After such knowledge…

I have read very little in the last few decades that is as shocking to me as this: Essay by a teacher in a black high school.

My first reaction was that I wanted to believe it was a bigot’s fabrication. I’d still like to believe that, but it was reposted by a black man who claims it is representative of “dirty laundry”: bad stuff [known among blacks] about black folk never to be said around whites.

My second reaction, afterwards, was: for those of us who insist that people ought to be judged by the content of their characters rather than the color of their skins, what emotionally compelling argument do we have against anti-black racism that reading this doesn’t blow to smithereens?

This is a question with more point now than it would have had thirty or fifty years ago, because of one thing this account makes harrowingly clear. White people didn’t impose the depraved, thuggish underculture it describes on black people; they did it to themselves, using a debased form of the rhetoric of white “anti-racists” and multiculturalists as rationalization.

Of course, all the rational arguments against racism are still sound; I’ve written about them pretty extensively on this blog. The mass is not the individual, etcetera, etcetera. Nothing about the ugly, barbaric rampaging of these high-schoolers predicts the behavior of the blacks of the same age or older I know from martial-arts schools, SF conventions, and other places where the lives of black individuals intersect with mine.

But if this is really where they came from – if this is what they’re right-end-of-the-bell-curve exceptions to, and that reality becomes widely known or believed – rational argument won’t be enough. How can we keep the bigots from winning?

UPDATE: I’ve replaced the link I got from the blog “Maggie’s Farm” with a link to what seems to be the original. The Maggie’s-Farm link is now behind the word “reposted”.

477 comments

  1. It is an awful and depressing piece that’s bothered me since I read it the other day. And while it’s true, to a great extent, that “they did it to themselves,” white liberals helped a lot. The welfare state was largely a creation of well-intentioned white reformers, but they did not foresee how destructive it would be of black families. And that is much of the problem: I’ve read that if you correct for single parenthood, black crime rates fall to roughly of that of whites.

  2. PapayaSF wrote:

    The welfare state was largely a creation of well-intentioned white reformers, but they did not foresee how destructive it would be of black families.

    I respond:

    So why hasn’t it destroyed white families to the same extent?

    And:

    I’ve read that if you correct for single parenthood, black crime rates fall to roughly of that of whites.

    I respond:

    First off, I don’t think there are any real stats to support that. Second, even if that was true, you just can’t control for single parenthood in the real world. There’s a reason why there are racial differences in the percentage of households that are led by single mothers. It’s like saying that if you take the sun out of summer, July in Phoenix would be near absolute zero.

  3. My wife, stepchildren, and grandchildren are all black. They are nothing like the black kids this diatribe describes. They’re all products of Baltimore City or Baltimore County schools. A lot of the adults (including my wife) have college degrees they earned without government help. The high schools the teenagers attend in Baltimore are run-down and not very nice, but are *not* bedlam. Those who want to learn, learn. There are those who don’t want to learn and they don’t. Some make trouble, but they are not the majority or even close to it.

    My grandkids get taken to the library every week. If Mom or (business owner) Dad forget, the kids have a fit. They like to read. And (I hate to admit it) one of the daughters is a romance junkie. Yes, she reads for pleasure. (I gave her a low-cost Android tablet for her most recent birthday, loaded with the software Baltimore County Library uses for e-book loans.)

    One grandkid, Earl, didn’t do well in school until about 7th grade. Suddenly he discovered…. math. And loved it. He just graduated from high school — an almost all-black high school — with good grades and FINE math comprehension. He works at Sears as an auto tech; has been promoted from tire work to oil & lube, keeps taking training and getting raises, and will soon be going to college part-time while working.

    And my wife, her daughters, the granddaughters, and many of their relatives and friends are slim, not fat. This “teacher” is either not looking at his students or not seeing them. Assuming that was written by a real teacher, which I doubt.

  4. ESR:

    First, your social circle of blacks are the exception, not the rule. Second, what you call “bigotry” that you don’t want “winning,” others would call rational people observing the world around them and drawing a conclusion.

  5. I’m confused why you would consider a standard that is both objective and just to be “racist” when it correctly and properly identifies evil, when that evil happens to be embodied in those with dark skin. Disproportionately? Perhaps, but then the solution is not to grade on a curve or change the standards, but to first focus the standard (I would consider the “war on drugs” a lose-lose proposition for minorities), and then demand adhering to it.

    The old bromide was “All it takes for evil to win is for a few good men to do nothing”. We have not been demanding evil – petty or gross – be punished.

    Detroit is the result. Look at it. If you dare. Lord of the Flies.

    The bell curve is not a fixture. It moves in response to incentives and stimulus. When we have been rewarding evil, we get more evil, so what you would have hoped would be 2 sigma has moved to the center.

    There is no reason to excuse evil – there may be reasons for mercy or excuses once it is in the sunlight, but not calling it something it is not.

    Also note that conformity is something which humans do as the “tyranny of the default”. While gay marriage sounds libertarian, if you redefine marriage (divorce is actually worse), you end up with the default of game, pick-up-artists, shacking-up, unwed mothers, feral children, etc. It is better when conformity is conformity to virtue and not vice – so if you really want to exercise your liberty you have to break out.

    Right now, conformity is to things which are destroying everyone and everything which we should hold dear.

    Are blacks today better – in the sense of freedom or stability – than they were in the 1950s when they weren’t born out of wedlock, when they owned modest homes, when they were becoming indistinguishable from the whites in the neighborhood a few miles away?

    There is a difference between freedom and license.

  6. TZ wrote:

    Are blacks today better – in the sense of freedom or stability – than they were in the 1950s when they weren’t born out of wedlock, when they owned modest homes, when they were becoming indistinguishable from the whites in the neighborhood a few miles away?

    I respond:

    The notion that “blacks were better back then” is largely a myth. If it seems like they were, it is because people have selective memories, and because “back then,” there was not YouTube that gave instant coverage to Mahogany Mobs, and because of de facto and at the time de jure segregation, whites did not gain the full experience of the black undertow. To the extent that blacks really were better off, it was because the segregationist system somewhat compelled blacks somewhat to conform to white social and cultural norms. After the success of the civil rights movement and the repudiation of segregation, blacks started to revert to who they really were and wanted to be all along.

  7. Of course, in today’s hypersensitive culture every damn thing is termed “Racism” so that the whole term has been diluted beyond words. From my limited exposure to American media, I think this exists a lot in your country. Sadly political correctness is a fast spreading disease, hard to nail down and harder to combat rationally.

    If there are two things I hate beyond reason, it’s communism (and all its liberal-thought cousins) and real racism. I’m not shocked or outraged by racism though. I am merely aware of its historic contexts and why it exists in the forms it does today. People act so morally outraged by small individual instances of so-called racism, that they dilute the debate and take the focus away from genuine discrimination and what can be done to re-integrate society.

    As to why some ethnic groups behave in a particular way, again, I think denial of such collective behaviours will not help re-integration. It will merely re-inforce differences and hatred.

    It is a fact that skin colour is definitely a big part of one’s identity in today’s world.
    It is also a fact that people of similar racial origin share certain traits individually and collectively.

    Why is it that media are so intent on denying such basic truths? I think genuinely anti-racist people should study and research such topics in depth rather than outright denying them.

  8. The linked essay does seem well over the top. My mother spent her career teaching, often in majority black schools, and this reads like a fun-house exaggeration of her experience, particularly in the completely dismissive asides that seem to write off all blacks. That’s not to say that there’s not recognizable truth in the piece. There is. But the author appears to have some severe PTSD that he’s having difficulty working out.

    1. >this reads like a fun-house exaggeration of her experience

      Perhaps that comparative should be read more as “this essay is what your mother might have experienced in places where the dominant black culture is poorer and more pathologized than she ever encountered”. That would be my guess, anyway.

  9. The only Hollywood Undead song that I like:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2qod1ojlVk

    I don’t know if it’s about the devastation caused by the short-sighted, irrational, bleeding-heart libertarianists, but I just so happened to be reading “Dumbing Down Our Kids” by Charles Sykes and “You’re Teaching my Children _WHAT_?” by Dr. Miriam Grossman at the time I discovered it. This, Dr. Miriam Grossman:

    http://www.miriamgrossmanmd.com/

    The evils described in this essay in a fairly racist way and the evils described by these books in other very unPC ways are related.

  10. >White people didn’t impose the depraved, thuggish underculture it describes on black people; they did it to themselves,

    The two are not mutually exclusive. Both as individuals and as groups humans have a tendency to do horrific things to ourselves in reaction to the treatment we receive from others.

  11. countenance:
    > Second, even if that was true, you just can’t control for single parenthood in the real world.

    An idea that’s been going through my head lately: No financial assistance for children who’s parents are on welfare when the child is born. Since children can easily be given up for adoption as babies (or aborted), the child should be treated as a luxury good and thus not supported by the state, much like pets.
    I would hope that this would disincentivize the creation of more children raised in extreme poverty, anyways.
    Thoughts?

  12. esr:
    One item of this article which makes me dubious of the observations is a simple factual error:
    Rap is a lyrical style whereas hip-hop is a musical style. One uses the other, but they are not interchangeable. Granted, many people don’t know this (sadly, resulting in mis-labeled music stores). However, if you are going to take an academic look at something, I would hope you’d get the basics right.

  13. There’s some truth to the essay, but it does seem exaggerated. Certainly there are some black communities and schools that resemble this, but I have also seen more than a few that do not.

    Especially as individuals, results can be quite different. Away from this culture that reinforces bad behavior, most behave reasonably well – though on average I can’t help notice that black workers are less inclined to work and are less capable than white workers. For example, the company I work for had, until some recent layoffs, roughly equal numbers of black and white employees. Of the white employees, probably 30% were well-qualified for the job, and the rest weren’t bad. Of the black employees, perhaps 5% were well-qualified, and only half were even passable.

    I have seen a black security guard propositioning every attractive white women who walked past his post, even after being told they would be fired if they continued. One black co-worker had a similar inability to cease and desist from chatting up the women at one workplace, even though his wife worked in the same building. I have NEVER seen such blatantly disrespectful behavior from a white man.

    I recall years ago, when I was a Boy Scout, teaching the younger scouts in the troop. The black scouts never even made the rank of tenderfoot, even though I was practically giving them the answers. “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, and brave – so, what is one thing that a Scout is?” “I dunno.” “Come on: trustworthy, loyal, brave – pick one.” “Why can’t you just give it to me?” The scoutmaster insisted that they could learn if I just tried hard enough, and after numerous attempts the only thing I could hope for was to make it so easy that they couldn’t fail – but they still failed. There was only so far that I was willing to debase myself. They wouldn’t even try – but of course they were sure that I was racist.

    At one job, a black co-worker had his high school diploma. He regularly made mistakes that indicated he could not read even simple words.

    On the other hand, I have often experienced kindness and generosity from black men and women, and especially the ones who grew up in the country are often lovely people – and though more violent than whites the fact is that most blacks are quite peaceful and loving people. I have known black men who got out of the ghetto to find a safe place to raise their family, and though some were not successful in ridding themselves of ghetto attitudes I saw that they had done everything they could to make the attempt. Such things are not easy.

    So – the account has some truth to it, but it is far from the whole picture – and when I look at historical accounts I know my Scottish ancestors of 500 years ago were no better. Things change, and natural selection can work far more quickly than many believe.

  14. A correction to my earlier comment – it has been a long time since I was active in the Scouts.

    The black boys in the troop not only never made the rank of tenderfoot – not a single one of them – but they did not even make the rank of “Scout”, which is, to quote Wikipedia: “a joining badge, earned by completing the requirements to join Boy Scouting. The Scout badge has a brown fleur-de-lis on a tan background. The badge is awarded when the boy demonstrates a rudimentary knowledge of the Scouting ideals such as tying a square knot and knowing the Scout oath, law, motto, and slogan.”

    This was not for a lack of trying on the part of myself and the other white members of the troop.

  15. I grew up in an odd place, as you know, so I’ve dealt with the described culture quite a bit despite not exactly growing up in it. I can’t say that the author’s descriptive comments are off in important ways, but his analysis, IMO, sucks.

    I can comment in more detail when I’m more awake if anyone is interested, but here are a few points, off the top of my head, that I find most worth making:

    * The author compares whites and blacks in an area where white culture is primarily working-poor, and black culture is primarily on the public dole or in jail. Then he describes many features of welfare culture and incorrectly attributes it to race. I’ve been around both white-dominated and black-dominated welfare culture. They have many of the same features. Working-poor white and black cultures also have many features in common. (I’m not saying there are no racial differences, merely that he incorrectly attributed several class differences to race.)

    * The author attributes his and his colleagues’ inability to control their classrooms to the students, without bothering to figure out whether anyone else has been able to do better in similar situations. Both my mother and I have been very successful in controlling classrooms full of kids and/or adolescents from the described culture. It’s not easy, but it’s consistently do-able when one has the relevant skills and constitution. The book Crazy Like a Fox by Ben Chavis describes a principle’s experience turning around such a school with methods that, while somewhat different from mine, have been reproduced many times since. Lesson: just because you are bad at something, that doesn’t mean the thing can’t be done or is hard.

    * The author has also misattributed several conservative/liberal differences to race. I know plenty of rich, white, liberals from the Chicago area who are oblivious to the notions that government money isn’t limitless, that more government services won’t fix anything, etc.

    * The author seems to think that he can motivate and educate people without understanding the culture they come from, by simply requesting that they adapt to his. Many of the behavior he mocks are adaptive in the environment these kids are from. That doesn’t make them *good*, but it does mean that one can’t request them away. If a behavior has saved my life in the past, you’d better believe that a request by a (weak according to my culture) teacher won’t make a damn bit of difference in it. One of the many problems with predominantly black schools (and many of their predominantly white counterparts in similarly rough areas) is that people who become teachers don’t generally come from there, and it’s not a particularly desirable post, so you have a teaching staff made up almost entirely of higher-SEC newbies who are trying to learn how to teach while dealing with a foreign culture. It’s no surprise they generally get eaten alive by teenagers who in any class or culture are rebellious pains in the ass at least.

    I’m not saying that the cultural problems the post describes don’t exist, or that none of them are related to race. However, the overall feel I got from the piece was “I tried to walk into a culture I don’t understand and act like an authority figure, didn’t establish discipline in my classroom (and possibly didn’t have an administration that backed teachers up on real discipline), at which time a bunch of rowdy teenagers chewed me up and spit me out. I don’t know why this happened, but the teenagers babbled a lot about race, and were a different race than I am, so that must be the problem!”.

    Just for the record, I’m the white mother of a white elementary school kid who currently (by choice) attends a predominantly-black charter school.

  16. We should reclaim the word “racist”.

    To me it means:

    1) There are very significant differences in IQ, impulsivity, ability to run a stable country, libido, sadistic tendencies, etc between racial groups. I mean, the fact alone that sub-Saharans do not have Neanderthal genes at all should make one think, and let’s not even get started on ice age group evolutionary strategies and r vs k selection…
    2) Having a sense of greater loyalty and liking of those in one’s own ethnic group, or race if you will, is natural and not something to be vilified as it currently is (though only for whites). Are people who want to preserve their own family somehow evil familyists?

    From your post history, you clearly agree with 1. Your predilection for eg history, Viking swordfights, druid religions, and LARPing tells me you have some measure of 2 as well, but that you have internalized the Left’s shaming of that sentiment. Your libertarian/rational worldview also puts a clamp on that sort of thing, I would assume.

    At its core, Leftism is essentially a religion, and one that employs heavy FUD to make dissenters self-shame and self-doubt. The fact that the libertarianism/rationality/geek/scifi memecluster seems to support some of the same ethnos-denying tenets (although in a more masculine, logical, Star Trek kind of way) probably serves to make you question anti-racism less than you ought to.

  17. Of course, all the rational arguments against racism are still sound; I’ve written about them pretty extensively on this blog. The mass is not the individual, etcetera, etcetera. Nothing about the ugly, barbaric rampaging of these high-schoolers predicts the behavior of the blacks of the same age or older I know from martial-arts schools, SF conventions, and other places where the lives of black individuals intersect with mine.

    That is an abstract, logical, Star Trek kind of argument. Nothing wrong with that, but you’re deluding yourself if you think the Left shares this line of reasoning on anything other than the superficial platitude level. If you scrape a tiny bit below that, it’s all mythos and FUD.

  18. But if this is really where they came from – if this is what they’re right-end-of-the-bell-curve exceptions to, and that reality becomes widely known or believed – rational argument won’t be enough. How can we keep the bigots from winning?

    Why is it so important to buy into the frame that the bigots are winning? Is it really worth erecting a massive Cathedral* of shame, doublethink and submission just to counter some noxious bigots? Or are there deeper agendas at work?

    * I assume you’re familiar with Mencius Moldbug and his writings on “the Cathedral”.

  19. Of course, in today’s hypersensitive culture every damn thing is termed “Racism” so that the whole term has been diluted beyond words.

    Racism was invented in the 30s by people with an agenda (Boaz, Frankfurt School). Racism just means “anti-white”.

    From my limited exposure to American media, I think this exists a lot in your country. Sadly political correctness is a fast spreading disease, hard to nail down and harder to combat rationally.

    That’s because the Left is a religion and PC is its catechism. It spreads fast because it is soteriological in nature. That’s why “conservative” politicians only manage to delay the Left on practical grounds, and always end up feature-creeping ever leftward: who can really argue with someone who is bringing Heaven on Earth? Look up Eric Voegelin.

  20. I sincerely do not understand how any of this can come as a surprise to any well-informed American. It does not seem to me that different to what the sub-genre of white-teacher-black-school films routinely show – without the happy ending, of course, but who is so bland here as to believe in hollywood happy endings? It also squares with what my friends with children that lived for a while in the US tell me about public schools there (not necessarily black).

    To me, what is surprising is how this teacher could be completely unaware of the conditions he was going to find himself in: how could he never have heard of whole classes completely uninterested in education, black communities living on social services etc.? I’m not American, have never been to the US, have no connection with American blacks, but I seem to have more specific information than he had. As a linguist, I was particularly shocked by his surprise that “blacks’ grammar is wrong”. Apparently, 60 plus years of research and debates over AAVE have escaped him completely. How separate are races in your country???

    As for the rest of the piece, I find it rather irrelevant, as the author fails to understand that his experience is part of a larger problem: a community’s complete absence of interest in school and education can exist, and have the same negative long-term effects even if the condition at school are not so bad as those described in the piece.

    As an italian, it would easy for me to find parallels to the piece’s observations in the south, say around Naples (our own Detroit), but the point is that you do not need drug-dealers inside the classroom and serially pregnant teenagers to find communities that have given up on education altogether. Go to the lower middle class areas of Rome and Milan and you will find them there too. For the first time in centuries, whole parts of society have renounced eduction as a path to a better life, and this is happening quickly and globally (certainly in Europe and South-America): it ain’t just rap music and crack.

    It cannot see it more clearly than in the South-America I hail from (the rio de la plata region): the difference between my parents’ generation’s efforts to provide an education to their children, and today’s families complete lack of interest in anything connected to school is huge, and indifferent to any kind of solution. It is petty and narrow-minded to blame “libruls” for this, everything has been tried and nothing seems to work.

    The author seems to grasp some aspect of this issue when he says that “for centuries” we had an education system that worked. True — and any experienced teacher can tell you how this was completely unconnected to reality already in the early 60’s. Think about the whole self-esteem trend in “good” schools, the actual “difficulty” in passing tests and exams in “good” private schools — isn’it the reverse side of what this piece talks about?

  21. For the record, I hail from Sweden. Probably the most PC country there is.

    A difference between my country and the US is that we’ve “only” been exposed to a multi-ethnic society for 20-30 years here. Our multi-ethnic situation is almost purely a political imposition from above* whereas that of the US is a combination of native population displacement (of amerinds by wasps), 19th century immigration (jews, non-wasp euros, chinese), political agenda (post-1965 immigration, hispanics) and artefact of previous economic system (slavery, blacks).

    Still, dem frogs be boilin’ just as good in Ikea-land…

    * http://www.destroyzionism.com/2013/01/13/how-and-why-sweden-became-multicultural/ (seems a bit of a kooky site in general but the facts on Sweden’s rapid conversion to multiculti seem true).

  22. Eric, your reaction is similar to mien when I first saw this crunk rap video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JOwyHghsag I saw it as propagating the worst stereotypes of black men. Then I saw a live version, and sure enough, it was done by black men.

    I dont buy the argument that anyone’s inherently inferior because of their race, or where they came from, or anything like that. It’s all about what you do with the hand you’re dealt. I used to work for a very smart guy, knew more about the software I was working with than anyone I’ve met before or since, well spoken, quite successful (flies a very nice Beech A36 Bonanza, among other things), wife, several kids. And yes, he was indeed black. I neither know nor care what his background was. He made something of himself, and that’s all we can ask of anyone.

    Once upon a time, people put signs saying “Irish need not apply” in their shop windows right next to the “Help wanted” signs. They can’t do that now, and it’s a good thing – but if they want to hire based on competence and customer service, and people skills and work ethic, and the majority of black people they interview don’t have those, then it makes it hard to hire in a way that can’t be painted by a race-baiter as non-racist.

    I don’t know what the answer is except to take all the leftists out back and shoot them as enemies of the state. Even I find that just a little extreme.

  23. > The black boys in the troop not only never made the rank of tenderfoot – not a single one > of them – but they did not even make the rank of “Scout”,

    yeah, cannot think of any reason why a black boy would not be enthusiastic to join the Boys Scouts of America …

    seriously, what makes you think that your American institutions, public and private, are indeed universally appealing – or universally accepting, for that matter? Here in Italy noone joins the scouts, who is not Catholic and right-wing.

  24. The Scouts are a right-leaning institution, true. Even so, that the boys were there in the first place implies some minimal level of interest, and the truly minimal knowledge required to earn the most basic membership level – and the reaction to being required to gain that knowledge – speak volumes about the culture of entitlement they are being raised in.

  25. Easy answer. Mandatory sterilization of welfare recipients (go ahead and make it temporary during the time a person is receiving welfare; it’ll only alter the effect by a few percent). The problem of “feral humans” will be wiped out in a single generation.

    Racist? Of course not. The rule would apply equally to all races.

    The “subculture” described in this article may have self-selected, but the magnitude of its size is squarely the fault of liberals who continue to propagate it because members of this subculture continue to vote for marxists (Democrats) reliably.

  26. ESR, have you read the works of John Taylor Gatto? He has a lack economic understanding which leads him to misattribute some things, however none of the stuff described in the linked article are surprising after reading his books.

    — Foo Quuxman

  27. Since the Scouts have come up, let me add my own little story. The troop I belonged to was sponsored by the All Souls Universalist Church in Brooklyn, New York. Its pastor (a wonderful man) was very proud that it was an ‘open troop’ – members came from inside and outside the church – no regard for race, religion, color, etc. This was during the late 1950s.

    Black boys would join. They had no trouble with the tests. The thing was, though, we could not have more than two black boys in our troop. As soon as a third one joined, their church would start its own troop, and we would see them no more.

  28. > And that is much of the problem: I’ve read that if you correct for single parenthood, black crime rates fall to roughly of that of whites.

    What I have read is that if you correct for IQ and single parenthood, black crime falls to roughly the level of whites.

    But single parent hood is both cause and effect. Getting married and staying married both causes responsible behavior in parents and children, and is an indicator of genetic propensity to responsible behavior. So all you are saying is that intelligent well behaved blacks show behavior similar to intelligent well behaved whites.

    Black crime levels just naturally tend to be higher than white levels, and black family formation lower. Black societies that have successfully imposed and maintained order and patriarchy, for example the Ashantee empire, used dramatically more severe levels of coercion than comparable white societies.

    Jamaica, which is markedly better governed than most black majority places, has levels of enforcement that are comparable to white societies. The result is levels of crime that are much higher than in white societies. It is pretty obvious that they need to introduce floggings, amputations, and executions, Ashantee style. Despite, or perhaps because of, the level of good government in Jamaica, government strikingly similar to that which white societies commonly provide, and black societies seldom provide, the Jamaican crime rate is close to being the highest in the world.

  29. This actually raises an interesting problem for libertarians. (Warning: long and rambly.)
    Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there do exist ghettos of which the essay is, modulo minor exaggeration, an accurate description.
    The datum we really need is – what are the outcomes of children born in this kind of ghetto but quickly adopted (either by whites or by non-ghettoised blacks, it doesn’t matter which except that one experiment would be deemed more “racist” than the other by the Left) and brought up in a civilised environment?
    Are these children genetically similar to the blacks who have integrated into society, in the US and elsewhere? Or do these ghettos comprise a separate sub-race? (The bigots – should they admit the existence of integrated blacks – would doubtless argue the latter.)
    And if – as I’m sure we all hope – there really is no genetic difference between the ghettos and the civilised blacks, how do we go about turning the former into the latter? The statist’s solution would be to take children away from parents who are not fit to raise them; and anarchist that I am I find it hard to argue with them in this case. And since a baby can’t really sue his parents for unfitness, what’s the libertarian/anarchist solution to this (admittedly hypothetical, but perhaps not so) situation?
    Of course, this problem does show up in other environments too; but it is only in the black ghettos (as described in the OP) that the situation is so concentrated and extreme.

    (One possible answer: the abolition of welfare would help. The coming entitlements crash may do American blacks a world of good. But while that may solve this particular scenario, the question of unfit parents in general remains.)

    In The Machinery of Freedom, David D. Friedman argues that “Any child… who is willing to arrange for his own support should be free from the authority of his parents.” I agree, but when the parental environment essentially prevents the child from developing the kind of self-reliance and self-respect that would enable the child even to think such a thing, clearly it does not suffice. In the scenarios we’re considering, the child is prevented from aspiring to the dignity of free men, and is thus unlikely to choose to become one.
    (Other abnegating environments, such as some forms of religion, could have a similar effect.)

  30. When a program crashes, you find the bug and fix it. Intent is irrelevant. Sometimes there is corrupt data, but you can’t pretend it isn’t corrupt if the results are bad. You have to deal with reality. And sometimes you can get to the root cause of a bug by asking the right question that reveals the contradiction.

    Right now the choices are genetic or memetic. I find the genetic explanation laughable – look at the French Revolution and the reign of terror. Or rednecks and hillbillies – there is a dark reality behind Foxworthy’s humor. But then what is the destructive meme? Hence the revelation question:

    What do the Fathers of these feral students think about their offspring?

    I live just north of Detroit where 80% of the children are born out of wedlock. Single-parenthood, including multiple children is subsidized if not celebrated. Even marriages when dissolved result in the ejection of the father, so the 80% is just the start. The penguicon cosplay regarding sexual license is the illusion – the reality is only a few miles away that even geeks with guns would likely not willingly go after dark. Yet where I live, the families are mostly intact and the children not much different than when I was growing up, in a 70% black suburb.

    The most cherished meme is that a single mother (remember Murphy Brown and Dan Quayle two decades ago!?) is as good as the traditional breadwinner-homemaker family for raising children. It is a damned lie – and generations have been damned by it. There aren’t a bunch of unreality tv show writers to make sure everyone lives happily ever after. They do live comfortably enough though.

    The complimentary question, “What would your Father say to you about this?”. Those children who are capable of an answer are rarely feral. Even as adults they tend to think about how they might answer.

    I’m libertarian, but also Christian, so the only commandments the state has any business with is Thou shall not kill/steal/bear false witness (violence, theft, fraud), and generally only after the fact. That does not mean I cannot call abominable things an abomination. And is not that feral classroom such? I will not impose my morality, yet am I a bigot for pointing out the direct traceable consequences of immorality? That I advocate for rational reasons doing the morally right thing? Mother nature herself is then the first bigot since that is her reality. STDs exist – and they existed before the Exodus and 10 commandments and will exist to the end of time. In the 1950s cigarettes were advertised as being healthy. The lungs of millions knew different. Sex is safe, healthy, and emotionally uplifting even a one night stand? Children raise themselves so don’t really need parents, especially not male role models? Divorce doesn’t hurt and the adults need it for their emotional well being? Really?

    Bedroom antics now demand government not stay out of my wallet, so forget any liberty or libertarian argument about this. I as a taxpayer am forced to subsidize fornication and adultery, and to an extent where the subsidies are deeper than for the traditional family. The boys in the article are not going to be able to pay any child-support. That is an illusion (jailing for non-support itself is expensive and doesn’t create any wealth with which to pay). So the boys know they aren’t going to be more than inconvenienced for being a successful sperm donor, and the girls know they will get thousands per month in transfer payments and get taken care of. Like the last two generations.

    Fathers have been denigrated and disrespected for years. But rewind to living memory when even the first hint of such behaviors in the article would have resulted in some kind of discipline. Can single mothers sometimes rise to the occasion? That is irrelevant as asking “if the data is perfect, will the program work?”. What do the actual single (divorce or never married) poor mothers – especially with multiple offspring actually do? Are they going to insure their children are going to be looking for a life-long mate who will be around from birth to college graduation, or better yet, “till death do us part”? How? Children learn far more from actions, not words. Do as I say, not as I do? The children are exactly like their mothers and fathers. Yes both. Single and absentee respectively. What do you expect?

    There is another point that one single mother amid dozens of “traditional” families has an easier time having her children conform, and especially if widowed or wronged. If she is the lone advocate of traditional structures amid an entire neighborhood of single mothers, the children won’t even have an example of what she is talking about. Disciplining children requires first the parent demonstrate self control and/or the other virtues they want to convey to and instill in the child.

    Before the civil rights movement, most black families were the Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, Little House, Waltons form. They could credibly say that the content of their character was no different. Because they were the underclass, misbehavior and deviancy were treated harsher from within – black was one strike, an out of wedlock birth would be a second and the family would be embarrassed – didn’t they raise their kid to know right from wrong? That was terrible – unjust. It had to go. So we got rid of the family, especially the father.

    If every student in the article had as an infant been given to foster care or adoption with a two-parent household (I’ll avoid the gay controversy except to say there is usually a masculine and a feminine partner, and the complimentary roles are likely very important), would they have ended up like they did?

    And perhaps the bigots have won. If in the late 1960’s the KKK planned to do exactly what happened to the black community, and it was revealed, it would have been condemned as genocide. Yet these policies were advocated by real people and have produced these results. Anyone calling the people who caused this living hell for blacks “bigots”?

    Not that I expect even if I convince anyone that the surest form of genocide is to destroy the family, especially the father, that they will raise a voice, a single objection. Traditional Fatherhood will continue to be embarrassing. There will not be a call to even reduce the subsidy for single parent feral families, much less eliminate it. Nor a single word of condemnation for either women or men who propagate the destruction. We’ve accepted Game and hypergamy – that is the new “morality”. Talking otherwise would all be too unpopular.

    And the last is the greatest tragedy. It is pride. The worst of the cardinal sins. It is worse because it will prevent anything from changing so that 20 years from now the schools will be worse, cities in ruins – Detroit is merely the first fruits. If we refuse to confront unpopular or uncomfortable realities, they will not change, but we can keep our self esteem intact as we go to hell – or hell comes to us.

    And if it isn’t race, but the culture of the family, it isn’t someone else’s problem. If you are Caucasian or Asian, your children too will end up just like those in the article after a few generations. You can see it already starting.

  31. “White people didn’t impose the depraved, thuggish underculture it describes on black people”

    No, but white people imposed the “slave” and then “second-class citizen” mindset to blacks when they brought them from Africa to America (and when they colonized Africa). This mindset is passed from father to child and will not change (anytime soon), no matter what the politically correct twats say. Remember, blacks didn’t get full voting rights till frickin’ 1965. Till 1965, blacks were by law required to be second-class citizens and have the second-class citizen mindset.

    It’s the same reason countries that gained independence from the Ottoman empire are all third-world shitholes. There is a mentality that goes like “the state is the biggest oppressor, so steal from the state if you can”. And it’s the same reason the leaders of those countries view their election as “be a Sultan for 4 years card”.
    It’s a mindset passed from father to child.

  32. PS: Forgot to mention I ‘m from Greece. So please no “you are a racist American” comments.

  33. American Renaissance’s “About Us” page is particularly informative on the tone of this piece.

    Race is an important aspect of individual and group identity. Of all the fault lines that divide society—language, religion, class, ideology—it is the most prominent and divisive. Race and racial conflict are at the heart of some of the most serious challenges the Western World faces in the 21st century.

    The problems of race cannot be solved without adequate understanding. Attempts to gloss over the significance of race or even to deny its reality only make problems worse. Progress requires the study of all aspects of race, whether historical, cultural, or biological. This approach is known as race realism.?

    It’s couched in the genteel words of the salon and academia, but, uh, no. That may be the most sugar-coated bigotry I’ve seen outside of 1860s to 1880s source material…but it’s still bigotry.

    1. >It’s couched in the genteel words of the salon and academia, but, uh, no. That may be the most sugar-coated bigotry I’ve seen outside of 1860s to 1880s source material…but it’s still bigotry.

      Beware the genetic fallacy, Ken. The correct question about this account is not whether it comes from an arguably bigoted source but to what extent it is true.

      I’m saying “arguably” because I’ve run across “racial realists” before and I think at least some of them are honest – that is, they’re not simply peddling race prejudice by stealth, they’re trying to confront reality more squarely than either the PC “anti-racists” or the bigots are willing to do.

      But let’s not get dragged into any discussion of “racial realism”. We should instead be asking to what extent this account is confirmed or disconfirmed by other observations.

  34. I can comment in more detail when I’m more awake if anyone is interested.

    I for one am highly interested and hope you do, especially if you talk about the methods you and your mother used.

  35. Eric, I’ve a customer who’s a Black conservative who teaches science in a predominantly Black high school in Nashville. I ran this by him before commenting.

    His read on it is that it’s taking a few elements of truth and grossly exaggerating the behaviors for polemic effect. The fact that the teacher never identifies the school district she worked in, let alone the school, is a tell that this is probably a hybridization of several “can you believe this?!” events.

    He’s also the one who pointed me at their About Us page.

    As to whether or not AmRen is a racist pulpit having an influence: if you can discount global warming pieces based on who published them, you really can’t argue when people discount this based on who published it.

    I’ve invited Charles to post here with his observations so I’m not inadvertently putting words in his mouth or misquoting him. Fair warning – he’s one of the handful of people who can call Jay Maynard a RINO and make it stick. :)

    1. >if you can discount global warming pieces based on who published them

      Huh? I’ve never found it necessary to do that.

      The proper attitude towards an ideologically biased source is not blanket rejection, it’s heightened skepticism and attentiveness to language intended to shut off thought and shut down debate.

  36. I come from a whole family of teachers. Mother, Father, Aunts, Uncles, etc, all teachers – many of their friends who have been close to the family also teachers. I have seen many of these relatives and their friends traumatized by a particularly bad semester where they really lost the respect and control of a class and have seen the students described, in various language, as a non-human pack of animals. To the greater extent these have not been urban minority classrooms, but classrooms of mostly white suburban kids.

  37. I went to some schools like that, and this article is unfortunately quite accurate.

    Blacks themselves (especially pundits like Al Sharpton) are certainly part of the problem, but the main reason it is so widespread is subsidies. The girl with the horrendous “career choice” has her facts right: if she gets pregnant, AFDC/TANF will stake her to her own apartment at the age of 16, effectively rewarding her for spawning more people who will be doomed to ignorance and poverty by giving her the benefits of being an adult without most of the responsibilities. 30% of US births are now out of wedlock, most of them as a result of this program.

    Now the left will tell you that after a century of discrimination, we owe the blacks a debt. Hogwash! Maybe some of those whites who were adults before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended discrimination against blacks still owe them something, but those people are all over 60 now. It’s high time the system became completely color-blind and stopped forcing the rest of us to put up with ignorance, hostility, and barbarity. Every race and class should be “protected” or none should be. And no one should be allowed to have kids he can’t raise out of his own pocket.

  38. Race formation is a well understood biological imperative designed to propagate fitness of local populations. If we can skip over the politically correct bull, a couple of billion years of evolution has enforced this tendency toward race and new species formation.

    Humans are no different from any other species. As to how applicable the linked article’s set of facts is to this conversation, feel free to draw your own conclusions. For myself, however, the larger view of human society just confirms the biological viewpoint.

  39. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago — these people were not me, or my immediate neighbors, but they were ten to twenty blocks away. I knew I was lucky to go to a private school and not the public school next door with metal detectors. It’s strange to me to see this guy relating as if it were news what is a common and long-standing tragedy.

    And it’s weird to see him describing this or that as a “black” problem. Those kids — at least some of them — have an aunt or grandma who has a normal job as a nurse or doorman or office worker, and who is worried sick about them (and pretty pissed off) but can’t do anything herself. I didn’t know the kids in that essay, but I knew some of the grandmas, and I taught math to some of their teachers (and most public school teachers in majority-black cities are black.) This guy is not the first person to worry about dysfunctional black underclass culture!

    But the thing that bothers me the most — and this is important — is the fact that you see this and think “welp, anti-black racism must be right then.”

    No cabal of white people conspired to do this to black people. But neither did any cabal of black people. Horrors can exist without being perpetrated deliberately by villains. They happen when large numbers of people are incompetent or short-sighted or don’t care enough to get their act together.

    Why do people die of cancer at the same rate they did in the 1970’s? Because there’s a conspiracy to preserve cancer? No, the reason is much scarier. Nobody is thinking hard; institutions (scientific, governmental, cultural) are set up in ways that make failure very likely. Mere apathy and incompetence can create a death toll bigger than the Holocaust.

    This is one of the things Ayn Rand got right. A malevolent, intentional villain might at least — perhaps — be bargained with, or reasoned with, or fought. But *lousiness*? Stupidity, incompetence, ass-covering, lack of caring, spread across a whole population because most humans just aren’t heroic? That’s even more dangerous.

  40. tz wrote “If every student in the article had as an infant been given to foster care or adoption with a two-parent household (I’ll avoid the gay controversy except to say there is usually a masculine and a feminine partner, and the complimentary roles are likely very important), would they have ended up like they did?”

    They might have ended up a lot like they did, actually. (With some sharp exceptions, like whether they’d still speak the same language if they grew up on the other side of a political border.) Obviously they wouldn’t have the same scars in the same places, but many outcomes can have a surprisingly high correlation.

    You seem to be making as a rhetorical question intending it to be answered by drawing conclusions that support a prestigious political agenda. In fact, though, it is an empirical question. It has been empirically studied, with the conceptually cleanest studies being those of identical twins separated at birth. For book-length pop-science treatments of how much a human’s future traits tend to be caused by what’s present at birth, with pointers to how it’s been empirically studied, see e.g. _The Blank Slate_ and _The Nurture Assumption_.

    Now, for a politically charged issue like this it’s especially important to seek out the best arguments from other sides, and my books above are both full-throated “the data show nature is important” advocacy. I’d like to give a good pointer to widely accepted arguments that data don’t show nature is very important. The old reigning champion was _The Mismeasure of Man_. Alas, (1) it is old enough that it can get away without addressing newer results and (2) it lost some of its lustre after Gould was posthumously caught faking data. And double alas, _Mismeasure_ may still be the reigning champion: I have seen advocates in the last two years citing it as an authority, and I haven’t seen anything else. So I honestly don’t know a newer replacement which is even as prominent as _Blank Slate_ or _Nurture Assumption_, much less as prominent as _Mismeasure of Man_ used to be. For what it’s worth, you might look at _From Parents to Children: Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage_, but I was very unimpressed (when I saw it at the return desk of the library and poked around in it for 10 minutes). It seemed less like an honest investigation than like http://lesswrong.com/lw/i4/belief_in_belief/ and a lot of cynical academic busywork grantsmanship gathering data that are only meaningful given the unstated axiom that children’s biological inheritance from their parents is utterly negligible. It’s at least a recent book, though, and maybe you could try to find something more rigorous by chasing its citations.

  41. The linked article was easily the most racist, ignorant thing I’ve read in years, whether or not the author’s anecdotes are ‘fabricated’. Pretending that this falls in the category of ‘racial realism’ or other soft forms of racism is something you can only do because you’ve built yourself a bizarre, hyper-conservative, racist echo-chamber in this blog.

    >Rap is one of the most degenerate things to have come out of our country, and it is tragic that it has infected whites to the extent it has.

    >Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens.

    > immediately other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming

    The factual basis of the anecdotes is hardly the point. The value judgments are what make this racist: “infected”, “welfare queens”, people reduced to “screaming mouths”. It’s pretty fucking weird, to be honest with you, that you don’t process this stuff as being hate speech..

    And then we get this, which is even weirder:

    > what emotionally compelling argument do we have against anti-black racism that reading this doesn’t blow to smithereens?

    Your stance against racism is so weak that reading a hateful racist screed blows it to smithereens? Holy shit. You’ve got so much cognitive dissonance going that you don’t realize your columns on this subject, and the comments that follow them, show more deeply held racist attitudes than anything you could read on redstate or even stormfront. But oh, I guess you had a black girlfriend once, so it’s logically impossible that you’re a racist, right? My grandparents used to play that trick too – they’d talk about how their good friend Joe was one of the ‘good niggers’. Ugh.

    1. >Your stance against racism is so weak that reading a hateful racist screed blows it to smithereens?

      That’s an exceptionally stupid misreading. I don’t make my judgments based on emotionally compelling arguments. I apply rational judgment. The report, however you choose to describe it, barely moves my needle; the worst it tells me is how concentratedly bad some social pathologies I already know about can get in places where nothing else but the pathology is going on.

      I don’t think of those pathologies as “black”; I think of them as problems of the stupid, which are going to recur any time the behavior of stupid people is not effectively regulated so that they must emulate the behavior of brighter people. The fact that American blacks have a lower average IQ than American whites, Asians, or Hispanics is relevant to prediction of mass behaviors in the same way any other statistical correlation would be, but does not make blackness a cause of these problems.

      Racist explanations are defective because they mistake visible accidents (skin color or whatever) for what is actually important; low intelligence, high time preference, limited ability to self-regulate. What the report is describing is what happens when a population that has the misfortune to be handicapped on at least one of those measures has their problems worsened by welfare dependency, then gets told that they can deflect all attempts to regulate them by flinging the r-word at critics and authority figures.

  42. I have a number of reactions to the piece you’ve written about, Eric, but the strongest one is surprise. I’m surprised you have taken the writer’s essay at face value.

    I don’t think Mr. Jackson is lying. But just judging from what he has said, and the way he has said it, and what I have seen of poor urban blacks, especially young blacks, and other poor adolescents, I think that Mr. Jackson came to the teaching position he writes about very young, and entirely unequipped to deal with–let alone teach–young people who come from a culture entirely different from his own. Why should urban blacks be interested in what Nietzche had to say? They are unlikely to have gotten the background to appreciate where Nietzche was coming from.

    Moreover, when you strip out Mr. Jackson’s claims that his statements apply to all of the blacks he taught, what you are left with are averments of fact that should be familiar to adults who have read anything about education in urban areas over the past 30 years. The ideas include:

    * That black kids despise education as being “white” and thus inappropriate for them;
    * That black kids in groups are very loud and disorderly. (White kids are too, though perhaps not as much so; if you doubt this, volunteer to be an adult monitor for a teenage class trip);
    * That black kids speak poor ungrammatical English. (Folks, what do you suppose “Ebonics” is?)
    * That black kids believe that they should just live off the white man’s charity. (Too true, and too natural in familes where the kids in school are the third generation of a family to live on welfare; I’ve seen a number of such families in representing neglected kids in Philadelphia).
    * That black kids turn to violence, more so against each other than against whites. (True of adults as well; crime stats show that most violence is against people the perpetrator knows and people of the same race). Given the roadblocks most schools place on disciplining children, that’s no surprise either.
    * That black kids like rap and that this is deplorable. Yeah, black kids like rap–it tends to reify the myth that you can live well off the white guy. Is it deplorable? Maybe, because it tends to perpetuate anti-woman and anti-education values, but that’s not why Mr. Jackson despises it; he despises it because he thinks of it as simply another example of ignorant, ungrammatical language. That’s a bit unfair. Rap can be witty, something Mr. Jackson, with his limited knowledge of the slang spoken by his students, has no basis himself to appreciate.

    All of that being said, I suspect even Mr. Jackson’s students are not as ignorant of English, or even as contemptuous of “white” education, as he believes. I suspect they are exaggerating all of the traits he describes in his essay because they know such behavior appalls him and they are getting off on his reactions.

    Do I think the state of urban blacks is terrible? Yes, and it has been for a long time. But it’s not universal. I’ve listened to an educated black woman deplore her grandchildren’s ignorance of the importance of education and the value of working for a living. I’ve seen black children who are eager to read and who are being read to by a black mother, or grandmother (sadly, black men often do not figure in urban black families). But these are problems exacerbated by poverty and the ways governments have chosen to try to address it. They don’t in and of themselves mean that black are ineducable. If that was the case, Philadelphia wouldn’t have a growing black middle class.

  43. Sound and Fury on 2013-07-07 at 10:51:33 said:
    > This actually raises an interesting problem for libertarians. (Warning: long and rambly.)
    Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there do exist ghettos of which the essay is, modulo minor exaggeration, an accurate description.
    The datum we really need is – what are the outcomes of children born in this kind of ghetto but quickly adopted (either by whites or by non-ghettoised blacks, it doesn’t matter which except that one experiment would be deemed more “racist” than the other by the Left) and brought up in a civilised environment?

    Been done, minor improvement to no improvement: The difference is clearly genetic.

    The Ashantee/Saudi solution, floggings, amputations, castrations, and executions works wonderfully. Not only did they get good behavior, but in the Ashantee empire, they got the stupid blacks to pay attention to the smart blacks, raising the effective intelligence of the black society as a whole.

    History tells us that blacks and black society need higher levels of coercion and punishment than whites and white society. The average black needs less freedom, more enforcement, and considerably harsher punishment than the average white. The aftermath of the civil war demonstrated that most blacks cannot handle freedom, though arguably the horrible disaster that followed the end of slavery was predominantly cultural. Never having experienced freedom, those blacks were considerably less capable of handling it than today’s blacks. East Germans handled freedom very badly, despite being genetically identical to West Germans. On the other hand, the newly freed slaves, lacking a welfare state to look after those unwilling or unable to look after themselves, handled it a great deal worse than East Germans.

  44. David on 2013-07-07 at 16:14:07 said:
    > Your stance against racism is so weak that reading a hateful racist screed blows it to smithereens? Holy shit.

    Suppose (and I stress that, at this stage, this is only a hypothetical) that the factual statements in the linked article were not only true, but made by someone who, as the article in fact claims, started out in no way racist and reached their current position purely based on the experiences detailed there. Would that in any way change anything? Would it affect the strategy you used to combat racism? Would it alter your assessment of the risk of racist bigotry becoming standard public opinion?

    Or would you declare that anyone who answered “Yes” to any of those questions was themselves racist?

  45. I wrote:
    > The Ashantee/Saudi solution, floggings, amputations, castrations, and executions works wonderfully. Not only did they get good behavior, but in the Ashantee empire, they got the stupid blacks to pay attention to the smart blacks, raising the effective intelligence of the black society as a whole.

    I base this on Garnet’s account. He depicted Ashantee blacks as brave, manly, dignified and competent, and their neighbors under British rule as vicious, subhuman, cowardly, depraved, and incompetent.

    He was quite horrified by the disciplinary measures employed by the Ashantee empire, and it does not seem to have occurred to him that there might be a connection.

  46. As a kid who grew up in bad neighborhoods, I completely agree with Catherine Raymond’s assesment.

  47. No, but white people imposed the “slave” and then “second-class citizen” mindset to blacks when they brought them from Africa to America (and when they colonized Africa).

    This is a common white-guilt line, but it doesn’t stand up to historical fact. Specifically, up until Johnson’s Great Society program (a massive federal welfare regime that started in the 1960s), black families actually had significantly better outcomes than comparable white families in such measures as crime rates, employment levels, and education, and stable two-parent families were the norm. When incentives were put into place that rewarded single motherhood, however, all of those measures promptly fell off a cliff, and the fact that the black community felt the impact most heavily is probably in large part a historical accident of who happened to be living in urban centers at the time; had it happened 50 years before, it might have been the Irish or Italians.

  48. Regarding various comments above: I saw nothing in the original essay stating or even implying that all blacks behave this way, so counter-examples (of which there are many) are beside the point. The point is that the attitudes and behaviors described apply to a large fraction of urban blacks, and the question is what can be done about it.

    @David: People like you make discussions of this subject difficult or impossible. You may think you are defending victims of racism by using the term “racism” so freely and fiercely, but you are actually helping to contribute to the very pathologies described.

    @countenance: The point was not that we can “control for single-parenthood in the real world.” The point was that many of the pathologies of the black underclass are not uniquely racial.

    esr: I applaud your ability to separate the message from the messenger, which is all too rare. I’ll go further: One should actively seek out dissenting voices, even the biased and disreputable, about any controversial subject, because that is often where one will find the most trenchant criticisms of the opposing side and information that is not spoken of in “polite company” or by those in the current establishment(s). Not that all the information will be fair or accurate, of course, but if I want information about Pentagon waste and police abuses, I’ll go to The Nation and Mother Jones before National Review and The American Spectator. If I want information about welfare waste and union abuses, I’ll do the opposite.

    @Garrett: I’m too much of a compromiser to go that far, but it reminds me of something important about the history of charity. In the old days of America (up to about a century ago), there was a clear and common distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. A widow, or abandoned wife with child, or possibly a young girl who got pregnant was considered worthy of charity, while a woman who just had children on her own (probably not common) would not have been. A man who could not work because of injury was deserving, but a drunk was not. And deserving or not, the recipients of charity were expected to pitch in as well as they could: people often chopped wood in exchange for a “free” meal.

    The early Progressives wanted to abolish this distinction, and have almost entirely succeeded. (It survives in a few places like unemployment insurance, where you have to show you have been looking for work.) They wanted to minimize or even remove individual responsibility, and instead blame social forces and society in general. The distinction has come back somewhat, with various welfare reforms, attempts to make drug tests a requirement for welfare, etc., but these are always fought by the left, and often by libertarians as well.

  49. The reactions to the essay (here and elsewhere) are more interesting than the essay itself.

    As HedgeMadge notes, the conclusions reached by the avowedly conservative author who wrote the essay are not supported by the observations he made.

    In particular, while there are no doubt very serious social problems behind the behaviours observed by the author, nothing in what he writes is evidence for the proposition that those behaviours are determined by race.

    (There are several clues in the author’s essay that his conclusions have been in no small part influenced by anti-leftism. Among these is his insistence on referring to people with a token. Hence black students are simply “blacks”).

    Eric’s own reflexive anti-leftism tends to manifest in a sort of enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend blindness to the sloppy logic that tends to be on display when cranky old conservatives like this spout off about race.

  50. If this essay is “evidence” of anything, then surely that is of the woeful state of public education in the USA. This Mr. “Jackson” was completely unprepared to meet his charges’ needs, was completely unwilling to change his methods or outlook to meet them halfway, and was completely unavoidable for the unfortunates who were sorted into his classes. It’s morbidly hilarious to read his faux-sociological accounts and see his students alternately pandering to and undercutting his Kiplingesque self-image. If they’re so stupid, how do they pull his strings, so obviously we can see it through the filter of this self-righteous testimonial? Elementary and secondary education must be the only field of endeavor in which a professional’s abject failure can be blamed on the race of her customers. At the very end, however, we get some actual good advice: “home school your children.”

    If the public in general really cared to help blacks with their problems, we would end the drug prohibition and the public school monopoly. Of course, we don’t.

  51. Not only that, but kurkosdr’s mention of 1965 reveals him as believing the Voting Rights Act cured all racism in administering elections. This can’t be further from the truth: How can a law that never affected places like Boston and Chicago fix problems there? Answer: It couldn’t and didn’t even try.

    Free clue: Racism was a problem in other places than the Southern US. By measures beloved of the left, it still is: Massachusetts has a worse record on voting rights than Mississippi.

  52. Jay: the Voting Rights Act affected Massachusetts. See this page.

    In general: I don’t know why you’d pay attention to a discussion of race from someone who thinks there weren’t any black people in 18th century England. When the facts you can check in an essay are wrong, you may want to be more skeptical of the facts you can’t check. Or not; your call.

  53. Bryant, no matter how you spin it, the Voting Rights Act affected Massachusetts far less than it did Mississippi, even after Mississippi’s problems became less than Massachusetts’s – and those parts that affected Massachusetts were not struck down by the Court, since they affected every jurisdiction.

    I’m not going to let one minor factual error do more than cause me to look at the other facts critically. When those other facts are right, throwing them away for that one error is intellectual dishonesty at its worst, and of the cruelest kind: it supports the bigotry of low expectations.

  54. Looking at that link: the state of Massachusetts was only included for a short time, and successfully got itself removed. Even so, it was still worse than Mississippi. The facts support my conclusion: that the Voting Rights Act was used not to ensure equality in voting, but instead to punish Southern states. The howling over the Supreme Court’s decision to do away with a test using data from 1972 as relevant in 2013 is nothing more than a desire to continue punishing Southern states for the acts of their grandfathers.

    Kinda like the rest of the race-baiters’ attempts to inflict white guilt on the rest of us.

  55. @Jay:
    > This can’t be further from the truth: How can a law that never affected places like Boston and
    > Chicago fix problems there? Answer: It couldn’t and didn’t even try.

    Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what you mean, but it sounds like you swallowed a mouthful of NPR propaganda. The Voting Rights Act applied everywhere across the US. Lawsuits have been filed everywhere based on it.

    What didn’t directly affect MA and most non-Southern states was the pre-clearence requirement. The pre-clearance requirement mandated that certain political states/cities/counties based upon a particular formula get approval from the Federal government prior to enacting any changes to their voting laws instead of having them challenged after enactment. This requirement was recently struck down by the SCOTUS as currently implemented for various technical reasons. This idea behind it was that some areas had racial discrimination so perverse that the people writing the election laws would simply come up with voting systems which violated the spirit but not the letter of the law to continue to disenfranchise people.

    Ultimately, the goal was the right to vote everywhere. It’s simply that an extra hurdle was enacted (prior to the introduction of disco) for certain areas.

  56. The requirement was struck down by the SCOTUS because it used data from 1972 to decide whether or not a state needed to be punished in 2013. That’s hardly a technical reason.

    In any case, if the location-independent parts of the law had an effect, then Massachusetts wouldn’t be worse than Mississippi.

    And I’m not the one howling that the decision gutted the law and returned the US to the bad old days pre-1965.

  57. Eric, you open this post with “I have read very little in the last few decades that is as shocking to me as this” but then you come down hard on David with “The report, however you choose to describe it, barely moves my needle”. Explain?

    1. >Eric, you open this post with “I have read very little in the last few decades that is as shocking to me as this” but then you come down hard on David with “The report, however you choose to describe it, barely moves my needle”. Explain?

      Peter Scott already did. I’ll amplify by contrasting three different ways in which it can be considered evidentiary:

      1. As evidence that, at least in some places, the peer culture of American blacks has degraded further than I knew. It is the reported extent of this that I find shocking.

      2. As rational evidence for a racist view of the matter – one which holds it to be due to innate differences that are caused by whatever genes or allelic frequency distributions one might think define the difference between blacks and whites. But I do not regard the report as being such evidence.

      3. As a fallacious but emotively convincing argument for the inferiority of blacks. I shouldn’t even have to say that I reject that, but some commenters on this thread seem dimwitted enough to require it.

      4. As rational evidence that the observed differences in IQ distributions between the white and black populations in the U.S. matters in an even more profound way than I thought it did (this is where it moves my needle). What’s dysfunctional about the peer culture as described isn’t that it’s black, is that it’s stupid. Viciously, self-destructively stupid.

      A racist may imagine that the stupidity somehow issues causally from the fact that these kids are black. This is because racists are idiots. Even when they allow themselves to notice that black people within the range of IQs our society is designed to accommodate do about as well as their IQ and SES peers, they don’t grasp what that means – that “race”, whatever they happen to think it is, is not the important variable that they want it to be.

  58. Any attempt by non-blacks to address negative behavior in the “black community” is labeled as “raaaaacist”, which causes well-meaning folks to avoid doing so. This inexorably produces more of the behavior in question.

    If there were no statistically-significant pre-existing genetic variations affecting behavior, a multi-generational program of refusing to confront negative behavior in one sub-population would produce effects very difficult to distinguish from those factors, and might well lead to breeding patterns that (by encouraging a greater reproductive rate in those who engage in the negative behavior) actually produce those statistically-significant genetic variations. These variations are then used by actual racists to justify discriminating against individuals who do not engage in those negative behaviors, simply because of the statistics.

    Thus, the reluctance to be perceived as “raaaaacist” leads to real racism.

  59. @ Peter Scott “There are good, rational arguments for why racism is a dumb idea”

    I am going to assume that this sentence poorly conveyed your point, rather than indicated your ignorance. Race formation is essentially UNIVERSAL process present in most every species’ populations regardless of any belief that it is a “stupid idea”.

    Perhaps you meant that selecting one arbitrary human trait like skin melanization to select a race is a poor choice, since human skin melanization forms an essentially continuous cline (a normal distribution) due to crossbreeding in what may have been formerly discontinuous populations or when a trait is the result of multiple convergent but separate mutation lineages. This is true of all human races and traits typically associated with them at this time.

  60. @ esr “one which holds it to be due to innate differences that are caused by whatever genes or allelic frequency distributions one might think define the difference between blacks and whites”

    There may have been some differences but nobody has done any actual population genetics studies to provide any proof of concept (racis !!) and it is quite apparent that crossbreeding over the past centuries has erased any possible race/population discontinuities that may have been present in the past in all loci.

    Race formation & population genetics is a statistical process at it’s core and large random samples are required. No easy button allowed.

  61. Even when they allow themselves to notice that black people within the range of IQs our society is designed to accommodate do about as well as their IQ and SES peers, they don’t grasp what that means – that “race”, whatever they happen to think it is, is not the important variable that they want it to be.

    Firstly, this simply is not true: High IQ blacks have lower rates of marriage, higher rates of criminal behavior, more likely to cheat in college exams, less likely to pay their debts, and so on and so forth than their white peers with similar IQ.

    Secondly, if it was true, which it is not, race would still matter: Even if the only difference between whites and blacks was average IQ a black youth showing signs of intoxication (Martin Trayvon) would be on average, more dangerous, because more stupid.

    1. >High IQ blacks have lower rates of marriage, higher rates of criminal behavior, more likely to cheat in college exams, less likely to pay their debts, and so on and so forth than their white peers with similar IQ.

      I don’t believe this, and I challenge you to produce credible evidence of it.

  62. @ James A. Donald
    Agree with esr. Emphatically.

    Anyway, how would you identify a ‘black’ ? Do they need one “black” grandparent or one “black” great grandparent or only one “black” parent. Is a “5% black” more or less likely to fit your criteria so that proportional behavior is observed like “5% more stupid” ??

    1. >Anyway, how would you identify a ‘black’ ?

      Just one of the questions on which the whole crazy edifice of racist thinking founders.

  63. @HedgeMage (Susan Stewart): I’m curious about your techniques for “controlling classrooms full of kids and/or adolescents from the described culture.” Maybe you could write a blog post about it?

  64. @esr
    ” What’s dysfunctional about the peer culture as described isn’t that it’s black, is that it’s stupid. Viciously, self-destructively stupid.”

    Collective suicidal stupidity has been endemic in human populations for all of recorded history. Read “March of Folly” or “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century” by Barbara Tuchman for an entertaining account.

    Half of my European history education in high school was about such stupidity. Every evening, international news will bring you current examples.

  65. @ esr & Winter

    From my point of view, it’s not that it’s stupid but instead a matter of incentives and time horizons. From the short term point of view, the low information population is responding to positive incentives and ignoring the long term consequences. Why would you expect anything else from a population where life too often truly is Hobbsian, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

  66. > > High IQ blacks have lower rates of marriage, higher rates of criminal behavior, more likely to cheat in college exams, less likely to pay their debts, and so on and so forth than their white peers with similar IQ.

    esr on 2013-07-08 at 01:02:31 said:
    > I don’t believe this, and I challenge you to produce credible evidence of it.

    Since will not believe your own eyes when politically incorrect reality is right in front of you, I doubt you would accept any evidence as credible, but I will produce the evidence I consider credible.

    Charles Murray, to get the desired results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, controlled for IQ and legitimacy. Which means that if he controlled for IQ alone, could not get the desired result.

    Similarly, surveys on the financial crisis tell us that controlling for this, that, and the other, blacks are still three times as likely to default on their mortgages (without telling us what the ratio is if they don’t control), though indirect evidence, the difference in default rates by suburb, indicates that if you don’t control you get a truly extraordinary ratio, East Palo Alto having a default rate about a hundred times that of Palo Alto. Redlining, predicting default on the basis of address, is a better predictor of default than individual credit rating.

    Indios have about the same IQ as blacks, but a considerably lower crime rate, indicating it is not IQ that makes the main difference. Some races are simply more prone to wickedness and need more external control than others, cannot handle as much freedom, need harsher punishments. Successful black cultures, such as the Ashantee empire, have applied quite extreme external control, while we see successful white cultures with lots of freedom and quite mild external control.

  67. BioBob on 2013-07-08 at 01:23:56 said:
    > Anyway, how would you identify a ‘black’ ?

    George Zimmerman is one quarter black, one quarter indio, and one half white, and he does not look all that black, which is why you lot want to hang him as a “white”, for defending himself against a stoned black drug dealer who was prone to fits of violence due to Robitussin abuse.

    So anyone who looks black, is largely black. Conversely, most of those Harvard “blacks”, if they were to go wandering in the hood, would get the crap beaten out of them as whites.

    ?

  68. Yeah, I’m sure there are some dystopian classrooms out there. It may be the case that this essay is 100% true. It’s also true that a bunch of black kids beat me up when I was young in what appeared to be a racially motivated attack. It’s also true that a bunch of black kids nearly killed my mom by throwing her off a bridge (a black girl stopped her friends at the last minute). They settled for tearing out most of her hair.

    But everyone who read that essay and got all upset about the future of this country should watch this, too.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8zu5Qn2XYs

    I am white. My best friend in elementary school was black. His dad spent many weekends with me and taught me how to ride the bike. My new best friend in middle school was black. He grew up in a horrible neighborhood, but was good in school, worked hard, avoided drugs and gangs, and his family eventually saved up the money to buy a house in a nice district. He still sends me birthday greetings each year (and I always forget to reciprocate, dammit.)

    Never give up on any portion of the human race, no matter how many bad experiences you might have personally had. Nothing wrong with reading and discussing this essay. But let’s not lose perspective.

  69. I haven’t seen anything here that you couldn’t say about a “chav” type white school on England. It’s going to be “Aw rate, he were gassed bruv innit?” instead of “dem dat”, but on the whole very similar.

    Why can’t we just say that all this is standard biological level “caveman” human behavior, those who are lucky to have good parents will be raised out of it, those who have bad parents will not?

    OK there is a potential answer to this objection that may explore e.g the violence but not the stupidity. But stupid behavior is not simply an ability but more like a normal lazy response to an environment that does not demand smart behavior to survive, and there is no intellectual motivation coming from parents.

  70. @JAD
    “So anyone who looks black, is largely black.”

    Nonsense as usual. People who look black produce a lot of melanin. Nothing more.

    Anyone who looks black, could have Australian aboriginal, Papua, or Southern Indian ancestors. But even knowing someone had African roots tells you less about his genetic make-up than just knowing his ancestors were outside Africa.

    As anyone who had looked into population genetics would know, there is more genetic variation within native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa than in all the rest of the world combined. Generalizations based on the look of a person’s skin are stupid.

    AFRICAN GENETIC DIVERSITY: Implications for Human Demographic History, Modern Human Origins, and Complex Disease Mapping
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2953791/

    The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans
    http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5930/1035.full

  71. What do you define as “bigots winning”?
    If it has anything to do with impairing the general collective health of blacks in the US, that seems to be happening on its own.

  72. @ esr
    >>Anyway, how would you identify a ‘black’ ?

    > Just one of the questions on which the whole crazy edifice of racist thinking founders.

    And yet you continue to profess that there is such a thing as a race of “blacks” with average IQ levels measurably lower than “whites” (and, let’s not forget, the “Ashkenazi Jews”).

    The sloppiness in thinking when it comes to race and culture is the great American blind spot.

    1. >And yet you continue to profess that there is such a thing as a race of “blacks” with average IQ levels measurably lower than “whites” (and, let’s not forget, the “Ashkenazi Jews”).

      Remember, the most important fact about “race” for me is a negative one: when you assort for IQ levels, supposedly “racial” differences in many kind of deviance disappear. Because what I mainly want is for governments and others to be race-blind, it’s not harmful to the implications I’m interested in if my categorization theory of “race” is weak and leaky.

      JAD and other racists have a different categorization problem; they want and need measurements of deviance to be strongly correlated with race. That means that they need a stronger theory of what “race” is than I do. The “logic” (such as it is) of their position founders on edge cases.

  73. @ esr
    > Because what I mainly want is for governments and others to be race-blind

    Linking uncritically to a rabble-rousing rant published by what appears to pretty much be the KKK without the pointy white hats is an … unconventional … means of pursuing that goal.

  74. Tom M, there’s a difference between being race-blind and culture-blind. The problems in the linked post are those of black culture, not of black people (unless you insist that the two are inseparable, which makes you the racist).

  75. @ James A. Donald

    I find these definitions so nebulous. Define ‘indio’, ‘white’, and the particulars of Zimmerman’s ‘black’ ancestors, if you can.

    how much ‘black’ in ‘indio’ or in ‘black’ in ‘white’. the whole concept is absurd since formerly isolated human races have been interbreeding for thousands of years. Romans imported Africans into Europe and boys will be boys. Arabs for centuries created and maintained colonies in sub-saharan Africa and boys will be boys. etc etc Folks from southern India have dark skins like those from southern Africa but do not share other genetically based traits. Does that dark skin make them “black” ? You need to do the math, as the saying goes.

    Your tendency to lump continues with thinking that I might be included in “you lot”. Sorry, I conclude that the entire Zimmerman prosecution was a futile politically motivated show trial.

  76. The racism individual invokes “otherism” in order to justify ignoring the problem with the individual in front of them. Thus, it is a simple form of selfishness because it allows the racist to hold back assistance and avoids putting in any work to improve the human condition. On the other hand, the charitable person sees the individuals in front of them who need assistance as a moment of opportunity. Thus, the racist individual is ideologically opposed. One uses pessimism in order to avoid work which is seen as a hopeless exercise in futility while the other sees opportunity to give of their own labor and does not avoid the risk of failure.

  77. Not only have we made it possible for single mothers to have a relatively comfortable lifestyle on welfare, but we have destroyed the economic value of low and semi-skilled labor in the formal economy. That is, the men bring nothing to the relationship but their sperm donations.

    The very bottom end of the labor market is day labor. Day labor is not cost-effective in the formal economy. The value of the labor is less than the cost of wages plus payroll taxes plus paperwork. A worker who only shows up for a day requires a year’s worth of record keeping. A dishwasher who works for a year is worth it. Dishwashers don’t do that.

  78. “Black” as usually used in the US doesn’t usually just mean dark-skinned. “Black” has been an important legal category here for many generations, and a significant number of dark-skinned people are sharply excluded from the modern version of that category. (A black applying to Harvard can expect to face a very different standard than a dark-skinned subcontinental Indian does.) In my experience, most English-speaking people arguing politics on the Internet know this full well: if I tried to argue that the success of dark-skinned subcontinental Indians in the US suffices to show that prejudice against blacks is not strong enough to be the cause of black problems, I would expect even Winter (correct me if I’m wrong) would know enough about the US to dismiss my claim. So when Winter responds to JAD’s “so anyone who looks black, is largely black” with “nonsense as usual. People who look black produce a lot of melanin. Nothing more.” I hope it is just an honest cross-cultural misunderstanding of idiomatic American English. Winter, it would be unidiomatic to say “he looks black” about someone like a dark subcontinental Indian unless he looked like a person with African ancestry. To avoid misunderstanding between the color and the category, most people would probably say something like “he has very dark skin.”

    (I live in Plano, Texas, a few hundred meters from an Indian restaurant and grocery store. When the school bus picks up kids near here, it seems like subcontinental Indians are more common than blacks. But it varies acros the city of Plano, which just elected a black mayor.)

    Winter may also not know that even though the definitions of “black” in common use in the USA aren’t very sophisticated, they have strong correlations with various non-skin-color genetic facts on the ground. A famous example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease “The prevalence of the disease in the United States is approximately 1 in 5,000, mostly affecting Americans of Sub-Saharan African descent, according to the National Institutes of Health.[54] In the United States, about 1 out of 500 African-American children and 1:36,000 Hispanic-American children born will have sickle-cell anaemia.” Even allowing for some significant amount of systematic distortion in these numbers — e.g., some fraction of patients being reclassified as black to explain the observed medical symptoms — 10:1 overrepresentation would be hard to explain away. And it doesn’t need to explained away, because it’s an unsurprising result given the relevant molecular genetics and population history.

  79. You can’t keep the bigots from winning, because the bigots are right. Sadly, they have the truth on their side.

    You can ignore the truth, or pretend the truth is not the truth, or deny the truth to its face, but sooner or later you, me, and all of us are going to have to face the ugly and unpleasant truth whether we like it or not.

    Are you ready? Are you willing to stop pretending and face the truth?

  80. Google some ‘black flash mob’ videos for more sad testimony about the decay of this particular subset of black society.

    They are committing civilizational suicide before our eyes.

  81. @William Newman
    “Winter may also not know that even though the definitions of “black” in common use in the USA aren’t very sophisticated, they have strong correlations with various non-skin-color genetic facts on the ground.”

    Obama qualifies as “black” although his father is probably genetically not more related to the slaves that are the ancestors of the original USA “Blacks” as I am (a native European).

    Your other arguments are all perfect evidence that there is no genetic foundation to the USA concept of “Black” other than skin color and “he looks West-African”. The population of blacks in the USA share genetic factors in a statistical sense that link them to West Africa. Beyond skin color, I have seen nothing really that features in the USA definition of “Black”.

    USA “Blackness” is a purely cultural construct that is statistically connected to people with ancestors in West Africa because it was designed to discriminate slaves and their progeny.. But you can be “Black” without such ancestors and non-“Black” with such ancestors.

  82. Jay Maynard said:
    > The problems in the linked post are those of black culture, not of black people
    It’s a culture and class thing allright, I’m with Hedgemage a.o on that one.

    I have to ask though : what makes it a black culture ?
    According to William Newman, black is US shorthand for “of [Sub-Sahara ?] African ancestry”
    Is Obama part of that culture then ? Is Morgan Freeman ? Condoleezza Rice ?

  83. If you want to understand black people read the real histories of Detroit and Haiti(Not the made up wikipedia ones). Both are good cases were blacks where allowed to do what they wanted without whites(libs/conservitives) telling them what to do. The results are not pretty.

  84. @ William Newman

    stats vary and I doubt the numbers are very reliable in any case, but I like this one:
    “Sickle cell trait occurs in approximately 1 in 12 African Americans; 1 in 1400 Hispanics, and nearly 1 in 100,000 Whites. ”

    “If two individuals who have sickle cell trait (Hb AS) mate, then there is a 25% chance with each birth that they will have a child with sickle cell anemia (Hb SS); a 25%
    chance that they will have a child with normal hemoglobin (Hb AA); and a
    50% chance that they will have a child with sickle cell trait.”

    as much as 40% of the population in some African tribes have sickle cell anemia

    This is a typical recessive genetic cline demonstrating global human population mixing and natural selection. There are actually no extant human races, since that term indicates population genetic discontinuities, if we use the biological definition.

    As for the rest, typical sophistry by redefinition. Obama calls himself black but was raised in a non-black cultural milieu. But as far as I can tell, he is simply a political chameleon enamored of.expedience and the con.

  85. I hesitate to contribute to a comment thread already this long, but

    (a) I didn’t see it above, but surely there needs to be a link back to this similar post.

    (b) “[ESR] at least in some places, the peer culture of American blacks has degraded further than I knew. It is the reported extent of this that I find shocking.”
    Taking the firsthand accounts of the author at face value, there is at least one place, wherever he teaches. Taking the reactions of so many here at face value, there are plenty of other places where this situation is not present. It would be very useful to understand this piece (and to think about a solution) if we had quantitative measures of where this situation may be found; how extensive it is.

    (c) This article made me think at first “we gotta get to ’em younger”. Obviously, at some point, sweet, innocent little kindergartners were conditioned into aggressively apathetic assholes. But then the rest of me realized, it’s not that elementary schools are making them this way, rather elementary schools cannot overcome the negative conditioning they receive from home and community.

  86. I’m a little surprised you either haven’t heard the expression “washing dirty laundry” before or didn’t expect your readers to know it. I’ve known it for decades from reading, though more usually for family secrets rather than racial secrets.

    For what it’s worth, the original publication of the essay is a white racist site– check out their store. I realize this isn’t proof that the article is a fabrication, but it does damage my trust in it.

    I skimmed the comments at Black and Right. They seemed to jump straight to politics rather than discussing black students.

    As other commenters have stated, there are plenty of black schools and black students which aren’t that bad, and there’s nothing in the essay to indicate whether that’s the bottom 5% or the majority or what.

    Part of my take is shaped because I’ve been living in Philadelphia (South Philly, and I usually just go to Center City and University City) since approximately 1995. Generally about half the people I see are black, and sometimes the proportion is higher. They’re occasionally louder than I like, but their behavior isn’t awful.

    I’ll grant you that this isn’t the worst parts of the city, but if we’re talking about racism and whether black people have a horrendous culture, then we have to include that there’s a black middle class, and a working class that isn’t an utter disaster. I’m inclined to think that the Black and Right link is at least as much a reflection of that sort of anger as it is knowledge about black students.

    Here’s Ta Nehisi Coates about black students needing more inspiration and less scolding. (It’s a good piece about the need in general to be pulled by goals.) He grew up in some rough circumstances, but with good parents.

    Here’s a school which found that mild discipline which is directed toward lowering students’ fear while directing them towards better behavior worked remarkably well. It does have quite a bit about the students living in very bad environments, but is emphatic that giving up on them is not the solution.

    “Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock. ” This is a quote from the original article, and is an example of why I think it’s fair to call it racist. Before I moved to Philadelphia, I was living in predominantly white Newark, Delaware, and while I did need to accomodate to living around a lot of black people, most of the issue was in my head. It wasn’t their behavior.

    I don’t have a very coherent thesis, but I do have a bunch of links. I haven’t heard anything to suggest that the worse parts of black urban culture are getting worse, and the murder rate is down generally.

    Koontown Killing Kaper by Bill Campbell. This is a satirical science fiction novel by a black author, with a good bit about black inter-group issues (also an automobile factory which has been repurposed as a morgue). It’s one of the liveliest most intense things I’ve read lately. The ending might be something of a surprise.

    Teach for America teacher recounts disastrous experiance. I believe this story a lot more than I believe the initial Jackson link, even though they’re about similar situations with out of control students. Extra crunchy goodness for conservatives because it’s about badly thought out efforts to help.

    Lead and crime.

  87. It’s not a racist article. You can get the exact same behavior and cycle of accepted hopelessness in any race.
    Read: “Life At The Bottom” by Theodore Dalrymple.
    He documents the exact same issues with the lower class whites in Britain.

    These behaviors the teacher describes are are learned in homes where parents have given up on life, regardless of race. Not given up in the suicidal sense, but given up in the sense that they do not believe in their own agency anymore. They fail to make an effort at parenting, because their kids are mostly just things they keep around for government subsidy checks. After all, who cares how well they behave as long as they don’t go to prison. They fail to make an effort to get ahead personally, because the government makes any job acquisition poisonous to their benefits. They make no effort to get out of the hole that they have helped make (with collusion from the government). The article ESR linked to just shows you what a K-13 teacher’s perspective on the matter might be, but it could just as easily be said of whites in any country where a white lower-class exist, ditto for lower-class asians in the Orient, etc…

  88. The essays that form the chapters of Life at the Bottom may all be read free online here (they occur in the earliest twenty or so at the bottom of the page – he’s written a lot more since). “We Don’t Want No Education” and “Lost in the Ghetto” are the most apropos.

  89. Incidentally, I’m with Nancy Lebowitz and Cathy Raymond and probably some others in finding the initial article much less convincing than the author seems to have intended. I’m angry about US race orthodoxy, but that doesn’t mean that unorthodoxy is necessarily correct or even innocently mistaken. Granting for the sake of argument that we trust the author’s reporting and judgment, the article still doesn’t begin to establish that this kind of screwup is common post-New-Deal, much less that it was common in 1955. So I think it’s clearly inappropriate — maybe stupid, or quite likely just dishonest — for the publisher to present it as a simple ‘majority black’ problem; there’s every reason to expect that has to be more underlying cause that that.

  90. Winter wrote “‘Blackness’ is a purely cultural construct that is statistically connected to people with ancestors in West Africa because it was designed to discriminate slaves and their progeny.”

    No. If a category like ‘people who are above average height’ has a tenfold overrepresentation in various natural measures (e.g. people who play in the NBA, or people who get struck by lightning) it’s generally something that carves reality at the joints. It may not be the optimal way to carve reality at the joints. Maybe it’s not quite right, and for many purposes you should draw the line around healthy people over 5’11” instead. But it’s a category that people could naturally arrive at without any culture to push them. It is only a cultural construct in the loose sense that damned near every category — superhighway, star, river, animal — can be thought of as a cultural construct. And it’s silly to say it’s purely a cultural construct, because then what do you call something like ‘fashionable’, which really is a purely cultural construct?

    People naturally generalize about sheep-herding breeds of dogs, or about automobile imports from a particular country, or about politicians from wealthy backgrounds, or about people who live in trailer parks, or about books with relatively expensive cover art. In the same way, people can naturally generalize from common evidence that black people in the US have characteristic behavior patterns. People’s generalizations can be wrong in important ways (as in all my examples, I think). People can be even more wrong about the underlying causal relationships. But leftists are not in a strong position to demand that their crude lies — e.g., we’re not racist, it’s just a cold hard objective fact that some overachieving historically discriminated-against merchant minorities are more equal than others, so please send a photo with your college application — take precedence over people’s crude heuristic generalizations. At least crude heuristics have a tolerable chance of being correct.

    People’s preconceptions about trailer parks are not just ‘purely a [designed] cultural construct’ even if they get written into zoning law and building codes. Not even if they are in part consequences of century-old attitudes that got written into zoning law and building codes. Reasonable people can jump to conclusions about the kinds of things they associate with trailer parks. They may be wrong, but they are honestly using heuristics which are often useful in other cases. Most of what’s going on is stereotyping, not legal classification. And this doesn’t change fundamentally if there are a few weird corner cases which don’t fit people’s common experience of what a trailer park is. If people in trailer parks are ten times more likely to die of lightning strikes than the general population, then the “trailer park” classification carves reality at the joints even if you happen to know of a trailer park in East Africa where it never rains. Good for you, but it doesn’t make “trailer park” an invalid basis for generalization or a purely cultural construct.

    (For ‘trailer park’ substitute other kinds of housing, or for ‘people living in trailer parks’ substitute ‘people with advanced degrees’ or ‘people with advanced degrees who insist on being called Doctor’, and the pattern still holds. Many other substitutions would work too.)

    Granted, people can acquire and hold their attitudes about trailer parks or auto imports or whatever for completely unfactual or bad reasons, like the stereotype of Detroit auto workers hostile to Japanese imports. But except in extreme situations, such as people competing with their fellow citizens to dehumanize the enemy in wartime, a large fraction of stereotypes are based on data and best guesses and laziness, and a large fraction of incorrect stereotypes are honest mistakes (typically trusting a flaky heuristic), not dishonest pretense.

    For comparison, consider some purely political constructs, constructs which have no more connection to the universe of nonpolitical facts than ‘fashionable’ has to the universe of non-in-group facts. No one not cynically holding a finger to the political wind would naturally arrive at the dual conclusions that (1) women have some essential unmeasurable important advantage over men as custodial parents even when they are single, and (2) now that Progressive political coalitions have changed in importance, we know that men have an equally valid essential unmeasurable ability as long as they are openly homosexual and they declare a pair bond. That class of officially good custodial parents is purely a political construct to reward Progressive interest group patronage. And no one not cynically holding a finger to the political wind would innocently jump to the dual conclusions that (1) ‘diversity’ is so much more important than classical measures of academic ability that it trumps explicit Constitutional guarantees and (2) ‘Jews’ have ‘diversity’ while ‘Asians’ don’t have ‘diversity’. It’s purely a political construct to justify Progressive interest group patronage.

    Recently in Fisher vs. Texas you may have noticed how the Supreme Court vomited up a camel for inspection, snuffled about admiring it, then chowed it back down. Where then was the leftist concern about how categories like ‘diversity’ and ‘Asian’ and ‘Jew’ are invalid criteria because they are ‘purely cultural constructs’? In the still-echoing sound of crickets, your voice speaking power to truth about how gnats absolutely should not be swallowed doesn’t have the same impact you might wish.

    (There *is* a pure political construct tied to blackness in the USA, with various people cynically pushing the envelope to gain a different racial classification, usually for AA advantages. But the arbitrary political boundaries in such skirmishes are almost entirely unrelated to the article ESR is writing about. No one seems to think that the classroom issues in that article are caused by falling on one side or another of an disputed arbitrary political divide like the one that makes it sorta OK for Elizabeth Warren to be promoted as an American Indian. If the Supreme Court decrees next month that officially pair-bonded gay men are black unless three quarters of their ancestors are from Spain, it may profoundly affect college admissions policy but it’s not going to affect the classroom issues in the article.)

  91. winter on 2013-07-08 at 06:25:21 said:
    > Nonsense as usual. People who look black produce a lot of melanin. Nothing more.

    In analyses of the mortgage crisis, those doing the analysis were reluctant to say “X% of non asian minorities defaulted, Y% of whites defaulted. Instead, they said, that X% of members of such and such a race who met such and such criteria defaulted, thereby producing the result that people who met those criteria were not too bad as mortgage risks. But they could not find criteria such that lending large sums of money to a member of a non asian minority was on average a good idea. (Or at least they could not find criteria that they dared to use) No matter what the selection criteria, mortgages to non asian minorities were disastrously bad, while mortgages to whites were reasonably profitable. It would always have been the fiscally responsible decision to say “no non asian minorities need apply”.

    (Of course had they used criteria such as skin color, legitimacy, and family background, they could have easily identified a minority subpopulation that was safe to lend to, light skinned male blacks raised by their fathers and raising their sons, but such criteria were unthinkable.)

  92. esr
    > JAD and other racists have a different categorization problem; they want and need measurements of deviance to be strongly correlated with race. That means that they need a stronger theory of what “race” is than I do. The “logic” (such as it is) of their position founders on edge cases.

    Take a look at the prison population. More interestingly, take a look at the prison population in places with far left local governments, governments that are violently anti racist, (meaning anti white) managing the police force. In particular, take a look at who gets arrested in San Francisco.

    It is glaringly obvious that deviance in San Francisco is black. They go out of their way to bust whites in order to make up the numbers and obscure this embarrassing result, but cannot bust enough to conceal the fact that deviance is black.

    Further, deviance is very black. The criminals look more like Martin Trayvon than Obama. (The Martin Trayvon on his facebook photos, not the ones you see everywhere photoshopped to make him european, femme, and childlike.) Edge cases are not a problem because few edge case people get busted by the San Francisco PD, except of course when they get yet another drive on to try and make their numbers less grossly “racist”, whereupon they are apt to bust a few George Zimmerman type “whites”.

    So. Select people by deviance, the result, as in San Francisco law enforcement, is very black.

    What if you select people by race, as in the mortgage crisis. “Hey, I am american indian. After all, everyone from Texas probably has some indio blood if you go back far enough”. Obviously you are selecting a lot of edge cases.

    You still get intolerable levels of deviance among those selected, even though there are many edge cases among those selected, and the edge cases among those selected are unlikely to be significantly deviant.

  93. esr:
    > That means that they need a stronger theory of what “race” is than I do.

    Observe that the traditional theory was “he is a n****r if he looks like a n****r”. Thus for example, traditionally, people from Egypt were classified as caucasian, as were the higher Indian castes. (Look it up.) The one drop rule is primarily employed by Harvard and the like to fatten their diversity numbers, by the democrats to fatten their voting blocks, and, to rationalize this ludicrous theory, attributed to their enemies. Thus, for Harvard, people from Egypt are not Caucasian. Similarly, we have a lot allegedly one sixty fourth indios.

    This is similar to the left attributing the theory that women are sexless angels to the right. In fact, of course, the theory that women were sexless angels was introduced by the left in 1820 or so to argue that the marriage contract only needed punitive enforcement on men, not women, was introduced to attack marriage, and continued to be the left wing theory from 1820 to 1960. During this entire period the right wing theory was that women were the uncontrollably lustful sex, and needed supervision by husbands and fathers to prevent them from behaving badly and self destructively.

    1. >traditionally, people from Egypt were classified as caucasian, as were the higher Indian castes

      I hope the weather’s nice on whatever planet you inhabit. It sure ain’t Earth.

      Through an accident of my childhood history that began with having lived in England at a formative time and imprinting on Kipling and other edge-of-Empire British adventure fiction – and then studying the non-fictional background because I found it fascinating – I happen to know a great deal about the racial attitudes that accompanied British imperialism in the Orient.

      Kipling is interesting in some part because his India fiction and poetry was an extended argument for respecting the Indians that general opinion of the time largely dismissed as “wogs” – a term never in period applied to Europeans or their notional equals. Egyptians were wogs too and thus not constructively white.

      Until around the time of the Indian Mutiny (possibly a bit before) Britons didn’t even routinely distinguish between black Africans and brown Indians. Both were “niggers” or “black” in soldier’s argot. Individuals could escape the “wog” category, but not by caste; the British admired personal bravery and raised to the level of near equals in their minds Indians and Africans who exhibited it. Eventually, entire tribes came to be thought of as warriors rather than wogs: Sikhs, Maasai, Pashtun, Zulus.

      Neil Ferguson is a good recent source on this stuff. JAD is not.

  94. …the theory that women were sexless angels was introduced by the left in 1820 or so…

    Um, what?

  95. The only way stories like that can be shocking to you is if you have deliberately been lying to yourself and deliberately been obscuring the truth.

    Anybody who’s attended a school with a significant percentage of blacks in the past 20 years – in other words, anybody who is not of the idiot-boomer-hippie-liberal-bubble generation, which, Deus be thanked, will be dying off soon enough – knows on an instinctive and reflexive level the truth of everything said in that piece, and the truth of all the obvious implications to be drawn from it.

    Desperate clinging to fantasy ideology (“such-and-such MUST be true, because it would be HORRIBLE if it wasn’t! and it would make me FEEL bad!”) is the province of the soon-to-be-dead. The rest of us know better.

  96. “Of course, all the rational arguments against racism are still sound”

    There is nothing “of course” about it.

    The brain is a physical device. It is customized according to genes. Genes are inherited. Population groups have genetic clusterings, statistically more similar to each other than with other groups. They have certain traits. Some of these affect physical characteristics and abilities. Some affect mental characteristics and abilities. The differences in average brain function are as noticeable as the difference in average melanin output, average sprinting ability, average swimming ability, or average ability to compose classical music. Some races are better at some of these than others, and it is just because that’s how the DNA shakes out.

    The only argument against this is that it’s horribly unfair and it makes people feel bad. That’s people’s problem, not reality’s. Reality doesn’t care how you feel. It just is.

    Reality is racist.

  97. James A. Donald on 2013-07-08 at 18:35:01 said:

    esr:
    > That means that they need a stronger theory of what “race” is than I do.

    No matter what theory of race you employ, you get the same result:

    Select people by deviance. The result is, like those imprisoned by the San Francisco police department, very black.

    Select people by race (“Hey, I am one sixty fourth native american, so gimme a million dollar mortgage and an obamaphone”) and the result is very deviant. You find that an intolerable proportion of the mortgages do not get repaid.

  98. George Zimmerman is one quarter black, one quarter indio, and one half white

    He is not. He is at most 1/8 black, but probably less than .1/16

  99. esr:
    > That means that they need a stronger theory of what “race” is than I do.

    If you lend money to people from certain areas, you will, on average, lose money.

    If you lend money to people who look like members of a certain race, you will, on average, lose money.

    If you lend money to people who claim to be members of a certain race, you will, on average, lose money.

  100. esr:
    > That means that they need a stronger theory of what “race” is than I do.

    Why is it that you do not need a strong theory of race to hand out obamaphones and million dollar mortgages on the basis of race, but you do need a strong theory of race to deny people mortgages on the basis of race?

  101. BioBob on 2013-07-08 at 14:00:47 said:
    > This is a typical recessive genetic cline demonstrating global human population mixing and natural selection. There are actually no extant human races, since that term indicates population genetic discontinuities, if we use the biological definition.

    Biological races, for example Asian leopards versus African leopards, always have clines. If they had a discontinuity, they would be different species, not different races.

    Further, Asian leopards look a lot more like African leopards than Asian homo looks like African homo yet they are nonetheless officially classified as different and separate races.

    Similarly, the only reason there is no cline between spotted and barred owls is that there is in fact a cline, but the government tries to kill every bird on the cline as “hybrids”. They get classified as different species even though there is a cline between them (no discontinuity) and even though they resemble each other much more closely than Caucasian homo sapiens and Asian homo sapiens resemble each other.

  102. “So why hasn’t it destroyed white families to the same extent?”

    IIRC, it’s because black culture (matrilineal) in Africa encouraged birth out of wedlock, with the mothers eventually being pushed into marriage so the fathers would support the children. LBJ’s “Great Society” eliminated the need to get married for financial support.

    (I’m not a historian – I just remember a magazine article arguing the above)

    Whites are headed in the same direction. It’s just taking them longer.

  103. To fully grasp this article’s meaning, it must first be noted that blacks are a completely different species from human beings. Blacks are very primitive and underevolved intellectually speaking, and they behave like a mix of infants and animals. Blacks lack any sense of morality, responsibility, or honor, and blacks lack critical/abstract thinking. These are the major reasons why we must not confuse blacks as proper human beings.
    With that being said, it is clearly the fault of human beings fro things such as this. We are all expecting blacks to at least be able to act like human beings. Why do we demand so much from blacks? They are simply not mentally, emotionally, or psychologically capable of it. Is this really far? I do not think so.
    We cannot expect blacks of such primitive environments and such subhuman genetics to perform at the same level as human beings which have at least 100,000 years head start evolutionarily speaking over the africans. Even in another 100,000 years, it will be unfair to demand humanity from these creatures, as they are not currently evolving at all, they continue to de-evolve before our own very eyes.
    Once humanity accepts the truth that blacks are simply not capable of existing in any modern human civilized society in any capacity, then we can finally move on to what we should do with them, to both fairly allow them to lead their violent, pointless lives, and to ensure the safety, security, and disease-free lives that human beings have worked and fought so hard to create and achieve over the past thousands of years.
    To allow all of our work to be undone by such savages, would be our fault, and our fault alone, for we are the ones that get in the positions to make such decisions.

  104. I actually knew a fellow who worked as a teacher at an inner-city black school in the Chicagoland area (I think). If this article be an exaggeration compared to his experiences, it’s not much of one. But it’s not universal, and as Chris Rock said, the things white people hate about black people, black people really hate about black people.

    I once saw a black child screaming her little head off on the bus, making the most god-awful sound imaginable, with something like a look of pure delight on her face. After about five minutes of annoyance visible on the faces of all the other riders, her mother intervened saying quietly, “Stop screaming!” I realized that if this were 1963 instead of 2013, that mother would have come down a lot harder on the girl a lot sooner. Black families were much stricter and more tightly knit back then than they are today, and the collapse of parenthood in the American black home is something that can and should be addressed by blacks.

    But the enclosing white-dominated culture can do a few things too, like ending racial profiling and and the ridiculously harsh sentencing policies for black-associated drugs as opposed to white-associated ones. White-managed record companies could stop promoting gangsta rap as a countermeasure against the popularity of consciousness-rasining political rap acts like Public Enemy. We could start funding education again, yet at the same time cut off support for fuzzy feel-good psychological projects like Outcome-Based Education whose goals seem to be anything but educating kids.

    Yeah. Good luck getting all that to happen. Marcus Garvey will get his face on the $1 bill before it does.

    Eric, your reaction is similar to mien when I first saw this crunk rap video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JOwyHghsag I saw it as propagating the worst stereotypes of black men. Then I saw a live version, and sure enough, it was done by black men.

    That’s a spoof of crunk music done by Bomani Armah, and its message is pretty much the exact opposite of most crunk music. The song is intended to call out the people who embody those negative stereotypes and encourage them to take responsibility and have a little self-respect.

    I for one think it’s a pretty brilliant parody of Lil’ Jon’s style with a much-needed payload. (I don’t recommend listening to Lil’ Jon’s stuff if you’re squeamish.)

  105. Jeff Read commented on After such knowledge….
    > But the enclosing white-dominated culture can do a few things too, like ending racial profiling and and the ridiculously harsh sentencing policies for black-associated drugs as opposed to white-associated ones.

    So the solution to undisciplined behavior by blacks is less discipline and less enforcement?

    That has been tried numberless times in the last two hundred and forty years, with entirely predictable results.

    The reason that blacks on drugs are treated worse than whites on drugs is that blacks on drugs are dangerous and whites on drugs, by and large, are not.

    Blacks, on average, need a more structured environment, firmer discipline and harsher punishment for misbehavior, than whites, and similarly women need a more structured environment and firmer discipline than males.

  106. Jeff Read:
    > the ridiculously harsh sentencing policies for black-associated drugs as opposed to white-associated ones.

    The capacity of the various races to handle drugs reflects how recently their ancestors invented beer. The more recent, the more that drugs and alcohol induce violence, adverse health effects, and self destructive behavior. The more ancient, the most ancient being whites, the more civilized and orderly their drug consumption, and the less harmful the health effects.

    Among the worst in the world are the Australian aboriginals, who never experienced alcohol until the white man arrived, and strangely failed to discover any of the numerous psychoactive plants native to Australia. It is perfectly clear that there is no sane policy other than absolute alcohol prohibition for full blooded Australian aboriginals, and in practice that is what is done, but political correctness clouds this absolutely necessary policy with confusion, denial, and hypocrisy.

  107. @ James A. Donald
    a genetic cline is a continuous gradient in the numerical representation of some species genetic trait. The genetic discontinuities in population clines are what makes the definitions of the races possible, dood, otherwise they are indistinguishable and all the same species without races (the current human condition). I am not going to go into more detail because it would be a waste of effort. You don’t get it in any case since you don’t understand the concept of normal curves or poisson distributions.

    If populations can still successfully interbreed and DO in the wild in an evolutionary timescale, then they are the same species with races. If they DO NOT, then they are different species. It’s pretty simple.

    Chihuahuas are not different species than St. Bernards despite your most excellent visual difference rule.

    Separation of leopard populations are clearly an artifact of recent human intervention and if one removed humans from the equation, you could reexamine the natural system. I have no clue what you are trying to explain with owls but it’s irrelevant since we are actually discussing humans, not leopards, owls or even chihuahuas..

    You need remedial edumacation in logic, genetics and evolutionary theory. Good luck with that.

  108. “No, but white people imposed the “slave” and then “second-class citizen” mindset to blacks when they brought them from Africa to America (and when they colonized Africa). This mindset is passed from father to child and will not change (anytime soon), no matter what the politically correct twats say.”

    Did they now? Cause blacks were enslaved by other blacks first and then sold to whites. Whites didn’t actually enslave people themselves very much.

    Maybe the ugly scar of slavery that’s being passed down from father to son is anger at the West African blacks for chasing them down with nets and spears and selling them to Dutch (not all white) people. It seems to take a really long time for them to get over it when whites keep them in slavery for a few hundred years.

    Is it the official position of blacks that they were “totally over” being enslaved before, by the blacks, and then when whites came along and bought them from Dutchmen and brought them to a wondrous fertile land of technological marvels that increased their lifespans within their own lifetimes it just ruined the harmonious peace they had just obtained after being sold to Persians by other blacks for THOUSANDS of years before a Dutchman ever took one on a trade and got the whole thing started with whites?

    I’m just wondering how blacks seemed to have made such enormous strides in forgiving black and Arab slave traders, maybe we could replicate the results here in this black/white conflict.

    Is the secret “DON’T BE A WHITE PERSON”,by any chance?

    I’m just wondering because you never hear American blacks express their frustration at having been enslaved for thousands of years in their native homelands, by their own people and Arabs, who are still doing it to this day,but you do hear them endlessly say that segregation and slavery they never personally experienced harms them today in tangible ways and liberals repeatedly attribute this to the results of current disparities between the races.

    This is interesting because whatever monetary calculation they’re using to translate hurt feelings over this into lawsuit money is undoubtedly weighting whites by 2/3rds of the share of slavery blame too much. I.e. white people are being provably racially-discriminated against by being blamed entirely for slavery,when, based on their ethnicity they could be as little as 1/8th guilty of causing bad ju ju for the black man by being a white person 200 years after slavery was abolished and nearly a century after segregation ended.

    The issue doesn’t appear to be slavery per se as we determine from the nonchalant stance toward ongoing African slavery by blacks and Arabs but something that white people are not doing, that other blacks and Arabs are.

    It’s just a total mystery to me. I Juuuuussst can’t put my finger on why a black would be really angry at whites in general for something that only one group of whites was actually responsible for technically that happened at least a century ago, and despite having a Muuuuuuuuch higher standard of living….but NOT AT ALL angry at other blacks and Arabs who do this exact thing to their distant cousins to this very day…

    What is it that’s different about whites and blacks?

  109. > Um, what?

    I’ve never heard it phrased in JAD’s way, but I’ve seen the claim before that the “sexless angels” angle was invented by the early suffragette movement as a way to claim a moral high ground.

  110. > The genetic discontinuities in population clines are what makes the definitions of the races possible, dood,

    Like most people who use epithets in place of arguments, you are ignorant. See Darwin’s discussion of species and races (subspecies), in particular Chapter seven of “The Descent of Man”

    “We will first consider the arguments which may be advanced in favour of classing the races of man as distinct species, and then the arguments on the other side.”

    Darwin then discusses at length the distinction between a species difference and a mere race difference, and argues a length that the existence of a cline, the existence of extensive interbreeding, is a compelling and important reason to classify a difference as merely a race difference rather than a species difference.

    And this is what scientists today do with those races, such as the various races of leopards, that it is safer to talk about than the races of humans.

    For a discontinuity to exist, crossbreeding must be small or negligible. If crossbreeding is small or negligible, they are different species, not different races (subspecies). If two races therefore two subspecies, therefore there is a cline between them. If no cline, two species, not two races.

    Most of the leopard subspecies (races) differ by about as much as the Scotch race differs from the English race, and blend into each other in the same way.

  111. This article reminds me of that old joke about the social scientist, the statistician and the mathematician traveling to Scotland. They all see a black sheep.

    “Look”, says the social scientist, “Scottish sheep are black!!”

    “No, no” says the statistician, “Some Scottish sheep are black.”

    “No, no, no” says the mathematician, “At least one Scottish sheep has at least one side that is black.”

    Which is to say: just because there was one school with a dreadful problem of lethargy, disengagement and hopelessness does not mean that that is representative of all black schools.

    I think the author has a lot to say that is valuable about black culture. There is a lot of it that is horrible, self destructive, nihilistic and ugly. The plain and uncomfortable fact that the black bell curve of intelligence is slid to the left surely exacerbates this, poverty, and worse the poverty trap created by narcissistic do gooders makes it worse. But I think the author is talking about the worst of the worst, which he had the misfortune to encounter. That does not mean that the average is as terrible as this.

    I was thinking about this whole black culture in regards to the Zimmerman trial. From the evidence I have seen there is no way Zimmerman should be convicted of anything short of bad judgement if that. Some of the prosecutions arguments are horrendous (“Zimmerman wasn’t hurt THAT badly, was he?” They opine. One wonders if they apply the same standard in rape trials.)

    If Zimmerman is acquitted there is no doubt in my mind that there will be nationwide race riots. No doubt many people will die in those riots. I think the fact that I can make such a claim and nobody bats an eye as to how outrageous it is, how self evidently true it is, tells you all you need to know about black culture in America.

  112. I thought I’d throw my own experience about teaching and order in public schools. mine wasn’t nearly as bad (or lengthy) as his, but the same problems were present. Note, however, that I make no reference to race. This problem applied equally to all my students.

  113. I have read this story before. Where I read it (I cannot remember where, I’m afraid) in the comments section were teachers who both related that this was exactly their experience too in teaching at such a school as well as others who said that their own experiences were quite different. It is not impossible that everyone was telling the truth; some areas may well be that horrible while others are not.

    To give a different experience, there was a black journalist who wanted to teach at a historically black college. A college is quite different from an assigned high school. This is the experience of a Tampa Bay Times “columnist and editorial board member”. There are two parts to the story and an epilogue. Perhaps you will find this man’s story to be of interest.

    http://www.sptimes.com//2007/05/13/Opinion/I_had_a_dream.shtml

  114. esr:
    > “I happen to know a great deal about the racial attitudes that accompanied British imperialism in the Orient.”

    You are utterly ignorant, brainwashed by ludicrous over the top propaganda, and your own self hatred.

    See, for example “Two lectures on the Natural History of Caucasian and Negro Races”, which starts out with a lengthy discussion of Egypt, telling us that the Egyptians are Caucasians.

    What you think you know is not nineteenth century attitudes, but late twentieth century accounts of nineteenth century attitudes, and the late twentieth century accounts (after 1930) are crazed hatred and self hatred. If you actually read old books, the modern books describing these old books sound like communist rhetoric about “running dogs of capitalism”, and “crushed under the iron heels of their capitalist overlords.”

    Use google books with the date selection set, and the dates set to exclude all books written after 1930. Search for “race and “Caucasian”. You will find that everything that you think you know about attitudes and beliefs from before 1930 is half truths and lies.

  115. esr, you really should have suspected that everything you think you know about older (pre 1930) beliefs about race is a lie, when the left hoped that the boston bombers were “caucasians” – and lo and behold, were shocked and disappointed to find that the boston bombers actually were caucuasian, more caucasian than anyone else in America except for a few hundred of their kin.

    Obviously, the meaning of “caucasian”, has been changed radically from its original meaning.

    That should have been a big enough hint to lead you suspect that your worldview rests on screaming over the top propaganda demonizing our past and our race.

    On checking google books, we see the radical change in the meaning of “caucasian” sets in with the rise of political correctness and affirmative action in favor of blacks in 1930.

    (Does 1930 sound a little early for affirmative action? Jim crow, in its later years was affirmative action in favor of blacks.)

  116. Jessica Boxer commented on After such knowledge….
    > Which is to say: just because there was one school with a dreadful problem of lethargy, disengagement and hopelessness does not mean that that is representative of all black schools.

    I am not sure whether your hatred makes you ignorant, or your ignorance makes you hateful. Or perhaps it self induced stupidity.

    The story is not about one black, or one school, but about a statistically significant number of blacks, all of whom happened to attend the same school.

  117. @ James A. Donald

    Great ! Bring up Darwin for your argument about genetics.

    You are aware that the nature of DNA was first discovered roughly 100 years after Darwin first published “Origin of the Species”. He knew something was going on but not why. We still don’t understand many parts of the genetic story of life, but invoking Darwin to explain molecular biology and the statistical nature of population genetics is not worth much. Keep trying though while you bone up on the rest. Only 100 years of progress to learn since you are still in the 19th century. You will get it eventually if you persist.

    Improvise, Adapt and Overcome, dood.

    [you really don’t know what dood means, eh ? truly clueless]
    try here — i think they do some 19th century stuff too
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrGWooNDPiE

  118. > but invoking Darwin to explain molecular biology and the statistical nature of population genetics is not worth much.

    But, as I pointed out, scientists today continue classify species and subspecies (races) by the same standard as Darwin explained at length, for example the innumerable leopard subspecies.

    Following the criteria proposed by Darwin, to this day, iIf there is continuity, scientists usually classify the difference as a race difference, for example the innumerable leopard subspecies which blend into each other like the English and the Scots, or recently used to before humans diminished their ranges. If there is discontinuity, usually classified as a species difference.

    Often two kinds are classified as different species on the basis of alleged discontinuity, and a small cline, continuity, later shows up. Much kerfuffle ensues, as with wolves and coyotes, where the cline was physically exterminated, and with barred owls and spotted owls, where, last time I heard, they were trying to physically exterminate the cline.

    Darwin pointed out that there was no absolute way to distinguish between a species difference and a race difference. It is like arguing whether something is a large hill or a small mountain. We draw sharp lines on a natural world that lacks sharp lines. However, these days, a lot of money depends on whether something kind is a rare species, or an uncommon race of a common species, so much silliness ensues as scientists attempt to define the undefinable.

  119. @JAD
    “Following the criteria proposed by Darwin, to this day, iIf there is continuity, scientists usually classify the difference as a race difference, for example the innumerable leopard subspecies which blend into each other like the English and the Scots, or recently used to before humans diminished their ranges.”

    As usual, you try to cloak your politics in pseudo-science. There is a reason you never come up with genetic data to support your racial theories. They are all based on cultural stereotypes: People are “black” etc because other people say they are.

    As human geneticists say “If two gorillas meet in an African rain forest, they are likely to differ more genetically than any two humans you can find on the planet”.
    http://theadvancedapes.com/201328great-ape-and-human-genetic-diversity/

    The human population bottleneck of 100k years ago, when there were only in the order of 10k humans left on earth, made us a very homogeneous species. Human “races” as used by JAD have no genetic basis at all.

  120. “Keep trying though while you bone up on the rest. Only 100 years of progress to learn since you are still in the 19th century. You will get it eventually if you persist.”

    What missing knowledge is there that would convince someone from the 19th century that they were wrong about race?

    The experience of Detroit? Haiti?

    Steven J Gould’s lies about Morton’s work?

    The discovery of DNA and that all people of Asian and European descent have significant Neanderthal DNA but other groups do not?

    What actual evidence that was unknown in the 19th century would you cite to disprove the contentions that Jim is making? What actual evidence is there that all human racial groups are equal or that human racial groups can’t be reliably identified?

  121. The author sees the reality but is too afraid to act in the knowledge of their conclusions. A typical liberal always cracks under pressure. They want a nice easy life with a nice easy conscience. Unfortunately, the denial of reality and projection are neurotic indicators. However, I´m sure that where they live shows their unconscious acknowlegement of that reality.

  122. winter on 2013-07-09 at 02:40:09 said:
    > As human geneticists say “If two gorillas meet in an African rain forest, they are likely to differ more genetically than any two humans you can find on the planet”.
    http://theadvancedapes.com/201328great-ape-and-human-genetic-diversity/

    The relevant comparison is how much human races differ genetically, as compared to how much they differ from chimps.

    Which comparison is given in the wonderfully politically incorrect “Root of the Phylogenetic Tree of Human populations” http://jim.com/1996-nei-takezaki.pdf

    Table one tells us that the difference between Chinese and Chimpanzees is 67, but the difference between Chinese and African pygmiesis 47 – smaller but not a whole lot smaller, quite comparable.

    Nei and Takezaki give us a variety of different measures, some with results that horribly politically incorrect, such as table one, others, notably table four, that are even more horribly politically incorrect.

    None of his genetic results give any reassurance to the politically correct. Some of them, particularly table four and the hilariously non PC figure five, provide a pretty good argument for classifying the different human kinds as different species, rather than merely different races.

  123. Winter, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/

    When it comes to questions of race, the “racists” have every single fact on their side. Adoption studies like the ones constantly brought up have actually taken place – decades ago. The question of race has been answered – it has a genetic basis and is far more than skin deep. A huge number of characteristics are genetically determined, and far more than just IQ is passed on – http://fowler.ucsd.edu/heritability_of_partisan_attachment.pdf

    You can dislike the fact that blacks have a lower average IQ or higher murder rate, but you can’t deny it and have a clear intellectual conscience. This doesn’t say anything about a given black individual, but it has very important implications when looking at policy issues or societal trends.

    Secondly, the idea that blacks are in a terrible position due to historical trauma is laughably easy to disprove by simply comparing them to other races that have gone through historical trauma and “discrimination”. I’m sure you can find your own examples of ethnic groups that have gone through horrifying treatment and display none of the pathologies found in that article.

  124. > > traditionally, people from Egypt were classified as caucasian, as were the higher Indian castes

    esr on 2013-07-08 at 22:22:26 said:
    > I hope the weather’s nice on whatever planet you inhabit. It sure ain’t Earth
    > …
    > … I happen to know a great deal about the racial attitudes that accompanied British imperialism in the Orient.

    You are stupefyingly ignorant, having unquestioningly accepted a pile of absurd self hating lies, intended to demonize your race and history, intended to make you hate yourself and people like yourself.

    > Neil Ferguson is a good recent source on this stuff..

    If you are reading “recent sources”, no wonder you believe crazy fanatical lies full of murderous hatred and suicidal self hatred. If you want to know what the past was really like, read what people who lived in the past wrote.

    And, on the question of whether Egyptians etc were viewed caucasians:

    “Two lectures on the Natural History of Caucasian and Negro races”, 1844 tells us in the first paragraph of lecture one that the Egyptians were caucasians.

    “Crania Aegyptiaca”, also 1844, goes measuring Egyptian skulls, concludes they are caucasians, for reasons of skull shape and cranial capacity.

    The London Medical and Physical Journal, 1825 – Volume 54 – Page 132, tells us that not only were early Egyptians caucasians, as are today’s peasants farming the Egyptian delta, but that they were substantially more caucasian than europeans – for exactly the same reasons as the Boston Bombers. were more caucasian than europeans. Early Egyptians looked more like people from the Caucasus than europeans do, which is to say, looked like the Boston Bombers.

    And so on and so forth.

    Yes, there were some nineteenth century people that disagreed, that argued that Egyptians etc were not Caucasians. But they were leftists. If on one page in one book they said that Egyptians were not caucasians, they also said that Caucasians had committed all sorts of horrid evil crimes against native Americans and so on and so forth, which horrid evils doubtless deserve ethnic cleansing and autogenocide. Whosoever in the nineteenth century argued, like twenty first century Harvard, for a narrow definition of Caucasian which excludes people from the Caucasus, also, like twenty first century Harvard, argued that Caucasians so defined were evil hateful and cold hearted, and not only were other races equal, but that other races were more equal than Caucasians.

    1. >Yes, there were some nineteenth century people that disagreed, that argued that Egyptians etc were not Caucasians. But they were leftists.

      British regimental troopers were leftists. Rudyard Kipling was a leftist. Yeah, tell me another one.

      Do you even listen to yourself when you spout nonsense like this? The “leftist” category you want to invoke barely existed before 1860; Marxist theory didn’t get enough traction to distort popular attitudes in Great Britain until well into the 1890s.

      >[Egyptians] were substantially more caucasian than europeans

      And there’s the tip-off to what those period sources actually meant – that “Caucasians” were not at the time considered “white”, that is the same race as Britons and other Northern Europeans. (Neither, for that matter, were some other groups at the edges of Europe. For some reason I’ve never been able to discover Portuguese caught a particularly strong dose of racial opprobrium in Britain until at least as late as the 1920s.)

      This is hard for readers today to grasp, because “Caucasian” was adopted in the mid-20th century as a way of not saying “white” in police and medical reports. Few people notice that this is discontinuous with earlier use as a racialist term because the whole edifice of “scientific” racialism became so discredited after WWII that much of its terminology was forgotten.

  125. JAD wrote “Jim crow, in its later years was affirmative action in favor of blacks.”

    Tooby and Cosmides famously pondered “are [Steven Jay] Gould’s characterizations of his opponents’ positions intelligible exaggerations (e.g., saying we use adaptationist principles exclusively when he means ‘more than I care for’), do they move beyond exaggeration into the incoherently wrong (e.g., confusing cabbages with concubinage), or indeed do they often transcend being completely wrong by aspiring to achieve the reverse of the truth (e.g., locating the orbit of the moon within the Earth’s core).”

    Separate water fountains and sitting at the back of the bus were not in favor of blacks.

    Granted, you can find individual policies of the era that arguably helped blacks, and more policies that were oh-so-sincerely officially supposed to help blacks. Granted, the usual modern reporting on this stuff does contain a significant amount of dishonest crap and a lot of selective omission. But that doesn’t mean we should conclude that the actual historical policy was net favorable to blacks. In fact, we should ask for extraordinary evidence before concluding that, because it would be a strange historical anomaly if a large politically underpowered demographic segment received net favorable treatment from the authorities. And much of the distortion and omission in modern reporting of Jim Crow isn’t to conceal favorable treatment, but to conceal oppression which happened to flow from Progressive darling groups and policies. E.g., the role of unions (and their favored policies like Davis-Bacon and minimum wage) in excluding blacks is concealed, and separate water fountains are presented as pure ritual humiliation instead of the tip of an iceberg where the iceberg is a case study in how regulatory capture tends to protect entrenched interests. (Requirements to build duplicate plumbing and other facilities as a legal prerequisite for having your first black employee is not just some historically noteworthy example of legal ritual humiliation, it’s completely typical regulatory protection of entrenched interests by arbitrarily imposing intentionally onerous requirements on competition.)

  126. The decline of black culture in the US began in the mid 1960s with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Initiative. These programs purchased black dignity, destroyed the two-parent home life, and inculcated economic dependence on government. In return, Democrats obtained a reliable voting block. The slavery is now ideological and the damage is all too evident.

  127. Nancy,

    The treatment of Ms. Bartoli was disgusting, body-shaming, and misogynistic, but I don’t think it was racism.

    Worse, it wasn’t just body-shaming, it was shaming the physical characteristics of a female athlete. Tennis is physically and mentally grueling; if you don’t look sweaty and ragged right after a match, you probably haven’t been giving it your all. Furthermore, playing championship-level tennis requires developing upper and lower body strength; that means putting on more muscle and looking “thicker”. It’s an open secret of women’s tennis that Anna Kournikova severely compromised her tennis game by focusing on being a model rather than an athlete.

    This isn’t racism, it’s sexism — from male sports fans who think women athletes are there to look pretty rather than, you know, play the game.

    Note how you rarely hear this about Serena Williams. Of course, she’s black; she’s not expected to be pretty, she’s expected to be athletic. Maybe there’s your racism.

  128. Nancy,

    You posted an article that collected tweets that said that an ugly woman who won Wimbledon is ugly. Not sure what the author was trying to prove but here’s the missing content.

    No one cares about women’s sports as sports because the best female athletes are about as good as an excellent high school male athlete (depending on the sport). For example, the 2010 US women’s hockey team who won a silver medal in the olympics lost a game to the Warroad High School boys team. Now, it’s true that the game had modified rules – unfortunately the rules were modified to give the women’s team an edge – it was a no checking game.

    So why do people watch women’s sports if they’re awful at sports? Well, it’s nice watching toned attractive women being active and this is especially true of tennis. When some unattractive women who’s better at tennis wins they’ve spoiled the reason for women’s tennis. How do people react when someone spoils their enjoyment? With anger directed at the person who did it. Duh.

    1. >No one cares about women’s sports as sports because the best female athletes are about as good as an excellent high school male athlete (depending on the sport).

      I’ve never heard this claim before. I don’t find it implausible, given sex-linked difference in bulk and distribution of muscle mass. But do the general statistics on male and female Olympic competitors support it?

  129. @HedgeMage (Susan Stewart)
    Just for the record, I’m the white mother of a white elementary school kid who currently (by choice) attends a predominantly-black charter school.

    All you had to say was Charter School. Kids going to a charter school, of any race, have parents who care about them. Your experience is going to be night-and-day different from what the author described.

    I went to high school less than 20 years ago in a smaller school district in Los Angeles County (Not LA Unified). The school I went to was still primarily white. However, we had a strong minority of black students. Most of those kids were quite normal, some were even serious achievers. The bell curve being what it is, there’s always outliers. HS Counselors being the stupid breed they are, I was told that I needed math courses that I had already taken due to a lack of records. So, as a freshman I ended up in a class that was still teaching fractions (I majored in Physics in college, so I’d love to meet that HS counselor again). Most of the class was black. There was one fat white kid (I wasn’t fat), who other than being a fat loner, was mostly behaved. The teacher was an old man who just wasn’t fully aware of what was going on. This fat white kid got picked on a lot by this group of 2-3 black guys in the class. He never put up a fight. One day the teacher left the classroom for 5 minutes, the instant the teacher left, these three black guys jumped out of their desks, ran to the front where this white kid was sitting, and all began beating him with their fists. This went on for about a minute. The white kid never left his chair, he just took it as best he could. I never reported it, to my knowledge, those guys never got in trouble for it. Maybe they had a reason, maybe it wasn’t random violence. It sure wasn’t behavior I ever saw anyone who cared about their education engaging in in HS.

    That was less than 20 years ago, in a mostly white school. What the author describes is easily believable to me. Kids (of *ANY* race) going to public school in a poor neighborhood get what their parents paid for, and they didn’t pay for much.

  130. Wow…that torrent of vitriol against Bartoli was a shock even to me.

    Note how you rarely hear this about Serena Williams.

    Yeah…with her it’s all references to “ape” etc….pedestrian racist fare.

  131. Well, it’s nice watching toned attractive women being active and this is especially true of tennis.

    Watching toned, athletic women is always a winner :)

    However, in tennis, I prefer the women’s matches because their lower power makes for more interesting rallies.

    Post Bjorn Borg-era men’s tennis is just *boring*. ACE ACE ACE ACE ACE fuck that for a game of soldiers ;)

  132. @esr
    I’ve never heard this claim before. I don’t find it implausible, given sex-linked difference in bulk and distribution of muscle mass. But do the general statistics on male and female Olympic competitors support it?

    If we look at track and field…
    Mens CIF State Finals results (2013): http://www.rtspt.com/events/cif/2013/130531F010.htm
    Womens 2012 Olympic Track and Field Results: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_at_the_2012_Summer_Olympics#Women

    You see that even high school mens 100m are faster than Olympic women.
    Gold in 100m Dash for women in the 2012 olympics was 10.75 seconds
    First Place in California Interscholastic Federation 100m Finals was 10.33 seconds.

    That’s just one event. Feel free to follow my links and find one that doesn’t follow the same pattern.

  133. So why do people watch women’s sports if they’re awful at sports? Well, it’s nice watching toned attractive women being active and this is especially true of tennis.

    Well, this has historically been true of men’s sports as well; the spectacle of oiled-up, muscled, naked men was just as much a justification for the ancient Greeks to hold the Olympics every four years as the competition, spirit of brotherhood among the city-states, etc.

    Watching athletes do their thing is always going to be titillating and arousing for someone. I see no reason to make that the basis of the competition — worse yet, for one sex but not another. Beauty contests are always available, and fine for what they are.

  134. @Steve Johnson
    > So why do people watch women’s sports if they’re awful at sports? Well, it’s nice watching toned attractive women being active and this is especially true of tennis.

    Maybe that is why you watch sports, but I don’t know what basis you claim to extrapolate you experience to everyone else. I think the reason people watch sports is kind of complicated. A lot of it is tribal (yah!!! an American won Wimbeldon, woo hoo, the White Sox beat the Cubbies.) A lot of it is the mirroring of the adrenaline caused by the competition. I think for a lot of people it is just watching people excelling at the limits of physical performance. No doubt some people watch it for the bouncing boobies, but there is a lot more to it than that. Are you disappointed that a sprinter can’t run 100 meters in 5 seconds? A woman might manage 11 seconds and a man 9 seconds, but if both are at the limits of their physical capacity, that seems perfectly interesting to me. Really, I don’t think it is about absolute scores so much as relative scores.

    Sports seems to me to be primarily a ritualized battle, and so I think the main reason people watch is simply to support “their team.” Do people watch a sports match without a preference as to who wins based on some non athletic reason? Not very often.

    Of course, we could be controversial. Since we segregate women’s sports from men’s sports based on their genetic capacity for athleticism, couldn’t that same argument be used to separate black leagues from white leagues too? One need only watch sports channel for ten minutes to know that there is a genetically based difference in athletic capacity in the races.

    1. >One need only watch sports channel for ten minutes to know that there is a genetically based difference in athletic capacity in the races.

      Yes, but the way these population differences net out is not simple. I wrote about them in Racism and group differences.

  135. >No one cares about women’s sports as sports because the best female athletes are about as good as an excellent high school male athlete (depending on the sport).

    I’ve never heard this claim before. I don’t find it implausible, given sex-linked difference in bulk and distribution of muscle mass. But do the general statistics on male and female Olympic competitors support it?

    Keep in mind that there’s likely to be a large distinction between high-power and high-skill sports, perhaps even to the point of bimodality. I’d expect to see complete male dominance in powerlifting, very little effect in marksmanship, and something in the middle for judo.

    1. >I’d expect to see complete male dominance in powerlifting, very little effect in marksmanship, and something in the middle for judo.

      Sensible. Though judo performance is more sensitive to muscle mass than you may realize. I say this from experience as a physically strong person who has trained in grappling and throwing arts, notably aikido. Just because they’re philosophically “soft” doesn’t mean I don’t collect some significant advantages – especially that some throws and locks are more difficult to work on me.

  136. …but if both are at the limits of their physical capacity, that seems perfectly interesting to me. Really, I don’t think it is about absolute scores so much as relative scores.

    The free market would disagree with you, which is why pee-wee sports are played in public parks with 3-rows of bleachers and NBA/NFL/MLB have hundred-million-dollar-price-tag stadiums.

  137. Of course, we could be controversial. Since we segregate women’s sports from men’s sports based on their genetic capacity for athleticism, couldn’t that same argument be used to separate black leagues from white leagues too? One need only watch sports channel for ten minutes to know that there is a genetically based difference in athletic capacity in the races.

    I actually do not agree with this. The reason that minorities in the U.S. are over-represented in professional sports is because their culture denigrates mental pursuits that may lead to reliable but boring employment later in favor of physical pursuits that may lead to “winning the NFL lottery” with a single child getting a big payout. American Black Culture spits on the black nerd, and glorifies the alpha-male rapper or sports star. You essentially have a single separated culture within the U.S. that grooms it’s children to be the breadwinners in one of these avenues to make up for all of the rest of the family’s failure to improve themselves.

  138. Sensible. Though judo performance is more sensitive to muscle mass than you may realize. I say this from experience as a physically strong person who has trained in grappling and throwing arts, notably aikido. Just because they’re philosophically “soft” doesn’t mean I don’t collect some significant advantages – especially that some throws and locks are more difficult to work on me.

    Thus the “middle”. ;-) My (mixed karate) sparring with small women usually came down to whether I could get enough (Newtonian and psychological) momentum before they did something surprising that was too quick for me! (Joint locks in my school were always odd, since the women were usually too weak to effectively hold them but too flexible to be held.)

  139. >Jeremy
    >The free market would disagree with you, which is why pee-wee sports are played in public parks with 3-rows of bleachers and NBA/NFL/MLB have hundred-million-dollar-price-tag stadiums.

    I’d bet a lot more people watch pee-wee sports that go to the gazillion dollar stadiums.

    Nevertheless, the flip side also can be argued. If, as whoever it was claimed, women’s sports is about bouncing boobies, then, Sumo wrestlers excepted, women should be shaking their money makers on the fields of those stadiums, not on the sidelines. Given that breast size is one of the few physical dimensions that women considerably exceed their male counterparts.

    Like I said, I think the main appeal of sports is ritualized battle, and consequentially tribalism. And since men were traditionally the battle makers, male sport more closely rivals this.

    Personally, I think sport is a fabulous thing, I was a competitive swimmer in college, and I currently practice Karate, and train kids in the art. I think spectator sport is actually a little pathetic and immature. The expression “spectator sport” makes me think of a 400lb guy with nacho sauce dripping down his shirt sitting on his fat ass yelling at an athlete to run faster, or tell him he is an idiot because he dropped a catch. But YMMV.

  140. Bullshit. But mine here is not a good argument.

    I’ll argument my position the way the author arguments his own position: “I am a teacher and this is bullshit.”

    (I am not actually a teacher. He probably isn’t, too.)

  141. >I’d bet a lot more people watch pee-wee sports that go to the gazillion dollar stadiums.

    Cost of going to a pee-wee game per person: $0
    Number of pee-wee football teams in the U.S., probably > 2000
    Cost of going to a major sports league game per person: >$100
    Number of teams in each of the major leagues < 50

    Pee-wee games are not televised, for the most part, whereas major sports are. The free market tells us that absolute performance is valued, or else Kobe Bryant would not be making $30,000,000 a year while younger basketball players volunteer. My point I think still stands quite starkly. The free market is telling us that, yes, absolute performance is valued higher than relative performance.

  142. Steve Johnson: Your generalization about women’s sports isn’t true everywhere. If you want to watch people give clinics on fundamental basketball skills instead of aerial hijinks that make good TV but lousy basketball, watch the WNBA.

  143. Jeremy
    > The free market is telling us that, yes, absolute performance is valued higher than relative performance.

    People’s time has value too you know. Not all value creation and consumption is monetized, in fact most isn’t, You are aware that the author of this blog is a big advocate of open source, software that is in large part created and consumed without monetization. Which isn’t to say of course that money can’t be made from open source software or pee wee baseball, it can and is. Red Hat is doing pretty well, and there are a lot of baseball bats and footballs under the Christmas tree, and a lot of kids spending a lot of their parent’s money at lacrosse camp this summer. However there is a lot of opportunity cost being spent in dad throwing a ball to his kid in the backyard. Why? So little Johnny and little Mary can kick ass against the team from the next subdivision over. Go Fighting Tigers.

    Furthermore, price is not an absolute measure of value either. Price is the point at which suppliers are willing to offer services at or below the price that buyers are willing to pay. It is why a cold beer at the ballpark costs more than a cold beer from your refrigerator.

    Pee wee games are not monetized for various societal reasons, memetically amateur sports is more virtuous. However, clearly parents pay lots and lots of money to travel with their kids to their games, equip their little players, pay fees and coaching camps and all that stuff. I don’t know if you have kids, but I have friends who do, and who play in various traveling sports leagues. They spend major cash to make it happen, tens of thousands of dollars in some cases.

    Its nuts, I agree. But so is paying $150 times four and $50 more in food to sit on your butt and watch the Yankees get beat by the White Sox. (IMHO)

  144. > >Yes, there were some nineteenth century people that disagreed, that argued that Egyptians etc were not Caucasians. But they were leftists.

    esr:
    > British regimental troopers were leftists. Rudyard Kipling was a leftist. Yeah, tell me another one.

    Be so kind as to quote Kipling on Egyptians or Caucasians.

    You are spouting hatred out of ignorance.

    People in the nineteenth century realistically and accurately noticed racial differences now forbidden. They noticed small distinctions in race, such as the distinction between the Scottish race and the English race, and large distinctions in race, such as the distinction between the Caucasian race and the negro race. And Egyptians, were of course, in the Caucasian race, unless you were a leftist to whom all such distinctions were arbitrary, meaningless, and therefore can be reinvented as politically convenient.

    Naturally leftists put Europeans and especially Britons in a different category (the category of races that deserve to be hated and ethnically cleansed from all the lands that they have so unjustly acquired) to Egyptians (poor innocent victims, who are not only equal, but more equal than Britons), while the nineteenth century mainstream grouped races according to actual race resemblance and ancient ancestry.

    If someone today advocates the policies that Obama supposedly advocated a few years ago, he is not merely a right winger, but an extreme right winger. Words do not exist to say how awful, stupid, and evil someone would be if he were to shockingly advocate what was mainstream fifteen years ago.

    It follows therefore that anything you read about the nineteenth century in twenty first century sources is crazed hate filled fanatical demonization, even if the twenty first century source is supposedly right wing, even if it is supposedly extreme right wing, for “extreme right wing”, means endorsing the views that were standard orthodoxy, standard democratic party orthodoxy, in the year 2000 or so.

    And you are ignorantly spouting what you think you have learned from crazed hate filled demonization.

    To understand the views of nineteenth century people, you have to read nineteenth century people. Twentieth century accounts of nineteenth century views are not only inaccurate, but wildly, insanely, bizarrely, inaccurate, merely the wild snarls and growls of a rabid dog.

  145. Way OT, but given the interests of our host and many of his commentators, I think as the official “Armed and Dangerous” representative from Illinois it appropriate to comment on a momentous occasion.

    Today as a follow on consequence of DC vs Heller, Illinois because the last state in the union to remove laws against concealed carry of a weapon. It is a shall issue law with mildly onerous requirements, and a number of significant restrictions, however, it is still a day worthy of mention.

    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-illinois-concealed-carry,0,4356935.story

  146. TomA
    > The decline of black culture in the US began in the mid 1960s with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Initiative.

    I would say the decline of black culture began with the abolition of Jim Crow. Under Jim Crow, a black was likely to work for a black employer. If he misbehaved, he was likely to be arrested by a black policeman, and hauled before a black judge. This gave blacks dignity that affirmative action jobs where the real work is done by a white person do not give them, the dignity of real work that produces real value.

    Not only is white behavior more antisocial in integrated suburbs, black behavior is more anti social in integrated suburbs.

  147. Bottom line, you won’t like this, it is established social science that Blacks have the lowest IQs in the US, and African Blacks the lowest save Kalahari Bushmen and Australian Aborigines. Sources here. Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ, at 110, next up NE Asians at 105 (yes, smarter than non-Ashkenazi Whites), next Whites at 100 (again, Whites are NOT the smartest group), next Hispanics at around 88, next Blacks in the US at about 85, next Africans at around 70, with Kalahari Bushmen, Pygmies, and Aborigines at around 50 or so.

    You are concerned with traditional Post-Christian American morality. I don’t care, since America long ceased to exist as anything other than a place on the map filled with Mexican and Central American illegal aliens intent on extracting the maximum amount of welfare from people like me; while people like me are officially non-persons.

    I just don’t care, not a whit, about being called “bigot” for accurately knowing the average propensity of Black people towards low IQ behavior — violent aggression, racial hatred towards Whites, lack of fear of consequences. I don’t need or want groveling from Blacks towards me nor love nor do I care if they hate me in private. Why would I? I need or want nothing from Black people, save not being beaten, robbed, nor my family murdered and tortured. That’s not too much to ask but apparently for Black people, it is.

    So I view Black people as the threat to my well being and that of my family that they are. I have no illusions of this ever changing, EVER, since they are what they are because of their low intelligence on average. I know that in any sufficiently large group of Black people there will be geniuses, but their influence will be nothing because the low IQ group dominates. I know from the accounts of intelligent Black men and women that hell is being smart and surrounded by Black people, even more than Theodore Dalrymple’s low-IQ White proles.

    I wish to avoid Black people at all costs, never be unarmed around them, and always have an escape route planned, or several, should I encounter them. I would rather flee than fight, but I would rather live than be tortured and murdered; like Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome, or Bob and Nancy Straight, or the two White British tourists in Sarasota, or the White boy burned alive in Miami.

    I know some Black people are not my enemy, those of moderate or high IQ, or those raised with religious boundaries. The problem they have (as I said I care only about my physical safety not social status or a long-dead nation and its rituals) is that I as a target #1 have no way of distinguishing them from those of low IQ threat at a glance. Thus I am courteous to all, non-commital, and watch my back and trust no one.

    If you want a different attitude out of me, you better restore my long dead nation (good luck with that!) and not vilify me as enemy #1. As a free man I am not obligated to bow and scrape before any idol — and I won’t.

  148. Jessica Boxer on 2013-07-09 at 12:57:19 said:

    @Steve Johnson
    > So why do people watch women’s sports if they’re awful at sports? Well, it’s nice watching toned attractive women being active and this is especially true of tennis.

    Maybe that is why you watch sports, but I don’t know what basis you claim to extrapolate you experience to everyone else.

    It’s a testable proposition.

    WNBA – crappy competition (basically no woman is strong and coordinated enough to shoot with any fluidity) and ugly women – no one watches.

    Women’s tennis – still crappy competition but attractive women (except for the uglier of the Williams sisters) and lots of people watch.

    As far as tribalism goes that simply doesn’t apply to women’s sports. My tribe’s women can beat up your tribe’s women? Who cares? If our tribes went to war the women would be the prizes not the warriors.

  149. Jeff Read on 2013-07-09 at 12:20:28 said:

    So why do people watch women’s sports if they’re awful at sports? Well, it’s nice watching toned attractive women being active and this is especially true of tennis.

    Well, this has historically been true of men’s sports as well; the spectacle of oiled-up, muscled, naked men was just as much a justification for the ancient Greeks to hold the Olympics every four years as the competition, spirit of brotherhood among the city-states, etc.

    Another meme that’s about destroying culture by poisoning it – by way of implying that something you don’t like is gay – instead of advancing the discussion.

    If your hypothesis was true women and gays would be interested in sports when for the most part they’re just not. When women and gays become interested in something men actively abandon it or set up other competitions – take dog shows for example. As they’ve been increasingly run by women and gays men have increasingly lost interest (incidentally, the breeding has gone insane as well with no thought to function and attention to form in such a manner that the dogs produced can’t function).

    Men are sincerely and actually interested in sports to watch competition, for tribalism, to see high levels of performance, and for the mental stimulation of thinking about game strategy.

  150. > Steve Johnson
    > It’s a testable proposition.

    “Testable” is not the same as “give an example to support your position.” You chose one of the few sports where women are not attractive in the classic way. But I think there are lots of reasons why WNBA is unsuccessful besides the attractiveness of the players.

    The nature of sports demands that women are lean and fit and well toned, which are the markers for health and attractiveness. But there are lots of sports with attractive women which are also not much watched. Swimming (my sport) is perhaps the sport that produces the most classically shaped female body, yet not too many people watch it outside the Olympics. Figure skating the same, hot chicks in tight outfits, but guys only watch it with their girlfriends because they think it’ll get them laid. How about cheerleading, a sport that is hyper competitive, full of women obsessed about their looks, and popular almost exclusively among women.

    > As far as tribalism goes that simply doesn’t apply to women’s sports.

    Not true at all. Have you seen the reaction of the American crowd supporting our women athletes at the Olympics and the world cup?

    I’ll grant you that generally speaking women are less interested in sports than men, and a significant segment of those who do see it through the lens of their man. For me spectator sports are mostly about tribalism and vicarious living. It is pretty hard for the dominant watchers (men) to live vicariously through an excellent woman athlete. And like I say, I think my comments earlier about how sophomoric spectator sports are is not a view unique to this woman.

  151. Jeff Read
    > This isn’t racism, it’s sexism — from male sports fans who think women athletes are there to look pretty rather than, you know, play the game.

    Women who are good at tennis look hot – unless they are taking steroids, as far too often they are.

    Fit women look good. Weight lifting women look ugly. Women who take body building steroids look even uglier.

  152. Steve Johnson wrote “Men are sincerely and actually interested in sports to watch competition, for tribalism, to see high levels of performance, and for the mental stimulation of thinking about game strategy.”

    That sounds about right to me. If I were to try to add something of comparable importance to the list, it wouldn’t be beefcake/cheesecake, it would be gambling. Gambling is obviously not an absolute requirement for sport, but sport is such a popular base for gambling that the two interests can support each other very strongly. I think adding gambling to a purely no-cake sport like automobile racing would be a much bigger draw than tuning a no-gambling sport to maximize cakicity.

  153. Black crime levels just naturally tend to be higher than white levels, and black family formation lower. Black societies that have successfully imposed and maintained order and patriarchy, for example the Ashantee empire, used dramatically more severe levels of coercion than comparable white societies.

    Jamaica, which is markedly better governed than most black majority places, has levels of enforcement that are comparable to white societies. The result is levels of crime that are much higher than in white societies. It is pretty obvious that they need to introduce floggings, amputations, and executions, Ashantee style. Despite, or perhaps because of, the level of good government in Jamaica, government strikingly similar to that which white societies commonly provide, and black societies seldom provide, the Jamaican crime rate is close to being the highest in the world.

    So how do you explain Botswana?

  154. Patrick
    > Perhaps you will find this man’s story to be of interest.
    > http://www.sptimes.com//2007/05/13/Opinion/I_had_a_dream.shtml

    The traditionally black college is going to hell precisely because Jim Crow ended. Under Jim Crow, they had the best blacks as professors. With the end of Jim Crow, they have the worst whites as professors. This demoralizes both the professors and their mostly black students, even if the academic quality of the staff and student body is not much changed. Instead of black successes as role models, the students have white failures as professors.

  155. Kipling is interesting in some part because his India fiction and poetry was an extended argument for respecting the Indians that general opinion of the time largely dismissed as “wogs” – a term never in period applied to Europeans or their notional equals.

    Really?! I find that impossible to believe. How could it be that in Kipling’s day Europeans were not wogs, and yet not all that much later the term came to mean almost exclusively South Europeans? And what of the half-facetious but common saying that “wogs begin at Calais”? Does that not date from Kipling’s time?

    1. > And what of the half-facetious but common saying that “wogs begin at Calais”? Does that not date from Kipling’s time?

      It does not. “Wogs begin at Calais” doesn’t seem to predate WWI and may not be much older than the use that made it infamous, in 1949, when a Labor MP accused Churchill of believing this.

      As for “wog” being used for Southern Europeans, to my knowledge that’s a strictly Australian mutation not found in British English (Wikipedia confirms, for whatever that’s worth). Since I know you’re from Australia originally, your interpretation is understandable.

      It will help you interpret British usage to know that “wog” has a folk etymology as “Wily Oriental Gentleman”. If I’m interpreting the period sources correctly, the center of the category was actually Arabs, Persians, other Central Asians, and Egyptians – with the term slightly less consistently used of Indians and much less applied to blacks. Blacks were often just tagged “niggers” instead, but an indication of how different Victorian categories were is that the n-word was also casually used to apply to low-caste Indians (possibly because they tend to be darker-skinned).

      It’s pretty clear in the sources that wogs were considered higher on an implied scale of worthiness than niggers, but lower than Mediterranean Europeans and Jews (Jews were nearly white). Another fine point about the term is that, opposite to Australian use, it doesn’t seem to have been applied to foreigners in Britain; it was military and travellers’ slang for foreigners in their native context.

      I don’t know if “wog” was generally used of Chinese and other East Asians. I’m going to guess (and I’m reporting this because of the reason for my guess) that Chinese didn’t catch it a lot. Even the sort of semi-literate working-class Brit who ended up as line troops seems to have been aware that the Chinese had a very old and complex civilization; period sources hint Chinese got treated just a bit less dismissively than most other non-Europeans.

  156. Iconochasm commented on After such knowledge….
    > I’ve never heard it phrased in JAD’s way, but I’ve seen the claim before that the “sexless angels” angle was invented by the early suffragette movement as a way to claim a moral high ground.

    The earliest version I find is the passionate national debate about the divorce of George the fourth and Caroline. King George produced compelling evidence that his wife Caroline had committed adultery, but the left reaction was that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and King George failed to get his divorce.

    The effect of this position was that women were unlikely to be punished for violation of the marriage contract, since supposedly a woman would never do such a thing, which in 1857, in the marital causes act, became law – female misconduct did not have punitive consequences that it previously would have had.

    And, since then, the law has moved ever further in favor of the wife, undermining the marital contract.

    After the marital causes act we see the movement to “rescue fallen women” – by abolishing all the unpleasant legal, social, and economic consequences of falling. This strategy only makes sense if women do not like falling, and are forced to fall by evil men, which was pretty much the argument that these people made.

    The “fallen women” movement was the bridge between the supposedly anti sex puritans of Cromwell’s time, and the supposedly pro sex puritans of our time, the common factor being that neither of them liked low status men getting any.

  157. Jessica Boxer on 2013-07-09 at 21:06:48 said:

    But there are lots of sports with attractive women which are also not much watched. Swimming (my sport) is perhaps the sport that produces the most classically shaped female body, yet not too many people watch it outside the Olympics.

    Ahem,

    http://0.tqn.com/d/swimming/1/0/B/C/trickett_80423330.jpg

    Or here’s a woman with a pretty face but dear god is she repulsive:

    http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EnoCiPo5W5I/TUCb-HNdylI/AAAAAAAAB2o/FEkVY2W4HrI/s1600/1.Inge%2Bde%2BBruijn.jpg

    My selection method for these pics? I did a google image search on “female swimmer” and these were in the first 5 hits.

    Figure skating the same, hot chicks in tight outfits, but guys only watch it with their girlfriends because they think it’ll get them laid. How about cheerleading, a sport that is hyper competitive, full of women obsessed about their looks, and popular almost exclusively among women.

    Both of these “sports” suffer from the same exact problem – they aren’t sports – they’re judged competitions. Men don’t go in for judged competitions. On top of that they’re culturally poisoned by gays being fans. Gays being so repulsive to men leads men to go to huge lengths to disassociate themselves with anything thought to be gay.

    William Newman on 2013-07-09 at 21:18:47 said:

    If I were to try to add something of comparable importance to the list, it wouldn’t be beefcake/cheesecake, it would be gambling.

    I agree but I think it’s a subset of thinking about the game and game strategy. People like to bet to “put their money where their mouth is” – in other words it’s a way for people who don’t deal well with abstract concepts to get an immediate payoff for correct thinking. People who are more comfortable with abstract concepts try to get that thrill in other ways – ways that don’t necessarily have a such a tangible beginning / ending and payoff.

  158. Milhouse on 2013-07-09 at 23:01:32 said:

    And what of the half-facetious but common saying that “wogs begin at Calais”? Does that not date from Kipling’s time?

    From wikipedia:

    The saying “The wogs begin at Calais” (implying that everyone who is not British is a wog) appears to date from the First World War, but was popularised by George Wigg, Labour MP for Dudley, in 1949 when in a parliamentary debate concerning the Burmese, Wigg shouted at the Conservative benches, “The Honourable Gentleman and his friends think they are all ‘wogs’. Indeed, the Right Honourable Member for Woodford [i.e. Winston Churchill] thinks that the ‘wogs’ begin at Calais.”

    In other words, exactly what Jim was saying – it was a slur from the left directed at the right by implying that they’re horrible bigots and therefore horrible people.

  159. Milhouse on 2013-07-09 at 21:58:41 said:
    > So how do you explain Botswana?

    Botswana is, or recently was, run by whites with black aristocrats fronting for them, which is the same arrangement that they had before independence. What is it that needs explaining about Botswana?

    During independence, Britain attempted to get rid of the black aristos, and install the usual anti colonialist London School of Economics graduates to screw up the economy, but was thwarted.

  160. William Newman commented on After such knowledge….
    > Separate water fountains and sitting at the back of the bus were not in favor of blacks.

    Neither did they harm blacks. Separate universities, however, were a measure in favor of blacks. For a black to become a professor in a black university, or a black to become a student in a black university, required a much lower level of ability than becoming a student in a white university.

    And, on graduating from that university, the graduate would usually get jobs in the black community that were similarly protected from white competition. The intent in creating these jobs being to manufacture a black ruling class inculcated with white middle class values to govern the black community. This mean that members of that black elite got real jobs where they actually produced value, instead of jobs where some white guy does the actual work, jobs that built their character, instead of destroying them.

    Jim Crow created a career path for the superior blacks that was protected from white competition, but nonetheless involved real, productive work, work that genuinely created value.

    This created a black society socially culturally dominated by a black middle class with middle class values, whereas today blacks that are supposedly middle class usually have thug values, and if they have middle class values, they have no impact on black society. Their fellow blacks despise them, and they despise themselves, knowing their jobs are fake, merely a more generous form of welfare.

    Jim Crow created real jobs for the better blacks, while affirmative action creates fake jobs for the better blacks, thinly disguised welfare, which destroys them.

  161. >Steve Johnson
    > My selection method for these pics? I did a google image search on “female swimmer”

    Curious, the first three I saw with the same search were:

    http://graphics.fansonly.com/photos/schools/cal/sports/w-swim/auto_action/a-coughlin2-0203wswim.jpg
    http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/female-swimmer-25735244.jpg
    http://www.lifesaving.tw/swim/intro/JennyThompson.files/image001.jpg

    I thought all three of those girls looked awesome.

    > Both of these “sports” suffer from the same exact problem – they aren’t sports – they’re judged competitions.

    Not a true Scotsman, huh? Are you questioning whether these “activities” are highly athletic and extremely competitive? Apparently women are not focused on a single number, instead dealing with multiple simultaneous metrics. It’s not like these competitions are judged based on subjective criteria.

  162. What is it that needs explaining about Botswana?

    A self-governing black society without Ashantee-level law-enforcement, and yet with very low crime levels* and generally not a shit-hole like the rest of black Africa. To me it’s the proof that the state of the rest of black Africa can’t be blamed on race. If the Batswana can maintain the pleasant country that the British bequeathed them, then so could the rest of Africa. That they didn’t is therefore due to something else.

    * Especially before the flood of Zimbabwean refugees came. But the “crime wave” that the refugees brought seems to have consisted mainly of cell phone thefts, and people complaining of having to start locking their doors and windows at night, which they had never bothered to do before. By most standards, that’s still pretty low-crime.

  163. esr commented on After such knowledge….
    > >[Egyptians] were substantially more caucasian than europeans

    > And there’s the tip-off to what those period sources actually meant – that “Caucasians” were not at the time considered “white”, that is the same race as Britons and other Northern Europeans

    Try searching google books for the phrase “the anglo saxon portion of the caucasian race” or “the Anglo-Saxon stock of the Caucasian race”

    Of course Caucasians, such as Egyptians, were considered white. Nineteenth century people assigned people’s race on the basis of ancestry and appearance, whereas moderns assign race on the basis of victim status. Today, if you are one of the evil hateful horrid oppressors, for example George Zimmerman, you are white. If, on the other hand, you are one of the poor victimized oppressed, for example the Boston Bombers, you are nonwhite.

    You have been driven frothing at the mouth insane by reading books whose depiction of our very recent past is frothing at the mouth insane

    Reading those victim centric categories onto nineteenth century references to race results in a depiction of the ninenteenth century that is flat out raving mad.

    The modern practice of ascribing race on the basis of virtuous victimhood or hateful evil became influential in the nineteenth century, but the practice of ascribing race on the basis of actual race remained dominant over the victim centric definition of race until around 1930 or so.

  164. Whom did separate water fountains and restrooms favour? I don’t see how it harmed blacks more than whites, or vice versa. It seems to me that the only people it helped were manufacturers of these things, and plumbers.

  165. Not a true Scotsman, huh?

    No, they’re not sports by a very clear criteria – (1) you have no idea who won when the competition is over until someone tells you what they thought (2) there’s no interaction between the players – cheerleaders aren’t going out and stopping other cheerleaders with tenacious defense. They watch when the other cheerleaders do whatever the hell it is you do in cheering contests.

    There are some sports that men watch that fail criteria (2) – the most popular of these is athletics (track and field) – which isn’t nearly as popular as team sports, golf or tennis. The only sports that men watch that fail (1) actually have other win conditions that are considered better wins by the fans of the sports – boxing and mixed martial arts both have judges determine the winner – but only if neither fighter submitted / incapacitated his opponent. There are almost no sports that men watch that fail both (1) and (2) – rare exceptions are things like snowboarding half pipe (which is very similar to figure skating in form – you do stunts that are judged for quality) – which gets watched only when it’s in the winter Olympics – and even then it’s eclipsed by snowboard cross – which doesn’t fail (1) or (2).

    Apparently women are not focused on a single number, instead dealing with multiple simultaneous metrics.

    Women like competitions that simulate their reality – they go out and display themselves then wait for someone to tell them who’s more popular afterward. Men don’t find that very interesting.

    Women deal with a single metric – who likes me?

    Are you questioning whether these “activities” are highly athletic and extremely competitive?

    Well, women can do them so they can’t require that much athleticism.

    I thought all three of those girls looked awesome.

    That’s because you’re not a heterosexual man.

    Here’s another picture of Jenny Thompson:

    http://lovely-pics.com/data/media/28/jenny_thompson__swimming.jpg

    She’s not hideous but she’d clearly look better if she didn’t have hugely hypertrophied arms from being a competitive swimmer.

    Here’s another picture of Natalie Coughlin

    http://i2.listal.com/image/4062427/600full-natalie-coughlin.jpg

    She’s a beautiful girl (if a bit heavy jawed) with a completely unattractive body – shaped by the demands of her sport (also note that in that picture she’s holding her arms behind her body – a common pose for women swimmers – why? It hides their gigantic lat muscles).

    My explanation still holds – men don’t watch women’s swimming because (a) they’re not very good swimmers compared to men at much lower levels (which people don’t watch either) and (b) they’re not attractive enough to make up for it – the ones that are pretty (and there are quite a few that have very nice faces) don’t actually look good because of the mannish bodies (and the swimming gear doesn’t help too much – it’s hard for any woman to look good with no hair showing and goggles over the eyes – eyes and hair are among the most critical features to a woman’s appearance).

  166. Do you even listen to yourself when you spout nonsense like this? The “leftist” category you want to invoke barely existed before 1860; Marxist theory didn’t get enough traction to distort popular attitudes in Great Britain until well into the 1890s.

    Politically speaking, how would you describe, as an example, the Puritans and their various fellow Calvinists? (And not just in Massachusetts- in the Republic of Geneva, Cromwell’s England, etc)

    Anyway, that’s a sidetrack. Back on the main track, HedgeMage and others are quite right that this is a cultural issue that, unfortunately is easily conflated with race. I would recommend once again reading Thomas Sowell, he has done a lot of work separating the racial from the cultural that I find quite convincing.

    Not least because it fits in so well with my own experiences growing up in NYC. For example, there is/was more than one ‘black’ culture and the problems we see (and read about in the original material that inspired this post) are associated with only one of those cultures. (I went to school with a black kid whose family were in a very real sense Boston Brahmin intellectuals, who fled the traditional NYC black community a few decades back when the Southern blacks migrated in.) The ‘problem’ culture was (and to some extent is) present in whites as well, but in whites it largely died out because it was uncompetitive/counterproductive. It was dying out in black as well until the coming of the welfare state.

    1. >Politically speaking, how would you describe, as an example, the Puritans and their various fellow Calvinists?

      As theocrats. I don’t get what you’re driving at here.

  167. This would appear to be another example of the artificial limitations imposed on our public discourse by the perpetually offended causing the racists and crackpots looking better than they really are by virtue of having a monopoly on the expression of certain actual truths. The piece linked to contains some of those truths.

    Seems to me you take away the persuasiveness of the racists/etc as speakers of the truth, by doing a better job of speaking the truth, and not letting there BE forbidden truth for the racists to use misleadingly for evil purposes.

    Which you’ve known all along, so I don’t know what’s changed.

  168. @Jessica
    “I’ll grant you that generally speaking women are less interested in sports than men, and a significant segment of those who do see it through the lens of their man. For me spectator sports are mostly about tribalism and vicarious living.”

    It is just testosteron. People want competition in relation to testosterone levels.

    http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/faculty/josephs/pdf_documents/EdwardsComment_MehtaJosephs.pdf

    It seems men have higher testosterone levels than women, so they would be more prone to seek raw competition. If you cannot compete yourself, you compete by proxy, i.e., watch sports.

  169. esr:
    >> the Indians that general opinion of the time largely dismissed as “wogs” – a term never in period applied to Europeans or their notional equals.

    Milhouse
    > Really?! I find that impossible to believe.

    In Kipling’s day, of course, no one was a wog. The word is mid twentieth century. Kipling was dead before anyone used the word wog to refer to people.

    Esr is just confabulating shit to rationalize his madness. If he knew anything about the nineteenth century, he would realize how completely batshit insane he sounds. The idea of Kipling, or anglo saxons before Word War I, using racial terms as epithets is just frothing at the mouth crazy.

    Mainstream racial terminology in the nineteenth century was simply factual and descriptive. The only use of racial terms as epithets was by the left, who were then as now pushing the modern definition of race, where whites were not only oppressors, but were defined by oppressing. If you did not oppress, you were not white. If you were white, you oppressed.

    1. >In Kipling’s day, of course, no one was a wog. The word is mid twentieth century. Kipling was dead before anyone used the word wog to refer to people.

      This nonsense is easily refuted with a few on-line searches. The word was described as an “old-timer’s term” in a 1929 lexicon; Kipling lived until 1936. Well, on this planet; perhaps he died in 44BC on whatever bizarro-world JAD reports in from.

      >The idea of Kipling, or anglo saxons before Word War I, using racial terms as epithets is just frothing at the mouth crazy.

      In period, “wog” wasn’t exactly an epithet (in the sense of a word hurled as an insult). For that matter neither was “nigger”, necessarily. It was all very matter-of-fact to Victorians and Edwardians; there were wogs and niggers and white men and Anglo-Saxons and the implied scale of value was just the way things were. Compare Indian use of the word “feringhee”, which wasn’t an epithet either.

      It is, on the other hand, true as far as I know that Kipling is not recorded to have used “wog” when speaking in his own voice – there might be mentions of it in his soldier dialect but I don’t have an easy way to check. As I noted previously, Kipling’s India fiction reads in part as an extended preachment against the idea that Indians were inferior to Europeans; he rejected the assumptions within which the terms “wog” and “nigger” were embedded, though as an anti-Semite he was no paragon of anti-racist virtue.

  170. > > What is it that needs explaining about Botswana?

    Milhouse
    > A self-governing black society without Ashantee-level law-enforcement, and yet with very low crime levels* and generally not a shit-hole like the rest of black Africa.

    Botswana uses judicial floggings, judicial executions, and frequent extra judicial punishment. Penalties are severe. They are not Ashantee, but they lean a bit that way.

    If you don’t have floggings and police beatings, it is hard to acceptable levels of order and security among blacks.

  171. esr
    > This nonsense is easily refuted with a few on-line searches. The word [wog] was described as an “old-timer’s term” in a 1929 lexicon;

    An old timer’s term for what? Tadpoles? That is what comes up when I google pre 1930 usage of the term “wog”. Let us see your lexicon entry.

    But in any case, regardless of how the term “wog” was used in the twentieth century, your claim was that Victorians did not see Egyptians as Caucasian, which I refuted.

    You then changed your claim to claim that Victorians did not see themselves as Caucasian, which I also refuted.

    So what is your claim now? That there were people in 1929 who did not see Egyptians as Caucasian?

    Of course there were. As I said in the beginning, throughout the nineteenth century leftists sought to define race by victimization and oppression, without regard to actual race, and around 1930 or so leftists got the upper hand on race and imposed their language on everyone. Egyptians, being oppressed by the evil hateful whites, are, by leftwing definition, nonwhite, and not only equal to whites, but more equal than whites, so, by around 1930 or so, Egyptians became nonwhite, though there was resistance to this then, and there is still quite a bit of resistance to it today.

    However, by the dominant Victorian definition, of identifying people’s race by ancestry and appearance, defining race by actual reality, Egyptians are Caucasian, and Anglo Saxons are Caucasian, and that is what all Victorians except for the radical left believed. (Radical left by Victorian standards, though I suppose that must make them unimaginably right wing by today’s standards)

    And because Victorian use of racial terminology corresponded to actual reality, racial terms were not epithets, nor likely to be used as epithets, but simply facts.

    1. >An old timer’s term for what?

      F.C. Bowen, “Sea slang: a dictionary of the old-timers’ expressions and epithets”, 1929. Look it up. Definitely used then of Indian humans, though possibly derived from the term “polliwog” for a tadpole; this is common speculation but nobody actually knows. I certainly don’t claim to.

      Wikipedia notes correctly that the phrase “Wogs begin at Calais” was in use as early as WWI, and that phrase only makes sense if the term “wog” was already well established in military slang by then. I believe I first ran across it as a child in Great Britain in quotes from period sources on Kitchener’s Sudan campaign, which is why I’m particularly sure it was used of Egyptians. None of that history is taught in American schools, of course.

      >which I refuted.

      I haven’t seen any refutation. I’ve seen a lot of false-to-fact claims. And dancing with different, occasionally conflicting uses of the term “Caucasian”. But since I don’t expect great intellectual acuity or even basic sanity from racists this surprises me not at all.

  172. Wow, I haven’t felt out of place on this blog until now. That the racist source article was accepted as truth by so many here is disappointing. There may be grains of truth mixed in with the racism but that is true of all stereotypes and the most effective lies contain some nugget of truth to make it believable. But that doesn’t make it not racist nor not a lie.

    I grew up in the deep south and still remember the faded signs for colored drinking fountains. Fountains that I would probably have had to use had the laws not been changed. Laws changed largely by African Americans and them evil liberals. Assholes that don’t believe separate schools and seperate drinking fountains harmful invariably get to go to the white schools and drink from the white fountains. Are there participants in this “discussion” that aren’t white?

    It is interesting how thin the “equality” veneer is over “modern” conservatism even in a geek hangout.

    1. >It is interesting how thin the “equality” veneer is over “modern” conservatism even in a geek hangout.

      Don’t overinterpret. I think the comments on the post attracted a number of white-nationalist types who aren’t going to stick around. I hope not, anyway; one racist scumbag among the regulars is as much of that crap as I want to deal with, and more would strain my free-speech policy.

      I’m not seeing uncritical acceptance of that report among A&D regulars who aren’t JAD. I’d be quite disappointed if I did.

  173. >>Politically speaking, how would you describe, as an example, the Puritans and their various
    >>fellow Calvinists?

    >As theocrats. I don’t get what you’re driving at here.

    Well that’s true. But that’s not all.

    Proto-leftists. Demolition of existing power structures, utopian politics, an assumed position of automatic moral righteousness that justified any actual evil they performed… those silly Pilgrims even started a commune.

    You can be a leftist and predate Marxism.

    1. >You can be a leftist and predate Marxism

      True. But the pathology under discussion was a specifically Marxist trope – not just that but actually a 20th-century Marxist trope; Marxists didn’t even pretend to be much bothered by racism, or routinely use accusations of racism as a rhetorical club, until after Baran & Wallerstein replaced the vanishing proletariat with the Third World in the theory of immiseration. This was a post-WWII development.

      JAD’s attempt to back-project Marxist racial kafkatrapping onto the early 19th century is particularly ludicrous in view of the fact that the “left” of that time (classical liberals, not Marxists) were strongly associated both with the movement for the abolition of chattel slavery and the valorization of free-enterprise capitalism and free trade. Their “right-wing” opponents, the Tory mercantilists, were pro-slavery and pro-state-intervention.

  174. sorry to push my point, but I’m interested in your opinion on my take of the post, namely that schools with dismal discipline problems obscure a wider problem: that education is rapidly becoming something of a commodity, of little value to both pupils and their parents . Hence my idea that situations like those described in the OP are just the other side of ‘good’ schools where no student ever fails a test.

    (my opinion is based on my academic career in 3 different euro countries: in all the universities I worked at, I was told – in some way or the other – that I could not fail students)

    1. >education is rapidly becoming something of a commodity, of little value to both pupils and their parents.

      I missed your original comment, and my comment-search box has inexplicably disappeared (the button is still on my admin screen but it does nothing). Recap, please?

  175. here is my previous post:

    I sincerely do not understand how any of this can come as a surprise to any well-informed American. It does not seem to me that different from what the sub-genre of white-teacher-black-school films routinely show – without the happy ending, of course, but who is so bland here as to believe in hollywood happy endings? It also squares with what my friends with children that lived for a while in the US tell me about public schools there (not necessarily black).

    To me, what is surprising is how this teacher could be completely unaware of the conditions he was going to find himself in: how could he never have heard of whole classes completely uninterested in education, black communities living on social services etc.? I’m not American, have never been to the US, have no connection with American blacks, but I seem to have more specific information than he had. As a linguist, I was particularly shocked by his surprise that “blacks’ grammar is wrong”. Apparently, 60 plus years of research and debates over AAVE have escaped him completely. How separate are races in your country???

    As for the rest of the piece, I find it rather irrelevant, as the author fails to understand that his experience is part of a larger problem: a community’s complete absence of interest in school and education can exist, and have the same negative long-term effects even if the condition at school are not so bad as those described in the piece.

    As an italian, it would easy for me to find parallels to the piece’s observations in the south, say around Naples (our own Detroit), but the point is that you do not need drug-dealers inside the classroom and serially pregnant teenagers to find communities that have given up on education altogether. Go to the lower middle class areas of Rome and Milan and you will find them there too. For the first time in centuries, whole parts of society have renounced eduction as a path to a better life, and this is happening quickly and globally (certainly in Europe and South-America): it ain’t just rap music and crack.

    It cannot see it more clearly than in the South-America I hail from (the rio de la plata region): the difference between my parents’ generation’s efforts to provide an education to their children, and today’s families complete lack of interest in anything connected to school is huge, and indifferent to any kind of solution. It is petty and narrow-minded to blame “libruls” for this, everything has been tried and nothing seems to work.

    The author seems to grasp some aspect of this issue when he says that “for centuries” we had an education system that worked. True — and any experienced teacher can tell you how this was completely unconnected to reality already in the early 60?s. Think about the whole self-esteem trend in “good” schools, the actual “difficulty” in passing tests and exams in “good” private schools — isn’it the reverse side of what this piece talks about?

    1. >For the first time in centuries, whole parts of society have renounced eduction as a path to a better life,

      Yes. Correlates perfectly with the rise of the welfare state. I don’t think there’s a mystery here; if you subsidize stupidity and sloth, you remove the incentives for education. An underclass begins to form. Eventually underclass groups develop pathological cultures that tend to lock in even the kids bright enough to leave.

      You’re right that race doesn’t drive the problem. But IQ distribution faithfully predicts who is most likely to fall out the bottom of the system when those incentives erode. Population groups with lower IQ means will be overrepresented in the underclass, so it will look like there is some sort of racial discrimination causing underclass formation to anyone with a mind to view social problems through that lens.

      To make the problem worse:

      1. Teach the underclass an ideology that describes them as victims of sinister oppressive forces.

      2. Have an overclass political faction that gains power from using the underclass as a captive voting bloc.

      This isn’t exclusively a modern phenomenon. Read any history of the Roman Republic to see how it worked out for them.

      1. I wrote: “it will look like there is some sort of racial discrimination causing underclass formation to anyone with a mind to view social problems through that lens.”

        I should add that, of course, racists will seize on racial inferiority as an explanation. And they’ll get it wrong, because while the race breakdown of the underclass will differ dramatically from society at large that divergence won’t actually be coupled through the accidental characteristics like melanization that people use as race markers.

  176. @Fedreico
    “in all the universities I worked at, I was told – in some way or the other – that I could not fail students”

    This is a disturbing trend, but not universally. As usual, quality requires commitment. I think this should me the take-home message of the original post: You can deliver good education, but you have to make an effort and commit to quality.

    I have only experience with Dutch universities. There was a huge scandal about colleges (“vocational” schools teaching for a bachelor degree only) that did just this. I know that it has been going on for years. After that scandal, these schools were crucified and changed course.

    However, the universities (those that include Master degrees) do fail students on a regular basis. In the sciences, half of the students can be kicked off before they get their bachelor degree. There are Majors where only a third of the students gets a degree. Most change to some subject that suits them more.

    Secondary schools here are tiered and end with a national exam. There have been scandals here too, but these exams are taken very seriously. 10-20% of the students fail their exam annually.

  177. …as the official “Armed and Dangerous” representative from Illinois…

    It’s a step in the right direction, but there’s a whole crapton that is still F’d up about your new law, and the people that are expected to enforce it faithfully.

    Neverthless, I’m still smiling for the good folks in IL that want to go packin’ :)

  178. @winter

    > However, the universities (those that include Master degrees) do fail students on a regular basis. In the sciences, half of the students can be kicked off before they get their bachelor degree. There are Majors where only a third of the students gets a degree. Most change to some subject that suits them more

    yes, sciences are still different. I’m in the humanities, and in a field (italian/spanish/general linguistics) which is quite small outside italy, and where students are a precious commodity that cannot be wasted.

    In Italy too now, (good) secondary schools are more selective than most universities. High schools were the first to fall to the “students cannot be failed” dogma, but they bounced back, and now they fail students routinely — especially in the first years.

  179. What many of the commenters have been doing here is trying to use ‘race’ to avoid the real problem – the fragility of modern society. It utterly depends on a high average education level, and the level required is going up all the time. It’s very hard to keep ach

  180. …It utterly depends on a high average education level…

    I’m not yet convinced it’s as straightforward as that. There are plenty of simple, baseline-educated folks in the US that do not have such societal problems. Good people.

    I happen to be one of those dorks that like cyberpunk, and there’s a term within that world called “technoshock” – where rapidly advancing technology leaves a certain strata of society feeling hopelessly lost and frightened by the world unfolding around them.

    Of course, I don’t see that happening in the real world, but it makes me wonder – apropos your “education level” comment – if, as our society and economy becomes increasingly technologically sophisticated, and as the knowledge/education requirements rise to meet the demands of these technological advances, whether the willful disregard/contempt for education (‘acting white’) by certain blacks is actually metastasizing as a cultural inability to exist within our civilization – that they’re becoming effectively a ‘handicapped’ group that needs perpetual care, like down syndrome children.

  181. >Steve Johnson
    > [Steve’s official criteria for sports]
    The long jump doesn’t meet either of your criteria either. All sports have a certain amount of judgement, that is why we have judges and referees. “Was his knee down when he caught the balll?”, “Was the pitch a strike?”, “Did he check him illegally”, “Was he outside the three point line” to choose the four sports most popular among men. All of these judgements determine (or can determine) who won. If you watch any sports TV you know that people argue about that sort of stuff just as much as they argue about the scores in figure skating. So sorry, your criteria are not nearly as black and white as you apparently think. It is a spectrum.

    So I’ll pass on the rest since it is mostly a bunch of vacuous misogynist fluff.

  182. …keep a child focussed on schoolwork for 15 years. You also have to convey the idea of growing up and making a career for yourself. Dedicated parents are needed for this – parents that have already done this and can show the way. Even then, the whole thing will be ruined if the kid’s peer group spends their time good-timing themselves.

    This is a lot of ifs. Bootstrapping the process is tremendously difficult. Trying to pretend that ‘those people’ are a different race and stupid won’t work. That sort of behavior will only spread further.

  183. Wow, I haven’t felt out of place on this blog until now. That the racist source article was accepted as truth by so many here is disappointing. There may be grains of truth mixed in with the racism but that is true of all stereotypes and the most effective lies contain some nugget of truth to make it believable. But that doesn’t make it not racist nor not a lie.

    That’s because you are uncritically accepting the societal notion of equality to mean existing equality of status, rather than it’s originally intended meaning to be equality of opportunity and potential.

    The article we speak of is not false. Your racism-detector-alarm should not render your critical thinking skills worthless. Just because something is racist does not make it wholly incorrect, and only a politician would try to get you to ignore all the points made by such people. The story is entirely believable based on my own experiences in the public school system in Los Angeles County. Where the teacher gets it wrong is in (slightly) presuming that only black young adults could act in such a fashion. The reality is that humans of any race, given the family and societal situation those kids are given early on, would act the same way. There’s loads of anecdotal evidence to back me up on this, and probably some academic evidence.

    By then transferring your discomfort with a presumably racist article into presumed racism of the commenters here who might agree with the correct points made, you are making an even greater error in judgement.

  184. @Jessica Boxer on 2013-07-09 at 16:39:59 said:

    >You are aware that the author of this blog is a big advocate of open source, software that is in large part created and consumed without monetization. Which isn’t to say of course that money can’t be made from open source software or pee wee baseball, it can and is. Red Hat is doing pretty well, and there are a lot of baseball bats and footballs under the Christmas tree, and a lot of kids spending a lot of their parent’s money at lacrosse camp this summer. However there is a lot of opportunity cost being spent in dad throwing a ball to his kid in the backyard. Why? So little Johnny and little Mary can kick ass against the team from the next subdivision over. Go Fighting Tigers.

    Yes, and the soft commodities market dwarfs the gold bullion market in terms of volume, total value in the system, and importance to the economy. That doesn’t change the fact that 1 ounce of gold is of higher value to anyone than an ounce of rice. The argument you are making is that because the bazaar is the proper method of letting humanity address its economic problems, that no one individuals skills have inherently more value to society than anyone else. The argument just doesn’t apply, it’s a non-sequitur.

    >Furthermore, price is not an absolute measure of value either. Price is the point at which suppliers are willing to offer services at or below the price that buyers are willing to pay. It is why a cold beer at the ballpark costs more than a cold beer from your refrigerator.

    The reason why a cold beer at the ballpark costs more is because it is a beer desert where supply is controlled. Your refrigerator should never be a beer desert. No one is controlling the supply of highly-skilled athletes, they’re extremely specialized workers that have spent unhealthy amounts of time perfecting their physical craft.

    >Pee wee games are not monetized for various societal reasons, memetically amateur sports is more virtuous. However, clearly parents pay lots and lots of money to travel with their kids to their games, equip their little players, pay fees and coaching camps and all that stuff. I don’t know if you have kids, but I have friends who do, and who play in various traveling sports leagues. They spend major cash to make it happen, tens of thousands of dollars in some cases.

    There are parents who push their <10-year-old kids into plastic surgery to win beauty contests. There are parents who push their kids into child acting to reap the benefits of it. So I find the argument that pee wee sports is not monetized for any reason other than a low quality competition kind of silly. There are plenty of sick parents who would exploit their child's earning potential. If someone were willing to recruit and pay a child for playing a game, it would happen.

  185. Milhouse> How could it be that in Kipling’s day Europeans were not wogs, and yet not all that much later the term came to mean almost exclusively South Europeans?

    I think you are mixing it up with “wops”.

    1. >I think you are mixing it up with “wops”.

      No, he isn’t. “Wog” is live usage for Europeans of Mediterranean extraction in Australia.

      And I don’t think “wop” is used outside the U.S. For you foreigners, it’s semi-obsolete American slang for Italians or Italian-Americans. Wikipedia says it’s widely used in Chicago, which may be; I associate it with the New York City / Jersey City area and have never encountered live usage outside the coastal metroplex.

  186. Jeremy
    > Yes, and the soft commodities market dwarfs the gold bullion market in terms of volume,

    What is soft about it? And you are wrong, there are essentially three economies, the trade economy, which you are talking about, the labor economy where value is created personally, and the gift economy, where value is transferred without trade. If you think the trade economy is the largest of these things, I’d respectfully submit that you are wrong. Think how much value is transferred from parents to children, for example. I’d say most of their net worth. Think how much value is created in little kitchens in people’s homes rather than in the kitchens of large restaurants. None of that is monetized, but all of it is an economy, which is to say the allocation of scarce resources and the creation and consumption of value.

    > That doesn’t change the fact that 1 ounce of gold is of higher value to anyone than an ounce of rice.

    The value of gold is a special case, its value deriving from memetics rather than intrinsic worth. However, I suggest as an exercise you think about circumstances in which an ounce of rice is worth more than an ounce of gold.

    > The argument you are making is that because the bazaar is the proper method of letting humanity address its economic problems,

    I made no such argument, because I don’t believe that statement is true. It is hard to drill for oil in a bazaar. The bazaar is often a very good solution to retail though. Today we call them “shopping malls”.

    > that no one individuals skills have inherently more value to society than anyone else.

    I certainly didn’t make that argument, since it is patently false.

    > The reason why a cold beer at the ballpark costs more is because it is a beer desert where supply is controlled.

    The reason beer costs more at the ballpark is because people are willing to pay more at the ballpark, and indeed monopoly pricing does take up the elasticity. If it is purely supply side, why doesn’t beer cost $200 at the ballpark?

  187. David Simon, with some much-needed honesty about what’s really going on here:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/25/the-wire-creator-us-drug-laws

    Simon said he “begins with the assumption that drugs are bad”, but also that the war on drugs has “always proceeded along racial lines”, since the banning of opium.

    It is waged “not against dangerous substances but against the poor, the excess Americans,” he said, and with striking and subversive originality, posited the crisis in stark economic terms: “We do not need 10-12% of our population; they’ve been abandoned. They don’t have barbed wire around them, but they might as well.”

    What we’re seeing here is not just a failure of blacks. It is a concerted effort of the ruling class to marginalize, criminalize, and — if David Simon is right — eventually exterminate the underclasses. And as capitalism becomes more efficient, the underclasses — the extraneous populace whose labor value has been debased by machines — grow to include thee and me.

    Eric, if you don’t want the furnaces at Auschwitz to start smoking, you’d best stop copping the Wallflower stance.

  188. Jessica Boxer on 2013-07-10 at 10:48:30 said:

    >Steve Johnson
    > [Steve’s official criteria for sports]
    The long jump doesn’t meet either of your criteria either.

    Like I said, men’s sports that fail condition (1) (not judged) or condition (2) are significantly less popular than those that don’t. In fact – I specifically mentioned track and field.

    All sports have a certain amount of judgement, that is why we have judges and referees. “Was his knee down when he caught the balll?”, “Was the pitch a strike?”, “Did he check him illegally”, “Was he outside the three point line” to choose the four sports most popular among men. All of these judgements determine (or can determine) who won.

    Wrong – these judgments determine the game state and the winner is determined by a score. There is no game state in figure skating – just judgments.

    Keeping to the original argument – I stated that women’s sports are unpopular because they’re a very low level of competition compared to men’s sports – women are basically acting as incompetent men but that if the women are attractive the sport can gain some measure of popularity. You countered with “women in these sports (swimming, figure skating and cheer leading) are attractive and these sports still aren’t popular”. The problem with your counterargument is that either (a) the women aren’t attractive (swimming) or (b) the ‘sport’ in question has a structure that is inherently unappealing to men – a judged contest with no interaction between competitors – and that even men’s sports that have no interaction or are judged contests are unpopular compared to sports that aren’t judged competitions and have interaction between the teams / players.

    So I’ll pass on the rest since it is mostly a bunch of vacuous misogynist fluff.

    I don’t really know what you’re referring to here and don’t much care since accusations like this “misogyny!” “raaaaacism” are substitutes for arguments when the person making them is losing an argument. If it’s about me noticing that some unattractive women are unattractive or noticing that there is such a thing as attractiveness and that some women do things that make them more or less attractive (but you don’t like that) then it’s laughable to call someone else names for stating this – it won’t make you more attractive. If it’s about noticing reality in a specific way – that women as sportsmen are just incompetent men – then your trigger word there is just ridiculous – like an epitaph as a fireist for someone who notices that a building is on fire.

  189. Jeff Reed –

    What we’re seeing here is not just a failure of blacks. It is a concerted effort of the ruling class to marginalize, criminalize, and — if David Simon is right — eventually exterminate the underclasses.

    That is frankly insane.

    The ruling class goes to great lengths to ensure that the underclass is huge and growing – from importing millions more from Mexico and all of Latin America to paying the current underclass to breed.

  190. JAD wrote “The intent in creating these jobs being to manufacture a black ruling class inculcated with white middle class values to govern the black community.” and “Jim Crow created a career path for the superior blacks that was protected from white competition, but nonetheless involved real, productive work, work that genuinely created value.”

    I think that’s an unreasonably starry-eyed assessment of the intent, but it’s hard to settle disagreements about intent, so I will graciously volunteer to disagree and hope you can find it in yourself to disagree too. Then if you could back off to “a characteristic and significant effect of a policy like Jim Crow is how something similar to AA applies in semiprivileged positions which are reserved for the second-class citizens” we could agree on that. But I gather from your explanation that you are still claiming considerably more than that.

    There is probably a historical or political science term of art whose definition is roughly “the way that multiethnic empires, colonial empires, apartheid, tinpot dictatorships, and long-term military occupiers systematically cultivate and promote useful agents and/or toadies within existing ethnic divisions of the ruled population.” I don’t know such a term, but I do know that the term is not “affirmative action”; I will refer to it as a protocaste system. For all the dishonest faults of AA in practice, AA in practice is at least somewhat sincere about systematically overpromoting members of favored groups all the way to the highest formal positions of privilege and prestige in shared hierarchies. Under AA, Elizabeth Warren rose about as far as an academic can go on the strength of her declared (Amer)Indian blood, and Obama was famously picked for editorship of the law review of one of the most prestigious law schools in the country. Under a non-AA protocaste system, a person like George Washington was not on track to rise to nosebleed levels in the main English military structure, and as far as I know simply could not be. The various continental Indian revolutionaries who had local political power and/or guild-for-locals privileges (lawyers, e.g.) under the British colonial rule were not on track to rise to nosebleed positions in England either.

    Such a system is not AA, it is merely “something similar to AA which holds for some special semiprivileged positions” which is not the same thing. Hell, even early-1800s US slave plantations had positions which were largely reserved for slaves which ambitious slaves could aspire to, and that didn’t make slavery AA.

    “Real, productive work, work that genuinely created value” is common in any halfway sane post-Industrial-Revolution pre-AI-Singularity economy, including ours. Prestigious desirable work is scarce, and our legal institutions related to hiring and firing are so dysfunctional that it can be unnaturally hard to get hired, and we’re driving a bigger and bigger tax and benefits wage into the aboveground economy, but it’s still glaringly obvious that there’s an enormous reservoir of demand for cheap short-term labor.

    You wrote “instead of jobs where some white guy does the actual work” which I acknowledge refers to an extremely serious problem with AA. But have you noticed that it’s also a serious problem with protocaste systems like Jim Crow? Putting side constraints on who can hold a position almost inevitably decreases the chance of a suitably qualified person holding the position. Cutting off the reserved positions at the noncom or captain or colonel level just means you don’t see it at the top, not that it doesn’t exist in the reserved positions. Beyond that, protocaste systems suffer from another IMNSHO equally serious problem: in your Jim Crow terminology, they are “jobs where ultimately some white guy needs to give orders or at least permission for key decisions”. Few real world organizations are excellent at letting authority follow responsibility and local knowledge, but successful organizations tend to be at least a little bit good at it. Protocaste systems tend to screw this up badly around any boundary between positions reserved for upper protocastes and positions reserved for lower protocastes, even if the organization is better about it elsewhere.

  191. If it’s about me noticing that some unattractive women are unattractive or noticing that there is such a thing as attractiveness and that some women do things that make them more or less attractive (but you don’t like that) then it’s laughable to call someone else names for stating this – it won’t make you more attractive.

    Saying that a Wimbledon winner doesn’t deserve to win Wimbledon because she’s unattractive is misogynistic.

    Calling her a “greasy fat slut” because she doesn’t have the standard Playboy size and build, and because she sweats a lot during a grueling tennis match is misogynistic.

    Maybe Marion Bartoli isn’t your cup of tea, looks-wise. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but her achievements speak for themselves and she deserves all merits and recognition pertaining thereto, irrespective of what she looks like or her body type. If you want attractiveness to be a judgement criterion, well, beauty contests do still exist and they’re enormously popular.

  192. Next nanowrimo, I’m gonna have to actually write “Shaniqua Umbombo and the Devil Drums of Honkeyland”

    It needs to be done.

  193. @Jeff Read on 2013-07-10 at 14:23:58 said:

    Saying that a Wimbledon winner doesn’t deserve to win Wimbledon because she’s unattractive is misogynistic.

    Calling her a “greasy fat slut” because she doesn’t have the standard Playboy size and build, and because she sweats a lot during a grueling tennis match is misogynistic.

    Misogyny is the hatred of women or girls. Disliking a particular girl because of her appearance is not a hatred of all women. Your blanket accusations of misogyny fall flat when you use the proper definition of the term. You may have an argument saying that someone is being prejudicial, or perhaps incorrectly judging a standard, but it does not qualify as misogyny. To rise to the level of misogyny, he would have to be denigrating all female sports as a useless activity.

  194. @Jessica Boxer on 2013-07-10 at 12:45:36 said:

    …there are essentially three economies, …Think how much value is created in little kitchens in people’s homes rather than in the kitchens of large restaurants. None of that is monetized.

    None of which changes anything in what I’ve said thus far. Sure, there’s lots of value created in non-monetized work. But any fool can clean a kitchen. Not just any fool can move a basketball around a court like LeBron James. You’re arguing that the common skill is more valuable than the specialized, which I find ridiculous. I’m saying that when you look at economies in bulk you are correct, but this changes nothing about the high value placed on skills that accomplish things the common man cannot.

    Face it, the free market disagrees with you on what leagues of competition are more valuable.

    >The reason beer costs more at the ballpark is because people are willing to pay more at the ballpark, and indeed monopoly pricing does take up the elasticity. If it is purely supply side, why doesn’t beer cost $200 at the ballpark?

    This is just a ridiculous statement. People who live near large bodies of water can drink more alcohol (because they’re in a humid environment and as a result are generally better hydrated), they party more, and they generally have more money since such real estate is higher value. Do such people pay more for such beverages than anyone else? No, they don’t. Clearly your argument is entirely false. Beer costs $10 a cup at a ballpark because they have a monopoly supply on their ticket holders while they are inside the ball park. If you started charging $200 a cup and we weren’t in a period of runaway inflation, you would see people turning walking sticks, shoe soles and portable diabetic equipment into alcohol containers to get alcohol into ballparks.


  195. >>For the first time in centuries, whole parts of society have renounced eduction as a path to a better life,

    >Yes. Correlates perfectly with the rise of the welfare state. I don’t think there’s a mystery here; if you subsidize stupidity and sloth, you remove the incentives for education. An underclass begins to form. Eventually underclass groups develop pathological cultures that tend to lock in even the kids bright enough to leave.

    Counter example.
    I don’t know how universal this is, but recent enough for me to have experienced, the working class in Belgium had a notion that (high-school) education was a waste of time. All that’s needed was learn a trade and get a job.
    When compulsory education age was raised from 14 to 16 and then to 18, making high school compulsory, vocational high schools ended up with loads of pupils who’d rather be out getting jobs and earn a living (or et least enough money to buy a car and a stereo).
    Teachers, especially those teaching theoretical classes, general education, history, languages and such, had a hell of a time in those schools – very similar to what the teacher in the posted article describes.

    The welfare state was obviously not a factor in this : these kids wanted to work, and saw school as getting in their way. Also, their work ethos was such that being on the dole was shameful.

    As it happens, there are obvious similarities between the behavior described in the article, and the behavior of those working class teens in Belgium : a lack of interest in almost anything a teacher teaches (the exception being practical skill training); testing the teachers through confrontation or by indifference and apathy ; a culture that valued loud-mouthing and physical strength over intelligence and eloquence. Performing badly at school and behaving badly in general earned you the respect of your peers. And so on.

    It could be about IQ. It’s definitely about culture in the sense of the values, behavior, customs, … one is brought up with. It could by about class or socio-economical stratum, in that classes or strata usually have their own culture or subcultures.

    1. >As it happens, there are obvious similarities between the behavior described in the article, and the behavior of those working class teens in Belgium

      Thanks, this is a real contribution that helps me think about the problem in a more general way.

      I think what your counterexample shows is that state subsidies are not the only thing that can drive underclass formation – though I still think it’s the major one today. There’s a risk of this kind of thing whenever education overruns the capacity of a population to absorb it.

  196. >>I think you are mixing it up with “wops”.
    >No, he isn’t. “Wog” is live usage for Europeans of Mediterranean extraction in Australia.
    And I don’t think “wop” is used outside the U.S.

    I found it alive and kicking in the UK. In London, I even saw a pizzeria called “W.O.P – Wood-fed Oven Pizza”!

  197. > This isn’t exclusively a modern phenomenon. Read any history of the Roman Republic to see how it worked out for them.

    Don’t get the reference, what did you have in mind?

  198. >Don’t get the reference, what did you have in mind?

    I’m guessing :
    panem et circenses, providing (free) food and entertainment for the masses as a way to gain or maintain political power.
    The Roman Republic became a monarchy (the emperors).

    I haven’t read enough Roman history to know if there was a causal relation between those two facts.

    1. >panem et circenses, providing (free) food and entertainment for the masses as a way to gain or maintain political power.

      Yes.

      >The Roman Republic became a monarchy (the emperors).

      Yes, but. The interesting part is what preceded the imperium itself; the hollowing out of democratic institutions by rival overclass factions completing to see who could most effectively enlist the plebeians as a compliant political tool.

      ~Any similarity to the politics of today’s U.S. is of course entirely coincidental.~

  199. The criticism of women’s sports is getting a bit tedious, but I’ll weigh-in with a point of view. I really enjoy watching women’s beach volleyball and would pay to see top flight competition just like at an NFL or NBA game. These women are frequently great athletes, many are drop dead gorgeous (no, you don’t have to have be a Victoria’s Secret model to be considered attractive), the matches can be fierce and edge-of-your-seat exciting, and if you haven’t lusted during one of these competitions, your testosterone level is probably way too low. If you don’t like any of the women’s sports, fine – don’t watch. But quit your griping. It’s not very manly.

  200. I found it alive and kicking in the UK. In London, I even saw a pizzeria called “W.O.P – Wood-fed Oven Pizza”!

    Solid brass ones on that pizza shop owner. In the U.S. there would be protests, appeals to the city government to force them to change their name, news stories, it’d be PR suicide.

  201. > > Politically speaking, how would you describe, as an example, the Puritans and their various fellow Calvinists?

    esr commented on After such knowledge….
    > As theocrats. I don’t get what you’re driving at here.

    The left are still theocrats – feminism is an obvious continuation of traditional puritanism (see Sunshine Mary’s report on the latest “take back the night” campaign), and environmentalism a replacement theology (Gaea worship) to the now embarrassing New Testament. (The New Testament tolerates slavery and commands patriarchy.)

    William Wilberforce is an example linking Cromwellian puritanism to modern “anti racism” (actually anti whitism, since members of victim classes are allowed hate Jews and such as much as they like, and are actively encouraged to hate whites). He denied being a Calvinist, but sought the appointment of Bishops to the Church of England who were secretly or not so secretly Calvinists, which at the time was analogous to appointing communists to the state department, and he operated out of Exeter Hall, which was the London headquarters of militant Puritanism.)

  202. I wrote:
    > He denied being a Calvinist, but sought the appointment of Bishops to the Church of England who were secretly or not so secretly Calvinists, which at the time was analogous to appointing communists to the state department,

    At the time, to run for parliament, or to have a government job, or to be a professor at a prestigious university, or suchlike, you had to swear a loyalty oath, (the Thirty Nine articles including allegiance to the Second Book of Homilies) part of which amounts to saying “I am not a Calvinist”) William Wilberforce was accused of lying on his oath, and it is pretty clear that William Wilberforce he was indeed lying on his oath, and was actively supporting hostile infiltrators who were even more obviously lying on their oaths.

  203. Steve Johnson
    >Wrong – these judgments determine the game state and the winner is determined by a score. There is no game state in figure skating – just judgments.

    Sure there is, it is just not published until the end.

    > Keeping to the original argument – I stated that women’s sports are unpopular because they’re a very low level of competition compared to men’s sports

    But that isn’t true. You might argue (mostly correctly) that women can’t compete with equivalent level men, but that isn’t the same as saying women’s sports isn’t internally competitive. I’ve been there, it is, exhaustingly so.

    The point is that just because a lightweight boxer would get killed in a heavyweight match doesn’t make lightweight boxing less competitive. And the fundamental question is how does the market value it? My argument that factoring all expenditure of money, time, effort, labor etc. etc. the resources committed to sports at a much lower level of skill than pro sports is very large, probably larger than the resources committed to pro sports. That is the essence of the argument, which is of course an extension of the tribalism point since your kids are the ultimate tribe.

    > I don’t really know what you’re referring to here and don’t much care since accusations like this “misogyny!”

    I was thinking of stuff like this:

    > Well, women can do them so they can’t require that much athleticism.

    I can’t decide if it is misogynistic or simply sophomoric, so perhaps better to describe much of your commentary as jejune. Just because some people throw around “-ism” arguments as a weapon doesn’t mean that misogyny and racism doesn’t exist.

    I assure you I have known many women who are spectacularly athletic. At one time my body fat was so low from training in the pool and gym, I stopped menstruating, I could bench 150% of my body weight and I could swim the 100 free in considerably less than a minute. I can’t do those things any more, but come down to my dojo sometime, I’ll happily kick your butt.

    Sorry, though, I can’t quite keep up with your posting cadence. Perhaps my girly typing is insufficiently athletic.

  204. > > your claim was that Victorians did not see Egyptians as Caucasian, which I refuted.
    > > You then changed your claim to claim that Victorians did not see themselves as Caucasian, which I also refuted.

    esr:
    > I haven’t seen any refutation.

    Yes you have.

    Here it is again:
    “Two lectures on the Natural History of Caucasian and Negro races”, 1844 tells us in the first paragraph of lecture one that the Egyptians were caucasians.

    “Crania Aegyptiaca”, also 1844, goes measuring Egyptian skulls, concludes they are caucasians, for reasons of skull shape and cranial capacity.

    The London Medical and Physical Journal, 1825 – Volume 54 – Page 132, tells us that not only were early Egyptians caucasians, as are today’s peasants farming the Egyptian delta, but that they were substantially more Caucasian than Europeans – for exactly the same reasons as the Boston Bombers. were more Caucasian than Europeans. Early Egyptians looked more like people from the Caucasus than Europeans do, which is to say, looked like the Boston Bombers.

    And so on and so forth.

    So much for the proposition that Anglo Saxons did not see Egyptians as caucasian

    As for whether Anglo Saxons viewed themselves as Caucasian:

    1863 A Treatise on hygiene – Page 68
    “It appears to be impossible for this race and the Anglo-Saxon portion of the Caucasian race to occupy the same territory at the same time. ”

    The Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery – Volume 2 – Page 118
    “In farther testimony of this latter truth, it might be added, that, be the cause what it may, the Anglo-Saxon stock of the Caucasian race acquire in America (especially in the United States) a loftier stature than they possess in Great Britain.”

    1. >So much for the proposition that Anglo Saxons did not see Egyptians as caucasian

      Uh huh. So you cite academic articles by race theorists as evidence of popular attitudes. By using the same method, I could convince a suffiently gullible future historian that the Egyptians were black – a theory that, based on spurious and axe-grinding “research”, has been propounded on this very blog by Jeff Read, your left-wing counterpart in barking madness. (Like a pair of grotesque bookends, you two are.)

      Of course today nobody outside a tiny band of crackpots actually believes that the Egyptians were black. I will grant you that the cases aren’t completely parallel, since the “Egyptians are Caucasians” theory was probably believed in its day by a few academics who were merely sadly deluded (as opposed to being total gibbering loony-toons like today’s “Black Athena” crowd).

      However, none of this constitutes evidence about popular attitudes of the day or the beliefs that shaped imperial policy. If you want to make that case, cite popular ballads, newspaper stories, and period “true life” adventure fiction like G. A. Henty. Explain lines like John Buchan’s “the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul” in a generative context with folk beliefs about race.

      Hint: I already did this research. And blogged about it.

  205. esr
    > Wikipedia notes correctly that the phrase “Wogs begin at Calais” was in use as early as WWI, and that phrase only makes sense if the term “wog” was already well established in military slang

    Your argument presupposes that the left would only demonize the right, if the right was actually demonic. Looking up actual usage appearing in books, it appears to me that “wog” was never used to refer to humans, except by the left attributing it to the right.

    You also persistently attribute to the right and the Victorian mainstream a definition of race that demonizes white people and justifies hatred of white people, that was in fact created by leftists, then and now, for the purpose of demonizing white people and justifying hatred of white people

  206. I noticed above someone is in a hissy fit over female athletes being judged by looks. Said as though it were any better to judge people based on how well they can kick a ball around or other nonsense. Professional sport is essentially an advanced form of prostitution.

  207. Since nobody’s responded:

    To me, what is surprising is how this teacher could be completely unaware of the conditions he was going to find himself in: how could he never have heard of whole classes completely uninterested in education, black communities living on social services etc.? I’m not American, have never been to the US, have no connection with American blacks, but I seem to have more specific information than he had.

    Education through high school tends to preferentially attract individuals who are idealistic and want to improve the world, but the course of study that teaches one to become a teacher does not require much in the way of critical or analytic thinking. The result is that teachers, and especially teachers who teach teaching, tend to fall into the thought patterns that are characteristic of “the left” as understood in the United States, especially in judging actions by their intentions rather than by their actual results and in dismissing unpleasant real-world realities that wouldn’t be present in a better world.

  208. James A. Donald:
    > > So much for the proposition that Anglo Saxons did not see Egyptians as Caucasian

    esr
    > Uh huh. So you cite academic articles by race theorists as evidence of popular attitudes.

    And you cite crazed fanatical venomous demonization of Victorians by twentieth century leftist authors as evidence of popular attitudes in Victorian times.

    If Victorians did not think that Egyptians and Afghans, etc, were Caucasian, quote a Victorian saying so. (A mainstream Victorian, not some lefty preaching social justice and telling us how evil white people are.)

    Recall the spies, double agents, triple agents, and men who would be king, who passed as Afghan. Obviously Victorians believed that an Anglo Saxon could pass as an Afghan, since some of their famous heroes did pass as Afghans.

    And, since Victorians attributed race largely on the basis of appearance, they must necessarily have believed that the difference between the British race and some of the Afghan races was very small.

    1. >And you cite crazed fanatical venomous demonization of Victorians by twentieth century leftist authors as evidence of popular attitudes in Victorian times.

      Really, I shouldn’t bother with you, but you froth at the mouth so entertainingly. I’ve cited, let’s see…Neil Ferguson. Oh yes, there’s a crazed leftist for you – wrote an entire book in the 21st century arguing that the British Empire was a good thing for its dark-skinned subjects. And Rudyard Kipling, who despite being far less racist than the typical Victorian has spent about a century being vituperated by leftists.

      > (A mainstream Victorian, not some lefty preaching social justice and telling us how evil white people are.)

      Right, I know how this game goes. Anyone I bring up, you’ll simply define as a crazed lefty and read out of the discussion. You’ve already copped that you think Wilberforce the evangelical Christian conservative who founded the Society for the Suppression of Vice was equivalent to a left-wing traitor, which is a pretty feverish mangling of history even for you.

      >Obviously Victorians believed that an Anglo Saxon could pass as an Afghan

      Yes, with a liberal use of walnut dye and several other tricks. I’ve read Sir Richard Francis Burton’s memoirs about passing as a Pashtun to infiltrate Meccah; have you? I hate to break it to you, but even the Pashtun (who are quite light-skinned compared, to, say, the Hazara, and sometimes have blue eyes) aren’t chaps you could have stuffed in a suit and bowler and dropped on Brompton Common in 1852 without causing raised eyebrows.

      But what a clever distraction from your even more ridiculous claim about Egyptians and high-caste Indians! I will generously concede that Burton could probably have managed either of those, too; he was as dark-skinned as a typical Greek or southern Italian. It is recorded that his peers under Sir James Napier in Gujarat called him “the White Nigger” after it became known that he had accepted upanayana from a Brahmin, effectively being adopted into the Brahmin caste.

      Let me spell out the implication of that for you: to British officers in Gujarat in the late 1840s high-caste Brahmin priests weren’t even wogs, they were niggers – as far from being considered “white” or European as was possible in Victorian racial typology. And those racist attitudes actually hardened after the Mutiny in 1857 (a generation later Kipling would position himself against them).

  209. Nigel commented on After such knowledge….
    > I grew up in the deep south and still remember the faded signs for colored drinking fountains.

    Oh, separate drinking fountains. Oh the horror, the horror, the unspeakable horror. Separate drinking fountains. Meanwhile white kids get the crap beaten out of them for being white, and no one pays any attention.

    Have you not noticed that today in an entirely politically correct high school there is officially unofficial separate seating in the school cafetaria?

  210. esr:
    > Explain John Buchan’s “the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul”

    John Buchan was a twentieth century novelist , who attributed that line to a horrid horrible evil eeeviiiil right winger. Recall I asked for Victorian evidence of the insanely eeeeviiiil hateful and stupid attitudes that you attribute to Victorians.

    And today, in the twentieth first century, the proposition that Jews are not white appears to mainly advocated by left wing Jews: “Hey, I should be eligible to be diversity commissar. I am not white, I am Jewish!”

  211. LS commented :
    > What many of the commenters have been doing here is trying to use ‘race’ to avoid the real problem – the fragility of modern society. It utterly depends on a high average education level

    Not it does not. It depends on smart people winding up on top, and being obeyed. The Ashantee empire had a pretty good system for selecting smart blacks (relying heavily on the observed performance of one’s ancestors, same system as racehorse breeders use) and a very effective system for imposing the will of smart blacks on stupid blacks.

    We used to have a system for selecting smart people – the LSAT. I don’t think was as effective as the Ashantee system (too easy to game) but it was somewhat effective. A policy of bread and circuses, of course, reduces the effectiveness of the smart in influencing the masses.

    These days, however, people are selected largely on sincere political correctness, and political correctness tends to select the stupid. So we have a both a stupid elite and that elite distributing ever increasing amounts of bread and circuses.

  212. esr:
    > But the pathology under discussion was a specifically Marxist trope – not just that but actually a 20th-century Marxist trope;

    Yet strangely, I find this trope (whiteness defined by sinful oppressing, nonwhiteness defined by virtuous and sanctifying noble victimhood) in The Quarterly Christian Spectator – Volume 10 – Page 465, 1838

    And if you were doing some google books for Victorians interpreting Egyptians as nonwhite, you would have come up with piles of this stinking crap, crap which, apart from its obnoxiously pious Calvinism, is pretty similar to what gets taught at Harvard.

  213. I can’t do those things any more, but come down to my dojo sometime, I’ll happily kick your butt.

    Ok, now that’s funny (and just silly as a proof to your argument – you have no idea who I am). You mentioned earlier that you practice karate – it’s been about 20 years since anyone could reasonably think that you can use that to defend yourself against someone who has any knowledge of grappling.

    I practice bjj – I’ll gladly come to your “dojo” and see how many times I can tap you out in 10 minutes.

  214. Roger Phillips
    >I noticed above someone is in a hissy fit over female athletes being judged by looks.

    If you mean me, not at all. I’m sure that is true, and I think it is no better or worse than women in general being judged excessively by their looks. My point was that women’s sport is more than just that, my complaint is the ridiculously simplistic broad stroke arguments being made.

    Steve Johnson
    > I practice bjj – I’ll gladly come to your “dojo” and see how many times I can tap you out in 10 minutes.

    Ah, no holds barred? Well in that case I won’t kick your butt, I’ll have to kick you in the nuts. As you know, in a street fight one has to play to ones advantages. :-)

  215. Ah, no holds barred? Well in that case I won’t kick your butt, I’ll have to kick you in the nuts. As you know, in a street fight one has to play to ones advantages.

    You really think it’s wise to turn a confrontation from a friendly game to a life and death struggle with a man? Men learn pretty early not to escalate when they’re confronted with someone bigger and stronger. Women never really learn this lesson because they have an entirely different nature and view of hierarchy.

  216. Jeff Read
    > What we’re seeing here is not just a failure of blacks. It is a concerted effort of the ruling class to marginalize, criminalize, and — if David Simon is right — eventually exterminate the underclasses

    Obamaphones and million dollar mortgages.

    Similarly, the mass importation of Mexico’s infamously non working indio underclass. They are not coming here for the jobs.

    To compete with what an underclass women with two kids by two unknown fathers can get from the state, a working class man would have to earn around sixty thousand dollars a year.

    Looks to me like an massive effort to create the largest possible non working underclass as a reliable vote bank for left wing votes, a majority underclass, as in the late Roman Republic/early Roman Empire.

  217. JAD wrote
    > > “The intent in creating these jobs being to manufacture a black ruling class inculcated with white middle class values to govern the black community.”

    > > “Jim Crow created a career path for the superior blacks that was protected from white competition, but nonetheless involved real, productive work, work that genuinely created value.”

    William Newman
    > There is probably a historical or political science term of art whose definition is roughly “the way that multiethnic empires, colonial empires, apartheid, tinpot dictatorships, and long-term military occupiers systematically cultivate and promote useful agents and/or toadies within existing ethnic divisions of the ruled population.”

    There does not seem to be a term for it, but there should be.

    Your argument is that Jim Crow had sinful motives, and our current system has noble motives.

    Perhaps. Quite possibly. But no one had nobler motives than Pol Pot.

    Our current system is based on religious beliefs that fail to work in the real world. If they sincerely hold these beliefs, which I doubt, it makes things worse, not better. Better to be ruled by the evil than by the insane.

  218. > > This isn’t exclusively a modern phenomenon. Read any history of the Roman Republic to see how it worked out for them.

    Federico
    > Don’t get the reference, what did you have in mind?

    Bread and circuses. The mob voted for dictators. Electoral outcomes were intolerable, and were resisted.

    The Populares Party (Democratic Party, People’s Party, Democratic People’s Party) seeing electoral outcomes resisted, politicized the army, but it failed to take. Instead of producing a left wing army, produced conflict within the army. Eventually you had a Roman army composed largely of recently freed slaves under Marius fighting a Roman army of real Romans under Sulla. Needless to say the real Romans won, taking no prisoners, but that did not settle things, as the voting continued to produce horrible results.

    After a long period of bloodshed and chaos, voting largely ceased to matter, and there followed the rule of the five good emperors. But eventually the army discovered it could make and break emperors, and military discipline declined.

  219. esr
    > Really, I shouldn’t bother with you, but you froth at the mouth so entertainingly. I’ve cited, let’s see…Neil Ferguson. Oh yes, there’s a crazed leftist for you – wrote an entire book in the 21st century arguing that the British Empire was a good thing for its dark-skinned subjects.

    By Victorian standards, Neil Ferguson is a fanatical crazed leftist – as are you. Indeed by the standards of eight years ago, today’s tea party are crazed leftists. Today, if you advocate the policies and programs that Obama advocated when campaigning, you are not just a right winger, but an ultra extreme far right winger, as Chick-fil-A discovered.

    > And Rudyard Kipling

    You have not cited Rudyard Kipling. To cite him you would have to say “On page so and so, Rudyard Kipling said such and such.

    You accused him of using the word “wogs”, which is a far out frothing at the mouth batshit crazy accusation.

    Did he say “wogs”? Quote him.

    > > (A mainstream Victorian, not some lefty preaching social justice and telling us how evil white people are.)

    > Anyone I bring up, you’ll simply define as a crazed lefty

    So bring them up. I will produce evidence from their writing that they are raving batshit crazy leftists.

    In fact I am pretty sure you have already gone googling for Victorians who depict Egyptians as non white. There is a great big pile of them, easy to find – all of them batshit crazy raving moonbat lefties that even you must have realized were batshit crazy raving moonbat leftists. Not only were they left by Victorian standards, they are, unlike Neil Ferguson, left even by twenty first century Harvard standards.

    > You’ve already copped that you think Wilberforce the evangelical Christian conservative who founded the Society for the Suppression of Vice was equivalent to a left-wing traitor, which is a pretty feverish mangling of history even for you.

    Observe today’s “take back the night” feminist programs, which in practice condemn male heterosexuality.

    If you are going to suppress vice, the obvious thing to do is arrest women who engage in sexual immorality – the brothel staff, not the brothel owners. Also, ensure that “fallen women” fall hard. (Adultery and out of wedlock pregnancy should have unpleasant consequences.) Instead, all his measures against vice, were measures against males, efforts at thought control, and suppression of porn, strikingly resembling today’s feminist demands against male sexuality.

    Cromwell, Wilberforce, and today’s feminists, all equally oppose low status males getting off. They don’t, however, favor traditional marriage, or women being constrained to observe their marital vows.

    1. >You accused [Kipling] of using the word “wogs”, which is a far out frothing at the mouth batshit crazy accusation.

      In fact, I said that Kipling never so far as I know used the word “wog” in his own voice, and that I don’t know if it occurs in his soldier dialect. What makes him interesting in this context is that you can tell a lot about Victorian racism by noticing what his India-story prose and poetry were arguing against.

      >In fact I am pretty sure you have already gone googling for Victorians who depict Egyptians as non white.

      Nope. But I’ll do so now. Google ahoy! Let’s see…we find that it is now commonly believed in Britain that “wog” = “black”. Sadly, Google Books doesn’t find your alleged Victorian-leftist sources for “Egyptian wog”, because it doesn’t find any Victorian sources at all. Not that I was expecting it to; not much stuff from that far back has made it into the corpus yet.

      Oh, here’s an interesting 20th-century hit: from “A Personal Kiwi-Yankee Dictionary”:

      wog or W.O.G: WORTHY ORIENTAL GENTLEMAN. When the British were in Egypt (the first time) the powers that be, felt that it would improve relationships with the local populace if their troops ceased to refer to their Egyptian counterparts as “dirty black buggers”. Therefore it was decreed that: `Henceforth you will speak ogf the Egyptians as Worthy Oriental Gentlemen.’ Wog is now an epithet applied to any non-European and just about as nasty as `dirty black bugger’.

      Now, I doubt that such an order was ever actually issued. But this is still interesting as an indication of folk belief about the term “wog”, and “the first time” pins it to 1898 at the very latest – probably the 1880s. Leaving “wog” aside, if you find it even in the least doubtful that a British regimental in 1885 would have referred to Egyptians as “dirty black buggers” you have paid no attention to the period sources at all.

  220. @ESR,

    OK so racist theory is out because it cannot even predict whom will it make predictions about, leftists theories are out, and I think that your proposed welfare theory does not cover all cases when underclasses in the world have an ethnic character, like Koreans in Japan, bedouins in Arab countries etc. and IQ differences neither. How about this theory then?

    Every group of humans in history tried hard to conquer and oppress every other group. Those who lost the game and ended up as underclass, had already some disfavorable cultural characteristics even before they became so. I have some ideas what those could be (mainly tribalism).

  221. @ESR
    Thanks, this is a real contribution that helps me think about the problem in a more general way.

    hmmm.

    /me makes 10 quatloo bet

    A lot of the reason you blog is to sift through the masses to find the few people who are worth communicating with combined with harvesting the occasional micro- and nanozens produced, isn’t it?

    Hell, you outright admitted to running filtering experiments here before, most recently in An Intelligence test or possibly A secret of game-fu.

    Do I get the quatloos?

    — Foo Quuxman

    1. >A lot of the reason you blog is to sift through the masses to find the few people who are worth communicating with combined with harvesting the occasional micro-and nanozens produced, isn’t it?

      Er, this wasn’t obvious all along?

  222. ESR

    I think I have a post in the spam trap, probably too many links :-\.

    You will likely find it worth the time to dig it out, maybe, I hope.

    — Foo Quuxman

  223. @Shenpen
    “Every group of humans in history tried hard to conquer and oppress every other group.”

    If you allow for groups to split off at random times to oppress their former “brothers”, I think that you got it largely right.

    You can also think of racists as people who want to institute a caste system like in India or Apartheid. The actual excuses for the castes are rarely relevant and can be made up on the spot if needed.

  224. @Shenpen: There’s an additional factor concerning American slavery that you should keep in mind. As time went on, ‘the peculiar institution’ came under increasing criticism on moral grounds. The response was that blacks were subhuman and fit only for slavery…

  225. However, in tennis, I prefer the women’s matches because their lower power makes for more interesting rallies.

    Post Bjorn Borg-era men’s tennis is just *boring*. ACE ACE ACE ACE ACE fuck that for a game of soldiers ;)

    A female friend of mine, who was an avid tennis fan (would play more often herself except her heels were screwed), argued that she hated women’s tennis because most of the players had crap all stamina as opposed to the mens game. Not that i can really back that up, tennis isn’t one of my favourite sports.

  226. esr:
    > Oh, here’s an interesting 20th-century hit: from …

    If you get twentieth century sources that say Victorians were evil, but strangely, this evil fails to show up in writings of the time, this should tell you that you are being lied to.

    And this is pretty much what is happening in our entire discussion. I produce Victorian sources that show that Victorians believed X and did Y, and you, on the rare occasions when you produce any sources at all, produce twentieth century sources that report that Victorians believed notX and did notY.

    > If you find it even in the least doubtful that a British regimental in 1885 would have referred to Egyptians as “dirty black buggers” you have paid no attention to the period sources at all.

    Yet strangely, somehow, you are unable to produce any of these period sources that would lead one to suppose that a British regimental would have referred to Egyptians as dirty black buggers.

    If the slightest familiarity with period sources would convince me that you are right, and you are familiar with those sources, surely it should be easy for you to produce these highly convincing sources?

    Yet strangely, not easy at all.

    You are doubtless plentifully supplied with twentieth century sources that would lead one to suppose that a nineteenth century British regimental would have referred to Egyptians as dirty black buggers, twentieth century sources that confidently assert that nineteenth century sources exist, without, however, naming those sources, but the large supply of the one kind of source, and the curious absence of the other kind of source, should make you at least a teensy bit suspicious.

    I had no trouble at all finding nineteenth century sources asserting that Egyptians were black, or asserting that other nineteenth century people viewed Egyptians as black. Perhaps my google fu is better than yours. But every such source was left wing, not just left wing by nineteenth century standards, but left wing by twentieth century standards, which makes them raving moonbats by Victorian standards. Mainstream Victorians did not view Egyptians as black, due to the obvious fact that Egyptians are not black. Victorians, unlike moderns, and unlike leftists, were reality based.

  227. Winter on 2013-07-11 at 07:52:37 said:
    > You can also think of racists as people who want to institute a caste system like in India or Apartheid. The actual excuses for the castes are rarely relevant and can be made up on the spot if needed.

    Our highly enlightened and progressive elite pays between an additional million dollars a house, to an additional five hundred thousand dollars a house, to live in places where they don’t see any ordinary blacks, and their children can go to school without seeing any ordinary blacks – a practice that Bryan Caplan calls “the bubble”. Even though doing this is horribly politically incorrect, people who can afford to live in the bubble keep indirectly mentioning it to people who cannot.

    So, if we shoved all the blacks back into ghettos, most white families in America would be several hundred thousand dollars better off, which would make family formation a whole lot more affordable.

  228. You really think it’s wise to turn a confrontation from a friendly game to a life and death struggle with a man? Men learn pretty early not to escalate when they’re confronted with someone bigger and stronger.

    Wimp. You need to train hard core.

    http://youtu.be/p2fmXtzkN4Y

    All it takes is a few thousand kicks to the groin and you won’t feel a thing anymore.

    LoL. Its hilarious to watch all the other guys on the set cringe.

    “Maaan…no cup, no nuthin, just straight up nuts…maaaaan.”

    And now back to your regularly scheduled racist JADfest.

  229. @ Steve Johnson – “You really think it’s wise to turn a confrontation from a friendly game to a life and death struggle with a man? ”

    Me thinks he doth protest too much.

    You really need to chill. Jessica was just expressing frustration with all the juvenile criticism of women’s sports, not starting WW3.

  230. Me thinks he doth protest too much

    My buddies would try to hook your cup (you ARE wearing one right?) for a painful snap back all in good fun. And these were my CHURCH buddies. Which means they’ll feel bad while laughing at you.

    Jessica’s point is stupid, stereotypical as well as an admission of weakness.

    In sparring you wear a cup. An obviously deliberate nut shot will get you tossed.

    In SD most karate dojos don’t practice it as much as say…Krav. Not that it takes a rocket scientist but if you don’t practice it you’re less likely to mentally do it. Even if you land it a junkie or even someone just hopped up on adrenaline might walk through it. It’s not a 100% fight stopper and you need to follow up. How many times to you see Karate or TKD train nut shots? “You kick here…giggle giggle…try on the dummy. Okay, next we will learn…”

    And it works on women too who are less likely to wear protection there than guys.

  231. @JAD
    “Our highly enlightened and progressive elite pays between an additional million dollars a house, to an additional five hundred thousand dollars a house, to live in places where they don’t see any ordinary blacks,…”

    That is a USA specific segregation policy not shared with the rest of the world. But I agree that your aim is to install a hereditary caste system world wide, augmented with assorted mass killings.

    The former leader of our Green Socialists Femke Halsema lives in an inner city immigrant neighborhood of Amsterdam and her children went to school with “blacks” and muslims.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GreenLeft

    If we have a progressive elite, she belongs to it. The guy preceding her was the same.

    The leaders of the communist ‘Socialist Party’ live in ordinary rented houses.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_%28Netherlands%29

  232. @Nigel
    ” It’s not a 100% fight stopper and you need to follow up.”

    Target the inner thigh or even better, inner knee of the stand leg. On the other hand, don’t do that during sparring.

  233. >TomA
    >You really need to chill. Jessica was just expressing frustration with all the juvenile criticism of women’s sports,

    That and the ridiculous contention that women aren’t capable of serious athleticism. One advantage women have in martial arts is that they tend to be much more flexible, especially at the hips, than men. It is rare for all but the most trained of men to be able to kick to head level, but it is common among women in reasonable shape. That doesn’t always compensate for their raw lack of strength and testosterone, but I assure you I have dropped many guys twice my weight and twice my strength without going anywhere near his dangley bits.

    not starting WW3.

  234. @ Jessica

    > Keeping to the original argument – I stated that women’s sports are unpopular because they’re a very low level of competition compared to men’s sports

    >But that isn’t true. You might argue (mostly correctly) that women can’t compete with equivalent level men, but that isn’t the same as saying women’s sports isn’t internally competitive. I’ve been there, it is, exhaustingly so.

    >The point is that just because a lightweight boxer would get killed in a heavyweight match doesn’t make lightweight boxing less competitive. And the fundamental question is how does the market value it? My argument that factoring all expenditure of money, time, effort, labor etc. etc. the resources committed to sports at a much lower level of skill than pro sports is very large, probably larger than the resources committed to pro sports. That is the essence of the argument, which is of course an extension of the tribalism point since your kids are the ultimate tribe.

    This is again an argument that is non-sequitur. Weight classes in boxing, wrestling, and martial arts do not exist to separate skill levels. They exist to separate classes of muscle bulk in physical confrontations wherein mass and strength are significant factors that determine outcome. Tennis is another sport in which players play matches against each other, however there are no significant advantages gained in being heavy and strong in tennis. As a result there are no weight classes in Tennis. So how does this argument that because lightweight boxers are valued the same as heavyweight boxers hold any weight to justifying similar value for lesser leagues of competition in other sports?

    You are trying to argue that weight classes and skill levels are the same thing, they are not. The exact same skill levels exist in lightweight and heavyweight boxing classes. The weight classes exist to prevent heavyweights from literally taking lightweights out with a single punch from the force disparity, not to separate how well people throw or block punches.

  235. @ Jessica Boxer on 2013-07-11 at 10:29:20 said:

    …One advantage women have in martial arts is that they tend to be much more flexible, especially at the hips, than men. It is rare for all but the most trained of men to be able to kick to head level, but it is common among women in reasonable shape.

    Unfortunately men’s heads are generally higher, and kicks are so slow in comparison to punches that only a fool in martial arts tries a kick to head level with any regularity. I would argue this does not qualify as an advantage.

  236. I’ve always regarded specialized martial arts as a wholistic mind-body improvement regime rather than primarily a “fighting” skill. MMA seems to bear out this premise, as few of the best competitors are strict martial artists. That said, in a true existential confrontation, there are no rules and no limits to what you must do to survive (else you become extinct).

  237. @Jessica
    With respect to fighting. In wars men tend to die in much larger numbers than women. As a matter of fact, more men die of violence than women everywhere.

    Somehow, the bulk muscle mass and testosterone do not lead to higher survival rates.

    On the other hand, I once read that the German anti-terrorist special police were instructed to shoot the women first during raids. This was against the RAF. Armed, women were considered much more dangerous than the men.

  238. @ TomA on 2013-07-11 at 11:04:57 said:
    >…MMA seems to bear out this premise, as few of the best competitors are strict martial artists.

    Strict martial arts are just that, art. There is significant self-defense value in them but you will find no final solution for the best technique or method for disabling an opponent in any specific formal martial art. MMA most closely approximates what is necessary to attempt to subdue someone if you happen to be alone with someone close to your own weight and strength and you get into a fight with this person. This is why MMA often looks more like cops tackling and wrestling a perp than any of the fight scenes in any martial arts movie.

    For most people, in most situations, there’s always someone else nearby to either call the cops or get inbetween two people, so a strict martial arts training works fine to defend yourself if only to teach you the limits of your skill. Of course, CCW and excellent running legs are always useful.

  239. JAD wrote of me “Your argument is that Jim Crow had sinful motives”.

    No, that’s not an argument I have been trying to make in this thread. And you are reading an awful lot into what I have written, and not even giving a specific cite to try to justify it.

    I dislike arguing about what’s “sinful”, which carries connotations of arbitrary taboos like not speaking to one’s father-in-law on the Sabbath if one’s wife is dead. If two tribes won’t have the same taboos if they’re isolated from each other, it’s unlikely to be worth arguing about those taboos. I do sometimes argue about what might be called sordid — even if two tribes are isolated, they will tend to arrive at the same judgment about whether crapping randomly in the main shelter or falsely crying wolf is wrong. But I wouldn’t argue that Jim Crow had more sordid motives than AA, because I don’t think that argument is supportable. And I’m pretty sure that whatever set you off must have been somewhere in my argument that Jim Crow was not AA in favor of blacks.

    I am arguing that it is nonsense to say that “Jim crow, in its later years was affirmative action in favor of blacks”. The syllogism “Jim Crow was sordid, AA is not sordid, therefore Jim Crow was not AA” is not how my argument works. My main argument is that Jim Crow’s anti-black policies were sufficiently harmful that the benefits that some blacks enjoyed in reserved positions didn’t begin to make up for it. (I anticipate that you may point out that overall blacks are arguably worse off today than they were at the end of Jim Crow, and I will remind you that there were dozens of other large policy and economic changes over the same period, some well-known and some less-known, e.g. the great increase in the proportion of jobs which require licensing. I am specifically arguing about Jim Crow, not the entire basket of changes which have come since the end of Jim Crow.) My secondary argument is that even though a significant number of blacks did enjoy significant benefits from positions reserved to them, even that doesn’t make it AA, it just makes it the typical protocaste system, and AA is distinguished from that by how it really does tend to go all the way to the top.

    And noting how AA goes all the way to the top isn’t praise, just an observation. I’d say something similar about a new King coming in and promoting his ethnic or religious base all the way to the top, or the French or Russian revolutionaries favoring and disfavoring people with various prerevolutionary backgrounds (AFAIK all the way to the top of the formal hierarchy). I see AA as historically unusual despite such historical examples because it combines this trait with other traits, like stretching out over generations in slow motion and becoming unusually baroque. (How many Elizabeth-Warren-alikes are there in history? I can’t think of a single one, but I guess I wouldn’t be totally surprised if someone in the USSR or mainland China had achieved comparably high academic rank on the strength of claims of less than 1/8 proletarian ancestry.)

  240. @ Winter – “But I agree that your aim is to install a hereditary caste system world wide, augmented with assorted mass killings.”

    Are your referring to JAD, the US government, an average American, or someone else?

    Frankly, I think your comment is over-the-top ad hominem, but Europe is still way ahead of us in terms of kleptocracy and tyranny. Our problem is that we are becoming too much like Europe.

  241. Nigel commented on After such knowledge….
    > How many times to you see Karate or TKD train nut shots? “You kick here…giggle giggle…try on the dummy. Okay, next we will learn…”

    It is, of course, easy to land a kick on the intended point on a dummy.

    I have been in real fights. No one has ever successfully landed a nut kick on me. I have never attempted a nut kick, because I doubt I would succeed. Maybe if I trained on real people – but somehow, no one volunteers for that.

    You can land a nut shot with your fists, especially if the guy is watching your other fist, but there is little hope of landing a nut shot with your foot. When you attempt to high kick someone, he will see it coming. Low kicks can land, punches can land, high kicks make for colorful movies. You can land a kick in the solar plexus, because it is a bigger target than the nuts and difficult to quickly block, but because he will see it coming, he will tense before it lands, so it will have limited effect. Kick to the solar plexus works, but is considerably less devastating that you would expect.

  242. I have been in real fights. No one has ever successfully landed a nut kick on me.

    It’s actually even worse than that.

    Almost everyone trains bjj without a cup. Bjj is full contact wrestling – plenty of incidental blows to the nuts get dished out. What’s the response? Nothing – it just hurts. Pain is only useful to make the other person put themselves in a bad position so you can do something that will really end a fight – like choking them to unconsciousness or dislocating a major joint like the knee or elbow.

  243. So good luck, land that nut kick – it’s not a fight ender and it’s just a sign that the kicker deserves serious injury when the kickee gets them into a submission hold.

  244. Maggie’s Farm has posted a good followup.

    @Jess: If the public in general really cared to help blacks with their problems, we would end the drug prohibition and the public school monopoly. Absolutely right. The reason we don’t is the NEA, whose near-monopoly gives them not just money but the power to control America’s “mainstream” thinking.

    @James Donald: You need to read up on the history of drug prohibition. It started as an explicit culture war against minorities. The safety arguments came decades later, are mostly bogus (Reefer Madness), and to the extent drugs really are unsafe it’s mostly a result of the law.

    But I agree with you about legitimacy, only the welfare system (and the related, unfair system of child-support enforcement) is the cause of most of it. (It doesn’t help, though, that both the poor school system and the drug laws send too many minority men to prison, so that women have to do without.)

    @Catherine Raymond and @Nancy Lebovitz: Apparently you’ve never lived in a really poor neighborhood, or are hopelessly naive.

    @kn: Yes, forcing teenagers who wanted to work to go to high school was very much about the welfare state. Welfare-state supporters want their state to be all-powerful. That means making more people dependent on government, by taking away their other options. A wide variety of laws are written to, and do, serve that purpose, including many that pretend to be about making us more self-reliant. The minimum wage is another example.

  245. William Newman
    > My main argument is that Jim Crow’s anti-black policies were sufficiently harmful that the benefits that some blacks enjoyed in reserved positions didn’t begin to make up for it.

    I did not see you make that argument, nor even attempt to make it, and I still don’t see it. My argument is that elite blacks benefited from Jim Crow both materially and spiritually, working class blacks benefited spiritually, and that all blacks, especially elite blacks, are spiritually harmed by today’s affirmative action, so severely harmed spiritually as to indirectly cause them material harm. A typical affirmative action black is given a job he cannot really do which is actually done by a white man. That is way more degrading than separate but equal drinking fountains. Why are separate but equal drinking fountains degrading, but having an area where blacks sit in the school cafeteria and an area where blacks do not sit in the school cafeteria is not degrading?

    I don’t see you attempting to refute that argument, and I don’t see you explaining why and how Jim Crow harmed blacks.

    Thus I perceived you as arguing from good intentions, piety, and moral superiority – making an explicitly and overtly religious argument.

  246. John David Galt commented on After such knowledge….
    > You need to read up on the history of drug prohibition. It started as an explicit culture war against minorities.

    Of course it did. Certain minorities, in particular blacks, are dangerous on drugs. Recall that George Zimmerman did not profile Trayvon as a black, but as a black on drugs.

    The correct solution would have been to ban drugs for certain minorities, but not for whites, which is the way alcohol prohibition works in Australia (thinly disguised by the usual hypocrisy, doublethink, and doubletalk).

  247. John David Galt on 2013-07-11 at 19:30:08 said:

    It doesn’t help, though, that both the poor school system and the drug laws send too many minority men to prison

    Yet they still manage to account for half the murders in this country – seems like there are either (a) way too few going to prison (b) not staying in prison for nearly long enough or (c) not nearly enough being executed after they’ve proven themselves habitual felons.

    To some extent I agree with you though. Our school system has failed blacks and our justice system has as well. It’s not nearly immediate and brutal enough. Schools train NAMs to be reckless and angry (on the direct level “LOOK AT THE HORRIBLE CRIMES OF THE WHITE MAN” and the subtle level of encouraging thuggery by never suppressing it). The criminal justice system is another joke – get arrested a few dozen times before a stint in jail. Men with 17 felony convictions then do home invasion burglaries where the scared housewife is subject to a “random” and “senseless” beating.

    Ah, but this is a libertarian site so “drug legalization” is a big thing, right? Here’s a hint – no one gives a damn about drugs except as a way to route around a badly damaged justice system that doesn’t punish criminals for crimes. You can intimidate witnesses to muggings and assaults. You can’t really intimidate police chemists so criminals go to jail for cocaine possession instead of for the muggings and assaults they’ve committed.

  248. @JAD
    “You can land a nut shot with your fists, especially if the guy is watching your other fist, but there is little hope of landing a nut shot with your foot.”

    Eh. With your fist close to that area you smash the pubic bone. That most certainly ends the fight.

  249. @TomA
    “Frankly, I think your comment is over-the-top ad hominem,”

    No, JAD has written many comments supporting historic mass killings, eg, of Hutus and “communist” Indonesians. In the latter case, it was the killing of well over a million people he applauded. His solutions of current problems always include the killing of many people, eg, the current civil war in East Congo. He also advocates hereditary segregation of “Untermenschen”.

    @TomA
    “but Europe is still way ahead of us in terms of kleptocracy and tyranny.”

    I live in Europe and have yet to meet an European who agrees with this statement. So it seems like the USA, the Europeans get the government they deserve (and want).

  250. JAD wrote “I did not see you make that argument [that Jim Crow harmed blacks], nor even attempt to make it, and I still don’t see it.”

    It seems to me that often even just claiming something is making an argument. For example, when you claimed “single parent hood is both cause and effect” I think it would be normal in many contexts to say that you were making the argument that s.p.h.i.b.c.a.e. When the audience agrees it’s a reasonable claim, then the claim alone can be a pretty convincing argument. When the audience isn’t already inclined to accept the claim, it probably won’t be convincing unless backed up with data or reasoning (or perhaps pounding the table or whatever). I didn’t do much to back up my claim, but a passage like “separate water fountains … intentionally onerous requirements on competition” is one of the themes that I would use as an outline if I were going to connect it back down to data.

    To my way of thinking, laws that prohibited blacks from living in places they could otherwise buy are suspect in the same way as systems that kept people from escaping Communism or pre-US-Civil-War slavery. They’re a milder case, of course, but the same “if they were beneficial, why would you have to enforce them on the supposed beneficiaries” logic applies, and that logic can be very convincing. Or in some hard cases it can be unconvincing: I’ve read at least dozens and probably hundreds of pages of arguments to and fro about whether Communist or pre-US-Civil-War slavery was in fact net beneficial to the slaves, and I can’t help noticing that people who don’t want to believe can be hard to convince by any line of reasoning including that one.

    I have never been as interested in Jim Crow as in dozens of other things in history, and most of my quite limited reading about detailed Jim Crow policies was decades ago. As I granted around where I was, y’know, making an argument about Jim Crow harming blacks, a lot of the modern reporting on this stuff does contain a significant amount of dishonest crap and selective omissions. But if I remember correctly, Epstein’s _Forbidden Grounds_ has some material on Jim Crow that might be convincing even to someone grouchily alert to how academic books tend to be systematically distorted by leftist agendas. The book is not specifically focused on Jim Crow, but IIRC has a chapter or so of information on Jim Crow regulatory burdens like like expensive requirements of duplicate facilities, and at least one case (textile mills?) where the differing state requirements seemed like a plausible causal explanation for the exclusion of blacks from the mills on one side of the border. If not in that book, I remember that I did read it somewhere, and thought it seemed careful, though I didn’t chase the footnotes or anything. (Also, if I am right that it was _Forbidden Grounds_, the politically incorrect book didn’t destroy the author’s career, which is roundabout evidence that it wasn’t too hopelessly sloppy.) That’s the kind of factual pattern that the kind of stubborn apologist who can excuse Communism or pre-Civil-War slavery might well persist in claiming was good for the proles or darkies, but to someone who thinks anything like me, it’s convincing evidence of harm.

  251. As I mentioned, JAD wrote “I did not see you make that argument [that Jim Crow harmed blacks], nor even attempt to make it, and I still don’t see it.”

    I responded to that, but neglected to add another thing that I consider to be helping to make the argument: “But that doesn’t mean we should conclude that the actual historical policy was net favorable to blacks. In fact, we should ask for extraordinary evidence before concluding that, because it would be a strange historical anomaly if a large politically underpowered demographic segment received net favorable treatment from the authorities.”

  252. Winter:
    > JAD has written many comments supporting historic mass killings, eg, of Hutus

    The Hutus were the ones that were committing genocide, not the victims, and today they are the ones employing state sponsored mass rape and the impalement of women with very large objects as a weapon of war.

    > and “communist” Indonesians.

    That they launched that war and attempted to conquer and rule indicates that a fair few of them actually were communists. Had they won, many millions would have died, since communist victories are always followed by the murder of a significant portion of the population.

    > His solutions of current problems always include the killing of many people, eg, the current civil war in East Congo.

    My proposed solution to the civil war in the Congo is that the Tutsi should win. That they are currently losing is not going to end it short of the murder of every Tutsi everywhere in the world. It is like Jews versus Muslims. When Jews win or Tutsis win, everyone stops fighting and goes about their business. If the Muslims won, they would kill all the Jews in the land where they are victorious, and then go looking for some more Jews in other lands. The war in the Congo does not end, but goes on and on and on, because the bottom line is that the Tutsis really are superior to other blacks, so the objective of making them equal can never be attained merely by defeating them, it can only be attained by killing them – a final solution that the “international community” is slowly sliding towards.

    > He also advocates hereditary segregation of “Untermenschen”.

    Not hereditary. I proposed that people who got jobs and kept out of trouble would be allowed out of the ghetto, vagrants and people who persistently and repeatedly got in trouble would be sent in to the ghetto.

  253. Hi everyone. Sorry to come late.

    On this topic, I’m on Frederico’s side. I’ll go even further than him, by saying the original text is just an incompetent teacher blaming its lack of skill(and maybe training) on the skin color of its students(of course, there could be other problems, as cited by esr. But this article, even if 100% true, proves none of them).

    When I was 14, I was in a little-better-than-average school of France. In those times(80’s), best students were learning german first, then english. I was, therefore, in the best group. We were overachieving. Teachers loved working with us. All but one. The lady teaching us english was so poorly skilled that our so quiet group was looking a little bit like this “black” group described in the original article. Impossible to hear the teacher, tough to see her through a cloud of flying paperballs, and violence towards her for requiring good grades. By people who were having very good grades honestly in other domains.

    If leftism betrayed us, it is not by paying unemployed, or whatever. It is by forbidding the sacking of such unable teachers. Dunno in your country, but in France, a teacher that does not rape or kill, cannot be fired. unskilled, drunk, drugged, violent or thief, stays learning. THAT is my problem with leftism at school. That, and the fact that each year god makes, exams are easier(so that minister of education can boast on better results than previous year).

  254. JAD
    > I did not see you make that argument [that Jim Crow harmed blacks], nor even attempt to make it,

    William Newman
    > laws that prohibited blacks from living in places they could otherwise buy are suspect in the same way as systems that kept people from escaping Communism or pre-US-Civil-War slavery. They’re a milder case, of course, but the same “if they were beneficial, why would you have to enforce them on the supposed beneficiaries” logic applies,

    OK, now you are making an argument.

    By and large, blacks like being with blacks, but they don’t like being with black crime. In fact black criminals like being with other black criminals less than anyone. So blacks move into white suburbs to get away from black crime, black criminals move into white suburbs to get away from black crime, which works for the individual black, but pretty soon other blacks follow them. Thus, for example, blacks destroyed Detroit, and are moving out of Detroit to destroy neighboring places.

    For the most part the best, the most elite blacks, moved out of Detroit first, since they had the money to do so. As they moved in housing prices fell, and they are now quite horrified to find that other, less elite, blacks are following them, turning the places that they moved to into the place that they fled.

    Blacks fleeing blacks is a negative sum competition. The net effect hurts whites and fails to benefit blacks. Blacks spend money buying houses dear and selling them cheap. Obviously a better solution is that elite blacks have to take charge of the black community, with as much white assistance as necessary and as little white assistance as possible, and make it safer.

  255. William Newman commented on After such knowledge….
    > it would be a strange historical anomaly if a large politically underpowered demographic segment received net favorable treatment from the authorities.”

    Blacks are obviously receiving net favorable treatment now. See Mencius’ article on “a theory of the ruling underclass”. http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/02/theory-of-ruling-underclass.html

    We can see high performing blacks being made into poster boys all the way back to the early nineteenth century, which looks mighty like a symptom of net favorable treatment.

  256. @JAD
    “The Hutus were the ones that were committing genocide, not the victims,”

    The were the victims in Burundi, and during earlier unrest. But you were seeing these as “justified” for some reason or other. And the victims of Suharto’s mass murder were unarmed civilians who were murdered because they had an opinion. You just repeated your support for mass murdering (unarmed) civilians because of their political views.

    @JAD
    ” I proposed that people who got jobs and kept out of trouble would be allowed out of the ghetto,”

    Is that a refutation of what I said? I looks like an endorsement that I was right.

  257. John David Galt, I have never lived in a poor neighborhood, and I know that some of them are very dangerous. My point was that anyone who thinks that black people in general are a hazard to white people is grossly and unfairly oversimplifying the situation.

    Long ago, I studied karate for a few weeks. My teacher said to never kick above the knee– he was a sensible person.

  258. Nancy Lebovitz
    > My point was that anyone who thinks that black people in general are a hazard to white people is grossly and unfairly oversimplifying the situation.

    Trouble is, you cannot tell which ones are a hazard until after they beat you up.

  259. @JAD
    > > The Hutus were the ones that were committing genocide, not the victims,

    winter
    > They were the victims in Burundi, and during earlier unrest.

    Mote, beam.

    The Hutus in Burundi made a start on killing every single Tutsi. The Tutsis, in successfully putting down the Hutu uprising, did not seek to kill every single Hutu.

    Hutus cannot even rule themselves. Tutsis cannot allow Hutus to rule them. Tutsis have to do whatever it takes to keep from being ruled by Hutus. Similarly, for communist uprisings.

  260. JAD, I can’t tell whether *anyone* is going to beat me up. All I– or anyone– can do is play the odds. And considering that I’ve been living among a high proportion of black people (as noted, not in especially poor neighborhoods, though I would go through a housing project area that I’d been told was dangerous) for 18 years without being beaten up, I think there are a lot of people who get the odds wrong.

    I’ve been shoved once. I’ve been subject to one attempted mugging. However, in Newark, DE, I was marginally kidnapped by a white man (I was hitchhiking, he didn’t let me out when I asked him to several times, I kept insisting, after about five or ten minutes he took me back in my preferred direction and let me out), so maybe I should just avoid people.

  261. William Newman
    > In fact, we should ask for extraordinary evidence before concluding that, because it would be a strange historical anomaly if a large politically underpowered demographic segment received net favorable treatment from the authorities.

    In physical conflicts between blacks and whites, who is more likely to be the aggressor, the black or the white?

    Given equivalent circumstances, is the judicial system more aggressive in punishing offences of blacks against whites, or vice versa?

    Given equivalent circumstances, in economic competition between a black and a white, which is more likely to win? If you are looking for a government contract or position, an official distinction, an educational opportunity, etc, etc, is it better to be a black or a white?

    Is it more socially marginal for a black to be rude to a white, or a white to be rude to a black? Is it more likely that whites will insult all blacks, or vice versa?

  262. @JAD
    “The Hutus in Burundi made a start on killing every single Tutsi. ”

    This is symptomatic of your reasoning. In your eyes, there is always a a good reason to murder people you do not like. It is enough to look or talk like other people that might have committed a crime.

    We have talked about this before. People identified as Hutus and Tutsis have murdered each other for decades in the lakes region in Africa. Some where more successful in terms of number of victims than others. You seem to consider this enough reason to murder innocent civilians. So your morals are little better than that of those murderers.

    @JAD
    ” Tutsis have to do whatever it takes to keep from being ruled by Hutus. Similarly, for communist uprisings.”

    Another illustration of my earlier statement about racists in general and JAD specifically.

  263. Please note that I am not arguing for Jim Crow laws here, nor am I arguing for laws or covenants that prohibit property ownership on the basis of race.

    “if they were beneficial, why would you have to enforce them on the supposed beneficiaries” logic applies,

    Prohibitions on allowing minors unfettered access alcohol are generally considered beneficial, except by minors.

    Prohibitions on recreational drug use are generally beneficial, modulo the whole militarization of the police, the encroaching police state and in whole the W.o.D. mindset, which is a side effect of the prohibition because the *adults* still want to f* their brains up on drugs and alcohol. And if you think the latter is a “black” problem, then you’re not just a racist, you’re a f*ing idiot.

  264. @LS another entry in The Book Of Horribly Backfired Good Intentions. Edmund Burke in 1774 already called slavery as a great evil and a great shame that was UNDERSTOOD to be so even before the writing of that essay, but it was shamefacedly that tolerated before for various reasons and he argued but no longer should be. Burke was already in 1774 reflecting that the public opinion before that year saw it as evil and it was merely the usualy pleading of necessity he had to argue against! (Source: Sketch of a Negro Code, 1774).

    If we think that pure value judgements tend to not “regress” (I have serious doubts of it but anyhow), then logically two generations later the counter-argument could not have been “nay, it is cool” but rather some kind of a statement that aimed to be rooted in some kind of an ostensible fact, not value.

    So this checks out to me.

    (Offtopic, but I have heard another good intention that can horribly backfire today. There will be an app I think called Lulu that will let women rate their and write reviews of their former boyfriends and hookups and the intention is to encourage good, gentlemanly behavior. Except that there is such a thing as copycat crimes induced by publicity. Except that quite some women write love letters to violent criminals in prison. Except that to the psychopath there is no such thing as a negative publicity. I sense a huge backfire opportunity here.)

  265. @William O. B’Livion
    > Prohibitions on recreational drug use are generally beneficial,

    Why?

  266. Next nanowrimo, I’m gonna have to actually write “Shaniqua Umbombo and the Devil Drums of Honkeyland”

    If it’s anywhere as good as Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, it should be quite interesting. :)

  267. winter commented on After such knowledge….
    > We have talked about this before. People identified as Hutus and Tutsis have murdered each other for decades in the lakes region in Africa. Some where more successful in terms of number of victims than others.

    When Tutsis rule Hutus there is peace, prosperity, freedom, and order.

    When Hutus rule Tutsis there are atrocities of unimaginable horror, mass murder, war without end, and attempted and often successful genocide.

    When Hutus rule Hutus there is war, cannibalism, famine and terror. There is social and economic collapse.

    Therefore people are justified to do whatever it takes to prevent rule by Hutus.

    And, similarly, justified to do whatever it takes to prevent rule by communists.

  268. William O. B’Livion commented on After such knowledge….
    > *adults* still want to f* their brains up on drugs and alcohol. And if you think the latter is a “black” problem, then you’re not just a racist, you’re a f*ing idiot.

    Alcohol has an effect on full blooded Australian aboriginals that is so obviously devastating to the aboriginal and anyone in his vicinity that all the progressive lefties have quietly, furtively, and shamefacedly accepted race based prohibition, albeit with the usual doublethink and doubletalk. Do you suppose that they are all f*ing idiots?

    The only controversy on alcohol prohibition in Australia is how best too keep the hypocrisy from getting too much in people’s faces. For example, no one in Australia, left or right, thinks that alcohol should be allowed on aboriginal reserves, though I suppose that if you asked them why not they would start babbling incoherently about capitalist exploiters and demonic males spending their girlfriend’s welfare money, or something similar.

    As I said earlier, the longer a race has had beer, the less harmful alcohol and drugs in general are to members of that race.

    In America, reality is that if someone sees young black male on drugs, he is afraid. If he sees a young white male on drugs, he is not afraid. And if a progressive says he is not like that, he is lying.

    1. >As I said earlier, the longer a race has had beer, the less harmful alcohol and drugs in general are to members of that race.

      Even a stopped clock can be right twice a day, and JAD is right about this. There’s even an observable gradient in Europe, running roughly north/south, inversely correlating alcoholism with the number of centuries alcoholic drinks have been readily accessible and the population has had time for the vulnerability to be selected out. Lowest rates among Mediterranean and Middle Eastern populations, highest among Irish, Scandinavians, and Russians.

  269. In America, reality is that if someone sees young black male on drugs, he is afraid. If he sees a young white male on drugs, he is not afraid. And if a progressive says he is not like that, he is lying.

    Come through Boston sometime and you’re bound to run into a few skeery whitefolks who make your buttcheeks clench together as much as, if not more than, any black dude.

  270. kurkosdr on 2013-07-07 at 11:23:25 said: Remember, blacks didn’t get full voting rights till frickin’ 1965.

    Wrong. The XVth Amendment (1870) extended voting to all races. In the South, blacks were prevented from voting by a combination of intimidation and legal tricks. (This campaign took over a generation to succeed. In 1898, a black Republican was elected U.S. Representative from North Carolina.)

    Outside the South, blacks voted if they wanted to. For example, in 1905, a black, Oscar De Priest, was an elected Commissioner of Cook County (where Chicago is); he was nominated because the Republicans wanted to appeal to black voters. In 1928, he was elected U.S. Representative from a district that had become largely black.

    What happened in 1965 was that the XXIVth Amendment banned poll taxes, which had been a keystone in the disfranchisement of Southern blacks, and the Voting Rights Act provided for Federal intervention against related trickery and intimidation.

    Till 1965, blacks were by law required to be second-class citizens and have the second-class citizen mindset.

    Not by law. By almost universal custom, backed up by occasional violence. Some of the rules were written into contracts, such as covenants in real-estate titles that barred sale to blacks and others. (These were ruled unconstitutional in 1948.) But nearly all the exclusions and restrictions were informal.

  271. ESR: White people didn’t impose the depraved, thuggish underculture it describes on black people; they did it to themselves…

    I disagree. I think the 1960s were the worst thing white America ever did to black America. Nearly all the pathologies of black underclass culture can be directly traced to the 1960s “counterculture”.

    Sexual promiscuity glorified, sexual restraint ridiculed. Check.
    Bastardy declared a non-issue. Check.
    Foul language applauded as “authentic”. Check.
    Social proprieties ridiculed as “bourgeois”. Check.
    Drug-taking and drug-dealing “normalized”. Check.
    Regular, diligent work at a job ridiculed as being exploited. Check.
    Living on welfare destigmatized. Check.
    Lawbreaking excused because “They” are all crooks. Check.
    Rejection of traditional standards of behavior is “liberation”. Check.
    Police, teachers, employers all viewed as agents of the oppressive Establishment. Check.

    Styles and fashions circulate between classes and ethnicities. The 60s made a lot of toxic behavior fashionable. Black Americans picked up on this trend, and were swamped by it.

    Why didn’t white Americans fall as badly? Because they had stronger codes of behavior to begin with, because they had much greater resources of social structure. A lot of ex-hippies wrecked themselves, but a lot more recovered and settled down.

    Another aspect of black underclass culture is also white-derived, but much earlier. The confrontational gangbanger attitude has been traced to the Celtic honor culture of the white South, which in turn came from Ireland and the Scottish border. It doesn’t seem to have any African roots, oddly.

  272. Christopher Smith on 2013-07-07 at 18:51:38 said: up until Johnson’s Great Society program … black families actually had significantly better outcomes than comparable white families in such measures as crime rates, employment levels, and education, and stable two-parent families were the norm.

    Actually, no, lagged behind whites in all categories. But less than now. Blacks had weaker codes of behavior and social structures. This made them far more vulnerable to subversion. The black illegitimacy rate went from 20% to 70%, and stayed there.

  273. esr on 2013-07-08 at 22:22:26 said: Until around the time of the Indian Mutiny (possibly a bit before) Britons didn’t even routinely distinguish between black Africans and brown Indians.

    They certainly did. India was an anciently civilized country with powerful nation-states which the British had to deal with and a fully literate ruling elite. Africa was a savage wilderness. The natives of both were “niggers”, but that remained true long after 1857. Before 1857, the only contact between Britons and blacks was the slave trade and slave ownership in the West Indies.

  274. Rich Rostrom commented on After such knowledge….
    > Another aspect of black underclass culture is also white-derived, but much earlier. The confrontational gangbanger attitude has been traced to the Celtic honor culture of the white South, which in turn came from Ireland and the Scottish border. It doesn’t seem to have any African roots, oddly.

    Because we all know how wonderfully peaceful and not at all murderous Africans in Africa are.

  275. Regarding “wog”: Google Ngrams finds it occurring throughout the 1800s at a low level, and becoming coming just after 1900.

    BTW: Kipling, an anti-Semite? There’s a cheap shot at Jews in “Bread Cast Upon the Waters”, but there are admirable Jews in “The House-Surgeon” and “The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat”. He subscribed to some of the common prejudices about Jews, but he had no feeling against them.

    1. >He subscribed to some of the common prejudices about Jews, but he had no feeling against them.

      Several biographers report fierce anti-Semitism in his personal letters. I have not seen the letters myself.

  276. Rich Rostrom commented on After such knowledge….
    > Regarding “wog”: Google Ngrams finds it occurring throughout the 1800s at a low level, and becoming coming just after 1900.

    Check out examples. Early usage of “wog” appears to refer to tadpoles, or to dirt or food on people’s faces.

    It first appears in reference to race, not as a racial slur, but as accusation that other people used it as a racial slur, part of the hate filled demonization of the supposedly evil past.

  277. It looks like the Obama administration agrees, at least in principle with JAD:
    http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/07/11/federal-government-now-endorses-soft-bigotry-of-low-expectations/

    ESR: White people didn’t impose the depraved, thuggish underculture it describes on black people; they did it to themselves…

    I disagree. I think the 1960s were the worst thing white America ever did to black America. Nearly all the pathologies of black underclass culture can be directly traced to the 1960s “counterculture”.

    Note the use of the word “impose”.

    Note that historically much of what you attribute to the 60s counter culture was already present in the black culture, it was just looked down on by middle class blacks the same way those behaviors were looked down on by middle class whites.

    Until the left told blacks–and everyone else that if they couldn’t help it, they didn’t even have to try.

    1. >Note that historically much of what you attribute to the 60s counter culture was already present in the black culture, it was just looked down on by middle class blacks the same way those behaviors were looked down on by middle class whites.

      I don’t think the three of us are in substantial disagreement about the facts. Yes, there was a thug-life minority of blacks before 1964; yes, the welfare state and the counterculture seriously compromised the ability of respectable middle-class blacks to transmit their self-discipline to following generations; yes, the thug-life culture expanded into the resulting vacuum.

      But I think viewing this process as something whites did to blacks is not helpful and is in itself prejudicial and diminishing. It denies black people agency. Black people and families weren’t pieces being pushed around on some culture-war gameboard, they made choices. Some saw the trap and evaded it. Too many, unfortunately, did not.

      It is also worth noting that white people damaged themselves as a population with the same combination of toxic memes and toxic policy. For both populations, even to say “whites should fix themselves” or “blacks should fix themselves” misses the point. Lots of individuals and families and supra-familial social networks need to notice that they’re living in a way that produces bad outcomes and generate the desire to change that. No one else can do it for them.

  278. esr commented on After such knowledge….
    > But I think viewing this process as something whites did to blacks is not helpful and is in itself prejudicial and diminishing. It denies black people agency. Black people and families weren’t pieces being pushed around on some culture-war gameboard, they made choices. Some saw the trap and evaded it. Too many, unfortunately, did not.

    To move the electorate ever leftwards, the state has a policy of turning the next generation into trash, and also a policy of importing trash, for example Mexico’s infamously non working indio underclass.

    Blacks are the most vulnerable to the policy of creating trash at home, because of short time preference and low intelligence. Mexico is the handiest source for importing trash, because nearest, but we are already seeing ideological preparation and rhetoric for importing the bottom most trash from the entire world. Bringing poor oppressed victims in from world wide to enjoy US standards of welfare (and vote left) is supposedly our philanthropic duty. To exclude them supposedly shows hatred and contempt for the unfortunate. It is racist and cruel.

    Indeed, because you, esr, move left as the right hand edge of the Overton window moves left, I expect in a few years to hear from you how horribly racist a commenter is if he objects to the latest mass importation a few hundred million people of even lower IQ, shorter time preference, and higher criminality, than our existing black population. As the US Government moves ever leftwards, it must endlessly elect a new people. Eventually even the existing black population will be insufficiently left.

  279. esr on 2013-07-12 at 22:58:36 said:
    > Several biographers report fierce anti-Semitism in his [Rudyard Kipling’s] personal letters.

    Because whenever someone notices genetic and cultural difference between group A and Group B, that is proof he that hates group B and intends them harm. Also that he has horns, a tail, and eats babies.

  280. @ ESR – “But I think viewing this process as something whites did to blacks is not helpful”

    I think you have the dichotomy wrong. It’s not black/white. It’s parasitic collectivists versus self-reliant individualists.

  281. @TomA
    “It’s parasitic collectivists versus self-reliant individualists.”

    The history of Homo Sapiens is one of collectivists surviving and self-reliant individualists dying.

    1. >The history of Homo Sapiens is one of collectivists surviving and self-reliant individualists dying.

      No, the history of Homo Sapiens is that people who are good at intelligent cooperation survive. You confuse ‘collectivist’ with ‘cooperative’. The difference is important. Individualists are actually better at cooperation than collectivists are (that is, individualists cooperate more efficiently and sustainably).

  282. @JAD and anyone else who wants to respond. JAD said
    > > …the longer a race has had beer, the less harmful alcohol and drugs in general are to members of that race.

    I get the idea and causal story for alcohol. That story is consistent with other facts, such as the Ancient Greek insistence on watering wine. I am wondering, however, how this would have generalized to other drugs. If necessary, limit yourself to the classic, more historical drugs (marijuana, opium & heroin, cocaine). They induce different pharmacological responses on different metabolic pathways. So what is the causal link between ancestor genetic selection in an environment with beer (and later other sources of alcohol), and the behavioral response to other, non-alcoholic drugs?

    1. >So what is the causal link between ancestor genetic selection in an environment with beer (and later other sources of alcohol), and the behavioral response to other, non-alcoholic drugs?

      I don’t think anyone knows for sure that there is one. However, there’s a clue in the epidemiological evidence: if you look at people who are addicted to any drug, cross-addiction to other drugs is more common than really having only a single addiction. There’s a quote about this that I don’t remember the source of: “There are no addictive drugs, only addictive [that is, addiction-prone] people.”

      This suggests to me that there may be some single glitch in the dopamine-reward pathway that underlies all specific chemical addictions. If so, genetic selection against alcoholism probably acts against that glitch as well as alcoholism-specific phenotypic traits.

      (This is personal for me as I have good reason to suspect I may carry a genetic predisposition to alcoholism myself. It’s one of several reasons I never drink.)

  283. Tom McKendree commented on After such knowledge….
    > how this would have generalized to other drugs. If necessary, limit yourself to the classic, more historical drugs (marijuana, opium & heroin, cocaine). They induce different pharmacological responses on different metabolic pathways.

    Selection against hangovers is likely to be specific to alcohol. Selection against addiction is likely to generalize

    I would expect that the ability to metabolize large amounts of alcohol rapidly and without harm, to not have a hangover in the short run or liver damage in the long run, to be specific to alcohol.

    The ability to become to control how intoxicated one becomes so that one does not do stupid things in public, and the ability to become intoxicated yet nonetheless stay out of trouble, the ability to resist addiction is more general, and I would expect it to generalize to other drugs.

    Robitussin is an over the counter medication because most people simply don’t abuse it. Martin Trayvon not only consumed a wide variety of drugs, he appears to have consumed Robitussin in amounts that would probably have killed him in the long run. Seems to me that is the same kind of personality defect as we see in alcoholics. In a slightly different environment, where Robitussin was not available but alcohol was, alcohol, or alcohol fueled violence, would have killed him, thus, the longer a people’s exposure to alcohol, the fewer Martin Trayvon’s

  284. Winter on 2013-07-13 at 16:32:57 said:
    > The history of Homo Sapiens is one of collectivists surviving and self-reliant individualists dying.

    The history of Homo Sapiens is one of tribes winning, and people who submit to governments dying in slavery. In the male line, westerners are largely descended from those who resisted the Roman Empire in the west, while those who submitted, perished without descendents in the male line.

    Government is perhaps innately tribal, though these days the tribes are largely synthetic, the psychological creations of religions and ideologies. If, however, you are governed, rather than governing, you are not really in the tribe.

  285. Winter on 2013-07-13 at 16:32:57 said:
    > The history of Homo Sapiens is one of collectivists surviving and self-reliant individualists dying.

    Voting bears the same relationship to power, as porn does to reproduction. Those who vote, will not be represented in the male line in future generations, just as today’s westerners are not descended in the male line from the Roman mob.

  286. But I think viewing this process as something whites did to blacks is not helpful and is in itself prejudicial and diminishing.

    It does not matter whether it is prejudicial and diminishing (although I agree that it is) it really, really matters whether “whites” knew, intended it to happen and deliberately set out to create the circumstances. If it was deliberate, and I do not think it was, then it is a horrific crime.

    OTOH, if it was blowback/side effects from the cold war subterfuge that was going on (the Soviets were deliberately trying to corrupt youth culture in the 50s and 60s), then it’s whitey’s fault, but NOT the Conservative/Republican whitey, the Soviet and Communist whitey.

    Black people and families weren’t pieces being pushed around on some culture-war gameboard, they made choices. Some saw the trap and evaded it. Too many, unfortunately, did not.

    We are *all* pieces being pushed around. Some of us see the push and try to moderate the bad parts of it. Some don’t.

    It is also worth noting that white people damaged themselves as a population with the same combination of toxic memes and toxic policy. For both populations, even to say “whites should fix themselves” or “blacks should fix themselves” misses the point. Lots of individuals and families and supra-familial social networks need to notice that they’re living in a way that produces bad outcomes and generate the desire to change that. No one else can do it for them.

    I took this “class” decades ago from a (as it turns out black) instructor who also taught at the school I was attending.

    While he was in many ways a lunatic, in many ways profoundly ignorant, he was also in many ways fairly intelligent and many of the thing he’s said stuck with me.

    One was “it doesn’t matter who spilled the damn milk. Clean it up.”

    Now, it *does* matter, but mostly so it won’t happen again. OTOH, it still does have to be cleaned up.

    1. >the Soviets were deliberately trying to corrupt youth culture in the 50s and 60s)

      I don’t think the Soviets ever understood American youth culture well enough to screw with it directly.

      On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that the Soviets sought to corrupt academia, the mass media and (to a lesser extent) show business, and were quite successful at that. This had obvious secondary effects on youth culture.

  287. Also:

    Is there any evidence or hint that impulse control is genetically moderated?

    1. >Is there any evidence or hint that impulse control is genetically moderated?

      I don’t know. It’s a harder quality to quantify than intelligence. Most of the literature on it comes out of criminology rather than psychometry or population genetics. I don’t know that there have been any heritability studies at all, and it’s the sort of thing I probably would know if there had been.

  288. esr on 2013-07-13 at 20:16:06 said:
    > I don’t think the Soviets ever understood American youth culture well enough to screw with it directly.

    The Soviets made serious efforts to undermine and coopt youth culture. For example, when they abruptly changed their policy on the Khmer Rouge in 1979 December, they created the music label “Alternative Tentacles” to promote their new line as more young and hip than the old line.

    Hands up anyone who has heard of “Alternative Tentacles”. Hmm, no one is raising their hand.

    The name was something of an in joke, since at the time “tentacle” meant roughly what “sock puppet” means today.

    On the other hand, the immensely influential Port Huron Statement was pretty much written by the KGB. It would seem that some time between 1962 July, and 1979 December, they lost their touch.

    Towards the end, the Soviets were absolutely incompetent in their ability to manipulate culture, as illustrated by their decision to show “Dallas” in the Soviet Union. Although “Dallas” represented capitalists as bad guys individually, it fundamentally repudiated the labor theory of value, since on the show, value was primarily created by the decision where to drill, and how deep to go on drilling, not by the men actually doing the drilling. The Soviets failed to notice that the very core of communism was being shot down in flames. The show encapsulated Adam Smith’s observation “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” On the show “Dallas” capitalists made themselves rich – and made everyone around them reasonably well off.

  289. Yes. And all geeks are ugly, anti-social, sexist and don’t know the difference between intelligent writing and clap trap. C’mon esr, you should know better. Next time, before you start speculating about a world you’ve never encountered, do a bit of research first. The world is plenty screwed up, and articles like these make it even more so. I’m not sure if there is much nuance going on when you’re coding, but social problems generally don’t abide gross generalizations. Are you planning to cover Mein Kampf next?

  290. @Nancy Lebovitz: My point was that anyone who thinks that black people in general are a hazard to white people is grossly and unfairly oversimplifying the situation. I totally agree. I have and do work with black people and they are not like that. Class is a much better predictor of misbehavior than race.

    Blacks only fall into the bad category more often than other people because they suffer more from aggravating factors. Some of these are ways they are still getting treated badly by the system (the school situation and the war on drugs) but others are “cultural”, especially “leaders” who give evil advice and set bad examples, like Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. (I put “cultural” in quotes because “black culture” mostly doesn’t really exist, but is just an attempt to shield bad behavior from criticism by hiding it behind multiculturalism.) I mostly agree with Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s The Great Reckoning on this topic, though they go too far when they advocate a return to sexual puritanism.

    (I am all for libertinism, but not for letting people have kids they can’t afford to raise. And I believe the way to stop that is to roll the child support law back to what it was 80 years ago — if the mother doesn’t get married first, she is on her own — because most of these kids are not really unwanted by the mother, but are conceived by tricking the father in order to get the welfare payments.)

    @James A Donald: (JDG: You need to read up on the history of drug prohibition. It started as an explicit culture war against minorities.) Of course it did. Certain minorities, in particular blacks, are dangerous on drugs.

    That, to me, is racism (of the same kind that led to the drug laws). The most anyone can reliably say is that certain individuals are dangerous to others on certain drugs. And it’s much more likely to be true on alcohol than on marijuana. I’ve never met anyone who could get fighting mad while high on marijuana.

    The point of which is, the law should not be banning substances or behaviors that usually don’t cause trouble merely as a precaution. “No harm, no foul” needs to be a principle of the law.

    As for Trayvon, I don’t know what he may have been using (though I’ve heard they found THC in his body), but if somebody voluntarily uses any substance, I figure he should be held responsible for his actions just as if sober. The bottom line in that case is that Zimmerman was doing nothing wrong to justify Trayvon’s attacking him.

    1. >http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3036802/

      OK, delay discounting is at least a major factor in impulse control; that’s a good start. The next question I’d like to see is how DD correlates with IQ. Betting it will be negative and significant (that is, lower delay discounting is significantly coupled to higher IQ).

      Any criminologist will telly you that the combination of high DD and low IQ strongly predicts criminality, and the predictivity gets stronger as you narrow to serious and violent crimes.

  291. John David Galt on 2013-07-14 at 00:23:18 said:

    Blacks only fall into the bad category more often than other people because they suffer more from aggravating factors.

    Nope, try again. Blacks at every socioeconomic level are more criminal, more violent, and exhibit more social pathologies than whites.

  292. @esr
    “You confuse ‘collectivist’ with ‘cooperative’.”

    It is debatable who is more confused here.

    Collectivism is an extension of tribalism and family based cooperations. It simply grows with the size of the community. I think you seriously over estimate the rational powers of people to actually fully understand how cooperation works in their community. People are mentally much too myopic.

    Fukuyama’s book Trust gives nice examples of how difficult it is for an individual to reshape the level of cooperation around her.

  293. @esr
    Impulse control is genetically moderated. But impuls control can be trained. It is one of the things religion is used for.

    Genes only rarely lead to imutable outcomes. Discipline is something you learn, whatever your genetic background.

  294. @JAD
    “The history of Homo Sapiens is one of tribes winning, and people who submit to governments dying in slavery.”

    States have higher population densities. After the fall of empires, the population tends to decline. In the cases of the Roman, Persian, and Chinese empires, this decline tended to be a population collapse. You can already read in Adam Smith’s work why that is.

    Your “dying in slavery” phantasies are part of Victorian lore. Probably inspired by the extraordinary high death rates in the American plantations.

  295. @esr
    Wrt DD vs crime

    You must include “neural activiy level”, that is, the sensitivity to stimulation. A live in crime requires that you seek strong thrills. Most people would succumb to the stress of violent crimes. Criminals tend to have lower stress level and need the thrills or they get bored to death.

    So, we are already at quite a requirement list for becoming a criminal: High testosterone, low DD, low IQ, and low stress level/strong thrill seeking.

    Does not sound like a winning combination.

  296. @esr:

    > The next question I’d like to see is how DD correlates with IQ

    I have a lot of personal examples where DD seems relatively uncorrelated with IQ. Sure, high IQ and low DD are both correlated with life success, but I’m sure we’ve all seen examples of dumb patient people who do OK, and really smart people who we think could be doing better.

    1. >I have a lot of personal examples where DD seems relatively uncorrelated with IQ.

      I strongly doubt that your social network is a good sample. :-)

  297. @winter:

    > High testosterone, low DD, low IQ, and low stress level/strong thrill seeking.

    That’s probably a useful list for describing the criminals who populate the prisons, but not necessarily for the ones who avoid capture for lengthy periods.

  298. @ Winter – “Your “dying in slavery” phantasies are part of Victorian lore.”

    Presumably you are unaware of the governments headed by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and many others in just the 20th Century alone.

  299. @TomA
    “Presumably you are unaware of the governments headed by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and many others in just the 20th Century alone.”

    The context was “Slavery” as it existed in the Roman empire. Which was roughly equivalent to the slave trades of the Arabs and American colonies.

    “Slavery” in the Roman Empire had a very different character than the labor camps in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Cambodia. Mao murdered as a result of ineptitude, ignorance, and indifference. Hitler and Pol Pot were out to exterminate a large section of the population, the labor camps were just one of the tools to execute the planned mass killings.

    Note that all your examples are from a roughly 50 year period 1925-1979. Explaining 10,000 years of human history by a single 50 year example seems excessive and myopic. All these examples of “dying in slavery” were abolished together with these tyrants. These mass murders were less an inherent part of the state as that they were connected to the personalities of these four and the absolute power they were able to grab.

    1. >These mass murders were less an inherent part of the state as that they were connected to the personalities of these four and the absolute power they were able to grab.

      No. The personalities of these four, and their ability to grab absolute power, were perfectly logical and in fact anticipated consequences of the logic of statism, especially in its most virulent Marxist variant. Internal competition in the state system rewards sociopathy; thus, occasionally, you get a really king sociopath. Genocide ensues as inexorably as water flows downhill. Afterward the toxic political logic of the system is impossible to disentangle from the personal insanity of the leader, because they were never really separate phenomena to begin with.

  300. @esr
    “The personalities of these four, and their ability to grab absolute power, were perfectly logical and in fact anticipated consequences of the logic of statism, especially in its most virulent Marxist variant.”

    All communist states in the examples remained communist after these tyrants lost power or died. None continued with the mass murders. Moreover, none of the other communist tyrants came even close in mass murders The murders started and ended with these persons obtaining absolute power.

    1. >None continued with the mass murders.

      Are you really so ignorant as that? The murders continued in all cases, because the necessity of repression was built into the logic of the system. The best that can be said is that the carnage became less visible and deaths per year fell to a level not sufficient to actually destroy the host society. This permitted apologists in the West to pretend that atrocities were no longer occurring.

      But the best counterexample to your ridiculous claim remains North Korea, where the dynasty is into its third generation and if anything the scale of atrocities has steadily increased over time.

  301. @ Winter – “The murders started and ended with these persons obtaining absolute power.”

    The instrument of statism is what allows a common murderer to become a mass murderer. But your missing the core principle. Tyrannical governments primarily kill when necessary to obtain and sustain their power. They much prefer a docile and controlled commoner class that can be exploited through non-violent means. Mass murderers are a clear and present danger. Covert tyrannies are much harder to rally against and defeat.

  302. @TomA
    ” Tyrannical governments primarily kill when necessary to obtain and sustain their power.”

    That is all beside the point. The claim was that states were filled with dying slaves. Over the extend of human history that is simply not true. States almost universally held higher population densities than their non-state predecessors and successors. This held for the Roman empire as well as the Chinese dynasties.

    The Roman empire had a population of between 65-100 million at its height. That might have been a fifth of the total world population at the time. The population density dropped very sharply after the fall of the empire.

    The debate about whether these people were as happy or as healthy as, say hunter gatherers, is a completely different one.

  303. @esr
    “The best that can be said is that the carnage became less visible and deaths per year fell to a level not sufficient to actually destroy the host society.”

    This is a rhetorical trick. There were three or four blood baths in human history where an unprecedented number of people where willfully murdered (or left to die). All occurred in the span of half a century and were “related” in a historical sense.

    Now you try to go to guilt by association using cases that had the historical “normal” level of political murders. When the Soviets under Khrushchev and Brezhnev murder at a rate that is “benign” when compared to Louis XIV or Sultan Mehmed II, there is no reason to compare them to Stalin.

    @esr
    “But the best counterexample to your ridiculous claim remains North Korea, where the dynasty is into its third generation and if anything the scale of atrocities has steadily increased over time.”

    North Korea is not connected to the blood baths of Stalin or Mao. Their leaders are probably among the worst humanity has produced. Still, for all their evil, they do not even aspire to the murderous level of a Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot.

    In total, the “normal” historical level of state murders is well below the 15% lifetime death by violence rate found in modern, state-less hunter gatherers.
    (arguments the Pleistocene hunter gatherers might have had lower violence rates are irrelevant for post-agricultural population densities)

    1. >Now you try to go to guilt by association using cases that had the historical “normal” level of political murders.

      Do you even listen to yourself when you say things like that? The Gulag Archiplago did not shut down when Stalin died. Our best documentation of that meatgrinder comes from 1958 (two years after Stalin’s death) to the early 1970s, when conditions were still so horrible that inmates cut strips of meat off themselves to have something to chew on and women backed their naked rumps up against barbed-wire fences hoping that a passing camp guard would fuck them pregnant so they could get out.

      This is your “normal” level of political atrocity in action – the true face, the night face, the logical conclusion towards which all states, everywhere, grind their way inexorably as the repression needed to keep the political class in power ratchets up. But you, of course, identify with the oppressors.

  304. @ Winter – “the “normal” historical level of state murders is well below the 15%”

    I can’t hold a candle to what Eric just said, but I would add that in Winter you have the true voice of a statist. His idea of a principled argument is to debate the appropriate level of genocide that will ensure the well-being of the collective.

  305. This is your “normal” level of political atrocity in action – the true face, the night face, the logical conclusion towards which all states, everywhere, grind their way inexorably as the repression needed to keep the political class in power ratchets up. But you, of course, identify with the oppressors.

    You’re doing the same sort of thing you accuse leftists of doing — taking anecdotes out of context in order to appeal to emotion.

    What Winter is saying is that outside of four isolated megadeath incidents, when compared to the best stateless society the worst state has a higher population density, better quality of life, and lower rate of death by violence — putting the lie to JAD’s statement that people who submit to governments die in slavery. He’s not condoning the gulags, or in any way suggesting that a state with gulags is tolerable or acceptable.

  306. @TomA:

    His idea of a principled argument is to debate the appropriate level of genocide that will ensure the well-being of the collective.

    To be fair, at bottom that may be a debate worth having. If we have good reasons (e.g. not merely premised on the promises of the leaders) to believe that a particular form of governance is better for most people on metrics that matter to us (such as average longevity) than another form of government (including anarchy), then perhaps we want such a government.

  307. @esr:

    I think they have updated the marshmallow test. IIRC, I have read at various times in the recent past that:

    – the marshmallow test is a better predictor of SAT scores than IQ
    – the marshmallow test results are much more variable over life than the IQ (changeable)
    – researchers actually changed the marshmallow test results by developing a rapport with the subjects. Trust enabled the subjects to wait longer based on prior experience with the fact that the researcher had a reputation for returning in a reasonable time.
    – Patience is not always a virtue. If someone has waited for awhile, but doesn’t know how much longer the researcher will be, it might be rational to eat the marshmallow.

    It practically goes without saying that if the ability to delay gratification can be nurtured and is dependent on trust, we should work on this to help people succeed later in life. It also practically goes without saying that high functioning families have probably always done this.

    This is actually the sort of skill that a regular schoolteacher might be able to inculcate. “Here are cupcakes — one for everybody in the class. You can have one today, or you can wait until tomorrow. Tonight, I’ll bake another cupcake for everybody who didn’t have one today, and then tomorrow those people can have two.”

    A class perhaps best taught immediately before lunch.

  308. > > > You need to read up on the history of drug prohibition. It started as an explicit culture war against minorities.)

    > > Of course it did. Certain minorities, in particular blacks, are dangerous on drugs.

    John David Galt
    > That, to me, is racism

    Reality is racist. Blacks, however, are not racist even when they viciously maim a white person for no reason other than that the victim is white.

  309. New comment on Armed and Dangerous

    Winter commented on After such knowledge….
    > Collectivism is an extension of tribalism and family based cooperations.

    Tribalism and families do not scale. The largest examples of government-as-a-family are monarchies, and if you are not royal or of high noble blood, you are not part of the family.

    We still have government as a tribe, though to hold together a very large tribe you need synthetic tribalism, based on religion and ideology, but again, if you are one of the governed, you are not part of the tribe.

    Government as a family scales out at the Dunbar number. There can only be a hundred or so that are part of the family. Observe the problems Saudi Arabia is having with a few thousand in the family.

    Government as a tribe scales out at a few thousand. When you attempt to incorporate more than that in the tribe, various pathologies happen. You get a pile of sinister conspiracies, and rule by consensus. Above ten thousand or so, the rest of the supposed tribe are not really incorporated, hence the current financial crisis. Madoff and the subsequent examination of the SEC revealed that a lot of people thought they were in the governing tribe, but were in fact among the governed, the looted, not the looters. Similarly with Jon Corzine. The owners of MF Global thought they were buying up political power, but found they were surrendering their wealth to politics, that they were part of the ruled, not part of the rulers.

  310. First, I find the discussion about this teacher’s experiences, as he relates them, as very close minded for the most part. I did not “take away” from the article that he was in any way condemning all blacks as coming from the environment in which he was teaching. What I do find interesting is his desire to stay in that environment and “slog it out” day-to-day with people who had another agenda, or that he does not report having been assaulted or threatened in any way. Too many are so quick to call “racism” and play the race card. My approach is to listen and try to understand the perspective of the writer, not judge him just because he is not delivering a message in terms you prefer, i.e. politically correct.

    I speak from my own experience with section 8 housing in a large metropolitan area that happened to have tenants that were mostly (90%+) black. Most, not all, were singe parent households (mom) which of course is the requirement for government welfare. Children of all ages were left unattended. Teens were pregnant. Drug use was evident. Brand new rental housing was totally trashed after one-year of living there off-setting much of the economic benefit of providing “free” housing to the recepients (mostly free as rents were typically $1200/mo and they only paid maybe $100/mo of that cost.) However, the damage left to the actual homeowner was in the thousands.
    Actual use of intelligence and energy was applied to gaming the system. As a lowly property manager doing move-out inspections, the “network” would notify the neighborhood of my arrival by whistles and hollers in some kind of code. Even though I had scheduled an appointment to perform an inspection, and could hear people in the house making noise, no one would answer the door making it necessary to cancel and reschedule the appointment in the hopes of catching someone in order to do the inspection.
    The clincher of my experience happened as I was showing a mother and her teen daughter two houses from which they could choose as their next abode. With excitement in her voice and eyes, the teen daughter turned to her mother and said “Mom, when do I get my house?” That was a telling statement, however, the real story was the mothers’ reaction. She took on a look of shock and looked immediately at me to see if I had “understood” what her daughter had said. I guess my expression told her everything because she was embarrassed and we quickly concluded our business and went our separate ways.
    I could leave the above statement without comment but I think it is worth saying that I found it ludicrous that after waiting myself for college then graduate school before I purchased my first home, it was incongruous that some seventeen year-old, or thereabouts, would even have a dream of having a house without an education. But from what I saw of “gaming the system” all she would have to do was get pregnant, not be married and when she was of legal age she would qualify for welfare benefits.
    Oh, and by the way, the people administering welfare in the metropolitan city were mostly black. So it was a nefarious model of one group of people being given government jobs probably because of their race, building a race baited domain in that department and then doling out benefits to their own.
    It was a system where a tenant could accuse the property management company of some wrong, be called into court on a week’s notice and the claimant had city/county provided legal representation free of charge.
    In almost one year of doing this work, this was my “typical” experience. As to the damage to the houses tenants lived in, the norm was red drink stains that destroyed carpets in all rooms, walk ways into homes blackened by repeated entry/exit with no cleaning at all, doors and walls with holes kicked and punched in them, all window screens destroyed and broken windows.. Closet doors were off hinges and not working, bathrooms major disaster areas. major appliances never cleaned or maintained as well as the yard never having a bit of maintenance, e.g. overgrown trees that looked more like bushes because they were never trimmed.

    My second major observation is having scanned comments at the beginning of the week and moving down the the most recent comments shows how far off track people went with this topic. Last comments are not even talking about the article the teacher wrote. Amazing.

    While I find it difficult to always do myself, I try to live by a principle espoused by Steven Covey of “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” fame, in “Try to understand before being understood.” I think many should also heed this advice. Take the teachers tale as a data point and don’t make a mountain out of it. It is only one person’s experience.

  311. Marxists didn’t even pretend to be much bothered by racism, or routinely use accusations of racism as a rhetorical club, until after Baran & Wallerstein replaced the vanishing proletariat with the Third World in the theory of immiseration. This was a post-WWII development.

    Indeed, in the 1920s the South African unions — already under Marxist control — were marching with the slogan “Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa”.

    And the White Australia policy was created and enforced by the Australian Labor Party, and opposed, weakened, and eventually repealed by the Liberal Party. The ALP didn’t embrace anti-racism until about 1970, when Gough Whitlam took over its leadership from Arthur Calwell, who infamously said “two wongs don’t make a white”.

  312. esr on 2013-07-10 at 08:36:29 said:
    > True. But the pathology under discussion was a specifically Marxist trope – not just that but actually a 20th-century Marxist trope; Marxists didn’t even pretend to be much bothered by racism, or routinely use accusations of racism as a rhetorical club, until after Baran & Wallerstein replaced the vanishing proletariat with the Third World in the theory of immiseration. This was a post-WWII development.

    Lenin substituted the third world for the proletariat in 1916 “Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism” . But that was the Jewish left. The Christian left was anti racist far earlier, and you can find all the twenty first century Harvard tropes all the way back to the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century, for example that races do not exist, that non whites cannot be racist, that all races are equal, but nonwhites are more equal.

    The left hates itself, and the Jewish left was less troubled by racism because they were more antisemitic than anyone.

  313. Winter commented on After such knowledge….
    > Your “dying in slavery” phantasies are part of Victorian lore. Probably inspired by the extraordinary high death rates in the American plantations.

    If death rates on the American plantations were high, how did a small number of imports give rise to a large black population? Black slaves had a remarkable rate of increase

  314. @esr
    “This is your “normal” level of political atrocity in action – the true face, the night face, the logical conclusion towards which all states, everywhere, grind their way inexorably as the repression needed to keep the political class in power ratchets up. But you, of course, identify with the oppressors.”

    I am tempted to accuse you of even more rhetorical tricks. But I will assume you are carried away. You leave out a word in your quote: ‘historical “normal” level’. Which, obviously, means the level found over history. I am not aware of any place where I suggested that I condone these murders and atrocities. I have no idea what I wrote that made you think I identify with the likes of Brezhnev.

    I could turn this reasoning around to you. I am pretty sure you will state that Stalin’s reign was much worse that that of the Argentinean junta of Videla. That does not imply that you support or condone the murder and raping of thousands of students by Argentinean “interrogators” or the practice of kidnapping pregnant women, torturing and murdering them after they have given birth and steal their children. But that is exactly what you do to me when I say the post-Stalinist rulers of the Soviet Union were less bad than Stalin.

    And, please, don’t come back with “just wait for the trains to get rolling again”. My country has existed for four centuries and never had a government that murdered its citizens in sizable numbers (the Germans and French did for a brief time kill Dutch citizens). The same for the UK. Modern day Germany has already existed for five times the duration of the third Reich, and still the trains are not rolling. They did not roll between 1880 and 1933, nor have they been rolling since 1945. Actually, Germany has only become more safe since 1950. And I would prefer German justice over that of the USA any time.

    @TomA
    “His idea of a principled argument is to debate the appropriate level of genocide that will ensure the well-being of the collective.”

    Show me where I even suggested that. But if you can point out a system with the lowest rate of death by violence, say, even lower than the level of current day Japan, then I would be happy to discuss that.

    On the whole you seem to confuse the facts I state, there was less murder after Stalin died, with my opinion about those murders, which I did not state in that comment. What is is not automatically what should be. So, to make it clear even to you, the Soviet system was horrible and it is deplorable that it took so long to collapse.

    @Patrick Maupin
    “To be fair, at bottom that may be a debate worth having.”

    I do not think the level of violence can be manipulated that way. I would see such a debate as academic and fruitless.

    @JAD
    “Black slaves had a remarkable rate of increase”

    Not all slaves worked in the plantations. Also, female slaves were used for breeding.

  315. @ESR

    “This suggests to me that there may be some single glitch in the dopamine-reward pathway” – how about plain simple depression (or a a genetic predisposition to that) ? Alcohol is typically a way aiming at self-treating male depression and of course ending up making it worse. “Drowning the sorrows.” Women are more likely to do it with chocolate, given that that bonds with opiate sensors and is not intself a depressant like alcohol that is likely to work better.

    1. >Women are more likely to do it with chocolate

      22 grams of dark chocolate is part of my daily routine, actually. A pharmacologically interesting point is that I find I enjoy it less when I have more than that.

  316. @Shenpen
    “Women are more likely to do it with chocolate, given that that bonds with opiate sensors and is not intself a depressant like alcohol that is likely to work better.”

    Middle aged women are renowned for resorting to alcohol for comfort.

  317. @ Winter – “Show me where I even suggested that.”

    You have argued that statism is a superior form of social organization as compared to previous modalities. Then made the claim that the historical norm for state-sponsored murder is something less than 15%, implying that this is also a comparatively good thing. If a band of hunter-gatherers kills 15% of its population, then that amounts to a few deaths. If a state tyranny kills 15% of its population, that could be millions. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot did not personally kill tens of millions of their victims. They acted through a state apparatus comprised of bureaucrats and thugs that magnified their power.

    Again, you are missing the core point. Governments are parasites. It is in their nature to create and subjugate a commoner class that they can feed on.

  318. @Winter:

    > I would see such a debate as academic and fruitless.

    And yet, here you are.

  319. @TomA
    “You have argued that statism is a superior form of social organization as compared to previous modalities.”

    Depends on what you think is “superior”. I wrote a higher population density and lower average death rate due to violence. I assume some people would consider that superior, but YMMV.

    @TomA
    “Then made the claim that the historical norm for state-sponsored murder is something less than 15%, implying that this is also a comparatively good thing.”

    Much less. At my place it murder rates are very low indeed. I assume I am not alone in considering a life time risk of being murdered of over 10% undesirable.

    @TomA
    “If a band of hunter-gatherers kills 15% of its population, then that amounts to a few deaths. If a state tyranny kills 15% of its population, that could be millions.”

    I have some difficulty in following your reasoning here. It implies that you would prefer an earth devoid of humans, as that will reduce the number of violent deaths to zero. I think I missed a step in the logic.

    @TomA
    “They acted through a state apparatus comprised of bureaucrats and thugs that magnified their power.”

    That seems to be the reason why people organize, united they are stronger. Again, this seems so obvious I must have missed some steps in the logic.

    @TomA
    “Governments are parasites. It is in their nature to create and subjugate a commoner class that they can feed on.”

    As far as I was able to ask, I find that people generally think of the Government as something that protects them against chaos and violence. Given that a collapse of government tends to increase both chaos and violence (eg, current day Egypt), I must conclude that they are most likely right.

  320. @Patrick
    “> I would see such a debate as academic and fruitless.
    And yet, here you are.”

    Indeed. And I must say that my earlier expectations seem to come true.
    ;-)

  321. Both sides seem to be overstating their case. If submitting to a government led reliably to extermination, there would’ve been an exponentially small number of Jews left for the Nazis to go after, because living under government by others had been the main Jewish strategy for a very long time before that. Conversely, the relationship between government and population is empirically messy and unlikely to be purely an effect caused by government. There is a lot of uncertainty in historical population figures. There is also a lot of uncertainty about governmental facts on the ground. Consider, if somehow the evidence clearly showed that after the fall of Rome population density had increased substantially, how much wiggle room there would be for statists to argue that it wasn’t anything like a stateless Golden Age, but that the population increase had been enabled by the various effective government institutions just at a somewhat smaller scale than the Roman Empire. And the causal direction of government correlation with population density is not clear. Note how weakly governed regions tend to be inhospitable: Afghanistan is not lightly populated just because it has historically tended to have a weak central government, and the Nile valley is not heavily populated just because it has tended to have a strong central government. When big external shocks (climate changes, new plagues, changes in the technological and military balance between mobile raiders and stationary agricultural societies) reduce population density, they could easily push the needle toward making it difficult to maintain strong central control in an area.

    1. >If submitting to a government led reliably to extermination, there would’ve been an exponentially small number of Jews left for the Nazis to go after, because living under government by others had been the main Jewish strategy for a very long time before that.

      No. In former times the lethality of statism was limited by significantly higher coordination overhead. The supernal deadliness of the modern state was approximated only when transport and communications costs were exceptionally low and uniform over large areas for pre-industrial times (one obvious extreme case was the Mongol Empire between 1206 and 1368).

  322. @ Winter – “I have some difficulty in following your reasoning here.”

    My last shot, then I’m done.

    In your mindset, statism/government is primarily a benevolent force in society that does far more good than bad. Fine, I hope it stays that way for you in the Netherlands.

    But there are no guarantees that the future will stay that way. Tyrannies and kleptocracies have been with us throughout recorded history and right up the present time. This “dark” side of statism is evolving away from mass murder and gulags as the primary tools for ensuring its power and is now morphing into the “Big Brother” model of passive enslavement. The enlightened parasite does not kill its host, it just controls it absolutely.

  323. @William Newman
    If population had increased after the fall of the Western Roman empire and between Chinese dynasties, we would have empirical data about the deathly consequences of empires. But our only data say the oposite. We have to live with that knowledge.

    This is not a very complicated question. Adam Smith already had a good economic model of this process in the 18th century.

    @esr
    The lethality of industrial states is practically boundless. But somehow, the only two fully industrial states that unleashed that genocidal potential were Germany and Japan. Funny enough, these have been two of the safest and most peaceful states in the last 65 years.

    1. >But somehow, the only two fully industrial states that unleashed that genocidal potential were Germany and Japan.

      Typical of you that you leave out Soviet Russia and its satrapies. You are not just blind, you are willfully so.

  324. @TomA
    “In your mindset, statism/government is primarily a benevolent force in society that does far more good than bad.”

    I do not do soundbites. But for some values of “good” and “bad”, e.g., population sizes, this could be an over-simplified summary of my feelings towards states.

    @TomA
    “Fine, I hope it stays that way for you in the Netherlands.”

    It worked for the last four centuries and there are no indications that is changing now.

    @TomA
    “But there are no guarantees that the future will stay that way.”

    Past performance is no guarantee of future results. I know that.

    @TomA
    “This “dark” side of statism is evolving away from mass murder and gulags as the primary tools for ensuring its power and is now morphing into the “Big Brother” model of passive enslavement. The enlightened parasite does not kill its host, it just controls it absolutely.”

    Sorry, but has this text fragment a meaning? I do not get it.

    I do not want to make fun of your writings but really, this sounds like it was produced by a Sokal Postmodernism generator for Libertarians and Anarchists
    http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

    I try to understand anyway, using your earlier writings. You seem to imply that there is a group of people, called the Government, that has a parasitic live style and lives off the production of the rest of the population, called Slaves. It would help if you would use the common terms “Elite” or “Aristocracy” and the “Common people” or “Plebs”.

    I also think you do not use the word “Slave” in a way that promotes understanding of the modern world. A slave was a person who was owned body and limb by another person. The body of a slave could be disposed of at the whim of the owner. That does not describe the common situation of citizens of the developed world.

    Anyhow, if we look over history, we see indeed that the bulk of the GDP in states tends to go through the hands of only a small proportion of the people. Say, in India before the English, around 25% of GDP is estimated to have been used by the royal court alone. The system was everywhere the same, the Plebs got what they needed to survive, and all extra production or income would go to the Elite.

    It is obvious that this is not true anymore, at least not in industrialized countries. There are countries where the difference between the very rich and the rest is very large. The USA is a prominent example with the infamous 1% who own most of all capital. However, the USA seems to be an exception among the developed countries. But even in the USA the Plebs do get quite a large fraction of GDP.

    Furthermore, the legal system of the USA may be accused of being worse than that of other developed countries (I do not know enough to say whether that is true), the Plebs still have some rights and protection from the law. That is not something you expect from a state of slaves.

  325. @esr
    “Typical of you that you leave out Soviet Russia and its satrapies. You are not just blind, you are willfully so.”

    I am not sure Soviet Russia was a fully industrialized country in the 1930’s. They tried hard, which was one of the causes of all the problems. Even in the 1940’s The soviets had enormous difficulty keeping its production up with Germany. And what satrapies do you mean?

    But if you want to count it as an industrial country, be my guest. Then there were three Industrial countries at war that went into genocide. Only, Russia was neither so safe nor peace loving after the war. They still did not repeat the horrors of Stalin.

    Personally, I still see them as only half industrialized. I wonder if they already are able to produce industrial products which are more valuable than the raw materials that went in their production.

    I do not assume you want to include China and Cambodia too?

  326. Winter on 2013-07-15 at 16:23:26 said:
    > Then there were three Industrial countries at war that went into genocide.

    You seem to be ignoring all the industrialized countries at peace that went into mass murder.

    Mass murder in war is excusable. You may have no alternative, or may plausibly or delusively believe you have no alternative. Charles the Great is rightly viewed as a hero, and one of his measures was to create a desert between Dar al Islam and Christendom. Could he have done something less murderous? Quite possibly. And quite possibly we would have all wound up under Muslim rule had he done something less murderous.

    It is mass murder in peace that is unambiguously a crime.

    Your own country, the Netherlands, is pretty murderous. About ten percent of deaths in hospital, which is a significant proportion of all deaths, are “under deep sedation”, which is to say, killed by the state. Perhaps those people were going to die anyway, and the doctors just made their passing a bit more comfortable, but, knowing how bureaucracies work, it is more likely that the state overpromised medical care and old age care, and doctors are killing off the excess to hide the fact that they cannot meet their promises.

  327. The most interesting thing I’ve seen about MS is Terry Wahls’ work. She’s a doctor who reversed the symptoms of serious MS by following what I’d call a high-vegetable paleo diet (especially heavy on the cruciferous vegetables) designed to support the mitochrondria. She’s got a good number of testimonials from people with MS who are doing better, apparently as a result of the diet, and to my mind, plausibility is added by people with other diseases who didn’t get anything useful from the diet.

  328. @TomA
    “This “dark” side of statism is evolving away from mass murder and gulags as the primary tools for ensuring its power and is now morphing into the “Big Brother” model of passive enslavement. The enlightened parasite does not kill its host, it just controls it absolutely.”

    Sorry, but has this text fragment a meaning? I do not get it.

    Compare the accounts of syphilis from just after the explorers brought it back from the Americas around 1500 to its present form, or even the modern course of bubonic plague to the descriptions from Justinian’s Constantinople. Parasites that do too much concentrated damage to their hosts kill them off and starve to death; the successful ones evolve into forms that are as virulent as they can be without causing a collapse in the host population (as happened in, say, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia).

  329. Really?? Mass murder? Syphillis? MS?

    Good grief, get a life. The article in question was about a teacher’s reputed experience with inner city ute’s, he he, of the black persuasion.

    Take your discussions to some other thread or blog where your weirdness won’t seem out of place.

  330. This is bul….
    I am black and I studied in Africa where all of my classmates were black. And the description does not correspond at all to what I’ve read in the article. In particular, we were not loud in a classroom. Now I was in an “expensive” private catholic school which emphasized discipline a lot. We were in good conditions even by west standards.
    So being loud in class does nothing to do with being black but all to do with social origin. Sorry to say that that remains true.
    For the record, I live now in France and France faces the same issues with “black” and north africans. And again, it happens where there are social issues.
    I’m not denying at all Black responsability but I still don’t see the need to find a biologic or genetic explanation to that.

  331. @Jessica Boxer on 2013-07-12 at 11:19:07 said:

    @William O. B’Livion
    > Prohibitions on recreational drug use are generally beneficial,

    Why?

    Note the word usage. *Prohibitions*, not the current WoD.

    There are no recreational drugs, including Pot, that are necessary for a full and healthy life. Even without the WoD and legal problems, recreational drugs, including alcohol, have mild to severe consequences for the individual and “negative externalities” as the economists like to put it. Properly implemented prohibitions (ranging from societal approbation or shunning to some undetermined level of legal involvement) will mitigate these harms to one degree or another.

    I do think that the current WoD has gone way overboard, and I am very, very sympathetic to the notion that adults ought to be able to do with their bodies (generally) what they wish.

    However we cannot–or at least should not–lie to ourselves and pretend that something is not what it really is.

    James A. Donald on 2013-07-12 at 14:39:31 said:

    William O. B’Livion commented on After such knowledge….
    > *adults* still want to f* their brains up on drugs and alcohol. And if you think the latter is a “black” problem, then you’re not just a racist, you’re a f*ing idiot.

    Alcohol has an effect on full blooded Australian aboriginals that is so obviously devastating to the aboriginal and anyone in his vicinity that all the progressive lefties have quietly, furtively, and shamefacedly accepted race based prohibition, albeit with the usual doublethink and doubletalk. Do you suppose that they are all f*ing idiots?

    Listen you screwhead, I spent 2 years in Central Australia. I had my house burglarized and my wife assaulted (not sexually) by 2 young aboriginal children.

    I’ve seen what you’ve read about first hand.

    But you’re the fucking idiot, because while alcohol (and any other mind altering chemical including gasoline) is a problem for “Australians” as my daughter called them (she was three to five while we were there), IT WAS AND IS A PROBLEM FOR WHITES YOU BLINKERED OLD FOOL.

    My mother helped take care of a 25 year old WHITE GIRL who was in advanced stages of alcohol dementia. My wife’s brother is a barely functional alcoholic. I’ve had “friends” who had addictions to everything from vicks nasal inhalers to fucking heroin.

    Fuck mate, look at the state Russia is in right now.

    My point was not that blacks DON’T have an alcohol problem.

    My point was that ALL RACES DO.

    The only controversy on alcohol prohibition in Australia is how best too keep the hypocrisy from getting too much in people’s faces. For example, no one in Australia, left or right, thinks that alcohol should be allowed on aboriginal reserves, though I suppose that if you asked them why not they would start babbling incoherently about capitalist exploiters and demonic males spending their girlfriend’s welfare money, or something similar.

    Alcohol is currently prohibited in most or all of the Aboriginal communities, and there is no hypocrisy as to why. The current controversy (sort of) is whether to allow Aboriginals to purchase it in non-aboriginal towns.

    And the problem isn’t the spending of the girlfriends money, it’s that the fuckers will steal from the elders (mostly the old women) who are afraid to talk to the police for fear of reprisal when their weak as piss judicial system fails to incarcerate the thief long enough that he forgets who dimed him out.

  332. Nancy Lebovitz on 2013-07-15 at 22:29:59 said:

    The most interesting thing I’ve seen about MS is Terry Wahls’ work. She’s a doctor who reversed the symptoms of serious MS by following what I’d call a high-vegetable paleo diet (especially heavy on the cruciferous vegetables) designed to support the mitochrondria. She’s got a good number of testimonials from people with MS who are doing better, apparently as a result of the diet, and to my mind, plausibility is added by people with other diseases who didn’t get anything useful from the diet.

    When determining accuracy one counts hits as percentage of shots fired, not just hits in the 10 ring.

  333. foodige commented on After such knowledge….
    > And the description does not correspond at all to what I’ve read in the article. In particular, we were not loud in a classroom. Now I was in an “expensive” private catholic school which emphasized discipline a lot. We were in good conditions even by west standards.
    So being loud in class does nothing to do with being black but all to do with social origin.

    To function well, blacks need higher levels of enforcement, harsher punishments, and less freedom that whites. And, lo and behold, your parents paid a lot of money to send you to a school with higher levels of enforcement, harsher punishments, and less freedom.

  334. @James A . Donald

    My parents paid a lot of money to send me in a good school as many parents do. Private catholic schools are well known for emphasizing discipline at least in French speaking countries. But don’t miss the point : the point was not about less freedom but good condition and environment.

    Regarding freedom, it’s a matter of education not a matter of being black or not. If your parents gives you the love of knowledge then you’ll tend to pursuit no matter what. You won’t need harsher punishments etc …

    It’s exactly this kind of sentence(“To function well, blacks need higher ” ) that I’m fighting against. This kind of statement is simply not true. Blacks do not function better with less freedom.

    Don’t get me wrong. When I say black, I mean being black from a genetic perspective. Of course, there are some cultural determinants.

  335. @JAD
    It is always instructive to evaluate the quality of a news source like a news paper or TV show on a topic you have intimate knowledge of. Euthanesia in the Netherlands is such a topic for me.

    I am pretty sure your presentation of the race question in the USA is just as distorted.

    Your distortion in the euthanasia case is obvious from the fact that you always insinuate our doctors murder people for money. But you never refer to the finances behind our health care system that would constitute this motivation. These finances are public, but addressing them would show that there are no monetary incentives to kill patients.

    In race questions you are just as manipulative. You play on folk ideas about population genetics where you know about the scientific results that have disproved them. You also are very good at picking exceptions and present them as the general rule.

    An example is to present genetic results on pygmee people (the only group that could possibly count as races) as valid for other “blacks”. You know perfectly well that pygmee people are genetically unrelated to other Africans and non-Africans.

  336. winter on 2013-07-16 at 01:21:47 said:
    > Your distortion in the euthanasia case is obvious from the fact that you always insinuate our doctors murder people for money

    Firstly, it is murder, not euthanasia. No one is ever asked to consent to prolonged deep sedation. They just quietly add it to the victims drip.

    Secondly, they don’t murder people for money. They murder people because the rules say that numerous bureaucratic requirements have to be met, and you just cannot meet these requirements with all these sick people hanging around the hospital. They murder people as bureaucrats, administrators, rather than as doctors. You cannot even identify a specific individual who ordered high dose sedatives added to the drip of a specific inconvenient patient. The system did it. It was procedure.

  337. foodige on 2013-07-16 at 01:13:33 said:
    > This kind of statement is simply not true. Blacks do not function better with less freedom.

    Depends on how one defines freedom. Botswana is a high functioning state, normally categorized as free, and rightly so, because it has freedom of speech and so on and so forth. On the other hand, it has also been alleged to be an international pariah for its use of executions and floggings.

    Unnatural acts (Lesbian Gay bisexual and transgender, or whatever the PC phrase is now) are, of course, illegal in Botswana.

    Government business starts with a prayer. The government quietly encourages Christianity. All religions are legal, but they have to register with the government, and unregistered religions are quite definitely illegal. The registration requirements are not onerous – or at least not onerous from the point of view of any mainstream religion. Kind of like concealed carry permits in most of the USA. If you are carrying a concealed religion without a permit, you can get in trouble, and bad people do not get permits. I conjecture that someone whose religion required him to sacrifice and eat albino children might have a bit of difficulty getting a permit for his religion.

  338. @James A Donald:

    If I understand you correctly, you generalize about black people from the bostwana example ?
    Is it your methodology ?

  339. Really?? Mass murder? Syphillis? MS?

    Good grief, get a life. The article in question was about a teacher’s reputed experience with inner city ute’s, he he, of the black persuasion.

    Take your discussions to some other thread or blog where your weirdness won’t seem out of place.

    If you’re having trouble following the discussion, perhaps you would find Reddit more to your satisfaction. A&D threads frequently involve world and political history as well as useful analogies such as memetics.

    @foodige: It’s best not to try reasoning with JAD; he’s a vehement racist whom ESR keeps around as some sort of example for instruction.

    @Winter: Without taking any position on the actual occurrence of murder-by-sedation, it’s well-established that even well-meaning individuals attempting to meet difficult metrics will often cut corners to do so, even if that means substantial rationalization or denial about it to themselves. This is most likely in cases that require subjective judgment calls and where later review is difficult. This effect is responsible for a large part of the structural evil evoked by bureaucracy, especially explicit power bureaucracies (government); it’s much easier to execute (or order) harmful actions if you can convince yourself it’s in someone else’s best interest, whether an individual’s (minimum-wage laws, Prohibition) or society’s (internments/forced relocations, genocides).

    1. >It’s best not to try reasoning with JAD; he’s a vehement racist whom ESR keeps around as some sort of example for instruction.

      I don’t “keep him around”, it’s merely against my principles to ban anyone for having opinions I disagree with. It is possible to get banned from this blog, but very difficult.

  340. foodige commented on After such knowledge….
    > If I understand you correctly, you generalize about black people from the bostwana example ?
    Is it your methodology ?

    You would agree, I suppose, that all black African states suck, and most of them really suck. The one that arguably sucks the least seems to have the firmest level of the kind discipline you probably encountered in your school.

    So I am arguing that your school, and Botswana, are not counter examples to the original post.

  341. @JAD
    “No one is ever asked to consent to prolonged deep sedation. They just quietly add it to the victims drip.”

    Any proof? Ever been in a cancer hospital? Palliative care?

    Another example of your distortions that is obvious to anyone who ever visited terminal patients.

  342. Mr. C. Smith: Nomar here. First time reader, first time responder. I do not know what Reddit is. But I do read political and world history. Someone using terms like “memetrics” must be from the elite category of academic or something like that because these discussion leave me desiring more in intellectual quality. Throwing terms around and people taking an example from an American inner city example and all of a sudden defense if being made from all over the globe is just silliness. I don’t mind people sharing their experiences as I did. I was only trying to share and support the fact that there is an element of truth to be found in the welfare society of America that exists,and therefore some legitimacy to the picture the author of the “article” paints.. How it came to exist and why it continues to exist makes for great discussion, as does the validity of the author’s experience.

    I spent almost one year in the midst of the section 8 housing mess before getting so disgusted, and worried for my own health having to go into these cesspools of filth and roach infested dwellings that only one year earlier had been brand new single family houses.

    Thanks for allowing me to comment. I don’t think I’ll be back.

  343. @James A. Donald. I do agree that most(if not all) african countries suck for many reasons that could be debatable.

    I just don’t agree with your following quote :
    “The one that arguably sucks the least seems to have the firmest level of the kind discipline you probably encountered in your school.”

    This is simply not true. You have choosen Botwana example but you could have choosen Ghana example which situation is better than Botwana’s situation.

    So you’ll have to find another explanation than your simplistic explanation.

  344. > Petro
    > There are no recreational drugs, including Pot, that are necessary for a full and healthy life.

    There might be none that are necessary for you to live a full and healthy life.but others disagree. So why do you get to decide? I’m not a drug user myself, but many people find smoking pot to be quite relaxing, and helpful to their enjoyment of a night with friends. Some people think that pot helps them with nausea during chemotherapy. Some people think that the use of LSD is essential to broaden your mind and to have a more visionary view of the future. That would be people like Steve Jobs, for example.

    Some religions want to use peyote buds to help them with their religious hallucinations, something they feel is important to connect them with their spirituality.

    So, I don’t agree. Lots of people need drugs to live a happy and full life. With the exception of the known medical benefits, people aren’t going to die because they don’t have recreational drugs, but that is true of a lot of things.

    The claim was that prohibitions are generally beneficial. Of course there are some benefits to prohibition, there are benefits to banning teddy bears too, but for them to be “generally beneficial” the benefits must outweigh the negatives. Where is the evidence to support that? If you think it OK to take away my right to act on my own body, you’d better have some pretty compelling evidence.

    Prohibitions on recreational parachuting could equally be claimed to be beneficial. But as with recreational drugs, it really is none of your damn business.

    Of course prohibitions on using recreational drugs in a motor vehicle are perfectly reasonable, since the government owns the roads, and has a reasonable right to set safety standards. But prohibiting a little weed in your basement never did anyone any good.

  345. foodige
    > You have choosen Botwana example but you could have choosen Ghana example which situation is better than Botwana’s situation.

    The 2012 Index of failed states rates Ghana pretty good by black African standards, but nonetheless rates Botswana better than Ghana.

    And while Ghana does not go in for swift and harsh punishment, and restrictions on people who merely profile as bad as firmly as Botswana does, it has a substantial tendency that way.

    Ghana is the successor state of the Ashanti empire, a pre colonial state famed for the effectiveness, competence, and success of its government, and the extraordinary brutality of its punishments.

    Today’s Ghana still has corporal punishment in schools. The school described in this blog post does not. If that teacher was in Ghana, the kids that shouted in class would be whacked.

    Today’s Ghana still believes in firm, swift, and harsh punishment of crime, not as much as Botswana does, and still less as much as the Ashanti empire did, but, according to Ghana web
    http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/artikel.php?ID=129647 their policy is, nonetheless, to give criminals a foretaste of the wrath of God

    The left and the international community (aka the USA State Department) is unhappy about this, and want Ghana to adopt a policy on crime more like that of its (failed) neighbors.

    So there does seem to be pretty clear correlation between black failure, and politically correct discipline, or rather the lack of discipline characteristic of political correctness. Obviously there is a correlation between white failure and politically correct discipline also, but weak discipline damages blacks more than it damages whites.

  346. Winter on 2013-07-14 at 03:18:27 said:

    @JAD
    “The history of Homo Sapiens is one of tribes winning, and people who submit to governments dying in slavery.”

    The Romans took a different view: Qui mori didicit servire dedidicit (“He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery.” Seneca, Letters on Morals to Lucilius, #26).

    States have higher population densities. After the fall of empires, the population tends to decline.

    Quite so.

    … the extraordinary high death rates in the American plantations.

    If by American, you mean “U.S.”, quite wrong. From 1790 to 1860, the slave population grew at 4.44%/year – very respectable, since slave imports were cut off in 1808, and many slaves were manumitted. The total population grew at 5.49%, including massive immigration.

    I have read that slave death rates were higher in the Caribbean and in Spanish colonies, but I have no data.

  347. Jessica Boxer commented on After such knowledge….
    > The claim was that prohibitions are generally beneficial. Of course there are some benefits to prohibition, there are benefits to banning teddy bears too, but for them to be “generally beneficial” the benefits must outweigh the negatives. Where is the evidence to support that?

    You are making an implicit status claim: “Oh, I live in a bubble, safely far away from all those people who are bloody scary when stoned. You don’t live in a bubble? Oh, poor you. Sucks to be you.”

    Arresting people on drugs is basically a form of profiling. What we need is more balanced profiling, Bayesian profiling, in which all relevant factors are taken into account.

    Instead of just arresting people on the basis of being stoned, we should also take into account race, legitimacy, and wealth – which is to say, should arrest people that are poor, black, fatherless, and stoned, (Martin Trayvon) because they are probably dangerous.

    Which is in practice a pretty good approximation of what we in fact do in the better police jurisdictions. When police bust middle class drug users, it is primarily to steal their drugs. We should make that illegal, which is to say make middle class drug use legal, while still arresting Martin Trayvon for Robitussin.

    If you live in a place which has a good police force, they don’t bust middle class drug users, because they don’t steal drugs.

  348. @James A. Donald
    >If you live in a place which has a good police force, they don’t bust middle class drug users, because they don’t steal drugs.

    You think it is ok for a legitimate activity to be illegal so long as the police choose not to arrest middle class citizens for it? When laws reach into everyone’s lives so that everyone can’t help break one of them, and when law enforcement becomes capricious, then all civil liberties are gone.

    1. >You think it is ok for a legitimate activity to be illegal so long as the police choose not to arrest middle class citizens for it?

      I think you misunderstand. JAD’s position is avowedly racist: he thinks drug use while black should be a crime, but drug use by whites should not be. His position is that this is consequentially justified because blacks handle drug intoxication poorly.

      You know what, this is worth a blog post. I’m going to write it.

  349. James A. Donald on 2013-07-15 at 22:13:41 said: Charles the Great is rightly viewed as a hero, and one of his measures was to create a desert between Dar al Islam and Christendom.

    Complete fantasy. The only place where Charlemagne’s empire was even in land contact with Islam was the “Spanish March” along the Pyreneees in NE Iberia. NW Iberia was the Christian Kingdom of Asturias. Both bordered the Ommayad Caliphate of Cordoba. There was no “desert”. Charles and his southwestern vassals intervened frequently in Iberia, usually at the request of some Moslem prince against his rivals. He accepted homage from Moslem rulers, and exchanged ambassadors with the Abbasid caliph, who gave him an elephant.

    The other land border between “Dar al Islam and Christendom” ran across Asia Minor and Transcaucasia, between the Abbasid Caliphate and Byzantium, Georgia, and Armenia. No “desert” there either.

  350. Rich Rostrom on 2013-07-16 at 20:40:53 said:
    > Complete fantasy. The only place where Charlemagne’s empire was even in land contact with Islam was the “Spanish March” along the Pyreneees in NE Iberia. NW Iberia was the Christian Kingdom of Asturias. Both bordered the Ommayad Caliphate of Cordoba. There was no “desert”. Charles and his southwestern vassals intervened frequently in Iberia, usually at the request of some Moslem prince against his rivals

    By “creating a desert”, I did not mean that they piled up sand dunes. I meant that they killed a lot of people and destroyed a lot of stuff, in order to make it difficult to move armies from Dar Al Islam into Christendom through the Spanish Marches.

    What would typically happen is that some Muslim prince would promise to double cross some other Muslim prince, but would then triple cross Charles or his vassals. Trying to play Muslims off against each other did not work very well, making scorched earth frequently the better solution, or the only solution. Roland got killed in a quadruple cross.

  351. @esr
    > I think you misunderstand. JAD’s position is avowedly racist:

    Could be, I don’t really read his stuff since it is turgid, lengthy and based on premises from a different planet from me. But in this case he was specifically talking about “arrest” vis-a-vis illegality; his claim is that the police should use their discretionary powers to profile based on various things including race, any my point is just how dangerous that discretionary power is.

    It reminds me a lot of all the arguments against red light cameras and speeding cameras. These tools (assuming they are fair, which they mostly are) enforce the law as written without discretion. If it is wrong to run a red light, what right does a cop have to choose whether to charge you with the offense? Further, why do we think it OK to give him discretion to pull you over and check your car for drugs or whatever else using a charge he would otherwise ignore. Or what right does a cop have to flash his badge and get away with it?

    Like I say, discretionary power of arrest and prosecution is a dangerous thing.

  352. Jessica Boxer on 2013-07-16 at 20:34:56 said:
    > You think it is ok for a legitimate activity to be illegal so long as the police choose not to arrest middle class citizens for it?

    In practice we do profile criminals, and that is the only sane and practical solution. We need to remove from circulation people who are black, fatherless, poor, and stoned in public. We don’t need to remove from circulation people who are white, legitimate, affluent, and stoned in private. Everyone knows it. Blacks know it better than anyone. Everyone lies about it.

    The destructive hurtful hypocrisy is not profiling. The destructive hurtful hypocrisy is busting a tiny handful of middle class kids in order to pretend that we are not profiling.

  353. Jumping in briefly on the Ghana thread because I lived there as a child:

    < Today’s Ghana still has corporal punishment in schools. The school described in this blog post does not. If that teacher was in Ghana, the kids that shouted in class would be whacked.

    Absolutely.

    My homeroom teacher emigrated, it took a while to find a replacement, and in the meantime our class had almost no adult supervision for a few months.

    Most Americans who hear this imagine instant bedlam. But we came in every day and sat quietly at our desks. The really dedicated students copied notes from a textbook someone had, and the rest of us never got rowdy enough to distract them. If we had, someone would have come by with a stick.

    So in some ways it seems like corporal punishment worked well for my school. On the other hand, teachers were not necessarily fair about who they hit or why. I met some older people who had dropped out to escape really brutal beatings, deep scars criss-crossing their backs.

  354. James A. Donald on 2013-07-16 at 22:07:45 said:
    I wrote:
    > We need to remove from circulation people who are black, fatherless, poor, and stoned in public.

    Prison, however, is overkill. I favor restricting blacks who profile as difficult to black ghettos, and only sending them to prison if caught outside the ghetto.

  355. @James A. Donald
    > We need to remove from circulation people who are black, fatherless, poor, and stoned in public.

    I am once again reminded of the Blackstone ratio, better that ten guilty go free than one innocent be published. Is 10 the right number? I don’t know. However, your solution: effectively preemptively removing potential criminals from society is not the sort of society I want to be part of. Didn’t even that nutty guy Tom Cruise make a movie lamenting such an approach?

    > Everyone lies about it.

    Don’t project your own insanity onto the rest of us. I’d much rather live in a just society and take the risk of capricious violence than hand over the reigns to a nutjob like you. Not a lie, it is what I sincerely, rationally believe.

    I am reminded of the Niemoller, “first they came for the communists and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.” Given your manifest misogyny, I can only imagine what you would do with me when you had finished with the blacks.

    Here is Jessica’s second law: There are not so unrighteous as the self righteous.

  356. I of course meant:

    “There is none so unrighteous as the self righteous.”

    Sheesh, a comments editor would be a huge boon around here.

  357. @James A. Donald.
    You say :

    “Today’s Ghana still has corporal punishment in schools. The school described in this blog post does not. If that teacher was in Ghana, the kids that shouted in class would be whacked.”

    Yes like other africain countries. I can’t think of a subsaharian country which doest not have corporal punishments in schools. By the way, it’s inherited from colonization. But that’s not the point. If this parameter was significative, other african countries will do as good (even if it’s not enough) as Ghana. But they don’t, so you’ll have there must be another explanation.

    You also say this :
    ” … but, according to Ghana web
    http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/artikel.php?ID=129647 their policy is, nonetheless, to give criminals a foretaste of the wrath of God”

    The funny thing is that the article you are quoting says that this policy has relatively low effect on crime reduction.

    So once again I think your view on black people are too simplistic.

    Regarding Ghana, I can tell you that there are other reasons that explain better Ghana’s (relatively) good performance.

    Finally you say :
    ” but weak discipline damages blacks more than it damages whites.”
    If you take a black which lives in a stable family then there would be no differences. Obviously, black people in America are generally not in the same “social” and most important “cultural” than white people so I’m not sure the compareason is correct.
    I really think that there are problems with black people in general (both in western and african countries). I think that these reasons has to with historical backgrounds. I really thing you’re making a mistake by trying to explain it from a racial perspective (genetics).

  358. Jessica Boxer
    > I am once again reminded of the Blackstone ratio, better that ten guilty go free than one innocent be published.

    I am pretty sure that if we removed from circulation people who are black, fatherless, poor, and stoned in public, we would be doing a lot better than ninety percent guilty.

  359. foodige on 2013-07-16 at 22:49:02 said:
    > The funny thing is that the article you are quoting says that this policy has relatively low effect on crime reduction.

    The policy was even more harsh under colonialism, and was well known to have been harsher still before colonialism, therefore, if harshness works, we would expect crime to have increased in recent times, not reduced. The relevant comparison is not with the recent past, but with societies with a more progressive policy on crime and punishment, for example today’s South Africa, which is notorious for horrifying levels of crime.

    Indeed, I would confidently expect that crime in Ghana has risen greatly ever since the Ashantee empire was overthrown, and continues to rise. If so, the rise in crime would demonstrate that the policies of the Ashantee empire are best for black people.

  360. > If you take a black which lives in a stable family then there would be no differences

    If you take a black who has been raised by his natural father, there would be considerably less difference – but rather few blacks are raised by their natural father.

  361. Jessica Boxer on 2013-07-16 at 22:25:29 said:
    > Don’t project your own insanity onto the rest of us. I’d much rather live in a just society and take the risk of capricious violence than hand over the reigns to a nutjob like you.

    Yet you live in a society where the drug laws are enforced primarily on poor blacks, where they for the most part do amount to profiling, so what you object to is not restricting people’s freedom on the basis of profile, but openly restricting people’s freedom on the basis of profile. My “nutjobbery” differs from Obama’s “nutjobbery” in that I can speak plainly of what is being done and why it is being done.

    Obama recoils from fixing the hypocrisy, since his own people would be the greatest victims of the ensuing crimes.

  362. “The policy was even more harsh under colonialism, and was well known to have been harsher still before colonialism”

    What makes you say that ? Do you have statistics of the ashanti period ?
    Your last statements are speculations.

    By what data allows you to say that South-Africa has a more progressive policy than Ghana ?

  363. > > “The policy was even more harsh under colonialism, and was well known to have been harsher still before colonialism”

    > What makes you say that ? Do you have statistics of the ashanti period ?

    The Victorians legitimized their aggression against the Ashantee on the grounds that the Ashantee were insufficiently progressive. The British empire was to bring progressivism to the benighted horribly reactionary natives. Following their victory, there were a bunch of conflicts arising from the forcible imposition of progressivism on the Ashantee, for example the conflict over the desecration of golden stool. The Ashantee wanted to execute some people who committed sacrilege and theft by stripping the gold, and the British felt this was overly harsh.

  364. I don’t “keep him around”, it’s merely against my principles to ban anyone for having opinions I disagree with.

    I meant the phrase in the sense of toleration, but I’ll try to be more careful with my diction. I have to say, though, that the few times I’ve seen you threaten the banhammer have been threads that went so spectacularly off the rails that the morbidly-fascinated part of me was a little disappointed to see the end to them!

  365. @ Jessica

    Some people think that the use of LSD is essential to broaden your mind and to have a more visionary view of the future. That would be people like Steve Jobs, for example.

    Yeah – I remember, in the mid-’80s, reading in Datamation (which (as I am sure you know) was, and now online, still seems to be, a magazine aimed more at managers of I.T. departments (and now CIOs) rather than I.T. people themselves), Steve Jobs describing his first acid trip.

    …many people find smoking pot to be quite relaxing, and helpful to their enjoyment of a night with friends.

    It may have been the same article that described how most of the early Apple employees smoked a lot of pot. It has been some time since I smoked it, but it is wonderful for thinking ‘outside the box’ – getting a lot of ideas, many of which are silly but some are very good.

    Decades ago, after I had let my ham radio licence expire (because I cared more about the technology than actually talking to people), I still couldn’t quite grasp single-side-band radio. I understood what happens when two frequencies are added, but it was when I was very stoned and my mind wandering about the subject that, all of a sudden, I grokked how multiplying two frequencies results in a carrier wave with half the power plus two side bands, each with a quarter of the power.

    And, long ago, I wrote code during the day and had my inspirations during the evening. It was very valuable.

    Pot, within limits, also makes a good driver into a better driver – more cautious and faster reaction time – my theory is that it is sort of disassociative, resulting in the part of ones’s brain that does the actual driving getting less interference from other parts of the brain.

    Now, alcohol – there is a drug that, for some people, can be one of the more dangerous – to a person, his career, his family and the people that he drives into.

  366. > > Everyone lies about it.

    > Don’t project your own insanity onto the rest of us.

    We do in fact have a policy of removing from circulation people who are black, poor, fatherless, and stoned in public, and everyone lies about it.

    I suggest we openly implement the policy and admit the reasons for it.

  367. The comment I just posted was about drugs, and, like the comment in which I mentioned Kubla Khan, Coleridge, opium and codeine, my post is awaiting moderation. Anyway…

    I would like to go wildly on-topic here for a bit…

    ESR asked:

    …rational argument won’t be enough. How can we keep the bigots from winning?

    There are always going to be bigots.

    I think that the single most important point is that it is good to judge cultures. Some are good. Some are bad. The culture associated with Hip-Hop, and, I gather, particularly Hip-Hop from “The South”, is very bad.

  368. @JAD : You still don’t give evidence about what you are saying. Let’s assume that the policy was more harsh during the ashanti period(I’m not sure that Ghanaan peoplle would think colonization has been less harsh on them but anyway), you still don’t have statistics on this period. So you are only speculating regaring this question. What makes you say that criminality was higher after colonization ?
    Now even if it was the case (which I’m not sure given the lack of evidence), there could be other explanations due to colonization.

  369. @BRM : “The culture associated with Hip-Hop, and, I gather, particularly Hip-Hop from “The South”, is very bad.”

    I totally agree with that and I think that one of the big handicap for black people living in America.
    Their value system is totally inversed.

  370. I wrote:
    > The British empire was to bring progressivism to the benighted horribly reactionary natives.

    Clarification: For most of Africa, bringing civilization to the benighted natives was a completely legitimate argument, since existing black societies were low functioning, but the Victorians admitted that the Ashantee empire was a high functioning black society, therefore, a hypocritical argument when applied against the Ashantee

  371. @ foodige

    Their value system is totally inversed.

    And, of course, it isn’t just the music – the whole ghetto – thug – never back down culture is extremely destructive. I don’t know if it is true or not, but I heard that the style of letting one’s pants sag way down is copying what happens in prisons where inmates are not allowed to have belts. Prisons! What a wonderful culture to copy!

  372. > he thinks drug use while black should be a crime, but drug use by whites should not be

    You oversimplify slightly.

    I think we should treat unequal groups unequally, and that the effect of this unequal treatment should approximate a full Bayesian profile of the individual.

    Of course we already do treat unequal groups unequally.

    Sometimes we do so furtively for sane reasons, as in the unequal treatment of black and white drug use.

    Sometimes we do so openly for insane reasons, as in the unequal treatment of blacks and whites in status related offenses:

    Given equivalent circumstances, the judicial system is more aggressive in punishing offenses of whites against blacks. (If Zimmerman had had an Indio or Spanish name, he would have been fine)

    If you are looking for a government contract or position, an official distinction, an educational opportunity, etc, etc, is it better to be a black or a white?

    It is more socially marginal for a white to be rude to a black that for a black to be rude to a white. A white, including myself, will never insult all blacks, whereas it is absolutely routine for a black to insult all whites.

    Now if I was an equalist, I would say this is unfair, and all whites should be treated equally with all blacks.

    But, of course, the trouble with equalism is that the superior group remains innately superior, even if, as with Hutu ruled Tutsi, they are continually subject to indiscriminate mass murder and brutal rape with very large objects. No matter how severely you mistreat the superior group, they remain superior to the inferior group, so no matter how severely you mistreat the superior group, equalism will lead you to conclude that you are not mistreating them hard enough. Mass state sponsored rape failed to make Tutsi equal to Hutu, so the next logical step was necessarily mass state sponsored rape with five foot poles.

    So the only workable solution is to say that since blacks are more likely to misbehave than whites, the consequences of a black misbehaving against a white should be more severe, and the standard of proof lower, than the other way around. Our existing unequal rules necessarily follow from equalism, and the only practical solution to this inequality is to have unequal rules based on rational Bayesian profiles.

    Similarly with women, who should never have been emancipated, although in their case the required inequality is in many ways directly opposite to the kind of inequality required for blacks. Blacks should be left to their own devices, as in Jim Crow. Women should not be left to their own devices.

  373. @ JAD

    …since blacks are more likely to misbehave than whites, the consequences of a black misbehaving against a white should be more severe, and the standard of proof lower, than the other way around.

    That is not only unjust and disgusting, it would give blacks a current, valid reason for misbehaving against whites. Even if your premises were correct, it would have the practical effect of increasing violence in society.

    It would be sort of like trying to reduce the number of Muslims that hate America by blowing up a house containing a variety of people, some of whom might by bad guys.

  374. BRM aka Brian R. Marshall on 2013-07-17 at 00:44:18 said:

    Even if your premises were correct, it would have the practical effect of increasing violence in society.

    You’re making a testable prediction. The historical tests do not back your interpretation.

    This is what progressives do all the time in all spheres. Policy X is insufficiently progressive – which will cause some side effect (blacks having a “valid” reason for misbehaving against whites) so we should be more progressive. Then as you get more progresssive and there are horrible consequences you get to argue for more progressivism – because the problems were caused by a lack of progressivism! Problems get worse? More progressivism!

    3,000 lynchings stopped 300,000 murders and you think that moving away from current policy would be a bloodbath because blacks would have a legitimate excuse for targeting whites for violence. What legitimate excuse is there now that’s causing all this violence? Excessive incarceration of black males?

    Maybe if we undo that then violence will drop.

  375. @ Steve Johnson

    I don’t understand what you are saying.

    JAD said that, for an equivalent crime (well, he doesn’t think it is equivalent), blacks should be punished more than whites and the standard of proof should be lower when judging blacks. I am saying that such a change would be unethical and, in any case, would likely make things worse.

    In other words, I oppose changes that JAD would like to see. How is that “progressive” and how would we do more of it – more not agreeing to change society as JAD would like?

    I don’t think disagreeing with JAD is something that is going to spin out of control.

  376. BRM aka Brian R. Marshall on 2013-07-17 at 01:34:44 said:

    I don’t understand what you are saying.

    Here it is again:

    JAD recommends that we base policy on a Baysian estimate of the dangerousness of various people that includes the person’s race – because as a single piece of information about a person it’s the second most significant one (behind the person’s sex).

    You claim that this will lead to an increase in black violence because now they have a legitimate grievance – that they are judged more harshly, suspected more easily, and ultimately cast out of society on lesser grounds. (Even if your premises were correct, it would have the practical effect of increasing violence in society.).

    Unfortunately for your argument policy in the past more closely resembled the policy that JAD is advocating and there was significantly less violence – not more.

    This actually fits a pattern with progressive arguments. A progressive will claim that policy X is flawed and will cause consequence Y (this example – harsher discipline for blacks will cause more black violence). When the progressive policy of undermining X is implemented (more permissiveness of black mis-behavior) and consequence Y – unexpectedly! – increases (more black violence) progressives start the ratchet over again clamoring for more reduction of X. The justification? Too much consequence Y.

  377. @ Steve Johnson

    I suspect that we could just keep repeating ourselves, but I will try once more…

    I am not arguing for more permissiveness of black mis-behaviour. I am, as a first approximation, arguing for no change. No change isn’t something that you can keep doing more and more.

  378. @ Steve Johnson

    The Lady of Justice (or whatever you call her – you know, the chick holding up the balance, the scale) is blindfolded. That is how it should be. If I rob a gas station and a black guy robs a gas station, we should expect equal treatment. (As a second approximation, to whatever degree this is not true, and I think it is very untrue in the US, this should be fixed.) But I am arguing for the blindfold.

  379. No, you argued that less permissiveness would lead to more violence:

    Even if your premises were correct, it would have the practical effect of increasing violence in society.

    This is a bad argument because there used to be a less permissive regime that, surprise surprise, had significantly less violence.

    This points strongly to the fact that JAD is correct and that you are incorrect. Unfortunately you are incorrect in such a way that leads to a feedback loop where things get worse and worse. Now you claim that you don’t want that to occur – you’re in favor of “no change”. Why? If you’re right then society would be foolish not to just try out a little more permissiveness.

  380. foodige commented on After such knowledge….
    > You still don’t give evidence about what you are saying. Let’s assume that the policy was more harsh during the ashanti period(I’m not sure that Ghanaan peoplle would think colonization has been less harsh on them but anyway), you still don’t have statistics on this period. So you are only speculating regaring this question.

    I do know that the Ashantee empire was a high functioning black society and high functioning black state, because the Victorians admitted it to be, contrary to interest, and that black societies and black states were and are generally low functioning, including the neighbors of the Ashantee ruled by the Victorians, because the Victorians acknowledged that even those that they themselves ruled were low functioning relative to the Ashantee – which runs contrary to the normal and usually entirely accurate colonial report that conquest greatly improved the conquered.

    1. >I do know that the Ashantee empire was a high functioning black society and high functioning black state, because the Victorians admitted it to be, contrary to interest,

      Not “contrary to interest”. There’s a clear pattern in the British record of admiring, favoring and to a significant extent co-opting indigenous warrior-elite groups – Sikhs are probably the best-known case.

  381. @ Steve Johnson

    I did not argue that less permissiveness would lead to more violence. I may not have been clear, but I argued that the justice system officially having different levels of punishment and different rules of evidence for blacks would lead to more violence (which is just a guess on my part, of course).

    It is your assumption that the current less permissive regime is the cause of the increase in violence. Maybe you are correct and maybe you are not. There are a lot of aspects of society that are different now than in the past.

    I am not arguing about the level of permissiveness at all. I am arguing for the blindfold on the Lady of Justice.

    I want to make sure the blindfold is properly in place. JAD is the one arguing for more and more of something until it fixes the problem.

  382. > If I rob a gas station and a black guy robs a gas station, we should expect equal treatment.

    If we knew what each person had done, and what he is likely to do in future, if we knew each person’s merits, we could treat them according to their merits, and the most efficient solution, as well as the just and morally right solution, would be to treat each person according to their individual merits.

    But we don’t know and we cannot know. So as a result, if we attempt to treat blacks and whites equally before the law we necessarily wind up treating them unequally before the law, as is obvious when a black commits a crime against a white or a white commits a crime against a black.

    Whosoever is vitally concerned that we should treat the black who robs a gas station in the same way we treat a white who robs a gas station is entirely untroubled by the way we have treated George Zimmerman, and if asked why it was OK to treat George Zimmerman in this fashion, will piously say “Well, no one knows what really happened”.

  383. JAD is the one arguing for more and more of something until it fixes the problem.

    Really? You’re arguing that the United States in 2013 is closer to JAD’s model than the United States of 1950 or 1904?

  384. > I don’t think disagreeing with JAD is something that is going to spin out of control.

    Disagreeing with JAD is something that has spun out of control, since my views correspond to what was mainstream some time ago..

  385. > I am not arguing for more permissiveness of black mis-behaviour. I am, as a first approximation, arguing for no change.

    But no change from the present is a very big change from what was normal ten years ago, a huge change from what was normal sixty years ago, a colossal change from what was normal a hundred years ago.

    So you are arguing for more permissiveness of black misbehavior, relative to historical norms.

  386. @JAD : I’m story, but you still don’t give evidence for what you are saying.
    Here are in a synthetic way your statements :
    1) Ashanti regime was a harsher regime than colonization for Ghana.
    2) Colonization was a harsher regime than actual Ghana regime.
    3) Ghana under colonization was fonctionning less than under Ashanti regime
    4) Ghana under actual regime is functionning less than under colonization.

    You don’t give evidence for statement 3). While I can admit statement 4 (even if I totally disagree with you for the reasons).

  387. > 3) Ghana under colonization was fonctionning less than under Ashanti regime

    I rely on Field Marshal Viscount Garnet Joseph Wolseley’s account of his war against the Ashantee. He describes the blacks ruled by Britain neighboring the Ashantee empire as low functioning, and the Ashantee empire as high functioning. (Which struck me as a pretty good reason to not make war against the Ashantee)

  388. @JAD: Here is the statement for which I ask you to give evidence :

    3) Ghana under colonization was fonctionning less than under Ashanti regime

    Your answer is :
    “I rely on Field Marshal Viscount Garnet Joseph Wolseley’s account of his war against the Ashantee. He describes the blacks ruled by Britain neighboring the Ashantee empire as low functioning, and the Ashantee empire as high functioning. (Which struck me as a pretty good reason to not make war against the Ashantee)”

    If I summarize it in one statement, it woud be :

    5) Neighbours of Ashantee empire were low fonctionning compared to Ashanti empire.

    I still don’t understand how it proves the statement :
    3) Ghana under colonization was fonctionning less than under Ashanti regime.

  389. foodige commented on After such knowledge….
    > 5) Neighbours of Ashantee empire were low fonctionning compared to Ashanti empire.
    >
    > I still don’t understand how it proves the statement :
    > 3) Ghana under colonization was fonctionning less than under Ashanti regime.

    British ruled neighbors of the Ashantee regime were Ghana under colonization.

  390. @JAD : British ruled neighbors of the Ashantee regime were Ghana under colonization.

    No. Ghana under colonization was Ashantee regime + some of neighbors of Ashantee regime.

    So If you want to make a compareason, you have to be more accurate.

    You are comparing neighbour of Ashanti’s regime with Ashanti’s regime. But you have to do is compare the situation of the Ashanti regime before and between colonization. If you have statistics or clue proving that under colonization, Ashanti regime were less functionning than before, then you can make your claim. But you are not doing that by comparing Ashanti’s regime and Neighbour’s.

  391. Sorry I meant :
    “But WHAT you have to do is compare the situation of the Ashanti regime before and DURING colonization.”

  392. @James A. Donald
    > Yet you live in a society where the drug laws are enforced primarily on poor blacks, where they for the most part do amount to profiling,

    I did not claim to be living in a society I consider just. I think nobody should be arrested for the simple act of using or trading drugs of any kind. Nonetheless JAD, what you lack in quality you make up in volume.

  393. > > I do know that the Ashantee empire was a high functioning black society and high functioning black state, because the Victorians admitted it to be, contrary to interest,

    esr commented on After such knowledge….
    > Not “contrary to interest”. There’s a clear pattern in the British record of admiring, favoring and to a significant extent co-opting indigenous warrior-elite groups – Sikhs are probably the best-known case

    1. The Sikhs were also a high functioning society in an otherwise decadent India. The British did not admire and coopt them because the British were evil racists, but because the Sikhs actually were admirable.

    2. The British did not favor and coopt the Ashantee.

  394. foodige on 2013-07-17 at 10:18:10 said:
    > You are comparing neighbour of Ashanti’s regime with Ashanti’s regime.

    I am comparing neighbors under British rule – which was largely territory conquered from the Ashantee empire, or territory that would have been conquered. The two empires were contending for land and people. Blacks under the Ashantee empire were allegedly higher functioning than adjacent blacks under the British empire (according to Garnet) – a highly unusual situation and one contrary to the usual rationale given for empire in Africa.

  395. Jessica Boxer on 2013-07-16 at 11:00:18 said:

    > Petro
    > There are no recreational drugs, including Pot, that are necessary for a full and healthy life.

    There might be none that are necessary for you to live a full and healthy life.but others disagree. So why do you get to decide? I’m not a drug user myself, but many people find smoking pot to be quite relaxing, and helpful to their enjoyment of a night with friends. Some people think that pot helps them with nausea during chemotherapy. Some people think that the use of LSD is essential to broaden your mind and to have a more visionary view of the future. That would be people like Steve Jobs, for example.

    Some people think that if you take a chemical that gives similar symptoms to those you are experiencing, and dilute the living crap out of it, until there is *probably* not even a molecule of the original chemical left in the “solution”. Because you know, water has memory.

    Some people think magnets and crystals are good for your health.

    I do not put much stock in what those three groups (with a large overlap) think when it comes to medical care.

    Likewise I don’t much pay attention to what drug users say about their habit. My father smoked for most of his life. He was in the health care industry (not a doctor, but had many friends and professional contacts who were). One of his good friends (Red Weir for those of you old enough to remember him, and live in Central Missouri) wound up on oxygen from emphysema.

    My father–the drug addict–was fairly adamant that Cigarettes didn’t really cause cancer and other problems. That was just correlation.

    He died at 64 of (probably) a massive coronary. I’m fairly certain his last deliberate, conscious act before laying down for a nap was to put out his cigarette.

    You happen to mention two of the *least* damaging drugs in your response, but even now as we have more legalization and more studies we are seeing more and more damage that these drugs do.

    These have–as noted previously “negative externalities” (I wish I could remember how to speel that word correctly, but it’s probably stored in braincells damaged by the LSD I did as a college student). Other drugs–cocaine, MDMA, opates etc. have even worse problems.

    These drugs alter impulse control in various ways, and often those ways are socially influenced. Amerinds have, in addition to problematic genes where alcohol is concerned, socialization in regards to alcohol that increases the tendency towards violence.

    Middle class and up folks have very different training when it comes to conflict resolution and impulse control. We *have* to stomp on that impulse to solve our problems with a punch to the throat or throwing a fit. It gets us fired, and then the bank repos our car. (this is sort of self-fulfilling. People who start off on the middle to upper class track and exhibit poor impulse control and conflict resolution tend to not stay middle class).

    Thus when some guy with a masters in CS tells me that “pot helps him see things” he’s (a) full of shit (I heard the same thing from a bunch of upper middle class white kids in Art School. Their art was shit–their ideas derivative and juvenile, their craft was crap (I know crap, I produced lots of it. My problem was a lack of talent, not drugs) and their follow up and follow through was in the bottom of a bong.

    I did have friends who could smoke up and do well. I had a lot more friends (and keep in mind this was middle to upper middle class mostly white folks) for whom pot was a leash that kept them “happy” (not one of my criteria, happy was yours) but kept them from progressing.

    In the parts of town where I had to live–where the “other half” lived–things were not so sanguine. Drugs are a *massive* problem in the Black, Latino and lower class white communities. For people who lack the sort of executive functions we do (and I saw “we” because most of us here have at least High school diplomas. Most have at least one degree, or work in a field where a degree is indicated), lack the self discipline, planning and ability to delay gratification you wind up with young adults who drop out of (high) school (or come to school in a state they can’t learn), who increase their consumption, and who make up the huge “unskilled worker” section of hte economy. Except that between the ages of 16 and 25 or 30 (drug use tends to tail off markedly during those 5 years) they aren’t “workers” in any sense because they’re not acculturated to the whole “weekend junkie” thing, and will show up to work non-functional.

    By the time they’re ready to more or less leave that world behind (those that do, a percentage are stuck in it for life) they have a poor work history, poor work habits and poor job skills.

    This isn’t Steve Jobs, this isn’t my best friends sister who used to do bong hits while doing her calculus homework. But this is my buddy [redacted] who barely managed to get out of the Marine Corps and despite being a reasonably bright guy wound up, well let’s just say he’s kept out of jail, but not done as well as he could.

    And we aren’t even into the “hard” drugs yet.

    It’s likely that Martin’s drug use is in part…No, scratch that. Martin’s drug use is what lead to his death by Zimmerman. If he hadn’t taken marijuana to school he wouldn’t have gotten searched and suspended. If he hadn’t been out getting mixings for syzurup or whatever the f* he was drinking, he’d not have been wandering from overhang to overhang looking in peoples windows–the suspicious activity that attracted Zimmerman’s attention.

    Note that I am drawing the distinction between recreational use of drugs and medical use, so we can dispense with the “nausea during chemo” example–that is medical.

    This also dispenses with the many, many people who need drugs ranging from SSRIs to opiates to anti-seizure meds to immunosuppressants. These are medical needs.

    As I noted in my first post on this subject, I have a great amount of sympathy for the notion that the individual should determine what they do and don’t put in their body, and that the only role the state should play is in making sure that there are no false or misleading claims made about those substances (which would get rid of the crystal hugging bunny *ckers, the magnet heads, the diluters and most of the chiropractors).

    But that doesn’t keep junkies out of my house. That doesn’t keep them from assaulting people on the street–even in the ideal political state.

    In the current political state we are expected to take care of those who will not take care of themselves (I’ve got a great deal of symathy for the truly ill and damaged. Dope smokers aren’t that) and until such time as people who don’t work starve, the legal and social prohibitions are generally better than not.

    Some religions want to use peyote buds to help them with their religious hallucinations, something they feel is important to connect them with their spirituality.

    If you want to take peyote as part of a religious ceremony under well established rituals, go for it. If you want do do his of mescaline and go to a goth club that’s not it.

    So, I don’t agree. Lots of people need drugs to live a happy and full life. With the exception of the known medical benefits, people aren’t going to die because they don’t have recreational drugs, but that is true of a lot of things.

    Other than medical issues, no, they do not, and while they *might* make some social situations more tolerable for the imbiber, they often make others in the room edgy and uncomfortable, expecially when the drunk starts to blow through social norms like they don’t exist. And frankly I’ve been on both sides of that–the one drunker than a Marine on a 3 day pass, and the one who was trying to keep the drunk from escalating into a full blown emergency room visit to have my foot removed from his ass.

    The claim was that prohibitions are generally beneficial. Of course there are some benefits to prohibition, there are benefits to banning teddy bears too, but for them to be “generally beneficial” the benefits must outweigh the negatives. Where is the evidence to support that? If you think it OK to take away my right to act on my own body, you’d better have some pretty compelling evidence.

    There are reams of evidence on both the personal and societal effects of drug use. Most if it indicates that the down side of using is more prevalent than the upside.

    And as long as the risks are socialized while the benefits are privatized, prohibitions are generally useful.

    And again I want to make sure I’m clear on four separate issues:

    1) I don’t think the WoD is good, I don’t think that throwing people in jail for small amounts of drugs is appropriate, and I think that (as long as we’re running a communitarian sort of society) that treatment for underlying pathologies is a better idea than jail time. Heck, I’d not even object to the “do what you want in private, if you show up in public intoxicated we hammer you”. My position overall is that non-medicinal drug use is *generally* bad, and that we as a society should take the position that it’s a bad thing.

    2) This has NOTHING to do with race.

    3) Cherry picking Pot and LSD is cheating.

    4) Caffeine isn’t a drug, it’s a vitamin. Or a mineral. Or something like that.

  396. @Petro
    >[compares homeopathy and crystals “therapy” to pot therapy.

    You are mistaken. The scientific evidence in support of the therapeutic benefits of pot with respect to various diseases is pretty well established, even if it has been difficult to obtain due to the illegality of the drug. It is by no means homeopathy or crystals. Feel free to read the Wikipedia page on medical cannabis. It discusses studies from such wacky reefer madness outfits like JAMA, University of Oxford, Scripps Institute, and the Institute of Medicine. Bunch of whacked out hippies that they are.

    And even if it were, exactly what business is it of yours if I happen to try some whacky treatment? Are you in favor of throwing crystal gurus in jail too?

    > wound up on oxygen from emphysema.

    Not from smoking MJ he didn’t unless he smoked a LOT of MJ, as an NiH sponsored study, published in JAMA found. (It is in the aforementioned Wikipedia page.)

    > You happen to mention two of the *least* damaging drugs in your response,

    Would you prefer I mentioned the two most damaging drugs? Alcohol and tobacco? Unless you are going to advocate repeal of the 21st amendment then I think you are on pretty shaky grounds.

    >These drugs alter impulse control in various ways, and often those ways are socially influenced. Amerinds have, in addition to problematic genes where alcohol is concerned, socialization in regards to alcohol that increases the tendency towards violence.

    OK, so are you advocating putting alcohol in that category? If your argument is “the negative externalities of this drug means that there is sufficient justification to take away a person’s liberty to use them” then the equations are not in favor of the current situation. The number of people who suffer as a result of cocaine addition is minuscule compared to the number of people who suffer as a result of alcohol use. And that is despite the fact that cocaine is extremely widely used. If you accept that people have the liberty to use alcohol then you have no solid ground to ban them from using cocaine. Furthermore, unlike alcohol, cocaine doesn’t tend to make people angry, in fact that is true of many recreational drugs, they tend to cause people to chill or be super euphoric for the most part. Tripping when driving a car or walking on a 20th story balcony isn’t a good idea. But I’d rather meet happy hippie than angry drunk guy any day.

    > Thus when some guy with a masters in CS tells me that “pot helps him see things” he’s (a) full of shit

    I was expecting a (b)… however, your assertion that mind altering drugs don’t provide a different perspective clearly is at odds with the views of many other people. So I don’t know your assertion adds much.

    > Drugs are a *massive* problem in the Black, Latino and lower class white communities.

    But two things — drugs are mostly a massive problem because they are illegal, black market, poorly manufactured, unreliable, not properly dosed, and subject to massive legal implications. Which isn’t to say they don’t have intrinsic problems in these communities, though I think drugs are more the symptom than the cause. Nonetheless, to state obvious, looking only at the intrinsic problems, considering the situation where you can buy your MJ along with your Camels, alcohol is a vastly more damaging problem.

    By making drugs illegal we take a minor problem and make it into a society destroying problem in the form of the war on drugs. Sorry, the two go hand in hand, you can’t have only one side of the coin.

    > It’s likely that Martin’s drug use is in part…No, scratch that. Martin’s drug use is what lead to his death by Zimmerman.

    That is a ridiculous claim. It is like claiming that Martin’s choice of clothing led to his death. If only he had chosen a red hoodie he’d still be alive today. That confrontation had nothing to do with drugs.

    >But that doesn’t keep junkies out of my house. That doesn’t keep them from assaulting people on the street–even in the ideal political state.

    But you are on the wrong side then. Junkies bust into your house and assault people on the street mostly because drugs are illegal, not because they use drugs. This fact leads to unfettered use, spectacularly high prices, lack of information, and a “broken windows” situation. Alcoholics don’t generally break into your house to feed their habit. They might assault you in the street, because alcohol is one of the few recreational drugs that make people really angry.

    > In the current political state we are expected to take care of those who will not take care of themselves

    You love these rabbit holes don’t you. In that case you should be advocating for the illegality of HFCS because it is one of the primary causes of obesity in America, and consequently complicit in the most common forms of mortality.

    > If you want to take peyote as part of a religious ceremony under well established rituals, go for it. If you want do do his of mescaline and go to a goth club that’s not it.

    So you get to establish what is sufficiently religious? What if goth is my religion? It is a nightmare, and exactly what happens when the government steals people’s liberty to both enjoy their own choices and suffer the consequences of their choices.

    > And as long as the risks are socialized while the benefits are privatized, prohibitions are generally useful.

    Perhaps, but the solution is to privatize the risks as much as possible. Nonetheless, the socialized risks of the war on drugs are far higher than the socialized risks of a pot head, or coke freak.

    > 1) I don’t think the WoD is good,

    But you only have three alternatives:
    1. Legalize or effectively legalize drugs
    2. Conduct the War on Drugs
    3. Leave the drug laws in a kind of legal gray area where they are illegal, but only prosecuted at the convenience and caprice of the authorities.

    The last option is totally terrifying to anyone who cares about civil liberties.

    > 3) Cherry picking Pot and LSD is cheating.

    Nonsense. Pot is far and away the most commonly used recreational drug. Most of what I said can be applied to many of these drugs.

    > 4) Caffeine isn’t a drug, it’s a vitamin. Or a mineral. Or something like that.

    Not a true Scotsman, huh? It is neither a vitamin or a mineral. It is a drug by any normal meaning of the word. It is, by the way, considerably more addictive than pot.

  397. And even if it were, exactly what business is it of yours if I happen to try some whacky treatment? Are you in favor of throwing crystal gurus in jail too?

    If they commit fraud, hell to the yes. A lot of these people urge you desperately to avoid “allopathic medicine”. If I have cancer and you tell me to sleep nightly on your crystal chakra disco bed instead of seeing a doctor, then you are actively harming people through deception and should sit in jail. For manslaughter, if anyone dies because they took your quack advice.

  398. @Jeff Read
    >then you are actively harming people through deception and should sit in jail. For manslaughter, if anyone dies because they took your quack advice.

    That is exactly the point of the previous, people not only have to receive the benefits of their own actions, but also the consequences. We have professionals to advise us on these things, and there is certainly a case for controlling appellations such as “doctor” or “engineer”. But people make outrageous claims all the time, and if you are too stupid to evaluate that claim then a little nanny government is at best a short term salve.

    We are so used to the government changing our diapers that we have forgotten how to take responsibility for ourselves. Time to kick the 40 something geek out of mommy’s basement and make him do his own grocery shopping and laundry.

  399. > But people make outrageous claims all the time, and if you are too stupid to evaluate that claim …

    This sentence didn’t come out quite right. It should be:

    …. if you are too stupid to *know you have to* evaluate [optionally with the help of experts] that claim then a little nanny government is at best a short term salve.

  400. @Nancy Lebovitz
    > Jeff and Jessica, should the same standard apply to medical treatments which are bad for people?

    I’m sure you have an example in mind, can you share?

  401. The image of the “fat black girl in a chair” is a lie, at least. When you see this image elsewhere on the internet, it isn’t cropped so close, and it’s clear that it’s an elderly white (and fat) woman waiting with other travelers and their luggage in line at a transportation terminal. Presumably she’s been given a chair because they didn’t want her to die.

  402. > The image of the “fat black girl in a chair” is a lie, …

    That’s not a big surprise, is it ?
    The whole thing reads, looks and feels as if it was designed to reinforce the already present (negative) opinions and prejudice of its audience, or awake negative feelings and opinions in people who might be susceptible to the manipulation.

    Do you think the image with the “After Katrina, at the Superdome” caption is an actual picture of the events mentioned in the preceding paragraph?

  403. Jess, could you point me at one of the images which shows that woman in a chair as white? Google images turns up a less cropped version, but nothing that shows any skin.

  404. @JAD : You are comparing Ashanti’s neighbour under British’s rules.
    If you want to validate your initial claim “Blacks can only function well with harsh regimes”, you have compare one of this situation :
    1) Ashanti’s regime before and after British domination.
    2) Ashanti’s neighbour under Ashanti domination and under British domination

    That’s not what you’re doing.

  405. Steve Johnson on 2013-07-09 at 20:18:50 said:
    “Women’s tennis – still crappy competition but attractive women (except for the uglier of the Williams sisters) and lots of people watch.”

    You obviously don’t know anything about tennis and its recent history. For what it’s worth, the last three women playing the most beautiful attacking game (all three having won Wimbledon too) are three women you would qualify as “ugly”, namely Martina Navratilova, Amélie Mauresmo and Justine Henin.

    The Chris Evert vs Martina Navratilova games in the 80’s were a beautiful show.

    Now female tennis is hardly bearable to watch, and yet it’s loaded with pseudo-models. A good racket and a basic technic are all it takes to play power shots, regardless of your arms’ thickness. This is why the mens’ game has turned into a fighting game. Again, you’re talking about something you obviously don’t understand.

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