How not thinking about race cripples philosophy

From the Chronicle of Higher Education's philosophy columnist:

Us v. Them: Good News from the Ancients
By Carlin Romano

"Us against them" seems a staple of human psychology ... Looking through a recent New York Times, you couldn't help thinking that the notion merits a separate daily section to organize stories efficiently: North Korean vs. South Korean, North Ivorian vs. South Ivorian (those hard geographical divisions help), e-book reader vs. traditional book lover, New York Giant vs. Dallas Cowboy, boomer vs. Gen X'er, man vs. woman.

Are we just boringly binary?

As opposed to excitingly unitary? This shouldn't be news to a professor of philosophy, but contrast is the essence of information. You can turn data into a stream of 1s and 0s, but you can't turn it into a stream of all 1s.

And why, as both Rodney King and distinguished science writer David Berreby asked, for different reasons, can't we all get along?

Back in 2005, Berreby tried to open our eyes on the subject with his noncontentiously titled Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind (Little, Brown and Co.). We can't help being tribal thinkers, Berreby explained, because organizing other humans into kinds is "an absolute requirement for being human." It is, he wrote, "the mind's guide for understanding anyone we do not know personally, for seeing our place in the human world, and for judging our actions." There is "apparently no people known to history or anthropology that lacks a distinction between 'us' and 'others,'" and particularly others who don't rise to our level.

Our categories for humans, Berreby elaborated, "serve so many different needs, there is no single recipe for making one." Categories for other people "can't be understood objectively." We fashion them in classic pragmatic style to suit our purposes in solving problems,

The notion that objectivity and pragmatism are obviously at odds is a curious one.

... particularly that of generalizing about people we know by only a feature or two. We make these categories—often out of strong emotional need. We don't discover them. American suburbanites need "soccer moms," Southern kids need "Nascar dads," Yemenites need neither.

Those are obviously silly examples of the horrors of Us v. Them thinking, in part because there was never any Us in them. The categories "soccer moms" and "Nascar dads" weren't dreamed up out of strong emotional needs by soccer moms and Nascar dads, they were cold-bloodedly invented by marketing researchers and political consultants to help their clients succeed focus their marketing better for inchoate groups of indivduals who had certain tendencies in common.

... "The issue," Berreby observed, "is not what human kinds are in the world, but what they are in the mind—not how we tell Tamils and Seventh-day Adventists and fans of Manchester United from their fellow human beings, but why we want to."

Well, uh, if you can tell that person you are talking to is a fan of Manchester United, you might want to compliment Wayne Rooney on his superlative soccer skills. If you can tell that person is a fan of one of Manchester United's rivals, however, you can feel free to mention Wayne's face.

Look, the motto of Faber College in Animal House offers words to live by: Knowledge is good.

Is it too hard to notice that there are differences between people, that these differences ("diversity!") make humanity infinitely more interesting than if we were all a homogeneous mass; and that noticing differences accurately is useful?

True enough. The problem remains that this habit of hostility to the "Other" seems inescapable, even if it's not hard-wired into us. We've been talking like Tarzan since the ancient Greeks. Me Athenian, you barbarian. Me Roman, you Carthaginian loser. Me Greek, you dumb Egyptian animal worshiper. Me better, you worse.

Again, as with Berreby's study, a book can help us if not save us—a small tool to pry the fetishisms of "Us vs. Them" from our minds.

Rethinking the Other in Antiquity, by Erich S. Gruen, out this month from Princeton University Press, like all excellent scholarship massages the mind in useful new directions. Gruen, a Berkeley professor emeritus of history and classics, wields his command of ancient sources to shake a widely shared historical belief—that ancient Greeks and Romans exuded condescension and hostility toward what European intellectuals call the "Other." For those Greeks and Romans, that largely meant peoples such as the Persians, Egyptians, and Jews. Even if Gruen doesn't wholly convince on every ground that Greeks and Romans operated like Obamas in togas, regularly reaching out to potential enemies, his careful readings of Aeschylus, Herodotus, Tacitus, and others introduce us to a kinder, gentler ancient world. His analysis confirms how even back then, tossing people into a category and then hating them en masse was a choice, not an evolutionary necessity.

Gruen doesn't deny the transhistorical phenomenon of "Us vs. Them" itself. "The denigration," he writes at the outset, "even demonization of the 'Other' in order to declare superiority or to construct a contrasting national identity is all too familiar." What bothers him is the degree to which analysis of "such self-fashioning through disparagement of alien societies" has become "a staple of academic analysis for more than three decades" (he respectfully mentions Edward Said's Orientalism and the progeny it sparked), rendering the factual phenomenon under examination too unquestioned.

As a result, Gruen reports, works of classical scholarship such as François Hartog's The Mirror of Herodotus (University of California Press, 1988) and Edith Hall's Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford University Press, 1989) leave us with the firm understanding that "negative images, misrepresentations, and stereotypes permitted ancients to invent the 'Other,' thereby justifying marginalization, subordination, and exclusion." A natural conclusion when it comes to "Us vs. Them," Gruen writes, is that "the ancients are thus to blame."

The concept of Projection suggests that the people who are really filled with Who? Whom? hatefulness are the post-modern academics who are always denouncing it in others.

Far from rejecting evidence for the standard view, Gruen helpfully sums it up: "Jewish writers excoriated Egyptians for zoolatry and shunned admixture with Canaanites, Ammonites, Moabites, and Philistines. ... The Romans scattered their biases widely with negative pronouncements on easterners and westerners alike. They dismissed Greeks as lightweights ...

The Romans conquered the Greeks and ruled them from 500 years, but they continued to take cultural direction from the Greeks. A better case could be made that the Romans were too in awe of the Greek cultural contributions, which slowed them down from coming up with more of their own.

Gruen's mission, however, is to unpack the contrary story, far less told: "that Greeks, Romans, and Jews (who provide us with almost all the relevant extant texts) had far more mixed, nuanced, and complex opinions about other peoples."

His examples span the ancient Mediterranean and beyond. In his opening chapters, he concentrates on four pieces of evidence—Aeschylus's Persae, Herodotus's treatment of the Persians, Xenophon's Cyropaedia, and our knowledge of Alexander's cooperation with the Persians—using them to reject the "prevailing scholarly consensus" that Greeks held a consistently negative image of Persians. ... Gruen says his aim is to show that "the descriptions and conceptualizations, far from establishing simplistic stereotypes, display subtle characterizations that resist reductive placement into negative (or, for that matter, positive) categories."

You could flip through Herodotus's Histories (which are a sort of sprawling travel book that eventually resolves into a history of the Greco-Persian Wars) for 20 minutes and come to the the same conclusion. The Greeks were really proud that they beat the Persians in 490-480 BC because the Persians were the top dogs. Herodotus's Greek audience was very interested in learning more about the rich and powerful Persians.

Perhaps, someday, revisionists scholars might sit down and carefully read, say,The Bell Curve and Human Accomplishment and notice their similar judicious nuance.

On the other hand, it's essential to remember that Herodotus's division between Oriental despotism and Occidental liberty was part of the Greatest Leap Forward in human thought. The confidence the Greeks gained from defeating the Persians at the beginning of the 5th Century, from the notion that they were not just different but better than the superpower of the era and that they should emphasize their differences, helped set off the most concentrated age of human accomplishment ever.

Rather, his point is that the ancients, like us, enjoyed options in how they categorized others, drew upon others, and defined them in the process of shaping their own cultures. They sometimes chose—more often than one realized before reading Gruen's book—to do so in a spirit of admiration and respect. Contrary to much received opinion, we have some classical role models in resisting "Us vs. Them."

A simple line, in Obama's Tucson memorial speech, captured the existentialist antidote to that ugly psychological strain.

"We may not be able to stop all evil in the world," the president said, "but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us."

We also get to decide how we categorize one another. And who we include in "us." If we included everyone, what might follow from that?

Ignorance.

This is not a sophisticated point but it eludes philosophers when thinking about human beings -- categorization is essential to knowledge, the solution to bad stereotypes are better stereotypes -- but it's one that gets lost all the time when intellectuals try to think (or, more precisely, to not think) about race.

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

Soccer stats

Big money soccer clubs have been trying to emulate the success of baseball statistical analysts for a number of years now, but it's hard to tell if they are making any progress, according to Brian Phillips in Slate. 

Sample sizes for, say, goals and assists are tiny. The game is very complicated. There are relatively few easy-to-measure objective measures, so various for profit consultancies are offering big clubs evaluations of play on a confidential basis, so it's hard to tell if anybody actually has figured out anything yet.

That reminds me of the current emphasis on using test scores to improve education. Yet, it took a quarter of a century for the Bill James Revolution in baseball to have much of an impact. Is education more like baseball or soccer?

Moreover, the prestige names in the Ed School racket, such as Linda Darling-Hammond, tend to be innumerate.

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

Flat Earthism, Ed School-Style

iSteve readers review books so I don't have to read them!

A reader writes about the latest book by Linda Darling-Hammond, who is probably the second biggest Education School name in the country, after Howard Garner. Her book is about why public schools in Finland, South Korea, and Singapore get so much better test scores than American public schools.

I've been reading a 2010 book on education policy by Linda Darling-Hammond, who holds a named chair in Stanford's education department. The book is The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future.  

A few choice items, from just skipping around:

From page 4:

Meanwhile, knowledge is expanding at a breathtaking pace . . . [I]n the three years from 1999 to 2002, the amount of new information produced nearly equaled the amount produced in the entire history of the world previously.  The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years, and it is predicted to double every 72 hours by 2010.

Dig that last sentence!  72 hours .... She has a citation to a 2002 source for that.  Could she mean 720 hours?  

On page 11, there's a bar chart of PISA scores across the four subject areas, with -- just like Peter Brimelow has written -- the white scores represented by a black bar and the black scores (yes, "black," not "African-American") represented by a white bar.  (Hispanics are gray, and there are variously crosshatched patterns for Asians, multiracial, and OECD average.)

From page 25:

The failure of many states to invest adequately in the education of low-income children and new immigrants, to provide them with effective teachers and the necessary curriculum and learning materials, results in growing numbers leaving school without the skills needed to become a part of the economy.  While the highest-achieving nations are making steep, strategically smart investments in education, the United States is squandering much of its human capital.

Better that the last half of that last sentence said "the United States is importing poverty and loading itself down with students who first need to learn English before they can learn anything else."

From page 60:

Thus, tracking persists in the face of growing evidence that it does not substantially benefit high achievers and tends to put low achievers at a serious disadvantage, in part because of these long-standing beliefs about the role of schools in selection, and in part because good teaching is a scarce resource and thus must be allocated.

The first part of that sounds unbelievable to me (at least for the high achievers), and I note that nothing by Charles Murray or Heather Mac Donald appears in either the references or index (and immigration doesn't appear in the index).  But I noticed that among the long list of her own publications in the references is something that appeared in the Huffington Post during the 2008 campaign, a plug for Wonderboy (here).

Judging from her pictures, Professor Dr. Hammond-Darling looks like she might (or might not be) about 1/32nd black, which can't hurt in the Ed School business.

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

The big thing Obama could do

In the NYT:

Gail Collins: Have you noticed that all the recent presidents could only accomplish a political agenda that belonged to the other side? Bill Clinton got welfare reform and George W. Bush got prescription drugs for Medicare. I’ve always expected that in his third year, Obama would wind up pushing for something like controlling pension costs for school janitors, and there he was, talking about capping spending....

David Brooks: That is a first class observation. It’s true that presidents in recent years have only succeeded by coopting the other party’s issues. Their own party goes along for partisan reasons and the other party goes along grudgingly for substantive reasons. Maybe there is some wisdom in this.

I'm going to keep harping on my theme that Obama could ensure himself a second term and do the country a lot of good using his own personal diversityness to push through a thoroughgoing reform of all the diversity policies that have gone bad over the decades (immigration, disparate impact, Fannie and Freddie quotas, etc etc) because you aren't supposed to talk about diversity policies unless you are diverse yourself.

Granted, he's not going to do this, but that should be held against him, because it's eminently politically feasible for him and it's well worth doing from a good government standpoint.. Right now, however, the entire concept is off the radar.

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

"The Way Back"

I review Peter Weir's The Way Back, with Ed Harris and Colin Farrell as escapees from a Soviet Gulag camp in Taki's Magazine:

The truth is that a vast number of survivors walked home from Soviet camps in the 1940s and 1950s, including a distant in-law of mine. He had been an Italian soldier posted to fight General Patton’s invading American army. When Mussolini was overthrown, peace was declared and he deserted. But the occupying Germans rounded him up and sent him to the Eastern Front, where the Soviets captured him. When the war ended, the camp commandant opened the gate and gestured in Italy’s general direction. It took him two years to trudge home. 

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

Michael Lind v. the Sputnik Moment

Michael Lind pre-responds in Salon to Obama's State of the Union address conventional wisdom. Lind writes:

The claim that America’s K-12 system is inferior to that of other industrial nations is another myth whose purpose is to divert the attention of the American public from the real reasons for the offshoring of U.S. industry. Much has been made of the fact that, according to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the U.S. ranks 12th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in mathematics. But the countries at the top of the list in 2009 -- Korea, Finland, Hong-Kong China, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand and Japan -- tend to be small or homogeneous or both.

The overall PISA scores of American students are lowered by the poor results for blacks and Latinos, who make up 35 percent of America’s K-12 student population. Asian-American students have an average score of 541, similar to those of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. The non-Hispanic white American student average of 525 is comparable to the averages of Canada (524), New Zealand (521), and Australia (515). In contrast, the average PISA readings score of Latino students is 446 and black students is 441.

Unlike Asian immigrants, many of whom are college-educated professionals, Latino immigrants tend to be less educated than the American average. And both Latinos and blacks are disproportionately poor. ... America’s public school system works quite well, for non-poor native students. It is overwhelmed by a disproportionately black poor population, which suffers the legacy of centuries of discrimination, and a disproportionately unskilled and illiterate foreign-born population. Instead of scapegoating America’s K-12 schools, we need to combat family poverty directly, by means of job creation programs and a living wage, while admitting fewer poorly educated immigrants.

... But American CEOs who offshore production have no right to complain that too few Americans are going into science and engineering. Why should young Americans commit career suicide by entering occupations that are going to be offshored?

American multinationals are not shutting factories in the U.S. and transferring production to China because of China’s superior innovation culture or superior educational achievements. Nor are low Chinese wages the major factor.

I'm not sure about that, but let's hear Lind out:

For the most part, multinationals are pressured or bribed by the Chinese dictatorship into producing in China. In some cases, U.S. multinationals are told they must produce inside China in order to have access to China's large and growing consumer market. In other cases, multinationals are bribed to relocate production to China by enormous subsidies from the Chinese government.

... Why has the Obama administration in general, unlike some members of Congress, shown such a lack of urgency in addressing the issue of China’s currency tariff (itself only one of many instruments of Chinese economic nationalism)? One answer is suggested by a recent Financial Times article by Alan Beattie: "While the drive for currency legislation is noisy and conducted by practiced lobbyists in industries in steel and textiles that have canvassed for protection against exports, many US multinationals are far more interested in investing in China than exporting there." (emphasis added).
It’s a sad reflection on America’s corporate leaders that instead of being honest with their fellow Americans about the true reasons for offshoring, they tend to blame America first, peddling the insulting story that we Americans are not innovative or educated enough to compete with a poor, dictatorial nation like China. The blame-America-first story is peddled as well by American politicians who receive corporate campaign donations and, after retirement, lucrative corporate board memberships, pundits who get paid on the corporate speaking circuit and academic economists with big corporate consulting contracts. These co-opted opinion leaders join the executives of U.S.-based multinationals in trying to divert the attention of the American people from the mercantilist industrial policies of countries like China that do not practice America’s version of free-market capitalism and have no intention of doing so.

... Innovation and education are red herrings, tossed out to distract the American public from the real problem. If we were serious about competing with China, we would copy their tactics. ... 

But the U.S. could emulate China by telling corporations that if they want access to America’s consumers they must produce at least a portion of the goods sold in the American market within America's borders and employ American workers.

That's what Reagan did in 1982 with Japanese car imports, although the existence of a vast Japanese car industry within America seems to have disappeared off the radar. It doesn't work in theory, even though it seems to work in practice.

• Continue reading

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

Oscar nominations

The boring truth is that the movies that everybody knew on January 1st were going to get most of the Oscar nominations actually are pretty good. For example, The Kids Are All Right is just a Lifetime Movie that has been inflated by gay marriage culture war solidarity, but it's also, by the standards of Lifetime Movies, well above average.

You can read my reviews at the links:

Best Picture

• “Black Swan” Mike Medavoy, Brian Oliver and Scott Franklin, Producers
• “The Fighter” David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman and Mark Wahlberg, Producers
• “Inception” Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan, Producers
• “The Kids Are All Right” Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Celine Rattray, Producers
• “The King's Speech” Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Gareth Unwin, Producers
• “127 Hours” Christian Colson, Danny Boyle and John Smithson, Producers
• “The Social Network” Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca and Ceán Chaffin, Producers
• “Toy Story 3” Darla K. Anderson, Producer
• “True Grit” Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, Producers
• “Winter's Bone" Anne Rosellini and Alix Madigan-Yorkin, Producers 

As for the two I haven't reviewed, I was looking forward to reviewing Inception all summer, but then the magazine went on vacation that week. I can't imagine I have much to say about Inception that hasn't already been said. I've been studying up on Jim Webb books to write my review of Winter's Bone, so that will probably be next week.

Directing

• “Black Swan” Darren Aronofsky
• “The Fighter” David O. Russell
• “The King's Speech” Tom Hooper
• “The Social Network” David Fincher
• “True Grit” Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

The problem with having ten Best Picture nominees to get more people to watch the Oscars show, but still having only five Best Director nominees is that it's pretty obvious that Inception won't win Best Picture because Christopher Nolan didn't get nominated for Best Director. One of these years he'll finally have proven himself ...

Actor in a Leading Role

• Javier Bardem in “Biutiful”
• Jeff Bridges in “True Grit”
• Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network”
• Colin Firth in “The King's Speech”
• James Franco in “127 Hours”

Biutiful is bad but Bardem is good. I usually like Jesse Eisenberg a lot, but I thought his performance in The Social Network wasn't up to par. I would have gone with Ryan Gosling of Blue Valentine for one of these spots.

Actor in a Supporting Role

• Christian Bale in “The Fighter”
• John Hawkes in “Winter's Bone”
• Jeremy Renner in “The Town”
• Mark Ruffalo in “The Kids Are All Right”
• Geoffrey Rush in “The King's Speech”

They're all good.

Actress in a Leading Role

• Annette Bening in “The Kids Are All Right”
• Nicole Kidman in “Rabbit Hole”
• Jennifer Lawrence in “Winter's Bone”
• Natalie Portman in “Black Swan”
• Michelle Williams in “Blue Valentine”

Natalie Portman didn't do much for me in Black Swan -- she mostly just look frenzied, and or weirded out -- kind of the female equivalent of Eisenberg's performance. Jennifer Lawrence is pretty great in Winter's Bone, but it was a good role if you can nail the Ozark accent.

Actress in a Supporting Role

• Amy Adams in “The Fighter”
• Helena Bonham Carter in “The King's Speech”
• Melissa Leo in “The Fighter”
• Hailee Steinfeld in “True Grit”
• Jacki Weaver in “Animal Kingdom”

I haven't seen Animal Kingdom, but all the rest are definitely good performances.

Animated Feature Film

• “How to Train Your Dragon” Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois
• “The Illusionist” Sylvain Chomet
• “Toy Story 3” Lee Unkrich

Art Direction

• “Alice in Wonderland”
  Production Design: Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Karen O'Hara
• “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1”
  Production Design: Stuart Craig; Set Decoration: Stephenie McMillan
• “Inception”
  Production Design: Guy Hendrix Dyas; Set Decoration: Larry Dias and Doug Mowat
• “The King's Speech”
  Production Design: Eve Stewart; Set Decoration: Judy Farr
• “True Grit”
  Production Design: Jess Gonchor; Set Decoration: Nancy Haigh
  

Cinematography

• “Black Swan” Matthew Libatique
• “Inception” Wally Pfister
• “The King's Speech” Danny Cohen
• “The Social Network” Jeff Cronenweth
• “True Grit” Roger Deakins 

I don't believe a woman has ever been nominated in this category. You apprentice by climbing ladders carrying heavy lights, so upper body strength is a prerequisite.

Costume Design

• “Alice in Wonderland” Colleen Atwood
• “I Am Love” Antonella Cannarozzi
• “The King's Speech” Jenny Beavan
• “The Tempest” Sandy Powell
• “True Grit” Mary Zophres

Documentary (Feature)

• “Exit through the Gift Shop” Banksy and Jaimie D'Cruz
• “Gasland” Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic
• “Inside Job” Charles Ferguson and Audrey Marrs
• “Restrepo” Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger
• “Waste Land” Lucy Walker and Angus Aynsley

Notably, Waiting for "Superman" failed to get a nomination. Good job, Academy members! For some reason, people in LA aren't as hyped up as people in NYC and DC about schools.

Documentary (Short Subject)

• “Killing in the Name” Nominees to be determined
• “Poster Girl” Nominees to be determined
• “Strangers No More” Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon
• “Sun Come Up” Jennifer Redfearn and Tim Metzger
• “The Warriors of Qiugang” Ruby Yang and Thomas Lennon

Film Editing

• “Black Swan” Andrew Weisblum
• “The Fighter” Pamela Martin
• “The King's Speech” Tariq Anwar
• “127 Hours” Jon Harris
• “The Social Network” Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter 

Even if they expanded the list of Best Director nominations to ten, you could still tell Inception won't win Best Picture because it's not on this list.

Foreign Language Film

• “Biutiful” Mexico
• “Dogtooth” Greece
• “In a Better World” Denmark
• “Incendies” Canada
• “Outside the Law (Hors-la-loi)” Algeria

Makeup

• “Barney's Version” Adrien Morot
• “The Way Back” Edouard F. Henriques, Gregory Funk and Yolanda Toussieng

I just finished my review of Peter Weir's movie about escape from the Gulag and it will be up at Taki's tomorrow.

• “The Wolfman” Rick Baker and Dave Elsey

Music (Original Score)

• “How to Train Your Dragon” John Powell
• “Inception” Hans Zimmer
• “The King's Speech” Alexandre Desplat
• “127 Hours” A.R. Rahman
• “The Social Network” Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross 

No nominations for Christopher Nolan, but one for Hans Zimmer?

Music (Original Song)

• “Coming Home” from “Country Strong” Music and Lyric by Tom Douglas, Troy Verges and Hillary Lindsey
• “I See the Light” from “Tangled” Music by Alan Menken Lyric by Glenn Slater
• “If I Rise” from “127 Hours” Music by A.R. Rahman Lyric by Dido and Rollo Armstrong
• “We Belong Together” from “Toy Story 3" Music and Lyric by Randy Newman

Short Film (Animated)

• “Day & Night” Teddy Newton (from Toy Story 3)
• “The Gruffalo” Jakob Schuh and Max Lang
• “Let's Pollute” Geefwee Boedoe
• “The Lost Thing” Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann
• “Madagascar, carnet de voyage (Madagascar, a Journey Diary)” Bastien Dubois

Short Film (Live Action)

• “The Confession” Tanel Toom
• “The Crush” Michael Creagh
• “God of Love” Luke Matheny
• “Na Wewe” Ivan Goldschmidt
• “Wish 143” Ian Barnes and Samantha Waite

Sound Editing

• “Inception” Richard King
• “Toy Story 3” Tom Myers and Michael Silvers
• “Tron: Legacy” Gwendolyn Yates Whittle and Addison Teague
• “True Grit” Skip Lievsay and Craig Berkey
• “Unstoppable” Mark P. Stoeckinger

Sound Mixing

• “Inception” Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo and Ed Novick
• “The King's Speech” Paul Hamblin, Martin Jensen and John Midgley
• “Salt” Jeffrey J. Haboush, Greg P. Russell, Scott Millan and William Sarokin
• “The Social Network” Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick and Mark Weingarten
• “True Grit” Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter F. Kurland

Visual Effects

• “Alice in Wonderland” Ken Ralston, David Schaub, Carey Villegas and Sean Phillips
• “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1” Tim Burke, John Richardson, Christian Manz and Nicolas Aithadi
• “Hereafter” Michael Owens, Bryan Grill, Stephan Trojanski and Joe Farrell
• “Inception” Paul Franklin, Chris Corbould, Andrew Lockley and Peter Bebb
• “Iron Man 2” Janek Sirrs, Ben Snow, Ged Wright and Daniel Sudick

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

• “127 Hours” Screenplay by Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy
• “The Social Network” Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin
• “Toy Story 3” Screenplay by Michael Arndt; Story by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich
• “True Grit” Written for the screen by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
• “Winter's Bone” Adapted for the screen by Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini

Writing (Original Screenplay)

• “Another Year” Written by Mike Leigh
• “The Fighter” Screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson;
  Story by Keith Dorrington & Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson
• “Inception” Written by Christopher Nolan
• “The Kids Are All Right” Written by Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg
• “The King's Speech” Screenplay by David Seidler 

Nolan certainly deserved this nomination for keeping Inception semi-comprehensible.

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

David Brooks' vibrant vision for America

David Brooks wants Obama to announce in his State of the Union Address that America is no longer a nation, it's now going to be a cross between the Admirals Club at JFK and Amy Chua's house:

The Talent Magnet

... The country wants a more precise vision of what a thriving America is going to look like in the 21st century... To thrive, America will have to be the crossroads nation where global talent congregates and collaborates. 

Parents in middle-class nations around the world should want to send their kids to American colleges.

And where will middle-class American parents (assuming there are any left) send their kids to college?

... Entrepreneurs from Israel to Indonesia should be visiting venture-capital firms in San Francisco or capital markets in New York. 

Maybe, David, you could talk Israel into testing this big idea of yours out for us first. How many people are there in China with 120+ IQs who would move to Israel if only given the opportunity? Think of how Israel would benefit from 20 million brilliant Chinese immigrants!

In this century, economic competition between countries is ... more like the competition between elite universities ...

Thanks goodness we imported all those tens of millions of high SAT score illegal immigrants and their descendants.

The new sort of competition is all about charisma....

Really? That must be why Germany is exporting so much these days. Everybody loves that German personality!

The nation with the most diverse creative hot spots will dominate the century. 

I think he meant "the most vibrantly diverse creative hot spots," or perhaps "the most diversely vibrant creative hot spots."

... Finally, the government has to work aggressively to reduce the human capital inequalities that open up in an innovation economy. That means early and constant interventions so everybody has a chance to participate. 

Aggressive early and constant government interventions ... Perhaps David would have Obama sign over the parental rights of all African-American mothers to Amy Chua?

What's the over-under line on when will come the official Stolen Generations apology from a future President for these now fashionable early and constant interventions? I'd put the over-under line at my 100th birthday.

President Obama exists because his father was drawn to study in the United States. Obama embodies America’s nascent role as the crossroads nation. Let’s see if he can describe the next phase of American greatness.

So, polygamists of the world, come to America, impregnate our 17-year-olds, and then abandon them!

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

State of the Union suggestion

Here's the opening of a long, sad article, Obama's Jobs Search, in the New York Times Magazine about how, despite all the economic geniuses in the Obama Administration, nobody can think of anything meaningful to do about unemployment:

Three days before Christmas, President Obama gathered his economic team in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room to review themes for his State of the Union address. The edge-of-the-cliff crisis he inherited had passed, but with more than 14 million Americans still out of work, he was looking for bold ways to bring down unemployment. The ideas presented to him, though, seemed familiar and uninspired. “You know, guys,” he said, according to someone in the room, “I’ve told you before, I want you to come to me with ideas that excite me.” Nothing he was hearing excited him. 

Let me repeat an idea of mine from November about how Obama could boldly lower the cost of hiring Americans. It certainly won't excite Obama, but it is one thing he could actually do politically -- and, in fact, is the one thing he has the personal expertise to do in a week -- that would give a jolt to hiring:

Obama should declare victory in the half-century old War on Discrimination—which Ed Rubenstein of VDARE.COM recently estimated costs 8 percent of a year’s GDP, or over a trillion dollars. ... Hiring legally unprotected whites is dangerous because that accumulates statistical evidence of disparate impact discrimination. But hiring legally protected minorities is a legal minefield because of the potential costs of discrimination lawsuits if they don’t work out and have to be let go. (A friend who owns a small business explains: “If I can’t afford to fire them, I can’t afford to hire them.”

Not surprisingly, firms have been slow to hire American citizens, who can get them in trouble with the Feds. Employers have been using the recession to outsource work to Asia or to hire illegal immigrants off the books. It makes more sense to work a few official employees long and hard than to hire many.

To rectify this, Obama could announce that his election as President shows that the civil rights war is over and it’s time to reap the peace dividend: the federal government can dramatically cut back its persecutions of employers for hiring the wrong people.

Nothing the President could do with a stroke of his pen would do more to cut unemployment by making it legally safer to hire Americans than Obama announcing that, between now and the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act in 2014, he will lay off most of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission bureaucrats and other federal racial inquisitors.

And the business climate would be immediately improved by Obama abolishing the EEOC’s innumerate “Four Fifths Rule.”

Similarly, Obama could order the Justice Department to switch sides in the Bush Administration’s egregious Vulcan Society disparate impact lawsuit.

Are you expecting to hear any better ideas from Obama? From the GOP? 

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

NYT: Obama needs to share more

Matt Bai in the New York Times worries that poor President Obama isn't successfully bypassing the traditional media:

For Obama, Getting Message Out Online is a Challenge
Truly taking the presidency online would not only enable Mr. Obama to get his message to some voters without passing through the traditional news media.

Because the establishment media has always been so skeptical and unfriendly toward Obama that he needs to go around them to connect directly with the average voter.

Mr. Obama is probably the most talented writer to occupy the office in the television age; his political career was made possible, in large part, by the candid memoir he wrote as a younger man. 

"Candid" is about the last word that comes to mind for "Dreams from My Father." The book sold 11,000 copies in the nine years up until he became a superstar at the 2004 Democratic convention. It's sold millions of copies since then, although I doubt that millions of people have finished it. I doubt if his memoir was a net benefit to his political career at all. It didn't hurt much because it was written in such an opaque style as to be unquotable, but it didn't help much other than to reconfirm the "What a fine young gentleman" feelings that many people already felt for him after seeing him on TV.

So it is hard to understand why the president hasn’t tried to use that talent the way Mr. Kennedy capitalized on his personal charm. You can easily imagine Mr. Obama sitting in front of a keyboard at the end of a long day, briefly reflecting on the oddity of a personal encounter or on the meaning of some overlooked event, or perhaps describing what it is like to stand in the well of Congress and deliver the State of the Union address. It could be that in order to expand the reach and persuasiveness of the modern presidency, Mr. Obama simply needs to be his online self — not so much a blogger as a memoirist-in-chief, walking us through history in real time. 

Yeah, but that would cut into the vital time the President devotes to having a cig, watching ESPN SportsCenter, getting in a quick 18 holes, stepping out for a Lucky Strike, shooting hoops, taking a mental health break for a smoke, daydreaming, etc etc.

The idea that Obama wants to share his thoughts unfiltered and unvetted with the American public is ridiculously naive. It took him four years to get Dreams from My Father finished. He, in effect, stole part of a large advance by not delivering it to the original publisher. The manuscript for his second book was vetted by 28 experts before being sent to the publisher. Do you really think he wants to have to have more Beer Summits every time he accidentally reveals his inner feelings?

What he is good at is the occasional set piece oration that he's rigorously prepared for, like tonight's speech, where he gets to tap into all the good will in America toward eloquent black men. That, and being tongue-bathed by the press. In contrast, the more we see of him on a mundane basis, the more we notice that there's not all that much there.

Nigeria’s leader, Goodluck Jonathan, has been called the “Facebook president” for posting his own frequent meditations for a country of 44 million Internet users. 

Yeah, my spambox is already full of emails from Lea Abiba Mangou, Mbebe  John, Thompsons Ngowa, Hassim Uhuru, and Barack Obama, all asking for my help. I think Obama should definitely step up his online efforts. Like the Mineshaft Gap in Dr. Strangelove, Mr. President, you cannot afford to allow a Nigerian Spam Gap to emerge.

C'mon, the Real Obama didn't get elected President in 2008, that was the Fake Obama, a collective delusion. The Real Obama has no intention of running in 2012 as the Real Obama, either.

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

The (hopefully) final word on Goldberg, Beck, and Piven

In my new VDARE.com column, I come up with two new angles on Jeffrey Goldberg's accusation of anti-Semitism against Glenn Beck at The Atlantic:

- Why didn't Goldberg put in a link to wherever Beck named "nine people, eight of them Jews, as enemies of American and humanity"? It's easy to put in a link ... if you have one. On the other hand, it's a good idea not to put in a link if you are badly mischaracterizing what the person you are smearing actually did.

- Ironically, leftist sociologist Frances Fox Piven gave an interview four days before Goldberg's smear in which she blamed Beck's campaign against her not on anti-Semites, but on Semites. And named names.

Read the whole thing there.

 

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

African Americans being driven from NYC

The NYT has maps showing demographic winners and losers in New York City between the 2000 and 2010 Censuses. By far, the biggest losers are American-born blacks, whose numbers are growing only on the remote peripheries of the city. 

With crime in New York City way, way down as African-Americans are economically cleansed, American-born whites are resurgent across much of the more desirable central part of the city, especially recolonizing some convenient neighborhoods in northern Manhattan and northern Brooklyn. 

Much of the Waiting for "Superman"-style frenzy over school reform has to do with NYC whites trying to figure out how they can take back the schools as well as the streets -- all without ever coming out and articulating exactly what they are trying to do.

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

JFK's Harvard Application

John F. Kennedy's 1936 Harvard application is now on the Internet. In grades, he finished 65th out of 110 at Choate Academy, which is awfully mediocre since they probably weren't all that selective back then. The application includes old-fashioned College Board tests scored on a 0 to 100 scale, but I don't know how to interpret those: Latin 75, French 60, and Math A 82.

One thing I hadn't known was that JFK had actually started college at Princeton, but then dropped out because of a severe illness that put him in the hospital for two months. He ended up missing a year to recuperate, so he didn't start Harvard until he was 19. I feel sorry for the kid being that sickly.

In other news, the Democrats' favorite Republican Senator, Lindsay Graham, likes to boast of his 800 combined SAT score.

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

Goldberg, Beck, Fox Piven.

As I mentioned yesterday, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic is accusing Glenn Beck of "a classic case of anti-Semitic dog-whistling" by "Beck's recent naming of nine people -- eight of them Jews -- as enemies of America and humanity." See, everybody is supposed to at all times know who is Jewish, or you could be an anti-Semite. You are also supposed to not know, because only anti-Semites know that stuff.

Goldberg admits that he can't prove that Beck knew that eight of nine people on his eccentric list are Jews, but

But Beck is a smart person, and has researchers at hand with access to Wikipedia. Further, most of these people on Beck's "big lie" list are already the targets of straightforward attacks in the dark, anti-Semitic corners of the Web, so an extended Google search, in some cases, would show that much of the opposition to some of these people is motivated by anti-Semitism.

Yet, how much Internet searching did Goldberg do before accusing Beck of anti-Semitism? For example, where's the Internet evidence for Goldberg's "eight of them Jews" assertion? In particular, Goldberg should explain how he's so sure that sociologist Frances Fox Piven, co-founder of the National Welfare Rights Organization back in 1966, is Jewish. Where's the Internet evidence for that?

Piven and her second husband Richard Cloward were Columbia U. professors who were highly influential in the 1960s and 1970s advocating for expanding the number of people on welfare. (In 1976, I read a book by them, The Politics of Turmoil: Essays on Poverty, Race, and the Urban Crisis, that was assigned reading for my History of the 1960s class at Rice U.) Eventually, most people figured out that putting more people on welfare was a really bad idea and their reputation receded to academia (where they, evidently, are still worshiped as gods), but they had another triumph with the Democrat's Motor Voter act in 1993.

I've wasted an hour poking around on Google and I can't find much evidence that Frances Fox Piven is Jewish.  (Nor any evidence that she's not Jewish.) Here, for example, is Fox Piven's Wikipedia page, which doesn't mention anything about it.

I found one one fellow on Media Matters on January 14, 2011 saying that eight of the nine on Beck's list are Jewish. Perhaps Goldberg is just echoing him on the theory that an organization as trustworthy and unbiased as George Soros and David Brock's Media Matters has to be unbiased and trustworthy. On the other hand, at Matzav.com, commenter Yerachmiel Lopin asserts, "The most radical name on the list, more radical than Soros, is Frances Fox Piven who is not Jewish." I would take both assertions with about equal weight.

Frances Fox was was born in Calgary in 1932. Piven is the name of her first husband. (Maybe she converted to Judaism when she married her first husband and then, like Walter Sobchak, didn't convert back after the divorce because of "3000 years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax." I don't know.)

Is Fox a Jewish name? Sometimes, sometimes not. Wikipedia, which features a gigantic list of semi-famous people named Fox, explains that "Fox or Foxe or Foxx is a surname originating in England and Ireland." For example, actor Michael J. Fox was also born in Alberta. As far as I know, Michael J. Fox, Charles James Fox, Jimmy Foxx, and Redd Foxx weren't Jewish. On the other hand, Beck's Fox News is named after William Fox, who Anglicized his mother's surname of Fuchs. Moreover, the bass player in The Runaways, Jackie Fox, went back to being Jackie Fuchs at Harvard Law School, where the youthful Barack Obama reminded her of her former bandmate Joan Jett, who starred in Light of Day with Michael J. Fox. (See, it really is all connected, just like Beck says.)

Perhaps Goldberg once exchanged the secret handshake with Frances Fox Piven, which is why he's so sure about her. I don't know. 

It all seems increasingly farcical.

I can't imagine how Beck, who sounds like the epitome of the clueless goyishe kopf, is supposed to know these things.

Of course, he's also supposed to not know these things. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

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

The Necessity of Doublethink

From the Atlantic Monthly:

DON'T MISS

Glenn Beck's Jewish Problem Does the Fox host realize that the majority of his "enemies of America" are Jewish? National | Jeffrey Goldberg

You are supposed to know who is Jewish, but you are also supposed to not know who is Jewish. Got that?

Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic, explains:

It's become clear to me that the Fox commentator Glenn Beck has something of a Jewish problem. Actually, he has something of a modernity problem, and people with modernity problems tend to have problems with Jews, who more or less invented modernity (Einstein, Marx, Freud, Franz Boas, etc.)

... This is a post about Beck's recent naming of nine people -- eight of them Jews -- as enemies of America and humanity. He calls these people prime contributors to the -- wait for it -- "era of the big lie." The eight Jews are Sigmund Freud; Edward Bernays, the founder of public relations, and a nephew of Freud's (which Beck discloses as if this had previously been a secret); Soros, of course; Cass Sunstein, now of the White House; the former labor leader Andy Stern; Walter Lippman, who is no longer here to defend himself; Frances Fox Piven, who Beck believes is "sowing the seeds" of revolution; and, of all people, Edward Rendell.

It is fair to ask if Beck knows that these people are Jewish (It is not widely-known that Rendell is Jewish, I think). 

But, of course, who doesn't know that Frances Fox Piven is Jewish? 

Look, I can't recall ever seeing Glenn Beck on TV (I don't have cable), but I can take some guesses about his knowledge based on my own level of knowledge in the later 1990s. At that point, I would have been sure Freud was Jewish, but would have been reduced to sheer guessing about the seven others (most of whom I'd heard of at that point: I don't recall ever wondering whether Francis Fox Piven or her late husband Richard Cloward were Jewish. It just didn't come up.)

Extremely ethnocentric Jews like Jeffrey Goldberg (born in Brooklyn, he joined the Israeli Defense Force after graduating from the Ivy League) vastly overestimate how much gentiles pay attention to the Is-he-a-Jew? questions that obsess them. Further, the media has done a really good job of persuading the average American that even noticing the ethnic patterns that personally preoccupy leading members of the media like Goldberg is a mark of lack of gentility, so most of them don't. 

As Joel Stein pointed out in the LA Times in 2008 on the dumbing down of America:

Only 22% of Americans now believe "the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews," down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. 

Goldberg continues:

... That said, Beck has not crossed a certain line, by identifying his targets openly as Jewish. Nevertheless, this, to me, is a classic case of anti-Semitic dog-whistling. Beck is speaking to a certain constituency, and the thought has now crossed my mind that this constituency understands the clear implications of what Beck is saying.

My modest suggestion to those Jews who fear the building of mosques in American cities is that they look elsewhere for threats that seem to be gathering against them.

The Establishment media freakout over the last two weeks about the fans of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Sarah Palin reveals how many leading figures in the press regard average Americans with atavistic dread and rage as The Other.

Guys, grow up and get over it. Fight the feeling. It's immature and unseemly, and just because nobody is allowed to point it out in polite society doesn't make it less so.
  

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

"Blue Valentine"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

Blue Valentine, a superbly acted indie drama about a middle-class nurse falling out of love with her working-class house-painter husband, is both a timeless look at how sexual attraction actually works and an increasingly timely depiction of male-female troubles.

Since director Derek Cianfrance rewrote his screenplay 66 times while struggling to find financing over the last dozen years, Blue Valentine wound up more socially relevant now than it would have been in the 1990s. The dropout-rate gap between males and females has widened, technology has rendered a strong back less useful, and illegal immigration has further driven down the wages of less-educated men.

The press has celebrated the decline of men relative to women (for example, Hanna Rosin’s Atlantic article “The End of Men”). Yet are women notably happier? Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner explained why his series’ JFK-era retrograde behavior excites contemporary female viewers: “What’s sexist in the office is fuel in the bedroom.” Blue Valentine is about a marriage running on fumes.

Michelle Williams is Cindy and Ryan Gosling is Dean. Each has been a minor star for some time, both earning Oscar nominations: he as a teacher in Half Nelson, she as the late Heath Ledger’s wife in Brokeback Mountain. (Williams and Ledger had a real-life child.) Williams and Gosling, both 30, are excellent at playing a five-year-old girl’s worn-down parents as well as (in extensive flashbacks to their first meeting) beautiful 20-year-olds. Cianfrance shot the present on harsh digital video, the past on warm film stock.

Read the whole thing there.

Roissy gives Blue Valentine a rave at Citizen Renegade.

In contrast, conventional movie critics overwhelmingly give the movie thumbs up, but have a hard time even grasping what it's about.

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

The Conservative McCain

Much of liberaldom's "eliminationist" rhetoric regarding Arizona has been an attempt to eliminate from the electoral playing field this guy.

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

O'Reilly's Willing Executioners?

Some perceptive critics, such as Michael Moynihan and Chris Roach, have noticed an extraordinary term that Paul Krugman, the most influential pundit in America, used twice in his "Climate of Hate" column: "eliminationist." 

Krugman opined:

It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. ... The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary. And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence. ... Of course, the likes of Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly are responding to popular demand.

Where did Krugman get the word "eliminationist?" Moynihan noted in Reason this recurrent theme in Krugman's vocabulary in 2010:

If your dictionary is unfamiliar with the word eliminationist, that's because of the term's recent vintage, coined in 1996 by Harvard political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. In his book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Goldhagen argued that far from being bullied and terrorized into allowing its government to commit genocide in their name, most Germans were imbued with an eliminationist hatred of Jews—i.e., a desire that Jews be eliminated from Aryan society—which transitioned smoothly into an exterminationist orgy of violence. ...

Of the 40 references to "eliminationism" in the Times archive, all but one refer to the destruction of European Jewry. The sole standout is Krugman, who, as we have seen, is referencing the Republican Party's opposition to health care legislation.

Google's Ngram notes a tiny number of instances of the word "eliminationist" showing up in books before Hitler's Willing Executioners, but almost all usage since the 18th Century has come, as Moynihan says, following Goldhagen's book.

Here are the top examples of the term "eliminationist" from Ngram:

1. The eliminationists: how hate talk radicalized the American right

   David A. Neiwert - 2009 - 281 pages - Preview Drawing from his extensive reporting on right-wing groups, David Neiwert argues that the conservative movements alliances with far-right extremists have not only pushed the movements agenda to the right, but have become a malignant ... books.google.com - Add to My Library▼ - In My Library: Change▼

2. Worse than war: genocide, eliminationism, and the ongoing assault ... - Page 252

   Daniel Jonah Goldhagen - 2009 - 658 pages - Preview The price paid by those practicing eliminationist politics owing to actions taken by the international community has, ... The current international political system, in which eliminationist politics is embedded, is, whatever its ... books.google.com - More editions - Add to My Library▼ - In My Library: Change▼

3. Genocide and fascism: the eliminationist drive in fascist Europe

   Aristotle A. Kallis - 2009 - 413 pages - No preview Drawing on the latest research into the ideological dynamics of fascism, Aristotle A. Kallis? fascinating new book is a major contribution to the understanding of the Holocaust, and the mass murder and genocide committed by Fascist regimes ... books.google.com - More editions - Add to My Library▼ - In My Library: Change▼

4. The continuities of German history: nation, religion, and race ... - Page 167

   Helmut Walser Smith - 2008 - 246 pages - Preview 5 eliminationist racism In Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, ... Eliminationist anti-Semitism, to take Goldhagen's term, cannot be said to be representative of public opinion in Imperial Germany, ... books.google.com - More editions - Add to My Library▼ - In My Library: Change▼

5. Hitler's willing executioners: ordinary Germans and the Holocaust - Page 49

   Daniel Jonah Goldhagen - 1997 - 634 pages - Preview 2 THE EVOLUTION OF ELIMINATIONIST ANTISEMITISM IN MODERN GERMANY EUROPEAN ANTISEMITISM is a corollary of Christianity. ... Eliminationist ... books.google.com - More editions - Add to My Library▼ - In My Library: Change▼

6. Becoming evil: how ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing - Page 45

   James Waller - 2002 - 316 pages - Preview You lived in a culture permeated by eliminationist antisemitism, and both its expression and its lack of expression ... Was Eliminationist Antisemitism the Central Motive for the Holocaust? Even if we accept the spurious concept of a ... books.google.com - More editions - Add to My Library - In My Library: Change▼

Krugman's obsession reminds me of Dick Cheney's "One Percent Doctrine" of how the threat from a "low-probability, high-impact event," such as Al-Qaeda getting a nuclear weapon, justified things like the Iraq Attaq. Similarly, if there's a one percent chance that Bill O'Reilly's show will lead to "eliminationism," well, that justifies ... Well, it would certainly be interesting to hear Dr. Krugman's inner opinion on just what a one percent chance would justify in response.

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

Amy Chua's next project?

Nicholas Wade writes about Chaser, a border collie dog, whose owner, a retired psychology professor, taught her to remember proper names for 1,022 different items to fetch.

Border collies are working dogs. They have a reputation for smartness, and they are highly motivated. They are bred to herd sheep indefatigably all day long. Absent that task, they must be given something else to do or they go stir crazy.

Chaser proved to be a diligent student. Unlike human children, she seems to love her drills and tests and is always asking for more. “She still demands four to five hours a day,” Dr. Pilley said. “I’m 82, and I have to go to bed to get away from her.” ...

As with other animals for which prodigious feats of cognition have been reported, like Alex the gray parrot or Kanzi the bonobo, it is hard to place Chaser’s and Rico’s abilities in context. If their achievements are within the general capacity of their species, why have many other instances not been reported? If, on the other hand, their achievements are unique, then either the researchers have lucked out in finding an Einstein of the species, or there could be something wrong with the experiments like a Clever Hans effect.

Dr. Pilley said that most border collies, with special training, “could be pretty close to where Chaser is.” When he told Chaser’s dog breeder of the experiment, “he wasn’t surprised about the dog’s ability, just that I had had the patience to teach her,” Dr. Pilley said.

Dr. Horowitz agreed: “It is not necessarily Chaser or Rico who is exceptional; it is the attention that is lavished on them,” she said. 

Border collies are a handful if you don't own a flock of sheep to keep them busy.

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

Ronald Brownstein's "White Flight" article in National Journal

From the VDARE.com column I wrote before the press whipped itself into a frenzy nine days ago:

Veteran centrist reporter Ronald Brownstein’s "White Flight" article in National Journal, a trade magazine for political professionals, had begun to get a lot of attention, until the political class went berserk over that psycho shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona. ...

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Brownstein’s article was left more implied than explicit:

“The Hispanic vote for Democrats in House races slipped to 60 percent, compared with about two-thirds for Obama in 2008 … Meanwhile, Republicans, with their 60 percent showing, notched the party’s best congressional result among white voters in the history of modern polling.”

Let me spell this out more clearly than Brownstein does. In 2010, whites voted slightly more as a bloc for Republican House candidates (60-37) than Hispanics did for Democrats (60-38).

...Still, it’s fascinating that after endless pronouncements in the MSM about how Republicans were dooming themselves in November by supporting the Arizona immigration law, it turns out that the GOP did fair to middling among Hispanic voters.

The unspoken reality: immigration is not that important an issue to Hispanic voters—certainly not anything like as important as it is to would-be Hispanic leaders.

Read the whole thing there.

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

The NYT's long war on Arizona rolls on

The NYT's long war on Arizona continues. The NYT editorializes:

Arizona, in the Classroom

Last week’s memorial service in Tucson, which began with a blessing by a professor of Yaqui Indian and Mexican heritage, showcased Arizona’s rich diversity as well as the love and tolerance of many of its citizens.

Unfortunately there is another Arizona, one where its state government all too often promotes discord and intolerance. This was painfully clear in the state’s immigration law, which empowers the police to demand the papers of suspected illegal immigrants. And it is painfully clear in a new education law that injects nativist fears directly into the public school classroom.

The law, which took effect Dec. 31, bans any courses or classes that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people” or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

Promoting resentment might seem like divisiveness and vitriol, but in Tucson the taxpayers were being forced to pay for the promotion of resentment of whites, so that's A-Okay. Discord and intolerance is not subsidizing  resentment toward a class, as long as the class is whites.

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

What are we allowed to say?

At Your Lying Eyes, Ziel elegantly states the central paradox of contemporary political discourse:

What Can the Right Say?

... And so this is the quandary the right finds itself in - it cannot communicate its message to voters since the message itself is verboten. And so it must rely on proxy arguments that don't necessarily make a lot of sense. For example, proclaiming loudly and forcefully to be against illegal immigration, but all for legal immigration. But when the left counters with "Then why not just declare them legal - problem solved" - the conservative is left sputtering about rule-of-law. His real argument - that the Hispanic population is simply [growing] too large and we can't afford as a nation to allow it to continue to grow rapidly - must be muted, as making this argument will lead to his banishment from public discourse. Why? Because any venue that hosts this argument will be immediately subject not just to a withering public flogging, but to boycott by sponsors and anyone associated with the host. ...

Similarly, in his attempt to be civil in his latest column "A Tale of Two Moralities," Paul Krugman states that "the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences — something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds." He then goes on to frame the yawning gulf between right-and-left as an unbridgeable dispute over tax policy! Taxation is about the only topic on which the right gets to argue with some passion - perhaps because everyone hates paying taxes. Republicans are routinely lambasted as the "party of greed" as a result, but again who isn't greedy? Unfortunately, that results in the Republican party being essentially focused with near single-mindedness on cutting taxes, since that's about the only issue they can really promote with gusto.

The general idea behind freedom of speech is that more speech is, on the whole, better than less speech. That's not a very popular notion these days.

Read the whole thing here.

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

Good for Charles M. Blow

New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow deserves congratulations.

Tucson Witch Hunt

Immediately after the news broke, the air became thick with conjecture, speculation and innuendo. There was a giddy, almost punch-drunk excitement on the left. The prophecy had been fulfilled: “words have consequences.” And now, the right’s rhetorical chickens had finally come home to roost.

The dots were too close and the temptation to connect them too strong. The target was a Democratic congresswoman. There was the map of her district in the cross hairs. There were her own prescient worries about overheated rhetoric.

Within hours of the shooting, there was a full-fledged witch hunt to link the shooter to the right.

“I saw Goody Proctor with the devil! Oh, I mean Jared Lee Loughner! Yes him. With the devil!” 

As I've said before, conjecture, speculation, and innuendo in the immediate hours following an unexpected event are to be expected. The national press has obvious regional and race prejudices that boil to the surface when there are few facts at hand. Demonizing white Arizonans has been a major theme of the mainstream media since the spring of 2010, so it was inevitable that they would seize upon this seeming opportunity to reinforce the narrative.

What was truly dismaying was the doubling down on the original stereotyping once plenty of disconfirming evidence was available by later on on Saturday.

The only problem is that there was no evidence then, and even now, that overheated rhetoric from the right had anything to do with the shooting. ...

Great. So the left overreacts and overreaches and it only accomplishes two things: fostering sympathy for its opponents and nurturing a false equivalence within the body politic. Well done, Democrats.

Now we’ve settled into the by-any-means-necessary argument: anything that gets us to focus on the rhetoric and tamp it down is a good thing. But a wrong in the service of righteousness is no less wrong, no less corrosive, no less a menace to the very righteousness it’s meant to support.

You can’t claim the higher ground in a pit of quicksand.

In theory, no. In reality, you can often get away with a lot just by shouting angrily enough about how angry the other guys are.

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