In the New Republic, John McWhorter has a column up, including vague swipes at me, resenting the fact that most evidence of a Stone Age great leap forward in culture comes from Europe. Because (follow me closely here), we know that everybody is the same, the fact that most of the prehistorical evidence for sudden progress comes from Stone Age Europe is "socially unsavory" (i.e., racist).
Personally, I don't care much about paleoanthropology, but this is just another example of how political correctness is anti-science. Here are hardworking scientists carefully digging up stuff, but some Broadway musical expert implies that they are racist for finding it and publicizing it.
Personally, I don't care much about paleoanthropology, but this is just another example of how political correctness is anti-science. Here are hardworking scientists carefully digging up stuff, but some Broadway musical expert implies that they are racist for finding it and publicizing it.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Posts
112 comments:
What should make John feel better is that the modern races likely did not appear until 12,000 years ago. Another thing that should make him feel better is that most of the major inventions that drove European society (magnetic compass, printing press, gun powder, etc.) were invented in China a good 500-1000 years before being independently invented in Europe.
Really, there is no reason for John to feel bad about this recent findings of human biodiversity.
kurt9 said:
Another thing that should make him feel better is that most of the major inventions that drove European society (magnetic compass, printing press, gun powder, etc.) were invented in China a good 500-1000 years before being independently invented in Europe.
Do you have a cite if gunpowder being invented in China 500-1000 years before it was independently invented in the West, or are you just making it up?
In my understanding, the dispute is whether or not GP was invented in China a couple of hundred years before it appeared in the West and was transmitted to the West, and whether or not the Chinese independently developed cannon.
I am embarassed for this man.
the fact that most of the prehistorical evidence for sudden progress comes from Stone Age Europe is "socially unsavory"Yes, well, you see, if archeology wasn't dominated by racist, patriarchal, white European males, they (led by Marija Gimbutas) would have already found large-breasted "Mother Goddess" figurines and bison-horn "girls' toys" (figure c) in 35K BCE Africa too, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Because if there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that prehistoric African girls needed to ... you know ... now and then, too.
Ever since Obama won and New Republic recruited him, McWhorter, the so-called 'black conservative', has become just another black guy yammering about racial injustice.
I would argue McWhorter is correct in describing archaeology as racist IF we re-define the meaning of racism(something I would recommend). If racism = race + ism, then it would imply that races exist and that racial differences could exist. We know that blacks, for example, are stronger than other races. We know that white IQ is generally higher than black IQ. There's also the matter of temperament; since whites are less 'wild' than blacks, they are more likely to sit down and work at certain tasks with greater attention. Consider the fact that many prominent black thinkers are actually have more white and/or Jewish genes--McWhorter, Patricia Williams, Mike Dyson, Cornel West, Henry Gates, etc.
By the way, if McWhorter finds it 'unsavory' that primitive Europeans were more inventive and creative than Africans, is he also offended by the fact that most professional athletes in America are black? Isn't that 'racist'? In a nation that 'celebrates diversity', where is the Vietnamese full-back in football or a Mexican-American center in basketball? Has there even been a Hindu-American heavy weight champion in boxing?
And, look at the Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, economics, and medicine. Lots and lots of Ashkenazi Jews but not a single black guy. Isn't McWhorter offended by that? As he writes for the New Republic, a liberal Jewish-American and Zionist magazine, maybe he should ask his bosses, 'hey, how come you Jews don't allow or acknowledge blacks in intellectual fields that you people dominate?' Indeed, I would wager that liberal Jews are keen to promote half-black or one-drop blacks like Obama and McWhorter to deflect the notion of superior Jewish intelligence. Jews know that they are smarter but are afraid of its implications. In a nation where all people are supposed to be equal and have an equal chance, many gentiles are going to be bitter and resentful if they realize that Jews have a natural advantage in intelligence, which means that Jews will disproportionately come to dominate much of the powerful institutions in this country. So, by over-praising people like Obama and McWhorter for their 'staggering intellect' and 'brilliance', the liberal Jews are trying to deflect our attention from their own advantage and power.
"I am embarassed for this man."
Don't be. He (and others like him) have no shame.
"Cool idea indeed, especially since we don't know what caused the mutation in question."
After years of Evolution being taught as fact rather than theory, no found transitional species (missing links), and our origins explained by a bolt of lightening striking water (by Thor, or is that too Euro centric) and creating Amino Acids, all of a sudden proof is required?
So if you dislike an idea, the preponderance of evidence is not enough, but if you do it is sufficient...
Anon --
Gunpowder was known to have existed around 900-1000 AD in China, mostly for various fireworks. Hand-cannon (hideously dangerous bamboo! tubes with re-inforcing strips of leather) date back to 1100.
What is interesting is that Europe adopted METAL cannons first, around the 1290's, using bell-making technology. The Chinese were expert metalworkers but perhaps lacked the ability to cast reliably large metal pieces. Around the early 1300's the first crude metal hand-cannons (literally, that) made their appearance.
What is striking is that the Islamic rulers imported cannon makers from the West, and did not develop their own arms industry that kept pace or improved on arms-making. Islamic rulers never imported Chinese weaponry. Which is itself significant.
It seems like an interesting question, whether there actually was some kind of great leap forward when Cro-Magnons conquered, and likely interbred with, Neanderthals in Europe ca 40,000 years ago, or whether it's just a matter of Cro Magnons arriving in Europe with their pre-existing suite of artworks.
Either seems possible; contra McWhorter it's certainly possible for beneficial intelligence alleles that possibly first evolved in Europe to have spread globally over the past 40,000 years.
Anyway, Steve's basic point about Political Correctness being anti-science is certainly true. More and more of the human sciences are swirling into the PC vortex, like a black hole gobbling up knowledge as it grows.
testing99, re gunpowder and metal cannon etc, you and I are almost on the same page.
To me, gunpowder is a substance used in guns, not an incendiary or smoke producing substance. You seem to understand the timelines so I imagine you will understand my objections.
In addition, knowledge of saltpeter in China preceeded its discovery in the West by a few centuries, and good quality steel was being made there as well.
Apart from that, the 500-1000 years seems like the sort of hyperbole that kurt9 is fond of.
"We know that blacks, for example, are stronger than other races."
It's more accurate to say that West Africans are FASTER than any other people. That's why they dominate sprinting events so completely. But STRENGTH events are dominated by people of northern European/Slavic ancestry. Check out any powerlifting or strongman competition: nary a black man to be found--RACISM!!!
This is just another notch against your idea that individuals in a diverse society can learn to put the civitas ahead of their racial loyalties. A society is doomed that cannot ALIGN racial and civic duties, and in that equation there is room for only one race: the race that built the society in the first place.
Jim Crow
Apartheid
White Australia policy
Rhodesian land partition
In all of these there were errors and misdeeds, but they were sensible alternatives to what we have had since.
If racism = race + ism, then it would imply that races exist and that racial differences could exist.
I'm on board with that.
We know that blacks, for example, are stronger than other races.
I don't think that we do "know" that. We know that blacks are faster runners, for instance. But in every single category of upper body strength, whites dominate.
McWhorter - "it is assumed that all human beings are equal in basic mental endowment"
Wow. Assumed by who?
I won't defend the column, but America's Greatest Artform isn't McWhorter's most impressive area of expertise nor the one he's most known for-- it's just his most charming one. What's your beef with the man's being a Broadway musical enthusiast?
You know what is really racist? Math contests.
Here is the list of past winners of LA County's annual high school math contest:
http://www.lacitycollege.edu/academic/departments/mathdept/pastwinners.html
19 of the top 20 scorers in 2009 have NE Asian names.
The single one with a white name google image confirms is indeed white, and has the good fortune to be in a very competitive asian-heavy South Pasadena school district.
Genghis Khan was killed in an outhouse, by rocket arrows shot by the Dukes Bo and Li in 1037.
Don't you people read Joseph Neeham?
I'd rather have a quiver of rocket arrows than any firearm before Sam Colt.
Steve, could it be that most evidence of sudden progress came from Europe because that is where most of the excavating has been done?
We know that the New World was populated much later than the old one, so that would rule out the Americas. Africa seems too politically and socially unstable to have many mass excavations. Not to mention the less favorable terrain. I can't comment on Asia or the Middle East, but for the latter...again political instability?
Archaeology is not my area of expertise.
"... some Broadway musical expert..." Steve, does that mean this guy McWhorter is gay? (I don't know anything about him, only from what I've read on your blog). I mean is it the same as being a big fan of Bette Midler, liking vacuuming, and liking to go clothes shopping (if you are a man)?
I mean, I like archeology quite a bit, but not those other things. Should I be worried?
Signed,
Not Gay that I know of, in Seattle
Aside from McWhorter's PC agenda-laden prattle, there does seem to be a legitimate argument that a "Cultural Big Bang", if it happened, could have just as easily originated in Africa -- and need not be, anyway, the consequence of some genetic mutation that occurred when Africans came into contact with native Europeans.
There is a good deal of evidence, for instance, that this "Great Leap Forward" could have been brought about initially by the increased consumption of fatty acids from seafood ca 60,000 years ago along the coast of South Africa. As these fish-eating groups migrated north, exposure to new environments, and the subsequent cognitive demands thereby placed on them, would soon select for these newly acquired neurological strengths, thus hardwiring them into the gene-pool via the Baldwin Effect. (See here for a more thorough explanation of the argument I've just paraphrased.) Eventually some of these groups made it to Europe, with, as an earlier commenter suggested, their pre-existing suite of artwork in tow.
The question is then, why are all these artifacts coming from Europe and not Africa? There's a few reasons. Most notably, people aren't looking in Africa as often as they're looking in Europe. And artifacts first carved out on Africa's exposed plains are more likely to be destroyed than those crafted in the relatively sheltered habitats of peer groups in Europe.
McWhorter may be making a peripheral argument here, but to say that the "Great Leap Forward" definitely started in Europe is itself rather presumptuous given how little is known on the subject.
McWhorter should go to sub-Saharan Africa and try to find evidence of what they invented there. That would be an appropriate use of his time and skills.
Actually, Mr. McW's article on the perils of racist archeological research is extremly encouraging. The amount of human resources and energy required by PC Police to keep dogma alive across the whole of society is obviously growing by leaps and bounds. King Obama will have to 'double that grain of wheat' at some point. And then again..
Marc, great call on Darwin.
testing99 said...
"What is striking is that the Islamic rulers imported cannon makers from the West, and did not develop their own arms industry that kept pace or improved on arms-making. Islamic rulers never imported Chinese weaponry. Which is itself significant."
And those Islamic theocracies are still hurtling toward the fifteenth century. Watch out world, someday someone somewhere in an Islamic nation will invent something useful.
I happened to link to his Jan 5 coumn in which he writes:
"What worries Saletan, he says, is that openly racist bloggers like Steve Sailer are using the NAEP results as evidence that black people really are less intelligent than others."
I think he needs to look up the meaning of the words 'racist' and 'slander.'
How does TNR have any credibility at all after the Beauchamp debacle? I can't figure out why it's still in circulation.
Ever since Obama won and New Republic recruited him, McWhorter, the so-called 'black conservative', has become just another black guy yammering about racial injustice.Agreed. There may be racial injustice, but as McWhorter is now working himself into a tizzy figuring out, the injustice is likely due to the group mean differences in IQ accumulated through the past 80,000 years of evolution. Perhaps he should direct his pen towards that cosmic injustice.
The White Oppressor Class is just expected to tolerate the likes of whiners like McWhorter with the utmost forbearance, I suppose.
Marc re: transitional species.
Stephen Jay Gould (yeah, I know, but hear me out) wrote in one of his books that the search for missing links was generally fruitless (I'm paraphrasing). The reason being that an archaeological missing link between species A and species C would probably end up being characterized as belonging to one or other, A or C. Rather than being seen as transitional form B.
Ironically most modern Europeans are probably only partly descended from the people who lived in Europe 40,000 years ago, if at all. The speakers of Indo-European came through and probably wiped out most of the original inhabitants not more than 10,000 years ago. For a White American to take pride in (or a Black American to feel belittled by) the achievements of someone living in Germany 40,000 years ago is completely nonsensical.
McWhorter
This week in Nature we learn of the discovery of a 35,000 year old erotic figurine in Germany, 5000 years older than previously known such work by early humans.
We are to take from this that evidence for an artistic mindset - i.e. modern, abstract thought - mysteriously "exploded" into the human endowment at this time. "The Big Bang," some call it, an apparent Great Leap Forward in toolmaking, burial rituals and art among European peoples at this time.
I watched the clip at Nature which he linked to, and it mentions none of this stuff in the second paragraph. So I'm not sure what set him off on this rant.
Yes, no doubt that these things are found in Europe because Bavaria, say, has attracted so much more attention from Paleontologists than the Great Rift Valley.
Its no different for the cult of equality, except, Christians generally won't shout at you and try to destroy your reputation if/when they disagree.
In that vein, another biggie is that the Equality Cultists aren't subject to the separation of Church and State that they imagine to be law.
To quote His Blackness:
And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I‘d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I‘d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine.
(Obama's impressions from his first European Grand Tour)
Yes, well, you see, if archeology wasn't dominated by racist, patriarchal, white European males
And then waiting in the wings is the Diamond script, where the Stone Age revolution in Europe proves GG&S correct.
McWhorters black? Ha ha i thought it was one of those McWhorter dudes from the Guiness book of Records.
"We know that blacks, for example, are stronger than other races."
It's more accurate to say that West Africans are FASTER than any other people. That's why they dominate sprinting events so completely. But STRENGTH events are dominated by people of northern European/Slavic ancestry. Check out any powerlifting or strongman competition: nary a black man to be found--RACISM!!!
Then there's what folks call power (AKA "explosive muscle power"), the confluence of speed and strength, which blacks seem to dominate, though not to the degree they dominate speed (I suppose - whites have knocked blacks off a power pedestal (boxing) in this decade, but nobody ever seems to knock them off the sprinting pedestal).
it is assumed that all human beings are equal in basic mental endowment
Is that a genuine quote? WTF?
"But STRENGTH events are dominated by people of northern European/Slavic ancestry. Check out any powerlifting or strongman competition: nary a black man to be found"That's because there is better money elsewhere for strong black men, particularly American blacks: they might be playing pro football or basketball, or boxing, or in professional bodybuilding.
"McWhorter should go to sub-Saharan Africa and try to find evidence of what they invented there."You should have read his article, because he mentioned some evidence found in sub-Saharan Africa.
McWhorter may be wrong in this essay, but neither Steve nor his commenters so far have addressed McWhorter's main point here. It's not that lots of prehistoric artifacts have been found in Europe, but that less fuss has been made about (what he considers to be) similarly impressive pre-historic artifacts in Africa and elsewhere. Are those non-European artifacts similarly impressive? I don't know. But I do know we'd have a more informative comment thread if more of you had read McWhorter's piece.
- Fred
Watch out everyone:
Don't take this 'Andrea' Freiboden' seriously...
This is a Zionist agent provacateur (in drag) who is absolutely making the rounds on all the 'right-wing' sites.
Also, 'she' has posted under the name 'Andrei'!
Steve Sailer:
I can imagine, with the "batch processing" that goes on in regards to comment approval, that time stamping each comment might prove irksome.
However, do you know if it would be possible to number the comments? Frequently, when there is a comment that invites further commentary, said aforementioned comment is submitted by an "anonymous" which makes further commentary somewhat scattershot.
I was amused by McWhorter's leap from the assumption that "all racial groups" being equal in basic mental endowment to "all human beings."
I often bump into this subject everywhere these days.
Centuries have not erased or settled issues of human achievement. Even with every single people now living very much the same as everyone else.
Mr sailor is right. there is a envy or disappointment in mankind about who has prevailed in mankind.
There is no reason to be profoundly offended.
All human achievements from the law of Motivation plus information equals result.
No race, sex, climate, genes but just what the Solomon taught in the bible. Its there and seek it out.
Yes there is a score with winners and losers (or less winners) but its inoffensive.
Achievement has not come from ancient or historic Europe but rather only Post-reformation Protestant peoples/nations have the patent on the resilts of the modern world. Especially in the english -speaking nations. I insist because of the greater motivation of the Puritan/Evangelical element which was more numerous and constantly so. l
Not a English world but a Puritan English/Scottish world.
America, the top right now, is case in point.
Later immigrant peoples to the Anglo-American world simply rose up under the influence.
The modern world is from simple religious motivation to better as God commanded. perhaps some extra blessing too.
By the way. Scoring identities within a single boundary is silly. only the segregation of identities is a actual test. There is room for science here.
Here is one you probably won't see often in the controlled media -
Anglo Whites vs. those 'wonderful' Jews:
Inductivist reaffirms utility of GSS Wordsum -
"Comparing a paper by Helmuth Nyborg (via Bruce G. Charlton) with a post earlier this year by Inductivist reaffirms that impressive level of precision.
"Nyborg finds the same surprising thing Inductivist found--Episcopalians have slightly higher average IQs than Jews do*.
"Of the eight denominations the two comprised estimates for, the correlation between aggregate totals is an impressive .87 (p=.005). Both estimates are for whites only."
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2008/12/inductivist-reaffirms-utility-of-gss.html
And let us not least forget, Israel has an average IQ OF 94!
You know, you know he is a linguistics professor too (or was before quitting for the full-time punditry life), not just a "Broadway musical expert."
Somewhat more accurately, McWhorter is claiming that places other than europe had equivalent artistic achievements as early or earlier:
It has actually been long established that the earliest evidence of artistically conscious humans has been found in, as we might expect, Africa, given that it's where our species emerged. Specifically, South Africa, in Blombos Cave. There were beads made from shells, and geometric engravings on ochre - i.e. slam-dunk "modern" tokens, unimaginable of even the smartest dog, parrot, chimp, or even Australopithecine "Lucy." And this stuff dates back to 75,000 to 80,000 years ago. No bosomy figurines, sure - but if what got dug up in Germany was jewelry and etchings instead, we can sure there would be the same claims that here was the birth of advanced thought.
Humans "banged" long before the European Cro-Magnon era.
But "Episcopalian" is more self-selecting than "Jew", isn't it? Poor unsuccessful whites tend to leave the Episcopalian church over time, successful whites from other religions (especially Catholic) migrate to Episcopalians. Not surprising to me that Episcopalians score high on IQ.
And, according to Cochran, only Ashkenazy Jews have selected for inteligence. There's nothing special about Sephardic Jews, and they bring Israel's average down.
My impression is that the Indo-Europeans didn't supplant the native Europeans but absorbed them. The fact that Germanic languages have non-IE elements suggests this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_substrate_hypothesis
Read the original article. His basic point is sound--if there was a huge flowering of ability in Europe that led to us developing language and music and art, then there needs to also be an explanation for how that flowering propogated back to the rest of the world, because humans everywhere have those things.
We aparently don't have all the same intellectual gifts, or personalities, or disease susceptibilities. But there's no racial group that doesn't have language, art, music, use of complicated tools, numbers, symbols, religion, stories, etc. (There have been some weird stories about obscure tribes in the Amazon that don't have those things, but that's nothing like the whole racial group.)
Now, I haven't read the article McWhorter was quoting from, so maybe he's taking something very different from that article than what's really being claimed. But reading McWhorter's article, it looks like Steve seriously missed the point of what he said.
It's my impression that Asian archaeology isn't well-developed, or at least, you don't read of Asian stone-age findings in as much detail as you do European ones. Does anyone know, is it truly not explored or, is it just not communicated to the West?
The speakers of Indo-European came through and probably wiped out most of the original inhabitants not more than 10,000 years ago.
The mitochondrial DNA trees of most Europeans (ca. 80%) converge about over 20 thousand years ago, in or very near Europe. Only Haplogroup T, 10% of Europeans and perhaps the descendants of Mesopotamian settlers who brought agriculture, has been in Europe less than 12,000 years.
And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I‘d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I‘d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. - Obama's impressions from his first European Grand Tour.
The irony is that Obama, being a male with a white mother who was raised in the USA by his white grandparents, is actually both biologically and culturally more white than black. He inherited about 51% of his DNA from his mother, and yet he rejects Europe as not being "his." He misjudges his own "book" by his own black-skinned cover.
Obama, whose European ancestry is mostly British, is probably more closely related to me (90%+ British) and most British Americans than to most American blacks who, unlike his father, came from West Africa.
I think he needs to look up the meaning of the words 'racist' and 'slander.'
The word racist is now so broadly defined that it is morally neutral. You may laugh, but if McWhorter were sued and feared losing that's precisely the argument he would make.
"And, according to Cochran, only Ashkenazy Jews have selected for inteligence."
Right, the 'Jews' with the most European genes and the least Middle Eastern, 'Hebrew' ones.
Read the original article. His basic point is sound...
Indeed. Except for his assertion that "all human beings are equal in basic mental endowment" - unless he's implying that some groups of humans also have "premium" and "ultimate" and "professional" endowments, like spiffed up versions of Windows - I don't see the controversy. The genetic data does not show that Europeans 40k years ago left to bless the world with their gene pool.
Poor unsuccessful whites tend to leave the Episcopalian church over time, successful whites from other religions (especially Catholic) migrate to Episcopalians. Not surprising to me that Episcopalians score high on IQ.
Couldn't you say, more or less, that's how Jews got to be so smart over the years - by turning into an honor society and driving out the less successful? By choosing a smarter religion you're choosing a smarter cohort for your offspring to interbreed with.
"There's nothing special about Sephardic Jews, and they bring Israel's average down."
This is a topic I would like posters to discuss more.
The Sephardim is quite successful. (I think 4 Nobel prizes in the sciences) Other Oriental Jews (Persians, etc.) also show a lot of talent.
Considering the non-Ashkenazim just number 2 million, they do extremely well.
Doesn't the estimate of low 90s sound like BS?
I'd like to hear the full scrutiny of this blog on this issue.
I understand that archeology must be distressing for a Black person, as African archeology is nonexistent. But also Black history and literature was nonexistent till it was invented. Nowadays you have university courses, hundreds of academic books, learned professors teaching about Black literary achievements. Mr McWhorter is proposing a feasible idea, of establishing Black Archeology Departments in universities. The subject matter will come later. If that will make him happy, why not?
"The word racist is now so broadly defined that it is morally neutral. You may laugh, but if McWhorter were sued and feared losing that's precisely the argument he would make."
I once read a black blogger who would call any poster racist if they disagreed with him, if he perceived they were "white" and not "down with the struggle", or for no reason at all (just for fun?). Then he said it wasn't a moral judgment, that he wasn't trying to insult you or shut you up, he was just trying to inform you of your racist attitudes. Then he came out and "admitted" that he was racist, because the white male power structure had made even him subconsciously think blacks are inferior. It's funny to see people like this do mental gymnastics to convince you that they don't just hurl insults carelessly around, because those insults are not insults at all!
It would be like if I dropped the n-bomb on a black colleague, then feigned surprise when he got mad. After all, I'm just noting and identifying his biological race. If he takes offense to it, it must be because he personally holds unfavorable attitudes toward black people!
It's funny how the standards of racial language are applied. "Negro" and "Colored" are not acceptable in polite discourse, unless you're referring to the United Negro College Fund or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. African-American is the numbnuts PC term, but "black" seems to be acceptable as well.
The situation reminds me of an episode of Tom Goes to the Mayor, where Tom is uncomfortable saying or even hearing the word "dam". Of course when he continually refers to it as a "darn", nobody knows what he's talking about.
--We know that blacks, for example, are stronger than other races.
I don't think that we do "know" that. We know that blacks are faster runners, for instance. But in every single category of upper body strength, whites dominate.--
This is such nonsense. Blacks are physically far superior to whites. Many blacks simply don't train for power sports, that is the only reason they do not dominate.
If you look at sports like powerlifting you will find a lot of men who are naturally strong, but who are not naturally athletic. These guys might train to bench 500-700 pounds - levels far higher than most NFL players like Bruce Smith. But there is a reason that Bruce Smith didn't bench 600 pounds: he was so unbelievably athletic that it would prove nonsensical to focus on powerlifting instead of football. The white guy benching 600, cannot claim the same.
Moreover, the world has yet to see what the Samoans can offer, and my experience is that the Turks are exceptional in this area.
That's because there is better money elsewhere for strong black men, particularly American blacks: they might be playing pro football or basketball, or boxing, or in professional bodybuilding.
Nonsense. Basketball players would make exceptionally bad weightlifters. And the traits that make for good all round athletes, such as speed, agility and hand-to-eye coordination, are not required in weightlifing. So it's absurd to suggest that the existing pool of strong black men from certain sports could simply shift to other athletic fields if only there was sufficient finiancial incentive. Abilities at this level are highly specialized.
My impression is that the Indo-Europeans didn't supplant the native Europeans but absorbed them. The fact that Germanic languages have non-IE elements suggests this.Probably this is correct, though the evidence on Indo-European culture and migration is extremely unclear, and has unfortunately attracted a large number of crackpots; most linguists in the field barely bother with it at all.
We are however finding that some of the historical migrations were probably a lot smaller than was recently thought; it used to be absolutely assumed, e.g., that the Anglo-Saxon invasions were large scale and included many whole family nuclei, but genetic results have suggested what was really more likely all the time, that they were a relatively scanty number of conquistadors. Nonetheless, they managed to establish their language over very nearly the whole territory of southern Britain in quite short order.
The Germanic substrate hypothesis is interesting, though substrate hypotheses are generally out of fashion these days. There are a lot of reconstructed Indo-European roots with outcomes only in one language group, not only Germanic, but also Slavic, Italic, Greek, etc., so there is a lot of difficulty getting at what is going on. There are many words from Greek generally thought to be pre-Greek/old-European/Aegean/autochtonous or whatever your theory calls it. On the other hand, there is interesting evidence on Semitic influences in Celtic (quick, someone call for the smelling salts!), so maybe these possible Germanic substrate items were picked up through trade (as with the huge Near Eastern influence on Ancient Greek, by the way) or along the migration routes, and not from pre-existing populations in the settlement area.
Wife-stealing, not genocide, seems to be the general manner of primitive people, so I think it is hugely improbable that modern European-descended peoples have no connection whatsoever to Europeans of 40,000 years ago, however tenuous it may be.
By the way, as to "None of the above" from, err, above, it is true that we must be clear that language is a biological function, not a technology like writing or tools or music. The science is quite clear on this point, though it is doubtless true that a thriving culture will make a language more useful and versatile over time.
That's because there is better money elsewhere for strong black men, particularly American blacks: they might be playing pro football or basketball, or boxing, or in professional bodybuilding.
But the same holds true for whites. Anyone of sufficient appropriate talent would gravitate towards those more profitable sports. So why are blacks so underrepresented in powerlifting & strongman circles. The only truly great black powerlifter I know of is Lamar Gant (his unusually long arms made him a natural born deadlifter).
The genetic data does not show that Europeans 40k years ago left to bless the world with their gene pool.As a matter of fact, there's clear evidence of back-migration from Eurasia to Africa (in the form of R1b Y-chromosomes in Cameroon, for example), and there was no doubt gene flow between the ancestors of West Eurasians and East Eurasians more recently than 40k years ago. Even Australian Aborigines experienced outside gene flow (from India) relatively recently. Not saying this is how it happened, but if these hypothetical genes were strongly favored by selection, it wouldn't take much for them to spread.
Peter:
"Ironically most modern Europeans are probably only partly descended from the people who lived in Europe 40,000 years ago, if at all. The speakers of Indo-European came through and probably wiped out most of the original inhabitants not more than 10,000 years ago. For a White American to take pride in (or a Black American to feel belittled by) the achievements of someone living in Germany 40,000 years ago is completely nonsensical."
All the DNA evidence shows that Eropeans are mostly descended from the original Cro Magnons of 30,000 years ago and that eastern (likely Indo-European speaking) introgression into Europe was pretty limited, from everything I've read on the subject.
In regards to strength sports and recruitment, exercising with weights and powerlifting were once, i under stand, rather popular in prisons although i can't think of any way this would have any err demographic biases
If you look at sports like powerlifting you will find a lot of men who are naturally strong, but who are not naturally athletic.
I think there may be a problem here with the word 'athletic'.
Kind of seems to me like 'athletic' is being used merely as a substitute for 'black'.
The burning question is... if we whites are so awesome, how did we let them kick us out to the cold, barren land which produced our skin color?
Can anyone explain just what exactly is "conservative" about McWhorter?
"The only truly great black powerlifter I know of is Lamar Gant (his unusually long arms made him a natural born deadlifter)."
This guy?
http://mortalkombat.wikia.com/wiki/Jax
Great career.
"Archaeology is not my area of expertise."
It ain't WcWhorter's either...
"Mr McWhorter is proposing a feasible idea, of establishing Black Archeology Departments in universities. The subject matter will come later. If that will make him happy, why not?"
Little things like intellectual integrity get in the way. (For most people)
Pissed Off Chinaman asked: could it be that most evidence of sudden progress came from Europe because that is where most of the excavating has been done?On the contrary, there is a lot of archaeological/paleontological excavation in Africa, esp. East Africa (think of the good ole Rift Valley).
In fact, this is a major contributing factor to the fact that the 'Out of Africa' theory prevails nowadays, i.e. 'cause that's where all the paleontologists go to do their research.
Once upon a time (pre-WWII) it was believed that modern humans probably originated somewhere on the Eurasian continent. But then there was the Maoist revolution in China so all the Western researchers were kicked outta there. And nobody seems to bother much with the fossil deposits in northern India/Pakistan. So, voila! We're all 'Out of Africa'.
It pains me to continue to see all this misinformation about China, gunpowder and Joseph Needham. Much of the nonsense written about China and its contributions to technology are directly traceable to Needham. Before people trust his opinions they should learn about his politics and his character. Briefly, he hated the US and the West, he was a communist, he was a liar and a traitor.
Don't trust me - google him.
China is a great civilization and the chinese are a great people. They do not need exageration and propaganda. I'm Irish. We need exageration and propaganda.
At one of the very first computer faires I met a fellow Irishman who told me that the Irish invented the computer. He explained that New Grange was the first computer because it had a celestial alignment.
Who was responsible for "inventing" gunpowder? Well it all depends on what you mean by invent. The Irish falacy tells us that the Chinese "invented" gunpowder because they were among the first to experiment with salt peter mixtures. In fact they mixed salt peter with honey.
The Irish falacy is to attribute an invention to the first ones who worked in an area. But in fact the normal meaning of the word invention is taht the inventor is the last person to add a feature not the first. For example, we say that Edison invented the light bulb. That means he assembled a lot of bits and pieces that constituted a light bulb. We do not say that some Venetian glass makers invented the light bulb because they created glass blowing. Nor do we credit Franklin with the light bulb because he had worked with electricity.
Electricity was known to cause filaments to glow before Edison. So how can we say that Edison invented anything? The answer is that before Edison there were no electric light bulbs and after Edison they were ubiguitous.
Similarly there was a "Gunpowder Revolution". Most books on military have a chapter on this revolution. Before the revolution and after things were very, very different on the battle field an infortifications. This revolution is very well documented. There is no real dispute in the historical record although no single individual inventor can be identified.
Gunpowder was invented in France in the early 15th century.
Before that time nitrate explosives were trivial additions to the battlefield. There had been guns at Agincourt but it was the longbow that was decisive. The French invented effective gunpowder with the addition of corning and drove the English ending the 100 Years War.
Gunpowder before the 15th century was made up in the field by whomever. Gunpowder became the first manufactured chemical product. Typically it was made in factories under a royal monopoly. Gunpowder was not just a simple mixture - the simple mixture had been around for centuries as a novelty that scared horses. It was
the manufactured product that was built to specifications in a mill that caused the revolution.
In 1493 Charles VIII of France invaded Italy with the new guns and gunpowder. He quickly knocked down every high walled castle he came across. These castles had stood for centuries.You can trace the progress of the Gunpowder Revolution in fortification architecture. The high walls ceased being built starting in 1493. This revolution proceeded from West to East.
Indeed much of the Ming Great Wall was built as late as the seventeenth century. It is a high wall of a type that had been made obsolete in the West a century earlier.
Gunpowder came very late to China. Members of Lord McCartney's expedition at the end of the 18th century remarked at their surprise that the Chinese who were credited with inventing gunpowder had no gunpowder weapons. They used crossbows. The defenselessness of the Chinese emboldened the English to launch the subsequent Opium Wars.
On college and professional football teams, the fastest players are - by a wide margin - disproportionately black. The strongest players are far more proportionately represented, despite the fact that it is just as much in Bruce Smith's interest to develop upper and lower body strength as it is in Phil Hansen's (for those of you who remember Buffalo in the 90s).
Okay: but if this "Big Bang" happened in Europe, then presumably this dramatic mutation did not happen to people beyond Europe. And yet, it is assumed that all human beings are equal in basic mental endowment.... - John McWhorter
I had assumed when I first read that, that he was going to debunk this assumption, but I suppose he just repeats it to himself while his coffee is percolating. (Switch to French press, buddy!)
Anyway, it's not nearly as funny as:
White people often commit crimes that are legal to commit. There are many sorts of behaviors that are of a criminal nature that have not been outlawed. So I think that racial oriented crime statistics are bogus. Each race is equally as criminal. - Patrick
Mr McWhorter is proposing a feasible idea, of establishing Black Archeology Departments in universities. The subject matter will come later. If that will make him happy, why not? - J
You are always so blase and positive, J. It's why I like reading your stuff. I would have no trouble with breaking up archaeology departments by continent, but breaking them up by race seems odd. And of course it's pure multicult-double-standard if there is no White Archaeology Department to balance it. A BAD would probably be swarmed by Afrocentrists who want Cleopatra to be black - who want Congoid who want peoples to be The Original Inhabitants of every square inch of Africa.
Call it "the Southwestern Division of the Old World Archaeology Department" and the Students of Color Union will lose interest.
"That's because there is better money elsewhere for strong black men, particularly American blacks: they might be playing pro football or basketball, or boxing, or in professional bodybuilding.
I find that excuse pretty thin.
No Africans could benefit from weight training? They've all got jobs in the NFL?
Yet, the NFL still leaves enough sprinters over for blacks to dominate sprinting...
And we all know there's soooo much money in sprinting, for everyone involved.
But wait, PLENTY of blacks in bodybuilding. Must be tons of money in it then.
Back when I watched teevee I'd see strong man contests. Do they even show bodybuilding on teevee anymore?
Even to this semi-numerate it seems that the athleticism/speed bell curves for the races overlap, meaning a substantial number of blacks who didn't get the genes for athleticism or speed, but did get the supposed genes for strength. Where's their dream job?
Btw, have you ever taken a look at some of the crackers you're talking about? I just don't see black men that size at anywhere near the same rate.
Does the difference between O line and D line in football (bet there are plenty of blacks who'd like those O line jobs whites are sitting on) catch your attention at all?
Fast-twitch vs. slow-twitch is a trade-off.
albertosaurus, China most certainly did have gunpowder weapons by the Song Dynasty, far before they appeared in the West. Primitive, but they were there. This isn't Needham, this is the generally accepted view of most every historian. However, they were not widely used because there was a saying that it took just as much courage to use gunpowder weapons as it took to face them.
Another example of technological regression in Asia was Japan. At one point, Nobunaga had unified Japan in the 1500s by importing guns from Portugal. They even improved on them, and had probably mastered the use of firearms better than any country in the world. Hundreds of years later in the 1800s? Guns were almost nowhere to be found. They were banned by the government. This is similar to what happened in China. It was an entirely different mindset in Asia, where the priority was to preserve order (and additionally, in China's case, defend themselves against barbarians on the frontier, that would be the Great Wall) rather than avoid conquest from powerful nation states, as was the case in Europe. By the time they figured out that those nation states would come for them eventually too, it was too late for China. Japan was lucky, and only received a wake up call from Commodore Perry's ships. They quickly began to modernize soon after.
Also, don't be so hard on yourself my Gaelic brother!
Cossack in a Kilt: However, do you know if it would be possible to number the comments? Frequently, when there is a comment that invites further commentary, said aforementioned comment is submitted by an "anonymous" which makes further commentary somewhat scattershot.
What's even worse is that the moron* who wrote the Blogger/Blogspot software package gave it a logical LIFO [last in first out, as opposed to FIFO] comment-approval stack, from which logical ordering the approved comments are then dumped into a flat file structure in HTML.
The result is that as we follow the temporal progression of a thread at iSteve, we have the sense of seeing the structure of the HTML change randomly before our very eyes.
In particular, if you come to iSteve and notice that new comments to a thread have been approved by Komment Kontrol, and if you open the thread looking to see whether one of your comments made it past Komment Kontrol and into the HTML file itself, then your natural inclination is to immediately head to the end of the file, at which point you will give up in frustration if you don't discover your comment attached there - when, in fact, your comment may very well have been added to the file, but, because of the LIFO approval stack, your comment was added in contradiction to what we perceive should have been the temporal ordering & temporal evolution of the thread - so that instead of finding itself at the end of the thread, your newly-approved comment may very well get inserted way up high somewhere in the middle of the thread.
*A moron who really ought to be taken out in woods and shot.
God in heaven, how I hate bad programming.
Blode0322, quoting somebody or other: White people often commit crimes that are legal to commit. There are many sorts of behaviors that are of a criminal nature that have not been outlawed.
Actually, there's some truth to that sentiment.
Smart but wicked people can alter the letter of the law [and its interpretation and application] to suit their nefarious ends.
Stupid but wicked people cannot [anything involving the "law" being beyond the capabilities of the stupid] - they have to rely on the ACLU and the SPLC and ACORN and their ilk to fight that battle for them.
As an example: Tell me why exactly is Timothy Geithner not in jail?
"Can anyone explain just what exactly is "conservative" about McWhorter?"
He used to write columns explaining that black Americans nowadays are held back mostly by their own bad attitudes and were using white racism as an excuse for failure. He seems to be losing interest in that angle.
It is simple. Europe was a cold place where high IQ and innovativeness was very important for survival. This is true of Eastern Eurasia too (Mongoloids). When these populations migrated south they brought their high IQ traits with them to places such as the Middle-East, South Asia, South East Asia etc... However Sub Saharan Africa and Australia were more or less out of reach of these migrants and hence these advantageous traits did not reach here much. This explains the hierarchy of intelligence, Europeans and East Asians on top, followed by the 'brown' masses of the Middle-East, South Asia, South East Asia etc... followed by the 'black' masses of Africa and Australia-Pacific.
Check the map
http://www.vdare.com/images/IQ%20of%20Nations.gif
Humans did not interbreed with Neanderthals. Why do people keep bringing this up?
"... some Broadway musical expert..." Steve, does that mean this guy McWhorter is gay? Funny you should ask that, although I know you're probably being facetious. However, knowing nothing about this "Broadway musical" stuff, after seeing McWhorter a couple of times and observing his mannerisms a few years back, I concluded he was a homosexual, and mentally put him in that camp. That is, until he married a couple of years ago.
By the way, could it be that a black like McWhorter, who marries a Jew, is especially driven to prove that the group he comes from possesses just as much potential for smartness as the group he married into? Do you think he works at convincing the in-laws of this?
I am embarassed for this man.
What a beautiful and damning statement. That is the sum and total of both gentile white glory and downfall.
Testing99, the earliest reference to metal hand cannons in Europe (aside from those in the hands of Muslims) dates to a few decades prior to the 30 years war. The oldest existing metal cannon in Europe dates to around 1380. The oldest existing metal cannon in the world is a Chinese piece dating from 1282. The literary references date even earlier. The bamboo arrow/rockets date even further back into the 10th century.
Albertosaurus, you are free to dispute some of Needham's theories, but the archaelogical evidence is not in dispute. If a Chinese history text written in 1345 states that as of 1067, the Song Dynasty was putting into place export restrictions on gunpowder and later outlawed private manufacture in favor of a state monopoly. Then this is likely true. Unless you mean to contest that Needham invented or fabricated the entire source material.
Similarly, just because McCartney did not personally see any firearms does not mean they didn't exist. If his testimony is countered by physical evidence, say a Qianlong period artwork displaying a battle between Chinese and Muslim forces being fought principally with muskets and artillery or earlier testimony of Jesuit missionaries noting a large artillery train accompanying an army into Korea then it is likely that he was mistaken, or more precisely, was limited in what he saw.
p.s. The Great Wall was not actually designed as a primary defense. Mostly it was used as a convenient point to tax trade heading north and south of the wall. It's defensive capabilities lay in it's role as an early warning system in that it could delay the steppe nomads while warning everyone South of the wall that a raid was eminent. An army garrison would then be marshaled and directed to meet the raiders. City Walls built during the Ming era were built to serve as a defense and could withstand cannon fire. Being as they were built with angled facades and nearly 16 meters thick (over 50 feet for the yanks).
Anon, how do we know we didn't interbreed with Neanderthals? Cochran thinks we probably did.
MacSweeney says:
albertosaurus, China most certainly did have gunpowder weapons by the Song Dynasty, far before they appeared in the West. Primitive, but they were there. This isn't Needham, this is the generally accepted view of most every historian. However, they were not widely used because there was a saying that it took just as much courage to use gunpowder weapons as it took to face them.
Ahhh, so the Chinese discovered everything, including nukular weapons, they just didn't bother to use them because they wanted to preserve order.
I am pretty sure we will one day find a text that attests that the Song Dynasty had discovered nukular fission.
Anonymous says:
Albertosaurus, you are free to dispute some of Needham's theories, but the archaelogical evidence is not in dispute. If a Chinese history text written in 1345 states that as of 1067, the Song Dynasty was putting into place export restrictions on gunpowder and later outlawed private manufacture in favor of a state monopoly.
It's funny how some people in the West are happy to discredit Christian History texts that claim Jesus rose from the dead and brought the dead back to life and other things, but are quite ready to believe self-serving Chinese so-called history texts.
Of course no Chinese author would ever dare put words in the mouth of older authors or try to pass their work off as that of earlier authors to give it more credence.
Eh, so there's proof humans never interbred with Neandertals? Where is it?
"It is simple. Europe was a cold place where high IQ and innovativeness was very important for survival. This is true of Eastern Eurasia too (Mongoloids)."
I think population growth & agriculture were also important. See 'The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution'. From part 2 of 5 part interview series:
"2B: You and Henry assert that populations that adopted agriculture were much influenced by the development, and in non-insignificant, deep-in-the-biochemistry sorts of ways. What would your favorite examples of those adaptations be?
GC: Metabolic/diet changes like lactose tolerance, many changes in genes involved with defense against infectious disease, many changes in genes that affect hearing and smell, changes in neurotransmitters and related genes that most likely influence personality, changes in genes involved with the regulation of nerve connections and brain growth."
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/01/5-part_interview_with_greg_coc.php
Much of the nonsense written about China and its contributions to technology are directly traceable to Needham. Before people trust his opinions they should learn about his politics and his character. Briefly, he hated the US and the West, he was a communist, he was a liar and a traitor.Seconded.
Hatred of the US and the West - or at least the desire to destroy or displace the root population and distort what remains of their culture - plays a larger role in scholarship than is generally known.
There are a number of major intellectual figures like Needham who cause crippling difficulties for Westerners who wish to examine their own history or reflect on their own place in human and historical ecology.
Jared Diamond will be familiar to readers on this blog.
The myth of the "Andalusian Golden Age", ceaselessly promoted as a moment in Islamic culture indicative of its superiority to the West, has as its epicenter Bernard Lewis, a man of the most profound mendacity. Ottoman and Andalusian culture are everywhere propounded as models of tolerance, when they are actually low points in world history of backwardness and cruelty. However, they are judged by certain academic factions as superior on the sole criteron of treatment of religious minorities.
The truth about Islamic culture, that its extremely minor achievements are the sole result of Persian reflections on ancient Greek texts, is little publicized. As has been noted elsewhere, the military conquest of Persia has given Islam a false reputation for civilization, to which it is not entitled.
Islamic architecture, such as it is, consists of barely altered Byzantine churches and other religious buildings, often actually designed and built by Byzantines - such as the Blue Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Following the loss of cultural transmission among actual Greco-Celtic Byzantines, no architecture of note emerged from Islam.
As to Islam's characteristic cultural and political forms, the less said the better. One does not want to gild the lilly of Islamic barbarism.
Other names like Martin Bernal, Jacques Derrida, Levi Strauss, could be brought up, but I trust the point is made. There are important commonalities between Bernal, Boas, Derrida, Diamond, Freud, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Levi Strauss, Bernard Lewis, and Needham. The roots of their anti Western rage take nourishment from a single source.
It is also important to note that these thinkers do not come to prominence by the intellectual substance of their works, but by tireless networks of dissemination which use crypsis to hide their essentially ethnic nature and their anti-majoritarian intent. Funding and publicity are never in short supply.
Dealing with people deeply informed by the harmful nonsense which these thinkers have propunded is a true ordeal of civility. In my opinion, a culture should spring up in opposition to them, subjecting them to a truly rigorous critique which they so thoroughly deserve.
"Funny you should ask that, although I know you're probably being facetious. However, knowing nothing about this "Broadway musical" stuff, after seeing McWhorter a couple of times and observing his mannerisms a few years back, I concluded he was a homosexual, and mentally put him in that camp. That is, until he married a couple of years ago."
A man or a woman?
OK, let's not get back into that one, haha. It would be kind of funny if he were gay, Victoria, as, yes, I never even heard of, much less saw the guy. I was just wondering what the deal was about the "Broadway Musical" part of iSteve's comment.
Also, indeed I was being facetious, and I appreciate your teaching me how to spell that, as it is a toughy. Really.
In fact, this is a major contributing factor to the fact that the 'Out of Africa' theory prevails nowadays, i.e. 'cause that's where all the paleontologists go to do their research.
That may have been a viable critique 20 years ago, but we now have genetic data which at least appears to validate the "Out of Africa" hypothesis.
Humans did not interbreed with Neanderthals. Why do people keep bringing this up?
All we know is that they did not pass down their y-chromosomal or mitochondrial DNA. It's still possible they interbred, but of further proof we have little to none.
By the "hate" meme anyone who is or defends Jews, homosexuals, muslims, or immigrants is a hero, while anyone who is or defends Whites, heterosexuals, Christians, or nativists is a hater. Likewise attacking Jews, homosexuals, muslims, or immigrants makes you a hater, while attacking Whites, heterosexuals, Christians, or nativists makes you a hero.
That disparity cannot long survive. People can be slow, but they catch on eventually.
The burning question is... if we whites are so awesome, how did we let them kick us out to the cold, barren land which produced our skin color?
Outside of the ice ages I don't see what's ever been particularly undesireable about Europe: mild winters, mild summers, no deserts to speak of. Just looking at the climate it's probably one of the most desireable places in the world.
"As an example: Tell me why exactly is Timothy Geithner not in jail?"
Answer: President Emanuel.
Ah yes, because there is no contextual difference between a text stating that a man claiming to to be the son of god was capable of walking on water, multiplying fish, and raising the dead and one stating that in year so and so, government bureaucrats do what government bureaucrats do.
No difference at all.
Moron.
albertosaurus: let me add a data point. In the 1450's, Hungarians were making the most powerful cannons in the world. They sold most of them to the Turkish Sultan who used them to destroy the previously impregnnable walls of Constantinople and bring about the final fall of the Roman Empire.
Eh, so there's proof humans never interbred with Neandertals? Where is it?We know that the junk portions of mitochondrial DNA and y-chromosomal DNA do not vary enough among the human population for any of them to have come from Neanderthals.
They managed to extract DNA from the well-preserved remains of a Neanderthal woman and the mitochondrial DNA was far different from any that survives among humans today.
Neanderthals and Homo sap may have occasionally "got it on," but either those branches died out, their progeny were infertile, like mules, or else their only genetic contributions are on chromosomes where lineage cannot be traced. I happen to believe in (and hope for proof of) the latter, but the evidence is not good.
"Genetic science says otherwise...Ashkenazi Jews are easily and fully distinguishable from indigenous Europeans.."
--
Oy vey -- we are a tribe -
...no, wait, we are a religion -
no wait, we are a race.
colin laney said
"They are actually low points in world history of backwardness and cruelty. However, they are judged by certain academic factions as superior on the sole criterion of treatment of religious minorities."
But whether it's good for the Jews IS the sole criterion by which to judge all culture, politics, science, art, life, everything. We have a Judeo-Christian (note the billing) country, Laney. Get with the program already.
Ahhh, so the Chinese discovered everything, including nukular weapons, they just didn't bother to use them because they wanted to preserve order.
I am pretty sure we will one day find a text that attests that the Song Dynasty had discovered nukular fission.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
It wouldn't be terribly surprising if Episcopalians have slightly higher IQs than other whites if you consider that Episcopalians have traditionally been from a higher social and economic class than other religious groups. Economics and environment have an effect on boosting IQ scores.
But whether it's good for the Jews IS the sole criterion by which to judge all culture, politics, science, art, life, everything. - David
Do you think Muslim immigration is good for Jews? Or do you think Jews are against it? I ask because of the hot debate at Kvetcher that's happening on this topic.
Other names like Martin Bernal, Jacques Derrida, Levi Strauss, could be brought up, but I trust the point is made. There are important commonalities between Bernal, Boas, Derrida, Diamond, Freud, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Levi Strauss, Bernard Lewis, and Needham. The roots of their anti Western rage take nourishment from a single source.Fascinating post, but this point was the most fascinating of all to me, since until this moment I never put 2 and 2 together in my mind. Jacques Derrida was THE big man on campus when I was at Yale. "Deconstructionism" was the reigning ideology. I was actually forced to change majors in order to escape from further indoctrination in deconstructionism.
God in heaven, how I hate bad programming.Then you must not spend much time working with computers, or you just stay mad.
I don't know what portion of the coding population I would trust to take out my garbage, but I don't think it's a majority.
It wouldn't be terribly surprising if Episcopalians have slightly higher IQs than other whites if you consider that Episcopalians have traditionally been from a higher social and economic class than other religious groups. Economics and environment have an effect on boosting IQ scores.
Conversely, it wouldn't be surprising if the smart folks got rich and had smart kids.
Svigor: Then you must not spend much time working with computers, or you just stay mad.
The older I get, the more I just can't tolerate bugs in software.
Especially when I can imagine exactly what went wrong in the code, and I can visualize precisely the half-assed lackadaisical "What me worry?" attitude which went into screwing the thing all to Hades.
PS: Dysgenic fertility is only going to exacerbate this looming nightmare.
In another ten or twenty years, it's not clear to me that there will be enough IQ left on the planet to design [correctly] and implement [correctly] and sell & service [correctly] hardly any complex systems.
And 30 or 40 years from now, we'll have legacy systems which no one will be competent to service [much less re-design and re-implement].
"Deconstructionism" was the reigning ideology. I was actually forced to change majors in order to escape from further indoctrination in deconstructionism.
Ditto. If I'd read another fucking thing by Derrida or Foucault, I think I would have died of nausea at its blatant stupidity. Foucault especially struck me as just a gay masochist pretentiously justifying his sad little fetish and trying to turn it into a paranoid, self-hating worldview. Didn't surprise me in the least when I learned that he was in fact a masochistic homosexual who hated modern Western civilization and sympathized with militant Islamic fundies.
Fascinating post, but this point was the most fascinating of all to me, since until this moment I never put 2 and 2 together in my mind.
You know, there's a lot of that going around.
Derrida is like Kevin MacDonald's pepper moth. A clearer connection between his actual, base ethnic motives and his theoretical superstructure couldn't be plainer, mainly because Derrida himself spells them out:
The idea behind deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue... The idea is to disarm the bombs... of identity that nation-states build to defend themselves against the stranger, against Jews and Arabs and immigrants..."
Plain enough?
So: is it a conscious cabal, or an evolutionary group strategy based in self deception? I'm not willing to say, but I offer Derrida up as exhibit A.
MacSweeney says:
However, they were not widely used because there was a saying that it took just as much courage to use gunpowder weapons as it took to face them.
Ahhh, so the Chinese are just a bunch of scaredy cats, and white people are just so courageous that they can deal with gunpowder weapons.
Not to mention that Chinese military types could never overcome the actions of bureaucrats when they recognized a good weapon, or could never recognize a good weapon while white Europeans could.
I understand now.
Seriously, what is up with you and your straw man arguments everywhere? If you'll go back and read my post VERY closely, I said that the Chinese were the first ones to invent gunpowder weapons. I never said that they were the ones to develop firearms to be effective enough to replace swords and crossbows. And the line about it taking as much courage to use gunpowder weapons as it took to face them was a commentary on how primitive they were, not anything actually relating to courage.
The older I get, the more I just can't tolerate bugs in software.
Yeah, don't get me started for God's sake. I wish I had a dollar for every time I noticed an effect from a Win upgrade and thought, "well goddamn, that should've been there before the $&@*ing thing left beta." Or a quarter for every time I've looked for a feature that should be there but isn't. Windows - want Media Player 9000? Check. Want a way to print the contents of a directory? Consult a third party, please.
"explains the hierarchy of intelligence, Europeans and East Asians on top, followed by the 'brown' masses of the Middle-East, South Asia, South East Asia etc... followed by the 'black' masses of Africa and Australia-Pacific."
there is that little hiccup in this triple-decker-cafe-creme diagram. The very dark people of southern India. Don't they produce some remarkable mathematicians? Mathematics has an ancient history there. I am familiar with personnel at NASA, and the Indian physicists are top notch. I know indians deny that caste has anything to do with such things, but I do think that this continent has some interesting things going on in its genetic makeup.
Ahhh, so the Chinese are just a bunch of scaredy cats, and white people are just so courageous that they can deal with gunpowder weapons.
Pathetic attempt at snark, dufus. If you are serious, that is.
His whole point is that the Europeans reinvented them so that they were [relatively] safe.
His point is the Europeans, for whatever reasons, were more motivated to make firearms usable, so that they actually killed the enemy and not the user.
I find the whole thing kind of depressing. That so much effort went into weaponry. Yet every war--at least in modern history-- has caused a dramatic leap in technological advancement.
I find the whole thing kind of depressing. That so much effort went into weaponry. Yet every war--at least in modern history-- has caused a dramatic leap in technological advancement.Some Western wars, maybe. But that's because westerners invent stuff all the time. Nothing much comes out the Congo War, I doubt much came out of Vietnam. Nuclear technology was on the way before WWII. Planes advanced a hell of a lot in WWI, but they had only been around like 10 years when it started, not to mention the US govt pooling patents. Same with radio and radar in the 2nd war.
Medical advances in war come from military and political activities creating exceptionally unethical experiments. Prosthetic limbs have improved without the Iraq was if a) The R&D was funded b) The goverment crippled similar numbers.
Speaking of bugs in software, this new thread at Slashdot describes how I have wasted weeks [? months? YEARS?!?] of my life in just the last fifteen years since the mid-1990s:
Ridiculous Software Bug Workarounds?
it.slashdot.org
"there is that little hiccup in this triple-decker-cafe-creme diagram. The very dark people of southern India. Don't they produce some remarkable mathematicians? Mathematics has an ancient history there. I am familiar with personnel at NASA, and the Indian physicists are top notch. I know indians deny that caste has anything to do with such things, but I do think that this continent has some interesting things going on in its genetic makeup."
Most of these South Indians tend to be upper caste Brahmins and Nayars whose origin atleast from the male side is in North India (All Brahmins have only 4 gotras ). Besides the approx 3% Brahmin population of South India faced an even higher evolutionary pressure towards higher IQ than the Ashkenazi. But my point is not about skin colour as such. It was about accessibility. My comments were based on my observation that the lowest IQs are found in places such as Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia-Papua New Guinea, places which were hard to reach by northern Eurasians during pre-historical times. Comparatively places such as South Asia, the Middle East and South East Asia were more accessible to Northern Eurasians and have absorbed immigrants/ invaders from Northern Eurasia. Besides the populations from these regions tend to exhibit physical features similar to either North Western Eurasians (Europeans) in places such as the Middle East and South Asia or to North East Eurasians (North East Asians) in places such as Polynesia and South East Asia. Many South Indians may look dark but certain other physical features that one would find in the colder parts of Eurasia (Body hair, straight hair, Caucasian nose) and are very different from black Africans.
there is that little hiccup in this triple-decker-cafe-creme diagram. The very dark people of southern India.They're dark-skinned Caucasoids, with some Asian thrown in, last I heard.
Post a Comment