HBD: Human Biodiversity

A note to aspiring Palestinian Game Theorists: Bedding Jewesses in the Middle East's only democracy by intimating that you're one of the Chosen can have bad consequences. 

Palestianian Jailed for rape after claiming to be Jewish

The Telegraph

By Adrian Blomfield in Jerusalem
20 Jul 2010

A Palestinian man has been convicted of rape after having consensual sex with an Israeli woman who believed he was Jewish because he introduced himself as "Daniel".

A court in Jerusalem has made international legal history by jailing Sabbar Kashur, a 30-year-old delivery man from East Jerusalem, for 18 months.

He was convicted of "rape by deception" following a criminal trial that has drawn criticism from across Israel.

The court heard accusations that Mr Kashur misled the woman, whose identity has not been disclosed, by introducing himself with the traditionally Jewish name during a chance encounter on a street in central Jerusalem in 2008.

After striking up a conversation, the two went into a top-floor room of a nearby office-block and engaged in a sexual encounter, after which Mr Kashur left before the woman had a chance to get dressed. It was only later that she discovered Mr Kashur's true racial background, lawyers said.

Although conceding that the sex was consensual, district court judge Tzvi Segal concluded that the law had a duty to protect women from "smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price"

"If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated," Mrs Segal said as she delivered her verdict.

A conviction for rape by deception on the grounds of racial misrepresentation is believed to be internationally unprecedented, according to British legal experts.



The NYT on very recent human evolution.

The book review section of American Renaissance has been particularly interesting of late, with a deconstruction of Nell Irvin Painter's History of White People in last month’s issue and in this month’s, a discussion of the life and work of the eminent research psychologist Raymond Cattell (1905-1998). (I wish I could link to these pieces, but Jared Taylor delays posting articles from the print edition online. AltRight’s review of Painter’s terrible book can be read here.)

The occasion for the Cattell piece is a recent biography of the man by anti-racist professor William Tucker, The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science, and Ideology, which, according to Jared’s review, amounts to a dishonest hit-piece, with some facts and a narrative of the man’s life tossed in along the way. What interested me while reading the review was the degree to which someone like Cattell is representative of a “Darwinian Left” -- even a “eugenic Left” -- a surprising, though not necessarily self-contradictory, position that Richard Hoste outlined not too long ago.

Eugenics and Social Darwinism are, of course, associated with Nazism and the “extreme Right” in the public’s mind nowadays (and are rejected by the mainstream Left and Right with equal vigor.) Moreover, “HBD” or applied Sociobiology (aka, The“Sailer-sphere”) is most definitely a phenomenon of the (alternative) Right. Even Steven Pinker, who, I would guess, is culturally and socially liberal, quotes approvingly from Thomas Sowell in The Blank Slate and argues that a “tragic” view of life befits those who are realistic about human nature.

Black Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy doesn't believe the new tax on tanning is discriminatory.

Mention the new "tan tax" in a major news outlet and cries of discrimination and reverse racism often follow.

The complaint surfaced on reader comment boards to blogs and news Web sites back in December, when it became clear that the levy -- a 10 percent surcharge on the use of ultraviolet tanning beds -- was likely to be included in the new health-care overhaul bill. Since then, it's been repeated by conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Doc Thompson, a fill-in host for Glenn Beck who intoned in March, "I now know the pain of racism."

When an article about the fallout from the tax -- which took effect last week -- appeared on the Washington Post's Web site Wednesday, dozens of commenters questioned the tax's legality.

The case can seem deceptively simple: Since patrons of tanning salons are almost exclusively white, the tax will be almost entirely paid by white people and, therefore, violates their constitutional right to equal protection under the law.

But does the argument have any merit? Not remotely said Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School specializing in racial conflict and law.

"There is no constitutional problem at all, because a plaintiff would have to show that the government intended to disadvantage a particular group, not simply that the group is disadvantaged in effect," he said.

That’s the exact opposite position that the government takes when it comes to anti-discrimination and affirmative action laws.

As Steve Sailer has explained, if you give a test that whites do too much better on than blacks the Feds may want to come and know why, and they won’t need a shred of evidence that you intended any discrimination. It's called disparate impact.  

I believe that if the tax was on hair weaves our Harvard professor would take a different view.

All that being said, I detest whites who tan.

Kerry Howley, who writes for Reason, has an article in the NYT about men who want to live forever and the wives who nag them about it.

There are ways of speaking about dying that very much annoy Peggy Jackson, an affable and rosy-cheeked hospice worker in Arlington, Va. She doesn’t like the militant cast of “lost her battle with,” as in, “She lost her battle with cancer.” She is similarly displeased by “We have run out of options” and “There is nothing left we can do,” when spoken by doctor to patient, implying as these phrases will that hospice care is not an “option” or a “thing” that can be done. She doesn’t like these phrases, but she tolerates them. The one death-related phrase she will not abide, will not let into her house under any circumstance, is “cryonic preservation,” by which is meant the low-temperature preservation of human beings in the hope of future resuscitation. That this will be her husband’s chosen form of bodily disposition creates, as you might imagine, certain complications in the Jackson household.

“You have to understand,” says Peggy, who at 54 is given to exasperation about her husband’s more exotic ideas. “I am a hospice social worker. I work with people who are dying all the time. I see people dying All. The. Time. And what’s so good about me that I’m going to live forever?”

The provenance of this disagreement remains somewhat hazy, as neither Peggy nor her husband, Robin Hanson, can remember quite when he first announced his intention to have his brain surgically removed from his freshly vacated cadaver and preserved in liquid nitrogen. It would have been decades ago, before the two were married and before the births of their two teenage sons. With the benefit of hindsight, Robin, who is 50 and an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, will acknowledge that he should have foreseen at least some initial discomfort on the part of his girlfriend, whom he met when they were both graduate students at the University of Chicago. “I was surprised by her response,” he recalls, “but that’s because I am a nerd and not good at predicting these things.”

Robin is the kind of nerd who is very excited about the future, an orientation evident on his C.V., which lists published articles like “Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence” (on why robots will give us growth rates “an order of magnitude” higher than we’ve currently got)...His enthusiasm is evident in the way he talks about these ideas, hands in the air, laughing amiably every time he brings up the distance between his own theories and those of the mainstream...

“I’m just really terribly curious,” Robin told me in January over Skype. “Cryonics isn’t just living a little longer. It’s also living quite a bit delayed into the future.” Peggy’s initial response to this ambition, rooted less in scientific skepticism than in her personal judgments about the quest for immortality, has changed little in the past 20-odd years. Robin, a deep thinker most at home in thought experiments, says he believes that there is some small chance his brain will be resurrected, that its time in cryopreservation will be merely a brief pause in the course of his life. Peggy finds the quest an act of cosmic selfishness. And within a particular American subculture, the pair are practically a cliché.

Among cryonicists, Peggy’s reaction might be referred to as an instance of the “hostile-wife phenomenon,” as discussed in a 2008 paper by Aschwin de Wolf, Chana de Wolf and Mike Federowicz.“From its inception in 1964,” they write, “cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists.” The opposition of romantic partners, Aschwin told me last year, is something that “everyone” involved in cryonics knows about but that he and Chana, his wife, find difficult to understand. To someone who believes that low-temperature preservation offers a legitimate chance at extending life, obstructionism can seem as willfully cruel as withholding medical treatment. Even if you don’t want to join your husband in storage, ask believers, what is to be lost by respecting a man’s wishes with regard to the treatment of his own remains? Would-be cryonicists forced to give it all up, the de Wolfs and Federowicz write, “face certain death.”

Premonitions of this problem can be found in the deepest reaches of cryonicist history, starting with the prime mover. Robert Ettinger is the father of cryonics, his 1964 book, “The Prospect of Immortality,” its founding text. “This is not a hobby or conversation piece,” he wrote in 1968, adding, “it is the struggle for survival. Drive a used car if the cost of a new one interferes. Divorce your wife if she will not cooperate.” Today, with just fewer than 200 patients preserved within the two major cryonics facilities, the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute and the Arizona-based Alcor, and with 10 times as many signed up to be stored upon their legal deaths, cryonicists have created support networks with which to tackle marital strife. Cryonet, a mailing list on “cryonics-related issues,” takes as one of its issues the opposition of wives. (The ratio of men to women among living cyronicists is roughly three to one.) “She thinks the whole idea is sick, twisted and generally spooky,” wrote one man newly acquainted with the hostile-wife phenomenon. “She is more intelligent than me, insatiably curious and lovingly devoted to me and our 2-year-old daughter. So why is this happening?”

Of course this is a male thing, reflecting sex differences.

Man: “I can live forever.  Worth a shot.”

Woman: “No, it just doesn’t feel right.”

Christians read an article like this and say atheists are afraid to die and should just come to the LORD for eternal salvation.  And while most atheists I’ve talked to say they have no desire to live forever, I think it’s for the same reason they have no wish to fly: the fact that it’s impossible prevents one from hoping for it.  But if the technology does come, then the longing for eternal life can be (re)kindled.  I had no wish to live forever before reading this article, but now I do.  Will Israel survive?  Will China adopt eugenics and turn into a nation of Gods?  Will there still be a white Europe in a hundred years? I want to know these things.

The invaluable Daily Mail reports:

Although he had not long since had an affair with Madonna and had slept with an estimated 12,000 women -- everyone from Julie Christie to Natalie Wood, Joan Collins, Janice Dickinson to Cher -- he said at the time that he was deeply fulfilled to be a father.

But it seems that Warren Beatty's first (legitimate) born daughter, Kathlyn, now 18, even though she's not obviously all that unattractive, and even though she's sexually attracted to men, has decided to become a "boy." She wants everybody to call her "Stephen," and is prepping for "gender reassignment surgery." So that she can sorta kinda pretend to be a gay man, I guess.

Hey -- it's the new black! Or the old new black! Or something like that. Anyway, she gets to play at being a "victim," instead of a pampered scion of zillionaires, for fifteen minutes or so.

One gathers that Kathlyn/Stephen's mother, Annette Bening, is "utterly thrilled" with this interesting development, but that father Warren is "glum...tense, grey, and old" -- even "crushed."

"Warren knows he can't stop her from following her dream, but it's breaking his heart."

Well. What what can one say, but this:

Warren -- dude! 12,000 women? That's a (different) woman every day, every week, every month, every year, for more than thirty years! Just think of the vast army of your bastards, now growing up! From a Darwinian point of view, you're competing in the same league with Julius Caesar, Ghengis Khan, Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson, and possibly even Bill Clinton!

So Kathlyn/Stephen won't be disseminating your genes any further.

Cry me a river.

Here's video of Richard Lynn's speech on "The Global Bell Curve" from Hans-Hermann Hoppe's 2010 Property and Freedom conference. Needless to say, Hoppe is one of the very few libertarians, or "paleos" for that matter, willing to discuss these taboo topics; we're lucky to have him. Next up is the Q&A, which also features Hoppe, Paul Gottfried, and yours truly.

PFS 2010 - Richard Lynn, On Human Diversity: The Global Bell Curve. Updates and Critical Replies from Sean Gabb on Vimeo.

PFS 2010 - Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Richard Spencer, Marco Bassani, Paul Gottfried, Richard Lynn, Discussion, Q & A from Sean Gabb on Vimeo.

At first glance this article on achievement gaps in Germany seems like it’s going to be as clueless as anything published in an American paper.

Ninth-graders from 1,500 schools across the nation were tested for their English and German skills, and the clear leaders were the states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. They were followed by Saxony and Rhineland-Palatinate, while the worst performer was the city-state of Bremen.

The tests taken by some 41,000 students were the first measure of new nationwide educational standards set in place after the country's embarrassing show in the European standardised PISA test performance in 2000.

And then there’s this.

The standardised tests mirrored PISA results that showed a strong connection between social background and educational success. An upper-class child with the same intelligence as a child born to skilled labourers has 4.5 times the likelihood of attending a college-preparatory high school, results showed.

Germans actually control for intelligence when trying to find if there’s some unfair discrepancy!  What a bunch of Nazis they must still be. Of course there's still a fallacy if we start jumping from such findings to conclusions about income and opportunity.  If two kids have equal intelligence we can assume that their parents have similar IQs and thus the family that ended up at a lower SES likely has more of some other traits that prevent one from succeeding in life.  Regardless, the acknowledgment that there is such a thing as intelligence and that it’s the most important determiner of academic success-that it must be controlled for before you attempt to prove anything-shows that Germans are way ahead of anything we have in mainstream educational thought here in America.

The IQB tests also measured what proportion of students are from an immigration background, registering a nationwide average of 18 percent. The highest concentration of these students were in the city-states of Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen. The tests showed an enormous difference in the academic capabilities between these students and native Germans, with Turks, the country’s largest immigrant population, performing the worst. Students from Poland and the former Soviet states showed far better results, signalling large differences among individual immigrant groups, the IQB found.

 How about that... 

According to Richard Lynn Turkey’s IQ is 90 but it’s completely possible that Muslim culture may depress scores a bit.  Other southeast Europeans are in the 93-95 range, so the Turks in Germany may eventually hit that level as they begin to become culturally more European.  

Germany’s “embarrassing” 2000 PISA score seems to apply most to reading comprehension, where they finished 21 out of 27.  This decade they did better in math (16 of 29) and science (8 of 30).

In Germany’s defense, one thing I have trouble understanding is how you can test reading comprehension cross-linguistically.  How well an Italian reads I would think depends on how well he understands what’s in front of him compared to the average person literate in the same language.  By what absolute standards can one say that the average Japanese student has good reading comprehension compared to the average American?  While I don’t doubt that a person with an IQ of 110 understands written material in his native tongue better than someone of a different country with an IQ of 85, I don’t see how one can test that.  To take one example, a Polish student has to worry about agreement among seven grammatical cases while an American doesn’t.  Do you somehow make the English test harder in order to handicap the country with the simpler grammatical system?  How does one compare vocabulary?  If there's say five words on an English test which appear at a rate of one-in-a-million in normal text are they certain that the Norwegian test has exactly five one-in-a-million words which appear in the text-placed where they'd be equally relevant to where they're located on the English exam?  I doubt international educrats are that thorough.

It's worth noting that of of the top seven countries in reading in the year 2000, five were English-speaking. The US was 15th, but it preformed better than it does in math or science.  

Ron Johnson is a Tea Party-oriented candidate for the U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, one of whose main concerns is the sorry state of education in this country. Earlier this year, Johnson invited Charles Murray to speak before the group chaired by Johnson, the Partners in Education Council. Instead of an open-minded hearing that could have introduced new ideas to people concerned with education, the result was all too predictable.

After Murray’s March speech, school board member Matt Wiedenhoeft took issue with Murray’s suggestions during an individual conversation that the United States couldn’t keep up with Asian countries in producing engineers because of a difference in genetic abilities.

According to an e-mail Murray wrote to Leschke, he told Wiedenhoeft in a personal conversation that east Asians have more of the “visual-spatial abilities associated with engineering than whites or any other ethnic group.”

Wiedenhoeft said he believes the comments were racist and requested that the Partners in Education Council vote to apologize to the community for inviting Murray.

“To me, that is a comment that I cannot imagine we would want to promote because, I guess in my mind, you end up with a statement that one race is better than another via genetics. Until it’s proved, I’m certainly not going to support that kind of a theory,” Wiedenhoeft said.

Murray told the Northwestern his theory is backed by IQ test data showing Japanese and Chinese students score higher on visual-spatial components of IQ tests than whites of European origin. He said that pattern is observed in both Chinese raised in China and Chinese Americans whose families have lived in the U.S. for multiple generations.

“Can you think of any explanation of this pattern that does not involve genes?” he wrote in an e-mail to The Northwestern. “The hand-wringing reaction of the council member, and of everyone who gets upset by any mention of ethnic differences is, in my view, childish.”

Childish, indeed, infantile really, the reaction elicited by the school board member. Charges of racism seem to be the catch-all term for anyone seeking to end debate, or even someone who decides that he had better make the charge first before someone accuse him of racism for having listened to Murray, a sort of preemptive charge of racism.

Whereas once the U.S was the nation of open minds with the will to excel and compete, we're now the country of charges of racism. Whereas once we had no compunctions about having Werner von Braun and his team work on our space program, today we're frightened of education reformers who attempt to tell us the truth.