As the Peacock Struts: are liberals more competent than conservatives?

Very anecdotal observations of the people I know suggests that the conservatives are more likely to be “dysfunctional” than the liberals–ironically, in precisely the ways conservatives claim liberals are dysfunctional in.

The important thing here is to go beyond hand-wavey anecdotes and get actual data. It’s easy to find things like this: Red America vs. Blue America: state maps illustrate the difference, but these maps are significantly confounded by different ethnicities being concentrated in different parts of the country. For example, the high % of people who never graduated from highschool in SW Texas is probably due to Mexican immigrants, and so not germane to the present conversation.

Here is a map assembled by demographers Glass and Levchak demonstrating the correlation between conservative Christianity and divorce:

Some quotes from the article:

“Their work confirms that one of the strongest factors predicting divorce rates (per 1000 married couples) is the concentration of conservative or evangelical Protestants in that county. …

“Yet even controlling for income and region, divorce rates tend to be especially high in areas where conservative religious groups are prominent. …

“So even though conservative Protestants are much less likely to cohabit, this didn’t make a difference. There was no evidence that cohabiting would have “weeded out” the less promising unions…

“a careful analysis of variations nationally reveals that this explains none of the association between religious conservatism and divorce. …

“Glass and Levchak found that the high divorce rate among conservative religious groups is indeed explained in large part by the earlier ages at first marriage and first birth, and the lower educational attainment and lower incomes of conservative Protestant youth.

“Explains Glass, “Restricting sexual activity to marriage and encouraging large families seem to make young people start families earlier in life, even though that may not be best for the long-term survival of those marriages.” In an earlier report to the Council on Contemporary Families, economist Evelyn Lehrer from University of Illinois at Chicago explained that every year a women postpones marriage, right up until her early 30s, lowers her chance of an eventual divorce.

“But people who live in conservative religious counties have a higher risk of divorce even when they are not affiliated with a conservative religious group.”

The HBD explanation, of course, is that Evangelical Protestantism is concentrated among dumber whites, and people who postpone marriage and childbearing are smarter and more competent at planning their lives. If you squint at the map, you may notice that Evangelical Protestants in the Deep South seem to have lower divorce rates than their religious brethren in Appalachia. (Is a finding of “Appalachians don’t act very smart” even interesting?)

But this is not necessarily an important detail in this particular conversation.

The important thing is that liberal atheists, Unitarians, and the like get divorced less than religious conservatives like Evangelical Christians.

And yet, these same Evangelicals have been protesting mightily against their very own divorces (among other marital novelties,) while blaming the whole business on liberals!

 

I’ve been looking for data on abortions, but can’t find any broken down by conservative vs liberal. Overall, it looks like conservatives get fewer abortions, but state regulations are an obvious confounder.

However, I think we can calculate teen pregnancy rates:

You know, this isn’t looking very good for West Virginia…

Okay, I was totally going to do math for you, but it turns out that someone has been keeping track of this data by race for me, so I’m going with that:

From The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy

West Virginia leads, but the rest of the South follows pretty closely.

“But wait,” I hear you saying, “what if this is just a side effect of Northerners aborting their unintended pregnancies?”

Never fear, I have another map:

From The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy

Nope! White Southerners just get pregnant a lot.

It’s probably already obvious, but the folks getting pregnant are also rather promiscuous:

The data ain’t great, but it looks like Southerners are sluts. And New Hampshirites.

My suspicion, based on data I’ve seen elsewhere and will try to dig up later, is that dumber people have higher sex drives and mature faster than smarter people–so dumb people are much more likely to have sex while still in highschool. But even intelligent people from the South seem to have more sex than more liberal folks.

A friend of mine who grew up in one of the more conservative parts of the country, who has always prided themself on being morally upright and derided the permissive immorality of liberals, moved a few years ago to a much more liberal part of the country, and describes everyone there as, “A bunch of prudes.” Yes, the descendants of Puritans are sexually reserved and don’t like to be touched–who’d have thought?

 

So. Conservatives are more promiscuous, have more teen pregnancies, and more divorces.  Even on a subject as trivial as weight, liberals are more likely to be part of the “fat acceptance movement,” but conservatives are more likely to actually be fat. I could go on, with other stats like educational attainment and GDP, but you get the idea: Conservatives walk one walk, but talk another.

This raises a question: If liberals are really better at doing the things conservative claim are moral, then is liberal morality really so “dysfunctional”?

The answer looks like: No.

(Those of you stressing out that gay marriage may be the downfall of civilization, take heart: it’s much more likely that stupid people fucking are going to be the downfall of civilization.)

Which raises the second question: Then why are Conservatives complaining about Liberal morality in the first place?

My theory: They aren’t.

In real life, liberals and conservatives don’t actually interact very often. They are concentrated in different parts of the country, are descended from different ethnic stock, and would rather their children married a non-white than a member of the opposite political party. They have very different personalities, and even when they aren’t talking politics, they get along horribly.

The “Liberal,” as far as the average conservative is concerned, is a boogeyman on TV doing horrible things in far-off places like CA or NYC. The inverse is also true: the “Conservative” is a disembodied talking head on Fox News or rural boogeyman in a place they’ve never been, like Indiana.

When conservatives talk about the sanctity of marriage, what they really mean is, “I screwed up. I did dumb things, and that’s how I got pregnant/divorced/etc. Whatever you do in life, don’t be like me.” But most people don’t like to admit that they’re talking about their own mistakes, so they blame everything they can on some mysterious, unknown “other”: the liberal. The other is, after all, but a foil for the self.

Liberals do the same thing. They blame all sorts of things (black-white test score gaps, incarceration rates, etc.) on the actions of conservatives (conservative and “racist” are pretty much synonymous to liberals,) even when no conservatives are even around. The invisible, insidious, omni-present conservative gets blamed for everything liberal policies can’t fix. (Saboteurs to the gulag!)

But why do liberals support policies they don’t themselves follow?

Two obvious reasons come to mind:

1. Liberals tend to believe that they shouldn’t tell others what to do, so if you want to do something dumb, hey, that’s your business, and…

2. It’s hard to muster a good argument for banning something if you’ve never been personally affected by it. Among the liberals I know, divorce is vanishingly rare, but I know conservatives with 4 or 5 divorces each. Divorce is a real issue for conservatives because it’s a thing they frequently do, just as low blood sugar is an issue for a diabetic. In an environment where lots of people get divorced, it is probably a good social strategy to advertise one’s qualities as a mate by roundly denouncing the practice–you look more serious about staying married. In an environment where few people get divorced, declaring your opposition isn’t so useful. There, the inverse may be true: people can signal that they are such good mates, they’re not even worried about divorce being legal. Like the peacock, they signal strength by flashily showing just how low they can lower their strength without getting eaten.

The only downside, of course, is that sometimes liberals do get eaten by their permissive attitudes toward sex. Like when they get AIDS.

Implications: Should conservatives ditch conservatism and adopt more liberal attitudes?

In general, it probably wouldn’t help. The liberals have their attitudes due to conditions in liberal areas, and conservatives have their attitudes due to conditions in their lives. Further, divorce and promiscuity probably have more to do intelligence than any particular attitudes, and encouraging divorce isn’t going to make people smarter.

If your goal is monogamous, stable, long-term marriages with happy, healthy people in them, you’d be better off focusing on the social policies that make people with these genetic traits breed less than people who don’t.

Schedule

Just a quick note to let you know that I’m testing a new Monday-Friday (no weekends) posting schedule for the next few weeks.

On the one hand, it’s frustrating that there are just so many ideas I haven’t written down yet–I have 20+ drafts going at any given time–but on the other hand, there’s something to be said for allowing enough time for discussion and reflection.

Feel free to let me know what you think.

Some Notable Nigerians

It’s easy to roll your eyes at people demanding that we teach the history of Africa and other non-Western locales. But I support such a move, so long as the history is honest.

Of course it wouldn’t be honest; we are a society of liars.

Here is Madam Efunroye Tinubu (c. 1810 – 1887) :

From the Wikipedia

Madam Tinubu was a wealthy and powerful chieftess of the Egba clan (Youruba people, Nigeria.) She made her money through the slave trade, and resisted the British Colonial Government because it was interfering with he ability to make money by selling humans into bondage.

Tinubu Square in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, is named in her honor.

Cosmic Yoruba has some interesting things to say about the next chieftess of the Egba, Efunsetan Aniwura:

“…she was a WSW [note: woman who has sex with women] who never married, never had any children and was referred to as lakiriboto [a woman with no vaginal opening] …

“Efunsetan Aniwura rose to become a very powerful and wealthy trader in the 19th century, she is one of the few Yoruba women that has withstood the test of history. Oral tradition states that she had three large farms, and that no less than 100 slaves worked in each at a time. Apparently she owned over 2,000 slaves in her lifetime.

“Like other Yoruba women traders, Efunsetan travelled across the land trading with all sorts of people. Her speciality was in arms and ammunition, she would lend these to warriors when they were going on military expeditions and it seems she also went to war a few times herself.”

Cosmic Yoruba notes that “oral tradition” is often dodgy, and we can’t believe everything we hear. She rejects various stories about Efunestan going crazy and terrorizing her slaves, on the grounds that they don’t make much sense, and further speculates:

“I wonder if this is a classic example of history erasing a woman’s achievements. I will never get tired of pointing out how our current ideas on how our female ancestors lived are very different from the reality. We believe that they all married, lived “under” their husbands, never divorced, spent their lives in the kitchen while the men went out to work, never enjoyed sex, were all straight and so on. Powerful women like Efunsetan, who may have never married or had children and may have even been queer will have their stories snipped and trimmed, molded to become a warning for other women…so as to discourage them from craving power perhaps.”

Cosmic Yoruba has done a lot more research about traditional Nigerian life than I have, so I am inclined to trust her. Besides, her accounts line up with most other accounts I have read.

Cosmic Yoruba ends with songs praising Efunestan:

“The woman, who instils fear in others,
the fearsome one, who slaughters slaves to celebrate Id-el-Kabir.
Efunsetan is one force, Ibadan is another.
The valiant that challenges the Almighty God,
if the most high does not answer her on time,
Efunsetan leaves the earth to go and meet him in Heaven…”

 

Have you heard the story that Africa was a developed, thriving place full of wealthy economies and fabulous cities, until evil Europeans showed up, enslaved a bunch of people and colonized the rest?

Cities did exist in Sub-Saharan Africa, but they were few and far between. They were in the sorts of places you would expect them to, like the intersections of major trade routes or major ports. There were a few major trade items, like gold, ivory, and human beings. There were empires with wealthy individuals.

But the overall level of economic development throughout the sub-continent was very low. Those who claim that Europeans are responsible for the current levels of African development need to explain why African development was so low before the Europeans got there.

Edited to add: hey, look, we have a new graph! It is far superior to the old one, though it covers a different time range, so well still have to use both:

I really hope I can find a better graph

with special thanks to commentator “With the thoughts you’d be thinkin” and Wikimedia Commons

Back in the year one, most of the world was engaged in hunter-gathering, small-scale agriculture, or herding. The GDP of most of the world reflects this. Africa at least has gold to export, unlike the steppe. Africa is still less developed than Western Europe (and this is including northern Africa, which is quite different from Sub-Saharan Africa.)

By 1300-1400, various estimates put British per cap GDP around $1,000, with the average for Western Europe as a whole a little lower, but still more than the current per capita GDP of many modern Sub-Saharan countries. And it’s more than SSA had in 1400, well before European colonialism began. If anything, Africa’s GDP only took off after colonialsim; there is no sign that colonialism caused economic collapse.

According to Peter Frost, “In sub-Saharan Africa, high polygyny rates are associated with ‘female farming’ societies, and such societies began to spread outward from a point of origin near the Niger’s headwaters some 6,000 to 7,000 years ago (Murdock, 1959, pp. 44, 64-68).”

In The African Outlier, Frost quotes Draper, 1989 (PDF):  “Much of rural African subsistence is based on the work of women in their gardens; men make only modest contributions. Typically, rights in land are held by men by virtue of their membership in kinship or village units. A man who wishes to add another wife is under few constraints (provided his kinship group has the land and bridewealth), since women, in effect, pay their own way. They produce food, and they rear children. In rural areas, when a man marries an additional wife, he is awarded additional fields for this woman and her children (Bryson 1981). The importance of male labor to support such households is reduced. In former times, before colonially imposed peace, the male role in defense was important. But since central governments have been present, men who remain in rural villages spend their time in leisure, in management of household labor, or in local political affairs…”

And in The Beginnings of Black Slavery and The Beginnings of Black Slavery II, Frost argues that, “… It looks like black slaves began to enter the Middle East in growing numbers some time before 0 AD, the result being a slow but steady increase in the region’s black population throughout the early Christian era and into the Islamic era.”

He goes on to argue that polygamy basically drove the slave trade. Do the math; if one man has 5 wives, then four men have no wives. What do you do with your extra men? Attack the next village over, capture their women and sell all of their extra men into slavery.

There are other possible explanations, but I happen to find Frost’s convincing.

The idea that things were going swimmingly until Europeans showed up and started enslaving everyone is pure a-historical baloney. In fact, did you catch this little bit above: “Madam Tinubu … resisted the British Colonial Government because it was interfering with he ability to make money by selling humans into bondage.”

According to the Wikipedia page on Colonial Nigeria, “British influence began with prohibition of slave trade to British subjects in 1807. The resulting collapse of African slave trade led to the decline and eventual collapse of the Edo Empire. ”

So Nigerian heroes were actively resisting British influence in Nigeria because the British were trying to stop them from enslaving people, and the slave trade is supposed to be the fault of the colonizers?

 

Let’s teach history.

Review: Decoding Neanderthals on PBS (Nova)

Available on Netflix, maybe elsewhere.

Overall: Recommended if you like Neanderthals or human ancestry. Probably not useful if you are already an expert in the field.

Pros: interesting discussion of flint-knapping, gluey pitch production, and Neanderthal burials.

Flint knapping is one of my occasional interests. It is surprisingly difficult to just pick up a rock and produce a useful tool. Without a good teacher, you quickly degenerate to banging the rock on the ground as hard as you can like a retarded monkey. If Kanzi the bonobo saw me trying to make stone tools, he’d probably bring me some fruit out of pity. “Poor hairless idiot ape,” Kanzi would think. “Can’t even make tools. If I don’t feed it, it’ll starve.”

Amusing digression time: Once I was walking through the city, in a semi-developed/semi-overgrown lot, and saw a bit of shiny rocks lying around on the ground. Unusual for the area, because the local geographic history hasn’t led to a lot of rocks on the surface, and most of those are of the duller sedimentary sorts (or, obviously, landscaping materials.) So I picked up this bit of flint, then another bit of flint, and then a larger one with obvious convex areas from being struck with another piece. And a few feet away, here was a piece that fit comfortably into my hand, perfect for knocking chips off the other chunk. Some of the pieces I even managed to fit back together, reassembling the rock that once was.

I came back with a small box and picked up all the bits of flint before development began on the lot. One piece does look like an arrowhead, but given that I found it alongside a bunch of chips that are more or less flint-knapping trash, the arrowhead’s creator probably thought there was something wrong with it.

Sure, the whole little box may be filled with little more than ancient trash, there is something I love about picking up these rocks and being able to see in their shapes the actions of some other humans, the angle they held that rock at, the way they smacked it with another rock to produce these flakes. To feel this connection between myself and some other human who walked here before me, and the traces of their life that no one else walking through that place had noticed.

Anyway, turns out the Neanderthals had a pretty interesting/unique way of making flint tools, that involved first shaping a large block of flint into a specific shape by flaking bits off the sides, and then, with one good hit, knocking off one large slice. This is a more complicated process than merely picking up a rock and whacking bits off of it it until you get an edge.

The gluey pitch seems to have been derived (distilled?) from birch bark. Some scientists demonstrated the process by burning a roll of birch bark in a pit, but they obviously did not use enough bark, and only got a smudge of goo. It’s a bit frustrating watching someone do something obviously wrong–since you’re filming this for TV, why not use a great big bunch of birch bark so you can get enough pitch to actually show us?

Anyway, looks like Neanderthals distilled this gluey stuff and then used it to help secure the flint tips to their spears, before thrusting them into the sides of enormous shaggy elephants, which are quite formidable animals. So the pitch (and bindings) had to be pretty darn good.

Neanderthals also seem to have buried their dead, though the show notes that their potential grave-goods pale in comparison to similar human burials.

The parts about Neanderthal DNA will be of interest to you if you don’t know about the Neanderthal/human DNA admixture business already, or you’ve heard about it but are still a little unclear on the details. The scientists interviewed claimed that it looks like there were a lot of interbreeding incidents rather than just a few, but “a lot” in this case does not necessarily mean “thousands”.

 

Cons: For a program that goes into depth on how inaccurate depictions of Neanderthals happened (ages ago, someone found a skeleton with arthritis and concluded that all Neanderthals were stooped,) their depiction of the homo Sapiens who first encountered the Neanderthals was also inaccurate.

The first encounters between humans and Neanderthals probably happened in the Middle East, shortly after h Sapiens left Africa, but before they had split into Asian and European branches. In other words, not to put too fine a point on it, whites did not yet exist. We’re not sure exactly when white skin evolved, but it probably wasn’t before h Sapiens got to Europe.

(Of course, it could be the other way around, and it’s the Bushmen who’ve changed since they split off.)

Either way, it’s pretty easy to assume things that are probably wrong, and the h Sapiens who first encountered h Neanderthals were probably more similar in appearance to modern Africans or Middle Easterners than Europeans.

A second issue occurred during a dramatization of the Neanderthal and h Sapiens DNA. Neanderthal DNA was depicted as red, and h Sapiens as blue. (Erm, I think. Unless I’ve got it backwards.) They then showed a “combined” DNA strand with blue and red pieces.

While this is a fine way to visualize what’s going on, I would just like to clarify that DNA isn’t actually blue or red, nor are there folks running around with mosaic red/blue variants.

You may be laughing (I burst out laughing at the sight of it,) but I know people who would very sincerely and devoutly insist that “Humans have different colored DNA from Neanderthals. I saw this program on PBS all about it, and I know PBS is accurate. You should watch the program!”

You can imagine how talking to these people makes me feel.

Finally, my last complaint is that there was no discussion of Neanderthal DNA in Native Americans!

Worldwide distribution of B006, (from Yotova et al. “An X-Linked Haplotype of Neandertal Origin Is Present Among All Non-African Populations,” Mol. Biol. Evol. 28 (7), 2011).

SNP PCA from Skoglund & Jakobsson’s “Archaic Human Ancestry in East Asia” (2011)

Right, so what’s up with Native Americans? You may have noticed that during the discussion with the map, no jellybeans were placed on the Americas at all. What a pity, when there’s still so much about the peopling of the Americas that we don’t know.

In the future, I’m hoping for similar documentaries about the Denisovans and their DNA admixture in modern humans.

Predictions for the Political Future

Looking back to 2005, I wonder what I would have predicted for the political trends of 2015. Of course it is tempting to inflate my success score (I did sort of predict 9/11 a couple of years before it happened, so at least I have that,) but here’s my attempt to be honest:

1. A variety of issues like abortion and the Middle East will remain prominent. Check.

2. Gay marriage is guaranteed, sooner or later. Check.

3. Transgender issues will never break into the mainstream, because there just aren’t that many trans people. Nope. Transgender issues have become oddly prominent.

4. Increased concern for the environment/global warming/alternative energy/peak oil. Nope.

5. Democrats focus on poverty/labor issues of the Occupy Wall Street variety. Nope. That’s been abandoned for anti-racism.

6. Internet feminism will be a growing political force. I give this a sort-of check, because internet feminism actually got much bigger than I expected, and then slid into anti-racism, which I didn’t expect. I should have, though. People were talking about it.

7. I was concerned at the time with over-criminalization/over-regulation destroying the country, but wouldn’t have predicted that anyone but me would care about these things. I’ve since discovered that I can always bond with my Republican relatives by complaining about over-regulation of small  businesses, and the Black Lives Matter movement has at least noticed some aspects of the over-criminalization.

8. I did not predict the demise of libertarianism due to the rise of SJWs pushing anti-racism on the left and the the alt-right / neoreaction response.

9. I did not see ISIS coming.

 

So I got to thinking, what do I predict for the future? Can I do better? I’m going to write down my predictions for 2025 now, so I can check back in a decade:

1. The government attempts to cut prison population by, say, 25%, between now and then. This is not to say that they will succeed, but that this will be their goal. The easiest methods will be paroling/releasing inmates, cutting sentences, and legalizing drugs, but there will also be some push to just arrest fewer people.

2. In a related move, schools will attempt to equalize punishments by race. It won’t work.

3. Large numbers of African-Americans moved out of slums in places like Detroit and into suburban neighborhoods in places like Seattle. This will result in lower crime in Detroit and higher crime in Seattle, triggering more white flight.

3. By 2025, government will have begun reversing its imprisonment policy to deal with a 1980s-style crime wave.

4. California’s budget will eventually collapse, though probably not within ten years. A large % of people in the state will be working (and living) “under the table”, so to speak, both to protect their wages from taxation and because complying with tax laws and other regulations is a huge pain in the butt. Those who can’t work under the table will increasingly move out, driving up land prices/rents in nearby states. Without taxes, there will be no money for pensions, police, schools, infrastructure, etc. Collapse will end with the Feds moving in to take over the place and sort out the mess.

5. More generally, over-regulation and taxation will continue placing an enormous burden on businesses, especially small businesses, continuing the ossification trend that will make America an increasingly unattractive place to do business.

6. Sometime in the next decade, a 2008-style economic downturn and aftermath; pensions collapse generally.

Looking further out:

7. Increased violence in “El Norte” as Latin American drug and gang violence becomes rooted in the area.

8. The % of whites with IQs over 140 continues to decline; black IQ appears to be declining faster. High-IQ Americans will increasingly come from immigrant backgrounds.

9. Abortion, the Middle East, etc., will continue being issues just like they are now.

10. The Left fractures as Muslim groups grow powerful enough to insist on toleration for cousin marriage, polygamy, and Sharia law, and no longer support leftist ideological things like female empowerment, abortion, or gay marriage. The necessary compromises will make no one happy.

11. The current SJW-style racial narrative will move on to other topics as the growing Hispanic population starts throwing its weight around. Hispanics aren’t big on voting, but when they do vote, they’ll make a pretty solid ethnic block, and they won’t really care about black issues. Blacks will have trouble competing with Hispanics on the labor market and will get displaced from Hispanic neighborhoods. Hispanics will not have the same fear of looking racist in their dealings with blacks as whites have, and will be pretty open about this.

12. NRx as we know it will probably also be gone, as prominent bloggers get bored and move on to other projects.

 

ETA: I meant to ask: What are your predictions?

Family, Nation, and History

What does it mean to belong?

Despite my inauspicious start, it turns out that I do have history of my own. For privacy reasons, I can’t give too many details, but so far, after reading family histories assembled by my grandparents, I’ve found immigrants in the early 1700s, the 1600s, and sometime between 60 and 12,000 years ago–the exact dates of that particular migration episode is still being debated–but none in the 1800s or 1900s. (This may, of course, be merely an issue of incomplete genealogy.) I can count over a dozen ethnic groups in my family tree (though I should note that I consider the “American Nations” ethnic groups, which you may not.)

If anyone has a right to call themselves an “American,” then I suspect I do.

My husband’s family I laughingly refer to as immigrants. Okay, half of them are good, old-stock Americans. The other half, though, seem to have immigrated at some point during the 1800s. Or maybe even the early 1900s.

I have no connections to the old country; indeed, I don’t really have an old country–there is no one place that a majority of my ancestors came from. I have never had any sense of being anything other than what I am, and for much of my life, not even that. For many years, actually, I operated under quite incorrect assumptions about my origins.

On a practical level, of course, it doesn’t really matter–I would still be me if it turned out I arrived here as an infant from Kazakhstan and my whole “history” was a colossal mix-up with someone else’s. But this is my history, and as such, it is special to me, just like that ragged old bear in the closet my grandmother made. It might be worthless to you, but it’s mine.

What does it mean to have a history?

When I read about the various Bering Strait theories, I think, “Some of my ancestors were there, hunting mammoths.”

When I look at the British, French, and Spanish colonies and the American Revolution, I get to think, “Some of my ancestors were there.” Indeed, some of them were influential folks in those days. When I think about the values of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, I can say, “These were my ancestors’ ideals.”

When I look at the Civil War, well, there’s a lot of family history. My grandmother still tells the stories her great-grandmother told her about watching the Yankees burn down the family farm.

Some ancestors were pioneers. Some were farmers and some professors and some scientists who helped develop technologies that sent satellites into outer space.

And yet… Nationalism isn’t really my thing. Bald eagles, Stars and Stripes, the Pledge of Allegiance… they’re all a big nope. I don’t feel much of anything for them. I have no interest in the “Southern Cause,” and I don’t even have a particular affection for Americans–most of my close friends are immigrants. And as previously stated, I am not a white nationalist–IQ nationalist is a much better description. I like smart people.

I look out for American interests because I happen to live here. If I lived in Japan, I’d look out for Japan’s interests, simply because anything bad that happened in Japan or to the Japanese would also be happening to me–even though I’d be an immigrant with no particular history there. It is natural (particularly among leftists) to assume, therefore, that immigrants to the US may do the same.

(Edited to clarify: Commonly assumed things are often wrong. Many on the left assume that unprecedented numbers of immigrants from non-Western cultures will adopt American culture in a way that does not substantially change it. The whole point of this post is to discuss the nebulous effects of cultural change and ethnic identity. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of graphs for “How proud I feel while looking at a picture of George Washington,” so this is difficult to express.)

In fact, I know plenty of immigrants who have far more nationalism for their adopted country than I do.

(Edited to clarify: I happened to write this after visiting the home of an immigrant family that had framed versions of the Pledge of Allegiance and the Signing of the Declaration of Independence on their walls. I recognize that these people are really glad to be in this country, which they consider a vastly superior place to the one they came from.)

Is it of any importance that people have some sort of cultural connection to the place where they live?

I’ve tracked down a bunch of graphs/pictures related to immigration over time:

(Oops, looks like a bit of text snuck in when I cropped the picture.)

ETA: Note that % of immigrants in the population is really at unprecedentedly high numbers, and the countries they come from have changed radically, too:

Total quantity of immigrants by region of origin.

ETA: I thought this was obvious, but immigrants from whatever country they happen to come from tend to bring with them the norms and values of their own culture. Sometimes those norms easily mix with American ones. Sometimes they don’t.

ETA: Another graph showing the ethnic makeup of American immigrants.

ETA: So what happens when immigration goes up? Well, for starters, it looks like a lot more crime happens:

 

And wages seem to stagnate:

(The increase in household median income is due to women entering the workforce, thus increasing the number of workers per household.)

I know there are other things going on in these time periods that could also affect income inequality, but that graph looks remarkably similar to the immigration graphs. Also:

  

A lot of these came from Migration Policy Institute, but I’ve tried to use a variety of sources to avoid any particular bias or inaccuracies.

Now here we began with poetic waxing about one’s ancestors, and are whining about Irish criminality in the 1800s and how hard it is to get a job. BTW, Irish criminality was a real problem.

The correlations are suggestive, but unproven, so let’s get back to nostalgia:

From, “Most decade-specific words in Billboard popular song titles, 1890-2014“

In the period from 1890-1920, the most common elements in the song titles seem to be family relations, friends, and nostalgia: Pal, Mammy, Home, Land, Old, Uncle, etc. This is in stark contrast to 1990-2015, when some sort of apocalyptic accident destroyed our ability to spell and we reverted to a savage state of nature: Hell, Fuck, Die, U, Ya, Thang.

Even in my own lifetime, historical nostalgia and appreciation for America’s founders seems to have drastically waned. As a child, Westerns were still occasional things and the whole mythology surrounding the settlement of the West was still floating around, though obviously nothing compared to its height in the 50s, when people were really into Davy Crockett:

 

(Look like anyone you know? , )

 

The “American Girls” line of books and toys was a big deal when I was a kid, featuring historically-themed dolls and books focusing on the American Revolution, Pioneers, Civil War, Industrialization, and WWII.

Today, the line has been re-branded as “Be Forever,” with far more focus on modern girls and cultural groups. Even the historical books have been re-designed, with “American Girl” reduced to fine print and “Be Forever” scrawled across the covers. The Revolutionary War, Pioneer, and WWII dolls have all been “retired” from the line. Yes, American history without the Revolution. The Civil War doll is still there, though.

Are slavery and the Vietnam protests the only parts of our history that we remember anymore?

Old:    New:

History is dead.

(Sadly, since Mattel bought the company, they’ve become delusional about the amount of pink and purple girls historically wore.)

 

What would the US look like if all the Johnny-Come-Lateys from the migration waves of the 1800s had never arrived?

I have no idea. (This is an invitation for you to discuss the question.)

In the casually pagan style of our Christian forebears, the US Capital Building rotunda features a painting titled The Apotheosis of Washington, painted by Greek-Italian artist Constantino Brumidi in 1865:

This is not the only painting by this title:

The Apotheosis of Washington, by John James Barralet

Apotheosis of George Washington, by H. Weishaupt

How about a few more on the general theme?

Statue of Washington in the style of Zeus

Apotheosis of Washington and Lincoln, 1860s.

 

Things change. Life moves on. Nothing new.

 

Is a nation’s history worth preserving? How do our identities and personal histories influence our values, cultures, and connections? What does any of this mean to you?

ETA for the clueless: This is an invitation for you to present your own opinions/answers to the questions.

 

disgust vs. aggression vs. fertility (part 4 of a series)

(See also: Part 1, Yes, Women Think Male Sexuality is Disgusting; Part 2, Is disgust Real? and Part 3, Disney Explains Disgust.)

So I made some graphs:

Log. graph of homicide rates vs. fertility rates

Graph of homicide rates vs fertility rates (data from the Wikipedia)

Take your pick. They’re the same graph, except the top graph has the homicide rate on a log scale and the bottom on a linear scale, because Honduras’s homicide rate is kind of off the charts.

I couldn’t fit all of the labels onto the graphs, but since most of the countries group by region, you can still figure out roughly where most of them go. The lower left hand corner, low fertility and low homicide, is filled with dots from East Asia and Western Europe. The central-middle-bottom section, of moderate birthrates and below-average homicide rates, has the Muslim countries. The far right–high fertility and medium violence–is mostly African. (Note that Angola and Gambia’s labels have been footnoted at the bottom of the graph.) And the upper left–high violence but moderate fertility–is Latin America. (The high homicide rates are one of the reasons I oppose unfettered Latin American immigration.)

While there is a positive relationship between violence and fertility, this is clearly not the whole story. Just eyeballing the log graph, it looks like a curved line would fit the data better than a straight line, but that’d require polynomial or quadratic regressions and we don’t really need to get into that much detail.

Rather, I suspect that just considering cleanliness explains the graphs: cleaner people are more easily disgusted by other people, and so have fewer children than their aggression levels would predict.

I haven’t found great data on overall “cleanliness” or “disgust rates,” but it appears that Latin Americans are some of the world’s cleanest people:

From the Atlantic, “How Often People in Various Countries Shower“

Brazilians shower nearly 12 times a week, and Mexicans wash their hair more than anyone else.

By contrast, the French and Russians are positively disgusting. (I’m giving India and China a pass here due to limited running water in their countries.)

Here’s another graph, showing similar numbers:

My personal experience with East Asians (Japanese, Taiwanese, etc.,) also suggests that they are cleaner overall than Americans. These countries appear to have been hit with a double-whammy–very clean and low aggression–driving down the interest in sex so far that 60% of girls aged 16-19 claim to be uninterested in sex or even despise it, and even 40-50% of married people haven’t had sex in the past month. They’ve even got a phrase for it, “sex disgust syndrome.”

I don’t find Japanese fertility rates concerning, just because Japan really does need fewer people and the sex-inclined Japanese will quickly replace the non-sex inclined ones, so the issue will work itself out naturally. (And at any rate, I am not really in any position to go telling the Japanese what to do with their own society.)

In our own society, though, I am concerned that decreased monogamy (more “hooking up” via apps like Tinder and Grindr, etc.) is leading to more, not less female concern about male sexual aggression, with all sorts of unfortunate side effects.

(See also: Part 1, Yes, Women Think Male Sexuality is Disgusting; Part 2, Is disgust Real? and Part 3, Disney Explains Disgust.)

Disgust part 3: Disney explains Disgust

(See also: Part 1, Yes, Women Think Male Sexuality is Disgusting; Part 2, Is disgust Real? and Part 4, Disgust vs. Aggression vs. Fertility.)

So today I was reading the picture book version of Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out, which is about a little girl and anthropomorphized versions of her emotions, and happened upon this quote:

“And of course, Riley needed Disgust’s good taste to avoid being poisoned, both physically and socially. Disgust helped Riley steer clear of anything and everything she found repulsive, from horrible food to rotten people.” [bold mine]

The accompanying picture is of a toddler refusing some icky vegetable. One wonders what toddlers think about “rotten people,” if anything at all.

Grownups, however, express their opinions about the ickiness of others loud and clear:

“David Merkur, 28, Keeps Seriously Creepy Spreadsheet Of All His Online Dates” claims the Huffington Post.

Poor David Merkur wrote no more in his spreadsheet than millions of women have written in their diaries–there is nothing remotely creepy about noting where you met someone or when you have a date scheduled. His only mistake was showing the spreadsheet to one of the women he was interested in. For this, Jezebel, the HuffPo, and many other websites ran articles which used his real name and intended, IMO, to completely humiliate and defame him.

Something similar happened to a friend when one of their exes decided to destroy them as publicly as possible. Thankfully their story didn’t make it onto Jezebel or HuffPo, but embarrassing personal details were broadcast to almost all of their friends, pretty much destroying their social life and leaving them really fucking depressed.

It is no secret that women are hostile to men they don’t like. Really hostile. I’ve spent enough time in the feminist trenches to know how these conversations tend to go:

“Why do women go after assholes? I’m such a nice guy and I can’t even get a date!”

“Any guy who calls himself a nice guy is actually an asshole! You’re a misogynist oppressor!”

Etc., etc.

The whole business has always been a little baroque to me, perhaps because I think people should be nice to each other, or perhaps because I’ve watched plenty of women fall all over themselves trying to hop into bed with criminals. But I find that one of the tricks to understanding people is to generally assume that they are asserting some true version of reality as they see it, so to understand feminists, I must assume that they really, truly hate Nice Guys.

But if we dig a little deeper, it’s not really the niceness they hate, (well, it is the niceness, but it is more than just that,) it’s the sexual interest.

Slate Star Codex made this montage that I have stolen without permission so I really hope he forgives me:

Some of those are anti-Semitic cartoons Scott stuck in there.

It’s from his article about Creep Shaming (my title, not his,) that is quite relevant to this whole post and I encourage you to read it if you haven’t already.

(While we are at it, 1. What is up with the fedora thing? Seriously I don’t get it. It is a hat. Who cares about hats? 2. How much social rejection/creep shaming is actually aimed at Jewish men who just don’t look like other whites and so don’t meet female attractiveness standards?)

Also, Scott Alexander is not the only person I’ve seen compare/imply that the whole feminist reaction to nerdy men reminds them of anti-Semitism.

Women complain about men’s unreasonable beauty standards, but it’s the women who rate 80% of men unattractive. Men, by contrast, rate most women as around “average” attractiveness.

As I noted a few days ago, this is all most likely because women have actually evolved to find male sexuality disgusting. A woman only needs 1-4 men in her life, not thousands, so any men other than her chosen few are little more than threats.

And apparently, people also route “potential threats” though their “disgust” modules, and some people are particularly prone to experiencing physical disgust at the mere thought of things they do not like.

Like inferior males and their sexuality.

Free Northerner has an older post about the time he tried to court a Christian young woman, and her parents (quite rudely) grilled him on a long list of personal questions. They obviously had it out for him, and so he should not have answered any of the questions or otherwise put up with their bullshit, but regardless, he probably sealed his fate with the woman by answering honestly that he sometimes watches porn.

You might as well talk about your feces at the dinner table as admit to a woman you barely know and her parents that you watch porn. Yes, everyone has to poop, but that doesn’t mean you talk about it in polite company. Likewise, yes, you have sexual needs, but that doesn’t mean you talk about them at the dinner, and any insistence that you should is just an insistence that the girl should only date men who are good at lying.

Be careful what you incentivise.

 

On a neurological level, I suspect that disgust and fear are closely related. Both get processed through the same region of the brain, my old favorite, the amygdala (but probably involve a bunch of other regions that I just don’t know anything about.) Both are negative reactions to external stimuli intended to protect you from danger. Fear protects you from things you might need to run away from, like tigers, while disgust protects you from stationary things, like rotting lions.

Conservatives show heightened fear/disgust responses upon meeting strangers, leading to distrust of outsiders, but the ability to feel fear also seems to help us empathize with others and feel their fear; sociopaths are deficient in their abilities to empathize and feel fear.

Disgust therefore has, apparently, two purposes:

1. It keeps you away from disease vectors like rot/feces

2. It prevents you from having sex with inferior mates.

One of the results implied by this is that cleaner people have less interest in sex, and dirtier people more interest. Which I suppose explains the phrase, “dirty old man.”

There is an additional important factor: aggression. Aggression, I suspect, neutralizes disgust. “Nice guys” lack the proper forms of aggression, like being tall and socially dominant, having a good sense of humor, good looks, prestigious job, and generally not being shy or otherwise beta. I am really super not the greatest person to get opinions about dating from, because I have never dated any women at all, but this appears, IMO, to be basically true: the aggressive bird gets the worm.

In the past, monogamy functioned, among other things, to basically protect women from too much male sexual interest, because married women were basically thought of as off-limits. This greatly reduced the number of men expressing sexual interest in married women, removing one source of potential stress from their lives.

When I hear women my own age talk about how, “We need to have a discussion about consent and aggression and rape,” I just look at them weird. After a decade of marriage, first-date style concerns about negotiating boundaries with people I’ve just met have faded far into the recesses of memory.

One of the side effects of decreasing monogamy in our society and an increase in “hookup” culture, seems to be an increase female concern about male sexual aggression. Overall, I suspect the numbers on aggressions like rape are down, (at least since 1990,) tracking other crime rates. But fear of male aggression need not have anything to do with actual aggression; it need only have to do with contact with males. If contact with men who want to have sex with them triggers womens’ disgust instincts, then putting women into more contact with men who want to have sex with them, even if those guys are totally nice guys who’d never do anything aggressive, will constantly trigger the disgust response and start stressing out the women. In the end, you get things like the whole Mattress Girl phenomenon.

“Sulkowicz, who graduated Sunday, spent her senior year hauling a 50-pound mattress around campus to protest the Columbia administration’s failure to expel her alleged rapist. …

““If we use proof in rape cases,” said Sulkowicz, “we fall into the patterns of rape deniers.” Yet it also trafficked in high-sounding maxims composed of that mélange of pseudo-academic, quasi-mystical jargon that passes today for profundity: “In saying I expose the truth, the viewer superimposes their truth upon mine, and once again silences me.” “Well-meaning people on the street will touch me reverently. . . . They do not believe they are violating me with their hands.” “When people engage in believing in me, they objectify me.” “

Read enough cases like these, and you start wondering if maybe there’s something to be said for social norms encouraging people to only have sex with people they already know really well, and maybe are already married to.

Instead, feminists tend to demand that men not express sexual desire in women, which of course only the really shy guys who are terrified of accidentally offending women and deeply committed to being decent humans in the first place actually listen to. They then sit in their rooms, alone, and feel absolutely awful for ever being attracted to a woman (objectification!) The assholes, of course, do not give a shit about any of this and continue being assholes.

As such, aggression appears to be an important factor in overcoming disgust and generally functioning in jobs and life. Shy, gentle people get shat upon in our society, while aggressive liars get jobs and women.

 

Of course, there are truly rotten people in this world, ones that kids (and adults) should watch out for. But the vast majority of “creeps” that women reject aren’t the truly rotten apples. They’re just guys with the misfortune to be not very attractive or socially dominant.

(See also: Part 1, Yes, Women Think Male Sexuality is Disgusting; Part 2, Is disgust Real? and Part 4, Disgust vs. Aggression vs. Fertility.)