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Steven Pinker on Harvard Admissions: Ignoring the Elephant in the Room

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Steven Pinker (“The Trouble with Harvard“) argues that students should be selected on the basis of standardized testing. He is tone deaf on Jewish overrepresentation and on the underrepresentation of non-Jewish Whites.

Like many observers of American universities, I used to believe the following story. Once upon a time Harvard was a finishing school for the plutocracy, where preppies and Kennedy scions earned gentleman’s Cs while playing football, singing in choral groups, and male-bonding at final clubs, while the blackballed Jews at CCNY founded left-wing magazines and slogged away in labs that prepared them for their Nobel prizes in science. Then came Sputnik, the ’60s, and the decline of genteel racism and anti-Semitism, and Harvard had to retool itself as a meritocracy, whose best-and-brightest gifts to America would include recombinant DNA, Wall Street quants, The Simpsons, Facebook, and the masthead of The New Republic.

This story has a grain of truth in it: Hoxby has documented that the academic standards for admission to elite universities have risen over the decades. But entrenched cultures die hard, and the ghost of Oliver Barrett IV still haunts every segment of the Harvard pipeline.

Sounds like Pinker is implying that WASPs like Oliver Barrett IV still run the show at Harvard, keeping out the Jews and anyone else who can’t trace their ancestry to the Mayflower.

The reality, of course, is there is more than a grain of truth to the idea that admission to Ivy League universities is anything but meritocratic. In fact, Jews are vastly overrepresented on the basis of any available metric, while Whites and Asians are underrepresented, as Ron Unz has shown. Pinker is aware of Unz, but interprets Unz’s results as showing only that the deck is stacked against Asians, with the implication that folks like Oliver Barrett IV are the beneficiaries of unearned privilege:

Jerome Karabel has unearthed a damning paper trail showing that in the first half of the twentieth century, holistic admissions were explicitly engineered to cap the number of Jewish students. Ron Unz, in an exposé even more scathing than Deresiewicz’s, has assembled impressive circumstantial evidence that the same thing is happening today with Asians.

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The Moral Dimension of Rotherham: “We can’t carry on like this. We just can’t.”

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Margaret Wente, “The Unspeakable Truth about Rotherham” (The Globe and Mail, Sept.4, 2014):

Andrew Norfolk, the Times journalist whose investigative reports prompted this inquiry and others now under way, has explained why this travesty is so toxic to Britain’s liberal elites. “The suggestion that men from a minority ethnic background were committing sex crimes against white children was always going to be the far right’s fantasy come true,” he wrote. “Innocent white victims, evil dark-skinned abusers. Liberal angst kicked instinctively into top gear.”

But of course, the anxieties of the right were never fantasies. The fantasy was the left’s ideology that there are no important differences between people, that race doesn’t exist, and that the bloody history of ethnic conflict would magically disappear when millions of Muslims immigrated to the UK.

But no amount of liberal angst will make this story go away. Current Home Secretary Theresa May has acknowledged that “institutionalized political correctness” has inflicted appalling damage on the innocent. And the broader failures of Muslim integration are now too obvious to ignore. It’s not just all the young men who run off to join the caliphate and saw off people’s heads. It’s the Birmingham school scandal, where it was discovered that dozens of secular schools had been targeted for Islamization by Muslim radicals. It’s the imported culture of violence and misogyny.

Right. It’s not just the Pakistani rape gangs preying on White girls, but the reality that the West has imported cultures of violence, misogyny, extreme ethnocentrism, political corruption, and hostility toward the West. As Wente notes, the effects of the campaign to displace the native British populations has resulted in moral travesty against the innocent.There is thus a powerful moral dimension here that should be exploited by patriots. Read more

Natural Selection against Europeans: Why the Silence?

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At his blog West Hunter, Greg Cochran writes 

Natural selection is not an odd, unusual, poorly understood phenomenon like ball lighting. It is not something that last occurred 50 million years ago, like a kimberlite pipe eruption. And, of course, it applies to human behavioral traits, which are significantly heritable. Unless you think that the optimum mental phenotype (considering costs and payoffs) was the same in tropical hunter-gatherers, arctic hunter-gatherers, neolithic peasants, and medieval moneylenders (which would strongly suggest that you are an idiot), natural selection must have generated significant differences between populations. Differences whose consequences we see every day, and that have been copiously documented by psychometricians.

This notion that ongoing natural selection is not the default – that it only happens on national holidays or whatever – is fairly common among biologists. Obviously untrue, because you can’t even have things stay the same without ongoing selection – otherwise mutations and drift would gradually ruin everything. Only selection lets horseshoe crabs outlast mountain ranges.

Sure, some of this is because the topic of human psychological differences makes biologists upset, or threatens to impose unemployment and/or celibacy – but it also shows up in topics that don’t seem to have much emotional or political charge.

He’s right, of course. Natural selection is ongoing. But a foundational dogma of evolutionary psychology was that natural selection stopped in the Pleistocene somewhere, resulting in the set of adaptations possessed by all humans, the only differences being between genders. This view allowed them to safely ignore group differences in traits because for all practical (and scientific) purposes humans are identical — a view that is tailor made to fit into the left/multicultural academic milieu. Read more

Jews, Hollywood, and Gaza: Some Thoughts

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A few days ago I noticed the appearance of a truly remarkable full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter. The ad, which I initially saw as a piece of poorly conceived propaganda, was concocted by the Anti-Defamation League, and called upon world leaders and ‘decent people everywhere’ to make sure that ‘Hamas terrorists’ cannot be rearmed so the ‘people of Gaza and Israel can move toward a more peaceful future.’

My immediate impression was that the ad failed on two levels. The first is the quote from the truly hideous Golda Meir: “We can forgive [them] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [them] when they love their children more than they hate us.”

Presented in bold, the quote reeks of an ADL desperate to counter the images of slaughtered children that continue to fill our television screens. A couple of important textual and contextual changes have been made to the quote — note the substitution of “the Arabs” from the original quote with the less pejorative “them.” But even more significantly, the original quote was referring to the deaths of sons and daughters on either side — soldiers rather than infants. The ADL has simply adapted the quote contextually in order to fit the current Israeli policy of mass child murder.

Even examining it in its new context, the central message being conveyed is that Israel is being forced to kill Palestinian children, and further, that Israel is distraught at being made to do this. Such a claim is ridiculous given world has seen images of Israelis making the bombing of Gaza’s schools and hospitals into a social occasion complete with snacks, drinks and selfies. Read more

Crock of Shock: Liberal Responses to Vibrant Depravity

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Life has been disturbing for liberals lately. An American journalist is beheaded by a jihadi with a “British accent.” “Shocking,” says the Independent. At least 1400 White girls are subject to years of rape by men “of Pakistani heritage” in the Yorkshire town of Rotherham. “Shocking,” says the anti-racist campaigner Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

Yes, it’s another of those occasions when I wonder whether English is really my mother-tongue. I thought “shocking” news had to contain some element of surprise and unpredictability. But that doesn’t seem to apply here. Britain has been enriched by mass immigration from violent and misogynistic Third World nations. Is it surprising when an enricher with a British accent cuts someone’s head off? Is it surprising when other enrichers commit gang-rape?

Not to me. I think it’s utterly predictable. Recall that smarmy liberal phrase: “of Pakistani heritage.” This is part of the heritage:

In the first phase of the war, young men and Hindus, Awami League members, intellectuals, students and academics were targeted for murder. In the second phase of the war, women were singled out. It is thought that at least 200,000 women were raped by the Pakistani forces and their collaborators – 25,000 victims found themselves pregnant, so that is not implausible. There are eyewitness accounts of “rape camps” set up by the Pakistani forces. The numbers, and the names of rape victims, remain disputed. Sheikh Mujib, the first leader of Bangladesh, ordered the destruction of lists so that the shame would not follow the victims all their lives. … It is impossible to know the real death toll. The historian R.J. Rummel, who has looked as deeply into it as anyone, concludes that the “final estimate of Pakistan’s democide to be 300,000 to 3,000,000, or a prudent 1,500,000.” (The war Bangladesh can never forget, The Independent, 19th February 2013)

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Ferguson: Media Images in the Service of White Dispossession

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“Look, folks, policing is done this way. You may like to live in Santa Monica and have your little wine party in the backyard and drive your Jaguar and do your little barbecue…. Know that the reason you are allowed to do that in the safety of your community is because police Officers go out and they clean up the streets and deal with all the scum that you don’t want to know about….”
—Stacey Koon [former LAPD Sergeant in charge of the Rodney King incident]
Quoted in Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD, 430

The two-week spectacle in Ferguson, Missouri, which culminated in the packed funeral of 18-year-old Michael Brown, produced a cascade of predictable volatility. Brown, an unarmed Black male, died August 9, 2014, after Darren Wilson, a White police officer, fired multiple rounds at the 6’4”, 292-pound amateur rapper known as “Big Mike.” (According to the New York Times, “[Brown] collaborated on songs that included lyrics such as ‘My favorite part is when the bodies hit the ground.’”)

As more details emerge, the sequence of events that prompted the shooting offers a plausible explanation for the skewed original narrative of an unarmed Black male targeted by a White police officer. Several eyewitnesses alleged that Brown was cooperative, had his hands up, and was shot from behind.

However, others tell a quite different story. According to forensic reports, Brown was shot from the front, not from behind. The pattern and number of rounds fired suggests that the officer attempted to stop Brown by wounding him. The two shots to Brown’s head may have been the rounds of last resort in the reasonable use of deadly force against a menacing assailant who was rushing at him, particularly given the possibility that the assailant was a large, physically powerful, marijuana-buzzed, man who showed no signs of being subdued by a volley of shots. Newly released audiotape from an amateur video chat of an apartment dweller near the shooting records ten or eleven shots over a 12-second span. This suggests that Wilson may have tried to thwart Brown by intimidating him at first, then wounding him with a volley of shots before unloading two rounds to the head (a series of six shots can be heard with a one- or two-second break followed by a burst of 4 or 5 additional shots). Read more

The Rotherham Pathology

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The horrifying scandal in Rotherham (previous versions covered copiously for TOO by Tobias Langdon) continues to unfold. A report commissioned by the city council stated that at least 1400 children were sexually abused over 16 years.

It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators. This abuse is not confined to the past but continues to this day. … One young person told us that ‘gang rape’ was a usual part of growing up in the area of Rotherham in which she lived. …

Within social care, the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers. At an operational level, the Police gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime. Further stark evidence came in 2002, 2003 and 2006 with three reports known to the Police and the Council, which could not have been clearer in their description of the situation in Rotherham. The first of these reports was effectively suppressed because some senior officers disbelieved the data it contained. This had led to suggestions of cover- up. The other two reports set out the links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality in the Borough. These reports were ignored and no action was taken to deal with the issues that were identified in them.

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