Humpty Dumpty: When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.
Alice: The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.
Humpty Dumpty: The question is which is to be master – that’s all.
A racist is someone who believes that:
each race or ethnic group possesses specific characterisitics, abilities, or qualities that distinguish it as inferior or superior to another such group.
That is what the Oxford English Dictionary says and so, as a matter blog policy, it is what I go by.
But that puts me at odds with both anti-racists and most White Americans who have changed the meaning of the word to suit their own ends.
White Americans seem to think that a racist is someone who says the n-word in a mean way (but not in a “friendly” or “joking” way), is in favour of the Klan, maybe has a Nazi flag on his bedroom wall, etc. Skinheads, neo-Nazis, Stormfront and all those. By narrowing the meaning of the word they have – presto-changeo – made themselves not racist!
What they mean by “racism” is the old Jim Crow racism that the civil rights movement publicly shamed on American television coast-to-coast in the 1960s, making it rare now in respectable white circles. But what has taken its place is a more subtle form of racism, which I call colour-blind racism. The colour-blind racist says he does not see colour – until you want to marry his daughter. He does not hate blacks so much as look down on them.
A colour-blind racist hides his racism under three layers of niceness (or maybe just one thin layer) and maybe throws in some politically correct words for added measure, but deep down he is still racist in the good old Oxford dictionary sense. How do we know? The numbers show that racism still goes on in housing, education, unemployment, marriage, etc.
Whites are taught that racism is bad. They pride themselves in not being racist. So when you call white people racist they get upset. They think you mean the Jim Crow sort.
To me racism is what it is in the dictionary: a set of beliefs – like communism or Platonism. When I say someone is racist I am doubting their thinking, not their character. And, nine times out of ten, the racism in question is not the ugly, old Jim Crow sort but the new, subtle colour-blind kind.
At the other end are the anti-racists who say:
racism = prejudice + power
But they are also changing the meaning of the word. And, in any case, I do not buy it, but that is another post.
Some say I am watering down the word, but how? I am the one who is sticking to the meaning of the word. If it turns out that most people are racist, then so be it. No point in fooling ourselves about it by changing the meaning of the word.
The simple answer, of course, is that no one in Ancient Egypt was black: “black” is an American social construct, something made up to make men into slaves, even those who are mostly European by blood.
The less-simple answer is to apply American ideas of race to ancient Egypt, something that people have been doing since the early 1800s.
Motives: Since American society is built on the idea that whites are naturally better than blacks, whites have reason to downplay the blackness of ancient Egypt while blacks have reason to play it up – because civilization in America goes all the way back to Egypt by way of the English, Romans and Greeks. If it turned out to be founded by black people, what would that say?
What they said in ancient times:
Herodotus said Egyptians had black skin and woolly hair, which is how he said the Ethiopians looked too.
Aristotle called both the Ethiopians and Egyptians black.
The Bible calls both the Ethiopians and Egyptians sons of Ham.
The Egyptians themselves saw themselves as belonging to their own race, different from blacks to the south – but also different from all their other neighbours. On the other hand:
They called themselves kemet - “black”, though some say it just means they are from the land of black soil (the Nile).
They said they came from the land of Punt – a place they drew as having elephants and giraffes.
By the way, American slaveowners also saw blacks as the sons of Ham. That allowed them to use the Curse of Ham from the Bible to excuse their racism.
What the DNA says:
Present-day Egyptians are, by blood, about 60% Eurasian, like the Arabs who took over their country, and 40% black African. In the past they were, if anything, blacker because since the glory days of Ancient Egypt they have been taken over by the Persians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs. But even at 40% black they easily count as black according to America’s One Drop Rule, which sees even a drop of black African blood (in practice, about 10% or more) as enough to make you black.
What their language shows:
These days Egyptians speak Arabic, but in ancient times they spoke Egyptian, the stuff they wrote in hieroglyphics. That language came to Egypt from Ethiopia about 12,000 years ago. Of course, the language could have been brought to Egypt by some forgotten war, but it seems it came from settlers: one study shows the maternal blood line of Egyptians also goes back to Ethiopia.
Reconstructions:
Using high-powered computers, experts can now get a rough idea of how someone looked from their skull. They make a living at it by doing it for the police for murder cases. When the same thing is done to the skulls of King Tut and a mummy some believe is Queen Nefertiti, here is what you get (click on the pictures to find out more about them):
It was December 24 on Hollis after the dark
My man Santa saw a rabbi and gave the strangest remark
He said that giving was his living and I had to take part
So I grabbed a bag of goodies and I hopped up on his cart
I laced the pockets of the poor and gave the hoodie a play
Dropped some dollars up on Hollis and I went on my way
I hear your jingle Mr. Kringle peep the single, my man
so Santa hit a brotha off and come as quick as you can!
[chorus]
Santa Baby
Just slip a Benzo under the tree for me
A ‘98 convertible, light blue
I’m looking for a fly guy, like you
So hurry down the chimney tonight…
Verse 3: Ma$e
Now all Mase know
When its eight twenty-four
He be looking at the door for the ho ho ho
Cause I know
When theres a christmas uptown
Ain’t no chimney for santa to come down
Verse 4: Puff Daddy
Now to me, PD I had alot
Appreciated everything that I got
Though I used to take my pops
Who aint caught me shaking the box
Cause I knew I couldn’t wait till it turned 12 o’clock
Verse 5: Snoop Doggy Dogg
Cookies and Milk
Satin and Silk
I’m chillin in the living room, wrapped in a quilt
I’m waiting on this fat Red Suit wearing-comparing
My gifts to my homeboy next door to me
A gift here, none there, but who cares
My little sister needs a comb just to braid her nappy hair
Bbut here we go again waiting on the enemy
To slide down the chimney
Look here, that ain’t reality
[chorus]
Santa Baby
Just slip a Benzo under the tree for me
A ‘98 convertible, light blue
I’m looking for a fly guy, like you
So hurry down the chimney tonight…
Verse 6: Salt & Pepa
Santa Baby, are you really real?
Chris Kringle
Let me see you make my pockets jingle (ching ching)
We need some jobs in the ghetto
Too much gangbanging where kids are playin
I hear the church bells ringing
On christmas eve
I believe
Jesus-calling me
Forget the gifts and the shopping lists
And the new kicks
Your just falling for tricks
(you better praise him)
[chorus]
Santa Baby
Just slip a Benzo under the tree for me
A ‘98 convertible, light blue
I’m looking for a fly guy, like you
So hurry down the chimney tonight…
Verse 7: Fredro Starr
It’s the gritty-the grimy
The low down, the shifty
Yo Sticky, christmas time in the city
Late night, stars are bright
We gettin rocked!
With the 50 St. Nicholas
Start rippin this
Verse 8: Sticky Fingaz
Its the Grinch who stole christmas
Climbin down ya chimney
Kids open up they gifts
They all gonna be empty
Just like mine was
I hate to say it
But if I wasnt a boy I wouldnt have had nuthin to play wit!
Verse 9: Keith Murray
On December 25th I knew I wasn’t getting jack
when I saw Santa Claus on the corner buying crack
I ran up on him with the (blur) and asked him “yo whats up with that?”
He said “there aint no christmas kid” and I can’t get him back
Back in the days, Christmas was deep
My moms put presents under the tree while I played sleep
And peeped ha! Santa Claus never gave me nuthin
Seen them mad faces, lying and frontin
So do some good to the ghetto, Mr. Chris Kringle
Come and stay awhile, kick it with God’s Angel
Take and acknowledge my wisdom and understand
That Santa Claus is a black man
word up
[chorus 2 times]
Santa Baby
Just slip a Benzo under the tree for me
A ‘98 convertible, light blue
I’m looking for a fly guy, like you
So hurry down the chimney tonight
The following is based on part five of Jacob Bronowski’s BBC series on the history of science and invention, “The Ascent of Man” (1973). It is about the rise of mathematics.
Mathematics is not the mere use of numbers, it is to reason about them.
With the Greeks, that begins with Pythagoras, who born about 580 BC. He said that numbers are the language of nature. He showed that in two ways:
He showed how music that sounds good is music that is played on strings that come in particular lengths – those that are whole numbers.
In about 550 BC he took the mathematical discoveries of the Egyptians and Babylonians, which to them were just discoveries, and showed how they followed from the nature of simpler elements – the first known mathematical proofs. It showed how number is bound up with the nature of the world, how it is the secret language of nature.
Proofs in geometry reached their height 300 years later in Alexandria when Euclid wrote down all the main ones in a book, The Elements. It is one of the most copied and translated books in all history.
Greeks applied geometry to the stars, to the motion of the sun and the planets. In AD 150, Ptolemy wrote down that beautiful model of the heavens, of circles within circles, in a book, which stood for over a thousand years. It came to the West from the Greeks not through the Romans, who cared little for mathematics and science, but through the Arabs.
The Arabs also brought to the West the astrolabe (pictured at the top of the post). It is an instrument that measures the height of a star or the sun that is laid over a star map. With it you can work out your latitude, sunrise, sunset, time for prayer and the direction of Mecca. It was a Greek invention that the Arabs made much more usable.
But more important than Ptolemy or the astrolabe were Arabic numbers, which by adding the number zero (an Arab word), made numbers far simpler to use than the old Roman (or even Greek) sort would allow. The Arabs brought the zero from India in 750, but it took another 500 years to catch on in the West.
Muhammad did not alow his followers to paint the human form, so Arab art becomes a wonderful play of forms. It was math as art. Bronowski shows us the beautiful palace of Alhambra as an example.
One thing the Greeks got completely wrong was how objects are seen in space: perspective. It was Alhazen, one of the great Arab minds, who got it right. That was in the 1000s. In the West Italian painters took to it first in the 1400s. It is what makes the Renaissance paintings so different than what came before.
But even with Alhazen something was still missing from the Greek and Arab picture of the world: time. That was added by the West in the 1600s with the work of Kepler, Newton and Leibniz.
The Chinese Invasion Experiment is a thought experiment where you imagine what would become of white people if the Chinese took over America and began to settle it:
Meijiang: Quick Facts:
Location: In North America, between Canada and Mexico
Status: overseas autonomous region
Governor: Lee Kwan Yu (since 2307)
Capital: San Francisco
Land Area: 9,166,601 sq km
Population: 1315.8 million (2309 est.)
Major ethnic groups: Han Chinese (75%), White American (12%), Mexican (8%), Black American (3%), Other (2%).
Resources: coal, timber, beef, wheat, hydroelectric power
Notes on the White American people:
The White Americans live mainly in the overseas Chinese province of Meijiang. It used to be their own country, called America.
They are not at all Chinese. They are distant relations of the Germans of Germany and close cousins of the British and Australians. Their language is English. Their religion is Protestant Christianity. Because of Chinese rule their religion is weak.
There are 159 million White Americans. Most live in Meijiang but some live in the neighbouring country of Canada or in big Chinese cities on the mainland, like Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai. The Chinese fear them as kind of wild and dangerous.
Hundreds of years ago they settled in cities across Meijiang. Their great city was New York. They were free and independent from the 1600s to the 2000s. Their empire - and their golden age – was from 1945 to 2017.
China began taking over their country in the late 2000s. By 2138 it was complete. In the 2100s they started sending Chinese there to live so that now San Francisco, the capital, is only 8% white and Meijiang as a whole is only 15% white.
White Americans are not allowed to study their language, English, after middle school. They cannot study or practise their religion, Christianity, till age 18. The Chinese treat them like dirt and destroy their famous buildings, particularly in New York and Washington. Taxi drivers in San Francisco will not pick them up.
Chinese workers at one factory say things like this:
Everyone always says watch out for whites, they’ll rob you. And they do look aggressive.
They are always trouble. They can’t speak Chinese. And they steal.
When asked why so many whites are out of work, the Chinese say it is because they do not work hard.
One hard-working Chinese business owner puts it well:
The Chinese are sick of being blamed for white misfortune in present times. The whites drop out, join gangs, sell drugs, go to jail – almost all of them. Then they demand special government support because we “took their land” and we owe them. On top of that they rob us and steal our cars, and somehow it’s all our fault. There are lots of poor Chinese people too but they don’t get the same attention.
From lunchtime yesterday (New York time) till this morning my blog was suspended. I was not sure if it would ever come back or why it was suspended in the first place. As it turns out the photographer of the Beau Latasha pictures that I posted last weekend filed a complaint and WordPress suspended my blog without telling me why. This morning they removed the pictures, told me not to put them back and then unsuspended the blog – shortly after I had just set up shop at Blogspot!
Most photographers in my experience send me an email and ask me to remove their pictures. Why on earth would I refuse? Why go over my head?
The first thing I am going to do after work today is back up my blog!!!
Note: This post was written at Blogspot while this blog was suspended.
Hal
Dave, I don't know how else to
put this, but it just happens to be
an unalterable fact that I am
incapable of being wrong.
WordPress has suspended my blog - without warning, without telling me why. They just did it. I am trying to get it unsuspended, but in the meantime I will continue my blogging at good old Blogspot.
If WordPress unsuspends my blog, then in the short term I will copy the posts I write at Blogspot back to WordPress. But longer term, no matter how this shakes out, I will have to do like Wildflower and get independently hosted. I cannot leave myself at the mercy of WordPress or even good old Blogspot.
I do not know why it was suspended. All they said was that I violated their Terms of Service – but how?
My three best guesses listed from most likely to least:
The suspension took place at the very moment I was pulling out a comment with a ton of links from the spam filter. A ton of links is a sign of spam, but this one was from a known commenter (Nita). At that point, though, some WordPress computer may have seen my blog as a source of spam and shut me down. Better safe than sorry: if it is a mistake, the humans will sort it out later.
That picture of Beau Latasha. The photographer of that picture got Scientist George to shut down his blog that very morning. He may have complained to WordPress about me too. There is a form for that. That picture had disappeared twice from my blog the day before. (Most photographers, though, just email me and ask me to take down the picture. I have no earthly reason to refuse such a request.)
Perhaps WordPress has been getting too many complaints about me from white racist commenters and they just got fed up with having to look into them all the time.
You are not supposed to have “calls to violence” on your blog. One commenter last week thought I was calling for the genocide of white people. I would never do such a thing – it would only lead to a much worse genocide of blacks. But it would hardly be the first time a white person misread a post of mine.
I did use the word “strap-on” in my last post, but WordPress hosts blogs like Black Kinky and Proud which are outright porn, so that is not it.
If it is the first one, then my chances of getting unsuspended are good.
If it is the third one, that would be the worst since that goes against free speech. And, since I mainly spoke against white people, what would that say?
If they do not unsuspend me then most of what I wrote is lost. It will be like Japan after the Second World War.
Postscript: WordPress has just unsuspended my blog!!! It was #2 – the Beau Latasha pictures. The photographer, instead of just emailing me, had my whole blog suspended!
Warning: This post is R-rated. It may shock or sicken you. Most will not like it, but I must set the record straight on this subject.
My post two weeks ago about female-led relationships was based mainly on the website Around Her Finger. I have since found out that it presents only the more acceptable end of something dark and dangerous.
There are two main kinds of female-led relationships (these are my names for them):
The yes-dear relationships in which the woman has the upper-hand in the marriage. Maybe she is headstrong or makes more money or maybe she just wears down her husband over the years. These are pretty harmless so long as they do not break up the marriage.
The fetish relationships in which the man is turned on by being under a woman’s rule. He is a submissive and the state of mind where he is turned on is called subspace. Some say it has to do with his brain chemistry – endorphins and so on. He can get hooked on it.
When a submissive gets used to a certain level of authority from his wife, it no longer turns him on. For that she needs to increase her level of authority. That is where the danger lies.
Here are some of the stages a submissive might go through:
He does all the housework.
He makes her the head of household.
She acts like she is in charge and does not let him forget it.
She controls all the money.
She controls all his orgasms.
That is as far as Around Her Finger and my post two weeks ago takes it. But as an addiction it can go much further:
She increases his level of personal service to her.
She uses a strap-on.
She punishes him physically when he gets out of line – this can go through several levels itself, sometimes going as far as whips (but not necessarily).
She makes him wear a dog collar in private to make him her slave.
She shows her authority over him in public.
She takes a lover and forces him to watch (cuckoldry).
When he no longer experiences the high of one stage he will want to go the next. All along she is breaking down his spirit and dignity to make him easier to rule.
Most wives are not cut out for this kind of stuff. They do the first few stages to please their husband but then fall back into their old ways. The husband is disappointed but he should thank his stars.
But some women get turned on by ruling a man, those who are a dominatrix at heart. They are the ones who will drive it all the way to the end, sometimes against the true will of the husband, meaning that it can end in adultery.
Some push this as a lifestyle, as an answer to boring or unhappy marriages. Some even see it as the seeds of a coming matriarchy. But, in fact, it only goes to show why true matriarchies are so rare in practice.
There are only 34,000 black men in America married to Asian women. That is about one married black man in a hundred. Asian women marry black men at about the same rate. Some number of these men met their wives overseas while serving in the military. Black men are five times more likely to marry an Asian than are black women.
Despite their low numbers they have some famous sons and daughters: Tiger Woods (golfer, Thai mother), Amerie (singer, Korean mother), Hines Ward (football player, Korean), Will Demps (football player, Korean)Tasha Reid (rapper, Korean), Crystal Kay (singer, Korean), Tomika Skanes (video vixen, Korean), La’Shontae Heckard (video vixen, Korean), Kimora Lee Simmons (businesswoman, Korean-Japanese), Sharon Leal (actress, Filipino) and Lou Jing (singer, Chinese).
Steve Sailer, an intellectual skinhead, says that Asian women are the most desirable women and black men are the most desirable men – more desirable than even their white counterparts. He bases that on the amount of body fat men and women of different races have.
That helps him to show why so many white women are with black men and so many white men are with Asian women. But he never stops to ask why the match made in Sailerite heaven – black men and Asian women – is so rare, less than 2% of all interracial marriages.
In an OkCupid study of online dating, Asian women were the least likely to show interest in black men.
Some say it is because Asian parents are even more racist than white ones. I am not sure how you would prove that. Kate Rigg put it this way:
My boyfriend’s Black and there’s gonna be trouble
My parents want to live in a Negro-free bubble
For black servicemen in Asia the circumstances would be different since presumably they would be seen as being more American than black.
Then there are some who say it is because Asian women do not fit black ideas of female beauty. Their bodies in general are too thin. Smooth magazine, a black men’s magazine, lists its top 100 women every year. In 2009 not a single one was clearly Asian – though in the past some have been part Asian, like Tomika Skanes and La’Shontae Heckard.
Even granting all that, there are most certainly black men who love how Asian women look and Asian women who are not about to let racism get in the way of their own happiness.
But maybe it is simpler than all that: As it turns out white men, who so famously have an Asian fetish, marry Asian women at about the same rate as black men: about one married man in a hundred.
But then why do white men seem to have an Asian fetish when black men generally do not? Because one Asian woman in six is married to a white man. But it is probably not even a case of a white fetish among Asian women: many of them live and work in places where it is much easier to meet white men than even Asian men, much less black men.
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was a black American leader, teacher, speaker and writer. He founded the Tuskegee Institute in 1881, which was his life’s work. He became the most famous and powerful black man in the country. He spoke on race relations and had the ear of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1901 Roosevelt invited him to dinner at the White House, the first black American so invited. He wrote about his life in “Up From Slavery” (1901).
Washington did not openly push for equal rights, like the right to vote, he did not push for an end to Jim Crow. He said blacks must first pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Education, hard work, saving money and patience were the way. Rocking the boat will help no one. White people both North and South agreed!
But W.E.B. Du Bois did not agree. He and others founded the NAACP to fight for equal rights by challenging racism through the courts. In time it led to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the huge growth of black middle-class that followed.
Washington, in his defence, wanted to help people in the here and now. The best way he could do that was to start a school – Tuskegee – that would produce black teachers, tradesmen and farmers. He also raised millions for black education – for Tuskegee, Fisk, Howard and Hampton. None of this would have been possible if he openly opposed white power.
Washington, as it turns out, was for equal rights too – in private. We know that because he secretly gave money to help fight for them in court. From his private letters we know he was putting on something of a front for whites.
Washington started life as, yes, a house Negro. His mother, like him, was a slave in Virginia. She was a cook. He helped her out, learning the ways of white people. His father was some unknown white man.
The summer he was nine the slaves were freed. Soon after his family moved to West Virginia where his stepfather found work in the salt furnaces and coal mines.
More than anything he wanted to learn to read. His mother could not read but bought him spelling books. Although he worked full-time he still got as much education as he could – even if it was just two hours at night
At 16 he left home to go to Virginia to become a schoolteacher. He went to Hampton, which was founded after Emancipation to produce black schoolteachers.
At 19 Washington came back home to teach, but soon was asked back to Hampton to teach there. They loved him. The state of Alabama wanted a school just like Hampton and so at age 25 Hampton sent him to Alabama to start it. The state did not give him much money, but slowly he made it into one of the best black schools in the land – Tuskegee.
Roberta Flack’s cover of Kitty White’s 1962 song. An utter classic, what can I say?
Lyrics:
The first time, ever I saw your face,
I thought the sun rose in your eyes.
And the moon and stars were the gifts you gave,
To the dark and the endless skies, my love.
To the dark and the endless skies.
And the first time, ever I kissed your mouth,
I felt the earth move in my hand.
Like the trembling heart of a captive bird,
That was there at my command, my love.
That was there at my command, my love.
And the first time, ever I lay with you,
I felt your heart, so close to mine.
And I knew our joy would fill the earth,
And last ’till the end of time, my love.
And it would last ’till the end of time, my love.
The first time ever I saw your face.
Your face.
Your face.
Your face.
Your face.
The following is based on part four of Jacob Bronowski’s BBC series on the history of science and invention, “The Ascent of Man” (1973). It is about metals, alchemy and the rise of chemistry.
Man first used fire 400,ooo years ago. It kept him warm, cooked his food, kept away wild animals. But he did not learn to use it to get the metal hidden in stone till 7,000 years ago somewhere in Persia or Afghanistan: put a certain green stone in the fire and out came a red, liquid metal: copper
Copper was the plastic of its day, an almost universal material that you could shape into anything. But copper had one drawback: it was too soft. It could not keep an edge; it would wear out too quickly.
A thousand years went by and then someone made a surprising discovery: if you add tin, an even softer metal, it made a new metal that was much stronger than either one: bronze. An impure metal, an alloy, is stronger than a pure one.
About 3,500 years ago the Hittites in what is now Turkey discovered how to make and work iron, which requires a much hotter fire. Its alloy is steel, which is made of iron and carbon. Steel was discovered in India 3,000 years ago. It was used in swords but it was so hard to make that it did not become common till the 1800s.
And then there was gold. It was not terribly useful, but in a world that is constantly changing and falling apart, it stayed the same: wind and rain could not make it rust and fire could not destroy it but only make it purer. In every age and every city it is prized above all the rest.
Starting 2,000 years ago in China the alchemists tried to make gold out of more common materials. After hundreds of years of trial and error they failed. But along the way they learned quite a bit about the stuff that makes up the world: the chemical elements.
Alchemy became a proper science, chemistry, in the 1700s. That was the work of three men in the West: Priestley, Lavoisier and Dalton:
Priestley discovered oxygen. It was because people did not know about oxygen that they thought fire was material, like air or water. Fire is not material – it is a process that takes other materials apart and puts them back together in new ways.
Lavoisier ran Priestley’s experiments and but carefully weighed everything before and after, even the air. He found that elements like mercury and oxygen always go together in certain proportions – it was not just a matter of chance. That was true for any substance that could be broken down into simpler substances.
Dalton took Lavoisier’s numbers and asked “Why?” That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to the pertinent answer. Dalton’s question led him, in 1803, to discover that everything is made of atoms.
Paracelsus – Bronowski talks about him too, but did not tie him well into the rest of his story. I think he just likes him and wanted to put him somewhere in the series.
Note: I do not have permission to show you any of the pictures of Beau Latasha. The photographer had my whole blog suspended over it!
Beau Latasha (2005- ) is an Internet hoax. In December 2009 she topped the Google search for “the prettiest women on the planet” – and yet there is only one picture of her (in different versions) on the Internet! The oldest reference I can find of her is from 2005. She is an example of astroturfing: creating a false sense of grassroots support by means of the Internet.
Just like the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot, the only proof we have of her is one bad picture (see right). And, in this day of Photoshop and computer morphing, it might not even be the picture of a living, breathing woman! I cannot even be sure she is alive and human.
Although users talk breathlessly of her beauty on certain websites and claim she is seen on billboards in Europe, New York, Miami, China and Africa, she has less of an Internet tail than a small-time model in Atlanta.
Scientist George at the blog The World’s Most Beautiful Women, says she wonan Internet poll in which “more than 10 million votes were posted from all over the World”. He lists the top 75.
That list is almost certainly made up:
A worldwide Internet poll would produce a list that was far more blonde and Anglo, like the one at AskMen.com (see below). It would be full of empty-eyed blondes from Hollywood. Instead this list is filled with dark-haired, high cheekboned women with beautiful eyes, especially from the Mediterranean, the Middle East and India. Black women make up 21% of the list – an extremely high number!
Beau Latasha is out of place. Compare her eyes and cheekbones to the other women on the list (see below).
Jayne Kennedy and Lena Hornebeat out Jennifer Aniston! In a just world they would, but we do not live in that world.
All of these black women made the list, beating out Jennifer Aniston (the number is their rank in the listing):
4. Halle Berry
20. Esti Mamo
36. Alicia Keys
42. Beyonce/Rihanna
46. Vanessa Williams
52. Naomi Campbell
55. Noemie Lenoir
59. Kenya Moore
60. Emanuela De Paula
61. Genevieve Nnaji
63. Jessica White
69. Kayann Sunarth
73. Jayne Kennedy
74. Lena Horne
75. Vanity
Here is the top ten:
Beau Latasha (France?) – not pictured below
Monica Bellucci (Italy)
Angelina Jolie (USA)
Halle Berry (USA)
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan (India)
Salma Hayek (Mexico)
Queen Rania (Jordan)
Adriana Lima (Brazil)
Katrina Kaif (India)
Audrey Hepburn (Belgium)
The Internet is far more Anglocentric than that. Compare it to another list of beautiful women based on an open Internet poll: the one at AskMen.com. Their list is more what you would expect: less than 10% black and far more blonde and Anglo. Here is their top ten for 2009:
Eva Mendes (USA)
Megan Fox (USA)
Marisa Miller (USA)
Keeley Hazell (Britain)
Anne Hathaway (USA)
Alessandra Ambrosio (Brazil)
Scarlett Johansson (USA)
Rihanna (Barbados)
Kristen Bell (USA)
Kate Beckinsale (Britain)
At a guess I would say that Scientist George is from south India: he knows Bollywood better than Hollywood but not Nollywood. While he prefers light skin, dark skin is not a deal-breaker (Kenya Moore, Jessica White). But then how does he know about Jayne Kennedy?
Postscript: Scientist George admits it was a hoax. Even the name, Beau Latasha, is made up. In 2004 he saw pictures of some unknown woman he liked and wanted to know if he could use the Internet to make her the most beautiful woman in the world.
A few days after I posted this the photographer got both of our blogs shut down – his for good, mine for 20 hours. If I did not take down the pictures I would have lost my whole blog.
Thanks to commenter Shani for suggesting this post.
The race industry argument says that racism is no longer a big deal, that it is being kept alive by those who make money out of it or win votes.
Here is Rush Limbaugh in 2009:
The race industry is still around. One of my most fervent desires and wishes, I’m serious, as a human being, is that all of this racism just be over with, all this group victimization be over with, and I don’t get it, because it’s never going to end. These are tactics, these are political tactics employed by the left to secure power, and they’ll never give it up. And while they’re the ones out there practicing all this racism and groupthink and victimization, they’re blaming people like me for it. And it’s just a shame. It’s just a shame.
But it is way older than that. Here is Booker T. Washington almost a hundred years before in 1911:
There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do do not want to lose their jobs.
Are there people who make money or win votes by bringing up racism? Of course. But there are also doctors who make money out of curing diseases. While you can argue that some doctors help to create disease or find cures to things that are not true diseases, disease would not go away if all the doctors became house painters. Instead it would get far worse.
In Booker T Washington’s day it was not the “race industry”, the profitable complainers, who hung black men from trees or kept black people at the back of the bus, who kept blacks from voting; they are not the ones who kept blacks out of libraries, cinemas, hotels, restaurants and amusement parks.
Likewise today it is not the complainers, the whiners, the race card pullers, who make innocent black children go to bad schools, who help to keep blacks out of white neighbourhoods, who hire them last and fire them first, who would rather spend money keeping black men in prison than in getting them off of drugs, etc.
That a black man could make the race industry argument at the height of Jim Crow shows two things:
A race industry does not prove that racism is just being kept alive by complainers, that if they shut up it would go away.
That some black people can argue that racism is no big deal even when it is.
The main thing that both Booker T Washington and Rush Limbaugh leave out is that they themselves make their living by defending an unjust society as just.
Thanks to commenter Great White Man for bringing the Booker T Washington quote to my attention.
Note: I got these pictures off the Internet, but they are very much like what I saw.
I saw Turkey in October 2008 as part of a Mediterranean cruise that also went to Italy and Greece. Our ship went up the western coast of Turkey and stopped for a day each at three cities: Marmaris in the south, Izmir (Smyrna) in the middle and Istanbul (Constantinople) in the north.
Turkey is way richer and more orderly than I expected. From the looks of it, it was richer than Greece or Naples but not as rich as Rome. In America you get this idea of Muslim countries as being poor and disorderly.
Another thing that surprised me is that the Turkish men looked just like I imagined: thick black hair on top, thick black eyebrows, a long nose and a thick black moustache (pictured). Kind of like George Orwell. Not all of them, of course, but way more than I expected.
Marmaris looks like a Greek city: streets of white houses with red roofs down by the edge of the sea, down by the ships, mountains in the background, some of them green or blue, some of them bare and grey. Inland it reminded me of southern California with its mountains and lines of planted fruit trees. But then you would see a silver mosque or a red Turkish flag and know you were somewhere else.
Like in Greece, dogs run free and you hear the sound of scooters in the distance. But unlike Greece – or southern California – the men still hold hands with their women when they walk down the street. Nearly everyone dressed in a Western style. They had BP, Nokia, McDonald’s and iPhones.
Even down in Marmaris, Istanbul is seen as the Big City.
Izmir is about the size of Philadelphia or Melbourne, the biggest city after Istanbul and Ankara, the capital. It is a port with ships and factories and highways and apartment buildings (pictured). It seems much richer than Naples. The infrastruture looks American.
I did not spend long there since I wanted to see Ephesus, the biggest city in these parts back in Roman times, back before the rise of Constantinople. It lies in a shallow grave an hour to the south by bus. I saw it and, on the top of a hill, the Virgin Mary’s house (pictured), but I will not go into that here since it requires a separate post.
Istanbul seems as big and modern as New York. You would think you were in Europe if it were not for the huge mosques and the loud call to prayer. I wanted to see the Hagia Sophia, the large, beautiful church from Byzantine times, but we missed the tour bus, so we went to the Grand Bazaar (pictured) instead – thousands of little shops under one roof. No set prices: the shopkeeper names a price that is five times too much and you must talk him down to something reasonable. My wife loved it.
Humpty Dumpty: When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.
How black was Ancient Egypt?
