October 4, 2012
196 million eligible for race/ethnic preferences by 2050
With the Supreme Court gearing up for oral arguments over affirmative action, I'm reminded for the umpty-umpth time that everybody loves to debate whether African-Americans deserve quotas. Personally, having been following these debates for 40 years, I know all the arguments on both sides and understand that both sides have their points.
What's fascinating / snooze-inducing is that almost nobody on either side of the quota issue is interested in arguing whether immigrant groups should continue to be eligible, even though they are rapidly becoming vastly more numerous than blacks and American Indians.
To quantify this, I took a look at the Census Bureau's 2008 projection of the makeup of the population in 2050. (In 2009, the Bureau followed up with multiple projections based on varying assumptions, but for simplicity's sake I'll just use the 2008 projections as the federal government's last attempt at a single best guess.)
Assume that whites and Asians are not eligible for preferences (and of course Asian businesspersons are eligible for a lot of obscure minority privileges, but let's ignore that for the moment.) Assume that all Hispanics remain a protected class, as well as all non-Hispanic blacks, American Indians, and Pacific Islanders, and half of non-Hispanic multi-racials (i.e., half will be white-Asians and thus ineligible, half something else and thus eligible).
I come up with just under 196,000,000 people in 2050 who will be eligible for race/ethnic preferences, with the great majority of the beneficiaries neither black nor American Indian.
Shouldn't we be having a discussion of how the country is going to function under those circumstances?
Projecting Obama's blankness onto Romney
"I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views ..."
Barack Obama
The Audacity of Hope
The Audacity of Hope
The concept of "projection" is one of the more empirically valid ideas that Sigmund Freud came up with. You can see it in the newspaper every day if you just look with fresh eyes: for example, that respected organization that is so angry all the time about "hate groups" -- oh, yeah, it is a hate group.
In recent months, we've been inundated with strident media assertions that Mitt Romney is a blank screen, an empty suit, a cipher, a nullity. Perhaps they are right, although Romney's long track record suggests that people who know him frequently turn to him when they have difficult problems requiring leadership and management chops to solve (something that does not seem to be true of Obama).
But, we shouldn't overlook the sizable element of projection in the pro-Obama press's attacks on Romney, which might help explain their rabid reaction to Clint Eastwood's improvisation with an empty chair sitting in for Obama. Clint's old and (judging by his last several movies) lazy, but he's still a cunning old bastard with enough on the ball to intuit one key insight into Obama: there's not a lot there.
October 3, 2012
Jarrett on Obama: "He's been bored to death his whole life"
Here's Chris Matthews blowing gaskets over his man Barack's low energy performance tonight.
Matthews shouldn't have been surprised. Obama's apathy has a long history that's detailed here and there in biographies by his partisans:
David Remnick quotes Obama's long-time Chicago political ally Valerie Jarrett recalling Obama's 1990s in Chicago (p. 274):
"... I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. ... So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy." Jarrett was quite sure that one of the few things that truly engaged him fully before going to the White House was writing Dreams from My Father. "He's been bored to death his whole life," she said.
Later, after Obama got elected to the U.S. Senate [p. 444]:
The truth was, David Axelrod told me, "Barack hated being a senator." Washington was a grander stage than Springfield, but the frustrations of being a rookie in a minority party were familiar. Obama could barely conceal his frustration with the torpid pace of the Senate. His aides could sense his frustration and so could his colleagues. "He was so bored being a senator," one Senate aide said. ...
His friend and law colleague Judd Miner said, "The reality was that during his first two years in the U.S. Senate, I think, he was struggling; it wasn't nearly as stimulating as he expected." ...
The one project that did engage Obama fully was work on The Audacity of Hope. He procrastinated for a long time and then, facing his deadline, wrote nearly a chapter a week.
One reason for Obama's perpetual boredom is that his skill set is basically that of a writer. He has everything that it takes to be a good writer except the ability to come up with interesting ideas.
The Debate
Here's a link to a semi-coherent transcript of the first Presidential debate.
The President seemed peeved having to deal with somebody who evidently hadn't been briefed that Obama is always The Smartest Guy in the Room. Hadn't Romney gotten the memo from Valerie Jarrett?
From the bits and pieces I saw, it looked like Romney would have won pretty decisively if he wasn't stuck with the reigning Republican orthodoxy. Like I've been saying, the notion that Romney is some particularly horrible individual candidate is silly. He's a man of varied accomplishments (and ridiculously good looking for his age). He's not particularly gifted at politics, but he makes a decent generic GOP candidate. He's a well-adjusted grown-up with a track record of executive skill.
From the bits and pieces I saw, it looked like Romney would have won pretty decisively if he wasn't stuck with the reigning Republican orthodoxy. Like I've been saying, the notion that Romney is some particularly horrible individual candidate is silly. He's a man of varied accomplishments (and ridiculously good looking for his age). He's not particularly gifted at politics, but he makes a decent generic GOP candidate. He's a well-adjusted grown-up with a track record of executive skill.
The problem is that the GOP ideology of tax cuts and stronger military and not much else is well-suited to solving the problems of 1980. There are diminishing marginal returns to tax cutting, and (as far as I can remember) we won the Cold War. Imagine that Romney stood up and said, "Look, one of the things we have to do is cut the bloat from the military budget. It's a managerial problem. I have years of experience going over budgets line by line. President Obama has years of experience writing his autobiographies. Who do you trust to do a better job?" But, he can't say that.
Further, the GOP is so throttled in what they can talk about by their concessions to political correctness that they don't have much to say.
The word immigration never came up.
J.P. Rushton, 1943-2012
Here is a short biography (and other links) for the great theoretical innovator in the human sciences J.P. Rushton, who, I am told, died yesterday.
J. Philippe Rushton, B.Sc., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.B.Ps.S., the fourth and current president of the Pioneer Fund, was born in 1943 in Bournemouth, England. He received all his degrees from the University of London, including a Ph.D. in social psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of 5 books and over 200 scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Rushton is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American, British, and Canadian Psychological Associations. He is also a member of the Behavioral Genetics Association and the Society for Neuroscience. Rushton has summarized his research for journals of opinion such as Liberty, the National Review, and the Washington Times’s Insight on the News, and discussed it on TV talk shows such as Donahue, Geraldo Live, and Connie Chung. His major published work is Race, Evolution, and Behavior, which was favorably reviewed in The New York Times Book Review of October 16, 1994, translated into Japanese, and is now in its 3rd unabridged edition, as well as in an abridged edition and an audio book.
Professor Rushton began his career by researching the basis of altruism. The question of why one individual aids another, thereby exposing himself to risk, has long posed a challenge to evolutionary theories of human development. Rushton’s early work focused on the social learning of generosity in 7- to 11-year-old children. After writing a book, Altruism, Socialization, and Society (1980), which examined the influence of the family, the educational system, and the mass media, he broadened his perspective to include sociobiological and behavioral genetic factors. He then analyzed the University of London Twin Register and found that individual differences in empathy and nurturance are about 50% heritable, as were individual differences in aggression and crime, some of which he found to be mediated by testosterone.
Studying behavioral genetics and sociobiology led Rushton to explore the dilemma of why, throughout the natural world, “birds of a feather flock together.” He found that genes incline people to marry, befriend, associate with, and help others like themselves. Typically, individuals learn to identify and prefer their own ethnic group, rather than others, for largely genetic reasons. Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory expanded the kin-selection theory of altruism (a fundamental theorem of sociobiology) to explain why the pull of that factor is so powerful across human relationships and how it provides an explanation for ethnocentrism and ethnic competition. Altruism follows lines of genetic similarity in order to replicate genes more effectively; xenophobia emerges as the dark side of human altruism.
It also led Rushton to examine race differences. In new studies and reviews of the world literature, he has documented that East Asians and their descendants consistently average a larger brain size, greater intelligence, more sexual restraint, a slower rate of maturation, and greater levels of law abidingness and social organization than do Europeans and their descendants. Europeans, in turn, average higher on these dimensions than do Africans and their descendants. To explain this pattern he proposed a gene-based evolutionary theory in his book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1995).
Here's Rushton's C.V. with links to most of his papers.
Here's an abridged version of Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior online.
Here's a short 2003 VDARE article I wrote on Rushton's rule of three on East Asians -- whites -- blacks.
Here's a 107 minute debate in 1989 on Canadian TV between Rushton and geneticist David Suzuki.
Templer on Rushton
a conversation with J Philippe Rushton
Jensen on Rushton
Hur on Rushton's contribution to the study of altruism
Templer on Rushton
a conversation with J Philippe Rushton
Jensen on Rushton
Hur on Rushton's contribution to the study of altruism
Meanwhile, Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm has died at age 95, loaded with honors from people his Party would have sent to the Gulag. From Wikipedia's article on Hobsbawm, who didn't resign from the Communist Party until the late 1980s:
1973: Honorary Fellow, King's College, Cambridge
1978: Fellow of the British Academy
1995: Deutscher Memorial Prize; Lionel Gelber Prize
1996: Wolfson History Oeuvre Prize
1998: Companion of Honour, Order of the Companions of Honour
1999: Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäischen Verständigung (Hauptpreis)
1999: Honorary degree from Universidad de la República Montevideo, Uruguay
2000: Ernst Bloch Prize
2003: Balzan Prize recipient
2006: Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature[60]
2008: Honorary citizenship from Vienna
2008: Honorary degree from University of Vienna
2008: Honorary degree from Charles University in Prague
2008: Bochum History Prize
An Englishmen in Bucharest points out:
Had Eric Hobsbawm adopted the theories of Gobineau and H.S. Chamberlain, rather than those of Marx and Engels, he would have been left to theorise in pubs ...
In contrast to Hobsbawm, Rushton innovated a remarkably large number of the more interesting and/or useful ideas in the human sciences of the era, and had to undergo, for his accomplishments, a lengthy police investigation.
Who was right about human nature: Ayn Rand or Colin Turnbull?
From Slate:
Ayn Rand vs. the Pygmies
Did human evolution favor individualists or altruists?
By Eric Michael Johnson
Black-and-white colobus monkeys scrambled through the branches of Congo’s Ituri Forest in 1957 as a small band of Mbuti hunters wound cautiously through the undergrowth, joined by anthropologist Colin Turnbull. The Mbuti are pygmies, about 4 feet tall, but they are powerful and tough. Any one of them could take down an elephant with only a short-handled spear. Recent genetic evidence suggests that pygmies have lived in this region for about 60,000 years. But this particular hunt reflected a timeless ethical conflict for our species, and one that has special relevance for contemporary American society.
The Mbuti employed long nets of twined liana bark to catch their prey, sometimes stretching the nets for 300 feet. Once the nets were hung, women and children began shouting, yelling, and beating the ground to frighten animals toward the trap. As Turnbull came to understand, Mbuti hunts were collective efforts in which each hunter’s success belonged to everybody else. But one man, a rugged individualist named Cephu, had other ideas. When no one was looking, Cephu slipped away to set up his own net in front of the others. “In this way he caught the first of the animals fleeing from the beaters,” explained Turnbull in his book The Forest People, “but he had not been able to retreat before he was discovered.” Word spread among camp members that Cephu had been trying to steal meat from the tribe, and a consensus quickly developed that he should answer for this crime. ...
At an impromptu trial, Cephu defended himself with arguments for individual initiative and personal responsibility. “He felt he deserved a better place in the line of nets,” Turnbull wrote. “After all, was he not an important man, a chief, in fact, of his own band?” But if that were the case, replied a respected member of the camp, Cephu should leave and never return. The Mbuti have no chiefs, they are a society of equals in which redistribution governs everyone’s livelihood. The rest of the camp sat in silent agreement.
Faced with banishment, a punishment nearly equivalent to a death sentence, Cephu relented. “He apologized profusely,” Turnbull wrote, “and said that in any case he would hand over all the meat.”
Okay, but best-selling anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who is treated as an objective authority in this article, is one of the few writers even wackier than Ayn Rand. Turnbull was a big deal back in the day. For example, the Royal Shakespeare Company, under the direction of his friend Peter Brook, toured with a play based on his second field study.
Turnbull wrote two well-known books on Africa, The Forest People (about his beloved Mbuti pygmies) and The Mountain People (about the Ik, whom he demonized as "the worst people on Earth" and demanded that they be culturally exterminated).
Turnbull wrote two well-known books on Africa, The Forest People (about his beloved Mbuti pygmies) and The Mountain People (about the Ik, whom he demonized as "the worst people on Earth" and demanded that they be culturally exterminated).
What motivated such unbalanced books?
Roy Richard Grinker's biography of Turnbull is called In the Arms of Africa. Here's Grinker's summary of Turnbull's view of the Mbuti pygmies in The Forest People:
Turnbull found the Mbuti to have social institutions more humane and more sophisticated than anything that existed in western civilization. As described in The Forest People, Mbuti children are never pitted against one another. People live in harmony not because they are coerced to do so by laws, the threat of violence, or other external impositions, but because of an internal desire for unity, reciprocity, and social equality ... Mbuti teenagers, he wrote, practice sex freely and yet have no unwanted pregnancies ... In addition, for Turnbull, the Mbuti's apparent subordination to the neighboring farmers was only playacting. The Mbuti pretended to be inferior when they were, in fact, far superior in almost every way.
Turnbull's second bestseller, The Mountain People, is quite a contrast:
He proposed to the Ugandan government that the Ik society should be eliminated, that individuals should be rounded up and dispersed over an area wide enough to make sure they never found each other again. The Ugandan government and the anthropological community were outraged
Why the sudden switch to a Stalinoid approach to some poor tribe? (There's a recent documentary, Ikland, about the Ik, which shows they are a pretty routine people and not the depraved monsters of Turnbull's bestselling imagination.)
The title of the biography of Turnbull is In the Arms of Africa and that is not metaphorical. Turnbull died of AIDS in 1994.
Turnbull's book about the pygmies was a Big Gay Ecstasy about a tribe that had furnished him with a boy for a bedmate. The first chapter of Grinker's biography of Turnbull, as published in the New York Times in 1997, is largely gay pedo-porn. Here's the book's opening paragraph:
On most mornings in 1957, the Scottish anthropologist Colin Macmillan Turnbull would wake up in his hut next to his young Mbuti assistant, Kenge, their legs and arms intertwined in the way that Mbuti men like to sleep with each other to stay warm. At four foot eight, Kenge was more than a foot and a half shorter than Colin, so Colin could hold him easily with his long legs, arms, and wide hands, keeping them both warm in the damp forest nights.
And it just gets creepier from there in its loving description of the Jerry Sandusky of leftist anthropology.
The Mountain People, in contrast, is a Big Gay Snit about how much Turnbull loathes the Ik, especially for not providing him with a boy toy. Grinker writes:
Turnbull hated the Ik. The Pygmies, and even Joseph Towles [Turnbull's African-American boyfriend] (who had begun his training as an anthropologist), empowered him. But because he could do little to stop the famine and social behaviors that emerged in that context, the Ik threatened his role as protector or saviour. Because they did not seem to respect him or care for him, the Ik never gave him the sense of self-worth he derived from Joseph and other underdogs. And because the Ik never gave him someone like the Pygmy young boy, Kenge, whom he could love and idolize, he grew angry and lonely.
You might expect from my extracts that Grinker's biography of Turnbull is a devastating takedown, but the bulk of it is pretty much hagiograpy, which goes to illustrate a lot about cultural power. Grinker got his initial draft rejected by his editor on the grounds that a straight man shouldn't be writing a biography of a gay hero. So, he gayed up his manuscript and got it through.
In the intellectual realm, one way power is exercised is in rewriting the past. For example, Francis Galton was, by any objective standard, one of the more creative geniuses in human history, but he is routinely demonized today. In contrast, this Turnbull fellow was a trainwreck, whose influence in the latter half of the 20th Century is of interest mostly from a clinical standpoint of figuring out why so many intellectuals went so far off the tracks. But, that's not a subject of approved interest today.
There are a few general points worth making about anthropological field work. Few anthropologists are as nuts / evil as Turnbull, but still ...
First, it's not that easy to stay wholly sane in the bush. Westerners can turn into their own versions of Mistah Kurtz.
Second, anthropologists get lonely. One anthropologist studying the Yanomamo, Kenneth Good, married a 15-year-old native, had three children with her, and tried to take her back with him to suburban New Jersey. The Amazonian lass didn't make a smooth transition to Jersey Girl.
More seriously, a gay athropologist, Jacques Lizot, introduced sodomy to the boys of the tribe. This is the worst, but least publicized aspect, of the Yanomamo story.
More seriously, a gay athropologist, Jacques Lizot, introduced sodomy to the boys of the tribe. This is the worst, but least publicized aspect, of the Yanomamo story.
Third, the most influential anthropology professors, the charismatic ones who most impress their personalities on their grad students, the ones whom cults of personality develop around in American academia, can have similar effects on the tribes they study. For example, Napoleon Chagnon, a third anthropologist to study the Yanomamo, author of The Fierce People about the Yanomamo is a fierce person himself, good man to have in your foxhole. If your platoon was cut off behind enemy lines and you had to fight your way out, you'd want Chagnon as your sergeant.
A fourth anthropologist who was with Chagnon with the Yanomamo told me, "He is a macho," and that the young Yanomamo males looked up to him as a role model. But, that raises a big question about Heisenbergian effects of charismatic researchers on their subjects. I sort of suspect that if Chagnon had decided to do a study of a local Pop Warner football team, he'd quickly wind up the coach, and his team would go undefeated and be renowned for their fierceness.
Now, it's not fair to Chagnon to mention his name in the same posting as Turnbull, but he's still a good example of how a formidable man might influence his research subjects.
Now, it's not fair to Chagnon to mention his name in the same posting as Turnbull, but he's still a good example of how a formidable man might influence his research subjects.
J.P. Rushton, RIP
Psychologist Phil Rushton has died at age 68. He was an insightful and brave scientist who proposed a number of paradigms that are now part of the toolkit of anybody who wants to think objectively about humanity.
Time Travel: Does it make for a better plot if you can or can't change history?
There are a million stories about time travel, but the good ones have to choose a side: when you go back into the past, either you can change the present or you can't. I'm not an expert on science fiction, but in my mind the canonical stories illustrating these polar opposite theories are one by Ray Bradbury and two by Robert Heinlein.
Bradbury's 1952 story "The Sound of Thunder" about a tourist who goes back to the dinosaur age and steps on a butterfly, making the present much worse when he gets home, is the source of the term "butterfly effect" about how small changes can have big results.
In contrast, Heinlein's 1941 time travel story "By His Bootstraps" is a good introduction to the paradoxes of predestination in which the time travel all unfolds as fated despite the best character's best efforts to change the past.
Heinlein returned to this notion in 1958 in one of the last short stories he wrote, the crazy, solipsistic "--All You Zombies--". Heinlein's character ultimately reflects:
That's one of the weirdest endings ever. (That reminds me of all the cults that were forming at the time around around lesser sci-fi writers, such as L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand. There was something in the air in the run-up to the Sixties. It speaks to Heinlein's strength of character and/or short attention span that, despite his tendency toward solipsism that runs amok in 1961's Stranger in a Strange Land, he was less tempted than they were to give in to being a cult leader. Heinlein had the ego, but not the capacity for boredom.)
Then I glanced at the ring on my finger.
The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever. I know where I came from - but where did all you zombies come from?
I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once - and you all went away.
So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light.
You aren't really there at all. There isn't anybody but me - Jane - here alone in the dark.
I miss you dreadfully!
That's one of the weirdest endings ever. (That reminds me of all the cults that were forming at the time around around lesser sci-fi writers, such as L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand. There was something in the air in the run-up to the Sixties. It speaks to Heinlein's strength of character and/or short attention span that, despite his tendency toward solipsism that runs amok in 1961's Stranger in a Strange Land, he was less tempted than they were to give in to being a cult leader. Heinlein had the ego, but not the capacity for boredom.)
So, which theory of time travel makes for better stories?
Back to the Future sides with Bradbury, and that's a pretty good movie.
On the other hand, you could argue that Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is a proto-time travel story that takes Heinlein's side. How does the Oracle know that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother? Maybe she has a time machine!
And that plot works pretty well, too.
I was thinking that maybe Bradbury's changeable history makes for better comedy and Heinlein's deterministic history makes for better tragedy, but perhaps the opposite is true. The gyrations that a Heinleinian time travel plot has to go through to make everything wind up being the same are often exhilaratingly comic, while Bradburyesque plots like the new Looper, which takes a strong stand at the end in favor of [Spoiler Alert!] mother love, often tend toward the sentimental.
I was thinking that maybe Bradbury's changeable history makes for better comedy and Heinlein's deterministic history makes for better tragedy, but perhaps the opposite is true. The gyrations that a Heinleinian time travel plot has to go through to make everything wind up being the same are often exhilaratingly comic, while Bradburyesque plots like the new Looper, which takes a strong stand at the end in favor of [Spoiler Alert!] mother love, often tend toward the sentimental.
October 2, 2012
"Looper"
From my review in Taki's Magazine of the fine time-travel movie Looper, with Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing a hit man from the future at different ages:
One irony about dystopian sci-fi and comic-book movies is that although leading men may be slightly East Asian-looking in the future, America's slums will apparently be mostly white, with everybody else black. Much like in The Matrix, Hispanics don’t exist in Looper’s vision of America in 2044.
While climate change is a favorite subject of sci-fi movies, demographic change is not. With the exception of Blade Runner (set in an Asian-dominated Southern California) and, to a lesser extent, Idiocracy (where America in 2505 is about as Mexican as Texas in 2005), sci-fi movies have shown little interest in projecting out current trends in ethnicity.
Read the whole thing there.
Key & Peele: Annual East/West Collegiate Bowl
From Key & Peele, the Comedy Central sketch show starring Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. (The announcer named "Jeff Worthing" is played by sportscaster Bill Seward, whom I went to school with from first through twelfth grade.)
It's not really college football without also an African name, such as Ngowa Mbube (delivered with a BBC announcer accent), a Haitian name such as Jean-Francois Perrier, and a West Indian name such as Cumberbatch Duncan-Forecastle.
Also, speaking of BYU, here's my posting on Mormon names, such as "Azer Baloo," "Bretile," "Clemouth, "Denim Levi," "D'Loaf," "EdDean," and "ElVoid."
It's not really college football without also an African name, such as Ngowa Mbube (delivered with a BBC announcer accent), a Haitian name such as Jean-Francois Perrier, and a West Indian name such as Cumberbatch Duncan-Forecastle.
Also, speaking of BYU, here's my posting on Mormon names, such as "Azer Baloo," "Bretile," "Clemouth, "Denim Levi," "D'Loaf," "EdDean," and "ElVoid."
What will Mormons do post-Romney?
Ever since roughly 1890, Mormons have been trying to compensate for the weirdness of their founding era by closely emulating mainstream middle class white American culture (which hasn't been that hard for them since they tended to start out as mainstream Northwest Europeans).
This worked well for them subjectively in terms of social acceptance within America (nobody much cares, or even notices, that the Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, is a Mormon).
This worked well for them subjectively in terms of social acceptance within America (nobody much cares, or even notices, that the Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, is a Mormon).
And, this Mormon strategy of being more mainstream than the mainstream also worked well for them objectively, in terms of prosperity, safety, sobriety, honesty and a host of other measures of good things, because the 20th Century American middle class mainstream had lots and lots of good values.
But now, a representative (indeed, exemplary) Mormon is trying, like John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, to lead his people to the ultimate symbolic level of acceptance, the Presidency. To Mormons, Romney represents the beau ideal of their culture.
Perhaps we'll have a different perspective after the debates, but at present it appears that the Mormon strategy has broken down at making the last leap. Contemporary Americans find Romney, and Mormons in general, weird and creepy and offputting and suspicious. And that's less because Mormons' great-grandfathers were polygamists than because Mormons try hard to act like the mainstream middle class white Americans who took the human race to the Moon, and what could be more uncool (and maybe downright racist) than that?
In 1928, voters rejected the first Catholic presidential candidate, Al Smith. This caused much soul-searching among Catholics, and the overall response was to redouble their efforts to fit into the American mainstream. Catholic schools became ever more Americanized (e.g., relative to Quebec's). The next Catholic nominee, JFK, was almost a parody of upper class WASPishness: winters in Palm Beach, Choate, Harvard, naval officer, sailing, golf, etc.
As a candidate, JFK gave a famous speech to suspicious Protestant ministers in Houston that allayed suspicions that he would let Catholic internationalism conflict with Protestant American nationalism. This speech is spun these days as a triumph over Protestant bigotry, but if you actually read JFK's speech, it was a near complete capitulation to Protestant American nationalism. Catholic Rick Santorum read it for the first time earlier this year and, being basted in 21st Century minoritariansm, he was shocked by how the minority candidate had fully endorsed the fundamental prejudice of the majority and promised to live up the majority's demands.
After JFK's election and, perhaps more importantly, martyrdom, American Catholic distinctiveness and sense of peoplehood receded.
But what will happen among Mormons if Romney is defeated in sizable part because he's so Mormon in affect, values, and behavior? Will they redouble their efforts to be even more what they are? Will they decide they have to loosen up and get funky? Will we see more ads on TV featuring Mormon Tongan NFL players?
Or, feeling rejected as a people, will Mormons go off in a new, subversive direction of ... what?
Mormons aren't a huge group (usually said to be about 9 million). And they aren't hugely talented. They generally seem to be about the white American average -- but that puts them increasingly above the American average. And they are better organized, more cohesive, and less dysfunctional than most. So, if they move in a particular direction, it could be moderately significant.
The most likely reaction would probably be to modernize by accelerating the Third Worldization of Mormonism. That would be the easy, socially acceptable path. But that way leads to irrelevance because nobody cares much about nonblack nonwhites, especially ones who choose to assimilate into polite Mormonhood rather than riot over YouTube videos.
Perhaps, though, there are other, more unexpected directions that insulted, alienated Mormons could turn. I don't know enough about them to guess what those might be, however.
Or, feeling rejected as a people, will Mormons go off in a new, subversive direction of ... what?
Mormons aren't a huge group (usually said to be about 9 million). And they aren't hugely talented. They generally seem to be about the white American average -- but that puts them increasingly above the American average. And they are better organized, more cohesive, and less dysfunctional than most. So, if they move in a particular direction, it could be moderately significant.
The most likely reaction would probably be to modernize by accelerating the Third Worldization of Mormonism. That would be the easy, socially acceptable path. But that way leads to irrelevance because nobody cares much about nonblack nonwhites, especially ones who choose to assimilate into polite Mormonhood rather than riot over YouTube videos.
Perhaps, though, there are other, more unexpected directions that insulted, alienated Mormons could turn. I don't know enough about them to guess what those might be, however.
October 1, 2012
The Dirt Gap: 2012 version
Obama appears to be winning in the Electoral College in almost all models, but Nate Silver's 538 blog has a map up of what the electoral college results would look like if Obama's lead deteriorated:
But suppose there is a deterioration in his polls between now and Nov. 6 — or that the polls have overestimated his standing across the board. And so Mr. Obama wins the states where he has at least an 85 percent chance of victory in the forecast, but no others. Then we’d be left with the following map ...
This distribution of states would produce a 269-269 tie. I'm not particularly interested in trying to forecast this election, but I am interested in what drives the results. This map is useful because it shows the red-blue divide in a perfectly even election. That's not a realistic scenario, but it is a useful one. The Red-Blue map came to major prominence during the protracted 2000 election in what was virtually a tie.
What we see once again is the dirt gap phenomenon I identified after the 2004 election. The Democrats carry the Northeast coast, the Great Lakes states, and the West Coast, while the Republicans carry the interior and the Southeast coastal states.
I noted in 2005 that:
Let's look at the 50 most populous metropolitan areas in the country. Of the ones in blue states, 73 percent of their population lives in cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, where physical growth is restricted by unbridgeable water, compared to only 19 percent of the population of the biggest red state metropolises, such as Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix.
The Law of Supply and Demand controls housing prices. The greater supply of available land for suburban expansion in red metropolises keeps house prices down.
Lower housing prices make for more affordable family formation, which makes the "family values" party more appealing.
Just looking at the map, it's easy to make up off the top of my head plausible sounding geographic explanations for the handful of anomalies.
Just looking at the map, it's easy to make up off the top of my head plausible sounding geographic explanations for the handful of anomalies.
- The largest is why the coastal states of the Southeast are redder than the coastal states elsewhere. That's because cities tend to be inland out of hurricane range. Galveston was the metropolis of the Texas coast until the 1900 hurricane, after which Houston took over.
- Indiana is a red state that touches the Great Lakes, but the city of Gary area is rather depopulated, and other areas near Lake Michigan are more likely low cost exurbs of Chicago.
- New Mexico doesn't have many illegal immigrants, but it does have lots of Hispanics and American Indians.
- The most curious anomalies are Minnesota and Vermont. Minnesota touches the Great Lakes at Duluth, but is largely inland. I guess you could call it the Moynihan Memorial Canadian Border Effect.
- Oregon isn't really a coastal state (Portland is well inland), but it pretends to be using zoning laws against exurban sprawl.
- In the noncontiguous states, huge Alaska and small Hawaii are the expected colors.
- In the noncontiguous states, huge Alaska and small Hawaii are the expected colors.
But, that's about all it takes to explain away the whole map, which suggests my electoral model continues to have some explanatory power.
Meanwhile, in strategically located Mali ...
The big news in the Washington Post tonight:
Al-Qaeda threat in N. Africa focus of secret talks
Greg Miller and Craig Whitlock
The White House deliberations include whether to prepare for unilateral strikes and reflect concern that the franchise has become more dangerous since gaining control of large pockets of territory in Mali and acquiring weapons from Libya.
The 2011 U.S. war on Libya destabilized strategically located Mali, leading the whitish Tuaregs of the north to rebel last spring against the black rulers of the more populous south and declare themselves the independent State of Azawad.
There was always an anti-black aspect to the successful rebellion in Libya because Gaddafi long positioned himself as the leader of the African continent and invited in many black immigrants and mercenaries, so it's hardly surprising that in the wake of Qaffafee's downfall, Koran-loving whitish desert dwellers in other countries sought to liberate themselves from black rule. But, judging from Michael Lewis's awe-struck account of how Obama decided to start the Libyan War, the President's depth of strategic knowledge may not go much further than having rented Hotel Rwanda from the Hyde Park Blockbuster.
There was always an anti-black aspect to the successful rebellion in Libya because Gaddafi long positioned himself as the leader of the African continent and invited in many black immigrants and mercenaries, so it's hardly surprising that in the wake of Qaffafee's downfall, Koran-loving whitish desert dwellers in other countries sought to liberate themselves from black rule. But, judging from Michael Lewis's awe-struck account of how Obama decided to start the Libyan War, the President's depth of strategic knowledge may not go much further than having rented Hotel Rwanda from the Hyde Park Blockbuster.
Unsurprisingly, official Washington is now getting around to getting excited about bombing rebel territory in Mali for the usual reasons: spending taxpayers money, the logic of empire, the thrill of the kill, boob-bait for voters, and so forth. I also suspect that Washington would disapprove of whites rebelling against blacks, but it's unclear how many people in Washington actually grasp that aspect of what happened in Mali since everybody is ignorant of physical anthropology today. (You might think that ignorance of anthropology and imperial influence don't go well together, and you'd be right, but who cares about imperial competence when nobody will admit we're running [ineptly] an empire.)
And, it's just Mali for heaven's sake.
Whatever happens
We have got
Remote controlled drones
And they do not.
Whatever happens
We have got
Remote controlled drones
And they do not.
Hypothetical History: Would Obama have been elected the second black president?
Let's imagine an alternative history in which L.A. mayor Tom Bradley is elected governor of California in 1982, then is picked as Walter Mondale's running mate in 1984 instead of the other diversity choice Geraldine Ferraro. Reagan then has two bad debate performances in a row, raising serious concerns about his advanced age. Mondale ekes out a victory, but dies in an Air Force One crash, making Tom Bradley the first black President.
Or, in 1995, Colin Powell's wife tells him to run for President and he defeats Bob Dole and wins a narrow victory over Bill Clinton, making Powell the first black President.
In either alternative history, does Barack Obama become the second black President? If there had already been a first black president, would anyone have ever even considered Obama to be Presidential Timber? Would you have ever even heard of Obama?
The Presidential Timber test is one that I emphasize because it's easy to drop Obama into a certain point in the timeline and say, well, sure, all he had to do was beat Hillary and McCain, anybody could have done that. No, the Presidential Timber test is: Would it occurred to many people a couple of years before the election that this person sounds like a plausible winner and plausible President?
The Presidential Timber test is one that I emphasize because it's easy to drop Obama into a certain point in the timeline and say, well, sure, all he had to do was beat Hillary and McCain, anybody could have done that. No, the Presidential Timber test is: Would it occurred to many people a couple of years before the election that this person sounds like a plausible winner and plausible President?
As far as I can tell, Obama has gone far in life because, as soon as he arrived at Harvard Law School, he struck a lot of influential people as a plausible first black President, a historically symbolic role of vast appeal to many. David Remnick's quasi-biography of Obama, The Bridge, makes this point repeatedly. He couldn't find much to say about Obama's own life, so he padded out the book with vast heapings of Civil Rights Era history and with interviews with big shots who told him that the moment they met Obama, they just knew he should be President.
But if there had already been a first black President, if that box had been checked off in American history, what of Obama? My guess is that in that alternative history, he would be a nonentity.
Obama generally has not struck people who knew him well as a natural leader in smaller scale organizations, and his performance in positions like chairman of the Annenberg Chicago challenge did little to change minds. It was always First Black President or Bust for Obama.
By the way, if, say, George Romney had become the first Mormon president in 1968 or Mo Udall had become the first Mormon President in 1976, I could well imagine Mitt Romney not running for President. I have this theory that Romney keeps running for President because he secretly wants to be the Mormon JFK who normalizes his people by becoming President.
But I can't imagine a Udall Presidency would have had much effect on whether other people would have considered Mitt Romney to be Presidential Timber. The number of non-Mormons in America who feel deep down that it's time to elect a Mormon President, even if he isn't particularly qualified, are minuscule.
But if there had already been a first black President, if that box had been checked off in American history, what of Obama? My guess is that in that alternative history, he would be a nonentity.
Obama generally has not struck people who knew him well as a natural leader in smaller scale organizations, and his performance in positions like chairman of the Annenberg Chicago challenge did little to change minds. It was always First Black President or Bust for Obama.
By the way, if, say, George Romney had become the first Mormon president in 1968 or Mo Udall had become the first Mormon President in 1976, I could well imagine Mitt Romney not running for President. I have this theory that Romney keeps running for President because he secretly wants to be the Mormon JFK who normalizes his people by becoming President.
But I can't imagine a Udall Presidency would have had much effect on whether other people would have considered Mitt Romney to be Presidential Timber. The number of non-Mormons in America who feel deep down that it's time to elect a Mormon President, even if he isn't particularly qualified, are minuscule.
Any stories of Obama going out of his way to do something nice for somebody?
Romney is widely assumed to be heartless and out of touch, but he has a long history of organizing helpful interventions for private citizens in need, partly as a Mormon leader, partly as a boss.
I know a fair amount about Obama, but very few similar stories about him leap to mind. He was professionally employed as a do-gooder for 3 years, but primarily seemed to help get some asbestos removed on the job, much less accomplish anything off hours. Any suggestions for good things Obama has done in his private life to help others?
The Supreme Court, Quotas, and Romney
Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor op-edize in the Washington Post on the upcoming Fisher affirmative action case that will be argued before the Supreme Court on October 10. They did an analysis of U. of Michigan admissions after Sandra Day O'Connor's 2003 ruling that, in effect, racial quotas were A-OK as long as you lie hard enough about what you are doing:
But our analysis of its 2006 admissions patterns found that racial preferences were clearly much larger than before Grutter, and race was more often the “defining feature” of an application. If we compare Asian and black students with similar test scores and grades, for example, blacks had a 96 percent chance of admission in 2006, compared with 11 percent for Asians. The college used more racial categories in evaluating applicants after Grutter and paid less attention to socioeconomic background.
I sure don't notice Romney talking much about the Supreme Court, and especially not about Supreme Court nominations' relevance to race preference cases.
I'm sure he and his highly paid advisers know best.
Back to affirmative action in colleges: a big question is whether the rise of Asians might begin to drive whites toward favoring affirmative action as beneficial to themselves.
September 30, 2012
"All must have prizes"
| General David Petraeus, 2008 |
Commenter Auntie Analog writes:
But even military decorations have been increasingly handed out like so many CrackerJack prizes: look a the parsimony of fruit salad on the left breast of the top officers who led vast armies and massive fleets and won the largest and most complex of all wars, WWII - men such as General Eisenhower, Admiral Nimitz, Admiral Halsey, General Bradely - and you see maybe three, at most four, rows of ribbons; then look at the nine, ten, and eleven rows of ribbons on General Petraeus and Admiral McMullen, guys who've never led more than a handful of divisions and, by comparison with WWII's enormous fleets, small naval forces, and then only in what have chiefly been constabulary campaigns - these guys wear so many ribbons that, with no more room to stack them on the left breast, the rows of them have begun stacking up above their uniforms' right breast.
| Admiral Raymond Spruance of Midway, formal portrait, post-WWII |
For this painting, Spruance wore one row of decorations.
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