Note the sudden explosion of friendliness between Iran and the US State Department.
They were both trying to overthrow King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King of Saudi Arabia and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.
Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was the face of Arab Spring in Saudi Arabia. Pretty obvious he was a tool of Iran, but the interesting question is: was he a tool of the US State Department?
“NGO” stands for “non government organization”, but if an organization is actually non governmental, for example McDonalds, no one calls it an NGO. In practice, “NGO” means “US State Department Front Organization”. This is an open secret, as for example when they advertise for employees, they are apt to describe the openings as government employment.
The reason that they call themselves non governmental is that they actively campaign in US politics and foreign politics, which is illegal or embarrassing for the US government to openly do.
When the Saudi princes arrested Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr for trying to overthrown them, the NGOs – pretty much all of them – went bananas, revealing Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr to be an NGO tool, and thus a US State Department Tool.
Note the great success of Arab Spring in Syria, Libya, and Egypt.
What would be the USG’s interest in shaking up the Saudi monarchy?
Your question assumes that the USG can usefully be thought of as a person, and that person sane and rational.
Rather, the USG seeks to destroy King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King of Saudi Arabia and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques in the same way, and for the same reasons, as it seeks to destroy the US.
Jim:
“Your question assumes that the USG can usefully be thought of as a person, and that person sane and rational.”
Not sure about sane but certainly rational.
There are countless destructive things that USG can do but it only does some of them, and to me it does not seem like they are picking the most destructive ones, nor do their choices look random.
The question a policy maker looks at is not “Is this measure going to wreck stuff or is it going to build stuff?”
But rather “Does this measure advance my career?”
What advances your career is to be further left than the other guy, since Cthulhu only swims left. Overthrowing military dictatorship is left wing. Overthrowing monarchy is left wing. Worrying whether Arabs are ready for democracy, or even interested in democracy, is right wing.
If you suggest that what follows Sadat is genocide, you are right wing. If you think that, you probably think that mass nonwhite immigration into the US is a bad idea, and if you are suspected of thinking that you be out of power so fast it will make your head spin. What you are supposed to think is that mass non white immigration will be an exact replacement for grandchildren we neglected to have.
If you want your career to go anywhere, you had damn well better believe that Arabs are exactly like us, except mysteriously held back in poverty and tyranny by evil thought rays emitted from the middle of America.
(I love you, man.)
True. But I don’t think this explains USG’s position on Iran and Saudi Arabia and why this position is now shifting.
“What you are supposed to think is that mass non white immigration will be an exact replacement for grandchildren we neglected to have.”
Saving this quote.
Israel is also cracking down on QUANGO agitation with the transparency law. Good times.
Israel seems to be acutely aware of the quango issue. The issue with Ford Foundation funding of the New Israel Fund is a good guide, which appears to have been countered by congressional pressure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Foundation – skip to controversies) and counter foundations funding such things as the NGO monitor – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGO_Monitor and the institute for contemporary affairs http://israelbehindthenews.com/institute-for-contemporary-affairs-founded-jointly-with-the-wechsler-family-foundation/10754/ (both .
NGOs are a problem, but the really huge elephant in the room called Israel is the tyranny of the judiciary branch — the true epicenter of Cathedral’s control within her borders.
Just read this eye opener by Moshe Koppel: http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2014/12/israels-imperious-judiciary/
At this stage, I, a secularist, am beginning to believe that a Halakhah-upholding theocracy is a better alternative to the status quo.
The Israeli supreme court is a tentacle of Harvard and progressivism, but its Israeli powerbase is the typical alliance with far against near – it protects Arabs and mud Jews from predation by Ashkenazi Jews, even though the supremes are all Ashkenazi themselves, and even though a political party that represented and united Arabs and Mud Jews against Ashkenazi Jews would be impossible and absurd.
>even though the supremes are all Ashkenazi themselves
Ahahahaahaa
Oh, boy.
You really know everything about everything, don’t you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salim_Joubran
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menachem_Mazuz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Shoham
Tell me, where did you buy your crystal ball? I want one too, for entertainment.
OK – they are not all Ashkenazi – having affirmative actioned one arab and one Mizrahi.
Just the overwhelming majority are Ashkenazi.
I love how you go from blatantly asserting something wrong, with total assurance, though three seconds with Google would have saved you the embarrassment…to just swapping to another version of the truth and pushing that version with the same total assurance.
Are you related to this gentleman?
https://youtu.be/PEBEjYxsx3w
I did not check the ethnicity of the other supreme court members. I am sure that if half of them turn out to be non-Ashkenazim, you will seamlessly transition to claiming that they are CULTURALLY Ashkenazi, or something else.
The difference between these two versions is trivial and uninteresting. You make a fuss over a technicality.
Now if you found a substantial number of non Ashkenazi judges, rather than a handful of mascots, then you would have a point.
The fact that the word was tyranny, not independence, is a sign.
But we can’t discount affirmative action. An affirmative action nigger here, a woman jew there, and now the US supreme court is majority minority.
The US supremes are majority minority. Israeli supremes are not.
Right, just go ahead and casually drag the goal posts over, whistling and staring off into the middle distance with a disinterested expression.
There are at least four non-Ashkenazi Supreme Court justices. Out of 15.
The difference between “none” and “a quarter” is only trivial and uninteresting when you confused one for the other.
The difference between none and a quarter is insignificant, since the question is, who has the power.
And I expect that most of that quarter are as Ashkenazi as native Americans in Harvard are white.
Supreme court was purely radical leftist Ashkenazi until the Likud started pressing for politically nominated judges, then proceeded to politically nominate a bunch of moderate leftist Ashkenazi and Mud judges. Likud itself is the affirmative action party for Jewish Muds, who typically can’t keep it in their pants for 3 minutes straight, which is hilarious. It’s almost like every single high-rank Mud Jew sooner or later starts Muh Dicking all around, though I’m sure B would be glad to commit a logical fallacy and find some degenerate Ashkenazim, with no problem obviously.
>And I expect that most of that quarter are as Ashkenazi as native Americans in Harvard are white.
Especially Joubran(owitz).
Will the Israeli Supreme Court be taken over by khooshim? Not for the next 20 years, says Jim, the Ashkenazis are in control of the independent judiciary with their ethnic awareness and GRE scores. Maybe, says B, but as long as they are good shit golems and obey HaShem, more Clarence Thomas than Barack Obama, then it is to be welcomed.
In the ’90s, when Clarence Thomas’s indiscretions were mentioned at his coronation hearings, he called it a high-tech lynching. Today’s dhimmicrats occasionally call for his impeachment based on tax irregularities and stock holdings, but can’t bring themselves to mention his sexual conduct.
peppermint –
The first hits on a google search for impeach Clarence Thomas is are stories about a David Brock memo to Hillary Clinton that discuss impeaching him over his personal sexual conduct rather than his finances.
Even the moveon.org petition* mentions his lying at his confirmation hearings (although in defense of your observation it doesn’t specify what he was lying about).
* which has a whole 5 signatures and yet is in the top 10 google hits for the search
At least get it right-it’s kushim, or qushim. Which only applies to Ethiopians, not Sepharadim or Yemenites.
Clarence Thomas’ supposed sexual indiscretions? Telling a woman she had a pube on her Pepsi can. Which she was so traumatized by that she didn’t say anything until his confirmation hearings.
I mean, come on.
B,
In the bible, Does kushim really mean ethiopian or does it just means black?
In the Bible, the land of Kush is modern Sudan/Ethiopia, and Kush was the son of Ham.
A Kushite is someone from Kush (for instance, Tzipporah, Moses’ wife, whom Miriam and Aaron complained about and were punished for it.)
In general, the Bible does not talk about people pejoratively just because of where they are from (with some exceptions like Amalek.)
In modern Hebrew, a kushi is an Ethiopian/black (although people make a clear distinction between Ethiopian Jews and, say, Eritrean/Sudanese infiltrators.) The word has some negative connotations (which it shouldn’t,) so most people say “Efiopi” for Ethiopians.
Nobody calls Sepharadim/Teimanim/Indian Jews “kushim.”
[i]peppermint says: January 5, 2016 at 6:38 pm
An affirmative action nigger here, a woman jew there, and now the US supreme court is majority minority.[/i]
the US Supreme court is not “majority minority”.
it is ENTIRELY minority. there is NOT A SINGLE White Anglo-Saxon Protestant currently sitting, man or woman.
think on that.
>In the Bible, the land of Kush is modern Sudan/Ethiopia, and Kush was the son of Ham.
Interesting! That’s what I always thought.
>In modern Hebrew, a kushi is an Ethiopian/black (although people make a clear distinction between Ethiopian Jews and, say, Eritrean/ Sudanese infiltrators.)
My understanding is that a large number of Haredi don’t think the Ethiopian Jews are real Jews, or that their status as Jews is doubtful. And every so often it seems to be the case that there is a dust-up over this issue. I would imagine that the distinction in the minds of many Israelis between Ethiopian Jews and these Eritrean ‘infiltrators’ is not so rigorous as you say.
Anyway, just one more question, if you don’t mind. Ethiopians (in the broad sense, which includes Eritreans) have always believed that the House of Solomon, which more or less ended with Haile Selassie, was established by a direct descendent of King Solomon, who came Ethiopia, established a monarchy and made Judaism the state religion. As well, this person is said to have brought the Arc of the Covenant to Ethiopia, where it is believed that it still remains. Is there something like an official Jewish view on this story, do you guys believe that it is true, or that it is made up, etc.?
>My understanding is that a large number of Haredi don’t think the Ethiopian Jews are real Jews, or that their status as Jews is doubtful.
They descended from Jews for sure. But they lost the Oral Torah at some point, and it is questionable how much they intermarried, etc. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Chief Sepharadi Rabbi of Israel at the time, successfully pushed to resolve the issue in their favor (he did the same for Indian Bnei Israel, who for sure had intermarried-those Shas votes, you know). It’s my understanding that the vast majority of them went through a “giur l’chumra” conversion, which is done when you think someone is Jewish but are not 100% sure. The ones that did, there is no doubt they are Jewish. The ones that didn’t, eh…
There are also the Falash Mura, who look different from the Jewish Ethiopians (a lot like erectus) and were Christians when they came here (lots of the women have crosses tattooed on their foreheads.) They are definitely not Jewish (unless they converted.)
>I would imagine that the distinction in the minds of many Israelis between Ethiopian Jews and these Eritrean ‘infiltrators’ is not so rigorous as you say.
No. There’s an enormous difference. Not just visual, or in terms of behavior (like that one Norwegian Eritrean refugee said in the NYT article about how Norway has classes about not raping women, “in Eritrea, if you see a lady on the street, you can just take her.”) But also, the Eritreans are Muslims. And the Ethiopians have been here for 30+ years and all serve in the army and go out of their way to show how Israeli they are, and most people I know tend to like them (from army experience or whatever). The Eritreans are predatory “refugees”, i.e., infiltrators, who live on handouts, thievery and dishwashing jobs. Nobody likes them.
>Ethiopians (in the broad sense, which includes Eritreans) have always believed that the House of Solomon, which more or less ended with Haile Selassie, was established by a direct descendent of King Solomon, who came Ethiopia, established a monarchy and made Judaism the state religion. As well, this person is said to have brought the Arc of the Covenant to Ethiopia, where it is believed that it still remains. Is there something like an official Jewish view on this story, do you guys believe that it is true, or that it is made up, etc.?
No official view I know of. I don’t think anyone takes it seriously. We believe that the Arc of the Covenant was buried deep inside the Temple Mount. You know, we constantly have to deal with Christians and Muslims explaining how actually, it is they who are the TRUE heirs of Israel/Abraham, because [insert wacky theory here].
This seems far-fetched. It is obvious that not only is Saudi Arabia a client state of America, but that America would like to spread what is already has in Saudi Arabia to the rest of the Muslim countries. The idea that America would try to overthrow the Saudis is preposterous. Rather, America has been deliberately destroying Muslim countries left and right for the simple fact that America has been having difficulty installing Saudi-style dictators and monarchies in those countries in the way that it wants.
With the above having been said, though, it is the case that there is reason to believe that the relationship between America and Iran is not what it seems. It isn’t clear that they are enemies and it may well be that they are closet allies. If the latter were the case, then it would be likely that the executed sheikh was in some way an asset of the USG.
Back in 2012 America refused to give the Israelis bunkerbusters intended to stop Irans nuke program… well now we know why.
Nah, the Jews are definitely in on it too.
Obviously in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US has been attempting to install democracy, with entirely predictable results, results that were predictable to anyone with a bit of common sense, but evidently came as a big surprise for those policy makers.
Why should you doubt the US expected democracy in Libya and Syria? They actually got democracy in Egypt, and were delighted, , and were outraged when the military, rightly horrified by the quite horrifying election outcome, took power again.
Bush the second declared he was going to install (progressive) democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and proceeded to do so. You should doubt his sanity, not his sincerity.
Jim,
The US never, ever tries to install democracy. It wants to make every country a subservient ally and when a country resists that, the US makes war against it, using democracy promotion as a pretext.
You seem to think that the Cathedral insiders who come up with and implement US foreign policy are stupid. To think this is foolish. They know exactly what they are doing and there is plenty of evidence, evidence that I’m surprised you aren’t familiar with, to prove this.
The best example of this is this essay, published in the early 90s and written by Steven R Mann, a former ambassador to Turkmenistan — a real Cathedral insider: http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/ Articles/1992/1992%20mann.pdf . This guy certainly isn’t crazy or stupid. He knows exactly what’s going on, and can probably give a much better account of why democracy is bad than you or Moldbug or anyone else. But he really doesn’t care if democracy doesn’t work, in fact he likes it precisely because it doesn’t work, for the fact that it necessarily leads to dysfunctionality and destruction makes it a useful weapon against enemies of the Cathedral. Here is a choice quote from the essay:
“As hackers have shown the most aggressive way to alter software is with a “virus” and what is ideology but another name for a human software virus? With this ideological virus as our weapon, the United States should move to the ultimate biological warfare and decide , as its basic national security strategy, to infect target populations with ideologies of democratic pluralism and respect for individual human rights…With a strong American commitment …the virus will be self-replicating and will spread in nicely chaotic ways.”
There’s much more where that came from but as far as I can tell, this is the first instance in which someone has proposed weaponized democracy as a tool of US foreign policy. And this was in the early 90s — you can tell that they were planning Iraq even back then. The point here is that the US knows exactly what its doing. It only seems like it because the spokespersons for these policies seem so stupid and unserious. But behind every Bush are guys like Mann who is calling the real shots.
>It wants to make every country a subservient ally and when a country resists that, the US makes war against it, using democracy promotion as a pretext.
Installing democracy is the best way for the US to make a country a subservient ally. Except in Muslim and African countries, where the population is so stupid/dysfunctional that every democracy devolves into a bloody and uncontrollable mess, and the only way you can have any degree of proxy control is by making an unprincipled exception and installing a brutal dictator. This is inefficient and costly politically, plus in every generation overthrowing that client dictator is a tempting project for middle/middle-upper cadres to make their bones (resume/budget).
>You seem to think that the Cathedral insiders who come up with and implement US foreign policy are stupid. To think this is foolish.
They are far from stupid. It’s just that their incentives are misaligned with those of the US as a whole, its people and government as a whole, and those of the countries which they are responsible for.
>Installing democracy is the best way for the US to make a country a subservient ally. Except in Muslim and African countries…
Ok so let’s just say that democracy promotion is the best way for the US to make white and northeast Asian countries subservient allies. Anyway, the US knows very well that democracy, whenever it is implemented in Muslim and African countries, destroys them, and so when it goes into these countries in order to promote democracy, we should interpret it as them going into these countries with the purpose of destroying them.
The “US” knows no such thing. Old State Department, CIA and Pentagon hands might know it, but they’re not allowed to say it publicly (and might not want to,) so when Young Turks arise and push democracy in these countries for career gain or out of sheer brainwashed stupidity, it flies.
You’re really overestimating the competence of big governmental organizations with a stupid ideology. It doesn’t really matter how many smart people with expertise are in these organizations. For instance, the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and stuck around as an occupying power, even though it had plenty of intel people who’d worked in Afghanistan for decades, were either of a Central Asian background or had nearly gone native, etc. Those people either didn’t see a point in warning their organization that this was a very bad move, or were ignored/punished for these warnings.
B,
The Cathedral is many things — the word evil comes to mind — but it certainly isn’t stupid or incompetent. The constellation of different public and private organizations that make up the Cathedral bureaucracy is largely staffed by deranged “empowered” women, sodomites and affirmative action lackeys, and when people notice this, they wrongly if understandably assume that, given the utterly low quality of these people, that the Cathedral is incompetent or stupid. But the fact remains that at each of the critical nerve centers of the Cathedral — those places where the policies are made — you find people with extraordinary intellect and competence. Whereas your typical Cathedral bureaucrat might really believe that democracy is an unadulterated good, and that the US is a moral superpower or whatever, insiders like Mann know that the reality is much different, and it is people like Mann who are setting the agenda.
The way things have been going in the middle east, looks mighty like they are stupid and incompetent.
Mann has degrees in tough subjects, but he rather famously committed a basic error in statistics.
I see this argument a lot: “well, the Cathedral acts stupid, and lot of prominent Cathedralites look like they have IQs of around 105-110, but there are some way smart people in the Cathedral, and they are the ones running the show.”
Larry Summers is a way smart Cathedralite. Rumsfeld is a way smart Cathedralite. But I don’t think they are running the show.
Recall what the Challenger inquiry revealed about NASA. The idiots were in charge.
If your official ideology is way stupid, does not pay to act too smart.
Jim,
They knew what the middle east and the people living there are like. They knew very well that by invading and destroying a few countries here, and engaging in democracy promotion in a few other countries there, they could tear the place up to shreds, which is precisely what they’ve done. The fact that they’ve managed to accomplish all of this rather strikes me as a testament to their intelligence and competency.
Cathedral ideology in its exoteric form is clearly stupid, but there’s no reason that Cathedral insiders believe in any of that. Just look at what they say as opposed to what they do. The fact of this discrepancy proves that they are either hypocrites or that they don’t really believe in the Cathedral ideology. Some of them may well be hypocrites, but if we examine what they occasionally let slip, in their speeches, in their writings, etc., we see that they have an entirely different agenda.
And, what statistical error did Mann make? Is it in the essay of his that I linked to? In any case, he seems very knowledgeable, well-read and he’s fluent in Russian and German, so I’m pretty sure that he has an exceptionally high IQ, probably no less than 135.
I am sure that they did not know this stuff – that they believed that Arab Spring would result in unicorns farting rainbows. Observe the blood and treasure wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq. Quite obviously they did not know what they were doing. If Humans are neurologically uniform, Arab spring and the invasions should have resulted in unicorns farting rainbows.
Jim, By the way, I think you’ve mentioned in another place that the Cathedral is not run by smart people because the SATs that they take to get into top schools, from where they’re recruited into the Cathedral, are not a real IQ tests but that the LSAT is a real IQ test. So I’ll just post this here in case you’re interested — it shows the average LSAT scores sorted out by undergraduate school :
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z7FPSt2L1Qc5dYDPhwoFfldl3mTZRZ8dI7-n2gN9f8E/edit#gid=0
On this evidence, the Ivy undergrads are about 135, which I find hard to believe. What is the source for these numbers? I could easily believe that Ivy law schools were 135.
When you apply to law school, they take your transcripts and calculate a GPA using a method that undergraduate schools don’t, and on your GPA report is included various facts about the school you attended, including the average LSAT score for students at that school. The document is getting its evidence from people who are reporting what those average LSAT scores are. I obviously can’t vouch for every single school, but what I can say is that the Harvard and the Princeton one are definitely accurate, which leads me to believe that most if not all of them are accurate.
As well, I doubt Ivy League LSAT scores translate into a 135 IQ. The average Harvard Law student gets a 173, which, extrapolating from your view of the correspondence between LSAT and IQ, would probably put him at a 144 – 148 IQ, which seems too high.
A better way of looking at it might be to start from the fact that a 167 is the absolute minimum LSAT score that Mensa will take, which wants a 130 or a 132 IQ depending on the test. Looking at the Ivy LSAT scores, given that they range from 162 to 167, it is probably more accurate to say that the average Ivy League student is at the 124 – 130/132 IQ range.
(Excuse me for posting excessively today, but these exchanges are always interesting and, at the moment, I really don’t have any work to do)
>I am sure that they did not know this stuff – that they believed that Arab Spring would result in unicorns farting rainbows.
Some may have believed that. But do you really think that all of them believed that? That sounds obviously implausible. Moreover, of the ones who didn’t believe that, doesn’t seem obvious to you, as it does to me, that they would have been among those who actually decided to engage in these wars and all of this democracy promotion? As far as I’m concerned, Rumsfeld, Bolton, Kagan, all of those guys, are extremely intelligent men, and that’s not to even mention the people behind the scenes whose names we don’t know.
Rumsfeld might think, without quite putting it into words “Give niggers the vote, they will vote to eat each other, give sand niggers the vote, they will vote to rape the other sand nigger’s goats and burn his house down”. But he would reflexively censor any conclusions that spring from this crime thought, and refrain from saying those conclusions out loud. And so he would go along with the large majority of not-so-bright people in the elite who expected unicorns farting rainbows.
Jim,
I’m interested in your opinion of the LSAT data that I’ve linked to. Has it made you revise your opinion that our current elite is not the cognitive elite? If you’re interested, I can linked to additional evidence corroborating the accuracy of the average LSAT scores among Ivy League undergraduates.
I would be interested in additional evidence corroborating the accuracy of average LSAT scores among Ivy League undergraduates – keep in mind that all universities have an incentive to inflate LSAT averages by excluding various entrants from the average.
On the evidence you presented, it looks like the great majority of people going to university have an LSAT Q typically above 142, corresponding to an IQ above 115, to which obviously cannot be the case, since if that was the case, only one American in six would go to university.
Thus we know for sure these scores are substantially inflated. And they may well be more inflated for ivies than for non ivies.
The simplest way for a university to inflate its LSAT score is to average only over those students that give their LSAT – and quietly discourage applicants from giving an LSAT unless it is very good.
Here’s the evidence for Harvard provided on Harvard’s website:
http://ocs.fas.harvard.edu/files/ocs/files/law_stats.pdf?m=1429122846
Here’s the evidence for Brown provided on Brown’s website:
http://www.brown.edu/academics/college/advising/law-school/statistics
The bottom of this admittedly old article from the Princeton student newspaper says that in 2009, Princeton had a 164 and Yale a 166. The one thing that I’ll say is that I know that as recently as 2014, the average Princeton LSAT was 165, and that it seems natural that Yale would have more or less the same average LSAT score as Harvard:
http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2009/12/u-trails-yale-in-law-school-acceptance-rates/
Once I find it, I’ll link to the evidence that I saw about a week ago saying that MIT students scored an average of 164. That seems low for them, but its probably because their best students don’t go into law school.
Also, again, a 167 on LSAT translates into an IQ 130 or 132, at least according to Mensa. Its the 94.4th Percentile on the test and, because the average LSAT taker is smarter than the average person, it seems right to say that a 167 would put you at the 98th percentile of the total population IQ-wise. And it seems absolutely believable that the average Harvard and Yale student is has a 130 or 132 IQ at least, so there’s that too.
>The simplest way for a university to inflate its LSAT score is to average only over those students that give their LSAT – and quietly discourage applicants from giving an LSAT unless it is very good.
It isn’t the student’s choice whether they want to give their undergraduate school their LSAT score or not. The company which administers the test immediately sends all of the LSAT scores to each student’s undergraduate school, whether the students likes it or not. The only way for the undergraduate school to inflate its numbers would be to simply lie, but they’d never get away with it — law schools, who have direct access to data, and the test takers, who also have direct access to the data, would call them out for it.
But you are not necessarily going to take the LSAT unless you have completed an undegraduate degree and are pursuing a JD degree. So this is not indicative of undergrads in general, but graduates who pursue a JD degree. And if you graduate, and your university fears your LSAT may look bad, will likely tell you to forget about a JD degree.
So these scores are not indicative of the typical student at an ivy, but a typical graduate at an Ivy that the Ivy has blessed to pursue an Ivy law degree. And no one disputes that Ivy law students studying for their JD are smart. That is exactly the reason the LSAT has remained well correlated with IQ, while the SAT and GPA have gone to shit.
>On the evidence you presented, it looks like the great majority of people going to university have an LSAT Q typically above 142, corresponding to an IQ above 115
Ah, I see where you’re coming from now. The average LSAT score for everyone who takes it is a 151, not a 142. (Incidentally, a 142 is the average black LSAT score, and I doubt the average IQ of blacks taking the LSAT is a 115.) I suspect it was this misunderstanding that led you to come up with your previous view on the correspondence of LSAT to IQ.
Jim,
I don’t know what to tell you if you can’t even accept that the average student at Harvard or Yale has an IQ of 130 or 132. Those are schools where most of the students major in the humanities and social sciences, and so law school is the natural place for them to go after they graduate. Therefore, a lot of them are going to take the LSAT.
Harvard and Yale don’t care about those their students’ average LSAT scores, so they have no incentive to fudge the numbers. And even if they were going to fudge the numbers, the way that they’d have to do that would be to basically tell their black and Hispanic students not to take the test. Now, if you really believe that they would really do that, I don’t know what to tell you–I think you a different Jim from the one I’ve been reading for some time now.
(Just to put things in perspective by the way, the average LSAT scores at the top 3 law school schools–Harvard, Yale and Stanford–are 173, 173, and 172. The next top 3 schools–Columbia, Chicago and NYU–and their average LSAT scores are 170, 171 and 169. The rest of the law schools don’t matter, except for 2 or 3 others which we needn’t bother with, it is these six that everyone wants to get into.
And, most Ivy league students don’t get into these schools. I know in fact that only about 1/3rd of Harvard students get into Harvard Law–the rest are rejected.
So these numbers make intuitive sense to me. It seems perfectly plausible that Ivy League students would, on average, be at the 124-132 IQ range, with Cornell on the low end and Harvard/Yale on the high end, while students at elite law schools would be at, say, the 133-139 range, assuming that we take 10 LSAT points as equivalent to a standard deviation.)
Sure, the typical student at Harvard or Yale who goes to Harvard Law School after graduating has an IQ around 130-140. Sounds about right. But I doubt that most graduates of Harvard and Yale go to Harvard or Yale Law school.
>But I doubt that most graduates of Harvard and Yale go to Harvard or Yale Law school.
Most don’t but a vastly disproportionate do when compared to other undergraduate schools. As the document I linked to on the Harvard website shows, 38% of Harvard undergrads get into Harvard Law. That, I promise you, is much higher than any other undergraduate school can say, except for maybe Yale.
Just accept it: these kids are smart, despite the fact that they may be for the most part brainwashed progressives.
This is not evidence that all or most students selected to Harvard are selected on the basis of intelligence and ability, but that some students selected to Harvard are selected on the basis of intelligence and ability.
And we have substantial evidence that not that many are selected on the basis of intelligence and ability, considerably fewer than used to be selected on that basis, and the number so selected continues to diminish.
“jim says: January 6, 2016 at 3:46 am
Observe the blood and treasure wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq. Quite obviously they did not know what they were doing. ”
the blood and treasure ‘wasted’ in Afghanistan and Iraq was
a – primarily wasted by Obama’s abrogation of everything Shrub did
b – only applicable if you think that Shrub’s public statements about his policy goals were accurate assessment of what he was really trying to do.
you’re seriously going to tell me that you think a former military pilot and son of a former CIA chief, VP and President doesn’t comprehend the concept of OPSEC?
in my opinion, Shrub’s esoteric, strategic goal was to hem in Iran and cow them. seriously, just look at a map. Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi to the west, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to the east. hell, we accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner in Gulf I, Iran more than anyone knew how easy it would be for the US forces on both of it’s flanks to pivot toward the center.
it would, of course, not be diplomatic to just come right out and tell the whole world that you’re jumping up and down on Iran’s neck. thus the ‘bringing democracy and ending the oppression of the freedom loving people’ cover stories floated by Shrub’s admin.
getting to take out Saddam ( who had attempted to assassinate Shrub’s father ) was just icing on the cake.
in the same way, what President Buck Naked says he’s doing in speeches doesn’t correlate in any way with what he’s actually doing on the ground. which is why he’s, OOOPSIE, ‘accidentally’ managed to donate 10s of millions of dollars of US .mil hardware to hardcore Islamic terrorist groups on at least three separate occasions.
when you view Obama’s foreign policy goals as
1 – aid Russia / international Communism
2 – aid Islam
3 – subvert US foreign policy aims and reputation as much as feasible
4 – destroy Christians where ever possible
then he’s accomplishing everything he wants to do.
>This is not evidence that all or most students selected to Harvard are selected on the basis of intelligence and ability, but that some students selected to Harvard are selected on the basis of intelligence and ability.
(Excuse my belated response to this, but I just saw it now.)
The one thing that I’ll say is that I agree with you that the SAT correlates very weakly with IQ. The other thing that I’ll say is that students at America’s top schools are not clearly not being selected on the sole basis of intelligence. Which is to say that there are way more smart kids than there are spots at these top schools, and so it is true, to the point of being tautological, that the admissions committees at these schools are looking for other things besides just intelligence. This is proven by the average LSAT scores of undergraduates at these top schools. For example, the fact that the average Harvard undergraduate is getting a 167 on the LSAT is incredibly impressive. But, there are plenty of students at your typical lesser regarded public university that can get that score too, meaning that those kids, even though they’re at least as smart if not smarter than the average Harvard undergraduate, didn’t get into the Ivy League. The question then becomes, What are these top schools looking for in a student, besides intelligence? That’s where, I think, the conspiracy starts. Obviously these schools are looking for intelligence + adherence to Cathedral ideology or whatever.
You propose that ever single Harvard student is smart, and then they select among smart people.
It is trivially obvious that some Harvard students are pretty stupid, that some white middle class Harvard students are pretty stupid. The only question is whether these constitute a majority or a small minority, whether this is typical or atypical.
On the evidence, the large majority are pretty stupid.
.
>And we have substantial evidence that not that many are selected on the basis of intelligence and ability, considerably fewer than used to be selected on that basis, and the number so selected continues to diminish.
The SATs were subverted a long time ago, and you know that, though I don’t think you’ve gone far enough. An entirely new section was added, the writing section, which has nothing to do with IQ, is complete bullshit, and was added to boost the scores of women, and to a lesser extent minorities, and it is worth 1/3 of your score. So we know it isn’t all about intelligence. Intelligence still matters in the admissions process though, or else schools like Harvard wouldn’t such an impressively high average LSAT among its undergraduates. After all, the ones who don’t go to law school go into finance, or PHD programs, or med school, or whatever, so it seems logical to assume that these average LSAT scores among undergrads at top schools is representative of the average student there.
We don’t know that they have an impressively high LSAT among their undergraduates. We know that they have an impressively high LSAT among their graduates that are going on to a JD. This, however, is likely an indicator that their law school still has standards while everything else has gone to shit.
About a quarter of each harvard class ends up taking the test so that’s a big sample. Some of the ones not taking it may well be dumb. A huge number of the others go on to work at goldman Sachs, get phds and mbas, majored in a stem subject and so have no law school aspirations, or work at fairly high levels in the government bureaucracy right out of graduation. Seems unlikely that if every student took it that the average would be significantly lower; it might even be higher
That is a highly selected sample. It indicates that about a quarter of Harvard are selected for smarts.
I don’t say that every single harvard student is smart. I just say that the vast majority are. I also know that if they choose students on a strictly meritocratic basis, everyone there would be asian and white male, with some jews and a smattering of high iq blacks, no more than 6 or 7. They don’t do this but, because its harvard, they can still put together a very smart group of kids. I see there’s no changing your mind on this though.
Used to be that the college entrance exam required students to derive the value of pi from first principles, using what we would today call the harmonic geometric mean, and was back then called Archimedes approximation to pi.
How many of today’s Harvard students do you think could derive the value of pi from first principles?
Seems to me that when they removed analogies from the SAT, that was a way of saying “A lot of the students we would like in Harvard are just too dumb to handle analogies correctly”.
Fine, so what would you say the average IQ is at Harvard? Looking at your “The moron elite” post, you seem to think its ~120, which I think is at least 7 or 8 points too low.
I would say the bottom at Harvard is 120, and there are a lot of people at the bottom, and the top at Harvard is not much higher than 140, and there are not all that many 140s.
The IQ range is narrow, and limited at the bottom and at the top, because of a marked preference for people like themselves. The truly stupid do not fit in, but neither do the genuinely smart.
“Eighty-six Harvard undergraduates (33 men, 53 women), with a mean age of 20.7 years (SD = 3.3) participated in the study. All were recruited from sign-up sheets posted on campus… The mean IQ of the sample was 128.1 points (SD = 10.3), with a range of 97 to 148 pointsâ€
Supposedly from a paper by Shelly Carson et al, which I can’t find online.
I remember a recent article that said that there was effectively an IQ ceiling for university professor jobs, but I can’t find that, either.
There it is:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PVRC86i5BNwJ:www.tc.umn.edu/~cdeyoung/psy5101/Carson_2003_LI_Creativity_JPSP.pdf+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
And there’s the other one:
http://polymatharchives.blogspot.ca/2015/01/the-inappropriately-excluded.html
>I would say the bottom at Harvard is 120, and there are a lot of people at the bottom, and the top at Harvard is not much higher than 140, and there are not all that many 140s.
OK, so this would come out to at least a 126 to 128 IQ average, which is slightly less than is suggested by the average Harvard undergraduate LSAT scores. So I don’t know why you’re arguing with me, given that you seem to share my view of the matter.
>The IQ range is narrow, and limited at the bottom and at the top, because of a marked preference for people like themselves. The truly stupid do not fit in, but neither do the genuinely smart.
Again, this is what I said. Harvard’s application pool is made up of generally smart kids, and they select among those kids those ones who are smart, while rejecting other kids who are also smart if not smarter, making their decisions on the basis of ideological conformity, sex/racial identity, etc. I don’t understand why you’re disagreeing with me, except for the fact that you’re wedded to the idea that the elite is not the cognitive elite. These kids are, for the most part, pretty smart, smart enough to constitute something like a cognitive elite, given that their average IQs are much higher than the average IQ of the general public.
——————————————————-
I should say here that the reason why I wanted to pick this fight with you is because you seem to think that the Cathedral is made up of idiots that are jumping from one stupidity-induced crisis to another. This, I think, is an incorrect understanding. There are plenty of smart people at the top that are planning and conspiring, laying out their strategies years in advance, and using the machinery of the Cathedral to achieve their goals. There are certainly stupid or in any case generally mediocre people staffing their bureaucracies, but the people at the very top are obviously very capable and intelligent.
I don’t think so. 120 is not all that smart, and the mechanism by which they cooperate and coordinate is ideological conformity, which requires them to be stupid.
Jim,
I’ll post this link here in case you’re interested. This blogger suggests an Ivy League IQ of 122, which is more or less what you suggested. I think he’s wrong given that he gets the number through “re-norming” the scores in a way which I think is misguided (i.e. the test results themselves suggests an average IQ of 129, which is compatible with the average LSAT scores of Ivy League undergraduates). As well, he seems to think that IQ tests somehow become unreliable just by the fact that they are reported. I don’t get it, and it strikes me as a really strange idea, but maybe you have something to say about it.
Here’s the link:
http://pumpkinperson.com/2016/01/15/more-evidence-that-ivy-league-students-average-iq-122/
He is correct that the fact a particular individual test result is reported is evidence that that particular individual test result is unreliable. I also agree with him on re-norming.
Let us suppose you want to select people on quality B, where quality B is difficult to observe, politically incorrect to observe, or hard to observe when people are gaming your methods of observing it, or all three. So you instead select people on quality C, which ordinarily correlates very well with quality B.
Suppose you want people who score 200 on quality B, where 200 is a high score. On average, people with 200 on quality B score 500 on quality C, which is also a high score. If you instead select people who score 500 on quality C, you will not get people who average 200 on quality B.
>He is correct that the fact a particular individual test result is reported is evidence that that particular individual test result is unreliable.
I find this unfathomable. For example — I got a 169 on the LSAT. Does the fact that I just posted my LSAT score make that LSAT score less indicative of my LSAT ability, whereas it would have been more indicative of it had I kept my score to myself? That this could be true seems absurd.
>Suppose you want people who score 200 on quality B, where 200 is a high score. On average, people with 200 on quality B score 500 on quality C, which is also a high score. If you instead select people who score 500 on quality C, you will not get people who average 200 on quality B.
I don’t get it. If B = C then C should = B. I don’t understand why and at what point a C that was designed to be more or less the same thing as B, stops being more or less the same thing as B.
Exactly so.
Monty Hall effect.
B does not equal C. B correlates strongly with C. Under strong selection however, the correlation will weaken.
>Exactly so.
OK, I’m clearly in way over my head. This is absolutely incomprehensible to me. If you and he are right, then we can’t rely on any test to ever give us reliable results.
Sure we can. You just have to use them correctly.
A test result that is indicative of X under some circumstances is likely to be indicative of Y under other circumstances. Do the full Baysian, and, as with the Monty Hall effect, this often leads to counter intuitive conclusions.
These get less counter intuitive the more different items are in our profile, and more counter intuitive the stronger the selection.
A test score is going to have to be reported to someone at some point in time, no one takes a test just because they want to take it. An LSAT score will be reported to law schools, a GMAT score to business schools, a score from a standard IQ test to researchers or high IQ societies or whatever — and if you’re right, all of these test scores are in the end unreliable because they were or will be reported. Therefore, coming up with reliable tests is impossible, because the only reliable test is one whose scores are not reported. But if the scores aren’t reported, how do we know if they’re reliable?
If everyone reports their test result to Joe, Joe should conclude one thing from a particular test value.
If some people report their test result to Joe and some people do not, Joe should conclude a different thing from the same particular test value.
“I don’t get it. If B = C then C should = B”
Try an experiment – generate N IQ/SAT pairs that correlate 0.7 with one another, then select SAT >= X, then compute the average SAT and the average IQ of the selection.
I can’t do the math in my head, but intuitively, one would expect the IQ to be lower than predicted by the SAT, because you’ll get more SAT>IQ pairs than IQ>SAT in your selection.
Similarly, self-reported SAT scores can be expected to be of the SAT>IQ type, because these people are more likely to report their SAT score.
“I find this unfathomable. For example — I got a 169 on the LSAT. Does the fact that I just posted my LSAT score make that LSAT score less indicative of my LSAT ability, whereas it would have been more indicative of it had I kept my score to myself?”
Exactly.
Here’s why – you also have an SAT score, maybe an IQ score, maybe a GRE or GMAT, etc. You posted your LSAT – therefore your LSAT is likely your best score and least indicative of your ability.
Even if this isn’t true in your specific instance it’s overall true. There’s an error margin in the test – sometimes the results will overstate the quantity they measure, other times understate. The scores the students report aren’t random because there’s an incentive to only post the highest score.
“I don’t get it. If B = C then C should = B. I don’t understand why and at what point a C that was designed to be more or less the same thing as B, stops being more or less the same thing as B.”
B measures some underlying quality. C is correlated with B. For some reason you’re not allowed to select on the basis of B but have to go by C. All of a sudden you don’t have anyone with the underlying quality. Real world example – smarter people are taller than average (C) but you can’t pick on the basis of IQ tests (B) so instead you simply pick members of the NBA – which is highly correlated with height (C). Think you’ll still get highly intelligent people?
>Similarly, self-reported SAT scores can be expected to be of the SAT>IQ type, because these people are more likely to report their SAT score.
This may be true, but it is a jump to go from saying that self-reported scores are more likely to be of the SAT/LSAT/GRE>IQ type to saying that self-reported scores are unreliable by definition, which is what Jim and the blogger I cited at the beginning of my exchange with Jim both seem to be saying.
>Exactly. Here’s why – you also have an SAT score, maybe an IQ score, maybe a GRE or GMAT, etc. You posted your LSAT – therefore your LSAT is likely your best score and least indicative of your ability.
I did badly on the SATs. The GREs don’t give a composite score, therefore making comparison between it and the LSATs difficult, but the score that I got on the verbal and writing components of that test were compatible percentile-wise with the 169 that I got on the LSAT.
>The scores the students report aren’t random because there’s an incentive to only post the highest score.
I suppose so. But to take the LSAT as an example, because I know a lot about it, it is well-known that in fact people don’t generally improve very much on their second and third tries. Multiple takers generally score +/- 2 points of their original score, according to the company that administers the test. It was actually this discovery that impelled American law schools to stop averaging the LSAT scores of those of their applicants who took the test multiple times. They saw that there was no real difference between a first-time test taker and a second- or third- time test taker. My point here is that maybe the danger that you have just pointed to can be circumvented by a test that gives very consistent results, such as the LSAT does.
La Griffe du Lion has an amusing article where he shows that the optimal selection strategy is racist (by the old school definition of racist):
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/dct.htm
This phenomenon is also caused by the fact that test performance merely correlates with the underlying quality.
“Using rank order selection in City B with its 50-50 black-white population split, 48 of the 300 widget-making jobs would go to blacks. Optimizing productivity with DCT would cut that number to 1.”
When I heard Mr Trump talking about Hillary causing “death” in Libya, at first I was a little surprised to hear him using the word Libya instead of Benghazi. Then I remembered how vividly the video of Col Gaddafi’s death was and so I agree that the Cathedral did an effective work there, probably of huge shock value to elitesters like Mr Trump himself who might think of themselves as a future target of such mayhem if that trend develops itself further…
A.J.P.
Would it be a bad thing if, by some combination of Iranian aggression and local Shiite subversion, Saudi Arabia lost control of its oil fields? It would at least force thousands of terrorist recruitment centers around the world, aka mosques, to find other sources of funding.
And who would gain control of the oil fields?
Libya, Syria, and Egypt suggest that the answer would be crazy murderous fanatics, the kind of people who won free and fair elections in Algeria and Gaza.
I was thinking Iran could seize the oil fields to protect the oppressed Shiites, just like Putin liberated Crimea. As bad as the Iranian regime is, they don’t have a holiness spiral. Anyone claiming superior holiness is arrested, tortured for months, confesses publicly, “I was wrong, the mullahs are the holiest Muslims!” and is then executed before he can change his mind.
The Iranians, who are not crazy like the Gazans or the Libyians, are presently doing their utmost to recreate the Persian empire. Were the Saudis to lose control over the oil fields, they would go to Iran. And the best thing that can happen for all of us here in the West is that that is what happens. The sooner the Saudi monarchy dies, the better.
The Iranians just pulled their fighters out of Syria, supposedly, because of sustained heavy losses undermining morale at home.
The Iranian ruling class is a long way from the Persians in terms of class, refinement and competence, as evidenced by the fact that after 35 years of ruling Iran, they’ve not delivered any economic results (pumping oil does not count.) And while they may or may not be insane, certainly their clients tend to be insane (Hamas and Hezbollah.)
Bullshit.
You surely know better: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/205301#.Vowkfvl95D8
How’s that Turkish tank charge towards Aleppo shaping up?
Has IS pulled out of Raqqa yet?
And has Aleppo been liberated? It’s already January…
The center of Aleppo, the major roads, and the roads connecting Aleppo to the airport, have been liberated. But you will not concede as long as one terrorist is hiding in a sewer.
What is your source?
The most recent map I can find is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo_offensive_(October_2015_%E2%80%93_present)#/media/File:Aleppo_Offensives_2015.svg
Does not look like Aleppo’s been liberated. Looks like the two sides are wrapped around each other. Not very impressive for 3 months’ work.
Is part of a Wikipedia page that says that the Russians and the Syrian government are winning.
> http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/205301#.Vowkfvl95D8
“Intelligence officials from the West and Israel both estimate that the high casualty count – particularly among high-ranking officers – has caught Tehran by surprise, although exact numbers are not yet known.”
Interesting. Am I the only one who reads this as “Israeli and/or US special forces are targeting and killing high-ranking Iranian officers”?
>Interesting. Am I the only one who reads this as “Israeli and/or US special forces are targeting and killing high-ranking Iranian officers�
Nope.
The page can say whatever it wants, the map shows the two sides wrapped around each other.
It is entirely possible that in another month or two, Aleppo WILL be liberated (at which point the Syrian Army will have quite a project on its hands keeping it pacified,) but that is far from the triumphal march of liberation you were predicting when the Russians intervened. What happened to flattening Raqqa and all that?
>Am I the only one who reads this as “Israeli and/or US special forces are targeting and killing high-ranking Iranian officers�
The US is on the side of the Iranians here (more or less).
The high-ranking Iranian officers have to be on the front lines, because they are acting as advisors to shitty volunteer militias which will not fight otherwise. The front lines are a good place to eat a mortar or a TOW.
Nothing will convince you the Syrian government is winning, as long as one terrorist is hiding in a sewer.
Let’s get to this point first.
The Iranian ruling class is basically a coalition of Western educated or influenced liberals and religious reactionaries. These people are perfectly representative of the political makeup of the country. As far as the economy goes, we need to remember that a significant chunk of Iranians are not Persian but are Persianized Arabs, Kurdish peasants, Central Asians and Afghans/Pakistanis. Those people are and have always been poor. However, in Tehran and in the other major Iranian cities, life really isn’t so bad; living standards there isn’t substantially different from what you find in many southern European countries.
Kurds and Central Asians are quite capable, in my experience.
I’m not talking about living standards. Living standards in a place with Iran’s massive agricultural potential (hardworking people with brains, good land, adequate water) and oil revenue will always be OK. The food is cheap and there’s enough money flowing in from oil.
I’m talking about building industry. Does Iran have advanced industry and manufacturing to the level you’d expect from a country with its level of educated, intelligent people?
Every where you see Kurds, they are living poverty, whether they be in Turkey, Syria and to a lesser extent, because of their oil, in Iraq. It doesn’t surprise me that they would be poor in Iran too, and the fact that they are poor there can’t be held against the government.
>I’m talking about building industry. Does Iran have advanced industry and manufacturing to the level you’d expect from a country with its level of educated, intelligent people?
Well, they certainly are not reaching their full potential, that’s for sure. I’d blame this primarily on their massive brain drain. Unluckily for them, there are many extremely bright Iranians all over North America and Europe studying computer science and engineering, and only maybe half of them have any intention of ever returning home. But it isn’t clear to me how much of this is attributable to their government. Its certainly responsible for it to some extent but to what degree is hard to tell.
In Iraq, the Kurdish areas were a different planet from the rest of the mess.
Everywhere else, shit flows freely in the street, disgusting children pelt mangy dogs with rocks among burning trash, etc.
You’d go to Zakho or Suleimaniya, and everything was clean, neat, the everpresent stench was gone.
Even the Yazidis around Sinjar, dirt poor ethnic Kurds, were 100 times cleaner, better, more dignified than the Arabs living in the rich agricultural plain below them, who were basically demonic monkeys murdering and robbing each other and shitting in their own kitchen.
I suspect that the poverty of the Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iran is due to them getting screwed over by their dominant neighbors.
As for Iran, the brain drain is completely due to the government. Iran is a beautiful country with a great culture, amazing climate (not talking about the desert part,) plenty of resources. Great trade opportunities on all four sides, lots of universities. The people have a deep pride in their culture and heritage. If their government was properly set up, not only would Persian intellectuals stick around and open businesses rather than going to the US to be immigrant sand nigger comp sci grad students, but people from America would go there to launch businesses.
But the reality is that it’s ruled by a combination of bazaari boors and peasants with turbans lording it over the rest, and smart people prefer to leave a place like that rather than be humiliated daily by their inferiors with a chance to go to Evin prison for opening their mouth.
Compare to Turkey. Where’s the Turkish diaspora? There’s maybe one expat Turk for 10 expat Persians.
“If their government was properly set up…”
If their government was properly set up, the State Dept would break it.
B,
The Kurds in Turkey are not only dirty poor but also extremely backwards. Every single time that you hear about an honor killing in Turkey or by “Turks” in Europe or America, it is always a Kurd. Many Kurds have also, believe it or not, joined ISIS. Female mutilation is also rife among them, especially in Iraq. The fact that they are better than Arabs only means that Arabs suck really badly.
I don’t mean to pick on the Kurds, however–by and large, I think they are good people. But it just isn’t a surprise to me that they are poor.
As far as the Iranian government is concerned, I would take a more nuanced view. The reality is that a huge chunk of the Iranian Persian elite never made their peace with the overthrow of the Shah. They began leaving Iran in 1979. How could anyone have prevented that?
On the other hand, the Iranian government is hugely popular among Iran’s poor–which is to say, among the Persian working and poorer classes, and as well among the non-Sunni ethnic minorities, which more or less includes everyone except the Balouchis. It isn’t clear that Iran could exist in its present form were it not governed by a system which is one part representative of its multi-ethnic underclass, which is whom the religious reactionaries represent, and its technocratic, Westernized liberals, who represent the urban, mostly Persian middle and upper classes.
And at any rate, the brain drain isn’t THAT bad — many of them do end up returning. Many Western countries don’t even allow them to study certain subjects given their suspicion of Iranians, and many of those people stay in or return to Iran and lead productive lives. This actually happened to one of the two Iranians I once shared a house with — he got kicked out of his program 2 months in because he was Iranian, and was forced to study something different. He eventually got so fed up that he returned to Iran for good.
As well, the Iranian government is far from stupid, at least where foreign policy is concerned. Take the following example: though I have no doubt that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were planned out years in advance, way before 9/11, it is also the case that one reason why America went in was due to fabricated intelligence disseminated by assets of Iranian intelligence, most famously Ahmed Chalabi. Iran has managed to colonize a huge swath of the Middle East just by egging on the Americans to do their dirty work for them. Stupid, irresponsible people could never have accomplished something like that.
>If their government was properly set up, the State Dept would break it.
The Turkish government managed to run fine for 70 years without being broken by the State Dept.
>They began leaving Iran in 1979. How could anyone have prevented that?
I don’t know, maybe by avoiding a revolutionary reign of terror?
>Iran has managed to colonize a huge swath of the Middle East just by egging on the Americans to do their dirty work for them.
That huge swath being Iraq (and they’ve lost most of Syria.) What has this great victory given them?
Saudi Arabia is America’s ally, and they support radical Sunni-Salafi jihadists like Al Qaeda, ISIS, etc. Who does ISIS attack? Shi’ite aligned factions like Hezbollah, Assad, Iraq’s Shi’ite controlled government, etc. The Saudis support this because they hate Shi’ites. Why does the US support them? Because they are killing Israel’s enemies.
If you don’t understand that America’s Deep State supports a Sunni-Israeli alliance against the Shi’ite-aligned anti-US/Israel coalition, you don’t understand anything about events in the middle east, and should remain silent.
Islamic State is trying to overthrow the Saudi Monarchy, and Islamic State, not the Saudi monarchy, is the State Department’s ally.
Saudi Arabia is allied with the Pentagon, Islamic State with the State Department. Thus the conflict between Islamic State and the Saudi royal family is a proxy war between the State Department and the Pentagon.
-between the State Department and the Pentagon.-
Among other international forces…
B:
:I love how you go from blatantly asserting something wrong, with total assurance, though three seconds with Google would have saved you the embarrassment…to just swapping to another version of the truth and pushing that version with the same total assurance.”
Characterizing an exaggeration as “blatantly wrong” is just as inaccurate as Jim’s statement.
This is from the article you linked:
“His appointment to the court was viewed as a victory for Mizrahi Jews, as the court had previously been filled largely with people of Ashkenazi descent.”
With that degree of accuracy it is a useful crystal ball.
Jim routinely explains to me what daily life in Israel and the Israeli people in general are like, despite me living here and him never having done so. I live and work with Ashkenazim, Sepharadim, Yemenites, Haredim, secular Jews, etc. Jim routinely tells me what these people are really like and what they think of each other.
It’s very hard to tell what a place and its people are like without having been there.
It’s NOT very hard to tell whether the Israeli Supreme Court is all Ashkenazi, or mostly Ashkenazi, or whatever.
If Jim can’t be relied on to accurately describe things which are easy to verify, which require no personal experience, why would he be reliable when it comes to accurately describing those things which are hard to describe accurately without personal experience, of which he has no experience?
Note that when it goes the other way, he has no issue finding a place where his opponents (our opponents) are wrong and extrapolating that universally. “One a lie, all lies,” etc.
Let’s have some truth in reporting.
Irving:
“The Cathedral is many things — the word evil comes to mind — but it certainly isn’t stupid or incompetent.”
Don’t underestimate the effect of religious zeal on bright minds.
This is good. More chaos. Damn, USG is stupid. Look for Saudis to increase ISIS funding.
[…] exodus. The House of Saud is built on sand (1, 2, 3). The Chinese debt monster. End of the deflationary epoch? Scared […]
[…] Jim has the startling truth behind the startling truth: Saudi Monarch executes US agent who tried to overthrow him: […]