A commenter writes:
I knew Amy Chua in passing while we were undergrads at Harvard. She was a typical Asian grind who barely stood out in either talent or looks. There were certainly no indications that she had a fetish for the difficult or Western Classical music – only a knack for craven careerism. She majored in Economics, which was a notoriously easy undergrad major at Harvard, certainly compared to, say, mathematics or physics or the classics. Economics, along with Folklore & Mythology or Psychology, were areas of concentration students chose when they were either strategizing their way to the highest possible GPA or trying to free up the maximum amount of time for golf or tennis.
Actually, Chua is a canonical example of regression to the mean: her father is a five sigma talent in the general population while she is a pitiful three. When measuring Amy Chua's "brilliance," one useful calibration point is Ron Unz -- also a contemporary of Chua at Harvard, who I also knew in passing. Ron was Phi Beta Kappa, too, but won a Churchill Fellowship after pursuing a double major in Physics and the Classics. Moreover, he did original publishable work in both fields before getting his BA!
(Hey, I know Ron Unz, too. Ron is a lot smarter than me, as well.)
The commenter's assessment of Chua sounds harsh, but that coincides with Chua's own take on herself. (What she has as an intellectual is energy, personality, and a certain degree of fearlessness about offending people by saying out loud, backed up by lots of research, what lots of people think but you aren't supposed to admit.) From Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:
Thank goodness I'm a lucky person, because all my life I've made important decisions for the wrong reasons. I started off as an applied mathematics major at Harvard because I thought it would please my parents. I dropped it after my father, watching me struggling with a problem set over winter break, told me I was in over my head, saving me. But then I mechanically switched to economics because it seemed vaguely sciencelike. I wrote my senior thesis on commuting patterns of two-earner families, a subject I found so boring I could never remember what my conclusion was.
I went to law school, mainly because I didn't want to go to medical school. I did well at law school, by working psychotically hard. I even made it onto the highly competitive Harvard Law Review, where I met [future husband] Jed and became an executive editor. But I always worried that law really wasn't my calling. I didn't care about the rights of criminals the way others did, and I froze whenever a professor called on me. I also wasn't naturally skeptical and questioning; I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it.
After graduating I went to a Wall Street law firm because it was the path of least resistance. I chose corporate practice because I didn't like litigation. I was actually decent at the job; long hours never bothered me, and I was good at understanding what the clients wanted and translating it into legal documents. But ... while everyone else was popping veins over the minutiae of some multibillion-dollar deal, I'd find my mind drifting to thoughts of dinner ...Jed, meanwhile, loved the law, and the contrast made my misfit all the more glaring. ... The next thing we knew he got a call from the dean of Yale Law School, and even though I was the one who always wanted to become an academic (I guess because my father was one), he got a job as a Yale law professor... It was a dream job for Jed. ...
I'd always thought of myself as someone imaginative with lots of ideas, but around Jed's colleagues, my brain turned to sludge. ...
That's when I decided to write an epic novel [about Chinese-American mother-daughter relationships spanning multiple generations]. Unfortunately, I had no talent for novel writing ... What's more Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Jung Chang all beat me to it ... At first, I was bitter and resentful, but then I got over it and came up with a new idea. Combining my law degree with my own family's background (as Overseas Chinese in the Philippines), I would write about law and ethnicity in the developing world. Ethnicity was my favorite thing to talk about anyway.
The person Amy Chua reminds me of is ... well ... me. (Although she has a lot more energy and willpower.)
I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it
ReplyDeletethat's all most orientals want to do - they lack creativity and can only ape the west, though they ape it pretty well.
And please, no posting about how japanese comic books are 'creative' 'art'
Ha ha, it's funny to see The Classics referred to not once but twice as a difficult major. Seems the humanities in general and stuff like ancient languages tend to get slagged on the Interwebz these days. Nice to see some respect for a change! (And, FWIW, people majoring at Harvard in The Classics, as they call it there, would often cite as their reason the fact that you actually got personal treatment from the faculty in that discipline, which was often not the case elsewhere.)
ReplyDeletethat we are talking about her suggest that she is quite apt at least one thing: trolling.
ReplyDelete"I would write about law and ethnicity in the developing world. Ethnicity was my favorite thing to talk about anyway."
ReplyDeleteEthnicity these days seems more like a tragic fact than a thing of particular interest. Maybe the human race needs a controlled breeding plan, after all.
When there is a lot of low hanging fruit, all you need is to be good enough.
ReplyDeleteShe seems self-aware.
ReplyDeleteAmy Chua as a teacher and a person
ReplyDeletehttp://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/01/25/a_few_words_on_amy_chua
Well Steve, the commenter you referred to makes no sense. He concedes that Amy Chua has an IQ of around +3SD from the white mean, but still refers to her as a pitiful grind. An IQ of 145 occurs with a theoretical rarity of around 1 in 740 or so amongst whites. I'm not sure what he means then when he claims that Amy Chua doesn't stand out talent wise. (How does a +3SD person not stand out talent-wise?)
ReplyDeleteChua may not be a genius at rigorous math/science, but I don't get how the commenter can concede on the one hand that Chua probably has an IQ of around +3SD and on the other hand argue that she benefited from affirmative action. I can only chalk up this inconsistency to the mind-numbing effects of white nationalism.
On an unrelated note, one of your readers actually denigrated the musical ability of Yo Yo Ma in a previous thread. The only other time I've seen someone denigrate the musical ability of Yo Yo Ma was in a thread on Stormfront. I think you really, really have to dislike East Asians before you can actually bring yourself to criticize Yo Yo Ma's talent. This guy is widely considered to be the one of the greatest living musicians and perhaps the greatest living cellist.
This website becomes stranger and stranger the more I read it.
She seems less obnoxious and less dangerous to the republic than Unz, at any rate.
ReplyDeleteWith all possible respect, Steve-O, she's a little more attractive than you, as well.
ReplyDeleteFelix: "Dude, you're spot on!"
Kylie: "I disagree, especially when you are wearing black leather, Steve!"
Mr. Anon: "Did she invent that water-powered car yet?"
Whiskey: "I'm sorry Truth, you're misinfomed: Steve's a Beta and even a chick gets more chicks than a Beta."
Albertosauraus: "She just got her job through being Asian, if she was a white guy she wouldn't be able to teach at my Jr. College!"
Lucius Vorenus: "At least she made a couple of HALF-white kids!"
Hmmm Amy. I wonder if you ever stepped out of the insular world of Harvard elitism what you might learn.
ReplyDeleteIf you had you might learn that white people are constantly accused of stealing black music. Remember the white dance team that won for the first time over a black team? What did all the black people do? They complained about how white people were stealing from them and how un original they were.
a very few words about Amy Chua as a teacher and a person.
ReplyDeleteChua was my Contracts professor in my first semester in law school. I later took International Business Transactions with her. She also supervised my first extended paper in law school, which, after many revisions, eventually became Virtual Worlds as Comparative Law.
She was, by a significant margin, the most Socratic professor I had in law school. She was also one of the best. Her Contracts class was fast-moving, thought-provoking, and entertaining. She had very high expectations for our class preparation and our engagement in class. But provided you did the reading and really thought about your answers when called on, she was on your side. I said some smart things in class, and some amazingly stupid ones; I felt comfortable trying, and I felt comfortable failing. It was a classroom where on-the-fly intellectual risk-taking was essential, but I knew at all times that there was a safety net below. At the end of every Socratic discussion, she would bring things to a close and carefully restate the law so that we knew what it was we needed to have extracted from the conversation. I’ve consciously modeled my own teaching, in large part, on hers.
Outside of class, I particularly remember two things. The first is that she invited us out, in groups of six, to have a drink with her and talk about law school. She was the most approachable professor I had in my first year of law school; she came out for a trivia contest between the two small groups that made up her Contracts class. I can’t imagine any of my other professors—as good as some of them were in their own ways—doing that. The second is that, for her IBT class, she assigned her book World on Fire. She regretted, however, the potential conflict of interest that her dual role as author and professor created. Thus, she asked us all to come, when were able, to her office, so that she could check our names off a list and give us each a refund for what we’d paid the bookstore. It was the only time, to my knowledge, that one of my professors paid for our coursebooks out of his or her own pocket.
http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/01/25/a_few_words_on_amy_chua
"This website becomes stranger and stranger the more I read it."
ReplyDeleteKeep in mind the "web" part of website. This means that anyone of any age, ability, qualification can post.
That said, Steve does attract a lot of bitter white people.
Sheer energy can make up for a lot of faults. My most successful cousin (doctor, businessman, athlete, coach, pilot, etc, etc) is above average in intelligence, but where he really outclasses even other smart people is his super-human energy. He sleeps 4-5 hrs a night and has all his life. I've stayed at his house and interacted with at morning, mid-day, night, and late-night -- at all times he maintains an exuberant energy. He's very happy, very positive. Not someone who spends time pondering life, he's constantly acting.
ReplyDeleteIn raw IQ I'm probably slightly above him, but I would gladly trade 10 IQ points for his stamina.
She's obviously really smart, as evidenced by her verbal (writing/speaking) skills and ability to thrive in a meriocratic academic atmosphere. I disagree that she's intellectually incurious. She's curious about topics like ethnicity and teaching, but perhaps not so much about corporate law. She just got pushed into something she didn't like by overly Asian ambitious parents, but now she's gone back to her passions in life.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that she's an intellecual (in a non-nerdy sense), proficient at expressing herself, beautiful (yes, looks matter), and fearless in personality. That's not a bad combination.
The Oriental mentality is to grind through the work, but I disagree that they can't think creatively. Their overall creativity is probably lower than westerners, but it's not nearly as poor as you think. A lot of Asian automobile and electronics companies, especially Japanese, produce unique products. Toyota, Nintendo, and Sony have driven a lot of small to medium scale technological innovation over the years.
It tells you something that Chua married a Jewish guy, but not an Asian. It's not like there's a shortage of well-paid Asian guys at the Ivy Leagues, but she chose to be Mrs. Rubenfeld.
"That said, Steve does attract a lot of bitter white people."
ReplyDeletePushy, greedy, rude, arrogant aliens displacing and dispossessing us. What's not to be bitter about?
An IQ of 145 occurs with a theoretical rarity of around 1 in 740 or so amongst whites. I'm not sure what he means then when he claims that Amy Chua doesn't stand out talent wise. (How does a +3SD person not stand out talent-wise?)
ReplyDeleteBy going to Harvard?
Somebody will write an expose of the short hours, low scholarly standards, and dubious social value provided by the nations law profs. That's why they all have blogs, too much free time.
ReplyDelete"I started off as an applied mathematics major at Harvard because I thought it would please my parents. I dropped it after my father, watching me struggling with a problem set over winter break, told me I was in over my head, saving me."
ReplyDeleteThe ever helpful Chinese father discouraging his daughter from doing anything less than perfect. Saved from the shame of graduating Harvard with a B+ grade average in a cognitively challenging major. Heaven forbid she might end up at University of Pennsylvania Medical School.
I agree. She seems to have a pretty healthy and realistic self-awareness without much pretension.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure she got that hanging around friends, family and colleagues that were an SD or several smarter than her.
If only more of our elites had such mental and social clarity. Chua is a refreshing break from the insanely out-of-touch and self-deluded 1SD leftist that populate our MSM. But then Steve would have to find a new schick.
"Keep in mind the "web" part of website. This means that anyone of any age, ability, qualification can post."
ReplyDeleteYes, but Steve is moderating. If a comment has no merit, and contributes nothing of value to the discussion, why does he post it?
"Well Steve, the commenter you referred to makes no sense. He concedes that Amy Chua has an IQ of around +3SD from the white mean, but still refers to her as a pitiful grind."
ReplyDeleteAt Harvard, in a class of 1600, +3SD doesn't stand out. +5SD does.
"On an unrelated note, one of your readers actually denigrated the musical ability of Yo Yo Ma in a previous thread. The only other time I've seen someone denigrate the musical ability of Yo Yo Ma was in a thread on Stormfront."
ReplyDeleteA Yo Yo Ma fan who reads Stormfront.
"This website becomes stranger and stranger the more I read it."
Indeed.
Anonymous (who's lost what little courage it takes to go by Yan Shen)
ReplyDeleteHow does a +3SD person not stand out talent-wise?
How does a 6'6" person not stand out height-wise?
(By the way, how many SDs above the Asian mean would that be?)
I don't get how the commenter can concede on the one hand that Chua probably has an IQ of around +3SD and on the other hand argue that she benefited from affirmative action.
That's okay, dear. Let me slowly explain. More highly-credentialed, 145-IQ-plus people want to be a Yale law professor than there are spaces for them. Universities like Yale are known to prefer certain profiles of candidates to others for reasons unrelated to merit. This is commonly known as affirmative action. Amy Chua's is one preferred profile (still is, although less so than when she started out in the 80s).
Did being an Asian woman in fact help Chua? I don't know, but it's possible. (You see it now, dear?) And it certainly didn't hurt.
Don't worry, Yan Shen. You do stand out around here, just as Muggsy Bogues did in the NBA.
PS I was once baffled about why the most vicious fights in these supposedly "racialist" circles appear to be of the white-on-white kind. Thanks, Yan Shen, for setting me straight. Among the civilized, pummeling your own kind is far more satisfying.
"that's all most orientals want to do - they lack creativity and can only ape the west, though they ape it pretty well."
ReplyDeleteLook at the profile of her dad, you jackal.
She seems self-aware.
ReplyDeleteAware of being a petty careerist who based her every life decision on her calculation of what might impress other people? Not even close.
What the hell's actually impressive about her? That she says things gutless whites are too gutless to say (and gets away with it)? Once one integrates these facts of reality into one's worldview they cease being so "impressive"; they just "are." From her perspective, she'd do well to milk it while the getting's good because the minute it all becomes common knowledge is the minute she no longer as anything interesting to say.
Personally, I have a great deal more respect for those law students who did care about the rights of criminals, even though they tend to be the type of people whose politics I don't think much of (to say nothing of their degenero-liberal lifestyles), than I could ever muster for an Amy Chua.
That said, Steve does attract a lot of bitter white people.
As opposed, say, to a lot of bitter asiatic people complaining about the bitterness of bitter white people? Who of the two, in your estimate, based on sound historical and sociological reasoning, has the better right to be bitter?
Well I'm still perplexed. Maybe Sailer or one of his white nationalist readers can explain it to me. We know that high IQ isn't a trademark of the white nationalist community, but let's work with me here.
ReplyDeleteSailer basically quotes a guy who concedes that Amy Chua has an IQ of around +3SD above the white mean, but somehow refers to that as being pitiful. I wonder what he thinks of the 739/740 whites whom by his own assertion Amy Chua is smarter than? Then he suggests that she benefited from affirmative action. Our good friend Tom V concurs because... he says it's possible that she befitted from affirmative action. Such brilliant reasoning!
On top of that, an early reader suggested that Yo Yo Ma had no musical talent. What's next? Bashing Albert Einstein's contributions to humanity? Ah wait, I've seen that on this blog as well. There's a reason why white nationalism is laughed at by the cognitive elitist element of the HBD crowd. Reading the comedy that Sailer and his readers provide on a daily basis serves as a reminder why.
"Don't worry, Yan Shen. You do stand out around here"
ReplyDeleteThis is not Yan Shen. The syntax, writing style, sophistication of argument, personality are all different. It's obviously not him.
The poppycock level of the posters here is off the charts.
Saved from the shame of graduating Harvard with a B+ grade average in a cognitively challenging major
ReplyDelete90% of harvard graduates with 'honors' and i think the average GPA is somewhere around b+
"On an unrelated note, one of your readers actually denigrated the musical ability of Yo Yo Ma in a previous thread. The only other time I've seen someone denigrate the musical ability of Yo Yo Ma was in a thread on Stormfront."
ReplyDeleteAnonymous said he detected hysteria in Asian classical performance styles, and it wasn't for him. And that Cassals was better than Ma. Big deal.
Anyone notice the actual put down was reserved for the white guy?
Another anonymous jerk:
ReplyDeleteThis is not Yan Shen. The syntax, writing style, sophistication of argument, personality are all different. It's obviously not him.
Wanna bet?
Comical indignation at any perceived slight of Asians,* check.
"White mean" (instead of just mean), check.
Calling all HBD people he doesn't like "White Nationalists," check.
Insulting said people's intelligence, check.
Overwrought writing style, check.
Pathetic logic, check.
"Cognitive elitist" self-reference, check.
Not denying that he's Yan Shen, check.
Hey, at least you got the part about poppycock right.
* Even though Steve cannot be more sympathetic to Amy Chua, and even the meannie commenter is laudatory about her father.
We know that high IQ isn't a trademark of the white nationalist community
ReplyDeleteNo, it's not. But having ethnic interests is (which, fyi, doesn't require high IQ) -- ethnic interests that require defense against "cognitive elitist" assholes who'd be only too happy to trample them in pursuit of naked self-interest.
Just what is your problem with this thread, anyway? Insufficient homage to Amy Chua's brilliance? Okay then, fine: she's more brilliant than the tenor of the posts on this thread suggests. Next?
I don't get how the commenter can ... argue that [a smart minority woman] benefited from affirmative action.
ReplyDeleteHow oh how, Yan Shen wants to know.
(I did try to explain to him, but apparently Teaching for America is not for me.)
The person Amy Chua reminds me of is ... well ... me.
ReplyDeleteCare to clarify this, Steve?
The girl strikes me as an incredibly shallow person who went to do what she does because she hated all the alternatives. Is this really a good description of you? Really?
"I wrote my senior thesis on commuting patterns of two-earner families, a subject I found so boring I could never remember what my conclusion was. "
ReplyDeleteFunny! Strong hat tip to her for being so honest. The SWPL crowd would never admit their studies didn't actually ahem *improve the world*. Good for Chua to admit it. (She can afford to be that gutsy cause of the Harvard background I'm guessing.)
""I wrote my senior thesis on commuting patterns of two-earner families, a subject I found so boring I could never remember what my conclusion was. "
ReplyDeleteFunny! Strong hat tip to her for being so honest. "
Not funny: shtick.
"Combining my law degree with my own family's background (as Overseas Chinese in the Philippines), I would write about law and ethnicity in the developing world. Ethnicity was my favorite thing to talk about anyway."
ReplyDeleteIs the developing world really developing, or just metastasizing?
"With all possible respect, Steve-O, she's a little more attractive than you, as well.
ReplyDeleteKylie: 'I disagree, especially when you are wearing black leather, Steve!'"
LOL! I hope you had as much fun coming up with that as I had reading it.
Tom V,
ReplyDeleteIt's not Yan Shen. The anonymous poster is making a basically trivial argument about taste, Yo-Yo Ma, some silly point about 3Sig not being respected enough.
That's not Yan Shen. Yan Shen's better than that. And better than you by about 2-3 sigma.
Personally, she sounds like a pretty witty self-aware writer....which DOES sound a lot like Steve, the master of self-deprecation. And she's clearly whip-smart, again, like Steve-O. Add in the interest in ethnicity and in intellect itself, and there you go.
ReplyDeleteWhy does the commentator think that her father has an IQ five standard deviations above the mean just because he is a very accomplished electrical engineering professor? Richard Feynman was one of the greatest physicists in history and only had an IQ of 124, so he wasn't even a two sigma. Scientific innovators have more going for them than stratospheric IQs.
ReplyDeleteSteve, I'm glad you haven't been as harsh on Amy Chua as your commenters have been. You are always a class act.
ReplyDeleteChua seems really likable. Frankness is an endearing quality.
ReplyDelete"Pushy, greedy, rude, arrogant aliens displacing and dispossessing even pushier, greedier, ruder, more arrogant natives?"
ReplyDeleteAt least he admits what is happening.
white people are constantly accused of stealing black music.
ReplyDeleteOnly by idiots who don't know anything about music.
On an unrelated note, one of your readers actually denigrated the musical ability of Yo Yo Ma in a previous thread.
ReplyDeleteThe horror! The horror!
Once people stop going along with the conventional wisdom, who knows where we'll end up?
yo yo ma's performances take too many liberties...only desperately middlebrow SWPLs rave about him (i.e. you're a philistine, hth)
ReplyDelete"Keep in mind the "web" part of website. This means that anyone of any age, ability, qualification can post."
ReplyDeleteYes, but Steve is moderating. If a comment has no merit, and contributes nothing of value to the discussion, why does he post it?
-----------------
because it's not his job to regulate thought (unlike his OneSTDV) and also it's remarkably petty to do so, it shows that you don't have confidence in your readers. in fact, steve shouldn't even moderate the comments, they should be posted as they are written and he should delete obvious spam later.
@Silver
ReplyDeleteWell, I haven't heard anyone seriously argue that Amy Chua is the second coming of Albert Einstein. But she's a fairly intelligent person IQ wise, has written a couple of best-selling books, and is a professor at Yale Law school. Those are pretty decent accomplishments by any measure. If someone of that caliber is representative of a "typical Asian grind", then East Asians really are a race of supermen.(I hope that the irony isn't lost upon Sailer and his white nationalist readers here. The commenter denigrates Chua as being nothing more than a typical Asian grind, yet still concedes that she has an IQ +3SD relative to the white mean. In other words, even a ho-hum East Asian is still somehow enormously smarter than virtually all whites.)
So what exactly is the point of bashing her? As far as I can tell, the only thing she's done wrong is to irk Sailer and his white nationalist readers by talking down to white parents in the same manner that whites often talk down to blacks/Hispanics. Now what was it that Chua said earlier about how Westerners today are obsessed with feel-good self-esteem...
"No, it's not. But having ethnic interests is (which, fyi, doesn't require high IQ) -- ethnic interests that require defense against "cognitive elitist" assholes who'd be only too happy to trample them in pursuit of naked self-interest."
ReplyDeleteWhat makes you think that the interests of whites coincide, or that we're all on the same team? Am I supposed to like you just because you're also white? That makes us brothers somehow?
Irk Sailer? He's obviously got a little bit of a crush going on. No irk in evidence.
ReplyDeleteSteve, how does your wife feel about all the interest you have in Mrs. Chua?
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I gotta say that Amy Chua is a knockout, especially for her age.
She was a National Merit Scholar. So she's gotta be smart.
A big difference between Amy and Ron is that as far as we know, Amy does not read & comment at iSteve. :)
ReplyDeleteI liked those crush posts about Mila Kunis better.
ReplyDeleteSteve has occasionally come close to writing a crush post about the cornucopia of girl rockers who were around when new wave hit big, but it's always just a line in passing.
I know if I had been in my mid-20s then, I'd still have a hopeless crush on Susanna Hoffs.
"Truth said...
ReplyDeleteWith all possible respect, Steve-O, she's a little more attractive than you, as well.
Felix: "Dude, you're spot on!"
Kylie: "I disagree, especially when you are wearing black leather, Steve!"
Mr. Anon: "Did she invent that water-powered car yet?"
Whiskey: "I'm sorry Truth, you're misinfomed: Steve's a Beta and even a chick gets more chicks than a Beta."
Albertosauraus: "She just got her job through being Asian, if she was a white guy she wouldn't be able to teach at my Jr. College!"
Lucius Vorenus: "At least she made a couple of HALF-white kids!""
______________________
I'm disappointed not to figure in your rollcall of shame, Truth. I must be too Fair & Balanced.
RAH:
"By going to Harvard?"
+3 SD or 145 IQ is well above average for students at Harvard, or any elite University (even Caltech I suspect). It's probably fairly average for a Harvard Law professor though.
"If a comment has no merit, and contributes nothing of value to the discussion, why does he post it?
ReplyDelete-----------------
because it's not his job to regulate thought (unlike his OneSTDV) and also it's remarkably petty to do so, it shows that you don't have confidence in your readers."
On the other hand, Steve might consider sorting comments according to relevance with a quick and dirty grading system (a scale of 1-4, say). That way commenters get the hint that they should work harder, hew closer to the point, or refrain.
Chua may not be a genius at rigorous math/science, but I don't get how the commenter can concede on the one hand that Chua probably has an IQ of around +3SD and on the other hand argue that she benefited from affirmative action.
ReplyDeleteDepends on the actual degree of IQ selectivity at these schools. In any case, no references to her benefiting from AA were made.
This is not Yan Shen. The syntax, writing style, sophistication of argument, personality are all different. It's obviously not him.
ReplyDeleteLots of the general structure and tone of the post (high superficial deference to the blog owner, passive aggressive criticism of commentators with veiled references to them being dumb whites, implicit argument to blogger that he needs to censor these bad people for the good of his blog, lest it become a ghetto for White Nationalists, obvious likely self serving pro-East Asian motivation) are typical of Shen though, so it's not the most off base of attributions.
Of course, as you say there are tonal differences from the run-of-the-mill Shenistry (for one, Shen does actually tend to present his own facile and self serving ideas about what America should be rather emphatically, at every opportunity, where this lacks that kind of content).
...
Interesting to hear that Chua reminds you of yourself Steve. I can understand where there are sympathies (you're both people who have found that while not out of your depth nor mediocre, you're more intelligent than the average but less so than the extreme right tail and both of you have interest in family and in ethnicity and are willing to put your convictions on the line to the test of public opinion).
Although from the general run of Chua's writing, free from context, at least as excerpted here, I wouldn't have said you were especially similar - she really does seem that arrogant, face obsessed, humor free (except in a rather forced sense, free of any genuine self deprecation or spontaneity), coldly calculating, mindlessly pro ingroup. Surprised her former pupil (upthread) describes her as having a degree of warmth and humilty, actually.
I admire her unvarnished honesty about her own abilities though. Although in a sense, its just a way for her to bolster an alternative narrative of her persistance and true grit, I still admire her for it.
If someone of that caliber is representative of a "typical Asian grind", then East Asians really are a race of supermen.
ReplyDeleteOh come on. If you called someone a "typical easygoing Hawaiian" that would not impute anything regarding their IQ. This is clearly the sense in which this poster was stating she was an "Asian grind", not to imply she was in any sense near or at the average in IQ (for one, if they were, they would not state she was not in the next paragraph).
. I can only chalk up this inconsistency to the mind-numbing effects of white nationalism.
ReplyDeleteOn an unrelated note, one of your readers actually denigrated the musical ability of Yo Yo Ma
typical oriental hypocrisy. The oriental sticks up for his own ethnic group member, while calling white nationalism 'dumb'. Jared Taylor is dumb? mind-numbing? Or challenging utopian, failing idealogy that is destroying the west.
Orientals may be smarter than blacks, but smart people believe in stupid things (just look at economists or swpl willing to embrace malcolm gladwell), and very often pursue their own ethnic interests, which means they aren't good for white interests.
On the whole, although they are good at rote learning, I have found orientals shallow, materialistic, sneaky, lacking western ethos and pathos, and utterly lacking creativity.
Though Chua's first book might have been frank her second one was much more supporting the east coast liberal neocon view:
ReplyDeleteempires are great, the native romans and greeks might have rumbled and been hurt, but empires which embrace multiculturalism are great... and then, ironically, or ignorantly enough, cited Spain as an example of declining because they didn't embrace multiculti....huh?
So clearly whatever her views before, she's advocating what is best for her in groups, even when she acknowledges it hurts native born, real Americans.
5-SD-anon,
ReplyDeleteSo what exactly is the point of bashing her? As far as I can tell, the only thing she's done wrong is to irk Sailer and his white nationalist readers by talking down to white parents in the same manner that whites often talk down to blacks/Hispanics.
I have no interest in bashing her. I have no interest in her period. But when Steve posts a passage which she (inadvertently, I'm sure) highlights the career-minded pettiness that drove her it's not really that surprising that I might step in question just how "self-aware" she really is. (And I certainly didn't need her to tell me ethnicity matters. I'm no 5SD but I kinda worked that one out on my own.)
Now, other readers please note: our 5SD defender of Miss Chua's bona fides is in no way ethnically motivated; his interest in her has nothing whatsoever to do with her ethnicity -- none. Ethnic interests are something only low IQ white scum -- can't they just be made to go away? -- think exists. I hope that's clear.
Wow, Yan Shen has a fan!
ReplyDeleteRead the linked comment and judge for yourself how much better the guy is in his signed comments. (I like the "trust me" part.)
See also his signature put-down here.
Steve, I'm surprised she reminds you of you. She seems likable enough, with a sense of humor, and kind of a nerd, so I get that part. But the main takeaway from her words is that she has worked very hard to achieve conventional success -- for it's own sake, for wealth and acclaim in a prestigious field -- with little interest in the field itself. She may as well have drawn straws to pick a career, for all the interest she had in anything. (Fortunately for her, she's smart and ambitious enough to succeed at something she doesn't care much about. Most people need to love their work to excel at it.)
ReplyDeleteYou, on the other hand, appear to work very hard at studying topics you find interesting, regardless of whether they'll lead to any wealth or acclaim -- or even have negative effects in those areas. I assume that's the case, anyway, since you could hardly have picked worse areas of interest if your goal was wealth or mainstream respect. So you seem to be exact opposites in the way you approach learning and work.
What makes you think that the interests of whites coincide, or that we're all on the same team? Am I supposed to like you just because you're also white? That makes us brothers somehow?
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to decide here on the best way to respond to you: whether to shoot for sarcasm; or perhaps inject something a little more lethal; or patiently clear up misconceptions; or point out inconsistencies; or whether to simply describe alternative view of society. But your post is such a concise object lesson in knee-jerk witlessness I'm just going to have to cover them all.
Let me begin by saying that if you're the kind of guy who, upon stepping out his front door and being greeted with, say, a mix of Mexicans here, a flock of Filipinos there, a gaggle of Guatemalans here, a colony of Koreans there, a herd of Hondurans here, a rabble of Russians there, an army of Arabs here, and a murder of Africans -- snigger :-) -- over yonder, tells himself as he navigates through it all, "Breath it in, folks. This is the stuff of life!" then far be it for me to deprive you of the ecstasy. At heart what I'm questioning, though, is whether in fact every last square inch of America, and of Canada, and of Australia, and of Britain, and all of Europe, absolutely, positively must be paved over by this relentless ideology. That's the nutshell.
Now, it seems to me that it's not the idea of ethnic interests per se that gets you steamed -- otherwise you'd be shaking blacks by the collar: "He ain't your 'brother' and she ain't your 'sister'!; we're all IND-IV-ID-U-ALS!!" -- it seems it's just the idea that whites have them, too.
To clear something up: I'm not a "white nationalist." Nor, strictly, am I even what you'd call "white." (So relax, you don't have to be my "brother" after all!) But I do take the white nationalists' side because -- check this out for an indictment of mainstream "thought" -- they're about the only ones making any sense about (a) the true nature of most social problems (or at least a criminally negligently neglected aspect of them) and (b) what is good in life. So, just as when you see a turtle struggling on its back the charitable act is turn it over, witnessing the mental constipation so many whites suffer from when thinking about race also calls for lending a helping hand.
And make no mistake, whites are seriously mentally constipated about race. I seriously doubt whether any group of people in history has suffered such a severe bout of mental constipation. In fact, I'm starting to think maybe "American history," whether in its PC format or the one that prevailed in an earlier era, is total hoax. That's because it's impossible to believe a people this mentally constipated could have ever conquered a cabbage patch, let alone a continent.
Comparitive advantage is the key here. If you're +3 sigma among normal people, your intelligence is your strong suit. If you're +3 sigma among other equally bright people, your work ethic, or creativity, or wide knowledge of other fields, or organizational prowess, or whatever is your strong suit. There's even a balancing effect here--at the same level of performance, someone who has a super strong work ethic may well be less smart than his colleagues, simply because if he were equally smart, he'd have gone even further.
ReplyDelete"I knew Amy Chua in passing while we were undergrads at Harvard. She was a typical Asian grind who barely stood out in either talent or looks. There were certainly no indications that she had a fetish for the difficult or Western Classical music"
ReplyDeleteI admit to being petty. What set me off was the quote: "Maybe the reason I can't appreciate gamelan music, which I heard when we visited Indonesia in 1992, is that I fetishize difficulty and accomplishment."
This rings hollow because, after all, she dumped applied math as an undergrad after a patronizing comment from her uber-genius father; so much for the virtues of eating bitterness. But somehow her at times self-deprecating tale of stumbling on the work that truly fascinates her while righteously frog marching her kids through piano and violin studies comes off to me as embellished and cringe-worthy. (Steve disagrees, of course.)
That said, I regret having been harsh. I can't appreciate gamelin music either -- to my amusement I just discovered I have some on a compilation CD which I listened to only once. But I'm irked and saddened that Western Classical music, which I have loved since childhood and consider my own cultural birthright, can't survive outside the world of the highly compensated, high IQ, status conscious elite. On the other hand, who else will buy all those absurdly expensive season tickets to the symphony?
If we admit that whites have ethnic interests, too, then, well, yes, life very quickly starts to get quite... "interesting." The fortunate upshot, however, will be that the rest of us who never actually bought into the diversity cult, who limited our affections and affiliations on what, when you get down to it and whether we were aware of it or not, was a racial basis (of sorts), will no longer have to lie. We'll no longer have to pretend or make believe. "Oh, we just luuuuuurve diversity," -- uttered while sticking to our own like white on rice. Like actress Melina Kanakaredes, who I saw on a Greek TV show proclaiming "sto spiti milame mono ellinika" -- "we only speak Greek at home." In common with most actresses, she probably loves to burnish her diversity credentials every chance she gets -- that, or whine about the nasty WASPs, like Angelo "Oompah Loompah" Mozilo, who, you figure, will carry it with him till his dying day. But if we admit that "race matters," or that "the white race matters," the Melinas and Mozilos -- and there are millions -- won't have to bullshit any more, neither to themselves nor to others. Imagine that, we'll be able to base social policy on what people actually want, rather than on what high-minded socio-ideologues demand that they want.
ReplyDeleteNow, if, like me, you believe that society has gained something from the last fifty or so years of universal love, that it hasn't been a complete waste, then you should understand that there's no need whatsoever to forfeit those gains. If you think it's a wonderful thing that European societies no longer hanker to war on each other, admitting the importance of race in our lives doesn't require us to forsake lessons we learned in a new wave of bloodletting; rather the admission should prompt us to recognize that just as we ourselves have ethnoracial interests of our own, so does the other guy, and that it's by leaving each other alone to the greatest possible extent that we'll both safeguard those interests. Expansionist war, contrary to popular (and hysterical) belief, and as displayed by the example of one A. Hitler, far from securing those interests, places them at tremendous risk -- all well and good if you win, at least for a while, but if you lose, you risk losing all. We should rejoice that that's so because it's one of the few occasions that the facts-of-life, so often so dismal, provide us with encouraging news.
"Wow, Yan Shen has a fan! "
ReplyDeleteTruth is iSteve seems to attract the one the Asian advocate serially. Yan Shen was the one for awhile. There was one before him, a lawyer, I think who was better.
He's part of a line. Clearly not a prestigious or even important calling, but good for a blog like this.
I mean you need to address thunking idiocies like:
"Asians only get into Harvard because they don't aren't creative (like me, an artistic type)...obviously they are grinds."
"Asians are imitators, they must be because Einstein, Newtown, Beethoven, etc are all white."
"Or Asians are imitators because they speak English."
The subtext is "Whites are alive, all else are dead."
I appreciate the effort of the Yan Shens. Keep up the Good Work!
"Keep in mind the "web" part of website. This means that anyone of any age, ability, qualification can post."
ReplyDeleteYes, but Steve is moderating. If a comment has no merit, and contributes nothing of value to the discussion, why does he post it?
Maybe because he doesn't set himself up as the omniscient arbiter of all that is meritorious?
I disagree that they can't think creatively. Their overall creativity is probably lower than westerners, but it's not nearly as poor as you think.
ReplyDeleteWho are you disagreeing with?
Is there a French term for someone who substitutes a straw man for your argument, beats it, then steals your argument and presents it as his own? Maybe there should be, because I've seen it more than once now, in the course of these yellow creativity discussions.
Ah wait, I've seen that on this blog as well. There's a reason why white nationalism is laughed at by the cognitive elitist element of the HBD crowd.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's called "nervous laughter."
"Cognitive elitists" may laugh at WNs, but meanwhile, WNs are laughing at "cognitive elitism," because the whole thing is a hilariously thin veil for yellow & sepia supremacy. The only "cognitive elites" are yellow & sepia supremacists on the make in white societies. Yellows & sepias do not actually practice "cognitive elitism"; they just preach it to whites.
What makes you think that the interests of whites coincide, or that we're all on the same team? Am I supposed to like you just because you're also white? That makes us brothers somehow?
ReplyDeleteEthnic Genetic Interests. G**gle awaits.
By the way, I gotta say that Amy Chua is a knockout, especially for her age.
ReplyDeleteShe may be a knockout for her age, since I don't know what that is, but age aside? Uhm, no.
"If a comment has no merit, and contributes nothing of value to the discussion, why does he post it?"
ReplyDeleteYou mean no merit and no value according to your standards.
Apparently, Steve's standards are different.
Now run along and apply your standards someplace else.
As to the actual topic under discussion, Chua is just as plain-spoken or outspoken as she can afford to be. And she can afford to be. She's bright, educated, and a member of the academic elite. She's also female, physically attractive and non-white.
Can someone define what "ethnic interests" mean? Having your race do better than others?
ReplyDeleteBut I'm irked and saddened that Western Classical music, which I have loved since childhood and consider my own cultural birthright, can't survive outside the world of the highly compensated, high IQ, status conscious elite.
ReplyDeleteUp until the mid-20th century, classical music was fairly mainstream. You weren't necessarily considered a snooty egghead for liking it. Hell, NBC had its own orchestra (with Toscanini as conductor!) and regularly broadcast classical concerts during prime time. But decades of relentless bashing by our commercialized popular culture have changed public opinion. Now classical music is associated in the public mind with sinister villains, snotty toffs, and posturing pseuds. I guess since classical music can't be marketed to giggling 13-year-old girls en masse (or at least not nearly so profitably as Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber can), it must be denigrated at every turn.
Anonymous said...
ReplyDelete"I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it"
that's all most orientals want to do - they lack creativity and can only ape the west, though they ape it pretty well.
And please, no posting about how japanese comic books are 'creative' 'art'
I guess that with your Western individualism and inventiveness you simply invented the multiplication tables out of thin air.
Unfortunately for the majority of even us Westerners, writing things down is key to being able to remember them, and you have to be able to remember shit to be able to see and understand the relationships between them.
other than her careerism ( her strategy is two fold: hardwork and trolling the mainstream press) there is nothing brave about her.
ReplyDeleteYOU are brave. You could've had a very successful mainstream career in the media if you were willing obfustercate the truth.
"To clear something up: I'm not a "white nationalist." Nor, strictly, am I even what you'd call "white."
ReplyDeleteSo It seems you're part of that gaggle, herd and "murder" homeboy is so happy to see everyday, so what are you two arguing about?
"In any case, no references to her benefiting from AA were made."
ReplyDeleteNot only that, Sport, she's Chinese, that means that according to our esteemed host, YOU benefited from affirmative action at her expense.
Amy did not stand out "lookswise":Have to agree on that one,though dont Asian girls get a bit of a bump for being Asian? I would be interested in how the 3SD crowd feels about Harvard women.Tho,like advanced physics,it may be a Harvard discipline they find too daunting to tackle.
ReplyDelete"Pushy, greedy, rude, arrogant aliens displacing and dispossessing even pushier, greedier, ruder, more arrogant natives?
ReplyDeleteI can live with that."
Spoken like an alien, a dishonest alien justifying his own modus operandi by projecting it onto his enemy.
"And make no mistake, whites are seriously mentally constipated about race."
ReplyDeleteGee, thanks so much for your help, but your "mental constipation" metaphor doesn't do our situation justice.
For one thing it fails to capture the zeal with which the anti-white "anti-racists" have pursued their own individual and ethnic interests to bring about this situation. Or that they imposed it via multi-generational propaganda based on the false premise that "diversity" and "equality" are good and right and necessary. Or that they viciously attack whites and only whites who seek a cause or cure for this imposed "constipation".
We're not suffering from mental constipation. We're being displaced and dispossessed by people who openly celebrate the fact and ruthlessly repress the slightest resistance.
I admire her candor. I wish the women I went to law school with would also admit all they were good at was memorization.
ReplyDeleteSteve, if you know Unz, does he still live in California?
ReplyDeleteSecond question: why do you still live in California?
Am I alone (or almost alone) in finding the passage from Chua that Steve quoted raucously funny? She doesn't just have a sense of awareness about herself, she has a sense of humor about herself too.
ReplyDeleteOh, I guess Steve found it funny too.
The comments are unbelievably stormfrontesque, as already reiterated.
ReplyDeleteThe first for example, is the most blunt and crass, but again these professional characterizing of entire groups based on individual judgment is even more tiresome.
With that said, it seems Isteve is encroaching popular white nationalist sentiments and away from actual HBD and discussing some finer points of merit which would support it, like eugenics.
"Chua was my Contracts professor in my first semester in law school. I later took International Business Transactions with her. She also supervised my first extended paper in law school, which, after many revisions, eventually became Virtual Worlds as Comparative Law."
ReplyDeleteWe can extend the same commentator character account to that poster, but can we likewise have a special post dedicated to this? I probably would dislike Chua as a person(primarily due to her articles) and definitely as a parent, but why don't you do this same for this post?
If such super competent people comprise the elite in America how come everything is so fucked up?
ReplyDeleteIf such super competent people comprise the elite in America how come everything is so fucked up?
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's why everybody's fleeing and nobody's coming here.
Thank God that immigration problem solved itself.
The comments are unbelievably stormfrontesque, as already reiterated.
ReplyDeleteRun along, Mao.
"Second question: why do you still live in California?"
ReplyDeleteBecause 12 months of sunshine and warm weather beats the HOLY HELL out of white neighbors.
-Steve
regarding the 'stormfront' accusation
ReplyDeletein pre-pc days, it was common for westerners to observe that orientals were shallow, materialistic, and thought good at rote learning, had very rigid intellects that lacked creativity.
"Run along, Mao."
ReplyDeleteThis again only strengthens my point. This poster believes you must be asian to believe in the points I state. You can't be any other race to not believe in group characterizations based on personal judgement.
Likewise, the belief of a grand Jewish conspiracy is another fine point of many commentators. Jews, in their opinion rule and dominate the United States. Neither unfounded nor solidly proven, but another key aspect of belonging to stormfront.
" regarding the 'stormfront' accusation
in pre-pc days, it was common for westerners to observe that orientals were shallow, materialistic, and thought good at rote learning, had very rigid intellects that lacked creativity."
In pre-PC days, Asians we're founded in such numbers or had wealth or educational levels, and the few real conception of Asians were the Japanese.
They were regarded usually as something to fear due to their hollow rise, or for their electronics and car prowess(both of which are neither uncreative, but are very materialistic).
Waaaaaaah, Stormfront. Waaaaaah, white nationalists. Waaaaah, Steve should only write and allow comments that I like.
ReplyDeleteWaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
" Richard Feynman was one of the greatest physicists in history and only had an IQ of 124, so he wasn't even a two sigma. "
ReplyDeleteBull-fucking-shit that Richard Feynman had an IQ of 124.
Come the fuck on.
Hopefully Anonymous
http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com
I think the commenter that pointed out that Prof. Chua is acting as a troll (rather than as an expert or a popularizer as experts, or even as a useful eccentric, which is where I'd place Mr. Sailer) is the winner of this comment thread.
ReplyDeleteShe bid low for our attention, and is successfully distracting us from other things we should be paying attention to. As a public, I think we should discourage that type of rent-seeking.
Hopefully Anonymous
http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com
Can someone define what "ethnic interests" mean? Having your race do better than others?
ReplyDeleteI use it as shorthand for "Ethnic Genetic Interests."
In a nutshell, it's about the math of biology. All organisms have an interest in reproducing themselves, right? In seeing their gene patterns propagated? Well, the more similar someone's gene patterns to yours, the greater your interest in seeing their gene patterns propagated, too.
the belief of a grand Jewish conspiracy is another fine point of many commentators. Jews, in their opinion rule and dominate the United States. Neither unfounded nor solidly proven, but another key aspect of belonging to stormfront.
ReplyDeleteproof of the 'grand conspiracy' claim? Or just that just mean that if you believe that Jews are more likely to support israel than mormons, you're an anti-semite?
"Your HTML could not be accepted. You are restricted to a maximum of 4,096 characters."
ReplyDeleteNo matter how much I edited my post, I still couldn't take it down to 4,096 characters. I cut over half of it and it still wasn't good enough. Then I tried to cutting of redundant words and it still was above. I then went to cut even more words but realized that my sentences were starting to become incoherent. After pressing the "post" button for the billionth time and getting the same message, I gave up. Being succint is ok, but sounding retarded because you are limited to a certain number of words is sad and unacceptable.
This is interesting because Chua and Unz are both 'minority success stories' and because their mix of conservatism and liberalism, of Americanism and ethnicism, betray a certain dichotomy--some would say cultural neurosis--of America. There seems to be two main developmental models of success in America: the wasp/northern European and the ethnic(Jewish, Italian, etc). Chua and Unz seem to be caught between both. Unz, though white, counts as a non-white minority in the current political climate. Chua is Chinese, and her story/outlook/perspective has the chutzpah of the Jews but also the orderliness of the Anglos. What is the nature of this Anglo orderliness?
ReplyDeleteThough the British made their share of contributions to music, in the area of classical music in the 19th century, the Brits were maybe the least accomplished among the great peoples/nations. British music paled next to German, Italian, French, Austrian, Russian,etc. Part of this was maybe due to hoity-toitism, an excessive emphasis on good manners, gentlemanliness, and etc. And British language itself suited hoity-toitiess perfectly. Brits were much more comfortable with words than with music. And in painting, they preferred nice landscape paintings and portraits. It wasn't in them to produce a Goya or Gogh. LIke British cooking, Brits didn't go for too much flavor or emotions--which explains the rebellion of the English Romantics like Shelly and Byron but even they stuck mostly to words than music. Brits really made a difference in music in the modern era when their youths enjoyed unprecedented freedom in the postwar order and took most of their inspirations from American popular music.
Germans are also known for orderliness, so why were they so musical? Maybe their 'barbaric-sounding' language made them more passionate despite their love of order. Maybe it was all the beer they drank. Brits were a tea people(and the beer the drank was warm). Germans drank a lot of cool beer, and maybe that loosened up their souls. Also, Germany united relativively late and each principality had its own artistic patrons. Also, Germans/Austrians were geographically located to absorb ideas, inspirations, and talents from all over. To the south were Italy and Balkans. To the East were the earthy and vital Slavs. To the west were the fancy and florid French. So, it could have been the tension between German love of order and German feel for passion that led to German greatness in music. Beethoven's music is very stern and perfectionist AND wild and free--a sublime mix. Brits, on the other hand, were in world of their own, and they got very proper and hoity toity, with tea and crumpets and guys talking kinda gay. But the advantage of Britishness was political rationality and social restraint. The passionate French tended to get carried away, first with the Revolution and then with Napoleon. The Germans and Russians eventually went crazy too with politics.
British manners allowed for greater tolerance, which was made possible by good manners, individual restraint, and social order. In other words, tolerance was more workable among a tolerable population. Since Brits had manners and sense of restraint, they were more tolerable than crazy Italians or wily Greeks ever could be. We generally define tolerance in terms with those with power tolerating those with less power, but in fact, tolerance works best when those with less power act more tolerably. Whites were willing to tolerate blacks in the early 60s because MLK spoke of peace and blacks seemed to act tolerably. But when blacks wents nuts in the late 60s, even Democratic whites turned against blacks and joined the GOP. The problem with PC is it tells white people to be tolerant but doesn't tell non-whites to be more tolerable. I mean how are we supposed to tolerate stuff like La Raza hostility?
Anything, one of the virtues of Englishness and Anglo-ness was cleanliness, order, and lack of odor, ESPECIALLY the lack of odor. Michael Novack wrote of this in RISE OF THE UNMELTABLE ETHNICS(when he was still a Democrat and not yet a neocon. His views prefigured the rise of multiculturalism. It also unwittingly pointed to waspiness as the source of political correctness--not yet an idea or term when Novack wrote the book.) Anglo food is odorless, and wasps used to call Italian-Americans 'garlic eaters'--at least Mr. Potter did in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. What Senator Geary says to Michael in GODFATHER II sums up traditional Anglo feelings about the ethnics--the stuff about the 'oily hair'. Novack talks of the importance of soap in Anglo culture--and maybe this explains the urban legend about Holocaust Soap: Northern European obsession about cleanliness even turned into genocide. And consider the term 'ethnic-cleansing'. Though Novack later came to admire the Anglo qualities and virtues as crucial to the founding of the laws, politics, and principles of America, he resented Anglo ways in the late 60s. Blacks had black power, browns had brown power, and Novack was into white ethnic power. Novack didn't just have a problem with Anglo conservatives but with Anglo liberals, with their soulless social reform do-goodery and endless puritanical moral sermons. He saw this Anglo-American culture washing away the stinking vitality of the ethnics. Novack's views had both leftist and rightist implications. Leftist in its rebellion to the American mainstream. Rightist in the sense of white ethnics embracing a tribal identity. His book came out in the early 70s, an interesting period for this issue as a whole. Consider the movies of around that time: from late 60s to mid 70s, and many dealt with the theme of Wasp-ethnic relations and conflict. HAROLD AND MAUDE was about a rich Anglo-kid and an old Jewish Holocaust survivor woman who teaches him the flavorful meaning of life. LOVE STORY is about a rich wasp kid who falls in love with an Italian-American girl. Cassavetes's HUSBANDS is about very ethnic bunch of guys in NY, as was MEAN STREETS. MIDNIGHT COWBOY is about Joe Buck the wasp 'cowboy' and Ratzo Rizzo, the Italian-American. Godfather and especially Godfather II are about Italian-Americans finding their place in America. Part II has Michael butt heads with the very Anglo and proper Kay. THE LANDLORD and CONRACK are about white guys finding new meaning by living with blacks. The more obvious titles are GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER and THE WAY WE WERE, but they're not as interesting. WHAT'S UP DOC has Anglo Ryan O Neal who's shown the true meaning of love through the very Jewishly Barbra Streisand. Though westerns had dealt with Mexican themes before, THE WILD BUNCH took it much further. THE GRADUATE, though based on an Anglo-American novel and not explicitly about a Jewish kids, has been Jewish-ized in its implications by the Jewish talents who made the movie. It's impossible to see the movie except as a Jewish male fantasy. Mrs. Robinson is the possessive Jewish mother and the big tall blonde guy is the Big Wasp standing in the Jew's way. In fact, there's a Jewishy element in many of these stories, with ethnics serving as stand-in for Jewish neurosis and complexes. LOVE STORY has an Italian-American girl, but the story was written by the Jewish Erich Segal, and the witty and pushy ethnic girl could pass for Jewish. And Hoffman plays Ratso as much as a Jewish as an Italian character. It's like the dimwitted Anglo and the wily Jew.
ReplyDeleteLOVE STORY and GODFATHER II indicate why wasps may have lost out to the ethnics, especially the Jews. (Though the Corleones are Italian,they could metaphorically be seen as Jewish or any ambitious ethnics.) The father in LOVE STORY is a snob but turns out to be a very decent sort. He's sorry that he drove his son away. In the end, he's more about FACE than BALLS. He wants to be good guy. Though elitist, he has no killer instinct. How different from what Pauline Kael said of Jews in her review("bagel with a bite out of it")of FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. Kael says Jews found great success and riches in America and put on all sorts of fancy airs... BUT they still maintained a part of that vulgar vitality that kept them hungry and feisty. Even while driving around in a limo, a rich Jew stuck his/her hand out of the car with a 'bagel with a bite out of it'. On the outside, Jews knew how to play nice and respectable but inside they remained hungry and cunning, with vital killer instinct. But with the rich father in LOVE STORY, the surface is also the inside. He wants to be respectable, nice, a good guy. He opposes the marriage but comes to realize he loves his son, Jenny is a nice girl, and he wants to help. He doesn't know how to get down and dirty and fight for his tribe. He doesn't act like Mark Levin or Michael Savage who takes no prisoners.
ReplyDeleteTHE EXORCIST requires a good Catholic boy to defeat evil and save the soul of a white girl. In other words, WASP rationality and order are not enough. You need strong ethnic will and faith.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY is interesting because the western Anglo was different from the Eastern Anglo. One might say the Western Anglo rediscovered his 'ethnic' self. In fighting with Indians, settling new lands, and separated from the refined culture of the East, Western Anglos gained a new vitality and 'stinky' particularity. They grew their hair long, came up with colorful names--Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill, etc--, and their language became very particular, flavorful, and particular, calling eachother 'peckerwoods' and the like. In a way, the tension between Eastern Anglo and Western Anglo prefigured the later tension between Anglos and waves of European immigration from Southern/Eastern Europe. In MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, the Eastern Anglo Jimmy Stewart is shocked by the barbarism of Western Anglos. Lee Marvin is a real wild son of a bitch, and even the good guy, John Wayne, is plenty wild.(But them fellers sure have personality.) And in BIG COUNTRY, Gregory Peck the civilized Eastern Anglo butts heads with the tribal 'ethnic' Western Anglos.
And if Eastern Anglos were into order and odorless cleanliness, western Anglos were eating all those beans and farting as in BLAZING SADDLES. And they didn't bathe much either. In WILD BUNCH, a German officer says all the Bunch needs a bath. So, MIDNIGHT COWBOY, though ethnically an Anglo-meets-Ethnic story, is also like an ethnic-meets-ethnic story since the Western Anglo has his own colorfulness and particularity. In fact, Joe Buck goes to NY cuz he thinks all the men there are tutti-fruity--like English gentlemen--and women want a Real Man like himself. Anyway, it was during the late 60s and early 70s that a real shift happened where the ethnics, especially the Jews, took the power from the Anglos, and it shows in the movies of the period. LONG GOODBYE by Altman had a Jewish private eye, a Marlowitz.
Kay's abortion in GODFATHER II is actually quite telling. In the literal sense, she aborts the kid because she's a good Anglo who's sick of all this 'Sicilian thing'. But in a metaphorical sense, it means she's willing to kill her own child, her own life and blood, herself, in order to the right thing.
An overly moral Anglo would rather choose self-death in the name of goodness than survival in the name of 'evil'.
Eventually, it seems as though wasps and Anglos(both in the US and UK)came to admit their 'dullness' and 'flavorlessness' and came to embrace ethnicism(and black-ism). Today, Anglo-American elites will go out of their way to show that they are adopting African babies, trying all sorts of international cuisine--they even put garlic in their mash potatoes--, and celebrating 'diversity'. But mentalities die hard. PC may be anti-conservative and anti-Anglo, but it's appealing to the puritanical moralism at the core of Anglo-culture. PC has its own strict rules of what is correct, what is incorrect, what is good form, what is bad form, what is proper, what is improper. The rules have changed by the mentality is the same.
ReplyDeleteIn people like Chua, Paglia, Unz, and Novack, we see the unresolved tension between their acknowledgment and even admiration for Anglo-roots but also their ethnic instinct and hunger for a good knife fight. In a way, Chua's commitment to classical music education for her kids is very much a part of traditionalist elitist thought; but her sometimes political incorrectness is an 'ethnic' rebellion against the prevailing PC that has become, in a way, the culture of the new Brahmins--with Jews as the neo-Anglos. When the Anglos were the elites, to be 'ethinic' meant to challenge Anglo power. With Jews as the new elites, the truly 'ethnic' thing to do is to take on Jewish power. Anglos have become to Jews what Senator Geary became to Michael Corleone. They got owned. With Jews as the new Anglos, maybe we should call them Janglos. (Does this make Obama, Mr. Beau Janglo?)
There is, outwardly, a contradiction between Anglo love of correctness/properness and Anglo love of liberty. But this paradox makes sense when we realize that freedom is most workable among people who adhere to common rules of propriety and order. If people all acted like Sarah Silverman or Flavor Flav, there would be social havoc, and social havoc leads to distrust and fear, and then society breaks down, and people demand a new tyranny to restore order. For there to be a steady order, there has to be a shared sense of correctness among the general populace. In the old days, this was established less by laws than by agreed-upon manners, habits, taboos, and values. But with the erosion of such things, only the laws are left. Since people are getting more out of control in our libertine society, there has been a rise in political correctness to proscrible bad thought and action by law, regulation, fines, penalties. But modern PC is bound to fail because its core is defined by self-loathing, lack of confidence, and self-hate within the majority population. As such, instead of pressuring troublesome minorities to behave better in order to free in a saner and more constructive way, it only finds faults with majority whites who are mostly well-behaved while making all sorts of excuses for bad behavior among blacks, illegal Hispanics, Muslims, radical gays, etc.
Richard Phillips Feynman
ReplyDeleteIn high school, his IQ was determined to be 125: high, but "merely respectable" according to biographer Gleick. Feynman later scoffed at psychometric testing.
So if you think that psychometric testing is meaningful, you're disagreeing with the great Richard Feynman!
I don't think that swearing is the sign of a keen intelligence.
"On top of that, an early reader suggested that Yo Yo Ma had no musical talent."
ReplyDeleteMaybe Yo Yo Ma is really a great cellist. I wouldn't know a great one from a good one. Besides, I'm more into symphonies than solo work where the whole point is to show off one's virtuosity.
Symphonies tend to be more conceptual/compositional-centric whereas solos tend to be more performance/technique-centric.
Both have their appeal, but I prefer the former.
Let us assume Yo Yo Ma is truly a great artist. I still think he pimped himself out too much, just like Pavarotti with the Three Tenors crap. I didn't care for Yo's schlocky work on Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon though I suppose it was okay.
But Yo Yo Ma's personal musical project of bringing together musical artist from different cultures--SILK ROAD PROJECT/ENSEMBLE--is a disaster.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZpEjrdf56k&feature=relmfu
I can see how it's politically correct with all the diversity crap, and I have nothing against greater interest in all forms of music from around the world, which I see as a good thing.
But when Yo Yo brings everyone together in the manner of sesame street muppetry, it's just so hokey. This isn't to say that one style/form of music shouldn't borrow ideas or chords from other styles of music but merely to say it has to be done chemistric-ly, not physic-ly. Same with cooking. You can borrow ideas, ingredients,and methods from other cuisines to enhance your own dish or create a new one, but you can't just take equal portions of spaghetti, sushi, chop suey, taco, pierogi, and sauer kraut and just blend them together. That's physical mixing, not chemical compounding. Also, one has to undertand that some things mix well(enhance one another), some things don't. Who would mix ice cream with green beans? When something tries to be everything, it's noting.
I'm sure Yoyo is a nice guy and means well. He wants to help lesser known musical artists of other cultures. He wants to spread musical knowledge. All very good. But as a character said in THE WILD BUNCH, "it's not what you meant to do, it's what you did I don't like."
Also, you don't create good music or art through niceness. There is time for artists to get together and be nice at cocktail parties or some such. Same with athletes AFTER THE GAME.
But the creative process itself is hungry, competitive, selfish, egotistical, ambitious, ruthless. Beethoven the artist wasn't a nice guy. He was trying to clobber the competition. Kubrick's ambition was to the greatest filmmaker of all time. Art is one area where tyranny is not only okay but necessary. An artist has to be tyrant over his domain. As we all know, the biggest rebels make the biggest tyrants in both arts and politics. In politics, we have to watch out for guys like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, but great creative artists cannot be nice guys. I mean Ron Howard is an okay director but he will never be great. He doesn't have tyrannical a soul to push the envelope and go all the way.
Yo Yo Ma may be a great musician, but as a CREATIVE person he just doesn't get it. He brings together all these musical artists together from the world and gets all nice with them. Since each person is being 'nice', they hold themselves back to fit into 'wonderful fabric of diversity'. Zzzzzzzzzzz, snore.
Yo Yo Ma the nice guy is too much of wuss to impose his vision on the group, and each member of the group is too PC to assert something unique about himself.
I wonder if Chua's self-deprecating stuff about her college yrs and career is an example of deceptive Asian false-modesty.
ReplyDelete"Oh me not so smart, me just work hard cuz I so boring. I no have original thought. Me useless and worthless, me just clown who look for attention because me so silly. I'm worthless daughter not worthy of my father who so much smarter than me."
This again only strengthens my point.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I've noticed that anything which anybody says strengthens your point, in your own eyes at least. If you're half as smart as you think you are you'd start to wonder why that is.
This poster believes you must be asian to believe in the points I state.
No, you ninny, I think the point being made was about your way of looking at the world and your insistence that anybody who says things you disagree with is a member of "stormfront".
If you'd been called "Stalin" if would not have a reference to your supposed Georgian ancestry. If somebody calls you "Hitler" they are not saying "I believe that commenter Descartes is of German background".
"Irk Sailer? He's obviously got a little bit of a crush going on. No irk in evidence."
ReplyDeleteBut this is nothing compared to Steve's fondness for Sarah the bear warrior goddess and the 'Athena-like' Kathryn Bigelow(which nearly killed me).
Chinese were regarded as highly industrious and orderly, with an instructable personality type. They were thought to be capable of creating a materially prosperous civilization, but lacking in dynamism and insufficently progressive.
ReplyDeleteThe Japanese were somewhat put in the same category as the Chinese, but considered more progressive and highly proficient at mastering Western technology. Other Asians weren't even on the radar until the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
As far back as the 1950s, Japanese-Americans had established a reptuation for being economically dynamic. The initial waves of Chinese immigrants from the more backward parts of China were seen as incompatible with America, but later waves from the more prosperous parts of Guandong did pretty well. As the Chinese-American population shifted from the more backward to the more dynamic groups, the community rose in prominence. In Hawaii, which mainly drew from the better regarded parts of Guandong, Chinese surpassed whites in income by the early 1950s.
Asians haven't changed that much over time, but we're more aware of them now than before. If there were millions of Amy Chuas in America back in the 1920s, we would have had this conversation a long time ago.
"The person Amy Chua reminds me of is ... well ... me." Aye, but she's not as pretty, Steve. Mwah.
ReplyDeleteThe stuff about Asian creativity.
ReplyDeleteThough it could be argued that Asians are less creative--at least in the more flamboyant way--, we must be careful not to fall into the either/or trap. Less creative(generally)doesn't mean uncreative, just like 'less faster than blacks' doesn't mean all whites are slow. Whites may be slower but that's still not the same as slow. There are plenty of speedy whites.
Examples like Kurosawa, Imamura, and Mizoguchi should prove beyond a doubt that Asians can not only be very creative but very original and individualistic.
Another thing. Creativity seems to come and go among a people. Greeks who were so creative in the ancient period somehow lost it. Of course, there were great artists like El Greco and others but the flower of creativity never returned to Greece. Germany was not the center of creativity in Europe for a long time. It was a backwater compared to Italy, France, UK, even Poland. But then an explosion of activity took hold from the mid 17th century. Since end of WWII, Germans have been far less creative.
One seeming contradiction is that the freest people are not necessarily the most individualistic in the creative sense. Anglo-Americans had a longer history of freedom than Italian-Americans, but it was the Italians, with their ethno-tribal bent, who contributed so much to filmmaking in the 70s and 80s: Scorsese, Coppola, DePalma, Cimino, etc.
And less free Germany produced more powerful music than freer Britain in the 19th century.
This paradox could may be understood by the fact that for a democracy to work, free people have to respect the rights of other people and get along. This need for 'niceness' and mutual respect may seep into culture, whereby artists become more cautious about possibly offending others. In less free societies, there is the ideal of the GREAT MAN who imposes his vision, power, and agenda on his domain; while this may lead to political tyranny, it may also seep into artistic sensiblity and promote huge egos like Beethoven and Wagner. They didn't just wanna make good music; they wanted to be the emperors of music. The problem with guys like John Sayles and Robert Redford as directors is they are so morally/socially conscious that they seem afraid to offend; so their movies tend to be dull and didactic. Scorsese doesn't give a shit; he stuck to his vision in movies like MEAN STREETS, TAXI DRIVER, and GOODFELLAS.
Of course, artists need freedom to thrive, and such may exist only in free nations. This may explain why some of the greatest artists have been people who grew up under an authoritarian system but escaped to the free world. They developed a tyrannical creative mentality--the desire to the GREAT MAN of art--but also gained newfound freedom. They get the best of both words. And indeed many of the great Hollywood directors of the 40s and 50s were German-Jewish emigres. Toscanini too in music. They were the creative products of the Old World unleashed in the political/social freedom of the New World.
This can also happen when a society goes from authoritarian to democratic. Kurosawa's formative period as an artist was under the old militarist regime, but he flowered as an artist under the democratic system. Part of his greatness owed to the desire of wanting to be the 'emperor' of Japanese cinema. Though he embraced democracy, his megalomaniacal sensiblity had been instilled during authoritarian times.
And the explosion of creativity during the Weimar period may owe to the same dynamic. It wasn't merely freedom but freedom availed to authoritarian personalities. Freedom for slackers means just taking it easy. Freedom for authoritarians means using the WILL TO POWER to assert their vision over others. It may be that Japan produced far fewer artistic giants since the 80s since a whole generation grew up under freedom, equality, and getting along as the ideal. There is no WILL TO POWER authoritarian drive that fuels them to greater/higher things. There was less hunger.
Another thing. The concept of creativity in the modern INDIVIDUAL sense is relatively recent in Europe. We tend to link western creativity with modern art, but modern art is a relatively newer phenomenon. For most of European history, artists learned and adhered to art as a handed-down craft. They tried to perfect, refine, or advance pre-existing forms and methods than do something TOTALLY NEW like Picasso did later. More changed in Western Art from late 19th century to 1950 than between 15th century to 19th century. Of course, there were great achievements along the way, and great art(whatever the form or style)has the stamp of individual genius. But even the greats were working within certain agreed upon concepts of what constituted art. Similarly, most old Hollwood films had to adhere to certain genre formulas, which is why most John Wayne movies are roughly similar. Directors were not given the freedom to do what Peckinpah and Leone did later. But within the conventional formulas, the truly great talents did stand out. RED RIVER by Hawks and MY DARLING CLEMENTINE by Ford are clearly more than conventional westerns. They have power and/or poetry missing in the run-of-the-mill stuff. Even so, Old Hollywood didn't allow all-out individuality--with few exceptions like CITIZEN KANE, but even that was more or less within the realm of conventional storytelling.
ReplyDeleteSo, for most of history, both Western art and Eastern art had more in common. Most artists changed only gradually and regarded art more as a fine craft or moral expressions(all those Jesus paintings)than as individual creative expression. And much of art was religious due to the (1) spiritual origins of art (2) church or temple patronage (3) shared values of whole commnity
(4) artist could be killed if he did something 'sacriligeious'.
Western art took on a whole new direction with the rise of secularism. In some ways, the separation of art and church was as important as separation of church and state. Not everything had to be about God, holy stuff, higher stuff, communal stuff. Artist could express himself as himself. Though there were tons of non-religious works of art since the end of Middle Ages, the aura one find even in non-religious art had a kind of spiritualish sanctimony. There was a feel of sacredness and holiness in most portraits, for example. But things really changed in the alate 19th century.
"I'd always thought of myself as someone imaginative with lots of ideas, but around Jed's colleagues, my brain turned to sludge. ...
ReplyDeleteThat's when I decided to write an epic novel [about Chinese-American mother-daughter relationships spanning multiple generations]. Unfortunately, I had no talent for novel writing ... but then I got over it and came up with a new idea... I would write about law and ethnicity in the developing world. Ethnicity was my favorite thing to talk about anyway."
This reminds of Erich Segal's THE CLASS. No great work of literature, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Like Chua, the leading character is a smart Harvardite but not in the same league with the REALLY SMART AND TALENTED Harvardites, so he turns to writing(about the others).
"Those who can't do, write."
With some people, classical music is really class music.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Class_(Erich_Segal_novel)
ReplyDelete"Am I supposed to like you just because you're also white? That makes us brothers somehow?"
ReplyDeleteWhat, are you new around here? As Steve has pointed out, race is a partially-inbred, extended family. So, yeah, a White guy IS your brother -- well, distant cousin, anyway.
"There's a reason why white nationalism is laughed at by the cognitive elitist element of the HBD crowd"
In the not-so-distant future those [White} laughing cognitive elitists may discover to their bitter astonishment the previously hidden Yellow Nationalism of their ostensibly cognitive-elitist Asian former best-buddies-forever.
At which time it will be the White Nationalists' turn for laughing.
He who laughs last...
Read some of Feynman's papers if you think his IQ was 124. Your saying that Feynman has no more raw brain power than George W. Bush. That's utterly ridiculous.
ReplyDelete"What makes you think that the interests of whites coincide, or that we're all on the same team? Am I supposed to like you just because you're also white? That makes us brothers somehow?
What fools like you need to understand is that non-whites will judge you as the outgroup no matter how much of a colorblind, meritocratic individual you think are. In the short term, some whites may benefit personally from ignoring the interests of other whites. When whites lose control of America, ALL whites will suffer.
Read some of Feynman's papers if you think his IQ was 124. Your saying that Feynman has no more raw brain power than George W. Bush. That's utterly ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteThe question is about the value of IQ testing and not about the value of intelligence. Feynman himself scoffed at the value of psychometric testing.
I'm not saying that Feynman has no more raw brain power than George W. Bush, the IQ test Feynman took said that.
Another contradiction among white nationalists. They attack the Jewish CULTURE OF CRITIQUE for upsetting the harmonious conformity of white gentile society. So, the very people who bitch about Asian lack of originality and creativity bitch about Jewish originality and creativity in disrupting bread-and-milk white harmony
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing "original" or "creative" in disruption. Of all the possible things you could have mentioned to argue that Jews are original and creative, that was the worst possible choice.
The notion that whites are boringly harmonious without Jewish disruption is equally clueless. Open a history book sometime.
"As Steve has pointed out, race is a partially-inbred, extended family. So, yeah, a White guy IS your brother -- well, distant cousin, anyway. "
ReplyDeleteSo what? The point is to propagate my genes not my distant cousins. Long term my success would seem to be better served by interbreeding with elite Asians and Jews than by interbreeding with white hillbillies from Arkansas, or even white middle class sales managers from Kansas. One of the lessons o biology is that no ethnic group is stable over time - we can and do form new inbred families which are more important to us than the older ones we came from (case in point - there were no Ashkenazi Jews 2500 years ago, it's a very new "partially-inbred, extended family"). Pretty soon a "white" ethnicity will be as archaic as an "out of Africa" ethnicity. Most elite whites get this at some level, which is why white nationalism is an ideology for the white loser - the guy who sees his genes long term mixing with hispanic and black genes.
Severn:
ReplyDelete"There is nothing "original" or "creative" in disruption. "
Don't be pretentious. You know nothing about either.
Propagating your genes and those of your distant cousins are, to some extent, one and the same. The issue is whether they are enough the same for to have developed, on an evolutionary scale, any inclination to do so, particularly if it involves any cost to your own fitness. This is something that EGI people have never satisfactorily demonstrated (and which I believe to be the case - too much of a diminishing return).
ReplyDeleteMost elite whites get this at some level
I don't really think "elite Whites get this". I certainly don't think they think on that kind of time scale. They're short termist and hedonistic, a quality inescapable due to their individualism (individuals have rather finite spans compared to, say, races) and lack of willingness to subordinate individualism to larger scaled groups.
In any case, currently, based on differential reproductive Darwinian fitness, you probably would be better served by interbreeding with the hillbillies, if your concern was the success of your genes, rather than the material success of your descendents.
"So what? The point is to propagate my genes not my distant cousins. Long term my success would seem to be better served by interbreeding with elite Asians and Jews than by interbreeding with white hillbillies from Arkansas, or even white ..."
ReplyDeleteuh, ok. Is the Onion speaking? You never know here when people are joking, or maybe they are not what they claim.
I am not sure what you mean by "hillbillies." The term does not imply an ethnicity. In spite of the constant scorn attached to whites living in the southern states (which is, I guess, what you mean), their IQs are in the white normal range, and at least high as the average black or mestizo college graduate. Crime and mayhem among southern whites are still vastly less than in "vibrant" neighborhoods. In fact, an oft quoted fact is that white kids whose families make less than 20,000 per year do better on the SATS than black kids from families making 70,000 per years.
Or do you mean people of, say, Scottish descent? English? Serbians who live in Arkansas? Are the only alternative whites "accountants?"
Britain produced more invention and cultural achievements in 300 years than the rest of the world produced in the recorded history.. except may be Italians, Dutch, Germans and French and let us not forget Linneaus the Swede or Copernicus the Pole and Nicola Tesla, the Serb. While there's no accounting for taste, and everyone has the right to breed with whomever, I would not call settling for blacks and hispanics "winner" tactics. They do not carry on European civilization; they like lighter skin and the toys and comforts of a high technology they didn't invent, but otherwise don't care about you or your heritage. You will be as highly regarded by your descendants as Malcolm X's g-g-grandfather was by him.
Please go live in Tenton, Detroit, or New Orleans before you decide. Or Langley Park, Maryland. I actually have some regard for the "hispanics." They do work, but they have caused a devolution of the local municipality, as they do everywhere they become a large minority much less a majority. They are not, however, as totaly annihilating of commerce and civilization, as is a black majority neighborhood. They are the future of this country. Who knows. Maybe a Henry Ford or a James Watt will emerge from among them. Maybe they will produce an Arthur C. Clark or Werner von Braun, and they will take us to the stars. Don't hold your breath though.
I'm at a loss to understand how you or your genes would be "winners." A more accurate term would be resigned loser.
Posts on Asian-anything here are big draws. They rack up many comments. The Asian avengers, fast as lightning, fly to Kung Fu their keyboards every time, and the goalpost-changers hasten to meet them ("IQ is the standard of value, except when it ain't").
ReplyDeleteGood for the numbers. But isn't this show getting a bit tired?
What's really ironic is that some white nationalists lack originality of thought themselves and regurgitate the same truisms over and over and over.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, when people try to explain what they observe, it's like salt in the wound for you. Can't all these people stop dissing yellow people and just jump on the superior yellow IQ bandwagon? No. HBD doesn't stop where you want it to stop.
All these people bitching about Asian lack of creativity and personality sound like clones of Kevin MacDonald.
Huh? For one thing, I don't bitch about yellow creativity, or the lack thereof. For another, what's MacDonald got to do with it?
Are they capable of learning and thinking on their own?
Whine, whine, whine... Where's the beef? You're trying to put a square peg in a round hole. White ethnopatriots as conformists? Are you high?
Another contradiction among white nationalists. They attack the Jewish CULTURE OF CRITIQUE for upsetting the harmonious conformity of white gentile society.
I suppose that's a quasi-plausible argument, though I can't recall ever worrying much about the "harmonious conformity of white gentile society," or anything remotely similar. So for me at least, this is a straw man. I see the "Culture of Critique" as a culture war for dominance. The "harmonious conformity" thing seems like a real stretch.
So, the very people who bitch about Asian lack of originality and creativity bitch about Jewish originality and creativity in disrupting bread-and-milk white harmony.
And again, I don't "bitch" about the relative lack of yellow creativity. I simply notice it, and do my best to work it into my HBD worldview. Waahh, poor you, taking it personally.
They argue in bad faith.
I don't argue in bad faith. Period. Bark up a different tree.
Creativity and originality are bad bad things in Jews and blacks AND conformity and order are bad things in Asians.
No, silly, creativity and originality are not bad things in Jews. Motives matter (galactic "duh" there). The more I think about your arguments, the sillier they seem. If Jews were creatively and originally defending my race and ethnicity, rather than attacking it, the tune I play would be far different. You're conflating ability and behavior.
But both creativity and conformism are good if they happen to be white.
Yellows and Jews hate hate hate creativity and conformism, any time they come from white ethnopatriots. This seems far truer than the arguments you're making.
I see the need for whites to be mindful of their interests but much of what passes for white nationalism is dumb dumb bad faith. A white nationalist bitches that blacks are too lazy but then bitches Asians are too industrious.
I don't "bitch" about blacks being lazy. I don't "bitch" about yellows being industrious. (I would like you to use consistent terminology, though: African, Asian, European; OR, black, white, yellow. Pick one, please)
It's interesting to me that none of the "bitching" I (and many other ethnopatriots) do about white folks bothers you. You could probably fill a book with all the "bitching" I've done about white folks over the years. What are they, chopped liver? What are you, a racist dumb-dumb yellow nationalist arguing in bad faith?
This whole conversation is stupid. You want whites to open their homes to yellows, whether they want to or not. I want whites to make up their own minds. We disagree. Barking up all these trees isn't going to change that, or strengthen your weak position.
("IQ is the standard of value, except when it ain't").
ReplyDeleteno David (pretty obvious which side you are on) IQ is just one of many factors. Would Jews in Israel welcome high IQ arabs.. or high IQ... anyone to share power? I haven't seen any evidence of that but I have seen plenty they encourage exactly that in White majority countries. What could account for the seemingly duplicitous behavior?
Smart does not mean good. Smart does not mean "not evil". Smart does not mean "not sinister". Smart does not mean altruistic.
Lastly, smart (high IQ) does not mean reasonable, or rational. Many Askanazi are extremely high strung, and one might even say, paranoid to the point of hysteria.
In the not-so-distant future those [White} laughing cognitive elitists may discover to their bitter astonishment the previously hidden Yellow Nationalism of their ostensibly cognitive-elitist Asian former best-buddies-forever.
Bingo.
"Another contradiction among white nationalists. They attack the Jewish CULTURE OF CRITIQUE for upsetting the harmonious conformity of white gentile society. So, the very people who bitch about Asian lack of originality and creativity bitch about Jewish originality and creativity in disrupting bread-and-milk white harmony"
ReplyDelete"There is nothing 'original' or 'creative' in disruption. Of all the possible things you could have mentioned to argue that Jews are original and creative, that was the worst possible choice.
The notion that whites are boringly harmonious without Jewish disruption is equally clueless. Open a history book sometime."
Creativity is often 'disruptive' and even 'destructive', as capitalism and empire building are. This is why new artists and thinkers are feared by the status quo. And sometimes, art or ideas can be distruptive despite the lack of such agenda. Galileo and Darwin were not looking to be troublemakers, but their ideas did cause a lot of trouble. Of course, some people go out of their way to rebel and stir things up to create something new. Brando was such a force in acting in the 50s and 60s. Elvis was a stranger case. He was the king of youth rebel music but also a good decent mama's boy and Christian; and he always took orders like a good little dog from colonel parker.
When Kevin MacDonald speaks of 'culture of critique', he's not only speaking of the Frankfurt school but Jewish arts, culture, influence, etc in every area. He's badmouthing Heine, Kafka, Schoenberg, Proust, Chagall, Jewish patrons of modern, Bob Dylan, etc. I suppose you agree all those Jewish talents didn't really amount to much.
The problem is not criticizing Jewish influence per se but bitching about it on the one hand while, at the same time, demeaning the conformism of Asians. To 'white nationalists', the real problem is not Jewish critique or Asian conformism but Jewishness and Asianness. White nationalits simply feel threatened or envious of the success of non-whites. Also, there is an element of 'white supremacism' among some white nationalists, which is why there is this desperate attempt to demean, discredit, and disparage the achievements of all non-whites. So ALL of black music is just primitive jungle music. So, all of Jewish culture is just vile cunningness. So, all of Asian culture is just conformism.
I'm for preserving and defending the West while, at the same time, giving credit where it's true and respecting the achievements of others(whether in their homelands or in the West.)
And it's tiresome at this point to say Jews were never 'creative or original' but only stole ideas from other peoples. Yes, Jews took ideas from other people, but other people also took ideas from Jews. Ideas belong to those who use them, and finding new ways to use existing ideas is itself a form of creativity and originality. It's not like Edison invented everything from scratch. He took the ideas of others and put them together in a new way. In that sense, he was an original.
Another thing. I didn't say whites are boring, harmonious, and communal-conformist. That is Kevin MacDonald's ideal of whiteness as opposed to the critique-ish individuality of the Jews.
Whether MacDonald and his fans are right or wrong, it is ridiculous for them to uphold communal conformism on the one hand for whites but then demean it in Asians. You realize white nationalists sound like 'we are so critical and individualistic as opposed to those dull conformist copycat Asians' and 'we are so communal and stable as opposed to those nastily critical and maverick Jews'. I call that bad faith.
I use it as shorthand for "Ethnic Genetic Interests."
ReplyDeleteIn a nutshell, it's about the math of biology. All organisms have an interest in reproducing themselves, right? In seeing their gene patterns propagated? Well, the more similar someone's gene patterns to yours, the greater your interest in seeing their gene patterns propagated, too.
The question is, why should you care? If it was all about genetic interests, we'd spend all our time lining up outside of sperm banks. We decide we don't want to do that because...well, if it's all about genetic interests, why not?
Likewise, the best thing for your genes might be to help your ethnic group proliferate. But if a person doesn't care about that, there's no logical reason he should any more than there's anything logical about spending all your time at a sperm bank.
"What's really ironic is that some white nationalists lack originality of thought themselves and regurgitate the same truisms over and over and over."
ReplyDelete"In other words, when people try to explain what they observe, it's like salt in the wound for you. Can't all these people stop dissing yellow people and just jump on the superior yellow IQ bandwagon? No. HBD doesn't stop where you want it to stop."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bF9lxl9N6I&feature=related
but great creative artists cannot be nice guys.
ReplyDeleteyawn.. Rubens, Sargent, Sorolla, yawn.. William Merrit Chase, Haydn...
No one's saying Orientals cannot be creative, but I do think they are genetically less capable of creativity than Caucasians. (and btw, even Madison Grant thought Meds were more creative than north europeans).
ReplyDeleteAs I have mentioned earlier, cut orientals off from the feeding trough of the west and their societies would stagnate in less than half a century.
However, even though westerners are more creative, I think our creative arts etc, are at an all time low, largely owing the influence of sixties revolution - dumbing down, pc, and wall street /neoconliberal/beltway tweaking the economy so the bright minds go into finance rather than industry. My uni. had one of the best engineering schools in the country, and it was mostly white when i went (late 80s) everyone I know who was majored in engineering went into something else - the bulk into finance.
"but great creative artists cannot be nice guys.
ReplyDeleteyawn.. Rubens, Sargent, Sorolla, yawn.. William Merrit Chase, Haydn..."
Sargent was a very good artist but not a great one. He played it safe and polite, though he did get into a bit of trouble with Madame X.
Haydn was very excellent and great in the sense of laying down the basic formula for the symphony and the like, but he doesn't belong in the same league as Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, etc.
I don't know about Ruben's life history and never heard of Sorolla and Chase, but I'll take your word for it. There is no IRON RULE in art, and there are always exceptions, just like there are great white basketball players. But the general rule is the great artists tend to be difficult people.
Ringo was nicer than Lennon, but Lennon was creative genius behind the Beatles.
"However, even though westerners are more creative, I think our creative arts etc, are at an all time low, largely owing the influence of sixties revolution"
ReplyDeleteYes and No. No in the sense that 60s were a very exciting period for the arts: French New Wave, rock music, literature, New American cinema, fashion and interior design, etc. Also, the counter-culture wasn't just about FUN. It was also about reconnecting with nature, rejecting conformity, etc. It was the 60s generation that turned away from Organization Man and read stuff by Huxley, Jung, Hesse, etc. If anything, they were searching for truth, meaning, and spirituality. They found the world of their parents materialistic, shallow, philistine, keep-up-with-the-jonesy. And this unleashed lots of good stuff and tons of creativity.
But it did fail in the end. Excesses let to counter-counter-revolution backlash. Americans rightly got sick of all those hippies, yippies, and radicals makeing total fools of themselves. Though drugs were initally for experimentation and exploration, stuff like lsd came to taken like candy and produced a lot of bad trips. And with youth culture as the main focus, many people weren't looking for meaning but for fun and hedonism. And even those seeking meaning happened to be conceited fools like Leary, Ginsburg, and many others. And then the corporations figured they could appropriate all this and rake it in big time. Something was kinda fishy when Sgt Pepper made the music industry very very rich. And though kids embraced THE GRADUATE as their movie, it made Hollywood very very rich too.
Also, people just got burnt out real bad.
But the decline of culture owes as much to revival of conservatism as the influence of the 60s. 80s was a conservative decade, and 'conservative' movies like Rambo were bottom of the pits. Stone's PLATOON--which owes something to 60s counterculture--was a much better film. When we look at the list of conservative 'artists' and entertainers--Andy Williams, Pat Boone, The Rock, etc, etc--, I mean, it's a pretty piss-poor list. Let's suppose the 60s never happened and America had remained culturally conservative as in the 40s and early 50s. Would we have better culture today if our music was Lawrence Welk, Andrew Sisters, Doris Day, and Bing Crosby? Maybe better manners but better culture?
NOw, I'm not knocking these people. I love DAy's Que Sera Que Sera and some of CRosby's songs, but for culture to stay alive, it has to move and change. Conservatives were not very creative. Buckley's attitude in the 50s and 60s was that everything that could be done in the arts had already been done. What a dumb attitude. While he was writing crappy Blackford Oakes novels, Vidal was writing much better stuff.
I think both people who blame everything on the 60s and people defend everything about the 60s got it wrong.
ReplyDeleteThe misunderstanding is best illustrated by Paglia's whine that 60s rockers were creative, curious, spiritual, etc in contrast to today's pop stars who are shallow and trite. She wonders... 'what happened?'
As it turns out, she's half-right, which is to say conservatives are half-wrong. There was indeed something special about the 60s: a fresh creativity and search for deeper meaning. 60s youth didn't just want dance music like young people in 40s and 50s. They wanted their own music as art. Also,they didn't just want movies as entertaiment but as art. But the emphasis on youth and pop culture ensured that immediate pleasure mattered most, and this hedonism came to trump other considerations. It's like LSD use began as a creative/spiritual thing but then degenerated into a party drug. Similarly, though rock and youth cinema strived for meaning, it was becoming obvious to the industry(and to the artists) that the real winners and moneymakers were the orgasmic stuff. And so, money and orgasm won out over much else.
The degeneration of 60s rock culture into shallow 90s pap was prefigured by the the spread of populist Christianity. Initially, churches that broke from the orthodoxy sought deeper meaning and communion with God. But as time passed, reigious freedom turned into religious populism, with lots of hillbillies tapping their feet, black folks hollering and dancing,and megachurches selling Jesus as big mac sandwich.
But, conservatives need to blame themselves too. Why were they so unable to offer an alternative in music, fine arts, literature, and cinema? I suppose there were exceptions like John Milius(though he too got stupid in the 80s with Conan the Bonehead and Red Dawn.)
What was conservative culture in the 80s? Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the 700 Club, and bitching and whining about Hollywood while being unable or unwilling to make any good movies on their own. Those who can't do, bitch.
Sargent was a very good artist but not a great one. He played it safe and polite, though he did get into a bit of trouble with Madame X.
ReplyDeletehe's a painters painter, considered one of the greatest portrait artists of all time. your assement is simply incorrect.
I don't know about Ruben's life history and never heard of Sorolla and Chase, but I'll take your word for it.
Then you don't know much about art. Rubens would attend mass everyday, was devotely religious, quiet, industrious hard working family man, same goes for sorolla and chase - chase was probably the most important teacher in america in the 19th century. He was eclipsed by sargent but again a painters painter, and that goes for W. Homer as well.
Lennon, but Lennon was creative genius behind the Beatles.
you poo poo sargent and haydn then tell me John Lennon's a 'genius"?
but he doesn't belong in the same league as Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, etc
ReplyDeleteBut apparently john lennon does.
"but he doesn't belong in the same league as Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, etc
ReplyDeleteBut apparently john lennon does."
TICKET TO RIDE is a great song.
"Then you don't know much about art."
ReplyDeleteThat's true, but I still say whole bunch of artists were crazy in some way. Even 'nice guys' were strange in some way. Bruckner was a very religious and pious man, but almost EXCESSIVELY so. He was weird in his unweirdness.
she is no more intelligent than the average person.
ReplyDeleteThat's just silly. She's probably 3SD above average.
But yeah, otherwise, you've got a point. Ms. Chua isn't Chinese but Chinese-American. There is a difference.
but almost EXCESSIVELY so. He was weird in his unweirdness.
ReplyDeleteok sir you're grasping at straws here :) seriously also, i agree that many artists lose their tempers, ect, that's true for lots of human beings- maybe another area to explore would the military - yes some officers are 'blood and guts' yelling 'creampuff!" etc. others like the classic english officer, are cool as cucumber sandwiches.
so i would say in the arts, both types are possible, but the idea that being loud, wild shouting unstable is the ingredients for being a great artist is wrong- throw aside abstract crap, like damien hirst and look at real artists, like ballet dancers, representational art takes an enormous amount of self discipline and practice. you can't do that if you're a nut.
It seems to me that Asians don't really get 'psychology'. Asians prefer philosophy, especially ethics. Asians prefer to think in terms of good or bad, virtuous or unworthy. Also, Asian morality is defined less by individual thought than by taking orders from superiors(who presumably know better) or giving orders to inferiors. Two kinds of superiority matter most in Asia, it seems: older age and scholarly knowledge.
ReplyDeleteSo, Asian parenting is more about 'do this' or 'do that' and 'don't do this' and 'don't do that'. There are good things and there are bad things, and kids should be told to good things and not do bad things. An Asian would train a dog with a stick and threats. Westerners have a more of a psychological approach to dog-training. Westerners try to understand the workings of the dog's mind. Maybe this partly cuz Whites are more empathetic, as some have claimed. Empathy allows the seeing/feeling of the world through other people's or animals' eyes.
It's paradoxical that whites, who are more empathetic, are more individualistic while Asians, who are less empathetic, are more communal. Maybe one needs empathy to be truly individualistic and to respect the individuality of others. If you can see/feel as others do, you are likely to acknoweldge and respect their individuality more.
Western thinking is more psychological, and this goes way back. One reason Freud drew so much from Greek mythology was because many of the myths were psychological metaphors. Greeks thought philosophically too and had their field of ethics, but they were more acutely aware of 'subconscious' forces. And this made Greeks very much aware of irony--the discrepancy between what one thinks/says and what really is. Asian culture, by contrast, happens to be more earnest.
Since western man understands the human mind/soul as something more than a storage of moral directives, he has developed two modes of controlling or influencing people(and animals). There are moral directives and sermons on the one hand(the earnest stuff) but also the means of manipulation through subtlety, wit, veiled threats, encouragement, gestures, etc.
What Asians see as 'Western softness' isn't always soft. It's a trickier way of gaining/maintaining control, and it can be far more effective(and psychologically deeper in impact). Asian respect is often founded on fear. Western respect is founded on admiration. If one teacher maintains orders by claim of social superiority and/or threat of violence, he will be feared but not loved. And even if there is love, it will be doggish/slavish kind than the human kind. But if another teacher has the intelligence and skills to gain the respect of his students through 'soft' means, he will be much admired.
The rigid hiearchy of Asian society may have prevented the rise of the 'psychological' way of thinking. Since superiors could get their way simply by handing out orders and inferiors understood 'goodness' in terms of following orders, social power in Asia came to be political, moral, and philosophical. Supposedly, the sage king knew what was right, so who were you to question his authority? Just do as he says.
But in the West, where there was greater individuality and equality among peers, one needed more than political/philosophical way of dealing with people. One had to be able to read people's mind. One had to be psychological, read the vibes and circumvent them, play it like a game. Bismarck and Kissinger were psychological masters in politics.
Of course, among great rivals in Asia, there was a good deal of deceit, cunning, mind-reading, manipulation, and etc, as between Mao and Chiang during their alliance, but this wasn't the Asian ideal; it was more like a necessity until one side took total power and then ruled society through philosophy--Confucianism or Communism.
Jazz is psychological. Rap is just physical.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with the psychological approach to parenting(for most people anyway) is that the parent needs to be really smart, perceptive, and even sly to pull it off. I remember a highschool history teacher. He rarely lost his temper and spoke very softly but he had that Don Corleone thing. He knew how to say just the right words at the right moment to go for the kill. So, no one messed with him. He would sometimes seem to let it go but then return in a roundabout way to needle you with a one-liner(and seemingly in good humor). Of course, even the masters of psychology know when they have to go a bit extra--like when Vito slaps Johnny Fontaine or when Professor Kingsfield gives a dime to Hart to call his mother and tell her he's out of law school--, but they know how to play it like a game. Vito shouts and slaps Johnny, but he quickly regains his composure and talks about family. He, in fact, kills two birds with one stone. Sonny walks in just then after fooling around with a mistress, and so Vito's "a man who doesn't time with his family is not a real man" is both a compliment to Johnny and an admonishment to Sonny.
ReplyDeleteMost parents don't have skills like this because they aint too smart. Jews make the best psychological parents cuz they can play mental chess games. And since their kids are also smart, they admire and appreciate the rules of the game too. Maybe Jews think everyone can do what they can do. Many psychological self-help books are written by Jews and tend to be Jewish-centric(not in the ethnic sense but in the IQ/mental-skill-sense). It's like a black guy thinking everyone can play basketball like blacks can.
But for less smart parents, the psychological method comes down to soaking up all that pop psychology about 'understanding your child' and 'being supportive' and 'fostering self-esteem'. Too often, the parent ends up spoiling the child who, thus pampered and 'understood', comes to feel that his/her own emotional hangups are the center of the universe.
Since most parents are no good at playing mind games, the philosophical approach that Chua suggests may be better. It has a clearer set of rules, authority, and limits. A simpler of what's good, what's bad, who's boss and who's not.
Below the philosophical is the physical, the approach favored by the dumbest parents(of the underclass). These parents don't know much about psychology and have no moral values(philosophy), and so they maintain their authority simply by screaming and beating up their kids(who often grow up to be thugs).
Of course, many parents may have to use a combination of all these things. Even a skilled Jewish parent may have to resort to the belt if the kid gets TOO out of line once awhile. But it would still be the last resort than the first one, as with underclass boors.
PS. It could be jazz is more psychological cuz blacks in the past had to play the slick-slack game of power. They couldn't just say, 'gimme this, white boy'. But rap music represents current black politics where blacks can just scare whitey and demand stuff. Blacks feel less need for playing/toying with white psychology since they can get what they want just by shaking their fists.
If a child is smaller/weaker than his parents(as most children are), he would have to develop psychological skills to manipulate the parent to do him favors--like buying him a certain toy. But if a child were bigger and stronger than the parent, the child could just shake his fist and demand stuff. In a way, white-black relations have changed from bigger/stronger white parent and smaller/weaker black child to smaller/weaker white parent and bigger/strong black child.
Kids sometimes use the philosphical approach on their parents too, especially when pointing out the discrepancy between parental rules and parental actions. Like smoking.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/9392420.stm
ReplyDeleteWhy is the art of music required to endure the ill-informed antics of such inartistic imbeciles as Amy Chua? Her lust for fame as an old-fashioned stage mother of either a famous violinist (yet another mechanical Sarah Chang?) or a famous pianist (yet another mechanical Lang Lang?) shines through what she perceives as devotion to the cultivation of the cultural sensitivities of her two unfortunate daughters.
ReplyDeleteDaughter Lulu at age 7 is unable to play compound rhythms from Jacques Ibert with both hands coordinated? Leonard Bernstein couldn’t conduct this at age 50! And he isn’t the only musician of achievement with this-or-that shortcoming. We all have our closets with doors that are not always fully opened.
And why all this Chinese obsession unthinkingly dumped on violin and piano? What do the parents with such insistence know of violin and piano repertoire? Further, what do they know of the great body of literature for flute? For French horn? For organ? For trumpet? Usually, nothing!
For pressure-driven (not professionally-driven!) parents like Amy Chua their children, with few exceptions, will remain little more than mechanical sidebars to the core of classical music as it’s practiced by musicians with a humanistic foundation.
Professor Chua better be socking away a hefty psychoreserve fund in preparation for the care and feeding of her two little lambs once it becomes clear to them both just how empty and ill-defined with pseudo-thorough grounding their emphasis has been on so-called achievement.
Read more about this widespread, continuing problem in Forbidden Childhood (N.Y., 1957) by Ruth Slenczynska.
______________________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.
An integral amalgam of defining examples of narcissism that Professor Chua has instilled in her two daughters is self-advancement with sexual provocation. Her public signature posture is one of excessive toothiness, for a university professor exceedingly vulgar displays of long legs, and breast projections that might have won her Blue Ribbons as “Best in Show” as a candidate in any Sweater Queen contest during the 1950s. http://www.britishpathe.com/vi…..en-contest She never misses an opportunity to increase the image of her breast size by folding her arms under them; in one oft-reproduced photograph she actually appears to be elevating the left one nudged up by a folded arm. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi…..ychua4.png
ReplyDeleteThe elder Chua daughter, Sophia, has learned her lesson well. http://www.nypost.com/rw/nypos…..15;450.jpg and http://www.facebook.com/amytig…..38;theater,
Birds of a feather . . . A coop of nesting trophy wives!
_______________________
André M. Smith, Bach Mus, Mas Sci (Juilliard)
Diploma (Lenox Hill Hospital School of Respiratory Therapy)
Postgraduate studies in Human and Comparative Anatomy (Columbia University)
Formerly Bass Trombonist
The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of New York,
Leopold Stokowski’s American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall),
The Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Festival Orchestra, etc.