HBD Day

Blode ambitiously suggests designating a specific day to draw attention to the realities of human biodiversity:I propose that race realists launch an international Human Biodiversity Day. The idea would be to discuss HBD issues in new and different venues, preferably running the gamut from African IQ deficits and criminality to the ability that Asians can healthily carry more body fat than other groups (as mentioned in Mr. Sailer's "Is Love Colorblind?"...

I never win. I just know I will this time, though. I'm due!

Tonight, a multi-state lottery game with a jackpot payout of $640 million took in $1.5 billion, most of it flowing into state coffers (retail cuts are generally 5% on the sale and nothing on the payout, except the big winner). I'm being genuine when I say I'm surprised by how much I've heard people talking about it in public over the last week, rationalizing their ticket purchases with obnoxious cliches like "can't win if you don't play". But their...

Churchist

Following a link from a reader named Chris, I saw this:I think this is starting to change in the younger generation. I don't think I have a single friend who actually believes in God but almost all of them are conservatives.The secular right has a lot of growing to do a lot of growing to dobefore it becomes a force in society. I wondered, though, how the association between...

Justice for Trayvon? Looks like it's already been served

Because life is about trade-offs, I generally don't read the comments to news articles. OneSTDV has been changing my mind on the value of doing so, and after my brother pointed out the unanimous hostility among the commentariat to a recent story on Yahoo about reverends and churchgoers wearing hoodies in "solidarity" with Trayvon Martin, I need to rethink that. As the Derb...

Roissy, Randall, and Charles

Reacting to Roissy's chastising of Charles Murray, Randall Parker makes an assertion I've seen repeated in various forms and in various places:Females basically playing out of their league have brought upon us the decline of marriage for the lower class and many social pathologies that have come as a result.I wonder where the actual evidence for this is. Women who end up as single mothers tend to congregate at the bottom of society, as do the men...

30% of atheists, agnostics are pro-life

The following comment comes from Skadhi the Raverner (Scandanavia's answer to John the Revelator?) on a thread to one of Steve Sailer's posts:In my experience more young people don't 'get' what's wrong with homosexual marriage or marijuana, but are more likely to be pro-life atheists and to oppose multiculturalism.Reading this, I instinctively googled "percentage of atheists pro-life" and was somewhat surprised to find scant quantitative treatment...

' is not a valid character

Steve Sailer writes:This would make a pretty good sketch comedy running joke -- L'qisjha Jones, Affirmative Action Arbiter -- as various people try to bluff their way past L'qisjha, each rejected with the same punchline. That doesn't actually appear to be a given black name (at least not yet), but it reminds me of a funny thing that happened a couple of years ago. At the company I work for, we were using a new in-house program that had been working...

Nostalgia

... if you're a guy between the ages of 25 and 35, anyway:If you weren't a Double Dragon junkie like I was (and I still have the occasional binge), but at least had some casual contact, this should do the tri...

Tea party support by candidate

Not satisfied (nor fully convinced) by looking at a few select exit polls, I calculated the total number of self-described tea partiers, defined as those who either "support" or "strongly support" the movement, who have voted for the four Republican Presidential candidates up through the Alabama and Mississippi primaries that took place earlier this week, for all the states where entrance or exit polling was conducted (excluding Virginia, where Romney...

Derb's the word

When I found out last week that John Derbyshire was undergoing chemotherapy for lymphoma, I wanted to write something to express how fervently I wanted to will the cancer into remission, but the only thing I could think of articulating were well wishes for a speedy recovery. Randall Parker improves mightily on that, with a sober spirit the Derb surely appreciates:I would wish the Derb well. But he and I both know wishes won't work against cancer....

Changes in youths' patriotism by country over time

In addition to gauging how the shift in perceptions among American youth over the last few decades, Steve Sailer's post concerning an increase in nationalism among young Israelis prodded me to look at the WVS to see how the attitudes of young people in other countries have changed over time.In both the second (1990-1991) and fifth (2005-2008) waves, participants were asked if they'd be willing to fight for their countries if war were to come to them....

Why it's okay to screech at the Manosphere

Writes OneSTDV:The $PLC did recently profile the so-called "Manosphere" as a community rife with "guttural hatred" ...The race realist blogosphere, loosely defined as the sites on my blogroll, does not have a similar profile on $PLC. $PLC only has one article about Steve Sailer on their site, so one presumes the rest of the HBD-osphere has not caught their attention yet (or maybe this week we'll be in for a surprise!). One wonders though why exactly...

Increasing confidence in military's ability to meet, kill exotic people?

++Addition++Steve Sailer comments.---Steve Sailer comments on an article in YNet News about how "Israeli youth" (defined as those under the age of 30) are shifting politically to the right, specifically in their desire to join IDF combat units:Although much of this is driven by the huge, subsidized fertility of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel, I suspect it reflects global trends, which in other countries tend to be masked by growing demographic diversity.The...

That good fight isn't ours

When I'm in discussions that find their way to the issues surrounding Israel and her relationships with her neighbors generally, and the Palestinians in particular, I find I often bemuse those I'm talking to because they're unsure of whether I'm "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestinian". In imitation of Half Sigma (and correspondingly in a nod to my pseudonym), my position is as follows.Israel's survival instincts are admirable. As an American, I can only...

Those days I remember seem so far away

Agnostic inadvertently tells a cautionary tale about self-reported survey response data in an interesting post about experiences with deja vu. The GSS question, posed three times in the eighties, asks each respondent how often in the course of his entire life he thought he was somewhere he'd been before, even though he knew it was impossible for that to have been the case....

One in three, you see

A post by Andrew Stuttaford at Secular Right about the seemingly bizarre idea of agape restaurants (about two-thirds of the way down at that link) put forth by Alain de Botton made me wonder what percentage of self-described atheists and agnostics attend religious services at least once a year. The relevant excerpt, which is actually an excerpt within an excerpt, follows:De Botton, in his attractive comments about Yom Kippur, regrets the fact that...

Va jay jay

Upon seeing pictures (requires being logged into a facebook account) of a recent protest in Virginia against the big government conservative-style ultrasound bill passed by the state legislature and soon to be signed into law by the governor, I have a reaction and proposed solution.Reaction: God those women are ugly.Solution: Male sobriety. It's all the birth control those...

Men have more friends than women do

A commenter is hesitant to accept Agnostic's assertion that men tend to have more friends but shallower friendships than women do (for simplicity's sake--Agnostic actually takes issue with this characterization in the relevant post, but the male quantitative advantage stands either way):My own anecdotal experience is that women tend to have far more friends than men do, and that that many of these are close friendships. Agnostic does not offer any...

Right to privacy, Facebook variety

A Pew survey on the online social networking habits of adults reveals unsurprising gender differences in personal privacy settings. By a ratio of nearly 5 to 1 (67% to 14%), women make their profiles private and thus only accessible to their friends rather than making them publicly available for viewing by whoever looks them up. While men also tend towards restricting profile access, the ratio, at less than 2 to 1 (48% to 26%), is far less lopsided....