EUROLAND

Gordon at NZ Pundit has a great link about the mess that Euroland is in. Britain has done well to stay out. Maybe Imperial Preferences should be revived! (Just kidding). But it does give the British Tories an issue they might be able to beat Tony Blair on. Self-interest is a powerful persuader.

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RACIAL DIFFERENCES

I think I owe Jason Soon a small correction. He has written to assure me that he does not at all go along with all of the views of his fellow bloggers at Gene Expression. He is much more dubious about the importance of genetics in explaining human differences generally. At least none of the group can be accused of being white supremacists: Of the team, Jason is of course East Asian, one is a Tamil, two are Bengalis, one is a Persian and one is Jewish.


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POSTMODERN ART

If anybody is still in any doubt about what postmodernism is, they should have a look at this and this. Both articles are quite brief and tell us what postmodern art is by way of some choice examples. Normal people would simply be be disgusted by it all. AND THAT IS THE POINT. Postmodern art aims to get attention at all costs. I have argued elsewhere at some length (here and here) that Leftists are basically unoriginal people who are desperate for attention and postmoderns are clearly an extreme example of that. They are people driven to desperation by having nothing to say or contribute yet also having a great longing for attention -- and in that situation any attention will do, even if all they manage to do is to disgust people.

Once again, thanks to Arthur Silber for suggesting the links.

Cameron Pritchard sums up the desperation of the modern Left well too.

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LEFTIST ANTHROPOLOGY

Given my career in the social sciences, the prevailing Leftist bias in the social sciences is no news to me. Leftists everywhere have a huge talent for distorting eveything to suit themselves and you can certainly rely on most psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists to find only what suits Leftist beliefs. Since that is probably less well-known to others than it is to me, however, I thought this example was worth a mention. The example also shows that Leftist bias in the social sciences has been with us for a long time. Excerpt:

PHILADELPHIA -- Nearly a century ago, Franz Boas, the man known as the founder of modern anthropology, launched a study of cranial measurements of 13,000 people and concluded that skull shapes are determined more by environment than by race. It was a powerfully influential finding, because at the time, skull size and shape were thought to be connected to intelligence.

Now, though, a new analysis suggests the distinguished anthropologist got it wrong: Race or, more properly, ethnicity is a bigger determinant than environment.

Whether Boas deliberately distorted his findings is not clear. But researchers think he may have had preconceived ideas about what the data should show. "It's pretty clear that Boas was in the forefront of racial equality and sex equality, and it's pretty clear that he was in the forefront of rejecting the ideas of racial typology and scientific racism that existed in the early century," University of Tennessee anthropology professor Richard Jantz said. "It wouldn't be hard to imagine that he had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to get out of this study, but I wouldn't want to say we know that's true."

Jantz also said that Boas was "seriously hamstrung because he couldn't analyze all that data with the resources available to him at the time." In Boas' day, the general view was that Europeans were the dominant race, an argument often based on brain size. For decades, scholars opposed to such notions have cited Boas' study of immigrants and their offspring.


Note that the guys Boas was trying to stymie were right after all. Bigger heads do tend to go with greater intelligence. See here.

Thanks to NZ Pundit for energizing me on this topic.


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