“For personal reasons I would like to believe that men and women are equal, and broadly that’s true.  But over a period of time the evidence in favour of biological factors has become stronger and stronger.  I have been dragged in a direction that I don’t particularly like, but it would be sensible if the debate was based on what we pretty much know to be the case.”  -  Dr Paul Irwing, in The Times, giving liberals the shocking news in a cuddly, empathic way.

Dr Irwing and Professor Lynn (whose earlier, liberal-offending exploits are touched upon at the end of the article) are only saying what anybody capable of surfing internet politics can easily discover:-

Men are more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, making them better suited for “tasks of high complexity”, according to the authors of a paper due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology.

Genetic differences in intelligence between the sexes helped to explain why many more men than women won Nobel Prizes or became chess grandmasters, the study by Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn concluded.

They showed that men outnumbered women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rise. There were twice as many with IQ scores of 125, a level typical for people with first-class degrees.

When scores rose to 155, a level associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman.

Alright, not new information for us.  But it is interesting that the MSM is now prepared to touch the IQ story at last - one thinks of the Guardian’s recent admission that, yes, genes have a role in general intelligence.  It doesn’t matter whether these are coincidental swallows.  Enough of them will usher in summer, and all scientists for whom the left has proved a censorious foe should think on that.

Human difference, lest one forgets, simply does not lend itself as a foundation for marxian politics.  We are a very long way yet from seeing the hopeless expectations of Affirmative Action recipients or the egalitarian obsessions of the establishment or the selfish interests of state employees challenged.  But that is the goal.  The public acknowledgement - however gradual and haphazard - of a truth that has been (at times, viciously) suppressed for three decades is a necessary start.  We need much, much more of it.

Some months ago I received a manuscript in the mail bearing the return address of an old friend.  This friend later denied any knowledge of the thing.  The postmark and stamps were unremarkable, and I have never been able to discover the identities of the sender, the two correspondents in the remarkable, fragmentary dialogue, or the author of the commentary, one “Johannes Climacus”.

I have been reluctant to publish this material, fearing that it might meet a hostile reception even from those who stand most to gain from an understanding of it.  But finally, overcoming these scruples, I determined to cast it like bread upon the bitter waters of MR, where readers may carp at it at their leisure.

Dialogue Conducted In Anticipation of the End of History

LYCOPHRON:  I suppose that one question (there are several that I won’t raise) is:  given the Eurasian characteristics of Dugin’s perspective (naturally, given where he is), his relationship to his own traditions and to globalization, etc. makes a certain sense.  But how would, say, an American in sympathy with these ideas situate himself?  I don’t necessarily mean practically, but close enough—do you move to Russia and pray for a reversion of North America to primeval forest?  That’s not meant derisively, but it raises an important question, which is: clearly someone in his context can be for something, but can someone in our context appropriate these ideas and be for anything?

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On July 25th BBC2 aired a powerful, half-hour piece of investigative journalism titled, “The Siege of Darley Hall Farm.  It charted:-

... five years of guerrilla warfare directed against John Hall, a guinea-pig farmer whose stock is bred for medical experimentation ...  [It] revealed how the tentacles of extremism exert a stranglehold first over one enterprise, then a series, and from here an entire community.  Stories of personal courage abounded as the Animal Liberation Front’s campaign intensified from dire warnings and attacks against property to arson, accusations of paedophilia, murder threats, and, finally, body snatching.

Altogether, the farm and its surrounds have endured 290 protests and 170 incidents of violence and intimidation.  In March a High Court judge refused the area an exclusion zone, while defining these actions as a terror campaign.  The ALF, it would seem, is not the only perpetrator of inhumanity.

Today we learn that the terror tactics, and specifically the stealing of the remains of the Hall family’s grandmother, were successful.  The Halls will abandon animal breeding in the hope that her remains will be returned.

The legal system badly failed the Halls.  No less importantly, it has failed the cause of scientific research in Britain and it has failed all of us.  Why?

When I consider the rush to protect Muslims through anti-British religious hate speech law, to bring Nick Griffin and his co-defendant to court for predicting 7/7 and to hound John Tyndall to his grave, I can only conclude that the legal will exists in spades if the “offender” suits the liberal establishment.  As far as I know the New Labour clique aren’t militant vegans.  The Animal Liberation Front has no members among Labour MP’s.  So is it that a residual 1960’s Student Union admiration for action directe is at work in them?  Is left-organised protest always allowed to pass because there are, as everybody knows, “no enemies to the left”?

ALF is everybody’s enemy.  Can anyone explain why it is not seen by our betters for the evil it is and stopped in its tracks at the outset?

UPDATE

Adam Nicolson, writing in the Guardian (where else?), has answered all my questions.

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“Leadership elections are intended to expose the ideas of rival candidates - thus making it possible for the party to decide the direction in which it wants to be led.  The Tory party is being denied that opportunity.  That is, I suspect, because none of the leadership candidates has the faintest idea about what Conservatism now stands for.  Meanwhile their supporters are engaged in no more than a doomed search for a “winner” who does not exist.”

Roy Hattersley, his tap dripping less bile than usual in today’s Guardian.

To which, no doubt, spirited Tories will counter that “if a week is a long time in politics four years is a hell of a lot longer.”  Or perhaps “oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose ‘em.”  That is the self-calming fatalism which passes for electoral wisdom on the right today.

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The philosophers of the Enlightenment wanted us all to be part of the same broad humanity - but the brutal truth is that we are all a bit tribal.
Simon Schama, a latter-day Macaulay quoted in yesterday’s Guardian as saying something necessary and true - and, given his background, rather refreshing.

Schama, along with fellow-historian and liberal Tristram Hunt, was endeavouring to explain to TV producer and Guardian invitee Stephen Moss the unexpectedly high viewer figures for BBC2’s series, Coast.  Of these Moss writes:-

One recent episode of Coast, on BBC2, attracted 5 million viewers, the highest rating factual programme on the channel this year.  And it’s not only programmes about the British seaside that are currently winning audiences: series featuring Britain’s landscape (Alan Titchmarsh’s British Isles: a Natural History), history (Tony Robinson’s Time Team and their Big Dig), and our native wildlife (Bill Oddie’s Springwatch) have been some of television’s biggest recent hits.

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THE Government of Robert Mugabe tabled draconian laws yesterday to drive the last white farmers from their land and crush dissent.

The constitutional amendments debated in Parliament will nationalise all agricultural land that has been listed for seizure since 2000. Landowners will have no right to contest the confiscations and will be barred from receiving compensation ...

After five years of murder, assault and harassment of white-owned farms by state agents, the Government has managed to confiscate legally only about 10 per cent of the estimated 4,500 properties. All but a handful of white farmers have had their property listed for “compulsory acquisition”.

However, most of them have kept the Government at bay by fighting their eviction in court. About 450 farmers have stayed on their farms.

Mr Coltart [MDC legal director] said: “These constitutional changes are designed for once and for all to smash the white farmers and to close any possible avenue for using the constitution to protect human rights.”

From todays Times.

Some unfamiliar speculation has appeared in our national dailies since BBC News broke the story of a rape gang operating in the unlikely, quiet south midlands town of Northampton.

The offenders are black and thought to be South Africans, a fact of immediate and deep concern to their victims.  It’s traumatic enough to be raped by a physically healthy criminal and left with only psychological scars.  It would be another to be handed a death sentence by an HIV positive kaffir five thousand miles from home.

Back in good old Jo’burg “jack rolling” gangs block-off two ends of a road with their vehicles and assault every woman caught between.  Something along these lines may be what we are seeing in Northampton.  The five women who were attacked - three rapes, two adbuctions in the course of ten days, all at night and the youngest victim just fifteen - report a three-man gang possibly employing two vehicles.

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I have certainly heard a lot of liberals claim that if we just give a lot of foreign aid to the Third world, then no one would have a reason to immigrate to America.  Marcus Epstein has an interesting article debunking this concept.  He gives a number of reasons why this policy will not work, but ignores perhaps the most important one: IQ.

At the end he says “Cultural, historical, and other factors that cannot be changed anytime soon will probably mean that some countries are always going to be poorer than other countries”  Perhaps he meant to include IQ in “other”.  In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn and Vanhannen look at the IQ’s of the countries where post-1965 immigrants, and the trend is clear: low IQ immigrants flood into High IQ countries.  Low IQ countries can never be close to as prosperous as high IQ countries, and immigrants from every failed society will always want to come to prosperous countries.  No amount of foreign aid, humanitarian intervention or government reform will change that.