The controversial Satoshi Kanazawa, most famous for saying black women are ugly… I mean “lower average level of physical attractiveness.” Kanazawa seems to believe that my previous observations are stereotypes and that stereotypes are what scientists call “empirical generalizations.” He claims that “An observation, if true, becomes an empirical generalization until someone objects to it, and then it becomes a stereotype.”  He also claims that saying men are taller than women doesn’t anger anyone and thus is a generalization, but on the other hand, saying women are fatter is a stereotype. The most important part of  Kanazawa’s argument is in a line he wrote saying, “If they are not true, they cannot survive long as stereotype.”

While Kanazawa’s claims do seem to have some logical merit on face value, only a few moments of thought are needed to sweep it away like rubbish. First, stereotypes are not based on real observations, someone we know might say, “Those ______ over there are totally _____,” but we all know this person never goes to where those people are, doesn’t know any of those people and themselves are totally ______.  We also can understand that stereotypes last a long time on large and small scale, despite being proven untrue.

The best explanation of this I have read is a quote found in an essay titled, The Merits of Stereotypes by Sam Vaknin. The quote was from an article from an education journal that reads:

Group generalizations are flexible and permeable to new, countervailing, knowledge – ideas, interpretations, and information that challenge or undermine current beliefs. Stereotypes are rigid and resistant to change even in the face of compelling new evidence.

Second, group generalizations incorporate intragroup heterogeneity while stereotypes foster intragroup homogeneity. Group generalizations embrace diversity – ‘there are many kinds of Jews, tall and short, mean and generous, clever and stupid, black and white, rich and poor’. Stereotypes cast certain individuals as exceptions or deviants – ‘though you are Jewish, you don’t behave as a Jew would, you are different’.

Finally, while generalizations provide mere clues about group culture and behavior – stereotypes purport to proffer immutable rules applicable to all the members of the group. Stereotypes develop easily, rigidify surreptitiously, and operate reflexively, providing simple, comfortable, convenient bases for making personal sense of the world. Because generalizations require greater attention, content flexibility, and nuance in application, they do not provide a stereotype’s security blanket of permanent, inviolate, all-encompassing, perfectly reliable group knowledge.

Based on my experience, this description seems much more plausible than Kanazawa’s and deals with the possible threats to truth telling that may come from so called “political correctness”. Vakin himself goes on to write:

Blacks are good athletes because sports is one of the few egalitarian career paths open to them. Jews, historically excluded from all professions, crowded into science and business and specialized. If gays are indeed more sensitive or caring than the average perhaps it is because they have been repressed and persecuted for so long… There is nothing wrong with stereotypes if they are embedded in reality and promote the understanding of social and historical processes.

This also seems to ring more true than Kanazawa’s thesis and helps shed some light on the other aspect of stereotypes. They don’t just make people upset, they actually hurt them.

Research shows that people unconsciously have biases that make society a worse place to live in. In What We Know Now about Bias and Intergroup Conflict, the Problem of the Century, Susan T. Fiske writes, “Automatic reactions to out group members matter in every day behavior. Awkward social interactions, embarrassing slips of the tongue, unchecked assumptions, Stereotypic judgments, and spontaneous neglect all exemplify the mundane automaticity of bias, which creates a subtly hostile environment for out-group members.” Conscious biases clearly make society worse off as well. To make this point, one needs to only allude to the extreme amount of pain caused by blatant racism, sexism, and bigotry.

Stereotypes also seem to be worse when groups are in more open disagreement or violence.

In conflicts, people tend to develop overly-negative images of the other side. The opponent is expected to be aggressive, self-serving, and deceitful, for example, while people view themselves in completely positive ways. These stereotypes tend to be self-perpetuating. If one side assumes the other side is deceitful and aggressive, they will tend to respond in a similar way. The opponent will then develop a similar image of the first party, and the negative stereotypes will be confirmed. They may be grow worse, as communication is shut down and escalation heightens emotions and tension (University of Colorado).

Lastly, it seems helpful to differentiate between a rigid stereotype and a flexible group generalization, and even when generalizing, it is very important to create context. It is not correct to say, for example, “Gypsies are hated because they steal.”  First, there has to be statistical proof that there is really a higher rate of theft committed by Roma, the proper term, rather than some perception that they do because they are easy targets. Second, if they are found to have statistically higher rates of theft, then it needs to be put in proper historical socioeconomic and economic context. For example, poverty and discrimination have been correlated to crime, and the Roma people suffer from both at higher rates than non-Roma and thus statically have higher rates of theft as a group.

In conclusion, be open to new information, use proper context, and most importantly, don’t be a callous jerk.

Thanks to poorkmart for help with this article.

We wanted to share two amazingly done videos of Nils Widlund, a Swedish kickboxer who took a fight against one of the best in the world on a few weeks notice at DREAM’s 2011 NYE show.

First off, here are some quick facts about Widlund:

Kickboxing Record: 70-16
Style: Sanshou
Country: Sweden
Gym/Camp: Black House Team Nogueira

Widlund is currently a resident of San Diego where he studies full time at UCSD.  From watching these videos and reading some of his blog, Widlund comes across as a really nice guy just living life and having fun. It also appears he is going to start his transition in to MMA. With his already successful kickboxing career and skill, he should be a natural, and training at school with such a BJJ background like Team Nog seems to be the best place to start.

On to the videos after the jump.

The first is Widlund’s DREAM PV and shows Alexander Palma, Muay Thai trainer at Black House Team Nogueira gym, holding pads for him. The second mostly follows Widlund as he hangs around Tokyo doing press work before his big fight. He is does a funny skit and kata in the hotel room with whom I believe is a fellow Sanshou kickboxer Hayes Jemide. The video also has tons of  JMMA people in it including Inoki, Fujii, Aoki, Kawajiri,  Fedor, and Widlund’s opponent Yuta Kubo. The videos were shot and edited by California-based reporter, filmmaker, and mixed martial artist Matt Nixon. Nixon also seems to be in charge of all of Team Nogueira’s video production. You can see more of his videos here.

Here is the actual fight between Kubo and Widlund:

Of course, these new female Legos have curves and busts and love to hang out at the hair salon and cafe in their horrible little town of Heart Lake City.

HEART LAKE CITY?!?!?!?!?!?! It’s like Salt Lake City except with more ponies.

I would write a whole article on the sexist stereotyping, logical fallacies, and self fulfilling marketing ‘research’ that tries to justify this crap, but many people have beautifully sounded the horn already and I will link some of their work here.

All I have to really contribute is how I personally loved building and storytelling with my Lego sets as a child, and I look forward to seeing my children have the same experience, boy or girl.

Juxtapose this horrible new ad:

with a wonderful old ad that Lego needs to remember:

Additional reads:
SPARK
New York Times
New York Daily News

When we first started the world, it was pretty simple due to the fact that we were playing the Alpha version. Since then of course, with recurring Beta updates, things like biomes and cave structures have become much more varied and complex.

We took on our first projects with the help of our friend Xemo. We made a pretty sweet network of forts connected by a wire controlled rail system and mined like crazy into this one mountain. We built a cool fort with automated iron doors and connected everything underground so you never have to put yourself in danger trekking over the surface at night.

It took awhile for the portals to start working on multiplayer servers, so we were forced to continue our epic journey on foot, mainly in search of our first snow/tundra biome. Along the way, we began construction of a canal system by which we would travel to and from our snow castle. It was incredibly time consuming and difficult, and sadly now that the portals actually work, we have absolutely no use for the canal or any of the paths cleared.

Most recently, I took a long journey in to the Nether to build a new portal. I ended up creating a log cabin, a cliff fortress, and discovered my first “abandoned mine” and NPC (no spawned NPCs however) village. The mine was scary, and I actually like the little village, which I’m adding onto.

Check out some screenshots from our adventures after the jump.

Pat Buchanan has often been a lighting rod of criticism, but many people hold him in high esteem as an intellect worth having in the conversation. Sadly, with his recent book “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”,  it seems possible that he had gone off the deep end or just more clearly showed his true colors. The controversial book and the particularly controversial chapter “The End of White America” has already sparked petitions for the former Presidential adviser and candidate to be fired from his analysis job at MSNBC.

Since his book tour started Buchanan says that “The End of White America” chapter has been brought up more than any other topic covered in his book and he decided to use the conservative website Townhall to answer the meta-question

“Why should we care if white Americans become a minority? America, interviewers remind me, assimilated the immigrants of a century ago — Italians, Poles, Jews, Slavs — and we can do the same with peoples from the Third World.”

What follows is a vexing and horrible attempt to make a rational argument out of revisionist history and prejudice.

Buchanan starts off saying that America has mistakenly rejected the ideal of the ‘melting pot’ is basically trying to take on mission impossible by “attempting to convert a republic, European and Christian in its origins and character, into an egalitarian democracy of all the races, religions, cultures and tribes of planet Earth.”  In other words America is trying to turn itself into some kind of melting pot, which would be okay, as long as what you added to the melting pot didn’t change the composition of the original. This kind of goes against the metaphor of a melting pot but lets just go along with Pat on this.

Next Buchanan states the larger number of immigrants today is beyond comparison to past immigration. However, he doesn’t seem to have a problem with the number of people as much as he does with the kind of people. Let Pat speak for himself here,

“Where the old immigrants all came from Europe, the new are overwhelmingly people of color. But America has never had the same success in assimilating peoples of color.”
Buchanan goes on to list the historic lesson of Black and Native Americans as examples of that lack of success.

“The Indians we fought for centuries live on reservations. And if we did not succeed with a few million Native Americans, what makes us think we will succeed in assimilating 135 million Hispanics who will be here in 2050, scores of millions of Indian ancestry?

We have encountered immense difficulty, including a civil war, to bring black Americans, who have been here longer than any immigrant group, into full participation in our society.

This was a failing that the last two generations have invested immense effort and enormous wealth to correct. But we cannot deny the difficulty of the problem when, 50 years after the civil rights revolution, one yet hears daily the accusation of “racist!” on our TV channels and in our political discourse. 

Ought we not first solve the problem of fully integrating people of color, before bringing in tens of millions more?”

Wow, that might not be a lot of text, but it is sure a lot of something, lets break it down.

Native Americans and blacks haven’t yet or didn’t easily assimilate, why…..that doesn’t matter, the important thing is the common denominator; they have dark skin. So before we decide to deal with any more dark skinned “people of color” lets assimilate the ones we have. Mexicans of course have Native Americans ancestors and despite the Civil Rights movement some people (like Buchanan) still get called out for being racists; so watch out ! We will either be fighting exponentially larger versions of Little Bighorn or being called racist more often.

What is most offensive about this line of argument is that it lacks a theoretical mechanism behind the claimed lack of integration. It is oddly left unsaid, leaving one to assume it is either in the nature of those with dark skin to be impossible to integrate or by their choice/stubbornness.

Forget about Indian Nations that changed to European styles of farming and economics, that went to the Supreme Court in proper suits to get their land rights upheld and definitely forget that they were victims of the racist Indian Removal policies of the U.S. that is rightfully remembered as the Trail of Tears.

Why haven’t black Americans been integrated in the long 50 years or so since the Civil Rights movement? Maybe because racism didn’t die the day Martin Lurther King Jr. or Fred Hampton were assassinated, by a racist gunman and police respectively. Or maybe it is because for over 200 years the processes of de-integration, slavery and segregation, were the customs and laws of this country and it takes more than one life time to undo!

Buchanan’s arguments against immigration

mirror those of infamous pro-slavery Sen.

Calhoun

Buchanan’s reasoning seems to be so extreme that he was forced to forget or omit the fact that the white majority was the cause of lack of assimilation by black and native Americans. He couldn’t come to that conclusion because then he would have to conclude that it might be good that there isn’t going to be a white majority in the future.
More seriously though, Buchanan’s sentiment is nothing new, in fact it is almost exactly the same as another racist, John C. Calhoun, the infamous states’ rights, pro-slavery senator of South Carolina. You really know someone is racist when they are the antagonist in Amistad.

Calhoun argued against the annexation of territory captured during the Mexican-American War under the following reasoning;

“we have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race. The greatest misfortunes of Spanish America are to be traced to the fatal error of placing these colored races on an equality with the white race. That error destroyed the social arrangement which formed the basis of society.”

Buchanan’s reasoning is exactly the same and just as racist, but his bigotry doesn’t stop there. He goes on to claim Islamic immigration is another mission impossible.

“Another factor is faith. After several generations, Catholics and Jews melded with the Protestant majority. But Muslims come from a civilization that has never accepted Christian equality.

I guess he forgets that Catholics and Jews had to deal with their fair share of discrimination as well. Oddly he doesn’t seem to think there is a problem with Jewish integration even though people still call others (like Buchanan) antisemitic  “on our TV channels and in our political discourse.” He also forgets to mention the centuries of animosity and violence between Catholics and Protestants in Europe, even recently in Northern Ireland.

All in all no matter how much you may agree with Buchanan on some issues such as tariffs, trade, or foreign affairs, he is, and this isn’t stated lightly , a bigot who has a distorted racist view of history. His arguments blame those who were wrongfully alienated from the American Dream for their suffering and uses this as evidence to keep people that don’t have his complexion out of the country. If he ever was considered an intellectual he has now shown his views to be so outlandish as to make him a pariah in good circles.

The original piece by Buchanan