Obama: Insincere or not-all-that-bright? One of the mysteries about the Presidential candidate that emerges from closely reading his autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is whether his superb literary eye for detail is accompanied by a comparable analytical intelligence. The book is so lacking in large-scale insights about his chosen subject of race that it's easy to assume that he really does know the score, but that he's just covering up for reasons of racial and personal pride … and that when he's in the White House, he will drop all the pretense and start behaving realistically.
On the other hand, maybe he just doesn't get it. He wouldn't be the first person of high literary skill whose real world intelligence was lacking. Or maybe he's smart about everything except race, because his emotions get in the way?
Here's a representative example. In his Epilogue, the last person Obama meets in Kenya is a supposedly wise old female historian named Dr. Rukia Odero, a friend of his late father's, whom the author brings on stage at the end to enunciate the lessons of his trip to Africa:
"I asked her why she thought black Americans were prone to disappointment when they visited Africa. She shook her head and smiled. 'Because they come here looking for the authentic,' she said. 'That is bound to disappoint a person. Look at this meal we are eating. … Kenyans are very boastful about the quality of their tea, you notice. But of course we got this habit from the English. Our ancestors did not drink such a thing. Then there's the spices we used to cook this fish. They originally came from India, or Indonesia. So even in this simple meal, you will find it very difficult to be authentic -- although the meal is certainly African.'"
Now, that is so transparently bogus that it's just plain sad -- the idea that the reason African-Americans are disappointed when they visit Africa is because the tea and spices turn out to be non-indigenous! Obviously, the real reason black Americans find black-ruled Africa to be disillusioning is because blacks are doing a bad job of ruling it. (See former Washington Post Africa bureau chief Keith R. Richburg's book Out of Africa: A Black Man Confronts Africa for a frank description of the causes of African-American disappointment in post-colonial Africa.)
Of course, it's just plain sad that Africans are doing a lousy job of running Africa, and it's perfectly natural for an African-American to want to distract attention from that fact with the kind of trendy nonsense that will get white liberals nodding along thoughtfully: Why, yes, Africa must be just like Switzerland, which, to be frank, was rather disappointing when we visited it on the Brown U. alumni tour and I didn't see any milkmaids like in that Heidi book I loved when I was a girl. Just people dressed in Italian designer clothes driving German luxury cars. So distressingly inauthentic! But, I guess that's all part of the vibrant magic of diversity.
So, is Obama knowingly yanking our chain? Or does he just not get it?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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37 comments:
Like many multiracial individuals, Obama most likely has an atypically segmented "quadrant of competence". He is probably an overall higher than average scorer, but there are probably areas where "nulls" show up which make him less than averagely competent in certain areas of perception and cognition.
These patterns resemble antenna radiation patterns, for a good analogy, if you understand the idea that a radio antenna can be designed to radiate and receive in many different patterns. Imagine a pie or pizza cut conventionally, but into very small numerous slices. There are areas with a lot of slices gone and some with few, but in strange orders.
Imagine that Japanese people are very good at the things they are (correctly) generally considered good at, and imagine blacks likewise. When a Japanese and a black interbreed you can get people with typically Japanese and black traits-but not smoothly integrated. Rather sharply pie-segmented.
I remember reading about some black jazz musicians on a state dept tour of africa many years ago. They were shocked when they gave clinics for local musicians. The Africans had no feeling for the music at all. They were very disappointed.
I had a similar experience in Trinidad watching an amateur hour show on TV. Some young black Trinidadians were covering a Motown tune. My wife (who is not white) and I looked at each other in disbelief. They had no feeling for the music.
American black culture is American. I don't think Obama yet realizes that.
Bono and Oprah find Africa plenty authentic. Chris Tucker too.
"Or maybe he's smart about everything except race, because his emotions get in the way?"
This is most likely it. Obama has demonstrated that:
a) He can get into Harvard Law School.
b) He is conflicted about his heritage and the surrounding racial issues.
If you add in the social rules among educated people when discussing these issues, the "inauthentic spices model" is excactly the kind of output you should expect, even from most sharp minds.
Obama starts off with a seemingly frank and correct observation (frequent disillusionment with Africa), but the obvious explanation (African failure) easily leads into uncomfortable territory.
Hence, brainpower must be deployed to come up with a diversionary, acceptable, explanation - and really, "inauthenticity of culture" is pretty clever.
It might not have much empirical value, but it sounds good enough for most readers, while being inoffensive to most western readers.
So if anything, this passage is evidence of both Obama's touchiness on the race issue (which he shares with roughly 90+ percent of the intelligentia, white or black) and his cleverness in coming up with a useful and harmless explanation.
One of my biggest fears of Obama is NOT his personal confusion with his "beige" racial identity, but the fact that he's the typical overeducated, unexperienced academic.
Geez...count how many social disasters has Harvard Liberal style "idealism" wrecked on the public. 40 years ago, these were the idiots that gave us Urban Renewal and Forced Busing to Achieve Racial Integration. Today these folks are championing gay marriage and affirmative action/racial quotas.
My own experience with the new CEO classes, with their MBAs and ZERO practical experience actually DOING anything, wrecking American economic might, and burdening it with debt, while crippling it with "reorganization" and "Reduction-in-force". For that matter, the entire libertarian/liberal fantasy of "globalization", and "inter-connected" economy.
Of course, I have to give the neo-cons for being practical enough to recognize the simple fact that the liberals/libertarians in their idealistic zeal for "free markets" forgot...is that "free markets" require IMPERIAL power to enforce, and protect. So in the end, it's just British Imperialism with a Jewish face.
Now we have Obama, the "new" politican, with a solid lack of accomplishment of anything other then selling himself to advance his own career.
At least Clinton came from low class white trash, and understood the consequenses of not having enough to make ends meet. We've got Barack, praactically the only BLACK politican with a privileged white liberal upbringing as one of the top 5 in the White House run.
In other words, Barack is 60's era Identity politics personified. It's end result so to speak. Instead of being united by economic interest, Identity politics has divided us by race and ethnicity, and religion.
God help us, is there any more proof that America is decadent?
Kenya is such a disaster compared to any majority-white country that any Westerner who gets off the plane and spends an hour there will be overcome by shock and pity. No intelligence is needed, any more than you need intelligence to feel uncomfortable and distressed when you take a taxi through Bedford-Stuyvesant. If Obama chooses not to write about these things, it can only be because he has figured out some rationale to explain them away so they become irrelevant. But isn't that what liberals always do with every kind of racial difference? For example, with regard to the fact that blacks do less well than others on IQ tests, they invent the rationalization that the difference is due to text-taking anxiety, or they invent the rationalization that peasant ethnic groups who emmigrate to cities always take several generations to reach normal IQ levels. (Actually that last rationalization is from Thomas Sowell, who isn't even a liberal.) I think Obama must be making some sort of analogous rationalization concerning Kenya as a whole.
On the other hand, maybe he just doesn't get it. He wouldn't be the first person of high literary skill whose real world intelligence was lacking. Or maybe he's smart about everything except race, because his emotions get in the way?
If it is between those two, then I would say the latter possibility is most likely. He seems to be a fairly intelligent person though I imagine he is probably less bright than he sounds. He has a gift for gab.
Part of it depends on what you mean by intelligence. When it comes to brains, the guy can likely hold his own among other politicians. I don't have any reason to think he is particularly mathematically inclined. Like most well-spoken politicians, he would probably make a better lawyer, historian, or English professor in another life than a scientist, engineer, or mathematician.
"Obviously, the real reason black Americans find black-ruled Africa to be disillusioning is because blacks are doing a bad job of ruling it."
I don't think that is obvious. I think rather that people who go seeking "roots" in a distant place are likely to go with incorrect ideas about it, which then get disappointed. Hazy ideas, to be sure, but in general I think they go expecting to find something positive for themselves, some revelation.
Instead, it's like visiting Disney for the first time. You may know as an intellectual matter that it's just another theme park, but you have to go there to experience it to know in your heart that's true. Until they do, many people are convinced that it will be somehow magical. Then it turns into a slogfest of lines and hyper expensive everything.
Thus, when Obama wrote down that quote about authenticity, I think he was hitting close to the mark. He was looking for some experience from his Fatherland that would speak to him in some way. He didn't find it. So, how does he explain that? One explanation would be that there is no magic in life, that places are just places, people just people. Materialism. But he rejects that (and this is where the stupid comes in), because he doesn't like it and he so wants to find his "place" in the world via external experience. So to cling to his idea that there is some happy place out there for him, he invents the idea that they Kenyans too, just like Americans, have become inauthentic.
But this is hardly specific just to Obama. Lots of smart people engage in all sorts of seemingly stupid practices based on spiritualistic nonsense. Astrology. Superstition. Religion. Do you believe that Jesus died for your sins, Steve? If so, you're trying to get back to the Garden too. Obama just looked for it a little closer to home, in a place where his mental hiccup could be exposed to the cruel light of reason.
Now, the good thing about the Christian idea of sin as versus Obama's, is that the Christian idea is universal -- we are all sinners -- and thus, politically neutral. Whereas Obama appears to be some sort of primitivist: sin, at least in the quote you have above, originates in trade goods. Hopefully he is not stupid enough to really believe that, but as an asserted idea it does put him in general accordance with much environmentalist thought.
I doubt that the motivation for traveling to Africa matters much. It seems clear to me that any American traveling to a region where things are a mess is going to say to himself in a loud voice, "Things are a mess." That fact will put a dark cloud over the rest of the experience.
I like the term self-deception. We all do this where cherished things are at stake. Liberals do it with race, among many other things, and doing this makes smart people situationally dumb.
This is most likely it. Obama has demonstrated that:
a) He can get into Harvard Law School.
But, you gotta wonder. Did he get there under his own steam, or was it affirmative action that got him in?
think of when you are in middle of a dream and, say, you hear a ringing sound. you subconsciously jump on the first possible explanation that fits in with your narrative, and continue dreaming. you do not stop to list all the possible causes (is it the phone? the doorbell? an alarm? why is it ringing??)... now if you do this kind of thing while awake, it doesn't necessarily mean you aren't bright (in fact, your inventiveness may prove the opposite), just that you are not _interested_ in the truth. "the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life."
Svigor,
Does "WN" = "White Nationalist"? What a silly term. How can you be a nationalist without reference to a nation? There is no nation of generic whites. There are various white majority nations: Germany, Britain, France, etc., but you may have noticed that their nationalisms in the past tend to have been limited to their nations, not their color.
"White nationalist" to me sounds like a term for economically unsuccessful whites who attempt to console themselves over their failures by blaming them on non-whites.
In truth, as you know, unless you are at the very lowest level of menial labor, non-whites have had no negative impact on your ability to make a living. True, if you're a black high school drop out hanging dry wall, Mexican illegals may have lowered your wages a few percent (but then you'd still be making about double minimum wage, as even most low-level construction jobs pay at least that).
I doubt the Chinese Ph.D. student in Microbiology or the Indian software entrepreneur has stolen any opportunities from you. Instead of raging against them or pining for an all-white America that never existed after you imported millions of black slaves, you should try to do practical things to improve your station in life. I will be happy to give you some suggestions:
1) Get a job where you aren't competing against those smarter than you, and you aren't in danger of being outsourced. Consider law enforcement, nursing or being a longshoreman.
2) Invest your money in those corporations you whine about. As a shareholder you will have some vote in their future, and more important you will be positioned to profit from their success.
3) Keep your thoughts about other races to yourself in public; save them for anonymous websites. Most Americans will think your views distasteful or daft, and they may limit romantic and economic opportunities for you.
Good luck, Svigor. I wish you increased vigor as you work on improving your life instead of pining for what never has been in America and what never will be. Bear in mind that if you get one of the jobs I mentioned and invest the maximum you can ever year, in 20 years you may be able to afford to retire to an all-white country like Argentina. You won't have to worry about Indians and Chinese rushing to immigrate there.
Well it looks like its Mrs. Irfan's "time of the month" again. Take some Midol,dearie,and try to think pleasant thoughts! :)
The thing about Steve's obsession with "Dreams From My Father" as the Rosetta Stone to Obama's personality is that it elevates a book Obama wrote 12 years ago and essentially ignores everything he's written and said since then.
As a result, you get a really distorted view of Obama as some guy who idolizes his absent dad and resents his mom and maternal grandparents. But in his speeches to the black community, he hits pretty much the opposite note, getting quite angry and accusatory on the subject of absent fathers.
In his second book, he writes "as I got older I came to recognize how hard it had been for my mother and grandmother to raise us without a strong male presence in the house. I felt as well the mark that a father's absence can leave on a child. I determined that my father's irresponsibility toward his children, my stepfather's remoteness, and my grandfather's failures would all become object lessons for me, and that my own children would have a father they can count on."
And in a 2005 speech at a black church, he said "There are a lot of folks, a lot of brothers, walking around, and they look like men. And they're tall, and they've got whiskers — might even have sired a child. But it's not clear to me that they're full-grown men."
And at Selma earlier this year: "Don't let them tell you money don't make a difference; there's a reason that rich people got a lot of stuff in their schools. But you've still got to turn off the T.V. when your kids get home from school, and that if you conjugate a verb or read a book you're somehow acting white? We've got to get over that.
"And if Cousin Pookie would vote, and Uncle Jethro would turn off ESPN, we might have a different kind of politics. And don't tell me it doesn't have something to do with too many daddies not acting like daddies."
That sounds a lot less like the father-idolizing stoker of racial resentment that's been built up around here, and a lot more like someone speaking a language social conservatives can relate to.
A question and a comment:
Question:
Is there any public record of Obama's measured psychometric intelligence out there such as an IQ, SAT, or LSAT score? After all, last election Steve was able to dig up data on Bush and Kerry. I'd be curious about the results. He does seem more able than Bush and Kerry just listening to him talk. Because of affirmative action, his admission to Columbia and Harvard Law don't tell you as much as they otherwise would. How did he actually perform academically at these institutions? I know he was on Harvard Law review and was its first black president, but these days Harvard even has affirmative action slots for blacks on its law review (I don't know if it did when Obama attended the institution).
Comment:
anonymous said:
"It's actually uncanny how much Africa's failure resembles Europes circa AD 450-1500 or so.
A lot of the rhetoric about Africa's failure comes from a short historical perspective. I have no doubt that if you could travel back in time and give Dark Ages Europeans IQ tests they'd come out about the same or possibly even lower than Africans. Largely due IMHO to even worse nutrition and health care back then."
You are basically dismissing an explanatory factor without proving it, namely that there are no inherent average biological differences in capacity between different human populations. You present no evidence to disprove this. The rest of your argument makes sense and is certainly a plausible factor, but cultural and biological explanations are not mutually exclusive. They could both play a roll and possibly also reenforce one another.
Also, your characterization of Europe during the period 450-1500 is not completely accurate. Europe may have been more or less politically fragmented, corrupt, and tribal in its outlook, depending on the period, but you can hardly compare it to black African run nations of today (or any historical period) with respect to technological, military, artistic and literary development.
The europeans in the high middle ages knew of a wide array of labor saving technologies (e.g., cranes, pulleys, wind- and watermills, counterweight and torsion powered seige machinery, blast furnaces for steel production, sailing vessels capable of transatlantic voyages, basic geometry and writing) that were never achieved in subsaharan Africa (granted, not all of them were invented in Europe either, but they were often significantly improved). In fact, Europe from about 1100 onwards was more advanced technologically than the Classical civilizations of Greece and Rome (which it was forced to be by the lack of such large administative and teritorial entities for organizing labor).
Your analogy to the Dark Ages (or even better, to the preliterate tribes of N. and C. Europe in Classical times) would be a better example. But your analogy is still flawed. Dark Age and Ancient Europeans were still able able to craft objects and tools far more complex than SubSaharan Africans. Furthermore, during the Dark Ages there was never a complete disappearance of a literary culture.
Also, for what it's worth, Dark Age Europeans weren't that poorly nourished, as evidenced by an average adult height for males of 173-174cm. From about 1100 onwards nutritional circumstances worsened due to climate change (mini-ice age) and population growth, as well as a concentration of wealth among the elites and heights gradually declined until bottoming out at around 167cm in the 17th C and then began improving only in the 2nd half of the 19th C and only reached and exceeded Dark age levels in the mid-20th C.
"A lot of the rhetoric about Africa's failure comes from a short historical perspective."
Short historical perspective? Has anyone of African ancestry *ever* contributed anything to civilization, or added *any* ingenious idea to the world's intellectual reserve?
Unlike the Dark Ages, there are over a *billion* black and hispanic people living at a time when opportunities for learning are orders of magnitude greater than ever before.
Use Occam's razor, dude. Wishful thinking of this sort is downright dangerous.
It's actually uncanny how much Africa's failure resembles Europes circa AD 450-1500 or so.
The Middle Ages suffer another bum rap.
It is quite natural that the prosperous people in our time should know no history. If they did know it, they would know the highly unedifying history of how they became prosperous. It is quite natural, I say, that they should not know history: but why do they think they do? Here is a sentence taken at random from a book written by one of the most cultivated of our younger critics, very well written and most reliable on its own subject, which is a modern one. The writer says: "There was little social or political advance in the Middle Ages" until the Reformation and the Renaissance. Now I might just as well say that there was little advance in science and invention in the nineteenth century until the coming of William Morris: and then excuse myself by saying that I am not personally interested in spinning-jennies and jelly-fish - which is indeed the case. For that is all that the writer really means: he means he is not personally interested in heralds or mitred abbots. That is all right; but why, when writing about something that did not exist in the Middle Ages, should he dogmatise about a story that he has evidently never heard? Yet it might be made a very interesting story.
A little while before the Norman Conquest, countries such as our own were a dust of yet feeble feudalism, continually scattered in eddies by barbarians, barbarians who had never ridden a horse. There was hardly a brick or stone house in England. There were scarcely any roads except beaten paths: there was practically no law except local customs. Those were the Dark Ages out of which the Middle Ages came. Take the Middle Ages two hundred years after the Norman Conquest and nearly as long before the beginnings of the
Reformation. The great cities have arisen; the burghers are privileged and important; Labour has been organised into free and responsible Trade Unions; the Parliaments are powerful and disputing with the princes; slavery has almost disappeared; the great Universities are open and teaching with the scheme of education that Huxley so much admired; Republics as proud and civic as the Republics of the pagans stand like marble statues along the Mediterranean; and all over the North men have built such churches as men may never build again. And this, the essential part of which was done in one century rather than two, is what the critic calls "little social or political advance." There is scarcely an important modern institution under which he lives, from the college that trained him to the Parliament that rules him, that did not make its main advance in that time.
http://www.chesterton.org/gkc/historian/middleages.html
"It's actually uncanny how much Africa's failure resembles Europes circa AD 450-1500 or so."
This may may may have made sense if we didnt have a whole host of biological variables AND social variables.
Blacks have SMALLER BRAINS. Is this your fabled environment at work?
Haiti is an all black nation...and it is worse than Nagasaki 3 minutes after the bomb. You dont need high culture and a high pH.D ratio per capita for basics.
Stop deluding yourself.
The obvious (at least I thought so, although no one mentioned it) difference between Dark Ages and Middle Ages Europe and modern Africa is Europe then had relatively little information available to them, modern Africa has all of the resources of modern science and engineering and technology already worked out, all they need to do is apply it; and they obviously can't.
"Men capable of significantly contributing to civilization are going to have IQ's of at least 130. (That correlates closely to a 1250 on the SAT..."
Just out of curiosity: Anyone know the correlation between IQ and GMAT scores?
Irfan's assessment of the poor opportunities for Average-or Slightly Above Average But Not Genius-White Man fails to explain WHY the Indian software entrepreneur has no job for him. It is because the Indian software entrepreneur has race consciousness, along with high intelligence and capacity for work. He will hire fellow Indians even though they may be only equal to or even slightly worse than non-Indians, because that is normal human behavior. Indians are unencumbered by equalitarianism. In addition, while many Asian, Indian, and even a few African (yes, black African....) programmers have contributed to software bases, none of the fundamental concepts today's computer science is based on are the fundamental inventions of non-Europeans.
My father was a mechanical engineer for Curtiss-Wright, and worked on the Wankel rotary engine in the 60s. The concept was that of a German, Felix Wankel. But the only really successful commercial implementation of it was Toyo Kogyo in Japan, the famous Mazda car's originator. Mazda still offers a Wankel, some forty years later. TK engineers came through the Curtiss lab and studied carefully. In the very late 70s my father visited their plant in Hiroshima. They made it work, but by spending an amount of basic research that would have caused any Western company (and in fact did cause them all) to abandon the effort as cost-ineffective. The Japanese openly admitted that the basic concept would have never been turned into a running test engine by a Japanese. However, they pursued it because they felt that their willingness to go to the detail required gave them a competitive advantage over Euro-American companies in making a new powerplant possible. And it did. But what good did it do them? The rotary has never been a particularly clean or economical powerplant, and the R&D effort would have resulted in a far better car if applied elsewhere.
T.J. Collins:
"Irfan's assessment of the poor opportunities for Average-or Slightly Above Average But Not Genius-White Man ..."
You misunderstand me. There are plenty of opportunities for white men of average-to-above average intelligence. I have met or dealt with many of them who have become financially successful in various fields -- law enforcement (where some retire at 50 with six figure pensions), real estate, stock brokerage, etc. My point was that, from what I have observed, so called "white nationalists" tend to be economically unsuccessful, and tend to blame their lack of success on some nefarious non-whites.
Contrary to Svigor's claims, this isn't an ad hominem attack on him or other "white nationalists" -- merely an observation he is welcome to refute, if he likes.
White men also are capable of being first rate technology engineers, and many are. For example, the senior executives at
this well-funded start-up are mostly white. There is one Asian gentlemen in the group, but the white fellows don't seem to be afraid of him limiting their "breeding space" or any other such nonsense.
Does someone want to tell Zeray Alemseged that he has an inferior intellect and hasn't contributed anything to human civilization? Maybe Montgomery and mensarefugee will, the next time they're at the Max Planck Institute.
My point was that, from what I have observed, so called "white nationalists" tend to be economically unsuccessful, and tend to blame their lack of success on some nefarious non-whites.
Perhaps for not totally invalid reasons. Example: the H-1b program has been used to import tech workers, most of whom, "from what I have observed" (FWIHO), are non-white and young (e.g. new grads) and seem often to be used (FWIHO) as implements of age discrimination, substituting for or replacing older, higher salary people, most of whom (FWIHO) are white (those who wrote the "prevailing wage" provision do not seem to have anticipated this, and the 'no US worker available' part is a joke and impossible to enforce). FWIHO, the H-1bers cannot possibly have been hired for their superior skills or analytical problem solving ability.
It is because the Indian software entrepreneur has race consciousness, ... He will hire fellow Indians even though they may be only equal to or even slightly worse than non-Indians, ...
FWIHO, this is true; it is deflating (not to mention infuriating, because this is America, goddamnit) to walk into an interview for a promising position, see you will be talking to mostly Indians and Chinese, and know you can kiss that job good-bye. Pretty soon you find yourself "economically unsuccessful" -- age-discriminated out of a career before you've hit 45.
If you compared Europe in say AD 800, very thinly Christianized, a great deal of it Pagan or Christian in name only, beset by Viking raids and Muslim raids, with only a very few (priests) able to write ... Africa of today would come out better.
Mugabe and Mbeki and the like may be a thug's thug, but they can at least READ. Nearly all of Europe's kings could not. Only a few monks could. Existing infrastructure inherited from the Romans were cannibalized for building material. Not a single construction project of any significance was undertaken during the period say 500-900 or so. No roads, no new cities. Cities got continually SMALLER. Life was confined to villages, with a feudal camp (not a castle) .
Moreover pre-Roman Europe had constructed Megaliths but little else. Neither the Gauls nor the Celts nor the Germanic tribes had much of their own. It was all borrowed from the Romans as far as technology, organized warcraft, and much else.
How then did a Europe that before Rome was a backwater not much different than Africa (except for sword-making) and for a goodly long time after might have been worse? How did Europe progress out of the Dark Ages to found Universities of Paris, Milan, or build great Cathedrals?
You could argue as Hanson does that the Roman culture preserved by Monks gave the blueprint for the reconstruction of Europe when conditions were settled much later. Or that natural selection led to only the most dangerous but co-operative (tribal war leaders who could raise enough men to be successful) passing on those traits: mixed aggression and co-operation. Plus of course tool-making. Perhaps it was the needs of Europe's metal workers for weapons that made the difference (requiring more co-operation over longer periods than African weapons).
But the main point is that Obama seems to look at this (Europe rich, Africa poor) and not wonder about WHY Europe went from possibly worse than Africa is now in the Dark Ages to what they are today?
Montgomery: Jazz, Rock and Roll, R&B are all African-American. Elijah McCoy, inventor of lubrication system for Steam Engines. Dr. Charles Drew, inventor of the blood bank, blood plasma. Duke Ellington and Scott Joplin composed works of genius equal or better than Mozart.
Jazz alone is a stupendous advancement, with works and performances of staggering genius. Haiti? There is a lot of ruin in a nation. China has had periods where they've looked like Haiti for hundreds of years (and have the starvation cuisine to prove it). Systems and tribalism and natural selection can all work together. And IQ might be a lot more elastic upwards and downwards due to natural selection than people think. I certainly don't see much correlation between a Europe that could not read or reason in 600 AD with Crusaders able to mount a successful siege of Jerusalem in the 1100s. How did that happen?
If Obama were a more thoughtful man, he would turn to this issue IMHO and again, wonder why? But while he is skilled as a writer, that doesn't make him possessed of sound judgement. Ike vs. the Dem Senator (Kefauver?) was an interesting take. The Dem was erudite and had considerable Senatorial and Academic Experience. Ike was fairly dull, but managed to corral Patton and Monty for Overlord and not panic during the Bulge, or get involved in a useless attempt to capture Berlin and get GIs killed for no good reason. Ike was the better call because he had the better specific skill set, temperament, and experience during the Cold War when job #1 was not blow up the world or roll over for the Russians at the same time.
Obama seems like that Dem Senator vs. Ike.
[The comment on software and Indian/Chinese strangleholds and age discrimination is spot on. I've seen it a zillion times.]
In addition, while many Asian, Indian, and even a few African (yes, black African....) programmers have contributed to software bases, none of the fundamental concepts today's computer science is based on are the fundamental inventions of non-Europeans.
We could quibble over what "fundamental concepts" means, but there are significant contributions from both Asians and, to a lesser extent, blacks.
For instance, the inventor of "Lingo", the forerunner of all the Flash stuff you find all over the internet, is John Henry Thompson:
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_Lingo_programming.htm
And the most hyped programming language of recent years, Ruby, was invented by the Japanese Yukihiro Matsumoto:
http://www.procata.com/blog/archives/2006/05/10/programming-language-trends-via-google/
irfan is using an argument that you don't see much - that natives object to immigration because they are blaming their own failures on immigrants.
it's laugh out loud wrong of course, because nobody objects to large scale immigration for that reason. but it's one of the only arguments left available to defenders of massive immigration, because all the other ones they were using 5 years ago to bash people over the head are simply so wrong and not true that you can't be taken seriously anymore if you use them.
"jobs americans won't do"
"shortage of skilled labor"
"nation of immigrants"
defenders of massive immigration don't use those anymore because even the average guy knows they're a bunch of crap. those lines from 2002 don't work in 2007.
"Ah, so it wasn't an ad hom, just an irrelevancy? Thanks for clearing that up."
It was neither an ad hominem attack nor an irrelevancy. Only a sophist would present such a false dichotomy. It was an observed correlation, which suggests an element of causation.
"What's the "logic" here? That y does not fear x, therefore x is "nonsense"?"
The point of the example was two-fold: first to demonstrate that there is room for intelligent whites to succeed in Silicon Valley; and second, that intelligent, economically successful whites tend not to share the racial fears of Asians that your ilk does.
"You couldn't argue your way out of a wet paper bag."
Really, Svigor: if you were as good at argument as you imagine yourself to be, there would be a good living in it for you. Shall I simply file this in the "ad hom" can?
"Economically succesful whites tend not to share the racial fears of Asians as your ilk does." Hmmm,have you been reading Steves theory of intra-racial status competition,whereby white people display their love of other races and multicultarlism,etc,to show that they are "superior" morally and all other ways to the lower scruffier whites who have mean nasty resentments against the little yellow/black/brown darlings?? Its SO true! Recall when blue-collar guys were first being laid-off en masse as the global economy changed America. What did the upper class/white collar types say? "Augh,those lazy bums! Always demanding too much!Goddamn unions! Greedy SOB's...fuck them! Too bad..." etc,etc. White people remain terrified and /or repulsed by the idea of 'sticking together' racially,as if some Giant Avenging Angel will come down and smash 'em to bits. Maybe thats why so many seem to support Barry,as if to say,"SEE?!? Im GOOD!!" :0
Joshrandall,
I doubt every white who works with and is friendly with Asians does so solely out of the status competition you speak of. One could postulate the reverse and say that by expressing your antipathy toward Asian Americans, you, are competing in a status competition here, with fellow travelers such as Jody, Jupiter, Svigor, etc.
Don't you ever find this sort of discussion pointless though? I admit I find this site a compelling diversion when I am online, but most of my time online is spent doing things I find far more constructive. For example, checking on my investments or scouting out new ones. Or using the small voice I am given as an investor to vote my views; for example, I just voted my Citigroup shares online after receiving the proxy materials.
I find that being an active investor causes me to see many of the topics on here in a different light. I dislike seeing a lady or gentlemen with negligible business experience being put on a board of directors out of the American concept of charity for representatives of so-called "under-represented" races, and so I vote against them. I don't hate them though, and I hope individuals of all races patronize the companies whose shares I hold. It's business: let those who can contribute do so, and let all of us who are prudent investors share in their success.
Whether or not Germany and Japan posed a threat to the U.S. mainland, there certainly was something in World War II for America and the American servicemen who survived the war.
World War II lifted America out of the Great Depression and set the stage for a long, great economic boom. The smarter American soldiers who returned had the benefit of GI Bill-funded educations, and the rest had high-paying manufacturing jobs when America benefited from most other countries' economies having been destroyed. World War II gave birth to the American middle class and made America a superpower.
World War II lifted America out of the Great Depression and set the stage for a long, great economic boom. The smarter American soldiers who returned had the benefit of GI Bill-funded educations, and the rest had high-paying manufacturing jobs when America benefited from most other countries' economies having been destroyed. World War II gave birth to the American middle class and made America a superpower.
There is no way ww2 GI's could have forseen the post-war economic boom or the GI bill. Before sometime in 1944 there was no way they could have forseen the destruction or destitution(eg. Britain) of the other industrial powers. You make it sound like they entered the military with starry visions of "plunder" before their eyes.
BTW, there was a widespread popular fear that the Depression would return after the war.
irfan is always hilariously off topic. he makes me crack up.
i can't wait for his next installment of "responding to things you never said" and "masturbating over asian immigrants".
Saying WW2 lifted a country out of depression is about par with saying hoodlums burning down stores is a good thing because it stimulates the construction industry.
AKA... dumb.
It was nice to see the urbane, intelligent irfan get the race rat Svigor in a tizzy. Keep running around in your cage, Svigor, until you drop. Or better yet, leave the cage and discover how to be a human being.
"Obviously, the real reason black Americans find black-ruled Africa to be disillusioning is because blacks are doing a bad job of ruling it."
Actually there are many who aren't disullisioned. As a Brit I have been to Africa but was not disillusioned by many of the advances in the countries I have been too. Obviously the issue you have is with Obama, as you have written profusely about him, so this would be his world view. The fact remains that many remain encouraged by countries which are looking outside of the usually pitiful commentaries on sub Saharan Africa.
Irfan said: "My point was that, from what I have observed, so called "white nationalists" tend to be economically unsuccessful, and tend to blame their lack of success on some nefarious non-whites."
You obviously haven't had your ear to the ground. Where exactly have you been making your observations?
See if you can understand the following: I'd rather be a white street-sweeper in an all-white city than a white tycoon in an all-black city.
There's just something about sharing your living space with people who are racially like yourself that trancscends mere dollars and cents.
In the modern west it's increasingly difficult to enjoy such simple pleasures, so people have to distract themselves with other pursuits, such as worrying endlessly about the outcome of their investments, or "global warming" or any other personal or global cause they engage in to alleviate the sense of estrangement they are feeling whose true causes they cannot allow themselves to finger (because it's supposedly "immoral" to admit you prefer your own kind over other kinds).
Multiracialism is surely one of the most costly and unwise societal arrangements ever conceived.
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