April 10, 2012

The Derb Speaks

In an interview with Gawker.

By Steve Sailer on 4/10/2012

42 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why nations fail.

Someone should write a book... Why Nations Jail.

4/10/12, 2:11 PM
Douglas Pitch said...

Derb is clearly a good man, and his prodigious intellect and knowledge added tremendous value to NRO, which is much, much weaker now, in many senses of the word.

Derb cares about his nation and also his people, the same way that Jewish activists care about their people, and Black activists care about their people, and Hispanic activists care about their people, etc., apart from their being Americans, and identifying as such.

Sure, disassociate with someone if he proves a Bad man. Meaning, a pedophile rapist, or cannibal, or arsonist. But a little bit of ethnic chauvinism or an emergent distaste for the consistent behavior of a large number of group X only makes one a Bad man in leftist controlled America, treated comparably to a murderer.

How can anyone talk about race openly if you have to go out of your way to avoid even the slightest "insensitivity" (there's the leftist indoctrination again!) -- even when you write at a different site, as Derbyshire did! (What if his diary went public? I bet Lowry would've been railroaded into "parting ways" then too.)

Let's be real here. NRO is enabling leftist control, even as they themselves become more and more "sensitive" and "progressive," on their way to becoming The New Republic, or a Weekly Standard/Atlantic hybrid, except with a soft spot for Santorum. All their essays might as well be vetted by leftist editors to avoid crossing their imaginary lines that serve only leftist interests.

4/10/12, 2:17 PM
Thursday said...

Interesting that NR has been so consistently purging its most interesting writers: John O'Sullivan, Peter Brimelow, our host here. Some would include Joe Sobran, though I haven't been as impressed by what I've read of him.

4/10/12, 2:56 PM
gumsy doo. said...

Hmmm... I wonder... did the liberal media pull a dipsy-doo(subconsciously if not consciously). By making a big fuss about the Derb, they got to have the cake and eat it too.

Many white liberals wanna have The Talk with blacks and tell blacks that there is a real problem in the black community--and that many of the faults are with blacks.
But they just can't do it out of combination of 'guilt', fear, cowardice, worship(of magic negro myth), etc.
But by making a big issue out of what the Derb said and turning it into a NATIONAL(indeed INTERNATIONAL)issue, liberals got tens of millions of people(many of them black) to hear/read what Derb had to say WHILE, AT THE SAME TIME, rebuking him for his horrible 'racism'. This way, liberals did get THE TALK ABOUT BLACKS out there in the public but absolved themselves of having anything to do with those sentiments.
Maybe it was like what the devious general pulled in PATHS OF GLORY. Pushing one way while pulling another.
A dipsy doo.

4/10/12, 2:58 PM
Anonymous said...

Thanks for the heads up to the interview, Steve.

4/10/12, 2:59 PM
Anonymous said...

Firing a long time writer when he is currently fighting cancer.

Stay classy, National Review.

4/10/12, 2:59 PM
Propeller Island said...

Of all places, Gawker?

The commenters there are really something.

4/10/12, 3:12 PM
Anonymous said...

I love JD. I've read him regularly for close to a decade. I own WAD. And I've listened to Radio Derb faithfully since it started. I've learned a lot from him. But that article he wrote was just stupid. It wasn't just stupid for him professionally but it was obnoxious and it didn't have much of anything interesting or intelligent to say. I think his chemo treatments may be affecting his judgement. That or he let his contrarian streak get the better of him.

4/10/12, 3:15 PM
Anonymous said...

Wow, I've never read Gawker before.

I never understood just how unknowledgeable of science most progressives are until now.

4/10/12, 3:42 PM
Anonymous said...

Screw John Derbyshire. This guy has been trashing everyone to his "right", like Kevin MacDonald, for over a decade now. Now he's some kind of brave truth teller? Give me a break.

4/10/12, 3:47 PM
Swifty Quick said...

Anybody else bother with that IA Test? I have "a moderate automatic preference for European American compared to African American." This is based on the differential speed in my responses when presented with photos of black people as opposed to white people. They divine a lot from speed.

4/10/12, 3:56 PM
Anonymous said...

So the Derb was never "hired" by NR to begin with.

So it was a lucky accident to have him there at all. This temporary reprieve from Dr. Jerry Pournell's Iron Law of Bureaucracy has now been closed.

Almost as good as and predictably stupid as the IAS throwing away all the computers the second John von Neumann died. Computers did not return there for 20 years. Someone should start a stopwatch to time when the next signs of intelligence can be detected coming from NR. For pure speed, I bet that IAS time is one they will not be able to beat.

4/10/12, 4:23 PM
Anonymous said...

"Of all places, Gawker?"

Better than preaching to the choir.

4/10/12, 4:25 PM
Baloo said...

As another frequent commenter here might say, the thing I really LIKE LIKE LIKE about this interview is that he
DIDN'T APOLOGIZE!

4/10/12, 4:25 PM
SFG said...

"Interesting that NR has been so consistently purging its most interesting writers: John O'Sullivan, Peter Brimelow, our host here. Some would include Joe Sobran, though I haven't been as impressed by what I've read of him."

NR wants to stay 'respectable'. That was actually Buckley's strategy--he threw the John Birch society under the bus after they said Ike was a commie, and he cut ties with the anti-Jewish writers, probably softening media criticism of the Right somewhat.

Sound strategically, if not very principled...

4/10/12, 4:30 PM
TontoBubbaGoldstein said...

@ Thursday : You need to read more Sobran. He was great. IMHO.

4/10/12, 4:38 PM
Anonymous said...

One of the horrified respondents on gawker quoted something favorably from Redstate. The quote was, of course, full of neocon stage-worthy moral outrage; the theatrical community is really missing out a lot by not having these primadonas. I won't name the specific weasel who wrote it, no need to get his numbers up, and the Centrist Borg has no genuine individuals in any case.

The leftist respondent on gawker was surprised she was quoting something favorably from Redstate. I think all of us can agree that there is no surprise there, just bipartisan consensus amongst neo-Jacobins.

And, while I am at, you gotta love Redstate, it's the place where actual Scotch-Irish can frolic under the direction of the other Scotch-Irish, their political shepherds, whom we playfully also call Scotch-Irish. They think they are still at home in the pasture, i.e. the red state. They aren't though, behind the fake grass and straw, one can see it is a factory farm.

4/10/12, 4:41 PM
Anonymous said...

"Screw John Derbyshire. This guy has been trashing everyone to his 'right', like Kevin MacDonald, for over a decade now."

So, what are you saying? A rightist should never criticize rightists? That sounds like the leftist Popular Front, or 'no enemy to the left'.

Macdonald has some interesting things to say and I honor his courage, but his views tend to be narrow and wonky.
But the real stinker of alt right is Kurtagic, a Scumbag.

4/10/12, 4:53 PM
Anonymous said...

"That was actually Buckley's strategy--he threw the John Birch society under the bus after they said Ike was a commie,... Sound strategically, if not very principled..."

No, I think Buckley's rejection of the John Birch Society was a good thing. I mean anti-communism is one thing but 'Ike is communist'? I mean that lives up to the authoritarian paranoid mentality stuff. Buckley wanted intelligent conservatism, not stupid paranoid conservatism. Since smart people don't wanna associate with total loonies, Buckley had to cut ties with Birch nuts. And why should an institution or organization be chummy on everyone on its side of political spectrum?
New Republic has no use for Stalinists and Maoist. Isn't that a good thing for liberalism?

Also, Buckley learned from the McCarthy debacle that the Right has to be more sober than the left. Why? (1) liberals have more power (2) rightists tend to be get carried away when they let their paranoia run loose. The problem wasn't McCarthy's anti-communism but his shameless and drunken demagoguery, which left Buckley and others with eggs on their face.

And I don't think Buckley's criticism of Buchanan or Sobran was without merit. I've found some of Buchanan's views idiotic or crazy myself. But Buckley started to very wrong when he became slavish to the neocons, as if by sucking up to them extra he could indeed bring about the political conversion of the Jews.

4/10/12, 5:00 PM
Anonymous said...

Derb from the interview:


"I bond effortlessly with East Asians & I think always have. I'm more at ease in a room full of Chinese people than I would be in a room full of black American rap artists. "


Hmmm, wonder why he put it that way? Would he also be more at ease in a room full of chinese rap artists, or chinese nationalists or chinese who want revenge for the Opium Wars, than he would be in a room full of black scientists? I am guessing he probably would be...

4/10/12, 5:24 PM
Anonymous said...

Buckley's attack on the JBS made sense because they really were a bunch of extreme kooks.

His attacks on Buchanan and Sobran was just pandering. His firing of Sullivan and exclusion of any discussion of immigration started NR on its road to Neo-con irrelevancy.

Lowery/Goldberg are just continuing the rot.

4/10/12, 5:43 PM
Baloo said...

"No enemy to the left" has worked so well for them, I say, "Pas d'ennemi a droite."

4/10/12, 5:44 PM
Anonymous said...

Maureen O'Connor is half Chinese...

4/10/12, 5:48 PM
Anonymous said...

"I think the big division in our society is always black-nonblack. The other stuff—Hispanics, Asians—is a bagatelle by comparison. This makes sense paleoanthropologically, too: Homo sap. first left Africa, then differentiated into other races"


So, hispanics and asians are OK compared to blacks? What about arabs and turks? What about hindus?

Seems to me that this kind of fixation on africans opens the doors to other minorities.

It also seems to me that this fixation on africans by racist whites is recognized and taken advantage of by other non-white races.

4/10/12, 5:54 PM
Svigor said...

I never understood just how unknowledgeable of science most progressives are until now.

They're morons. Just look at the comments for "The Talk" at Taki's.

Make that indefatigable morons. They never get tired of chanting the same slogans over and over.

4/10/12, 5:59 PM
Anonymous said...

So, what are you saying? A rightist should never criticize rightists? That sounds like the leftist Popular Front, or 'no enemy to the left'.


Okay, well, now it's Derbyshire's turn in the barrel. He's dished it out, and now he can take it.

4/10/12, 6:26 PM
Anonymous said...

"Maureen O'Connor is half Chinese..."

That explains a lot. A full white liberal would never have given Derb such a fair hearing. There's no love lost between Asians and blacks.

4/10/12, 6:27 PM
NOTA said...

Most people are kind of stupid, and most people are vastly ignorant of science, history, economics, statistics, math, etc. This sucks, but it's reality.

However, this is a situation that brings out the worst in people. Get your whole community worked up into a lather of moral outrage, start using that to assert your community's superiority to its enemies, and it's damned hard not to advance shaky arguments and rely on questionable facts. It's human nature to feel like your arguments are stronger when you're more certain of the conclusion, even though things don't really work that way.

This is one reason to read and listen to people from very different communities, with very different ideas than yours. People who think like you will usually not call you on shaky arguments whose conclusions they like, but people who don't think like you will.

Gawker is a fine place for this interview. Derb got to have his say, and was heard by a bunch of people who wouldn't normally have heard any of it. Many were surely outraged. But in some people, this might trigger some of that inconvenient, yucky thinking stuff that causes so many problems. Most of those people won't necessarily be convinced by Derb's ideas or reasoning. But some will, and others will at least have a different set of peoblems in their minds that need to be solved, which seldom come up on the left end of the blogosphere.

4/10/12, 6:37 PM
peterike said...

In response to some comments above, if you want to know what Joe Sobran was about, read this:

http://www.wildwestcycle.com/f_pensees.htm

It's long, but it's a brilliant synopsis of the Conservative argument. This essay should be required reading for every high school and college student in America. It shatters the blinders.

4/10/12, 7:10 PM
John Dooey said...

Anybody else bother with that IA Test? I have "a moderate automatic preference for European American compared to African American." This is based on the differential speed in my responses when presented with photos of black people as opposed to white people. They divine a lot from speed.

How dense can you be? It wasn't simply about switching pictures of blacks and whites. They gave you the categories black and white but also good and bad, joining one from the first pair with one from then second. Then you had to sort not just pictures of blacks and whites but also positive and negative words like "good" and "humiliate" into these mixed categories. So what it measures is the speed with which you can put a picture of a black/white person or a positive or a negative word into the categories "white/good" vs. "black/bad" or "black/good" vs. "white/bad". If you don't like blacks, there's a certain cognitive dissonance in associating "black" with "good" and "white" with "bad". And it's hesitations and errors along these lines that determine the outcome.

Whether that really is a valid way of determining one's attitudes about race may be open to question, but the test itself was certainly more than just sorting pictures of black and white people. Same goes for the gender/science test, which pairs male/female and hard sciences/humanities. For me at least, that was a lot more disconcerting than the black/white test.

4/10/12, 7:36 PM
Anonymous said...

Why did they have a picture of Derbyshire in a deep hole? Is the interviewer implying something?

4/10/12, 7:51 PM
Anonymous said...

Derbyshire's opinions on censorship:

http://www.jewcy.com/post/kevin_macdonald_derbs2

If tomorrow I submitted a piece to National Review saying, “Kevin MacDonald is really onto something. He’s doing great work and I think everyone should read him,” the editors would reject the piece, and they would be right to do so. I don’t think I would be canned for submitting such an article, but if it happened, I would not be much surprised.

...

Anyone running a mainstream conservative magazine has to constantly demonstrate ideological purity in matters of race. They have to show repeatedly, by indirect means of course (I mean, it would be no use to just stamp “THIS IS NOT AN ANTISEMITIC MAGAZINE! WE DO NOT FAVOR THE RETURN OF JIM CROW LAWS!” in Day-Glo letters on the cover) that they are ideologically pure in this zone. Otherwise, they won’t be taken seriously by the cultural establishment.

...

National Review wants to get certain ideas out to the U.S. public—ideas about economics, politics, law, religion, science, history, the arts, and more. [note: no mention of race] To do that, the magazine needs standing in our broad cultural milieu. It needs status. That’s hard at the best of times for a conservative publication. To lose status points—to lose standing—just in order to draw readers’ attention to some rather abstruse socio-historical theories cooked up by a cranky small-college faculty member, would be dumb. Ergo, as I said, NR would reject a piece of the kind you suggested, and they would be correct to do so. I would do so if I were editor of NR.


In other words, Derbyshire thinks it's fine for conservative publications to fire people for discussing racial issues as it might take attention off of more important things, like cutting taxes on billionaires or starting the next Middle East war. Hard to feel sorry for the guy when he gets canned under the system that he himself has advocated.

4/10/12, 8:57 PM
Anonymous said...

"Gawker is a fine place for this interview. Derb got to have his say, and was heard by a bunch of people who wouldn't normally have heard any of it. Many were surely outraged"

I read the comments. I can't believe how many people are truly ignorant of the studies. I mean, they think Derb simply MADE UP the results of the research.

4/10/12, 10:37 PM
Anonymous said...

Anybody else bother with that IA Test?

I remember taking the race IA test way back then when it just appeared online (late 1990s?). Can't remember the result but do remember that I had an issue with experimental design as far as sequence of presentations is concerned.

So today I decided to take the test in two modes: "honest" (do as they ask) and "fake" (cheat intentionally, pretending I am black liking blacks). In the end my tentative conclusion is that it's totally not reliable:

1. In the "honest" mode, I came out "a slight automatic preference for European American" - which is wrong because on every level and without a slightest doubt I have a very significant automatic preference for whites over blacks.

2. In the "cheat" mode, I was able to cheat into "strong automatic preference for African American". A good test is almost impossible to game. Well, gaming this one was exceedingly easy. What the authors are after is very transparent half way through - the cheating is trivial from that point on.

The religion test was equally easy to cheat. I am an atheist and I made it look like I have slight preference for Islam and strong dislike of Buddism.

So, IA test is a sand castle - good for academics gaining tenures and publishing papers, useless for everything else.

4/10/12, 10:47 PM
Anonymous said...

A bit lame when she tries to affect blogger savvy by invoking NWA. Oh my, how current. You should also hear this record by the Fat Boys, it's totally fresh

4/10/12, 10:49 PM
Alcalde Jaime Miguel Curleo said...

Found an amazing passage after clicking around from someone's link to Jewcy.com above; from Joey Kurtzman, Nov 28, 2007:

Yesterday, some Jewcy readers observed that Brendan O'Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked and recent contributor here, began his journalistic career at a magazine named Living Marxism. Living Marxism was the organ of Britain's Revolutionary Communist Party, which held positions with which most Jewcers would not agree. Our would-be comrade commissars proclaim that O'Neill must be exiled from Jewcy.

Michael Kinsley says that the digital age is a propitious time to be a cranky libertarian, but it's also springtime for leftist factionalism. On the web, every clique can sanctify its own luminoso blogrollo, forever excommunicating deviationists for doctrinal unorthodoxies, past affiliations, refusals to pronounce some shibboleth of our corner of the internet

Otherwise I can't say as I grok the point of the site but am confident it was well positioned for someone else.

4/10/12, 11:14 PM
Matthew said...

"Would he also be more at ease in a room full of chinese rap artists...than he would be in a room full of black scientists?"

Hard to say, but judging from his writing he doesn't like to spend much time in Hollywood.

4/11/12, 12:11 AM
Anonymous said...

I never understood just how unknowledgeable of science most progressives are until now.

They're morons. Just look at the comments for "The Talk" at Taki's.

Yeah, on average they're just not smart at all.

Anyone who thinks that Liberals are smart and is of a level of intelligence such that they can read any serious thinker or any serious ideas at all simply has to read the comments section of any Liberal newspaper published online to get a sense that the ground level average intelligence difference between Liberals and Conservatives has been much, much exaggerated. Liberalism = smartness not required.

Of course, no group is smart on average.

There are clever Liberal positions Liberals can think to, on HBD and immigration, if they actually pay attention to the facts, since Liberalism vs Conservatism is mostly a matter of personality and values which guide reasoning, not the acceptance of true or false propositions which are reasoned through (to be clear though, I vastly prefer our personalities and values, if I have to make a choice).

But they mostly don't. Because they mostly are dumb (like most people) and don't have the facts and like most people don't care about consistency.

This is kind of a double edged sword. On the one hand the Liberal HBD response is dumb as hell, because their smart people don't or can't look at the facts, which means the Conservative HBD response is comparatively smart as hell. We have the advantage in having a smart ideology on this one, and that's nice! On the other hand they're still making dumb as hell choices and believing dumb as hell things.

4/11/12, 12:57 AM
Seamus said...

Interesting that NR has been so consistently purging its most interesting writers: John O'Sullivan, Peter Brimelow, our host here. Some would include Joe Sobran, though I haven't been as impressed by what I've read of him.

The real question should be whether you've been impressed by what you've read *by* him.

4/11/12, 6:10 AM
Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

A bit lame when she tries to affect blogger savvy by invoking NWA. Oh my, how current. You should also hear this record by the Fat Boys, it's totally fresh."

Indeed. I would have replied that I do not like any group whose name I am not permitted to speak aloud in full - either NWA or the NAACP.

4/11/12, 7:14 AM
gawk attack said...

I came across Gawker a while ago and tried to comment on some particularly stupid thread but couldn't get a log in so I gave up. What i surmised from it was that is a propaganda tool, like so many blog-like "magazines" that have sprung up on the internet. The comments were so nutty--they were talking about Buchanan and his anti-immigration position. Naturally they did not approve, but then launched into a series of comments on the irrelevancy of the viewpoints of "old white people" which made no sense--young white people enjoy being replaced by browns, blacks and yellows who side against them? I recognized the buttons they were pushing on any white person reading it. Nobody wants to be "old" -- legacy of the 60s and the goofy don't trust anybody over 30. It suggested that white push-back was relegated to "old" people who would soon be dead. Any young white people left were so hip that anything anybody non-white does is just great, including taking over everything the whites have now or ever built. Don't be old and irrelevant. This country just built itself apparently. And now it's the blacks-browns-yellows turn.
Total schmeer campaign.

4/11/12, 7:34 AM
Svigor said...

I read the comments. I can't believe how many people are truly ignorant of the studies. I mean, they believe Derb simply MADE UP the results of the research.

FTFY. It's the same at the Taki thread.

These people need a real god. Seriously, if you're going to be entirely faith-based, shouldn't you get a pleasant afterlife to believe in?

4/12/12, 11:17 AM

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