#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
This is an open thread to discuss Day One of the NFL Draft. And just to get the conversation started, if I was the GM of the Cleveland Browns, I’d take Barkley, then Mayfield, with Allen as my fallback unless Darnold was still available and Mayfield wasn’t.
I don’t think that is what they will do, however. I think they’ll take a quarterback at 1, then the Giants will take Barkley, as they should.
This expanding lawsuit against Harvard University is not entirely unrelated from the recent discussion of intelligence, success, and ethnicity:
The Justice Department is actively investigating Harvard University’s use of race in its admissions policies and has concluded the school is “out of compliance” with federal law, according to documents obtained by CNN.
The Justice Department’s battle with Harvard potentially sets the stage for the first major legal test of affirmative action policies under the Trump administration. Last year, the US Supreme Court ruled that race can be one among many factors universities use in making admission decisions. Two letters from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division indicate that Harvard has challenged the department’s authority to investigate, and further state that if the school fails to provide documents to the department by December 1, the agency may file a lawsuit against the school….
Additional correspondence obtained by CNN shows that the Justice Department formally notified Harvard it was under investigation on September 20 and since that time, lawyers for the agency and the school have been trading letters over the scope of the department’s document requests, despite what Harvard noted were “its concerns about the highly unusual nature of this investigation.” The Justice Department’s interest in Harvard’s policies stems from a 2015 federal complaint that accuses the school of discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions. When The New York Times reported in August that the Justice Department was looking for lawyers to work on “possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” the department said that the posting was related to an ongoing case rolled over from the Obama administration.
But these more recent letters from the Justice Department, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, mark the first confirmation that the school is currently under investigation.
Who knows whether Harvard will be able to wave its magic wand and make it all go away somehow. But if they can’t, here is what the statistics very strongly indicate they are trying to hide:
This is a really good interview with Jaron Lanier which hits on three important concepts:
This dovetails with something you’ve said in the past that’s with me, which is your phrase Digital Maoism. Do you think that the Digital Maoism that you described years ago — are those the people who run Silicon Valley today?
I was talking about a few different things at the time I wrote “Digital Maoism.” One of them was the way that we were centralizing culture, even though the rhetoric was that we were distributing it. Before Wikipedia, I think it would have been viewed as being this horrible thing to say that there could only be one encyclopedia, and that there would be one dominant entry for a given topic. Instead, there were different encyclopedias. There would be variations not so much in what facts were presented, but in the way they were presented. That voice was a real thing.
And then we moved to this idea that we have a single dominant encyclopedia that was supposed to be the truth for the global AI or something like that. But there’s something deeply pernicious about that. So we’re saying anybody can write for Wikipedia, so it’s, like, purely democratic and it’s this wonderful open thing, and yet the bizarreness is that that open democratic process is on the surface of something that struck me as being Maoist, which is that there’s this one point of view that’s then gonna be the official one.
And then I also noticed that that process of people being put into a global system in which they’re supposed to work together toward some sort of dominating megabrain that’s the one truth didn’t seem to bring out the best in people, that people turned aggressive and mean-spirited when they interacted in that context. I had worked on some content for Britannica years and years ago, and I never experienced the kind of just petty meanness that’s just commonplace in everything about the internet. Among many other places, on Wikipedia.
On the one hand, you have this very open collective process actually in the service of this very domineering global brain, destroyer of local interpretation, destroyer of individual voice process. And then you also have this thing that seems to bring out this meanness in people, where people get into this kind of mob mentality and they become unkind to each other. And those two things have happened all over the internet; they’re both very present in Facebook, everywhere. And it’s a bit of a subtle debate, and it takes a while to work through it with somebody who doesn’t see what I’m talking about. That was what I was talking about.
But then there’s this other thing about the centralization of economic power. What happened with Maoists and with communists in general, and neo-Marxists and all kinds of similar movements, is that on the surface, you say everybody shares, everybody’s equal, we’re not gonna have this capitalist concentration. But then there’s some other entity that might not look like traditional capitalism, but is effectively some kind of robber baron that actually owns everything, some kind of Communist Party actually controls everything, and you have just a very small number of individuals who become hyperempowered and everybody else loses power.
And exactly the same thing has happened with the supposed openness of the internet, where you say, “Isn’t it wonderful, with Facebook and Twitter anybody can express themselves. Everybody’s an equal, everybody’s empowered.” But in fact, we’re in a period of time of extreme concentration of wealth and power, and it’s precisely around those who run the biggest computers. So the truth and the effect is just the opposite of what the rhetoric is and the immediate experience.
A lot of people were furious with me over Digital Maoism and felt that I had betrayed our cause or something, and I lost some friends over it. And some of it was actually hard. But I fail to see how it was anything but accurate.
This guy is sharing some important insights into the intrinsic danger of centralization, even when it is unintentional and inadvertent. It also underlines the importance of the Infogalactic approach, which rejects the concept of the One True Page that defines objective reality for everyone on the basis of the opinions of the information gatekeepers.
As you’ve probably noted, I have remained resolutely silent on the man. Tonight, at about 7:15 EST, I’m doing a Darkstream to address what I believe to be his inherent lack of intellectual honesty and integrity. Tune in via Periscope.
My analysis of the so-called “Jewish question” has been criticized by exactly the people you would expect to criticize it. I responded today with an update, making the mathematical case linking higher IQ to higher Jewish achievement properly:
In summary, his updated case is based on a false premise that is supported by inaccurate numbers which are based on irrelevant and outdated studies that never purported to claim what is being cited. It is the most intellectually shoddy case I have seen any public intellectual attempt to make since Richard Dawkins tried to prove that a religious upbringing is worse than sexual abuse in childhood by citing an apocryphal story about Alfred Hitchcock driving through Switzerland.
Peterson would have done much better to simply state that he is not free to state his opinion on the subject since he lives in Canada and is subject to Canadian anti-speech laws.
No more songs of Ice and Fire for you, at least not this year:
George R.R. Martin is confirming what Game of Thrones fans have increasingly suspected: The long-awaited sixth book in his A Song of Ice and Fire saga, The Winds of Winter, will not be out in 2018 (here are some of the best fan reactions to this news).
The author revealed the decision in a press release announcing a publication date for Fire and Blood, his upcoming history of the Targaryens which has clocked in at a massive 989 pages long.
“No, winter is not coming… not in 2018, at least,” Martin wrote. “You’re going to have to keep waiting for The Winds of Winter. You will, however, be able to return to Westeros this year. I do want to stress… indeed, I want to shout… that Fire and Blood is not a novel. This is not a traditional narrative and was never intended to be… let’s call this one ‘imaginary history’ instead. The essential point being the ‘history’ part. I love reading popular histories myself, and that’s what I was aiming for here … (Though there are enough stories here for twenty novels. Battles, bloodshed, betrayals, love, lust, horror, religious wars, politics, incest, historical revisionism, all the fun stuff) .… As for me, I’m returning once again to The Winds of Winter.”
I can, however, confirm that the full A Sea of Skulls will be released this year. The hardcover will definitely be available for Christmas.
John Derbyshire is frustrated with geneticist David Reich’s one-step-forward, two-steps-back routine in Who We Are and How We Got Here.
It is plain from the evidence, amply presented in this book, that many—perhaps most—of the “mixture” events Prof. Reich urges us to “embrace” in fact involved one group of human males killing off another group’s males and mating with their females.
Does Prof. Reich really expect males from that second group to “embrace” their annihilation?
The last three chapters of Who We Are are marbled with incoherent gibberish like this, punctuated with shamefully gratuitous insults to more honest and brave human-science writers like Wade, Cochran, the late Henry Harpending, and even the great James Watson.
What makes it all very odd is that these preposterosities and insults are interleaved with commendably frank statements about the reality of biological race differences, e.g.
If selection on height and infant head circumference can occur within a couple of thousand years, it seems a bad bet to argue that there cannot be similar average differences in cognitive or behavioral traits.
Reich’s lurching between PC pablum and honest race realism left this reader feeling positively dizzy. Why is the book like this? The most charitable explanation: Prof. Reich believes he needs to do the signaling in order to preserve his funding.
It is more than a bit bizarre, as are Reich’s regular digressions into Jewish history, the myth of Jewish intelligence, and various other Jewish minutiae that have literally nothing to do with the science of ancient human DNA that is the nominal topic of the book. Reich is a serious and accomplished scientist, but as Derb points out, he lacks the basic literary competence of science popularizers like Dawkins and Wade, and he is almost astonishingly nasty and unfair to Wade as well as James Watson. That being said, Reich does step firmly, if not fully, away from the blank slate theory and leaves the anti-racist anthropologists without a single scientific leg to stand on. From Chapter 11, The Genomics of Race and Identity:
Beginning in 1972, genetic arguments began to be incorporated into the assertions that anthropologists were making about the lack of substantial biological differences among human populations. In that year, Richard Lewontin published a study of variation in protein types in blood.7 He grouped the populations he analyzed into seven “races”—West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians, and indigenous Australians—and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. He concluded: “Races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals. Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.”
In this way, through the collaboration of anthropologists and geneticists, a consensus was established that there are no differences among human populations that are large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Lewontin’s results made it clear that for the great majority of traits, human populations overlap to such a degree that it is impossible to identify a single biological trait that distinguishes people in any two groups, which is intuitively what some people think of when they conceive of “biological race.”
But this consensus view of many anthropologists and geneticists has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy that the biological differences among human populations are so modest that they should in practice be ignored—and moreover, because the issues are so fraught, that study of biological differences among populations should be avoided if at all possible. It should come as no surprise, then, that some anthropologists and sociologists see genetic research into differences across populations, even if done in a well-intentioned way, as problematic. They are concerned that work on such differences will be used to validate concepts of race that should be considered discredited. They see this work as located on a slippery slope to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement to sterilize the disabled as biologically defective, and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.
The concern is so acute that the political scientist Jacqueline Stevens has even suggested that research and even emails discussing biological differences across populations should be banned, and that the United States “should issue a regulation prohibiting its staff or grantees…from publishing in any form—including internal documents and citations to other studies—claims about genetics associated with variables of race, ethnicity, nationality, or any other category of population that is observed or imagined as heritable unless statistically significant disparities between groups exist and description of these will yield clear benefits for public health, as deemed by a standing committee to which these claims must be submitted and authorized.”
But whether we like it or not, there is no stopping the genome revolution. The results that it is producing are making it impossible to maintain the orthodoxy established over the last half century, as they are revealing hard evidence of substantial differences across populations.
It’s not a good book. But it is a useful one that may well point the way towards better-written, more intellectually coherent books in the future.
Thales points out that the social media world is literally engulfed in low-level leftist rhetoric:
Surfing around Instagram, you will find a large number of scantily-clad women travelling the world petting cute little animals, talking about “body positivity” and posing provocatively, generally with the juicy bits only barely covered enough to avoid attracting the attention of the censors. Invariably, every cause spouted by these Instagram ladies is boilerplate Leftism. Save the whales, maybe, or fat is beautiful, or white men are vaguely shitty and probably shouldn’t even exist. Also, Christianity is crap, and Atheism is morally superior to the zombie sky wizard.
Now, we roll our eyes at this and go about our business. Why, after all, should we worry excessively about near-porn fusing with idiotic Leftism?
Truthfully, this is a massive problem. Leftism is seen, even by most Rightists, as the default position. It’s the ‘no thinking required’ setting. If you want to spout some kind of philosophical nonsense to make yourself look smart and cultured while your boob is falling out, you do Leftism. It’s easy rhetoric. Hey look, there’s a man with no fish. Saying “somebody should give him a fish, look he’s starving” is the easy rhetorical answer. Defeating this argument is simple with dialectic, but few people care about dialectic. It’s boring. Nerdy. Too many words. Better to just call somebody a bigot and move on.
The correct way to fight this is through memes. That’s why I created the Daily Meme Wars, although to be honest, the memes I create tend to incorporate excessively high rhetoric. But it would be more effective to simply subvert the low-level rhetoric by taking their imagery and repurposing it. This will tend to be even more effective than their incoherent, dishonest rhetoric because, as Aristotle notes, the most effective rhetoric is based on the truth.
One can even engage in destructive meta-rhetoric, by taking their message and attaching it to images that make it clear how absurd and false their rhetoric is.
So, I’m going to be experimenting with lowering the level of the rhetoric and making it more direct to see if that makes it more effective on social media. For example, it doesn’t change the message if the background image is a painting of the signing of the Constitution or a girl in an American flag bikini when the words, and the intrinsic truth underlying those words, are the same.
It is not your Country. It is not your Constitution. You have to go back.
The only substantive difference is in the effectiveness of the memes on different people. Some people do react emotionally to images from 1776. But a lot more react emotionally to images of attractive young women.
UPDATE: Here is an example from today’s Daily Meme Wars that directly addresses the feminist body-positivity rhetoric.
We can expect more of this inter-party conflict as whites cease to become the only identity group with influence who can be safely targeted:
California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, the prominent #MeToo activist now under investigation for groping and sexual harassment of former legislative staffers, was reprimanded by former Assembly Speaker John Perez in 2014 for making racially insensitive comments directed toward Asians.
Perez confirmed to POLITICO on Saturday that he had to “strongly admonish” Garcia after she made comments against Asians in a closed-door Assembly Democratic Caucus meeting in 2014 — the same year in which she also acknowledged using homophobic slurs aimed at Perez, the first openly gay speaker of the California State Assembly.
Sources familiar with the incident say Garcia’s anti-Asian remarks came during a legislative battle that arose when Asian-American community activists successfully lobbied to defeat a Democratic proposal to overturn California’s ban on affirmative action in college admissions. They argued that such a move could hurt Asian student admission rates.
Perez in mid-March 2014 announced a move to return the bill to the Senate without any action from the Assembly, effectively blocking its advance. Garcia, the sources said, erupted in anger during a tense meeting of the entire Assembly Democratic caucus.
“This makes me feel like I want to punch the next Asian person I see in the face,” according to sources present at the meeting and other legislative sources who were told about the comments in the immediate aftermath.
It is beginning to look like there will be a Hispanic-Jewish alliance battling the Asians for control of the Democratic Party. Which is why LA Mayor Garcetti, who is the poster boy for that alliance, will be heavily pushed to be the next Democratic candidate for President.
Russia now has the ability to drown the US coasts:
Russia’s new nuclear drone submarine could be capable of causing 300ft-high tsunamis, able to wipe out coastal cities, experts say. The existence of the drone, believed to be the Status-6 system – also known as ‘Putin’s doomsday machine’ – was confirmed by the Russian President himself in his annual state-of-the-nation speech in Moscow last month.
Experts say a 50 megaton underwater nuclear bomb would be able to create tsunami waves reaching more than 320ft – the ‘Status-6’ is allegedly able to carry a 100 megaton warhead.
Perhaps the neocons should stop trying to throw the US weight around and interfering in the affairs of sovereign nations. On the plus side, the prospect of having both coasts submerged underwater is considerably better than thermonuclear war. Indeed, one could quite credibly argue that the American nation would be better off without either of them.