Writes Isaac Chotiner, in his introduction to his interview with Amy Wax, "A Penn Law Professor Wants to Make America White Again" (The New Yorker). Yikes. It sounds like she was right to be wary, but she did the interview. I haven't read the transcript yet. I'll update when I have.
UPDATE: The boldface is Chotiner, the rest Wax:
My reading of this was that you are not only embracing cultural-distance nationalism but saying it may, in fact, be necessary to save the country. Is that correct?It's a fair interview. A good interview. Chotiner tried very hard to out Wax as a racist and she had a full opportunity to be precise about what she's saying and why it's not racist. Clearly, Chotiner has a broader definition of "racist" than Wax and Wax's effort to get to a tighter definition of racism — to exclude ethnicity and culture — is not going to work on Chotiner (and on many New Yorker readers). You can see that easily from the transcript.
Well that’s a little bit of an overheated way of saying it....
Why are successful, peaceful, orderly, prosperous, technologically advanced, democratically sound countries so rare and so few, and why do they clump up in one tiny corner of the globe, namely Europe, the Anglosphere? We also have Japan, which is a wonder, I think, in many ways, a very admirable country. Perhaps Taiwan. And why is the rest of the world essentially consisting of, in various degrees, failed states? Why do we have a post-Enlightenment portion of the world and a pre-Enlightenment portion of the world? And I guess, to be really crude about it, you would use Trump’s succinct phrase: Why are there so many shithole countries? Of course the moment you say that, people just get outraged: Oh, my God, you are a racist for saying that. And that, of course, lets them off the hook; they don’t have to answer the question, which is convenient..... Do the people make the culture? Is it something that drops from the sky, or is it something about how people think, what they do, the habits that they have, the values that they have, the practices that they engage in?...
I would not use the word “innate.” To me, “innate” is a term that looks to heritable, or genetic factors. Now you can broaden it and say innate to a culture, but I would probably not say that, because it is so misleading. So, I’m really not saying anything about biology. Nothing at all....
Can you define racism for me? Is so-and-so a racist? Where are we getting with that? Define racist. I have no idea what you mean. It is a bludgeon that is a promiscuous term. You define what a racist is, and I will spend two seconds addressing that question because it is sterile.
You think that in the U.S. today that’s a sterile question?
Yes, I do, because it prevents us from dealing with real, down-to-earth, concrete problems....
So I would say our country’s culture is best preserved if most of the people in our country are of European origins, because those are the people that created our system, but that certainly doesn’t exclude bringing in other people....
What I find really interesting... is how do big Swiss people produce little Swiss people?... I’m Jewish. Why are Jews so Jewy? How did that happen? Why do French women, at least until recently, look so French? I mean, what is going on? I have a friend who’s Dutch, a Dutch artist, and he’s very well off, and, every morning, he gets up and cleans the front window of his house. It sparkles. I said, “Why are you doing that?” He said, “Because I’m Dutch.” So people do differ, there are these differences, and we just take them for granted....
What about [Trump's] calling into question whether a judge of Mexican heritage could make a fair judicial decision? Do you think that is racist?
Well, first of all, Mexican is not a race. It’s an ethnicity. It’s actually a national identity, isn’t it?
I think if the person had been from El Salvador or Venezuela, the President would have made the same comment. I think we’re getting lost in niceties here. We’re both smart people, Amy, or at least I’m somewhat smart. You know what he was saying. Come on.
O.K., but you’re patronizing me because you’re trying to use the word “racist”—
O.K., bigoted, would bigoted help with this?
—where race is not the operant category. You see, you’re saying, “Oh, you have to expect that, when you say something about a Mexican, it’s something about race.”
So what do you think Trump was trying to say there?
Well, I don’t really know. I guess he was trying to say something like, “I worry that people from particular backgrounds might have divided loyalty.” Just like people who are Jewish are sometimes accused of being too loyal to Israel, to the detriment of the United States. That is not a racist question. That is a question where the answer to that is, No. 1, both normative and positive. Normatively, we, as a country, give the benefit of the doubt to people from different backgrounds that they are loyal to our country, without evidence to the contrary, so that’s a presumption that a President shouldn’t be indulging.
Once again, I think we’re now having a discussion about the content of what he said, and we can’t have that discussion if you just go off on this ridiculous heresy hunt: “Is he a racist? Isn’t he a racist? Is that racist? Is this racist?” That’s really, as far as I can tell, eighty-five per cent of what the discussion now is about on the progressive left. It is so pointless, and it’s so shallow. O.K.?...
I just don’t want to go down the road of defending President Trump. He’s just one person. The real reason President Trump was elected, I think, to the extent I know anything about politics at all—and I know very, very little—is that a lot of people really were relieved to see someone stand up to the thought police of the progressive left wing.
The headline, however, overreaches. It's execrable pandering. Embarrassing clickbait.
AND: There's something so desperate and, simultaneously, arrogant about the "smart people" argument: "We’re both smart people, Amy, or at least I’m somewhat smart. You know what he was saying. Come on."
Posts
221 comments:
1 – 200 of 221 Newer› Newest»It's not that non-whites can't be "scrupulous, empirical, and orderly" and use "rigorous and realistic thinking", they just need to come to America to do it, maybe.
Perhaps I read it wrong.
I am Laslo.
I hope she recorded the interview as well. "Edited for clarity".
"...while offering evidence that ranged from two studies by a eugenicist to personal anecdotes."
I'm sure that pretty much covers what a scholar like Wax bases her views on.
What an unbelievable - but not surprising - smear of her and her views. Nothing she says has anything to do about "making America white" again. It's absurd.
She's talking about behavior and cultural not race. To leftwingers like Chotiner such language is really a "dog whistle" about race. It's really tiresome.
Wax was right. Let's listen to her tape and then compare it to the article.
White people do litter less than POCs based on my personal observations. I wonder what the research shows. Maybe they litter less. Did Inspector Chotiner get to the bottom of that?
And Isaac Chotiner. I wonder if he’s related to Murray Chotiner. That would explain a lot.
I had a friend in the Navy in 1972 whose primary complaint about Richard Nixon was that he had once hired Murray Chotiner.
The guy went to Yale Law School, so that explains a lot about him. He also claimed to have finished first, third and eighth in a circle jerk at Yale. The rest of us were in awe.
Here's a great quote:
"There you go again. Can you define racism for me? Is so-and-so a racist? Where are we getting with that? Define racist. I have no idea what you mean. It is a bludgeon that is a promiscuous term. You define what a racist is, and I will spend two seconds addressing that question because it is sterile."
Exactly. That's why the left-wing Establishment has moved on from "Racism" to "White Supremacist". Everything and everyone is "Racist". So, now they'll attack everyone with "white supremacist". How long the Left-wing can intimate the boobs with that word is unclear. But they'll run it into the ground and squeeze every ounce of advantage out of it.
But even if the interview is accurate, I've seen her on bloggingheads w Glenn Loury. She says dumb stuff, not too carefully thought out. Not at all like Glenn.
“Wax expounded on her beliefs that people ....” There you have it: “beliefs,” the analogy to religion that renders it possible for NYer readers to fall back on their own religion, Progressivism, rather than consider seriously her evidence for anything she says. You know, Uncle Joe’s “truth, not facts.”
I’m not willing to read more. Althouse links in the past have demonstrated New Yorker to be a partisan rag.
Here's the thing. The left can call people "racist" or "White supremacist" and they don't even have to define it and the charge doesn't even have to make sense. Its like calling someone - without proof - a child molester or NAMBLA supporter.
And then never get any blow-back for being wrong or making a false accusation. It doesn't even have to make sense. So, its an endless chant of 'racist/racist/white supremacist" against conservatives/right-wingers. And whining about "I'm not a racist, why blah, blah" just gets you called racist even more.
She says dumb stuff, not too carefully thought out. Not at all like Glenn.
Could you give us an example? I've seen her on Bloggingheads with Loury and don't see it.
She defends the west, western civilization and values. That's considered racist or nativist nowadays. But why?
"A Penn Law Professor Wants to Make America White Again" (The New Yorker).Yikes.
I laughed out loud at this!
And that's just the headline.....
Wax is incredibly intelligent and interested in the real world as opposed to blathering about Edmund Burke. Therefore, as you would suspect, she's more of an intelligent, reasonable, liberal then a Conservative.
An analogy that I think perfectly encapsulates this whole debate:
Anybody here ever been to S. Korea? Specifically Seoul? Have you ever been to the Costco in Seoul (there's only one)?
I have. It's bedlam. It's the equivalent to the worst of the worst black Friday sales opener. Every day. All Day. Every year. Costco is to Seoul residents what Macy's or Saks 5th is to us. You have to view it from their perspective, it's an opportunity to buy extremely large amounts of merchandise of very high quality at reasonable and fixed non-negotiable prices which saves time and the act of buying there in and of itself is a status marker for most S. Koreans.
What is my point you might ask?
It's bedlam in SK or in China or in Japan or in Dakar or in Sao Paulo or in Delhi because those people understand implicitly (perhaps even genetically) that the ability or inability to get access to something is going to be complete shit show. You CAN NOT expect any level of civility from the other people that will be there at the same time. It's a war. It's the prisoner's dilemma writ large on a societal scale. Every one automatically knows and defaults to the fact that everyone else is going to cheat, lie, cajole, attack and otherwise be as mean as possible to get one more place ahead of them in line.
Having travelled to 30+ countries you can see that for most of the world's people (who are not white), this is society's default setting. All. The. Time.
OF COURSE they want to get to the USA. OF COURSE they want to get their resources here. It's relatively safe. We have some semblance of fairness. We have rule of law. People in the Midwest will smile at you and say 'good morning'. What a bunch of rubes! Of course they want to be here. You would too if you were them living out your life it thunderdome.
tl;dr...for most of the rest of the world's non-white/non-Western tradition population life IS STILL cruel, brutish and short.
Yse. If we had bigger litters we would not need the Mexicans.
Wax is courageous. She had the nerve to say that no first year law students in her long career has been in the top 25 % of the class. The law school refuted this but could not produce evidence. Of course.
Chotiner has a history: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/05/hanging-up-on-the-new-yorker.php
Wax believes there are innate differences between the sexes and that Western civilization, it's culture, it's politics, is the best in the world.
For the left you cannot say either of those things. If you say both then you're driven out of polite society.
The problem with the "Conversation" is that while Amy Wax is smart and well informed, the questioner Ian something is just your typical cookie-cutter party-line Leftist. He just keeps asking the same question - in various ways - trying to get Wax to commit some sort of "Bad think" - so he can say "Gotcha!".
Push a button and the New yorker robot spits out "racism".
Living with less litter is part of white privilege.
A truely woke cracker is in a catch 22. Throw around some litter for the sake of equality and now you are guilty of cultural appropriation. See that white privilege has is costs. It's not all expensive coffee and fancy sandwiches out here in the suburbs.
Someone like Barack Obama is in a real twist. He has to throw his arugula wrappers on the ground and then pick them up. The man gets no rest from the racial conformity police.
We, there are places in the world where people are much more polite.
A Filipino mall or public market are not subject to mob rule, in spite of poverty.
My genteel grandma and aunts thought nothing of going to the vast Divisoria market, which had everything conceivable.
The worst hardships, as usual, were weather and traffic.
Elizabeth Warren is forced to dig up all her buried tomahawks and dispose of them properly.
Granted, politeness does not necessarily imply a lack of dirt and garbage.
I know billionaires who would go to Divisoria.
Granted, some may have done so just to demonstrate that they weren’t stuck up.
To expand, places like the Divisoria are not where tourists go, but a good place for a traveller.
Wax is courageous. She had the nerve to say that no first year law students in her long career has been in the top 25 % of the class. The law school refuted this but could not produce evidence.
The school didn't refute anything (check a dictionary), the guy just lied about the subject and about Wax.
Here's her 2011 paper Disparate Impact Realism; it has 307 anecdotes from eugenicists.
What is the purpose of this article?
Amy Wax ... perhaps best represents the ideology of the Trump Administration’s immigration restrictionists.
I wanted to understand the basis of her thinking and find out how she views President Trump’s leadership.
In some respects, her proposed immigration policies are not as extreme as those of the Trump Administration.
So what do you think Trump was trying to say there?
This article doesn't seem to be about Amy Wax at all.
Is pooping on the sidewalk considered littering? Littering seems to involve very little ceremony or process, while pooping is a muti-step operation, at least when it's done right. Littering can be an almost unconscious act, but I guess sometime people also poop by accident.
I note the New Yorker already has a tag for eugenics.
Clearly the NYT isn't the only media property to be filtering all the news through a particular framework.
OF COURSE they want to get to the USA. OF COURSE they want to get their resources here. It's relatively safe.
My middle daughter has been to China multiple times staying with friends. They went out to breakfast her first trip in Shanghai. Her friends said to her, "Don't eat the fluffy looking muffins. They put detergent in them to make them fluffy looking."
Trump's extreme immigration policy is basically long standing American law and some of the most liberal immigration policies in the world, if not THE most liberal. The left lives in Bizarroland. Their ideas of correct and normal have never existed anywhere, ever.
Michael: She had the nerve to say that no first year law students in her long career has been in the top 25 % of the class.
This confuses me. Who was in the top 25% of the class, if not students?
I'm guessing "class" doesn't mean what I think it means...?
When I was in high school my mom had a visit from her old high school boyfriend. He had gone on to become a Vietnam-era CIA guy. He told about being accustomed in Thailand to mobs everywhere, movie theaters, markets, everywhere, pushing and shoving for advantage. So he was rather amazed one day to see an orderly line at a bus stop. When the bus arrived, the line dissolved into a mob, everyone pushing and shoving for advantage. They had been standing in the shade of a telephone pole.
so, is the problem that what she was saying was untrue?
or was the problem that what she was saying WAS TRUE?
I have no idea who this Wax person is, but I do know that interviewers from outlets like the New Yorker and their ilk tend to be extremely unfair to people who espouse any belief outside of progressive orthodoxy.
Reading some of her points, I find it difficult to disagree with them.
If you think the Australia and Canada points system and restrictions don’t have a differential racial impact, you are kidding yourself. They do. But nobody calls them white supremacist. Well, a few people do. [Laughs.]
I have tried to get people to answer it. And the question is: Why are successful, peaceful, orderly, prosperous, technologically advanced, democratically sound countries so rare and so few, and why do they clump up in one tiny corner of the globe, namely Europe, the Anglosphere? We also have Japan, which is a wonder, I think, in many ways, a very admirable country. Perhaps Taiwan. And why is the rest of the world essentially consisting of, in various degrees, failed states? Why do we have a post-Enlightenment portion of the world and a pre-Enlightenment portion of the world? And I guess, to be really crude about it, you would use Trump’s succinct phrase: Why are there so many shithole countries? Of course the moment you say that, people just get outraged: Oh, my God, you are a racist for saying that. And that, of course, lets them off the hook; they don’t have to answer the question, which is convenient.
I would add South Korea, Hong Long, and a few other East Asian territories to her list. East Asians in general have always been a naturally industrious lot.
A diversitist's inference. #Principles[Character]Matter
"Michael: She had the nerve to say that no first year law students in her long career has been in the top 25 % of the class."
This confuses me. Who was in the top 25% of the class, if not students?
Heh. That was a bad misquote, and missing a significant word (which I missed, being familiar with the statement): "I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half."
Amadeus 48 said...
White people do litter less than POCs based on my personal observations. I wonder what the research shows. Maybe they litter less. Did Inspector Chotiner get to the bottom of that?
Lots and lots of people observe the same thing. Therefore, it's likely never been studied, because the researchers would know the outcome in advance- and it's not a desirable outcome, and undesirable outcomes are off limits for studies.
It is a proven fact that if two crowds gather that can be described as liberal or conservative, that after they leave, the area occupied by the eco-conscious planet loving liberals needs more clean up dud to trash and litter on the ground.
Speaking of undesirable outcomes, a study was undertaken to prove that NJ Troopers were stopping people for speeding based on their race, not their speed. The numbers seemed to prove it, as POCs got more tickets by percentage than their percentage in the population. So a study was undertaken to prove what all right thinking people knew was TRUTH, that NJ State Police were racists. http://edition.cnn.com/2002/LAW/03/27/nj.speeding.study/index.html Whoops! There was another study done by a newspapers to prove the same thing. They noted that really fast speeders were dominated by non-caucasians. The results kind of sort of leaked out from the newspaper, but I don't recall they ever actually published the numbers.
In my experience, POC do litter more. Black people, to be specific. But also, progressives—just see the trash left behind after any large “march” or whatever of mostly white progressives.
Yesterday, while out on a run, I passed a line of cars. I noticed a candy wrapper come wafting out of a driver’s side window. I stopped, picked it up, and returned it to the owner (a black woman), with the remark that she must have dropped it by mistake. She got out of the car and screamed at me, calling me a bitch and threatening to “kick my ass.” I told her she should be ashamed of herself, that Oakland is not her trash can, and that kicking my ass would end up with her ass in jail for battery. She could only repeatedly scream the same thing, over and over. I was a bitch and she would kick my ass.
I am ashamed to say that I finally told her that her behavior was why people like me engage in racial stereotyping. I think the point was lost on her. I threw her trash in a nearby trash can.
Michael I was puzzled by your statement that she said that no students in her first year classes were "in the top 25% of the class". Well, stated that way it's an impossibility. Even in a class full of people who are dumb as a box of rocks there has to be a top 25% and a bottom 25%.
Going to the Chotiner article she supposedly said that no black students were in the top 25% of her first year classes. Affirmative action can explain that.
OTOH you can find rare talent in groups that you don't expect. Way back in the day (early 70's) the Dean at Boalt Hall Law School ---who was also an authority on estates and trusts-- had earned his law degree at the University of Iowa. That's not the most prestigious law school in the world. But then Dean Halbach had been first in his class at Iowa Law.
Anne, running in Oakland is a brave act.
See also a very interesting and disturbing book called “Bottle of Lies,” about the generic drug industry in India. The author presents compelling evidence that the “culture” in India is to cheat as much as possible to make as much money as possible—and that is considered behavior to be admired. The so-called scientists fake data, skip testing, lie about results, and produce a product they admit is not fit for human use. And the justification is, “That is our culture.” Mind-boggling.
A fireman lieutenant's exam is in effect an IQ test administered to large numbers of people. If you break the results out by race, you get the usual race difference in IQ tests as the result. It's not discrimination, it's just how it is.
There's a speculation that you need a certain percentage (not all, but enough) of smart people to establish a working Western culture.
Where that's lacking, the survival strategy does not include standing in queues quietly but more towards hit the guy in the head and take his stuff.
@Steve "Could you give us an example?" Nah, can't remember that well. I'm just giving my impression: Glenn is incredibly fast and well thought-out, and she wasn't. I skipped the last one or two with her on, it wasn't worth the time. I agree with her ideas but her presentation was careless, and Glenn tended to point that out.
Michael K, LOL. I am very fast.
I live in between the hills (wealthy people) and the flats. I run everywhere and never really worry about it—most people are friendly. Also, there are the incredible East Bay parks, where one mostly has to worry about maniacal mountain bikers and idiot white people who think their dogs are special and should never have a leash within 10 feet of them.
I love Oakland. It feels like the Midwest to me, a familiar and comforting oasis in the midst of NoCal progressive insanity. There is pathology, to be sure, but it is a pathology I recognize and can navigate. The rest of the Bay Area is a foreign country.
I was in San Rafael last night for a performance of Spamalot. Wandering around town before hand was a surreal experience of true privilege combined with blind posturing. I was more uncomfortable there than I am walking around Lake Merritt.
Lucid-Ideas: Having travelled to 30+ countries you can see that for most of the world's people (who are not white), this is society's default setting. All. The. Time.
This is the real reason Althouse isn't keen on foreign travel and wants to think it's all a waste of time. There are things nice white liberal ladies don't really want to know.
I would never, ever trust a writer for The New Yorker. The headline alone is proof of malicious intent.
In SF and NYC you can take a piss/poop in public and draw nothing more than a citation. If that. No need to find a toilet. If you sneer about that, New Yorkers and people from "frisco" get upset. But otherwise, they do nothing about it.
I love Oakland. It feels like the Midwest to me,
My older son lives there. His law firm wants him to take over the Orange County division so he is edging south again.
I'm currently on a Spainish Civil war kick, and what's amazing is that 80 years later, the Left-wing historians like Paul Preston are still writing the same Left-wing propaganda and left-wing lies about the war. All their propaganda has been dis-proven by the Spanish and Soviet archives but they act like 80 years of historical research never happened and tell the same old liberal fairy-tale. And that's the way their are. They get their party line and just stick to it, no independent thought required. Its amazing.
I used to live in Oakland, by Lake Merritt, almost 30 years ago.
And I also used to run around the lake (pretty close to three miles).
I was mugged twice at gunpoint within a few hundred yards of Lake Merritt BART, in the early 90's.
Both times after dark.
Granted crime is probably down from the early 90's.
Some parts of Oakland were like the mid-west, Detroit to be exact. but the High-tech wealth has changed things.
Rcocean
Compare lefty rhetoric from the 1920s to now.
The hilly part of Oakland has always been nice.
Nice one
and that women are less intellectual than men.
Vicki Hearne (Adam's Task, Bandit, Animal Happiness) would be good examples of how that's a positive; taking on intellectual men by correcting the area of application.
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Mark Twain wasn't wrong about much, but he was dead wrong about "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
Dead. Wrong.
Huge swaths of the world function - if they function at all - on little more than an agreed-upon cease-fire by various tribal parties till the next calamity. They produce nothing. They create nothing. The pie - in good times - remains exactly the same size it's just the distribution matrix changes.
Another huge swath is dominated by the ones that do manage to produce or create something of value or some semblance of order, the price for which is strict loyalty (China) or reliable poverty (Russia), or the freedom to pay to be left largely alone (Europe...but that is fading very fast).
Dont' get me wrong there are good individuals, smart individuals in these places, but they are as much slaves to their cultural zeitgeists as we are. I'm not a cultural relativist. Some cultural zeitgeists are better than others. Those people in those countries would agree with me when I say ours is better than theirs...for now.
you have to go to this fellow or pio moa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nduRDeNywl4
just like with Vietnam, mark moyar, with cuba, Humberto fontova, with iran, Andrew scott,
he's an iconoclast in many thing, but aren't we all, on certain matters,
Chotiner, "[The Trump Administration] threatened to revoke birthright citizenship, a fundamental American right enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment."
False. It has never been tested in court. The key language is, "subject to the jurisdiction therof." If birthright citizenship was a fundamental constitutional right then why did Congress have to pass a statute to give Native Americans born in the United States citizenship?
Why should birth tourists from China get US citizenship for their US born babies?
Idiot.
All you with Oakland ties...
The hilly part of Oakland is spectacular. Incredible views. Not surprisingly, perhaps, these parts of Oakland (Montclair, Piedmont—technically its own town) are subject to a lot of what our betters call low-level crime. Car break-ins, theft of packages, even some home invasions. There is a lot of money there, and the Oakland PD is stretched thin. I think where I live—kind of in-between— is probably the safest area! Not enough money to attract a raft of criminals, but nice enough to feel safe coming and going late at night.
I run with a group on Wednesday nights. During the winter, when the trails are too muddy and dark to navigate, we run the streets of Oakland and Berkeley. We run around Lake Merritt frequently. The city has put a lot of money into improving it. I have never felt unsafe in the area around the lake, either. But then, a runner makes a poor target for a robbery. Wearing very little clothing, we obviously have nothing worth taking!
The thing that bothers me most about the lake now is that during the day, running around it means getting a contact high from all the pot smoke. For that reason, I avoid it. Also, the trash left lying around is icky. Again, an example of certain people not respecting themselves and their environment.
It's not about race. It's the difference between cultures where Christianity prevails and cultures where it does not.
largely, todays events remind me of this:
http://blog.mobileadventures.com/2006/11/lord-palmerston-and-hong-kong.html
"She [identified as a black female driver] got out of the car and screamed at me, calling me a bitch and threatening to “kick my ass.” I told her she should be ashamed of herself, that Oakland is not her trash can, and that kicking my ass would end up with her ass in jail for battery. She could only repeatedly scream the same thing, over and over."
This is not unusual. The instantaneous flash to anger, the yelling, the aggression such as getting out of the car, and the generally uncivil/anti-social behavior is just SOP in some "communities."
But to comment on it is racist. So if you insist on labeling this comment and the one above as racist, Tight Sneakers to you.
It's the difference between cultures where Christianity prevails and cultures where it does not.
Like Mexico, El Salvador, Nigeria and East Timor vs Japan, New Zealand and The Netherlands.
I don't think these various mass shooters are typical of white men, but you'd never know it from the coverage. I don't think that the various black, drive-by shooters are typical of black men either, but that possibility would never, ever be entertained in news coverage.....Forty or fifty years ago I read an article in TV Guide. The article explained how the producer of some TV show (Columbo or Rockford Files?) always used a white villain with an Anglo-Saxon name. Any other villain would cause tons of protest mail.....In a perverse way, this rebounds to the credit of white men with Anglo-Saxon names. Even when you stereotype them as villains, people don't think of them a villains.
Another news story is some city council candidate in some hamlet in Michigan wanting to keep the town white, and saying that she thinks that married couples should be of the same race. This is the kind of thing that Timesmen use instead of Viagra.
protestant, vs. catholic, some countries like el Salvador are actually making progress, new Zealand is largely a catspaw of china, the saving grace has been they haven't fallen for the disarmament narrative after Christchurch, Netherlands is metaphorically underwater,
"The headline alone is proof of malicious intent."
But predictable, no? To wax in a Waxian generalization, intellectual white women do not stand out in common sense.
"Even when you stereotype them as villains, people don't think of them a villains."
Same thing with the recent phone company ok-is-not-ok ads: all the incompetents were white men. No one complained, and of course no one started thinking of white men as incompetent.
It's not about race. It's the difference between cultures where Christianity prevails and cultures where it does not.
Faith, religion, and tradition are part of the answer. Separation of logical domains was also key to Christian development. And ideology.
no one started thinking of white men as incompetent.
Most people are not diversitist, all of the time, and indulge color judgments.
The Oakland hills are nice, and there's a lotta good folks in the flats. too. But, Yes, a lotta dangerous knuckleheads infest the City.
The Wax interview is a joke. The New Yorker interviewer (Chotiner) basically keeps asking, "Are you a racist? Are you a racist? Prove to me you're not a racist!"
I used to live on Perkins, not far from the Childrens Fairyland part of Lake Merritt.
That was a nice place then too, and handy to Grand Avenue.
Later we used to take the kids to Childrens Fairyland quite often.
I guess that was the "middle" part of Oakland.
Where faith (the Christian kind*), family, and freedom are strong, there you will find a stable productive society.
*The evidence is both longstanding, abundant, and frightening of the type of society that results when the Islamic faith is strong.
Prof Wax is both a medical doctor and lawyer; she has been a target for a long time, being the rare conservative at Penn LS willing to be outspoken in her rejection of all the lefty pieties that rule in that world. (AA may know something of that, having been an occasional dissenter from the usual leftiness at Wisconsin.) And the attacks (as your selection of Chotiner's comments show) paint Wax with all the usual "-isms". She knew what was coming in agreeing to talk to Chotiner, but evidently valued the opportunity to make her point to that audience over the flak (and distortion) that was likely to come with it.
Having heard her lectures (in venues where she is not being attacked) and read her commentaries, her main point is about the impacts of different urban cultures on the success or failure of communities. She contends that the values typically associated with the educated, employed demographic -- middle and upper class America -- are more conducive to stable, productive and healthy lives than the alternatives. Charles Murray (on the conservative end) and Robert Putnam (at the other end) have made broadly similar arguments, albeit (especially in Putnam's case) using metaphors far more palatable to lefty-land. But her views are easily caricatured by anyone for whom race/class/gender are the only permissible categories for social analysis, with the understanding that in each of those categories, some are more equal than others. Her perspective is about as far from that mind-set as it is possible to be. Same, of course, with Murray.
She's a brave woman who has reached the stage of life where she can stick with it in the face of the howling mob. And the mob will howl.
Amy: Waxes On.
The New Yorker: Whacks Off.
I am Laslo.
I thought Professor Wax was brave, smart, and disruptive in her answers (and questions) as revealed in this article. She reminds me of Camille Paglia. I don't agree 100% on substance with either of them, but Philadelphia is blessed to have both women in its intellectual community.
The first paragraph of the interview:
I was saying, “Well, if you do discuss it or you even advocate for it, people are going to say, ‘Oh, you are saying we are better off with more whites than non-whites. That is the equivalent of the position you are taking, and that is going to spook conservatives.’ ” Not knowing that there would be this limousine-liberal meltdown, I probably should have spelled out in more explicit terms that the media and people on the left are going to interpret your neutral criterion as a racial one, or at least they will be upset that it has racial effects, and you will be tarred with that. That is essentially the gist of what I was saying to them, and, at the time, everybody understood that I was saying, “Here is why you guys are not going to go down that path.” I think it is going to be very hard for you to go down that path.
I guess the headline writer is just helping her prove her point:
"A Penn Law Professor Wants to Make America White Again"
I literally LOL'ed.
I'm genuinely puzzled at people who legitimately don't think that, 'the west', meaning Western civilization so US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe, are not currently the best nations to live in. I can understand politeness in not mentioning it or boasting about it, but the West is the best. I doubt it is something unique to white people but rather the the culture that is prevalent.
Yes, maybe I shoulda started with this:
I don't know much about Amy Wax. But she comes off as intelligent, interesting and civil. This starkly contrasts with the moronic New Yorker.
from two studies by a eugenicist
Which one? Margaret Sanger? Adolf Hitler? George Bernard Shaw? H. G. Wells? Theodore Roosevelt? John Maynard Keynes? Bertrand Russell?
I love absolutely everything about this kind of Althouse blog post.
It makes it all the harder to understand why this sort of incisive analysis is never applied to Trump.
The Vault Dweller: I'm genuinely puzzled at people who legitimately don't think that, 'the west', meaning Western civilization so US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe, are not currently the best nations to live in.
Oh, that's not what they're denying. If cornered they're willing to admit to the superior quality of life in these countries. What they're denying is that their niceness has anything to do with their native or majority European or European-descended populations. They are nice places despite, not because of these people, all their niceness having derived from the exploitation of non-whites in colonized countries, or the historical enslavement or exploitation of non-white minorities inside these countries, or the labors of non-white immigrants. (N.B., this is true even of European countries that never colonized any PoC and never had any non-white minorities to speak of until very recently. If you ask how that can be I'm sure they will give you an entirely plausible explanation.)
For example, that the U.S. is what it is has nothing to do with the whites who settled its territory and formed its majority population for just about all of its history. It's all due to the contributions of the non-white minority who actually did all the work while the whites sat on their asses. So if you think these countries are relatively nice now, just think how great they'll be once the whites are a minority, or gone!
"t makes it all the harder to understand why this sort of incisive analysis is never applied to Trump.”
Chuck should be embarrassed to keep flogging that poorly reasoned and easily debunked Bulwark article but he’s not. The thing is you can tell he knows there are problems with it, because he slightly changes the language when he describes it, but even changing the language to something a little less egregiously idiotic doesn’t save it. If I thought he would listen, I would say a good way to figure out the answer to his question would be to keep reading that Bulwark article on the Charlottesville hoax until you see why it is so lame.
Wax and Glenn Loury have some Great DV's on Blogging-heads. I don't think she ever did one with Bob Wright - for obvious reasons.
"She says dumb stuff, not too carefully thought out. Not at all like Glenn."
Yes, yes. Good sarcasm.
The Bulwark quotes Pence--You didn't build that.
What Pence said--We’re going to keep fighting for American jobs and American opportunities and American manufacturing, not just for this great industrial heartland, but for all the hardworking men and women of this country.
And I want to promise all of you that it's those men and women that are never far from our minds. I mean, I'm talking about the people who make things and grow things; who spend their days building more than a Facebook page; who read the local paper, not the New York Times; who wear uniforms at home and abroad. (Applause.) I'm talking about people that put faith, and family, and freedom first. They love this country and they know what a blessing it is to be a citizen of the United States of America.
Conclusion: The Bulwark is just as full of shit as Chuck is.
It's a jungle out there
Man Charged in Death of Detroit Girl Attacked by Three Dogs (Yahoo News)
RBG has pancreatic cancer. Looks like next summer is going to be entertaining.
Amy Wax is a sane academic: she must be destroyed. For the encouragement of others.
The New Yorker is just the Marxist rag to take the job on. But I think she'll hold her own. She seems to be hip to their jive, so to speak.
Being from the area, I remember when Penn was a respected, and I mean really respected, school. Now it's just another lefty madhouse.
One of the notable, but not surprising, features of the interview is that Chotiner never defines racism.
I thought Wax could have pushed him a little harder on that, but the non-answer is still telling.
RBG won't make it to 2020.
Chuck said...
I love absolutely everything about this kind of Althouse blog post.
It makes it all the harder to understand why this sort of incisive analysis is never applied to Trump.
We gots you, Inga,RV, Gadfly, Steve Uhr for that.
Keep up the good work, and remember,
KEEP HOPE ALIVE !
Thank you for the article Ms Ann. I haven't read intelligence like this since the first Dr. Thomas Sowell works.
FTR: whites who live is shitholes are called white trash. Blacks usually see living without trash as a white man’s rule that does not have to be followed.
Some guy has even has a mantra about this.
I read the article. Well, a swing and a miss for poor Isaac.
Wax asks the rhetorical question: "Why are successful, peaceful, orderly, prosperous, technologically advanced, democratically sound countries so rare and so few, and why do they clump up in one tiny corner of the globe, namely Europe, the Anglosphere?" [With a few notable exceptions that she mentions.]
And then she states: "I have asked many sophisticated, knowledgeable people that question, and I have never gotten anything close to a plausible answer...I have had a couple of really smart people, people on the left, say, to me, Hey, you have a point: we don’t have an answer, and we are not allowed to think about it rigorously and realistically..."
Well, that's it in a nutshell, isn't it?
Chotiner missed several opportunities to teach Wax the meaning of "racist" or "racism". Or perhaps he tried, and then edited out the parts where Wax shot his face off.
Chuck @2:47 PM: Did you read the article that this post was about? Wax summed him (Trump) up quite nicely, I thought.
Believe me, my friend, most Trump supporters see him for what (and who) his is, and have decided that, on the whole, they support him anyway. (Don't get me started on what I think of Trump's indifference to deficit spending, for instance.) Because, what are the alternatives? Jeb!? Peter McBoatshoes-Buttboy? The Massachusetts Mohican? More of the RINO business-as-usual bootlicking sellout action from the white-shoe country club lawyer faction?
I’d much rather have a US Senate with 54 McConnells, than a Senate with 42 Steve King/Matt Gaetz/Louie Gohmert Teabaggers. Like what 2018 did to the House.
the Dems play this game, like it's war by other means, the republicans play like it's tennis, there are a few like tom cotton, that understand this dynamic, but most do not, considering that mcconnell is married to someone who's family understands what communism means, he still doesn't get it,
And if the Axis had won WW2 we'd be talking about how Fascism is most common in Europe. Or if the USSR had won the Cold War we'd be talking about Communism. There's nothing inherent in white people which forms stable democracies. What did that was US military power. See Republic of Korea, too. The US military seems to be a necessary but not sufficient ingredient to 20th century democracy.
Seven years ago Niall Ferguson took a hard look at root causes of why the West got so far ahead of the rest of the world, and the result was Civilization: the West and the Rest. Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law (especially property rights), modern medicine, consumerism, and the much-maligned Protestant work ethic. Bernie, and other democratic socialists, may think that competition is wasteful (and besides, being losers, they don’t want to be in any situation where they are competing with anyone possessing any sort of talent), but improvements follow competition, otherwise who would bother to improve anything? It’s a great book that I much recommend.
"What they're denying is that their niceness has anything to do with their native or majority European or European-descended populations."
Yes, and Wax denies it too. Wax believes that turning the ground you occupy into a shithole is a choice that people make, for reasons she can't quite fathom. She hopes to reason them out of it. Her critics, on the other hand, are racists who know perfectly well that you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear. But they would never admit that they know it. That would be "racism". You are supposed to pretend you live where you do because the schools are good.
At one point the author, Isaac Chotiner, says I’m just trying to make a point about how something could be true but still racist. . .
Wax didn't follow up on this but I so wish she had asked Chotiner to give an example of something that was simultaneously true and also racist. I suspect he would say that anything that was uncomplimentary about minorities was by definition racist, whether it was true or not.
Paul Ciotti: That's the corner they've painted themselves into, and they do get a bit defensive when you point it out.
About 25 years ago, in an undergrad world history survey course, the question of European dominance of every aspect of the modern world was considered to be the result of one of two causes: geography or the wickedness of the Europeans.
From what I can see, the geography idea was abandoned and now the answer to the question of European dominance of every aspect of the modern world is the wickedness of Europeans, aka "white people."
Getting rid of geographical determinism was a good idea. Human history is a human creation, not a creation of geography. Geography as the engine of history is ahistorical.
But so is the idea of a people or culture being wicked. "The wickedness of the Romans drove them to colonize the Mediterranean" is not a statement about history. Neither is "the wickedness of the Europeans drove them to colonize Africa."
The reason the question was asked in the first place was because of the domination of the people of the European nations in virtually every field of human endeavor, in all of the arts, in all of the sciences, in industry, in economics, and in invention, for the last three hundred years.
"A Penn Law Professor Wants to Make America White Again"
Here's another fake headline:
"Trophy hunter’s bones ‘turned to mush’ as 11ft alligator savages him"
Some guy reached over the side of a boat and an alligator that he'd been harassing grabbed his hand and then almost immediately let go. That is known as "savaging", or, sometimes "nipping". The actual size of the alligator is unknown.
"Back on land he is recovering at the Orlando Regional Medical Center where he is walking and has function in his hand" despite the bones o' mush.
Apparently an alligator nipping someone on the hand and giving a minor injury is international news if the bitee's brother uses a funny word like "mush".
yes it's about will, as buwaya has pointed out on a number of occasions, cortez or clive, two centuries later on another continent,
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/august_2019/voters_don_t_trust_political_news_say_most_reporters_want_to_stop_trump
@Paul Ciotti, or perhaps Wax did follow up but Chotiner looked at his answer before publication and wisely edited the whole thing out.
I looked into some of his other research, which may have inspired this project,
http://meaninginhistory.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-patrick-byrne-bombshell.html#comment-form
Jonah Goldberg, in Suicide of the West, writes that the reason most countries were shit holes for most of human history (and some still are today) is tribalism. Loyalty in a shit hole country goes family, tribe, ethnic nation. The breakout that allowed the West to succeed was loyalty to abstract concepts like law and constitutional order to trump tribal and ethnic loyalty.
Here's a typical quote from Goldberg:
The best defense against bad nationalism isn’t good nationalism, but a recommitment to the neutral rules of a liberal order enshrined in the Constitution.
It is an idea worth discussing.
But where I think Goldberg gets it wrong is in his belief that a rules-based system can replace other loyalties, rather than compete with them; when John Brown raided the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in 1859, his goal was to use the seized weapons to start a slave revolt and overthrow the rules-based constitutional order of the United States. This was a very American thing to do.
"I'm sure that pretty much covers what a scholar like Wax bases her views on."
-- She's just Living Her Truth and Lived In Experience.
People shouldn't agree to be interviewed if they're not given Clinton-levels of final approval on the copy.
Jonah Goldberg is a journalist. Not a scholar. He doesn't know shit from shinola about History or "Why countries were shit-holes". His book "Suicide of the West" was written by googling the internet and using his dog as a history teacher.
He's a libertarian. Or he's paid to be one. So, he starts with that, and finds facts to support it. His opinion on everything, is worthless. He's even dumber than Bob Wright when it comes to History.
"The best defense against bad nationalism isn’t good nationalism, but a recommitment to the neutral rules of a liberal order enshrined in the Constitution."
What Jonah means is, "My tribe will always be successful out of all proportion to our share of the population, provided the rest of the population is splintered into warring factions." But I can understand why he doesn't actually phrase it that way.
well some people I know, were impressed with Jonah's first book, but to borrow the title of james burnham's great cri de couer, you need to have something substantial to say, one might shorthand American and british nationalisms as about liberty, on balance, versus the german Japanese and soviet as about power, as an end in itself,
Jonah's tribe had a very bad experience with a modern nation whose population was ethnically homogeneous, and they aren't taking any chances.
yes, fdr's regime, left something to be desired, obviously, and perhaps the Indians and the irish, didn't regard Churchill as all that benevolent,
Now more than ever, we need thought control legislation.
Seriously though. I hear these kinds of comments all the time among latino coworkers.
The temp agency has some kind of arrangement were they hire so called "zombies" in exchange for looking the other way on "undocumented", but hard and reliable workers.
The zombies probably sense the arrangement, so they... work under half steam.
The undocumented uses that as a reason to hold their head high, and not refrain from commenting in their native tongue.
Blogger rcocean said...
. . .
He's a libertarian.
. . .
Yes, Goldberg is becoming one. So is George Will. So is Kevin Williamson, #nevertrumpers all (although Goldberg rejects that label these days, he still would much rather criticize Trump & his defenders than any of the Leftist lunatics on the Democrat debate stage or in DC).
But none of them has yet, as far as I know, dealt with the implications of becoming a philosophic libertarian. As in Marxism, man is economic man. Morality is a personal choice and likely interferes with the expression of our true nature as Economic Man.
"Chuck said...
I’d much rather have a US Senate with 54 McConnells, than a Senate with 42 Steve King/Matt Gaetz/Louie Gohmert Teabaggers. Like what 2018 did to the House."
Yeah, but you'd rather have a Senate of 54 Bernie Sanders/Dick Durbin/Chuck Schumer socialists/kleptocrats, so who cares what you desire. And only a buffoon like you contines to use epithets like "Teabagger". You argue like a first-year affirmative action law school student.
""Trophy hunter’s bones ‘turned to mush’ as 11ft alligator savages him"
This is embarrassing.
Sometimes one just wants a snack, you know?
But for proprieties sake one really must eat the whole human.
That leads to bloating and then one is useless for a week.
But that's what it takes to keep up appearances.
"yes it's about will, as buwaya has pointed out on a number of occasions, cortez or clive, two centuries later on another continent,"
Or about ferocity. All of that came before invention or science or any of that. This all started without relative technological advantages, or none that mattered much. Abuquerque and Cortez and Pizarro.
Small bands of men who could defeat the natives at sword or pike point, at odds of 100+:1 sometimes. And then talk them into bending the knee.
It's bedlam. It's the equivalent to the worst of the worst black Friday sales opener. Every day. All Day. Every year.
At the risk of ridicule, I think Mr. Calhoun was on to something.. It all goes to hell when there are too many rats in the cage.
the norse were the ravagers of their time, now look at them now,
https://dailycaller.com/2019/08/23/denmark-failed-state-greenland/
where one family, has turned the whole country into a plantation,
https://babalublog.com/2019/08/23/cubas-2017-zika-outbreak-ignored-tourirsts-not-warned-new-york-times-shocked-shocked/
Re eugenics -- Wax gave Chotiner some links to the work of Richard Lynn. From a piece on him in the December 23, 1996 issue of the Guardian (no link because I accessed the article via my library's journal database):
Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Ulster, argues that improvements in health care and an increasingly immoral society are leading to people of low intelligence having more children at an earlier age.
In his book Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration of Modern Populations, published next Monday, he says this is causing a fall in general intelligence and a decline in the quality of civilised life.
He stops just short of recommending what he calls "coercive eugenics" but is writing a second book which addresses the issue.
"My argument is elitist," he said yesterday. "The professional and middle classes are generally superior in regard to other classes, particularly the underclass, in terms of intelligence and moral character.
"Natural selection has broken down. In centuries past, it did the job for us of weeding out those with low moral character or low intelligence. There was a high mortality rate. Now the underclass survive and have children. Obviously some measures need to be taken." ...
Prof Lynn, who also believes men are on average cleverer than women, is no stranger to controversy. He recently argued that criminals should be flogged, claiming criminal behaviour is genetically passed from father to son. He also advocates caning for young children, particularly those who are "sociopaths".
Speaking from his home in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, he said: "We have to get into social engineering to prevent complete social breakdown. You could use voluntary methods - for example, offering the morning after pill over the counter." He added: "The professional classes are a lot more efficient at handling contraception.
"A lot of people with low IQ can't be bothered. This causes excessive fertility.'
I don't see the Europeans as paragons. Nazis, fascists, communists, anarchists, all came out of Europe. The current fascination with race comes out of Europe, too. It's deconstructionist literary theory. None of this "white privilege" crap is based on social science. It's out of literary criticism.
The USA keeps Europe from screwing up the world with their terrible ideas. We picked up on the liberal ideas of the enlightenment and stuck with it.
Richard lynn was one of the sources, Charles murray used for the bell curve, he got a good ten year cycle of hate, out of that,
Uh oh. Wax links to someone called Prof Richard Lynn. that of course makes Wax Responsible for EVERY GODDAMN THING Lynn every said. Just like Althouse is responsible for EVERY GODDAMN THING "Lydia" ever wrote. After all, "Lydia" is on Althouse's blog isn't she/he/it?
Smear Merchants. SJW's. They never get old. They never give up. They never think.
Objectively, Lynn was right, according to all available data, or very likely right, in some cases, those having to do with dysgenics and intelligence. Indeed deep in the consciousness of anyone working in these areas all this is a given, and has been for years, but it cannot be said in public. All these subjects are tiptoed around. Even the “social justice” types, I think, understand it all quite well, as they are generally careful to avoid metrics and data-based analysis. And of course none of them are willing to contest the matter scientifically, but instead depend on social sanctions to avoid being challenged. They know they are wrong.
This is the biggest case of open secrets ever.
The problem of course is that it’s all very politically inconvenient, for many intersecting reasons.
The Europeans are your ancestors.
If you are paragons, so are they, and vice versa.
Dave Begley: "RBG won't make it to 2020."
LLR and "RolCon conservative" Chuck hardest hit.
Lydia
You used the Guardian? You know that the Guardian editorialized in favor of sterilization and eugenics, right?
‘When a parliamentary report in 1934 backed voluntary sterilisation of the unfit, a Guardian editorial offered warm support, endorsing the sterilisation campaign "the eugenists soundly urge". ‘
Get Wax's transcript, to see what was "edited" - this interviewer has a reputation fo rhackery.
Teabaggers
Any doubt I may have had has completely evaporated. NO Republican would ever use that disgusting term.
Drago has been right about this imposter all along.
Lynn and much of the commentariat here think the movie Idiocracy is prophetic. It seems that way so far, but that will change within a few decades.
Despite the fact that it's politically incorrect to do so, geneticists here and abroad are figuring out what genes affect IQ and other desirable traits, and they're figuring out how to modify genes in embryos. Within a generation or two, our descendants will be able to endow their children with higher IQ, better health and better looks than their parents had. (And not necessarily in that order.)
And they will take advantage of that because no one wants to be left behind. If some of your neighbors are having smarter and more athletic kids, do you want your children to play second fiddle forever? It's a lot like steroids in sports. Most athletes wish they didn't exists, but if a few athletes start using them, everyone else has to do so as well if they want to be competitive. Imagine a President 30 years from now being told that the Chinese are breeding supermen and superwomen who will bury us in a generation or two. Is he going to insist on outlawing genetic enhancement? I don't think so.
Competition brings about improvements whether we like them or not. That's also the argument for free trade and for immigration. Competition is a reality that you can't actually shelter yourself from for very long.
Teabaggers
Any doubt I may have had has completely evaporated. NO Republican would ever use that disgusting term.
Drago has been right about this imposter all along.
Yup. Chuck might have slipped in his usual speech knowing teabaggers personally but I doubt it,.
Not only that eddie, but LLR Chuck is once again celebrating the democrat takeover of the House in 2018!
Again!!
Meade was quite right to call this obvious RolCon poseur out.
Within a generation or two, our descendants will be able to endow their children with higher IQ, better health and better looks than their parents had. (And not necessarily in that order.)
There is hazard in those plans. For example, there is a theory that rapid evolutionary pressure on Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle Ages when they were restricted to occupations that required high mathematical skills, resulted in not only higher IQs but in Tay Sachs' disease.
Yes indeed on one end basque, other castilian, and even canary islander
Lewis: Loyalty in a shit hole country goes family, tribe, ethnic nation. The breakout that allowed the West to succeed was loyalty to abstract concepts like law and constitutional order to trump tribal and ethnic loyalty.
European nations did not stop being ethno-states as they achieved non-shithole status. For a variety of historical and cultural reason (e.g., monogamy, more restrictive rules on consanguinseous marriage), the "ethny" to which loyalty is directed was eventually a lot larger than that of your average highly inbred micro-tribal shithole. But it's still an ethnic identity.
Abstract concepts don't create cohesive polities. It's the other way 'round. Current non-shitholes didn't de-shitholize by deciding to become "proposition nations". Ethnonationalism is still here. (Despite fervent wishing and deliberate nation-breaking policies.)
"Consanguinseous", lol. Consanguineous, dammit.
@MichaelK,
Sure, it's not simple, but it can be done. We all know people who are simultaneously smarter than average, better looking than average, and more athletic than average without any obvious genetic downside. Say Tiger Woods or Tom Brady. Don't those examples establish that it's not impossible? All we have to do is figure out how it works.
Jeff: That's also the argument for free trade and for immigration. Competition is a reality that you can't actually shelter yourself from for very long.
That's why your competitors try to guilt-trip and concern-troll you into open borders and letting them flood your market with their exports, but are careful to practice much more restrictive and selective immigration policies themselves, and set up all kinds of barriers to your exporting into their country. Because they very altruistically want you to improve your competitive edge at their expense.
You're just not being trite and platitudinous enough on a complex issues here. Try to be a little more trite and platitudinous.
Perhaps I have missed this in the comments, but the thing that strikes me is that interviewer Chotiner says: "something could be true but still racist." This is troubling to me. We insist on having an open dialog about race, but there are certain truths which must not be spoken. How is that an open dialog? But apparently, truth is no defense against a charge of racism.
Usually they call something “unhelpful."
Re Lynn and the Guardian’s one-time enthusiasm for eugenics: Jesus loves the poor and stupid, too.
@Angle-Dyne,
I'm old enough to remember how crappy American cars were in the 1970's. Ford, GM and Chrysler did not improve the quality of their products until imports of Japanese and German cars forced them to. One thing almost all poor countries have in common is that they are protectionist.
Openness to trade has long been one of the strongest predictors of economic development. Third world governments protect various native industries from foreign competition and the result is that those industries fall further and further behind world-class competition. This has been demonstrated again and again.
Milton Friedman famously said you can have open borders or a welfare state, but not both. Just about everyone who comments here agrees with that. But if you don't give free stuff (other than educating their children) to legal immigrants, what's the harm from legal immigration? Canada and Australia both take skills and resources into account when deciding whether or not to allow someone in. If we had a system like that, would you still be opposed to immigration? Why?
Canada and Australia both take skills and resources into account when deciding whether or not to allow someone in.
That is not even remotely the system that we have or will have.
Enforce the law, discuss changes to immigration after that.
There is no reason -- none -- to expect good faith from DC when it comes to immigration.
All we have to do is figure out how it works.
Yes, but my point was many of these things have a downside. We live in a society that treasures equality and academic credentials. Can you have both ?
@ h
No, the way you need to phrase it is: “Chotiner admits many racist statements are true.”
Blogger Angle-Dyne, Samurai Buzzard said...
Lewis: Loyalty in a shit hole country goes family, tribe, ethnic nation. The breakout that allowed the West to succeed was loyalty to abstract concepts like law and constitutional order to trump tribal and ethnic loyalty.
European nations did not stop being ethno-states as they achieved non-shithole status.
. . .
This is one of the flaws of Goldberg's argument. Take nationalism to the extreme and you have Mussolini (not Trump). Take Goldberg's idea to the extreme and you have a world-spanning set of rules designed to increase wealth, with no mediating institutions between the individual and the state.
We live in a society that treasures equality and academic credentials. Can you have both ?
No, but that's mostly because you can't have equality. You can have equality of opportunity, and equality before the law, but not equality of outcome. It's never been done anywhere, and appears to be impossible. If nothing else, those who enforce equality are likely to be, as Orwell put it, more equal than others.
And if you're thinking of academic credentials as something that distinguishes the above-average from the average-or-less, then by definition you can't have both. But that's a truism.
Lewis Wetzel said...
"Canada and Australia both take skills and resources into account when deciding whether or not to allow someone in."
That is not even remotely the system that we have or will have.
Enforce the law, discuss changes to immigration after that.
There is no reason -- none -- to expect good faith from DC when it comes to immigration.
Oh we could have such a wonderful immigration debate. On the merits, and very much including the examples of Australia and Canada. And learning from the foibles of the EU. I'm an immigration hawk. I'd love to see better immigration law enforcement.
But we'd do so much better with all of that, without the weird stupidities of Donald Trump.
Jeff wrote: But if you don't give free stuff (other than educating their children) to legal immigrants, what's the harm from legal immigration?
??
But we'd do so much better with all of that, without the weird stupidities of Donald Trump.
We would do so much better with Romney and Ryan. You are a walking talking parody
One sensible way to look high rates of immigration by poor, low skilled, non-English speaking people, is that it converts the social capital of communities and converts it into dollars that land in the bank accounts of those with existing high levels of wealth.
I'm not in favor of that, even when you change the wording to "immigration just matches labor with people willing to pay for that labor in a free market."
You would not have a debate, such as it is (its really a power struggle) without Trump. The debate exists only because of Trump.
This is not an intellectual exercise.
Thats the sum of it.
LLR Chuck wants a discussion on the "merits" of immigration....long long after he has registered his strong support for ALL the open borders dems.
LOL
So much for the "merits"....
Hey Chuck, are you following the direction of your Bulwarkian-supported Sleepy Creepy Li'l Joey Biden and "imagining the assassination of obama"?
LOL
What a real powerhouse you turned out to be supporting!
What was she thinking?
One sensible way to look high rates of immigration by poor, low skilled, non-English speaking people, is that it converts the social capital of communities
Are you saying that immigration is destroying social capital? I don't know what that means. Please explain, specifically, what is this social capital that is being destroyed by immigration? Who does it belong to? How is it destroyed? Surely it's more than just "I don't like those people." Please explain.
‘No, the way you need to phrase it is: “Chotiner admits many racist statements are true.”’
Better: “Chotiner says many racist statements are true.”
The admits would be used against you. What you think is not the important point here.
As part of the America Sucks initiative launched by the NYT, the New Yorker is trying to associate Donald Trump with Amy Wax and Wax with racism. The statement is made that Trump is trying to close the border because he agrees with Wax. But there is no evidence shown in the article that strng border policies Trump's policies come from people like Amy Wax. The Mexicans have a very tight border and strong laws controlling the movement and employment of foreigners except in place like Tijuana. The statement about Trump is the same kind of unsourced, unproven, ignorant slam that went on with "Russia and Collusion".
Amy Wax herself, in my opinion, is holding very questionable ideas derived from very questionable persons whom she may not understand. For example, the eugenicist cited by Amy Wax was Richard Lynn.
Richard Lynn was a eugenicist as shown by his membership in the English Eugenics Society and by the articles he wrote for Social Biology, the journal of the American national eugenics society:
1999 Richard Lynn. New evidence for dysgenic fertility for intelligence in the United States". Social Biology 46 (1-2): 146–53
1990 Richard Lynn. Differential rates of secular increase of five major primary abilities. Social Biology 37, 137–141
1977 Richard Lynn. Selective emigration and the decline of intelligence in Scotland. Social Biology 24, 3:173-182
Richard Lynn was a racist as shown by his longstanding connection with the journal, Mankind Quarterly, which was founded to resist desegregation. Here is a fairly recent article which is still in effect arguing that desegregation was bad. (There is plenty of evidence that the policy of the educators rather than the race of the students has the strongest effect on behavior in schools.)
-2009 Race Differences in School Exclusions and Anti-social Behavior. Richard Lynn. Mankind Quarterly 50, 1-2
Richard Lynn was a scientific racist as shown by the fact that he was a grantee and the last President of the Pioneer Fund which funded almost all of the research and the researchers associated with "scientific racism". Scientific racism, simply put, is the theory (held by all Pioneer Fund grantees) that there is a hereditary genetically based deficit in IQ in those of African descent. see The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund by William H. Tucker
Richard Lynn associates head size and IQ.
2017 Richard Lynn, et al. Correlations Between Intelligence, Head Circumference and Height: Evidence from Two Samples in Saudi Arabia. Journal of Biosocial Science, 49(2), 276-280
2013 Richard Lynn, et al. Normative Data for IQ, Height and Head Circumference for Children in Saudi Arabia. Journal of Biosocial Science 45, 4
Richard Lynn has connected culture and wealth with race via IQ as shown in his book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002.)
How much of all this does Amy Wax believe? To a student of eugenics like me there is a direct descent from resisting desegregation in the Sixties to scientific racism to the ideas of Amy Wax on the kind of culture that makes nations wealthy. I think this because there are figures like Richard Lynn who opposed desegregation, supported scientific racism and now support the "IQ and the wealth of nations" concept. To me, the three phases are one set of ideas redraped in differing intellectual fashions. But a person, even though a professor at Penn, might not think the same set of ideas are being used in all three cultural phases. I have not been round and round on this issue on this blog without realizing that it's very common for people to disregard the source and the history of their ideas and to regard them as de novo productions appearing in the last five or ten years. So Wax might sincerely oppose segregation and sincerely think that her remarks about culture are historical in nature. However they are the same remarks made by segregationists to whom Wax is linked through Richard Lynn. So, questionable
"the weird stupidities of Donald Trump"
What buwaya said. No one else would touch the subject. He forced if front and center, if crudely.
Someone had to do it.
But Lynn was right.
In every respect, or very nearly so.
More, everyone who matters, at this point, knows it too.
Its a curious situation.
Jeff wrote:
Are you saying that immigration is destroying social capital? I don't know what that means. Please explain, specifically, what is this social capital that is being destroyed by immigration? Who does it belong to? How is it destroyed? Surely it's more than just "I don't like those people." Please explain.
Ten seconds with google:
"Author Lyda Hanifan referred to social capital as “those tangibleassets [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namelygoodwill, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among theindividuals and families who make up a social unit”"
https://www.oecd.org/insights/37966934.pdf
If you want an example:
A neighborhood has high social capital. The people have similar incomes and jobs, speak the same language, and have similar education backgrounds, and most own their own homes.
Ten years later, the neighborhood is 30% illegal immigrants. 20% of the housing is rentals, some illegally subdivided into tiny apartments. The vast majority of the illegal immigrants are young single men, low skilled, who make the minimum wage or less.
Crime in the neighborhood increases. The original population that remains buys alarm systems for their cars and houses. They no longer feel safe at night. Drug dealers come and go. Housing values plummet.
Who profits from this?
None of this, now, is an argument about facts, or nature.
That all is as solid, as settled, and more so, than any question in psychology.
This is pure politico-cultural taboo. There are facts that can't be admitted to be true, though everyone knows them to be true. Even among those that would be the first to destroy the next speaker of this truth.
Wildswan says “the” eugenicist quoted by Wax was Lynn.
This assumes facts not in evidence, viz that Lynn was the only person of eugenicist views Wax quoted.
Did she quote Keynes, or Woodrow Wilson, or Francis Crick? More to the point, did she quote scholarly work by other researchers than Lynn who the New Yorker would call eugenicist but who were not racists?
Here is an interesting fact. Many on the Left advocate killing babies with Downs. Jerry Coyne for example, and Peter Singer. They also of course advocate some genetic screening. Isn’t this eugenicist?
Close relations are usually barred not just from reproducing but even from copulating. This is a eugenicist policy isn’t it?
Wildswan
Don’t drive over a bridge. It was built using calculus, which Newton invented, and thus linked to Newton's ideas on witchcraft. Hence, questionable.
What was the most racist period in the US?
It wasn't pre civil war. It was the 1900s. Anti-miscegination laws in the south date from the early 20th century, not pre Civil War.
Why?
Eugenics was a big deal in the late 19th-early 20th centuries. Evolution gave a natural, not a Biblical, explanation for inferior and superior races. Before Darwin, all the races were cousins, descended from the sons of Adam. After Darwin, the races were viewed as different animals, and competitors for resources. Compare the attitude of Mark Twain towards Blacks with the attitude of 20s-30s pulp writer Robert E. Howard, or read Joseph Conrad's "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'" (1897).
There are facts that can't be admitted to be true, though everyone knows them to be true.
Yes and no one can admit they know they are true. Even the left knows they are true, hence Affirmative Action
A neighborhood has high social capital. The people have similar incomes and jobs, speak the same language, and have similar education backgrounds, and most own their own homes.
Ten years later, the neighborhood is 30% illegal immigrants. 20% of the housing is rentals, some illegally subdivided into tiny apartments. The vast majority of the illegal immigrants are young single men, low skilled, who make the minimum wage or less.
Crime in the neighborhood increases. The original population that remains buys alarm systems for their cars and houses. They no longer feel safe at night. Drug dealers come and go. Housing values plummet.
Who profits from this?
If the neighborhood is 30 percent immigrants and 20 percent renters, that means somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the original owners sold and moved out. Most likely they did so because their kids had grown and housing prices appreciated to the point where they could take the money and retire somewhere cheaper. So those are the people who profited.
But they're not the only ones. Those houses that are subdivided are almost certainly bringing in more rent than if they weren't subdivided, so those owners are profiting as well. And of course, none of this would have happened in the first place if restrictive zoning hadn't driven the cost of housing so high that only the upper middle class could afford to buy a house. All those guys housed in the subdivided homes would be in inexpensive apartments if developers were allowed to build them.
Who profits from zoning? 1) Politicians who control the zoning, and 2) people who already own houses and see them appreciate due to scarcity.
I live in Woodbridge, Virginia, about 20 miles due South of DC. We have some expensive, low-crime areas, and some less expensive (but still pretty costly) higher-crime areas. There are more illegal immigrants in the cheaper areas, but they're not the reason for the higher crime there. In fact, it's a pretty common occurrence that crime in a neighborhood drops when Hispanics move in and displace black residents. I've never seen crime go up just because immigrants moved into an area, and we have a lot of immigrants in Northern Virginia.
I think you should try to get to know some of those young Hispanic men who come here to work. I think you might find that most of them are hard working honest guys trying to take care of their families and improve themselves. Pretty admirable, for the most part.
@Lewis Wetzel,
Actually, from the way you wrote about the neighborhood that declined when immigrants moved in, I strongly suspect that it's just a hypothetical neighborhood rather than an actual one. So please tell me where the neighborhood you described actually is. If you won't do so, I'll assume you just made it up.
Also, Lewis, your contention that the 1900's were somehow more racist than actual slavery based on skin color is just amazing.
@Lewis Wetzel,
Also this quote of yours
"Author Lyda Hanifan referred to social capital as “those tangibleassets [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namelygoodwill, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among theindividuals and families who make up a social unit”"
tells me nothing except that Lyda Hanifan does not know the meaning of the word "tangible".
Those are intangibles, good grief.
There is a socioeconomic status and intra ethnic factor say caribbean vs central american, this has become true in places like little havana and sweetwater to cite too locations in south florida.
Always, always record an interview with the media. Remember, they are hostile propagandists, working for the Left.
60 Minutes established how much damage creative editing can do.
"Most likely they did so because their kids had grown and housing prices appreciated to the point where they could take the money and retire somewhere cheaper. So those are the people who profited."
This is what is called "hand waving."
The people who lost: the people who did not sell their homes, possible the people who sold their homes when they saw what wsa happening to the neighborhood. The bad drives out the good.
The winners: Illegal aliens, who are making more money than would in their own country. The people who hire them. who pay less for value received than if they had hired Americans.
Where did the social capital of the neighborhood go? Into the pockets of non-Americans and American chiselers.
Chuck: I love absolutely everything about this kind of Althouse blog post. It makes it all the harder to understand why this sort of incisive analysis is never applied to Trump.
Dude. You're going to have to kill your own strawmen. That's the way it works.
Sorry, Chuck. I’ve consciously been reserving judgment on you for a couple of years, but more fool I. “Teabaggers” did it.
Chuck=rolcon.
Althouse should ban you for dishonesty. Your arguments stand or fall on their merits in any case. Why pose as a Republican?
I no longer have any interest in anything you have to say.
the people who sold their homes when they saw what wsa happening to the neighborhood.
If you are stupid enough (as we were) to shrug when the Section 8 lottery comes to your neighborhood, a key sign to look for is the flight of white families with young children.
Our block had maybe 8 kids. Then two section 8s came in with 12 total, outnumbering the others. Stereotypically, the Section 8 kids had no adult supervision outside during the day, which let to them fighting (and actually stabbing) 10 year olds who could no longer go outside and play. Within 3 months every family with young kids had moved out of the area.
This compounded the problem, because the falling home values (yay trash spread out all over the street) led to more renters than buyers. Then it was just a matter of time before the local businesses moved on, the Mall was at half it's store capacity with more abandoning the area every day. To be replaced by liquor stores, payday lenders, pawn shops and a fleet of tow trucks parked around town at night (they prey on irresponsible people who let their auto papers lapse).
And this is not happening to some dying town in Missouri. This is happening in Montgomery Village Maryland. One Section 8 is like a cancer.
Last week the wife and I were trying to get out of the parking lot. Black guy talking to a car parked in front of us, taking up the entire street. We pull in behind and wait patiently for them to wrap up and move. They act like they are the only people that exist in the world. So we wait. And wait. Finally, I get out of the car and ask if they wouldn't mind moving over to the curb, as we are trying to get to the hospital. The black guy starts cursing me out in the middle of neighborhood, "fuck you asshole fuck you I'll beat the fuck out of you" in from of a dozen kids.
I'm not sure what his intent was. If he was trying to intimidate me, he only caused me to think of apes flinging poo. No impulse control. You have to regard him as mental case that should be worked around in the future.
those tangibleassets [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely goodwill, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit
The man my wife was dating before she met me was Latino. He lived in a poor part of Dallas, but was surrounded by fellow Latino families, salt of the earth blue collar types. He was OCD about home maintenance, and spent 3 months planting and cultivating shrubbery outside his white picket fence. Woke up one morning to find his fellow neighbors had torched the whole thing in the night. Like the union guys who tell you to stop working so fast, they considered his attempts to brighten his property up pretentious, trying to be something he wasn't.
I read the interview last night and found Chotiner to be his usual biased and smug self I don’t know why anyone outside the perimeters of correct thought submit to his game.. Did he ever define racism?
John Hinderaker references Althouse in his blog about this interview and he includes this warning from Victor Davis Hanson:
If Chotiner makes numerous calls and sends emails, go with your original and initial instincts that he is a disingenuous and snarky performance artist, not a journalist. We can be sure the tone and substance of his outreach were toadyish and insidious too. Thanks for reminding people he needs a warning label given his toxicity.
kritarch - a judge who thinks he's a legislator
kritarche - the onset of the urge to comment
"Ken B said...
Wildswan says “the” eugenicist quoted by Wax was Lynn.
This assumes facts not in evidence, viz that Lynn was the only person of eugenicist views Wax quoted."
We do not have the transcript and Althouse is right that we need to be cautious without it. The only person quoted by name and acknowledged by Amy Wax as a source in the article under discussion was Richard Lynn. But he is a very significant figure in eugenics and in the field of IQ studies and his book IQ and the Wealth of Nations promotes the same ideas as those held by Amy Wax. I think it is fair to assume that she is intellectually coherent to discuss her as influenced by him.
"Ken B said...
Here is an interesting fact. Many on the Left advocate killing babies with Downs. Jerry Coyne for example, and Peter Singer. They also of course advocate some genetic screening. Isn’t this eugenicist?"
The field of genetic screening was founded by members of the eugenic societies. It took the place of genetic medicine, i.e. trying to find ways to alter the consequences of genetic diseases
"Ken B said...
Close relations are usually barred not just from reproducing but even from copulating. This is a eugenicist policy isn’t it?"
There are three characteristics of a real eugenicist:
1. they believe that evolution by natural selection can and should be applied to human society with the goal of extinguishing certain human groups just as natural selection extinguishes plant and animal groups when conditions in the wild change.
2. They believe that they know the direction natural selection would follow in human society if left to itself and they specifically mean that they know marks by which groups to be exterminated can be identified. These marks in the past have been: poverty under Social Darwinism and mainline eugenics; race under the Nazis and their supporters; IQ under reform eugenics; behavior under neo-social biological eugenics
3. They have a specific social policy they want enacted in order to exterminate quickly or slowly the group they think is lagging. These policies were: segregation and sterilization in the US under mainline eugenics; death camps under the Nazis; birth control under reform eugenics; behavior control under no social biological eugenics.
This isn't the same as not marrying your close relatives.
This isn't the same as not marrying your close relatives.
Tell it to the Hapsburgs and the Wilkes's.
Seriously, I read years ago that centuries of male-side first cousin marriages not only reinforced tribalism but may also have lowered average IQ in some Muslim countries.
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