Category Archives: HBD

La Différence

I’ve just read a pithy and sensible article at Quilette on the subject of psychological and behavioral sex differences. The essay was written by David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, and it disputes the social-sciences orthodoxy that sees all such differences as social constructions, remediable (as if remediation were actually […]

Charles Murray’s Latest

Charles Murray has a new book out: Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. From the blurb at Amazon: The thesis of Human Diversity is that advances in genetics and neuroscience are overthrowing an intellectual orthodoxy that has ruled the social sciences for decades. The core of the orthodoxy consists of three dogmas: […]

Well, You Can Just Ask Directions, Right?

In a recent poll, men were almost twice as likely as women to be able to locate Iran on an unlableled map. The overall success rate was a dismal 28%. By sex: 38% of men got it right, and 20% of women.

An Inconvenient Truth

I’ve just read a fine paper by Nathan Cofnas, a doctoral student in philosophy at Oxford, on the censorship. suppression, and misrepresentation of scientific and philosophical inquiry into the heritability of intelligence and the statistical distribution of intelligence in different human populations. The gist is this: that a great deal of evidence has already been […]

Hard-Hitting Journalism From The Beeb

Commenting on our previous item about immigrant gangs in Sweden, and the wave of bombings and shootings they have brought to that previously peaceful nation, reader “Whitewall” offered up this link, from the BBC: Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: What’s going on? The first subheading asks: Who is to blame? If you thought they might […]

“Swedish”

Denmark has now instituted border checks with Sweden in response to Sweden’s inability to control its tide of violent crime. According to The Guardian: Denmark has temporarily reinstated checks at its border crossings with Sweden after a spate of bombings and shootings in the Copenhagen area that authorities say were carried out by members of […]

Race: Untangling ‘Ought’ From ‘Is’

In Monday’s post about Angela Saini’s race-denialist polemic, I should have added a few words about the deep moral and philosophical errors that lead so many people to fear, and to seek to suppress, the stubborn realities of human biodiversity. (“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”) For Americans […]

The “Social Construct”

Attracting considerable attention is Superior: The Return of Race Science, a new book about race by Angela Saini. It makes the usual case: that beyond mere superficialities, race is a meaningless concept, a “social construct”. In the face of mounting evidence, this is a claim that is becoming more and more difficult to defend; indeed […]

Is America A ‘Proposition Nation’?

Yesterday our friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, commented on a 2018 column by Mackubin Thomas Owens about kinds of nationalism. Mr. Owens says that American nationalism is good and necessary because it is of the right sort: an allegiance only to a set of philosophical principles. Bill singled out this passage: Much of today’s […]

The Empirical Strikes Back

One thing that you may have noticed is that where science conflicts with hegemonic ideology, science takes a beating. (You shouldn’t have much difficulty thinking of both historical and contemporary examples, from Galileo to E.O. Wilson, and I’m sure Judith Curry would agree.) Nowhere is this more apparent in our own time than in the […]

What If…

Over at West Hunter, Greg Cochran imagines a counterfactual world in which everything we on the Dissident Right know to be true is false, and everything we are told to believe by our cultural overlords is true. I reproduce this vision below, in full: Since I just found out that someone already wrote the story […]

Et Tu, Al?

From the Guardian: Einstein’s travel diaries reveal ‘shocking’ xenophobia I guess cultural relativity was just too much even for him. (Some things are true despite being obvious.) I’m reminded of the old joke: “Why did the mob have to rub out Einstein?” “Because he knew too much.” Wait till this mob gets a-hold of him.

Pot, Kettle

For as long as I can remember we’ve been lectured about the peaceful streets of England, and how that “scepter’d isle” should be a model for us of the blessings of a government that disarms its people. Meanwhile, old Blighty has been hard at work, for decades now, putting every aspect of its ancient culture […]

By George, I Think He’s Got It

You may recall a fellow by the name of Chris Langan (I wrote about him here, back in 2009). He has one of the highest IQs ever measured, but after a hard early life has lived quietly, without attracting much attention. Yesterday I stumbled on a link to a page on the Q&A website Quora, […]

Container Vs. Content

The brilliant but relentlessly optimistic Steven Pinker offered today a link to a brief article about a new cross-cultural study of human morals. The article, which you can read here, lists seven moral rules that seem to be universal to all cultures. They are: 1) Love your family. 2) Help your group. 3) Return favors. […]

Truth And Consequences

I’ve been busy catching up with work, and have no time for writing just yet. But I do have something good for you to read: a substantial essay by Toby Young on heredity and heresy, and the scientific denialism of the progressive Left. It’s so good that I won’t excerpt it: you must go and […]

E Pluribus Multis

Continuing the discussion of David Reich’s book on human genetics, here’s Steve Sailer with an essay on the populations of India and China. The gist: compared to India, which has maintained genetically distinct (and stratified) subgroups for millennia, China is highly homogeneous. Mr. Sailer is a man of broad erudition, penetrating intelligence, and roving curiosity. […]

Three Models Of Equality

Last Saturday’s post was about the scuffle between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein over the role of genetics in the varying distribution of cognitive, behavioral, and personality traits in distinct human populations (and over Mr. Harris’s association with Charles Murray, whom people like Klein accuse of peddling racism and “pseudoscience”). I linked to Andrew Sullivan, […]

Eppur, Si Muove!

The secularist writer and podcaster Sam Harris has got into a public scuffle with Ezra Klein, “editor-at-large” of the young-adult news website Vox, over Harris’s recent interview with Charles Murray, and the more general question of the role of genetics in the distribution of traits in distinct human populations. The absolutist “blank-slate” view of human […]

Tiptoe… Through the Land-Mines

Making a bit of a splash at the moment is a new book by the Harvard geneticist David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. (Any book that says anything truthful about heredity and human groups is going to attract attention these days, […]

Reactionary Roundup

For tonight, something to listen to and some things to read. To listen to, we have John Derbyshire’s latest Radio Derb. This week’s 43-minute installment is dedicated to the cultural and demographic death of his ancestral homeland, the British Isles. It is a melancholy survey of the ruin of a great nation, but some things […]

“Land reform”

South Africa is moving rapidly toward “expropriation without compensation”: the confiscation of white-owned farms and transfer of them to black owners. Displacement of white farmers in Africa has happened before, in places like Kenya and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Agricultural productivity plummeted. It will do so here as well. In his book Suicide of the West […]

Places And People Are Not All The Same

Required reading, sent my way by several readers this morning: a former Peace Corps volunteer’s reflections on her time in Africa. Here.

Windshield v. Bug

If there’s anything worse than an imbecile, it’s a smug imbecile. And — forgive me if this seems ungallant — if there’s anything worse than that, it’s a smug, “progressive” imbecile with a chip on her shoulder (but I fear I repeat myself). When it gets better is when such a person is put in […]

The Truth Will Set You Free — Of An Income

The blogger JayMan (one of the most intelligent and articulate voices you’ll find online) comments on the Steven Pinker brouhaha, here. In my own comments a couple of days ago, I said that “Dr. Pinker, quite understandably for someone who wishes to remain employed”, was “trying to thread a needle.” JayMan puts this far more […]

Pinker And The Priests

Steven Pinker, who by some miracle still finds himself employed despite holding some deeply heretical notions (of which those he expresses are surely just the tip of the iceberg), is under fire today for some remarks he made at a panel at Harvard. The snippet that’s been making the rounds is this: The other way […]

Fierce Tiger Descends Mountain

For tonight, I have an article by a Chinese national, Puzhong Yao, who emigrated to the West — first to England, then to the United States — to complete his education, and to work in the financial industry. He is obviously highly intelligent, and has done very well. He writes about the difference between Chinese […]

‘A’ For Effort

Ah, Diversity. How its worship enriches us! It doesn’t, of course. But it does, at least, make for some last-minute entertainment, here on the deck of the Titanic. There are some areas of human activity that lie forever beyond the reach of heartfelt wishes and fond imaginings: places where reality is still there even after […]

Europe: Prostrate And Bleeding

File this under “Diversity and its Blessings”. I’m off to Vienna and Prague tomorrow; I’ll let you know how things seem there.

It Ain’t Necessarily So

Many of you will have read Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-decorated book Guns, Germs, and Steel. It makes what has seemed to many (even to me, when I first read it) an overwhelmingly persuasive case that the persistent inequalities in power, influence, and prosperity among the world’s population groups — why, for example, did Europeans colonize the […]

Pick One

Here are two syllogisms about race. The first: (1) All human groups have identical statistical distributions of cognitive, behavioral and personality traits. (2) Human groups, when considered as groups, have measurably different life-outcomes and levels of success in our societies. (3) Given (1), these different outcomes can only be due to wholly exogenous factors, such […]

Coming Apart

I’ve mentioned Charles Murray rather a lot recently; this is because he is often in the news lately, and has been right on the frontlines of the culture war. The pillorying and excommunication of this meticulous and mild-mannered scholar also shows the extent to which ideological and cryptoreligious loyalties and prejudices have contaminated science as […]

The Future, By The Numbers

Making the rounds is a video by Mark Steyn in which he discusses the demographics of Europe and Africa, and Steve Sailer’s “Most Important Graph In The World“. Take particular note starting at 9:55, if you’ve been wondering why Europe’s leaders don’t seem to give a damn about the future.

Across The Great Divide

Well, here is something quite remarkable for our time: an actual “conversation about race” in which two people, with completely incommensurable axioms and worldviews, discuss the topic for a full hour without shouting each other down, or resorting to violence. (Astonishingly, there isn’t even any mention of Hitler.) The interlocutors are Jared Taylor, of American […]

The Weaker Sex

Just ran across this: a study of hand-grip strength showed that 95% of males are stronger than 90% of females. The abstract: Hand-grip strength has been identified as one limiting factor for manual lifting and carrying loads. To obtain epidemiologically relevant hand-grip strength data for pre-employment screening, we determined maximal isometric hand-grip strength in 1,654 […]

Trouble In Paradise

Here is an interview of Daily Mail reporter Katie Hopkins by Tucker Carlson. Ms. Hopkins describes her recent trip to Sweden. By the way, speaking of Sweden and Tucker Carlson, here’s John Derbyshire’s understanding of Donald Trump’s recent “last night in Sweden” remark that set off such a commotion: It happened that Tucker Carlson over […]

Closing The Circle

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of The Outline of History, written in 1920 by H.G. Wells. I’m halfway through the first volume of two. It’s a fine example of post-WWI Progressive-era thinking, and Mr. Wells was of course a wonderful craftsman, so I’ve been enjoying it enormously. (The entire book […]

Stockholm Syndrome

There’s been quite a fuss about Donald Trump’s having suggested that Sweden might be having problems digesting millions of profoundly alien, mostly Muslim, immigrants. The narrative conflict could not be starker: on the one side, a description of a formerly safe, homogeneous and peaceful Scandinavian nation descending into a darkening abyss of rape, fear, cultural […]

Forensic Entomology

From the Express: A migrant turf war erupted into violence on the streets of one of Paris’ trendiest neighbourhoods early this morning as asylum seekers beat each other to a pulp with wooden clubs. Story and video here. A defining characteristic of a living organism is the maintenance of its internal order, and of its […]

A Difference Without a Division

With the increasingly documented genetic reality of human biodiversity washing over the gunwales of Utopian universalism, there’s a word on the rise in liberal circles: essentialism. It’s used to make a retreat from discredited Lewontinian denial of genetic differences, without really ceding any ideological ground. In effect it says: “OK, OK — we’ll admit that […]

Proof Of Concept

We’re still in Vienna; heading back to the States on Saturday. What a calm and orderly place this is! It may be otherwise in corners of the city we haven’t visited, but so far as I can tell Vienna, and the other little Austrian towns we’ve been to, are everything you’d imagine: polite, law-abiding, efficient, […]

Science!

Some science items for today: With race front and center in every news cycle, it’s good to be prepared for encounters with those who insist that race is “only a social construct” (many of whom also spend all their waking hours totting up accounts of how one race is doing compared to another). Readers of […]

The Problem

Scott Adams (a keen observer whom you may know as the creator of Dilbert) offers an interesting explanation as to why the Democrat-Republican dispute over gun control is so intractable: On average, Democrats (that’s my team*) use guns for shooting the innocent. We call that crime. On average, Republicans use guns for sporting purposes and […]

Delivering Us Bound To Our Foe

I do enjoy a good polemic, and Fred Reed’s rants are among the best. His response to the recent act of jihad in Orlando is a fine specimen. Some excerpts: Orlando? So what else is new? Why the excitement? I am puzzled that everyone is distraught over a perfectly ordinary act of terrorism by a […]

You Can’t Have Everything

Here’s the gay political gadfly Milo Yiannopolous on the Orlando atrocity (my emphasis): “I’m not talking about Islamists. I’m not talking about terrorists. I’m not talking about radical Islam. I’m talking about mainstream Muslim culture. There are eleven Muslim countries in which I could be killed for being a homosexual. The state penalty is death. […]

Round Up The Usual Suspects

Yesterday a friend sent me a link to an item about race over at the Huffington Post. The post is an interview of David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy from the University of New England. The title of the piece is Race Delusion: Lies That Divide Us, so you know where it’s going right […]

The American Nations, 2016

With yet another hat-tip to hbd*chick, here’s a very interesting item from “Jayman” on Trump, democracy and demographics.

Truth And Consequences

With a hat-tip to our e-pal hbd*chick (whose blog you should be reading), here’s an article called The Bermuda Triangle of Science. It’s about a dangerous place where careers go to vanish.

Festering Europa

Gates of Vienna has posted two video clips taken from a discussion panel at the latest CPAC conference. The subject was the fate of Europe. (At this point it might well be a post-mortem; Europe has already gone far beyond the “tipping point”, and is now, barring a full-on revolt by its indigenous peoples, nothing […]

People, Get Ready

The evidence that most human traits are highly heritable — not just obvious physical traits, mind you, but cognitive and behavioral qualities and dispositions as well — is accumulating rapidly, and will soon be overwhelming. (In scientific terms it already is, but what is about to be overwhelmed is the nurturist and culturist dogma that […]