December 27, 2012

Two-part interview with me in the Washington Times

In the Washington Times, Joseph Cotto interviews me:


29 comments:

  1. What on Earth is this??

    When looking at different neighborhoods, your real estate agent will explain to you that, all else being equal, the higher the locals students' test scores, the more expensive the homes. There are a lot of reasons for this, such as that smart neighbors tend to do fewer stupid things like celebrating New Year's Eve by shooting their guns off in the air.

    "Smart" neighbors don't do fewer stupid things. They merely do fewer "high risk" things. It's all about calculating odds, something people living in the ghetto assuredly do not comprehend.

    Risk-taking in the wealthier and upper middle-class neighborhoods earns our societal approval because it is laced with mathematics and statistically obscure odds. Certainly not what we would call "stupid."

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  2. theo the kraut12/27/12, 3:47 PM

    So that photo session with a pro did pay off; hooray for distinguished gentlemen--what a difference a pic makes :-)) The goody-two-shoes likely imagined you had fangs. I' make the photo a tad smaller, though, as they do in GNXP, maybe with a frame and some short blurb presenting you and your blog for first time readers.

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  3. Funny interview, Steve.

    You have practiced methods of avoiding the hidden daggers of the interviewer.

    They don't get the scream quotes they're looking for.

    You must have been practicing this manner for years. Or, is it just the way you are?

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  4. ADL condemnnation of the Washington Times coming up in 3... 2... 1.

    Not for anything they asked or you replied, but just for giving you a platform at all.

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  5. Congrats on the long-overdue mainstream recognition, Steve.

    By the way, doesn't Joseph Cotto look like a 90's-era Rushton after a few months of beefing up at the gym?

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  6. Yawn. A very topical interview.

    Smart move plugging that charity though.

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  7. You are better in writing.

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  8. Remember us anonymous commenters when you are a big shot reappearing pundit on a cable news network and a columnist for the huffiington post. And as always, keep keeping it real.

    Congratulations, this is a start for others to start saying your name out loud.

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  9. Ex Submarine Officer12/27/12, 8:16 PM

    Congratulations.

    iSteve is just too good and too much fun w/commentariat to go unnoticed forever.

    But can it scale?

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  10. continued
    So I separated homicide rate vs. country IQ by racial grouping, to make this relation clearer. (I cribbed this idea from La Griffe Du Lion: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm) I used marker color to divide the broad racial categories – Europeans, Asians/North Africans, Amerinds, and Africans. Within those I selected regions, especially when I knew that there was relatedness, I grouped close ethnicities together as best I could.

    Because of the topical nature of USA homicide rates, I also broke out the largest racial groupings within the USA – whites, blacks and Hispanics (mostly Amerind). Once broken out like that, it is evident that within that country, the homicide rates appear to be largely of a racial origin. The USA’s white homicide rate of around ~2/100k fits perfectly within the European range, including the areas from which most of its white people are drawn (Western, Northern-Germanic, Southern Europe). The USA’s black homicide rate is very similar to that of the West/Central African areas from which the slaves were taken (e.g. Benin, Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal and Cote I’voire, Siera Leone, Angola etc.). The Hispanic homicide rate appears to be very similar to that of Mexico, where most of the Hispanic population comes from. I used the FBI stats to tease this information out.

    http://i.imgur.com/dCa9U.jpg

    Because the data suits a log scale better, I graphed it that way here:

    http://i.imgur.com/J5Iuv.jpg

    For some more information, it is worth reading the pdf at the following site:
    http://www.colorofcrime.com/

    In light of all of the above, it seems that race/ethnicity is a very good predictor of homicide rate. It is very hard to make an honest case that gun ownership is much of a factor at all in causing homicides. The evidence suggests that people(s) kill people, not guns. In heavily armed Switzerland, white USA, Serbia etc., the homicide rate is low. In mostly disarmed Netherlands, Poland and Italy, the homicide rate is also low. The common factor here is the European background.

    In sub-Saharan African areas with more guns (Equatorial Guinea, Angola), homicide rates are high. In sub-Saharan African areas that have very few guns (Ghana, Ethiopia, Eritrea, in fact most of sub-Saharan Africa) homicide rates are also high. The common factor here is the sub-Saharan racial background.

    The policy implications for countries wishing to minimize their homicide rates are obvious, but also sure to send the left into apoplexy.

    Note that inductivist has already done this relation, but not using nearly as many countries (especially sub-Saharan Africa and Central/South America with the outsized homicide rates. See here:

    http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2006/09/smart-countries-have-less-homicide.html

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  11. I kinda detected an undercurrent of desperation in the media concern-trolling after the election. While the text was all "can the Republicans rebrand and pull in millions of meso-Americans, or will the Central Americans reject White men?" I think there was a subtext of "Oh God, if the Latinoas destroy the Republican party, what other American institutions will they destroy or trash?" Maybe the Democrats see the writing on the wall, and want to co-opt the Republicans into supporting the huge mistake/grand victory. Sort of like, The Undiscovered Jew at Half Sigma or Whiskey over chah are constantly pimping their revisionist Protocols of the Learned Elders of WASPS and SWPLs history.

    It's probably just wishful thinking, and they have no idea what might be coming.

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  12. Isn't "Washington times communities" just an open forum for people not good enough to get their oped submissions published by regular Washington times (which isn't that high a bar to start with)? Or, to put another way, who the hell is Joseph cotto?

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  13. Wasn't the Washington times owned by the Moonies?

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  14. 'Joseph Cotto'.

    The original surname was 'Cotton' as in 'Cotton Mather' - old English pioneer stock, 'Cotton' not meaning the fibre bearing tropical plant (unknown in old England), but derived from the Anglo-Saxon 'Cott - ton' meaning a 'cott' (cottage) , by a farmstead (-'ton').
    Under Italianate influence, the terminal 'n' was dropped.

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  15. "Cotto: How do you regard his findings, along with those of your critics who might say that memes are more important than genes?"

    What?

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  16. Congratulations Steve!

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  17. The tone here is perfect, IMO. A large part of the reaction to hbd ideas is to point and sputter, or to start calling people nazis or racists. A calm, reasonable tone referring to facts and bringing common sense and real-world examples to bear is the best way to stand against that stuff, as anyone not already emotionally invested in attacking hbd will be struck by seeing one side screaming insults while the other calmly states observable facts and obvious conclusions.

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  18. Good interview Steve. It's a shame no sports writer at ESPN will dare venture into some of the territory you've broached.

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  19. The people should distribute the books of ''golden boyidsh'' for the ukrainians with cold in this winter.
    They will find one way of to use them appropriately. Not for brain but for heat your hearts.

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  20. To the anonymous who posted the graphs, since you have a methodology and spreadsheets, could you plug in numbers from the past?

    I'm talking about 1930, 40, 50, so on by decade.

    I don't know how many numbers you need to plug in, or whether the data is readily available for these years but I have a hunch it might be interesting.

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  21. Well, basically I give up, read about how Virginia deported the illegals and they are back. Also, read about how Luis Gutierrez and Paul Ryan are supporting a legalization process. And some Right wing people prefer tax cuts to do something about immirgation but are getting con into supporting big guestworker programs. I have been against this before prop 187 in California and I'm getting tired of both left and right politcally ganging up on us, it doesn't seem to be the opposition there were in the time of Bush, we can only hope that Mexican birthrates keep dropping as they become Smericanzed because the politicans don't want to help us and this has been going on since Ronald Reagan back in 1986.

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  22. sunbeam: I suppose I could if I could get access to the figures. It was a lot of effort to plug in all that data. If you want to chase it up, I could have a look at it at least. It was a lot of effort to do the work that lead to just those graphs there. What do you suspect it will show?

    Thanks for looking at those graphs and drawing attention to them. Quite frankly, I think they are amazing and very powerful. As far as I can tell (with google image search), it's the first time anyone has graphed those variables and included countries with homicide rates higher than 10. Inductivist's graph has the USA's homicide looking like an outlier, when in the context of the world homicide rates it's really pretty low, even in 1999 when it was at a high for the 20th century.

    http://madeinamericathebook.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/homicides-1900-20062.jpg

    One thing that seems to stand out is that you can't really have civilization if you aren't civilized. It seems quite possible to have a low-end civilization with low IQ people. But savage is as savage does - it's difficult for anyone living amongst savages (as judged by the homicide rates) to invest in the sort of things a civilization takes for granted. It's hard to hold a long term view and delay gratification when circumstances mandate a focus on short term needs.

    Some other questions this information poses are these: by what right are low homicide countries compelled to take immigration from high homicide countries? Why are we compelled to take refugees from these areas? What about our human rights? Why isn't the burden of proof on leftists, governments and the UN to prove that people from high homicide countries are safe before we import them? When the property values of houses we live in plummet after people from these high crime countries move in to our neighborhoods, overloading the local police force with 10 times the work - and we can't do anything about it - can we sue? Are class action suits possible?

    One other idea, though I'm not really sure that this is how the low-homicide countries got that way - perhaps savage countries might become civilized by executing murderers (and perhaps other criminals) and removing them from the gene pool over a period of generations. Perhaps what Central/South America and sub-Saharan Africa really needs is the swift and voluminous application of the death penalty? One can't help but compare the periods of liberal application of execution in Britain (and Europe) and the rise of its Empire.

    http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Death-penalty-map.png

    I also note that it seems that thus far my comment over at Diego Basch's site is not approved.

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  23. Another accomplishment of Dr. Porsche was the invention of the hybrid. But that wasn't what he called it and he didn't intend it for automobiles.

    Porsche invented a way to better power tanks. He called it an "electric transmission". This is basically the system in a Toyota Prius.

    The problem with tanks at the time was that there was no gas or dieasel engine powerful enough. A tank was large enough to have two engines but it would be impossible to duplicate the drive shafts and gearboxes. So Porsche conceived of a gas engine that drove a generator that produced the electricity that drove a series of electric motors.

    In WWII Porsche also produced a Tiger tank prototype but he lost out to Henschel. In any case the German tank designs were always less reliable than those from America and Russia.

    If you consider the German Panther's reliability in the first days at Kursk you be baffled by their present day reputation for quality. A Sherman with a Ford V-8 was goods back in the day. The German machines fell apart.

    Albertosaurus

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  24. To anonymous:

    I'm sorry, I didn't know it was that much work. I was kind of thinking you had found data sources, and made spreadsheets, and it was simply a matter of plugging new data into them and letting them chug.

    As to what I'm curious about:

    Look, it's anecdotal, but to me now even the thugs look "soft" or something. Maybe it's the eye of the beholder, or some kind of contempt for the younger generation that happens as you age, but the people I see on the street... a younger me wouldn't have taken them seriously. I can't explain it. They just don't really seem to know how to be violent, for want of a better description.

    People get killed, but it just seems kind of lame or something. Almost pathetic in a way. Like some mindless idiot suffocating someone under flab. Not a threat, per se, more like someone didn't bother to move out of a slow moving bulldozer's path.

    It just seems to me that if today's thugs were transported back to 1972, they had better be packing a gun, because otherwise they'd get eaten up.

    So I kind of expect your numbers have dropped as time has gone by. For all ethnicities, though I expect the pattern to be similar in past years.

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  25. the mainstream media is so boring compared to the honesty that can be found from Steve and your commenters. on this site anything can be discussed: race, immigration, jews (i'm one myself). the msm i hope might get jealous of being so much less intresting than this blogger from California.

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  26. Congrats Steve, you had it due for a long time

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  27. "Wasn't the Washington times owned by the Moonies?"

    Yes, and the rest of the media are owned by people of another tribal cult.

    And funny how oboonies are just as starstruck as the moonies were.

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  28. Sunbeam:

    "I'm sorry, I didn't know it was that much work. I was kind of thinking you had found data sources, and made spreadsheets, and it was simply a matter of plugging new data into them and letting them chug."

    If you want to chase up the data for me, I could have a look at doing it. In addition to the couple hours of looking up data manually and plugging it into the spreadsheet, there was a lot of effort in figuring out where to put the exceptions, and putting them in their proper groups.

    Also, I don't think it will change much. Look at the USA data over a century. Between 5 and 10/100k for the whole time. There are some estimates that were higher previously, but without data... I'm reluctant to take them seriously. In the scheme of things, I would suspect much the same picture to emerge. War being a probable exception.

    Maybe the difference between now and 1972 is that we have liberal government but not-so-liberal crime laws. Clinton introduced 3 strikes laws for example. So people are on better behavior.

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  29. you did an excellent job in that interview. well-done!

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