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The William McDougall NewsLetter
UNMATCHED FOR SEX, VIOLENCE, INTELLIGENCE, REALISM, LIBERALISM AND OPTIMISM!
Edinburgh, Spring 2000
Differential Psychology -- and its Politics
This weekly newsletter advances the ideas of the British social psychologist and Harvard professor William McDougall FRS (1870-1938). The Lancashire-born Anglo-Scot has been recognized by a leading Harvard historian as the major figure to have resisted the arrival of behaviourism, egalitarianism and environmentalism in psychology and anthropology (R. Pipes, 1999, Property and Freedom -- see McDNL 24 viii '99). McDougall believed in innate and inherited factors of instinct, purpose and ability; in race and sex differences; in three realms of reality (matter, mentality and knowledge -- cf. the later ideas of philosopher Sir Karl Popper); and in the liberty that he took the USA most especially to enshrine. McDougall was at once a classical liberal, an empiricist (even backing parapsychology research), an optimist (advocating voluntary eugenics) and a realist about human intelligence and personality. His boyhood dream was that he might have been one of the Pilgrim Fathers; and he had a lifelong proclivity for 'out-speaking' even though his own arguments with materialists and 'race slumpers' won him few friends in academia. The William McDougall NewsLetter reports advances and setbacks as the West struggles to maintain realism, individualism, choice and contract in days of 'multiculturalism' and 'political correctness.'
Reality? Is that where the pizza delivery guy comes from?
WARNINGS FROM LIBERAL REALISTS OF TODAY
"….if
multiculturalism prevails and if the consensus on liberal democracy
disintegrates, the United States could join the Soviet Union on the ash heap of
history." Samuel HUNTINGTON, 1997, 'The erosion of
American national interest.' Foreign Affairs 76.
"[Political Correctness] is the most intolerant system of thought to
dominate the British Isles since the Reformation." Peter
HITCHENS, 1999, The Abolition of Britain: from Lady Chatterley to Tony Blair.
London : Quartet.
"Today, to suggest that genetically based group differences are even
probable provokes a reaction that resembles hysteria." Charles MURRAY
(co-author of The Bell Curve), 2000, National Review [USA], 24 i.
EDITOR: CHRIS BRAND
(brand@crispian.demon.co.uk) -- THE BRITISH ACADEMIC PSYCHOLOGIST
WHO DECRIED IGNORACISM, ENVIRONMENTOSTALINISM, FEMINAZISM AND PAEDOHYSTERIA
(THE ACTIVE INGREDIENTS OF INNOCUOUS-SOUNDING 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS').
GUESS
WHAT HAPPENED? BRAND'S BOOK, The
g Factor, WAS DE-PUBLISHED
by Wiley Inc. [New York] (1996) AND BRAND WAS FIRED by
Edinburgh University (1997). He was refused help by HRH Prince Philip (or the
Duke's minions) and stayed fired after an internal Appeal,
1998. However, faced with legal action in 1999, the University
paid Brand £UK12,000 -- the maximum he could have been awarded by a British
court for unfair dismissal. Today, Brand is working on a biography of
William McDougall and offers an Essay Prize of £1,000
to encourage students to read his censored book, The g Factor (see
Brand's Home Page for
library locations of the book).
"The man who walks alone
is soon trailed by the FBI."
Wright
MORRIS, 1967, A Bill of Rites.
For other news: Yahoo / Reuters / BBC. For
Internet search engines: Alta Vista
Google.
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ALL YOUR NEOLIBEREAL NEWS AND OP-ED NEEDS
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Go to 2000 McDNL issues Jan/Feb, March?
APRIL 4
THIS WEEK:
Black Racism: ZIMBABWE CRACKS WHITE HEADS
Affirmative Racism: WHITE PROFS SUE 'BLACK RACIST' COLLEGE
Biology of Lesbianism: 'CHRIS BRAND KNEW IT ALL BACK IN 1982,' SAYS Guardian.
Multiculturalism: OSLO FIRST IN SHOUTING MATCHES
Political Correctness: 'IT'S WAR,' SAYS U.S. NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION
Education: CALIFORNIA SCHOOL SCRAPS MIXED-ABILITY TEACHING
McDougall NewsLetter:
INVITATION OF COMMENT
(The TgF and McDougall NewsLetters
have now been published weekly for almost four years. What should happen next?)
Book Review: BRAND SLAMS 'PSYCHOMETRICS PRIMER'
Students' Corner: Ashley Montagu's and Jared Diamond's ignoracism challenged in review of recent work on racial classification
(BBCR4UK 2 iv '00, 09:00; Guardian, 3 iv '00)
MULTICULTURAL ZIMBABWE
UNLEASHES STORMTROOPERS
ON WHITES
HARARE, Zimbabwe -- Fans of Black rule in Africa received a nasty surprise as President Robert Mugabe turned his police and armed thugs on totally unarmed demonstrators in his capital, concentrating especially on cracking the heads of middle-aged Whites. Whites made up 15% of the 4,000-strong crowd. Among the dozen Whites injured as police suddenly allowed thugs armed from Mugabe's party headquarters to beat and hurl tear gas grenades at fleeing demonstrators was the son of a first cousin of the Queen. Stephen Rhodes, 40, was grabbed as he was leaving and thrown into the back of a landrover. After questioning at a police station, Rhodes asked whether police should not have protected demonstrators from assault. He was told, "No, we are here to protect the government."
Zimbabwe had been a 'front-line state' in efforts to end White rule in South Africa. Mugabe's violence against civilians protesting peacefully and lawfully took the increasingly impoverished and war-making country another step towards anarchy under a Black terrorist ooops independence campaigner who had saint-like status for the British left just ten years ago. Courts had sanctioned the march, but when 500 armed veterans attacked the 4,000 demonstrators the police arrested only demonstrators. Recently, Mugabe, 76, has denounced the British Cabinet as homosexual pigs, opened New Labour Britain's diplomatic bags and let Black 'veterans' occupy White farms contrary to rulings from Zimbabwe's High Court. Under the constitution, elections are required to take place by June 2nd. At any moment Whites could trash their farms and leave, though many have gambled that Mugabe is just 'playing the race card' to whip in votes and that he secretly appreciates that the White farmers are the geese who lay his golden eggs. Zimbabwe is an elaborately courteous and kindly society in which race relations are generally excellent; but all this could change if Mugabe is determined to use his veterans to assault and rob Whites. {In fully 'liberated' South Africa itself, crime now runs at nine times the rate obtaining in the USA.}
(Times Higher 30 iii '00)
COLLEGE PRACTISED BLACK-ONLY HIRING, SAY PROFS
Devotees of multiculturalism, i.e. Black racism, are to get a dose of their
own medicine from five White professors in North Carolina. The professors, at
Livingstone College, are seeking at least a million dollars in damages for
firings (in two cases), denials of promotion, physical intimidation and verbal
harassment. They claim to have evidence of a sustained plan of racist
appointments at the college in the 1990's. According to the professors, a 1994
review of the college's operations unashamedly talked of making "Black
replacements" for existing staff; and the vice-president of the college
wrote a note for the English Department saying "Bring in Black Ph.D."
The college's lips are sealed as legal
action approaches. But the president has resigned and a nearby theological
seminary has decided to cut its ties with Livingstone.
Since the early 1980's it has been known from the work of sex realist Glenn Wilson (long Hans Eysenck's first lieutenant at London's Maudsley Hospital) that a relatively long index finger is a associated with being female and to some slight degree with femininity and submissiveness (e.g. Wilson, 1983, Person. & Indiv. Diffs.). Now a negative link has been found -- to lesbianism. Marc Breedlove's finding has elicited an anguished response in the Guardian from one of Chris Brand's students of 1982 -- see later.
CNN 29 iii '00
//////
SAN FRANCISCO -- A California psychologist has found the level of male
hormones a fetus is exposed to in the womb can influence future sexual
orientation. The study, published in this week's Nature, is based an
unusual research technique -- comparing the lengths of a person's index and
ring fingers.
Marc Breedlove, a professor of psychology at University
of California Berkley, said that finger length is influenced by levels of male
hormone, or androgen, in the womb. Thus, he used the finger comparisons as an
approximate measure of fetal androgen levels.
In most people, the index finger is slightly shorter
than the ring finger. But in the right hand, the difference is accentuated by
higher levels of androgens during fetal development, according to the study. In
women, the ring and the index finger tend to be almost the same size. In men,
the index finger is usually shorter.
In his study of 720 people, Breedlove found higher
levels of androgens can create a greater than normal tendency for both males
and females to develop a homosexual orientation. Breedlove found lesbians
tended to have a more masculine hand pattern, with the index finger
considerably shorter than the ring finger, when compared to heterosexual women
as a group. But he cautions, "There is no gene that forces a person to be
straight or gay... I believe there are many social and psychological, as well
as biological factors that make up sexual preference." Breedlove says what
his data does show is that some people are gay because of fetal androgen
levels. "We think that lesbians, as a group, were seeing slightly higher
prenatal testosterone levels than were the heterosexual women," Breedlove
said.
He said the pattern for men was more complicated. There
did not appear to be a direct relationship between finger length and sexual
orientation. Still, Breedlove found some gay men did appear, based on finger measurements,
to have been exposed to higher levels of fetal androgens. "This calls into
question all of our cultural assumptions that gay men are feminine," said
Breedlove. He says his findings point more toward gay men as hypermasculinized.
Breedlove conducted his research at three street fairs
in the San Francisco Bay area in the fall of 1999. Each study participant had
his or her hand photocopied on a portable copy machine to record finger length.
Participants also filled out a questionnaire on sexual orientation and birth
order.
Neuroscientist Simon Levay says Breedlove's work
confirms his own views on the causes of homosexuality. "I think it is one
more contribution if you like to the idea that our personalities including our
sexuality and our sexual orientation are influenced by things that happen when
our brain first assembles itself before birth," Levay said.
\\\\\\
REFERENCE: Terence J. Williams, Michelle E. Pepitone, S. E. Christensen, B. M. Cooke, A. D. Huberman, N. J. Breedlove, Tessa J. Breedlove, Cynthia L. Jordan & S. Marc Breedlove (2000). 'Finger-length and sexual orientation.' Nature 404, 6777, 455-6.
The study was conducted in the course of San Francisco carnivals for gays, allowing large numbers of homosexuals to be tested in relaxed conditions where inquiries about sexual orientation were acceptable. The main finding was that index fingers of the right hand were longer, relatively to ring fingers, in heterosexual women (p<.025). All other groups had similar '2D:4D' ratios; but later-born male homosexuals having more brothers had especially short index fingers -- compatible with their being randier, having larger genitalia and having got the AIDS crisis going. The authors' interpret their work as showing "influences of androgens on sexual orientation." For more: breedsm@socrates.berkeley.edu.
Marc Breedlove has long been recognized as a
leader in the field of studies of sex, sexual orientation and sexual style
(dominant/submissive). He wrote the review chapter on sex for Annual Review
of Psychology 45 in 1994. His new finding as reported would seem compatible
equally with the possibility that pregnancy stress yields overproduction of
testosterone with resultant masculinization of the foetus (e.g. Vowles, 1970, The
Psychobiology of Aggression, Edinburgh University Press) or with the
possibility that more foetal testosterone is produced as a result of the
genetic contribution to the development of lesbianism (e.g. Bailey, 1993, Arch.
Gen. Psychiat. 50).
Be that as it may, Breedlove's empirical finding has
resulted in a striking disclosure in the Guardian (31 iii '00, G2,
pp. 4-5, 'Slight of hand -- New research links finger length to homosexuality.
But Becky Gardiner has heard it all before'; http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,154025,00.html).
Becky Gardiner's article begins, "When I was 19, I had the misfortune to
be taught by Chris Brand, a psychologist with a belief in genetic determinism
bordering on the evangelical…."
It turns out that Chris Brand knew about short-fingered
lezzies all along and used it to harass feminazie students when they droned on
making interruptions in classes of 300 students which they had only rarely
attended! Brand's low-n (or perhaps alcohol-washed) memory banks retain
today no serious recall of the incident, in which he attributed the student's
Deirdre Spart-style interruptiveness to masculinization, but he writes:
I am sorry to have only the haziest recollection of my (pretty good?….) put-down for Ms Gardiner. (She may be Black, says a Birmingham correspondent who has seen the Guardian's photo of her hand -- though Black students were a rarity in the LUniversity of Edinburgh in 1982 and Black people usually claim homosexuality to be non-existent among Africans). However, I would like to make six points:
-- C.R.B.
McDNL's Missouri Correspondent thinks similarly:
I found it interesting that Chris Brand was able to guess something about a woman's fingers based on her classroom behavior. That woman has struggled with the maleness of her hands for 18 years now, as she reveals in her article. She questions the validity of the ratio of lengths of index and ring fingers as a predictor of sexual orientation in women, but her article seems actually to make a strong case for the other side. In the 18 years since Chris Brand taught her about her fingers, she has met only one other woman like herself -- with ring finger longer than index finger. That woman is editor of the Women's page of the Guardian (I think the author means to imply that the woman is a lesbian). The author has had lesbian relationships. Her data seem to corroborate, not contradict, Marc Breedlove's recent work and Chris Brand's remark to her 18 years ago.
McDNL's Georgia Correspondent, Hotpants
So then, what she said has no significance at all? What she said had no bearing at all on the response? It's not in the least bit important what she said? Is that what we are supposed to buy? It's very convenient for her in her role as victim that she can't remember what she said, but some of us would like to have at least a general idea before forming an opinion about the exchange. I wasn't born yesterday. She remembers exactly what she said!
Crime
UNSTOPPED AND UNSEARCHED BLACK YOUTHS
GO ON RAMPAGE IN LONDON
(Daily Telegraph 26 iii '00)
LONDON -- Street crimes in the capital rose by 50 per cent in just a year. Scotland Yard figures show there were 4,138 muggings in January this year compared with 2,811 in January 1999. Muggings -- committed overwhelmingly by young Black young men -- increased in 31 out of 32 London boroughs. Now, Sir John Stevens, the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, is to launch an intensive drive and has told officers they must use their stop-and-search powers so long as they can think of plausible excuses and are polite to Black youths. The powers were never formally withdrawn, but police in 1999 became fearful of using them lest they be accused of 'racism.' Sir John is determined that street crimes, including aggressive begging, "steaming" (where victims are set upon by a group at high speed by Black youths), and mugging will be reduced over the next few months.
{It will be interesting to see what pretexts Metropolitan police are allowed to use. In the USA, the Supreme Court recently ruled unanimously that the police may not stop and frisk someone solely based on an anonymous tip that the person was carrying a gun.}
White-guilt-ridden wee Norway is about to allow religious provocations in Oslo. It hopes not to lag the rest of the multicultural West as all religious groups start annoying each other.
Reuters, March 29, 2000
//////
Muslims, atheists to slug it out in Oslo via loudspeakers
OSLO, Norway --The Norwegian capital, solving
a tangle over religious freedom in the Christian-dominated nation, has decided
to let Muslims broadcast prayer calls for the first time. In reciprocation,
atheists will be allowed to shout, "God does not exist." Under a ruling
by a council for eastern Oslo, a local mosque will be allowed to use a
loudspeaker to broadcast a prayer call into the streets for three minutes every
Friday, the Muslim holy day. The volume of the broadcast must not exceed 60
decibels.
The Atheist Society, in the same part of the capital
(which has a high population of immigrants), will also be allowed to use a
megaphone to invite members to meetings from a rooftop once a week, including
the call: "God does not exist."
"We strongly suspect that the atheists applied to
shout out their opinions because they were provoked by the applications from
the World Islamic Mission," said Jan Willy Lyng, a Labour member of the
local Oslo council. "To give fair treatment, we had to say 'yes', but I
don't think these atheists actually will get up in time ooops climb on the roof
and shout too often," he told Reuters.
Until now, the only legal prayer call in Norway is the
ringing of church bells. Christianity is the state religion in Norway {where
Oslo was known till 1925 as Kristiania}. The wailing call to prayer, or azzan,
is recited five times daily in mosques in Muslim countries.
\\\\\\
{Today, troublespots cannot be ethnically cleansed by PC governments to yield the relatively tranquil ghettoes of cities like Los Angeles. All contestants are supposed to stay together and shout and bomb each other, as in Northern Ireland of the last generation. It can take years for ordinary people themselves to move home unassisted on the scale necessary to evade politically correct preachments and multicultural mayhem.}
Commissar Jack Straw intends to intervene and punish in areas where Tories would never have dreamed of letting the police roam free -- in Britain's council housing estates, and even further afield. Evidently, British police are to be sent back into virtual no-go areas in order to advance the PC belief that tough behavioural control can work wonders even with the unsatisfactory human material accumulated in Britain's modern slums through years of state-funded dysgenics.
Reuters 30 iii '00, 'Straw declares war on "neighbours from hell"'
LONDON -- Home Secretary Jack Straw has declared war on "neighbours
from hell", vowing to step up powers to turf out disruptive and
destructive tenants. "There will be no hiding place for the few whose
behaviour destroys the quality of life for the majority," Straw said in a
statement accompanying an action plan by the government's Social Exclusion
Unit.
Twinning a heavy hand with a supportive one, the Home
Office will now assume overall control for preventing and tackling vandalism,
racism and other abusive behaviour on council estates and by people living in
private housing….
{Previously it had been thought New Labour was opposed to 'social exclusion'….}
(Times Higher 30 iii '00)
Britain's academics are forever whining officially about the importance of equality, and especially about wanting Oxbridge cut down to size. Now, after years of debasing their calling, they are getting somewhere. Staff at the University of Bradford [the city which has one of the major concentration of Srindopakeshis in the UK] have been disgruntled to find that quite a few foreign guests invited to attend a knees-up to celebrate Nato's invasion of Kosovo did not arrive. Soon it emerged the distinguished foreign representatives (from U. Tirana etc.) had been turned back at Dover by customs and immigration staff -- lately under strict instructions to admit no foreigner whose presence might incense the Sun or Daily Mail. Shocked, Bradford's academics turned to the Foreign Office (a notorious bastion of elitism) to ask about this disgrace. But the F.O., too, was under New Labour orders: "Each individual application is treated on its merits," it said. "It makes no difference if you are an academic or on a shopping trip from Kiev."
Whether because he believes in free speech or because he wants to be rid of surplus population via AIDS, the South African President is infuriating do-gooders of the West.
AFP 2 iv '00
//////
Angry debate in South Africa on AIDS theories
JOHANNESBURG -- A
decision by President Thabo Mbeki to include dissident scientists on a panel of
experts studying measures to counter AIDS is provoking angry debate in South
Africa, a country where nine percent of the population -- 3.6 million people --
are HIV-positive. The "dissidents" deny any link between HIV (human
immunodeficiency virus) and AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome).
….Anti-AIDS militants, doctors and editorial writers
charge that the panel will create confusion by giving a platform to scientists
espousing theories rejected several years ago by mainstream experts.
The government provoked sharp and widespread criticism
last October in refusing to provide the drug AZT to HIV-positive pregnant
women, despite its use in many other countries to prevent infection of the
foetus. Official figures show that 22.8 percent of pregnant women tested
positive for HIV in South Africa in 1998. Mbeki maintained that apart from the
high cost the state would have to bear to provide AZT, it could be dangerous
for the women's and babies' health. In [a recent reply to attempts to plead
with him], Mbeki said: "I am taken aback by the determination of many
people in our country to sacrifice all intellectual integrity to act as
salespersons of the products of one pharmaceutical company" -- a reference
to the British firm Glaxo Wellcome, which manufactures AZT. The president also
claimed that "an entire regiment of eminent 'dissident' scientists"
had been "wiped out from the public view."
….Mbeki's decisions have exasperated Malegapuru
Makgoba, the head of the South African Medical Research Council, who denounced
the establishment of the panel as a "national scandal"….
\\\\\\
KANUNGU, Uganda -- Nature of Negritude -- The sad capacities of Black Africans for murderous crime, religious superstition, stupidity and incompetence were much in evidence as more than 1,000 bodies were unearthed of Black folk who had subscribed to a Mariolatrous doomsday cult which promised them the joys of heaven looked after by the Mother of God. Police believe the killings in Uganda were triggered by the failure of a prophecy by 'Return of the 10 Commandments' leader Joseph Kibwetere that the world would end at the Blairennium. Afterwards, some members may have unwisely demanded the return of belongings of themselves and friends which they had collected and donated to the sect. Kibwetere and a former prostitute called Dledonia Mwerinde are thought to have left Uganda to enjoy the spoils of their crimes. So far, after two weeks of intense activity under the Western media spotlight, police have detained just one person in connection with the mega-death fraud. {In the past year, Africa has lost a hundred thousand people thanks to Black-on-Black butchery in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and a total failure to prepare for the widely forecast flooding in Mozambique and Madagascar. In the Congo, six countries are now at war because they have not read McDNL's plan for establishing constituency choice and allowing Africa a peaceful and democratic transition to ethnically realistic frontiers….}
LONDON (Daily Telegraph 3 iv '00) -- Anti-homosexualist
campaigners menaced -- Extending neosocialist protectiveness of minorities,
mayoral candidate 'Red' Ken Livingstone declared war on Scottish billionaire
Brian Souter. Livingstone said: "I will not tolerate companies being
commercially involved with the Greater London Authority if they display any
homophobia." His remark was understood to be a direct threat to ban
Souter's 'Stagecoach' company from links and shared facilities with London
Transport. Trying to compete with Livingstone, Prime Minister Blair turned
furiously in Parliament on Conservative leader William Hague, accusing him of
outright homophobic prejudice. Both Souter and Hague say they only oppose
homosexual propaganda in schools, not homosexuality itself. Hague had
challenged Blair to admit that he would accept the Government's recent defeat
in the House of Lords for its proposal to repeal Section 28 (the regulation for
local authorities which currently forbids the promotion of homosexuality in
state schools). "This campaign is based on people who don't want to come
out and say they are prejudiced against gay people," Blair told the House
of Commons. Across the chamber, opposition deputies roared back their
disapproval. "So they hide behind the issue of child protection,"
Blair continued.
Britain's Electoral Reform Society, which will normally
do anything to help arrange elections using proportional representation,
refused to accept a UK£1 million to organize a Scottish referendum on Section
28 -- provoking allegations from Brian Souter that it had been "got
at." Mr Souter has already had a computer firm compile a complete
electoral register for Scotland and says he will now ask an American firm to
organize the referendum he seeks.
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania -- Free speech defended in US academia -- The University of Oklahoma has cleared Professor David Deming {see McDNL 7 iii '00, 'Freedom of expression'} of sexual harassment. In a case that illustrates the threat to liberty posed by political correctness, the professor had been the target of more than twenty sexual harassment complaints filed with the University of Oklahoma's affirmative action office as a result of a guns-realistic letter that he wrote to the student newspaper. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE -- fire@thefire.org) adopted Professor David Deming's case because Deming faced possible termination for daring to comment on an issue of national concern. Now Deming, an associate professor of Geology and Geophysics, remains in post -- though with a letter in his hand from his Dean, John T. Snow, excoriating him for expressing himself, accusing him of lowering morale, and berating him for upsetting the University President's office by occasioning a large number of phone calls from media and alumni.
LONDON (Reuters 30 iii '00) -- Neosocialist drugohysteria defied -- Five members of the elite Parachute Regiment face the sack after testing positive for cocaine and cannabis in a random drugs test, the Defence Ministry has said. The tests were carried out weeks after seven colleagues in the regiment -- all reported by the media to be veterans of the Nato-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo -- also failed drugs tests. {The week saw renewed pressures in Britain, even from police, to scrap jail sentences for cannabis users, as had been proposed by a Royal Commission in 1978 but rejected by Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan. The unspoken fear of politicians is that while cannabis might be benign in use by hippies and intellectuals and Dutchmen, its use by low-IQ Britoids in combination with drink might be much less acceptable. While lower class girls continue to demonstrate considerable ineptness about taking contraceptive pills, politicians fear the consequences of new substances in a population of youngsters who have few resident fathers and whose new Blair-appointed 'superheads' have been resigning in despair of controlling them.}
WASHINGTON -- Femilunacy -- America breathed a sigh of relief as allegations were made by an attractive top blonde general that she had been groped by a fellow general, 50, who was male. It was previously thought that America's armed forces had lost their joie de vivre. The USA has tried to implement Plato's suggestion (in The Republic) that both men and women should be recruited as combatants on the battlefield, but it had seemed to require PC standards of decorum. However, relief was qualified when Generalissima Kennedy explained just how little machismo had bothered her exquisitely sensitive soul: "Here's the problem," she told the Washington Times. "When a man is doing something and you can't tell what his intention is. His hand lingers on your back, he touches you on your upper arm and you can't tell if he's a touchy-feely person. All you know is that he gives you the creeps."
BONN, Germany (New York Post, 1 iv '00, 'Neo-Nazis on Rise in Germany Again') -- PC immigrationalunacy bears fruit in 'Haider of the Rhine' -- Political leaders, church groups and business leaders are all condemned in an election-campaign slogan by former Technology Minister Juergen Ruettgers, running to be the CDU's state premier in North Rhine-Westphalia. Ruettgers is trying to stop the government's plans to grant visas for 20,000 computer specialists to fill jobs for which the industry said it could find no suitable applicants in Germany. His slogans "Children instead of Indians" [Kinder statt Inder] and ``Education instead of immigration'' have been roundly criticized as a nod to far-right ideas.
WASHINGTON (Guardian 3 iv '00) -- Heart of Africa -- The CIA is convinced that a thousand enslaved girls may be brought into the USA each week to service brothels and strip joints. The primary sources for the traffic in women and children were Thailand, Vietnam, China, Mexico, Russia and the Czech Republic, a report found. But Nigerian traffickers are the best paid because they deliver high class girls. They convince Nigerians to fork out large sums for the 'education' of their daughters in America; then double their money when they sell the girls as indentured labour. Considering such matters in conjunction with the horrors of Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zimbabwe and South Africa, a Guardian leading article admitted, "Africa is getting worse" -- while proceeding more conventionally to claim 'everyone agrees primary education is the chief key to the answer.'
BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters 31 iii '00) -- The neuroticism factor -- Last year's Coca-Cola crisis, which caused the recall of millions of bottles and cans of Coke across Europe, was due to psychosomatic illnesses caused by unpleasant sulphurous odors that sometimes linger faintly on cans and bottles after Coke has been carbonated, a Belgian psychiatrist said on Friday. The crisis initially broke last June after schoolchildren in Belgium complained of headaches, nausea and shivering after drinking Coke. Isy Pelc, head of the psychiatry and psychological medicine service at Brugmann Hospital in Belgium, said that a climate of fear over food safety due to the country's dioxin-in-food crisis, as well as student nervousness during their exam period were key factors in the Coke crisis. Pelc, who interviewed and conducted psychological tests on about 150 schoolchildren, said he found that particularly suggestible and sensitive children represented the largest group of sufferers in the Coke crisis at a ratio of two-to-one. Pelc's conclusions, presented in a final report by a government advisory body on the crisis, were in line with the findings of two professors from Belgium's Catholic University of Leuven who last year attributed the Coca-Cola crisis to mass hysteria.
Daily Telegraph [London] 1 iv '00
//////
Cultural war being waged, says Heston
CHARLTON HESTON, the Hollywood actor who played Moses, God and
Michelangelo, has attacked the "cultural cancer" of political
correctness in America.
When he became president of the National Rifle
Association, which champions a US citizen's constitutional right to bear arms,
Mr Heston said, he "went straight from Moses to the
devil -- from celluloid saint to cultural sinner" in the
imagination of the public.
Addressing 700 students at Georgetown University
Washington, this week, Mr Heston said the conflict in US society was "not
just about guns" and compared it to the American Civil War. "Today
the battle is for hearts and minds, to follow that moral compass that points to
what is right."
Political correctness was "a cultural cancer
that is eating away at our society", and his standing against meant him
being "struck by the bomb shells of the cultural war." He claimed
that universities were "incubators for a rampant epidemic of a new brand
of McCarthyism."
\\\\\\
{Two weeks ago, Charlton Heston's NRA suffered a setback when gun-maker Smith & Wesson agreed to adopt restrictions on the manufacturing and distribution of handguns in return for its exclusion from a series of government lawsuits. Guns restrictions would break the post-1965 compact whereby Americans are obliged to be polite about Black men and send their children to mixed-race schools but in return can shoot Black people dead on the spot if they threaten violence. Neither President Clinton nor Charlton Heston seems willing to take the elementary step of restricting gun use to those of above average intelligence who pass tough training courses. However, it will be splendid if the NRA at last presents itself as wanting to take on PC across the board. The tin-pot PC tyrants on campuses could do with some heavyweight opposition at last; and speakers on IQ certainly need armed guards. There is a lot of work to be done. A Zogby poll has just found that, despite Ward Connerly's heroic efforts, 70% of Hispanic Americans and 65% of African Americans shamelessly favour affirmative racism in employment and college admissions.}
A McDNL correspondent in London notes: Charlton Heston's analogy of PC with McCarthyism might be called unfair to McCarthy. At least McCarthy was attacking those who, if guilty of more than communist associations and chatter, had directly opposed the interests of the USA. Our PC friends attack anything which is to the West's advantage.
{The outreach of affirmative sexism now embraces even America's engineers. The National Association of Engineers says that it "has begun to address the low numbers of women in engineering. We created the Celebration of Women in Engineering to draw high-level attention to the need to increase the number of women in engineering. Chaired by the Honorable E. Gail de Planque, an NAE member, the Steering Committee for the Celebration focused on two main projects: developing an inspirational and informational website and convening a national conference on women in engineering." It is surely time for an outfit like the NRA to treat the illustriously named Hon. E. Gail de Plonk to sufficient celebratory hospitality for her own real proclivities and penchants to be ascertained.}
PC indoctrination and terrorization of trainee schoolteachers are now familiar spectacles on US campuses. Soon, trainees will no doubt be required to present their posteriors at gay bathhouses to increase their sensitivity to social ishoos….
Students entering the teacher
education program at San Diego State University must take a course on
multicultural education that requires them to take not tests but "cultural
plunges." These include taking trips to homosexual bars, visiting Black
churches if they are White and identifying themselves publicly as gay or
lesbian, even if they are not, to better understand what it feels like to be
different.
For its efforts at training new teachers, San Diego
State has been named the winner of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's
'Polly Awards', issued each year for outrageous examples of political
correctness on college campuses. Now in their third year, the Pollys are
awarded on or near April Fools' Day to highlight "the zany, bizarre, and
noxious tendencies of radical faculty and students on the nation's college
campuses," say institute officials.
T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., institute president, says the
awards were created "to publicize instances of outrageous totalitarianism,
politicization of the curriculum and left-wing bigotry on college campuses.
Many university deans and presidents decry the idea that political correctness
exists and claim that critics of PC use exaggerated or outdated
anecdotes," he says. "Here's proof to the contrary." The
institute, a conservative think-thank in Wilmington, Delaware, solicits Polly
nominations from students on campuses nation-wide…..
For more, see the full article by Andrea Billups at http://www.washtimes.com.
The Wall Street Journal (31 iii '00, Jonathan Kaufman, 'Silicon Valley High School Struggles With Integration') has been telling its readers of the sheer impossibility of mixed-ability education. An extract follows. (Menlo Park is a place that is divided west vs. east along high-IQ vs. lower-IQ lines.)
MENLO PARK, California -- Biology
teacher Stan Ogren performed hundreds of experiments in his 35 years at
Menlo-Atherton High School, but few of them ever failed as badly as his Advanced
Integrated Science program.
Mr. Ogren, head of the school's prestigious science
department, designed the program to break down some of the walls that divide
wealthy and poor students, whites and minorities, here in the heart of Silicon
Valley. Starting in the fall of 1997, the school mixed ninth-graders of varying
abilities in the same science classes, rather than track them into separate
programs based on their middle-school grades and recommendations.
It was a noble idea, but it ran into huge trouble right
from the start. The classes were crowded. The curriculum was in flux. Many of
the better-prepared kids felt it was a waste of time. Eric Hartwig, who had
been principal for two years, was overwhelmed by the angry phone calls and
heated meetings, mostly with affluent, powerful families. "Parents of the
upper-end kids thought their kids were being held back by the other kids, that
their children's chances for M.I.T. or Stanford were being hampered," says
Mr. Hartwig, the school's principal. "It was a P.R. nightmare. There was a
lot of heat out there."
Mr. Ogren heard many of the same complaints. Still,
with the backing of the entire science faculty, he pleaded to the principal to
keep the program alive.
Mr. Hartwig listened, and then, as the school year came
to an end, pulled the plug. While he admired the intent behind mixing students,
he says, "it was almost impossible to pull off in real life. The disparity
was too great."….
Daily Telegraph 31 iii '00, Mark Ward
//////
Climbdown on internet libel shows online risks
THE first libel case against a British internet service provider has been settled out of court in a development that could have serious consequences for the online industry. Yesterday the first of two actions brought by Dr Laurence Godfrey, a physicist, against Demon Internet over defamatory messages was due to be heard in the High Court. But before the case started, Demon, now owned by the Scottish telecommunications company Thus, announced that it had reached a settlement. The decision marked a humiliating climbdown for Demon, which earlier said that it was fighting Mr Godfrey's claims on behalf of the internet industry and in the interests of free speech….
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Dear McDNL reader:
It is now almost four years since outrage in London and Edinburgh greeted the publication of The g Factor and my own acceptance that I was what the left standardly calls a scientific racist. Promptly deserted by my academic colleagues, I decided to fight on. I thought I could seriously dent PC. It was not to be. Only a few Trotskyists bothered to protest the suppression of my lecturing in Edinburgh. Others wrote letters, but few were published in London even when signed by a half-dozen academics from Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin. Within six months, the freedom-loving TgF NewsLetter had provided sufficient ammunition to the censorious agents of modern piety; so I was suspended and duly sacked for a single page of email urging clemency for a paedophile Nobelist in America. Since then, the William McDougall NewsLetter has allowed me the opportunity to reveal and to comment upon the advance of PC unrealism in the West. But today the question must be asked: Where next?
Depressing features of the past four years have been as follows.
Happier features must also be remembered.
So what is to be done?
One thing at least.
McDNL and TgFNL readers have enjoyed a service for the last four years that has brought them just about the best hot news in differential psychology and its related politics that has ever been available. The easily-searched newsletter archives are an unparalleled source of informed and critical comment on the major scientific developments of the period -- as well as on still more pressing political questions. For better or worse, after 26 years of academic circumspection, I have been able to 'have my say' on every issue of the day, from Kosovo to transsexualism. William McDougall's name has been kept alive; and a new name, neolibeREALISM, has been coined to describe a 'national liberal' stance with which the Mighty Mac would have sympathized if he could have been told its political context -- of Western victory over socialism followed only by the growth of another head by the monster. But perhaps four years McDougalling is enough?
Please send your thoughts to McDNL HQ -- preferably together with any suggestions for extending McDNL's world-wide network of Correspondents.
With sincere thanks for your interest and support, -- Chris Brand.
PS 'And what of the biography of William McDougall?'some will ask. Simply, all the academic preparation is complete: I have read virtually everything McDougall wrote, and I know what I think of him and his work. Brought up to despise the 'old fogey', I now have considerable admiration for his great scholarship and his lonely battle against behaviourism -- he had the support of religious believers, but he himself had lost his Christian faith in adolescence. However, there are two big problems. (1) Because McDougall was a loner yet he and his very dear wife Ann were close and continually together (he had given up a Cambridge Fellowship to marry for love in 1901), there appears to be no substantial correspondence that can throw any serious light on his personal life. McDougall moved through life leaving few personal traces -- even in the Oxford college where he was a Fellow for 15 years before proceeding to take the Chair of Psychology at Harvard. Even St John's College Cambridge which made him an Honorary Fellow just before his death in 1938 has little material on him. And, though he and Ann had five fine children, there is no record of more than one grandchild (whom I have been unable to trace -- probably born in Mexico, but the mother, McD's first child, was on the move after a bust-up with a millionaire). (2) Not a single mainstream publisher has offered to republish The g Factor. I therefore presume that the West's wretched 'publishers' would have even less interest in a book about what they would doubtless call 'an obscure psychologist of dodgy racist views which he never proved -- and then he turned to parapsychology!' All ideas for solutions to either problem will be warmly appreciated. My summary of McD's life and ideas is published at http://www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/pinc/july97/brand-mcd.html.
This newsletter for the science and politics of differential psychology appears on Tuesdays. See also its Archives and related articles on psychology, heredity, individual liberty and William McDougall FRS.
Silence would have been golden
A short review by Chris Brand of:
Paul KLINE, 2000, A Psychometrics Primer.
London : Free Association.
By his death in 1999, the author of this 'primer' had completed a remarkable transition. Best known around 1970 as a modest supporter of Freudian theory, Paul Kline had gone on to become an Eysenckian. By the 1990's, the Exeter-based academic sought the bases of personality not in sexual and aggressive impulses and in the individual's defence mechanisms, but in genetic and physiological differences that manifested themselves quantifiably -- especially in IQ, extraversion and neuroticism. Over the period spanned by Kline's career, writers in evolutionary psychology came to stress the importance of what Freudians had called 'the family romance.' They pointed out that women had a powerfully erotic maternal drive; that parents had to decide whether or not to 'invest' in children; and that some children made investment a pleasure while others had little confidence even that their 'Daddy' was actually their father (so were not keen to imitate parental role models). Yet, indifferent to such new Freudian dramas, Paul Kline became Britain's only professor of psychometrics and contented himself with trait measurement.
This personal development would be interesting if Kline had something to show for it. Yet, as this book makes clear from the outset, he died with hardly a test to his name and beset by doubt. Kline could have linked up with the many psychometrician-psychologists who thought that questionnaire work of the past generation allowed the delineation of some 'Big Five' dimensions of personality -- all partly heritable and none having simple environmental origins (in parental 'socialization style'). Alternatively, Kline could have accepted the wisdom of the co-researcher whom he most admired. Raymond Cattell* preferred his 'Big Six' -- including heritable IQ and allowing some play for Freudian factors. In fact, Kline felt unable to take either route. Nor, it turns out, does he have any answer of his own. Indeed, his primer admits that the evidence for Eysenck's central physiology-based concept of arousal -- supposedly high in introverts -- has vanished into thin air. Worse, Kline even shares the ancient anxiety that psychometric measurement may be much less than scientific since psychologists' scales have no 'true zero.'
None of this will inspire novices to persist long with Kline's book. Nor is the primer sufficiently detailed to allow readers actually to learn how to make up any tests or to find the correlations between them. Kline's wide but shallow coverage is more a set of notes for what might have been a substantial introduction to psychometric methods had he lived. The text is enlivened by occasional magisterial condemnation of other workers' ideas as "rubbish" but students will need to go elsewhere to understand the arguments mentioned -- as Kline frequently admits in many frustrating references to books which he 'does not have time to discuss.'
To cheer readers up, Kline promises that he will introduce a 'psychometrics for the new Millennium'; but readers who reach as far as Kline's concluding Chapter 9 will find that the sought-after measures are merely of reaction times and that Kline cannot make any of them work. Such was Kline's punishment for forgetting that psychology is about sex. Why he should have wanted to share it with a wider public is a mystery.
* Cattell himself is today denounced as a racist eugenicist -- at least by 'anti-racist' environmentalists (http://www.ferris.edu/ISAR/bios/cattell/). Kline solves this problem by avoiding the topic of race altogether, even though racial differences in lifestyle have attracted discussion in the past decade because of the awesome self-inflicted problems of African and Caribbean countries.
(BBCR4UK 29 iii '00, 08:50)
Unusually, and perhaps accidentally, a report by scientists that there is no single gene for comedy was immediately countered by the BBC's Today programme. Doctors at St Thomas's Hospital, London, had apparently found no special similarities between MZ twins -- though MZs have in fact long been known to push apart from each other along extravert-introvert and optimist-pessimist lines. Possibly shocked at the bleak prospect of being unable to explain the main difference between Brits and Germans, the BBC promptly brought on to the air Britain's top music hall comic, Bernard Manning. Because Manning's son is a theatre director and not himself a stand-up comic, Manning has sometimes joked that his son has no sense of humour -- 'like the rest of my family.' But Manning now soberly insists that, in truth, his son is very funny, often supplying gags for his father. All the boy lacks, on his own account, is the 'bottle' [nerve] to appear before 2,000 people with drink taken, believing he can instantly have them eating out of his hand. Manning senior says the gene for humour almost certainly came from his own mother; and he believes he has passed it not only to his son but to his two daughters -- the funniest girls he has ever known.
PS The Times eventually told its readers of Tim Spector's finding on 71 pairs of MZ twins that humour was not genetic (13 iv '00, 'Genes do not make us laugh', Tim Nuttall). The only measure involved was response to the cartoons of Gary Larson '[The Far Side]. {How anyone found any of these cartoons 'funny' remains mysterious.}
(BBCR4UK 29 iii '00, 07:00; 31 iii '00, 08:20)
Aiming to wrap himself in the flag, Prime Minister Blair announced his
belief in a fine list of British virtues. "The typical Briton is
hard-working, tolerant, good-humoured, understated, courageous, creative and
generous," he said, repeating what he had said a year ago (BBC Radio 4
UK, c. 25 v 1999).
Whether Mr Blair's subscription to trait
psychology will impress constructgurgling non-realists remains to be seen; but
it is thought unlikely to impress those who believe the main thing about being
British is not being run from Brussels. In the 1997 election campaign Blair
favourite and propaganda mastermind Peter Mandelson paraded a bulldog in an
attempt to associate Blairism with the British fighting spirit. But in government
the "cool Britannia" theme was aborted almost as soon as it was
launched -- though not in time to prevent London's futuristic Blairennial Dome
being revealed as a stunningly poor combination of PC education, PC
entertainment PC diversity.
Research shows the only widely valued
British institution to be the National Health Service which has freed Britons
to break up their families while doctors and nurses are presumed to deal with
every human ill. Among British 18-35-year-olds, a poll to find a
twentieth-century icon was topped by Elvis Presley. Princess Diana was voted
number two icon, followed by Martin Luther King and cartoon character Bart
Simpson. Hanging and kindred savage punishment for criminals, especially
paedophiles, are also popular in neosocialist Britain according to a
Nestlé-funded survey, Mapping Britain's Moral Values, prepared by an
embarrassed social psychologist (Professor Helen Weinreich-Haste, University of
Bath). Faced with the coloured immigration sought by both employers and
socialists, Brits have reacted in an American way -- seeking fierce punishment
for any who step out of line, many of whom happen to be Black.
The Prime Minister's concern with national
character triggered a debate among the intelligentsia, with both the Spectator
and the New Statesman devoting articles to the question of
'Englishness.' Needless to say, none of the selected writers were
psychologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists or sociologists.
(http://skepdic.com/mozart.html)
{cf. McDNL 4 viii '98 "Mozart makes you smarter!"; McDNL 11 viii '98, Musical Ability; McDNL 17 xi '98 Head Start Corner}
Eighteen months after Christopher Chabris demolished in Commentary claims made since 1993 that listening to Mozart can boost children's IQ, the industry of neo-HeadStarters is bouncing along as if nothing had happened. Reviewing 1999 work (including that by John Bruer -- e.g. McDNL 7 iii '00) Robert Carroll writes in The Sceptic's Dictionary:
Shaw and Rauscher may have spawned an industry, but the mass media and others have created a kind of alternative science which supports the industry. Exaggerated and false claims about music have become so commonplace that it is probably a waste of time to try to correct them. For example, Jamal Munshi, an associate professor of Business Administration at Sonoma State University, collects tidbits of misinformation and gullibility. He posts them on the Internet as "Weird but True," including the claim that Shaw and Rauscher showed that listening to Mozart's sonata for two pianos in D major "increased SAT scores of students by 51 points." Actually, Shaw and Rauscher gave 36 UC Irvine students a paper folding and cutting test and found the Mozart group showed a temporary 8-9 point increase over their scores when they took the test after either a period of silence or listening to a relaxation tape.
Despite the feeling of futility in dealing with American utopians, Carroll does a nice job of reviewing the academic state of play up to 1999. Here is the comment of John Bruer, head of the James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis: "Stories stressing that children's experiences during their early years of life will ultimately determine their scholastic ability, their future career paths, and their ability to form loving relationships have little basis in neuroscience."
A student has written to McDNL inquiring about Ashley Montagu's claim that there are no races. Here is McDNL editor Chris Brand's reply.
I think you have chosen an excellent subject: important yet neglected. I would say Israel Ehrenburg (the name of 'Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu' at his birth in England) was long the most formidable and persuasive opponent that the London School had. (Eventually, c. 1974, Leon Kamin entered the fray over IQ; then c. 1980, Stephen Jay Gould took up the cudgels from an even dizzier height within the circles of New York Times-venerated science.) It was only when I bought his Man and Aggression (1968, O.U.P.) -- compiling papers largely opposing the McDougall/Lorenz/Ardrey view of human aggression* -- that I began to realize, as a young psychologist, just how bitter the battle over the heredity/innateness of important human characters was going to be. Please tell me more of what you would like to know. I will be interested to learn from you just how much influence he actually had in social anthropology. Do you know Roger Pearson's book Heredity and Humanity (reprinted 1996, Washington, Scott-Townsend)? It has some useful pages on all the intellectual descendants of Franz Boas. Sincerely, -- Chris Brand.
* Montagu noted that most
definitions of instinct "have widely tended to follow the essentials of
McDougall's pattern" and wrote: "The truth is that the concept of
"instinct" has assumed the form of a doctrine, and perhaps represents
the outstanding example of reification in the whole realm of science, the
employment of an abstraction as if it had a real existence." Montagu felt
that even Tinbergen's revival of 'instinct' theorizing could be set aside in
view of D. S. Lehrman's critique of Lorenz (Quart. Rev. Biol. 28, 1953).
Montagu's view was simple: "The notable thing about human behavior
is that it is learned. Everything a human being does as such he has had to
learn from other human beings."
Montagu had been troubled by the appearance of such
popular books as William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Desmond
Morris's Naked Ape. He felt that in accepting innate aggression and thus
innate evil, "Ardrey and Lorenz stand in a sort of apostolic
succession" to St Paul's view that it 'the sin that dwelleth in me'
explains evil conduct (Romans 7:18-24). Montagu feared that people would once
more be tempted by the lazy Christian way out of this problem: relying on
divine redemption and absolution rather than seeking true emancipation and
emendation of life. In fact, thought Montagu, "The evidence of scientific
inquiry does not support this dismal view of human nature, still less does it
provide any support for the idea of "innate depravity", whatever form
that doctrine may take." The book was dedicated to Morris Ginsberg -- the
dreaded intellectual who was much lampooned in BBC Radio's satirical 'Goon
Show' of circa 1960.
PS À propos Montagu's idea that there are no races, here are some articles from my newsletters through 1997-8-9.
TgFNL 7 iii '97
__________________
Race Realism: HUMAN RACES BY FACTOR ANALYSIS
Thanks to Art Jensen, six Varimax components have now been identified in genetic data collected world-wide. The following extract comes from TgF supporter Glayde Whitney's helpful article in this month's issue of American Renaissance.
////////////
[A survey of allele-frequency by Nei & Roychoudhury, subsequently factor-analysed by Jensen, gave] six components [reflecting] clusters that are easily identified as the following population groups. (1) [North] Mongoloids, (2) Caucasoids, (3) South Asians and Pacific Islanders, (4) Negroids, (5) North and South Amerinds plus Eskimos, (6) Aboriginal Australians and Papuan New Guineans. These data are....a virtually irrefutable demonstration of the reality of race.... [In future] it could easily be found that there is far more consistent genetic difference between the different [human] races -- all thought to [belong to] the same species -- than there is between wolves and coyotes, for example, which can interbreed but are recognized as distinct species.
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Further discussion of recent work on the major human genetic groups can be found in Del Thiessen's Bittersweet Destiny: the Stormy Evolution of Human Behaviour (1996, Transaction, £28-95). The constant in all this is the major threefold division between Blacks, Whites and Asians; moreover, the biggest and most ancient division is that between Blacks on the one hand and the rest of the world's peoples on the other.
________________
TgFNL 11 iv '97
__________________
Race Realism: RACE NOW SHOWN TO BE LINKED TO DNA DIFFERENCES
Thanks to an American TgF supporter, I am able to pass on the following information.
//////
As you probably believed, and contrary to the ideas of some people, analysis of human DNA samples provides "significant statistical power for ethnic affiliation estimation." See the following brand-new paper:
Mark D. Shriver, Michael W. Smith, Li Jin, Amy Marcini, Joshua M. Akey, Ranjan Deka, and Robert E. Ferrell (1997). 'Ethnic-Affiliation Estimation by Use of Population-Specific DNA Markers.' American Journal of Human Genetics 60, iv, 957-964.
Reprints from: Dr. Mark Shriver; Dept. of Human Genetics; University of Pittsburgh; 130 DeSoto Street; Pittsburgh, PA 15235.
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Race Realism and The History Man: NO 'RACES', PLEASE, WE'RE 'ETHNICS' NOW!
Heterodox historian Professor John Vincent -- suspended from teaching at the University of Bristol (NL, Apr. 7) -- has kindly acknowledged the information with which I supplied him about the affair of 'The 'g' Factor.' Kindly, he sympathizes with me re the stress that I must have suffered; and he has no doubt that "both Edinburgh University and your publishers failed lamentably." Although I may be entirely wrong (perhaps "too essentialist"), "unless we can debate your views freely, nobody will ever know the truth." However, even this brave and deviant British academic cannot resist a little show of PC 'sensitivity'.
//////
I would prefer it if you did not use the word 'Race' for human differentiation within a population capable of interbreeding. I do not see that it has any scientific or biological basis. 'Ethnic' and 'ethnicity' would be altogether better.
\\\\\\
Frankly, I am, as the young say, gob-smacked that a fellow heretic should feel moved to issue such advice. Of course, I have sent 'the Prof.' [as The Sun used to call him] Glayde Whitney's piece on race (NL, Mar. 7, Race Realism: HUMAN RACES BY FACTOR ANALYSIS) -- though noting sadly as I did so that the users of multivariate statistics have yet to agree whether there are nine major racial clusters (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994), six major clusters (Jensen, 1997/8), or really just the well-known big 'BAAW' four (in rough order of arrival)
Black; Aboriginal [Australian-Aboriginal / Papuan];
Asian [i.e. Mongoloid, or East Asian]; White
which between them (and their interfaces with each other) allow adequate primary description of some 99.99% of the world's population today).
_____________________
Recently there has been new research from China.
McDNL 23 xi '98
___________________________________________
Race Ancestry: CHINESE RESEARCH REVEALS MAIN HUMAN RACES
(Nature 15 x '98, News & Views, Alberto Piazza)
New research using 'microsatellites' [repeats
of short DNA segments] to test human genetic variability has produced a clear
picture of racial grouping and descent. A particularly novel feature of the
work by J. Y. Chu et al. (Proc. Nat. Acad. Science 95, 11763-11768) was the use
of 28 samples from Asia -- four of them involving Han Chinese and the remaining
24 involving Chinese minorities. The picture of descent that emerges is roughly
as follows:
African; Caucasian; New Guinea; Australian Aborigine; Amerindian [Native
American]; Japan + North-east China; Shanghai; Guanxi and Taiwan; Cambodia
/Sezuan; Han [Northern China].
The authors' representation of differences between racial groups has its diverting feature of appearing to suggest maximal separation between the Negroid and Han Chinese populations.
_____________________________________________
Finally, to bring the matter of what is the best racial classification up to date, it should be noted that luminaries Jared Diamond and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza continue quite happy to give the impression that there are no real races at all, as Ashley Montagu always hoped in his arguments with race realist Carlton Coon. However, Diamond's account of the matter does not even refer to any statistical analyses being undertaken (New York Review of Books 13 iv '00, 58-61). If Diamond is to be believed, the two scholars between them prefer to do without quantitative assessments of similarity and clustering! Of course, they additionally insist that any differences between 'races' are merely 'skin deep'; but Diamond at least does not trouble to mention a single instance where any search for deeper differences has ever been made! Such quasi-lordly indifference to the formulations of Arthur Jensen, Phil Rushton and J. Y. Chu et al. does the obscurantist Montagu/Cavalli-Sforza?/Diamond cause no service at all.
"The
problem of Freud's theories is that they are just not testicle."
A
psychology student overheard, reported by Liz Spelman, London Review of
Books 30 iii '00. {Reviewing
a new book by philosopher Richard Wollheim which continues Wollheim's crusade
to re-instate Freudian and McDougallian emotions and instincts in any serious
account of the human moral sense. Wollheim is not happy with Kant's
"singularly bleached view of morality"; nor does he seem to care for
psychologists who have shamelessly abandoned Freud out of feminism or fear of
feminism.}
APRIL 11
THIS WEEK:
Zimbabwe: BLACK RACE-HATE DICTATOR SHREDS PC HARMONY
Feminazism: GOVERNMENT SET TO DEFY APPEAL COURT WARNING
Internet Censorship: GAYS ARE FIRST VICTIMS OF ANTIQUE BRITISH VIEW OF NET
'Antiracism': NEW LABOUR STIRS RACE WAR POT
Racial sensitivity: BOSTON BARKEEPER IN TROUBLE FOR CELEBRATING BLACK HISTORY MONTH….
'American Renaissance' Conference Report: PROFS LYNN AND RUSHTON STAR IN WASHINGTON
Ancient History: ROME'S FALL DUE TO IMMIGRATION ON "EXCEPTIONALLY MASSIVE SCALE"
(Times 8 and 10 iv '00; Reuters 9 iv '00; Daily Mail 10 iv '00)
BLACK RACE-HATE DICTATOR
SHREDS PC HARMONY
-- How a Black racist reparationaloony tyrant, once beloved of lefties but now opposed by most of his fellow Black Zimbabweans, will wreck race relations for the whole world --
As Britain's top leftie handouts minister, Clare Short, decreases aid to famine-threatened Ethiopia because of that country's continuing preference for war, Zimbabwe tells the world quite simply: 'Just don't bother investing in Black countries -- we are incorrigible!'
HARARE, Zimbabwe -- In party mood, high on drink and drugs, gangs of Black 'veterans' taunted White farmers all over former Southern Rhodesia and occupied a thousand of the country's 4,500 big farms. Waving machetes and nail-studded sticks, ruffians and their obese women under the influence of former independence fighter Chenjerai Hitler Hunzvi, killed two Whites, injured dozens and chased scores of White families from their farms. Twenty years ago, Robert Mugabe, then 56, had promised land to 600,000 Black Zimbabweans; but he went on to spend UKP£43 million from Britain on providing land for only 65,000 of his own supporters -- many of whom have proved incapable of running the farms they were given. Now Zimbabwe's government-backed gangs have brought to a dramatic end world-wide the pretence that multiculturalism will ever endure once Black voters are in a majority.
Gone are the African Raj pictures of Whites lolling over their landrovers admiring sunsets on their tobacco farms attended by liveried Black servants. Today's pictures show Whites with blood streaming down their faces and shirts and White women and children pinned within electric fences circling their farms. One tearful farmer, Alexander Van Leenhoff, said he signed a document giving half his property 155 miles west of Harare to the 'veterans.' They had beaten and whipped him front of his wife and children after occupying his farm. The Afrikaaner told Reuters: "How the hell do we expect to get reconciliation when people can abuse us like this. They can beat you. They can swear at you. I don't know -- I don't know the future. It is like a woman being raped then standing up and saying 'thank you."' Alarm bells have begun ringing in South Africa, too, where 1,000 White families already leave each month and many Blacks are disenchanted at the failure of Black rule to deliver White wealth into their hands.
Zimbabwe Attorney General Patrick Chinamasa told the High Court that 60,000 veterans were occupying 1,000 farms and said police could not handle the court's order to evict them. ``At the end of the day any order issued by this court ordering the evictions will be unenforceable,'' he said in an application to the High Court on behalf of the police.
Zimbabwe's homophobic and racist dictator met little opposition from Britain's "ethical foreign policy" as he declared: "This country belongs to Black people. There is no-one who is going to say to a White man, 'You are the boss.'" The shameless tyrant who defies the judgement of the country's courts told White farmers, "I will hand over to you any money that Britain gives in compensation for your farms. But if Britain gives nothing, you are finished." Nor was New Labour visibly upset that an Observer correspondent was told by Hitler Hunzvi (watched by admiring bodyguards): "You look like a White farmer to me. Do not go to any more of those protest marches or you will die!" Instead, Messrs Blair and Shaw berated British Conservatives for talking of a 'flood of bogus asylum seekers' in Britain itself -- though in fact the numbers of asylum seekers are up twenty-fold on the 1980's and it is agreed by New Labour that most are mere economic migrants. Westminster opposition spokesman Francis Maude said what was happening in Zimbabwe "looks pretty much like ethnic cleansing"; and Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai called Mugabe a "deranged despot." ``The president has pressed the country's self-destruct button for personal gain,'' Topper Whitehead of Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change said at a rally on Sunday. But Her Majesty's Government would only say -- via one-time anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain -- "We are not into either appeasing or punishing him." Hain said Britain agreed that the "historic injustice" in the colonial period and "racist rule" of white-governed Rhodesia had left whites with much of the best land in today's Zimbabwe. Spineless vacillation seemed the name of Britain's 'Third Way' neosocialists who had last year told Serbia at Rambouillet it must accept invasion so that Nato could solve the Kosovo conflict. Reparationaloony Hain does not consider that 'colonial rule' in Zimbabwe ended with a mutually agreed settlement twenty years ago. In South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu condemned Mugabe, but Saint Nelson Mandela declined to do so.
The Times described Mugabe as a "flailing racist dictator" and talked of Mugabe's "gospel of race hate"; but wiseacres thought Mugabe was only wanting shots to be fired by White farmers against his veterans so he could declare an emergency and postpone elections. In any case, no-one was minded to inflict on one-time-left-wing-darling Mugabe the high principles that the West inflicts on itself -- certainly not British Foreign Secretary Nookie Cookie who met with Mugabe and other leaders for prawn cocktail croissants, sundowners and sensational belly dancing at Cairo's Hilton Hotel.
Zimbabwe is currently experiencing severe fuel shortages: people are lining up at gas pumps for as much as 6 - 8 hours for a gallon of gasoline, and even doctors are struggling to get fuel for their vehicles. However, many Whites are hoping to hang on. Most already have their own personal wealth out of the country. The farms themselves are in debt to Zimbabwe banks to the tune of UK£100 million, so if Whites leave huge problems will arise for the Zimbabwe economy. Zimbabwe's 4,500 commercial farmers are the banking sector's biggest business. A small proportion of farms are owned outright, but most farmers have borrowed the money to buy their properties and all are reliant on short-term loans to plant and harvest crops.
Mugabe travelled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Saturday to visit President Laurent Kabila on his way to a Third World economic summit in Cuba. His deployment of an estimated 11,000 soldiers in the Congo to bolster Kabila against a rebellion backed by Uganda and Rwanda has contributed to Zimbabwe's economic crisis. Critics of the land-grab say the number of Black farm workers displaced exceeds those resettled.
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LONDON -- 'Africa leads the world,' says Nobelist Mandela -- After a year of butchery in the Congo, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Somalia, and with Zimbabwe declaring its readiness for war with Mr Blair and his "homosexual pigs", Saint Nelson Mandela said peace, stability and the emergence of democratic leaders in Africa indicated that the continent was experiencing a renaissance that would make the 21st century, "the African century." He told an audience of gullible, PC-indoctrinated, TV-watching 'students' at the London School of Economics, "I want you to open your eyes and observe what is happening."
US REPUBLICANS GROW BRAVER re SHARPTON
WASHINGTON (Associated Press 29 iii '00) -- The Rev. Al Sharpton has filed a $30 million libel lawsuit against the Republican National Committee and its chairman Jim Nicholson. The suit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington claims the GOP libelled Sharpton by saying he had incited riots and protests that led to deaths in Crown Heights in 1991 and Harlem in 1995. "They have a right to call me names, they have no right to accuse me of a crime," Sharpton said outside RNC headquarters in Washington Wednesday. "To accuse me of murder is slander." Republicans stepped up their attacks on Sharpton after Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Al Gore met privately with him as they courted black voters in New York. Nicholson said he stands by his statement, published in the Washington Post March 11 as a letter to the editor. "Al Sharpton is no civil rights leader. He is a hatemonger, an anti-Semite and a racist, and for him to be a political partner of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton ... is shameful," the RNC leader said. In the letter, Nicholson wrote that "Sharpton set off four nights of rock and bottle throwing attacks on Jewish homes culminating in a mob surrounding a young Talmudic scholar Yankel Rosenbaum and stabbing him to death."
GAYS ARE FIRST VICTIMS OF ANTIQUE BRITISH VIEW OF NET
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A gay current affairs magazine has had its website shut down by its
internet service provider, the first casualty of a libel case settled four days
ago that could stifle free speech on the net in Britain. The entire site of Outcast,
edited by Chris Morris, was closed by Netbenefit, the ISP which hosted but did
not control its content. The removal followed legal letters from another gay
publication, the Pink Paper, which said a proposed article in Outcast was
defamatory and libellous of the paper and its chairman, Kelvin Sollis.
Netbenefit took the site down after an examination of Outcast's entire
online content, prompted by the letters, said Alison Sparshatt, the company's
managing director.
The decision follows last Friday's legal settlement
when the ISP Demon Internet agreed to pay £15,000 in damages and £230,000 in
legal costs to Dr Laurence Godfrey, a British physicist who said he had been
defamed by two anonymous messages on the Net. Last year a judge ruled that
because Dr Godfrey had contacted Demon, the company could not claim it was
simply a carrier of the messages and unable to control their content.
The Demon case "is very serious for ISPs because
it means they have to err on the side of caution and will remove content rather
than face the threat of legal action," said Nicholas Lansman, secretary-general
of the Internet Services Providers Association (ISPA). ISPs want the Government
to change the law so they are not liable for content they carry, in the way
that phone companies are not responsible for slander over the phone.
Feminazism
GOVERNMENT SET TO DEFY APPEAL COURT WARNING
(Times 6 iv '00, p. 1; Daily Mail 10 iv '00; Observer 9 iv '00)
LONDON -- Britain's neosocialist Government plans to shift the burden of proof in rape cases. In future, as the most extreme PC fanatics recommend, defendants in rape trials would be required to prove that their victims agreed to sex.
This plan may result in all dating in Britain coming to include the use of McDNL's Standard Consent Letter (McDNL 28 vii '98). However, the announcement of New Labour idiocy was followed by the Appeal Court overturning the conviction of a man who has been imprisoned for 14 years (BBCR4UK 7 iv '00, 11:00; Times 8 iv '00, 'Man freed after rape lie cost him 14 years in jail'). Roy Burnett, now 56, a gardener, said to be mentally subnormal, had supposedly followed a student nurse one night and raped her and had oral sex with her savagely at knife point. (Remarkably, no traces of his own blood or semen were found; and the 'victim' had only scratches to show for her ordeal.) Already having been once subjected to a hospital order after an indecent assault, Burnett was condemned by the trial judge in 1986 as a menace to society. But Devon police became suspicious when, in 1998, the victim reported she had been raped a second time, by another man. After inquiries among her friends, she was believed to have made completely false allegations and to have inflicted her injuries on herself. The woman still maintains she was raped in 1986 but she refused to give evidence at Burnett's appeal. Now the woman herself may face charges.
Mr Burnett is probably eligible for about UK£1.25 million in compensation for his wrongful detention. He could have stayed in prison much longer if his 'victim' had not made her second rape allegation -- for he could never be given parole since he declined to admit guilt. Appeal judge Lord Justice Judge expressly remarked the injustice of the case that had resulting from a failure to insist on unequivocal evidence that Burnett was the criminal. Burnett had been picked out by the 'victim' at a police identity parade.
Astonishingly, the psychopathic female herself 'cannot be named for legal reasons' -- supposedly to protect a baby she has just had by the boyfriend who went to police to tell them of her lies. Even more astonishingly, the left-wing Observer carried prominently an article by Carol Sarler deploring the ease with which men can be convicted for rape in Britain (10 iv '00, 'All rapes are not the same'). Apparently, British men today are even obliged to suspend sexual intercourse when they have completed vaginal penetration and have full steam up -- if the woman changes her mind. Sarler said Britain has "a judicial system gone bonkers" under ultra-feminist influences.
UNIVERSITY OF UNTRUTH SLIPS FURTHER BEHIND COMPETITORS
The Times has now evaluated all UK universities and begun presenting its results (10 iv '00, and www.the-times.co.uk/gug/). Edinburgh LUniversity has got off to a poor start. In the first nine comparisons made, in languages, Edinburgh came in the top ten UK universities in only three of the comparisons -- the same level as was achieved by Durham, Exeter and Edinburgh's Scottish rival, St Andrews. The universities of Cambridge, London and Oxford were in the top ten for all nine comparisons. Ratings gave a 50% weighting to Teaching Quality Assessment, 30% to Research Assessment and 20% to the academic level of students on intake.
NEW LABOUR STIRS RACE WAR POT
(BBCR4UK 08:00; Observer 10 iv '00)
LONDON -- The Home Office has been denounced as "institutionally racist" by one of the Government Ministers responsible for it. Mr Mike O'Brien says that few of his staff may be racist as individuals -- at least, no more than in any other British organisation. 20% of H.O. civil servants are now drawn from ethnic minorities and many more are women. But O'Brien deplored the fact that only 1% of senior staff at the H.O. are coloured. A recent survey found that 30% of staff in his department felt they had suffered discrimination.
O'Brien's implied criticism of the record of the Labour Government, in power since May 1997, came after an attack on a 17-year-old half-West Indian youth who had fathered an out-of-wedlock child by a White Oxfordshire girl, also 17. The shaven-headed youth had his pullover sprayed with petrol and set on fire by four White youths. They drew up in a car and called him a 'smelly Paki' as he walked home at 1a.m. from an evening's drinking while in the village of Berinsfield, 12 miles south of Oxford. Thames Valley police said the attack on Christopher Barton, which required brief hospital out-patient treatment, was "doubtless racially motivated." White inhabitants of the village were surprised by the incident, telling the Guardian that the village of 3,000 had never experienced any racial problems before.
{The massive over-representation of minorities among middle-ranking Home Office staff perhaps explains recent authoritarian proposals to restrict jury trials and to shift the burden of proof in rape cases…. It is now plain that 'institutional racism' is a handy concept for ministers -- allowing an appearance of instant special empathy for supposed victims of race hate, and sackings if they desire, while equally being compatible with no action at all. Sadly, British police in the past year set an example of how to handle such accusations by superiors: they simply grovelled, arranged high-publicity Fanta-drinking conferences with minorities and dawn raids on 'racists' (yielding a mere 18 charges from 100 arrests) and have carried on without a single newsworthy retirement. However, the new authoritarianism and caprice in government has done Britain's minorities no conspicuous good: figures show massive increases in race-hate incidents since New Labour took office. It is time to try the classic policy of treating crime according to the damage done instead of pandering to alleged 'sensitivities' and 'fears' and making it appear that a drunken Black youth needs more protection than an old age pensioner or a college lecturer who speaks out against paedohysteria. To try to turn an out-of-wedlock father into a martyr for his race seems particularly misguided when Christopher Barton's attackers did not even know what race he was. The Government's insistence on showing favouritism to minorities -- even a phoney favouritism -- is bound to be provocative and counter-productive with the White majority. Already, sensible Black lefty Darcus Howe is warning of imminent trouble in areas of unemployment like Dover, Oldham and Birmingham. He writes (New Statesman, 10 iv '00): "Combat 18 activists are building a capacity for war and the Pakistanis are prepared to retaliate. This is no scaremongering. Trust me." (Darcust's belief in Combat 18 is interesting since the British National Party considers Combat 18 to be a government-controlled MI6 operation….) }
NEW YORK (APBnews.com 4 iv '00) -- Danegeld -- Mexican soldiers in a lorry crossed into the USA (New Mexico) on March 18, probably trafficking in drugs or bringing illegal immigrants. When challenged, they fired on US troops without injury occurring. Nine of the Mexican soldiers were caught and detained; but they were released within the day without charge. An attempt -- successful for a fortnight -- was made to achieve US media silence. Washington regards Mexico as having been friendly in keeping down world prices for oil. Evidently President Clinton considers Mexican criminality and Kosovo-type massaging of the Washington press corps a small price to pay for a quiet life.
BRIERFIELD, Lancashire (Times 6 iv '00, 'Church fire blamed on racists', Russell Jenkins) -- Multicultural Britain Hots Up -- A petrol-bomb attack on a church used by White worshippers was racially motivated, police believe. The Rev David Bullock, the minister at the Full Gospel Mission, in Brierfield, saw flames leap from the wooden doors of his tabernacle as he was holding a Bible study group. Worshippers, some in their eighties, were ushered to safety through a side door while others tackled the fire with pans of water. Nobody was injured. Muslim community leaders condemned the attack. Zameer Ahmed, an Islamic teacher, said: "We see this as a racist attack intended to stir up trouble in the area. It is not the work of a genuine Muslim." {Attacks on Christians are common in Muslim countries. There are often racial underpinnings to that, as Christians are often tribes or sub-tribes of conquered people. For instance Maronites and Coptic Christians in the Middle East are not Arabs, likewise in the Sudan.}
LONDON -- As part of woebegone articles about Englishness, the Spectator (1 iv '00) has admitted a few of the facts about PC, the arrival of which the '