November 15, 2005

The feminization of "jobs Americans just won't do:"

One of the many vague misconceptions American elites hold about immigration is that "the jobs Americans just won't do" are primarily the kind for sweaty men with strong backs. The reality, though, is that an awful lot of the jobs where physical strength traditionally mattered the most, such as coal mining, have been heavily automated.

Why? The industries with the manliest work forces tended to unionize most effectively -- in part because of less competition from women workers, but also because the tough guy workforces were better at terrifying potential strikebreakers into not trying to cross picket lines if they wanted to keep their skulls unfractured. So, these jobs paid the highest premiums in wages due to union monopoly power, which meant that management had the most incentive to pay to replace men with machines.

Thus, the jobs available to poorly educated immigrants are increasingly services jobs, where being a man is not much of an advantage.

And that plays into a phenomenon seen in both America and France. Here, African-American women are doing much better economically than African-American men, and the same is true for Muslim women in France. About 40 years ago, black males, sick of being called "boy," started to opt out of servile jobs. The same appears to be true among Muslims in France, who don't want to do service work where a good attitude is important.

In contrast, Mexican men are still willing to take servile jobs. Think about the last black waiter you encountered. (You may have to throw you mind back several years to remember him.) He was probably gay, right?

Now, think about the last Latino male waiter you've had. He probably wasn't gay, right? In fact, I've had Mexican waiters who could have played the we-don't-need-no-steenking-badges bandito chieftain in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre." At present, Mexicans don't seem to find it a massive insult to their machismo to hold servile jobs, the way African-American men and, it appears, Muslim men in France do.

I don't know exactly why that is, but I doubt if it's genetic. It strike me as fairly likely that an upcoming generation of Latino-American males, who grow up heavily influenced by black rappers, will come to reject the kind of service jobs that black males have rejected, and turn instead to crime. In fact, judging from crime statistics, it's already happening.

And what will be the response of American elites to this fairly natural evolution of assimilating Hispanic males away from "the jobs Americans just won't do?" My guess is that they will just turn to importing new immigrants -- more Hispanics, or how about those 160 million Untouchables in India? They know their place! And the treadmill will go and on, filling up the country with unskilled immigrants to turn into a hip-hop lumpenproletariat.


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

Mike Hass, white receiver

The top pass-catcher in college football this year in terms of yards is Mike Hass of Oregon St. with 143 yards per game (second place is only 121). He's not a flash in the pan: "Oregon State's Mike Hass (pronounced like pass) is the first receiver in Pac-10 history to have three 1,000-plus yard seasons."

Hass did not receive a scholarship offer from any of the 117 Div. 1A colleges:

"It wasn’t as if Hass was an unknown coming out of Jesuit High. As a 6-1, 190-pound senior, he had 79 catches for 1,739 yards and 21 touchdowns, scored seven TDs in a state playoff game and was the [Oregon] offensive player of the year."

Any guesses why nobody recruited him? Click here to see.


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

Were the Niger yellowcake forgeries reforged?

One of the mysteries of the Iraq Attaq has been how the ludicrously bad forgeries claiming that Saddam was trying to buy 1,000,000 pounds of uranium yellowcake from Niger were accepted by Washington even though anyone with Google could disprove them in a few hours. A new article in La Repubblica says that Italian military intelligence, SISMI, initially provided only the text of the documents to Washington, but with the obvious errors in the documents fixed. In other words, somebody higher up than the original forgers was intentionally lying.

So, who rewrote the first forgeries to cover up the errors? It's probably in the best interests of the Bush Administration if SISMI officials take responsibility for this: Hey, it's not our fault, we innocent Americans were duped by those wily Machiavellians in Rome! On the other hand, Italians spies are not necessarily the strong silent types who will stoically fall on their swords. So, more revelations could follow.

There's still time for Michael Ledeen to use his contacts in SISMI to search for the Real Forgers!

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

Listen to your mom: Keep your feet warm and dry in winter!

The BBC reports:

Mothers 'were right' over colds If your mother always warned you to wrap up warm to avoid catching a cold, it seems she may have had a point. Scientists say they have the first proof that there really is a link between getting cold and catching one.

Staff at the Common Cold Centre in Cardiff took 180 volunteers and asked half of them to keep their bare feet in icy water for 20 minutes. They found 29% developed a cold within five days, compared with only 9% in the control group not exposed to a chill.

Professor Ronald Eccles, director of the centre, said the study had shown, for the first time, a scientific link between chilling and viral infection - something previously dismissed by other studies.

"When colds are circulating in the community, many people are mildly infected but show no symptoms," Prof Eccles said. "If they become chilled, this causes a pronounced constriction of the blood vessels in the nose and shuts off the warm blood that supplies the white cells that fight infection. The reduced defences in the nose allow the virus to get stronger and common cold symptoms develop.

"Although the chilled subject believes they have 'caught a cold' what has, in fact, happened is that the dormant infection has taken hold."

By the way, with all the fear of bird flu these days, isn't it time for a public campaign to get people to wash their hands, use alcohol gel sanitizers, and refrain from rubbing your eyes with your hands?


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

Your Lying Eyes offers two comments worth passing on

Your Lying Eyes offers two comments worth passing on:

Cause of Death: "Decomposition"!?

This NYT article "Bungled Records of Storm Deaths Renew Anguish" on the sloppy accounting of the Katrina dead in Louisiana doesn't give us much hope that autopsies will shed any light on what really happened in the city during those dark days.

And This Is Supposed to be Bad News?

The Washington Post reports (Civil Rights Focus Shift Roils Staff At Justice: Veterans Exit Division as Traditional Cases Decline) that dozens of veteran lawyers have left the Justice Department's Civil Rights division in frustration over a 40% decline in racial and gender discrimination prosecutions. I'm not sure I'll be able to sleep well tonight knowing that in America today businesses may now feel they can, with impunity, just go out and hire the best person available for a job.

I suspect that corporate America has been brought to heel so well by affirmative action systems that there isn't much need for prosecuting heretics anymore.


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

November 14, 2005

Listen to your mom: Keep your feet warm and dry in winter!

The BBC reports:

Mothers 'were right' over colds If your mother always warned you to wrap up warm to avoid catching a cold, it seems she may have had a point. Scientists say they have the first proof that there really is a link between getting cold and catching one.

Staff at the Common Cold Centre in Cardiff took 180 volunteers and asked half of them to keep their bare feet in icy water for 20 minutes. They found 29% developed a cold within five days, compared with only 9% in the control group not exposed to a chill.

Professor Ronald Eccles, director of the centre, said the study had shown, for the first time, a scientific link between chilling and viral infection - something previously dismissed by other studies.

"When colds are circulating in the community, many people are mildly infected but show no symptoms," Prof Eccles said. "If they become chilled, this causes a pronounced constriction of the blood vessels in the nose and shuts off the warm blood that supplies the white cells that fight infection. The reduced defences in the nose allow the virus to get stronger and common cold symptoms develop.

"Although the chilled subject believes they have 'caught a cold' what has, in fact, happened is that the dormant infection has taken hold."

By the way, with all the fear of bird flu these days, isn't it time for a public campaign to get people to wash their hands, use alcohol gel sanitizers, and refrain from rubbing your eyes with your hands?


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

Time to colorize old movies

When Ted Turner started colorizing old movies in the late 1980s, the technology was god-awfully primitive. I remember watching a colorized version of "Bringing Up Baby," the screwball comedy with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, where there only seemed to be three shades of sick-making color in the entire movie. I get queasy just recalling it.

Colorization was condemned on moral grounds and driven out of practice, but, let's face it: the upcoming generation won't watch black-and-white films. Their eyes won't focus on them. Kids these days will watch "Robin Hood" from 1938 because it's in color, but they won't black and white movies from the same year. All of those great old movies will be forgotten if they aren't colorized.

The colorization technology has improved vastly over the last decade and a half, and it's time to colorize films. Don't mess with films like "Citizen Kane" where a strong effort was put into the b&w cinematography, but for the "Bringing Up Baby" movies, where the quality is in the script and acting, why not colorize them?

As rental store shelf space becomes less and less important, with more movies obtained through the mail, from Netflix and Amazon, and with downloading on the horizon, colorized versions won't permanently crowd out b&w originals. The old version will always be available for purists.

As the technology evolves, it will become feasible for artists to create colorized versions that are better than the originals, where the color adds to the aesthetic experience. For example, I'd like to see Steven Spielberg's colorization of the old "Gunga Din," a great adventure comedy that deserves a lavish color scheme.


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

November 13, 2005

If Islam doesn't have anything to do with the French rioting,

why aren't they looting large numbers of liquor stores? That's the first thing that American rioters do. Good Muslims, however, aren't supposed to drink. Lots of Muslims drink in private, but I'm still confused: how do you hold a riot without looting liquor stores? Or were all the liquor stores already driven out of the slums by Islamic activists? I suspect the liquor store question is a key to understanding the French situation.


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

Jodie Foster, Eugenicist

Few word strings bring Google search hits faster than "Jodie Foster lesbian," (enquiring minds want to know!) but, as I've been pointing out for years, what's more interesting about Foster is her long-standing fascination with alternative forms of conception. It's not just that she spent a long time searching out the perfect sperm donor for her two children - a handsome scientist with a 160 IQ according to Fleet Street -- but that the eugenics theme keeps popping up in her film career, including the name of her production company, Egg Pictures. But nobody else in the media has ever connected the many dots about Foster.

For example, in the middle of the French movie "A Very Long Engagement," Jodie surprisingly pops up in a supporting role, speaking perfect French. It's more than a cameo -- she's onscreen for at least five minutes, has scores of lines, and is excellent. Although European stars often take small roles in American films, it's extremely rare to see the reverse -- especially for a regal, not very hard working near-superstar like Foster, who has appeared in only five American movies over the last decade.

So, why did she take this role? Well, she plays the wife of a soldier during World War I, who is sterile, but is the the step-father of his first wife's four children and step-father of Jodie's child, making him only one child short of the six kids necessary for getting a deferment that will bring him home from the trenches. So, he asks his wife to get impregnated by his best friend. Complications ensue, including two rather explicit coitus scenes, which is probably about two more than Jodie has appeared in in her private life in recent years.


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

November 12, 2005

"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" and "A History of Violence"

When did movie directors decide that thematically "dark" movies had to be "dark" in the sense of being underexposed? The upcoming Harry Potter movie struck me as a snooze because only about 2% of the scenes were brightly lit, unlike the first Harry Potter movie, which had lots of sunshine falling on the beautiful Lake Country (?) mountain scenery around Hogwarts. Granted, it's unrealistic to expect sunny days during the school term in northern England, but when you're making a guaranteed blockbuster, I expect the director to burn cash waiting around for the three hours per week when the light is perfect.

After getting the series off to a solid start with the first two movies, Chris Columbus dropped out, and art house Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron won critical kudos with the third film for making it "dark" -- i.e., filming outdoors during the usual bad weather. Now Mike Newell has made the fourth film, and it's also dreary-looking. The three seventh graders liked it, though, and that's what counts.

The same goes for "A History of Violence, " which is so underexposed that I took my glasses off to check to make sure I wasn't accidentally wearing my prescription sunglasses.

"A History of Violence" aspires to be a little like Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs," but without the memorable dialogue, fun acting, and bright colors. If the point of the movie is too shock you with all the blood, doesn't it help if the blood looks red?

The wife and I finally saw David Cronenberg's latest at the $3 2nd-run theatre, and the low-budget Saturday night crowd gave it the raspberry, laughing derisively at numerous phony turns in the plot. In contrast, the critics found it a thought provoking work of art:

"A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg's latest mindblower is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year."
-- Manohla Dargis, NEW YORK TIMES

"A gripping, incendiary, casually subversive piece of work that marries pulp watchability with larger concerns without skipping a beat."
-- Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Packed inside David Cronenberg's latest film, which presents itself as gift-wrapped, shoot-'em-up entertainment, is a sobering reflection on our culture's attitude toward violence."
-- Desson Thomson, WASHINGTON POST

Apparently, the critics decided it was an anti-Bush and anti-American film, so therefore it had to be good:

"It's a savage film that questions its savagery every step of the way and asks its audience to consider the costs of Dirty Harry diplomacy writ large. It will hit you like a ton of bricks. Don't miss it."
-- Glenn Whipp, LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS

But the plot and the dialogue about a small town nice guy who isn't what he seems, just appears off from the first five minutes of the film, as if nobody involved with it had ever been to a small town and had no clue how anybody would actually act in these situations. It doesn't help that "A History of Violence" is another ultra-serious movie made from a graphic novel (i.e., expensive comic book), like Road to Perdition, but without that film's expensive cinematography, sets, costumes, and musical score. The film is full of the kind of ridiculous incidents that look cool in a graphic novel but ring false when projected 30 feet high on the screen.

And the casting is ridiculous, with Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, and William Hurt playing gangsters in the Philadelphia mob, the Anglo-Nordic Mafia, apparently.


William Hurt appears to have negotiated a contract that his character will only be seen with a glass of scotch in his hand, and that that won't be colored water pretending to be scotch in his glass. Hurt appears to be making up his characterization as he goes along, and he's more entertaining than anybody else in the movie.


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

Congratulations, Malcolm, just remember to leave your soul with its rightful owner when you're done using it:

Proving that there is no limit to the amount of money an insightful journalist can make if chooses to sell his soul comes this article in Variety:

Leonardo DiCaprio's production company Appian Way is developing Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Blink into a movie, with DiCaprio attached to star and Stephen Gaghan (Syriana) onboard to write and direct.

As he did in his previous book "The Tipping Point," in "Blink" Gladwell combines vignettes about people making snap judgments in various situations to argue larger points about how people make first impressions.

Gaghan's pitch is thought to include a writer character based on Gladwell and various characters out of the book, woven together into a story.

Here's my capsule review of Blink:

- Go with your gut reactions, but only when they are right.

- And even when your gut reactions are factually correct, ignore them when they are politically incorrect.

Uh, Leonardo, Gladwell, who is a little bit black, got the idea for Blink when he grew an afro and suddenly started getting hassled by The Man. Are you sure this role is perfect for you?

Tyler Cowen asks:

So who will star in Freakonomics?


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

Peter Drucker, RIP

The one management guru who deserved that title has died at age 95. Last year he pointed out something that almost nobody is talking about:

"But the immigrants have a mismatch of skills: They are qualified for yesterday's jobs, which are the kinds of jobs that are going away."

As the French have discovered, by importing people to do the jobs you don't want to do, you're setting yourself up for trouble a generation hence when machines do those jobs.


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

Whites over-represented in Iraq fatalities

Here's something you won't read elsewhere.

It's widely assumed that American minority soldiers are suffering a disproportionate number of deaths in the current war. Yet, according to iCasualites, 74% of all American fatal casualties in the Iraq war have been suffered by non-Hispanic whites. In 2004, non-Hispanic whites only made up 67% of the total population, and, more relevantly, only 61% of the 25-year-olds, which might be about the representative age of the fatalities.

So, young whites are dying in Iraq at a per capita rate more than 80% higher than young minorities. If you are wondering about how I calculated that, it's:

(74% / 61%) / (26% / 39%)

What you definitely won't see elsewhere is an explanation of the most likely reason for this racial imbalance: IQ. To be allowed to enlist, you have to score 92 or higher on the military's IQ test, the Armed Forces Qualification Test (the same one used throughout The Bell Curve.) Since 1992, only 1% of new military enlistees have had IQs below the 30th percentile nationally.

This requirement disqualifies about half of all Hispanics and over 60% of all blacks from joining up, versus less than a quarter of all whites.


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

November 11, 2005

Your Christmas Present Purchasing Problem Solved!

Just give a subscription to the American Conservative magazine to those on your Christmas list. Only $19.95 for 16 issues or $29.95 for 24 issues. Do it now and you won't have to worry for the next six weeks about what you'll get them .

A relevant article from the Nov. 21st issue of The American Conservative:

The Weekly Standard’s War

Murdoch’s mag stands athwart history yelling, “Attack!”
By Scott McConnell

As the Weekly Standard celebrates its 10th birthday, it may be time to ask whether America has ever seen a more successful political magazine. Many have been more widely read, profitable, amusing, or brilliant. But in terms of actually changing the world and shaping the course of history, what contemporary magazine rivals the Standard? Even if you believe that the change has been much for the worse, the Standard’s record of success in its own terms is formidable.

At the time of the Standard’s founding in 1995, there was considerable speculation among neoconservatives over whether the movement had run its course. In “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” Norman Podhoretz argued that neoconservatism had effectively put itself out of business by winning on its two major battle fronts: over communism and the residue of the 1960s counterculture. In the process, it had injected itself into the main body of American conservatism to such a degree that it was no longer particularly distinct from it. The eulogy was not a lamentation, more an appreciation of a job well done.

But while there was something to the Podhoretz argument, the American Right in 1995 did not have a neoconnish feel. Newt Gingrich and the new Congress were the center of gravity; Rush Limbaugh was a far more important figure than Bill Kristol; the issues that most agitated the Right, gays in the military and Whitewater, were either the province of religious and social conservatives or committed Republican partisans.

On other national issues, neocons were either uncertain or not on the cutting edge. Charles Murray’s 1994 bestseller The Bell Curve, which argued that IQ was hereditarily based and was increasingly and ineluctably correlated with career success and life outcomes, was the most discussed and controversial book on the Right, but neocons were split over whether to distance themselves from it or quietly embrace at least some of its analyses. Immigration, already an issue of intense popular concern in California, was a key cause for National Review, the oldest and most popular magazine on the Right. But most neoconservatives deplored the immigration-reform impulse, with many claiming to see in it an echo of the restrictionists of the 1920s, whose legislation had the (obviously unintended) result of closing America’s door to Jewish refugees a decade later.

Foreign policy, which had been a prime unifier of the Right during the Cold War, was on the back burner. Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary had been waging a lonely battle against the Oslo peace process (a track leading to a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank), but its position was very much in the minority among both foreign-affairs experts and American Jews. In the quarterlies, foreign-policy specialists debated America’s role in the post-Cold War world, but it was hard for most newspaper readers to keep up with obscure struggles on the Balkans or complicated debate about NATO expansion. America, it seemed, had no real enemies. Thus in 1995, it could be rightly claimed that the original neoconservative movement had spawned a successor generation, even two. But it was not clear what that generation’s role would be, if any.

Enter the Weekly Standard—edited principally by William Kristol, a genial and sharp son of an eminent neoconservative family—which arrived on the scene thanks to a $3 million annual subsidy from Rupert Murdoch. It is not always understood beyond the world of journalism that political opinion magazines almost invariably lose money—sometimes a lot of it. The deficits are usually made up by their owners and subscribers’ contributions, some quite substantial. Commentary was supported for most of its life by the American Jewish Committee and now has a publication committee of formidably wealthy people. William F. Buckley’s National Review always had angels; Buckley once answered a query about when his magazine would be profitable by saying, “You don’t expect the Church to make a profit, do you?” The venerable Nation, at the time of the Standard’s founding, had an annual deficit of roughly $500,000, made up by owner Arthur Carter. The prestigious Atlantic Monthly reportedly loses between $4 and $8 million a year.

That said, while the Standard’s reported subsidy was gigantic for a small ideological niche magazine, if Rupert Murdoch’s purpose was to make things happen in Washington and in the world, he could not have leveraged it better. One could spend 10 times that much on political action committees without achieving anything comparable...

The subsidy Murdoch accorded the Standard assured the new venture would be highly visible by the standards of start-up political magazines. It could afford a wide newsstand presence: it is costly for any new magazine to print issues that will in most cases not be sold. The Standard not only passed out thousands of complimentary issues around Washington, it had them personally delivered to Beltway influentials as soon as they were printed. Above all, the new journal provided employment for a small coterie of neoconservative essayists and a ready place to publish for dozens of apparatchiks who held posts at the American Enterprise Institute and other neocon-friendly think tanks.

With the fledgling Fox News network, the Standard soon emerged as the key leg in a synergistic triangle of neoconservative argumentation: you could write a piece for the magazine, talk about your ideas on Fox, pick up a paycheck from Kristol or from AEI. It was not a way to get rich, but it sustained a network of careers that might otherwise have shriveled or been diverted elsewhere. Indeed, it did more than sustain them, it gave neocons an aura of being “happening” inside the Beltway that no other conservative (or liberal) faction could match. Murdoch had refuted the otherwise plausible arguments in Norman Podhoretz’s eulogy...

Without the Weekly Standard, would the invasion of Iraq taken place? It’s impossible to know. Without the Standard, other voices—including those of the realist foreign-policy establishment, which had been dominant in the first Bush administration and which opposed a precipitous campaign against Saddam—would have been on a more level playing field with the neocons. That would have made a difference.

So in a sense the Iraq War is Bill Kristol’s War as much as it is George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s, and the Standard is the vehicle that made it possible. [More]


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

"Genetic Find Stirs Debate on Race-Based Medicine"

Nicholas Wade writes in the NYT:

In a finding that is likely to sharpen discussion about the merits of race-based medicine, an Icelandic company says it has detected a version of a gene that raises the risk of heart attack in African-Americans by more than 250 percent.

The company, DeCode Genetics, first found the variant gene among Icelanders and then looked for it in three American populations, in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Atlanta.

Among Americans of European ancestry, the variant is quite common, but it causes only a small increase in risk, about 16 percent.

The opposite is true among African-Americans. Only 6 percent of African-Americans have inherited the variant gene, but they are 3.5 times as likely to suffer a heart attack as those who carry the normal version of the gene, a team of DeCode scientists led by Dr. Anna Helgadottir reported in an article released online yesterday by Nature Genetics...

The new variant found by DeCode Genetics is a more active version of a gene that helps govern the body's inflammatory response to infection. Called leukotriene A4 hydrolase, the gene is involved in the synthesis of leukotrienes, agents that maintain a state of inflammation.

Dr. Stefansson said he believed that the more active version of this gene might have risen to prominence in Europeans and Asians because it conferred extra protection against infectious disease.

Along with the protection would have come a higher risk of heart attack because plaques that build up in the walls of the arteries could become inflamed and rupture. But because the active version of the gene started to be favored long ago, Europeans and Asians have had time to develop genetic changes that offset the extra risk of heart attack.

The active version of the inflammatory gene would have passed from Europeans into African-Americans only a few generations ago, too short a time for development of genes that protect against heart attack, Dr. Stefansson suggested.

That's interesting in part because it suggests that interracial marriage could cause health problems by combining genes that haven't evolved together and thus don't work as well together.

I haven't seen much evidence for this incompatibility problem in the past. My assumption has been that minor problems caused by incompatibilities like this were about evened out by small advantages from hybrid vigor, so people born of interbreeding between races were about as healthy as everybody else on average (other than examples of extreme inbreeding such as first cousin marriages).


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

Diversity Means Death

In the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson opines:

The riots in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities ought to wipe the smirk from the lips of even multiculturalism's smuggest critics. Those who lobby against bilingual education or get upset when their children learn about Cinco de Mayo should look at France and realize that multiculturalism is a lot like democracy -- it's the worst system except for all the others.

The French example presents an ideal laboratory experiment. France, like the United States, bases its sense of nationhood on a set of Enlightenment ideas about the rights of individuals in a society. France, much more than this country, also draws identity from language and an ancient cultural heritage.

But then immigrants began to arrive -- mostly former colonials from North and West Africa, people with darker skin and a different cultural and religious heritage. France essentially said to the immigrants: "Look, these are our ideals -- liberty, equality, fraternity . We're not adding diversity to the list."

It was a deliberate decision, of the kind that opponents of multiculturalism in the United States would have our country make: As a matter of policy, the French refused to acknowledge that cultural and religious differences even existed.

Apparently, Eugene doesn't read the rest of his newspaper, because then he could have told us about how well multiculti is working out in the officially multicultural Netherlands. From the Washington Post:

As Prof. Afshin Ellian arrived at Leiden University law school one day recently, two bodyguards hustled him through the entrance and past the electronically locked doors leading to his office. For the rest of the day, the men stood sentry outside those doors, scanning the hallways for any sign of the people who want him dead.

Ellian is one of a soaring number of Dutch academics, lawmakers and other public figures who have been forced to accept 24-hour protection or go into hiding after receiving death threats from Islamic extremists. In a country with a tradition of robust public debate and an anything-goes culture, the fear of assassination has rattled society and forced people such as Ellian to reassess whether it's worth it to express opinions that could endanger their lives.

"The extremists are afraid that if Dutch society becomes a safe haven for an intellectual discussion of political Islam, it will be very dangerous for them," said Ellian, an Iranian-born professor of social cohesion who escaped to the Netherlands two decades ago from Afghanistan after receiving death threats from communists there. "This is normal behavior in the Middle East, but not in Europe. They think it's their obligation to kill people they consider to be enemies of Islam."

In other European countries and in the United States, Islamic extremists have generally sought to spread terror with indiscriminate attacks -- bombing trains and hijacking airliners. In the Netherlands, however, radicals have embraced a different strategy: singling out individuals for assassination...

The wave of political violence began in May 2002, when Pim Fortuyn, an anti-immigration populist and biting social critic, was assassinated by an animal rights activist. While the crime shocked the Dutch, many people dismissed it as a freak occurrence, not a sign of overheating in the passionate rhetoric and vigorous debate that the country has always cherished.

It drives me nuts that the media keep on lying about Pim Fortuyn's assassination. The reason they lie is precisely because the media and political establishments have some of Fortuyn's blood on their hands.

Fortuyn, a potential prime minister, was murdered by Volkert Van der Graaf, a white lawyer for an environmental organization on May 6, 2002. Tellingly, that was the day after the French Presidential election of May 5 between Chirac and Le Pen, which climaxed the continent-wide Two Week Hate toward anti-immigrationists that Le Pen's qualifying for the final round on April 21 had initiated.

The respectable elites were so enraged at immigration restrictionists at the time that Fortuyn's murder was widely greeted by establishment figures with variations on he-had-it-coming. As I reported for UPI on May 8, 2002:

In response to his killing, El Mundo, a leading Spanish paper, cast much of the blame on the victim in convoluted but clearly angry prose: "A criminal response to the incendiary racist calls of these distant heirs of Nazism, introduces a terrible new element in a Europe that is fearful and harassed by demagoguery: that of vengeful violence, which can only engender more violence."...

Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel implied that the dead man had been just too darn democratic for a modern Euro-democracy: "Democratic parties have to campaign in a very cautious way, and in a balanced and serene way to try to orientate the debate toward democratic values.

The Irish Times editorialized, "It is the very essence of democracy to allow anti-democratic views to be expressed." Apparently, trying to win an election on an anti-immigration plank is inherently "anti-democratic."

Mainstream newspapers and politicians hinted that Fortuyn was a racist, a fascist or even a Nazi. The Irish Times went on: "Nevertheless the murder will serve to highlight the rise of the far right in European politics and may in the long run gain votes for those involved in simplistic, racially-motivated campaigns. Today, on the 57th anniversary of the defeat of fascism, such trends strike a sad note."

Norman Lamont, the former Tory chancellor of the exchequer, wrote, "Britain has been fortunate to avoid the rise of extreme Right-wing, hateful politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen and Pim Fortuyn, the Dutchman who was murdered in Hilversum."

Aftonbladet, the leading circulation Swedish newspaper, weighed in with, "The brown parties of Europe have a new martyr." Brown was Hitler's color.

The media soon seized upon the self-exculpatory theory that the assassin was some animal rights nut who had shot Fortuyn not because of the politician's voluminous politically incorrect statements about immigration and Muslims, but because of a tiny number of glancing references to animals in his writings.

This was disproved when the murderer finally appeared in court and explained why he did it, but by then, the convention wisdom was set in stone.

First, he wasn't crazy. The BBC reported:

A psychiatrists' report presented to the court concluded that Van der Graaf was sane. It said he was a highly intelligent perfectionist who was emotionally uncommunicative and intolerant of those with different values to his own.

Second, as I wrote in VDARE in "Pim Fortuyn’s Murderer Revealed As Immigration Enthusiast:"

The assassin, Volkert van der Graaf, finally made his confession in court this last week. And -- what do you know! -- he says he killed Fortuyn largely for opposing Muslim immigration.

The London Daily Telegraph reported:

"Facing a raucous court on the first day of his murder trial, he said his goal was to stop Mr. Fortuyn exploiting Muslims as 'scapegoats' and targeting "the weak parts of society to score points" to try to gain political power. He said: 'I confess to the shooting. He was an ever growing danger who would affect many people in society. I saw it as a danger. I hoped that I could solve it myself.'"

The Boston Globe noted:

"Van der Graaf said that he had sensed an increasingly unpleasant and anti-Muslim atmosphere in society after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States—a time when Fortuyn's star was beginning its meteoric rise. Van der Graaf said Fortuyn, 54, had tried to use that atmosphere for his own aggrandizement. 'I saw him as a highly vindictive man who used feelings in society to boost his personal stature. The ideas he had about refugees, asylum seekers, the environment, animals. . . . He was always using or abusing the weak side of society to get ahead.'"

Reported Expatica.com:

"Van der Graaf claimed, according to the Algemeen Dagblad, he was greatly influenced by politicians who compared Fortuyn with Austrian far-right leader Jorg Haider and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini."

Obviously, I take Fortuyn's murder pretty personally. He wasn't shot by some Muslim loony but by a well-educated person who swallowed the media's demonization of outspoken immigration restrictionists.

The "respectable" press and politicians bear some of the blame for Fortuyn's murder.

Nor am I crazy about the fact that the assassin will be eligible to get out of jail after serving only 12 years.

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

Diversity Means Homogeneity

Michael at 2Blowhards wrote a post that explains more about the French than anything else I've ever seen. Here's an excerpt:

I suspect that the reason why France had such an impact on me and my tastes is simple: it's because Culture and Pleasure are such big things for the French. They're subjects that aren't kept under Puritanical wraps; instead, they're constantly out there, acknowledged, discussed, pursued, and relished. In many ways, there's (or at least there was back in my time) a cultural consensus that art (conceived of in a rather strict sense) and pleasure (conceived of in a very broad sense) are the points of life....

I was lucky enough to spend some time with a wide range of French people -- some rich ones, some middle-class ones, and some poor and working-class ones. And it was striking how similar their convictions about Culture were, and how similar their ideas of Pleasure were too. The Good Life? Coffee, wine, cheese; sparkling cities; good cars; witty conversation, flirtation, fashion; travel and time in the country; picnics; film and lit; and especially food and l'amour ... Rich or poor, all the French people I encountered shared the same taste-set. They worked with different budgets -- and the French people I knew were all really, really tight with a franc. But you didn't deny yourself the pleasures. What would be the point of doing such a thing? Work was important, money was important -- but far more important was having some perspective on these banal concerns. (I recall that even discussing work past a certain point was frowned on.) Living well (l'art de vivre), on the other hand -- ah, now that's what it's all about.

We might as well admit that one reason the French irk us so much is that they genuinely are onto something. If we Anglos feel looked-down on by the Froggies, it's partly because they're so annoyingly snobbish, sure. And, y'know, screw 'em for that. But why not allow too as to how they're onto something worthwhile that we're clueless about?...

The key to understanding the French is understanding how rewarding the French find "Being French" to be. Hard though it is for an American to believe, the French wake up in the morning and look forward to a full day's-worth of Being French. They go through the day Being French with great relish. They re-charge at night so that they can spend the following day Being French.

Well, goodbye to all that. The New York Times explains that in order to start being sensitive to diversity, the French are going to have to stop being so damn French:

[I]n a nutshell, ... what lies at the heart of the unrest that has swept France in the past two weeks: millions of French citizens, whether immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional French society, which has resisted adjusting a vision of itself forged in fires of the French Revolution. The concept of French identity remains rooted deep in the country's centuries-old culture, and a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair.

It drives us Americans nuts with rage that the French think their culture is superior to ours -- and, what really gets on our nerves is that we know deep down that in a lot of ways ... they're right. Then, think of how French arrogance about their cultural superiority must strike people from Mauritania, a country so dirtbaggish that they've outlawed slavery three times (and still practice it) and their most famous cultural contribution is force-feeding girls to fatten them up until they are globular.

So, we are told, France must now compromise both its highest ideals and it unique culture to to make the thugs rioting in the streets feel more at home. It must stop being so snootily French and instead welcome with open arms the global lumpenproletariat multiculture, led by African-American rappers. Soon, Paris can be another Birmingham or Bradford, where the Ali G's of Paris won't have to worry that anybody is looking down their noses at them.

Of course, those officially multicultural British cities with their supposedly vibrant free market Anglo-Saxon economic systems have had their own race riots in this decade, but solving problems isn't the point, now is it? The point of diversity is that every place in the world must become just like every other place! The ultimate goal of diversity is global homogeneity.

To adapt what I wrote about Utah for VDARE in "Utah's Not Diverse -- It's Weird!"

There are two kinds of diversity: external and internal. And they inevitably conflict with each other. When there is more of one, there must, mathematically speaking, be less of the other.

France was an example of external diversity. It worked hard to make itself culturally homogenous internally, so therefore, when observed from the outside, it was obvious that it had a distinct character of its own. It took in a steady but not overwhelming flow of immigrants, mostly from other Roman and Orthodox Catholic countries in Europe, such as Chopin from Poland and Zola's father from Italy, and brought all the considerable resources of the French state and society to forcing them to adopt French culture. But, now it has taken in too many people from Africa who don't want to, or can't, or both, adjust to French culture.

In contrast, internal diversity is the only kind we are supposed to celebrate these days. The people in every state, company, college, or club must "look like America." And soon the people in every Western country must "look like the world."

Of course, when that great day arrives, then everything and everywhere will look like everything else.

As Solzhenitsyn wrote in his Nobel Prize lecture, which the Soviet regime refused to let him deliver:

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.


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

Udolpho on Tuesday's defeat of anti-gerrymandering initiatives

He writes:

Where is your brain?… Anti-gerrymandering initiatives lost in both California and Ohio. IN GOD'S NAME WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU MORONS? Gerrymandering is nothing more than a way of reducing the power of your vote and giving the balance over to the parties – whichever party is in office gets to wield it over you. There is actually no argument in favor of it, unless you regard yourself as a zombie created as a mere extension of the Party's will – an undead, moronic automaton. These initiatives are the closest thing we will ever see to an initiative that states plainly, "Vote against me if you are a complete fool." [More]

I, for one, welcome our old invincible overlords. I look forward to the exact same legislators and Congressmen ruling us into their senile years, with absolutely no chance of the public mobilizing to defeat any of them unless, as the saying goes, they are found with a dead girl or live boy (and that didn't stop Congressman Gerry Studds).


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