There are opinions that are required in most of academia (and government, press, etc), if you want to keep your job (or ever be invited to parties). Naturally, most of them are false or silly: what would be the point of requiring people to avow things that were obviously true? That would be like an initiation rite that consisted of eating an ice-cream cone. Of course, they can only require public support, not real private belief: as yet there is no “sincerometer”.
In a previous post, a correspondent mentioned famous environmentalists that privately buy into our hypothesis on Ashkenazi IQ – I know one of those myself. That’s the sort of thing I’m wondering about – there are of course others. I don’t necessarily think that such people are incredibly common – really, I don’t know – but I would be interested in hearing of other examples. Famous is good, but really funny is perhaps even better. Mainly I’m curious.
If details would tend to incriminate you, feel free to send an email to gcochran9@comcast.net.
West Hunter 
No one famous, but…PhD psychologist at my hospital. Born 1952, wife is local Democratic politician. Mid-liberal, thinks conservatives are generally ridiculous rather that greedy and evil. We have talked often over the years about psychometric testing. He has administered many a WAIS, hates the Rorschach but has to do it, etc. Has repeatedly said to me. “I know, I know, Jensen showed all that years ago. But you just can’t say it out loud.”
People do not change their minds from 0-100% on things very often. More usually, they have a 25-30% view they suspect might be true that they keep to themselves but don’t think about much. They have a majority view they hold with tenacity as their official POV, but allow among trusted associates that there are holes in it at points B and F. Put them in a new environment and they might flip quickly, though not completely. That seems to be how it works in psychology, anyway, with opinions about autism, CBT, and what symptoms persist after trauma. Place to watch: people are wondering whether EMDR is simply voodoo, or based on sound neurology of memory even though it is sold like voodoo.
Rorschach? Wasn’t he on Welcome Back, Kotter?
No, he dropped that guy down the elevator shaft.
EMDR is pretty damned weird. I went into it thinking it was going to be a huge waste of time, and it wound up working like magic. I ran out of things to treat with it in half an hour. A year later, still feeling fine about those things.
Maybe it’s voodoo, but it worked for me.
Good to know. I was dismissive until a few years ago.
I wonder if other movements besides eye movements would be useful for reducing obsessing over traumatic memories… Perhaps skipping?
Touching this topic, there was a recent Twitter kerfuffle started by this fellow:
http://twitter.com/ChuckCJohnson/status/561019268523761664
How long does he last now?
Pardon the semi-hijack, but I’ve heard you wondering where the commentor known as Misdreavus went. I don’t know either, but I recently saw something that made me think.
http://www.xenosystems.net/war-of-the-week/
About six months ago a site called Xenosystems featured some Misdreavus tweets where he makes fun of the “dark enlightenment”. The commentors don’t like it. Midway through the comment thread, Misdreavus himself shows up, and trades insults with one of them. Then a sockpuppet account starts doing detective work on Misdreavus, trying to uncover his real life identity based on his internet handle and writing style and so forth.
Not a nice thing to do. No, we don’t have a right as such to online anonymity, but honoring each others’ privacy should at least be a gentlemanly standard of conduct we adhere to.
Misdreavus’s final word is “I’m going to start paying a lot closer attention to who’s following me on Twitter. This is weird.” And that’s around the same time @SuperMisdreavus goes dark, and he stops commenting on Cochran’s blog and elsewhere.
I don’t know if these two events are related at all. But my guess now is that Misdreavus is either gone for good, or is contributing under a new name.
I stopped posting because of grad school, not because I’m being “cyber-bullied”. There’s no way anybody’s going to figure out my identity, anyway. Although I’ve caught more than a few people openly plagiarizing content from my posting history and twitter feed, but that’s a different story… (even once on an MMA forum. Really, the chutzpah!)
Also, there’s the unfortunate fact that I no longer have very much to comment on, anyway. I don’t know anywhere near enough to generate novel ideas about race, homosexuality, or anything else, and it’s quite tiresome having to inform people for the umpteenth time that parenting exerts no lasting impact on IQ or personality, that Grindr is causing exponentially greater harm to the well-being of homosexual men than any Southern Baptist preacher ever could, that group selection doesn’t work out mathematically under nearly all circumstances, etc.
And I no longer have the time to do much leisure reading as it is. I’m not interested in doing other people’s homework for them, and nobody will miss my ideas when I’m gone. Perhaps I’ll consider posting again when I’m a bit older and wiser, or when I actually have the time to learn all the subjects that should have been part of my undergraduate curriculum, but weren’t because people are such gutless cowards.
@misdreavus:
Well,
A. Good to know you’re still alive and well!
B. I wouldn’t say your ideas have no originality or are devoid of value.
C. Even if B was the case, well, there’s this: It Must Be Said. Just sayin’.
It would be so useful to have the alleged data on Aboriginal Australian Visual Cortex sizes. Is there a compensatory reduction in other areas of the brain in Aboriginal Australians? What is the average Cranial Capacity of Aboriginal Australians?
“nobody will miss my ideas when I’m gone” – simply not true, and the discussion is the poorer because you are no longer around as often as before.
Sounds like all that cyber-bullying has taken a toll on his self-esteem.
misdreavus has better things to do than shot the shit on a blog
Well, thanks for setting the record straight. All the best with your studies – and if time permits, please don’t be a stranger.
Misdreavus! You should write a blog. Seriously (if you haent already that is). Don’t underestimate how your being gay may help many people hear you out on controversial topics. It’s bs I know the source shouldn’t change the info but it’s just the way it is, and your ability to be brutally honest about pathogen theory or what have you definitely helps open up the ears of people who might not be willing to listen otherwise.
Plus it gives you a centralized location to point to with links when you find arguments that have been repeatedly demolished. JayMan is excellent at this on different prog sites, educating those who wouldn’t listen to a conservative white guy for instance.
Just my 2 cents. I like your comments and reading what you have to say, even when I disagree. Hope to see more of it.
You’re wrong.
Obviously the probability that all human varieties are exactly genetically equivalent in cognition or any other biological trait is negligible. Only from an animistic not a scientific perspective can one take seriously the idea that a complex natural process such as evolution would lead to results conforming to some simple moral pattern. It is like believing that if a thunderstorm rolls over the Great Plains the resulting tornadoes will only strike the wicked and spare the good. In a world run by gods or spirits that might be the case but not in a world run by differential equations.
@Jim:
Pretty much.
Nicely put.
Thank you.
On a similar note, Jim Flynn has come in favor of eugenics.
Interesting. Please link?
I can find papal bulls that he’s against eugenics and racism:
http://alliance.org.nz/2007/07/10/jim-flynn-against-eugenics/
And I can find this on his wiki, from 2007:
During 2007, new research from the 2006 New Zealand census showed that women without a tertiary (college) education had produced 2.57 babies each, compared to 1.85 babies for those women with a higher education. During July 2007, The Sunday Star-Times quoted Flynn as saying that New Zealand risked having a less intelligent population and that a “persistent genetic trend which lowered the genetic quality for brain physiology would have some effect eventually”. He referred to hypothetical eugenicists’ suggestions for reversing the trend, including some sort of oral contraceptive “in the water supply and … an antidote” to conceive.[18]
Flynn later articulated his own views on the Close Up television program in an interview with Paul Henry, suggesting that the Sunday Star-Times had grossly misrepresented his opinions. In the article, Flynn argued that he never intended for his suggestion to be taken seriously, as he only said this to illustrate a particular point.[19][20]
Taqiyya, indeed.
Yeah, I saw the Henry show. I felt that Flynn was really just backpedalling to avoid offending people. His suggestion was that a contraceptive could be put in the water supply – it was a tongue in cheek comment but idiots (including the children’s commissioner) went nuts about it.
He also made the observation that intelligence was like height – if the shortest people had the most children then the population average would go down.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10450313
Given that language seems like an innate ability that all humans have to have it seems unlikely to be strongly related to IQ, unlike, say, vocabulary.
On another topic I have tried to communicate with Emeritus Professor Clive Harper to ask him for his data on the visual cortex sizes of Aboriginal Australians. It would seem to be as interesting as data on the presence of the VWFA in world populations, especially Aboriginal Australians and South American Natives.
Long live selection!
Given that bipedal locomotion seems like an innate ability that all humans have to have it seems unlikely to be strongly related to running speed, unlike, say, the ability to run a four minute mile …
In other words, having language is a trait of homo sapiens. How good someone is at it is correlated with how smart they are.
I can’t decide whether you are disagreeing with my comment or not?
Singing seems like a trait of homo sapiens as well.
Homo sapiens have both an innate ability for language and a highly developed cortex, which supports both language and other intellectual functions.
The fact that people are both lingual and smart means the two are correlated.
By the way, what did you mean to imply when you said “related”: correlated or causal?
If you interpret IQ as a relative measure of intelligence between people then saying it is not related to having language is a little like saying that how much a cow weighs isn’t related to it having four legs. But it is related to how big its legs are.
Relating a basic feature of a species to a relative measure is either meaningless or tautological, depending on the point you are trying to make.
Evidence that linguistic ability is related to IQ is pretty poor. What studies are you thinking of? If IQ is correlated with linguistic ability at all, I would expect it to relate to mastery of things like formal register, technical jargon, literary style and vocabulary, reading ability etc. but not core linguistic competence, such as fluency in one’s native language.
I am sure that most people think that figuring out how to fly takes a lot of intelligence, yet birds have been doing it for millions of years.
‘Singing seems like a trait of homo sapiens as well.’
This doesn’t make much sense. All sorts of animals sing – for example – song birds. Howler Monkeys probably think they’re singing too but the human taxonomists don’t seem to favor their particular style of music. Sounds a lot like rap to me.
For many years a tenor was described as a man with resonance where his brains should be. But Placido Domingo has begun to stamp out that particular calumny. Also Villazon who speaks several languages and knows both music and musicology. Kaufmann is also an intellectual – the new type tenor. But Pavarotti was a boob. Bonisolli even more so. Both remain greatly admired.
I think singing and smarts are largely independent.
I think you just made my point for me … talking and intelligence are independent.
It seems that several papers were published on the Aboriginal Australian Visual Cortex issue, however, they might only have been published in German.
Trying to track them down.
This might be one of the papers:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1261675/
It is interesting that the cause of death in the case of three of the Caucasians is listed as “hanging.”
how do you pronounce that? does it rhyme with auto-da-fe? most importantly will their be a bonfire?
Closest approximation of Arabic /taqiyya/ pronounciation is:
taw-key-yeah
Wouldn’t it be easier to list the people who actually believe those required opinions, past the age of 35? There can’t be many.
I’m currently at a Santa Fe Institute workshop with a collection of human behavioral ecologists. The norm in this field is basically to not talk about genetic racial variation in behavior, although morphology and physiology is fine. This is partly because HBE traditionally assumes that most behavioral variation around the world is due to flexible phenotypic responses to local ecology. This is probably true for lots of traits: variation in foraging behavior around the world, e.g., is largely constrained by what animals happen to be around.
As for what people privately believe about the contribution of genetic variation, I don’t really know. I suspect many of them suspect some amount of innate behavioral differences.
Let’s include plants?
Have they not heard of recent papers suggesting that rice cultures seem to select for different characteristics over time?
However, I wonder if the studies are reproducible.
I’m a longtime reader of West hunter who would also like to visit/intern at the Santa Fe institute. We are probably similar people. What is it like?
There are dry erase markers attached to glass walls, so you can draw equations on them. Kind of silly, but it’s a cool environment, and with a beautiful view.
I believe it was John Hawks who had a series of posts on his old blog offering evidence that Luigi Cavalli-Sforza is a secret race realist.
I’d be curious to know if people’s opinions are changing in various countries around the world regarding being a race realist. I’m not talking about the cartoonish racists who can’t think well enough to imagine various populations on highly overlapped bell shaped curves of intelligence, I don’t care what stupid people think. By race realist i mean people who can read this article http://www.unz.com/akarlin/genetics-iq-and-convergence/ and not be the least bit upset by the variation in IQ in various nations.
I think that your cartoonish racists are one of the reasons that a lot of people don’t want to consider race realism. So if one of your objectives is to “convert” more people to the race realist side you will need to find a way to deal with the cartoons. As far as I can see, the field is wide open for a solution.
I think the few idiots who still use racial slurs to describe black americans and actually mean what they say is inconsequential. What really matters is that just two generations ago our own grandparents believed weird mean shit about people. Public opinion regarding human equality has swung like a pendulum. First we had thesis (there was a strict pecking order of the races) antithesis (we are all equal, it is just the environment that causes differences between us) and gradually we will get closer to a synthesis.
How close we will ever get to a realistic view is a matter of debate. You can’t talk about IQ , much less variation between various people in IQ, without pissing people off. It is one of those emotional issues where the conversation gets quickly dragged into childish directions where open minded discussion stops. Nerds who read a lot of non fiction in this specific area where very few books have been mass produced take a long time to come around to becoming what I define as a race realist.
I have god knows how many direct ancestors (hundreds and hundreds) who chose mates in this country and damned if I am not plus 90% WASP. My direct ancestors were utter elitists, “uh, you’re not English, well you’re below me.” Action speaks louder than words, I’m damn near all White Anglo Saxon Protestant. Well the pendulum swung the other way and I was raised a liberal to believe we are all created exactly equal. I read the insidious book “The Bell Shaped Curve” back when it came out in the mid nineties and I pronounced it wrong and mean spirited. But since that time I’ve been reading more and hanging out with the wrong crowd on the internet and I am now a low down dirty despicable race realist who has come around to believe variation in IQ is not an artifact of environment and goes a very long way to explain the world that surrounds me. I keep my thoughts to myself, I like going to parties, I don’t want to be ostracized by family and friends. Viva la difference.
I hate to tell you this, since you seem so confused and all, but it is an artifact of the environment. Do you really understand what selection is?
semantics semantics. IQ is of course a product of both environment and inheritance. I can’t see how anyone could read into what I said any different but if they did, thanks for the correction.
Very interesting in that we have very similar personal trajectories.
We can just disagree about the damage done by obnoxious racists.
Let me speak for the ‘cartoon racists’.
There are plenty of web sites where the commenters live in close approximation to blacks. They see their schools and neighborhoods ravished by blacks every day. They experience the crime and the bad manners that characterize black urban neighborhoods.
Then they have to endure lectures from their intellectual betters about the unreality of race. They get testy. Most of those who lecture them live in gated communities or areas where they never meet a black street gang.
As a final indignity these white people who have watched the civilization that their ancestors built crumble when occupied by blacks try to speak out – their protests are call cartoonish,
These people are hurting. You may choose to ignore their plight but you don’t have to spit on them as you pass.
I spit on no one. (Well, maybe capitalist running dogs.)
In the US we live in a multi-cultural and multi-racial society. Assimilation is diminishing and was never complete. The future for us will be distinct groups, not a melting pot. You and I may not like this, but it is reality. (As an aside here, because of race, blacks assimilated the least.)
There are many problems arising from a multi-cultural and multi-racial society. Blatant racist verbiage does not benefit anyone; it hinders solving political and social problems. Decent black people suffer as much as whites stranded in changed demographic areas. Decent people are decent people, regardless of race.
Anybody can be a racist if they want. The rest of us are free to reject it because it hinders social and political progress.
Define racist.
Define social and political progress.
You can speak for racists Patrick but that in no way justifies stereotyping a huge group of people because of negative experience with a few. Negative attitudes about other people are self fulfilling. Of course I can say that from my big suburban house in the lily white suburbs. 🙂 It is tough living in or near a ghetto, and I hear where you are coming from. The Taqiyya, a ban against discussing race realism, will continue as long as race realism is strongly associated with racism. That is how it is. So if you think race realism is an important factor in explaining the world as it is and people need to pull their heads out of the sand, then the logical place to start is to clearly separate racism, and race realism.
Cracker1 is right and I was wrong. Racism is not inconsequential.
@Patrick Boyle:
“These people are hurting. You may choose to ignore their plight but you don’t have to spit on them as you pass.”
There’s a line between hurt and mean-spirit.
@Cracker1:
“In the US we live in a multi-cultural and multi-racial society. Assimilation is diminishing and was never complete.”
Assimilation is a myth. Clothes and speech deep, quite literally.
There are many problems arising from a multi-cultural and multi-racial society. Blatant racist verbiage does not benefit anyone; it hinders solving political and social problems.
Honest question: How do you know the blatant racist verbiage hinders solving political and social problems?
HBD is interesting in isolation, and it’s nice to be able to study reality without getting too deep into philosophical or moral controversy, but it does of course have political and philosophical implications. The neoreactionaries may believe that HBD implies that group conflict may be minimized by separation–perhaps the racism would help achieve such a goal. Also, anti-racist groups will tend to get taken advantage of by other groups who favor themselves unless anti-racism can be uniformly imposed. Perhaps the authoritarian imposition of anti-racism is actually worse than the racism itself, though.
Who are some of these obnoxious racists?
cartoonish racists who can’t think well enough to imagine various populations on highly overlapped bell shaped curves of intelligence
And where the curves overlap, we’re all exactically the same, neat!
All races have epicanthic folds, just Orientals have it at a slightly higher, almost inperceptably, higer frequency. And there’s plenty of whites with sickle haemoglobin, just not at as high a frequency as blacks, it’s a bell curve.
Those biological traits are not the same as the variation in IQ.
Nope.
peter frost != john hawks
http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/03/a-bird-in-gilded-cage.html
Woops, yes, Peter Frost. Thanks for catching that
It’s been awhile since I read those posts but the argument seemed pretty compelling, if not downright dispositive.
Not related to the human sciences, but I’ve heard from a computer admin at an oil company that they’re running simulations of oil drilling on Mars. That would imply they don’t really believe that oil on Earth is a fossil fuel.
Thomas Gold, of Cambridge and Cornell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold
Scroll down to the Petroleum bit.
Aha! I was vaguely aware that there is such a theory, but I was surprised to see that there are people in the oil industry taking it completely seriously.
Funny to learn that it’s a theory with Soviet (maybe even Stalin-era) origins.
I’ve always wondered about Richard Dawkins. Yes, he knows how to say the right things, but every now and then on twitter you see his real views on a topic emerge.
The key would be to provoke Dawkins’ vanity.
Even today he was tweeting how religious people are often low IQ, high-testosterone.
Nothing wrong with high testosterone
Take a good look at steroid abusers and say that again.
Androgens have a lot of effects which can’t simply be reduced to “Are they good or bad?”.
Quite a lot of women have used the “testosterone reduces hemispheric integration” finding as an implied insult. And while that’s not easily reducible to good or bad, extreme cases suggest they have a point.
Extreme cases on anything virtually by definition have no point.
Higher-than-average testosterone levels have definite effects, and it is notable that when those effects are amplified they are universally considered bad. If they were considered neutral or positive, then there’d be little reason to think that merely higher-than-normal would be bad. It is OBVIOUSLY relevant.
Male athletes and actors have higher than average androgen levels and the results are not necessarily considered wholly bad. High levels of estrogens have been associated with increased risk of breast cancer. Does that mean that estrogens are “bad”?
Almost any trai sufficently amplified or exagerated probably has bad effects.
IIIRC he defended James Watson’s right to speak and defend his views after his talks were cancelled in 2007.
I recall that your Ashkenazi theory made a falsifiable prediction that heterozygotes for Ashkenazi diseases would have a statistical IQ advantage over non-carrier sibs. Are you aware of any researchers with the data to test the theory? Who would publish the results if they corroborated your hypothesis?
Charles Murray made a similar comment in his interview on 20 years of Bell Curve.
“Now that I’ve said that, I’m also thinking of all the other social scientists who have come up to me over the years and told me what a wonderful book “The Bell Curve” is. But they never said it publicly. So corruption is one thing that ails the social sciences. Cowardice is another.”
As for Ashkenazi and their verbal superiority, I read a paper about how SAT-V scores declined by 50 points due to simplification of textbooks.
http://www.ernweb.com/educational-research-articles/the-decline-in-sat-verbal-scores/
Which is the cause and which is the effect? If SAT Scores have declined then perhaps publishers have had to respond by publishing simpler texts.
The paper makes it clearer, the decline of students who were brought up on simpler textbooks. It might have implications for Flynn effect, at least in US, since the gains on vocab. aren’t as marked on say, Raven’s. Someone has made the connection earlier,
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000786.html
This appears to be the actual paper, although that other stuff is interesting too:
Click to access HayesWolferAndWolf1996.pdf
Probably not what you have in mind, but I have personally heard from a few reputable scholars (whose identities am am obliged not to disclose) who think highly of Samuel Crowell’s “The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes” (the definitive Nine-Banded Books edition of which I published) and would never say so publicly.
Stephen Jay Gould probably didn’t believe his own arguments. Armand Leroi recounts this story:
“In the early ’90s, I was visiting Cambridge and went out to dinner with the late Stephen Jay Gould. During a long evening of conversation we talked about his ideas concerning race, racial racial differences, racial equality, including his well-known writings on the use and misuse of IQ tests and other such measures. I came away from the conversation with the distinct sense that he believed there were some things better left unsaid, some areas of investigation that were out of bounds if he wanted to have a just society. Nothing strange here. His views were, and still are, consistent with the daily fare of the editorial pages of many of our important newspapers and magazines.”
http://edge.org/conversation/the-nature-of-normal-human-variety
Not that it matters much, but that quote is taken form the introduction to Armand Leroi’s essay, which was written by John Bockman, not Leroi.
Oops, yes good catch.
With the benefit of hindsight, there was not much evidence to support the mainstream beliefs of 40 years ago on race and IQ, developed by Gould and others. Perhaps there was not much evidence then to support an opposing view either. The kindest explanation is that in the absence of evidence Gould propounded the null hypothesis that he considered the most benign, but he pretended that it was supported by science.
It is a completely different matter if he intended this area of investigation to be permanently out of bounds – if he intended all future generations to ignore the results of experiments that happen to contradict a mid-1970s view of social justice.
Gould’s views were clearly determined by his ideology. Even in the 19th century it was pretty obvious from places like Haiti that ther were substantial differences in average intelligence by race. The gap in cultural achievekments between Sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasia was quite stark.
in one of his blog posts Peter Frost quoted from writings of Boas way back before 1930 indicating that Boas himself didn’t believe in perfect equality between races.
The chances of a complex natural process like human evolution producing outcomes conforming to some simple moral pattern are somewhat like the chances of all the molecules in the room I’m sitting in having the same speed at a given moment.
@Jim:
“The chances of a complex natural process like human evolution producing outcomes conforming to some simple moral pattern are somewhat like the chances of all the molecules in the room I’m sitting in having the same speed at a given moment.”
Too bad that won’t fit in a tweet. It makes a great quote!
Thank you.
another “taqiyya” (lie that is permitted) is public education’s complete disregard of the normal curve & how ability matters – schools with low performing students are put on all kinds of administrative probation with extra programs to “raise scores” creating more work for everyone, yet this does not make kids any smarter, & doesn’t make them score higher (thank goodness for a little regression to the mean on the next test, then all the administrators can go home happy:)
@Jayman
“Assimilation is a myth. Clothes and speech deep, quite literally.”
Don’t know any 3rd generation Korean-American rednecks do you?
@Cracker1:
Do you?
Is assortment or intermixing a thing?
Yes I know some.
If there is no assimilation and admixture why are there not millions of different ethnic groups? Why do people use the term Anglo-Saxon, why not Angle or Saxon. What happened to the Celts? Where are they?
It’s pretty confusing. “Angeln” is the name of an area in Eastern Denmark. But most scholars seem to think that “Angle” was a gereral term for people from around modern Denmark. “Saxons” presumably came from the area of Germany called “Saxony”. In the earliest documentation of Old English and Saxon they already seem quite different although English like Saxon is a West German language. There is evidence that the Germanic invasions of Britain included in addition to the traditional Angles, Saxons and Jutes also Franconians and even Burgundians.
It is curious that the English epic poem Beowulf is about Geats and a Geatish hero Beowulf. The Geats were a North German people.
Thanks Jim.
I have had the impression that we are talking about various Germanic peoples who have gone though fission and fusion for a very long time. In addition to that, a principle element in the history of central and northern Europe through WWII pretty much boils down to different Germanic peoples fighting each other.
No more. There was a war in 1864. We lost.
(And “Saxony” is a term one should be careful with: there is a band of three states from West to East called Saxony something or other: Niedersachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, and just Sachsen. They seemed to have come from the Northern part of Niedersachsen and maybe Frisia as well.)
Bjówulf is clearly Scandinavian. The mead halls actually existed and some of them have been excavated by archeologists.
Niedersachsen is the real Saxony. The ones in former East Germany got their names for dynastic reasons, in the same way that the Mark of Brandenburg was redubbed Prussia and Piedmont was once sort of called the Kingdom of Sardinia. When a family held several territories, the name territory where they held the highest noble title (eg, king rather than duke) would be applied to their collective holdings. In later splinterings they might lose the original territory, but by then the name might have transferred over.
Niedersachsen, though, is the original home of the Saxon tribes.
@Cracker1:
“If there is no assimilation and admixture”
You misunderstand what I’m getting at. Multigenerational immigrants are often not representative of their forebears (who themselves were not exactly representative of their source population). JayMan Jr. is technically a 3rd generation Jamaican-American. Or, you could say he’s 4th generation Latvian-American. Hopefully you see what I mean.
So the question is how Korean (by blood) are those “3rd generation Korean-American rednecks?” The next question is where are the other members of their generation? Did they all stay with the (presumably) White rednecks?
No, Jayman, I don’t understand what you are saying.
Don’t refer me to Albion’s Seed or your maps (even though they are very good).
Since you used your family for illustration, I will use mine to tell you what I mean by assimilation and you can point out where I am wrong and where I am not understanding what you are saying.
I have one Great Grandfather that was 100% of German descent. I have another line where my 2nd Great Grandmother was at least 50% German, maybe more. One line came from NC and one from SC. The German ancestors arrived in NC and SC in the late 1700’s. As far as I can tell all of my other ancestors were Scotch-Irish. The SC German ancestors started marrying Scotch-Irish in 1829 and the NC ones not until 1904. I have no German cultural artifacts. No words, no recipes, no names, no customs, nothing. The Germans were completely submerged, swamped and obliterated by the Scotch-Irish. They no longer exist as a separate group biologically or culturally. I, nor anyone in my family, knew about the German ancestors until some of us were bitten by the genealogy bug about 30 years ago. I call that assimilation.
@ Cracker
Well, it could imply that assimilation is solely a biological phenomenon, via reproduction, and absent extensive interbreeding there is no assimilation. Hey! This relates to Cochrane’s original point
“Why do people use the term Anglo-Saxon, why not Angle or Saxon. What happened to the Celts?” They’re not called The Dark Ages for nothing.
Are you saying that is was a bad thing for the Angles, Jutes, Saxon, Danes, Normans, Celts, Picts, Scots and (n) other groups to mix it up?
I guess he’s saying the ‘mixing up’ was the result of conquest or kidnapping. As for the strength of the groups before/after mixing, that’s impossible to say now isn’t it?
I am an American born to American parents, themselves born to American parents.
Basically “white” with 3% Sub-Saharan African admixture, 1/5 Ashkenazi, 1/5 Italian, 1/5 English, 1/5 German, the rest “broadly European”.
I think I am pretty well “assimilated” to American culture. Shit what would you even assume the ethnic background of someone ought to be to be a proper American, just old-stock English? The Scots-Irish don’t count? British Isles only? Northern Europe only?
@Hipster:
What “White American” means today means quite a bit something different than it did 150 years ago. And even that depends on what region of the country we’re talking.
Mixing paint is a good (if imperfect) analogy.
You are aware of my American Nations posts, yes?
This will probably get lost in this few day old thread and you have probably answered this before, but: do you think the dominance of Sephardic Jews in Spain has any bearing on your theory of the origins of Ashkenazi intelligence? Don’t get me wrong, I find your theory plausible, and I fully admit that you know way more about it than I do, but wouldn’t an older origin of pan-Jewish intelligence and some kind of disgenic effect on the Sephardim also account for this?
If i remember correctly, Nicholas Wade said that literacy was required of Jewish males, so this might be that ‘older origin of pan-Jewish intelligence’ that you think is required to explain the supposed Sephardi dominance in Spain.
the dominance of Sephardic Jews in Spain
Like that’s hard?
“Honest question: How do you know the blatant racist verbiage hinders solving political and social problems?”
In a multi-racial society, where one group cannot dictate the conditions, co-operation among the races is a better option for accomplishing common goals. Frequently (usually?) this co-operation will fall apart for various reasons and openly gratuitous racist language can initiate and accelerate the break downs. Blatant racism and open, unrestrained expression of that racism does not benefit anybody except for demagogues and various psychopathic type individuals who thrive on the disorganization of common people.
Cooperation and anti-racism is great if everyone wants to go along with it. What if some groups don’t? What if some groups are naturally more racist than others (see “clannishness”)? Doesn’t the naturally less racist side get taken advantage of by the naturally more racist side? Is it a good idea to be promoting less racism among people on the naturally less racist side?
I think I can match my personal “clannishness” and my group’s against anybody. If push comes to shove, I will stand by my people, right or wrong.
I am looking from a pragmatic point of view as to what may be possible in the US, now. It is my opinion that idiots and criminals are in total control of this country. I still think that it is possible for decent people to take control. I don’t think that is possible with expressions of blatant racism dividing the very people who could come together and accomplish common goals. Look at the surveys of black people as a whole. They are church-going people. The political leaders are the ones that push the homosexual agenda and all the other garbage, not the common folk. They believe in the power of education and strong families. I’m looking for allies.
Racial/ethnic differences tend to trump other conflicts.
But NW Euro clannishness/racism is naturally much lower than in other groups. Whites, overall, are the most anti-racist people on Earth already. Telling them to be less racist will just allow them to get taken advantage of. As a strategic matter, you may be correct that racism is not useful because it is so deprecated, but anti-racism is similarly not useful for achieving social or political progress.
“But NW Euro clannishness/racism is naturally much lower than in other groups.”
This may be true. In any case NWE is not a clan, and if your premise is correct they won’t be able to form one. (Maybe a few hundred years from now)
If one is in a South Africa type situation, it might be better to go your route. I have said for some time that separate but equal was never given a fair chance to succeed. We had separate but unequal. That said I can’t see the US going to some sort of confederated political system with enclaves and such. I am looking for feasible possibilities for the US in 2015.
Who the US military accepts is very interesting but an under reported news story because it will trouble some people. As just about everyone knows the US military used to except any damn fool that could walk through the door. Come one come all, all races, creeds, colors and idiot levels. But the military has become high tech so they have recently raised the bar so that anyone below an IQ of 100 is not allowed in.
A similar weeding out process is occurring in jobs requiring high IQ and again it is an under reported news story because it will trouble some people. You can spend a fortune, or make yourself an indentured servant till age 40, by going to a private college that charges 50 grand a year an come out 4 years later with a degree in computer programming. If you have an IQ of 110 you won’t be very good. Some immigrant with an IQ of 130 can go on line and learn the rudimentary skills of computer programming for pennies on the dollar of what it cost our first example and when they compete in the job market, all other factors being equal, the guy with the IQ of 110 will end up working retail while 130 IQ guy does quite well for himself.
So a race realist can say there are measurable differences in IQ between races after all factors such as the Flynn effect are removed. And a racial idealist can respond STFU, you will never get tenure at this university and furthermore don’t come to my parties ever again. And a racist can say the blacks and new immigrants are ruining this country! And the press can ignore the whole mess because whatever they say will piss someone off and that hurts their ratings which is all they ever cared about in the first place.
Meanwhile back in the working world employers will do what works. Race won’t matter much, IQ will matter a lot.
Do you have any evidence for this, because I don’t think it is true. It is true that they do not like to take large numbers of people who are 1SD below the mean, but the military is very politically correct these days so I doubt that they have a cutoff at an IQ of 100.
The hard minimum for the Marines is about 93 (with a high school degree), the minimum for the coast guard is about 98, judging from AFQT scores. Other services in between.
They don’t take anybody that’s one std below the mean.
Somebody with an IQ of 130 in the US would probably get beyond writing computer code pretty quickly.
Here is where I got my information.It is titled “100 million Americans aren’t smart enough to enlist in the US military. https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=almost+100+million+people+aren%27t+smart+enough+to+enlist+in+the+US+military&ei=UTF-8&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-001
You will notice there is a sliding scale dipping below the 50th percentile if you have a high school diploma. The air force has the highest standards. This is a Steve Sailor article and I will quote from it. “But with the recession and the winding down of the Iraq meat grinder, the military often won’t let in kids who just barely make the minimum.”
This article is almost three years old so I would expect more stringent demands to be in place today.
Do you support affirmative action? It would seem to hinder cooperation and to create a lot of friction between racial groups.I mean, if one group is getting the short stick when it gets to college slots, government jobs, promotions etc, then I can see why this group would object to share the country with others.
I don’t support permanent AA and set asides. I think that in the past where it was shown that there were very clear discriminatory rules and structures in place, then it was fair to impose remedies to benefit those individuals who were treated unfairly. The current situation is different. Winning a lawsuit for discrimination today is kind of like winning the lottery; it usually doesn’t have anything to do with the facts of the situation. That said I don’t think that there is anything wrong with a governmental unit making extra efforts to attract members of minority groups to its workforce if the unit represents a diverse community. Even then I don’t support a quota for any group.
There is no real difference between affirmative action and quotas.
I was using the terms to distinguish between a judicial order requiring something like a 1 to 1 hiring until a certain ratio was achieved. This would have been after a judicial finding of discrimination. There are many instances in the past. It is not at all clear to me that such discrimination exists anymore, certainly not on the scale seen earlier. I was using quotas to mean set-asides, such as requiring a certain percentage of minority contractors, or requiring a particular student admission ratio when no past judicial finding of discrimination has been made and no order exists. To clarify as best I can, I support rectification of proven discrimination (against actual individuals). I do not support quotas or AA for different groups as a general policy.
“In a multi-racial society, where one group cannot dictate the conditions, co-operation among the races is a better option for accomplishing common goals. ”
And since this is so difficult, it’s best not to have a multi-racial society is you can possibly avoid it.
The dream of white nationalist. It does exist after ww2, Poland is an artificial country with almost 100% ethnic purity after ethnic cleansing all German out. Poland was artificial country as fallout of ww1.
There are people who can not tolerate different race. There are people even can not tolerate different ethnicity like Poland. Make you pick and move to it. I bet there are people even can not tolerate any body except themselve. Well, exile to desert is the choice.
If some even not tolerate themselves, then suicide.
Really? There are millions of people who speak Polish. The Kingdom of Poland was established in 1025. Yes, Poland’s boundaries and even existence as an independent country have varied over the years. But it was hardly imagined out of the aether after WWI.
There are few if any boundaries in Eastern Europe that are not “artificial”.
Or pretty much anywhere else. Poland is more natural than many.
You’re right. The US-Canadian border is pretty artificial west of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence. The Rio Grande is more “natural”. The present borders in Eastern Europe (excluding what was Yugoslavia) were basically decided by Stalin.
“There are opinions that are required in most of academia (and government, press, etc), if you want to keep your job (or ever be invited to parties). ”
I know full well that you’re referring to higher status jobs than mine own. High school teachers are the peasants of the cognitive class. But nonetheless, a teacher who openly opposes affirmative action, immigration, or blank slateism will not be able to keep a job. Which is why I try to keep Google a stranger.
Dave Chamberlin’s attempt to categorize “race realists” as different from “racists” is pretty damn funny. “Yeah, I just accept that the average black IQ is lower than the average white one. But I don’t use the n-word, or anything.”
I get it. Really. Just recently this post (https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2014/09/21/the-available-pool/) linked in at Reddit, in a subthread with a name that shocked me so much I tried to flag the link as Spam, but wordpress wouldn’t let me because Reddit. The poster discussed my post knowledgeably, clearly understood it and made a reasonable point. The comments below it were unspeakable.
But you’ll be lined up and shot with the rest of them, come the purge. As will I.
Along those lines, one of the New Blogs that’s getting approval (Jayman and Steve both like it, I think) is something called Slate Star Codex. This guy is trying to write about IQ and other HBD issues without being lined up and shot. Which means he writes prolix posts (which is saying something, from me) that discuss IQ intelligently (I guess) but then says “so why is IQ so unmentionable, when we can talk about height and sports ability?”. Then he ignores anyone who says, “Um. Duh? RACE?” because he’s worried about getting negative attention. He threatens to ban people who talk about race. Plus, he wants to talk about IQ, not race!
But never mind that, because what’s hysterical is that when you talk about IQ without race everyone wants to talk about their own personal IQ failings. The comments section is the worst bunch of Eeyores imaginable.
An HBD blog that’s SWPL. Definitely not sure that’s a good thing.
I tried to take “race realism” away from being “Voldemortean” but I see now it is impossible. If I lived in a world full of bright compassionate people of course I could but of course I don’t. I see that now, kindly excuse my ramblings, I was just thinking out loud. I have come to realize that public discourse regarding race realism can’t go anywhere productive, because the world isn’t isn’t full of west hunter commentators it is full of bitter stupid powerless people who live in a complex world they can’t understand. The few blogs that will have open eyes to race realism are but tiny islands in a sea of ignorance.
God help the Africans born in there 21st century because humanity won’t.
/pol/ is always right!
Ah, the “sincerometer”. The most important thing in life is “sincerity … if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” (George Burns)
I can offer only anecdotal evidence observed within my family and closest friends. My mother’s family traces itself to the 1600’s in America and for the past three generations has been in education except for my mother and myself. These folks, from a very liberal subset of education, are the sort one might see at an anti-racist protest. Yet privately to me, they have admitted that africans will always require some type of public assistance (eg affirmative action) because they do have cognitive deficit relative to other groups. This admission, private and one-to-one, came with a deep sadness. There was no shame at the admission, just a very defeated sort of sadness that reality could not be altered in the name of “fairness.” My mother, the only one of her generation not an educator (she tried it, in an “urban” school no less, quit and attained even higher education and profession), never broke under my questioning. Perhaps it was eight years indoctrination in college on top of the liberal upbringing, but when confronted privately and directly she would break into tears (an admission of sorts I suppose – but she couldn’t verbalized the truth).
This experience, along with others like it with other family and friends, led to thought on how these folks will react when irrefutable genetic evidence emerges confirming HBD that centuries of non-genetic observation has already proven (to my satisfaction at least). The lifelong committed “elite” leftists will resist until they cannot without being laughed at. When that time comes, when denying reality earns them ridicule rather than adoration, they will double down on their “social justice” on the grounds that we simply must help those who are “cognitively disadvantaged” (look at their activism on behalf of other “disabled” or “disadvantaged” currently). This is already the secret private position of many today. Practically speaking, nothing changes.
Maybe she was crying because she was talking to you, Stan, and she just couldn’t bear telling you that.
Making the transition from animism to science involves the recognition that the world is amoral. Getting over that is dificult.