November 11, 2010

Not by me

I'd like to thank everybody who sent me this late-breaking news from the New York Times:

52 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could you please write an article about this:
Sweden is going crazy. The government paid for this song quote: "hey blond girl, take a black man between your legs and mix it up." At 1:04 Minute you can see a blond girl singing about the pride and beauty of Sweden while having sex with a black man. Watch it and show it to everyone you know.

This is genocide of whites!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u-mihtgTm0&feature=player_embedded

Nanonymous said...

And yet the most that Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard can bring himself to say on the subject is "[racial differences] have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces."

nooffensebut said...

Here is the actual report.

Anonymous said...

Not once did the New York Times mention stereotype threat. What's next: an "Oh, shit!" moment about America's mass immigration policy for the past 40 years?

Anonymous said...

From the article, "“Hispanic kids and African-American kids this year had a lower dropout rate than white kids,” Mr. Alonso said."

You know it is spin when a simple artifact of the data is the last word of an article. Obviously only the lowest performing whites on average are attending Baltimore public schools, so sure from this tiny select population, there is a higher white dropout rate. It would be interesting to test dropouts to see how low functioning they actually are. My guess is that once whites see the writing on the wall, they are more likely to get out since no one is begging them to stay. Also dropout rate calculation methods can be quite dubious.

spacehabitats said...

"...In order to address those [racial differences before kindergarten], we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

Oh, you mean like conversations about I.Q., race and genetics?

Carol said...

'the group hopes that including so much of what it calls “jaw-dropping data” in one place will spark a new sense of national urgency.'

Here we go - open your wallets! (again)

Peggy Apple said...

You need to unpack your invisible knapsack of White privilege and take a good look in the mirror son.

Just because you didn't write the article doesn't mean that you aren't responsible for the contents.

Anonymous said...

Wow, exactly as you predicted, the Establishment is recreating, step-by-step, what those Aussies have been calling their "stolen generations" policy.

When "mentoring" African-American parents fails, the next step will be "residential schools."

You are da man.

Of course, this train may yet be derailed by backlash, either from the African-American parents or from society in general. Residential schools would cost so much money and do so much collateral damage (like rape and abuse of students by staff) that politically-correct do-gooders might never be able to get them out of the "pilot" phase.

Polymath said...

I posted this story on my blog the other day as an example of what you have called "Occam's butterknife", pointing out that the verbal and math percentile differences given corresponded to an IQ difference of 13 to 15 points and were therefore EXACTLY what was to be expected.

adfasdfasf said...

But but but it's culture, not race.

Well, at least liberals have come halfway. They used to be pure materialists blaming it all on economics or social/political oppression. To say one culture was less functional than another was considered intolerant and bigoted.
Now, they are admitting culture is a factor... but they'll still ready to tackle race.

Tick tock Tick tock(let me play Tim Wise), science is making it more clear by the day that there are racial differences.

tommy said...

No, Steve, it is merely a perception that blacks are less proficient than The Other.

From whence this perception? It's a product of your white, male, Christian, gentile (or quasi-gentile/semi-gentile), American, Western, capitalist, non-developmentally-challenged privilege[s] that you would infer such by quoting the headline. You're privileging this racial narrative at the expense of my other possibilities. I question your color-blindedness and your masculinit(ies). It is my perception that your adherence to postmodernism and contemporary thinking in the humanities is suspect.

Haven't you learned anything yet from your last post and the illustrious Ms. Boyd?

Anonymous said...

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

================

is this really progress?

Anonymous said...

I wonder if The Times publish these stories with a 'wink.' Only sociological factors are even considered for the gap, no mention of biological causes. Yet, any sentient reader will deduce that or at least CONSIDER it....

agree???????

fbj said...

I think this would be solved if the blacks to be hired as mentors worked harder and got engineering degrees instead! Funny, the history of slavery only prohibits black performance in math/science, not in mentoring and teaching.

Anonymous said...

A little on Gabby (my new nickname for our intrepid reporter):

http://gawker.com/253667/trip-gabriel-about-getting-his-kids-out-of-the-house

P.s. Just getting meta on myself, but it really seems we are getting into an era where people can automatically and conveniently do sort of opo research to find out writer's backgrounds and clues to biases and the like. Not sure what this will mean in the end for how people write or how they experience writing.

Anonymous said...

Well, at least they were honest about it. Although to certainly no one in the HBD world was this news "far lower than expected". We have expected this data for quite some time, and have had more of this data for even longer. Steve, your ideas have been spreading quite a bit lately in the MSM. Even the fact that law student Stephanie Grace, a young female, who was vilified in the blogosphere for her Watson-like error of pointing out the truth, means your ideas are slowly working their way through the muck,and it gives me hope for the next generation.

Anonymous said...

Here's a couple more items on Trip. I haven't even sunk to making fun of his name. Oh...damn...yes, I did.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/business/media/12asktheeditors.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.observer.com/2010/media/stuart-emmrich-replaces-trip-gabriel-times-style-editor

The reader questions about the Style section are kind of interesting.

Both pieces, linked here, have a sort of snappiness to them, that I would call "smart", with a bit of a spin on that word. A connotation of breeziness and well style over substance. I would get
Tom Wolfe to make fun if it, if it weren't that he is guilty of the same...

Dennis Dale said...

Yes, but did you know the cause is racism and the answer is better schools?

Hail said...

Excerpt from NY Times, Nov-11th-2060:

__________________________________
Drive Towards Closing Racial Achievement Gap Continues
...We asked the director of the Department For Racial Integration, Tim Wise III, about why this white-racist-inspired gap continues. Said he: "Yes, whites are only 35% of Americans now. But remember our 35th Amendment, 'Resolved: The White Race is a race of devils.' We can overcome this obstacle. But it will take time to make up for centuries of white racial existence. ...
__________________________________

Anonymous said...

Steve: I'll bet you didn't come up with one of the article's suggested solutions for this problem: Spend more money on education. That's something no one ever thought of before! And did you notice the hopeful news from Baltimore, presented at the end of the article: That public school system has reduced the dropout rate for Black and Hispanic males. Unfortunately, no information was presented on how close to grade level those new graduates were performing when they got their high school diplomas. I wonder why.

Anonymous said...

Steve: I'll bet you didn't come up with one of the article's suggested solutions for this problem: Spend more money on education. That's something no one ever thought of before! And did you notice the hopeful news from Baltimore, presented at the end of the article: That public school system has reduced the dropout rate for Black and Hispanic males. Unfortunately, no information was presented on how close to grade level those new graduates were performing when they got their high school diplomas. I wonder why.

Anonymous said...

Personally, I would've never seen this coming. The best minds are baffled.

Anonymous said...

yay!!!!! Another one for "the team"!

Take that, blacks!

sg said...

As part of Obama’s “Race to the Top” program Illinois has changed the requirements for the teacher certification test. This change was instituted to receive federal cash.

The old standard was that a test taker had to get 35% of the questions correct. The new standard is 75% correct. Anyone with common sense could have anticipated the outcome. The percentage of those who pass the test dropped dramatically. It is now well below 50%. I think only 15-20% of students who took the test from my university passed it.

Here is the test. Please glance at a few items. I think the readers of this blog will be struck at how easy it is.

http://www.icts.nesinc.com/PDFs/IL_PracticeTest.pdf

So much of what this blog is about and some of the recent focus is exemplified in this example.

1. The test is clearly an IQ test.

2. The old standard is so low as to render the results meaningless. One has to get a score 10% above chance and I think someone can take the test 5 times before they are cut off. I haven’t run the stats, but I would guess that in five tries that random error would put you over the 35% correct threshold in at least one attempt.

3. Administrators and politicians from up on high make declarations and believe reality will follow.

4. I was struck by the response of the university faculty to the change. They supported it whole-heartedly and displayed a tendency to blame the high school teachers for the failure of the students.

5. If the new standard holds there will be a number of students with education degrees who will not be able to teach. My thought was that there was no way that this could stand, that pressure will be too great to lower the standard. However, I was told that those up on high are committed to the new standard.

6. There appears to be a growing schism between teachers, and their unions, and those interested in black and Hispanic achievement. The momentum is against the unions, but I still can’t see how standards for teachers can be raised to such a degree. Someone has to do the teaching. Can someone explain to me how we could increase teaching standards to the degree that the majority of people who would be our future teachers are now ineligible? Are there that many childless nice white ladies out there?

Anonymous said...

"Here we go - open your wallets! (again)"

For this reason and a whole host of others, I want the next GOP candidate for the Presidency to advocate getting rid of the Dept. of Education.

There is not one thing it has ever done to improve the education of a single child in America.

Anonymous said...

"But but but it's culture, not race."

You know, at this point, I'm of a mind that I'd settle for the HBD deniers arguing "it's culture" *as long as* they'll admit that it's the NAMS culture that's at fault, as long as they'll say, "And their culture, their own product, is a piece of sh_t."

Anonymous said...

Not once did the New York Times mention stereotype threat.

And what happened to fear of acting white?

Mel Torme said...

"Can someone explain to me how we could increase teaching standards to the degree that the majority of people who would be our future teachers are now ineligible? Are there that many childless white ladies out there?"

Easy. Take out the requirement for a Masters in Education. Then, some non-stupid college graduates can teach in high school who were blocked before, as they didn't want to spend 10 Grand and waste a year of their life sitting in classes with the morons who are education majors (not to mention opportunity costs over that one year).

But, there's a lot of people in on this scam, so it would be hard to nix this requirement. Maybe Gov. Christie could push this in NJ. Best he stay armed though, as those union people don't let go of power easily. You may wake up and realize you're buried under the end-zone of Giant's stadium, or possibly you are human rebar buried in the foundation.

Anonymous said...


From whence this perception? It's a product of your white, male, Christian, gentile (or quasi-gentile/semi-gentile), American, Western, capitalist, non-developmentally-challenged privilege[s] that you would infer such by quoting the headline


You forgot heterosexual and hetero-normative ... they are the worst traits.

adsfasdfasdf said...

"This is genocide of whites!"

Not genocide but genecide, genetic dissolution of a people through excessive mixing.

AmericanGoy said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u-mihtgTm0&feature=player_embedded

OK, you are shi**ing me!

At least they could have gotten some nicer looking African women, the black ladies in this video look ugly as sin.

Perhaps this is an anti "mix it up" propaganda, as it achieves exactly the opposite effect of the one intended?

Or... best troll ever.

Antioco Dascalon said...

Interesting that black males have a high drop-out rate and low SAT scores, but still seem to get into college at similar rates as other groups... So, success! Except it doesn't mention the drop-out rate in college, which is nearly 70% for black males.

Tom Regan said...

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

1. if he's laying the groundwork for early-child intervention of 2 and 3 yos, stand by for the lawsuits 20 years from now when those children claim they were 'stolen' from their families and denied their cultural heritage.
2. anyone want to place odds on the likelihood of America having conversations that they haven't previously wanted to have?
3. kudos to the guy from the Achievement Gap Initiative for resisting saying 'Kerr-chiiiing!'

Anonymous said...

OT

Hehe.

http://www.vdare.com/buchanan/101111_dollar.htm

"In denouncing Bernanke, even the Chinese are not all wrong. They have followed the monetary policy we created at Bretton Woods in 1944, where we tied the dollar to gold at $35 an ounce, while other nations tied their currencies to the dollar at fixed rates of exchange.
China is being denounced for manipulating its currency when Beijing is adhering to a strict dollar-renminbi exchange rate, while our Fed is manipulating the dollar price to seek competitive advantage.
The other Chinese complaint is that they lent us trillions to buy Chinese goods and now we are robbing them by depreciating the dollar-denominated Treasury bonds they accepted in return for their goods."

Lmao. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!! I knew that the Jews would outmanuever the Chinese. In the end, Jews own all. And stupid Chinese thought they were gonna become the next great power. But in the world, the global economy is like a casino where the House is owned by Jews. Chinese can bring a lot of cash to play but in the end, they'll lose.

TH said...

You know it is spin when a simple artifact of the data is the last word of an article. Obviously only the lowest performing whites on average are attending Baltimore public schools, so sure from this tiny select population, there is a higher white dropout rate. It would be interesting to test dropouts to see how low functioning they actually are. My guess is that once whites see the writing on the wall, they are more likely to get out since no one is begging them to stay. Also dropout rate calculation methods can be quite dubious.

If you look at the report, it shows that the white male dropout rate has been between 5 and 7 percent for years, whereas the black male rate has been between 8 to 12 percent. Probably there were specific measures taken to reduce the black rate to 4.9 percent in Baltimore, while white males there dropped out at their usual rate, i.e. between 5 and 7 percent.

Anonymous said...

It's an interesting framing "this is a problem to be solved, middle class black boys are failing to do better than poor white boys".

Putting aside HBD monomaniacal concerns, that lacks a comprehensively progressive feel to it and any sort of explicit self-awareness about it.

It's neither technocratic nor socialist. Maybe I'd describe it as a campaign for telescopic philanthropy by black americans. Alternatively, it could be part of a general black people/southern white people coordination pageant for attentional privilege, sort of like the endless "battles" with Al Sharpton & Jesse Jackson on one side and Pat Buchanan and Bill O'Reilly on the other side (today perhaps substitute Glenn Beck). In that framework, I think the blandly technocratic are the losers. And I suppose some other populations like Chinese Americans and perhaps middle class whites, particularly non-southern like the large, hardworking, German & Scandinavian American populations of the Midwest.

Hopefully Anonymous

http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com

Anonymous said...

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

Yeah, like the history of natural selection in sub Saharan Africa.

nooffensebut said...

Look out! HBD has a new spokesperson. If you want race realism to be relevant in civil society, then job one must be developing a moderate form with a little less ugliness.

Whiskey said...

Where is all the money going to come from to push Black and Hispanic achievement upwards? Really?

FT is predicting "Agflation" with basic commodities corn, soybeans, cotton, sugar, etc. skyrocketing, along with oil (WTI over $90 now) and of course, electricity. India, Russia, Pakistan, China, have all put export quotas in place. Meanwhile Fed printing of dollars QE2 means commodity inflation.

Spare cash will go to paying skyrocketing food prices, not social engineering of dubious benefit.

alonzo portfolio said...

When I was at Abraham Lincoln high in San Francisco, I remember thinking how proficient the black kids were at hitting Abe's portrain in the library with spitballs.

Anonymous said...

"There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,”

NO SHIT SHERLOCK!!!!

Anonymous said...

", any sentient reader will deduce that or at least CONSIDER it....

agree???????
"

No. The crimethink warning kicks in and they will resolutely refuse to consider it, or to consider that they're not considering it.

Dave said...

Anonymous says:

"In denouncing Bernanke, even the Chinese are not all wrong. They have followed the monetary policy we created at Bretton Woods in 1944, where we tied the dollar to gold at $35 an ounce, while other nations tied their currencies to the dollar at fixed rates of exchange.
China is being denounced for manipulating its currency when Beijing is adhering to a strict dollar-renminbi exchange rate, while our Fed is manipulating the dollar price to seek competitive advantage."


Paul Tudor Jones says:

"On January 1, 1994, China devalued its currency by 50% in a single day, and since then has experienced a manufacturing boom. After 15 years of impressive productivity gains relative to its trading partners, though, it now resists the smallest appreciation. (The IMF implies the RMB could be as much as 30% undervalued taking 2000 as a base, but absolute purchasing power parity would argue that undervaluation is even greater— possibly as much as 60%.) Clearly, there is a direct correlation between the six million manufacturing jobs lost in the US and the close to twelve million manufacturing jobs gained in China over the last two decades."

corvinus said...

Could you please write an article about this: Sweden is going crazy.

Sure, it seems to outdo even our own National Endowment for the Arts (then again, maybe not...) but otherwise this is par for the course. Thankfully, after the latest election, Sweden's parliament is only 94% libtard rather than 100%.

Claverhouse said...

An Anonymous said:


Obviously only the lowest performing whites on average are attending Baltimore public schools, so sure from this tiny select population, there is a higher white dropout rate. It would be interesting to test dropouts to see how low functioning they actually are. My guess is that once whites see the writing on the wall, they are more likely to get out since no one is begging them to stay.



My guess is that, sensibly, they realise they have less to lose by leaving as soon as possible than by staying if they're a white minority in a --- possibly --- rough school.

Education is a good thing, but keeping one's health takes precedence.

Anonymous said...

Somewhat related...did you read the attack by sportswriter John Feinstein on Mike Shanahan for his yanking of D. McNabb in the last two minutes of a game? Seems he called Shanahan a racist.

Here's Rick Reilly of ESPN's retort:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=5795495

I like that this guy called out another for a ridiculous claim.

none of the above said...

Whiskey:

If it worked, it would be worth every penny, even if it cost us as much as the whole Defense budget. Taking 38 million people and boosting their IQ, in effect, by one sigma would be a huge win at almost any price. We'd save enough on falling crime rates and empty prisons to pay for the extra universities and doctors' offices and patent clerks.

The problem isn't that we're trying to do it but can't pay for it, the problem is that we're trying to do it while carefully ignoring some really big and important data that suggest it may not be possible.

none of the above said...

There is an important pattern here, which you see all the time in politics: There is an official "party line" which everyone is supposed to at least pretend to believe. You can tell you're dealing with the party line when, if you were to call it into question, people around you would be shocked or dismayed or would assume bad things about you.

The party line is shaped by all kinds of stuff--PR, government initiatives, propoganda, political compromises between different factions, etc. The process that shapes it has little to do with truth, though often it's pretty close to the truth.

When the party line is close to the truth, political discussions and news reporting and private discussions all are about something like reality. As a result, people can broadly come to sensible conclusions, and politicians can run on policies that make some sense.

The further the party line is from reality, the more destructive it is. People whose picture of reality is shaped by a party line at odds with reality will make horrible decisions. Reporters and pundits won't do a good job reporting on the issue, and politicians will support policies that don't make any sense, even if both groups know the party line is bullshit. Because their success is dependent on keeping their readers/voters happy with them. Thus, you'll often see people who know the party line is bullshit being its biggest public boosters.

Education policy is a place where the party line is horribly at odds with reality. (The war on terror is another example.) The map that every respectable source of information offers us of the territory is so wrong, it's impossible not to get lost following it. So long as this is true, our education policy can't make any sense. Presumably Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee and Barack Obama and George W Bush and many other reasonably bright, worldly, cynical people understand that the performance gap probably reflects something that can't be fixed by better schools. But they can never say that in public, can never even act in ways that suggest they believe it, lest they be shown to not believe in that which all right-thinking, serious people believe. And so we get gaming of test scores, and loudly-announced, quietly-shut-down programs to close the performance gap, and elaborate theories to explain what's going on that never get to the important issue. They can't.

The bigger the issue, and the bigger the disconnect with reality, the more destructive this becomes. Being unable to think straight about race in the US, right now, is IMO responsible for a lot of the most broken parts of US society. (Ironically, those parts mostly screw over blacks, especially poor blacks.)

Anonymous said...

>And what happened to fear of acting white?<

That's an old conservative meme. "Not right for us" at the NYT.

>Take that, blacks!<

Take what? Another trillion dollars? (Two can play the "I'm a mean, unserious snark" game.)

Anonymous said...

"If it worked, it would be worth every penny, even if it cost us as much as the whole Defense budget. Taking 38 million people and boosting their IQ, in effect, by one sigma would be a huge win at almost any price. We'd save enough on falling crime rates and empty prisons to pay for the extra universities and doctors' offices and patent clerks."

Do you really believe it would be worth it? Maybe we would just end up with smarter criminals,
malcontents and sociopaths.

When all the egg-headed talk ends, what are we left with? Should we just try to re-institute segregation? Do we just seperate? Can different groups live together in a way that is beneficial for everyone?

helene edwards said...

re blacks and higher ed., I heard a great quote on a BART train going through Berkeley about 5 years ago. it was two old buddies who hadn't seen each other for awhile. One says he's attending Cal. The other responds, "Ethnic Studies?" Ya gotta like how quickly blacks can get to the point.