Workaround

I had a thought and just had to share it with Steve Sailer:

Mr. Sailer,

Call me crazy, but if race and IQ are really related, isn't hiring by race "inversely equivalent" to hiring by IQ? In other words, you could get the same results affirmative action supposedly gets - more (lower-IQ) minorities working - by giving all applicants a (suitably disguised) IQ test and hiring those with lower IQs in preference to those with higher IQs. You might want to give some thought to potential job performance on other measures (height? weight? strength?), until that's outlawed, too.

I suppose the only fly in the ointment might be that, if higher-IQ applicants got wind of the strategy, they might purposely score lower on the tests in order to get jobs. Ego being the force it is, though, I predict this would be rare. And you could mix it up. You could hire by low-IQ until you got enough identifiable minorities, then turn around and hire by ability to get the workers to actually do the jobs you need done.

A virtue of this tactic would be that you wouldn't even have to ask applicants to identify themselves by race. Perfect for the Internet. And you would avoid any accusations of quota-seeking. Also, you would know what you were getting and wouldn't have any false expectations. And liberals thought IQ was invariably racist!

I plan to put this email on my blog (http://conundrum.blogspot.com), but I won't post any response you may make unless you give me permission.

Robert Speirs
Tallahassee, Florida

Let them eat lies
Theodore Dalrymple's column in the Times on the accelerating drive toward total social control in Britain is disturbing:

Increasingly the citizen is asked to denounce his neighbour, for example if his neighbour is cheating social security. (Cheating it is the only rational response to so preposterous, impersonal and inhumane a system.) This official invitation to atomise society further by sowing mistrust among the population has not yet been entirely successful; but posters such as the one I saw last weekend in a bookshop — “Racism is a crime. Report it!” — engender a vague but nevertheless all-pervasive anxiety.
****
We also live in a propaganda state...One is reminded of the Stalinist images of flaxen-haired peasant maidens serving at banquet tables groaning with food of every description that were disseminated to the world in the midst of one of the most severe famines in history.

Let them eat lies!

Very disturbing. The double whammy of no freedom for the law-abiding and almost total incompetence in dealing with real, violent criminals is calculated to deter the most rabid Anglophile, a group in which I used to find myself, from even thinking of living in Britain. Now I even have serious qualms about visiting. This, too, shall pass, one hopes.

Lawrence O'Donnell is pathetic

I know, and water is wet. But Lawrence O'Donnell IS pathetic. Who knew that Bush Derangement Syndrome was indistinguishable from schizoid psychosis?:

HH: Well, you wrote it. I want to know about your...

LO: Let's assume that I talked to no one. Let's say that's a lie.

HH: Okay. So you did lie about this?

LO: Say it's a lie. I'm not saying...no.

HH: Did you make...

LO: No. You say it's a lie. Now let's proceed with the argument with that being a lie. So what?

HH: No, no. I'm just trying to get the facts, Lawrence. I would like to know...

LO: Yes, I talked to a bunch of lawyers.

What a sick, stupid bastard.

Hamas delenda est

I couldn't believe David Adesnik's stunning piece of dreck on Oxblog about Hamas winning the Palestinian elections:

What I want is a statement from the President himself that America punishes no one for the outcome of free and fair elections. And that such punishment would subvert the strategy of democracy promotion on which this administration's entire foreign policy rests.

It got me riled up:

So any democratically elected government, even one dedicated to the violent overthrow of a neighboring state, the mass killing of innocent civilians, the extermination of a people and the imposition of a tyrannical religious fundamentalism, should be perfectly OK with everyone and we should continue to shower them with billions of dollars? What nonsense. What evil.

I thought these Oxblog people were supposed to be smart? I thought I'd overreacted, or at least overreached, but the thread shows some positive support for my position. That's satisfactory, as Nero Wolfe would say.

Who says metaphor is dead?
Guy Herbert pontificates about world government on Samizdata:

With multiple governments, people have the possibility of moving to whatever nation suits them (with, admittedly, varying degrees of effort/risk).

With one government, if you object to how things are being run, your non-violent options are just about limited to "leave the planet entirely".

I'd add that with one world government your violent options are going to be be limited, too. Governmental violence will always be quantatively greater than any you can muster.

It struck me that the present world is pretty - uh - uniformly governed even without "one flag to cow them all":

You could say there already is one world government, as everywhere in the world is covered by some government or other and they all agree on 99% of the restrictions they impose on their subjects. Sure there are a few cracks in the authoritarian structure, but that would also be the case in a formally unitary world government. Individuals can only survive and live a reasonable life by being small furry mammals living in the cracks and keeping a sharp lookout lest the great clumsy dinosaurs step on us.

I also liked Richard Garner's comment:

Consider our world as it would be if the cost of moving from one country to another were zero. Everyone lives in a housetrailer and speaks the same language.

Read the whole thread, as they say. I would like to live in a house trailer, or perhaps just an RV, someday. I could have little shelters for it, with utility hookups, on little bits of land I would own, in various parts of the country, then just move house when I got bored. No worries about your house being vandalized when you're somewhere else.

Anti-smoking Nazis ride again

On Samizdata, this post's smoking comments included this piece of idiocy:

As I have said to anti-ban types many times, defend your 'right' to smoke in public all you like. Just don't object when I pour a bucket of water over your head to douse your noxious and annoying health risk (ESPECIALLY when I am eating). Does it need legislating ? In the wider sense, nothing should (imo there is nothing worse than the tyranny of the majority), however human nature being what it is some individuals will not respect my health and zone of personal comfort without either legislation or the afore-mentioned bucket of water.

Posted by Lusiphur at February 15, 2006 07:29 PM

So I had to take this PC collectivist brigand down a peg:

Lusiphur, would you really be so rude as to pour a bucket of water over someone's head without first asking him not to smoke? How about if someone was singing loudly or eating smelly cheese? Do you really have the right to dictate by violence how people should act, without any preliminaries? Civilized interaction requires a request for civil behavior before any drastic action. You are a barbarian. Why would you think anyone would approve of such an attack? And, by the way, no, you do not have the right to pour a bucket of water over someone's head because they are smoking. It's called battery. Deal with it. Act like an adult and a gentleman, if possible. And stop lying about the "health risk".

The "progressive" mindset continues to amaze. But not surprise.

Welfare eagle

In bald eagle news, the government is planning the future of the bald eagle:

Seven years after the government said the fierce raptor is no longer threatened with extinction, officials finally have a plan for removing it from the endangered species list.

Before too long they'll be harder to find than all those prosperous Americans the War on Poverty was supposed to produce from the poor of the pre-socialist era. Speirs' Law predicts that, when government says eagles are in fine shape, you might as well wave them bye-bye. There is another possibility. Maybe the whole "endangered" thing was just a lie all along, propounded to make jobs for bird-babysitters. Yah think?

Hall said at least 7,066 known nesting pairs now exist in the contiguous United States. The bald eagle's territory stretches over much of the North American continent. Tens of thousands more live in Alaska and Canada, where their existence never was imperiled.

If we'd just take down those ten-thousand feet high anti-eagle barriers that are preventing all the Canadian and Alaskan eagles from coming into the Lower 48, we might not have needed a government program. Ever think maybe the eagles just don't like it down here? Nah. The enviroweenies will whine unless there's one eagle for each acre everywhere. That's only natural, right?

The proof of the pudding

The news about this anti-HIV drug discovery will put the question to those who like myself are more than slightly skeptical about the whole AIDS business (see Dean Esmay's blog, to which I don't go any more). But what if this drug does kill all the HIV anyone can find and people are still dying in Africa, like they have been for, oh, the past 100,000 years or so? Will anyone say then that HIV was the cause of "AIDS"? What do you bet they come up with a new theory that requires, surprise, surprise, billions of dollars of research funding and foreign aid to kleptocracies?

Parallel Idiocy
My thoughts are coming together on this cartoonGate matter:

This controversy reminds me of a story about an English Communist who went to Moscow in the Soviet era. He was so excited to be out of what he considered the "tyranny" of England that he took out a picture of Queen Elizabeth and stomped on it and tore it. He expected the Soviets to be as gleeful as he. But they were outraged. They threw him in jail, then deported him. Their argument was almost as religious as the Islamists. Their religion was authority. They saw any rebellion against what had been constituted as authority as dangerous and unacceptable. One of the aspects of Western culture the Islamists hate is our tolerance of anti-religious feeling. They are almost as outraged at cartoons deriding Jesus as at those mocking Mohammed. They don't riot when those come out because they figure before long Islam will replace Christianity, since Christianity is obviously too weak to defend itself against blasphemers.
Make no mistake about it. Their enemy is not Christianity. It's toleration, individualism, reason, and sanity itself.

This was in response to a post on Belgravia Dispatch with thoughts like this which are, shall I say, blind and "not helpful":

And, truth be told, that's not a message that's particularly helpful to propagate at this juncture. I mean, why describe one of the three great monotheistic religions on the planet, one that over a billion individuals call their own, as a terrorist faith?

Uh, because it IS a terrorist faith??

And in the collegial world of the Senate ...
Senator McCain drops the hammer on a rookie:

I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere.

Seven years in a tiger cage can put an edge on a guy. Sure, he's off his meds, but that's pretty good snark. So good, in fact, that I have to quote more:

But I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn’t always a priority for every one of us.

Who's the Senator addressed, you may ask? To find out, read the whole thing. You won't regret it. Really. But he rhymes with Osama. (via Drudge)

Islam v. Christianity = Rand v. Branden?
In response to a Dane on Noodlefood:

"Denmark for the past 25 years has been one of the main contributors in the efforts of creating a sovereign state of Palestine. " Well, that'll teach you! I find it interesting that the Muslims find it completely incomprehensible that a man can defend someone else's right to say something that he disagrees with. Or, to put it a different way, that because a man tolerates a certain form of expression, that doesn't necessarily mean he agrees with the content of the expression. This applies double for governments. Separation of church and state is a foreign concept in the Islamic world, much less separation of the press and the state. Muslims assume that if something's printed in the New York Times, George W. Bush personally approved it. As we all know, that couldn't be farther from the truth! Perhaps one religious saying: "render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's and unto God that which is God's" has made a difference in the political consciousness of Christians, however much it has been ignored and belied in the last couple of thousand years.

I feel this comment summed up pretty neatly my ambivalence about Christianity and the state. Now Objectivists don't necessarily agree:

Just imagine how much would be lost if Europe slid into yet another Dark Ages, this time of Islam rather than Christianity. And if that happened, America would stand alone on the front lines of an ever-expanding cultural empire of Islam. Would we have the knowledge and determination to fight for the values of Western civilization? Or would we be overrun by our own Christian barbarians and embroiled in a religious war between two evils: Christianity and Islam?

Call me crazy, but I don't think our local "Christian barbarians" are anything like the threat represented by Hizbollah, Hamas, the Twelfth Imam moonbats and Bin Laden, especially when you throw nuclear weapons into the mix.

Trabzon in the news

But not for a good reason:

An Italian Catholic priest has been shot dead outside his church in north-east Turkey.

Police in the Black Sea port of Trabzon said they were searching for a teenage boy seen fleeing from the scene of the attack on Sunday.

So is Eastern Turkey significantly more moonbat-Moslem than the Aegean Coast and Istanbul? Duh. So I want to live there why again?

Holy Quartet
I've always wondered about this question:

Why not just declare Mohammed the Nephew of God and part of the Holy Quartet and have done with it? Making the Quran sacrosanct is in itself idolatrous. How can a man who received the Holy Word not be a god himself? To say he is a man is to admit that he and all his acts are capable of imperfection.

So I posted it to the comments section on this "paradox" post on Samizdata. This part of the post stimulated my thoughts:

So the objection to the cartoons cannot really be founded in the Islamic image-ban. They are clearly neither idolatry nor invitations to it. On the contrary, the insistance that a mocking representation amounts to a gross insult to the prophet is much more like idolatry in that sense: a demand that the man be revered as incapable of representation as God.

Does this have anything to do with the rejection of rationality? That's what brings that weird smile to the faces of the fanatics: the realization that what they're doing makes no sense at all but they can't help themselves. Of course that's what I feel when I have that fourth martini.

Angry yet?
The Belmont Club hits the target again:

For who in Islam would believe in us if we did not believe in ourselves? Who in Islam could trust that we would fight at their side if we could not defend all that we were, all that we believed?

Would to God that attitude applied to "our" government. Yes, I'm angry:

Not only did "our" government say we should tolerate Islamic violent intolerance of free speech that mildly mocks Islam, "our" government gives these murderers billions of dollars of our money every year. And "our" government also gives money to "artists" who scurrilously and obscenely mock and defile the Christian religion. Then if someone were to get violently intolerant about that, do you imagine "our" government would tolerate such violence? Angry yet?

Crush, but tolerate
I responded to a post on the Belmont Club about the correct tactics to use against Islamic intolerance, perhaps because Wretchard was atypically mild:

No one can foresee where the Danish cartoon controversy will lead. At best both sides will return to their lines of departure after having made their points, each with a renewed respect for the other. The West should understand, if it didn't realize it before, that Muslims are willing to fight for their religion. And Muslims should understand, from the cartoon controversy, that whatever they had heard to the contrary it goes double ditto for the West.

I spake thusly:

Saudi Arabia is a good example of a place that has built a wall around its borders to "protect its culture". And they prohibit Bibles and churches and don't let their women drive. But radio waves and the Internet do not respect walls. The kicker is that we have no reason to fear contamination from Islamic culture. We are winning the culture war. That's why they have turned to violence. And that can be dealt with. But we must continue to propagate the winning ideas of individual freedom, reason and toleration while we utterly crush anyone who resorts to violence.

We must never forget: they are afraid of us. We have both the cultural and military might to exterminate them utterly. They barely have the ability to be a bother. And it is our collectivist fellow-travelers who give the violent Islamists what strength they have. These are indeed, as Wretchard says, interesting times.
Update: Just remember what FrankJ said:

...there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.

(via Instapundit)

Last option?

Angela Merkel, in Debka:

Merkel says military force can be used as a “last option” against terrorism

speaking of Iran.

So, OK, what if she had said military force was the "second-to-last option"? What would that make the last option? Smothering the country in sauerkraut?

Disagreeing, but tolerating

Samizdata makes a good point about toleration of dissenting opinions:

Robin Koerner of Watching America thinks that the whole 'Satanic Cartoon' issue needs to be resolved with the straightforward notion that people must agree to disagree...
This entire furor is premised on the assumption that we can not dignify people by giving them responsibility for the way they choose to react to the things in their world - and especially things that they do not like. Just as I have the responsibility not to choose to get angry at all every Muslim when a few damaged individuals commit such evil acts as beheading of innocents.

I clarify the collectivist/individualist spinpoint:

One point of the Voltaire quote is that just because a particular expression of opinion is tolerated does not mean the tolerating person agrees with that opinion. The protesting Islamists have transgressed civilized norms by holding an entire society and culture responsible for the actions of a few. And their "multiculti" defenders insist that is exactly what we should not do in relation to the truly offensive idiocy emanating from a good part of the Islamic media.

As when in sixth grade the teacher would keep everyone after school because one idiot threw a spitball, collective punishment seems obviously unfair to Westerners.

Posted to Samizdata:

As to military deaths in the war on terror, the 1753 US combat deaths in Iraq in three years (the 2245 figure is overall deaths, including car accidents and suicides) should be compared to the over-2000 combat deaths in a single month in Vietnam. And that figure was exceeded in two particular months during the Vietnam War. So the War on Terror isn't causing historically significant casualties even in Iraq.
Asymmetrical warfare is an information problem. I think of Three Mile Island, the incident from which no one even took sick, much less died, but which destroyed the future of a clean, efficient technology we could really use about now.

Ethical - or not?
I posted this comment:

Stark's and Weber's arguments are, may I say, starkly different. Stark certainly does not discount the possibility of other cultures adopting real science after the kind of change of consciousness typified by the Meiji restoration. The thesis reminds me of Julian Jaynes' arguments in The Emergence of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - stimulating even if not bulletproof.

on both GNXP and the Two Blowhards blog. Is it ethical to paste the same comment into two (or more) blogs? As long as the post is about the same topic, I don't see the problem. And I prize laziness as the mother of invention. At least on 2Blowhards I added this:

Stark's thesis isn't about religion writ large - it's about one particular part of one particular religion and why the people who adopted that way of looking at the world succeeded in creating a civilization beyond the wildest dreams of any other men throughout history while their closest theological relatives failed to develop much of anything.

Incomplete information

On Asymmetrical Information, one of my favorite blogs, Winterspeak addresses determining whether a particular individual shares the attributes of his racial or sexual group:

If you do not have detailed information on an individual, it is rational to evaluate them on group averages.

So I had to point out the irrationality of the usual job interview process:

Job interviews, which should be all about the individual's identification with those of his own race and sex and age, in order to clarify the individual's likely behavior, are forbidden from even addressing these topics. So it's no wonder that hirers are thrown back on their assumptions.
I suggest a new law requiring employers to ask specifically about the implications of an applicant's race, sex and age, so as to bring out any factors that may differentiate him from the collective mass whose outward characteristics he shares.

OT: Steve Jobs doesn't wear Chuck Norris pajamas; Chuck Norris wears Steve Jobs pajamas. Steve Jobs didn't invent computers. He just leaned over and breathed the breath of life into them. On the seventh day God rested after creating the earth and the heavens and all that lives within them, until Steve Jobs kicked him in the butt and told him to get back to work and create cyberspace.