Category Archives: Reason

NEW COLUMN: Resist the Left’s Conflation of ‘Racism’ With the Law, for Chauvin and Beyond

Argument, Law, libertarianism, Liberty, Logic, Natural Law, Race, Racism, Reason

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NEW ON CNSNews.com: “Resist the Left’s Conflation of ‘Racism’ With the Law, for Chauvin and Beyond.”

An excerpt: https://tinyurl.com/3j6sdu5z

Racism consists of a mindset or a worldview that boils down to impolite and impolitic thoughts and words written, spoken, preached, or tweeted.

If that’s all racism is, you ask, then what was the knee on George Floyd’s neck? Was that not racism?

No, it was not.

Judging from the known facts, the knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck was a knee on a man’s neck. That’s all that can be inferred from the chilling video recording in which Floyd expired slowly as he pleaded for air.

Floyd begged to breathe. But the knee on his neck—“subdual restraint and neck compression,” in medical terms—was sustained for fully eight minutes and 46 seconds, causing “cardiopulmonary arrest.”

There are laws against what transpired between former Officer Derek Chauvin and Mr. Floyd.

And the law’s ambit is not to decide whether the offending officer is a correct-thinking individual, but whether Mr. Chauvin had committed a crime.

About Officer Chauvin’s mindset, the most the law is supposed to divine is mens rea—criminal intention: Was the officer whose knee pressed on Floyd’s neck acting with a guilty mind or not?

For fact-finding is the essence of the law. The law is not an abstract ideal of imagined social justice, that exists to salve sensitive souls.

If “racism” looks like a felony crime, then it ought to be prosecuted as nothing but a crime and debated as such. In the case of Mr. Chauvin, a mindset of depraved indifference seems to jibe with the video.

This is not to refute the reality of racially motivated crimes. These most certainly occur. It is only to refute the legal and ethical validity of a racist mindset in the prosecution of a crime.

Surely, a life taken because of racial or antisemitic animus is not worth more than life lost to spousal battery or to a home invasion.

The law, then, must mete justice, in accordance with the rules of evidence, proportionality and due process. Other than intent, references to the attendant thoughts that accompanied the commission of a crime should be irrelevant—be they racist, sexist, ageist or anti-Semitic.

Ultimately, those thoughts are known only to the perp….

… READ THE REST ON CNSNews.com: “Resist the Left’s Conflation of ‘Racism’ With the Law, for Chauvin and Beyond.”

*Image via CNS.News (Photo credit: Noam Galai/Getty Images)

Dr. Seuss And The Wussification Of The West

Argument, Education, English, Literature, Logic, Race, Racism, Reason, The West

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Tucker Carlson’s defense of some purged Dr. Seuss books is plain wrong: “Seuss was not a racist” was the gist of Tucker’s defense.

But before deconstructing the TV host’s conservative, typically defeatist argument, here is the latest in the saga of Dr. Seuss and the wussification of the West, from the New York Times:

Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published because of their use of offensive imagery, according to the business that oversees the estate of the children’s author and illustrator.

In a statement on Tuesday, Dr. Seuss Enterprises said that it had decided last year to end publication and licensing of the books by Theodor Seuss Geisel. The titles include his first book writing under the pen name Dr. Seuss, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” (1937), and “If I Ran the Zoo” (1950).

“These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises said in the statement. The business said the decision came after working with a panel of experts, including educators, and reviewing its catalog of titles.

Mr. Geisel, whose whimsical stories have entertained millions of children and adults worldwide, died in 1991. The other books that will no longer be published are “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!” “Scrambled Eggs Super!” and “The Cat’s Quizzer.”

In “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” a character described as “a Chinaman” has lines for eyes, wears a pointed hat, and carries chopsticks and a bowl of rice. (Editions published in the 1970s changed the reference from “a Chinaman” to “a Chinese man.”) In “If I Ran the Zoo,” two characters from “the African island of Yerka” are depicted as shirtless, shoeless and resembling monkeys.

A school district in Virginia said over the weekend that it had advised schools to de-emphasize Dr. Seuss books on “Read Across America Day,” a national literacy program that takes place each year on March 2, the anniversary of Mr. Geisel’s birth.

“Research in recent years has revealed strong racial undertones in many books written/illustrated by Dr. Seuss,” according to the statement by the district, Loudoun County Public Schools.

An example of “wussification,” namely the melding of “wimp” and “pussy” to make a wussy, is this fretful headline: “Parents grapple with racist images in Dr. Seuss books.”

You “grapple” with a shortage of food; with the fact that your kids are not learning to speak, read and write English proficiently. You “grapple” with footage of Kamala Harris, swallowed whole and  subjected to the peristaltic movements of a python snake, as he digests her—to pull or to publish the ostensibly upsetting images?

But you don’t “grapple” with Dr. Seuss content.

And, yes, Dr. Seuss Enterprises rolled over, conceding to cancelling its own books.

Tucker’s defense:

“Dr. Seuss was not a racist,” Carlson asserted. “He was an evangelist against bigotry. He wrote an entire shelf of books against racism, and not in a subtle way. They were clearly, explicitly against racism. That was the whole point of writing them, to teach children not to be racist.”

Actual racism in the targeted literature should be a peripheral issue, or no issue at all.

The Argument from Freedom means arguing process, not substance.

Whether he intended it or not, the premise of Tucker’s defense is that if we do detect legitimate racism in literature—there is a case for banning it. (Tucker didn’t mean it that way comes the counter-argument. This, however, is what the structure of his argument portends. The premise of Tucker’s argument is precisely that.)

And freedom means that politically impolite books may be published and read freely. Freedom means no book banning. Period!

Moreover, banning books demands a higher authority that decides for the rest of us. As does banning  assume a lack of choice and agency among individual human beings.

It’s called freedom. The Argument from freedom means arguing for Mein Kampf as well as for McElligots Pool. A free market in ideas.

And not because of history, blah, blah, blah; namely, so that we don’t forget it or repeat it, as I heard it enunciated by radio mouth Jason Rantz, the other day. Mein Kampf, and any literature, needs to be available in a free society to free men and women who want it.

In the face of the cancellation of conservatives, the latter invariably just keep making these logically impoverished “arguments.” In this case, it’s the Argument from Hitler: “I want what Hitler got, Ebay. Me too, Amazon.” Or, call it a kind of “WhatAboutism”: Amazon sells Hitler’s book, why not Dr. Seuss’s?

“Conservatives,” tweets “Musil Protege,” “start arguments by legitimizing the premises of stupid questions. Then they condone presentism. As Audrey says in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan: “Has it ever occurred to you that our world judged by the standards of Jane Austen’s time would (look ridiculous)?”

Most great literature doesn’t meet the sub-standards of the woke illiterate who control the means of intellectual production, these being schools (primary, secondary, tertiary), press, publishing print, think tanks, Deep Tech and Deep State.

Much of the literary canon—the greatest works of literature—is guaranteed to violate woke racial dogma.

Shall we ban Shakespeare for Othello?

*(Christopher Dolan/The Times-Tribune via AP)

MATH: The Problem With Conservatives? They Run From Racial Reality

Affirmative Action, Ancient History, Conservatism, Education, Intelligence, Race, Racism, Reason, Science, The West

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The problem with math is that it can be—how shall we put it?—mean to certain minorities. The problem with conservatives? They run from such racial realities.

Math as racist is not a new angle in the war for egalitarianism in aptitude.

Some people can do math well; others less so. Still others not at all. There are aggregate discrepancies between the sexes and between the races in the facility with mathematics.

(There has been a link to the work of La Griffe du Lion, on the ilanamercer.com Resources page (Junk Science category), since the website’s inception. His explosive work was allowed back then.)

These days, however, kids are being taught that, given enough Kale, care and instruction from formative figures—everyone has a chance at achieving a similar aptitude. “You can do anything you put your mind to,” goes the parental and pedagogic refrain.

No wonder anger rises among the less proficient when reality bites and puts the lie to the fiction of an egalitarian distribution of talent.

If some fail miserably in certain fields, why, the deficit is said to be not in the child but in the “system,” the teacher, the topic, or the particular discipline.

And if patterns of failure correlate with racial groupings; voila! It’s systemic. See, “‘Systemic Racism’ Or Systemic Rubbish?” Video included (for those who, unlike me, do not prefer text).

Anti-white activists—let us call them what they are, please—are now claiming math is a white supremacist discipline, not least because it is also an objective science with right or wrong answers. There is no relativism to it; no, “Hey Johnny, that’s an interesting answer, why don’t you try that new equation in the next bridge you design?”

Trust conservatives to never cop to the fact that complex math was the invention of Westerners. Oh, no!

As is the wont of conservatives, they apologize for any white involvement in such greatness as is math.

Tucker Carlson’s guest takes the tired conservative tack. Denounce and deprecate Western achievement:

“Math is not a white discipline, how absurd,” says Tucker’s guest.

Okay, Miss obsequious.

More advanced mathematics can be traced to ancient Greece over 2,500 years ago. Ancient mathematician Pythagoras had questions about the sides of a right triangle. His questioning, research, and testing led to a basic understanding of triangles we still study today, known as the Pythagorean Theorem.
Most experts agree that it was around this time (2,500 years ago) in ancient Greece that mathematics first became an organized science.

If it’s me, I’m owning it.

Beginning in the 6th century BC with the Pythagoreans, with Greek mathematics the Ancient Greeks began a systematic study of mathematics as a subject in its own right. Around 300 BC, Euclid introduced the axiomatic method still used in mathematics today, consisting of definition, axiom, theorem, and proof.

Wikipedia.

Next, Miss Millennial parrots the exhausted cliche about “the soft bigotry of lowered expectations,” namely the “myth” that students of color can’t achieve to standards, and therefore the standards must be lowered.

Both host and guest feel safe in their sanctimony, ignoring the well-established and enduring “racial achievement gap in the United States” in mathematics.

 

UPDATED (2/22): NTSB, so nerdy and white.

 

Fake News USA Assert The Security Of The Election System, BUT Refuse To Investigate It

Argument, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Journalism, Media, Reason, Technology

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CNN’s Jeremy Diamond and his American circle-jerk of progressive, activist reporters ought to take lessons from BBC’s James Clayton, of “Click,” a BBC program.

Six minutes and 12 seconds into the clip on digital voting, the coverage of “serious security issues” begins. Techies who’ve “reversed engineered voting systems” are worried.

BBC News clearly still does the job Fake News USA refuses to do: investigate the security of the election system, not simply assert it.

Jeremy Diamond, a specimen in the national, journalistic circle jerk, is CNN’s White House correspondent. He’s a reporter, not an opinion-purveyor. Yet opinion is what he and his cohort purvey.

While reporting, Diamond will constantly express his opinion by exclaiming how “remarkable” and “outlandish” it is that President Trump wishes to overturn “a democratically held election.”

Breathy exclamations of disgust, surprise and frustration have no place in the repertoire of a reporter. It’s one thing, moreover, had CNN and Mr. Diamond investigated the election-fraud claims wending their way through the Courts—there are constitutional violations uninvestigated by them, too. But they don’t. The aforementioned BBC program, Click, clearly has no issue investigating and concluding that digital voting, for one, is fraught.

Had the American media done the work required; then they could legitimately say, “Having investigated and reported on the election fraud allegation, we find that there is no …”

But Diamond and his CNN crooks do not argue their case; they use their powerful positions in front of the camera to assert their claims, relying on viewers not to know the difference.

The same can be said of every other reporter on the CNN and MSNBC Fake News makers. They all offer their opinions on panels of opinionaters and from the field. Abby Phillip is another young journalist like Diamond who does opinion, not reporting.