Category Archives: The West

Dr. Seuss And The Wussification Of The West

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

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)

UPDATE II (4/9): Whites: Stop Weeping And ‘Weatherize’ Your Kids

Aesthetics, Argument, Egalitarianism, Multiculturalism, Pop-Culture, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa, The West

Americans aren’t understanding on a visceral level the extent of the envy behind anti-White animus.

It’s the ethnocidal jealousy described in my book, “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” It made the ugly Hutus take machetes to the beautiful Tutsis, killing a million. It’s what drives so much black-on-white violent crime.

This kind of jealousy makes uglies gouge blue eyes out. Literally.

Whites: Stop weeping and weatherize your kids, in other words, make warriors out of them.

See: “How To Think And Act Like A Ruthless Warrior By Jack Kerwick.”

AND:

Why Hatred Of Whites Is Here To Stay”

UPDATE (2/24): The “Why Do They Come Here, Then” Argument.

Another evasive tack taken, I believe, even by Tucker Carlson, @DrC88118048 No contradictions here. The only contradiction lies in the dumb West’s response of letting ’em in: Third World likes your stuff–likes the countries you create–just doesn’t like you creative types very much: Envy!

UPDATE II (4/9): The same applies to politicians. Grow a backbone.

Don’t apologize, Ron Johnson. Don’t bow to the racialist hostage takers. Stand tall. We were all petrified BLM and Antifa would come to out neighborhoods. Still are! The Jan 6 crowd? Harmless to you and me. Speak for us, man!

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

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

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.

 

The Future of Medicine in America: Whites Go To The Back Of The Proverbial Bus

America, Britain, COVID-19, Criminal Injustice, Ethics, Morality, Race, Racism, The West

In Britain, where the image appended originates, “authorities are getting the vaccine to their elderly as quickly as they can.” As dysfunctional and perfidious as Albion certainly is, there doesn’t seem to be any debate over the urgent need to protect the vulnerable elderly. It’s what a civilized society does.

The future of medicine in America is somewhat different. The “idea” is not to get too fixated on the old, who are dying of the China Virus. After all, America’s elderly are overwhelmingly white and hence privileged.

That is the immoral non sequitur coming from the nation’s ethicists. Non sequitur why? Because, from the fact that one is old, it doesn’t follow that one is white and privileged. Moreover, from the moral point of view, determining who shall live and who shall die based on race is indeed eugenics. Tucker Carlson called it out courageously .

Apparently, in America, eugenics practiced against whites by other whites emulating God is morally redeemable.

In America The Radical, those chosen to apply ethics to questions of public policy are morally and intellectually bankrupt. Profoundly so. One Harald Schmidt (whatever happened to the spelling of “Harold”? Too white, as in grammatical?) has advised the CDC that,

“Older populations are whiter. [sic] Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already have more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

As others have pointed out, the discrimination is not even based on empirical evidence (see “Essential workers should get coronavirus vaccine before the elderly, experts tell NYT“):

“…he’s wrong—Asians and Hispanics have greatest life expectancy in US,” wrote Christina Hoff Sommers. According to data compiled by worldlifeexpectancy.com from the CDC and NIH, Asian Americans have a life expectancy of 86.67 and Hispanic Americans, 82.89. White Americans have a life expectancy of 79.12.

Writes Tucker Carlson:

But in this country, a panel of ideologues at the CDC has decided that the elderly should not be at the front of the line. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has made a different determination, and the reasoning is simple: Old people in this country are too White to save. They even put it in writing.

Last month, the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee unanimously approved recommendations from a doctor called Kathleen Dooling. According to her presentation, it is true that more lives would be saved if the elderly receive priority access to the vaccine. But here’s the problem: “Racial and ethnic minority groups [are] under-represented [sic] among adults” age 65 and older. Therefore, the elderly should not be a top priority.

According to the CDC panel, another group, those officially classified as “non-healthcare essential workers”, should get the vaccine first. Why is that? Because “racial and ethnic minority groups [are] disproportionately represented in many essential industries.”

In other words, it’s entirely racial. They’re making the decision based on race. Kathleen Dooling’s presentation concluded that doling out life-saving medicine on the basis of skin color would “mitigate health inequities.” Of course it would kill people, and she effectively concedes that. But the people it would kill come from a disfavored race, so it’s not a big deal.

It’s been a very long time since anyone close to what we would consider the mainstream has endorsed eugenics, but that’s exactly what this is. Earlier this month, The New York Times, supposedly our greatest newspaper, interviewed Harald Schmidt, a leading expert on medical ethics and vaccination at the University of Pennsylvania.

Here’s how Harald Schmidt advised the CDC: “Older populations are whiter. [sic] Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already have more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

This anti-white pathology emanates from American academics. The dishonorable Harald Schmidt should be stripped of his “ethicist” honorific. Institutions that teach such ethics as Harald espouses ought to be discredited, certainly not attended.

Schmidt is an anti-white activist. And, I’d urge Mr. Carlson to vaporize less about the “identity politics that divides us.” For, as I’ve argued, “It’s Not ‘Identity Politics,’ It’s Anti-White Politics”:

Every time a manifestly racist, anti-white event goes down, which is frequently, conservative media call it “identity politics.” “The left is playing identity politics.”
Whatever is convulsing the country, it’s not identity politics. For, blacks are not being pitted against Hispanics. Hispanics are not being sicced on Asians, and Ameri-Indians aren’t being urged to attack the groups just mentioned. Rather, they’re all piling on honky. Hence, anti-white politics or animus.

Having exposed this horror, a logical extension of the institutionalization of progressivism and the Critical Race Theory rot, it would be immensely helpful if the courageous Mr. Carlson and the timid conservative commentariat dropped the “identity politics” fig-leaf in favor of “anti-white politics”:

Undergirding the factional identity politics so roundly condemned is a practiced anti-whiteness.  Hispanic, LGBT, plutocrat and feminist: All would concur. The road to their political salvation is in collaborating to extinguish “white dominant culture.” —ilana mercer