I have a review of The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t up over at Quillette. The book begins with the Dreyfus affair, and I didn’t really get to highlight one of the most interesting aspects of this.
For those who don’t know, Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jewish officer who was framed for espionage and subsequently exonerated. Julia Galef, the author of The Scout Mindset, points out that one of the major reasons that Dreyfus was exonerated was the persistence of Georges Picquart, chief of the army’s intelligence section, in exposing the true spy. Picquart was a conservative, and conventionally anti-Semitic as was typical of Frenchmen of his day and class. He did not have a strong motive to exonerate Dreyfus, but he held to his conviction that the case was wrongly decided once he couldn’t deny the facts. Like Dreyfus, Picquart also faced serious consequences, including court-martial. His reputation was repaired when Dreyfus was let go thanks to the effort of Émile Zola.
Here is the conundrum at the heart of Picquart’s behavior: was it rational for him to hold to the truth against his self-interest? I’m not sure it was, at least conventionally understood. One of the aspects of human nature, and human history, is that people do the right thing, the virtuous thing, even in the fact of negative consequences. If they didn’t, I’m not sure we’d have a civilization.
And hurrah to that. A society built on a web of lies won’t endure – at minimum, it will be outcompeted and overcome at some point by those clearer-eyed.
That said, I must take some issue with a couple of the points in your review.
I would not state that the elders’ wisdom is “far less valuable than it was in the past.” If anything, I think that it is far more valuable today, precisely because of the overwhelming amount of “noise” that distracts, obfuscates, and deceives. That wisdom – e.g. for a woman to court a man longer to ascertain his true intentions instead of jumping in bed with him right away – might indeed SEEM “quaint and irrelevant in the world of Tinder,” but is in fact much more useful in an age where men are less gentlemanly and more short-term transactive in sexual terms.
I also disagree with this. Your assigning of traditional “obstinacy” (or “soldier mindset”*) as such to modern trends such as gender dysphoria is both factually wrong and rhetorically deceptive. As you point out, traditional “soldier mindset” was a product of millennia of adaptation to survival, conflict, etc. and rested on solid evolutionary grounds. Meanwhile hyper post-modern trends such as gender dysphoria rests on no such grounds. Indeed, what the Covid pandemic unwittingly demonstrated was just how shallow such ideas have been – reports of gender dysphoria by young girls seem to have declined dramatically during the pandemic, thus lending evidence to the contention that it has been largely a short-term social signaling fad rather than an enduring notion constructed on a firmer foundation.
Your argument here strikes me as something of an attempt to elevate (presumably atheist) “critical rationality” on the side of the angels in contrast to both nebulous hyper post-modern insanities and traditional prejudices as varying expressions of the same conflated unreasoned and rationalized mindset.
*”Soldier mindset” is dumb. Soldiers do what is necessary to survive and overcome the enemy in war. They are participants in the real testing grounds of what is real and existential in human life. Soldiers are more “scouts” in action than would be “leaders of the rationalist community.”
As always the “truth” is a fish in our hands. Something sometime may be adulterated but what it says to be true.
It’s interesting that you mention this now, because at the moment here in France there’s a growing anti-Semitic movement declaring that Dreyfus was actually guilty, despite pretty conclusive evidence to the contrary. It’s mainly led by the extreme right-wing media personality Eric Zemmour, who is himself of Algerian Jewish ancestry.
Maybe an example of unvirtuously irrational?
From a distance (here in America), that is absurdly, if only mildly, humorous.
Is Zemmour, despite being “extreme right-wing,” in league with actual Algerians (and other Muslims) on this?
For what I know Zemmour is a Jew and is against Muslim immigration to Europe, and he isn’t the only one.
Zemmour is virulently anti-muslim, but hasn’t explicitly said whether he is anti-Semitic (in the sense of hating Jews) himself. However, he’s a vocal defender of Maréchal Pétain and the Vichy government that was an enthusiastic collaborator with Nazi Germany and responsible for the deportations and deaths of more than 70000 French Jews, so you can draw whatever conclusions you want from that…
Many of his supporters, however, are explicitly anti-Semitic and Holocaust deniers.
There is a Picquart movie about his travails. Directed by Polanski.
Perhaps you should ask him if he is an anti-Zionist rather than an anti-Semitic, which doesn’t mean anything, and how much he thinks the “Semitic” intake of european Jews is and of northern African Jews as him. There are many Jews, like Shlomo Sand, for instance, who don’t agree with the Zionist Weltanschauung (Matai ve-‘ech humza ha-‘am ha-Yehudi / The invention of the Jewish people). Perhaps he is more linked to French Jewry rather than to the English/American one, close to the Crown and the British Empire. Thus many are the things to know, and not easy.
@Gioiello
Well, I don’t think that the French Jewry defends the deportations perpetuated by the Vichy government, given that most of them lost family members to them.
In fact, I would say that it’s pretty much condemned by everyone, Jewish or not, Zionist or not, French or not. There’s generally a pretty wide consensus that Holocaust=bad so defending any part of it, even if it’s “just” the French government’s complicity at the time, is indicative of something…
I don’t pretend to know Zemmour’s actual beliefs, but he’s not hesitant in defending some pretty reprehensible parts of French history.
@Tognoni: “Shlomo Sand, for instance, who don’t agree with the Zionist Weltanschauung”
Sand’s book, which is a rehash of the Khazar fantasy, is just plain wrong.
Pay up, join Razib’s substack, read his essays on Jewish genomics.
@phanmo
If what you say were true, we wouldn’t understand why a Jew (because Zemmour is a Jew, in his surname, in his aspect: a Northern African Jew, with a complex origin, I know very well and wrote a lot about the origin of Moroccan Jews, above all one who is hg. J-Y15222, the upstream subclades of the Jewish cluster of the Rothshilds who are J-Y15223, probably a Roman Y introgressed in Iberia even though this Y came from around the Caucasus before) risks to become the leader of the French right wing party against immigration, what Le Pen didn’t do so far. And tell me: would you define the politics of Israel (and before of the Zionists, what the same Shlomo Sand explains in his book) “Nazi” or not? Do you think that all the Jews all around the world agree with this politics? American Jews are frequently mixed (you may see that also simply in the 23andMe data), they are “Americans” and probably as blacks in the past as to Liberia they don’t think of living in Israel. Don’t you think that the passage from Trump to Biden was due to this politics? Which weight do you think that what I call the Zionist Finance had in all this, and in Syria war, and the actual politics of US? Do you think 35% (what of the American wealth is owned by Jews), less or more? Do you think that Zemmour is acting for himself or, as always happened in the past, he takes orders from elsewhere? Don’t you think that before the danger China also the politics of Israel (thus of US) as to Syria and all the rest is changing?
@Walter Sobchack
I’d be very glad to know what Razib Khan wrote (or spoke) about Jewish genetics (he is a respectful geneticist, more than me, who am a literate and a poet above all), that I am writing about from 15 years and perhaps 20000 letters, and it isn’t a question of few dollars to pay, but my knowledge of English is scarce, I am a “Teach yourself book” guy and video without auto generated subtitles are difficult to me, and about genetics I was surprised when he replied to a post of mine by saying that the oldest hg R1* has been found in Mal’ta boy (for supporting his interpretation of the R1 hg. which is also his for what I know), long before Villabruna (Italy), but it seems that long before it was already in Bacho Kiro, which is in eastern Europe and not in central Asia. About Shlomo Sand perhaps you read Elan Elhaik and not his book. And finally: a Jew with his name and Surname (probably). Which nicknames do you use in the blogs?
@Gioiello
You are the only one who mentioned the politics of Israel and Zionism.
I only mentioned the Dreyfus affair and the Vichy government.
This seems to be a big issue to you, and quite honestly I don’t care; so have fun with your Rothschild/Zionist conspiracy theories or whatever you’re babbling on about…
Because history is a chain where everything se tient (as French say) and, if you didn’t understand that, I think that you didn’t (or wanted to) understand anything, also about genetics, where everyone has got his agenda, also Razib Khan, is he witnessed or not. Was the same Rothschild to say that Israel was a creation of his, but above all we should understand what is happening now and in the next future.
… was it rational for him to hold to the truth against his self-interest? I’m not sure it was …
Doesn’t this illustrate the dichotomy between rational self-interest and rational “self”-interest of the group. If we accept that a person can act “irrationally” against his immediate personal self-interest, but such action is rational from the group’s perspective, how do we extract the benefit to the individual that accrues because of his group membership? He is irrational regarding the self, but rational toward the group self. But then there is no self “essence” separate from the group.
@phanmo
You are the only one who mentioned the politics of Israel and Zionism.
Is this an activation of the timer to count down for the invocation of Godwin’s law?
Or does the timer start on its own with the first comment?
@iffen
I was wondering the same thing!
Godwin Shmodwin, I’m still trying to work out what a fish in our hands means.
I’m still trying to work out what a fish in our hands means.
I’m guessing that you have never held a live, slime covered 3 pound fish.
As I wrote that: “As always the “truth” is a fish in our hands. Something sometime may be adulterated but what it says to be true”, probably you were referring to me, but I don’t understand why I am “Godwin Shmodwin”. Of course I frequently use metaphors in my poems, and that was a metaphor… but I go to the end of my explanation: the protocols could be fake but what was said to be true. De facto bellorum causa non dicta.
@iffen – Oh yes I have.
Oh yes I have
Does this mean that you believe the truth to be a rock and not a fish?
I don’t understand why I am “Godwin Shmodwin”
I don’t believe that he meant that you are Godwin Shmodwin, it was my question that he was referencing.
LOL. The truth is that I will never hold a stonefish in my hands. As one of my blonde ex-girlfriends once said: I may be dumb but I’m not stupid.
I once caught a very slimy rock cod, and I didn’t even want to grab that ugly thing to get the hook out. That wasn’t any 3 pounder though. Pound and a half, maybe.
I thought truth was an elephant! (Though real life experience leads me to suspect it is actually a monkey with a bag of cocaine.)
I’m wrong. It was not a rock cod, it was a grouper. Very small one, though.
@John Massey: I don’t believe that you have ever held a fish in your hand. A real fisherman (overtones here of “No true Scotsman”) would never admit to holding “a very small one,” without at least adding “You should have seen the one that got away.” You blew your cover. Until now, you were one of the commenters here whose comments I relied on. The scales have fallen from my eyes!
Ha ha. But isn’t internet a place where people posture with a “humble brag”?
Sorry, Mr. Massey. 😉
No offence taken, Twinkie.
For marcel proust’s benefit, I was fishing in the estuary at the mouth of the Murchison River in Western Australia, in a place called Kalbarri, using just a very light hand line and small hooks. I caught a lot of a fish called locally a tailor, and black bream, and that one small grouper.
None of the fish I caught there exceeded 2 lbs, but I caught a hell of a lot of them – far too many for me and my girlfriend to eat, so I gave away all of the surplus to other people in the caravan (trailer) park, who were pleased to receive them. Black bream is a delicious fish to eat. Tailor are somewhat less palatable – the flesh is rather dry, but they are fun to catch because they fight like crazy – still a challenge for a fish that size when using very light tackle, and you need to use gang hooks, otherwise they will bite through the line; and when removing the hooks you need to be careful, otherwise they will get their needle sharp teeth into your finger – you need to use one of those plastic hook removers. I didn’t attempt to eat the grouper because I didn’t know what it was and was wary of it – it turns out that at that size they are very good to eat.
No one else thought to fish in the estuary, they were all out fishing in the ocean at the mouth of the estuary for the very large fish that can be caught there, but on my arrival I had seen a lot of fish jumping in the estuary as the sun was going down, and I had not gone equipped with a very long rod and heavy tackle that I would need to fish off the rocks at the mouth of the estuary (and besides it was too crowded with sports fishermen trying to hook a big one), so I reckoned I would try my luck there, in the window between the sun going below the horizon and it getting too dark to see. My assessment was correct – during that time window the fish would go into a feeding frenzy, and I was pulling in fish faster than I could bait hooks and get my line out again, so my girl friend was baiting hooks for me while I was pulling in fish.
My efforts did not go unnoticed – when I went to the local pub, they were all talking about “that young bloke who has been catching all those fish in the estuary.” When they recognised me, I became an instant celebrity.
One unfortunate quirk, though – there were many seagulls around, and several times when I cast out my line, a gull swooped down and snatched the bait before it had hit the water, and I found I had hooked a seagull. It was a bit like flying a kite. The first couple of times it happened I tried pulling the line in to see if I could get the hook out of the bird, but it was hopeless – they resisted being pulled in too strongly, and it would just have been driving the hook into them more deeply, so after futile attempts to pull them in, all I could do was cut the line and let them go, and hope somehow that they would disgorge the hook later.
Kalbarri is a fascinating place to visit because of the river gorges, which are beautiful. There was not much of a town there then, mostly just caravans you could rent in the camping area, and of course, being in Australia, a pub with copious supplies of beer, but there is a bigger town there now, and the areas around the river have been declared a national park. I was fortunate enough to be able to go there before it got too much on the tourist map. The town was wrecked by a tropical cyclone (hurricane) in April this year, so I don’t know how well things have recovered from that. They would not have been prepared for it because cyclones rarely travel that far south.
That’s my humble brag, such as it is, but every word is the truth. I have never caught so many fish in my life, before or since. And yes, I realise you were just pulling my leg, but I put great stake in being an honest man, so thought I would elaborate in order to try to establish the truth of my story.
Well, I don’t have that elaborate a “humble brag” fishing story, but I’ll share mine too.
I must have been about six or seven. My father had worked all week – all night on some project through Friday night and Saturday morning (back in those days, the work week was six days in my birth country), and he was absolutely exhausted. But he had promised to take me to a lake (an artificial one, stocked with a few little fish) and teach me fishing for weeks and couldn’t break his words to me. So he said to my mother, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll just set the boy up with the rod and worm on the hook and take a nice, long nap. I don’t think he’ll catch anything his first time.”
So we went. I was pretty jazzed. He set up the rod for me, put half a worm on the hook (always half a worm – he said a whole worm would be partially gobbled by a fish without hooking), and then proceeded to lie back on the folding beach chair he brought, covered his face with a hat, and started to snooze.
About 15 minutes into his nap, I felt a bite, so excitedly yelled out, “Dad, I think I got one!” He woke up, looking pretty peeved, and said, “I don’t think so.” I kept persisting and he checked and, indeed, I caught a small little fish, which he helped me to reel in and unhook. It was about an anchovy sized, which he tossed into the icebox. He spitted out, “You got lucky. Try again.” Then he put another half a worm on the hook and was back to napping.
Well, I felt another bite in fewer than 10 minutes. So we repeated the routine. Then another one, and another, and another… In the span of a couple of hours, I caught over 20 little fishes. By the end, my father looked like he was going to explode (having never gotten that long nap) and had that, “WTF is with this lake?” look. Even at that age, I could tell his mind was alternating between sheer rage from the turn of events and that fatherly sense of “I must remain calm and act like I am proud of my son’s bizarre f—ing string of luck here.”
After a couple of hours of this, we went home – I was in high heaven all the way home, and proudly showed my mother the whole lot, which she then helped me to ink on sheets of paper. The final dagger to my father – my mother said, “That’s great! You are such a good little fisherman. Your father went to that lake several times to fish and never caught even one!”
He never took me fishing to that lake again.
And I didn’t realize this until I had children of my own. Today I know that they are such incredible blessings from God, but they are also the crosses He gives us to bear. And what heavy, frustrating, and annoying crosses they are to bear sometimes!
Great story. Thanks for sharing.
Glad you liked it. And every word of the story is true, too, including the number of the fish I caught. 😉
Iran_N-like pulse found in Iberia during the BA:
“Mediterranean and central European ancestries shaped the genetic profile of southeastern BA groups in Iberia
To explore the genetic turnover and the contribution of the local groups to the newly formed BA genetic profile in Iberia, we systematically tested a series of qpAdm models. We started by using the distal ancestry sources Anatolia_N, WHG, GoyetQ2, Yamnaya_Samara, and Iran_N to model the genetic ancestry components of Iberian BA groups (table S2.10 and fig. S6). We found that the local traces of GoyetQ2, a characteristic but variable component of southern Iberia CA individuals, were no longer detectable, suggesting a dissolution of geographic substructure in BA Iberia with respect to HG ancestry. We explain this by the spread of steppe-related ancestry from North to South (7) that also contributed northern and central Iberian ancestry to the South, diluting the subtle GoyetQ2 signal to a level beyond the limits of detection (text S8). By using the same qpAdm model, we also observed that Almoloya_Argar_Early, Almoloya_Argar_Late, SE_CabezoRedondo_BA, and Bastida_Argar cannot be modeled with Yamnaya_Samara as a single source but find better support with a combination of Iran_N and Yamnaya_Samara, however, without reaching P values ≥0.05 in Almoloya_Argar_Early and Late and SE_CabezoRedondo_BA (table S2.10 and fig. S6). These El Argar groups (Almoloya and Bastida) are also slightly shifted to the right on the PC1 axis, in the direction of Mediterranean BA groups with excess Iran_N-like ancestry, such as “Minoans,” who only carry Iran_N-like ancestry but not steppe-related ancestry, or “Mycenaeans,” who carry a mix of both (71), and that has also been shown for some BA individuals from Sicily_MBA (51) and for Sardinians here”
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi7038
No fish stories of my own to share. My Dad’s father (a born and bred Brooklyn Jew) fished and tried taking my father a few times but gave up after my father repeatedly fell in over the course of several trips. So my father never took me (and his father died before I was old enough).
My ex BIL fishes and once 30 years ago he and my sister took my kids camping when they were about 6 & 4. What I heard was that my 6 y.o. son caught several but when it came time to clean them, he kept walking up and down the beach, checking every now and then to see if there had been a miracle and they had cleaned themselves. My BIL was patient and not going to let him get away with that. Eventually my son threw in the towel and learned how to clean fish. As a teenager on a YMCA canoeing trip, he was the only one (other than the counselor) who’d ever cleaned fish and was happy to do so in exchange for getting out of some other chores while performing that task.
@ Jovialis
“Together, these results suggest a dual genetic contribution to the formation of the BA genetic profile of southeastern Iberians in addition to a local CA genetic substrate. The major additional ancestry source resembles central European Bell Beaker groups, which first contributed ancestry to northern Iberia, followed by a southward spread in the form of C_Iberia_CA_Stp. A second minor ancestry component is an Iran_N-rich/central Mediterranean source, which is restricted to individuals from BA El Argar contexts. The timing of the last contributing component remains unclear and points to either a Neolithic legacy that persisted throughout the local CA or a subtle trace of connections to insular central Mediterranean BA groups” [p. 9].
Dont’you think that these Jews of Harvard are buffoons?
Absolutely not.
@ Jovialis
Search for their corpses not at my home or the circus of Montecarlo, but in “Eurogenes blog”:
“I’m hoping that 2022 is the year when this problem is finally straightened out. Over to you David Reich, Nick Patterson, Iosif Lazaridis, David Anthony, Wolfgang Haak, Johannes Krause and colleagues”. Mr Eurogenes spoke about the Iranian presence in Yamnaya, I about this supposed presence in Sicily (as to the paper, but 4200 years ago aDNA was linked to odiern Flemish not Yamnaya) or Sardinia or Mediterranean Europe. Don’t forget that the Harvardians are to me the “levantinists-kurganists-levantinists” funded by the Zionist Finance.
Still up to the same sort of comments as on Eurogenes then, I see, Gioiello. (Which got you banished).
There is a news. Until a few years ago I was only one to say that (so that Davidski banned me for order of Ted the Mad), but we are many to say that now, and the same Davidski begins to get many doubts.
@ Matt
How could you add this “(Which got you banished)” after that I hinted at that in my post? “Matt” in Italian is close to “matto”, i.e. English “mad”…
These stupid not goyim continue to hang up to the paper of Behar et al. 2017 for which I reproached Boattini for having contributed to, not only because it is clearly wrong but because Behar wrote it after having said at a FTDNA conference that he had been wrong in saying that R1a-Levites was old Jewish. Also R1a-Y2619 Levites has probably found an older separated sample in a Catholic Pole negative for BY29826/FGC74782 [and Y193463]:
R1a FTDNA project row 13:
118564 Rzepka Poland Poland R-Y2619
13 26 15 10 11-14 12 12 10 13 11 30 14 9-10 11 11 24 14 20 30 12-12-15-15 11 11 19-23 14 15 18 22 35-38 14 11 11 8 17-17 8 11 10 8 11 10 12 22-22 15 10 12 12 14 8 14 23 21 12 12 11 13 10 11 12 13
118564 Poland R-Y2619 L342+, CTS6+, Y2619+, Y2630-, L657-, M434-, L235-
Of course no data in the Big Y Block tree nor in the FTDNA projects. But look at the YFull tree: https://www.yfull.com/live/tree/R-Y2619/
Anyway, @Razib Khan, I would like to hear what your opinion on the Iran_N ancestry in South Eastern Iberia. I think more and more as evidence comes out about this pulse in the BA, the more people will need to revisit the idea that this kind of ancestry was already present in Italy, and the rest of southern Europe before the Imperial Roman era. IMHO pre-Italic/Indo-European southern Italians could have been similar to Minoans; Anatolian_N +smaller but significant Iran_N. The Latins, Etruscans, Daunians, Mycenaeans, South east Iberians must be modeled with steppe plus extra Iran_N. To me, I think it is pretty much certain this Iran_N ancestry took place.
Antonio et al 2019 shows Neolithic central Italians are modeled as 95% central Anatolia; different from groups like LBK. We see some of the earliest J2 haplogroups among them. It stands to reason that the south could have had even more Iran_N-like ancestry. Idk why some ppl assume ancient Italians were 100% latin/Etruscan-like from North to South, and only augmented in the Imperial era. That’s just unrealistic imho.