Links - 2nd January 2023 (1 - History Extra Quoting)

Fascism: everything you wanted to know | History Extra - "‘Italy didn't sleepwalk into the First World War, it entered deliberately. While it was still allegedly a liberal state of its own peculiar kind, and it then had a very difficult war. It spent more on waging the war than all the Italian governments had spent since 1860, up to 1913. It had heavy casualties. So it had far more casualties in the First World War than it actually would do, in the more notorious Second World War when Italy was fighting on the German side. And so it emerged from the war in a battered state, with lots of social division. Like other European societies, the liberal elite were trying to work out what on earth to do with socialists, who had not supported Italy's war, and tried to in a rather feeble way to remain neutral during it. And in 1919, there were lots of strikes. The Socialist Party in elections in November, it became, well there wasn't really a liberal party, but if you forget about liberals became the largest party in the Italian chamber of deputies, and so on and so forth. So there was a sense in which Italy looked as though it might be about to go the way that Russia had already gone and there's a socialist song from the period all about how we will do what they're already doing in Russia. And whoever doesn't work won't eat, are the words, the first words of the song. Mussolini had been a socialist before 1914. He was a very bright young man, editor of the main national socialist newspaper, when he was still only 29, a very successful editor, quadrupling the sales of the paper up to 1914. But then when the First World War started, he, like many other Italian intellectuals decided that really, Italy couldn't be a great power and stay out of the First World War. And in his mind, it couldn't have a revolution, which he still wanted, without going into the First World War. So he served for a while at the front, was wounded in practice, it behind the front, and then by 1917, was back making a career as a journalist, which is an important position in the Italian political system...
Anglo Saxon society say, tended to be pretty much as racist about Italians as, as were most Germans, etc, of Hitler. In other words, you thought that I mean, the key phrase of course, was, Italians can't fight, can they? The British had a leading member of British Foreign Office, tended to write down in his little minutes that these people are a bunch of ice creamers. So they’re soft and their power melts away, if you lick it with British firmness. And so you can find Churchill, of course, in 1927, in one of his anti Marxist moments, came out with a fascinating statement that had I been an Italian I would have been with you from start to finish in your struggle against the bestial passions and appetites of Leninism. A nice Churchilian phrase. His wife, also rather liked Mussolini’s musculature, and wrote a rather sweet letter back to Winston, when she went to a fascist parade in I think 1927. But I could be wrong, saying that she did hope those wicked Italians didn't kill Mussolini because he was such a effective leader. And so the idea that Mussolini and fascism are okay for Italy, but only okay for Italy and not necessarily for, say liberal parliamentarism in Britain. In the United States, Italian immigrants tend to be, notably pro fascist, the regime is, has makes lots of propaganda statements towards those immigrants… The Economist for example, in March 1936, forgives Hitler and the Germans for re militarizing the Rhineland, and then their editorial runs on well, they're nothing like those horrible Italians who are murdering Ethiopians and dropping poison gas on them and generally behaving in a way that you'd expect the inferior people like the Italians. In a way, the most interesting part of that story is why on earth does Hitler not join the general German right wing view that the Italians are belong to a racial group that's inferior to the superior German racial group. Partly perhaps that's his artistic temperament or something in the fact that he likes looking at paintings in Florence or such places...
It has, of course been used very readily for Trump and his aspirations in the United States. I do think there's a big problem there, because Trump is, of course, a zillionaire. He's not a poor boy from the provinces, as Mussolini was. And he certainly doesn't believe in much state welfare to go a long way down. He might, might like to make it sound as though, but he is not willing to have his taxation bill vastly increased so the state has money to spend on welfare, and he certainly doesn't believe in regulation. And obviously, a fascist does believe in regulation. I don't think he really wants to invade other places very much’"
No one cares about racism against white people

The Jacobites: everything you wanted to know | History Extra - "‘The accession of George I to the throne, to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, led also to Hanover being incorporated into the possessions of Great Britain and he was the king of Hanover. And the, only with Queen Victoria did that stop because Hanover wouldn't allow a woman to come to, come to the throne. But Hanover was a small Central European state. And basically, a lot of the support and the political language about the, about support the Jacobites had, came from the fact that other European states didn't like the fact that this small state Hanover, effectively now had the backing of this very large offshore island with a colonial empire behind it. And of course, in England people didn't much like the fact that British money and troops were sent to support Hanover. So it was a two way street. But we kind of write Hanover out of British history, but it was actually you know, a just, I would say not quite just as much a part of Britain as Wiltshire in 1750. But it was a lot closer than then you might think.’"

Disabled people in Tudor times | History Extra - "'I think you've revealed a really interesting picture that might surprise a few people, that there was this aspect of support and compassion shown towards disabled people in Tudor times. Because I think a lot of people won't be expecting that that's the story they were going to hear in this podcast. What do you think that looking at the history of disabled people can reveal about the Tudor mindset and the Tudor era more generally?'
'Well we always just tend to look at the brutality of it. With the executions and the battles and the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Cromwell going around destroying all of that and Henry just becoming more powerful financially and, you know, the drama of the six wives. But, this I think, the way that they cared for disabled people and supported them shows a completely different side of the dynasty. And it's really important because not only did Henry VIII have natural fools - disabled people - living with him, Henry VII did as well. And Wolsey did as well. For example Wolsey had a natural food with a disability living with him and when he fell from grace and gave Henry VIII Hampton Court Palace, he also gave Henry Patch, his natural fool, as a present. And Patch didn't actually want to go to the king. He was dragged away by guards kicking and screaming back to Henry VIII and didn't want to leave Wolsey...
I think we should have a lot more representation. Disability needs to be seen as a normal part of our everyday life like the Tudors thought it was. We've done a lot on black history and people are looking at LGBT community history. But disability history is always the poor relation and we're always left last because people see it as a very taboo topic. And I have no idea why. And we should have airtime to tell our stories to show what we can actually achieve, to make a difference, to encourage other disabled people, and that's my whole point of also doing the history - is so that the general public and history students and historians will view disabled people from a completely different perspective because it's about time'"
Of course, disabled history needs to be politicised rather than its case made on its own merits. This is what identity politics leads to - everyone wants their share

Magellan: daring explorer or doomed failure? | History Extra - "He's usually credited with making a profit on the voyage. Or he's, the survivors came back with a profitable cargo of spices on board. That's a myth. In fact, the value of the cargo they brought back didn't remotely cover all the costs. That myth is based on a misreading of an enquiry by the Spanish Crown's agents in 1537 which produced some figures that were... ridiculously massaged. In fact, the voyage was a failure even commercially but, it just raises the possibility that maybe if it could be done again in a better way with better planning with the value of hindsight and experience, maybe, maybe the sort of route that Magellan followed could be profitably exploited. And the Spanish Crown does make further efforts to follow up on that possibility, but they all fail. So even that hope that Magellan's voyage inspired in the contemporaries who survived it, proved in the long run to be illusory"

A legacy of inequality: the economic impact of empire | HistoryExtra - "Following the emergence of Mohamed Mossadegh as the prime minister of Iran, he sought to use the sovereignty of Iran to claim ownership over the oil refineries in the Abadan region, which were the property of the Anglo Iranian oil company. And this conflict put the British government in a really curious position, because at the same time that Mohamed Mossadegh was nationalizing the oil refineries in Iran, the British government of Clement Attlee, now famously canonized as you know, one of the most progressive Prime Ministers in British history, was also nationalizing failing industries here in Britain, in order to establish the welfare state, the National Health Service, and the expansive programme of council house building… the British government lent its weight and support with the Anglo Iranian oil company. Not only seeking the UN Security Council resolution in order to be able to wage war on Iran, which failed. They then took Iran to the ICJ which also failed, and eventually were able to replace Mossadegh by a coup d'etat with the allegiance of the United States as well. And so by supporting the Anglo Iranian oil company against the sovereignty interests of what was then called Third World nationalism, I think that the British government at the time, that a lot to create the world that we live in today, where multinational corporate power seems to be free of accountability to any sovereign government, not only in the developing world, but maybe also in the developed world as well...
One of the most significant projects of trying to readdress this global power imbalance came with the attempt to create a new international economic order through the United Nations that was really led by the Jamaican Prime Minister of the 1970s, Michael Manley. And so Michael Manley, like Mossadegh, like Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana realize that the achievement of legal sovereignty, of political sovereignty was only one step in the decolonization project, because so much of the wealth of Empire was not held in that realm of political sovereignty, but in that realm of private capital. And so once they faced that obstacle, Manley thought it was important to unify all of the recently decolonized nations in the United Nations in order to get a new resolution passed that would allow a rebalancing of power between those private corporations that operate in their territories, and the new governments that have emerged. And this resulted in the drafting and passing of a UN resolution that still reads incredibly radically today, which is the New International Economic Order resolution. And this resolution included a commitment to allow countries to have permanent sovereignty over their national resources, and allow them to be able to hold transnational corporations to account in terms of their own local regulations. It allowed things like a right to food to be enshrined in international law. And even though it was passed at the UN level, eventually it was defeated and placed into the, into the kind of dustbin of history by what we call the neoliberal revolution in the Atlantic world. And so, in the only North South Conference in 1980 in Cancun, the representatives of the United Kingdom and the United States, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, went over and above themselves to ensure that the provisions of the New International Economic Order would not receive binding commitment from all of the different nation states that have gathered there today. And instead, the answer for the decolonized world became foreign investment, loan agreements from the IMF, and structural adjustment programs... we can see how the consequences of supporting the Anglo Iranian oil company, are now impacting on daily life here in the United Kingdom, the Anglo Iranian oil company, of course, after the Abadan Crisis became British Petroleum now known as BP. And as we're in the midst of the energy crisis, the chief executive of BP has gone on record talking about how the energy crisis is going to turn his company into a cash machine, whilst the cries from British people for there to be a windfall tax on these energy companies in order to help everyday people pay their escalating bills is being ignored...
I think that there's a real attempt to make the history of empire a divisive project by focusing on the cultural and racial aspects of it, because there's a recognition and perhaps even a fear that some of the more material, the legal and economic aspects of it, are things that are very popular... there's a certain exhaustion that a lot of us are all feeling with the attempt to try and relegate all of these significant histories into questions simply of identity and culture. And that's not to say that there isn't a significant importance in the reframing of our cultural and symbolic sphere, you know, nothing's ever purely cultural"
Of course, if they had really managed to nationalise all the industries, any subsequent poor performance and failures (given generally poorer results at state-owned enterprises [especially in the developing world]) would still have been the fault of the colonisers and the international companies sabotaging them

Carrot conspiracies & digging for victory: feeding Britain in WW2 | HistoryExtra - "‘There's a major attempt to persuade people to eat substitute meats. I mentioned previously about the way in which rabbits were in plentiful supply, that there's a incentive to eat rabbits because they're an important pest and consequently, we could actually increase food production by just reducing the rabbit population. Children were often encouraged to keep a pet rabbit, which would when it had grown to adult size might disappear and be replaced by a small, a smaller version... The Minister of Food embarked upon increasing extraction rate, that is the amount of flour extracted from a quantity of grain. So consequently, you've got a bran style loaf which becomes… dominant, and people, the so called National loaf, and this brownish bran style loaf wasn't really kind of a, very popular amongst the population. But it was encouraged and directed by the government. There's a great emphasis on encouraging people to eat the crust. In the 1930s, perhaps the richer members of the community didn't bother to eat the crust, and the government comes up with propaganda ideas like, ah, eating the crust makes it, makes your hair curl. And consequently, it helps us to encourage the eating of items, which previously would have been perhaps less appealing.’"

Our Winston Churchill obsession | HistoryExtra - "‘Churchill became all things to all people... when Fidel Castro was visiting New York in 1961, for the United Nations General Assembly, by which time he, he could always go to New York for the UN, even if you were on the brink of war with the United States. And he said he'd been reading the Second World War by Winston Churchill, had been inspired by the story of a little island, heroically resisting a bullying, much larger continental neighbor, which is really almost amusing... … every single time in my lifetime, when politicians or generals have invoked the aura of Churchill and using Munich and appeasement, and Chamberlain as curses, every time it has led to disaster. In Korea, in the Suez expedition in 1956, which was the work of people like Sir Anthony Eden was prime minister who himself had resigned from the government in 1938, in the opposition to appeasement, and he saw quite wrongly, Colonel Nasser of Egypt as a new Hitler. Then Lyndon Johnson stepped up the American war in Vietnam, because he said you didn't want to be seen as another Chamberlain, appeasing the enemy, and then all the way through to Iraq, when Churchill was practically held up aloft as, as the invasion took place...
Churchill then complained about the Iron Curtain in 1946, the iron curtain which has fallen across Europe, but nobody alive, bore more responsibility for that than it, he himself. That he had decided to fight on in 1940, rightly. He embraced Starlin as an ally: rhetorically in 1941, physically in 1942. He dragged his feet as long as he could about a Western invasion of Northern France, which was the only real contribution the allies could make, the Western Allies could make to defeating Germany. And the result was that for, for three years, almost all the fighting was done by the Russians. And, and the fact that Stalin ended up in control of half of Europe was a direct consequence of Churchill's own policies’"

The Franks: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘Were the nicknames given to the Carolingian rulers ever ironic, or were they a way sort of exact effect? So you've mentioned Pippin the Short for instance, they're these these these rulers who have the interesting nicknames was, what's the story there?’
‘It's worth pointing out that that, I think before we before we get into it, that many of these nicknames aren't actually from the Carolingian period itself. But they were only later applied to many of these rulers that were, that we're talking about. So yeah, Pippin the Short, for example, is only first named as being short, a few 100 years after his death, which makes it very difficult to verify whether he was actually short or not. But some of these kinds of epithets may have been coined during the actual period itself. And I think that a good place to start is, is not so much Pepin the Short but probably King, Charles the Bald. Now, Charles the Bald was a grandson of, of Charlemagne. And even though the earliest written evidence for his nickname, The Bald is from the mid 10 century, it may already have been in use during his lifetime. Now, we don't have any particularly strong evidence to suggest that Charles was actually bald, we do have a number of contemporary descriptions and depictions of him, but he seems to have hair on his head in all of those. So it's, it's been suggested that the term may have in fact been used, ironically, and that he was actually you know, really hairy, not, you know, not bald at all. So, there are also theories that perhaps it could have been applied in a metaphorical sense, that the baldness, you know, could have referred to maybe his piety, you know, like a tonsured monk, for example, or that it may have referred to him lacking an inheritance at first, or that it was really that, that it was simply because he was a really, you know, ineffective ruler. And maybe it could have been used even as as a type of an emasculating term. But there's, there's really no strong evidence that you know, supports or discredits any of these theories in particular, and we have, you know, similar discussions for, you know, other rulers like King, Charles the Simple and Louis the Stammerer and various other people. And unfortunately, at the moment, all we can really do is sort of speculate when it comes to comes to these kinds of nicknames’
‘But the nicknames do at least make it easier to remember who's who don't they?’
‘For sure. Yeah, everyone is called Charles or Louis in those days’"

The secret WW2 mission to save Britain’s art collections | HistoryExtra - "‘Were the hosts of these sites in these locations, did they have a choice in supporting these efforts? Or how were these collections greeted by their new hosts?’
‘Well, in terms of whether they had a choice very often, the host had volunteered their services. Because before the war, people knew that they were likely to have evacuees and they'd much rather in some cases have art evacuees, which they thought were going to sort of add to their own local art collections and be decorative than having you know kids from the East End who are incontinent or squaddies practising maneuvers in the landscape park. So actually offering yourself up to host, you know, a museum or gallery collection was actually very, very popular. But the reality turned out to be somewhat different because very often, these hosts discovered that they didn't just get, you know, they didn't have the Turners and the Constables ready to hang on their walls. All of these things were packed up, they were covered with blankets and brown paper. In the case of museum collections, they were often in very large crates, that simply were stacked up in the best rooms of the house, forcing the families out into the servants’ quarters. And the hosts also had the responsibility of keeping the conditions right for the collections as well, they'd got to heat the rooms, so that we didn't get mold growing on them. And that cost a lot of money. And then there were rows between them and the government about how much of the cost have been in which proportion belonged to the house and which proportion belonged to the museum collections and so on. And yes, in some, in some places, that ,relations relations broke down between the the host families and, and the the organizations themselves. So you know, there were the warders who'd come to guard, the, the items, you know, sort of wanted extra meals, and maybe they wouldn't help out with household chores, or they, they'd go off to the pub and come back drunk, or in one case, you know, be harrassing, harrassing, parlor maids or, you know, just just basically being in the way and being unwelcome guests. So the reality did not, did not often meet the, the expectations of the volunteer custodians...
The black book actually lists the different cultural institutions in London. And so you can see that there were potentially preparations taking place before before invasion, to identify which would be the target institutions, where looting would take place or confiscation of works to be sent back to Berlin to perhaps potentially become part of Goering’s bloated collection of Western masterpieces… The black book… was really put together from tourist guides, it wasn't actually, sort of hadn't been put together from in person research. It was really a digest of tourist guides, available in… 1930s Germany, but it did give an insight into where the Nazis felt that they would they would be targeting their heritage interests. Let's put it like that’"

The Normans: beyond 1066 | HistoryExtra - "‘Is Normandy in any way an equivalent to the English Danelaw? The English Danelaw was where Scandinavian settlers came and established a territory of sorts. Is the same sort of thing going on in Normandy. vis-a-vis the Franks?’
‘We assume so but the current thinking is that there were so few of them in Normandy that they soon assimilated with the Frankish population, and that's why we don't have any physical remains. The other complication is that whereas in, in the British Isles, quite a lot has been done on Viking DNA, my understanding is that's not allowed in France, so people can't just dig up Viking sites and test the bones to find out where these people came from...
In the early years, you get the sense of they're interested in the Viking past, but then their own historians want to show how they became Christian and because the writers are writing from a clerical perspective that then is more important. So they present the Viking leaders, the Norman leaders as Christians and then doing the right things Christian rulers should do, founding monasteries being kind to the clergy etc, etc. So you get a turning away from the the Viking past by the early 11th century I think’
‘So it hasn't taken very long for them then, a century to sort of move into quite a different characterization.’
‘Yeah. Which is why the current thinking is there can’t be terribly many of them.’"

Stonehenge: everything you wanted to know (part two) | HistoryExtra - "‘One of the curious facts about Stonehenge is there's actually more Roman pottery than there is Neolithic. So we know Roman people were there, or at least, you know, Britons were there in Roman times, possibly doing no more than having the old picnic, going along with a jar, possibly doing more than that. I mean, it has been suggested in the past that one of the reasons Stonehenge looks as dilapidated as it is today is that Romans attacked it, they saw it as a pagan monument, associated with druids, and that they had a kind of war against druidry. And knocking down Stonehenge will be a great symbolic act to to show their power over native religion, that they wanted to wipe out. That doesn't really stack up for all sorts of reasons. One is that the archaeological evidence that Romans did anything like that just doesn't exist. Although to be honest, it's difficult to know exactly what you might find to prove, what you could find to prove it, but but it’s not there. But more importantly, we've got no indication that this was the Roman approach to native religions. Across Europe what tended to happen is that local religious sites, local religious traditions were adopted and merged with Roman beliefs. And they were very, they worked with indigenous communities in that sense in really quite clever way. It's one of the reasons why the Empire was so successful. We also need to remember that when Romans came to Britain, Stonehenge was already a ruin. There's no evidence at all that it was an active religious site. So in a sense of Roman seeing Stonehenge might well have thought much the same that we might think today and look at it and think what the hell is this? You know, no Roman soldier would have seen anything like Stonehenge any more than, than we do today.’"

Periods, fertility & childbirth: a pre-modern history | HistoryExtra - "‘To pick up on something that you just mentioned there, which I think a lot of people might be surprised by. And it's something we've had questions in on, you said that there was a belief that a baby could not be conceived unless the woman orgasmed in sex. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about the idea because it seems to run counter to what we might think about gender relations and women's sexuality in this period.’
‘Sure. And I think sometimes people read back a kind of Victorian prurience onto the earlier time period, which frankly isn't true of the Victorian period as much as you might think. But definitely not true earlier in, sort of the 16th 17th 18th century, women are the lustier of the two sexes. The one you have to watch out for is a widow, because she's known the pleasures of the marriage bed, and she wants more. So they definitely thought women were much lustier than men and much more dangerous in that regard. So the idea of both partners, achieving sexual pleasure has to do again with heat. Heat is the source of life. And so both people have to reach this heat for the seed to be emitted, so that there can actually be a new being. So it's very much about the physiology of warmth and heat. Now, there is a downside that may have already occurred to you, which is that if a woman got pregnant as a result of being raped, clearly, she had granted consent because she'd experienced pleasure...
The one method that was extant, in the 17th and 18th centuries is the condom. It’ss made of animal guts, but it's really understood as a venereal disease preventive, not as much as a contraceptive. And because it was associated with venereal disease, it was associated with prostitution. And so it was shameful, was nothing that a nice married woman would want to be thinking about, or maybe even know about… What happens in the 1820s, is that a couple of methods get promoted, that are newly available or newly understood, one of them is the use of a sponge. And they recommend soaking a sponge in vinegar or some other, you know, mildly acid solution that will both act as a barrier and the spermicide. And the idea is that women could do that possibly without even their partners knowing… successful may mean, postponing rather than completely succeeding, it may be creating birth intervals, rather than actually not having a child at all. They thought it was effective. Let's put it that way. They also mentioned the age old method of withdrawal, which could be effective. Again, something might not really kind of rate in our day, because it's, our success rate would be too low. But compared to nothing, it actually looks pretty good. And so those methods, they make birth control a natural option in the 19th century, sometimes they also by mid century, especially in the United States. Douching, right after sex was really considered a very effective method. Again, we wouldn't recommend it today. But they saw it as having potential... It was widely believed that women would know right after sex that they had conceived. Truly interesting to us, but felt this little shiver and supposedly and this, this strange feeling, and then you would know. But actually, you wouldn't know you were pregnant until quickening, when the fetus moves within the mother's body. And the mother can feel that and that's like four and a half months… women took medication, took herbal preparations that were designed to return menstrual flow, but we might understand as early abortifacients. And the same plants have been known since antiquity. And they do in fact, stimulate the uterus to contract. The problem is the safety is really difficult to ascertain. There's a little window between enough and dangerously too much’"

Britain’s only war crimes trial | HistoryExtra - "'For many years, he was bullied. He was abused. He was laughed at by his fellow villagers. And then when the Nazis came to power, I think it's one of the misunderstandings that the Nazis, the SS carried out all the slaughters of Jews around Europe and all took place in concentration camps. 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of Jews were killed by Nazi collaborators, by local people. They certainly weren't, weren't enough German soldiers to carry out the executions they wanted to. And German soldiers who were family men began to be shocked and horrified by being asked to kill women and children. And that's where collaborators allegedly like Sawoniuk stepped in, and they proved to be even more ruthless in many cases than the Nazis they were replacing.'"
So much for there being not enough ovens to kill 6 million Jews

Eugenics: a toxic history | HistoryExtra - "‘Something that I was most surprised to read in your book was how also African American people who might be primarily targeted by eugenics would sometimes advocated it. So people like WEB Du Bois thought that it might offer some opportunities for African Americans. Can you explain that connection?’...
‘It's connected again with first wave feminism, because he was he was he was closely associated with Margaret Sanger. And Margaret Sanger was one of the key developers of of reproductive rights for women in in America, and founded what became Planned Parenthood. And DuBois was interested in what has become known as racial uplift. So how do we improve the quality of lives for black people in America. But he also, in some of his writings, as a means of generating racial uplift, the improving the quality of lives for black people in America, he, he took a very eugenicist view, which is that too many lower socioeconomic status black people were having too many children, rather than higher socioeconomic status black people, and that they should be encouraged. So one of the things that happens in America in the early 20th, first two decades of the 20th is that the protagonists tried to encourage working class white Americans to embrace eugenics as an idea via State Farm fares, right? They have better baby contests, in state, state agricultural fairs. And Du Bois adopts a similar sort of attitude that we can have better black baby competitions, in and around places like Chicago and this and this would improve the quality and I'm doing air quotes for people who can't see me, which is everyone the quality of, of, of the people who, who we are concerned with...
Many of the key protagonists, particularly this guy called Alfred Ploetz, who's the kind of the equivalent to Francis Galton in Germany, thinks that because of the successes of Jewish people in various domains, which are considered important, particularly sort of the intellectual domains, he thinks that the Nordic people should breed with Jewish people in order to improve the stock of of Nordic people. But that changes in the 1930s and with with Hitler seizing power in 33...
We still have eugenics organizations in the UK until the 60s and 70s. And in America it’s the same and eugenics labs, sort of, they mutate into human genetics labs. And indeed, the Department of Genes, Evolution and Environment where I am a lecturer was in the 1990s, called the Galton Laboratory where I was an undergraduate. But before that, well, the 1904/1907, depending on how you name it, it's the Eugenics Records Office in in the UK...
You look at India and China and the numbers are huge. So coercive or enforced sterilization in India has been effectively policy since the late 1970s… the legacy of that continues in India to this day in China, which I know is not a democratic political system. 10,000 women over the course of three months were coercively sterilized under the what's known as the Iron Fist campaign. That's 10,000 Women in three months, had enforced sterilization for violating the one child policy. Now, you know, the term has gone out of favor and it's irredeemably toxic, but that that sounds a lot like state eugenics policy to me, happening in the two most populous countries on earth. So, population control is eternal’"
Population control is the same as eugenics. Apparently in China minorities and rural people are considered superior to urban Han, which is why they can have more children under their system of "eugenics"

Links - 1st January 2023 (2 - Gender Differences)

José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente on Twitter - "Probability of choosing STEM, SEH (Socsci&Humanities/Education/Health) and business, by SES and gender, in the US."
The Impact of Parental Occupation and Socioeconomic Status on Choice of College Major

Richer girls overwhelmingly choose to study the "arts" instead of STEM compared to poorer ones. There is a dose-response effect too. The feminist explanation would presumably be that as girls get richer, they get more and more influenced by "patriarchy" This is similar to what we see in poor countries where gender differences are smaller than in rich ones

Yes, there is a female and a male brain: Morphology versus functionality - "In a recent PNAS paper, Joel et al. examine several large datasets of MRI images and surveys of human brains. The authors conclude that brains of women and men are not dimorphic and not categorically different, as are the genital systems of the two genders, but resemble more an overlapping mosaic of specific functional regions and therefore cannot be distinguished as male and female brains. This conclusion cannot be drawn based on the methodology used. MRIs are “still images.” Looking at these is more akin to examining a road map and drawing conclusions about traffic patterns. Other imaging methods might have yielded different results... Functionally, brains of women and men are indeed different. Not better, not worse, neither more nor less sophisticated, just different. The very brain cells differ chromosomally. The male brain is exposed to a completely different hormonal environment during intrauterine life than the female brain. The available scientific data as to the crucial effect of testosterone on the developing male brain is overwhelming... Consider the heart, which is morphologically indistinguishable between the sexes; however, more women than men who suffer from a heart attack will have open coronary arteries and atypical symptoms. Consider drugs: prophylactic aspirin taken by women will more often prevent strokes, and if taken by men will more often prevent a heart attack. Consider the gastrointestinal system: passage time of food and drugs will more often be longer in women than in men, with consequences for drug absorption and food digestion"
So much for "neuro-sexism"

Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain - "Sex differences in human behavior show adaptive complementarity: Males have better motor and spatial abilities, whereas females have superior memory and social cognition skills. Studies also show sex differences in human brains but do not explain this complementarity. In this work, we modeled the structural connectome using diffusion tensor imaging in a sample of 949 youths (aged 8–22 y, 428 males and 521 females) and discovered unique sex differences in brain connectivity during the course of development. Connection-wise statistical analysis, as well as analysis of regional and global network measures, presented a comprehensive description of network characteristics. In all supratentorial regions, males had greater within-hemispheric connectivity, as well as enhanced modularity and transitivity, whereas between-hemispheric connectivity and cross-module participation predominated in females. However, this effect was reversed in the cerebellar connections. Analysis of these changes developmentally demonstrated differences in trajectory between males and females mainly in adolescence and in adulthood. Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes."

Geoffrey Miller on Twitter-  "in fact, there’s very little overlap in strength between the sexes. almost all men are stronger than almost all women. it’s just bizarre to deny it."
"TIL the average 80 year old man has much higher grip strength than the average 25 year old woman."
Inquisitive Bird on Twitter - "Perhaps even more surprising, this paper investigates the subgroup of highly trained female athletes, and they still score on average lower than the typical (untrained) male."
This also has interesting implications for trans mania

Universal sex differences appear in adolescents' career aspirations, study finds - "A new analysis by David Geary at the University of Missouri and Gijsbert Stoet at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom finds career aspirations from nearly 500,000 adolescents shows consistent sex differences across 80 nations, suggesting biologically-influenced preferences can play a role in gender segregation in the workplace later in life. The researchers also found a tendency for larger differences to appear in gender-equal countries, such as Finland, Norway or Sweden...   "The sex differences in interest in things- and people-oriented occupations were not only found throughout the world, but mirror those found in a study done more than 100 years ago," Geary said. "The results are consistent across time and place, in keeping with inherent sex differences that make some activities more attractive to adolescent boys than girls and others more attractive to girls than boys.""

Misguided attraction: The contribution of normative and individual-differences components of the sexual system to mating preferences - "We examined the contribution of variations in sexual-system functioning, namely, sexual hyperactivation (heightened sex-related desire and worries) and sexual deactivation (suppression of sexual behavior and thoughts), to mating preferences. Participants (N = 78) completed a questionnaire assessing sexual hyperactivation and deactivation and rated their interest in videotaped potential romantic partners in two mating conditions (long-term, short-term). Sexual hyperactivation was associated with increased short-term mating interest and a greater reliance on gender-typical mating preferences (e.g., lower short-term standards among men). Sexual deactivation was associated with gender-atypical mating preferences among men (e.g., short-term preference for high-status women). These findings highlight the role of individual differences in sexual system functioning in shaping mating preferences.
► Sexually hyperactivated men and women display elevated short-term mating interest. ► Sexually hyperactivated men display lower short-term attractiveness standards. ► Sexually hyperactivated women display higher short-term attractiveness standards. ► Sexually deactivated women display lower short-term mating interest. ► Sexually deactivated men prefer as short-term mates women high in economic status."

Ugly Truth About One Night Stands: Men Less Choosy Than Women - "Men are far more interested in casual sex than women. While men need to be exceptionally attractive to tempt women to consider casual sex, men are far less choosy. New research shows that men are more likely than women to report having had casual sex and they express a greater desire for it than do women. It is also thought that women but not men raise their standards of attractiveness for a casual sex partner... Across all three levels of requestor attractiveness, men were more likely to go out, go to their apartment and go to bed with them than were women. German men were less likely to go out with the requestor and go to their apartment than American and Italian men. Italian men were more likely to go to bed with the requestor than were American men. German men were even less likely than American men to go to bed with the requestor. These differences highlight cultural differences in sexual morals and preferences.   For each of the three offers, men were more likely to accept when the hypothetical woman was moderately or exceptionally attractive than when she was slightly unattractive, but whether she was moderately or exceptionally attractive made no difference. Women however placed more importance on the requestor's good looks. They were more likely to accept the apartment and bed requests from an exceptionally attractive man than from either a moderately attractive or slightly unattractive man."

Gender differences in responses to moral dilemmas: a process dissociation analysis - "The principle of deontology states that the morality of an action depends on its consistency with moral norms; the principle of utilitarianism implies that the morality of an action depends on its consequences. Previous research suggests that deontological judgments are shaped by affective processes, whereas utilitarian judgments are guided by cognitive processes. The current research used process dissociation (PD) to independently assess deontological and utilitarian inclinations in women and men. A meta-analytic re-analysis of 40 studies with 6,100 participants indicated that men showed a stronger preference for utilitarian over deontological judgments than women when the two principles implied conflicting decisions (d = 0.52). PD further revealed that women exhibited stronger deontological inclinations than men (d = 0.57), while men exhibited only slightly stronger utilitarian inclinations than women (d = 0.10). The findings suggest that gender differences in moral dilemma judgments are due to differences in affective responses to harm rather than cognitive evaluations of outcomes."

Steve Stewart-Williams on Twitter - ""Sex differences in occupational preferences have been found in every society where psychologists have looked for them. In one large study (N ≈ 200,000), Lippa found the differences in 53 out of 53 nations: a level of cross-cultural unanimity almost unheard of within psychology"
"sex differences in occupational preferences have remained remarkably stable throughout the half-century or so that psychologists have measured them, even in the face of significant shifts in women’s social roles and place in society (Su et al., 2009). In particular, the sex difference in interest in things vs. people seems stubbornly resistant to change. One analysis, for instance, found that whereas the number of women pursuing high-status professions increased a great deal since the 1970s, the number pursuing things-related professions remained virtually static (Lippa, Preston, & Penner, 2014). Notably, this was the case despite the fact that, during that same period, a wide range of initiatives were established to try to entice women into those very professions"

Are Sex Differences in Preferences for Physical Attractiveness and Good Earning Capacity in Potential Mates Smaller in Countries With Greater Gender Equality? - "On average, women show stronger preferences for mates with good earning capacity than men do, while men show stronger preferences for physically attractive mates than women do. Studies reporting that sex differences in mate preferences are smaller in countries with greater gender equality have been interpreted as evidence that these sex differences in mate preferences are caused by the different roles society imposes on men and women. Here, we attempted to replicate previously reported links between sex differences in mate preferences and country-level measures of gender inequality in a sample of 3,073 participants from 36 countries (data and code available at https://osf.io/4sr5f/). Although women preferred mates with good earning capacity more than men did and men preferred physically attractive mates more than women did, we found little evidence that these sex differences were smaller in countries with greater gender equality. Although one analysis suggested that the sex difference in preferences for good earning capacity was smaller in countries with greater gender equality, this effect was not significant when controlling for Galton’s problem or when correcting for multiple comparisons. Collectively, these results provide little support for the social roles account of sex differences in mate preferences."
The power of patriarchy!
Addendum: Patriarchy is more powerful in countries with more gender equality. Amazing.
From 14 August 2020 time I posted this: "So much for "gender stereotypes" being the problem" (I also posted this on 22 May 2019 oops)

Genetic Variants Tied to Sex Differences in Psychiatric Disorders - "Just as recent research has shown that the sex of cells used in cellular models can bias studies of neurological disease, new research is showing that men and women also have genetic differences that are linked to their likelihood of developing certain psychotic and mood disorders... Jill Goldstein: If you start at the population level, there are sex differences in the incidence of major psychiatric disorders. For example, in schizophrenia there’s a slightly higher incidence in men than in women, but in major depression and anxiety disorders, the risk is actually two-fold higher in women than in men. The importance is that it’s worldwide, it is not culture-specific, so [scientists] really believe there is a biology to understanding the incidence difference... We’re living in the day and age of precision medicine, and we want to identify genes that are associated with treatment responses so we can personalize our treatments. It’s absolutely critical, if we’re going to talk about these things, to consider sex and gender. In 2001, for example, eighty percent of adverse drug reactions [occurred in] women. But most studies in neuroscience and in medicine in general involve male animals, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the side effects and drug reactions would be greater in women than in men. There are a few instances in which this has changed treatment completely. One is in cardiovascular disease, where it’s primarily treated as a small vessel disease in women and a large vessel disease in men. Before, most of our treatments were developed for large vessel disease and the development of plaques. When these sex-based differences were discovered, it really revolutionized women’s heart health programs.   There are also examples in stroke and in lung cancer, in which brilliant scientists were about to throw a treatment away because it looked like it didn’t work. But it turned out that in lung cancer, for example, they were targeting a mutation [linked to] a form of lung cancer that was more common in women, but they were testing it using male animals.   There are real-life consequences if we do not develop sex-dependent therapeutics, and I think it is critical for precision medicine."
The power of patriarchy and neuro-sexism!

Sex Is Binary, Gender Is Fluid - "For the thousands of studies that show sex differences, please check the resources I’ve provided at the end of this post. Neuroscientist Camilla Benbow, for instance, has studied data from nearly 2,000,000 children, including adolescents, and seen clear brain differences relevant to future math performance. She and other researchers utilize large sample sizes, study tens of thousands of brain scans, and study the brain longitudinally (over a long period of time)"

The Fight for Gender Equality Is Increasing Sexism (Playboy) - " Damore’s memo wasn’t an anonymous email he sent to all employees at the company, or a Google doc that he shared with a few people that went viral; it was feedback invited by Google after he attended a “Diversity and Inclusion Summit”... he advocated for viewpoint diversity in addition to diversity around gender and race. His goal was to help the tech giant implement useful strategies to close the gender gap, instead of ineffective policies based on the incorrect assumption that all differences we see between women and men are due to socialization or bias... another former Googler, Tim Chevalier, has also sued Google, after he was fired for denigrating white men... [He] compared Damore to—of all people—Elliot Rodger and Marc Lépine, mass murderers who targeted female victims... it becomes clear that most people didn’t bother to read the memo before spouting their opinions... in 10 to 15 years from now, I predict the gender gap we currently see will only widen as occupational opportunities for women continue to expand in less equitable countries. Somewhere along the way, science on biological sex differences became taboo, and in countering its existence, it’s become acceptable to resort to making up claims, like saying that the latest science shows something altogether different and that Damore was “cherry picking scientific evidence to support a preexisting point of view.” It also includes having the gall to put the words “prenatal testosterone” in air-quotes, as if the jury is still out on the legitimacy of its influence. Speaking further to how threatening some find this research, Quillette Magazine suffered not one, but two, DDoS attacks after publishing commentary by three scientists and me, in response to the Google memo... In order to mandate a 50:50 ratio, we will essentially be forcing women to do things they don’t want to, and what has gone unspoken in this debate, which I find particularly concerning, is the undervaluing of female-typical occupations. The belief that girls should be pushed toward male-typical jobs as the only acceptable option is where the real sexism lies, yet no one is talking about this. What I also found terrifying is how the average person bought into the narrative that James Damore was a woman-hating tech bro who called upon “pseudoscience” to justify his "sexist" and "racist" views. Why did they buy into this story? Because they, perhaps reasonably, assumed that mainstream media outlets aren't going to outright lie to you... If we follow Hanlon’s razor, journalists promoting these specious ideas either don’t know anything about human biology and statistics, or they don’t know how to read... as a woman with a PhD in a STEM discipline, I truly believe that if a person wants to succeed in the field, there is nothing holding them back... "if men are afraid of even interacting with women because that interaction might be seen as sexist, then they will stop interacting with women, and that hurts both of them"... employees were awarded bonuses for arguing against the political viewpoints Damore laid out in his memo. What I want to know, among many things, is why Asians are being lumped in with white men in the name of advancing "diversity." But then it occurred to me: it’s because we don’t fit into the victim-oppression narrative promoted by far-left ideology, especially when it comes to income and level of education. But instead of altering their hypothesis, people who subscribe to this warped way of thinking double down and change the rules of the game—the only plausible explanation must surely be that Asian Americans also possess "white privilege."... libertarians and conservatives are “hesitant” to be themselves at work, particularly in the context of Google’s reaction to Damore’s memo. Right-leaning individuals also had higher rates of leaving the tech industry as a result."
What might be even more terrifying is that there're people who claim to have read the "memo" and have such poor comprehension skills that they still insist the media were right
"Diversity" means it's good for right-leaning people to leave the industry, since they have nothing to offer (unlike "minorities")

The Casual Misandry that Masquerades as Criticism of Men and Boys - "Describing the results of four large-scale, cross-cultural studies of personality differences between the sexes, Kaufman notes, “All four studies converge on the same basic finding: when looking at the overall gestalt of human personality, there is a truly striking difference between the typical male and female personality profiles.”Kaufman notes that these include traits like “sensitivity, tender-mindedness, warmth, anxiety, appreciation of beauty, and openness to change” for women and “emotional stability, assertiveness/dominance, dutifulness, conservatism, and conformity to social hierarchy and traditional structure for men.” Women were also found to be more sociable and sensitive as well as more prone to self-doubt, while men were less risk-averse, more thrill-seeking, and utilitarian on average. None of this is news to anyone who spends time around the opposite sex, of course, but at a time when the acceptable cultural message is that gender is a fluid construct, and embracing the non-binary is so important that it must be compulsorily enshrined even in our pronoun use, offering evidence that men and women are fundamentally different is a surprisingly radical act... culturally we are so intent on avoiding harmful stereotyping drawn from sex differences that “rarely do we consider the harm that could be caused by ignoring sex differences!”... The most revealing (and poignant) moment in her piece —albeit one she breezes past in her long march toward re-educating supposedly toxic boys—is when she asks a college sophomore what he likes about being a boy. His response? “Huh. That’s interesting. I never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys.” He’s right, and pieces like Orenstein’s in elite publications like the Atlantic are a major reason why young men feel this way. So is the relentless message of girl-power uplift that has dominated the culture for decades, and the casual denigration of masculinity that permeates much of popular culture. What do you think passes through the mind of an adolescent boy when he sees t-shirts and bumper stickers that say things like “The Future is Female,” or any of the other casually misandrist slogans celebrated as empowering by peddlers of feminist kitsch? Where does he see himself fitting into this future? What is his role? Orenstein, like many self-appointed fixers of boys, starts from the assumption that boys (and the male personality traits they are, on average, more likely to display) are a problem that needs to be fixed. This is a far cry from their response to the struggles of girls. When girls struggle, the argument goes, it must be the fault of the culture, or patriarchy, or Disney princesses. When boys struggle, it’s because they are inherently flawed (or have embraced an inherently flawed model of manhood) and must be reeducated by “experts” like… Orenstein... Unfortunately, writers like Orenstein are more interested in the “reality” of proving their theories of toxic masculinity than in improving the lives of boys."

How men's and women's brains are different - "over the past 15 years or so, there’s been a sea change as new technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work... data from animal research, cross-cultural surveys, natural experiments and brain-imaging studies demonstrate real, if not always earthshaking, brain differences, and that these differences may contribute to differences in behavior and cognition... In 1991, just a few years before Shah launched his sex-differences research, Diane Halpern, PhD, past president of the American Psychological Association, began writing the first edition of her acclaimed academic text, Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities. She found that the animal-research literature had been steadily accreting reports of sex-associated neuroanatomical and behavioral differences, but those studies were mainly gathering dust in university libraries. Social psychologists and sociologists pooh-poohed the notion of any fundamental cognitive differences between male and female humans, notes Halpern, a professor emerita of psychology at Claremont McKenna College... Navigation studies in both humans and rats show that females of both species tend to rely on landmarks, while males more typically rely on “dead reckoning”: calculating one’s position by estimating the direction and distance traveled rather than using landmarks. Many of these cognitive differences appear quite early in life. “You see sex differences in spatial-visualization ability in 2- and 3-month-old infants,” Halpern says. Infant girls respond more readily to faces and begin talking earlier. Boys react earlier in infancy to experimentally induced perceptual discrepancies in their visual environment. In adulthood, women remain more oriented to faces, men to things... Women are twice as likely as men to experience clinical depression in their lifetimes; likewise for post-traumatic stress disorder. Men are twice as likely to become alcoholic or drug-dependent, and 40 percent more likely to develop schizophrenia. Boys’ dyslexia rate is perhaps 10 times that of girls, and they’re four or five times as likely to get a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder... the great majority of female subjects with ASD, the researchers found, had cortical-thickness variation profiles similar to those of typical non-ASD males.In other words, having a typical male brain structure, whether you’re a boy or a girl, is a substantial risk factor for ASD. By definition, more boys’ than girls’ brains have this profile, possibly helping explain ASD’s four- to fivefold preponderance among boys compared with girls... In general, brain regions that differ in size between men and women (such as the amygdala and the hippocampus) tend to contain especially high concentrations of receptors for sex hormones... Scientists routinely acknowledge that the presence or absence of a single DNA base pair can make a medically important difference. What about an entire chromosome?... Shah’s experiments in animals employ technologies enabling scientists to boost or suppress the activity of individual nerve cells — or even of single genes within those nerve cells — in a conscious, active animal’s brain. These experiments have pinpointed genes whose activity levels differ strongly at specific sites in male versus female mice’s brains.What would happen, Shah’s team wondered, if you knocked out of commission one or another of these genes whose activity level differed between male and female brains?"
So much for "neurosexism". Testosterone Rex strikes again. Actually since, we are told, "science" shows that trans people have brains resembling those of the sex they think they are, that means allegations of "neurosexism" are transphobic

Gender is not just a social construct, according to scientific research - "A study published (paywall) in November 2017 suggests that these sorts of girly toy preferences aren’t simply a reflection of gendered social pressures. A meta-analysis of research, reviewing 16 studies on the subject that collectively included some 1,600 children, found that both biology and society affect boys’ and girls’  toy choices. The researchers found a huge effect size (1.03 for boys playing with boys’ toys more than girls, and 0.9 for girls playing with girls toys more than boys; anything above 0.8 is considered “large”) across geographical regions. “The size of sex differences in children’s preferences for male-typed and female-typed toys did not appear to be smaller in studies conducted in more egalitarian countries”... contrary to the popular progressive belief, gender is partly socially constructed—but it’s not just a social construct... "We strive to find out how the biology of people works. Would we close our minds as scientists because it might be politically incorrect?"... “If we have a better understanding of how biology impacts the developing brain, we might be better able to tailor educational practices to specific students,” says Stevens. In other words, nurture can be manipulated so that it more effectively interacts with nature to develop particular skills. If we ignore biology, says Stevens, “we’re not acknowledging that there might be another factor impacting things and then we wonder why things aren’t as effective.”"
Testosterone Rex strikes again
Feminist logic - the fact that more gender equal societies still had the same sex differences shows how strong patriarchy is

Old T-Rex - "Rather than talk much about differences between the sexes, which would do her case no good at all, she talks about testosterone’s role in creating such differences. Testosterone is a strawman theory, here. Sex differences might be caused, in part or in whole, by biological factors other than testosterone: would disproving an incorrect testosterone-based theory make the differences go away? On the other hand, it might confuse people enough to reduce or eliminate belief in such differences. People are fairly easy to confuse... Men take more risks, especially after puberty. Fine attempts to talk this away, as she often does. Her argumentative approach sometimes has a certain mad charm, as when she mentions her baby son rolling across the room to a power drill, juggling knives, and trying to plunge a running hair dryer into the cake mix. I guess that no truly educated person could believe in anything so obvious, so… She also steps up to ” No true Scotsman “. She defines what must be the only correct definition of a risk-prone personality – someone that tends to embrace every possible risk – and if those correlations aren’t perfect, how could there be such a thing as a risk-prone person? She reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld, trying to define away the insurgency in Iraq by explaining that real guerrillas must have a unified doctrine and central command, which would have been a surprise to the raggedy-assed Spaniards fighting Napoleon, the men that gave us the word... Generally, sexual selection is strongest in the sex with the greater reproductive variance. Usually, that means males – some have many offspring while others have few or none. Female reproduction varies less. Fine discusses a series of experiments by Angus Bateman [published in 1948] that led to claims of higher reproductive variance in male fruit flies. There were problems in those experiments – mistakes, technical problems and limitations. Some of the mutations used to trace paternal identity interfered with fitness and thus buggered the statistics. We wouldn’t have to use such a sloppy procedure today, but hey, it was 1948 – they didn’t even have the human chromosome count right. Yet similar studies have been done more recently on many other species – without those problems – and Bateman’s principle, that females are the limiting factor of parental investment, is generally true. Male reproductive variance is generally higher. So how does criticism of errors in a pioneering study refute a now-proven idea? That would be like claiming that Otto Lilienthal’s glider crash, where he died saying “sacrifices must be paid for” [which makes no sense at all] proves that Man will never fly. Fine’s fruit fly chapter is completely pointless. This lawyerly rhetorical technique, criticizing an early experiment in order to snipe at a well-established contemporary theory, was also used by S.J. Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, when he argued that Samuel Morton had skewed his measurements of skulls to fit his preconceptions. Which was untrue – but it wouldn’t have mattered a rat’s ass if Morton had screwed up, because the art has advanced very far since Morton’s time. Today we use MRI and CAT scanners to image skulls to millimetric precision. Fine takes a stab at showing that there’s isn’t much point [in terms of extra evolutionary fitness] in men getting extra mates. She comes up with an unphysical and absurd example – mentioning how unlikely it would be for 100 one-night stands to generate an extra 100 babies. That’s totally irrelevant: all it shows is that she’s innumerate... if sexual selection doesn’t really happen, what could explain men’s huge strength advantage? Eating Wheaties?Fine seems to think that only producing a horde of extra kids could have any evolutionary significance – but she is wrong. One more kid is a big deal, fitness-wise... In talking about the effects of testosterone, Fine mention a kind of cichlid fish where dominance influences gonadal events – causation ( in part) goes from behavior to hormones, instead of hormones to behavior. Interesting. But is there evidence of a similar pattern in humans? No. Are humans so evolutionarily close to fish – in particular, cichlid fish – that any pattern we see in cichlids is an immediate heads-up, something that might be happening in humans? Christ no. Then what’s the God-damn point? If we’re talking logic and inference, there is none: Fine seems to think that random unconnected facts are just fine for confusing her audience, and of course she’s right about that. Or, more charitably and probably more accurately, they’re good at confusing her"
On Cordelia Fine's Testosterone Rex

Denying the Neuroscience of Sex Differences - "Turns out that yet another book, this one with a fawning review in Nature, claims to “shatter” myths about sex differences in the brain while in fact perpetuating the largest one. Editors at Nature decided to give this book their imprimatur. Ironically, within a couple of days of the Nature review being published came a news alert from the American Association for the Advancement of Science titled, “Researchers discover clues to brain differences between males and females,” and a new editorial in Lancet Neurology titled “A spotlight on sex differences in neurological disorders,” both of which contradict the book’s core thesis... It is now abundantly clear to anyone honestly looking, that the variable of biological sex influences all levels of mammalian brain function, down to the cellular/genetic substrate, which of course includes the human mammalian brain... Recognizing our obligation to carefully study sex influences in essentially all domains (not just neuroscience), the National Institute of Health on January 25, 2016 adopted a policy (called “Sex as a Biological Variable,” or SABV for short) requiring all of its grantees to seriously incorporate the understanding of females into their research... Since Simone de Beauvoir in the early 1950s famously asserted that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” and John Money at Johns Hopkins shortly thereafter introduced the term “gender” (borrowed from linguistics) to avoid the biological implications of the word “sex,” a belief that no meaningful differences exist in the brains of women and men has dominated U.S. culture... it is replete with tactics that are now standard operating procedure for the anti-sex difference writers. The most important tactic is a comically biased, utterly non-representative view of the enormous literature of studies ranging from humans to single neurons. Other tactics include magnifying or inventing problems with disfavored studies, ignoring even fatal problems with favored studies, dismissing what powerful animal research reveals about mammalian brains, hiding uncomfortable facts in footnotes, pretending not to be denying biologically based sex-influences on the brain while doing everything possible to deny them, pretending to be in favor of understanding sex differences in medical contexts yet never offering a single specific research example why the issue is important for medicine, treating “brain plasticity” as a magic talisman with no limitations that can explain away sex differences, presenting a distorted view of the “stereotype” literature and what it really suggests, and resurrecting 19th century arguments almost no modern neuroscientist knows of, or cares about. Finally, use a catchy name to slander those who dare to be good scientists and investigate potential sex influences in their research despite the profound biases against the topic (“neurosexists!”). These tactics work quite well with those who know little or nothing about the neuroscience... You may ask: What exactly are people like Rippon so afraid of? She cites potential misuse of the findings for sexist ends, which has surface plausibility. But by that logic we should also stop studying, for example, genetics. The potential to misuse new knowledge has been around since we discovered fire and invented the wheel. It is not a valid argument for remaining ignorant... No one seems to have a problem accepting that, on average, male and female bodies differ in many, many ways. Why is it surprising or unacceptable that this is true for the part of our body that we call “brain”? Marie Curie said, “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”"
Why do the tactics sound so similar to creationist ones?
Feminists: It's sexist to only study men since the results don't apply to women
Also feminists: Men and women are the same and if you say they're different you're sexist

Gaslighting on Critical Race Theory in Schools

"This is not happening, and it's good that it is" (also, more evidence that it's not confined to the law)

 

No Critical Race Theory in Schools? Here's the Abundant Evidence Saying Otherwise

"Mary Nicely, who is now second-in-command at the California Department of Education, went on her personal Facebook page this summer to denounce conservatives who oppose teaching critical race theory in schools as “yet another White right and education reformer distraction.”

Nicely also reposted a newspaper column in July defining critical race theory as a key used in law schools to expose racism in the legal system: “It is taught, if at all, in law school — not high school.”

Her claim echoed other education experts, like Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who tweeted: “We could explain until our last breath that CRT is not taught in K-12, but the actual definition of CRT doesn’t matter anymore in these debates.”

These denials, which have been amplified by many news organizations, are at odds with overwhelming evidence – documented by class lessons, school curricula, focus groups, teacher surveys and public statements by educators – that CRT is not only taught in class, but is also heavily promoted by the K-12 education establishment. 

Some high schools are already teaching lessons and units on CRT, where students write papers demonstrating their facility with applying the theory, while other schools are introducing CRT concepts, such as systemic racism, white privilege, microaggressions, implicit bias and intersectionality.

Public and private schools are also training teachers, staff, administrators – and even parents – on the elements of critical race theory, which school administrators see as an indispensable tool for dismantling what activists describe as America’s racial caste system.

A July survey by EducationWeek found that barely a year after the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota cop, 8% of K-12 teachers said they have taught or discussed CRT with students; the figure for teachers in urban schools is much higher: 20%.

Meanwhile, the Association of American Educators found in July that 4.1% of teachers were actually required to teach critical race theory, and 11% said that teaching CRT should be mandatory...

“Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially in social studies, but you'll find it in English language arts and the other disciplines,” Detroit Public Schools Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said at a Nov. 9 board of education meeting. “We were very intentional about creating a curriculum, infusing materials, and embedding critical race theory within our curriculum.”...

Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, believes it is “educational malpractice” not to teach students about critical race theory at the height of its cultural moment. But Zimmerman thinks it’s perverse to teach it and claim not to.

“I think it’s a defensive posture,” he said of progressives. “They know the Republicans have succeeded in demonizing it and I don’t think they have the confidence and the courage to defend it.”  

CRT is poised to grow at an unprecedented scale in Nicely’s bellwether state of California, which in March approved an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum that states teachers and administrators should be familiar with the theory and includes an example of how to teach it in high school.

In October, the state’s legislature made ethnic studies – a subject that focuses on the histories and cultures of marginalized identity groups, such as indigenous populations and African Americans – a requirement for high school graduation. Although ethnic studies is not identical to CRT, many academics, teachers and consultants who develop ethnic studies curricula for K-12 schools say that CRT is the software on which ethnic studies runs. (Nicely declined comment for this article.)

"Ethnic studies without Critical Race Theory is not ethnic studies,” Manuel Rustin, a high school history teacher who helped oversee the drafting of California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, told EdSource earlier this year. “It would be like a science class without the scientific method. There is no critical analysis of systems of power and experiences of these marginalized groups without Critical Race Theory.” 

This means that within several years, when the high school graduation mandate goes into effect, California’s 1.7 million secondary school students would be exposed to CRT – and its trademark practices, such as interrogating “whiteness,” systemic racism, colorblindness and meritocracy as tools of power and oppression – on an unprecedented scale.

A sample course description included in state’s model curriculum affirms CRT’s centrality for the field of ethnic studies.

"Students will be introduced to the concept Critical Race Theory as they highlight and discuss [an assigned] reading in small groups,” reads the description of an actual course taught at San Juan High School in Citrus Heights. "One of the main focuses of ethnic studies is translating historical lessons and Critical Race Theory into direct action for social justice."

Focus groups in California surveying 48 teachers and 17 administrators last year found that “an essential focus of ethnic studies content is critical theory and critical framing”...

Critics warned that the [Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum] contains at least 90 direct and indirect references to CRT...

“I am just so relieved that California stood up and kept critical race theory intact,” Rustin said on his podcast in March. “That's an example for other states to follow, honestly.”...

What makes CRT truly radical is that it “questions the very foundations of the liberal order” as the source of anti-black oppression, according to “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,” a 2001 book, now in its third edition, that’s used in high schools and universities. Classical liberal ideals such as free speech, equal treatment and individual rights are not revered as sacrosanct constitutional guarantees, but regarded as hollow phrases and unearned privileges – mere smokescreens created by white men to justify structuring social institutions for their own advantage – that sometimes need to be scaled back to advance social justice.

Critical race theory entered the field of education in the mid-1990s, initially as an academic research methodology for explaining racial disparities in school discipline, standardized test scores and high school graduation rates as consequences of systemic racism and implicit bias, as opposed to social pathologies within the black community. Over time, the study of CRT trickled down to education students in college, who then became K-12 teachers and administrators and began applying the ideas in their work as educators. More recently, with the growth of the ethnic studies movement and the nation’s so-called racial reckoning, CRT and anti-racist pedagogy have become entrenched in the educational establishment.

In a groundbreaking 1995 article, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education,” the authors argue that “U.S. society is based on property rights rather than human rights,” and that “racism is as healthy today as it was during the Enlightenment.” The paper refers to white people as “the oppressor” and “the perpetrator.”...

The Tamalpais Union High School District in Marin County approved a high school class called An Examination of Race in the United States. The course description outlines such learning goals as: “Students can identify the tenets of CRT and key scholars who were instrumental in its development.” Sample assignments include: “Students will write a 2‐3 page essay describing CRT and utility in evaluating historical and current events.”

A 12^th grade, year-long course at the Acalanes Union High School District in Contra Costa County, called Deconstructing Race, instructs students how to critique “whiteness” through a CRT lens. “How can white race and culture be examined and critiqued?” the course description reads.

Acalanes students learn about the tenets and themes of CRT, examine CRT’s legal origins, read case law excerpts, study legal storytelling, narrative analysis and counter-storytelling. As one of the hallmarks of CRT, narrative theory and counter-stories were developed by law professors who adapted classic courtroom rhetorical techniques of framing facts to the maximum advantage of one’s client, but in CRT’s case it’s for the purposes of political advocacy and moral suasion.

In other instances, CRT may not be on the menu, but it’s in the ingredients, so that teachers season their lectures with the theory to help students grapple with social issues...

It’s impossible to tell how common CRT is in the nation’s high schools, because as often as not, teachers don’t cite the theory by name when they teach it.

“K-12 teachers didn’t usually get up and say, ‘Well, today we’re going to do a lesson on critical race theory,” Theresa Montaño, a professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at the California State University, coached teachers during a November webinar.

“What they did is they took those tenets of critical race theory, the pedagogy, or the methodology, and create[d] pedagogical models,” she said. “You’re going to see how classroom teachers apply some of these pedagogical models in ways where they don’t even mention the words critical race theory but are doing anti-racist work.”

Montaño boiled down CRT to one of its core tenets – the ubiquity and permanence of racism in American society: “Simply what critical race theory argues is that every time our students of color walk out of their door into society, their every single day experience is informed by their encounters with racism.”...

Schools and teachers who use and teach CRT in school are not engaging in professional malpractice; indeed, teacher training colleges encourage it as a professional duty.

“There are plenty of topics that are reserved for the collegiate level and have difficulty translating to K-12 schools because they are too specific, advanced, or inappropriate for children. However, CRT does not fit those criteria,” Loyola University Maryland’s school of education said in a statement of solidarity. “We encourage teachers to use CRT to initiate complex dialogues about systems, structures, and race in our country. These conversations are vital to the collective work of eliminating barriers to opportunity and success, and are intended to promote solidarity, compassion, and care.”

Likewise, the nation’s largest teacher union, the National Education Association, endorsed CRT at its 100^th Representative Assembly this summer. The union vowed support and to lead campaigns that “result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, critical race theory, and ethnic … studies curriculum in pre-K-12 and higher education,” the trade publication EdWeek reported...

PEN America has also stated that “CRT is not taught in elementary, middle or high schools”...

One of the most frustrating claims of CRT for its critics is the idea that there is no objective truth, only the subjective perspectives of competing identity groups, and one’s identity can confer a special, almost prophetic, authority to interpret the human experience. Once opinions become a function of one’s identity, then it naturally follows that claims of oppression and microaggressions are unimpeachable, and objections to CRT can be dismissed as the exercise of white privilege and systemic racism.

“CRT’s adversaries are perhaps most concerned with what they perceive to be critical race theorists’ nonchalance about objective truth,” according to “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.”

“For the critical race theorist, objective truth, like merit, does not exist, at least in social science and politics,” the authors state. “In these realms, truth is a social construct created to suit the purposes of the dominant group.”...

Marvin Lynn, dubbed by Loyola University Maryland as a renowned education and CRT scholar, said that conservatives are correct that CRT can be found in K-12 schools "

Liberals will continue to gaslight about CRT not being taught in schools - at the same time as getting outraged that conservatives want to ban it. The best cope I saw was this liberal who first claimed Education Week ("Since 1981... America's most trusted resource for K-12 education news and information" with 1.6+ million readers") was an unreliable source then, when I quoted the NEA website, proclaimed that the NEA says that CRT "needs" to be taught, which is proof that it isn't taught

This is another great summary of the relationship between post-modernism and critical theory/grievance studies

Links - 1st January 2023 (1)

An AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place at a State Fair Fine Arts Competition, and Artists Are Pissed - "A man came in first at the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition using an AI generated artwork on Monday. “I won first place,” a user going by Sincarnate said in a Discord post above photos of the AI-generated canvases hanging at the fair. Sincarnate’s name is Jason Allen, who is president of Colorado-based tabletop gaming company Incarnate Games. According to the state fair’s website, he won in the digital art category with a work called “Théâtre D'opéra Spatial.”... Allen did not paint “Théâtre D'opéra Spatial,” AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital brush. This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs."

Lightning Strikes at Exact Moment Girlfriend Accepts Marriage Proposal - "Wedding photographer Danika Camba captured a once-in-a-lifetime photo when lightning struck at the exact moment a woman said “yes” to her boyfriend’s marriage proposal."

Actually, The Bug That Made Gandhi Drop Nukes In Civilization Is Just A Myth - "According to Meier's autobiography, a forum user named Tunafish claimed that Gandhi's affinity for nukes came from an overflow error. Every leader in Civ is assigned an aggression rating between 1 and 12. Gandhi's was 1, but get this: whenever a country adopted democracy, its leader's aggression rating automatically went down by two points. Because there was no way of reading a value for -1, Gandhi ended up going to zero, and then to the opposite end of the spectrum, boasting an aggression rating of 255. But again, this never happened. This purported "overflow error" was fabricated by an internet troll who was annoyed that Gandhi nuked them...   Despite the fact it was all made up, none of this new information makes it any less funny — and Meier himself is the first person to acknowledge that.  "Gandhi firing nukes is, and always has been, inherently funny, no matter how rarely it occurs""

UK tourist complains after holiday to Spain ruined by '˜too many Spaniards' - "Freda Jackson, 81, said she cried at the end of her two-week trip to the popular holiday destination through travel operator Thomas Cook"

Scott Stinson: In defence of the sports press conference - "tennis star Naomi Osaka announced on social media that she would not submit to the post-match question-and-answer sessions while at the French Open... tournament officials in Paris, joined by representatives from the other tennis Grand Slams, responded to Osaka’s first missed press session with a wildly over-the-top statement that threatened not just escalating fines, but possible disqualification and — the real kick in the pants — suspension from future events if she kept up the poor form... it has been weird to see so many, and in particular so many journalists, take this incident as proof that press conferences themselves are dumb and pointless, full stop... despite their flaws, press conferences are still the only efficient way to allow large numbers of media to interact with athletes and coaches. Beyond that, the answers that come from the podium fuel all kinds of coverage of the event and the sport. Those clips and comments go into print coverage, highlight shows, radio and Internet programming. They are also pushed out on social media, including sometimes by the social-media teams of the athletes themselves. It may be true that athletes are not paid directly for the time they spend speaking to the media, but the money that they do make is tied to media coverage of their sport. Broadcast fees, which have risen sharply in recent decades, have boosted salaries and prize money, and it’s those same broadcasters who naturally want press coverage to boost ratings, and interview clips that can be used on their programming... I’ve seen players and coaches use them to provide valuable insight about tactical adjustments. I’ve seen athletes explain the key moments in a match or tournament. I’ve seen coaches who are clearly annoyed with their players and players who are just as mad at their coaches and, sometimes, teammates. The media helps bring that stuff out. I haven’t seen too many players explain those things on Instagram. (Though they have been known to use a devastating googly-eyes emoji to get such a message across.)"
So much for do your job or get fired. It is more important to be brave and stunning

Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann confesses in newly unearthed tapes - "newly unearthed audio recordings of Adolf Eichmann reveal how the architect of the Holocaust described his role in organizing the “Final Solution.” For the first time, the Nazi war criminal, who maintained at his trial that he was nothing more than a “little cog” in the machine, can be heard, in his own words, defending the Holocaust that resulted in the death of six million Jews. “If we had killed 10.3 million Jews, I would say with satisfaction, ‘Good, we destroyed an enemy,'” Eichmann says in one of the recordings, referring to the total population of Jews in Europe at the time of the Second World War. “Then we would have fulfilled our mission.”  The recordings are contained in a 180-minute Israeli documentary series, The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes... In 1957, years after fleeing to Argentina after the Second World War, Eichmann recorded 70 hours of interviews in Buenos Aires. The interviews were conducted by a Dutch journalist and Nazi-sympathizer, Willem Sassen."
Clearly he was just a Jewish agent and this is misinformation to perpetuate the myth of the Holocaust

Nat on Twitter - "20-something: My rent is incr-
Some guy™: Why do you live somewhere so expensive? Have you considered moving to a dilapidated shack in a swamp? You think there aren’t jobs? ?? My buddy got a job kidnapping children for bog witches. It’s not glamorous but it pays well. This gen-
All jokes aside, people should not have to move away from their families, friends, and communities just to be able to afford to live. It’s not entitlement to want to stay where you’ve put down roots, or in many cases, where you’ve lived your entire life."
Of course, the irony is that these are the people who oppose densification and development

Meme - "Watch me make a grown adult their 6am milkshake *Starbucks*"

I didn't poop for a month — but it got me 244,000 followers - "A woman has kept hundreds of thousands of viewers captivated with her battle to be able to poop again after more than a month of pain and unsuccessful attempts.  Cherine Docherty, 39, began documenting her constipation consternation after mysteriously developing bowel problems in February 2022 and is now living with a colostomy bag following months of treatments for an unknown ailment"

Meme - "Have over 400 gallons regular gasoline willing to trade only (Austin)
I am blessed to have over 400 gallons of gasoline. I dont want money am only looking to exchange up to 15 gallons for anal sex. Me giving it to you. Both men and women are welcome but the men need to be very attractive as that is not my prefered sex, will wear a condom and use organic lubricant, there will be no filming or photos, I dont want anyone else to know either, so lets agree to keep it hush. If you are interested send pics so know if it is worth it."

This is a 3200-year old attendance sheet found in Deir el-Medina, Egypt. Reasons for worker absence include "embalming brother", "brewing beer" and "bitten by scorpion" : interestingasfuck

Meme - "Muhammad (53): 'I love you so much'
Aisha (9): 'Like a daughter right?'
'like a daughter right?'"

Is it time to increase maximum speed limits? - The Globe and Mail - "If you were to design the perfect speed trap, it would look a lot like Ontario. Its highway speed limits are among the lowest in the developed world. It's illegal to use a radar detector, and there's a law that allows roadside car seizures and fines of up to $10,000 for drivers caught exceeding the limit by 50 km/h.  Speeding tickets are an Ontario growth industry... "They set the limit low, so everyone speeds," says Chris Klimek, founder of Stop100.ca, an advocacy group. "The whole thing is a cash grab."... I started thinking about the logic of speed enforcement. Cruising on Hwy 401, I realized that the vast majority of traffic was travelling well above the 100 km/h limit; the median speed appeared to be in the 120 km/h range.  As a test, I set my cruise control for 100 and travelled from Toronto to Windsor, a distance of just under 400 km. In my four-hour trip, I was passed by hundreds of cars, including several OPP cruisers – almost no one obeyed the posted limit, including the police. "There is a natural speed all over the planet," says Klimek. "And it's not 100. It's 130. That's the speed we gravitate to. We don't want to be criminalized for driving at a safe and responsible speed." For politicians, selling a speed limit is not unlike selling a war – to get a buy-in, the public must believe that your cause is right. With a war, you sell freedom and justice. And when it comes to speed limits, you sell safety. For decades, police have pushed the idea that speed kills, and that the only way to make highways safe is by enforcing strict speed limits.  But does speed really kill?... highway safety involves more than theoretical calculation. According to the World Health Organization, for example, it's safer to drive in Germany, home of the fastest highways in the world, than it is in Canada: WHO data shows that Germany's death rate is 6.9 per 100,000 cars. Canada's rate is 13.  In countless studies on the relationship between speed and risk, although there is general agreement that lower speeds are theoretically safer, researchers have learned that real-world safety can involve a mind-boggling set of variables. Setting an artificially low limit, for example, can actually make a road more dangerous by creating a greater speed differential between the slowest and fastest drivers. One of the most interesting studies on speed was published in 1964 by researcher David Solomon, who developed a graph that became known as "the Solomon Curve." After plotting data gathered from over 10,000 highway crashes, Solomon showed that the likelihood of being in a crash follows a U-shaped curve, and that the drivers travelling at the traffic's median speed (such as the drivers doing 120 km/h on Hwy 401) were least likely to be involved in an accident. So is speed enforcement designed to make the roads safer, or is it a form of taxation? According to autoinsurance.org, speeding tickets generate more than $5-billion in revenue for North American municipalities each year. They also generate $10.2-billion in extra revenue for insurance companies, who add an average of $300 in surcharges for each ticket. The site also found an inverse relationship between municipal growth and speed enforcement – on average, a 10 per cent decline in a city's economic growth resulted in a 6.4 per cent increase in tickets issued. For a failing municipality, speeding tickets can serve as a "sin tax" (a category that also includes casinos and lotteries)... speed limits can also be set for political reasons – such as when the U.S. lowered the national limit to 55 mph during the 1970's oil crisis. Politics also played a role in Ontario.  Back in the 1960s and early '70s, the limit on Ontario highways was 113 km/h. Under pressure from the U.S., the province lowered the limit to 100 km/h in 1976.  And that's where it remains today, even though most other jurisdictions have since raised theirs. Most U.S. states have a 70 mph (113 km/h) limit. The highest speed limit in North America is 85 mph (140 km/h) on Texas's State Highway 130. Ontario's low limit is often defended on the basis of speed elasticity – the assumption that drivers will automatically exceed the posted limit by a certain margin. By this reasoning, increasing the limit could lead to speeds that are beyond the highway's safe design limits.  Or maybe it wouldn't. On Highway 130 in Texas (where the limit is 140 km/h) traffic studies have shown that more than 86 per cent of drivers operate at or below the limit... "If limits are set artificially low, drivers will break them consistently. Compliance is partly due to perceived reasonableness.""

Armando on Twitter - "how do people who "hate small talk" plan on being in sustained meaningful relationships what are you gonna do "hi honey i'm home do you think freewill truly exists?""

Florida man breaks into woman's home to pet family cat - "A Florida woman said she was startled when she woke up last month to find her neighbor petting her cat... Cline said the man got away, but he returned Wednesday morning. This time, Cline was ready for him, as were police.  "I can't believe he came back," Cline said.  Jasper Fiorenza, 24, was arrested on charges of burglary and resisting an officer without violence."

mack on Twitter - "a condom?? babe think of the turtles"

Meme - "I did IQ research as a grad student, and it involved a lot of this stuff. Did you know that most people (95%+) with less than 90 IQ can't understand conditional hypotheticals?
For example:
>How would you have felt yesterday evening if you hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch?
>What do you mean? I did eat breakfast and lunch.
>Yes, but if you had not, how would you have felt?
>Why are you saying that I didn't eat breakfast? I just told you that I did.
>Imagine that you hadn't eaten it, though. How would you have felt?
>I don't understand the question.
It's really fascinating. We did research on convicts in San Quentin. They're absolute fucking retards, at least 50% illiterate.
Other interesting phenomenon around IQ involves recursion. For example:
>Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue.
Most literate people can manage this, specially once you give them an example.
>Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue. In this story, one of the characters must be describing a story with at least two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue.
If you have less than 90 IQ, this second exercise is basically completely impossible. Add a third level ('frame') to the story, and even IQ 100's start to get mixed up with the names and who's talking. Turns out Scheherazade was an IQ test!
Time is practically impossible to understand for sub 80's. They exist only in the present, can barely reflect on the past and can't plan for the future at all. Sub 90's struggle with anachronism too. For example, I remember the 80-85's stumbling on logic problems that involved common sense anachronism stuff. For instance:
>Why do you think that military strategists in WWII didn't use laptop computers to help develop their strategies?
>I guess they didn't want to get hacked by nazis?
Admittedly you could argue that this is a history knowledge question, not quite a logic sequencing question, but you get the idea.
Sequencing is super hard for them to track, but most 100+ have no problem with it, although I imagine that a movie like Memento strains them a little.
Recursion was definitely the killer, though. Recursive thinking and recursive knowledge seems genuinely hard for people of even average intelligence (although at San Quentin there weren't too many of those!)
It's the main reason why so many people with sub-90 IQ are sociopathic or psychopathic. They don't have the mental computing power to model other people's thoughts and feelings. I've seen it millions of times with convicts.
>How do you think that man felt when you beat him?
>Dunno.
>How do you think that boy's mother felt when she heard that her son was dead?
>Dunno.
It comes across as psychopathic, but these people literally don't have the brainpower to build even a crude model of someone else's mind, let alone populate it with events that are in the past.
I forgot to mention another important part of abstract reasoning, which is 'mapping'. Basically, expressing one thing in terms of another.
For example:
>Imagine a picture of an arrow, colored in a gradient from yellow to green, following the direction of the arrow.
>Imagine a one-way residential street, with ascending house numbers, with the lowest number being at the entrance of the street and the highest number being at the exit.
>If you mapped the arrow onto the street, what color would house number 1 be?
This question really isn't tricky for most 100+s. It has some minor ambiguities, but anyone of normal intelligence can do the 'mapping': that is, the expression of one thing in terms of another.
However, for sub-90's, this stuff is REALLY difficult. They struggle terribly with it. Sub 80's just can't do it at all. Anything under 90 will routinely make errors with even commonplace mapping (like subway maps, time schedules, etc.) Sub 85s start to get into the territory where they can't learn to read, as symbolic mapping of phonemes (or even morphemes) even with constant drilling, is just too tricky.
Maths is another area I could get into, but the long and the short of it is that it's heavily decided by IQ. That's a bit tautological, since it's a principal IQ measurement, but you know what I mean.
As for the criminial narcissists etc: I honestly don't know. However, sufficiently high IQ autists can emulate theory of mind, and do. If you're smart enough, you can build a little simulator in your brain. You also need to be smart enough to appreciate the utility of it. I suspect that any autist or narcissist over 120 can do this stuff regularly without getting tired, but it's like playing a strenuous game of chess for them. They really don't have the 'hardware' for empathy."

Meme - "Someone should make a haunted house where it's not that scary and the props look poorly made, but the Exit is fake and the real haunted house begins when you think you've left it."

Meme - "Old Left vs. the Modern Left."
Old left 1971: Resist Authority
*NO* CIA
Screw the establishment
Free Speech Free Love
Modern left 2021: OBEY THE ESTABLISHMENT
*NO* Free Speech
<3 CDC
Mask up!
Do what you're told"

Facebook - "Most British citizens will not immediately spot anything significant or out of the ordinary with these photos. For Malaysians who were days away from Bersih 3.0 in 2012, Najib arranged for yellow T-shirts and other items related to Bersih to be banned. Then on the eve of the protest itself, Najib fled the country on one of his many overseas 'working trips'. An official visit to London was part of the overall trip itinerary, calling in on her majesty as well. Of all the colours Her Majesty and team of advisers could have chosen for the Queen's dress that day...... Yellow was chosen. Kudos your Majesty!"
From 2015

Feedy TV - Posts | Facebook - "Crispy skin fried pork castle"

Facebook - "OIympic gold medallist Joseph Schooling is in hot water. He’s admitted trying cannabis, once, while overseas. Did he commit a crime? Short answer: no. For those who want to take a deep dive into the law, here it is. The key legal provision is Section 8A of the Misuse of Drugs Act. It lists cannabis as a controlled drug. It says a Singapore citizen or permanent resident who “is found as a result of urine tests” to have consumed a controlled drug commits an offence. Schooling wasn’t found to have consumed cannabis “as a result of urine tests”. He passed his urine tests (i.e. no drugs were found in his urine samples)... Why was Section 8A written this way? In the 1990s, Singaporean addicts were making trips to and from neighbouring countries to get their fixes. That made a mockery of our anti-drug laws, which at the time didn’t prohibit consumption of drugs outside Singapore... That’s something to bear in mind, when we consider the outcry on social media, and the calls to cancel Schooling. When it was reported that Schooling admitted taking cannabis, but wasn’t being prosecuted, it set off a wave of protests. People complained that, in not charging Schooling, the authorities were guilty of favourtism... Should we hold Schooling to a higher standard because he's a national sportsman? That's not how the law works."
Meanwhile, in countries where marijuana is legal...

Meme - "Didn't pay for his overseas training. Check. Gave him deferment for National Service and made it sound like he owed them the favour. Check. Humiliated him when he didn't win the latest Olympics, even though his dad was sick. Check. Publicly shamed and provoked his sponsors to pull out deals with him through the use of newspaper mouthpieces when he admitted to taking weed overseas. Check. Completely revoke his "privileges" (lmao) to train during NS, effectively ending his swimming career. Check. Double-down on drug policies despite the overwhelming evidence of weed's relative lack of harm as evidenced by multiple independently-led scientific studies and meta-reviews compared to tobacco and alcohol (to the point where the UN/WHO has rescheduled the substance), under the guise of protecting Singaporeans. Check. Place highly condescending articles in Straits Times by impotent editors saying "A Hero Fell Down, Let's Pick Him Up", or some pretentious shit. Check. Hold his prize money for Hanoi SEA games. Check. Classic Singapore. Treating people like used condoms. Perhaps we should start seeing this country as a condom too. Discard after use, tyvm."
Drugs are one of the sacred cows in Singapore after all

Meme - "Player: I'm going to play a entertainer fighter who uses the power of dance
DM: weird, how would that w...oooooh
How it works: *Rasputin fight in the King's Man*"

Asbestos, The Twin Towers and 9/11 - "WHEN THE FIRE ALARM WENT OFF, IT TOOK TWO HOURS TO EVACUATENEW YORK'S WORLD TRADE CENTRE.
The bigger the building, the more important fire-proofing becomes. That’s why today’s buildings have asbestos-cement walls and even floors containing asbestos. Asbestos contains fire, cannot burn and holds up after metal and glass have melted down, giving vital time for people to escape. You’ll also find asbestos sealing plumbing joints, insulating heating pipes, electric motors and emergency generators. Asbestos.  We couldn’t live the way we do without it.
When life depends on it, you use asbestos."

Meme - "Soyman 28 Income: 150k Becky 30 Income: 120k
"we just cant afford kids right now"
"I cant see us being able to afford children until we're at least in our mid- late 30s"
"People aren't having kids because of the economy"
Meanwhile...
Muhammad 25 Income: 0 Abidah 22 Income: 0"

Meme - "Justin Gray
On the first pic is me and the second is how my wife should look like. White (required, i have high standards), blonde, petite (nothing taller than 165cm or 5'5), innocent looking and virgin.
About me i'm the typical alpha male, tall as hell
(196cm or 6'5) so i will protect you from beta short males approaching you. Rich, confident and manly looking as hell.
Open for volunteers"

Meme - "Welcome to Ang Mo Kio
Yip Hon Weng
Welcome to Yio Chu Kang!"

Meme - "HER : I DO NOT GIVE ANY MIXED SIGNALS
ALSO HER:
*Spanish flag*
American
English French toast
 Made in China"

Meme - "Oh you're posting on an alt? Why don't you use your real photo and name so I can call your employer and get you fired for disagreeing with my retarded world views???"

Kathy Griffin slammed for saying Republicans will start a 'Civil War' - "Kathy Griffin is catching heat Wednesday following a political tweet some social media watchdogs are now calling out as “threatening.”  The controversial standup comic threw herself into the fiery pits of Twitter when she suggested that if Americans want to endure a fatal historical throwback — then they should vote for red in the forthcoming election.  “If you don’t want a Civil War, vote for Democrats in November. If you do want Civil War, vote Republican”"

Cynde Moya on Twitter - "Remote login is a lot like astral projection."

Pie Chart of Dark Desert Highway : charts - *Hotel California lyrics*

Meme - "Kaspersky
YOUR CHILD SEARCHED RESTRICTED TOPICS
Strairdrac The Netherwatcher searched for ”Teaching crabs how to read" which is considered forbidden knowledge under your current parental control settings."

Meme - "I've accidentally set up push notifications for the BBC science magazine and it's like being followed about by an inquisitive but annoying child
Why am I seeing stars after bumping my head?
What would happen if there were no Moon?
Where do sound waves end up?
Do plants die of old age?
Why do the British talk about the weather so much?"

Meme - "You know what the Green Heron is basically the best heron because it is like 90% neck so when it is all folded down it looks like a giant head with wings and legs but then suddenly ZOOP" "

Coming back into my son's life PRANK (fuck that lil nigga!) (EMOTIONAL) - YouTube

Meme - "people beating up the blind kid for saying the n-word
"me who told him he's black *popcorn*"

Meme - "Girls with the time machine:
I am your granddaughter
Really?
Boys with the time machine:
Looks at those jewish milkers
Hitler: How wrong i was... "
Addendum: This features Abby Shapiro

Meme - "Friendly reminder that anime is a form of insidious propaganda used to distract people from japan's war crimes"

Meme - "Art work that was appreciated before WW2-
Art work that was appreciated after WW2-
They just made sure that everybody can go to art school now"