What to learn in kindergarten

Research in educational methodologies can have an effect, at least in Germany.

Psychology Today reports:

A number of well-controlled studies have compared the effects of academically oriented early education classrooms with those of play-based classrooms (some of which are reviewed here, in an article by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Geralyn McLaughlin,and Joan Almon).[1]  The results are quite consistent from study to study:  Early academic training somewhat increases children’s immediate scores on the specific tests that the training is aimed at (no surprise), but these initial gains wash out within 1 to 3 years and, at least in some studies, are eventually reversed.  Perhaps more tragic than the lack of long-term academic advantage of early academic instruction is evidence that such instruction can produce long-term harm, especially in the realms of social and emotional development.

A Study in Germany that Changed Educational Policy There

For example, in the 1970s, the German government sponsored a large-scale comparison in which the graduates of 50 play-based kindergartens were compared, over time, with the graduates of 50 academic direct-instruction-based kindergartens.[2]  Despite the initial academic gains of direct instruction, by grade four the children from the direct-instruction kindergartens performed significantly worse than those from the play-based kindergartens on every measure that was used.  In particular, they were less advanced in reading and mathematics and less well adjusted socially and emotionally. At the time of the study, Germany was gradually making a switch from traditional play-based kindergartens to academic ones.  At least partly as a result of the study, Germany reversed that trend; they went back to play-based kindergartens.  Apparently, German educational authorities, at least at that time, unlike American authorities today, actually paid attention to educational research and used it to inform educational practice.

A Large-Scale Study of Children from Poverty in the United States

Similar studies in the United States have produced comparable results.

I think that the trend in the USA is the opposite. Schools ignore the research, and emphasize some current fad for academic learning.

Lecturer suspended for offensive prediction

I mentioned a video speculating that Hitler might be more highly regarded in the future. Now his university employer is trying to fire him for it:

A New Jersey professor at the center of an alt-right scandal since a video of him apparently spouting anti-Semitic sentiments was revealed last week has been placed on administrative leave.

The New Jersey Institute of Technology released a statement Monday evening announcing the suspension of lecturer Jason Jorjani, who was captured on video as part of a New York Times opinion piece about nonprofit Hope Over Hate's undercover investigation into the white nationalism movement.

Jorjani has insisted his comments in the video were taken out of context.

"NJIT is a university that draws great strength from the diversity of its campus community, and statements made by Mr. Jorjani in a video published by 'The New York Times' are antithetical to our institution's core values," the school said in a statement.

"A review of this and related matters is ongoing, and Mr. Jorjani has been placed on administrative leave pending its conclusion."

In the video, Jorjani is seen talking about the return of concentration camps and foreseeing a future in which Adolf Hitler is regarded as a "great European leader."

Jorjani has come out strongly against the video, saying it was edited to remove the context of the conversation, which he says was about a dystopian society that would result from continuing current U.S. political practices.

I guess academic freedom is antithetical to the institution's core values.

This sort of censorship is likely to backfire. It just makes ppl want to learn more about Hitler, and to suspect that the authorities have been lying to us about him.

Here is a 1920 Hitler speech with offensive attacks on Jews. What is anyone afraid of?

The sea-lion meme

Apparently this 2014 Wondermark cartoon is famous for popularizing "sea lion" for a certain type of annoying person on the internet. I think it is trying to say that we are all entitled to our prejudices, without being called out for facts and evidence. Or maybe argumentative bystanders should not get in your face. Or maybe each race should stick to its own kind, I'm not sure.

Adolf Hitler may be on bank notes

Raw Story reports:

Patrik Hermansson, a 25-year-old Swede, went undercover to infiltrate the alt-right, creating a fake identity that led him to meetings with some of the group’s leaders.

As video Hermansson provided to the New York Times shows, he got one of the group’s highest-ranking members — Alt-Right Corporation board member Jason Reza Jorjani — to admit his “final solution” for minorities.

“It’s gonna end with the expulsion of the majority of the migrants, including [Muslim] citizens,” Jorjani told an undercover Hermansson at a pub near the Empire State Building in New York City. “It’s gonna end with concentration camps and expulsions and war at the cost of a few hundred million people.”

“We will have a Europe, in 2050, where the bank notes have Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great,” he continued. “And Hitler will be seen like that: like Napoleon, like Alexander, not like some weird monster who is unique in his own category — no, he is just going to be seen as a great European leader.”

I don't know whether anyone is advocating such a war, but I do believe that this scenario is possible.

Some European countries will probably keep taking Moslem migrants until they become Islamic countries, and the white Christians and atheists will have to submit to Islamic authorities. Other European countries will reject this, and see deporting the Moslems as their only way out. If this happens, then we could be headed for a world war.

Again, I am not advocating war, and I don't know if Jorjani is either. I am hoping for more sensible immigration policies, and I think that war could be prevented. But policymakers do not listen to me, and I believe that we are on a path that is headed for world war.

Closet MGTOWs in Si Valley

I am surprised to see this NY Times article:

Silicon Valley has for years accommodated a fringe element of men who say women are ruining the tech world. ...

“It’s a witch hunt,” he said in a phone interview, contending men are being fired by “dangerous” human resources departments. “I’m sitting in a soundproof booth right now because I’m afraid someone will hear me. When you’re discussing gender issues, it’s almost religious, the response. It’s almost zealotry.” ...

“What Google did was wake up sectors of society that weren’t into these issues before,” said Paul Elam, who runs A Voice for Men, a men’s rights group. He said his organization had seen more interest from people in Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley has always been a men’s space, others said. Warren Farrell, who lives in Marin, Calif., and whose 1993 book, “The Myth of Male Power,” birthed the modern men’s rights movement, said, “The less safe the environment is for men, the more they will seek little pods of safety like the tech world.” ...

One radical fringe that is growing is Mgtow, which stands for Men Going Their Own Way and pronounced MIG-tow. Mgtow aims for total male separatism, including forgoing children, avoiding marriage and limiting involvement with women. Its message boards are brimming with activity from Silicon Valley, Mr. Altizer said.

Cassie Jaye, who lives in Marin and made a documentary about the men’s rights movement called “The Red Pill,” said that the tech world and the men’s rights community had “snowballed” together and that the rise in the number of people in Mgtow is new.

On the Mgtow message boards, members discuss work (“Ever work for a woman? Roll up your sleeves and share your horror story”), technology (“The stuff girlfriends and wives can’t stand — computers, games, consoles”) and dating (mostly best practices to avoid commitment).

“I think there are a lot of guys living this lifestyle without naming it, and then they find Mgtow,” said Ms. Jaye, who calls herself a former feminist.

Jaye's movie is about men's rights activists (MRAs), and does not acknowledge until the very end that the MRAs have very little to do with the game players and the MGTOWs.

What these groups have in common is taking the red pill. This means accepting human nature of men, women, and relationships, and also recognizing practical and legal realities. Where they sharply differ is in what to do about it. They either want to change the system, adapt to the system, or drop out.

Colonialism article might be censored

I mentioned an essay justifying colonialism, and now the author writes:

I have asked the Third World Quarterly to withdraw my article “The Case for Colonialism.” I regret the pain and anger that it has caused for many people. I hope that this action will allow a more civil and caring discussion on this important issue to take place.

Wow. Obviously he must have been threatened with firing or ostracism.

No, there cannot be a civil discussion of this issue if merely raising the issue causes so much pain and anger that academic articles must be censored.

Obviously the article must have contained a lot of uncomfortable truths. That is why articles get censored.

I am not an expert in colonialism, but it is probably good if the arguments for it are so valid that the only way to refute them is to censor. And if Third World scholars are not capable of discussing an issue without pain and anger, then maybe those countries are not competent to rule themselves.

The NY Times reports:

BERKELEY, Calif. — The class is called symplectic geometry, a high-level course in mathematics that provides elite graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, a better understanding of, among other things, planetary motion.

But symplectic geometry will not be meeting for its scheduled session on Tuesday because the professor, Katrin Wehrheim, is one of dozens of faculty members who have canceled classes ahead of a series of scheduled appearances by right-wing speakers next week in the latest round of Berkeley’s free speech wars.

“It’s just not safe to hold class,” Professor Wehrheim said. “This is not about free speech. These people are coming here to pick a fight.” ...

“I think a person needs to hear stuff that they don’t agree with,” Ms. Piper said. “They need the opportunity of discovering that they are not going to melt and go down the nearest drain as a puddle if somebody says something ugly to them. I don’t think we should be protected from those experiences.”

In stark contrast to this position is Professor Wehrheim, the symplectic geometry expert, whose German heritage informs a stance that certain speech should be banned from campus.

“Americans are missing the profound analogies between present day U.S. developments and German history,” Professor Wehrheim said.

In Germany today, Professor Wehrheim said, “you will get jailed for certain speech — and I think that is absolutely the right thing.”

So this German professor wants to jail citizens with dissenting political opinions?

The dissenting opinions are not even particularly unusual. They are similar to views expressed by President Trump, who got 60 million votes. They are not in any way a threat to symplectic geometry. These leftist professors are disgusting.

It is funny that the NY Times would pick a German math professor for the anti-free-speech position. He sounds like some sort of Nazi, with his eagerness to jail citizens for their opinions. Most of the leftist-activist-white-hating professors are from soft departments like English and African-American studies.

Update: A widely publicized Brookings poll claimed that about 20% of students agreed with "A student group opposed to the speaker uses violence to prevent the speaker from speaking." It appears that the margin of error is higher than what was first reported, but even so, it is hard to have free speech if 10% of the students believe in using violence to block a campus message.

How cat parasites affect the mind

This story may shed some light on the peculiar personality characteristics of cat-lovers:

The brain-dwelling parasite Toxoplasma gondii is estimated to be hosted by at least 2 billion people around the world, and new evidence suggests the lodger could be more dangerous than we think. While the protozoan invader poses the greatest risk to developing fetuses infected in the womb, new research suggests the parasite could alter and amplify a range of neurological disorders, including epilepsy, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's, and also cancer. "This study is a paradigm shifter," says one of the team, neuroscientist Dennis Steindler from Tufts University. "We now have to insert infectious disease into the equation of neurodegenerative diseases, epilepsy, and neural cancers." The findings are part of an emerging field of research looking into how T. gondii, which is usually transmitted to humans via contact with cat faeces (or by eating uncooked meat), produces proteins that alter and manipulate the brain chemistry of their infected hosts.

How Libertarians seek to destroy America

Javier Hidalgo is an academic specializing in concocting justifications for illegal immigration, and he writes for a handbook on Libertarianism:

If you’re a libertarian, you should endorse open borders. Here’s why.

Libertarians prize individual liberty. According to libertarians, we have rights to associate with others as we see fit and engage in economic transactions with them. These rights are constraints on state action. Libertarians think it is unjust for states to infringe on individual rights even in order to bring about socially beneficial outcomes. States certainly can’t violate our rights to protect some of us from economic competition or shield our cultures from change.

These commitments should lead libertarians to oppose immigration restrictions. When states restrict immigration, they stop you from associating with foreigners and engaging in many mutually beneficial economic exchanges with them. ...

Some libertarians reject rights-talk. They use more utilitarian reasoning to evaluate public policy. And these libertarians also have a good reason to oppose at least actual immigration restrictions. The same arguments that justify free trade apply to immigration. More immigration increases the division of labor and immigrants help generate more wealth.

I always thought that libertarianism was all about rights, but I only recently learned that is not the case. Many adopt utilitarianism. Under their theory, if you buy a toy for your child, but then encounter another child who would get more happiness from the toy, then you are morally bound to give the toy to the other child. The idea is to do whatever most increases the total happiness of the world.

So, if individuals have rights to private property, then we should reject the view that the United States is the collective property of its government or citizens.

A nation or a corporation is not just the sum of its individuals. Similar reasoning would reject that Microsoft or General Motors could own anything. We could never have modern civilization if such reasoning prevailed.

Maybe you’re concerned that immigration will change the national culture in bad ways. Immigrants bring new and occasionally upsetting cultural norms and customs with them. But you lack a right to freeze cultural change. ... Sure, immigration brings about cultural change. Deal with it. ... As an aside, I’m more worried about my fellow citizens [link to Donald Trump] destroying valuable institutions — not immigrants!

Libertarianism is apparently some sort of suicide pact. Even if immigration destroy the nation, the Libertarians will say "deal with it" and refuse to do anything.

The primary concern of most American Libertarians is dope-smoking. They want to sit back, and let America be invaded by immigrants who are not libertarians at all. They do not even believe in most of the freedoms that Americans take for granted.

Google is censoring Gab.ai

This is weird:

The tech industry’s opposition to a proposed bill is causing Google and other big companies to be lumped in with sex traffickers, such as in this headline on a New York Times column earlier this month: “Google and Sex Traffickers Like Backpage.com.”

Facebook, Twitter and other companies also oppose the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2017, which would update the 1990s-era Communications Decency Act to hold website operators such as Backpage accountable for enabling sex trafficking.

I don't believe that Backpage promotes child sex trafficking. I just don't see any proof of it. So this probably is a bad law.

But Google, Facebook, and Twitter are on the forefront of censoring right-wing opinions on the internet. They are currently conspiring to shut down Gab:

The social media service Gab, which bills itself as Twitter for the alt-right, is on the verge of being booted from the internet.

Andrew Torba, CEO of the company, posted on Monday that “Gab's domain registrar has given us 5 days to transfer our domain or they will seize it.” ...

Prior to the suit, Google had suspended Gab from its Google Play app store in August. Google said it removed Gab because of its insufficient “level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people.” The company said the app violates the store’s terms of service.

Gab is just a forum, where ppl express opinion. Violent threats are not permitted. Some advocate limiting immigration, but that is considered hate speech.

Meawhilte, Google is hosting much more offensive content, like this YouTube video: XXXTENTACION - Look At Me!.

Google and Facebook are also in trouble for posting Islamic terrorist propaganda.

So Google and Facebook say that child sex trafficking and Islamic terrorism info are just fine, but political opinions against immigration have to be banned! Those companies must really be run by some sick creeps.

Bring back Western Colonization

Bruce Gilley writes a paywalled article, The case for colonialism:

For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts. The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it. Anti-colonial ideology imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in many places. Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch.

If this wrong, you might expect scholarly articles rebutting it. Instead, the leftists want to censor it:

Now several petitions are circulating (here and here) to ask for the retraction of this article, and an apology from the editors. Together, the petitions garnered around 16,000 signatures. The editor of Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson, went as far as to say that the article was “morally tantamount to Holocaust denial”, because it does not mention any “colonial atrocities” (although it does refer to at least one book about such atrocities).

These articles explain that most of the world would rather live under the authority of white ppl. Maybe a new colonization would improve the Third World enuf that the citizens are less eager to move to white countries.

Migrants who hate whites

Suketu Mehta writes in Foreign Policy mag:

The West is being destroyed, not by migrants but by the fear of migrants. ...

Driven by this fear, voters are electing, in country after country, leaders who are doing incalculable long-term damage: Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Andrzej Duda and his Law and Justice party in Poland. It was fear of migrants that led British voters to vote for Brexit, the biggest own goal in the country’s history. ...

It shows that when countries safeguard the rights of their minorities, they also safeguard, as a happy side effect, the rights of their majorities. The obverse is also true: When they don’t safeguard the rights of their minorities, every other citizen’s rights are in peril. ...

It is every migrant’s dream to see the tables turned, to see long lines of Americans and Britons in front of the Bangladeshi or Mexican or Nigerian Embassy, begging for a residence visa.

He makes it pretty clear that he hates the West, that he hate White Christian culture, and that he is all in favor of migrants trying to destroy white culture.

It is not true that attempts to safeguard minorities have safeguarded the rights of others. On the contrary, those attempts have led to the most serious infringements on free speech and a lot of other rights. The migrants have lowered the quality of life in most places.

Here is another view:

Universalist Whites of the West will need to destroy the Globohomo propaganda hate machine, AND they will need the help, in interbred blood or electoral power, of their clannish White brethren to prevent the West from driving off the cliff. Trump has channeled both forces, but he can’t do it alone. He needs his people to keep him honest.

And another:

The mainstream media failed to see the rise of Donald Trump in 2016. Now it’s overlooking another grassroots movement that may soon be of equal significance — the growing number of liberals “taking the red pill.” People of all ages and ethnicities are posting YouTube videos describing “red pill moments” — personal awakenings that have caused them to reject leftist narratives imbibed since childhood from friends, teachers, and the news and entertainment media.

You might say that those who take the red pill have been “triggered.” But instead of seeking out “safe spaces,” they’re doing the opposite, posting monologues throwing off the shackles of political correctness.

Their videos can feature the kind of subversiveness that was once a hallmark of the left—before the movement lost its sense of humor.

Today's kids get a lot of brainwashing. Some of them eventually come to a realization that they have been lied to all their lives.

Global warming on Harris podcast

I tried to listen to this podcast:

Waking Up with Sam Harris #95 - What You Need to Know About Climate Change (with Joseph Romm)

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Joseph Romm about how the climate is changing and how we know that human behavior is the primary cause. They discuss why small changes in temperature matter so much, the threats of sea-level rise and desertification, the best and worst case scenarios, the Paris Climate Agreement, the politics surrounding climate science, and many other topics.

Joseph Romm is one of the country’s leading communicators on climate science and solutions. He was Chief Science Advisor for “Years of Living Dangerously,” which won the 2014 Emmy Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Series. He is the founding editor of Climate Progress, which Tom Friedman of the New York Times called “the indispensable blog.” In 2009, Time named him one of its “Heroes of the Environment,” and Rolling Stone put him on its list of 100 “people who are reinventing America.” Romm was acting assistant secretary of energy in 1997, where he oversaw $1 billion in low-carbon technology development and deployment. He is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. He is the author of Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know.

I expected to hear a good description of what is known about climate. Instead I got an unconvincing polemic.

He kept arguing that we should go along with the 97% of climate scientists. He also claimed a consensus that Trump was unfit to be President.

He kept mixing scientific and political arguments. He refused to admit weaknesses in the science or data.

A revealing point is when Harris asks why it is so important to say that humans caused the warming of the last 50 years or so. After all, if green energy is going to save millions or billions of lives, then why would we care whether it is a response to a human-induced crisis?

Romm was adamant that the humans must be blamed. Otherwise, he says that you could never convince ppl of the urgency of the action needed.

This view seems to be common, but it is hard for me to take anyone seriously who says that. Are they more interested in making things better in the future, or making moral judgments about the past? If they are really interested in the future, then it shouldn't matter how we got here.

But when they get all moralistic about the past, then they appear to be Gaia Earth Goddess worshippers whose main goal seems to be remedy some ecological injustice.

I wonder if Romm convinces anyone. He is supposed to be an expert in communicating climate science, but he seems terrible at it. I don't think that I learned any science at all.

At the end, Harris asks this question, from Scott Adams: "How much subjectivity is involved in the climate science as you move from the measuring devices to the climate models?" Instead of answering the question, Romm went into a rant about how stupid Adams is, and saying that models are used throughout science.

Adams is not a scientist, but he used to do financial modeling, and those models were very subjective. Saying that models are used throughout science tells him nothing, as models are also used throughout finance. They still can be subjective.

Obviously Romm does not want to admit the subjectivity of the models.

Zuckerberg writes hate book, alleges harassment

Donna Zuckerberg wrote some articles attacking the Alt-Right, including racial attacks, and now complains about online harassment.

I wonder how many of these harassment stories are hoaxes.

Candace Owens has a theory that much of it comes from leftist feminist sock-puppets. Most of the anti-semitic incidents in the news have turned out to be Jewish hoaxes. Neo-Nazi and KKK incidents have also turned out to be leftist hoaxes.

Zuckerberg is about to publish a Jewish feminist book on "dead white males". How would she like it if a neo-Nazi published a book on "dead Jewish females"? My guess is that her brother would ban any mention of it on Facebook.

Chinese have term for White Left

The Chinese have a word for the political views that seem to dominate the American news media and Democrat party:

The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult ...

If you look at any thread about Trump, Islam or immigration on a Chinese social media platform these days, it’s impossible to avoid encountering the term baizuo (白左), or literally, the ‘white left’. It first emerged about two years ago, and yet has quickly become one of the most popular derogatory descriptions for Chinese netizens to discredit their opponents in online debates.

So what does ‘white left’ mean in the Chinese context, and what’s behind the rise of its (negative) popularity? ...

The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu users, which include some of the most representative perceptions of the 'white left'. Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.

Apart from some anti-hegemonic sentiments, the connotations of ‘white left’ in the Chinese context clearly resemble terms such as ‘regressive liberals’ or ‘libtards’ in the United States. In a way the demonization of the ‘white left’ in Chinese social media may also reflect the resurgence of right-wing populism globally.

The rest of the world (outside Europe and the USA) must think that it is very strange to tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism.

The atheist community is dying

I have sometimes mocked leftist-atheist-evolutionists here, but the whole movement is crumbling, according to its more prominent blogger, PZ Myers:

The skeptic-atheist community broke apart when Cultural Marxism was introduced into it e.g. third wave feminism, identity politics, intersectionality. New rules for behavior and speech were introduced. This ideology even demonised the most prominent and influential atheists like Dakwins or Harris as bigoted, racist, islamophobic white males.

As a counter movement, many skeptics became fiercely anti-SJW. There the division took place.

The “Cultural Marxist” remark gives it away. This is one of those pseudoscientifically racist people who whines about white genocide. ...

One flashpoint where the differences crystallized: Rebecca Watson and Elevatorgate. You remember that — when Watson, in response to a late-night suggestion in an elevator said “Guys, don’t do that”, and ...

Now I think that Myers and many of the skeptic-atheist-humanist community have some sort of mental illness. They get trapped by crazy issues like elevatorgate, and reading their rants makes you wonder how they ever cope with ordinary life.

Elevatorgate was some story about how some guy supposedly made some mildly flirtatious comment in ordinary conversation, and some feminist wanted to make an issue out of it. All the atheist communities then spent about a year arguing about it.

Big NPR story is a Jewish cartoon

NPR Radio reports:

In Israel, a lot of people are talking about a Facebook post. It was put up by Yair Netanyahu, the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Over the weekend, the 26-year-old posted a cartoon bashing his father's adversaries. That cartoon was swiftly criticized for containing anti-Semitic imagery. The post was shared by former KKK leader David Duke. It was also praised by the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. Netanyahu's son, we should say, did take down the post. But the prime minister has declined to comment on it. ...

Well, if you can picture it, it's a row of characters. And each one dangles a kind of fishing rod in front of the next. And it seems to depict who controls the world. So the liberal, American, Jewish philanthropist George Soros is the master manipulator in the cartoon.

You can see the cartoon here.

So why is this news? Because no one is supposed to suggest that rich liberal Jews control some politicians? Because no one is supposed to get agreement from some guy who dressed up in a KKK outfit 40 years ago?

What I get out of this is that some Jewish-influenced news media do not want anyone to suggest that liberal Jews control the world, and if someone does, then the Jews will destroy him.

After a;;. a;; the other ethnic groups get mocked in political cartoons without such controversy.

Race is real, racism is not

A reader sends this essay:

Racism Is Real. Race Is Not. ...

What justifies the continued use of racial classification? Nothing, or so I argue in Replacing Race, an open-access article published recently in the philosophy journal Ergo.

I argue that there are no races, only racialised groups – groups that have been misunderstood as biological races. ...

This is not merely an opinion. From a scientific perspective, the best candidate for a synonym for “race” is “subspecies” (the classification level below “species” in biology). When scientists apply the standard criteria to determine whether there are subspecies/races in humans, none are found. In chimpanzees yes, but in humans no.

Racial classification is unscientific. ...

“Race” is not needed for purposes of social justice. ...

The ConversationWe need to be talking about racism, racialisation, and racialised groups, not “race”.

Here is what a leftist evolutionist says, while also giving a partial defense of a Marxist denial of race:

Edwards asked “Can individual humans be assigned to races from genetic data?”, or, alternatively, “Can human races be diagnosed (in the taxonomic sense of subspecies)?” The answer is yes, they can. ...

Lewontin and Edwards agree on the moral equality of human beings; Edwards just doesn’t want that moral equality to depend on any contingent facts of genetic similarity. Lewontin wouldn’t want it to, either, but sees the high genetic similarity among human races (genetic similarity is much lower among races in some other species) as empirical reinforcement for his moral conclusion.

I think the problem here is that the much-hated Richard Spencer gives an argument:

Race is real.
Race matters.
He prefers to live in a white ethnostate.

These leftists do not want to deal with the rest of his argument, so they just try to cut it off at the start, and pretend race is not real.

So race is real, according to science, popular culture, and common sense. But what about the other half of the claim in the above paper, and "racism is real"? No support is offered for that conclusion at all.

I have come to the conclusion that racism is not real. There is no generally accepted definition of it. Some say that reciting demographic or scientific facts about racial groups is racist, and some don't. Some say that failing to affirmatively equalize all groups in society is racist, some don't. Some say it is racist for races to live separately, some say it is racist for them to live together. Some say that it is racist to say "black lives matter", while others say that it is racist to say "all lives matter".

In most cases, "racist" is just a meaningless epithet, like "jerk" or "nazi". Nobody says it as part of an intellectual conversation. Racism does not exist, except for name-calling.

Anglin debates Vox Day

Two of the most deplorable of the deplorables on the Alt-Right are Vox Day and Andrew Anglin, and now they had a public debate! You can find links to the video here and
here.

I haven't watched it yet, but this should be enlightening. They both have coherent worldviews, and they brilliantly expose what is wrong with today's leftists. They both have millions of internet followers, and they are fearless about saying something politically incorrect.

For their opinions, Anglin is being unpersoned, and I would not be surprised if Vox Day is also.

It turns out that they have some sharp disagreements about where our society should be headed. Both of them are so far outside the mainstream that these differences are of mainly academic interest. Neither is going to get his way anyway.

If you need trigger warnings, these guys are offensive sometimes. But if you do not hear their views or other Alt-Right views, then you are being brainwashed.

More Twitter and YouTube bans

A PJ Media column reports:

Twitter has banned writer Elizabeth Johnston, who writes at "The Activist Mommy," for her war of words with Teen Vogue editor Phillip Picardi

Not only has Twitter banned her, but YouTube will not allow her video commentaries to be monetized. While Johnston's posts and views are controversial to some, none of what she has to say is new. Her views on homosexuality come from the best-selling book in the world — the Bible. The tweet that got her booted was a little salty and perhaps not the best tactic to use for persuasion, but it wasn't any more obscene than the Teen Vogue article.

She was criticizing a Teen Vogue article on anal sex.

Twitter and Google are enemies of free speech. Same with Facebook and Apple.

The white Christian minority

AP reports:

NEW YORK (AP) -- The share of Americans who identify as white and Christian has dropped below 50 percent, a transformation fueled by immigration and by growing numbers of people who reject organized religion altogether, according to a new survey released Wednesday.

Christians overall remain a large majority in the U.S., at nearly 70 percent of Americans. However, white Christians, once predominant in the country's religious life, now comprise only 43 percent of the population, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, a polling organization based in Washington. Four decades ago, about eight in 10 Americans were white Christians.

This trend sometimes goes under the name White Genocide.

Most of the white Christians are older, so the trend is more pronounced if you look at younger ppl. We have policies to import millions of non-whites and non-Christians, and most of those coming are young and reproducing more rapidly. In a few years, white Christians will be an even smaller minority. They are already a smaller minority in California.

The non-whites and non-Christians mostly think that this trend is a good thing, and they support the policies that diminish the white Christian share of the population.

Many white Christians have somehow been convinced that they must never speak against this trend, because that would make them bigots. So they strangely celebrate their own demise.

Hard to communicate accross IQ gap

Neuroskeptic says this is an oversimplification:

Let’s say high IQ is a blessing which comes with a terrible price. And each and every person with reading east from 135 has paid that price.

HIgh IQ persons usually have also extremely vivid and wide spectrum of emotions and emotional life, and when they are happy, they are in rapture, and when they are unhappy, it is sheer emotional hell. The IQ is a great enabler, and it unfortunately also enables to experience unhappiness in much deeper and profound way than anyone with mediocre IQ would.

The concept of communication range was established by Leta Hollingworth. It is +/- 2 standard deviations (roughly 30 points) up or down on one’s own IQ. It denotes the range where meaningful interaction (communication, discussion, conversation and socializing) is possible. If the IQ difference between two persons is more than 30 points, the communication breaks up. The higher IQ person will look like an incomprehensible nerd and the lower IQ as a moronic dullard – and they will not find anything common.

There do not seem to be any hard studies proving this, but there is some truth to it.

I can talk to a small child that might have 80 less IQ points, but I do not attempt to have an intelligent conversation. If I attempt an intelligent conversation with an adult with 30 less IQ points, then inevitably he or she will make some completely false inference from something I said, and I have to spend most of my time explaining what I think should be obvious to a 10-year-old, and it seems unlikely that the person is getting anything else right either.

At the other end, dumb ppl normally do not realize how much smarter other ppl are.

As an example, look at how much time President Trump has to spend explaining points when ppl misquote or misinterpret him. It is as if he is 30 IQ points smarter than anyone at CNN or the NY Times. It is hard to believe everyone in the news media is really that stupid. Maybe they were not always that stupid, but learned to dumb down in order to relate to their low IQ viewers and readers.

The Less Wrong community is convinced that in a couple of decades, AI super-intelligent robots will pass up human intelligence by 30 IQ points or so, and thus we could lose our ability to communicate effectively with them. They do not want to slow down AI research, so they want us humans to up our game, and learn to behave more logically so that we can coexist with the super-intelligent robots.

The coming food shortage

The NY Post reports:

The world could be facing a food shortage in just 10 years, according to an agricultural data technology company.

Gro Intelligence founder and chief executive Sara Menker says previous calculations about food supply have focused on mass and weight, not nutritional value — and this is where things become problematic.

Previously the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has predicted that the world’s population will reach 9.1 billion by 2050 and the world needs to produce 70 percent more food to feed all these extra people.

But at a TEDGlobal event Arusha, Tanzania, Menker said if you look at the nutritional value of current food production instead, global food security is more tenuous than originally thought.

According to Quartz, Menker believes the year 2023 will be the crossover point when we will no longer be able to produce enough food to feed a growing population.

She has estimated that by 2027, there could be a 214 trillion-calorie deficit, which is the equivalent of 379 million Big Macs.

Demand will be driven by population and economic growth in China, India and African countries.

If this is correct, then soon we will all be expected to make sacrifices in order to subsidize runaway population growth in China, India, and Africa.

It makes more sense to isolate those countries. Stop sending them food and technology, and stop allowing them to export their population problems. They will eventually learn to solve their own problems.

Autism is term for white male brain

I found this 2008 post:

Is autism the symptom of an "extreme white brain"?

In several previous posts, I've discussed Simon Baron-Cohen's theory of autism as a symptom of an "extreme male brain" (e.g. "Stereotypes and facts", 9/24/2006), and also Mary Bucholtz's hypothesis that nerdity is defined by "hyperwhite" behavior (e.g. "Language and identity", 7/29/2007). I'm ashamed to say that it never seriously occurred to me to cross-pollinate these two theories, until (for serendipitous reasons) I recently read YW Wang et al. "The Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy: Development, validation, and reliability", Journal of Counseling Psychology, 50(2): 221-234, 2003. ...

To avoid misunderstanding, let me be explicit: Despite the humorous question in the title, I'm not suggesting that there are innate racial differences in empathy, nor that autism is caused by excessively caucasian genetics.

Yes, a liberal academic does not dare suggest those things. But forget about what is innate or genetic.

The cited research appears to show that some of the traits which define autism are also personality characteristics that are correlated both with being white and male.

You might want to consider this if your white male kid gets diagnosed as autistic by some non-white female psychologist. Maybe she is just applying a group prejudice.

Feminism is a fitness test

Karen Straughan comments on a Jordan Peterson video:

Feminism in the west is one giant, society wide shit test that western men have collectively failed, over and over and over again. For those unfamiliar with Pick Up Artist parlance, a shit test is believed to be: A manufactured grievance a woman uses to test the mettle, competence and confidence of her mate. It is an intentional provocation accompanied by an implicit and subconscious desire that the man put his foot down, set reasonable boundaries and demonstrate that he will not be bullied, nagged, shamed or guilted into submission. Its purpose is to confirm for her that he is capable of doing what needs to be done to provide for and protect her and her children. The subconscious thought process is, "If he can't stand up to _me,_ how will he be able to deal with the cavemen down the valley who keep us up all night revving their motorcycles, let alone help bring down a mastodon or fend off the sabre toothed tigers?" According to PUAs, the worst thing a man can do when his woman is shit testing him is assume the grievance is genuine and cave in to her. Despite her seeming demand that he submit, if he does, she will lose respect for him, and once she loses respect for him she will believe that she's with a man who is not worthy of her, which in turn makes her angry and resentful of him. She will then escalate the tests, each grievance becoming more and more outrageous and irrational in a desperate bid for him to finally draw a line and say, "this far, no further." I have to admit, as I have in the past, that the last 50 years or so of feminism in the west have followed this pattern. :/

That is a good theory, and I take this reasoning further. Those who tear down statues are just testing us to see if we have a culture that we will defend. Moslems are testing us to see if we are willing to defend religious values.

If your church is unable to proudly and forcefully say that it is better than Islam, then what good is it?

When a thug tries to kill a cop, are you willing to stick up for the cop?

Do you want a President who backs down just because someone misquotes him, calls him mean names, or makes fun of his wife's shoes?

Donald Trump is unusual, as a politician, because he passes all these fitness tests. Most others cannot stand up to the simplest attacks, and therefore lose respect because they probably cannot stand up to a more serious enemy.

For the most part, modern liberalism is failing the fitness tests. So are cuckservatives.

Chemicals Turn Xenophobes Into Migrant-Lovers

Here is something I learned from a Google-censored site:

Jews Planning to Put Chemicals in the Water Which Turn Xenophobes Into Migrant-Lovers

This time they’re not planning to turn the frogs gay.

In the paper that is being referenced here they claim that in addition to being accepting of their own ethnic displacement people doped with oxytocin increased donations to migrants by 74%.

This sounds like hate-inspired fake news, but it cites its source, and the paper was indeed published in PNAS, one of the top scientific journals in the USA. The published paper says:

Significance
In the midst of rapid globalization, the peaceful coexistence of cultures requires a deeper understanding of the forces that compel prosocial behavior and thwart xenophobia. Yet, the conditions promoting such outgroup-directed altruism have not been determined. Here we report the results of a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment showing that enhanced activity of the oxytocin system paired with charitable social cues can help counter the effects of xenophobia by fostering altruism toward refugees. These findings suggest that the combination of oxytocin and peer-derived altruistic norms reduces outgroup rejection even in the most selfish and xenophobic individuals, and thereby would be expected to increase the ease by which people adapt to rapidly changing social ecosystems.

The paper actually cites the Bible for justification!

The biblical parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–16:17) describes an ethical maxim of helping strangers who have fallen in need. As such, it not only captures the essence of altruistic behavior by emphasizing the personal costs of selflessness toward others but also represents a formidable example that norm-enforced altruistic cooperation is by no means limited to the ingroup, but can even extend to outgroup members in ways neither precisely understood nor systematically researched. Here, we hypothesize that normative incentives co-occurring with enhanced activity of the OXT system exert a motivational force for inducing altruism toward strangers even in the most selfish and xenophobic individuals.

I wonder if the authors even read the Bible passasge, as the description and citation are inaccurate. After saying "Love your neighbor as yourself", the parable seeks to answer "And who is my neighbor?". Jesus says that the non-Jew who helps the traveler is more of a neighbor than the Jews who refused to help.

The paper is all about drugging ppl to help non-neighbors, and the Bible parable does not support that at all.

Google is censoring Daily Stormer criticism of this research. If you are willing to let Google censor ideas from what you read, then maybe you would be willing to let the authorities drug you to change your beliefs towards alien invaders, and also to make you donate towards leftist goals.

Robots will take our jobs

The Economist mag is a big fan of automating jobs, and reports:

Fears about the impact of technology on jobs have resurfaced periodically ever since. The latest bout of anxiety concerns the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI). Once again, however, technology is creating demand for work. ...

These numbers are likely to rise. One reason is increasing demand for “content moderation”. A new law in Germany will require social media to remove any content that is illegal in the country, such as Holocaust denial, within 24 hours or face hefty fines. Facebook has announced that it will increase the number of its moderators globally, from 4,500 to 7,500.

Wow, this is what we are going to be doing when the robots take our jobs? We will work to deny free speech, so that the authorities can perpetuate Jewish myths?

The Jewish Holocaust is not a myth, but this law protects various myths.

The Laws against Holocaust denial are not limited to denying historical facts:

In Germany, Volksverhetzung ("incitement of the people")[31][32] is a concept in German criminal law that bans incitement to hatred against segments of the population. It often applies to (though not limited to) trials relating to Holocaust denial in Germany. In addition, Strafgesetzbuch § 86a outlaws various symbols of "unconstitutional organisations", such as the Swastika and the SS runes.

I think that most of the prosecutions are to ppl who accept the basic facts of the Jewish Holocaust, but who have denied some story in a way that offends Jews.

This censorship will not work, of course. Ppl eventually figure out that authorities are most eager to censor truths, not falsehoods.

Robots and AI will take our jobs. A couple of centuries ago, most workers were farm workers. Farm automation killed those jobs, and ppl became factory workers. After more automation, they became office workers. What is next? We will not have an economy of workers doing Jewish censorship.

Google censors again

Google is becoming the world's worst censor, and here is the latest story:

On Tuesday evening, Google sent a conservative website an ultimatum: remove one of your articles, or lose the ability to make ad revenue on your website. The website was strong-armed into removing the content, and then warned that the page was "just an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of this website."

The offending article is gone, but I managed to find a copy:

The media has demonstrated an unwillingness to cover the alt-right fairly. As much as one may disagree with some alt-right figures, that is not a license to lie about or misrepresent their individual political goals.

There are some figures on the alt-right, such as Richard Spencer, who has declared a white ethnostate to be his very clear and well-defined political goal.

And yet there are many others on the alt-right who have no clue about NPI and no idea who Spencer is. Many young people, especially young men, have flocked to the alt-right because of its universal rejection of feminism and PC culture and strong embrace of masculinity and tradition.

White men in this country are tired of being blamed for every failure and hardship experienced by women and minorities. Does this make them alt-right? Not necessarily, but possibly. Does it make them a white supremacist or a white nationalist? Certainly not.

Understanding and acknowledging the differences between race realism, white nationalism, and white supremacy is essential to understanding or fairly covering the alt-right, and unless the media does so, they will continue to set their credibility ablaze.

What is so offensive about this? It doesn't express any opinions at all, except to urge the media to distinguish some political players.

Google is truly evil if it is going to censor pages like this.

Some will say that this is not true censorship, because Google is not a govt agent. However it is squarely within the dictionary definition, and Google has more monopoly power than most governments anyway.

Perhaps some Google bot automatically searched for all articles advocating a white ethnostate, and picked this article without understanding that this article just references the idea without endorsing it. It is more likely that Google wants to censor all articles mentioning a white ethnostate, whether they are for or against it. If so, then Google could be soon banning this blog. I better be careful what I say.

Update: Here is another Google censorship story. Google also got fired James Damore, and got someone at a thinktank fired, all for expressing mainstream opinions. And here is more Google censorhip.