Tag: Vibrancy is our strength

Observations and societal implications

This long essay on African difficulties with abstract thought and how this effects everything from basic morality to building maintenance is not unrelated to my own concept of time-to-civilization and how that relates to a population group that has been in regular contact with advanced civilization for less than 400 years. If you are an American reading this, please keep in mind that the African-Americans of your acquaintance are not fully African, but are on average 17-18 percent European.

I am an American who taught philosophy in several African
universities from 1976 to 1988, and have lived since that time in South
Africa. When I first came to Africa, I knew virtually nothing about the
continent or its people, but I began learning quickly. I noticed, for
example, that Africans rarely kept promises and saw no need to apologize
when they broke them. It was as if they were unaware they had done
anything that called for an apology.

It took many years for me to understand why Africans behaved this way
but I think I can now explain this and other behavior that
characterizes Africa. I believe that morality requires abstract
thinking—as does planning for the future—and that a relative deficiency
in abstract thinking may explain many things that are typically African.

What follow are not scientific findings. There could be alternative
explanations for what I have observed, but my conclusions are drawn from
more than 30 years of living among Africans….

I quote from an article in the South African press about the problems blacks have with mathematics:

“[Xhosa] is a language where polygon and plane have the
same definition … where concepts like triangle, quadrilateral, pentagon,
hexagon are defined by only one word.” (“Finding New Languages for
Maths and Science,” Star [Johannesburg], July 24, 2002, p. 8.)

More accurately, these concepts simply do not exist in Xhosa, which,
along with Zulu, is one of the two most widely spoken languages in South
Africa. In America, blacks are said to have a “tendency to approximate
space, numbers and time instead of aiming for complete accuracy.” (Star,
June 8, 1988, p.10.) In other words, they are also poor at math. Notice
the identical triumvirate—space, numbers, and time. Is it just a
coincidence that these three highly abstract concepts are the ones with
which blacks — everywhere — seem to have such difficulties?

The entry in the Zulu dictionary for “number,” by the way — ningi —
means “numerous,” which is not at all the same as the concept of
number. It is clear, therefore, that there is no concept of number in
Zulu.

White rule in South Africa ended in 1994. It was about ten years
later that power outages began, which eventually reached crisis
proportions. The principle reason for this is simply lack of maintenance
on the generating equipment. Maintenance is future-oriented, and the
Zulu entry in the dictionary for it is ondla, which means: “1.
Nourish, rear; bring up; 2. Keep an eye on; watch (your crop).”

In
short, there is no such thing as maintenance in Zulu thought, and it
would be hard to argue that this is wholly unrelated to the fact that
when people throughout Africa say “nothing works,” it is only an
exaggeration.

Now, it would be surprising if the average American, who has never met an actual African and has absolutely no experience with them, did not blithely attempt to dismiss the detailed observations of someone who has spent more than 30 years living in Africa. After all, most Americans blithely ignore the lessons learned by inner city American schoolteachers. It is considerably harder for those of us who are in occasional contact with Africans and have witnessed them being completely stumped by the abstract concept of “you must first go right in order to go left” to do so.

For those equalitarians who are horrified by the terrible racissness intrinsic in the observation that most Africans lack the capacity for abstract thinking, I invite you to consider this thought experiment: how successful would you be in a society where you were required to perform complex calculus calculations just to turn on your car? How easy would it be for you to live your daily life if you had to solve a single higher mathematics problem every time you sat down at your desk to do your job?

That is very similar to the position your equalitarianism places hundreds of millions of people by expecting them to constructively participate in a technologically advanced society that is observably beyond their cognitive capacity. Even in the miraculous event you manage to teach the poor bastards how to puzzle out these metaphorical calculus problems, how successful are they going to be if it usually takes them an hour to work out what the other members of society do without even thinking about it?

What the equalitarian dogma inevitably leads to is this: a professional signer who doesn’t know sign language.  Now that’s pretty damn funny. But it’s not so funny when you’re talking about engineers at power stations, airplane mechanics, and transportation technicians responsible for keeping the food supply chain flowing smoothly.

Thowing an entire people into the civilizational deep end to either sink or swim is an intrinsically ugly and inhumane action. And it’s even worse to go on and permit them to drag down the very institutions that are capable of raising them up over time. It also has some ominous implications for racially diverse places such as South Africa and various American cities, as there is considerable evidence very thing that the equalitarians are counting on to prevent widespread racial conflict, a sense of future self-interest on the part of the African community, does not exist at all.

Now, one can certainly argue that I’m incorrect. One can certainly argue that the gentleman’s observations over the last 30 years are mistaken for one reason or another. But doing so will require the presentation of contrasting evidence and running away angrily crying raciss is a retreat from reality; it is not a response. It should also be kept in mind that divergent capacity for abstract thought in various human population groups has no more to do with my personal preferences than the score of the upcoming Vikings game depends upon which team I want to win.

While the idea that I am some sort of reality-defining god is flattering, I can assure you, it simply isn’t the case.

Race, crime, and (r)

From Explorable:

Statistical correlation is measured by what is called coefficient of correlation (r). Its numerical value ranges from +1.0 to -1.0. It gives us an indication of the strength of relationship.


In general, r > 0 indicates positive relationship, r < 0
indicates negative relationship while r = 0 indicates no relationship
(or that the variables are independent and not related). Here r = +1.0
describes a perfect positive correlation and r = -1.0 describes a
perfect negative correlation.
Closer the coefficients are to +1.0 and -1.0, greater is the strength of the relationship between the variables.


As a rule of thumb, the following guidelines on strength of
relationship are often useful (though many experts would somewhat
disagree on the choice of boundaries).

Value of rStrength of relationship
-1.0 to -0.5 or 1.0 to 0.5Strong
-0.5 to -0.3 or 0.3 to 0.5Moderate
-0.3 to -0.1 or 0.1 to 0.3Weak
-0.1 to 0.1None or very weak

From Ron Unz:

[O]ver the last twenty-five years the weighted correlations for each of
the crime categories against the percentages of whites, Hispanics, and
“immigrants” (i.e. Hispanics-plus-Asians) have fluctuated in the general
range of -0.20 to -0.60. Interestingly enough, for most of the last
decade the presence of Hispanics and immigrants has become noticeably
less associated with crime than the presence of whites, although that
latter category obviously exhibits large regional heterogeneity.
Meanwhile, in the case of blacks, the weighted crime correlations have
steadily risen from 0.60 to around 0.80 or above, almost always now
falling within between 0.75 and 0.85.

That’s not the interesting part, however. At this point, only a complete idiot or the willfully blind will deny the relative African predilection for crime. What is interesting is his conclusions regarding how the supposedly anti-racist liberals are addressing this very strong correlation and how immigration factors into it:

America’s ruling financial, media, and political elites are largely
concentrated in three major urban centers—New York City, Los Angeles,
and Washington, D.C.—and all three have contained large black
populations, including a violent underclass. During the early 1990s,
many observers feared New York City was headed for urban collapse due to
its enormously high crime rates, Los Angeles experienced the massive
and deadly Rodney King Riots, and Washington often vied for the title of
American homicide capital. In each city, the violence and crime were
overwhelmingly committed by black males, and although white elites were
rarely the victims, their fears were quite palpable.

One obvious reaction to these concerns was strong political support
for a massive national crackdown on crime, and the prison incarceration
of black men increased by almost 500% during the two decades after 1980.
But even after such enormous rates of imprisonment, official FBI
statistics indicate that blacks today are still over 600% as likely to
commit homicide than non-blacks and their robbery rate is over 700%
larger; these disparities seem just as high with respect to Hispanic or
Asian immigrants as they are for whites. Thus, replacing a city’s
blacks with immigrants would tend to lower local crime rates by as much
as 90%, and during the 1990s American elites may have become
increasingly aware of this important fact, together with the obvious
implications for their quality of urban life and housing values.

According to Census data, between 1990 and 2010 the number of
Hispanics and Asians increased by one-third in Los Angeles, by nearly
50% in New York City, and by over 70% in Washington, D.C. The
inevitable result was to squeeze out much of the local black population,
which declined, often substantially, in each location. And all three
cities experienced enormous drops in local crime, with homicide rates
falling by 73%, 79%, and 72% respectively, perhaps partly as a result of
these underlying demographic changes. Meanwhile, the white population
increasingly shifted toward the affluent, who were best able to afford
the sharp rise in housing prices. It is an undeniable fact that
American elites, conservative and liberal alike, are today almost
universally in favor of very high levels of immigration, and their
possible recognition of the direct demographic impact upon their own
urban circumstances may be an important but unspoken factor in shaping
their views.

As an anecdotal example, consider the case of Matthew Yglesias, a
prominent young liberal blogger living in Washington, DC. A couple of
years ago he recounted on his blogsite
how he was suddenly attacked from behind and seriously beaten by two
young men while walking home one evening from a dinner party. At first
he was quite cagey about identifying his attackers, but he eventually
admitted they were blacks, possibly engaged in the growing racial
practice of urban “polar bear hunting” so widely publicized by the
Drudge Report and other rightwing websites.

Few matters are more likely to trouble the minds of our
Harvard-educated intellectual elite than fear of suffering random
violent assaults while they walk the streets of their own city. Yet no
respectable progressive would possibly focus on the racial character of
such an attack, let alone advocate the removal of local blacks as a
precautionary measure. Instead Yglesias suggested that housing-density
issues might have been responsible and that better urban planning would
reduce crime.

But consider that support for very high levels of foreign immigration
is an impeccably liberal cause, and such policies inevitably displace
and remove huge numbers of urban blacks; it is easy to imagine that
Yglesias quietly redoubled his pro-immigration zeal in the wake of the
incident. Multiply this personal example a thousand-fold, and perhaps
an important strand of the tremendous pro-immigration ideological
framework of American elites becomes apparent. The more
conspiratorially-minded racialists, bitterly hostile to immigration,
sometimes speculate that there is a diabolical plot by our ruling power
structure to “race-replace” America’s traditional white population.
Perhaps a hidden motive along these lines does indeed help explain some
support for heavy immigration, but I suspect that the race being
targeted for replacement is not the white one.

Indeed. One might reach the same conclusion when looking closely at the consequences of liberal policies on welfare and abortion. Never look at the selling points, look at the consequences. If the course is not subsequently changed in light of a divergence between the two, it is safe to assume that the consequences were planned from the start.

Remember, extrapolating current trends to predict the future is reliably a failure. In 1900, it was widely believed that the black race was inevitably headed for extinction. 100 years later, it looks like the whites are on the way out. But it’s not hard to imagine ethnic cleansing in Europe combined with ethnic strife in the Americas and ruthless Chinese colonization in Africa leading to the revival of concerns for the black race in 2100.

Multiculturalism is isolationism

Roissy brings the atomized wedges to our attention:

i was on transit today and it seems like white people are getting less and less common. just disappearing. transit is like a microcosm of multiculturalism. dead eyed somalians sitting awkwardly next to old chinese ladies. nothing in common. acknowledging each other as mere objects. no sign of life. riding by ugly buildings with grey skies above.

That reminds me of the last time I was in London. There was not a single white person on the train that evening, as I was the only individual of even partial English descent. No one was speaking, everyone was simply sitting there in stolid silence, tolerating the presence of the others with no sense of community whatsoever.

This is to be celebrated?  I don’t think so. This is indefinitely sustainable? I doubt it. I very much doubt it.

Don’t forget, post-racialists, your ideal outcome is ME. You dream of a world where various races are all blended together so you can’t even tell what someone is by looking at them?  Then look at a picture of me. I am that future. I am that nightmare you cannot guilt or browbeat into submission by crying raciss because racial identity and racial guilt mean absolutely nothing to me.

Guess That Race!

What could possibly prompt a pack of strangers to viciously attack a young woman walking home from a football game? It’s a complete mystery! It’s like crop circles or other perplexing conundrums for which there are obviously no answers in science, religion, or history.

Speaking exclusively to CBS 3, a 15-year-old high school student,
whose identity we are concealing, described a terrifying attack by a
gang of at least nine teenage boys as she was leaving an Interboro High
School football game Monday night.

The teenage victim described first being taunted by the attackers,
who followed her down a neighborhood street, cursing and spitting at
her, before she was repeatedly kicked and punched, at least one of the
blows to her head.

“It was scary, just horrible, just the worst feeling in the world,”
she said. “He punched me in my back and then kicked me in the back, and
then punched me in the back of my head. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t
move, I couldn’t talk. I was just straight crying.”

The victim says as at least two of the teenagers pummeled her, the
others cheered them on shouting, “come on, let’s get her.” At one point,
the victim says, the gang tried to throw her under the wheels of a
passing car, which swerved, narrowly missing her.

My guess? I suspect yet another Eskimo-on-Pacific Islander attack. Those bad boys from the frozen tundra can be seriously hard core and we all know how they feel about Hawaiians.

A Safer Space

Once more, the progressive paragons of the science fiction community show the way towards a better, safer, more civilized society:

I am once again the WisCon concom liaison and organizer for the POC Safer Space. This year I am joined in organizing and fabulousness by Jayme Goh. Huzzah!

We will once again be in the Solitaire Room since it affords us an out of the way space with no Gawkers. Last year we had the hotel push the conference room up against the wall which made the space a lot more inviting. I will also ask if more comfy chairs can find a way in there. If any locals are willing to donate comfy chairs, please let me know.

Last year we pre-scheduled some break out sessions and alternate panels in the room, but what seemed to work better was spontaneous stuff.I encourage any POC attending WisCon to come to that space if they need to discuss something that went down on a panel, continue a discussion that started at a panel, or if they just need a space to vent and calm down. I actually had some of the most enlightening conversations in that room during after-panel venting and I’m sure that will happen again,

However, if anyone wants to pre-schedule something please feel free. I just suspect mostly it will be spontaneous stuff.

The one thing I would like to schedule is a post Opening Ceremonies trip to the space so that people know where it is and how it will be set up and how they can use the space. This will come on the heels of the POC dinner earlier that evening. And then, of course, it’s party time.

Huzzah indeed!  It is readily apparent that the federal government should follow the inspired lead of the brilliant K. Tempest Bradford and the fabulous Jayme Goh and provide a Safer Space for Vibrant America.  In fact, several Safer Spaces are probably in order.

We could call them “Detroit” and “Chicago” and “Atlanta” and “Washington DC” and “Liberia” and limit all access to those spaces by the insufficiently vibrant. Naturally, no one would want the newly ensafened vibrant population of those Safer Spaces to be subject to any risks that might endanger either their precious feelings or their even more valuable persons, so it will of course be necessary to strictly control egress as well as ingress.

Nothing is more important than the safety of America’s vibrant population, therefore it is vital to provide these Safer Spaces at the earliest opportunity to protect them from the quotidian trauma of being exposed on a daily basis to the evil, racist, white population of the United States.

It’s only a matter of time

I expect it won’t be long until something this happens in an American shopping mall.  And considering the active link between the jihadists in Somalia and the Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it happens at the Mall of America.

At least 22 people are reported to be dead and more than 50 injured as a gun fight continues between police and armed men at a shopping centre in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. One witness claimed gunmen told Muslims to stand up and leave and that only non-Muslims would be targeted when they opened fire at the upmarket mall of the Westlands district around midday today.

At least two dozen people, wounded and dead, were wheeled out on stretchers and in shopping trolleys by security guards, while others were seen walking out of the building, clutching bloodied clothing around their injuries. Locals and tourists who were out shopping on the sunny Saturday in Kenya ran screaming from the building and cars were left abandoned as attackers threw grenades and fired AK47s.

It’s just one more reason to carry, in the unlikely event that you are a reader here who doesn’t carry already.

Decivilization in Detroit

Now, no doubt those who believe that race doesn’t exist, that all homo sub-species and human population groups are equal, and that it is intrinsically raciss to notice any statistical differences in behaviors, capabilities, and outcomes will find the juxtaposition of these two graphics to be unfair. Whether that is the case or not, they do, indubitably, represent undisputed historical facts.

One of my more controversial ideas is my time-to-civilization hypothesis, which states that considerably more time is required for a human population group to transition from full savagery to full civilization than is commonly believed. Most people appear to believe that a single generation combined with geographical relocation is sufficient, some even argue that a mere change in physical location combined with exposure to advanced civilization is sufficient to transform a naked, demon-worshipping cannibal into a responsible, productive, voting citizen entirely capable of contributing responsibly to an advanced, civilized society.

My observation is that it appears to have taken around 1,000 years for savages such as the Germans and Britons to make the transition from their first encounters with an advanced civilization, and I have seen little evidence that the formerly savage people of Africa have proven to be capable of making the same transition any more quickly when considered in the collective. Setting aside any intrinsic genetic differences, even an equalitarian perspective logically indicates that there should be observable differences based upon the historically different amount of time the various groups have been exposed to civilization.

While I do not doubt that there are some individuals capable of making speedy and near-miraculous individual transformations, it must be kept in mind that there is a considerable difference between positively participating in, maintaining, and advancing/developing a technologically advanced society. The fact is that there are relatively few members of any society who are capable of helping it advance or develop civilization in the first place. These are an elite, and not only an elite, but a rare and special form of elite that possesses both long time preferences and an amount of concern for the society as a whole.

Without sufficient developers, a society will stagnate, as happened most famously in China. Without sufficient maintainers, a society will decline. And without sufficient positive participants, a society will collapse.

So, what changed in Detroit? What happened to cause it to transform so rapidly from a wealthy, growing, industrial city to a demographically dying region of crumbling buildings increasingly inhabited by human predators and their unproductive prey? We can see the inflection point at 1985, with the surge of borrowing that began under longtime mayor Coleman Young, but the situation didn’t get truly out of hand until 2000.  What changed so dramatically between 1974 and 1985?

The most obvious nd dramatic difference was the change in the population demographics. In 1970, the percentage of non-Hispanic whites in Detroit was 54 percent versus 44 percent black. By 1990, the racial population ratio was 21.6 to 75.7. This removed sufficient maintainers and positive participants from the population and tipped the scale from a society capable of at least maintaining an advanced and civilized society to one incapable of doing so.

Now, there are certainly other factors involved, but anyone who wishes to claim that I am incorrect and make the case for those factors being more important than the demographic one in a democratic society cannot simply cite the existence of those factors,which no one disputes, but prove that they are more fundamentally causal than the rapidly shifting racial demographic. Correlation is not causation, but it is indicative of a possible causation and thereby merits consideration for causative status.

It should be relatively easy to challenge my hypothesis concerning time-to-civilization. One has merely to cite a predominantly African society that has shown itself to be capable of sustaining itself in a highly civilized state without dependence upon outside assistance from non-Africans. Or to cite a non-African society that went from full savagery to full civilization in considerably less than one thousand years. There is no point in simply crying raciss and burying one’s head in the sand; if the mainstream assumption of instant auto-civilization by proximity is wrong, then the consequences will be considerable. If the mainstream assumption is wrong, it will call into serious question decades of social policy and raise significant philosophical questions about the ethics and morality of expecting historically unprecedented collective transformations from large groups of people who may be fundamentally incapable of them.

Is it truly either moral or and decent to, in the name of equality, abandon hundreds of thousands of human beings to a system that predictably caused them to saddle themselves with “staggering costs that today threaten [their] safety and quality of life”?  If it is not right to turn over the keys of a liquor cabinet and a high-performance sports car to a child, how can it be right to place an advanced society under the control of the insufficiently civilized? And perhaps more importantly, how credible is it to claim that the subsequent crash was merely an accident of coincidental correlation.

Diversity and collapse

Most people who have paid any attention to the financial crisis know the Bush administration’s pathological fixation on expanding homeownership among Hispanics played a contributing role in blowing the housing bubble, but I didn’t realize that diversity dogma also played a part in the collapse of Lehman Bros. Steve Sailer quotes from A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, a book by an ex-Lehman executive, describing how the president of Lehman was more interested in diversity and inclusion than in risk management.

One of these was our corporate president, Joe Gregory, the right-hand
man of the reclusive CEO, Dick Fuld. … But Joe Gregory was a regular,
run-of-the-mill, ho-hum financial sycophant, devoted to his master,
Richard Fuld, … Joe’s fixation was a subject called diversity. He was
consumed with it. His aim was the mission of inclusion. He had an entire
department devoted to it, headed up by a managing director. Great
rallies were staged in New York’s auditoriums, with free cocktails and
hors d’oeuvres served for up to six hundred people, all listening to Joe
or one of his henchmen pontificating. “Inclusion! That must be our
aim!” he would yell, as if we were running a friggin’ prayer meeting.
… Which was all very well, but down in the trenches, where a trader
 might sweat blood to make a couple of million dollars, most of us were a
bit tetchy about Joe Gregory going off and spending it on a cocktail
party for six hundred people..

… Especially when it emerged that the top dog in diversity was earning
well over $2 million a year and that the diversity division had a
bigger budget and more people than risk management!

Joe’s mission for diversity drove [Christine Daley, head of
distressed-debt research] mad. She had no time for any of it, but Joe
Gregory had us all over a barrel: he had major control over our bonus
compensation, and he made it clear there would be extra money for those
who rallied to his cause. Most of us did not care about the cause, but
the prospect of this thirty-first-floor sycophant lopping a couple of
hundred thousand off our annual check because we weren’t in there
pitching for the cause of the day was seriously irritating. Harsher
judges than I considered Joe hid behind his unusual fixation,
appearing to fight the world’s woes while staying well clear of the
gundeck.

As go corporations, so go nations. The ongoing fixation of the USA’s politicians and body politic on diversity and inclusion means that the country is unlikely to sustain itself any more successfully than Lehman Bros. did.

Transracialism: the next moral imperative

Since the societal powers-that-be have decided that sex presently determined by the individual, obviously it is logically impossible to claim that race is still a matter of genetics, let alone skin color. This means it is now a moral imperative for everyone to henceforth accept that an individual is whatever race he declares himself to be, regardless if he happens to be cis-racial or trans-racial.

Therefore, in the future, please do not refer to me as any of my three biologically state-sanctioned racial heritages, (White, Hispanic, and Asian, to be precise), but rather, as trans-racial, Esquimaux and proud.

Qagaasakung.

When rape fantasies go awry

Thanks to the manifold blessings of vibrancy, two lucky Delaware women were able to see their (interracial?) rape fantasies come true, albeit in what appears to have been a profoundly disappointing manner:

Neighbors near Kosciuszko Park in Wilmington expressed anger and
outrage Friday, after learning the details of a brutal gang-rape that
happened in the park Thursday. Police say two women, ages 32 and 24, were reportedly attacked and
sexually assaulted by a group of 10 to 12 black male juveniles in
Kosciuszko Park at about 6:54 p.m. Thursday. According to police, the
suspects, who range in age from 12 to 17-years-old, remain on the loose.

What a pity that the sexual reality so seldom lives up to the dream.  I’m sure it was a little disappointing that instead of being tenderly ravished by Hollywood-designated female fantasy objects Denzel Washington, Isaac Washington, and Blair Underwood, they got stuck, so to speak, by precocious preteens and larval gangstas instead.

It’s amusing to think of Phoenician now desperately searching all over the Internet for a reports of a pack of white juveniles raping black women in order to cry raciss.  Especially in light of how the FBI has reported ZERO white rapes of black women in recent years.

John Derbyshire was right. If women of any race don’t wish to be gang-raped by people who are not even a little bit savage and it would totally be raciss to consider their behavior anything less than one hundred percent civilized, they are advised to avoid being caught alone, unarmed, or in insufficient numbers, in excessively vibrant circumstances.

UPDATE: I am vastly amused by the reaction of this pair of white boy gammas:

David Gorski ‏@gorskon
Misogyny and blatant racism from @voxday, all mixed up into an offensive, toxic ball. Ugh.

Michael Ward ‏@badsciencemonk
That is one of the most disgusting diatribes I have ever read

You can practically see the wheels spinning in their little politically correct heads.  If I express sufficient public outrage about sexiss and raciss, maybe a shoggoth will let me approach the stankity grail!  The best part is the way the idea that someone might speak freely about the observable societal blessings of vibrancy genuinely upsets them more than literal gang-rape by children.

Also, I would like to point out that as a bona fide Person of Color, by definition, I cannot be racist because minority, and it is racist of these two white men to offend me by attempting to falsely label me as such.  That’s right, boys, I see your Raciss card and I trump with my Color card and my own Raciss card.  Now go say three I Have a Dreams and watch The Color Purple by way of penance.