The Anti-Racialist Q & A – UPDATES ongoing

“Ideas precede accomplishment. Race, to the extent that it exists, is a fact. Nations and Cultures are ideas. The racial stock which appears to preserve its identity does so only by means of an idea. If an idea contains a universal principle, it will merge races; if it cuts across an idea previously accepted, it will divide nations in fatal strife. Every achievement is foreshadowed in fancy; every major disaster is the result of inadequacy, error, or perversion of intelligence. An idea may be previsioned in myth. Europe was a myth before it grew into a rich and complex civilization; and it is called a continent in defiance of geography, for the division between Europe and Asia was drawn in the minds of men.” – Isabell Patterson

[UPDATE: Please read the reality check at S14 at the bottom, if you read nothing else]

Trigger warning: To write this, I have to state racialist arguments at their best. However, if you think that this means I accept these ideas, you fail arguing forever.

Other trigger warning: occasional references to pop-culture of various levels of cheesiness; on the ground that if I am going to do this, I am going to have some fun with it.

Third trigger: Because of the explicitly anti-Objectivist and anti-libertarian attacks of neoreactionaries, this is written from a openly pro-Capitalism, pro-Western Civilisation standpoint so I do not want to hear any crap about that.

0.1 Preliminaries

0.1.: What is this all about?

This is about the re-emergence, especially over the internet, of quite explicit racialism in what is called the neoreactionary movement. If you want to know more about neoreactionary philosophy, I can strongly recommend Scott Alexander’s piece on it, as well as his long refutation of the same. Precis of the movement, or hints at how it behaves, can also be read here, under the heading of ‘reactionary douchebag conservatism’, and here, ‘Derbyshire’s firing is an ideological matter’.

0.2.: Why this piece?

I was inspired to this kind of Q and A by Scott Alexander; while I find his pieces good, I think that he did not address the racialist arguments of the neoreactionaries sufficiently. I also think it is important to have a refutation of this written by someone from an Objectivist/Libertarian/pro-Western Civilization perspective.

That last one in particular matters to me. While some neoreactionaries (e.g. Michael Annissimov) can be quite reasonable, others are utterly rancid. So when I find them trying to cast themselves in the tradition of Nietzsche and Frederick the Great, and worst of all, as defenders of science, I feel a responsibility to say something.

0.3.: Why ‘racialist’ and not ‘racist’?

I like to use words that mean something, and the term ‘racist’ has been rendered completely meaningless through overuse and its application to just about anything that upsets the Centre-Left Hivemind. Concerned about immigration? Racist! Crime? Racist! Abortion? Racist! The record of Obama? Extra-racist! Islam? Triple racist, with Islamophobia thrown in!

…and so on. The term is used almost exclusively for shutting down debate and preventing any kind of thought. This sort of yelling doesn’t do anything to convince anyone who isn’t convinced already; rather, it ends up driving people away and giving cover to the other side.

0.4: Is this really necessary?

I notice that Greta Christina has been rhetorically asking whether atheists would debate “whether black people are human beings”. Which is another way of abandoning the field. It is announcing, loudly, that Greta and those like her don’t actually have any good arguments for racial equality, cannot make a case that black people are human beings, probably don’t really believe it, and can only shout down loudly the opinion they secretly hold, as one always ends up accepting an argument, albeit subconsciously, if one cannot refute it. In a way, I’m glad that Christina is staying the hell out of this debate, as she’d probably just make everything worse.

Yet here in the real world, you defeat bad ideas through reason. This subject is far too important to be left in the hands of Social Justice Warriors and other losers. This has to be done right. SJW types are all arguing like Stalin and are then surprised when the racialists run rings around them.

0.5.: Who are you drawing on in your rebuttal?

In gathering information on this phenomenon, I’ve decided to use a number of neoreactionary, white supremacist, or white nationalist sites, specifically VDARE, TheRightStuff, Radish Magazine, as well as the writings and views of John Derbyshire and Jared Taylor. But to restate the disclaimer at the top, my linking these sites is in no way an endorsement.

0.6.: But surely you’re sending them oxygen by linking and discussing them!

Please read this. Also, not only are American racialists not as bad as you think, they aren’t as bad as they think.

Let me explain: it wasn’t the racialists who defended a US President when he destroyed Sudan’s only medicine factory, and cheered when he executed a mentally retarded black prisoner. Nor were they the guys who greenlighted the Rwandan genocide. Nor did they construct the system of protectionism, subsidy and trade barriers that are bleeding the poorest of the earth. Nor did they try to extend French colonial rule in Indo-China. Nor was it the racialists who blocked GM in East Asia for twelve years, killing eight million children. Nor did they found the CIA with renegade Nazis, and betray Mandela to the Afrikaner cops.

American racialists like to think they’re bad. “Oooh, look at me! I’m so big and bad! I’ll get to shock the status quo by saying that blacks are a standard deviation below whites! I’m soooo bad!” My reaction to this, summarized here, tends towards “Awww! So cute!”

Real bad doesn’t behave like this. Real bad acts, it doesn’t posture.

1. The Science and Sociology

1.1.: The idea that race is just a social contract is ridiculous; race is an empirical fact, referring to a group of common descent.

That’s true as far as it goes; but answer me this: what race is ‘white’ exactly? There is a sound genetic basis for a Caucasian race, certainly, but if we look at the definition of the five main races, the five branches of our species we find the following:

– Africans are those who primary ancestry is in sub-Saharan Africa. This includes African Americans and Afro-Carribeans. – Caucasians are people of western Eurasia – Europeans, Middle Easterners, North Africans and those of the Indian subcontinent – Asians are people of eastern Eurasia (China, Japan, Indochina, the Philippines and Siberia). – Pacific Islanders are Australian aborigines and people of New Guinea, Melanesia and Micronesia – Native Americans are the original inhabitants of North and South America

Definitions taken from Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, which has been given a glowing review in National Review Online by John Derbyshire, so please don’t give me any guff about ‘political correctness’.

Pay careful attention to those definitions – it turns out that the Caucasian race is rather diverse:

1.2.: The Standard Social Science model, which holds that people from any background can be made into anything is transparent nonsense because human beings didn’t just stop evolving fifty thousand years ago when the first migrations from Africa happened.

The problem with this statement is threefold. First of all, it makes a non-sequitor in the second half; it assumes that a banal truth (that humanity continues to evolve) is the reason for the first statement. Second, I don’t think anyone really thinks human beings have stopped evolving; who seriously doubts the differences in lactose tolerance, sickle cell anaemia, or reaction to different drugs? Third, it misrepresents the SSSM. Here it is, courtesy of VDARE:

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors”.

My emphasis. A ‘dozen healthy infants’? You know how rare that is worldwide, and historically? Even the SSSM doesn’t discount biology, because it would be insane to do so.

So in lieu of the SSSM, I would like to propose the SSSSM, the Sensible Standard Social Science Model:

Biology, and to a lesser extent, genetics, has a powerful influence on individual human life but at the group level it is overshadowed by culture and social institutions, not least because these drive biological changes in a reciprocal manner.

Notice how well this explains, for example, the history of my Fatherland. From the liberal 1848 revolutions, to Imperial Germany, to the short lived Weimar Republic, to the horrors of Nazism, then the country being divided between two radically different systems, and then finally, the market economy and social democracy we have today. Each produced radically different results.

And if that is not radical enough, consider the situation of south and north korea – decades of the worst tyranny in human history have practically produced a separate species in the north: starved, stunted dwarves, inculcated with the most fanatical racism and war worship.

So much for racial determinism.

1.3.: That’s not legitimate; genetics only defines potential. Sure, whites can have their development stunted, but they have the potential to succeed where other races don’t.

What did I just say about there being no genetic basic for ‘white’ as a classification? But, just to grant your premise for a second, allow me to introduce to you Mr. Joseph Needham whose Science and Civilization in China takes up a whole shelf. And this development was at a time when Northern Europeans were at the level of roaming tribes. And in modern times, East Asians excel so much at STEM subjects that the race-obsessed American Universities actively discriminate against them.

1.4.: Okay, I’ll give you the East Asians, but what about other races?

You mean the peoples of India, for example? Again, India had a flourishing civilization long, long before northern Europe did, and are so capable that if all Indians were to leave UK, the National Health service would just shut down.

(Yes, as I pointed out, Indians are genetically Caucasian, but this is a point that needs to be hammered home.)

And don’t start about either the Pacific Islanders or the Native Americans. They both were practically annihilated by the diseases brought by the Europeans; you can’t judge a people’s potential when they have been reaved almost to nonexistence.

1.5.: South Americans still exist. Just look at the pathologies infesting Latin America –

Before we get to those, you are aware that it is called Latin America for a reason. The ‘hispanic’ peoples are 39% Native American, 58% Caucasian, and 3% Africa (ref.: Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn). So, that is a mixture of Caucasians and the people who broke off east asians.

Latin America has problems, but take a look at this map:

What strikes me is that North America and Oceania retains the corruption levels of the European nations that settled there, and South America does the same (Portugal and Spain are currently not well liked in Europe). Again, cultural institutions trump race – and institutions can be changed. Chile is less corrupt than Botswana, and ahead of Austria, Spain, and Portugal.

1.6: C’mon, you know who I mean. Blacks.

I did know you meant that, but just returning to the genetic basis here, Africans are also a reasonably diverse bunch.

Let me just note at the outset that it’s a weird kind of racial supremacism that finds itself including the majority of humanity in its top group. It’s one of the reasons I find myself hopeful about humanity – when a self confessed racist like John Derbyshire starts preaching the values of multi-racial politics, something must be going right.

1.7: Stop dodging the point; studies show that Africa has a considerably lower mean IQ than the other nations. And it shows: Africa is a nest of corruption, tribalism, war, misery…

The IQ point is certainly true; there is a reference to maps like this one:

However, that leaves one question unaddressed:

Is IQ racially and genetically fixed?

Everything I have read on the subject says “no” and “no”.

This is where the part of SSSSM about the interplay between society and biology becomes extremely important. Here are some things we know depress IQ scores:

Pollution

Malnutrition / Hunger

Parasites

And guess what? These are extremely widespread throughout Africa.

Let me take them in order:

1) Pollution has a horrible effect on children’s IQ. There are a lot of small-scale, artisanal miners throughout Africa, and they use mercury – a substance that comprehensively messes up entire communities, and sabotages children’s IQ development. Then there are other substances, like lead and hydrocarbons also depress IQ. Then there are all the problems caused by having to cook your food on an open fire and inhale all that smoke…

2) Malnutrition’s effect on mental development is completely uncontroversial; study after study show the same thing – poor nutrition for kids and for pregnant women is bad for brain development.

3) Parasites are such a problem for mental development that even in the US you find them as an effect. Imagine how bad it is in sub-Saharan Africa.

This is why we talk about the ‘Flynn effect’. The fact is that IQ scores keep having to be renormalised because they keep rising, so a significant chunk of Africa probably has higher IQ scores than Europeans did when we ruled the world.

1.8.: The Flynn effect only describes a rise in IQ. But that may not be a rise in real intelligence.

I can recognise a “god of the gaps” argument when I see it. IQ scores were the alpha and omega of all self-proclaimed ‘race realists’, right up until it was found that they don’t support a racialist agenda. What does John Derbyshire say?

IQ deniers are like the Intelligent Design folk: long on critique, pitifully short on research, on data, on work, on science.

Yes, I notice that Radish does bang on about this when it suits and then reverses course when the Flynn effect is brought up.

1.9.: Intelligence is only part of it; Africans are still on a lower level of human development, with a higher level of aggression that, on average make them unsuitable for modern industrial civilization, or at least explains the higher level of criminality seen in American blacks compared with American whites

This is Jared Taylor‘s line, and it focuses heavily on MAO-A, a gene with variants that are linked with higher aggression (termed ‘the warrior gene’, and therefore a higher incidence of antisocial behaviour. Actually, Taylor focuses pretty much exclusively on this one gene variant, the 3R (as its called).

It is true that this is differentially distributed between racial groups – 58% of black men, 56% of Maori, and 36% of Caucasian men have it. That is seriously supposed to explain an eight fold difference in the homicide rate?

As observant people will have noticed, 58% of Black men and 36% of all Caucasian men are not currently in jail for violent offences. A great deal more than just a genetic propensity for aggression is necessary – things like early childhood trauma, etc. So, culture and cultural institutions play the dominant role, as predicted by my SSSSM.

1.10.: You can’t really believe that just by changing a bunch of environmental characteristics Africans can get the brains to rise to the level of European civilization!

Oh, yes I can. Allow me to describe a population with far lower IQs that modern Europeans, at least thirty if not more points lower – a people riven through with incest, dreadful hysterias that enveloped entire towns, poverty and corruption, religious hysteria…

I am describing Europeans four, five hundred years ago. With the lack of any kind of easy transport, incest was extremely common with catastrophic effects on health; it is thought that the legend of changelings was inspired by all the genetic problems this caused. Pollution in the form of human and animal feces was awful, as was smoke. Worse, everyone was pretty much constantly drunk – the average beer intake per day was three litres and this was not the weak lager you had today. Women drank routinely during pregnancy. We all know what kind of parasite load Europeans had at that point. And so on.

You think, say, Kenya has tribal problems? Take a look out of what Germany was welded:

Christian Africa is trying to replicate in decades what it took Europe centuries to achieve. And they are getting there; in fits and starts, but they are. Just to touch on the subject of corruption for a moment, it is certainly true that it is a serious problem in most of that region.

But then there’s Botswana, which, in the world rankings of corruption swings in at place 30. That is ahead of most of Europe, ahead of Portugal (33), Spain (40), Italy (43) and Greece (80). It’s also ahead of Slovenia, Hungary, the Czech republic, Slovakia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia.

Also, corruption is a broad metric covering up a lot of individual variations, and in some ways, African nations have features that I’d love to see in the modern West. Kenyatta, the president of Kenya, has decided to take a voluntary pay cut. If you can imagine either Bush or Obama saying, “Actually, the American people spending $1.4 Billion a year on me and my family is a bit much – we’ll try to squeak by on a measly $1 billion”, you have a better imagination than me.

Further there was a rather nasty line, prior to decolonialisation, that it’d be “one man, one vote, once”. In point of fact, that is actually the case when it comes to much of the U.S. Senate. There are several African countries that have had greater democratic turnover than many US senate seats.

Once again, cultural institutions and environment trumps race as a predictor.

And if we are going to talk history here, let me ask you to take a look at this:

Notice Balthazar. There was a time when it would have been completely uncontroversial to think of civilizations in Africa. And, yes, these are principally in North Africa, but they still predate the development of Northern Europe.

1.11.: So what is your take on racial IQ differences, and on differences between peoples more generally?

For any two groups, that have developed apart for significant portions of time, there will obviously be a number of differences, and those will include IQ differences. No one would be surprised to hear that there is more malnutrition among Africans than among Europeans, so no one should be surprised to find an IQ difference. For malnutrition substitute cooking fires, literacy, pollution, parasites et cetera. Similarly, one reason why Germans are on average one of the smartest people on the continent (we are) may be because of sauerkraut and good beer (both promote healthy gut flora that in turn promote higher intelligence, because the gut flora are instrumental in delivering energy to the brain).

So we’d expect to see differences, but we would also expect to see these differences closing as development happens. And guess what? We are seeing exactly this. Over a twelve year period, Kenya added 13.85 IQ points, over a thirty-five year period Dominica added 18 points, Sudan added 4.05 points over twenty years (to return to my point about society and environment, Sudan’s markedly lower gains may have something to do with two genocides, civil wars, and famines) and so on.

This is sometimes masked in official tests, which is why you have headlines like “American black-white IQ gap not closing”. But it is not controversial that white American IQs have been increasing, so the fact that you see no increase in the gap means that both are increasing at a very similar rate. Which fits with the stunningly original view that equality may have been achieved for black America, but the past gravely retarded its development.

I don’t think anyone serious and cognizant of the facts can dispute this basic finding.

1.12.: Oh really? Look at what they did to James Watson!

I said “anyone serious and cognizant of the facts”. The hounding of Watson was an absolute disgrace. I completely agree with Derbyshire that not one of the riff-raff who was traducing a great man was fit to squeeze toothpaste for him. Indeed, we will never be able to compute what this man has added to humanity, and everyone involved should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

Ask yourself this, however: will such behaviour be more or less likely in the future if a) a case is made “Look facts are facts, and a stack of environmental factors influence IQ, so if there is a black-white IQ difference, let’s be honest about it and find out what causes that so it can be fixed.” or b) a case is made that this means that slavery and segregation weren’t so bad after all?

I’ve written before about the rejection of climate science being rooted in the awareness by many that it is being used to advance a fantastically wicked agenda. The same applies here.

1.13.: Botswana is just one nation; there’s always an exception to a general rule. As Nicholas Wade points out, you cannot transplant a culture onto one that has been shaped in a radically different way by evolution. Africa has never succeeded in copying Euro-American civilisation because it lacks the biological basis to do.

My first response to this is that it forgets – ignores – that a lot of Europe isn’t exactly squeaky clean. Look at politicians like Berlusconi, and that’s even before I’ve gotten into the Eastern nations like Belarus and Russia (yes, Russia is European).

The second thing that is being left out is a peculiarity related to Africa’s colonial history. No, I am not going into the whole ‘legacy of colonialism’ rag, but something more subtle. Just as decolonization was getting underway, a host of lunatic ideologies of the socialist family were infesting Western Universities. And when the newly free nations send their best and their brightest to Western Universities, they absorbed this poison in its pure state. They did not return with the ideas that had demonstrably and provably lead to the West’s success, but with a swarm of nonsense that was specifically the opposite.

The generation of African intellectuals wasn’t stupid or wicked. They just had no experience in how bad those ideas were, and their countries lacked the cultural institutions of the developed world that prevented those ideas from making an impact.

Julius Nyeyere of Tanzania is a good example. He was a socialist, but he wasn’t a power hungry psycho like many. He honestly thought he was doing the right thing, and he did do a few good things (abolish the tribal system). It is just that, thanks to Western academics, he was operating off a completely insane philosophy.

I have a lot of respect for Nicholas Wade – his Before the Dawn is a damn fine piece of work – but he is off the rails here. His claim that racial determinism is proved by the fact that people are highly imitative and the failure of much of Africa to completely copy Euro-American civilisation skips the fact that Africa did copy Euro-American civilisation, just the worst parts of it. When you have a generation of new leaders raised believing that some of the bugfuck political philosophies of the left are a good idea, what do you think the result is? As for the Arab Islamic world, the Euro-American tradition they were happy to copy were the Nazis. Ideas matter.

There is a counter-proof: Japan. Japan has been as biologically isolated as you can get, and for millennia had a culture of extreme violence. Today Japanese men are so gelded that they give up on dating and prefer virtual girlfriends to real life women, and women have to actually pay men to sit and drink with them. Japan modernised in response to the West, and then had its culture completely rewritten, because the people who did it were not afraid to say “The West is best, and we are not going to shy of telling you so”.

So, the blame lies elsewhere; it is similar to the way that redistributionist, left-wing politics wrecked Detroit. And speaking of Detroit…

1.14.: That’s not true; look at blacks in America! They do worse than US whites, and much worse than Asian immigrants; not just in IQ, and in school, in violence and crime they are considerably worse too. Those examples of American blacks who succeed tend to have mixed-race ancestry, and you can just look at Detroit to see what happens when blacks get power.

(first argument courtesy of Radish magazine, second argument courtesy of The Right Stuff)

Yes, about that… It is true that black American society suffers from a number of pathologies, but here’s the thing: some of these aren’t just unusual by the standards of America, they are unusual by the standards of Christian Africa.

Let’s take Detroit. Among its many charming characteristics, it has a literacy rate of about 50%. Compare this with Kenya (87.4%), Lesotho (89.6%), Tanzania (69.4%), Botswana (85.1%). In fact, the comparison is much more damning, since the average illiterate African typically speaks four languages (two local ones, and two colonial ones), and his illiteracy is due to poverty, whereas in Detroit it is due to catastrophic bad management.

So, why is it that I’m reading headlines like this about Detroit:

And ones like this about Nairobi?

There another detail I’d like to add. From my own observation in the UK, black Africans who come from the west Indies tend to do poorly. Black Africans who come directly from Africa are doing really well. I’m reminded of a similar observation of Yaron Brook, that Nigerian immigrants to the US were doing extraordinarily well.

Depending on your hat you could argue that if you take a people, abduct them, drag them to somewhere that might as well be another planet, keep them as property, and then subject them to institutional degradation and oppression for decades, they don’t do as well as people who haven’t had that happen (note you don’t need to be a lefty to think that; Peter Hitchens takes that tack). Or you could argue that if you have a culture that has 72.3% illegitimacy, glorifies violence, drugs and criminality, it doesn’t do as well as a conservative Christian culture with strong family values and an emphasis on hard work and personal achievement. Or you can abandon your hat altogether and take the Nietzschean line that slave peoples are always more vicious and cruel than master peoples.

Life being what it is, it is probably a combination of all of these, plus other things that aren’t here. Whatever, once again we are stuck with the reality that racial determination doesn’t really explain much.

Anyway, if we are going to start banging on about racial propensities, in any tallying of propensities to homicidal violence, Germans make it into the top five, easily. Not to mention the British, the Belgians…

1.15.: That’s not universally true; Somali immigrants, for example do really poorly.

I am specifically focusing on Christian Africa because Islam breeds all sorts of pathologies.

1.16.: What about the achievements of Europeans versus those of Africans? Europeans have Bach, Beethoven, Brahms etc. while Africans have Jay-Z at most.

(this one’s courtesy of Radish Magazine)

You have to compare like with like. As reactionaries like to say, and I think they’ve got this one right, there’s a general cultural decay. These days, Caucasians aren’t exactly creating much in the way of the Musical Offering, the Brandenburg Concertos etc. So it’s completely unsurprising to see this replicate itself across the board – and given the relatively recent emancipations of African blacks, they are in the position of having just climbed onto a ladder that is slowly sinking into the mud. It’s completely unsurprising that you see a decline from Frederick Douglass, an autodidact polymath who spoke seven languages, to Otis Mathis, President of Detroit’s school board, who has trouble speaking one.

This is a matter of simple observation; black America’s cultural output has decreased from Nat ‘King’ Cole and Duke Ellington to Snoop Dogg. Meanwhile, black Africa, because it was (at least until recently) isolated from this pathology, still have groups like the Soweto Gospel Choir, and the String Quartet.

If we really are going to do the whole genetic thing, black Africans (like east Asians) have a keener ear for tonal differences so, given the right opportunity, we should expect to see greater musical achievement.

1.17.: Some concluding remarks on Human Biological Diversity

Human biological diversity is obviously real – outside the loonier fringes of sociology, no one doubts that human beings continued to evolve after the great diaspora 50,000 years ago. Witness the recent paper showing that our Neanderthaler genes make Europeans better able to burn fat. The subject of how people vary across time and space is a fascinating one, and one with great practical applications.

Here’s the problem: Racialists like to cast themselves as stone cold, dispassionate scientists. But they repeatedly ignore all the proven science about what causes IQ fluctuations in favour of putting it all on genes, and we still haven’t identified intelligence genes with any certainty. This bias leaves them looking rather foolish; when differences in African and Caucasian distributions of the ASPM gene that is involved in brain development, racialists jumped to argue that this was the long looked for basis for white cognitive supremacy (Derbyshire’s line). Unfortunately for them, it turned out that the variation does not affect IQ, but does affect the ability to hear tones, and is associated with a lack of tonal languages.

To be honest, this is a lot more interesting than any IQ mumbo-jumbo; that Indo-European languages (‘Aryan’ languages to use the term correctly, and not in the disgraceful way it was used) are non-tonal is one of the big puzzles, and may be a reason why civilization got started in these regions. This is a variant of Joseph Needham’s hypothesis of why China ‘got stuck’ at a certain level of technology. Needham argued that the Chinese failed to make the break to the conceptual level of science that the ancient Greeks did, and part of this is to do with the concrete-level of chinese vocabulary. By contrast, the reduced sound range and hence, reduced word range available to Indo-European languages may have played a crucial role in making that initial great breakthrough.

Similarly, there is this obsession about MAO-A as a driver of aggression and a complete ignoring the correlation of murder rates with the presence of leaded gasoline (lead drives people bonkers, the inner cities of America were full of lead; something similar may have happened in ancient Rome).

So for all their supposed reverence for the scientific method, they are missing out on the richness of biology.

Weirdly enough, this is a flaw that the old school eugenicists did not have. People forget this, but one of the big campaigns of the eugenics movement was to clean up the working class slums and houses and prevent the pollution that was leading to birth defects. If any HBD nut is clamouring for, e.g., better nutrition for the world’s poor, or restrictions on mercury use, I haven’t found it.

They have also a habit of missing genuine genetic facts, when these do not support a certain interpretation of race. For example, to return to Radish’s assertion that many of the high achievers attributed to black America were of mixed race, leaving aside the bonuses of having a white parent in America, it is also the case that mixed-race people are more attractive than average. And attractive people find it easier to get on in the world, sad but true.

In a way, their relation to biological science seems to be a bit like that of the climate alarmists to climate science. Since Michael Mann has been annoying me, please take a look at the following:

From left to right, they are the hockey stick Mann included in the IPCC report, the hockey stick he actually made, and the hockey stick that he produced when other people were working with him.

The same thing is going on with the racialists – hence the transformation of “58% of black males and 36% of white males have the short form of MAO-A” into “Studies show that blacks are genetically more violent!” There is a huge leap between the two statements, and there are many different ways that this finding can be viewed. Here’s one: “a tendency towards aggressiveness and assertiveness, if found in the general population, will prevent the formation of a unified polity require for ultra-violence. So black violence is the urban gang, white violence is the Third Reich.” There’s a hypothesis you’re not likely to hear in racialist circles, but it is a perfectly acceptable interpretation of the results – certainly as respectable as the previous interpretation. Or try this one: “We know that pale skins are better than dark skins at triggering vitamin D production in response to sunlight; given that vitamin D is linked to testosterone, this could explain the cruelty of European colonists in Africa.” That’s another interesting hypothesis.

But the point I am driving at is that is all they are, hypotheses. I’d love to see some solid science on this, but racialists typically jump clean over all the hard spade work required to get there. I’m especially suspicious on something that focuses only on one gene – biology is usually a lot more complicated. To eat eggs, the rat snake has no less than three distinct features – smooth mouth, very wide jaw even by snake standards, and specialised vertebrae – controlled by who knows how many genes. Deriving the whole complexity of human culture and interaction from one gene? Seriously?

I just reviewed a project proposal that would examine the changing microbial genetics in the arctic in response to climate change. The timeline proposed is four years. Four years to make some headway with a completely non-controversial topic, where we can say pretty much whatever we think is correct. Get your head around how much worse it is trying to studying human genetics.

I’m with Steve Jones here:

The trouble with sociobiology was always that you could invent apparently convincing explanations for contradictory forms of human behaviour. Take sex. If men were solely monogamous or serially monogamous, occasionally adulterous or incessantly treacherous, bigamous, polygamous or merely libidinous, there was a superficially plausible account of how their behaviour evolved in pre-history. Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College, London, can make up pseudo-scientific theories off the top of his head. He told me the best thing about playing Darwinian party tricks was that no one could falsify your conclusions in a controlled experiment because no one could travel back in time to study our African ancestors. Jones and other sceptical biologists dismiss conjectures about the evolution of human behaviour as Just So Stories … Kipling told us ‘How the Camel Got His Hump’; socio-biologists tell the tale of ‘Why Humans Get the Hump’. The first is fiction, the second may as well be.

What I have noticed is that the more scientific a HBD type is, the less racialist he becomes, and the more interesting he becomes. The gold standard for me is Razib Khan’s wonderful Gene Expression blog, who makes the following observation:

[O]ver the years I have encountered many people who have come to the conclusion that the standard sociological arguments about the fictional nature of racial categories are false, and derive from the caricature that crude racist positions are tenable and correct, and defensible on normative grounds.

That’s about it.

1.18.: Any last comments specifically on genetic superiority?

Man is a rope, spanned between animal and Overman, a rope over an Abyss – Nietzsche

I’m in favour of it.

I agree with Michio Kaku that the twentieth century was defined by understanding nature, the twenty-first will be defined by controlling it. The more we know about human difference – on the genetic level, sure, but on all levels – the sooner we can start to control it. Selecting for genes that increase lifespan, intelligence, disease resistance etc. it’s all great stuff, and it will come. We’re just not there yet. So I’m extremely happy with all results from comparative genomics, and look forward to the day when we can sequence humanity, take the best qualities from all and strip out the weaknesses. One way or another that will happen, the incentive is just too strong. If the West is too squeamish, you think Japan or China will hesitate?

This also makes nonsense of the racialists’ obsession with Africans. Let us just imagine for the sake of the argument that even after all of the problems of disease, poverty, malnutrition, pollution and the rest of it are corrected for, there is still a genetic difference that means average African intelligence is ten points below that of average Caucasian intelligence (or mathematical ability or whatever). By the time that rolled around, the technology would be in place so that would just be one more thing to be corrected – relying on the old fashioned way of shuffling genes around will be a disability in itself. Whatever genetic differences there are between the human races will be nothing compared to those between humanity and post-humanity. You white supremacists aren’t just wrong, you are obsolete.

So, all you VDAREists, meet the future:

2.0. The Politics

2.1.: The virtues that allow for the creation and maintenance of a high industrial civilization are particular to whites (or maybe Caucasians and East Asians); whites are pretty much the only ones talking about overcoming racial identity. And this is catastrophic, because other racial groups get together and manipulate the system to live parasitically off the productive native majority.

It is certainly true that racial minorities can band together to completely screw the majority. For example, the fons et origo of Apartheid was the drive by white labour unions and other racialist riff-raff who just didn’t want the bother of competing with ‘natives’. Oddly enough, this example is never used by the racialists.

Instead, they tend to take John Derbyshire’s line:

I don’t mind the word “white” in either of those expressions. Conservatism, Inc. or otherwise, is a white people’s movement, a scattering of outliers notwithstanding. Always has been, always will be. I have attended at least a hundred conservative gatherings, conferences, cruises, and jamborees: let me tell you, there ain’t too many raisins in that bun.I was in and out of the National Review offices for twelve years, and the only black person I saw there, other than when Herman Cain came calling, was Alex, the guy who runs the mail room. (Hey, Alex!) This isn’t because conservatism is hostile to blacks and mestizos. Very much the contrary, especially in the case of Conservatism Inc. They fawn over the occasional nonwhite with a puppyish deference that fairly fogs the air with embarrassment. (Q: What do you call the one black guy at a gathering of 1,000 Republicans? A: “Mr. Chairman.”) It’s just that conservative ideals like self-sufficiency and minimal dependence on government have no appeal to underperforming minorities—groups who, in the statistical generality, are short of the attributes that make for group success in a modern commercial nation. Of what use would it be to them to embrace such ideals? They would end up even more decisively pooled at the bottom of society than they are currently.

(my emphasis)

The problem with this analysis is that, even if we grant the premise, there is no way that race can account for the it, since it is lumping together two groups (“blacks and mestizos”) that are the maximum of racial distance, if we are going to talk actual science. Again, it misses that ‘ideals like self-sufficiency and minimal dependence on government’ do take root in non-Caucasians, especially in sub-Saharan Africa because, guess what? You can’t rely on the government down there, and those that can’t be self-sufficient end up dead. It is par for the course for people in Kenya to have second jobs, private companies, other sources of income, because there is no way to rely on the state for that kind of thing.

You see this clearly in the U.K.: Non-Muslim Asian immigrants have a far lower rate of violent crime and substance abuse than native whites; Sikhs and Hindus in particular do well, and Africans who are not descendents of slaves are the same.

Mark Steyn, no one’s idea of a PC squish, summarized it like this:

Pat Buchanan is an engaging fellow, but he was never more wrong than in his observation, apropos immigration a few years back, that obviously America would find it easier to assimilate a hundred thousand Englishmen than a hundred thousand Zulus. The Zulus have mostly given up their traditional practices of disemboweling and genital-severing, and I feel sure that, were a hundred thousand of them to turn up in, say, a small town in northern Maine, the locals would have little trouble, at least after the select board’s polite request that they tone down the tribal dancing or save it for the Fourth of Jul y parade. On the other hand, were a hundred thousand Englishmen to move in, well, there goes the neighborhood. As I understand it, Pat’s a protectionist in the economic sense; with a hundred thousand Englishmen next door, he’d soon be a protectionist in the “Quick, wedge the armoire against the front door” sense. My advice to him would be to head for the hills, especially since many of the English seem to have become belated converts to some of the Zulus’ more robust tribal customs.

Here’s another version of that argument, courtesy of the chuckleheads at The Right Stuff:

2.2.: “Libertarianism is a white man’s ideology […] If humans are indeed driven by incentives, where is the incentive in selling shitty people on a more difficult and honest world of merit?”

“Shitty”… by what standard? Rest assured, I place no stock in any bleeding heart nonsense that is the academic equivalent of ‘oh everybody’s special in their own way!’ Instead, let me take the neoreactionary’s own definition of worthy, the high octane, male values of honour, loyalty, courage etc. After all, this is a group that considers Fight Club to be Holy Writ, as an expression of Julius Evola’s Mannerbund, and that Tyler Durden is the ideal to be aspired to.

Let’s take that as our standard then. Wouldn’t be good to find a man who started an off-the-books boxing club, that developed a terrorist wing as part of its political movement, and didn’t just fight, but actually succeeded in completely transforming his society?

Well, here is that man:

You see those faces at the top of this site? You see that I placed Nelson Mandela next to Frederick the Great? That wasn’t an accident.

Want another example? How about this one?

That’s General Laurent Nkunda who prior to one of the meanest stitch ups I’ve ever seen, was – well, I’ll let the War Nerd tell it:

The reason Nkunda’s little army (estimates range from 5000 to 10000 men) advanced into Eastern Congo this week is that the Hutu gangs were getting a little too aggressive about jumping ethnic-Tutsi villages in eastern Congo, killing the men and kidnapping women and girls as sex slaves. Nkunda knows very well nobody else will protect the Tutsi, for the simple reason nobody ever has. So he went in to do it himself. Nkunda is a great man, a brilliant man, a hero, a military genius who speaks four languages and has beaten the biggest armies around with a force of less than 10,000 men. He’s the only decent leader that part of Africa’s ever seen.

Here also:

He came up out of nowhere, never asked anybody for a thing. Nobody even knows much about him because he’s always played his biographical details very close to the flak vest. He whipped a small Tutsi militia into such fantastic shape that it chased the gigantic robbin’, rapin’ army of Congo right out of the bush. And he did all this while his people, the Tutsi, were being slaughtered all through Rwanda. Nobody helped him or the Tutsi. Not Bono, not nobody. The first time the bleeding hearts got worried about Rwanda, and this is a matter of “historical record” as they say, was when RPF, the Tutsi militia, chased the Hutu genocidaires out of Rwanda with their pangas still dripping Tutsi women and kids’ blood. Then the UN came out in force, with all the free food and sympathy even Bono could ask. The Tutsi didn’t complain. They don’t do complaining. They’re like the Prussians, tall and grim, and just as likely to be wiped out, too. They took back Rwanda and forgave the Hutu murderers. The Tutsi, this little tribal army carved out of the survivors of the worst genocide in decades, kept walking west out of Rwanda and walked into a giant vacuum called “Congo.” The Congo Army was a dirty joke and collapsed when the disciplined Tutsi units approached, and the little army marched all the way to Kinshasa, where the leaders, including Nkunda, were fobbed off with fancy titles while the Kabilas, father and son, went about making the usual sleazy Congo deals with the Katanga rich boys, divvying up the country fresh. Nkunda was promoted to general in the Congo Army in 2004, but as he watched his friends from the bush picked off one by one, framed for treason or other joke crimes and disappeared, he got the idea that Kinshasa wasn’t a healthy place for a real man of war. That kind of peace was too dirty for him. And there was work for a soldier back in eastern Congo. The Hutu genocidaires, those wonderful specimens of humanity who were sulking in the forests there after being forced out of Rwanda before they could finish off “the work” of killing every last Tutsi infant, responded to the Tutsis’ totally unprecedented softness and failure to take revenge by massacring and raping all the Tutsi civilians they could catch in Congo. It was like they decided to franchise Tutsi genocide to their new location. That’s when Nkunda’s little army went in, to flush them out and protect his tribe.

So, you want to talk Mannerbund? You want to talk honour, courage, standing up for your family and your people in desperate times? Well, what do you have to compare to that Mr Neoreactionary? A high score in Quake?

I’ll repeat another line from the War Nerd, because I like it:

The Tutsi didn’t complain. They don’t do complaining. They’re like the Prussians, tall and grim,

Oh, yes indeed.

(For the record, I have checked out all of the War Nerd’s claims, and he’s bang on the money here. The treatment of Nkunda and the Tutsis by the international media and the international community has been an absolute disgrace)

Want another example? Try these guys:

Those are the JEM, the anti-Janjaweed militia, disgracefully and shamefully betrayed by the modern West (meaning whites to the neoreactionaries, I might add).

2.2.: Okay, I can give you those virtues, but what about the high IQ, technical ones necessary to build an industrial civilization?

Please reread section 1.

2.3.: Then why do we not see that many non-white libertarians?

Whaddya mean we white man? What this reminds me of is that it was, and largely still is, U.S. republican doctrine that we Euro-weenies were always gonna be socialist, not like the red blooded, capitalist Americans. Meanwhile, in many ways much of Europe is more free market and less redistributionist than the United States. And if this complaint is true, then why is it that Atlas Shrugged is a best seller in India?

Until 2007, Indians conducted more Google searches for the Russian-American novelist than residents of any other country, and in recent years have ceded the top spot only to Americans.

Why do I keep meeting Nigerian Objectivists? Why is it that Africa is now giving rise to capitalist revolutionaries like Dambisa Moyo and Paul Kagame?

I’ve sold many people from the developing world on capitalism with one simple fact: the international order is not capitalistic; it is a socialistic, redistributionist racket designed to completely screw the poorest in the developing world and the average joe in the developed world, for the benefit of no one except corrupt megacorps, tin-pot tyrants, and the collection of anti-globalisation riff-raff that are parasitic off both. See farm subsidies, protectionism, trade barriers etc. I will be returning to this point.

2.4.: But in the U.S. blacks and hispanics predominantly vote left and support redistributionism, and why wouldn’t they? The less able have no incentive to support capitalism which only benefits the more able.

How very… leftist. The idea that capitalism benefits the able (“strong”) and is terrible for the less able (“weak”) is a trope that has been peddle for a century and is always wrong.

If this was the case, then you would assume that the average, the people at the bottom of the heap would do best in a maximally redistributionist system. The history of the twentieth century proves the exact opposite. Marxism was the single greatest disaster to happen to the international working class; not even the explicitly elitist fascist movements did what the Commies did:

Communists killed different people to fascists. If you were a peasant farmer in Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, they allowed you to live – as long as you did not cross them. Marxism was the greatest disaster the 20th-century peasantry endured. Death by execution or in a manmade famine could await, regardless of whether you kept your nose out of politics.

Guess what? Bad, rotten government is a disaster for everyone – and it hurts the people at the bottom most of all, because they are least able to cope or escape with such a situation. To return to the example of Detroit, everyone with the cash and ability to get out, did, and who will say that those left behind in any way benefit?

As to the reason for those historic voting patterns, the reason for that is people like you bucko. Ayn Rand:

One of the worst contradictions, in this context, is the stand of many so-called “conservatives” (not confined exclusively to the South) who claim to be defenders of freedom, of capitalism, of property rights, of the Constitution, yet who advocate racism at the same time. They do not seem to possess enough concern with principles to realize tht they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. Men who deny individual rights cannot claim, defend or uphold any rights whatsoever. It is such alleged champions of capitalism who are helping to discredit and destroy it.

With the supposed defenders of capitalism supporting oppression and bigotry, and leaving it to the left to fight this battle, how could things be different? I cannot begin to describe how much better the world would have been had, throughout the cold war, the right completely embraced capitalism as a moral ideal and spread the principles of it around the world. After all, in many ways in the 50s the Congo was ahead of Texas in development; had Africa’s new generation of leaders learnt from von Mises, Hayek and Ayn Rand, rather than Patrice Lumumba University, this whole argument would never even come up, and you’d have people scrambling for African STEM workers the way they do for Indian and East Asian ones today.

Fortunately, and no thanks whatsoever to the racialists, that situation is changing even in the U.S. Sixty percent of U.S. blacks do not think that the problems of the community – poverty etc. – are the result of white oppression. There is an inherent irony here: by eliminating racial oppression, the left has also removed the main reason for racism’s victims to support the left. Their best incentive to actually do something with that freedom is to switch to the pro-capialist right. Naturally, this leads to ever increasing hysteria among the left and attempts to define racism ever more broadly, but is that surprising? The first aim of a boss class is to remain a boss class, no matter how and no matter what its colour.

2.5.: Okay, so let me just grant that all other things being equal, all races can do this. But granting the Flynn effect, it follows that at any given time, different groups will be at different stages, and that can cause problems in terms of assimilation. There is good evidence that the more diverse a society, the lower its social capital, and the higher its internal conflicts. Multi-racialism is all nice in theory, but in practice we have enough problems with the diversity we have already. Life is better if all races just stay out of each others hair .

(courtesy of John Derbyshire)

…this argument actually has a fair bit going for it. Subliminal racism – rather, a subliminal tendency to identify your own group as safe and others as less so – has nothing to do with ‘internalized stereotypes’ or other SJW nonsense. It is a basic survival trait, coded into us at the DNA level – for the overwhelming majority of our species sad life, the guy who came from elsewhere, who looked different, and spoke funny really was bad news. The worst kind of bad news. In times of stress, people will revert to more primitive modes of association, and they switch from being rational to tribal actors.

The objections I have are twofold. First of all, to make this with any kind of honesty, you have to argue that colonialism was one unmitigated disaster. I believe, to his credit, Michael Annisimov does seem to take this view; most neoreactionaries do not. The second problem is that it conflates ‘monoracial’ with ‘unified/un-diverse’, and worse, “less likely to have conflicts”.

When and where, exactly, was this monoracial utopia, the ‘whitopia’ that many racialists seem to dream about? During the 30 years war that killed half of central Europe? When it tore itself apart in the Great War that almost destroyed our civilization, or the more terrible sequel, or the cold war?

Some things are better expressed in song:

And where is the racial unity in other groups – the one that people like Derbyshire seem to have penis-envy for? In Somalia, Rwanda, the Congo? Was it in southern Africa when Shaka’s troops unleashed the Mfecane? Did it exist in East Asia when the army of Imperial Japan slaughtered its way across Manchuria – or during the warring states period of Imperial China? When the Southern Americans butchered tens of thousands to the Sun, or their northern equivalents waged continuous war on each other?

Simply as a matter of empirical fact, conflicts within racial groups dwarf any between racial groups. I can think of only one exception, and that is the colonization of the Americas – and in that case it was not due to the savagery of the settlers, but because they brought the smallpox virus with them.

For the record, I believe in Greater Europe, from Reykjavik to Vladivostok, from Isafjordur to St Lawrence Bay. But I am also aware that the idea of intra-racial harmony is such a progressive, utopian project that you might as well go the whole hog and advocate for inter-racial harmony while you’re at it.

Not least because you seem to find people overcoming inter-racial prejudices before intra-racial ones:

2.6.: Slavery wasn’t really that bad; much of what we think of as historical fact is just anti-whitey propaganda. Slaves in the U.S. Deep South were effectively adopted freemen with the employment-for-life seen in Japanese corporations. The abuses we hear about were either non-existant or extremely rare, as the slaves were protected partly by law but mainly by an immense public opinion that ensured that slaves were well treated. Add to that the fact that it was in a slave-owner’s best interest to protect his slaves, given the financial investment they represented. Sure, they had to work hard, but who didn’t in those days? They lived as well as freemen and sometimes better.

… I swear on my ancestors that this argument is being made with a straight face over at Radish.

Let me start by just considering the hypothetical situation they suggest. Imagine you had been adopted at birth by a Japanese corporation (I’m assuming that you’re not Japanese – if you are, imagine some other corporation. The race difference matters here). You may be with your parents (they may also be lifetime employees), or you may be separated at birth; it’s not up to you and not up to them.. As soon as you are old enough to do the most basic labour – sorting printer cartridges, carrying paper – say at 5, or 6, you are put to work all day. You might or might not get some education – it depends on the corporation, not you. You can never quit, you have to work for this corporation all your life. And no matter how much you work, you will always remain on the lowest ranks, making coffee, taking dictation, filing paperwork, while you get to see the japanese kids of the company bosses rise and rise and live a grand life that you will never taste.

Sound like fun to you?

It might be argued that that is not a lot of fun from our perspective, but by the standards of the time, it was pretty good. Let me grant that at least some of that is true. In George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, Flashy finds himself talking with a black slave who is working against the abolition of slavery. On inquiring why, he is told that, sure, the slave could be free in the north – free to be spat on in the street, free to be thrown out of hotels, free to starve for want of work… in the southland he may be a slave, but he is the slave of a powerful and respected man, and that gives him respect that no free black has.

And yes, the kind of people who pretend that slavery was just a “white” thing, the kind of people who ignore that the biggest slavers in history, to this day were the Muslim Arabs (there are still a million black slaves in the Arab Islamic world, not that those who think this is all ‘CAUSE ‘MURICA! care), or those who either deny or consider it irrelevant that it was other African tribes who caught and sold the African slaves to the white slavers, or those who seriously try to argue that the astonishing achievements of European civilization are only because the Europeans had slaves – these are tiresome wastes of breath and human intelligence and we should not treat them seriously.

And it is true that a lot of historical reality is lost in the modern presentation of the ‘peculiar instution’. What Radish misses is that that loss doesn’t mean just that a more evil picture is painted of slavery than was real, it means that in many ways the reality was worse than is depicted.

Radish has their Unitarian gentleman travelogue who explains how he only saw slaves well treated and in the one example of abuse he saw, that of a baby girlchild being put up for sale, the sale was declared null and the local Sherrif returned the child to her mother.

Those of you with IQs greater than room temperature will have observed that if it got to the point that a baby could even be put up for sale, it must have been a practice that had some acceptance and such sales must have happened at least to some extent.

However, since Radish has their Unitarian gentleman, allow me to introduce my victorian one – step forward Mr Charles Darwin:

I thank God, I shal never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recals with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerfless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in ahouse where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse whip (before I couldi nterfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye […] I have sen at Rio Janeiro a powerful negro afraid to ward off a blow directed, as he thought, at his face. I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating for ever the men, women and children of a large number of families who had long lived together [… ] Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children – those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own – being torn from you and sold like beasts to the highest bidder!“

But these are in South America! Surely things were better in the Anglosphere, in the American plantations?

These latter cruelties were witnessed by me in a Spanish colony, n which it has always been said, that slaves are better treated than by the Portuguese, English or other European nations.

But what about our Unitarian traveller who said he saw everything as fine?

I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authenitically heard of – nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details, had I not met with several people, so blinded by the contitutional gaiety of the negro, as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil. Such people have generally visited at the hosues of the upper classes, where the domestic slaves are usually well treated; and they have not, like myself, lived amongst the lower classes.

That fits Radish’s Unitarian, arrived for a leisurely river cruise.

Such enquires will ask slaves about their condition; they forget that the slave must indeed by dull, who does not calculate on the chance of his answer reaching his mater’s ears.

But Darwin wasn’t in the United States! He may have heard things were worse there, but how could he know if he was not there?

To that I turn to another eminent victorian who was indeed there – please step forward Mr Charles Dickens. What say you to the argument that the slave owner’s self-interest prevented abuse ?

Is it the interest of any man to steal, to game, to waste his health and mental faculties by drunkenness, to lie, forswear himself, indulge hatred, seek desperate revenge, or do murder? No. All these are roads to ruin. And why, then, do men tread them. Because such inclinations are among the vicious qualities of mankind. Blot out, ye friends of slavery, from the catalogue of human passions, brutal lust, cruelty, and the abuse of irresponsible power (of all earthly temptations the most difficult to be resisted), and when ye have done so, and not before, we will inquire whether it be the interest of a master to lash and maim the slaves, over whose lives and limbs he has an absolute control!

Okay, granted, that was a dumb idea. But what about the laws?

Public opinion has made this law. It has declared that in Washington, in that city which takes its name from the father of American liberty, any justice of the peace may bind with fetters any negro passing down the street and thrust him into jail: no offence on the black man’s part is necessary. The justice says, ‘I choose to think this man a runaway:’ and locks hm up. Public opinion impowers the man of law when this is done, to advertise the negro in the newspapers, warning his owner to come and claim him, or he will be sold to pay the jail fees. But supposing his a free black, and has no owner, it may naturally be presumed that he is set at liberty. No: HE IS SOLD TO RECOMPENSE HIS JAILER.

Dickens is mentioning ‘public opinion’, but surely it must have been instrumental in protecting the bond-slaves of the south?

Let us try this public opinion by another test, which is important in three points of view: first, as showing how desperately timid of public opinion slave-owners are, in their delicte descriptions of fugitive slaves in widely circulated newspapers; secondly, as showing how perfetly contented the slaves are, and how very seldom they run away; thirdly, as exhibiting their entire freedom from scar, or blemish, or any mark of cruel infliction, as their pictures are drawn, not by lying abolitionists, but by their own truthful masters. The following are a few specimens of the advertisements in the public papers. It is only four years since the oldest among them appeared; and others of the same nature continue to be published every day, in shoals. ‘Ran away, Negress Caroline. Had on a collar with one prong turned down. ‘Ran away, a black woman, Betsy. Had an iron bar on he right leg.’ ‘Tan away, the negress Fanny. Had in an iron band about her neck.’ ‘Ran away, a negro boy about twelve years old. Had round his neck a chain dog-collar with “De Lampert” engraved on it.” ‘Ran away, the negrow Hown. Has a ring of iron on his left foot. Also, rise, his wife, having a ring and chain on the left leg.’ ‘Ran away, a negro boy named James. Said boy was ironed when he left me.’ ‘Committed to jail, a man who calls his name John. He has a clog of iron on his right foot which will weigh four or five pounds. ‘ ‘Detained at the police jail, the negro wench, Myra. Has several marks of LASHING, and has irons on her feet.’ ‘Ran away a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.’

I could go on further, and Dickens did, and the Southern slavers carried on far, far further still.

You can read the whole miserable story in Dickens’ Âmerican Notes. But, let us say for the sake of the argument, that you do not care for the slaves, for the blacks who endured this hell. What effect does this have on their rulers, on the children of “the delicata mamma, who smiles her acquiescence in this sprightly writing as she reads the paper in her cool piazza, quits her youngest child who clings about her skirst, by promisiong the boy ‘a whip to beat the little niggers with’? Well, Dickens is unsparing as ever – he goes through newpaper report after newspaper report, detailing the causal murders, the prickly tensions, the easy hatred and duels. One such story dealt with two boys, aged fifteen and thirteen.

The idea that something as wicked and evil as slavery could be confined is insane; its effects spread outward, infesting every section of society. This is something that the neoreactionaries, who profess such a concern with crime and violence, would do well to remember.

But, it might be argued, the emancipation of slaves into a society that had not place for them lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands from famine. That is an argument for a better handling of emancipation, not an argument in favour of slavery.

What do my two victorians conclude?

Darwin:

And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to live their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a consolation to reflet, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin.

Dickens is less forgiving:

What! Shall we declaim against the ignorant pesantry of Ireland, and mince the matter wen these American taskmasters are in question? Shall we cry shame on the brutality of those who hamstring cattle: and spare the lights of Freedom upon earth who notch the ears of men and women, cut pleasant posies in the shrinking flesh, learn to write with pens of red-hot iron on the human face, rack their poetic fancies for liveries of mutilation which their slaves shall wear for life and carry to the grave, breaking living limbs as did the soldiery who mocked and slew the Saviour of the world, and set defenceless creatures up for targets! Shall we whimper over legends of the tortures practiced on each other by the Pagan Indians, and smile upon the cruelties of Christian men! Shall we so long as these things last, exult above the scattered remnants of that race, and triumph in the white enjoyment of their possessions? Rather, for me, restore the forest and the Indian village; in lieu of the stars and stripes, let some poor feather flutter in the breeze; replace the streets and squares by wigwams; and though the death-song of a hundred haughty warriors fill the air, it will be music to the shriek of one unhappy slave.

2.7.: Wealthy nations tend to be small, ethnically homogeneous ones. In The Size of Nations, Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore note that in the top richest countries, only four have populations over one million – the United States (310 million people), Norway and Singapore (~5 million a piece), Switzerland (~8 million). More groups equals more factions to buy off, means more bloated, bureaucratic and senseless government. Limiting immigration makes very good sense on that basis.

Let’s take a look at those countries, shall we? By IMF ranking as of 2013, the top richest countries per person and adjusted for purchasing power parity were:

1. Qatar

2. Luxembourg

3. Singapore

4. Norway

5. Brunei Darussalam

6. Hong Kong

7. United States

8. United Arab Emirates

9. Switzerland

10. Australia

By my count, that is at least 6 nations with a population of over 1 million. That’s being finicky, given that Alesina and Spolaore did their work back in 2005, it is completely understandable that there are changes in population and who makes it into the top ten. What is more important is that of the ones who made it into the top ten, three have appallingly bad governments and are only there because of immense oil wealth.

This doesn’t change the fact that the more groups a nation has the greater the possibility for someone to start stirring up trouble. And worse still, the presence of representative democracy almost guarantees that someone will, because there is an incentive to do so: racial trouble can be very good for fundraising and votes. However, there is something missed here.

Had Europe sealed itself off in the 50s and 60s, this would be a viable option. However, immigration has already occurred. Tens of millions of people are not going anywhere. We have to find a way to deal with and accommodate diversity, and learn how to use it. Diversity does, after all, provide a peculiar kind of strength to a community. A community with many different kinds of people is far more likely to have ones that can respond to changing circumstances than a monolithic community.

That is important because we face a civilizational menace, one that threatens everything that makes life worthwhile: Islam. Islamic immigration has been a complete disaster for the West, as it has for everywhere else. This is not a diversity we have any real hope of dealing with – a Muslim immigrant typically takes thirty years to reach a level of assimilation of an infidel immigrant who has just arrived. No matter how much you might wish otherwise, facing this menace requires a rejection of racialism.

For two reasons. The first is that any sane attempts to stop further Muslim influx is stymied by fears of racism. By peddling this poison, racialists help keep the castle gates wedged firmly open.

The second is that, for the West to make it through this, it will require alliances with our kin-civilizations. Now who is it who has born the full brunt of Islam’s jihad? The Israelis, perhaps, but apart from them? The principle fighters against this have been the peoples of Christian Africa.

And they have done extraordinarily well in holding that line, no thanks to the West’s disgraceful default on this issue. Kenya, Tanzania – these are where the tide can be turned. We have Imams wailing that millions of Africans are apostatising. Further, out of all infidel civilisations, Africa is the only one that has a healthy demography. It is the only one that has a decent chance of running out Islam’s demographic clock. Conversely, it is often from immigrant populations that resistance to Islam has come, from apostates like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq, and also from infidel immigrants – it is my experience that Hindus, Sikhs, and Christian Africans are all much more willing to express themselves forcibly about Islam than white Europeans.

If you want the best of the West to endure, you are going to have to make use of this. It was done before. I quote from Daniel Hanna’s How we invented Freedom & Why it matters:

During the Second World War, 215,000 men served from New Zealand, 410,000 from South Africa, 995,000 from Australia, 1,060,00 from Canada, 2,400,00 from India. The vast majority had made an individual decision to enlist. […] Here is the radical newspaper the West Indian in 1915: “West Indians, most of whom are descendants of slaves, are fighting for human liberty together with the immediate sons of the Motherland.” Here is Havildar Singh writing to his family in India from the sodden trenches of northern France in the same year: “We must honour him who gives us our salt. Our dear government’s rule is very good and gracious.” Here is a Maori leader in 1918, recalling the fate of native peoples in German colonies: “We know of the Samoians, our kin. We know of the Eastern and Western natives of German Africa. We know of the extermination of the Hereros, and that is enough for us. For 78 years we have been, not under the rule of the British, but taking part in the ruling of ourselves, and we know by experience that the foundations of British sovereignty are based upon the eternal principles of liberty, equity and justice.”

2.8.: You cannot be serious that anyone other than whites seek to transcend racial politics! And things are so bad that it is acceptable in polite company to call for the genocide of whites – not in any crank, fringe publications but in the Harvard journal!

I’m pretty sure that this is what is behind so much of this stuff. It is absolutely true that you have a swarm of mediocrities spouting all sorts of drivel – Guardian journalists saying that whites are automatically racist because of their skin colour (irony alert), Susan Sontag saying people like me are a ‘cancer’, Tim Wise jerking off while fantasising about the disappearance of all whites… In addition to this we get all the lesser breeds: the ones who use “check your privilege” instead of explaining anything, the identity-politics types et cetera, ad nauseum.

Fair enough. But you’re not going to be rattled by this riff-raff are you? You’re not going to take this minstrel show seriously are you?

Of course you get indolent riff-raff spouting racialist garbage to earn themselves unmerited pay and utterly unmerited sense of importance. What do you expect? Maybe instead of just posting his picture, you could actually read Nietzsche: such types recur again and again, and will continue as long as people can degrade themselves.

To return to the question of whether anyone who isn’t white is struggling to transcend racial barriers, let me just note that in my corner I can count Nelson Mandela:

I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to life for and to see realized. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Martin Luther King:

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

W.E.B. Du Bois:

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilden halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised land?

C.L.R. James:

The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous.

Hell, even Malcolm X:

I am not a racist… In the past I permitted myself to be used… to make sweeping indictments of all white people, the entire white race and these generalization have caused injuries to some whites who perhaps did not deserve to be hurt […] I no longer subscribe to sweeping indictments of any one race. I am now striving to live the life of a true … Muslim. I must repeat that I am not a racist nor do I subscribe to the tenants of racism. I can state in all sincerity that I wish nothing but freedom, justice and equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all people.

That is who is on my A-team, and many, many others, right back to the dawn of reason in ancient Greece. And, contra to what the neoreactionaries like to believe, the majority of all racial groups are with us on that one.

So my only line to the aforementioned flies of the marketplace? Bring it on.

3.0.: Ethics and final questions

3.1.: What is it that you dislike about racialists and racialist thinking?

The same thing I despise about SJW types, certain so-called “freethinkers” and other people for whom the Last Man is an ideal. Both are all about pissing on the other guy. Guys like the “Crommunist” (linked above) think that they are somehow made worthwhile by running down whites and chaps like Radish think they are somehow not losers by running down blacks. Both are completely obsessed with the crimes and failures of the other – southern slavery in the former case, the warlords of liberia in the latter.

I, however, am truly Nietzschean in this. I take no joy in seeing crimes and failures of anyone. I would much, much rather contemplate the best in every people, and take delight in their glory.

To make this clear: A lot of racialsts in Europe and elsewhere like to say that they are racialists but not supremacists – they just celebrate difference, and don’t think in terms of ‘better’.

Not me! I’m perfectly happy to cop to the ‘supremacist’ charge. It is the racial bit that I loathe.

As Ayn Rand famously wrote:

A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race – and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has “produced” some brutes, or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has “produced” Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.

I worship human excellence. The idea of excusing a resentful mediocrity just because he happens to have a certain skin colour is revolting, and the idea of ignoring human genius because he has a certain skin colour is beyond obscene.

So when I see something like, I don’t know, certain shit-head WND writers sneering at Nelson Mandela while simultaneously kissing the arse of Eugene Terreblanche, I want to puke horseshoe nails and molten lava.

And my contempt is not just limited to those who attack the highest examples our species has produced. When I came of age, as the expression goes, my father took me to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, which the Masai call “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God. The guide who took us up there climbs the mountain twice a month, with a full load of gear and luggage, to pay his sons’ way through university. I will not be told that such men are to be considered inferior to a collection of nonentities whose sole claim to fame is an internet connection and having too much time on their hands.

There are a couple of lesser points. I cannot stand seeing such nonsense coming out of the right, let alone those who dare to claim heirship to Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. I will not see them poison that tradition, especially now that we have a chance to see it triumph on a world scale.

If you are going to be a race-obsessed nonentity hell bent on sneering at your betters, why not just join FtB and have done with it?

3.2.: Is there anything you like about the racialists?

“Like” is a bit of a strong word, but there are some things I value about them. As I wrote about Lothrop Stoddard, there are things they see more easily so it is probably useful to have a few of them knocking around in a society. I also take a certain perverse delight in them soaking up all the bilge of the ‘identity politics’ types and spitting their poison right back at them. When you have certain blue-eyed, blond haired types get all moist at the idea that they “are not 100% white” there is something deliciously ironic about racialists snapping back with celebrations of ‘white culture’. There is just something about watching Caliban recoil on seeing his face in the mirror.

I also value having someone to sharpen my claws on. I learned more about evolutionary biology from studying the Scopes Trial than I did as four years as an undergraduate, and more about human evolution and what genetics can and cannot tell me from writing this thing than I ever did in my other studies. I also notice the more that they get into the actual science of human difference – human biological diversity, if you will – the less poisonous and more wholesome they become. There is a lesson there.

And there is one final thing that I unashamedly like about modern racialists – how liberal and progressive they are. They like to think of themselves as baaaad boys, but as SSC notes, their attitudes are basically 1970s America. None of them really wants to go back to days when a black student required police protection to attend University, let alone to the attitudes that existed a hundred years ago when the total extermination of a people was considered a policy so acceptable that it could be discussed in mainstream newspapers.

3.3.: That seems a bit blase about the menace of racism. Don’t you think that you might be giving a cover to dangerous types?

Yes and no. Let’s look at what, say, Jared Taylor proposes. Violent insurrection? An army of Klansmen to rebuild the days they were the provisional wing of the US Democratic party? No. He proposes that he and his fellow minded people find some small communities that they can all move to, keep those communities all white and run them. So he proposes to isolate himself and his chums from the rest of society. This is a problem how, exactly?

However, I am referring to American racialists here. In Europe, just as with religious fanaticism, racial fanaticism is a bit more scary. When you have guys like this:

Then things get a little more hairy. Keeping this lot in line is another matter entirely.

3.4.: What is your general view of immigration?

Leaving aside the issue of Islamic immigration, which should be zero if not negative, I’m generally in favour. However, there are some important caveats.

The first is that, as a matter of sheer numbers, immigration cannot be an answer to the desperate poverty of the developing world. So I detest the mush-brained fetishization of immigration that serves to keep the trade barriers up that are bleeding the world’s poorest, while ensuring a steady flow of helots to serve an entrenched crony socialist, politico-business class in the developed world. If a serious restriction on immigration were required to fix this, I’d consider it an acceptable trade off.

I also think that the developed world could support a far larger number of immigrants, and a higher rate, if it sorted out its dreadful welfare state and debt problems, starting with cronyism, corporate welfare and the rest of the things that provide artificial barriers to the productive class. For the moment, I think that the developed world should rework its immigration policies to favour skilled immigrants and to offer a blanket asylum to all infidels fleeing the Jihad. I think that several million coptic Christians could easily be resettled within the boundaries of Greater Europe, and we could do the same for those rescued from Islam’s slave trade.

As regards ‘assimilation’, I tend to think of that as a red herring. Take the case of chinese immigrants – we see plenty of Chinatowns that make zero effort to hide their difference, but no one but the most poisonous of white British racists and black American racists has a problem there. You see something similar with the Hindu and Sikh communities in Britain. I think that, if we sort out the economic issues, and give a boot to the types who like to stir up trouble, then we can have various communities living side by side, running their own internal affairs. Mixed marriages probably will remain a rarity, though the children of those marriages will do well thanks to the power of sexy, and things will trundle along just fine, with a certain low level of mutual antagonism. That’s been my experience in Britain – yes there is the occasional grumble and complaint of immigrant communities against the host society, but it’s nothing in comparison to what I hear from Scotsmen or Welshmen when they let fly about the English. For that matter, native whites in the U.K. are less racist than immigrant communities – in one study 13% of white Britons said they would have a problem if a family member married an Afro-Caribbean, compared with 29% of Jews and a whopping 32% of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. Yes, I’d prefer that 13% to be 0% but can we get some bloody perspective here?

The racialists are quite right to point out the hypocrisy of the bigmouth, self-declared “anti-racists” like Chris Matthews (whom some of my American friends have assured me isn’t an invention by The Onion) who drones on about “racist dog whistles” and lives in an upscale village that is 93% white and 0.5% black, or the aforementioned Tim Wise, who lives in an area 97% white and 0% black.

3.5.: So your point is…?

People tend to group together with those from a similar background. I grew up in Africa and I had most of my friends from within the European diaspora. Again, I noticed individual alignments of a similar sort among immigrant communities in the U.K. Race isn’t even close to the deciding factor here; blacks from sub-Saharan Africa tend to cluster in national and sometimes tribal associations, and certainly don’t mix easily with those from the West Indies.

And that’s okay. We can all get along if we just get by and keep out of each other’s hair. It’s healthier for everyone, and probably the only real hope. Some time back my girlfriend complimented me on being “really disciplined” in sticking to a diet. I answered that discipline had nothing to do with it – I just made a couple of big, one-pot meals at the start of the week and was far too lazy to cheat.

Same thing here. I’m Burkean on this – collective, national feeling is built from the ground up. From family to local community, to township… and so on. Those low level structures are vital. A society where people from all sorts of backgrounds can get up, go to work, work with people from every one of those backgrounds, and then punch the clock and return to their own idiosyncratic community – that is pretty amazing. By the standards of planet earth, that’s almost unique. In fact, by the standards of planet earth, that’s utopia. A modest, low key, undramatic utopia, but utopia nonetheless.

If it doesn’t measure up to the desires of racialist bigmouths – whether they are called Radish or Chris Matthews – then it is the racialist bigmouths who have to go.

3.6.: So why are so many mainstream people unwilling to accept this?

I’m not surprised that much of the trouble comes from those ensconced permanently in Universities, and advanced by those who went through them. Universities are pretty much the only example of an absolute cosmopolitanism – a situation where literally every background mixes with little problem. But what people forget is that a University is a carefully tended garden, a unique environment, protected and maintained. Expecting it to be a blueprint for a whole society is stark staring nuts.

To understand why, forget about race and consider two young white Britons attending university, one from a working class background, one from an upper-middle class background. They spend four years mixing, getting on, and the idea of a difference never really occurs to either.

Then they graduate and go on to different worlds. The working class boy will likely join the army, or go into teacher training or something. The upper-middle class one may go on to be a manager or banker (with his family connections) or advance high into academia or publishing. They are fantastically unlikely to ever meet as equals again.

You can lament that, but it is what it is. The only attempts that have ever been made to change that, to equalize that, have unleashed hell on earth. The single most consistent practitioner of the egalitarian ethos was a man called Pol Pt.

3.7.: Any final words of advice to U.S. racialists?

Stop being such a bunch of milquetoast crybabies and man up.

Yes, I am sure that SJW types and the aforementioned market flies are a colossal pain in the ass. Yes, it must be infuriating to read and hear unscrupulous types explain how any deviation from political orthodoxy is racist. Yes, I know that seeing such types fawned on is revolting.

You know what’s worse? Try six years of racialist abuse for your ancestry, abuse that did involve having to watch your back on a sometimes daily basis. I did go through that, and I see no reason to let my abusers be my teachers.

You know what is much, much worse than that? Try sitting for nearly thirty years in a tiny cell for trying to get your people freedom in their own country. Or leading a tiny army against those who almost completely destroyed all of your people. Or watching the one person you love be lynched by your father, and then be forced to fight for your homeland against three of the scariest empires of your time. Or risking your neck to save a quarter of a million lives only to be betrayed and denounced by pretty much everyone.

Yes, I know – most of us can’t manage to live up to that standard. But we can try. And some of those men succeeded. They suffered and bled and were almost destroyed – and they won. In the teeth of the most brutal opposition, they won.

So if you really, truly are worried about the way your country is going, don’t sit around whining or blaming it on people who look a bit different – find your testicles, step away from the computer, get out there and take that nation. Inch by inch, block by block – whatever it takes.

And not just your nation. The only good thing, the only thing I like about the menace of Islam’s jihad is that it may prove the catalyst to align the modern West with her sister civilisations. Alone, we might be in trouble, but if we unite with Latin America, the Orthodox East, the Hindu and Buddhist civilisations, and finally Christian Africa, there is nothing that cannot be won. These people are not our enemies. The only real question is whether they are our cousins or our siblings.

Through supporting those on the front lines, through helping those fleeing Islam’s cruelty, there lies the power to set right the many abuses of the modern West, and to build something truly extraordinary – a pan-civilizational alliance encircling the entire globe, re-uniting the majority of mankind as never before. And to move us one great step closer to the great day foreseen nearly two hundred years ago:

The time will therefore come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments will exist only in the work of history and on the stage; and when we shall think of them only to pity their victims and their dupes; to maintain ourselves in a state of vigilance by thinking on their excesses; and to learn how to recognise and so to destroy, by force of reason, the first seeds of tyranny and superstition, should they ever dare to reappear amongst us.

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UPDATE: I am tickled pink by being linked to by Slate Star Codex. Big time, here I come… In his link to me, and in some of the comments there and here, I think some interesting points have been raised and I will try to address some of them here. First things first though, a correction to Scott Alexander:

– I am not a climate denialist. As I have said a bunch of times, I think man made global warming is real and a real problem. What I say is that a lot of the sound science of global warming is being used to advance evil politics. And that is parallel to what’s going on with HBD.

Basically, many people hear “Climate science is real, THEREFORE SUSPEND DEMOCRACY, STOP INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT, RAISE TAXES” and conclude the whole thing is bullshit. Many people also hear “Human beings didn’t stop evolving fifty thousand years ago THEREFORE SEGREGATION AND SLAVERY WEREN’T SO BAD, WE NEED A WHITOPIA, AFRICANS ARE VIOLENT, STUPID BRUTES” and conclude that all of that thing is bullshit, too.

So, yeah. Global warming is bad. Bad politics is bad too. Maybe we can figure out a way to be against both?

On to some other Q & A:

S1.: You seem to be very hostile to Islam; don’t you realize that Islam is very diverse/not monolithic –



Please stand by for my upcoming “Anti-Islam F.A.Q.” In the meantime, if you consult any of my “Friday Jihad Round up”, I think you will see why. Also, please read the following: “Is Europe becoming Eurabia?”

Let me grant the following: lots of decent people – I think Scott Alexander is one of them – are fearful of anti-Islam stances, not because they are steeped in knowledge of Islam and its history – they usually don’t know that much about it – but because they are frightened that it is being used to advance a violent and illiberal agenda.

This is a completely legitimate and valid fear. It is, indeed, the same thing that motivates people who argue that there are no differences between human populations, or that there is no problem with global warming. However, here is one policy that I would like to see in place:

Let us grant that the United States has an original sin in the form of slavery, one it still labours under. Would it not be a fine way to discharge that debt by finishing what the British Empire started and waging total war on the slave trade, in particular the Islamic slave trade? U.S. Evangelicals do sterling work in helping to free slaves and they do deserve some credit for this.

Here are some others:

A reparation of the relations between North and South America. As a show of good will, the U.S. should shut down the CIA and seek the indictment of Henry Kissinger for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

A liquidation of all forms of protectionism and subsidy, starting with the agricultural sector, as a gesture of good will to Christian Africa

Support for apostates and religious minorities fleeing the House of Submission. Help for refugees who do reach our shores.

Strong support for women’s rights throughout the world.

Switching support from Pakistan to India, and generally deepening the West’s ties with our sister civilizations.

There are others. I have yet to hear anyone come up with a good argument against these.

S2: You don’t seem to give a clear definition of racialism.

My apologies. Here is the one I use:

the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors. Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men. Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination. – Ayn Rand

That’s a definition I can actually do something with. When certain Guardian journalists start arguing that most or all British whites are racists, not because they hold any sort of beliefs that could be defined as such, but because they are part of some sort of power structure or whatever – as far as I’m concerned that’s bollocks on stilts and doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. Orwell wrote about the prosecution of thoughtcrimes; these guys prosecute unthoughtcrimes.

S3: You don’t state racialist/HBD thought at its best. There is a lot of sound, good blogging on human biological diversity that has nothing to do with supremacism or neoreaction.

I grant that, but this is a confrontational piece. I read through a number of these websites and tried to respond to the arguments I found. You’ll notice that I haven’t locked horns with Razib Khan – because he hasn’t written anything I particularly disagree with. That is part of something I’ve observed: the more scientific a HBD person is, the less supremacist and generally douchebag they become.

However, in practice, the line between HBD and neoreaction is blurry at best. Take HBD chick, for whom I have a soft spot since she seems genuinely science obsessed. However, here she posts a link about identitarian though, which leads to this post, whose links lead to a number of interesting websites hawking books about Hitler getting a bad rap. And, no, that isn’t an exaggeration.

S4: You don’t state anti-racialist at its best. There are all these studies that show that IQ isn’t fixed/racial determinism is flawed. Why didn’t you cite them?

Because I am one man who can only write so much. Sarah, in the SSC comments, mentions a study showing that East and West Germans had markedly different IQs. I’d love that link, it would be a great addition to my comments on North and South Korea – and I am ashamed to admit that it never occurred to me to see if something similar happened in the Fatherland.

Please feel free to join in. I’m going to bang a “to read” section at the end of this F.A.Q. which I will keep expanding – and I am really grateful for any you can kick my way, but please also feel free to join in the discussion on your own.
