February 14, 2013

Sailer in Taki's: "Mother's Baby, Father's Maybe"

From my column in Taki's Magazine:
A young English teacher at a public high school in New Jersey emails me: 
I’m just in my third year of teaching, so I get stuck with the remedial classes. I mean, what are you going to do? But the stress of dealing with bad behavior is wearing me down. I ask myself why the old teacher’s honors classes are full of well-behaved students, while mine are—I've got to say it—bastards
After dozens of parent conferences, maybe I’ve figured it out. My students are bastards. Literally. My remedial kids come from chaotic families. The honors teachers meet with Prof. and Dr. Smith. But I meet with Ms. Jones and her four misbehaving kids by three baby daddies, none of whom seem to be around. 
I used to think all those ancient putdowns of poor little illegitimate children were awful, and we’re so much better than they were back then. But, I’m starting to think they knew something we don’t.

Two out of five children are now born out of wedlock, so, uh…get used to it, America! 
But that raises the perennial question of what percentage of children born in wedlock were actually fathered by someone else. Few topics generate more heat and less light than “mother’s baby, father’s maybe.”

Read the whole thing there.

14 comments:

Cail Corishev said...

Not exactly the same thing, but there's some overlap: look up the 'Tard Blog by Riti Sped. You'll laugh so hard you'll cry, and hate yourself for doing it.

Anonymous said...

40% of kids in America are born out of wedlock. How can anybody not find that alarming? Would not a % like that have been unimaginable 100 years ago?

brap said...

Of course, with cheap paternity testing here... and dirt cheap testing (on par with an electrolyte test) around the corner, we'll have these stats pretty soon....

... assuming the feminists don't ban them for being "misogynist".

It's going to be interesting to observe that happens when a historical female privilege gets undermined for the first time.

Anonymous said...

Interesting question.

Despite being founded on paternalism (ie the seed of Abraham), Judaism is passed on by the maternal line, since in the days before DNA testing, maternal descent could not be faked or cuckholded, as the canny Jews saw evident.
Similarly, the Pictish kings of old Scotland were descended from the matrilinear line.
Julius Caesar reorted from ancient Britain that the Britons habitually lived in 'communal groups' with women being the 'wives in common' to a group of men, so perhaps claiming descnt from the maternal line was the original mode of inheritance and paternalism came later. Wh knows, but I'm sure someone on this board can elucidate further.

Anonymous said...

I hope the young teacher, unlike many of us of an advanced age, understands that the "bastards" behave the way they do, primarily, not because they are being raised in a dysfunctional family but because their mother and the baby daddies she chose are by _nature, idiots.

Once in a while the genetic dice turn out a nice kid from such idiots, one who can be nurtured and taught by a caring adult, but I stress "once in a while."

Anonymous said...

While many illegitimate children turn out badly in life because they inherited low IQ/low conscientiousness/low impulse controll from their parents, I do believe that even if a high IQ/high income/high education/high social class set of parents bore a child out of wedlock, that child would have a worse life outcome than a legitimate child from a similar social/economic/IQ background. Genes are very important, as this blog demonstrates, but nurture does count for something too.

FredR said...

"Tard Blog by Riti Sped"

Don't worry scro'! There are plenty of 'tards out there living really kick ass lives. My first wife was 'tarded. She's a pilot now.

Anonymous said...

There was a thread at West Hunter on the historical incidence of cuckold kids - 'pretty low' seems to be the answer - a percent or so. Of course bastardy was also historically low.

"An Economic History of Bastardy in England and Wales"

https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/publications/working-papers/iser/2006-15

Anonymous said...

Happy Valentine's Day, eh Steve?

Anonymous said...

My brother fathered a child by a White girl (parents immigrants from Belgium) when both were 16. He later married an ostensibly white woman (she is in reality 1/4 Comanche and probably 1/8 Japanese with the rest white) and they have four kids. The four legitimate kids, raised in a churchgoing household and enrolled in good public schools,are mediocre students and showing signs of delinquency. His illegitimate son grew up in a mobile home park and is an electrical engineer responsible for a very successful power electronics startup: he graduated cum laude from the third or fourth best (after Caltech or MIT) engineering college in the US.

Not a big statistical base, of course. But what are the odds?

Anonymous said...

The link at the end is bad. It links to that Man Who Would Be King clip.

Anonymous said...

>I hope the mother understands.. that the kids behave as they do because they are idiots-

Bastards are not necessarily idiots, but they are, necessarily, bastards. Guys who grow up modelling their emotional responses off women, who have the female parathyroid positive reinforcement to emotion. Why not? Gets things out on the table, and it's not the broad's really gonna kill anyone. Bastards have add male violence to female emotion, and they really kill.

neil craig said...

This project http://sikes-sykesfamilies.rootsweb.com/dna-analysis.htm to test paternity of people called Sykes shows not perfect paternal inheritance but not far off, which considering the originator has been traced back to 1379, call it about 25 generations of mothers,means almost all the mothers were faithful (or only had chidren by brothers in law).

Of course for most of that period people lived in small villages and married somebody born no more than a few hundrerds yards away, so it may well be different now.

Matthew said...

"There was a thread at West Hunter on the historical incidence of cuckold kids - 'pretty low' seems to be the answer - a percent or so."

I suspect that incidence of cuckoldry is surprisingly low in large part because of the defense mechanisms men have evolved to ensure that is so. More intelligent men are also more likely to pick up on legitimate cues of infidelity, so fighting cuckoldry may actually have helped increase human intelligence.