Category Archives: Race

Like Two Pimps In A Pod

Like two pimps in a pod, the two stood men proudly alongside one another, at the National Action Network convention, prepared to yakety-yak about their pigment burden. The one is President Barack Obama. The other is Rev. Al Sharpton, a notorious sleazemeister, with whom the president has no qualms associating.

That Al Sharpton is accepted in polite company, to say nothing of being considered the nation’s moral arbiter on things racial, is preposterous. “Tawana Brawley anyone? The Crown Heights Riot? The first was a version of the Duke Lacrosse libel, where a black girl, carefully coached by Sharpton, Nifonged a district attorney and some innocent police officers. Sharpton never retracted the rapist and racist epithets he slung at the falsely accused. The last saw Sharpton help incite an anti-Jewish riot, after a rabbi’s motorcade accidentally ran over a black boy. Consequently, a young Jew was lynched by a mob chanting ‘kill the Jew.’ Sharpton, a bent and brutal man with vengeance on his mind, was impenitent.”

Differentiating A ‘Racist’ From A Non-Racist Beating

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Race, Racism

In Steven Utash’s battered body and comatose brain, courtesy of a mob of black youths, Detroit law enforcement has discerned different kinds of beatings: Some of the deadly blows are said to be based in racial hatred; other, equally brutal beatings are, apparently, bereft of racial overtones. That’s how ridiculous is the legal species of hate-crimes.

Background Via Fox News:

Two more men, ages 30 and 24, have reportedly been arrested in the brutal beating of Steve Utash, who remains in a coma Tuesday morning. Police are still looking for more suspects, believing 10-12 people attacked Utash. …
A brutal beating on the streets of Detroit has left a 54-year-old father of three fighting for his life. The shocking incident happened last week when Steve Utash, a tree trimmer from Roseville, Mich., struck a 10-year-old boy with his pickup truck.

The scene was captured from a distance on surveillance video, and it appears that a group of youngsters were playing a game of chicken with passing cars, darting into the street and sticking their legs out. When Utash struck one of the children accidentally, he stopped and got out to check on the boy.

A group of older teens, however, attacked Utash, beating him nearly to death. Two teens, ages 16 and 17, have been arrested, but authorities are still looking for more of the attackers.

The 10-year-old boy suffered a broken foot. …

Utash remains hospitalized in a medically-induced coma. Joe Utash described the gut-wrenching scene that the family has had to endure each time doctors try to bring Steve out of the coma.

If you’re a white supremacist caught in the act—no “alleged” or “buts” for you. On the other hand, if you’re a swarthy supremacist, driven by hate for honky or by devotion to a vampiric prophet and his deity—then mitigating circumstances will be cobbled up for you or your gang.

In fact, after learning (via CBS) of the ages of the accomplices of the 16-year-old charged in the beating—30, 24, 19, and 17—I wonder whether the prosecutor is charging only the youngest of them with a hate crime because, as a juvenile, his punishment is guaranteed to be negligible.

Cynical but quite possible.

Via CBS:

The teenager facing the hate crime charge is accused of beating Utash with his fists and feet. The teen’s name is not being released because of his age and the fact that he is being charged as a juvenile. Prosecutors say the teen will remain in custody and appear at the Wayne County Juvenile Detention Center on April 12.

Ideologues Battle Intellectuals Over ’12 Years a Slave’

Intellectualism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Literature, Political Correctness, Race, Ron Paul

Libertarian gush and tosh over the film “12 Years a Slave” is worse than juvenile; it’s anti-intellectual.

Anyone who asserts that the book is “one of the greatest autobiographies [he’s] ever read,” as this libertarian educator does, can’t be serious, and if he is serious, should not be taken seriously. (And what does the choice of this lackluster “literature” say about the Ron Paul Curriculum? Maybe The Curriculum should confine itself to economics and leave the teaching of literature to those who know and love the canon of English literature.)

White Americans—liberals, conservatives and libertarians—appear constitutionally primed to convulse hysterically over all things racial. (Check out how Ann Coulter’s C-SPAN CPUKE audience goes wild when she insists the GOP is the party of blacks and Hispanics.)

Since “the 1852 publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “the slave-narrative craze” has been going strong.

An ideologue is not necessarily an intellectual. The responsibility of a public intellectual, in this case, is to provide an intellectual appraisal of a cultural product. The ideologue who isn’t an intellectual will struggle with the task (not that his readers or students will know the difference).

Not suffering the foregoing deficit, Steve Sailer nails “12 Years a Slave,” about which I ventured that “I’m no more inclined to turn to [its star] Lupita Nyong perform reruns of ‘Roots,’ for entertainment, than I am to subject myself to Oprah Winfrey and her M.O.P.E. (Most Oppressed Person Ever) ‘Butler.’”

If to go by Steve Sailer’s superb review, truth too has been lost in the gush and tosh over “12 Years a Slave.” (Gary North glosses over these “few discrepancies.”)

Writes Sailer: “12 Years a Slave is hailed by critics as a long-awaited breakthrough that finally dares to mention the subject of slavery after decades of the entertainment industry being controlled by the South. Yet as cinema encyclopedist Leonard Maltin notes”:

12 Years A Slave is a remake. What’s more, the original television film was directed by the celebrated Gordon Parks. Why no one seems to remember this is a mystery to me, yet all too typical of what I’ll call media amnesia. It first aired on PBS in 1984 as Solomon Northup’s Odyssey, reached a wider audience the following year when it was repeated as an installment of American Playhouse, and made its video debut under the title Half Slave, Half Free.

“You can watch the 1984 version online for $2.99.

The remake has more whippings, though.”

AND,

… it’s built upon a fourth-rate screenplay that might have embarrassed Horatio Alger. Screenwriter John Ridley’s imitation Victorian dialogue is depressingly bad, reminiscent of the sub-Shakespearean lines John Wayne had to deliver as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.

The message behind the ongoing enshrinement of the rather amateurish 12 Years a Slave is that the cultural whippings of white folk for the sins of their great-great-great-great-grandfathers will continue until morale improves.

Steve McQueen (an art-house filmmaker who is a black Brit of West Indian background) directs 12 Years a Slave in a sort of minor league Passion of the Christ manner. (Incidentally, it’s obnoxious for anybody involved with movies today to call himself “Steve McQueen” instead of, say, “Steven McQueen.” In contrast, there were two 20th-century writers named Thomas Wolfe, but the second had the good manners to call himself “Tom” to minimize confusion.)

Some of the appeal to critics is that Northern whites are shown as saints of racial sensitivity in the film’s preposterous first 20 minutes. 12 Years a Slave opens in 1841 with Solomon Northup (stolidly played by the Anglo-Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor) being effusively admired by his white neighbors in Saratoga, New York. Northup is a model of prosperous bourgeois respectability, always doffing his top hat to his white peers while out riding with his wife and children in an elegant carriage. (Watch 0:24 to 0:35 in the trailer.)

How could he afford that?

Well, actually, he didn’t and couldn’t.

A glance at Northup’s ghostwritten 1853 memoir makes clear that in 1841, rather than being a pillar of this Yankee community, he was an unemployed fiddler dragged down by his own “shiftlessness”: …

READ THE REVIEW.

UPDATED: Cite Your Sources, Creep!

Ethics, Etiquette, Ilana Mercer, Morality, Paleoconservatism, Race, Reason

I receive the Taki Magazine newsletter in my In-Box.

I often click on it for a quick once-over.

With some exceptions, speed reading is the mode reserved for the stuff. With exceptions like Sailer, of course (Pat Buchanan is read on WND), the reason for this was touched upon in a Feb. 15, Facebook, thread with a Fred Reed fan.

While I too think “Fred Reed rocks,” information-rich work is my preference. I love Reed for his audacity, but riffing does not do it for me. I need information.

Unless I learn something substantive in the process, I’m not interested in other people’s opinions. I have too many of my own. 🙂

As I was skimming a riff by a character called Jim Goad (one of whose light-reading posts I was decent enough to reference in a January post of my own; naturally I cite my sources)—I came across a remarkably familiar line on a rather obscure matter of logic, also the only analytical part in this riff of a column.

This character was motivating (dah) against an “egalitarian … fallacy, which roughly runs thusly.” And Goad writes:

Differences within any group are greater than those between groups.

The familiar part of the Goad column was this:

“Against every known rule of logic,” he notes,” “this statement is always used as some blanket proof of equality.” Goad promises to “carefully dismantle this super-dumb time bomb.” He continues:

Here’s why the statement is deceptive: Differences between highs and lows WITHIN a group do not discount or magically wash away differences between group AVERAGES.

High and low did I search Barely A Blog, but was unable to locate the familiar point of logic made on BAB so long ago. Finally, it came to me: I would have alluded to inter-group differences. Yes! I found what I was after using the “inter” prefix in the BAB search window.

The post is “The Kindness Of (Caucasian) Strangers (On Brotherly Love).” It’s dated 01.31.10. My identical line of reasoning about this obscure matter is as follows, verbatim:

… no; we’re not all the same. A common liberal refrain (I would like to see what Steve Sailer has said in this regard) is that differences between individuals are statistically more significant than those between cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. I don’t see why the fact of inter-individual differences would nullify inter-group variance. That’s liberal logic for you. [ILANA MERCER]

Moreover, I have never heard of the formal fallacy Goad cites to label his inquiry. However, on perusing the Wikipedia entry, I found empirical refutations but no analytical ones–no allusion was made to the deduction that appears in the Mercer post titled “The Kindness Of (Caucasian) Strangers (On Brotherly Love).”

Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but unacknowledged, lifting someone’s ideas without attribution is disgusting—it tells me all I need to know about a person.

Alas, borrowing of this nature is mostly impossible to prove. This is why passing off the often-idiosyncratic ideas or references of others as their own is “par for the course” in these circles. Nevertheless, shame we shall when we come across this lowly practice.

About the natural law, Sir William Blackstone noted that it should include such precepts as that human beings should live honestly, hurt nobody, and render everyone their due (in Conway, 2004). Clearly, this is an instinct alien to some.

UPDATE (3/2): As my dear (most original) friend professor Walter Block once said to me, when we first met (2000?), “You are a natural praxeologist.” I’m sure I make a lot of mistakes, but this method comes naturally. Mercer columns tend to consist in logical deductions. Other than in similar circles, this is not a common style/habit. (We stand on the shoulders of the brilliant David Gordon.) When you see your reasoning, it’s like seeing an image of your offspring. Others might say, “All babies look the same,” but you know that bundle is yours.