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Group polarization

And the fad of ethnomasochism

26.09.2012. How can it be that so many whites hate themselves and their own culture? How can it be that so many whites would like to see their own civilization replaced by something else? Hugh MacDonald thinks that the well-known phenomenon of group polarization can provide part of the explanation. See his sober and thought-provoking YouTube video: Group Polarization and the Fad of Ethnomasochism.

Václav Klaus

«The destruction of Europe's democracy is in its final phase»

25.09.2012. The new push for a European Union federation, complete with its own head of state and army, is the "final phase" of the destruction of democracy and the nation state, the president of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, has warned. Here are some further excerpts from the article The Destruction of Europe's Democracy Is In Its Final Phase:

"We need to think about how to restore our statehood and our sovereignty. That is impossible in a federation. The EU should move in an opposite direction," he said.

Last week, Germany, France and nine other of Europe's largest countries called for an end to national vetoes over defence policy as Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, urged the creation of a directly elected EU president "who personally appoints the members of his European government".

Mr Westerwelle, in a reference to British opposition, called for nation states to be stripped of vetoes on defence to "prevent one single member state from being able to obstruct initiatives" which "could eventually involve a European army".

The new offensive followed the unprecedented declaration by the Commission's president, José Manuel Barroso, during his "state of union" address to the European Parliament on 12 September, that he would make proposals for a fully-fledged EU "federation" in 2014. "Let's not be afraid of the word," he said.

Speaking in Hradcany Castle, a complex of majestic buildings that soars above Prague, and is a symbol of Czech national identity, Mr Klaus described Mr Barroso's call for a federation, quickly followed by the German-led intervention, as an important turning point.

"This is the first time he has acknowledged the real ambitions of today's protagonists of a further deepening of European integration. Until today, people, like Mr Barroso, held these ambitions in secret from the European public," he said. "I'm afraid that Barroso has the feeling that the time is right to announce such an absolutely wrong development.

"They think they are finalising the concept of Europe, but in my understanding they are destroying it."

[...]

In his book, Europe: The Shattering of Illusions, to be published by Bloomsbury on Thursday, Mr Klaus makes the case that the EU has evolved into its current form because political leaders have found it convenient to turn away from their nation states, where voters have historically been able to hold them to account.

"Political elites have always known that the shift in decision-making from the national to the supranational level weakens the traditional democratic mechanisms (that are inseparable from the existence of the nation state), and this increases their power in a radical way. That is why they wanted this shift so badly in the past, and that is why they want it today," he writes.

"The authors of the concept of European integration managed to short circuit the minds of the people, making a link between Hitler's aggressive nationalism (nationalism of a totally negative type) and the traditional nation state, calling into question the existence of nation states in general. Of the many fatal mistakes and lies that have always underpinned the evolution of the EU, this is one of the worst."

Read the entire article in Business Insider.

Crisis

What the West is headed for

24.09.2012. Norwegian social commentator Hanne Nabintu Herland has written an article about the devlopments in her own country as well as most other Western countries: The West in crisis.

Ethnic mixing

Will humans eventually all look like Brazilians?

22.09.2012. According to Stephen Stearns, a Yale professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, globalization, immigration, cultural diffusion and the ease of modern travel will gradually homogenize the human population, averaging out more and more people's traits. Because recessive traits depend on two copies of the same gene pairing up in order to get expressed, these traits will express themselves more rarely, and dominant traits will become the norm. In short, blue skin is out. Brown skin is in. This is according to an article in Live Science. Here are some further excerpts (emphasis added):

Other recessive traits will drop to low levels too, according to University of Delaware evolutionary biologist John McDonald. "Because most immigrants to the U.S. are from Asia, Africa or Latin America, any trait that is more common in northern Europeans than in the rest of the world will get less common over the near future in the U.S. due to immigration," McDonald wrote in an email. "Examples would include red and blond hair, blue eyes, and freckles. Traits that are recessive and are more common in some groups than others will decrease due to blending; blue eyes, sickle cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis are examples of this."

Meanwhile, many other physical traits will simply blend together. "Most of the traits that we think of as distinguishing different groups (hair color, skin color, hair curliness, facial features, eye shape) are controlled by multiple genes, so they don't follow a simple dominant/recessive pattern," McDonald explained. "In those cases, blending will make people look more similar over time."

It's not straightforward to predict how blending of genes affects physical appearances, but McDonald said the tendency is for such traits to average out. The average American skin and hair color will probably darken slightly, and there will be fewer people with very dark or very pale skin and hair.

The genetic mixing under way in the United States is also happening to a greater or lesser degree in other parts of the world, the researchers said. In some places, unique physical traits tailored to the habitat still confer an evolutionary advantage and thus might not bow out so easily; in other places, immigration happens much more slowly than it does elsewhere. According to Stearns, perfect homogenization of the human race will probably never occur, but in general, Earth is becoming more and more of a melting pot.

A population forged from the long-term mixing of Africans, Native Americans and Europeans serves as an archetype for the future of humanity, Stearns said: A few centuries from now, we're all going to look like Brazilians.

Read the entire article: Will humans eventually all look like Brazilians?.

American demography

Population change threatens the dream

22.09.2012. The US is at a crossroads. Its future depends on the interwoven fates of two main groups: an ageing population of European extraction and a growing and mostly youthful population of Latin American ancestry. Unless they help each other out, warn leading demographers, the economic success that underpins the American dream may be under threat. Continue reading in New Scientist.

Human origins

Genetic study finds complexity in cradle of humanity

22.09.2012. The melting pot of early human history has just been given a good stir. The largest study of genetic variance across present-day populations in southern Africa suggests that there is no single place in Africa from which all modern humans emerged. Instead, our species is the result of mixing between numerous early human populations across a vast area. Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University, Sweden, and his colleagues analysed around 2.3 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – variations in DNA that are useful for comparing regions of the genome between populations – in 220 individuals from 11 southern African populations. "When we start digging into this data, the most striking result is the deep population structure that we find," says Jakobsson. This structure suggests that modern humans emerged from a geographically diverse group, in contrast to the "bottleneck" theory in which all humans alive today are descended from a single, relatively homogenous group of people. Continue reading in New Scientist.

Arab Winter

The guilty men behind it

20.09.2012. So now we can see the terrible results of western liberal hubris, the so-called Arab Spring so credulously and stupidly brought into being by Barack Obama, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy. In Libya, the American ambassador and three colleagues have been murdered. In Egypt, the embassy has been sacked. In Yemen, the mob inflamed by Muslim Brotherhood incitement has today stormed the US embassy there. Thus begins Melanie Phillips her scathing article about The guilty men behind the Arab Winter. Hat tip Document.no.

Islam

Theodore Dalrymple is convinced that Islam will break down

16.09.2012. [T]he anger of Muslims, their demand that their sensibilities should be accorded a more than normal respect, is a sign not of the strength but of the weakness — or rather, the brittleness — of Islam in the modern world, the desperation its adherents feel that it could so easily fall to pieces. The control that Islam has over its populations in an era of globalization reminds me of the hold that the Ceausescus appeared to have over the Rumanians: an absolute hold, until Ceausescu appeared one day on the balcony and was jeered by the crowd that had lost its fear. The game was over, as far as Ceausescu was concerned, even if there had been no preexisting conspiracy to oust him, writes Theodore Dalrymple towards the end of his City Journal article When Islam Breaks Down. He continues:

One sign of the increasing weakness of Islam’s hold over its nominal adherents in Britain—of which militancy is itself but another sign—is the throng of young Muslim men in prison. They will soon overtake the young men of Jamaican origin in their numbers and in the extent of their criminality. By contrast, young Sikhs and Hindus are almost completely absent from prison, so racism is not the explanation for such Muslim overrepresentation.

Confounding expectations, these prisoners display no interest in Islam whatsoever; they are entirely secularized. True, they still adhere to Muslim marriage customs, but only for the obvious personal advantage of having a domestic slave at home. Many of them also dot the city with their concubines—sluttish white working-class girls or exploitable young Muslims who have fled forced marriages and do not know that their young men are married. This is not religion, but having one’s cake and eating it.

The young Muslim men in prison do not pray; they do not demand halal meat. They do not read the Qu’ran. They do not ask to see the visiting imam. They wear no visible signs of piety: their main badge of allegiance is a gold front tooth, which proclaims them members of the city’s criminal subculture—a badge (of honor, they think) that they share with young Jamaicans, though their relations with the Jamaicans are otherwise fraught with hostility. The young Muslim men want wives at home to cook and clean for them, concubines elsewhere, and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. As for Muslim proselytism in the prison—and Muslim literature has been insinuated into nooks and crannies there far more thoroughly than any Christian literature—it is directed mainly at the Jamaican prisoners. It answers their need for an excuse to go straight, while not at the same time surrendering to the morality of a society they believe has wronged them deeply. Indeed, conversion to Islam is their revenge upon that society, for they sense that their newfound religion is fundamentally opposed to it. By conversion, therefore, they kill two birds with one stone.

But Islam has no improving or inhibiting effect upon the behavior of my city’s young Muslim men, who, in astonishing numbers, have taken to heroin, a habit almost unknown among their Sikh and Hindu contemporaries. The young Muslims not only take heroin but deal in it, and have adopted all the criminality attendant on the trade.

What I think these young Muslim prisoners demonstrate is that the rigidity of the traditional code by which their parents live, with its universalist pretensions and emphasis on outward conformity to them, is all or nothing; when it dissolves, it dissolves completely and leaves nothing in its place. The young Muslims then have little defense against the egotistical licentiousness they see about them and that they all too understandably take to be the summum bonum of Western life.

Observing this, of course, there are among Muslim youth a tiny minority who reject this absorption into the white lumpenproletariat and turn militant or fundamentalist. It is their perhaps natural, or at least understandable, reaction to the failure of our society, kowtowing to absurd and dishonest multiculturalist pieties, to induct them into the best of Western culture: into that spirit of free inquiry and personal freedom that has so transformed the life chances of every person in the world, whether he knows it or not.

Islam in the modern world is weak and brittle, not strong: that accounts for its so frequent shrillness. The Shah will, sooner or later, triumph over the Ayatollah in Iran, because human nature decrees it, though meanwhile millions of lives will have been ruined and impoverished. The Iranian refugees who have flooded into the West are fleeing Islam, not seeking to extend its dominion, as I know from speaking to many in my city. To be sure, fundamentalist Islam will be very dangerous for some time to come, and all of us, after all, live only in the short term; but ultimately the fate of the Church of England awaits it. Its melancholy, withdrawing roar may well (unlike that of the Church of England) be not just long but bloody, but withdraw it will. The fanatics and the bombers do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle.

Read the entire article in City Journal. Hat tip Document.no.

HonestThinking comments: While my own take on the situation is somewhat different from Dalrymple's, his article contains several interesting and thought-provoking observations. Dalrymple is — as usual — well worth reading.

E pur si muove

New blog by Satoshi Kanazawa

10.09.2012. E pur si muove is a phrase allegedly uttered before the Inquisition by the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei, the meaning of which is «and yet it moves». Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, London School of Economics and Political Science, has chosen Galilei's famous phrase as the name of his new blog. Writes he:

E pur si muove is about science. Science is the accumulation of pure knowledge for its own sake; it has no other goals or purposes. In science, only logic and evidence are the arbitrators of the truth; nothing else matters. No scientific conclusions can ever be good or bad, desirable or undesirable, sexist, racist, offensive, reactionary or dangerous; they can only be true or false. No other adjectives apply.

If the truth offends people, it is our job as scientists to offend them. In the memorable words of David Hilbert, Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen. If what I say as a scientist is wrong, because it is illogical or lacks credible scientific evidence, then it is my problem. If what I say offends you, then it is your problem. Get over it. Prepare to be offended. I am a scientific purist – the Scientific Fundamentalist – who doesn’t care about anything or anybody except for the pursuit of the truths. Welcome to E pur si muove.

His first blog post: The Return of the Ugly, Racist Pseudoscientist with a Small Penis.

France

Seeks to reclaim ‘no-go’ zones

06.09.2012. The French government has announced a plan to boost policing in 15 of the most crime-ridden parts of France in an effort to reassert state control over the country’s so-called “no-go” zones: Muslim-dominated neighborhoods that are largely off limits to non-Muslims, writes Soeren Kern of Gatestone Institute. He continues:

The crime-infested districts, which the French Interior Ministry has designated as Priority Security Zones (zones de sécurité prioritaires, or ZSP), include heavily Muslim parts of Paris, Marseilles, Strasbourg, Lille and Amiens, where Muslim youths recently went on a two-day arson rampage that caused extensive property damage and injured more than a dozen police officers.

The crackdown on lawlessness in the ZSP is set to begin in September, when French Interior Minister Manuel Valls plans to deploy riot police, detectives and intelligence agents into the selected areas. The hope is that a “North American-style” war on crime can prevent France’s impoverished suburbs from descending into turmoil. If the new policy results in a drop in crime, Valls is expected to name up to 40 more ZSP before the summer of 2013.

[...]

Many of these new ZSP coincide with Muslim neighborhoods that previous French governments have considered to be Sensitive Urban Zones. (Zones Urbaine Sensibles, or ZUS) — also “no-go” zones for French police.

At last count, there were a total of 751 Sensitive Urban Zones, a comprehensive list of which can be found on a French government website, complete with satellite maps and precise street demarcations. An estimated five million Muslims live in the ZUS — parts of France over which the French state has lost control.

Continue reading at Document.no.

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HonestThinking is dedicated and committed to the art of thinking honestly. Yet honest thinking is not the same as true thinking, for it is possible to think honestly, but be mistaken. For the same reason, honest thinking is not identical with objective thinking either. Honest thinking is striving to get things right. This involves being truthful about whatever one publishes, but just as importantly, it involves an uncompromising dedication never to suppress relevant data, even when data collides with dearly held prejudices. Such an approach may sometimes cause hurtful revisions in one’s belief system. That’s what HonestThinking is all about! Read the entire manifesto.

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Please send e-mail to postmaster at honestThinking.org (replacing ' at ' with '@') if you would like to tip us about a web resource that we should link to, or if you wish to submit an article for publication here. Quality contributions are welcome from anyone.

The current European immigration and integration policy is profoundly disrespectful of both Muslims and Islam, because it is built on the tacit assumption that the Muslims will become like us. One claims to have respect for Islam and for Muslims, but one also expects Muslims to give up their orthodox faith when they come here. At the same time one is assuming that Islam will be reformed and modernized as soon as the Muslims become integrated and understand and appreciate how superior our Western culture is compared to their own. This is cultural shauvinism and arrogance indeed! The unspoken premise for this scenario is that Western socities are superior to Islam. Read more.

Human rights and democracy are under pressure. One threat comes from the Western world, in the form of lack of or dishonest thinking. There exists a peculiar Western "tolerance" which is so "tolerant" that it even tolerates totalitarian or anti-democratic ideologies. A tacit assumption underlying such an attitude is that all cultures, world views, and religions are really equally good. As a consequence of this assumption one is cut off from the possibility of critically examining the above mentioned ideologies. Read more.