The only consistent thing about liberalism is their inconsistency. It's hard work keeping together the various sorts of anti-reality notions that underlie modern liberalism. Of course, actually presenting a cohesive worldview is unnecessary when invective suffices in responding to challenges.

Diet is one of the more subtle pillars of leftism. As with all liberal beliefs, the low-fat diet is grounded in both academic spuriousness and social support amongst adherents. We expect defense of the low-fat paradigm to rest on shoddy evidence, as almost all anti-meat studies do not control for differences in general health conscientiousness between groups. But something interesting happens when the vegetarian mafia encounters evidence undermining their religion; they sometimes commit unbelievable errors relevant to their other beliefs.

Here's Amanda Marcotte admitting to the notion that racial groups differ, i.e. HBD (seriously):

This was heavily criticized, not just by vegans but by lactose intolerant people and equality-advocacy groups that pointed out, rightly, that the assumption of lactose tolerance is casually white dominated, since European-descended people tend to digest lactose on average better than everyone else.

In other words, "equality-advocacy groups" criticize the food pyramid's implied importance of dairy, arguing that this advice only applies to white people and thus illustrates yet another incidence of anti-minority bias. Of course, Ms. Marcotte (a vegan - shocking!) also thinks that believing in racial differences (which she admits to above) is the epitome of bigotry, so once again, it's a lose/lose in her mind.

In an article from Time magazine, the anti-paleo author makes the same exact case:

For one thing, there was no single Paleolithic "lifestyle." Survival in Ice Age Europe, for instance, was vastly different from life on the African savannah, requiring different diets, behaviors and genetic adaptations.

That's the most basic premise of HBD, yet I can't imagine Time racing to hire Steve Sailer any time soon. Unless Time has embraced bioconservatism, this naked appeal to racial differences contradicts the general leftism of their magazine. For example, here's a video celebrating the Harlem's Children Zone and its founder Geoffrey Canada, a video interview with Teach for America's founder, and an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates defending Henry Gates following his 2009 arrest. I can't imagine Time champions anything except liberal creationism, so the quoted statement surely contradicts one of their central premises. Fittingly, the article attempts to maintain the credibility of anti-male and anti-white diet and exercise, whereby foreign foods and testosterone-draining workouts find favor amongst the SWPL class. 

Curiously, liberals never really notice the apparent contradictions. Getting their ideas pushed matters far more than anything else.

Every couple of years or so, a “respectable,” Establishmentarian, Center-Left commentator will touch on the subject of racial differences in intelligence. William Saletan was the last. Andrew Sullivan is the latest. 

In the abstract, the fact that Beltway journalists would be interested in the subject of race and IQ should not at all be surprising. The evidence for racially defined and, more or less, intractable differences in General Intelligence (g) is mountainous. And race has tremendous predictive power when it comes to individuals and societies. (A report on an inexplicable achievement gap between Blacks and Asians might shock and dismay New York Times readers; among American Renaissance subscribers, it elicits a yawn.) The impact of racial differences in intelligence on international economies—and international investment—has yet to be fully explored.

Nevertheless, the reality of race undermines the civic religion of most Western societies—as well as almost every piece of socially uplifting legislation from the past 50 years—and thus has become the ultimate taboo.

And hesitant expeditions into the unspeakable by writers like Sullivan and Saletan usually evoke a quick, predictable response:

• The offender’s colleagues express outrage, and he is symbolically rapped across the wrist with a ruler;
• The offender’s critics eventually suggest ostracism as the only solution;
• The heretic relents, recants, and begs for forgiveness.

There’s no need for state intervention; journalists police themselves effectively.

But perhaps Sullivan will break the trend… In the mid-’90s, when Sullivan was Editor of The New Republic (and a neocon/neoliberal or sorts), he published an entire issue dedicated to sober commentary on Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Indeed, this issue—along with a non-hysterical review in the New York Times Book Review—marked the last moment in which racial differences in intelligence were discussed forthrightly in mainstream sources—before the door was slammed and bolted shut.

While little of what Sullivan writes will be surprising to readers in the AltRight sphere, he does make one important point that will touch fair-minded liberals: “The study of intelligence has been strangled by pc egalitarianism.” (Just ask Bruce Lahn, hardly a "White Nationalist" but simply a scholar searching for truth.)

Moreover, it came as no surprise to me that race realism is breaking out among liberals, who can no longer abide the cognitive dissonance between PC and their expressed support of the scientific method and empirical research—and not among conservatives and paleos. The “conservative movement” has fully embraced a kind of “Americanist Creationism,” in which everyone who believes in “equality” can be an American, and all earthly residents outside America's borders must be integrated into our One True Way. The paleos, it seems, have decided to take a pass on the central, most unavoidable geopolitical question of our time. This choice hasn’t granted them credibility...it's simply made them unthreatening. (Note that Charles Murray’s update on The Bell Curve, “The Inequality Taboo,” appeared in the neocon Commentary, not Chronicles.)

For years, Andrew Sullivan has been a reliable barometer of the social mood of America’s college-educated masses: that is to say, he’s flipped from being a neoliberal in the ‘90s...to a war-happy neocon after 9/11...to an anti-war “realist” around 2006...to an Obamaniac in 2008...etc. etc. etc.

Let’s hope that this time, he takes a principled stand.

“Heartiste” (who’s still “Roissy” to me) demonstrates, through the ramblings of blogger Amanda Marcotte, that HBD and Feminism are implacable enemies.

Most everything he writes there is true...but the science of human nature demolishes more than just bitchy feminism.

In America, and much of the Western world, right-thinking people think about Evolution thusly: 

• If you’re liberal, then Darwin was absolutely correct. Only backward, religious people think otherwise. That said, around 60,000 years ago, Evolution pulled the emergency break: no significant human development has occurred since then; all apparent racial differences are either “skin deep” or social constructs. Only backward, racist, religious people think otherwise.

• If you’re a conservative, Darwin was dead wrong. To believe his Theory is to deny that there is a moral thrust to the universe—and thus to undermine the basis of Democracy, Equality, and Apple Pie. Plus, Darwin is racist.  

It’s difficult to judge which side is wronger in this dispute…

In the conservatives' defense, Darwin is “racist,” in the sense that the procedure of Evolution explains not only the differences between Africans and Europeans but those between Yorkshire Terriers and Pit Bulls.

What’s significant is that the positions of both the acceptable Left and Right are radically egalitarian, each in its own way.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that there’s no inherent reason why a sincere religious believer could not affirm that God (or the Gods) made the races distinct and separate—or that He (or They) delineated the fates of each individual. The godfather of scientific racism, Arthur de Gobineau, an ancien-regime Catholic, actually rejected Darwin, exclaiming, “We are not descended from the ape, but we are headed in that direction!”

Whatever the case, the American Creed, of both Left and Right,  is that You Can Be All That You Can Be, and anyone and everyone can be an American.  HBD is pure heresy.

As part of my continuing series of extensive interviews with daring authors and publishers, I have interviewed Professor Richard Lynn, author of IQ and Global Inequality, Race Differences in Intelligence, Eugenics: A Reassessment, and Dysgenics, recently published in a new and updated edition. As with earlier interviews in the series, I wanted to get a sense of the subject's personality, not simply ask questions about his work, which can be found elsewhere. Professor Lynn, otherwise keen on prose efficiency and Lacedaemonian brevity, kindly provided substantial answers to my questions and afforded us some insights into his early life and memories.

You can read the interview here.

It never ceases to amuse one how equality zealots, when confronted with an inconvenient fact, always manage to square the circle with their unique brand of tortive logic. In fact, one has to marvel at the ingenuity displayed from time to time, because contriving politically correct explanations for observed events in order to force them into compliance with ideology is not always easy.

Take for example the article Is it Wrong to Note 100m Winners are Always Black?, authored by former table tennis champion and failed Labour candidate Matthew Syed, published by the BBC News website this last Saturday. It is clear from it that the consistency with which Black athletes win the 100 metre sprint competition had been noticed, causing enough discomfort vis-à-vis the implications for race relations in the multicultural state to warrant a full explanatory article, lest sports fans watching the World Athletics Championships this weekend reached conclusions not approved by the state.

Syed lays out the problem:

Every winner of the 100m since the inaugural event in 1983 has been black, as has every finalist from the last 10 championships with the solitary exception of Matic Osovnikar of Slovenia, who finished seventh in 2007.

Assuming that this success is driven by genes rather than environment, there is a rather obvious inference to make - black people are naturally better sprinters than white people. Indeed, it is an inference that seems obligatory, barring considerations of political correctness.

This, of course, will not do. Syed then proceeds to explode the inference—and how he does it is really incredible:

But here's the thing. This inference is not merely false - it is logically flawed. . . .

To see how, let us examine success not in the sprints but in distance running, for this is also dominated by black athletes. Kenya has won an astonishing 63 medals at the Olympic Games in races of 800m and above, 21 of them gold, since 1968. Little wonder that one commentator once described distance running as "a Kenyan monopoly".

But it turns out that it is not Kenya as a whole that usually wins these medals, but individuals from a tiny region in the Rift Valley called Nandi. As one writer put it: "Most of Kenya's runners call Nandi home."

Seen in this context, the notion that black people are naturally superior distance runners seems bizarre. Far from being a "black" phenomenon, or even a Kenyan phenomenon, distance running is actually a Nandi phenomenon. Or, to put it another way, "black" distance running success is focused on the tiniest of pinpricks on the map of Africa, with the vast majority of the continent underrepresented.

The same analysis applies to the sprints, where success is focused on Jamaicans and African-Americans. Africa, as a continent, has almost no success at all. Not even West Africans win much.

The combined forces of Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, the Republic of Guinea, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Togo, Niger, Benin, Mali, the Gambia, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Gabon, Senegal, Congo and Angola have not won a single sprinting medal at the Olympics or World Championships.

The fallacy, then, is simple. Just because some black people are good at something does not imply that black people in general will be good at it.

Note how Syed, using a tired Labour tactic, attempts to pass evidence as a refutation. He conveniently neglects to mention that most of the individuals residing in Nandi belong to an eponymous tribe. And while he is correct to point out later in the article that it is wrong to assume that all Blacks are the same, given that they exhibit the most genetic variation among the main racial groups, this adds substance to, rather than detract from, a genetic explanation, as all this tells us is that the Nandi are particularly well equipped anatomically for the 10,000 metre competition.

Syed proceeds to make genetic explanations seem preposterous by providing a preposterous analogy:

Imagine a similar argument using the Central African Bambuti, a black tribe more commonly known as Pygmies. With an average height of 4ft we could assert that the Bambuti are naturally better at walking under low doors. Would it be legitimate to extrapolate that black people in general have a natural advantage at walking under low doors?

He then attempts to explicate an alleged fallacy by committing three in a row himself:

Our tendency to generalise rests on a deeper fallacy - the idea that "black" refers to a genetic type. We put people of dark skin in a box labelled black and assume that a trait shared by some is shared by all.

The truth is rather different. There is far more genetic variation within racial groups (around 85%) than there is between racial groups (just 15%). Indeed, surface appearance is often a highly misleading way of assessing the genetic distance between populations.

This evidence demonstrates how absurd it is to engage in racial generalisations - how crazy it is to witness a tiny group of black people winning at, say, the 10,000m and to infer that all people who share the same skin colour share an aptitude for 10,000m running.

One surmises this tells us more about the hidden racial prejudices and subterranean determinism of so-called ‘anti-racists’ than about how race realists think about human biodiversity. What is craziest about the arguments presented above is that they provide evidence for their own refutation: for example, it is obvious that in the face of great genetic variation, and given the highly specialised nature and the very high level of the competitions involved, some racial subtypes will possess superior genetic endowments for one competition and other racial subtypes will possess them for another.

Finally, we get to the most bizarre part of the article, and the one that gives the game away (note the tone):

But our subconscious assumptions about race have more than merely sporting implications.

Consider an experiment by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, two American economists. They drafted 5,000 CVs and placed archetypal "black" names such as Tyrone or Latoya on half of them and "white" names such as Brendan or Alison on the other half. They then divided the white CVs into high and low quality and did the same with the black CVs.

A few weeks later the offers came rolling in from employers, and guess what? The "black" candidates were 50% less likely to be invited to interview. Employers were using skin colour as a marker for employment potential, despite the fact that the candidates' CVs were identical.

But that's not all. The researchers also found that although high-quality "white" candidates were preferred to low-quality "white" candidates, the relative quality of "black" CVs made no difference whatsoever.

It was as if employers saw three categories - high-quality white, low-quality white and black candidates. To put it another way, the subliminal assumption that causes us to think that black people are all the same has powerful real-world consequences.

For many economists, this assumption, which gets under the radar of our conscious thought, explains why black people still lag behind white people in economic development more than four decades after the introduction of race-relations legislation.

Recognising that we have these biases is a good place to start in trying to combat them. And a good way of tracking progress is to watch a 100m final and see whether we fall into the trap, when seeing eight contestants with black skin, of inferring that black people are naturally better sprinters.

Ultimately, then, this entire exposition about Black supremacy in athletic competitions and comically contrived logical fallacies is about calling White people racists and once again suggesting they must  redouble efforts to remove themselves from their own societies.

Given the effort expended slandering White folk in this very roundabout way, one cannot help but sense the exercise was driven by desperation.

This baboon troop suggests that the drive to domesticate dogs, work cooperatively with them, and even accept them as family members isn't exclusively a trait of Homo Sapiens; indeed, it may very well have predated his rise.  

From the film Animals Like Us.

The newest installment to my series on individuals from the wild fringes of the publishing world—of writers and publishers of politically incorrect literature, opinion, and research—features Louis Andrews, chairman of the National Policy Institute and founder and editor of Washington Summit Publishers, a scientific imprint notable for publishing the books on human biodiversity that no one else dared. Among its roster of authors we find courageous men like Tatu Vanhanen and Richard Lynn.

Louis Andrews has not sought publicity, but he has done a great deal to disseminate modern research findings on racial differences and racial dynamics, a project with which he became involved very early on, back in the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the latest book-length published research we have in the area of human biodiversity has come through his publishing venture. Even the Channel 4 'documentary' that was aired in the United Kingdom in the Autumn of 2009, featuring Richard Lynn and J. Philippe Rushton, relied on Washington Summit books for its research (I reviewed the 'documentary' here). So did Nobel Prize winner James Watson when he commented on Africa's bleak prospects for development, much to his subsequent regret.

We find out about Mr. Andrews roots in the remotest colonial past, his early years, and his previous ventures. We also explore his perspective on a range of social issues and the future.

You can read the interview here.

During the 2010 HL Mencken conference, Richard Spencer expressed his doubts that Republicans would ever be able to capture the White vote because White women will continue to be swayed by what is fashionable. I assume he was speaking in terms of social influence, but there might also be a biological component to support his position—not enough White women are having babies.

In Annie Paul’s book Origins, she discusses the work of UCLA anthropologist Dan Fessler whose “research suggests that while pregnant, women become more xenophobic: more distrustful of strangers and more favorable disposed toward members of their own group.”

Fessler acknowledges that pregnant women feel more vulnerable precisely because they are more vulnerable, but he explains the ethnocentric result with a politically correct argument:

The reasons we experience these reactions today is that the response protected our ancestors…These emotions allowed our forbears to survive long enough to produce offspring, who in turn passed the same sensitivities on to us. We often respond to today’s world with yesterday’s adaptations.

In other words, biologically induced feelings of in-group loyalty are antiquated and no longer serve any real purpose. This conclusion is unsurprising from a contemporary anthropologist, but Fessler’s research is revealing. If pregnant women are more likely to have elevated levels of in-group consciousness, then it makes sense why so many White women are persuaded to vote for what is fashionable—they are not having babies. The vulnerability of pregnancy might open their eyes, if only for a brief period of time, to the out-group threat of leftwing political candidates who prioritize minority interests. Unfortunately, ethnocentrism among white women will continue to decrease as we further progress into the Anti-Fertilization Age of career women, Facebook singles, and feminist lesbians.

A video of a racist beating perpetrated by five black savages has surfaced online (H/T: Auster and Chuck Ross):

Obviously, only anonymous online voices will disseminate information about this sickening incident and the evident motivations. The mainstream media will either ignore the story altogether or cast it as a racially neutral event, the criminals and the victims but mere coincidences. And if a sort of mainstream pundit like Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage dares speak the truth, they will be dismissed as incorrigible racists fabricating enmity not in the pursuit of truth, but rather as a means for fear-mongering.

But we already know this and it's one reason why this blog exists. Instead, I'd like to briefly consider a question raised over at GLPiggy: what percentage of blacks (and Hispanics) are capable of such savagery, or at the very least, incapable of existing in a civilized society?

As I've argued before, black (and Latino) criminality does not stem entirely from genetics; rather, the relative degree of criminality, not the absolute magnitude of pathology, derives from genetics. Thus, one can't even consider the above question without a grasp of the overarching social factors that motivate or excuse such behavior. In the linked post, I argued that:

[t]he Civil Rights movement didn't only legally condemn discrimination, but it also, through attendant social and cultural changes, unfettered black impetuousness and collectively exonerated them from any future wrong doings. Mainstream academia and media adopted a narrative that blamed black transgression on historical wrongs, and later, hoaxes like "institutional racism."

So assuming the extant social factors, how can one quantify the misbehaving subset of the respective racial groups? Of course, this is a somewhat amorphous characterization to begin with, further muddled by the difficulty of finding a viable metric. Perhaps, we should look for the metric first and extrapolate that particular behavior to connected pathology. Incarceration rates are a good place to start, though this isn't exactly what I want. I want not only violent individuals like that profiled, but I also want to include socially and culturally depressive individuals, the kind that make you roll your eyes at the post office or cause a scene at the supermarket.

To get that, I think the best metric is out of wedlock births and two-family homes. I found those numbers last summer: just over 80% of black births and about 35% of white births are out of wedlock. Of course, many black and Hispanic middle class people exhibit stereotypical behavior, like that Columbia professor, but let's ignore them. So I'd estimate about 80% of blacks, probably somewhere around 65% of Hispanics, and 35% of whites are contributing to our social and cultural depression. If anyone has a better metric, please provide it in the comments.

Finally, this question leads into the concept of genetic determinism. Maybe we needn't answer this particular question or obtain an accurate approximation in order to prognosticate on societal outcomes. Sure, this constitutes an interesting intellectual exercise, but in the end, we don't really need to pinpoint the number of morally diseased individuals shown in the video. And we really don't need an accurate assessment of the "Smart Fraction" either. For all the qualifications race realists repeat about the lack of black intellectual uniformity, the facts remain that societies function commensurate with their majority population. See this chart for all the evidence you'll need.

That question is not as preposterous as it might sound. Here is a selection from Pat Buchanan’s most recent syndicated column:

Every three years, the Paris-based OECD holds its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of the reading, math and science skills of 15-year-olds in developing and developed countries. Gurria was talking of the results of the 2009 tests.

Sixty-five nations competed. The Chinese swept the board.

The schools of Shanghai-China finished first in math, reading and science. Hong Kong-China was third in math and science. Singapore, a city-state dominated by overseas

Chinese, was second in math, fourth in science.

Only Korea, Japan and Finland were in the hunt.

And the U.S.A.? America ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math, producing the familiar quack-quack.

“This is an absolute wake-up call for America,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan. “We have to face the brutal truth. We have to get much more serious about investment in education.”

But the “brutal truth” is that we invest more per pupil than any other country save Luxembourg, and we are broke. And a closer look at the PISA scores reveals some unacknowledged truths.

True, East Asians—Chinese, Koreans, Japanese—are turning in the top scores in all three categories, followed by the Europeans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders.

But, looking down the New York Times list of the top 30 nations, one finds not a single Latin American nation, not a single African nation, not a single Muslim nation, not a single South or Southeast Asian nation (save Singapore), not a single nation of the old Soviet Union except Latvia and Estonia.

“If the brains and the will to learn are absent, no amount of spending on schools, teacher salaries, educational consultants or new texts will matter.”

And in Europe as in Asia, the northern countries (Finland, Norway, Belgium, Iceland, Austria, Germany) outscore the southern (Greece, Italy, Portugal). Slovenia and Croatia, formerly of the Habsburg Empire, outperformed Albania and Serbia, which spent centuries under Turkish rule.

Among the OECD members, the most developed 34 nations on earth, Mexico, principal feeder nation for U.S. schools, came in dead last in reading.

Steve Sailer on VDARE.com got the full list of 65 nations, broke down U.S. reading scores by race, then measured Americans with the countries and continents whence their families originated. What he found was surprising.

Asian-Americans outperform all Asian students except for Shanghai-Chinese. White Americans outperform students from all 37 predominantly white nations except Finns, and U.S. Hispanics outperformed the students of all eight Latin American countries that participated in the tests.

African-American kids would have outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African country that took the test (none did) and did outperform the only black country to participate, Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points.

America’s public schools, then, are not abject failures.

They are educating immigrants and their descendants to outperform the kinfolk their parents or ancestors left behind when they came to America. America’s schools are improving the academic performance of all Americans above what it would have been had they not come to America.

What American schools are failing at, despite the trillions poured into schools since the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is closing the racial divide.

We do not know how to close the gap in reading, science and math between Anglo and

Asian students and black and Hispanic students.

And from the PISA tests, neither does any other country on earth.

The gap between the test scores of East Asian and European nations and those of Latin America and African nations mirrors the gap between Asian and white students in the U.S. and black and Hispanic students in the U.S.

Which brings us to “Bad Students, Not Bad Schools,” a new book in which Dr. Robert Weissberg contends that U.S. educational experts deliberately “refuse to confront the obvious truth.”

“America’s educational woes reflect our demographic mix of students. Today’s schools are filled with millions of youngsters, many of whom are Hispanic immigrants struggling with English plus millions of others of mediocre intellectual ability disdaining academic achievement.”

Pat often gets demonized as “far Right” by neocons and Left-liberals, but we shouldn’t forget how much a part of the Establishment he is. The three-time presidential candidate, advisor to presidents, MSNBC commentator, bestselling author, and pal of many DC insiders is making, essentially, HBD-wise arguments and quoting from authors whose work has appeared at guerrilla outfits like AltRight, Takimag, VDARE.com, The HL Mencken Club, and American Renaissance.