From VDARE, here's the opening of my speech last weekend to the H.L. Mencken Club in Baltimore, in which I try to do a quick summing up of my epistemological approach:
I’m glad to be back addressing the H.L. Mencken Club.
Richard Spencer has asked me to speak on the topic “Can HBD Trump PC?” So let me begin by explaining what those acronyms mean.
PC stands for “Political Correctness”. HBD is short for “Human Biodiversity”.
In an intellectually healthy world, of course, the study of “human biodiversity” wouldn’t be imperiled by the reign of Political Correctness. Instead, HBD would be recognized as a necessary complement to the study of human cultural diversity. To a student of the social world, human biodiversity and human cultural diversity ought to be complementary tools, like a straight right and a left jab are to a boxer, or like words and numbers are to a thinker.
In 21st Century America, however, noticing reality is often, by unfortunate necessity, a political act. As George Orwell pointed out, “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle”.
Should HBD be a field of study … or a political movement … or both?
Let’s consider the term “Political Correctness” first. This is an old New Left phrase. I first recall hearing it about 30 years ago in an interview with Joe Strummer of The Clash, in which the punk rock star lamented how stultifying the demands of Political Correctness were even for a lifelong leftist like himself. (Despite Joe’s Old Left proletarian façade, Strummer’s father, a British diplomat and secret agent, had been a close friend of Kim Philby.)
We’re often told that Political Correctness is a trivial matter of using the latest name for minority groups, but I always do that. That’s less Political Correctness than politeness.
No, PC is vastly more far-reaching. It enervates American intellectual discourse on many levels.
As John Derbyshire noted last night [in a speech on "Men Versus the Man, 100 Years On"], the best depiction of how Political Correctness functions is from the appendix to George Orwell’s 1984:“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments …, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”
What Orwell got wrong, though, is that inculcating crimestop doesn’t require an army of men watching you from your TV.
Instead, you watch your TV—and learn from it what kind of thoughts raise your status and what kind lower your status.
It’s a system of Status Climbing through Stupidity.
Every so often, a celebrity is fired to encourage the others: NPR dumped Juan Williams this week for admitting that passengers in Muslim garb on airplanes make him nervous. Earlier this month blowhard Rick Sanchez was sacked by CNN for responding sarcastically to his interviewer’s suggestion that Jews are an oppressed minority in the media. (As one wag commented, Sanchez got fired for the first story he ever got right.)
Read the whole thing here and comment upon it below.
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60 comments:
OT: more lies from the left.
http://www.historytoday.com/ian-morris/latitudes-not-attitudes-how-geography-explains-history?utm_source=History+Today&utm_campaign=bfc15ff197-November_Newsletter&utm_medium=email
Just get a load of this PC nonsense:
"Explaining why the West rules calls for a different kind of history than usual, one stepping back from the details to see broader patterns, playing out over millennia on a global scale. When we do this the first thing we see is the biological unity of humanity, which flatly disproves racist theories of western rule."
What is the 'biological unity of man'? All dogs are biologically unified within one species, but there's clearly a difference between a greyhound and a dachshund, between a chihuahua and a pitbull. And wolves and coyotes too are really part of the same species of dogs if we define species as including those animals that can mate to produce fertile offsprings. Yet, try raising a wolf as a house pet. Or see what happens when a wolf fights a coyote. Or see what happens if you try to use a bulldog as a tracking hound dog.
'Biological unity of man' doesn't mean all men or all races are the same. It only means they are roughly similar. Albert Einstein and Mike Tyson are roughly similar as members of the same species, but surely a race or community with more people like Einstein is going to intellectually achieve more than a race or community with more people like Mike Tyson. And a race or community with more people like Tyson is going to produce more great athletes than a race or community with more people like Einstein. If 'biological unity of man' means that all races are the same--or races don't even exist--, how come all the top runners in 100and 200 m sprint are West African blacks? How come the stronger blacks routinely beat up weaker whites in poor integrated communities all over America?
And if it's all a matter of geography, how come blacks in North America achieve less than other races though they are now living in the Northern hemisphere with full acess to Western ideas?
Another thing. Geography doesn't only influence or change a people's culture and socio-economic potential, but it changes their biology. A people in colder climates had to use their brains more extensively to survive than people in hot regions, especially Africa. Also, people in colder climates had to be more even-tempered and self-controlled to conserve their energies and huddle/cooperate during long cold winters. Thus, people who tended to have wild 'African' temperaments got weeded out. If they acted too wild and funky, they would expended all their energies and fatty reserves and would have frozen to death.
So, it's not geography vs biology, but GEOGRAPHY CHANGES BIOLOGY. Different georgraphies not only allowed different economic possibilities but changed the genetics of the different races.
And people who developed certain cultures were also changed biologically or genetically by those cultural changes. Stephen Jay Gould's notion that mankind genetically remained the same in the past 10,000s of yrs is all bogus.
Why are Jews so smart? Jews had long engaged in business which tended to be brainier than agriculture. Also, Jewish culture placed great primacy on learning and knowledge. Over time, smart daughters of successful Jewish businessmen married highly intelligent Talmudic scholars, and they tended to have more children who passed down more intelligent genes. So you see, it's not always culture vs nature. Culture can change nature, just as nature can change culture. Ian Morris is just another liar of the Jared Diamond school.
Of course, political correctness is equally rampant on the left and right. On the right, for example, any criticism of Christianity or its empirical or historical claims brings out the exact same sort of "victim /offense" complex as it does on the left. Relativism and sensitivity and victim posing is rampant all round. The same right wingers that tell others to get a backbone will immediately cry abotu being "attacked" if we dare question or exam their sacred cows using the same lame relativistic and "I'm offended!" protestations as the PC left does.
I think Anonymous No. 1 has it exactly wrong. It's the "secular right" people who had to write comments about feeling excluded when Mr. Sailer quoted a Ann Coulter joke about Obama being an atheist. Christians are used to being insulted in the media. Why would we get mad when some "secular right" person repeats some standard liberal talking point.
I think I can imagine why people like Anonymous No.1 feel so left out. First, atheists are a pretty small minority in America. Second, virtually all of them recognize the SWPL/Obama/Howard Dean/collectivist left as their natural home. There don't seem to be enough "secular right" writers to maintain one blog on the topic. Even making allowance for that, though, Mr. Anonymous is awfully touchy. Is he victim posing?
Great post Steve. I say we celebrate HBD rather than spurn it. I for one don't mind seeing blacks dominate athletics or East Asian Americans disproportionately dominating basically all of the elite high IQ academic competitions in the US, i.e. the International Mathematics Olympiad, the International Physics Olympiad, the Intel Science Talent Search, etc. In my opinion, diversity is a good thing.
any criticism of Christianity or its empirical or historical claims brings out the exact same sort of "victim /offense" complex as it does on the left.
No, it does not bring out "exactly the same" sort of response. For one thing, the defenders of Christianity don't typically invoke the magic word "racism".
The same right wingers that tell others to get a backbone ..
will wonder why you lack the courage to post under some handle.
I have heard a lot of folks throw around their definitions of political correctness. Like a certain body part that we all have, everyone seems to have a slight variation to the definition of PC.
Here is a video that traces PC back to the ending of World War 1. The guy in the video does a good job documenting the linkages between what we call political correctness and the marxist scholars of the Frankfurt School.
Isn't HBD a threat to American individualism? I am all for it being studied scientifically, but when you are going to go ahead and implement policies based on HBD, don't individuals cease to represent themselves and start representing a certain group?
Its a fine addition to combat counter-HBD issues like educational affirmative action, etc. though.
The political coalition that enforces PC is going to lose Congress next Tuesday. They will still control the federal executive branch, the schools, the mainstream media, the courts, the bureaucracy, the U.S. Catholic hierarchy and the leadership of mainline Protestant denominations. As long as they control the courts, PC will be enforced.
Major elements in the coalition are these: elite whites, Jews, blacks, other minorities, teachers and other government employees, labor union members, homosexuals, the poor, and ideological leftists. Together these groups make up 40 – 45% of the electorate. Its financial muscle comes from government employee unions and from banks who profit from buying and selling government debt and who receive the proceeds from currency debasement.
What this coalition has lost in the last two years is its vaunted rainmaker status. In 2008 they claimed that they knew how to fix the economy. Events have proven them wrong. Americans will accept a lot of nonsense from these people if they truly know how to produce prosperity. But now that everyone knows that that they are phony rainmakers, a majority of Americans want them tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.
What does the future hold for this coalition? It is not good. They will likely lose the presidency in 2012. With each passing year, there will be fewer government employees; America can no longer afford them. Labor unions operating in the private sector continue inexorably to decline. Jews are a small demographic and getting smaller.
With open immigration, this coalition can possibly hang on to power. If borders are closed, their prospects are dim. Thus they will fight with every weapon they have to maintain an open borders immigration policy.
Thus my answer to the question, “Will PC continue to be enforced in the U.S.?” is another question: Will the U.S. continue to have open borders?
"Of course, political correctness is equally rampant on the left and right."
Castefootball is a rightwing PC joke.
>The same right wingers that tell others to get a backbone will immediately cry about being "attacked" if we dare question or examine their sacred cows using the same lame relativistic and "I'm offended!" protestations as the PC left does.<
True. It's because as average IQ in the US declines, childishness increases. Dissed/not dissed is more often regarded not only as a political fact of primary importance, but also as the *only* political fact existing.
I love Steve and what he represents, but, Steve, it is time to retire “human biodiversity.” You said yourself, “'biodiversity' ... embodied ... his favorite political cause: conserving the rainforests ...” The term, “human biodiversity” necessarily implies the same idea as David Lane’s “14 words” applied to all human groups. It implies a need to preserve human racial diversity without condemning any manner of violent coercion. You have specifically endorsed “citizenism” as an alternative to “white nationalism,” but this term will tar anyone who self-identifies with it as a racial separatist. Steve and I are probably a mixture of the ancient African and Neandertal races. So, we are “impure,” regardless of whether we can also claim to be “partly inbred” while blushing. With all that confronts those of us who accept the existence of biological human diversity, the last thing we need is a radical moniker that could be read as inciting violence and intolerance.
"On the right, for example, any criticism of Christianity or its empirical or historical claims brings out the exact same"
I don't think anyone (except someone in a private explicitly religious institution) has recently lost his job for expressing disbelief in a cannon of religious faith.
I wish you would have emphasized ways that acknowledging human biodiversity can help us design better social policies to promote the welfare of all groups, irrespective of their differences. The way you used to do when you talked about the left-hand side of the bell curve, or that Charles Murray did in the final chapter of his controversial book, "A Place for Everyone."
It is the moral implications of HBD that scare people. You need to show them that knowledge is good.
Steve,
It's funny, but when you Google "origins of PC" you don't get much insight. I have a strong feeling this phrase is a translation from some other language (Russian, Chinese, Korean,..?) Now we are are used to it, but when I first heard it, it didn't seem like a native English expression. Doesn't it still feel a little "foreign" to you?
moral equivalence fail, first commenter!
gg!
Go away now!
take logic 101!
"Of course, political correctness is equally rampant on the left and right. On the right, for example, any criticism of Christianity or its empirical or historical claims brings out the exact same sort of "victim /offense" complex as it does on the left. Relativism and sensitivity and victim posing is rampant all round. The same right wingers that tell others to get a backbone will immediately cry abotu being "attacked" if we dare question or exam their sacred cows using the same lame relativistic and "I'm offended!" protestations as the PC left does."
True, and I expect you'll get pilloried here by the Bible-thumping crowd, but true.
Arguably the older religious based "PC" had some positive evolutionary psychology behind it, while the current PC is negative in its effects (except for the small group of parasites at the top who benefit from modern PC).
That's arguable of course. But we've never had a society without these kinds of taboos and "crime think" shaping what people are allowed to say. Best we can hope for is to try to defeat the current negative PC and try to put something positive in its place. We're not likely to ever see a truly "rational" public discourse like some people imagine could exist, though. Human nature is a pretty hard thing to fight against; it would be better to use it to our advantage than to fight against it.
On the right*, for example, any criticism of Christianity or its empirical or historical claims brings out the exact same sort of "victim /offense" complex as it does on the left.
Oh wow, it's one of the neo-pagan pagan alt.right guys.
So brave and bold, philosophizing with a hammer and bringing on the twighlight of the Idols.
Yo, Zarathustra, is your blog getting lots of clicks?
* Mencken was a conspicuous example of an anti-Christian right-winger.
"The tale’s famous ending, however, is naïve. As anthropologists Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger point out, just because one little brat exclaims, “The emperor has no clothes!” the mob isn’t going to suddenly concede the truth. Instead, they are going to get very angry at this unpardonably stupid child who, clearly, is unfit for his office of street urchin."
Your criticism of this story is largely right -- it's not so easy to change the opinion of the herd -- but I think you're missing out on something about this story because you're not paying attention to who wrote it/who he wrote it about.
Andersen was, of course, Scandinavian and he was, no doubt, writing about other Scandinavians.
He was, on the one hand, making fun of them because in many instances even a child can see how stupid popular opinions can be despite the fact that everybody believes them.
But, Scandinavians (being Germanic) are severe herders. They do NOT want to be left out of the crowd. Here in Norway, for instance, 2.4 million Norwegians are on Facebook. There's only about 4.5 million of us(!), so practically all adults, except for the very old, must be on Facebook.
You see, once something becomes a bit popular, EVERYBODY has to be a part of it in Scandinavia (and Germany? Japan? the Koreas? even China, maybe?).
So, when opinion does turn in Scandinavia, it turns RAPIDLY! That is an important point to take away from Andersen's story.
And, we're seeing it now here in Scandinavia (across greater Germania?). Political correctness is dying ... and quickly. It's amazing to watch, actually!
Here in Norway over last two years or so there was a series of immigrant-related incidents (almost all Oslo taxi drivers, who are mostly immigrants, being found to cheat on taxes; the government trying to sneak in pro-hijab legislation on the quiet; asylum centers being burnt down) -- plus "Brainwash" was aired on television slamming all sorts of politically correct ideas about human nature -- and now the politically correct crowd is VERY quiet. There's pretty much no more being called a "racist" for having HBD or anti-immigration opinions. A once-popular anti-racist organization has been investigated for dirty financial dealings and has pretty much been shut down. An academic institute which focused on how wonderful multi-culturalism is has also lost its funding and has been shut down. And, there is next to no outrage about the success of our neighboring country's Sweden Democrats or over Sarrazin's book.
The times they are a' changing. And RAPIDLY, as they are want to do amongst peoples of Germanic stock. ;-)
want=wont
(I knew that!)
If what Nora Helmer says is true, that's encouraging news indeed. I got a whiff of this changing wind while in Germany recently during the Sarrazin brouhaha. There was lots of politically correct protestation - going all the way up Chacellor Merkel - but some honest discussion as well, and a feeling of relief at newly opened avenues of discourse.
"Doesn't it still feel a little "foreign" to you?"
It has always seemed Soviet-sounding to me. I'm not sure why.
I think Luke Lea is right, you need show that HBD can do some moral good.
I think the best way to do that might be to show how HBD-denial damages medicine, possibly resulting in a great many unnecessary deaths.
You mention elsewhere NYT reporter Nicholas Wade's view that "the 'Race Does Not Exist' crowd will condemn sick people to death by keeping doctors from learning what treatments are appropriate for each patient’s genes."
We need to know much more about those deaths.
We need to begin to compile a list of the potential deaths resulting from PC's 'good intentions'.
Even PC people will begin to say, "Oh, I never meant to have *that* effect".
And then they might begin to inquire about HBD...
Presumably Wade has given some examples – even if he doesn't say "this could be causing 2,500 deaths a year". (We might need to work out those estimates).
Another topic might be IQ's role in inability to read, understand and follow the instructions on medicines. I think Linda Gottfredson's worked on this, recently...
Ian F
And, we're seeing it now here in Scandinavia (across greater Germania?). Political correctness is dying ... and quickly. It's amazing to watch, actually! - Nora Helmer
Greater Germania? Political correctness is dying there?
Pualeeze, your not fooling anyone, since you all are the biggest PC Libs in the Western world, as well as being the biggest German-o-phobes (my grandvater in 'occupied ____' during the war just hated those Knatsees....).
Germania is Germany, not Scandinavia.
So, we are “impure,” regardless of whether we can also claim to be “partly inbred” while blushing. With all that confronts those of us who accept the existence of biological human diversity, the last thing we need is a radical moniker that could be read as inciting violence and intolerance. - "nooffensebut"
Your very neurotic.
The existence of half German Shepard/half Rottweiler hybrids does not disprove or or repudiate that those distinct breeds exist in the first place.
Nor does recognizing those two different breeds mean that could be read as 'inciting violence and intolerance'.
"It has always seemed Soviet-sounding to me. I'm not sure why"
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=WSQ_AAAAIBAJ&sjid=EFAMAAAAIBAJ&pg=5278,3655977&dq=political-correctness&hl=en
"Ministry for culture in East Germany checks every proposed films for political 'correctness'..."
Next mention I can find is from the Villiage Voice 1970 article about Ray Mungo.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=EO4QAAAAIBAJ&sjid=OIwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3173,3315703&dq=political-correctness&hl=en
"The 'Vulgar Marxists' wanted to take LNS [liberation news service] away from Bloom and Mungo because the two founders were too erratic, individualistic, and failed to show concern for political 'correctness'."
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=SoBIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=8G0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=3956,1528068&dq=political-correctness&hl=en
From 1981, Pittsburgh Pose-Gazette
Notes how Mao, "shut down universities, place political 'correctness' above all else."
Note the same scare quotes around correctness. This is not a term invented by the authors of either article. Not definitive, but the concept and even the phrase, PC seem to have Commie origins. Not that this should surprise anybody.
Incidentally, by the 1980s the term appears without the scare quotes and with little trace of pejorative. Remind me who won the cold war again.
""Doesn't it still feel a little "foreign" to you?"
It has always seemed Soviet-sounding to me. I'm not sure why."
Hey, I thought you knew all the answers, Steve. Maybe I'm talking out my fourth point of contact, but isn't PC a direct import from China (of the 1950's or so)? I don't mean the Frankfurt school of socialists and that crowd (I did see the video that someone linked to above). I just mean the wording "politically correct."
The funny thing is that China is a much less politically-correct place than America is these days. There is an exception - dissing the government.
Steve -- You mentioned an interest in how HBD relates to senses of humor, but I've never heard you talk about it on the blog. I took a crack at it (it's in two parts):
Does a sense of humor correlate with IQ?
One of the arguments against the g factor is the existence of savants, autistic people who are mind-bogglingly good at one particular kind of mental task, but subnormal in most other ways. I don't find this a particularly compelling argument: severe autistics are too anomalous an offshoot to draw conclusions about the rest of humanity from.
To me, a better argument against g would be the existence of Asians. Northeast Asians (Japanese, Korean, northern Chinese) average somewhere between 105 and 110 on IQ, yet the vast majority of Asians have nerdy personalities. If g is such an all around boost, why do so many Asian-Americans seem to have weak senses of humor? (I'm half-Asian, which is probably why I seem to spend around half my life being lame.)
For that matter, it's been my experience that blacks, who on average do poorly on IQ tests, often have good senses of humor. Does IQ not correlate with humor?
Possibly. I've known plenty of whites with all sorts of intellectual credentials and incredibly lame senses of humor. And I've met plenty of whites with none who have good senses of humor. So what gives?
It may just be that a lower level of inhibitions correlates with a better sense of humor. Much of humor consists of saying things others are unwilling -- perhaps too shy or too inhibited -- to say. Delivery is crucial as well: telling a joke hesitantly basically strangles it. Sociopaths are totally uninhibited, and this allows them to be glibly charming, with what appears at first to be a good sense of humor (in fact they usually just have a bunch of prepackaged lines they trot out at the appropriate times).
It also helps to have an outsider's perspective, which may help explain the many funny blacks and gays.
Gays seem particularly skillful at delivering funny impressionistic summations of situations which highlight their absurdity -- witness David Sedaris.
A sense of humor may derive in part from a sense of helplessness. (As in, the winners get the spoils, the losers get philosophy -- because they have no choice but to be philosophical about things.)
It also helps to have what is known as a twisted outlook, all the better to have a sick sense of humor. But this may also just be a matter of being a left-handed, right-brained type of person, the type long associated with creativity.
Speed of thought helps too. If you're like me, and can only think of the perfect response half an hour later, no one will ever think you funny.
(cont--)
It has often been said that comedians are angry people. So that probably helps. Except I've never seen a person actually throwing a temper tantrum who was funny except in an unintentional way. It's also been said that the top comedians are often substance abusers. And, come to think of it, you don't see a lot of Asian-American alcoholics.
But many of the funniest people I know are also the smartest. This can't be just coincidence. A few of them are even well-adjusted: having a sense of humor would seem to equip one well for the various slings and arrows that come our way.
So is humor a form of intelligence or not? I'd say that it is, even if it doesn't correlate well with measured IQ.
One thing a sense of humor does correlate with is sanity -- which also doesn't necessarily correlate well with IQ. (The existence of Harvard University is testimony to that.) To have a sense of what's absurd or out of place or unexpected, you must start with a strong sense of what is normal.
There also seems to be a gender correlation. Men are just funnier than women. There, I've said it. But it's not as if I'm the only one who's ever noticed -- or said -- this. I've heard similar comments from a wide range of people, including some females. (As the old saying goes, a woman with a good sense of humor is one who laughs at your jokes.)
If testosterone is associated with humor, then that might explain why blacks are funnier than Asians, since blacks on average have the highest testosterone levels, and Asians the lowest. But you don't generally associate a quick wit with muscle bound NFL linemen. On the contrary, when you look at the top comedians, like Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle or Richard Pryor or Howard Stern, they tend to be skinny guys who look like they'd be lucky to make the JV basketball team.
There's also a correlation with humor and narcissism -- a negative correlation. If you can't laugh at yourself, you're probably not going to be very funny.
So it's settled then: the funniest person is going to be a quick-witted, left-handed, gay, non-narcissistic black man who is exceptionally intelligent and sane.
I started out writing that sentence intending to sound sarcastic. But now that I look at it, that guy actually does sound as if he'd probably have a good sense of humor.
So the left won't acknowledge biological human differences?
The "right" as we know it won't even acknowledge evolution! Make sure you're not in a glass house before casting stones. Why don't you ever slam those Discovery Institute creationist whackjobs? Without acceptance of evolution with your allies on the right, your HBD theories are going NOWHERE.
Jeff said . . .
The political coalition that enforces PC is going to lose Congress next Tuesday.
Right now, the Democrats and Republicans control Congress. After next Tuesday, it's going to be . . .
Tracing PC back to WWII is silly. Its roots go back further. Charles Dickens, for example, revised "Oliver Twist" after he received critical letters about it from Jews. And "Nathan the Wise" by Goethe is a prime example of uncritical multiculturalism.
"but when you are going to go ahead and implement policies based on HBD, don't individuals cease to represent themselves and start representing a certain group?"
No, just the opposite: when a society implements policies based on *group identity* as we do now rather than on a demonstration of individual skill (just visit your local public high school if you think this kind of policy is limited to affirmative action), *that* is when individualism is quashed.
After all, HBD recognizes that group differences say nothing about an individual within a particular group. That's the whole point--it's the individual that counts.
The individual should be rewarded based on his or her accomplishments, not on the accomplishments of his group. Similarly, he ought not be punished for the failure of his group. Why should this be so hard a concept for HBD deniers? What are they afraid of?
Speaking of political correctness, I can read the entry on your blog but not at VDare because my computer here at work blocks VDare as a "Hate Site."
Stalin liked to use the word "incorrect" to refer to heretical political views. This became common Cominternspeak.
Steve Sailer...
It has always seemed Soviet-sounding to me. I'm not sure why.
Because you suffer from
Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia:
Whoa, this sounds like a bad one. Could it be a form of dementia? A new addition to the recognized psychiatric standards of evaluating schizophrenia? A horrible mental illness with a slow onset like Alzheimer's? Actually, the answer is far more prosaic. In the post-Stalin Soviet era, political repression was sort of frowned upon. That's not to say that it didn't occur, but rather that it generally took on a more subtle form. The tactics were less outwardly heavy handed than before but were still particularly unpleasant. The fate that met many people who called for reform was a diagnosis of sluggishly progressing schizophrenia. Jaures Medvedev (of no relation to current Russian president Dmitri Medvedev) was an academic interested in both politics and the hard sciences who made the unfortunate mistake of criticizing the Soviet government's handling of a harrowing pre-Chernobyl incident at a nuclear facility near the town of Kyshtym in 1957. It was meant to be a closely guarded secret, but within a month or so, Medvedev spilled the beans to the public. He kept it up until 1970 and received the horrible diagnosis. According to available Soviet psychiatric records of the time, the onset of the typical case of sluggishly progressing schizophrenia could be identified through "patient" statements that reflected a messianic outlook or irrational agitation with the policies of the government. In Medvedev's case, his divergent personal and professional interests were taken as a sign that he was definitely suffering from some type of a split personality. Protesting the diagnosis was a definite sign that a person had the affliction. The rest of the criteria were so deliberately vague that the diagnosis could be applied to anyone. While dissidents and reformers who were diagnosed with SPS were spared forced labor, they often met unfortunate fates in Soviet psychiatric hospitals. Medvedev was subjected to three years worth of "treatments" such as forced electroshock therapy and constant streams of different anti-depressant drugs until he was finally expelled from the USSR in 1973. Most of the rest of the psychiatric community in the world rejected the notion of SPS as a legitimate form of the disease and their case was strengthened when prominent Soviet psychologists almost always refused to present or debate evidence for or against the uniquely Soviet condition. The use of SPS as a tool to stifle dissent came to an end in the 1980s but the legacy of sluggishly progressing schizophrenia lives on in China as the mental health of Falun Gong members and other dissident groups is often used as a pretext to remove these people from the public eye.
PC is primarily about the assumption that we are all the same, and differ in no important ways, and about relativism. Things can be different, but not better or worse (unless you're white). Judging is now an evil.
Still, some utterly unimportant differences are allowed, like acknowledging different skin color, etc. You can even, to some degree, talk about racial differences in athleticism (catching some flack, but not near universal). The one thing that is absolutely taboo is discussing meaningful differences in group intelligence. That will not be brooked presently in the U.S.
You can present arguments about the intelligence pecking order being the same the world over (if you dare), regardless if a country had a "legacy of racism" or not. Present all the twins studies that you can find, but until there is absolute irrefutable DNA evidence pointing to group differences in intelligence, the multicultists will continue to deny, deny, deny, and really not engage in debate at all. It'll be all about character assassination of the heretic. Wonder if such evidence will be found within ten years or so.
The changing attitudes about PC in Norway that the commenter noted are fortunate for them, but I believe they still have a great deal of homogeneity in their country, no?
Here, they say whites will only be a majority for another 30 years. My own guess is that it'll be closer to 20. Not only will PC be almost impossible to squelch without affirmative DNA evidence (and even with it, they'll come up with ever more creative ways to deny racial intelligence differences), but there will be escalating vilification of whites as years go by, with Whiteness Studies detailing our evilness, and White Privelege and Institutional Racism being used to explain group level differences in achievement. The worry to me, is that as the demonization of whites gets ever more harsh in coming years, and with our shrinking and aging population, the demonization, and in a manner of speaking, the dehumanizing of whites will eventually lead to far greater physical violence against us, and the perps will have convinced themselves that their violence is justified. We don't have to look that far back (Nazis to the Jews, black on white murder and violence in SA and Zimbabwe) to note how that plays out. Less certain is how a Mestizo majority will treat a white minority.
There will likely be a fair bit of miscegenation between Mestizos and Whites in the coming decades, so I'm less concerned about racial pogroms from them than I would be from blacks, although the utter lawlessness of Mexico is sure to be coming to a town near you soon. I'd be more concerned about a Mestizo majority if I were black, frankly.
Interesting times ahead, unfortunately.
“I think Luke Lea is right, you need show that HBD can do some moral good. I think the best way to do that might be to show how HBD-denial damages medicine, possibly resulting in a great many unnecessary deaths.”
Steve previously made this point about the controversy surrounding the FDA approval of BiDil. BiDil was actually a poor example because it was a combination drug that probably took advantage of low African-American medical literacy. BiDil was an expensive gimmick that doctors saw through. However, political correctness may be preventing useful analysis into the roles of sex hormones in cancer mortality. When Dr. Albain’s research team produced a major study identifying hormonal differences as a likely culprit in racial differences in cancer mortality, the media and the American Cancer Society accused her of “medical racial profiling.”
I do disagree with you on two points:
1) Doctors already practice race realism to some extent. Medical school is full of racial epidemiology, and doctors often do consider race when they consider treatments and diagnoses. This is particularly true for the treatment of high blood pressure.
2) Making a medical case for race realism is difficult for two important reasons. One is that medical research to determine the number needed to treat (NNT) of one medical approach versus another is expensive. The other is that making a life-saving case for medicine, in general, is quite difficult, given that modern medicine has made little difference is average lifespan. Most longevity benefits owe to improvements in water quality. You could make a case that vaccines have made a huge difference, but the case is harder for antibiotics and would be much harder still for a potential benefit to race realism in medicine.
This is why I think violence research is so important because impulsive violence clearly is influenced by genetics, and it kills young men, which is very meaningful for average lifespan. Black people are more likely to have alleles associated with violence, and a study this year even found that just five genes influenced violent behavior in black men, but not white men, with greater significance than the mother-son childhood relationship.
GLOBAL BELL CURVE HITS BIGTIME
Richard Lynn’s work received the ultimate accolade as a Christian Science Monitor columnist, one Husna Haq, was allowed to speculate whether it should be banned – along with Mein Kampf, The Burblings of Bin Liner and all anti-Holohoax publications
-- from Chris Brand's blog
article--
http://tinyurl.com/2ddmu4h
Isn't HBD a threat to American individualism? I am all for it being studied scientifically, but when you are going to go ahead and implement policies based on HBD, don't individuals cease to represent themselves and start representing a certain group?
Individuals already do belong to groups -- and often like it that way. This doesn't necessarily harm their individualism; it can also enhance it.
So the left won't acknowledge biological human differences?
The "right" as we know it won't even acknowledge evolution! Make sure you're not in a glass house before casting stones.
Oh, don't you worry. Evolution, properly understood, is vastly more threatening to the left.
I once asked a bunch of atheistic evolutionists, "So human evolution being true and all, which way do you guys reckon "humankind" might continue to evolve from here?" You could hear crickets chirping!
(For those a little slow on the uptake: think about it for a minute.)
"How come the stronger blacks routinely beat up weaker whites in poor integrated communities all over America?"
Am I the only one sick of reading posts from the troll Andrea aka asdfasfadsf aka a million other things with his creepy sexual obsession with black dominance?
With all that confronts those of us who accept the existence of biological human diversity, the last thing we need is a radical moniker that could be read as inciting violence and intolerance.
Too true. If important mean differences between human groups were acknowledged who knows what might happen! I mean, blacks might start hating, murdering and raping whites, for example. They might start dropping out of school and having children out of wedlock. People might start to self-segregate on the basis of race. Jobs might start being denied whites in order to be given to less deserving blacks and browns. Who knows what evils might befall us!
With all that confronts those of us who accept the existence of biological human diversity, the last thing we need is a radical moniker that could be read as inciting violence and intolerance. - "nooffensebut"
Too true. If important mean differences between human groups were acknowledged who knows what might happen! I mean, blacks might start hating, murdering and raping whites, for example. They might start dropping out of school and having children out of wedlock. People might start to self-segregate on the basis of race. Jobs might start being denied whites in order to be given to less deserving blacks and browns. Who knows what evils might befall us! - Silver
Silver - LMFAO!! You called bs on that one!
"nooffensebut" - should be "offensebut"
Lucille said...
Tracing PC back to WWII is silly. Its roots go back further. Charles Dickens, for example, revised "Oliver Twist" after he received critical letters about it from Jews. And "Nathan the Wise" by Goethe is a prime example of uncritical multiculturalism.
Who wrote anything about tracing it back to WW2? From the comment I saw, it was traced back to post WW1 and the Frankfurt School. That video seemed pretty convincing too.
Anonymous said... "Germania is Germany, not Scandinavia."
Germanic peoples.
(NB: I didn't say or mean to imply that there is complete unity amongst Germanic peoples. Just that Scandinavians are Germanic. That is a fact that cannot be denied.)
Anonymous said... "Germania is Germany, not Scandinavia."
Germanic peoples.
(NB: I didn't say or mean to imply that there is complete unity amongst Germanic peoples. Just that Scandinavians are Germanic. That is a fact that cannot be denied.) @Nora
Of course I agree, and I am sorry if I was a bit abrupt with you personally meine freund Nora, since I am always a little carefully suspicious of Scandinavians claiming any kind of conservative values.
Nothing personal against you of course, just my life experiences have found that, in the perception of most Skandi's, anyone to the Right of Gunner Myrdal is a 'Rightest' - all protestations to the contrary.
*Additionally, it was appalling how the Norwegian state, and so many individual Norwegians, treated the children of German fathers and Norwegian mothers after WW2 (so much for 'Greater Germania' there).
-Stefan
Lucille:
The question (and uncertainty) has not to do with the phenomenon of political correctness (which, we all realize)is ancient but with the origin of the term itself. The concensus, though ragged, is that its origin lies somewhere among the collectivists themselves.
Jeff:
You're quite right that "the Left" is a coalition. My own somewhat (but neither basically nor completely) facile explanation is that the left is a ccoalition of resentment and envy, the political organization of the aggrieved.
But, for quite some time, I have held my own (i.e., original to me, insofar as I am aware) theory as to a biological--that is to say, "natural" explanation of the phenomenon. Some years ago, I wrote briefly of the idea to John Ray ("Dissecting Leftism" blog) and he seemed, essentially, to be in agreement (and published it on his site).
It's not really complicated nor abstruse; it's readily grasped (actually is grasped by many of even very slight intellect) and, though not actually provable, is quite impossible of refutation. So, though in a broad sense, it is a "scientific" observation or theory, it does not meet either Popper's "subject to refutation" criterion of the natural sciences nor the unbroken chain of syllogisms characteristic of sciences such as mathematics, logic, (or "Austrian-School"
economics).
I'll explain in a follow-up. To save myself some time and trouble, I'll hunt it at Dr. Ray's site for a copy-and-paste; otherwise, I'm liable to a less thorough job of reconstruction.
Writing WWII rather than WWI was a typo, but it doesn't change my point. (Goethe and Dickens predate WWI, as I'm sure you know.)
I don't want to watch the video in its entirely, but if anyone has a transcript, I wouldn't mind looking at it.
Did you catch this? Getting worked up over racism in a 19th century novel is absurd; that the offensive passage is an accurate description puts it beyond absurd.
Stefan said... "*Additionally, it was appalling how the Norwegian state, and so many individual Norwegians, treated the children of German fathers and Norwegian mothers after WW2 (so much for 'Greater Germania' there)."
But if all that hadn't have happened, the world wouldn't have had ABBA! ;-)
In all seriousness, though, the treatment of the tyskerunger was terrible - as if children can choose their parents. :-(
But, it just goes to show that even though Norwegians are Germanic, we're not (as you pointed out) Germans - we're not related enough to you guys to welcome you into the country with open arms.
Everyone does has their own ethnic genetic interests.
I don't want to watch the video in its entirely, but if anyone has a transcript, I wouldn't mind looking at it.
This is not a direct transcript of the video, but it is from a speech given by the same man in the video and encompasses most of what is presented in that video. From my quick overview, it looks to be very similar.
" Scandinavians (being Germanic) are severe herders. They do NOT want to be left out of the crowd."
What about Latvians? Do they follow the herd? A whole herd of 50,000 of them sure can follow a director: Song Festival
Silver:
I suppose by the time I'm an old man, it will begin to be clear whether there's enough genetic impact on behavior that resistance to the draw of birth control and abortion can be evolved. We currently have a world where lots of people choose to have zero or one children, and a noticable number choose to have many children--I know a family with nine kids and one more on the way.
The same right wingers that tell others to get a backbone will immediately cry abotu being "attacked" if we dare question or exam their sacred cows using the same lame relativistic and "I'm offended!" protestations as the PC left does.
It's a human universal (go to Stormfront and pick a fight with the feminazis (heh) if you don't believe me, or Christians on a Christian forum, regardless of left-right) IME. It's basically what you do when you've got no case, which is why the rates vary so much from group to group; liberals have no case.
PC is primarily about the assumption that we are all the same, and differ in no important ways, and about relativism. Things can be different, but not better or worse (unless you're white). Judging is now an evil.
Nope. Crackers have a uniquely wicked past and nature, and are freely judged. You're projecting your rationality onto others when it does not fit.
PC is (an action-oriented) part of The Narrative, the huge mass of contradictory just-so stories that obeys no logic other than "who-whom?" And even that logic is only of the furtive, Machiavellian, self-deceptive sort employed by its authors.
But, it just goes to show that even though Norwegians are Germanic, we're not (as you pointed out) Germans - we're not related enough to you guys to welcome you into the country with open arms.
Yeah, Germany is a way better country than pee-cee-ified Norway.
Dont kid yourself Nora, the Norwegians who did this treatment did it out of liberal status concerns more than anything else, since Skandi's are the biggest approval seekers in the world.
-Stefan
But, it just goes to show that even though Norwegians are Germanic, we're not (as you pointed out) Germans - we're not related enough to you guys to welcome you into the country with open arms. - Nora
The real reasonlargely was that the Scandinavians were and are largely followers, who, during WW2, hedged their bets and fence-sat to see which side was going to win, then claim they were on the 'winning side' all along.
There was a famous saying in Sweden during WW2 that went along the lines of...
"If the Germans/Axis win the war, were Aryans"
OR
"If the Americans/Allies win the war, were 'a democracy'.
Really hypocritical proto-SWPLism if you ask me.
*And this is why I was and am justified in my skepticism of any kind of real conservatism or traditionalism among Scandinavians, since their top-priorities always seem to be approval and status-seeking rather than kith, kin and kindredness within Western Civilization.
-Stefan
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