A gay reader on Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain"

He writes:

As a gay man, I found your comment on "Brokeback Mountain" spot on.

The part about BbM being a heterosexual liberal's fantasy is absolutely true and it shows how very little they know about gay men.

[Just about everybody creatively involved with BbM is either a straight man -- director Ang Lee, screenwriter Larry McMurtry, and actors Heath Ledger and, presumably, Jake Gyllenhaal, or a woman: short story writer Annie Proulx and screenwriter Diana Ossana.]

The truth is, and I'm sure you know, that gay men do not have the same type of relationships as straight people. There is a significant number of gay men who have open relationships and as for the monogamous relationships, they quickly get boring and somebody ends up cheating (at a higher rate than in straight relationships) or they just do not last very long at all (something lasting longer than 15 years is a miracle).

Liberals cannot deal with this reality, so they invent Ledger as the ideal homosexual, one that does not cheat because he is so committed to his love for Gyllenhaal. Realistically, if Ledger's character was gay, he would have had other partners like Gyllenhaal.

I think they were forced to make Gyllenhaal somewhat promiscuous or else the entire script would have been laughable (not that it isn't already). I don't find Gyllenhaal's character all that masculine in the film to tell you the truth or the real Gyllenhaal for that matter so I do not think the chances of him being gay, realistically speaking, would be as rare as you say. Would it be uncommon? Yes, but not terribly so.

Heath Ledger on the other hand is a complete joke. There is no way in hell a character as masculine as him would be gay. Every gay man has his "gay moments". There is no way Ledger's character would have any of those.

As for the gay fantasy, I think you missed one crucial point. It's a gay man's fantasy that he can TURN a masculine man gay and have him pine at him forever (and be monogamous of course!). Amateur gay porn sites boost their traffic tremendously among their gay audience by just adding "str8" to the titlebar. I think this is indicative of the self-loathing that can be found among many "str8 acting" gay men. They search for something they lack, hyper-masculinity and they also see something in straightness that they don't see in gayness: loyalty.

Since the masculine man is not a "real" gay but a "convert", they assume that he will be more loyal to them because they helped him "convert" and because he has not been exposed as much to the gay "culture". The obsession with straightness among gay men is made most explicit in Hollywood. Obviously there are many gay men who work in Hollywood, in front of the camera and behind it, and many remain closeted for various economic reasons. However, a friend of mine noticed that casting agents who were gay would not cast other gay actors based on the fact that "they liked musicals" (read: they were flaming off the set but not while acting).

Something similar is noticeable in the gay porn industry. "Tops" make by far the most money. "Bottoms" make the least and "Versatiles" are somewhere in between. A top who insists that he is straight makes the most money of all and they are the only ones that get superstar status and some of the best contracts. This has become such a problem that men who are obviously gay pretend to be straight so they can get a better contract with a studio.

Also, "str8 acting" gays come out later in life than some of those who are more effeminate. Part of it is due to the obviousness of the more fey homosexuals but I do think some self-loathing comes into play. They do not like their masculinity to be in question until they reach a point where it becomes unbearable to "play straight". Effeminate homosexuals don't care that much about how "masculine" they appear. They have been tormented during childhood and they are used to the abuse by now so they do not have to put up as big of a front. That does not mean that they are not attracted to straight men. Many are. But they are more tolerant of dating an effeminate homosexual than their str8 acting counterparts.

Overall, I just wish liberals and homosexuals would just leave the politics behind for once and tell the truth. Homosexuals are generally nice people, they just have one major vice. Is it so wrong to admit it?

The Best Actor Oscar Race: The frontrunners appear to be Philip Seymour Hoffman for portraying the world's gayest gay in "Capote " and Heath Ledger for portraying the world's straightest gay in "Brokeback Mountain." One of the oddities of contemporary movies is that only straight actors, like Hoffman and Ledger, or Tom Hanks in "Philadelphia" and William Hurt in "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (to cite two Best Actor winning roles), are allowed to play gays.

Joaquin Phoenix is likely the other main contender, for playing in "Walk the Line," Johnny Cash who, amazing as it may seem to Oscar voters, was not gay. (The other nominees are David Strathairn as the self-righteous Edward R. Murrow in "Good Night, and Good Luck" and Terrence Howard as an unbelievably soft, sodden pimp in "Hustle and Flow.")

Ledger is just about the only thing the drab, dreary "Brokeback Mountain" has going for it, but he and his deep, deep voice are most impressive. (He's also good doing a George Sanders impersonation in the silly but likable "Casanova.")

"Walk the Line" is a better movie than "Brokeback." For example, Reese Witherspoon is infinitely superior in "Walk" to Jake Gyllenhaal in "Brokeback," where he often looks like a member of a country music boy band for teenyboppers. At other times, Gyllenhaal looks like Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman wearing a cowboy hat. That he got a best Supporting Actor nomination for "Brokeback" is just a Culture War political gesture on the part of Hollywood. The only one of "Brokeback's" eight nominations that it actually deserves is Ledger's.

If you look at the top three love story movies on the American Film Institute's list -- "Casablanca," "Gone With the Wind," and "West Side Story" -- you'll notice a common denominator. There's a lot else going on besides the romance: WWII, the Civil War, and an ethnic gang war, respectively. But there's nothing else going on in "Brokeback." You learn next to nothing about sheepherding or ranch work or bull riding or the combine business. It's just two not very intelligent guys talking about their relationship. You don't learning anything about their jobs or anything else. It's a chick flick of the dullest kind.

Even the vaunted cinematography is weak. The camera gets pointed at a lot of potentially beautiful mountain scenery, but they must have lacked the budget to wait around for the sun to come out.

"Brokeback Mountain" works on two levels, both bogus. It's a heterosexual liberal's fantasy that homosexuals are just like heterosexuals except for sexual orientation. In reality, the odds that Gyllenhaal's character, who is of average to above-average masculinity, and Ledger's character, who is out at the far right edge of the masculinity bell curve with John Wayne, would both be homosexual is one in a million.

And it's a gay's fantasy that somewhere out there is an ultra-masculine cowboy who will fall head over heels in love with me and pine away for me his whole life. To be precise, it's that ultimate gay's fantasy, the same one as in "Kiss of the Spider Woman," where William Hurt's flouncy window-dresser seduces the ultra-macho Raul Julia: that you're so irresistible that you attract a Real Man who is only gay for you. It's a silly, silly movie, and I suspect the people making it deep down recognized that fact, so they made it slooooow and serious to cover up its essential campiness.

Unfortunately, the prosaic "Walk the Line" suffers from Phoenix lacking Cash's mythic resonance. Phoenix is a fine actor, but his voice isn't pitched low enough to play Johnny Cash. I'm sorry, but when the actor rumbles, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash," it has to be be a thrilling moment, but Phoenix just doesn't have the pipes for it.

So, who should have played Johnny Cash? The man with the deep voice, Heath Ledger. He's much fairer than Cash, who often fooled people into believing he was part American Indian, but they can do more with makeup than they can with vocal timbre. Ledger doesn't look like Cash, although he has enough of his size to be satisfactory, but then Phoenix doesn't look much like Cash either.

I don't know if Ledger can sing, but it was pointless to have Phoenix sing Cash's songs in "Walk the Line" when he could have just lip-synced them like Jessica Lange did Patsy Cline's songs in the excellent biopic "Sweet Dreams." They must have insisted on Phoenix singing rather than lip-syncing because otherwise there would have been an obvious disconnect between his singing and speaking voices. But that just meant that the songs lack Cash's famous sound.

And, switching roles with Phoenix would have gotten Ledger out of "Brokeback."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Best Actor Oscar Race

The frontrunners appear to be Philip Seymour Hoffman for portraying the world's gayest gay in "Capote " and Heath Ledger for portraying the world's straightest gay in "Brokeback Mountain." (One of the oddities of contemporary movies is that only straight actors, like Hoffman and Ledger, or Tom Hanks in "Philadelphia," are allowed to play gays.)

Joaquin Phoenix is likely the other main contender, for playing Johnnie Cash in "Walk the Line," who, amazing as it may seem to Oscar voters, was not gay. (The other nominees are David Strathairn as the self-righteous Edward R. Murrow in "Good Night, and Good Luck" and Terrence Howard as an unbelievably soft, sodden pimp in "Hustle and Flow.")

Ledger is just about the only thing the drab, dreary "Brokeback Mountain" has going for it, but he and his deep, deep voice are most impressive. (He's also good doing a George Sanders impersonation in the silly but likable "Casanova.")

"Walk the Line" is a better movie than "Brokeback." For example, Reese Witherspoon is infinitely superior in "Walk" to Jake Gyllenhaal in "Brokeback," where he often looks like a member of a country music boy band for teenyboppers. At other times, Gyllenhaal looks like Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman wearing a cowboy hat. That he got a best Supporting Actor nomination for "Brokeback" is just a Culture War political gesture on the part of Hollywood. The only one of "Brokeback's" eight nominations that it actually deserves is Ledger's.

If you look at the top three love story movies on the American Film Institute's list -- "Casablanca," "Gone With the Wind," and "West Side Story" -- you'll notice a common denominator. There's a lot else going on besides the romance: WWII, the Civil War, and an ethnic gang war." But there's nothing else going on in "Brokeback." It's just two not very intelligent guys talking about their relationship. You don't learning anything about their jobs or anything else. It's a chick flick of the dullest kind.

Even the vaunted cinematography is weak. The camera gets pointed at a lot of potentially beautiful mountain scenery, but they must have lacked the budget to wait around for the sun to come out.

"Brokeback Mountain" works on two levels, both bogus. It's a heterosexual liberal's fantasy that homosexuals are just like heterosexuals except for sexual orientation. In reality, the odds that Gyllenhaal's character, who is of average to above-average masculinity, and Ledger's character, who is out at the far right edge of the masculinity bell curve with John Wayne, would both be homosexual is one in a million.

And it's a gay's fantasy that somewhere out there is an ultra-masculine cowboy who will fall head over heels in love with me and pine away for me his whole life. It's a silly, silly movie, and I suspect the people making it deep down recognized that fact, so they made it slooooow and serious to cover up its essential campiness.

Unfortunately, the prosaic "Walk the Line" suffers from Phoenix lacking Cash's mythic resonance. Phoenix is a fine actor, but his voice isn't pitched low enough to play Johnnie Cash. I'm sorry, but when the actor rumbles, "Hello, I'm Johnnie Cash," it has to be be a thrilling moment, but Phoenix just doesn't have the pipes for it.

So, who should have played Johnnie Cash? The man with the deep voice, Heath Ledger. He's much fairer than Cash, who often fooled people into believing he was part American Indian, but they can do more with makeup than they can with vocal timbre. Ledger doesn't look like Cash, although he has enough of his size to be satisfactory, but then Phoenix doesn't look much like Cash either.

I don't know if Ledger can sing, but it was pointless to have Phoenix sing Cash's songs in "Walk the Line" when he could have just lip-synced them like Jessica Lange did Patsy Cline's songs in the excellent biopic "Sweet Dreams." They must have insisted on Phoenix singing rather than lip-syncing because otherwise there would have been an obvious disconnect between his singing and speaking voices. But that just meant that the songs lack Cash's famous sound.

And, switching roles with Phoenix would have gotten Ledger out of "Brokeback."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My ideal Winter Olympic event

The problem with most of the Winter Games events is that only one person or team competes at a time. That's because it's so slippery out there that catastrophes could ensue if athletes competed directly. So, the events end up with play-by-plays like this:

"And there goes Schievenhoffel! He's going really fast. Man, he's flying! He's very quick! Wow, he's fast! Fast, fast, fast! And there's his time: oh, well, he just wasn't quite fast enough..."

What I'd like to see is the Mass Downhill -- all the skiers line up side by on top of the mountain and the first one, no holds barred, to the bottom gets the gold. Whacking each other with ski poles is not only allowed, but encouraged.

Fortunately, the recently added short track speed skating is close. My favorite race in 2002 was the men's 1000m when America's Apolo Anton Ohno and the other three leaders all crashed into each other in the final turn and went down. The Australian guy in last place was so far back that he was able to skate around and between the human debris on the ice to win the funniest gold medal of that Games.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Are the Winter Olympics a Nordocentric plot against 3rd Worlders?

From the Washington Post:

Where the Rich and Elite Meet to Compete
By Paul Farhi

Never mind the usual puffery about what this month's Winter Olympics are all about. Sure, there's the beauty of sports, the spirit of friendly competition, the dedication of great athletes and all that. But the Winter Games are about a few other things as well: elitism, exclusion and the triumph of the world's sporting haves over its have nots.

What the Winter Games are not is a truly international sporting competition that brings the best of the world together to compete, as the promotional blather would have you believe. Unlike the widely attended Summer Olympics, the winter version is almost exclusively the preserve of a narrow, generally wealthy, predominantly Caucasian collection of athletes and nations. In fact, I'd suggest that the name of the Winter Games, which start Friday, be changed. They could be more accurately branded "The European and North American Expensive Sports Festival."...

In the history of the winter competition, dating from its inception in 1924, competitors from only six countries -- the Soviet Union/Russia, Germany (East, West and combined), Norway, the United States, Austria and Finland, in that order -- have won almost two-thirds of all the medals awarded. Only 17 countries have ever amassed more than 10 medals during the past 19 winter Olympiads. Only 38 countries have won even one medal...

If it were, athletes from countries like Peru, Chile, Nepal, Morocco, Afghanistan and Ethiopia -- all blessed with soaring, snow-covered mountains -- would be marching en masse in the Opening Ceremonies and fighting for the medal stand.

What about Tanzania? They could put a ski jump and a biathlon track on top of Mt. Kilimanjaro!

Instead, the more telling factors are economic. Would-be Winter Olympians need years of training, coaching and competition if they're going to make it to the Games.

Yet, fairly similar patterns can be seen in the Summer Olympics, too. I write a lot about the running races in the Olympics because they offer a more level playing field for the analysis of human biodiversity than most other sports, And, it's nice to see worthy individuals from poor countries, like Hicham el-Gerrouj, the Moroccan star of the 2004 Athens Olympics, excel.

But most Summer Games sports are dominated either by peoples originating in the temperate to cool climates of Europe and Northeast Asia, or by black minorities living in temperate countries, or by countries where Communist dictatorships built up huge sports machines (Cuba being the most successful 3rd World country -- and, as Humberto Fontova would remind me, it had more of a First World economy before Castro).

If you list China as a Northeast Asian country, which seems appropriate from a cultural standpoint, then examples of Summer sports dominated by Northerners include swimming, gymnastics, diving, archery, canoeing, cycling, equestrian, fencing, field hockey (a sport once dominated by India, but no longer), team handball, judo, modern pentathlon, rowing, sailing, shooting, softball, synchronized swimming, table tennis, tennis, triathlon, water polo, and weightlifting.

The ideal situation for winning at the Summer Games appears to be to have people from cold winter climates living in a sunny, mild, low humidity climate like Los Angeles (UCLA and USC are the leading Olympic medal-winning universities in history) or Sydney, where they can train outdoors year-round.

The same appears to be generally true for the new Extreme Sports, which mostly trace their roots to the 1950s when Orange County surfers invented the skateboard.

The Summer Olympic events that would meet Mr. Farhi's approval for diversity of winners are fewer in number: track & field, badminton (dominated by southeast Asians), baseball (but that's being discontinued), basketball (but African-American dominance has been slipping), boxing, soccer (but, with the exception of mighty Brazil, that's largely because the Olympic rules are biased in favor of Third World countries, putting a 23 year age limit on First World countries), volleyball, with the two kinds of wrestling and weightlifting being sui generis because of the strong showing in them by poor countries from the cold winter belt of the Eurasian steppe.

So, why the domination by the Winter People over the Tropical People in both Olympics? Mr. Farhi says it's economic, but then that just raises the question of why the Ice People are so much more economically productive than the Sun People? And, as hugely important as that question is, that's not a topic you'll likely see explored frankly in the Washington Post. But one possibility is that the worry that winter, the starving time, is approaching selected for cultural and/or genetic traits such as self-discipline in the Ice People, which now prove useful both in the economic and sporting spheres.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Welcome to the Winter Olympics

The more things change, the more they stay the same, so here's some of my blogging on the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Yes, I know lots of you couldn't care less about figure skating, but from a human biodiversity perspective figure skating is hugely instructive because it is that rare sport (assuming it is a sport) that appeals more to women than to men and to gay men than to straight men. It is the exception that proves a lot of rules.

The Figure Skating Powers That Be have announced that they are going to try to make their sport's judging more objective by giving credit for each move on a degree of difficulty scale. There's only one problem with this. Figure skating, as we know it, is essentially about being a princess, not a jock. The more they make it more of a sport like gymnastics and less of an art form, the less feminine it will become and thus the less feminine its champions will be. The danger is not so much that skating will crown as winners more burly women like Tonya Harding, who are strong jumpers, but then so was Charles Barkley. No, the risk is that skating will be overrun by more pre-pubescent girls like Tara "The Human Drill Bit" Lipinksi, the 15 year old who took the gold in 1998 with her high-RPM jumps.

The physical difference between a little girl and a woman is basically body fat. Women have higher body fat percentages than girls (more body fat is bad in just about any sport not involving massive heat loss like English Channel swimming or Iditarod dogsled mushing). And their weight is distributed farther from their vertical axis (i.e., they have T&A). Recall how skaters spin faster at the ends of their routines when they pull their arms in. It's basic physics. The same applies with T&A. A womanly beauty like Katarina Witt could never attain the RPM necessary to jump like the stick insect-like Lipinski.

Gymnastics has been overrun by pre-pubescents for years (e.g., 14 year old Nadia Comaneci in 1976). That's why they had to set a minimum age of 16 for Olympics "women's" gymnastics. Unfortunately, that just means girls try to delay puberty with dieting, exercise, and drugs, with God-knows-what long term health effects.

Ultimately, womanly grace is awfully hard to quantify, but we sure know it when we see it. It would be sad to penalize that in the name of making skating judging more objective.

Race and the Winter Olympics: Since I've written so much over the years about racial patterns in winners of Summer Olympics medals, a reader asked me several weeks ago if I had anything to say about race in the Winter Olympics. I replied that the role where African Americans have the greatest natural advantage is "brakeman," the primary pusher of the bobsled. It's a job that requires that rare combination of sprinting speed and strength that blacks of West African descent tend to have more of than anybody else. Congratulations to Vonetta Flowers, who just became the first black Winter Olympics gold medallist ... as a bobsled brakewoman.

Despite all the gee-whiz commentary, there's nothing surprising about a sprinter/long jumper switching to bobsled - the Soviets did that all the time with their 100m men who were just below Olympic caliber. NFL players Herschel Walker and Willie Gault have competed in the bobsled, but the in-bred, soap-operaish family of American bobsledders didn't much appreciate rich black superstars parachuting into their penurious sport and hogging their quadrennial moment in the spotlight.

I hope I'm not surprising anybody by stating that obviously a lot of male figure skaters, especially in men's singles, are gay. Here's a lesbian activist's list of publicly out skaters. (Obviously, it's missing a lot of theoretically still-closeted stars). The interesting thing is the dog that doesn't bark - the complete lack of out lesbian skaters. The same is true for gymnastics. In ballet, J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern, the leading demographer of homosexuality, found that more than 50% of male dancers (what my later mother-in-law called "ballerinos") are gay, but he was hard-pressed to find a single lesbian.

The simplest explanation is the best: figure skating and ballet (and, to a lesser extent, gymnastics) are highly feminine pastimes, and thus appeal most to feminine (i.e., heterosexual) women and effeminate (i.e., homosexual) men. In general, despite the politicized assumption that gays and lesbians are alike, they are actually radically dissimilar on a host of dimensions. Here's my classic 1994 article "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay," with its notorious table of three dozen traits upon which they tend to differ markedly.

Judging Skating: An irony of the figure skating pairs controversy is that one of the flagrantly biased NBC announcers, Scott Hamilton, was the beneficiary of one of the most rigged decisions in skating history. Coming into the 1984 Games, Scott had been World Champion three years in a row. Everyone knew that if he won the gold, the personable (and heterosexual!) American would be a great ambassador for the sport. So, even though at Sarajevo Hamilton was sick and skated a weak final program, blowing off two triple jumps, he still was handed the gold.

Similarly, Sale and Pelletier, the supposedly martyred Canadian pairs skaters, were only in gold medal contention because the judges decided to not penalize justly their catastrophic double fall at the climax of their short program.

I sort of sympathize with this "cumulative" approach to judging, which tries to lessen the general problem with the Winter Games, which is that it's damn slippery out there. Thus, too many events turn on almost-random mistakes rather than on talent. The skating judges try to smooth out the results by voting for the competitors who have shown themselves the best over the years. Of course, on the other hand, that lends skating its aura of bogusness.

Salt Lake City Olympics "Bribery" Scandal - Well before the scandal broke, I was doing research for a possible TV sitcom script about the International Olympics Committee. It was common knowledge even then - at least among anybody who cared to look - that IOC members were shaking down potential host cities for bribes.

The economic reason is simple: the Olympics don't pay the athletes anything and they have no real competition. Thus, they can make huge profits (the LA Olympics reaped over $300 million way back in 1984). Not surprisingly, IOC members, who get to decide which city will get the Games, use their power to horn in and claim a share of the loot for their own accounts. So, if you want to eliminate corruption in the site selection process, the solution is simple: pay the athletes. That will lower the profits to be made from hosting an Olympics, which will make potential host cities less willing to share the (reduced) wealth with IOC extortionists.

Women's Olympic figure skating is kind of strange: it's as if all the girls in the kingdom who want to be the Princess and live happily ever after with the Prince not only have to try on Cinderella's glass slippers, but then they have to dance in them down a freshly waxed marble staircase without falling on their keisters.

Did you notice how Women's Ice Hockey, which set off such a frenzy of feminist patriotic chauvinism in 1998, was an utter dud in 2002? NBC broadcast just the last 6 minutes of the gold medal hockey game Thursday night (Canada beat the U.S. 3-2), while giving saturation coverage to the ladies' figure skating final, which is so popular because it serves, in effect, to crown the World's Top Princess (just as women's gymnastics in the Summer Olympics crowns the World's Top Pixie) . The collapse of interest in the U.S. Women's Hockey team continues a trend of faddish interest in women's teams fizzling in their return performances. In the 1996 Olympics, the U.S. Women's Softball and Basketball teams were the subject of vast hoopla, but in 2000 few fans were interested in them anymore. If this trend continues, the next Women's World Cup in soccer will be a massive let-down. Essentially, I see little evidence of long term interest in women's team sports except among lesbian fans and the kind of guy sports nuts who will watch anything on ESPN2.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The NSA wiretapping / datamining brouhaha

As you know, I'm not a true believer in the rightness of everything the Bush Administration does. Still, I'm simply unable to get my dudgeon up over this issue. I keep coming back to the question:

"On September 12, 2001, did I want my government to do something like this?"

And the answer I keep coming up with is: Sure.

As it turns out, the scans didn't find many terrorists in America. Why not? Probably because, as it appears now, 53 months later, there weren't many (and on 9/12/2001 there were 19 fewer than on 9/10/2001.)

But we didn't know there weren't many terrorists left at the time. It was prudent for the government to use the tools at its disposal to find out whether there were lots of them left.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Mexico v. America

"You hate us, you really hate us" -- Considering that over 40% of the 106 million Mexicans left in Mexico want to immigrate here, it's worth knowing what Mexicans think of the United States.

According to a new survey by the BBC World Service of 39,000 people in 33 countries, the 1000 surveyed Mexican adults more or less despise America's influence on the world, Only 10% of Mexicans viewed America as having a "mainly positive" influence on the world, while 55% viewed us as "mainly negative."

No other country of the 33 surveyed had such a tiny minority who viewed America's role in the world favorably, although nine other countries had larger majorities who found us to be a negative influence. (Mexicans seem less likely to have opinions of world affairs in general than almost all other countries, which goes along with a lot of other evidence, such as tiny newspaper readership rates, that suggest Mexicans tend to be poorly informed and not very interested in civil society.) In only one country was the margin between negative and positive views of American influence larger than Mexico's -45%: Finland at -46% (19% positive - 65% negative)

In contrast, Mexicans had a slightly positive overall view of Iran, 22% positive and 21% negative. Mexico was one of only five countries to look on Iran with favor. I suspect that one of the few things most Mexicans know about Iran is that it is anti-American.

Mexicans also viewed China's impact marginally favorably 28% to 26%, which is interesting because China's surge into world manufacturing dominance is ruining Mexico's last chance for prosperity. A smart play for Mexico would be to argue in America for a Grand Bargain: that we shouldn't export our manufacturing industries to China in search of lower wages, because the Chinese are our long run competitors for world leadership. In case of war with China over Taiwan or elsewhere, we'll be in deep trouble. Instead, the Mexicans should contend, we should outsource our manufacturing industries to Mexico, where no matter what happens in the Pacific, we'll have safe overland supply routes. In return for America imposing tariffs on China, Mexico would agree to be our faithful lapdogs on foreign policy. But, the Mexicans are so reflexively anti-American that this idea would never cross their minds.

Mexicans looked upon Russia slightly negatively (17% to 22%), France solidly positively (30% to 20%), Japan somewhat favorably (29% to 24%), "Europe" quite positively (37% to 13%), Great Britain quite negatively (15% to 36%), and India quite favorably (33% to 22%).

Overall, America appeared to be the second least popular country of the eight that the survey inquired about, with our image being more negative than positive in 18 countries versus 13 where we were viewed less favorably. The only less popular country than America is Iran.

And our positive total is inflated by our high ratings in strategically insignificant Sub-Saharan Africa, where all eight countries like us. I'm glad to know that Tanzanians think we're hot stuff by a 63%-16% margin, but, in the big picture, so what?

So, leaving out black Africa, we're losing 18 to 5. The only countries that like us are Poland (62%-15%), the Philippines (82%-10%), Afghanistan (72%-14%, a gratifying tribute to our more limited war aims there than in Iraq), strategically important India (44%-17%), and Sri Lanka (30%-20%). And we're tied in Saudi Arabia (38%-38%).

In Iraq, we're down 27%-56% (although God only knows how you get a representative sample there without getting beheaded). And when Michael Ledeen tells you how popular we are with the people of Iran, well, he's full of it: we're down 26%-65%. (And I suspect if we blow up their nuclear facilities, that will drop to about 1%-99%, just as Pearl Harbor didn't make Americans more open to merits of the Japanese case.)

The countries that oppose American influence on the world include our cultural cousins in Britain (36%-57%), Canada (30%-60%), and Australia (29%-60%).

Obviously, much of America's unpopularity is related to the unpopularity of George W. Bush and his Iraq Attaq. Yet, Bush's views toward Mexico have been wildly biased in favor of Mexico at the expense of his own country. And they still hate us!

This raises some severe questions about the neoconservative "propositionist" justification for mass immigration from Mexico -- they're coming here because they believe in the propositions that America stands for! But, propositionism was always an obvious crock, a jerry-rigged justification for a policy favored for reasons the neocons didn't want to admit in public.

Gideon's Blog has lots more analysis of the survey results.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Americans First: What's best for the citizens we already have?"

My American Conservative article outlining my "citizenist" philosophy is now on-line. Here's an excerpt on the problems with neoconservative "propositionism:"

Neoconservatives have long claimed to dissent from this reigning multiculturalist orthodoxy by advocating a philosophy of immigration that observers have dubbed propositionism. The neocons argue that immigrants should be admitted based on their current—or eventual —assent to the propositions underlying the United States government, such as “All men are created equal.” But the neocons have failed to answer numerous questions about how their philosophy would work.

If American values are rare, do we really want to deplete the rest of the world of the few people who agree with us? In many Third World countries, a “brain drain” saps medical care and economic progress. Do we want to be also responsible for “proposition attrition?”

On the other hand, what if agreement with American propositions is as common as the neoconservatives have claimed in trying to justify our Mesopotamian misadventure? President Bush has asserted that most Iraqis share our fundamental political values. If that’s true of the furious Iraqis, who are notorious even among other Arabs for self-destructive lunacy, then how many billions of other foreigners qualify to move to America? How then does propositionism help us choose among the hundreds of millions who want to immigrate?

And exactly whom would the propositionists keep out, other than the most fanatical Muslim fundamentalists? With the exception of a handful of refugee dissidents, the vast majority of immigrants to America are in it for the money and are willing to mouth whatever platitudes would be required to get in.

Finally, there’s an insidiously Jacobin implication to propositionism. If believing in neoconservative theories should make anyone in the world eligible for immigration, what should disbelieving in them make thought criminals like you and me? Candidates for deportation? For the guillotine?

Ultimately, propositionism seems less like a well thought-through philosophy and more like ethnocentric nostalgia, an intellectualized exercise in ancestor-worship. Emotionally, the neocons abhor asking tough questions about today’s immigrants because they see that as the equivalent of asking tough questions about their own Ellis Island immigrant forebears and, thus, about themselves. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

African-American DNA tests:

There's a lot of interest in the topic right now due to Henry Louis Gates' TV series, in which he discovers that although he's the most prominent black studies professor in the country, he's half white.

So, here are some things I've written on the subject:

Rick Kittles' African Ancestry Inc. Traces DNA Roots

How White Are Blacks? How Black Are Whites?

Where Did Mexico's Missing Blacks Go?

Race Is Not So Black or White

The AncestryByDNA Admixture Test

Henry Louis Gates's Norton Anthology of African-American Literature

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More phony intellectualizing from Belmont Club

This Belmont Club guy is smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is. He doesn't test his ideas enough before he publishes them. He takes a few facts and weaves them into a complicated theory, but he falls in love with his beautiful contraptions and doesn't ask basic questions about them before he publishes them.

For example, "Wretchard" claims to be reading William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill's life from 1932-1940 for a second time, but he still gets it all wrong:

Re-reading William Manchester's "Alone"

Although today it is fashionable to think of Appeasement as the political embodiment of cowardice it was coldly calculated to bring the Dictators into conflict and -- so Chamberlain hoped -- into annihilating each other. By selling out Austria in the Anchluss, the Czechs in the Sudetendland and nearly betraying Poland over the Danzig corridor Chamberlain was tempting Hitler ever further east into what he hoped would be an eventual clash with the other monster, Joseph Stalin. He did not reckon that evil, while coarse, is surpassingly cunning. The announcement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonagression pact on August 23, 1939, just a week before Poland was finally invaded by both Hitler and Stalin, made plain to Chamberlain that he had been outwitted. If Britain intended to drive Hitler East, Stalin had instead turned Hitler West. Nothing remained to Chamberlain and Britain's enervated armed forces but to gather up the tatters of their strategy and huddle behind the army of France. Having staked everything on diplomatically containing Hitler while neglecting Britain's defense -- not provoking Hitler was a deemed essential for diplomacy to succeed -- Chamberlain had no Plan B.

No, that's just not true. The moment when Neville Chamberlain woke up and realized that appeasing Hitler at Munich in 1938 was a mistake was when Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939. On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a heroic but impractical guarantee to Poland that they would go to war with Germany in case of German attack on Poland.

The problem then was that Britain and France were a long way from Poland and had no way to defend Poland in Poland. Neither had much offensive capability yet to take the war to Germany. Britain had started rearming in 1936-37 (the real villain was previous prime minister Stanley Baldwin) and would be in good shape by about 1942-43, while France had invested heavily in defensive warfare (the Maginot line) while not putting much into tanks. the crucial offensive weapon. (Actually, they had a lot of tanks but they distributed them widely rather than concentrating them for an offensive thrust.)

So, the most obvious alliance to defend Poland was the revival of the alliance of 1914 among Britain, France, and Russia. Stalin was open to such an alliance if he could move his troops up into Poland to defend against German attack. The Poles, however, absolutely rejected this, assuming that if they allowed the Russians in, it would take them about 50 years to get the Russians out (which turned out to be right).

There didn't seem to be any solution to this problem, and Chamberlain and the French weren't enthusiastic about bullying the poor Poles into a deal, so Stalin in August 1939 decided to temporarily align with Hitler. He figured that Hitler would, after digesting part of Poland, attack France and that would bog down into another WWI-style conflict. After the two sides were bled dry, Stalin would then re-enter the war and become the big victor.

And then Wretchard uses his fallacious history to draw this analogy:

Yet the cartoon crisis has been cruelest to radical Islam because it has upset the timetable for the slow demographic conquest of Europe. It forced the crisis before the time was ripe to win an outright trial of strength. And it has deranged the carefully crafted plan to hold Europe politically neutral while the Islamists concentrated their force on their most dangerous enemy, the United States. Unless the Islamists can reverse or at least pause the process of confrontation it will find itself engaged on two fronts, against Europe and the United States simultaneously.

Oh, for heaven's sake, what a load of portentous tripe. The Cartoon Crisis will be largely forgotten in a year, just like the Nigerian Muslim beauty contest riots of 2002 are forgotten. (The good news out of the Cartoon Crisis is that a few more people, maybe one or two dozen, will figure out that diversity and free speech are contradictory.) By next summer, everybody will be up in arms over some new example of Muslim obnoxiousness.

And what the heck is this "carefully crafted plan?" Who carefully crafted it? Where is this "Islamist" version of the Imperial German General Staff supposedly headquartered? Who belongs to it it? The Elders of Islam? Where is this Islamist Schlieffen Plan written down? There's a billion-plus Muslims and they can barely organize a Boy Scout troop.

There are two larger points here. The first is that we must learn the correct lessons of how WWII started. For example, we have to stop seeing every tin horn politician in the Middle East as another Hitler. Hitler was something unusual, thank God. Heck, Stalin wasn't even another Hitler when it came to starting wars. Saddam Hussein in 2003 wasn't another Hitler -- he was a worn out old man writing romance novels. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran isn't another Hitler -- he's not even in charge of his own country.

Second, even if they had cloned Hitler and had been secretly raising Hitler 2.0 for 50 years in some Muslim country, he still wouldn't be in charge of Germany. At worst, he'd be in charge of some ramshackle Muslim country full of illiterate, corrupt, and fractious Muslims. It was the bizarre combination of the cold rationality of the German people and the maniacal ambition of Hitler that made World War II.

The second point is that there is a real danger in over-emphasizing the lessons of how WWII started, even the correct ones, at the expense of the lessons of how WWI started. In the 1930s, the good guys over-learned the lessons of 1914, and thus weren't prepared for Hitler, but we have the advantage that we can study the causes of both wars. The obsession in recent years with the 1930s, while ignoring 1914, is not healthy.

In 1914, a whole bunch of fairly reasonable men, none of them a Hitler, were responsible for just about the worst thing that ever happened. Historian David Fromkin's recent re-examination of who started the Great War concluded that the man most responsible for WWI was von Moltke the Younger, the head of the German General Staff. Maybe, maybe not, but the point is that von Moltke, or General von Hotzendorff of Austria, or Colonel Dragutin Dimitrievitch, the leader of both the Black Hand terrorists and military intelligence in Serbia, or Sir Edward Grey, or whomever you want to pin the blame on is a pretty boring villain compared to Hitler.

The most picturesque villains of the time were Kaiser Wilhelm II and Rasputin. But the Kaiser in this case was quite reluctant to go to war and had to be dragged into it by his generals. Rasputin was utterly against war on the grounds that too many Russian peasants would die. But he couldn't work his usual magic on the Czar and Czarina because he was laid up in a Siberian hospital after being stabbed by a young lady he had trifled with.

The point is that WWI came about through all the proper bureaucratic channels, without the impetus of anybody who seemed overtly evil -- except for the fact that they played a role in bringing about four years of slaughter..

One important lesson to be learned from WWI is the dangers of the mood that says, "We must run any risk to be safe," a logic that has had its grips on much of the U.S. since 9/11. The German General Staff in 1914 had calculated that if Russia continued to grow economically faster than Germany for another couple of decades, then by 1935 or 1940, Russia could defeat Germany. Therefore, to be safe, Germany must fight Russia now!

And to conquer Russia, they first had to conquer France. And to conquer France they had to violate Belgium's neutrality, which meant they had to beat Britain. (And, they later figured out, to knock Russia out of the war they had to send Lenin to St. Petersburg, and to starve Britain, they had to sink American ships, which meant they had to beat America, which turned out to be a bridge too far.)

Well, swell ... It was a hell of a plan, and they almost pulled it off, but it ultimately set into motion a chain of events that lost them two World Wars and ended in 1945 with the Russian Army occupying the flattened ruins of Berlin and raping every East German woman under 70.

They had run every risk to be safe.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Feminist crone cat fight!

Betty Friedan, RIP, was a long-time Stalinist fellow-traveler who got bored with supporting the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and discovered a more fun way to indulge her inner diva by transforming herself into a celebrity feminist.

Germaine Greer, recently an unsuccessful contestant on the UK version of the reality TV show "Big Brother," unloads on the recently dead Friedan in "The Betty I Knew" in The Guardian, describing a trip they took together to pre-revolutionary Iran in the 1970s:

Betty's imperiousness had the shah's courtiers completely flummoxed. She ordered a respirator for her hotel room and one was brought over from the children's hospital. Three days later the courtiers asked me if it would be possible to remove it, as the hospital only had two and she wasn't using hers. I told them to go ahead and grab it, and that I would deal with Betty myself, but she didn't seem to notice that it was gone.

Again and again our escorts, aristocratic ladies with bleached hair and eyebrows, dressed from head to toe by Guy Laroche, would ask me to explain Betty's behaviour. "Please, Mrs Greer, she behaves so strangely, we think she may be drinking. She shouts at us, and when we try to explain she walks away. Sometimes her speech is strange." ...

As we were leaving our farewell party to go back to the hotel, Betty propped herself in front of our Cadillac and refused to get in. "Dammit!" she shouted, "I wunt, I deserve my own car! I will nutt travel cooped up in this thing with two other women. Don't you clowns know who I am?"

"Mrs Greer," pleaded the courtiers, who were shaking with fright. "What shall we do? Please make her quiet! She is very drunk."

Betty wasn't drunk. She was furious that the various dignitaries and ministers of state all had their own cars, while the female guests of honour were piled into a single car like a harem. Helvi and I looked on from our Cadillac at Betty standing there in her spangled black crepe-de-chine and yelling fit to bust, "I will nutt be quiet and gedinna car! Absolutely nutt!"

Eventually one of the ministers' cars was sent back for Betty. As it pulled out of the gateway I caught sight of her, small, alone in the back, her great head pillowed on the leather, eyes closed, resting after this important victory.

This is quite reminiscent of last year's expose of the egomania of the late Susan Sontag by lesbian English professor Terry Castle, "Desperately Seeking Susan." As I said then:

Indeed, much of what we are taught as the high intellectual history of the human race is based more on the magnetism and impenetrable self-assurance of thinkers than on minor issues like whether they were right or not. Freud is a perfect example, a charlatan who befuddled two generations via his implacable self-esteem. Marx was similar, and Ayn Rand was cut from the same cloth but fortunately never had as deleteriously wide an impact as Marx or Freud.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Feminist crone cat fight!

Betty Friedan, RIP, was a long-time Stalinist fellow-traveler who got bored with supporting the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and discovered a more fun way to indulge her inner diva by transforming herself into a celebrity feminist.

Germaine Greer unloads on the recently dead Friedan in "The Betty I Knew" in The Guardian, describing a trip they took together to pre-revolutionary Iran in the 1970s:

Betty's imperiousness had the shah's courtiers completely flummoxed. She ordered a respirator for her hotel room and one was brought over from the children's hospital. Three days later the courtiers asked me if it would be possible to remove it, as the hospital only had two and she wasn't using hers. I told them to go ahead and grab it, and that I would deal with Betty myself, but she didn't seem to notice that it was gone.

Again and again our escorts, aristocratic ladies with bleached hair and eyebrows, dressed from head to toe by Guy Laroche, would ask me to explain Betty's behaviour. "Please, Mrs Greer, she behaves so strangely, we think she may be drinking. She shouts at us, and when we try to explain she walks away. Sometimes her speech is strange." ...

As we were leaving our farewell party to go back to the hotel, Betty propped herself in front of our Cadillac and refused to get in. "Dammit!" she shouted, "I wunt, I deserve my own car! I will nutt travel cooped up in this thing with two other women. Don't you clowns know who I am?"

"Mrs Greer," pleaded the courtiers, who were shaking with fright. "What shall we do? Please make her quiet! She is very drunk."

Betty wasn't drunk. She was furious that the various dignitaries and ministers of state all had their own cars, while the female guests of honour were piled into a single car like a harem. Helvi and I looked on from our Cadillac at Betty standing there in her spangled black crepe-de-chine and yelling fit to bust, "I will nutt be quiet and gedinna car! Absolutely nutt!"

Eventually one of the ministers' cars was sent back for Betty. As it pulled out of the gateway I caught sight of her, small, alone in the back, her great head pillowed on the leather, eyes closed, resting after this important victory.

This is quite reminiscent of last year's expose of the egomania of the late Susan Sontag by lesbian English professor Terry Castle, "Desperately Seeking Susan." As I said then:

Indeed, much of what we are taught as the high intellectual history of the human race is based more on the magnetism and impenetrable self-assurance of thinkers than on minor issues like whether they were right or not. Freud is a perfect example, a charlatan who befuddled two generations via his implacable self-esteem. Marx was similar, and Ayn Rand was cut from the same cloth but fortunately never had as deleteriously wide an impact as Marx or Freud.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

At least somebody is willing to defend their borders

A long time theme here at iSteve.com is defending human biodiversity. Although defending plant and animal biodiversity is extremely fashionable, nobody else speaks up for human biodiversity. Of particular concern to me has been the survival of the pygmy negrito Andamanese of North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean (located roughly where Skull Island in "King Kong" would be), one of the last tribes out of contact with the rest of the world. If they ever come into contact with us, most of them will die from diseases for which they have no defenses.

Fortunately, the Sentinelese have no intention of going down without a fight. The Daily Telegraph reports:

Stone Age tribe kills fishermen who strayed on to island
By Peter Foster in New Delhi
(Filed: 08/02/2006)

One of the world's last Stone Age tribes has murdered two fishermen whose boat drifted on to a desert island in the Indian Ocean.

The Sentinelese, thought to number between 50 and 200, have rebuffed all contact with the modern world, firing a shower of arrows at anyone who comes within range.

They are believed to be the last pre-Neolithic tribe in the world to remain isolated and appear to have survived the 2004 Asian tsunami.

The two men killed, Sunder Raj, 48, and Pandit Tiwari, 52, were fishing illegally for mud crabs off North Sentinel Island, a speck of land in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands archipelago. Fellow fishermen said they dropped anchor for the night on Jan 25 but fell into a deep sleep, probably helped by large amounts of alcohol. During the night their anchor, a rock tied to a rope, failed to hold their open-topped boat against the currents and they drifted towards the island.

"As day broke, fellow fishermen say they tried to shout at the men and warn them they were in danger," said Samir Acharya, the head of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, an environmental organisation. "However they did not respond - they were probably drunk - and the boat drifted into the shallows where they were attacked and killed."

After the fishermen's families raised the alarm, the Indian coastguard tried to recover the bodies using a helicopter but was met by the customary hail of arrows.

Photographs shot from the helicopter show the near-naked tribesmen rushing to fire. But the downdraught from its rotors exposed the two fisherman buried in shallow graves and not roasted and eaten, as local rumour suggested.

Mr Acharya said the erroneous belief in the tribe's cannibalism grew from the practice of another tribe, the Onge, who would cut up and burn their dead to avoid them returning as evil spirits.

"People saw the flesh cooking on the fire and thought they must be cannibals but this incident clearly contradicts that belief," he said.

Attempts to recover the bodies of the two men have been suspended, although the Andaman Islands police chief, Dharmendra Kumar, said an operation might be mounted later. "Right now, there will be casualties on both sides," he said from Port Blair. "The tribesmen are out in large numbers. We shall let things cool down and once these tribals move to the island's other end we will sneak in and bring back the bodies."

Environmental groups urged the authorities to leave the bodies and respect the three-mile exclusion zone thrown around the island.

In the 1980s and early 1990s many Sentinelese were killed in skirmishes with armed salvage operators who visited the island after a shipwreck. Since then the tribesmen have remained virtually undisturbed.

DNA analysis of another tribe, the Jarawa, whose members made first contact with the outside world in 1997, suggest that the tribesmen migrated from Africa around 60,000 years ago.

However, the experience of the Jarawa since their emergence - sexual exploitation, alcoholism and a measles epidemic - has encouraged efforts to protect the Sentinelese from a similar fate.

My 2002 interview with the founder of the Andaman Association, George Weber, is here.

John Derbyshire has scanned in the two great pictures of Andamanese from Carleton Coon's 1965 classic The Living Races of Man. That picture of a steatopygous Andaman mom and how she carries her toddler around is now on-line here. The portrait of a young pygmy negrito couple of Little Andaman Island, his arm lovingly around her shoulders, the joy in each other's company radiating outward. It's as happy a picture as you'll ever see. This photo is now on-line here, [Not safe for work in a National Geographic way.]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A Car Salesman's Secrets

A reader writes:

I sold cars on assorted lots during my summers off from college.

What you're saying [in debunking Malcolm Gladwell's theory that car salesmen are unconsciously offering higher prices to blacks and women] is true.

As a matter of fact, because of this phenomena of black men wanting to appear to be big spenders, I reflexively used what is called a "negative sell" approach.

When a black man would tell me what car he was interested in, I'd "try" to dissuade him.

"That's kind of an expensive model. Not everyone can swing that. Maybe you should take a look at a Ford Focus? Obviously, it isn't like the car you're interested in, but they're easier to finance."

Most often, he would say, "Oh no! I can afford what I want, no problem."

I'd reply with plenty of enthusiasm, and show his car of choice.

Back in the office, if he gave me any objections, I'd remind him that I told him it might be a little too expensive for him to handle, and he told me it would be no problem. That usually squelched any lowballing efforts.

Where did I learn this? Through experience, and the advice of mentors who had been selling cars for decades.

Nothing unconscious about it.

We all just wanted to make money. What race a fellow was being irrelevant except as it may pertain to getting them out with one of our cars under their butts.

If I'd been told blacks enjoy English tea and crumpets, and I found it to be true, all my black customers would be sipping Earl Grey.

Race did not matter to me. Making the sale did.

Matter of fact, professional sales is all about psychological self-discipline.

Generally for a professional salesman, being a racist is not cost effective. Being observant of human behavior, and accurately identifying how to exploit it... is.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The American Conservative's February 13th Issue

The American Conservative's new issue is now semi-online:

February 13, 2006 Issue

Republic for Sale
By Doug Bandow
As long as government dispenses trillions in spoils, high-power lobbying is here to stay.



Eat, Drink, and Buy Merrily
By Bill Bonner
Celebrated Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s true legacy is one of debt and fiscal deceit. His successor aims to follow.

Americans First
By Steve Sailer
In devising immigration policy, the question should be: what’s best for the citizens we already have?

Lumpen Leisure
By James Howard Kunstler
Last days of the cheap-oil carnival

Reformers’ Roadblock
By W. James Antle III
The Senate gives amnesty another chance.

Land With No Plants
By Arthur Versluis
Globalism’s local toll

The Fire Next Time
By Wayne Madsen
Neocons set their sights on Tehran.



Basketball As It Wasn’t
By Steve Sailer
Jerry Bruckheimer’s “Glory Road”

The Devils We Knew
By Leon Hadar
Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam by Robert Dreyfuss

One Nation, Divisible
By Peter J. Lynch
The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future by Juan Enriquez

Try 5 FREE Issues of The American Conservative Today

Purchase an online edition of this issue immediately!

Counsels of a Liberal Ex-President
By Chip Pitts
Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis by Jimmy Carter



TAC to Standard— Challenge Accepted
By Patrick J. Buchanan
The Weekly Standard wants another war.

Beyond Sharon
By Leon Hadar
Sharon’s stroke reschedules the world.

A Night Out With the Kennedys
By Taki
Who is the Massachusetts Senator to judge Alito?



Fourteen Days: Trying Alito; A Trillion Here, A Trillion There; Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

Deep Background: London Bomber’s Legitimate Money; Fish and Chips and Terror; Cornered Syria

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Is this why the West won?

On Albion's Seedlings, J. McCormick has a most informative review of a little known 1997 book by Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600. It makes an argument that I'm personally inclined to favor: that the secret to the West's triumph was a change in style of thought centered in pre-Renaissance northern Italy. People began to find it normal to measure and quantify things, and create visual or otherwise ordered representations of this measured reality. McCormick writes:

"Crosby believes that the period between 1275 and 1325 (and shortly thereafter) in northern Italy saw the radical realignment of social attitudes toward the nature and management of time and space. This dramatic change in perspective (literal and figurative) was in turn to influence navigation, mapmaking, timekeeping, mathematics, art, writing, music, optics, mechanical devices, and financial management.

The final “striking of the match,” according to the professor, was the linking of quantification techniques (n.b., echoes of Nisbett’s cognitive research) with the aggressive development of visualization methods: maps, perspective drawing, clock faces, plotted cannonball trajectories, musical notation, algebraic notation, alphabetization, book indexing and tables of contents, etc. etc. At every turn, the properties of objects were being measured, recorded, and evaluated from the perspective of literally a new vision of “reality” … simpler, universal, and graspable by ordinary people.

"The choice of the Renaissance West was to perceive as much of reality as possible visually and all at once, a trait then and for centuries after the most distinctive of its culture."

Unlike every other culture on the planet, mathematics was enthusiastically merged with measurement. And the vision of what was measurable expanded accordingly. [More]

I'd echo Charles Murray in pointing to the benign effect of the dominant theologian of the age, St. Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274, right at the beginning of this Great Leap Forward in Italy. Murray wrote in Human Accomplishment:

[Christianity] was a theology that empowered the individual acting as an individual as no other philosophy or religion had ever done before. The potentially revolutionary message was realized more completely in one part of Christendom, the Catholic West, than in the Orthodox East. The crucial difference was that Roman Catholicism developed a philosophical and artistic humanism typified, and to a great degree engendered, by Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274). Aquinas made the case, eventually adopted by the Church, that human intelligence is a gift from God, and that to apply human intelligence to understanding the world is not an affront to God but is pleasing to him.

I wonder if the Japanese, who were the one non-Western culture not beset with decadence after 1500, separately embarked on a similar journey into quantification. For example, sumo wrestling statistics run back into 18th century, which, I believe, is earlier than any examples of sports statistics in England. (Sports statistics are of course a classic example of the urge to quantify.)

Or did the Japanese pick these ideas up from the West in the 16th Century, when they were open to European trade and missions?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

If black men like to be seen as big spenders, why are they notoriously bad tippers?

Across Difficult Country cites a PricewaterhouseCoopers study of inner city black spending habits that finds poor blacks like spend a lot on ostentatious purchases:

"African-American inner-city shoppers are 35 percent more likely than the population as a whole to buy women's dress shoes. They're also 54 percent more likely to purchase teen boys' clothing, and 64 percent more likely than average to buy fine jewelry...

"While American households in general spend an average of $1,069 annually on apparel, inner-city African Americans spend $1,502."

A reader writes:

I worked in the restaurant business for several years, and the conventional wisdom was that black people tipped less than other races. People who probably weren't otherwise racist would complain about this. I remember one pointy-bearded, multiply-pierced guy who looked like a WTO protestor and would blare rap music out of his car, who would (against company policy) skip anybody with a black sounding name ("Andre", "LaShuiqa") when his turn to deliver a pizza came up. People were not only conscious of this issue, they exaggerated it. I actually kept track of my tips from black and white customers for a while, and found that whites tip about 1/3 more, which is far less disparity than service industry employees (including myself) would have guessed without doing the math. This was in a white suburb, so I wouldn't necessarily expect these to be typical black folks. But that doesn't affect my main point, that people exaggerate, rather than suppress, these differences, because we were all dealing with these suburban blacks.

We were always looking for trends and trying to make generalizations about who tips and who doesn't, and when you work for tips, that's all you care about. If Hitler tipped well and Mother Teresa stiffed, a typical restaurant worker would praise him and bitch about her. Nobody was suppressing any un-PC thoughts.

Although I've never been a salesman, I would assume that salesmen are at least as conscious of their customers - probably more so. So Gladwell is full of it. I'll bet if he just asked some car salesmen, they would tell him the truth, or at least they would if they didn't think he was going to write about it and get them in trouble.

Also, surprisingly, Mexicans (meaning illegals in this area - I worked and was friendly with many of these people and I know that few of them are legal) were the best tippers of any ethnic group, on average (no, I didn't do the math, but my unconscious bias, if it exists, would have made me expect them to be cheap). Of course, this is all highly variable.

Ian Ayres found that blacks tip taxi cab drivers only about half as much as whites.

This raises the question of why do blacks like to be seen as big spenders but don't tip much? I presume it could be just a cultural difference -- tipping is a pretty screwy phenomenon in general, and you can see why one group might decide they could get more personal benefit out of stiffing the waiter and spending the money saved on bling.

I also expect that car dealers have a lot of tricks for persuading black customers that the salesman isn't some lowly servant like a waiter whose opinion doesn't matter, but is instead a fellow player, just like the customer is, a man worthy of being impressed by how much money you have to spend.

However, one group of blacks were big tippers, at least in the recent past: Another reader wrote awhile ago about her dad, who made his career as a waiter at a famous Manhattan restaurant where celebrities dined. The biggest tippers were the boxing champs, and the all-time greatest customer -- huge tipper, tremendous fun to wait on, and no complaints about the food or service -- was, indeed, The Greatest, Muhammad Ali.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Your base JPod model does not come with the self-awareness module

A reader points out that on NRO's The Corner today, John Podhoretz, of all people, accused his immigration restrictionist opponents of lacking decorum, civility, and thoughtfulness.

IMMIGRATION AT CPAC [Mark Krikorian]
This week's Conservative Political Action Conference will have two panels on immigration (one of them including yours truly), plus Rep. Tom Tancredo and Sen. John Cornyn giving (separate) speeches on the topic. Tamar Jacoby got booed last year.

BOOING TAMAR JACOBY AT CPAC [John Podhoretz]
I tell you, there's nothing like the open-mindedness in the debate over immigration. What decorum! What civility! What thoughtful discourse! How proud you restrictionists must be!

RE: BOOING TAMAR JACOBY [Mark Krikorian]
My point was not that booing her was a good thing; I get along with her fine, despite her being all wet on immigration. But the intensity of feeling on this is largely a function of the contempt with which the party establishment treats the grassroots: the president calling the Minutemen "vigilantes," Chris Cannon and Darrell Issa saying restrictionists don't belong in the Republican Party, and the shameful conduct of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. If mass-immigration supporters are going to dish it out, they'd better be ready to take it.

HAVING BEEN BOOED RECENTLY... [John Podhoretz]
...when the subject was immigration, Mark, I assure you that I wasn't dishing anything out at the time. I said merely what I feel deeply -- which is that, as a Jew, I have great difficulty supporting a blanket policy of immigration restriction because of what happened to the Jewish people after 1924 and the unwillingness of the United States to take Jews in. That didn't seem to me to be deserving of boos. But I got 'em, and I took 'em.

JPod is leaving out a crucial point: he was booed by a Jewish audience for his unpatriotic ethnocentric self-absorption. An iSteve reader attended the discussion that Pod Person 2.0 is referring to:

I attended a forum in Skokie outside of Chicago sponsored by the Jewish Policy Center (JPC) — the think tank offshoot of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC). The forum consisted of a moderator – Michael Medved, and four presenters, including John Podhoretz and David Horowitz.

I would say about 300 people showed up for the event, a lot considering it was a nice afternoon and both the Bears and Sox were playing....

Another questioner from the audience asked the panel about our immigration problems... But Podhoretz decided he wanted to answer this question, and here is where the fireworks began. He started by saying something along the lines of, “Well, first I feel when it comes to any issue of immigration, I have to rely on my Jewish experience. And I think back on the 1924 immigration restrictionist law which excluded so many Jews...”

Here he was interrupted and cut off by boos and jeers from the audience.

He was visibly taken aback by this reaction. He asked, “Why are you booing me?” Clearly shocked. Then he thought he had it figured out and responded by basically, “Oh, well I guess now this is an issue of Mexicans versus Jews...” And this produced even more jeers and boos from the audience, since he was clearly implying the audience was racist.

Damn Sailerites following him wherever he goes.

Let me emphasize again that a crowd of Jewish Republicans lustily rejected Podhoretz's philosophy of putting the welfare of Jews ahead of the welfare of Americans.

As this example makes clear, John Podhoretz himself is the Jewish Al Sharpton, a clownish ethnic activist who thinks first and foremost in tribal terms of how his ethnic group can profit from the political process at the expense of America as a whole.

The crucial question is why are bad apples like Podhoretz up on the speakers' platform while all the good eggs in that audience are stuck paying to hear his odious tripe? Why are the worst full of passionate intensity, while the best, who in this case have plenty of convictions, lack almost all media outlets?

A bizarre aspect of the neocon Open Borders mindset, as enunciated by Podhoretz and Tamar Jacoby, is how utterly nostalgia-driven is their is-it-good-for-the-Jews thinking. They don't care much about protecting Jews in America in the future from immigrant terrorists by guarding the borders. (To protect Americans from Arab terrorists, according to the neocons, we must instead conquer the Middle East: the notorious invite-the-world-invade-the-world strategy. And if occupying all the Arab countries doesn't turn the Arabs into Americans as planned, well, it will still kill a lot of Arabs in the process, so, from the neocon point of view, it's all good.) Virtually no contemporary immigrants give a damn about Israel, and some are highly anti-Semitic.

No, to the neocons, the crucial thing is to refight the 1924 argument over immigration, because they perceive that as an insult to their ethnicity. See, the Holocaust is Congress' fault -- they should have known that, even though he was in jail in 1924, Hitler would kill all the Jews 20 years later. (That perhaps the most important voice in favor of cutting back immigration in 1924 was the top union leader in the country Samuel Gompers, a Jewish immigrant, well, that little detail gets shoved down the memory hole big time.)

Of course, this neocon obsession with 1924 isn't really about Hitler, it's about maintaining status dominance in modern America, about strutting one's valuable victim status to put others in their place.

For an alternative patriotic philosophy, see my new article on citizenism in The American Conservative.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A Triumph of Jewish Eugenics

The Jewish Week reports:

The Vanquishing Of Tay-Sachs

The fatal genetic disease has almost disappeared among Jews thanks to aggressive screening — and the efforts of two parents.

By then, the Tay-Sachs screening procedure ... had become commonplace among potential mates and parents-to-be. The screening, discovered in 1969, meant that “Tay-Sachs was 95 percent eliminated” in American Jewry, a speaker at the dinner announced. Prominent Jewish organizations quickly advocated Tay-Sachs screening, and the disease’s incidence plummeted by the mid 1970s, remaining low since then.

Today, according to recent figures, of the 20 or so children diagnosed with Tay-Sachs in the U.S. each year, only a handful are Ashkenazi Jews, like the Dunkells. The rest are members of the Cajun community of Louisiana or are French-Canadians living near the St. Lawrence River, who have not undergone screening as frequently as American Jews...

Today, most Jewish couples undergo the screening, either before marriage (Orthodox couples do not generally approve of abortions, so Orthodox carriers either choose to marry other mates or adopt) or after conception (for people for whom abortion is an alternative when the fetus is found to have the disease.)

Some couples who are unwilling to consider terminating a pregnancy can also do an in-vitro fertilization that involves an analysis of the embryo’s DNA.

Despite reports in the media about the decline in Tay-Sachs, because of the Jewish community’s openness to Tay-Sachs screening the achievement of nearly wiping it out is not widely known.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Another black-brown prison race riot in LA County

The LA Daily News reports:

The Los Angeles County jail system remained in lockdown Sunday as authorities investigated a race-related riot at Pitchess Detention Center - one of the worst in at least four years that left an inmate dead and dozens injured.

Wayne Robert Tiznor, 45, of Los Angeles died from apparent blunt force trauma amid the chaos Saturday when fighting between Latino and African-American inmates spread to involve more than 2,000 in the North County Correctional Facility, one of three jails inside the sprawling 8,200-inmate complex...

Officials segregated Latino and African-American inmates in the North County facility - permitted during emergencies - while the entire county jail system was in lockdown, though deputies allowed restricted movement for some inmates by Sunday afternoon.

"Everything's quiet," Whitmore said. The measures are in effect until officials decide it's "safe to move forward."

The jail system - the nation's largest - oversees a daily population of about 21,000. About 60 percent are Hispanic, and about 30 percent are African-American, officials said.

With racial tensions viewed as a catalyst for the riot, Sheriff Lee Baca said he wants to discuss the need for inmate segregation with civil liberties groups, even as a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling forbid separation of state prison inmates strictly by race.

"The sheriff wants to ... have some real-life discussions," Whitmore said. "He wants to examine the reality of the jail world, where segregation prevents violence that could lead to death."

The Sheriff's Department has said it doesn't segregate by race but rather by gang affiliation, type of crime, propensity for violence or escape, sexual orientation and other factors. But gangs in and out of jail are often organized around race.

Kent of the American Civil Liberties Union said racial segregation of inmates might be allowed during emergencies, but it can't be the only solution to jailhouse violence.

I hate to say I-told-you-so (strike that, actually, I quite enjoy it), but I pointed out last year in VDARE that the Supreme Court's decision in Johnson v. California of outlawing temporary preventative segregation of new inmates was arrogantly naive, another example of the puerile (the clerks) assisting the senile (the Justices) to come up with a smugly stupid decision.

Your Lying Eyes points out:

Segregating prisoners would be dangerous, you see, because "by insisting that inmates be housed only with other inmates of the same race, it is possible that prison officials will breed further hostility among prisoners and reinforce racial and ethnic divisions." Yep, that's what Sandra Day O'Connor said in her majority opinion in Johnson v California. Whatever will our nation do without her down-to-earth, practical wisdom to guide the court?

This notion that shoving people together against their will is the best way to get them to like each other is one of the dominant dogmas of our society. To an elderly Supreme Court justice, this makes perfect sense:

"It's so educational for our grandchildren (great-grandchildren? I can never remember any more) when they come to visit us in Chevy Chase and Mr. Sodabottlewala next door shows them his pictures from his family estate in Bombay (or did they change the city's name? What do they call it now? Oh, yes, Bombay is now Bangalore. Sorry, my mistake.)"

But at the opposite end of the social scale, it doesn't work like that. Especially among violent inmates. To know a felon is generally not to love him. If you spend five years in a prison where the only people of another race you come in contact with are either criminals or guards, your opinion of that race will likely not improve. But you can't expect Supreme Court justices or their Ivy League clerks to figure that out.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer