We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day My experience of racists is that they are race based collectivists who are so utterly without anything to redeem them (and know it), that they pick out something they didn’t have to earn (race) and claim that as their most valuable asset.
Regular commenter VeryRetired, skewering one of those rather sad individuals who are upset that libertarian bloggers do not devote more time to writing about inherited genetic characteristics or the supposed political implications thereof.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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You should give that man a samizdata byline. Veryretired is already one of the most consistently interesting and level-headed writers on this site.
A race-based individualist would be a hard thing to be.
Racists may only come in the collectivist flavor, but collectivists come in many flavors. Some times it helps to state the sometimes not so obvious.
I should point out that there is a lot of fascinating stuff about genetics, and I certainly do not disparage the study of this topic, or indeed do I turn a blind eye to its possible implications for our understanding of the mind, human nature, ethics and so forth. But there is no reason why arguments for individual liberty, capitalism etc are in any way threatened by genetics. Some reactionaries tend to pray it in aid to attack individualism and the idea that humans have volition.
Interestingly, these same folk tend also to sneer at transhumanism, even though transhumanism makes use of genetics as a source of knowledge. But of course racists are not interested in science if it can be used to enhance liberty rather than crush it.
very retired,
That line is a peach. You’ve nailed it. Goddamn it you really have. It covers everything from the modern BNP back to Huck Finn’s father.
Absolutely agree!!!
Spot on Veryretired!
There a folks I like and folks that I don’t but the colour of their skin has nothing to do with it.
It’s all down to how they think and act as far as I’m concerned.
Well I don’t know..
“You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you”.
The same could be said about race..
I’m all for individualism if everyone else is playing by the same rules. But they are not..
The riots in France not long ago was just one example.
Dave,
Many people like to say that the riots in France were to do with Islam and that it was not racist to be rude about Muslims because they are a religious rather than a racial group.
Meanwhile, in the real world race is becoming less and less important as people intermarry, move around and generally blur the boundaries. The fastest growing racial group in the US is the group which classifies itself as being mixed race.
My observation is that people who tout the superiority of their own race are frequently among the worst examples of it.
I often read Randall Parker on FuturePundit. He puts some interesting things together there. On his other blog, ParaPundit, he’ll go into great depth about group differences.
Sure, with a free society, genetics mean little. He’ll say that the costs of certain immigrants to the US in the form of higher crime, lower performance in education, higher propensity to use government resources like welfare and medicaid etc.
The benefits of free movement of individuals are clear. His argument is that the costs outweigh the benefits, and it has little to do with a free society. It mainly has to do with programs the government sets up which make the whole ‘free society’ thing a bit watered down.
I tend to disagree with him because the individuals who come to the US are coming to a more free society, where their worth can be actualized. This tapping of a greater amount of “the ultimate resource” is important. Government wasting money is not really caused by immigrants, and certainly isn’t stopped by limiting immigration. That said, if the restrictions on immigration continue, I would prefer they weren’t quota based, but IQ based.
Anyway, just thought I’d point out someone who might be called a racist because he pays attention to studies that show group differences in IQ and looks at government programs statistics and crime rates. I wouldn’t call him a crackpot.
Veryretired makes an excellent point about racists claiming their race as their most important asset. This is certainly a part of the identity polics of race. The term racism has become so smudged that it has blurred meaning. I would add to Veryretired’s definition the claim of said racist to be victimized by “the other”.
The worst incidences of “racism ” in the last century were probably better described as tribalism. In Nazi Germany Jews were scapegoated as having stabbed the German volk in the back. All Jews are not of a single race, but a religion (I hear screaming and hollering, but this can be argued both ways). All Moslems are definitely not of a single race. But the Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda are. I see the most virulent strain of what is called racism, tribalism.
Matt Hale gave a lecture in our town before his imprisonment. He and his entourage furnished some rather unconvincing examples of the idea of racial superiority; in fact, they themselves constituted a reductio ad absurdum of their ideas.
Just ran across this entry and am flattered by the generous comments. TY.
Where did you find this? For the life of me, I can’t remember the context of writing it, although it sums up my feelings on the matter pretty well.
And, to give credit where credit is due, it’s pretty much a paraphrase of one of Rand’s comments in which she expressed her disdain for racism as “the crudest form of collectivism”.
That about sums it up for me, especially the crude part.
Has it occurred to veryretired that he has just described not so much the indigenous Britons, but the ethnic minority groups, who seem unable to function in this country without a whole mess of organisations pandering to their ethnicity? Examples include the state-funded teaching of Urdu/Punjabi etc, the endless festivals, all these Sikh/Hindu/Jamaican community halls, the diversity officers, the Race Relations Board, Black History Month, the new members of the House of Lords, endless consulation groups etc, etc, etc ad nauseam. The UK concerns itself with race nothing but race. It infantilises the minority groups by turning them into self-absorbed and demanding children, unable to play nicely with the rest of the class because they must have all the grownups’ attention all the time. It is positively tribal for Heaven’s sake. It is also so insanely BORING!
If the indigenous Britons have started playing this race game you can hardly blame them since it has been so lucrative in garnering both political power and money for the tribe most sucessful at playing it. The Indigenes are being discriminated against at every level – I even heard of a cricket club whose attempts to gain a modest government grant to help coach the children was knocked back because they didn’t have enough ethnic minority players – this in a rural area with about 99.9% white people. It creates resentment and it encourages race identification.
You are busy creating a Northern Ireland in your own mainland except that instead of having two tribes fighting for political control you seem to have dozens. Thank God I live in a grown-up multicultural country where most people subsume their racial differences into a common culture.
…the ethnic minority groups, who seem unable to function in this country without a whole mess of organisations pandering to their ethnicity?
Rot. People of all types function perfectly well in this country. The organisations you refer to are not generally pandering to ethnicity, but pimping it to politicians and bureacrats. At bottom, ‘community relations’ experts and leaders of various sorts are saying to the corporatist establishment: “Give me and my friends money, and our organisation status, and I will deliver you compliant people of group X.”
Very few ‘racists’ are actually ‘supremacists’, but survivalists. And I see nothing wrong in wanting to preserve ones unearned genetic and cultural heritage, or human bio-diversity in general for that matter. It would be a very dull world otherwise.
Johnathan Pearce is rather ungracious not to mention me by name (ditto in his post about Harry Browne’s death, to which I alerted him) but FYI here is a flavour of what this ‘rather sad’ person (I’m actually quite a cheerful soul; having low expectations of humanity does that for you) wrote in an earlier thread:
The implications of DNA are not a ‘supreme breakthrough’ (typical silly strawman stuff) but they are going to hit us like a tidal wave in a few years, raising problems of personal liberty far more momentous than ID cards or ASBOs. Reacting to every attempt to ventilate these questions with a “Get thee behind me, Nazi!” doesn’t answer.
The Chinese, the Indians and Japanese are going full steam ahead on making fitter and cleverer people– and a lot of this activity is private sector and voluntary. Some weeks back when I mentioned this, and asked how the West should respond, you *immediately* jumped down my throat with your libertarian bell, book and candle, assuming (which I never said) that I was all for compulsory state engineering of the genome. You give the impression of trying to stifle discussion at the outset by tying on the ‘collectivists and racist bigots’ label.
Time to decide. Libertarianism is very much on the back foot these days. Do you want to dwindle into a collection of grumbly old men stopping your ears, or will you engage with the apostles of genetic and racial realism?
Note that I have not said that I am such an apostle and I have never talked about any one race being ‘superior’ to another. As Jeff implies immediately above, such an absurd claim is incompatible with the idea that subspecies isolated for many generations have developed measurable and substantial differences. No one race could be equally adapted to all environments.
What I *did* argue is that the implied absolutist model of human biology posited by Samizdata in its constant quest for ‘individual freedom’ is scientifically outdated, and that this explains why libertarians are, if anything, losing ground in public debates.
Evolutionary psychology and materialist mensuration of differences between populations suggest that the varieties of homo sapiens may be diverging *more* rapidly because of the differential ability of higher and lower IQ societies to control their environments which has emerged since the Middle Ages. The idea that there is a single universal standard of rationality, expressed in a particular set of political values, towards which the whole world is converging is not borne out by history or the present state of the world.
All I am asking is that Samizdata addresses these objections to its own brand of one-size-fits-all thinking, instead of spluttering about ‘collectivists’.
“His [Randall Parker’s] argument is that the costs outweigh the benefits, and it has little to do with a free society. It mainly has to do with programs the government sets up which make the whole ‘free society’ thing a bit watered down.”
Harry Browne made the same case. He was alarmed about the scale and indiscriminate nature of US immigration, but argued that it would soon be stemmed (and the less valuable incomers go away) if the welfare ‘Welcome Wagon’ wasn’t put out for immigrants.
The idea that libertarianism is compatible with the desire to preserve a particular cultural ethos (which is ultimately based on shared ancestry) has been made by Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Michael Levin.
I see you point out that “The Chinese, the Indians and Japanese are going full steam ahead on making fitter and cleverer people”
Even here you see things not as genetics, but race. A person truly pursuing genetic improvement would not be worried about which race is ahead. A person truly advocating genetic improvement would see our future transcending race, not segregating it into competitive teams. You didn’t mention the Russians. They probably were/are studying eugenics, too. But they’re white? So that makes them on ‘our’ side?
You claim that we are ignoring genetics. No. The great advantage of DNA science is that we are now identifiable down to the individual level. You have heard of DNA evidence used in courts? The evidence the can tell any two people apart? Not just identify race?
What you want to do is take us backward in time to when race was the way we categorized people. If any one here is ignoring the benefits of DNA research, it’s you.
Your closing statement sums you up rather well.
“Apostles”. How very scientific that sounds. Your history on this site is one of racism. You only use the word ‘genetic’ to make your bilge more palatable. ‘Racial Realism’ is what you’re preaching.
Matt O’Halloran,
I read your post twice (I think it was twice – it all kinda blurred) and have not the slightest idea what the bloody hell you are wittering on about. I feel I must quote you.
Any meaning this peerless statement actually has is doubtless objectionable.
Nick,
What I think he’s saying is that North Koreans are really really dumb and South Koreans are really really smart because they are racially superiour.
This is why South Korea is so much wealthier.
It has nothing to do with this.
South Korea
North Korea
I’m with Jonathan, Midwesterner et al on this.
While there are significant gaps among the economic success of different racial groups, if you choose to classify people in that way, those groups correlate very strongly with different cultures. I believe it is the culture – attitude to work, to learning, family, the place of women in society, beliefs about money and the levels of trust between business partners which are critical influences in economic success. Race is often correlated with religion but not always. Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims are all significant groups where significant numbers of people are of Indian origin. Largely the same racial group, different cultures and different social outcomes.
Who contributes the most benefit to society – a Marxist sociology professor with a high IQ, paid by the taxpayer or a rather dimwitted immigrant who gets a job in a sandwich shop and spends his day providing a service people want and are willing to pay for while never claiming a penny in benefits?
“What you want to do is take us backward in time to when race was the way we categorized people.”
But who is ‘us’ ?
It is the ‘multi-cultural’ West that is trying to deny race. Most other people don’t have a problem with categorizing people around race(& religion) at all. The blank-slate fantasy is a Western political idea, in other parts of the world kinship is much much stronger. Matt wouldn’t be taking them backwards, its what they already believe.
Individualism is a two way thing. If one tribe is ruled by Jonathan Pearce and other other by Mugabe, Jonathan can make the rules of his tribe be as individual as he likes until Mugabe attacks in which case you would have to regroup as a tribe to defend yourselves! or be wiped out. As Jeff said racialism/tribalism is about survival.
Wolfie, you are wrong, Indians are not largely of the same racial group at all.
“India is a country remarkable for its diversity; biological and human.”
(Link)
Wolfie, you are wrong, Indians are not largely of the same racial group at all.
“India is a country remarkable for its diversity; biological and human.”
(Link)
Do you think Chinese genetic research is being undertaken in order to benefit all of humanity as a whole, or the Chinese race in particular?
Everyone needs a few handy shortcut methods with which to make quick decisions about people and situations.
Some people use race.
I use a few simple rules depending on the situation:
Never watch a movie with Sylvester Stallone;
Never walk into a burning room;
Always say yes when SWMBO asks if I would like to take a nap on Saturday afternoon;
Always ignore any argument if it includes classifying people by race;
Never pass up a chance to go to a t-ball game or watch mite hockey;
Buy 2 year old used cars.
There’s more, but I also have a rule that says—never tell all your secrets, let other people tell you theirs.
Matt, it is true that your comments did prompt me to quote VeryRetired’s excellent and accurate remark. Take that as a compliment of sorts.
Even if some of what you say about genetics is true, how does any of that affect directly the arguments in favour or against a liberal, capitalist order, or any of the other political issues that we write and argue about? How would it inform the argument, say, about the case for legalising drugs, or the case for trial by jury, or free trade?
I suspect, also, that many people tend to pick on those scientific ideas that they think bolster their existing political views. I am honest in stressing the means by which our understanding of the world can enhance human liberty and bring out the benefits of human differences and uniqueness. I actually think that the more we know about the world and our place in it, the freer we will be. You seem to be a sort of determinist, at least on a superficial reading, arguing that group differences, DNA or whatever somehow trump arguments for free will and rationality. But I don’t see that as necessarily following at all.
I have recently read people like Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker, and neither of them would, for a second, see their views as undercutting the case for understanding man as a rational, choice-making creature. Quite the reverse.
I would be more willing to grant Matt O’Halloran and other such folk the benefit of the doubt had he not been so snarky and dismissive of libertarianism and arguments for liberty generally. I smell a rat, and I continue to do so.
I don’t know, veryretired, it sounds like you’re gettin’ the hang of this ‘homespun’ stuff right quick!
In theory is should be possible to have a rational reasonable discussion about race and genetics as it is a legitimate subject of enquiry like everything else.
In the real world however my experience is that there is Peason’s coefficient of damn near 1 between racist loony toons and anyone who keeps discussing the subject. I have met a couple people (literally two) in the last few years who bucked the numbers and proved to be rational civilised people who really had no interest in defending The Volk against the non-white peril of the day… but as a general rule if you assume anyone discussing racial intelligence is crypto-fascist wacko (and generally obsessive about the subject), you will very rarely be proven wrong. And no, I am not a great fan of Hans-Hermann Hoppe either, even if we agree (to some extent) about democracy.
Perry,
With your much wider connections, it’s not too surprising that you’re two people ahead of me on that tally sheet. Otherwise, agree with you 100%.
Pearce: “You seem to be a sort of determinist, at least on a superficial reading, arguing that group differences, DNA or whatever somehow trump arguments for free will and rationality. But I don’t see that as necessarily following at all.”
A very superficial reading, yielding another either/or strawman. I wrote that our heredity *largely* governs how we turn out– the current psychometric consensus is that by adulthood 80% of stabilised general intelligence is attributable to the genetic contribution of our parents, and ‘g’ is an immensely valuable predictor of all sorts of outcomes apart from what job we do and how much we earn. But the remaining 20% *may* be under our control, or at least not susceptible to prediction. And when 6 billion 20%s collide, it leaves a fog of uncertainty in which we can rationalise our blunderings as the fetterless exercise of free will.
Which brings us to what you call ‘rationality’, which I suspect you measure by how far one agrees with libertarians. This ought not to be opposed to genetic influence. The brain is an organ of the body like any other, and our swiftly improving understanding of how it functions (the materialist London School of psychology is still in the vanguard of this) leads one to doubt that most ‘rationality’ is more than a fairly low-grade, moment-by-moment apprehension of what benefits us in everyday life. Most people just don’t have the IQ to ratiocinate further.
Libertarianism is an unusually cerebral political philosophy. Its attractions cannot be crisply summarised in a form attractive to the generality of mankind, or at any rate have not been thus summarised so far. (Perhaps Ayn Rand in the 1950s came closest, but she’s a museum exhibit now. Harry Browne got no further.) Purporting to free us all, in practice libertarianism seems to appeal most to self-consciously isolated, rather haughty intellectuals in coteries.
I am proposing that the post-HGP biological model of human nature, which is much less malleable than libertarianism requires to flourish, goes far to explain why the creed does not resonate with the masses anywhere on Earth. (See, I can be a good multiracial generaliser too.)
You can sniff as many rodents as you like, but the facts of your failure to convert your fellow Man are stark and multiplying as he flees into the womb of the State, clutching his biometric ID card. You must be less proud and less Luddite. If libertarianism does not take evolutionary psychology on board, it will go the way of all the other heresies and variants of ‘Enlightenment’ wishfulness. If it reaches an accomodation with what geneticists and psychometricians know, it may become a formidable, because informed, counter-irritant.
If, as you say, you have read Pinker’s The Blank Slate, you will find my musings elaborated there. Libertarianism as preached by the Objectivists is the most extreme statement of blank-slatery I know of, give or take the odd Pol Pot. I have called it the autism of politics; behaviorism (BF Skinner’s kind) might be a more suitable metaphor.
I might add that Euan Gray, your much derided but infintely patient commenter, is articulating in terms of political practicality a vision of Man’s capabilities and limits which well fits the Pinkerian model. Yet Pinker is a liberal. No course of action is dictated by appreciation of what science is telling us about our make-up. That’s where all those 20%s come in.
Nick M: Are you perchance an admirer of Germaine Dulac?
The sentence you quote alludes to the divergence in civilisational accomplishment snce c. 1492 between Europe and the Far East.
Half a millennium ago the Chinese were as prosperous as the peoples of the West, and if anything more technologically accomplished (printing, rockets, gunpowder, the Great Wall etc). How did the Caucasoids forge ahead?
For some reason(s) China decided to seal itself off from contact with foreign barbarians just as Europeans were venturing beyond the world’s known limits. Europeans exposed themselves, often with initially disastrous results, to all sorts of unfamiliar environment and adapted thereto, so that in time they could plant their urban civilisations in places such as Sydney, Johannesburg and San Francisco, even surpassing the mother countries on some measures in these faraway places.
To transplant themselves and survive, Europeans had to learn new methods of prophylaxis, cultivation and defence which constituted an evolutionary crash course in adaptation and enabled them to multiply transmittable knowledge, accelerate transport and sharpen their wits. Conceivably the result over the past 25 or so generations has been a widening IQ gap between whites and most Asiatics or Africans, the stay- at-homes of the planet. At any rate, the gap is present today and proving very hard to close.
Where non-whites equal or slightly exceed Europeans in average IQ, as northern Chinese, Japanese and northern Indians do, they have eventually managed to imitate and now hope to surpass western accomplishments. But they are cramped by their heritage of unadventurousness, since their scatter of IQ scores around the median is narrower than among whites: they produce fewer dolts but fewer geniuses, and this conformity may have cramped their style as innovators. (The Japanese have been open to the West for 150 years, but still reprove themselves for not blazing enough trails or throwing up enough charismatic world leaders.)
There is nothing in the hap-map to make such an East/West divergence implausible. Significant genetic mutations, e.g. lactose tolerance, can occur in far less than 500 years. The magnetic resonance imaging of brains and culture-free reaction testing which is now proceeding apace is finding systematic racial differences in cranial capacity (absolute and relative to body size), in structure and in processing speeds. These variances may help explain why most important inventions and innovations have come from people of white European descent, whereas most blacks retain their traditional African social structures (extended families with low-investment parenting) even after several generations living alongside whites.
This is not to say that today’s dispensation cannot alter; genetics may furnish an answer to the riddle of how we can make human subspecies more equal in performance. Such an answer has to be at least as credible as the failed environmentalist interventions– such as foreign aid, special schooling and ‘enrichment’ programmes for young children– which have poured so much money down the drain since the early 1960s. But we do the world’s less fortunate no favours by telling them that all their woes are due to their own lack of will power or a malign ‘culture’, or are the results of their being oppressed and exploited by us.
Yes, Meanwhile, in the real world race is becoming less and less important as people intermarry, move around and generally blur the boundaries. The fastest growing racial group in the US is the group which classifies itself as being mixed race.
A few comments without even attempting any sort of point by point response to MOH, partly because I don’t understand much of what he is claiming.
Liberterianism is a modern response to the progressive/statist resurgence of the late 19th-early 20th century in the US. It is a restatement of the classical liberal theories of government which undergirded the establishment of a world wide commercial empire for the British, and formed the philosophical basis for the constitutional government of the US.
Since those theories, as incomplete and flawed as they were, were the societal structure that led to one of the most influential empires since Rome, and the establishment of a network of representative governments around the globe, and the establishment of the richest and most powerful nation in history, and its subsequent cultural domination of the globe, it is a distinctly odd and counterfactual position which asserts that these ideas are ineffectual and futile.
Regardless of one’s opinions about the supposed determinent value of racial or genetic heritage, it is a very well documented fact that the differences in genetic composition between one racial group and another is utterly inconsequential in any scientific sense.
It has also been documented in the genetic record that there have been several times in human history when the genetic pool was reduced to only a few thousand people, especially a very significant bottleneck aout 180,000 years ago, when the genetic pool was less than 10,000.
The assertion that genetic mutations have occurred from that period until now which are significant enough to enable us to classify whole segments of the species on the basis of their superficial racial characteristics is not in any way supported by any legitimate genetic or mitochondrial analysis.
Such a claim of legitimacy for a purely political statement is a malignant attempt to resurrect the race and blood theories of the psuedo-science of the 19th century, theories which have had every bit as disastrous an effect on civilization as the equally bogus claims of economic determinism, or the current multi-cultural claims of cultural determinism.
Men and women are influenced and affected by any number of factors, beginning with their genetic heritage, and extending through their entire lives as experiences and ideas combine and intertwine with a complexity and variation in effect that no theory can possibly predict or adequately explain.
I, personally, believe that the extreme variablility of climate and prey animals due to the recurring ice ages in the northern hemisphere led the northern peoples to develop a set of cultural values rewarding innovation and adaptation that did not always occur in other parts of the globe. But that is a discussion for another time and place.
I know some things with the same certainty that I know the sun will rise in the east and set in the west.
The first of those things is that I, me, my essence, that element that is me and no other, demands that I be addressed, considered, treated, and respected as an individual first, last, and always. And so I must regard any human that I encounter.
If I am a rational man, then I can do no other.
These reams of comment on the subject of Race are laced with much that I do not understand. I know of DNA & genetics & IQs etc. but in such a simple way that I am unable to compete with our experts. Clear beyond doubt is that the “interest” seems tinged with guilt, either personal or by association & that it is “Caucasian” whiteys & honkies whom you all mention that are wearing the black hats. Au bloody contraire as my travels have educated me. And which of you hasn’t been a tad surprized when introduced to a non-honkey business partner?…..no surface tension but a query sent hot to your subconscious. Time has ingrained the distrust of strangers; especially if they’re green………..to everyone.
More years ag than I care to count and having lived in The Gold Coast, as it the was, I joined a very mixed student group in a major city in England. One of the students was a very charming & educated young Ganaian who introduced ne to his English Rose girlfriend. Later,getting to know him a little better I asked if he intended to marry his amorata. “Good gracious no,” he replied, “she’s White!
please forgive the spelling errors……I have only one functioning eye at the moment.
But the remaining 20% *may* be under our control, or at least not susceptible to prediction. And when 6 billion 20%s collide, it leaves a fog of uncertainty in which we can rationalise our blunderings as the fetterless exercise of free will.
That is jolly sporting of you.
I must say I share Perry’s experience. I once met a genetics buff who actually was a radical libertarian.
If, as you say, you have read Pinker’s The Blank Slate, you will find my musings elaborated there. Libertarianism as preached by the Objectivists is the most extreme statement of blank-slatery I know of, give or take the odd Pol Pot. I have called it the autism of politics; behaviorism (BF Skinner’s kind) might be a more suitable metaphor.
Incorrect. Ayn Rand believed man has a certain type of consciousness, requiring the exercise of volition. She did not, as far as I know, deny that humans differed in their capacities or IQs, but she did deny that a huge amount of our rational capacities are hardwired from birth.
I might add that Euan Gray, your much derided but infintely patient commenter, is articulating in terms of political practicality a vision of Man’s capabilities and limits which well fits the Pinkerian model.
Euan can no doubt speak for himself. I have read him enough to know that he is not a fan of genetic “realism”, and in fact I distinctly recall him denouncing it on one occasion. You’re on your own, mate.
M O’H writes,
[“Non-whites” in some societies with higher mean IQ] are cramped by their heritage of unadventurousness, since their scatter of IQ scores […]
Well, I’ve come across some odd claims for the predictive capacity of IQ tests, but never before heard it suggested that IQ is correlated with ‘adventurousness’ or other personality traits – even on an individual level, never mind for groups (which need not follow). Is there any evidence for it?
Hmm. Mr O’Halloran, it seems to me that you are one of these “scientific” racists, so I’m not entirely comfortable with your comment here. I don’t generally comment in threads related to race, but I think I’ll make an exception this time. I’ll say at the start that I haven’t read Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” and can only go by reviews I’ve read.
I do not subscribe to the tabula rasa view of humanity. I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say all libertarians do subscribe, either, although it does seem to be a popular and ideologically convenient notion for many of them.
It is trivially true that man’s genetic inheritance limits what he can do, but only what he can do directly and only in gross terms – for example, we cannot fly like the birds, but we can build machines that can fly much better than the birds. I suppose it’s possible, even probable, that in many cases the reason an individual human is less or more intelligent than the average may have a genetic component, but I doubt very much that the science is at the stage where it can say this with any certainty, still less do anything about it. I doubt even more that there is the slightest genetic influence on intelligence at the ethnic level – i.e. no justification for saying blacks are less intelligent than whites, or for this notion of “IQ scatter.”
Humans are of course born with a certain programming, as are all animals. Ours is a bit more complex than most, but not that much more than some. There is no difference in this programming between human ethnic groups, nor is there a difference in the capacity for reason, abstraction or any other attribute between ethnic groups. We aren’t blank slates, but the writing on the slates is pretty much the same in all ethnicities.
But even if it wasn’t, does it bloody matter?
Pretending that some ethnicities have a greater capacity for reason than others, or have a tighter statistical spread of IQ results, is risible. It’s just an attempt to clothe naked racism in pseudo-scientific robes. Then again, you have the right to your view.
I, however, have the right to laugh at your view, and to condemn it as nothing more than the philosophical manifestation of your insecurities about people who are different than you.
EG
Euan, well bloody said. Well said indeed. (And I meant that!).
permanent expat,
I can’t speak for others on this site but, far from guilt, my interest is tinged with anticipation. I see an individualist future, not a collectivist one. And for your concern that only “whiteys & honkies” are wearing the black hats, I think the modern western world and the commenters on this site are actually the most determined to see equal opportunities for all. For reasons of optimism, not guilt.
All I can say is, well traveled and educated or no, I hope you never represent my business interests with that frame of mind. I want someone who searches out opportunities, not obstacles.
More years ago than I care to count, I too, had a friend from Ghana (Earlier Gold Coast). He was also charming and educated. The difference is, he married his white girlfriend. Last I saw him, they had a beautiful daughter named Holly and, I think, another on the way.
The difference is not what their color is. The difference is not where they came from. Maybe the difference is where they came to. Maybe the difference was not who he left, but who he joined.
Dave wrote,
Please, please tell me you were watching Monty Python’s Life of Brian when you wrote that (Brian: You are all individuals, Crowd [in unison]: Yes, we are all individuals). The whole point of individualism is that you do not require anyone else to play by the ‘rules’. That’s why its called individualism.
Matt O’Halloran,
I’ve never heard of Germaine Dulac.
Neither have I heard of any good whatsoever coming from trying to compile a league table of “smarts” by race or nationality.
But, there is another thing, which is perhaps the hidden reason the samizdatistas don’t take you seriously. Your arguments are essentially determinist. Libertarians believe in freedom which is the antithesis of determinism. We believe that certain individuals can make enormous differences by being smarter, luckier or quicker on the draw than their contemporaries.
Lets look at just one example. The Battle of Midway. Now, you might like to think the US trounced the Japs there because they were intrinsically more adventurous (however one measurse that). I prefer to think in terms of my knowledge of military history. Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway
It seems far more compatible with Occam’s razor to believe that the US won because Chester Nimitz made better decisions than Isuroku Yamamoto and he also had a bigger slice of luck than some far-fetched theory of racial intelligence.
Before the Pearl Harbour attacks the US DoD Intelligence believed, like you, that the Japanese were genetically unsuitable (citing in particular poor eyesight, amongst other factors) for modern air warfare. I guess the guys who produced that report didn’t stay in their jobs much beyond December 7, 1941.
I’ve just looked up Germaine Dulac. I’m sorry Matt, but you have managed to obscure your point even more. Hats off to you for that. I thought it impossible.
Is your (I assume willful) obscurantism a cover for the fact that you’re really just a nasty little neo-fascist? A shaven-headed guttersnipe who’s read a book on genetics? A racist with a bit of knowledge of “hap maps” and mitochondria? Am I getting warm? Perhaps you could enlighten us with your pontifications on the “gay gene” or genes for criminality?
Tomorrow doesn’t belong to you.
PS. Midwesterner, loved your comparison of the two Koreas. Spot on!
Banned. Spare us the pseudo-science and just stick to your own Nazi site
Oh, and as to your post-racial fantasies: have you noticed that the greater the number of inter-breds, the less liberty there is in a place?
No, I haven’t noticed any such thing, old boy. In fact, I doubt whether there is much of a correlation between how racially varied a nation is and how free it is. Is Japan, a racially fairly homogenous country, freer than say, the United States? I doubt it.
But a nation’s freedoms are the product of its race
Paranoid garbage.
EG, you seem to pretty much be saying race doesn’t exist?
veryretired ” it is a very well documented fact that the differences in genetic composition between one racial group and another is utterly inconsequential in any scientific sense. “
Thats just MSM nonsense mate. The human genome is made of about 3 billion DNA base pairs, when the MSM say there is only 0.1-0.2% difference between races at most, they are trying to make it sound like a small figure, but 0.1 percent of 3 billion “is” big. And with genetics very small differences can have a very big effects. Such as the gene alteration that gives people 5 fingers.
veryretired also suggests genetic differences can’t happen quickly, thats just not true, straight from wikipedia.
“Dogs were first domesticated from wolves at least 15,000 years ago, but perhaps as early as 150,000 years ago. In this time, the dog has developed into hundreds of breeds with a great degree of variation.”
Ofcourse these dog breeds are not real, only a right-wing racist fantasy!
veryretired “I, personally, believe that the extreme variablility of climate and prey animals due to the recurring ice ages in the northern hemisphere led the northern peoples to develop a set of cultural values rewarding innovation and adaptation that did not always occur in other parts of the globe. But that is a discussion for another time and place.”
I don’t see why its for another place, you are admitting the enviroment affected the cultural values and therefor by implication it also affect natural selection leading to evolution. Which is exactly what we are talking about, did one group of people get natural selection pressures that others didn’t get leading to a distinctiveness for that group.
Does that distinctiveness affect the political attitudes of that group compared to another, I don’t know the answer but I don’t think the idea can be dismissed so easily.
And aren’t those ‘racial’ categories odd? I was under the impression that being an Arab was a matter of language and culture, and that ‘mestizo’ was a social label for vastly varied groups across Latin America meaning different things in different places. All “Blacks” to Mr Zeka fall into one category in his “real world”, whereas skin colour is just one very obvious, extremely variable, phenotypic variation.
Dave, Alex, and any more like you,
I really, sincerely can’t be bothered with you. You operate at a level of ignorance that is impenetrable.
veryretired,
Right with you on that. There is no point arguing the toss with cretins.
I can’t resist this though. Genetically, Israeli Jews are very similiar to middle-east Arabs. They are essentially the same “race”. How then can “race” be used to explain the existence of a vibrant capitalist democracy in Israel, compared to the appaling statist or Islamicist tyrannies in the rest of the region. Given the closeness, genetically, of the Brits and Germans, how come the Brits invented liberalism and the German’s Nazism?
I greatly dislike the way some people have taken this thread, though it’s good to see enough of us laughing at them.
Nope. Often quite the contrary, as the mingling of different cultures opens the host culture to new ideas, which is usually a Good Thing ™.
Immigration is good and healthy. Selective inbreeding amongst the host population results in recessive genetic disorders and is bad and unhealthy. Ever heard of Tay-Sachs disease?
Pretty much, yes. To the extent it is a valid concept, it really doesn’t mean very much. Sure, some people have darker skin than others, some have straighter hair. So bloody what?
I’ll take you’re word for 0.1 to 0.2%, although to be perfectly frank I really can’t be bothered to check. However, if you want to chuck some DNA statictics around, ponder this:
All life on this planet that we know if is related. All of it. Man shares 99.5% of his DNA with the bonobo chimp, so I’m sure you’ll take that as meaning that our African cousins (actually, brothers) are that bit more simian. I mean, look at the flat noses and the fuzzy hair, like apes, innit? Did you know that man also shares 70% of his DNA with Drosophila melanogaster, our friend the common fruit fly? Did you know also that man shares 40% of his DNA with the humble cabbage?
The interesting question here is, are you 0.2% closer to a cabbage than me?
More seriously, we can view life as just something that happens, or we can see it as a minor miracle of complex organisation. Either all life is special and important or none is. For me all life is special, and frankly I don’t give a tuppeny fuck what colour it’s skin is.
Humans aren’t dogs, although I suspect you’d treat them as if they were. Dogs come in many shapes and sizes, it is true, but the funny thing is that they are, for all their differences, *still dogs* A toy poodle is genetically compatible with a St Bernard, although arguably there are some mechanical difficulties to overcome if they want to have pups.
Interesting thing about dogs is that they do indeed show that selective inbreeding does give rise to genetic defects, just as it does with humans.
The bulldog, for example, is notoriously stupid, even by canine standards. And the bulldog is the symbolic mutt of the British racist crowd. How apt, I’ve always though.
I should say now that I’ll be changing my ISP in the next couple of days to Bulldog, so that will appear in my email address. Given the content of this thread and the distressing tendency of racist cretins to turn up here, I’d like to state in advance that it has nothing to do with any racist or Nazi organisation, just in case anyone wondered.
No.
I do and it can. I suspect if you keep posting comments like this then you’ll be dismissed pretty easily, and permanently too. The editors don’t seem to like racists, for some unaccountable reason probably grounded in taste and decency (you may have heard of the concepts), so I’d watch it if I were you.
Now you’ve made me be rude, which almost everyone here will testify is most uncharacteristic for me, so why don’t you just fuck off and take you deluded dog-breeding fantasies with you. And remember, if it’s true that blacks are less intelligent than whites, maybe it’s also true that they have larger penises – is that the root of your insecurity?
My apologies to everyone else for my intemperance.
EG
I have said nothing at all racist, Euan Gray. I agreed with some people who questioned if different ethnicities may generally respond differently to certain ideas. I never claimed one group to be superior to the other.
You make my point for me. Humans share 99.5% of his DNA with the bonobo chimp, and is significantly different to a chimp in reality.
Small difference big effect.
I simply mentioned dog breeding as proof that evolution can make rapid changes in a short space of time. Nothing to do with comparing humans to dogs as you well know. Nice try though.
Another good site is Gene Expression (www.gnxp.com).
Honestly, the level of ignorance about intelligence research and population genetics among these libertarians is abysmal. Now they’re banning the messengers.
Would just like to offer a hearty second to everything Euan Gray said in his last post. (Bet THAT doesn’t happen twice…)
No need, the guy totally deserves it.
The point about all these racial studies is that there is a lot more variation within races than between them. Certain people who have posted here need to go read up on statistical significance. It is not enough for a statistical comparison to take the means of two populations and compare them. You also have to look at whether the difference in these two means meets certain requirements. Generally speaking, when there is large amounts of variation about a mean present, you have to be more careful of your conclusions. You have to be especially careful when there is large variation about both means, as is transparently the case in most matters pertaining to race.
Another thing to keep in mind is that statistics only ever tell you about correlation, not causation. Responsible scientists use them mostly as a method for sniffing out where explanations are likely to be found, but the point is that you still have to find an underlying explanation. Good luck sorting through millions of gene combinations!
Also, even if you could prove that one race was superior to another to some statistically significant extent in, say, IQ scores, it would still be silly to discriminate against all members of the “lesser” race on this basis. It isn’t as though there’s a “IQ > 120” gene that is completely absent in a particular race so that you can aways be 100% certain that any job applicant from that race isn’t qualified for certain positions. That is, even if it could be proven that some races are better than others in certain areas, the variation would still ensure that many members of the “better” race scored lower than many members of the “lesser” race. It would be both immoral and stupid to allow a general average to dictate one’s opinion of every individual he encoutered.
To put this in perspective – there are certain regions of Africa that consistently produce great runners. Should the US or UK Olympic teams recruit only from people who have this ancestry? Surely not! Surely the measure of a good runner is…well, in how well he runs. It would be ridiculous in the extreme to throw out the result of a sprint because a white athlete bucked the statistical average and won against a black opponent. The winner is who won, not who the fastest black runner was. By this logic, if and when I am in a position to hire people, I will simply hire people that I think are suitable for the job. The racists on this site are free to hire only whites if that’s what floats their boat, but I predict my company will kick their company’s ass as a result of having a greater hiring pool.
Euan, I really enjoyed that. I went back and read it after Joshua’s comment. That was one of the funniest take downs I’ve read in a while.
Kudos. (What am I saying?)
It is curious how all these race roaches can come crawling out of the electronic woodwork.
banned. deleted. just changing your name aint going to work Mr. Racist Jackanapes.
In any event, try to understand that the “pondlife”, “racist scum” and “roaches” have a deep intellectual grounding which is supported by emerging science. You are living in a fantasy world
No, it is people like you living in a fantasy world. One thing we have pointed out repeatedly on this thread (by VeryRetired, Euan, Josh, and others) is that there is a lot more variation within supposed racial sets than between them. And yet you never seem to accept that point, I suspect because it does not suit your paranoid purposes.
As Guy Herbert said, when many people use race to describe such issues, what they are really talking about is culture. Fine. I am dead against multi-cultural posturing, am an unashamed supporter of Western, post-Enlightment values.
Some of the posters here seem to labour under the delusion that because this is, broadly speaking, a libertarian blog, that the hosts of it will cut a lot of slack to race or genetic “realists”. Biiiig mistake. While it is theoretically possible to have a reasonable discussion about genetics and race, as Perry has said, in my experience nearly all those who try to draw political implications from the subject are crackpots and bigots who simply want to use race as a pretext for collectivist coercion.
I am glad we have had this thread. It has given me the pleasure of seeing a cracking piece by Euan Gray and show that most libertarians out there have zero tolerance for bigotry. That is obviously a mite upsetting to some people.
Oh and Euan, no need to apologise for any rudeness. Sometimes rudeness is the only morally correct response to hate-filled bigotry.
I particularly liked the line about the Bulldog. Heh.
Johnathan, you really are a specialist in insult, aren’t you? What is the reason for that? Where are your substantive arguments? Within-race genetic variation isn’t one. That’s Lewontin – the manoeuvrings of a Jewish nationalist and self-professed Marxist. Culture isn’t one, because it is not true. Full stop. You don’t have children, do you, or you would know that family and extended family has a meaning that is not cultural.
If you, or anybody reading this, is in the slightest inclined to honesty, at least bear in mind that the sentiments of Alex, Matt and Mighty Mole were endemic throughout the Western world and thought entirely normal, healthy and natural … until 1945. Then biiiig change, to use your so grown-up language.
Why was that, do you think? Why did the normal and natural become “bigotry” for “pondlife”. Cui bono?
Answer that question, please – without more pettiness. And then tell me whether the Han Chinese, who are fiercely particularist (see John Derbyshire), and the Indians, who operate an official Brown India immigration policy (see Peter Brimelow), are not equally “pondlife”. They are, of course, merely human … like us.
You won’t answer, of course. You will fall back on yet more opprobrium – apparently in the belief your own people’s (?) natural instincts are “coercive”. Crazy.
Actually, this leftist anti-racism of yours is an obediently Pavlovian response to the moral consensus on race which was manufactured after the war. That, I may say, was a genuine coercion.
Johnathan, you really are a specialist in insult, aren’t you? What is the reason for that? Where are your substantive arguments? Within-race genetic variation isn’t one. That’s Lewontin – the manoeuvrings of a Jewish nationalist and self-professed Marxist. Culture isn’t one, because it is not true. Full stop. You don’t have children, do you, or you would know that family and extended family has a meaning that is not cultural.
When it comes to insults, I try my best. Glad to see my skills get appreciated. They are genetically inherited, you know.
you, or anybody reading this, is in the slightest inclined to honesty, at least bear in mind that the sentiments of Alex, Matt and Mighty Mole were endemic throughout the Western world and thought entirely normal, healthy and natural … until 1945. Then biiiig change, to use your so grown-up language.I
I wonder what happened up to 1945? Anyone hazard a guess?
Actually, this leftist anti-racism of yours is an obediently Pavlovian response to the moral consensus on race which was manufactured after the war
Yes, I write my words not of my own conviction because I am a “Pavlovian” dog.
There is no point arguing with the likes of you any more. You consistently want to draw out the determinist side of genetics, while consistently failing to address the point that knowledge can be empowering for individuals. You dismiss culture because it does not suit, etc. How lame.
Johnathan,
Absolutely nobody eliminates culture from the equation. Nobody determines solely on the basis of genetics. If you don’t know that, you don’t know anything.
I suspect you have alighted on a 100% (or near 100%) culturally determinist description of Man because it facilitates the rest of your worldview, and your mind is closed on the matter. This is arse about front, and that’s your problem. Man does just not fit the description your type of freedom demands, and you can’t adjust your type of freedom to the fact of Man.
Thus, I am calling upon you to be unbigoted, Johnathan. I am calling upon you to learn about the world and how it works.
I have not, incidentally, called you a Pavolian dog. That would be unjust and insulting, which is how you play the game, not me. But I do think there is much mechanicity in Man, and submission to the general assumptions of the age is a very clear and sound indication that that is what’s going on. Freedom is not to be found here.
By contrast, understanding those countless aspects of yourself and your fellow Man which do indeed arise from Nature – and not declaring a hopeless war on them on the basis that they are “unchosen” – carries no negative implications for human freedom. On the contrary, out of peace and stability flows the very freedom you desire, if you did but know it.
You don’t. Or won’t. I am sorry for you. “Pondlife” that I am, I think myself freer than you.
I suspect you have alighted on a 100% (or near 100%) culturally determinist description of Man because it facilitates the rest of your worldview, and your mind is closed on the matter.
You can suspect what you like. I don’t take a “determinist” view of culture, either. I am not a determinist, full stop. I think we have in us a speck of volition, or free will, that makes the difference between human beings and lumps of meat.
I am calling upon you to learn about the world and how it works.
Sure. I am willing to learn about a lot of things. Just don’t expect me to reach the same conclusions after studying said things.
I have not, incidentally, called you a Pavolian dog.
You used the word “pavlovian” in the first place, so perhaps you should be a bit more careful in your use of words.
By contrast, understanding those countless aspects of yourself and your fellow Man which do indeed arise from Nature – and not declaring a hopeless war on them on the basis that they are “unchosen” – carries no negative implications for human freedom. On the contrary, out of peace and stability flows the very freedom you desire, if you did but know it.
Blather. I don’t declare a “war” on whatever inherited characteristics I may, or may not, have. I am pretty comfortable with my own skin, in fact, and fascinated by some of the new ideas being thrown up by science. I make no bones about the fact, that, however, I want the insights of science to maximise the freedoms we have, and not the reverse.
I trust you share that objective.
Oh, for Heaven’s sake! No one here is denying that an individual’s genetic makeup plays a role in determining his abilities and success in life, etc. What we’re denying is that this correlates with race in any way that allows useful predictions. Certainly there is a genetic basis for IQ to some significant extent. Certainly one arbitrarily defined group will have a higher average IQ than another. But there is no just basis from any of this for concluding that all individuals from one group are superior to all individuals from another on any measure. In plain English – the most intelligent Japanese people and the most intelligent Europeans and the most intelligent Africans will have more in common with each other than they will with other less intelligent members of their own races. If you’re looking for a genetic explanation for which nations are successful you’re unlikely to find it because all races, as far as we know, have both intelligent and stupid, lazy and diligent members. What seems to matter is how a society divides its labor – whether
suitable people fill suitable roles. It is in this sense that affirmative action is an abomination – because it forces jobs etc. to be apportioned on the basis of superficial and irrelevant characteristics. The problem with affirmative action is, in short, that it lets membership in an arbitrarily defined race trump actual ability — which is pretty much what you’re advocating, as far as I can tell (only for white people, so that somehow magically makes it ok???).
I repeat one thing I said earlier: we can put this to the test in the real world. You go out and form a company and handicap yourself by only accepting white staff, no matter how qualified other job candidates may be. I’ll form a company and hire anyone from any race who can do the job I need done well. My company will do better 9 times in 10 because it has a greater pool of talent from which to draw.
I repeat one thing Midwesterner said that I haven’t heard
ya’ll give a good answer to yet: if race is the primary determinant of how successful a country is, then why does South Korea boast the 12th largest economy in the world while North Korea has one of the worst? Why is South Korea a net exporter of technology while North Korea can’t even feed itself? This divide is even greater than you might expect when you consider that in 1949, when NK went its own way, the lion’s share of industry was in and around Pyongyang, NOT Seoul. North Korea started with the better hand and has managed to piss away its advantage in spectacular fashion, while South Korea literally pulled itself out of the mud. And all this with the same race on both sides of the DMZ.
Johnathan,
The natural sciences do not exist to maximise freedoms. They exist to explain the universe and our place in it. You may not be 100% culturally determinist, as you claim. But, nonetheless, you reject those scientific explanations that don’t suit your ideology. Not only that, you employ slander against those, like myself, who quote them. How is this consonant with freedom, never mind the goals of science?
On the other hand, you lavish praise on poor, hapless EG because he thinks black IQ has not yet been measured in all the thousands of psychometric studies! Or if it has, it can’t be right!!
But any “pondlife” can tell you that average African cranial capacity and brain weight fits the IQ disparity very well. Sadly, there is no doubt that Africans have, on average, small, light brains. When, finally, will you people take truth seriously, whether or not it fits your political interests? You aren’t Marxists, after all. You don’t have to rely on the tabula rasa.
Don’t self-censor the science you encounter because its conclusions are awkward for you. Change your worldview.
Returning to where I began, I will be happy to duel with you anytime on the nature of freedom rather than on race realist issues. There, too, you are on extremely shaky ground – always assuming, of course, that you are of European descent (this is important and not “racist” etc. Precisely the opposite – it is to protect us against racial animosity.)
You say, “I think we have in us a speck of volition, or free will, that makes the difference between human beings and lumps of meat”. But you do not understand anything of will. You think it is the power of choice, don’t you. I know it is the ability to “do”, to create out of the material of life. You are playing on a penny whistle.
The natural sciences do not exist to maximise freedoms. They exist to explain the universe and our place in it.
I always thought that knowledge gave us freedom, rather than doomed man to live in a sort of determinist pre-set order.
Joshua’s point on the difference between North and South Korea is a good one. I notice that it has yet to meet with a reasoned response.
The “white supremacists” who call themselves race realists say that not only Jews but northern Chinese and Japanese are slightly cleverer than whites on average. Funny, that.
Moreover, the site I mentioned called Gene Expression is run by a Bangladeshi-born American and is full of Asian contributors.
When The Economist can run a piece about how Ashkenazi Jews’ higher intelligence can be linked to their greater susceptibility to some diseases, and both are put down to selective breeding in the past, it does not seem to me that Samizdata can dismiss the research that is now piling up in the aftermath of the human genome being charted.
It may turn out that we have more free will than some ev-psych theorists say. Only, how can we know if we don’t go on testing and investigating? (BTW E.O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology, is a mild leftist.)
People take these things too personally. Nobody is making blanket judgements about individuals being hopelessly handicapped or whatever, but in all politics and social policy you have to work with aggregates, averages and probabilities.
Few but the most extreme feminists still think women and men are capable of doing all things equally well, so why should the rather smaller potential differences in aptitudes between human subspecies be so hard to credit? Because if we admit them, Hitler will rise from the grave? Come on, get real.
Few but the most extreme feminists still think women and men are capable of doing all things equally well, so why should the rather smaller potential differences in aptitudes between human subspecies be so hard to credit? Because if we admit them, Hitler will rise from the grave? Come on, get real.
As I have said over and over, I would be willing to believe in the intellectual honesty of people who harp on about this if they did not also go on about “protecting the species”, as several have done in this thread. That implies that there are clear and coercive political implications to what they say, such as discrimination laws (either positive or negative) in relation to certain groups, defined on the basis of a certain scientific classification.
Of course I accept men and women are different (thank god). I also accept that there are behavioural differences between the sexes that could be worth studying, and I would certainly not want to shut that down. Ditto for stuff on IQ. But with all these things, one should not get bogged down indentifying any one factor as the key driver of human motivation, which is what i see constantly in the determinist-flavoured remarks here.
If it is just part of an ongoing research project, great. I can think of a lot of good that can come out of this, such as cracking certain diseases, improving plant resistance to disease, possibly finding a cure for cancer, and much else.
Matt, SJ etc,
I have followed this thread with interest, and see the normally civil and logical samizdata types descend into ad-hominem insults and shut-downs on further discourse in some cases.
It seems that people who wish to live in a nation consisting of people of common culture, language, and common descent are the most vilified people on earth, though for the life of me I can see only good things about this wish, which has been common sense for millennia. We need a context within which to live, that is the nation, but this is being steadily snuffed out and there are people on here who should know better who are helping the left out with their programme of a single distopia made up of fragmented peoples with no power and thereforeno real power or democracy.
I am reminded of the quote by Thomas Carlyle:
“It is strange indeed how prepossessions and delusions sieze upon whole communities of men: no basis in the notion they have formed, yet everybody adopting it, everybody finding the whole world agree with him in it, and accept it as an axiom of Euclid: and, in the universal repetition and reverberation, taking all contradiction of it as an insult and sign of malicious insanity, hardly to be borne with patience. ”
This quote applies perfectly to the multicultural samizdatans on this thread.
Andy
Yes. Well, in each race there are substantial numbers of members who fall outside the “aggregates, averages and probabilities.” of all races.
Given a large enough sample group and enough refining of data, you will be able to create “aggregates, averages and probabilities.” for each race.
The predictive effect of these measures on quality of life and productive capacity, and every other measure of success, is microscopic compared to even minor adjustments in the laws that govern them.
Andy, I have never claimed to be other than a cultural supremacists. I have never believed in anything but one-language government.
Your arguments for race as a factor are so lame that the only way you can defend them is by tying them into the legitimate factors of culture and language.
Even your closing argument is just one more effort to hitch your false and undefendable claims to other ideas of merit.
Race is bogus and you have all been totally unable to prove otherwise. This is why you are compelled to tie your bigotries onto ideas that actually have substance.
“one should not get bogged down indentifying any one factor as the key driver of human motivation”
Agreed.
But why try to specifically exclude one ‘possible’ factor?
There is a lot of hypocrisy regarding race. As Mighty Mole says, no one has a problem mentioning higher than average IQ in Jews. But as soon as almost any other racial group is mentioned its considered some kind of sin.
The North vs South Korean is simple. They only split 50-60 years ago its not enough time to indicate a general trend.
And while North Korean was dragged down by ‘help’ from the Chinese, South Korean was supported by America.
You guys know this better than I do, the question is disingenous.
It seems that people who wish to live in a nation consisting of people of common culture, language, and common descent are the most vilified people on earth, though for the life of me I can see only good things about this wish, which has been common sense for millennia. We need a context within which to live, that is the nation, but this is being steadily snuffed out and there are people on here who should know better who are helping the left out with their programme of a single distopia made up of fragmented peoples with no power and thereforeno real power or democracy.
Andy, since you choose to take a reasonable tack, let me point out that the issue that needs to be stressed here is culture, not bloodlines. How many blasted times do we have to point this out?
As a matter of basic common sense, there may be a case for controlled immigration to take account of simple human nature: the fact that when large numbers of very different cultural groups enter a nation, there are tensions. That is the sort of realism I recognise. But race has nothing to do with it. Look at the success of Asian emigrants to the United States, for example, or Indians here, or the Chinese in Malaysia, etc.
It is the ideas in people’s heads I worry about, not their skin type. And that, my friend, is why we have been so harsh on the “genetic realists” on this site.
The stakes are big. We live at the time of growing irrationality, fear of strangers, paranoia and concerns about security. My fear is that there are probably quite a lot of people like Matt O’Halloran and the various other charmers who sneer at free will or the capacity for humans to be free. It frightens the fuck out of me, frankly. So excuse my language and mood on this matter. Even the ever-patient Euan Gray, who I wondered actually had an objective moral value system, blew his stack over this issue.
Samizdata is an anti-racist blog. Which is why I am damn proud to write for it.
The North vs South Korean is simple. They only split 50-60 years ago its not enough time to indicate a general trend.
And while North Korean was dragged down by ‘help’ from the Chinese, South Korean was supported by America.
Nice try but no cigar. I see, so genetics is a key driver of human life except when it isn’t. riiiight.
“My fear is that there are probably quite a lot of people like Matt O’Halloran and the various other charmers who sneer at free will or the capacity for humans to be free.”
You mean people like prof Robert Winston?
I saw a documentory by him a while ago where he was claiming that although people think selecting a mate / breeding partener / girlfriend is free will we are infact directed by various subconscious factors that help us choose the best match. There were various tests that predicted matches and generally they worked, although it was too small a study to make huge conclusions about. Genetically programmed instincts directing free will was basically the implication.
When is free will not free will?
When you use “will” in the sense of “Triumph of the Will”
EG
I am aware that the consensus on this thread is that culture matters, race does not. I simply happen to believe both matter. I do not believe in ‘racial supremacy’, as is the usual slur aimed at racialists, I just want to be left alone.
Now I can see why people who believe that we are all pretty much identical apart from skin colour etc would believe that race means nothing. This is in a theoretical context though, inside their heads, in their utopia. On an individual basis it may be true, but immigration in Britain nowadays is turning over the population at 1% /annum.
I believe this level of immigration is unassimilable and will result in instability ( civil strife ), and balkanisation.
You may say that this again is culture, not race, but on a macro scale, culture is correlated with race. Not all asians are muslims, but in this country, it is true enough to say that nearly all muslims are asians.
Now it may not be logical ( or maybe it is, in an instinctive evolutionary sense ), but very many people identify with their own, familiar values, familiar faces etc. It is a human need. You lucky Libertarians may be able to transcend all this, but it is my contention that most people will not. There was a famous experiment in the 80’s, perhaps a computer simulation, that showed that minor differences between organisms lead to an unexpectely high degree of separation.
This is why whole housing districts can go from being 100% white to being 100%minority. Why stay somewhere you no longer recognise as familiar, where you are marginalised, even threatened?
It’s not as though there are not plenty of examples of multiculturalism that have gone spectacularly wrong, often culture based, but usually with a high degree of racial separation. Cyprus, N.I., Fiji, Sri Lanka, USA ( cracks showed during the N.O. hurricane ), France, Hutus v. Tutsis, expulsion of the Ugandan asians ( too succesful ), partition in India, the Balkans/Kosovo etc.
The list is endless. And you folks think that what is happening in the UK and Europe is a new paradigm? It’s different this time? We’re smarter than those other societies?
I personally think that there are differences between the races, some more than others, for instance the peculiar level of black underachievement seemingly everywhere as a group, but my case does not depend on racial differences, only on the perception of otherness.
I am also unimpressed with the idea that we should take the brightest and the best from other countries, as (1), it screws those countries of their talent, and (2), the second and third generations may not take the same view as their parents, and may grow up disenchanted, rootless, angry. We are seeing that now, I need not remind you that the 7/7 bombers were British, born and bred. Culture you will say was the cause of that, but it seems inextricably linked to race, and certainly black gun culture etc, whereby they have 7-8 times the level of crime associated with their community as compared to the white, is not religious, and seems to follow them wherever in the world they are.
Anyway, it’s your blog and I respect your right to slag me off on private property, but I am surprised that Samizdatans cannot consider that race is, for most of the world’s people, in their minds’ at least, and apparently in real life too, an important thing. I met a South Korean woman a few years back, who was fretting about her marital prospects. She wanted a Korean hubbie: she was American but was considering her prospects with her distant relatives back in Korea,
To her, race was important, not culture, and a white man wouldn’t do, an I understood that. That’s a sample of one, but believe me when I say she’s not a total aberration.
To you folks race is not important, to others, it is, and your analysis of race and its importance must take into account all those people who think unlike you, and the likely consequences if they achieve critical mass. In a homogenous society, what does it matter if a person is racist? In a multicultural society, it starts to matter a lot.
To keep the lid on, more and more repressive laws will need to be passed, and this will leave your ideal of Libertarianism even further beyond the horizon. In truth, It’s already happening now.
Andy
Banned. Spare us the pseudo-science and just stick to your own Nazi site
This worries me, too.
It’s perhaps too easy to see demons where they don’t exist, but FWIW it seems to me that there are a few regular and semi-regular commenters here who aren’t a million miles away from Mr O’Halloran’s point of view. It’s just a feeling I get, but such is the monomaniacal stridency of their comments on a specific subject that it does appear to me that they are petty little racists and xenophobes covering themselves with a not entirely opaque cloak of libertarianism mixed with (very) reactionary conservatism. I’m not completely sure of this, but I do get a distinctly disquieting feeling about them. I dunno.
Our current climate of paranoid fear of the different and over-sensitivity to small risks does, unfortunately but inevitably, play into the hands of the racists and xenophobes, because it’s so bloody easy and satisfying to blame all our woes on Johnny Foreigner, especially if he’s actually Ahmed al-Foreigner and thus visibly different. It’s clear enough that the government has milked this for all it’s worth, not because they’re the government, nor because they’re Labour, but because they see votes in it. The other winners are the extremists like the superficially slick and plausible Griffin and his mob.
Look, it really doesn’t matter a damn what the colour of someone’s skin is. We’re all human beings and we have far more in common than we have dividing us. God knows, I’m not a libertarian but one of the things that I do like about libertarianism is the desire to treat people as individuals and not as groups, be those groups blacks, whites, Moslems, Christians or pale green rock-worshippers. You can, I think, take this too far, and the lack of recognition of the collective side of humanity is one of the things that pisses me off about libertarianism.
This is why I don’t like racism. Another reason, incidentally, is that I am white and my ex-wife was black. The reasons for divorce are nobody’s business here, but they have sod all to do with skin colour or culture. It’s also why I rail against the tendency of some to lump “statists,” collectivists, the “political class,” Moslems, European bureaucrats and so on into groups and apply a collective assessment to them. It strikes me as odd that soi-disant libertarians should do this, and even more odd that a horrible old pragmatic Conservative such as yours truly tends not to, but there it is.
Here’s my Thought for the Day. Our little racists friends could do a lot worse than read it and spend a little time reflecting upon it, for there is much wisdom in it:
Think about it.
Hah. Now you know.
EG
Banned. Spare us the pseudo-science
On the Koreas, the IQ gap is similar to the Hong Kong/mainland China gap that obtained during the years when testing was almost impossible on the mainland. There is, of course, every reason to believe that Hong Kong IQ was raised considerably – say 5 points – by the filter of immigration from the mainland during those years.
There are always good reasons for psychometric outcomes, which are among the more solid and reliable population measuring mechanisms. In the NK case one can surmise that limited testing opportunities and bad testing conditions – as occurred in Mao’s China – possible departure south and/or genocide of the more cognitively gifted layer might bear some responsibility. But for me the most likely factor is that the authorities believed in communism and in the equality of human gifts, and did not allow the testers a genuinely broad sample. Government, I’m afraid. Something that should be understood here.
NK is a mystery for us all, still and does not form a sound basis for overturning the hereditarian case. There is a mountain of evidence for hereditarianism. Sorry.
I suppose all those burly blond extrovert rugby players and footballers are merely optical illusions, then? I’ve worked in Nordic countries, and I don’t recall them being awfully shy and introspective. In fact, they’re often extremely open and uninhibited. Actual conversation:
Englishman to Norwegian man he’s met 10 minutes earlier: “Quiet place, this. What do you do in the evenings?”
Norwegian: “Tonight I’m going to the bar.”
Englishman: “Few drinks with your friends?”
Norwegian: “No, I want to fuck so I am going to the bar.”
Englisman: [stunned silence]
Dead shy and introspective, hmm?
Unlike I suspect you, I have lived and worked in west Africa and have some experience of the people there. I married one, for a start. I have met a hell of a lot of shy and quiet west Africans – Ghanaians, for instance, are renowned in the region for their quiet politeness and restraint. Even in rough and tumble Nigeria, one meets a LOT of surprisingly reserved people.
It’s kind of dangerous to make sweeping generalisations people simply because of their skin colour. Generally, they don’t hold up too well in reality.
It’s much better just to take people as they come.
EG
Euan,
Are you a racist? I mean, really, there you go with your little epethet carefully learned from the fraud, Franz Boas. Has it occurred to you that 99% of the people in this world, including Franzy babes Ashkenazim, are racist. It is the human condition. Now grow up and use some respinsible language.
You married one. OK, your opinions can be discounted accordingly. Now we know that you cannot possible afford to consider the evidence impartially. You genetic interests have swung against your own people.
Editors note: next time someone claims these ‘race realists’ are not just repackaged Nazis, they should really read this
Dave: When is free will not free will?
In normal waking consciousness.
I saw a documentory by him a while ago where he was claiming that although people think selecting a mate / breeding partener / girlfriend is free will we are infact directed by various subconscious factors that help us choose the best match.
Some of this is undoubtedly true, but not really relevant. I am attracted to smart women of a certain shape and character. I am going to marry here in June. But I could have married someone quite different. So the argument that there are certain “hardwired” factors influencing our desires does not, as I repeatedly point out, diminish the choice involved. That choice was real, it was not some pre-ordained, which is what you seem to be saying.
Take another case: a close buddy of mine loves oriental women. He is part Scottish, part Irish, part French with some native American Indian thrown in. I’d love to see how the genetic fatalists, which is what I think is a good term, would explain that one.
Having said all of which, when I met my better half, I had had several beers. (She’d better not be reading this).
Interbreeding opening people’s minds? More like opening their arses, if you ask me. But then, modal “libertarians”, parroting Marcuse’s half-baked inanities, believe that having no morals is the same as having an open mind and being free.
No, if you bother to read any serious work by a libertarian, you will realise that it is stuffed with morality. In fact, what is destructive of morality is the idea that Man has no free will and is the plaything of a genetic lottery draw.
Your comments on interbreeding are also disgusting. The mask slipped there, and the savagery was revealed. It usually happens in the end.
I’ll be keeping a beady eye on the Majority Rights outfit in future.
You married one. OK, your opinions can be discounted accordingly. Now we know that you cannot possible afford to consider the evidence impartially. You genetic interests have swung against your own people.
I have got news or you, bonehead. I am marrying a Maltese, and she has a slightly darkish complexion, lovely brown eyes, is descended from a fair old mix of races and cultures, and is probably a gazillion times brighter, nicer and sharper than you will ever be.
Perry, I think we need to sweep these wankers off the site. I don’t think Euan Gray needs to be subjected to that sort of abuse, and it is getting beyond a joke. These people are evil.
Thank you, Johnathan, that’s most gracious of you.
I wonder if it helps our friends if they know that I’m going to get married again. But, sadly for their horrible theories, my (very much) better half is Russian so is no doubt a Slavic subhuman. And if it helps you, when I met her we’d *both* had a few beers.
Funny how life works, isn’t it? I’m an Anglo-Scot, and I met my Russian lady in an Irish bar in Kazakhstan whilst working for a Canadian-American company scouting out information for an Italian client. Where’s the genetic determinism in that, I’d like to know.
EG
Hey, did you guys know that the very term ‘racist’ was invented by the communists. At least as far as I have read, Trotsky came up with the term.
Also, you guys might want to check out some of the abundant literature on ethnic groups and trade. See Janet T. Landa’s work for one. The basic thrust is that ethnic groups work together to gain advantage over non ‘in group’ competitors.
Empirical empirical empirical her work is. And she’s Chinese!
Are you guys for a 100% inheretence tax , because if your against things people didn’t earn, then you have to be for the 100% inherentence tax.
Finally, you all must be aware that the single opportunity for state intrusion into private affairs is the area of ‘anti-discrimination’ law. If I prefer to rent to people of my own race, I cannot. If I prefer to do business only with people of my own race, I cannot. And as Randy Weaver found out, even if I choose to dissacciate myself entirely from the dominant society, to live among my kith and kin, the government will find a pretext to come after me.
Given all this, it seems to me that libertarian antiracism runs into some very real problems when forced to planet earth.
Are you guys for a 100% inheretence tax , because if your against things people didn’t earn, then you have to be for the 100% inherentence tax.
People are entitled to bequeath what material possessions they want to whom they want, or to charities, or whatever. That is a dumb argument.
I don’t “deserve” whatever traits I might have inherited from my parents, but so what? There is no cosmic big man out there deciding who does and who does not “deserve” such things. Such language of desert only makes sense in the realm of human actions made by free individuals.
I must say that if is the best you twerps can do to hit at libertarianism, then I am in a jollier mood than I was when I got home from the office this evening.
Euan, you’re welcome mate. I draw the line at some things, and though I have been rather rude to you in the past, I hope most of the time that we try to keep on the subject in hand, and argue properly, even if a bit roughly at times. But personal stuff is off the scale.
Finally, you all must be aware that the single opportunity for state intrusion into private affairs is the area of ‘anti-discrimination’ law. If I prefer to rent to people of my own race, I cannot. If I prefer to do business only with people of my own race, I cannot.
Actually, I would agree that this is a stupid situation. If you want to put up a sign saying “no blacks” then if it is private property, and you are not receiving money from the taxpayer, you can be as bigoted, as stupid as you want. In a free market, in fact, bigotry imposes a cost on the bigot, since you may be in a situation where you turn away rich folk you dispise.
The situation is of course different with facilities that are paid for by the general public, in my view.
I also believe that in the very early stages of life after the Civil Rights Act in the 60s, there was merit in giving certain ethnic groups a step up. However, it is far from clear that this is now needed and economists such as Tom Sowell (black) have argued that it does more harm than good.
Oh, let them stay. This is educational. I don’t meet many racists in my daily life and so don’t get many chances to see what their buttons are. Euan mentioned his ex of his own free will knowing full well what kind of people he was dealing with. He’s a measured, calculating type for the most part: I suspect he wouldn’t have let that slip unless fully prepared to deal with their insults. As for the rest of us, I’m sort of enjoying the irony of Samizdata now being vilified by racists after having been accused of racism not four months ago (I’m thinking of Owen’s comments on that post on Mugabe).
That they are not arguing in good faith is, I think, now obvious to everyone. sj’s comment about Euan’s ex-wife is the most blatant example, but the dodges on the Korea question work just as well.
If you define the ‘real world’ as the West, then yes, the general consensus, among White people, for the last 40 years has been that race doesn’t matter. Even when White people do think it matters, they are ‘shut up’ with meaningless epithets like ‘racist’, ‘fascist’, ‘nazi’ and any number of catchphrases people learn from Hollywood and TV shows. Hence, White people are being race-replaced. However, everywhere else in the world, race still matters, so China remains Chinese, Japan – Japanese, Africa- African etc.
Notice how Black people generally identify as Black, Hispanic as Hispanic, Asian as Asian etc…..yet White people identify as ‘libertarians’, ‘conservatives’ and any number of other sub-culture labels. To the outsider looking in, this is beyond ludicrous…..it is a parody of a parody.
The facts are that multiracial societies are bad for White people. In terms of interracial violence, rape and murder the statistics show that the last 30 years are tantamount to a genocide on Whites. More White people have been murdered by non-whites in the US since 1965, than died in the whole Vietnam conflict. That’s all your ‘civil rights’ movement accomplished. As White people become less ‘racist’, they are easy pickings for hyper-ethnocentric non-whites that are increasing in number.
Of course, state these facts, and one is called ‘paranoid’. Totally legitimate ‘fears’ and grievances are reduced to catch phrases like ‘xenophobic’ and ‘irrational fear of the other’, even when such ‘fears’ are perfectly rational.
The future of the West is white male eunuchs turning a blind eye to facts like:
There is nothing noble about being ‘anti-racist’ or reducing arguments about multiracial societies to speeches about how ‘i don’t care about teh skin colouz dude!’
Regardless of your phoney platitudes, ‘enlightenment values’ and raceless americanisms, people vote with their feet on the issue. This movement away from the utopian multiracial hellholes, along with interracial crime statistics and the hyper-ethnocentrism of non-whites, makes all of your arguments redundant. You know a black/yellow/brown person who is nice? So do i. This isn’t the argument. It’s about societal change on a big scale and the consequences. Most Whites, despite paying lip service to ‘anti-racist’, choose to live amongst other whites.
On a macro level, race matters.
In European states we’re seeing a rise of the ‘far right’ because Whitey is running out of places to hide. In America, where Whites have been fleeing ‘diverse’ cities for years, we’re seeing them fleeing whole states like California. In my nation, Australia, we’re having out-and-out racial rebellion thanks to the multicult.
If you wish to remain blind to the realities of this situation, go ahead. Just don’t drag us all down with you or complain when large blocs of white devils draw a line in the sand(as they’re starting to do).
You can always move to California, Detroit, China, Zimbabwe etc if you don’t like it when the BNP or LePen get some power, or when parts of the US partition themselves off formally. You can also tell them how much ‘race doesn’t matter’ til your hearts content.
I think roughly 99% of all Libertarians are against “anti-discrimination” laws. Property rights are our biggest turn-on. I wouldn’t dream of denying you your right to discriminate against whatever paying customers you choose to turn away.
For what it’s worth, affirmative action is one of my least favorite big-state policies. One of the highlights of my involvement in campus political groups came in October 2004 when, representing the Libertarians in a 3-way debate at the Black Student Union, I finally got the chance to stand up in front of a crowd of affirmative action supporters and denounce the policy as racist (and accuse the Democrats of buying votes with it besides). It didn’t persuade any of them to vote Libertarian I’m sure, but then, the Republicans’ evasive answer probably didn’t do much better.
In a free market, in fact, bigotry imposes a cost on the bigot, since you may be in a situation where you turn away rich folk you dispise.
Actually, only if you consider monetary costs, which is typically of libertarians, but by definition if I am willing to turn away rich folk then I am meeting my preferences. I am willing to forgo money in order to deal only with my own race (or heck, if someone wanted only to deal with a race other then their own)
This is not hypothetical. There are traditional Japanese inns that won’t take none Japanese. Perhaps they do this because they would loose Japanese customers, perhaps because they don’t like none Japanese. Doesn’t matter. They are doing what is best for them.
But here is the thing — empirically where is the society (Western at least) with racial differences that hasn’t instituted restrictions on freedom of association. Britain has anti-discrimination laws, Canada most certainly does, and the US does. All interfere with private property rights, freedom of association, and increasingly, free speech. You guys may sound great in theory, but when it comes to reality, you lose. BTW I am not libertarian, but even on your own terms, when it comes to reality, you lose
BTW since this is a Brit site, I ‘ll explain that Randy Weaver was a very poor, white man that lived way up in the hills of Idaho — very much a true, anti-government libertarian existence in fact. He was framed by government agents and, after resisting their offers to become a stooge, was killed by an FBI sniper. The sniper, oddly enough, was of ‘pure’ Japanese descent.
On inheretence
If I inheret a beautiful house, built by my grandfather, together with a wonderous garden and orchard, nutured by my father. Am I aloud to be proud of it — I certainly didn’t earn it, but can I not be proud of it and, indeed, want to maintain it.
Of irrationality
There is an increasing body of work showing that it is perfectly rational to favour those most genetically like yourself. Again, Landa, and Salter , and Hamiliton (decades ago)
I find it somewhat odd that Gray should be saddling up to ride in defence of libertarianism, but this thread has produced all manner of strangeness thus far.
In a libertarian society, Mr O’Halloran and his ilk would be at liberty to refuse to deal with people for no better reason than that their skin pigmentation wasn’t right. This would be their choice, and if it affects only their property and money, libertarianism has nothing to say about it.
This in no sense whatsoever implies, or entitles the reader to infer, that libertarianism as a socio-political philosophy supports in any way racist doctrines, and nor should it be construed in such a manner. The fact that it is a philosophy founded upon the idea of individual liberty, and the fact that some individuals are of a racist bent, simply does not mean that libertarianism is a natural home for racists.
Quite the reverse. As others have pointed out above, an individualist philsophy is somewhat at odds with racism, whose adherents by definition prefer collective policy over individual. It is perhaps unfortunate that the freedom of thought and expression that libertarianism promises should attract people whose thoughts and expressions are deeply unpopular elsewhere, but it is quite plain to me that racism and libertarianism as philosophies are mutually incompatible.
You racists have a right to your views, and you have a right to express them. Whether you have a right to express them on this blog is a matter for the editors, of course. My view is this:
I think you’re a bunch of deluded fuckwits, wedded to an ideology that preys on insecurity and fear of change and the different. That’s ok. I’ll defend your right to be fuckwits, and I’ll stand up for your right to say what you want. But, and here’s the difference between us, I’ll also stand up for the right of the Marxist to preach proletarian revolution, and I’ll stand up for the right of the black man to say “No” to people like you, and I’ll stand up for the Jew, and the Moslem, and the homosexual. And I’ll stand up for your right to insult the woman I married.
I’m not vain, and God knows I have little to be vain about, but I’m a better man than you’ll ever be.
EG
Joshua, where’s the dodge? My comment on the Koreas was straight forward. To be more definitive would require knowledge of the testing conditions which I do not possess. I have simply demonstrated that the NK question is not a singular phenomenon and will turn out to have a single (or multiple) explanation(s) that fit(s) in to the vast body of evidence for hereditarianism.
As far as Eawn’s marriage is concerned, if you do not understand the concept of ethnic genetic interests then don’t bother to criticise what I have said. EGI is not complicated, but entirely natural. If you are Jewish it should be easy to grasp, since it holds Jewry together in diaspora. It is, of course – horror upon horrors – a collective interest. But ordinary, uncomplicated human beings, as opposed to liberals, are contented thereby.
Your comment on the Koreas completely missed the point. No one was arguing that the two Koreas are examples of wildly different average IQs. In fact, I wasn’t talking about IQ at all. I was talking about economic success, which may or may not have anything to do with IQ. For whatever reason, North Korea is a much LESS successful nation than South Korea. Since both nations are staffed by exactly the same race, this presents a problem for any theory that race is the dominant factor in determining which groups do well and which do not. If race were the main ingredient in a culture or nation, then both Koreas should be more or less the same. But they are not at all the same. To call them vastly different would be something of an understatement, in fact.
In a libertarian society, Mr O’Halloran and his ilk would be at liberty to refuse to deal with people for no better reason than that their skin pigmentation wasn’t right.
Even here we have a retreat from reality. You see, race is not (soley) about skin pigmentation. That is why forensic scientists can examine bones and say, ‘this individual was of European descent’, or ‘that individual was of Northeast Asian descent’ all without skin entering into the picture.
Back in the 1980s there was a reggae artist called ‘Yellowman’ — he was an albino of African descent. I am hear to tell you, no one would think he was of anything other that that , despite the lack of pigmentation.
But I find it really strange that one post finds us warned ‘judge not, lest ye be judged’ or words to that effect. And then to be called a ‘fuckwit’ , be psychoanalyzed from afar (‘fear of change, insecure’). And insulting Mr. Greys dear ex-wife. I certainly haven’t. I don’t think anyone else hear has.
Libertarianism certainly isn’t the natural home for those concerned about racial issues, immigration, ethnic collectivity (‘ours’ and ‘theirs’). But l think its an empirical reality that multicultural/multiracial libertarian societies are a chimera. As our friend the anti-affirmative action guy so ably pointed out, Blacks love collectivity that favours them, mainstream parties will not stand up to a mobilized ethnic group for fear of losing votes. So in the real, western democracies we have today, the ethnic group that fails to mobilize WILL lose out.
Stop indulging Matt O’Halloran’s racist pseudo-science drivel (regardless of what names he uses to post it). The whole race issue is a psychological trap that draws out the fascist collectivists who masquerade as libertarians or conservatives but are really just as collectivist as they come. Vast volumes were produced using phrenology to ‘prove’ racial superiority, this is no different.
As veryretired pointed out, the reason these guys are UTTERLY obsessive about this issue is that race is the one thing that cannot be taken away from them.
Yawn Euawn, an individualist philosophy is at odds with life. Individualism places the Sovereign One at a potential disadvantage to every organised group, as someone has already noted on this thread. Individualism is not a survivable basis for social organisation. Nation is, and so is race – a fact noticed somewhat by every people in the world. Imagine … all those Chinese, all those Indians, all those Japanese, all those Jews. All shocking racists, Euawn, because they follow their own EGI.
You have broken with yours. That is your right. But recognise that your people still has its right to its ethnic interests, and do not speak against that. In silence, you comport yourself honourably. By spitting on their survival you reduce yourself and cannot be taken seriously any more, as I have said.
Sorry Joshua, yes I am guilty of a false assumption, as you say. But you are correct that the NK story is, ultimately, about IQ because that is the best predictor of national wealth.
Not all communist societies report low IQ. East Germany, I believe, scored markedly higher than its Western counterpart but there was a vast difference in economic outcome. Mainland China has scored very low but is now powering ahead economically. NK is not so great on either front. The intellectual quality and cooperative mores of the population are the principal keys. My guess – and it is only a guess – is that the mores under Our Beloved Leader II are very stable. But the population is suffering from a mix of factors – some short-term like nutrition and some fairly horrendous like genocide of the natural middle classes, – that feed into the genetic/IQ side of the equation.
Culture and genes. Always.
sj writes:
Of course, I said no such thing. What I said was this:
So I restate my original claim: I think it is clear that certain people on the pro-race side of this argument are not arguing in good faith.
Well, this whole thread seems to have been started by a wholly gratuitous comment of the day followed by the inevitable echo chamber. Good show, old chap. Spot on! Right, Nick Griffin, Cave men.
And then the ugglies show up. Well, actually, there’s a lot of scholarship and a lot of thought out there, and this is some of it probably and its probably right. And this is why maybe you are wrong empirically, or at least really thinking wishfully, if you believe a libertarian multicultural society can exist.
And then the insults — ‘fuckwit’ etc. ‘Indulging’ ‘those of his ilk’.
Here’s a thing. On the way back to London I was watching the beeb’s inflight programming. They had this show, “I’ll show them whose boss” and this older white chappy goes in to fix a business. Now this is one seriously messed up bed manufacturing business. Little capital investment. Owned by a Pakistani in the Midlands. Three intelligent, English speaking daughters. All shipped back to the old country to marry second cousins from the village, thus entitling more immigraiton into Britain. Naturally, as these are not white people, all their employees are of their own ethnic group (that I saw). Naturally, since they are Muslims, the serious out of it sons-in-law are put in charge of the business. Naturally, the daughters know more about the business but are shunted aside.
Of course, the white man, being a white AngloSaxon, says ‘put the daughers in charge’. As you’d imagine, its was like pulling teeth.
Now, please libertarians, please tell me how having more of these types (the Pakistanis) of people in your society are making it more freedom loving, more individualist, more economically efficient.
Having this particular Pakistani clearly is not helping make England more freedom-loving, individualist or economically efficient.
Neither will denying qualified, freedom-loving Pakistanis entrance on the basis that they are Pakistani.
What will help make England more freedom-loving, individualist and economically efficient is to support a system that allows capable individuals to reach their full potential unencumbered by prejudices of what they can and cannot achieve based on BBC documentaries of other members of their ethnic group.
Joshua,
I take it you believe this particular family business was not representative of a tendency within Pakistani society here and in Pakistan. Have you read anything at all about attempts to limit arranged marriages (check that, limit the visas for spouses of arranged marriages) and the resulting uproar by Pakistani community spokesmen. Can you show me the corner shop that employs a multiracial staff? Oh, if you go up to tottenham court there are plenty of pakistani electronics shops that do employ Africans — but strangley enough only as security guards. And nary an Englishman to be seen.
But, Joshua, Man is much, much more than your prescription for him. If you have so little understanding that you find individualism compelling, you are a truly lost soul.
Actually, individualism is a hobby for university-capable but not fiercely intelligent political children. It lacks the weight necessary to deal with the real world in which, for example, Perry’s neighbours are attacked in their homes and the British Board of Deputies relentlessly promotes one hundred and one things that are good for Jews.
In such a disordered and ethnic-competitive world once-bitten prejudice is an essential tool for survival, not some ghastly and inhuman encumbrance. Your condemnation of it, quite apart from its airy idealism, merely betrays the closeness of Popper to his uncle in Frankfurt.
In any case, individualism is not on the political menu. Coerced equality is. The Frankfurt solution. Racial particularism is the only escape route from this darkness. Minorities won’t accept it. Those like Euwn who have turned their backs on their own EGI won’t accept it. But the survival of the West is at stake and everything is riding on the next two or three decades.
Unlike you, we – the prejudiced – will fight. If you want your freedom you had better hope that we win.
Joshua, your wasting your time. I worked up a funny response highlighting what absurdly stupid people these are. Then realized it would be wasted on them. The old battle of wits with an unarmed person dilemma.
With due respect to free speech, I hope Perry shuts down this thread. It depresses me to be reminded what absolute refuse there is in the gene pool. These guys ancestors must have carried the genetic purity thing a little to far. You know, planting their nuts just a little too close to the tree.
I’m outta here.
It bears repeating.
Agreed. I’m outta here too.
Come on Jonathan, I didn’t claim your choice of girlfriend / wife was pre-ordained by genetics and I wouldn’t claim any type of desision was purely (or mostly) directed by genetics.
The question is whether or not your desision was totally free / random and you could have choosen anyone, or if subconsciously your genes had ‘some’ influence over your choice.
I don’t know the answer, I am not an expert, but prof Winston’s programme did seem to suggest our choices weren’t as free as we thought.
“So the argument that there are certain “hardwired” factors influencing our desires does not, as I repeatedly point out, diminish the choice involved.”
Well, erm, how can this be true? If we are being subjected to influences outside of our control how can that not affect the way we think ?
Deleted.
Typical… you are incapable of seeing the difference between defeat and contempt. People have decided you are simply not worth debating but there is one characteristic that all the ‘race realists’ seem to share, judging by how they react when that invariably happens: they make themselves look like asses and then when they are told to get lost they assume that means they have won the argument. You guys are nothing if not predictable.
This riposte to veryretired was posted by ben tillman on Alex’s “Samidioting” thread at MR:-
My experience of racists is that they are race based collectivists who are so utterly without anything to redeem them (and know it), that they pick out something they didn’t have to earn (race) and claim that as their most valuable asset.
Stupid.
“Collectivist” is a meaningless buzz word like “racist”.
No sane person needs to find something to “redeem” himself. As a living organism, every sane person (and every sane group of persons) wishes to continue to live.
“Racists” don’t claim race as their “most valuable asset”; they simply recognize their identity, and want themselves to continue to live.
deleted.<.em>
You see, race is not (soley) about skin pigmentation. That is why forensic scientists can examine bones and say, ‘this individual was of European descent’, or ‘that individual was of Northeast Asian descent’ all without skin entering into the picture.
I see. So I guess you guys will insist that the racial classifications you favour should be tattooed on our foreheads then! You crack me up, you really do.
“Collectivist” is a meaningless buzz word like “racist”.
No, it is a shorthand term for people who look at others primarily as members of a group, not as individuals. How hard is that to grasp?
No sane person needs to find something to “redeem” himself. As a living organism, every sane person (and every sane group of persons) wishes to continue to live.
VeryRetired’s incisive quote really cut to the quick, I reckon. Of course people desire to live. What on earth has that to do with your racism?
It’s not my site, but I bet the guys at Majority Rights would love to see you all there sometime.
Thanks but no thanks.
The question is whether or not your desision was totally free / random and you could have choosen anyone, or if subconsciously your genes had ‘some’ influence over your choice.
I don’t know the answer, I am not an expert, but prof Winston’s programme did seem to suggest our choices weren’t as free as we thought.
No, you don’t know the answer. But tell me this, my determinist correspondent, how can someone claim to know that 10 percent, or 20 percent, or 80 percent, or whatever, percentage of our actions are freely chosen or determined? In any event, like VeryRetired, I think most of us innately know that the actions we take involve conscious choice.
Actually, individualism is a hobby for university-capable but not fiercely intelligent political children. It lacks the weight necessary to deal with the real world in which, for example, Perry’s neighbours are attacked in their homes and the British Board of Deputies relentlessly promotes one hundred and one things that are good for Jews.
A hobby? Individualism is a bedrock principle of the liberal, western order, not a freakin pastime. It is part of a body of ideas.
As I said, you people are evil. Either that, or very, very depressed people, as your rantings about inter-racial marriage etc demonstrate. Makes me wonder whether you are all sexual inadequates or something.
Johnathan,
That is a disappointing comment full of insult, as usual, and with no honest attempt to engage. Pity. Anyhow, here is a sincere attempt to engage with you:-
Individualism also has a genetic foundation, and this means that from an evolutionary perspective it is NOT contrary to our collective interest in the survival and advancement of our own people. The contrariness, therefore, is an invention.
The polar opposite of genetic individualism is conformism, not collectivism. But peoples evolve only one strategy within the range of possibilities. East Asians demonstrate high conformism. Africans demonstrate high individualism. As in so many measures of human sociobiology, Europeans fall in between the two.
What, then, is this invented polarity of individualism <> collectivism which so possess you? Again, at this juncture it is necessary to confirm that you are of European lineage because otherwise you can propose open-borders, for example, and an atomised host population as a discreet means of pursuing your own ethnic interests. Perhaps you would be kind enough to reassure me on that count.
Obviously, in your world only a collectivism based on free will is “good”. Let’s not concern ourselves imediately with the existential problems of that. You know already that free will is highly problematic. But for the sake of this argument we will pretend that is isn’t.
This voluntary collectivism requires that natural collectivism, which extrudes into the hearts of men from their genes, be denied. But it cannot be denied because the evidence for it is everywhere you turn all over the globe.
So to be consistent you should, if you happen to visit Sepia Mutiny and come across the “real” Razib Khan, use all the sin words you have used against us. You should visit Norm Geras’ blog or the good folk of Harry’s Place to tell them why Israelis must embrace the Palestinian r-o-r and banish their anti-miscegenation laws against having sex with Falashas. That’s the only way Indians and Israelis and Norm and old Harry can be sovereign individuals, right?
In a libertarian world, I see it, if you don’t eliminate ALL ties of blood, the surviving groups will simply out-compete you and that will be the end of your political experiment. That’s the reason why your blue skies individualism is just a game for middling smarts, Johnathan. The only races sufficiently lacking in ethno-centrism are we decadent Europeans (today) and Africans (always). But Africans are incapable of sustaining an advanced economy, and drive all other peoples away. So they aren’t “in”. Indians and Jews and Chinese are powerfully ethno-centric – that is, they understand and at all times act upon their EGI. So they represent instability. You will not get Jews to cease to identify as Jews, even if they have to lie to you that it is a voluntary collectivism. It isn’t.
So a 100% or near 100% European society is the only one that might make a go of it. In other words, you need homogeneity before you encourage people to behave as if the unfettered human will was really psychologically possible.
Well, on this basis you would be acting in according with your European EGI. Your libertarianism would no longer be maladaptive. It would, of course, also no longer be universalist. But that is the price of making it work.
If you deny Man his Nature your “New Hampshire” must end up as one of three things:-
1) Coercive, in order to stamp out minority competitiveness,
2) Destructive to those ethnic Europeans who have dutifully followed your prescriptions only to find that others more ethno-centric did not.
3) A total panmixia in which no distinctions apply.
Give me one stable alternative that doesn’t attempt to deny Nature.
BTW since this is a Brit site, I ‘ll explain that Randy Weaver was a very poor, white man that lived way up in the hills of Idaho — very much a true, anti-government libertarian existence in fact. He was framed by government agents and, after resisting their offers to become a stooge, was killed by an FBI sniper. The sniper, oddly enough, was of ‘pure’ Japanese descent.
The only problem with that statement is that it isn’t true. Randy Weaver is alive, the people who were killed was Randy’s son and his wife.
The incident was a major factor in the anti-government attitudes common among the right in the late 90s (along with the Branch Davidian mess, and a couple of others- there’s a reason I don’t describe it as paranoia).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge
Individualism also has a genetic foundation, and this means that from an evolutionary perspective it is NOT contrary to our collective interest in the survival and advancement of our own people. The contrariness, therefore, is an invention.
Gibberish. I am an individual. You are an individual. We share certain characteristics (standing on hind legs, opposable thumbs, etc), but we are also separate. There is no such thing as a collective brain. Each act of thought by you or me requires effort, focus. When you sat down in front of your computer today, you did not do so because of some genetic trait shared by all, but because you wanted to do so. You chose to do, as I am now choosing to respond.
So to be consistent you should, if you happen to visit Sepia Mutiny and come across the “real” Razib Khan, use all the sin words you have used against us. You should visit Norm Geras’ blog or the good folk of Harry’s Place to tell them why Israelis must embrace the Palestinian r-o-r and banish their anti-miscegenation laws against having sex with Falashas. That’s the only way Indians and Israelis and Norm and old Harry can be sovereign individuals, right?
Gibberish. I don’t defend Israeli anti-miscegnation laws, anyway (do you?). In fact I suspect you do oppose it, like some of the others who chose to make cracks against folk for mixed marriages, like Euan Gray.
In a libertarian world, I see it, if you don’t eliminate ALL ties of blood, the surviving groups will simply out-compete you and that will be the end of your political experiment.
We are all doomed! I don’t see mixed-race societies as inherently less tolerant places, and I keep making the point, for instance, that the United States, which was built by a mix of immigrants, is probably about as free/unfree as a monoracial one, like Japan. I just don’t see a clear correlation.
Another thing I don’t understand about you guys is the idea that liberty is some sort of white caucasion invention. Man has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, while the idea of liberty is still, by any standards, a short-lived one. How on earth can the slow movements of Darwinian evolution correlate with the emergence of an idea like that, or explain why liberty has taken root, however imperfectly, in some places and not others?
And you keep downgrading culture, or mixing it up with race, ignoring the overlaps between the two.
Anyway, enough. I have work to do.
rosignol — I actually corrected the Weaver mistake in a post, but the correction was deleted. Mr. Horiuchi killed Weaver’s wife.
bye you all
God bless you and keep you, Johnathan.
Well, Johnathan, I’ll forgive you for rushing your reply, for it was a rushed reply with little consideration of the ideas being put forward. I prefer to think kindly of you in that way since the sad alternative is that the stream of invective and airy dismissiveness that you have employed on this thread is indicative of some deeper philosophical malaise.
First off, don’t confuse individualism>conformism with individualism>collectivism. One is part of the variegations of Man’s nature, the other you know. You and I have an adaptive individualism which we hold in common with our relatively individualistic people – compared to other peoples. Of course, I am assuming here that you are English like me.
This adaptive individualism is part of our race’s evolutionary strategy – the genes for it were useful to survival. To say this, of course, isn’t being sinfully collective or coercive or anything silly like that. All we have here is an instance of human biodiversity, and it has its place in the scheme of things – including the political.
The individualism that you are more comfortable talking about is a personal attribute – again partly derived through one’s parents but also partly acquired from without. One might say that this resides in character, in which it draws something from the other individualism. But it is greatly embroidered in the more superficial layer of personality. It is part of what one calls “me”.
So whilst you are right that we are both individuals, our individualism is more complex than you really want to admit. And that’s the source of the trouble between us. You can grant Nature its suzereignty everywhere it presents no risk to your liberalism. But you are unable to let her fingers touch your mind.
You are very nearly as depressing to debate as an unreformed Boasian blank-slater, desperately hurling vile epithets at your interloctors from the right, bowdlerising their views where you don’t ignore them, making statements you know to be false (“the United States, which was built by a mix of immigrants …”) and which in a different context would crush in an instant, and sometimes being just plain daffy.
For example: “Another thing I don’t understand about you guys is the idea that liberty is some sort of white caucasion invention”. Really, Johnathan, I am astonished that you can type this stuff. Have you really read nothing but Popper?
Well, you do ask one important question: “How on earth can the slow movements of Darwinian evolution correlate with the emergence of an idea like that, or explain why liberty has taken root, however imperfectly, in some places and not others?”
Liberty could arise, in my, of course, very limited view, from some quite ancient sources. One entirely likely root is that all male vertebrates strive for status as a strategy for mate competition. In humans the status of slave is less successful than the status of emporer, or indeed free man.
This is a crude type of liberty, for sure. But the will to strive upwards is the also the will to amplify mating opportunities.
The second source – the great one, really – is that dual teleology of self liberation: self-perfectionment and union with the divine principle. Of course all peoples, even the Cargo Cultists of PNG, have felt the pull of this ancient, driving idea. Its importance to my third possible source of liberty is that its dynamic is an emergence from what is not, effected through self-consciousness. This idea has survived into modern right- and left-liberalism, and is found in second-wave libertarianism’s rather mechanical distaste for the “given” and for Nature. It is a mistake, of course, but there we are. Few intellectuals understand the intentionality of consciousness.
My last source for liberty is particular to the dreaded European Caucasian and is a product, in my humble view, of our particular place on something called the r-K scale. We have a high investment in childcare – another evolutionary strategy different to “r”-heavy SSA’s who parent much less, and different to East Asians who parent much more. For a very long time we raised our children in a food scarce environment, each child being brought up as a peculiarly precious resource. But … unlike East Asians with their still greater investment in their children, we also have a pretty high individualism strategy. So here are these individualistic kids who believe themselves to be of high value … Anyway, you get my drift.
Liberty comes out of our collective past, and is part of nature. We are all interested in it. Libertarianism in its Judaic, second-wave form is maladaptive for us so long as it denies expression to both parts of ourselves: that with which we are born and that which we acquire.
Sorry to post at such length.
Jimmy Cantrell has a nice piece on the weakness of libertarianism entitled “Good Culture Requires Good People.” He writes:
Sj, one reason why my language gets heated is that I almost think it a sin to respond gently to vile views. It is the way I am. Genetically influenced, perhaps.
Desmond, a lot of clunky generalisations. It does not convince. Also, my genetic fatalist friends, bear this in mind: if white caucasians have some genetic predisposition to liberty, how to explain how white-based cultures (Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia) spawned two of the greatest tyrannies in human recorded history? And don’t say they were exceptions to prove the rule. Europe has been devastated over an over by war.
For example: “Another thing I don’t understand about you guys is the idea that liberty is some sort of white caucasion invention”. Really, Johnathan, I am astonished that you can type this stuff. Have you really read nothing but Popper?
Nicely evaded. You guys are claiming that there is a clear link, a clear connection, between white racial groupings and ideas of liberalism. You said it. I have you folk saying this on this blog. I have thrown your own words back at you. Making snide remarks about a brilliant Austrian philosopher of science (who would have trashed your musings), does not work.
My last source for liberty is particular to the dreaded European Caucasian and is a product, in my humble view, of our particular place on something called the r-K scale. We have a high investment in childcare – another evolutionary strategy different to “r”-heavy SSA’s who parent much less, and different to East Asians who parent much more. For a very long time we raised our children in a food scarce environment, each child being brought up as a peculiarly precious resource. But … unlike East Asians with their still greater investment in their children, we also have a pretty high individualism strategy. So here are these individualistic kids who believe themselves to be of high value … Anyway, you get my drift.
Some of these points may actually be quite true, but again, does it really explain much beyond certain large generalisations? For example, I happen to think of religion as a sort of genetic factor, inasmuch as ideas about religion can spread in the memetic way that Richard Dawkins has described. So different cultural/ethnic groupings can show differing collective tendencies. But the key word here is tendencies. Put a black person in a different and supportive environment and he or she can thrive, as many do.
Even if different behavioural patterns show persistence, it does not necessarily – and here I come to the crux of the matter – have political implications. It does not mean, as many racists might hope, that we should treat non-whites differently, or support coercive and often highly dangerous eugenics policies, for example. (Eugenics, even in its more “benign” forms, has led to serious imbalances in populations, such as mainland China).
I do think it is in Man’s nature to require liberty to thrive and survive. It is one of the core values of classical liberalism and a reason why it was not sustainable for the United States, built on such value, to tolerate indefinitely the institution of slavery.
Johnathan,
how to explain how white-based cultures (Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia) spawned two of the greatest tyrannies in human recorded history?
Evolution. Different tribal groups evolved different strategies, both social and moral, to enhance survival. As Cantrell writes,
Ditto for the Germans. They developed a collective identity, in-group altruism, to defend the German Volk.
Darwin writes,
How does open border libertarianism deal with the immigration of, say, 50 million Indian Muslims, a monolithic collective moral group, to the UK? It’s impossible to convert them to Western free loving fornicators, because they have evolved a strategy that ensures their survival in an environment they have inhabited for thousands of years. It is fundamentally incompatible with a British people, who evolved their individualistic tendencies, largely in isolation, over the same period.
“But tell me this, my determinist correspondent, how can someone claim to know that 10 percent, or 20 percent, or 80 percent, or whatever, percentage of our actions are freely chosen or determined?”
They can’t claim to ‘know’ that. But they can study, make hypothesis about human nature and question why people make the desisions they do. I don’t see whats wrong with that.
I am not a determinist, I just don’t believe human nature is as malleable as you do.
“let me point out that the issue that needs to be stressed here is culture, not bloodlines. How many blasted times do we have to point this out?”
Culture is affected by human ‘free will’ which is affected by human nature, human nature is affected by evolution.
By saying that I am not trying to suggest superiority or say that its impossible for some people to adopt another peoples culture..
Darwinian evolution is not necessarily as slow as you suggest, it depends on the selective pressures around at the time and the ability of one group to isolate its self to avoid diluting its gene pool.
Humans came out of Africa approx 200,000 years ago and only started to travel North 70,000 years ago (its in the latest edition of National Geographic). Yet in that time far northern people have developed significantly different physical characteristics from Africans, for example lighter skin colour, flatter face, thinner nose, smaller lips, more rounded shaped chest (doesn’t lose heat as fast). An African couldn’t live in the Arctic circle without extreme difficulty and problems maintaining a safe body temperature, but an Eskimo would have a very hard time living in Africa.
Important differences, but neither could be said to be superior.
Oh and for people like Euan Grey who thinks race doesn’t exist, how do you explain what happened when Europeans first arrived in South and Central America and accidentally wiped out huge numbers of native peoples by bring diseases from Europe that the natives had no natural resistance to?
Popper would not have been able to trash my particularism, Johnathan. Very, very few Jews are non-particularist. Hens teeth. Rand, for example, said some aggressively racial things in her life, whether in seriousness or just bad taste I do not know. Interestingly, I have never known a Jewish interlocutor continue to try to delegitimise or undermine my particularism in all the usual, boorish ways once he knows that I know we think alike.
It is important for non-Jews reading this to be aware that there is nothing “vile”, as you put it, in particularising in exactly the same way Jews do. Actually, I judge us as a people of superior charity and tolerance – known in the trade as out-group altruism. Adorno’s “authoritarian gentile” was invented specifically to exploit this genetic characteristic and poison even our children’s children’s capacity to self-identify. The global mythification of the Nazi extermination programme is in the same vein. I strongly sense that you, Johnathan, and others here are not yet freed from the emotional burden of such stratagems.
Just quickly on the metaphysical, I am unaware that Popper was granted any insights whatsoever into his own soul – without which he would be forced back onto intellectualism alone. But I have met and stripped bare stratospherics 20 points my betters on these recondite issues. The life of the intellect is not enough. One needs a certain experience. If you tell me he had it, then I demur.
Moving on, let us be clear that secular Western philosophy from the Greeks onwards has brought us to what you have called “Enlightenment values”. Not Taoism nor Shamanism nor Judaism nor any other alien religion or system of thought did this. Traditional Chinese philosophy, for instance, seeks to find the most promising path through the uncertainties of the natural world. For that purpose liberty has a most minor utility. Why, then, would the governance of high-conformity Chinese not tend generally towards the authoritarian?
In other words, there are very sound reasons why liberty has not, as you say, taken root outside the West. Liberty is our big production, our particular lodestar.
Now we are getting closer to the heart of the matter. You go on to infer that I abstract from this fact a value for “white racial groupings” (which is a strained way of saying … us). And you are right. I particularise. And it is not at all “evil” to do so, is it?
That “strain” is interesting, though. It shows, as I said before, that you are answering to a hostile emotion. Since the commonality of ethnic interest is a fact, such hostility must have an external cause. You have learned it … unless, again, you are Jewish or some other non-Western minority … if you do not share my ethnic interest at all.
That is as far as you will travel with me, Johnathan, because the next stage is to discuss the truly coercive circumstances that have formed your moral outlook. For now and probably for ever, the knowledge that the “vile” “pondlife” have freed themselves from something to which you remain in thrall is too radical. You must laugh in my face or your intellectual and personal integrity means nothing.
Naturally, Iwould hold that if you cannot see your own people straight, it doesn’t.
Jonathan: “So different cultural/ethnic groupings can show differing collective tendencies. But the key word here is tendencies.”
Which is all I was ever trying to say. So we are in agreement.
Finally!
Now the question is what is going to happen to this country in the long term if we don’t control immigration of these people with higher collective tendencies.
Will we become more libertarian or less?
I would think less! libertarians supporting mass-immigration are shooting themselves in the foot.
sj: “You go on to infer that I abstract from this fact a value for “white racial groupings” (which is a strained way of saying … us). And you are right.”
Isn’t it rather stupid to talk about ‘white racial groups’?
Afterall Africans and Australian Aboriginies could both be described as blacks, but are distinct racial groups.
All ‘white’ groups are not the same and some even evolved seperately.
Just one other thought. The ultimate value for libertarians has been transferred from EGI – the common good of protecting and advancing one’s ethnic group interests – to the self. This is quite a new phenomenon among any section of European Caucasians. It is certain that in past ages reaching up to the end of WW2 the self was a strong but nonetheless only proximate interest.
This is a real revolution, and it is important. I see it less as a “libertarian event” in its own right than an outcrop of the psychopathies of war. Self-absorbsion, all the decadent excess of the “me generation” et al, are a Durkheimian working out of the first half of the twentieth century. These are major currents in which flow many a treacherous little eddy in which values may be lost. Libertarianism is one such, and provides a justification for cast aside traditional values.
The amazing (to us) vehemence with which some obviously intelligent people here react to traditionalism, pouring every kind of scorn upon it that they can, reveals the tension between the new but as yet insecure ultimate interest of self and the old of EGI. Basically, the me-generationist says “fuck you”. He can’t justify the revolution because the old king is not yet dead and still calls upon him to kneel. So he defends his usurpation with much untoward violence.
Dave, not my phrase. Hence it is in quotation marks. I prefer European Caucasian where a wide definition is required, but will settle for Western Man.
If you visit majorityrights.com you’ll probably find all kinds of shorthand employed to the same end. People seem to know what is meant.
Why do Mr Pearce and his supporters always say ‘it’s not genes, it’s the culture’ as though culture was an independent variable. Surely our heredity goes a long way to making us what we are, and it affects the day-to-day habits and prejudices which make up ‘culture’. An Indian or Pakistani born in inner London retains a set of cultural characteristics which in obvious and significant respects differs from that of a cockney white.
The libertarians talk about ‘culture’ as if we are totally free to discard one and put on another like a set of clothes. No doubt they wish we were, so that their internationalist and individualistic outlook would get more widespread approval, but it’s not so easy.
Popper would not have been able to trash my particularism, Johnathan. Very, very few Jews are non-particularist. Hens teeth. Rand, for example, said some aggressively racial things in her life, whether in seriousness or just bad taste I do not know. Interestingly, I have never known a Jewish interlocutor continue to try to delegitimise or undermine my particularism in all the usual, boorish ways once he knows that I know we think alike.
Oh Popper would have crushed you very easily. So you discard his opinions because he is ethnically Jewish. You are like those old Marxists who used to dismiss the views of a middle class person.
Rand was also ethnically Jewish, but she was pretty fierce on racism, regarding it a s primitive form of racism. Quite what she would have said about the likes of you does not bear repeating in front of people of a nervous disposition.
The global mythification of the Nazi extermination programme is in the same vein. I strongly sense that you, Johnathan, and others here are not yet freed from the emotional burden of such stratagems.
“Mythification”? Oh god, just to add to your lengtheing list of dire arguments, you are probably a Holocaust denier to boot. Marvellous.
You must laugh in my face or your intellectual and personal integrity means nothing.
Naturally, Iwould hold that if you cannot see your own people straight, it doesn’t.
No, I laugh in your face because that is one of the ways to take down evil.
I am not a determinist, I just don’t believe human nature is as malleable as you do., writes Dave.
I don’t believe human nature is all that malleable. That is because I think that one aspect of human nature that seems to be pretty broadly set is the ability and desire to choose, to act, to have control, a point that SJ seems to argue is present only in what he calls Western Man (or whatever other term he feels able to get away with at the time).
It’s been a pleasure as always.
Popper would not have been able to trash my particularism, Johnathan. Very, very few Jews are non-particularist.
So Popper was a Jew (was a he an actual believer in Judaism?), therefore he is a particularist, therefore his views don’t count. QED, end of argument. Brilliant.
Rand was not a racist, as far as one could reasonably infer from her description of racism as a primitive form of collectivism. I bet that helps explain why so many of you guys latching on like barnacles to genetics are so annoyed with her.
Come on, before I get totally bored with this, let me throw out a few bullet points and wrap this up:
I think human nature is partly affected by our genes, although how widely or deeply is something I don’t know and neither do, I suspect, any of the “race realist” types posting here. But it is only one influence among gazillions of influences, and frankly, given Man’s appalling history of bigotry, it is not all that surprising that a proud, self-declared libertarian like yours truly should treat your arguments with a bucket of salt.
There is something about this passage that explains why I don’t trust you guys very much at all:
This is a real revolution, and it is important. I see it less as a “libertarian event” in its own right than an outcrop of the psychopathies of war. Self-absorbsion, all the decadent excess of the “me generation” et al, are a Durkheimian working out of the first half of the twentieth century. These are major currents in which flow many a treacherous little eddy in which values may be lost. Libertarianism is one such, and provides a justification for cast aside traditional values.
That revolution has been building for a long time, and it is partly in response to a series of murderous wars (WW1&2, the 30 Years War, etc, etc). Those wars were fought by people who, in the 20th Century examples, believed that their collective racial interests justified all manner of horrors. The reaction against that is not just some temporary psychological thing, as you no doubt hope, but a more lasting development. Good.
Oh and for people like Euan Grey who thinks race doesn’t exist, how do you explain what happened when Europeans first arrived in South and Central America and accidentally wiped out huge numbers of native peoples by bring diseases from Europe that the natives had no natural resistance to?
This is not, on the face of it, a simple racial issue. People living far away from others can and do develop different resistances to disease, or no resistance at all. Climate has a lot to do with it (this subject has not been raised but is actually quite important).
Even so, I would not deny that different groups of people can develop different traits or capacities such as resistance to disease, though that should not be pressed too far. And as Euan Gray pointed out above, one of the problems of very small populations is in-breeding, which leads to deformities over time.
When I pointed out that white races have held murderous wars, which rather undermines the idea that liberty is associated with Western Man, as SJ claims, Desmond writes this of the Germans:
They developed a collective identity, in-group altruism, to defend the German Volk.
And much good it did them. Millions dead and wounded, 6 million Jews exterminated, Europe in ruins. If that is what “in-group altruism” leads to, give me something else.
On a point of information: population geneticists have calculated that a stable community of as few as 850 will not have problems due to inbreeding as long as it avoids first-cousin marriages. (Vide Iceland, one of the smallest, most historically isolated nations, and also one of the healthiest and most intelligent.) So race mixing is not essential for health or smarts.
Deleted.
I reached the conclusion long ago that the great engine of liberalism which has dominated our political life certainly since 1832 imposes a cost for every benefit. That is in its nature. This exchange has, since 1945, become increasingly unstable, and in the years since the mid-1980’s has steadily leached away at our psychological and spiritual foundations, there being no other resources in the bank to pay freedom’s bills.
Given that British society is in many ways as oppressed by bureaucracy and Big Government as it was in 1945, I’d dispute that argument. Yes, certain freedoms have been secured. Homosexuals are no longer persecuted, for example. Abortions – up to a point – are legal. Censorship is less draconian than it was in some ways though we have seen it spread elsewhere, and shamefully, under the present Labour government.
Your critique of liberalism hardly squares with your earlier comment that liberty is the “lodestar” of the West. But then maybe you only refer to liberty as a debating point, and don’t actually believe in it very much anyway. That seems pretty clear from your last big comment paragraph.
You sound like a certain type of social conservative who has latched onto the arguments of modern science as a sort of new prop. I actually re-read a passage of Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate last night and he made it clear, as clear as crystal, that his ideas give not one iota of comfort to genetic determinism or the sort of views expressed by you and others. In fact, he makes it clear that humanity is united by common, universal qualities of nature, that in many ways are more important than what sets folk apart.
And I find that encouraging.
“I think human nature is partly affected by our genes, although how widely or deeply is something I don’t know and neither do, I suspect, any of the “race realist” types posting here. But it is only one influence among gazillions of influences”
Well ok what about homosexuals, are they making a free will choice? or are they being compelled by genes and hormones?
“Even so, I would not deny that different groups of people can develop different traits or capacities such as resistance to disease, though that should not be pressed too far.”
What do you mean not pressed too far? If two groups of people develop different resistances to diseases then it proves they have evolved seperately over a relatively significant amount of time.. proving they are distinct racial groups, does it not?
“Yes, certain freedoms have been secured. Homosexuals are no longer persecuted, for example. Abortions – up to a point – are legal.”
Ahem?
I thought one of the main tenets of you guys beliefs was ‘individualism’ so how can abortion, ie the murder of an individual life be acceptible?
I am not religous btw.