a country with much greater potential for becoming a "normal country" than Iraq - into foreign adventurism, which could be fatal to the chances for internal reform.

And how many tribes are there among the Sunnis?

It looks to me like the Axis of Evil speech was the direct cause of America now getting stuck waist deep in the Big Muddy River of the ever-lasting Israel-Palestine race war. By saying we were out to get Iraq, we made ourselves dependent on the acquiescence of the Arab countries that we need for bases from which to launch an invasion. That in turn made us hostage to Yasser Arafat, who has cranked up the violence in the Holy Land to get America to put more pressure on Israel.


Black and white in the NBA

The return of the white B-baller: A reader writes:

What do you make of the following trends?

-In this year's NCAA Men's Final Four, three of the four teams had white point guards. Further, a team with three white starters, Indiana, made it to the title game.

-White European players are having a greater impact on the NBA:

--Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA, is a 6'10" blonde German, NBA All-Star, and perhaps one of the most dangerous players in the league. Spain's 21 year old Pau Gasol most likely will win rookie of the year honors (beating out, among others, his teammate and last year's college player of the year, Shane Battier). 21 year old rookie from Moscow, Andrei Kirilenko, is the fourth leading scorer for the Utah Jazz, and recently, shut down the player many compare to Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant. Besides Nowitzki, Dallas also starts Steve Nash, 6' white player from Canada.

- The Sacramento Kings, the best team in the NBA based on record, is relying heavily on starter and second-leading scorer Predrag Stojakovic (Belgrade) and Turkish back-up Hidayet Turkoglu.

-The USA now relies on pros to win in the Olympics. After thoroughly dominating with pros in the 1992 Summer Games, the USA has gradually become less dominant against the World -- specifically Europe. In the 2000 Summer games, the US won by 2 points in the semi-final game against Lithuania. In the Gold Medal game, France was within four with four minutes to play before losing by 10. Granted, the 2000 Summer Olympic team did not include Shaq or Kobe Bryant, but subtract the two best players from the 1992 Olympic Team and they still would have averaged 30 point wins.

Do these trends present new evidence in which to question the assumed physical advantages blacks have in basketball? Or is it a numbers game: from a greater pool of players as more white European's take basketball seriously, more whites would emerge as elite players.

I suspect that the American style of play has become a little too dominated by black b-ball culture for optimum effectiveness. For example, American basketball players don't seem to shoot from the outside as well as they used to - free throw percentages are lower than in past generations, and outside field goal shooting is probably worse too. That's likely because today's NBA players spent less time shooting by themselves when they were growing up.


And that's primarily due to the decline of white players in the NBA. Whites typically are rich enough to have their own driveway to shoot in by themselves. Blacks, in contrast, tend to congregate at public courts and scrimmage non-stop - that's great for developing passing and defense, but not for grooving the outside shot. Also, the increasingly black American basketball culture has emphasized defense over the last 20 years. So, you get lots of highly athletic quick guys with good jumping ability, but not enough guys with the eye-hand coordination to put the ball in the basket from more than 3' away. There's not much difference between blacks and whites in hand-eye coordination, but blacks have a higher likelihood for being quick enough to be top defenders.

Also, the NBA right now has a lot of 25 year olds who were impressionable adolescents during the worst of the crack epidemic and they absorbed a lot of the atrocious attitudes going around a decade ago that remain embodied in gangsta rap. The next generation might be a little better, since the crime rate is way down.

Also, we are finally starting to see NBA-quality players from the basketball-crazy Mediterranean countries like Spain, Italy, and Turkey. Before, European players were almost all from Slavic or Northern European countries. People tend to grow taller in those countries than in the Mediterranean lands. Maybe they are catching up in height?

David Brooks, Israel, and "bourgeoisophobia"

David Brooks argues in The Weekly Standard that Europeans don't like Ariel Sharon's Israel because the Jewish State is "bourgeois" and Europeans suffer from "bourgeoisophobia." I think, though, David is just using the word "bourgeois" here to mean "good," rather than what it actually means. Sharon, himself, would be offended by being called bourgeois. He sees himself as the embodiment of more ancient virtues: he entitled his autobiography Warrior, not Businessman. The entire Zionist project was distinctly antibourgeois. It was heroic, romantic, anti-capitalist, socialist, collectivist, risky, nationalist, militarist, agriculturalist, trade unionist, anti-individualist, ethnocentrist, feminist, myth-driven, and on and on. If the Zionists had wanted to be bourgeois, they could have made a lot more money by moving virtually anywhere else in the world, or even by buying Baja California from Mexico. The Zionists tried to de-bourgeoisify Jews by creating a national economy in which Jews would hold all the jobs, including farmer and soldier, rather than just the bourgeois middle-man-minority jobs at which they made much money, but also elicited dangerous resentment from other peoples.

From an ideological standpoint, it's more than a little strange that the mouthpieces of the American big business Right in America are so attached to this offshoot of the 19th Century European romantic nationalist Left. The neoconservatives should be complimented for rising above narrow doctrinaire prejudices to warmly embrace a country founded on principles they oppose. Ideological purity isn't everything.

What the neocons shouldn't do is distort the nature of Israel to paper over the contradictions in their own views. For example, Larry Kudlow writes in NR: "A free-market Israel has every right to defend itself." But, Israel's hardly a free market paragon - it ranks a mediocre 56th out of 123 countries on the Economic Freedom index. And, surely, Larry also believed that Israel had every right to defend itself back in 1980 when it ranked a miserable 93rd out 107 countries in economic freedom? What nation shouldn't have a right to defend itself? So, why do Brooks and Kudlow make up transparently obvious rationalizations like this? Why not just admit that there are other things deserving of loyalty in this world besides bourgeois values and the free market?

Fukuyama: Our Posthuman Future

Francis Fukuyama Imagines a Terrifying New Drug: The End of History guy is back with Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution." The first chapter is called, "A Tale of Two Dystopias," and in it he gets very worried about the potential development of new psychoactive drugs. Here's the scary picture he paints of the effects of futuristic drugs: "Stolid people can become vivacious; introspective ones extroverted; you can adopt one personality on Wednesday and another for the weekend."

Uh, Francis, people are already using a drug to make themselves more vivacious and extroverted on the weekend. You might even have heard of it: it's called "beer."

This is not to say that drugs won't have a big impact on human behavior in the future. But what I am saying is that the best way to predict what that will be is to study the impact of drugs in the past and right now. The same goes with genetic technologies. If Fukuyama honestly wanted to understand what the manipulation of genetic diversity will bring in the future, he'd examine the social impact of existing genetic diversity - e.g., racial differences. But that would threaten his highly successful career. Here's my "The Future of Human Nature" as an intro to the topic.

South Asian Genetics Bloggers

The Human Biodiversity revolution in intellectual discourse is finally starting to catch on, with younger South Asian-American scientists in the vanguard: After I featured Razib's website, I received this email.

"I'm a South Asian geneticist with a new weblog and a long time reader of your site - but I'm not Razib. Just a coincidence that we started around the same time. Anyway, if you want you can check out my site at capitalist.blogspot.com. I'd appreciate any comments you have ... I'd ask you not to divulge my secret identity. I could get railed during the tenure process if anyone could connect my name to these comments.".

It's a good one. By the way, this geneticist's site provides the following list Human Biodiversity links:

iSteve
La Griffe Du Lion
Fred On Everything
Razib
Inspirited
Chris Brand