Racism Or Realism?

Race, Racism

In the words of the inimitable Hans-Hermann Hoppe: “If you are not called a racist, then, it seems to me, you are in intellectual trouble and it is high time to reconsider your own thinking. Professor Hoppe was attempting to console me, after someone marked us both with that Mark of Cain.
Now, based on my last column, Rah-Rah for Rioters, Connie Deady of The Reform Club implies the same:

“It is offensive to me to suggest that something is lacking in a race of people. Just because Jews at a different time and place were able to rise above doesn’t mean another race in another time should be able.
Or maybe I misunderstand [Ilana’s] point. I suspect that being hated might make one work harder. I don’t know that everyone hates Jewish people. Maybe they are jealous? I tend to think that Jewish people as a race are smarter than the rest of us.

I stated that Chinese and Jews have 1) overall endured far greater depredations in modern times than Muslims and African-Americans (notwithstanding category overlap). 2) Have coped with such contingencies admirably while Arabs and blacks… not so much.
Is this not an observation of reality? Am I not stating an objective fact? So why is realism framed as racism? Dare discomfit people with unsettling facts, and they threaten to tarnish your reputation with damaging labels; tell the truth, and, it would seem, you risk your reputation.
That pretty much sums the direction in which discourse has been steered.
Note that Ms. Deady gets herself into a bit of a bind with a performative contradiction—she herself observes aggregate trends among groups.

French, Romans, And Countrymen

Free Will Vs. Determinism, IMMIGRATION, Islam, libertarianism, The State

I’d like to preface what Bill Anderson writes by saying that my column, Rah-Rah for Rioters, is more than sardonic about the French Welfare State, and about state intervention, in general. Witness the comments about affirmative action. Or those about the state, not German civil society, being responsible for liquidating Jews. Can one be more direct than that? However, the thrust of my writing is not deterministic. Sure welfare destroys. But people’s actions, good or bad, are not reducible to a single cause. Some libertarians take the position that it’s all the state’s fault. More accurately: it’s all the American State’s fault. What an utterly unserious stance. Entitlements are available to all who choose them as a way of life. Ditto violence. People have a good degree of free will. They can choose to reject both. One embodies Left-Liberalism if one has succumbed to seeing human motivation as unidirectional and lacking volition. Cleese’s delicious (and brilliant) “What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us” is a spoof just up my alley. Yeah the Romans were the bad guys, but hell, the Jews could be a handful. Then again not everyone shares my sense of the absurd.

From: WILLIAM ANDERSON
Sent: Friday, November 11, 2005 3:38 AM
Subject: Rah-Rah for Rioters

Very, very good.

People need to understand—and I think you do—that the French “system” of suffocating bureaucracy and antipathy to private enterprise definitely destroys a real future, not only for the Muslims, but also for everyone else. I had a conversation with a Canadian in Vancouver a couple summers ago and his point was that what was left for people like him were government jobs, something he realized in and of themselves were dead end.
Now, this hardly counts as “oppression” CNN style, but the insistence that people on the left make that “economic security,” as peddled by the Europeans, is a REALLY GREAT THING do not realize the longer term implications of destroying private initiative.
That, however, was not your point. Your larger issue was that the so-called CNN reasons for rioting were, to put it mildly, something that emanates from the rear end of a bull, and with that, I heartily concur.
—Bill

Jay D. Homnick writes this on The Reform Club’s blog. His guiding lights are the prophets of the Hebrew Testament. They are mine too (It wasn’t always uncool to look up to a prophet, you know.):

“CALL ME ISHMAEL (WHILE I BURN YOUR CAR)

Is Ilana Mercer an absolute genius or what? What does it say about the conservative movement in America to have this level of passion and talent?
Her article today eclipsed my understanding of the media France coverage, left me feeling like a rank amateur in understanding the depth of the kulturkampf. I had contented myself with the lazy observation that the media was disposed to “excuse” criminality when it wore a liberal-political fig leaf.
Ilana digs much deeper. She explains that the miscreancy is itself cited as “proof of virtue”.
Her brilliant insight hit me like an epiphany. I felt like I could actually hear Isaiah (5:20):
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil; who assert that darkness is light and light is darkness; who assert that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter.” (My translation.)
POSTED by Jay D. Homnick at 10:17 AM

From: Lawren
Sent: Friday, November 11, 2005
Subject: Rah-Rah for Rioters

Thank you for your article on the unbelievable coverage of the French riots. One CNN pundit, with mike clutched to her bosom called the rioters “lads.” I immediately sent my monthly email to CNN that they again confirmed they are on the side of chaos and anarchy. Unbelievable.
Thank you again for giving a voice to the unheard.
—Lawren

The Anatomy Of Group Think

Bush

As I pointed out in Bush’s Bastardized Conservatism, the anti-intellectual tribalist is easy to spot. He’s a, “You are either with us or against us” kind of a guy (or gal). Adherents of this tradition judge ideas and opinions not on their merit but according to whether they comport with preordained positions. Or according to who originated them. These sorts usually have a High Priest or two from whom they take their cues. They seldom deviate. They even blog in boring unison on almost every topic.
The skirmish over Harriett Miers typifies this group think. No sooner had a welcome conservative opposition arisen to this comical crony than “establishment Republicans” endeavored to crush it. While quite a few libertarians cogitated alongside conservatives over substantive issues—the dangers of cronyism, the patent lack of qualifications and a discernable judicial philosophy in Miers—others argued along tribal lines, ala GOP groupies.
Their first proposition: we hate neoconservatives-cum-conservatives. Their second proposition: we hate Coulter and Krauthammer. Their Third: Coulter and Krauthammer hate the idea of Harriet for judge. Ergo, we like the idea of Harriet for judge. Talk about succumbing to a non sequitur.
Not that reasoning by default doesn’t have its place, but as a habit it’s plain slothful. For example, from Nancy Pelosi’s left-liberal credo, it follows that, in general, when she opens her mouth to speak, out will come gibberish. But her political stripe doesn’t necessarily mean everything she says will be silly. “It’s a fine day,” for example. More seriously, her accurate assessments of Bush (“the emperor has no clothes”) and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (it’s “not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist”).
The point being, libertarians should consider the issues, not the individuals involved. Sitting on the sidelines and hooting derisively might make an already marginalized group feel superior. Nevertheless, to feel superior isn’t necessarily to be superior. Intellectual superiority is impossible without substantively and persuasively addressing issues and winning debates. A good start is to think outside the tribe.

The Elusive Jewish Gene

History, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Judaism & Jews

I’m getting sick of the determinists who whittle down Jewish thinking and achievement over thousands of years to oppression-generated genetic mutations during the Middle Ages, or something. This article in the New York Magazine puts paid to such reductionism:

“To say that the Jews have a history of emphasizing scholarship is not just the fantasy of ethnic chauvinists and Woody Allen fans. To look at a single page of the Talmud is to understand this, with its main text at the center, its generations of rabbis arguing around the rim. The dialectic and critical reasoning are at its core.”

At the secular, Israeli secondary school I attended, not enough Talmud was taught, unfortunately. Still, the process of reasoning, called pilpul, captivated me; it’s marvelous—magic, really. The Talmud is calisthenics for the mind, for sure, but also sagacious.

Jay Homnick writes insightfully about the topic:

“In fact this analysis is not only demonstrably incorrect, its blind-man-and-the-elephant methodology doomed it from the start. Let’s ask this: is it logical to say that the people who produced the world’s greatest literary work in the 24 books of Scripture, the most powerful (and unprecedented) poetry in history in the Psalms and Song of Songs, and the most ingenious legal compilation, the Talmud, did not have these smarts? That by the merest coincidence their offspring fell into an ironic social anomaly two millennia later and only then achieved a belated smartening?”

He follows up with equal bite in an e-mail exchange:

“As for that rubbish about Jews suddenly getting smart because they had to suddenly figure out that 8 percent of a hundred dollars was 8 dollars, while in the old days they could just farm without having to figure out their overhead and the necessary profit margin to make it profitable, how crass is that?!”

True, “Jews make up a mere 0.25 percent of the world’s population and a mere 3 percent of the United States’, [yet] they account… for 27 percent of all American Nobel Prize winners, 25 percent of all ACM Turing Award winners for computer science, and 50 percent of the globe’s chess champions.” But if this Jewish menace upsets you, take comfort in the knowledge that there are plenty of stupid Jews to go around.