October 22, 2005

No bias here, no sirree!

The Associated Press writes:

" Caught between business supporters who need foreign workers and conservatives clamoring for a clampdown on illegal immigration, President Bush tried on Saturday to give his temporary guest-worker plan a nudge by promising strong enforcement." [Emphasis mine].

Notice the language the AP uses to summarize a debate between the wealthy and the average American:

- Business supporters "need foreign workers." It's not that businesses "want" foreign workers. No, it's a proven, scientific fact that they NEED foreign workers. Didn't you take Econ 101, where they told you that there are no such thing as needs, just wants -- except for the need for cheap illegal immigrant labor? (By the way, I need a membership in the Cypress Point Golf Club, and I expect the President to get to work meeting my need, posthaste.)

- Meanwhile, those emotional, low-class, racist "conservatives" are "clamoring" for a "clampdown." (The unspeakableness of this drives the AP frantic with alliteration.) And we all know what that means! Cue The Clash:

The judge said five-to-ten
But I say double that again
I'm not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown

And, anyway, Bush's "guest workers" will be here just for a "temporary" time. When their legal residency of six years, or whatever it will be is up, they'll just go home. What, do you think they'll break the law? I'm ashamed of you for even imagining that any foreigner wouldn't obey our immigration laws! What possible evidence do you have for such a hateful implication?

A reader writes:

The term "guest worker" seems to me to be another re-labeling of something to reduce the opposition to it, a standard leftist tactic.

Calling someone a guest implies all sorts of social obligations on the host - none of which we in the host group ever asked for. They aren't guests in the new context - they are simply job thieves, brought in to undermine American workers. The union people would instantly see them for what they are - scabs, although that term is normally reserved for strikebreakers. But we all understand that this is pre-emptive action - let's break the strike before it gets a chance to start!

There should be no echo on the restrictionist Right giving credence to the notion of "guest workers". Job theft program, scab program, whatever grating label our side can come up with - that's what should always be used, so that the people pushing the program will have to combat popular vernacular and will not be able to get away with coy labels.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

No bias here, no sirree!

The Associated Press writes:

" Caught between business supporters who need foreign workers and conservatives clamoring for a clampdown on illegal immigration, President Bush tried on Saturday to give his temporary guest-worker plan a nudge by promising strong enforcement." [Emphasis mine].

Notice the language the AP uses to summarize a debate between the wealthy and the average American:

- Business supporters "need foreign workers." It's not that businesses "want" foreign workers. No, it's a proven, scientific fact that they NEED foreign workers. Didn't you take Econ 101, where they told you that there are no such thing as needs, just wants -- except for the need for cheap illegal immigrant labor? (By the way, I need a membership in the Cypress Point Golf Club, and I expect the President to get to work meeting my need, posthaste.)

- Meanwhile, those emotional, low-class, racist "conservatives" are "clamoring" for a "clampdown." (The unspeakableness of this drives the AP frantic with alliteration.) And we all know what that means! Cue The Clash:

The judge said five-to-ten
But I say double that again
I'm not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown

And, anyway, Bush's "guest workers" will be here just for a "temporary" time. When their legal residency of six years, or whatever it will be is up, they'll just go home. What, do you think they'll break the law? I'm ashamed of you for even imagining that any foreigner wouldn't obey our immigration laws! What possible evidence do you have for such a hateful implication?

A reader writes:

The term "guest worker" seems to me to be another re-labeling of something to reduce the opposition to it, a standard leftist tactic.

Calling someone a guest implies all sorts of social obligations on the host - none of which we in the host group ever asked for. They aren't guests in the new context - they are simply job thieves, brought in to undermine American workers. The union people would instantly see them for what they are - scabs, although that term is normally reserved for strikebreakers. But we all understand that this is pre-emptive action - let's break the strike before it gets a chance to start!

There should be no echo on the restrictionist Right giving credence to the notion of "guest workers". Job theft program, scab program, whatever grating label our side can come up with - that's what should always be used, so that the people pushing the program will have to combat popular vernacular and will not be able to get away with coy labels.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Razib offers a philosophy of science for the 21st century

at GNXP in " Extremism in defense of precision is no vice." This kid is well on his way to being the Popper and Kuhn of this century, although he strikes me as wiser than either.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Speaking of wise young men ...

Noah at Gideon's Blog discusses my "citizenist" position. (Unfortunately, his comments don't seem to be working.) I have to take exception, though, to his statement:

"To put it bluntly: it cannot be that white people "inherently" reject tribal or racial consciousness; no one familiar with the history of European nationalism, to say nothing of the color line and race slavery, can seriously maintain such a thing."

But, what Noah overlooks is the mechanism for maintaining tribal distinctiveness: loveless marriage. The Middle East is full of ancient groups like the Samaritans, the Yezidis, the Druzes, etc. because it is taken for granted that elders will arrange the marriages of the young, and will do it more to insure the ethnic identity and separateness of the tribe than the romantic fulfillment of the couple.

But that mechanism has been under cultural assault for at least 700 years in Western Europe, since the origin of "courtly romances" about true love. And long before that the Roman Catholic Church banned cousin marriages, which reduced the payoff to arranged marriages, perhaps setting the stage for the growing social approval of love matches. Those who elope with their soulmates are ostracized. And in a region organized on clannishness rather than law, ostracism means you don't have a mafia to watch your back, so you are in severe trouble.

So, what we've seen in the West is a fairly steadily expanding definition of the boundaries of the tribe, typically defined in territorial rather genealogical terms. Indeed, the "history of European nationalism" is one of vastly expanded definitions of who "we" are to encompass huge territories defined by language groups. This emerging European ability to organize and enthusiastically cooperate at the scale of the tens of millions made Europeans world-conquering. As Burke might have said, "Citizenism did not make Revolutionary France free; it made it formidable."

This vast trend means that an ideology of racial separatism, such as Jared Taylor's white nationalism, is ultimately doomed among white Americans by the enormous value we place upon true love and our discomfort at ostracizing those who find love across ethnic boundaries.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 21, 2005

The man with the negative IQ

Thrasymachus calculates, based on the Gaussian normal distribution:

"Assuming a global average IQ of 93 and a global population of 6 billion, there is 1 person alive with a negative IQ."

Unfortunately, he doesn't speculate on who that individual might be. Perhaps he should start a betting pool.

We know who General Tommy Franks would put his money on.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Transparency International's 2005 Corruption Perceptions Index is now out. The top of the list (the least corrupt) is dominated by northwestern European countries and their offspring. (Singapore's high rating is mostly testimony to Lee Kuan Yew.) America's 7.6 score is rather embarrassing.

Country rank
Country
2005 CPI score*
Confidence range**
Surveys used***
1
Iceland
9.7
9.5 - 9.7
8
2
Finland
9.6
9.5 - 9.7
9
New Zealand
9.6
9.5 - 9.7
9
4
Denmark
9.5
9.3 - 9.6
10
5
Singapore
9.4
9.3 - 9.5
12
6
Sweden
9.2
9.0 - 9.3
10
7
Switzerland
9.1
8.9 - 9.2
9
8
Norway
8.9
8.5 - 9.1
9
9
Australia
8.8
8.4 - 9.1
13
10
Austria
8.7
8.4 - 9.0
9
11
Netherlands
8.6
8.3 - 8.9
9
United Kingdom
8.6
8.3 - 8.8
11
13
Luxembourg
8.5
8.1 - 8.9
8
14
Canada
8.4
7.9 - 8.8
11
15
Hong Kong
8.3
7.7 - 8.7
12
16
Germany
8.2
7.9 - 8.5
10
17
USA
7.6
7.0 - 8.0
12
18
France
7.5
7.0 - 7.8
11

At the bottom of the list are a lot of places where you don't want to live, visit, do business with, or even think about:

151
Angola
2.0
1.8 - 2.1
5
152
Cote d'Ivoire
1.9
1.7 - 2.1
4
Equatorial Guinea
1.9
1.6 - 2.1
3
Nigeria
1.9
1.7 - 2.0
9
155
Haiti
1.8
1.5 - 2.1
4
Myanmar
1.8
1.7 - 2.0
4
Turkmenistan
1.8
1.7 - 2.0
4
158
Bangladesh
1.7
1.4 - 2.0
7
Chad
1.7
1.3 - 2.1
6

This database offers a rich opportunity for running correlations. (Here are 47 ranked tables from the CIA World Factbook.) There's obviously a positive correlation between lack of corruption and the absolute value of latitude (you could take the latitude of the capital of each country if you wanted to run calculation). I'd also be interested in the correlation between corruption and cousin marriage rates. Ethnic homogeneity seems to help, as does Protestantism. And if you want to correlate corruption with IQ, you can find all of Lynn and Vanhanen's statistics here.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 20, 2005

Rubbing It In

Most private colleges now have a sticker price of $40,000 to $45,000 per year (tuition plus room, board, and miscellaneous), or $160,000 to $180,000 for four years. They then discount off this absurdly high price for most families earning less than, roughly, $120,000 to $160,000 per year. The colleges don't call this a discount, and prefer to trumpet their charitableness. Yet, of course, to anyone who took Econ 101, "financial aid" is just another name for the profit maximizing strategy of "price discrimination," or getting each customer to pay the maximum they can.

In theory, price discrimination is an ideal way to extract the most money from customers, but in most businesses it's hard to execute in practice. For instance, if you try to charge rich people more money for their groceries, they could hire poor people to shop for them. Or they could just dress in ratty clothes when they go to the store. See, a major problem with price discrimination is the difficulty of figuring out how much each customer could pay. That's why in practice it usually turns out to be limited to things like giving seniors a lower price at the movie theatre.

The enormous exception are colleges, who insist that you fill in financial disclosure forms (the FAFSA and the "Profile") even more intrusive than the IRS's 1040.

The Achilles heel in this system of price discrimination would appear to be competition. Since the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, it's been illegal for firms to form cartels to coordinate pricing. If rival businessmen meet in a parking garage at midnight to decide on common pricing, they can go to prison. But, don't worry, the colleges have that covered. US News & World Report writes:

The 568 Group. This newcomer on the financial aid scene is made up of 28 of the nation's top colleges, including Amherst College, the University of Chicago, and Columbia, Duke, Georgetown, Rice, Stanford, and Yale universities. (Four of the Ivies are not participating: Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton.) The group, named after a law that waives antitrust provisions to allow the members to meet, --

The other name the colleges considered for their 568 Group was the Nyah-Nyah-Nyah-We're-Above-The-Law-And-You're-Not Group, but they decided that "568 Group" was more amusingly insulting. USNWR explains that the 568 Group

wants to lessen the confusing variation in offers by requiring aid officers to use the same method for determining need.

Don't you just hate it when one college offers to lower your tuition payment by $10,000, a second college wants to knock $15,000 off, and a third offers $20,000 off? It's so confusing trying to figure out which of those three numbers is biggest! But, now, thanks to the 568 Group, all three colleges will offer you $8,000 off! Isn't that less confusing?

*

If you have kids, financial planning for college is a fraught process, since your incentives run in opposite directions:

- To minimize taxes, you want to put assets under your child's name, including the federal income tax exempt 529 accounts.

- To maximize financial aid, you want to minimize your child's assets, since colleges will "tax" them at the rate of 35% per year, as compared to imposing a tax of only 5.6% on your assets (and they won't touch your retirement IRAs, 401ks, and SEPs).

If you are so rich you won't qualify for financial aid, you should shove money into your kid's name. And if you are poor enough that you know you will qualify, you should not put anything under his name (and don't let Grandma open an account in his name either).

If you are anywhere in the middle, you should play around with the Expected Family Contribution calculator provided by the College Board. Run different scenarios for what you expect your income and assets to be the year before your child goes off to college.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The ultimate logic of the present moment

If front-runner Hillary Clinton wins the 2008 election and is re-elected, then two families will rule America for 28 straight years. The next step in this grand historical evolution seems obvious.

Thinking along similar lines, Norm Ornstein writes today:

"Americans all have to consider the implications now of a worst case scenario-- the problems of scandal and polarization result in a meltdown of the W. Administration and a collapse of governance in Washington. No Doubt some hard core partisans and ideologues would exult. But with the domestic and foreign policy challenges the country faces, it would be a disaster for all of us.

"We are in the same boat, and if it is rudderless, we all sink. So how can we deal with the consequences if that worst case scenario occurs? Here is one simple three steop roadmap:


"1. Vice President Cheney resigns-- and President Bush replaces him not with Condoleezza Rice, as the rumors in Washington speculate, but with his father, George H.W. Bush.

"2. President Bush resigns, allowing his father to move up to the presidency.

"3. Bush 41/44 chooses his best buddy and surrogate son Bill Clinton (42, that is) to be Vice President. Talk about a fusion White House. Talk about bringing us together. Talk about compassionate triangulation.


C'mon, Norm, you can do better. Why stop there? How about ...

4. Jeb Bush's politically ambitious son George P. Bush gets his marriage to that blonde annulled on the grounds of non-dynasticism and marries Chelsea Clinton.

5. George P. and Chelsea succeed to the White House as co-Presidents in the mode of England's King William and Queen Mary (fulfilling her mother's deepest wish).

6. Chelsea gives birth to a son and daughter, who, in the fullness of time, follow their parents on the throne.

7. The royal siblings marry and produce a son and a daughter.

8. Repeat forever... or at least until inbreeding depression reduces the co-Presidents to drooling cretins and the Secret Service auctions off the Presidency to the highest bidder.

Hey, it worked for the ancient Egyptians.

A reader updated Richmond's speech concluding Shakespeare's Richard III about the marriage to end the War of the Roses:


We will unite the blue rose and the red:
Smile heaven upon this fair conjunction,
That long have frown'd upon their enmity!
What extremist hears me, and says not amen?
America hath long been mad, and scarr'd herself;
The doctor blindly spinned his client's gaffe,
The consultant plotteth revenge in ye War Room
The leader useth his aide as a cigar
All this divided Red and Blue
Divided in their dire division,

O, now, let George P and Chelsea
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God's fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if thy will be so.
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!
Abate the edge of racists, gracious Lord,
That would demand both parties make borders secure,
And make America less inclusive
Let them not live to taste this land's increase
That would with insensitivity wound this fair land's peace!
Now civil wounds are stopp'd, peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God say amen!


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Race v. Ethnicity

Much of the confusion in modern American intellectual discourse would be cleared up if pundits would adapt by definitions of race and ethnicity, which I've designed to fit the way the U.S. Census Bureau uses the terms.

- A racial group is a partly inbred extended biological family.

- An ethnic groups is one defined by shared traits that are often passed down within biological families -- e.g., language, surname, religion, cuisine, accent, self-identification, historical or mythological heroes, musical styles, etc. -- but that don't have to be.

The difference is perhaps easiest to see with adopted children. For example, if, say, an Armenian baby is adopted by Icelanders, his ethnicity would be Icelandic, at least until he became a teen and decided to rebel against his parents by searching out and espousing his Armenian heritage. But racially, he'd always be Armenian.

One amusing example of ethnicity in action was the invention of rock and roll in the 1950s. To the teenage John Lennon and Paul McCartney in the Liverpool in the late 1950s, their heroes -- Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly -- weren't black or white. To John and Paul, the relevant fact was that they were American, Southern American. That's ethnicity in action.

There's a tendency today, with PBS documentarian Ken Burns being most notorious for this (see the Old Negro Space Program parody), to attribute all past creativity in American pop culture to blacks (for instance, the Irish-American contribution to tap-dancing has disappeared down the Memory Hole). But it's important to note that African-Americans weren't building on African musical models, which, other than their emphasis on rhythm, don't sound at all like rock and roll.

On the other hand, the races have diverged musically since then, even though blacks can still make money if they deign to play rock music. Nobody ever said Hootie and the Blowfish were particularly talented, but they made a lot of money in the 1990s because there was a real hunger among white fans for a band that would feature white electric guitar rock fronted by a lead singer with a resonant black voice.

This kind of de-assimilation along racial lines is a subject deserving of more study that it has received.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Does Genghis Khan have a rival as History's Greatest Lover?

The only time I scooped Nicholas Wade, the NYT's ace genetics reporter, was on the story that Y-chromosome analysis showed that Genghis Khan was the ancestor in the direct male line of one out of every 200 men on earth, making him roughly 800,000 times more fecund than the average man alive 800 years ago. Now, we have a new (collective) candidate: the Manchu kings that founded the last dynasty in China, the Qing.

Yali Xue, Chris Tyler-Smith (whom I interviewed for the Genghis Khan story), et al, have a new paper entitled "Recent Spread of a Y-Chromosomal Lineage in Northern China and Mongolia" in the new American Journal of Human Genetics. Here's the abstract:

We have identified a Y-chromosomal lineage that is unusually frequent in northeastern China and Mongolia, in which a haplotype cluster defined by 15 Y short tandem repeats was carried by 3.3% of the males sampled from East Asia. The most recent common ancestor of this lineage lived 590 +- 340 years ago (mean = SD), and it was detected in Mongolians and six Chinese minority populations. We suggest that the lineage was spread by Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) nobility, who were a privileged elite sharing patrilineal descent from Giocangga (died 1582), the grandfather of Manchu leader Nurhaci, and whose documented members formed 0.4% of the minority population by the end of the dynasty.

They argue:

We reasoned that the events leading to the spread of this lineage might have been recorded in the historical record, as well as in the genetic record. The spread must have occurred after the cluster's TMRCA (~500 years ago, corresponding to about A.D. 1500) and, most likely, before the Xibe migration in 1764. Notable features are the occurrence of the lineage in seven different populations but its apparent absence from the most populous Chinese ethnic group, the Han. A major historical event took place in this part of the world during this period, namely, the Manchu conquest of China and the establishment of the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912. This dynasty was founded by Nurhaci (1559 - 1626) and was dominated by the Qing imperial nobility, a hereditary class consisting of male-line descendants of Nurhaci's paternal grandfather, Giocangga (died 1582), with 180,000 official members by the end of the dynasty (Elliott 2001). The nobility were highly privileged; for example, a ninth-rank noble annually received ~11 kg of silver and 22,000 liters of rice and maintained many concubines.

I've emailed Tyler-Smith to find out if he believes that this lineage is even more common today than Genghis Khan's. If his sample of 1,003 East Asian men is representative of China's population (which is 1/5th of the world's), then 1/150th of all the men on Earth have the Y-chromosome of Manchu kings. Looking at his paper, however, it appears that his sample of 1,0003 East Asian men is not representative of China as a whole, but is biased in favor of the less densely populated far north of China. If so, then Genghis Khan is still the reigning heavyweight champion progenitor.

UPDATE: Chris Tyler-Smith emails to confirm that the Mighty Manslayer is still #1:

The Qing chromosome was not found at all in the Han samples we looked at, and this makes a big difference to predictions of its total number. If we make the assumption that its real frequency in the Minority populations is the same as our measurement (about 5%) and that it is really absent from the Han, the total number of carriers in the world would be a little over one and a half million, about one-tenth of the Genghis Khan chromosome. Still quite impressive for such a recent and relatively peaceful expansion.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 19, 2005

Bush's cronyism and nepotism

Publisher Adam Bellow (yes, son of author Saul) has some thoughts on how dynastic families like the Bushes are vulnerable to cronyism. An alternative interpretation is that the Bush Administration isn't quite nepotistic enough. Although John F. Kennedy was frequently laid up with various illnesses, and occasionally out of his head on pain medication (as at his first disastrous summit meeting, which encouraged Khrushchev to provoke the Cuban Missile Crisis), he had his energetic brother Bobby by his side to cover for him. In contrast, Bush's more competent brother, Jeb, has no role in the White House because he's down in Florida being governor.

One of the unfortunate accidents of recent American history was that in 1994, Jeb, who was favored to be elected governor of Florida, lost, while George W., who seemed a long shot in Texas, won. That reversed Poppy and Barb Bush's expectation that it would be their fair-haired boy Jeb, not their ne'er-do-well son George W., who would succeed them in the White House. I imagine George W. could have served a valuable role in Jeb's Administration as the heavy, the tough guy who sniffs out disloyalty and fires people for the President. Instead, George W. wound up as the GOP frontrunner in 2000 mostly due to name-recognition and twice narrowly defeated unappealing Democratic opponents.

By the way, has anybody heard Jeb vociferously defending his brother's Iraq Attaq lately?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Mysterious Andrew Sullivan Parenthetical Comment of the Day:

Mysterious Andrew Sullivan Parenthetical Comment of the Day:

(This item is just for JPod. Love you, blue eyes.)


I'm not sure I want to know what is behind this.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Anti-immigration Maori new Foreign Secretary of New Zealand

As an indigenous New Zealander, Winston Peters can point out facts about the lack of reciprocity in Asian countries' immigration policies that white politicians aren't allowed to mention. The Australian snarkily opines:

WINSTON Peters thinks he will get on fabulously with Asian leaders because, like him, they think it is an outrageous mistake to let too many immigrants alter a country's ethnic make-up.

Mr Peters caused ripples around the world when news broke on Monday that he would be New Zealand's new Foreign Minister in Prime Minister Helen Clark's third Labour-led government.

He negotiated the plum job as part of a complex deal in which his nationalist New Zealand First party would support Labour on confidence and supply, although not within a formal coalition. Mr Peters is an unashamed anti-immigrationist who has said Muslims should be ethnically profiled and, as a default position, kept out as a terror threat.

Yesterday he did not resile from his comments, including those he made four years ago: that the country was becoming an Asian colony.

In an interview with The Australian last night, he said he was no newcomer to world affairs, having travelled and met Asian leaders when he was a senior minister in previous National-led governments. "When I was a treasurer, a deputy prime minister, I got on with them superbly," he said.

Japan, Malaysia, China and other countries of the region had a policy of little or no immigration, he said. "It is absurd to suggest that somebody talking in New Zealand about excessive immigration would not be acceptable to Asia," he said.

Mr Peters, a former teacher and barrister, is one of the country's most experienced politicians. A Maori and former Maori affairs minister, he worked with Ms Clark in her last government to draw up legislation securing beaches from land rights claims...

Mr Peters said he would move to restore New Zealand's two critical alliances: with Australia and the US.

Pro-American and anti-immigration, a win-win.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 17, 2005

More on Muslims:

Larry Auster of View from the Right writes:

Your Istanbul correspondent is discussing an author, unnamed by you or by him, who is plainly me, but which I only realized several paragraphs into his e-mail because of a reference to my debate with Daniel Pipes about nominalism vs essentialism. The correspondent’s criticisms are completely off base. He’s talking about ethnic and national traits, and arguing that my mistake, in my article, “The Search for Moderate Islam,” is to assume the existence of a single ethnic essence for all Muslim people. But I’m not talking about people's ethnic or personal traits and their supposed essence; I’m talking about Islam and its essence and what it commands its followers to do. His discussion trivializes the issue.

You share his trivializing view when you introduce his letter this way:

“Does Islam make its adherents violent? My man in Istanbul writes that’s he’s unimpressed by another author’s arguments that Muslims are inherently prickly and violent.”

I’ve never said Muslims are inherently prickly and violent. I don’t discuss Muslims’ characteristics at all. I discuss Islam, which is inherently violent, warlike, aiming at global conquest and sharia. As long as Muslims remain Muslims, even if they are not personally devout and followers of Jihad, they remain always liable to return to a genuine version of the faith, and then they will be supporters of jihad violence. Moreover, as long as one is a Muslim, one cannot renounce such things as the death sentence pronounced on apostates, or the command to kill infidels. These are the final and absolute command of Allah. Your correspondent says that he and his family are not personally violent. But the point is that they cannot separate themselves from the terrorists who are their fellow believers, because those terrorists are good Muslims. This solidarity is what makes Islam, in radio host Michael Graham’s immortal words, “a terrorist organization.”

Finally, I would note that the way you mischaracterized my views (“Muslims are inherently prickly”) is a good example of the limitations of the biodiversity approach to social and political problems. The issue, as I’ve said, is not people’s traits, it’s Islam, as stated in the Koran, the biographies of Muhammad, the Traditions, and the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence of the early Middle Ages which are the source of sharia and are still authoritative today. To understand the real nature of Islam and the threat it poses to the world, it’s necessary to put biodiversity aside for a while and look at the teachings of Islam.

Larry, I deleted your name from my reader's comments because I didn't think they were fully fair to you, but lots of less sophisticated thinkers hold views rather like what he was attributing to you, so they provided a good springboard for a wide-ranging discussion.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Does Islam make its adherents violent?

Here's a long rambling post on a hugely complicated topic. I've made no attempt to organize it, because I don't have a central theme I want to argue. But readers seem to find it thought-provoking, and have made many contributions.

My man in Istanbul writes that's he's unimpressed by another author's arguments that Muslims are inherently prickly and violent.

I cannot say I find this fear of Islam exaggerated - I feel a much higher degree of revulsion towards Islam as I have to endure being a nominal member of it. But that's also what makes some of the things he says questionable. He, like every conservative (or Christian) who is entirely outside "Dar'ul Islam", paints too homogenous, unified, monolithic a picture of Islam.

For example, the attribution (by conservative Westerners) of a relentless taste for violence to all Muslims, I find almost superstitious. For the simple reason that Islam is not an external substance like "ether" which, once it permeates a region, renders it deadly.

The real trouble is most people who live in Islamic lands (and subscribe to that primitive creed) are MORONS. What makes them violent is the same reason that turned Nawlins into the 3rd world a few weeks ago. And yet, he, too, seems to have bought into the myth that those muzzies (who, one gets the impression, could have been perfectly civilized were they Christian), for some unintelligible reason cling to that stupid faith which makes them prone to violence.

I know no one in my extended family who remotely fits into the profile of it he imagines when he talks about it in that relentlessly paranoid tone. They are all Muslims, and I have yet to hear them wish ill - let alone design to kill - anyone of any faith in the world. And yet, reading him, you'd think anyone - myself included - anyone who so much as has been associated with Islam is lethal to civilization. This does not qualify as a perspective worthy of a developed intellect.

(Perhaps because we don't speak Arabic, the Islam we're taught is close to Calvinism - though you shouldn't mention this among Christian conservatives as it infuriates them. I can honestly say that I've learned some of the worst things about Islam from Robert Spencer, not through my religious education. I don't have a single memory where we were made to pray "and you should slay the infidel wherever you see him" etc.

But these things are not on his radar since he doesn't understand that a Bosniac, an Afghani, a Yemeni, a Chechen, a Malay, and an Indonesian cannot possibly be doing all those violent things - whatever they are this week - just because they were taught to "slay the infidel wherever you see him". If for instance, last week Bosniacs had a friction with Kosovars, and this week Malays with Thais, it's the "essence" of Islam in action. He may learn a few things from population genetics, especially regarding genotypical/ancestral distances. Oh and history would also help - for example, Bosniacs and Malays have no connection to each other in any way whatsoever in history.

(The reason for his failure to recognize such things, he reveals in his reply to Daniel. Pipes may deserve his opprobrium, but he slays his own philosophical infidel, "nominalism", there. See, this is the charming result of "essentialism": it makes you assume that once a Bosniac and a Malay become Musulmaniacs, they'll all acquire the same essence, because hr finds the opposite idea, that "words" are *not* "things", relativistic and post-modern, therefore abhorrent. That the nominalist conviction also gave us empiricism, is a detail too expensive for him - especially when there's Christian conservative propaganda at stake.) His obliviousness to race and biology - which he seemed to deride as a "reductionism" in your work - causes him to fail to see this: "Dar-ul Islam" is a wasteland of ill-tempered morons who, were they Christian, would still not be able to build a civilization any more developed than that of (Christian) Nigeria. Islam only gives its dimwitted adherents a ready-made sense of mission to push their primitive attitude with impunity. That's all.'

One test of this dispute would be to look at countries where there are both Muslims and non-Muslims. India would be the largest example. Do Indian Muslims share the Hindu tendency toward a sort of cheerfulness in relations with strangers (which some deride as obsequiousness, but which I've always liked)? Or are Indian Muslims more bristly, like Arabs?

Another test case would be mostly Muslim Indonesia. Its Hindu island of Bali is, by far, the favorite destination of tourists. Is this in part because the Balinese are gentler, less prickly, than other Indonesians?

On the other hand, most of the Lebanese I've known have been Christians, and nobody would confuse them with Balinese. At a company where I worked, the most brilliant young executive was from Lebanon. I had to often remind myself (and everybody else who came in contact with him) that although he was, by Chicago corporate standards, extraordinarily brusque, he was also the politest Lebanese I'd ever met, so, grading on the Lebanese curve, you'd have to say that, deep down, he was a really nice guy.

An associated question is why Israeli Jews are so much brusquer than American Jews, even New Yorkers. Did they pick it up in the Levant from the locals? Or did the Jews who came to America assimilate into the American style of amiability? Or were the "Oriental" Jews who came to Israel from Islamic countries brusquer than the Ashkenazim from Europe? Or were there differences within the Ashkenazim, with the European Sephardic and German Jews who reached America first being politer than the Eastern European Jews who followed, and thus setting a template for their co-religionists to assimilate toward after 1900?

These are not idle questions because it's clear that, on a day to day basis in Israel, the sabra's brusqueness interacts disastrously with the Arab's obsession with politeness. As Alec Guinness's Prince Feisal memorably says in "Lawrence of Arabia:"

For Lawrence, mercy is a passion. For me, it is a matter of good manners. I leave it to you to decide which is the more reliable motivation.

As Heinlein said, an armed society is a polite society. The Bedouin, being nomads in an unpoliced desert, had to be armed at all times. And they set a cultural template of Arab authenticity for more sedentary Arabs to aspire towards.

But a polite armed society can still be a highly violent one. The most Arab-acting non-Arabic speakers are probably the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan (the demographic base of the Taliban). Winston Churchill fought against them in the 1890s and left a wonderful description of their society, specifically noting the connection between their politeness and the endless violence in their lives (which can apply to some extent toward Arabs, too):

... a most elaborate code of honour has been established and is on the whole faithfully observed. A man who knew it and observed it faultlessly might pass unarmed from one end of the frontier to another. The slightest technical slip would, however, be fatal. The life of the Pathan is thus full of interest...

So, clearly, I haven't resolved this question, but it's definitely an important one.

A reader comments:

My wife is an Arab Christian, and I've had dealings with Pakistani, Turkish and Arabic Muslims, since I work in the oil industry and have traveled to the Middle East with the military and on vacation.

On a person-to-person basis, almost every Muslim I've dealt with has been polite to a fault. In fact, I've heard, though never tested it myself, that one can walk at perfect ease through the poorest neighborhoods of Cairo without fear of being mugged. Ironically, though, this politeness to strangers may have its roots in the same thing that creates Islamic "prickliness." Treating strangers well is a matter of honor, which is a great thing. But honor has its dark side, too. Trespass against that honor by overstepping one of many, many boundaries, and you are in a world of hurt--See Iraq.

When you get down to it, the problem with Islam comes at the macroeconomic scale. It's almost the direct reverse of the problem we in America have with blacks; ie, we worry about individual street crime, not massive black movements (people like Louis Farrakhan quickly become something of joke). On this larger level, Islam lives in a zero-sum world. For them, the game is about taking as much of the pie as possible, not increasing the size of the pie for everyone as we free-marketeers like to do. Thus Muslims almost invariably insist on segregating themselves, no matter where they are. As a group, they also insist on expanding their territory at others' expense. You can see this by surveying a map of the world's conflicts. Just about every place where Islam borders another faith, there is conflict: in the Balkans, in Indonesia, in Thailand, in Russia, in Africa, in the subcontinent, and so forth. You see this also in the enclaves they form in many western cities, and in that big enclave to the northwest of India called Pakistan.

This self-isolation does lead to some antisocial behavior in the West. Compare Indian and Pakistani populations in Britain. The Indians are doing quite well, but Pakistanis have the highest rate of imprisonment (this according to Theodore Dalrymple).

My impression is that the Pakistani Muslims in Britain were from a much lower class origin than the fairly selected Hindus and Sikhs, who were often professionals before they immigrated. Many of the Pakistanis are descended from peasants who were airlifted en masse from rural Pakistan around 1960 because their land was being flooded by new reservoirs.

In the U.S., leaving terrorism aside, I would guess that Muslims, who are somewhat selected by the immigration system, are much more likely to be victims of violent street crime (especially as shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods) than perpetrators.

Muslims are also very insecure about anything that may even slightly represent a slur on their faith, thus we see all the silliness about names we choose for military operations (remember "Infinite Justice") or cartoon characters, like Piglet from Winnie the Pooh. This "prickliness", for lack of a better word, can even turn fatal, as countless "honor killings" can attest. The most famous "honor killing" we know of is that Van Gogh fellow.

Biologically inherited stupidity may play a role, but I do not think it can answer all the questions. The Pakistanis, the Iranians, and the Turks are not exactly historically stupid people, yet they are all subject to the same phenomena.

But, this Muslim inferiority complex that encourages prickliness is, at least partially, based on an accurate assessment of the lack of Muslim accomplishments in the world over, say, the last 400 years.

A reader writes:

It should be said that the murdering, slaughtering Islam of the past was almost a noble religion compared to the Islam of today, which is a religion for the absolute wretched of the Earth. Islamic violence and terrorism is driven by the resentment of a slave people who have been swept away into irrelevance by the breathtaking technological and scientific advancement of modern (non-Islamic) society. The truth is that the Muslims of today are powerless - a puny bomb here, a little car bomb there. Gone are the days of the conquering hordes. What's left is a religion for the "deprived" of the ghetto - planning in the dark and killing some innocent civilians. But when called to fight in the field of battle, they disintegrate with a rapidity seen to be believed. It was with good reason that Moshe Dayan said that the secret of military success in the 20th century was: "to fight Arabs".

A reader writes:

I agree with your assertion that all Muslims are not inherently violent. In fact, I've walked the streets of cities from Cairo to Kuala Lumpur and found them safer than American cities. The problem is a very small group of Muslims who are disposed to violence, principally against "unbelievers." This in itself is not remarkable, but what is disturbing is that the vast bulk of peaceful Muslims refuse to do anything about it.

Something that's going on now is the cultural Arabization of non-Arab Muslims, both in Europe and in Asia. In part, this is because the Saudi princes pay their religious hotheads to go away and proselytize for Wahabbiism somewhere else, far from home.

Another reason is that Muslim teenagers growing up in the West often develop a broader, cruder form of identity. In Britain, it's now being common to see third generation Bangladeshi school girls insist on wearing Arab tent-dresses to school, although nobody in Bangladesh has ever worn them. Whereas their immigrant grandparents might identify as members of a particular tribe in Bangladesh, and their parents as Bangladesh, they find it hard to explain to the non-Muslim kids at school in Birmingham where Bangladesh even is. But they notice that lots of British people are scared of Muslim terrorists, and since fear is a form of respect, which is very important to teens, they identify with Muslims in general, which means Arabs get pride of place in their imagination.

And there's increasing Muslim literacy. Often the first book somebody will read is their scripture, and they notice all sorts of things in it that people didn't talk about before when just the elite read it and the elite just wanted to keep things calm so they could go on being the elite (The invention of the printing press 560 years ago led to literalist Protestantism in Europe, which caused no end of trouble up through 1648, but Arabs showed very little interest in the printing press until not that long ago).

So, lots of lower class people are discovering for themselves that the Koran talks about jihad, so they figure they'd better get with the program.


A reader writes:

As long as Muslims remain Muslims, even if they are not personally devout and followers of Jihad, they remain always liable to return to a genuine version of the faith, and then they will be supporters of jihad violence.

As long as one is a Muslim, one cannot renounce such things as the death sentence pronounced on apostates, or the command to kill infidels. These are the final and absolute command of Allah. Your correspondent and his family are not personally violent. But they cannot separate themselves from the terrorists who are their fellow believers, because those terrorists are good Muslims. This solidarity is what makes Islam, in Michael Grahams's immortal words, "a terrorist organization."

On the other hand, it's easy to overestimate the importance of literal scriptures. If you arrived from Mars and your only knowledge of Earthlings was from reading the Old Testament and the New Testament, you'd probably guess that the warlike Hebrews had been kicking the pacifist Christians around for the last 2,000 years. So, people often pick out of their holy book whatever they want to find, and the sprawling Koran makes this post of mine look tightly organized and closely argued.

But, also because, -- as Razib at GNXP pointed out in one of those insights that make you slap your forehead and echo T.H. Huxley in saying "How stupid of me not to have thought of that" -- of increased numbers of pilgrims to Mecca due to better transportation. When the pilgrims get home to Jakarta or Birmingham, they are socially entitled to lord it over their fellow Muslims who haven't mad the haj, and constantly point out to them, "Well, when I made my Koran-mandated pilgrimage, I noticed that the way they do it in Mecca is ..." So, this spreads the Mecca-style all over the Muslim world.


Another reader writes:

The thoughts expressed by your Turkish Muslim reader are, in my mind, both reasonable and mostly accurate. I’m married to a Turkish woman who was nominally Muslim until she converted to Christianity when we got married. My in-laws (one American, one Turk) live in Istanbul, so I’ve had the opportunity to see how one – albeit rare – Muslim society operates. My main disagreement with your reader is this: Muslims who take they’re religion seriously scare me, while Christians who take their faith seriously comfort me.

In Turkey, the elite, Western-oriented class isn’t very pious. I’ve been to countless dinners and events where everyone was drinking and dancing, and the women were dressed as provocatively as you would see in a LA club. These people are not going to the mosque on a weekly basis. My father-in-law hasn’t stepped foot in one in the 17 years I’ve known him. These people may disagree with US foreign policy, but they certainly don’t advocate violence. Of course, Turkey is unique because of its forced secularism – who knows what Turkish Islam would be like if there was no Kemalism 80 years ago.

Of course the types of people that inhabit a society make a big difference in how that society develops. But, I think the records shows that ideology and religion play an equally important role. In short, I’m not convinced an authentic, religious Muslim society of made up of people who are not “morons” would adopt Western values – only when they drop Islamic values do they look Western.

And another:

Wait a minute; much of Latin America has about the same IQ as the Muslim world, and you don't see international terrorism coming from that region. Islam has bloody borders, and Latin America doesn't. Where Muslims begin to make up a minority of the population, organized violence against enemies of Islam is waged (the murder of Van Gogh in the Netherlands, the recent terrorism in the UK, and even India has had problems).

But, you also see a lot of organized violence within Arab countries, at least when they don't have a dictator keeping the lid on things. Remember how Peter O'Toole tries to shame the Arab tribes into developing a sense of Arab nationalism in "Lawrence of Arabia:"

So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people - greedy, barbarous, and cruel, as you are.

Just speculating off the top of my head on a grand scale, I suspect that the Middle Eastern pattern of in-marriage, such as cousin marriage, tends to make Arab societies more fractious.

In contrast, the Roman Catholic church long discouraged marriage even between distant cousins in medieval Europe, which I suspect helped develop civil society in Europe. Your in-laws couldn't be your blood relatives, so you had a Hamiltonian genetic interest in the welfare of other people in your region because they might end up grandparents of your grandchildren. In the Middle East, however, with it's high levels of inbreeding, your future in-laws, the potential grandparents of your grandchildren, were likely to be blood relations of you, so why bother being altruistic toward strangers, at least beyond the minimums set by religion and politeness.

And that raises the scary question: If we somehow persuade Muslims to become less Islamic, will they start acting genteel, like post-Christian Europeans, or will they act even more hostile and tribalistic because they now lack the encouragements of their religion toward universalism? Much of the popularity of Islam stems from the feeling in the Islamic world that without Islam's teachings of benevolence toward fellow Muslims, everybody would be at everybody else's throat all the time.

For example, the Taliban were able to come to power with little opposition in 1995 precisely because many Afghans of good will were sick of the warlordism that beset Afghanistan after the Communists were driven out, and they hoped that these Taliban religious students would rule more altruistically than the warlords. Indeed, the precipitating incident that brought the puritanical Taliban to favor among Afghans was a shameful civil war that between two warlords contending for the favors of a pretty catamite.

Well, the Taliban didn't work out so hot, but it's important to understand why many decent Afghans in 1995 wanted to give the Taliban a try.

Somewhat similarly, one of the striking things that hasn't happened in the Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States in the three decades of vast oil wealth is the complete moral collapse of society. If many countries, if the government put everybody on welfare, as the Gulf Arabs did after 1973, the society would soon decay into drunken brawling, heroin addiction, and AIDS. Islamic puritanism, however, for all its other faults, has at least allowed the oil Arabs to avoid the grossest forms of social collapse.

So, why isn't India as fractious as the Middle East? Hindu India has extreme endogamy within regional subcastes (although little cousin marriage), but this comes with a religious scheme explaining both the exact hierarchy and why individuals deserve to be born into their caste -- because of what they did in their past lives. This makes India somewhat more socially stable than Arab countries, where Islam and Christianity both encourage some sense of spiritual equality.

In contrast, Latin America has had a relatively stable social system for 500 years, with the whiter looking people on top in most countries in most eras for that entire time, because it allows the most formidable and ambitious dark young men to marry whiter women and thus absorbs their children and grandchildren into the white ascendancy.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Top Public Intellectuals list turns out to be a dud

Or at least that seems to be the sense of the write-up of the results by David Herman in Foreign Policy magazine, which co-sponsored the Internet poll with Prospect. Here are the top 20:

1 Noam Chomsky
2 Umberto Eco
3 Richard Dawkins
4 Václav Havel
5 Christopher Hitchens
6 Paul Krugman
7 Jürgen Habermas
8 Amartya Sen
9 Jared Diamond
10 Salman Rushdie
11 Naomi Klein
12 Shirin Ebadi
13 Hernando de Soto
14 Bjørn Lomborg
15 Abdolkarim Soroush
16 Thomas Friedman
17 Pope Benedict XVI
18 Eric Hobsbawm
19 Paul Wolfowitz
20 Camille Paglia


Top Write-in Votes
1 Milton Friedman
2 Stephen Hawking
3 Arundhati Roy
4 Howard Zinn
5 Bill Clinton

But what can you expect from a list where Thomas Friedman was nominated but Milton Friedman was not? Herman churlishly denounces the write-in vote for Uncle Miltie:

In fact, Friedman was specifically named in last month’s criteria for inclusion—along with other ancient greats like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—as an example of someone who had been deliberately left off the long list on the grounds that they were no longer actively contributing to their discipline.

And we're supposed to believe that the #1 public intellectual, Noam Chomsky, is actively contributing to his discipline of linguistics? Chomsky's big breakthrough in linguistics came in 1958. Chomsky's evidence that humans possess an innate talent for language was a major early blow against the reigning blank slate theory, but Chomsky hasn't contributed much since then because he declined to look for the Darwinian roots of language. That opened the door for his former acolyte Steven Pinker to surpass him.

I don't despise Chomsky's punditry because his political stance is idiosyncratic -- a sort of romantic left anarchism, or something like that -- but I hardly feel the need to pay attention to it. Friedman is in his 90s now, but I quoted his latest views on Pres. Bush as recently as last June, which is more than I can say for Chomsky.

Similarly, Solzhenitsyn's latest two books -- a two volume history of the relationship between Russians and Jews -- haven't even been published in the United States yet. And not because they are irrelevant to present day life but because they are too hot for the NYC publishing world to touch.

In general, the poll merely adds to my sense that we are living in an age of pygmies, when thought is valued mostly as a fashion accessory.

Let's do my list of Senior public intellectuals (about age 75 and up):

Top 5

Milton Friedman

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Edward O. Wilson

Tom Wolfe
Thomas Sowell

Honorable Mention

Freeman Dyson

Peter F. Drucker

Jacques Barzun

Samuel P. Huntington

James Q. Wilson

Among the younger generation, I know enough of the contenders to not want to get into publicly deciding who and who wouldn't make my list.

But here's a question for you: Based just on what they've written in this decade, where would "Gary Brecher" deserve to fall among the list of 100 official nominees (assuming that he had been nominated)? He looks like definite Top 10 material to me, which says a lot about the current quality of most of the nominees.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer