Washington Post: We Had to Destroy the Democracy to Save It.

The Post reports on how in Europe, the secret police are putting under surveillance political parties that are growing by advocating policies popular with voters.

This is to "save democracy."

unz.com/isteve/we-had-…
One of the many threats to democracy in Europe, according the Washington Post news section, is that political parties are increasingly debating immigration policy instead of having a gentleman's agreement not to discuss it.

washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/…

A standard response to complaints about immigrant crime is that the migrant murder rate is is lower than the native born rate. (Of course, the trick here is that few Americans know that blacks accounted in 2021 for 60.4% of known murder offenders & 55.0% of homicide victims.) But imagine that the 15,000 U. of Chicago students commit 3 murders / year. When Chicagoans complain that the U. of C. is bringing in 3 murderers annually, the college president scoffs analogously that his admittees' murder rate is 20% lower than Chicago's, so why the kvetching?

A new preprint attemps to debunk all the noticing since the 1990s that sub-Saharans tend to have more really fast runners than other races:

"Revisiting Stereotypes: Race and Running"

@tadesouaiaia, @thebirdmaniac

Tade Souaiaia, Nabie Fofanah, Rawle DeLisle, Sheena Mason

arxiv.org/abs/2403.02358 The all-time fastest marathoners as of today include: 1 Japanese, 1 black Brazilian, 2 North Africans, and the rest East Africans (46 Ethiopians and 44 Kenyans).



Here are top 30 fastest marathoners of all time at the moment: unz.com/isteve/has-the…

From my new Taki's column:

These different types of mass shooting suggest the need for different types of gun control: point of sale vs. point of use. Only a tiny fraction of mass shootings are carried out with long guns that the shooter bought legally.
takimag.com/article/the-ka… Instead, blacks, who are the perpetrators and victims of nearly 75% of mass shootings with 4 or more dead or wounded, typically get their handguns through friends and acquaintances on the black market.

takimag.com/article/the-ka…

@whstancil The weight of slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining suddenly got vastly worse on African Americans the week that George Floyd died, causing despairing blacks to experience a historic increase in weekly deaths by car crash and homicide as the cops depoliced:

takimag.com/article/unnece…
@whstancil Or, @whstancil, are you arguing that am I saying that African-Americans experienced genetic mutations on May 25, 2020 that within days made them on average dramatically shootier and worse drivers?

My recollection instead is that The Establishment encouraged a "racial reckoning."

@whstancil You aren't supposed to talk about it in polite society so progressive reformers only make the problem worse, but young black men have a colossal problem with shooting each other, even compared to comparably poor young Hispanic men. @whstancil Strikingly, both poverty and race influence crime rates. according to Harvard economist Raj Chetty's landmark study of 21 million Americans, both family income while he was growing up and race have a lot to do with the odds a man is in prison at age 30:

takimag.com/article/americ…

@whstancil America has a major problem with young black men shooting each other. CDC data shows black men age 15-34 die by gun homicide 6 times as often per capita as comparably poor young Hispanic men, 24x their white counterparts, and 60x Asians.

Nature? Nurture? Both?

This needs study @whstancil We know that at least some of the extremely high black homicide rate in the 2020s can't all be due to genes, because the black homicide death rate has been higher since the "racial reckoning" was declared after George Floyd's death. Genes don't change in a week.

@VP His childhood Ramadan feasts are one of my husband Doug's favorite memories. Grandma Emhoff would simmer the pork roast in wine sauce and they'd gather around across multiple generations and gorge all afternoon. Happy Ramadan to all fasters from the Veep!

https://twitter.com/DouglasEmhoff/status/1118953064818298880

@VP "Our St. Patrick's Day pub crawls are one of my favorite childhood memories. We'd gather multiple generations & hammer back Guinnesses until Grandpa Gopalan would take a shillelagh to me da's skull. Whether you’re brawling together or drinking alone, happy St. Patty's Day"--Veep.

In my new column: Justin Trudeau's government is currently subjecting Canada to a bizarre experiment in pedal-to-the-medal mass immigration, with the logically inevitable consequence of high housing costs making family formation unaffordable for Canadians
takimag.com/article/americ…
Some more relevant graphs regarding Justin Trudeau's immigration policy:

Why do Louisiana, Mississippi, and Washington DC have high homicide rates, but UT and VT don't? Guns? Racism? Democrats?

In the CDC's counts of homicide deaths over the last half decade, states' homicide rates correlate closely (r = 0.82) with their black share of the population Do state homicide rates correlate much with political ideology as measured by their vote in 2020?

Nope. Very little. There is a tiny trend toward a higher homicide rate the more Biden-voting a place is, but that's driven by the Washington DC outlier.

Let's make the strongest case for quotas using the Korean height example. Say that North and South Korea decide to sent a joint basketball team to the Olympics. But 95% of the best basketball players on the peninsula are Southerners because they average so much taller.

https://twitter.com/Shiftant/status/1704196266303893654

But the leadership decides to put more North Koreans on the team in order to generate interest in basketball among NK kids in the hopes that they or their children will grow up to be as tall as South Koreans due to less bad nutrition in North Korea than in the 1990s.

Two "Atlantic" writers try to cancel Richard Hanania's upcoming "The Origins of Woke" because he knows more social science than they do

E.g., their reviewer is unaware that the white-black IQ gap might be the best documented finding in US social science: unz.com/isteve/the-atl…
For example, here's Roth et al's 2001 meta-analysis in "Personnel Psychology" of over 6 million test scores:

psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-01…

The Asian-black test score gap is so huge that all colleges can think to do is to make test scores optional or, as at UC schools, banned. On the Common App, the 36% of blacks who submit SAT/ACT scores average 1108, while the 61% of Asians average 1382:

unz.com/isteve/test-sc…
The number of Indian-Americans who applied to college using the Common App more than doubled over the last decade. Among the 72% who submitted scores, Indians averaged 1415. In contrast, only 35% of Descendants of American Slave applicants submitted scores and they averaged 1084.

Q. How many more died during the BLM Depolicing Years of 2020-2022 due to increased homicides and traffic fatalities than if death rates had stayed the same as in 2018-19?

A. Approaching 35,000, with half of the incremental deaths black:


Here's homicide: unz.com/isteve/approac…
And here's my calculation of extra motor vehicle accident deaths in the George Floyd Years of 2020-2022 vs. a baseline of the average death rate in 2018-2019.

unz.com/isteve/approac…

Where is African-American culture most homicidally-inclined?

According to CDC WONDER cause-of-death data, black males age 15-24 died by gun homicide more than five times more often per capita in 2020-2022 in Missouri and DC than in Massachusetts.

Why?

https://t.co/0DB61YVZW1unz.com/isteve/is-ther…
Overall nationally, black male 15-24 year olds died 28 times as often per capita from firearm homicides in 2020-2022 as did their white equivalents. Here's the white rates for young men, with New Mexico worse off.

The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was a classic high IQ and not nice autogynephilic fetishist. From the WP in 1998:

"In the psychiatric evaluation, Johnson reveals that Kaczynski had persistent and intense sexual fantasies about being a woman."

unz.com/isteve/the-una… One argument in favor of letting adult autogynephilic fetishists have themselves castrated is that while Theodore Kaczynski blew up all those people, a testicleless Theodora Kaczynski probably wouldn't have.

Here's the umpteenth article I've read about how a Racist Road destroyed a thriving black neighborhood in 1956-1966. But where now are the thriving black neighborhoods that were spared? Every city has its own excuse for the collapse of its black districts.
nytimes.com/2023/06/03/nyr… Rather than attributing each and every black business district's demise to some specific 1960s local urban renewal project, isn't it more likely the national cause was that lower blacks became more numerous and criminal in Northern cities and middle class blacks could move out?

I'm often asked why I try to stay up to date on the science of racial differences in average cognitive test scores. It's because IQ differences are the Occam's Razor that explain countless headlines in the New York Times that confuse and anger uninformed NYT readers. For example:

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1664673293675134980

Nationally representative Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study of 10,600 10-year-olds found in 2016-18 that Asians & part-Asians averaged 19.9 points higher than blacks, a 1.33 standard deviation gap: median Asian is at 91st percentile among blacks
takimag.com/article/mind-t…

Today, May 25th, is the third anniversary of George Floyd's death.

How's that whole "racial reckoning" thing working out anyway?

It's starting to look like the harder heads of the Democrat-media industrial complex have decided it's best to memoryhole their 2020 mania. The CDC tracks the cause of each death. Here's the weekly number of blacks dying by homicide (red) and motor vehicle accident (blue) by week from 2018 to late 2022. After George Floyd's death, black homicides jumped from a trend line of ~200 to ~300/wk and car crash deaths up ~45

Riffing on Cecil Deaton's 2015 discovery of rising white white working class Deaths of Despair (suicide, opioid overdose, cirrhosis), I coined the term Deaths of Exuberance for rising black homicide and car crash deaths during the "racial reckoning" since George Floyd. For a spectacular example of Deaths of Exuberance, observe the drunk and high Usual Suspect who killed 3 on D.C.'s Rock Creek Parkway in March by driving her Lexus into them at 100 mph while fleeing the police because her boyfriend had an illegal gun:

unz.com/isteve/usual-s…

The U. of California banned SAT/ACT admissions tests in 2021. The data is now available for 2022 acceptances and it looks like dumping the SAT was a disaster for UC San Diego's freshman class quality.

takimag.com/article/low-gr… In 2020, 2,878 students from majority Asian and white L.A. County public schools were accepted by UC San Diego. This dropped to 2,199 in 2022 (down 24%).

In contrast, 1,601 applicants from majority black and Hispanic schools were accepted in 2020, but 5,130 in 2022 (up 215%).