VPFL 2014

It’s that time again. There is an extra spot open this year thanks to the Greenfield Grizzlies claiming last year’s championship. Current members are: the White Buffalo, Nate, me, and Zek, the winner of the VP-AFL. That leaves six teams open for management; it’s a keeper league so you’ll inherit up to three players of your choice from last year’s roster.

If you haven’t participated before but would like to do so this season, please throw your name in the hat here now. I’ll choose the six participants randomly.

A lesson in atheist social autism

I saw this conversation come up in my Notifications on Twitter today:

Francis Begbie ‏@BegbieBegbie
I think there’s something to @voxday ‘s theory on atheism and social skills: Look at Myers response in the comments.

Preston S. Brooks ‏@Rebel_Bill
That’s beyond a lack of social skills, that’s almost into the realm of autism.

I had no idea what they were talking about, so I went over to Pharyngula and saw that PZ, fresh from correctly criticizing Richard Dawkins for failing to understand that you can’t complain about people reacting emotionally when you intentionally push their emotional buttons with rhetoric intended to do just that, had somehow decided that the coverage of Robin Williams’s suicide was a wonderful opportunity to strike a morally superior prose and preen about his supposed  a) lack of interest in celebrities and b) deep concern for people of African descent. The response referenced above:

Celebrity culture. Fuck it. These people do not have an emotional connection to Robin Williams, the man; it’s fine to like the actor/comedian and enjoy his work, but look at this thread, and my twitter feed: people are freaking out that someone pointed out that the obsession with celebrity is getting in the way of caring about things that matter. I’m mainly feeling that I should have been more rude, because asking me to have been nicer about the dead famous guy is completely missing the point.

But it’s not PZ’s social autism that amuses me. I’ve known his AQ score indicates basic lack of empathy since 2008; my observations concerning the connection between atheism and social autism in TIA even prompted at least two scientific studies. What amuses me is PZ’s transparent hypocrisy.

I’m sorry to report that comedian Robin Williams has committed suicide, an event of great import and grief to his family. But his sacrifice has been a great boon to the the news cycle and the electoral machinery — thank God that we have a tragedy involving a wealthy white man to drag us away from the depressing news about brown people. I mean, really: young 18 year old black man gunned down for walking in the street vs. 63 year old white comedian killing himself?

That is from the first of two posts about Robin Williams at Pharyngula. The number of posts about Michael Brown’s death on Pharyngula and the subsequent black unrest in Ferguson, MO in the five days since his death? ZERO. PZ is not only empathetically obtuse, he is observably guilty of the very act he was attempting to portray himself as being above.

Of course, PZ is smart enough to know that the reason that the media doesn’t cover the deaths of young black men is because doing so would shatter their attempts to sell the myth of racial equality. If the media did what he feigns to want, he would accuse them of racism, because if every death of a young black man was covered in the same intense detail as Robin Williams’s death, there would be more nationwide demand for interning all male African-Americans between the ages of 15 and 30 than there ever was for interning Japanese-Americans.

The death knell for equality

The bell tolls for the advocates of diversity, multiculturalism, and human equality, as a study has determined that half the human capacity for learning is genetic:

The genes that determine a person’s ability to tackle one subject influence their aptitude at the other, accounting for about half of a person’s overall ability. The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, used nearly 1,500 pairs of 12-year-old twins to tease apart the effects of genetic inheritance and environmental variables on math and reading ability. Twin studies provide a clever way of assessing the balance of nature versus nurture….

The researchers administered a set of math and verbal tests to the children and then compared the performance of different sets of twins. They found that the twins’ scores  — no matter if they were high or low — were twice as similar among pairs of identical twins as among pairs of fraternal twins. The results indicated that approximately half of the children’s math and reading ability stemmed from their genetic makeup.

A complementary analysis of unrelated kids corroborated this conclusion — strangers with equivalent academic abilities shared genetic similarities. What’s more, the genes responsible for math and reading ability appear
to be numerous and interconnected, not specifically targeted toward one
set of skills. These so-called “generalist genes” act in concert to
determine a child’s aptitude across multiple disciplines.

This should not be surprising in any way. But it is an efficient, scientific slash across the exposed jugular of ideological equalitarianism. What this means is all the attempts to bring up African children to the level of European and Asian children by educating them were wasted efforts genetically doomed to failure. While improvement is possible, equality is not.

And even attempts to breed equality through the media advocacy of interracial relations are bound to be disastrous, being intrinsically dysgenic. Sure, there always will be the occasional sports such as me, a European-Hispanic-Native American melange with astigmatism, seriously sub-optimal spatial relations, sprinter speed, and a 150+ IQ, but in general, Arthur C. Clarke’s utopian browning of the world would indicate human population that is shifted to the left on the Bell Curve, with a heavier distribution in the middle and a shorter right tail. That is the literal opposite of human progress.

(Speaking of my Native American ancestry, my brother succeeded in determining the tribe. My initial surmise was correct and it was my great-grandmother who married the Mexican revolutionary that was the full Indian. My brother doesn’t know yet if we have sufficient tribal blood to qualify for membership in the tribe, although one-eighth is enough to qualify for membership in a related one. The blood quantum requirements vary from tribe to tribe, from one-sixteenth for the Cherokee to one-half for the St. Croix Chippewa.)

While it will take years, even decades, for the populace and the political system to absorb the consequences of this scientific reality, it is another nail in the coffin of the equality myth.

It’s good to be back

I know that my time on the soccer field is growing shorter. I’m the second-oldest man on the veteran’s team, and the other guy is only a few months older. I think both of us have survived because we have the benefit of relatively fresh knees, I missed 10 years of playing after high school, plus three years more years after an old groin injury flared up, while he didn’t play for nearly 20 years before getting back into the sport.

The fall season started tonight, and it was my best first practice I’ve ever had. Knowing that we’d be getting some new guys who are 14 years younger, I figured I’d better get myself in prime shape if I wanted to hang onto my starting spot. So, I barely missed a workout this summer, added a leg day to the schedule, and made sure to run at least once a week on the treadmill. By last week, I was able to do a 40-minute run with a constant elevation that burned over a thousand calories and still have something left.

When I went to the field, I discovered that the coaches decided we’d have a scrimmage between the vets and the first team. We had more vets, and since my Dutch friend and I were already wearing blue, we were sent to play with the first team. And damn, they were GOOD on the ball. I actually got the first shot, which I put wide, and I managed to keep up with their tiki-taka on the rare occasions they passed it to me instead of pushing it forward, pulling it back, spinning around, and going between two vets. For the most part, I was a spectator, which was fine with me. I was just happy that my occasional passes hit the target.

But my real teammates have been doing this for a LONG time. They dealt with all the flashy ball skills by using their heavier weight to knock the kids around and taking advantage of the young guys typical failure to stay back on defense. They actually scored the first three goals, so I switched back to defense and that helped shut them down. I know how our guys play, I’m faster than most of them, and our rapid counterattacks eventually tired them out. After 90 minutes, they’d only scored twice more and we’d scored seven or eight.

At one point, I brought the ball up from the back and somehow managed to beat four guys in succession before passing off, but the best part was when I saw one young midfielder less than half my age bending over and holding his knees. I laughed at him as I jogged back into position; he looked at me in disbelief and shook his head. Now, don’t get me wrong, I can’t play seriously at their level; their intensity, quickness, and energy is considerably more than I can match. They are in constant motion whereas I have to play a position game and choose my bursts. But it’s rather nice to know that they can’t blow me off the field yet.

Would-be Salon writer visits Alpha Game

It started with a seemingly innocent series of five emails, which I distilled down to part of one:

Can you give me a quick, couple-paragraph summary of the overall AG philosophy? I think that a large part of it is that it’s about not being/appearing weak. What exactly is weakness? Is kindness weakness? Is gentleness weakness? Or is it more that reticence and insecurity in your decisions and beliefs are weaknesses?

I addressed it. Two days later, I addressed another one:

Basically, “how dare you not be interested in me when I was interested in you?” Even though I had made it very clear that I was not interested, he had assumed that I still was. He did the right thing, I guess. He didn’t give up when I turned him down. But it was pretty revolting, rather than attractive.

I reached some conclusions and promptly lost interest:

Anyhow, the point is that outside of sex, women aren’t very interested in men and their interests and men have even less interest in women and theirs. It is a simple and straightforward observation, there is nothing wrong with this perfectly normal state of affairs, and the better you understand it, the more easily you will get along with the opposite sex. 

But then the man about whom she was writing sent me an email. Which is when hilarity ensued.

I’m the guy from the story. For what it’s worth, I read through both the post and the extensive comments section. I was absolutely shocked to find this post, since Eliza never mentioned to me that she intended to make this story public…. seems like some of the people posting had some misconceptions about me and how I acted — and after reading Eliza’s piece, I can hardly blame them!

She reacted angrily by outing the gentleman by linking to his social media accounts and managed to out herself in the process. It turns out that the ever-so-curious Eliza is a writer named Eliza Hecht who was doing research for what one presumes will be another hit piece on the Androsphere.

The return of the Lizard Queen

Speaking of Mitt Romney, Pat Buchanan doesn’t think he has a chance against Hillary Clinton. Nor, he thinks, does anyone else:

Amid rumblings of another Mitt Romney run for the White House, author
and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan is advising
the GOP to avoid nominating the first two-time loser since Democratic
presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower in
1952 and again in 1956.

Buchanan made clear that despite Hillary’s recent decline in popularity, she remains the front-runner. “It’s very hard to see if Hillary runs who will beat her,” he
stressed. “I don’t see Elizabeth Warren beating her. I tell people that
if I were a 45-year-old Democratic senator, I would run, and I would
challenge Hillary on issues, so if I lost I would have gained the
opportunity to introduce myself to the American people and hope
lightening strikes.”

Mindful of Bill Clinton’s support of Hillary’s candidacy, he added,
“But I doubt any Democrat wants to take the risk of running against
Hillary, since it means going after the king, and failing to get the job
done might just have disastrous consequences.”

I’m out of the presidential prediction game. Since I don’t live there anymore, it has become clear over the years that my ability to read the electorate has declined. That being said, the one thing we do know is that there is usually at least one surprise challenger who pops up, especially in years where there is no incumbent candidate.

We’re still two years out, so there is plenty of time for someone to make a run. Remember, two years ago, Marco Rubio was still being mentioned as a serious candidate.

Sun Tzu did not approve this message

Although he is vastly unpopular with the pinkshirts due to a combination of his huge success as a SF writer combined with his lack of enthusiasm for homosexuals playing house, Orson Scott Card is no conventional conservative. His political positions are more than a little incoherent, especially those where he appeals to what he claims is Christian theology:

The Republican Party deserves to fail, has chosen to fail, and this death wish continues in full force. They could have elected Mitt Romney in 2012 and stopped the
national nightmare by installing in the White House the most competent
man to be a major party nominee since Dwight Eisenhower.

But the evangelical Christians stayed home in droves rather
than vote for an evil Mormon – thus remaining “pure” but refusing to
govern.

The irony is that these very “Christians,” so determined to be
pure, now have as their single most important test of purity the most
unChristian dogma in present-day politics: No Amnesty!

Card’s first mistake is failing to recognize that the Republican Party chose to fail in 2012 by nominating Mitt Romney. But evangelical Christians were not Romney’s problem. Card simply does not have his facts straight. Not only did evangelicals vote for Romney at a higher rate than Mormons did, 79 percent vs 78 percent, but according to Pew
Research they gave him more support than they gave either John McCain (65 percent) or George W. Bush (63
percent and 67 percent in 2000 and 2004).

If anything, Card should be blaming Hispanic Catholics, whose support dropped five points, from 26 percent to 21 percent, from 2008 to 2012.

There were, of course, other Republican groups who were less than keen on the Romney. Libertarians loathed him. Ron Paul’s supporters despised him as well as their treatment by the Republican machine. Competent or not, the man was nearly as foolish a choice as John McCain, and would be even stupider in 2016. What the Republican party leaders always describe as “electable” has reliably turned out to be the opposite.

Mormons may well be fine, upstanding individuals on average. They still belong to a statistically insignificant religious group that is looked on with some suspicion due to their unusual views concerning what is, and what is not, Christian. Among them, apparently, being the idea that amnesty for criminals is a Christian concept, when that actually goes well beyond heresy into the realm of pure fiction.

Card’s version of Christian theology is as incorrect as his grasp of the 2012 voting patterns. I recommend to him the example of Jesus speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well. There may be neither Greek nor Jew in Christ Jesus, but at no point does Jesus, or any of the apostles, ever suggest that Roman citizenship belongs to everyone or that the Samaritans should be supported by Jewish taxes.

And as for a Mormon scare-quoting evangelicals and referring to them as “Christians” on the basis of their failure to support an foreign invasion consisting of tens of millions of aliens, well, let’s just say I don’t think that is the wisest choice of theological ground for Mr. Card to fight that particular battle. The fact that evangelicals generally tolerate Mormons these days does not mean they are going to be terribly inclined to having the legitimacy of their Christianity questioned by one.

Especially when Mr. Card simply embarrasses himself with his observable lack of knowledge of the Bible.

These “Christians” would do well to read chapter 18 of the Gospel of
Matthew, where Jesus tells his exact opinion of those who demand “no
amnesty, ever!” for other people’s sins – while they expect to be
forgiven for their own much greater ones.

Card is, theologically speaking, a complete illiterate. Jesus says absolutely nothing about “those who demand no amnesty ever.” Quite to the contrary, he says: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.”

In other words, Christians are to treat their unrepentant sinful brothers like pagans. Presumably, they need not treat unrepentant criminal aliens any better. As for the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant, the three requirements are for the debtor to admit that the debt is owed, be willing to pay it, and beg for patience, none of which apply to invading foreigners.

My suspicion is that Card is sufficiently Biblically illiterate to have confused the reference to gouging out an eye in Matthew 18:9 with Matthew 7:5’s reference to planks and specks.

It never really was

A Jewish woman explains why she is leaving Sweden:

I just can’t live like this any longer. I can’t accept that life consists of long periods of fear and despair, interrupted by the short bursts of happiness I get when I come back to Israel. I can’t raise my kids to hide who they are, I can’t usher them into a society that teaches them they are the other and that being less of who they are is the key to survival.

I just can’t, not anymore.

I got back to Sweden yesterday and something has changed, the shift is so tangible. Within me, yes, but also in the world around me. I take down my Israeli flag that I so proudly hung from my balcony. I’m told it is no longer safe, and I have to make a choice between being open and keeping my children safe. The Palestinian flag hanging from my neighbor’s window is still visible across the courtyard. I notice the injustice, but the outrage is replaced with sadness and fatigue.

I called this my home for 33 years. Yet, I realize now that it isn’t, and it never really was.

She’s absolutely correct. Sweden wasn’t her home. It isn’t her home. If it was, she would have been flying a Swedish flag from her balcony, not an Israeli one. Just as Israel belongs to the Jews, Sweden belongs to the Swedes. And Sweden’s younger generation is not at all shy about proclaiming it.

I expect her Palestinian neighbor is also going to discover that Sweden isn’t his home in the near future.

An erroneous conclusion re crime

Ron Unz is a smart guy and he does a lot of good work. But I strongly suspect he made a fundamental error in his examination of race and crime rates:

This contentious history of racially-charged social analysis was certainly in the back of my mind when I began my quantitative research into Hispanic crime rates in late 2009. One traditional difficulty in producing such estimates had been the problematical nature of the data. Although the FBI Uniform Crime Reports readily show the annual totals of black and Asian criminal perpetrators, Hispanics are generally grouped together with whites and no separate figures are provided, thereby allowing all sorts of extreme speculation by those so inclined.

In order to distinguish reality from vivid imagination, a major section of my analysis focused on the data from America’s larger cities, exploring the correlations between their FBI-reported crime rates and their Census-reported ethnic proportions. If urban crime rates had little relation to the relative size of the local Hispanic population, this would indicate that Hispanics did not have unusually high rates of criminality. Furthermore, densely populated urban centers have almost always had far more crime than rural areas or suburbs, so restricting the analysis to cities would reduce the impact of that extraneous variable, which might otherwise artificially inflate the national crime statistics for a heavily urbanized population group such as Hispanics.

My expectations proved entirely correct, and the correlations between Hispanic percentages and local crime rates were usually quite close to the same figures for whites, strongly supporting my hypothesis that the two groups had fairly similar rates of urban criminality despite their huge differences in socio-economic status. But that same simple calculation yielded a remarkably strong correlation between black numbers and crime, fully confirming the implications of the FBI racial data on perpetrators.

He’s correct about blacks committing crime at much higher rates than whites. But I think I can show that his conclusion that Hispanics commit rates at about the same rate as whites is wrong. The reason is that the metric he chose to try to pull out the information that the FBI is hiding is suboptimal.

I reached a very different conclusion when looking at race and homicide by firearm in 2012.

We will assume, for the sake of argument, that Hispanic victims are synonymous with Hispanic killers. The BJS supports this assumption, reporting that from 1976 to 2005, 86% of white victims were killed by whites and 94% of black victims were killed by black.  A CDC report states: “Homicide rates in 2010 among non-Hispanic, African-American males 10-24 years of age (51.5 per 100,000) exceeded those of Hispanic males (13.5 per 100,000) and non-Hispanic, White males in the same age group (2.9 per 100,000).”

We’re not concerned with the black homicide rate since we already know that.  What interests us is how the remaining 4,116 gun homicides are divided between whites and Hispanics.  The distribution indicated by the CDC report shows that 3,388 were Hispanic and only 728 were white.  This may be a little skewed by the focus on young males, but nevertheless provides a very credible estimate of 6.8 per 100k population, which would put the US-Latin firearms homicide rate in between Nicaragua at 5.9 and Paraguay at 7.4.  It would also indicate that the US-White homicide rate is 0.32 per 100k population, a per capita rate very close to The Netherlands at 0.33 although still higher than France, Germany, or the UK.

Now, it is theoretically possible that while young Hispanics commit a disproportionate amount of firearms homicide, Hispanics of all ages commit other crimes at the same rate as whites. This strikes me as a very unlikely conclusion, especially in light of what we know anecdotally from police and media reports.  Obviously more work needs to be done before the matter can be considered settled, but I think that this is sufficient to call Mr. Unz’s conclusion into question.