Turns out Bhutan bans opinion polls. So I thought of making a poll asking this question:

Should opinion polls be banned?

* Yes,

* No.

Now there is only one consistent answer to this, which is “No.” Hence the hilarity of the joke: we can giggle at whoever says “Yes.”

The right answer, incidentally, is “Yes”; the right answer in the meta sense, of course. Opinion polls reinforce the Voting Fallacy (which is a chapter in my new upcoming book) and also reinforce the silly idea that all people’s opinions matter on all questions. Skip that.

I elsewhere caused a different poll to be released, which said:

Is race a social construct? (Please also note your race in the comments so we can break down the results.)

* Yes,

* No.

Several hundred people answered this, with “No” winning with 90% of the vote.

As far as I can tell, everybody who answered did so in earnest. Many gave their race, or gave opinions about the difficulty of identifying race.

But I meant it as a joke.

You can say No, race is not a social construct, which admits race is real in some sense, and then you can state what your race is with regard to this sense.

Or you can say Yes, race is a social construct, but then you cannot state your race. Well, logically you can, of course. It’s not completely inconsistent, but if you really believed race was a social construct you’d refuse to give a race because that would only serve to perpetuate the fiction that race was real.

The raucous point, which I was sure was obvious, and which because it was not proves the true clarity (mud) of my thinking, is that our Elites always answer Yes.

Every Elite university teaches that race is a social construct in some version or another. Just as every Elite university most assiduously tracks the race of all professors and students. Diversity czars are hired, and paid handsomely, to increase “diversity”, which is defined at its apex as the absence of whites.

Many of these “degree-granting”—I almost said educational—institutions teach courses on the evilness of whites, or the despicability of whites, or the crimes of whites, hold seminars on how to avoid exhibiting whiteness, and so forth. All of which acknowledges that at least the white race is not a social construct. Or that whiteness is a social construct, but a construct only possessed by those meeting those characteristics which everybody would take as defining the white race.

A black man, say, can be said to be “acting white”, but only because those saying it admit the man is of the black race. A white man who scores as high on the same math test as the black guy, the high score being the activity that labeled the black man as “acting white”, won’t be said to be acting white, because all recognize him as being white.

Sometimes whites are said to be doing especially white things—like inventing calculus or transistors or philosophy or rockets or moral theology or vaccines. Kidding! I’m kidding. No, the kind of whiteness they mean is whites acting like goofballs; dancing badly or whatnot (and always forgetting the greatest dancer of all). But, as the description says, because these activities are only ascribed to whites, it is an acknowledgement of the white race by those making the claim.

The point—he has a point?—is the lack of consistency. We have long argued here at WMBriggs.com that if feminists really believed the nonsense blasting out of their cheap-white-wine holes then they would everywhere argue for the equal treatment of men and women. Including sports. No feminist will argue this because they, at heart, know that which they push is bullshit, and what they really want is power.

Same things with race-as-social-construct mongers. To be perfectly consistent, if you say there is no such thing as race, then you should nowhere track, mention, point to, speak of, or give acknowledgement to any idea of race. That these scammers do the exact opposite of this, and everywhere emphasize race, proves all they want is to stir up trouble and gain power for themselves and for those they consider favored races.

Now as dumb as I am, I do at least know that pointing out these inconsistencies is like barking into a hurricane. All you can do is make fun of the situation. Which I tried to do.

There. I have just reproved the ancient wisdom that if you have to explain a joke it isn’t funny.

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