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“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.
“The Deported”
In honor of The Original Cyberpunk belatedly getting the March issue of Stupefying Stories out the door, which as I mentioned contains one of my short stories, I’m posting the story that was published in the October 2011 issue. Ten points if you can correctly identify the author whose style I imitated here – and if you happen to already know, please keep your mouth shut and let those who don’t see if they can guess it. “The Deported” was written in keeping with the “ghost story” theme of the October issue, but the most frightening thing about it may be that the Italian town in which it is set was all but destroyed by flooding and mudslides in the same month the anthology was published.
The Deported
Stupefying Stories, October 2011
Vox Day
It was the fourth day of our summer holiday in Vernazza, a little fishing village in the Cinque Terre. We had spent the morning on a charming hike through the hills, lunched in Monterosso al Mare, then enjoyed a languid afternoon in the sun on the beach there. After hiking back and taking a brief but restorative nap, the six of us had reconvened for the evening on the terrace overlooking the sea. We were well into our second bottle of prosecco as Francois attempted to convince Bertrand’s wife, Michèle, that one could not genuinely claim to be an atheist and yet still believe in ghosts.
“There is more to a term than its etymology, ma cherie,” he declared, punctuating his words with an authoritative jab of his cigarette. “When we reject the possibility of existence of gods, we are necessarily rejecting with it the very idea of the supernatural. If one cannot see it, or touch it, or experience it in any material manner, then it is entirely apparent that it simply does not exist.”
“But what about love?” Michèle protested. She was an intelligent, educated woman, without a religious bone in her slender body, but she did harbor a lamentable affection for crystals, feng shui, and any number of fashionable absurdities. “What about hate?”
I reached out to place my glass on the side table when I noticed a smile on the face of the young German man sitting to our left. I had seen him before. He arrived in Vernazza the day after us, but apparently alone, for we had not seen him in the company of anyone other than the occasional waiter since then. He nodded to me, which I found to be a little surprising, as we had, of course, been speaking French. The German, for such I naturally assumed him to be, was a big, beefy fellow, with a sun-reddened face and the sort of fine blond hair that is all too liable to disappear before a man’s fortieth year.
“Pardon me, monsieur, I merely happened to overhear the conversation,” he said in fluent, if provincial, French. “It reminded me of something.”
“Ghosts or gods?” I asked him. The others, surprised to hear the German speaking our language, stopped talking and turned to listen to us.
“Perhaps both. Perhaps neither. Who can say?” He gave a shrug that was almost Gallic in its fatalism. “I only know there are things in this world that neither priest nor scientist can explain to my satisfaction. Things I have seen with my own eyes.”
“Do you believe in God?” Bertrand leaned over and asked in an aggressive tone. He is one of my oldest and dearest friends, but at times, he can be a trial. He lost his beloved father at the age of seven in an automobile accident and has been demanding answers of God and anyone who is foolish enough to admit to believing in God ever since.
But the blond man only chuckled at his vehemence and raised his glass of red wine in an ironic salute. “I am Swiss. Of course I believe in God. Do we not worship Mammon?”
“Don’t we all,” Michèle said theatrically. Everyone laughed except Bertrand.
The Swiss’s name was Beat Kistler. He was, he explained, from an old family in the canton of Zurich, but his mother was Vaudoise and he was awarded a criminology degree by the University of Lausanne. After graduation, he joined the Geneva police force and in his third year was reassigned to a task force assisting the Swiss Federal Migration Office in processing immigrants who were seeking asylum. And it was there, in the detention center, that he had seen something that he found inexplicable, even now. We were all interested to hear his mysterious story, for it was eminently clear that he was an educated and level-headed man. He told us his tale without resort to drama, in a calm and relaxed manner.
“The first thing you must understand,” he said, “is that most of the asylum seekers we see in the federal system are Africans. Nigerians are the most common. They’re economic migrants, of course, but somewhere along the way, word gets around the community that if they can present themselves as political victims, there is a chance they will be able to receive a residence permit and stay in the country. We can’t allow most of them to remain, you understand, because they have no skills, they have no means of supporting themselves, and they simply cannot afford to live in such an expensive country. The franc is very high, you know. And, in any event, we have no room for them; there literally isn’t anywhere for them to live. The city of Lagos alone has more people than we have in all of Switzerland.
“The Migration Office reviews about fifteen thousand applicants per year. About a third of them can be sent immediately to other European states, because the Dublin accord requires them to apply for asylum in the state that served as their port of entry. So we send them to Italy, Spain, or in some cases, to you, in France. Another third leave on their own once we explain to them that they will not, under any circumstances, be permitted to remain. But the remainder—ah, well, that is where things occasionally get out of order.
“You should hear the lies they tell. Many times, they are most amusing. The sort of young men who are adventurous enough to make it all the way to Switzerland from Africa seldom have much in the way of education and so it’s not uncommon for them to fail to properly understand what their legal advisers are telling them to say. So we hear men claiming they are facing female genital mutilation should they be forced to return home, or telling us their entire family was killed in a massacre even though we already have the rejected applications from three of their brothers in our files. Occasionally a story will check out and permission will be granted, but only in the most extreme cases. Out of the two thousand Nigerians who applied last year, I think perhaps one or two were given residence. The rest, we must somehow transport back to their home country.”
“Only one or two?” my wife protested. “Out of thousands? Surely you could take more!”
Beat smiled and shook his head. “A fifth of our residents are already foreigners as it is. And recall, none of these people are being oppressed or tortured in any way, in which case we would have a moral duty to help them. They simply want to live off the Swiss people. It’s not possible.”
“Enough about the Africans, what about the ghosts!” Bertrand was getting impatient.
“Before you can understand the significance of this, my friends, you must first accept the context of the situation. But I see that you have grasped the general idea, therefore I shall move on to the specific case of which I speak.
“Two years ago, I met a Nigerian man who did not fit the description of the sort of asylum seekers we are accustomed to see every day. He was older, in his fifties, and instead of giving his religion as either Christian or Muslim, his file showed that he was classified as an animist. The traditional religions are officially recognized in Nigeria, and in fact many of those who call themselves Christians or Muslims still pay due regard to their tribal gods and ancestral spirits.
“I was tasked to accompany the social worker who was assigned to interview him for his appeal hearing. This was necessary because both the asylum seekers and the deportees are held in detainment facilities, and, like prisoners everywhere, they sometimes get unruly. It’s mostly those who have already been sentenced to deportation, since they have little to lose if they behave badly, but sometimes the asylum seekers forget themselves and get out of hand as well.
“The contrast between the facilities and the inhabitants is stark. It is literally black and white. Most of the facilities are very new, all squares and fluorescent lighting, with undecorated walls painted white and the ceilings and floors covered with white tile. You cannot imagine a more lifeless and sterile environment. The Nigerians, on the other hand, are very dark-skinned and full of life. When they are happy, they sing and smile, and some of them play a sort of rhythmic music with their hands on the walls to which the others dance. Of course, some of them, particularly the less intelligent, are demoralized by their incarceration. In such cases, their behavior at times borders on the bestial. They glare and they snarl, they beg and they plead, at times they offer their bodies for pleasure, other times they spit at anyone who walks past their cells.
“This man was not one of the ones who act like animals. He had a dignity to him, and his file showed he had been a man of some substance in Lagos. His brother, now deceased, was a senior official in the Ministry of Finance, but he was closely tied to the progressive opposition party, which accounted for his emigration from the country after the corrupt election of 2007 that was essentially stolen by the party in power today.
“He spoke English; better English than I do. When the social worker interviewed him, he explained in a very lucid and coherent manner that to return to Nigeria meant death, not only for him, but for everyone around him. The reason he gave was that he had been cursed by an Igbo shaman in the employ of the new finance minister, the same man who was responsible for his brother’s death. He told us he was a shaman himself, but his ancestral spirits had been defeated by the shaman’s spirits during the conflict that surrounded the election in 2007.”
Michèle and I laughed. Bertrand snorted. “How did the immigration judge view that?”
“The social worker tried several times to explain to him that his appeal would be rejected, as ancestral spirits are not listed among the potential justifications for asylum accepted by the foreign office, but the Nigerian was absolutely insistent. He said he would not lie and he was absolutely convinced that his return would prove fatal, because the Igbo spirits would not permit it. As I said, he was a serious, dignified man, and if his claim hadn’t been so clearly impossible, one might have almost found it to be persuasive.
“I don’t know if the social worker actually cited the spirits or how things went at the hearing, all I know is that the appeal was unsuccessful, which of course was hardly surprising. The whole incident was very strange, but at the time I thought nothing more of it until two months later, when my entire unit was summoned in the middle of the night to help the Securitas guards deal with a riot that had broken out at that very facility. We were sent in wearing full riot gear, although we were only armed with mace and batons. We left our shields in the bus they used to bring us there, since they would only get in the way.”
“You must have been very frightened,” interjected Aurélie, Francois’s partner of the last five years.
“No, for the most part we were annoyed at being dragged from the comfort of our beds. A few of the more aggressive lads, they were bragging about how they were going to break heads and so forth, you know the type. But mostly we just wanted to go in, get the job done, and hopefully return in time to get a few hours of sleep before the sun came up. I’d been on duty since the morning at the federal court in Bern, so my main feeling was one of exhaustion.
“Once we entered, we quickly realized it wasn’t a riot. All the lights were out, but the facility technicians said there was no loss of power, which was confusing. Our helmets have flashlights, so we switched them on and entered. There was screaming, but they were screams of terror, not the wordless roaring you hear when a crowd is out of control, and they were coming from somewhere deep inside the building. The asylum seekers were still in their cells, but most of the deportees were gathered in the cafeteria and out of their heads with fear. They weren’t rioting; they’d broken out of their cells because they were all scared to death of something. They greeted us with hugs and tears, as if we were their saviors. Right about then, the screams stopped. I think the sudden silence, more than anything else, started to make us feel nervous.
“Our captain talked one of them, a big man with a shaved head, into leading us towards the deportee cells from where the screams had been coming. Most of the cells were empty, but then we came upon a cell with a closed door. The captain had the keys, so he unlocked it and discovered two dead Nigerians inside. Their eyes were open, but they were dead and there wasn’t a mark on them. The deportee who was acting as our guide was shaking a little, but he said he was a Jesus man and ‘the shadow that kill’ couldn’t touch him. We passed two more locked cells and found a pair of dead Nigerians inside both of them, and again, the dead men were unmarked.
“Now remember, it was pitch black down there, except for our helmet lights, which aren’t as powerful as they should be. I thought I heard something, so I took my baton out, shook it out to its full length, and went to investigate. I looked in a cell on the other side of the hall, and first things I saw were two eyes; big, round, white eyes, almost like when your automobile catches a fox’s eyes along the side of the road. Then I saw the rest of it…
“I must have shouted because there were eight or nine lights shining into the cell almost right away.”
“The old man, the shaman—,” breathed Francois.
“Precisely,” nodded the Swiss. “He was crouched over the body of his cellmate, eating his heart! It was him we had heard screaming earlier; the cellmate, because the shaman had painted all sorts of evil-looking symbols on the walls of their cell in his blood, before finally taking his heart and killing him. He must have been doing it for an hour or more, because the floor was completely covered in blood. When they counted later, there were more than one hundred separate symbols on the walls.”
“What did the symbols mean?”
“The psychologists asked him that later. We didn’t ask questions then, you see, we just unlocked the cell, threw open the door, maced him and put him in shackles. There wasn’t anything we could do for the cellmate, of course. But the symbols; that’s the intriguing thing. He told the psychologists they were to summon the spirits of the Igbo ancestors and offer them the lives of the men in the cells around him as an attempt to appease them. He said the six men who died in the other cells meant that his offering had been accepted, but it was all to no avail since we had interrupted him before he could finish the ritual. His cellmate was Igbo, so that’s why he had to eat his heart; to sort of make himself Igbo, in a way, so the spirits would see him as one of theirs and leave him alone when he returned to Lagos.”
“That sounds rather heartless of the man,” Bertrand commented wryly.
“Bertrand!” Michèle protested. “But didn’t you say you had to unlock his cell when you found him?”
“It was definitely locked. So were the other cells. But the other men were definitely dead as well and the times of their deaths were consistent with the time that the lights went out and the riot started.”
“Interesting,” mused Bertrand. “Of course, these other Nigerians were uneducated, superstitious, and more or less animists for the most part. Therefore, it is safe to assume they were highly susceptible to suggestion. You said that even the Christian man was terrified. So, if they knew he was a shaman and became aware of what he intended, it’s entirely possible that they were quite literally frightened to death!”
“But that doesn’t explain the lights,” I pointed out.
“That might have merely been an unfortunate coincidence.”
“The lights came on a few minutes after we maced the shaman,” the Swiss explained. “But that’s not the end of my story. Three months after the riot, my friend Walther and I were assigned to the squad that accompanies the deportation flight to Lagos. When we reviewed the deportee list, I recognized one of the names as belonging to the man I’d last seen devouring his companion’s heart. I will not lie; at that moment I felt such a fear as I have never known before. I heard no voice, but suddenly I understood the message, as clearly as you hear me speak to you now, that I should not, under any circumstances, board that flight. The ancestral spirits had been strong enough to kill six healthy young men a continent away—and the ritual to appease them was a failure.
“I made some excuse to my captain, told him I was unwell or something, I don’t recall. To my shame, I did not do more than make a half-hearted attempt to convince Walther to avoid the flight as well. I arranged to have lunch with him, but when I mentioned my fears, he laughed at me for being an irrational, superstitious fool and I was too embarrassed to argue the point with him. I bitterly regretted that a week later, when I received a telephone call from my captain. He told me that the Swiss flight from Zurich to Lagos had gone down not long after entering Nigerian airspace. There were no survivors.”
“Oh my God,” breathed Michèle.
“How awful for you,” said my wife.
The Swiss only smiled ruefully and lit a cigarette. He inhaled thoughtfully, and tapped out the small amount of ash on the tip. “Rather more awful for Walther and the others, I should think.”
“What caused the crash?” I asked. “I can’t imagine the aviation authorities attributed it to angry ancestral spirits.”
“After the black box was analyzed, the experts concluded that the co-pilot had fallen asleep and the pilot had a heart attack. But to my mind, that sounds like an attempt to explain away the inexplicable. There was no mechanical failure; no signs of distress from the cockpit. Unfortunately the plane burned, so conjecture was all that was left to them, in the absence of anything conclusive from the black box.”
He looked at Bertrand. “So, have you an explanation for me, other than an unfortunate string of unlikely coincidences?”
Bertrand, to his credit, wasn’t inclined to bluster. “I fear you have anticipated me, monsieur. Of course, I am hardly an expert on aviation.”
We were all quick to protest the idea that Bertrand might be anything less than expert on everything. It was an old joke among us. Amidst the laughter, the Swiss extinguished his cigarette and rose from his chair.
“Ladies, gentlemen, I bid you une bonne soirée and a pleasant remainder to your vacation. And I hope my little tale has not disturbed you.”
Bertrand and I hastened to assure him that it was impossible, as we had enjoyed it immensely. Were we not all français, hailing from that most rational of nations? We bade him farewell, and the last we saw of him was his broad back, as he returned to the bar inside.
But later that evening, as my wife slept by my side, there was a soft knock on my door. It was Bertrand, and he was holding his iPad. “Come outside and look at this,” he whispered.
I followed him out to the patio where we had been drinking earlier that evening. We could hear the sound of the sea below us, but where there had been a broad expanse of clear blue water only a few hours before, there was now nothing but a vast black emptiness, devoid of reflections from the shore or even the pinpricks of starlight that animated the night sky above. The glow of the tablet screen was so bright against the darkness that it was almost painful to my eyes. And what had been unthinkable under the warm glow of the Italian sun suddenly seemed all too possible, when standing above the inky abyss of the Mediterranean at midnight.
“I looked it up. A flight from Zurich to Lagos that was carrying twenty deportees, eight police, and the two pilots went down about eighteen months ago.”
“So that much was true, anyhow.”
We stared out at the black depths of the sea. It was a quiet evening and the Moon was obscured by clouds that had crept in under the cover of darkness. The waves lapped at the rocky shoreline hundreds of meters below us, indifferent, mindless, uncaring, exactly as they had one thousand, two thousand, three thousand years ago.
“This doesn’t prove anything about the existence of ghosts, much less God,” Bertrand suddenly declared.
“Of course not,” I said. “But still….”
“But still,” he agreed.
Stupefying Stories: March 2012
The new Stupefying Stories is out as of March 42nd, and it includes a story from yours truly entitled “The Last Testament of Henry Halleck”, which concerns the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the madness of William T. Sherman, and, of course, the Cthulhu Mythos.
“The fifth volume in award-winning editor Bruce Bethke’s new ebook-only original anthology series features ten all-new tales of science, hope, magic, and passion, by Beth Cato, Jason Wittman, Chuck Bordell, J. R. Johnson, Paul Dixon, Aaron Bradford Starr, Kersley Fitzgerald, Richard Zwicker, Vox Day, and Alex Shvartsman.”
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.