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On the bird site (or is it the letter site now?) I'm seeing increasing calls to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay. Famously, during her recent Congressional testimony she was asked this question:
"Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?"
Her memeworthy reply was: "It can be, depending on the context".
This of course, is pretty weak sauce considering that Harvard is ranked dead last out of 245 institutions for Freedom of Expression according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It would appear to an outside observer that Harvard's standards of what is acceptable speech vary greatly depending on who is doing the speaking.
Bill Ackman, billionaire and Harvard alum, didn't pull any punches tweeting "Resign in Disgrace".
Predictably the scandal has caused people to dig into Ms. Gay's academic work, and accusations were made that she plagiarized parts of her thesis. Nevertheless, many have come to her defense with more than 650 Harvard faculty signing a letter of support for Dr. Gay, who became the institution's first black President earlier this year.
It would appear that Harvard is in a no-win situation.
If they fire Dr. Gay, they will have fired a black, female President and will enrage the social justice left who constitute the vast majority of Harvard's students and staff.
If they don't fire her, they will have proven that Harvard has no consistent free speech principles and, furthermore, that calls for genocide are acceptable as long as they are against the appropriate targets.
There is perhaps a third option, in which Dr. Gay cracks down hard on anti-Semitic speech and makes an example of a few students or staff who crossed the line, thus blaming it on a few bad apples and going back to the status quo.
Whatever happens, I think that Harvard's reputation has been damaged by this incident. There is an opportunity for another school in the elite ranks to set itself apart as the "sane" alternative and perhaps capture Harvard's crown at the top of the academic food chain.
As always, I believe that donations to elite institutions are harmful and the donors should be laughed at, taxed, and shamed.
How is any of this surprising at all? He has been cataloguing the exact same system of social aggression that is being turned not on Jews qua Jews, but on White Nationalist jews. Antizionist jews aren't just applauded, they're celebrated by the left for entirely consistent reasons. If you advocate for an ethnostate for white people the fact that some of those white people wear funny hats and don't like Santa Claus doesn't change the fact that you're a white nationalist in the eyes of the left, especially when there's a daily feed of photos of brown people getting blown up and killed. It isn't like the left has been hiding their views on this situation, and while I don't pay for his content I have a sneaking suspicion that Singal has actually got a bit of first-hand experience with the modern left (and may in fact make a living talking about it).
Israeli Jews are majority indistinguishable in phenotype from Palestinians and Israeli society is ethnonationalist, but it’s not that ethnocentric and racist- Arab Christians in Israel have better educational and labor market outcomes than the Jewish majority despite being Arab. Muslims do worse, but that’s probably partly HBD and partly cultural dysfunction.
You’ve mentioned this a few times, including the bit about HBD likely explaining the different outcomes between Arab Christians and Muslims. Do you have any idea how that could have come about historically? My possibly incorrect understanding is that Jews and Christians were ineligible for public service and positions of authority under the Ottomans and various previous Islamic states. They could remove this handicap, and many did, by converting to Islam; they’d also avoid additional taxes that way. Under those conditions, I would have expected the most ambitious (and therefore possibly more intelligent? I’m not sure how well correlated those two traits are) to have converted to Islam over the centuries, leading to a slightly dumber Christian population. Do you know of anything I’m missing?
Christians in the Middle East are a well-educated, relatively wealthy minority everywhere, and when there’s separate IQ data it’s higher. This despite often fairly severe discrimination.
Exactly how this came about is the sort of thing that has lots of different explanations. I personally think Islamic law is dysgenic, but you’ll also notice that 1) the groups are not ‘different religion, same ethnicity’ like northern Irish Protestants and Catholics- there’s over a thousand years of divergence and 2) it’s been hypothesized that the dumbest Christians were unable to afford the jizya and were enslaved, melding into the general Arab Muslim gene pool.
The other elephant in the living room is consanguinity- Arab Muslims have close to triple rate of cousin marriage that their Christian neighbors have- but I don’t think that explains the magnitude of IQ gap(in Israel, the lowest to highest performing groups on college entrance exams, which are probably pretty close to an IQ proxy).
The cousin marriage thing completely slipped my mind. I think you’re probably right that that plays a role, perhaps even a major one.
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