Wise Man's Heart

You're cooler than you think

2010-09-05T22:30:00.003-04:00

I told you I would post again.

Negative thoughts about my ability to relate to other people have been a constant thorn in my side for my whole life. Over the past 2 years or so, a confluence of factors, including learning about the particular brand of social self-help pitched by the seduction community, moving to a new city where it happens to be easier to meet people from a conservative Christian background and thus who have at least something culturally in common with me, my increased status resulting from being a medical student (yes, it does exist, even if it's not enough to win a girl over by itself,) and the phenomenon of just being more comfortable in one's own skin that does happen as you enter your thirties, have given me reason to be more optimistic about this. I still become frustrated once in a while, but one thing I have learned is just how much your own self-perception influences others' perception of you.

I live directly across the street from a small supermarket, one that happens to be the closest full-scale grocery store to the university, and is therefore frequently patronized by students undergraduate, graduate, and professional. One evening a couple of weeks ago, on one my frequent saunters over there to pick up a few foodstuffs, three sorority chicks, to the best of my recollection a 6, a 7, and a 9, were wandering around the produce section chattering ditzily as they undertook the intellectually challenging task of selecting produce. I witnessed the following exchange:

Sorority chick: What kind of lettuce are you supposed to put on tacos?

Random passing undergrad dude: The shredded kind.

SC: (Oh, aren't you funny, blah blah blah, I don't really remember what she said) Want to come to our taco party?

RPUG: Sure.

Now RPUG looked like a pretty average guy. He wasn't a rock star. He didn't come across as super-alpha. It struck me that in the course of about 5 seconds, with one smart-ass comment, this guy had gotten himself invited to a sorority taco party.

My first reaction in situations like this has long been--and this time was no different--"Why can't I be that kind of guy? Why doesn't anything like that ever happen to me?" Maybe those thoughts come from the devil on one shoulder, because this time, another voice inside my head, call it the angel on my other shoulder, said "you are that kind of guy. Stuff like that does happen to you all the time, or at least it used to when you got out more." It occurred to me that I had always thought of myself as a low-social status nerd who is perceived by hot girls (and cool guys) as a low social-status nerd and is incapable of rolling with them. But something made me stop, do a reality check, and realize: when I was in undergrad, hot girls and cool guys invited me to parties all the time. I just always turned them down. "I can't go to parties where people drink and dance and listen to loud, currently popular music," I thought. "I'm not cool enough." But they didn't think I was a low-social-status nerd who couldn't roll with them. I created that persona in my own mind by acting that way.

The same thing happened when I started medical school. When everyone was new to everyone else and eager to make friends, I got invited to parties galore. But since I never went, figuring my social time was better spent at church where I was sure to meet a wife, I assume I soon developed a reputation as someone who just isn't interested in socializing and I stopped getting invited.

It's an uphill battle when you're fighting 33 years of negative thought patterns, but one thing I have to keep reminding myself of is that a decent appearance is actually easy to put on. In the past couple of years, I've learned to dress a bit more stylishly for social occasions, gotten contact lenses, and learned to use a bit of product in my hair, but even long before all that I could never have been mistaken for a Magic: The Gathering player. My freshman year of college, directly across the hall from me lived two of the biggest stoners I have ever met in my life. I'll never forget the time, early on in the year, when one of them, having somehow surmised that I didn't go out Friday night, said to me, perplexed and genuinely curious, "dude, did you just, like, hang out here?" Well, of course, I thought, don't you know I'm a nerd? But to him, I obviously looked like a regular guy, the kind who would be found at a frat party on a Friday night doing a keg stand or bumping and grinding with some drunk chick just like the rest of 'em. He didn't think I was a nerd. I did. It's actually easy to look like a socially mainstream person, and from there it's a choice to act the part.

As I said, it's not easy to change these thought patterns when they've been so deeply ingrained over so many years. But the evidence has long been right in front of my eyes--I simply chose to ignore it--that if I simply muster the cojones to blurt out the word "shredded" to some strange girls, I could find myself at a taco party.

It's all in your head.

I will never stop blogging

2010-03-03T12:21:00.003-05:00

I'm sitting here in mid-day, with three weeks off from medical school, feeling overwhelmed despite having a totally open schedule--I have to write up the findings from my research project in the form of a real scientific paper, to be published in an actual medical journal--so I thought I'd procrastinate by posting a blog entry.

One of the reasons I don't post more often is that I have so much to do in medical school. Now, it's not that I'm always working; I wind up procrastinating as much as anyone else, but as long as I have work to do I usually feel I shouldn't spend the time blogging (merely browsing my favorite blogs is more passive, and thus easier to allow myself to do.) But I like blogging when I can, no matter how infrequently I do it, and thus one of the phenomena I don't understand is permanently closing one's blog. I was thinking about this after reading that Anakin Niceguy is closing up shop. Novaseeker did the same thing in January, and I know there have been other bloggers I used to read, or at least check in on occasionally, whose names I can't remember right now, who announced an official end to blogging. (At least those guys are leaving their blogs up, though. One thing I really can't understand is deleting your blog. Unless you fear that the thought police are coming after you in real life, what harm is there in leaving it up, for posterity's sake?)

Sure, there are disadvantages to being an infrequent blogger, namely, that you lose regular readership. There was a time when I was posting nearly every day, and got a lot more hits than I do now. When it's been weeks since you've posted, people simply stop dropping by, as I myself have with Ganttsquarry and A.J. Travis. But, they may post again someday. Why foreclose that possibility by announcing that you are officially done with blogging?

All of this is not to criticize or argue with people who stop blogging; just to say that, no matter how infrequently I write a substantive post, I'll always be around.

Adventures in gynecology

2009-12-14T22:29:00.002-05:00

For the past six weeks I've been on an outpatient rotation, which means seeing patients in the office from 8-5. My weeks consist of family practice, pediatrics, and obstetrics/gynecology all intermingled together. This afternoon was a gynecology afternoon. Incidentally, this is at one of the top hospitals in the country according to U.S. News & World Report.

My second patient of the afternoon was a pretty, prim and proper, professional white 30 year old woman, the kind you'd expect to meet at happy hour at the yuppie bar near the local office park. I saw that she had a hyphenated surname and heard the nurse mention that the patient didn't want us to use the stickers with her name on them because she was changing her name. I walked into the room and introduced myself.

Me: Hi, Miss Hyphenated-Surname?

Pt: Yes.

Me: I'm Dr. Abooboo's medical student for the afternoon. Would you mind if I go over some history with you before Dr. Abooboo comes in?

Pt: Sure.

Me: So, I hear you're changing your name, is that right?

Pt: Yeah, actually the name they have on there is wrong, my last name is Similarsounding-HyphenatedSurname, but I'm getting married next week, so it'll be changing anyway.

Me: Oh, congratulations. So, what can we help you with today, do you have any concerns, are your periods regular, when was your last Pap smear, etc., etc.

Pt: Blah blah blah, yakity scmakity.

Me: OK, let me go find Dr. Abooboo and we'll be back in together to do the exam.

Exit.
[I should say here that the patient was very nice and pleasant, but I don't have the ear for conveying that in dialogue.]
Enter Hermes and Dr. Abooboo.

Dr: So, I hear you have some big plans! Where are you getting married?

Pt: Well, we're having two weddings, actually. The first one's in Turkey. My fiance is Turkish.

Internal dialog of Hermes of 5 years ago: (Oh, isn't that nice, I'm happy for her.)

Internal dialog of present-day Hermes: (Another one bites the dust.)

(Sometime later)
Dr: what do you do for a living?

Pt: I'm a management consultant. My fiance is too; we both work for the same company.

So this nice, pretty, highly educated and accomplished six-figure-earning white girl will marry a six-figure-earning Middle Eastern immigrant, probably have one mixed-race baby and deposit him in day care, then spend the rest of their lives blowing their combined six-figure income on a big house in some white-flight development with a name like "The Hunt at Glen Run," a couple of BMW's in the driveway, and international luxury vacations until they die in a nursing home. If their marriage lasts.

Later in the afternoon I saw an 18-year-old white girl who was there with her mother to discuss the results of a Pap smear and colposcopy. (Colposcopy is the screening test done after a Pap comes back negative, and often involves cervical biopsy.) She was cute, freckle-faced, with slightly eccentric mannerisms, the kind you can tell is a theater chick just by looking at her. She was wearing one of those knit wool caps with the brim that sticks out which theater chicks always wear. I don't know what they're called. Both mother and daughter were quite irate because they had had multiple Paps and colpos done at one of the other big hospitals in town and had never been able to get the results. They were both quite nervous about the fact that she had had an abnormal Pap. I looked in her chart, and saw that she had already had five colposcopies. Five. This girl was a freshman in college, and evidently she had already spread her legs for enough bad boys--or maybe one who was really, really bad--that HPV had already crawled in, put its feet up, made itself right at home, even built a little bungalow and had a party going on.

Call me naive, cultural leftists, but I'm pretty sure my grandmothers wouldn't have had five abnormal Pap smears by age 18.

This girl was not happy about the prospect of future Paps and colpos. "I'm deathly, irrational afraid of needles," or something equally eccentric, she said with typical theater chick melodrama. The doctor suggested she get the HPV vaccine. She immediately blurted out "I don't believe in vaccines." Her mother feebly expressed hope that if she were with one steady partner, maybe her future risk would be minimized. This normal, white bread, suburban mother, who took it in stride that her unmarried 18-year-old daughter was sexually active, was not wearing a wedding ring.

The fall of Western Civilization continues unabated. Gynecology clinic is the front line.

A true WTF moment

2009-11-01T20:22:00.006-05:00

Thanks to the wonder of Facebook, I have just learned that a woman from my high school class is currently married to Mike Tyson. Apparently, they wed in June, two weeks after Tyson's 4-year-old daughter died in a "tragic treadmill accident." (I never knew there was such a thing.)

Here is a photo of the happy couple:

I didn't really know the girl, but I recognized the name, I looked her up in the yearbook, and yes, that's her. Who would have known that when I was 15, I was sitting in class next to the future wife of the notorious boxer a digital representation of whom I had spent countless hours trying to defeat?

Words fail me. Come to think of it, I don't recall there being a "common sense" class in high school.

Had it not been for alpha-eyed Joe, I'd have been married a long time ago

2009-09-20T16:27:00.005-04:00

In the previous post, Thursday left a comment stating that it doesn't make sense to assign all the blame for the current sexual dystopia to alpha males, but we shouldn't place all the blame on women either.

This got me thinking about what I think is a fatal flaw in the Roissysphere so far. It holds two mutually contradictory propositions--OK, these may never have been stated explicitly in these words anywhere, but one can definitely detect their undercurrent in the posts of Roissy et al.--namely:

Men are moral agents capable of choosing deliberate actions based on rational thought processes (e.g., choosing to run game and succeed with women or wallow in loneliness), while women are animals who are totally incapable of doing anything but blindly obeying their genetic programming to seek out and mate with the highest-status male they can find.
Women are to blame for our current situation.

Obviously, these cannot both be true. When an unruly dog bites the mailman, we don't blame the dog; we blame the owner for failing to keep the dog fenced in or on a leash. The stronger the first proposition, the weaker the second, and vice versa. If it is solely up to men to control and lead women, then women can have no responsibility for the current situation. If women are to blame, on the other hand, they must possess at least as much moral agency as men, if not more.

Interestingly, this is an idea the Roissysphere shares with some of the social conservatives they so despise. There's a conservative Reformed pastor and author named Douglas Wilson who wrote a book called Her Hand in Marriage in which he apparently says this:

When a couple comes for marriage counseling, my operating assumption is always that the man is completely responsible for all the problems. [Italics original.] Some may be inclined to react to this, but it is important to note that responsibility is not the same thing as guilt. If a woman has been unfaithful to her husband, of course she bears the guilt of adultery. But at the same time, he is responsible for it. To illustrate, suppose a young sailor disobeys his orders and runs a ship aground in the middle of the night. The captain and the navigator were both asleep and had nothing to do with his irresponsible actions. Who is finally responsible? The captain and navigator are responsible for the incident. They are career officers, and their careers are ruined. The young sailor will be getting out of the Navy in six months anyway. It may strike many as being unfair, but is is indisputably the way God made the world. The sailor is guilty; the captain is responsible.

Without this understanding of responsibility, authority becomes meaningless and tyrannical. Husbands are responsible for their wives. They are the head of their wives as Christ is the head of the church. Taking a covenant oath to become a husband involves assuming responsibility for that home. This means that men, whether through tyranny or abdication, are responsible for any problems in the home. If Christian men loved their wives as Christ loved the church, if they had given direction to their wives, if husbands had accepted their wives' necessary help with their God-ordained vocation, there never would have been room for any kind of feminist thinking within the church.

Yes, those italics are Wilson's. The man is completely responsible for all the problems. If your wife cheats on you, it's because you didn't lead her properly. As a Christian and a social conservative who, as Ferdinand Bardamu would say, "gets it," I completely disavow this kind of thinking. Yet you've got to hand it to Wilson: he at least gets the fact that if you assume the wife is a mere untrained dog, then it is completely the owner-husband's fault when she misbehaves.

I bring this up because I think there is a gaping hole in the burgeoning school of thought that melds MRA/MGTOW with the PUA/seduction community. I think it's great that more and more men are being clued into the realities of female psychology and that we're proposing solutions to the current mess in which we find ourselves. But right now, it seems like the only solution being proposed is slut-shaming, with no thought to the idea that in a sexually sane society there will have to be restraints on alpha males as well. This is true if only as a simple matter of supply and demand: it is often said that the cads we will always have with us. But if we succeed in slut-shaming all women into total chastity (i.e., no sex before marriage and total faithfulness to their husbands thereafter,) then assuming an equal sex ratio, whom will the cads fool around with? Yet in a traditional society, restraints on alphas go much further: polygamy has never been permitted in the Christian West, and as far as I know bigamy is still a crime in every state in the USA. Think also of the common occurrences in traditional society I mentioned in my last post: shotgun marriages, prison sentences (for men) for adultery, juries routinely nullifying charges against a vengeful wife out of sympathy. Would such a society consider a man like Silvio Berlusconi "an inspiration for men everywhere"?

I would hope it would be obvious that I don't blame either men or women exclusively. I believe both sexes are capable of being moral agents, and thus both are to blame. And perhaps my personal biases are showing through here; as a natural provider beta, I suppose I could be accused of being a little too eager to find ways to sock it to the alphas. However, one can't deny that alpha males willingly allowed the current sexual dystopia to develop, and benefit enormously from it. And when talking about the kind of society we should have, however true it is that restraints on women are necessary, we can't neglect the moral requirements and limitations that must be placed on men as well.

Our real enemies: alpha males

2009-09-07T15:32:00.008-04:00

A few weeks ago, someone calling himself Anonomega left the same comment on both In Mala Fide and Half Sigma, in response to the George Sodini incident. This comment intrigued me, though it was poorly formatted and a little obscene. I'm going to take the liberty of editing it slightly and reposting it here, in hopefully more readable form:

After pondering on Omega rage and pain, I realise it would do the Sodinis of the world good to, to paraphrase Sinead O'Connor, Fight The Real Enemy.

Gammas, Omegas, lend me your ear: your misogyny is, at worst, understandable; of this I will not argue. But stay your hand at those with the XX chromosome and heed... Yes, women ought stop having such high standards, settle more for lower males, appreciate nice guys, give them chance etc., since this is what men have to do. But consider: we can be pretty damn content with a 5, heck, even a 4.5. But what if there were many 10s not only making themselves available, but AGGRESSIVELY SEDUCING us? Would we bother with those 5s? Is it reasonable to expect us to? So in this alternate reality, if a 5 is deprived the joys of sex, romance, marriage, and motherhood, who should she really blame? The men, or a bunch of bitchy, slutty 10s who already have plenty of men, but still run around rubbing up against every halfway attractive man, simply because they CAN?

Do the "math".

Fight the Real Enemy: the ALPHAS.

All alphas have to do is pick one or two of the hottest ass they can get and f***ing MAKE DO with it, and it will trickle down to some come hither stares in Sodinis direction. But with each just-because-I-can extra lay, they brutally SNATCHED away Sodini's one chance at meager sexual contentment.

And many alphas know this! Look at Roissy's blog! They know this and they're laughing their sick f***ing asses off about it!! "Trix are for kids, motherf***er!" May I remind you these are the guys who TORMENTED YOU IN SCHOOL?! REMEMBER THAT, OMEGAS?! And when we learn how the mating game is really played, we realise they destroyed us far more than we thought they were when we were young. By beating us down, crushing our self-esteem, they were wringing out of us something PRECIOUS: our confidence, something ESSENTIAL to securing a mate, though we did not realise it at the time! Wake up and smell the locker insides and toilet water!

Alpha's, higher Betas, the Real Enemy, have always been our oppressors, their cruelty fueled by nothing other than their vile despising of the weak. Yet so many Gamma-Omegas wanna lash out at the c*nts. Why? The reasons are obvious. when your beaten down and SCARED--SO TERRIFIED--of your oppressors, it is expected to direct your bitterness and hurt at softer, easier targets. I walked the path of misogyny too, and I'm not suggesting going back to women-are-angels bullsh*t. It's just that upon simple thinking, reflection, analysis, whatever, I realise that misogyny is the easier path, yet it is ultimately the more cowardly.

To any future, budding, wanna-be, halfway, or neo-George Sodinis out there: I don't, ahem, support the sort of bloodshed he was about or anything... but I'm JUST SAYING.... IF YOU HAVE TO SHOOT SOMEBODY, IF YOU HAVE TO KIDNAP AND TORTURE SOMEBODY... think on my words and ask yourself: WHO DESERVES IT MORE?! Ahem... of course, in the name of decency and morality and all that good sh*t, I would have to advocate less psychotic means. Vengeance on alphas will be a lot harder and scarier than c*nt-hatred: you may have to discipline yourself, make yourself combat ready, and ultimately become that which you hate. Heck, I can't practice what I preach! But if you put down the "Stupid Sluts Take It Up The Ass Like they Deserve" porn and pick up the barbell, it will be potentially more rewarding, for yourself and (I think) society. And Alphas will learn the one downside rule of the alpha life:

Watch Your F***ing Back.

I have to admit that, while morbid, what this commenter said really resonated with me. I, too, was a frustrated teenage boy, with no clue about how to even begin interacting with these strange alien creatures called girls, impotently looking on with envy as the more popular boys somehow won their affections effortlessly, seemingly without doing anything, as if by magic. I wasn't exactly tormented by the bad boys in school; for the most part, they just ignored me, though this was doubtless due to the fact that I didn't even try to insert myself into their world. But those about whom I entertained sadistic fantasies of torture, murder, and worse (perhaps a bit too much disclosure, but I'm assuming most of us go through such a phase as a teenager) were not the girls, they were the cooler boys who were getting those girls. It was they I wanted to hurt.

And I'm sure Anonomega articulates the thoughts of many a frustrated teenage boy/young man with his observation that all an alpha has to do is pick a woman and make do with her. Just pick one! How many betas, at the nadir of their despair, have thought, "my God, he doesn't know how lucky he is! If I could be with just one of the countless girls he could get, I'd feel like the king of the world!"

I believe this tendency to view the man who is getting the woman as the problem, rather than the woman, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. After all, in lower animals, such as wolves, how does a male gain the privilege of mating with a female? Not by doing anything to the female herself, but by physically defeating the higher-status male who would stop him.

The problem is made complicated by the fact that today, alphas have been divided into two groups: as Ferdinand Bardamu of In Mala Fide has been calling them, male alphas and female alphas. ("Female alphas" referring not to females who are alpha, but males who are alpha in the eyes of females.) As Thursday has pointed out elsewhere, some of the men who are best with women have almost nothing else going for them. In modern society, where women don't need providers, you can have a dead-end job, be up to your eyeballs in debt, and have no future to speak of, yet be a world-class ladies' man. But it wasn't always this way. In traditional society, male alphas--leaders of men--more often got the girl, and it was hard to be a player. You were universally reviled, and the lack of contraception and abortion made multiple sexual conquests extremely impractical. In the past, naturals usually did have to just pick one and make do with her.

As Half Sigma recently wrote:

When pre-marital and extra-marital sex was very strongly discouraged by society, being able to talk a girl into bed didn’t mean spreading your genes as much as it meant being forced to marry her at the end of a shotgun (or crossbow or sword or whatever weapon was used back then), or even worse, killed by her angry relatives, put in jail for the crime of adultery, etc.

Examples of this sentiment--that it's not the ladies, but the ladies' men, who are the problem--abound. It's is captured well in the lyrics of country singer Vince Gill's song, "Pocket Full of Gold," about the life of the cad:

Some night you're gonna wind up
On the wrong end of a gun
Some jealous guy's gonna show up
And you'll pay for what you've done
What will it say on your tombstone?
"Here lies a rich man
With his pocket full of gold."

And remember the ending of Mozart's Don Giovanni: the seducer is depicted, quite literally, burning in hell.

And just today, Lawrence Auster at View from the Right referred to a sordid tale from his ancestry, in which his grandmother shot and killed his grandfather during an argument about an affair he was having with an another woman, and the jury let her off out of sympathy with her. In other words, they believed the philanderer deserves what he gets.

This tendency to blame and hate women that arises in some segments of the MRA/MGTOW community appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon. I'm not sure why this is. It could be that traditional society carried an implicit recognition that women were fallen creatures too, but was also resigned to the fact that women were going to do what they were going to do, and given the necessity of men leading and women following, thought it more important to discipline men. (Incidentally, this would contradict the Roissysphere's description of men as keys who will adapt themselves to whatever shape women choose their locks to take, but that is a topic for another entry.) And it could be that in modern society, even MRAs/MGTOWers have unconsciously absorbed the belief in female equality, so they expect women to make decisions on the same basis as men do, and become angry at them when they don't.

Whatever the case, like Anonomega, I don't advocate going out and shooting anyone, but I'm sure we can all agree that George Sodini didn't accomplish any good with his choice of targets.

Overheard at the gym: MRA/MGTOW talk from med students

2009-08-31T21:59:00.004-04:00

About two weeks ago, I was at the campus gym lifting weights, when I heard the phrase "get married" drifting over from a conversation some distance away. I looked over, and saw a group of three guys at a piece of equipment about twenty feet away from the one I was using. They were taking turns on it and chatting as they did so. I recognized one of them as a member of the class one year behind mine in medical school, though I really don't know him at all, so I assumed the others were med students as well. The part of the conversation I overheard went something like this:

"Me, getting married?"

"I'd never get married."

"I saw a thing on the news about some celebrity who just got divorced, and his wife wound up with more than half of all his money." [I thought they might have been referring to John Cleese.]

"I just don't get why you'd do that to yourself!"

"Well, I don't know, I guess some people do it if they want to have a family, you know..."

"Yeah, but you don't have to get married to have a family."

"True, but some people still feel like they should, I guess..."

I thought this was interesting just because of how my views have changed over the past year. If I had overheard this conversation one year ago, I would have felt in response a mixture of envy, jealousy, intimidation, resentment, and despair. Envy, because I would have assumed the reason the guys were talking this way is that they were selfish hedonists who happened to be blessed with the traits that make men attractive to women, and therefore they were going to take as much as they could get (of sex) while they could get it; and I wished I had the power to attract women that way. Jealousy, because I would have thought that by doing this they were monopolizing all the girls, corrupting many who would otherwise have remained innocent and naive and been attracted to a guy like me, turning them into sluts and party girls who were out of my league. Intimidation, because I would have assumed that anyone who lived their life that way was more socially dominant than I and would see me as a pathetic sniveling little wimp for clinging to traditional morality, and that they were on the side of the culture wars which was fighting to transform our society away from what I wanted it to be and toward something that was very unpleasant to me. Resentment that they would have the nerve to do this, and despair that their side in the culture wars was winning and their victory seemed inevitable.

All of this, because a few males indirectly implied that they thought it made more sense to have sex outside of marriage than within it.

Now that I have become familiar with the seduction community and the writings of F. Roger Devlin, and been clued into the real dynamics behind sexual relationships, I see things in a different light. I don't see these guys as heroes, nor innocent victims, but they are merely reacting to their environment. They see men in the news every day having their lives ruined and everything they have taken away in divorce court, all because their wives got "bored," and they understandably want to avoid that. They weren't objecting to marriage in theory, but to what it has become in practice in our society. Notably--something that would have escaped me a year ago, when I would have focused on their supposed caddishness and superiority to me in the dating market--they weren't complaining about the idea of settling down with one woman for the rest of your life. None of them explicitly said that they wanted to sleep around, and in fact they seemed to think having a family was still an acceptable goal. Fifty years ago, in a society that still held traditional sexual morality up as a public ideal, these guys would probably have gotten married without giving it much thought.

The point is that my own journey is illustrative of just how in the dark most of our society is. I can't say for certain what all the factors were which converged over the past year to change my point of view, but for most people, it is something that still hasn't happened. It must happen, particularly among social and religious conservatives, if we are to turn this ship around. Whether this will happen in time, or on a sufficient scale, remains to be seen, but the truth, at least in raw form, is out there.

Lustful men force innocent, unsuspecting girls to have abortions

2009-08-27T00:03:00.003-04:00

In the recent debate about game (aka the practice of seduction) that has engulfed a certain number of blogs I follow, the central bone of contention seems to be the question of what, exactly, has been understood about female sexuality in the past and whether or not new information about the same has been discovered recently. In a post on this topic, Thursday, who graciously quoted me, wrote the following:

The usual social conservative/traditionalist explanation was that bad males had gotten these young girls to sleep with them because these poor females wanted love and affection (but not sex) and those bad males refused to give them love and affection unless they slept with them. Those innocent females didn't really want the sex, you see, they just wanted to be loved and cherished, but they had to give these men sex outside of marriage or else these bad men would move on to some girl who would have sex with them. It was sexual extortion, aided by the fact that the young man could now say, "But you won't get pregnant. We have birth control now."

Whatever your background, I'm sure you will at least recognize this view as being a commonly held one. A prominent expositor of it is Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and in his spare time a prolific anti-male, woman-on-pedestal-placing blogger who seems to believe that all the problems in the world stem from the fact that men won't do what women want. When I read the above paragraph by Thursday, I immediately thought of Mohler, and surfed over to his blog to see ~~whether~~ in what way he had been attacking men lately. Sure enough, he wrote a post just last week entitled "The Hidden Reality of Abortion -- Empowering Men."

The reader is invited to peruse Mohler's blog at leisure, but I'm less interested in what Mohler himself had to say on the subject than on the piece which apparently sparked his thoughts. It's an opinion piece from the August/September issue of First Things entitled "Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men." In this essay, Richard Stith of Valparaiso University School of Law argues that abortion "has had the perverse result of freeing men and trapping women." Supposedly it has done so by allowing men to demand casual sex of women, under the threat that the men will not be responsible if the women become pregnant. I don't know what universe Stith is living in, where a man can force a woman to have an abortion. It's certainly not the one I'm living in, where an unmarried father can be sued for, and forced to pay, child support for 18 years, if the girl decides that she wants to keep the baby.

In a perfect illustration of the kind of thinking described by Thursday above, Stith writes:

I’ve also met a clever female undergraduate student living with her boyfriend, who thought she had solved this problem. When I asked whether she was for or against abortion, she answered: “I’m pro-choice, but you can bet I tell him I’m pro-life!” She reasoned that, in light of her warning, he would be careful not to fool around in ways that could lead to pregnancy.

Such a lie may not provide protection for every young woman in her situation, however. If she says she is pro-life so that he thinks abortion is not an option for her, he might decide to keep her from getting pregnant by leaving her for someone more open to abortion, a woman who doesn’t insist on his using a condom. That is, the presence in the sexual marketplace of women willing to have an abortion reduces an individual woman’s bargaining power. As a result, in order not to lose her guy, she may be pressured into doing precisely what she doesn’t want to do: have unprotected sex, then an unwanted pregnancy, then the abortion she had all along been trying to avoid.

Got that? A girl who is pro-choice, but for some reason trying to avoid an abortion, may, by lying and claiming to be pro-life, be "pressured" into the very abortion she'd been trying to avoid. Oh, the poor, clever, pro-choice, lying, angelic ingenue! Conspicuously absent from this scenario is any mention of the fact that the girl wilfully and deliberately chose to have sex with the guy. Does Stith even believe that is possible?

Jeez, if men had the power to mind-control women the way the Mohlers and Stiths of the world think we do, I'd have been married for 10 years by now.

Fortunately, a couple of the commenters display some common sense, including one Jerome, who writes:

A related myth embedded in this article is that women, somehow, don't naturally enjoy and want sex, but view it purely in procreative and responsible terms, while men are somehow wired to pursue irresponsible sex with no attention to the possibility of procreation.

It's true; this is a subtext that is present in the writings of most social conservatives on these subjects, though rarely stated explicitly. It's like the elephant in the living room, totally unnoticed when one has never questioned these myths about female sexuality, but, once one has had the veil lifted, makes reading such pieces a quite frustrating and somewhat unnerving experience. Unfortunately, in my experience, social conservative writers who espouse these views never respond to comments or any other form of feedback. No matter how many Jeromes write in to correct them, they never even bother to address the rebuttals; they simply ignore them and go on writing as though women don't like sex and are incapable of immorality.

A final thought: both Mohler and Stith's headlines place a negative connotation on the phrase "empowering men." Isn't it bizarre, that these male writers, believers in a traditional religion, one so often castigated by feminists as patriarchal, men who would undoubtedly affirm the biblical precepts that men be the head of both the church and their families, and that women submit to their husbands, apparently consider the empowerment of men to be a bad thing? They remind me of conservatives who are always arguing against affirmative action on the basis that it hurts black people; leaving the door wide open for everyone to assume that if it helped black people, it would then be OK. Hey Albert Mohler and Richard Stith: if it were proved tomorrow that abortion really empowered women and disempowered men, would it be OK after all?

Where have I been?

2009-08-03T22:21:00.003-04:00

I apologize to whomever out there had decided to follow this blog on a semi-regular basis. I received many compliments on my posts, but I knew this day would come--or rather, the day that came a few months ago, when I began 3rd year of medical school and had to place the blog lower on my list of priorities. The problem is compounded by the fact that I did not study as hard as I could have during the first two years of medical school (as evidenced by the fact, documented on this very blog, that I was spending at least some of my time thinking about politics, when most of my classmates were spending a much greater portion of their time thinking about nothing but anatomy, physiology, pathology, and biochemistry.) So now, I feel compelled to spend some of my spare time studying to ensure that I'm prepared for my experiences on the wards.

However--and I questioned for a long time whether this blog should take a more personal turn, as many do, but I think it's inevitable--there was something else non-medical I was spending a good deal of my time over the last two years thinking about, something that, in fact, consumed me and kept me preoccupied most of the time, and that is, woman. I seldom admit this in person, but a large proportion of my motivation for pursuing medicine was my belief that, by doing something conventionally considered "prestigious", and positioning myself as a good future provider, I would become attractive to women. The slow and painful discrediting of that belief has occupied most of the time I spend thinking about non-med school-related matters over the past 8 months or so, and it commenced last fall, when I discovered the seduction community.

I had had two brief intimations of this community in years prior, which I may describe later, and it repulsed me at first. But this time, something compelled me to investigate it further, and I have now read, or viewed in one case, several seduction-related materials. I must say that my eyes have been opened to the nature of women and of male-female relations, both in traditional times and in modern society. So many of my past experiences, as well as my frustrations in finding that being a medical student got me nowhere even with conservative Christian women, suddenly make sense, now that I see them through the light of female hypergamy. It really is, as a commenter said somewhere, like finally seeing the Matrix.

Now, this is not about to become a PUA blog. Lord knows there are enough of them out there already, and I am not about to give up on Christian sexual morality in an attempt to reinvent myself as a player. However, I've decided that in our society, however unfortunate it may be, a guy has to learn some "game" just to attract a decent wife. I'm sure that now and then, when I do find time to post, the topics of dating, sexual relations, marriage, etc. will come up more often than they have.

I've also added two blogs, which discuss these matters in ways I find helpful, to my blogroll: Novaseeker and The Elusive Wapiti. There are others which I browse from time to time, which I may add when they come to mind.

Blacks stop assaulting students, now it's done by "males"

2009-04-07T18:18:00.004-04:00

Whenever a crime occurs on or near campus, the university security service sends out a mass-email "security alert" describing the incident, and wherever possible, the suspect. In the past, these emails always mentioned the race of the suspect, a commonsensical practice, as presumably making the suspect's race known aids in his apprehension. (The suspects have uniformly been black.) I've noticed that the last two security alerts we've gotten have left this detail out. Thus, we have these descriptions of the respective perps:

Suspect Description: The suspect is still at large and is described as a male 30-35 years old, 5'10" tall, 180 lbs, wearing a tan jacket, dark shoes and pants and carrying a grocery bag.

Suspect Description: The suspect is still at large and is described as a male 18-19 years old, 5'7" tall, 140lbs, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and black pants.

Now, are we to believe that in both cases the victims caught a good enough glimpse of their assailants to describe their age, height, weight, and dress, but somehow couldn't ascertain their race?

It's good to know they're males, though. I'll be sure to keep a lookout for any males.

Reason women don't belong in politics #2370293847

2009-01-31T18:30:00.002-05:00

I give you Maira Kalman.

Is this illustration intended to commemorate, perhaps, Easter Sunday? Why, no, of course not, this is the New York Times. It's about the inauguration of our new Messiah, President Barack Hussein Obama. The creator is one Maira Kalman, whose Wikipedia entry claims she is both "an American" and "born in Tel Aviv." To me, those two statements contradict each other, unless she 1) was born to American parents who happened to be living in Tel Aviv, or 2) is naturalized. A Google search for biographical information her found no sources which might explain whether either of those two things is true.

Anyway, you can look at the entire entry by clicking on the link above. Apparently, her "blog" at the Times consists of pages of these illustrations. This one contains a list of all sorts of different reasons we should exclaim "Hallelujah!" upon the inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama. If you have traditionalist sympathies, the list provides as good a reason as any why women should not have political power. For example, my favorite is the third-to-last panel: "For being smart again. And sexy again. And optimistic again." Because God knows, America just wasn't sexy enough under George W. Bush. This reminds me of how, the day after the inauguration, several of my female classmates were discussing how much they loved Michelle Obama's dress and how excited they were to have a First Lady whose fashion they can follow closely.

I was alerted to Maira Kalman's blog by a classmate who posted the above entry as, uh, his or her Facebook status. I'll give you three guesses as to the sex of this individual.

Re-enfranchised and it feels so good

2009-01-06T19:14:00.002-05:00

A week or two ago--I don't remember, medical school has become such a blur--I received a new voter registration card in the mail. I never did receive a return phone call from the clerk at the board of elections, but someone must have discovered that I did sign whatever I needed to sign after all. Was my vote counted? The world may never know.

I had always dismissed left-wing concerns about voting problems in America; the process has always seemed so well-controlled to me. However, after this experience, I'm a little more willing to believe that there are large numbers of people whose votes aren't being counted properly. Not, of course, because old white men in top hats twirling their mustaches and smoking cigars are pulling the strings to keep brown people down, as the left thinks, but simply because so many people can't be counted upon to do their job right. As the quotation often apocryphally attributed to Napoleon goes, "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

(The title of this post is a play on the 1978 hit "Reunited" by Peaches & Herb.)

In which a white man gets disenfranchised

2008-12-11T23:57:00.005-05:00

In the summer of 2007, I moved from the only state where I had ever been a legal resident to a different state to attend medical school. I registered to vote in my new state well before the primary elections earlier this year. I'm looking right now at my voter registration card from the county Board of Elections, marked with a date of 12/03/07. It doesn't mention a party affiliation, and now that I think about it, I can't remember whether the registration process required declaring one. In the state where I grew up, I registered as a Republican so I could vote in the primaries, but the state where I now reside is one of these God-awful open primary states, so such consideration is irrelevant. If I was asked for a party affiliation, I'm sure I chose Republican, but I just can't remember. So I don't know whether the county thinks that I consider myself a Republican or not.

At the time of the primary, I carried the same voting card to my polling place, requested a Republican ballot (the only person present, according to my eavesdropping, to do so), and cast my vote for Mitt Romney. Of course, they never ask for the card, since it's not a valid ID and the voter's name is supposed to be in the book. I took it anyway, just in case. Voting went off without a hitch. They looked up my name in the book, checked my driver's license, handed me the ballot, and I filled it out and dropped it in the box. No problems.

So I didn't think there would be any problems the day of the general election in November, either. I confidently strode up to the volunteer sitting behind the table and gave her my name. She flipped through the book... no dice. The other volunteer manning the other book (there was an A-L book and an M-Z book or something like that) checked his book too; I wasn't there either. I suggested some possible misspellings of my last name and they checked for those too. Nothing. I showed them the card, but it's not much: there's no voter ID number, just my name, polling place, and a list of the relevant districts in which I reside. They said that if my name wasn't in the book, they couldn't give me a ballot.

They got on the phone with someone downtown, and the answer that came back was that I should cast a provisional ballot. I'd fill out the ballot, but it wouldn't be counted until my registration was verified at the county office. I figured this wouldn't be a problem; since I was registered and had voted in the primary, the absence of my name in the book that day could only have been a minor clerical error, and I was sure they'd find that I was registered and promptly count the ballot.

Then, last week, I received a letter from the county Board of Elections. It stated that they had been unable to verify my registration, and suggested calling them if I believed I was registered. Otherwise, a new voter registration form was handily enclosed for my convenience.

Since I know I'm registered, I called on Wednesday. The person I spoke to checked the records and told me that the problem was that I had never signed my voter registration. Ah, I see, a simple mistake on my part... except that I'm holding a voter registration card in my hand, and I voted in the primary election, where I was on the books. Well, she said, the earliest activity our records show for you is this registration which is is June of this year.

In June of this year I was having my first ever experience in lab research by day, hanging out with friends by night. I was having no communication, direct or indirect, with the county Board of Elections. I voted, in person, in the primary election in the spring. My name was in the book then. In November, I returned to the same polling place, without having moved, changed my name, been convicted of a felony, been declared legally insane, or done anything else which one might suspect would result in a change in my voting registration. I was not on the book.

The woman on the phone said she could check the book from the primary. I said yes, I'd like her to do that. She said she'd call me back, hopefully later the same day. I haven't been called back.

I've never thought of myself as a potential conspiracy theorist, nor someone who complains about being victimized. As I said, I don't even know whether the county knows I consider myself a Republican. But I do live in the bluest county [sigh... I keep wanting to settle among like-minded people, but universities keep pulling me back in] in a swing state, and this was a very important election to the presumably mostly Democratic election officials. Is it too much to think that they purged Republicans from the voter rolls? Oh, right, only Republicans do that; the left only cares about fairness and justice for everyone. Except when said fairness doesn't produce the required results.

The specific result in this case is immaterial; Obama solidly carried the state and I voted for Chuck Baldwin anyway. But, if we're now entering an age where the left is going to use widespread corruption and underhanded trickery to prevent conservatives from voting, that in my mind proves how irreconcilably divided those in our society who want to destroy traditional America are from those of us who want to preserve it, so that only something as radical as revolution or civil war can settle our disputes.

The "corporations" left and the baby boomers

2008-11-06T21:12:00.011-05:00

I hesitate to post anything related to my personal life on the blog, if only because I feel references to one's personal life cheapen serious discussions and sidetrack them into being about feelings rather than objective ideas. But sometimes one's personal life provides such a perfect example of what one wants to talk about that I feel it's acceptable.

Vanishing American recently had an entry on the Baby Boomers and how they're blamed for allowing our nation to start down the wrong path. My parents are Baby Boomers, and in many ways they represent the worst of that generation. They rebelled against "the system," they tuned in, turned on, and dropped out, they shacked up together before marriage at a time when it was still scandalous to do so, and the cumulative effect of millions of people doing so, starting with their generation, has led to the practice being totally accepted today. Still, like many if not most people, they have always been somewhat apolitical pragmatists. As someone with strong philosophical views, I've never understood how people can vacillate between the two major parties, sometimes voting Republican, sometimes Democrat, yet that is what my parents did in their younger years. My father, however, has since gone off the deep end, something I'm reminded of every time I talk to him.

He was a Reagan supporter in the 1980s, on the basis of limited government, wanting to keep more of his own income, and the idea that welfare was bad because we shouldn't have unproductive members of society leeching off productive people's money. I think he voted for George H.W. Bush in 1988, though in the subsequent elections he was a Clinton supporter. Now, however, he's become a raging leftist, and seems to be reading through all of Kevin Phillips' books. Again, this is something I have trouble grasping. How can one's views change that drastically? When that happens to someone, is it a sign that they never really held their old views deeply to begin with?

He is not, however, the kind of leftist often discussed at traditionalist websites: the kind whose main motivation is culturally left-wing philosophical views, for whom everything revolves around the notion that America, whites, and the West are racist and guilty and are oppressing "diverse" peoples. In fact, he has the makings of a race realist: he recently remarked, only semi-facetiously, in reference to the state of South Africa, "you can't put black people in charge of anything!" Rather, he's one of these "corporations" people--you know, the soak-the-rich kind, the kind for whom everything comes down to money. Our society is run by the rich, they're the movers and shakers, the people who pull the strings behind the scenes, and they've got everything rigged to benefit themselves and screw the rest of us, and the politicians are all in bed with them, their congressional votes bought with lobbyist money, buying themselves tax breaks and corporate welfare, etc. Everything comes down to money. Everything the rich and corporations do, they do it to enrich themselves; everything politicians do they do for bribes from the rich; meanwhile, it is foolish and wrong for the non-rich to consider anything other than their own short-term material gain (i.e., there is something the matter with Kansas.)

And it's impossible to argue against this; anytime I say anything that conflicts with this view, he insists it all comes down to money. I mentioned the mental health regulations that had been snuck into the bailout bill, and his immediate reaction was, "who paid for that?" I replied that I thought it was cultural; the left just thinks mental health is so important, and a great injustice is being done to so many people who are being denied the essential mental health coverage they so desperately need, and so on. He insisted that no, someone must be paying for it, there must be some lobby, someone must stand to get rich off of it and that's why it was in the bill. He reiterated his support for universal single-payer health care, saying that every time the people are polled, the people want it, but we don't listen to the people in this country, we listen to corporations. He said that McCain accused Obama of supporting single-payer, which he does not, meaning Obama's not leftist enough. He said that the powers that be are so entrenched that Obama doesn't represent enough change; he was disappointed with the Rahm Emmanuel pick because Emmanuel is an insider; what we need is another FDR who will get in there and make sweeping changes and say, "I don't care that this is illegal, it's what needs to be done." So he wants the executive to push the country so far to the left that he breaks the law in doing so. And Bush is the "imperial president"?!

Again, how does someone go from being a Reagan supporter to this, in 20 years?

A potential answer is in Aesop's fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper. My father has spent his life self-employed, and has never been good at managing money; not much of a businessman. (A trait I seem to have inherited, and one that perhaps shows there are different aspects of intelligence--despite having scored in the 99th percentile on the MCAT, I can't begin to fathom how people do things like play the stock market or manage a successful business.) In the 1980s, he was doing OK financially, supporting a family, and wanted to keep more of the money he earned. Now that he's near retirement age, however, he wants the government to wait on him hand and foot. Since he lived paycheck-to-paycheck and has no nest egg, now it's suddenly not fair that there are rich people who have more than he does. If true, this explanation shows how the everything-comes-down-to-money view feeds back on itself.

But I still can't quite grasp how someone can be so unprincipled. And while I do blame the baby boomers, I also blame the generation that raised them: the so-called "Greatest Generation," the one that elected and supported FDR. After all, they didn't actively turn against Western culture the way the baby boomers did; they were shocked and horrified at their children's rebellion. But they did pave the way for FDR and his New Deal, the introduction of socialism into the policy of the federal government, thus making it possible for FDR to be considered a hero today for ignoring the law to force economic redistribution and social welfare on the nation. And I wonder, if so many people are so unprincipled, if so many, however little they care for the culture of the West, care even less for the founding American principles of private property and self-reliance, can we really ever take this country back?

Safety in the wake of the election

2008-11-01T16:32:00.003-04:00

I'm reasonably certain that Senator Barack Hussein Obama will be elected the next President of the United States of America on Tuesday. As for whom I will personally vote for, I am still undecided, unlike the vast majority of my fellow medical students, who took advantage of the disgraceful early voting apparatus they so passionately support and have already cast their votes for Our Savior Barack Hussein Obama. I had been planning to vote for either a write-in candidate or Chuck Baldwin, but I've started to find some of the "existential threat" argument from commenters at View from the Right convincing. A Barack Hussein Obama administration, coupled with the cooperation of a Democratically-controlled Congress, may cement leftist rule in America for all eternity. I live in a swing state, so I can't distance myself from the mainstream candidates and cast a third-party vote on pure principle. One thing's for sure: if I do decide to vote for McCain, I will be holding my nose harder than it's ever been held before.

What I already do know I will do, is stock up on at least a week's supply of food before Tuesday, since there's no telling how some of the residents of my, uh, diverse neighborhood will comport themselves in the event of a McCain victory, not to mention what kind of service I'll be able to expect at the grocery store across the street, which is staffed primarily by those same individuals. Of course, conditions may not be much better in the event of a Barack Hussein Obama victory, since it will be, to paraphrase Thurgood Marshall, their turn now.

As for self-defense, I've heard that some people are arming themselves to protect themselves from black rioters, but I won't be purchasing a gun between now and Tuesday. Though it's a weakness in my conservative credentials, I've never fired a gun in my life, and this being exam week, I'm certainly not going to learn enough to make an informed decision about a handgun purchase in the next two days. So, I will have to hunker down with my week's supply of food and hope for the best.

Health care professionals accost patients about politics

2008-09-30T22:16:00.005-04:00

As an example of how divided our society has become, take my experience yesterday. I went to the eye clinic at the big university medical center to see about getting contact lenses. The optometrist I saw asked me if I had seen the news that day, and when I replied that I hadn't, he told me there had been panicked selling on the stock market. He then proceeded to denounce the House Republicans for killing the bailout bill. I said I don't know, maybe we should just let the chips fall where they may, force the banks to face the consequences of their mistakes. He said that wasn't an option, we can't have the system crash, institutions like the medical center itself depend on being able to take out short-term overnight loans and we'd go out of business if these banks did.

Is it just me, or does this come too close to starting a political argument in a setting where it shouldn't be considered appropriate? I'm sure political disagreements are as old as civilization itself, but I don't have the impression that people did things like this 50 years ago. But as our society has become more and more liberal, the left has felt more and more empowered to drive non-liberal beliefs out of the realm of respectability. I'm reminded of my former co-worker who thought everyone who owned guns or went to church lived in Kentucky, and my classmates who often make much more explicitly liberal statements in public in a way that indicates they assume everyone present agrees with them. We are witnessing the "I don't know how Nixon won; no one I know voted for him" effect writ large.

Low activity

2008-09-30T21:16:00.004-04:00

As a cynic may have predicted would happen, my posting has dropped off as medical school has once again become more intense. I won't deny that I've been busy with schoolwork, but I must admit I also haven't been motivated to post much lately because of low morale. As the fervor of our nation's political debate has increased with the impending presidential election, I've been feeling more and more like the left has irrevocably won. If Barack Obama wins, he gets a Democratic Congress to do his bidding, plus the black "community" will be empowered like never before, and any failures and setbacks the nation experiences during his term will be blamed on racism. If McCain wins, the left will go absolutely apoplectic, foaming at the mouth with rabid denunciations of America as a thoroughly racist country, and mounting who-knows-what all-new full-scale assault on American society to purge it of its bigotry and discrimination. We truly are screwed in '08.

Why Obama's candidacy may be disastrous for America

2008-08-30T20:10:00.000-04:00

I recently posted on the negative consequences of an Obama presidency, with the disclaimer that of course I don't think a McCain presidnecy would be good for America either. But quite apart from whatever negative consequences result from John McCain's policies, I also think an Obama defeat could have disastrous consequences for our society as well. For this reason, I think we're already in a very bad place merely for having Obama be a contender for the presidency.

First, let me remind readers of my view, contrary to some of the more optimistic (or maybe less pessimistic) traditionalists, that most white liberals will never wake up and abandon their liberalism. Nothing can dissuade them from the view that all people must be totally equal and that any problems associated with nonwhite, non-Western peoples are caused by white racism. They would literally rather die than come to believe otherwise. With that said, allow me to spell out a possible chain of events which could happen should Obama win in November.

Barack Obama takes office in January of 2009.
Despite having achieved what was thought of as the highest possible victory, putting a "black" man in the White House, blacks continue to lag behind whites in school achievement, in average income, in crime rates, and virtually every other commonly examined marker.
Since everyone knows that blacks' problems are caused by systemic racism, this proves that America is even worse, even more racist, than we thought. We thought we had overcome racism by electing a black president, but far from overcoming it, we've discovered that it's even worse, because even having a black man in the White House has not made blacks equal.
With their anger at whites inflamed by this supposed racism, and emboldened by the sense gained from having one of their own in the White House that they are winning, that they've got whitey's number, blacks begin to attack whites with even greater fury. Black-on-white robberies, rapes, and murders increase, and educated, "respectable" blacks like Jeremiah Wright turn up the heat on their constant denunciations of whites and their calls for white America to give up ever more for blacks.
Again, all of this is seen as a consequence of our racism, so even more must be done to combat racism. Congress passes a slavery reparations bill which calculates the value with interest of 40 acres and a mule in 1865, and pays that amount to every black person in America. Anti-racial profiling laws are passed which are so restrictive that it becomes virtually impossible to arrest black criminals. Bold new affirmative action programs are instituted nationwide and enshrined at the highest level of federal law. It becomes virtually impossible for any employer ever to fire a black person for any reason. New zoning laws are created, aimed at forcing racial integration, making it extremely difficult for whites to move to all- or mostly-white neighborhoods. Who knows what other manner of yet unconceived tyrannical laws are passed and institutions created to combat our supposed racism.
None of this works, which only proves that America is yet even more racist that we had thought in #3! So, even more must be done, and blacks' anger at whites increases again. Return to step 4.
Society plunges into chaos. Crime rates skyrocket, and whites everywhere live in fear for their lives. Even white liberals acknowledge they live in fear for their lives, but they blame this problem on racism and conservatives. White liberals continue not to have children, so nonwhites' power over whites continues to increase. There are pockets of traditionalist whites here and there, who recognize the problem and who continue to have children, but they are prevented from gathering into an organized resistance by the fact that they are so scattered, by the aforementioned zoning laws, and by internet companies' shutting down our blogs and online fora for their racist hate speech.
As the lights go out in America, the last white liberal lies in the street bleeding to death of a black gang member-inflicted gunshot wound. (I always picture this person as the hippie social worker who is in charge of our weekly liberalism seminar in med school.) Her dying words are: "if only our society hadn't been so conservative and racist."

Now, this is a pretty depressing picture, and I'm not saying it's what I think is going to happen, only that I think it could happen. But what struck me yesterday is how little of this is dependent on Barack Obama being elected, or any other single event. Indeed, the reaction from the left will be similar if Obama is defeated: his defeat will be proof of how racist America is, even more racist than we thought, which proves we must do even more to combat racism, which feeds into step 4 above. In fact, the initial reaction from the left if Obama is defeated will be even worse! I can only imagine the vitriol, the rabid denunciations of America, the wishes that the older generation of white voters would just die off already, that I'll be treated to in November from my medical school classmates if Obama is defeated.

So, if Obama is elected, his failure to fix the problems caused by racism will inspire us to destroy ourselves, while if he is defeated, our racism will be proven and we will be inspired to destroy ourselves. We're Screwed '08 indeed. What's more, this situation could not have been permanently avoided by Obama's defeat in the primaries; eventually, a black candidate would have received a presidential nomination, and the results would be the same. Only a return to realistic views on race can save us. And since I believe most white liberals will never abandon their liberalism, only efforts by traditionalists to maintain pockets of resistance and to prevent liberals from seizing our entire society from us by prohibiting us from living together and communicating with each other can save us.

California stores required to provide facilities for "day laborers"

2008-08-28T23:01:00.001-04:00

The Los Angeles City Council has unanimously passed a law requiring big-box home improvement stores to erect shelters with water, bathrooms, and tables for "day laborers." No mention of the day laborers' immigration status.

People who live near Home Depot stores have complained of day laborers drinking beer, urinating in yards or other unseemly behavior.

The National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a nonprofit group started in Northridge in 2001, supports the new requirements.

"It provides for safe and dignified hiring locations where contingent workers can defend their basic rights. It carefully balances the interests of business, residents, day laborers and their employers," said the group's executive director, Pablo Alvarado.

Over the past few days I've been having some interesting interactions with posters on the Student Doctor Network. I've seen that this is exactly the kind of thing that many liberals get outraged over, claiming that it takes things "too far," but when you try to get them to see that this is a necessary result of their philosophy, they dismiss you. What we need people to understand is that as long as we believe discrimination and inequality are evil, this kind of thing is inevitable.

The article also mentions that Home Depot has no problem with the ordinance, once again proving that large corporations are liberal.

Why an Obama presidency must mean the end of white America

2008-08-26T00:07:00.000-04:00

Here's something that struck me a few days ago about Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Conservatives have realized for years now that in our society, there's a general assumption that once a prominent position has been occupied by a minority or a woman, it "belongs" to minorities and it would be morally unjust for it to revert to being occupied by a white man. For example, we haven't had a white male Secretary of State for over ten years now.

While this view causes problems, it has not so far proven devastating to our society. But the presidency is sui generis, and the problem of electing a minority president goes far beyond creating the view that we must always have a minority president from then on. In the minds of the public, the president represents or symbolizes all of America. So with a black president, America will be seen as a truly and legitimately non-white country. In the minds of a great many people, if only subconsciously, there will have ceased to be anything distinctly white about America, anything defining of America having to do with a historic white majority. Obviously, this will not comport with the reality that for the time being, America will still have a white majority, and even though that majority is at only 66% and falling, it is one that, being "top-loaded" in the older end of the population, still holds most of the positions of power and influence, thus making America still seem like a basically white country.

Now, this is so inconsistent with the reality of a non-white America as symbolized by President Obama, that it will be seen as morally illegitimate for America to have a white majority. It will be seen as a grave and dire problem, one that must be rectified as soon as possible. The attacks on whites and on white society--both physical, and in terms of social policies like school curricula which deemphasize and demonize our historical figures, and immigration laws which are already reducing whites to a minority in America--by both nonwhites, and by the white liberal elite who love Barack Obama and hate ordinary white Americans--will increase and intensify. Life for white people in America will become difficult, much sooner than the predicted end of the white majority in 2042.

This is why, as much as I loathe the idea of a McCain presidency, I cannot hope for Barack Obama to be elected this November.

Race: The Reality of Human Differences--Chapter 1: Race and the Law

2008-08-25T01:42:00.001-04:00

In Chapter 1 of Race: The Reality Of Human Differences, Sarich and Miele begin their treatment of race in earnest. Entitled "Race and the Law," this chapter seeks to justify the biological reality of race by showing that it is a commonsense concept that everyone intuitively understands. Although this chapter provides useful illustrations of the concept of race, as I said in my discussion of the book's opening statement, it is one I think will not be convincing to race-deniers.

The authors note that there is no legal definition of "race," yet the legal system accepts it and relies on average people's ability to identify race. Their point seems to be that if our legal system, the most contentious system within our society, has no problem accepting the reality of race, then it must be real. But of course, this will not sway the race deniers, whose belief that race has no biological basis in reality but is merely a "social construct" does not imply, in their minds, that race does not exist. They think it exists as a concept, but that that concept can be quite powerful and have a great deal of meaning and determinative effect on a person's life. They would say "yes, we can usually recognize when a person would be considered white, black, or Asian, but these are not clear-cut categories for which we can test for membership and make any predictions about the individuals based on them."

The authors describe two court cases in which race came into play and was accepted by all parties involved. The first, Rice v. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, involved Hawaiian laws defining "Native Hawaiian" as a person descended from the indigenous people of Hawaii. These laws originally used the word "races" repeatedly, but were later amended to substitute the word "peoples." An Office of Hawaiian Affairs was created, designated for the benefit of "Hawaiians," and one H.F. Rice brought suit against it for not allowing him to vote in an election for its trustees since he was not a "Native Hawaiian."

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (often called the "9th Circus" for its liberal rulings) found in favor of the OHA, since Rice, while a resident of Hawaii, did not meet the legal definition of a "Native Hawaiian." The US Supreme Court reversed the decision, citing the 15th amendment to the US Constitution; in other words, finding that Rice was being denied a vote on account of his race. Now, anyone could have told you that this was inevitable, as soon as the OHA attempted to decide voter eligibility based on race. But the word "race" in the original statues was changed to "people" in order to get around a possible 15th amendment objection. In the end, however, this was unsuccessful, because the Supreme Court recognized the common sense definition of race.

In the second case, Haak v. Rochester School District, the parents of a white fourth-grade student named Jessica Haak had attempted to transfer their daughter from their home district to a mostly white district, through a transfer program that existed for the purpose of lessening racial separation among the districts involved. Their case was based on the notion that forbidding her to transfer because of her race violated the much-abused "equal protection" clause of the 14th amendment. The district court ruled for the plaintiff, but the 2nd Circuit overturned their decision.

The purpose for which the authors mention this case is to show how the Haaks, the school district, and the courts all took the existence of race, and the possibility of racial classification, for granted. The program involved a definition of a "minority pupil" as "a pupil who is of Black or Hispanic origin or is a member of another minority group that historically has been the subject of discrimination." It also specified that a program administrator could question the student's race on the basis of "name, manner of speaking and phrasing, and personal appearance during an interview or orientation." The point is that no one disputed that the school or anyone else was able to correctly identify Haak's race.

Again, as consistent as these two examples may be with the reality of race, they do not satisfy the race-denier. Race-deniers do not deny that there are some phenotypic features that correlate with self-identified race; they just claim that because there is no definitive genetic test to determine which race a person belongs to, and there is more genetic variation within races than between races, race is not biologically valid and racial differences are only skin deep.

The authors seem to recognize this when they proceed to question whether the courts "recognize the existence of race as a mere social construct or as an underlying biological reality." We can allow that the courts might recognize that race is real, but only because the social construct is so powerful, not because it has a biological basis. To bolster their case for the biological reality of race, they give an example in which genetic testing was used to determine the race of a killer on the loose, the case of Derrick Todd Lee.

You can read about the case from any number of online sources, so I won't bother rehashing the details. I recommend, though, that if you search for "Derrick Todd Lee" you include the name "Frudakis" in your search, because most online sources don't even mention the most salient aspect of this case, which is to be expected, because it proves the genetic reality of race. In a nutshell, police were looking for a white suspect until Tony Frudakis of DNAPrint Genomics told them he could determine the race of the killer via genetic testing. I recommend Wired Magazine's story, which has this to say:

In early March, 2003, investigators turned to Tony Frudakis, a molecular biologist who said he could determine the killer's race by analyzing his DNA. They were unsure about the science, so, before giving him the go-ahead, the task force sent Frudakis DNA swabs taken from 20 people whose race they knew and asked him to determine their races through blind testing. He nailed every single one.

Still, when they gathered in the Baton Rouge police department for a conference call with Frudakis in mid-March, they were not prepared to hear or accept his conclusions about the killer.

"Your guy has substantial African ancestry," said Frudakis. "He could be Afro-Caribbean or African American but there is no chance that this is a Caucasian. No chance at all."

There was a prolonged, stunned silence, followed by a flurry of questions looking for doubt but Frudakis had none. Would he bet his life on this, they wanted to know? Absolutely. In fact, he was certain that the Baton Rouge serial killer was 85 percent Sub-Saharan African and 15 percent native American.

"This means we're going to turn our investigation in an entirely different direction," Frudakis recalls someone saying. "Are you comfortable with that?"

"Yes. I recommend you do that," he said. And now, rather than later since, in the time it took Frudakis to analyze the sample, the killer had claimed his fifth victim. The task force followed Frudakis' advice and, two months later, the killer was in custody.

Think about that: there was a "they were not prepared to hear or accept his conclusions" and "there was a prolonged, stunned silence" in response to them. All because he told them the killer was black. That is the degree to which the important institutions in our society--law enforcement among them--deny the reality of race.

Sarich and Miele mention the type of DNA profiling commonly used in forensics examines short tandem repeats (STRs), which are sequences of DNA where a short pattern is repeated several times. Using thirteen of these markers is considered valid for identifying an individual, because with thirteen the odds of misidentification are about one in a billion. Thirteen STR markers are not sufficient to identify race, however. The DNAPrint methodology used by Frudakis uses a different kind of marker, a single nucleotide polymorphism or SNP, in which there is a difference of exactly 1 nucleotide between individuals. They point out that academic research has confirmed that using 100 of these markers, a person's ancestry (Africa, Europe, Asia, or the Americas) can be determined with almost 100 percent accuracy, and that DNAPrint Genomics has reduced the number required to 73. They also point out that this methodology is correct at a rate equal to that of the DNA profiling that is considered legally valid for identifying individuals.

The authors conclude their discussion of the case thus:

Unless race is a biological reality that gives important information about an individual's degree of genetic resemblance to the various human populations and the sequence in which those populations evolved by separating from other populations, it would be inconceivable to achieve the level of accuracy obtainable through the DNAPrint methodology. Indeed, given a sufficient number of markers, such analysis is capable of not only identifying race but predicting skin tone as well.

The success of the DNAPrint methodology contrasts sharply with a faulty genetic testing experiment used in the PBS documentary "Race: The Power of an Illusion" to prove that race has no genetic basis. In that program, six students of different racial backgrounds made predictions about which of the other students would have DNA most similar to their own, based upon typical racial criteria. They then examined six markers of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to see if the reuslts would match up with their predictions, and lo and behold, they did not. The program concluded that people in one race were not more genetically similar to each other than to those in another race. Sarich and Miele explain why this experiment was flawed: first, only six markers were used, less than one-half of the thirteen required for individual identification by DNA fingerprinting. Second, mtDNA is inherited only along the maternal line and thus is not fully indicative of a person's ancestry. Therefore, the PBS program dishonestly stacked the deck to make it appear that genetic testing could not be used to determine race, when it easily can.

The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of an experiment showing that children as young as three can classify people into races without having been taught to do so. In the experiments, anthropologist Lawrence Hirschfeld found that when presented with a series of drawings of people who differ by race, body type, and occupational uniform, young children identify race as being inherited over the other two categories. After many years of research along these lines, Hirschfeld has concluded that children believe that "race is an intrinsic, immutable, and essential aspect of a person's identity," and "they come to this conclusion on their own." According to the authors, this must be because the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees must have been able to tell those who belonged to his own group from those who did not. Whatever the explanation behind it, the phenomenon is apparently observable and should give the lie to the liberal idea that race is something children need to be taught.

As I've said, unfortunately, I don't believe that is true for most of the examples given earlier in the chapter. The fact that the legal system doesn't question race, and that most ordinary people can correctly identify race, will not sway race deniers--in fact, since leftists typically don't trust common sense and believe that truth can be elucidated only by highly trained "experts," they may be all the more likely on this basis to believe that race must be illusory. Nevertheless, in closing the chapter, Sarich and Miele mention the moralistic fallacy, which says that what ought to be is what is, or that if something is morally wrong, it cannot be a part of our nature. This fallacy is sometimes used to argue that since racism is wrong, and belief in biological race leads to racism, there must not be any such thing as biological race. This echoes the belief of Alan Goodman, which the authors mentioned in the opening statement and say they will rebut later in the book, that even if race does not exist, it should not be studied; essentially, we should pull the wool over our eyes, because if we don't, we might become racists.

In the next chapter, Race and History, we will learn of how ancient cultures, including non-Western ones, believed in race, a specific rebuttal to the PBS documentary's assertion that race is a recent European idea invented to justify colonialism and slavery.

New email address

2008-08-23T23:42:00.002-04:00

I've created a new email address for readers to email me, visible at the top left of the page. The Contactify link was a bit cumbersome and not very friendly; now you can use the email program of your choice.

That was fast

2008-08-20T16:30:00.005-04:00

I suppose it was inevitable: Google has pulled their ads from my site, no doubt because it "promote[s] discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age." In Kafkaesque fashion, the email didn't mention the specific offense, only that they are "unable to display ads that would provide a valuable experience for your site's users or our advertisers." The offending post was Saying something worth saying.

Interestingly, althought the email also said that Google's "program specialists regularly review sites in the AdSense program," I suspect this was not a routine review. Katie's Dad has Google ads on his site, which expresses views similar to those found here, and they are still up. Instead, I suspect that one of the liberals who wound up here by my link to the blog in my SDN forums signature reported the site to Google as offensive, fulfilling the left-wing dream of shutting down people who oppose liberalism. Joseph Stalin would be proud.

Oh, well. Maybe this will spur me on to fulfil my dream of creating other, more profitable blogs, like this doctor who launched his blog while still in medical school, leaving Wise Man's Heart pure and undefiled by commercialism.

H1B visa video

2008-08-18T23:07:00.000-04:00

Here's something guaranteed to make your blood boil. A law firm by the name of Cohen & Grigsby apparently gives presentations to employers on how NOT to hire American workers, so as to be able to justify hiring cheaper foreigners with H-1B visas.

Representative quotation (at about 1:45): "our goal is, clearly, not to find a qualified and interested US worker. And, you know, in a sense that sounds funny, but it's what we're trying to do here!"

Can anyone explain why so many on both the left and the right consider big business "conservative?" Whether it's for multiculturalism or just for profit, they want to destroy America too.

Lou Dobbs discussed this video around the time it became public:

Adults engage in bizarre, uncouth practice of marrying and having children

2008-08-15T23:05:00.004-04:00

I've mentioned the phenomenon of liberal shock at reality before, but this quintessential dog-bites-man story from the New York Observer takes the cake. It would seem, according to author Lizzy Ratner, that there has arisen an alarming trend of twenty-somethings engaging in the highly offensive and tasteless practice of getting married, buying houses, and having children.

In commenting on a piece like this, one hardly knows where to begin. The entire thing is suffused with a worldview so completely inverted from normality and sanity that to a traditionalist reader it speaks for itself, and to a reader who shares the author's views, one despairs of being able to explain its wrongness.

Then she opened her mouth, and it was if one had been transported back—oh, 150 years or so. “We had been talking about getting married since we got together,” Ms.—or perhaps we should write Miss—Miller said, describing how her friend Noelle had, early on, asked her beloved his “intentions”; how he had proposed last autumn, presenting the diamond ring that now glittered in the cloud-light on her left hand. “Ever since I met him, I felt like we’re a strong unit that would be a great foundation for a family,” she said demurely. “We’re very settled in and cozy; we’re like Hobbits in our little place.”

There was a time, not too long ago, when the young and the aimless hightailed it to New York City in pursuit of an altogether different urban experience than the domestic bliss enjoyed by Miss Miller and many of her bosom companions. High on a cocktail of recklessness and abandon, they came here to find their id, lose their superego, shake up the world, or simply shake their thang. Then they promptly chronicled these exploits in confessional sex columns.

Obviously, the world would be a better place if we had more confessional sex columns chronicling the exploits of the young and aimless as they bed-hop with reckless abandon. But now the Miss Millers of the world are throwing a wrench into the works, what with their talking about getting married and thinking that they and the men they're seeing would make a great foundation for a family. Why, imagine this:

Down in the West Village, we have Liv Tyler, barely 30, the daughter of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and legendary rock-star muse Bebe Buellwho’s now contented wife to Royston Langdon and mother of 2-year-old Milo.

Married and the mother a two-year-old at "barely 30!" Who ever heard of such a thing?

Perhaps the most disturbing passage is this:

The adultery-filled pages of John Updike’s best novels now seem like dispatches from a foreign land. One need only mention the word “affair” in the chatroom pages of Urbanbaby.com to get quickly excoriated as a “slut” and a “home wrecker”; the New Victorian morality is not one that permits nuance or discretion.

I've never seen such a cavalier dismissal of the idea that there's something wrong with adultery. I mean, I think I understand how liberals think, but sometimes they still manage to surprise me. No nuance or discretion here; the author actually thinks there's something wrong with excoriating adulterers as "sluts" and "home wreckers." How do these people expect to be able to maintain a civilization at all?

Why evangelicals are going liberal

2008-08-14T14:45:00.003-04:00

In a comment on this post, I said that evangelicals believe that individuals coming to faith in Jesus on an individual basis was the only thing in the world that mattered, and that they can't conceive of a Christian society, only Christian persons. I thought I should expand on this while it was fresh in my mind.

The idea about people coming to personal faith in Jesus on an individual basis has always been the core theological principle of evangelicalism, stemming largely from John 3:3 which says "Jesus answered him, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.'" This is usually taken to mean that in order to be a Christian, to be saved through Jesus and go to heaven, you must have a personal, conscious conversion experience; being baptized as an infant and raised in a Christian family or Christian culture, and always having more or less assumed that you believed Christianity, is not enough. Despite this emphasis on an individual's personal relationship with Jesus above all else, for a long time evangelicals did accept the idea of a Christian nation, society, or culture, if only because of some vestigial, received traditional wisdom they had never thought to question despite the fact that it wasn't found in the Bible. Or at least, they were neutral or apathetic toward the idea of a Christian nation, society, or culture.

Now, however, the younger generation of evangelicals is becoming antagonistic to the idea, because it's counter to the prevailing principles of liberalism in our society, and it's not found in the Bible. In fact, in the Bible, the early Christians are described as having been a persecuted minority who were imprisoned or killed for their beliefs. This leads to an identification of Christians with other "marginalized" groups, the definition of "marginalized" being the one used in modern liberal society: blacks, immigrants, women, homosexuals, etc. There are still some young evangelicals who believe in the older, James Dobson-esque vision of America as a Christian nation, but to the extent that they do, it's out of a naive belief that the principles of traditional American civic life can be derived from the Bible just as being born again can.

An interesting result of this naivete is what happens when evangelicals succeed in converting nonwhite, non-Western immigrants, so praised as "vibrant" and "diverse" even by evangelicals, to Christianity. Many evangelicals are excited by the prospect of nonwhite immigration, because it presents an opportunity for making converts and bringing about the Revelation 9 vision of people from every nation, tribe, people, and language praising God together. These "conservative" evangelicals are unprepared for what happens when they do so, however; they thought that converting such people to evangelicalism would also mean converting them to a white, Western, traditional American cultural identity as well. Instead, what you get when you convert liberal non-Westerners to evangelical Christianity are liberal, non-Western Christians--people who, as I have seen in my personal life, see no conflict between considering oneself a "Bible-believing, born-again Christian" and voting for Barack Obama, supporting socialized medicine and affirmative action, and endorsing or promoting all manner of other typical left-wing views.

White Americans no longer a majority by 2042

2008-08-14T00:16:00.004-04:00

This AP article announces recent government projections that we white people will be a minority in America by 2042, eight years earlier than had previously been predicted.

There's not much I can say about this. We've known for a long time now that if current trends continue, white Americans will be a minority within my lifetime. Furthermore, any white people with any common sense should be able to tell that this will be a bad thing for whites, just by looking at how virtually every other population group on earth sticks together and looks out for its own first, including Asians, whose numbers are still relatively small in America and who are considered an assimilated, "model minority" group.

The article does have a few lines worth responding to:

"The white population is older and very much centered around the aging baby boomers who are well past their high fertility years," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "The future of America is epitomized by the young people today. They are basically the melting pot we are going to see in the future."

When I was in school, I was taught that the term "melting pot" referred to the phenomena wherein various groups all blend together and form one, homogeneous group. Here it's being used in virtually the opposite sense: to describe the coming fractured society in which the groups don't blend with each other but all retain radically different values, cultures, and languages (while somehow managing to live harmoniously together, the left reassures us.)

The U.S. has nearly 305 million people today. The population is projected to hit 400 million in 2039 and 439 million in 2050.

That's like adding all the people from France and Britain, said Steve A. Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington group that advocates tighter immigration policies.

The CIS is on our side, but I think Camarota should choose his analogies more carefully. Adding 134 million Mexicans, Chinese, and Africans will be very, very different from adding the white, Western European populations of France and Britain.

There is a glimmer of hope:

The Census Bureau Thursday released population projections through 2050, based on rates for births, deaths and immigration. They are subject to big revisions, depending on immigration policy, cultural changes and natural or manmade disasters.

All right, folks, let's get cracking on that immigration policy.

Evangelicals start nonwhite adoption push?

2008-08-13T02:53:00.001-04:00

Last year there was an AP article making the rounds on how evangelicals are trying to promote adoption, in part to answer criticism that while they oppose abortion (excuse me, I mean they're "anti-choice") they don't care about unwanted children.

Prominent evangelical Christians are urging churchgoers to strongly consider adoption or foster care, not just out of kindness or biblical calling but also to answer criticism that their movement, while condemning abortion and same-sex adoption, does not do enough for children without parents.

The article doesn't mention whether race is being discussed in this context, but perhaps it should be. On more than one occasion, I have seen a commenter named Bruce B. at VFR mention the growing trend of white evangelical couples adopting nonwhite children. This is something I have seen in my own circles as well. Usually it is done after the couple already has a few biological children of their own; that is, they "round out" their family by adopting a nonwhite child, but sometimes in the case of fertility difficulties the couple will adopt nonwhite right off the bat.

If one were being cynical, one might say that their motivations are pecuniary in nature; we all know that it is much more expensive to adopt a white baby than a nonwhite, thanks to the laws of supply and demand. One would be wrong, however, for the demand among these white evangelicals is very much for nonwhite babies. A couple in my church adopted a toddler from India, after having talked for some time about how they felt God was calling them to do so, and about their frustration with the obstacles they were encountering (to put it bluntly, India wants its orphans to be adopted by Indian parents, not white ones.) If they had had the money, they could have more easily adopted a higher-demand white baby, and they certainly could have spent less and had less bureaucracy to deal with if they had been willing to spring for a nonwhite American baby. But they really wanted an Indian child.

Evangelicals these days are quite enamored of Revelation 7:9-10, which reads:

After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: "Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb."

This is taken to be not only a picture of heaven but a picture of the one unified world we should be striving for on earth. And as I have said elsewhere, their "love for other cultures" usually involves a negative attitude toward their own culture. Another couple in my church adopted a little boy from Thailand, and one Sunday the wife gave a testimony about it. In it she expressed reservations about having brought the boy from a land of deprivation and spiritual darkness into the land of X-Boxes and other forms of material excess. This kind of statement is quite common from missionaries as well, this idea that, while they don't have Jesus, non-Western cultures overall are to be commended for their greater authenticity or down-to-earthness.

I don't know whether there is yet any formal movement within evangelicalism to advocate for adoption of nonwhite babies by white couples, but the trend is there. Just one more reason why, contrary to popular belief, evangelicals aren't reliably conservative.

Race: The Reality of Human Differences--Opening Statement: The Case for Race

2008-08-11T20:42:00.004-04:00

In Race: The Reality of Human Differences, before beginning their chapter-by-chapter treatment of the subject of race, Sarich and Miele present an opening statement briefly explaining the purpose of the book and laying out the general path it will follow.

They begin by calling race "America's most taboo four-letter word." Obviously "race" is not comparable to other four-letter words in terms of the reaction to speaking it, but it is true that the subject it denotes is one on which our society's opinion-makers will brook no dissent from the accepted view. Obviously, it was not always this way. The authors marshal an array of quotations from four American presidents--Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon--that would be unspeakable in polite society today. For example, Abraham Lincoln said, "There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." The authors intend for these quotations to demonstrate that belief in universal equality is a relatively recent phenomenon, and that for most of human history, the accepted view was what we might call race realism. Of course, we are used to hearing from the left that all of human history was a nightmare of ignorance, oppression, and injustice until the 1960's, so race deniers will likely be unpersuaded by this argument, dismissing it as argumentum ad populum.

As many of us know from real-life or online interactions with liberals, race deniers generally really believe that scientifically established facts are on their side; they tend to claim to be impartial, willing to evaluate any empirical evidence, and project an image of themselves as believing that race is a mere social construction only because that is what the best information we have tells us. While not mentioning this view directly, the authors provide a rebuttal to it:

Denying the biological reality of race and recognizing it as a pseudoscientific myth created to justify white supremacy, they admonish, will produce what biological anthropologist Alan Goodman in the PBS documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion terms "an absolute paradigm shift." The resulting realization that "race is not based on biology but race is rather an idea that we ascribe to biology" will cause any thought of genetically based group differences to disappear as well, or at least it will set society on the road to their long-overdue remediation through social and economic policy.

In other words, race-deniers don't say race is a social construction because they think that true, but rather because they think having people believe it will eliminate racism. The authors seem to be implying that race-deniers are less concerned with the truth or falsehood of their views than they are with how those views can be used as a means to their desired end.

Sarich and Miele intend to present "the case for race" in three parts: first, race being understood in the context of the history of the concept itself, second, what we know about race from evolution, and third, the political problems associated with race in our present society. In Chapter 1, "Race and the Law," they tell us, we will see that the commonsense idea of race is accepted without question in the legal system. Again, this will be useful in understanding the reality of race, but given what we know of the cultural left's view of the world, where common sense is always wrong, where what seems obvious is never really true, where we need experts to enlighten us, race-deniers will probably dismiss this argument as an appeal to the majority or to authority.

Chapter 2, "Race and History," sounds as though it will stand on more solid ground, in that it will present evidence from a variety of cultures throughout human history that the concept of race has always been with us, that even ancient civilizations believed that different racial groups had different physical and mental characteristics. In the authors' view, this chapter will refute the contention that race is a recent concept invented to justify European colonialism.

Chapter 3 is entitled "Anthropology as the Science of Race." This chapter will address, among other things, "the Darwinian revolution, when anthropology emerged as the science of race, and how and why that viewpoint was increasingly marginalized after World War II." That little tidbit was surprising to me, since the great majority of anthropologists today accept the "race is merely a social construction" view! What a drastic change for a field that, as the authors say, was created as the science of race. I'll be interested to learn how exactly that view of the field was marginalized after World War II.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6, "Resolving the Primate Tree," "Homo Sapiens and its Races," and "The Two 'Miracles' That Made Humankind" respectively, will address race in the context of evolution. It's interesting to use evolution to prove the reality of race, since the left wholeheartedly accepts evolution. I believe this is why, as I alluded to earlier, the race-deniers that make up the left claim to have the best scientific evidence on their side. They cannot dismiss the consensus view arrived at by a materialist scientific approach to human history, since that view hinges on Darwinian evolution, which provides them with their arguments against God, against transcendence, and for the religious right being a bunch of fascist rednecks trying to establish a theocracy in America. So instead they must claim to hew to modern science, distorting or misinterpreting scientific evidence to show that race is not real. The authors repeat the statement that Homo sapiens originated "only 50,000" years ago at least thrice in this opening statement; clearly they believe this is an unusually short time and that this shortness is significant in understanding race. Exactly why and how remain to be seen.

Sarich and Miele describe the views of three eminent scientists: Stephen Jay Gould (race cannot exist), Richard Lewontin (race does not exist), and Alan Goodman (even if race can and does exist, it should not be studied), and say that they reject all three of these views. Of particular interest will be their refutation of Lewontin: he was one of the star witnesses against race in the PBS documentary, and I know from online debates into which I have attempted to inject race realism that his name is often used by race-deniers as someone who's created an airtight argument against race being a valid biological concept. That is, when you get into an argument with a race-denier, their response is often to the effect of, "go read Richard Lewontin. Case dismissed."

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 sound to me like they will prove the most interesting; they are the ones which most directly address the common contention that the phenotypic differences between the races, which we see all around us every day, are illusory. Chapter 7 is entitled "Race and Physical Differences" and in it the authors intend to introduce the topic of racial differences in the least controversial, most accepted arena in which they are manifest: athletic performance. They mention the Kalenjin, the Kenyan tribe which utterly dominates world long-distance running. Of course, race-deniers do not deny the reality of such examples; they just say that that is one single trait that cannot be used to classify individuals into races in a valid way, and add that there is more genetic variation within races than between races (an argument the authors intend to address.) It will be interesting to see if the authors flesh this argument out in such a way as to answer the race-deniers' objections.

Chapter 8, "Race and Behavior," will address, inter alia, what is probably the most controversial topic of all related to race: intelligence differences. Entire books have been written on this subject, none of which, I'm ashamed to admit, I have read, so I'm looking forward to what will hopefully be a good overview of the topic from Sarich and Miele. They will use a classic study in dog breeds to elucidate this topic. Unsurprisingly, they say, Sarich had difficulties publishing a similar study done to examine race differences in humans.

In Chapter 9, "Learning to Live with Race," the authors will present three approaches to dealing with race: Meritocracy in the Emerging Global Economy, Affirmative Action and Race Norming, and Rising Resegretation and the Emergence of Ethno-States, and describe the pros and cons to each. While Rising Resegregation sounds best to me, and most realistic in dealing with the conflict created by racial diversity, the authors state their preference for the global meritocracy.

And this ties in with my one criticism of this opening statement. Several times the authors refer to the concept of evolution, by which I assume they mean Darwinian evolution, as though it were an end in itself. For example, they say that they believe "it is not only appropriate but important to study race, because it helps us to apply the evolutionary perspective to the analysis of human variation generally." In other words, it's not important to apply the evolutionary perspective because doing so helps us understand race; rather, it's the other way around. It's almost as though studying race were merely a means to an end, that end being applying the evolutionary perspective. When writing about the subject of race, we race realists often place scare quotes around the word "mere," because race-deniers say that race is "merely a social construct," implying that it is somehow less significant or important than commonly believed. But those to whom Darwinian evolution explains everything about mankind also inspire scare quotes, believing as they do that man, not merely his physical body but his highest, noblest, most transcendent thoughts, his dreams, aspirations, and hopes, is "merely" the product of random mutation and natural selection.

Whether this view informs the authors' preference for the meritocracy I cannot say for sure, but their stated goal is to enhance "the potential for achievement by individuals." This is a fine goal within a particular nation that can handle it, such as America, but to make this a worldwide goal is not something one would expect of those who understand the reality of race, unless their worldview was one in which there was nothing higher than man, and the autonomy and happiness of each individual was considered the greatest good.

That said, by the looks of the opening statement, the book will be a tour de force through race realism, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Next up: Chapter 1, "Race and the Law."

Another liberal victory: defining Western civilization as secular libertinism

2008-08-10T23:30:00.003-04:00

In the recent thread at View from the Right in which the Candian leftist Ken Hechtman expounds upon his vision for the world, Hechtman stated his belief that a soap opera was going to "Westernize" the Middle East. This sentiment was popular shortly after September 11th, 2001, when prominent leftists and neoconservatives began to advocate what might be called the "Britney Spears" strategy for combating terrorism: bombard 'em with the MTV culture. At the same time, "public health" enforcers often speak of the problems with a "Western" diet, or claim that various non-Western peoples, previously healthy, have developed health problems after being introduced to a "Western" diet. At a recent visit with my father, who was a Reagan voter in the 80s but has more recently become a liberal, I remarked that the North Koreans could alleviate their famine and other problems by abandoning Communism and adopting a freer economy as South Korea has done, and he said that that's what brought down the Soviet Union: increasing "Western" influence with our movies, TV shows, pop music, fashions, etc.

What is interesting about this is that when such people use the word "Western," they don't mean traditional Western civilization. They don't think that soap operas are going to spark a wave of Middle Eastern interest in Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Shakespeare. They don't mean that African tribes started developing atherosclerosis and heart disease after they began to eat roast chicken and peas. Instead, they're referring to the corrupt, degraded, mass-produced popular culture that has taken hold of Western countries. They're referring to the television shows and movies that glorify sexual promiscuity, the acceptance of cohabitation and homosexuality and bastardy, the interest in getting the latest upgrade to one's home theater system rather than in living rightly, the ubiquitous fast food and junk food with their high-calorie but otherwise low-nutrient French fries and sodas.

Of course, it's insulting to traditional Western civilization to have these things co-opt the "Western" label. Not only are they unrelated to the traditional West, they are positively antagonistic to traditional Western values. And of course, it's a victory for the left to have the term used this way, because it makes it that much harder to advocate for the traditional West when the name "Western" now means something else. But there's a second, often overlooked point in this discussion: why should these phenomena be considered Western? There's nothing distinctly Western about them; debauchery, materialism, and junk food exist the world over. Western civilization did not invent them, and there is no historical continuity between them and the traditional West; Shakespeare did not give birth to The Sopranos, nor Mozart to Britney Spears. One might say that these phenomena first emerged as society-wide phenomena in Western countries, but that is more a function of Western countries being uniquely suited to produce the wealth necessary to support them. Today, they certainly exist anywhere such wealth exists, and take on their own decidedly non-Western cultural flavors: witness the burgeoning Hong Kong pop music scene, for instance. So why should they be called Western, any more than strong family ties or a sense of social obligation should be called "Eastern?"

They shouldn't. Let's stop giving the cultural left ammunition, and make sure we don't participate in their defining everything that's corrupt about our society at present as characteristic of our civilization.

Dr. Fetus, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Abortion

2008-08-10T02:07:00.001-04:00

A few months ago, in lecture, the lecturer used the word "baby" to refer to a fetus, then quickly corrected himself and uttered the word "fetus."

In medical school, we are taught to refer to a fetus as a fetus rather than a baby when speaking to an expectant mother, unless the mother refers to it as a baby and says that she plans to keep it. Last year we had a "communications workshop" where we had to practice giving genetic counseling to a standardized patient (i.e., an actor) about the risk of her baby having Down syndrome. Fortunately, my "patient" told me right off the bat that she planned to keep the baby no matter what, so I was spared from having to use the word "fetus" over and over again for the rest of the session, instead being able to do what most people naturally do: use the word "baby."

This is yet another area where the left claims to be merely trying to encourage neutrality, but instead winds up pushing the leftist vision. The insistence on "fetus" encourages people to think of a baby as an inanimate object. If a pregnant woman who is genuinely undecided about whether to give birth or have an abortion hears her baby referred to as a "fetus," she is implicitly and ever-so-subtly being counseled in the direction of abortion. More broadly, and more importantly in the grand scheme of things, the cumulative effect on society at large of hearing physicians refer to "fetuses" by default, and "babies" only when given permission to use that word by the mother, is to encourage us to think of fetuses as objects which can easily be disposed of if they prove inconvenient. There really is no such thing as neutrality here. It's common sense & human nature to think of a fetus as a baby, but of course the left is against this, because they would never want to encourage a woman who might want to have an abortion to give birth instead. So they go in the opposite direction and wind up implicitly encouraging abortion.

Fast food is the new tobacco: the next advance of the nanny state

2008-08-09T00:06:00.004-04:00

Have you ever heard anyone joke, "what a great country America is! Even our poor people are fat!" Well, the left has plans to change that. It was only a few short months ago that I heard a medical school classmate, as I've mentioned before, advocate taxing fatty foods to encourage those who tend to eat such foods to eat more healthfully. Now the discussion has gone national. In an article at Slate, William Saletan describes an ordinance passed by the Los Angeles City Council prohibiting construction of new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area inhabited by 500,000 low-income people. Saletan seems to be against it, but on close reading his reaction is basically the "shock" that liberals are always evincing to phenomena they should have been able to predict:

We're not talking anymore about preaching diet and exercise, disclosing calorie counts, or restricting sodas in schools. We're talking about banning the sale of food to adults. Treating French fries like cigarettes or liquor. I didn't think this would happen in the United States anytime soon. I was wrong.

Well, why didn't you think it would happen in the United States? Look at what's happened with smoking. The left has already virtually won that war; why shouldn't they turn to unhealthy food next? And notice that by Saletan's own description, we're not talking about treating French fries like cigarettes or liquor, we're talking about treating them more severely than cigarettes and liquor, which are freely available for purchase by adults.

Saletan does make a good point in the article. Among those who think that the obese poor need more governmental help with their culinary choices, it is often said that poor people in urban environments have no choice but to eat fast food, since there are no supermarkets in their neighborhoods because of high crime and economic deprivation. Saletan thinks that's bogus:

And the helplessness attributed to poor people is exaggerated. "You try to get a salad within 20 minutes of our location; it's virtually impossible," says the Community Coalition's executive director. Really? The coalition's headquarters is at 8101 S. Vermont Ave. A quick Google search shows, among other outlets, a Jack-in-the-Box six blocks away. They have salads. Not the world's greatest salads, but not as bad as a government that tells you whose salad you can eat.

I tend to agree with this. During the first year of medical school, we were all forced to do a public service project, and one group decided to examine nutrition in poor areas of the city. They claimed that in one area, for blocks and blocks in every direction, there was no store selling fresh produce. Despite such claims, I find it hard to believe that the denizens of the "inner cities" can't find healthy food. Even if they don't have cars, they have public transportation. Most of them do work, meaning they are probably leaving their neighborhoods daily for somewhat more thriving ones. Yet the left accepts the "poor people don't have stores selling healthy food accessible to them" idea as gospel, and will not consider that it might not be true, using it to shut down debate when one suggests that we shouldn't regulate fast food.

In any case, while there's nothing morally wrong with tobacco, it's not a necessity of life and there's no question that chronic smoking is foolish. Yet eating is a basic necessity, and as I pointed out above, the left wants to treat it more strictly than tobacco. Perhaps it will soon be time to formulate a new law. Something along the lines of: in liberal society, the more natural and normal an activity, the more it will be constrained and regulated according to what the elite deems best. I don't think we have sufficient examples of this yet, but be on the lookout for more.

Race: The Reality of Human Differences (Introduction)

2008-08-07T22:27:00.004-04:00

A few months ago, I bought a copy of Race: The Reality of Human Differences by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele, but hadn't gotten around to reading it. I thought that before medical school gets too busy again, I could try something new for this blog: an in-depth book review. So, over the course of the next few weeks, I am going to read the book, and post a review of each chapter.

I'll set the stage by summarizing the preface. Vincent Sarich is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, and Frank Miele is a senior editor of Skeptic magazine. Before I bought the book, I thought it was conceived as a response to PBS's much-vaunted documentary called Race: The Power of an Illusion, which unsurprisingly supported the view that race is a mere "social construct." This turned out to be wrong: the authors say that the PBS documentary aired while they were preparing the final draft of the book. Nevertheless, they had sufficient time to note in the Preface that the book provides a neat rebuttal to the documentary.

The authors list the 10 points available on the PBS website which summarize the documentary. They are as follows:

1. Race is a modern idea.
2. Race has no genetic basis.
3. Human subspecies don't exist.
4. Skin color really is only skin deep.
5. Most variation is within, not between, "races."
6. Slavery predates race.
7. Race and freedom evolved together.
8. Race justified social inequalities as natural.
9. Race isn't biological, but racism is still real.
10. Colorblindness will not end racism.

To a race-realist, those ten points--and even more so, that they were presented to the American public as fact, with all the authority of the Public Broadcasting System behind them--are quite infuriating.

The authors then state that they:

disagree with each of these ten points--and that is a remarkable degree of disagreement, given that the first eight points are matters of fact. In Race: The Reality of Human Differences, we present the evidence we believe refutes the first eight points and explain why we reject points nine and ten, not only for economic but ethical reasons as well.

Along with these ten points, the authors include a reference to the chapters which refute each point.

Sarich and Miele have set before them a daunting task: to establish that, against the received wisdom of all the leaders and elites of our society, nearly all those who consider themselves educated people, including the scientific establishment itself, race is a valid biological concept. I would tend to assume that such a valid biological concept, by dint of its momentous import, must necessarily influence social policy. Sarich and Miele don't seem to think so. They say that they are "individualists" on matters of social policy, seemingly setting themselves up as proponents of a strict meritocracy. It remains to be seen how they will derive this principle from, or reconcile it with, their view of race.

Stay tuned for part 2, "Opening Statement: The Case for Race."

How to become a traditionalist in one easy lesson

2008-08-07T00:43:00.005-04:00

In the recent entry Michael Novak: Americans love belonging to a real, concrete nation, commenter Smith/Wesson wrote that the Republican party currently contains an "unholy combination of Evangelicals, neocons, and corporate interests," which sparked me to comment on how liberal corporations are.

I thought this bore repeating in a separate post because to my mind, it brings to light the crucial realization that brings one out of mainstream conservatism and into traditionalism. In our world, mainstream conservatives and Republicans are always using liberal arguments to advance what are seen as conservative policies. For example, conservative columnists will argue against affirmative action on the basis that it keeps black people down and is therefore racist. George Bush pushes tax cuts, saying that they will stimulate the economy and create jobs, thereby helping poor people. Now, the standard view on the left is that these people don't really mean what they are saying: conservatives really hate black people and want to oppress them; that is their real reason for opposing affirmative action, but they know that argument won't hold water in modern society, so they make up a phony excuse about how it hurts black people. George Bush really hates poor people and just wants to pass tax cuts to help his rich buddies get richer off the backs of the poor; but he knows he couldn't get away with it if he admitted that, so he makes up the bit about how tax cuts will stimulate the economy and create jobs for poor people. And the standard view of the rank-and-file mainstream right is similar: conservatives oppose affirmative action because it is unjust, George Bush supports tax cuts because such a progressive tax system is unjust, but the left is crazy and won't listen to these arguments so they make up some phony liberal arguments to appease the left.

The realization that these standard views are wrong, the realization that the reason conservative columnists say they oppose affirmative action because it hurts black people, or that George Bush says he supports tax cuts because they will create jobs for the poor, or that corporations say they love diversity and create executive-level Chief Diversity Officer positions, is that those people really believe those things--is the realization that mainstream conservatism itself has become liberal. And that was the key realization, the epiphany, that brought me out of mainstream conservatism and into traditionalism.

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball

2008-08-05T23:38:00.003-04:00

Several bloggers I read regularly have recently discussed the state of major league baseball. From the sound of things, it's not good: America's erstwhile national pastime, a title now occupied by football, has lost ground to that and other faster-paced sports, and has attempted to keep up by inundating the fans with a cacophony of overstimulation to the senses. Strobe effects on a giant screen dominating the stadium, rock music constantly blaring, certainly don't sound appealing especially when one was hoping to experience the slower, more contemplative game that so captivated pre-ADD-era America. The athletic and gentlemanly nature of the players is said to be gone as well, with many players overweight, scruffy, and unkempt. I had had intimations along these lines for years, but they were all second-hand, as I don't follow sports. That changed last Monday night, when I attended a major league baseball game probably for the first time since high school. I was at Progressive Field in Cleveland where the Indians played against the Detroit Tigers.

Based on what I had read, I braced myself for the worst, but I really thought it wasn't that bad. Yes, the giant screen was new, but it didn't seem obtrusive; in fact, being able to view the current batter's stats, both teams' batting orders, who was pitching, and other tidbits of information made it easier to follow the game. The clips of rock music were mildly annoying, and yes, probably out of place if you are used to the low-tech, old-fashioned game from a simpler era, but they were played only between innings, not when each new batter stepped to the plate, and they were pretty short. None of the players looked particularly grotesque to me, though I am too young to remember the era of Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle or even Hank Aaron.

There were some enjoyable moments which I felt probably hadn't changed that much since the pre-modern age of baseball: the cheering for a home run, for a base hit, for a particularly deft play, for the starting pitcher when he was replaced; the booing when the crowd disagreed with an umpire's call; the crowd getting on its feet for the final inning. As Rick Darby commented, seeing a pop-up fly ball caught in real life is a different experience from seeing it on TV, but so are more mundane events, like merely seeing the players take the field. Being there imparts a different feel to the entire game. The only problem is that crowd participation is somewhat manufactured; at various times the screen displayed exhortations for the crowd to cheer, like an "applause" sign in a TV studio, so you could never quite tell how much cheering would have gone on naturally.

My biggest complaint is unrelated to the game itself: the ridiculous names all the stadiums have now that they are corporate-sponsored. "Progressive Field?" At least it's not the main indoor venue in Cleveland, the Quicken Loans Arena. When I was growing up in Philadelphia, the local sports scene was dominated by Veterans Stadium, the home of both the Phillies and the Eagles. Those teams now play at Citizens Bank Park and Lincoln Financial Field, respectively. One wonders exactly what the change was in our economy that prevented cities from being able to finance their own stadiums and forced them instead to turn to these corporate sponsors who insist on slathering their name all over everything.

I have never been a big sports fan, but after seeing a live game I have to say that I thought the game is still alive and well. Though it has been displaced by football in national prominence, it is still there, running as a current under the surface of American society. Just as I hope traditional America will re-awaken, cast off liberalism and multiculturalism, and return to a distinctly Western European identity, just as that identity still exists under the surface if not in the daily lives of many Americans then at least in their memories, waiting to move into the seat that will be vacated when people abandon the current ruling ideology, so baseball still exists, perhaps waiting to take the reins back from football and basketball when a restored traditional America decides it prefers a more relaxed, contemplative game.

[The title of this entry is a line spoken by James Earl Jones' character in the movie Field of Dreams.]

Sponsorship

2008-08-04T18:30:00.003-04:00

If it's good enough for Katie's Dad and Ron Guhname, it's good enough for me: advertising on my blog, that is. You may notice a Google ad banner on the left-hand side, a Google search box, and an Amazon.com search box. Now, this blog isn't exactly one of the most visited on the web, and so I don't expect to quit medical school and sit around living high on the hog while the advertising revenues roll in. However, since I am currently a starving student, I thought that I might as well experiment with ads to see if they might bring in some spare change. I hope none of my readers mind--I don't intend to make this blog one of those cluttered, dizzying to look at sites that are so common today.

I was actually somewhat surprised to be accepted to the Google and Amazon programs. Here's an excerpt from the Amazon.com affiliate program operating agreement:

We may reject your application if we determine (in our sole discretion) that your site is unsuitable for the Program. Unsuitable sites include, but are not limited to, those that:
promote sexually explicit materials
promote violence
promote discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age [bolding mine]
promote illegal activities

I strongly suspected that if Amazon's people carefully read this blog, they would decided that it does in fact promote discrimination on several of those bases, and turn me down. Apparently, they either didn't dig deep enough, or they decided that Wise Man's Heart wasn't really that bad. A form of unprincipled exception, perhaps? "We can't go turning down every site that disagrees with us... that would be taking things too far!"

What's truly remarkable about the above policy, however, is the sweeping language. A site is unsuitable if it promotes discrimination based on nationality? So if a blogger promotes an immigration policy that favors persons from some nations over others, his site is unsuitable? Or how about sexual orientation? Logically speaking, if someone supports current marriage law in the United States, which does not provide for same-sex marriage, his site violates Amazon's policy.

Similarly, Google AdSense program policies read as follows:

Sites displaying Google ads may not include:
Violent content, racial intolerance, or advocacy against any individual, group, or organization

I stop there because that is the very first rule. The most important thing to Google is that the sites on which its ads appear exhibit no discrimination whatsoever. And their language is even more sweeping than Amazon's: under Google's rules, you may not "advocate" against any "individual, group, or organization," meaning you cannot say anything negative at all. Obviously, this rule is not strictly enforced. Daily Kos has Google ads, and that site certainly advocates against George W. Bush, who is an individual, and the Republican party, which is an organization.

One might be tempted to say that these companies are unprincipled because they don't carry their rules to their logical conclusion. Viewed from another angle, however, they are quite principled, because at least in their official rules they place the principle of non-discrimination above that of turning a profit--even turning a profit from, and thus "sticking it to," people they disagree with.

Michael Novak: Americans love belonging to a real, concrete nation

2008-07-30T13:31:00.004-04:00

Just yesterday Lawrence Auster had a great post on how mainstream conservatives oppose globalism when it's promoted by leftists and Democrats but support it when it's promoted by Republicans. As if to prove the point, Michael Novak, in the course of criticizing Barack Obama for not wearing an American flag lapel pin, posted the following at National Review Online's The Corner today:

Real patriotism, [Obama] clarified, is loving the ideals of a country and dissenting from policies not in line with those ideals.

Here Obama points to a huge divide between left-wingers and ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans do not love a mere “ideal” out in never-never land. They love the land, the soil, the mountains, the plains, the history, the bloody battles, the mistakes, the rises and falls, the real human history of an altogether human people, the particular, imperfect people of the United States.

This is the same Michael Novak who wrote a long, blustering article called "Global Liberty" saying that Western nations must spread the universal ideals of democracy and capitalism across the globe, who wrote a book called Universal Hunger for Liberty arguing among other things that the concept of liberty has deep roots within Islam, who has in fact made an entire career of pumping out inane, vacuous books and articles (any time I attempt to read anything by Novak I become so frustrated by the sheer emptiness of his prose that I promptly give up) arguing that all people the world over have an innate longing for liberty and that we must spread democracy and capitalism everywhere so that this longing in everyone can be fulfilled. But now that Barack Obama is promoting globalism, suddenly the great thing about us is that we love our land, soil, mountains, plains, and history.

You must be a genius to read Wise Man's Heart

2008-07-29T22:02:00.002-04:00

As can be seen in the sidebar, the Blog Readability Test tool determined that this blog's reading level is Genius. I must be doing something right. If you can understand my writing, give yourself a pat on the back--you're a genius!

Hispanics refuse to vote for McCain despite fully agreeing with his platform

2008-07-28T23:09:00.004-04:00

Here's a story which appeared on Yahoo's main page with the headline "Immigration debate turns Hispanic voters away from McCain." How can this be, I thought when I saw the headline, since John McCain is so pro-immigration?

The story is typical of the awful reporting we're so used to seeing. We're told that 56 percent of Protestant "Latinos" (when are they going to start speaking Latin?) supported Bush in 2004, but only one third plan to vote for McCain this year, while 59 percent support Obama. The article goes on to say:

The biggest reason for the shift, though, has been the heated debate over immigration reform that has alienated many Hispanic voters previously receptive to the GOP — and that nearly cost McCain, a co-sponsor of the bipartisan 2006 immigration reform bill that inflamed conservatives, his party’s nomination.

How do we know this is the biggest reason for the shift? We're not told. The article gives no poll results from which this conclusion is obvious; we're just supposed to accept that the immigration debate, a debate in which John McCain is firmly on the side of increasing Hispanic immigration, has turned Hispanics off to McCain.

The reader is then treated to the words of Luis Cortes, "one of Time Magazine’s 25 most influential evangelicals in America and twice an early Bush backer."

“I’m going to vote brown,” Cortes said.

“McCain’s problem is the problem of his party demonizing Hispanic people,” Cortes said. “His party demonized us. You can’t switch off the immigration rhetoric and think it will work. In the context of the immigration issue, Hispanics define the enemy as the Republican Party and you don’t erase that overnight.

“Bush didn’t have to overcome his party’s position on immigration and I think that’s the difference,” said Cortes, who heads the Christian social service group Nueva Esperanza (New Hope).

The Republican party stance on immigration may not be clear until the platform is completed, and Cortes said he may wait to read the platform before deciding whether or not to leave the GOP.

“Do the border fence overnight, do it first, fine,” he said. “Then get to work on immigration reform in the first year.”

There is so much wrong with this I don't even know where to start. "I'm going to vote brown"? Sounds like he has his mind made up then, doesn't it? Not much chance he'll be voting for a white candidate, unless maybe said candidate gets a deep tan between now and November. The Republicans "demonize" Hispanics? Both Bush and McCain can't say enough good things about Hispanics, can't stop extolling their virtues while denigrating ordinary white Americans, and Hispanics still think Republicans "demonize" them, and admit outright that they define the Republican party as the enemy. This shows the cluelessness of the mainstream conservative movement. We're being told that there's nothing we can do that will bring Hispanics on board. As Steve Sailer said, the Republican party would be much better off trying to capture a larger share of the much more substantial white vote, than going after a fraction of a percentage of the Hispanic vote.

Cortes's last sentence, stating his preferred candidate's immigration policy, is exactly what John McCain has said he'd do: "build the damn fence," then work on amnesty. So, why isn't Cortes a McCain supporter?

This article is so typical of the mainstream media. They write articles containing conclusions not supported by their facts, containing huge, gaping questions the article doesn't even acknowledge the existence of, like an elephant in the living room. And though they are losing their influence, there are still far too many people who turn to reporting like this for their "news."

Parent-free services for thee, but not for me

2008-07-27T22:24:00.000-04:00

I have to say that if anyone who enjoys having the time to write is thinking about going to medical school, don't. I thought that during the summer, with only a "day job" doing lab research, I was going to have more spare time for blogging, but between occasionally staying late at the lab, trying to get regular exercise, spending time with friends whom my academic obligations forced me to neglect during the school year, and family obligations, it almost feels like I have had less time for blogging during the summer than I did when school was in session. And the 2nd year of medical school starts in one week.

Because I don't like neglecting the blog for months at a time, I thought I'd finish and post an old entry I'd had in draft form that's not too long or involved. I think I've mentioned before that in my weekly liberalism seminar, one of our faculty "facilitators" is a female family practice doc who works for the big downtown county hospital which provides a lot of medical care to the Holy Underserved. This woman is fully on board with the liberal practices we are taught based on individual moral autonomy, like the idea that you must offer contraception to adolescent patients without their parents knowledge or that you must kick the father of a woman's baby out of the room before informing her she is pregnant (in case she wants to make a decision about the pregnancy without him.)

Well, one morning this female doc came in complaining about the process of getting a passport for one's child. She and her husband were planning a family vacation, I believe to Bermuda, and she discovered that in order for a child to get a passport, both parents must be present. This had caused her major inconvenience in that she had to leave work to join her husband at the passport office. Obviously, this is done so that one parent who is on the outs with the other cannot abscond with the children.

I immediately thought of this woman's policy of not allowing parents to be in charge of the medical care of their children nor husbands (or, in the case of most of her patient populations, "babydaddies,") to be involved in the care of the women who are carrying their children. She doesn't want these parents to be trusted, allowing the children or pregnant women to be completely autonomous. Yet she wants US passport policy to trust her husband when he shows up without her to get passports for their children.

When I first conceived this entry, I thought this was hypocritical of her; thus the post title, which I am leaving intact. But upon further reflection, I think that both cases could be seen in the light of wanting as little parental involvement as possible. Though I'm sure she wouldn't say that a dependent minor should be able to get a passport with neither parent present, so her passport policy is not consistent with her contraception policy. This could be a classic case of an unprincipled exception--we can't have children getting passports against their parents' wishes and leaving the country, that's taking things too far.

The woman's anecdote ended with her sarcastically saying, "I love America." This reminded me of how much I hate sarcasm. You intentionally say the opposite of what you mean. You say "I love America" in order to communicate the fact that you do not love America. No doubt she thought that this was all somehow George W. Bush's fault.

Whatever the case, despite their claim to belief in absolute equality, the elites don't really believe they should have to play by the same rules as the hoi polloi.

Does sexual liberation deter white men from being traditionalists?

2008-07-04T13:53:00.000-04:00

When you've been a traditionalist for a while, you become accustomed to the obviousness of non-liberal truths. You wonder why everyone can't see, for example, that Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate to Western countries, or that whites should recognize and be conscious of ourselves as a group and celebrate our heritage, or that homosexuality should not be publicly recognized by society. Yet you also know that the vast majority of your countrymen, including most "conservatives," would brand you a racist and a Nazi, compare you to a Klansman or Hitler, for saying these things. Still, the obviousness of them is on your mind, and you can't help but wonder whether, given enough time and a chance for a non-threatening conversation, you could make converts.

Therefore, it was inevitable that over the past year I would find myself from time to time imagining "coming out" as a traditionalist to my classmates, calmly trying to convince them, and wondering what their reactions might be. They are overwhelmingly liberal, but some of them seem like reasonable people who could be persuaded of a non-liberal view with sufficient evidence. So, I tried to imagine with whom I might broach the subject some day, perhaps in the midst of shooting the breeze during some downtime on a call night during 3rd year. Obviously, the black students are out of the question. There aren't many of them, but they have an enormous amount to lose if the affirmative action regime and American society's current practice of treating them deferentially were to come crashing down. Not only would I be called a racist, I'd probably be reported to the Dean and face disciplinary action. The Asian students, being at the top of the heap IQ-wise, would probably be more sympathetic to arguments about racial differences, but no more sympathetic than the blacks to arguments that America should take conscious steps to remain a white, Western European, Christian country.

Then there are the white students. Half of them are women, and I can just imagine the jaws hitting the floor when I say that, while there will always be exceptions, the general rule should be that women stay home as housewives while men are leaders of the society. Again, Dean's office, here I come. That leaves the white men. If no one else would, wouldn't they be able to be convinced of how much better life would be in a traditionalist America?

Blacks, Asians, women... in my mind's eye, those in these groups call me racist, sexist, bigot, etc. But the predicted white men's reaction to my traditionalist views is: "you're never going to get laid with an attitude like that." Young men know that most single young women are liberal, and, except for those with strong religious convictions about sexual behavior, the overarching concern in life is to have sex with women. So the truth or falsity of non-liberal views is almost irrelevant; the question for the young man is "will women be attracted to me if I accept this view versus that one?" This phenomenon has spilled over to religious conservatives as well; a few weeks ago I remarked to some evangelical Christian friends that I thought that by and large, women should not be doctors, and one of them said to me, "you're never going to get married!"

One would think that white men would realize how the liberal regime has made the life they plan to lead so much worse: the expectation that women will work and children will be placed in day care leading to a fractured family life, affirmative action programs causing the white man to fail to get the promotion he deserves, refusal to acknowledge racial differences leading to his children being placed in classrooms full of unruly low-achieving minority children, preventing them from learning at the level they're capable of, no-fault divorce laws making it easy for his wife to walk out on him, and the very same sexual liberation he prizes when young creating the view that sexual fulfillment is paramount in life, making it likely that his wife will walk out on him when she becomes "bored." Instead, non-liberalism is out of the question, because if they adopt it women won't want to have sex with them.

There is much more to say about this topic; in particular, the direction my thoughts are going is toward the inversion of the concept of manhood, of what is masculine vs. what isn't; how in the past restraining one's sexual desires was seen as manly, whereas today to bend over backwards for liberal women in order to "get laid" is seen as manly while to care more about standing on principle than about opportunistically having cheap sex will get one labeled weak, feminine, wimpy, etc. But that is for another post. I admit here that I could be wrong; I haven't talked to any of these men about the big questions facing our society and I don't know for sure what their reaction would be. But based on everything I can surmise from interaction with those of my own generation, their reaction would be what I described. Which means, if we can just somehow free them from this enslavement to sexual desire, somehow help them gain just a little more foresight, we could potentially convert large numbers of white men to traditionalism. What do others think?

How dishonest use of the term "evangelical" weakens Christian influence in our society

2008-06-30T00:28:00.003-04:00

By now we've all seen the headlines about James Dobson's "accusing" Barack Obama of distorting the Bible. The story being several days old, we are now on round two or three, with the most recent articles describing counter-responses to responses to the original story. So we know Obama thinks Dobson was wrong. But where do evangelicals themselves stand?

According to an entry on the Dallas Morning News religion blog, Jim Wallis, noted liberal evangelical, has "ripped" Dobson for his criticism of Obama. This is not surprising, since Wallis is a known left-winger, and has become something of a darling of the left for allegedly squaring evangelicalism with leftism and proving that not all evangelicals are rabid right-wing troglodytes. Thus he has become useful in the left-wing quest to weaken the influence of Christianity in our society. But wait, isn't he an evangelical? And isn't the very definition of an evangelical to be a patriotic, pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-same-sex marriage, pro-prayer in schools, etc., etc., conservative American?

Not when the meaning of the term "evangelical" is shifting. The word comes from the Greek "evangelion," meaning good news. In the strictest, perhaps original sense, it simply means one who is concerned with spreading the good news of the Christian gospel, namely that Jesus Christ, the son of God, came to earth to pay with his life the debt we could not pay for our own sin, purchasing for us eternal life. Now, in theory, this is something a Jim Wallis, a mainline protestant, or a Roman Catholic could sign on to just as well as James Dobson. So how did "evangelical" come to mean conservative, generic, non-denominational (or not particularly denominationally oriented) low-church Protestant? I speak only from my own memory here, but I believe that the term was not in common use in this sense until the 1990s. When I was a child in the 1980s, the term the media used for such people was "fundamentalists." That word had a negative connotation, and was not entirely accurate because only a small subset of conservative Protestants are true fundamentalists, so, by my understanding, this group of which we speak mounted a large PR campaign to replace the f-word with "evangelical," a more positive word that emphasized the seemingly benign mission to spread the gospel.

This campaign was largely successful; the media, and those outside the conservative Protestant world, actually began using this word instead of "fundamentalist." But a funny thing happened on the way to the church: instead of swapping meanings, liberals, secularists, and the mainstream media swapped only symbols, leaving the underlying meaning intact. "Evangelical" simply came to mean exactly what "fundamentalist" used to mean, negative connotations and all. (I had a coworker, a secular Russian Jew about my age, who like many in my generation got all his information about the world from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, who used to say the word "evangelicals" with a sneer in his voice, just the way an older leftist would speak the word "fundamentalist.")

It was inevitable that this would happen. Since conservative Christianity is defined as bad in the worldview of liberalism, any word which conservative Christians adopt to describe themselves must take on negative connotations. This makes it extremely dishonest of the media to describe Jim Wallis and other liberals as "evangelicals," since for them the word implies holding to a level of religious "fanaticism" that goes beyond what is legitimate. I'm not exactly sure why they would use a word that has negative connotations to describe someone they view as good, but I think what they are trying to do is discredit conservative Christians' claim to be true Christians; by co-opting the word commonly used to describe conservative Christians and applying it to liberals like Wallis, they're trying to say that he is the one really spreading the good news, and the Dobsons of the world are spreading hate, intolerance, judgmentalism, etc. (Note: I know that Wallis himself embraces the label "evangelical," but since he is on the same side as the left and the mainstream media, I'm including him under the pronoun "they.")

The other major point of dishonesty in the entry is the following:

Older Religious Right leaders are now being passed by a new generation of young evangelicals who believe that poverty, "creation care" of the environment, human trafficking, human rights, pandemic diseases like HIV/AIDS, and the fundamental issues of war and peace are also "religious" and "moral" issues and now a part of a much wider and deeper agenda.

For the past several years, news stories on religion have been peppered with statements like the above, saying that the younger, rising generation of evangelicals believes that typical left-wing concerns are "also" religious and moral issues, that they take the liberal line on poverty and environmentalism "in addition to" opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. The effect is to make it sound as though these young liberal evangelicals are, to invert a common libertarian catch-phrase, socially conservative and fiscally liberal; that they are in fact conservative on cultural issues but merely add income redistribution and environmentalism to those issues; that their concerns form a superset of the older evangelicals' concerns (i.e., "part of a much wider and deeper agenda.") What they want us to believe is that older evangelicals care only about abortion and same-sex marriage, while the new generation, in addition to caring about these things, also cares about human rights and AIDS.

This is a bald-faced lie. These liberal evangelicals don't care about left-wing causes in addition to the standard right-wing social and cultural concerns; they care about left-wing causes instead of right-wing social and cultural concerns. How often do Wallis or Tony Campolo or other liberal evangelical leaders call for abortion to be illegal, or same-sex marriage to be resisted? Answer: never. Instead, they say they are personally opposed to these things, but refuse to call for a public morality enshrined in law that opposes them. Here is an interview with Campolo where he says that abortion should remain legal and takes the pathetic "get the government out of the marriage business" line on same-sex marriage. And here is an article by Wallis in which he says that liberal Christians "find it painfully difficult to vote Democratic" given that party's stance on abortion, similar to Campolo's description of himself as a "reluctant Democrat." But notice what he's saying: it may be painfully difficult for them to vote Democratic, but they still do it. And why not? The Democratic party's stance on abortion is what allegedly troubles them so much--but their own stance is that abortion is regrettable but should remain legal, a stance indistinguishable from that of most Democratic politicians! How many times did Bill Clinton say that abortion should remain "safe, legal, and rare?"

So, we see that liberal evangelicals aren't some new amalgam of liberals and conservatives, independent thinkers offering a "third way," people who are suffering great personal anguish at being horribly torn between two sides, agreeing more with one on certain issues and with the other on other issues. Instead, they are garden variety left-wingers who completely sign on to the Democratic party platform and have nothing but scorn for conservative positions.

Left-wing dishonesty knows no bounds.

Forget marriage mandate, it's the miscegenation mandate!

2008-06-09T23:46:00.001-04:00

Here's something from the "Evangelicals can't save Western Civilization" files.

A certain segment of the evangelical community has been taken to task by some writers and bloggers for promoting a "marriage mandate," the notion that with few exceptions, everyone is obligated to get married. Usually, it is said that more women want to get married than men, and so the blame is placed on the men for not marrying the women. Boundless Line, a blog run by Focus on the Family, whose posters are all conservative evangelicals and which draws a lot of evangelical commenters, is among the publications accused of promoting this view.

I don't want to discuss the marriage mandate controversy here. The purpose of this post is to point out a Boundless post from last July on the subject of interracial dating. As you would be stunned, pleasantly surprised, or knowingly disappointed to learn, based on whether you are a leftist, a neocon, or a traditionalist, the post as well as most of the comments were strongly pro-interracial dating.

I've been familiar with the world of evangelicalism for many years now, so most of the comments did not surprise me. It is not at all shocking to hear evangelicals repeat typical liberal platitudes such as the idea that race is merely a social construct, or make snarky comments about "melanin" or one's "epidermis," falsely reducing race to mere skin color. However, there are a few real howlers in the comments section, like the statement that "a person with black skin raised in a Norwegian community is culturally Norwegian." Even that absurdity, though, is the logical conclusion of the view voiced by many other commenters that any problems encountered in interracial dating are due to culture and culture alone, culture being something completely separate from race.

I was, however, mildly surprised by a comment from a black woman who opposed interracial dating on the grounds that it would lead to the end of the black race. Some traditionalists and paleos have, rightly, said that from the white Western point of view, race-mixing should be frowned upon, because it will lead to the end of the white race. Of course, that is undesirable, but more than the end of the white race, global race-mixing will lead to the end of every race. Non-whites should be expected to care as much about the potential end of their races as we care about ours. The comment was surprising only because the liberalism most often expressed by evangelicals is of the right-liberal variety, where any concern about race is seen as invalid and bigoted, instead of the left-liberal variety, where the white race is constantly upbraided but the exaltation of other races is perfectly legitimate. To hear even a black person within an evangelical context speak so frankly about race is rare.

The point about the end of races was lost on most commenters, though, like the one who said that she grew up thinking inter-ethnic families were the norm (she meant interracial, but wrote inter-ethnic because she doesn't believe race exists.) If you think about it, for interracial families to be the norm is a self-contradictory proposition: if most people marry and have children with someone of another race, soon all races will have blended into one, and without distinct races, there cannot be interracial families. The fact that this commenter thought that something inherently impossible was the norm shows how confused most evangelicals are on these issues.

All of this brings to mind a quotation by Sam Francis I came across for the first time a month or two ago:

The real problem with the religious right is that, in the long run, its religious vehicle won’t carry it home. If it ever ended abortion, restored school prayer, outlawed sodomy and banned pornography, I suspect, most of its followers would simply declare victory and retire. But having accomplished all of that, the Christian right would have done absolutely nothing to strip the federal government of the power it has seized throughout this century, restore a proper understanding and enforcement of the Constitution and of republican government, prevent the inundation of the country by anti-Western immigrants, stop the cultural and racial dispossession of the historic American people, or resist the absorption of the American nation into a multicultural and multiracialist globalist regime.

Indeed, all evangelicals really seem to care about is abortion and same-sex marriage. They would be perfectly happy to see America become a nonwhite, third-world country, as long as abortion, pornography, same-sex marriage, and embryonic stem cell research were illegal. Which means that whoever saves America, it will not be evangelicals, at least not in their current incarnation.

On writing

2008-06-04T23:49:00.004-04:00

In the preface to Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor tells of how the original idea for the book was an unfinished story he was working on when his briefcase was stolen in a train station. It was never recovered, and he found himself unable to recreate the story as he remembered it. The more time passed, the better the lost story seemed, and he never felt the book was nearly as good.

I often have the same experience when writing. An idea is never as good as when it first occurs to me, and if I can't manage to get all my thoughts down in writing while they are still fresh in my mind, the eventual product always seems to pale in comparison to the original idea. My previous entry, which was finally published on June 3, 2008, was begun on August 26, 2007. At that time, I typed up the few key points that had occurred to me, and was able to envision them fully developed, but didn't have time to write them down that way. As the weeks passed, the original fervor that had surrounded the ideas in my mind began to wane, and while I'd try to work on the post now and then, the results never seemed up to snuff. Finally, when I had more time to blog again, I realized that my view of that post as an important one, and its being unfinished, was keeping me from starting to post more often again, and I forced myself to finish it. But in my mind, it is not nearly as good as it could have been, or would have been if I had written it the day the idea came to me.

I sometimes think the mark of distinction between a merely good writer and a great writer is how clear, detailed, and permanent his ideas are in his head before they have been written down. I remember how astounded I was when in college I first read Wordsworth's note to his Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, nonchalantly mentioning that he had composed the entire 150+ line poem in his mind over the course of 4-5 days while on a walking tour, and not written any of it down until it was finished. That is the mark of genius--something most of us cannot even imagine being able to do.

Null-O: How Philip K. Dick prophesied liberals' desire to destroy civilization

2008-06-03T23:29:00.003-04:00

Warning: this post contains spoilers to the short story "Null-O" by Philip K. Dick. If you have aspirations of someday reading this story without knowing the plot in advance, read no further.

Philip K. Dick is not a writer one would expect a traditionalist to praise. He was married five times, had a lifelong history of drug abuse and wrote much of his work while under the influence of amphetamines, and late in life apparently experienced paranoia and "visions" which he believed were of divine origin. Yet his stories were so thought-provoking, his psychological insights so trenchant, that one cannot help but feel that he was a prophet of the postmodern era. He was exploring the themes of reality vs. unreality and how we can tell the difference decades before such ideas became popular in movies like The Matrix. (A few years ago I picked up a copy of The Philip K. Dick Reader and read most of the stories before checking the dates of publication. I was surprised to find that most were published as early as the 1950s.)

In the short story Null-O, Dick describes the rise of a group of mutant humans called Null-Os who are somehow inherently predisposed toward logical positivism and materialist reductionism. From the Null-Os' point of view, they are gifted in being able to realize the truth that the entire universe is nothing but a vast inchoate stew of subatomic particles and that therefore all distinctions and categories are meaningless. To this factual observation they add a moral imperative: those who realize this truth must actively work to eliminate all factually incorrect, illogical distinctions and categories, such as those that lead us to see, say, a chair as distinct object with its own existence instead of merely a collection of particles that happen to be in a certain configuration at a certain time. Thus, the Null-Os initiate a program of destroying everything: they will start with the Earth, then move on to our solar system, then the Milky Way galaxy, and ultimately, the entire universe.

How does this pertain to modern liberalism? Well, there are liberals and there are liberals. We traditionalists often criticize liberals for their belief in equality, severed from any particular cultural and historical context, as the highest good, and rightly so. The belief in the supremacy of equality is destroying our society, and a large measure of the impetus for this destruction comes from the belief in non-discrimination as a moral imperative. But there is another pernicious idea at work here: the belief in equality and non-discrimination as facts; indeed, as a left-liberal might put it, as scientific facts. In this view, the notion that generalizations are not valid, that there are really no such things as categories, is considered to be a simple, observable fact; one so well established that to doubt it is like doubting that the Earth revolves around the sun, deserving of the same scorn and indignation as geocentrism. I have seen this view made manifest in many online discussions: as soon as someone takes a non-liberal view and posits the existence of categories, or tries to apply a general rule, liberals will immediately blow up at him with vicious anger for being so stupid as to think that generalizations are at all possible.

For example, one might say that Muslims, with their belief in sharia, are not compatible with the Western world and therefore should not be allowed to live in it. A typical response to this would be that there are some "moderate" (i.e., liberal) Muslims who do not believe in sharia, no matter how small a minority they may be, and so to bar all Muslims from the West would be unfair to those few and therefore is unacceptable. This objection is problematic enough, being part and parcel of the liberal contempt for the very idea of a majority, and the willingness to give away our entire civilization so that a very tiny minority does not feel put upon. There is, however, a deeper, more insidious, nihilistic objection, which goes as follows: yes, there are some Muslims who believe in sharia and thus want to destroy Western civilization. They may even comprise the vast majority of Muslims. They may even comprise the entirety of the world's Muslim population, except for one lone Muslim who does not believe in sharia. But, because there is no such thing as transcendence, because all that exists are atoms, those Muslims' status as Muslims and their desire to destroy us have nothing to do with each other. The apparent association is merely a coincidence. Each individual Muslim who believes in sharia just happens to be a Muslim, and just happens to want to destroy us. Every case, no matter how much it appears to point to a general rule, is really a case of just happens. Therefore, it is wrong to bar a Muslim entry into our society even if he believes in sharia, because his desire to destroy us is really just an isolated, causeless desire to destroy us, no different from, say, Timothy McVeigh's desire to destroy us. Even if the Muslim himself thinks there is an association, there isn't.

This line of thinking is difficult to understand when applied to political or religious principles. Dick's Null-O's are chiefly concerned with physical reality, and his exposition of their thinking on this is clearer. Consider this passage from a scene where Lemuel, the Null-O boy the story is centered on, explains his philosophy to his friend Dr. North:

Lemuel indicated the apartment with a wave of his hand. "All these apparent objects--each has a name. Book, chair, couch, rug, lamp, drapes, window, door, wall, and so on. But this division into objects is purely artificial. Based on an antiquated system of thought. In reality there are no objects. The universe is actually a unity. We have been taught to think in terms of objects. This thing, that thing. When Null-O is realized, this purely verbal division will cease. It has long since outlived its usefulness."

"Can you give me an example, a demonstration?"

Lemuel hesitated. "It's hard to do alone. Later on, when we've contacted others... I can do it crudely, on a small scale."

As Dr. North watched intently, Lemuel rushed about the apartment gathering everything together in a heap. Then, when all the books, pictures, rugs, drapes, furniture and bric-a-brac had been collected, he systematically smashed everything into a shapeless mass.

"You see," he said, exhausted and pale from the violent effort, "the distinction into arbitrary objects is now gone. This unification of things into their basic homogeneity can be applied to the universe as a whole. The universe is a gestalt, a unified substance, without division into living and non-living, being and non-being. A vast vortex of energy, not discrete particles! Underlying the purely artificial appearance of material objects lies the world of reality: a vast undifferentiated realm of pure energy. Remember: the object is not the reality. First law of Null-O thought!"

So, to the Null-O, there is really no such thing as a chair. A chair is just a collection of atoms, all of which are indistinguishable from other atoms. A chair cannot be differentiated from a rug, because the carbon atoms in the cellulose that make up the chair are exactly the same as the carbon atoms in the wool that makes up the rug. Yes, they are oriented differently and bound in different configurations, but these differences are purely coincidental: they are not the way things have to be, there is nothing requiring them in the nature of the atoms themselves, and they are not permanent. A chair isn't really a chair, it's just a collection of atoms that just happen to be oriented in a particular way at a particular time. And it's therefore a great offense against nature and truth to speak of a chair as something real or as distinct from a rug.

Is this not the way the left speaks about human differences? Dick even has another Null-O who is working on a bomb to destroy the Earth say "Ultimately, we will unify the entire universe into a homogeneous mass." Sound familiar? Unifying the entire human race into a homogeneous mass is William Saletan's solution to the existence of racial differences in intelligence he has been forced to acknowledge. The Null-O's program of universal physical leveling is akin to the left's program of universal social leveling.

This line of thinking applies in so many other ways. For example, take racial intelligence differences. Even if the left comes to admit that these differences exist and are statistically significant, they may simply progress to the Null-O argument: that the differences are coincidental and meaningless. There is no such thing as a group called "blacks" and there is no such thing as a group called "people with an average IQ of 85." There is merely one individual who happens to have dark skin and be descended from African peoples, and who also happens to have an IQ of 85. Then there is merely a second person who happens to have dark skin and be descended from African peoples, and who also happens to have an IQ of 85... and so on. All higher truths, all categories, all generalizations, don't really exist and are meaningless.

Interestingly, though not all hard leftists are materialists, many are, and there is no real reason why their denial of differences, categories, and generalizations must stop at human society. What will happen once all humans are rendered totally equal? Is it really fair for there to be differences between humans and other animals? Between animals and plants? Between plants and rocks? Is there any reason to think that the left, if unchecked, will not eventually embrace Null-O and decide that the physical world must be leveled as well?

Obviously, this is the stuff of science fiction. In the story, the Null-Os' plan to destroy the world is foiled by, as Dick describes them, "The lower forms of human life: clerks, bus drivers, day-laborers, typists, janitors, tailors, bakers, turret lathe operators, shipping clerks, baseball players, radio announcers, garage mechanics, policemen, necktie peddlers, ice cream vendors, door-to-door salesmen, bill collectors, receptionists, welders, carpenters, construction laborers, farmers, politicians, merchants--the men and women whose very existence terrified the Null-O's to their core." Or, with the exception of politicians, the men and women whose very existence terrifies the modern left to their core. Will ordinary people ever rise up and overthrow our real-life Null-O's before they destroy us? I believe they will, but it remains to be seen how bad conditions must become before that happens.

Cultural illiteracy on Jeopardy!

2008-05-14T15:15:00.003-04:00

I hope some people out there are still checking this blog from time to time. This block of medical school (lasting from sometime in February until next week) has proved even more time-consuming than I anticipated, and I have not felt it wise to devote any time at all to posting. That will change after next week, when classes will be over until August, I will begin a basic science research project, and my spare time will be truly spare, i.e., open for blogging.

In the meantime, here's something that struck me recently. During the past few weeks, the Jeopardy! college championship has been airing. Last week, in the Double Jeopardy round, the more difficult of the two, there was a category called Get Your "B.A." Jeopardy! viewers know that when a word or set of letters in a category heading appears in quotation marks, that word or set of letters will appear in every correct response; in this case, we were told that each correct response in that category would be a phrase beginning with the letters B.A. The $2000 clue, i.e., the most difficult in the category, was: "In John 3, Jesus said, 'Except a man be' this, 'he cannot see the Kingdom of God'."

None of the three contestants even rang in. The clue was left hanging in the air until the buzzer sounded and Alex Trebek informed them of the correct response, which my grandparents who never went to college probably could have given by the time they were six years old: "What is born again?"

I don't know what's more disconcerting: the fact that the Jeopardy! producers saw fit to rank a question concerning a famous quotation from the most important document in Western Civilization (well, at least since Western Civ became Christian) as the most difficult in the category in the more difficult of the two rounds, or the fact that none of three presumably bright college students, having been given the hint that the correct response would be a two-word phrase beginning with the letters B and A, could even venture a guess.

Then I thought about some of the exchanges I've had with liberals (a category which includes almost all college students) online. There seem to be two broad schools of thought on religion within liberalism: one is that religion is evil; the other is that the true form of all religions, as intended by their founders, is a liberal form, which teaches that sin is synonymous with non-liberalism and virtue with liberalism, and that any non-liberal form must represent a perversion or "hijack" of the religion by people with ulterior motives. As we all know, this is our political mainstream's current understanding of Islam, with Islam being a "religion of peace," a view that requires ignoring what the Koran actually says. Similarly, there is often a belief that Jesus was simply a humanistic teacher who taught people to be kind and non-judgmental, and correspondingly, an assumption that whenever conservative Christians present a view of Christianity that diverges from that view, they must be making it all up. I have found that there are many secular leftists who are truly surprised when they learn that this or that teaching espoused by conservative Christians--e.g., the belief that one must be "born again" to enter the Kingdom of God--is actually in the Bible, even the New Testament, even the words of Jesus himself. Therefore it's not surprising that three college students would be unaware that this phrase, embraced by wacky "fundies" who have allegedly hijacked the true Christianity, originated with Jesus. No doubt after that question aired, there were many liberals all across the country exclaiming "whoa... 'born again' is actually in the Bible?!"

The privilege walk comes to medical school

2008-02-26T17:11:00.004-05:00

(I keep revealing more and more details that will eventually make it possible for someone to determine which school I go to and "out" me in real life. I know this is a danger, but I think it is a risk worth taking to blog about these issues.)

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse: last week, as part of our weekly liberalism seminar, our class had a group interview with a patient and her doctor. The patient was black, and said some things which were funny, at which both she and the class laughed. Apparently, some of the many left-wing members of the class thought that she reinforced black stereotypes and that it was insensitive of the class to laugh, and found this discomfiting. Word has it that they are proposing a "solution" to this "problem:" host a "privilege walk." You know, the college orientation-type left-wing indoctrination exercise where someone reads off a series of yes-or-no questions about how privileged you are, and everyone takes one step backward or forward depending on their answer to each question, and all the white men end up at the front and have to turn around and see how far behind the nonwhites, women, homosexuals, and immigrants are, and feel guilty about being such horrible racist sexist oppressors. Worse, this is being proposed not as an ad hoc event, but as the main event of one of our weekly liberalism seminars at some undetermined future date.

I've thought about this, and realized that I need to take a stand. I cannot in good conscience participate in this anti-white, anti-American activity, but I'm not sure how to make my views known. I will almost certainly stand alone in refusing to participate: I'd estimate that about 50% of my class would say that this is a great idea that will be a really powerful, eye-opening, consciousness-raising experience, 45% probably thinks it would be somewhat interesting, 5% (libertarians or mainstream Republican types) would roll their eyes and go through the motions, and then there's me: the only one I know of who is strongly opposed in principle to this sort of thing. I'd appreciate any advice on how to stand up against it.

By the way, John Derbyshire did a good job of taking apart this privilege walk. I suspect that, like him, I'd actually end up farther toward the back than the front.

Links

2008-02-21T16:21:00.003-05:00

I apologize to the (few) appreciative readers I garnered over the first few months of this blog's existence. I really had planned to post more often, but school has only grown ever-more time-consuming, and my poor time-management skills (there's a downside to having been the type who could get away with goofing off and then cramming the night before tests when you were younger) have caught up with me. As those skills improve, my hope is to at least get something up every weekend, though I can't guarantee even that. Unfortunately, blogging in mid-week has become all but impossible.

I have a substantial backlog of drafts or post ideas I just need to get around to finishing. In the meantime, I'd like to spotlight two links. The first, via Dennis Mangan, is a blog I've just added to my blogroll: Delenda est Carthago. The blogger there, Phi (like Mr. Mangan, I have no idea how to reproduce the Greek letter,) has some excellent observations on race and sex. The second, Free Market Cure, is devoted to combating socialized medicine and promoting fixes that preserve freedom in health care, something you should care about if you want to uphold the traditional American value of self sufficiency, especially the self-sufficiency of the family.

New Hampshire turning 'blue'

2008-01-08T18:44:00.000-05:00

According to the Christian Science Monitor,

The Republican Party in New England's only "red state" may be going the way of the Old Man of the Mountain, the craggy icon of independence that crumbled a few years back in a rock slide.

In the last election, Democrats took both seats in Congress for the first time in nearly a century and both houses of the legislature for the first time since 1874. Democratic Gov. John Lynch won a second term with a record 74 percent of the vote, and lawmakers recently authorized same-sex civil unions and a smoking ban in bars and restaurants.

The "Live Free or Die" state is becoming "Blue Hampshire." The Granite State, said a blog for the conservative National Review, is "trending alarmingly Granola State."...

The shifting political landscape is mainly a product of demographics. New Hampshire is the fastest-growing state in New England, growing more than 6 percent since 2000 as the Massachusetts suburbs sprawl northward, baby boomers retire to their second homes, and vibrant high-tech and healthcare industries draw affluent city dwellers from across the country.

Call me paranoid, but the first thing that came to mind when I read this story was "immigration, anyone?" The article doesn't mention the i-word, so I looked for some other sources.

According to FAIR's page on New Hampshire, between 2000 and 2006, the foreign-born population of New Hampshire grew from 54,154 to 65,465, or from 4.4% of the population to 5%. That, taken together with the fact that the majority of foreign-born persons are not naturalized and thus not eligible to vote (or at least, aren't supposed to be able to vote) indicates that the problem is probably not with immigration to New Hampshire directly.

However, look at who is moving to New Hampshire. "Affluent city dwellers from across the country" who work in high-tech and health care (when did that phrase become one word?) industries, people who are, in the words of a pollster quoted in the story, "highly educated, liberal Democrats." While this group no doubt includes large numbers of left-wing whites, it is well-known to anyone who has worked in the high-tech or health care industries that there is one population group whose representation in those fields is much higher than their proportion of the U.S. population: Asians.

And how do Asians vote? According to a blogger at the disturbingly named asian-nation.org (is the USA an Asian nation now?) they vote Democratic.

As reflected in my article on the 2004 Elections, national-level aggregate data tends to show that in terms of political affiliation among those stating a preference, about two-thirds of all Asian Americans lean Democratic and the other third identify with the Republicans.

But as reported by Politico.com, new data from a Harvard research team shows that among young Asian Americans, the percentage who lean Democratic is much higher:

The Institute of Politics at Harvard University recently released data from an online survey of 2,525 18- to 24-year-olds. Among the survey’s more notable statistics are those concerning party affiliation among Asian-Americans: 47 percent identify themselves as Democratic, 15 percent Republican and 39 percent independent — making them more Democratic than any other ethnic group except African-Americans in the survey. . . .

So, while I suspect that the spread of the Boston exurbs means that white liberals are the main source of Democratization of New Hampshire so far, there is no doubt that Asians play a role. And the vast majority of those Asians would not be here if we had not had, for the past 40 years, an immigration policy which regards all peoples in the world as equally worthy to come to America, and permits massive amounts of chain migration through family reunification provisions.

What a tragedy, to see the "live free or die" state forced to throw its lot in with the socialist left by a bunch of recent transplants who have no love for or long-standing connection with New Hampshire. Wasn't this the state of the Free State Project, whose goal was to have libertarians move there en masse and try to create a society with a drastically reduced government? According to the website 8,142 people have joined so far, while the Monitor says that there have been 145,000 "newcomers" to New Hampshire in the past 6 years. So much for that. Can New Hampshire's vestiges of traditional self-sufficient America be saved, or will it become the latest fatality in the left's push for a unified bureaucratic socialist state?

How liberals see Western culture as a vacuum

2008-01-05T21:01:00.000-05:00

Back in August, Mark Richardson of Oz Conservative and John Savage of Brave New World Watch commented on how liberals often admire traditionalism and "authenticity" among non-white, non-Western peoples but despise those same traits in the white Western world. Their posts sparked a few thoughts which I made a note of, but I never got around to actually writing a post. More recently, however, a post from Vanishing American and a comment on her blog from John Savage have brought this concept to mind again, so I was inspired to comment.

Richardson quotes Robert Manne, a professor of politics at La Trobe University, waxing nostalgic about the Australian Aborigines, and then provides his own comments:

Manne recently defended the traditional Aboriginal way of life by referring to the work of white anthropologists who, Manne believes, observed:
not an Edenic but an enchanted world, in the technical sense of the sociologist Max Weber. They discovered an intricate social order in which, through the kinship structure, every human being held a precise and acknowledged place. They discovered a world that was filled with economic purpose; leavened by playfulness, joy and humour; soaked in magic, sorcery, mystery and ritual; pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning.
It's difficult to imagine anything more out of line with liberal modernism. At the moment the bookshops are full of works by the liberal intelligentsia claiming that religion is a dangerous threat to humanity. Yet here the Aborigines are given a free pass to live in an enchanted world in which there is not only religion, but a world "soaked in magic, sorcery, mystery and ritual" and "pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning".

Why isn't the ethos of liberal rationalism and scientism applied to Aborigines?

Similarly, liberals have pressed for an ideal in which we are unimpeded in choosing who we are and what we do. We are supposed to be self-determining individual agents, who aren't constrained by unchosen forms of identity based on gender or ethnicity, or by traditional social roles or patterns of family life.

Again, Manne doesn't apply the logic of liberalism to Aborigines. Not only do they get to keep basic forms of family life and gender identity, they are even praised for having "an intricate social order, in which, through kinship structure, every human held a precise and acknowledged place".

Indeed, one hears this sort of thing all the time. How can liberals praise the authenticity of nonwhite, non-Western groups like Australian Aborigines, American Indians, African tribes, etc., and then, far from admiring medieval Europe or red-state Evangelicals for their authenticity, decry them as evil and oppressive? It's impossible to imagine a Robert Manne looking at, say, the insular Dutch Reformed communities in the Midwestern USA, with their traditional gender roles, prayer meetings, and Sundays that revolve entirely around church, and extolling their world for being "pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning" and for possessing "an intricate social order, in which, through kinship structure, every human held a precise and acknowledged place." After all, they support homeschooling and oppose same-sex marriage!

Richardson, his commenters, and John Savage all had some thought-provoking ideas, but I wonder if something more basic is being missed. Recently I was ruminating on the epithet "white-bread," used to mean boring, bland, and homogeneous, as when Charles Murray said that he'd "a hell of a lot rather live in a Little Vietnam or a Little Guatemala neighborhood, even if I couldn’t read the store signs, than in many white-bread communities I can think of." The idea being that white-bread communities don't have the festive music, the vibrant colors, the spicy foods of Little Vietnam or a Little Guatemala, so no intelligent sophisticated man of the world would want to live in one. Yet, of course, traditional Western culture does have exciting or "vibrant" aspects--just listen to Beethoven's 9th symphony, visit a museum with a collection by Leonardo da Vinci or Manet, sample some French cuisine, attend a German Oktoberfest; the list goes on.

So what explains this? We conservatives, rightly, make much of the fact that the left simply hates traditional Western culture (for, e.g., its inequality) and wants to destroy it, as Richardson and John Savage have commented. Yet perhaps it is not always necessary to dig so deep. I believe that liberals fail to see the cultural distinctiveness, the "authenticity," of our own society because they have been immersed in it since birth; it is what they see as the "default," the state of man without any interesting cultural adornments. They view Western culture as a vacuum, a blank template onto which can be written all kinds of "enriching" distinctive cultural traditions, a kind of foundation for a culture, but inadequate as a complete culture.

In fact, this could be seen as a reason the left hates Western culture, that they view failure to provide any interesting "add-ons" as a moral failure. We could have had interesting cultural traditions, but we failed to develop them. Meanwhile, look at these wonderful non-Western cultures. They add loud, exciting music, parades with elaborate costumes and rich colors, spicy foods, and what do we do? Eat our dinners of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and cooked peas and then retire to the living room to put our feet up and read the Saturday Evening Post until little Jimmy gets home from Boy Scouts.

I can't point to any published examples that show this is how liberals think; it's based mainly on my observations of and interactions with college-student-style liberals. Based on the way they behave and innumerable little things they've said, I get the impression that they view that dinner of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas not as its own, perfectly legitimate cultural particularity, but as the base one is left with if one strips away the curry powder, habanero peppers, wasabi, or whatever.

This explains the incident Vanishing American referenced in the post I linked to above. David Yeagley was having a discussion with a student:

"Look, Dr, Yeagley, I don’t see anything about my culture to be proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing."

The girl was white. She was tall and pretty, with amber hair and brown eyes. For convenience’ sake, let’s call her "Rachel."

I had been leading a class on social psychology, in which we discussed patriotism – what it means to be a people or a nation. The discussion had been quite lively. But when Rachel spoke, everyone fell silent.

"Look at your culture," she said to me. "Look at American Indian tradition. Now I think that’s really great. You have something to be proud of. My culture is nothing."

Notice what this girl was saying. She didn't say her culture was evil, racist, discriminatory, intolerant, oppressive, imperialistic, etc. She may have believed it was all of those things, but that wasn't the particular objection she was raising to it at the time. She merely said it was nothing. In other words, you have your fancy feathered tribal headdresses, others have Cinco de Mayo, others still have the Chinese New Year. But we have nothing. Thanksgiving, fireworks on the Fourth of July, Christmas choirs in colored tuxedos and dresses accompanied by an orchestra and majestic pipe organ, those are all nothing. They're not interesting cultural traditions in their own right; they're just there.

It also explains something John Savage wondered about in a comment:

Thus I think most stereotypes about whites are pretty well justified (the "racist" one aside). The question should be, though, what qualities are necessary to create an advanced and free country. Whites possess all those qualities better than others. Blacks and Mexicans may have certain qualities we appreciate, but not those that help to sustain the kind of country we want. They don't spontaneously create cultures that sustain advanced and free civilizations. Asians, it would appear, can sustain advanced ones, but only with a minimal amount of freedom. It's telling that leftists usually care more about having people with "rhythm" who can jump, than the fundamental abilities and virtues that have traditionally made America what it is.

We know that liberals think that human beings are blank slates, that our natures are all fundamentally the same and it is only our environments that make us different. When we combine this fact with the concept of Western culture as blank slate, it makes sense that liberals would think the way John Savage describes. They don't see the fundamental abilities and virtues that have traditionally made America what it is--i.e., an advanced and free country--as being in conflict with having people with "rhythm" who can jump; they don't see the two as being the same kind of thing at all (i.e., civilizational characteristics particular to a population group.) They think that the ability to create a free and advanced country like America is present in everyone; it's part of the foundation or template which we see as Western culture, but which is unexposed but still present in other cultures because it has spicy foods and exciting parades built on top of it. America, or more broadly Western Europe, is nothing but the ability to create a free and advanced country, for we have no cultural traditions built on top of it. Other cultures are the ability to create a free and advanced country plus all sorts of interesting cultural traditions. Therefore, liberals think we will always have a free and advanced country, and in their view are merely "improving" on our society by painting on that blank canvas, by importing characteristics like rhythm and the ability to jump.

Today's college women more accepting of pornography: it's all men's fault

2007-12-17T09:52:00.000-05:00

The purpose of this entry is to continue a discussion from another blog which it was not possible to continue there, and to illustrate to my fellow traditionalists who are not as familiar with the evangelical world the kind of liberal thinking that often occurs among evangelicals.

At Boundless Line, the blog of Focus on the Family's webzine for young single Christians, Steve Watters commented on a study finding that today's college women are more accepting of pornography. He wrote the following:

My hunch is that the mainstreaming of pornography is making it easier for both men and women to cover over their hunch that something's inherently wrong with porn with the fig leaf that it's just entertainment. For every problem we'll come across in life, there will be two camps -- one camp that says we just don't know how bad the problem really is and another camp that says the problem is really not a big deal and in fact the real problem is those prudish people who think it's a problem.

It's my perspective that the "porn is not a big deal camp" is clearly beginning to win the day -- and we just don't know how bad that problem really is. No woman is going to experience meaningful sexual intimacy by expanding her tolerance of material that "educates" men to treat her like an object of their self-centered fantasies. It might seem sophisticated for some to tolerate porn as mere entertainment, but it's a lot like saying, "oh, it's just a cute little kitty" while letting a fox into your house.

I submitted this comment:

Ah, the view of women as innately good rears its ugly head again. Unlike Loris, I'm going to make the case that those women really were okay with it.

Steve Watters wrote the following:

"No woman is going to experience meaningful sexual intimacy by expanding her tolerance of material that 'educates' men to treat her like an object of their self-centered fantasies. It might seem sophisticated for some to tolerate porn as mere entertainment, but it's a lot like saying, 'oh, it's just a cute little kitty' while letting a fox into your house."

What makes Mr. Watters think that these women's primary goal is to experience meaningful sexual intimacy, as opposed to physical pleasure? What makes him think that they are merely trying to seem sophisticated, instead of genuinely seeing pornography as benign or even empowering to women? The fact is that women's sexual attractiveness to men gives them enormous bargaining power with us. The sexual revolution didn't just "liberate" men, it also unleashed this power of women in a radically new way. When men are slaves to their lust for women--and relations between men and women are not tempered by pre-sexual revolution traditional morality, in which sex was considered inextricably linked to marriage and childbearing--men will go to great lengths go obtain women's sexual favor. Thus, modern feminists are right to view pornography as empowering to women. Women are out becoming doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, and elected office-holders, while men are sitting at home in front of their computers masturbating. Those same men are willing to go to any lengths, including disavowal of traditional morality and manhood, to get modern liberal women to allow them access to sex. How is that not "empowering" to women?

Another commenter named Carrie Lea then responded to me:

Jacob M.,
"Ah, the view of women as innately good rears its ugly head again."
On the contrary, Jacob. I wish that my opposition to porn were motivated purely by the fact that it is wrong and harmful. However, I realize that my strong reaction against it occurs largely because of my very human need to feel secure in my desirability as a woman (to my husband, in particular).
"What makes Mr. Watters think that these women's primary goal is to experience meaningful sexual intimacy, as opposed to physical pleasure?"
Obviously, Mr. Watters understands the female psyche better than you do. Here's a hint: Don't assume that women are driven by the same things that drive men.
"Women are out becoming doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, and elected office-holders, while men are sitting at home in front of their computers masturbating."
I'm sure that you love the idea of porn being "liberating" to women, since that seems to justify your own acceptance of porn (and, I would venture to guess, your own use of porn). Nevertheless, your above statement is ridiculous. You imply that the widespread acceptance of porn has led to women's ability to obtain certain careers, but this is nonsense. In fact, it is insulting. I did not obtain two degrees and a career in engineering because my male counterparts were too busy watching porn.
Also, you further betray your misunderstanding of the female psyche. Different women feel differently about their careers, but from my perspective as a woman (even in a male-dominated career field), your above statement is like saying, "Women are out being overworked, overstressed, and struggling to keep their families intact, while their husbands are sitting at home having affairs with the next-door neighbor."
"Those same men are willing to go to any lengths ... to get modern liberal women to allow them access to sex."
To what lengths did my husband go to get access to sex with his beloved? He married me and continues to reject pornography. Your argument in the above statement is incoherent at best.
For your sake, I hope that you will one day look past the phony justifications that you give yourself for using porn, and start spending your time focusing on what makes a woman truly happy. You wouldn't believe what you're missing out on.

After several more replies, including some in which other commenters came to my defense, I attempted to submit the following response. I was informed that the comment was not accepted because it had been determined by Typepad's anti-spam filter to be potential spam. (Of course, the software does not tell you why your post is considered spam or give you the opportunity to fix it. I suppose that would defeat the purpose of the filter.) That is why I am posting it here.

Oh, boy. A lot has been said for me to respond to, and I really don't have time to respond to everything. I think Adam T. did a good initial job of answering Carrie's criticisms of me; I wouldn't change much of what he wrote. There are, however, a few of Carrie's misunderstandings I need to correct.

First, when I used the word "women" here, I was referring not to evangelical Christian women who believe that pornography is morally wrong, but to the women in the study who say that they find pornography acceptable. Presumably those two groups don't overlap.

Second, I want to clarify that I do not look at pornography, nor think that it is good or morally neutral, nor want it to be legal or even exist at all.

This would appear to confuse Carrie, since I said that pornography (and the sexual revolution in general) is "empowering to women." That this should cause confusion highlights the essentially liberal nature of our entire society, and the fact that even most people today who are considered "conservative" (e.g., evangelical Christians) are really liberal. Conservatives today are always trying to appeal to liberals by saying that they agree with liberals' goals, they just don't agree that the methods proposed by liberals to reach those goals are the most effective. For example, you'd be hard pressed to find a conservative or evangelical Christian today who would argue that women's "empowerment" is a good thing. The only difference between the liberal and "conservative" points of view on the subject is that liberals believe that women are best empowered by being made totally independent from men and being free from the bonds of traditional sexual morality, while "conservatives" think women are best empowered by having lasting marriages, maybe staying home with the children while they're young if their financial situation allows it, but otherwise pursuing careers and advanced degrees just as liberal feminists advocate that women should.

The problem stems from the fact that modern liberal society separates men and women into discrete groups with competing interests. I, as a traditionalist, believe that we should not view these issues in the light of "men's interests," vs. "women's interests," but rather that the family, not the individual, should be considered the basic unit of society, with men's and women's interests unified under the banner of the interests of the family. And in those families, women would occupy a generally subordinate role to men. So I do not regard the "empowerment" of women as a good thing.

I could have been more clear on the issue of women being innately good. It's not that women's acceptance of porn means that they're innately good; it's that women's acceptance of porn is explained away by the supposition that they're innately good, a supposition that often crops up on Boundless and among modern Christians in general. My point wasn't obvious perhaps because the belief is stated only implicitly in this entry, but I was referring to Mr. Watter's statements that "No woman is going to experience meaningful sexual intimacy by expanding her tolerance" of porn and that "it might seem sophisticated for some to tolerate porn as mere entertainment." I take this to mean that even among women who accept porn, their goal is still to experience meaningful sexual intimacy and they are accepting porn only because it makes them seem sophisticated to do so. Mr. Watters seems to be saying that when men say they like porn, it's because they do, because they're lustful and tainted by sin (a true statement, don't get me wrong.) But when women say they like porn, well, they don't really like it, they're just saying they like it to gain the acceptance of porn-loving men so that men will marry them, because deep down the true desire of their pure innocent hearts is to be stay-at-home-moms and enjoy the life of domestic tranquility God intended them for.

When you look at the world realistically, and you see a survey finding that 49% of college women find porn acceptable, this interpretation is laughable. Why not take women at their word? We know that all people, men and women, are stained by original sin. Why not simply assume that if women say they find porn acceptable, they are saying it because they really mean it? Then we can work to understand the reasons and implications of that, and try to deal with it realistically, instead of trying to explain it away with our premises of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails vs. sugar and spice and everything nice.

If you would like to continue this discussion at a different venue, feel free to visit my blog, which should be linked to my name in this comment's header. There you will find a link to email me, and I'll create a new blog entry for the discussion.

Philadelphia commission: limiting the language a shop conducts its business in is "hate"

2007-12-15T00:07:00.000-05:00

Philadelphia is my home town. The cheesesteak is one of its hallmark foods. In 2005, Joe Vento, the owner of Geno's, one of the two biggest tourist-trap cheesesteak shops, posted signs in the shop's window which read "This is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH." Vento is now being charged with "discrimination" by an ominous-sounding entity called the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations. According to the Associated Press article,

After extensive publicity in 2006, the commission began investigating whether Vento violated a city ordinance that prohibits discrimination in employment, public accommodation and housing on the basis of race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

In February, the commission found probable cause against Geno's Steaks for discrimination, alleging that the policy at the shop discourages customers of certain backgrounds from eating there.

First of all, there should not even be a city ordinance prohibiting discrimination in employment, public accommodation and housing, for such prohibitions interfere with our right to freedom of association. Even so, on what basis does this ordinance forbid a business owner from insisting that business in his store be conducted in English? Is ordering a cheesesteak from a private business now a form of "public accommodation?" Here we are seeing the leftist tendency to eliminate the private and make all things public.

Camille Charles, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, testified that Vento's signs harken [sic] back to the "Whites only" postings of the Jim Crow era.
"The signs give a feeling of being unwelcome and being excluded," Charles said.

So we see that liberals want to use the power of government to forbid people from doing anything that might make other people feel unwelcome and excluded. I suppose if I had a party and didn't invite the guy upstairs, he might feel unwelcome and excluded. Should I then be prosecuted for "discrimination?"

Or if I went to France, and encountered a sign in a sandwich shop which read (in French) "This is France: When ordering please speak French," would I have a legitimate grievance against the owner?

Well, at least Professor Charles didn't mention Hitler. Maybe that would have been too trite.

I hear that Philadelphia, like most northeastern cities, has been deluged by Hispanic illegal aliens over the past ten or fifteen years. Indeed, to borrow Professor Charles's terminology, they are not welcome here, and should be excluded. I applaud Joe Vento's effort to maintain America's identity as an English-speaking society, and I hope this case is thrown out.

(Note: I see upon spell-check that either Professor Charles or Bob Lentz the AP writer do not know how to spell the word "hearken." A sign of the deterioration of English in our society, perhaps?)

Conservatives entertained by nihilistic propaganda

2007-12-12T23:38:00.000-05:00

View from the Right had a good discussion today on people not noticing the liberal messages that surround us in modern society. A commenter mentioned meeting "conservatives" who enjoy movies like Pleasantville without even realizing that these films are leftist propaganda.

By far the most egregious example of this phenomenon, in my experience, is how so many conservatives are fans of the television show The Simpsons. I used to watch it sometimes in college, before I became mature and discerning enough to realize how destructive it was, and I honestly don't think it's possible to pack more nihilism, cynicism, and scorn for all things traditional into one half-hour than the producers of this show do. Appallingly, I have even met evangelical Christians who are fans of the show, despite the fact that mockery of evangelical Christians from a clearly atheist or secular-left perspective has been one of the show's longest-running and most prominent themes. When I pointed this out to one of them, he replied, "well, they pretty much make fun of everyone." I can't imagine how one can consider oneself a devout Christian and think that mockery of, say communism, or alcoholics, or Indian culture, somehow excuses mockery of Christianity.

Another example is the movie The Golden Compass which recently opened in theaters. Now, I have not heard conservatives or Christians express admiration for this film, but it is certain that many people are completely unaware of its anti-traditional religion message. To be fair, the message may not be clear from the first movie alone. I read the first two books, before the author's intentions in writing them became known, and if I recall correctly, at the end of the first the message is still unclear, but by the end of the second it is obvious that the trilogy is intended as an anti-Christianity diatribe, which is now well-known to anyone who cares to read reviews. As I understand it, in the fictional world of the books God is really just the most powerful of angels, and he wrongly usurped power long ago and convinced everyone he was God, and now he must be killed so that mankind can be free from his tyranny. The author, Philip Pullman, has stated in interviews that he hates C.S. Lewis and the Narnia books (not to mention Christianity), and essentially set out to write an anti-Narnia. Despite this, I recently overheard someone describing the movie as "basically another Narnia, except instead of a lion there's a bear, and instead of a witch there's a [something]," and he listed several other superficial differences without which, he was implying, the movie is very similar to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I wonder if what is going on here is that people have lost the ability to think beyond any but the most superficial level. The Golden Compass is a fantasy movie featuring talking animals based on a series of children's novels, so therefore it must be like the Narnia stories, even though it suggests that the Christian God is evil and can and should be killed. The Simpsons makes fun of people doing foolish things, so it's funny; it doesn't matter who it makes fun of or why it considers what those people do foolish. At the moment, though, I can't figure out how this happened; how supposedly educated people, and especially professing conservatives, lost sight of the fact that ideas have consequences.

A final note: I was about to claim that I had never seen commentary from a traditionalist or conscientious cultural conservative on the topic of this "conservative" adoration of The Simpsons, something that should outrage us. But after searching, I came across another VFR discussion in which Sage McLaughlin, the same commenter who made the Pleasantville point, wrote a good comment about it. It's about halfway down the page.

Another reason women should not be in the military

2007-12-01T22:31:00.000-05:00

Our weekly liberalism seminar provides plenty of fodder for a blog, perhaps too much. The more I discuss specific goings-on at my school, the more I fear revealing which school I attend, a dangerous possibility in the era of thoughtcrime. Still, for the time being I can't help it; these things are just too interesting to write about. Last week, the topic was intimate partner violence. (Did you know that "domestic violence" has been rechristened "intimate partner violence?" I suppose those concerned with this phenomenon decided that the word "domestic" wrongly excludes violence that occurs outside of the home or between, uh, partners who do not live together.)

The session began with a group interview, in front of the whole class, of three women, all of whom had suffered child abuse, not "intimate partner violence." Go figure. Two of them had served in the military, where both had experienced sexual harassment and one had been the victim of rape. One, the sole white woman, had been in the Marines, where, she complained, the sense of camaraderie they claim to want to instill in recruits isn't really honored because of the sexual harassment that takes place. The other military woman, who had served in the now-defunct Women's Army Corps, said that women who joined the military were assumed to be "loose," there was a sense that as the few females present they had an obligation to provide the men with sexual favors, and that men who attempted to protect them were subject to blanket parties.

Later, when we had convened in our small groups, one of our facilitators, a social worker, remarked that what we had heard was a sad commentary on how the military treats women. Since I still have not had the courage to reveal myself as someone who would surely be considered a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot, an enemy of all that is good and right, an oppressor who wants to throw humanity back into the dark ages, I did not say what I was thinking, which was that this is one of the many reasons women don't belong in the military. Think about that for a minute: that the military, and indeed not just the military but every institution within our society, must spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, erect vast social structures, agencies, and bureaucracies, and devote untold numbers of man-hours to the Sisyphean task of fighting human nature, is taken for granted by everyone and assumed to be the solution to problems such as these. The simple, obvious solution, which should occur to anyone thinking rationally and objectively--don't have women in the military--is not only considered offensive and beyond the pale, but doesn't occur to people.

I could be wrong about that last assertion. I can't read people's minds, and its possible that many more people have common sense than are willing to speak up. But from what I have observed of liberal thinking--and most people in our society, certainly most in the upper echelons, one of which is medical school, are liberals--commonsensical non-liberal ideas really don't occur to them at all. That, more so than their being considered offensive, is what I find so interesting. One of the most striking things that happens when one leaves mainstream conservatism and becomes a traditionalist is that one begins frequently noticing this vast gulf between sane, rational thought and the prevailing thought of our society. Ideas that present themselves to the mind immediately and effortlessly--like the idea that in military training we are trying to teach young, rowdy, mostly aggressive men how to fight, and we keep such men in extremely close quarters, and these experiences create a strong sense of male camaraderie among the trainees, and therefore it would be best for the men, for the women, and for our country not to throw women into the mix--are utterly foreign to large numbers of people.

Curiously, although moving from mainstream conservatism to traditionalism makes it easier to debate liberals honestly, it also makes doing so much less convenient, since one could face sanctions from one's employer, school, or what have you. When I was a mainstream-con I might have objected to the statement about how the military treats women, saying that yes, while there is room for improvement and the military should do all it can to reduce and eliminate rape and sexual harassment of female recruits, we shouldn't let our judgment on this issue overshadow the progress we've made, how much good the military has done for our country, how much better off women in the military are today than they used to be, how such behavior is considered unconscionable by ever-larger numbers of people, how the vast majority of women in the military do not experience such problems, and so on. But now, I would be lying if I talked that way. As a traditionalist, one often must hold one's tongue and be extremely careful about opening one's mouth, because truth and common sense are so foreign and horrifying to the regnant liberal thinking of our time. This makes it difficult to get the word out when one is under the authority of liberals.

Human nature punches liberalism in the face

2007-11-21T22:33:00.000-05:00

I have updated the Catalog of Clinical Liberalisms with perhaps the greatest offender yet: the question "are you sexually active" and its follow-up, "with men, women, or both?" This is particularly relevant because of a story I heard secondhand from a classmate last week.

During our first year, we have a number of clinical experiences wherein we spend one afternoon in a particular practice setting. In most of these we merely observe, but some students, when sent to the ER, have been asked to take patients' histories. Allegedly, so the gossip goes, one of my young female classmates was sent into a room to interview a patient, a young urban minority type, and asked him the famous "men, women, or both" question, whereupon he promptly took a swing at her, voicing offense at the suggestion that he was a "faggot." She was unhurt, but the patient had to be restrained for the remainder of the visit, and I assume the med student was somewhat shaken.

At one level, this reflects merely on the naivete of the medical student. One must assume that a seasoned physician, even a liberal one who believes devoutly in these clinical liberalisms, would not be so foolish as to ask this question so nonchalantly of a man who, were one permitted to employ stereotypes, one would know would not take kindly to it. At another level, though, it reflects on how out of step liberalism is with basic reality. After all, not only social workers but liberal physicians themselves advocate this system, and while their approach to the issue in daily practice may be more nuanced, they fully support the system of medical education that is teaching students that we must ask these ridiculous and socially destructive questions without qualification. Do they not know that incidents like this are bound to happen?

While I do not celebrate a physical assault on my fellow student, I find stories like this one heartening in a way, because they provide evidence that liberalism so contradicts reality and human nature that it cannot ultimately triumph.

A catalog of clinical liberalisms

2007-11-03T21:52:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, there were posts at What's Wrong with the World and Mere Comments about the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines recommending that physicians attempt to subvert parents' authority over their children, and consider them guilty until proven innocent of all kinds of horrible crimes, ranging from molestation to gun ownership. The Boston Herald story and accompanying comments are also worth reading. I chimed in at WWTW, since I've already begun to see how these ideas are taught to physicians in training.

In general, what we are seeing, predictably, is that the elites of the medical profession (medical school deans and administrators, the leaders of the various boards and professional societies, etc.) are cultural liberals who believe that normality, decency, convention, tradition, and authority are evil and must be subverted, that beneath the facade of every apparently normal, loving relationship between husband and wife or parents and children lurks all kinds of social pathology. Being doctors, they are especially concered with health, and so they think that health is hindered by traditional morality and would be greatly improved if traditional morality were overthrown. That is why they think, for example, that all men should be suspected of wife-beating, all fathers of molestation, and all parents of being clueless fuddy-duddies hopelessly opposed to their teens' inevitable and healthy sexual activity.

Being in medical school, I can't help but remember every time I hear or see a specific recommendation along these lines, so I thought I would start a catalog of them. These are based both on things I have been told in medical school, and things I have read in articles like the one from the Boston Herald.

When seeing an adolescent patient, it is essential that at some point you kick the parent(s) out of the room so that you can ask the teen about his drug use, sexual activity, and anything else he may simply not want to talk to his parents about.
When a husband, or, um, "partner," accompanies a female patient to her medical visit, it is essential that at some point you get her alone and ask her "do you feel safe at home?"
When a husband, or, um, "partner," accompanies a female patient who is seeking a pregnancy test, even if the couple came to the visit together specifically for the purpose of confirming that they are pregnant, you must kick him out of the room before giving her the results so that you can ask her in confidence whether she wants the man to know.
When a female patient presents with amenorrhea (absence of a menstrual period), you should first rule out pregnancy, and must always do a pregnancy test no matter what the woman tells you, even if she says that she's never had sex.

I may add to this catalog as I am exposed to more of these atrocities. Also, if you have visited a liberal doctor or hospital and been the victim of such tripe, feel free to contribute your own.

Updates:

This should have been part of the original list, because I had heard it already when I first created this post: As part of a history and physical, it is important to take a patient's sexual history. This should begin with the question "are you sexually active?" and if the patient answers yes, you must follow-up by asking "with men, women, or both?" You must ask this second question no matter how offended you think the patient may be by it, no matter how unlikely you think it may be that the patient will give an unconventional answer (e.g., with a 70-year-old widow.)

Should I change to a serif font?

2007-11-02T23:16:00.000-04:00

This blog currently uses a template with a sans-serif font. Some people find serif fonts more readable. I have put up a poll to determine whether my readers would prefer a serif font. Please click on the thumbnail below to see what this blog would look like with a serif font if you would like to make an informed decision.

Is the MCAT an IQ test?

2007-11-02T23:00:00.000-04:00

Terry Morris of Webster's Blogspot noticed my reference to an IQ test being required for medical school admissions, and asked whether the standards for this exam are different for "minorities." I have been thinking about intelligence and medical school admissions lately, so I thought the question deserved a dedicated post here as an answer.

First, anyone who is familiar with the world of medical school admissions will recognize that, when I linked the phrase "IQ test" to the MCAT homepage, there was an implicit wink there. This is because the MCAT is supposedly a knowledge test, not an apititude test. Perhaps some background on the MCAT would be useful.

The Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) is administered by the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC). It is divided into four sections: physical sciences, biological sciences, verbal reasoning, and the writing sample. The writing sample is generally considered unimportant. The other three sections are multiple-choice. The verbal reasoning section consists solely of a series of passages, typically excerpts from articles or essays on non-scientific topics, each followed by a few questions designed to examine the subject's understanding of the passage. The physical sciences and biological sciences are arranged mostly the same way; while there are a few stand-alone questions interspersed throughout, most of the questions are based on passages containing a few paragraphs of text on some scientific topic and sometimes a diagram, graph, or table. Officially, the physical sciences section tests one's knowledge of college-level introductory physics and general chemistry, while the biological sciences section tests one's knowledge of introductory biology and organic chemistry. Those are the core courses required for admission into all medical schools in the USA.

Each of the three multiple-choice sections is scored out of 15. The score is scaled relative to other examinees' scores, so simply dividing one's section score by 15 doesn't yield one's percentage of correct answers on that section. The score report, which goes to the examinee and all of the medical schools to which he applies, shows the examinee's score on each section, and the percentile for each section and for the total score relative to all others who took the test on the same day. To give an idea of what the distribution of scores is like, a total score above 30 is generally considered sufficient for admission to medical school, and the average score among students accepted to Harvard is 35. A score above 39 would place one in the 99th percentile, and scores above 42 almost never occur.

Virtually everyone thinks that the MCAT is a knowledge-based test rather than an aptitude test; that is, that it tests how well the examinee actually knows biology, general chemistry, organic chemistry, and physics. Pre-medical students taking these classes are always concerned about ensuring that the topics appearing on the MCAT are being covered. MCAT preparation courses run by companies like Kaplan or Princeton Review, while they regularly involve taking practice tests, focus on drilling the material. The AAMC publishes a complete list of scientific topics that are fair game for the test, which many students refer to when preparing. And after the exam, before scores have been released, everyone seems to attempt to gauge how well they did by how well they feel they knew the answers to the questions that were asked.

Yet I suspect the MCAT is really a test of critical reasoning; that is, it is closer to an IQ test than it is to a content test. First, there is the verbal reasoning section, which one can prepare for only by practice. To answer the questions requires critical reasoning, because they do not ask for content directly from the passage, but rather are oblique to it, asking for things like inferences which could be drawn from it or approximations of the author's implied but never directly stated position. The physical and biological sciences sections, to be fair, do require a good bit of background knowledge, but again, most of the questions do not simply ask directly about that knowledge but instead require interpretation of a passage, which often, but not always, requires that background knowledge to be fully understood. I can speak only from my own experience here, but my impression after taking the test and receiving my scores is that logical reasoning and critical thinking are more important than mastery of material, or perhaps that if we stipulate a basic level of understanding of the background material, one's logical reasoning and critical thinking skills are what determine one's score. I say this because I emerged from the test demoralized, having felt that I may have bombed the biological sciences section, because most of the passages seemed to be based on topics from advanced biology that had not been covered in the introductory biology courses I had taken. Yet when I received my scores, it turned out I had done quite well. This indicated to me that the ability to reason through the passages was more important than having memorized a large volume of facts.

The other reason I think the MCAT is an IQ test is that the results along race and sex lines are consistent with what we see in IQ tests. Believe it or not, the AAMC actually makes some of this data available on its website. In 2005, according to the most recent summary document available, men on average scored higher than women on every section, though the difference was least on the verbal reasoning section and greatest on the physical sciences section (which relies heavily on math skills), and women scored one grade better on the writing sample. Meanwhile, Asians and whites were equal in biological sciences, Asians edged out whites in physical sciences, and whites surpassed Asians in verbal reasoning. Blacks' averages were significantly lower than both groups in every section.

No one really knows whether the MCAT is an IQ test. Searches of both the general web and scholarly indices turned up nothing. It would be fascinating to see the results of a study designed to look into MCAT-IQ correlations, but in our political climate, I can't see such a study being done. Imagine submitting that grant application. Who would agree to fund it, knowing that the results will probably not only add fuel to the fire of undeniable group differences in intelligence, but also show that the medical school admissions process is a discriminatory one?

Now, before discussing the standards applied to "minorities," I must make two things clear, because of assumptions people tend to make about tests in general. I encountered these misconceptions many times during the admissions process, so I know it can be confusing for people not familiar with the MCAT. First, one does not pass or fail the MCAT; one simply gets a numerical score. Second, schools may do with that score what they will; there is no hard and fast cutoff for admissions. Think of the SAT--whether it's Harvard or your local State U, no college simply accepts everyone with a score above, say, 1200 and rejects everyone below. Just about every medical school will tell you that they consider many factors when making admissions decisions: GPA, academic background, extracurricular activities, work experience, volunteer experience, exposure to the medical field, research experience, letters of recommendation, the interview, and the MCAT. My anecdotal view is that because most schools are dominated by liberalism and wish to appear open-minded and humanistic and not narrowly focused on numbers, they tend to downplay the significance of the applicant's MCAT score and exaggerate the value they place on "soft" qualities like volunteer experience, but there is no doubt that other factors besides the MCAT are important.

That said, are the standards for the MCAT different for "minorities?" Undoubtedly. One can see this by looking at the AAMC's own published data. Among 2006 matriculants, blacks had the second lowest score in each of the three numerically scored sections, second only to Puerto Ricans. There is nothing more to say. Blacks, as well as Hispanics, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders are accepted to medical school with lower MCAT scores than whites.

Why have I been putting the word "minorities" in quotation marks? Because not all minorities are created equal. Every racial or ethnic group in America right now other than whites are a "minority." But as you see from the AAMC's data, there is one minority group which sticks out like a sore thumb, being admitted to medical school with higher scores than whites: Asians, of course. Because of their high average IQs, Asians are over-represented in the upper echelons of society out of proportion to their numbers in the population. This has led to the creation of a new term, "under-represented minority" or URM. In medical school admissions, one does not speak of minorities, only of under-represented minorities. Though as you can see from the table, this is really just a euphemism for "non-Asian minorities," since every racial or ethnic group other than whites are "under-represented" in the medical profession, if you are a liberal and believe that every subset of the American population must reflect the racial proportions of the entire population.

So, the medical schools are sitting pretty. They can use an IQ test to screen their applicants, yet because no one thinks it's an IQ test, they don't have to admit they are doing so. At the same time, they can apply different standards to different racial groups, without taking heat for it because they are looking at the "whole person" rather than focusing on one narrow numerical score. It's a liberal's dream come true.

Hiatus

2007-10-14T21:31:00.000-04:00

My dear, few but loyal readers:

I have been working on draft versions of a few posts over the past few weeks, but without having actually completed any of them, I now find myself in the final two-week period before a week of huge exams. I therefore think it wise to not even attempt to blog for the next three weeks. Putting patients first requires passing one's exams, I believe.

Please return after that time, when I hope to have a few new interesting posts up, including a discussion of the MCAT promised to Terry Morris, a question of whether sexual liberation dissuades men from becoming traditionalists, and a comparison between a Philip K. Dick short story and the nihilism of today's liberals.

Hermes, your future trad-con doc

The tragedy continues

2007-10-13T14:53:00.000-04:00

First, there was the tragedy of September 11th, 2001, when Islamic terrorists tragically hijacked four jetliners and, tragically, flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, tragically murdering thousands of people.

Then came the tragedy of the Virginia Tech shootings, where Seung-Hui Cho tragically murdered 32 people and wounded 17 more, before tragically killing himself.

The latest tragedy is a school shooting in Cleveland, Ohio. Student Asa Coon tragically shot four people before, in the height of tragedy, turning the gun on himself. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer's headline on October 13th, Coon's death was "tragic." I have captured the online image of the front page, because the article with the headline wasn't available online.

It's a sad, but by this time predictable, fact of our society that we can't recognize violent crime as the deliberate act of an evil person. Since man is basically good, evil does not exist, and all people are equal, murder is just another random occurrence that befalls us unexpectedly like a hurricane or earthquake.

The only tragedy here is how deeply liberalism has permeated our society. Hopefully, in 100 years, we will be using the word tragedy to describe not murder, but our current inability to understand and combat evil.

A Few Reasons not to Give to NRO

2007-10-01T20:39:00.001-04:00

At National Review Online's The Corner, fatuous one-line content-free poster extraordinaire Kathryn Jean Lopez posted the following:

A Few Reasons to Give to NRO [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Victor Davis Hanson.

Ramesh Ponnuru.

Jay Nordlinger.

John Derbyshire.

And they're just from today, and just a few of today's NRO offerings.

Consider making an investment in more of the above and more. Donate to NRO now.

Let's see.

Victor Davis Hanson: Thinks that "Americans believe that freedom and consensual government — far from being the exclusive domain of the West — are ideals central to the human condition and the shared aspirations of all born into this world" and that these values are "the same principles for which Americans died at Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Iwo Jima, and Pusan." Also routinely bloviates against "fundamentalism," a word most commonly used by secularists to refer to any sincere, orthodox religious belief.

Ramesh Ponnuru: Criticized social conservatives' rhetoric against homosexuality as "spiteful, harsh, and obsessive" in an article arguing that homosexual "marriage" is inevitable.

Jay Nordlinger: Wrote that George W. Bush is a "Rushmore-level President" and that if history doesn't bear that out, "history will be wrong." Also that "I have a deep fondness — love, really — for the man, though I don't know him."

John Derbyshire: A nihilistic atheist who thinks that an individual human life has no purpose. When discussing religion, he routinely writes such sneering sentences as "All religious faith, after all, depends on magical thinking. To people who eschew such thinking—people who prefer to ground their beliefs in the strict rules of evidence used in modern law and science—Mohammed’s flying through the air to Jerusalem on a white steed is no more preposterous than the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception." Thinks that Playboy is conservative.

Does a principled conservative need any more reasons not to donate to NRO?

Saying something worth saying

2007-09-24T22:50:00.000-04:00

As I've gotten into the thick of medical school, I've discovered that the development of my time management skills has lagged behind the demands being placed on me. It's not easy to blog when one is already behind in the many pages of reading of dense medical textbooks one is expected to keep up with every day. Hence, many entries I started weeks ago remain unfinished.

I've decided that Mark of Western Survival, who also blogs only sporadically, is right: it's better for one's posts to be infrequent but worthwhile, than to post the kind of incessant, trivial, vapid one-liners as we see from, for example, Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO. Of course, it would be great to come up with something astute and thought-provoking nearly every day, as do Vanishing American and Lawrence Auster, but not everyone's schedule (nor intellect) permits this.

I must say that the time constraints I've been under have got me thinking about the liberal nature of our society and the disadvantages conservatives face: I believe it takes more time to be a conservative than it does to be a liberal. This is because liberalism is so thoroughly entrenched in our society as to be the "default" view in most situations. Liberals can therefore take their beliefs for granted; they don't really need to be able to justify them, because they know that most people around them will simply assume that their claims are correct. Conservatives, on the other hand, must spend extra time studying to buttress our arguments, both in order to advance conservative views, because we know that the instant we make a conservative claim we will be called on the carpet for it and will need cold, hard facts to back it up, and to refute liberal ones, because we know that any off-the-cuff rebuttals we offer that are not backed up by "official" citations will simply be assumed to be wrong.

For example, this morning in our small group session, the same liberal black young woman I have referred to previously objected to the term "Caucasian" which was used in a written scenario we were given, on the basis that it was "outdated" (so? Why is it outdated? Must we assume that everything old is bad?) and because it was coined as a contrast to "Mongoloid" and it means "the beautiful people." Now, this claim that the word Caucasian means "beautiful people" sounded totally bogus to me, but I had no basis on which to object to it. I knew that it comes from the Caucasus mountains, but I wasn't sure where that name in turn came from. When I got home, I did some Googling and found the apparent origin of the tale--Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the German naturalist who came up with the idea of dividing humanity into Caucasians, Mongolians, Malayans, Negros, and Americans, had written that the Caucasus region had produced "the most beautiful race of men." That's it. The word itself is just the name of a mountain range, nothing more. But I, not knowing this at the time, had nothing to say. And whenever this happens--a liberal claim is made and no conservative counterarguments are offered--liberalism wins a small victory.

And what could I have done? There is no way I could have anticipated that this subject would come up, and even if I could have, I don't have the time to spend an hour every evening prepping myself with conservative rebuttals of liberal arguments. I and a liberal classmate can sit in lecture all morning, spend all afternoon reading textbooks, spend all evening organizing our notes, and then at 10:00 PM he can turn to me and say "it's a travesty that the wealthiest nation in the world doesn't recognize health care as a fundamental human right and provide it free of charge to all its citizens." And that that point, it's 10:00 PM and I'm ready for bed; I don't have time to spend hours reading John Stuart Mill and John Locke and Tocqueville and Thomas Jefferson, studying the classical and traditional American concepts of liberty and self-government which contradict this claim, when I've already had to spend hours reading medical textbooks. The liberal, however, faces no such hurdle. The hours spent reading medical textbooks do not interfere with his ability to advance liberalism, because all he has to do is make his claim; the surrounding society gives him the benefit of the doubt.

This is why I'm less optimistic than some of my fellow traditionalists about a revival of traditional America. I fear liberalism already has too strong a foothold in our society. As I put it in an unpublished comment sent to VFR a few weeks ago,

You are correct to point out that both you and Mark, in speculating on how white-majority America might restore itself, are speaking of the coming into existence of something that does not now exist, and that is what we must hope for. The biggest question that comes to my mind is, how can this happen given the extreme and pervasive liberalism of the younger generations? The last generation to have a real memory of traditional America, of what it was like to live in a society where liberalism was not the dominant way of thinking, are now dying out. My parents' generation were the ones who rebelled in the Sixties, but at least they grew up in a world where their parents listened to classical music in the home, they had to read Shakespeare and Wordsworth in school, they learned about the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Pact, and George Washington crossing the Delaware, it was unacceptable for an unmarried couple to live together, homosexuality was unspeakable, there was no affirmative action and it was understood that this was basically a white Western Christian society, etc. They have some memory of that world, and might conceivably return to believing in it if conditions became bad enough.

But they're now turning the reins over to my generation, who are totally cut off from that tradition, having no memory of it, no knowledge of what it's like to live in anything other than modern liberal society, whose only "knowledge" of traditional America comes in the form of the extreme liberal caricatures of it we're so used to hearing: it was a horrible oppressive dark past where women couldn't vote or be educated and were kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, blacks had to sit in the back of the bus, everyone was sexually repressed because the extent of the typical birds-and-the-bees talk was "lie back and think of England" and condoms weren't available to 13-year-olds, and so on. Even I, a product of public schools in the 1980s, feel woefully ignorant of such things as literature for someone who considers himself a traditionalist--for example, I read your comment on Scott of Powerline's appllication of Yeats's Easter 1916 to the Dartmouth controversy, and couldn't understand what you found so wrong with it (unless you meant that because Yeats was expressing some admiration for the revolutionaries, the poem just wasn't particularly applicable to this situation.) Frankly, it's hard to imagine any significant number of my peers adopting anything like a self-consciously white-majority traditionalist philosophy, no matter how bad things get. My personal perception is that there are just too many of them who would never return to the "dark ages" when we silly white-bread people were so ignorant that we didn't understand that everyone is different and you have to tolerate and accept all viewpoints and lifestyles, who would literally rather die than become "racist" or advocate "authoritarianism."

I don't mean to be pessimistic and say it can't happen. I agree with you, that as long as we're hoping for something we should hope and work toward the restoration of traditional America which would have historical continuity with the nation that was founded in 1776, rather than the effective dissolution of that nation and its replacement with something which, though traditional and Western, would not be the same nation. I just have not been able to think of a way of surmounting this enormous obstacle presented by the loss of connection to the old America, and our pervasive liberalism, so deeply ingrained in the younger generations that it's as natural to them as breathing. As long as that stands in the way, very few people will want to fight for either the restoration of America or secession from it.

I have to admit, as I re-read that, I was thinking of my medical school peers, and they might not be the most representative sample of the American population. Unfortunate as it is, at this point in time, the cognitive elite in our society tend overwhelmingly to be liberal, and medical students--well, no one wants to admit this, but we had to take an IQ test to get in. Furthermore, only 53% of my class is white, and these Orientals and Indians are not likely to be at the vanguard of a white-majority traditionalist resurgence. So maybe things look worse from where I stand than they do in many other segments of society. On the other hand, the cognitive elites are the standard-bearers and rule-makers, and the time constraints of being a conservative, the necessity of extra studying just to be able to hold our own against liberalism, when many of us have daily lives to attend to, while liberals can get on with their lives while making liberal arguments unopposed if conservatives have not done our homework, make me wonder if control of our society can ever be wrested back from liberals who seem determined to drive it into the ground.

I would be interested in knowing what other conservatives and traditionalists think about this.

Freedom is slavery; increasing secularism is increasing theocracy

2007-09-08T21:41:00.000-04:00

John Savage at Brave New World Watch has begun an interesting discussion on how traditionalists should reclaim the virtues of Victorianism and Puritanism, which are constantly denigrated by the left as virtually the apotheosis of everything they see as wrong with the world. In the comments, Vanishing American wrote:

And who was it who said (I wish I could remember) that each age condemns the very thing they have least of: for example our age condemns restraint and self-discipline, and ironically we are in absolutely no danger of overdoing those things.

The quotation she is probably thinking of is one often cited by conservatives, from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters:

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere “understanding.” Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

Notice how Lewis mentions the attack on Puritanism by name, something we continue to see in 21st century America. This quotation also brought to mind a comment I once made on VFR about how the less conservatively religious our society becomes, the more the secular left bizarrely and nonsensically attacks it for becoming increasingly conservatively religious:

...they talk as though traditional religious belief is something that’s on the increase in our society, saying things like “given the frightening direction our country is headed...” or “if this goes on...” , when it’s obvious that by any conceivable measure religiosity is decreasing in America. They make it sound as though until recently, America was the land of the free and the home of the brave atheists, with no religion in public schools, legal abortion and pornography, and other such “freedoms” until we crazy right-wing religious nutjobs just recently came out of nowhere and started trying to take over the country. Can they really possibly believe this? Do they not know that prior to the 1960’s, public schools all across America opened with a prayer and Bible reading, that prior to 1972 abortion was largely illegal, that women really used to be all but formally excluded from the professions, that it was only in the 21st century that sodomy laws were struck down, that many of the states used to have established churches, or even in colonial times made it a crime not to go to church on Sunday?...

Indeed, I would like to ask one of these liberals (and would do so if I ever got into a face-to-face discussion about it) the following question: given that all of America’s past prior to the 1960s, from the time of our very Founding, looks exactly like what you are calling a “theocracy,” do you believe that for most of America’s history we were a theocracy?

As yet more evidence of this, when I was searching for the Lewis quote, I came across a review of The Screwtape Letters by an atheist, who italicized the sentence "and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey" [1] and then had this to say:

I could not resist highlighting that last sentence, which demonstrates a nearly prophetic insight into the political character which has taken Christianity over in the United States today. In recent years, American Christianity has been subsumed into the political aims of an aggressively militant and zealous right-wing faction which, to judge by their actions, believes Jesus supported endless war and militarism, slashing social programs, and cutting taxes on the rich. The leaders of this movement constantly rail against the evils of liberalism and secularism, and support an intrusive, paternalistic state that controls all its citizens' most private decisions - when they will give birth, who they are permitted to marry, under what circumstances they are allowed to die. Most notably, the Christian right supports an omnipotent, unaccountable executive who operates in total secrecy and without checks and balances of any kind. This support verges on worship in the case of George W. Bush, who claims the power to break any law he pleases if, in his sole judgment, doing so is necessary to protect the country from terrorists. If anyone at all could be described as "hastening to be slaves or tyrants", it is the followers of this movement. Whatever Lewis' faults, it stands as a mark in his favor that he recognized, as today's religious right does not, the dangers of blind submission to authority that comes in a religious guise.

Now, this is really quite remarkable. Notwithstanding the devotion to President Bush by some conservative Christians (though this is always overestimated and overstated by secularists) and how it could represent a small step in the direction of tyranny, look at the other things listed as associated with freedom: social programs, taxes on the rich, euthanasia, homosexual "marriage." We've been seeing this kind of thought from the left for a long time, and one must admit, there is a weird kind of internal sense to it: soaking the rich makes everyone else free from economic inequality; banning trans fats makes people free from heart disease; banning tobacco frees people from lung cancer; mandating seat belt use frees people from injuries caused by automobile accidents; mandating comprehensive sex education and the HPV vaccine for schoolchildren and not even allowing parents to opt out frees people from sexually transmitted disease; instituting homosexual "marriage" frees homosexuals to have their relationships publicly recognized, to be guaranteed sharing of spousal benefits. Never mind that much of what has traditionally been considered freedom must be revoked in order to guarantee these freedoms: individual freedoms (e.g., the freedom to decide for myself whether to smoke tobacco), family freedoms (the freedom of parents to decide what's best for their children), and social freedoms (the freedom of a people collectively to decide whether they want their society to recognize sexual deviancy or not.) The only freedom that matters is the freedom to live a liberal life. I admit, many of us conservatives are in favor of various restrictions on individual liberty: abortion, pornography, obscenity, adultery, divorce, though these fall under the classic right of a society to self-regulate, have existed in America since before its Founding, and I wouldn't want them enforced at the federal level. But the left wants to enact (and in some cases already has enacted) some of the most intrusive, oppressive, and burdensome restrictions on liberty imaginable--restricting what we can eat, or requiring us to undergo certain medical treatments--and they honestly don't see this as "hastening to be slaves or tyrants." Freedom is slavery, indeed.

This trend in which the left attacks our society for the opposite of what it is actually doing is certainly perplexing. What could be the reason for it? In the VFR entry mentioned above, Lawrence Auster suggests that because our civilization is under threat from Islam, but we cannot criticize Islam because it is an exotic non-Western Other, the left is displacing what would be proper criticism of Islam onto the West's own religion, Christianity. I don't doubt that that that is a driving factor, but there is another I've been considering. Because liberals believe that man is basically good, they believe that the "default" state of life is a liberal utopia existing everywhere on earth, and the only reason this is not the present reality is that conservatives are interfering and preventing it from happening. Therefore, when they battle with conservatives, they see conservatives as the ones picking the fight, not themselves. In their minds, their role is always passive and the conservatives' is always active. So, for example, when a city has had a nativity scene on display at Christmastime in front of its city hall since time immemorial, and then the village atheist gets the ACLU involved and launches a lawsuit, and conservatives rally to the cause of keeping the nativity scene there, the left seems them as aggressively inserting displays of religion into public life. It doesn't matter if the nativity scene has been there since the town's incorporation; because in the liberal mindset it's not supposed to be, the conservatives are the aggressors and the liberals are the defenders. Indeed, in the liberal mindset, even though their hero Thomas Jefferson, the very author of the phrase "wall of separation between church and state" clearly did not see established state churches as unconstitutional, since they actually existed during his tenure as president and he did not see fit to try to abolish them, religion has no place in public life and anyone seeking to keep it there is picking a fight.

Thus, when conservatives so much as merely try to preserve the present order (e.g., keeping sacred music in the school Christmas concert, keeping strip clubs out of town), the left sees them as working to create or establish a theocracy. They don't realize that most people were happy with the way things were, that conservative activism on these issues really arose only in reaction to the left's in-our-faces attempt to secularize our society, because they view secularism as the way things were always supposed to be from the beginning. Therefore, though they have won many battles, causing a trend away from public religiosity (I won't use their word "theocracy" because America has never been a theocracy), they see the conservatives who are merely trying to preserve the existing order as aggressors, leading to the belief that there is a societal trend toward theocracy.

Notes:
[1]: When I first read this quotation, I thought that by "liberalism" Lewis couldn't have meant leftism as we know it today, but I didn't know what he might have meant. Then I found a blog called called Deviant Scholar whose author suggests "it is probably closer in meaning to what we would think of as Libertarianism with a conservative streak, or maybe conservatism with a libertarian streak."

Germany fails to consider deporting Muslims

2007-09-06T23:45:00.000-04:00

In a sane and civilized society, that's what the headline would have read. Instead, it reads "Germany considers increased spying on Muslims." Because, as we all know, if you happen to have let into your house a stranger who believes he has a God-given mission to kill or subjugate you, the best way to deal with the threat he presents is to spy on him.

One of the points Lawrence Auster makes frequently is that liberals are continually being "shocked" by reality, and no matter how many times they are "shocked," they always find it "shocking" when the same thing that "shocked" them before happens again. Naturally, this was on my mind as I read this article, and I couldn't help but notice the number of times the word "shock" appears:

"Germans were shocked to learn that two of the bombers were native-born and had common German names, Fritz and Daniel."
"As shocked as they were by the arrests, the idea of spying on other Germans unnerves many in civil-rights minded Germany , where government surveillance recalls memories of Adolf Hitler."
"She noted that while it was a shock to hear of an Islamic terrorist named Fritz, it also was a shock this summer to hear of terrorist doctors in England and Scotland."
"That their names are Fritz and Daniel is shocking, but only means that the known spectrum of terrorists has now increased."

Now, one might be tempted to ask, since the Koran is filled with exhortations toward violence against non-Muslims, since Islam has a long history of warlike agression against non-Muslims dating back to its very founding, since the newspapers have been filled with an unending stream of reports of Islamic terrorist attacks on the Western world for decades now, why exactly is it so shocking to discover Muslims planning to kill Westerners? One might as well be "shocked" to see the sun rise in the morning.

But of course, if one subscribes to the liberal view of man as basically good, and evil arising only from external corrupting influences, and the view that everyone in the world wants to live in peace, love, and harmony, and the view that modern liberal secular democracy is the best way of life ever to exist anywhere, and that this fact is self-evident to everyone in the world, so that no one, having been exposed to this way of life, could possibly have any desire to live any other way, I suppose events like this are shocking. Besides, you can't kick that murderous invader out of your house; that would be discrimination.

By the way, the article states that one of the terrorist plotters was a white German convert to Islam, and implies that a second was also, though no information about him has been released. What can Europeans conclude from this information?

"This is what we can expect for the future: The attack plots are going to come fast and furious," he said. "And, as is clear in both these attacks, they're operating in new vistas. Terrorism in Europe is a part of life now."

Ah, terrorist attacks are just going to happen and there's nothing we can do about it. We might as well shrug our shoulders, mutter "it was nice while it lasted," hunker down, and prepare to die. Say, have these Europeans been reading John Derbyshire?

Reduction in residents' hours doesn't reduce death rates

2007-09-05T23:32:00.000-04:00

One of the most ominous trends in medicine today is the ongoing trend away from being a respected sovereign profession with a high degree of authority and independence toward a more "team-based, cooperative" (i.e., subjugated to insurance companies, government, nurses, hospital administrators,etc.) one. There are many reasons for this, but in general, it fits perfectly with modern liberal society's view of anything smacking of authority, convention, or a traditional hierarchical social structure as bad, and non-judgemental, tolerant egalitarianism as good.

The call for more humble, less authoritarian doctors has manifested itself in many ways, not the least of which is an increasingly hostile attitude toward the tradition of intense residency training with its associated long work hours and frequent lack of sleep. As some may not know, the term "resident" comes from the fact that under the original system, these trainees actually lived in the hospital and basically never left. Though that requirement was abandoned long ago, for a long time interns (residents in their first year of training) were "on call" every other night, and residents every few nights, and call, especially for interns, typically involved being up virtually all night performing patient care duties, with seldom more than a chance to catch a few cat naps throughout the night.

Obviously, this system is unacceptable to liberals, because it is associated with producing authoritarian, "hardcore" doctors who think they know it all and can do it all, who have an air of confidence about their ability to handle any medical situation. Because this is non-egalitarian, it must be abolished. (The presence of liberals with this attitude within the medical profession has been greatly exacerbated by the presence of large numbers of women within the profession, who are concerned with "balancing" work and family life, a topic on which I have yet to write substantially about.) Liberals will bleat about how it's all about patient safety, but in reality I think they just can't stand the idea of doctors being so "hardcore," as they say, and, as I've learned as a new medical student, there are many liberal doctors and future doctors who feel this way too.

Starting with the famous Libby Zion case in 1984, there has been a movement to limit the number of hours residents can work, culminating in the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education's enacting the 80-hour-limit workweek for residency programs in 2003. This is a private accreditation rule rather than a law, but the threat of congressional action was imminent, and the ACGME felt that the medical profession would be better off self-regulated than federally regulated. The rules made it difficult for some programs to meet what they felt were long-established standards of postgraduate medical education: for example, a surgery resident might have the opportunity to participate in a rare procedure thanks to an emergency, but would now have to be sent home because he had reached the 30-consecutive-hour limit on in-hospital time. Still, the thread of congressional action was due to alleged patient safety issues, so everyone has been waiting with bated breath to see if the work hour limitations resulted in fewer medical errors.

Well, surprise surprise, a new study has come out showing that they haven't:

"We can say conclusively that the duty-hour regulations did not worsen patient mortality. There was a lot of concern about that, and we can conclusively say that's not the case," said Dr. Kevin G. Volpp, staff physician and core faculty member at the Center for Health Equity, Research and Promotion at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center. "We can also say that there's some evidence of benefit in terms of mortality outcomes."

The only statistically significant difference the studies found was an improvement in mortality for medical (as opposed to surgical) patients at the VA. Meanwhile,

"The big question is how regulating work hours will affect the quality of training of the next generation of physicians who will be taking care of all of us for the next several decades," said Volpp, an assistant professor of medicine and health care systems at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Wharton School of Business. "That's the question no one really knows the answer to."

I don't know the answer either, but I have a prediction: it will make the quality of training worse.

Some may think that I, as not only a medical student who has yet to run this gauntlet, but an older one who will be running it in his mid-to-late thirties, am crazy for standing up for the old system. Certainly all of my fellow medical students whom I have heard voice an opinion on the matter have expressed disdain for the old system and support for the work hour restrictions, believing if anything that they're still not limited enough. But here's the rub: the disdain the express for the old system is of a piece with the disdain liberals express toward our society's traditional historical culture. Everything old, traditional, and Western European must go, because those old white males just didn't "get it." They were products of an ignorant and benighted time who didn't realize that people who strike a healthy balance between work and personal life make better doctors, instead believing that doctors have to be type-A macho jerks. They think that the younger generation has discovered the wonderful idea of shift work for the first time, which for some reason no one ever thought to apply to medicine before, but now that they have, the entire world is going to be filled with goodness and light. It doesn't occur to them that if doctors are shift-based, salaried employees, instead of independent professionals, they will continue to lose prestige, income, and the respect they traditionally as the final authority in the world of health care, until they are just yet another class of pencil-pushers overseen by middle managers.

This is a good example of what might be called the "positive feedback loop of liberalism," where once a liberal idea has infected a person or group, it begins to escalate, creating ever increasing and more fervent demands for even more liberalism. The work week rules were ostensibly established for safety reasons, but they soon created a shift-work mentality in new doctors; these new doctors forgot about the safety issues, and the idea of just plain not having to work as hard became the raison d'être for the restrictions. But since in an important job one will always have to work hard, someone looking for limits on hard work will never be satisfied; so the demands for ever more lenient standards--even more work-hour restrictions, part-time residencies and part-time attending/private practice positions (driven largely by women seeking to have families), and the transition of certain specialties, and in the ideals of some the entire profession, toward a shift-based salaried employment model rather than a sovereign independent professional model--never cease and grow ever more stringent.

There are certainly other reasons for this besides the ACGME work hour rules: for example, increasing numbers of women in the profession, a topic I really must address in its own entry, and the general immaturity of our society. The work hour restrictions, however, are a prime example of the law of unintended consequences, the deleterious effect of our society's obsession with "safety," and the way the medical profession, like our society in general, has become effectively suicidal due to liberalism.

Quote of the day

2007-09-03T18:44:00.001-04:00

I just saw John Edwards on the news speaking at a Labor Day rally, and he made the following statement:

"America was built by men and women who were steel workers, who were mine workers..."

Really, Mr. Edwards? It's news to me that America was built by female steel workers and mine workers. I can't imagine how miniscule the number of female steel and mine workers is even today, let alone what it was when the industrial revolution was first getting off the ground.

Making such absurd statements must necessarily result from liberalism, with its axiomatic belief that all people must be totally equal and differences of either the individual or group kind must not exist. We've been hearing the same kind of thing from politicians with their constant reference to "servicemen and women" or our "sons and daughters" who fight to defend our country, phrases which are by now de rigeur for even "conservative" Republicans.

When "kids" are no longer kids

2007-09-01T17:41:00.000-04:00

When I wrote my post on the corrupted usage of the word "single" among the younger generations (though now that I think about it, it's not what single means that is telling, it's what it doesn't mean ), I had already noticed another similar trend: use of the word "kid" by those well into their twenties to refer to their peers.

It's easy to see where this comes from. It's natural for children and adolescents to refer to their peers as kids, and I can well remember doing this myself in high school: talking about the cool kids, the nerdy kids, the shop kids, etc. And if one remains a full-time student, it's easy to see how this habit could persist, especially since our society promotes prolonging adolescence until one's thirties. I've heard my fellow medical students employing this usage--talking about how many "kids" from this year's class are from such-and-such undergraduate institution, for example, or how many "kids" from the med school they saw at such-and-such bar over the weekend. Some of these people just graduated from college this May, but others have been working for a year or two. At my last job, I even had a co-worker, also a medical school applicant, who I think was 27 and did this. I think it's not merely a leftover habit from childhood but a sign of something deeper: that adults don't think of themselves as adults. In the past, a person of the age of majority would have been extremely self-conscious had he let the word "kid" slip in reference to those his age. Now people are using the word without irony, without thinking it's anything unusual.

And just as I've been thinking about this over the past few weeks, Diana West has been in the news with her new book The Death of the Grown Up. In an interview with Newsweek she says:

I remember being at a high-school party, and at 12 o’clock the mother comes into the middle of the room and blows a police whistle and says, “Thank you for coming, goodnight.” What parent would do that today? It’s the same thing with the spring-break syndrome, where kids are planning expensive trips, going out unchaperoned, they are drinking, debauching, absolutely running amok, yet the parents say, “I can’t do anything about it.” Parents have abdicated responsibilities to give in to adolescent desire.

This is reminiscent of the story of the Catholic high school in a wealthy Long Island suburb that cancelled its prom a few years ago because of not merely the debauchery, but the parent-sanctioned-and-funded debauchery that had accumulated around it. Parents were renting liquor-serving limos, chartering "booze cruises," and renting houses in the Hamptons for unchaperoned post-prom parties. Those were presumably parents in their late forties. How much worse will the next generation, those now in their early twenties, be with their children? Will they counter-rebel and return to traditional values, having realized the havoc they're wreaking on society? It's possible if things get bad enough, but it's going to be difficult as long as they think of themselves as "kids."

A genetics/population bleg

2007-08-31T23:16:00.000-04:00

I don't know whether I have enough readers yet to start "blegging," but I thought I'd give it a shot in the off chance that one of the few visitors I do have knows something about this.

In our small group session today, one member of the group, a very liberal, biracial (black/white) young woman became reservedly yet visibly exercised when we broached the subject of genetic risk for disease being associated with race. She was quick to tell us that when working at the NIH (an experience she is obviously quite proud of--I'm sure a liberal half-black woman has no trouble getting a job at the NIH) she learned that racial risk factors, while they do exist, are really attributable to social factors correlated with race such as low income, education, living in a high-crime area, etc., rather than to genetics. Naturally, I don't buy that. She also said that the only diseases that are correctly attributable to genetics and correlate with race are single-gene disorders such as sickle cell anemia, and that even in those cases, since it's only one gene, it's not really racial since any person of any race can have that one mutation. She said that multifactorial disorders aren't really attributable to race at all, that there's more genetic variation within races than between races, and of course, repeated the ubiquitous leftist talking point that there's really no such thing as race anyway and it's merely a social construct. She made it sound like at the NIH this stuff is considered firmly established scientific fact.

Now, it doesn't surprise me at all that the NIH has "discovered" the scientific "fact" that racial differences don't actually exist, though obviously, I'm highly skeptical. But I was unable to rebut any of these claims, because I'm really not well-read on this topic, and I figured that this being a subject that is obviously near and dear to her, she would probably have several studies or articles she could cite off the top of her head which she at least believes establish her view, which would make her look like she had science on her side while I was merely a quack engaging in speculation.

So I'd like to ask if anyone can recommend good books, articles, or other sources that may show that what this woman was saying is wrong. Specifically, I'm interested in knowing more about where this idea that there is more genetic variation within races than between races comes from, what its significance really is, and whether it really means what liberals seem to want it to mean. More generally, I'd also love to know if there's been anything solid refuting this incessant claim that there's no such thing as race and it's merely a social construct.

Ron Paul

2007-08-28T13:16:00.000-04:00

John Savage said that in order to increase traffic, I should mention Ron Paul. I will now therefore mention Ron Paul. Ron Paul, Ron Paul, Ron Paul. I'll say it again: Ron Paul.

In all seriousness, I think Ron Paul would make a fine President of the United States of America. He is one of the few politicians these days who actually understands and believes in our Constitution. Although my Crunchy Con sympathies disagree somewhat with some of his libertarian economic views, I know America can't be saved without being restored to true democracy and self-government, as opposed to an EU-style "democracy" of universal rights and equality imposed on the people against their will by an unaccountable bureaucracy, and Ron Paul makes this a priority. His reputation in the House as "Dr. No" because of his consistent opposition to spending increases is eminently commendable in an age when most politicians stay in office by voting for goodies for their constituents. (Though I suppose this really says something about the difference between the people of Paul's district in Texas and, say, Ted Kennedy's in Massachusetts.)

Tom Tancredo is still my first choice for the Republican nomination, because he, more so than Paul, correctly identifies immigration as the most important issue facing our nation right now. But if Tancredo doesn't make it, I will have no qualms about supporting Ron Paul for President.

Woman knows best?

2007-08-26T13:52:00.000-04:00

I used to regularly attend the mens' ministry at my home church. I don't remember what exactly sparked the discussion, but I remember one point at which the leader remarked upon the necessity of getting over the notion that women don't sin. It is actually a common notion in the modern evangelical world. It's seldom stated explicitly, but often, any discussion of relations between the sexes carries a subtext of assumptions that women are these good-hearted, pure, noble creatures who always want what's best but whose desires are often thwarted by the immorality of uncouth men. You know, snips and snails and puppy-dog tails vs. sugar and spice and everything nice.

These assumptions are often present in the articles and blog posts at Boundless, the Focus on the Family-run site I mentioned in my post on how evangelicals love diversity. A few days ago, editor Ted Slater posted what amounted to a statement of contrition for the personal qualities he possessed while a bachelor and gratefulness toward marriage for absolving him of those sins and reforming him. Part of it read as follows:

"Habits" were a big part of who I was, pre-marriage. Habits like staying up late working on my audio or Web site projects, taking naps whenever I felt like it, eating whenever (and whatever) I wanted, spending money impulsively on new musical or computer equipment, enjoying flirt-tinged conversations with single women, hanging out late with my buddies after worship band practice, getting to work late and staying at the office late, and so on.

The way I prepared for married life was by telling myself, and my bride-to-be, that our wedding day marked the death of the single Ted. On Dec. 21, 2002, the single Ted would be no longer. He would be dead.

The truth is that it took years to shed some of my more self-centered habits, but I do think it was helpful to begin the process by having a specific time in mind where those habits were no longer what characterized me.

The single Ted is long dead. And the happily married Ted doesn't miss him.

Now, it may very well be that Slater was a rotten guy as bachelor and that marriage forced him to clean himself up. I have to question, though, why if this kind of thinking is not part of a trend that sees men as inherently bad and women as inherently good, we never see similar thoughts expressed about women needing to clean themselves up. Indeed, try to imagine a post from Ted's wife Ashleigh alongs these lines:

"Habits" were a big part of who I was, pre-marriage. Habits like staying up late working on my school projects, taking naps whenever I felt like it, eating whenever (and whatever) I wanted, spending money impulsively on new clothes or shoes, enjoying flirt-tinged conversations with single men, hanging out late with my friends after worship band practice, getting to work late and staying at the office late, and so on.

The way I prepared for married life was by telling myself, and my husband-to-be, that our wedding day marked the death of the single Ashleigh. On Dec. 21, 2002, the single Ashleigh would be no longer. She would be dead.

The truth is that it took years to shed some of my more self-centered habits, but I do think it was helpful to begin the process by having a specific time in mind where those habits were no longer what characterized me.

The single Ashleigh is long dead. And the happily married Ashleigh doesn't miss her.

One simply doesn't hear this kind of thing in the evangelical world. And the funny thing is that most evangelicals will still claim to believe in traditional gender roles, even though this totally contradicts the notion that men are inherently bad and essentially need to "submit" themselves to women in order to be reformed. The aforementioned mens' minstry met at 6:30 AM on Saturdays, and some of the men didn't have much time to stay and chat afterward because they said their wives wanted them home to relieve them of the kids. Excuse me, but I thought that when a woman stayed home, taking care of the kids was part of her job. Where in all this are the "submission" of wives to their husbands and the "rule" of husbands over their households of which the Bible speaks? Now we have "conservative" Christian men cowering in fear of their wives, or perhaps, not wishing to provoke sexual rejection.

There's a lot of fretting in the evangelical subculture today about how the divorce rate among professing born-again Christians isn't any lower than that of society at large. That is certainly worrisome and wrong, but it is never going to change as long as evangelicals hold this view of women being morally superior to men.

A profession that doesn't look like America

2007-08-26T00:31:00.000-04:00

Some people may wonder why I have described myself, a white male conservative Christian, as a vanishing breed in the world of American medicine. "Oh, cry me a river," I can hear the left saying. "Everybody knows that doctors are a bunch of conservative hoary old coots!" Even those of the conservative persuasion may be puzzled. The image of the kindly, gentlemanly white male doctor still pervades the consciousness of our society. Yet in this as in so many other things, popular perception lags behind reality.

Unfortunately, historical data on the demographics of medical students is hard to find. It may be that no one was keeping track of the race and sex distribution of medical students prior to about 1980. But let's make do with what we can. Consider a hypothetical doctor on the verge of retirement. If he turned 65 years old today, he was born in 1942, and thus most likely started medical school around 1964. At that time, more than 93% of American medical school graduates were men. While racial data was hard to find, I figured from this table published in 1990 that in our hypothetical physician's age group (45-54 at the time), more than 75% of physicians were non-Hispanic white, so we can reasonably extrapolate that this same demographic datum applied to his fellow medical students when he was in school. Furthermore, we know that in the years prior to 1965, when the infamous immigration bill was passed that was responsible for the ongoing transformation of America into a multicultural society, our nation was 89% white. So our 65 year old doctor was a white medical student in a white world.

Some people might not know, however, how drastically the profession is changing. Fortunately, the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) has collected all sorts of demographic data about medical students for the past 15-20 years, so it's much easier to look at what's happening now. First of all, there has been a massive influx of women into the field: 2003 made headlines as the first year in which more women applied to medical school than men (though still ever so slightly more men were accepted) and for several years now the ratio of male to female matriculants has appeared to asymptotically approach 50-50. While the implications of this are important, I'd like to confine a discussion of them to its own post and focus on the racial changes here.

In 2006, 61% of medical school matriculants were non-Hispanic white. 7% were black, 7% were Hispanic of any race, and 19% were Asian.* This is something that varies greatly by school. In many Southern and Midwestern state schools, the number of whites still dwarfs the number of Asians, but at East and West coast private schools, Asian students are admitted in numbers greatly out of proportion to their numbers in the general population, and at some California schools Asians outnumber whites. (At my own school, a fairly high-ranking private school, only 53% of this year's class is white while 30% are Asian. Interestingly, this means that the much-maligned and dreaded white males comprise less than 30% of our class.)

Now, everyone knows that for a long time, affirmative action was said to be necessary because "minorities" were at a historic disadvantage in America and needed a special boost in university admissions and job hiring to bring their average levels of education and representation in various professions up to their proportion of the general population. Originally, when we spoke of "minorities" in this sense we almost always meant blacks, though I suppose American Indians and non-white Hispanics may have been included under the banner as well. A funny thing happened on the way to equality, however. After the aforementioned 1965 immigration bill, we began admitting large numbers of Asian immigrants, who as a group have average IQs higher than not only blacks but whites as well. These high-IQ Asians naturally began rising to the top of our society, being admitted to prestigious universities and entering the "cognitive elite" professions in proportions vastly greater than their share of the general population. Suddenly, the word "minority" by itself was no longer useful to describe the groups supposedly needing affirmative action, since these Asians were and still are a minority. Hence, the name of the game these days in medical school admissions is "underrepresented minority," or URM.

The usual justification for affirmative action for URMs is that patients are better treated by physicians who are like them. White physicians, it is said, cannot understand blacks as well as blacks can, and black patients are less likely to feel comfortable with or confide in a white physician compared to a black one. The same is said to hold true for Hispanic patients. Therefore, just as Bill Clinton wanted to create a cabinet that "looks like America," we need to increase the number of URMs to serve the needs of society. But wait--whites are still 67% of the US population, but only 61% of last year's medical school matriculants. Who will meet the needs of that remaining 6% of the population? If black people need black physicians rather than white ones, don't white people need white physicians rather than Indian ones? By the liberals' logic, shouldn't we place some limits on the number of Asians and start practicing affirmative action for whites?

Maybe not. For one thing, large numbers of Asians increase "diversity," by which the left really means non-whiteness, and thus are just as useful as any other race in achieving the leftist goal of turning whites into a minority in our own country. But more significantly, America itself increasingly no longer looks like America. It's troubling enough that we've gone from 89% white in 1965 to only about 2/3 white in the early 2000's. Even worse, however, was the report earlier this year that only 55% of children under age 5 in America are white. So maybe we don't need more white doctors to serve the needs of the "white community." If whites become a minority in America, as we are on track to do unless we wake up, get off our duffs, and enact a moratorium on non-Western immigration soon, even 61% will be too high a proportion of white doctors. The only question that will remain is where we will get all of the Hispanic doctors needed to serve the needs of the swelling "Hispanic community", since most of the Mestizo peasants currently "immigrating" here, with their average IQ of 90, generally don't have a level of intelligence that is considered acceptable to make a good physician.

It doesn't end there, however. So far I have been speaking only of people admitted to and graduating from American medical schools. However, after medical school, in order to be licensed to practice medicine, one must complete a 1-year internship, and while this was not true 50 years ago, nowadays one must become board-certified by completing a full residency in order to realistically make a living as a doctor, since no hospital will bring a non-board-certified physician on staff nor will insurance companies reimburse for services provided by non-board-certified physicians. These residency programs, which exist at teaching hospitals across the country, are funded by Medicare and, unlike the number of slots available in medical schools, their numbers are not controlled by the AAMC. In 2007, 15206 US medical school seniors applied for residency positions, of which there were 21845 available. How did the remaining 6639 residency positions get themselves filled, you ask? Foreign medical graduates, who represent an ever-increasing share of the US physician workforce.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that most of these foreign medical graduates don't come from Western Europe, Canada, and Australia. While some do, a great many are from South Asia and Eastern Europe. They tend to occupy the residency positions that American medical students find undesirable, like primary care fields and programs at community (as opposed to university) hospitals. My uncle, a private practice physician, told me recently of a patient satisfaction survey conducted by the community hospital where he is on staff. He said he suspected that a significant amount of the dissatisfaction patients expressed with the resident physicians could be attributed to their foreignness. "I mean, we've got guys wearing turbans, " he said. "Imagine you're a 75-year-old woman who's lived all her life in Jamison. The only place you've ever seen someone like that is on the evening news!" Yes, some of them really do wear turbans. Suffice it to say that they don't represent the "white community," or the black or Hispanic communities for that matter, very well. I don't think they have much "cultural competence," either. 30 years from now, when you need a primary care doctor, it may not only not be possible to find a white one--it may not even be possible to find an American-born one.

America is currently sick, with a disease called liberalism. Even though most Americans are still at a point where they are afraid to say it, America doesn't look like itself. Still, like many sick patients, it can get better. However, this cure is not going to come from doctors, who have been infected with liberalism themselves. What is needed is a behavioral approach rather than a biomedical one. The patient will need to find his own motivation, and to make some serious lifestyle changes, just as an overweight person who knows he is at risk for heart disease might go on a diet and start exercising. We as Americans can take this patient-centered approach and be cured if we really want to. Medicine and other institutions which represent only small segments of America can't cause top-down change; it has to come from the bottom up. Once we have set ourselves down the right path, medicine, as well as all of our other societal institutions, won't be able to help but follow.

*It's important to note that many demographic surveys don't make a distinction between Orientals and South Asians; thus, the term Asian encompasses Orientals, Indians, Pakistanis, etc. From purely anecdotal observation I'd say that the number of Indian students at my school is equal to if not greater than the number of Orientals.

More evidence that evangelicals are going liberal

2007-08-17T11:50:00.000-04:00

Focus on the Family runs a website for young single adults called Boundless. Now, remember, this is Focus on the Family--an organization within the satellite of entities reviled by the left as "the American Taliban," "Dominionists," and other such nonsensical appellations; an organization many liberals believe is hell-bent on destroying basic civil liberties and turning America into a fascist dictatorship. It is also, and more importantly to its actual purpose, an organization respected by evangelicals and many conservatives.

Boundless has a blog called Boundless Line. Recently they had a post on Robert Putnam's recent study which has been making waves for its conclusions about the downsides of diversity. Author Candice Watters started off sounding conservative on the issue: she gave the post a title of "Forced Diversity Has Opposite Effect," and wrote that "now a new study suggests maybe the glorification of diversity wasn't such a good idea after all." By the end of the post, however, it's clear that she's only against "forced diversity," and agrees with Daniel Henninger that evangelical megachurches are a good "assimilation model."

Where it really gets interesting is the comments section. None of the commenters questioned the notion that diversity is good. Several questions Putnam's conclusion, and several raised the specter of racism. Now, it's possible that Boundless publishes some comments from nonbelievers, but I think we have to assume that evangelicals constitute a solid majority of its readership. Remember, these are evangelicals, those evil right-wing fascists whom the left thinks want to destroy basic civil liberties and purge the entire world of everyone who's not white, Christian, male, and wealthy. Look at some of the things they're saying:

"I don't want this research to be used as an excuse to promote segregation."
"I love my church. It's awesome to see all the people in it. You can find mohawks, perms, Jessica Simpson hair, and wash-and-wear styles all together in the same room! It's like 300 cultures becoming one!"
"if admissions quotas and other efforts to diversify force us out of our comfort bubbles, than so be it. And if we're going to be political, I find it very plausible that admissions standards quotas are both necessary and just... I love diversity, especially ethnic and cultural diversity."
"Unfortunately, arguments that call diversity a failed process only hinder racial tolerance and integration...To argue against diversity seems pointless...I guess that racism is not dead. Apparently, individuals still think that diversity is not necessary."
"Putnam discovered that 'People in ethnically diverse settings don't want to have much of anything to do with each other,'
Am I the only person who thought 'racism' when I read this quote?"

One of the most instructive comments, to me, came from a commenter named Chris, who quoted Putnam's abstract and responded with "Read that carefully, and you'll notice that things look good in the long term." Here is the abstract:

Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.

I suppose Chris is referring to the statements that "In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits" and "successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities." That may sound positive, but it is a statement that people are overcoming problems, not that problems don't exist in the first place. The real question is, where did the problems come from? Wouldn't it be better to prevent problems from existing in the first place, rather than finding ways to work around them? Aren't we interested in addressing, as they say, the "root causes?"

To make this point clear, let me rephrase the first sentence of the abstract in two different ways:

Ethnic goodness is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration.
Ethnic conflict is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration.

Each of those sentences is identical to the original sentence, except that the word "diversity" has been replaced with a word that reflects a value judgment about the nature of diversity. I submit that someone who thinks realistically about ethnic diversity reads the sentence the second way, and that the first way reflects an a priori assumption that diversity is good, a fundamentally liberal assumption--and it is the one the Boundless commenters are using. As Jared Taylor put it when addressing a Canadian audience:

Now, you probably think that every major Canadian institution from the federal government on down takes the view that racial diversity is a great strength for Canada. In fact, they all agree with me. They all assert most emphatically that racial diversity is not a source of strength but a source of conflict. The only difference is that instead of the word “conflict,” they use the word “racism.”

In other words, the liberal sees diversity as automatically good, and any conflict that results from it as racism, an evil reaction to it that must be rooted out. A true conservative sees true racism as bad, but also at the same time sees conflict as the inevitable result of incompatible peoples trying to live side-by-side with one another. Therefore the true conservative will advocate the reduction of diversity as a means of minimizing the problem of ethnic and racial conflict.

That is not what these evangelicals are doing. They are taking the liberal side in the debate. In signing onto the diversity movement, they have willingly subscribed to a view that originated with secular leftists who hated traditional white Western societies for their particularism, and hated Christianity for the same reason. For this reason, evangelicals should find the liberal view revolting, but they don't realize what they're doing. They have decided that they look bad when they take conservative positions, and that leftists are right when they say Jesus was a liberal, and so in order to win people over they must attempt to out-liberal liberals, an effort doomed to failure.

I suppose liberal evangelicals think they (or rather, God working through them) are going to save our society by saving the world. They need to realize that unless our society is saved first, which involves making it more cohesive and unified--in other words, reducing diversity--they are never going to get the chance to save the world.

Getting off the ground

2007-08-15T13:49:00.000-04:00

I notice that I'm actually beginning to get a few visitors. If you've visited my blog for the first time recently, please don't write it off as one of those blogs that is started but never updated again. Instead, please consider coming back in the next week or two. I've been very busy with academic responsibilities this week, but once the week is over, I will be posting several new entries.

When "single" no longer means single

2007-08-08T23:23:00.000-04:00

One of the topics which fascinates me, and on which I no doubt will be writing from time to time, is what the way people use words signifies about their underlying thoughts. Some people don't agree that it signifies much. When I was a freshman in college, I attended the introductory meeting for those interested in writing for the student newspaper. At some point, the discussion turned to ideas for op-ed or opinion pieces, and one of my fellow freshmen volunteered that he was interested in writing an opinion piece protesting the administration's attempt to replace the word "freshman" with the gender-neutral "first year student." The editor-in-chief said that he was not a fan of that effort, since he believed you can't change what people think by changing the words they use. Now, he was obviously on the liberal side of the issue, since he implicitly admitted that he was in favor of changing the way people think, but that is another discussion. The important point here is that he was wrong. If people change the words they use based on what they think, why shouldn't an imposed change in vocabulary effect changes in thought? George Orwell wrote a book about a fictional attempt to do just that.

I had an interesting experience a few days ago, which brought home how significant a shift in the usage of a seemingly innocuous word can be--and how far outside the mainstream my traditional views are. I was with a group of several other first-year students and one second-year student, all male, and the second-year requested the straight dope on the appeal of the females in our class. (For those who don't know, the medical school population in the USA is now nearly 50% female, a topic which I intend to address in later entries.)

The consensus view emerging from my classmates--I kept silent, as I usually do in conversations like this--was that there are a few attractive women in our class, but they are few and far between, and furthermore, that almost all of them have boyfriends. So far, nothing surprising in the slightest. Then one man quipped that you could identify three desirable traits in women: cute, single, and nice, and you could choose two of the three. (I don't remember whether the third trait was actually "nice," but if not, it was unimportant.) And as the conversation progressed along those lines, I realized something. The word "single," in this context, has always simply meant not married. Fellow conservative Christians, no matter how culturally non-traditionalistic they may be, know what I'm talking about. If you are not legally married, you are single. It doesn't matter if you've been dating your boyfriend for two years and are about to go ring shopping tomorrow; the word "single" refers to nothing more than the absence of a marriage license.

Yet that was not what it meant to these young products of the 21st century world. To them, it meant without a boyfriend or girlfriend. A single girl is one who is not even dating; a girl who has a boyfriend is... what? I don't know what they would call it. Taken? Attached? Whatever it is, it seems to have become a semi-official state, drifting inchoate somewhere between being completely romantically uninvolved and being married.

As I've aged, this common concept we use the words "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" to describe has slowly bothered me more and more. This is because there is no "official" basis for it. I'm not saying it should be done away with: I have participated in it myself, and obviously some kind of steady dating relationship is necessary before a couple progresses to engagement. What I am saying is that if you are married, you have participated in a rite which your surrounding society believes in: you have taken vows before witnesses, and declared yourselves to be attached to each other in an official legal relationship which has real, formal implications (inheritance; official sanctions on consorting with others, though these have fallen by the wayside in our debauched society; the assumption of parenting roles, etc.) In a traditional society, marriage is something the society as a whole believes in, and everyone knows what is meant by it. But in our society, where expressive individualism reigns, what is important is not what society thinks of your relationship, but what you think of it. And society's views must change to fit your needs and desires. If you say that you have a "boyfriend," that you are "taken" or "attached," who am I to say otherwise?

It occurred to me that the students using the word "single" this way didn't think there was anything remarkable about their usage. When they are asked to fill out a form which requests their marital status, are they surprised that it seems to consider "single" the opposite of "married?" I wonder, are we reaching the point where we need a compound term to describe someone's marital state; for example "unmarried and single" vs. "unmarried but taken?"

But the most troubling thing about this development in the usage of "single" is that not only does it replace the society-defined relationship with the couple-defined one, it elevates "dating" to the level of marriage. For all intents and purposes in our society, except among conservative Christians (and, I imagine, orthodox Jews), the belief that there is anything wrong or even remarkable about cohabitation before marriage is at present dead. The usual way of looking at this situation is to say that since people have abandoned traditional moral strictures, there is no reason not to live together before marriage: it's convenient, it's fun, and it gives people a chance to "test drive" marriage. But an oblique, and in my opinion more ominous, view is that, given the emphasis on individual expression and self-realization in the modern world, people have replaced the traditional, society-defined institution of marriage and its accompanying externally imposed strictures, with the self- (or couple-) defined institution of... well it doesn't have a name yet. But in a way, that's the point. Perhaps it if had a name, it would be too formal, too official, too externally imposed.

Now, when people recognize as legitimate these informal, self-defined relationships, as my fellow students and their peers certainly do, that takes away a certain amount of the impetus to get married. Part of the reason people used to get married was to have their relationships not merely legally recognized but socially taken seriously. Now that the opposite of "single" is not "married" but "dating," dating is taken as seriously as marriage. And when a person uses the word "single" in that sense, he reinforces that view--and when there is a trend of people doing this collectively, across the country, it is yet another of the many forces chipping away at the foundation of marriage in our society.

So there you have it. Words matter. They influence the way people think. What can one man do about it? Perhaps not much, but at least he can resist. If one of my classmates asks me if I am single, I will say yes, I am unmarried. And if, by the grace of God, I manage to convince a woman to start dating me, if one of them refers to me as no longer single, I will correct him.

Welcome!

2007-08-08T17:36:00.000-04:00

This post marks my first foray into blogging. I am a conservative, a Christian, and a "non-traditional" (i.e., older than average) medical student who approaches life from a traditionalist perspective. Recently, I have had so many opinions on such a varying range of topics popping into my head that I decided I should write them down in a place where those who agree can hopefully be edified, and those who disagree can hopefully challenge me to refine them. My experiences in medical school so far have been especially rife with fodder for opinion pieces and essays, seeing as how most of today's medical students, to put it mildly, do not feel much kinship for conservative or Christian views. I hope to offer commentary on politics, culture, religion, and the world of medical education on my precious few study breaks.

I hope you enjoy the blog, and please don't be turned off by its simplistic appearance so far--I'm completely new to this, and expect to refine both the look and the content extensively as I gain experience.