Movie Questions:

A reader asks:

1. Why does France have a lot of first-rate femme directors, who make clever, insightful, professional films about la condition humaine [e.g., the new comedy "Look at Me," which I review in the new April 25th edition of The American Conservative, while the liberated US doesn't? (Insult to injury: their films are clumsily adapted in Hollywood, usually by oafish male directors, who pervert the original ideas--see three men and a baby".)

2. Why did sexist old post-war Italy produce a group of total woman, magnificent, steamy, strong actresses (magnani, loren, lolobrigida, cardinale, others) who didn't scare men, but the liberated US doesn't?

3. Why does extremely sexist China produce goddesses like Gong Li but the liberated US produces Julia Roberts?

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

The Three Assassination Attempts of 1981

Although nobody has ever fully explained why, The Sixties began on Nov. 22, 1963 with the assassination of the President. That ill-starred decade's worst year was 1968, marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. For some reason, during my lifetime, assassinations strengthened the forces of despair and disorder.

The long decay of the West continued during the 1970s, but by 1981 there was finally reason for optimism, due to the recent elections of strong leaders such as Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II. Then the President was shot in March, the Pope in May, and Anwar Sadat in October.

It's not reassuring to contemplate how much worse the last quarter of a century would have gone if all three had died, instead of just Sadat. (Mrs. Thatcher's hotel room was blown up in October of 1984, but she survived too, due to needing less sleep than mortals. Although by then, the victory of the West over Communism had become much more likely.)

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

Dumbing Boys Down

"Wrong Answer" In my new VDARE column, I note that the WSJ declares that Larry Summers was wrong. Their proof? English boys have been getting stupider about math:

The math gender gap has closed largely by English boys becoming more ignorant.

What Whalen and Begley don't mention is that in recent decades, millions of Britain's young males have adopted a philosophy of "laddism." Being "one of the lads" is proven by one's dedication to cutting school, machismo, brawling, drunkenness, soccer hooliganism, anti-intellectualism, and property crime. The lads of Britain have been increasingly turning against schoolwork and honest jobs, with disastrous effects on society as a whole—as seen in the sky-high property crime rates in what used to be one of the world's most law-abiding societies.

This is a significant omission, because way back in 2000, the BBC inquired into the same phenomenon as Whalen and Begley … and came to very different conclusions:

“Britain's academics are asking why girls now outperform boys at A-Level. Their conclusion? The UK's anti-intellectual ‘lad culture’ and our, now notorious, lads' mags…

“Two British academics have blamed a culture of ‘laddism’ where successful male students are ‘geeks;’ and a cultivated indifference to intellectual pursuits is as de rigueur as having a mobile phone.

“Tony Sewell, a lecturer in education at Leeds University says a 'black youth culture' which prizes trainers [athletic shoes] and CDs over exam grades has now captured the imaginations of boys across the board.

“Dr Mary James of Cambridge University says such a climate is being stoked by so-called ‘lad mags,’ which in the absence of other male role models help define the teenage understanding of ‘masculinity.’”

The brilliant British comic Sacha Baron-Cohen famously parodies white and Pakistani youths' infatuation with black American gangsta rappers with his character Ali G, a canary yellow sweatsuit and gold chain-wearing idiot.

Britain’s crime rate is now substantially worse than that of the U.S. For example, the 2000 International Crime Victimization Survey reported that for every 100 people, there were 55 crimes committed in Britain compared to 40 in the U.S.

Immigrants, especially West Indians, have contributed heavily to this inglorious record. But the most important cause has been a moral collapse among Britain’s white working class males—who in the first half of the 20th Century were famous for their honesty. The British prison psychiatrist who writes under the nom de plume Theodore Dalrymple has vividly described the decay of the working class in his book Life at the Bottom.

Not surprisingly, the massive government effort to feminize math classes praised by the WSJ women appears to have made the lads even less inclined to study math.

It's a reflection of how messed up feminists' priorities are that Whalen and Begley salute this latest triumph of "laddism" as a victory for women.

Those poor English schoolgirls, whatever their math scores, are going to have to live the rest of their lives with those dumbed-down English lads. [More]

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

Worst cathedral EVER

"We've got the worst cathedral ever," groaned my wife as the local newscasts displayed crowds of the Catholic faithful gathering before magnificent cathedrals around the world but ended up at our brand new L.A. Cathedral, which looks less like a place of worship than a secret police headquarters. It resembles a more angular, more awkward version of the Bastille.

Why does the Catholic Church, of all institutions, feel the need for novelty in architecture? Innovation is all very fine in things that cost less than $170 million and are supposed to last for less than centuries, but with countless wonderful traditional styles of churches to draw from, what are the odds that a new design will also prove to be a good design? And why choose an intellectualized design (it is supposed to deconstruct and abstract the design elements of the Spanish Mission style) for a congregation that is not among the best-educated? Why not use the indigenous Spanish Mission style?

A reader writes:

And remember, there is nothing that cures banal architecture like plenty of tall, full trees with lots of foliage. Trees have done wonders for I. M. Pei's East Wing of the National Gallery on the mall.

A few redwoods would fix everything.

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

On Woody Allen

Woody Allen's "Melinda and Melinda" and the fine Woody Allenesque French comedy "Look at Me" are reviewed by me in the April 25th issue of The American Conservative (now available to electronic subscribers). An excerpt:

Although the New York critics once hailed him as a genius, Woody Allen was never a Stanley Kubrick-style prophet of the cinema occasionally coming down from the mountaintop with a wholly original new film. Instead, we can see now that he's always been a talented, hardworking craftsman who churned out a prodigious number of pretty good movies before finally colliding with the law of diminishing returns in this decade.

Allen is an upscale, limited edition version of his mass-market idol, the late Bob Hope, from whom he borrowed his film persona as the cowardly but self-absorbed schlemiel who somehow always gets the girl. Indeed, watching one of Hope's ancient "Road" comedies these days generates the odd feeling that Bob Hope is impersonating Woody Allen. Similarly, the post-modern touches in Allen's films trace back to Hope's wildly self-referential late 40s comedies.

Like Hope, Allen is an alpha male off-screen (he was captain of his high school basketball team). Blessed with Hope's indefatigability and efficiency, Allen makes a movie every year for what the Wachowski Siblings probably spent on the "Matrix" sequels' catering. Allen can land big stars on hiatus between their high-paying projects because they know he always finishes on schedule.

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

Tierney on cars and votes

"Your Car: Politics on Wheels:" John Tierney writes in the NYT:

It has always been tempting to think you can figure out who a person is and what he thinks by what he drives. That subject was raised recently by Chely Wright in her country and western hit, "Bumper of My S.U.V.," in which she tells of a "lady in a minivan" giving her a vulgar hand gesture for driving a car with a Marines bumper sticker:

"Does she think she knows what I stand for/Or the things that I believe/Just by looking at a sticker for the U.S. Marines/On the bumper of my S.U.V.?"

The lady in the minivan might not know, but some of the finest minds in market research think they do. By analyzing new-car sales, surveying car owners and keeping count of political bumper stickers, they are identifying the differences between Democratic cars and Republican ones.

Among their findings: buyers of American cars tend to be Republican - except, for some reason, those who buy Pontiacs, who tend to be Democrats. Foreign-brand compact cars are usually bought by Democrats - but not Mini Coopers, which are bought by almost equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. And Volvos may not actually represent quite what you think.

As Volvo's advertising has stressed performance in addition to safety, more and more Republicans are buying Volvos. The CNW survey last year showed that Democratic buyers of Volvo cars outnumbered Republicans by only 32 percent to 27 percent.

"Volvos have become more plush and bourgeois, which is a Republican thing to be," said Mickey Kaus, a dual expert in politics and cars as the author of the Kausfiles and Gearbox columns for Slate. "Subaru is the new Volvo - that is, it is what Volvos used to be: trusty, rugged, inexpensive, unpretentious, performs well, maybe a bit ugly. You don't buy it because you want to show you have money; you buy it because you have college-professor values."

The CNW survey, which measured political affiliation not just by make but also by model, found that a Jeep Grand Cherokee S.U.V. was more than half again as likely to be bought by a Republican than by a Democrat, at 46 percent to 28. Among Hummer buyers, the Republican-to-Democrat ratio was a whopping 52 to 23...

he survey also found that minivans skewed blue, just as Chely Wright surmised in her song. At first glance, this might seem odd, because Republican car buyers tended to have more children - 3.5 on average, versus 1.7 for the Democratic buyers. Explaining this apparent contradiction offers a look into the increasing exactitude marketers seem to be applying to the question of who drives what.

"You might think with all the kids, they'd want the practicality of a minivan," said Art Spinella, the president of CNW. But practicality was not the Republican customer's highest priority, as Mr. Spinella's company discovered by tracking the customers throughout the buying process.

"There is a certain resistance that male new-car buyers have to minivans even in a household with two or three kids," Mr. Spinella explained. "For the most part, red-state households are more male-dominated when it comes to decision-making for a vehicle. In blue states, it's more of a joint decision-making process." Because the Democratic women get more of a say in the decision, their families end up with more minivans than S.U.V.'s.

,,Midsize and large American cars skew Republican, and so, of course, do big American pickup trucks. That may have something to do with American car companies marketing themselves through one of the great symbols of Republicanism, Nascar, which is enormously popular in the red states.

"Nascar has an American-made-only requirement for cars and a variety of other rules that discourage foreign makers from competing," said Steve Sailer, a conservative journalist who has analyzed the red-blue divide. "Toyota has dipped its toe into Nascar's truck-racing series with its American-made trucks, but there isn't a lot of demand for Japanese participation.

"In truth, a lot of fans would be sore about ending the all-American monopoly. Nascar has become a covert ethnic-pride celebration for red-state whites of Northern European descent." [More]

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

In search of Protestant sculptors

My statement that a characteristic Catholic sculpture is Bernini's astonishing "Ecstasy of St. Theresa," while a characteristic Protestant sculpture is a Jello mold caused one reader to write: "Off hand, I can't think of a great Protestant sculptor, although I'm sure they exist."

Googling on "Protestant sculptor" brings up the name "Bertel Thorvaldsen." Case closed!

No, honestly, there are plenty of Protestant sculptors, like Gutzon Borglum of Mr. Rushmore fame. And I wrote about Malvina Hoffman, America's excellent sculptress of human biodiversity here.

Still, Protestantism's Islamic-like objection to "idol-worship" obviously short-changed the development of sculpture in Protestant countries. Compare Pieter Saenredam's almost abstract paintings of the interiors of post-Reformation Dutch churches stripped of their statues with Panini's famous painting of St. Peter's lavish interior.

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

Boring but Right

More nominees for Correct yet Uncharismatic:

Better at being right than personally imposing: Edward Westermarck.

Westermarck argued in the early 20th century for what is called (not by him) the "Westermarck effect": individuals raised together from infancy display a lack of erotic interest in one another when they reach sexual maturity. Westermarck argued that the effect is an adaptation to prevent the harmful genetic effects of close inbreeding -- since those raised together are commonly siblings -- but that it incidentally reduces sexual activity even among non-siblings raised together. He had evidence for this from fieldwork in Morocco, from cousin marriages that didn't work out. All sorts of evidence, both human and non-human, now supports both the harmful effects of inbreeding and the "negative imprinting" proposed by Westermarck,. And Westermarck also did a huge amount of what is basically evolutionary psychology both on human marriage and sexuality, and on morality.

Yet, although he provided the correct explanation for incest avoidance, a big part of what kinship is about (altruism is another big part, of course, covered by Hamilton and successors),Westermarck was completely overshadowed in the 20th century by various sociological style theories and by Freud. The sociological theories aren't completely crazy, and might even be at least part right, but Freud's Oedipus Complex story is so off-the-wall that you have to suspect that its real appeal is not those in search of serious scientific explanations, but to folks with an unadmitted hunger for vivid counterintuitive narratives -- i.e. mythology. Chesterton says something like "Those who leave the Church don't end up believing in nothing; they end up believing in anything."

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My choice for the substance over style intellectual in political science would never be James Burnham--who was endowed with both--but Ferdinand Hermens who, in a series of books (Democracy or Anarchy, the Representative Republic, etc.) in the forties and fifties destroyed proportional representation for its contribution to the political catastrophe of the 1930s. (Not even a sexy topic then!) After the war, several European countries either dropped PR or modified its bad effects and henceforth became stable democracies. (Germany is the prime example.) Hermens critique of PR has in my view never been refuted--just ignored. Recently the UN and the US foisted it on Iraq. Hermens would not have been surprised that no government has formed yet.

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I'm surprised nobody mentioned Kant in philosophy. The man never bothered to leave Konigsberg his entire life, and was considered a bust until he published the First Critique in his mid-50s. Housewives, it is said, set their clocks to his daily walks. Yet, nearly all 19th and 20th century philosophy can be traced in large part back to Kant's ideas.

On the opposite extreme, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the two most celebrated 20th century philosophers, had a mesmerizing effect on their followers, which probably accounts in large part for their continued fame today. In Wittgenstein's case, his followers even adopted his eccentric mannerisms, so that for almost a half century after his death one could instantly recognize any Wittgensteinians walking the halls of academe.

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My hazy assumption is that 19th Century Germans developed an outsized respect for Herr Professors. For example, in Germany to this day, a man with two doctorates is a double doctor by title. Jerry Pournelle, for example, would be "Dr. Dr. Pournelle" in Germany.

This got intermingled with traditional Jewish esteem for charismatic rabbinical scholars who could exegete esoteric texts more cleverly than anybody else in town. Thus, the small number of German Jews. combining the two traditions, led the world in the production of intellectual cult figures like Marx and Freud.

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

"Constantine"

I finally saw the ponderously delirious Catholic fantasy film with Keanu Reeves as a Philip Marlowe-style hard-boiled detective/exorcist who battles demons on the mean streets of noir LA.

A lot of people hated it. As a horror film, it's a failure since it lacks scary moments. Its pacing is stately at best, and its script is too congested with ideas to be intellectually interesting (although it's got some great hardbitten theological one-liners like, "God's a kid with an ant farm. There is no plan."

And it's fashionable to put down Keanu these days because of the failure of the last two "Matrix" movies, although that was hardly his fault.

But, for all its flaws, "Constantine" has style.

Catholicism just has more visual style than Protestantism. When you think of a Catholic sculpture, you think of, oh, say, Bernini's "Ecstasy of St. Theresa." In contrast, the leading Protestant contribution to the art of sculpture is the Jello mold.

Everybody compares "Constantine" to "The Matrix," but it's much more in the tradition of "Blade Runner," another visually extravagant fantasy LA detective film noir. In contrast to "Constantine," "Blade Runner's" theological underpinnings were kept mostly under wraps until the climactic scene where Rutger Hauer's Christ-figure replicant drives a nail through his palm and then, as he dies, releases a white dove that flies up to a patch of heavenly blue sky. Not too subtle, but a lot of people still didn't get it. (Like me, the first time I saw it.)

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

Unsung intellectuals in the human sciences

Yesterday, I complained that many of the intellectual heavyweights of Western civilization are known not for being right but for being charismatic and asked for suggestions for people who are famous now for being right despite non-charismatic personalities.

My son suggests Mendel, the discoverer of genetics, who is probably the ultimate choice since he was unknown until after his death. Science would have benefited from him having a more forceful personality.

Readers write:

In management theory: surely Demming deserves more limelight?

In philosophy: I think that Hume has been overshadowed by those German metaphysicians who were always, unsuccessfuly, trying to outwit him. A special mention to David Stove who could never resist a joke. Bad move in dull but worthy fields.

In economics: The Keynsian economic scientists models and analyses were crucial in organising and administering the War Effort. Leontieff, who invented input-output analysis, and Jan Tinbergen, who introduced mathematical modelling, Kuznets for decising national accounts, Milton Friedman for designing the witholding income tax (Ha X 3) they alll deserve a guernsey.

In sociology: Weber can never get enough credit. Schumpeter was a polymath in the same league as the other Mettle European emigres.

In pol-sci: James Burnham.

Really, the interesting thing is how little social sciences have done to contribute to social technology. The big names in social science, apart from Keynes of course, have usually been flops when running government and business enterprises (eg Hayek). It looks like motivated and intelligent people can run teams without the help of egg-head advisors. Although egg-heads have their uses in summing things up for the on-lookers.

The big names in social ideology have been, both intellectually and socially, an unmitigaged disaster. We have had to spend almost the whole century unlearning what just ain't so.

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In the hard sciences, strict standards of proof make harder for a charlatan to arise. Still, this sometimes happens as in the case of an obscurantist like the late Stephen Jay Gould being far better known among the general public than Hamilton or Trivers. But you can't keep a lie forever, so I think Gould's reputation will sorely fall (it already has) in the future.

What the human or social "sciences" sorely need is a good BS detector. Still, if I were to name good and underappreciated work in social science I would say that Paul Romer's work in growth theory is very good in explaining issues like the failure of depletion of resources to occur, yet he is far less known than other more prominent, less accomplished economists like Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz.

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John Bardeen, the only person to win the Nobel twice in physics, was a completely normal, friendly, bland mid-westerner who liked to play golf. No "Feynmanisms" whatsover. [Okay, he was a hard scientist, but he was a famously nice guy.]

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If one holds that communism was the biggest disaster of last century, then the only guy who predicted it wouldn't work seems pretty important, Ludwig von Mises. He wasn't appreciated by the Nazis and then no one would give him a job in the United States. Given his predictions and body of work he has to be one of the most under appreciated intellectuals ever.

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Claude Shannon, who came up with the idea of using binary numbers in computers in 1937, and invented digital communications in 1948 was a cheerful, whimsical soul who invented a juggling robot. A reader notes, "He built the original black box with one switch: when you turned it on, an arm came out of it and turned the switch back off. My kind of guy."

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

Desperately Seeking Susan

Here's a long but hilarious article called "Desperately Seeking Susan" by a lesbian English professor at Stanford named Terry Castle exposing her former idol, the late Susan Sontag, as a massive egomaniac.

Yet, egomania provides confidence and confidence is essential to charisma, and, clearly, Sontag's fame in the intellectual world didn't depend on her writings -- what did she ever write that was memorable besides "The white race is the cancer of human history?" -- but on her personal charisma.

Indeed, much of what we are taught as the high intellectual history of the human race is based more on the magnetism and impenetrable self-assurance of thinkers than on minor issues like whether they were right or not. Freud is a perfect example, a charlatan who befuddled two generations via his implacable self-esteem. Marx was similar, and Ayn Rand was cut from the same cloth but fortunately never had as deleteriously wide an impact as Marx or Freud.

I'd like to make up an honor role of thinkers who were better at being right than being personally imposing. Adam Smith, a classic nerd whose best known anecdote is his falling in a tanning pit in a fit of abstraction while showing Edmund Burke around a leather factory, and the retiring Charles Darwin come first to mind. Until the publications of big books by Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins publicizing his theories when he was approaching 40, the great William D. Hamilton was known only to a few dozen evolutionary theorists. I've never heard anything at all about the personality of Claude Shannon, the Bell Labs engineer who pretty much invented information theory in 1948.

Other suggestions? Lots of mathematician and physicists fall in this mold, but what about in the more politicized human sciences?

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

Heather MacDonald on "Diversity Mongers Target the Web" on NRO:

Bad move, guys. The "diversity" mongers have just brought up the one thing that they should have stayed far far away from: the web. Newsweek's technology columnist Steven Levy has declared that the lack of "diversity" among the web's most popular blogs requires corrective action. The goal? A blogosphere whose elite tier "reflects the actual population" — i.e., where female- and minority-written blogs are found among the top 100 blogs in the same proportion as females and minorities are found in the general population.

Levy's complaint comes on the heels of Susan Estrich's campaign against the Los Angeles Times for allegedly refusing to publish female op-ed writers, a campaign that has caused widespread wringing of editorial hands about male-dominated op-ed pages.

Heather certainly doesn't need any quotas tainting her accomplishments -- she just won a $250,000 prize from the Bradley Foundation. (How do I sign up for one of those? Is there, like, an on-line form to fill in, like there is for unemployment compensation?)

What's striking is that while everybody recognizes that Estrich's hysterical (in both meanings of the term) attack on Michael Kinsley was pure menopausal hot flash, the Axiom of Equality -- the assumption that any inequality disfavoring non-white males is the product of discrimination and must be alleviated -- is so engrained in public discourse that you just know Estrich is going to win in the end. We're going to end up with disguised quotas for opinion-mongers anyway, just like there are quotas for reporters right now. Look at the Washington Monthly blog, where Kevin Drum, who knows perfectly well that this is pure stupidity, still turned his blog over for some time to brainless smear artists like Garance Franke-Ruta just because they are women.

By the way, one of the first things I noticed when I started writing op-eds for newspapers back in 1990 as a hobby was that the majority of op-ed editors I dealt with were women. Men like to get paid peanuts for the opportunity to spout off, while women like to get paid a regular salary to choose which men get to spout off.

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

The Florida Lawyer is validated

"The legal case to keep Terri Schiavo alive failed because of ineptitude" writes bioethicist Michael Cook down under in the Melbourne Age.

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

I'm Baaaaack!

The Boston Globe runs a long article by Drake Bennett on sociobiologist Robert Trivers, who was one of the world's most brilliant thinkers from 1970-1975, but has been mostly AWOL for the last 30 years. Now, he's feeling smart again and promises lots of hot new ideas.

What the article fails to mention is why Trivers' career has been so erratic: manic-depression. Edward O. Wilson wrote in his fine autobiography Naturalist:

Trivers both benefited and suffered from a case of manic-depressive syndrome (now cured). When he was up he was dazzling, when he was down he was terrifying.

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

Why the Terri Schiavo case is a big story

I keep reading nonsense about how people who side with Schiavo's parents want to turn America into a theocracy. That's a complete misreading of why this case has generated so much interest. Vast ideological principles are not behind the controversy so much as small idiosyncratic details.

In short, a lot of people smell a rat. Michael Schiavo's story strikes them as sounding fishy. This is all straight out of Evolutionary Psychology 101: humans supposedly come equipped with "cheater detection modules" that make us particularly interested in, and suspicious of, other people's motives.

Personally, if I had to bet, I would bet that the husband's motivations aren't terribly sinister. But I could be wrong.

And that, more than anything, is why this is a big story -- because it's a small story, a human scale story. Different people can identify with the various characters and are suspicious of the others.

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

Terri Schiavo: We wouldn't treat a dog this way

Thrasymachus raises the uncomfortable issue that we wouldn't let a faithful old dog die of thirst. We'd have her put to sleep:

Why is she being killed through neglect though? Starvation and dehydration in fact?

Simple enough. Because euphemisms matter. It's important, for our own moral well-being, that we be able to lie to ourselves that this is a matter of "not prolonging her life."

It would be more humane to Schiavo to use lethal injection to end her life. But its effect upon us would be warping. [More]

Tough questions ... But is this really a stable sticking point? Or will there be an inevitable slide toward state-sanctioned killing of the infirm, once the logic of the current system sinks in?

One thing I've wanted to mention is that I've always thought that there was something not quite right about using doctors to execute murderers via lethal injection. I think that's a job for professional executioners, perhaps one single family like in England over a few generations. (I don't think the job requires a doctor's professional expertise. What's the worst that could happen if the executioner screws up? The patient dies. Perhaps a veterinarian would be the appropriate professional to carry out a lethal injection execution.)

I'm not crazy about doctors killing people, in prisons or in hospitals, lest they grow too fond of it, to paraphrase Robert E. Lee on war.

I would rather that doctors focus just on making you better, just as when you hire a defense attorney, his professional ethics require him to do what he can to get you off even if he thinks you're guilty.

The Dutch system where doctors are supposed to heal some people and kill others, to play both defense attorney and executioner, strikes me as presupposing a degree of moral strength that not all doctors are likely to have. Killing is a psychologically fraught act and some doctors who feel uncertain about past killings they've carried out might well respond by lowering the bar against medical killings even further and trying to persuade their fellow doctors to lower it too. That way they can assuage their consciences by saying to themselves, "Everybody is doing it. It's standard operating procedure."

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

Why the Jews Rejected Jesus

is the new book by my old editor when I used to review books for National Review, David Klinghoffer. A devout Jew, David says:

The Jewish rejection of Jesus was the founding act of Western civilization. Had the Jews welcomed the Christian message, at any stage prior to the crucial council of Jerusalem at which Peter and James accepted Paul's belief that it was time to drop Jewish law from the requirements placed on Christians, the Jesus movement would have remained a Jewish sect with all the handicaps that implies. Unlike Christianity, and also unlike Islam, Judaism was never intended or suited to be a mass religion. Had the Jews embraced the Gospel of Jesus Christ in greater numbers, there would be no Christian Europe.

When Islam, that other daughter faith of Judaism, arose in the seventh century, its armies would have confronted a Europe that was a spiritual vaccum, which Muhammad's teachings would likely have filled..

If the historian Rodney Stark is correct in attributing the progress of Western science to the belief system of the Bible, then our world would be a poorer, less scientifically advanced one, not unlike the Muslim nations today would be, were it not for the technology they import from the nations of Europe and North America, cultures nourished on the Bible.

Interesting speculations...

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

Terri Schiavo: We wouldn't treat a dog this way

Thrasymachus raises the uncomfortable issue that we wouldn't let a faithful old dog die of thirst. We'd have her put to sleep:

Why is she being killed through neglect though? Starvation and dehydration in fact?

Simple enough. Because euphemisms matter. It's important, for our own moral well-being, that we be able to lie to ourselves that this is a matter of "not prolonging her life."

It would be more humane to Schiavo to use lethal injection to end her life. But its effect upon us would be warping. [More]

Tough questions ... But is this really a stable sticking point? Or will there be an inevitable slide toward state-sanctioned killing of the infirm, once the logic of the current system sinks in?

One thing I've wanted to mention is that I've always thought that there was something not quite right about using doctors to execute murderers via lethal injection. I think that's a job for professional executioners, perhaps one single family like in England over a few generations. (I don't think the job requires a doctor's professional expertise. What's the worst that could happen if the executioner screws up? The patient dies. Perhaps a veterinarian would be the appropriate professional to carry out a lethal injection execution.)

I'm not crazy about doctors killing people, in prisons or in hospitals, lest they grow too fond of it, to paraphrase Robert E. Lee on war.

I would rather that doctors focus just on making you better, just as when you hire a defense attorney, his professional ethics require him to do what he can to get you off even if he thinks you're guilty.

The Dutch system where doctors are supposed to heal some people and kill others, to play both defense attorney and executioner, strikes me as presupposing a degree of moral strength that not all doctors are likely to have. Killing is a psychologically fraught act and some doctors who feel uncertain about past killings they've carried out might well respond by lowering the bar against medical killings even further and trying to persuade their fellow doctors to lower it too. That way they can assuage their consciences by saying to themselves, "Everybody is doing it. It's standard operating procedure."

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