Richard Hoste

It sounds as if The History of White People, reviewed by Kevin Lamb, is more of the same PC nonsense we’re used to on race.  

Reading Lamb reminded me of how dishonest and incoherent I find the “No Such Thing as Race” (NOSTAR) arguments.  Once we notice that people look different, whether there are important inherent cognitive or behavioral differences becomes an empirical question.  Race is socially constructed?  Ok, in that case, I believe that those we happen to “socially construct” as white are on average naturally smarter and less criminal than those we “socially construct” as black.  We can look at the evidence and see whether I’m right, but there’s no way one can argue that the question is meaningless.  

Another favorite of the NOSTAR crowd is Lewontin’s Fallacy.  Richard Lewontin argued that most human variation occurs within a population.  One can read the Wikipedia article to see where he went wrong.

When arguing against HBD smart people make logical mistakes they would see right through if they were discussing any other topic. 

I’ve found that it’s relatively easy to convince people of HBD one on one and difficult to do so in front of a crowd or say on a blog.  In cases where there are three or more people in a discussion, there will always be at least one who has drunk the Kool-Aid and will right away turn the scientific questions into moral ones. If you’re in a crowded lecture hall, somebody will groan or mumble something.  Most people are unsure about their own intellects, so they’ll go along with ideas which they wouldn’t defend with their own intuitive reasoning one on one if those opinions are held by a majority in the room they happen to be sitting in. 

Another interesting thing I've found is that many race realists say that “The day is coming soon when there will be no way anybody can deny race differences.” For example, Sailer has quoted James Watson as telling the President of Harvard that within fifteen years the latter's successor would have to "handle this very hot potato" due to advances in genetics.  There have even been articles about scientists forming rapid response teams to go to the media and explain to everybody why they can still be liberals if/when there’s conclusive proof.  I disagree.  As is, there isn’t anything in the social sciences more proven than black/Eurasian differences in intelligence.  How many other questions in sociology or psychology can give you the same answer when looking at the problem from ten different angles and remain controversial?  If one day we wake up and find that genetics has made the case 100 instead of 99 percent certain I don’t think that Harvard, NBC and the NYT are going to throw their hands up and say “oh, they’ve got us now!”  They'll have to do little more than adjust a few of their lies, distortions and logical fallacies, none of which will be much more ridiculous than the ones they rely on now.  

John McCain now believes in militarizing the border.  I wonder what changed his mind.

Does he know he's lying or does being a politician for a really long time make you able to convince yourself you believe something new whenever it's politically expedient?  

This year Michelle Obama was put in charge of dealing with the nation's “obesity epidemic."  Of course, liberals love this as a public health initiative.  But how to sell government meddling in a new part of our lives to Red America?  Just call it “national security.”

WASHINGTON – School lunches have been called many things, but a group of retired military officers is giving them a new label: national security threat.

That's not a reference to the mystery meat served up in the cafeteria line either. The retired officers are saying that school lunches have helped make the nation's young people so fat that fewer of them can meet the military's physical fitness standards, and recruitment is in jeopardy.

A new report being released Tuesday says more than 9 million young adults, or 27 percent of all Americans ages 17 to 24, are too overweight to join the military. Now, the officers are advocating for passage of a wide-ranging nutrition bill that aims to make the nation's school lunches healthier.The officers' group, Mission: Readiness, was appearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack...

Although all branches of the military now meet or exceed recruitment goals, retired Navy Rear Adm. James Barnett Jr., a member of the officers group, says the obesity trend could affect that.

"When over a quarter of young adults are too fat to fight, we need to take notice," Barnett said. He noted that national security in the year 2030 is "absolutely dependent" on reversing child obesity rates.

In other words, the military for now has all the soldiers it needs, but it’ll be keeping its eyes on your kids just in case.  

If this kind of logic flies, what government activity couldn’t be justified on the same grounds?  

As a matter of fact, if you go to the Mission: Readiness website, you’ll see a report titled Young Virginians: Ready, Willing and Unable to Serve with the byline “75 Percent of Young Adults Cannot Join the Military: Early Education across Virginia is Needed to Ensure National Security.”  The idea is that pre-K will improve IQs and stop kids from getting in trouble with the law, thus making more of them eligible to defend Korea from Koreans and Georgians from Russians.  Let me guess, we also need mass immigration for national security, because otherwise we won’t have enough potential soldiers.  And militant feminism too because if women get any ideas about proper sex roles in their heads they won’t want to become soldiers and the number of potential reserves will be cut in half.  

Unfortunately, these strategies of wrapping up liberalism in the flag and having ex-soldiers as spokesmen for progressive causes tend to work on American conservatives.  Lovers of liberty must never forget that war is the health of the state and there's no easier way to sell big government than connecting it with "national security."  

Anybody who watches the mainstream media with a critical eye notices a  number of tropes they keep returning to again and again. One of them is their love of "moderates" or those who get "beyond partisanship." Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and Joe Lieberman are three examples of national politicians who have been hailed as centrist figures, whatever that means. In fact, the idea that the nation needs more "moderation" has been the basis of quite a few books in recent years, among them Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now, The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics, and most recently, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America. Who or what is a "Wingnut"?  According to author John Avlon¹,

It's someone on the far-right or far-left of the political spectrum.  They are the professional partisans and the unhinged activists, the hard-core haters and the paranoid conspiracy theorists.

So the problem with these Wignuts is both their tone and views.  As far as national figures go, Glenn Beck is, of course, the worst sinner, offering a regular "Comrade Update" on his show and warning of a slow descent into Communism. John McCain's nomination in 2008 was a "repudiation" of the more extreme Karl Rove(!) but the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate was divisive. The Tea Party is uncivil and represents "the birth or white identity politics," an idea that the author informs us he owes to David Frum. Other villains of the Right include Michael Savage and of course, Rush Limbaugh. 

From The Wall Street Journal:

The social sciences are having a moment. The most prominent members of this congeries of academic disciplines—economics, psychology, sociology and political science—traditionally have been derided as the "soft sciences" by comparison with more rigorous, substantial fields like biology, chemistry and the ne plus ultra of "hard" sciences, physics. But over the past decade the study of human behavior has shaken off some of its science-lite reputation and acquired a new cachet with the general public. Even on campus, many of its practitioners have a bit more swagger than they used to—notwithstanding the failure of economists to precisely predict the current financial crisis...

Last Saturday, Harvard hosted a conference on "Hard Problems in Social Science," sponsored by the Indira Foundation, that was explicitly inspired by Hilbert's legacy. Twelve leading social scientists from a variety of fields and institutions were given 15 minutes each to present whatever hard problems they liked. The Harvard organizers did one thing that couldn't have been tried in 1900: They broadcast the meeting on the Internet and have invited the public to propose and discuss new problems, and ultimately to vote on what the hardest ones really are...

Economist Claudia Goldin proposed understanding why there is still a gap in wages between women and men, even when they are in the same professions and have equal qualifications.

Roland Fryer pointed to the gap in educational achievement between black and white children, and suggested a solution: Figure out what those charter schools that have closed the gap, or at least narrowed it, are doing right, and then distribute those techniques to the public schools. Longer hours, esprit de corps, a return to drilling—whatever it is, find it and clone it.

Listening to the speakers, I was impressed by the range of their ideas and by how much I was learning from them. But I was struck by the nearly complete lack of overlap among their proposals. Social scientists collaborate across disciplinary boundaries more than ever, but this has not necessarily produced consensus on what the biggest issues are. I started to wonder whether it can really be the case that the hardest problems in social science just happen to be those that this group of scholars, impressive as they are, has been working on for the past decade. The speakers were convincing me that their problems were difficult—if they were easy, wouldn't they have been solved already?—but they weren't saying as much about how important or fundamental they really were.

Actually, those questions could be solved by the employees at your local Taco Bell.  Women who have the same qualifications as men are still women and are thus less ambitious and whites have higher IQs than blacks.  How could anyone be impressed by these hacks?  

Nick Bostrom, a broad-minded philosopher who seemed to have secured a guest pass to this particular gathering, suggested that social science has made great progress in the past by refuting incorrect beliefs, such as the assertion that "there are no inborn differences in personality or intelligence" or "trade causes economic weakness." His first hard problem, he said, would be to discover the "biggest falsehood promulgated within the social sciences today."

Is the writer here clueless or is she speaking to us in code?  (And was Bostrom clueless or was he speaking in code?)  Figuring out the big lie answers the questions alluded to above and is a natural extension of the statement that the social sciences have proven false the proposition that “there are no inborn differences in personality or intelligence.”

I looked up Nick Bostrom and his website seems to have a lot of fascinating things about transhumanism.  This ideology is dangerously close to eugenics, the most politically incorrect thing in the world.  In fact, Bostrom understands this and addresses the inevitable question in his Transhumanist FAQ

Do Transhumanists Advocate Eugenics?

Eugenics in the narrow sense refers to the pre-WWII movement in Europe and the United States to involuntarily sterilize the “ genetically unfit” and encourage breeding of the genetically advantaged. These ideas are entirely contrary to the tolerant humanistic and scientific tenets of transhumanism. In addition to condemning the coercion involved in such policies, transhumanists strongly reject the racialist and classist assumptions on which they were based, along with the notion that eugenic improvements could be accomplished in a practically meaningful timeframe through selective human breeding.

Transhumanists uphold the principles of bodily autonomy and procreative liberty. Parents must be allowed to choose for themselves whether to reproduce, how to reproduce, and what technological methods they use in their reproduction. The use of genetic medicine or embryonic screening to increase the probability of a healthy, happy, and multiply talented child is a responsible and justifiable application of parental reproductive freedom.

Beyond this, one can argue that parents have a moral responsibility to make use of these methods, assuming they are safe and effective. Just as it would be wrong for parents to fail in their duty to procure the best available medical care for their sick child, it would be wrong not to take reasonable precautions to ensure that a child-to-be will be as healthy as possible. This, however, is a moral judgment that is best left to individual conscience rather than imposed by law. Only in extreme and unusual cases might state infringement of procreative liberty be justified. If, for example, a would-be parent wished to undertake a genetic modification that would be clearly harmful to the child or would drastically curtail its options in life, then this prospective parent should be prevented by law from doing so. This case is analogous to the state taking custody of a child in situations of gross parental neglect or child abuse.

And it goes on for another couple hundred words, explaining why transhumanists favor eugenics without calling it eugenics.  

Yes, I think he was speaking to those social scientists in code.  

The table below explains why I don’t share Paul Gottfried’s optimism about the supposedly new radical right wing in America.

As you can see, besides foreign aid, which makes up one percent of the budget, the vast majority of Americans oppose every specific spending cut one can think of.

Kevin MacDonald’s recent post on the decline in traditional morality among poorer whites is incomplete without objective evidence that whites in Red America have lower IQs than those in the more liberal regions of the country.  Luckily, last year I estimated white IQ by state from NAEP data.  Nine of the bottom ten voted for Bush in 2004, Hawaii being the only exception.

The IQ difference between the smartest whites in the country, who live in Massachusetts, and the dumbest, who live in West Virginia, is a full 15 points, the same as the black/white gap.

If intelligence is heritable, and it is, then this has to be so.  Generation after generation of the smartest people leaving takes its toll.  It’s also not surprising that two populations who are that far apart in cognitive ability wouldn’t feel like they had much in common; the tastes, experiences and biases of whites in the Northeast are always going to be different from those in the South, even if we ignore obvious cultural differences.

During the healthcare debate, I wondered whether if the government ever got enough power, it would try to close health care related gaps between whites and minorities. Just as we supposedly can’t tolerate school achievement disparities, Washington would eventually use statistical analysis to decide that whites were similarly advantaged in the kind of medical treatment they received relative to others.  And just as how conservatives may oppose more education spending in general but not “gap closing” schemes, they would be silent about all this despite having originally fought tooth and nail against the original government take over of medicine.

I expected all this to happen, but not so soon.

NEW YORK - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Wednesday that she is developing a national plan of action that would focus for the first time on reducing health care disparities between minority and white populations.

HHS has been writing reports for 25 years documenting the gap in health care services between white and minority communities, but there never has been an action plan to address the gap, she said in an address to the National Action Network convention.

"I'm here to say that's going to end this year," Sebelius said.

In other words, the federal government has been collecting data for 25 years, rubbing its hands together in anticipation that one day they would be able to “do something” about healthcare disparities between NAMs and whites.  Here, now, is their chance.

When “reducing gaps” and general welfare together rather than general welfare alone become the goal of government, then every question gets seen through the lens of “how can we make X do as well as Y?” instead of simply “how do we help P?” when P is a population that includes X and Y.  That means that with this new paradigm, the concept of population Y doing too well enters into any equation.

If, say, the elderly are disproportionately white, Washington may go and decide that taking money away from programs helping older Americans to fund health clinics in inner-city neighborhoods would contribute to reducing healthcare gaps. Both the advantage accrued to blacks and the reduced life expectancy for whites would be seen as pluses.

What’s interesting about gapology is the phrasing. Government could just as easily say that they were simply going to help blacks and Mexicans. Why talk about a "gap," which implies that the goal is for equalizing populations whether by making minorities do better, making whites do worse, or some combination of both? This is a rare instance of liberals phrasing something in the worst possible way, a sort of anti-euphemism. They are explicitly acknowledging that for the situation of their favored races to improve, it may be necessary, albeit regrettable, for whites to end up worse off than they would be otherwise.  The reason that they don’t have to defend these declarations of race war to the electorate is that making these logical inferences smacks too much of “racism” to the conservative mind.

Some of the less prestigious law schools are getting rid of the LSAT requirement in the hopes of, you guessed it, increasing diversity.

Considering that the standard line on IQ is, or was, that it’s a meaningless concept, it’s interesting how important standardized test scores are for college and graduate school admissions in this country.  We say one thing but do another.

I wonder if we have US News & World Report to thank for that.  Every year the paper ranks undergraduate and law programs, considering test scores as an objective measure of student quality.  Colleges report their 25th and 75th percentile scores for the ACT and SAT in the case of undergraduate institutions and the same numbers for the LSAT in law schools.  In practicing affirmative action, you better keep the black/Mestizo school population below 25% so that their lower scores don’t show up and hurt your ratings.  And a university that actually had a decent ranking, unlike the colleges mentioned in the article linked to above, would be laughed down the list if it stopped requiring standardized test scores all together.

Sarah Palin is making news for recently taking some jabs at President Obama’s new rule that the United States won’t retaliate to a non-nuclear attack with nuclear weapons.

"No administration in America's history would, I think, ever have considered such a step that we just found out President Obama is supporting today," she proclaimed. "It's kind of like getting out there on a playground, a bunch of kids, getting ready to fight, and one of the kids saying, 'Go ahead, punch me in the face, and I'm not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want to with me.'"

The sage from Wasilla on Hannity’s show went on to say that with this policy “We are kind of dissing our friends” like Israel and that she missed the “moral clarity” of Ronald Reagan who “would look at our enemies and say, no, you lose, we win.”   She even found a way to call the Obama doctrine a “slap on the face” to all past and present members of the US armed forces.

This is a wonderful reminder of how close we came to the health of John McCain being the only thing standing between Sarah Palin and control over the US nuke arsenal.

I’m also reminded of when Palin said that she wondered whether Obama would “play the war card” to get reelected, an idea that she revealed shot got from a Pat Buchanan article. Palin then went on that maybe the President would become a bigger supporter of Israel to help his poll ratings, which she wished he would do.  In the video linked to above she equates the Obama “playing the war card” to “doing all that he can to secure our nation and our allies.”  That’s certainly not what Buchanan meant by the phrase.  Looking back on this, I have to ask myself does she even realize that he is anti-war and a constant critic of the US special relationship with the Jewish state? Or is her reading comprehension so poor that she saw an article with the phrase “playing the war card” on a conservative website like Human Events, had it go over her head and assumed that the author thought that making war for political reasons was a good thing?

The former Alaska governor’s ignorance seems only to be matched by her ego.  This means that she’ll probably run for president and I wouldn’t count her out in the Republican primaries.  If you think George W. Bush discredited conservatism, you haven’t seen anything yet.