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| Hume and Smith |
H. Allen Orr writes in the New York Review of Books in a characteristic review of about how the first half of Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance is all very fine -- I mean, of course, race is biologically real, but who doesn't already believe that? -- while all this Gregory Clark stuff from the second half of the book is all wrong.
Conversely, it’s hard to see why profound instability in social institutions doesn’t trouble Wade more. He’s much taken, for instance, with the difference between tribal and modern societies, but one of the most tribal peoples on the planet, the Scots with their clans, are now identified with some of the most modern of ideas and attitudes. Were David Hume and Adam Smith precocious carriers of a mutation that swept Edinburgh?
Like I said, figuring out the engines of history is the big leagues of erudition and nobody is all that good at it yet. It's easy for anybody to trip up. Wade does in places, as does Orr here in trying to score what he thinks is a slam dunk on Wade: Hume and Smith!
Of course, the Scottish Enlightenment was a product of the Lowland Scots, who had been settled English speakers for a long, long time. Orr is getting them confused with the Gaelic-speaking Highland Scot clans. As Thomas Babington Macaulay vividly pointed out in his 1855 History of England, his Highlander ancestors tended to be more or less barbarians into the 18th Century. Now Macaulay might be a better example of what Orr is groping for (but then that would be derided as Whig History.)
Similarly, consider the immense institutional differences that distinguish North and South Korea, ones that appeared only decades ago. The people who live north and south of the thirty-eighth parallel have very similar genes, so why do their social institutions differ so dramatically?
That's not really a tough question. From my careful study of history (mostly watching Team America: World Police), I've deduced that there appears to be this Kim family ruling North Korea.
C'mon, North and South Korea have been the go-to libertarian example for at least three decades. Can we come up with some newer ones? Also, as North Korea gears up for a fourth nuclear bomb test, I'm not sure it's such a good idea to insult their intelligence.
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The border country between England and Scotland had it's share of lawlessness leading up the Hume and Smith. Yes, their English may have been better but I'm not seeing much else better there. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Reivers
Steve you were mentonted by Patton Oswalt on the Opie & Anthony Show today.
At minute 2:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5F_w4zOtrA
I pointed this out in the comments to an earlier post. hat tip anonymous...lol
It's incredible to see someone called Orr assume that a Scot called Adams and a Scot called Hume are somehow wild O'Neils and MacDonaghs. No it's not incredible to see it I suppose, a cartoon history like Tartan wearing 1200s Scots is Parr for Orr's course. The Clans were not tribes either. The Edinburgh and Aberdeen Scots are quite well settled and the low landers are basically Anglo-Saxon blended with Picts and a few Gaels. These people were never "uncivilized" just on the losing side against Westminster and this subject to the ridicule that comes from defeat at the hand of the English establishment. What kind of a fucking name is Orr btw? German?
Steve, the Korea example does carry some weight.
It shows unequivocally that culture can make a huge difference, hence lending plausibility to the liberal/Charles Murray claim that it is culture which keeps blacks and africans poor, as opposed to the HBD claim that genes are the primary driver of inequality.
Similar contentions can be made for Dubai and Aden, Yemen, both of which lack oil. Same stock of people. Both were Arab port cities run by the British empire.
Other examples are Japan vs Korea 100 years ago. Tamils in Singapore vs Tamils in Sri Lanka. Argentina vs Chile.
I'm not discounting the HBD explanation, but the echo chamber of the HBD sphere often blinds us to other factors.
You silly sod. Edinburgh developed the high rise tenement. Probably the most dense populated city in Western Europe. Highly civilized. The Reivers were out of business with James I coronation. The Lalands were quite civilized and intensely farmed.
Could being the client state of China have anything to do with the Funhouse that is North Korea? Bufferstates are what they are.
Another Steve mention in some podcast with Patton Oswalt: "pretty disgusting, BUT..."
He appears to be working his way through the Stages of Grief for a Liberal Who Can't Stop Reading Steve Sailer.
http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/7/2/e/72e583ddba76fb01/199.mp3?c_id=7193644&expiration=1400570426&hwt=9a5f3b67a2ef1362d6efdff60a91e1ed
^ Sorry, about above 7 minutes in...
He also cops to reading Jared Taylor and John Derbyshire.
Methinks he doth protest too much.
Edinburgh was a very civilized place in the 1600s and the clans were akin to the Medici and Borgia families. No matter the bloodshed no one called Renaissance Italy uncivilized.
" -- I mean, of course, race is biologically real, but who doesn't already believe that? -"
Rubbish. As i said before, if you read the 2006 reviews of wade's before the dawn, they were all disgusted by wade's insistence on the reality of race.
I tried to read Orr's review for wade's 2006 book, but it's behind lock and key. I'd be interested in reading it if someone could get it.
"As Thomas Babington Macaulay vividly pointed out in his 1855 History of England, his Highlander ancestors "
Steve, you're the most well-read person i know. How do you do it?
Patton Oswalt, another celebrity who reads Steve Sailer.
He claims he disagrees and hates Steve, but I don't know anyone who reads a blog written by someone they hate.
I read and listen to people I disagree with, but I can only take so much. At first it's like "Oh this is fun because I'm exercising my brain by defeating their arguments" but it soon just wears on me to the point where I can't do it anymore.
Someone who follows a blog with the dedication that Patton Oswalt seems to, agrees with the content. He is just covering his butt by proclaiming that Steve is the devil.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2014/01/patton-oswalt-political-correctness-is.html
Steve Sailer: iSteve
January 24, 2014
"Patton Oswalt: 'Political correctness is a war on noticing.'"
SK vs NK:
South Korea was the client of the winning side (I.e. the USA). People forget that NK was economically ahead of SK well into the 1970s and even 1980s by some measures but they were the clients of the losers (USSR) and the 1990s bit hard. These two states have never existed in a vacuum...
"There's this guy named Steve Sailer and he has some, in my opinion, some pretty disgusting views about race and .... and just using...him and this other guy called Jared Taylor use statistics in this very 1930s style eugenics way of classifying the races and saying, you know it just, it's just... it's just really awful. It's a combination of a, you know, smug and incurious worldview that bothers me, really bothers me.
I can't stand him , and he drives me crazy. That said, he can FUCKING write. Every now and then he will say something...um, i want to read the opposition as much as i want to read people who agree with me, so i am always reading [Sailer] and Derbyshire just to get my blood boiling. Anyway, he wrote a line in one of his essay. It said: 'Political erectness is a war on noticing.' On noticing things."
"ok"
" I was like oh shit. I don't agree with this guy, but he nailed it that time.
" he did nail it. He did"
"FUCK"
"So i retweeted it. I said god damn that's true. I put it out there and people...and again its...you have no freedom of association....if you even dare to read this guy. Bad writing and evil writing are not radioactive. If you're still intelligent you cam read Mein Kampf and go, 'what a sad mother fucker.' A lot of the social justice crowd were attacking me for that. 'why have you quoted a known white supremacist? Why do you read him?'"
....
'You read Steve Sailer? You're out' No, i should be allowed to read whomever i want, just to know what these assholes are thinking."
"This guy called Jared Taylor has (reems?) of statistical information that I think...
"what's he trying to prove with it?"
"He's trying to prove mathematically that whites are superior to african-americans and latinos. "
"oh, you could do that with 4+8"
"Just really ugly regressive worldviews. However, to this credit, he got invited by someone, either the Klan or some modern white nationalist movement, to either speak at their convention or join them , because he's this scientists, basically.
"He's a scietnist?"
"Yeah he has a PHD."
"good for him."
"um, i think he has a phd. Pretty sure. He's published a lot of books. Anyway, they said: 'we like what you're doing -- all this immigration of the latinos and the asians and the jews running everything. But [Jared] said, well jews and asians should be running everything because they are superior to whites. They were so happy that he was pissing on blacks and latinos, but they didn't read all of his book. He's all but said that asians, and especially japanese, should breed whites out of existence and just run the planet.
"lol, what an old school japanese way of thinking "
"i just love a guy who offends -- no not love or like his views -- but anyone who even gets the klan... a guy who pisses of the klan."
"I would love to see his speech."
"All that craziness delights me. The fact that racism, transphobia, homophobia exists now. We're recording this right now in spring. It's 140 degrees. There are fires and tornadoes in (calabascis ?)"
...
" they need to prove whites are superior to blacks. but even if you're right who cares. "
The flimsiness of the cultural institutions argument is laid bare when one looks at the performance of immigrants (or their progeny) in first world countries.
And the adoption studies take it one step further, stripping away all trace of any lingering cultural remnants.
Being subjugated by an occupying Communist police state doesn't really count as 'culture'.
"I'm not seeing much else better there." Then you're not looking very hard. The Borders were pacified after the Union of the Crowns. Moreover, they were literate and Christian; much of the Highlands had tumbled back to paganism until they were re-Christianised in the 19th century.
Is there actually any reason to think that Scots were "one of the most tribal people on the planet"? It seems more likely to me that the English were the least tribal people on the planet (by a very large margin) and Scots got famous for clannishness out of that comparison.
We can conduct a thought experiment. If NK falls and is integrated to SK, in a hundred years will people be talking about the dysfunction caused by the 'legacy of communism?'
@Steve "Of course, the Scottish Enlightenment was a product of the Lowland Scots, who had been settled English speakers for a long, long time. Orr is getting them confused with the Gaelic-speaking Highland Scot clans. "
Yes.
The lowland medieval dialect of Middle Scots was termed Inglis.
And long after that, sophisticated lowland Scots would call the Highlander clans Wild Irish, because that is what they were like and where they came from.
I seem to recall that there were rebellions/ mutinies when the army tried to make lowland Scottish regiments wear (Highland-style) kilts. Instead they wore tartan trousers called trews - as (I think) did some Northern Irish/ Ulster regiments.
Pan-Scottish Nationalism (the modern type, which currently runs Scotland and is trying to become 'independent' of England) didn't really get going until after the 1914-18 war (initially explicitly linked with Mussolini fascism).
The perils of basing your history knowledge on Wikipedia. The border counties weren't lowland and they had nothing to do with what we understand as lowland Scot culture. Most of the reivers got shipped to Ireland, and then America.
I'm not sure how n. Koreans can be compared to african-Americans. N
Koreans are poor because they live in a completely closed society. No one believes they are unintelligent, I don't think. African-Americans are relatively poor despite living in an open society where rules are routinely bent for their advantage. And their intelligence is known to be deficient.
Blacks live in a democracy as a relatively dilute percentage of the white majority. Their dysfunction makes no sense given that they live in the richest nation.
In this case culture is a racial construct.
NK is a Chinese bufferzone.
C'mon, North and South Korea have been the go-to libertarian example for at least three decades. Can we come up with some newer ones? Also, as North Korea gears up for a fourth nuclear bomb test, I'm not sure it's such a good idea to insult their intelligence.
Obviously there's a good point there about the superiority of a liberal free market economy over central planning, but NK's bizarre history also supports the stereotype of Asian conformity and collectivism.
And it's just as instructive to compare North Korea with other, non-Asian countries run along similar lines. I mean, Zimbabwe is a basket case too, but it's never going to threaten anyone with technologically advanced weaponry or manage a coherent foreign policy.
@boobio1 - Thanks for the link. Anthony's laughing throughout Patton's riff on Steve means, to me, that he knows of (and probably reads) Steve.
You can follow Anthony's very un-PC twitter feed at @anthonycumia.
I would wager we see a North Korean car before we see a sub Saharan. Smart people play catch up very well.
(No, Mercedes Benz' assembled in Port Elizabeth don't count.)
Gilbert P
This reminds me of irrationality found in Jared Diamond. He used selective pressure on tribal populations in New Guinea to "prove" that selective pressures had no impact on people anywhere else.
Orr is pointing to two tribes in close proximity and saying "See? Their obvious differences prove they are not different at all!"
The irony of bringing up Hume should not be ignored. The critics of Wade and population genetics as a whole are committed irrationalists in the tradition of Hume. They argue that we cannot draw conclusions about the unobserved from the observed. Any such effort is ruled scientifically out of bounds.
It is my belief, though I don't really have sources to back it up, that lowland Scotland has been English-speaking since about 1066.
I believe that dispossessed Anglo-Saxon landowners crossed the border to escape Norman rule. Their serfs stayed on the land in England, saying, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
I believe that Lowland Scots are a mixture of upper class Anglo-Saxons and native Celts.
I would be happy to be corrected on any of this, but this would explain why Lowland Scots have been English speakers for about 1000 years.
“modern anthropology, as defined the German-Jewish expatriate Franz Boas, for three decades head of the anthropology department at Columbia University, declared nineteenth-century race theory without foundation.” Cantor admitted that “this behavioral egalitarianism and universality was itself an ideology,” and that the Boasians never actually disproved social-Darwinian race theory, but rather insisted that it be “excluded from civil discourse as a result of what the Nazis and other such hate-mongering groups did with it.”
The question should be does Boas disprove the reality of racial differences? Cui bono from his answer and activism?
@hardly:
I'm not discounting the HBD explanation, but the echo chamber of the HBD sphere often blinds us to other factors.
You are noticing things you are not allowed to notice.
It’s a little grotesque that the only argument the Left can come up with to demonstrate the overwhelming importance of institutions in determining economic progress is the economic stagnation of clever people when subject to the brain-dead economic system most popular among the Left through much of the 20th Century.
You mean to say that there was no gene flow between highland Scots & lowland Scots?
On the subject of genes, you are a total ignoramus.
The NY Review of Books review is very perceptive, and points out major problems in Wade's theorizing. Not to say it's a worthless book, and that I don't in the main agree with him. But your flippant dismissal of the objections is pathetic.
The people who live north and south of the thirty-eighth parallel have very similar genes, so why do their social institutions differ so dramatically?
The social institutions are similar. Unwed mothers are rare in both, and average age of marriage is within one year.
NORTH KOREA:
Love & Lust in North Korea
Jae-young grew up in North Korea but now lives in the South [says:]
[...]
there can be quite a lot of problems for a North Korean girl if she gets pregnant before she is married,
[...]
in the urban centers [...] you even find the odd girl who has had a child before marriage. Sex before marriage does take place, but it is not that common.
[...]
it is hard to find scenes on TV or in movies where people physically express their love.
the average North Korean man marries at age 29, and the average woman at 25.5
-----------------------------------------------------------
SOUTH KOREA:
South Korea's Unwed Mothers Organize:
There are approximately 16,000 unwed mothers raising children on their own in South Korea [0.06% of women] . Because of a strong social stigma, these women face tremendous economic and social hardships, and most are pressured to have abortions
the average age of the first marriage is 30.1 for men and 27.3 for women
------------------------------------------------------------
Do any of the Communist regimes in Africa make it's blacks act like this? Does the poverty of NK make it's Asians form gangs and get teen pregnant?
but the Korean Peninsula example is just the social history version of asteroids : the smartest people are vulnerable to exogenous catastrophes, doesn't tell us anything about what any given society can do to construct efficient institutions.
Dubai/Yemen does illustrate the power of manna from geological heaven, but again, doesn't tell us much about how wisely any given society handles all that manna.
what are the Tamils supposed to illustrate again ? they outpeform the singhalese in Sri Lanka and the Malays in SIngapore but not the Chinese.
Chile and Argentina -- they have about the same per cap GDP, Chile has been growing faster in the last 25 years and Argentina more or less stagnant, but both countries have had relative income declines since their 19th century peak !
one of the most tribal peoples on the planet, the Scots with their clans, are now identified with some of the most modern of ideas and attitudes
Actually that remark is far more apt with respect to Jews. They're simultaneously the most insular, in-bred, parochial, clannish people you can ever meet - and the most fanatical opponents of these same traits in non-Jews.
That's a very sexy observation.
Allow me to sit at the table for a moment.
A nation devoted to the abstraction of radical equality is used as an example of what not to do by a bunch of halfwit radical equalitarians.
Brilliant!
Edinburgh was founded by a Northhumbrian Anglo Saxon lord.
Edwin's Burgh.
Note too that a radically egalitarian political regime is used by egalitarians as an example of a failed culture.
This shit writes itself.
Even then, I'd probably dip my toe into NK life more happily than I would Zimbabwe.
One was even sent to the moon.
Sweden is an example of cool headed Northern Europeans adopting socialism. North Korea is what happens when you have Asians take Marx to heart. Zimbabwe is Black Marxism.
Scotland is a British version of socialism. free college for the top 20 percent, decent education, some oil money, the chance to run down to London and act smarter than the Ainglish and then claim racism if anyone there calls you Jock.
If Oswalt can agree the statement "political correctness is a war on noticing" and he reads Steve Sailed then he understands the context in which Sailer makes the statement. So, if he agrees with the statement and appreciates the context in which the statement is made, how disgusting does he honestly think Steve Sailed is? In defense of Oswalt, saying anything other than the accepted dogma on race in America is a likely career killer for a white comic. And people tend to really like three things: being rich, being famous and being well regarded.
Steve, the Korea example does carry some weight.
It shows unequivocally that culture can make a huge difference, hence lending plausibility to the liberal/Charles Murray claim that it is culture which keeps blacks and africans poor, as opposed to the HBD claim that genes are the primary driver of inequality.
North versus South Korea is an example of political differences, not cultural ones. Your example falls apart because black Americans live under the same political system as do white ones.
There are black people living in a lot of different countries (in and out of Africa) with different political systems and different cultures, and blacks are poor everywhere. Nobody has yet been able to come up with a "culture" in which blacks are other than poor, least of all blacks themselves. And that points strongly to a genetic cause rather than a cultural one.
... much of the Highlands had tumbled back to paganism until they were re-Christianised in the 19th century.
Paganism in 19th Century Scotland? That's really wild. Think of English missionaires voyaging to the furthest ends of the earth to Christainize the heathen when they just could have just gone to Scotland to do the same thing.
"Edinburgh was founded by a Northhumbrian Anglo Saxon lord.
Edwin's Burgh."
A common yarn, but almost certainly untrue. Hark to WKPD:
"Edin", the root of the city's name, is most likely of Brittonic Celtic origin, from the Cumbric language or a variation of it that would have been spoken by the earliest known people of the area, an Iron Age tribe known to the Romans as the Votadini, and latterly in sub-Roman history as the Gododdin. It appears to derive from the place name Eidyn mentioned in the Old Welsh epic poem Y Gododdin.
The poem names Din Eidyn as a hill fort ... in the territory of the Gododdin. The change in nomenclature, from Din Eidyn to Edinburgh, reflects changes in the local language from Cumbric to Old English, the Germanic language of the Anglian kingdom of Bernicia that permeated the area from the mid-7th century and is regarded as the ancestor of modern Scots. The Celtic element din was dropped and replaced by the Old English burh.
In other words: it started as Welsh and mutated to German.
"much of the Highlands had tumbled back to paganism until they were re-Christianised in the 19th century."
Um, what? I'm not aware of any significant paganism in Scotland after they were Christianized. It was bad enough to be a Catholic, let alone a pagan.
North and South Korea are, to this day, very similar societies at everything but a superficial level. They are both conformist societies where people have a great deal of respect for authority. They are societies that value education, and are very effective at pursuing single minded goals - the South Koreans' goal is "get richer than Japan", the North Koreans' goal is "be militarily stronger than Japan". North Korea is not a "poor" country the way Subsaharan African countries are poor, it is a "deprived" country. It has an educated, literate, disciplined workforce whose efforts are mostly channeled by a corrupt and cynical regime into tasks that leave little surplus for the general population. Certainly North Korea has a vicious regime that is flagrantly squandering its population's gifts, but it is nowhere near a "failed state" like you will find in Liberia, the CAR, or Sierra Leone. The North Korean government even learned from the disastrous famine in the '90s, and now allows farmers' markets and a significant amount of small business. How many Sub-Saharan African states are able to recognize their mistakes and implement policy corrections to fix those mistakes? How many Sub-Saharan African governments are capable of actually implementing any policy prescriptions on a national level?
What Patton Oswalt said about Steve is probably the best marketing you could do aimed at the Opie and Anthony audience, and at the same time it gives him plausible deniability.
You got at least a thousand persistent readers just from that denouncement.
BurplesonAFB
The thing is, no one who is already a reader of Sailer's is going to be dissuaded by Patton Oswalt's PC denouncement. We are all here because in part we all understand the pressures and environment the Oswalt's of the world work under and within. But like you said, who knows how many people will Google Sailer and read him and realize a lot of what he says resonates with how they themselves view the world. Oswalt can call it evil and ugly but who other than the brainwashed, lying left would call Steve Sailer's worldview evil?
Burgh...
The Northumbrians had the run of the North from Bamburgh and Lindesfarne.
Ok, so I read H. Allen Orr's review. It begins snidely, it's snide in the middle, and it ends snidely. Along the way, it makes no points of particular interest and tosses floating underhand pitches that it treats as if they were devastating Nolan Ryan fastballs. It's completely unconvincing on any level.
Really though, all these arguments about "are there behavioral differences innate in racial groups" are best addressed in one sentence: "Look around you, honestly."
Nobody that lives in a multi-cult polyglot city can possibly think there is no racial component to behavior. It's as obvious as the sun in the sky. But just like looking at the sun, somehow looking at actual racial behaviors taking place right in your face also blinds people.
@peterike
Really though, all these arguments about "are there behavioral differences innate in racial groups" are best addressed in one sentence: "Look around you, honestly."
Back when people believed the earth was flat, their justification too was "Look around you, honestly."
There is a reason to not take what you see and observe around you at face value, and instead do a deeper analysis. It is called SCIENCE.
The Anglo-Saxon, such as they were, borderers weren't exactly the tea and crumpets set. The biggest feud in American history was between, after all, the Hatfields and McCoys.
As a counter example, it is well known that large swaths of Europe were evangelized/civilized by Irish monks. E.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbanus
BTW, the very last exemplar of that model -- the monastery as center of civilization, is right here in our home state. I don't know if Junipero had any Celtic blood (not an entire impossibility given the history of Northern Spain), but the model he followed wasn't too far different than that of Columban.
The medieval Europeans knew that the earth was a sphere. Flat earth is a yarn created by an American author in the 19th century.
Bonus points for providing the name!
Curvature is suggested by objects dipping over the Horizon. Curvature is suggested by the shape of the moon and the shadow that crosses it in a crescent shape.
Hills with vantage points also suggest a curved surface.
Grow up with your sophomoric attitude.
It's called empiricism.
One cannot repeat the experiment of race replacement. There is no reset button. Also, one can observe history. That's called longitudinal analysis.
Don't give up your territory to foreigners. Don't give up your territory to other humans with such obvious physically different markers.
@Dan, James I coronation was in 1603. Here is Edinburgh in 1544:
http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/1_MAP/1_map_edinburgh_1544.htm#map
Here is Edinburgh in 1582:
http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/1_MAP/1_map_edinburgh_1582.htm#map
Here is Edinburgh in 1670, where we finally start seeing those taller buildings you are talking about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edinburgh_in_the_17thC_(detail)_by_Wenceslas_Hollar_(1670).jpg
Hume was born in 1711. Smith was born in 1723.
So, within 200 years, this area of Scotland when from a Medieval city in a borderland with Reivers before James I to an area without many Reivers with a city with high-rise (for the time) buildings that could give birth to a Hume or Smith after James I. And I'm supposed to believe that this was because of some sort of great genetic shift or evolutionary change rather than simply cultural change produced by closer ties with England that were part of a broader cultural shift in Europe? Sorry, not buying it.
As a disclaimer, I have Lowlands Scottish ancestry.
Steve, I was sure you would note this irony yourself but since you hadn't done (or I hadn't noticed), I pointed it out.
Heh.
For those who really want to dig in to Border country and Scottish genetics, try these:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gallgaedhil/border_reiver_deep_ancestry.htm
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-17740638
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