Race Differences in Behavior

Kevin Lamb’s review of Tucker on Cattell

Kevin Lamb’s TOO review of William Tucker’s book on Raymond Cattell is a microcosm of how far the academic world has sunk. (“The Malicious Smearing of a Psychological Pioneer”) Tucker, who calls himself a psychologist,  is no better than the $PLC or the ADL, substituting guilt-by-association arguments for intellectual engagement with Raymond Cattell on issues like eugenics and race differences. Richard Lynn’s review of Cattell’s Beyondism shows why the left hates Cattell.  Cattell viewed racial hybridization as leading to a genetic potential for IQ that is midway between the two parent races, leading to a decline from the IQ of the superior group. This is basic behavior genetics for a trait like IQ — and well supported by the results of White/African admixture in the US.

As a result, races should remain separate, and incompetent peoples should be allowed to die out. (Haiti comes to mind.)

For Cattell the basic principles for a scientific ethics are these: diverse societies and types; competition between societies and between individuals; survival of the fittest, extinction of the unfit. This is the way to a better world. How different from most prescriptions for Utopia, with their socialistic world states in which competition is extinguished and all men work together in a spirit of co-operation, brotherly love and, no doubt, boredom.

The most pathetic thing is that Cattell spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Illinois, and yet the U of I Press published Tucker’s book. Tucker should be ashamed, but he will doubtless be praised effusively by his colleagues.

In my last blog I conceded the humanities departments to the political left while acknowleding the power of the left throughout the university. The sordid tale of Raymond Cattell and the story of the denial of his lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association shows that the political pressures are very strong in the social sciences and that scientific rigor can easily be pushed aside for political purposes.

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Haiti the quintessential dysfunctional society

In doing some reading of Tom Watson’s writing on the Leo Frank case I came across an interesting comment on Haiti from 1915. (Watson was the only media figure who argued for Frank’s guilt and for the justice of Frank’s lynching.) Watson quotes a passage from a New Republic article on Frank’s lynching that illustrates the common perception of Haiti at the time. Like the rest of the mainstream media of the time, The New Republic was condemning the lynching of Leo Frank, comparing Georgia with Haiti, which is pretty much the worst thing you could say about a society:

A people which cannot preserve its legal fabric from violence is unfit for self-government. It belongs in the category of communities like Haiti, comunities which have to be supervised and protected by more civilized powers. Georgia is in that humiliating position today. If the Frank case is evidence of Georgia’s political development, then Georgia deserves to be known as the black sheep of the American Union.

In short, nothing much has changed in Haiti in 100 years. The only exception is the attitudes of the liberal media: The New Republic‘s liberal politics didn’t prevent it from attributing Haiti’s troubles to its lack of civilization.

The US occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see a de facto occupation again. Haiti is already on welfare — a “Republic of NGOs” where half the budget comes from foreign aid and 3000 NGOs operate most government services, including education and health care. (A search on Haiti and NGOs turns up lot of articles blaming Haiti’s problems on poorly managed charity or  as a modern form of imperialism! See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

The other thing that has changed in 100 years is that now there is a very real danger is that Haitians will now be allowed to immigrate in huge numbers to the US. VDARE.com’s blog is an indispensable source of information on this. As Rob Sanchez writes, Haiti is about to become our Camp of the Saints. There are sure to be hundreds of thousands of orphaned children and others pulling at America’s heart strings. And as Patrick Cleburne notes, their neighbors in the Dominican Republic are not so stupid, but already there are calls for mass airlifts of Haitian children to the US. Will the first Black president in American history stop it. I rather doubt it.

But if there is a huge influx of Haitians, I do think that the great majority of Whites (apart from the Angelina Jolie types and professors in the humanities and social sciences) will recoil against it. It would be a politically risky move for an administration that already has little support among White Americans.

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Charles Dodgson: The New York Times Keeps on Page

Charles Dodgson: The other day I came across a somewhat befuddled but nevertheless  interesting op-ed in the New York Times titled “The Protocol Society” (22 Dec. 2009). The idea is that nowadays industry not only makes physical things but packages sets of instructions. An obvious example is a piece of software. So is a car, most of the value of which is tied up with the knowledge that goes into its design. The steel and plastic are not worth much unshaped. There are important difference between physical and information-rich products. The former are costly to produce, the latter cheap once the design is there. Metal and glass are costly to produce and transport. But an idea, once formulated, can travel at the speed of light and be copied endlessly at essentially zero cost. The pharmaceutical industry is another example. The first pill can cost billions to develop but from there on producing copies costs less than a dime a dozen. 

My only objection at this stage of the article is that physical culture has always had elements of the protocol economy. The first sewn clothing must have been a creative act of genius but because imitation is easier than invention it could spread to the hoi polloi. The ingredients for simple tools are often readily available, but not the knowledge about how to make them. The Neolithic was an economic and lifestyle revolution driven by the spread of innovations. Population density rose 100 times with profound ramifications for human evolution, as argued by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending in their  recent book, The 10,000 Year Explosion.  My point is that the protocol economy is not new, just accelerated. 

Then the article veered off into the fascinating subject of social implications. It also became horribly befuddled where before it had been middling. 

Protocols are intangible, so the traits needed to invent and absorb them are intangible, too. First, a nation has to have a good operating system: laws, regulations and property rights.

Oh really! Ideas are intangible. Does it follow that the brains that produce them are intangible? What a remarkably silly thing to say. And how did nationhood enter the conversation? The author, whose name I had not yet noticed, was using the nation concept loosely to say the least. The term crops up 5 times, once in a book title. It seems that any state is a nation. The New York Times was making the same error as George W. Bush who throughout his presidency called anything with a government a “nation.” More of the distinction between state and nation in a future post. 

Then came the paragraph that made me look for the author’s name. 

A protocol economy tends toward inequality because some societies and subcultures have norms, attitudes and customs that increase the velocity of new recipes while other subcultures retard it. Some nations are blessed with self-reliant families, social trust and fairly enforced regulations, while others are cursed by distrust, corruption and fatalistic attitudes about the future. It is very hard to transfer the protocols of one culture onto those of another. 

The article does not hint at the possibility of tangible differences between societies. Consistent I suppose. What possible effect could genes and brain characteristics have on a population’s production of useful ideas? Or for that matter what could stable family life and general altruism have to do with,  say, hormone levels and evolutionary history? 

The thing is that this ignorance is willful. Someone who has been around as long as David Brooks knows the evidence or knows where to find it. In addition the NYT does not publish all the news fit to print on such matters. Such people together with such publications create synergies of lies and deception. 

The author is David Brooks. Here he is:

The rewards for towing the line are considerable. Mr. Brooks has an illustrious career providing Americans with an outlook designed to lead them away from their vital interests. Here is one career trail of this “conservative” and very well-connected columnist: 

     The New York Times Columnist (2003-)
    The Weekly Standard Senior Editor (1995-2003)
    The Wall Street Journal (1986-95)
    Atlantic Monthly Contributing Editor
    Newsweek Editor (former)
    National Review
    The New Yorker
    The Washington Post
    The Washington Times  

He is currently a commentator on “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” He is the author of Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (basically a portrait of people from his ethnic group — combining “the values of the countercultural sixties with those of the achieving eighties) and On Paradise Drive : How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense, both published by Simon & Schuster.

Baltasar Nordstrom: Tiger Woods' matrimonial betrayal and its relevance for Whites

Baltasar Nordstrom: As the new year gets underway and the Tiger Woods affair begins to wind up, Tiger may be about to be given a late Christmas gift that he probably did not want. With the number of his paramours peaking (at least for now) at 14, his badly betrayed wife Elin has reportedly hired a high-caliber attorney for the purposes of divorce. The mass media portray his story, of course, as nothing more than that of a highly talented and tremendously well-compensated American athlete who goes wrong and indulges widely in extramarital affairs with willing, amoral tarts over his five years of marriage. What Tiger did to Nordic Elin is symbolic of a much larger, ongoing phenomenon that goes to the heart of multi-racial, multicultural America. 

Tiger had been marketed by the media and his corporate sponsors as, to quote Lisa Schiffren, “an all-purpose icon: a man of personal rectitude, a lovely smile, apparent openness; a family man, with a lovely wife and two adorable babies.” The Woods image was “constructed for corporate consumption” for business reasons. Though the talent was real, the image was a “fraud,” “an act,” manufactured for corporate profits. He was also, because of the marriage of the dark-skinned Tiger to the pure Nordic (blond, blue-eyed, very White-skinned) Elin, packaged, or at least understood by some to be, to quote Schiffren again, “our first living embodiment of the collective hope for racial reconciliation.” It all went very well for a while until this particular deck of cards came crashing down on November 27th. 

Citing corporate profits as the underlying motive for the construction and maintenance of this false idol only begins to tell the story, however. It is undeniable that large enterprises like Nike, Gillette, AT&T, and Gatorade did have a stake in portraying Tiger as a clean-cut all-American, and, according to Shiffren, some of his philandering, as well as his “personal nastiness, arrogance, and general non-cuddly nature”, may have been known to at least a couple of his corporate sponsors and media outlets. He is rumored to be the most-fined player on the Professional Golfers Association Tour, throwing his clubs and having a dirty mouth (frequent “audible obscenities”), among other things, something that could not have escaped the attention of all his corporate benefactors. Other dynamics are in play, however. 

First, to state the obvious, Tiger himself is a member of the corporate class that has showered him with wealth. His wealth lies somewhere in the $500 million to $1 billion dollar range. The cover-ups of his character flaws, to the extent these cover-ups existed, were done in collusion with him, for his personal profit. He knew he was not the clean-cut, all-American male he was presented as, yet raked in his sponsorship fees nevertheless. 

Second, his philandering could not have happened were it not for his wealth and fame. It is highly unlikely that he would have been the target of so many attractive women if he were a handyman or office clerk, for example. His infidelities were enabled by his membership in his class and are a result of the way wealth and fame are distributed in the United States. 

It would be too much to say that the wealth-infidelity connection is causal, however. Presumably, most wealthy people do not engage in extramarital affairs to the extent Tiger did. Though wealth made it possible, the causality must lie elsewhere. 

This brings us back to the mass media’s portrayal of Tiger’s affairs as the result of the weaknesses of a single man — a man who perhaps let his talent and success go to his head — but his transgressions are the problems of an individual man nevertheless. Other professional athletes like Kobe Bryant, Alex Rodriguez, Michael Jordan, Wade Boggs, and Babe Ruth have had the same problem, though none except for Ruth to the same or greater degree, and there is no reason to suspect infidelity is significantly more typical of professional athletes than of other males. (Joe Namath and Wilt Chamberlain are often included in lists like this, but they frequented women only as bachelors.) The rambunctiousness of professional golfers in particular remains to be documented. Nevertheless, professional athletics does bring with it money and fame, facilitating the sexual and relational appropriation of women. The question is whether this provides a full explanation of Tiger’s proclivities. The answer is that his profession most likely does not, since most professional athletes, at least married ones, abstain from such extensive philandering as Tiger’s. 

Class and profession provide dynamic semi-causal social forces that, as suggested, are insufficient in cases like Tiger’s to explain all forms of behavior. Society comprises other social groupings besides class and profession, however, so for a full analysis of Tiger’s behavior we are scientifically and rationally obliged to look at other social groupings to see if they might explain, or at least add to the explanation of, what Tiger did. This includes racial/cultural heritage. 

Race differences in sexuality are basic to Prof. J. P. Rushton’s life history theoryof race. Rushton finds a general racial ordering from Blacks, to Whites, to Asians such that Blacks show less paternal involvement in children, less pair bonding between partners, and greater attraction to short-term sexual relationships. The theory and data compiled by Rushton suggest that Tiger Woods’ Black racial heritage would be part of the explanation for his behavior. 

For example, according to Treas and Geiden (2000), “There is racial variation in the proportion of families headed by a single parent: 22 percent for white, 57 percent for black, and 33 percent for Hispanic families.” Even though single-parent, the great majority of these “families” were headed by women: 90.1 percent of Black single-parent households and 79.3 percent of White single-parent households. Most Black children under age 18 (58.27 percent) lived with one parent, compared to 23 percent of all White children under age 18 that same year. 

Further, almost 70 percent of Black children are born to single mothers, compared to 24 percent of White children born to single mothers, nearly three times as many. This is a kind of infidelity, a familial and not only marital infidelity, to expand the meaning a bit, that rejects obligations to the woman, marriage, family, and fatherhood even prior to a child’s birth. And, according to Treas and Giesen, being a Black male is associated with an increased risk of infidelity even within marriage. Given Rushton’s theory, it is safe to assume that Black males are more inclined to sexual irresponsibility and opportunism. 

When it comes to infidelity, racial heritage makes a difference and is a likely contributing factor to Tiger Woods’ behavior. But you won’t read about it in the media. 

The author is a freelance writer and uses a nom de plume. 

Reference 

Treas, J & Gieden, D. “Sexual infidelity among married and cohabiting Americans,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 62(1), pp. 48-60, 2000, cited at The Kinsey Institute, “Frequently Asked Sexuality Questions to the Kinsey Institute”: http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/FAQ.html#Treas.

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How Should a White Female Evaluate Potential Rape Threats?

Reginald Thompson: If a White female encounters a White man and a Black man in the same day, the Black male is at least 9 Times More Likely to Rape her.

Obviously, if a woman is wary of being raped she’ll assess a Man in his twenties as a greater potential threat than an old man or a little boy. Also, it is thought by many women that certain traits in the appearance of a Man, such as a scuzzy hairstyle and clothing, tends to correlate with an increased likelihood of him being a rapist. But what about the most obvious and unmistakable of appearance traits, whether a man is White or Black? Would it make sense for White females to assess the threat of rape as being significantly greater from the average Black male she encounters?

The answer from the Statistical Data is a very clear yes.

Looking at the 2005 FBI Uniform Crime Report we find that though Blacks are only 12.4% of the US Population, they commit 33.6% of the rapes of White females.

This means that even if we assume totally random racial assortment, where a White female is just as likely to encounter the average Black male as she is to encounter the average White male, we would still have to conclude that a Black male is 2.7 times more likely to rape a White female than the average male she encounters.

But here’s the thing: There’s clearly not random racial assortment in America, so the increased rape risk to a White female for every Black male she encounters is even greater than that.

Probably the closest thing we can find to a meaningful estimate of what percentage of the Males encountered by a White female are Black is to look at how Black a neighborhood the average White lives in.

I found some data taken from the 2000 Census saying the average White lives in a neighborhood that is 6.7% Black.

There are two problems with using this as the baseline for the Percentage of Rapes of White females committed by Blacks though:

1. It is only data for Metropolitan Counties, and leaves out Rural Counties that have fewer Blacks.

2. It fails to take into account the effects of intra-neighborhood racial assortment resulting from implicit Whiteness.  For example, it could be there’s a neighborhood that’s 50% White and 50% Black, but where the Whites primarily go to the restaurant that serves food White people like, while the Blacks go to the restaurant that serves food Black people like. This sort of thing will create a situation where even in a 50% Black neighborhood, the White females living there will have much less than 50% of the males they encounter be Black.

So bear very closely in mind that using 6.7% as the proportion of Black people met by White females is likely a strong overestimation, and therefore that the figures below underestimate the degree of increased rape risk a White female incurs when she encounters a Black male.

White Males   Black Males

Percent of Encounters          80.2%             6.7%

Percent of Rapes                   44.5%              33.6%

Impact Value                          .55                    5.01

This means that while the average Black male encountered by a White female is 5.01 Times more likely to rape her than the average male, the average White male she encounters is almost half as likely to rape her as the average male. It also implies that if a White female encounters a White and Black male, the Black is 9.1 times more likely to rape her than the White.

It is all too clear from this data that Black rapists are deliberately targeting White females.  This could be because of racial hatred for Whites, and possibly also because they perceive White females as being more sexually desirable than women of their own race.

Strong evidence in favor of the racial animus explanation playing a crucial role here can be found in the fact that when a Black man marries a White woman, he is 82% more likely to Murder her than if he was married to a Black women.

In conclusion, White women have every right to be “paranoid” about Black men. It’s the White women who aren’t afraid of Black men that have something wrong with them.

Reginald Thompson is the Pen Name of an Advisor to an International Software Company. He lives on the American East Coast and is proprietor/manager of a recently created Blog called Statsaholic.

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Kevin MacDonald: The Myth of Pure Science

Kevin MacDonald: The brouhaha over climate change science has prompted an op-ed in the LA Times  “Climate change e-mail scandal underscores myth of pure science.”  It’s interesting to substitute race science rather than climate science when pondering their comments. Some quotes:

The East Anglia controversy serves as a reminder that when the politics are divisive and the science is sufficiently complex, the boundary between the two may become indiscernible.

Race science is also complex — complex enough for obfuscation by politically motivated parties. It’s not like the double helix structure of DNA where someone who doubts it can be safely relegated to the Flat Earth Society.

Yet both parties have agreed, although tacitly, on one thing: Science is the appropriate arbiter of the political debate, and policy decisions should be determined by objective scientific assessments of future risks. This seductive idea gives politicians something to hide behind when faced with divisive decisions. If “pure” science dictates our actions, then there is no need to acknowledge the role that political interests and social values play in deciding how society should address climate change.

Politicians (and academics and journalists) often hide behind the idea that science has absolutely proved that IQ is not a valid measure or that race differences in academic success are due to White racism, etc.  No need to mention the political commitments of the people who have produced this “knowledge” — people like S. J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin.

In practice, science is competitive, backbiting, venal, imperfect and, indeed, political. Science, in other words, is replete with the same human failings that mark all other social activities.

For sure. I think pretty much every scientist starts out thinking science is way purer than it is. By the end of their career, they are less idealistic. In my case, it came as a result of writing The Culture of Critique. A more recent example of my disillusion is evolutionary psychology.

What is the solution? Let politics do its job; indeed, demand it. … Better to recognize that decision-makers, depending on their political beliefs, will weigh the evidence and risks of climate change differently when evaluating policy options. Voters should evaluate the decisions on that basis, rather than on the false notion that science is dictating the choices.

The problem with this is that it’s no solution at all. We are supposed to simply accept the fact that race science is politicized and that politicians are politicized in what they say about race science. Then somehow the voters are supposed to wade through all this when they decide how to vote on issues such as anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives.

But voters are completely unqualified for evaluating any of the evidence. And in any case, surely voters’ politics will affect their choices in the same way politics  influences everyone else’s choices. 

Of course, the media will weigh in heavily and predictably to convince voters against race realism because we all know they are politicized. The media will be effective because when it comes to race science, the realists are completely marginalized. So in the end, clueless voters who read the New York Times or watch Fox News will end up making these decisions. 

I think that Jewish intellectuals have always known about the politicization of truth. And if truth is politicized, all that’s left is to try to establish consensus and delegitimize everything else –forcibly if need be. This is from Ch. 6 of The Culture of Critique:

A fundamental aspect of Jewish intellectual history has been the realization that there is really no demonstrable difference between truth and consensus. Within traditional Jewish religious discourse, “truth” was the prerogative of a privileged interpretive elite that in traditional societies consisted of the scholarly class within the Jewish community. Within this community, “truth” and “reality” were nothing more (and were undoubtedly perceived as nothing more) than consensus within a sufficiently large portion of the interpretive community.

People who dissent from the manufactured consensus are simply marginalized from polite society. So the closest we can come to truth in race science is consensus and the consensus simply reflects the politics of the people with more power.

I think a lot of race scientists have had an idealistic conception of science. Until we change the people who have the power, especially in the media, there is no chance for their ideas to become mainstream.

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