Tag: society

First, a Happy Mother’s Day to the many mothers out there. However, I think it is long past time to change the emphasis of the holiday, from one that is a saccharine and sentimental celebration of biology to one that honors a vital societal contribution. It is rightly said that the future belongs to those who show up for it. Mothers are the builders of the future, and civilized mothers are nothing less than the core defenders of civilization. Without mothers, all the science and technology and art of Man is pointless and without value.

Mothers risk their lives and sacrifice their petty desires to ensure that Man will survive one more generation. Their unique and precious gift to the species should never be overlooked, much less belittled, as a woman who marries, bears children, and raises them with her husband is doing the single most important thing she can possibly do as a human being. Everything else is of lesser import. So, in addition to the breakfasts in bed, the cards, the flowers, and so forth, don’t forget to remember that she is more than the mother of your children, she is a decorated veteran in civilization’s never-ending war against barbarism and the void.

Is a mother’s career really worth the loss of a child? And whatever happened to the liberal’s customary “if it saves just one child’s life” standard?

A Star Tribune examination of hundreds of public records shows that the number of children dying in child care has nearly doubled in the past five years — reaching the rate of one per month. Nearly all the deaths have occurred at in-home providers (also known as family care), and most involved a child sleeping. The newspaper’s investigation also found more unsafe-sleep citations, such as lack of training or children in unsafe sleep positions, at in-home settings than at large child-care centers.

The Department of Human Services (DHS), the state’s top child-care regulator, is treating the rise in deaths as a public health crisis. “It’s huge,” said DHS Inspector General Jerry Kerber. “It makes it clear that something has got to be done. What that something is, I think, is going to take the work. … It’s completely unacceptable.”

Using a state licensing website, the Star Tribune reviewed 217 licensed family homes and 185 child-care centers that have been cited since July 2010 for violations of state regulations. Some 20 percent of these family homes were cited for having children in unsafe sleeping positions — such as sleeping on open beds or in mechanical swings — or sleeping with heavy blankets that present suffocation hazards. About 12 percent of the child-care centers were cited for such violations.

What should be done is that married women with young children should be encouraged and given financial incentives to stay home and raise them. What will be done, I suspect, is a useless increase in regulation, perhaps combined with a ban on family homes that will no doubt be strongly supported by the corporations that own the large child-care centers.

What is particularly unfortunate about this incident is that it made almost no financial sense for the baby to be in day care anyhow. “The Fletchers’ tragedy started with a dilemma faced by thousands of working parents across Minnesota. Just weeks after Blake was born, in February of that year, Amanda was making plans to return to her $9-an-hour job as a medical records clerk. “It’s kind of the American way,” she said. “You have the baby, you stay home with them and then you are back to work to support your family.” So they began looking for child care. They weighed cost, convenience and availability of providers in Park Rapids. They found that a local child-care center would charge $120 per month more than in-home providers. That’s not unusual in Minnesota, where the average annual cost of infant care in a center is $12,900, third-highest in the nation.”

In other words, Amanda Fletcher had to work 1,433 hours per year – 35 weeks – simply to pay for average child care. Factor in the payroll and income taxes at approximately 20 percent of her income, and she’d have to work 1,791 hours, or 45 weeks, simply to break even. Even with the cheaper and substandard family home day care, at $7,350 per year she had to work 1,020 hours, or half the year, just to pay for it. If that is the American way, then the American way is as economically illiterate as it is unsustainable.

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.

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.

1. Where did the chavs go? There were two orders of magnitude fewer neck tattoos? The vibe distinctly changed from high prole last year to low bourgeois. Lower traffic too. Conclusion: economy is not recovering.

2. Saw many white families, black families, and Arab families. One interesting observation: the multiracial couples did not have children. And with one exception, the multiracial children were there with a white mother without any adult male figure in sight.

3. European children are by and large pretty well behaved.