February 9, 2006

More phony intellectualizing from Belmont Club

This Belmont Club guy is smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is. He doesn't test his ideas enough before he publishes them. He takes a few facts and weaves them into a complicated theory, but he falls in love with his beautiful contraptions and doesn't ask basic questions about them before he publishes them.

For example, "Wretchard" claims to be reading William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill's life from 1932-1940 for a second time, but he still gets it all wrong:

Re-reading William Manchester's "Alone"

Although today it is fashionable to think of Appeasement as the political embodiment of cowardice it was coldly calculated to bring the Dictators into conflict and -- so Chamberlain hoped -- into annihilating each other. By selling out Austria in the Anchluss, the Czechs in the Sudetendland and nearly betraying Poland over the Danzig corridor Chamberlain was tempting Hitler ever further east into what he hoped would be an eventual clash with the other monster, Joseph Stalin. He did not reckon that evil, while coarse, is surpassingly cunning. The announcement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonagression pact on August 23, 1939, just a week before Poland was finally invaded by both Hitler and Stalin, made plain to Chamberlain that he had been outwitted. If Britain intended to drive Hitler East, Stalin had instead turned Hitler West. Nothing remained to Chamberlain and Britain's enervated armed forces but to gather up the tatters of their strategy and huddle behind the army of France. Having staked everything on diplomatically containing Hitler while neglecting Britain's defense -- not provoking Hitler was a deemed essential for diplomacy to succeed -- Chamberlain had no Plan B.

No, that's just not true. The moment when Neville Chamberlain woke up and realized that appeasing Hitler at Munich in 1938 was a mistake was when Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939. On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a heroic but impractical guarantee to Poland that they would go to war with Germany in case of German attack on Poland.

The problem then was that Britain and France were a long way from Poland and had no way to defend Poland in Poland. Neither had much offensive capability yet to take the war to Germany. Britain had started rearming in 1936-37 (the real villain was previous prime minister Stanley Baldwin) and would be in good shape by about 1942-43, while France had invested heavily in defensive warfare (the Maginot line) while not putting much into tanks. the crucial offensive weapon. (Actually, they had a lot of tanks but they distributed them widely rather than concentrating them for an offensive thrust.)

So, the most obvious alliance to defend Poland was the revival of the alliance of 1914 among Britain, France, and Russia. Stalin was open to such an alliance if he could move his troops up into Poland to defend against German attack. The Poles, however, absolutely rejected this, assuming that if they allowed the Russians in, it would take them about 50 years to get the Russians out (which turned out to be right).

There didn't seem to be any solution to this problem, and Chamberlain and the French weren't enthusiastic about bullying the poor Poles into a deal, so Stalin in August 1939 decided to temporarily align with Hitler. He figured that Hitler would, after digesting part of Poland, attack France and that would bog down into another WWI-style conflict. After the two sides were bled dry, Stalin would then re-enter the war and become the big victor.

And then Wretchard uses his fallacious history to draw this analogy:

Yet the cartoon crisis has been cruelest to radical Islam because it has upset the timetable for the slow demographic conquest of Europe. It forced the crisis before the time was ripe to win an outright trial of strength. And it has deranged the carefully crafted plan to hold Europe politically neutral while the Islamists concentrated their force on their most dangerous enemy, the United States. Unless the Islamists can reverse or at least pause the process of confrontation it will find itself engaged on two fronts, against Europe and the United States simultaneously.

Oh, for heaven's sake, what a load of portentous tripe. The Cartoon Crisis will be largely forgotten in a year, just like the Nigerian Muslim beauty contest riots of 2002 are forgotten. (The good news out of the Cartoon Crisis is that a few more people, maybe one or two dozen, will figure out that diversity and free speech are contradictory.) By next summer, everybody will be up in arms over some new example of Muslim obnoxiousness.

And what the heck is this "carefully crafted plan?" Who carefully crafted it? Where is this "Islamist" version of the Imperial German General Staff supposedly headquartered? Who belongs to it it? The Elders of Islam? Where is this Islamist Schlieffen Plan written down? There's a billion-plus Muslims and they can barely organize a Boy Scout troop.

There are two larger points here. The first is that we must learn the correct lessons of how WWII started. For example, we have to stop seeing every tin horn politician in the Middle East as another Hitler. Hitler was something unusual, thank God. Heck, Stalin wasn't even another Hitler when it came to starting wars. Saddam Hussein in 2003 wasn't another Hitler -- he was a worn out old man writing romance novels. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran isn't another Hitler -- he's not even in charge of his own country.

Second, even if they had cloned Hitler and had been secretly raising Hitler 2.0 for 50 years in some Muslim country, he still wouldn't be in charge of Germany. At worst, he'd be in charge of some ramshackle Muslim country full of illiterate, corrupt, and fractious Muslims. It was the bizarre combination of the cold rationality of the German people and the maniacal ambition of Hitler that made World War II.

The second point is that there is a real danger in over-emphasizing the lessons of how WWII started, even the correct ones, at the expense of the lessons of how WWI started. In the 1930s, the good guys over-learned the lessons of 1914, and thus weren't prepared for Hitler, but we have the advantage that we can study the causes of both wars. The obsession in recent years with the 1930s, while ignoring 1914, is not healthy.

In 1914, a whole bunch of fairly reasonable men, none of them a Hitler, were responsible for just about the worst thing that ever happened. Historian David Fromkin's recent re-examination of who started the Great War concluded that the man most responsible for WWI was von Moltke the Younger, the head of the German General Staff. Maybe, maybe not, but the point is that von Moltke, or General von Hotzendorff of Austria, or Colonel Dragutin Dimitrievitch, the leader of both the Black Hand terrorists and military intelligence in Serbia, or Sir Edward Grey, or whomever you want to pin the blame on is a pretty boring villain compared to Hitler.

The most picturesque villains of the time were Kaiser Wilhelm II and Rasputin. But the Kaiser in this case was quite reluctant to go to war and had to be dragged into it by his generals. Rasputin was utterly against war on the grounds that too many Russian peasants would die. But he couldn't work his usual magic on the Czar and Czarina because he was laid up in a Siberian hospital after being stabbed by a young lady he had trifled with.

The point is that WWI came about through all the proper bureaucratic channels, without the impetus of anybody who seemed overtly evil -- except for the fact that they played a role in bringing about four years of slaughter..

One important lesson to be learned from WWI is the dangers of the mood that says, "We must run any risk to be safe," a logic that has had its grips on much of the U.S. since 9/11. The German General Staff in 1914 had calculated that if Russia continued to grow economically faster than Germany for another couple of decades, then by 1935 or 1940, Russia could defeat Germany. Therefore, to be safe, Germany must fight Russia now!

And to conquer Russia, they first had to conquer France. And to conquer France they had to violate Belgium's neutrality, which meant they had to beat Britain. (And, they later figured out, to knock Russia out of the war they had to send Lenin to St. Petersburg, and to starve Britain, they had to sink American ships, which meant they had to beat America, which turned out to be a bridge too far.)

Well, swell ... It was a hell of a plan, and they almost pulled it off, but it ultimately set into motion a chain of events that lost them two World Wars and ended in 1945 with the Russian Army occupying the flattened ruins of Berlin and raping every East German woman under 70.

They had run every risk to be safe.


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

February 8, 2006

Feminist crone cat fight!

Betty Friedan, RIP, was a long-time Stalinist fellow-traveler who got bored with supporting the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and discovered a more fun way to indulge her inner diva by transforming herself into a celebrity feminist.

Germaine Greer, recently an unsuccessful contestant on the UK version of the reality TV show "Big Brother," unloads on the recently dead Friedan in "The Betty I Knew" in The Guardian, describing a trip they took together to pre-revolutionary Iran in the 1970s:

Betty's imperiousness had the shah's courtiers completely flummoxed. She ordered a respirator for her hotel room and one was brought over from the children's hospital. Three days later the courtiers asked me if it would be possible to remove it, as the hospital only had two and she wasn't using hers. I told them to go ahead and grab it, and that I would deal with Betty myself, but she didn't seem to notice that it was gone.

Again and again our escorts, aristocratic ladies with bleached hair and eyebrows, dressed from head to toe by Guy Laroche, would ask me to explain Betty's behaviour. "Please, Mrs Greer, she behaves so strangely, we think she may be drinking. She shouts at us, and when we try to explain she walks away. Sometimes her speech is strange." ...

As we were leaving our farewell party to go back to the hotel, Betty propped herself in front of our Cadillac and refused to get in. "Dammit!" she shouted, "I wunt, I deserve my own car! I will nutt travel cooped up in this thing with two other women. Don't you clowns know who I am?"

"Mrs Greer," pleaded the courtiers, who were shaking with fright. "What shall we do? Please make her quiet! She is very drunk."

Betty wasn't drunk. She was furious that the various dignitaries and ministers of state all had their own cars, while the female guests of honour were piled into a single car like a harem. Helvi and I looked on from our Cadillac at Betty standing there in her spangled black crepe-de-chine and yelling fit to bust, "I will nutt be quiet and gedinna car! Absolutely nutt!"

Eventually one of the ministers' cars was sent back for Betty. As it pulled out of the gateway I caught sight of her, small, alone in the back, her great head pillowed on the leather, eyes closed, resting after this important victory.

This is quite reminiscent of last year's expose of the egomania of the late Susan Sontag by lesbian English professor Terry Castle, "Desperately Seeking Susan." As I said then:

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.


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

Feminist crone cat fight!

Betty Friedan, RIP, was a long-time Stalinist fellow-traveler who got bored with supporting the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and discovered a more fun way to indulge her inner diva by transforming herself into a celebrity feminist.

Germaine Greer unloads on the recently dead Friedan in "The Betty I Knew" in The Guardian, describing a trip they took together to pre-revolutionary Iran in the 1970s:

Betty's imperiousness had the shah's courtiers completely flummoxed. She ordered a respirator for her hotel room and one was brought over from the children's hospital. Three days later the courtiers asked me if it would be possible to remove it, as the hospital only had two and she wasn't using hers. I told them to go ahead and grab it, and that I would deal with Betty myself, but she didn't seem to notice that it was gone.

Again and again our escorts, aristocratic ladies with bleached hair and eyebrows, dressed from head to toe by Guy Laroche, would ask me to explain Betty's behaviour. "Please, Mrs Greer, she behaves so strangely, we think she may be drinking. She shouts at us, and when we try to explain she walks away. Sometimes her speech is strange." ...

As we were leaving our farewell party to go back to the hotel, Betty propped herself in front of our Cadillac and refused to get in. "Dammit!" she shouted, "I wunt, I deserve my own car! I will nutt travel cooped up in this thing with two other women. Don't you clowns know who I am?"

"Mrs Greer," pleaded the courtiers, who were shaking with fright. "What shall we do? Please make her quiet! She is very drunk."

Betty wasn't drunk. She was furious that the various dignitaries and ministers of state all had their own cars, while the female guests of honour were piled into a single car like a harem. Helvi and I looked on from our Cadillac at Betty standing there in her spangled black crepe-de-chine and yelling fit to bust, "I will nutt be quiet and gedinna car! Absolutely nutt!"

Eventually one of the ministers' cars was sent back for Betty. As it pulled out of the gateway I caught sight of her, small, alone in the back, her great head pillowed on the leather, eyes closed, resting after this important victory.

This is quite reminiscent of last year's expose of the egomania of the late Susan Sontag by lesbian English professor Terry Castle, "Desperately Seeking Susan." As I said then:

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.


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

February 7, 2006

At least somebody is willing to defend their borders

A long time theme here at iSteve.com is defending human biodiversity. Although defending plant and animal biodiversity is extremely fashionable, nobody else speaks up for human biodiversity. Of particular concern to me has been the survival of the pygmy negrito Andamanese of North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean (located roughly where Skull Island in "King Kong" would be), one of the last tribes out of contact with the rest of the world. If they ever come into contact with us, most of them will die from diseases for which they have no defenses.

Fortunately, the Sentinelese have no intention of going down without a fight. The Daily Telegraph reports:

Stone Age tribe kills fishermen who strayed on to island
By Peter Foster in New Delhi
(Filed: 08/02/2006)

One of the world's last Stone Age tribes has murdered two fishermen whose boat drifted on to a desert island in the Indian Ocean.

The Sentinelese, thought to number between 50 and 200, have rebuffed all contact with the modern world, firing a shower of arrows at anyone who comes within range.

They are believed to be the last pre-Neolithic tribe in the world to remain isolated and appear to have survived the 2004 Asian tsunami.

The two men killed, Sunder Raj, 48, and Pandit Tiwari, 52, were fishing illegally for mud crabs off North Sentinel Island, a speck of land in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands archipelago. Fellow fishermen said they dropped anchor for the night on Jan 25 but fell into a deep sleep, probably helped by large amounts of alcohol. During the night their anchor, a rock tied to a rope, failed to hold their open-topped boat against the currents and they drifted towards the island.

"As day broke, fellow fishermen say they tried to shout at the men and warn them they were in danger," said Samir Acharya, the head of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, an environmental organisation. "However they did not respond - they were probably drunk - and the boat drifted into the shallows where they were attacked and killed."

After the fishermen's families raised the alarm, the Indian coastguard tried to recover the bodies using a helicopter but was met by the customary hail of arrows.

Photographs shot from the helicopter show the near-naked tribesmen rushing to fire. But the downdraught from its rotors exposed the two fisherman buried in shallow graves and not roasted and eaten, as local rumour suggested.

Mr Acharya said the erroneous belief in the tribe's cannibalism grew from the practice of another tribe, the Onge, who would cut up and burn their dead to avoid them returning as evil spirits.

"People saw the flesh cooking on the fire and thought they must be cannibals but this incident clearly contradicts that belief," he said.

Attempts to recover the bodies of the two men have been suspended, although the Andaman Islands police chief, Dharmendra Kumar, said an operation might be mounted later. "Right now, there will be casualties on both sides," he said from Port Blair. "The tribesmen are out in large numbers. We shall let things cool down and once these tribals move to the island's other end we will sneak in and bring back the bodies."

Environmental groups urged the authorities to leave the bodies and respect the three-mile exclusion zone thrown around the island.

In the 1980s and early 1990s many Sentinelese were killed in skirmishes with armed salvage operators who visited the island after a shipwreck. Since then the tribesmen have remained virtually undisturbed.

DNA analysis of another tribe, the Jarawa, whose members made first contact with the outside world in 1997, suggest that the tribesmen migrated from Africa around 60,000 years ago.

However, the experience of the Jarawa since their emergence - sexual exploitation, alcoholism and a measles epidemic - has encouraged efforts to protect the Sentinelese from a similar fate.

My 2002 interview with the founder of the Andaman Association, George Weber, is here.

John Derbyshire has scanned in the two great pictures of Andamanese from Carleton Coon's 1965 classic The Living Races of Man. That picture of a steatopygous Andaman mom and how she carries her toddler around is now on-line here. The portrait of a young pygmy negrito couple of Little Andaman Island, his arm lovingly around her shoulders, the joy in each other's company radiating outward. It's as happy a picture as you'll ever see. This photo is now on-line here, [Not safe for work in a National Geographic way.]


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

A Car Salesman's Secrets

A reader writes:

I sold cars on assorted lots during my summers off from college.

What you're saying [in debunking Malcolm Gladwell's theory that car salesmen are unconsciously offering higher prices to blacks and women] is true.

As a matter of fact, because of this phenomena of black men wanting to appear to be big spenders, I reflexively used what is called a "negative sell" approach.

When a black man would tell me what car he was interested in, I'd "try" to dissuade him.

"That's kind of an expensive model. Not everyone can swing that. Maybe you should take a look at a Ford Focus? Obviously, it isn't like the car you're interested in, but they're easier to finance."

Most often, he would say, "Oh no! I can afford what I want, no problem."

I'd reply with plenty of enthusiasm, and show his car of choice.

Back in the office, if he gave me any objections, I'd remind him that I told him it might be a little too expensive for him to handle, and he told me it would be no problem. That usually squelched any lowballing efforts.

Where did I learn this? Through experience, and the advice of mentors who had been selling cars for decades.

Nothing unconscious about it.

We all just wanted to make money. What race a fellow was being irrelevant except as it may pertain to getting them out with one of our cars under their butts.

If I'd been told blacks enjoy English tea and crumpets, and I found it to be true, all my black customers would be sipping Earl Grey.

Race did not matter to me. Making the sale did.

Matter of fact, professional sales is all about psychological self-discipline.

Generally for a professional salesman, being a racist is not cost effective. Being observant of human behavior, and accurately identifying how to exploit it... is.


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

The American Conservative's February 13th Issue

The American Conservative's new issue is now semi-online:

February 13, 2006 Issue


Republic for Sale

By Doug Bandow
As long as government dispenses trillions in spoils, high-power lobbying is here to stay.



Eat, Drink, and Buy Merrily

By Bill Bonner
Celebrated Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s true legacy is one of debt and fiscal deceit. His successor aims to follow.

Americans First
By Steve Sailer
In devising immigration policy, the question should be: what’s best for the citizens we already have?

Lumpen Leisure
By James Howard Kunstler
Last days of the cheap-oil carnival

Reformers’ Roadblock
By W. James Antle III
The Senate gives amnesty another chance.

Land With No Plants
By Arthur Versluis
Globalism’s local toll

The Fire Next Time
By Wayne Madsen
Neocons set their sights on Tehran.



Basketball As It Wasn’t
By Steve Sailer
Jerry Bruckheimer’s “Glory Road”

The Devils We Knew
By Leon Hadar
Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam
by Robert Dreyfuss

One Nation, Divisible
By Peter J. Lynch
The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future
by Juan Enriquez

Purchase an online edition of this issue immediately!

Counsels of a Liberal Ex-President
By Chip Pitts
Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis
by Jimmy Carter



TAC to Standard— Challenge Accepted
By Patrick J. Buchanan
The Weekly Standard
wants another war.

Beyond Sharon
By Leon Hadar
Sharon’s stroke reschedules the world.


A Night Out With the Kennedys
By Taki
Who is the Massachusetts Senator to judge Alito?



Fourteen Days: Trying Alito; A Trillion Here, A Trillion There; Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

Deep Background: London Bomber’s Legitimate Money; Fish and Chips and Terror; Cornered Syria


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

Is this why the West won?

On Albion's Seedlings, J. McCormick has a most informative review of a little known 1997 book by Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600. It makes an argument that I'm personally inclined to favor: that the secret to the West's triumph was a change in style of thought centered in pre-Renaissance northern Italy. People began to find it normal to measure and quantify things, and create visual or otherwise ordered representations of this measured reality. McCormick writes:

"Crosby believes that the period between 1275 and 1325 (and shortly thereafter) in northern Italy saw the radical realignment of social attitudes toward the nature and management of time and space. This dramatic change in perspective (literal and figurative) was in turn to influence navigation, mapmaking, timekeeping, mathematics, art, writing, music, optics, mechanical devices, and financial management.

The final “striking of the match,” according to the professor, was the linking of quantification techniques (n.b., echoes of Nisbett’s cognitive research) with the aggressive development of visualization methods: maps, perspective drawing, clock faces, plotted cannonball trajectories, musical notation, algebraic notation, alphabetization, book indexing and tables of contents, etc. etc. At every turn, the properties of objects were being measured, recorded, and evaluated from the perspective of literally a new vision of “reality” … simpler, universal, and graspable by ordinary people.


"The choice of the Renaissance West was to perceive as much of reality as possible visually and all at once, a trait then and for centuries after the most distinctive of its culture."


Unlike every other culture on the planet, mathematics was enthusiastically merged with measurement. And the vision of what was measurable expanded accordingly. [More]


I'd echo Charles Murray in pointing to the benign effect of the dominant theologian of the age, St. Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274, right at the beginning of this Great Leap Forward in Italy. Murray wrote in Human Accomplishment:


[Christianity] was a theology that empowered the individual acting as an individual as no other philosophy or religion had ever done before. The potentially revolutionary message was realized more completely in one part of Christendom, the Catholic West, than in the Orthodox East. The crucial difference was that Roman Catholicism developed a philosophical and artistic humanism typified, and to a great degree engendered, by Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274). Aquinas made the case, eventually adopted by the Church, that human intelligence is a gift from God, and that to apply human intelligence to understanding the world is not an affront to God but is pleasing to him.


I wonder if the Japanese, who were the one non-Western culture not beset with decadence after 1500, separately embarked on a similar journey into quantification. For example, sumo wrestling statistics run back into 18th century, which, I believe, is earlier than any examples of sports statistics in England. (Sports statistics are of course a classic example of the urge to quantify.)

Or did the Japanese pick these ideas up from the West in the 16th Century, when they were open to European trade and missions?


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

If black men like to be seen as big spenders, why are they notoriously bad tippers?

Across Difficult Country cites a PricewaterhouseCoopers study of inner city black spending habits that finds poor blacks like spend a lot on ostentatious purchases:

"African-American inner-city shoppers are 35 percent more likely than the population as a whole to buy women's dress shoes. They're also 54 percent more likely to purchase teen boys' clothing, and 64 percent more likely than average to buy fine jewelry...

"While American households in general spend an average of $1,069 annually on apparel, inner-city African Americans spend $1,502."

A reader writes:

I worked in the restaurant business for several years, and the conventional wisdom was that black people tipped less than other races. People who probably weren't otherwise racist would complain about this. I remember one pointy-bearded, multiply-pierced guy who looked like a WTO protestor and would blare rap music out of his car, who would (against company policy) skip anybody with a black sounding name ("Andre", "LaShuiqa") when his turn to deliver a pizza came up. People were not only conscious of this issue, they exaggerated it. I actually kept track of my tips from black and white customers for a while, and found that whites tip about 1/3 more, which is far less disparity than service industry employees (including myself) would have guessed without doing the math. This was in a white suburb, so I wouldn't necessarily expect these to be typical black folks. But that doesn't affect my main point, that people exaggerate, rather than suppress, these differences, because we were all dealing with these suburban blacks.

We were always looking for trends and trying to make generalizations about who tips and who doesn't, and when you work for tips, that's all you care about. If Hitler tipped well and Mother Teresa stiffed, a typical restaurant worker would praise him and bitch about her. Nobody was suppressing any un-PC thoughts.

Although I've never been a salesman, I would assume that salesmen are at least as conscious of their customers - probably more so. So Gladwell is full of it. I'll bet if he just asked some car salesmen, they would tell him the truth, or at least they would if they didn't think he was going to write about it and get them in trouble.

Also, surprisingly, Mexicans (meaning illegals in this area - I worked and was friendly with many of these people and I know that few of them are legal) were the best tippers of any ethnic group, on average (no, I didn't do the math, but my unconscious bias, if it exists, would have made me expect them to be cheap). Of course, this is all highly variable.

Ian Ayres found that blacks tip taxi cab drivers only about half as much as whites.

This raises the question of why do blacks like to be seen as big spenders but don't tip much? I presume it could be just a cultural difference -- tipping is a pretty screwy phenomenon in general, and you can see why one group might decide they could get more personal benefit out of stiffing the waiter and spending the money saved on bling.

I also expect that car dealers have a lot of tricks for persuading black customers that the salesman isn't some lowly servant like a waiter whose opinion doesn't matter, but is instead a fellow player, just like the customer is, a man worthy of being impressed by how much money you have to spend.

However, one group of blacks were big tippers, at least in the recent past: Another reader wrote awhile ago about her dad, who made his career as a waiter at a famous Manhattan restaurant where celebrities dined. The biggest tippers were the boxing champs, and the all-time greatest customer -- huge tipper, tremendous fun to wait on, and no complaints about the food or service -- was, indeed, The Greatest, Muhammad Ali.


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

Your base JPod model does not come with the self-awareness module

A reader points out that on NRO's The Corner today, John Podhoretz, of all people, accused his immigration restrictionist opponents of lacking decorum, civility, and thoughtfulness.

IMMIGRATION AT CPAC [Mark Krikorian]
This week's Conservative Political Action Conference will have two panels on immigration (one of them including yours truly), plus Rep. Tom Tancredo and Sen. John Cornyn giving (separate) speeches on the topic. Tamar Jacoby got booed last year.

BOOING TAMAR JACOBY AT CPAC [John Podhoretz]
I tell you, there's nothing like the open-mindedness in the debate over immigration. What decorum! What civility! What thoughtful discourse! How proud you restrictionists must be!

RE: BOOING TAMAR JACOBY [Mark Krikorian]
My point was not that booing her was a good thing; I get along with her fine, despite her being all wet on immigration. But the intensity of feeling on this is largely a function of the contempt with which the party establishment treats the grassroots: the president calling the Minutemen "vigilantes," Chris Cannon and Darrell Issa saying restrictionists don't belong in the Republican Party, and the shameful conduct of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. If mass-immigration supporters are going to dish it out, they'd better be ready to take it.

HAVING BEEN BOOED RECENTLY... [John Podhoretz]
...when the subject was immigration, Mark, I assure you that I wasn't dishing anything out at the time. I said merely what I feel deeply -- which is that, as a Jew, I have great difficulty supporting a blanket policy of immigration restriction because of what happened to the Jewish people after 1924 and the unwillingness of the United States to take Jews in. That didn't seem to me to be deserving of boos. But I got 'em, and I took 'em.


JPod is leaving out a crucial point: he was booed by a Jewish audience for his unpatriotic ethnocentric self-absorption. An iSteve reader attended the discussion that Pod Person 2.0 is referring to:


I attended a forum in Skokie outside of Chicago sponsored by the Jewish Policy Center (JPC) — the think tank offshoot of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC). The forum consisted of a moderator – Michael Medved, and four presenters, including John Podhoretz and David Horowitz.

I would say about 300 people showed up for the event, a lot considering it was a nice afternoon and both the Bears and Sox were playing....

Another questioner from the audience asked the panel about our immigration problems... But Podhoretz decided he wanted to answer this question, and here is where the fireworks began. He started by saying something along the lines of, “Well, first I feel when it comes to any issue of immigration, I have to rely on my Jewish experience. And I think back on the 1924 immigration restrictionist law which excluded so many Jews...”

Here he was interrupted and cut off by boos and jeers from the audience.

He was visibly taken aback by this reaction. He asked, “Why are you booing me?” Clearly shocked. Then he thought he had it figured out and responded by basically, “Oh, well I guess now this is an issue of Mexicans versus Jews...” And this produced even more jeers and boos from the audience, since he was clearly implying the audience was racist.


Damn Sailerites following him wherever he goes.

Let me emphasize again that a crowd of Jewish Republicans lustily rejected Podhoretz's philosophy of putting the welfare of Jews ahead of the welfare of Americans.

As this example makes clear, John Podhoretz himself is the Jewish Al Sharpton, a clownish ethnic activist who thinks first and foremost in tribal terms of how his ethnic group can profit from the political process at the expense of America as a whole.

The crucial question is why are bad apples like Podhoretz up on the speakers' platform while all the good eggs in that audience are stuck paying to hear his odious tripe? Why are the worst full of passionate intensity, while the best, who in this case have plenty of convictions, lack almost all media outlets?

A bizarre aspect of the neocon Open Borders mindset, as enunciated by Podhoretz and Tamar Jacoby, is how utterly nostalgia-driven is their is-it-good-for-the-Jews thinking. They don't care much about protecting Jews in America in the future from immigrant terrorists by guarding the borders. (To protect Americans from Arab terrorists, according to the neocons, we must instead conquer the Middle East: the notorious invite-the-world-invade-the-world strategy. And if occupying all the Arab countries doesn't turn the Arabs into Americans as planned, well, it will still kill a lot of Arabs in the process, so, from the neocon point of view, it's all good.) Virtually no contemporary immigrants give a damn about Israel, and some are highly anti-Semitic.

No, to the neocons, the crucial thing is to refight the 1924 argument over immigration, because they perceive that as an insult to their ethnicity. See, the Holocaust is Congress' fault -- they should have known that, even though he was in jail in 1924, Hitler would kill all the Jews 20 years later. (That perhaps the most important voice in favor of cutting back immigration in 1924 was the top union leader in the country Samuel Gompers, a Jewish immigrant, well, that little detail gets shoved down the memory hole big time.)

Of course, this neocon obsession with 1924 isn't really about Hitler, it's about maintaining status dominance in modern America, about strutting one's valuable victim status to put others in their place.


For an alternative patriotic philosophy, see my new article on citizenism in The American Conservative.


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

February 6, 2006

A Triumph of Jewish Eugenics

The Jewish Week reports:

The Vanquishing Of Tay-Sachs

The fatal genetic disease has almost disappeared among Jews thanks to aggressive screening — and the efforts of two parents.

By then, the Tay-Sachs screening procedure ... had become commonplace among potential mates and parents-to-be. The screening, discovered in 1969, meant that “Tay-Sachs was 95 percent eliminated” in American Jewry, a speaker at the dinner announced. Prominent Jewish organizations quickly advocated Tay-Sachs screening, and the disease’s incidence plummeted by the mid 1970s, remaining low since then.

Today, according to recent figures, of the 20 or so children diagnosed with Tay-Sachs in the U.S. each year, only a handful are Ashkenazi Jews, like the Dunkells. The rest are members of the Cajun community of Louisiana or are French-Canadians living near the St. Lawrence River, who have not undergone screening as frequently as American Jews...

Today, most Jewish couples undergo the screening, either before marriage (Orthodox couples do not generally approve of abortions, so Orthodox carriers either choose to marry other mates or adopt) or after conception (for people for whom abortion is an alternative when the fetus is found to have the disease.)

Some couples who are unwilling to consider terminating a pregnancy can also do an in-vitro fertilization that involves an analysis of the embryo’s DNA.

Despite reports in the media about the decline in Tay-Sachs, because of the Jewish community’s openness to Tay-Sachs screening the achievement of nearly wiping it out is not widely known.


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

Another black-brown prison race riot in LA County

The LA Daily News reports:

The Los Angeles County jail system remained in lockdown Sunday as authorities investigated a race-related riot at Pitchess Detention Center - one of the worst in at least four years that left an inmate dead and dozens injured.

Wayne Robert Tiznor, 45, of Los Angeles died from apparent blunt force trauma amid the chaos Saturday when fighting between Latino and African-American inmates spread to involve more than 2,000 in the North County Correctional Facility, one of three jails inside the sprawling 8,200-inmate complex...

Officials segregated Latino and African-American inmates in the North County facility - permitted during emergencies - while the entire county jail system was in lockdown, though deputies allowed restricted movement for some inmates by Sunday afternoon.

"Everything's quiet," Whitmore said. The measures are in effect until officials decide it's "safe to move forward."

The jail system - the nation's largest - oversees a daily population of about 21,000. About 60 percent are Hispanic, and about 30 percent are African-American, officials said.

With racial tensions viewed as a catalyst for the riot, Sheriff Lee Baca said he wants to discuss the need for inmate segregation with civil liberties groups, even as a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling forbid separation of state prison inmates strictly by race.

"The sheriff wants to ... have some real-life discussions," Whitmore said. "He wants to examine the reality of the jail world, where segregation prevents violence that could lead to death."

The Sheriff's Department has said it doesn't segregate by race but rather by gang affiliation, type of crime, propensity for violence or escape, sexual orientation and other factors. But gangs in and out of jail are often organized around race.

Kent of the American Civil Liberties Union said racial segregation of inmates might be allowed during emergencies, but it can't be the only solution to jailhouse violence.

I hate to say I-told-you-so (strike that, actually, I quite enjoy it), but I pointed out last year in VDARE that the Supreme Court's decision in Johnson v. California of outlawing temporary preventative segregation of new inmates was arrogantly naive, another example of the puerile (the clerks) assisting the senile (the Justices) to come up with a smugly stupid decision.

Your Lying Eyes points out:

Segregating prisoners would be dangerous, you see, because "by insisting that inmates be housed only with other inmates of the same race, it is possible that prison officials will breed further hostility among prisoners and reinforce racial and ethnic divisions." Yep, that's what Sandra Day O'Connor said in her majority opinion in Johnson v California. Whatever will our nation do without her down-to-earth, practical wisdom to guide the court?

This notion that shoving people together against their will is the best way to get them to like each other is one of the dominant dogmas of our society. To an elderly Supreme Court justice, this makes perfect sense:

"It's so educational for our grandchildren (great-grandchildren? I can never remember any more) when they come to visit us in Chevy Chase and Mr. Sodabottlewala next door shows them his pictures from his family estate in Bombay (or did they change the city's name? What do they call it now? Oh, yes, Bombay is now Bangalore. Sorry, my mistake.)"

But at the opposite end of the social scale, it doesn't work like that. Especially among violent inmates. To know a felon is generally not to love him. If you spend five years in a prison where the only people of another race you come in contact with are either criminals or guards, your opinion of that race will likely not improve. But you can't expect Supreme Court justices or their Ivy League clerks to figure that out.


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

February 5, 2006

Bushonomics in a nutshell

Edwin S. Rubenstein of VDARE.com continues to be the only person regularly covering what has to be the biggest economic story of the decade. On the VDARE blog he reports:

Hispanic employment rose 278,000, or by 1.46 percent in January, while non-Hispanic employment rose 17,000, or 0.01 percent....

Over the past five years - January 2001 through January 2006 – Hispanic employment rose by 3,226,000, or 20.0 percent, while non-Hispanic employment increased by 2,072,000, or 1.7 percent.

The government doesn't break out immigrants (much less illegal immigrants), so the Hispanic figure is the best proxy we have for the impact of immigration.


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

Malcolm Gladwell, Superstar

I just discovered that Gladwell responded at length to my uncomplimentary VDARE.com review of his humongous bestseller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. It's a marvel of fatuity. (My favorite line of Gladwell's: "Sailer and Posner have a very low opinion of car salesmen." Now that's a killer comeback!) I'll have my answer up on VDARE late on Sunday evening.

Meanwhile, tomorrow's Sunday New York Times runs a 2,600 word tongue-bath entitled "The Gladwell Effect." There is, however, a barely perceptible degree of subversive snark in Rachel Donadio's profile that shows she Googled my review. For example, she lifts from my piece when she writes:

His message is that we should trust first impressions — except when we shouldn't. Gladwell, who is multiracial, said he became interested in first impressions when he grew his hair into an Afro and then was repeatedly pulled over for speeding, and stopped once by the police looking for a rapist with similar hair.

And there's a new parody book out called Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All by "Noah Tall" (Lewis Grossberger and Michael Solomon):

Stop! Don't think! You already know what this book is about. That is the power of BLANK: the power of not actually thinking at all. Using what scientific researchers call "Extra-Lean Deli Slicing" (or would if they actually bothered to research it), your brain has already decided whether you're going to like BLANK, whether its cover goes with your shirt, and whether it will make you look smart if somebody sees you reading it on the train.

Chances are you and your shirt are both liking it a lot, you're going to buy several copies, and you don't even know why! That's why you've absolutely got to read BLANK: to find out why your brain keeps doing these wacky things without your permission. In BLANK, a hilarious parody of the number-one bestseller it looks eerily like (and sort of rhymes with) and that your brain wisely advised you to just read a review or magazine excerpt about while avoiding the actual book itself, the brilliantly impulsive and slightly irresponsible Noah Tall explains how people as diverse as General Custer, Roy Rogers, a semi-famous rock star, and the entire New York City Police Department either won big or lost miserably as a result of their minds going completely Blank.

About the Author

Noah Tall is a longtime subscriber to The New Yorker and other magazines that people leave on their coffee tables when they want to look smart. He has also been a member of NAMES, the dyslexic branch of MENSA, since 1598. He is the author of the highly acclaimed national bestseller The Tippling Point, which has yet to be published.


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

In other diversity news

Popular Pittsburgh Steeler running back Jerome "The Bus" Bettis, a Detroit native, received the key to the city of Detroit last week. His predecessor recipients include Saddam Hussein in 1980 for his generous donations to an Iraqi Christian church in Detroit.


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

The Danish Cartoons, or Diversity v. Freedom of Speech, Part CMXLIV

I've been pointing out for years that diversity and freedom of the press are in natural conflict, but the press has been slow to catch on.

"Reporter" Craig S. Smith writes in the New York Times:

Adding Newsprint to the Fire

EUROPEANS hoisted the banner of press freedom last week in response to Muslim anger over a dozen Danish cartoons, some of them mocking the Prophet Muhammad. But something deeper and more complex was also at work: The fracas grew out of, and then fed, a war of polemics between Europe's anti-immigrant nationalists and the fundamentalist Muslims among its immigrants.

"One extreme triggers the other," said Jonas Gahr Store, Norway's foreign minister, arguing that both sides want to polarize the debate at the expense of the moderate majority. "These issues are dangerous because they give the extremes fertile ground."

But this did not take place in a political vacuum. Hostile feelings have been growing between Denmark's immigrants and a government supported by the right-wing Danish People's Party, which has pushed anti-immigrant policies....

Let me see if I have this straight: what the New York Times is implying is that one representative of "extremism" is the elected government of Denmark?

In the current climate, some experts on mass communications suggest, the exercise was no more benign than commissioning caricatures of African-Americans would have been during the 1960's civil rights struggle. "You have to ask what was the intent of these cartoons, bearing in mind the recent history of tension in Denmark with the Muslim community," said David Welch, head of the Center for the Study of Propaganda and War at the University of Kent in Britain. Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, put it this way: "He knew what he was doing."

Way to uphold freedom of the press, Nicholas! I always knew you had it in you, you duplicitous toad.

And there was agonizing over what it meant for both press freedom and tolerance. "The limit to freedom of expression is the point at which there is an intent to harm a person or a community," said William Bourdon, a French lawyer who has handled high-profile freedom of speech cases...

No, the limit to freedom of expression should be falsehood. "Intent to harm" is a disaster for free speech.

But Mustafa Hussain, a Pakistani-born Danish sociologist, said the cartoons showed how far to the right Europe's debate has swung. "Switch on the television and you have the impression that Muslims are all fanatics, that Muslims don't understand Western liberal values," he said.

Perhaps Muslims should stop acting like fanatics whenever a TV camera is pointed in there direction? As for whether or not Muslims understand Western liberal values, a more pertinent question is whether Westerners still understand Western liberal values? What this pathetic article suggests is that Muslims understand the new and improved Western liberal values perfectly: that the highest value in the contemporary West is to be considered an official minority, which then gives you that ultimate value of victim status.

Mr. Rose offered a distinction between respecting other people's faith, which he favors, and obeying someone else's religious taboos, which he said society has no obligation to do.

But whether his exercise had achieved his stated goal — of forcing citizens to think about their submission to someone else's taboos — it was clear that it had helped extremists on both sides who would keep Europe and the Muslim world from understanding each other.

Yeah, yeah, all us freedom of speech extremists.

Isn't this last sentence a perfect example of elite media BS? What's happening is that people in Europe are finally coming to understand the values of the Muslim world that the media has tried to keep from them.


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

The In-Your-Face to Feel-Your-Pain Gradient

The In-Your-Face to Feel-Your-Pain Gradient -- The Dane-Muslim cartoon controversy illuminates one of the less understood dynamics in the modern world, which I call the In-Your-Face to Feel-Your-Pain Gradient.

All over the world, peoples differ in terms of how in-your-face they tend to be. The ultra-polite Japanese, for example, who might be the most sensitive people on earth to other people's emotional discomfort, are deeply distressed by the kind of brusque assertiveness that's common in South China. Thus the Japanese developed elaborate forms of business entertaining, while the South Chinese businessmen love to bargain aggressively when stone sober.

But the particular gradient that's most relevant to us is the one that runs between the Middle East and Northwestern Europe. Northwestern Europe and its overseas offshoots are probably second only to Japan as being Feel-Your-Pain cultures where people don't like social friction and don't like to see others upset. In contrast, the Middle East is perhaps the most in-your-face place on Earth. Here's P.J. O'Rourke's memorable description in The Atlantic of a Red Cross attempt at food distribution during the 2003 Iraq Attaq:

I was outside Safwan [in Iraq] on March 28, on the roof of a Kuwait Red Crescent tractor-trailer full of food donations. Below, a couple of hundred shoving, shouldering, kneeing, kicking Iraqi men and boys were grabbing at boxes of food.

Red Crescent volunteers provided the boxes, gingerly, to the mob. Each white carton would be grasped by three or four or five belligerents and pulled in three or four or five directions—tug-of-Congolese-civil-war.

Every person in the mob seemed to be arguing with every other person. Giving in to impulses to push themselves forward and push others away, shouting Iraqis were propelled in circles. A short, plump, bald man sank in the roil. A small boy, red-faced and crying, was crushed between two bellowing fat men. An old man was trampled trying to join the fray.

The Iraqis were snatching the food as if they were starving, but they couldn't have been starving or they wouldn't have been able to snatch so well. Most looked fully fed. Some were too fit and active. Everyone behind the trailer was expending a lot of calories at noon on a 90° day.

Looking out, I saw irrigated patches in the desert, at about the same density as the patches on the uniform of a mildly diligent Boy Scout. The tomatoes were ripe. Nannies, billies, and kids browsed between garden plots. Goat bolognese was on offer, at least for some locals.

There was no reason for people to clobber one another. Even assuming that each man in the riot—and each boy—was the head of a family, and assuming the family was huge, there was enough food in the truck. Mohammed al-Kandari, a doctor from the Kuwait Red Crescent Society, had explained this to the Iraqis when the trailer arrived. Al-Kandari was a forceful explainer. He resembled a beneficent version of Bluto in the Popeye comics, or Bluto in Animal House.

Al-Kandari had persuaded the Iraqis to form ranks. They looked patient and grateful, the way we privately imagine the recipients of food donations looking when we're writing checks to charities. Then the trailer was opened, and everything went to hell.

Al-Kandari marched through the donnybrook and slammed the trailer doors shut. He harangued the Iraqis. They lined up again. The trailer was opened, and everything went to hell.

Al-Kandari waded in and closed the trailer doors again. He swung his large arms in parallel arcs at the Iraqis. "Line up!" he boomed; "Queue!" he thundered—the Arabic-speaking doctor speaking to Arabic-speakers in English, as if no Arabic word existed for the action.

Al-Kandari took a pad of Post-it notes and a marker pen from his lab-coat pocket. "Numbers!" he said, still speaking English. "I will give you all numbers!" A couple of hundred shouldering, shoving Iraqi men and boys grabbed at the Post-it notes.

The doctor gave up and opened the trailer doors. I climbed the ladder behind the truck cab to get a better view.

Aid-seekers in England would queue automatically by needs, disabled war vets and nursing mothers first. Americans would bring lawn chairs and sleeping bags, camp out the night before, and sell their places to the highest bidders. Japanese would text-message one another, creating virtual formations, getting in line to get in line. Germans would await commands from a local official, such as the undersupervisor of the town clock. Even Italians know how to line up, albeit in an ebullient wedge. The happier parts of the world have capacities for self-organization so fundamental and obvious that they appear to be the pillars of civilization. But here—on the road to Ur, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, where civilization has obtained for 5,000 years longer than it has, for example, at a Libertarian Party confab in Phoenix—nothing was supporting the roof.

What I saw, however, wasn't anarchy... The Iraqis didn't try to climb into the tractor-trailer or break through its side doors. Red Crescent volunteers, coming and going from the back of the truck, were unmolested. Once an aid box was fully in an Iraqi's control and had been pulled free from the commotion, no one tried to take it. I saw four boxes being guarded by a young boy.

I watched a confident gray-haired man push toward the trailer gate. He had wire-rimmed glasses on the end of his nose and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He dove for a box, his glasses flying, cigarette embers burning various gutras and dishdashahs. He disappeared for the better part of a minute. Then he came out on the other side of the throng, box under one arm and glasses somehow back on his face (but minus the cigarette). The gray-haired man looked around and delivered an open-handed whack to someone who, I guess, had indulged in a late hit.

I stared at the rampage for an hour. Now and then I'd be noticed on the trailer roof. Whenever I caught someone's eye, I was greeted with a big, happy smile. The Iraqis were having fun.

Now, this is not solely the fault of Islam. Non-Muslims in the Middle East are also quite brusque. For example, I used to work at a marketing research firm where the most brilliant executive was a Lebanese Christian immigrant, who was constantly upsetting lesser employees by pointing out their mistakes in no uncertain terms. I had to counsel employees that you had to grade Magid on the curve -- that I'd known a half dozen Lebanese (all of them Christians, I believe) and he was the most considerate one of the six, so by the standards of his Levantine upbringing, he was practically David Niven for grace and good manners. Similarly, Israeli Jews are remarkably in-your-face, so Islam isn't totally to blame for why Middle Easterners are the way they are. (It may play a role, though -- the Hindus of Bali are said to be a lot nicer on average than the Muslims in the rest of Indonesia.)

In a culture like Iraq's where everyone is constantly asserting his and his family's rights at the top of his lungs, it's hard for anyone to have rights if anything is to get done. In a culture like England's where each individual is reticent about asserting his rights or the rights of his family or clan, it's much easier for everyone to have rights.

You can see the problem that then develops when people from the in-your-face end of the gradient immigrate to the feel-your-pain countries. When immigrants bring their Middle Eastern hostility and assertiveness, the natives in the northwest are reluctant to vocally protest right back at them, because, well, it's just not done. They just give them That Look that causes their fellow Northwest Europeans to feel guilty that they've caused their neighbors discomfort. But it doesn't work on the Middle Easterners. They just see the failure of the natives to do anything substantial as proof of their bland white bread inferiority.

But the truly catastrophic problem for the Northwesterners is that their empathy and politeness makes it very difficult for them to publicly discuss the problems that immigration of Middle Easterners causes for them. To say out loud, "Maybe we shouldn't let in more of these people," is seen as being rude toward the people we've already let in. The ones that are already there will get angry and cause a scene, which we just can't bear, so we'd better just not talk about immigration policy at all.

Of course, that means the problem just keeps getting worse.

Now, the Japanese get around this problem by not letting in immigrants at all, not even perfectly pleasant Filipinos. Instead, they build robots and program them to act like Japanese, which is a lot easier on the Japanese and their fragile emotions.

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

The Gladwell Beatdown

"Malcolm Gladwell Blinks Again:" In my new VDARE.com column, I consider Malcolm Gladwell's baffled and hurt response to my unkind review last year on VDARE.com of his humongous bestseller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Gladwell, the tribune multiculti capitalism, had claimed that the reason car salesmen had been found to offer prices to women and blacks was because the dealers were the victims of instantaneous unconscious prejudices. I had quoted Judge Richard A. Posner, the distinguished leader of the Law and Economics school of thought, in scoffing at this. We both argued that car dealers were simply exploiting the lesser tendencies of women and blacks to drive a hard bargain to extract more profit from them.

Here's what Gladwell had to say on his website. I'll put Gladwell's remarks in italics:

"One of the most bizarre reactions that I received from reviewers of Blink is an absolute inability to accept the notion of unconscious prejudice. Here is an example from a fairly well known writer named Steve Sailer. Sailer, in turns, quotes from a very hostile review of Blink in The New Republic by Richard Posner." ...

Back in 2005, I explained what was really happening in the showrooms:

"Women dislike hurting other people's feelings more than men do, and car salesmen are very good at acting emotionally hurt when you try to lowball them. … Black men, for whatever complicated reasons, enjoy being seen as big spenders. And car salesmen are all too willing to help them spend big."

Malcolm, you could only sputter in shock and repeat yourself:

"It's hard to know just what to say in the face of arguments like this. … My interpretation is that the reason the car salesmen quote higher prices to otherwise identical black shoppers is because of unconscious discrimination. They don't realize what they are doing…"

That's naive to the point of hilarity. Some of these guys have been selling cars for as long as you have been alive. And, believe it or not, they pay close attention not just to what makes the most money for themselves but to what works for other salesmen as well.

Further, if the salesman's unconscious prejudice is costing the dealership money, his manager will make him highly conscious of it quickly, or the salesman will be out on the street.

You go on, working up an impressive display of righteous indignation:

"Sailer and Posner, by contrast, think that the discrimination is conscious and, what's more, that it's rational. The salesmen, in Posner's words, ‘ascribe the group's average characteristics to each member of the group, even though one knows that many members deviate from the average.’ And what is the ‘group's average characteristic’ in this case? That, as Sailer puts it, black men "enjoy being seen as big spenders." Am I wrong or is that an utterly ludicrous (not to mention offensive) statement? Where does this idea come from?"

Uh, from 10,000 rap videos? From the fact that the world's #1 market for cognac is Detroit, which is 80% black? The mouths of black stand-up comedians? Decades of marketing research? 100 years of car buying experience?

Malcolm, you go on:

"How is it possible that when it comes to buying things black men--magically--all take on the same personality?"

Uh, because they don't all take on the same personality. Go reread the line from Judge Posner that you yourself quoted above: we're talking about the "average"—a concept you may have heard of?

You say:

"… I refuse to believe that all of the car salesmen of Chicago are so stupid as to believe that by virtue of having a slightly darker skin color a human being becomes somehow predisposed towards higher prices."

But Malcolm, saying "I refuse to believe" when you have no evidence bespeaks desperation.

We're talking about an ethnic cultural trait. And the simple fact is that the urge to drive a hard bargain famously varies between ethnic groups. As Dave Barry notes in his new book Dave Barry's Money Secrets (Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar?):

"I'm the world's worst car buyer. I come from a long line of Presbyterians, who get their name from the Greek words pre, meaning 'people,' and sbyterian, meaning 'who always pay retail.' … My idea of an opening tactical salvo is to look at the car's sticker price and say to the salesperson, 'This looks like a good deal! Are you sure you're making enough profit on this?'"

As for your coup de grace"Sailer and Poser [sic] have a very low opinion of car salesmen”—you must be one of the few people in the country who claims not to have a low opinion of car salesmen. A 2005 Gallup poll asked 1002 adults nationwide to rate the honesty and ethical standards of 21 occupations. Nurses came in first, with 82% rating them high or very high. Last were telemarketers at 7%. Next to last were car salesmen at 8%.

[More, much more]


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

I was feeling sorry for the Seattle Seahawks,

who looked like the better team in their unlucky Super Bowl loss, until at the end of the game the TV showed their grieving owner Paul Allen. Mr. Allen is Bill Gates' old roommate and thus has more money than God. He bought Ticketmaster, which bought its only competitor Ticketron, and then started raising prices So now when my wife looked into buying a $20 concert ticket last month, the Ticketmaster service charge on top of that was $9.50, or a 47.5% surcharge. But I guess Allen had to raise prices so much, what with the ever rising cost of computing and communications.

When Pearl Jam objected in 1994 that their fans shouldn't have to pay Ticketmaster's absurd markups, Ticketmaster wouldn't cut their charges, daring the biggest band in America at the time to see if anyone would do business with them. Pearl Jam tried it, and tour turned out to be a fiasco, because all the good hockey rinks were terrified of the wrath of Ticketmaster. You'd think that some politician hoping to appeal to the youth vote would take on Ticketmaster's monopoly, but it hasn't happened.


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