March 7, 2005

Manhattan Transfer on Neoconservatives

"The Neoconservatives: What Went Wrong" explains Manhattan Transfer. He points out in an email to me: "No mention of drinking in the entire post, so most of my regular readers will probably skip it."

How did the sons of the acerbic critics of the Great Society at home become the wooly-headed promoters of National Greatness abroad? Besides victory in the Cold War,

Sometime in the nineties, however, this neoconservatism suffered from two setbacks. The first was that many neoconservatives began to suspect that the culture was not quite (or no longer) as brittle as it had seemed. America had withered the storm of the social upheavals of the sixties and remained largely intact, if radically altered. Several indicators of societal breakdown—most notably crime—reversed, in direct contrast to neoconservative predictions. Other indicators seemed not as serious in hindsight. American culture had shown a surprising ability to absorb feminism, sexual liberation and gay rights. Even the breakdown of the family no longer seemed as deleterious as the neoconservatives had feared. America had been radically transformed in the last quarter of twentieth the century but it had not crumbled.

Perhaps a more cheerful way to look at this would be to say that the neoconservatives and their allies had triumphed in their struggle to temper the worst elements of the adversarial culture. They had “tamed” (to use a word popular with neoconservative theorists) its radicalism. They had, in short, accomplished the conservative task of preserving the culture while adapting it to new circumstances. Of course, the work of taming the adversarial culture had to be continued indefinitely, but Western civilization was no longer on Orange Alert.

The second was the neoconservative triumph over liberal policy. The neoconservative projects of welfare reform and other revisions to the programs of the Great Society were essentially accomplished during the neoconservative moment. Not even the liberals clamored for great projects of social engineering. Democratic President Bill Clinton declared that the era of big government had come to an end.

(Perhaps a a third setback was the loss of the Cold War enemy but, again, this was more generally felt on the right and not particular to the neoconservatives.)

Why describe these accomplishments as setbacks? While they were arguably political victories—or rather, certainly in the case of policy reform and perhaps in the case of taming the adversary culture—they left the neoconservative intellectuals without psychologically satisfying cause. The objects of the neoconservative critique had in various ways entered into the dustbin of history...

What happened? One explanation might be psychological and political. Like their New Class forebearers and the British imperialists before them, neoconservatives needed a project. For the Neo-New Class, power and status are now sought through the expansion and management of empire rather than a large public sector at home. The War on Terror is the Great Society for the Neo-New Class.

I would add a little more ethnic detail. The original neocons were mostly Irish (D.P. Moynihan, J.Q. Wilson, Fr. Greeley) or Jewish (Kristol, Podhoretz, Glazer), with the occasional WASP inner city sociologist thrown in (Banfield, Coleman), and thus had numerous relatives in the big cities who were directly exposed to the rise of black power and black crime in the 1960s. The Irish professors had relatives who were cops and firemen, and the Jewish intellectuals had relatives who were liquor store owners and public schoolteachers.

Over time, Americans learned to insulate themselves from the worst of the crime wave, both by moving away and by locking up more and more criminals, so even the horrible murder epidemic of the crack years affected mostly inner city people.


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March 6, 2005

"Why (Some) Men Don’t Support Summers"

"Why (Some) Men Don’t Support Summers" is my new VDARE column. An excerpt:

Obviously, feminist intimidation plays a huge role. But some of the gentlemen actually seem to be semi-sincere.

No doubt a few have become true believers in the politically-correct cant with which they have been so heavily indoctrinated.

But a more interesting subset, however, are the male science and engineering types who support gender quotas for women out of self-interest. My theory: they see the feminists' vendetta against Summers as their chance to get revenge on the female sex for its annoying femaleness.

Why do these men insist that sexist discrimination and socialization are the only possible reasons there are fewer women than men in their own fields?

Why do they demand massive social engineering to get more women to become as obsessive about the pocket-protector professions as they are?

Paradoxically, this is typically because of how little these nerds appreciate women. They don't like females the way they are. They want a vast societal effort to remold women into liking the same nerdy things they like.

That way, maybe, nerds can finally get dates.

It's roughly same reason you see so many butt-kicking babes in movies aimed at male teenage comic book geeks—such as "The Matrix," "X-Men," "Charlie's Angels," and "Tomb Raider" franchises. It’s always hyped in the press as female empowerment. But it's driven far more by the adolescent male's wish that sexy girls would stop being interested in all that boring girl stuff like relationships and start being interested in cool guy stuff, like kung-fu fighting and really big guns.

There’s also a somewhat older male constituency for re-engineering American society to persuade females to care more about crankshafts and subatomic particles and less about stereotypical female interests like other human beings: scientist and engineer fathers who hunger for a child to follow in their professional footsteps.

Increasingly, these men lack the sons who they would previously have browbeaten into studying their specialties. Smaller family sizes mean fewer men have sons. Roughly half of all one-child families and one quarter of all two-child families have only daughters. So men are putting more pressure on their little girls to follow in their footsteps.

You see the same dynamic in kids' baseball these days. There will eight 11-year-old boys on the field, and one girl, out in right field. She doesn't particularly want to be there. But her dad played a little ball back in school, and has always dreamed of a son who will fulfill his jock dreams. However, he doesn't have one. So she has to stand in.

It would make this father's job easier if society propagandized girls even more about how fashionable it is for girls to do traditionally male things. [...More]

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WatchingAmerica.com

WatchingAmerica.com -- A new news site that presents articles relating to America from foreign news sources -- much of it translated.


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Mapinator teams up with Laboratory of the States

Laboratory of the States is back and Mapinator's got it (or vice-versa): Randall Burns and Jim Bowery have built this remarkable statistical investigation system called Laboratory of the States that allows you to correlate several hundred variables for the 50 states against each other, and see a scatterplot of the results. For example, Bush's Share of the vote in 2004 and UFO sightings per capita correlate at only the 0.03 level (virtually random).

Ethan Herdrick's Mapinator displays color-coded maps of the states.

Now, you can feed data from Laboratory of the States into Mapinator just by clicking on the Click here for a geographic map of this correlation line.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Luke Ford Interviews Steve Sailer

Steve Sailer interviewed by Luke Ford on Race: Here's an excerpt:


* Can a society ever have too much diversity?


Personally, I like ethnic diversity a lot. I lived for many years in the Uptown neighborhood in Chicago, where something like 100 different languages are spoken. I enjoy observing different kinds of people, and because I'm rather shy, the fact that I couldn't converse with most of my neighbors due to the language barriers wasn't much of a problem to me. And I didn't worry too much about crime because I'm a big galoot and muggers don't mess with me much.


But, just because I like diversity doesn't mean everyone else necessarily should. When you get right down to it, most intellectuals' prescriptions for how to improve the world is for the human race to Be Like Me. Well, I try not to be that dogmatic about imposing my tastes on others. For example, among all the professional film critics in this country, I probably spend the least time in my reviews explaining my opinion of the movie and the most time analyzing the issues it raises. I like understanding how the world works more than I like hectoring it to be more like me.

For example, precisely what I liked about Uptown was what made it a lousy place to raise a family due to it lack of neighborliness, crime, and public schools completely overwhelmed by the challenge of educating children speaking 100 different languages.

Ethnic diversity isn't of much interest or value to little kids. They need to learn to deal first with all the human diversity that is found in even the most mono-ethnic communities: young and old, boy and girl, and all the different personality types that you see even in one extended family. Further, kids need some homogeneity and safety so they can learn independence. Before the great crime wave began in the 1960s, kids used to walk or ride their bikes everywhere. Now, moms chauffeur their kids everywhere, which is bad for kids and bad for women.

Overall, like everything else in life, increased ethnic diversity comes with tradeoffs. The funny thing is that a lot of its side effects are precisely the ones that liberals say they oppose: for instance, diversity makes free speech less popular; it lessens community solidarity and support for welfare programs, and it vulgarizes the arts. That's probably why so many liberals have moved to Howard Dean's and Bernie Sanders' Vermont, which is the whitest state in the country. [...more]


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The Dirt Gap

Finally fully online: "The Dirt Gap: A Tale of Two States, Texas vs. California" - The fundamental cause of why some states are red and some are blue, from the Feb. 14th issue of The American Conservative.

Here is my series of four articles progressively digging deeper into explaining the Red State vs. Blue State Gap:

The Baby Gap

The Marriage Gap

The Mortgage Gap

The Dirt Gap

And here is the Gap Map.


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 5, 2005

War Nerd, Charles Murray, Arnold Schwarzenegger and more

More of my 2003 articles:

Q&A with Gary Brecher, the War Nerd

Q&A with Charles Murray on Human Accomplishment

Baseball's Hidden Ethnic Bias

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steroids

Few Republicans in Hollywood


Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Muslim Democracies are Anti-American

Muslim Democracy Marches On -- Wise old Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI Editor at Large, writes:

No one noticed as Turkey, an erstwhile ally, nabbed the gold medal recently in the global anti-American stakes. Those with the most negative views of the Bush administration's policies are (1) Turks with 82 percent; (2) Indonesians, 81 percent; (3) Lebanese, 80 percent; (4) Argentines, 79 percent; (5) Brazilians, 78 percent. Mercifully, half the 22,000 people surveyed in 21 countries by the BBC around the world did not agree, "America's influence on the world is very negative."

For those who see thousands of demonstrators in Beirut excoriating Syria as pro-American voices for freedom, think again. In Egypt, there are far more people angry with President Hosni Mubarak for his close alliance with the U.S. than for denying them their political freedom.

After reading a long list of lies and distortions published by the Turkish media, the gold medal is hardly surprising. From left to right, and from centrist to Islamist, the United States is raked over hot coals with odious comparisons to Nazi Germany.

So, Lebanon, site of the latest triumph of democracy, has the second most anti-American populous on Earth?


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March 4, 2005

The End of "The Public Interest"

They ain't making neocons like they used to: Despite the influence and money wielded by neoconservatives today, the 40-year-old flagship journal of neoconservatism -- The Public Interest -- is shutting down. See, neoconservatism used to be about the careful study of the unexpected consequences of domestic policies. Today, all the neoconservative money is in the careless advocacy of foreign policies with who knows what consequences.

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Assimilation Toward What?

Head-On and Up and Down, two movies about the impact of immigration on modern Europe, are reviewed by me in The American Conservative of March 28, 2005, available this weekend to electronic subscribers. Here's an excerpt from my review of "Head-On," an exciting Turkish-German film:

In Fatih Akin's funny and disturbing "Head-On," a suicidally glum busboy at a Hamburg punk rock bar, who has almost forgotten his native Turkish, agrees to a fake, sexless marriage to a pretty but slutty Turkish girl. She needs a Turkish husband to move out of her patriarchal father's house, so she can sleep around and take drugs.

"Head-On" begins as a raucous reworking of "The Odd Couple" as a punk romantic comedy. When the bride nicely redecorates her pseudo-groom's squalid apartment, replacing his Siouxsie and the Banshees poster with throw pillows, he snorts, "It looks like a chick-bomb exploded in here." (Modern love stories need these kinds of plot contrivances to delay consummation.) But her Carmen-like promiscuity leads to tragedy and an impassioned coda in Istanbul.

Many pundits advocate assimilation as the sure cure for any problems caused by immigration, but few ask: "Assimilation toward what?" In America, for example, immigrant kids often assimilate toward gangsta rap norms. German culture, still despised and depressed 60 years after 1945, lacks the confidence in its own coolness that African-Americans possess, so Hamburg's hipsters, both German and Turkish, assimilate instead toward the decadent styles of the old London and New York punk scenes.

True-believers in assimilation assume that young Turks educated in Germany will naturally want to write a new Eroica Symphony or found the next Mercedes-Benz, but "Head-On" suggests that they actually want to re-enact "Sid and Nancy," Alex Cox's 1986 classic about Sex Pistols' bassist Sid Vicious and junkie-groupie Nancy Spungeon, the two most worthless people ever to fall madly in love.


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A Literal "Wing Man"

Here's a new study upholding the late William D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection and nepotistic altruism. From UC Berkeley News:

For wild turkeys, at least, helping your brother find a willing and eager mate is a better way to pass on your genes than chancing the mating game alone, according to a new study by a University of California, Berkeley, graduate student...

"This study not only shows that the males are related, but that the indirect gain in fitness through your relative's gain is equal to or greater than the expense of cooperating," said the study's author, Alan Krakauer. "This is one of the best demonstrations in vertebrates that the benefits of cooperating can outweigh the costs because of kinship alone."


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Larry Summers' Math

"We're Different. Get Over It." - My op-ed for the National Post of Toronto on what Larry Summers actually said:

In fact, it's precisely because the presentation by Summers, one of the world's leading economists, was lacking in crude misstatements that it was so threatening to feminists. When finally published, it turned out to be humbly argued, open-minded, well-informed, logically rigorous, and, in sum, cumulatively devastating to the feminist orthodoxy from which many of Summers' female critics have professionally and financially profited...

Hopkins and company want to drive Summers out of polite society to prevent his insightful skepticism from undermining their special privileges.

This is not to say that Summers' sophisticated attempt "to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation" would instantly convince those unfamiliar with the issues. But over the years, the example of the President of Harvard getting away with speaking the subversive truth about gender inequality would embolden others to point out that the feminist empresses have no clothes.

Let me try to outline Summers' unusual approach to "underrepresentation."

He tends to view people relativistically, employing that most useful of all conceptual tools for thinking about both the similarity and the diversity of human beings: the probability distribution (more roughly known as the bell-shaped curve).

In contrast, most intellectuals today think in absolute, black and white categories, and thus they get irrationally upset by mention of any facts they can denigrate as a "stereotype." Many seem unable to distinguish between perceptive observations about the average traits of a group and blanket assertions about each and every group member. Thus, even carefully worded summations of the obvious like, "More men than women find mechanical engineering interesting," are indignantly countered with, "So, you're saying no woman likes engineering? Huh? Huh?"

As a bell curve aficionado, Summers noted a widely observed tendency: "It does appear that on many, many different human attributes -- height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability -- there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means … there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and a female population."

In other words, as any woman could testify, there are more stupid men than women; likewise, at least in math and spatial reasoning, there are more brilliant men than women.

Summers stated, "… if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. [In a normal bell curve, only one out of 44 individuals is that much above average.] And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean [or one out of 741]. But it's talking about people who are three and a half [one out of 4,299], four standard deviations above the mean [one in 31,574] …"

Observing that among the top five percent of twelfth-graders in math and science, it's common to see two boys for every girl, Summers estimated that the variance in ability is about 20 percent greater among males. He went on, "If you do that calculation -- and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways -- you get five to one [males per female], at the high end."

Actually, by my calculations, although perhaps I'm wrong, Summers was being a bit politically correct with his math. At three standard deviations above average (the equivalent of a 145 IQ, although he's just talking about the quantitative/visual portion of IQ), there would be over seven males for every female. At four standard deviations (a stratospheric 160 IQ), there would be more than 30 men for each woman.

This also implies, correctly, that there are a lot more retarded men than women, but they don't come up much for tenure at Harvard.


My homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 3, 2005

Actress Jada Pinkett Smith's "heteronormative" talk at Harvard:

You may have heard about how the Scream 2 actress was invited to give a speech by the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations. She said the usual uplifting you-go-girl Oprah-talk that you hear on TV a hundred times per day:

"Women, you can have it all—a loving man, devoted husband, loving children, a fabulous career," she said. "They say you gotta choose. Nah, nah, nah. We are a new generation of women. We got to set a new standard of rules around here. You can do whatever it is you want. All you have to do is want it."

But, as you may have heard, Harvard is a particularly sensitive place these days, and the university's Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance [don't you have the nagging suspicion that some group is missing from that list and is really sore about it?] denounced Pinkett Smith's pep talk. The Harvard Crimson reported:

"Some of the content was extremely heteronormative, and made BGLTSA members feel uncomfortable," [BGLTSA co-chair Jordan Woods] said. Calling the comments heteronormative, according to Woods, means they implied that standard sexual relationships are only between males and females. "Our position is that the comments weren’t homophobic, but the content was specific to male-female relationships," Woods said....

Paulus added that the [Intercultural] Foundation will issue a letter later this week apologizing for any offense the show might have caused and encouraging concerned students to attend the planned discussions.

I merely want to point out that black women are rightly very interested in Pinkett Smith's advice on how to have a "devoted husband" because she is Mrs. Will Smith. While the illegitimacy rate for blacks is around 2/3rds, she not only has had a husband for seven years, but her hubby currently holds the record for the highest average opening weekend box office take in movie history. In other words, she persuaded the most popular black man in the world, a fellow who presumably (to use Elvis Presley's formulation) doesn't need to buy the cow because he can get all the milk he wants through the fence, to marry her. You go girl.


My homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Meanwhile, heteronormativity is on the run in Ontario,

where a newly passed law eliminates the terms "husband" and "wife" from the law book in favor of "spouse," so as not to discriminate against gay marriage.


My homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Speaking of Will Smith

A reader sent me this note:

Today on the Don and Mike Show, they were talking about an interview Will Smith gave to the London Daily Express talking about casting decisions for "Hitch." Smith talks more openly in Europe, so they said. Apparently, Smith said that the studio turned down the idea of a black-black couple (wouldn't play in US or in Europe); also turned down black/white (would go over okay in Europe but not in US). Finally decided to compromise with black/Latina to satisfy all markets.

Moviegoers like leading ladies to be fairer-skinned than their leading men, and they also like their leading ladies to have lots of long soft hair, both of which make it harder (not impossible, just harder) for black actresses to make it big.

The leading lady in Hitch, Eva Mendes, is not much of a name at all (I can't place her) to star with a star of the magnitude of Will Smith, so it appears that the producers essentially decided to that the important thing was to find a Hispanic, and it didn't have to be anybody famous.

Black-black romantic comedies are a steadily profitable subgenre -- you can make them for $10-15 million, advertise them cheaply mostly on BET and buses, and they'll draw 25-35 million domestically, but they don't sell much overseas. Black-black buddy action movies like Bad Boys II can make over a $100 million and do pretty well overseas, and black-white (Lethal Weapon) or black-Asian (Rush Hour) buddy movies can become lucrative franchises, but black actresses aren't in much demand overseas at all. Whitney Huston might have broken through after The Bodyguard into being a Barbra Streisand-style singer-actress who could "open" a movie, but she developed a lot of personal problems, and never really learned how to act.

The fine black comedy Barbershop made 75 million in America, but if it had been a white movie, with say Cedric the Entertainer as the one black guy in it, it might have gone to Meet the Parents level in the $150-200 million range.


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All about me

Luke Ford Interviews Me at LukeFord.net (scan down).

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Catching up...

More of My 2002 Articles not previously available on iSteve.com:

Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality

Stephen Jay Gould, R.I.P.

"Redshirting" Little Boys: A Kindergarten Arms Race

South Central LA, 10 Years after the Riots

That Curious Immigration Diversity Visa Lottery


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iSteve syndication: I stuck this button up above that is supposed to allow you to read my new blog items in RSS or Atom (whatever those are). I'm just experimenting with this whole concept right now, so don't expect too much yet.

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