“This, in spite of the fact that, since 9/11/01, white supremacist and other right-wing extremist hate groups have killed twice as many people and committed more than twice as many overall domestic terrorist attacks than Muslim extremists. Yet which image is it that is conjured up with mention of the word “terrorist”?”
The bullet-hole-sprayed recruitment center for the Navy Marines in Chattanooga, Tennessee
It took less than a few hours after the death of Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, who shot and killed five U.S. Marines at a Marine training center in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Thursday, for the FBI to announce that the shooting would be investigated as an act of “domestic terrorism”. The corporate media, always true to form, began immediately speculating over whether Abdulazeez’s actions were perhaps inspired or directed by I.S.I.L. or some other self-proclaimed jihadist terror group. The contrast to the response in the aftermath of last month’s vicious attack on a Black Church in Charleston, South Carolina by avowed an white supremacist, Dylann Storm Roof, which left nine parishioners dead, couldn’t have been more stark. Initial reports in the wake of the Charleston Church Massacre seemed at a loss for words over what possibly could have motivated this obviously
View original post 1,153 more words
Marmalade 
Some people will comment on the ratio or somethig. Ex: fewer killed by Muslims but that’s cause there’s less Muslims in America than whites.
A bit like how total jail and welfare is higher for whites but percentage wise the black rate is higher.
Who ones?
Most Americans don’t belong to white supremacist and other right-wing hate groups. Still, these groups sure kill a lot of people for their relatively small proportion of the population.
Before 9/11, the largest bombings were by right-wingers. Whites have high rates off terrorism and hate crimes, even excluding all the white police brutality against minorities. For decades long before Americans worried about Islamic terrorists, anti-abortion crazies had been threatening, kidnapping, murdering, bombing, and committing arson. Whites in general commit a lot of mass shootings. This wave of white violence, mostly right-wing, continues to this day
Anyway, most Americans are white, most murderers are white, and most victims are white. Sure, it is mostly a violent sub-population of white people committing most of the terrorism and violent crime, but that is true for blacks and Muslims as well. It’s a tiny fraction of a percentage of blacks who commit most acts of crime and violence. If it isn’t fair to broadbrush all white people, why is it fair to broadbrush all black people or all Muslims?
It shouldn’t surrpise anyone that a white president in a mostly white government, as a response to 9/11, chose to start two illegal wars of aggression against dark-skinned poor people, two wars that killed several hundred times as many innocent people as did 9/11. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that this same white president and government illegally opened a secret prison and illegally committed torture. Illegal and immoral state violence is still terrorism.
Also, if we are to be fair and accurate, we have to apportion violence according to ancestral genetic percentages. Obama is half white and so 50% of his following Bush’s bad example must still go to whites. Also, the average black has a large percentage of white. That comes out to about 20-25% of black crime that needs to be placed with the white crime data.
Furthermore, Arabs are technically Caucasians. Most Muslisms are Arabs and so we need to include Islamic terrorism as part of the right-wing white violence data. The same goes for most Hispanics who are white.
Still, Wray says anxiety among whites over their place in America is nothing new. Some 19th century whites worried about slave revolts. During segregation. some worried about blacks they labeled as “uppity Negroes.”
“Whites have never really felt terribly secure in their majority status,” he says. “It’s often said that it is lonely at the top, but it’s also an anxious place to be, because you live in constant fear of falling.”
Wise says the recession hit blue-collar, white Americans hard, financially and psychologically.
Many white Americans have lived under the assumption that if they worked hard, they would be rewarded. Now more white Americans are sharing unemployment lines with “those people” — black and brown, Wise says.
“For the first time since the Great Depression, white Americans have been confronted with a level of economic insecurity that we’re not used to,” he says. “It’s not so new for black and brown folks, but for white folks, this is something we haven’t seen since the Depression.”
Until the Civil War, South Carolina was majority black. Other Southern states at the time had large black populations. Even states like Kentucky that are part of Appalachia used to have a lot of blacks, even though today we associate those places with whites. Blacks used to be a much greater percentage of the population before the large waves of ethnic immigrants.
But, as you know, even those early ethnic immigrants (Irish, Italians, Germans, etc) weren’t always considered white. Also, after the Civil War, Southern whites weren’t embraced with open arms when they migrated north looking for jobs. There was no sense of a unified white majority until well into the 20th century.
It was probably the Civil Rights movement more than anything that finally got WASPs and various hyphenated Americans to put their differences aside. Though it began to develop a little earlier. Decades before the Civil Rights movement, the Second KKK started to become more inclusive beyond just WASPs, once it became more established in the ethnically mixed northern states.
As for German-Americans, it required to world wars involving Germany as our enemy before their ethnic independence was broken. Forcing them to assimilate finally created the basis for a unified white identity, since they were the single largest ethnic population in the entire country.
Those hyphenated Americans had little interest in just being good whiteys. They had their own proud cultures and histories. The anxiety those people had were directed toward the forces of mainstream WASP culture seeking to destroy their communities and way of life. Their anxieties were well founded. It certainly wasn’t the black population that was threatening them.
Lmao
“Some white commentators are unapologetic about this racial anxiety.
Peter Brimelow, author of “Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster,” asserts that much of white America’s anxiety derives from living under a black president and changing demographics.
Diversity, he says, “is not strength.”
Brimelow’s website, VDARE.COM, has been described as a hate site by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks extremist groups in the U.S.
Some may see him as extreme, but Brimelow argues in his columns that more white Americans are moving toward his stance on immigration and other issues.
He cites as proof the rise of the Tea Party movement and the racial makeup of Beck’s march on Washington. He says more whites recognize, even if it’s only on a subliminal level, that they have common interests to defend.
“Of course, they would deny this, quite sincerely, if you put it to them because the idea of whites defending their interests as whites is quite new,” he says. “Americans are trained to think that any explicit defense of white interests is ‘racist.’ ”
Sociologist Charles Gallagher says more whites regard themselves as an embattled minority group.
James Edwards, host of the “Political Cesspool” radio show, isn’t shy about naming those interests. He says white Americans have become the “dispossessed majority” and that coming demographic changes may turn the United States into a “Third-World flop-house.”
Edwards, who is considered a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, says whites must organize like other stigmatized groups.
“There is nothing wrong for Jewish organizations to promote the self-interest of Jews or black organizations to promote the interest of blacks,” he says. “There is no organization to stand up to advance the interests of the dispossessed majority.”
Those white interests have been compromised by what he sees as the “preferential treatment” blacks have received in the job market to compensate for slavery, Edwards says.
“Whatever mistakes might have been made in our pasts, they have not only been corrected, but they’ve been overcompensated for,” he says.
Now whites are victims of pervasive racism, Edwards says.
“They’re the victims of it every day. Anything a white conservative does that a liberal doesn’t like is called racism.”
Both Brimelow and Edwards reject outright the Southern Poverty Law Center’s description of their organizations as extremist.
https://archive.is/qVOGv
Interesting that this “Larry Murdoch” person who supposedly wrote this has no online presence at all, no real specifics are given about his credentials, and the email they give for him is avigoldberg@gmail.com. Why do I get the feeling that this article, which basically regurgitates their white supremacist talking points, was written by a sockpuppet from American Renaissance?
Their whole pseudo intellectual angle is an irritating gimmick: We’re just being realistic about the facts, so don’t be closed minded, blah blah. It’s just Storm Front in a cheap rented tuxedo. It’s their version of “Intelligent Design.” It’s the same warmed over nonsense presented in an intellectual looking manner.
The writing style didn’t seem natural. It felt forced. I assume it is a fiction piece. It appears to be the fantasy of how a white race realist would imagine a black guy sounding like if he finally confessed to their own race’s inferiority. It’s kind of amusing when you peer into someone’s imagination like that.
The economy is collapsing.
Labor isn’t worth shit, and soon enough we will have drastically more people than realistic jobs. Anything mass produced will be done outside the country and shipped in, or done by automation, also possibly outside the country.
This will leave most jobs as “service jobs” aka Teaching, Healthcare, Food Prep, etc. Eventually even those jobs will likely be mostly replaced by automation. Its only a matter of time before self driving cars becomes self driving container ships with automated unloading/loading at large scale ports, when trains become self driving, when trailer trucks become self driving, etc.
Realistically we need to be converting to a society/economy where it is not expected for “everyone” to hold down a job. As likely within my life time or my childrens lifetimes the prospect of holding a job even things like fast food will be highly unlikely.
Things like ACA/Obamacare are only furthering us towards this. “How many people does your business employee?” “myself, and nobody else, sometimes were contract out to a maintance/repair company for the robots” and suddenly the entire cost of healthcare insurance is gone, the entire cost of employee benefits is gone, so many costs are simply gone and replaced by effective automated options that will not call in sick sunday morning because they got wasted saturday night, that will not cheat you at the register, and you don’t have to worry about them having there own lives and doing there own thing.
Eliminating loads of costs while also having an infinitely more dependable work force is the dream of basically every business owner/operator.
Eventually technology will get us there. The issue is if society can handle it.
While I am an anarcho capitalist, I think we can both agree that today’s regulations has no benefits for people, but benefits the companies we should be protected against.
The famous one is Obamacare, aka blue Cross Blue Shield mandatory health insurance act. Where the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, medical doctors, pharmacists, and the health care industry paid for a law to help them.
The people lost. The politicians and corporations won.
Government in 2015 will never help the people. There is too much money in politics to help anyone other than the companies paying for it.
I think it’s going to be hard to find an argument that more government is better, considering the past 3 decades.
permalinksaveparentreportgive goldreply
[–]Uzgob 2 points an hour ago
I completely agree that Obamacare turned into a complete fuck up. It was too complex and had too many loopholes to accomplish its goal. The only credit I can give it is for bringing the idea of overpriced healthcare to the national stage.
I believe that government should do things in the way that costs the least amount of money. So if a road needs to be built, and the army corp of engineers can do it cheaper, then they do it. Regardless of external agreements. Also if were not using something we shouldn’t spend a lot of money on it, like the military.
Also I agree that most if not all of our politicians are corrupt. I would prefer if everyone woke up and voted the entire congress out of office, since most seem to be oversized man children.
permalinksaveparentreportgive goldreply
[–]florideWeakensUrWill 2 points an hour ago
Upvoted for trying to discuss the issue rather than downvotes and name calling. Reminds me of reddit years ago.
We both agree that the politicians are terrible for us today, but I want to know how more government would ever provide a benefit? I mean, aside from roads and police, does the government do anything particularly well?
I’m a strong believer in less government for this reason. It doesn’t understand an industry and the relationship with customers but it makes laws about this relationship. They tax and spend on things most people would never voluntarily pay for.
I would like to comment on this. After the 2008 market crash, some members of my Union were not willing to take concessions and more than willing to have low seniority members laid off for the the theoretical better contract that was never going to happen. These delusional baby boomers couldn’t give a fuck about anyone, but themselves.
As a steward, I had people crying in my office due to the fear of getting laid off in a terrible job market who either just bought a house and/or started a family. I was really appalled by some of the callous behavior of certain baby boomers had towards those unfortunate individuals. I don’t think they even realized how bad things were, because they were so out of touch with reality. Anyway the contract eventually passed and the layoffs averted, but close friendships were completely destroyed when selfish assholes really showed their true colors.
A 50 year old being laid off is likely fucked for good. They probably haven’t saved enough to retire on at that point, it may be much harder to get re-hired, and if they do it may be at a much lower pay level.
A 20 year old being laid off is likely fucked for only a little while. They haven’t even started saving for retirement, they have a long time to recover and they will find it easier to get hired once things pick up.
It sucks for both but I can see why older people might adopt a seeming callous position.
permalinksaveparentreportgive goldreply
[–]hatestheinternet 14 points an hour ago
A 20 year old being laid off is likely fucked for only a little while.
And that logic is how the 20 year old ends up a 50 year old with no money saved for retirement. “Oh, he’s only 30, he can recover”. “Oh, he’s only 40, it’ll be harder for the 50 year old.”
Fucking over the “younger” people for a small benefit is EXACTLY why we’re in the situation we’re in.
And his most famous kid Judith has a tested iq 174, well into the gifted range. The other kids are chess masters so they are probably well into that range as well.
“He is also considered a pioneer theorist in child-rearing, who believes “geniuses are made, not born”. Polgár’s experiment with his daughters has been called “one of the most amazing experiments…in the history of human education.”[1] He has been “portrayed by his detractors as a Dr. Frankenstein” and viewed by his admirers as “a Houdini,” noted Peter Maas in the Washington Post in 1992.[2]”
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20877035-bring-up-genius
I do think we could be a lot more intelligent and intentional about how kids are raised. It’s amazing that more kids don’t turn out even worse, considering the conditions kids are forced to grow up in.
Yeah, the pressure to be beautiful, often artificially so, can be extreme in Korea.
That being said, plastic surgery is such a touchy subject. For example, whenever American media publications run a story about Asian plastic surgery, a lot of Asians, especially Asian women, seem to become very defensive. Even those that have not had any procedures done and decry the prevalence of these procedures become angry. Based on a lot of the responses that I’ve read, the gut reaction seems to be: “These White women think they’re so much better than us that they think we all want to be like them!”
I can understand the irritation that Asians feel when non-Asians obsess over and gawk at a select few things that seem to titillate their preconceived notions (e.g. Western media constantly publishing stories that imply that Japanese men are impotent or asexual). At the same time, this defensiveness over plastic surgery can swing to the other extreme where you have Asian progressive types circling the wagons to deny that procedures like double eyelid surgeries, nose jobs, and jaw shaving have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WHATSOEVER with internalized racism or idealizing White features, even though Asians themselves in these countries commonly associate the combination of big eyes, tall noses, and narrow faces as “Caucasian.”
Also, this Asian outrage over plastic surgery sometimes has the danger of becoming a “Tsk tsk tsk, Asians” diatribe espoused by Asian Americans who may not have the full context of the origins of these procedures and why they’ve become popular. American publications can easily use these stories to portray Asian society as superficial and backwards and pit Asian Americans against Asian Asians. Meanwhile, White Americans sit back and implicitly portray themselves as being above all this, even though White standards of beauty that were/are aggressively pushed by White sources bear a lot of responsibility for all this.
A happy ending
http://www.upworthy.com/a-convicted-felon-couldnt-get-anyone-to-take-a-chance-and-hire-him-until-one-company-did?c=ufb1
Now if we could just multiply that happy ending by a few million, the number of unemployed ex-cons.
I miss my distinctly flavored veggies in japan. All the veggies here are bland and taste the same
http://gaia-health.com/natural-health/food/why-american-european-fruits-and-vegetables-have-no-flavor/
I wonder if that is a major reason for Americans eating unhealthy foods. The foods that are supposedly healthy don’t taste all that great. Maybe Americans would eat better if they had access to high quality, tasty, nutritious fruits and vegetables.
It’s sort of like wondering why there are social problems in neighborhoods with high rates of poverty, unemployment, and homelessness. We Americans don’t appreciate how much we are shaped by the choices and opportunities around us (or lack thereof). If the worst choices are the most available, cheapest, etc, most people will make bad choices. Why is this simple insight so hard for Americans to grasp?
Americans live such crappy lives that they have come to see it as normal. Few Americans can imagine it being any other way. Take the food example. Recent generations have grown up having tasted only mediocre fruits and vegetables. It’s a rare American that grows their own heirloom tomatoes or goes to a farmers’ market, especially as many places have no farmers’ markets. How are Americans supposed to know that lettuce isn’t supposed to taste bland?
If we can’t imagine something, we won’t seek it out.
I love it!
But now I’m getting tainted by gifted parents. “That’s my kid in the future so you better be nice to him!”
These parents just say this lady was a born blessed by god kid who didn’t suffer the way their kids do
This lady has passion I like that. I love seeing more and more women having their accomplishments recognized
http://www.upworthy.com/does-cancer-follow-the-rules-of-math-this-scientist-certainly-thinks-so-and-shes-onto-something?c=ufb2
I always appreciate hearing about people who are talented at something like that. I’ve never had much talent in math, and even though it is beyond my comprehension it is nice to hear someone like that taking knowledge in a new direction. I expect that as women increasingly enter fields they were excluded from that they will bring new perspectives with them.
What do you thinks of my links from the other thread?
Here’s another cool woman,
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=879634578739523&substory_index=0&id=316489315054055
Not only was it a woman who saved thousands of American lives, but worse still she did it through the power of government regulation.
“What do you thinks of my links from the other thread?”
Do you mean from my other post, Gangs as Civic Institutions?
I haven’t been on the internet much this week. I normally use my Kindle Fire to access my blog and such, but it died. I’ve been using my Kindle Fire more than anything. I haven’t owned a standard computer in a while and I still have little desire to get one.
I came over to my parents’ place today. I’m using my mom’s laptop right now.
I need to get a new device sometime. I may not be spending as much time responding to comments until that happens. I don’t know when I’ll buy something new, as I don’t exactly feel in a hurry. I do have another Kindle that has internet connection, but it isn’t as nice for that purpose.
I’m trying to decide what kind of device I might get next. I’m not sure I was all that happy with my Kindle Fire. It had limitations. I liked its size and it mostly served my purposes with the keyboard case, but the web browser was a bit glitchy. I need to look around to see what is available. I’m thinking I might want something like a small notebook computer, something that would be easy to carry around in my backpack.
I’ve been spending less time on certain internet activities, such as social media. The main thing I do with the internet these days is blogging or blog-related activities. The internet can be an endless distraction and takes away time from reading books, one of my favorite activities. I try to be careful about how I spend my time. I’ve been trying to refocus. I want to get back into genealogy research.
Also, I sometimes feel like retreating from the world. I can only handle so much socializing before I begin to shut down. Even too much comment dialogue on the internet can psychologically drain me.
I can’t promise you I’ll always respond to everything you post. Believe it or not, sometimes I just don’t have an opinion about a particular article or whatever. And sometimes I just don’t feel motivated enough to formulate and communicate an opinion.
Anyway, I’ll look back to that other thread, assuming you mean the post you’ve been mostly commenting on. I’ll see if I have anything to add.
http://m.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1495043/good-man-hard-find-chinas-leftover-women-look-love-abroad?page=all
So poor men and rich women aren’t desired? That seems to align with traditional gender norms.
http://m.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1567158/chinas-real-problem-leftover-men?page=all
I liked this comment to the second article:
“History has three main ways of dealing with leftover men: more monks, more homosexuality, start a war.”
That sounds about right. Under present circumstances of modernity, the second and third options seem the most likely. I doubt the Chinese government is going to encourage the leftover men to become monks. They won’t encourage homosexuality either, but that is inevitable with that gender ratio. Many people have thought China will be forced to go to war, if only to deal with its demographic problems.
Наш странный мир
http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/07/new-report-sparks-discussion-of-chinas-bachelor-crisis/
I’m cool with it since it’s a private school, but dang, my good public school couldn’t match this place in it’s perks offered!! It’s rare to see languages offered since Kingergarden, even though languages are better learned young. And that many languages! Wow! Seems like a place I’d love to attend.
Even my classes often had over 30 kids and our school cut a lot of programs due to budget cuts 😦
http://www.schillingschool.org/upper-school-2/
It’s plain stupid to wait until high school to teach another language. Everyone knows its stupid. Yet that is still what most of the education system continues to do. We know what works and still refuse to do it.
Now do you know why I don’t want to raise kids in NYC?
http://nypost.com/2015/01/19/lunatic-exams-citys-unfair-gifted-tests/
That is plain idiotic. What is the point? It’s not even serving most of the supposedly brightest of the brightest.
I’m not even sure the test is all that valid. Has it been scientifically tested to show that it actually measures all that it claims to be measuring? Also, many kids with immense potential wouldn’t test well at 4 years old.
This sounds more like another thing that middle-to-upper class parents obsess over. I bet lots of money is spent on special classes, tutors, and materials in preparing 4 year olds for a test that determines their entire future.
“The real tragedy, of course, is the truly unforgivable ways the city schools system fails to even try to do right by the children. Fixing the Gifted & Talented test would be just one tiny step toward fixing our broken system.”
Once again, why not just improve education for all kids? Giving high quality education to a few hundred kids is no way to operate a well functioning education system. It certainly won’t contribute to a well functioning society.
http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20150518/carroll-gardens/7-things-know-about-sending-your-kid-gifted-talented-school
喜欢這个城市但是我想起来学校的事情我就生气
http://m.nydailynews.com/opinion/editorial-best-nyc-brightest-article-1.2181151
Comments at the first link:
Nicany:
“I’ve had the displeasure of working in a school for gifted children and these kids are not as well rounded as is believed to be. Some of these kids have some serious psychological problems but are made to get over it and focus on their “genius” instead. They’re so spoiled by those around them that they become intolerable when they meet people who will not bow down to them. And the parents are just as obnoxious as their children are. They don’t know how to be themselves when you take them to a playground!! One little girl having told me once that she will not slide down the slide because of all the contaminants that exists on it. She doesn’t want germs all over her. I witness a kid hit one of these gifted kids because he push the other off the swing. He felt he should be allowed on the swing because he considered himself special. The other was nothing to him. So he got smacked. Deserved it too.”
Gold0105:
“the absolute NERVE of the city to allow a freakin gifting and talented program when the city doesnt even have enough money to have a freakin art teacher and a gym teacher in each school. DISGUSTING.”
What do you think of this idea regarding iq tests?
“Finally, virtually every expert agrees that the exams are better suited to detect learning disabilities than to divine infinitesimal degrees of brightness.
Here is the full conclusion:
“Finally, virtually every expert agrees that the exams are better suited to detect learning disabilities than to divine infinitesimal degrees of brightness. In reality, a 99 is the same as a 98 is the same as a 97. All kids who score, say, at least 90 should be equally eligible for admission by lottery.”
It’s a good point.
At best, testing at that age isn’t going to be able to show much other than the extremes of differences. A 4 year old that tested at 99 isn’t necessarily going to be more cognitively advanced a decade or two later than the 4 year old that tested at 90. Heck, a 4 year old that only tests at 80 or even 80 might later on show immense academic ability and talent.
A kid at that age might simply suck at taking tests or be distracted that one day because of some stupid thing that distract little kids. Maybe the kid got her finger smashed in a door, her goldfish died, she didn’t get her nap that day, or whatever, and so she couldn’t think straight in the test. So, her arbitrary test results are going to determine her entire future, really?
There were some other parts that stood out to me.
“Those are the elite classes and schools reserved for the very young students who score highest on an aptitude test — and they skew dramatically toward the most privileged families.”
Well, duh! That is about as unsurprising as all the other results we see in our society that are heavily influenced by class factors.
“Even those who believe in testing, as we do, must acknowledge that placing this much stock in the precise score registered on a single exam for kids who are more interested in play than mental puzzles is insane.”
That connects to the concluding statements. A kid might not even understand what a test is. Certainly, a kid won’t understand the consequences. There is no reason to think a smart and talented kid is more likely to take the test seriously. Little kids are moody creatures, anyhow, and easily distracted.
“Making matters worse, a whole industry coaches little ones to get any fraction of an edge. The children of parents who see G&T as the first step toward Harvard, and who have the money to pay for tutors, often do best on the test.”
Yep, that is what class is all about. That whole industry is driven by wealth. It might only give a tiny fraction of an edge, but in a social darwinian society those various fractions of an edge add up and multiply. Also, when compared to the massive disadvantages so many kids have to deal with, the edge the wealthier kids get don’t seem so small after all.
Is it possible to go from scoring dead average (slightly below average) to top percentiles between ages 10 and 14, as I did?
I’d say these kinds of tests say a lot less about individuals than most people believe they do. They are mostly useful for showing patterns across demographics. Even then many qualifications should be kept in mind.
There are thousands of factors, besides mere intelligence, that go into IQ and academic testing. Research shows this. Simply how a test is designed can greatly alter results, favoring some people and disadvantaging others. A great example of that are the studies on stereotype threat, where asking a question about someone’s identity (race, gender, etc) determines how well they do.
Tests are just a tool. Sometimes useful and sometimes not. But such tools should be used to serve the good of students, rather than students being put in the position of serving some testing scheme.
More comments.
In this context (NYC) the label g and t sucks, because it’s inherently fatalistic and a product of god/genetics/Santa’s blessing.
“As a former Inwood resident, I remember when this T&G nonsense started. Every kid in the playground my sibling’s age (born after 1978) was gifted (I don’t remember the talented part). This of course as they were eating the sand in the sandbox.
I suppose PS 98 and IS 52 aren’t good enough for the snowflake. And we won’t go there on just sending the kid to Good Shepherd. Too many evil Catholics………..”
There a balance. Being absent is bad, but so is being a helicopter.
“SaidItNow william
2 months ago
Here’s the thing – there is a public school, actually a few now, in Inwood. Of course all 3 are east of Broadway and I’m sure the white population in all 3 are too low for this snowflake to go there. There is also a Catholic school, Good Shepherd, west of Broadway, which graduated many smart kids (ha! myself included) but I know how many of these newbies to the hood don’t like religious schools. Since they can’t afford the uppity private schools, they need to find a place for little Duncan where he will look like his fellow classmates. Nothing wrong w/that but like anonymous_tms, I wish they would have the balls to point this out.
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william SaidItNow
2 months ago
Wow talk about racist “snowflake” comment. Maybe more people need not worry that they look like someone to get their education versus, parents may want to be involved in their children’s education. Maybe spend the time to ensure that their child is paying attention in class, doing homework, acting like a valued person in society… shame that this article opens up the idea that only little white kids parents make an effort. It does allow people to focus once more on color versus effort.
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SaidItNow william
2 months ago
Nothing racist about the truth.
And if non-white parents, outside of Asians, were taking the time to ensure their child did their homework, studied and if the parents showed up to parent/teacher meetings, maybe the graduation rates in the public school wouldn’t be as dismal as they are.”
“y children attend a school with a G&T program. The G&T students all get “band” and only 1 child from each 3, 4, & 5 grade class is permitted in the band program. The PTA shills everything from ice cream to pretzels to the children to support G&T program fund. The school shut down 1 G&T class starting last September because the school was getting too crowded with sibling admissions for out of district students. This program is a waste of funds and space in an overcrowded and inappropriately funded system.”
“Gifted children run the risk of becoming bored and disengaged with school. There’s no reason for these kids not to be challenged to the best of their ability. I think the city should have more funding for more gifted and talented programs since obviously, there is not enough space for everyone who scores high enough. They also should consider some sort of busing for citywide schools, even if it is just one pick up point per borough.”
Yeah. I saw those comments.
I have an idea. Let’s put all kids in gifted classes. I was taught in Bible school that all children are gifts from God. Then we could redirect the entire education system’s funding to gifted programs, because the entire education system would be a gifted program.
That would be an interesting experiment. What if every child was treated as gifted? That is to say, what if every child is treated as if they have immense potential? That is true, after all. Every child has way more potential than our present system even begins to tap.
What if our entire society was funded, designed, and focused in such a way as to promote the cognitive development and academic achievement of all children?
That would require cleaning up all the toxins and stopping further pollution. That would also mean ensuring every child has full healthcare and optimal nutrition, along with access to parks to play in and free availability of team sports. Of course, there would need to be universal availability of the best resources and opportunities in every neighborhood in every community: well funded schools and pre-school programs, public libraries, computer labs, science labs, free internet, etc. In schools, every kind of class, program, tutoring, resources, and whatever else should be available equally to all students. Plus, we would need to ensure that every child has a parent that could stay at home with them in order to read to the child and help with the child’s homework, as happens with wealthy families, even if that means paying parents to stay at home.
All of this could be achieved by doing what Bernie Sanders suggests. We just need to take some of the funding from the military-industrial complex and, while we’re at it, we can also take some from the prison-industrial complex. We could easily fund education a hundred times or even a thousand times more. By doing so, we could raise the salaries of all teachers and require the highest possible standards of teacher qualifications, both of which have been successfully done in other countries. This would attract the most brilliant people into the teaching profession.
Instead of having a few well-funded gifted programs for a few intellectual elite kids, we could have an entire friggin’ gifted education system that would create an entire generation of intellectual wunderkind. We wouldn’t need an intellectual elite to take us into a brighter future. The entire population would be raised to a whole new level. Rather than a ruling elite, we’d have democratic self-governance by a well-educated public.
Or else we can continue on our present path toward oligarchy and fascism, and maybe eugenics will come back into fashion. It’s only a small step from Social Darwinism to eugenics. America, after all, is the place of origins for eugenics and the inspiration for the Nazis. I’m willing to bet that the Nazis had gifted programs for the perceived future Aryan ruling elite.
I’d be less wary of gifted programs, if not for the history of American society. I know where this kind of thing leads to. We’ve been down this road before. Social Darwinism and its precursors have been in America for a long time, even before the US was founded.
Segregation by race, class, or whatever other category you choose. A ruling elite is a ruling elite. Even the plantation aristocracy assumed they were an intellectual elite based on a meritocracy. It just so happened that their superiority was inherited along with power and wealth, not to mention along with plantation and the slaves that went with it. The more things change the more they stay the same.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/15293-gifted-and-talented-schools-are-segregation-by-another-name
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/america-social-mobility-parents-income/399311/
How is this a meritocracy in any meaningful sense? Most wealth is inherited and social mobility is extremely low? Why are we worrying about gifted programs for the elite when we haven’t even offered good basic education in general? How are the poor and working class gifted kids supposed to be detected when they they are attending underfunded schools? Maybe spend some of that money to simply stop the lead poisoning of so many disadvantaged children?
For God’s sake, our priorities are fucked up! There are a growing number of kids who are poor, homeless, and don’t necessarily even know where their next meal is coming from. Let’s take care of basic needs first and then we can worry about the rest. There is no excuse for this bullshit in the wealthiest country in all of world history.
I think Bernie Sanders may actually cause me to come out and vote, LOL.
Anyway, it’s beause the gifted parents tend to think everything is fine and dandy for the normal masses. They think their kid’s problems are the normals’ fault. That mum even admitted she didn’t know what normal was like since her kids are only on the tail ends.
I am a transhumanist, I suppose. I support a future where technology can vastly increase the cognitive capacity of pretty much anyone. I’m an egalitarian transhumanist.
I’ve become politically apathetic in recent years. I just don’t like the choices presented me. And there seems to be no viable way to seek out better choices. But I’m hoping that Bernie Sanders might be different enough to make a difference.
He is no radical by any means. I’m just thinking with the populist mood right now that even a moderate liberal professional politician like Sanders could shake things up. US politics has been pushed so far right that moderate liberalism can get called socialism and no one even laughs at the absurdity of it all.
That mother doesn’t even know what genuine below average looks like. She doesn’t have to deal with a kid on the low end while also dealing with issues of lead exposure, food deserts, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, violent ghettoized neighborhoods, economic and racial segregation, racism and class prejudice, police profiling and brutality, lack of public libraries and parks, underfunded schools, etc.
Relative to most of the world’s population, she is living the easy life and she doesn’t even know it. Most of her struggles are what people call first world problems. She isn’t worried about basic survival and basic needs, about sheltering and feeding her children, about gangs and police that might target her children. She complains about such things as her kid’s therapy and official paperwork that goes with it, when most kids in the world have no access to therapy at all or couldn’t afford it even if they did have access.
The lady needs a bit of perspective. If she realized how bad off so many other people are, maybe she’d be more motivated to improve society for all people and not just for herself and for her kids. Maybe she’d feel less isolated and frustrated if she sought out common cause with all the parents with even more problems than she has. This isn’t just an education problem, for all of these issues are built on systemic biases and endemic forces of oppression, not to mention a larger societal structure of corrupt politics and corporatism.
More funding for special programs and classes won’t even put a dint in this wall of problems. We need the equivalent of a wrecking ball to find a way through in order to move toward a society that promotes the good of all and an education system that helps all children.
I’m perfectly fine with egalitarian transhumanism. Let’s seek to create an improved humanity and society, a more highly advanced science and technology, and I’m sure we can also have a better education system as well. I might add let’s also seek a more effective democratic system and a more beneficial economy (maybe a genuine free market that actually supports and promotes freedom for all), but that is beginning to get utopian.
Anyway, you talked aboutMy school’s gifted programme was open to anyone who wanted to enter. It was basically a door to a bunch of local oppertunities including classes at the local school, among other shit, with two specialists to act as guidance counselors. They liked the ”multiple intelligence thing” too.
So it was a gifted program offered to all. The kids all varied in their interests, though we all felt like we fitted in and were happy, from the ”genius” kids to everyone else. It was cozy. But my school was also not very cliquish, at all.
But not everyone likes it. For example, this guy: http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10137.aspx
I still think it was more beneficial for all of us, though.
I’m not sure why it bothers some gifted advocates the possibility that most kids have all kinds of potential, largely untapped and unexpressed. It’s as if they or their kids can’t be special, unless the average person is portrayed as lacking any hope of greater ability and cognitive development. I think it is a fear of limited funds. If all kids could benefit from more resources and help, then these gifted advocates can’t argue that more funding would only help their kids. It’s similar to why white supremacists will argue that it is a waste of money to try to improve black schools, because they of course believe blacks are inherently inferior.
Well other than the Fact that it could be lifted straight from a NR site…
I reread the article and honestly it really pissed the shit out of me. Most of these people annoy me but this article actually pissed me the fuck off.
I think it is because tye think this enrichment for all waters it down for their kids. A zero sum game so to speak.
It dosen’t.
Anyway, how can they happily write this stuff and not put people off?
He’s just blatantly off putting, that’s all. His attitude is a total turn off. I can totally see “normals” instead of catering to him being trend off by him.
http://www.prufrock.com/cw_contributorinfo.aspx?ContribID=31&Name=James+R.+Delisle%2C+Ph.D.
I had trouble respecting most of my teachers in grade school compared to my Japanese teachers. Teachers here just don’t really command respect. Is that bratty to say? I don’t know.
The entire teaching profession isn’t respected. Teachers are paid badly and treated badly, even though they have one of the hardest and most important jobs in the world. These conditions don’t attract the best people to the job and good teachers who decide to sacrifice everything to stick with it find themselves endlessly frustrated and attacked. Teachers don’t ‘command’ respect from students in the way that poor minorities don’t ‘command’ respect from the police. This predictably leads to less than optimal results.
Support matters. A lot of prodigies crash and burn, but this guy made it 🙂
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/magazine/the-singular-mind-of-terry-tao.html?referrer=
There is an interesting example. If gifted has any meaning whatsoever, it would apply to someone like him. Besides his intelligence, he seems mostly normal. He has no psychological or behavior problems. He is well adjusted, friendly, helpful, and cooperative. He advanced through school quickly, but it didn’t sound like he was in any gifted classes. He was just a smart kid.
You know what I like about this guy? That this is on his blogroll 😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆
http://whitewhine.com
Similar article. His parents seemed supportive of him, including wanting him to develop social skills. He played with his siblings as a kid and plays with his kids now 🙂 They didn’t really seem obsessed with giftedness as much as they encouraged his growth. Then again this was before the internet.
Indeed he didn’t seem to be in a gifted program. I don’t think gifted programs were that common back then. Mostly he seemed to skip grades or at least take classes on his level, even f his peers were older.
Terry is exceptional even among the “gifted” kids though. Honestly, he is more “gifted” than any of those gifted advocates’ kids in the traditional sense. It’s interesting that a guy like him who is even more gifted than their kids, is more well-adjusted. What’s the secret?h
He also grew up in Australia though. Maybe the “gifted” culture there isn’t the same?
http://m.smh.com.au/good-weekend/terence-tao-the-mozart-of-maths-20150306-13fwcv.html
I do wonder about the experience of ‘gifted’ kids in other countries. I’d especially like to see how places like Scandinavia and Japan deal with academically advanced students.
Here is singapore:
I usually see rankings of schoolchildren and the US doesn’t really do very well in these rankings. I think that there ought to be a more nuanced view of these things. I grew up in Singapore and was educated there and I’ve also lived in the US as an adult, so I can compare the two systems.
The US is usually pretty critical of itself, and has predicted its own downfall many times before (often incorrectly). My contention with the US is not that it is lazy or stupid. It is most certainly neither of these things. But the fact is that when children are kids, the nerds have a very low social status. Especially when compared to Asia. I’m pretty glad I grew up in Asia, where not only was it normal to be a little nerdy, we were the guys beating up the jocks at recess and taking their lunch money (haha just kidding). I’m a nerd, so I will forever be grateful that I grew up in Asia and not the US.
The paradox is that the US nerds, once they reach adulthood, suddenly morph into the ultra-high achievers who invented lightbulbs, invented flight, invented the atom bomb, invented the computer, transported a few guys to the moon and back, built the internet and the Silicon Valley New Economy. This record of technological achievement over the last 100 years is match by, like, nobody. It’s as though the school yard where you got kicked in, or after years of being subtly ignored by everybody around you, the nerds toughened up, learnt many survival skills, and learnt to live in a world mostly populated by people who are not like them. The ones who survived best are those who have a big chip on their shoulders, are competitive and have a killer instinct as formidable as their nerdy analytical prowess. Maybe that’s why these people have ended up conquering the world. However, there are a quite a few people who end up as damaged goods later on in life. America has some of the best universities in the world but judging from who attends the graduate schools I’m not really convinced that they’re making the best use of them.
It’s better to grow up ultra smart in an Asian environment. It is a more sheltered environment, and maybe more leeway for personal growth. The typical Asian parent will balance out the effects of being told time and again that you’re smart: Asian parents are infamous for being hyper-critical and reminding you about the need for more effort. But in Asian society, there is some social status to being a little (but not too) nerdy. This is in contrast to America where – if some of the stories are to be believed, people are openly hostile to kids considered super smart.
Personally when I grew up I was identified as “supersmart” and placed in a class for similarly inclined kids. This was the gifted education program, the GEP for short. I’ve written at length about this elsewhere and I won’t really be repeating myself: Gifted Education Programme
Contrary to something a few other people wrote, I had a pretty good childhood. Some of my classmates grew up to be leaders of men. Somebody from that system (Andrew Ng) went on to found Coursera. There is a Caltech professor somewhere. A few people became academics and muddled along. There were one or two captains of industry. Many get vacuumed into the civil service. Personally I’m working in tech now, pretty glad to be doing work which is useful and uses brainpower. I’ve got two good degrees. No, I’m not extremely motivated, just muddling along, but doing pretty OK.
If I feel like chilling out in the afternoon with a beer in my hand I’ll do it, I don’t think I’m “letting the system down” and if somebody thinks that way, haha too bad for him. I’ve dabbled, with varying amounts of success, in drama, music, mathematics, history, politics. I’ve got a good brain and there’s something for me to do, some way to use it to contribute to society. I haven’t that much ambition for that much more than that. If I had the largest dick in the world I’m not going to be making women happy 24/7.
There are a few flaws in the way that we handle ultra smart people. Sometimes we forget that many of them aren’t going to be ultra smart adults. There will be a few people who weren’t ultra smart kids, and suddenly at the age of 20, everything clicks and they become great geniuses. Sometimes we allow them to be complacent and think they can get away with being ultra smart and not working really hard. Ultra smart kids have to find a way to gang up together and defend themselves against everybody else in the school yard, and they should figure out that 2 or 3 people is usually good enough to handle a bully. Most importantly, childhood is when you prepare for adulthood, so ultra smart kids need to figure out how to be of service to society and live in the real world.
“I started reading newspapers and books at age 2. Was given many IQ tests. School tried to advance me several grades. My parents wisely refused, but did allow a single grade skip after being hounded by my teachers and the school administrators. I aced standardized tests consistently. I begged my parents to send me to a boarding school in the US (we lived overseas for much of my elementary school years), but they refused, saying it was important to be with the rest of the family. I often asked my mother what my IQ score was, since I knew that I had taken many IQ tests. She insisted it was not important and I did not need to know it. Eventually, when I was 10, she relented and told me it was 109. I was crushed and thought, “Wow I really am not so smart after all.” The only explanation I could come up with for the ease of schoolwork was that I had read most of the material for any class years before. So my advantage was that I worked harder than everyone else. Apparently (to me), one could make up for average intelligence by reading a lot and working hard.
Fast forward 25 years and I was a tenured professor at a top university. I was with my parents and the subject of IQ came up. I reminded her that I was not smart at all, since I had a barely average IQ. She looked at me in surprise and asked why I thought that. I reminded her that she told me my IQ was 109. She laughed and said that she just gave me a number slightly above what she thought the average was because I kept pestering her and she thought it was a bad idea for me to think I was exceptionally smart. She could no longer remember the exact score, just that it was the highest the testers had ever seen. By that time in my life, it meant absolutely nothing to me (and I still do not know what the numeric score is/was). But I was aware then (and even more so after reading all the responses to this question) that she made exactly the right decision to tell me I was neither average nor particularly smart.”
Iran:
In my home country (Iran), there is a prestigious national school in each of the big cities, which accepted the top 75 students in the city. The students spend their middle school and high school on accelerated level. In addition, each year 120 high school juniors were selected from all over the country for participation in student science Olympiad. Because of lots of perks to get into the school or in that group, every student try their best to get passed the exams and get in. I have been in both groups and I keep contact with people and I am generally aware what everyone is up to, so I can give you a one man perspective of what happens to 200 of the smartest people in my country.
By the way, this unique setup and exclusivity lasted until university only. At the university level we went to universities with everyone else.
Almost all of my classmates, irrespective of their family status went to university and almost all of them get into top universities. (Universities are free in Iran). Everyone who went to university graduated and again almost everyone got decent jobs no matter where they came from. Among the 200, I can think of only 3 people who didn’t make it into solid middle and upper-middle class.
We never had the social issues that is the cliche for smart people in america. Even among a school of nerds, there was a range from very smart and not so relatively smart. However, by the end of high school, we were all a unified group of friends with bonds so strong that even after all these years it has not been severed. It didn’t start that way, in middle school, we had outcasts and isolation (I felt like one in the begining) but somehow it got fixed as we grow up together.
So I guess from my perspective, it really depends. I guess if as its cliche in America, they go to a normal high school an get ostracized by their peers, they probably won’t develop the necessary social skills and by the time they do, its already late and their best college and career development years are behind them. If they do develop the social skills, they normally would have a more successful and hence, usually happier life than average.
Мужчина говорить по русски? Мне уже нравится им.
I was tested as having an IQ of 190 when I was four years old, and was put into a Gifted and Talented school in Denver. Two years later, because of my sensory integration dysfunction (sensory processing disorder) and social anxiety disorder, I was kicked out. I was so displeased with myself and didn’t know what was going to happen to me. So I hid. From everyone. I couldn’t look at anyone directly. I lost my edge. I moved to a mountain town (I won’t say which one for my privacy) when I was 8. I’m still here. I behaved so average that my school counselor thought I was stupid. I was put in average classes, which bored the hell out of me, so I demonstrated that I wasn’t who she thought I was. I’m still only in high school now but I love my life. I’m taking all college courses and spend a lot of my day in the school library, working on new projects. I can code in 3 different languages (JavaScript, Ruby, C++) and speak 3 languages (English, Spanish, Russian) as well. I love physics and music (I play 7 instruments) more than most. I ski with the local ski club and got 11th at Nationals for big mountain skiing last year. My counselor still won’t allow me to skip grades since I don’t pay much attention to my core classes, though school doesn’t matter to me very much. I’d rather spend my life doing things that matter. I suggest everyone do the same. That is what life is like when you’re a teenager.
I wonder if there has been a book written doing an international comparison of education for kids on the high end. As always, I’m most interested in Scandinavia, because of their being among the most functional social democracies. I really don’t know how different the US is from so many other countries, although I know some of the ways it is extremely different from particular countries with other kinds of school systems. I find it strange that bullying comes up so much. Is there more bullying in US schools? I don’t remember a lot of bullying in my youth, either toward me or kids I knew, and I think many of the schools I went to were more or less average.
Supportive and nurturing parents seem to make a difference between him and this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufiah_Yusof
That said Sufiah seems okay these days, she seems at peace.
That is the problem I see with many parents who are gifted advocates. I sense that, in some cases, the kid’s problems might be directly related to the parent’s problems. They seem to be projecting a lot onto those kids, not just pressure to succeed, but also strange ideological beliefs that will warp young minds. The parents won’t let the kids be normal.
Maybe it is my school, but at my school “smart” kids weren’t really bullied. I went to a competitive school though, but still. If anything it was a “wow! You did that? You are so smart!” “You’re amazing” and such. I did remember one guy who was bullied in middle school, but he had a habit of calling other people stupid when they did something wrong.
I didn’t go to a special school. It was an ordinary school with a mix of kids from different races, classes, and backgrounds. I don’t recall there being any issue about smart kids or simply academically-oriented kids. Most kids seemed to socialize between groups and I never noticed bullying, even for kids who were obviously nerdy. I was friends with some nerdy kids and, in my own book-reading introversion, I suppose I sort of was nerdy. If there had been significant bullying, I think I would have known about it.
Math is indeed creative. It’s so cool.
I fact I think the “creativity” american schools hammer on about lacks substance, actually.
“As someone who, later in life, realized that math is indeed a terrifically creative field, I wonder how many potential achievers in the field are turned off in childhood by teachers and a system that never once, ever, bring forward the creativity and immense intellectual possibilities to their students but instead, “teach” math” as a set of hard rules to be enforced and memorized at all costs and nothing more. It feels like the only people who get past the barrier that current math teaching lays down are those whose DNA leads them to it from birth. The rest of us move on without ever seeing the invigorating possibilities.”
“Class 1: 1st class intellects. They enjoy Dr. Tao’s success and thinking, and tell him so; and share their own work freely. About 1-5% of professors.
Class 2: 2nd class intellects. They find a hundred ways to disparage his work, success and humanity. Because? They are smart- but not smart enough- and they know it. Their envy consumes their entire lives, and they will slander all the people around them at every opportunity. About 30% of professors; the most successful at winning grants; ergo loved by administrators.
Class 3: Good minds, and good hearts- and no illusion they are geniuses. They cheer Dr. Tao on, even more happily than Class 1. Often just as smart as Class 2; but without the desire to succeed at any cost. About 30% of professors.
The missing percentage are people who would never have been awarded a PhD if that required passing an intelligence test.
Now- what would a university be like- made up of only Class 1 and Class 3?”
As far as I can tell, most American schools aren’t all that encouraging of creativity. Maybe they allow more room for independent thought than in the school systems of other countries. I guess it depends on what comparison is being made.
Love it!
“Begin with any fraction (numerator divided by denominator) such that both the numerator and denominator are non-zero, say 1/1. We all know from high school algebra that as the denominator continually decreases for a fixed numerator, the fraction tends to take on larger and larger values. It is also a fact that there are infinitely many “real’ numbers in the number line. As a corollary, given any two real numbers, there are infinitely many real numbers between them.
So with this as a background, if the numerator in our fraction, 1, were to be reduced infinitely to get closer and closer and closer, and closer to zero, the fraction will correspondingly increase to infinity. This is why generally mathematics call (any number)/0 as infinity.”
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-genius-obsession-may-be-why-men-often-outnumber-women-in-academia
I hope one day we can get rid of these centuries old or even millennia old biases, prejudices, and oppressions. I’d love to see what the data would look like if no group was being kept down and discouraged. I doubt the data would fit what the bigots expect. We are seeing the shift toward more women in college and over time that will likely also shift the number of women in certain fields and women perceived as geniuses.
http://www.quora.com/Why-are-most-geniuses-male
Fwiw, it was said that Mozart had a sister that was equally as good as him, if not more. Social norms from the day prevented her from rising to fame though. Rumors that some of mozarts pieces were his sisters
“The current reality most likely resembles this. However, this reality is very rapidly changing due to evolving conditions. I doubt that the current reality will resemble that which will exist in 100 years.”
The American feminist, Camille Paglia, wrote provocatively that “[s]erial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”
According to Hans Eysenck, genius = high intelligence + psychoticism.
1) high intelligence
Women have a very slightly lower mean IQ (barely enough to matter), but a much lower variance. Women are more normal, and more men are freakish. So you see many more men on the extreme right hand tails. Look at the audience attending any highly meritocratic conference on a quantitative topic.
2) psychoticism
This has nothing to do with propensity to become a serial killer, but it relates to a certain kind of creativity that is rather undomesticated. It is associated with being less conscientious (therefore unwilling to work on tasks that are not intrinsically interesting), disagreeable (and having high ego strength), and sensitive to inspiration (think the poetic Muse). Men score much higher in this trait than women on average, which means at the right hand tail, men are overrepresented by 5, 10, 100 fold.
3) intrinsic interest
on average women are more interested in social factors, and men tend on average to have a higher interest in abstract things. the nerd in mother’s basement might be a girl, but the odds are much higher that he is a boy, and this is one case where folk wisdom aligns with reality. the asocial nerd may not yet have harnessed his abilities productively, yet the low status we attribute to this way of being in the world should not blind us from recognizing that this set of emotional drives and wiring is immensely important if one is to achieve anything in certain domains.
What most people seem to not understand is the power of environments. It isn’t just that the environment shapes us and determines or limits what we can achieve. Those who control and influence society can create the environmental conditions that favor people like themselves.
So, a society largely dominated by men tends to favor men, a society largely dominated by whites tends to dominate whites, a society dominated by sociopaths tends to favor sociopaths, a society dominated by wealthy plutocrats tends to favor wealthy plutocrats, and on and on. Those who write the rules and referee the game tend to win more often. But if more women, minorities, etc are allowed to enter positions of authority or otherwise gain influence (e.g., a more well functioning democracy where self-governance actually operates), then we will likely see a far different society that favors entirely different kinds of people and leads to other results.
I don’t know if people are willfully ignorant about this kind of thing or what. Looking at the social science research, all of this is obvious. Yet so few people seem to care to look at what the data shows. Ignorance is safer. If you don’t know the truth, then you have plausible deniability and you can pretend you have no moral obligation about the problems of society. That only works so long, for such ignorance ends up being self-defeating. The rest of society isn’t going to stay in their allotted place just because of the willful ignorance of the comfortable and/or privileged.
He held the Guinness World Record for highest IQ at 210 [1]. He could absorb languages like a sponge– not just rote memorization but also thoroughly grasping grammar and nuance. At age 3, he was attending physics lectures at Hanyang University. He could read Korean, Japanese, German, and English by the time he was 4. When he was 8 he was invited to the U.S. by NASA, where he earned his masters and PhD at Colorado State. Afterwards, he worked as a nuclear physicist and researcher at NASA for 5 years until the ripe age of 16, upon when he suddenly wrapped up his life overseas and returned to Korea.
To everyone’s curiosity (and dismay) he enrolled in a ‘no-name’ university and studied civil engineering. He originally couldn’t even apply for university because he’d never graduated from high school, and had to get his GED. He was an ordinary office worker for a while and gradually faded from the memories of the Korean populace.
His own thoughts are as follows… (from an interview)
“Sorry, but I am not a genius. I just happened to learn things a little faster than others. Learning things more quickly doesn’t mean that you go further in life. [2]
“After I returned from the states, I chose my school and my workplace as I pleased. What I’d studied in the past was for destructive purposes, but my new major (civil engineering) was to create useful objects that had never existed before, and I enjoyed that. My current workplace is the same way. However, the things that brought me happiness incited a different reaction from the rest of the world. No matter how often I said “Right now, I am happy,” others told me, “There’s no way that’s possible.” If I say, “I am satisfied in my work,” they respond with, “Why would you even…” I was called a genius in the past, and it seems that that means I must be a professor at Harvard or Yale. I will say this again: I am happiest right now.” [3]
The interviewer still didn’t get it. “But why did you throw it all away?”
“To become happy. Even when I was in the U.S. I heard that I was fairly talented. But I didn’t know what I was talented at. All I did was solve problems and equations like a machine. For one division, there were more than twenty different research labs, but you’d never even know what was going on in the room next to yours. Secrecy was most vital, and any important milestones were attributed to those in superior positions. Perhaps the most problematic thing was that there was no one to listen to the small voice of a young boy. I could see no escape. I wonder, now, if there were similarities between the recent suicide of the KAIST students and my situation back then.” [4]
Personally, I don’t believe Kim threw anything away. He let go of something that he didn’t want and didn’t need in order to grasp hold of something better. The simple joys of a normal life. He could have become almost anything he wanted to be, and he chose happiness.
Today, Kim Ung-yong is 52 years old, and recently fulfilled his dream of becoming a full-time professor. He lives a quiet life, staying out of the eyes of the media and investing in the young minds of his students.
“When I am kicking around a ball with my son, or getting a drink with my colleagues after work… That is when I am the happiest.”
So many people can’t comprehend that a brilliant person could and would want to live a normal, well-adjusted life. Maybe the world would be a better place if the smartest and most talented people went into jobs like civil engineering, instead of seeking careers to feed their over-sized egos. What a novel idea! Quietly and humbly serving other people and the betterment of society might be a better path toward personal satisfaction and happiness.
Lewis Terman, an American psychologist, initiated IQ Tests to identify bright children (IQ>135) and study them from their early childhood into adulthood. Those selected numbered 1528 with an average IQ of around 140 (some going as high as 200), and were known an the “Termites”. Majority of these were from upper and middle-class families.
Terman looked at 730 of these people when they reached adulthood and divided them into 3 groups based on their success:
20% fell in Group A, who were successful (in Terman’s opinion) and in positions such as in law, engineering and academics.
60% were in Group B, who in Terman’s words were in positions “as humble as those of policeman, seaman, typist and filing clerk”.
20% in Group C, among whom a third were college dropouts, and together had a total of 8 graduate degrees.
The ones among Group A overwhelmingly were from the upper class. The Cs were majorly from the lower class.
Majority in the group had careers that were quite ordinary. No Nobel Laureates among the Termites. Interestingly, he had actually tested two students (William Shockley and Luis Alvarez) who went on to be Nobel Laureates, and had rejected them both since their IQs weren’t high enough!
Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, in his critique of the study, argued showing that Terman’s selected group of children with high IQs did about as well as a random group of children selected from similar family backgrounds would have done.
Terman himself had to conclude that “At any rate, we have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated”.
He did prove that there is one dominant factor that determines achievement more than anything else. It is socioeconomic class. To the degree your parents are wealthy, influential, and successful (according to mainstream norms), so will you be. It’s the same reason Ivy League colleges allow in a large number of legacies. If this study had been done in a society that had higher rates of socioeconomic mobility, the results would have been different. It’s just that the US, unlike the American Dream propaganda, is highly class stratified.
I’m anonymous on this answer, even though so many people have come forward bravely and told their stories, and attached their names to it. But, put simply, I feel a certain amount of shame regarding my outcome, such that I cannot help but feel that I am personally responsible for every aspect of it, even if some people tell me I shouldn’t feel that way. I’m 50 years old now, and I believe I should have overcome the past. People overcome tragic backstories all the time, why should I be hobbled by mine, right?
The first test I know about, I took was when I was five years old. Where I lived, kindergarten was not mandatory, so I was being tested for placement into first grade. I was never told all the details of the test, but the part that my dad always liked to crow about was the reading: tenth grade reading ability, and sixth grade reading comprehension. It was recommended that I be placed in the school system’s Advanced Program. I wasn’t, at first; I went to a private Christian school for first grade. I enjoyed it well enough, I guess. To the teacher’s credit, she was very sweet and accommodated a bright six-year-old fairly well. I was always in the top reading group, and was constantly blowing the doors off my classmates.
In second grade, I switched to the public school, where I did go into the Advanced Program. School seemed to go well for a few years. I got involved in spelling bees, eventually winning the state education association spelling bee, and coming in second at the state Scripps-Howard bee (could have gone on to Washington, DC, too, had it not been for a really bad pronouncer at the bee that completely mispronounced a word I could have spelled easily had she said it right).
But there were problems. First of all, while I was getting great grades, it was because I wasn’t being challenged intellectually. All the material was easy to me, so I never learned how to study – I was getting all A’s on everything, so why bother? If I watched a show, say a rerun of “Leave It to Beaver”, and either Wally or Beaver said they had to study for a test, I really had no idea what they were supposedly doing. I thought it was one of those TV conventions, where dads have to wear suits to work, the phone number always started with 555, and kids were always bummed out because they had to study something for school.
Second problem was, the home life was bad and getting worse. My dad was pretty abusive, and, as we found out later, probably mentally ill. In the 1970s, there was still a strong sense that there were things you didn’t talk about outside the family, and two of the top things were mental illness and abuse.
Things got bad when I went to middle school. I wound up grouped with a bunch of kids from several different schools, none of whom liked the smart kid who showed them up in class and dared to be different. As now, they called it bullying then, too, but the attitude of teachers was considerably different from what you see today. Back then, it was very much a “kids will be kids” and “maybe it’ll teach him to stick up for himself” mentality. I learned very quickly not to stand out in any way. Just the act of getting good grades was a bad idea, because teachers had a habit of mentioning your good grades in front of the whole class, and that would get you picked on later. The one exception to that was the standardized tests; teachers never talked about them in class, maybe because they were state-administered tests. But I knew from the results sheets that I was getting 99th percentile on them virtually every single time.
When my folks finally divorced, and my mom and I moved a few hundred miles away, I had learned my lesson. Do not make a spectacle of yourself. Keep your head low. The only classes I was excelling in during high school were band and choir; I had always had a natural affinity for music, and had been able to sight-read to some degree since I was four years old. It was a thing my dad had pushed on me, to the point of abuse when I didn’t practice or play as much as he wanted me to, until my mom made the rare move of putting her foot down and making him stop forcing me. But the abuse had not been able to kill my enjoyment or skill at music.
The rest of the classes, however, were strictly down the tubes. I was skipping school quite a bit. I was never a troublemaker. I later called myself “the quiet failure”. I understood the material, I just didn’t take notes or do the homework. I would read the book, pass the test, thereby passing the class with a C-.
It wasn’t until my junior year in high school that I encountered a class that actually challenged me. It was a college-level English course, which involved fairly deep book reports. I was so used to doing the minimum to get by, using my base knowledge to let me skate, that I had no idea how to write an analysis of, say, “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey. I could tell you who all the characters were, what the basic story of the book was, and so forth; but I had no idea how to analyze each character’s motivation. I had no idea how to plot their emotional changes over the course of the story, or why they felt the way they did. I knew how to read, I knew how to absorb information, but I had never been taught how to think. It was the first class I ever failed, and it was one that I actually tried to succeed at, long after I had quit trying at everything else, because I had no idea how to approach it.
I quit high school after my junior year. Got my GED the same weekend my classmates were graduating; highest score they’d ever seen at the GED testing place.
From there, my path became kind of aimless. I considered the Army, briefly. I took the ASVAB and, again, scored 99th percentile on everything, which completely blew the recruiters away. At the last minute I chickened out and didn’t join. I delivered pizzas for a while. I worked at a department store that, because I was working there when it closed down, landed me into a full ride at a business college to take accounting. Couldn’t finish; by that time I had a house note to pay for, and working was incompatible with school.
Except for one job (office manager at a medical claims company) which could have held some promise as a career, most of my jobs were pretty pointless. Assistant manager at a convenience store; shift manager at a fast food joint; clerk at a county welfare office, restaurateur (failed), pharmacy delivery, with a smattering of freelance web design thrown into the mix since the beginning of this century.
Right now I’m working for a temp agency. Despite my requests for something that is more administrative (which I have taken their tests and proven that I am more than competent in the field; they just don’t have the clients for it), I’m currently assigned to a factory where all I do all day is work a balky machine that presses washers onto screws. I am bored stiff, and all I get for my troubles is $10 an hour and sore muscles that take an entire weekend to heal. But I stick with the temp agency because at least I know there is a chance with them; anywhere else, my resume looks like I pieced together parts of three or four different people’s resumes. No one wants to hire a 50 year old guy that hasn’t demonstrated a commitment to a particular career.
I feel I should be able to put my past into my past, as it were, and not let it handicap the way I approach life going forward. But it hasn’t worked out that way, and I feel a fair measure of guilt and regret for that. There are plenty of not-nearly-as-smart folks from my high school who have found immense satisfaction in solid professional careers that I should have been able to follow easily, and yet, I didn’t.
The bright side: I am married and have a beautiful daughter who is in the gifted program at school, like I was. Much more is understood today about the educational needs associated with highly intelligent children than was understood when I was a kid. Bullying is no longer passively tolerated as it once was. Plus, with my own experience, I am able to have valuable input into her education. I told her principal and teachers early on, I would rather she come home with a B- or C+ on her report card that she worked hard to earn, than an A+ that she skated through because it wasn’t challenging enough. She is learning the educational work ethic I never quite grasped. I am jealous in a way, but very thankful for her sake that she won’t have to go through what I’ve gone through.
That is nice to hear. He isn’t making excuses for his daughter. Nor making excuses for his own problems. He seems to have been humbled by life.
Now he is trying to do right by his own kid. He is helping her, not coddling. I also like that he isn’t demanding teachers and other parents to coddle his daughter either. He wants them to challenge her and treat her fairly.
That seems like a healthy and reasonable attitude. I wouldn’t have many complaints about gifted parents if they were all more like him or like the parents of Terry Tao.
All the Terman kids were tested as high iq, though, which shows that high iq and troublemaker behavior are not automatic package deals.
Teachers are notoriously unable, as a group, to discern the truly gifted, because they conflate docility with intelligence. That’s the central flaw of the Terman Study–it depended on initial selection by teachers. Subsequently none of the people tracked in the study turned out to be world-shakers, though many were very successful pillars of society. The real geniuses were like as not sitting in the back of the classroom making trouble out of sheer boredom and the antisocial tendencies bright people sometimes acquire from being rejected by most kids.
There is no necessary connection between being bright and being a good student. The latter has a lot to do with personality traits like conscientiousness and habits picked up when young, neither of which are dependent on being bright.
Also, being bright doesn’t require that it gets applied to anything of value. A bright kid might use his intelligence and talent to play video games or become a thief.
My friend’s father has a great mind with an amazing memory (his own father was a professor), but he dropped out of college before completing his dissertation and now is a book dealer who makes almost no money and financially depends on his wife. Still, he is a smart guy and seems to enjoy what he does and taught my friend, his son, the tricks of the trade.
Yes. My point was that the commenter seems to think a good student will not be a ”genius” and that is also false
I get what you are saying. An extremely smart person may or may not be a good student. They are simply two different issues.
What do you think of the last sentence?
Whether I got lucky or unlucky in the genetic lottery is very much a matter of perspective. I sometimes wish I had been born normal, so I could have simply conformed and gone on to a somewhat more normal life. It did not help that while I was born highly intelligent, I was also born into a highly dysfunctional family. Before leaving home at seventeen to live as a school dropout, drug addict and street person, I had lived through four divorces, lived in over thirty homes and been to over twenty schools.
I taught myself to read at the age of four because I wanted to get all the story out of comic books, not just the half told in pictures. It took me two weeks to get to the point where I was reading them out loud to my baby brother.
My first day in grade one was amusing. We sat in our assigned desks and were each given a book. The teacher launched into a short description of how we were to spend the rest of the year learning to read this book. As she did, I read the book. All of it. (It was a book of full page illustrations with only one extremely short sentence per page.)
The teacher finished her speech to find my hand up. No doubt she had assumed I was looking at the pictures as she talked as I was flipping the pages quite quickly. “Yes?” She looked at her seating plan, “Peter?”
“I finished reading the book.” I said, not really intending to be smug about it.
The teacher stood and stared at me for a moment then told me to come up front. She pulled a text book out of her desk, a teacher’s text book, like a text book on how to teach kids or something. She opened the book at random, pointed to a paragraph and said, “Read that.”
So I did. I read it with good inflection and proper attention to punctuation, as I had spent many months reading out loud for my brother. I stumbled once, pointing to a four syllable word I had never seen before, “I don’t know this word.” The teacher told me to sound it out. I did, continued on, and when I finished reading there was another extended silence.
Finally she pronounced my sentence. “Morning period is reading period. From now on, you shall spend morning period in the library.”
So I spent the mornings in the library doing what I loved best. I quickly discovered that if I spent the whole day in the library, nobody said anything. I loved going to school.
So there I was in the library with the librarians worrying about what to do with me. I told them not to worry, I would just sit and read. I did later, often enough volunteer to help with library chores. The first day however I did have one question, did they have any books about rockets and space? I had not meant ‘fiction’ books as I had not actually realized that there were such fiction books. The librarians however proudly pointed out to me their shelf of science fiction books, about fifty paperbacks. Eureka! An entire shelf of stories about space travel! Nothing was more exciting to me at that time than the space program.
I grabbed the first book on the left of the shelf, sat down and started reading. When I finished the book, I took the next one in line and read it. One by one, I read every book on the shelf. This took me a little while as I did discover other things to read as well. However that shelf was of supreme importance.
Then one day I got to the end of the shelf. This was a sad day. However I had given the matter some thought. There was another school in town. If I could convince my father to register me in the other school, I could have a new shelf! Brilliant plan! Er…
Well, I got my transfer of schools. What I did not get was my library privileges.
My new teacher was a nightmare, quite literally. We were all to sit bone still in our chairs while she lectured at us. Anything so much as a fidget and your name went on the blackboard. If you looked away from her, your name went up. If you dropped your pencil or spoke without being asked, your name went up. Any little infraction and your name went up. Subsequent infractions would get stars placed beside your name. At the end of the day, everyone whose name was on the board was lined up in front of the class. For your name and for each star, you got the strap, a big thick leather strap made for the job, wielded hard on the palm of your hand.
It took a few weeks for my father to clue into why suddenly I no longer wanted to go to school. (He was a Doctor, busy helping people who needed him. Yes, I needed him too.) When he finally realized what was happening, he exemplified the heroics of my loved comic book characters. He instantly refused to let me go to school. He demanded and got audiences with the principal, the mayor, the police chief, the fire marshal, I don’t know who, he just went storming off madder than I had ever seen him. The teacher soon was gone, never to teach again.
The damage however had been done. I was still not allowed to spend the days in the library. I was forced to sit through deathly boring classes WAY below my level, filled with stupid kids who knew nothing and didn’t want to know. I hated going to school.
I DEEPLY resented being forced to sit through those classes and my resentment manifested in actively opposing everything they attempted to force me into. I never did homework. I was always getting in trouble for that. I never saw the point given that I could ace any exam merely by reading the encyclopedia for a couple of hours, assuming I chose to make even that effort.
Obviously I never developed any study habits, or the self discipline that requires. I have dabbled with higher education (as a mature student) several times over the course of my life, exploring numerous subjects, but my attention span is short. I have no degrees, no job prospects but the most menial, no family, no close friends. I have little tolerance for the stupidly of most hierarchies but too much pride for welfare, so I barely feed myself with what entrepreneurial activity I can muster. I have zero means to fix my disintegrating teeth, let alone address what I think might be cancer. Next month I can either eat or pay rent.
In short, intelligence can be a curse if it is not properly nurtured. (That said, given my family, I would probably be every bit as messed up if I had been born normal.) Forcing a system of equality upon a population that very much is not, is HIGHLY destructive to those outside the average.
“In short, intelligence can be a curse if it is not properly nurtured. (That said, given my family, I would probably be every bit as messed up if I had been born normal.) Forcing a system of equality upon a population that very much is not, is HIGHLY destructive to those outside the average.”
Anything and everything for all children can be a curse if not properly nurtured. Children need nurturing, not just smart children. I’m glad that he admits his real problem was his family more than anything. It doesn’t seem that anyone was forcing equality onto him. His father intervened twice, once to send him to the other school and the second time to get rid of that teacher, whether or not she deserved it. If this guy really was so brilliant as a kid, his father should have put him into an alternative school, homeschooled him (partly or fully), or simply sent him back to the original school where he had library privileges. There were some simple solutions available.
I was one of those kids. 99th percentile in all tests, except spelling where I’d end up in 60th. Whatever. Or watevver. Lol.
I was in the “gifted” classes and blew all the other “gifted” children out of the water academically. This created some animosity, and, paired with the fact that my parents weren’t in the clique of parents and teachers whose children made up the rest of the class, really created a hostile environment I had no recourse for and thus internalized.
I tested into college level English based on vocabulary and reasoning when I was in early grade school. I begged my parents to let me but they wanted me to have a normal childhood. I honestly believed that when kids on TV said they were failing a class that they were getting a B+. So normal was subjective. But I respect their intentions.
I was made to feel insignificant for many years by my classmates and some teachers in very subtle ways which I’ve only now come to realize were wrong, but as a kid I was simply depressed and felt I was ugly and dumb. I desperately wanted to be anyone but myself.
For about 5 years, my classmates and some teachers would constantly interrupt me when speaking. It probably was pretty annoying to have some girl in class constantly have the highest grade and right answer. It was the worst when I became involved in academic teams, especially with a teacher who liked to make announcements as such: “I have bad news and good news! Which would you like to hear first? The bad news? Ok, our team lost to the other schools and won’t be advancing. What’s the good news? Oh, one of you won 2 medals for the high score in math and science, but of course once again it’s _________. Here they are. Why don’t you wear them all day today?”
I got good grades in high school despite things. I figured out how to do my hair and makeup (or at least I thought I did. Looking back at photos, even a “gifted” kid should not be allowed to cut their own bangs.) and I got some less academically competitive friends, discovered heavy metal music (finally something that mirrored how I felt on the inside!), and ran around with skater kids doing Jackass style stunts in shopping mall parking lots and construction zones.
Despite still tripping on mushrooms from the night before, I got a high SAT score and I got into some great colleges.
This was right about the time, in a very overly dramatic sequence of events, my Dad insisted I go work at McDonald’s to get a taste of how aweful my life would be if I continued to hang out with people not focused on their education. I worked the night shift at a McDonald’s attached to a gas station. This was my first experience with crack heads, angry customers, and being relentlessly hit on by the non-angry customers (how I dreaded calling out order number 69 each shift!) I spent most of my time burning the tops of my hands off on the grill and literally wearing a trash bag washing dishes in the back. I befriended 2 older Mexican women who barely spoke English but worked just as hard as I did. One day they snuck me into the walk in freezer and we all drank some super strong Mexican brand tequila that I haven’t seen since, straight out of the bottle. This was the first time in my life I felt like I had friends, that my hard work was recognized, and that I was truly included. I would relive everyday the smug satisfaction on the faces of my earlier classmates in the “gifted” class and their parents as they came to gawk at me on the register or over the grill and complain about incorrect change or food not to their taste…. all for that fun moment in the freezer with genuine people.
I went to college, graduated a year early, got into law school, etc etc etc.
I loved college. I loved my classes. I had a ton of nerdy inside jokes about philosophy and biology with a great group of friends. College was a very happy time.
Most of my antics were funded by the fact that I had already hatched the plan (at McDonald’s, no less) to become a stripper once I turned 18, just like my friend in high school, who made (what we thought) was a bunch of money. I used my psychology classes in tandem with cornering each customer and attempting to pick their brains about life, money, careers, etc etc etc. Very few people or other dancers asked about my education or cared. It was refreshing. I studied human behavior and psychology in the field and made cash doing it. The other dancers took me under their wings and taught me people skills, how to exercise and eat healthy, how to actually do my makeup and hair, and most importantly, how to exude confidence and stick up for myself in funny and classy ways. I had a wonderful time.
I learned a lot, but I didn’t learn everything. Over all it was a valuable and positive experience. I travelled a lot. Each club was like a little family, and if for whatever reason I moved on from the club it was difficult. Now, however, I’m well put together and poised on the outside and tough as a nail on the inside.
I’ve had other “career” jobs and done well for myself. I’m married to the most amazing man, the love of my life. My best girlfriend from college, who I used to run around the lab after hours with and explore the old halls of the campus, is not only a scientist but a sales woman and a commercial fisherman. I love my dogs and try to do them justice via a thorough study of animal behavior and lots of fetch.
I’ve had one hell of an “interesting” life, but as I’ve gotten older (late 20s now), I’ve shifted the focus from life being interesting and adventurous to building something and creating. I still really really hate being interrupted. But I’m ready to see what else this brain of mine can get into.
My sense is that, even though she hates being interrupted, she probably loves to interrupt others.
I think the term genius is a hopeful one.. that genius will take care of my problems when they get older. but this is not a healthy attitude to have towards other people..
Yes, we should appreciate creativity and skill in all people, and be quick to support it. There are many many bright young people, and they should not have to earn a rep as a genius to get our support. The children are our future as Whitney so eloquently expressed.
The personal attribute I think is most valuable is a commitment to kindness and charity. To me that’s the high point of intellect. I guess I value wisdom much more than intellectual capacity, storage capacity or analytical/computational capacity.
The moral Flynn effect points toward a larger correlation between increasing intelligence and increasing moral outcomes. Well-rounded intelligence should include such things as empathy and related moral attributes. Most of the increase of IQ has been with fluid intelligence, which includes perspective-taking, the very basis of a more expansive capacity of empathy.
This is the attitude of many of the parents, unintentionally. For example, they respond to others not taken to them warmly, their kid not fitting in, with the ”my kid will be curing your diseases thomorrow so stop being mean to him.” It’s rather catty, for one thing, don’t you think?
I’m not verbal. I often have trouble articulating my sentiments into words, beyond ”something is off but i’m nto sure how to verbalize it. But this is really off putting, now i need to verbalize why it is.” My thinking for me, i can understand on an intuitive level, but i often have trouble verbalizing even to myself.
It’s a lot of pressure for a kid. Isn’t there the possibility that a genius would feel content living an ”average” life? Or there is no way, he MUST strive for greatness, and the only reason he isnt is because the normals are holding him back? Isn’t there the possibility the genius is happy as a baker in a small town with a spouse and kids, and not merely relegated into that position because society sucks for gifted?
Also, I don’t like that some of the g parents tell the average kid parents who express feeling bad that their kid isn’t ”gifted” with ”You need to accept your kid as he is!” with the underlying sentiment that the average parent is a real piece of work
Here is the difference with the moral Flynn effect.
Moral outcomes don’t increase for a society when the elite have increasing IQs. No, it is only seen because the entire population is experiencing a rising average IQ, specifically rising the fastest on the low end and so hence with a shrinking IQ disparity. So, if you wanted to further promote the moral Flynn effect, you would intentionally focus on the low end where you are going to get more bang for your buck.
The moral Flynn effect is precisely the refusal to accept that some people inherently have little potential and worth, and so they should just accept their fates and their childrens’ fates. The point is that individuals in society improve, all across the spectrum, when the entire society improves.
This is what gifted advocates don’t understand (or refuse to acknowledge) about what actually will improve society. But most of them don’t give a damn about improving society, since they are narrowly focused just on their own kids.
Not sure if it was smart, but I often felt like I had to hide my “hyper-awareness” so to speak. I seemed to have a combo of curiosity/detectiveness/inquisitiveness and hyper-aware senses, making me know things about people that could come across as creepy
“I tested in the high normal range, and my brother was a genius. He was unhappy all his life. He could never find friends who understood him. He wasn’t popular with the ladies because he was a “little blond nerd.” He died at 35 of an “accidental” gunshot wound.
I prayed for my children to be smart but not genius level. Why? Because I had to see the unhappiness of my brother. My advice if you have a genius child? Keep him/her in her/his grade level and teach him/her how to hide how smart she/he is. Tell them to think of their friends as super smart pets if they have to do so to be happy and content with never finding anyone they can relate to at their intelligence level. Understand how frustrated you would be if you only had dogs for company. Yes, when they have perfect recall and can jump ten steps ahead in a lecture based on a sentence, they really are that much smarter than the rest of us. Hell I was happy my brother thought I was “almost smart enough” to hold a conversation with. Think of how lonely that must make them feel.
My uncle was also a genius and hung himself. Being smarter than the rest of humanity is not a gift — it is a curse. I am glad all of my children are smart, but I would never wish genius on anyone in my family. Rest in peace Henry, and may there be lots of genius level people wherever you are now.
What is up with this assumption that being smart means having major problems, primarily psychiatric issues?
Her brother and uncle probably suffered from depression. That is a separate issue from their intelligence, but their depression probably made it harder for them to express their intelligence in a normal, functional, and healthy way. Then again, their depression probably made everything in their life harder, which would have been just as true if they had been stupid.
Plenty of smart people don’t have depression. And plenty of not-so-smart people do have depression. I doubt most people who kill themselves are above average IQ or anything.
Her story: http://herscoop.com/posts/christi-johnstone-adoption/
Her baking blog is nice though.
I suppose so, but it does give me another view of her life.
She seems to be upper middle class. Her husband seems to be the breadwinner and she appears to be a stay-at-home mom. She started a hobby of jewelry-making that became a business, but she probably works at home and unlikely makes much money at it.
She obviously spends a ton of time with her kids. She talks about constantly talking to teachers, therapists, experts, etc. They certainly aren’t poor. She can not only afford to pay for all these expensive services but also can afford not to have to work a normal job.
“When it comes to disabilities, people always say to me, “I could never do what you do.” I whole heartedly do not believe this to be true. You do what you have to do for your kids, and when it’s sink or swim, you just swim — simple as that.”
That would only be a meaningful statement if she dealt with a tiny fraction of the difficulties so many others experience. She no where indicates that she has ever been poor, homeless, etc. She never talks about struggling with paying bills or buying food. She hasn’t stated any problems with living in a poor, violent neighborhood with underfunded inner city schools (or anything similar).
There are plenty of people in America and around the world who work harder than her and are more determined than her and yet still sink, no matter how much they try to swim against the currents with weights tied around their feet. People swim when it’s possible and they sink when it’s not. Only someone who has lived a relatively easy and comfortable life would suggest otherwise.
“
Some of her statements “we never get challenges we can’t handle” are really really naive
Rugged individualism
https://www.reddit.com/r/AsianMasculinity/comments/3esiui/work_for_your_descendants/cti0ks9
When the Social Darwinists fall off a cruise liner and are floating alone in the middle of the ocean, then they can tell me all about rugged individualism.
There are starving people in the USA
I have seen a great weight loss among my employees. We all work for the State of NC and hold Master’s degrees to teach in local public schools. After 7 years of only a 0.6-1% total raise for a majority of us, 20% of us have filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy since we make above the median as we have a high local unemployment rate from NAFTA stripping jobs, and triple the home break in rate of Washington, D.C. Our house insurance has increased 35% from 2010-2015 with property values declining 15%. After paying for housing and health care premium increases and tripled copays, we struggle to put food on the table. Of 870 educators, 27% have had their 1130k mile plus clunker cars repossessed on 30-34k salaries and 100k college debt. 37% haven’t taken a vacation in 3 years more than a total of 2 days, 62% hold part time jobs at $7.25 and hour to $8.50, and 40% have lost 30-40 pounds from not being able to afford groceries. We feed our kids, but as parents, we often skip 7-12 meals ourselves per week to have food on the table for our children. Even worse are our colleagues who teach in the bordering Counties of Anson, Montgomery, Marlboro, and Scotland Counties. We are also in the top 10 States for the most insolvent retirement funds that we put our mandatory deductions into each month. Since it is illegal to have teacher unions, our teachers are literally working poor and quietly malnourished like many who live in the community we serve, so we can’t really complain:
I hadn’t heard that before, but I’m not surprised. There are lots of examples like that. Many Americans don’t realize how bad it is. Even many professionals are among the working poor. If professionals are struggling that much, imagine those who have little education and can’t even find work that will pay the bills, when they can find work at all.
Damn genetics
http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150723/srep11713/full/srep11713.html
I love claire. She hates this piece lol
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/07/25/richard-dawkins-fails-spectacularly-on-feminism-and-islam/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=socialnetwork
“Damn genetics”
I have no problem this kind of thing be studied. I just wish the researchers would hold themselves to a higher standard. We do need to understand all of this better, but this doesn’t offer understanding.
“Our results demonstrate that educational achievement across a wide range of academic subjects from traditional core subjects of English, mathematics and science, to humanities, second language learning, business informatics and art at the end of compulsory education in the UK is highly heritable, with over half of the variance in children’s educational achievement explained by inherited differences in their DNA, rather than school, family and other environmental influences.”
That statement lacks careful thought. Lots of things are heritable, not just genetics.
Most every aspect of their lives is shared by twins. They inherit the same environments. They even inherit the same parents, of course. And, when they get adopted, they tend to be adopted by parents who are quite similar and also raised in similar environments. More importantly, twins tend to go to the same schools and have the same educational experiences. They tend to have access to the same opportunities and resources. Et cetera.
“In the most novel contribution of the present study, we showed that academic subjects at the end of compulsory education in the UK are to a large extent influenced by the same genes, even when intelligence is controlled.”
The more obvious explanation is environmental factors. If are born into relatively greater wealth, even just middle class, you will likely have accordingly higher rates of academic success, whether you are high or low IQ. If you are born into the lower classes, especially in poverty attending underfunded schools and some lead exposure thrown in, you aren’t likely to be successful in any kind of way.
All of these confounding factors should be obvious to any serious researcher.
“The present study showed that even after intelligence has been controlled for, the academic subjects still correlate substantially both phenotypically and genetically. It is possible that the genetic mechanisms responsible for these associations are also influenced by many genetically influenced traits, such as personality, motivation, and psychopathology.”
Fuck you! This is the kind of unquestioned prejudice that needs to ripped out by the roots. It is so subtle. It hides behind the most politically correct obfuscations ans outwardly neutral language. The worst aspects of heritable environmental conditions are racism, ethnocentrism, and classism. It’s not surprising that particular minority racial or ethnic populations will have different experiences in school systems that are part of societies that have long histories of systemic prejudice and oppression.
“Understanding the specific genetic and unique environmental factors influencing individual differences in educational achievement, and the complex interplay between them, could help educationalists develop effective personalized learning programs, so that every child could reach their maximum potential by the end of compulsory education.”
Then they tack on this political correct bullshit on the end. It doesn’t fit anything that they said throughout the rest of the paper. Taken at face value, the assumption is that since it supposedly is genetically inheritable there probably isn’t anything that can be done to change it. Why can’t these bigots at least be honest?
“I love claire. She hates this piece lol”
I assume you’re talking about Claire Lehmann. I would imagine she’d that. The article does seem to read a lot into Dawkins’ words. I don’t care much about Dawkins, but I’m not going to look for reasons to criticize him. His statement could be interpreted many ways, depending on the assumptions and interpretations one brings to it.
I tend to agree that Islam needs a feminist revolution. So does every other religion. The whole world needs a feminist revolution and some other revolutions along with it. A global democratic revolution would useful. Anyway, Dawkins, in that statement, never denied Islamic feminists exists as individuals and organizations, but that is a far cry from a feminist revolution. We could argue over the definition and real world meaning of ‘revolution’, but nitpicking over word usage probably won’t contribute to the progress of the feminist cause.
It doesn’t seem like Dawkins is dictating anything. I’m not saying he isn’t being an obtuse wealthy old white male Westerner, but maybe give him the benefit of the doubt in this case. He does ask how he can help? That sounds like someone offering to be an ally. He is not declaring that Islamic feminists need his help. He is not demanding that they must accept his help. He is simply asking how he could help.
The author acts as if Dawkins is completely ignorant of the female Islamic experience. Maybe he is, but this feminist offers no proof that is the case. As far as I know, maybe Dawkins was recently reading some books about the female Islamic experience and that inspired his tweet.
I understand Dawkins has issues. I don’t doubt he can be a clueless asshole at times. He definitely rubs many people wrong. Still, I don’t see much point in looking for something to complain about. It really was an extremely simple tweet. Taken at face value, there is nothing objectionable about it. But of course one could read into it all kinds of things, if one so desired.
No I agree. I just think it’s funny
So much stupid, so little time http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sftfi1%7Bimage3%7D.gif
I’ve learned to ignore a certain kind of stupid. It just is too much at times.
Honestly, this is why I tend to be cautious around solo white guys I see in Asia these days. Is that bad? I don’t know.
http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2014/12/alt-right-podcast-20-asian-century.html?m=1
Discernment is always important. But I wouldn’t judge people solely on too narrow set of outward characteristics. You just have to learn to finely tune your creep detector.
My creepdar does need tuning. Too many of these types in Asia.
viakorea.wordpress.com/about/
viakorea.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/goodbye-white-devil-hello-minority-status/
viakorea.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/never-go-into-business-with-an-ajeossi/
viakorea.wordpress.com/2015/06/02/final-impressions-of-korea/
viakorea.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/to-catch-an-asian-predator/
Korea does have issues but this guy is just a bitter creep.
I don’t really get bitter expats, especially ones with jobs like English teacher. It’s not like they have such an urgent job as to have to stay, much less five years
Korea is a bit dirtier than Japan, but no dirtier than the USA, really. Also, puke on streets? A bit of an exaggeration unless all you do is hang out at bars.
Japan is indeed exceptional regarding manners. But it’s unique to Japan. I could shit on America too if I was comparing American manners to Japanese manners.
The cmments on Europeans is uncalled for.
viakorea.wordpress.com/2014/01/13/why-japan-korea/
viakorea.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/it-sucks-to-be-a-chinese-tourist-in-korea/
He seems like a bitter guy. My sense, though, is that he is more bitter about himself than about Korea. He is projecting his sense of failure. For whatever reason, he isn’t where he wants to be in life and so blames the people in that place, as if it is their fault he is a failure.
He’s probably what many in Asia call an lbh, or loser back home
I’ve been to Alhambra and eaten at its numerous Asian restaurants. Yes, some places have the absolute worst service (0/10 would not eat there again), and I have eaten at a place with a “C” health rating. Myers needs to read reviews and look at health department signs. If she doesn’t like the place, she can take her business elsewhere. Money speaks louder than words.
Also, about the bad drivers…she’s kidding herself right? This is California…where a half inch of rain will cause traffic accidents all over LA. Half the people break the law and don’t turn on their headlights while using their windshield wipers. There’s a reason why California car insurance rates are among the highest in the country. Just don’t go insinuating it’s just the Asians who are the bad drivers.
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-groceries-race-20150727-htmlstory.html
I always look forward to my yearly visits there lol.
Since I’ve never been aajority both racially and culturally, being around people “different” dosent faze me at all.
Omg she drives 3 miles more. Ooohhh the humanity! The struggle is real guys!
Think of all the sacrifices she’s made so she can buy her groceries away from all of those orientals?
That comment section is a party.
See, this is hat I don’t like about PC. It’s made t so people just don’t come out and say it, too much dogwhistling
I have no opinion about the quality of driving habits as judged according to ethnicity or anything else, but I do have an observation that I’ve always wondered about. As a parking ramp cashier in a college town, I notice one driving habit that is more common among Asians, and keep in mind they are largely foreign students. I particularly notice it among Asian women, but I think I’ve also seen it among Asian men.
When pulling up to my booth, some Asians will often not pull up as closely to the window. They will stop their vehicles a couple feet out from the window and sometimes back a foot or two, so that they aren’t directly next to my window and are more directly facing me, with additional space between us. I know some cultures have a preference for face-to-face interactions and/or greater personal space. My dad would tell me about his Indian friends who would walk sideways when they were talking. India is also a part of Asia and so I thought there might be a broad cultural pattern to this tendency.
I also love how some Asian women will sometimes hold their left arm with their right hand while giving me a ticket or money. My father who spent time in South Korea said that this had to do with the traditional habit for wearing kimonos, but I don’t know if that is true. Maybe you have more insight into this.
I notice the different habits of my customers and it always makes me curious. I can sometimes guess the regions of the US that my customers come from, even before I see their license plates. Sometimes it is in their way of speaking, but sometimes it is just their general appearance. Some Kentuckians have a very distinct appearance that I can recognize from some of my own family.
There has been a large increase of ethnic grocery stores and restaurants in this town. I like that it increases variety. It creates more choices. I’m not much of a cook, whether with standard American ingredients or anything else, but I do like to try new foods.
The parking ramp in my town just has a machine that issues tickets and a coin slot, lol. In manhattan parking is hella expensive and valets park for you, yu give them your key.
I’m not sure about the driving habits, but japanese people at least, are excellent drivers.
Driving in and korea and China is more erratic (street lights are really just guides not rules lol) but people subsequently tend to have excellent maneuvering skills. An american would probably get into way more accidents in these conditions.
But public transportation is more common in all three of these nations honestly. It’s not as much a cultural habit to drive everywhere.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/us/asians-now-largest-immigrant-group-in-southern-california.html?referrer=
It will be an interesting change. Different regions will have different racial/ethnic majorities. That could make American society and politics more interesting.
I thought it was funny that she admitted that she could still get the same products she needed at the new places (it’s true. Asian themed supermarkets carry the usual american stuff in addition to the exotic shit. I easily get cheese, mayo, Oreos, Lindt chocolate there too) but for her it was all about atmosphere lol.
The labels are also almost always in English in addition to the particular ethnic language.
Anyway I don’t mind the places. The products there, produce and meats, tends to be fresher and better quality than on mainstream places I find.
And yes, they don’t “plastic” their meats as much. What I mean is in America you know how the meat is presented so an alien visiting would probably never realize it was once alive?” Well you can get freshly killed whole fish laying on ice in these places. The chicken still has it’s head, etc.
There’s nothing like a whole fish. Americans are missing out :p
I don’t shop at ethnic stores all that often. Most of them around here are smaller stores.
There are a few items that I regularly pick up at a local Korean grocery: sesame oil, tofu, miso, dried seaweed; sometimes I’ll pick up some wasabi peas. I’m a big fan of really good miso, but I don’t like the varieties that are too salty.
I must admit I’ve never had a whole fish. But I have eaten whole soft crabs.
Anyway that was just a comment reminding me of comfort zones. A lot of people aren’t used to being minorities either racially or culturally. Propel generally don’t like change and like what they are fimilar with. Double in-group out-group dynamics.
But for me there really aren’t places where I can be both racially and culturally the majority. In Asia I don’t physically stand out, but culturally I do, especially in non-Chinese speaking areas. In America, there aren’t really places 99% the way there are places 99% white. Even in heavily asian areas, it’s only like 60% asian (flushing NY, areas of SoCal mentioned.) these asian enclaves are still at least 30% non-asian, often Hispanics (both SoCal and in Queens NYC.) So while I am a “majority” in parts of the sgv, it’s not like I’m not gonna see a non-asian the way many whites in America will rarely see non-whites.
Culturally these areas are also immigrant heavy. So even more, there aren’t really towns 99% american born asian, lol.
I don’t really have in issue with this. I don’t really desire an environment where everyone else is asian american, not that I don’t actively dislike it. I just have no real preference for being the majority, really. My own identity dosent seem traditionally rooted in that sense. I almost have built an identity around being a free-floater so to speak. I identify as Chinese-American, but am not strictly tied down to all things Chinese, though I embrace Chinese. I just float around, from Chijese land, to mainstream America land, to Hispanic grocery, to Eastern European place, what have you.
I’ve never lived anywhere where I wasn’t the majority.
I did go to schools where I wasn’t clearly the majority, about equal between blacks and whites. I’ve also lived in Arizona for a time and worked around Native Americans. Even here in this town, a hotel I worked at a while back had a majority-minority staff, a combination of Asians (mostly or entirely Chinese) and Hispanics; I worked mostly with the Hispanics and they would sometimes speak in Spanish, which I don’t know all that well.
Still, I’ve always been surrounded by lots of white people, often middle class white people, especially now in this middle class white town. It has been an odd experience to see the quick growth of the minority population here, even though most of it is a temporary student population. Minorities are increasing in places all over the country.
I don’t have issues with ethnic enclaves. I think they, and the cultural stuff they bring out, make things more interesting. I just care about safety really. That and the place being accepting of other people.
Asian ethnic enclaves at least are only 60-70% asian at best. There isn’t really a homogeneous lu asian asian-ethnic enclave in America. Glendale CA, Where Armenians are, isn’t only Armenians are either. Russians aren’t the only people in Brighton Beach Brooklyn, etc.
I’ve actually never spent any time in an ethnic enclave. I have been in South Carolina projects which are mostly black, but that isn’t quite the same thing. I guess I have been in Amish country many times, sort of an ethnic enclave as they do speak a different language. I’ve never felt unsafe in Amish country. LOL
That said, I do admit that I find the xenophobia hurtful. I wonder how many Latinos feel. Since they’re traditionally the big targets. I suppose I should get used to it. It’s just that on the past Asians were kind of ognored, so it’s weird to see things that blacks and Latinos must be entirely used to :p
Yeah. Asian-Americans haven’t had much attention since WWII. Recent generations of Asian-Americans only know the experience of having been mostly ignored. It will start heating up and not just for Asian-Americans. All minorities are increasing in number. It’s going to force many issues to the surface.
This kind of shit also tends to hurt more coming from whites than from other groups, too.
One day, whites in the US will be just another minority. After a few generations, even whites will have no memory of a country dominated by white people.
Another chilling murder story
http://www.torontolife.com/informer/features/2015/07/22/jennifer-pan-revenge/
I know I couldn’t handle that kind of stress without going off the deep end. None of us knows what we are capable of until we are pushed over the edge. Shame is one of the most powerful forces. Throughout history, shame has been one of the main motivations for suicides and homicides.
As an (ex-)endocrinologist, I’m unaware of any ethnic or racial differences in testosterone levels. In fact, as an internist, I don’t ever recall seeing a normal range for the blood level of any substance that depends on the ethnicity of the subject (with a very few, “partial” exceptions e.g. more people of African descent have low white blood cell counts than do people of other ancestry).
That being said, however, and with specific reference to testosterone, there are ethnic differences in tissue sensitivity to testosterone. For example, women of Mediterranean background tend to be more sensitive to trace levels of testosterone than women of other backgrounds. In particular, Italian women, say, are more likely to have mild “hirsutism” (i.e. excess, unwanted hair) than many other women. Conversely, the skin of women of Scandanavian ancestry is relatively resistant to the effect of testosterone to promote hair growth.
The phenomenon of differing racial or ethnic sensitivities to different hormones also seems to extend to insulin. Specifically, people of Native American descent, Hispanics, and those from the Indian subcontinent tend to be resistant to the effect of insulin to lower blood sugar. Indeed, in the case of certain Native peoples (e.g. the Pima Indians), virtually the entire population is insulin resistant.
I draw your attention to this review article (pdf). In it, note the following:
Quote:
Not biased by selection of subjects in conflict with the law, other studies demonstrate similar testosterone levels in African±American and Caucasian American men. In contradiction to the so-called predisposition theories on crime rates and race, another study involving 1127 men and adjusting data for age and body mass index (BMI), showed levels of total and bioavailable testosterone to be highest in Asian Americans, followed by African±Americans and lowest in Caucasian Americans (112).
(emphasis added)
IIRC, free testosterone is converted by aromatase into estrogen, and high free estrogen levels are a signal to the body to stop producing testosterone. I wonder if the differences between groups were physically significant.
http://eje-online.org/content/144/3/183.full.pdf+html
As you know, I always wonder how combination of factors influence results. How do different environments, diets, poverty, stress levels, etc effect such things as testosterone levels and testosterone sensitivity? Why is it so rare to see discussions that consider a wide range of contributing and confounding factors?
Getting sick of idiotic posts like these”
http://www.ampedasia.com/article/RE-Physical-Appearance-of-Asian-Men/
This woman is no better than the white men who justify their Asian fetish. We as Asian women need to reflect on our views about dating and race. Her rebuttal is filled with blanket statements all those traits she mentioned can be found in all men of various backgrounds and color. Being adopted and not raised culturally Asian I noticed many Asian women tend to hold strong prejudices towards non white men. Since most of white America give Asian women a white pass or are seen as white passing we rarely get scrutinized for our dating preferences outside the Asian community. Frank Chin coined this dating trend perfectly as “racist love”, because underneath it all racism is one of the strongest motivators behind these unions.
http://www.ampedasia.com/article/RE-5-Reasons-Asian-Girls-Like-White-Guys/
There is a reason I don’t pay a lot of attention to much these days, from social media to news, whether mainstream or alternative. I narrowly focus on a few sources I respect and mostly ignore all the rest, except when occasionally come across something while doing a web search, but I sure don’t go looking for idiocy. I’ve come to realize the crap out there is near infinite and it just depresses me. I’ve had to learn to be more discerning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racist_love
I hadn’t heard of that idea before. It is a good description of a particular phenomenon.
I came across the following last night and I thought of our discussions. It is from Honor Bound: Race and Shame in America by David Leverenz (Kindle Locations 778-782).
“Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel (2007) vividly recounts her experiences moving from an imperiled honor-bound family in tribal Africa to cosmopolitan mobility. The code that kept her family alive when she was a child suffocated her spirit before she gained freedom in the Netherlands and the United States. Like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), Infidel gained a wide American audience in part by stimulating sympathies for strong-minded modern heroines oppressed by alien, retrograde, patriarchal cultures. Differences among Islamic faiths and practices in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt-or Somalia or Indonesia for that matter-could easily be erased in the appeal of that grand narrative. As several critics have said, Americans delight in saving brown women from brown men.”
Going by articles like that from ampedasia, it would appear that some brown women want to be saved from brown men. They’ve internalized the racism or rather colorism. You do see the same thing with some black women who like to complain about black men. Maybe they too want to be saved from their own brown lower status by white male saviors.
In a world of prejudice and bigotry, many people get fucked up in the head. They are casualties of a demented world.
Stereotypes always contradict each other. What else is new?
http://asianmancure.com/anti-asian_male_and_asian_female_sexualization_racism.php
Stereotypes aren’t products of rational thought.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3143915/
What interested you about that? Was there a reason you were looking things up about testosterone?
lmao
http://asianmancure.com/biggest_problems_for_asian_men.php
“We have a LOT of problems. The biggest one that I can see is that WE ARE OUR OWN WORST ENEMY.”
It’s ironic that this post in defense of Asian men ends up being an attack on Asian men.
“Also, we are too tolerant and too disorganized. Asians haven’t organized themselves into a critical mass to speak out against the wide spread racism against Asians. The Blacks had the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. Jews have the anti-defamation league.”
African-Americans have been struggling against American oppression for longer than the country has existed. They have had a much greater length of time to get organized.
Plus, they are a massive part of the population, unlike Asian-Americans at present. African-Americans have been the majority of some states in the past and they have become the majority again in some states.
That makes a massive difference in getting your collective voice heard and heeded. Being a small minority is a more difficult challenge than being a large minority.
“Moreover, the term “Asians” is a vague umbrella term that can mean anything – Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai…etc. We SHOULD be super strong given that one umbrella term covers so many ethnicities but sadly, it worked the other way and splintered our efforts.”
American blacks and whites also used to be divided by ethnicities. It took centuries for the present black andwhite racial categories to develop, both as social identities and political forces.
“Why is your hair style so gay?”
Oh, great. Fight back against anti-Asian bigotry with anti-gay bigotry. So, now Asian men have to worry about their hair being gay, really? Is this person trying to be helpful?
http://thediplomat.com/2015/02/was-colonialism-good-for-asia/
I had a thought. Maybe the places that were most attractive to long-term colonization by European empires were those that had the kind of development already in place that was useful for a globalized economy. If that is the case, colonialism was in a sense a response to already existing conditions, not the cause of anything.
The reason I had this thought relates to Africa and slavery. One of the most interesting facts I came across involved the places where the slave trade took hold. It was specifically in the most advanced societies of Africa that had centralized governments, infrastructure, trade networks, and official currencies. The enslavers didn’t go looking for Africans to enslave in distant rural areas. They needed well established societies.
This is why some of the early slaves included a high class of people: the formally educated and literate, people with professional trades such as blacksmithing, farmers with knowledge of complex agricultural practices, etc. Plantation owners needed these people not just for the work they could do, but also for the knowledge they had (and the plantation owners lacked).
I’m going to share my experience. I grew up outside the States. Never lived in Asian majority environment until I moved to San Francisco. Until I started browsing reddit, I never thought much about WMs. Whenever I used to see a WM with AF, I would give them props (Yes 100% serious) because I assumed that this guy must not be racist since he’s opened to dating other races. This all changed about half a year ago.
I discovered Reddit and I started seeing topics about teaching English in Asia. It sounded like a good experience to me. I definitely wanted to get in on that. So naturally, I googled and visited different forums addressing this very topic. First, I saw a thread from a WM expat talking about his experience in China while casually referring to local men as “Chinamen.” Okay, maybe he didn’t know any better. So I gave him the benefit of the doubt. In another thread, I see a comment from a WM married to local AF in China answering a question about why AFs are into WMs. In his answer, he basically said “it’s because of the dick size and apparently, he kept asking his wife about the dick size of her AM ex and she wouldn’t give him the answer he wanted.” You and I both know what sort of answer he wanted to compensate for his insecurity. This led me to believe that a WM can be racist to Asians despite being married to AF. Crazy, eh? This is just the tip of the iceberg. There were numerous other threads from expats looking down on locals.
Bigotry comes in many forms.
I’ll do my best. I’m a white guy who’s lived in China for 3 years. I’m in my early 30s. I’ve achieved about a C1 level in Mandarin so I understand most of what is said around me and can have fairly involved conversations about familiar topics but don’t consider myself fluent yet.
I like to consider myself an ally when it comes to things like examining white privilege and opposing white supremacy, which is why I lurk subs like r/aa to hear what other communities are dealing with and thinking about. I usually wouldn’t comment but since there’s a specific invitation here I’ll fire up a throwaway and give my take.
Does white privilege exist in China? Absolutely. Is it the same as in the U.S.? Absolutely not. Does it exempt you from general discrimination against foreigners of all types? Also no. Are there some specific types of discriminatory treatment that whites get more than others? Yes, but they tend to be limited, more political in nature, and I wouldn’t classify them as horrible to deal with i general. In comparison we definitely have it easier than nonwhite foreigners.
It’s a very mixed bag of privilege and discrimination that gets thrown at you all at once. A lot of it just applies to foreigners of all colors, some is white specific.
*1) Jobs: *
Yeah, being white makes it easy for you to get an extremely narrow range of jobs in China. Really two: ESL teaching and “face jobs” where you pretend to be some bigwig in order to make the local company look more “international.”
Beyond that, the glass ceiling closes in extremely quickly, even if you speak fluent Chinese. I’m a teacher (an actual one with qualifications, I taught U.S. public school before coming over here) who does some administrative stuff, and I’m always being kept at arms’ length, having vital information withheld from me (even though I send and receive calls/emails in Chinese every day) and generally have to fight tooth and nail for trust or authority. You’re usually not taken very seriously, or it’s a massive uphill battle.
As a foreigner, you are basically “Othered” at all times when it comes to making decisions. Most Chinese administrators just want white people as marketing tools, not as actual members of the team. Part of the reason that sexpats proliferate is because foreigners who actually want to contribute are usually shut out of any decision making process because apparently we are too stupid or untrustworthy to be involved in anything beyond making the company look prosperous “Look, we have enough money to afford FIVE white people! Five! The other school only has THREE!”
The exceptions are expats who work at multinationals that have branches in China. When it comes to working at a domestic Chinese companies though the above usually applies.
So it’s a type of privilege, but in a way it has some similarities to the positive discrimination that some Asian professionals face in American IT positions: “let’s hire lots of Asian tech guys because we think they’re good at math, but never promote them into executive/management positions.” At the end of the day it’s about how you are useful to them, they’re not doing you any favors just because of your whiteness.
*2)Dating: *
Full disclosure, my gf is Chinese (downvote away). We’re the same age, both working professionals in a stable relationship. My dating history does not indicate yellow fever as she’s the only Asian I’ve dated. We’re really proactive about discussing issues related to WMAF couples (I sometimes direct her to articles on this sub and r/asiantwox) because neither of us want to be in weird fetishy relationships and if we have kids we’d like to try to be smart about helping them navigate their identities when the time comes.
White guys definitely are considered “handsome” by default in China. You basically get a free “two point adjustment.” If you’re a 6 back home, you’re an 8 here. Some douchey guys take advantage of this, but it’s also often a two way street: beauty standards in China trend towards pale and thin, whereas a lot of Western guys are used to curvier and more tanned women. So a lot of girls who are a 6 in the eyes of local Chinese guys (too big, too dark) will be an 8 to a Western guy. This is where the whole “laowai only date ugly girls” thing comes from. In general the Chinese girls I know who have Western bfs are curvier, darker, and less concerned with traditional gender/lifestyle norms than the general population.
Some Chinese girls also see it as a “do it for the story, bro” situation to date a foreign guy. It is what it is, I think it’s a temporary stage that will probably disappear after a decade or so.
The thing is, some Chinese guys are VERY bitter about the situation and once in a while there are stories of packs of Chinese guys randomly beating the crap of white guys for “stealing our women.” My gf and I are very careful to not hold hands or be too affectionate in public, especially at bars or nightclubs. I have one personal story about this: I was taking the subway with a friend, a 24 year old girl who was my language exchange partner. We weren’t dating or flirting, just having a mundane conversation. Local guy wanders on the train, drunk, gives me a death stare and tries to punch me in the stomach. Lucky for me he was so drunk that it just grazed my hip and he kind of fell over in a heap.
But a friend of mine was straight up attacked in broad daylight at a McDonalds (of all places) by some aggro local guy because he was with his Chinese gf. So the 2 point bonus is kind of offset by the ever present (though small) chance of random xenophobic violence.
Luckily I managed to win over my gf’s parents, but one of her cousins also referred to her in a “haha I’m totally joking except probably not” way as a “hanjian” (race traitor, basically) at the lunch table literally ten minutes after meeting me. Way to make a guy feel welcome, bro.
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[–]xiyangyangguizi 10 points 14 hours ago
3)Society in general:
This is the part where I think white privilege least applies. Despite living in a more developed/international city (not BJ/SH/HK though) I’m always being reminded of my otherness and foreignness. Little kids pointing and yelling “Foreigner!” is one thing. They don’t know any better and are usually cute about it.
I mean sitting on the subway and the 30 something couple across the car starts to talk about my appearance and try to figure out where I’m from, assuming I can’t understand. Walking into a restaurant and the table next to you suddenly starts a conversation about all the foreigners they know or have met. Walk into a coffee shop and the college kids next to you start OBVIOUSLY dropping extra English words and phrases into their otherwise Chinese conversation as a way of showing off (because all white people speak English and Russia doesn’t exist, right?).
The taxi driver who, upon discovering my nationality, immediately lays into “I really hate Americans, but Russians are okay because you guys are afraid of them.” or (other taxi driver) “You know that China has nuclear weapons, right? We’re not so weak anymore.” Thanks, can you just drive me home please?
Lots of Cold War mentality still alive here, and being a white American puts me directly in the crosshairs of nationalism. It’s mostly posturing and bluster and I rarely feel actually threatened, but it’s a constant reminder of your “outsiderness” and the hidden resentment/grievances that people lay on you due to your skin color and the history of imperialism (while domestic media always glorifies China’s 5000 years of empire and territorial expansion…).
Also as a white guy I feel like local dudes my age are always comparing themselves to me. It’s kind of depressing because I mostly have mostly made friends with Chinese men 10+ years older than me since with guys my ow age there’s this awkward competition that I wasn’t asking to be a part of. I stopped lifting weights at a local gym because this one guy would not so subtly follow me from machine to machine, copying each exercise in sequence, looking at me, SO AS TO BE SURE THAT I SAW that he was lifting 10 or 20 lbs. more than me on each exercise. Really? Really?!
Then if you listen to or read state media, you get things like “Education Minister states that textbooks supporting Western Values must be barred from our classrooms” and school curricula remind kids to “Always Remember The Century of Humiliation” so that 11 year old kids will challenge my British friends in 2015 about the Opium Wars. Hell, lots of media tried to blame the recent stock market drama on “hostile foreign forces short selling stocks”. Or I go on Baidu Tieba and every article about Western people has at least a handful of comments that sound like the Chinese version of Stormfront… yet at the same time lots of people want iPhones and wears U.S. flag t shirts and want to send their kids to study at UC Berkeley and Harvard…
Like I said, it’s a mixed bag.
The most eye opening to me as a white guy from the U.S. though, is that in China I no longer have the “privilege of individual judgment.” A few weeks after I arrived, there was a huge story in the news about some drunk asshole foreigner in Beijing who tried to molest a Chinese woman on the street and got his head kicked in by local dudes. Fair enough. It was all over Youku and Weibo for a few weeks. A few days later, I was getting off the metro around 10 pm. The only ones in the station are me and a middle aged Chinese woman. She turns, looks at me, then DASHES away in the other direction, clutching her purse in fear. The next day, an elderly woman in my building sees me coming and hurriedly closes the elevator door in my face with fearful eyes. The white privilege of escaping collective punishment for individual crimes doesn’t apply in China.
I’m actually grateful in a weird for that experience though, because it at least opened my eyes to a little taste of what non whites go through in the U.S. I’d read about it all before, but until you actually have someone treat YOU as a potential rapist/criminal because of what someone else who shares your skin color did, you can’t really begin to understand how infuriating it is. It was a realization for me.
Anyway, that’s a basic overview. If anyone has questions or wants details I’m here. I’m trying to be candid and frank but I’m not interested in a flame war so if it goes in that direction I won’t engage.
Lastly…
4) A note on r/china:
You really need to take it with a HUGE grain of salt. Remember that reddit is one of the few unblocked (yet) Western websites in China’s extremely censored web environment. Simply using the internet is a massive frustration here, and everyone assumes that one day reddit will also get the axe, so people tend to go over the top in that sub letting out steam because they have few other online outlets. Or any social outlets, really, since making too much noise even in personal conversations about your negative opinions/experiences can easily lead you to trouble…
That’s why it’s so much more “extreme” than r/japan, r/korea, etc. Those countries don’t have such a constrained atmosphere when it comes to discussing social issues.
I don’t post there but I understand why the community is the way it is. So you need a big grain of salt if you’ve never lived here as a foreigner for a significant period of time. A lot of it is sarcasm, a lot of it is catharsis, and you need to understand it in context. There are some people on that sub who are straight up bitter and racist, but the majority actually do care a lot about China and Chinese people. They criticize because they feel like China still has amazing potential that’s being held back.
It would be tough being a foreigner. I don’t think I could handle it. I don’t even like dealing with people I don’t know well in my own community. To feel as if everyone were treating me like a stranger would be tiresome. I try to never treat anyone as a stranger, no matter who they are, despite my introversion.
[–]kaisr1 [score hidden] 5 hours ago
I’m a CBC and have visited Shanghai twice for work purposes for a total duration of a little over a year. I feel most of what you say is very accurate and in line with what I’ve observed while I was there. However in addition to being ESL teachers and “face jobs”, international companies with branches in China will very often have white people in the managerial roles.
Otherwise I agree that contrary to what some posts say in this thread, white people aren’t worshipped in China, they are foreign, exotic and there is a great deal of ambivalence in general public attitudes toward them. My white colleagues were far more likely to be scammed or charged more than me, but they have also gotten free tables/bottle service at clubs. Overall though, if you’re gonna be a foreigner in China, being a white male is far and away the most advantageous.
My white female colleagues were assumed to be Russian prostitutes whenever we went out at night or just assumed to be extremely “open” and my Indian colleague was disrespected on a regular basis and pretty much not treated as an equal in most situations involving local chinese.
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[–]ptpatil [score hidden] 4 hours ago*
Yea, as an Indian person who is Americanized (living in the U.S. for 15+ years) I hate going to China, had to go for work a few times and I absolutely hated every minute. I am not going to lie, I like western culture more than east and west asian culture (even my own Indian culture). Good fucking riddance though, never going back, hope I never have to deal with non-westernized chinese ever again either.
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[–]AsianCentury [score hidden] 54 minutes ago
Interesting stories. BTW sounds a lot more tame than when Blacks were lynched for talking to or even glancing innocently at a white woman not too long ago.
Yeah I know what you’re saying. The same is true about white expat men too. I’ve met many who would just be as hateful and derogatory and generalize as much as possible against white/western women. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “White women are disgusting compared to asian women. They’re all obese femnazi cunts with dicks” is generally what they go on about while putting asians on some kind of superior pedastool of perfection (Nether of which is true and both attitudes are racist). There’s a lot of jaded, bitter men with issues and they’ve been repeatedly rejected by women of their own country/race and then think that “well its THEM not me” and become very nasty and then go after other women of other races. I see this “anti white woman” attitude a lot with white men who date asian women and I also notice that many of them are very, very racist against asian men as well.
Nina
November 23, 2014 at 1:11 pm | Permalink
So very true, Kay. I steer clear of expat sites for that reason. It’s mostly white guys with Asian wives saying awful things about Western women and Asian men all day. They even say awful thing of their guest country which makes me wonder why they’re there or with an Asian woman if he hates her country so much.
Saving face is the most important thing in Western society. In western culture, it is rare to admit mistake or failure. Thus, privacy is extremely important for westerners to hide their defects since western culture is about winner admiring and loser despising. Very little sympathy for losers in West.
I’m not sure how to take that comment.
I don’t know about Europeans, but saving face doesn’t seem all that important to most Americans. For example, Americans will air their dirty laundry without giving it much thought or concern. Even the most personal of problems such as mental illness isn’t that big of a deal in admitting. I’ve heard that bankruptcy is more common in the US than in Europe and that there is less stigma attached to it.
For Americans, being a loser isn’t all that important in and of itself. The greater issues for Americans are about social identity, such as race. If you are a poor black, you are shamed for just being born, but such attitudes have nothing to do with saving face or not saving face. It’s just bigotry.
Click to access EHB2000a.pdf
He just can’t help it
https://whimsicalweltschmerz.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/aint-nothing-logical-about-yellow-fever-its-bio-logical/
He does go to a lot of effort in rationalizing his behavior.
Colonial mentality hurts
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_mentality
http://mediadiversified.org/2014/10/14/tourism-white-privilege-and-colonial-mentality-in-east-africa/
America too once was a colony or rather many colonies. I think many Americans have a colonial mentality, not just minorities. America has always had the problem of not having its own distinct traditions. Everything we have comes from somewhere else, largely from former colonial powers (even calling this country ‘America’ points to the vagueness of the mentality of being American). This relates to why the US has social problems more similar to other former colonized places. Our rates of violence, inequality, etc are simply not comparable to Europe, except maybe Ireland (the first colony of England and the prototype of all later English colonies). We are more similar to countries in Central and South America. Our becoming an empire has been our way of trying to deny our own colonial past.
https://gregschina.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/asias-expat-stigma/
はい
http://www.echinacities.com/expat-corner/The-Difficulties-of-Being-a-Female-Expat-in-China#page_cmt
The ‘urban water buffalo’ is a term for an old, rich male expat with sex on his mind in Bangkok
The birds do it; the bees do it; teenagers most certainly do it and so do water buffalo. The ‘urban water buffalo’ – an exploding social phenomenon of old men with young, Thai women – is very common in Bangkok.
The water buffalo are defined by their characteristics of being Western-sized large, frequently slow, good for making money out of and usually grey.
This much-coveted species is often found outside such entrepôts as Louis Vuitton, Coach and other exclusive boutiques for women. As the men bray in protest at the size of the designer label shopping bills they are being asked to cover, the young women flash their doe-like black eyes. With steely resolve, these often very young, barely legal, women enforce their unwritten contracts against men who have deluded themselves into believing their May-December relationship is anything but the commercial opportunity that it is. Although it is easy for an outsider to condemn, this is perhaps not a well-considered conclusion as the cultural references in which it occurs are very different from our own.
Firstly, one has to look at the rapidly shifting demographics of Thailand, which have caused massive rural poverty. As the government concentrates on encouraging industrial growth and expanding exports, it has poured money into urban development and mainly ignored the needs of rural Thailand. A World Bank report from 2012 states that 66.7 per cent of Thais live outside the major centres, where there is little employment for a populace moving away from its agrarian roots.
For most, the few decent work opportunities that are available are limited by being products of an education system ranked the worst in Southeast Asia and listed 77th among 142 countries by the World Economic Forum Global Competitive Report. So waves of people come to Bangkok in search of a livelihood in a workforce for which they are ill-prepared. The result according to MP Chuvit Kamolvisit, leader of the Rak Prathet Thai Party, is a burgeoning sex industry estimated to involve up to a million women.
Secondly, social values around the place of women in society, and their extreme lack of empowerment, increase women’s vulnerability to be drawn into a sex-related occupation. Simply put, women are subject to a high level of violence inside and outside the home. The Leadership Academy of Muslim Women found “over 40 per cent of women report having experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner”.
So ingrained is violence against women that the Nation newspaper quotes Shoko Ishikawa of UN Women East and Southeast Asia as citing a statistic that more than seven in 10 women in rural Thailand believe there are circumstances in which it is justifiable for a man to beat his wife. And, although the 2007 Thai constitution guarantees equality, such laws are treated as ‘guidelines’ in the real world, leaving gender inequality and discrimination the norm in Thailand. This is often expressed in the high incidence of rape and physical assaults. Female Thai friends say they are afraid to take taxis and motor bicycle transports after dark.
It must also be factored into any understanding of these relationships that societal mores around sexual relationships in Thailand are different from those of the West. Sex is far more open here. A Durex-sponsored study of faithfulness in intimate relationships among 29,000 respondents in 36 countries found that Thai men lead the world, with 54 per cent admitting to being unfaithful. Thai women kept apace with a 59 per cent unfaithful rating, second only to Ghana’s women at 62 per cent.
In context, an intimate couple may not really consider that the woman is cheating by having a concomitant relationship with a Western male because it is only a business transaction, the nature of which would not carry a connotation of prostitution for many Thais. Interestingly, business is one thing, but Thai men are wary of their partners finding out about their lovers for justifiable fear of losing their manhood. A colloquialism holds that a man has to return to his conjugal bed or his partner may “that hai pet kin” (roughly translated as “to cut and feed to the duck”, ie thereby making the organ unavailable for reattachment). It is a serious threat: Bangkok is known as the penis-reattachment capital of the world.
Ill-educated and with no “silver-spoon” connections, many Thai women’s only resource is themselves, and they know better than to squander their one advantage in a transactional economy. And some of them are quite industrious about it. It is not unusual for the women to have several Western boyfriends. As the expats return to their home countries, they show their appreciation by sending their girlfriends money every month until they can take another Asian sojourn, encouraged by the women’s promises of “I love you too much”. It beats the women working in a brothel run by organised crime.
So, older men – who probably never had such beautiful, charming and acquiescent women give them the time of day even when they were young and virile – get to fulfil their fantasies. Wealthy, older men with younger, trophy wives, is a cliché in Western society. This new take on elder care simply lowers the entry cost, making such relationships available for the average bloke. For the women, it brings a substantial redistribution of tourist income. Clearly, these relationships are not acceptable in polite Thai society, but they do sometimes evolve into marriage – German is the most common nationality of foreign husbands.
But with few opportunities for so many women, who are we to judge the choices the women have made? And, as for the men, trouble only arises when they forget the social context of the relationship and become delusional about its true nature. If they do not want to be part of the Old Sexpats Club, then they should not play the game.
Trafficking of Eastern European women into japan and Korea is a big issue, as well
http://nobsrussia.com/2014/05/21/graham-phillips-is-a-sack-of-shit-and-there-are-many-more-like-him/
The Eastern European issue is significant from a Western European perspective. They are similar to Hispanics in their whiteness being questionable, especially to Anglo-Americans. The residual rhetoric of the Cold War exaggerates this further. To the Western Cold War mindset, the Russians might as well be Mongol hordes. Prostitution is just another way for Westerners to bring capitalist modernity to the backwards natives in order to civilize them. It’s for their own good.
Speaking of Eastern euro
Polgar has a 170 iq it’s reported. Look at her early life though, hdd’ers would just say that euro Jews are genetically smart
Her dad’s experiment certainly succeeded
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polgár
If genetic determinism is more important than everything else, then why do even HBD and race realist parents waste their time giving their kids all these privileges, opportunities, and resources?
Why do they raise them in the best communities with high rates of social capital and low rates of violence, pollution, and toxins? Why do they ensure their kids get plenty of exercise, nutrition, and intellectually stimulating toys and activities? Why do they pay for tutors and lessons, get them into special programs, private schools, and Ivy League colleges? Why do they ensure tax money goes to fund all the things they value and that personally benefits themselves, their families, and their communities?
Since the white supremacists and class elitists are inherently superior, we should be able to take all their wealth and property, enslave and oppress them for centuries, ghettoize and imprison them for generations, and then after all that they should still rise to the top. They wouldn’t even need to raise their own kids and so we could take them away as many minorities had their children taken away from them. Their kids are so genetically superior that they could be raised by chimpanzees and their genetics would prevail over everything. Right?
Fwiw, like East Asians are stereotyped as tiger parents, Jews are as well. My own parents often said “those Jews are so much like us Chinwse when it comes to education and kids”
I always wonder about the supposedly intellectually inferior groups.
I remember coming across a Jew who was responding a review. She had data from where her family came from in Europe. In the past, they were poor and had low rates of education. There was nothing that indicated they were special. But then conditions changed for some reason and particular populations of Jews started doing well.
In discussions of Asians, especially Asian immigrants and their Asian-American descendants, I always think about class and related issues. Most Asian immigrants are of wealthier and more educated demographics. But I know some Asian immigrants have been extremely poor and there are poor Asian-American communities with high rates of violence, crime, and gangs.
It makes me wonder about the poor people of Asian countries. What about the the rural people left behind in China and what about the poor working in desperate conditions in factories? I doubt they are tiger parents, as the parents often are stuck in factories that are located far away from their families. I’ve heard that China has many kids without parents in the rural areas. They are left with their grandparents or extended family, but I doubt they are getting as much good parenting like they would have received if their parents had been there.
I think there’s a difference between in-group preferences and out-group preferences. Preferences for those of similar backgrounds wouldn’t exist in an ideally fair world, but we all do it to some extent, whether it’s race, ethnicity, education level, type of profession, etc.
The issue with Asian women (and Black men) isn’t so much why they date outside their race; it’s that they do so in an environment that still greatly tilts towards in-group preferences. So why are they the outliers? The answer is pretty obvious.
Furthermore, it’s especially problematic when out-group preferences exactly follow our collective racist and sexist prejudices (i.e. Blacks are abnormally masculine, Asians are abnormally feminine, and Whites are the ideal blend and everyone who can should try to get with them).
Shouldn’t Asian females and black males make the perfect mating pair and produce superior progeny? Social conservatives love gender stereotypes. Men should be men and women women. The problem with whites would seem to be that, according to the stereotypes, they tend to fall somewhere in the mediocre middle, not particular feminine and not particularly masculine, failing both ends of the gender ideal.
I was thinking about how hdd’ers take the “goldilocks” thing (perfect whites, masculine blacks, girly Asians) for granted as biology, but in reality fetishizarion of asian women is recent, and whites have been threatened both by black and asian and basically any other man. Sessue hayakAwa being an early Hollywood sex symbol, before a lot of white men in charge didn’t like that
“I mean, I have two Asian American cousins who are in their 40s now and they remember the same thing growing up in the 80s. Yellow fever wasn’t really a thing for either sex. One was dated no one but white girls all through grad school. An English woman he dated even proposed to HIM — by buying him a car! He’s been married to a Korean woman for about 10 years now.
His sister is married to a Jewish dude with two kids. There was no cachet to being an Asian woman in the 80s. This was a time when the vast majority of Americans were still completely grossed out by the idea of sushi. Neither of my cousins had trouble getting dates cause they’re both really good looking but the Asian card didn’t really help them, either.
That’s changed today. Again, I really think porn and K-Pop are the two biggest factors in this. The exploitation of Asian female bodies began to really take off once the Internet made porn extremely accessible. After that, you have a whole generation of kids who have grown up with hardcore Asian fetish. The West hadn’t really seen the sexualized Asian male body until K-Pop started becoming a global phenomenon. I guarantee you in 10 more years, when the current teeny bopper generation comes of age, there will be lots of white girls with yellow fever and it’ll be a problem our sons will have to navigate.”
I’m sure there will be changes. Also, whites becoming the minority will shift the dynamics of lots of issues.
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec94/vol52/num04/Why-Gifted-Students-Belong-in-Inclusive-Schools.aspx
Inclusive schools make sense to me. Many ‘gifted’ kids appear to be highly advanced in some ways while simultaneously being stunted or dysfunctional in other ways. That applies to my own experience. I had much some potential where I could have used more challenging education experiences, but I also had some severe problems and I certainly wasn’t psychologically mature for my age. Putting me into tracking would not have helped.
Never exclusively fancied white guys (or guys in general really) but I could relate in the sense of feeling internalized racism in the sense of being weak, uncreative, robotic, and the biggest one, one I still struggle to shake, “second best.” In the sense that the (white) west is on top and in the last few centuries the big guy, the inventor, while Asians were doig better than other groups, but in “second place.” So to speak. That Chija’s 5000 hear history? I’ve internalized white supremacy. That 5000 year history didn’t take them to the moon, or TV, or the industrial revolution, whatever.
That kind of stuff
http://www.rookiemag.com/2015/04/far-away-from-me/
When I was younger, I wanted to be anything but Chinese. From the info I was fed it was like everyone either hated or looked down on Chinese. Everyone, whether first or third world.
I enjoy personal articles like that. It offers a peak into someone else’s life. I also appreciated her insights.
“One of the things I’ve noticed is that the people who benefit the most from living in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy are always the ones who most adamantly insist it does not exist. The people who have always had the right to tell their own story are usually the first ones to protest when their story is reframed in the context of our white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The idea that their story, their personal experience is somehow part of a larger narrative, a larger context, never sits well with people who have been told their whole lives that they are exceptional, whose individuality has never been contested.”
That makes sense.
I’m a white, male American and raised middle class at that. But a number of things forced me outside of the norm. I’ve always known that I’m not the ideal of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
On the other hand, I have the advantage of appearing normal, more or less. My parents raised me to know how to play the game and, even with all of my dysfunctions, I can play the game reasonably well. Plus, I’m always going to be given the benefit of the doubt in American society. I know that no matter how difficult life is for me I still have immense advantages and privileges, most of them I probably never notice.
I don’t ever have to justify my existence. My ancestry would be the envy of any white supremacist. As far as I know, I’m pure ‘white’ and the right kind of ethnicity at that, some combination of British and Northern European. All of my ancestors have been in the US since at least the 1800s and most of them came much earlier than that. My roots go back to the earliest colonists. The only thing I lack is an ancestor who was on the first boat of Puritans, but I can make up for that with having one of the first Vigrinia slave owners in my family tree. My distant and extended family includes those who fought in the American Revolution, the Indian Wars, both sides of the Civil War, and both world wars.
So, yeah, my personal story is part of an ancestral story that is embedded in the mainstream story of American society. It doesn’t even matter that I know my ancestry. People will simply look at me and assume that I’m a Real American. No one is going to question my legitimacy. No one is going to ask me to prove my citizenship.
I could be a first generation European-American, raised white trash, or even been born in a Hispanic country. But as long as I have light skin, mostly stereotypical European features, and some variant of acceptable English, I will be perceived as white and treated accordingly. I will be ‘normal’.
That is a strange thing, for such superficial factors to have such powerful impact on one’s life experience.
“One way to threaten someone’s power is to say, “You think you acted purely on your own free will and individual volition but there are forces larger than you, larger than any individual, that contributed to you being the way you are and doing the things you have done.” Or: “Your intentions are not all that matters and good intentions do not absolve you of your complicity in harming others.””
There is that as well. I will be treated as an ‘individual’. I’m not even expected to represent America or other white people. Whiteness is a given, in that it is defined by what it isn’t. I’m not black, not Hispanic, not Asian, not an immigrant, etc. My whiteness frees me, rather than constrains me, or so that is how mainstream society treats whiteness.
“And it spoke so much to the paralyzing expectations and pressures we put on people of color, especially politically outspoken people of color, to make sure our personal lives and our sex lives do not contradict ANY of our political beliefs. The pressure, in essence, for people of color—especially outspoken activists of color who are taking the difficult step of publicly engaging with these systems of oppression—to be perfect in all aspects of our lives, public and private.”
As a white person, I can even criticize other white people. My position is secure. There is no sting to any far right-winger who might claim I’m a race traitor, and in fact I rarely even hear anyone making such a claim. Not even white supremacists can seriously question the legitimacy of my whiteness. They too will acknowledge my white privilege.
I don’t have to represent my ‘people’. I can simply be an individual.
I was thinking about how technology could help make an improved humanity, but it could also make ww3 unlike the first two, and not in a good way
Look at the first answer
http://www.quora.com/China-in-2014/Is-the-Chinese-Peoples-Liberation-Army-a-Paper-Tiger
The most apt comparison of the relationship between the US and China is not that of the Cold War conflict between the US and the USSR. If anything, a closer comparison would be the close ties the US had to Germany before WWII.
There were high rates of German immigration to the US in the early 20th century, as there are now high rates of Chinese immigration. There were close business connections between the US and Germany, including American investments in Germany, which resonates with present economic links between the US and China.
The US was slow to enter war with Germany, since many Americans were of German ancestry and there was a close cultural and even ideological affinity among the populations of the two nations. Germany, for example, looked to the US as an inspiration for its eugenics aspirations. In the US, the German Bund strongly supported the Nazis and they had massive marches in many US cities.
The US never would have gone to war if Germany hadn’t declared war against the US. And Germany never would have declared war if the Japanese hadn’t attacked. None of that was inevitable.
The international situation right now is quite a bit different. But the similarities are interesting. I don’t see either China or the US wanting to start a war against the other. They both would lose a lot in the process. A third party, however, could eventually force conflict to arise.
If that occurs, there is no doubt that technology would play a greater role than any military conflict ever before. Could you imagine these two immense economic powers focusing all of their resources toward technological innovations, whether in terms of a world war or a cold war? The world would never be the same again.
China I think will go in a trajectory we haven’t seen before. I don’t think it will be a copycat Soviet Union. At least based on now.
It’s funny how media in the west is always slanted against China. For example Muslims are evil according to the media, except when it’s Uighur Muslims in cinjiang. Then it’s just poor people being oppressed by evil red china :p
I agree. China doesn’t fit into any categories that Westerners understand. I doubt even the Chinese know for sure their own trajectory. It’s a new phase of world history and many alternative possibilities may arise. China is the one country that has the clearest potential of moving in an entirely different direction.
Here is something maybe of interest:
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18246/uniqlo-labor-conditions-china
I’ve been waiting for a long time to see more signs of international worker solidarity. In this globalized economy, injustices will continue as long as we remain isolated in our problems. We either see that our fates are entangled or those in power will continue to take advantage of all the ways we are divided.
This relates to climate change. We are no longer living in a time when problems are merely local. I hope we can learn that lesson before things get too horrific. The consequences of ignoring these global problems could be beyond imagination.
Right now, the one thing beginning to connect the world’s populations is the internet. But many countries are seeking to end the openness of the internet. If that happens, that would be a tragedy of immense proportions.
That’s unfortunate, but not surprising. Uniqlo is everywhere in Japan. The quality is also as good as it gets in that price range.
You can’t really escape unethical labor unless you buy very expensive these days, unfortunately.
mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/03/business/chinese-textile-mills-are-now-hiring-in-places-where-cotton-was-king.html?referrer=
There’s plenty of racist assholes in my hometown. Usually it is subtle though. They’ll never come out and say it.
Being treated unfairly by the police, police not listening to you, not taking your statement. The only thing that saved me and my folks was that we had witnesses to back us up, cause the police sure weren’t listening even though all evidence pointed to our side.
At least I’m not afraid of being killed by the police, but that’s a pretty pathetic consolation.
I was biking with my dad on a golf course today and some guy said we weren’t allowed to bike there, fair enough, we pushed our bikes on our way out. Later on same guy basically beckoned us in a really nasty way to gtfo. We first ignored him, but he kept doing it (that really rude two fingered gtfo thing of you know what I mean) Once my dad looked like he was going to pick a fight with him, he backed away. Ugh.
The police in that day also never listened to my parents, my mum. It was just my mum, the police didn’t even listen to her and would not take her statement. It wasn’t until my dad arrived and said he was a professor that the police literally 180-ed his attitude. We still would have been fucked if it weren’t for witnesses on our side even though all other evidence was on our side.
I have a lot of sympathy for black people. Fuck this place sometimes
My parents always told me about black people’s sacrifices benefiting Asians like us.
It wasn’t easy for them immigrating here. They’ve worked up to the middle class, but faced plenty of discrimination along the way, still do. No kkk shot, it always more subtle. They can spot it a mile away not, facial expressions, body language, words, etx.
My parents speak decent English And my dad is fire-y tempered and they work “respectable” jobs. They tell me that if they didn’t speak English and really were working stereotypical jobs like laundry and dish washing, they’d be screwed. Discriminated all day.
I’m very supportive of anti-racism, I don’t try to live in a “I’m privileged cause I’m model minority asian” mentality. I can’t afford to.
It would be nice if more minorities saw their situations as inseparably linked. The saddest thing in the world is when minorities see other minorities as enemies or competitors. I know it isn’t anything new. How minority groups are divided up changes with time, but the dynamic of division and divisiveness is the same.
The majority has the trick of letting minority groups into the majority position in order to maintain majority privilege. The Irish, Germans, and Italians were allowed to assimilate not because of the kindness of WASPs, but because WASPs were becoming a minority and needed to shore up their numbers.
Majority whites will try to pull this trick again. If they can convince a group like Hispanics to assimilate, they will be able to maintain their majority for the foreseeable future. They just have to convince enough Hispanics to oppress other minorities. WASPs were able to assimilate the massive numbers of ethnic European-Americans and they are more than able to do the same for Hispanics.
I’m not sure about Asian-Americans, though. I think they better be wary about playing the model minority role. That is likely to backfire in unpredictable ways. Asian-Americans may be the first group to be sacrificed when times get tough, for their smaller numbers will make them an easy target for scapegoating. I wonder how many Asian-Americans realize how precarious their position is in the social hierarchy. Their best hope is to seek solidarity with African-Americans, the one demographic that will always stand against white supremacy, because they have no choice.
I also hope lower class whites begin to wise up. Their whiteness doesn’t mean jack shit in the end.
No. We’ll always be the weaker minority until/if an Asian country overtakes as the dominant superpower, then we’ll be marked as the evil foreigner (just like Japan was in the 80s)
The division between AMs and AFs is too deep and severe to mend. The issues we focus on are too different (objectification by AFs, and emasculation by AMs) The way we treat each other is too shoddy (dating exclusively white boys by a massive number of AFs, resentment, anger and retaliation by AMs) Both genders worship marrying white as their ultimate goal (Many AFs think that marrying a white boy will make them white, and save them from their “abusive” Asian families. AMs think that marrying a white woman will make them a hero, and take “revenge” against jelly AFs) In reality, we care very little for each other.
Too much inter-racial hatred amongst Asians. Even American ones. You can see the reactions against the Japanese. Look at /u/profitfalls and his anti East-Asian views, because he perceives filipinos are looked down upon. Look at the reactions after filipino coast guard murders Taiwanese fishermen. Look at the reaction after the Japanese PM visits Yasukuni shrine. As much as we laugh at FOBs, we cannot escape our roots. Our home countries hate each other as much as we hate each other.
Laughing at FOBs. We want to be respected and admired, and yet we laugh at people from our home country. A British accent is sexy. A Frenchman is exotic and romantic. A Italian is a spicy latino lover. Many of the white people from their motherlands speak with weird accents or cannot speak good english, but yet, are looked up to. We laugh at people from the motherland as silly, awkward and stupid. Shows how much pride we have.
For those who say we are like the Jews, you are wrong. They are white. We are not.
We have been discussing this for years, and little to nothing has changed. If anything, it has gotten worse. TV still pumps out AFWM couples more than ever before. White boys are now not only C-level execs in their own country, they’re colonising Asian firms with nothing but their own. AFs pump out articles more than ever about not dating Asian men/dating white boys (with us trying to explain it away) Look at reddit even. We hide in our shitty AA corner while /r/China , /r/thailand and other national subreddits are populated by sexpats criticising Asia. You’re delusional and lying to yourself if you think its getting better.
Asian-Americans are going through an experience that has similarities to that of non-WASP European-Americans from the mid-1800s to early-1900s. I do think that in the coming century or so a new racial category in America could form that merges those of Asian and so-called Caucasian ancestry, essentially almost everyone who isn’t African-American or Native American. A world war with China, as I’ve argued before, might force such an assimilation as the previous world wars forced German-Americans to assimilate.
One thing that sets apart Asians and non-white Latinos is that we on average look more different, though. The Germans, Scandinavians, Irish and other northern Europeans especially could “blend in” physically.
I don’t think that is as big of an issue as one might think. Many ethnic immigrants looked quite different. Some Irish were pale, freckled, red-haired, and green-eyed. Many Southern Europeans looked quite different than the English with dark skin, dark curly hair, and dark eyes. Also, go far enough into Eastern Europe and you begin to see stereotypically Asian features, even though most people would still include those populations as ‘white’. Furthermore, if even Arabs and Indians often get included as Caucasians, then I don’t see it as all that great of a stretch to include most Asians. Caucasian has never meant only the most light skinned people.
http://www.seventhgeneration.com/learn/blog/what-if-someone-told-you-you-couldnt-line-dry-your-clothes
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/08/28/public-high-schools-are-not-doing-their-jobs
People aren’t less educated than they used to be. It’s just that more people are taking tests like the ACT. There has never before been a point in history when so many young people are going to college. The problem is that the primary education system hasn’t caught up, as it still is designed for an era when most high school students didn’t go to college. We have an economy that demands people go to college or be left behind, but as a society we refuse to further invest in the education system to prepare kids for any of this. Like every other aspect of our society, it’s sink or swim Social Darwinism.
http://nypost.com/2015/08/02/students-stunning-plea-why-did-nyc-let-me-graduate-high-school/
That is a whole other issue. There is a push to get students to graduate high school. This wasn’t a big deal in past generations, when few people graduated high school (or needed to), much less went to college. The schools are feeling the pressure to graduate students, but they aren’t receiving the funding and reform that would force genuine improvements. So, they are simply covering up the problems and hoping no one will notice.
Everyone in power seems afraid to actually deal with these problems, because everyone knows this is a systemic problem that exists at every level. It’s not just education that needs fixed. Our entire society and political system is dysfunctional. What we need at this point is a revolution, preferably peaceful, but revolution one way or another.
http://nypost.com/2014/02/23/students-defend-murry-bergtraum-hs-in-error-filled-letters/
I never heard of this blended learning. It appears to be total crap. I’m glad it got public attention.
I guess what they’re trying to argue is that with a mixed heritage most of these actors that are part Asian don’t really share the same features as a full Asian anymore. And because they look white, they’re treated as white in the industry. Nothing wrong with having a mixed heritage, it’s just that the genes that these actors/actresses inherited makes them pass as white more than Asian and they’re treated as white, not Asian.
The thing about the US is that if you look white, you’re treated white because it’s a privilege. It doesn’t matter if you’re half Asian or quarter- as long as you fit the white narrative you’re going to have that kind of status. The reason why Asians have such a hard time breaking into Hollywood is because of their looks and the baggage of racial stereotypes.
We’re going through the same shit that black people had to decades ago in order to get past the white barrier. Even then a recent interview with Chris Rock shows that even well known black actors still have a lot of barriers and issues to fight because of Hollywood’s whiteness. However the difference between black people in the industry and Asians is that they’ve been in the States much longer and were able to form a strong political base to push changes during the Civil Rights movement.
Hollywood is and always will push a white narrative which is why they nab actors with quarter/half Asian heritage to fill Asian roles because white producers think that they’ll fit the role best and still can sell the ‘white’ image to the masses. It’s also an appeasement tactic. Look we filled the role by a quarter Asian/half Asian! We’re diverse!
Even when we have actors like Ken Jeong and John Cho who don’t share white looks, they had to break into the industry by playing stereotypes and make self depreciating humor, by essentially being the Asian version of Chappelle. Because of that there’s now a rising trend for white people trying to stereotype Asian males as comedians.
The list of shit in Hollywood goes on and on.
If you start looking at a lot of actors/actresses and musicians in Asia you’ll see in their bios that a ton of them were born or lived in the States for a while but went back to Asia. The reason being is because it’s tough trying to break into Hollywood and to play puppet to shitty scripts that call for constant degrading racial humor/stereotypes and pigeon holing women to play as prostitutes, evil martial arts femme fatales, ect and males as self depreciating comedians or awkward geeks.
In some ways, it’s worse for Native Americans. They are probably the most stereotyped actors of any ethnicity. I can’t wait for whites to become just another minority. It won’t change quickly, but I bet more will change than many are expecting. Even if whites try to shore up their numbers by including white-looking Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans, it still will alter the dynamics of this society.
Of course, colorism might just replace racism, where skin tone will become the new determinant of the social hierarchy. Lighter-skinned African-Americans, like lighter-skinned Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans, do get treated differently. I could imagine that it would be hard to accept as a lighter-skinned non-‘white’ that your success wasn’t earned, but simply an extension of skin color privilege. There is a long history of light-skinned blacks truly believing that they were a better sort of black. It’s sad when oppressed groups are divided so easily.
I don’t know. It will be challenging times in the coming decades and generations. Whatever develops, it won’t be the same.
I know that whiteness has been a strong cultural beauty norm in Asia. In my opinion it needs to stop because even though it’s a cultural beauty thing, I can’t help but feel that some of that is a subconscious need to have this ideal Eurasian look or something. Whether it’s a traumatic leftover from history or what, but it needs to change in my honest opinion.
Though the US is accepting of tanner skin tones, there’s a certain limit of darkness they’ll tolerate. A good point in case would be half black/half white actresses. Because they have a lighter skin tone, they’re more popular in Hollywood and in the music industry. If you look at Aretha Franklin, Beyonce, Halle Berry and Niki Minaj…their skin tones are pretty light. Even if you have someone like Oprah who’s a little darker…comparing her cover photos and photoshoot images versus normal images, you’ll see that the industry makes her skin tone lighter. Hollywood’s appeal of black people women is that lighter skin tone.
permalinksavecontextfull comments (62)give gold
An Asian American Actor’s Thoughts on #OscarsSoWhite by Sinomurica in asianamerican
[–]Anatase 2 points 6 months ago*
If you take a closer look at half black/half white actresses/models…the lighter their skin tone, the more tolerated they are in Hollywood. For black males, skin tone isn’t as big of a factor as shown with Samuel L Jackson and Morgan Freeman. However they came onto the scene shortly after the Civil Rights movement. There’s a few articles written and active discussions in the black community about this very issue. They’re still labeled as black because their skin is still darker than the average tan white person. By average I mean more of a light tan, not the gross overcooked kind.
In the case of part white/part Asians- we have naturally lighter skin tone ranges versus black people (without mixing of genes) and with white genes mixed in, can come out looking fairly white. Some people from India with naturally lighter skin tones can pass as white and same goes with people of Moroccan/Middle Eastern descent. One of my best friends is pure Moroccan with a light skin tone with caucasian features and because of that she’s treated as white.
permalinksavecontextfull comments (62)give gold
From generation to generation, whiteness will keep expanding and including more and more of the world’s population. It’s this strange concept that is sort of a non-concept. Whiteness is defined not by what it is, but by what it isn’t, i.e., black. Whites will accept almost anyone into the ‘white’ club, just as long as those new members help to defend their privilege and position against the black underclass.
http://audreymagazine.com/korean-woman-harassed-by-caucasian-foreigners/
There is nothing worse than when entire populations internalize the oppression used against them. This has been seen with every oppressed population on the planet, including poor whites. You would think people would see through this kind of bullshit, but most people seem unable to see it for what it is.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/worldviews/2012/04/30/why-women-are-the-worst-kind-of-bullies/
I remember hearing about a female social scientist. She studied child behavior. She spent a lot of time observing young kids in schools.
She talked about how horrific it was to see what girls would do to each other. She would go home at night wanting to cry. She would describe how boys would physically fight and then that would usually be the end of it. But girls would be vicious in tormenting particular other girls until they had destroyed them, psychologically and socially.
As a person who isn’t female and didn’t have any sisters, I don’t know why this would be. Do girls learn to act this way toward each other? Or is there something else going on? Will any of this change once women become more secure in their positions in society?
There’s a lot socetial pressure for women to not be direct.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/the-evolution-of-bitchiness/281657/
I would’ve just called them out honesty. I always tend to do that.
I suppose it can be jarring, but I was also able to avoid most “female” drama.
http://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/why-are-those-girls-so-mean/
Can’t walk anywhere, can’t hang my shot outside lmao
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-11417677
That isn’t something I’ve ever given any thought to before. My mother used to hang our clothes on lines when I was a kid. I don’t remember it being an issue. I had no idea that there were laws prohibiting this in some places. That is fucked up.
https://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/Connect/MediaCentre/NewsReleases/Dominant%20East%20Asians%20face%20workplace%20harassment.aspx
That is how social control is used to maintain the status quo. Most people don’t understand how bigotry operates. It doesn’t require Klansmen riding on horses with torches. Social oppression is enforced through everyday behaviors of people who are oblivious to what they are doing.
There is always a reason people can give for why they act a particular way. No one will ever admit, likely even to themselves, that they are being bigoted. Everyone knows being bigoted is a bad thing, and most people don’t think of themselves as being bad. Bigotry is what other people do, mostly people in the past.
It’s easy to believe the worst is over in the economic downturn. But for African-Americans, the pain continues — over 13 percent of black workers are unemployed, nearly twice the national average. And that’s not a new development: regardless of the economy, job prospects for African-Americans have long been significantly worse than for the country as a whole.
The most obvious explanation for this entrenched disparity is racial discrimination. But in my research I have found a somewhat different culprit: favoritism. Getting an inside edge by using help from family and friends is a powerful, hidden force driving inequality in the United States.
Such favoritism has a strong racial component. Through such seemingly innocuous networking, white Americans tend to help other whites, because social resources are concentrated among whites. If African-Americans are not part of the same networks, they will have a harder time finding decent jobs.
Favoritism is almost universal in today’s job market. In interviews with hundreds of people on this topic, I found that all but a handful used the help of family and friends to find 70 percent of the jobs they held over their lifetimes; they all used personal networks and insider information if it was available to them.
Help is not given to just anyone, nor is it available from everyone. Inequality reproduces itself because help is typically reserved for people who are “like me”: the people who live in my neighborhood, those who attend my church or school or those with whom I have worked in the past. It is only natural that when there are jobs to be had, people who know about them will tell the people who are close to them, those with whom they identify, and those who at some point can reciprocate the favor.
Because we still live largely segregated lives, such networking fosters categorical inequality: whites help other whites, especially when unemployment is high. Although people from every background may try to help their own, whites are more likely to hold the sorts of jobs that are protected from market competition, that pay a living wage and that have the potential to teach skills and allow for job training and advancement. So, just as opportunities are unequally distributed, they are also unequally redistributed.
Exactly! That is how racism persists while nearly everyone denies being a racist. The entire social system, including personal relationships, are built on a long history of racism. It perpetuates itself by default. When you are part of such a system, you either actively fight racism or you promote it.
As with most wealth in this country, power and privilege, opportunity and resources are inherited. Favoritism is most basic form of cronyism. It’s the injustice that plays out in everyday life, and when played out on the larger scale we call it corruption, but in essence it is the same thing.
http://www.towleroad.com/2015/08/filmmaker-matthew-cooke-shows-you-how-to-race-bait-watch/
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/dear-white-america-your-toxic-masculinity-killing-you
In reality, right-wing domestic terrorists and mass shooters are the number one threat to America’s safety and security since September 11, 2001.
White men are approximately 31 percent of the United States population. And yet, white men are nearly 63 percent of those people who commit mass shootings. Such behavior, among any other group, would be considered pathological and a public health crisis.
A friend sent me this link. It’s an implicit bias test. I only took one of the tests so far. It required a lot of concentration. I might try another one later.
My results are below the link. In my conscious mind, Native Americans are more strongly associated with American than any other group. But in the test I apparently showed no lean in either direction. I don’t know what that means.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
You have completed the Native American – European American IAT.
Your Result
Your data suggest little or no association between White Am. and Native Am. with Foreign and American.
The interpretation is described as ‘automatic association between White Am. and American’ if you responded faster when White Am. images and American were classified with the same key than when White Am. images and Foreign were classified with the same key. Depending on the magnitude of your result, your automatic association may be described as ‘slight’, ‘moderate’, ‘strong’, or ‘little to no preference’. Alternatively, you may have received feedback that ‘there were too many errors to determine a result’.
Most respondents find it easier to associate White Am with American and Native Am with Foreign compared to the reverse.
This test measures the association between the social group ‘Native American’ and the attribute ‘American’. Inherent in the name of the group itself lies the information that Native Americans are the original inhabitants of the continent of North America. The history of the group in the United States is unique in that a native population has rarely experienced its fate in modern history. In testing this association we are prepared for the ironic possibility that Native Americans may not be as strongly associated with their own land as are the European-ancestry groups who displaced Native Americans from much of their original territory.
We have explicitly chosen to represent the category ‘America’ via icons and examples that are not biased in favor of White America — for example, we do not use the American flag or monuments that are explicitly the creation of White Americans. You randomly received one of two versions of this task. One uses natural scenes from the American landscape that can easily be associated with Native Americans; the other uses names of cities and states in which the names have Native American origins (e.g., Seattle). The selection of these stimuli provides full opportunity to reveal an association between Native Americans and their country.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/19/a-nation-of-promiscuous-prudes/
That was a strange article.
I don’t even understand the point of the paragraph. What do homicides have to do with gay marriage? The next paragraph was also odd. Agree or disagree, but it’s simply a fact that cigarettes are unhealthy, both for the smoker and for those who spend a lot of time around smokers. What does dealing with a health issue have to do with deciding to stop imprisoning people for victimless crimes?
He then talks about there being “there is now almost no tolerance for casual and slang banter in the media or the workplace.” So, it is no longer his white male privilege to be a condescending asshole. Am I supposed to feel sorry for him? What does masturbation have to do with sexual harassment, as long as you aren’t masturbating in public?
He asks, “However, if vast numbers of girls younger than 16 need after-sex options to prevent unwanted pregnancies, will there be a flood of statutory rape charges lodged against older teenagers who had such consensual relations with younger girls?” WTF! Is this guy stupid? Ensuring sexually active teens don’t get pregnant opens the flood gates to a sex free-for-all, is that what he is arguing? Anyway, if he cared to be informed instead of ignorant, he’d know that teen sex rates are actually at a low point. Was it better in the past when a teen pregnancy was shameful and sometimes destroyed a young teens entire life?
His claim is that we have a schizophrenic morality. As far as I can tell, the only schizophrenia is what exists in his mind. There has always been a schizophrenic morality in this country. It’s just now being forced to the surface and people like this are complaining about being forced to acknowledge the problem. He is sad that ol school white male privilege is disappearing. People like Eisenhower used to be able to get away with anything, unlike everyone else who wasn’t a white male, especially of the wealthier variety. How awful that white males are now being treated like everyone else and are forced to deal with consequences.
I bet the author has never called a guy with his shirt off a slut or whatever. Why not? Why is only defending the right of white males to criticize everyone else, but not the other way around? Is he really arguing that bigots should be protected against the consequences of their bigotry? Having free speech doesn’t mean one is free of consequences of what one speaks. Why is that so hard for bigots to understand?
This guy doesn’t even want to get started about abortion. The utter willful ignorance of right-wingers about abortion is mind-blowing. The same goes with their willful ignorance about guns. All they ever do is create straw man arguments. Most Americans are simultaneously for abortion and gun ownership being legal while also being regulated. It’s not a black/white issue. Why are idiots like this too stupid to understand?
I love asian reactionaries like midwestpdd
https://www.reddit.com/r/asianamerican/comments/2ndftl/is_harvard_unfair_to_asianamericans/cmcxfvb?context=3
Does the stuff finding no differences also find no differences on variation?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligence
What do you mean? Variation in what? Are you talking about males being at the extremes? I don’t know. I still think we lack much good data. Most of the research that has been done in recent decades isn’t of the highest quality. We haven’t yet figured out how to control for most confounding factors, much less even notice their existence or acknowledge their significance.
https://restructure.wordpress.com/tag/greater-male-variability-hypothesis/
Simple observation: All the Cons here bring up “failed Socialist states” to make their point, but as in any debate had with Cons they leave out the actual causes once they’ve identified a scapegoat. Of course a Society that decides to behave humanely is at a disadvantage against Societies that do not. Greece, Venezuela and any other nation you care to hoist as an example of “liberal policy failures” did not fail because of their Liberal policies. They failed because the nations that still operate on greed and their respective financial institutions decided to punish them for having the gall to treat their citizens fairly. Living outside Detroit I am very familiar with Conservative politicians using shady financial exploits to punish cities and regions for having the audacity to pay their employees a wage above average. I watched the Big 3 and Republican officials decimate a city as a social experiment and then expand the practice regionally, nationally and then globally in the last 30 years. 1 Government, 1 set of Laws, remove any dark corners for the Capitalist cockroaches to hide in and you’ll be amazed how well a system that cares for all citizens is received by those same citizens. But what you cannot do is keep ignoring the
It isn’t failure when it is intentional and planned. The alternatives to corporatism don’t simply fail. They are destroyed or at least crippled, on purpose. That is one of the obvious lessons that future generations will learn from studying our era.
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Rattan Singh Nagra
Was losing faith in this country and the direction we were headed in. Bernie Sanders deff has my vote.
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46 replies
Anthony Orlando Barrios
If Trump is Bernie’s biggest threat then Bernie is basically our new POTUS
#bernie16
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Greg Price
unseating hillary is the second to last hurdle.
Like · 4 · More · Yesterday at 9:03pm
Francis Blacklin
Trump isn’t a threat to anyone but his own ego.
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Polly Noyes
If Joe Biden enters the race and wins the nomination I’d vote for him over Hillary. But yes, if Hillary gets the nomination I’ll vote for her. Anything’s better than a republican in office. Especially the group of idiots in the race.
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Alison Grice
I do think the Trump supporters, like the Bernie supporters, are disenchanted, disgruntled, with the establishment party hacks. That is good, healthy. But I’m afraid I agree with Tracy Strode that most of them would vote for Honey Booboo than a Democrat because they see Dems and socialists as ‘tax and spends’ and bureaucrats who live off government dole – and off of ‘their’ hard work, whether those Dems are workers or recipients of aid. They see themselves as the rugged individualists ( in N.E. here they would be the old Yankees) who worked hard to make this country, without unions, and in spite of government. And they are! They aren’t asking for anything but freedom and respect and they work hard and pay their own way. They aren’t educated, but …. not without brains and have an onery streak – that I have to respect. . Many are vets and first responders who look on this country with pride and who are looking for respect and purpose – and that is so understandable! If anyone – other than dramatic, macho Trump can reach out to them, it’s Bernie. He’s direct and gruff and oh. so sincere! He totally appeals to the educated middle class, the ‘intelligentsia”. He is one. But he has to appeal to the majority of the working class – whether white (the Trump followers, esp,) afro-american, hispanic or other…. to unite this country. If anyone can – and it’s a Herculean task – it’s Bernie. But he and we, his supporters, need to talk to these constituencies in their own language and comfort zone. Don’t write these people off! They care – help them recognize who truly cares the most!
I’m not sure how many minorities are going to support yet another old white male, no matter what he advocates. The problem with Sanders is that he isn’t radical enough for what so many people are wanting. Sanders is a mild-mannered moderate progressive, which would be fine for less challenging times, but what people are hungering for right now is a fiery visionary along the lines of MLK. I don’t know if Sanders has it in him to play that role.
https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1024516774248499&id=100000705572558&set=p.1024516774248499&source=47
That is a point I regularly make. I find it bizarre that racists are offended by people pointing out racism or even attempting to honestly discuss race issues of any sort. It’s not just that their whiteness is taken as a privilege. Their racism is also taken as a privilege.
They want to be able to criticize black people without fear of being criticized in return. But if racists weren’t so obsessed with race and always playing the race card, most people would see race as a lot less relevant. Ultimately, race is meaningless without racism, for the two can’t be separated. Talking about one always involves talking about the other, which is what bothers racists.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alabama-man-says-cop-threatened-him-murder-racial-slur-report-n403921?cid=sm_tw&hootPostID=ec50975777a00e91462bdac318b97ea0
I have absolutely no doubt that this kind of thing happens all the time, probably on a daily basis across the country. This is well within the normal range of behavior in the US. It just rarely gets recorded. But the scariest part is, even if cops stop making such statements out loud, you know they are still thinking this way.
https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3g09z8/were_the_aclu_and_thisisthemovementorgs_deray/cttqzir
I remember reading something along these lines. It was pointed out that every major ethnic group in America operated and shopped at their own stores. They had ethnic solidarity and would always put their own interests as a group before that of others.
The problem for blacks is that they were never a willing immigrant group. No other American population was ever as systematically oppressed. African slaves had utterly annihalated their entire traditions of culture, religion, language, community, and family. After the Civil War, when blacks tried to create their own stores and communities, they were attacked and destroyed.
It’s not as if blacks didn’t try to create group solidarity to pull themselves up as a group. It’s just that whites would never allow them. But now times have changed. Blacks could do what was for centuries was impossible. The challenge is that it is hard to overcome the still entrenched racial order that continues to oppress blacks at every turn. It will be hard for blacks to overcome the cynicism and apathy of knowing deep-in-their bones that everything about this society has been against them. To believe that this time will be different is not an easy thing to accept.
Maybe it really is different, finally. In some states, blacks are already the new majority. They haven’t been in this position as a majority since slave times. It will take a while for this to sink in.
I’ve had to deal with racism since childhood, til now, with no end in sight. There is no real diversity, no acceptance, and no understanding – just forced tolerance, and it’s not unique to Vancouver as it’s a global problem.
Eurocentricity is the crux of Western culture and media. You even have companies in China, for example, who only want to hire whites for higher positions, rather than someone who is Chinese, regardless of their abilities.
Then you have tests like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG7U1QsUd1g
Watch those poor children end up joining gangs and having no self-worth, committing crimes due to pent up rage, and then being locked in jail forever, punished by the same society that made them that way.
Racism is subtly integrated into various facets of Western culture, it’s everywhere, and it’s here to stay. Some people aren’t even consciously aware of their own racist views.
My view exactly. Racism fucks everyone up in the head. Even if you think you aren’t racist, it seeps into your psyche and colors your every experience. It’s always there as the background of every thought and action.
Canada is so interesting to me. It’s America’s twin, yet it’s not. It’s probably the most similar place to America superficially, yet it really is culturally distinct. Out of all the nations it’s probably the nation an American could wander into on accident and not notice he left America the longest.
There is a very hateful, racist undercurrent in Vancouver. Overt racism is merely kept at bay through government-sanctioned political correctness and education.
As a Canadian-born Chinese person I should feel equal to any white Canadian. I served for many years in the Canadian military, protected Canada’s borders as a border services officer, and continue to serve in the federal public service.
In reality, I am routinely subject to comments such as “Welcome to Canada” and “go back to China” when I make opinions with nothing to do about race; subject to blatant racism at work (the federal government would never tell you) and made to sign papers to shut up about it. I remember how my brother was made to go to ESL school, even though he was born in White Rock. This is something no white Canadian would ever have to endure. No white Canadian can ever understand.
It’s disheartening to see racism hasn’t changed from 1940. All people have learned since then is to hide it better.
I should visit Canada one of these days. It would be interesting as a comparison to my American experience. For the same reason, I should visit Mexico. It would be best to visit these places by staying with locals and avoiding the tourist crap. I know some Canadians and probably someone would be willing to be my guide to the exotic world of Canada, but I don’t know well as many Mexicans or Mexican-Americans.
There’s a popular line of thinking that one of the reasons for Vancouver’s high housing costs is that too many properties/apartments/condos/suites/etc are owned by people who don’t live in them. They are bought and later sold like stocks or bonds, and in the meantime, they sit empty, with security guards protecting them from thousands of others who must sleep in the rain and snow. I actually agree that this is a big problem. There are a lot of people in this city, and not very much space; if someone owns land that they aren’t using, it should be legal for others to squat and take over that land. Other countries have legalized squatting (even Canada, hundreds of years ago, and more recently, i believe Slovenia?) and the results have not been disastrous; squatting should be legal in 21st century vancouver. Unfortunately, there have been times when I’ve made this point and the person I’m speaking with replies “yes, good point, there are too many asian investors buying up all the properties here.” It’s frustrating that what might be a valid argument is thereby co-opted by the racist attitudes which have dominated our history, as Nathan describes. Why does this have to be racialized? It’s a problem when someone buys local properties and lets them sit empty. It doesn’t matter whether the owner is from China or Toronto or Powell River. Apartments aren’t stocks; if you’re not going to occupy them, let someone else in. This shouldn’t have anything to do with race, but unfortunately, in historically-anti-asian-vancouver, it turns out that way.
Why not do what Utah has done? Simply build enough housing for everyone and guarantee every homeless person has a place to live. Maybe put a special tax on those who buy up property and don’t live there. That tax could then fund the housing for the homeless. Problem solved.
http://groupthink.kinja.com/racism-in-vancouver-we-need-to-stop-pretending-it-does-1178247789
There is some advantage to having a blatant history of racism like the US. We Americans can’t honestly deny what is obvious to everyone in the world. We are used to dealing with issues of racism. We argue and disagree about racism, but at least it gets discussed out in the open.
Vancouver blows ass
Hold on, hold on, there’s a thing we missed that I’d really like to go back to:
“I hear a dozen languages in my mall food court every day. No one has any loyalty to their adopted country. Canada is just a piece of real estate to hang your hat and carry on with your own language, customs and beliefs – even if they are not compatible with Western values of freedom and tolerance.”
Tolerance. Tolerance.
I disagree on the USA’s system being to increase blacks and hispanics. I think it is more to maintain the white status quo
Canadian universities admit almost all of their undergrads on just one criterion: academic merit, usually defined as high school grades. Most American universities, in contrast, have developed complex, controversial and constitutionally questionable ways of gerrymandering their admission criteria, so as to water down the weight given to grades and standardized exams. Why? Because if admission were based solely on academic achievement, the two largest minority groups in the U.S. — blacks and Hispanics — would be underrepresented on campus, especially at the most elite institutions.
Take Berkeley, the pinnacle of the University of California system. In the mid-1990s, Californian voters passed Proposition 209, which prohibits race from being considered in academic admissions. More than a third of California’s population is Hispanic, but as a result of Prop 209, only about one in 10 Berkeley undergrads is Hispanic.
In Canada, by contrast, a race-blind university admissions process isn’t leading to the underrepresentation of minorities. On the contrary, the normal Canadian university practice of admission based on academic achievement has resulted in the over-representation of non-whites on campus. A 2005 Statistics Canada study found that 54% of visible minority Canadians aged 24 to 26 reported having attended university, versus just 38% of the non-visible minority population.
One of the few universities that publishes data on the race of its students is the University of British Columbia. According to a survey UBC conducted last year, 38% of UBC-Vancouver students admitted directly from high school identified their background as “white.” Another 5% were Aboriginal, Arab, Black or Latin-American. Pretty much everyone else said that their “ethno-racial” background was from somewhere in Asia, including 38% who selected “Chinese.”
And more than half of UBC-V’s direct-from-high-school students are not native English speakers.
The survey also counted a smaller group of students, the roughly one-third who transferred to UBC-Vancouver from another university or college. This group was 57% white, and 21% Chinese.
Taken together, the data suggests that Asians are the largest group at UBC-Vancouver, at close to 50% of the undergrad student body. That’s above the proportion of Asian-Canadians in Vancouver’s population, and far above the proportion in the population of B.C., or Canada.
To which we should say: hallelujah. Break out the champagne already. Canadian visible minorities are somewhat more likely than white Canadians to attend university. And Asian Canadians, the country’s largest immigrant and minority group, appear to be more likely to attend university than the majority white population. This is a problem?
Americans and Europeans dream of such problems. In Europe, the fear is that racial minorities are falling behind educationally and economically, being excluded and excluding themselves. France worries about North African kids from the banlieues mugging Jean-Sebastien and Marie-Claire, not outperforming them on a university admissions exam.
In Canada, the challenge is that our relatively happy reality doesn’t match up with expectations. We look at the United States, and expect to see the same story here. On any Canadian university campus, you will find groups of academics and students earnestly demanding that their institution become more “diverse” and “representative.” They’re apparently unaware that affirmative action in university admissions — “positive discrimination” as the Brits call it — would mean reducing the number of some minorities, especially Asians, for the benefit of other minorities, and even the majority white population.
Five years ago, I had the opportunity to spend some time at the U of T faculty of law. It’s the most competitive law school in Canada, drawing the best students from across the country. While I was there, a group of students began calling on the school to become more diverse and representative in hiring and admissions. Five years ago, to see if their complaints jibed with reality, I flipped through the school’s online student directory.
A quick eyeballing suggested that the complaining students were probably right about the lack of racial representativeness — though not quite as they had imagined. For example, the student body appeared to be as much as one-third Jewish, making Jews hugely overrepresented relative to their tiny percentage of the Canadian population. Visible minorities were 16% of the Canadian population in 2005, but seemed to account for a higher proportion of U of T law students. And non-Jewish whites, who make up more than 80% of the Canadian population, looked to be less than 50% of the law school’s student body.
If the goal is excellence, Canada’s race-blind admissions system works. There are people and groups that are falling behind educationally, but addressing that shouldn’t involve watering down the merit principle in university admissions. The solution lies elsewhere.
Last Thursday night at 11:30, I walked over to Robarts library. The 24-hour study rooms were packed; the crowd about three-quarters East Asian. Then I walked over to the Brunswick House. Outside, a fight had just broken out. A drunk blond girl in a mini skirt was trying to punch a bouncer as her boyfriend dragged her out the door. A few minutes later, she came stumbling back, her boyfriend still trying to restrain her, she wildly kicking at him. “Check it! She’s trying to kneecap him!” the bouncers laughed.
The crowd milling about out front laughed too. They were a little bit black and a little bit brown, but mostly white.
Canada is different than the US and even further different from Europe. The poor minorities in Canada are more isolated, because they are the natives disproportionately in the rural areas. I bet you don’t find many of them in the Canadian colleges. As for minorities who are immigrants or the children of immigrants, they tend to be of a wealthier class in Canada, as the immigration policies intentionally are prejudiced against the poor. In the US and Europe, there are vast numbers of poor immigrants, and in the US large minority populations that have been here for centuries. Canada’s problem is the opposite in having too many upper class minorities who are wealthier than the average white Canadian.
I swear, the commenters didnt even read the article. She WAS speaking fucking english!
http://www.torontosun.com/2013/08/20/mcdonalds-customer-says-she-was-booted-due-to-english-skills
I sense that the English language might be more important to white Anglo-Canadians than it is even to white Anglo-Americans.
One of the groups that hates Asian males and their advancement the most are White sexpats, or White males who’s main motivation for living in Asia is getting laid and the lower cost of living.
Many of them teach ESL/EFL in China (mostly in illegal or unaccredited schools, as they usually don’t have a degree or education beyond a high school diploma), while others are just plain sex tourists in countries like Thailand or the Philippines.
Since White sexpats couldn’t get laid at home due to being creepy/unattractive and women have higher standards, they have to resort to going to Asia to simply have sex.
You would think that having had exposure to Asian countries, they would have more respect for Asians, but it’s the exact opposite – White sexpats are very vocal in bashing Asian countries and Asian males, as well as fetishizing Asian females for being more “feminine”, “traditional”, and “submissive”, while they complain about White females being feminist (as if it’s the reason they couldn’t get laid back at home).
Many white sexpats are also hypocrites who have stormfront-like views about other races, yet consider it acceptable for themselves to have an Asian wife or girlfriend. Furthermore, they also promote SJW/feminist narratives which depict Asian males as misogynistic and patriarchal, and have a vested interest in propagating negative stereotypes against Asian males since they need it as leverage to gain sexual access to Asian females.
Living in Asia couldn’t cure White sexpats of their hatred of Asian men because the sight of Asian men in positions of power and authority deeply upset them, and they themselves wish that Asian countries were still colonies or subject to foreign treaty ports and legations. They hate the idea of seeing Asians as equals and see themselves as White Gods or “Charisma man” sent down to earth from a Boeing 777 to rescue Asian women from the grip of the evil and oppressive Asian male patriarchy. When reality struck, it only embittered them further against Asian men.
If you need an example of a White sexpat, get a load of this piece of work, who brags about having sex with Asian prostitutes and how easy Asian women are with the same breath that claims to love his Asian wife. He also likes to troll /r/hapas since they hate White sexpats like himself.
I am a white American who moved to Thailand. Here is a comment I wrote earlier today concerning this topic.
“Let’s see….. All the teachers I interact with… Well there is the 60 year old Canadian who has five years here so far yet does not know how to say rice and shared his dream of finding a hot 20 year old to take care of him, there is the 24 year old American college professor who lives in the same apartment building as many students and jokes about how his students get jealous when they see their peers leaving his room in the morning just like they were last week, there was the 40 something Brit joking about how often he teaches still drunk as he felt up the bar girl next to him. Most of these teachers are real winners.”
Do not be like these people and you will be ok. You will have to “prove” you are not like these people because unfortunately they make up a large percentage if not the majority. Once people realize you are just a genuine person everything is good. I think my worst experience so far was talking to a group of young men on the street in broken Thai and one of the more drunk ones started yelling “Why you learn Thai? To sleep with Thai girls?” But his friends quickly calmed him down and we were sharing a beer not long after. It will show up in many more subtle ways but generally it won’t effect your quality of life and if you remove yourself from the expat circle and make an effort to integrate you will see why there is some animosity that comes from further than just women. (Although when getting comfortable with a Thai male friend the treatment of Thai women by foreigners is always the first sensitive topic we will talk about)
Also, if you do come out to Asia, a tip on dating. (I know white guys with Asian girlfriends is a hot topic but I have dated everywhere I have lived, do you expect me to become abstinent all of a sudden?) If an uneducated girl finds you and speaks English, walk away. For many men it is the first time an attractive woman has been that forward and it is easy to fall for. They are charming and will use whatever they think will work on you, for decent people it is guilt. These are the girls that the horror stories you hear about come from, for many it is not about the money either which makes it even more difficult to spot when it is happening to you but that is a different discussion. Bottom line, just keep it in your pants until you find someone you actually connect with (it will require conscience effort, they are actually that pushy) or fuck around, develop a bad reputation, and go home with a bad experience because everyone knows what kind of girl(s) you are with and most of society gets shut off from you.
Well I’m slightly sleep deprived so i am naturally irritable, but I’m feeling really fuckijg pissed off.
I don’t know what it is about Asia especially china that attracts such terrible people. White guys with superiority complexes who think they’re better than the locals and other shit. Who are bitter. Bitter white guys who trash their host nation, when most of them are working easily replaceable jobs so it’s not like their presence is essential. They are so bitter and hateful and even call the locals slurs like chink and chinamen and how japan should have dominated them, yet they still stay in the country workif their easily replaceable jobs instead of getting the fuck out. Seriously what the flying fuck.
I am being racist myself, in that I keep white guys at arms length because there are so many of these bitter dickheads.
Lol a lot of the stresses white expats feel are just normal shit of minority life. It’s funny how so few of these white expats actually are able to extrapolate their feelings/experiences to “so this is what this is like to me a minority” “now I get it.” Instead it just becomes bitter white expat.
The entitlement of some white westerners
You would think being in a minority position might create sympathy for those different from them. But obviously that isn’t how it often happens. For many people, they just become further hardened in their identity.
I thinkit requires a level of self awareness that isn’t really the default in people, it takes effort.
I’ve certainly become much more sympathetic of other minorities.
Asia does attract a lot of white guys who got wedgied a lot in grade school for some reason.
I’m a bit racist towards western white guys maybe. Okay, not racist. But I keep y guard up around them more, at least in Asia.
“http://www.chinalawblog.com/2014/01/expat-stress-in-china.html”
I’m an enfp, fairly strong f, and sometimes I really wish I was a strong T, because they don’t get offended personally as easily. My dad’s a strong T , entj/p, and he’s muc harder than me to upset. Internet comments ca depress me, whereas they don’t faze him.
I totally understand. I’m easily affected by everything around me, even silliness on the internet. I’m emotionally thin-skinned. I don’t tend to show it because of my Introversion, but things get to me.
I wonder if there should be a campaign in Asia so people can spot losers more than they do
“[–]number888 3 points 4 days ago
I really don’t understand this logic whites have. If you are a loser in the US, you’re probably going to be a loser everywhere else too. You’ll just be a loser in a different culture
That’s incorrect. Many guys go overseas and will sleep with 100 women in 100 days successfully. You see it even with minority women born in the US. Men game women for sex, dates, relationships and marriage. If a guy is a loser in one environment, he can switch into another one where they are not as familiar with the nuances of his people. I see naive women with manipulative lying men all the time. It’s even tougher for a girl to pick up on that behavior, if he’s different from her. She’s more likely to misinterpret it. People have difficulty distinguishing those from different nations, cultures, ethnicities or speak different languages. These situations are where stereotypes and media images come into great effect. Guys go overseas, because it works.
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[–]thehurp 3 points 3 days ago
True say. I was doing some work in Hong Kong in a mixed group of locals and foreigners. We met up with one dude to interview him, this white dude who really was was the biggest smug twat I’ve ever met – the locals all thought he was lovely, funny etc, me and the other foreigners (both white, one male one female) immediately hated this guy and saw straight through him. In fact, I think he kind of took against us, because as fellow native English speakers we saw right through his bullshit. I guess he didn’t like having his reverential wow handsome white man treatment taken away from him huh.”
An interesting theory — the “Hygiene Hypothesis — may explain why certain allergies and diseases have nearly quadrupled in recent decades. The premise is that children raised in an environment devoid of dirt and germs are less able to build up natural disease resistance.
Much worse: the growing tendency to ply children with antibiotics, which can kill healthy gut flora. Scientific evidence indicates that both practices contribute to increased vulnerability to illness later in life.
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But how could dirt and germs keep you healthy?
Your immune system plays two main protective roles. Specialized white blood cells called Th1 lymphocytes assault infected cells throughout your body. Th2 lymphocytes produce antibodies to block dangerous microbes from invading your body’s cells in the first place, while using other white blood cells to drive allergic responses to foreign organisms.
How Dirt Helps “Pump Up” Your Immune System
At birth, an infant’s immune system appears to rely primarily on the Th2 system while the Th1 system grows stronger. But the hygiene hypothesis suggests that the Th1 system grows stronger only through fighting infection or encounters with harmless microbes. Without such stimulation, the Th2 system flourishes and the immune system reacts with allergic responses more easily.
In other words, adults who never allow themselves or their children to be exposed to viruses, dirt, germs and parasites may be preventing their systems from kicking in natural disease resistance.
Allergies, Heart Disease and Depression Linked to “Clean Freak” Tendencies
If you’re healthy, exposure to bacteria and viruses may serve as natural “vaccines” that strengthen your system and provide long-lasting disease immunity. If you don’t experience a healthy exposure to germs in your environment, you may end up sick.
Health problems associated with the hygiene hypothesis include:
• Allergies
• Asthma
• Eczema
• Autoimmune diseases
• Heart disease
One study even determined that childhood exposure to viral infections could reduce later-life heart disease risk by 90 percent.
Even depression has been connected to early pathogen exposure via an inflammatory connection. Neuroscientist Charles Raison, M.D., observed:
Since ancient times benign microorganisms, sometimes referred to as “old friends,” have taught your immune system how to tolerate other harmless microorganisms, and in the process, reduce inflammatory responses that have been linked to the development of most modern illnesses, from cancer to depression.
Your Immune System Dictates Whether or Not You Get Sick
If you’re looking for further evidence that booger eating may not be so bad after all, consider that it’s the state of your immune system that determines your health after germ exposure. In one study, when 17 volunteers were infected with a flu virus, only half got sick. Researchers found that certain changes in blood took place 36 hours before flu symptoms showed up.
While all the participants had an immune response even if they didn’t get sick, the responses were quite different.
“Symptomatic” participants experienced antiviral and inflammatory reactions, which may have been related to virus-induced oxidative stress. But in the non-symptomatic participants, these responses were tightly regulated. The asymptomatic group also had elevated expression of genes that function in antioxidant responses and cell-mediated responses. The scientists noted:
Exposure to influenza viruses is necessary, but not sufficient, for healthy human hosts to develop symptomatic illness. The host response [emphasis added] is an important determinant of disease progression.
The bottom line? If exposure to booger bacteria can help strengthen your immune system, a case could be made for their consumption… or at least, not scolding when you find a youngster with a finger up his nose.
Fortunately, healthy germ exposure comes in other ways, too…
How to Avoid Being Overly Hygienic
If the hygiene hypothesis is true — and there’s mounting research that it is — trying to keep your environment overly sterile could backfire and actually increase your risk of acute and chronic disease. You can avoid being “too clean,” and in turn help bolster your body’s natural immune responses by:
• Letting your child get dirty. Allow your kids to play outside and get dirty (and realize that if your kid eats boogers, it isn’t the end of the world).
• Not using antibacterial soaps and other antibacterial household products, which wipe out the microorganisms your body needs to be exposed to in order to develop and maintain proper immune function. Simple soap and water are all you need to wash your hands. Antibacterial chemicals (typically triclosan) are quite toxic and have even been found to promote the growth of resistant bacteria.
• Avoiding unnecessary antibiotics. Remember: Viral infections are impervious to antibiotics, as antibiotics only work on bacterial infections.
• Serving locally grown or organic meats that do not contain antibiotics.
• Educating yourself on the differences between natural and artificial immunity, and making informed decisions about the use of vaccinations.
For more by Dr. Joseph Mercola, click here.
For more on personal health, click here.
More:
#Health #Wellness #Personal Health
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I’ve heard of that before. I have a strong immune system. I go for years without getting even slightly sick. I was a grimy child. I played in the dirt and in creeks. I constantly had cuts that would get infected. Sometimes its true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=503429373142867&substory_index=0&id=488967187922419
It’s all about perception. And the social order determines that.
Ha! I am in Arcadia right now! It’s just a clean middle class suburb. It’s where the 626 night market occurs every year, a cool event where local businesses and restaurants, food trucks, park and sell. It’s awesome. It’s pretty asian American but there’s all kinds, and it attracts a diverse range of people.
What do u think? I think ss from his writings is a bitter guy with a chip on his shoulder. That doset invalidate the issues in the region, but too many use it to fuel their baggage like this guy.
http://www.vdare.com/posts/arcadia-vice-chinese-oligarchs-laundering-money-in-my-late-aunts-suburb
Lmao at the smog. Chinese sure don’t mind cause they don’t exercise outdoors, except that the immigrants sure love their walking
It wasn’t clear to me the point of that post. Was there an argument or conclusion being made? What was the central issue even?
Ss is an idiot. Chijese aren’t rich, those are just the 1%. Yes, white Americans are indeed privileged on average compared to the world at large, fool.
Most homes in the area look like the photo. I mean that is indeed a recent photo, no?
Arcadia anyway is a pretty generic suburb still, but with an asian twist. Still, the stores are still the mostly the normal places like trader joes and cvs and american chains. The ethnic places are all bilingual anyway.
I like the town anyway. It’s clean and safe, that’s what I need really. Especially the safe part.
But in a way, the area has gone through a sort of gentrification, only the gentrifiers are evil law-breaking foreign yellow people :p
Evil Muslims are buying up Dearborn Michigan, evil Orthodox Jews are buying up a New Jersey town, evil red Chijese communists are buying up SoCal.
Yep, you heard it here. Even though these corrupt Chinese oligarchs were getting in trouble with the Chinese government, them buying american land is evidence of a communist government conspiracy.
”
The massive increase in wealthy chinese is not due to some great capitalist entrepreneurial spirit that’s somehow suddenly and magically found its way into the Chinese. It comes from Americans destroying their manufacturing capacity and selling out to communist china. The wealthy chinese are not genius entrepreneurs. They just happened to be well connected in that society at the time that America decided to shoot itself in the face. America decided to legislate itself into a position of being uncompetetive in the global goods production market, and so American businessmen decided to sell our technology and production to China, where the laws were less strict. The wealthy chinese didn’t hatch some genius plan. Americans went to china and offered them all our best stuff, because they knew they could personally make out like bandits. The chinese businessmen are raking in millions and billions, and then taking that money and buying up American land as fast as they can because we still have relatively uncrowded areas, and a wealth of natural resources. We’ve also been stupid enough to become indebted to the chinese to the tune of trillions, so the chinese government is making a push for grabbing land. The chinese government knows that they control all chinese businesses and people, so as long as chinese businessmen are buying American real estate, it’s no different then the chinese government buying real estate. The only real difference being the illusion of seperation, which prevents any kind of outrage from the American people.
What do you think the reaction would be if news reports started coming out saying that American debt owed to the Chinese government was being traded in for American land? There’d be a massive cry of public outrage, of course. People would demand it be stopped by any means necessary. Yet that is essentially what’s happening here, and you hardly hear a peep. Why is that? It seems apparent to me that it’s because it’s wealthy businessmen, not the chinese government, that are doing the land grab. That, even though there’s no practical difference when these people come from a communist nation.
We’re being bought out because we’re being sold out.
“
The funny thing is that many Americans can’t see that China is one of the greatest capitalist countries in the world. If anything, Americans should fear China being better at capitalism than we are. Capitalism doesn’t give a fuck about white supremacy or American patriotism. The white right-wingers and reactionaries are barking up the wrong tree if they think capitalism is going to save them.
Evil communists!
Everyone knows that capitalism isn’t exclusive to democratic systems. Or oligarchies, which sometimes America can be. At least Russia and China are honest about their lack of democracy and existence of oligarchs
Note that I think if it is real, than money laundering is an issue. It’s just that all the discourse on it just ends up being fuckijg xenophobic and racist.
COMMIESZZZZ
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nvtncs
10 months ago
Simultaneously they steal our secrets, ramp up their military, hollow out our manufacturing, buy out our companies ( Smithfield, etc…), buy out our houses and raze them then build brand new houses, have their babies delivered in our country and finally move in next door.
They are just taking it over every which way, all legally, through all loopholes and there are 1.5 billion of them.
China is 10X more dangerous than the USSR ever was.
They are winning but thanks to our stupidity and naivete.
35
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Hau Vu
10 months ago
Now they buy our HOMES… Next step they BUY our Government… And soon turn the USA to communist China…. Just wait…….
32
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Tray Mark Hau Vu
10 months ago
Just look at the number of old white males in the US congress which is a reflection of corporate America and you will know who really owns the USA.
41
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Eddie
10 months ago
Same thing in Silicon Valley, Chinese and Indian buying up everything they can get their hands on and paying in cash.
We were looking at couple of houses listed around $500-600k, they sold for $750 – 800k cash. how can I compete with that when my puny offer of $25k over the listed price get trumped by $200k over the listed price?
32
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bb91103 Eddie
10 months ago
You can’t. Live elsewhere.
40
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boxtor
10 months ago
Maybe the Chinese should stop over paying for California and pick up all the cheap land they can in Gary, south Chicago, and Detroit. If they could acquire most of the land and evict the existing residents, they could have their own cities.
20
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Frank Lee
10 months ago
Americans are greedy suckers. Selling to all these sneaky chinese with their dirty money. Way to go.
29
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bb91103 Frank Lee
10 months ago
If you can sell your $1.2 million home for $1.8 million and you didn’t you are an idiot. PERIOD.
49
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Mikey Frank Lee
10 months ago
Americans, British, Canadians … they have always been and always will be greedy. It’s in their culture. It’s in their blood.
22
My croatian friend spends half her year in Croatia and half in America.
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nvtncs
10 months ago
Simultaneously they steal our secrets, ramp up their military, hollow out our manufacturing, buy out our companies ( Smithfield, etc…), buy out our houses and raze them then build brand new houses, have their babies delivered in our country and finally move in next door.
They are just taking it over every which way, all legally, through all loopholes and there are 1.5 billion of them.
China is 10X more dangerous than the USSR ever was.
They are winning but thanks to our stupidity and naivete.
35
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Hau Vu
10 months ago
Now they buy our HOMES… Next step they BUY our Government… And soon turn the USA to communist China…. Just wait…….
32
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Tray Mark Hau Vu
10 months ago
Just look at the number of old white males in the US congress which is a reflection of corporate America and you will know who really owns the USA.
41
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Eddie
10 months ago
Same thing in Silicon Valley, Chinese and Indian buying up everything they can get their hands on and paying in cash.
We were looking at couple of houses listed around $500-600k, they sold for $750 – 800k cash. how can I compete with that when my puny offer of $25k over the listed price get trumped by $200k over the listed price?
32
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bb91103 Eddie
10 months ago
You can’t. Live elsewhere.
40
−
boxtor
10 months ago
Maybe the Chinese should stop over paying for California and pick up all the cheap land they can in Gary, south Chicago, and Detroit. If they could acquire most of the land and evict the existing residents, they could have their own cities.
20
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Frank Lee
10 months ago
Americans are greedy suckers. Selling to all these sneaky chinese with their dirty money. Way to go.
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bb91103 Frank Lee
10 months ago
If you can sell your $1.2 million home for $1.8 million and you didn’t you are an idiot. PERIOD.
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Mikey Frank Lee
10 months ago
Americans, British, Canadians … they have always been and always will be greedy. It’s in their culture. It’s in their blood.
22
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What do you think?
http://www.citylab.com/politics/2012/08/rise-majority-asian-suburb
There is nothing at that link. I did a web search and found this:
http://www.citylab.com/politics/2012/08/rise-majority-asian-suburb/3044/
I assume that is what you meant to have linked.
I’m not sure what to make of it. But I’m not too surprised.
Minorities in general are increasingly relocating to the suburbs. Meanwhile, middle-to-upper class whites are increasingly returning to the cities where gentrification is happening.
California schools can be pretty bad due to budget cuts. My California friends tended to go to private school if they could afford them because the public schools had huge class sizes, massive cuts…
Palo Alto, a rich area, scrapped many programs including the gifted program due to budget cuts.
http://www.sandi.net/Page/39206
If I could choose I would have ignored the gate option and picked the seminar for myself. It sounds way more s
Appealing. Individualized? Seminar like scenes? I like that.
So how do you serve kids who may have social issues because they are different if not through this exclusive program? You yourself admit to being divergent in thinking. What do yu propose as an alternative for these kids who are so “weird”
As you know, I think most schools fail to effectively educate most students. There is no such thing as an average student. Every kid is a mix of abilities and disabilities, potentials and problems. I’m fine with more options being available, as long as this is directed toward all varieties of kids, not just the most obvious extremes who usually get all the attention. I’m fine with all kinds of programs being tried. I just don’t think ‘gifted’ ideology is useful.
Wtf is wrong with this world
http://koreatownlanews.com/kim-nguyen-latest-victim-of-lapd-olympic-division/
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6931408
They didn’t get away with murder like white cops. So they sued and won? This country gets more twisted with each passing day.
It’s messed up that white cops get away with this all the time. And it’s messed up that minority cops can sue for not having the same white privilege of killing citizens.
Inclusiveness is bad for kids outside the norm, retarded and blessed.
Except isn’t the current movement to integrate retarded kids into the mainstream when possible? My classes always had special ed kids, with their aides. I befriended one of them, though she was autistic,, but not retarded.
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10545.aspx
I’m of mixed views. I realize not all kids can be included.
My mom complained about all the time when she worked in public schools. Kids with severe problems such as retardation by law had to be included in public schools, even when it was literally impossible to educate them.
It became an expensive form of babysitting that made everyone’s jobs harder and sometimes put people’s lives in danger, as some of these kids were violent and uncontrollable. Worse still, a teacher or other employee who grabbed one of these kids, even just to get him to stop violently attacking, could lose their job or get sued. According to law, your only option was to let the kid continue to beat on you until official help arrived, such as the police or other specially trained workers.
Yet, when possible and within reason, inclusiveness is optimal. But I don’t think any kid should be allowed to disrupt the education of other students, whether their social function goes along with low IQ or high IQ (or even average IQ). How to deal with socially dysfunctional kids is a separate issue from how to deal with kids outside the academic norm of ability, learning style, etc. That is what is wrong with ‘gifted’ ideology, its tendency to conflate separate issues.
My school had a resource room, though it was open to all kids. It where where all the extra enrichment stuff was came up with and organized as well. I usual signed in and hung out there for lunch. I remember defacing the whiteboard with geico geckos.
A lot of kids would sign out from where then go to their independent studies, local college classes, volunteer hours,,-‘d other off campus shit. Basically all our extra perks including independent study, and such were down through that resource room. One girl even for hooked up with a local professor through it.a
What so yu think? http://sengifted.org/archives/articles/do-we-know-if-gifted-children-are-being-served-appropriately
On the part of “highly blessed” kids being beyond inclusion, what do you propose Benjamin? The kids who are total misfits?
I’d say Terry Tao, but Tao is truly exceptional. In the “blessed” definition he’s beyond any of the “highly blessed” kids really.
Okay, so what to do with the kids so blessed they are misfits and inclusiveness harms them?
I’m less concerned about inclusiveness harming the special kids than it harming the education of other students who have to deal with their social problems. The kids outside the norm who can easily be included should be included. As for the rest, that is a dilemma.
This is a major issue for public schools. The most socially dysfunctional kids are in public schools for a reason. Many private schools refuse to take them. Small private schools, in particular, aren’t equipped to deal with kids far outside the norm. But no one wants to fund public schools well enough to handle the extra load of dealing with this diverse population.
The problem with kids with severe social dysfunctions is twofold. Putting them in normal classes isn’t fair to the other students. Yet putting all these misfits into the same class doesn’t help these kids, as it just concentrates all of their problems in one place, problems that will clash and result in further problems.
I’m not sure what we can do with the most worse off kids. There will always be some kids that are extremely difficult or even impossible to help, based on our present limited knowledge of certain kinds of problems. But most social problems are moderate-to-middling and a little bit of help could go a long way. Once those problems are dealt with, it might be possible to have more inclusion with the general population of students.
San Diego has cut a lot of things as well it seems.
It’s interesting, because I am not sure if Terry two would have benefited from these programs. These programs, the kids are all grade level and normal age, they just… Are labeled as blessed and in these programs. I get that they have more homework and such there, but still. For example those programs for “highly blessed” kids, the special program like mums and SD’s were only for highly blessed elementary school kids. They they go on the middle and high school at fairly normal ages, give or take. For high school, they may take honors, ap, ib classes, and do extracurricular a like science Olympiad, debate team, and such. T seems like most of these programs: the “blessed” aspect is only really strong in elementary school. In the teen years they are served the stuff tha is normally served to overachieving, affluent suburbs.
http://sengifted.org/archives/articles/do-we-know-if-gifted-children-are-being-served-appropriately
We do need to include all kids as well as possible. Socialization is as important to education as other aspects. We also need to integrate a variety of educational possibilities into general education and make these accessible to more students. We could do far better in all ways for all kids.
Yes, so what to do with very advanced kids? The highly blessed kids?
Is there such thing as an advanced kid who isn’t socially misfit? Since US ideology takes for granted that they are a package deal.
How do we sort out the brilliant kids with problems and the brilliant kids without problems? Do we put all of the problem kids together or all of the brilliant kids together?
What do we do with the kids who are advanced in one subject while behind in others? What do we do with kids who are utter geniuses in areas that our society doesn’t publicly value or our school systems don’t test for? What do we do with the majority of kids who have more potential than anyone will ever know because the system ignores them and/or environmental conditions suppress their cognitive development? Who gets to decide a child’s potential and whether the child has enough social value to receive funding for special education, gifted programs, or whatever?
Can we create enough boxes so that every kid can be properly pigeonholed? Should we begin tracking kids in preschool by genetic testing for their predetermined academic aptitude? What if a kid has all the genes that correlate to high IQ but tests as normal or below? What should determine a child’s lifelong fate in the social hierarchy of human worth?
I
I get the point; but I feel like I’d want my own child in a school that dosent test kids so much, iq testing, standardized testing, testing for this and that, gahhhh.
I
http://news.utexas.edu/2015/08/06/genders-differ-dramatically-in-evolved-mate-preferences
Remember that bitter korea blogger?
“I studied in Beijing for a semester in college and also interned there the summer before my senior year. Maybe I was a little bit insulated because I was constantly around students from my school or other interns but I felt like we all generally had a great time there.
My biggest gripe was with the air pollution. Other than that, I can’t really say I had any major complaints. Then again, I’m a New Yorker so I grew up in a crazy hectic and dirty city. When you grow up in a city where people are constantly honking for no reason, where taxi drivers almost try to run you over on purpose, and where you sit next to piss and vomit puddles on the subway, not a whole lot can faze you.
However, the people outside of my program and my internship didn’t really feel the same way, especially the English teachers. I feel like a lot of the negativity comes from the English teacher crowd because they’re generally the types that are unskilled and borderline unemployable here in the US. They probably would rather be over here but instead, they’re kind of trapped over there because that’s the only place they can get a half decent and stable job. But I don’t know if you can really feel happy in a place where you feel like you’re trapped instead of feeling like you’re improving yourself and the world around you.
I also feel like a lot of them probably suffer from depression or some other personal problems they’re trying to resolve. Generally, these are a self selecting group of people. No one who is happy with his life and has a lot of options at legitimate careers would probably choose to teach English there in their 30’s. So the kind of people who are gonna stay long term there and who come to communities like this are gonna be these type of people with some personal problems and maybe self esteem issues.
I mean even if you want to teach English, there are plenty of places to teach it. Most of the people who go there to do it couldn’t care less about the “culture” or “history” of China. Just look at this subreddit, nobody cares. So I think they are in China because they can’t get jobs teaching in any other decent country. It’s damn easy to get a job, I’ve been stopped on the streets and offered interviews/jobs for tutoring companies just because I was white and spoke English.
And I feel like a lot of them are really expecting a bit too much given what they actually earn. It’s possible to have a first world middle class lifestyle there but you need to actually earn enough to afford it. I don’t understand why they expect so much when they earn the equivalent of less than minimum wage here in America. They actually have an amazing lifestyle for how much they earn because of the cheaper cost of living there but for some reason they expect all the perks of a place like new york.
So basically, normal people leave a place they don’t like, but the ones who hate China but still live there are kind of stuck there because of their employment prospects. They are already more prone to be the kind of negative, depressed, and low self esteem types but being trapped there just make them more and more jaded. But they don’t really have the option of leaving for better opportunities so they come to forums like this to vent their frustrations.
If you are looking for more positive people over there, try looking for the study abroad students or the people with legitimate jobs at major companies. Once you go outside of those circles and especially when you go to cities that aren’t Beijing and Shanghai you start running into nothing but those English teachers.”
R/china is a sexpat forum. They reply “yu just haven’t been here long enough. You’re in the honeymoon phase.” Only they don’t mention that the final stage of culture chock is the “acceptance” phase, not the bitter phase.
Still, if it sucks… WHY EONT THEY FUCKING LEAVE????? It’s not like most of them are doing anything important:
It sucks living in a foreign country. I wonder if they ever wonder what it’s like being an immigrant.
“Generally, these are a self selecting group of people.”
That is a similarity those English teachers have to immigrants. It’s why such people aren’t representative. In order to understand who these people are, you have to understand their motivations for immigrating or moving to another country.
Many of thr expats are running away from their problems. There’s one really cringey one on YouTube who made all these videos bitching about America, Americans, and american women who are evil and feminist. After he arrived in Asia he made all these videos bitching about Asia.
Many of those expats on that forum are white supremacists (with asian women fetishes.) there’s lots of overlap with coontown, Stormfront, etc
I wonder if these people ever develop empathy for immigrants? Probably not.
https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/38rhct/why_are_you_guys_very_negative_towards_korea/crxcs6x
It doesn’t matter there experience or where they live and work. Those people probably have always been that way and always will be.
1. (generalization ahead. . . ) One of my English Teacher friends has a lot of non-English teaching expat friends — from other parts of the world than England, USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, with skin-colours other than white, and notes that loudest and bitterest complaints come from white males from English-speaking, first-world countries. She thinks it’s because, for first-world WASP males, coming to Korea is the first time white male priveledge hasn’t managed to open every door to them: only most doors.
I don’t doubt that there is a strong element of that. Every person gets used to the world they grew up in. It is what they consider normal, no matter how morally problematic or dysfunctional it may seem to others. People will adapt to almost anything when it is all they’ve known for most of their lives. It takes a rare person to ever escape the reality tunnel they were born into. Most will carry that internalized worldview with them even when they move to entirely new places. That is just the way humans are.
http://roboseyo.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-do-expats-hate-korea-complain-so.html?m=1
What do you think?
https://www.reddit.com/r/asianamerican/comments/2b8ou2/why_does_it_seem_like_expats_in_japan_so_much/?
I would give several reasons.
The relationship between Japan and the English-speaking West is quite old at this point. It might have had something to do with both England and Japan being island nations, which creates certain similarities. Americans have been fascinated with Japan since the 1800s, maybe around the time the West Coast began to be more populated.
The US bombing and the rebuilding Japan created a special relationship between the two countries. Having a US military base has added to that connection. Japan is maybe the most Westernized and Americanized among Asian countries. I suspect that the Japanese are more used to and welcoming of Western visitors and expats. There probably is a larger population per capita of Westerners living there.
Because of Japan being rebuilt by the US, their economy was directly linked to Western economies. So, they are also one of the most highly developed countries, not just in Asia but also in the world. Japan probably attracts a higher percentage of wealthy, well-educated, and successful Westerners than does a country like China. Japan also is probably in less need of English teachers from the West, as they already have a well developed school system.
On top of that, there has been much more cultural exchange between Japan and the West. There has been some popular American tv shows that have had Japanese characters who regularly spoke in Japanese. The tv show Heroes comes to mind.
There is more of a familiarity and friendliness between Japan and the West.
Western expats, generally the more third world the country the worse the expats are.
“Usually those who can complain are those who actually are disadvantaged and wronged. As a white American with overwhelming privilege in China, your complaint is just extremely petty and a punch in the face for vast majority of other Chinese who don’t have as good as a life circumstances as you. In my experience, the typical complaint from your type is like why isn’t China a 1st world country yet to provide me an even better life, even when you are living a privileged life that an average Chinese can only dream of getting.
Also, don’t tell me you are one of those English teacher unemployable in your home country. You get even less leeway to complain.”
I would guess that expats that end up in poor countries tend to be people who themselves were relatively more poor in their countries of birth. I’m willing to bet that the more poor the expat the more likely there to be problems involved. It’s the same reason you find greater rates of problems the more poor are families, communities, and schools.
There are complex factors behind why this is the case. In terms of expats, some of the problems might relate to the fact that the more poor someone is growing up the less likely they experienced much cultural diversity growing up. Cultural diversity in childhood correlates to not only greater probability of social liberalism in adulthood but also higher average rates of IQ.
In particular, if you are an expat who as a child went to expensive private schools that had kids from around the world, you would have grown up with the ability to deal with multiple cultures well. But if you are an expat who went to poor-to-middling culturally homogenous public schools, you never had the opportunity to develop the skills of dealing with those who are different from you.
All of this, of course, gets exacerbated by issues of racism and privilege. My point is that we shouldn’t dismiss economic and class issues. In a class-based society, oddly issues of race and ethnicity seem to become all that more important. The reason is because inequality breeds xenophobia. This is why throughout American history the poor blacks, poor Hispanics, and poor ethnic whites all hated each other and fought with each other.
Many people who are in the upper working class or middle class are part of families who a generation or two ago were in poverty. The old conflicts shift and yet remain, because the inequality continues even as who is on each side of that divide changes over time. There is a lot of dysfunction that goes along with this kind of social order, and people who are most impacted by that dysfunction are likely to carry it with them anywhere they go.
My sense is you’d see some interesting patterns if you could look at a thorough demographic breakdown of expats, their extended families, and their places of birth.
My point is this. Bigots aren’t born. They are made.
Particular social conditions and life experiences create them. For example, lower IQ correlates to social conservatism and bigotry. Particular kinds of environments and factors are known to contribute to such correlations.
No one chooses the life they are born into. And no society or population is fated to be a certain way. Change the conditions and the results will follow.
That conclusion is my liberal bias.
I think pointing out problems of a place are cool and necessary, but it’s really hard to have any sympathy for guys like that bitter korea dude. You know?
I don’t mind those who point out problems. But the following is how I judge individuals. I look to what problems and whose problems an individual points to. Does a person point to problems in their own country as much as in other countries? Does a person point to problems in themselves as much as in other people? Are they an equal opportunity critic or just another bigot targeting their hatred at specific groups?
I noticed this while I was living in Korea and I think it’s because expats tend to be white people (who are racist/orientalist/whatever). There is some sense that Japan = high culture. I knew someone who hated dwenjang jjigae but thought miso soup was just amazing. But Japan is expensive, while Korea is relatively cheap, so they go to Korea while wishing they were in Japan. (And talking about how Japanese is such a pretty language, while Korean…UGH.)
Plus, westerners just love to wonder why Koreans haven’t gotten over the whole colonization / comfort women / imperialist exploitation thing, even as Japanese politicians make statements about how the comfort women were totally willing. (Of course they feel more sympathy with the colonizer)…all the while complaining about how racist Koreans are because they keep pointing at white people (and equating that to the black experience in the states…right…).
I mentioned the tv show Heroes. A similar example is Lost. Interestingly, the Asian actors in it are Korean. The woman spoke both Korean and English, but the guy spoke only Korean.
Maybe that indicates changing attitudes. Then again, the Korean characters in that show weren’t representative of the average Korean. It also didn’t show Korea in as positive of a light as did Heroes with Japan.
Still, it is amazing that there can be Korean-speaking characters in a popular mainstream American tv show. That would have been impossible when I was a kid. The new generation of kids are growing up with such things being more normalized. That is bound to have an impact on inter-cultural attitudes.
I wish I was a T yes. I’m easily frustrated and consumed.
Mostly I feel frustrated because of powerlessness. I see shit and there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s what gets me. There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s how I felt hangin out with special ed kids. There’s nothing I can do
Here is the best thing I’ve learned in my life. The happiest and maybe the wisest course of action is to spend one’s time and energy focusing on what one can do something about, specifically what one is inspired by.
As a person with severe depression and numerous other personal issues, this has been my survival strategy in a fucked up world. Otherwise, I probably would have killed myself long ago.
This world will chew you up and spit you out, if you allow it. It’s a war out there. Protect yourself and look for allies. Don’t venture out onto the battlefield, unless you have good reason.
The expats in China situation is a little unique, though. China isn’t a first world country, and the expats in China often aren’t rich enough to buy themselves a nice first world existence in China, and thus they have to live in a normal second world existence there. I think most of the time, expats either go to a first world country (say Europe or Japan/Korea/Taiwan) or if they go to a less developed country (say somewhere in Africa), they can afford to buy themselves a first world existence there. China is an exception because the country is sort of in between third/second world and first world. In order to buy yourself first world living standards in China, you pretty much need to have qualifications or ability that would already get you a medium to high-end job back in the US or Europe. So most English teachers in China basically have to live almost “second world” living standards (not really, but it feels less than first world to them) in China. So they complain.
People in the West live relatively easy lives. This is even true for most lower class Westerners.
Few Westerners ever experience a visceral sense of desperation or even standard conditions for a developing country. I’m not sure about Europeans, but Americans of all classes love to complain, even though most poor Americans are still way better off than most people in the rest of the world.
In the developed world, we live privileged and protected lives. Moving to another country is the first experience many Westerners have of how the rest of the world lives. Many of them probably find it shocking and they don’t know how to deal with it.
/r/korea is much the same. For some reason both China and Korea (probably Japan too, though can’t confirm) attract self loathing losers in hordes. Well I know part of the reason – just by virtue of being white they are afforded the attention they never received in the US coupled with a decently paying job that requires zero skill to get (keeping it is another matter). If they have yellow fever it’s like a package deal of great opportunities.
What they don’t realise is that, upon leaving the US for the first time in their lives, they’ll need to adapt to an entirely different culture. Quite a few can’t hack it and thankfully go back home. He makes a good point about how most of them didn’t really choose China for any good reason. They don’t care about the country itself or about its development, history, or culture. They couldn’t give a shit about Chinese politics because it’s easier to hold onto the American mindset of holding an inherent distrust for anything Chinese. Apart from countries that are in an even worse state than China (Africa, South East Asia) no where else will employ these kinds of unskilled English teachers. Good luck getting a job in the Middle East or Europe, for example. So, they’re stuck with China.
Don’t even get me started on not even making an attempt to learn the language. Sure, Chinese is hard, but just a grasp of basic grammar and some key nouns and verbs will get you a long way.
I think everyone should learn multiple languages. At least a second languages and optimally more than that. But it is hard for most people to learn languages as adults. I struggled in high school to learn the most basic rudiments of Spanish and never learned how to speak it. High school is too late for most people.
I don’t have a talent for languages. I struggled enough just learning to read English as a child. That is one thing that would keep me from moving to another country. I don’t feel confident that I could learn another language and I would hate living among people who spoke a different language. It would make an individual feel isolated and moving to a foreign society in general is going to make one feel disconnected and lonely, unless you are an extremely extraverted, gregarious, and self-confident person… none of which describes me.
I could see how easy it would be to become frustrated and angry while living in a foreign country. People should be better prepared before attempting such a thing. Most people probably don’t realize how stressful it will be once they get there. Even many open-minded and compassionate people might become cynical from such stress. Humans are designed to deal with that kind of stress, although some are better at it than others.
Obviously, many of these people don’t realize what they are getting themselves into. They probably just think it will be easy money or an interesting experience.
I lack sympathy for the 70 year old perv professor who shacked up with his grad student, though. Even if I feel sorry for his kid.
http://www.tickld.com/x/jaw/he-was-getting-prepared-to-defend-his-autistic-son?utm_source=tickld&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=autistic&ts_pid=2&ts_pid=2&ts_pid=2
We do need to find better ways of dealing with these kinds of problems. Rates of autism and certain other conditions have been going up. Some of the factors are controllable. It’s not even just about older parents. As much or more of the contributing factors might be brain toxins.
There are 213 known brain toxins that are in use and thousands of other chemicals we regularly come into contact with that have never been tested for brain toxicity. We have a toxin epidemic going on in the world right now. I’m reading a book right now that calculates the total known costs for just lead alone. It is in the double digit billions per year for the US and trillions per year worldwide.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-case-of-the-truth-telling-but-racially-incorrect-teacher
Sadly, that teacher just expresses another variety of bigotry. Blacks are more likely to be cross-generationally trapped in poverty, economically segregated, racially profiled by police and teachers (e.g., school-to-prison pipeline), exposed to toxins, and on and on. The ignorance of this teacher is all the worse because he should know better. When even teachers are ignorant, the problems we face are far worse than anyone wants to acknowledge.
http://thegrandnarrative.com/2010/03/18/korea-cosmetic-surgery-caucasian/
Interesting background info.
Do English and Germans have different complexions?
Ben Franklin:
“”Why should the Palatine Boors [Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Languages or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”
That is what many don’t understand.
Europeans didn’t always think of each other as being part of a single race. The Irish, for example, were thought by some of the English to be the missing link between Europeans, Africans, and apes. The Germans also were sometimes portrayed as apes. That is what many people seriously believed at one time.
We don’t see the differences between Europeans because ideology has taught us to only look for the similarities. It is all a matter of what you are focusing upon.
To answer your question: Yes, they did have different complexions.
The key word in Franklin’s comment is “Palatine.” Those are some of my people. It is a border region between Germany and France. The people living there included many oppressed groups, including Jews. It’s where Yiddish had its origins. The people in that region had a darker complexion than the English. They were also shorter because of poverty and malnutrition.
I dont remember Italians and other Europeans being babied with endless forms in their own languages,special esl classes.
ESL classes? Are you kidding? There were elementary schools across the United States that taught their curriculum solely in German. You “don’t remember” it because you weren’t there and you have this silly, utopian view of history in which the valiant Europeans flocked to America and immediately learned the language, eschewing their mother tongue.
Not surprisingly, this has no basis in reality.
The children of German immigrants often attended German language schools, public or private. There was a large and widespread German press in this country. In 1910, 10% of the population spoke German as its primary language.
Similar realities existed for Italians, though as there were fewer immigrants from italy than Germany, such realities weren’t as widespread or as common.
Here’s an interesting read, if you’re willing to open your mind to historical reality:
The German-Americans-Chapter Seven
Quote:
They came over here and learned the language worked hard,didn’t sponge of Welfare and other social services for generations and overload our prisons,schools,hospitals and infrastructure.
Some worked hard, some didn’t. Some learned the language, some didn’t. This is how it has always been, your heroic image of the great migrant past notwithstanding.
Quote:
Did they utilize FAKE documents and engage in Identity theft?.
Uh… they were white. For a long time, they could immigrate at will, without restrictions. Why then would they fake documents? But after the immigration restrictions of the 1920s, when movement from southern and eastern Europe to the United States was restricted, there were indeed those who broke the law in order to get into the United States and stay here. How naive it is of you to imagine that there was ever a law that was not widely broken by those who stood to gain from breaking that law.
Quote:
European migration here was not as long as this present Illegal alien invasion.
Hello? European migration to what is now the United States began long before the founding of the country, and finally breathed its last major gasp in the wave of post-World War II refugees after a long pause during the depression and the war. It lasted for centuries. The current period of immigration is but a few decades old.
There are certainly a wide variety of problems, growing pains and harsh realities associated with immigration, legal and otherwise, but they have always been there. Yes, even with those wonderful European immigrants from the past. And, yes, even back then various Americans were direly warning anyone who would listen that this was spelling America’s doom.
Read more: http://www.city-data.com/forum/orange-county/897634-white-flight-3.html#ixzz3ifudtUDn
Yep. The so-called ethnic or hyphenated Americans were the Hispanics and Asians of that earlier era. BTW the Palatine Germans, along with the Irish and Scots-Irish, were immigrating to America before the founding of the United States. It still took them a couple of centuries to fully assimilate and even then it often required violent force to do so.
http://m.huffpost.com/in/entry/7558424
Here is another perspective in response to that story:
Jax Blaze ·
Toronto, Ontario
I feel very sorry for the kids. Just because they were born in that household where everything is measured in scores.
The parents robbed them their childhood and now gloating and glorifying it.
Lmaooooo
thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/12/08/3600907/how-would-media-cover-leonardo-dicaprio-partying-if-he-were-a-woman/
The whole movie star obsession is silly, but that was a fun take on it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/asianamerican/comments/3fjexp/are_you_optimistic_about_the_future_for_asian/ctpc22s
Monkeyavelli 4 points 10 days ago
For those who say we are like the Jews, you are wrong. They are white. We are not.
Until relatively recently this was not true. It’s what people mean when they say race is a social construct. Until recently even the Italians weren’t considered white.
boobbbers 6 points 10 days ago
Sad how every country in asia hates each other
Most countries in Europe hate each other too. You should see Africa!
LasTeclasNegro[S] 3 points 10 days ago
There’s still some feuds and rivalries amongst the different European nations, some of which stretches back for centuries. Neighboring countries always tend to have a certain antagonism and rivalry towards each other.
Hdd’ers be like “see! More boys are geniuses and idiots! We’re the top but also the bottom!”
So girls outnumber boys, except at the top? What does that mean
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21652323-blue-collar-men-rich-countries-are-trouble-they-must-learn-adapt-weaker-sex
Women don’t lack the potential to be in top positions. They are kept out because old biases. It has nothing to do with genetics. It doesn’t mean jack shit, other than prejudices die hard and established power maintains itself.
That was a good article, by the way.
“Policymakers also need to lend a hand, because foolish laws are making the problem worse. America reduces the supply of marriageable men by locking up millions of young males for non-violent offences and then making it hard for them to find work when they get out (in Georgia, for example, felons are barred from feeding pigs, fighting fires or working in funeral homes). A number of rich countries discourage poor people from marrying or cohabiting by cutting their benefits if they do.”
Many poor men, mostly minorities, have their lives destroyed by a system that targets them. They also suffer high unemployment because so much employment has disappeared. But it is easier for a woman to get on welfare than it is for a man. And it is easier for a woman to get into a homeless shelter than a man. The only thing it is easier for a poor man to get into is prison. Once someone has a prison record, they are ineligible for all welfare. They can’t even live with their wife and the mother of their children, if she lives in public housing. Then assholes have the arrogance to ask where are the poor minority fathers.
“More generally, schools need to become more boy-friendly. They should recognise that boys like to rush around more than girls do: it’s better to give them lots of organised sports and energy-eating games than to dose them with Ritalin or tell them off for fidgeting. They need to provide more male role models: employing more male teachers in primary schools will both supply boys with a male to whom they can relate and demonstrate that men can be teachers as well as firefighters.”
Schools used to be more boy-friendly. They used to have more activities and classes directed at boys. For example, boys on average are more physical and high energy, but schools have cut recess time and force kids to sit for longer periods of time, and in response we drug the boys to make them act more like girls.
Plus, as the article points out, the type of classes that working class boys enjoy the most are the very ones that have been cut the most, even though they are the type of courses that prepare working class boys for the type of jobs that pay well. Instead, we try to funnel all kids into college, even as most college graduates are struggling to find jobs. Meanwhile, manual labor jobs like plumbing, construction, etc are in need of trained workers.
“The growing equality of the sexes is one of the biggest achievements of the post-war era: people have greater opportunities than ever before to achieve their ambitions regardless of their gender. But some men have failed to cope with this new world. It is time to give them a hand.”
Why is it in the US that we believe the only way to help one group is by fucking over another group? Why not use education to help all people? Also, why can’t poor and working class whites see that their fate is tied into the fate of poor and working class minorities? Americans can be so stupid sometimes that it makes me want to cry.