I'd say the race differences genie is out of the bottle. Maybe not in old-line academia still dominated by aging liberal boomers like Pinker, but certainly among younger conservatives.
As boomers age out and are replaced over the next decade, anyone seriously trying to deny such differences will seem like an irrelevant fool. Maybe they won't be called out to their faces in the faculty lounge, but they certainly will be on X.
I'm less sanguine. Just as crazy superstitions persists to this day, so do I expect the myth of Racial Creationism--you know, when Lewontin flew in on his Flying Spaghetti Monster at the moment humans evolved and made all the races equal in all abilities--will persist indefinitely.
Your "Discrete Ignorance" is a manifestation of another evolved psychological trait. For a group identity to survive in the presence of a different--and possibly more appealing--group identity, one thing that is needed is a crazy hallucinatory belief. This belief must be obviously wrong to any outsider with an ounce of reason, and yet completely impenetrable for the people within the group. It also helps to require a different mode of dress and dietary restrictions, but the bonkers unshakable belief is the most important.
Not only is the belief bonkers and unshakable despite its flimsy foundation, people outside the group can readily identify it, but people within the group would struggle to find it-- even if they agree to the principle in general, and can easily see what wacko things other groups believe.
I've never been able to penetrate such a belief. A challenge is met with anything from head shaking "you'll never get it" to anger to Donald Sutherland at the end of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" pointing and shrieking. There's no logic involved. It's like your foot refusing to step too far out on a ledge.
Pre-literate cultures have a reluctance to indulge in “as if” thinking. That makes them seem stubborn but helps them retain the hard-won habits they’ve evolved for survival.
Literate and post-literate cultures are really into “as if”. It enables innovation (e.g., the scientific method comes out of asking weird, annoying questions) but might also make you more naive. Most modern humans still have aspects of both mental models; few people are constantly questioning everything.
I made it about halfway. The author's treatment of "as-if" reasoning was slippery and inconsistent to me. I think she just means abstract reasoning. The Russian study is weird. It basically says that old people who had never been taught to categorize things in a certain way failed to categorize things in that way.
For me a more useful idea is that culture is more important than reasoning and that new ideas are the cultural equivalent of mutations in evolution and that cultural practices evolve because they convey a survival advantage.
One cool example from the book review (I wish I could remember the title) was that if a hunter goes to the hunting ground where he found caribou last time, chances are the caribou aren;t their because last time they went there some dude killed one of them. So the best strategy per game theory is selecting hunting grounds randomly.
Therefore these societies evolved a roll of a guy who throws bones on the ground and "reads" them. He isn't magic, he's just a legitimized random number generator.
Like mutations, most innovations, i.e. variance from cultural practice, could get you killed at most times in history. It's only in modern times that we have the breathing room to try out new things.
> For me a more useful idea is that culture is more important than reasoning and that new ideas are the cultural equivalent of mutations in evolution and that cultural practices evolve because they convey a survival advantage. <
For me this is the core conservative insight. The old ways are old .... because they actually work! Natural selection.
If you're taking on the old ways ... you
a) probably do not understand why the old ways are what they are and how they work
and
b) are almost certainly wrong that your brand new way is better
or
c) you just want to break stuff
> It's only in modern times that we have the breathing room to try out new things. <
But unfortunately a whole lot less than we think. Individuals can screw up more now and still get back on track--though many do not.
Beyond the obvious technological/production leeway--yeah, we aren't going to have a famine--the apparent resilience of Western societies has a whole lot to do with demographic momentum. It simply takes a long time--at minimum two generations, 50 years or so--for the demographic damage being done to Western nations to really have an impact.
With respect to demographic momentum (if I understand what you are referencing correctly) the problem is less new ways and more that we are importing people whose old ways are optimized for some other kind of society.
To a leftie everything is environmental/cultural and western culture is not superior to any other culture and yet simply by coming here they are confident that all these other people will adopt western culture?
It's too late for us. Only consolation is that western Europe is preparing an even worse bed for itself. And I agree 50 years. I imagine no one at the time will think anything is wrong because it came upon them so slowly.
> Not only is the belief bonkers and unshakable despite its flimsy foundation, people outside the group can readily identify it, but people within the group would struggle to find it.
I am sure that the American Association of University Professors wouldn't stoop to replying to you, but they did post something relevant on Twitter a few days ago, as a rebuttal to a Chronicle of Higher Education reporter's musings on Viewpoint Diversity.
There’s been a burst of debate around viewpoint diversity (an always controversial topic) in our pages and elsewhere. Will thread and describe the key arguments below… [six tweets follow]
Fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review, but perhaps it’s the intellectual values of academia, which emphasizes critical inquiry & challenges traditional norms, that may be inherently less appealing to those with a more conservative worldview.
I couldn't even begin to argue with the author of the original article. I skipped the intro and went to thesis one which says you can't have diversity of viewpoint (by which I assume we would both agree this means mostly political viewpoint) because academics is all about "THE TRUTH!!!!!!!!"
As-if most questions and opinions have a single objective truth.
So he mentions how the structure of DNA was figured out a long time ago...okay good start. Then next paragraph, having stolen the intellectual rigor prestige of science he smoothly transitions to "in my own field of literary studies..."
I stopped reading. I think one of the guys in D12 said it best when he responded to a reporter "Bitch, are you retarded?"
> I stopped reading [the very long article by Lisa Siraganian, the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University and the president of the JHU-AAUP chapter]
I guess that makes you a fascist. Me, too!
Either Prof. Siraganian has a well-developed sense of humor or she doesn't, by my understanding.
1). Use global Search-And-Replace to substitute "routine Progressive-endorsed DEI diversity" for "viewpoint diversity." The essay is not harmed.
2). How many of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals does the essay fulfill? I checked off 9 of 12. Especially #4, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
Siraganian's forebears could well have fled the Soviet Union. I think she'd have found the climate to be pretty agreeable.
Of course, there is also a powerful element of class identity and dominance in this pattern of discrete ignorance. Once one is safely ensconced in a suburb outside Boston, having open contempt for the Southie Irish upset at their kids being bussed into Black schools is a further kind of luxury money can't buy. Which may also explain the need to continually expand the zone of absurdity (gay marriage, open borders, trans rights): scarcity is guaranteed at the extremes.
> In a similar way, if scholars tacitly decide that the best way to handle a socially pernicious and intellectually minor topic is not to go there, they would not be surrendering to the ignorance of a dark age, but may be deploying a higher-order personality which factors in the effects of making discoveries common knowledge. That could even be true if they reasoned that the best way of implementing such a policy is not to speak too long and loud about why they are implementing it.<
Suck that in whitey! We are higher-order personalities, saving society!
Pinker is about as honest as Jewish intellectuals get--left of true patriot like Stephen Miller--and he delivers this oh-so-typical verbalist diarrhea.
Racial differences are not an "intellectually minor topic". It is perhaps the most interesting topic in the whole sphere of genetics and evolution--how selection has worked and how we are performing selection upon ourselves with gene-culture-gene feedback.
And it is far and away the *most important* topic in terms of public policy. Bazillions of dollars being spent, blood libel on whites and more importantly the effect upon the nation of letting various random peoples flood in.
~~
And this continual lying has nothing to do with "emboldening racists" or "shaking the confidence of individual African-Americans". (Does Pinker know any blacks?)
Politeness indeed can be a virtue. We don't need to talk about black criminality 24-7. But if we are talking about criminal justice policy, or yet another shit show starts up, then honesty is not just reasonable it is *required*.
And, c'mon--how to put this politely?--Jews are not known for being polite. No this is not about polite restraint. This continual lying is to attack whites, to push the minoritarian narrative to deny whites their right to live as they wish, to balkanize and destroy white nations. Lying in the service of evil.
In the last sentence quoted, Pinker seems to be endorsing your “Book of Secrets” model of governance, i.e., the board of Harvard should know the truth about race realism and allow it to guide their decision-making, but not the plebes. However, our governing model is not a closed, self-perpetuating aristocracy like Harvard’s but electoral democracy. When knowledge is denied to the general public and truth-tellers are penalized, grifters like Zohran Mamdani are more likely to profit than moderates like Steven Pinker—or, from the other side, you have to be as crass as Donald Trump or Nigel Farage to tell the truth publicly.
You can see this at work in the UK right now. Because you aren’t allowed to say or think that Pakistani Muslims are more inclined to rape white girls, it becomes prudent to suppress that fact for exactly the reasons Pinker stated. When it finally becomes undeniable, there is an inability to act because the official “common knowledge” still hasn’t changed (inclination to rape must be evenly distributed throughout the population).
My Harvard President's Book of Secret's model didn't even work out for Pinker's friend Larry Summers when he was giving an address at a science conference and got cancelled by an MIT chemistry professor.
I'm beginning to see arguments from commenters along the lines of, yes we know the WW2/#literallyHitler paradigm no longer fits and "classical liberalism" is riddled with unprincipled exceptions but STOP SPOILING THINGS! To which I respond, to paraphrase Will Ferrell, Steve Sailer and Roissy, how long do you think your throne of pretty little lies will stand?
I like the phrase "recursively explaining" and the mental picture of Vizzini talking himself down a rabbit hole. That's what I hear when economists start blabbing that ACKSHUALLY [points to line graph] filling your country up with Third World tax eaters is good for the economy! Then you ask them why Third World tax eaters can't seem to do any good for Third World economies, and they're off for another ten minutes of ACKSHUALLY!
It's also interesting how Hispanics show up in this reverse canary-in-the-coal-mine role: when the ambient socio-economics are healthy, Hispanics do good! When the ambient socio-economics are toxic, Hispanics deal drugs and kidnap each other. They are cultural followers and we should harness this.
I'm reminded of a documentary I watched on Guatemalan gangs. It was produced by a free-lancer who obviously wanted to show the grittiness and _oppression_ of life in paramilitarized Guatemala but the actual affect was kind of pathetic. Guatemala is basically a country of 14-year-olds with lots of ad hoc gang formation, and the more civic minded men form these ragtag neighborhood watches and ask for donations from their wealthier neighbors to keep them in ammo (and, I suspect, food and cerveza). Not pretty but it's cheaper than what the gangs charge and they don't kill you and rape your daughters if you don't pay. (By the way, where is the uber-compassionate Catholic Church in these messes in all her traditionally Catholic countries?)
What also struck me from this documentary was how low-tier the firearms were. The average suburban dad/iSteve reader easily outguns them. You could probably get a Marine battalion drunk and tell them go take over the place and they'd have it in a week.
In closing and without further elaboration, I think we are approaching the end of liberalism and the beginning of neo-colonialism. The alternative is the Global North becomes the Global South and the light of the world goes out.
Thanks. "Cultural followers" is a good term for something I ought to write about in more depth: you really can sort of socially engineer Hispanics. That's why you see crazy changes up and down over time like the murder rate in El Salvador.
A Hispanicized America is going to lead to more rightwing social engineering where the government draws a firm line and then Hispanics go, "Oh, so that's what El Caudillo wants! Why didn't the gringos tell us before? Okay, I guess we'll do that."
Wonderfully and humorously expressed Steve, thank you. A good example is the indio and mestizo Chileans' enthusiastic embrace of El Jefe Augusto's Prussian-style military, right down to the schellenbaums. There's a healthy Hispanic presence in the US Marine's drill instructor corps as well.
One thing that I have found living in different parts of the world is that there is no such thing as "Commom" or universally "common knowledge". What is thought of as common knowledge varies widely from culture to culture and largely defines them.
I've been an expat for my whole adult life, and I couldn't agree more. There are certainly areas of knowledge that are shared across (at least developed) cultures, but 'common knowledge' varies widely.
I've related the following 'common knowledge' cross-cultural clash before on iSteve, and received numerous incredulous comments. But I can assure you it's 100% true.
And here it is: I'm tall, i.e. 6' 5" or so. I live in Hong Kong, which is not one of the world's taller societies. Over my years here -- maybe moreso 25 or 30 years ago, but still fairly recently -- I've been told by a variety of Hong Kong people that I am so tall because I played basketball when I was younger, and did a lot of jumping. And that made me tall.
Hong Kong has one of the world's most rigorous and competitive educational systems; it's heavily STEM-loaded. And some of the people who said this to me have graduate degrees.
Exactly. Great example. On a side note, Billy Connelly and Gerry Rafferty when they were "The Humblebums" even did a song called, "But everyone knows that".
Exactly. Great example. On a side note, Billy Connelly and Gerry Rafferty when they were "The Humblebums" even did a song called, "But everyone knows that".
It's nice that Steve's so complimentary about Pinker's IQ and such, but Pinker is really just an example of Orwell's dictum that "there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
Pinker's warning that discussing race and IQ "might embolden racists, make it easy to overlook systemic racism, shake the confidence of individual African Americans, and further divide the country along racial lines" is not a reasoned evaluation of reality, it's merely a recitation of the Leftist Credo to let everyone know he is one of the 'good guys'.
As Steve and AnotherDad have shown item by item, Pinker is wrong about everything that matters. And worse, he's wrong about it in a clever-sounding way that further entrenches destructive policy.
I recall reading Pinker's *The Blank Slate*, and being quite disappointed. Pinker tries to assert that the 'ghost in the machine', i.e. the soul, isn't really needed from an evolutionary point of view. His problem then is to explain why human beings engage in seemingly counterproductive (from an evolutionary POV) benevolent and even sacrificial behaviors, and avoid behaviours (e.g. rape, aggressive promiscuity, etc.) that would promote the success of our genes. His answer is essentially that we can simply encourage or ban actions that we believe should be encouraged or banned -- i.e. employ and enforce a form of 'common knowledge'. But this seems to be circular reasoning to me, i.e. he's turning tail and retreating back to a socially-constructed ethical safe haven, which stands in contrast to his Brave Truth-Teller authorly persona.
But he is a glib writer; if you just go with his flow, and are inclined to accept his views, then he seems very clever indeed. In this he's like a premium-grade Malcolm Gladwell.
> "Pinker tries to assert that the 'ghost in the machine', i.e. the soul, isn't really needed from an evolutionary point of view."
I suppose this is the usual "whatever propagates genes is by definition good" logic.
> "His answer is essentially that we can simply encourage or ban actions that we believe should be encouraged or banned -- i.e. employ and enforce a form of 'common knowledge'."
He must be having an attack of 'soul' to defy the hard logic of genes with his superstitions about "common knowledge".
Imagine writing about "The Emperor's new clothes" in such detail and not mentioning a genocide backed fully by USA and all its media (ditto most western countries) but that can be seen by about 1 American in 3 and 1 in 2 US Jews.
Steve plays the hits again. On a similar topic, how many Americans know that K-12 students are less than 50% non-Hispanic white or that medical schools and law school stude3nts are more than 50% female.
Also, Steve has discussed for years that non-Hispanic whites outperform black students at almost every high school in the U.S. but Steve has never been interested in why girls outperform boys at those same schools or at least should mention that some the male/female gap can be attributed to biology.
I hope you didn't make him cry with that last sentence. You can untie your other hand from behind your back now.
I don't think the FBI stats, even for murder, are useful anymore because too many entities are not participating, especially in cities and along the southern border. The NCVS data used to be more reliable, but it's a survey with such a high non-response rate that it has become less valuable over time. I like to work backwards from the crimeinamerica.net site, which combines the FBI and NCVS data.
A few things jump out, and they align with my subjective experience living in both black-majority and Hispanic-majority cities and rural areas, plus what I see and hear of what is happening in places where I have deep familiarity.
-- Most crimes are not reported to law enforcement. Millions of crimes are not included in the FBI statistics.
-- The majority of reported crimes do not end in arrest. It is also common practice to unfound even serious violent crimes such as stranger rape once the offender is convicted of one crime (this was done to me, and my DNA collection swabs were "disappeared," even though he told me his first name and had a very, very strange modus operandi).
--Only 42% of violent crimes are reported to police. I believe this referenced 2022.
--Urban areas report fewer than 40% of violent victimizations; suburban and rural are higher, but even rural only reaches 51%. Before, I believe, 2022, when they dropped further.
--74% of violent victimizations of juveniles are NOT reported to police.
-- Reporting of crime to police has been plummeting for decades and through at least 2022. NCVS differences from FBI reports bear this out.
--2020 stats were underreported in both FBI and NCVS data, which had to be revised upward.
--The change to NIBRS in 2021 led to a vast drop in reporting for FBI statistics. How vast? From 95% to 65% of agencies participating. How much this has adjusted since then, I didn't research.
Except my comments, this is all per Crime in America.
Thus, nationwide statistics are now virtually meaningless. Some very localized studies can be done, but they are very time-consuming.
The FBI murder stats offer one interesting nugget: in 2019, 759 white-on-Hispanic murders and only 177 black-on Hispanic offenders were recorded in the "race" stats from the FBI, but in the separate "ethnicity" stats, the number of Hispanic offenders shot up to 595, from zero of them in the race stats. So in reality, only 164 of these killers of Hispanics were either white or black. Note that FBI race statistics count Hispanics as a category of victims but not offenders. But with so few agencies reporting, who knows the real numbers?
I've always wondered if it is higher IQ members, at least of minority groups, who commit a higher percentage of crimes per race. Or at least of serious, violent crimes. I have a lot of experience with deprived children. I got so I divided the small sub-group of "bad little kids" into two: the smart, engaged, really dangerous ones, and the ones so utterly unparented and numb that they could barely acquire language. My hunches tended to be correct by their adolescence.
But the question then is whether blacks underreport more than whites or Hispanic. And Steve uses the CDC homicide data but who knows how much longer that data will be around.
Trump is having the CDC WONDER (mortality by death certificate) tool changed -- I imagine that will remain available and useful because the left uses it in their anti-gun activism too. I don't know if the government shut-down affects the timeline. I didn't use it to blog about cases I wrote about because you are not permitted to do so, and it really didn't add anything for me. I imagine it is one tool used by the Crime in America people. I've never heard of coroners who don't share that data.
The NCVS surveys tended to be pretty accurate. They did establish long-term household relationships. But of course, why would any criminal participate? I really haven't looked at these tools for a while. Remenber, back in the crack era, it was the Congressional Black Caucus clamoring for more police and longer sentences.
these include homicides, motor vehicle accidents, "poisonings" (drug overdoses) and other categories society ought to keep an eye on.
The CDC reports death certificates signed off on by doctors (or coroners for the more suspicious deaths) for cause of death for which funeral directors collect demographic statistics from the family of the dead person. Nobody blames doctors or funeral directors for not keeping homicides or car crashes from going up or down, so the system doesn't have the obvious biases that FBI stats from local police agencies have.
On the other hand, murder isn't the only crime and homicide trends are only vaguely related to quality of life crime-caused problems like why it takes ten minutes extra to buy toe nail clippers at the drug store these days.
I just realized that I live in a rare place where the murder rate appears to be higher in the rich neighborhood next door than in my middle class neighborhood down in the San Fernando Valley flats: until Air B n B cracked down, rappers would rent Mulholland Drive mansions for parties and the inevitable gunplay would break out. Plus, there are occasional examples of people now being able to afford to live in Bel-Air because of something they did back in Eurasia, but vengeance taken cold still tastes sweet to the Eurasian sensibility.
Who keeps track when the body isn't found or even known to be missing? We hope those are low numbers compared to the usual. On "Criminal Minds," some ended up in a Canadian pig farm, leaving a bin full of shoes and tasteless bacon.
Michael Jackson's death went back and forth between legally being considered an accident and negligent homicide by doctor for awhile. I don't recall how it wound up.
"His personal physician, Conrad Murray, [from Grenada & Trinidad] was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter in connection with his death." Given 4 years, served 2.
"Nobody blames doctors or funeral directors for not keeping homicides or car crashes from going up or down, so the system doesn't have the obvious biases that FBI stats from local police agencies have."
That is their real strength. The politicization of parts of the CDC is real, and it started way back with Fauci and AIDS (though he was at NIAID, not the CDC). But the people signing and reporting those death certificates are everywhere in America, not employed in one place under the culture of a government agency.
I spent years being obsessed with the Crime in America stats and articles. I lack the skill set to understand their statistical methodology and worked more in politics and policy, but they're good interpreters for explaining what statistics are not telling us and how they can be manipulated. I worked mostly trying to show how hate crime laws destroyed our justice system from the head down. Like the recent transmania, you couldn't get a foot in the door at the FBI unless you were deep in the culture of the hate crimes industry; then states couldn't get bureau funding if not the same, and police departments, and so on. Hate crime laws turned the FBI into a political weapon in the hands of Eric Holder under Clinton, with assist from Elena Kagan. This, curiously, played a huge factor in the later emergence of transmania. Only transwomen are really counted as women victims of hate crimes. Real women are disappeared, not in the law itself, but through federal training of police executives and prosecutors and statisticians to make choices in investigating, charging, and reporting. You can kill a hundred random women, but only the trans and sometimes minority ones you kill are "counted" as victims of hate crime.
A really great book on politics infecting data collection, health policy, money, and the CDC in the AIDS era is Elinor Burkett's 1996 The Gravest Show on Earth. Fauci looms large, way back then, doing precisely what he did with COVID. Courageous book -- earned Burkett no friends.
Thanks again, Tina, for your comments. I'm enjoying and learning from your explanations of how these stats have been used.
The 1990s link with World War T is especially fascinating. It's evidence that the roots of current woke insanity dig deep, and that American culture's seeming return to normality in the 1980s and on into the 1990s was transitory at best.
Here is an American historian, Anton Chaitkin, talking for an hour about the "stupidity, falsehood, and wishful thinking" he's hearing expressed these days by "good, well-meaning" people of his personal acquaintance.
When nobody knows that nobody knows.
"Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect knowing the truth is better for us than stupidity, falsehood, and wishful thinking."
See, this is why Dr. Pinker is a greatly respected Cultural commentator and you are confined to your walk in closet. Also, the hair halo thing...
Pinker sounds like a Boeing executive circa 2018.
I'd say the race differences genie is out of the bottle. Maybe not in old-line academia still dominated by aging liberal boomers like Pinker, but certainly among younger conservatives.
As boomers age out and are replaced over the next decade, anyone seriously trying to deny such differences will seem like an irrelevant fool. Maybe they won't be called out to their faces in the faculty lounge, but they certainly will be on X.
> "anyone seriously trying to deny such differences will seem like an irrelevant fool."
What's with the future tense?
I'm less sanguine. Just as crazy superstitions persists to this day, so do I expect the myth of Racial Creationism--you know, when Lewontin flew in on his Flying Spaghetti Monster at the moment humans evolved and made all the races equal in all abilities--will persist indefinitely.
Your "Discrete Ignorance" is a manifestation of another evolved psychological trait. For a group identity to survive in the presence of a different--and possibly more appealing--group identity, one thing that is needed is a crazy hallucinatory belief. This belief must be obviously wrong to any outsider with an ounce of reason, and yet completely impenetrable for the people within the group. It also helps to require a different mode of dress and dietary restrictions, but the bonkers unshakable belief is the most important.
Not only is the belief bonkers and unshakable despite its flimsy foundation, people outside the group can readily identify it, but people within the group would struggle to find it-- even if they agree to the principle in general, and can easily see what wacko things other groups believe.
I've never been able to penetrate such a belief. A challenge is met with anything from head shaking "you'll never get it" to anger to Donald Sutherland at the end of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" pointing and shrieking. There's no logic involved. It's like your foot refusing to step too far out on a ledge.
Pre-literate cultures have a reluctance to indulge in “as if” thinking. That makes them seem stubborn but helps them retain the hard-won habits they’ve evolved for survival.
Literate and post-literate cultures are really into “as if”. It enables innovation (e.g., the scientific method comes out of asking weird, annoying questions) but might also make you more naive. Most modern humans still have aspects of both mental models; few people are constantly questioning everything.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/09/07/the-world-as-if/
I made it about halfway. The author's treatment of "as-if" reasoning was slippery and inconsistent to me. I think she just means abstract reasoning. The Russian study is weird. It basically says that old people who had never been taught to categorize things in a certain way failed to categorize things in that way.
For me a more useful idea is that culture is more important than reasoning and that new ideas are the cultural equivalent of mutations in evolution and that cultural practices evolve because they convey a survival advantage.
One cool example from the book review (I wish I could remember the title) was that if a hunter goes to the hunting ground where he found caribou last time, chances are the caribou aren;t their because last time they went there some dude killed one of them. So the best strategy per game theory is selecting hunting grounds randomly.
Therefore these societies evolved a roll of a guy who throws bones on the ground and "reads" them. He isn't magic, he's just a legitimized random number generator.
Like mutations, most innovations, i.e. variance from cultural practice, could get you killed at most times in history. It's only in modern times that we have the breathing room to try out new things.
Excellent comment Erik.
> For me a more useful idea is that culture is more important than reasoning and that new ideas are the cultural equivalent of mutations in evolution and that cultural practices evolve because they convey a survival advantage. <
For me this is the core conservative insight. The old ways are old .... because they actually work! Natural selection.
If you're taking on the old ways ... you
a) probably do not understand why the old ways are what they are and how they work
and
b) are almost certainly wrong that your brand new way is better
or
c) you just want to break stuff
> It's only in modern times that we have the breathing room to try out new things. <
But unfortunately a whole lot less than we think. Individuals can screw up more now and still get back on track--though many do not.
Beyond the obvious technological/production leeway--yeah, we aren't going to have a famine--the apparent resilience of Western societies has a whole lot to do with demographic momentum. It simply takes a long time--at minimum two generations, 50 years or so--for the demographic damage being done to Western nations to really have an impact.
With respect to demographic momentum (if I understand what you are referencing correctly) the problem is less new ways and more that we are importing people whose old ways are optimized for some other kind of society.
To a leftie everything is environmental/cultural and western culture is not superior to any other culture and yet simply by coming here they are confident that all these other people will adopt western culture?
It's too late for us. Only consolation is that western Europe is preparing an even worse bed for itself. And I agree 50 years. I imagine no one at the time will think anything is wrong because it came upon them so slowly.
> Not only is the belief bonkers and unshakable despite its flimsy foundation, people outside the group can readily identify it, but people within the group would struggle to find it.
I am sure that the American Association of University Professors wouldn't stoop to replying to you, but they did post something relevant on Twitter a few days ago, as a rebuttal to a Chronicle of Higher Education reporter's musings on Viewpoint Diversity.
.
@EmmaJanePettit | 11:06 AM · Oct 20, 2025
https://x.com/EmmaJanePettit/status/1980289474652246017
There’s been a burst of debate around viewpoint diversity (an always controversial topic) in our pages and elsewhere. Will thread and describe the key arguments below… [six tweets follow]
.
@AAUP | 11:33 AM · Oct 20, 2025
https://x.com/AAUP/status/1980296341525069995
Fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review, but perhaps it’s the intellectual values of academia, which emphasizes critical inquiry & challenges traditional norms, that may be inherently less appealing to those with a more conservative worldview.
I couldn't even begin to argue with the author of the original article. I skipped the intro and went to thesis one which says you can't have diversity of viewpoint (by which I assume we would both agree this means mostly political viewpoint) because academics is all about "THE TRUTH!!!!!!!!"
As-if most questions and opinions have a single objective truth.
So he mentions how the structure of DNA was figured out a long time ago...okay good start. Then next paragraph, having stolen the intellectual rigor prestige of science he smoothly transitions to "in my own field of literary studies..."
I stopped reading. I think one of the guys in D12 said it best when he responded to a reporter "Bitch, are you retarded?"
> I stopped reading [the very long article by Lisa Siraganian, the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University and the president of the JHU-AAUP chapter]
I guess that makes you a fascist. Me, too!
Either Prof. Siraganian has a well-developed sense of humor or she doesn't, by my understanding.
1). Use global Search-And-Replace to substitute "routine Progressive-endorsed DEI diversity" for "viewpoint diversity." The essay is not harmed.
2). How many of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals does the essay fulfill? I checked off 9 of 12. Especially #4, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
Siraganian's forebears could well have fled the Soviet Union. I think she'd have found the climate to be pretty agreeable.
I never wanted to be a Fascist. I really didn't. But lately it turns out everything good, fun, and funny is Fascist so what can I do?
Exellent work, Stevo, one of your best.
Of course, there is also a powerful element of class identity and dominance in this pattern of discrete ignorance. Once one is safely ensconced in a suburb outside Boston, having open contempt for the Southie Irish upset at their kids being bussed into Black schools is a further kind of luxury money can't buy. Which may also explain the need to continually expand the zone of absurdity (gay marriage, open borders, trans rights): scarcity is guaranteed at the extremes.
> In a similar way, if scholars tacitly decide that the best way to handle a socially pernicious and intellectually minor topic is not to go there, they would not be surrendering to the ignorance of a dark age, but may be deploying a higher-order personality which factors in the effects of making discoveries common knowledge. That could even be true if they reasoned that the best way of implementing such a policy is not to speak too long and loud about why they are implementing it.<
Suck that in whitey! We are higher-order personalities, saving society!
Pinker is about as honest as Jewish intellectuals get--left of true patriot like Stephen Miller--and he delivers this oh-so-typical verbalist diarrhea.
Racial differences are not an "intellectually minor topic". It is perhaps the most interesting topic in the whole sphere of genetics and evolution--how selection has worked and how we are performing selection upon ourselves with gene-culture-gene feedback.
And it is far and away the *most important* topic in terms of public policy. Bazillions of dollars being spent, blood libel on whites and more importantly the effect upon the nation of letting various random peoples flood in.
~~
And this continual lying has nothing to do with "emboldening racists" or "shaking the confidence of individual African-Americans". (Does Pinker know any blacks?)
Politeness indeed can be a virtue. We don't need to talk about black criminality 24-7. But if we are talking about criminal justice policy, or yet another shit show starts up, then honesty is not just reasonable it is *required*.
And, c'mon--how to put this politely?--Jews are not known for being polite. No this is not about polite restraint. This continual lying is to attack whites, to push the minoritarian narrative to deny whites their right to live as they wish, to balkanize and destroy white nations. Lying in the service of evil.
In the last sentence quoted, Pinker seems to be endorsing your “Book of Secrets” model of governance, i.e., the board of Harvard should know the truth about race realism and allow it to guide their decision-making, but not the plebes. However, our governing model is not a closed, self-perpetuating aristocracy like Harvard’s but electoral democracy. When knowledge is denied to the general public and truth-tellers are penalized, grifters like Zohran Mamdani are more likely to profit than moderates like Steven Pinker—or, from the other side, you have to be as crass as Donald Trump or Nigel Farage to tell the truth publicly.
You can see this at work in the UK right now. Because you aren’t allowed to say or think that Pakistani Muslims are more inclined to rape white girls, it becomes prudent to suppress that fact for exactly the reasons Pinker stated. When it finally becomes undeniable, there is an inability to act because the official “common knowledge” still hasn’t changed (inclination to rape must be evenly distributed throughout the population).
I just saw on X that the BBC isn't reporting the reason for the recent Irish riot--the rape of a 10 y.o. girl by an African migrant.
My Harvard President's Book of Secret's model didn't even work out for Pinker's friend Larry Summers when he was giving an address at a science conference and got cancelled by an MIT chemistry professor.
I'm beginning to see arguments from commenters along the lines of, yes we know the WW2/#literallyHitler paradigm no longer fits and "classical liberalism" is riddled with unprincipled exceptions but STOP SPOILING THINGS! To which I respond, to paraphrase Will Ferrell, Steve Sailer and Roissy, how long do you think your throne of pretty little lies will stand?
I like the phrase "recursively explaining" and the mental picture of Vizzini talking himself down a rabbit hole. That's what I hear when economists start blabbing that ACKSHUALLY [points to line graph] filling your country up with Third World tax eaters is good for the economy! Then you ask them why Third World tax eaters can't seem to do any good for Third World economies, and they're off for another ten minutes of ACKSHUALLY!
It's also interesting how Hispanics show up in this reverse canary-in-the-coal-mine role: when the ambient socio-economics are healthy, Hispanics do good! When the ambient socio-economics are toxic, Hispanics deal drugs and kidnap each other. They are cultural followers and we should harness this.
I'm reminded of a documentary I watched on Guatemalan gangs. It was produced by a free-lancer who obviously wanted to show the grittiness and _oppression_ of life in paramilitarized Guatemala but the actual affect was kind of pathetic. Guatemala is basically a country of 14-year-olds with lots of ad hoc gang formation, and the more civic minded men form these ragtag neighborhood watches and ask for donations from their wealthier neighbors to keep them in ammo (and, I suspect, food and cerveza). Not pretty but it's cheaper than what the gangs charge and they don't kill you and rape your daughters if you don't pay. (By the way, where is the uber-compassionate Catholic Church in these messes in all her traditionally Catholic countries?)
What also struck me from this documentary was how low-tier the firearms were. The average suburban dad/iSteve reader easily outguns them. You could probably get a Marine battalion drunk and tell them go take over the place and they'd have it in a week.
In closing and without further elaboration, I think we are approaching the end of liberalism and the beginning of neo-colonialism. The alternative is the Global North becomes the Global South and the light of the world goes out.
Outstanding, AG
Thanks. "Cultural followers" is a good term for something I ought to write about in more depth: you really can sort of socially engineer Hispanics. That's why you see crazy changes up and down over time like the murder rate in El Salvador.
A Hispanicized America is going to lead to more rightwing social engineering where the government draws a firm line and then Hispanics go, "Oh, so that's what El Caudillo wants! Why didn't the gringos tell us before? Okay, I guess we'll do that."
Wonderfully and humorously expressed Steve, thank you. A good example is the indio and mestizo Chileans' enthusiastic embrace of El Jefe Augusto's Prussian-style military, right down to the schellenbaums. There's a healthy Hispanic presence in the US Marine's drill instructor corps as well.
Lol, Steve Sailer is Jewish. The Global North is already the Global South. SUFFAH and Hang It The Fuck Up, The Light Of The World Never Existed.
Whatever, wigger.
Lol, You’re a BAPNigger.
One thing that I have found living in different parts of the world is that there is no such thing as "Commom" or universally "common knowledge". What is thought of as common knowledge varies widely from culture to culture and largely defines them.
I've been an expat for my whole adult life, and I couldn't agree more. There are certainly areas of knowledge that are shared across (at least developed) cultures, but 'common knowledge' varies widely.
I've related the following 'common knowledge' cross-cultural clash before on iSteve, and received numerous incredulous comments. But I can assure you it's 100% true.
And here it is: I'm tall, i.e. 6' 5" or so. I live in Hong Kong, which is not one of the world's taller societies. Over my years here -- maybe moreso 25 or 30 years ago, but still fairly recently -- I've been told by a variety of Hong Kong people that I am so tall because I played basketball when I was younger, and did a lot of jumping. And that made me tall.
Hong Kong has one of the world's most rigorous and competitive educational systems; it's heavily STEM-loaded. And some of the people who said this to me have graduate degrees.
But hey -- everybody *knows* how you get tall!
Exactly. Great example. On a side note, Billy Connelly and Gerry Rafferty when they were "The Humblebums" even did a song called, "But everyone knows that".
Exactly. Great example. On a side note, Billy Connelly and Gerry Rafferty when they were "The Humblebums" even did a song called, "But everyone knows that".
It's nice that Steve's so complimentary about Pinker's IQ and such, but Pinker is really just an example of Orwell's dictum that "there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
Pinker's warning that discussing race and IQ "might embolden racists, make it easy to overlook systemic racism, shake the confidence of individual African Americans, and further divide the country along racial lines" is not a reasoned evaluation of reality, it's merely a recitation of the Leftist Credo to let everyone know he is one of the 'good guys'.
As Steve and AnotherDad have shown item by item, Pinker is wrong about everything that matters. And worse, he's wrong about it in a clever-sounding way that further entrenches destructive policy.
Pinker has always been a clever doofus.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/isteve-open-thread-6/#comment-7138601
https://www.unz.com/isteve/isteve-open-thread-12/#comment-7332822
I recall reading Pinker's *The Blank Slate*, and being quite disappointed. Pinker tries to assert that the 'ghost in the machine', i.e. the soul, isn't really needed from an evolutionary point of view. His problem then is to explain why human beings engage in seemingly counterproductive (from an evolutionary POV) benevolent and even sacrificial behaviors, and avoid behaviours (e.g. rape, aggressive promiscuity, etc.) that would promote the success of our genes. His answer is essentially that we can simply encourage or ban actions that we believe should be encouraged or banned -- i.e. employ and enforce a form of 'common knowledge'. But this seems to be circular reasoning to me, i.e. he's turning tail and retreating back to a socially-constructed ethical safe haven, which stands in contrast to his Brave Truth-Teller authorly persona.
But he is a glib writer; if you just go with his flow, and are inclined to accept his views, then he seems very clever indeed. In this he's like a premium-grade Malcolm Gladwell.
> "Pinker tries to assert that the 'ghost in the machine', i.e. the soul, isn't really needed from an evolutionary point of view."
I suppose this is the usual "whatever propagates genes is by definition good" logic.
> "His answer is essentially that we can simply encourage or ban actions that we believe should be encouraged or banned -- i.e. employ and enforce a form of 'common knowledge'."
He must be having an attack of 'soul' to defy the hard logic of genes with his superstitions about "common knowledge".
"Clever doofus" demonstrated again.
Steven Pinker as "a premium-grade Malcolm Gladwell." That's a good line.
Pinker is constantly 10,000 hours ahead of Gladwell
Imagine writing about "The Emperor's new clothes" in such detail and not mentioning a genocide backed fully by USA and all its media (ditto most western countries) but that can be seen by about 1 American in 3 and 1 in 2 US Jews.
Steve plays the hits again. On a similar topic, how many Americans know that K-12 students are less than 50% non-Hispanic white or that medical schools and law school stude3nts are more than 50% female.
Also, Steve has discussed for years that non-Hispanic whites outperform black students at almost every high school in the U.S. but Steve has never been interested in why girls outperform boys at those same schools or at least should mention that some the male/female gap can be attributed to biology.
I hope you didn't make him cry with that last sentence. You can untie your other hand from behind your back now.
I don't think the FBI stats, even for murder, are useful anymore because too many entities are not participating, especially in cities and along the southern border. The NCVS data used to be more reliable, but it's a survey with such a high non-response rate that it has become less valuable over time. I like to work backwards from the crimeinamerica.net site, which combines the FBI and NCVS data.
A few things jump out, and they align with my subjective experience living in both black-majority and Hispanic-majority cities and rural areas, plus what I see and hear of what is happening in places where I have deep familiarity.
-- Most crimes are not reported to law enforcement. Millions of crimes are not included in the FBI statistics.
-- The majority of reported crimes do not end in arrest. It is also common practice to unfound even serious violent crimes such as stranger rape once the offender is convicted of one crime (this was done to me, and my DNA collection swabs were "disappeared," even though he told me his first name and had a very, very strange modus operandi).
--Only 42% of violent crimes are reported to police. I believe this referenced 2022.
--Urban areas report fewer than 40% of violent victimizations; suburban and rural are higher, but even rural only reaches 51%. Before, I believe, 2022, when they dropped further.
--74% of violent victimizations of juveniles are NOT reported to police.
-- Reporting of crime to police has been plummeting for decades and through at least 2022. NCVS differences from FBI reports bear this out.
--2020 stats were underreported in both FBI and NCVS data, which had to be revised upward.
--The change to NIBRS in 2021 led to a vast drop in reporting for FBI statistics. How vast? From 95% to 65% of agencies participating. How much this has adjusted since then, I didn't research.
Except my comments, this is all per Crime in America.
Thus, nationwide statistics are now virtually meaningless. Some very localized studies can be done, but they are very time-consuming.
The FBI murder stats offer one interesting nugget: in 2019, 759 white-on-Hispanic murders and only 177 black-on Hispanic offenders were recorded in the "race" stats from the FBI, but in the separate "ethnicity" stats, the number of Hispanic offenders shot up to 595, from zero of them in the race stats. So in reality, only 164 of these killers of Hispanics were either white or black. Note that FBI race statistics count Hispanics as a category of victims but not offenders. But with so few agencies reporting, who knows the real numbers?
I've always wondered if it is higher IQ members, at least of minority groups, who commit a higher percentage of crimes per race. Or at least of serious, violent crimes. I have a lot of experience with deprived children. I got so I divided the small sub-group of "bad little kids" into two: the smart, engaged, really dangerous ones, and the ones so utterly unparented and numb that they could barely acquire language. My hunches tended to be correct by their adolescence.
But the question then is whether blacks underreport more than whites or Hispanic. And Steve uses the CDC homicide data but who knows how much longer that data will be around.
Trump is having the CDC WONDER (mortality by death certificate) tool changed -- I imagine that will remain available and useful because the left uses it in their anti-gun activism too. I don't know if the government shut-down affects the timeline. I didn't use it to blog about cases I wrote about because you are not permitted to do so, and it really didn't add anything for me. I imagine it is one tool used by the Crime in America people. I've never heard of coroners who don't share that data.
The NCVS surveys tended to be pretty accurate. They did establish long-term household relationships. But of course, why would any criminal participate? I really haven't looked at these tools for a while. Remenber, back in the crack era, it was the Congressional Black Caucus clamoring for more police and longer sentences.
Thanks. For the last few years, I've been obsessed with the CDC's mortality stats at
https://wonder.cdc.gov/mcd.html
these include homicides, motor vehicle accidents, "poisonings" (drug overdoses) and other categories society ought to keep an eye on.
The CDC reports death certificates signed off on by doctors (or coroners for the more suspicious deaths) for cause of death for which funeral directors collect demographic statistics from the family of the dead person. Nobody blames doctors or funeral directors for not keeping homicides or car crashes from going up or down, so the system doesn't have the obvious biases that FBI stats from local police agencies have.
On the other hand, murder isn't the only crime and homicide trends are only vaguely related to quality of life crime-caused problems like why it takes ten minutes extra to buy toe nail clippers at the drug store these days.
I just realized that I live in a rare place where the murder rate appears to be higher in the rich neighborhood next door than in my middle class neighborhood down in the San Fernando Valley flats: until Air B n B cracked down, rappers would rent Mulholland Drive mansions for parties and the inevitable gunplay would break out. Plus, there are occasional examples of people now being able to afford to live in Bel-Air because of something they did back in Eurasia, but vengeance taken cold still tastes sweet to the Eurasian sensibility.
Who keeps track when the body isn't found or even known to be missing? We hope those are low numbers compared to the usual. On "Criminal Minds," some ended up in a Canadian pig farm, leaving a bin full of shoes and tasteless bacon.
That's what a friend of a friend of an acquaintance of a stranger (who would know) claims happened to Jimmy Hoffa.
Michael Jackson's death went back and forth between legally being considered an accident and negligent homicide by doctor for awhile. I don't recall how it wound up.
"His personal physician, Conrad Murray, [from Grenada & Trinidad] was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter in connection with his death." Given 4 years, served 2.
"Nobody blames doctors or funeral directors for not keeping homicides or car crashes from going up or down, so the system doesn't have the obvious biases that FBI stats from local police agencies have."
That is their real strength. The politicization of parts of the CDC is real, and it started way back with Fauci and AIDS (though he was at NIAID, not the CDC). But the people signing and reporting those death certificates are everywhere in America, not employed in one place under the culture of a government agency.
I spent years being obsessed with the Crime in America stats and articles. I lack the skill set to understand their statistical methodology and worked more in politics and policy, but they're good interpreters for explaining what statistics are not telling us and how they can be manipulated. I worked mostly trying to show how hate crime laws destroyed our justice system from the head down. Like the recent transmania, you couldn't get a foot in the door at the FBI unless you were deep in the culture of the hate crimes industry; then states couldn't get bureau funding if not the same, and police departments, and so on. Hate crime laws turned the FBI into a political weapon in the hands of Eric Holder under Clinton, with assist from Elena Kagan. This, curiously, played a huge factor in the later emergence of transmania. Only transwomen are really counted as women victims of hate crimes. Real women are disappeared, not in the law itself, but through federal training of police executives and prosecutors and statisticians to make choices in investigating, charging, and reporting. You can kill a hundred random women, but only the trans and sometimes minority ones you kill are "counted" as victims of hate crime.
A really great book on politics infecting data collection, health policy, money, and the CDC in the AIDS era is Elinor Burkett's 1996 The Gravest Show on Earth. Fauci looms large, way back then, doing precisely what he did with COVID. Courageous book -- earned Burkett no friends.
Thanks again, Tina, for your comments. I'm enjoying and learning from your explanations of how these stats have been used.
The 1990s link with World War T is especially fascinating. It's evidence that the roots of current woke insanity dig deep, and that American culture's seeming return to normality in the 1980s and on into the 1990s was transitory at best.
Here is an American historian, Anton Chaitkin, talking for an hour about the "stupidity, falsehood, and wishful thinking" he's hearing expressed these days by "good, well-meaning" people of his personal acquaintance.
https://rumble.com/v6sq889-thinking-needed-to-save-the-nation-featuring-anton-chaitkin.html