Transsexuals Prove That Gender is Real

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one: Sex is biological; gender is a social construct.

Well, you should know my response by now: Sex is also a social construct.

X is a social construct does not mean “X is totally made up.” It means, “The word is defined however the hell people feel like using it.” This is true of all language.

200 years ago, people did not define “biological sex” as “has XX or XY chromosomes,” because no one knew about chromosomes, and yet they still had this concept of “biological sex.” For that matter, if you get right down to the nitty gritty of how “biological sex” develops in the fetus/young person, it is not just a matter of “Do you have a Y chromosome?” Biological sex does not work the same for all species, (eg, for crocodiles, the egg’s temperature determines whether the baby inside develops as male or female,) but even within humans, the process is complicated.

Diseases or medical conditions are the easiest way to highlight all the things that come together to determine one’s “biological sex”:

Klinefelter Syndrome: person is born XXY instead of XX or XY. People with KS have tiny genitals. The Y chromosome triggers male development, but the two Xs cause an over-production of female hormones. Most people with KS are infertile. KS occurs in 1:500 to 1:1000 live male births.

Given about 150 million men in the US, that comes out to between 300,000 and 150,000 Americans with Klinefelter Syndrome.

Some other obscure conditions with similar names are XYY, XXXX, and XXYY Syndrome. People with only one X chromosome and nothing else have Turner Syndrome. TS affects about 1 in 2000 to 1 in 5000 females, or about 75,ooo to 30,000 Americans.

Congenital adrenal hyperplasia “are any of several autosomal recessive diseases resulting from mutations of genes for enzymes mediating the biochemical steps of production of cortisol from cholesterol by the adrenal glands (steroidogenesis).

“Most of these conditions involve excessive or deficient production of sex steroids and can alter development of primary or secondary sex characteristics in some affected infants, children, or adults.”

The Wikipedia  recounts the potential first historical description of a CAH case:

“‘In one of the anatomical theaters of the hospital…, there arrived toward the end of January a cadaver which in life was the body of a certain Joseph Marzo… The general physiognomy was decidedly male in all respects. There were no feminine curves to the body. There was a heavy beard. There was some delicacy of structure with muscles that were not very well developed… The distribution of pubic hair was typical of the male. Perhaps the lower extremities were somewhat delicate, resembling the female, and were covered with hair… The penis was curved posteriorly and measured 6 cm, or with stretching, 10 cm. The corona was 3 cm long and 8 cm in circumference. There was an ample prepuce. There was a first grade hypospadias… There were two folds of skin coming from the top of the penis and encircling it on either side. These were somewhat loose and resembled labia majora.’

“De Crecchio then described the internal organs, which included a normal vagina, uterus, tubes, and ovaries. … He interviewed many people and satisfied himself that Joseph Marzo “conducted himself within the sexual area exclusively as a male”, even to the point of contracting the “French disease” on two occasions. “

CAH apparently varies in incidence; among the American Indians, 1 in 280; among whites, 1 in 15,000. Given 245.5 million whites and 3 million Indians, that works out to about 27,000 in those two groups. (Wikipedia doesn’t give numbers for blacks or Hispanics.)

Androgen insensitivity syndrome “is a condition that results in the partial or complete inability of the cell to respond to androgens. The unresponsiveness of the cell to the presence of androgenic hormones can impair or prevent the masculinization of male genitalia in the developing fetus, as well as the development of male secondary sexual characteristics at puberty, … these individuals range from a normal male habitus with mild spermatogenic defect or reduced secondary terminal hair, to a full female habitus, despite the presence of a Y-chromosome.”

The people in this picture have XY chromosomes, but developed as females because they have have AIS or related conditions:

The exact incidence is unknown, especially since XX carriers are basically unaffected by the condition, but Wikipedia lists estimates between 1 in 20,400 XY births and one in 130,000, or between about 7,000 and 1,000 affected Americans.

Kallman Syndrome isn’t so much an “intersex” disorder as an “asex” disorder. Kallmann syndrome is a genetic disorder in which, “the hypothalamic neurons that are responsible for releasing gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH neurons) fail to migrate into the hypothalamus during embryonic development.”

The most prominent symptom is a failure to start puberty; oddly, one of the other common symptoms is an inability to smell. It affects both men and women.

Incidence: about 1 in 10,000, or about 32,000 Americans.

“True hermaphrodites” are rare, but do exist–perhaps due to improper cell division in developing fraternal twins. See also “human chimeras“:

“The Dutch sprinter Foekje Dillema was expelled from the 1950 national team after she refused a mandatory sex test in July 1950; later investigations revealed a Y-chromosome in her body cells, and the analysis showed that she probably was a 46,XX/46,XY mosaic female. …

“Another report of a human chimera was published in 1998, where a male human had some partially developed female organs due to chimerism. He had been conceived by in-vitro fertilization.

“In 2002, Lydia Fairchild was denied public assistance in Washington state when DNA evidence showed that she was not related to her children. A lawyer for the prosecution heard of a human chimera in New England, Karen Keegan, and suggested the possibility to the defense, who were able to show that Fairchild, too, was a chimera with two sets of DNA.”

And as I have mentioned before, people exposed to Diethylstilbestrol–DES–a synthetic estrogen used as an anti-miscarriage drug between 1940 and 1971, (when they realized its major epigenetic effects included cancer,) seems to have triggered female brain development in male fetuses.

“An estimated 3 million pregnant women in the USA were prescribed DES from 1941 through 1971. … The number of persons exposed to DES during pregnancy or in utero during 1940–1971 is unknown, but may be as high as 2 million in the United States.” Or about 1 million men.

There are others, but I will stop here. It is difficult to give a total for such conditions, but folks estimate incidence of intersex conditions around 1.7% of births, or 5.4 million Americans. (By contrast, identical twins occur in only 0.3% of pregnancies.)

As I have mentioned before, I strongly suspect that the vast majority of “trans” people actually have some form of intersex condition–I base this suspicion on the lives of the trans  people I’ve actually talked to. According to LiveScience, about 700,000 Americans, or 0.2%, are trans–significantly less than the estimated number of people with intersex conditions.

Even though 98.3% of us probably don’t have any kind of intersex (or asex) condition, 5.4 million is a lot of people. In a country where we like to put weirdos on TV so we can laugh and point at them, really obscure conditions can become quite well-known. Like octuplets.

Whether you want to call them “male,” “female,” “intersex,” or something else all has to do with your particular definition of “biological sex.” If you’d lived in 1800, your definition of “biological sex” would probably have something to do with genitals and maybe something to do with behavior, but certainly nothing to do with chromosomes or hormones or anything like that. Ten minutes ago, you probably defined “biological sex” as “has XX or XY chromosomes.” Now you’re probably wondering what the hell is up with crocodiles.

None of this changes reality. Reality doesn’t care what you call it.

 

On to Gender!

What does it mean when people say, “Gender is a social construct”?

I’m pretty sure the technical answer is, “Gender is the set of behaviors and social roles and things that people expect out of people based on their biological sex, and those expectations vary by society, ie, people in Uganda expect different things out of ‘men’ and ‘women’ than people in Japan. Heck, some societies even have ‘third genders’ and things like that.”

However, most of the time when people say, “Gender is a social construct,” what they actually mean is, “People don’t actually have gender; gender roles are a mass delusion created by the Patriarchy to oppress women that we are taught to hallucinate as little kids.”

Unfortunately, the belief that children are blank gender slates is not only common among many academics and feminists, but was a thing people really believed–leading to the surgical “correction” of intersex children born with incorrect genitalia, followed by attempts at raising them as whatever gender the parents picked. They usually picked female, because it is much easier to lop a bit off than to add on.

Imagine, for a moment, that you born with a small penis, so your parents just decided to have it chopped off, turned the nub into a clitoris, stuck a dress on you, and called you a girl.

No, it doesn’t work.

I don’t have any statistics, but I have read a lot of stories along the lines of, “My parents lied to me all my life that I was a girl and it turned out I was a boy and it was horribly traumatic and I was suicidal for most of puberty, etc., etc.”

Gender is a real thing, and even intersex kids can figure it out.

If the feminist “You learn gender roles from the patriarchical society around you” school of thought were correct, these kids would turn out completely normal members of the gender assigned to them and not have any issues at all.

If gender is a real thing, then trying to raise a kid as the opposite gender should result in exactly what we see: The kids are miserable, and then they assert that they are the gender they were born as.

 

But what about trans people who don’t have any kind of intersex condition? Given 7 billion people in the world, there are probably some. Again, if gender were nothing more than arbitrary social roles determined by our dumb patriarchical society, why would anyone bother changing their “sex” to match their “gender”? Remember that SRS is very expensive, painful, time consuming, and incurs significant social stigma. If I can just say, “hey, all this business with handbags and football is totally arbitrary; I’m just going to re-define football as a thing “women” like and handbags as something “men” like,”–which is exactly what the feminist theory of gender claims you can do–then why wouldn’t trans people just do that, and save themselves all of the effort?

Because trans people understand that gender is a real thing, not just a made up thing that they can re-define because it happens to suit them.

“But wait,” I hear you saying, “trans people are actually just autogynophiliacs, and so that’s why they transition, not because they’re actually trans.”

To be honest, I consider this a weird story. For starters, half the trans people I know started as “female”, not male. Second, almost all of the trans people I know have really obvious intersex conditions. Third, most people into LGBTQ etc. sorts of things will NOT SHUT UP about their sexual interests. If these people had weird self-fetishes, they’d be talking about it all over the damn place. Like furries. Remember furries? No one was ever confused about furries’ sexual interests.

Now, could some trans people be autogynophiliacs? Sure. There are 700,000 of them in the country. That’s a lot of people. Some of ’em are probably into all kinds of weird things.

But there are about 1 million men who were exposed to DES in the womb. So DES sounds like a more likely cause of biological men who “feel female” than weird sexual fetishes.

However, I am willing to grant a chicken and egg potential: once a “man” starts believing that he really is a woman trapped in a man’s body, then he will of course begin thinking about himself as female, and want other people to treat him as female, and even fantasize about being treated like a normal female, being found attractive as a normal female, etc.

That is, I suspect the autogynophiliac hypothesis has the causation backwards. Believing that one is a female trapped in a man’s body leads to imagining oneself as female, not the other way around. The same probably holds true for trans folks in “female” bodies who decide that they are really men–they desire to be seen as attractive, too.

(I will note that a fair number of people with intersex conditions are asexual.)

Now, does that mean that Jenner or any other high-profile celebrity trans person is actually intersex and not just a weird attention whore? I have no clue, but if Jenner wants to be female, I don’t care.

But I don’t consider Jenner “brave” or “pioneering” or anything like that. Jenner has millions of dollars and a media three-ring circus to praise her every move. Meanwhile, I know people with actual, diagnosed chromosomal abnormalities who live in poverty because their families don’t believe in fucking genetics.

 

But anyway, why does this whole “Sex != Gender” thing get hauled out every time people start trying to explain transsexuals?

Eh, it’s because they’re gender non-conforming weirdos and so for a long time, the only people who would accept them were other gender non-conformists like radical feminists and gay people, and this whole “gender is a social construct” business has been the dominant catch-phrase of feminists out to re-define femininity for a long time. And I’m sure that for some trans people, it has given them some peace of mind to think that it’s okay, they can redefine gender how they want to include people like themselves.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the reality of gender is what trans people are actually seeking.

South Africa, Democracy, and the dangers of Demographics (pt. 2)

See part 1 here.

So how have the 20 yeas since apartheid ended benefited South Africa?

Certainly it has benefited some people. Many black, Indian, or mixed-race people who were shut out of the economic system, land holding, etc., have become wealthy or at least middle class:

1994 = end of apartheid

On the other hand, rising GDP looks like it’s more of a global trend than a specifically SA one.

Tim Stanley, of The Telegraph, weighs in on the “Things have gotten better” side:

“South Africa has held four free national elections – a massive achievement in a country of 53 million people. There are now fair courts and civil rights. Yes, there is corruption and current President Jacob Zuma is often accused of it. But there is also a free press and oversight. As a result, South Africa has fallen from the 38th most corrupt country in 2001 to the 72nd today. And in the 2013 election, there were signs of the emergence of pluralism thanks to a cross-racial democratic alliance headed by Helen Zille, premier of the Western Cape. …

“the economy has doubled in real terms and South Africa is now the economic super power of the region. Not only is this proof that an African economy can be run efficiently as part of the global community but it’s also a model that many other countries are following – with enormous success. With booms in minerals and telecommunications, African capitalism is in the ascendant. …

“But crime was always high under Apartheid – it’s just that a media blackout meant that it went unreported. Drugs, drink and gangs were common in the shanties, the product of decades of brutal marginalisation. This historic legacy combined with failed expectations after the end of Apartheid to produce an explosion of violence that exposed the white community, for the first time, to serious crime.” (emphasis added)

According to NPR, Desmond Tutu is more ambivalent:

“‘I didn’t think there would be a disillusionment so soon. I’m glad that (Nelson Mandela) is dead. I’m glad that most of these people are no longer alive to see this,’ a reference to a host of chronic problems such as corruption and poverty.”

WND (World Net Daily?) an organization whose credibility I don’t know, claims that South Africa is in free fall. By contrast, the BBC claims that South Africa has been almost incomparably successful since the end of apartheid. The Economist, though, is less cheerful, “Sad South Africa: South Africa is sliding downhill while much of the rest of the continent is clawing its way up,” arguing that South Africa has seen less economic growth than the rest of the African continent since the end of apartheid, and so is effectively under-performing. And in Business Tech, University of Witwatersrand Vice-Chancellor Adam Habib says that, “South Africa is unraveling– and no one seems to care.” (Since he is actually from SA, I trust his opinion a little more than the others.)

SA’s overall Human Development Index score has fallen since apartheid ended in 1994:

And here’s life expectancy:

1994 = end of apartheid

Many people attribute the collapse in life expectancy in SA to AIDS, but statistically, the only way that many people are catching AIDS is if the vast majority of people in SA are having unprotected sex with hundreds of other people, which is both incredibly stupid and incredibly easy not to do, so yes, I lay full blame for declining life expectancies on the people engaged in life-shortening behaviors and the government that has failed to stop the epidemic ravaging its own people.

Obviously the crime rate is through the roof.

Graph is labeled incorrectly since apartheid ended in 1994, but you can still see the general trend.

source: Africa Check

SA has one of the world’s highest murder rates (at least outside of Latin America,) one of if not the highest rape rate, and I hear it has the world’s highest rate of infant rape.

I have heard that there is a myth in South Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS, so often when a man discovers that he has AIDS, he goes and pays a local family for the right to have sex with one of their daughters. If the AIDS doesn’t clear up, then obviously the daughter wasn’t a virgin, and the family is compelled to offer up someone younger, more likely to be a virgin. If the youngest daughter happens to be a baby, then the youngest daughter happens to be a baby. This process continues until the AIDS goes away or you run out of daughters.

Source: Human Science Research Council

In my research, I have talked to people who live in South Africa and love it there, and people who live in South Africa and are terrified. I have read posts claiming that South Africa is thriving and on the upswing, and posts claiming that the whole place is a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

And I’ve seen a lot of pictures of burned out, broken, boarded-up buildings and trash:

These are photos taken and uploaded by “The Real Realist” during a drive through Yeoburg, formerly one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Johannesburg. Now it is decayed, broken, boarded up, and overflowing with trash.

In other words, it looks like Detroit.

But maybe it always looked like that. Here are pictures Real Realist took of the Johannesburg Jewish Museum:

I bet it didn’t look like that back when it was a museum.

There are hundreds more such photos and stories. Go and look for yourself.

Some more perspectives:

(Pay attention especially around 42 minutes in)

I find this interesting because I first heard about something like this in a Reddit thread I ran across while looking for photos of South Africa. I can’t even find the thread, now, but someone in it described a phenomenon whereby a occupied business building (occupied by people doing business, I mean) would suddenly be invaded by hundreds of people (and their chickens) who had suddenly decided to live there. This of course made it difficult to do business anymore, so all of the business people had to relocate elsewhere. Meanwhile, the squatters, not knowing exactly how the buildings worked, would throw their trash and excrement into the elevator shafts. When the shafts filled up, the people moved on.

The only way to get rid of these squatters was by hiring small armies of men (the police will not do it,) to physically remove them in the middle of the night (being asleep makes it difficult to fight back,) and then the building gets surrounded by barbed wire and crews have to come in to thoroughly clean it before it can become an office building or anything else again.

I wrote this off as “unverifiable rumor” until I found this Christian Science Monitor Slideshow (see #15) with a photo of one of the men tasked with cleaning out these hijacked buildings:

Let’s talk demographics:

Population density map of South Africa (from Wikipedia)

According to Wikipedia, when the Brits arrived in SA, the Cape colony had roughly 25,000 slaves, 20,000 white colonists, 15,000 Khoisan, and 1,000 freed black slaves. However, that data is marked, “citation needed.” If we trust it, though, whites were, at the time, roughly 1/3 (33%) of the population.

Source: The Economist

If we squint, it looks like whites were just over 1/6th of the population in 1910–probably around 20%. By 1990, they had fallen to about 11%. Today, they’re at 9%.

What happens when you become a tiny minority in the country your ancestors built?

You lose it.

There is no practical way for 9% of the population in a “democratic” country to control the other 91%.

Love it or hate it, a country belongs to the people in it.

Yes, the whites saw this coming. They knew the demographics. They were even trying to encourage family planning, which was moderately successful:

Source: South African Regional Policy Network

Sorry, Boers. (And Brits.) You ran into a 3,000 year old unstoppable Bantu migration wave and lost. Your buildings will be burned and looted, the wealth your ancestors created, murdered for and died for will be taken by people who have no idea how to maintain it, and your entire country will crumble away. A few of you remain, in walled-off communities supplied by private roads, electricity, water, and police. If you don’t get killed, well, you might have a pretty good life.

One of the things I’ve found interesting about the Boers, during all this research, is how much they remind me of a lot of the NRx/alt-right/Moldbuggian types. The Cape Colony began, after all, as a corporation, founded by the Dutch East India Company. When the British took over the Cape, many of the Dutch, rather than deal with someone telling them what to do, decided to take the exit option and go found a new state. This was no trivial undertaking, and required (among other things,) militarily defeating the Zulus, starting a new country from scratch in the middle of nowhere, and fighting off the British.

They eventually failed because they were numerically overwhelmed by the British, both migrants they had allowed into their country and troops sent from abroad. Exit is useless if you do not or cannot secure your own territory.

There’s a fail state to democracy, which Malema so succinctly identified: long term, you don’t need to wage a war to take over a democratic country. You just have to out-breed your opposition.

Given a finite planet, (which we have,) breeding wars can only end in catastrophe. But the other option–not playing–means losing your country.

Could you get around this by simply not being a democracy? Saudi Arabia doesn’t let women vote, but I don’t see anyone putting pressure on them to change their ways. Singapore also manages to be a pretty decent place, (though it is tiny,) due to what looks like good management. Bring back the old Dutch East India Company. Let those who buy stock be shareholders; let the company buy what it can and manage it for the sake of its owners.

Conclusion: only let people into your country whom you like and would hypothetically be willing to marry and have kids with. Keeping a large population of subjugated people is impractical and cruel. If you don’t want them to be equals, give them their own country to do with as they please.

With a leadership that looks toward Zimbabwe as a model, I expect South Africa to look ever more like Zimbabwe.

But hey, the Afrikaners were racists.

South Africa, democracy, and the dangers of demographics (part 1)

(Remember, creatives are psychotic.)
People have been bugging me to write a post on South Africa ever since I started this blog, more or less, so here you go.

I regard South Africa (SA) as one of the most misunderstood countries in the world, so I’m going to start with the history and try to clear up some potential misconceptions.

Disclaimer: I am not a South Africa scholar. This is what I’ve cobbled together by reading first and second hand accounts on the internet, Wikipedia, talking to friends who’ve lived in SA, etc. Since I’ve never been there myself, there’s always a chance that I’ve trusted the wrong people or come to some incorrect conclusions, but as always, I’ve tried to present an accurate picture.

The most common misconception I run across is that whites arrived recently in SA, conquered and oppressed the natives via apartheid and after years of righteous struggle, the native people of South Africa have finally gotten the right to vote and run their own country.

History, as usual, tells a slightly different story.

The dominant group in South Africa today is the Bantus. Nelson Mandela, for example, was a Bantu.

When the first Europeans arrived at the Cape of Good Hope (later site of Cape Town and most of the economic development of the state of South Africa,) most of the people there were Bushmen, (aka San aka KhoiSan,) who were hunter-gatherers. Not Bantus.

Distribution of ancient paintings and engravings attributed to the San

Modern distribution of African languages–Bantus in orange. Note the isolated pocket of KhoiSan speakers up in Tanzania

If you believe that ancestrality determines a person’s right to a country, then the KhoiSan have a right to the Cape, and the Johnny-Come-Latey Bantus do not.

If you haven’t been reading along, you might think that the Bushmen and the Bantus are probably closely related, and that I am merely splitting hairs.

No. The Bantus are more closely related to Koreans, Australian Aborigines, and even Europeans than they are to the Bushmen.

As we’ve discussed before, the Bushmen are one of the world’s most isolated peoples, having split off from the rest of the human population, (or perhaps the rest of the humans split off from them,) 100,000 years or more ago. The Out-of-Africa event only happened 70,000 years ago, so only 70,000 years separates the Bantus from all non-Africans, but 100,000 years separate the Bantus from the San.

So. The original inhabitants of the area, who’d been there for about 100,000 years, were the San. Most of them were hunter-gatherers, which means their population density was really low; much of the area appears to have been uninhabited, given regions with names like “Nomansland”. Some of the Khoi peoples, though, had adopted animal herding.

The Bantus came originally from somewhere up near Nigeria, but by the relevant time period, occupied the north east part of South Africa, which they’d conquered from the San. (The Cape of Good Hope, where the Europeans settled, is in the south west corner. Hardly anyone has ever lived in the north west corner, because it’s desert.)

The first European in the area was Portuguese sailor Bartolomeu Dias, (and, obviously, his crew,) way back in 1488. In 1647, the Dutch built a small fort in the area, and in 1652, the Dutch East India Company (which I wrote about recently,) set up a supply station and fortifications on the Cape. By 1659, the Dutch were producing corn, wine, and babies.

Most of the KhoiSan people were probably killed, either outright by warfare or by diseases they had no resistance to, but I have no numbers and am just speculating. There are still KhoiSan people in SA and neighboring places, so they are not all dead.

By 1800, some of the mixed-race children/descendants of the Dutch and the locals, KhoiSan, former slaves*, and the like decided they’d had enough of the Dutch and migrated northward, establishing Griqualand in an apparently uninhabited area. They migrated around a bit, and eventually Griqualand got moved to the region formerly known as Nomansland.

*The slaves were imported from elsewhere in Africa, since the Dutch considered it a bad idea to enslave the locals.

The British took possession of the Cape during the Napoleonic Wars. They promptly set about outlawing slavery and the Dutch language, so a lot of the Dutch decided to leave, too. By the 1830s, they were leaving by the hundreds, a migration known as the “Great Trek.” (There is some debate about whether outlawing slavery was actually a big deal to the Trekkers, as they tended to be the poorer folks who would have been less likely to own slaves in the first place, but I don’t know anywhere near enough history here to weigh in on the debate.)

Paths of the Great Trek–note the locations of the Cape Colony in the south east, and the Zulu kingdom in the north west.

The Dutch population by this point also included a lot of Germans, French, etc., and so would be more accurately called Afrikaners.  These Trekkers, or Voortrekkers, or Boers, or Trekboers, or Afrikaners, whatever we want to call them.

These Afrikaners are an interesting people, who endured considerable hardship to go live in the middle of nowhere with nothing but what they could carry in small wagons, their family, faith, and a few guns. They trekked toward the north east, until they ran smack into the southern end of the Great Bantu Migration. The Bantus (Zulus) massacred about 500 Boers–men, women, and children–in the middle of the night. Shortly after, approximately 30,000 Zulu soldiers attacked 460 Boers, at the Battle of Blood River. This time the Boers were awake, and since they had guns and the Zulus had pointy sticks, 3,000 Zulus died and 3 Boers were injured. (December, 1836.)

Long story short, the Boers established several small, independent republics up in north east South Africa, the details of which are too complicated for our current discussion, but you may want to remember the names Orange Free State, Transvaal, and Natal.

The British-controlled Cape Colony is in blue; Boer Transvaal in Green; Boer Free Orange State in orange; Zulu state, Natal (aka Natalia,) is in red.

In 1866, diamonds were discovered on the banks of the Orange River. The diamond-rich territory was eventually awarded to Griqualand, which was subsequently annexed by Britain in 1874. In 1886, gold was found in Transvaal. The British had tried to conquer Transvaal in 1877, but did not succeed until the Second Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902, which ended with the annexation of both Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

Boers forced to watch their home burned to the ground

Lots of people were killed, but eventually the British got the upper hand and, having decided they were sick of the Boers, herded them into concentration camps and tried to kill them all:

“This was not the first appearance of internment camps. … But the Boer War concentration camp system was the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted, and the first in which some whole regions had been depopulated.

“Eventually, there were a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children. Over 26,000 women and children were to perish in these concentration camps.

“… 93,940 Boers and 24,457 black Africans were reported to be in “camps of refuge” and the crisis was becoming a catastrophe as the death rates appeared very high, especially among the children.

“A report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 24,074 [50 percent of the Boer child population] were children under 16) had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about one in four (25 percent) of the Boer inmates, mostly children, died.

“Improvements [however] were much slower in coming to the black camps.”^[51] It is thought that about 12 percent of black African inmates died (about 14,154) but the precise number of deaths of black Africans in concentration camps is unknown as little attempt was made to keep any records of the 107,000 black Africans who were interned.” —Wikipedia

Her name was Lizzie Van Zyl. She was 7 years old.

“[Hobhouse] describes Lizzie as “a frail, weak little child in desperate need of good care”, who was placed on the lowest rations and, after a month, was moved to the new hospital about 50 kilometres (31 miles) away from the concentration camp, suffering from starvation.

According to Hobhouse, she was treated harshly in the hospital. Unable to speak English, she was labelled an “idiot” by an English-speaking doctor and her nurses, who were unable to understand her. One day she started calling for her mother; a lady went over to comfort her, but “was brusquely interrupted by one of the nurses who told her not to interfere with the child as she was a nuisance.” Lizzie died in 1901 at 7 years of age.”

As a mother, I look at Lizzie and feel like someone has torn my heart out and stomped on it.

To add insult to murder,

“The photo [of Lizzie] was used as propaganda, author Hélène Opperman Lewis states, to convince the British public that Boer children were neglected by their parents. The image was released with the detail that it was taken when van Zyl and her mother entered the camp. Chamberlain was quoted in The Times on 5 March 1902, saying that Lizzy’s mother was prosecuted for mistreatment.^[4]

Hobhouse investigated the case and was unable to find any evidence of the case or prosecution of Lizzie’s mother. She located the photographer, a man named Mr. de Klerk, who confirmed that the photograph was taken two months after Lizzie arrived at the camp.^[4]”

And people accuse the Afrikaners of being racist.

I count about 62,000 people dead in this war. Certainly it was no WWII, but then, South Africa didn’t have that many people to start with, so percentage wise, it’s pretty significant.

Now, I want to pause and look at some demographic issues that contributed to the Anglo-Boer War. Note that the Boers had been pretty much going along, minding their own business, running their own country, for several decades before this war started. They’d gone through quite a bit of effort to get away from the British, successfully defeated the Zulus (and other tribes,) and weren’t even the worst people in the area.

“But wait,” I hear you saying, “Didn’t the Boers have slaves? Or at least Apartheid?”

I actually don’t remember if they had slaves; if they did, they are still better than the Congolese, who are not only enslaving the Pygmies right now, but also literally eat other humans. As for apartheid, do you think the Zulus were letting their conquered subjects vote? (Or live?)

For the most part, the Boers just wanted to be left the fuck alone–they didn’t conquer the Griquas, they abandoned their colony after the British took it over rather than fight for it, and I don’t think they were even messing with Natal. They just had the bad luck to have gold and diamonds, and the British decided they wanted gold and diamonds.

“In 1866 Erasmus Jacobs discovered diamonds at Kimberley, prompting a diamond rush and a massive influx of foreigners to the borders of the Orange Free State. Then in 1886, an Australian discovered gold in the Witwatersrand area of the South African Republic. Gold made the Transvaal the richest and potentially the most powerful nation in southern Africa; however, the country had neither the manpower nor the industrial base to develop the resource on its own. As a result, the Transvaal reluctantly acquiesced to the immigration of uitlanders (foreigners), mainly from Britain, who came to the Boer region in search of fortune and employment. This resulted in the number of uitlanders in the Transvaal potentially exceeding the number of Boers, and precipitated confrontations between the earlier-arrived Boer settlers and the newer, non-Boer arrivals.” —Wikipedia [Bold mine]

The British then demanded voting rights for their citizens in Transvaal, the Boers realized that they were outnumbered and that letting the Brits vote would result in their country becoming part of the British Empire and so refused, and so the war began.

Once you are a demographic minority, there is absolutely nothing to stop the majority from herding you into concentration camps and murdering you and your children, except for how much they pity you.

And nobody pities you, my friend.

At any rate, South Africa was thus forged from the Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange Free State, and Transvaal. (I still don’t know why Lesotho is independent. Perhaps no diamonds, or maybe just the fact that it’s on top of some mountains.) The British instituted the system of apartheid, perhaps because they felt like it, perhaps because they felt like making some concessions to the conquered Afrikaners.

SA became an independent country again in 1960. In 1966, UN resolution 2202 A (XXI) declared apartheid “A Crime Against Humanity.” (Of course, the UN also criticized the Vietnamese for kicking the Khmer Rouge out of Cambodia and decided to let the deposed Khmer Rouge gov’t continue holding its seat in the UN despite being one of the most genocidal regimes the earth has ever seen, so who gives a shit what the UN thinks?)

Deaths under apartheid:

“By mid-1987 the Human Rights Commission knew of at least 140 political assassinations in the country, while about 200 people died at the hands of South African agents in neighbouring states. The exact numbers of all the victims may never be known. …

“Between 1960 and 1994, according to statistics from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Inkatha Freedom Party was responsible for 4,500 deaths, South African Police 2,700, and the ANC about 1,300.^[135]” —Wikipedia

3,100+ murders attributed to the SA government, and 5,800 murders attributed to the anti-apartheid fighters.

The ANC (African National Congress,) Nelson Mandela’s party, is a communist organization that received direct funding and training by the Soviet Union. (I strongly suspect that the vast majority of anti-colonialist movements were funded by the Soviets, as colonialism has strong capitalist ties, eg, the Dutch East India Company, and so Communism morphed into an anti-colonialist ideology by the 50s or 60s.)

The ANC engaged in a brutal execution method called necklacing:

Necklacing Victim, burned alive

“In 1986 Winnie Mandela, then-wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, stated “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country. …

The first victim of necklacing, according to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was a young girl, Maki Skosana, on 20 July 1985.^[10]

Moloko said her sister was burned to death with a tire around her neck while attending the funeral of one of the youths. Her body had been scorched by fire and some broken pieces of glass had been inserted into her vagina, Moloko told the committee. Moloko added that a big rock had been thrown on her face after she had been killed.^[11]” —wikipedia

As you know, nothing makes your country productive like electing communists who make their points by shoving broken glass into little girls’ vaginas.

Inkatha seems a little more into tribal pride and less communist; they’ve recently lost a bunch of parliamentary seats to the explicitly communist Economic Freedom Fighters. The EFF’s leader, Julius Malema, is a lovely person who admires Mugabe, advocates Mugabe-style seizure of mines and other economic resources in SA, and likes to lead the SA parliament in rousing choruses of “Shoot the Boer,” an old anti-apartheid war song.

You mean you can just print more of these things? Mugabe is brilliant!

SA president Jacob Zuma, a guy who gets 1.2 million pounds per year to support his four wives, is also fond “Shoot the Boer”:

“We are going to shoot them with machine guns, they are going to run… The cabinet will shoot them, with the machine gun… Shoot the Boer, we are going to hit them, they are going to run.”

Don’t worry; South Africans are very good at killing Boers, and getting better. Here’s what Genocide Watch has to say:

“Cape Town – Social media buzzed on Monday over a picture of a banner allegedly shown at the Economic Freedom Fighter (EFF) launch in Marikana.

A picture showing a red banner with the words “A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate” was quickly shared on various social networks on Monday.

Another picture shows a banner saying “Honeymoon is over for white people in South Africa”.

“I also saw ‘we need to kill them like they killed us’ banners yesterday,” User Qaanitah Hunter said in a Tweet.”

Gulags are a feature of communism, not bugs

From the second PDF:

“Over 3,000 white farmers have been murdered since the end of apartheid, according to Genocide Watch. Twenty years ago, there were 60,000 farmers. Today there are 30,000.

On August 8, two men were convicted of killing a 77-year-old man and his wife on their farm in Somerset. The husband was hacked to pieces. The wife was tied up, thrown in a freezer, and buried in frozen meat. She suffocated to death.

According to the police, the motivation was robbery.

On August 11, four men broke into 57-year-old Vivien Ponté’s home. She was tied to her bed, raped and lit on fire. Her house was ransacked, but it is unclear if anything was stolen.

Just another robbery gone bad.

On August 15, an 83-year-old Volksrust woman was assaulted, raped and left for dead, lying naked on the floor.

The list of “robberies” goes on. …

Beginning in 2003, the government began disbanding the rural commando units used to protect the remote farming communities that did not have police protection. The government said the commandos were unconstitutional and promised special police units to replace them. In 2008, the last commando unit was disbanded.

To this day, the special police forces still haven’t arrived.

Then in 2010, the government passed gun-control laws mandating that all guns be re-registered. In the process of registration, more than half the applicants were turned down and their weapons were seized.”

Various sources estimate the murder rate of SA farmers at about 100 per 100,000.

But you know, the Afrikaners are the racists.

Oh, let me include a bit from the Wikipedia page on Malema:

“Malema visited Zimbabwe in October 2012… “He said the youths in South Africa were calling for whites to surrender land and minerals resources they hold because when they came from Europe they did not carry any land into South Africa.”

“‘What we are asking is for them to surrender our minerals because they did not come with any minerals. We want that land and those minerals for free because they never paid for those minerals.’

“Malema told the youth he was in Zimbabwe to gain inspiration and wisdom, so that when he returned home he could “double the spirit of fighting against imperialist forces”.^[77] He called on black South Africans to have as many children as possible so as to increase dominance of ‘our ideas’ in the world at large and help catalyze world revolution.^[78][79]

“‘We want to see many kids, why? Because we must reproduce ourselves. For our ideas to be sustainable, we have to reproduce ourselves. In the whole of Africa, we are not more than one billion and the world has seven billion people. In Africa we have not more than one billion people… facing more than six billion. We have to be half of that so that our ideas can dominate. I know that in some instances size does not matter… but when it comes to a revolution, size matters.^[79]‘” (bold mine)

Malema is descended from Bantus, so he is no more entitled to the mines than anyone else is, and certainly no one was mining those minerals before the Boers and English got there. If they were precious to Malema’s people, they would have been mining them, but they weren’t.

This is getting long, so I am going to continue with Part 2 tomorrow.

Women in Combat

“The US Marines Tested Mixed-Gender Squads Against all Male ones, and the Results are Pretty Bleak”

I will be writing a full post about this soon, but since I already have a month+ backlog, it’s going to be a while before it shows up here. Nevertheless, I think this is an important enough study that I want to bring your attention to it now. A few quotes:

“All branches of the military are facing a January 1, 2016, deadline to open all combat roles to women. …

“All-male squads, teams and crews and gender-integrated squads, teams, and crews had a noticeable difference in their performance of the basic combat tasks of negotiating obstacles and evacuating casualties. For example, when negotiating the wall obstacle, male Marines threw their packs to the top of the wall, whereas female Marines required regular assistance in getting their packs to the top. During casualty evacuation assessments, there were notable differences in execution times between all-male and gender-integrated groups, except in the case where teams conducted a casualty evacuation as a one-Marine fireman’s carry of another (in which case it was most often a male Marine who “evacuated” the casualty.)

“The report also says that female Marines had higher rates of injury throughout the experiment. …

“A military unit at maximum combat effectiveness is a military unit least likely to suffer casualties. Winning in war is often only a matter of inches, and unnecessary distraction or any dilution of the combat effectiveness puts the mission and lives in jeopardy. Risking the lives of a military unit in combat to provide career opportunities or accommodate the personal desires or interests of an individual, or group of individuals, is more than bad military judgment. It is morally wrong.”

cathedral round up #2

In the WTF file: Ex-Harvard Student Brittany Smith Sentenced to Three Years in Prison

“On May 18, 2009, just two weeks before Smith’s graduation from Harvard, her boyfriend Copney and two accomplices shot and killed Cosby in the basement of Kirkland’s J entryway.

“An aspiring songwriter from New York City who frequently visited Smith and stayed in her room, Copney was convicted of felony murder of the first degree at the conclusion of his trial in April. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. …

“A senior in Lowell House at the time, Smith watched Jiggetts load the gun in her room before the men brought Cosby to Kirkland House to arrange the drug rip. Smith gave Copney and his accomplices her Harvard ID to gain access to the Kirkland basement, where Cosby was shot. Cosby later died from a bullet wound to his abdomen.

“Upon Copney’s return from Cosby’s shooting, Smith hid the gun in her blockmate’s room in a bag under her bed. She then called a taxi to help with the men’s getaway to South Station, where the four boarded a bus to New York. Smith returned to Harvard the next day.”

According to HuffPo,

“Prosecutors said Cosby, 21, was shot during an attempted robbery by Smith’s former boyfriend, Jabrai Jordan Copney, and two other New York City men.”

Harvard, is this the kind of student you’ve sunk to admitting?

In a related matter, Education Department Dismisses Admissions Complaint:

“The U.S. Department of Education has dismissed a complaint filed against Harvard this spring by 64 Asian-American groups accusing the University of discriminating based on race in its admissions practices.

“The complaint, filed in May, accused the University of unfairly denying admission to highly qualified Asian-American students while admitting similar applicants of other races.”

Everyone knows they do it, but they still get away with denying it. (A similar lawsuit is ongoing, though.)

Also, via iSteve: MIT shits on one of its minority groups, white men:

“The MIT Physics Department is committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty and student populations to improve our excellence and to better serve the society that supports our work.”

“Like in many physics departments, white males are over-represented in our student and faculty populations.  There are several reasons to pursue change, seeking to increase the number of women and under-represented minorities in our community:”

Make that two minority groups: “Under-represented minorities” is code for “Piano-playing Asians need not apply. We have enough of you already.”

The whole thing is a painful ball of nonsense and lies. Putting more of group X, Y, or Z into the MIT physics department has zero effect on whether or not the department serves the society that supports its work. For that matter, who the hell do you think supports the MIT physics department? Asian men, white men, and Jewish men. THOSE ARE THE PEOPLE THAT SUPPORT YOU. Don’t shit on them.

When I need some physics, maybe a quark proven to exist or a new state of matter created, do I care the race or gender of the physicist? No! I just want them to prove that quarks exist and create new states of matter.

MIT, stop hurting my soul.

Meanwhile, Yale Law’s professors have been focusing on police:

Law professor Tracey Meares is interviewed about Sandra Bland in Sandra Bland Video Shows An Argument With Police Officer:

“TRACEY MEARES: It’s a pretty good example of a police officer. He’s angry because she said no.

“KASTE: Tracey Meares is a professor at Yale Law. She was also on President Obama’s police reform task force. She’s actually surprised by how well this traffic stop went at first. But the cigarette was the turning point. Meares says it looked like a case of contempt of cop. That’s when a police officer tries to reassert authority in the face of disrespect. And she says it’s not justified.

“MEARES: Given that he is a police officer with the power to take her life that it’s incumbent on him to make the first move and maybe tolerate a little bit more disrespect.”

and in State Child Advocate; Policing in the 21st Century:

“Also, we’ll sit down with a Yale Law professor who is on President Obama’s task force examining policing, as America grapples with a series of deaths of African Americans after confrontations with police.”

(The rest of the interview is audio, so you’ll have to listen to it yourself.)

Professor Wishnie is quoted in, “Lynch visits Connecticut in stop on community policing tour“:

“Despite the improvements, East Haven police still have work to do, including fulfilling the remaining requirements in the consent decree, said Michael Wishnie, a Yale Law School professor who represented the plaintiffs in the civil rights lawsuit.

“The kinds of structural racism and practices that have long existed in East Haven take a long time to change,” Wishnie said. “I think it’s far too soon to claim victory.”

San Francisco slaying case likely would have played out differently in Connecticut:

“In Connecticut, California slaying suspect Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez would have been held for pickup by Immigration and Custom Enforcement officials only if he had a violent felony in his background or there was a court order in the case. …

In February 2013, as part of a settlement with a legal clinic at the Yale Law School, the Connecticut Department of Correction said it would review each request on a case-by-case basis.

It agreed to hand over the person if they already were the subject of a removal order; they were gang members or part of an anti-terrorism database; of if they had been convicted of a felony. This was codified into statute as part of the Connecticut Trust Act. …

“Under the revised policy, the Connecticut Department of Correction will no longer enforce ICE detainer requests and Administrative warrants solely on the basis of a final order of deportation or removal, unless accompanied by a judicial warrant, or past criminal conviction unless it’s for a violent felony,” Commissioner Scott Semple wrote in a memo to ICE. “

Maybe I’m just too tired, but I can’t figure out what this article is trying to say about the difference between Conn and CA law.

Could One Soldier Derail ISIS War?

“President Barack Obama’s war against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq currently is illegal, many scholars say, and as the one-year mark for U.S. intervention approaches one constitutional law expert has an idea for how to prove it in court.

“Yale University law professor Bruce Ackerman, like other critics of the war’s current legal grounding, says Obama is violating the War Powers Resolution by committing the U.S. military to hostilities without specific authorization from Congress.

“It’s historically been tough to establish standing to make such claims in court. But Ackerman has a plan.  …”

What was that about chicken butts?

Robotics and the Law: When software can harm you sounds like an interesting article, but I can’t read it because UW Today’s website is shitty. However, I did make it through to How Makerspaces Can Be Accessible to People with Disabilities:

“The effort is part of a broader National Science Foundation-funded AccessEngineering initiative, which supports students with disabilities in pursuing engineering careers and promotes accessible and universal design in engineering departments and courses.

“A lot of universities are creating these more casual prototyping spaces where students can have more of a DIY experience, as an alternative to a traditional machine shop,” said AccessEngineering co-principal investigator Kat Steele, a UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering whose Human Ability & Engineering Lab focuses on developing tools for people with cerebral palsy, stroke and other movement disorders.

“Because this is a big growth area for engineering schools, we wanted to help with some best practices and guidelines so that as these new spaces are being created they can be accessible to the widest group possible.”

Cerebral Palsy is caused by brain damage, and somewhere around 30-50% of sufferers are also intellectually disabled. While I know personally a very capable engineer who must use a wheelchair, severely disabled people, on the whole, tend to have things wrong with them that also impact their brains. Making cerebral palsy accessible labs will catch only a very small number of geniuses who happen to have cerebral palsy; by contrast, just spending the same money to hire people who have already graduated with STEM degrees and can’t find jobs would do far more to create more science in the world. Instead of actually hiring scientists to do research, universities want to throw buckets of money at specific identity groups just to look good.

Just in case you thought Harvard’s business was educating students: Harvard’s Controversial Romanian Forest Sold to Ikea Group:

“The move distances Harvard from a corruption case involving one of the contractors who helped oversee the land, and comes shortly after a change in leadership at Harvard Management Company, which invests the University’s $35.9 billion endowment. …

“HMC began purchasing timberland in 1997. It invested heavily in timber under the guidance of then-President and CEO Jane L. Mendillo, who resigned in 2014 after a tumultuous six-year stint as the head manager of Harvard’s endowment. Her replacement, Stephen Blyth, comes from a background in public markets and faces high expectations to bring Harvard back to its pre-recession dominance in investment returns.”

After Federal Feedback, Law School Implements New Title IX Standards:

“Unlike the procedures for students at other parts of the University, Law School students involved in cases of alleged sexual harassment will now be guaranteed access to an attorney, paid for by the Law School, during the different stages of a case. After professional investigators examine a case, a separate adjudicatory panel, whose members are not affiliated with Harvard, will determine guilt, potentially after a hearing. A school-specific Title IX committee, staffed by tenured professors, will oversee the process for investigating and adjudicating cases of alleged sexual misconduct between Law School students. …

“The apparent implementation of the school’s procedures marks the close of a lobbying process that Law School professors, unhappy with Harvard’s new approach to Title IX, began last year. Harvard’s new policy and procedures, unveiled last July, altered its new definition of sexual harassment and centralized its process for handling cases, a fact administrators lauded as a positive step forward. It also adopted the preponderance of the evidence standard for determining guilt.

“But quickly afterward, both in closed-door meetings with top University officials and in an open letter published in The Boston Globe, several Law School professors pushed back. They charged that the University’s framework was biased against the accused and did not offer adequate due process. …

“The discord between the Law School and central administrators has also made some Law professors increasingly wary of centralized administrative rule at Harvard.”

This is perhaps an excessive level of formality given A. the number of people who get raped at HLS every year, and B. the fact that rape is already illegal under completely normal criminal laws, so I don’t see any reason why universities should set themselves up as parallel court systems in the first place instead, but at least HLS appears to be holding back from the full madness.

And over at the Harvard Crimson, we get some student opinions:

A Police Officer’s Bullet, The People’s Ballot

“Today, Ferguson, Missouri will be holding its first city council elections since Michael Brown was shot and killed last August. The city of Ferguson has been around for 121 years; during those first 120 years, only three black candidates ran for city council. This year, there are four black candidates for the Ferguson city council. This is no coincidence. Many of those in Ferguson realize that to prevent the next police officer’s bullet from killing another unarmed, black teenager, they need the ballot.

Yet, fresh off the heels of the 2014 midterm elections, which saw the lowest voter turnout since World War II, I am still worried. I am worried that our generation is losing sight of what it means to even have the right to vote. I am worried that not enough young people, people of color, and people who care about social justice are participating in the political process.”

Written before Trump came on the scene: A Threat to Moderation: Cruz’s candidacy will only drive Republican candidates further right

“It is difficult to believe that the Republican Party will win a presidential election in the near future when Tea Party candidates like Ted Cruz—whose announcement speech included numerous religious references and alluded to repealing the Affordable Care Act and eliminating the Internal Revenue Service—run in the primaries and pull the eventual nominee into supporting more ideologically extreme platforms.”

Yup, Ted Cruz sure did turn out to be the right-wing ideologue for liberals to fear.

Some Pictures of the ‘Stans

“Yes, I know, objectively, that there are things wrong with my country. But I was born here; my country is like my mother, and for that, I love her and do not count her faults.” — a friend from one of the ‘Stans.

Someone recently referred to my blog as “the high mountains of Turdistan,” and I thought, “Gosh, that’s awfully unfair to the ‘Stans. What did they ever do to warrant the comparison?”

So this is a post about the ‘Stans.

1. Kazakhstan:

Yeah, I bet you didn’t know that Kazakhstan is also Middle Earth.

The Kazakhs have some beautiful cities:

Scenes of Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital

And understand the art of dramatic lighting:

Almaty, Kazakhastan’s biggest city

Even the Kazakh flag is awesome:

 

2. Kyrgyzstan:

Kyrgyzstan has got to be one of the most obscure countries in the world. It’s also one of the most isolated–it’s landlocked, the furthest landlocked country from the sea, and its rivers don’t even empty into the sea.

What it lacks in navigable rivers, it makes up for in mountains:

Kyrgyzstan’s highest mountain

(Pictures from Trip Advisor’s Top 30 things to do in Kyrgyzstan.)

Also, the Kyrgyz people have some great yurts (I am a yurt fan):

Unique mosque architecture:

And they hunt with eagles:

 

 

Tajikistan:

Tajikistan appears to be a country on the upswing. Their homicide rate has fallen from 7.6 (per 100,000) in 1997 to a mere 1.6 in 2011. The US’s was 4.7 in 2012. (Though I hear getting enough food is still an issue.)

They have some nice architecture and monuments, though they may be overspending on them:

And yes, of course, they have mountains:

 

Turkmenistan:

The Door to Hell.

 

Uzbekistan:

Uzbekistan has high-speed rail networks with shinkansen:

And they have some of the world’s loveliest subway and train stations:

 

Pakistan:

All right, I’ll admit it: people who know better than I do claim that Pakistan is a “failed state.” Or as a friend put it, “You think you have issues with the Taliban? We have to live next door to them!”

Still, I hope things work out for the Pakistanis. Especially since they have nukes.

Plus, they have some nice university architecture:

Islamia College University in Peshawar, Pakistan

 

Afghanistan:

Yes, the Afghan people know the problems their country face. They’ve been invaded by the Soviets, taken over by the Taliban, then invaded by the Americans, etc. etc. It’s still their country, and chances are they aren’t getting a new one, so they’ll take their pride where they can get it.

Of course, Afghanistan is the kind of place that historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists love. The area has a history going back perhaps 50,000 years, was part of the Indus Valley civilization–one of the first civilizations in the world–and has been a major cultural meeting point along the Silk Road for thousands of years.

Buddhist Stupa in Mes Aynak, Afghanistan

The ruins at Mes Aynak go back at least 5,000 years, making the complex one of the most valuable currently-being-excavated locations in the world. Unfortunately, the whole place is slated for destruction via mining–if you’re interested in saving Mes Aynak, go here.

Nomads’ tents in Badghis province, Afghanistan

Well, there you have it.

So Why do Native Americans have so much Neanderthal DNA?

Warning: highly speculative post ahead.

As I mentioned the other day:

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)

(Please note that Africans do not have chimpanzee admixture, despite the labeling on the graph–no human group has chimp admixture, because chimps and humans have different #s of chromosomes, so even if you could get a successful cross, the resulting child would be infertile, like a mule. I assume the point of the chimp node is just to represent that which has neither Neanderthal nor Denisovan admixture, though of course there is the possibility of some other form of archaic hominin admixture in Africans.)

So, Native Americans appear to have a ton of Neanderthal DNA. (Relatively speaking.)

Possibilities:

1. It’s all measurement error/convergent evolution/something else other than archaic admixture.

As much as I hate to say it, I still consider this very likely. There is just a ton of stuff that we don’t about the Americas–like how and when people first got here. I’m sticking here with what I think are the most scientifically-supported theories, but a lot of this is still quite disputed. In particular, all of this genetic admixture business is still kind of speculative, and when people start talking about finding admixture in the admixture, either life is totally awesome, or we’re trying too hard.

2. Survival at the Fringes theory

A lot of people seem to look at this data and respond with something like, “But Neanderthals are from Europe, not America!” But this is not a big issue; the Indians are descended from people who passed through Neanderthal-inhabited regions (the Middle East), just like everyone else with Neanderthal DNA. The migration to the Americas took place long after they acquired Neanderthal admixture.

But this doesn’t explain why they have so much of it.

My “concentration on the edge” theory states that when one population is displaced by another population, you end up with a “fringe” of the original population’s traits. Sometimes this fringe results in isolated groups, as the invading population completely surrounds or cuts off a remnant population from their former range.

The Ainu, for example, resemble certain other Oceanin groups, but not their neighbors, the Japanese. I’m speculating here, so don’t take my word for it.

But I have a much better case with the distribution of red hair:

(So far I have found nothing explaining that dot over in Russia.)

Red hair is highly associated with the so-called Celtic fringe. It looks like it’s highly concentrated in Wales, Scotland, and parts of Ireland, but since I know a little history, and I know these aren’t areas of concentration, but just the areas that managed to escape being displaced by Anglo-Saxon invaders, just by virtue of being further away from the south-east coast of Britain.

One can imagine that the isolated dot in the middle of Russia might, at one time, have been connected with the other red-haired regions before other peoples invaded the lands between them and cut them off.

Compare to the map of blond hair:

Blond hair looks like it has been spreading steadily outward from a central source.

So what does this have to do with Neanderthal admixture in Native Americans?

It means that I think the Native Americans may have closer to original levels of Neanderthal admixture, while people in Europe and Asia have lower admixture because they mixed with later waves of people who came from Africa and had no Neanderthal admixture.

3. The Bering Strait selected for Neanderthal admixture

Alternatively, the harsh conditions of life in the Bering Strait–where some scientists think the ancestors of today’s Indians hung out (or “paused”) for thousands of years before the ice sheets opened up to let them through–may have selected for winter adaptations that came from ice-age Neanderthals. I have speculated previously that Type-2 Diabetes may actually be a winter adaptation picked up from Neanderthal DNA; now scientists think this DNA may be responsible for high rates of Type-2 Diabetes in Native Americans.

4. Western diseases selected for Western immune responses

One of the interesting things about the Neanderthal DNA hanging around in people is that it appears to code for certain immune responses. West Hunter recently had a great post (TLRs, PAMPs, and Alley Oop) detailing how they work, but for our purposes, “provide immunity” is sufficient. Austin Whittall suggests that back when smallpox, influenza, measles, and all of the other Western diseases tore through the Native Americans, killing about 90% of them, the guys who had more Neanderthal DNA were more likely to survive because they were more likely to be immune to the same stuff as Europeans. By contrast, those Indians with less Neanderthal DNA may have had less immunity to the European diseases, and so been more likely to die, leaving behind a population of high-Neanderthal DNA people.

5. One thing we can say for sure: if the data’s correct, the peopling of the Americas was more complex than previously thought.

There are four areas of particular interest:

A. The highly Neanderthal area in the Pacific Northwest

B. The highly Denisovan area in Brazil

C. The low-Neanderthal area on the South American coast

D. The low-Neanderthal and low-Denisovan area along the Baja gulf in Mexico.

I’ve got nothing on A and C; supply your own theories.

6. Speculations on the origins of high-Denisovan people in Brazil:

A couple of papers in Science and Nature recently proposed that Melanesian-related people somehow made it to the rain forest long after the other Indians got to the area. West Hunter helpfully summarizes them.

West Hunter suggests that the Melanesian-related people with their high-Denisovan DNA got to the Americas first, and were then replaced throughout the continents by later invaders, the ancestors of current Indians. The one place the Melanesian-related people managed to survive was in the depths of the rainforest, a very difficult place to conquer. Even today, there are “uncontacted tribes” living in the Amazon rainforest; if anywhere were a good spot for a group of humans to avoid getting conquered, the depths of the rainforest is a good one.

7. The low-Neanderthal and low-Denisovan area along the Baja gulf in Mexico.

So what’s up with that? As far as I know, the only people who don’t have any Neanderthal or Denisovan are Africans. (And even there, there’s a little, just due to back-migration from the rest of the world.)

Are these people descended from a totally different group that came directly from Africa?

There’s a tiny ethnic group in the area, called the Seri:

Dona Ramona of the Seri Indians of Sonora, Mexico

According to the Wikipedia, the Seri speak a language isolate–that is, their language, like Basque, doesn’t appear to be related to any other language on Earth–and they are not culturally connected with any of their neighbors. They’ve also held out significantly against Spanish and Mexican assimilation. In other words, they might very well be a totally isolated population that is not related at all to any of their neighbors.

Some more information on the Seris.

Then I found this interesting map:

maps showing global distribution of the HLA-B*73:01 allele

I found these maps over on Austin Whittall’s post on Denisovans and America.

Looks like the same spot, doesn’t it?

The two different “real” maps how different things because they come from different scientists who came up with different data, but the overall picture is similar–if you look closely, both maps show a hotspot in Israel, for example. The second map looks less detailed, (hence their miss of several Middle Eastern hotspots,) but has a wider global range, which is obviously useful for our purposes. They also help show the importance of not putting too much stock in any single study about the distribution of a particular gene or allele or whathaveyou; different scientists come up with different numbers.

At any rate, while this could be just a totally random coincidence, if it isn’t, it’s awfully interesting, isn’t it? I know the Egyptians circumnavigated Africa; the Carthaginians and Phoenicians were also noted sea-farers. Or perhaps some other group I know nothing about from the region, before folks started keeping good records. Who knows?

8. Other people’s theories: Neanderthals, Denisovans, and H erectus made it to America before we did, and H Sapiens intermixed with them after they arrived; humans evolved in American, and then migrated to the rest of the world from there.

Into Africa: The Great Bantu Migration

As I’ve mentioned before, the famous Out of Africa (OoA) migration was likely preceded by an Into Africa migration, or at least, a Moving Through Africa migration.

Near as we can tell, based on the science at our disposal, H sapiens (humans, us,) evolved in Africa and then spread out from there.

But genetics (and other evidence) suggests that the oldest human split lies not between Africans and non-Africans, but between the San (aka Bushmen or KhoiSan) people of southern Africa and pretty much everyone else in the world.

But hold on. One frequently sees comments to the effect of “All modern humans descended from the San” or “The San are the most ancestral population alive today.” Bollocks. Look, you and your cousin are both descended from your grandparents. Your cousin is not ancestral to you, your grandparents are ancestral to both of you. You did not descend from the San because the San are living right now in southern Africa. They are not an ancient people known only from the architectural record, like the Yamnaya or Minoans. (Unless, of course, your parents actually are San. Then of course you are descended from the San.)

So what does this mean?

Humans–H Sapiens–arose around 200,000 years ago, somewhere or other in Africa. Around 100,000 years ago, the San split off from everyone else, and stayed isolated for almost 100,000 years.

The San look like this:

Some anthropologists refer to Bushmen as “gracile,” which means they are a little shorter than average Europeans and not stockily built

And their homeland is down in the green:

Modern distribution of major African language groups

Their historic range was probably much larger than it currently is–note the little green dot over in Tanzania.

Here’s a different map’s opinion on the subject:

And here’s a map showing the locations of art attributed to the San / their ancestors:

Whether the San started in southern Africa, and everyone else left for northern Africa, leaving them behind, or the San started in northern Africa and then left for the south, leaving everyone else behind, I have no idea. Either way, one group left the other, and the split persisted, more or less, for almost a hundred thousand years.

I’ve mentioned before that the San are notably lighter-skinned than Africans from closer to the equator, like the Bantus:

Bantu mother and child

Probably because the sun is just really harsh at the equator. You can see the current distribution of Bantus in orange on the brightly-colored map above.

Now, back to the story. Shortly after, the Pygmies split off, which I’m not going on to natter on about here because you can read the post I wrote about it. Around 70,000 years ago, some guys left Africa to explore the rest of the world. Around 40,000 years ago, some of those guys split, more or less, into Asians, Europeans, and their descendants.

Among other things, this means that the Batus are more closely related to Koreans, Australian Aborigines, and Native Americans than to the KhoiSan peoples. This is because the ancestors of the Bantus and the ancestors of everyone-not-from-Africa split up around 70,000 years ago, whereas the ancestors of the Bantus and the ancestors of the KhoiSan split 100,000 years ago.

If this is confusing, think about it like this: you and your brother are closely related, because you are only one generation away from your common ancestor, your parents. (In this case, Europeans and Asians are like siblings.) You are related to your cousins, but less closely–you share half your DNA with a sibling, but only 12.5% with a cousin. You and your cousin are two generations away from your common ancestor, your grandparents. In this case, Bantus are cousins to siblings Europeans and Asians. Your second-cousins are descended from your great-grandparents. (If you have cousins, and you both have kids, those kids are second-cousins.) Second cousins share only a quarter as much DNA again–3.13%. The San are like your second-cousins. They are also second-cousins to your brother, and also second cousins to your cousins. All of the siblings are more closely related to each other than to their cousins; all of the cousins are more closely related to each other than to their second cousins; Bantus are more closely related to Koreans than to the San.

And just in case you are still confused:

vs

If you’re still confused, here’s the Wikipedia page on kinship coefficients.

Please note that this is all a massive, massive over-simplification–obviously there are lots of groups in Africa other than the Bantus and the San–like the Yoruba. But “everyone in Africa other than the San and the Pygmies and people who’ve had Arab and other admixture” gets really clunky.

If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that the green and orange regions on the map above look awfully close together. How have the San been so isolated for so long if they’re living right next to the Bantus?

About 3,500 years ago–96,500 after they split–the Bantus did this:

Paths of the great Bantu Migration

1 = 2000–1500 BC origin 2 = ca.1500 BC first migrations      2.a = Eastern Bantu,   2.b = Western Bantu 3 = 1000–500 BC Urewe nucleus of Eastern Bantu 4–7 = southward advance 9 = 500 BC–0 Congo nucleus 10 = 0–1000 AD last phase (from Wikipedia)

The Great Bantu Migration.

Why? I don’t know.

With their larger builds, superior weapons, and more complex social systems, the Bantus appear to have dominated the shit out of everyone they met, until they massacred the wrong guys:

Battle of Blood River

Yes, they ran right into the Afrikaneer (Dutch) Boers, trekking northward from Cape Town, South Africa. And the Boers had guns.

Never bring a spear to a gun fight.

In the end, though, the Bantus won. They have the overwhelming numbers, after all.

Nelson Mandela

The San are still around, but their territory has dwindled severely; some managed to survive in the Kalahari desert, a place just too harsh for anyone else, but even this has not protected them, as farmers and ranchers have moved in and they’ve been forced into more sedentary lifestyles.

I’ve mentioned The Harmless People before; it’s an ethnography of the Bushmen. It has the whole, “primitive people have so much less crime than we do” thing going on, (hence the title,) but it’s still an interesting account of a quickly-disappearing lifestyle.

The book’s epilogue describes efforts to force the Bushmen onto reservations, where they have been encouraged to take up farming and herding. The account is depressing; the Bushmen seem to have been perfectly happy with their lives before, and ill-suited to agricultural toil. Alcoholism is rampant, as it is among everyone whose ancestors haven’t been distilling alcohol for thousands of years, and violent crime appears to be taking more lives.

Whether the San will continue existing or be completely absorbed by the unstoppable Bantu migration remains to be seen.

 

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.