A large Norwegian study finds a small effect.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
A large Norwegian study finds a small effect.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Over on the VDARE.com blog, I try to help him out by suggesting a TV commercial he could run:
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
A
U of M study finds that Americans couch feelings about race in the 'happy talk' of diversity-speak
According to a new study by researchers in the University of Minnesota's sociology department, Americans are generally positive -- even optimistic -- about the word 'diversity,' but when asked, even those working in the field of race relations have trouble describing diversity's value and stumble when giving real life examples.
The desire to appear color-blind leads most Americans to prefer the standardized language of diversity-speak when addressing issues of race, rather than the other way around. The researchers conclude that American diversity-speak is a sort of 'happy talk,' an upbeat language in which everyone has a place, everyone is welcome and even celebrated.
The study takes its conclusions from a telephone survey of more than 2,000 households across the country and nearly 150 hour-long interviews with adults from a wide range of backgrounds living in
The study found a majority of Americans -- cutting across race, class and gender lines -- value diversity, but their upbeat responses to the term contradict tensions between individual values and fears that cultural disunity could threaten the stability of American society. Also regardless of race, Americans' definition of diversity places white people at the neutral center and all other groups of people as outside contributors.
"The public debates and talk-show lamentations about immigration and political correctness leave many Americans to assume there's a big divide in the country between those who value diversity and those who reject it," said Doug Hartmann, associate sociology professor, who coauthored the study with graduate student Joyce Bell. "The fact is, most Americans value diversity - but they see it as a benefit with the potential cost of cultural disunity and social instability."
The study also found that most Americans use platitudes when describing diversity. "The topic of race lies outside the realm of polite conversation," said
The study will be published in a forthcoming issue of American Sociological Review and is part of the sociology department's American Mosaic Project, an ongoing project funded by the Minneapolis-based David Edelstein Family Foundation that looks at race, religion and cultural diversity in the contemporary
Judging from how audiences laugh like mad at stand-up comedians who eschew diversity happy talk, everybody knows this is just hypocritical cant. Now, hypocrisy can be a useful social lubricant. When somebody asks you "How are you?" they want to hear you say "Fine, and you?" not "I don't know what's acting up more, my prostate or my hemorrhoids."
In the past, typically, happy talk was the style of the insecure middle of the social scale. Those who wished to be seen as above status concerns espoused frankness. In the 1920s, for example, H.L. Mencken made himself hugely popular with the cultural elite by waging erudite war on
A really odd thing about American culture today, however, is that as you go up the educational and social ladder, the more sanctimoniously hypocritical they tend to be about enforcing the code of diversity happy talk. It's quite curious.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Can somebody explain to me why this guy is still a billionaire? I used to read many years ago about his business of renting computer terminals for the same price for which you could buy equivalent generic hardware outright. The big selling point (or renting point) of this 1970s-sounding business model was that was the only way you could get Bloomberg's proprietary content. I figured his business might last a couple of years longer than all the comparable ones out there before being wiped out by open standards approaches because his market was Wall Street traders, who have more money than God, so they weren't in a hurry to give up a system they were familiar with just to save their employers $10,000 each per year or so. But, I gather, he's not only still in business, he's still raking in the billions. What's the deal?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Anybody know how I can see the new Michael Moore health care documentary by this weekend (without being in NYC, where it's playing in one theatre)?
Here's my 2004 AmCon review of his "Fahrenheit 9/11."
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My American Conservative article is now up:
La Raza’s Lapdogs
By Steve Sailer
Straight talk about immigration: another job Americans won’t do.
Here are some more excerpts:
1. An aversion to working with numbers is common among intellectuals and media types. For instance, it’s of some relevance to crafting immigration policy to know that 5 billion people live in countries with lower average per capita GDPs than
2. Views on illegal immigration may be the surest status symbol. A blithe attitude toward illegal immigration conveys your self-confidence that you don’t have to worry about competition from Latin American peasants and that you can afford to insulate your children from their children. Moreover, your desire to keep down the wages of nannies, housekeepers, and pool boys by importing more cheap labor advertises that you are a member of the servant-employing upper-middle class.
3. While libertarians enjoy displaying their feelings of economic superiority— their Randian confidence that they can claw their way to the top of the heap no matter how overcrowded it gets—liberals feel that laxity on illegal immigration shows off their moral superiority. Celebrating diversity has been promoted for a generation now as the highest imaginable ethical value, so the ambitious compete to be seen espousing most fervently the reigning civic religion and damning most loudly any heretics who dare to speak up. [More]
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
A reader points out that Tamar Jacoby, the leading spokesperson for the Cheap Labor lobby, married the legendary Eric Breindel in 1988, although the marriage famously didn't last long. (Here's the NYT's article "Miss Jacoby Is Affianced" and here's the wedding notice.)
Due to his personal magnetism, energy, and ambition, Breindel is an extremely important figure in the development of the neocon stranglehold on public debate in
A 1998
'As a writer, Breindel was unexceptional, producing mostly the joyless prose of an ideologue. And as an ideologue, he was more effective working the back channels than he was at publicly taking issues and ideas into new territory. But Breindel understood power in a way few people do. He recognized early in his life that personality is more important than ideology. It's all about proximity and access. If you have someone's ear, you can make things happen."
Breindel, among much else, was crucial to the election of Rudy Giuliani as mayor of NYC in 1993 by persuading Rupert Murdoch to have the New York Post back Rudy in its attack-dog style rather than the Conservative Party candidate.
Despite his soaring
It was, of course, a big story at the time. The coverage portrayed him as a "golden youth" -- Harvard Phi Beta Kappa,
As Moynihan was vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Breindel had a heavyweight security clearance, so the revelation that he was consorting with heroin dealers was a much bigger deal than if he was an aide to the vice-chairman of Ways & Means. Breindel's Harvard roommate was Bobby Kennedy's son David, another druggie.
Breindel's life was the sum of his obsessions, and chief among them -- quite naturally, given his background [as the son of wealthy Holocaust survivors] -- was the fate of the Jews. It was the locus from which all of his other political positions flowed. He believed that most of the world's evil took place under totalitarian regimes, and from this came his obsession with communism. ...
But there was also an upside, a positive view provided by this prism through which he saw the world: his lack of cynicism about
When Breindel got to Harvard, his obsessions served him well. They were the foundation on which he built what would turn out to be the seminal relationships of his adult life -- those with Moynihan, Peretz, and Podhoretz.
After his arrest shattered his ambitions for high government office,
He continued to write the occasional piece, and he asked his friend Christopher Buckley to make contact for him at the New York Times. He'd written a piece about Whittaker Chambers that he wanted to get placed on the op-ed page.
Buckley hooked Breindel up with Tamar Jacoby, who was then the deputy editor of the Times's op-ed page. "As soon as we met, we knew there was something there," says Jacoby, whose most recent book is Someone Else's House, a look at race and the struggle to achieve integration in
With her help, and recommendations from Podhoretz, Peretz, and Moynihan, Breindel landed a job writing for the editorial page of the
Breindel and Jacoby decided to marry at the beginning of 1988, four years into their relationship. The wedding was at the Harvard Club, and the guest list was, of course, eye-opening. "We both knew a lot of people, and we took some mischievous pleasure in Elliot Abrams having to shake hands with Anthony Lewis and Norman Podhoretz having to shake hands with Bob Silvers," Jacoby says, laughing at the memory. "Eric and I joked about having to have different rooms to accommodate the various ideologies."
The relationship, which had always been combative, deteriorated not long after the wedding, and their split yielded one of the most often told and heavily embellished breakup stories in the history of
Even without the apocryphal rendering of the breakup, the cynical view is that Breindel chose women the same way he chose his friends -- based on who could help him the most. Tamar Jacoby was the right woman for him at the right time, and when times changed, he found Lally Weymouth, [Washington Post owner] Katharine Graham's daughter, far more useful.
A general lesson for our era is that cyberspace is far overrated as a way to influence events compared to personal contacts and behind the scenes machinations.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
The day after I accused sainted baseball statistics maven Bill James of intentionally ignoring the steroids outbreak of the 1990s in his 1,000 page 2001 book The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, the WSJ interviews James in his Fenway Park office (he's been a paid insider since 2002):
His theory on baseball and steroids may or may not be odd, but it is certainly not in vogue. "I don't know," he says, when asked if steroids account for the surge in home runs in the late 1990s. "Speaking globally . . . the reality is that there are many changes in the game which could cause batting numbers to jump. And no one really knows to what extent the increase is a consequence of steroids. I strongly suspect that the influence of steroids on hitting numbers is greatly overstated by the public." Other factors include ballpark dimensions and bat design. "I've never understood why nobody writes about it, but the bats are very different now than they were 20 years ago," Mr. James says, with different woods and finishes. "[Barry] Bonds's bats are still different from everybody else's," he notes.
He's being disingenuous. Of course lots of factors contributed to the home run surge, including all the recent retro-design parks that are built like old hitters parks such as Ebbetts Field. And everybody took up weightlifting, which is perfectly admirable as long as they don't use performance-enhancing drugs. (Honus Wagner was the greatest player of the first decade of the 20th Century because he was just about the only player of his era to lift weights.)
But we now know that many of the historic seasons of the the last two decades were drug-tainted, starting with Jose Canseco's 1988, when he became the first player to hit 40 homers and steal 40 bases, and including the late Ken Caminiti's MVP surge in the second half of 1996, McGwire's (and likely Sosa's) famous 1998 homer binge, Jason Giambi's monster MVP season in 2000, and Barry Bonds' surrealistic seasons in this decade. (Here's my 2004 American Conservative article on steroids.)
This wasn't a surprise. Thomas Boswell accused Canseco in a Washington Post column in October 1988 of taking steroids. A baseball agent told me in the early 1990s that Canseco was the "Typhoid Mary of steroids."
How can we be sure if any recent MVPs and Cy Young award winners were clean? Okay, skinny guys like Ichiro Suzuki and Jack McDowell, sure, and unimposing guys like Greg Maddux, and guys who didn't lift weights, like Ken Griffey Jr.. But for lots of the other guys, who knows?
James had to know that, say, Barry Bonds suddenly having in 2001 the greatest season (according to James' own Win Shares metric) since Babe Ruth his .393 in 1923 was ridiculous, new bat or not. But, making a stink about steroids wouldn't have done James' chances of getting hired by a big league team like the Red Sox much good.
I suspect that James was able to kid himself that using steroids was just like pitchers (such as Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry) throwing the spitball (which had been outlawed in 1920, a couple of decades before Perry's birth). Everybody knew Perry was throwing the spitter, but the baseball ethos is the opposite of golf, where players call penalties on themselves. In baseball, it's the umpires' job, not yours, to catch you cheating.
But steroids aren't spitballs. They have serious side effects on the players' health, and on their mood, which affects people around them. When, say, the Canseco twins beat up people in a nightclub in the throes of 'roid rage, that's not at all like the spitter.
By the way, I discovered in James' Historical Abstract a new explanation for Stephen Jay Gould's famous observation that in the early decades of baseball there was more disparity between the best players and the average player (although there have been a lot of super-spectacular seasons since 1993). Gould, being an intellectual, attributed it to intellectual disparities -- Wagner, Cobb, Ruth, etc. knew how to do things that other players didn't yet know how to do.
There's some truth to that. Ruth, for example, taught himself how to take a huge uppercut swing to hit home runs, which gave him a big lead over the rest of the league. Cobb pointed out that Ruth was allowed to get away with this because he was a pitcher -- if he'd been a hitter, his manager would have forced him to swing level to hit line drives like everybody else. But nobody cared what a pitcher did when fooling around in batting practice.
A few years earlier during the heart of the dead ball era, right-handed slugger Gavvy Cravath figured out how to hit opposite field home runs over the short right field fence in
Another reason for the disparity is that until Branch Rickey built the farm system, the proportion of the top players in the major leagues wasn't as high so the quality of the average player was lower. Cravath spent two of his peak years in the minors. Lefty Grove, maybe the greatest pitcher ever, spent five years playing for an independent minor league team in
But, a new reason I hadn't thought about before was that in the old days only superstars could afford to devote their offseasons to staying in shape (or just relaxing and getting recharged for the coming season). The average player had to get a job. When Ruth had a lousy 1925 season at age 30 due to hedonism, many observers assumed he was washed up. Instead, he hired a personal trainer and spent his winters tossing medicine balls around in a gym (or whatever it was they did back then for exercise). He came back to enjoy nine more spectacular seasons, including hitting 60 homers in 1927. If you spent October through February working in a mill or lifting crates on a loading dock, it was hard to compete in the summer with a superstar.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
In
The Science of Gaydar
If sexual orientation is biological, are the traits that make people seem gay innate, too? The new research on everything from voice pitch to hair whorl.
By David France
My 1994 National Review article "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay," which lists three dozen traits where statistical differences among the sexual orientations are found, appears to have held up well over the years.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
In the WSJ:
It's Not Enough to Be 'Wanted'
Illegitimacy has risen despite--indeed, because of--legal abortion.
BY JOHN R. LOTT JR.
And here's a graph I made up a few years ago during the Freakonomics controversy. Hard to see much evidence that legalizing abortion increased the "wantedness" of babies like Steven D. Levitt claims these days, now that he figured out he'd get in trouble if he mentioned that he originally attributed 39% of his theorized crime-fighting effect to the much higher abortion rate seen among blacks.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Considering that columnist Eric Alterman recently got himself arrested at the Democratic candidate's debate, there's a bit of a pot-kettle aspect to Alterman's American Prospect article denouncing long-time New Republic boss Marty Peretz as "crazy." But he does a good job of explaining how Peretz's passionate ethnocentrism has damaged his magazine:
It is really not too much to say that almost all of Peretz's political beliefs are subordinate to his commitment to
Peretz insists that, yes, the interests of
Alterman points to the year 1967 as the turning point:
Peretz and [heiress] Farnsworth married in June 1967 -- coincidentally, the same month that the Six Day War transformed not only the
Lots of people love a winner. Similarly,
Indeed, I've argued jokingly that the lack of big-time college football teams in
But, maybe that's not a joke ... So, please, would some hedge fund manager give NYU a quarter of a billion to start a Top 10 football team? Your country needs you!
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
AP reports:
Only in the arcane world of the U.S. Senate could a quirky gambit known as a "clay pigeon" make the difference between passage of an important immigration measure and its death at the hands of opponents.
Democratic leaders hope the complex maneuver _ which makes use of the Senate's labyrinthine rules to insist on votes on amendments _ will frustrate conservatives' attempts to derail the embattled immigration bill, instead putting it on a fast track to passage next week.
In plain English, what this means is ... well ... Okay, I admit it, I am utterly baffled by what this means, other than that the Democratic leadership is amenable to playing Dr. Kevorkian to the GOP's suicide attempt.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
As I've pointed out before, the priority of new immigration legislation should be to stop the situation from getting worse. But the media and the Kennedy-Bush Axis of Amnesty assumes the most crucial issue is"doing something" about the illegal immigrants currently here. Specifically, we must "bring them out of the shadows," as the cliche goes.
Why?
Can anybody document what bringing 2.7 million illegal immigrants out of the shadows into legality accomplished in 1986?
These amnestied illegals were preponderantly living in
- Help California's standard of living? Well, from the standpoint of becoming a homeowner,
- Improve
- Persuade the amnestied illegals' kids to stop spraypainting their tags all over every vertical surface in LA? Ever since Villaraigosa got elected mayor in 2005, the city has been swamped by gang graffiti.
- Stop more illegal aliens from coming to
So, why does Axis keep trying to yank our chains about the benefits of amnesty when it failed so spectacularly in the biggest state in the country?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My new VDARE.com column:
By Steve Sailer
As Dr. Frankenstein used to say:
"It's alive!"
Just as I warned last week, the Kennedy-Bush-McCain Axis of Amnesty reanimated their patched-together monster in the Senate … although it's definitely not back by popular demand.
If this bill were a horror movie, it would be House of Wax II … and not a sequel to the Vincent Price original, either, but a remake of the recent Paris Hilton remake.
Or maybe:
Aliens 4
In
We're going to have to scream loud enough this week before the crucial cloture votes to be heard even in
The politics of amnesty, however, would make a natural suspense thriller film:
Establishing Shot: Ted Kennedy drives a blushing Republican Party girl down a moonlit dirt road.
Cut to: His car lurches off a bridge.
Pan: Senator Ted swims away while the bubbles from the sunken car die out.
Amnesty is so unpopular these days that even President Bush's old speechwriter David Frum has lately gone on the immigration restrictionist warpath after years largely missing in inaction. In the June 25th National Review, Frum explains "How I Rethought Immigration" way back during the first Bush Administration of 1989-1993. (You can read it online here.)
Frum is wonderfully lucid writer—except, unluckily, on those topics that most engage his personal passions—so it's quite a fine article....
Still, while this is all well and good, it does raise the question: If Frum was so expert over 15 years ago, why was he essentially a no-show in the immigration debates back when his influence was at its peak in the first half of this decade?
(Hint: It's VDARE.COM’s fault!)
[More]
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
NYT closing gap with American Conservative: In the New York Times Magazine, Erica Goode, science editor of the NYT, writes about Robert D. Putnam's research on diversity and trust (which was the subject of my January 15, 2007 cover story "Fragmented Future" in AmCon):
Home Alone
For decades, students of American society have offered dueling theories about how encountering racial and ethnic diversity affects the way we live. One says that simple contact — being tossed into a stew of different cultures, values, languages and styles of dress — is likely to nourish tolerance and trust. Familiarity, in this view, trumps insularity. Others argue that just throwing people together is rarely enough to breed solidarity: when diversity increases, they assert, people tend to stick to their own groups and distrust those who are different from them.
But what if diversity had an even more complex and pervasive effect? What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood barbecue or joining a community project?
This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes in the June issue of the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
In highly diverse cities and towns like Los Angeles, Houston and Yakima, Wash., the survey found, the residents were about half as likely to trust people of other races as in homogenous places like Fremont, Mich., or rural South Dakota, where, Putnam noted, “diversity means inviting a few Norwegians to the annual Swedish picnic.”
Goode's article reflects a lot of the usual class prejudices:
The public discourse on diversity runs at a high temperature. Told by one side, the narrative of how different ethnic and racial groups come together in schools, workplaces, churches and shopping centers can sound as if it was lifted from “
Obviously, anyone who would worry about this is the kind of radio talk show-listening racist loser who has to send his kid to a school that is 45 percent Mexican. The right sort of New York Times-reading person supports the minority outreach program at his child's school whose long term goal is to double the Mexican enrollment ... from two percent to four percent.
Diversity has clear benefits, [Putnam] says, among them economic growth and enhanced creativity — more top-flight scientists, more entrepreneurs, more artists.
As we can see from the way the 30 million Mexican-Americans have been sweeping the Nobel Prizes! Thank God lots of Mexicans have moved to
Aren't social scientists supposed to understand that correlation is not proof of causation? Clearly, the illegal immigrants (as well as the artists) follow the wealth-creating scientists and entrepreneurs, not the other way around.
But the diversity finding was so surprising that Putnam said his first thought was that maybe something was wrong with the data. He and his research team spent five years testing other explanations. Maybe people in more diverse areas had less political clout and thus fewer amenities, like playgrounds and pothole-free streets, putting them in a misanthropic mood; or maybe diversity caused “hunkering down” only in people who were older or richer or white or female. But the effect did not go away. When colleagues who heard about the results protested, “I bet you haven’t thought about X” — a frequent occurrence, Putnam said — the researchers went back and looked at X.
The idea that it is diversity (the researchers used the census’s standard racial categories to define diversity) that drives social capital down has its critics. Among them is Steven Durlauf, an economist at the University of Wisconsin and a critic of Putnam’s past work, who said he thinks some other characteristic, as yet unidentified, explains the lowered trust and social withdrawal of people living in diverse areas. But without clear evidence to the contrary, Putnam says, he has to believe the conclusion is solid.
Many decades ago, I used to run into Steve Durlauf of Burbank H.S. all the time at high school speech and debate tournaments, where he would beat me like a drum. I wasn't terribly good at forensics because I'm not that orally fluent, but even at what I was good at, Durlauf was much better. I don't know if he was the most successful debater in
So, why does Prof. Durlauf come out sounding kind of dim on this topic compared to me? Because political correctness lowers your effective IQ. Truths are connected to other truths, so if you are willing to follow the truth wherever it goes, you'll make a lot more progress than if you put up big "Can't Go There" signs in your own head.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Second: You can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here. (Paypal and credit cards accepted, including recurring "subscription" donations.) UPDATE: Don't try this at the moment.
Third: send money via the Paypal-like Google Wallet to my Gmail address (that's isteveslrATgmail.com -- replace the AT with a @). (Non-tax deductible.)
Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.
You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.
Or you can send money via credit card (Visa, MasterCard, AmEx, Discover) with the industry-standard 2.9% fee. (You don't need to put money into your Google Wallet Balance to do this.)
Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).
Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here's how to do it.
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Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)
Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)
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