INTELLIGENCE IS ILLEGAL

flederhund:

This one got me thinking…

Crazy divorce stories from a single guy.

Why is it offensive? Hmmm…

1. 95% of those who hold records for speed are West African or of West African descent. But when a journalist commented that “West Africans are built for speed,” there were numerous complaints.

2. When I was traveling in Alabama, near the Florida border, I saw an ancient diner, the kind that looks like a railway car, with a sign in the window that read “Blacks welcome.” I knew it was “racist,” but I didn’t know why. Hmmm…

3. Funnily enough, there was a conference recently on the topic: “Is there anything good about men?” I wasn’t there, but I read an article about it. Someone in the audience, obviously exasperated with the conversation about the immorality of violent, sex-crazed males, said, “Men are good chess players.” And they are. Those knuckle-dragging males make up all but one of the top 100 grandmasters. The sole member of the fair sex is Judit Polgar, no doubt the most famous of the bunch in spite of her rating of 55. Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian wunderkind who has been the top chess player in the world for years is as obscure as the guy who does your dry cleaning. Anyway: “men are good chess players” was considered an offensive statement. Does this mean you can’t say “men are good astro-physicists?” or “men compose excellent symphonies?” If so, does that mean assertions about “men” can only be negative?

4. Ashkenazi Jews are about .2% of the world’s population, many of them in the US and Israel. Since the early 20th century, they have won about 22% of Nobel Prizes and 39% of Nobels won by Americans. Is it okay to say “Jews are smart”? How about “Jews have a genetic disposition toward high intelligence.” Assuredly not. When the authors of The Bell Curve suggested that there may be a genetic basis for intelligence, it was as if they had just directed Mein Kampf, The Motion Picture. So, why is it offensive to praise a group that has probably suffered more from prejudice than any other in history?

Who was Karl Marx?

Karl Marx was a Prussian-German theorist, one of many eccentric theorists of the post-Romantic era. Like Wordsworth, the Romantic poet, Marx rejected industrialism as “alienating” to workers. In Marx’s day there were many eccentric theorist; the remarkable thing is that Marx’s views are still held in high esteem.

Marx was a sociological theorist and amateur economist (who borrowed heavily from Adam Smith). He also borrowed from the philosopher Hegel, who tended to see history as progressive, as moving toward some conclusion. However, Marx’s use of Hegel is quite eccentric, because Hegel was a spiritual philosopher: Marx was a materialist (one who believes that only physical things exist).

Marx believed that the industrialism of his day would give way to “socialism,” particularly in countries in which capitalism had run its course. He thought this was a scientific fact - the progress of history towards a worker’s paradise was “proven by science.” His economic theories are influential but (like much bad economics), they are riddled with errors. For instance, Marx tended to claim that the value of a product depended entirely on the amount of labor expended to make it. (If this is true, then workers should seek to expend more effort and produce less to raise the prices.) Labor plays a role in value, but shifts in supply and demand - as well as fashions and trends - play a great role as well. Like many bad economists, Marx looked at only one aspect of the market - labor and prices. He failed to see the interconnectedness of every player in the market.

Perhaps worst of all, Marx was something of a prophet with some bizarre beliefs about how society would change. Since promoters controlled the “means of production” and were therefore able to cheat laborers out of their just rewards, Marx foresaw state ownership of the means of production (socialism). This would be achieved through revolution (violence). After this intermediary stage, the state, which had been granted an outrageous amount of power, would magically “whither away,” leaving the workers in charge of the economy. Glory be!

Somehow intellectuals are in love with the idea and tend to defend Marx, although many attempts to put his ideas into practice have been made, with horrendous results. Viewing these disasters as a distortion of “true” Marxism, academic intellectuals continue to admire Marx and teach this admiration to students.

Just an experiment. Reblog if you actually give a fuck about male victims of domestic violence and rape.

Yuck

Elizabeth Warren’s contribution to a collection of “Five Tribes” recipes, the Pow Wow Chow Cookbook, was a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. A traditional Cherokee specialty?

Review of Hanna Rosin’s THE END OF MEN

The theme of male obsolescence is tiresome, to say the least. It also has a curious quality of seeming fresh no matter how many times, and in how many ways, it is repeated. I remember back in 1999 seeing a “forum” in Harpers called “Who Needs Men?” At the time I thought, Wow - they’re still recycling that same article? Almost 15 years later, the same idea is repeated with each month’s salvo of junk-nonfiction - and no sign of slowing down.

Some reviewers will no doubt complain that you can’t talk this way about women. They’re right, but no one cares about the double standard. Similarly, a few will be offended by her snide tone on the subject of men. What, were they born yesterday - it’s just the normal tone everyone takes. It’s not “misandry” that makes this book bad. It’s not the perky, informal writing style. I wasn’t expecting her to write like Orwell or Roth. It’s bad because the writer doesn’t know much about this or any other subject.

To be fair, or fairer, I did learn two things from this book. Firstly, readers love to hear their group praised and never tire of such praise. Secondly, when women are perceived to be failing, people blame it on environmental factors or prejudice. When men come up short, it is blamed on men’s inherent shortcomings. Why are there so few female chess grandmasters? Well, little girls aren’t encouraged to play chess. Why are there so few men in PR? Well, women have better communication skills. See? It makes perfect sense.

But I can’t say the same about this book. Rosin bases most of her theory on the recession. It is a “man-cession” due to men’s inherent inability to adapt. (By the way, the story of the human race is one of adaptation, is it not? Economic and otherwise. Men played a small but significant role in this history.) “Cognitive research” shows this (cognitive research about sex differences shows some of the darndest things - see reviews of Louann Brizendine and other junk-science-on-gender authors: also Leonard Sax). But never mind that.

1. “Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men.” Good God, no. As an Indian I know that knowledge of English is a matter of formal education, pure and simple. But India, according to the government census, has one of the lowest rates of female literacy in the developing world. While the gender gap is decreasing, according the US Department of Commerce, “there continues to be a large gap” in literacy rates favoring men. This is worst among the poor: “in poorer states, the rate of literacy gap has been growing.” (You can easily find this on the US census site.)

2. “In the past, men derived their advantage largely from their size and strength…” Seriously? This weary cliche sounds convincing to people who’ve never thought about the subject. Newton, Mozart, Fischer, and Einstein were not big, strong men.

3. “Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China..” I don’t know if Rosin reads Foreign Affairs (seems doubtful), but she should know this is ridiculous. Who cares when you don’t cite your sources? The sky’s the limit! Anyway, China has a woman shortage, so such economic strides on the part of women would be quite remarkable were they true. As it is, Chinese women are doing better than average, with ownership of 8.7% of private businesses. You can find this statistic almost anywhere (try BBC sites or, really, anywhere).

4. The ever-flexible Ms. Rosin, who must do Pilates at Lucille Roberts, makes much of the journalist’s favorite statistic: “young women in urban areas - 22-30 year olds - are doing better than young men.” Let’s do what journalists (used to) do, and look closer. According to US Department of Labor statistics, women’s median full-time earnings as a percentage of men’s in the first quarter of 2012 for the ages of 20-24 are 88%; for the next age group, 25-34, 91%. Pretty good, right? This means younger women earn about 88% of men’s median earnings (MEDIAN earnings: this doesn’t mean they’re paid less for the same job.)

5. This is where the admirably adaptable Rosin misstates one of the most common factoids around. It’s not “young women” who are doing better than their male counterparts - it’s “full-time, non-working, childfree women in urban areas.” This shouldn’t be generalized to “young women,” as Rosin does. She extols the virtues of young women like an apparatchik writing a HUD-funded “Girl Power” pamphlet. So, what of these young marvels, so well-adapted to “hook up culture” (with which the anecdote-happy Rosin seems weirdly obsessed)? Most of the difference between the never-married, urban denizens is among Hispanics. 23.7% of this group (urban, unmarried, etc.) are Hispanic men; 15.9% are Latinas, wise or otherwise. And within this group, the median earnings for men (2010 ACS statistics) are $24,000; for women, $25,000. The net advantage among young unmarried female city folk is $1,000, accounted for by the higher incomes of Hispanic women. (Among blacks, men have a slight advantage; among non-Hispanic whites, the sexes are more or less equal.) We should be talking about why Latins earn so little, male or female, but that doesn’t sell books or provide fodder for David Brooks editorials.

6. Liza Mundy, Rosin’s partner in puerility, makes much of the “women wear the pants” idea so common in our times. But in US marriages only 28% of women earn more than their husbands (US Census). For working women, it’s more like 38%. This is misleading, though, because male-centered industries (like construction) are often seasonal (more profitable at certain times of year), and are more subject to ups and downs than female-centered industries like education or health care.

7. These female-centered industries are often subsidized by the government. I come from Washington DC, and I can tell you there is no “he-cession” or “she-cession” there. Why? Because they’re papering the walls of the Kennedy Center with all that currency they keep printing or borrowing from the Chinese Politburo. The stimulus may have been a rip-roaring success that prevented a depression, as the president says, but it didn’t do much for old school manufacturing jobs. Despite what you’ve heard, these industries (you know, the ones that make cement or ball bearings) are still a big part of the US economy. Originally Mr. Obama was going to toss a lot of money their way, but lobby groups (such as NOW) complained, calling it a “burly man” bailout. (You can find this in Christina Sommers’ essay “No Country for Burly Men.”) So - here’s my point - much of female economic success is subsidized by tax dollars. Health care can’t fail, not because it’s too big, but because, like a skinny kid with a smart mouth, it’s got a big friend for protection.

8. The language used by NOW - “a burly man bailout” - shows the kind of attitude that gets Hanna rosining up her bow and playing a scratchy tune. Her book drips with this kind of sitcom contempt for men, without even sparing her own son. Maybe she would have rather had another daughter; she gleefully recounts an anecdote of a doctor specializing in sex selection who believes that couples are requesting girls these days. “In the ’90s, when Ericsson looked into the numbers for the two dozen or so clinics that use his process, he discovered, to his surprise, that couples were requesting more girls than boys, a gap that has persisted, even though Ericsson advertises the method as more effective for producing boys.” The doctor Rosin apparently interviewed hardly invented prenatal sex selection: it’s been available for ages. And researchers (remember them?) see evidence that in the United States, as everywhere else, couples are picking boys. A study at the University of CT Health Center looked at the ratio of live births in the U.S. and found evidence that couples were selecting for boys (Prenat Diagn. 2011 Jun;31(6):560-5. doi: 10.1002/pd.2747. Epub 2011 Mar 27). A second study at the Department of Economics, Columbia University looked at the census and found “son-biased sex ratios” (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Apr 15;105(15):5681-2. Epub 2008 Mar 31). This is not to mention the strong bias for sons in China and India which threatens to create a worldwide male majority. AIDS, which disproportionately affects women in Sub-Saharan Africa, may contribute to this male future.

Since virtually every country in the world with birth rates above replacement levels is Muslim, one might look at the evidence and worry about the end of women. “Hooking up” is punishable by death in some countries.

But who cares about evidence when you can interview a small, all-female sample, throw around some anecdotes and get more hype than, well, a real journalist? Credulous Amazon buyers will praise this because it’s familiar and makes them feel good. It keeps them vaguely amused and pleased until next month’s book about male obsolescence (or maybe a musical?).

And why? Because readers like to hear their group praised.

The UK makes Singapore look like New Hampshire →

Being a libertarian in America or the UK is like…

1. Living under Stalin in the 1930s, being an artist or writer - a James Joyce type, but refusing to do “socialist realism.” I know an academic - one of my professors before I was kicked out for being generally offensive - who fit this description. He refused to write about social justice; but he was a genius who had written a 2,000 page novel. Everyone who was writing about transgender or postcolonial themes considered him a loser. After a while, he started to see himself as a loser. It must have been like that under Stalin.

2. Being an atheist in the 17th century. Everyone has the same view - more or less; they believe that Jesus died for our sins, that their country was the New Jerusalem, that the apocalypse was coming at the end of the century. Normal stuff. And they always heard about atheists: godless Satan-worshipers. They had never actually met one, but they always felt like they were a minority even though everyone agreed had the same view. They kept retelling those old stories about Christians being thrown to the lions. Then when they discovered someone with a slightly different perspective, their little eyes lit up. They realized they were in the presence of a real atheist. They began to shriek with righteous indignation. I’ve been shrieked at like that for simple statements like: “Weather is complicated, and people don’t understand its historical shifts that well.” That statement brought a rain of locusts on me, let me tell you.

3. Being a Jew anywhere in Europe any time in history up to the end of the second world war. You know how people talk about “white male science”? “Male sexuality” as equal to Fascism. (I think these people have only a sketchy idea of what European Fascism was.) White oppression of the colored races, showing ignorance of the most basic history. (All people have had slaves; England was the first country to BAN slavery - and make it stick. (The French banned it, but Napoleon reinstated it.)) They used to talk the same way about Jews: “Jewish history,” “Jewish science,” “Jewish banking,” etc. And this was perfectly respectable. (Leftists have rediscovered their Jew-hating roots lately.) So being white or, worse white and male, is like being the new Jew. (And I’m not even white: more of a mix….)

American from a European perspective

from The Partisan Review, 2002, by Dmitry Shlapentokh, a survivor of the Soviet Union. He writes on European views of America he noticed at a NATO conference.

The French led the criticism of America. One erudite Frenchman, who could converse easily about philosophy and literature, had visited America several times and focused on the “lack of freedom.” “It is absolute nonsense to believe that Americans live in a free country,” he asserted. When asked for an explanation, he noted that one has to follow the rules of the majority, play the same game as everybody else, and approach minorities with a prescribed point of view; that everything bad has to be ascribed to white people, and if you see things differently, you are a racist.

He continued by saying, “Any joke that has a sexual connotation is absolutely taboo. And, of course, any flirting with a woman, no matter how innocent, is absolutely out of the question. This is dictatorship, pure and simple.” Later, he said that only American “idiots” could still be fascinated with Foucault.

We then proceeded to discuss American feminism. They ultimately concluded that the American Left had begun with attacks on the restrictiveness of American culture, and had ended up espousing a philosophy that places more restrictions on sexual behavior than the previous one, so that sexual harassment has emerged as one of the major threats for male members of academia, government, and big business.

Many East Europeans from new member countries or from countries seeking membership in the alliance supported the West Europeans’ vision of America as a repressive society. A Romanian delegate remarked that American men had become so timid that they couldn’t even give a bouquet of flowers to a girl for fear of being accused of sexual harassment.

We stopped talking when one of the conference organizers stood up and proclaimed that Croatia had finally joined NATO. “This is like the first kiss,” he said. “There is no way back.” At that moment a young Croat and his girlfriend joined our table. He responded to the announcement defiantly, “You know, we in the Balkans are politically incorrect. That is why I could never live in America. Political incorrectness is in our blood. We beat our wives.” His girlfriend smiled beatifically.

My Croat friend in many ways conveyed the ideas of other Europeans at the conference. “Yes,” they seemed to be saying, “We Europeans are part of NATO. Yes, we accept American leadership because the United States is just too powerful to ignore. Yet this does not mean that Americans can control us completely. You Americans can live in a culture wherein its members are spying on each other and controlling people’s private lives. You can make ‘sexual harassment’ a cardinal crime which will drive people mad. You can enjoy creating committees to explore the nature of ‘eye contact’ between professors and students and divine the appropriate scholarly teaching gaze from the inappropriate lust-ridden gaze. You Americans can do all of this and make your country an Orwellian world comparable to Stalinist Russia. You can even call yourselves free. Yet, we Europeans will never follow you, even though we listen to your music and wear your blue jeans.”

More evidence that Orwell was an optimist!

1. Lazar Greenfield, highly respected scientist, president of the American College of Surgeouns, and known for his mentorship of younger, often female scientists, joked about studies showing that semen had a mood-lifting effect on women. The elderly gentleman made a witticism in his Valentine’s Day editorial:  “So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolate.” Can you say “modern-day lynching”?

2. A guy who worked as a janitor at Indiana University was reading a book called Notre Dame vs. the Klan. He was a poor guy, well on in years, gradually working his way through school. As you might guess, the book was the story of a victory against the Klan. But someone at the Affirmative Action Office was offended. This janitor was kicked out of school. A legal group called FIRE defended him.

3. Helmuth Nyborg, a Danish scientist, published a peer-reviewed paper called Sex-related differences in general intelligence g, brain size, and social status. He said that men had, in general, an 8 point difference in intelligence. It’s not that uncommon to give men a slight advantage; he just gave them a bit too much. And Boston College professor Mary Daly, who said that men should be reduced to 15% of the population for the good of the human race, didn’t get into trouble. But Nyborg did - big time. He tells his own story here. 

4. You’d think a skilled writer, a Somalian feminist telling her story in a book called Infidel, would be held up as a demi-goddess. She’s even good-looking and could appear side-by-side with Naomi Wolf on talk shows. Unfortunately, in her book, she slammed Islam. And with some reason: she was a victim of the practice of clitoridectomy. And boy did she have a hard time after that. Now, she’s “associated with right wing think tanks.” Why? Because no one else will tolerate her. The producer of her film, Submission, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered.