Archives for July 2012

Hamburgers And Rednecks: IQ Estimates Of US Ethnic Groups

This about Human Biodiversity, tagged , , , was written by for on July 31, 2012

Via The Audacious Epigone: IQ scores by US ethnic groups. It is not very useful I think in theoretical or practical applications but it is interesting as a showcase of why IQ is more than just genetic inheritance, incorporating also Flynn, sampling issues, sense of popular identity, selection bias, etc.

Wordsum is basically a vocab test of 10 words (example). While one might not expect such a quick and simple test to accurately reflect IQ it actually does – the correlation between Wordsum scores and IQ is about 0.71. Respondents got to choose the one or two ethnic groups to which they belong. (See table below)

By and large, the results are as we would expect:

(1) Many of the Russians (about 50%) are, of course, Ashkenazi Jews. Explained.

(2) At first puzzling is the fact that Germans score considerably below the Irish, Mediterraneans (Italians, Greeks, French) and Slavics (Poles, Czechs). This is an inversion of European PISA results in which native Germans got 105 compared to France’s 101, Poland’s 100, Italy’s 98, Greece’s 96, etc. There are two reasons for this I think:

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The Guardian’s Pussy Worship

This about Society, tagged , , , was written by for on July 29, 2012

From their latest Editorial / anti-Putin rant, via Mercouris. It is not with the ideological rhetoric that I have an issue with; it’s The Guardian, after all. Nor am I especially interested in defending Pussy Riot’s prosecution (my own views on the matter jive with Kononenko’s). I do however have an issue with the The Guardian explicitly misrepresenting or outright lying to support its agenda – a modus operandus that is now all too common to it and makes a mockery of the “facts are sacred” values it claims to uphold. In this “fisking”, I will only highlight the most egregious violations of basic journalistic standards.

“Their protest is not made of slogans and placards, but is crafted from art, dance and performance. Putin and his henchmen know how to deal with the former – the hundreds of thousands who have spilled into the streets in the last eight months – but their handling of the these women is much less assured.”

The Protests for Fair Elections got at very, very most 100,000 at the biggest such rally, the one on Prospekt Sakharova in December – a count made by Russia’s most liberal mainstream newspaper. (Other estimates ranged 60,000-80,000). That is, they numbered in the tens of thousands. If they want hundreds of thousands, they had better look elsewhere… say, Spain.

“The trial takes place in the same courthouse where alleged fraudster and billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former boss of the Yukos oil company and Putin’s political enemy, was tried.”

Not an alleged but a CONVICTED fraudster, in a judgment ruled sound by the ECHR.

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Did Ron Unz Score An Own Goal Too?

This about Human Biodiversity, tagged , , , , was written by for on July 28, 2012

In recent days Ron Unz’s article Race, IQ, and Wealth (The American Conservative) has been making the rounds in the HBDsphere. Broadly speaking it argues for the predominance of cultural and environmental factors as opposed to genetic in forming IQ. It is fairly long but it’s also one of the best statements of that position out there, and I highly suggest you go and read it in its entirety (as well as the good discussions it spawned at thanks to hbd* chick, Peter Frost, David Sanders, etc).

(Incidentally, part of the reason it is so good is that it avoids throwing round the racism card in addressing proponents of the genetic-determinist model of IQ, as do all too many mainstream commentators. That is really a kind of trolling, and by and by, will as such no longer be tolerated on this blog as it once was.)

To prove his case Ron Unz takes data from Lynn and Vanhanen, the two foremost compilers of global IQ data (along with Rinderman), and turns it against their own position that national IQ levels – barring a universal Flynn Effect – are essentially fixed: “… I would suggest that the heralded 300-page work by Lynn and Vanhanen constituted a game-ending own-goal against their IQ-determinist side, but that neither of the competing ideological teams ever noticed. … Given that Lynn and Vanhanen rank as titans of the racial-difference camp, perhaps their ideological opponents, who often come from less quantitative backgrounds, are reluctant even to open the pages of their books, fearful lest the vast quantity of data within prove that the racialist analysis is factually correct after all. Meanwhile, the pro-racialist elements may simply skim over the hundreds of pages of dry and detailed quantitative evidence and skip to the summary text, which claims that the data demonstrate IQ is genetically fixed and determines which nations will be rich and which will be poor.”

In support of his thesis Ron Unz cites the wide dispersion seen in IQ results for European populations, which are genetically close. Many East-Central European societies that scored low during the 1950’s-80’s have since come close to converging with results from Western Europe. Furthermore, South Europeans and East Europeans who migrated to the US in the 1920’s scored in the mid-80’s – a 1 S.D. discrepancy that is about as big as that which continually separates Blacks from whites. I.e., very significant. However, these folks all managed to integrate into American society and now have IQ’s higher than those of longer established (and more rural) groups such as the Germans and Dutch. In particular, he cites a test administered to 3,500 Irish schoolchildren in 1972, which showed an average IQ of just 87. That is almost 1 S.D. lower than the IQ of Irish-Americans, or for that matter, more recent PISA results which now show the Irish to be well within the European cognitive mainstream.

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Will Russia Record Natural Population Growth This Year?

This about Demographics, tagged , was written by for on July 27, 2012

Is the question asked by Mark Adomanis in his recent post. If you linearly extrapolate dynamics for the first half of this year to the second (BR +7.5%; DR -1.9%), then yes, it will – as per the graph I’ve stolen from him below.

Adomanis says that making such a prediction back in 2005 would have resulted in him getting dragged off to a lunatic asylum. I avoided that fate, though considering I made said predictions in 2008, it is still fairly impressive.

“Russia will see positive population growth starting from 2010 at the latest.”
“Natural population increase will occur starting from 2013 at the latest.”

And, just for peter:

“The share of Russia’s working age population will peak around 2010 at about 72%.”

The Guardian And Putin

This about Media, tagged , , , was written by for on July 27, 2012

Two months ago I wrote an article in which I used data and statistics to show that Russian journalists today under Putin are, contrary to extravagant claims in the Western media, far safer than in several acknowledged democracies such as India or Brazil; far safer than ordinary Russians; and indeed, far safer than they were under Yeltsin. Why then does one get the exact opposite impression from reading the Western media on this subject? Mainly that is because they lean on rhetoric and hyperbole over fact; they deny the utility of comparative perspective; and in some cases, they outright lie or make things up. The Guardian is an example par excellence of all this. On reading a certain Guardian editorial, longtime DR commentator Alex Mercouris noticed that its figure of 200 journalist deaths under Putin clashed irrevocably with ALL estimates from reputed press freedoms watchdogs, most of which converged on a figure of 40 deaths or less. Did The Guardian just make up its own facts? Unable to rest without an answer to this question, Mercouris embarked on an investigation to find out the origins of this massively over-inflated figure… and why The Guardian left it up on their site unchanged for SIX MONTHS after having become aware of their mistake. I am happy to present:

The Guardian and Putin

Alexander Mercouris

As readers of the British newspaper the Guardian know, the Guardian has conducted for many years a fierce campaign against Vladimir Putin.  This began almost from the moment of Putin’s appointment by Boris Yeltsin as Prime Minister in 1999.  I still remember an editorial the Guardian published at the time which called on Yeltsin to sack Putin just a few weeks after he had appointed him.

On 18th December 2011 the Guardian published another in its long line of anti Putin editorials under the provocative title “Truth is being murdered in Putin’s bloody Russia.” The language used in this editorial was extreme even by the Guardian’s standards.  I was particularly shocked by the final sentence, which referred to the Russian state as “slack, slimy and savage”.  Such language seems to me completely inappropriate in an editorial in a serious newspaper with an international readership.

The editorial appeared in print form in the Guardian’s Sunday supplement the Observer and online in the Guardian’s website on “Comment is Free”.  The timing of the editorial on 18th December 2011 is important.  Parliamentary elections took place in Russia on 4th December 2011 over the course of which the pro Putin party United Russia suffered a substantial loss of support, triggering protests amidst allegations of vote rigging.  An unauthorised protest took place in central Moscow on 5th December 2011, which turned violent.  A much bigger peaceful protest took place in Moscow on Bolotnaya Square within sight of the Kremlin on 10th December 2011.  This was followed by a further big protest in Moscow on Sakharov Avenue on 24th December 2011.  The editorial therefore appeared at a tense time in Russia, when the protest movement in Moscow against Putin was at its height and when the Russian and international news media were buzzing with speculation that Putin might be on his way out with rumours circulating of troop movements in Moscow and of a violent crackdown being planned against the protest movement.

The editorial was supposedly written in connection with the murder in Russia’s southern republic of Dagestan in the northern Caucasus of a journalist called Khadzimurad Kamalov.  In emotional and angry language the editorial condemned Kamalov’s murder, which it linked to the murder of what it said were “around 200” other journalists who had supposedly been killed in Russia since Putin came to power.  Amongst the murdered journalists named in the editorial was the famous journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was killed outside her apartment in 2006.  The editorial accused Putin and his government of complicity in these murders as part of a “bloody” campaign to “murder the truth”.

In other words at a time when Putin was facing a challenge in Moscow from the protest movement and at a time when speculation of a violent crackdown on the protest movement in Moscow was rife the Guardian published an editorial that accused Putin and the Russian government of complicity in the murder of “around 200” journalists and which referred to Russia as a “slack, slimy and savage” state.

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Chinese Netizens Praise Russian Democracy, Accountability

This about Society, tagged , , , , was written by for on July 27, 2012

Typically when Westerners write about Chinese and Russians they stress the negative aspects of the relationship. Russians are invariably racist towards the Chinese and fear them in xenophobic reaction to their (non-existent) swamping of Siberia. The Chinese for their part laugh at the alcoholic, non-productive Russkies. And quite likely they will soon invade and take back Outer Manchuria. Unlike the Putinist kleptocracy the Chinese model at least incorporates fast growth, public service and rule of law.

Of course as regards opinions on China-Russia relations, the Westerners are the least relevant of the three parties. When Russians themselves reference China in online discussions, my impression is that it is usually in positive and self-critical terms: “They are growing so much faster than us”; “They shoot corrupt bureaucrats”; “Their prices are so low and thus they are now richer than us.” (For reasons that should be obvious there are critical caveats to all these views which renders the Chinese situation less relatively impressive once accounted for). Of course there are negative views too. In particular, all too many Russians buy into the thesis of a Chinese military threat to the Far East (thanks to propagandists/publicists Golts, Latynina, Aleksandr Khramchikhin, etc). It’s like they’re unaware of certain critical innovations in bombing technology since 1945.

The view that I am least familiar with is the Chinese. My impression based on reading translations from the website chinaSMACK is that typically the Chinese feel quite positively towards Russia. A few have lingering resentments over events in 1858 and suchlike but these are not widespread sentiments. However what was really pleasantly surprising was to see that some Chinese at least have high opinions of Russian governance relative to their own, at least in response to the news that the Mayor of Krymsk and other senior local bureaucrats had been arrested in response to recent flooding that took 170 lives. (Typically, both Russians and Westerners disagree, regarding Chinese governance as superior). This I know because Inosmi translated the comments of Chinese netizens on the Krymsk arrests on Sina Weibo (their equivalent of Twitter). I re-translate them into English.

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Why Everyone Is Getting The Aurora Shootings Wrong

This about Society, tagged , , , , was written by for on July 22, 2012

(1) Mass shootings of this type account for far less than 1% of US homicides. As such it is pointless and bizarre to try to make some kind of anti-guns point with them.

(2) They are a relatively new phenomenon; even the term “postal killings“, describing mass shootings at postal offices, was first coined in 1993. This suggests that other factors are at work. In particular, these shooters almost always tend to be whites or Asians with no girlfriend and frequently specializing in STEM fields; a remarkable fact given that most homicides in the US are committed by low-class Blacks or Hispanics. They are also loners: James Holmes himself, as well as Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), George Sodini (who was so desperate at never getting laid that he attended seduction workshops), Marc Lépine, etc. In short what ties most of them together is that these mass shootings are driven by beta male rage.

Here is how James Holmes was described by a female classmate. Note that “weird” coming from a chick is the kiss of death to any romantic prospect:

“I always thought that he was a little strange. I could never put my finger on it, but something told me to not get to close to him, female instincts I guess,” the female student told NBC News. “I had tons of classes with him and lived across from him in the Honors dorms. He was a very smart guy though. He was a little bit of a weird guy, but we were honors students, so weird people were kind of common.”

(3) Why now? I assume that from the 1980’s on society passed some critical tipping point. Before it was possibly to get a good girlfriend just by being a “nice guy”; today it is necessary to skilfully game women to get laid with any frequency. Today the combination of obesity (especially among lower class women) and unleashed female hypergamy (especially among higher class women) which enabled alpha male soft polygamy has made half of femdom practically inaccessible to your average beta. Your typical shooter isn’t just a beta but a raging omega; condemned to a life of celibacy by a social ineptitude that society no longer caters for because of the aforementioned factors. Some of them marry their cats or become homosexuals; a few go on killing sprees driven by sexless rage.

(4) That said, it’s important to keep in mind that these mass shootings are in the end a mere cultural curiosity, more than anything. They dominate the airwaves but the chances of getting killed in one is probably no more than the chances of dying in a terrorist attack on US soil, or getting struck dead by lightning. Only a fool or paranoiac would spend his days worrying about it. The vast majority of homicides in the US are accounted for by inner city areas, where homicide rates can go as high as 40/100,000 (e.g. Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, St. Louis, Washington DC). As is well known all these places have in common a racial composition of a certain character. Meanwhile there are quite a few states with West European-level homicide rates of below 2/100,000: New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, Minnesota, Hawaii, Maine, Utah. What’s immediately striking is that these are the states with the most, erm, European-like populations.

(6) The main liberal-collectivist argument against gun rights is that they increase homicide rates. However these is no real statistical evidence for this. At least in a reasonably high-IQ population, there is no reason to think that sprinkling firearms all over makes homicide rates any worse. The liberal-collectivists hate this because they deny HBD theory and reality and affirm human equality, and would rather law-abiding citizens go defenseless against criminals than admit they are wrong. Indeed, they are like radical Communists or fascists, putting ideology ahead of people.

(7) Feminism (with its attendant obesity apologism and female hypergamy) is for the most part responsible for mass shootings. NAM’s (Non-Asian Minorities) – especially Blacks, who account for about 50% of homicides on 13% of the total population [statistics linkie] – are responsible for the US homicide rate being more than twice as high as Europe’s. Guns are faultless; to the contrary, they tend to incentivize the very middle-class civility that is typical of low-violence societies. That is why the liberal-collectivists and cultural Marxists and Guardianistas oh so predictably hate them and want to take them away from us.

From our cold dead hands they will!

EDIT 7/25: And I was completely, 100% correct as always surprise surprise.

On Defending The Soviet Union

This about Economy, tagged , , , , , , , was written by for on July 12, 2012

scylla-charybdis-and-meContrary to what some might try to take from my post on the longterm failure of the Soviet economy, I am not an anti-Soviet ideologue. I loathe lies about its achievements and the blanket condemnations directed its way by moralistic poseurs every bit as much or more than I detest reality-challenged attempts to paint it off as some kind of utopia or at least superior to alternative paths of development.

After communists, most of all I hate anti-communists. – Sergei Dovlatov, Soviet dissident.

On the latter point, I especially notice a tendency to ignore wider historical and comparative context. In the crudest cases, Russian literacy rates and GDP are compared with those of the Tsarist era: Yes, of course the average Soviet citizen c.1980 lived far better than the average Russian citizen in 1913, but then again, so did the average citizen of EVERY OTHER European country. The more important question to ask: Would the average Russian have been better off had the Russian Empire continued on its natural development trajectory without the distortions of Stalinist central planning? Yes, he almost certainly would have, as per comparison with, say, Finland (the sole part of the Empire that didn’t go Communist), or even the Mediterranean periphery nations.

Alternatively, they say that the USSR nonetheless managed to be richer than the “Third World”, as if that was some kind of achievement. Of course it was not, as (1) they were much less advanced than the Russian Empire even in 1913, and (2) their low national IQ’s would have precluded, and continue to do so, convergence with the rich world anyway; a weakness that Russia *doesn’t* suffer from. But the evidence is simply too overwhelming to be deniable: China; North Korea; Cuba; to a lesser extent, the ex-Soviet countries and Eastern Europe – all these nations, which have little in common except insofar as they suffered from the scourge of Communist economics, are ALL glaring and consistent downwards exceptions to the otherwise remarkably tight correlation between levels of national IQ/human capital and GDP per capita. (Of course a further problem here is that hardcore Soviet apologists tend to be cultural Marxists and deny Human Biodiversity and intelligence theory).

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Mexico Makes The Right Choice

This about Politics, tagged , , was written by for on July 3, 2012

Two days ago, Mexicans returned the PRI to power after 12 years in the political wilderness, with Enrique Peña Nieto becoming President. The leftist Obrador as well as PAN’s Mota lost. I don’t know much about Mexico but this is how I interpret things.

(1) The PAN seem to be full of neoliberals, who serve foreign and corporate interests and don’t care much for ordinary Mexicans. They favor a hyper-militarized approach to the War on Drugs, but this hasn’t yielded successes, as the Mexican homicide rate doubled in the past 5 years. The socialist Obrador is a poseur, who does not much like democracy (as per his Orange Revolution-like attempts to overturn the results of the 2006 elections). In general, the opposition to the PRI is quite thuggish while attempting to paint itself as transparent and democratic; much like the Russian opposition to United Russia. See the impudence of the Yo Soy 132 student protesters, rich self-entitled thugs who think it cool to physically threaten their political enemies.

(2) The PAN hasn’t had much success in the past 12 years. While north-bound migration has fallen, this was due to economic difficulties in the US as opposed to Mexican success. It doesn’t seem to have become noticeably less corrupt nor did it achieve significant economic growth relative to the developed world (see right).

I don’t think this was mostly the PAN’s fault. After all, Mexico is pretty much where it should be as dictated by its (very modest) level of human capital or national IQ; its position relative to the US hasn’t budged over the past century. That said the PRI is still the better choice. It is the party of the majority, respectably corporatist but also nationalist and mindful of workers’ interests. The same cannot be said of the PAN, who pander to the interests of foreigners and Mexican elites; their electorate are oligarchs and emigres. As for Obrador he is a dangerous demagogue. Mexico made the right choice.

Egyptian Progress

This about Society, tagged , , , was written by for on July 3, 2012

The woman on the right is the Egyptian First Lady in 1930. The woman on the left is Mrs. Mursi, First Lady in 2012.

I do not know if there is any better illustration of the collapse in aesthetics, culture, etc. when Islamic radicals seize power thanks to their liberal, internationalist, and socialist enablers. Truly, it is a horror to behold.

PS. Sorry for the short nature of the posts of late. I’m very busy ATM.