Author: VD

Still smarting

Wängsty’s posterior is apparently still stinging from the spanking I gave him more than eight months ago:

The fact is, someone has to call these people out, same with Vox, challenge them. As powerful as moral indignation is, it has a short shelf life, if you doggedly engage, engage, engage… People need to be ‘radical’ about reason and moderation…

To which I responded: Come now, Wängsty, you did nothing of the sort. After admitting you couldn’t make heads or tails of a fairly simple analogy and whining about my “refusal” to answer rhetorical questions that I directly addressed, you ran away rather than even attempt to defend your own perspective. I answered your questions, but I don’t recall you ever getting around to answering mine. I’ve been challenged by Keynesians, atheists, biologists, feminists, Calvinists, and Trinitarians and engaged in substantive debates with all of them. You’re a talented writer, to be sure, but as a thinker and an intellectual disputant, you’re not even a contestant at this point.

If you want to debate anything from the aesthetics of fantasy fiction to your philosophic uncertainty principle, I’m always game. But your philosophic posturing is seriously weak dishwater; there is no intrinsic virtue in uncertainty.

In case one has forgotten, here is a link to my last post concerning The Prince of Wängst. The idea that he still thinks I am given to moral outrage simply underlines how stubbornly clueless he remains.

Interview with John Derbyshire

Vox Day interviewed the “summarily executed” ex-National Review writer about his controversial magazine article on April 10th, 2012:

Somehow you managed to turn yourself into a bigger media discussion point than the guy who went and shot five people out in Tulsa. That seems a little ironic in light of concerns regarding racism in America.

I think it was two guys who did the shooting, two guys were arrested.

That’s right. But it just seems odd that some advice to your children on dealing with race in America somehow trumps actually going out and shooting people. I find it remarkable that the media considers the John Derbyshire story to be more significant and indicative of racial problems in America than a pair of folks going around shooting and killing black people.

I think you may be exaggerating there, Vox. I read a prominent newspaper every morning and the Tulsa shootings have been in that newspaper and I have not.

I’ve seen stories about you in the Guardian and other UK newspapers.

Oh, I got a notice in the Russian press too. A Russian friend sent me something all in Russian. It was quite well done. So yeah, I’m a worldwide sensation. Fifteen minutes of fame or what?

After all this time and all you’ve written, is it surprising that this article should be the one to which everyone pays attention?

It is a bit surprising, yes. I’m a bit surprised. I didn’t think there was anything that much out of the ordinary in it. I’ve written similar things before and the tone wasn’t anything sensational. It’s an odd thing. People pick these things up and they buzz around for a few days… that’s the news business.

I was impressed with Mark Steyn’s defense of your article, or rather, your employment by National Review. Was it disappointing to see the opinions of Ramesh Ponnuru, Jonah Goldberg, and some of the others who took the opposite position?

You know, Vox, I have to confess I try not to read negative stuff about myself. You can call that cowardice if you like. The way I look at it is why spoil my digestion? But I’ve been going by friends who have pointed me to various things, a friend sent me an email saying Goldberg’s really slagged off on you. Okay, fine, so I’m not going to read Goldberg. But friends did email me and said Mark Steyn’s put up a very good and thoughtful piece and you really should go and look at it. So I did read Mark’s piece and yes, I thought it was very judicious, very well done. And that nice little quip about if stuff published on Taki’s Magazine is so outrageous, why is Taki still on the National Review masthead. So yeah, I really did like Mark’s piece. The other pieces, I don’t know, as I said, I try not to read negative stuff about myself. Why upset yourself?

For the most part, there’s been a tremendous amount of support for you across the right blogosphere, whereas there hasn’t been much defense of Rich Lowry’s position except by the other writers at National Review. I would estimate that eighty to eighty-five percent of the comments have been running in your favor. I thought that was really striking, because I’m not sure that would have been the case ten years ago.

Do you mean the comments on the National Review blog?

I mean the comments on pretty much every blog where it’s been discussed, with the exception of the left-wing blogs where the competition is to see who can feign the most outrage.

I am in quite high spirits because I’ve had tremendous email support. I’ve had hundreds of emails and I’m going to have to do some collective thank you for them somewhere because I’ve totally given up trying to deal with them. I’d answer a dozen and forty more would come up in the meantime. It’s been almost a tsunami. I’m taking my life in my hands here, I know, but almost none of them have been negative even though my email address is right there on my web page. I think by the time I got through the first few dozen, there were two negative ones. And they weren’t vituperative, they were sarcastic and sneering, but they weren’t horrible. Everything else was really positive and supportive. That’s just tremendous, I’m really heartened by it. I am going to read them all. I can’t possibly answer them all, but I am going to read them all. People have been great.

I get the definite impression that something has changed. You talk about how 50 years ago, you would have had some different opinions more in line with the Standard Model view of race. And certainly 20 years ago, the reflexive anti-racist position was the normal one in educated society. But now things have changed and people are much less terrified of having the race card waved at them. Have you noticed that yourself?

There are a number of things in play there. One, which I’ve written about more than once, I think, in the United States, is just despair. I am of a certain age, and I was around 50 years ago. I was reading the newspapers and following world events and I remember the civil rights movement. I was in England, but we followed it. I remember it, I remember what we felt about it, and what people were writing about it. It was full of hope. The idea in everyone’s mind was that if we strike down these unjust laws and we outlaw all this discrimination, then we’ll be whole. Then America will be made whole. After an intermediate period of a few years, who knows, maybe 20 years, with a hand up from things like affirmative action, black America will just merge into the general population and the whole thing will just go away. That’s what everybody believed. Everybody thought that. And it didn’t happen.

Here we are, we’re 50 years later, and we’ve still got these tremendous disparities in crime rates, educational attainment, and so on. And I think, although they’re still mouthing the platitudes, Americans in their hearts feel a kind of cold despair about it. They feel that Thomas Jefferson was probably right and we can’t live together in harmony. I think that’s why you see this slow ethnic disaggregation. We have a very segregated school system now. There are schools within 10 miles of where I’m sitting that are 98 percent minority. In residential housing too, it’s the same thing. So I think there is a cold, dark despair lurking in America’s collective heart about the whole thing. That’s one factor. Another factor is the Internet, especially YouTube. Now, you can log on any morning to the Drudge Report and see videos of crowds of black Americans misbehaving. Maybe there should be some videos of white Americans misbehaving, but there just aren’t that many. People are seeing these things and it’s fortifying that despair.

I’m a bit scared of it, it’s making us kind of cold. But we’re still mouthing the platitudes. It’s something happening under the surface and it hasn’t really come to the surface yet except perhaps in reaction to events like this. But I do think that in our innermost hearts we’re in a state of despair.

One of the things I’ve noticed, living in Europe, is that Europeans really don’t get the American racial obsession. It’s pretty clear that approved racial etiquette in the United States is not normal and one wonders how long it can last.

That’s always been the case to some degree. Back in the 1930s, Agatha Christie wrote a book called “10 Little N-words”. Do you know that book?

I do.

That wasn’t the title of the book of course. I’m trying to observe the proprieties. It was published like that in Britain, but her American publisher wouldn’t publish it under that title. The American publication was “And Then There Were None”.

That was before World War II, in the 1940s. But it was published under the original name in England until the 1960s, well into the 1960s. So we’ve had this difference in sensibilities between polite, well-educated, upper middle class Americans and Europeans for a long time. We’ve always had that. But contra that, it seems to me, based on reading the newspapers, that the British are even more prissy than the Americans about these things. We’re constantly hearing about somebody getting prosecuted for yelling a racist word at a soccer player or something like that.

I exchanged some email with Jonah Goldberg about this and the thing that really appeared to bother him, and the thing that appears to have bothered your other critics the most, was the idea that one should not stop and offer assistance to a black individual in apparent distress. Obviously, you’re not a Christian, so barring any sort of Good Samaritan Christian duty, why do you think there’s been such a negative response to that particular piece of advice.

I must say, I think they have a point. If I was to write it over again, that would be just about the one thing I would change. I actually wanted to add some qualifiers to that point, just to tell people to be more wary in that situation, but you know, I’m a writer and I was over my allotted word count. I would rewrite that if I could. But again, I’m giving advice to kids and kids don’t have much judgment. I do think you need more judgment in a situation like that and I put a link to where it happened. You get a regular trickle of stories about people who have tried to help in those situations and come to grief, where they’ve been turned on or its been some kind of con.

I noticed you used the words “apparent distress” in your article. I thought it was fairly obvious you were indicating that not all distress is necessarily real and sometimes it’s a trap.

Yeah, and if you’re giving advice to kids, they don’t have the judgment to know what’s a trap and what isn’t. I don’t think it’s that bad advice even as it stands. But it’s the one thing I would have elaborated on if I’d had more words to use.

One thing I think people neglect to consider about the Good Samaritan is that he wouldn’t have been in any position to help the man if he didn’t have an animal to put the guy on, money to pay his medical bills and leave him in the inn for a couple of days.

(Laughs) Come on now, Vox. You’re lawyering it. I’ve made my semi-apology, let’s leave it at that.

Fair enough, fair enough. So Mark Steyn referred to what he called your “summary execution” by Lowry. Was it really that summary? Were you given any opportunity to walk yourself back or was it just a case of you’ve stuck your head in it, so off with your head? Lowry seemed to view the article as some sort of resignation, was that your intention?

Not at all. I thought it was just a routine piece.

The other theory that was making the rounds was that your obvious guilt could be mitigated by the fact that you’d been affected by your cancer treatments. Is there any veracity to that?

Nope, I don’t believe that at all. I’m on a monthly chemotherapy cycle and at the beginning of the cycle, where they pump the poison into you, you really are out of it for a few days. But then, a couple of weeks later, you’re back pretty much to normal. And that piece was written at the end of the cycle, so, no, I don’t believe it’s got anything to do with it.

National Review has a long and rather Stalinist history of purging its writers, including Joe Sobran, Samuel Francis, Ann Coulter, and now you. Is this part of National Review’s culture or is there something else going on there?

On National Review’s behalf, let me just correct you on Coulter. She wasn’t a National Review employee, they just syndicated her column and they stopped syndicating it. I think that was all that happened there. I’m sorry to sound defensive on National Review’s behalf, but it is something they have to do, to some degree. I actually spoke to Bill Buckley about this a couple of times. As a committed conservative, it hurts to say this, but there are a lot of crazy people on the political right and if you’re going to have any kind of presentation in the media marketplace at all, you do have to keep fending them off. Unfortunately, it’s a matter of judgment about which ones you fend off and which ones you let into the tent. It’s awfully hard to get right, and I know, Bill Buckley had said to me, that he didn’t think he’d always gotten it exactly right. It’s an approximate art. You sometimes boot out the wrong person and sometimes keep in the wrong person. Bill called it a policing exercise and it does have to be done. If you’re going to be a, oh dear, respectable publication, and get your ideas out there in the marketplace, you do have to draw a line against the craziest of the crazies. It’s not an easy line to draw. It’s not an easy judgment to make. Sometimes you get it wrong. I think Bill got it wrong with Sam Francis.

You sound remarkably comfortable having been found to be on the wrong side of the line.

Well, I say again, it’s a hard thing to get right. Did Rich Lowry get it right in my case? You be the judge.

Who will be the next to be purged at National Review? Most of the betting money is going towards Mark Steyn or Victor Davis Hanson.

What, no Mark Krikorian? No, VDH and Mark Steyn will have positions at National Review as long as they want them. VDH will self-purge before it becomes necessary to excommunicate him.

Some things must be read

If one is to believe them. This is an incredibly amusing letter from a white, deeply liberal, very not-racist woman who is deeply concerned about the insufficient profits of a prospective hip-hop club proprietor:

My name is Jennifer McMillen, and I live only a few doors down from the proposed site of Prime 6. Like most of the folks at the CB6 meeting on Monday night, I too have been concerned about the impending entrance of Prime 6 into our community and our daily lives.

I’m not generally the type of person that speaks up, (I remained silent during the entire Monday night meeting), but in this situation, I’m hopeful that I’ve stumbled onto a solution that makes so much sense for *both* parties that I’m beyond excited to share it with all of you.

First, let me explain what’s at the heart of this conflict: I know for a fact that there’s no single type of establishment (or type of bar/club patron for that matter) that Park Slopers would inherently view as “undesirable.” I don’t think anyone would deny that Park Slopers are about the least “racist” people on the planet.

What IS causing strife in this situation is that over the last ten years, Park Slope has become a family-oriented and family-centric community. This can be annoying at times – believe me, as someone who has chosen not to have children, I’m more than aware of the self-entitled attitude that often pervades parts of our community.

Nevertheless, it’s just a fact that in this neighborhood, family comes first.

Prime 6 has to realize this – but at the same time – Park Slope families need to realize that this is a free country, and that Prime 6 has a right to exist. Furthermore, no one can legally stop the owners from doing what it is they’re going to do.

So here’s the gist of my big idea: Isn’t there some middle ground between this spot being a stroller repair shop and it being a full-on hip-hop club?

No one can change the fact that Prime 6 WILL exist – they have their liquor license, and nothing’s going to deter them from opening. BUT: What if owner Akiva Ofshtein could be convinced that his business will see far more financial success as a different kind of nightlife establishment. Instead of focussing on hip-hop and urban entertainment, what if Prime 6 embraced some of the more indie local artists of ALL races who live and perform in the area.

Now, why might this devoutly anti-racist woman imagine that having an establishment devoted to “hip-hop and urban entertainment” would not be compatible with families or white spinsters like herself? What could the problem possibly be?

The only difference between white “racists” like John Derbyshire and avowedly anti-racist whites like Ms McMillen is that the latter completely lacks self-awareness. The observable and provable reality is that every single mentally functioning adult on the planet is racist because racism, in its most commonly recognized form, is nothing more than the possession of a functioning pattern-recognition capacity.

But the woman’s solution is even more amusing than the self-delusion. What a surprise that a liberal white woman would believe that an “indie” club would be more popular than an urban one. After all, doesn’t everyone love, love, love Tori Amos and Sarah Mclachlan?

Abandon the Word

This is not a statement about Christianity, but rather, concerns that infernal organization known as Microsoft and one of its flagship products that has badly lost its way:

Nearly two decades and several text-handling paradigms ago, I was an editorial assistant at a weekly newspaper, where a few freelancers still submitted their work on typewritten pages. Stories would come in over the fax machine. If the printout was clear enough, and if our giant flatbed scanner was in the mood, someone would scan the pages in, a text-recognition program would decipher the letters, and we would comb the resulting electronic file for nonsense and typos. If the scanner wasn’t in the mood, we would prop up the hard copy beside a computer and retype the whole thing. Technology was changing fast, and some people were a few steps slow. You couldn’t blame them, really, but for those of us who were fully in the computer age, those dead-tree sheets meant tedious extra work.

Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone’s archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It’s time to give up on Word.

I switched over to OpenOffice years ago, then after Sun was acquired by Oracle, to LibreOffice. I had to use a recent version of Word a few months ago, and although I’d been using Word since it was first released, I found the latest version very difficult to use. It’s the perfect example of a software company taking a perfectly useful, if flawed, piece of software and methodically making it less and less usable with every release.

If I was in charge of the Word project, I would throw out everything and start over from scratch. The fact that a single eight-character document is automatically transformed into a 16,224-character monster is lunacy squared.

Feminism is failure

Female careers are a fallback plan:

Forget ambition, financial security and that first-class degree. A controversial study has concluded that the real reason women pursue careers is because they fear they are too unattractive to get married. The research team, made up of three women and two men, said that when men are thin on the ground, ‘women are more likely to choose briefcase over baby’.

And the plainer a woman is, they claim, the more she is driven to succeed in the workplace.

It’s long been observed that the uglier a woman is, the more likely she is to be a feminist. And it was always logical, too, that women who couldn’t compete with other women in the traditional manner would seek to change the rules of the game. But now there is some scientific evidence supporting both the logic and the observation, and it could be very useful in helping counteract the feminist propaganda that inundates young women from the time they are girls, encouraging them to waste their youth and fertility in chasing careers rather than families.

The message is a simple and straighforward one: feminism is for female losers in the game of Life.

Anonymous comments

A word of warning. Because it has gotten too confusing too keep track of them, all Anonymous comments will be shot on sight from now on. If you’re going to comment and aren’t logged in with Google, make use of the Name/URL option; you don’t need to enter a URL, just a name.

“Never worked a day in her life”

James Taranto correctly excoriates the feminist philosophy that served as the foundation for Hilary Rosen’s epically stupid attack on Ann Romney:

In truth, anti-momism was the very heart of “The Feminine Mystique.” Friedan’s argument was that motherhood and homemaking were soul-deadening occupations and that pursuing a professional career was the way for a woman to “become complete.” She agreed with the midcentury misogynists that a stay-at-home mother was, in Friedan’s words, “castrative to her husband and sons.” But she emphasized that women were “fellow victims.”

The book might as well have been titled “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” Today, of course, she can, and because feminism has entailed a diminution of male responsibility, she often has no choice. As we’ve noted, an increasing number of women are choosing domestic life, finding it a liberating alternative to working for a boss. But to do so requires a husband with considerable means.

Fifty years ago, Ann Romney’s life would have made her just a regular woman. Today, she is a countercultural figure–someone who lives in a way that the dominant culture regards with a hostile disdain. And she has chosen to live that way, which is why Hilary Rosen, as an intellectual heiress to Betty Friedan, regards her as a villain rather than a victim.

Taranto also points out something that I consider vital. He effectively draws the distinction between Romney’s accomplishments and Rosen’s: “Raising children is a lot of work, and we’d venture to say it’s more valuable work than, say, lobbying for the music industry or helping BP with its crisis communications, to name two of the highlights of Rosen’s career.”

I’ll go even farther. Bearing and raising children is far more important than anything any working woman has ever done in her professional career in the entire history of Mankind. The silly, short-sighted, white trash teen mothers on MTV are contributing more to the human race than the most intelligent, highly educated, and accomplished women have ever done for it.

If a woman wants to devote sixteen or more years of her life to “education”, then follow it up by sitting in a cubicle and transferring information from point A to point B, that’s her legal right. But it’s not doing anything for the human race, and indeed, considering the economically negative effects of the government agencies and human resources departments where women are inordinately employed, economic irrelevance is probably the best case scenario.

Linda Hirschman once claimed: ““The tasks of housekeeping and child-rearing are not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings.”

But she had it wrong. She had it completely backwards, because there is absolutely nothing a woman, however educated and intelligent, can do that is more important or more vital than raising children. And while home-making not the physical equivalent of working in a coal mine, it is at least as laborious as most white collar employment. I have no affection for Captain Underoos and if he wins in November I think he will probably be even worse than Obama has been. But it is as evil as it is stupid to attack his wife for doing the one thing that the human race absolutely requires for its survival.

The end of the Holocult

Germany is finally rejecting the self-serving religion of collective ethnic responsibility for historical crimes:

Sharp criticism of Israel, particularly from the left, has long been a tradition among European intellectuals, and Mr. Grass’s poem caused little stir on the Continent outside of Germany. But political and scholarly elites here have more often resisted that trend, tending to see basic support for Israel as a German responsibility, if not a necessity, after the Holocaust.

But the public response to the furor over Mr. Grass’s poem suggests that that attitude is breaking down as World War II recedes into history. “In the populism you see surfacing on a large scale, the public is all behind Grass,” said Georg Diez, an author and journalist at the magazine Der Spiegel who has written critically of the poem.

One needn’t be a Holocaust denier nor an anti-semite to recognize the fundamental absurdity of the “Never Again” cult. After all, there is no more justification to hold the Germans of today responsible for the large-scale slaughter of the Polish and Russian Jews sixty years ago than there was for medieval Christians to hold the Jews of their day responsible for crucifying Jesus.

The Holocaust doesn’t justify anything. It doesn’t justify Jewish paranoia about American Christians, it doesn’t justify open immigration, it doesn’t justify Israeli aggression in the Middle East, it doesn’t justify American aggression in the Middle East, and it certainly doesn’t justify the neocon willingness to sacrifice American interests for Israeli ones. The Holocaust was just one of the many bloody historical tragedies that illustrate the fallen state of Man, and it wasn’t even unique at the time given the Nazi slaughter of the Slavs, the Soviet slaughter of the Ukrainians, and the Japanese slaughter of the Chinese that all took place during the same historical milieu.

Nor is it necessary to justify the existence of Israel. Israel has the same right to defend itself that every other nation does. Israel has the same right to exist that every other nation does. Israel is neither a saintly nation that can do no wrong nor an evil fascist state that can do no right. It’s just a small nation-state that is both praised and criticized to a degree that greatly exceeds what its actions merit.

Now, despite the best efforts of Hollywood’s Jews to preserve it as a useful propaganda device, people are increasingly beginning to abandon the iconic notion of collective ethnic responsibility for past events. This is in part due to immigration, as I doubt any of the 50 million Central and South Americans now resident in the United States feel any more residual guilt for the Holocaust than they do for 19th century slavery or the Mongol invasions. But it’s also due to the perspective that the passage of time always eventually brings.

It’s hard to believe in the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust in the light of the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the massacres in Rwanda. It’s even harder to believe that the National Socialists were viciously attacking completely innocent scapegoats for absolutely no reason in light of how the members of an ethnic group that comprises only 2.1 percent of the U.S. population are now massively overrepresented in the House and Senate, at 6.2 percent and 13 percent respectively. And while the Federal Reserve isn’t doing anything it hasn’t been doing since 1913, it probably doesn’t greatly help the Jewish cause that Ben Shalom Bernanke is the individual now presiding over a particularly problematic stage for the US fiat currency.

Anyhow, my thought is that if a small and distinctive group of people want to band together and acquire as much political power as possible, they had damned well better be sure to do a good job of running things for the benefit of everyone, not merely their own particular interests, because if they’re simply going to play the interest group game, eventually the majority or one of the larger minority groups is going to band together and do whatever is necessary to throw them out of power and keep them out. The fact that the two primary interests of the U.S. Congress presently appear to be a) sending trillions to Wall Street and b) supporting Israeli foreign policy does not bode well in this regard, as it suggests that there is a small, but real risk that if the U.S. economy crashes and the nation begins to divide on its ethnic fault lines, even Americans may eventually find themselves casting about for an all-too-familiar scapegoat.

The global medieval

While it is generally a category error to talk about the medieval period outside of Europe, it is perfectly appropriate to discuss the warming that took place during medieval times and has bedeviled the climate change propagandists. Unsurprisingly, the latest evidence indicates that the AGW/CC scammers are incorrect – again – and the warming period was not limited to Europe:

Current theories of the causes and impact of global warming have been thrown into question by a new study which shows that during medieval times areas as far apart as Europe and Antarctica both warmed up. It then cooled down naturally and there was even a ‘mini ice age’.

A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn’t just confined to Europe. In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica.

At present the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argues that the Medieval Warm Period was confined to Europe.

It shouldn’t be at all surprising that the climate scientists have been shown to be wrong again. Remember, experiment-backed science is only about 11% reliable according to the scientific method itself, so you can safely expect that whenever scientists make a new public announcement, they’re going to be wrong around 90 percent of the time.

The rule of thumb is that if you can’t make a physical object or machine based on the scientific principles involved, the scientists are wrong. One can reasonably trust engineers, engineering, and technology, one cannot reasonably place any confidence in scientists, science, or the current scientific consensus.