Dennis Mangan

Whenever the subject of intelligence testing comes up, especially in the context of racial and ethnic differences in intelligence, or disparate outcomes in education, liberals can always be counted upon for their skepticism towards the entire subject of IQ testing. They will usually claim that the tests are either biased or don't measure anything real - as in "IQ measures the ability to take an IQ test". This is of course ironic, since individual differences in intelligence as measured by IQ testing is the most established and robust finding of modern psychometrics, and liberals constantly proclaim their devotion to science, only inbred conservatives being opposed to scientific findings. 

But liberals become IQ believers when something like this happens: Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice.

Some of the quotes from the article show how a study like this operates. For instance:

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority."

I guess smart liberals believe that a mother working outside the home full-time couldn't possibly have any downside for family life, and that their indoctrination of schoolkids in things like environmentalism, global warming, and the essential evilness of America's past don't constitute teaching children to obey their authority.

The essential point to make here is that the average Democratic Party member is very likely not as intelligent as the average Republican, since the Democratic Party contains more minorities, who on average score lower on IQ tests than whites. But once you point out something like that, liberals go into IQ denial.

Affirmative action is the Orwellian name given to efforts to hire, admit, or otherwise promote people of certain racial or ethnic groups, merely because they belong to those groups. The name of this game derives from the notion that it actively helps people, i.e. it is “affirmative”, rather than harming people who belong to excluded groups. In the second edition of The Affirmative Action Hoax: Diversity, Character, and Other Lies (2010), Steven Farron traces the history, the excuses, the lies, and the deceit behind this form of racial discrimination.

The origins of the policy known as affirmative action (hereafter “AA”) lie in the Kennedy Administration, when incipient concern for the civil rights of Black Americans caused many in power to notice that Blacks were underrepresented in the universities, the professions, and in government. To most of them, inequality of outcome was de facto evidence of "discrimination"; there could be no inequality of ability or intelligence between races. In Daniel Moynihan's famous report, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (1965), he wrote, “There is absolutely no question of any genetic differential: Intelligence potential is distributed among Negro infants in the same proportion and pattern as among Icelanders or Chinese or any other group.”

Yet affirmative action, as a policy if not a name, goes back further, and most definitely was motivated by the recognition that at least one group in particular possessed greater intelligence and ability to succeed in academia and in life. That group was the Jews. In the early years of the 20th century, Jewish admissions to elite universities rose greatly. By 1919, 40 percent of Columbia's students were Jewish, and for university administrators who wanted their institutions to retain their character, “radical steps had to be taken." And here lies the origin of non-academic criteria for admission to a university, in other words the doctrine of “diversity.” At this point, university admissions bureaucracies began their cancerous growth, since while it was a simple matter to screen students based on academic merit, it was not so simple to admit students seemingly on qualities like “leadership” or “character,” when in reality one wanted only to keep out a disfavored group.

Current AA policy relies on defining favored groups, and Farron ably dissects the absurdities of this practice. For instance, “Black” denotes anyone with at least one Black ancestor, and furthermore, bureaucrats are not allowed to override the self-description of any candidate for hiring, promotion, or admission. In other words, someone who says that he's Black (or Hispanic, etc.) must be taken at face value, no matter how absurd it seems. “Hispanic” was so defined as to exclude anyone with origins in Brazil, yet fully White Argentinians and Uruguyans fall into this category. Financial success is no impediment to becoming a recipient of AA either; a Black millionaire is eligible for preference over a poor White, and in fact most AA benefits go to the middle and upper middle class. It will not have escaped notice that while AA was meant to benefit victims of historical discrimination, not only have most Blacks alive today not experienced it--especially so when they come from the middle class-- but Hispanics have never been subject to slavery or Jim Crow, and have not even been a major presence in the U.S. until recently.

George W. Bush spent hundreds of billions of dollars, over 4,000 American dead and nearly 32,000 wounded, all to make Iraq a democracy.

Then Ben Bernanke comes along and prints a few trillion, causes world food prices to spike, and all of a sudden we've got revolutions all over the Middle East, revolutions which have at least as much a chance, maybe better, at making these countries as democratic as Iraq (and Afghanistan) currently are. A dictatorship which looked to last nearly forever, Gaddafi's, is on the ropes and headed for a fall, after years of American and especially European sucking up to it, all because of Big Ben.

Maybe when Bush and the neocons got their grand idea to invade the Middle East and turn the Muslim countries into democracies, they should instead have just fired Greenspan and appointed Helicopter Ben Bernanke. Though he's clueless as to the unintended consequences of his money printing, he's inadvertently spreading democracy, and so far at no cost in American lives.

William Poundstone's recent book Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) discusses many of the startling ramifications of behavioral economics, which was more or less invented by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and for which Kahneman received the Nobel Prize (Tversky having died before the award). Among the classic experiments in behavioral economics is the ultimatum game, consisting of two players and a given amount of money. One player, the proposer, is given a sum of money, let's say ten dollars, and is allowed to split this sum in any fashion he likes with the other player. The second player, the responder, then either accepts the sum he is offered, in which case both players receive the money in the proportions chosen by the first player, or he rejects it, in which case neither player receives any money.

A moment's reflection will show that the second player ought to accept any offer at all, and that the first player ought to divide the sum in such a way as to give himself the most money; for instance, assuming the ten dollars can be divided into dollar units only, the first player ought to give himself nine and offer one the the second player, who then ought to accept it. That would be the way of rationality.

The surprising thing about the ultimatum game is how seldom this occurs. The average split, according to some of the studies, was 50-50, and other results showed that most of the second players would reject any offer below three dollars. Some psychologists and economists were skeptical that, when larger sums of money were at stake, the same sort of rejections would take place; after all, it costs little (perhaps only two dollars) to reject an offer that is felt unfair, but how many people would reject ten or twenty just out of spite, or a feeling of unfairness? But experiments with larger sums, such as one hundred dollars, gave the same results: responders are apt to reject any sum they consider unfair, and the most common offer is a 50-50 split.

Aside from the grievous damage these experimental results do to homo economicus, the economists' rational man, what could be going on here? Are human beings hardwired for some sort of “fairness”?

The ultimatum game has been tried on people of many different cultures, one of them being the Machichuenga people of Peru, whom Poundstone describes as “among the most asocial people on earth”, a “people with no economy to speak of”, and uncooperative with either each other or outsiders. Interestingly, the Machichuenga responders were likely to accept any offer, at least putatively exhibiting far more rationality than others who played the game.

Could the ultimatum game hold clues for political orientation? It would seem so. Leftist concerns with inequality and “fairness” could be hardwired, at least in certain people (i.e. leftists). Rightists and conservatives generally are usually more at ease with social inequality. Consider also that Europeans invented modern capitalism, and European societies are characterized by high degrees of trust. The most rigid adherence to the 50-50 split in the ultimatum game occurred among peoples of New Guinea, in which gifts must be reciprocated; among these people responders actually rejected offers of greater than 50% of the money, apparently on the grounds that it put them on the hook for a return of the favor. If European peoples exhibit a greater degree of acceptance of any split – even though they tend to reject lowball offers – it could indicate a greater degree of rationality, although whether that rationality has genetic grounds or whether it is a product of many years of capitalism is an open question.

 

The Joy of Curmudgeonry's Deogolwulf has a simply amazing post on the agenda of the United States government to promote diversity, that is the promotion of minority groups at the expense of the majority, along with extensive propagandizing of the latter, in... France. Deogolwulf's source is Wikileaks, and the cited words are all from the American Embassy in Paris, the "Minority Engagement Strategy". Here's a sample, see the link for the rest:

“[W]e will continue and intensify our work with French museums and educators to reform the history curriculum taught in French schools, so that it takes into account the role and perspectives of minorities in French history.” [2]

We will create or support training and exchange programs that teach the enduring value of broad inclusion to schools, civil society groups, bloggers, political advisors, and local politicians.

“Finally, a Minority Working Group will integrate the discourse, actions, and analysis of relevant sections and agencies in the Embassy. This group, working in tandem with the Youth Outreach Initiative, will identify and target influential leaders and groups among our primary audiences. It will also evaluate our impact over the course of the year, by examining both tangible and intangible indicators of success. Tangible changes include a measurable increase in the number of minorities leading and participating in public and private organizations, including elite educational institutions; growth in the number of constructive efforts by minority leaders to organize political support both within and beyond their own minority communities; new, proactive policies to enhance social inclusion adopted by non-minority political leaders; expansion of inter-communal and inter-faith exchanges at the local level; decrease in popular support for xenophobic political parties and platforms.

State Department apparatchiks will now not only teach the French about the proper understanding of their own history, but also look like they're actively promoting the Islamisation and Africanisation of France. That's pretty close to what the government and its media enablers already promote here, so why not let France have the best America has to offer?

We have met the enemy, and he isn't us, but he's very closely related.

Satoshi Kanazawa reports that a fundamental tenet of evolutionary psychology may be doubtful. Specifically, the fact that children are far more likely to be murdered in a home with a stepparent (read: stepfather) may require a different interpretation than standard evolutionary psychology theory has given it.

Parental love for children is evolutionarily conditional on the children’s ability to increase the parents’ reproductive success.  Stepchildren do not carry any of the genes of the stepparents, so there is absolutely no evolutionary reason for stepparents to love, care for and invest in their stepchildren.  Worse yet, any resources invested in stepchildren take away from investment that the stepparents could make in their own genetic children.  So, in the cold, heartless calculus of evolutionary logic, it makes perfect sense for the stepfather to kill his stepchildren, so that his mate (the mother of the stepchildren) will only invest in their joint children, children whom the stepfather has had with the mother and who carry his genes.  Only they can increase the stepfather’s reproductive success.

 According to a recent study that Kanazawa discusses, it turns out that stepfathers themselves are much more likely to have a history of criminal violence, and thus a propensity to murder stepchildren may be as much or more due to the criminal proclivities of these men than to the fact that the children are stepchildren. Furthermore, it appears that violent men are equally likely to kill their own children as they are to kill stepchildren. Kanazawa explains why stepfathers are more likely to have criminal records:

Divorced women with children are on average older, so they have lower mate value than younger women without children.  Given choice, and all else equal, all men would prefer to marry younger women without children rather than older women with children with other men.  The logic of assortative mating would suggest that women with lower mate value are more likely to mate with men with lower mate value.  And, as I explain in an earlier post, men with lower mate value are more likely to be criminal and violent.

However, Kanazawa doesn't draw the obvious conclusion here: the fact that divorced women with children have lower mate value, and that therefore they are more likely to become married to men with criminal histories, is itself a perfect example of a result that agrees with evolutionary theory. Thus, while the cited study calls into question one of the foundational facts of evolutionary psychology, the study itself confirms another fundamental tenet, namely that the value of a mate can be measured by such things as the ability to provide offspring, the presence of non-related offspring, and a history of criminal violence.

The differences in average IQ among races has been fairly well-established, with Asians having the highest IQ scores, whites next, and blacks third. This order – Asians, whites, blacks – or the reverse order, can be seen in many aspects of life and society. For instance, crime rates show the reverse order (with blacks having the highest, Asians the lowest); in personality, blacks are more aggressive and more extroverted than Asians, with whites again in the middle. (These examples are all taken from Philippe Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior, where many more examples can be found.) A perhaps less remarked-upon race difference is that of aging and longevity, where again we find the same order: Asians live longest, blacks the shortest, with whites in between. (Asian American women have the highest life expectancy of any group in this country, at 85.8 years.) Naturally, it might be expected that the various factors and outcomes which show racial variation and in the order described here will be correlated, and that is indeed the case. For instance, IQ has been shown to be correlated with longevity.

Why in fact does IQ affect longevity, or maybe vice versa? This is the subject of some debate among IQ researchers. It appears, for example, that those with higher IQ have better health practices (diet, exercise, etc.); they also are more likely to be better informed about health and illness and as such will seek a doctor's care earlier than others, as well as being better able to understand a doctor's orders and comply with them better. (Don't laugh: “26% of the outpatients at two urban hospitals were unable to determine from an appointment slip when their next appointment was scheduled, and 42% did not understand directions for taking medicine on an empty stomach.” [see PDF])

Writing in the Boston Globe, Paul Kix summarizes compelling research that suggests that many suicide terrorists may be motivated – or demotivated, as the case may be – by depression and suicidal impulses, rather than Islamic ideology.

At the forefront is the University of Alabama’s Adam Lankford, who recently published an analysis of suicide terrorism in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior. Lankford cites Israeli scholars who interviewed would-be Palestinian suicide bombers. These scholars found that 40 percent of the terrorists showed suicidal tendencies; 13 percent had made previous suicide attempts, unrelated to terrorism. Lankford finds Palestinian and Chechen terrorists who are financially insolvent, recently divorced, or in debilitating health in the months prior to their attacks. A 9/11 hijacker, in his final note to his wife, describing how ashamed he is to have never lived up to her expectations. Terrorist recruiters admitting they look for the “sad guys” for martyrdom.

Kix points out that depressed and suicidal young men can feel that they would be giving their lives tremendous significance if they die as a “martyr"; at the same time Islam forbids suicide, so killing themselves in an act of terrorism is a way to kill themselves without technically, in their minds, committing suicide.

While depressed people exist in almost any society, and depression has become a virtual epidemic in Western societies, some characteristics of the Muslim world may predispose to depression, perhaps the main one among them being polygamy. In a polygamous world, many young men will be permanently shut out of the institution that for the vast majority of people gives their lives its main source of meaning: marriage and family. As London School of Economics professor Satoshi Kanazawa has noted, virtually all Muslim suicide bombers have been young and unmarried:

Most importantly, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but also other (non-suicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, and nearly all suicide bombers are single (Atran, 2003; Berrebi, 2003). Because all primate societies, including humans, are gerontocratic, age is the greatest predictor of men’s social status, and we would therefore expect the youngest men to have the lowest status and thus the dimmest prospect for reproductive success in any organization.

Being young and unmarried means, as Kanazawa points out, that the social status of suicide bombers is lower, and this is also a factor in depression. Aside from the issue of depression, young, single men are disproportionately likely to be the perpetrators of violent crime.

Kix writes:

Fifty-three percent of the would-be bombers showed “depressive tendencies” — melancholy, low energy, tearfulness, the study found — whereas 21 percent of the organizers exhibited the same. Furthermore, 40 percent of the would-be suicide bombers expressed suicidal tendencies; one talked openly of slitting his wrists after his father died. But the study found that none of the terrorist organizers were suicidal.

“[N]one of the terrorist organizers were suicidal”: it's also a safe bet that few of the terrorist organizers were single either. A polygamous society provides abundant numbers of young men, predisposed to violence because of family and sexual deprivation, who can be used to further the interests of the powerful.

What about Islam? As Kanazawa notes, other polygamous societies don't produce suicide bombers; for instance, Swaziland has the highest incidence of polygamy in the world. While Islam's culture of martyrdom, as well as the promise of endless sexual delight in the world to come surely enter into it, it's only part of the equation. If it were the whole of it, as many neoconservatives would have us believe, we would see more married, older, and/or female suicide bombers. After all, the tenets of Islam apply to them too. Yet it appears that it is disproportionately the young, the male, the unmarried – and, related to all these factors, the depressed – who find the culture of martyrdom so compelling that they actually put it into practice.

 

 

The concept of race has long been under assault by egalitarian liberals, Boasian anthropologists, and other bien pensants who abhor the idea that every human being is not equally capable of the heights of accomplishment. The notion that humans differ systematically in various characteristics would, if accepted, put a huge damper in many left-liberal projects – one of the most prominent being education, on which the left wants to spend ever more billions in order to finally do away with racial achievement gaps – and perhaps most importantly would rob them of their generalized accusation of racism, directed at whites and used to explain the underachievement – or overachievement in the cases of things like crime, drug use, and illegitimacy – of various non-white ethnic groups.

One of the leading champions of the no-such-thing-as-race school of thought (if it can be said that any thought goes into it) has been the biologist and self-identified Marxist Richard Lewontin. His critique of the concept of race focuses on the fact that most genetic variation occurs within races, which is true enough when looking at only one genetic locus. However, when multiple loci are compared, it is seen that they vary systematically among races, and when these multiple loci are taken into account, it's possible to classify individuals by race with almost perfect accuracy. Hence, Lewontin's critique has come to be known as Lewontin's fallacy.

A new paper by philosopher Neven Sesardic, “Race: a social destruction of a biological concept,” published in the journal Biology and Philosophy, takes the critique further.

A number of contemporary philosophers, anthropologists, geneticists, evolutionary biologists and psychologists have argued for some time that the concept of race does not have a biological reality. But what is actually being denied here? What exactly does it mean that a concept has (or does not have) a biological reality?

 Much of Sesardic's work here involves the clearing up of straw men. For example:

Naomi Zack claims that those who believe in the existence of human races ‘‘to this day… assume the following: (1) races are made up of individuals sharing the same essence; (2) each race is sharply discontinuous from all others…’’ (Zack 2002, 63—italics added).

 Sesardic shows that hardly any scientist has ever believed Zack's two propositions. Another straw man set up by a race denier says that there are no alleles distinctive of “this race or that”, and that therefore “races are not biologically real”. Sesardic rightly shows that this statement is a “parody” of what actual scientists believe.

Sesardic points out that the exactness demanded of the concept of race by those who believe that it has no biological reality are so demanding that, were they accepted as legitimate, there couldn't even be any such thing as species, for, quoting Matt Ridley, “the characters that define a species will not be present in all members of that species and absent from all members of other species”.

As for Lewontin's fallacy, Sesardic writes:

Lewontin’s univariate approach to the conceptualization of race is particularly clear when he asks: ‘‘How much difference in the frequencies of A, B, AB, and O blood groups does one require before deciding that it is large enough to declare two local populations are in separate ‘races’?’’ (Lewontin 1987, 200) This is the wrong question completely. Races are not distinguished from one another by some specially big difference of allelic frequencies in one trait, but rather by a combination of a number of small or moderate differences in many traits. That is, e pluribus, not ex uno.

Sesardic goes on to show that the best current science manifestly does support the biological reality of the concept of race.

Conservatives are rightly skeptical of much of what government does, and foreign aid has long been something that stuck deeply in conservatives' craws, having a lineage of doubt going back to the John Birch Society and beyond. Mostly, it seems that hostility to the idea of foreign aid has centered around the fact that it involves taking money from honest, hardworking taxpayers and giving it to undeserving foreign governments. But there's perhaps an even better reason for the abolition of foreign aid: far from helping, it actively hurts those it intends to help. So says the journalist Linda Polman in a new book, The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?

Sierra Leone, the small West African state that was wracked by a brutal civil war – and where this writer lived many years ago working in, I now meekly report, humanitarian aid – is a classic example of the extremes which foreign aid has provoked. Foreign governments, along with various non-state actors, such as warlords and bandits, long ago learned that aid from the developed world and their various agencies is a fairly reliable source of cash. Being the shifty souls that so many of them are, they've learned to do whatever it takes to keep the cash flowing. In Sierra Leone, the appearance of amputation as a form of warfare and terror was somewhat mystifying; thoroughly brutal, it was hard to see for what purpose it could be used, other than terrorizing the civilian population – and they were seemingly already terrorized enough, being killed and maimed in the tens of thousands by roving bands of unspeakably violent marauders. In his New Yorker review of Polman's book, Philip Gourevitch explains the logic behind amputation in that unhappy country.

Three decades later, in Sierra Leone, a Dutch journalist named Linda Polman squeezed into a bush taxi bound for Makeni, the headquarters of the Revolutionary United Front rebels. In the previous decade, the R.U.F. had waged a guerrilla war of such extreme cruelty in the service of such incoherent politics that the mania seemed its own end. While the R.U.F. leadership, backed by President Charles Taylor, of Liberia, got rich off captured diamond mines, its Army, made up largely of abducted children, got stoned and sacked the land, raping and hacking limbs off citizens and burning homes and villages to the ground. But, in May, 2001, a truce had been signed, and by the time Polman arrived in Sierra Leone later that year the Blue Helmets of the United Nations were disarming and demobilizing the R.U.F. The business of war was giving way to the business of peace, and, in Makeni, Polman found that former rebel warlords—such self-named men as General Cut-Throat, Major Roadblock, Sergeant Rape Star, and Kill-Man No-Blood—had taken to calling their territories “humanitarian zones,” and identifying themselves as “humanitarian officers.” As one rebel turned peacenik, who went by the name Colonel Vandamme, explained, “The white men are soon gonna need drivers, security guards, and houses. We’re gonna provide them.”

Colonel Vandamme called aid workers “wives”—“because they care for people,” according to Polman, and also, presumably, because they are seen as fit objects of manipulation and exploitation. Speaking in the local pidgin, Vandamme told Polman, “Them N.G.O. wifes done reach already for come count how much sick and pikin [children] de na di area.” Vandamme saw opportunity in this census. “They’re my pikin and my sick,” he said. “Anyone who wants to count them has to pay me first.”

This was what Polman had come to Makeni to hear. The conventional wisdom was that Sierra Leone’s civil war had been pure insanity: tens of thousands dead, many more maimed or wounded, and half the population displaced—all for nothing. But Polman had heard it suggested that the R.U.F.’s rampages had followed from “a rational, calculated strategy.” The idea was that the extreme violence had been “a deliberate attempt to drive up the price of peace.” Sure enough, Polman met a rebel leader in Makeni, who told her, “We’d worked harder than anyone for peace, but we got almost nothing in return.” Addressing Polman as a stand-in for the international community, he elaborated, “You people looked the other way all those years. . . . There was nothing to stop for. Everything was broken, and you people weren’t here to fix it.”

In the end, he claimed, the R.U.F. had escalated the horror of the war (and provoked the government, too, to escalate it) by deploying special “cut-hands gangs” to lop off civilian limbs. “It was only when you saw ever more amputees that you started paying attention to our fate,” he said. “Without the amputee factor, you people wouldn’t have come.” The U.N.’s mission in Sierra Leone was per capita the most expensive humanitarian relief operation in the world at the time. The old rebel believed that, instead of being vilified for the mutilations, he and his comrades should be thanked for rescuing their country. [Emphasis added.]

Some Africans themselves have come to understand the damaging effects of foreign aid. James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist, has argued that the aid does more harm than good, and in an interview with Der Spiegel, said, “For God's sake, please stop the aid!”

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

With evidence like that presented here, why does the aid keep flowing? One reason is careerism: foreign aid by both governments and NGOs supports a by now huge bureaucracy. But I suspect a major reason is vanity: we want to think of ourselves as generous people, regardless of the actual effects of our giving. Consider the reaction of Bob Geldof at accusations that much of the money he helped raise financed warlords.

Bob Geldof has launched a furious attack on the BBC World Service over its claim that 95% of the $100m aid raised to fight famine in northern Ethiopia was diverted by rebels and spent on weapons.

Writing in today's Guardian, the musician and mastermind of the 1985 Live Aid concerts accuses the World Service of a "total collapse of standards and systems", threatens it with legal action and calls for the sacking of the reporter behind the story, his editor and the head of the World Service, Peter Horrocks.

Anger and denial was the response, not an engagement with the alleged facts – which is usually a sign that the criticisms have hit home.

Aside from the injustice of forcibly taking Americans' hard-earned money for causes they themselves might not choose to support, we have another reason for ending foreign aid: it causes more harm than good.