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Who is your neighbor?

The Parable of the Good Samaritan:

Behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?”

He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind and your neighbour as yourself.”

He said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live.”

But he, desiring to justify himself, asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbour?”

Jesus answered, “A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he traveled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, and gave them to the host, and said to him, ‘Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.’ Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbour to him who fell among the robbers?”

He said, “He who showed mercy on him.”

Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

There are a few interesting points here, although I think it is probably important to avoid being too Pharasaically pedantic in considering them. First is the confusion between who one’s neighbor is and who is not. The usual Churchian concept is that everyone is your neighbor and the Christian should be mindlessly nice to everyone. This is why Churchianity is essentially the religion of niceness that doesn’t so much preach salvation through faith or works, but through etiquette and due regard for the social mores. But if we follow the pure logic of the parable, one’s neighbor is the individual who shows mercy to you. It’s not everyone, in fact, it cannot possibly be everyone since only one of the three men was the correct answer. Second is the fact that the Samaritan had the wherewithal to help the helpless man. Third is the fact that the man was actually helpless, half-dead, to be specific.

So, this makes a few things clear. First, one clearly has a Christian duty to help the helpless. Therefore, this duty just as clearly does not apply as any sort of moral imperative to the non-Christian. Nietzsche, for one, would howl at the concept. Second, while one should offer assistance when one has the ability to do so, it’s not a blanket requirement to everyone. What would the Poor Samaritan, lacking an animal to carry the injured man, without either oil or wine for his wounds, and devoid of money to pay for an inn, been able to do for the man? And third, the parable says absolutely nothing about responding to a call for assistance, which may or may not be legitimate. It is an extrapolation, and a groundless one, to expand the Christian duty from helping the helpless to helping everyone who requests assistance.

There is a significant difference between “lying on the ground wounded and half-dead” and “standing next to a parked car, waving one’s arms”, especially given that most individuals have cell phones and are perfectly capable of summoning appropriate assistance on their own. So, while one can do so for a variety of reasons, given these distinctions, I don’t think that anyone can reasonably appeal to the Parable of the Good Samaritan as a basis for criticizing John Derbyshire’s advice to young people concerning individuals of African descent in apparent distress requesting assistance.

It’s over, it’s Romney

The intrepid Republicans are going into the election led by Captain Underoos:

Finally embracing reality, Rick Santorum decided to take the easy way out rather than the hard way, leaving the GOP presidential race before a potentially humiliating loss in his home state.

It’s nice to see Republican respect for tradition. They are certainly living up to their reputation as The Stupid Party. Even if Romney wins, Republicans will lose.

Lest you think I jest

On April 5th, I made the seemingly absurd claim that “problem isn’t that [Paul Krugman’s] solutions are old, failed policies from the 1930s, but that they are old, failed policies from the 13th century” in reference to the inflation created by Gaikhatu Khan’s paper currency in 1294.

Absurd, one might well have concluded. Crackpottish. Surely it must be exaggeration for rhetorical effect, at the very least.

And yet, on that very same day, Paul Krugman published an article in the New York Times entitled Not Enough Inflation, in which he declared:

[L]arge parts of the private sector continue to be crippled by the overhang of debt accumulated during the bubble years; this debt burden is arguably the main thing holding private spending back and perpetuating the slump. Modest inflation would, however, reduce that overhang — by eroding the real value of that debt — and help promote the private-sector recovery we need. Meanwhile, other parts of the private sector (like much of corporate America) are sitting on large hoards of cash; the prospect of moderate inflation would make letting the cash just sit there less attractive, acting as a spur to investment — again, helping to promote overall recovery.

In short, far from fearing that more action against unemployment might lead to an uptick in inflation, the Fed should actually welcome that prospect.

I rest my case.

Gawker interviews Derb

This is a surprisingly straightforward interview of John Derbyshire by Gawker’s Maureen O’Connor:

Is racism—yours or other people’s—a problem?

Depends what you mean by a problem. The mild and tolerant racism I’ve owned up to, and which seems (from these Implicit Association studies) to be very common, is not usually a problem in people’s personal social lives. It’s never been a problem in my life. I’ve always got on pretty well with persons of all races, excepting those individuals nobody can get along with—we’ve all met ’em. But then, of course, as an individual, one can “navigate” through life, making choices that avoid difficult quandaries, by just the kinds of strategies outlined in my article.

Those irenic results don’t scale up. Entire societies don’t have the “navigational” freedom of individuals. The natural preference most people have for some races—usually their own—over others means that multiracial societies are plagued with stresses that you don’t see in monoracial societies. The tendency in modern times is to separation. Look at residential and educational patterns in the U.S.A. I discuss these issues at length in my book We Are Doomed.

A friend of mine who is an academic social scientist likes to say that if you want to know what people believe, there are two methods of inquiry: (A) ask them, or (B) observe their behavior. It’s a depressing fact about human nature that if you apply both (A) and (B) to a given situation, the answers you get will not necessarily be the same. Whether we are, as our current Attorney General said, a nation of cowards about race, I don’t know; but looking at those residential and educational patterns, it’s awfully hard to deny that we are a nation of liars.

The big question is whether these problems, as they manifest themselves in the U.S.A., are solvable. Current orthodoxy is that they are, and offers a laundry list of solution methods. Fix the schools! End poverty! Stamp out racism! Affirmative action! Fifty years ago a thoughtful person could sign on to those prescriptions. I know: I was around: I did. Yes (we said) once unjust laws had been struck down, and some social massaging of that sort been done for a few years, the races would merge in happy harmony, and the word “race” and its derivatives would drop out of the language. We all believed that. I believed it.

Plainly this hasn’t happened, except of course in the upper classes, which go by their own rules. For a thoughtful person today to believe that these social-engineering nostrums will (for example) bring black crime rates to a level indistinguishable from white crime rates, involves a strenuous act of what Orwell called “doublethink”—massive self-deception. Does anyone, after all those decades, all those trillions of dollars, all those failed social-engineering experiments, does anyone really, honestly still believe in the nostrums? I don’t.

My own sense of the thing is that underneath the happy talk, underneath the dogged adherence to failed ideas and dead theories, underneath the shrieking and anathematizing at people like me, there is a deep and cold despair. In our innermost hearts,we don’t believe racial harmony can be attained. Hence the trend to separation. We just want to get on with our lives away from each other. Yet for a moralistic, optimistic people like Americans, this despair is unbearable. It’s pushed away somewhere we don’t have to think about it. When someone forces us to think about it, we react with fury. That little boy in the Andersen story about the Emperor’s new clothes? The ending would be more true to life if he had been lynched by a howling mob of outraged citizens.

Have you given your children any of the advise outlined in your “The Talk: The Nonblack Version”? If so, how did they receive it?

They have, as I said in the article, had bits and pieces of it, though never in a formal let’s-sit-down-and-have-a-chat [links to video] kind of way. Both took it with some skepticism, even some disgust in my daughter’s case. Both have been through the public-school system and taken in a lot of the left-liberal PC indoctrination in which that system is marinated. So I’d have to say they weren’t very receptive. Was there ever a time when kids listened to their parent’s advice? But at least they’ve heard it, and know that there’s another point of view besides the PC flapdoodle, a point of view held by non-crazy persons. One does one’s best.

It’s not hard to see that Derb’s position is either reasonable and wholly unobjectionable or unthinkable. Those who conclude it is the former are driven by facts and observation of the real world. Those who conclude it is the latter are driven by ideology and the myth of equality. That is how we can be confident that Derb is correct, because the emptiness of ideology that is contradicted by observation will inevitably be exposed sooner or later. As Derb himself notes, 50 years ago it was possible to credibly subscribe to the equalitarian position. He once did. I once did, although always with some degree of suspicion that something wasn’t quite right. But after five decades of the orthodox racial model’s complete and unmitigated failure, it simply isn’t possible for any thinking individual to do so any longer.

I was also pleased to be informed that unlike his fellow NROniks, Mark Steyn was bold enough to openly defend Derb and oppose what he refers to as Lowry’s “summary execution”. Since I no longer link to the National Review site, I shall simply quote the relevant bits from Steyn here:

I didn’t agree with Derb on many things, from Ron Paul and talk radio to God and science. For his part, he reckoned I was a bit of a wimp on what he called “the Great Unmentionables.” He thought that neuroscientists and geneticists’ understanding of race trumped my touching belief in “culture.” I’m not so sure: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados? Why is India India and Pakistan Pakistan? Skin color and biological determinism don’t get you very far on that.

But I almost always learned something from his columns, and, at a time when punditry is increasingly parochial, I appreciated his range of historical and literary allusion (his recent “Duke of Marlborough moment,” for example). He will be impossible to replace on that front….

The net result of Derb’s summary execution by NR will be further to shrivel the parameters, and confine debate in this area to ever more unreal fatuities. He knew that mentioning the Great Unmentionables would sooner or later do him in, and, in an age when shrieking “That’s totally racist!” is totally gay, he at least has the rare satisfaction of having earned his colors. Yet what are we to make of wee, inoffensive Dave Weigel over at Slate? The water still churning with blood, the sharks are circling poor old Dave for the sin of insufficiently denouncing the racist Derbyshire. Weigel must go for not enthusiastically bellowing, “Derbyshire must go!” Come to think of it, I should probably go for querying whether Weigel should go.

NR shouldn’t be rewarding those who want to play this game. The more sacrifices you offer up, the more ravenously the volcano belches.

PS If Derb’s piece is sufficiently beyond the pale that its author must be terminated immediately, why is its publisher — our old friend Taki — proudly listed on the NR masthead?

Good for Steyn. It was well and bravely done. Of course, he, along with Victor Davis Hanson, is widely considered to be one of the leading contenders for NRO’s next purge.

The intrinsic unreliability of science

Further evidence that science can only be trusted at the point it becomes engineering:

A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer — a high proportion of them from university labs — are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications — papers in top journals, from reputable labs — for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.

Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Fascinating. That’s an 88.6 percent unreliability rate for landmark, gold-standard science. Imagine how bad it is in the stuff that is only peer-reviewed and isn’t even theoretically replicable, like evolutionary biology. Keep that figure in mind the next time some secularist is claiming that we should structure society around scientific technocracy; they are arguing for the foundation of society upon something that has a reliability rate of 11 percent.

Now, I’ve noted previously that atheists often attempt to compare ideal science with real theology and noted that in a fair comparison, ideal theology trumps ideal science. But as we gather more evidence about the true reliability of science, it is becoming increasingly obvious that real theology also trumps real science. The selling point of science is supposed to be its replicability… so what is the value of science that cannot be repeated?

A purge too far

It’s a little-known fact, but I was once selected as the heir apparent to William F. Buckley by his syndicate, Universal Press Syndicate. As he was getting quite old and obviously approaching the end of his run, they’d looked over all the columnists of my generation and decided that I was the one whose intelligence and writing style was most similar to that of Buckley.

The syndication went nowhere; the Dallas Morning News was the only paper to pick up my UPS column – which was the same as my WND column – and we learned that the newspaper editors a) believed that my sentence structure was too complex and my vocabulary was too expansive for the eighth-grade reading level they were targeting, and b) didn’t want another right-wing columnist when they already had Ann Coulter. The outcome might have been very different if UPS sold its columns in package deals the way some of the other syndicates do, but they reasonably believed every column should stand on its own. So, after 18 months, Universal gave up and my second spell as a nationally syndicated columnist came to an end. But it always gave me a small sense of accomplishment, because I’d long been a reader of William F. Buckley’s magazine.

I used to read National Review in the library at college. I liked Commentary as well, but National Review always had a compelling sense of ideological style to it that made it seem both relevant to the times as well as moderately intellectual. I fell out of the habit of reading it after college, but then discovered NRO and The Corner not long after it was introduced online and began reading that on a daily basis. I thought about looking into becoming an NR contributor from time to time, but there was never really any reason to do so since WND’s traffic was already blowing away NRO’s and it would have been a step down in terms of readership even if it was a step up in terms of prestige.

I let my subscription to NR Digital go more out of a general sense that things were ideologically falling apart there than in response to any specific event. I disliked the growing My Party Left or Right theme there, was mystified by the total lack of competence concerning economics, and found the purge of Joe Sobran to be reprehensible. But I still read The Corner every day even though I seldom bothered with the articles on the main page. Readers here will recall that “NRO’S CORNER” was one of the featured Day Trip links for most of the last seven years. But then I read this post by Rich Lowry yesterday:

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,” or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.

Now, I know Derb, I’ve read his articles, I’ve read his books, I’ve interviewed him, and I’ve exchanged email with him. He is a good, decent, and intelligent man. And since National Review does not wish to associate with him any longer, I do not wish to support it in any way, shape, or form. So, I have removed the link from this blog and will not be reading either National Review or The Corner anymore. I would encourage those who number themselves in the Dread Ilk to similarly remove their bookmarks and ignore what has become an entirely superflous organ of the squishy Republican center.

I’m not doing this solely out of loyalty to Derb. If National Review was still publishing anything of genuine significance or interest, I would have to continue reading it simply for the information. But National Review no longer publishes anything that is remotely controversial, new, or interesting; Derb was last of that breed still remaining there. After all, one hardly requires National Review to be exposed to the following dogma:

1. Israel must be supported at all costs because it is the only democracy in the Middle East. Followed by an article about the Egyptian/Palestinian/Iraqi/Iranian/Syrian elections….
2. Any amount of immigration from anywhere is good for America as long as it is legal.
3. We love [insert race or other interest group here] more than liberals do.
4. Hispanics will turn conservative Real Soon Now.
5. [Insert most liberal candidate running] is actually the real conservative and should be the Republican candidate.
6. Winning elections is more important than purity of principle. Or any principle, for that matter.
7. [Republican] may be bad, but [Democrat] is worse.
8. I am a huge [Yankees/Red Sox] fan even though I don’t follow baseball and am from [city nowhere near NYC or Boston].
9. Support for the troops by finding further occupation for them in as-yet uninvaded Middle Eastern countries. Faster please!

Actually, after thinking about what I’ve read at NRO over the last few years, I find myself wondering why I was still bothering to read it at all. The inertia of habit, I suppose. Anyhow, I emailed both Derb and Jonah Goldberg yesterday. Derb appreciated the support although he noted that the retroactive admission that Enoch Powell had been right all along didn’t do Mr. Powell much good. Jonah and I had a civil exchange in which we simply had to agree to disagree, for while he considered the article to have been offensive and indefensible, I think it is very easily defended indeed. But, as I told Derb, the eventual conclusion is obvious: “As was the case with Enoch Powell, it will one day be common knowledge that John Derbyshire was right.”

I think it is very telling already that at most of the sites where Derbyshire has found support, the comments are running heavily in his favor, whereas at most of the places that condemn him, public comments are not even being permitted. My conclusion is that the race card had a lot more power and the equalitarian dogma was much more convincing when most white knowledge of the behavior of the African underclass was theoretical; desegregation, immigration, and smartphone videos means that the equalitarian propaganda is being rapidly trumped by actual experience and observation.

And finally, Derb’s focus on race realism is based solidly on the same reasoning that is shared by numerous observers of societal decline across the political spectrum. The rationale for his actions is probably best explained here, in a section taken from his 2012 speech at CPAC.

This is from Chapter 21 of The Bell Curve[1], in which Herrnstein and Murray are discussing possible consequences of cognitive stratification. Perhaps the most startling of the possibilities they suggest is that, quote, “Racism will emerge in a new and more virulent form.” Here is the passage that follows.

The tension between what the white elite is supposed to think and what it is actually thinking about race will reach something close to breaking point. This pessimistic prognosis must be contemplated: When the break comes, the result, as so often happens when cognitive dissonance is resolved, will be an overreaction in the other direction. Instead of the candor and realism about race that is so urgently needed, the nation will be faced with racial divisiveness and hostility that is as great as, or greater, than America experienced before the civil rights movement. We realize how outlandish it seems to predict that educated and influential Americans, who have been so puritanical about racial conversation, will openly revert to racism. We would not go so far as to say it is probable. It is, however, more than just possible. If it were to happen, all the scenarios for the custodial state would be more unpleasant — more vicious — than anyone can now imagine.

I should explain that by the phrase “the custodial state,” Herrnstein and Murray mean a sort of Indian-reservation policy in which the elites “fence off” the low-IQ underclass.

That our elites might turn racist does indeed sound outlandish. The reigning doctrine on race throughout the Western world today is the Standard Social Science Model, which I’ll just trim down to “Standard Model” in what follows. According to this doctrine, all observed group differences are the result of social forces. The Standard Model says that there is a conceivable, discoverable, attainable configuration of social forces in which all group differences would vanish; and that we ought to strive to shift our own society towards that configuration. Among our political and cultural elites, the Standard Model is universally accepted.

Looking to the future, there are three possibilities. One of them, Possibility One, is that our elites will continue to adhere to the Standard Model. The other two are implied in the extract I just quoted from Herrnstein and Murray: Possibility Two: We may attain “the candor and realism about race that is so urgently needed.” Possibility Three: Our elites will revert to “open racism.”

I expect Possibility Three. So does Derb. And the hostile reactions of people towards Derb’s futile attempts to push Possibility Two only underlines the assurance of that expectation. The European elites are already beginning to change direction; once that takes place, the American elites will be quick to follow.

WND column

Republicans nominate Romney

Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.
– Narcotics Anonymous

Four years ago, the Republican Party faced what appeared to be a reasonably winnable presidential election. The expected Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, had blundered away what should have been a sure thing by her refusal to take a stand against the unpopular military occupations, as well as the failure of her campaign manager to understand the rules by which Democratic delegates were awarded, and so Republicans were facing a national neophyte who had never won a competitive election at any level.

Reclaiming the crown

It was looking pretty grim there for a while. I took control of the center with my knights, but then launched an attempt on Ender’s king that was thwarted by quick action on the part of his rook. I fell behind by a rook and a knight, but managed to put enough pressure on with the threat of queening a pawn until I could restore the balance and get back in control of the game. He eventually took the pawn, but with my original queen behind his defenses, I managed to force a checkmate with the help of my last rook and an advancing pawn.

This could be getting ugly sooner than I thought, as he asked if I could find him any books on chess strategy. I think tomorrow I’ll insist that we finish our current ASL scenario, which I’ve already got in the bag. It’s hard to take too much satisfaction in winning at chess when your intrepid opponent spends the next hour fighting a space battle in the living room with the X-wings and TIE fighters that serve as pawns.

“He is not here”

On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ ” Then they remembered his words.

When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.
– Luke 24:1-12

Still INTJ

Some of the folks at Susan Walsh’s appear to have discovered Meyers-Briggs for the first time. So, I took the test given at the site they’ve been using and the result wasn’t exactly the biggest surprise.

67 Introverted
88 Intuitive
62 Thinking
78 Judging

However, this wasn’t enough to prevent Ender from beating me at chess for the first time. His knight held the center, he first nabbed one of my rooks when I got a little careless in setting up an exchange of bishops, then managed to use his one-rook advantage to queen a pawn while holding off my desperate attempt to do the same. My rook was too occupied defending my own advancing pawn to make an attempt on his castled king, so three moves later, it was checkmate.