Barrel Strength

Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Barrel Strength - Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Category Archives: Culture

Weaker men support wealth distribution, stronger men do not

Social science is always telling you what you suspected but were afraid of thinking. From the Telegraph:

Researchers found that men’s opinions on redistribution of wealth could be predicted by their upper body strength, with powerful men more likely to take a conservative stance of protecting their own interests.

In contrast men who were just as wealthy but were of a flimsier build were less opposed to policies like those of Labour leader Ed Miliband, which would involve surrendering some of their wealth to society.

The scientists, from Aarhus University in Denmark, analysed the wealth, bicep size and views on economic redistribution of hundreds of men in America, Denmark and Argentina.

They found that wealthy men with strong arms were less likely to support economic redistribution, or the fairer sharing of wealth among society, and unsurprisingly strong men with less money supported the policy.

But among physically weaker men, the pattern was reversed. Those with plenty of money were less opposed to redistributing it, while those who were poorer were less supportive.

contemporary witches

I was going over the news today:

Detroit insolvent

Mayhem at Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans

Jason Richwine canned from Heritage Foundation for accurate descriptions of Mexican-American intelligence levels in a PhD thesis of years back

Obama regime considers forbidding Christians to proselytize within US Army,  and so forth;

as Western society drops its ideological and religious antibodies, declaring them to be racist, sexist, homophobic etc., and I wonder, what will fill the vacuum? Islam?

Here we are, making our societies deliberately less intelligent, and forbidding discussion of it; making our societies so tolerant we lose any sight of permanent moral realities; absorbing underclass behaviour and saying white people cause it through bad thoughts, rather than black people causing it through total lack of thoughts; dropping standards because they derive from European civilization, or because they are Christian, or because their existence implies that moral standards exist at all, or that they exclude people who would rather be ruthlessly intolerant, exclusivist, and hate-filled from full and equal participation in liberal society’s rich banquet.

Why are we doing this?

More relevant, perhaps, is the approach of the commentariat on those who would draw attention to the permanence and reality of racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and cultural divisions. The latter are the new witches. They cast spells of racism, sexism and homophobia, and much else besides. They must cause the underperformance or bad behaviour  of the groups they describe. Clearly, since all different outcomes are the result, not of any kind of innate or persistence differences among groups, but of social causes, then the people who draw attention to these moral standards, innate or persistent differences, and who refuse to believe in unqualified human equality must be causing the problem. Witches!Burn them!

The modern cultural marxist commentariat is reduced to believing in white witches, rather than change their thinking. Why should they, when the science is settled, there is only one politically correct view of anything, and they control the courts, the universities, and all the pulpits that matter.

 

 

Template for a terrorist attack

Or, how you can impress your liberal friends by correctly forecasting unfolding events in the next terrorist attack.

Now that people like Gov. Andrew Cuomo, are starting to refer to the random acts of violence as “the new normal“, it is important that we understand how they unfold. We have had enough terrorist attacks in the Western world to model and extrapolate this. Following is the first attempt.

1. Terrorist attack occurs.

2. A leftist politician will attempt to compensate for his limited intelligence by talking about “root cause” of terrorism, e.g. Justin Trudeau – Justin Trudeau and the problem with ‘root causes’

3. A leftist politician will blame the right-wing for the attack, e.g. Barack Obama – Axelrod: Obama Thinks Boston Bombings Could Be Related to ‘Tax Day’, and Chris Matthews - Chris Matthews, Democratic congressman suggest Tax Day tie to Boston attacks

4. A leftist columnist will try to make it a race issue, e.g. Salon.com – Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American, or an example of right-wing hate.

5. Terrorist will most likely turn out to be Muslims.

6. Articles will appear lamenting about the inevitable oncoming brutal backlash against the Muslims although this has never occurred before. BBC - Boston bombings: Muslim Americans await bomber’s ID. As an aside, notice how some of the savvier news organisations, like BBC, thread the needle on the knotty topic of terrorist identification? They don’t want to wait to write about the brutal backlash after the terrorist have been identified in case they get relegated with the slow-moving and slow-thinking print press. They also do not want to jump the gun and identify them as Muslims because that would be, oh gosh, so judgemental, so they write about how the Muslims wait for the identity of the terrorist with trepidation and are “braced for a backlash”.

7. We will be lectured by the politicians who we heard from in #3 above how we should not rush to judgement about “motivations [of]…entire groups of people” even though they were doing precisely that earlier, albeit against their political enemies.

8. The media will print heart-rending tales of how the larger society has mistreated the terrorist and attempt to rationalize, justify and mitigate the responsibility on behalf of the terrorist, e.g. NYT – Far From War-Torn Homeland, Trying To Fit In, and how we should sympathize with them.

Riga

Riga is an old trading port on the Baltic, across the Baltic Sea from Sweden and too close to Moscow. It is the capital of Latvia,  which was crushed between Nazis and Commies for much of the disastrous 20th century. Since the Communists won World War 2 in the part of the world, Latvians and Balts generally had to endure the forced Russification of their countries and the dreariness, hopelessness and general decrepitude of socialism, a fate from which Margaret Thatcher helped Britain escape, for a time. Russians still compose about a quarter of the country’s population. The United Kingdom, by contrast, imposed socialism on itself, without any invasion. Says something about the Latvians, that socialism was something imposed from without and rejected with every fiber of their being.

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On the way in from the modern airport, one passes boarded-up 19th century buildings that have yet to see the hand of restoration, but in the downtown, the architecture is largely scrubbed and restored, and beautiful.

Riga was  originally a German city, as were so many of Eastern Europe’s trading centres. The cathedral is Lutheran, and is now reopened for services and for concerts. The Latvians are Protestants, in the main, and given their choice, they would prefer to associate with higher rather than lower cultures. Ethnic Russians are here to stay, but, judging by the superficial evidence of drunk Norwegians laughing through the streets at night, even in the chill of April, Latvia is again re-oriented towards its Baltic and Scandinavian neighbours.

I had a couple of drinks tonight with a young couple and their adorable 14-month old child at a posh bar. Father flies airplanes as a commercial pilot, stationed in Riga. He was Flemish, his wife Spanish, and their friend who joined us was Italian. Their common language was English. For an English-speaker especially, the notion that English is the language in which an Italian converses with his Flemish friend is startling.

More tourism tomorrow. I do not know whether to avoid or join the wandering over-refreshed Norwegians. If I do join them I will probably have little I can recall to report. But just as in Prague, civilization is resurgent here.

 

 

 

 

No, this isn’t the face of homophobia, it is the face of stupidity

Al-Jazzera reports the following with an accompanying picture.

A man in Paris, France was reportedly beaten for walking with arm in arm with his boyfriend Olivier early Sunday morning. Wilfred de Bruijn, a French resident, says he was assaulted while walking in Paris’ 19th arrondissement. He says he sustained several injuries, including a missing tooth, broken bones, and fractured pieces of bone in his skull. He posted a photo of his wounds on his Facebook page with the caption “Sorry to show you this. It’s the face of homophobia”.

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No you fool. That is the face of stupidity. What exactly did you expect when you walked through a Muslim area arm in arm with your boyfriend? Did you really think Quakers and Muslims were  one and the same as you learned in some university class from your favourite professor? Please go join Islam so that the average IQ of both religions can go up.

Mass killer rationalizes violence by converting to Islam

The Dark Knight killer has reconciled facts in a way that some liberals still aren’t able to do, as exemplified by his conversion to Islam.

The source said Holmes has turned to Islam as a way of justifying his horrific murder spree in an Aurora, Colorado cinema on July 20 which left 12 people dead and 58 people wounded.

‘He has brainwashed himself into believing he was on his own personal jihad and that his victims were infidels,’ a prison source told the National Enquirer.

Original Sin

If perceiving differences and acting against the different is the primary sin of man, then babies are all profound sinners.

In an article entitled ”Babies show inherent dislike for those who are different”, it was revealed that babies as young as nine months show preference for those who bring harm to people different from themselves – in this case, the difference concerned a taste for graham crackers over green beans, and vice versa.

Psychology professor and lead author Kiley Hamlin found infants who were as  young as nine months old favoured those who brought harm to people who were  different than themselves.

She said adults, similarly, tend to like people who harm individuals who are  different.

“We wanted to see if we could tell whether infants had that same kind of  judgement,” said Hamlin in an interview.

“It was shocking how robust the results were.”

Nothing surprises me about this. Tolerance is a virtue not because it is natural, but because it is an acquired habit of civilization. By contrast, those people who call themselevs “liberals” tend to believe that the natural state of man is acceptance, and only perverse educations make us racist, sexist, nationalist, tribalist, other-ist.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, looked at two  groups of infants aged nine months and 14 months and the food they preferred — green beans or graham crackers.

The infants watched a puppet show, with two puppets demonstrating a like for  green beans or graham crackers.

More puppets then joined the production, demonstrating nice, neutral or mean  behaviour towards the original two puppets.

The study showed that the babies later preferred the puppets who harmed the  puppet with the opposite food preferences.

One baby even gave a kiss to the harmful puppet.

The study said the desire to treat badly those with differences was more  widespread in the age group of 14-month-old infants, suggesting an increase in  bias with age.

Hamlin said almost all of the babies tested acted the same, which was an  unexpected result.

“(Babies) like nice puppets really strongly. That’s in line with our  intuition. Other studies have shown they like punishers if somebody was bad  before, but that’s also in line with our intuitions.

“If someone’s bad they might deserve punishment. This one is not in line with  our intuitions.”

Lady, it is not in line with your “intuitions” because you think people are naturally good, tolerant, accepting. They are not. They are naturally racist, tribalist, differentist, nationalist. They think people from the next valley are feckless swine, unless they have cousins over there, in which case they may know that some people in the next valley are okay, or not, on the basis of real knoweldge.

Man’s innate “differentism” is not something that is going to be fixed by talking about the problem differently, or by different social arrangements, though improvements are possible. Discriminations are at the core of existence. Every cell of my body is locked in a life and death struggle to determine what belongs in that cell and what does not. They all discriminate. I can only hope they discriminate in a way suitable to my survival. Likewise, every person discriminates, and has to for the organism to survive. One can only hope that discrimination takes place on bases suitable for the survival of civilization. That is the best we can do.

 

Research shows difference in liberal and conservative brains

Will this be deployed soon at a government office near you?

In a prior experiment, participants had their brain activity measured as they played a simple gambling game. Dr. Schreiber and his UC San Diego collaborators were able to look up the political party registration of the participants in public records. Using this new analysis of 82 people who performed the gambling task, the academics showed that Republicans and Democrats do not differ in the risks they take. However, there were striking differences in the participants’ brain activity during the risk-taking task.

Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, a region associated with social and self-awareness. Meanwhile Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala, a region involved in the body’s fight-or-flight system. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk.

In fact, brain activity in these two regions alone can be used to predict whether a person is a Democrat or Republican with 82.9% accuracy. By comparison, the longstanding traditional model in political science, which uses the party affiliation of a person’s mother and father to predict the child’s affiliation, is only accurate about 69.5% of the time. And another model based on the differences in brain structure distinguishes liberals from conservatives with only 71.6% accuracy.

IQ test for juries? Yes!

In US this question was settled long ago after the OJ verdict, where it was noted that most of the jurors were unable to understand the scientific evidence that was presented. Now it seems that the same conclusion is being reached in UK.

For example, they asked for a definition of reaching a verdict ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.

This was despite the fact that the judge had already given them guidance on this in writing.

Mr Justice Sweeney effectively threw up his hands in despair, saying that these were ‘ordinary English words’ that he could not define any further.

Bafflingly, they asked whether a wife’s religious conviction would make her feel that she had no option but to obey her husband. But since Vicky Pryce’s religious beliefs had not even been mentioned, this was clearly totally irrelevant to the case.

Equally perplexingly, they asked whether the defendant had an obligation to present a defence. In reply, the judge reminded them he had told them that the defendant did not have to prove anything at all.

Most extraordinary of all, they asked whether they could reach a verdict based on a reason that was not presented in court and had no facts or evidence to support it.