Steven Pinker’s “Inherit the Wind: Our Weird Obsession with Genealogy” is the cover story in\ the August 6, 2007 issue of The New Republic. Here’s an excerpt:

In the struggle between society and family, the exponential mathematics of kinship ordinarily works to the advantage of society. As time passes or groups get larger, family trees intertwine, dynasties dissipate, and nepotistic emotions get diluted. But families can defend themselves with a potent tactic: they can graft the twig tips of the family tree together by cousin marriage. If you force your daughter to marry her first cousin, then your son-in-law is your nephew, her father-inlaw is your brother, your parents’ estate will be worth twice as much per grandchild, and the couple will never have to bicker about which side of the family to visit on holidays. For these reasons, clans and dynasties in many cultures encourage first-or second-cousin marriage, tolerating the slightly elevated risk of genetic disease. Not only does cousin marriage amplify the average degree of relatedness among members of the clan, but it enmeshes them in a network of triangular relationships, with kinsmen valuing each other because of their many mutual kin as well as their own relatedness. As a result, the extended family, clan, or tribe can emerge as a powerfully cohesive bloc—and one with little common cause with other families, clans, or tribes in the larger polity that comprises them. The anthropologist Nancy Thornhill has shown that the prohibitions against incestuous marriages in most societies are not public-health measures aimed at reducing birth defects but the society’s way of fighting back against extended families.

In January 2003, during the buildup to the war in Iraq, the journalist and blogger Steven Sailer published an article in The American Conservative in which he warned readers about a feature of that country that had been ignored in the ongoing debate. As in many traditional Middle Eastern societies, Iraqis tend to marry their cousins. About half of all marriages are consanguineous (including that of Saddam Hussein, who filled many government positions with his relatives from Tikrit). The connection between Iraqis’ strong family ties and their tribalism, corruption, and lack of commitment to an overarching nation had long been noted by those familiar with the country. In 1931, King Faisal described his subjects as “devoid of any patriotic idea … connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil; prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever.” Sailer presciently suggested that Iraqi family structure and its mismatch with the sensibilities of civil society would frustrate any attempt at democratic nation-building. [More]

Overall, Pinker does an excellent job of synthesizing what I’ve been writing for years, with one lacuna, which I’ll explain at another time

What’s this country coming to when a poor illegal alien can’t even run out to the local drug store without getting busted for not having the required auto insurance or a valid drivers license?

“I would say that if I’m not this color I’m not gonna get pulled over,” said an indignant Gustavo Flores, who moved to Waukegan, IL, nine years ago and is whining to everyone who will listen that because he’s an illegal he’s now “afraid of the police.”[Waukegan Man Says He Was Arrested Based On Race By Katie McCall, CBS, June 30, 2007]

Memo to Mr. Flores and those who share the same “plight”: That’s how the system is supposed to work.

Waukegan is among the growing number of U.S. cities that have signed on to the federal program (287g) that allows local police to assist in enforcing our immigration laws, a move many Latinos view as an “abuse of power.”

“We have persons, we have innocent people who are being arrested and deported,” said Margaret Carrasco of Casa Mexiquense.

Gee, it would have been swell if reporter Katie McCall (e-mail) had asked Ms. Carrasco, “If someone is here illegally and uses bogus ID to get a job in violation of federal law, how can they be ‘innocent?’ ”

Robert Vasquez has been mentioned in these pages before–he’s was Commissioner of Canyon County in Idaho, and he once sent the Mexican Government a bill for what their citizens were costing Canyon County. Here, he’s complaining about the University Of Idaho Law School’s Tribal And Immigration Clinic,

Ex-commissioner says UI Law School illegally defends immigrants
AG Weekly Online — Twin Falls, Idaho
MOSCOW, Idaho (AP) — A former Canyon County commissioner and vocal foe of illegal immigration says instructors and students at the University of Idaho Law School are breaking the law by offering free legal representation to people who face deportation or other immigration proceedings.

“Federal law states that anyone who aids and abets an illegal alien in remaining in the United States is committing a felony,” Robert Vasquez told the Lewiston Tribune.

Monica Schurtman, [Send her mail]a UI professor and supervising attorney for the Tribal Clinic, laughed off Vasquez’s criticism.

“That’s really funny,” she said. “What we try to do is assist our clients in a well-established legal system to remain legally in the United States.”

Schurtman said the immigration aspect was added to the clinic in 2000 when she saw immigration as a growing concern in the state.

Schurtman has a point in that lawyers are generally exempt from being considered accessories after the fact, but I question the use of the taxpayer’s money and the students’ time to aid in the Mexican invasion of Idaho. A while back, I wrote

But even if one granted a theoretical “public good” in helping to make sure that justice is done to accused American citizens, it wouldn’t apply to the Treason Lobby’s free (or worse, taxpayer subsidized) legal assistance to people who aren’t part of the the American public at all.

Perhaps they should call this kind of advocacy “Pro Bono Mexico.”

Perhaps they’d be better employed defending towns like Farmer’s Branch and Hazleton from the ACLU, or employers who try to check for illegals from the Federal Government’s anti-discrimination police.

Peter Brimelow was on the Washington Monthly Radio Show with Markos Kounalakis and Peter Laufer. He was on in the third segment, Border Skirmish, at 31:47 on the audio which you can get here.April 22, 2007 Show.
My post about the Duke University debate is here.

I saw a discussion of this on the Just One Minute blog, where Tom Maguire says

“So young white nerds today are traitors to their whiteness by not pretending to be hip-hop gangstas? Could someone please just cap me with a nine right now? But quietly - people are sleeping…”.

Apparently a linguist at the University of California, Mary Bucholtz, [send her extremely grammatical mail]has spent 12 years studying “nerds” and wrote a paper in 2001 called
The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness[PDF] which is part of the whiteness studies phenomenon. Just saying “phenomenon” I get a rush of nerdiness to the the head.

Who’s a Nerd, Anyway?
By BENJAMIN NUGENT
New York Times
July 29, 2007
Idea Lab

What is a nerd? Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been working on the question for the last 12 years. She has gone to high schools and colleges, mainly in California, and asked students from different crowds to think about the idea of nerdiness and who among their peers should be considered a nerd; students have also “reported” themselves. Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”

You really need to read the whole thing–one part of nerdiness is not using African-American slang. Which I suppose means actually keeping it real. With a “g” at the end of “keeping,” and everything.

Apparently that “g” is a sign of being so white it hurts:

As a linguist, Bucholtz understands nerdiness first and foremost as a way of using language. In a 2001 paper, “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness,” and other works, including a book in progress, Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white” kids use a limited amount of African-American vernacular English; they may say “blood” in lieu of “friend,” or drop the “g” in “playing.” But the nerds she has interviewed, mostly white kids, punctiliously adhere to Standard English.

And I’m sure you will all appreciate this aspect of the nerdiness problem:

On the other hand, the code of conspicuous intellectualism in the nerd cliques Bucholtz observed may shut out “black students who chose not to openly display their abilities.” This is especially disturbing at a time when African-American students can be stigmatized by other African-American students if they’re too obviously diligent about school. Even more problematic, “Nerds’ dismissal of black cultural practices often led them to discount the possibility of friendship with black students,” even if the nerds were involved in political activities like protesting against the dismantling of affirmative action in California schools. If nerdiness, as Bucholtz suggests, can be a rebellion against the cool white kids and their use of black culture, it’s a rebellion with a limited membership.

Of course, if you do somehow acquire the hyper-correct language disease, you can be a copy-editor like me–I’ve only used the word “farizzle” in conversation once in my life. (I couldn’t resist:EARNEST YOUNG FELLOW:” Sir, I think that older people sound foolish when they try to use the younger people’s slang expressions, don’t you?” ME:”Farizzle?”) But really, this is probably a symptom of something important, and it makes me wish we had Sam Francis still around to write about it.