About

Evolutionist X is a meta-political blog. We are neither liberal nor conservative, but a radical mash-up of whatever strikes our fancy. We are dedicated to the frank discussion of evolution, genetics, and related concepts–human evolution, human bio-diversity, gene-culture co-evolution, neuro-politics, and social systems.

Or in other words:

There is no god  but Gnon, and Darwin is his prophet.

112 thoughts on “About”

  1. sorry to bother, I wondered what you think of the “fat acceptance movement” and especialy its claims that being fat isnt unhealthy, that society can be changed to see fat people just a beautiful as more….normal people and that fat shaming dosnt reduce the amount of obesety in society?

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    • No bother.
      It’s been a long time since I read any FA blogs, so I can’t comment directly on the movement politically, but I can comment from what I remember from reading health and nutrition research.

      Is being fat unhealthy? Fat people die at higher rates than skinny people (you will find very few morbidly obese centenarians,) and their mental function degenerates faster (that is, they get stupider faster than everyone else as they age,) but it is not clear whether the fat itself is to blame, or whether some *other* factor is making them unhealthy which is in turn making them fat. If the fat itself makes people unhealthy, then losing weight ought to make people healthier. But if the cause is further upstream–say, lack of exercise makes people unhealthy and fat–then merely losing weight may not actually address the real problem. (Additionally, some ethnic groups gain more weight than others–Mexican Americans are pretty chunky, but have longer life expectancies than whites; blacks are also chunky, but have shorter life expectancies. It seems unlikely that fat is making blacks die faster but Mexicans die slower.)

      Does dieting work? There’s a decent amount of evidence that suggests that most dieters fail, long-term, to lose weight–despite spending a ton of money and effort on it. A few succeed.
      On the other hand, dieting may stop people from gaining more weight.

      Also, I suspect that a lot of extreme dieting behavior is unhealthy and/or results in long-term weight gain. I would not be surprised if some people would weigh less in the long run if they’d never dieted.

      Can society be changed to see fat people as beautiful? No. Societies change, but not on the time scale they want. The best they can hope for is to change their own self-image (mental energy being spent worrying about one’s weight may be better spent on other activities,) and to get people/employers to be generally nicer to them/discriminate less actively against them in employment. (And they probably are discriminated against in employment, because everyone else thinks they’re disgusting. For that matter, short people and people with ugly faces also have a tough time getting jobs; I don’t know why all the unattractive people don’t just band together.)

      I think that most men do not realize just how much most women obsess over their appearances, or just how shitty fat women feel about being fat. Women are terrified of being fat. More educated, high-class women would probably be willing to have children if there were less of a social stigma against being fat, because it’s basically impossible to have a kid without getting fat in the process, and once it’s there, it’s very difficult to go back.

      The flipside to all of this is that telling people that “fat is beautiful” is a lie, and believing lies can have bad effects. I think a lot of young women are hurt by imbibing too many feel-good messages that appearances don’t matter. I might wish that appearances don’t matter, but they do; people judge each other by their appearances all of the time, and people who don’t realize this are at a disadvantage. I have known nice, smart, reasonably-attractive young women who dressed like slobs and then didn’t understand why they had so much trouble finding a boyfriend, or more tragically, nice, smart, reasonably-attractive young women who didn’t date in college and then gained a tremendous amount of weight within a couple of years and found their dating prospects suddenly very, very bad. No one needs to have “You’re ugly and disgusting!” shouted at them every day, but the rules of the game should be honestly outlined for people: Yes, some people are more attractive than others. No, it is probably not going to get any better than it is right now, because age comes for us all. Yes, people will judge you based on your appearances, so do the very best you can with what you’ve got.

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      • Fat people die at higher rates than skinny people (you will find very few morbidly obese centenarians,) and their mental function degenerates faster

        No.

        The risk of death depends on fitness, not fatness.

        I forget the exact data and source (I have to find my books), but the increase in mortality only occurs past 35 BMI.

        Moreover, in a huge study of over 120,000 people, the researchers gathered people from Copenhagen, Denmark, recruiting people from 1976 to 2013. They were then separately compared to those who were recruited in the 70s, 90s, and 00s. Surprisingly, the BMI linked with the lowest risk of having died from any cause was 23.7 in the 70s, 24.6 in the 90s, and 27 from 2003-2013. Due to the results of this study, the researchers are arguing that BMI categories may need adjusting.

        Mental function degenerates faster? You have causalities reversed.

        but it is not clear whether the fat itself is to blame, or whether some *other* factor is making them unhealthy which is in turn making them fat.

        I recommend you read Taubes, Fung, Aamodt and Kolata for this. Insulin drives obesity. insulin makes us fat. Insulin makes us eat more. We don’t get fat because we eat more, we eat more because we get fat. Causalities are reversed. Saying that one gets fat from overeating doesn’t tell us why people get fat. Invoking thermodynamics makes no sense as the human body is a physiologic and biological system. We are not calorimeters and we don’t fully ingest or digest all of what we eat. Insulin also drives fat storage into the adipocyte.

        then losing weight ought to make people healthier.

        It doesn’t.

        lack of exercise makes people unhealthy and fat

        Exercise does not induce weight loss.

        But everyone should exercise. Obese people who exercise more and walk more live longer than thing people who don’t do them.

        (Additionally, some ethnic groups gain more weight than others–Mexican Americans are pretty chunky, but have longer life expectancies than whites; blacks are also chunky, but have shorter life expectancies. It seems unlikely that fat is making blacks die faster but Mexicans die slower.)

        It’s not just that. It’s a whole slew of factors. I’ve recently written on them.

        Agriculture and Evolution: A Reply to The Alternative Hypothesis

        Ethnic Differences in Sleep, Obesity, and Metabolic Syndromes

        Race, Obesity, Poverty, and IQ

        Does dieting work? There’s a decent amount of evidence that suggests that most dieters fail, long-term, to lose weight–despite spending a ton of money and effort on it. A few succeed.

        Dieting does not work.

        Big Food and the diet industry don’t want you to know that though.

        On the other hand, dieting may stop people from gaining more weight.

        No. Dieting causes the lean to get fat.

        Also, I suspect that a lot of extreme dieting behavior is unhealthy and/or results in long-term weight gain. I would not be surprised if some people would weigh less in the long run if they’d never dieted.

        You are correct.

        because it’s basically impossible to have a kid without getting fat in the process, and once it’s there, it’s very difficult to go back.

        Correct. Pregnancy changes the body set weight (BSW). You may see people show singular examples of women who have lost weight after pregnancy, but what does that mean to a statisitcally representative sample?

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    • and especialy its claims that being fat isnt unhealthy

      It’s completely possible for obese people to be metabolically healthy.

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22895358

      that society can be changed to see fat people just a beautiful

      Cultural perceptions of beauty change. Just 100 years ago, the standard of beauty was a more buxom figue in comparison to today. Fat used to be associated with wealth and was thus more attractive.

      fat shaming dosnt reduce the amount of obesety in society?

      It doesn’t.

      https://notpoliticallycorrect.me/2016/07/06/science-proves-it-fat-shaming-doesnt-work/

      This is my response to Milo Yiannopoulos’s article that fat-shaming works. It doesn’t. It makes the problem worse and he ignored all contrary data.

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  2. Thank you very much for the answer!

    I wanted also to ask you if you know feminist scholar cordelia fines book “Delusions of Gender” and what your opinion of it is?

    Sadly there is no in depth critizism of it (so far as I know). Just a lot of people saying that its bad. Meanwhile many feminists are waving it around as “proof” that all sciense that says there are biological genderdifferences that affect personality is “neurosexism”.

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    • Her theories have been tested and found not only wrong, but horribly so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

      David Reimer was a normal XY baby boy who, after a botched circumcision, had his penis chopped off, his testicles removed, and his name changed to Brenda. His parents stuck a dress on him, injected him with estrogen, and told him he was a girl.

      It didn’t work. David did not identify as a girl, even as a kid. By 13 he was suicidal. He began refusing to see the psychologist who’d suggested the gender-swap procedure (he was seen regularly for “follow-up” to document the case,) and threatened to commit suicide if his parents made him see the shrink again. At 14 he was finally told what had happened to him as a baby and completely rejected female identity, renaming himself David. He had his penis surgically reconstructed, testosterone injections, and a double-mastectomy (estrogen causes breast development,) married a woman and became a stepfather.

      If Cordelia’s theories were correct, not only would this work, it’d work even without the estrogen injections and testicle removal. You could stick a dress on any boy–or pants on any girl–tell him he’s a girl, and he’d grow up to be a girl. He’d love dolls instead of trucks and grow up to be shy and diffident around boys and obsessed with makeup and handbags, (or whatever.)

      I’ve known a fair number of trans people over the years (since middle school.) Most of them have some kind of obvious medical abnormality, like a chromosomal or hormonal disorder. Their experiences are in direct conflict with the radical feminist claim that gender is socially constructed. If gender were socially constructed, there would be no such thing as trans people. A person raised as a boy would just identify as a boy, no matter what chromosomes or hormones he was exposed to. A person raised as a girl would just identify as a girl. It would be far easier for a trans person to say, “Hey, girls can like baseball and being noisy and aggressive and boys can like dolls and handbags, gender is just a social construct!” than to go through all of the pain, expense, and social stigma associated with SRS. This is why there is a deep divide among leftists between trans people and trans-exclusive-radical feminists (aka TERF-wars). (I go into more detail on this in https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/09/16/trans-people-prove-that-gender-is-real/ )

      Feminists like to talk about how men “silence” them and ignore their experiences, but then they turn around and do the same thing to mothers, their fellow women. Feminists claim that mothers are purposefully raising their little boys to be loud and aggressive, and their little girls to be calm and docile. WHAT SHIT. Parents devote A TON of effort to making their little boys behave. The majority of discipline, both at home and at school, is aimed at making little boys less active and less aggressive. No one is trying to get little boys to misbehave! (Sorry, I am a little passionate on this point.) Meanwhile, society devotes itself to trying to get women to be less shy and nurturing–take books like “Lean In” or all of the researchers Frost cites (http://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-adaptive-value-of-aw-shucks/) who are trying to figure out how to make girls less shy.

      Telling a parent who has just spent their day trying to contain the whirlwind of destruction that is little boys that they are encouraging this behavior, and that their sweet little girls would act like this, too, if they weren’t oppressing them is a slap in the face. Radical feminists are delusional, liars, or completely ignorant.

      I know this is not a direct response to Fine’s book, which I have not read, just a response to hundreds of pages of other debates I’ve read. But responding to the Amazon summary:

      It is true that a ton of “scientific” research is shitty, badly done, or does not replicate. This is also true of a lot of the research that purports to prove that gender differences don’t exist. The most reliable research we have on the subject is, sadly, people like David Reimer, and this research is solidly against Fine’s thesis.

      There is a hormonal surge that happens in late pregnancy–androgens for boys and estrogen for girls–that is critical for fetal brain development. Brains dosed with androgens actually develop differently, structurally, than brains dosed with estrogen. This is, again, something we have experimented with, by dosing developing fetuses with high levels of estrogens (found in anti-miscarriage drugs.) XY-fetuses dosed with high levels of estrogens during this development period end up with normal-looking male bodies, but feminine brains, resulting in high levels of trans- identity later in life.

      From a biological perspective, the idea that different hormones create different bodies but not different brains is nonsense. No matter how much we might wish it weren’t so, brains are part of our bodies, like livers and toes, and hormones influence the development of both.

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  3. Thanks a lot for the interesting answer!

    I think many feminists claim that gender identity may be biological but most charakteristics asociated with it (shynes, nurturing charakteristics, dominance ect.) are learnt.

    But there are other explanations as well…..Scott Alexanders (girl?)friend has proposed that cases like david Reimer are exeptions and the rule is gender socialisation….http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/

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    • Occam’s Razor says Ozy is wrong.

      What are the chances that–of all cases–David Reimer is a weird exception in which biology suddenly dictated gender, but biology doesn’t do that for the vast, vast majority of people who have their hormonal systems intact?

      Speaking from a parent’s perspective, the facts on the ground are that American girls are socialized to be brave and daring and outspoken and courageous (go watch Frozen or Dora the Explorer or Sesame Street if you haven’t delved into kids’ programming recently,) while little boys are socialized to be quiet, docile, and non-violent.

      Most of school discipline is aimed at boys. Teachers (most of whom are women,) try very hard to get little boys to behave. This is socialization. I would like someone to show me a school where little girls get the majority of discipline slips, for infractions like “insufficient shyness” or “not enough nurturing,” while little boys are rewarded for biting graham crackers into toy guns and beating kids up on the playground!

      Quoting Fine, “My book is concerned with the idea that males and females are, on average, ‘hardwired’ to ‘systemise’ versus ‘empathise’, which is why I focused on evidence most relevant to the question of the effects of prenatal hormones on sex-typed interests…”

      The vast majority of people actually believe that women and men have the same math abilities, so different sets of abilities showing up in scientific studies probably has nothing to do with folk-beliefs about math, gender, and brain development. For that matter, the whole idea of there being a systematizing vs. empathizing gradient comes out of autism research, which is miles away from where the average person gets their ideas about the differences between boys and girls.

      Is Fine arguing that autistic children have simply been deceived by their parents into thinking they are autistic?

      For that matter, if the dearth of female math professors is due to women being socialized to think they’re bad at math, how does she explain all of the boys at the other end of the IQ scale? The population of special ed kids and those diagnosed with genuine mental retardation are both disproportionately male. If society is neurosexist against women, it’s extra-super neuruosexist against boys.

      But somehow, I never see people arguing that special ed is sexist just because it’s full of boys.

      (Note: I do not believe that people must trade-off between systematizing and empathizing, because lots of people are good at both and lots of people are bad at both.)

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  4. hers what fine herself said about david reimer: “Your book is incredibly well researched so I was surprised that you didn’t discuss the case of David Reimer. He lost his penis in a botched circumcision operation aged eight months and was subsequently raised as a girl (which included having his testicles removed, and female hormone treatment) on the advice of a psychologist who believed gender identity is entirely socially constructed. This proved to be a disaster and Reimer later reclaimed his male identity aged 14. Similar outcomes have been observed for boys with cloacal exstrophy (in which the penis is missing from birth) who have been treated with female hormones and raised as girls. What do you feel these cases say about the innateness of gender identity, if anything? ”
    My book is concerned with the idea that males and females are, on average, ‘hardwired’ to ‘systemise’ versus ‘empathise’, which is why I focused on evidence most relevant to the question of the effects of prenatal hormones on sex-typed interests, rather than core gender identity (that is, sense of being male or female). But to answer the second part of your question, despite the huge popular impact the case of David Reimer has had, this was one individual, reared as a male until 17 months of age. And in her new book Brain Storm (which takes on the whole ‘package’ offered by brain organisation theory) Rebecca Jordan-Young points out that femininity was forced rather heavy-handedly on Reimer, and with a kind of anxious ‘let’s hope and pray we can turn this boy into a girl’ mentality, and that we should consider what effect this might have had, especially in light of recent reviews of similar kinds of cases that conclude that rejection of a female identity is far from inevitable.

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  5. Thank you very much for your answer!

    Now dine stated: “especially in light of recent reviews of similar kinds of cases that conclude that rejection of a female identity is far from inevitable.”

    Now I didnt hear about such cases….Now most people talk about reimer but I heared there were many more examples and in all of them the “changed” people decided to get into the gender of birth. I never heared of people who didnt. Then again I heared about transgender identified people who decided to live in the gender of their birth after all so it may be possible.

    Do oyu know anything about that outside of the case of Reimer?

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    • It’s awfully difficult to evaluate Fine’s claims if she does not cite her sources.

      I know trans people personally who have not opted to pursue SRS or be openly trans because of the expense, pain, inconvenience, and public stigma. However, if they could snap their fingers and make SRS cheap, painless, and stigma-free, they’d do it.

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  6. Sorry to bother again. I wanted to ask what you think of the concept of cultural appropriation (SSC seems to have endorsed it).

    I must say living in Germany and studying on a quiet left wing university I have never seen the SJW approach of “you cannot be racist against whites” and blacks are perfectly in their right to humiliate, insult and otherwise attack whites as a whole and individual whites based on their whiteness because it helps to destroy oppression. Also white suffering and problems can be mocked as “white tears” (same about feminists with men). Interestingly enough it is also frequently used by white leftists to insult their enemies. Most leftists I met here still believe that it’s bad to insult anyone based solely on race. So I wanted to ask how widespread such an attitude is in the USA, is it limited to Tumbler and other internet movements or is it mainstream at least in the Democratic Party.

    Also do you know if Pseudoerasmus has left the HBD movement and if HBD chick will be writing again?

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    • Hey, Unknown, welcome back.
      I have no special knowledge of HBD Chick or Pseudoerasmus’s whereabouts, though I do note that both of them are still active on Twitter. Maybe they just don’t have a lot of material to make long posts about right now?

      Things are genuinely pretty bad here. Have you seen any of the videos of Trump supporters being attacked at rallies? There is nothing comparable at all on the other side–the Trump supporters have not attacked Hillary supporters at her rallies.

      Here is a video of a guy who actually held up a Hillary sign at the RNC and a Trump sign at the DNC and filmed people’s reactions:

      My own mother has been cursed at by random men in the street for wearing a Trump hat or T-shirt.

      The media is portraying Trump as literally Hitler, saying that he is making politics dangerous, etc., despite the fact that it’s Hillary’s supporters who are committing the violence.

      A couple of days ago, a black police officer shot a black man in Milwaukee. Whites, as usual, were blamed. “Protesters” began burning down buildings, looting, trying to drag random white people out of their cars and beating journalists. A white guy got shot in the neck.

      An Hispanic guy just shot a couple of Muslims in New York; media blames Trump.

      The violence is new but the attitude is not; when I was a kid, I was routinely bullied and picked on for being white, to the point that I used to pray every evening for God to turn me into a Mexican so I could have friends. Having talked to a lot of other kids who were bullied, I now realize that I actually had it better than many–I was never actually beaten by my classmates, for example, just frequently told that I should kill myself.

      I personally know white men who graduated from top universities in the country and have struggled for years and sent out hundreds of resumes in search of jobs.

      Twitter is just, like, the unbridled id of it all.

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    • Oh, sorry for forgetting to answer your first question.
      “Cultural appropriation” is one of those concepts that could be useful if used reasonably, but most of the arguments I have seen on the topic are really stupid, and are usually used to attack people who genuinely like the culture in question or are trying to embrace diversity.

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  7. Thank you very much for the answer.

    I think the term of “cultural apropriation” seems to suffer from the same problem that most of Americas political discussion seems to suffer from, one sidedness and selective aplication. I mean realy so much european culture has been “apropriated” and changed by just about everyone in the world. Just take classical music which Asians not only embraced and tinckled with but now Asian opera singers and such are replacing Europeans in Europe itself which seems to fit the term.

    I am sorry to hear you had it that bad at school. I was myself often attacked for being a Russian at a german school in east germany.

    So basicly when scott Alexander in his “anti reationary FAQ” writes that: “5.4.3: Even if the establishment has not managed to completely ban all discussion of race that contradicts their own ideas, isn’t it only a matter of time before political correctness takes over completely?

    It’s hard to measure the power of the more intellectually bankrupt wing of the social justice movement, but as best I can tell it does not seem to be getting more powerful.

    According to Rasmussen, support for “political correctness” is declining in America. As we saw above, fewer and fewer people are willing to attribute black-white disparities to “racism” over time. Gallup finds that in the past decade, the percent of blacks satisfied with the way blacks are treated has gone up nearly 10% (I can’t find similar numbers for white people, but I bet they’re similar). Both white and black people are about 25% less likely to consider the justice system racially biased than 20 years ago. The percent of whites who think government should play “a major role” in helping minorities has dropped by 10 percent since 2004; for blacks, there is a similar drop of 14 percent.

    The percent of people who think women have equal job opportunities to men has gone up 15% in the past nine years. Women are less likely to identify as feminists than twenty years ago, and support for affirmative action is at historic lows.

    Here we see really the most encouraging combination of trends possible: actual racism, perceptions of racism, and concern about racism are all decreasing at the same time.

    5.4.3.2: So how come social justice people have been making so much more noise lately?

    My guess is changes in the media. The Internet allows small groups to form isolated bubbles and then fester away from the rest of society, becoming more and more extremist and paranoid and certain of themselves as their members feed upon each other in a vicious cycle.

    Of course, as Reactionaries, you wouldn’t possibly know anything about that.

    At the same time, the relative anonymity of the Internet promotes bad manners and flame wars and general trollishness. It’s not just that the writer is anonymous and therefore doesn’t fear punishment for what he or she says. It’s that their enemy is some nameless evil, rather than a person with a face whom they will treat as a human being.

    And again at the same time, the national media has become more and more efficient at detecting outrageous events associated with some small town or some B-list celebrity and publicizing them to the entire world. This allows the hatred of the entire world to be focused on a single random person for a short period of time, which usually results in that person’s life being ruined in a way that would be impossible without this media efficiency.” he is basicly wrong?

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    • If I may be allowed to summarize: We now live in technologically-induced media bubbles which filter and intensify situations, making things seem worse than they really are.

      This is–at least in many situations–basically true. For example, there was a big scare about “sexual predators” back around 2000, (that went on for many years,) stoked mostly by 24-hour TV coverage of a few murder cases. These cases were tragic, of course, but people ended up with a greatly exaggerated sense of how often these crimes actually occur.

      We humans aren’t designed for social media and TV. We’re designed for village gossip, and if village gossip describes three children gruesomely murdered, you’d better bet that there’s a gruesome murderer in your community.

      Modern media raises the philosophical specter of all of your perceptions being just the work of a deceiving demon to a whole new level. But I don’t think it is useful to just throw out the notion of knowing.

      But by the same token, that doesn’t mean that crime rates don’t go up or down, or that everyone who is concerned about crime is just delusional (or wrong.) We can still talk about reality.

      Ideas influence action, and riots are pretty real.

      Sorry you had a rough time, too.

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    • It occurs to me that I may not have adequately answered your actual question, which I think is more along the lines of, “To what extent do SJWs have actual control and influence in America, or do we just think they have control because they are very vocal on the internet?”

      Obviously explicit SJWs are a small % of the country and generally deep in debt. And America is a big country, with large conservative areas where people like Sarah Palin can get into power.

      Our upper class is, overall, much closer in politics and philosophy to SJWs. They may regard SJWs as overwrought, they may not care about “fat acceptance” or whatever, but they think conservatives are basically retarded. Liberals set the agenda (eg, LBJ signed into law the immigration act that lead to our current immigration situation back in 1965,) and conservatives oppose them.

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  8. Thank you very much for answering again!

    Yes from what I saw of US politics it seemed to me that SSC was clearly minimizing the support for SJW positions that he called “intellectually bankrupt” among the intellectual elites in Media, academia and the leftist political spectrum.

    To me the social justice movement is characterized by 2 factors that seem to distinguish it from the mainstream left I know, 1: The bringing of the oppression idea to its logical conclusion and including things like fat acceptance, otherkin and furries into this category and 2: The idea that to create equality you not only uplift the once below the universal level you want all to have but you also have to push the once further up down, thus the belief that attacks (psychological and sometimes even violent) carried out against the “oppressor groups” are justified and that the “oppressed” basically should have the right to carry out such attacks whenever they want. This reminds me strongly of the mentality of Communists in Russia who were far from satisfied in just dispossessing the groups above average in wealth but also created a whole system of laws to humiliate them to “make up for past oppression” and “destroy the psychology of hierarchy still existing in society”. Basically even if dispossessed a worker may still have an inferiority complex before let’s say a lawyer, but if you publicly shame some lawyers and force them to clean the streets without payment while allowing lower class people to spit on them and throw stones (and shoot a few other lawyers) the inferiority complex will be gone (also the lawyer might have not personally oppressed any workers but because he profited from a system based on oppression he is still guilty and must be broken).

    It is the second aspect of Social justice I am particularly interested in my question here. Basically how widespread is this attitude among non-University Blue state Americans?

    To make an example of what I mean, imagine a gathering of Lawyers who talk about all kinds of things most are white but there is one young Indian among them, this Indian starts to speak “Whites are the cancer of the world, by your very nature you cannot create anything, all you can do is to steal and appropriate. You are responsible for all misery in the world, we Indians were the greatest civilization on earth and invented so much and lived in harmony and peace then you whites came and stole it all from us, all you can do is exploit, steal and kill! Thankfully India and China are rising and I hope we will soon take back all you stole from us. But really you will soon have died off anyway and the world can finally breathe easier!

    If some of the white lawyers after listening to him would have answered “I am not insulting your people, please don’t insult mine” the Indian would say “hahaha cry me a river withy I bathe in your white tears!”

    Now how common is such a scene in modern blue tribe America, what would be the reaction? Do most Blue tribe Americans subscribe to the idea that this Indian is justified and in no way racist while http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=16824 is racist?

    Basically I wonder to what degree the SJW position that whites deserve to suffer is mainstream?
    I heard it is at least not mainstream when it comes to feminism, considering that many feminists outside of Gawker Jazzebel and Salon try to lie that the “male tears” and other anti-male phrases are just irony about the stereotype of the man hating feminist while the Feminists on this magazines clearly don’t see it ironicly but believe that men have to be humiliated, Freddie DeBoer agrees for instance that women and blacks have the right to humiliate and attack whites and men as groups but denies the right to whites and men. http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/05/27/political-appropriation/ But the New York times and other mainstream left newspapers deny that Feminists even do such things at all. Thus I suspected that if the mainstream left still prefers to hide such motivations among the SJW it indicates that most blue state Americans aren’t ready for that yet.

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    • “This reminds me strongly of the mentality of Communists in Russia…”

      That’s why we call it “Cultural Marxism.”

      Group of lawyers incident:
      That level of vitriol would be considered rude, and I’ve never encountered (in real life) a rude Indian, (from India or America.) Also, Americans tend to be careful about what they say in front of co-workers, because no one wants to get fired.

      However, at an average blue tribe gathering, I’d expect everyone present to agree with the idea that “whites are privileged and need to atone for their privilege,” that “racism is bigotry + power,” and that blacks can’t be racist (or can’t be racist in ways that actually matter.) You could say, “Oh, invention XYZ, that was actually invented by an Indian guy, and some white guy took credit for it,” and that would be fine. Bonus points if you bring up that Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas were part black. In general, adhering to SJW orthodoxy is the way to go in conversation, just so long as you aren’t obnoxious.

      Your link would just confuse them.

      “Suffer” is a strong word. They would say that they don’t want people to suffer, because they don’t want themselves to suffer. But if you say, “whites are suffering,” they tell you whites aren’t (and give you a dirty look that implies they think you are racist.) They genuinely believe that the police are racist and shooting black people left and right and that mass incarceration needs to end.

      Did you see the video of the woman from Milwaukee telling people “Don’t burn down stuff here, go burn down stuff in the suburbs,” which CNN referred to as a “request for peace” (I am paraphrasing slightly from memory,) and cut to “down burn down stuff here”?

      The folks at CNN may not want riots, but they sure aren’t trying to stop them.

      I forgot to mention earlier that the statistics on “number of feminists” are misleading because feminism is so deep in the culture, that most people agree with it but see no reason to explicitly say so. Consider Sarah Palin, a woman who probably loudly and explicitly denies being a feminist, but has still chosen to get a job outside the home, in a traditionally male field. Sarah Palin believes that women should have the right to vote, to be governors or presidents, and probably even to earn the same pay as men. The only thing she doesn’t believe in is abortion. It is not unusual at all to meet conservatives who are “feminist” in all but name.

      The media–movies, tv–makes buffoons of men all the time. It is extremely common to make fun of men, and they are expected to take it. The legal system, from what I understand, is not kind to them, either. I know several men who’ve been devastated by divorce, (including one man forced to pay child support for a child who had died in his ex-wife’s custody,) but no women.

      I should add: among the upper class, it is shameful to be a devout Christian. You can be a Unitarian, or a mainline Protestant, if you must. But Evangelicals and “fundie” Christians are routinely mocked and regarded as little better than slime. Most of my relatives are very religious and their beliefs are some of the more interesting things about them, but I tend to leave all of that out in conversation with upper class people because I don’t want them to look down on me. But these same people are concerned about “Islamaphobia” and have no problem with Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, etc.

      How are things in Germany?

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  9. Also the term “racism” is understood here almost purly in its original meaning, the cathegorisation of ethnic groups into different biological clusters with different essentian characteristics that members of this groups cant change because they are genetic.

    I have so far never encountered a german who believed that the belief that different cultures instill different values into their members which lead to different social outcomes was “racist”. Actualy the inventors of this word were part of the long 19th century debate between racists and culturalists about exactly this question.

    With for instance in the USA the racists arguing that the Native americans were inherently biologicly unable to become civilized and thus had to die, while culturalists argued that they were essentialy equal to whites and just had to have their culture changed to reach equal status.

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  10. Thank you very much for your time!

    you wrote “If you ask blue-tribers “Why are black communities poor and violent?” or “Why are African countries poor and violent?” the vast majority will answer, “because of white people.” Even the cultural explanation–blacks drop out of school at high rates and have a lot of kids out of wedlock who end up raised by single mothers–is seen as racist because it “blames the victim.”

    I wonder why in surveys http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/05/white-supremacy-and-white-privilege-same-coin/#.V7bt_Ezbwz0 only about half of the Liberals believe that Black problems are mostly due to discrimination?

    It seems there is a dominant narrative that people cant dare to breach publicly even if they dont believe it.

    Maybe some of this people think as consequentionalists in terms like “even if black problems arnt mostly white peoples fault we should still shame white people into giving Blacks privileges and money because this way the existing inequality will lessen” a “end justifies the means” aproach?

    The idea here is that it might be unimportant why the downtrodden are downtrodden, the superior groups might perfectly deserve their superiority but whats important is to increase net equality and hapiness (pleasure). Thus rescourses have to be redistributed and to do this thous who have more must be broken.

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  11. I have seen historians openly adopting such an approach btw “we can’t discover the truth anyway and striving for it is pointless so why not strive for equality and social justice instead” some of the post-colonial folks have openly admitted this attitude but many more follow it silently.

    If you look at some of their works you’d be shocked to see how much wishful thinking they put there. for instance “Gay marriage was widely practiced in ancient Rome” is based on a text accusing Nero of all kinds of crimes and presenting him as a moral monster which among other accusations also stated (in horror) that he married a man.

    The idea behind most of this historians is on the one hand accuse the pre 1960s west of being uniquely and absolutely evil and to create the impression that all elements of nonwestern cultures they don’t like were imported from the evil colonialist west. Its basically westerners declaring to the non-westerners that all of their stories and customs they don’t like are false and recent inventions while their true culture is what is currently fashionable in the western left. Razib Khan summarized my thoughts from reading this kind of literature perfectly: “South Asian religiosity was without form or edge before the arrival of Europeans and their gaze collapsed the wave function. Before the instigation of Europeans people of color were tolerant of religious diversity, varied sexual orientations, and practiced gender egalitarianism. In other words, India was like the campus of Oberlin college, except without the microaggressions, and more authentic spirituality!”

    If you call such people out on their farfetched interpretations they will often openly say that “we are trying to make the world better! What could you possibly have against equality and diversity?”

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    • It’s an older post, so various things in it are likely out of date (and therefore it is not necessarily a fair representation of Scott’s current views) “Implicit association” tests of racial bias, for example, are now in the “fail to replicate” or “fail to show real-world outcomes” basket. (I took an implicit association test, once. It told me I was biased in favor of black and fat people. Take that as you will.)

      Scott cites a number of cases where blacks and whites send out identical resumes and the like, and whites receive more responses. These are interesting, but neglect the fact that in the real world, blacks and whites don’t, on average, have identical resumes. If the last five black guys I hired did a terrible job, and the last five white guys I hired did a mediocre job, then I am probably going to start preferring the resumes from white guys. If on top of that, the average black resume I receive is just not as good as the average white resume (a likely case given that blacks have, on average, lower SAT scores, lower college attendance/graduation rates, etc., and I have hundreds (or thousands) of resumes to read, then I’m probably going to start skimming the ones that just don’t look like they’re worth the time to read.

      Obviously this sucks terribly for black people who genuinely are equally qualified. But if you’re trying to figure out why blacks don’t make as much money as whites or have trouble getting hired, being lower-qualified, on average, is a much bigger deal.

      Take, for comparison, the experience of Asian (and Indian) Americans. Japanese Americans were so hated, they were literally put in internment camps about 75 years ago. Today, Asian and Indian Americans are our richest ethnic groups. People are still biased and racist against them, but they’re extremely hard workers and have excellent resumes, which has resulted in financial success.

      There are tons of programs today aimed at helping blacks that Asians don’t even qualify for, like affirmative action. Asians actually end up getting discriminated *against* in university admissions and government hiring; the average black medical student has an MCAT (medical admissions test) score 5.5 points lower than the average Asian student.

      Talking about implicit bias is just ignoring the elephant in the room.

      Scott’s numerical speculation about the cost of racism is interesting, but problematic due to resting on flawed assumptions. Just as baseball teams like wining, so do companies like making money, and presumably the ones with better hiring practices will out-compete the ones with worse. Scott doesn’t seem to take into account the fact that companies (and universities) are already spending a great deal of money on trying to be more diverse, from minority recruitment and scholarships to “African American Studies” departments and the like. I’ve heard too many stories about companies that hire a black (or female!) person who turns out to be not very good at their job, threatens to sue for discrimination if fired, and so is kept on the payroll while transferred to another department where they hopefully can’t do too much damage to think it’s as simple as he presents it.

      I’ve heard some terrible stories about female firefighters, eg this lady: Firefighter who flunked physical injured 10 days into the job (She broke her foot stepping off the firetruck while doing routine training.)

      “Doirin-Holder, who turns 40 this month, is one of 282 “priority hires” passed over in 1999 and 2000. Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis ordered they must get preference as victims of past discrimination against minorities.

      It was Doirin-Holder’s third attempt to pass the academy. She failed midway through an academy class in 2013 and returned to her former job as an EMT. Two other female priority hires in that class did well.

      Doirin-Holder started another class in early 2014 but dropped out because of an injury. The FDNY then gave her a desk job and kept her on the payroll at top firefighter salary, $76,488. She made $81,376 with overtime in 2014 and entered her third class this summer.

      Since she was injured on duty, she is eligible for a disability pension that would pay three-quarters of her annual salary, tax-free, if deemed unfit to return.”

      All things considered, while I’m sure that “real discrimination and racism” do exist, I’m not sure this untapped population that can add a trillion dollars to the economy does.

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      • I’d just be cautious about assuming any opinion was unchanged after 3 years, plus he’s posted about the “replication crisis” plaguing a lot of the studies he cited, so he knows they’re bad.

        I honestly don’t know enough about cars/car buying to have an opinion on the car study.

        I have read studies on workplace diversity that go both ways. Some find increased profits and some decreased profits. I suspect that mere “diversity” is less important than the specific employees. Eg, companies in Japan don’t have much diversity, but do very well, while companies in Haiti also don’t have much diversity, but tend to do pretty badly. If companies end up with diverse workforces because they’re genuinely hiring the best employees, (and diversity doesn’t do bad things to group cooperation,) then profits could go up, but if companies are just hiring people in order to fill specific quotas, they’re more likely to get lower quality employees than they would otherwise.

        Thanks for the link.

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  14. There is also the greater dificulty to fire protected minorities once hired making employers often think twice about hiering them.

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  15. Well Garret Jones argues that only in the highest income professions is the research on diversity ambiguous, when it comes to lower income professions it one sidedly says that diversity decreases effectivness. Thus from this perspective its not surprising that employers want to keep their workplaces homogenious. Then again SSC would just reply that the reason it decreases effectivness is racism (from white people only I suspect), even though I suspect it has far more to do with diferent cultures. Then again maybe what Garret Jhones studies found wasnt realy a diversity effect but rather the effect of on averege worst preforming groups getting mixed togather with better preforming groups lowering hte averege. While in top positions most of the “diversity” is white-asian thus no decrease.

    As for SSC you might be right actualy since in the study we are discussing he is quiet sure that a 10% wage gap between men and women is cause to discrimination while in a more recent article he wrote “I’m tempted to say something like “the worst you’ve ever been able to find is a single-digit pay gap which may or may not exist, and you’re going to turn that into people not thinking you’re human?”” Thus he is now doubting that any of the wage gap is due to discrimination.(and there are quiet a lot of reasons to doubt that, then again I am willing to believe in a 5% gap due to steryotypes or discrimination.)

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    • That seems sensible. Often in lower-income profession, “diversity” means “lower-skilled workers,” who may be cheaper in the short run but not as effective in the long run (or even a sign that the business wasn’t doing well and so had to hire cheaper workers.) At the upper end, high-income professions, as you say, may be a different matter.

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  16. Hello and sorry to bother again. You have several times written about the whole “Nerd culture is mysogenist” concept so I wanted to ask you if you know anything about if women are realy so horribly harrased in the video game world. The studies Iv seen show a somewhat lesser report of harasment by female players then by male once and it seems that mostly men and women just play different games on averege. Still I wonder if the harassment that women experience is worst then that of men or if women just experience it more painfully because of a more emotional personality. When I played online games Iv seen women usualy treated much friendlier then men and given free stuff and I have never seen any harrasment of female players. Maybe the problem is not so much harrasment but that the typical women cant stand nerds and their very presence is offputing for them, making htem chouse to play male dominated games less?

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    • Hey, you’re no bother.
      I’m not in the video game world and don’t blog or post about video games, so I have no first-hand experience with whether women in this niche get harassed or not. My experiences are being a female blogger in a heavily male-dominated nerd/science sphere, being female IRL in a heavily male-dominated nerd academic sphere, and hanging out IRL in male-dominated casual gaming/nerd spheres. In all of these spheres, men have been near 100% nice to me and I’ve had almost zero negative interactions that I can blame on sexism.

      I have encountered some sexism or just asshole behavior outside of nerd spheres, as well as a lot of anti-nerd sentiment, but for practical reasons I don’t interact too much with these spheres.

      So on net, the idea that nerd culture is misogynist is a complete load of shit.

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    • 3 factors:
      1. Men are normally more aggressive than women, and most of their aggression is directed toward other men. Eg, most criminals and most victims of criminals are men. Men live with this, they’re used to it, they think it is “normal.”
      Women have no idea. EG: the first time my husband described to me the male behavior of bumping into each other on the sidewalk. Men try to dominate public spaces and aggressively bump into each other just walking down the street. I HAD NO IDEA. It’s a behavior that has never been aimed at me because I am female. So women have no idea how much aggression men are dealing with every day.
      2. Women are smaller than men. The vast majority of us are smaller and weaker than the vast majority of men. Almost 100% of men are bigger than me. We are easily killed and therefore freak out at male aggression.
      3. Society incentivizes female claims of discrimination.

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    • I haven’t seen any criticisms one way or another. Obviously I haven’t looked at the raw data.
      I can offer a few potential ones off the top of my head: High-IQ non-whites, by and large, are immigrants (including high-IQ Africans, if they got counted as “black” in this survey,) and they tend to have different cultural patterns from whites about doing homework, going to college, and getting degrees. Whites will let their kids do things like “become mountain climbers” or artists for a living, while Asians demand that their kids go to college and become doctors. Doctors make more money than mountain climbers.

      I’m going to try to paste in a couple of graphs:

      screenshot-2016-05-07-17-07-13 clk4xrpugam65aj

      Hindus make more money than Jews, and Asians give them a solid run for their money. All of these groups may also be significantly more frugal with their money than whites, due (again) to immigrant background.

      The graph comparing IQ distributions by race is also telling–clearly the graph has cut off a significant portion of the black and Hispanic distributions to the right, and a significant portion of the Jewish distribution to the left (hence the especially large bar for the top 5% of Jewish IQs, which is lumping together a lot of people.

      Thanks to Pumpkin Person
      Thanks to Pumpkin Person

      I’m not sure exactly what % of the population has an IQ above 150, but according to this site, it’s less than 0.1% of the population. Point being, if there are twice as many 150s in the Jewish population than the gentile, this could account for some (or all) of the difference.

      We may also want to control for location–Jews are more likely to live in high cost of living areas like NYC and gentiles more likely to live in low-cost areas like Utah. (This also affects college admissions, as high-IQ whites outside of the North East are more likely to attend local schools, like Duke or UT, than to apply to far-off Harvard.)

      “Hispanic” is always a problematic category due to being linguistic rather than racial; my experience with high IQ Hispanics is they are heavily white and Jewish. (They are also not, generally speaking, an historically oppressed group in the US, so they shouldn’t qualify for AA anyway.)

      Statistics can do odd things at the extremes–for example, even though blacks have lower life expectancies than whites, the oldest person in the US–last time I checked–was a black lady. Likewise, the richest lady in the US, IIRC, is Oprah (also black, and according to Pumpkin Person, extremely smart.)

      I’m doing my best here to come up with potential critiques.

      Overall, I suspect that even if you take these factors into account, you still end up with an Affirmative Action effect.

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      • Thank you very much! Still I think its an interesting analysis although with a clearly biased aim (then again most academic studies are also biased they just hide it better).

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      • It does effectively answer one pertinent question: when we control for IQ, do blacks make less money than whites, as we would expect if people are routinely discriminating against blacks (also, Hispanics.) And that does not appear to be the case.

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  19. You are the only HBD blogger who ever bothered to respond to my questions, for this I am very grateful!

    So I wanted to ask you another one. What is your opinion of the “racial invariance hypothesis” which says that poor whites have about the same crime rate as poor blacks and that if you control for socioeconomic status all the diferences between the races in crime go away?

    This thesis is mainly backed by this studies:
    http://www88.homepage.villanova.edu/lance.hannon/Forthcoming%20in%20the%20Journal%20of%20Poverty.pdf http://www.columbia.edu/~rs328/Homicide.pdf http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/badcomm.htm

    Since poor whites have a generaly higher IQ as equaly poor blacks this would also contradict the idea that lower IQ leads to more crime.

    Basicly I wonder why none in the HBD/Nrx/alt Right hasnt confronted this studies.

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    • It’s probably because I get fewer comments due to being less popular and so have more time to respond.

      I doubt those stats:

      source: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/99v05n3/9909levi.pdf
      source: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/99v05n3/9909levi.pdf

      Regardless, crime and poverty correlate because dumb, violent people (of every race) make bad life decisions, leading to crime and poverty. The argument that poverty causes poverty I find noxious, because I know many poor people who have never committed a crime besides sleeping on a park bench.

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      • I think the idea behind the “racial invariance hypothesis” is that most poor whites dont live in comunities of poor people like the black ghetto but rather as isolated examples in a sea of middle class whites, thus they are unable to organize criminal enviroments. In the few cases they do live in such comunities they are just as criminal as blacks.

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  20. I guess the answer here would be that its not THAT poor and not that urban and that criminal activity is easier in an urban setting.

    Then again over the centuries there have been aglomerations of much poorer people in cities and they were not nearly as criminal. I dont know I would realy like someone in the Nrx sphere to at least take a look at this studies, it is suspicious that they are ignored.

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    • Crime went down during the Great Depression.

      There are cities in Appalachia and the “Rust Belt” (if you aren’t familiar with our economic history, a band of old factory towns/cities in states like Pennsylvania, eg, Pittsburgh.) And there are rural blacks living in the countryside throughout the Deep South. There are also Native Americans living on reservations, and those are poor, rural, and high-crime (though I don’t recall off the top of my head exactly how high the crime is.)

      There are dumb, violent whites and dumb, violent blacks. I’ve met both.

      One of your links didn’t work, but I’ll try to make time to look at the second PDF. Ultimately, I think if you control for enough bad life decisions, you’ll find groups of people who both make bad decisions.

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  22. To be honest though I never in my life saw so much concentrated hatred then when I read Tim wise, and I have read Islamists who blamed the west for everything or Russian communists who jusr despised the west. This guy is a fanatic!

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    • Tim Wise does, I think, get a great deal of hate mail, and that could make a fellow vitriolic.

      I have a post scheduled to go up in the next couple of weeks that actually looks at a fair amount of crime data; after that I can write something addressing the rest.

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  23. Thank you I am looking forward to your post. So far as I know http://thealternativehypothesis.org/ and https://zombiemeditations.com/2016/04/23/the-poverty-of-sociology2/ have tried to deal with this question so far.

    Well most of the prominent racialists also get masses of hatemail and they still somehow manege to stay civil.

    btw Tim wise also said that every study made by conservatives is “garbege”, do you know if there is anything behind this exept pure ideological hatred?

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    • Yes, but they have to stay civil or no one will listen to them. There are days when I feel like writing something angry, but I think it would be bad for the blog.

      Lol, clearly not every conservative study is garbage. Cons probably have done bad studies, but then, so have libs (see the “replication crisis” in the social sciences.) At this point, I don’t know which side has produced more bad studies, but I suspect libs.

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    • First–I will get around to writing a longer response on the other posts you asked me about eventually. I just have a lot I’m working on.

      I don’t know Mr. Steele; I don’t recall ever encountering his blog before.

      picture-10a

      “Racist” is an accusation that just comes with the HBD territory. Everybody here gets called racist. Even James Watson, the guy who won a Nobel prize for discovering DNA, has been blacklisted for “racism.” If you’re going to talk about HBD, the first thing you have to do is stop thinking that cries of “racist!” have any legitimacy.

      Calling someone “racist” doesn’t prove they’re wrong; it’s just an ad-hominem argument, and ad-homs have no place in science.

      Saying, “HBD Chick isn’t racist, but ThoseWhoCanSee is, therefore HBD Chick shouldn’t link to them,” is asking HBDChick to observe/confirm the moral legitimacy of an argument that anyone on the internet could turn around and use against her–because I guarantee you, there are people who call her racist.

      Who decides what is and isn’t racist? Remember when the SPLC declared Henry Harpending racist? Or when it called moderate Muslim Maajid Nawaz an anti-Muslim extremist?

      Steele is polite, but his arguments aren’t anything new (and note here that you now have one guy arguing that density is correlated with crime, and another guy arguing that rural areas have more crime…) I can see why TWCS might get annoyed and not want to deal with him. Like, yes, we are familiar with the argument that poverty and discrimination cause crime and low IQ.

      Then he makes a silly argument that no one in HBD is interested in other cultures (really?) criticizes someone with Asperger’s for having narrow interests (REALLY?) and complains that HBDers don’t write works of political philosophy (apparently he hasn’t read Moldbug.)

      Sorry, I don’t have time to wade into whatever debate he inspired.

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  25. Thank you very much for the answer! If I ever get on your nerves please tell me!

    He does argue that in the early 1900 there were black comunities with a very low crime level and they suposedly had the “same genes and same culture” as moden inner city blacks (especialy the culture part is….”debateble”) and that southern rural whites are suposedly more violent then blacks if controlled for…stuff (his proof is a map of “gun violence”. He also claims that “institutionalized racism is even more a taboo topic then HBD” which concidering well everything seems like a strange claim.

    Here he claims to have defeated the hereditarian hypothesis! https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/white-supremacy-defeated-yet-again/ https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/heritability-inheritance-genetics-epigenetics-etc/

    Because clearly he has never seen poor White IQ compared to that of rich blacks, its all poverty!

    THen again he is one of the few leftists out there who actualy talks to HBDers instead of just calling them names (well he does that too but not only).

    Also Epigenetic links are PROVEN!

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    • You’re fine, bro. No worries.

      There are black communities today with low crime rates and high IQs. There are white communities with high crime and low IQ. People vary. (Also, I’m not entirely sure how much we should trust crime stats from before 1930 or so. We’re a lot better at figuring out how someone died these days.)

      Hey, I’ve started doing an open-thread thing on Wednesdays, so feel free to post there. :)

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  26. Sorry to bother again.

    I wanted to ask what your opinion was on the link between “IQ and Testosterone” in men, or the overall observation, originating many centuries ago, that more intelligent men seem to have weaker sex drives and be overall less masculine on averege? This seems to correlated with race and IQ as well, with Black men displaying the most agressive and barbaric behavior and east asians the least (with a good chunk of their male population not having sex at all). Now there are some studies that seem to indicate, that the very stupid have low testosterone , it then rises from IQ 70 till around 90 and then starts to fall, with the IQ 130 and above having the lowest levels. This would validate stereotypes that existed about upper and lower classes in just about all civilized societies (Lower classes = Dumb, brutish, agressive and barsh, decide worth trough physical strenght. Hypersexual Bulky build. Upper classes = Smart, polite, self controlled, more romantic then sexual, build a valuesystem mostly built around intellectual achievements, be it the accumulation of money, educational achievement or preformance on a court, less sexaul and more romantic, thin and more slender build then the lower classes). I wonder what your opinion about this question is?

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    • I can’t comment on testosterone because I haven’t read any relevant studies, however, there definitely does seem to be a correlation between “masculine” faces/builds and low IQ. Overall, higher IQ people seem less sexually dimorphic than low-IQ people, which may have to do with slower development in order to give their brains more time to develop or to do with high-IQ people coming from societies where unrestrained sexuality was traditionally a hindrance to success rather than a help.

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      • Thank you for the reply.

        I do wonder, if one looks at global IQ distribution one will see that two factors seem to have played key roles.

        1.Cold climates

        2.A history of at least a millennium of agriculture.

        We see that societies with a long history of Agriculture have higher average IQ, compared to genetically similar societies that don’t (Han vs Mongols), but on the other hand after around 1000 years the IQ stops adding up (See Finland), non agricultural Caucasians, like the ones in north Caucasus, have IQs of 90 and are very aggressive. They may be a good example of the ancient Celts, Germanics or Slavs, who tore down ancient civilizations.

        Now agricultural and especially civilized societies put very different demands on men and women then primitive Hunter-Gatherer or pastoralist societies. Suddenly hyper masculine violent behavior was no longer solely rewarded but very often punished. Instead intelligence (especially verbal one) got massively more rewarding.

        I think that this might be the reason why civilization did require enforced monogamy for the majority which meant a shackling of women to men they would otherwise not have chosen. Even the men on top, the smooth high verbal IQ bureaucrats, capitalists and courtiers were far away from the “alpha Chad, Conan the Barbarian” of the past. Women adapted to this trough a combination of their trait of being attracted not only to specific traits but to status in general and maybe due to some selection as well, which is why the brain of the modern women is sending her often contradictory messages about which men to pick as mates.

        Now most of the intelligencia couldn’t have survived in the barbaric past, but since in civilization they get above average positions, they were able to get a wife and spread their genes. Since similar traits were weeded out in the lower classes (try being a weakly build introvert, without having a 115+ IQ to be useful and see how quickly your prole comrades will tear you to shreds), we see a connection between IQ and such traits (although it is the extroverted, self controlled, high verbal IQ smooth talker, who truly rules the civilized world (just look at every high culture in the world and I think you will see it clearly made by such people, for such people, raising the things such people are good at at the level of virtues.), high spatial IQ and creative, low social skills people still usually occupied a higher niche in it then the brutes in the lower classes.

        In a barbaric society, the natural hierarchy of the schoolyard predominates. Now I myself was at a German Gymnasium, where the lowest IQ probably was 100, so I can only speak about a truly mixed class and IQ schoolyard from what I have heard from Anglos or Russians, I know of the “Schoolyard Jock” only from hearsay, but I think that in a state of nature he is the ideal man. What they (and parts of female brains) can’t understand is why they stop dominating in adult life. Women are hence often torn apart between various parts of their nature and their reason, driving them into different directions, as are men.

        The high IQ-Low aggression level of our western, or east Asian civilized societies are hence unnatural and could not exist in a state of nature. The Smart have usurped the natural role of elite from the strong and the brash, they did it (in the view of the strong and brash), trough cunning, underhanded means. This fact is causing resentment and the quiet common feeling for both men and women that the world doesn’t work exactly how it should.
        Just 200 years ago, it was guaranteed that the smart mate, due to them having more money. But in a post sacristy society, where women can make their own choices, the more primal instinct can be followed far more freely, with probably dysgenic consequences. Should genetic engineering or similar things not come soon, our current breeding patterns (combined with migration) might turn our society into one that is far more suited for barbarism, then for civilization.

        Sorry for the rant.

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  27. A somewhat different question:

    Suposedly around 20% of women record that they experienced acts that are legaly defined as rape.
    (Even if a good part of them dont think that they have been raped).

    Now much of it seems like usualy parts of the mating game “no not always means no”, people getting drunk ect.

    Since Leftists especialy focus on questions of “harm”, I doubt that many of such acts cause that much harm to the women.
    On the other hand Iv read that “Half of rape victims suffer from post traumatic stress disorder”. Now I wonder if it is these sort of “victims” that are meant here and where this data comes from. Is this aplied to all the 20%, or was this data collected from a different sample?

    Since you dealt with Tim wises race and crime claims very good, I am just coming to you with such questions now.

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    • Last time I looked into it, the data on rape was not very reliable, drawn from unrepresentative survey data, used questionable definitions or phrasing, etc. I think these statistics are far too unreliable to be used in any meaningful way. For example, if you combine your two stats, 10% of women must have PTSD.

      I have a relative who ended up with PTSD after being in the military. One minute he’d be walking down the street, the next he’d be hiding under a car, shaking, because he heard a loud noise. Do 1 in 10 women dart under a car every time a man makes a loud noise? No.

      Any victim of violence (or even accidental harm) is likely to end up traumatized. You can be traumatized by a mugging, childbirth, or a traffic accident. The death of a loved one. But lumping all of these traumas under “PTSD” renders the term useless.

      So maybe half of people who suffer from some definition of rape also develop PTSD–but 10% of women definitely do not have PTSD.

      Thanks.

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  29. Now I have the feeling that if this study speaks of “rape” it dosnt mean the kind of rape that is done in the surveys that find 20%, since most there dont even see their experience as rape.

    Or am I missing something here?

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  31. So it seems that 10% of women do indeed have PTSD at some point in their lives acording to these statistics.

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  32. I wonder if there are other smaller numbers, some articles do hint at them, but I sofar havnt seen any.

    You see most of the right laughs about the “20% rape hoax” but the PTSD argument is one Iv never seen adressed anywhere by rightists.

    You see if lets say 7% of all women do experience sexual assault related PTSD, then rape would indeed have an epidemical charakter.

    Overall I do see rightists reporting the same mantras, without adressing the points of the other side nearly as much as Id like they do.

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  33. From the article you linked: “The lifetime prevalence of PTSD for women who have been sexually assaulted is 50% (10). Moreover, sexual assault is the most frequent cause of PTSD in women, with one study reporting that 94% of women experienced PTSD symptoms during the first two weeks after an assault.”

    Now if 20% of women were sexualy assaulted that would mean that 19% of women would have PTSD at one point in their lives (and not 10% or 8%) and that 10% of all women would have lifelong PTSD.

    If 1/3 of women were sexualy assauted the numbers would be 33% and 17% respectivly.

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    • “Now if 20% of women were sexualy assaulted that would mean that 19% of women would have PTSD”
      Technically, it would mean they had some symptoms of PTSD, not full-blown PTSD. For example, after giving birth, I started crying any time something about babies or childbirth came on TV (childbirth was traumatic) but I didn’t have full PTSD.

      Frankly, none of these numbers pass the smell test, at least not for American society. Do 10% of women have PTSD? Absolutely not. Their behavior would be radically different if they did. Could some large percent have, as I did, some of the symptoms of PTSD for a few months out of their lives? Yes. I used to know a woman whose cat died while at the groomers and for at least the next couple of years she started crying whenever she drove past the building or heard the company mentioned. We’re human; we get hurt. To compare this to how people feel after watching people get blown up or being tortured in POW camps, though, is absurd.

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  34. Thank you very much for the answer.

    Another question if I haven’t tiered you too much:

    On an US level East Asians seem to have fat higher incomes then Whites, but SJWs like to argue that this is only due to the fact that EAs tend to live in states, where salaries and prices are on average higher, while lots of whites live in different states.

    One should hence look at the income distribution in places like California.

    Indeed there is one Graphic Iv seen, which seems to confirm that. http://www.thejuliagroup.com/blog/?p=1180

    I wanted to ask if you or the NrX community had any answers to this argument?

    Are there proofs that EAs do earn less than Whites if controlled for such factors?

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    • I’m not sure exactly which argument you want a counter to. Asians tend to do very well for themselves–they go to college at high rates and are very likely to become doctors. They dominate elementary school math competitions and gifted programs; CalTech is heavily Asian, and there’s a joke that MIT stands for “Made in Taiwan.”

      Most of our Asians are a highly select group of very smart, determined, hard-working people.

      Some Asians hail from less select refugee groups; Vietnamese, Hmong, and certain others don’t always score as well as Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc. Asians. (Though one of the smartest people I know is Vietnamese.)

      Asians are discriminated against in normal American life. Their over-performance on tests leads colleges to reverse-affirmative action against them, denying them admissions they would have gotten under objective standards. The men are routinely discriminated against on the dating market. Highschool can be rough for a kid who speaks English as a second language, doesn’t have much of a community, and whose parents don’t understand American social or dating norms and only want their kid to study.

      They do tend to live in more expensive states like California, but they chose to live in these states. I feel like digging for stats one way or another would be seeking a specific answer in a potentially biased way. To be fair, I don’t know how things are in China Town or other major Asian communities, but you never hear of the Asian equivalent of Appalachia or trailer parks.

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  36. Well after taking a closer look, it seems that Asian Americans indeed earn more than whites, even on a state level.

    The difference is smaller than on a country wide level, but it is still quiet significant.

    So while the factor of real wages has some impact, it is by far not strong enough to negate the overall character of things.

    After taking a break from following the reactosphere, I do have to say that it has become a very sad place.
    Neo-Nazis and other sometimes even more absurd neobarbarian ideas have come to dominate it.

    Nick Land seems to have stopped blogging, but his old phrase about the few bourgeois and aristocratic elements in the right, being swept away by a mass of savagery seem to come to fruition, so much so that I am starting to think that maybe the lefts utopia (if realized), despite the disgust it invokes in me, might be preferable to neosparta.

    “Bronze age pervert” is probably the perfect embodiment of what the right has become. I don’t know if even half of the ideas of the guy are serious, but they certainly paint the picture of a dystopia, compared to which Hitler vision was civilized and sane.

    For all the problems of NrX, it tried to create an ideology, that could and did draw intelligent people to it. Now it seems that right wing thoughts are doomed to degeneration in the heads of low IQ brutes, where some true facts, that the left rejects, will be mixed with a flood of nonsense and filth.

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    • Nick Land is on Twitter these days, if you want to follow him.

      I’ve never considered NRx and the Alt-Right synonymous so much as overlapping–and then there’s HBD, which is its own universe.

      HBD is thriving, although the landscape has shifted. David Reich’s new book, for example, looks like a wonderful contribution to the field (his disdain for his fellows aside.) Razib is still writing http://razib.com/razib/ and the sheer volume of results pouring out of the ancient DNA and modern genetics fields is marvelous. In a way we’ve gone from a few guys on the internet saying “genetics is going to prove this” to folks actually doing the genetics work and getting fascinating results. I myself just plain don’t have time to read and write as much as I’d like to, so I’m not feeling like I’ve run out of good material to read.

      On the political side, I think Social Matter continues to highlight/publish a lot of good material. You might be interested in joining the Hestia Society or something like that; they don’t take women so I don’t know what they’re up to, but I gather there are a fair number of less visible NRx or reactionary discussion groups.

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      • Thank you very much for your answer.

        Its good to hear that genetics is advancing. When it comes to HBD, I only know about Razib, West Hunter, Anatoly Karlin, Sailer, Peter Frost, Pumpkin and You. Id say there was more activity in this sphere 4 years ago.

        Still it certainly has not declined as much as NRX has. The best example for this process would be the fact, that James Donald has become the most famous Neoreactionary. Quiet a fall from Moldbug In my opinion.

        From my recent observations, the remnants of NRX have been drifting into the direction of simple Nazism for some years now. Good example is the latest “froudesociety” article.

        With the alt-right itself in shambles right now tough, who knows how things will develop further.

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      • Thank you for your answer.

        I’m merely sad to see something I had some hopes for falling to shambles. Mind you, knowing the usually success rate of right wing intellectual movements in the past, this was to be expected. Makes one think if there is something to Steven pinkers idea, about smart people on average having a preference for liberalism. Right wing thought is either shackled to the left, or seems to experience the near irresistible pull of fascism.

        I did run a blog years ago, it was in my mother tongue, Russian. It mostly dealt with quantitative history applied to late 19th and early 20th century Russia, as well as to the first world war. My life has become much more busy since then tough. Should I ever start to blog again, it will certainly not be in English, I honestly feel quiet embarrassed writing in it.

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  37. I also wanted to ask about Pseudoerasmus. He seems to be bouncing between HBD and anti HBD views. I wonder if he has now turned his back on HBD?

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  39. Sorry to bother again.

    I would like to contact Dr.Peter Frost. Sadly I cant find his E-Mail adress anywhere.

    Do you maybe know how I could contact him?

    Thanks in advance.

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  41. I’m truly honored, that you do consider me your friend!

    Only if it’s no problem, is there a way I could contact you privately?
    I am afraid that I have made the “About” page into a tool of my personal curiosity and I doubt, this was, what it was intended for.

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    • Don’t worry about it. I like that the about page has become a place where people can come and post things of interest.

      You can contact me at evolutionistxyz @ gmail.com (minus the spaces, of course) though it’s best to let me know before sending a message because I don’t check it very often.

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    • Without reading much of the site–
      It is a taboo topic because people desire to protect children from harm. A concept like the “age of consent” does not exist in biology, (animals cannot count how old other animals are,) but in the laws and morals of people.

      All (mature) animals are attracted to sexually mature and fertile members of their own species, and unattracted to non-fertile members. However, age preferences vary by species, with some preferring older and some preferring younger mates. EG, chimp males prefer older chimp females, not younger ones. These preferences are due to the way chimps raise their children, which make older chimp females more successful than younger ones.

      Note that human societies have a variety of ways of raising their children, from complete paternal investment to none, which probably also leads to different evolutionary pressures for different mating strategies. There is not just one successful human mating strategy that all human groups use.

      The issue with adolescent sex with older people in our own society is not that it is counter to biology, but that it is likely to be harmful to the adolescent, who is not yet emotionally nor mentally mature and cannot support any resulting children. The imperative of protecting children from harm is strong enough that we have developed strong taboos around the subject and declare anyone who would harm children “disgusting,” because we route taboos through the same mental systems that protect us from rotten food, parasites, and incest.

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  44. Hello again!

    I wonder what you thing of the idea presented in “Dr Edward Dutton, J. Philippe Rushton: A Life History Perspective”, that most “scientific geniuses were “highly intelligent r-strategists—reflected in illegitimate children, affairs, and even academic corner-cutting”

    THe idea is that the truly genius scientists are hypersexual.

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    • That is not even remotely true. Einstein had, like, 3 kids–two survived to adulthood. Darwin had 10 children, but all by the same wife. Bohr and Margrethe had 6 children. Galileo never married, but had three children with one woman. James Watson has 2 kids. Shockley and his wife had one child, though Shockley also donated sperm to a sperm bank. I don’t think da Vinci had any children.

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  45. Hmm interesting,

    do you know about any scientists besides einstein who acted in a hypersexual way all over their lives?
    I have heared of several who had no sex at all. I wonder what this theory of “r-strategy” is based on.

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    • Oh, yes, though it would be rude to mention people I know personally by name. In my experience, there is at least a decent minority of STEM-types who are interested in the “polyamorous” lifestyle (Scott Alexander of SSC is a famous example, though this is obviously mediated by his apparent asexuality.) However, I have never heard of anyone in the poly community having children.

      I think the community is probably due to 1. Nerds not really understanding arbitrary-seeming social norms like “monogamy”
      2. Figuring that if you’re not having children anyway, why be monogamous?
      and 3. male-female imbalance.

      On a totally different track, there was a time in the 40s-60s when–I think–STEM work was well compensated. The guys who did the Manhattan Project, for example, probably got paid pretty well. This gave them plenty of money for having children, and being of a higher education level/social class, may have been accepting of divorce and remarriage earlier than the rest of society. I am REALLY SPECULATING here.

      In general, though, nerds do very badly on the dating market and tend to be more focused on work than dating or socializing.

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      • Isaac Newton: No children; I don’t think Alan Turing had any children. Heisenberg had 7 (including one set of twins) with one wife. I have this vague sense that Heisenberg was popular with the ladies. Dirac certainly wasn’t; how he managed to marry is something of a mystery.

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  46. It’s true that Nerds usually arnt that sexually active and seem to on average have a lower sexdrive (which seems to be negatively correlated with IQ). The polyamorous community, isn’t usually composed of the most sexually successful people either.

    Thing is, the adherents of this “genius theory” argue that “creative geniuses” are different from the rest of high IQ people and especially from the “Nerds” (whom they tend to hate), in that they are behaviorally very manly and aggressive.
    see for example: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/jrp2003.pdf

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    • Are you sure this is the paper you meant to link? I have only read the beginning, but it doesn’t look like it is going into R/K habits nor the idea that creative geniuses hate nerds–something I’ve never heard asserted nor seen any real world proof for. I interpret the paper as “Before people get mates, they engage in behavior intended to attract a mate. After they get a mate, they do less of this behavior.”

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  48. Hey, I couldn’t find contact info (understandable, flooding inboxes are a major problem) I just wanted to share some info.

    I couldn’t find the quote or article, but you mention the anthropologist Richard lee reporting how due to the long duration of tree growth, the Khoisan don’t manage the tree fruit. You said regardless that the extra tree would do good for one’s children.

    To the informant’s point of being “long dead”, there is also the possibility of migration from that area within their lifetime, so the tree being less important. However, I do have data indicating that Pygmies in central Africa have a similar thing called “paracultivation” that is implied to be both precolonial and important to their dwelling of the forests. (contrary to popular belief, the biomass of forests are not actually that well suited for human consumption without modification).

    https://scholars.sil.org/thomas_n_headland/controversies/wild_yam

    Such management was also seemed to have been don in West African forests in Ghana around 10k at a site called “Bosumpra”.

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0067270X.2017.1393925?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=raza20

    https://www.academia.edu/11974542/10_000_year_history_of_plant_use_at_Bosumpra_Cave_Ghana

    Simply put, given how the pygmies and ancient West African HG could get by when given the option of management, there’s no reason to believe that the Khoisan couldn’t without environmental constraints. Niche-wise, I believe they represent pre-food producing African economies compared to Forest dwellers of both Farming and HG type.

    Also, I have data that I believe fleshes out the paradox that you noted with Pygmies and Jensen noted with Black IQs not lining up with “retarded” behavior. The answer, discriminant validity with Adaptive Behavior (with some correlation with reading skills).

    To flesh this out requires more links, but I don’t want this to be a bigger comment then needed.

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  49. Are you still discussing Legal Systems Very Different Than Our Own? I got it a while ago but I just finished reading it. I have some interesting thoughts on it as I’m in law school.

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    • Oh, no, I should change the sidebar. That was about a year ago. I’m so sorry. However, i am always very happy to discuss the book again. What would you like to discuss about it? From the perspective of a bit of time, I find the Somali example has stuck with me as the most interesting, perhaps because I grew up thinking of Somalia as an anarchic, failed state. Which it was (or is, I haven’t checked in with Somalia lately,) on the state-level, but that doesn’t preclude the formation of local government structures, which indeed they have. And it reminds me of the book of Judges in the Bible, when Israel was “ruled by judges” instead of kings–so I guess that describes a real gov’t system the authors were familiar with at the time.

      Looking at our own legal system (congratulations, btw,) I definitely feel like there’s some room for improvement. Aside from the obvious, (copyright is too long,) the incentives surrounding prosecution have serious issues. What do you think?

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  50. Hope you’re well. I’m a bit anxious as there have been no new posts for quite a while. I know there’s more in life than blogging but those are hard times and I’d be happy to hear that you’re at least alive (and well would be even better)

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      • Gratulations re the baby!!!
        But … Having a baby and no ideas regarding evolution? Unexpected :-)
        Ideas:
        – “Spiteful mutants”, real or nonsense?
        – Rapid increase of Gender Dysphoria and its evolutionary background (if any)
        On the other hand, the baby is and must be top prio .
        At least I know that you’re well! Have a great time!

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