Western Quran schools are “terrorist factories”
By Dr. Nicolai Sennels
How would you turn normal human beings into murderous and hateful psychopaths who blindly obey their totalitarian systems and its authorities, suppressing and killing innocent people? In short: How would you create a terrorist?
Violent and murderous political, ethnic, and religious regimes have used the same effective methods all over the world throughout history. The procedure consists of two simple steps that are repeated again and again:
| 1. | You force a person to repeat the system’s doctrine over and over for months and years until he knows every word by heart and it pervades his or her whole way of thinking and it is the only truth he believes in. |
| 2. | You beat and scare the person (best if done randomly and severely), thus forcing him to become insensitive and unempathic in order to be able to bear the physical and psychological suffering and to increase his feelings of anger, frustration, and fear — feelings that are then directed against the system’s enemies. |
In this way you will create a person whose whole being is pervaded by the system’s doctrine and who has lost the ability to feel both his own and others’ pain. You will have an emotionally cold person who blindly follows his leaders and their political or religious doctrine. If you use this method on a child who is in the process of developing his personality, the learned doctrine will simply become a part of the child’s personality. The psychological impact of the physical abuse will also be deeper. As children and youth are dependent on adults for acceptance, they are easier to influence.
Being a child psychologist, I was shocked to realise that this is exactly what is done to millions of Muslim children in both the Muslim world and the West. Tens of thousand of madrassas and Quranic schools all over the world are making their students repeat the Quran and the Hadiths again and again, until they know them by heart. They are told to believe every word and never to question either the way or the goal.
It is normal in these schools that the defenceless and innocent children are randomly beaten and humiliated by the teachers and older students — who themselves are emotionally destroyed beings who have been abused in the same way that they now use against their pupils. They personify the goal: The abused becomes the abuser.
Britain has more than 2,000 madrassas, where more than 200,000 children aged from four to their mid-teens are taught the Quran on weekday evenings.
Investigations show that extreme violence is common in the British madrassas: “Students have been slapped, punched and had their ears twisted, according to an unpublished report by an imam based on interviews with victims in the north of England. One was ‘picked up by one leg and spun around’ while another said a madrassa teacher was ‘kicking my head — like a football’… Hiba, 7, was slapped across the face so hard by her madrassa teacher that her ear was cut. It later became inflamed and she had to have emergency medical treatment.” The teachers reportedly punish the children whenever they mispronounce a word or forget a verse of the Quran. One private investigator reported that “the victims had grown to accept the abuse. ‘They all joked about it. There’s a culture that accepts it.’”
Another investigation disclosed that the children are taught to hate non-Muslims: “‘You’re not like the non-Muslims out there,’ the teacher says, gesturing towards the window. ‘All that evil you see in the streets, people not wearing the hijab properly, people smoking… you should hate it, you should hate walking down that street.’” The same investigation reports that during less than three hours of lessons the teacher beat children as young as six at least ten times. In one occasion during the secret filming, one child is held down by an older student while another older student threatens to beat him with a small table.
These reports are from the West, where thousands of madrassas exist and millions of Muslim children are learning the traditional Islamic teachings by heart, while many of them are physically and psychologically traumatized. Research show that in Muslim culture “moral education seems to be neglected in favour of punishment”, which may explain the wide acceptance of the abuse by the children’s parents. Everybody is welcome to look for videos, for example on YouTube, about madrassas in Muslim countries, where the conditions and are even worse.
Seen from the perspective of a child psychologist, the many thousands of madrassas and Quran schools are literally terrorist factories creating an army-like Muslim population of youths and adults inside Western countries. From an early age they have been brainwashed to think that every word of the Quran should be taken literally, and they have been made hateful and emotionally cold by the physical and psychological punishments. To make the schools non-violent would require immense amounts of year long of control.
This also includes changing a central pattern of the Muslim culture — child-rearing — and the Muslim culture’s massive failure to integrate into non-Islamic cultures has proven that changing basic cultural values and behavior within the Muslim communities is almost impossible. If we, despite the immense challenges, were able to remove the widespread abuse, the children would still be learning the Quran by heart and would be taught to take every word at face value, which is exactly what Islamic terrorists do. Millions of children attend the madrassas, and when they and subsequent generations grow up, the consequences will be huge.
Nicolai Sennels is a psychologist and the author of “Among Criminal Muslims: A Psychologist’s experiences with the Copenhagen Municipality”.
Previous posts by or about Nicolai Sennels:
148 comments:
Islam is a brittle system. Its mechanisms operate smoothly enough provided the number of distractions or challenges are few, explaining why Muslim leaders and teachers, following Mohammed’s example, do not allow dissent. They understand that should dissent enter and certain age-old practices questioned, the vibrations could be devastating. Akin to a top-loading washing machine whose load has become unbalanced: the machine begins to make very loud noises and very strange movements which increase in intensify to the point that the machine stops.
Today, Islam is on the march; it has an certain undeniable confidence about itself. But its marching forward into the camps of the infidels carries great risk. Its votaries (to use Churchill’s descriptor of Muslims (The River Wars, 1899)) are being exposed to ideas that had never been heard in a 24/7 Muslim culture.
Now in the usual case, Muslims, like those in other parts of the world when they too are exposed to the truth, will simple ignore it. As Churchill once said, many people trip over the truth at various points in their lives, but most simply get up, dust themselves off, and go about life’s journey as if nothing had ever happened. So too with Muslims. To many the well thought-out criticisms about Islam coming from the West will simply go over their heads.
But not every Muslim will react this way. Some might actually think about the comments and begin to ask questions. Which is the very last things the mullahs and imams want them to do. And some of those questioners might be Muslim women who, because of photos, videos, DVDs, the internet and so forth, get to see how women in other parts of the world, notably the West, are treated. And they might begin to ask questions. Again, the last thing the mullahs and imams want.
Because of Islam’s inherent attribute of brittleness, and its inability to take an intellectual punch, Islam is incapable of dealing with and absorbing the shock of new knowledge in the hands of its votaries.
The world does not have enough psychiatrists and psychologists to even begin the untangling the brains of those inculcated with Islam from birth. For them Islam is so hard-wired that nothing can get it and all the anti-social pathologies it has spawned out. The very idea of bringing such people to our shores is not the idiocy so often ascribed, but rather is a sign certain of a deliberate plan to destroy our values. No American worthy of the title wants this, yet it continues.
The NYT, Boston Globe, WaPo, LA Times, ChiTrib, and other left wing MSM can continue to spew all this “religion-of-peace” nonsense, but fewer and fewer are buying it any more. Americans have the witness of their own eyes of how Muslims behave. Even the stupid begin to catch on after a while.
Islam is not about to change. Muslims will continue to act like Muslims, especially when there are more of them. Fortunately more and more Americans are connecting the dots. And as the dots get connected, these stories, when they appear, will simply act as signposts to real Americans as to who their internal enemies are.
My ex was a muslim and I spent many years as an "insider", so I will share some insights that reflect the above, but for the majority of families, who go to "normal" schools.
1. The child is brought up to revere and fear, and not question, the Koran, Muhammad and Allah, but without actual contents. They are first brainwashed to believe, believe, believe.
2. Secondly comes the content which, as we are all aware, is not about peace and love.
Stage 2 usually happens in early adulthood, if at all. The majority of muslims have NO idea of the content of the Koran and Mo's evil deeds, and the majority never get past stage 1. They simply revere a book and a couple of names just because it was drummed into them as children. If and when they DO find out the contents, they are either ashamed and horrifed, but hide this even to themselves out of fear of Allah's wrath, or they support the doctrines.
Add to the mix that independent, rational and logical analysis is shunned when it comes to Allah's dictated words or Muhammad's deeds.
Like Rebecca Bynum says; Islam has no purpose except to propogate itself. Along those lines it is like a virus that infects children at a young age, but can only become "pathological" in some hosts if the environment is right.
I'm amazed at how it wasn't until almost the very last paragraph that the word "brainwashed" finally appeared.
Exactly how "spiritual" can something be that utilizes advanced mind programming techniques? The amount of sheer physical torture, not to mention mental abuse, that Muslims undergo simply defies all reason.
I have just finished reading Leon Uris' "The Haj". It is not about any pilgrimage to Mecca but, instead deals with the life of someone by that name.
Uris goes to great lengths in explaining the stupendous amount of hatred that permeates Arab culture at, literally, every imaginable level. We in the West are flat-out incapable of understanding or remotely comprehending how all-consuming the emotion of hatred is within Islamic culture.
Sons hate the eldest son for his position of privilege. Families hate their relatives for even microscopic degrees of advantage that they might have. Clans hate other clans due to ancient feuds or even just perceived slights. Tribes hate other tribes with eternal enmity because of losing in a rigged camel race some twelve centuries ago. There is no end to the hatred.
In all of this, humiliation plays a starring role as the one actor who's presence onstage cannot be abided. Humiliation is, literally, worse than death. Death is over in an instant. The agony of humiliation goes on forever until it is avenged or until the entire affected clan is vanquished.
Islam's history is one of near-constant bloodshed, mayhem and war. There is absolutely no indication that this will change anytime soon, much less at all.
Therefore, what must change is the West's toleration of such limitless barbarity and the abject gender apartheid for which Islam is so justly famous. Muslims are entirely unable to live in peace with all other cultures.
How long will it be before all other cultures decide that Islam is of no further use or worth to this world? How many more innocents must die needlessly in order to prove this simple fact?
Good article. May I suggest part 2? What upbringing causes Western people to become apologists for Islam? Everyone here has had those interminable, frustrating conversations, both in person and online, where if you refer to anything done by Muslims, the standard answer is, but Christians/Americans blah blah. You literally can't get through. Why are people like that? I had a liberal upbringing, too, but I was able to see 9/11 for what it was, and learn more. Does Dr. Sennels see these people in his practice?
"...millions of Muslim children ...are physically and psychologically traumatized."
Part of the brainwashing of both Muslim girls and boys includes an extraordinary amount of violent childhood sexual abuse which may start in infancy and continue through adulthood - with multiple perpetrators, family sanction, and societal sanction of molestation, clitorectomies, marital rape, forced marriage, child marriage, cousin marriage, polygamy, etc.
It appears that lifelong pervasive violent sexual abuse is the Muslim norm - rather than the exception.
"Research shows that in Muslim culture “moral education seems to be neglected in favour of punishment”, which may explain the wide acceptance of the abuse by the children’s parents."
Hmmm. Just because the morals of another culture are different than Western morals does NOT mean that the foreign culture has NO morals. Indeed, devout Muslims spend an inordinate amount of time teaching their children Muslim morals - with the foremost moral being to value death more than life.
"Millions of children attend the madrassas, and when they and subsequent generations grow up, the consequences will be huge."
The future is now. Every devout Muslim is a ticking time bomb....
I couldn't get past Blogger's sentence --
The majority of muslims have NO idea of the content of the Koran and Mo's evil deeds, and the majority never get past stage 1.
-- to read the rest. If he's going to propose unsubstantiated, sweeping generalizations that tend to exonerate Muslims, I have no interest in reading the rest.
So Blogger had an ex who was Muslim, and he may have known a handful of Muslims in his life. How does this confer upon him the authority to tell us what "the majority of Muslims" know or believe?
Well Hesperado, it is one of the things ex-muslims mention in Ibn Warraq's Why I am not a Muslim
One of them describes being angry and indignant over what western critics say about islam and Mohammed, and how he decides to actually start reading the koran in a language he does understand and finds that what they are saying is actually true.
And Zenster: you're so right. There is absolutely no indication that islam will change anytime soon, much less at all, and even if it does, there is every indication that one day some disgruntled believer will dig up the old time religion again and starts calling the sons of Allah back to the basis; same thing that happened in this century after the khalifate collapsed and Sayid Qutb began railing against the west and the degeneration of the real islam..
With islam we have enough explosive matter on our hands to last us for five hundred years, and there's no telling what we can do to protect ourselves from it's murderous insanity
Dear readers
Thanks for your comments. I agree fully with the comment of Blogger. I have the same experiences from working therapeutically with Muslims.
All the best, from Denmark
Dr. Nicolai Sennels
Paardestaart: There is absolutely no indication that islam will change anytime soon, much less at all, and even if it does, there is every indication that one day some disgruntled believer will dig up the old time religion again and starts calling the sons of Allah back to the basis; same thing that happened in this century after the khalifate collapsed and Sayid Qutb began railing against the west and the degeneration of the real islam.
You are totally correct. I liken this situation to the one with taqiyya.
Muslims could avow for a century into the future that they had foresworn jihad and even the pratcice of taqiyya itself, only to have some terrorist goons decide that it was, all over again, time to launch jihad anew.
Like you noted, there's enough antagonistic bile in Islamic doctrine to keep the blood flowing for centuries, if not more. Why not just dismantle this piece of crap right now and get it over with once and for all time?
How many more atrocities do we really need?
By our standards, Mohammed's actions were evil. But Muslims live in a different moral universe from the rest of us, where the very definition of good and evil are determined by what Mohammed (the Perfect man) did and said.
Islam aims to completely destroy the conscience and free will of the Muslim and replace it with the cloned behavior of a psychopathic megalomaniac.
Yes Hesperado, it is true; the majority, in fact the vast majority, do not know the "contents". In fact, their parents, and their grandparents and going right back through the centuries also had no idea. They only "believe". That is why this time that we are living in, where there is free exchange of infomation that wasn't available before, is very exciting. And I believe that this will be Islam's downfall.
And I am a female. If I had been a male, there is no way I could have had an "ex" who was a muslim (unless I was gay!).
Paardestaart,
"...it is one of the things ex-muslims mention in Ibn Warraq's Why I am not a Muslim..."
Does Ibn Warraq provide statistically persuasive evidence for this implication that such types of ex-Muslims are a significant number; or does he merely provide anecdotal evidence?
Given what we know (or should know) about Islamic history, culture, psychology and sociology, the rule of thumb should be to prejudicially assume that any sort of human, noble or rational motives we would ascribe to Muslims by which to explain behavior that seems ostensibly human, noble or rational (such as, for example, leaving Islam, but also short of that, the sweeping presumption Blogger made that "the majority of Muslims" don't know that Islam is bad and therefore are, by implication, not bad themselves) is the exception that proves the rule -- the rule, of course, being that the baseline grassroots normative mainstream Muslim is fanatical, pernicious and either passively or actively dangerous.
Nicolai Sennels wrote, in agreeing with Blogger:
"I have the same experiences from working therapeutically with Muslims."
If Sennels' agreement is strictly limiting itself to experiences, then that would mean that his agreement did not touch on the interpretation Blogger added, that the "majority of Muslims have NO idea of the content of the Koran and Mo's evil deeds" -- which is not an experience; and cannot be, for one individual cannot possibly experience the cognition of over 500 million Muslims around the world (which would be "the majority").
Egghead makes a good point:
"Just because the morals of another culture are different than Western morals does NOT mean that the foreign culture has NO morals."
Too many anti-Islam analysts (forget the PC MC analysts, who are as such hopelessly deformed) look at Muslims as potential Western human beings, and thus impute an empty vessel whereby the evil of Islam is solely negative -- a deficiency without any positive content caused by extraneous factors like poverty, abuse, brainwashing, etc. -- while the human potential of Muslims to become non-Muslims and thus to activate the positive Western content of human values & virtues is apodictically assumed to exist (yea, even among "the majority of Muslims", over 500 million spread out all over the globe), as though psychology and culture are neatly separable from each other. And if only we Westerners can intervene, we can save Muslims and recover their humanity. Thus, even in the anti-Islam movement, there are varying degrees of the Wilsonianist virus which is one major symptom of the very same disease that got us into this massive pickle in the first place.
Blogger,
Yes, I had overlooked that clue about the "ex".
However, you cannot possibly know what over 500 million Muslims believe inside their heads.
And this staggering demographical statistical feat isn't even considering the taqiyya problem (as Zenster mentioned above) -- viz., even if you have personal experience of one Muslim who tells you personally "I don't know what's in the Koran", that should not be taken on face value. Then, how would one prove that even that one Muslim is telling the truth?
But over 500 million Muslims spread out over the globe? It is physically and intellectually and ontologically impossible to know what they think and feel. Given what we know about Muslim history, psychology, culture and sociology, it would be reckless to assume anything good or harmless or hopeful about a majority of Muslims.
Hi Nicolai Sennels: I am very glad that you write your essays - even though I may disagree with certain elements - as I do here. In any case, a civil discussion of Muslim pathology contributes to further understanding the scope of the problem of Islam.
I find it LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to agree with Blogger regarding the following statement: "The majority of muslims have NO idea of the content of the Koran and Mo's evil deeds, and the majority never get past stage 1. They simply revere a book and a couple of names just because it was drummed into them as children. If and when they DO find out the contents, they are either ashamed and horrified, but hide this even to themselves out of fear of Allah's wrath, or they support the doctrines."
I hate the typical Western PC MC argument that contends: "The majority of Muslims do NOT really know or believe what Islam is...."
Even very young Muslim children understand the fundamentals of Islamic Sharia Law including 1) Muslims should rule the entire world via Sharia Law, 2) the community is worth more than the individual, 3) women are shameful and worth far less than men, 4) men may physically, emotionally, and sexually abuse women, boys, and girls with the sanction of Allah, Mohammed and Muslims, 5) non-Muslims are evil disbelievers who may be tortured and taxed - and eventually must be eliminated, 6) kuffars (particularly Jews and Israel along with Americans and the United States) are responsible for all Muslim problems and therefore may be violently attacked and murdered with moral impunity, 7) romantic love is forbidden and curtailed by child marriage, forced marriage, cousin marriage, polygamy, and honor beatings and killings, etc.
Any contention that Muslims are unaware of the fundamentals of their religion beggars disbelief BECAUSE Muslims actively seek to implement Sharia Law wherever Muslims obtain a majority - and Sharia Law is consistent in its Muslim morals.
To any person who would contend that Sharia Law varies from place to place, I would have to ask, "In what place does Sharia Law grant true equality between men and women or between Muslim and kuffar?" As every Muslim knows and understands, Sharia Law is standard in its preference of men over women and Muslim over Kuffar. The rest is details....
The Pew Research Center provides a politically correct - and yet infinitely more believable - picture of Muslim ideas and goals:
Pew Islamic Study Results
Hesperado: Too many anti-Islam analysts … look at Muslims as potential Western human beings, and thus impute an empty vessel…
Again, this is where even relatively well-educated Western minds cannot begin to imagine the yawning chasm that divides Islam and the West. Not even the substantial gap between High Context and Low Context cultures can explain this tremendous gulf.
Until recently, Western education typically encouraged students to engage in independent thought using conventional skills such as critical analysis. No such thing exists in traditional Islam. The practice of ijtihad (independent analysis), was forbidden almost 1,000 years ago.
Quite to the contrary, Islamic "education" relies almost entirely upon rote memorization. Those of us who have been educated by way of meaningful learning will just as often be unable to grasp the tremendous discrepancy between these two methods.
Rote memorization is the most basic form of indoctrination. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. A mind shaped from its earliest stages of perception by this sort of repetitive behavioral modification is stunted by the discouragement of any questioning or investigative spirit.
As Hesperado mentions above, Western minds tend to regard individual humans as an “empty vessel”. The traditional philosophical term for this is, tabula rasa, meaning “blank slate”. What if a person’s mental landscape is so preconfigured from the very outset whereby it is unable to adopt or implement certain fundamental learning mechanisms?
This is the upshot of Islamic “education”. It produces automatons that are specifically designed to serve the limited scope of Islamic ends and which abruptly cease to operate when called upon to perform outside of that functional envelope. Just a cursory examination of Islam’s comprehensive scientific, technological and industrial stagnation confirms this fact.
Plainly put, Western notions of perceptual mechanics and learning processes simply DO NOT apply to the Muslim mind. If any further confirmation of this is needed, please refer to the near-total lack of Muslim Nobel Prize winners, especially in the more taxing categories of physics, chemistry and medicine. Even more telling is the devastating per capita numbers for Jewish versus Muslim Noble Prize winners. Consider these admittedly dated figures:
Muslims = ~20% of world population
Number of Nobel Prizes = 7*
Jews = 0.02% of world population
Number of Nobel Prizes = 165
* One of the Muslim Nobel Prize winners, Dr. Mohammad Abdus Salam, is an Ahmadiyya and, therefore regarded as a heretic and takfir. This also neglects the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to the grandfather of modern Islamic terrorism, Yasser Arafat.
There are one thousand times the number of Muslims than Jews. Statistically, they should be earning 1,000 times the number of Nobel Prizes. Instead, they have earn less than a twentieth of that number.
Balanced for population disparity, Jews are winning around 23,500 Nobel Prizes for every one awarded to a Muslim.
The mental deformation and retardation imposed by Islamic “education” cannot be overstated.
Egghead's last two posts nicely round out and flesh out my objections to both Blogger (and by extension Sennels).
I would add two further details:
1) Sennels' essay implies a fixation on madrassas and mosques, as though that were the only (or only significant) milieu for indoctrination of Islam among Muslims. This tends to bracket out other profoundly effective milieus -- the family, the tribe or clan, fellow Muslims in terms of extra-curricular (so to speak) activities such as cafes to gather to smoke and watch Al Jazeera (and speaking of Al Jazeera, various forms of Islamic news media including the Internet), study sessions/social activism cells, or social activities such as malingering in the street waiting for a woman to heckle (or possibly rape) or a passing Hindu to abuse (or possibly lynch); and there are the public harangues delivered by clerics or scholars (not "scholars" in the tweedy bespectacled nerdy sense we associate in the West but basically Third World Nazi brownshirts) where Muslims gather around to hear.
All these additional sociological milieus contribute to inform (or deform) the Muslim heart and mind from an early age.
2) More broadly, the hypothesis of Sennels and Blogger (and, unfortunately, many others in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement) implies a baseline assumption: that the badness of Islam is an extraneous force, forced upon masses of Muslims, which over time warps their assumed essential humanity (humanity here equals being Western fundamentally, Homo Occidentalis being the gold standard for humanity pace the neo-Wilsonian crypto-Colonialist mentality even if it consciously abjures such a paternalizing and condescending attitude to the Noble Savage it so sincerely wishes to take on as the White Man's Burden in order to save, in the process appeasing its own White Western angst and guilt and shame for being... white and Western).
This notion -- that the badness of Islam is an extraneous force, forced upon masses of Muslims -- involves a strange presumption that seems paradoxical. If the badness of Islam is being externally imposed upon Muslims, who is doing the imposing? Why, other Muslims! How did they become Islamically bad themselves in order to transmit it to other Muslims? This chicken-and-egg conundrum will tend to find release of logical pressure by minimizing the richness and density of Islamic badness throughout Islamic sociological culture (as my likely partial list above sketched out) -- and thus throughout masses of Muslims (yes, even "the majority"), and focusing on "madrassas" as the main engine of it. Thus, we have the building blocks of the model of the Tiny Minority of Extremists and Tyrants who are holding in their thrall all those hundreds of millions of poor, ignorant-of-their-own-Islam Muslims.
Such assumptions and models seem to be derived from a vacuum reflecting a lack of familiarization with the mountain of evidence -- both in the form of data and in the form of oceans of dots that scream for dot-connection -- concerning the full horror of Islam.
I.e., why has Sennels apparently spent years with Muslim patients? To help them, or to understand how they tick so that we may be better equipped to protect ourselves from them? Somehow, I get the sense it is more the former than the latter.
Egghead: Any contention that Muslims are unaware of the fundamentals of their religion beggars disbelief BECAUSE Muslims actively seek to implement Sharia Law wherever Muslims obtain a majority - and Sharia Law is consistent in its Muslim morals.
To any person who would contend that Sharia Law varies from place to place, I would have to ask, "In what place does Sharia Law grant true equality between men and women or between Muslim and kuffar?" As every Muslim knows and understands, Sharia Law is standard in its preference of men over women and Muslim over Kuffar. The rest is details....
This is the bottom line. If so many Muslims are supposedly fleeing their "repressive regimes" overseas, why is it that they always agitate for installation of Shari'a law at the earliest opportunity?
Please pardon the following rather frank language. Freedom and Rule of Law are a lot like ice cream. Stir in even just a tiny bit of sh*t and it's not really ice cream anymore, now is it?
As Egghead has so capably noted, the various "flavors" of Shari'a law all have the same portion of bigoted and misogynistic sh*t stirred into them. Put as many jimmies and sprinkles as you like on that ice cream. It will not change the fact that there is sh*t stirred into it.
Islam can be viewed as a "neo-" or "meta-tribalizing" force, and in a way it is a "modernizing" influence in that it is able to transcend boundaries. That much transpired from micro-level research I mentioned in another thread (something about narcissism and small differences). Ethnic and tribal feuds can be suspended when all these supposedly ignorant Muslims unite to conquer. In the West, Muslim immigrants - already an existential threat to Westerners, irrespective of their depth of insight into the Koran and all that - don't become more knowledgeable about "modernity" (whatever brand is en vogue), but they actually reform towards more Islam, that is: even in their home countries they help to erect mosques where there were none, and Islamic propaganda centres (called "schools" over here) with money earned, uhm.. "collected" in our welfare state societies.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Zenster, although your point is valid your numbers are off by a factor of 10: Jews are about 0.2% not 0.02% of the world population.
And the disparity is already explainable in terms of differing average intelligence. Ashkenazi Jews are about 2 standard deviations higher than Muslims; a Nobel Prize winner in a scientific subject might represent a "3 sigma" IQ outlier for Jews and a "5 sigma" outlier for Muslims; the difference between 3 sigma and 5 sigma is the difference between "1 in 750" and "1 in 3.5 million", a factor of nearly 5,000 in the size of the pool you can draw Nobel Prize winners from. This is larger than the disparity you find after your factor-of-10 error is corrected.
Islam still gets the blame for part of this, because the low average IQ of Muslims is partly due to a culture that discourages independent thought -- this means not only that Muslims will score low relative to their genetic endowments, but that the general rise in genetically based intelligence humans have experienced over the last 1,000 years would not be expected to affect Muslims as much as others due to less selection pressure. However, I think most of the bad performance of Muslims is due to causality going in the other direction, the nations and tribes which got conquered by Islam were the stupider ones. (The good performance of Jews, on the other hand, probably IS mostly due to genetic selection for intelligence over time, since the ancient Jews were not noted by contemporaries as particularly smart like, say, the Greeks were).
Polymath: … although your point is valid your numbers are off by a factor of 10: Jews are about 0.2% not 0.02% of the world population.
Thank you for clarifying. So it's only a 2,350:1 ratio of Jewish versus Muslim Nobel Prizes. That's still enough to inspire fatal levels of embarassment in any sane human being.
Islam still gets the blame for part of this, because the low average IQ of Muslims is partly due to a culture that discourages independent thought -- this means not only that Muslims will score low relative to their genetic endowments, but that the general rise in genetically based intelligence humans have experienced over the last 1,000 years would not be expected to affect Muslims as much as others due to less selection pressure.
Let's not omit how millennia of consanguineous marriage larded the world's Arab population with congenital mental retardation. Birth defects related to cousin intermarriage also confer a negative impact on overall intelligence as learning opportunities will be constrained by individual handicaps.
Arab tribalism and clannishness inspired breeding solutions to property inheritance issues that were exceptionally deleterious in terms of intelligence and its growth. Pauvre petite!
I have to correct your math again. The gene pool issue is not so simple.
Only immediate products of consanguineous marriage are affected. If Arabs suddenly stopped marrying anybody closely related to them, the very next generation would show a 100% recovery, because the actual frequency of the bad recessive genes among all genes is not any higher in Arabs, it is only that they are concentrated in fewer people so more have the damaging double dose. So to say "millennia of consanguineous marriage larded the world's Arab population with congenital mental retardation" is wrong if you mean to imply that the situation would take many generations to reverse. Any Arab whose parents are already unrelated should be expected to suffer no bad genetic effects at all from the previous generations of inbreeding within the family trees of each of his parents.
Of course, the history of widespread inbreeding retarded cultural progress because each generation was affected by defects, but on the other hand it would have created stronger selection pressures against any given bad mutation, the inbreeding means that it would have been weeded out faster. This is observed in genetic studies in both human and animal populations -- although "founder effects" and population bottlenecks have bad impacts for many generations, eventually the surviving population is more defect-free despite low genetic diversity because the bad genes get purged.
Unfortunately for Arabs, there is enough inflow from genetically distant populations that the high level of inbreeding continues to produce lots of defects, they have too much inbreeding to avoid defects and not enough to completely purge them. Even though their overall frequency of bad recessive genes as a fraction of all genes may be lower, their overall frequency of defects (double doses of bad recessive genes) is still much higher.
A related misconception occurs regarding "regression to the mean" -- that also is entirely accomplished within the first generation. This is important for understanding what happens with immigrants educationally (and also what happens in enclaves where high-achieving members of certain groups tend to concentrate themselves).
And now for some Dutch Nobel Prize supremacism:
Let's take the period of, say, from the beginning until the outbreak of WW-II. That's about 40 years.
World population circa 1900: 1650 million / Dutch: 5 million / Jews: 11 million.
Nobel Prizes that really count (I mean, Peace Prize? C'mon): Physics and Chemistry:
Dutch: Physics, 4 laureates; Chemistry, 2 laureates
Jews: Physics, 4 laureates (5 in stats, but Bohr not from two Jewish parents); Chemistry, 3 laureates (5 in stats, but 2 not from two Jewish parents).
So, in the period under survey the Dutch beat the Jews both at Physics (8.8 laureates) and Chemistry (4.4) laureates).
;-)
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Polymath: So to say "millennia of consanguineous marriage larded the world's Arab population with congenital mental retardation" is wrong if you mean to imply that the situation would take many generations to reverse.
My sole implication was in having a higher frequency of mentally retarded offspring that represented and overall drag on the Arab world's ability to gradually elevate their collective IQ. If anything, both retardation and congenital deformities impose significant economic drains that would divert resources away from others who might make better progress.
Consanguineous marriage is one enormous self-imposed millstone upon the Arab world.
I would also suspect that "lower genetic diversity" automatically implies a reduction in the frequency of genetic "sports" (i.e., benign or beneficial mutations), which might have been one source for those "rare geniuses" which can sometimes singlehandedly originate paradigm-shifting discoveries.
Zenster, I'd like to point out that Jewish inbreeding is the reason for both their IQ boost AND Tay Sachs. The story goes like this - since Jews were forced to do bureaucrat work, the Jews with higher IQ had twice as many kids and the gene that gives you Tay Sachs also gives you an IQ boost(so it's like this: single copy - IQ boost; both copies - Tay Sachs). So the selection pressures for intelligence in Jewish people and their tribalism is the reason why they have Tay Sachs now. :)
So if Jews married outside their group, they'd get dumber AND suffer less from Tay Sachs. Somehow people think that inbreeding is all bad and outbreeding is all good, which is stupid. There's also outbreeding depression, for instance(which is given by certain genes working better in certain patterns created by other genes). Also, ethnic groups are defined by gene frequency, not absolute differences.
"I would also suspect that "lower genetic diversity" automatically implies a reduction in the frequency of genetic "sports" (i.e., benign or beneficial mutations), which might have been one source for those "rare geniuses" which can sometimes singlehandedly originate paradigm-shifting discoveries."
Africans are the most diverse human group. Yep, their achievements speak for themselves.
And Jews aren't that diverse either. Hence the ton of Jewish heritable diseases too.
On counting "Jewish" Nobel Prize laureates.
Case in point: the "Jew" Christian Anfinsen.
He was born in Monessen, Pennsylvania, from Norwegian immigrants who taught their children the Norwegian language and heritage.
Christian Anfinsen was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1972.
He converted to Judaism in 1979 because of his new wife:
"In 1978, Anfinsen and his wife were divorced. The following year, he married Libby Esther Shulman Ely and converted to Orthodox Judaism, a commitment he retained for the rest of his life. "Although my feelings about religion still very strongly reflect a fifty-year period of orthodox agnosticism," Anfinsen wrote in 1985, "I must say that I do find the history, practice and intensity of Judaism an extremely interesting philosophical package." [..]"
And still he is
retroactively counted and paraded as a "Jewish" Noble Prize winner. I do think this method of counting merits closer scrutiny, to say the least.
To bring this whole thing back to the Muzzies and wrap it all up, a simple UN survey would suffice to make the general point, instead of wallowing in IQ wonderland: the report stated that the average Arab reads 4 pages of literature per year, against 11 books by the average American. Case closed.
Sag.
Afterthought: 9 Jews (no wait, that's minus one Dutch guy, so 8) were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What would be the correlation between receiving this specific Prize and IQ, knowing that Yasser A. got it and even Adolf Hitler was nominated? Perhaps the IQ of the ones selecting the nominees should be investigated as well?
rebelliousvanilla: Somehow people think that inbreeding is all bad and outbreeding is all good, which is stupid.
…Africans are the most diverse human group.
As has frequently been the case of late, your comments fail the "So what?" test.
No one is maintaining that "inbreeding is all bad and outbreeding is all good".
Nor is anyone arguing that maximizing genetic diversity (African or otherwise), is good either.
32
"I would also suspect that "lower genetic diversity" automatically implies a reduction in the frequency of genetic "sports" (i.e., benign or beneficial mutations), which might have been one source for those "rare geniuses" which can sometimes singlehandedly originate paradigm-shifting discoveries."
You forget things as soon as you write them? Or are you having an I reject universalism, but believe in universal human rights moment?
Zenster: Thanks for the good laugh with your ice cream comment above!
Now, let's all talk honestly about Muslim inbreeding. Any thinking person can fairly conclude that Muslims are far more interbred than simply participating in 1,400+ years of first cousin marriages.
With Sharia Law giving family molesters full access and societal sanction to molest girl and boy children from infancy, girls are fair game for any male relatives with access - fathers, brothers, half-brothers, uncles, grandfathers, cousins, male friends, and any cousin in-law versions of the same....
Have you ever wondered WHY Iran's Khomeini advised Muslim families to marry off their girls BEFORE their first menstrual period? Well, clearly, this marital practice enables family molesters to hide the results of highly consanguineous family member impregnations under the disguise of early marriage.
Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady
"Mohammedans have been interbreeding so long, and have done so with such close relatives, that there are genetically only about 100 Muslims in the whole world, in a population of 1.2 billion."
"Many Muslim countries have consanguinity rates of above 50%. 50% is the consanguinity rate between parents and their children. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan has consanguinity rates above 50%."
"This means that there are genetically fewer than two Saudis and two Pakistanis, and that any and all Saudis and Pakistanis are more closely related than the offspring of outbred full-siblings."
"So if you are outbred (as almost all non-Mohammedans are) and you have two children with your own brother or sister, those two children will still be genetically more distant than any two Saudis or any two Pakistanis."
"Don't think the same isn't true of Egyptian and Sudanese Mohammedans. When one factors out the Christian populations of both countries, the consanguinity rate is greater than 50%."
CONSANGUINEOUS MARRIAGE IN ASIA
CONSANGUINEOUS MARRIAGE IN AFRICA
Polymath: "Only immediate products of consanguineous marriage are affected."
I find your above contention extremely difficult to believe.
Here's why: If each generation marries itself, then Muslims are passing on dominant genes in addition to recessive genes.
I think that you are assuming that low intelligence and low IQ are exclusively the result of a mental handicap caused by a recessive gene.
What if low intelligence and low IQ are simply the result of two parents passing along 1,400+ years of a range of dominant genes that interact to produce a child with low intelligence and low IQ?
In other words, if the original Muslims possessed low intelligence and low IQ, then those are the dominant genes that are being passed along - not as a mental handicap per se - but as a dominant trait.
It makes sense to me that the original Muslims possessed low intelligence and low IQ because high intelligence and high IQ people would have run very far very fast from the EVIL Mohammed.
Zenster: "If anything, both retardation and congenital deformities impose significant economic drains that would divert resources away from others who might make better progress."
There is anecdotal evidence that Muslims are fully aware of that consanguineous marriage produces handicapped children yet Muslims participate anyway to further Western jihad.
First, Western nations actively reward consanguineous marriage through distorted immigration policies whereby teenage brides are allowed (possibly encouraged) to import their significantly older foreign-born Muslim cousin husbands.
Second, a medical doctor in India autopsied Muslim terrorists and discovered that many, if not all, of the Muslim terrorists possessed noticeable handicaps. In Islam, suicide is unacceptable whereas jihad is sanctioned. One theory is that handicapped people perform jihad as a religiously-sanctioned form of suicide which provides a death income for family members.
Third, one British commenter on another site mentioned that she had visited the home of a British Muslim mother who bragged that she received extensive state payments for the "care" of her severely handicapped child. The Muslim mother revealed that she hoped that she would have more children with severe handicaps in order to receive more government money. While personal greed is certainly apparent, the bigger issue is that handicapped Muslim children drain valuable resources from Western governments.
As a group, Muslims use more than their fair share of handicapped and education resources compared to their percentage of the population. The high incidence of Muslim cousin marriage - particularly by second generation Western Muslims - resulting in statistically significant numbers of handicapped Muslim children is an economic jihad on the social services of Western nations fully equivalent to the EVIL Cloward-Piven strategy which is currently being used to drive the United States in bankruptcy.
Egghead,
Your first of the last 3 comments, the one with the links, is mathematical nonsense and the links do not contain the text you put between quote marks. Give me a real source.
Your next comment shows so much ignorance of logic and genetics I don't know where to begin.
Your third comment, which avoids mathematics, I agree with.
Polymath: The links that I cited just worked for me. Please try again because I am interested in your CIVIL input. Educate me instead of insulting me.
The quotations in the first of my last three comments come from the first link at the top which is a YouTube video entitled "Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady" that explains the Islamic basis for Muslim incest as well as the extreme prevalence of Muslim incest. The YouTube video lists references which I examined myself for the statistics use to cite Muslim consanguinity.
Here is the link that contains the quotations: Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady. If the link fails to work for you, just open YouTube.com and search for Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady.
The statistics used as references for the YouTube video derive from the consang.net site which appears to be a reputable site:
Here is the link that contains the statistics: consang.net
For a summary of consanguinity with an extensive reference list, go to the Resources Box on the right and select Summary.
For the detailed consanguinity statistics by continent with detailed references, go to the Resources Box and select Tables. Under the Tables list on the left, select the continent of your choice - Asia and Africa being the choices that I linked above.
Polymath: The links that I cited just worked for me. Please try again because I am interested in your CIVIL input. Educate me instead of insulting me.
The quotations in the first of my last three comments come from the first link at the top which is a YouTube video entitled "Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady" that explains the Islamic basis for Muslim incest as well as the extreme prevalence of Muslim incest. The YouTube video lists references which I examined myself for the statistics use to cite Muslim consanguinity.
Here is the link that contains the quotations: Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady. If the link fails to work for you, just open YouTube.com and search for Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady.
The statistics used as references for the YouTube video derive from the consang.net site which appears to be a reputable site:
Here is the link that contains the statistics: consang.net
For a summary of consanguinity with an extensive reference list, go to the Resources Box on the right and select Summary.
For the detailed consanguinity statistics by continent with detailed references, go to the Resources Box and select Tables. Under the Tables list on the left, select the continent of your choice - Asia and Africa being the choices that I linked above.
Polymath: The links that I cited just worked for me. Please try again because I am interested in your CIVIL input. Educate me instead of insulting me.
The quotations in the first of my last three comments come from the first link at the top which is a YouTube video entitled "Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady" that explains the Islamic basis for Muslim incest as well as the extreme prevalence of Muslim incest. The YouTube video lists references which I examined myself for the statistics use to cite Muslim consanguinity.
Here is the link that contains the quotations: Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady. If the link fails to work for you, just open YouTube.com and search for Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady.
The statistics used as references for the YouTube video derive from the consang.net site which appears to be a reputable site:
Here is the link that contains the statistics: consang.net
For a summary of consanguinity with an extensive reference list, go to the Resources Box on the right and select Summary.
For the detailed consanguinity statistics by continent with detailed references, go to the Resources Box and select Tables. Under the Tables list on the left, select the continent of your choice - Asia and Africa being the choices that I linked above.
Polymath: The links that I cited just worked for me. Please try again because I am interested in your CIVIL input. Educate me instead of insulting me.
The quotations in the first of my last three comments come from the first link at the top which is a YouTube video entitled "Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady" that explains the Islamic basis for Muslim incest as well as the extreme prevalence of Muslim incest. The YouTube video lists references which I examined myself for the statistics use to cite Muslim consanguinity.
Here is the link that contains the quotations: Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady. If the link fails to work for you, just open YouTube.com and search for Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady.
The statistics used as references for the YouTube video derive from the consang.net site which appears to be a reputable site:
Here is the link that contains the statistics: consang.net
For a summary of consanguinity with an extensive reference list, go to the Resources Box on the right and select Summary.
For the detailed consanguinity statistics by continent with detailed references, go to the Resources Box and select Tables. Under the Tables list on the left, select the continent of your choice - Asia and Africa being the choices that I linked above.
Polymath: "Your next comment shows so much ignorance of logic and genetics I don't know where to begin."
Here's my genetic logic (or WHY high intelligence men should try to marry high intelligence women):
HIGH INTELLIGENCE FATHER + HIGH INTELLIGENCE MOTHER = HIGH INTELLIGENCE CHILD (STATISTICALLY VIA DOMINANT GENES)
LOW INTELLIGENCE FATHER + LOW INTELLIGENCE MOTHER = LOW INTELLIGENCE CHILD (STATISTICALLY VIA DOMINANT GENES)
PATERNAL RECESSIVE MENTAL HANDICAP GENE + MATERNAL RECESSIVE MENTAL HANDICAP GENE = MENTALLY HANDICAPPED CHILD (STATISTICALLY VIA RECESSIVE GENES)
Polymath: The links that I cited just worked for me. Please try again because I am interested in your CIVIL input. Educate me instead of insulting me.
The quotations in the first of my last three comments come from the first link at the top which is a YouTube video entitled "Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady" that explains the Islamic basis for Muslim incest as well as the extreme prevalence of Muslim incest. The YouTube video lists references which I examined myself for the statistics use to cite Muslim consanguinity.
Here is the link that contains the quotations: Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady. If the link fails to work for you, just open YouTube.com and search for Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady.
The statistics used as references for the YouTube video derive from the consang.net site which appears to be a reputable site:
Here is the link that contains the statistics: consang.net
For a summary of consanguinity with an extensive reference list, go to the Resources Box on the right and select Summary.
For the detailed consanguinity statistics by continent with detailed references, go to the Resources Box and select Tables. Under the Tables list on the left, select the continent of your choice - Asia and Africa being the choices that I linked above.
Polymath: The links that I cited just worked for me. Please try again because I am interested in your CIVIL input. Educate me instead of insulting me.
The quotations in the first of my last three comments come from the first link at the top of the entry which is a YouTube video entitled "Incest in Islam - Slow and Steady" that explains the Islamic basis for Muslim incest as well as the extreme prevalence of Muslim incest. The YouTube video lists references which I examined myself for the statistics use to cite Muslim consanguinity.
The statistics used as references for the YouTube video derive from the consang.net site:
For a summary of consanguinity with an extensive reference list, go to the Resources Box on the right and select Summary.
For the detailed consanguinity statistics by continent with detailed references, go to the Resources Box and select Tables. Under the Tables list on the left, select the continent of your choice - Asia and Africa being the choices that I linked above.
Egghead, intelligence is a multigenic trait created by a certain pattern of genetic material, not just two intelligent people. Also, the intelligence of individuals belonging to a group tend back towards the mean of that group. For instance, retards who have kids, will have brighter kids than them more often than not, while brilliant people will have stupider kids.
And I don't see what isn't civil in Polymath's comments. He didn't say anything about you - he just said that your links are trash(and they are) and that you don't really know genetics. Which really isn't a shame - I have only a rudimentary understanding of quantum physics, for example.
RV: I understand your point about reverting to the mean. If Marilyn Monroe marries Arthur Miller then their children will probably be less pretty than Marilyn and less intelligent than Arthur. BUT, as I understand the issue, it appears that certain genes also travel more with the mother to girls and the father to boys. For example, when scientists perform an age progression from the photograph of a missing girl, scientists refer to the face of her mother because girls grow to look like their mothers - in general - more than their fathers.
As professional animal breeders know: Breeding adults with "better stock" leads to children with more desirable genetic characteristics.
One desirable characteristic is high intelligence. Personally, I would NEVER have willingly married a low intelligence man - figuring that my children would revert to the mean. Instead, I consciously searched for a high intelligence mate.
Your comment reflects extremes who revert to the mean. I am talking about the mean populating with the mean. I absolutely contend that two smart people are vastly more genetically likely to produce a smart child than two stupid people.
This is WHY race horse breeders freeze the sperm from championship horses to propagate with fast fillies. :) Two fast horses are absolutely more likely to produce another fast horse....
My idea is that the mean that ALL Muslims came from a distinct starting point which was a limited number of the first followers of Islam. Without heirs, Mohammed himself appears to have been eliminated from the Muslim gene pool.
What was the mean intelligence of the first Muslims? And, given the extreme inbreeding of dominant genetic traits in Islam over the last 1,400+ years, when Muslims revert to the mean for the genetic trait of intelligence, is that mean less than the mean of other groups for high intelligence? I would argue that the results have spoken for themselves for 1,400+ years....
How are my links trashed? The links work for me. However, I left information about how to google for the links.
If you and Polymath are criticizing the continent list of the summary of consanguinity studies, then you would need to review the actual studies before making an assessment as to their validity and reliability. A variety of authors contributed to the project.
Egghead, no, let's assume I have an IQ of 140 and I marry another man with the same IQ. The kid will have a lower IQ than us, more often than not, since a lot of times, higher IQ is caused by a certain arrangement of genes, which is off compared to the general population that reverts back to that mean. I'm not sure exactly how to explain this. It's not that if I marry someone stupid, the IQ will be in between the two numbers. It's not skin color where is more like mixing paint(even though if you look at Steve Blake, even skin color isn't as simple).
So while we select for the phenotype of someone, the phenotype is created by the genotype and the interaction in between different genes.
And I didn't say your links are trashed. The content is of poor quality. I will leave Polymath explain why if he feels like it since it would be a lot of writing if I am to do it properly.
Okay, I'll try to make this clearer.
First of all, inbreeding leads to defects because of bad RECESSIVE genes only. Dominant genes have nothing to do with that -- if you exhibit a dominant defect, one of your parents also had the defect (unless there was a multi-gene interaction which masked it in that parent's case). So what I said was absolutely correct. The quality of the "gene pool" for inbred groups, if you consider only the frequency of defective genes, is not bad, it is the fact that defective genes are paired together with each other much more often in an inbred population that leads to more people exhibiting the defect. But someone from such a group who does not himself have a defect is perfectly OK genetically if he mates with someone unrelated.
As for intelligence, I already made the point you made, but you didn't notice. I said "I think most of the bad performance of Muslims is due to causality going in the other direction, the nations and tribes which got conquered by Islam were the stupider ones." So the Muslims are starting from poorer raw material. But inbreeding doesn't reduce intelligence except via recessive single-gene defects. As I also said, the reason Muslims may have failed to get smarter as much as other groups did over the centuries is that Islam discourages independent thought so there would have been less selection pressure for intelligence.
As RV says, intelligence is determined by many genes (which is why within a population that has freely intermarried and doesn't have genetically distinct subgroups, it follows a normal distribution or bell curve -- the Central Limit Theorem ensures that anything that depends on lots of small independent factors will be normally distributed). It is determined by both dominant and recessive traits. You don't seem to be using the word "dominant" in a technically correct way.
Regression to the mean occurs because there are non-genetic factors that also contribute to traits like height and intelligence -- so someone who is extremely smart has probably got both good genes and good luck with the other factors, and only the good genes will be passed on to his children who will on the other hand have only average luck. If a high IQ person marries someone just as smart their kids are likely to be less smart unless the parents' high IQs were fully attributable to genetic factors. There is also the issue of gene interaction which RV discusses as a reason for children have lower IQs than their high-IQ parents, but that is technically outbreeding depression not regression to the mean.
The quotes you gave are complete nonsense, mathematical idiocy. They make statements about the size of the overall gene poool for Muslims which are obviously impossible. The confusion is between the degree of relatedness of a typical mating, and the overall genetic diversity of the entire population. It is like saying that if you have a large crowd of people who are an average distance of 2 feet from their nearest neighbor, the entire crowd can only be 4 feet wide.
Muslim incest is a terrible problem because of the frequency of genetic defects caused by recessive genes (and also for social reasons of course), but Muslims as a whole show as much genetic diversity as you would expect a population of a billion people to show. Since Islam spread very widely by conquest, arguments based on "the first Muslims" and their subsequent inbreeding fail. Any given population of Muslims that practices incest and cousin marriage routinely will have a lot of defects, but that doesn't mean Muslims as a whole aren't diverse.
Egghead: Thanks for the good laugh with your ice cream comment above!
You are most certainly welcome. I'm delighted that somebody − and particularly yourself − got a good larf out of it. The analogy also applies to Islam as a whole.
Stir even just a little bit of Islam into any other culture and, more often than not, everything quickly changes for the worse.
Have you ever wondered WHY Iran's Khomeini advised Muslim families to marry off their girls BEFORE their first menstrual period?
If anything it was in order to reduce the number of incestuous pregnancies that normally result from intra-familial sexual child abuse. Departure of the girl child prior to initial onset of her menses helped assure that all subsequent offspring were not the result of familial liaisons.
The exception to this circumstance would be when incestuous impregnation occurred in exact coincidence with a daughter’s first ovulation. Nonetheless, Khomeini's advice still tends to reduce the frequency of this happening.
However, none of this alters the fact that some non-zero percentage of the Muslim population continues to be the direct result of intra-familial incest. It is intuitive that the probability of negative recessive traits emerging from such a union can only be some degree higher and - due to whatever genetic form of constructive interference - be even more deleterious than those which result from typical consanguineous marriages.
Egghead: "Mohammedans have been interbreeding so long, and have done so with such close relatives, that there are genetically only about 100 Muslims in the whole world, in a population of 1.2 billion."
I think that the human genome project would be required to confirm this figure before accepting it on face value. That said, any verification would certainly go quite a ways towards explaining the startling degree of homogeneity in thought, attitude and behavior that prevails throughout Islam.
What if low intelligence and low IQ are simply the result of two parents passing along 1,400+ years of a range of dominant genes that interact to produce a child with low intelligence and low IQ?
In other words, if the original Muslims possessed low intelligence and low IQ, then those are the dominant genes that are being passed along - not as a mental handicap per se - but as a dominant trait.
While I consider the jury to still be out regarding what is commonly viewed as “genetic intelligence”; there certainly are many other heritable traits that confer a wide range of positive survival abilities. The Caucasian race has managed to evolve away from the post-infancy lactose intolerance which plagues much of our world. Additionally, epidermal photosynthesis of vitamin D and the visual acuity conferred by having blue eyes also meet this same criteria.
It makes sense to me that the original Muslims possessed low intelligence and low IQ because high intelligence and high IQ people would have run very far very fast from the EVIL Mohammed.
Or simply be killed by Muslims for exhibiting such threatening behaviors as analytical thinking or just a simple rejection of dogmatic thought.
Polymath: So the Muslims are starting from poorer raw material. But inbreeding doesn't reduce intelligence except via recessive single-gene defects.
I realize that your statement is couched entirely within a genetic context but − as has been indicated by “Nature versus Nurture” studies − there is also an environmental factor that can affect intelligence.
Inbreeding is typically accompanied by other socio-cultural behaviors that may not be conducive to intelligence or the growth of it. Clannishness, xenophobia, paranoia and an inability to entertain new modes of thought are chief among them.
A common secondary effect of just those four previous factors can manifest as an unadventurous character. When this trait is set within a shared milieu that just as frequently discourages exploration or, especially, adoption of new traditions − be they intellectual or spiritual − then the stage is set for societal stagnation.
Simple lack of exposure − whether it be to visual or tactile stimulus − has been shown to have a profound impact on physical and mental development. Deprivation studies with monkeys using wire versus cloth surrogate “mother” constructs demonstrate this rather conclusively.
Considering the increased degree of isolation that Islamic tribalism can impose in the form of purdah, highly contained communities and so forth, the resulting lack of novelty and engagement could easily be seen as stunting intellectual development and thereby create an overall impediment to growth in IQ over time.
To your credit you did give passing notice to this when you noted how:
As I also said, the reason Muslims may have failed to get smarter as much as other groups did over the centuries is that Islam discourages independent thought so there would have been less selection pressure for intelligence.
Although, personally, I think you may have significantly underrated the effects of isolationism within Islamic culture.
Any given population of Muslims that practices incest and cousin marriage routinely will have a lot of defects, but that doesn't mean Muslims as a whole aren't diverse.
While it certainly would not totally overcome the genetic diversity obtained through geographic expansion, there is still a negating effect due to Islam's practice of polygamy.
Additionally, Islam's traditions of preference, corruption and other non-survival oriented traits would predict that a good portion of its male population which successfully manages to practice polygamy may not be the alpha male types who − in the animal world − more constructively use the harem strategy.
Zenster, I'd like to point out that Jews exhibit these: clannishness, xenophobia, paranoia. They somehow are fairly bright people. Intelligence is mostly heritable. For instance, the parietal lobe part, which handles math skills, logic and visio-spatial skills is about 85% heritable. Also, the environmental factor doesn't affect cross generational behaviors. Also, as you see in the case of the Jews, inbreeding actually made them more intelligent.
And novelty seeking is driven by another gene, unrelated to intelligence, but related to dopamine regulation.
Oh, and to sum it up, the most dysgenic reproduction patterns aren't the ones in Islam, but the ones of people of European descent.
A lot of science including genetic science is theory dressed up as fact. Just like breeders charge owners A LOT of money to pair one fast horse with another to obtain fast progeny, I believe that high intelligence humans can - and do - selectively mate to improve their individual chances of producing high intelligence children.
I am going to email A.H. Bittles who runs the consang.net site and ask for Bittles to comment on the various assertions in this thread about the quality of his genetic research. It will be interesting to see if Bittles responds....
In any case, in addition to the damaging genetic effects of 1,400+ years of consanguineous marriage with its recessive mental defects in full force, Muslim intelligence may also be diminished around the world by Muslims growing up in "poor" environments featuring chaotic polygamous homes that are rife with physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual abuse.
"Evidence suggests that family environmental factors may have an effect upon childhood IQ, accounting for up to a quarter of the variance. Other variance in IQ results from environmental influences not shared by siblings who grow up in the same home. Another important influence on IQ that was often neglected in earlier human genetic studies is the "maternal effect" of the prenatal environment of the mother's womb.[53] In the context of follow-up research on the nature versus nurture debate, it is still unclear whether the "nature" component is more important than the "nurture" component in explaining IQ variance in the general population.[54]"
Intelligence (trait)
Egghead, you realize that theory, in a scientific sense means something completely different than the lay version of the word? Theory = a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena.
Sure, some parts of science are just 'theory' and let me guess - those that you don't agree with are just 'theory'?
rebelliousvanilla: … I'd like to point out that Jews exhibit these: clannishness, xenophobia, paranoia.
Perhaps so, but you rather conspicuously omitted the last trait I mentioned; an inability to entertain new modes of thought. Be it the disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes or, simply, Judaism's allowance for its followers to question even the very existence of God − an act that is punishable by death in Islam − Jews rather clearly are able to entertain alternative modes of perception or thought without all of the hysteria that Muslims experience.
This goes a long way towards explaining why Jews have so successfully integrated into nearly every culture on earth − including Islam up until recently − which is something that Muslims fail at miserably.
What's more, if Jews are, indeed, so clannish, xenophobic and paranoid, then Israel − as the center of all things Jewish − should exhibit this to a high degree. Instead, Israel has mosques, churches and other temples, something conspicuously lacking in Islamic countries. Additionally, Israel has opened its doors to immigration by Ethiopian Jews and remains home to countless non-Jews as well. Again, another achievement that consistently eludes Muslim countries.
Finally, in just a few short decades − and entirely without the benefit of oil-based wealth − Israel has blossomed forth as an agricultural wonderland and technological powerhouse in complete contrast to the Muslim countries around it, all of whom have had millennia to do the same. That one accomplishment speaks volumes and calls into question the entire validity of your comparison.
All of the foregoing taken into consideration, this comes across as yet another of your "apples and oranges" sort of argument that you seem to be so inordinately fond of.
Zenster, if Jews really integrated, they would have intermarried and not be around anymore, for one. And secondly, they are the human group who was probably expelled from the biggest number of countries on Earth, regardless of who inhabited in that country. Besides the hard on that the Christian right has for them, I don't really know anybody who likes Jews that much.
And I left the last one out because I wanted to point out to you that none of those three are bad, even though it is a typical American thing to say they are.
And while Israel didn't have oil, it got a hellload of money and technology from Germany and it still does. Not to mention billions of foreign aid from the US per year. But I'm not exactly sure what this has anything to do with it. I suppose it's one of your favorite things - bringing up irrelevant things into the discussion.
rebelliousvanilla: … if Jews really integrated, they would have intermarried and not be around anymore, for one.
So what? By your reasoning neither would many other still-existing groups be around as well. As usual, you cite facts not in evidence.
And secondly, they are the human group who was probably expelled from the biggest number of countries on Earth, regardless of who inhabited in that country.
So what? The Jews managed to go there in the first place. Furthermore, their expulsions are just as often based upon religious prejudice. Religious prejudice does not equate with an inability to integrate, regardless of your assertion that it does.
You continue to demonstrate extreme difficulty in passing the "So what?" test.
Besides the hard on that the Christian right has for them, I don't really know anybody who likes Jews that much.
Such gutter language does not even merit an answer. Why you so often descend into incivility is beyond me.
And I left the last one out because I wanted to point out to you that none of those three are bad, even though it is a typical American thing to say they are.
America bashing, now that's a more familiar theme of yours. Not to mention America bashing with a solid dose of total rubbish.
It is fairly safe to say that paranoia and phobias are unhealthy mental traits.
Paranoid Personality Disorder:
Diagnostic Features:
Paranoid Personality Disorder is a condition characterized by excessive distrust and suspiciousness of others. This disorder is only diagnosed when these behaviors become persistent and very disabling or distressing. This disorder should not be diagnosed if the distrust and suspiciousness occurs exclusively during the course of Schizophrenia, a Mood Disorder With Psychotic Features, or another Psychotic Disorder or if it is due to the direct physiological effects of a neurological (e.g., temporal lobe epilepsy) or other general medical condition.
Complications:
Individuals with this disorder are generally difficult to get along with and often have problems with close relationships because of their excessive suspiciousness and hostility. Their combative and suspicious nature may elicit a hostile response in others, which then serves to confirm their original expectations. Individuals with this disorder have a need to have a high degree of control over those around them. They are often rigid, critical of others, and unable to collaborate, although they have great difficulty accepting criticism themselves. They often become involved in legal disputes. They may exhibit thinly hidden, unrealistic grandiose fantasies, are often attuned to issues of power and rank, and tend to develop negative stereotypes of others, particularly those from population groups distinct from their own. More severely affected individuals with this disorder may be perceived by others as fanatics and form tightly knit cults or groups with others who share their paranoid beliefs.
That all sounds very unhealthy to me.
Next up, Phobias!
Phobias:
Diagnostic criteria for 300.29 Specific Phobia
A. Marked and persistent fear that is excessive or unreasonable, cued by the presence or anticipation of a specific object or situation (e.g., flying, heights, animals, receiving an injection, seeing blood).
B. Exposure to the phobic stimulus almost invariably provokes an immediate anxiety response, which may take the form of a situationally bound or situationally predisposed Panic Attack.
Note: In children, the anxiety may be expressed by crying, tantrums, freezing, or clinging.
C. The person recognizes that the fear is excessive or unreasonable. Note: In children, this feature may be absent.
D. The phobic situation(s) is avoided or else is endured with intense anxiety or distress.
E. The avoidance, anxious anticipation, or distress in the feared situation(s) interferes significantly with the person's normal routine, occupational (or academic) functioning, or social activities or relationships, or there is marked distress about having the phobia.
F. In individuals under age 18 years, the duration is at least 6 months.
So, a phobia is something that: "interferes significantly with the person's normal routine, occupational (or academic) functioning, or social activities or relationships".
That sounds very unhealthy, yet you make the totally unfounded assertion that "that none of those … [paranoia, xenophobia] … are bad".
(Note: Clannishness has been intentionally excluded as it is not recognized as a diagnosable condition.)
It is very apparent that you have a minimal grasp upon what constitutes normal, healthy human behavior. Given that demonstrated fact, your other assessments of people and cultures are thrown into question as well.
Actually, xenophobia is the word of choice of anti-racism idiots before it was fashionable to call people racist. I suppose it is the European equivalent of the word. But if you knew any European history, you'd know that.
And I never claimed that any group who lived in the midst of other people for over 1000 years in an integrated way is still around. lol. But again, I don't consider opening the gates of the Spanish cities to the Muslims to be integrated - sure, behavior such as this isn't the reason why people disliked them. It was religious prejudice.
rebelliousvanilla: Actually, xenophobia is the word of choice of anti-racism idiots before it was fashionable to call people racist.
But now that you're the one who is using it, suddenly everything is all right, just so long as you're doing the defining. Yeesh!
I suppose it is the European equivalent of the word.
Perish the thought that you might use any of a host of more appropriate terms that refer to a healthy suspicion with regard to strangers or a normal tendency to lean towards mild distrust when first dealing with people from other cultures.
Instead, your choice of terminology reflects what can only be a tremendous chip on your shoulder the size of Nebraska.
But if you knew any European history, you'd know that.
If you had bothered to pay closer attention to my comments here at Gates of Vienna, you'd already know that I'm half European and grew up in largely European immigrant households. But don't let such trifles get in the way of your absurd pronouncements.
rebelliousvanilla: … I'd like to point out that Jews exhibit these: clannishness, xenophobia, paranoia.
So RV accuses Jews of being xenophobic -- and of being the main architects of PC MC. Seems like Jews are fantastic acrobats who can execute amazingly contradictory feats.
I.e., xenophobia is the polar opposite of PC MC.
More likely, therefore, RV has in mind that Jews are really xenophobic, but for their dastardly machinations of subverting the West, they foment a (with strangely spectacular success, it might be added) a PC MC that goes against their xenophobia.
Hi Polymath & RV: Please read. It's good stuff. :)
Sexual Selection
"Sexual selection is the theory proposed by Charles Darwin that states that certain evolutionary traits can be explained by intraspecific competition. Darwin defined sexual selection as the effects of the "struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex".[1] Biologists today distinguish between "male to male combat" or "Intrasexual Selection" (it is usually males that fight each other), "mate choice" or "Intersexual Selection" (usually female choice of male mates)[2] and sexual conflict."
Phylogeny of sexual selection and base conditions
"The success of an organism is not only measured by the number of offspring left behind, but by the quality or probable success of the offspring: reproductive fitness. Sexual selection is the expansion on the ability of organisms to differentiate each other at the species level, interspecies selection."
"The expansion of interspecies selection and intraspecies selection is a driving force behind species fission: the separation of a single contiguous species into multiple non-contiguous variants. Sexual preference creates a specialized tendency towards homogamy that provides a system by which a group constantly invaded by the diffusion of unfavourable genes may suppress ill effects."
"When it is possible for it to be exercised usefully, the general conditions of sexual discrimination appear to be (1) the acceptance of one mate precludes the effective acceptance of alternative mates, and (2) the rejection of an offer will be followed by other offers, either certainly, or at such high chance that the risk of non-occurrence will be smaller than the chance advantage to be gained by selecting a mate."
In Humans
"Geoffrey Miller, drawing on some of Darwin's largely neglected ideas about human behavior, has hypothesized that many human behaviors not clearly tied to survival benefits, such as humor, music, visual art, verbal creativity, and some forms of altruism, are courtship adaptations that have been favored through sexual selection. In that view, many human artefacts could be considered subject to sexual selection as part of the extended phenotype, for instance clothing that enhances sexually selected traits."
"Some hypotheses about the evolution of the human brain argue that it is a sexually selected trait, as it would not confer enough fitness in itself relative to its high maintenance costs (a quarter to a fifth of the energy and oxygen consumed by a human).[11] Related to this is vocabulary, where humans, on average, know far more words than are necessary for communication. Miller (2000) has proposed that this apparent redundancy is due to individuals using vocabulary to demonstrate their intelligence, and consequently their “fitness”, to potential mates. This has been tested experimentally and it appears that males do make greater use of lower frequency (more unusual) words when in a romantic mindset compared to a non-romantic mindset, meaning that vocabulary is likely to be used as a sexual display (Rosenberg & Tunney, 2008)."
History and application of the theory
"The theory of sexual selection was first proposed by Charles Darwin in his book The Origin of Species, though it was primarily devoted to natural selection. A later work, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex dealt with the subject of sexual selection exhaustively, in part because Darwin felt that natural selection alone was unable to account for certain types of apparently non-competitive adaptations, such as the tail of a male peacock. He once wrote to a colleague that "The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!" His work divided sexual selection into two primary categories: male-male competition (which would produce adaptations such as a Bighorn Sheep's horns, which are used primarily in sparring with other males over females), and cases of female choice (which would produce adaptations like beautiful plumage, elaborate songs, and other things related to impressing and attracting)."
"Though Darwin considered sexual and natural selection to be two separate processes of equal importance, most of his contemporaries were not convinced, and sexual selection is usually de-emphasized as being a lesser force than, or simply a part of, natural selection."
Sexual Selection
Geoffrey Miller (evolutionary psychologist)
Human mental evolution
"The starting point for Miller's work was Darwin's theoretical observation that evolution is driven not just by natural selection, but by the process called sexual selection.[1] In support of his views on sexual selection, he has written The mating mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. This revives and extends Darwin's suggestion that sexual selection through mate choice has been critical in human mental evolution—especially the more "self-expressive" aspects of human behavior, such as art, morality, language, and creativity. Identifying the survival value of these traits has proved elusive, but their adaptive design features do suggest that they evolved through mutual mate-choice by both sexes to advertise intelligence, creativity, moral character and heritable fitness. The supporting evidence includes human mate preferences, courtship behavior, behavior genetics, psychometrics, and life history patterns. The theory makes many testable predictions, and sheds new light on human cognition, motivation, communication, sexuality, and culture.[2]"
"Miller believes that our minds evolved not as survival machines, but as courtship machines, and proposes that the human mind's most impressive abilities are courtship tools that evolved to attract and entertain sexual partners. By switching from a survival-centred to a courtship-centred view of evolution, he attempts to show how we can understand the mysteries of mind. The main competing theories of human mental evolution are (1) selection for generalist foraging ability (i.e., hunting and gathering), as embodied in the work of researchers such as Hillard Kaplan and Kim Hill at the University of New Mexico, and (2) selection for social intelligence, as argued by Andrew Whiten, Robin Dunbar, and Simon Baron-Cohen."
Geoffrey Miller (evolutionary psychologist)
More likely, therefore, RV has in mind that Jews are really xenophobic, but for their dastardly machinations of subverting the West, they foment a (with strangely spectacular success, it might be added) a PC MC that goes against their xenophobia.
There is no contradiction here. Jews exhibit a trait common in all the other privileged minorities: PC MC for the society as a whole to undermine the majority, xenophobia/racism/clannishness as an exception for themselves. Muslims and Blacks cherish as well the PC MC paradigm, as long as it is directed against the majority. They all want a "tolerant", open, liberal society, because it serves their interests as a group. Even gays present the same characteristic: in the name of tolerance, they want special rights for their minority, like the right to marry. Then, in a clannish, totalitarian manner, they threaten, blackamail and intimidate the dissenters, like it happened with the advocates of Proposition 8 in California, who were threatened in broad daylight by gay rights groups and their supporters.
The minority mindset works like this: I want enough tolerance to express my intolerance.
What part of this you don't understand?
Armance, also, the last 3 Fed chairmen, 20% of Congress, 33% of the Supreme Court and 50% of the opinion leaders in America are Jewish. I hardly doubt that they'd be so overrepresented in a society that wasn't multicultural.
Hesperado, in case you didn't figure it out, Jews are exempt from having to be MC-PC, since just like blacks, they are exempt from criticism or having to put up with stuff. Only anti-Semites criticize them, you know? Armance explained it quite well.
Right about the Supreme Court and about opinion leaders, wrong about Congress. There are 13 out of 100 Jewish Senators and 27 out of 435 (6.2%) Representatives. Before the last election it was 32 Reps (7.4%) but still 13 Senators (Specter was ousted but Blumenthal replaced Dodd). Still overrepresented.
It is interesting to compare the overrepresentation with the IQ disparity. Assuming Jews in America are 1 standard deviation higher than average in verbal IQ (Ashkenazi Jews are about 0.8 SDs higher in general and US Jews are only 90% Ashkenazim, but compensating for that is that they do relatively better on verbal IQ and the ones who managed to emigrate were probably a little smarter), one would expect overrepresentation by a factor of 3 at the one-sigma-and-up level, and by a factor of 7 at the two-sigma-and-up level. Since Jews are 2% of the US population, I conclude that you need a verbal IQ of at least +1sigma (115-116) to be elected to Congress and >=+2 sigma (130-132) to be elected to the Senate. The factor is about 18 at the 3 sigma level, so you need to be verbal IQ 145 to make it to the Supreme Court. (When you do this with Nobel Prize winners in Science you should use math IQ instead which is a smaller disparity, and this doesn't apply to opinion leaders because that is related to another Jewish trait as well as IQ, namely "being aggressively opinionated").
Armance, also, the last 3 Fed chairmen, 20% of Congress, 33% of the Supreme Court and 50% of the opinion leaders in America are Jewish. I hardly doubt that they'd be so overrepresented in a society that wasn't multicultural.
Yes, RV, in my opinion, you are 100% right. Now it's up to Hesperado to demonstrate that we are wrong and the Jewish influence regarding the American foreign and domestic policy is not related at all to PC MC or maybe it does not exist, but, in the best case scenario, it's just an epi-phenomenon of a meritocratic, democracy-based society, that values its members, regardless of their group-affiliation, race, ethnic and religious background, in a just, equal manner. And I am ready to admit that AIPAC is just an objective political manifestation of a meritocratic American democracy based on the intelligence and scientific accomplishments of some Nobel prize winners, especially Jewish.
(Trebuie sa marturisesc ca in timp ce scriu aceste rinduri ma prabusesc de ris. Or in translation: I have to admit that while I write these lines my sides are splitting with laughter.)
Armance, I am smiling after reading your post. And I agree that it is not just meritocracy about the opinion leaders. But for Congress and the Supreme Court IQ can explain the overrepresentation (the other 6 Supreme Court members are Catholic, that obviously requires a different explanation ;) ). I suppose you could use Barbara Boxer as evidence against my thesis, since she is a stupid Jewish Senator based on her public statements. Funnily, her cousin, who is a math professor and a great musician, is the smartest person I know.
,But for Congress and the Supreme Court IQ can explain the overrepresentation (the other 6 Supreme Court members are Catholic, that obviously requires a different explanation ;)
Polymath, I'd like to hear your explanation about the Catholic overrepresentation in the Supreme Court and Congress.
Armance, I don't know about Catholic overrepresentation in Congress, though if there is any it is because of the Irish who are Catholic and gabby.
For the Supreme Court, it is partly because Catholics are more likely to be lawyers due to this being traditionally an honored profession among Catholics (the Church itself has a very well-developed system of Canon Law). But the main reason is that Reagan (who selected Scalia and Kennedy), Bush 41 (who selected Thomas), and Bush 43 (who selected Roberts and Alito) wanted solidly anti-abortion judges. Legally, Roe v. Wade was very badly reasoned, and Protestant judges were vulnerable to being swayed by the pro-abortion zeitgeist in a way that the most eminent Catholic judges were not so they could get away with pretending to agree with it. Catholic judges, however, could not do so without forfeiting their intellectual self-respect, because there would be so much pressure on them from their fellow Catholics to justify unjustifiable arguments.
Of course, for this to apply you need not only a Catholic judge, but one of high intellect. Dopes like Sotomayor (who is on the court because she is Hispanic, her Catholicism is a mere corollary), or idiot politicians like Ted Kennedy, can be pro-abortion without being intellectually ashamed. The big exception is Mario Cuomo, whose speeches on the subject are reprehensibly dishonest.
Hmm, now I am wishing I had gone into law instead of mathematics. Since I am Catholic, and also 50% Ashkenazi by ancestry (my father, a lawyer himself, is a convert), I would have had a good chance to make it to the Supreme Court. :P
,Since I am Catholic, and also 50% Ashkenazi by ancestry (my father, a lawyer himself, is a convert), I would have had a good chance to make it to the Supreme Court. :P
Well, then, I have to ask you a question. Let's suppose that we have a case regarding the legislation of the EU. As you probably know, the Jews and the Muslims use only a part of the halal/kosher meat, only certain parts of the animals which was slaughtered in such a way, according to their religious commandments. The other non-halal/non-kosher parts of the animal go directly to the European supermarkets, without the Europeans who buy them knowing that the animal was slaughtered according to the Judaic/Muslim habit. Two years ago, the EU suggested that such a meat should be labeled accordingly in European supermarkets ("this animal was killed upon halal/kosher prescription"). This suggestion met an opposition from both the Jewish and and the Muslim organizations, which argued that a label like this would be a threat to their ancient cultural habit of killing the animals as they please.
Do you think that Europeans should be warned about the way animals were killed, when they buy meat from the supermarkets?
Polymath, the idea that you need intelligence to somehow represent people is silly to me. This is the whole thing actually - I'd rather have a stupider representative that actually represents me.
And I doubt you need a 130 IQ to be elected into the Senate. I disagree with you about politics being meritocratic. I don't find, say, Nancy Pelosi to be particularly intelligent. Politics is about knowing the right people and being willing to step on others to get to the top and then being a hooker for the highest bidder in terms of lobbyists. Or let's pick Obama and Bush - neither really seems particularly intelligent. Sure, Obama can read off a teleprompter, but it's not like his speeches are particularly smart. I'm sure I could win a debate against him easily. It would actually be interesting to see SAT and IQ scores of elected officials.
Also, recent findings, put the Ashkenazi Jewish IQ to about 109-110, which is 0.66 or so SD.
Anyway, I was reading about the time when Catholicism was sane. In the 1940s, when the king of my country married, the Catholic church excommunicated the princess he married because he was an Orthodox Christian. What a shame that now even Muslims go to the Catholic heaven.
Armance, the American foreign policy in regards to Israel is actually one of the best examples of the foundational beliefs behind multiculturalism.
Armance, I can answer for Polymath, since I know him fairly well - the answer would be yes, Europeans should know that the food is halal or kosher. Funny enough, I have koser pasta bag and I laughed with my mom about it being kosher. lol
RV, it was just a rough calculation, and you don't need intelligence to be a good representative, but it does help in getting elected. I agree it is better to have a less intelligent representative who actually represents you rather than himself or someone else, and the minority groups understand this better than whites do. You're right that 130 is an overestimate of how smart you have to be to get into the Senate, though 115 makes sense to get into the House because you have to be at least that smart to be a lawyer which the typical Congressman is (exceptions for the CBC who represent minority districts of course). The other reason Senators are more likely to be Jews is that it really helps to be rich (Congressional districts are much less expensive to mount campaigns in than entire states, you can actually afford to go everywhere and mail stuff to everyone).
Obama and Bush are in the 120's, so of course you could beat them in a debate. They both act stupider politically though, Obama because he is intellectually lazy and prefers to follow the leftist line rather than learn anything, Bush because has swallowed the PC/MC BS and is also lazy.
Armance, RV is right but I had a lot more to say, I wrote a really great reply to your comment but Blogger destroyed it (it doesn't work well with my browser and sometimes when it makes you log in it then forgets the comment you wrote). I will try to reconstruct it, but please imagine now that I am saying all those words that the Baron won't allow here in my frustration.
Hi Polymath and RV:
Regarding the consang.net site and the quality of its research, A.H. Bittles emailed me the following response. I must confess that, in soliciting clarification from A.H. Bittles, I fully realized that my own comments, as well as those of others, were fair game for scholarly clarification. I believe that A.H. Bittles might be open to answering further questions from GoV readers if asked politely via his email. :)
Dear Egghead,
Thank you for your query. The assertion by rebelliousvanilla that the quality of the data on the global prevalence of consanguineous marriage, collated and presented in a standardized format on consang.net, is of 'poor quality', is spurious. All of the studies cited were published in refereed scientific and medical journals, and so prior to acceptance for publication they had been vetted and approved by reviewers deemed to be experts in the field by the Editors of these journals. Quite which aspect of the factual data listed in consang.net rebelliousvanilla finds to be 'poor quality' I don't know. The data listed are not perfect, empirical studies seldom if ever attain that goal, but to the best of our knowledge they surpass any other data source on the subject and for that reason they have been widely cited in the scientific literature. If rebelliousvanilla has an equivalent but superior dataset to substantiate his/her assertion, I would suggest it rapidly be made available to a waiting world.
For your information, on a separate matter already partially alluded to by Polymath, it is important to differentiate between the levels of genetic similarity at the individual versus the population level. The data on the prevalence of consanguineous marriage listed in consang.net, e.g. 61.2% for Pakistan as a whole, refer to the combined percentage of first and second cousin marriages determined in the study sample. These figures are then mathematically translated into the mean coefficient of inbreeding (alpha) which in this case = 0.0332. As first cousins have 1/8 of their genes in common, on average their children will have inherited identical gene copies at 1/16 of their gene loci, i.e. giving a coefficient of inbreeding of 0.0625 (= 6.25%). The equivalent figures for second cousins are 1/32, 1/64 and 1.56%. Therefore the mean coefficient of inbreeding (alpha) of 0.0332 calculated for Pakistanis as a whole indicates that, on average, they have inherited identical gene copies at 3.32% of all gene loci, NOT that as individuals they are identical across 61.2% of their genome.
I hope these comments help.
With regards,
Alan Bittles.
Armance, truth-in-labeling laws are generally good things, because as regulations they represent quite a small economic burden. I agree about the kosher/halal labeling but the question is more complex than it appears at first.
In most cases, the free market will take care of things without requiring a labeling law. For example, although I don't care about animal treatment laws much in general, I do spend twice as much on eggs to buy the free-range kind rather than the eggs from chickens who lived their whole lives in a small cage, and the manufacturers are quite happy to label these eggs "cage-free" (or even "cruelty-free" but they then say no cages were used). Similarly, milk from cows which were fed naturally without bovine growth hormone, or without antibiotics, or both, is labeled as such voluntarily. (It was ridiculous when the dairy lobbies tried to get a law passed which would PREVENT such labeling on the grounds that it would mislead customers into thinking there were health benefits, because first they didn't prove there were no health benefits, and second the producers didn't claim there WERE benefits, and third there might be other reasons for opposing BGH than health benefits to the milk, for example it might be more comfortable for the cows to avoid the resulting udder enhancement). And I think "organic produce" is a ridiculous swindle and wouldn't pay a penny extra for it but as long as the term has a defined technical meaning that they follow then it is fine for them to label it that way and extract more SWPL money.
(to be continued)
(comment continued)
The place you need labeling laws is when for some reason the market forces discourage disclosure. Three examples:
1) If the product is adulterated with ingredients which are not part of the normal process the public assumes has been used to produce it. For example, there is an assumption that all the fat in butter comes from milk, and if vegetable fat is used then the product must be called margarine or some other word. It would not be right to require traditional dairies to explicitly say they use milk and not vegetable ingredients, the burden of disclosure should be on the one who does use the other ingredients. (One annoying thing when we visit the American South is that when you ask for "butter" you frequently get margarine, but this is just a regional linguistic quirk, the packages in the markets are labeled correctly.)
2) If there is a health issue -- for example, some people have strong allergies to nuts and it is reasonable to require that labels show, not only whether the product contains nuts (which already is required by regular ingredients-disclosure laws), but if it was produced using machines which also processed nuts (since even traces from the machines which were not part of the recipe can send a severely allergic person into anaphylactic shock).
3) When there are religious or moral scruples involved. Here too the free market will normally take care of things: for example, manufacturers whose products happen to be produced in a way that satisfies kosher or halal rules are happy to label them this way so that they can also sell to Jews and Muslims, and will even give further details like the product is pareve (kosher with both meat and milk), and the only law that needs to apply is that they they tell the truth if they make such a statement, just like my earlier example with the eggs.
The special factor in the case you cite is that, although the meat is slaughtered in a way consistent with kosher/halal, there are still PARTS of the meat that Jews and Muslims don't want but which could be sold to other customers. Without this factor, there would be no need for a special law -- stores would volutarily label meat kosher or halal or neither, and stock it in the appropriate proportions for the demographics of their customer base. But since part of the religiously slaughtered meat must be sold to nonbelievers, there is an incentive NOT to label it as such, in case there are a significant number of people who would not buy it because they object to Jewish or Islamic ritual slaughter (or to Judaism or Islam more generally). Because of this disincentive, I would support the law you describe.
"The special factor in the case you cite is that, although the meat is slaughtered in a way consistent with kosher/halal, there are still PARTS of the meat that Jews and Muslims don't want but which could be sold to other customers."
The result of truth in labeling is clear: non-Muslims do NOT want to buy religiously slaughtered meat.
Jews and Muslims should be forced to bear the higher costs incurred by the waste associated with their religiously slaughtered meat.
When unlabeled undesirable meat is sold to non-Muslims at full price, then non-Muslims are financially subsidizing the Jewish and Muslim religions.
Polymath, the problem is that it isn't cost effective to customize your products so from some point, you will sell kosher/halal food to people who aren't neither Jewish nor Muslim. For example, since I'm neither, I'd rather not eat either of the two foods(not that I actually care in the end).
Egghead, what Mr Bittles says makes sense, but it pretty much contradicts what you said and what that video says. I just watched the video and browser through the website(I supposed that the person making the video actually cites what the research says). And the definition of consanguinity I know from my genetics class refers to the amount of shared identical DNA. So there's a huge difference in between the rate of consanguine marriages and the rate of consanguinity. :)
Armance and RV:
"There is no contradiction here. Jews exhibit a trait common in all the other privileged minorities: PC MC for the society as a whole to undermine the majority, xenophobia/racism/clannishness as an exception for themselves."
Once again, we see the tendency to treat all members of a category the same: If apples, oranges, bananas, grapefruits and limes are all fruits, then they must all taste the same.
Here, while Jews, Blacks and Muslims may generally speaking exhibit the formula of xenophobia against the Other whilst exploiting PC MC to protect themselves, does this mean that they all do it exactly the same way?
There is no evidence that Jews and Blacks are exploiting PC MC beyond the normal baseline of trying to get a little advantage for themselves. There is, however, a mountain of evidence that Muslims are exploiting it for purposes of a fanatical desire to conquer the Earth, and to that end -- in addition to many other tactics -- engaging in (and plotting) any form of terrorist mass destruction necessary to achieve that goal. Jews and Blacks don't fit this larger, and more dangerous, dimension of the problem.
Egghead, good summary of my point on labeling laws. And I agree with RV that the video and your quotes from it are wrong, as Bittles confirms.
Hesperado, although you are right that Muslims are more ambitious in the type of power they intend to gain, the other two groups have done very serious cultural an social damage here despite not having a blueprint for world conquest.
RV, we don't disagree about labeling, but the issue doesn't arise for most products, only for slaughtered meat -- for other foods, kosher and halal just confirm certain things have not been done but a gentile kafir like you needn't care about such negative statements. (For example, today I just bought some yogurt for my family, one of whom is a vegetarian--so I got both a brand with gelatin, which makes the yogurt unacceptable to him and also non-Kosher, and a different brand which uses only fruit pectin as a binding agent and happens to be kosher too, but nothing specially Jewish was done to it.) For slaughtered meat, there is a very different process involved and you should care, but the customization issue isn't so serious because the meat already comes from a different butcher and it is nor difficult or inefficient to give it a different label, it's not like you'd need two different manufacturing processes and lose economies of scale. (Maybe you would though if the meat is then processed into sausages or something, I was just thinking of people buying it directly.)
lol@conversation about food.
Hesperado, the things Jews lobbied for did more harm to America than all the terrorist attacks and crimes of Muslims so far. The immigration reforms is an example and the civil rights is another one(Jews were instrumental in both and I can enumerate a bunch of organizations which were fairly important in the two). Related to immigration, they've been fairly open about being against proper immigration law since the 19th century. Also, Bolshevism was a fairly Jewish affair, just like the Frankfurt school.
RV: Here is WHY non-Muslims should care about the introduction of any halal food into the West.
I read a great anti-halal essay that explained that halal food contributes to four significant problems - independent of animal cruelty or religious issues.
The first problem is an employment fairness issue. Halal slaughter requires that Muslims perform all halal rituals. The end result is that Muslims begin to "take over" food production jobs of a nation. The idea that Muslims - who wish to eliminate non-Muslims - control any aspect of non-Muslim food production is disturbing.
The second problem is a terrorist funding issue. All halal products require the monetary purchase of halal certification from a major Muslim entity - and some of that money inevitably supports terror efforts against the West.
The third problem is a Muslim immigration scam. Evidently, halal slaughter requires Western nations to import halal butchers from Muslim nations. The scam is that the halal butchers QUIT as soon as they receive their Western immigration status - requiring the constant importation of halal butchers from - you guessed it - Muslim nations.
The fourth problem is that - where Western countries have banned guns but allow knives - halal butchers can use their butchering skills as very effective human murderers. In essence, the importation of halal butchers is the importation of devout Muslims who would make extremely effective foot soldiers in a fighting war.
In the meantime, halal butchers use their butchering skills to commit violent crimes in the West - halal human slaughters which go unreported by the main stream media.
Halal Murder of Humans
rebelliousvanilla: Hesperado, the things Jews lobbied for did more harm to America than all the terrorist attacks and crimes of Muslims so far.
This endless Jew bashing is as tiresomely narrow-minded as it is obnoxious. Even though I have problems with the way that Israel proliferates advanced American military technology to our enemies in China and elsewhere, a little perspective goes a long way and it sure seems to be in short supply these days.
That disproportionate number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners, especially the ones in physics, chemistry and medicine, all point towards some truly momentous contributions to the betterment of mankind.
Blame Jews all you want for PC MC or Communism, things that they are not solely responsible for, but then take into account just where our world would be without a certain Jewish patent office clerk in Switzerland or several other European Jewish refugees.
Without them and their contributions to America, large portions of Europe and beyond might today be speaking German or Russian. Moreover, large tracts of our world might be radioactive wastelands had America's Cold War foes mastered nuclear weapons technology in advance of the USA.
Without Einstein, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Bethe, Teller, Frisch, Bloch and Szilard the outcome of World War II and the Cold War might have been drastically different.
Without Salk, Sabin and many other Jewish contributors to medical advances, our world would likely be a far more dangerous place to grow up in.
Try to keep that in mind whenever there is a temptation to compare the entire PC MC debacle with the evils of Islam. PC MC and Communism can be defeated and reversed. How many Muslim doctors and scientists are doing anything besides advancing terrorist causes? They sure as Hell aren't winning any Nobel Prizes.
Finally, from all indications, it appears as though the nuclear weapons R&D performed by all of those Jewish scientists is going to play a pivotal role in defeating Islam. Grim as that prospect may be, imagine what would have already happened if Islam had obtained nuclear weapons technology before the West.
Zenster,
I think with RV and Armance (and perhaps also with Polymath, as well as with that person who has mysteriously stopped commenting here of late: you know, that flaming neo-Nazi who claimed she wasn't a Nazi?), an argument based on persuasive data will never suffice: they are conspiracy theorists, and once that line has been crossed, all the contrary evidence in the world only serves a fuel to stoke their fantasy. Jews are dastardly Satanic Macchiavellian geniuses successfully subverting the Cosmos, and only a special Remnant to whom RV and others are privy may stand a chance to fend them off and recreate a New World after the pagan Apocalypse.
Zen, Hesperado -
I was also inclined to stop commenting here, since every other thread that starts with Islam ends up in endless mathematical digressions combined with one exposé after another about every discernible group of people, except Muslims, that have damaged Western society and culture. I don't mean to suggest that it is a deliberate attempt to draw attention away from Islam, but suppose it were, how would it look any different?
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Egghead, and how is that different from buying anything? I mean, all corporations funnel money to the third world in order to appease the liberals. lol
Zenster, you mean those same people who funneled the nuclear technology to our enemies too, right? :)
And I didn't bring up the Jews - you and Egghead did. I suppose that you can bring them up only as long as s**k them off, otherwise, you are naughty. lol. And your special pleading is vaguely amusing - sure, their good parts are made only by them, but the bad parts, not.
Also, it is amusing for an American to ramble about how the world would have been a nuclear wasteland, considering you are the only ones who nuked somebody, you know?
Hesperado, do you want me to make a list of the people in the Frankfurt school and their ethnicity? And Polymath is probably the only half Jewish neo-Nazi I heard of. But again, it is something normal for multiculturalists and leftists to call people who they disagree with Nazis or fascists. I suppose it is the least graceful way of admitting you lost a debate.
Sagunto, don't worry, this is the last thread on which I will comment on this blog considering that it's not really what it used to be. It ended up being just a bunch of people bashing Muslims for not being politically correct enough, while worshiping all other minorities quite like the good multiculturalists. It's not like it has any point to preserve Europe if this is what is left of it.
rebelliousvanilla:
And I didn't bring up the Jews - you and Egghead did.
So what? No one said that you were the one to "bring up the Jews". You just managed to continue with your tedious Jew hating and America bashing, as usual.
Also as usual, more trouble with the "So what?" test.
I suppose that you can bring them up only as long as s**k them off, otherwise, you are naughty.
Difficult as it might be to imagine; even more tiresome is your willing descent into the gutter with typical incivility. It exposes some serious character flaws in you that any discussion of would take pages. I'll not gratify you with such lengthy attention.
Also, it is amusing for an American to ramble about how the world would have been a nuclear wasteland, considering you are the only ones who nuked somebody, you know?
Far be it from you to recognize how the nuclear attacks on Japan saved, not just some 500,000 American combat fatalities, but countless Japanese lives as well. In your usual haste to bash America, facts have no place, while reason and logic must take a back seat to your petty agendas.
Many of us probably hoped that you were more erudite than to trot out such a moldy chestnut from the Liberal Left's locker of stale rubrics, but your obsession with cutting America down to size is just too great, isn't it?
Sagunto, don't worry, this is the last thread on which I will comment on this blog considering that it's not really what it used to be.
Oh ho, the Nodrog Promise™, we'll see how many minutes that will last. Then again, we can only hope − at least in this particular case − that, for once, you will keep your word.
"Polymath is probably the only half Jewish neo-Nazi I heard of. But again, it is something normal for multiculturalists and leftists to call people who they disagree with Nazis or fascists."
It seems I'm not the only one who has so soon forgotten that commenter who had been commenting on this blog quite regularly and frequently up until January of this year (I think). I wish I could remember her name, but I can't -- it was two words I think, the first one starting with "F".
After one particularly sharp scolding from Baron (when he told her to stop posting long comments exonerating Hitler and the Nazis in threads where they were off-topic), has since utterly vanished (or perhaps continues to lurk under another name?)
Hesperado: It seems I'm not the only one who has so soon forgotten that commenter who had been commenting on this blog quite regularly and frequently up until January of this year (I think). I wish I could remember her name, but I can't -- it was two words I think, the first one starting with "F".
The Baron was obliged to take the exceptional measure of banning F's Cats because of her inability to stop derailing every thread with lengthy attempts at rehabilitating Hitler.
In my years of commenting here I can count the number of banned individuals on one hand. That fact stands as an immense credit to the freedom of speech which Gates of Vienna grants its participants.
To be perfectly clear; When the Baron took this step, it was with the caveat that F's comment would be welcome in any threads that explicitly dealt with rehabilitating Hitler. So this was not a total ban but a measure taken to prevent contamination of other threads with off-topic diatribes.
I find it interesting that Gates of Vienna comments seems to attract more of a certain type of commenter than the comment fields of any other anti-Islam blog -- namely, of the antisemitically inclined with a vague aura of Nordic or Germanic pagan apocalyptic all wrapped up in one or another sort of conspiracy-theory. I don't know why that is, or how it developed, since I haven't been a regular part of the commenting community here until only recently (I did spend quite a bit of time here a couple of years ago for a spate -- probably during one of those hiatuses in between Robert Spencer bannings of me from Jihad Watch comments). There might be a clue in the quasi-apocalypticism with an Ur-European flavor of frequent contributor Fjordman as well as the grandiose quasi-apocalyptic pessimism of "El Ingles", whose works are given special notice on the GOV banner. Both of these writers (and there are perhaps others whom I have not sufficiently researched) whether they intend it or not project a kind of apolitical or transpolitical apathy and Gnostic alienation from their own West, perhaps conducive to the types to which I adverted above who seem to be attracted to GOV.
Hesperado, I have no idea who you are referring to and I don't care. It is laughable that I should be prejudiced against Jews, considering my paternal grandparents were Jewish; I am often mistaken for being Jewish and it doesn't bother me a bit. RV's fundamental difference with you is that she cares about preserving or restoring European culture, not simply stopping Islam's advance which is merely one threat (and in America a relatively minor one). It's a political saying over here that you can't beat something with nothing, and if you don't have a positive vision to defend your powers of resistance will be greatly weakened.
I have made the counterpoint that as far as fighting Islam is concerned, and even for fighting other threats like socialism, people who don't share the same positive vision, such as Christians and atheists, libertarians and traditionalists, can still effectively cooperate to oppose those threats, as this website sometimes demonstrates. The important thing as that those diverse opponents of Islam, or of socialism, each have a positive vision that can motivate them, and the differences can be dealt with in good time, while fighting leftists and Islamists can be done most effectively by exposing their own insanity and wickedness and dangerousness, something that does not necessarily involve one particular positive vision in opposition to them.
I have differences with RV about America, but she never said that nuking Japan was wrong or unnecessary. As usual, she speaks provocatively in a way which can be misinterpreted by non-careful readers whom she then prefers to insult rather than enlighten. She was merely expressing her amusement at Zenster's notion that Muslims could conceivably have developed the Bomb on their own if Westerners had never done it, and at the idea that Jews were more important in developing the A-bomb than in providing its secrets to our enemies (answer: significant but not essential in developing the A-bomb, almost entirely responsible for giving it to Russia), and at the propensity of Americans more generally to fear nuclear threats given their overwhelming dominance in this area of weaponry as well their history of being the only ones to use such weapons.
Thanks Zenster -- now I remember the name, "Frejya's cats". I didn't know that Baron had banned her/him from certain comments. I realize that monitoring comments can become tedious work when comments are long and many. I personally don't see the need for monitoring comments on a blog at all. Or, one could devise features to manage them, such as an automatic limit of numbers of comments as well as numbers of words per commenter, with any comments that go over this amount automatically rerouted to a parallel blog composed solely of these "extra" comments.
As for content in the comments fields of blogs, I could never understand the need to regulate that at all -- neither in terms of off-topicness, nor in terms of incivility, nor in terms of vulgar language, nor in terms of ideology. Anyone who can't understand the simple principle that comments are separate from the blog in terms of positions upheld -- particularly when there is a disclaimer in plain sight -- is an utter idiot who shouldn't be worried over.
As bafflingly repellent as as I found Freyja's cats' defenses of Hitler to be, I would never limit or ban them. When I had mildly chided Baron once for tolerating Freyja's cats' pro-Hitler apologetics, I was only noting his absence of any condemnation of FC's ideas juxtaposed with the presence of his interactions in comments with FC that were friendly and polite. That juxtaposition struck me as odd, given that the person one with whom one is being unremarkably friendly is defending Hitler. I'm a believer in being friendly and reasonable with people one disagrees with as long as they remain civil -- but every principle has its limits, and if the defense of Hitler isn't a limit, I don't know what is! I.e., the only appropriate response (if one must respond at all) to a pro-Hitler apologist who insists on verbosely articulating his defenses of Hitler and of classical Nazism is one statement, for the record, expressing one's visceral condemnation of that apologism, and thereafter only general critiques that do not get into the jungle of details typical of apologists of evil, whether they be pro-Hitler or pro-Islam (or both). The general critique should, however, rarely be necessary in the case of the pro-Hitler apologist, since if anything should be treated as an apodictic truism on which all further discussion and debate is slammed shut (and precious few things should be so treated), it would be precisely the merits of a defense of Hitler. Other than these things, it is unseemly in the extreme to be casually communicating with Frejya's cats and even thanking her/him for this or that unrelated favor. Such a person should be treated as a pariah and persona non grata, not as a fellow member of the human community. I would allow the bare minimum -- the freedom to post comments of any number and size on a blog (because that freedom would not be itself were it to limit anyone's speech); but beyond that, I wouldn't give them the time of day.
Zenster --
I've never banned anyone. I can't ban anyone; Blogger doesn't offer that capability.
Freyja's cats has simply chosen not to comment, but may return at some point.
Baron, where's the very long comment I posted in reply to Hesperado half an hour ago? If I keep having to reconstruct such long comments it's not worth it any more; can you at least email the text back to me so I can try it in segments, if you don't want to tell me what was wrong with it that got it deleted?
Baron Bodissey: I've never banned anyone. I can't ban anyone; Blogger doesn't offer that capability.
Please pardon my poor choice of words. There are participants such a Nodrog and Solkhar whose comments are deleted on sight. While that is de facto "banning", there is a difference.
I continue to stand by my praise of GoV for publishing such a tremendous scope of articles and commentary. Few sites offer such a grand opportunity for the exchange of differing outlooks.
Polymath: Baron, where's the very long comment I posted in reply to Hesperado half an hour ago?
Polymath, Control + A → Control + C is your friend.
Always, always, always, ALWAYS save your comment's text to a blank page elswhere, especially ones that are more than a few sentences long.
If your comment contained URL links, then it may have become lodged in Blogger's hypersensitive and dysfunctional spam filter.
The Baron is kind enough to flush out the sink trap a few times each day but this is no guarantee that your comment has not been sent off into the universe of unpaired socks.
Again, perform a total save of your comment each and every time you refresh the page or risk losing your work.
Polymath --
Blogger sometimes marks comments as spam and quarantines them, even after they have been published and appeared on the thread.
When I find them, I rescue them.
Polymath,
1) There could be a glitch on Blogspot comments, as a couple of times I thought a long post of mine disappeared or never appeared in the first place -- only to reappear an hour or so later. So give it time.
2) When typing out a comment, I'd recommend always having your Notepad or Wordpad program open (it's a rudimentary form of Word, bare bones) and simply copy-paste your text into that and save it. It took me the experience of one too many catastrophes -- where a 1,000-word comment I had labored over vanished when my computer crashed or something else happened -- to vow to always save my comments elsewhere before finalizing them.
Baron, thanks for rescuing my comment, but is it possible to clue me in on what property it possessed that triggered the spam filter?
Polymath --
The trigger for a "spam" flag seems to be embedded links. The more links, the more likely is that it will be labeled as spam.
Well obviously I knew that, but you saw for yourself that my comment #97 above from almost 4 hours ago had no links in it, so what was wrong with it?
Polymath --
Blogger makes the rain to fall upon the just and the unjust. Her ways are mysterious.
Ultimately, I have no idea why. I just notice that comments with links are more likely to be tagged as spam.
But the system isn't very good, because plenty of real spam gets through the filter.
WordPress's anti-spam filter, which is called "Akismet", is really excellent -- on my blog, it has correctly marked 148 comments as spam, incorrectly marked only 2 real comments as spam, correctly marked 960 comments as real, and only let 2 spam comments through as real.
Polymath,
"Hesperado, I have no idea who you are referring to and I don't care."
That's odd. Both you and RV had the same response to my parenthetical wondering about that former commenter. I described that person sufficiently so that Zenster remembered who it was: "Freyja's cats". Surely you remember who that is now?
"It is laughable that I should be prejudiced against Jews, considering my paternal grandparents were Jewish; I am often mistaken for being Jewish and it doesn't bother me a bit."
It was RV herself who wrote:
"Polymath is probably the only half Jewish neo-Nazi I heard of."
Elsewhere above, on an unrelated subject, she wrote:
"I can answer for Polymath, since I know him fairly well..."
Is she wrong about her characterization of you?
More broadly, the issue is not whether you have Jewish ancestry (there are many people who hate themselves through hating their own culture or civilization -- like white Western Leftists for example), nor whether you are not bothered by being mistaken for being Jewish. The issue is statements of yours like the following, and the questions they raise:
...although you are right that Muslims are more ambitious in the type of power they intend to gain, the other two groups have done very serious cultural an social damage here despite not having a blueprint for world conquest.
One of those "two groups" is the Jews. The questions raised by this statement are:
1) what kind of "social damage" are you talking about and what are its dimensions?
2) when Jews participate in that "social damage" is their Jewishness relevant? If so, how?
"RV's fundamental difference with you is that she cares about preserving or restoring European culture, not simply stopping Islam's advance..."
When have I said I don't care about preserving or restoring European culture?
"...Islam's advance which is merely one threat (and in America a relatively minor one)."
Insofar as it is reasonable to assume that --
1) America is the grand prize in the minds of Muslims for conquest (if for no other reason -- but there are plenty of other reasons as well -- than that Muslims know that one cannot even begin to conquer the world without first destroying America)
2) Muslim violence is not a static phenomenon but an escalating dynamic, clearly metastisizing in our time, with the danger of multiple and horrific WMD attacks in the decades ahead only increasing in America, as in Europe, the UK and Australia
-- then the threat of Muslims in America is not "relatively minor"; it only may seem that way to those who, as Hugh Fitzgerald once put it, "don't have the mental pencil to connect the dots".
[continued next post]
Polymath:
Please ignore that part about RV's comment regarding you being a "half Jewish neo-Nazi" -- on re-reading that, I see she was being sarcastic.
[continued]
Back to the issue of preserving or restoring European (or Western) culture, you wrote:
"It's a political saying over here that you can't beat something with nothing, and if you don't have a positive vision to defend your powers of resistance will be greatly weakened."
This is all well and good, but the question of substance matters: what exactly is this something that RV is trying to preserve or restore? Does she have an adequate appreciation and understanding for it? Who is to decide? By what criteria? I agree that we have to have something worth defending. However, I tend to disagree when the object of defense seems to be conceived in Manichean terms, with a rather stark division of Good and Evil within the West. Furthermore, the criteria by which that division is defined and justified often disquiets. Too often, it begins to sound as though the person is out of touch with the actual organic West as it has evolved, and has in his mind some romantic fantasy, an artificial construct resembling more a computer game than the reality, which is messier and more complicated than that simplex division suggests.
About RV's comment --
"...it is amusing for an American to ramble about how the world would have been a nuclear wasteland, considering you are the only ones who nuked somebody, you know?"
-- you explained:
"As usual, she speaks provocatively in a way which can be misinterpreted by non-careful readers whom she then prefers to insult rather than enlighten. She was merely expressing her amusement at Zenster's notion that Muslims could conceivably have developed the Bomb on their own if Westerners had never done it, and at the idea that Jews were more important in developing the A-bomb than in providing its secrets to our enemies (answer: significant but not essential in developing the A-bomb, almost entirely responsible for giving it to Russia), and at the propensity of Americans more generally to fear nuclear threats given their overwhelming dominance in this area of weaponry as well their history of being the only ones to use such weapons."
Let's unravel this tangled skein:
[continued next]
[continued -- last part]
a) "As usual, she speaks provocatively in a way which can be misinterpreted by non-careful readers..."
Your putatively correct interpretation does not persuade, since you did not argue it, and also since it doesn't seem to do justice to RV's words which, admittedly, are a bit opaque:
"...it is amusing for an American to ramble about how the world would have been a nuclear wasteland, considering you are the only ones who nuked somebody, you know?"
While you are strictly speaking unremarkably correct that, as you wrote, "...[RV] never said that nuking Japan was wrong or unnecessary", it is nevertheless reasonable to detect the implication in her words.
b) "...her amusement at Zenster's notion that Muslims could conceivably have developed the Bomb on their own if Westerners had never done it..."
That was an unfortunate lapse on Zenster's part, but it was tangential to his argument; and furthermore, RV never said she was amused at that nor did she connect her Japan-nuking statement to such an alleged amusement. Are you RV's mindreader?
c) "...and at the idea that Jews were more important in developing the A-bomb than in providing its secrets to our enemies (answer: significant but not essential in developing the A-bomb, almost entirely responsible for giving it to Russia)..."
When Jews gave nuclear secrets to the Russians, was their Jewishness a crucial factor? If so, how so?
d) "...the propensity of Americans more generally to fear nuclear threats given their overwhelming dominance in this area of weaponry as well their history of being the only ones to use such weapons."
Why is it odd when those who have dominance, overwhelming or not, in nuclear weapons also fear nuclear threats? It would be odd for anyone, any nation, whether they have dominance or not, not to fear nuclear threats. In fact, it is more reasonable when you are the dominant power, in an era of ideologically diseased terrorism (Communist and Anarchist for decades, and increasingly Islamic in the latter 20th century, with Islamic now the Gold Medal Winner of all global terrorist threats), to fear nuclear threats. In your bizarre sympathy with RV's "amusement" at this perfectly rational fear America has, there seems to be lurking between the lines that other Leftist chestnut (to borrow Zenster's phrase) -- namely, the one that reflects an inability to see that America's relatively high degree of benevolence and rationality is astoundingly singular (shared of course in varying degrees with Europe and the UK) -- manifested by the astounding fact that America has not used nuclear weapons except at the dawn of her acquisition of them, against an enemy whose horrific and terrifying fanaticism is rivaled only by that of Muslims. No other culture, outside the West, had they had nuclear dominance, would have been so amazingly restrained.
Polymath: "...as well their (USA) history of being the only ones to use such weapons...."
Actually, in addition to the USA, many have "used" nuclear weapons on innocent land, air, and ocean animals in order to test those weapons - or just to "prove" to the world that their nuclear weapons worked!
"The average pace of nuclear weapons testing is remarkable: Since 16 July 1945 there have been 2,044 tests worldwide, the equivalent of one test occurring somewhere in the world every nine days for the last fifty years."
"Of the 2,044 nuclear weapons tests worldwide, there have been 711 in the atmosphere or underwater: 215 by the U.S., 207 by the Soviet Union, 21 by Britain, 45 by France and, 23 by China."
"It is estimated that the total yield of all the atmospheric nuclear weapons tests conducted is 438 megatons. That's equivalent to 29,200 Hiroshima size bombs. In the 36 years between 1945 and 1980 when atmospheric testing was being conducted this would have been equivalent to exploding a Hiroshima size bomb in the atmosphere every 11 hours."
"Approximately 3,830 kilograms of plutonium has been left in the ground as a result of all underground nuclear testing and some 4,200 kilograms of plutonium has been discharged into the atmosphere as a result of atmospheric nuclear testing."
"There has also been a program of 'Peaceful Nuclear Explosions' conducted over the years by two of the five declared nuclear powers."
"These PNEs had a variety of uses: deep seismic sounding; creating underground storage cavities; helping to help extract gas and oil; extinguishing burning gas or oil wells; creating reservoirs and; one was used to help build a canal."
"Wherever nuclear weapons testing has occurred for whatever reasons there have been environmental problems. Radioactivity has leaked into the environment from underground nuclear tests, large areas of land are uninhabitable as a result of atmospheric and underground nuclear testing, and indigenous people, their children and their children's children's health and livelihoods have been affected by nuclear weapons tests."
History of Nuclear Weapons Testing (Greenpeace)
Polymath: "...as well their (USA) history of being the only ones to use such weapons...."
Actually, in addition to the USA, many have "used" nuclear weapons on innocent land, air, and ocean animals in order to test those weapons - or just to "prove" to the world that their nuclear weapons worked!
"The average pace of nuclear weapons testing is remarkable: Since 16 July 1945 there have been 2,044 tests worldwide, the equivalent of one test occurring somewhere in the world every nine days for the last fifty years."
"Of the 2,044 nuclear weapons tests worldwide, there have been 711 in the atmosphere or underwater: 215 by the U.S., 207 by the Soviet Union, 21 by Britain, 45 by France and, 23 by China."
"It is estimated that the total yield of all the atmospheric nuclear weapons tests conducted is 438 megatons. That's equivalent to 29,200 Hiroshima size bombs. In the 36 years between 1945 and 1980 when atmospheric testing was being conducted this would have been equivalent to exploding a Hiroshima size bomb in the atmosphere every 11 hours."
"Approximately 3,830 kilograms of plutonium has been left in the ground as a result of all underground nuclear testing and some 4,200 kilograms of plutonium has been discharged into the atmosphere as a result of atmospheric nuclear testing."
"There has also been a program of 'Peaceful Nuclear Explosions' conducted over the years by two of the five declared nuclear powers."
"These PNEs had a variety of uses: deep seismic sounding; creating underground storage cavities; helping to help extract gas and oil; extinguishing burning gas or oil wells; creating reservoirs and; one was used to help build a canal."
"Wherever nuclear weapons testing has occurred for whatever reasons there have been environmental problems. Radioactivity has leaked into the environment from underground nuclear tests, large areas of land are uninhabitable as a result of atmospheric and underground nuclear testing, and indigenous people, their children and their children's children's health and livelihoods have been affected by nuclear weapons tests."
--Greenpeace 1996
More nuclear explosions have occurred since the Greenpeace essay. Specifically, Pakistan, India, and North Korea have all conducted nuclear tests.
Hesperado, thanks for your long and thoughtful reply. You are still reading way too much into what I said. I'll try to keep this short enough to fit into one reply:
1) I didn't read or comment much here at the time Frejya's Cats was posting so I missed those discussions, I was doing my own blog back then (and that explains RV's puzzlement too since that was also where she hung out)
2) Thanks for noticing the sarcasm eventually, but it was pretty laughable for you to think of me as a Nazi type or self-hating
3) The answer to your question what kind of "social damage" are you talking about and what are its dimensions? is the promotion of multiculturalism, the encouraging of every group except whites to nurse grievances and pursue its interest at the cost of the interests of other groups, the vulgarisation of American popular culture, the promotion of open borders and mass immigration, and the denigration and diminishment of Christianity in American life. The answer to your question when Jews participate in that "social damage" is their Jewishness relevant? If so, how? is not directly, anymore than African-Americans' blackness is relevant to their high murder rate; there are various reasons Jews have played a large role in the social damage I talk about, which in America have little to do with Jewishness per se but a lot to do with the type of people the Jews who have come to America are. It is primarily a statistical association, but a powerful enough one to raise concerns, just as the fact that blacks commit murders at 8 times the rate whites do is worth taking into account in various contexts.
4) I didn't mean to imply you don't care about preserving or restoring European culture, when I talk about RV's fundamental difference with you I mean that it is one of emphasis, you want to talk about the Islamic threat to all civilizations and she wants to talk about all the threats to European civilization
5) The difference between the Muslim threats to Europe and America is that there is zero chance Americans will let Muslims outbreed them and impose creeping sharia, as they are clearly making progress with in Europe. WMDs are a different kind of Muslim threat that, conversely, threaten America more than Europe, but that is a very different kind of problem which is much less discussed on this blog than the cultural threat to Europe, and which in any event would not result in Muslims becoming America's rulers and imposing sharia. Domestically America has much worse issues to deal with than Muslims, although it is the most important foreign policy issue.
6) "The question of substance matters", true, but my point was it doesn't matter so much that it should prevent us from working together against common threats. If you want to know my own views in more detail, or RVs, go to my blog and look at the old discussions there.
7) Yes, I understand what RV means better than anyone due to my history with her
8) No, the Jews who gave the nuclear secrets to Russia did not do so out of loyalty to Judaism or Jews, the point is a different one, that Jews have been likely to go bad in certain ways just as other groups are likely to go bad in other ways, and this must be considered when evaluating the overall impact the group has on society
9) I agree with you about America's benevolence and rationality in certain respects, and that almost any other nation with nuclear weapons would have used them more aggressively than we did; but Americans have often been quite hypocritical when talking about nukes, which is one reason for RV's amusement; even though our fear of Islamic nukes need not be taken to irrational extremes, there are ironies which are probably more obvious to Eastern Europeans than to Americans.
Egghead, I thought it would have been clear that by "use" nuclear weapons I meant use them AS WEAPONS, that is, to intentionally kill people.
I cannot believe that this requires any clarification at all. Unfortunately, a previous response of mine was deleted for some reason.
Moreover, large tracts of our world might be radioactive wastelands had America's Cold War foes mastered nuclear weapons technology in advance of the USA.
My mention of "radioactive wastelands" was in direct connection to "America's Cold War foes". Those would be, Communist Russia and China.
Only a intentionally provocative and needlessly combative person could possibly interpret that as referring, in any way, to Islam.
Polymath: She was merely expressing her amusement at Zenster's notion that Muslims could conceivably have developed the Bomb on their own if Westerners had never done it, and at the idea that Jews were more important in developing the A-bomb than in providing its secrets to our enemies… [emphasis added]
Do you comprehend what a total farce this is? I never made any such statement nor remotely drew that sort of connection. You have blindly followed the lead of someone whose troll-like behavior has derailed more threads than just this one.
As to your contention that:
Polymath: Jews were more important in developing the A-bomb than in providing its secrets to our enemies…
Without Einstein's fundamental work, it is questionable whether nuclear weapons would ever have been invented in time for World War II.
Furthermore, Hesperado's important question still merits some serious consideration. Remember, idiots of all sorts subscribe to Socialism and Liberal PC MC tenets.
Therefore, please explain how:
… when Jews participate in that "social damage" is their Jewishness relevant? If so, how?
This is a question that needs sorting out damn soon as stupid Socialist Jews and stupid White Liberals have one important thing in common. Namely. STUPIDITY.
Again, per Hesperado: When Jews gave nuclear secrets to the Russians, was their Jewishness a crucial factor? If so, how so?
Again, is this really about "Jewishness" or just Socialist morons acting on their moronic Socialistic beliefs?
Polymath,
"The answer to your question when Jews participate in that "social damage" is their Jewishness relevant? If so, how? is not directly, anymore than African-Americans' blackness is relevant to their high murder rate..."
Are you here reducing African-Americans to skin pigment? One doesn't have to blame pigment itself for the high rate of violent behavior and crimes (let's not limit it to "murder") exhibited by blacks in contrast to whites (and to Jews) to still say that blackness is still a relevant factor -- if by "blackness" we expand what that entails, whether we call that "culture" or not. So yes, there is something about blackness that is relevant to the high degree of violence among blacks. I have not been persuaded that there is anything comparable among the Jewishness of Jews to explain their bad behavior with regard to PC MC and Leftism. The more reasonable hypothesis would be that because Jews are unusually intelligent and socially influential, they have been among the cream of the crop generally of the West in its overall paradigm shift into PC MC. The antisemitic explanation would be that Jews for dastardly reasons have actually engineered Leftism, and then its watered-down version PC MC, in order to undermine the West. What would be the un-antisemitic explanation? The only one that seems reasonable to me is that Jews in fact have not engineered Leftism and PC MC, but have, as I said, as an unusually intelligent and influential class, ridden the surf wave of the overarching paradigm shift the West has been undergoing. To try to locate delimited blame for this paradigm shift in some group or cabal is to have a curiously stunted view of history, and a curiously alienated appreciation for the West.
"5) The difference between the Muslim threats to Europe and America is that there is zero chance Americans will let Muslims outbreed them and impose creeping sharia..."
This is almost entirely due to geographical proximity: Muslims are Europe's Mexicans, and the Mediterranean is Europe's Rio Grande. It is reasonable to assume that Muslims fervently desire to increase their numbers in America, and so they will do so unless they are stopped. It won't simply remain a "zero chance" automatically. We have to do things to ensure that it remains so.
But even if the chances are slim, the threats of terror attacks in America not only now, but metastasizing in the decades ahead, are grim, since Muslims have more than enough millions in America to pool from for the job. And anyway, beyond Muslims actually formally immigrating to the West, we also have cosmopolitan Muslims jet-setting back and forth all over the world: simply visiting the US for a few months would provide more than enough opportunity to participate in a terror cell's WMD plot in one or another capacity -- particularly in an American climate that allows Muslims as much free access and mobility as they continue to have.
"WMDs are a different kind of Muslim threat ... which in any event would not result in Muslims becoming America's rulers and imposing sharia."
The problem is not that Muslims might become America's rulers -- the problem is that millions of innocents might get mass-murdered in various places, and other millions suffer horribly, and infrastructure damaged, and lives ruined. Is that not enough of a worry to be concerned about, without having to dial it up to Successful Conquest and Sharia Courts Stoning people in New York City?
Polymath: Egghead, I thought it would have been clear that by "use" nuclear weapons I meant use them AS WEAPONS, that is, to intentionally kill people.
You are not adequately addressing the question. Yes, our atomic bombs were used against "people" in Japan but they also served another vital purpose and served that purpose in the capacity of "WEAPONS".
America's nuclear arsenal provided a strategic counterbalance to Soviet − and to a lesser extent Chinese − aggression, even if they never left their respective points of deployment. My mention of the Cold War made the topic absolutely relevant to this discussion.
Thus, even those nuclear bombs which were never used, still served as "weapons".
Capiche?
Had we not possessed that functional (i.e., tested in real life) arsenal, the Cold War's outcome would likely have been very different. It is also very childish to think that atmospheric or underground nuclear weapons tests have no strategic value.
Numerous countries, but especially America, engage in the global monitoring of nuclear tests to assess their yield and overall performance. Large nuclear blasts ring the entire planet's crust LIKE A BELL and their shock waves can travel around the world several times.
Detonating an atomic bomb of any sort but especially a high yield nuclear device is as good as a NEON SIGN saying, "Don't F&%k With Us!".
Future historians will one day marvel at the remarkable degree of restraint that America has shown in its honorable stewardship of nuclear weapons. There is now a new era dawning where we all will be fortunate if quite a number of them are not deployed with the specific aim of maximum human fatalities.
Hesperado: So yes, there is something about blackness that is relevant to the high degree of violence among blacks. I have not been persuaded that there is anything comparable among the Jewishness of Jews to explain their bad behavior with regard to PC MC and Leftism. The more reasonable hypothesis would be that because Jews are unusually intelligent and socially influential, they have been among the cream of the crop generally of the West in its overall paradigm shift into PC MC.
BRAVO! Hesperado, you continue to provide a very persuasive argument about PC MC's proliferation. As Egghead has previously noted, it satisfies the Law of Parsimony by being one of the most simple explanations.
All of the other conspiracy theories on offer do not come anywhere near meeting that one simple requirement.
And, yes, Black tribalistic culture or behavior, as imported into the United States, stands as a serious motivating factor behind their collective crime statistics. Nothing of the sort can be said about "Jewishness" beyond that of their's being a culture which nurtures intellectual excellence along with all of the rewards and pitfalls that accompany it.
Hesperado,
You are beginning to get the points I am making.
1) Of course I am treating blackness as a cultural thing not as pigment; the point is that the ways in which blackness is relevant to the increased murder rate in that group are mostly indirect, not many of the murders actually have race-related motivations (though of course some do).
2) There is indeed something about the Jewishness of Jews that explains their bad behavior with regard to PC/MC and leftism. As a persecuted minority throughout much of their history, they have always had an interest in increasing the rights of minorities in general and limiting the dominance of whatever group was actually dominant. This went on for so long that they even did it in America where is was extremely counterproductive; unlike in Europe they faced no persecution and in fact had never had it so good, but they still acted to promote the same agenda even though its biggest effect was not to protect them but to weaken American society. This doesn't have to be "dastardly" because it does not have to be a conscious undermining, but it is a strategy which worked for Jews in the past in reducing their persecution (they always had it worst when there was a single dominant group which could pick on them as the most prominent minority group). They are largely responsible for taking Christianity out of the public square in America for example, even though in America Christianity was not used against Jews as it was in Europe.
There are additional factors related to not having the same kind of notion of national loyalty as other immigrant groups which made it less natural for them to feel allegiance to the place they immigrated to, as well as their greater intelligence making them disproportionately influential, and so on. NONE of these things imply that the typical Jewish immigrant was responsible for any problems, the point is that statistically the group is responsible for a disproportionate amount of social damage (a conclusion which is based on empirical observations, the reasons given in the previous sentences are attempts to explain the observations, not a priori anti-Jewish ideas). And "a disproportionate amount" is far from "most" -- I am in no way suggesting that they bear PRIMARY responsibility.
3) You're not disagreeing with me about Muslims in America, because I didn't say they WOULDN'T outbreed us here if they could, just that they can't and won't (if we close the borders they won't, and if we open the borders they still won't because the Mexicans immigrants will be way more numerous). I'm not denying they are a WMD threat, and never have, I am just saying that is a different kind of problem, much more a security and foreign-policy problem than a social problem -- we have worse social problems to deal with and don't need to focus on Muslims as the #1 social problem as Europeans do, and most of the discussion here has been about social matters rather than the direct fight against terrorism.
Zenster, I have not disagreed with anything you are saying about nuclear weapons. If you go back and look at the context, I have not criticized the nuclear weapons policy of the U.S. (about which I do in fact have some criticisms, but not fundamental ones).
Polymath: There is indeed something about the Jewishness of Jews that explains their bad behavior with regard to PC/MC and leftism. As a persecuted minority throughout much of their history, they have always had an interest in increasing the rights of minorities in general and limiting the dominance of whatever group was actually dominant. This went on for so long that they even did it in America where is was extremely counterproductive; unlike in Europe they faced no persecution and in fact had never had it so good, but they still acted to promote the same agenda even though its biggest effect was not to protect them but to weaken American society.
This is one of the few explanations that has much merit but, again, the question arises of whether it is strictly related to "Jewishness" or more due to the relentless persecution of Jews by numerous other cultures to such an extent where this divisive technique was adopted as a survival mechanism.
While I am no expert on Judeaism, I do not recall the Torah or Talmud specifically directing Jews to go forth and create distracting internecine disputes within societies that did not adequately embrace the presence of Israelites.
So, despite Jews instigating PC MC to even a disproportionate degree, it may not be a distinct artifact of "Jewishness", per se, but one of solely being a strategy that utilized the pre-existing religious or legal factors of host cultures in a manner which decreased the odds of catastrophic anti-Semitism.
I have no wish to split hairs but the tremendous amount of historic anti-Semitism that Jews have faced in both past and present has not been deserved to the degree in which it exists. Therefore, any survival strategy that was adopted by Jews may not have been a direct outcome of "Jewishness" so much as it merely being a survival tool of consequence arising from those circumstances.
By comparison, the violence, materialism and criminality of Black populations is much more an artifact of their (Afro-cultural) "Blackness".
Hesperado, I reject the Christian theory of war, so I see no problem with being as ruthless and taking any means necessary to oust your enemy, including, yes, nuking them. So I don't see a moral evil in America nuking Japan. But I do find it ironic when Americans talk about how other countries would be irresponsible, when the US is the only country to have nuked somebody. That's all. And before the Pakistan has nukes idiocy comes up, yes, I'd rather have America have nukes than Pakistan.
And Polymath pretty much explained what I wanted to say and agree with him. The reality is that Jews, as a group are a bad influence to any civilization, especially if they see themselves as outsiders. As individuals, they can be great people, since it's not really a genetic compulsion they have to undermine cultures, it is a product of their history as outsiders(and this is why they will identify with blacks against whites as long as the narrative is that blacks are victims and all that). So I really have no problem with them if they stop being Jews and become whatever the dominant ethnicity in the country in which they live is. For instance, in the Netherlands, they should intermarry with the Dutch. Or they could become staunch Zionists, which would make it impossible for them to undermine the countries in which they live, especially if they moved to Israel. The Jews are only a problem as they are allowed to play this dual role. Otherwise, they'd probably make great people. If I was motivated by some hatred of them, I'd want Israel to be destroyed, not want them to kick the Muslims out.
On the other hand, you can't really do this with Muslims and I agree it is different. Just because both are bad influences for Europeans, it doesn't mean that they should get the same treatment. Muslims aren't that great as individuals either and possess a lot of problems and unlike Jews.
Now, in regard to blacks, it's obvious that not being black makes them have higher crime rates. But having lower IQ and higher testosterone levels does, among other things. So you can't really split their violence from their skin color, like you can remove the dysfunction of Jews from them being Jewish. I hope this clears things out.
Polymath: Zenster, I have not disagreed with anything you are saying about nuclear weapons. If you go back and look at the context, I have not criticized the nuclear weapons policy of the U.S. (about which I do in fact have some criticisms, but not fundamental ones).
No harm, no foul, then. You carried over some of RV's tedious mischaracterizations and I had to make very sure that they did not take up residence in this thread.
More often than not we are in fairly regular agreement.
I truly look forward to resolving, to whatever degree possible, the Jewish roots of PC MC as this is one topic that genuinely needs some major consensus at GoV.
Well, well. I'd wager a hefty sum that tasty_glamgirl (comment #125), is none other than one rebelliousvanilla. Which means her Nodrog Promise™ was good for all of barely seventeen hours. Hell, even Nodrog himself usually exhibited more (temporary) restraint than that.
Zenster, how do you expect a group who moves into your country and refuses to integrate to be treated? And believe me, if Jews cared about integrating, in 1500 years, they would have intermarried to such an extent they wouldn't have existed around. I really don't see why anybody should be forced to accept outsiders in their midst, regardless of who they are.
And still, why the heck do you think that Jewish people were persecuted in every single country where they went? Because they were nice neighbors?
And I'd like to point out that philo-Semitism such as yours is fairly irrational. Unless you are Jewish, of course. Sort of like the obsession of the other people with Jews. It's not like it's so hard to figure out why people disliked them and why it is normal to do so, if they keep dual identities. It's not like any ethnic group is perfect. And I do understand them too - if I was Jewish, I'd probably do what they do too. After all, they had the Muslims screw around on top of their temple for the last 1500 years.
I think blogger is F'ed up, because apparently my blogger account has been suspended. Yet another reason to give up commenting around. :)
Zenster, the account is the same, but my blogger identity has been suspended and I don't feel like getting on the phone with blogger to figure it out. I commented to clear things out - in case you didn't figure it out, I didn't comment on new blog posts besides the ones where I already had conversations started.
Maybe I wouldn't have posted if Hesperado wouldn't have been cute about it and asked Polymath if he can read my mind.
Polymath,
Your hypothesis about how the Jewishness of Jews explains their pro-PC MC activities may be plausible; however, it doesn't explain why the majority of non-Jewish Westerners have also become PC MC with regard to one or more issues (with the issue of Islam being the most widespread it seems). Again, the antisemite would have a nice way to tie the two together, by imputing near-supernatural powers to the "influence" of Jews over non-Jews, through machinations and web-spinning behind the scenes, etc. How would the non-antisemite resolve it? The only reasonable way I can see, even accepting your hypothesis, is to say that, okay, Jews had that extra incentive to foster PC MC and, okay, Jews tend to have an edge in intellect and other influential talents -- but still, nevertheless, the movement of PC MC is a much broader and larger process around them, and so the "blame" for that lies in the majority who are non-Jews. Sure, many Jews may have semi-consciously exploited the process happening all around them, and may have done their share in helping it along. But beyond this kind of hypothetical calculus there is one thing missing from your explanation: you forget that most PC MCs are sincere, decent people. Their participation in, and relative promotion of, PC MC is not intended to be a bad thing: they really believe they are helping society do the right thing.
And that's what was missing from your explanation: you only explained the Jew's PC MC behavior, in its tribalistic self-interest, as having bad-for-society motives. Noticeably absent from your explanation was the possibility that many Jews, in being PC MC, really think they are helping society do the right thing. And in this regard they would not substantially differ from the non-Jewish PC MCs: both are myopic to the neurotic or dysfunctional excesses their starry-eyed and ultimately misguided pursuit of progressive ethics leads them, and society, to.
Indeed, another ironic and paradoxical wrinkle comes up about Jews in this regard: the very same civilizational process of PC MC that many of them have been helping along has also corroded their own Jewish structures (just as PC MC has with Christian structures): Jews are already a small minority, but it is safe to say that with the process of PC MC over the past century (increasing in mainstream dominance with each passing decade) the seriously observant Jew has dwindled, while the lax and secular-minded Jew who hardly thinks about his religion (though he may still keep in touch through relatives with certain trappings and a kind of filial nationalism with regard to Israel) has statistically mushroomed. Indeed, these lax and secular-minded Jews are quite promiscuous (in the old sense) in their assimilation with non-Jews and non-Jewish societies. While they are not monolithic and have many flavors, they may be uniformly categorized as not observant, and therefore not "Jewish" in the very sense that matters to your hypothesis. And yet most of them continue to be PC MC.
RV,
"But I do find it ironic when Americans talk about how other countries would be irresponsible, when the US is the only country to have nuked somebody."
It's only ironic if
a) America had not been a singular paragon of responsibility and restraint in this regard for the last half century
and if
b) the "somebody" we nuked at the very beginning of the nuclear era were mass-murdering fanatics allied with Hitler and trying to conquer the world.
There is not a shred of irony here, since (b) was not a lapse of responsibility.
I sense that between the lines of RV's argument here is a kind of baseline nihilistic tribalism that sees no people, no culture, no nation as essentially better than others: we are all just tribes with our turfs, and RV merely believes in defending the tribe and turf that happens to be hers. She accepts that other tribes would do the same. But no one can say that essentially any one of them is objectively superior to any others. I could be wrong, but that's what I sense; and I also get that sense from many others in the anti-Islam movement who have this whole "Germanic/Norse mythos" thing going on.
Zenster,
"BRAVO! Hesperado, you continue to provide a very persuasive argument about PC MC's proliferation. As Egghead has previously noted, it satisfies the Law of Parsimony by being one of the most simple explanations."
Thanks Zenster, and I hadn't seen Egghead's comment to that effect. I struggle with the parsimony aspect because the careful unraveling and avoidance of the complications of conspiracy theory sometimes takes on the form of the complexity it's trying to avoid.
At bottom, I am trying to stay true to the epiphany that the West is a singular miracle in history of massive goodness (with the usual caveats about imperfections aside). To explain Western disease with that guideline in place is the challenge.
The disease can neither be too small or tangential or extraneous that it is no longer that big of a problem, or no longer a Western phenomenon.
On the other hand, the disease cannot be so broad and deep that it threatens to reveal a West rotten to the core, not worth saving (except as a small Remnant who will hunker down then fight during a Mad Max Apocalyptic Civil War and become the nucleus for a New West).
Here's a curious little question:
How is it that Jews − with all their scheming tribalistic self-interest − have supposedly tooled up this devious little plot called PC MC yet, in a totally uncharacteristic fashion, not thought it through well enough to ensure that it couldn't be used − as it is to an almost insane degree − to protect their eternal enemies, the Muslims?
Why would they consciously construct the supreme socio-political shelter for their own worst enemy?
Just sayin'.
Zenster: "As Egghead has previously noted, it satisfies the Law of Parsimony by being one of the most simple explanations."
Hesperado, here are several of my comments about your theory from a previous thread:
"Previously, you have indicated your opinion that the PC MC mentality of the general population of the West derives from positive motivations - rather than the desire to maliciously destroy the West (as I believe the leftist New World Order elites intend)."
"Based on YOUR important idea, I think that the reason that most Westerners have passively accepted massive immigration is the idea that most Westerners feel that immigrants will accept indigenous people and blend with Western societies via shared values and activities - including marriages which create blended families - with Western respect for various cultures and religions."
-----------
"YES. I have thought for a long time that the PC MC crowd pressures the West to act like an intelligent person who is supposed to act "normal" - or even stupid - so that the stupidest person in the room will feel better about him or herself. It is the worst of affirmative action on a massive international scale."
"P.S. I fully agree that PC MC imported Muslim immigrants offer an entirely different situation than non-Muslim immigrants."
"What I am saying is that (in my search for positive PC MC motivations in the general American population - based on your important idea that I agree with - what I am saying is that I think that the general American population has been unable SO FAR to make a meaningful distinction between the assimilation chances of Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants."
"Familiarity with Muslims (as Muslims increase in the general population and exhibit more and more aggressive behavior) should address this failure to separate immigrants into their two primary groups with distinct assimilation characteristics: Muslims who are unwilling and unable to assimilate into the American population - and non-Muslim immigrants who blend better into the general American population."
"Why would they consciously construct the supreme socio-political shelter for their own worst enemy?"
This is a general comment here - undirected at any ethnic group:
Short answer: The introduction of Islam into the West is merely a calculated distraction from the real goal of the leftist New World Order to rule the world - without human dissent.
Long answer: Smart people always believe that they can outsmart everyone else. For example, George Soros does NOT now - nor ever did - consider himself to be a Jew. Rather, Soros considers himself to be a master manipulator ready and willing to perform those actions which he deems that anyone who is as smart or capable as him would also perform. Why shouldn't Soros - and his very smart and high-powered friends - rule the world if they can arrange it?
I believe that the leftist New World Order intends to use Islam to consolidate the elimination of ALL human and civil rights - and then to justify the elimination of ALL religion. After carefully-manufactured religious conflicts cause too much trouble in the West and in the world, the leftist New World Order will declare God to be dead.
After all, when a whole bunch of carbon-emitting people are killed by rogue nuclear bombs given to Muslim terrorists, it will be easy for the leftist New World Order to ask and argue, "How can God exist - and still allow such horrible things to happen in the world?"
The leftist New World Order will ban religion in favor of science which will act as a logical human substitute for God and religion. Who can argue with science - which will be used to justify very heavy taxes on the already RFID-chipped populace?
RFID chips will be implanted into every human from birth and will control access to all facets of life to include food, health care, education, employment, and transportation. Humans will live as high tech - high tax-paying - slaves, and human dissent will be altogether impossible.
Zenster -
I partly quote you (the other part from Hesp?)
"Therefore, please explain how:
… when Jews participate in that "social damage" is their Jewishness relevant? If so, how?"
I second your explanation wholeheartedly, so it is with utmost reluctance that I must confess to a slight inclination to ask the same about the specific "Jewishness" in scientific endeavour. Part of my scruple also stems from the fact that I think the Jew/Black/anything-but-Muslim trolls have already been overfed on this thread; unfortunately my "Dutch supremacism" intermezzo wasn't able to stop that ;-)
Egghead -
I probably said it before, but I like your style.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Hesperado and Zenster, you are reading things into my comments that I did not say. I actually agree that most PC/MC promoters sincerely believe they are doing the right thing, and I never said anything about the Jews having consciously bad motives, and I already made the point that Jews do not get the majority of blame for PC/MC, just an amount very disproportionate to their numbers, and I never said that the actions of Jews in promoting bad social trends were related to the Torah or Talmud or anything about the actual Jewish religion, I only talked about the history of persecution. And I don't see a difference between Jews and Blacks here, in both cases there are cultural attitudes which can result in certain bad consequences, which are aggravated by a legacy of persecution.
(One could actually make the argument that, just as progressivism and multiculturalism among liberals are a residue of Christian universalist ethics after faith in God is lost, lack of concern for the impact of their activities on the broader society they live in is a residue of Jewish "chosen people" attitudes after faith in God is lost, since most of the trouble has come from secularized Jews, but that's not necessary to make my points.)
You also read too much into RV, of course she recognizes that other tribes than hers will defend themselves culturally and approves of this attitude, but that is very far indeed from believing her own (classical, traditional, European) culture is not superior. It *is* superior in practically all respects we care about to the culture of Muslims for example, if you overlook its recent degeneration.
And the West may not be "rotten to the core", but the rot goes very deep if you judge by current popular attitudes, though not incurably deep.
Egghead, there is a lot of truth to what you say about leftists and how they intend to use Islam to weaken society and enable them to consolidate power and eliminate religion and human rights; they cannot believe that Muslims could ever become smart enough and competent enough to truly threaten them. Soros is a great example; and although he doesn't consider himself a Jew, it is people like him whom I had been counting as part of the bad influence Jews have had -- whether they think it is about Judaism is completely irrelevant to how they should be evaluated as a collection of people (and group evaluations are unfortunately necessary when formulating policy on things like immigration and education and so on).
Sagunto, there are good things about Jewish culture such as a respect for logic and study which make them more likely to excel at being things like scientists and lawyers. And the problems we face must be looked at in a unified context, as you praise Egghead for doing, we can't just focus on Muslims.
Polymath, Soros not being an adherent of Judaism doesn't matter because his identity is still shaped by being a Jew, just like the identity of most atheists today is defined by Christian myths(caring about empowerment is one of them).
Sagunto, and that wouldn't have happened if people would have stuck on topic and commented only about Muslims, without inferring anything about any other human group. :)
Zenster, do Jews live better now or did they live better in the 18th century? Just asking. If now, then MC-PC is in their favor.
Hesperado, I think European civilization(the one that mattered, prior to the Enlightenment and some sort period after it), the one of Greece and Rome, are superior to any civilization on Earth, especially applied to European people. I somehow feel like I'm talking with Auster right now - you are either a nihilist or a Nazi anti-Semite with him. And yes, Americans don't conquer - they liberate. Another thing that is ironic.
And I don't think that the Jews are to blame for our ills. Sure, they exploited our idiotic moral system, but that's of no consequence(which is funny because somehow people around here really like blaming the Frankfurt school for our civilization AIDS). Also, I'd like to point out that the intent of someone doesn't really matter. If I get killed by someone that threw a plate out on the window while arguing with his wife or someone who hates me is of no relevance(and since bringing up the Nazis around here, did they have good intentions too? I mean, it's the same rationale that the neo-Nazis use that you use in regards to the Jews, but continue, this pathological need to excuse Jews is funny). We are to blame for our ills and our foolish post-Enlightenment beliefs. Multiculturalism, political correctness and their cousin socialism are born in the Enlightenment, which is the secularization of Christian values. Jews didn't start the Civil War, nor did they make blacks citizens, the founding fathers of America, who had some funny quotes in regards to Islam and how Mohammed is one of the world's great prophets, and so on aren't Jewish either. If I somehow thought that Europeans are a bunch of moronic fools who can be screwed around with in the sense in which the Jew blamers for our all ills people think, what would be the point in doing anything? Or heck, if I thought that European men are so pathetic that even we, their women can rule over them, why would I date one now? I do have more faith in my own. lol
Sagunto:
Yes, that quote about:
… when Jews participate in that "social damage" is their Jewishness relevant? If so, how?"
… was from Hesperado.
As to your own inquiry:
I second your explanation wholeheartedly, so it is with utmost reluctance that I must confess to a slight inclination to ask the same about the specific "Jewishness" in scientific endeavour.
You are absolutely right. "Jewishness" most likely plays an identically peripheral role in both PC MC mentality and winning Nobel Prizes. The Prizes are those "rewards" and PC MC idiocies are the "pitfalls" that I was referring to. Neither are dependent upon "Jewishness" so much as the existential cultural frame of reference they derive from.
My main intent in parading the disparity between Jewish and Muslim Nobel Prize winners was to demonstrate Islam's intense stagnation, more than it was to exalt Jewish intellectual achievements. There is plenty of global competition in the intellectual department, Islam just happens to be a no show at the party.
Polymath, I am not so much accusing you of such things as just trying to clear the air for all concerned. As I noted earlier: "More often than not we are in fairly regular agreement." My only hope is that you will step away from the mind-reading act and thereby eliminate a lot of noise from your own message.
"My main intent in parading the disparity between Jewish and Muslim Nobel Prize winners was to demonstrate Islam's intense stagnation..."
Has anyone done a simple Muslim/non-Muslim Nobel Prize comparison?
Polymath,
"..the West may not be "rotten to the core", but the rot goes very deep if you judge by current popular attitudes, though not incurably deep."
There's quite a wide berth of fudge factor in this statement of yours -- enough to drive the perceived inevitability of an apocalyptic global civil war through.
There seems to be an amorphous weltschmerzlich disposition in the air, permeating the anti-Islam movement, that tends to build on a quasi-Gnostic alienation from the cosmion of the West, perceiving all, or nearly all, of its authority structures as quasi-Gnostic aeons ("principalities and powers" in Pauline symbology) of the evil demiurge who controls the cosmion from which the disaffected Westerner, already a spiritual expatriate, must escape through the baptism of fire of some kind of general insurrection consequent upon a gloomy inevitability of the globalist world order collapsing in near-apocalyptic terms in the near future (for the imminent eschaton is always in the "near future" -- it's been so for the past 2,000 years!); etc.
What worries is not, of course, the actual veracity and predictability of such a doom, but what too many Westerners will do merely through becoming convinced of its inevitability -- not to mention the profound alienation from their own West that accompanies it. This alienation on the part of those many disaffected Westerners (all on the "right") who are trans-Christian, so to say, is a kind of secularist version(sometimes imbued with a pagan mythos) of the alienation of extremist Christian evangelicals and Christian cultists such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, who look around them and see in the wondrous infrastructures of the West (both material infrastructures and the mental and spiritual infrastructures that make the material infrastructures possible) only hollow structures inimical to the true meaning of life, to which their hearts cultivate a true allegiance.
RV/T_G:
Use the OpenID choice for WordPress and you will appear as rebelliousvanilla again, since your WordPress blog has that name (unfortunately "polymath" was taken over there so when I use my blog there I show up here as "polymathblogger" instead). Blogger did the same thing to me the other day but I was able to restore my identity.
Thanks, Sagunto. I like your style, too. Someone with a good sense of humor and irony like yours is always much appreciated. :)
A salient criticism of Islam is that Muslims have NO sense of humor about themselves, their societies, and/or their religion.
Egghead -
Care for some extra input in the Bully Playground thread? :)
Sag.
Polymath, I tried doing that, but I got open ID errors and submitting the same comment 100 times before it goes through isn't something I care about.
Hesperado, I'm curious what exactly about the West in its current from, the 'West' of the last 200-250 years is really worth preserving? I mean, a civilization that works against its founding people, not to its advantage is flawed and its destruction will be inevitable due to either the founding people destroying it or the founding people being destroyed(so far we are on the latter path).
"I'm curious what exactly about the West in its current from, the 'West' of the last 200-250 years is really worth preserving?"
Your Honor, the defense rests!
Sagunto: "Egghead, Care for some extra input in the Bully Playground thread? :)"
Yes. I read your comment there, and I will reply on that thread. :)
@ “Hesperado, the things Jews lobbied for did more harm to America than all the terrorist attacks and crimes of Muslims so far.” - Rebelliousvanilla
@ “This endless Jew bashing is as tiresomely narrow-minded as it is obnoxious… That disproportionate number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners, especially the…”
Zenster, this line of argument has been responded ad nauseam in other blogsites. In a nutshell, you are confusing apples with oranges. Do the disproportionate number of discoveries in math and astronomy (apples) erase the barbarity of the Amerindians toward their kind (oranges)? Of course not. Do the disproportionate number of scientific discoveries in Nazi Germany (apples) erase how they treated other ethnic groups (oranges)?
The same with the Jews. Take a look at how nationalists rebutted both Auster and Taksei at my blog (here and here) and pay special attention to my letters in red.
Post a Comment