June 7, 2010

Michael Chabon on Jewish IQ

My new VDARE.com column is a response to an essay by novelist Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, on Jewish intelligence. Here are a few excerpts from Chabon's eloquent Chosen, but not Special:
“GAZA Flotilla Drives Israel Into a Sea of Stupidity” declared the Israeli daily Haaretz on Monday, as though announcing the discovery of some hitherto unknown body of water. Citizens of other nations have long since resigned themselves, of course, to sailing those crowded waters, but for Israelis — and, indeed, for Jews everywhere — this felt like headline news.

Regardless of whether we chose in the end to condemn or to defend the botched raid on the Mavi Marmara, for Jews the first reaction was shock, confusion, as we tried to get our heads around what appeared to be an unprecedented display of blockheadedness. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic cast his startled regard back along the length of Jewish history looking for a parallel example of arrant stupidity and found, instead, what Jews around the world have long been accustomed to find in contemplating ourselves and that history: an inborn, half-legendary agility of intellect, amounting almost to a magical power.

“There is a word in Yiddish, seichel, which means wisdom, but it also means more than that: It connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance,” Mr. Goldberg wrote. “Jews have always needed seichel to survive in this world; a person in possession of a yiddishe kop, a ‘Jewish head,’ is someone who has seichel, someone who looks for a clever way out of problems, someone who understands that the most direct way — blunt force, for instance — often represents the least elegant solution, a person who can foresee consequences of his actions.”

This is nonsense, of course — nonsense to which, I hasten to assure Mr. Goldberg, I have always avidly subscribed. In the aggregate, Jews may or may not be smarter than other groups, but the evidence in favor of granting some kind of inherent or culturally determined supernatural abilities of seichel to the yiddishe kop certainly cannot be found in our history, which is littered as thickly with the individual and collective acts of blockheads as that of any other nation or people or tribe.

... As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over — God love them — any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.

This is why, to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of “Goodbye, Columbus” from the uncanny experience. The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before — Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people — but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. ...

It was this endlessly repeated yet never remembered shock of encountering our own stupidity as a people — stupidity now enacted by the elite military arm of a nation whose history we have long written, in our accustomed way, by pushing to the endnotes all counterexamples to the myth of seichel — that one heard filtering through so much of the initial response among Jews to the raid on the Mavi Marmara.

This sense of widespread shock at Israel’s blockheadedness in the aftermath of the raid seemed not to be confined, in fact, to Jews. Even Israel’s sternest critics will concede that the Jewish state knows how to go about the business of survival in a hostile world with intelligence, ingenuity, creativity, flexibility and preternatural control over the levers of chance and diplomacy (not to mention the global economic system and the news media).

Indeed anti-Semites and the enemies of Israel have often been found among the most devout believers in the myth of seichel, of a special — O.K., a diabolical — Jewish intelligence.

For we Jews are not, it turns out, entirely comfortable living with the consequences of this myth, as becomes clear from the squirming and throat-clearing that take place among us whenever some non-Jew pipes up with his own observations about how clever and smart we are in our yiddishe kops. These include people like the political scientist Charles Murray, author of an influential essay titled “Jewish Genius,” or Kevin B. MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State University at Long Beach who argues that Jews essentially undertook a centuries-long program of self-breeding, selecting for traits of intelligence, guile and skill at calculation, as a kind of evolutionary adaptation to the buffetings of history and exile.

Such claims, in mouths of gentiles, are a disturbing echo of the charges of the pogrom-stokers, the genocidalists, the Father Coughlins, who come to sharpen their knives against the same grindstone of generalization on which we Jews have long polished the magnifying lenses of our self-regard. The man who praises you for your history of accomplishment may someday seek therein the grounds for your destruction.

This is, of course, the foundational ambiguity of Judaism and Jewish identity: the idea of chosenness, of exceptionalism, of the treasure that is a curse, the blessing that is a burden, of the setting apart that may presage redemption or extermination. To be chosen has been, all too often in our history, to be culled.

You can read my response here.

114 comments:

Anonymous said...

>control over the levers of chance and diplomacy (not to mention the global economic system and the news media).<

From the horse's mouth.

Anonymous said...

>foundational ambiguity of Judaism and Jewish identity: the idea of chosenness, of exceptionalism, of the treasure that is a curse, the blessing that is a burden, of the setting apart that may presage redemption or extermination. To be chosen has been, all too often in our history, to be culled.<

Regarding themselves as the Master Race has made them somewhat unpopular now and then. Nobody likes to be "unchosen" and treated accordingly. Dare we use the R word here? Two thousand years of r-r-r-racism...

Anonymous said...

Darn, that was good. Reading this blog over a couple years is like reading one of Szatz's early books where there are hints of his later ideas and then reading a latter work where the argument becomes so proficient its like the ideas drive the works. I'll never look at political corectness quite the same way.

B said...

How do you figure that worrying about peasants with pitchforks in 2010 is stupid? 85% of the stuff you write is about the expanding numbers of peasants with pitchforks in our country. Them aside, would it have been absurd for Jews in 1925 Germany to worry about peasants with pitchforks?

headache said...

gonna be fun watching testy triangulate unwilling leggy blondes, neocons and poor Israel, and Iranian nukes on this one.

dearieme said...

Some tensions seem unavoidable - what's the point of being so clever if it costs you the right to eat bacon?

TH said...

Politically, Jews have always been rather stupid. They have a long history, but for most of it they have been ruled by foreigners, subject to the whims of same. Israel does not look that hot long-term, either.

Chabon, who is obviously stronger at creative than analytic thinking, announces, with no cited evidence other than the flotilla fiasco, that "Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people."

Steve, he's lying.

Simon in UK said...

Recent Israeli stupidity:

1967 - the attacks on the USS Liberty were pretty dumb.

1973 - the entire Yom Kippur war was pretty dumb, up until Ariel Sharon's brilliant final attack that broke the Egyptians. In particular, Golda Meir's refusal to believe the Egyptians were about to attack ranks with Stalin's refusal to believe the Nazis were about to attack. If the Arabs had had more than one competent commander they'd have won.

Simon in UK said...

"With great power comes great responsibility."

Can the American (mostly New York) Jewish elite learn to behave responsibly, as a responsible leadership class? Certainly that would be an enormous achievement. I think the first question that needs to be asked though is whether the assumption of a responsible leadership role would be in Jewish interests. Leadership classes don't take on the role for altruistic reasons. Normally they see themselves as very much a natural part of the society they lead, like the Ashkenazi elite in Israel, or the ancient Roman patrician families. If US Jewish identity is still founded on 'otherness', this seems unlikely.

On a different note, how about the effects of outbreeding? Large numbers of elite US Jews marry gentiles. Are they merging into the general white-gentile gene pool the way most Christian immigrant groups have done? If so, will their descendants eventually threaten ethnic-Jewish hegemony? If not, will they reinforce it?

Big bill said...

A particular problem with feigning equality of intellect/IQ is the obvious next step in the analysis: if Jews and North Asians and East Asians are equal to Europeans, then why are they massively overrepresented in elite positions?

"Disparate impact" theory tells us it must be due to invidious discrimination in their favor. In short, that they are racists and engage in massive "institutional racism". We don't need to know how or why or even identify the mechanisms by which they achieve their superior position. It is enough to recognize their superior position and take measures to "remedy" this "inequality".

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. But it is ever thus with ethnocentric intellectual elites -- with the possible exception of the Parsees.

Then again, their survival may be due to the massively multi-cultural and multi-religious nature of India. If America becomes as culturally and religiously fragmented as India, Jews may be as safe in America as the Parsees are in India.

Luke Lea said...

BTW, a very nice response!

Anonymous said...

The Ayelet-Chabons' appreciation of perfection and intelligence rivals that of any Nazi eugenicist. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

http://dir.salon.com/mwt/feature/2005/02/09/fetus/index.html

"I had a second trimester abortion. I was pregnant with a much-wanted child who was diagnosed with a genetic abnormality. I made a choice to terminate the pregnancy. It was my third pregnancy, and I was very obviously showing. More important, I could feel the baby move. We had seen him on the ultrasound; I have a very clear memory of his two tiny feet, perfect pearl toes, footprint arches, round heels. This was, for me, a baby, not a "clump of cells" as an older woman, steeped in the arcane language of the early feminist movement, called him. He was my baby, and I chose to end his life...

I have no regrets.

I made a choice based on my own and my family's needs and limitations. I did not want to raise a genetically compromised child. I did not want my children to have to contend with the massive diversion of parental attention, and the consequences of being compelled to care for their brother after I died. I wanted a genetically perfect baby, and because that was something I could control, I chose to end his life."

Anonymous said...

"Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people — but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. ..."


Speaking of stupid. This is what you get from people who can't count the number of brilliant Jews and others and then do a simple calculation of their proportion to their population size.

Could we please make the humanities majors take some math classes?

Peter A said...

The root of political correctness is the Rube Goldbergian fear that if the goyisher kops are allowed to be exposed to realism about human differences, they will eventually realize that Jews tend to be smarter than them, and then they will come after the Jews with torches and pitchforks.

Excellent point. It's not an accident that political correctness began in earnest after WWII and the Holocaust made Jews keenly aware that their distinctiveness was always going to put them in danger. It's interesting that centuries of slavery, brutal lynchings and economic exloitation of black people, or the destruction of most American Indian culture, was not enough to make "racist" a vile epithet to most Americans, but the Nazis and the Holocaust somehow did the trick.

Dahlia said...

Your solution is very hopeful, but what about envy?l I would like to believe you're prescription is correct...

I remember when Cochran, Harpending, and Hardy came out with their paper on Ashkenazim intelligence, there were responses that said everywhere Jews went, they ended up a little smarter than the native population due to the occupations they filled.

I was kind of accepting, kind of dismissive of their theory when it came out mainly because it seemed they were arguing Jews weren't anything special in classical times. I don't think they were quite saying that upon re-reading. The explanation of those diseases was such strong evidence, however.

What pushed me over into their camp, and the camp of those who said they end up a little smarter than every group they've lived amongst for centuries were
a. the slightly lowered Jewish I.Q. to closer to 110, but mostly...
b. the new numbers Lynn came up with for national IQs in 2006... IF CORRECT:
Germany: 107
Poland: 106

If these numbers hold, this would make these two groups the smartest Gentile groups in the world... the German one especially seems correct.

And if you put a foreign people in to a smart occupational niche of the smartest people and keep them their for centuries, you would come up with a new smartest people. And it would be far more *painful* for that group to succeed there in such a short time than amongst a less intelligent and demanding people and environment.

Anonymous said...

I don't know whether Jews are smarter then other people. I do KNOW that America would be a lot better off without Israel.

Anonymous said...

Great post, Steve.

Like everyone in the HBD blog-o-sphere I am concerned about dysgenic fertility.

Dysgenic fertility is a threat to almost all advanced societies today. For example, in Japan the women with higher IQ tend to pursue a moderated "sex and the city" type lifestyle - a lifestyle that generally produces zero to one offspring. Meanwhile women with lower IQ tend to live in more "traditional" less densely populated areas and have two or more children.

Obviously the success of the Ashkenazi comes partially from eugenic IQ policies. There were two separate elite groups within the ashkenazi community from the year 1000 to 1900. Talmud sholars and Successful businessmen. The route to elite status was available through both of these paths.

I am trying to figure out how powerful the eugenic effect was.

Has any academics done studies of the birth and death records of individual ashkenazi communities in the relevant time period.

My personal hypothesis is that in a typical community, the best talmud scholars would have an average of 50 grandchildren survive to age 40, the best businessmen would have an average of 50 grandchildren survive to age 40.

Meanwhile, men that were not successful as torah scholars and not at all successful in business would be effectively prohibited from having children. One way to prohibit them from having children would be to forbid marraige completely. Another equally effective method would be for the community to only allow them to marry older widows who were known to be infertile.

It is very well known among scholars of Ireland that elaborate social strictures were put in place to reduce the birthrate. In Ireland, young females were told by the church and the large community to not marry unless they could attract a proposal from a man who had the money to feed the offspring. As a result, in various periods in Irish history, 30 or 40 percent of the males were forbidden to reproduce.

While it is pretty well known that many males in Ireland were forbidden to reproduce, for some reason this phenom has not been studied among the Ashkenazim.

Anyone else have specific data on exactly how eugenic policies were among the Ashkenazi communities of Europe?

Anonymous said...

Am I correct in understanding that you believe that there is a sort-of conspiracy among Jews to deny their superior brain to avoid resentment among inferior-brains?

I find that hard to believe.

I think Jews genuinely believe what they're saying: it's "progressive."

it's liberal.

it's moral.

not some self-defensive conspiracy.

Paul Mendez said...

Once upon a time, the IDF and Mossad seemed to possess super-human abilities.

Now, not so much.

Just wondering -- could this be a symptom of the waning influence of Ashkenazi Jews in Israeli military?

I have no data on what percentage of Israeli military is still Ashkenazi, but just looking at photos of soldier from War of Independence through today, it appears to me that more and more of the soldiers look Sephardic in origin.

greenrivervalleyman said...

Steve, while there is a lot of sense to what you say (and yes, the flotilla frenzy is a classic tempset in a teapot type scenario) your distaste for neoconservatives and left-wing Jews clouds much of your foreign policy judgment.

Not to go all Whiskey/evil-neocon-testing99 on you, but Israel is an advanced Western country that is vilified primarily for being an advanced Western country and unless American conservatives counteract some of the propaganda directed against it, they will soon find themselves dealing with it much closer to home. Or did I hallucinate the fact that after suffering the worst terrorist attack in history our first response was to rain down- CARE PACKAKGES?!?! on the country which originated the attack?

bjdouble said...

It would be interesting if somebody tested subjects of similar intelligence and compared the results of jews and non-jews on the ultimatum game. I think Jews would score at either of the extremes, just not sure which one.

Anonymous said...

In reading the online comment section of Canadian newspapers I'm shocked to see how vocally my fellow Canadians are opposing Israel, it is now mainstream to be anti-Israel in Canada, which trails only Israel and USA in percentage of Jewish people and has arguably an even more pro-Israel government than the USA.

The bad news is that you just know a false flag attack is coming to take the heat off them.

Anonymous said...

Steve, I've never told you this but I really love you and your blog.

Noah Smith said...

I don't think the phrase "chosen people" means "master race".

As a kid, I was always taught that it meant that Jews had been chosen to bring the Ten Commandments to the people of the world...a task which has already been accomplished...

Anonymous said...

An American (formerly Soviet) Jew:

Because of assortative mating, the elites always become a mixed breed.

No matter the name and personal identification, it's hard to find a Russian intellectual in the capital cities (Moscow and St. Petersburg) who isn’t partially Jewish.

The same is true for the U.S. Look at the genealogies of the Jews who arrived in the beginning of the 20th century. Only a small part of their offspring continues to be Jewish. The rest intermarried and assimilated.

The elite of any country is a result of assortative mating of smart individuals from all of its classes and ethnic groups. The harder the social mobility, the smarter are the ones who get to the top from the outsider groups.

To David who said, "regarding themselves as the Master Race has made them somewhat unpopular now and then. Nobody likes to be "unchosen" and treated accordingly. Dare we use the R word here? Two thousand years of r-r-r-racism..."

Calling mating practices of a particular people RACIST is disingenuous. Every group and country has a mating philosophy and strategy. In Israel, the current propaganda is “we’ll all be chocolate.” In America, “we should all intermarry.” Among Christians, “we should marry other Christians.” Among the elite, “we should marry intelligent people.” Even saying to one’s children, “you should marry the one you love” or “you shouldn’t marry” is also a mating strategy.

And in this sense, everyone is a racist.

Big bill said...

Anonymous, there is no more a conspiracy of Jews than there was conspiracy of bankers to pimp sub-prime mortgages. There was never any Protocols of the Elders of Bankstas, just a bunch of banker folk who maybe felt a bit squeamish about pimping sub-prime, yet couldn't resist the lust for gelt.

So when some banksta or another came up with some quasi-plausible BS rap about how sub-prime mortgages were "empowering", and "redressed racial wrongs" they just fell in behind the leader, that's all. They believed. It is always easier to believe the truth of anything that lines your own pocket and not look too closely at the reality.

Same with Jews: no secret black-robed rituals and blood oaths, just common sense. The meme of "healing the world" (ie Jewish self-sacrifice for all humanity) fit perfectly, seemed nice enough and plausible enough, and certainly gave big ego boo to the believers. As a result, it naturally propagated, and quite successfully, just like the beliefs of every other self-serving constituency, whether it is the self-serving rules of the American Bar Association or the State Hair Cutters Licensing Board.

No conspiracy required. People innately understand that "believing" and "propagating" are in their own interests and bend their minds accordingly.

As a matter of fact, if there ever WAS a conspiracy that surfaced, the true believers would feel awfully betrayed, and would likely insist at the top of their lungs that THEY, at least, were sincere.

crawfurdmuir said...

Judgment and intelligence are not identical qualities. There are plenty of illustrations of bad political judgment on the parts of Jews. During the period of the Hitler/Stalin pact, almost the entire American and western European left (including most Jewish leftists/communists) toed the party line and advocated 'peace' with the Nazis. How many Jewish lives were lost as a consequence - how many eggs broken for the sake of making the Marxist omelette? This doesn't seem to have been an example of astute judgment on the part of the Jews involved.

Whether the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla is anything more than a momentary "PR disaster" remains to be seen. Simon in the UK reminds us of the attack on the USS Liberty. That ought to have been a worse PR disaster for Israel from the standpoint of relations with the US than the Gaza flotilla attack. From the point of view of most of the American public today it has gone down the memory hole. The same can be said about the treason of Jonathan Pollard. Its consequences for the US/Israel relationship were effectively nil. Calculation can be of many kinds, including about the public tendency toward anterograde amnesia, and its implications about the nature of political opinion.

Anyone who is surprised by the willingness of the Israelis to shed blood, even innocent blood, has not read the Old Testament. One might start with the story of Jephthah (Judges xi - xii), and in particular of the original holocaust (Judges xi:31).

Sheila said...

Dearieme, marvelously pithy comment. A muslim friend of my son (I'm trying to discourage this) recently came over to our home and asked "What's that smell?" I nonchalantly replied "I cook bacon every Saturday morning" and he mumbled "Oh." I still think the guy who thought up the all-pork airline (can't remember the website that featured the satire, but for security purposes the planes had pig-leather seats, etc.) had it right - if not forbidden by Dear Leader and PC cultists (most of them Jews) such an airline would be a big money maker.

agnostic said...

"Could we please make the humanities majors take some math classes?"

It's not matter of analytic vs. creative thinking, since arts majors readily notice that blacks are a small portion of the total population but a large portion of the prison population, of the pulled-over population, etc.

But in the black case, using simple analytic thinking to notice and publicize patterns lets them push a PC claim about racist cops or institutional racism.

FirstComment said...

Interestingly, the head of the Israeli Navy who planned the flotilla takeover is Chinese.
http://neoconexpress.blogspot.com/2007/10/first-eli-marom-israeli-of-chinese.html
Actually he's one-quarter Chinese. Shouldn't he have been smart enough to come up with a better plan.

e-burke said...

"If Jews were as amenable to kidding by gentiles as WASPs had been to Jewish comedians, they would be less prone to inflicting their complexes upon American policy."

Why would anyone want to be "less prone to inflicting their complexes"? How would that be in one's interests. The very Darwinian point of existence is to gain as much influence or control as possible, whether it be the control of a squirrel over the nuts or a group of humans over ideas, customs, or rules. The English played this game, won big, then faded. Jews may follow the same trajectory, or not.
What you are asking of the Jews, and to my constant disappointment everyone conflates with intelligence (Chabon's article conflates smart with wise and stupid with foolish), is to be wise, or to be truly moral as opposed to just well-behaved.

Anonymous said...

As is clear from most of the recent genetic data, there is nothing exceptional about Jews, any more than there is anything exceptional about Iraqis, Greeks or Italians.

The Captain said...

Speaking of Jews:

Steve, are you going to comment on the firestorm of hate being directed at Helen Thomas for basically saying for the Jews of Israel to go back home?

I hear now that she is "retiring."

Steve Sailer said...

The simplest explanation is that Helen Thomas is a Lebanese Christian Arab and for that reason she has always been irritated about America’s tilt toward Israel and against her fellow Arabs in Palestine. Neocons have been complaining about her being Arab for decades.

Also, she’s 89, and 89 years old tend to be less suave and diplomatic about how they express their unfashionable opinions. But she was never very suave and diplomatic as back as I can remember her -- maybe 35 years. The neocons have always been mad at her over the Holy Land issue.

Anonymous said...

Jews, owing in part to their higher average cognitive functioning, should embrace greater responsibility.

Instead of viewing themselves as beleaguered victims, they should admit that they now comprise an elite within America---and that they should apply to themselves an updated version of the old cavalier concept of noblesse oblige.



Yes, I'm sure that would end well.

ProudWhiteMan said...

From John Derbyshire:

http://www.olimu.com/Journalism/Texts/Commentary/TooDumbToVote.htm

"It seems to me, in fact, that political stupidity is a special kind of stupidity, not well correlated with other kinds. At the very highest levels of intelligence, the correlation may actually be inverse: the more brilliant you are, the dumber your politics. Albert Einstein seems to have thought well of Stalin; Hitlerism got its first mass following in the highly-selective German universities. And think—without smiling, if you can—of the barmy political programs that issued forth, with such confidence, from Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Norman Mailer and other members of the mid-20th-century preposterentsia, as exposed in withering detail in Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals."

And Helen Thomas should watch and listen to her fellow Arab, about the inevitable result of Muslims taking over a country:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8fa9yKQeTY

Jews know they're smarter then most people; hell, what smart person doesn't realize that they're smarter than most others? The problem is that that's who gets beaten up in high school! How many groupies hang around the engineering labs in college, compared to the athletic dorms? Why do people think that being smart should make one popular or loved (or sexually desired, for that matter?)

Anonymous said...

Dahlia said:
"b. the new numbers Lynn came up with for national IQs in 2006... IF CORRECT:
Germany: 107
Poland: 106

If these numbers hold, this would make these two groups the smartest Gentile groups in the world... the German one especially seems correct."

These numbers are certainly not correct. Lynn is citing a 1981 study by Buj which used the Cattell culture fair IQ test to test people from European capital cities (i.e., Bonn and Warsaw in the case of Germany and Poland). Capital cities are often unrepresentative of the nation as a whole. The most recent Raven's normings for Germany indicate an average IQ of 101 for the former W. Germany and 97 for the former E. Germany compared to a white British and US mean of 100. A Wechlsler norming for Germany done a few years ago yielded a mean of 99 where UK and US whites are 100. A Raven's norming for Poland done in the early 90s yielded a mean of 92. (Interestingly, the data for gentiles presented by Lynn for nations in the former Jewish "Pale of Settlement" seem to be on the low side for Europe as a whole - Ravens and Wechlser normings for Poland and Lithuania yield results in the low 90s, whereas other nearby countries that didn't get Jews until more recent times tend to be nearer 100. I have wondered whether Jews filing mercantile and other high IQ niches retarded the development of intelligence which may have happened in other parts of Europe in a process similar to what has been proposed by Cochran and Harpending and Gregory Clark.)

Anonymous said...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/science/08tier.html?hp

That is what I call Sailer-bait.

Writer is a brave man.

Get ready for the pitch-forks.

dearieme said...

"Israel ... is vilified primarily for being an advanced Western country": you don't think that treating the Palestinians like Red Indians might have something to do with it?

James Stamford said...

Why no mention of Jewish Nepotism?

Anonymous said...

Langobard wrote: "Most importantly, there are other groups that show a higher mean IQ average than Ashkenazi Jews do, such as White Episcopalians"

This is not an apples to apples comparison for two reasons. First, Ashkenazi Jews, the predominant type in the U.S., are as much an ethnic group as a religion compared to Episcopalians, who really are more of a religious group than an ethnic one. Second, the Episcopalians have absorbed a lot of upwardly mobile and intelligent (mostly already Christian of other denominations) converts since the founding of the nation which would tend to raise their group IQ. U.S. Jews have never absorbed such a large number of converts. Moreover, since Judaism has never been socially elite, the few converts it did accept likely were not of the quality of the converts to Episcopalianism.

Anonymous said...

Calling mating practices of a particular people RACIST is disingenuous. Every group and country has a mating philosophy and strategy. In Israel, the current propaganda is “we’ll all be chocolate.”

This is absolute nonsense. Israel bans marriages between Jews and non-Jews and forces foreign guest workers to sign contracts stating that they will not have sex with Jews.

In America, Jews in-marry at a rate over 50%, according to stats provided by Jewish organizations. The number of Jews who out-marry is likely exaggerated to increase the sense of a "threat" to the Jewish community, and both the elite Jews and the more fecund religious Jews (i.e. the two most important sets of Jews for our purposes here) are far less likely to marry non-Jews.

Jews have always had large numbers leave the tribe, and they're still here and just as Jewish as ever. There's no reason to believe that intermarriage is going to reduce Jewish ethnocentrism or make Jews identify with the broader white or non-Jewish American populations anytime soon.

Whiskey said...

Liberty is analogous to Operation Goodwood. Allied Bombers hit the wrong people (British and US Troops, not Germans) and killed about 5,000 or so, and wounded many more. Friendly fire has been a problem since the dust of a hoplite battle and hasn't gotten any better.

Israel's "public relations disaster" has been mostly outside the US, with people who are Muslim or effectively Muslim (Europeans) who hate them and want them all dead anyway. The latest Gallup poll shows most Americans support Israel's version of events and back them, but don't care that much.
--------------
We have accounts of ancient Jews from Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Hittite, Phoenician, Carthaginian, and Assyrian sources. Not one describes Jews as "smart" or ascribes any significant accomplishment in arts, architecture, engineering, medicine, or anything else by Jews.

This only changes around 1200 or so, suggesting a diaspora effect of pressures to produce higher IQ (with attendant higher immune diseases, partly because of a genetic bottleneck due to genocide around 1000-1500).

Jews, many of them middle class, the "smart fraction," sought to escape Europe on the eve of and during WWII, and America turned them back. The Voyage of the Damned. When a large portion of your extended family is simply gone because there was no refuge when one was needed, it tends to make things different.

But you over-estimate Jewish influence. Last time I looked, Teddy Kennedy was Catholic. GWB a Methodist. Bill Clinton ... whatever, not Jewish. Barack Hussein Obama ... whatever. John McCain, Amnesty supporter, is not Jewish.

Helen Thomas simply hates Jews (nearly all Muslims do). Her "go back to Germany and Poland" was a thinly disguised "go to Auschwitz" comment found on the Flotilla and among the "humanitarian" (i.e. terrorist-jihad front with extensive ties to bin Laden personally) protestors.

By the same logic, shouldn't Helen Thomas go back to Lebanon? Since Jews born in Israel "belong" in places that exterminated their cousins, shouldn't she go to Beirut? Or Steve and I be sent to Ireland or Scotland or Germany? Since "America belongs to Mexicans / Amerindians?"

Israel is affected with weak, SWPL-ness like America after 9/11 (Bush visiting a mosque). They should have sunk the ships in deep water (like the North Koreans did) and then denied it. No one is worrying about North Korea despite it sinking a South Korean ship in South Korean waters and killing 43 sailors. Fast-roping to a place filled with jihadi thugs armed with only paintball guns and personal pistols was stupid.

Machiavelli was right. Strength is respected, weakness despised. Israel is a small nation with only 5-6 million Jews in a world that wants them exterminated no matter where they are.

Whiskey said...

Let me add, PC is clearly a female backed policy that gives power to women like Whoopi Goldberg, or Oprah, or Ellen, to define "proper" behavior and a complex caste system designed to weed-out non-Alpha males.

Looking for scapegoats, Jews, Cultural Marxists, Bill Ayers, does not lend itself to solutions because broad, Western (and non-Western) trends are caused by technological changes affecting society more than anything else.

Japan is known as the place of Herbivore men. There aren't any Jews there. Its full of PC, an aging society, kow-towing to China, fearful and stagnant, despite being filled with smart people (as smart as Ashkenazi Jews). Jewish influence on Japan is about zero.

Why all these changes? Because rising living standards (particularly for women) + contraception + urban living, anonymous for the most part = Sex and the City lifestyle, few kids.

Along with a heaping dose of PC. Japanese style of course, but its there.

Whiskey said...

One more thing. As the resident philo-semite, America needs more Jews. Jews like Jack Warner, or Louis B. Mayer, deeply assimilated and very Jewish at the same time, who LOVED LOVED LOVED America.

Instead, Peter Beinart has a piece somewhere with a poll showing most younger American Jews don't much care about Israel or America. Consider themselves "citizens of the world" and are functionally indistinguishable from SWPL latte-swillers in Seattle or Park Slope.

Anonymous said...


Interestingly, the head of the Israeli Navy who planned the flotilla takeover is Chinese.
http://neoconexpress.blogspot.com/2007/10/first-eli-marom-israeli-of-chinese.html
Actually he's one-quarter Chinese. Shouldn't he have been smart enough to come up with a better plan.


I am sure that next time he will. Experience is a superb teacher.

Anonymous said...

Speaking as a WASP, I am tired of being spoken down to by Jews.

I am tired of being referred to as a Gentile. How quaint!

I am tired of being told I am a shiksa. Actually, that's just as well, because I would have been truly miseable married to a Jew. You'll have to deal with that whole inbreeding thing yourselves. I'm not taking it on.

I am tired of being told that I am responsible for the Holocaust. Acutally, several of my family members died liberating Europe, and the Jews.

I am tired of being told that Jews are the chosen people. Chosen my ass.

And i am tired of being told that Jews are smarter than everybody else. Greedier, maybe, but with the Madoff scandle, that's worn thin.

Chief Seattle said...

If Helen Thomas had told white South Africans to go back to England 20 years ago she would have been deified by the press.

My personal opinion is that after a lifetime of suppressing her beliefs in order to keep her employment she finally cracked. What she said at this point is less important than her frustration with the mafia that controls U.S. media.

Anonymous said...

By the way, the anon above posted the following


"""In America, Jews in-marry at a rate over 50%, according to stats provided by Jewish organizations. The number of Jews who out-marry is likely exaggerated to increase the sense of a "threat" to the Jewish community, and both the elite Jews and the more fecund religious Jews (i.e. the two most important sets of Jews for our purposes here) are far less likely to marry non-Jews.
"""""


this poster is obviously mistaken. Elite Jews have a spectacularly high rate of marrying Christians. Donald Trump told his daughter to marry a jew, not just any jew, only an elite jew would do. And she did.

Bill Clinton told his daughter to marry a jew, and not just any jew only an elite jew and she did.

Look it up. Both the trump daughter and the Clinton daughter have now taken Elite jewish husbands.

So stop claiming that elite jews don't intermarry

Anonymous said...

We all agree that Jews have higher IQ than Christian Europeans. Why is it - is it that the talmud scholars had tons and tons of kids or is it that the successful business men had tons and tons of kids?

OR is it a third reason - that christian european society promoted the breeding of strong, brave, fearless athletic men at the expense of high IQ christians? How many super high IQ christian men were sent in to the catholic priesthood, never to reproduce? how many high IQ catholic girls were deemed "uppity" and forced in to the nunnery, never to reproduce?

Is the Jew / Christian iq gap a function of actions taken by the jews, or a function of actions taken by the Christians?

By the way, the difference between a christian average IQ of 100 and a Jewish ashkenazi in america average of 110 is small in most ways, but when you look at people with an iq over 160, you find that the odds of a jew having iq over 160 are FIVE TIMES as high as the odds of a christian having iq that high. FIVE TIMES - that is huge.

Anonymous said...

Uh - the nice Christian lady above posted the following

""And i am tired of being told that Jews are smarter than everybody else. Greedier, maybe, but with the Madoff scandle, that's worn thin."""

Uh - Mrs. nice Christian lady, if you are tied of being told that jews are smarter than you, perhaps you should stop misspelling "scandal"

Thank you.

SGOTI said...

One more thing. As the resident philo-semite, America needs more Jews. Jews like Jack Warner, or Louis B. Mayer, deeply assimilated and very Jewish at the same time, who LOVED LOVED LOVED America.

Well what came first, the chicken or the matzoh ball? Were Jack Warner and Louis Mayer "encouraged" to go along with that theme because they were living in an overwhelmingly white, Christian (and Protestant to boot) nation that was still confident in itself and nt afraid to project the strength of its foundings peoples? Or did they love, love, love America?

I fear Anonymous gal who posted below you might have the score a bit more.

Ronnie V said...

Helen Thomas simply hates Jews (nearly all Muslims do).

Helen Thomas is not a Muslim!

Chris said...

Japan... Its full of PC...

You don't know Japan very well. Polite, yes. PC, no.

Anonymous said...

From an American (formerly Soviet) Jew to the anonymous who objected to current propaganda in Israel being "we’ll all be chocolate.”

You wrote: This is absolute nonsense. Israel bans marriages between Jews and non-Jews and forces foreign guest workers to sign contracts stating that they will not have sex with Jews.

Unlike the U.S., Israel has a huge number of black and chocolate Jews: Moroccan, African, and so on. There is no prohibition against marriage between Jews from different groups. Also, there is no prohibition against having children with anyone one wishes, even if official intermarriage is not legal.

re: "both the elite Jews and the more fecund religious Jews (i.e. the two most important sets of Jews for our purposes here) are far less likely to marry non-Jews."

Orthodox Jews are least likely to marry someone of another faith, but they do marry people who convert to Judaism. The converts are considered Jews of a higher probe than the hereditary Jews since their Jewishness has been vetted by a rabbi.

As for "elite Jews" you are both right and wrong. If by "elite Jews" you mean individuals of the highest intelligence and achievements (this is how a Jew would understand elitism; think Woody Allen), then these Jews out-marry the most.

But if by "elite Jews" you mean offspring of successful and rich families, they do try to marry within their own circle. But even in this group, the rebellion of the younger generation is hard to stop.

Anonymous said...

"This is absolute nonsense. Israel bans marriages between Jews and non-Jews..."

That's a recently enacted law...


No, it's not a recently enacted law. Israel has always had this policy.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for popularizing Occam's Razor!

Anonymous said...

Steve, a lot of Jews believe in noblesse oblige already-they just call it "tikkun olam."

Former Aviation Person

Truth said...

"Jews like Jack Warner, or Louis B. Mayer, deeply assimilated."

No, they deeply Inseminated...A TRUCKLOAD OF IOWA BLONDES!

Anonymous said...

Hey, Chabon linked to Murray's essay.

From the New York Times!

Chabon's column, just by virtue of where it is published, is going to have a lot of readers. Some of the more intellectually responsible readers will read Murray as well, and many of those will recognize that Murray is making a much better case. That's a lot better than we usually get from the Times, so I'm happy!

afasfasfasf said...

testing.

gcochran said...

Whiskey, you are a pinhead. Operation Goodwood was a British armored attack on Caen: there was heavy bombing in support, but it did not hit British troops. It was relatively ineffective against the Germans, however. Killed way too many Frenchmen.

If you could think at all, which is to be doubted, you would have been misremembering the heavy bomber operations in support/preparation for Operation Cobra, which led to the breakout at St. Lo. US heavy bombers did accidentally hit US troops in that operation: we lost 111 killed (including General McNair). If we'd lost 5000 in one battle to friendly fire from the Army Air Corps, we would have disbanded it. Which would be obvious if you understood a fucking thing about history, but of course you don't. In fact, I have no reason to think that you even know what the number 5000 even means - you look to be the one, two, three, many type.

As for the attack on the Liberty, it was deliberate. Everyone in the Johnson Administration thought so, from Dean Rusk to Tordella (assistant NSA director) Retirees who saw the transcripts (intercepts of the conversation between Israeli ground controllers and the pilots) confirm that the Israelis knew it was an American ship and that the pilots were ordered to leave no survivors. Why? Does it matter?

In the case of the Liberty it's hard to say just what the mix is. To what extent are you lying, and to what extent are you just plain stupid? And lazy, don't forget that: if I was trying to push this sort of nonsense, presumably because someone was holding my children hostage, at least I would have done a professional job and gotten the supporting details right. In my case this would have used pre-existing knowledge, since I know the Normandy campaign like the back of my hand. In your case, since you know nothing about everything - since you're the sort of Renaissance idiot who could think that losing four of five pilots in Georgia would _cripple_ the Russian air force - you could have googled the battle of Caen, which would have taken maybe thirty seconds.

Have you ever thought of adopting a different career path. one that played up your strengths, or at least your more interesting weaknesses? For example, you might consider becoming a street hooker (HIV is treatable nowadays), write a book about the glories of impotence, or prance around wearing a sandwich sign in front of Godzilla.

marlo said...

"Bill Clinton told his daughter to marry a jew, and not just any jew only an elite jew and she did.

Look it up. Both the trump daughter and the Clinton daughter have now taken Elite jewish husbands."

Must be a trend. Both JFK and RFK have half-Jewish grandchildren. I thought one of Gore's daughters married Jewish, but I am not sure about that.
Look, they are only 3% of the population and we are living in an increasingly secular society despite the evangelical rhetoric from various quarters. Of course they're going to marry out to a great extent. There's no mystery about it.

Anonymous said...

"We all agree that Jews have higher IQ than Christian Europeans. Why is it - is it that the talmud scholars had tons and tons of kids or is it that the successful business men had tons and tons of kids?"

Actually, no we don't.

Jews agree that they have higher IQs than Christian Europeans.

Anonymous said...

Unlike the U.S., Israel has a huge number of black and chocolate Jews: Moroccan, African, and so on."

i lived in Israel during the 80s and 90s. Moroccan Jews are not particularly dark. In fact, Iraqi Jews are not either--they could usually be distinguised from Iraqi Muslims because they were much lighter. I don't think there's much intermarriage between Israeli Jews and Ethiopians Jews. Very little. Golda Meier talked back in 1970 about how Israelis would all be a sort of light olive eventually, from mixing. Nowadays I don't see much difference in what they look like now to what they looked like then. If there is a lot of mixing between the Ashkenzaz and the Mizrahi (middle-eastern Jews), it's not resulting in much browning for some reason, but it is a sunny country so I guess everybody gets somewhat tan.
I did see a family of Jews from India that were "chocolate." They were from southern India and really did look sort of Jewish and Indian. Even if I didn't know who they were I would have noticed that unique look. They ran an Indian restaurant.

icr said...

Liberty is analogous to Operation Goodwood. Allied Bombers hit the wrong people (British and US Troops, not Germans) and killed about 5,000 or so, and wounded many more. Friendly fire has been a problem since the dust of a hoplite battle and hasn't gotten any better.

This is complete lying Israeli propaganda. Author James Scott on this:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/shortstack/2009/07/liberty_authors_response.html?sid=ST2009071501841
(...)
One reader wrote that there are "thousands of cases of friendly fire" yet the Liberty always seems to rise to the top. I think one of the reasons it does is the circumstances of the attack never fit the mold of a typical friendly fire incident. Most such assaults are over in seconds, maybe minutes, and occur at night, in inclement weather and otherwise poor conditions. In contrast, the attack on the Liberty lasted approximately an hour and happened on a clear and sunny afternoon. The attack was exceedingly brutal, leaving 821 shell holes in the ship in addition to a 39-foot torpedo hole. Those facts have made it hard - both in 1967 and today - for many to believe it could have been simply friendly fire.

More importantly, as we now know from declassified Israeli documents, some Israeli personnel in fact knew the Liberty was an American ship. Early in the attack an Israeli pilot radioed in the Liberty's hull number, and that information was passed to the Israeli Navy. Others inside Israel's chain of command also later testified that they were aware of the ship's identity before the torpedo strike. This is unfortunate, because had Israel stopped the attack at that point more than two dozen lives would have been saved. Based on this information, Israel's ambassador to the United States in 1967, Avraham Harman, insisted that some of the attackers be prosecuted and that American journalists be invited to cover the trial, which unfortunately never happened.
(...)

Anonymous said...

Israeli Jews who desire to intermarry often do so in other countries (e.g. Cyprus), and the marriage is recognized by the secular state. Since the orthodox rabbinate controls marriage and family law in Israel, Reform and Conservative rabbis cannot perform marriages there either, even between people of known Jewish ancestry.

Black Sea said...

"Instead, Peter Beinart has a piece somewhere with a poll showing most younger American Jews don't much care about Israel or America."

Beinart's article is here, and is worth reading.

Dahinda said...

"The root of political correctness is the Rube Goldbergian fear that if the goyisher kops are allowed to be exposed to realism about human differences, they will eventually realize that Jews tend to be smarter than them, and then they will come after the Jews with torches and pitchforks."

This sums up the last 65 years or so.

Dahlia said...

Anonymous,
On Richard Lynn's assigned I.Q. scores... That's the million dollar question. Are the numbers accurate?

I've seen just a little discussion of those revised European numbers released in 2006 and I've mostly had the feeling that politics about who did or didn't do well were at the forefront; they haven't been flushed out that well. I don't think Steve even brought it up even though he talked much about the initial numbers in "IQ and the Wealth of Nations".

From everything I know, I respect Lynn. He co-wrote, "IQ and the Wealth of Nations". He aggressively and bravely pursued the question of intelligence differences between men and women and found men to indeed be smarter on average after age 16 (maturation).

My bias is to trust that he is mostly correct. I would think that since "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" his desire in revisiting these countries is to be more precise and come up with more accurate numbers. In IQWN (2002), he gave Germany an IQ of 102 and revised it up by five points in 2006.

I could be wrong and he messed up.

Finally, all his findings intuitively seem correct. Men are smarter than women on average to my eyes; I.Q. is correlated to GDP; and Germany is noticeably the smartest European country, at least. 102 is great, but I doubt it would be noticeable amongst the Europeans. The Germanics noticeably stand out from other Europeans, though the difference isn't as extreme as the difference between the Ashkenazim Jews versus the average European American.

The Germanics are over-represented amongst the Science and Math illuminaries. They're over-represented amongst the geniuses of music. Their economy is majority family-business (70% in 2006) meaning most families are talented enough, and actually do, undertake running a business. I can't find the statistic, but if I remember correctly, Germany is the only country where the majority of its economy is majority family-owned businesses. (Yes, the mittelstand is a whole other box of worms that economists love to debate.) Finally, the financial debacle in Europe is making extremely plain which country was the most productive, and now the most angry, and who all is not... mostly comporting with what all Lynn has found.

I'm just skeptical that a couple point I.Q. difference between Germany and the other western European countries would produce such differences. Also, despite their very painful histories together and the atrocities committed, the Ashkenazim Jews have mostly felt an unmistakable pride in being German Jews and want to be seen as playing an intrinsic role in Germany's history and even being part ethnically German. I've never seen that kind of pride shown by them for any other country or ethnicity, not even the United States. Affection, yes, but not pride.

One doesn't have these feelings for another that one regards as inferior.

Observer said...

Realistically, in regard to intelligence, it is the Europeans, particularly the North-West Euro ones, who overwhelmingly invented and developed the world as we know it today.

For starters, to call and compare Ashkenazi Jews, a very small, select, sub-group of Caucasians against an amorphous mass of other Caucasians — let alone all the rest of the non-Jews the world over, is, at the very least, highly dishonest.

One would need to compare select sub-groups from other groups and races to the select sub-group of Ashkenazim in order to draw a fair comparison (such as poster 'Langobard' did a few comments back).

Never mind the fact that Jews are not a race, or even a true ethnicity in a meaningful biological sense, since they carry the genetic markers from wherever they have settled throughout the world. Additionally, the most accomplished Jews, the Ashkenazi, have significant White European genes … otherwise, they would look ‘Middle Eastern’ like the Sephardim, no?

As per Lynn, Israel has an IQ of 94 ... and the average Ashkenazi IQ in Israel is 103.

Sorry, but measuring Jewish IQ in a Jewish country is far more commonsensical than extrapolating numbers from dated NYC IQ tests, where, for even that matter, it was not known for certain what religion the subjects belonged to.

Observer said...

In other words - it seems like this never-ending lauding of Jews and their supposed intelligence, especially by many HBD'rs, seems to be for the demoralization of higher-status, high-IQ non-Prole White ‘gentiles’ into legitimizing, and accepting, their displacement, dispossession and dis-empowerment to what Paul Gottfried calls the “Jewish overclass” ... alleging that since Jews have such tremendous disproportionate power in American society, that this is all somehow due to “merit” and “fair play” in how they got into these positions.

And I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Cheap.

Kylie said...

Anonymous said..."Uh - Mrs. nice Christian lady, if you are tied[sic] of being told that jews are smarter than you, perhaps you should stop misspelling "scandal".

And start misspelling "tired" instead?

Svigor said...

This is not an apples to apples comparison for two reasons. First, Ashkenazi Jews, the predominant type in the U.S., are as much an ethnic group as a religion compared to Episcopalians, who really are more of a religious group than an ethnic one. Second, the Episcopalians have absorbed a lot of upwardly mobile and intelligent (mostly already Christian of other denominations) converts since the founding of the nation which would tend to raise their group IQ.

True. But somewhere in the comparison is something that belies the simple IQ-centric explanations of the Jewish phenomenon, no?

U.S. Jews have never absorbed such a large number of converts.

True. Instead, they shed their dummies into the surrounding populations, which is why Jewry has no lower class.

Moreover, since Judaism has never been socially elite, the few converts it did accept likely were not of the quality of the converts to Episcopalianism.

There's more to attraction than that. Jewry has always had a parallel social structure anyway, so the question of being socially elite is moot. Wealth and solidarity and economic dominance would've been the primary attractions. Christianity proselytizes, Judaism rejects. Conversion to Judaism has always been a question of rejecting all comers, while allowing for the rare overwhelmingly "good for the Jews" exception that overcomes the inherent negatives (never mind the question of how converts are treated once in the camp). So Judaism has almost certainly gotten a better quality of convert than any Christian sect.

So stop claiming that elite jews don't intermarry

I don't recall anyone saying they don't. But they intermarry at roughly half the rate that Europeans do.

Japan... Its full of PC

I assume that's from Whiskey's barrage; I wouldn't know, I skip those.

I'll switch with Japan any time. They can have our problems, and we can have theirs. I'd do that trade in a nanosecond.

That's a recently enacted law, prompted by a Palestinian suicide bomber using marriage to an Israeli as a security loophole.

There's always an excuse, we know. But only one group gets to be "part of the West" and all that jazz AND act the way Israel does AND make excuses. Excuse that.

The mestizo immivasion is using the marriage loophole en masse, but Jews generally scream bloody murder if you suggest closing it.

Unlike the U.S., Israel has a huge number of black and chocolate Jews: Moroccan, African, and so on.

Define huge. Since we know Israel is the 51st state, they track and publish such info, no? And American Jews kvetch over the racism this "huge number" of black and chocolate Jews endure, right? And they get AA of course, right? And they're lionized in Israeli popular culture, right?

There is no prohibition against marriage between Jews from different groups. Also, there is no prohibition against having children with anyone one wishes, even if official intermarriage is not legal.

And they track interracial marriage in Israel and publish the data, right? Funny about the Jewish "intermarriage" numbers game; never once have I seen numbers for how many Jews are marrying blacks or yellows or browns. But I digress; Jews would never tolerate this from Americans.

Steve, a lot of Jews believe in noblesse oblige already-they just call it "tikkun olam."

Yep, and there's "Jewish guilt," too, but it's the opposite of "white guilt."

Cristol said...

"Retirees who saw the transcripts (intercepts of the conversation between Israeli ground controllers and the pilots) confirm that the Israelis knew it was an American ship and that the pilots were ordered to leave no survivors."

The CIA and DIA reports both dispute that and argue that the attack appeared to be an accident, with the American spy ship in a war zone being mistaken for an Egyptian ship. None of the several subsequent American investigations -- not the NSA investigation of 1981, or the House Armed Services Committee investigation of 1991 (initiated at the instigation of USS Liberty veterans) supports the claim that the Israelis knowingly attacked an American ship.

"Why? Does it matter?"

Motives always matter when you accuse someone of an outrageous crime. Why would Israel want to attack the ship of a superpower, and an ally at that?

Anonymous said...

This whole IQ thing is an obsession for the self delusional.

Intelligence is largely an artifact of how much you are put to the test intellectually on a continual basis.

Why do women appear to have lower IQs than men? Probably because we are so busy picking up your junk, raising your kids and otherwise trying to keep you happy.

We don't have much time to doddle around with "concepts" all day.

Jews?

By what measure are Jews considered to be so intelligent? It's the Chinese that have consistently swept the International Math Olympiad in the last few years. And Canadians and Finns that consistently place at the top of the OECD/PISA.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure I am following the arguements here.

The anti semites said that "elite" jews don't intermarry

And the reply was that JFK, RFK, Trump, and Clinton all had offspring that married elite jews.

Where is the evidence from the anti semites that elite jews don't intermarry?

Anonymous said...

"The root of political correctness is the Rube Goldbergian fear that if the goyisher kops are allowed to be exposed to realism about human differences, they will eventually realize that Jews tend to be smarter than them, and then they will come after the Jews with torches and pitchforks.

It’s a characteristic example of Jews using all those IQ points to overthink what’s increasingly a non-problem, only to wind up exacerbating bigger problems, such as contemporary immigration policy.

Of course, worrying about peasants with pitchforks in 2010 is laughable. And that’s what everyone—gentiles and Jews—should do with this line of thinking: laugh at it. Satire is the solution. If Jews were as amenable to kidding by gentiles as WASPs had been to Jewish comedians, they would be less prone to inflicting their complexes upon American policy. "



100%. A fine idea indeed. Vdare has been really good lately. On "overthinking", an old history professor of mine discussed William Howard Taft's propensity to legally overthink the constitutionality of a course of action, and his contemplation (time) oft-costed him politically. I know its usually wise to think 5 or 6 moves ahead, and from your perspective plus your opponents, but thats probably enough as the variables are all going to be moving three moves into the action and your best-concieved foreplanned countermeasures probably will never be necessary anyway. Udolpho had a great thread about a middle-eastern intellectual who was lecturing on a similar tangent.

Anonymous said...

"headache said...
gonna be fun watching testy triangulate unwilling leggy blondes, neocons and poor Israel, and Iranian nukes on this one."



Luv you guys. Some of the funniest guys in the rightosphere make remarks in response to Steve's articles. Even Whiskey will no doubt chuckle if he sees that (his sense of humor is probably much more eased than we credit him for).

Anonymous said...

Whiskey sez:Looking for scapegoats, Jews, Cultural Marxists, Bill Ayers, does not lend itself to solutions because...

...i don't like it coz i'm ethnically jewish or coz i identify with them. period.

Onan the librarian said...

Sha-f%cking-zam.

Sailer: best journalist, best essayist in America.

Anonymous said...

Anti-semites tend to dismiss US Jewish intermarriage statistics as proof that Jewish influence will decline.

I've come to the conclusion that what they really fear is a "Jewish genetic marking" of the White Elite. 100 years from now, Jewish ancestry will be a small, but essential compononent of the elite white class.

Every elite white person will grow up knowing ultra-intelligent Jews are part of his makeup, unlike the white proles who will lack this distinctive marker.

Anti-Semites fear that this will compromise the white elite's loyalty to the rest of the white race, for all eternity.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of dumb, some of the posts on this thread are kind of dumb.
yeah, specially the ones u don't like...

icr said...

Cristol (if that's really him) should give it a rest and stop insulting our collective intelligence.

Please.

As I posted several years ago, The flight leader reported that he had the ship in sight and that it was displaying an American flag. He asked if he was still ordered to attack the ship. The answer was yes. My wife remembers that I mentioned it to her at the time. This was in the winter of 1967-68. I was attending the year long career course for military intelligence officers at the army intelligence school at Ft. Holabird, Maryland. i was taking an elective course in cryptology taught by staff from the nearby national cryptologic school at Ft. Meade. the transcript was in a booklet prepared fby the staff for some other course but used in this one as well. There are lots of old people out there who saw this. pl

Posted by: Patrick Lang | 07 June 2010 at 11:53 PM

Anonymous said...

>it's "progressive."

it's liberal.

it's moral.

not some self-defensive conspiracy.<

Non sequitur.

"Progressive," "liberal," "moral" are so many gaseous terms of self-justification. As such, they would be tools par excellence of a "self-defensive conspiracy."

>fear that if the goyisher kops are allowed to be exposed to realism about human differences, they will eventually realize that Jews [ARE A SEPARATE PEOPLE WHO] tend to [SCREW] them, and then they will come after the Jews with torches<

Fixed that for you. Madoff embarrasses Jews far more than Einstein did.

Tanstaafl said...

Of course, worrying about peasants with pitchforks in 2010 is laughable. And that’s what everyone—gentiles and Jews—should do with this line of thinking: laugh at it. Satire is the solution. If Jews were as amenable to kidding by gentiles as WASPs had been to Jewish comedians, they would be less prone to inflicting their complexes upon American policy.

Translation: race-replacement wouldn't be so bad if we could all just laugh about it.

Anonymous said...

The previous anon, commenting on the anti semites, said the following -

___I've come to the conclusion that what they really fear is a "Jewish genetic marking" of the White Elite. 100 years from now, Jewish ancestry will be a small, but essential compononent of the elite white class.

Every elite white person will grow up knowing ultra-intelligent Jews are part of his makeup, unlike the white proles who will lack this distinctive marker.

Anti-Semites fear that this will compromise the white elite's loyalty to the rest of the white race, for all eternity.

___________

I have never thought of it that way, but I think there is a lot of truth to this statement.

When you look at it this way, the interests of the "paranoid jews" and the "anti semites" actually co incide. Neither of them wants American jews to melt in to the American elite.

"paranoid jews" like the SPLC or the ADL desperately want jews in America to feel threatened by the white elite. The more threatened american jews feel, the more afraid they are, the bigger the donations to the SPLC and ADL.

So the anti semites want to make white americans afraid of the jews, and the "paranoid jews" want to make american jews afraid of the white americans.

In my opinion both the "paranoid jews" and the anti semites will be very disappointed in the direction that things are going. The high IQ jews are rapidly melting in to the general high IQ elite of American society. High IQ jews and high IQ whites mix and mingle at the ivies and at other elite colleges. Then when they get out of school they tend to join the same elite law firms and investment banks and accounting firms. I don't know how eager the average white elite family is to have their son or daughter marry someone Jewish (how much did Trump and Clinton approve of their daughters decisions? Do we know) but at the end of the day, kids these days choose for themselves who they are going to marry.

Probably sooner than anyone realizes, the elite of the USA will sort of be a melting pot of high IQ groups. Most elite families will get the majority of their DNA from old line white Europeans, but also some DNA from Ashkenazi jews, with some mixed in DNA from high IQ northeast europeans (japanese, chinese, etc)

There won't really exist a pure, all white elite anymore.


At the same time, the non elite whites that live in states like California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada will intermarry with the latino population,

So 100 years from now the IQ gap between the American elite and the American non elite will be larger than it is today.

Sort of caught in the middle will be the "white survivalist" group. These are folks for whom the maintenance of racial purity is important. They will be caught between a huge low IQ mixed race non elite and a somewhat smaller elite that is a mix of the high IQ races and groups.


The white survivalists will be between the two other groups in terms of IQ.

The question is, should the white survivalists just sit around and wait for the future to arrive or should they move somewhere right now and prepare for the future. Very interesting stuff.

Anonymous said...

Let's assume that the white elite is going to intermarry with Jews and Japanese and Chinese over the next 100 years. So if you look at the class with the high IQ in the USA in 100 years it will be a polyglot mix.

Let's assume that the pure white proletariat has no wish to be ruled by this polyglot elite.

Where can the pure white proletariat move to ?

My understanding is that many of the whites in South Africa want to flee and that in general the higher IQ South African whites are offered citizenship in Australia or New Zealand but the lower IQ South african whites are not being offered citizenship anywhere.

Is this true? are lower IQ whites trapped inside South Africa?

If so, it seems like the average non elite white person in the USA is very smart to start thinking about plan B and plan C.

Betting on support from the white elite doesn't make sense. The non elite whites of the USA are very perceptive and forward thinking to "dig a well before they are thirsty"

Anonymous said...

First anon here. Thanks for elaborating on my point, second anon.

What I was trying to get at, is that perhaps "Macdonaldite" Neo-Antisemitism (as I've come to call it), is better understood not as a feud with the Jewish ethnic group, but rather as the desire to safeguard the genetic purity of the majority's leadership class against introgression of Jewish genes.

It's perhaps similar to popular unrest that may have arisen in the Middle Ages when the King of the realm married an unpopular foreign Queen.

Anonymous said...

Q: What's more unlikely than a dumb Jew?

A:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/06/08/amish-man-accused-sexually-assaulting-children-missouri-wisconsin/

Anonymous said...

Anon wrote:

___

What I was trying to get at, is that perhaps "Macdonaldite" Neo-Antisemitism (as I've come to call it), is better understood not as a feud with the Jewish ethnic group, but rather as the desire to safeguard the genetic purity of the majority's leadership class against introgression of Jewish genes.
____

Anon, can I ask you to refer to McDonald's theories as "white survivalism" ?

I think white survivalism is a term that is acceptable to all sides in this debate. I mean philo semites and anti semites can both agree that white survivalism is less of a loaded term.

I think that the majority of the very high IQ white people / white people in the ruling class in the USA don't feel ethnic loyalty, they are ok with their sons and daughters marrying high IQ Jews and Japanese and Koreans and Chinese and Brahmins.

I think McDonald understands this. So McDonald has two choices, either he can accept that the the ruling class of the USA will be a polyglot group, a group that feels connected in many ways to high IQ people all over the world, high IQ people of all the high IQ races

OR McDonald can advocate for a new elite to take over.

But where is the racially aware white elite going to come from?

Pat Buchanan isn't perfect, but he is the closest we have in this nation to a race realist, white survivalist. Pat ran a few good campaigns, he had plenty of chances to present his platform to the citizenry of the US. Not only was Pat soundly rejected by the great mass of Americans, he was rejected by the great mass of white Americans. And he failed to get support from ANY sector of the white elite. I mean, military officers didn't vote for him in any great number, business leaders didn't vote for him in any great number. Religious leaders didn't vote for him in any great number.

The white elite resoundingly rejected Pat. So I respect McDonald very much, but I fail to see how he is going to persuade the current white elite from intermarrying, and I fail to see how he is going to find a new white elite to take over.

Again, I wish we had a few Enoch Powells here in the USA. If we did then McDonald would have a leg to stand on.

But we don't have any Enoch Powells so the best that McDonald and his supporters will get is a geographical subset of the USA given over to the white survivalists.

This seems very fair and reasonable to me. I mean, mormons were disliked by most americans in the past, but America still gifted the mormons Utah and the mormons have done quite nicely with it.

In sum, don't call McDonald an anti semite, call him a white survivalist. and think about how the white survivalists can survive, the white elite is lost to them. permanently lost. They need a survival plan that doesn't involve the white elite

But jump in and disagree if you think I am wrong

Udolpho.com said...

The Jewish mentality is to use cleverness instead of wisdom. It gives them an unappealing arrogance.

Talmudic ethnical reasoning can be summed up as: What is legally permissible is morally permissible. The injunction is to stay within the law, and don't worry so much about larger conceptions of goodness. What is amusing is that Jewish rhetoric is so often rigidly moralizing, while being empty of moral content once you get past the surface claims.

Of course this will be hotly denied by vociferous Jews, even as the whole rest of the world recognizes this trait in them.

The International Jew said...

Thanks for your preoccupation.

MQ said...

Israel's "public relations disaster" has been mostly outside the US, with people who are Muslim or effectively Muslim (Europeans)

You mean, it has only been with 95 percent of the world's population. Also, white Europeans are not Muslim, effectively or otherwise.


Helen Thomas simply hates Jews (nearly all Muslims do).

Helen Thomas is a Christian.

Israel is affected with weak, SWPL-ness like America after 9/11 (Bush visiting a mosque). They should have sunk the ships in deep water (like the North Koreans did) and then denied it....Fast-roping to a place filled with jihadi thugs armed with only paintball guns and personal pistols was stupid.

I suspect you're Jewish (as am I). I meet more and more chauvinistic meathead idiots like you among my fellow Jews (which does give the lie to the whole Jewish=smart thing). Type like you are one of the greatest threats to the future of Israel.

Anonymous said...

Hey Udolpho, how do you square your negative opinions of Jewish vs. gentile humor with the fact that Monty Python-style gentile humor is the type of humor most beloved by the geeks and nerds whom you despise?

Unknown said...

I don't have a particularly negative opinion of Jewish humor, other than that it is suffocatingly overrepresented in current American comedy. As with the Jewish personality, a little goes a long way.

headache said...

Steve, you're getting even better with age. It feels like I've been reading your columns for ages now.

Luke Lea said...

"Betting on support from the white elite doesn't make sense."

Especially since they gave none when they were high in the saddle.

Jewish support, on the other hand, would make sense as a matter of enlightened self-interest. Noblesse Oblige indeed!

Rabbi Hillel said...

"Talmudic ethnical reasoning can be summed up as: What is legally permissible is morally permissible. The injunction is to stay within the law, and don't worry so much about larger conceptions of goodness."

Wrong: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself – the rest is commentary.”

Anonymous said...

Observer is totally correct.

Anonymous said...

if Jews and North Asians and East Asians are equal to Europeans, then why are they massively overrepresented in elite positions?




One might also ask why they are here in the first place rather than in their own countries.

Anonymous said...

Donald Trump told his daughter to marry a jew, not just any jew, only an elite jew would do. And she did.

Bill Clinton told his daughter to marry a jew, and not just any jew only an elite jew and she did.




Fathers everywhere want to know the secret to getting their daughters to marry whoever the father selects. Perhaps Trump and Clinton will publish it in a book.

Anonymous said...

Wrong: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself – the rest is commentary.”

I read the link. I'm afraid it doesnt say that you shall love your (non-jewish) neighbor as yourself.

Anonymous said...

Rosie O'Donnell does a Helen Thomas.

Anonymous said...

Most white South Africans do not come from England, but from Central Europe. The ones who come from England are the liberal ones primarily responsible for the current mess in South Africa.

I get the impression that another group, a not-quite-white group also punched above their weight in the destruction of SA.

buhy said...

"People who say things about Jews which you don't agree with are not actually "anti-semites". Just FYI."

No no - they ARE.

Anonymous said...

I met many truly stupid Ashkenazis in Israel, so I don't know if I buy the Jewish superiority talk. Either way,there are enough intelligent non-Jews to make intelligent Jews dispensible.

ben tillman said...

The white elite resoundingly rejected Pat. So I respect McDonald very much, but I fail to see how he is going to persuade the current white elite from intermarrying....

Vinny Gambini: I understand you played a game of pool with Lisa for $200, which she won. I'm here to collect.

J.T.: How 'bout if I just kick your ass?

Vinny Gambini: Oh, a counter-offer. That's what we lawyers - I'm a lawyer - we lawyers call that a counter-offer. This is a tough decision here. Get my ass kicked or collect $200. Let me think... I could use a good ass-kickin', I'll be very honest with you... nah, I think I'll just go with the two hundred.
______________

And I think, as part of the white elite, that I'll take the prospect of a leadership role in a country of three million square miles populated by hundreds of millions of my kinsmen over the alternative:

Extinction.

Janus said...

Sorry, that got posted in the completely wrong place. Please delete it.

Adam of Bremen said...

"People who say things about Jews which you don't agree with are not actually "anti-semites". Just FYI."

No no - they ARE.


This philo-semitic posturing is just more confirmation that an "anti-semite" is not (necessarily) someone who hates Jews -- but most certainly is someone whom *Jews hate* ;}

You can just feel the hypocrisy of this attitude in modern-day Weimar Amerika.

asdfadfadsf said...

"’GAZA Flotilla Drives Israel Into a Sea of Stupidity’ declared the Israeli daily Haaretz... for Jews everywhere—this felt like headline news."

This gives the game away. Chabon is like an octopus squirting ink to obfuscate the REAL issue and focus our attention on a red herring.
He's essentially apologizing for Israeli actions by characterizing it as 'stupid' or 'blockheaded' than what others have called it: 'murderous', 'violation of human rights and international laws', 'ruthless', 'bloody', or 'evil'.

It reminds me of something that a white nationalist said back in 1990s after the Oklahoma bombing. He called it 'stupid'. Not evil, not sick, not demented. Just stupid.. because he was mainly concerned with the bad rap militia movements might get than with the 100+ victims.

Chabon's main concern is NOT the plight of Gazans, the dead people on the ship(including a US citizen), etc. No, his main concern is publicity fiasco for Israel.
It's like a German criticizing Kristallnacht not for its violence, murderousness, and evil but for, er, eh, uh, it's 'stupidity'; I mean it doesn't make for good international image.

Indeed, he wants to fool us that the problems of Israel, AIPAC, Jewish power, etc, etc are all the product of false perceptions and stereotypes created by crypto-Nazi goyim and some 'stupid' Jews. Never mind 11 people REALLY got killed and never mind AIPAC really does control Congress.

Also, Chabon is playing another trick. He's willfully confusing 'stupid' with 'dumb'. I agree Jews are as stupid as everyone else. Smart people can be stupid, especially if their high intelligence is misdirected. Just look at Chomsky and Ayn Rand. They were Jews but sooooo stupid.
Sometimes, smarts can lead to arrogance, which leads to super stupidity. Hitler in 1941, for instance. The smarter(and very arrogant) Trotsky lost the battle to the more common sensical Stalin.
But, stupidity is not the same as dumbness. Dumbness is simply low IQ, and Chabon surely knows that a smart Jew acting stupid is not the same as being a dumb Jew.
I'll say this. Chabon is a prime example of a smart guy acting dumb than a dumb guy acting smart. A dumb guy actin smart fools no one, but a smart guy acting dumb fools a lot of people, and surely many dumb goyim will swallow his BS hook, line, and sinker.

Of course, smart Jews need to be mindful of their limits. Just because they are smarter than goyim doesn't mean they are all-knowing. Similarly, just because a person is stronger than everyone else doesn't make him the most powerful force in the universe. Mike Tyson could beat up everyone at one time but make him go up against a grizzly bear or a panzer tank. If Tyson thought he could beat up EVERYTHING just because he could beat up anyone, he would have been very stupid.

Some Jews seem to think that because they are smarter than goyim, they are smartest beings in the universe and know EVERYTHING. Since modern secular Jews don't believe in God, they come to idolize their own genius. Marx, Ayn Rand, and so many others. This is the stupidity of high intelligence Jews. They seem not to know that 'smarter' is not the same as 'smartest in the universe'.
Napoleon and Hitler similarly confused 'strongest in Europe' with 'invincible in all wars'. No person, idea, or nation is all-powerful, all-knowing, or all-right.
So, I agree with Chabon that there are many stupid Jews. But, the fact is smart people can be stupid--like Wall Street with its financial instruments or Bill Clinton with Monica or Nixon with Watergate--, but that doesn't mean they are DUMB(like crackhead Bob).

Kulak said...

It's utterly amazing how many of you absolutely get reeled in by the "Jewish high IQ" meme that floats around the internet.

It is very questionable if Jews, even the Ashkenazi, are really as putatively 'smart' and as "high IQ" as they, or their 'Gentile' admirers, think or wish themselves to actually be.

For one thing, Ashkenazi (rather than strictly 'Jewish') intelligence is weighed heavily in favor of the Verbal component of IQ, with visio-spatial and other components being nowhere near exceptional.

Let me quote a long-time observer on this issue:

To obtain an accurate measurement of Jewish intelligence, it would seem reasonable to compare Jews, a select group within the white population, with other select white population groups rather than with the white population as a whole.
An intelligence test restricted to Jews and Majority members might produce entirely different results than the tests cited by Weyl. Also, since some intelligence tests reveal as much information about verbal ability, quick recall, and educational levels as they do about intelligence itself, consideration should be given to the fact that Jews, being the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan population group, have readier access than other Americans to education and to such educational byproducts as memory training and vocabulary building. Although it may sound heretical in this day and age, a college degree, a subscription to the New York Times, and a fondness for forensics are not conclusive proof of higher intelligence.
- Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority, p. 191.

That last sentence is really apropos to what motivates many philo and (genuine) anti-semites alike in their misconstruing a (supposedly) high Jewish 'intelligence': that of the age-old problem of confusing, and conflating, STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE.

Langobard said...

What bothers us so much is that Jews are soooo smart but goyim are soooo dumb, thus easy prey to smartER Jews.

What an arrogant, mendacious comment (and speak for yourself). There is no concrete, meaningful evidence to back up this spurious claim, nor do many of "us" believe it. It is simply maintained to justify Jewish power and control over the native White Christian, and specifically, the Anglo-Protestant population.

Comparing a paper by Helmuth Nyborg (via Bruce G. Charlton) with a post earlier this year by Inductivist reaffirms that impressive level of precision. Nyborg finds the same surprising thing Inductivist found--Episcopalians have slightly higher average IQs than Jews do*. Of the eight denominations the two comprised estimates for, the correlation between aggregate totals is an impressive .87 (p=.005). Both estimates are for whites only.
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2008/12/inductivist-reaffirms-utility-of-gss.html

As we see, us Whites will do just fine with our own native, highly intelligent, indigenous Anglo-Northern European elites, and we DO NOT NEED "Ashkenazi 'Jews" to be our so-called "leaders".

As an Italian American, give me a real 'WASP' any day of the week to run and rule this country -- since I know it will be governed far more decently, and fairly, than by the likes of Madoff, Bernanke, Kagan and Emanuel.

I want 'WASP' hegemony back!

Christopher said...

The Derb in Taki: "The Gazans? I’ll care about them right after I start caring about the Congo."

A case of a catchy phrase getting the better of a writer. By ALL of his own standards mentioned earlier in his essay --ethnicity, religion, the Gazans are closer to him than the tribes in Congo. Gazans are semites. Islam takes from the Jewish and Christian religion (call it a heresy if you will). Their homeland, such as it is, is far more significant, historically and at present, to Western Civilization than the Congo. And finally, in fact, there are, whether Derb wants to believe it or not, Christians in Gaza.