Mel Gibson to Dean Richards: "I’ve moved on; You’re an asshole"

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Mel Gibson can’t avoid questions about his anti-Jewish comments. Dean Richards, a reporter for WGN in Chicago, brought up the topic once again, probably realizing that it was a great strategy for getting ahead. Gibson is obviously pissed off about it:

“That’s been almost four years, dude. I’ve moved on. But I guess you haven’t. …  That was a while back, and I’ve done all the necessary mea culpas, so … let’s move on, dude.”

Richards wrapped up the interview with a standard thank-you-for-coming, and Gibson, drinking coffee, gave the reporter a thumbs-up before muttering a loud-and-clear [“asshole”] right into his mic before the satellite feed was cut.

The mea culpas don’t matter. Apologizing doesn’t work and never has. This is the kind of realization that radicalizes people. One can only hope that Gibson, with all his wealth, his movie-making ability, his  fan base, and his connections in the movie industry will realize that there is no going back and that he will make movies that can change the world.

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Christopher Donovan: Trial By Ordeal — Not as Primitive as It Sounds?

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Christopher Donovan: An interesting article in the Boston Globe describes how the medieval practice of “trial by ordeal” might have actually worked pretty well. 

Basically, it came down to the social order created by widely-held beliefs — the logic or truth of those beliefs aside.  If everyone uniformly believed that God would punish them for a crime, fewer guilty persons would go through with an ordeal.  So you got a good sense of who’d been bad, and who was falsely accused.  It would have taken a stiffly anti-social European to fool the system. 

Today’s criminal jury trial system might even be less reliable than sticking a hand in boiling water as an indicator of truth.  In multiracial America, there are far fewer uniformly held beliefs.  A system in which a black or Hispanic defendant feels aggrieved by the pressures of living in a “White society” surely feels less moral compunction about lying or fooling the system.  If evil White police, prosecutors, judges and juries are staring you down, who cares?  You’re justified in lying. 

And, consistent with Prof. Robert Putnam’s observation that even intra-racial relations are harmed in a multiracial society, guilty White defendants might feel similarly.  If society is nothing but a crazy mishmash of clashing ethnicities, why not have a little party in the midst of the confusion? 

This is to say nothing of the craziness surrounding the racial makeup of the jury.  As O.J. Simpson found, having black jurors is very handy when the evidence against you is overwhelming.

As a civil litigator, I watched as race — of the plaintiff, defendants, witnesses and juries — absolutely obliterated anything else going on.  Like, say, the facts.  There was no widely-held belief that a barely-injured plaintiff should be denied a financial windfall — no, it was a fellow Hispanic woman looking to get a chunk of white society’s cash, so by all means, help her.  It was a capricious system that often had little to do with witnesses, cross-examination or persuasive arguments by attorneys.  It was a race racket. 

So, while the “trial by ordeal” had truth as its aim (and possible result) in racially homogenous European societies, the trial by jury’s truth-finding function is often subverted in multiracial America.

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The Failure of Head Start — Another Blow for IQ Realism

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I teach courses on child psychology, and every textbook has a chapter on IQ. It’s always a bit touchy talking about it — I’ve got to be on my best behavior. I discuss the data showing genetic influences and then I point out that most of the “environmental influences” on IQ could equally well be explained by parent-child genetic correlations: Smart parents are genetically inclined to high IQ and they talk to their kids more. This results in correlations between IQ and parents talking to their kids.

But the chapter always ends on an optimistic note for the environmentalists because of the Head Start data. The standard line is that Head Start has a positive effect on IQ for a while and then tapers off to nothing after a few years. But the good news for environmentalists is that there are lots of other great things Head Start does, like improve academic achievement, prevent school dropout, etc.

However, the recent report on Head Start shows that there are no positive effects at all on academic achievement, social and emotional functioning, or health, even in the first grade. These are overwhelmingly poor non-White children — the future of America

As the Brookings Institute’s Russ Whitehurst notes,

The children in Head Start are overwhelmingly poor and minority. They are at high risk of starting school far behind their more advantaged peers, and falling further behind over time. They tune-out and drop-out at alarming rates. In a world in which nearly everything we value, from a long lifespan to financial wealth to family stability, is associated with educational attainment, these children’s lives are in danger.

So the ever hopeful left is back to square one. No positive effects at all. Indeed, things seem to have gotten worse: “In the critical area of vocabulary (a good measure of IQ), 3-year-olds entered the study at the 29th percentile in terms of national norms and finished first grade at the 24th percentile whether or not they attended Head Start.” They might as well have stayed home with grandma.

But because the ever hopeful educational establishment didn’t want the word to get out, they delayed the report for three years. During this time they sweated the data (as we psychologists say) to try to come up with some positive results. Not possible. And believe me, they were motivated. There are lots of private contractors and an entire bureaucracy to feed. They pulled out all the stops.

Actually, it’s quite surprising that they couldn’t come up with something positive, since, as Whitehurst points out, the same federal agencies that administer the programs are in charge of evaluating them. Short of  making up the data, they couldn’t come up with what they wanted. It’s something of a miracle that they didn’t falsify the data. All for a good cause, you know.

But, as Whitehurst notes, when the report was finally released there was absolute silence in the MSM. The New York Times did not think it was news fit to print, nor did the Washington Post. I am still waiting for an article to appear in the LA Times.

Reports like this are just not the sort of thing that the left wants to hear, because it does not augur well for the future of the impending multicultural paradise we are heading into. I wonder if the next edition of my textbook will even bother to note it.

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More Marriage, Less Rape

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Reginald Thompson: Research shows that remaining unmarried greatly increases the chances that a woman will be raped, while living with a husband greatly decreases her chances of being raped.

According to the FBI Crime Victimization Survey, the average unmarried female over the age of 12 had a 0.37% chance of being raped or sexually assaulted in 2006.

In contrast, the average married female over the age of 12 had only a 0.04% chance of being raped or sexually assaulted that year.

That’s a staggering risk factor for single women of being 9.3 times more likely to be raped!

Now you might think this is due to single women tending to be younger, and younger women being more likely to be raped. But that idea is refuted by the fact that divorced women, on average older than single women, are even more likely to be raped than single women are.

Divorced or seperated women had a 0.43% chance of being raped or sexually assaulted in 2006, which means they had a 10.8 times greater chance of being raped than the married women did, and a 16% greater chance than the Single women.

Intriguingly, single women are also 3.7 times more likely to be subjected to violent crime than married women are, while being 5.5 times more likely to be subjected to completed violence.

Also, they are 4.9 times more likely to be robbed, 3.1 times more likely to be subjected to aggravated assault, and 3.5 times more likely to be subjected to simple assault.

So single women are at an elevated risk for all kinds of violent crime, but none so much as rape and sexual assault.  This is doubtless due to the sexual nature of the relationship between a husband and wife, and the fact that by marrying a man, a woman provides herself with a physically stronger companion who has a profound evolutionary interest in protecting her sexuality.

But does it follow from these findings that if women spent more of their lives married, the overall rape rate would decline?

Or would rapists just compensate by raping the remaining single women at a higher rate?

To find out I got the rape rate for 18 years from 1960 to 2007, and checked it against the median age at first marriage for women in those years.  What I found was a very strong +.602 correlation between the rape rate and median age at first marriage for women, with a statistically significant P Value of .008.

This means that 36% of the explosive increase in rape from 1960 to 2007 is explained simply by the catastrophic trend of more and more American women delaying marriage until later in life.

In sharp contrast, variation in median age at first marriage explains only a paltry 3.3% of the variation in the overall crime rate. This shows that there’s something very special about the relationship between age at first marriage and rape, and that the correlation between them isn’t just a question of median age at first marriage corresponding with some other factor that has an influence on crime.

Given this data, it is clear that anyone who actually has the best interests of women at heart will encourage them to get married as early in life as is reasonably possible.

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: Patrick Cleburne on Jewish involvement in immigration

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Kevin MacDonald: I was going to blog on the recent news reports of Latino-Jewish ties, but I really can’t improve on Patrick Cleburne’s  blog over at Vdare.com. A must read. Cleburne agrees with the Kvetcher that the real motivation is “the mutual goal of making the majority population a minority population. We need to all be ‘The Stranger.'” It’s obviously a goal that is radically opposed to the interests of White Americans.

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The academic left’s involvement in politics

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In today’s LA Times, the op-ed page was dominated by comments on Howard Zinn (“An experts’ history of Zinn”), who by all accounts was a leftist political activist as well as a professor of political science at Boston University. Zinn, who probably deserved a chapter in The Culture of Critique as an exemplar of a leftist Jewish intellectual activist, was involved in all the leftist causes of the last 60 years. He wore his political beliefs on his sleeve and was proud of his lack of neutrality in his writing, titling his memoir You can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train.  As one of the commentators, Sean Wilentz, notes,

He saw history primarily as a means to motivate people to political action that he found admirable. That’s what he said he did. It’s fine as a form of agitation — agitprop — but it’s not particularly good history.

To a point, he helped correct mainstream popular conceptions of American history that were highly biased. But he ceased writing serious history. He had a very simplified view that everyone who was president was always a stinker and every left-winger was always great.

But other historians are much more sympathetic to Zinn. Eric Foner, who is described by one reviewer as the “sainted PC commissar for US history and Reconstruction fabulist” is, like Zinn, an academic radical activist. Foner says about Zinn:

The idea that historians have to be neutral about everything they study is the death of history. Every historian has beliefs and feelings about what they’re studying. Howard made them very explicit. The teachers you remember are the ones with a passion for history who made it clear what they thought. They were not polemicists. They respected the canons of historical scholarship, as Zinn did, but they cared deeply.

Well, I’m not sure how much Zinn respected the canons of scholarship in creating what one commentor called an “eternal struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.” The print version of the Times op-ed provides some quotations from Zinn’s work A People’s History of the United States. The Western culture = evil, native peoples = good theme is obvious. Europe of the Renaissance was “dominated … by the religion of the popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western Civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.” The natives, on the other hand, are all about hospitality and sharing, and they have no concept of war. (Imagine the horror if someone made blanket assertions about Jews as having a frenzy for money.)

As an evolutionist, the idea that Western culture is uniquely evil is ridiculous, but the idea that it is uniquely evil has been common among Jewish intellectual activists, most notably the Boasian anthropologists. As I noted in The Culture of Critique,

one consequence of the triumph of the Boasians was that there was almost no research on warfare and violence among the peoples studied by anthropologists (Keegan 1993, 90–94). Warfare and warriors were ignored, and cultures were conceived as consisting of myth-makers and gift-givers [or, as hospitable, loving, and sharing people, as Zinn would have it]. (Orans [1996, 120] shows that Mead systematically ignored cases of rape, violence, revolution, and competition in her account of Samoa.) Only five articles on the anthropology of war appeared during the 1950s. Revealingly, when Harry Turney-High published his volume Primitive Warfarein 1949 documenting the universality of warfare and its oftentimes awesome savagery, the book was completely ignored by the anthropological profession—another example of the exclusionary tactics used against dissenters among the Boasians and characteristic of the other intellectual movements reviewed in this volume as well. Turney-High’s massive data on non-Western peoples conflicted with the image of them favored by a highly politicized profession whose members simply excluded these data entirely from intellectual discourse. The result was a “pacified past” (Keeley 1996, 163ff) and an “attitude of self-reproach” (p. 179) in which the behavior of primitive peoples was bowdlerized while the behavior of European peoples was not only excoriated as uniquely evil but also as responsible for all extant examples of warfare among primitive peoples. From this perspective, it is only the fundamental inadequacy of European culture that prevents an idyllic world free from between-group conflict. 

The reality, of course, is far different. Warfare was and remains a recurrent phenomenon among prestate societies. Surveys indicate over 90 percent of societies engage in warfare, the great majority engaging in military activities at least once per year (Keeley 1996, 27–32). Moreover, “whenever modern humans appear on the scene, definitive evidence of homicidal violence becomes more common, given a sufficient number of burials (Keeley 1996, 37). Because of its frequency and the seriousness of its consequences, primitive warfare was more deadly than civilized warfare. Most adult males in primitive and prehistoric societies engaged in warfare and “saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime” (Keeley, 1996, 174).

Howard Zinn was obviously in this tradition. But because he plugged into the anti-Western zeitgeist of the academic left, he had a long and happy career at Boston University — untroubled by student activists trying to get him fired.

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Nietzsche on Religion

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I went through a Nietzsche phase as an undergrad philosophy major but never read The Anti-Christ, so Thomas Dalton’s current TOO article “Nietzsche and the Origins of Christianity” was a real eye-opener — the ultimate conspiracy theory: St. Paul as the center of a plan to counter Roman power by recruiting non-Jews to “to steal away their moral authority and place it, ultimately, in the hands of a Jew who would sooth their suffering, and ‘save’ them.” The result of the triumph of Christianity was a Jewish slave morality — “a catastrophe of the highest magnitude. … countering every aspect of Roman morality and spirituality, and … establishing a system favorable to Jewish interests.” A morality born of “the hatred and revenge of the Jews.”

What an incredible feat:  to turn Europeans away from their own western heritage — a noble, life-affirming Greco-Roman culture — and toward a foreign, alien, decadent, Oriental worldview.  And it was done as revenge, out of hatred, and built upon lies.  An ancient religion — Judaism — born of falsehood and lies, creates another born of falsehood and lies.  It is done for reasons of power, control, wealth, and survival.  And the lie prevails.

Anything bordering on religion is always likely to provoke intense feelings and for good reason. Since I am an evolutionist, I see all religion as a sort of ideology — a belief system that gives meaning and coherence to the world, and motivates behavior. The only important question is whether the ideology furthers or hinders the evolutionary aims of the people who believe in it. In that sense, Jewish religious ideology has tended to be quite adaptive for Jews — regulating marriage and providing for group cohesion and negative views of non-Jews, etc.

What about Christian ideology? Here the record is quite a bit more mixed, but in general I am much more positive about Christianity than Nietzsche. Regarding the ancient Roman world, the following is a passage from my review of David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedrals:

Particularly interesting is the discussion of early Christianity based on the work of Rodney Stark (1996). Early Christianity emerges as a non-ethnic form of Judaism that functioned as a way of producing cohesive, effective groups able to deal with the uncertainties of the ancient world. The ancient world was a very unpredictable place indeed, characterized by natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, rioting, epidemics, brutal military campaigns against civilians, famines, and widespread poverty. Navigating this world was greatly facilitated by co-religionists ready to lend a helping hand and to establish economic alliances. Wilson has no hesitation in supposing that Christian charity in extending aid to fellow Christians suffering from the plague involved altruism, as indeed it did. But the result was that more Christians survived these disasters than did Pagans: Christianity was adaptive at the group level. The adaptiveness of Christianity also stemmed from its emphasis on several attitudes that were notably lacking in the Roman Empire: encouragement of large families, conjugal fidelity, high-investment parenting, and outlawing of abortion, infanticide, and non-reproductive sexual behavior. The bottom line is that Christian women did indeed out-reproduce Pagan women. Other obvious examples of religiously mandated fertility and family-promoting values in the contemporary world are the Amish and Hutterites, the Mormons, and Orthodox Jews. All of these religions are characterized by social controls and religious ideologies that promote adaptive behavior at the group level.

Further, Christianity has at times been a very effective force against Judaism. Indeed, in Ch. 3 of Separation and Its Discontents I argue that the institutionalization of Christianity in the late Roman Empire was fundamentally an anti-Jewish movement. See here for the short version. I note there that these fundamentally anti-Jewish attitudes remained Church teaching and influenced Church policy until Vatican II. I also note that

on the one hand, there is no question that Catholicism was able to serve as a viable institution of ethnic defense in other historical eras, notably the Middle Ages when, as James C. Russell notes, the Church was influenced by German culture. On the other hand, the strands of Christian universalism can lead to compromising the ethnic interests of Christians. Indeed, since Vatican II, Catholicism has become part of the culture of Western suicide. In the US, it is in the forefront of the open borders movement. It is therefore not at all surprising that Jewish organizations would be dismayed by any retreat from Vatican II.

As Russell notes, Germanic culture was not submerged by Christianity. My view is that a biological tendency toward individualism is a far better explanation of Western institutions since the Enlightenment than Christianity. There is much else to be said — too much to get into in a blog.  Suffice it to say that whatever St. Paul intended in creating Christianity, he could not control the outcome in its long later history.

Nevertheless, I do think that Christian universalism remains a problem for European survival. In commenting on Evangelical Protestants in the US, I noted their high fertility and strong sense of family values as clearly adaptive.  However,

A great many Christian denominations, including some evangelical groups, are strong supporters of multi-racial immigration and quite a few Christian groups avidly seek converts from all races and ethnicities. My impression is that most white Christians live in an implicit white world. Their gut instincts are to preserve an America that has at least a vague resemblance to the world in which they grew up.

There is no question that Christian Zionism has been a negative force on US foreign policy in the Middle East, although. as Mearsheimer and Walt note, it is very doubtful that they would have any influence at all without the support and encouragement of the Israel Lobby.

I do think that race will trump religion in American politics in the sense that White Americans will realize that importing millions of non-White Christians from Mexico and elsewhere is a horrible idea. Race is a far more powerful variable in predicting people’s political affiliations than religion, and that will continue as the racial polarization of America continues and the Republican Party (or, hopefully, the A3P)  becomes the party of Whites. Implicitly at least, White people who are strong Christians understand that they have far more in common with atheists, agnostics and liberal Protestants who are White than they do with non-White Christians. The fact that Conservative Protestants defied their leaders and were strong supporters of immigration restriction in the period of ethnic defense that culminated in the 1924 law shows that they can be rallied to sensible causes. The fact that so many of them are now involved in the Tea Party opposition movement and the rallies against immigration amnesty of recent years shows that they have healthy instincts.

So I remain optimistic that Christianity will ultimately prove to be an evolutionarily adaptive ideology for Christians.

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