Multiculturalism IS Racism

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Good Saturday morning. I apologize for not writing this in cave symbols, since I know that language is inherited in the blood and therefore can’t be changed as can’t any other part of the culture. Because it’s all in our genes. And that’s why I’m squatting here in my cave, working at starting a fire while my husband and the boys sit in a corner chipping flint implements.

Oh, how I wish that human beings had been designed with the ability to grow and adapt, to learn new techniques, evolve new beliefs, adjust their behavior, create new words to fit new meanings, and thereby change their culture to fit new tech and new times.

Then I might be sitting in a shiny office, (more or less clean. Hey, I’ve been recovering from surgery) typing on a keyboard in a language full of meanings that our stone age ancestors couldn’t even imagine.

Oh, wait. Maybe we can learn and adapt. Or else, I’d be looking for berries while the guys tried to club something to death with their bare fists.

No, I’m not actually out of my ever-loving mind, but I think our culture, our “intellectuals” and our cognoscenti are. Not just out of their minds, but over the hills and far away, staking out a position that Hitler would be proud of.

What prompted this were clashes between two Australian groups, Reclaim Australia and No Room For Racism.

On the face of it it sounds like the nice narrative we are fed every time something like this happens. I haven’t been following the international scene, and frankly it wouldn’t even surprise me if Europe headed for nativism and blood-related nationality. It is what is at the basis of their nation states (even if it’s often a lie. For instance I’d hazard that a lot of people in Portugal – yes, d*mn it, I’ll do the DNA testing. Let the house sell and let me have some money first – are as mixed as Americans. My kids call Portugal the reservoir tip at the end of Europe, which is unkind but somewhat accurate since that portion of land was part of the Celtic commonwealth, before being invaded by Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Germanic tribes, Moors (though their contribution in the North is minimal as the North was usually administered by overseers with little or no actual colonization) French crusaders, Viking raiders. Then there were British and Irish merchants due to ties going back before the Carthaginians who would set up trading posts, send their younger sons over, sometimes engage in a bit of raiding, etc. There are unkind proverbs about blue eyed Portuguese, but there are also a lot of them. (Two of my grandparents. A third was green eyed.) And in the end sometimes I think all of us are the result of some girl who tripped (on purpose or not) while evading a foreigner. All this to say that when my dad talks of the “The Portuguese Race” (and boy, does he) he’s mostly talking of a mythical entity. But it’s one they all believe in as hard as they can.)

I’ll even accept that given that most of the programs of blood-nationality parties are to put it mildly socialism (but with the goodies going to a different group) it is accurate to call them fascists.

And my sons at least assure me that the Golden Dawn is honest to Bog fascism. I bow to their knowledge. They read a lot more international news than I do and by virtue of being millennials have friends all over the world. (Ah, the internet.)

However, Australia is not in Europe. And going on the self definition of the groups – and only that. (Note to the idiots who are going to dig out quotes by some figure in Reclaim Australia saying that if you have a tan you should be killed – I’m only going on the group’s self-definition as stated in the article I read.)

So, the protests by Reclaim Australia were according to the article I read for: Around the country Reclaim Australia protesters held rallies to oppose “sharia law, halal tax and Islamisation”, where they waved Australian flags and carried signs saying “Yes Australia. No Sharia”.

Now you can think whatever you want of those goals, but I look at them and think “They want to keep a more adaptable and successful (in raw terms of giving people a better life) culture from being replaced with a medieval nightmare that makes women into slaves, gay people into corpses and denies people the ability to practice other religions/cultures without paying dearly for it, either with money or blood.” (And please, don’t tell me burkas are freeing, and gay people REALLY want to be thrown from buildings, and that the tax to be a person of the book but non-Muslim is REALLY freedom of religion. And don’t try the nonsense that this only happens in rare and isolated places, either. It happens EVERY TIME that Islam gets the upper hand or the numbers.)

While I don’t care if people practice/believe in Islam or not, I think that freedom should be restricted to what we in the west would consider a purely religious arena. Or to put it another way, you have the right to wear the burka, you don’t have the right to make other people wear it; you have the right to tell your gay son he’s going to hell, or even kick him out of the house, you don’t have the right to throw him off a building; you have the right to divorce your wife because she insists on having a job, you can’t honor kill her. Or in other words, you have the right to follow the rules of your religion, but you WILL respect our civil laws. Or, again in other words “Very well, you build your pyre, we build our gallows. When you’re done burning your widow, we’ll hang the people who burned her.”

I don’t know if that’s what Reclaim Australia wants, or if they’re the more extreme form of “no mosques in Australia.”

I don’t care.

I don’t care not because I don’t see a difference between those positions (I do. I’d oppose the latter on principle) but because the group opposing them is not the “pro-islamicization group” or even the “no discrimination against religions group.”

No, the group opposing them is No Room for Racism.

This means that the problem they have isn’t even the problem that’s actually being fought over.

In other words, this is like if you had a problem because your car blew a tire, and someone pulled over and started arguing what type of seats you should have.

It is also entirely predictable.

The left can’t argue the actual problems and their actual causes, so it defaults to insane accusations and running around screaming what are (at least to them, but also to a vast portion of mal-educated young) trigger words: racism! Sexism! White supremacism!

We’ve seen this in the fight for science fiction and the fight for gaming, in the discussions about immigration, and in fact in just about anything that is a point of contention in the present day. I could write the longest, most carefully reasoned essay on why our schools are failing to teach people to read, and someone will quote truncated phrases and call me racist or sexist or (and this is funny) white supremacist.

This is how they’ve convinced themselves the people who want the Hugos to be the award of the majority of fandom again are about pushing women out. (Funny way to do it when Brad’s slate contained about half women.) Sigh.

They should consider not only are those words losing their sting but they DO encourage the people they purport to oppose. TRUE white supremacists in the US and abroad have been considered beneath the touch of normal people. However, when you call everyone who disagrees with you “white supremacists” how are people to know who the real ones are? They will just assume you’re going nuts again. And from that to falling prey to true demagogues is a step.

Anyway, to return to the point of this post – yes, I have one – the problem is that a lot of people on the left have evolved this bizarre theory of race/culture.

I saw it in my kids homework, when they were requested to write about “your culture” but got the essay sent back when they wrote about SF/F geekdom because they wanted “your ancestral culture.”

In my kids particular case the situation quickly became tragic or funny depending on how you look at it, because I descended on them like the wrath of Sarah, demanding they explain themselves.

The explanation went something like this “Language and costumes are tied to your race. Trying to get an immigrant to learn a new language/integrate in the culture he immigrated to is aggression, since you’re supposed to keep your culture, because it’s part of your race. To want you to change is racist.”

(Note to those in SF/F this is much, much worse than the position staked out by VD, the banished one, which if I understand him correctly is that SOME characteristics are inherited and make you more/less competent for industrial civilization. Note also that I don’t even agree with his position, much less the more extreme one. Note also that for his position he is condemned as racist, but the other position makes you enlightened and possibly beautiful and full of the meanings.)

This is the point at which I broke out my broom and flew in circles around their office, pointing out their position was something Hitler would have been proud to embrace. What they are claiming in fact is that there is some ur-mythical-quality to races (and races in this case are defined in the European sense, like my dad blathering on about the “Portuguese race”) which imbues them with their own language and culture. If wanting to change that is racist, and if some of these “races” are better at life than others (understood in the whole system of Marxist reward and punishment) then what will prevent them from in the future deciding to eugenically improve the breed by eliminating the less competent? Or just, as they’re doing now, handicapping them by never teaching them the lingua franca of the age and the technological culture needed to survive?

I didn’t convince anyone, of course, because this is a “religious” belief. I.e. if they thought rationally about it, they’d know that culture isn’t race, because we don’t all speak/dress/eat as they did in Ur of the Chaldees or on that distant day when we lounged about on tree tops eating insects, rodents and berries. But they can’t think about it because in their own blinkered minds, that would make them “racist.”

That is, the admission that all groups of humans (as groups. Obviously every individual is different) can adopt whatever religion/culture they like and be as successful at it as any other group (if they try hard enough) would to them be racist.

While claiming that you’re stuck with whatever culture your ancestors had and that even if you immigrate you have to keep repeating the mistakes of your culture, which caused your country of origin to have problems that caused you to immigrate, THAT in these idiots (apologies to real idiots whom I’m maligning)’s “minds” is racism.

(In other news, Slavery is Freedom, Work is Leisure, and Big Brother loves you.)

And that is what caught me about the confrontations in Australia. Not that they’re clashing over muslims, no. That half of these people think race equals culture.

And that is the epistemological error that can put paid to Western Civilization unless it’s combated every time we meet it.

And we must combat it, or the end result of this will be sitting in a cave, chipping away at flint. And I for one suck at making fires without matches.

Fortunately I also suck at tolerating racism and genetic supremacists of every race. So I’ll continue fighting, long before it comes to that.

In the end, we win, they lose. At least if we don’t allow them to change the meaning of words.

372 thoughts on “Multiculturalism IS Racism”

  2. When their only argument is to attempt changing definitions and arguing chair placement, they’ve lost and they know it. We should recognize it as well. It’s like a novice playing chess with a Master. They keep shedding pawns in an attempt to delay the inevitable.
    They can only win if we concede. Ain’t gonna happen.

  3. I saw an article comparing the styles of dressing in the Middle East vs. Rio. There was a very interesting commentary in that women in Rio—supposedly freer—were shamed for *not* dressing in a particular way, that is, dressing in a highly sexualized fashion (and having a body to support it.) One of the commenters mentioned that it’s not the outfit that determined the freedom of the women involved, but the ability to choose it. If you *have* to dress a particular way lest you face serious consequences (legal or social), it doesn’t matter what the outfit is.

    That’s just to say that the thing that’s oppressive about a burqua is the requirement that women wear them. If you had it as a particular choice, and some women chose it for religious reasons, then that’s one thing. The problem, of course, is when the whole society imposes that “choice” on them and insists that it’s freeing.

    1. Yes. Exactly. I’m perfectly fine with people practicing Islam by choice. Unfortunately it’s an Imperial System as well as a religion, and that part NEEDS to end.

      1. Imperial System as well as a religion
        Gee, you’d think it was originated by a military man on the run who went without food and water long enough to hallucinate.

        2. It wasn’t just hunger or thirst, the asshole was legitimately crazy/schizophrenic.

          1. Interestingly, Islamic tradition says that his family on his mother’s side were basically pagans who specialized in being possessed by gods, demons, and/or jinn and making oracular pronouncements.

            But Mohammed going to a cave and having visions of an angel (attached to a religion followed by one of his uncles but not by him), and bringing back oral recitations of the angel reading off oracular pronouncements? Totally different.

            1. *interest*

              See, this is the kind of stuff that gets me interested– and I can’t be sure if I can trust it or not, if it wasn’t from someone I know is good about research– because even *looking* at it makes folks flip out. Pretty much like Sarah said in her post, really– you drive people into the extreme group by insisting that any deviation puts them there anyways.

              1. I’ve found good stuff coming out of Europe, published under assumed names as you might imagine. _The Hidden Origins of Islam_ is a good place to start. it is an essay collection with sections about trade, language, archaeology and other sources. Ibn Warraq’s _The Origins of the Koran_ is another essay collection that looks at language and traditions. He has two other essay collections about different variants of the Koran. Cristoph Luxenberg has a monograph about the Koran and the Syriac language, but that may be a lot more technical than you are interested in.

                1. This webpage has a lot of hadith and history footnotes about jinn worship in Mohammed’s family, Ebionites, Sabians, etc. I’ve seen some other sources talking about similar family history, though they don’t seem to be coming up at the moment.

                  But there are still men and women who make good money off being possessed by a jinn or peri whom they control, very similarly to Japanese possession mediums. It doesn’t count as magic, apparently, in a lot of the Muslim world.

                  Also it’s apparently common for desperate women to go nuts and start destroying stuff when they get angry, and this is said to be jinn possession too.

                  1. “Also it’s apparently common for desperate women to go nuts and start destroying stuff when they get angry, and this is said to be jinn possession too.”

                    And most jinns sleep about 28 days out of the month and only actively possess their “receptacles” for about three days out of the month. Which leads to more women being accused of being possessed.

                    1. Actually, there’s a hadith saying from Mohammed that everybody has a “companion jinn,” but some of them are good guys (faithful Muslim jinn) and some of them are bad guys (infidel jinn). Not a guardian angel, just a fickle fairy whom you’re stuck with for life.

                      Yeah, I don’t like this guy’s worldbuilding much.

            2. Write it up as a novel — denying any charge that it is a roman a clef — and see how the sales go. Maybe set it on a planet settled in some forgotten past by human colonialists.

            3. Interesting parallel with the story of Terach, the father of Abraham/Avraham Avinu making a living manufacturing idols. My guess is that whoever wrote this bit wanted to establish a link between Ibrahim (as Muslims call Avraham) and their “Seal of the Prophets”.

          3. It is a question I ponder:
            Was the man demented enough to believe what he was spouting,
            or
            Was he the most successful confidence man in history?

        1. Islamism is Islam; the only question is how far along the “follows all the teachings” continuum they are. What makes it tricky is that a “Friday only Muslim” (think Sunday only Christian, cafeteria Catholic, etc.) may wake up some day and decide they need to Get Right with Mohammed. The end result is “lone wolves”, more accurately described as “Instant Jihadi Syndrome.”

          Not even going to say that this doesn’t happen with Christians; it does. The difference is that Christianity from my study of it has many more ways to tell the person they are Scripturally wrong, and here are the verses that prove it. Islam DOESN’T. The whole thing is one individual’s writings, complicated by the fact that the verses he wrote when he had actual power to order people killed “abrogate” any verses he may have written earlier that were more reasonable.

          Add in the twin doctrines of taqqiya and hudna, both of which add up to “You can and should lie to infidels as you need to and no promises to them are binding” and you have a religion that is tough to have living with you. Very much like Leftists.

        1. In the course of my running around the Internet, I’ve noticed that locales known for pushing the “sex is awesome and if you don’t do it you’re some kind of weirdo” have been growing more muted and have begun to acknowledge that not having sex is actually okay.

    3. Sarah, thanks for quoting one of my favorite historical figures. General Sir Charles Napier. The quote about prior and gallons is from when he was the colonial governor of India. That man new how to deal with PC bullshit.

  4. Personally, I think Islam is a “Divine Right” political system with a twisted religion to support a raw will to power. The radical Islamists are the ones who preach tolerance.
    Oh, and religion has absolutely nothing to do with race.

      1. There are religions that are purely endogamous — the Druze, for example: one cannot convert to the Druze religion at all. However, the three major Abrahamic faiths are all multiracial. Yes, even Judaism — I personally know converts of all races, even though ours hasn’t been an actively proselytizing faith for about 2,000 years. Jews are a *people*, not a race.

        1. And even in the Bad Old Days, the Jews weren’t supposed to be conquerors. The Old Testament describes a people taking a particular piece of land and holding it. The implication was that they would someday be the world’s priests–never its rulers.

  5. And that’s why I’m squatting here in my cave, working at starting a fire while my husband and the boys sit in a corner chipping flint implements.

    You mean they’ve been caught knapping?

          1. We do, but we don’t let it run. Interesting* things happen when it strikes 12.

            *Interesting in the Wash “Oh G-d, oh G-d, we’re all going to die” sense.

                  1. Means we’re going to get speared with a random piece of metal at an inopportune moment.

          2. Only the hopelessly OCD insist on all hours being of equal length. Certain hours (lunch, cocktail) should be significantly longer than others and some hours should be much shorter.

        2. On the other hand, if you use the traditional artillery circle, graduated in mils, you get 6400 to play with…

  6. First, I didn’t know the situation in Australia had devolved to a point that anyone actually feared introduction to Sharia. Australia is a civilized, modern nation-state; I suggest developing their own nuclear arsenal. I’m sure Israel will help with their technology.
    Indeed multiculturalism is racist in the sense that multiculturalist uniformly hate white people. I don’t know the reference to VD; however, sure some traits are inherited, but don’t generalize this to racial traits. I am descended from Scots, and I have the Y-chromosome to prove it; however, the largest ‘racial mix’ of my DNA is certainly Polish (1/4), and I have more Native American blood than Elizabeth Warren. If the chore of writing about “my culture” was required, it would probably be about moonshine and keeping ahead of the ‘revenuers’.
    Of course, the whole thrust of multiculturalism is to ‘divide and conquer’. If we all thought of ourselves as ‘Americans’, sharing a common heritage, language and customs, then it would be more difficult to create divisions to tear us apart.

    1. I used VD because otherwise we get all the trolls who hate him and assume if you mention him, you agree with him. Google Banished from SFWA and you’ll get it.
      Sure some traits are inherited or are early acquired cultural traits. Like almost all Latins (and by that I mean from colonies where Rome scored widely) I have to work D*mn hard to be organized at all. I come off as “ditsy” and that’s a win. If I didn’t struggle I’d be the goddess of chaos. BUT I can LEARN.

      1. I wonder if even that’s more cultural than genetic. I can easily see the common folk of the Empire developing an attitude of “let the Legate handle it” to anything requiring coordination and then the Germans realizing after they had decapitated (literally) the leadership that they had just killed everyone who knows how to get things done. The culture would have to develop organizational skills from first principles. Hard enough to do in itself, it becomes nearly impossible when anyone with organizational skills is pushed into the position of “Legate.”

        1. This is why I said “might have been acquired in early childhood” — I’ll note that for Portugal I’m “German levels of organized” which I was accused of being, all the time.

        2. I suspect culture usually has a greater impact. Now, a culture like the Arabs, where you routinely marry your father’s brother’s daughter might get into trouble. If you doubt it, look at the royal families of Europe, lots of incest there too.
          I think that genetics may ‘predispose’ you to one form or another, think the Myers-Briggs personality types. Your default behavior is the one you are more comfortable with, but ultimately, you can do whatever you set your mind to. Sarah just has Kaos in her bones, it is more comfortable than being organized. Doesn’t mean she can’t do either one she wants.

          1. …Myers-Briggs personality types…

            The last time I took that test I found myself gaming the answers based on the politics of the workplace “team” that was doing the offsite where we took it. I’ve taken and scored that thing so often that I know where all the hamster-wheels are in the results algorithm, so figuring out where I wanted to end up ended up being more entertaining than anything else.

            I think I am not the best test subject anymore for Myers-Briggs.

            1. Last time I took that test, a professor went into an epic meltdown where he accused us of cheating. On the personality test. Yes …

            2. I took a very long pencil and paper version, scored by a psychology type instructor. He said he had never seen a ‘P’ score as high as mine.
              Most of the internet versions I can game any score I want. To some extent only the test like my first one, when the testee is totally ignorant of what they are looking for give good results.

              1. But by the very act of reading the questions and the list of answers, you can already tell more or less what they’re looking for. Even a little kid can game personality tests. It’s difficult to resist, in fact.

                1. *nod*

                  And even if you’re not trying to game, it’s hard to figure out what exactly they mean in a lot of them– sometimes I’m halfway through when the way a question is asked makes it clear that I’ve been answering the wrong questions. (A simple example is the “could you” type– I always seem to guess wrong on if they mean “could you in normal, voluntary situations” or “do you ever think it is possible you could be driven to this”– or I mess up if they mean deliberately and directly instead of via any conceivable route.)

            3. i don’t know the Myers-Briggs test, but being x- submarine, we had to take a battery of psyic tests. and the conclusion that they made of us is half of us are very very crazy… and half of us are very very stable. gaming the test for fun, we all did it, on an instinctive level.

          3. When I first joined the military, they had me take two different personality tests. They both came back saying that I didn’t have a personality.

            Standardized tests are fun!

        3. Maybe both? I know that if you compare enough siblings, you’ll find ones that are more inclined to wing it, while the other is almost obsessively organized…but one of them usually matches the more notable tendencies of the rest of the family, extended-wise.

          Maybe a cultural tendency develops because of a higher occurrence of a complementing physical tendency?
          Example: the English habit of being more polite to those with whom you are not, ah, in harmony with, but incredibly rude and disrespectful to those with whom you are most intimate? (It really startled the heck out of me when I realized that Bahzel felt like family because of that rude-to-friends thing.)
          Source of the English thing: tendency to be very good at keeping track of who’s done you wrong, and fixing it. Contrast with, say, the Irish side– which also does the “be rude to friends” thing, but also has a blow-up-and-get-it-over-with trait due to having really bad tempers. Cultural encouragement of the blowing up means that you don’t get the deadly, secret feuds.
          (F if I know which way I tend– that’s a little too much self knowledge.)

          2. My mom’s an interesting case of nature vs. nurture. She was raised in a different household than her siblings (her father died in WWII and she was semi-adopted into another branch of the family so her mother could look for work without having to deal with a baby.) There’s a lot of differences—she’s Catholic while her sibs are basically atheists-by-way-of-Protestants, for instance—but what’s really interesting is that you get her together with my aunt and you’d never guess they didn’t even meet until my mom was a teenager. There’s a lot of attitude overlap and definitely sense of humor.

            It’s good for a compare and contrast situation. My take is that it’s not just one thing; it’s the whole realm of circumstances.

          3. Ah, I have that blow-up-and-get-it-over-with trait. In my case it is reputed to be the “Gillispie” in me. My great-grandmother was Irish-American, with a temper.

            1. Kinda funny, I didn’t even know that most people didn’t get over it after they’d had a nice yell until I figured out why one of my aunts is such a trouble-nexus in the family. She can’t just blow up and get it over with— when she blows up, she STAYS mad, because she’s committed now.

              I’d guess my dad’s side of the family might be the same way…except they don’t yell, so I don’t actually know. Any time they have “yelled,” it’s been well after long term effects were going to happen either way.

              1. Even without a nice yell, I have a pathological inability to hold a grudge. There are people who have been apparently stabbing me in the back for years, who I still don’t hold a grudge against.

                I don’t trust them, but that’s a different mechanism for me. They could walk up and ask how my day was, and I’d probably chat all nice and friendly with them and I wouldn’t be putting on. Now, if they asked for my car keys…well, that would shake out differently.

                1. So which ancestors do I blame the keep a grudge so long that when the target’s been dead and buried twenty years you remember to go dance on the grave trait on?

                  Really, I feel whoever passed along that trait, well, I need to know so I can go find their grave, okay? Grudge-holding is hard on relationships, so they deserve it.

                    1. Oh, probably. I have a line English ancestors (including, if the Genealogy Cousins are right, some in common with Queen Elizabeth I). Doesn’t explain why the Finn side of the family feels the same thing’s necessary, though . . . though they could be part English. They were big on intermarriage, that side.

              2. There is enough English (even though I don’t usually admit it) mixed in with my Irish, so that I got both traits. It depends on what you do, cross me, or do something to tick me off, and I blow up and forget it. Act like my friend and double-cross me or stab me in the back; and I know a good taxidermist who will stuff that grudge when it dies of old age.

          4. Of the four of us brothers and sisters, three of us did well to find our hindquarters with both hands and a roadmap, as far as organization is concerned. My older sister is so organized it is painful to watch. We’ve always thought it was because Mom had to jack a car up off Dad when she was eight months pregnant, but maybe your point is closer to the truth.

      2. If you read _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, Jared Diamond comes within a paragraph or two . . and stops cold . . . of saying that perhaps the people of New Guinea and other very old hunter/gatherer cultures do not have the mental wiring to cope well with technological cultures. And people who are used to dealing with machines and computers and advanced tech, and the culture that produces such things, might not have the mental wiring to cope well in the equatorial jungle environment. Doesn’t say that both parties couldn’t learn to function in the other’s cultural habitat, but that it would be very, very difficult.

          1. Exactly. And you’ll notice that what Diamond almost said (but probably didn’t dare) is not that far from what Vox Day says. But of course Diamond is a great anthropologist and writer while VD . . . we know how the rest of that song goes.

            1. Everything I’ve ever read about the New Guinea cannibal tribes who helped our airmen? The New Guinea people were pretty darned clever and ingenious.

              Now, that said, you might not grow a big lot of brain area dedicated toward the abstract if you lived in the jungle, or your abstract reasoning areas might be all stuff that Jared Diamond wouldn’t even recognize as a category that exists to think about. Or you might be malnourished, or suffering from kuru.

              But in general, most primitive tribes have a very complicated oral culture, and an extremely specialized knowledge and technology, based on what’s useful in their environment. If the culture shock and the outside diseases don’t kill them, the problem is more that the kids are too interested in outside tech, and the insider tech tends to die out for lack of interest in the old technical toys.

              1. There is the argument, and I believe there is some truth to it, that genetics has a role in that. If abstract reasoning doesn’t help you survive and be successful; and might possibly even be detrimental to successful survival in a hardscrabble, jungle, subsistence lifestyle. Then those without a lot of abstract reasoning would tend to survive longer, be more successful, and therefore have more children. Which would slowly skew the population towards non-abstract reasoners.

                Of course there are always those who have plenty of abstract reasoning skills that simply don’t use them, and so are successful and breed a whole litter of kids. For many of those traits, particularly mental traits, it is very hard to draw the line where inheritance ends and environment begins.

                On the other hand some physical traits that enhance certain abilities are self-evidently genetic. Which is what I believe (from what little I have read of it) VD’s position is based on and extrapolated from. For example, a much higher proportion of professional football players are of African descent than the proportion of US citizens are. This is inarguably (well you can argue against it, as some do, but all the facts support one side, while the other side uses rainbows and unicorn tears to power their argument) because their genetics are more predisposed to producing someone that can be successful at the sport than those of other ancestry. While there may be a professional football player of Asian descent I’m not aware of one (and note I haven’t watched or payed attention to any profession sports since grade school) and they are vanishingly rare. Some of this is no doubt due to cultural influences, but mostly it is due to the fact that Asian genetics are much less likely to produce someone physically capable of playing at a professional level in the first place. This doesn’t make them any more or less human than those of African descent, nor doesn’t it make them better or worse people. It does make them different however, and I’m going to go out on a limb here and say anybody who argues that it doesn’t is an idiot.

                Of course the multiculti liberals want to tell us that not only is diversity is the key to a ‘good’ society, and insist that everyone must stay true to their ancestral culture; but at the same insist that any differences between people are an artificial, “social construct.” It is schizophrenic reasoning like this that makes people release that arguing logic with the multiculti fanatics is about as useful as a salad fork is to a tiger.

              2. IIRC Diamond actually talks about the different type of knowledge; he recounts how he and a group of natives who were his guides got stuck somewhere in a jungle, and he was fretting about food and starving. They weren’t worried and foraged, and he worried about the mushrooms they brought back, and his guides pointed out that they knew what was edible or not, and it seemed a bit silly to them that his people didn’t know how to distinguish what was poisonous from good food.

                I could be misremembering how it went though.

              3. Book a while back(think it was 1493: The Americas After Columbus) that noted most primitive tribes start dying out shortly after coming into contact with advanced civilization.

                Not disease, but dying out because the young ones(especially) see All This STUFF!! the other civilization has, and lots of them decide to go that way. And the tribe starts dying out.

                I’ll throw in, the early British colonists who got along pretty well with the Indians in North America, there was a constant worry by the leaders that younger men- and some women- would go over to one of the tribes and join them(some did) because ‘They live better than we do.’ Better ways of living in the environment than ways brought from England, better diet and such

        2. Remember that when we are born our brains are essentially completely unwired, and that our experiences while growing up literally shape the connections in our brains. So even our mental wiring is more an effect of culture than genetics.

          1. There is actually quite a bit of hardwiring, that changes as children reach the age of reason, which if I remember was traditionally 14 in Jewish culture. It’s why professional educators, in their misguided attempts to stamp out racism are instead increasing it. At 59 years old, I can remember being taught in school, in Sunday School and church, and at home, that all people were the same, wanting the same things out of life. Sameness- good. infants and children are hardwired to fear different. Survival is at stake. Dogs in the village- they’re used to. Big cat comes around- different. Hide! Every male in the village has a beard and walks. Same. Cossacks come through clean shaven and riding horses- Hide! No one has snakes around. See snake- Run and Hide! Everyone eats green things. OOH! A bright red berry! DON”T TOUCH IT! Different, it’s bad. Ask yourself- how many kids do you know or have you known that would be perfectly happy eating hot dogs or PB&J 30 days in a row? Most of them.

            Now, in school, at a very early age- Hey kids. Black and Latino cultures are different! They eat different food! They celebrate different holidays! Isn’t that great? Celebrate the diversity kids! Ummm, doesn’t happen. As soon as you tell a child that someone or something is different- brain sorts it our and categorizes it as BAD. Telling them to celebrate diversity doesn’t change the basic programming. Not until they reach the age of reason. (It’s debatable whether some people ever get there, but that’s another topic…) The more you drum differences into children- the more you teach them to distrust and dislike the different. It’s hardwired. There’s nothing that can be done. Until they reach the age of reason.

            My kids all eat all kinds of exotic fruits and things that I never did, and still don’t. How? I’d bring them home and say, “Hey. Try this. It tastes just like (Whatever the store sign said it tasted like). And they would. Wasn’t until my second son was home on leave and 21 and I was introducing my younger ones to dragonfruit that he suddenly said, “Hey! I just realized something. You never eat these fruits. Why not?” My secret was out. I got them to like different foods not by saying they were different, but by emphasizing how they were similar.

            1. I hadn’t thought about it, but we do kind of the same thing, usually with a lot of facts. For example, at play group one of the kids has classic African hair; I explained that it was like the curls in their hair, but more, and explained how the shape of the hair makes it curl more or less, and how strong the hair is can make it easier to see the curls– so when daddy’s hair was as long as mommy’s, it was curly, while mommy’s you can barely see the curl. It helped that the kid had already pronounced her hair “really soft” so they had a good start.

              Incidentally, his mother was mortified that it even came up, because he was always walks up and feels peoples’ hair if he has half a chance, and they’d noticed because he was patting them on the head. A few weeks later his grandma was laughing because he’d stopped doing that, but had given his dad a really confusing talk about his hair being flat-egg-shaped.

              It made the much later skin-color-is-how-much-color-is-in-your-skin discussion easier, although freckles were especially helpful there.

              Kids are great at finding ways that things are the same!

          2. There’s actually a lot of debate on how “unwired” we are– starting with the problem that kids are learning things like sounds while in the womb. (The nurses when the Baron was born couldn’t get him to stop crying, and urged me to say something he’d heard a lot to help him calm– so I said “get down!” in my mom voice. He stopped crying. They, being professionals, didn’t drop him while they were laughing.)

            We also don’t even know how to measure what we don’t know about the effects of “environment” in the womb, for things like vitamins, stress, etc. I’m convinced that a large chunk of our “obesity epidemic” is from women dieting while pregnant, usually to keep in a “normal” weight gain category.

            1. I’m looking forward to weight I’ll be gaining when I have kids.

              Though my kids will probably be sick of classical music before their born… Oye

              2. My Step-niece was a pole vaulter in school and just had a rather large boy (8 lbs 2 oz)and was able to wear her normal size lowrider jeans. She sent a pic to my sister and she looked like her normal self except she looked to have a basketball under her sweater. This was as she was walking out the door to have him, a short bit later he arrived. She hardly gained a pound.

                1. Yes, but that has to do with body type and complications. I am a very active person, but pre-eclampsia sidelined me for six months, and boy did I gain weight on bed rest.

                    1. I’ve already been threatened with bed rest as the first complication and kids are still at the earliest a year away.

                      I have brats for friends. ARGH

                  2. That whole Trig Truffer idiocy seems to have resulted from Sarah Palin carrying the way a tall athletic woman often carries, high and displaying late. Who was the idiot who said she was wearing a pregnancy puff? They are available, for theater and movie and tv use, depicting various stages of pregnancy, but they depict an AVERAGE pregnant appearance. The idiot was saying that someone was custom crafting pregnancy puffs for an atypical pregnancy, about one custom hand-made puff per month.

                    1. I never went out of normal clothes with #2 son. When I went to buy a protection thingy for the bed in case my water broke, the lady treated me like I imagined I was pregnant. I was 2 weeks overdue. NOW I’m bigger than I was with the bear.

                    2. The ‘idiot’ was probably gay social justice warrior Andrew Sullivan, who for the first time in his life, obsessed over a woman’s vagina. The fact that Palin chose to have a down-syndrome child over an abortion drove most Progressives crazy. Especially the women that chose to have an abortion over a down-syndrome baby. I know one such lady, and she said it took her years to get over the grief of her decision.

                    3. To put it unkindly, Andrew Sullivan has been the poster boy for AIDS-related dementia since about 2004.

              1. I’m a pre-eclampsia premie too; and one of the things I note is that I get hungry often; taking in food in small, frequent meals suits me better than 3 large meals a day. I also have a high need for sweets; but test me for diabetes and the sugar tests will show I have low blood sugar. I tend not to gain weight easily; pregnancy is about the only time I ever do so. But once it’s gained it takes a long while to shed it, but it’ll eventually be shed.

                I actually wonder how badly the dietary fads hurt our children, both in utero and out of it. I’d recently read some dietary guidelines for children where the advocacy is not to give them fruit juices to avoid sugar in fruit. My first thought was that was insane, since eating the fruit still results in the consumption of those fruit sugars, and one’s brain needs glucose in order to function. Also, ‘wow, people today are really gunning for scurvy.’

                2. well, they are bringing back Polio, Smallpox, and Measles with the anti-vax silliness, so why not the dietary inadequacy diseases too?

                  1. I’ve noticed that the FDA is saying people really should get a little sunlight, since we’re not drinking the 2 gallons milk/day or bushels of leafy green fodder to get all the vitamin D we need. (Rickets – it’s not just for the 3rd world anymore.)

                    1. IIRC, a previous doctor was inclined to recommend vitamin D supplements, because she found that even relatively outdoorsy people were often kind of low.

                    2. Not around here. I will say that I only recommend sunscreen in between the equinoxes and in the middle of the day; while melanoma is no joke, having some natural sun on a daily basis is a good thing unless you’re Irish-pale.

                3. The difference is that the fruit itself has fiber which is lost when you press out the juice. Which means if you want to give your kids fruit liquid, make ’em a smoothie.

                  1. I can understand advocating for the smoothies, if one’s kiddlywinks don’t have fiber in their diet. (I don’t have that problem; they love oatmeal) But the rationale given was that fruit juice has sugar.

                    Which is where my Logic Switch went *clunk* because if the argument is ‘don’t give your kids fruit juice because SUGAR BAAAAAAAAAD’ … by the same rationale, fruit has sugar; namely fructose.

                    And it’s a stupid stretch to assume that all fruit juices have extra sugar added to them.

                    But no, it’s ‘all sugar is bad’; thus we have the crazy fad diets like ‘no sugar’ or ‘no salt’ (because clearly, you “don’t need salt” to live, right? That’s going to be ‘entertaining’ when one is dehydrated/ just finished a jog / been sweating)…

                    (Ok, baby done nursing; let’s hope he’ll let me sleeeeeep. He didn’t yesterday.)

        3. Diamond knows that drawing that conclusion would be the end of his career. At the same time, while he didn’t say that the mental wiring was different, he demonstrated it rather clearly.

          Personally, I think he’s right, and that this is something carefully not considered by any research initiatives. First, development of an adult human approximately parallels the evolution of humanity. First you get an undifferentiated single-celled organism. It goes through a fish-like phase, an amphibian-ish phase, a reptilish phase, before hitting the mammalian phase. The tail disappears and the more human features start to emerge. Brain development does the same thing. The most primitive brain regions grow first (and are closest to the spinal cord), and the more advanced parts layer on top of the older ones.

          The last bit to develop? Abstract reasoning. There’s evidence in history if you care to look that way that abstract reasoning is a fairly late addition to humanity. The Babylonians for all their practical expertise never made the jump from marked triangles to Pythagoras’s law. This happened in parts of the world where it wasn’t possible to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle any more, and where there were a lot of people living in cities – China, Egypt, Rome, Greece…

          Even now, there are plenty of modern Westerners who don’t make the jump from concrete reasoning to abstractions. Those of us who do make it typically get it last: that part of the brain doesn’t finish developing until the mid-20s.

          And coincidentally, abstract reasoning ability is what IQ tests actually measure.

          But putting all these bits of information into a coherent theory of human development and evolution is racist. </sarc>

          1. Since we are not allowed to even postulate that male and female brain development is any different, in the same race, of course anyone would be socially crucified to suggest it across racial/cultural lines.
            I remember reading recently that there appears to be some basis for the old ‘giraffe gets longer neck because mother had to stretch hers’ theory of evolution, popular before Darwin nailed the lid down. They claimed that your grandmother and mother can transmit markers based on their lives, which determines which genes choose to activate and express themselves. Kind of the you are really going to need these three items from your tool kit type of influence. If you don’t have the gene, you can’t express it.

            2. They went further, into Lysenkoism.
              And there is some basis for this–apparently there was a study done in some Nordic village where folks whose forebears were conceived and born during lean times lived longer. Or something like that.

              1. Google “epigenetics”. Babies that were born during the Dutch “hunger winter” (1944-5) likewise had their “metabolic thriftiness genes” activated, and there are indications that this activation was inherited for at least the next generation.

            3. Evolution, as propounded by Darwin, isn’t accurate. And furthermore could not be accurate. He used the pop genetics of his time; what is now taught is neo-Darwinism, worked out after they rediscovered Mendel.

              There was a stretch of about fifty years between his publication and the rediscovery where Darwin looked less plausible every year.

              Though I remember hearing that George Bernard Shaw rejected the “chop tail off mouse” experiment that supposedly refuted it on the grounds that an external force chopping off your tail was not an acquired trait. He had a point

          2. Aztecs and Incas had wheels on toys, but never developed carts and wagons. Nowhere in the America’s is there any evidence of wheels ever being used before arrival of the Europeans.

            1. What would you pull the thing with? There’s no beasts-of-burden native to the Americas that survived the Pleistocene Extinctions, aside from the llama and dog, and neither of those pull all that well. Apparently there was a whole idea set that arose with the domestication of goats, sheep, horses, and cattle that never crossed the Bearing Strait, Pacific, or central Atlantic (depending on your preferred origin theory).

              1. A wheeled cart is very useful– even if you don’t have a lot of flat areas, it enables one person to move more, quicker. Similar to how a drag pallet works.

                I don’t know if they predate animal-drawn carts, though, and isn’t a large chunk of the efficiency in animals pulling a cart from after they figured out the horse collar?

                If the early forms don’t have a high enough return on effort, you’d never get to the more efficient forms.

                1. Well, where you had llamas, you didn’t have much timber to make wheels with. Or roadable terrian. As best I recall, only the northeastern and Pacific northwestern peoples made planks of wood, which is one of the things you need to make a wheelbarrow. And no one in the Americas made large woven things, like some of the chariots of Egypt or Assyria. You had canoes, travois, back-packs with tumplines (forehead straps), and I think sleds in a few areas, but nothing with wheels.

                  Everything I’ve read holds that the wheeled vehicles and domestication arrived together about 3500-4000 BC/BCE, in the Chalcolithic or early Copper Age. Even the potters wheel was not invented in the Americas. I suspect there is/are anthropological papers speculating what the connection between domestication and wheeled vehicles/tools is, but a quick academic database search is not turning up much, if anything. Which strongly suggests that perhaps there is a mental jump required to bridge the gap between animals on wheels pulled by children and animals (and people) pulling things on wheels. The first hard evidence of anyone coming up with a wheelbarrow is in China in the 100s AD/CE. They don’t appear in western Europe until the 1100s or so.

                  1. Most transportation inventions in Europe and Asia now appear to have come from the steppe people. Apparently they had nothing better to do all day than invent wagons, stirrups, compound bows, and crossbows.

                    1. And horse collars, too, IIRC.

                      OTOH, Europe and Asia never invented those incredibly intricate agricultural biotechnologies that the lost Amazon civilizations apparently used, or that weird way to “meld” rocks with acid. Freaky stuff.

                    2. When you are nomadic, you would tend to think more about ways to make transportation* easier than if you squatted on one chunk of land your whole life. And probably never traveled more than a few days walk from their from birth until death.

                      *This is the first time I have heard of compound bows and crossbows being considered transportation devices. 🙂

                    3. “This is the first time I have heard of compound bows and crossbows being considered transportation devices.”

                      They ABSO-effing-LUTELY will transport you to the afterlife.

                    5. In “King David’s Spaceship” by Pournelle there is a mention of how horse collars reduced the “need” for slavery, or at the demand for it.

                  2. What’s more the llama can take stairs, as the horse can’t. On hilly territory then, it’s much easier to put in steps. But it does hinder the wheels.

                2. Only if it doesn’t mire down in the mud. In colonial New England, the big visiting time was the winter because you could use sleighs.

              2. A travois with an axle and wheels would be a cart- sort of- and much easier to pull. they were using travois, pulled by themselves. And they never put wheels on them.

            2. The Aztecs didn’t have any animals that could “pull a cart” and I don’t know if the Llama (used by the Incas) can be used that way.

              Note, it’s be said that the reason that the Americas suffered more from imported diseases from Europe than Europe suffered from imported diseases from the Americas is that the great plagues came first from herding animals.

              Europe had more contact with herding animals (horse & cattle) than the Americas did.

              1. Not just herding animals; pigs are a big factor in zoonotic diseases. Add in all the chickens and such(bird to pig to human).

                One theory/idea I read a while back is “Say the Indians had managed to domesticate more animals and keep them in numbers. They’d have been exposed to far more zoonotic diseases, which would’ve caused their immune systems to become more able to deal with new threats.

                And they might well have dealt with diseases somewhat different than those brought over by Europeans. Which means the ones that the Europeans were exposed to might’ve been FAR more virulent than they were to the tribes. Which means when some of those got back to a crowded Europe… Think of the mass killings in the Americas happening in Europe at the same time.”

            3. That’s the reason I think many of the odd out of place artifacts really don’t represent the advances in technology they seem to. The Antikythera mechanism was probably just a genius inventor’s one-off that served as a toy on a rich man’s desk. That it had differential gearing doesn’t mean the inventor figured out anything else to do with it. And the Bagdad Battery was never found with wires, without which a battery would be useless.

          3. . First, development of an adult human approximately parallels the evolution of humanity. First you get an undifferentiated single-celled organism.

            It’s called recapitulation theory, and– even though it’s in a lot of text books, including the advanced biology one in my high school– it’s not accurate. One of those things like “people thought the world was flat before Columbus proved them wrong” that just keeps going around. It’s got an element of truth– people thought that Columbus would die before he could hit India, the embryos resemble simpler forms of life at the same stage (reptile embryo vs human embryo) — but the details are wrong. (Columbus would have died before he hit India; luckily, he hit us.)
            Buncha details if you’re interested.

            /end metaphor murder

          4. If I remember correctly; Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra Hardcover by John Derbyshire discusses that the Babylonians had rules/task lists for solving quadratic equations and even using Pythagorean Triples for measuring and determining land area. They never generalized to the abstract reasoning required for one concept to rule them all.

          5. I wonder, honestly, how much of the hesitancy is solidly in the social condemnation of the public, and how much actually is studied but never makes it outside of research. I mean, look at the furore about the two medical ethicists who tested by means of thought exercise the arguments used by pro-abortion and pro-life proponents regarding viability, and took them both to their logical extremes. What they discovered was that the imaginary line of birth for defining personhood made no sense if you used the arguments posed by pro-abortionists since a newborn infant is just as helpless and unable to care for itself outside of the womb – thus cannot survive on it’s own, thus is not, by the definitions of the arguments used by pro-abortionists, viable and by applying the argument, theoretically there is no reason for a pro-abortionist argument to be against infanticide after birth. (By extension, the same argument of viability applies to euthanizing the elderly.)

            Unsurprisingly the media spun it as them advocating that ‘it’s okay to kill babies out of the womb’ or some such idiocy, when nothing of the sort was actually said. The experiment took the viability argument and applied it to all stages of human life, from conception, gestation, birth, childhood, through to adulthood, and old age, taking the ‘yes-no’ answers. It’s a thought experiment that analyzed and observed the viability arguments in purely theoretical application, not telling people what they should think or do. The medical and research establishment’s grumpiness I side with, because there is nothing wrong in conducting a thought experiment and stating the logical conclusions therof. Morality and ethics kicks in when there is an advocacy for action based on the conclusion (just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be.)

            The whole outrage I found actually rather stupid because nobody was remotely hurt in the process, and highlighted that the idea of viability can shift because technology in of itself affects that; since viability using the pro-life argument went the other direction; it is entirely possible, given the existence of theoretical technology that we do not at present have access to, have viable fetuses as soon as after fertilization (the mechanical womb.) These are abstract thoughts that the general layman would not generally think of, which is why it’s academic in discussion. At no point did they suggest that their findings have real world application.

            1. Sadly, yes. Unfortunately, there are those who believe that such thought experiments should be forbidden because logic leads to such ugly conclusions.

              1. It is anti-intellectual, which is the ultimate irony in that position held (thought experiments should be verboten). They might as well declare philosophy be unallowed.

                The funny thing is I actually grew up with the history that the reason behind why people developed into different races was due entirely to environment (people living up north didn’t need as much melanin as those who lived closer to the equator because of the exposure to the sun over time – I may be misremembering and the description is likely inaccurate and very likely wrong given current science) but at no point did being different equal to being ‘less or more’ human than the other group. Just that ‘environment lead us to developing differently in order to better survive, so if more melanin wasn’t needed, northerner folk eventually developed paler skin.

                I think the hysteria about such history and the study thereof being ‘racist’ became really popular when I was a teenager, largely because of misconceptions and arguments of emotions without reason tempering them. Or at least, that’s when I became aware of it.

                (going to try sleep for a few hours. Emphasis on ‘try.’ *eyes baby boy*)

                1. Heh. Just look back at the scheisssturm Charles Alan Murray evoked when he published The Bell Curve. It was necessary he be made an example of lest anybody else begin investigating forbidden areas. Why, the Southern Poverty Law Center features him in their profiles him in their Extremist Files as “using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.” You will notice that nothing they do constitutes a rebuttal or counter-argument, merely denunciation as bad think. Why, Murray even used research and accepted funding from officially designated “tainted sources.”
                  http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/Charles-Murray

                  Some ideas are so dangerous that their advocates must be publicly crucified as a deterrent to others.

                1. Gosh, why would you think that? (As a side note, from the little bit of information there, it appears the woman was/is not mentally ill – which is the only reason I’d consider what she did remotely defensible, and even then it would be a case of proof of sterilization being required for clemency.

        4. And here we find the hidden, fatal conflict at the heart of multiculturalism. It’s unfair to expect someone from another culture to even try and adapt to yours, but it’s racist of you not to be able and willing to adapt to a multiplicity of other cultures to accommodate them.

      3. That’s interesting because I love organizing things. It makes me happy. Of course, I’m mostly of British descent AFAIK.

    2. Vox takes a position that’s fairly extreme by any standards, but he’s still far more centrist than popular, mainstream, atheist Peter Singer. But because he’s a right-reactionary the left treats him as, to quote Correia, SatanHitler. It doesn’t help that many of his commenters are way more extreme, including his pet white supremacist.

      The disturbing thing is that my observations lead me to believe that Vox is actually not even going to be an extremist in 20 years… We’re looking at a period of rapidly escalating ethnic and hard-culture-ethnic-religious-hybrid (read: Islam) induced chaos. And when that happens, we’d all better hope that the majority of Americans still see themselves as the people of an idea.

      If white/primarily white individuals in this country were *actually* a bunch of racist psychos, there’d be blood.

      1. “The disturbing thing is that my observations lead me to believe that Vox is actually not even going to be an extremist in 20 years… ” Yep. I’m very afraid of this too.

        2. Apparently a lot of people here read VD, as do I. Not so true as far as some of his commenters go, but as far as what he writes- I have’t yet seen something he’s written that I don’t hear on a regular basis from people I interact with every day.

          And his views are quite mild compared to let’s say, anyone I know who’s worked in a correctional facility for more then a few years. They’re forced to keep their views to themselves around management and politicos, and can’t express them in letters to the editor and blogs, but if you know them well, they weill express themselves.

        3. I do indeed wonder on many occasions if extreme, inane SJWism will eventually lead to such a fierce backlash that both the SJWs and the likes of us will be in deep shiite.

          1. That’s precisely what I’m afraid of with the whole Memories Pizza affair and its’ related cases. Because it’s getting pretty widely known outside the LSM that Muslims aren’t being held to the same standards, apparently because being known for responding with violence to attacks on your religion….. means people don’t apply laws / standards / etc. to your religion.

    3. Donald Campbell
      As a true Scotsman and a permanent resident in Australia since I was 40 I was surprised when you chose to comment on neo-Nazi groups here.

      its strange you talk about Australia when your own country has just introduced Sharia law allowing shop keepers to refuse service on the grounds of race, religion or sexual orientation.

      I would be happy if you could stop claiming fealty to my homeland.

      Ironically since the Glen Coe massacre Campbell’s have been the most hated Clan in Scotland and in many highland areas hotels and shops refuse to serve anyone admitting to that name.

      A T Whyte

  7. The people who talk the most about the benefits of diversity only care about the meaningless superficialities that matter only to bigots. When it comes to truly important diversity, the kind the First Amendment was written to protect, they are militantly in favor of monoculture.

    1. Their “diversity” means people of different skin tones who run a really good ethnic restaurant (probably not Norwegian or German) and who support the same causes, place of worship (or non-worship), charities, and organic grocery stores that the speaker does.

      1. The best kind of diversity is those you can readily identify as “other.” Because heavens forfend that you actually spend the time and effort to get to know another person. That would mean you weren’t talking about you!

        1. No, that they are probably not “ethnic” enough for the die-hard diversity fans. They’re European, right? North of the Alps? Not really exotic or cool (unless it’s local-sourced Scandinavian-fusion techno-food.)

  8. In the U.S. (and, in general, in western civilizations) we are sometimes blinded by our principle of “freedom of religion.” This is, in general, a good idea. (Thank you, Founders!) But, it, like many platitudes, begs the question: “What is religion?”

    This is not a simple question. Is every thought, no matter how absurd, no matter how vile, a “religion” if its adherents say it is? Can I say a chair is my god and then say that said chair tells me to protect all stools? Sure. But, is it a “religion” for purposes of protection under the Constitution?

    And, therein lies the problem. I have no problem saying that Islam is a “religion” to its adherents just as much as Catholicism is to its adherents. But, again, that isn’t the question. The question is whether it should be granted the protection of the Constitution as a state recognized “religion.”

    The Supreme Court (U.S.) has long been troubled by this question. (Good overview here: http://americanaejournal.hu/vol5no1/blutman) The best they have for determining whether a belief system is a “religion” was articulated in U.S. v. Seegar (1965) “The test is whether a given belief that is sincere and meaningful occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God of one who clearly qualifies for the exemption”

    I believe this needs to be revisited in light of the clearly militant theocracy which is Islam. I would suggest that the very first and foundational rule of any belief system which is granted state protection under the Constitution is the following: It must accept the existence of other religions and allow for the continued existence of any adherent to those other religions.

    That’s a pretty basic requirement. If the supposed “religion” doesn’t accept that other religions can exist and accept that people who believe in those religions have the right to live, then that belief system isn’t a “religion” for purposes of Constitutional protection.

    The second requirement of any Constitutionally protected religion would be: Anyone who chooses may leave the belief system at any time for any reason without being physically harmed in any way.

    So: These are what I would AT A MINIMUM require for any belief system to qualify as a “religion” for purposes of Constitutional protection:

    1) It allows for the existence of other religions;
    2) It allows adherents of those other religions (or no religion) to continue to breathe;
    3) It allows for members of that belief system to quit it for any reason or no reason without being killed.

    Sure, there are other “rules” which I might impose for a belief system to be considered a “religion” for purposes of Constitutional protection, but THESE are fundamental.

    1. The problem isn’t defining a religion, the problem is that we are ignoring the 9th and 10th amendments. The government should only ban things when it has a very good reason, in which case religion is irrelevant (no matter what I claim my religion entails I don’t get to sacrifice virgins). If we’re willing to entertain an exemption from a ban for religious reasons, why are we banning it in the first place? Why is “my magic book says to do it” any better justification to break the law than “because I want to”?

      Freedom of Religion stems from the First Amendment, which initially looks like a loosely related grab-bag – speech, press, religious liberty, and disestablishment all shoved together – but actually boils down to “you can think what you want and say what you think, and nobody can force you to support what you don’t believe in.”

    2. Here, here! Fundamentalist Islam is a supremacist religion which cannot fit itself into a cosmopolitan framework of other modes of thought. This was also true of certain other religions at other times, largely because compulsion was added by the majoritarian inability to distinguish church from state. We call the true believers “IslamIST” to distinguish those who refuse to give up political control. The problem with Islam specifically is that the political control is embedded throughout their founding document and story. This will not stop modernized Muslims from ignoring that and living peacefully in a free society, it just makes it a little harder. “Our book is just a story with moral lessons” is a long way from being acceptable to most Muslims.

      1. The founding document of Judaism has political control deeply embedded in it, but modern Jews have not trouble living in a cosmopolitan framework. Of course, it took destruction of their temple and 2000 years as a scattered and despised minority. I’m hoping that Muslims won’t need as extreme a lesson, but I’m not convinced. I’m pretty sure that Mecca isn’t going to survive this war, somebody is going to put a nuke on it.

        1. In my last book I had a bunch of future history notes but left out anything not directly relevant to the story. One likely event is nuclear exchange between Tehran and Riyadh — the Sunni-Shiite war is more likely than Israel getting nuked.

    3. Honestly, I don’t mind religions that believe that there can only be one religion, and that all people not of that religion must die, and that anyone who leaves must be killed, any more than I am of religions that require daily sacrifices of virgins, and practices the wearing of the skins of the sacrificed. I don’t even mind protecting these religions, if said protection doesn’t run afoul of the right to free association and other fundamental rights.

      The thing is, though, we here in Utah also have a cultural tradition of imprisoning those who practice such things, and in extreme situations, will use lethal injection and (if that’s not an option) the firing squad to kill such people. We also have a tradition of fighting to preserve our rights in the cases where groups are trying to take them away.

      (At the very least, I *hope* we have this tradition, and can keep it. I am sometimes afraid that certain people in our culture are trying to end these traditions…and that thought deeply annoys me, and even scares me a little…)

  10. Now how am I supposed to get all worked up about a basketball game later today after reading this thoughtful polemic? I am going to have to take notes so I am well armed for my next foray against the local School Board. That’s work!

  11. Multiculturalism, as now understood, is a product of the Progressive Left’s desperate need to avoid actually examining the differences between cultures and the comparative success of various societies. That desperate need was, in turn, born of several roots.

    In the first place, Socialism does not work, and never did once it grows beyond a small group of volunteers motivated by an explicit belief in a higher power. Not ALL schismatic Christian communal sects flourished, but some of them did. Nothing larger has ever worked worth a goddamn. To disguise the fact that Socialism does not work it was necessary for the Progressives to make comparing the results of Socialism to the results of Capitalism (or any other option) Beyond The Pale. Start arguing with a Progressive about the economic failures of the Soviet Union, and you would get “Their culture is different, you can’t really compare…” and similar drivel.

    In the second place, Progressives are racists – as our lovely Hostess has pointed out. But they don’t want to be obviously racist; they tried that with Eugenics, before a certain Austrian put the stink on the whole idea. It wasn’t really flying even before Mr. Toothbrush Mustache came along, and he made it anathema. So they have to have a RESON why it Isn’t Done to actually hold Brown People to the same standards as White People. They couldn’t do that because they “know’ that the brown people CAN’T keep up, and they don’t really want them to.

    in fact, look at how outraged they get when some Brown person DOES compete and succeed, without kissing Progressive Butt. Why the man is a FREAK!

    But if Culture and Race are the Same Thing Really, and one isn’t allowed to talk about the merits and demerits of Culture, why everything is soooo much simpler.

    For the Progressives, that is.

    Now, I don’t KNOW this, but Multiculturalism smells like an idea that escaped from its valid realm. For a historian or anthropologist, Multiculturalism would be a mental exercise to try to keep from interpreting all evidence through the filter of 20th century prejudices. In that context, multiculturalism would be valid. And like so many ideas that escape the scientific or scholarly reals they belong to, Multiculturalism was adopted by people;e who don’t understand its original point, and don’t care.

    1. ” fact, look at how outraged they get when some Brown person DOES compete and succeed, without kissing Progressive Butt. Why the man is a FREAK!” — I’m actually Spun Gold (thank you Lowe’s paint chips) BUT yeah. I know this from the inside.

  13. When I think of “Multiculturalism”, I think of the Ottoman Empire.

    Within that Empire, there were hundreds of “tribal groups” that often hated the other “tribal groups”.

    While the “tribal groups” often disliked the Ruling Ottomans, they saw them as those who would back their “tribal group” if the other “tribal groups” tried to kill to kill their tribal group”.

    The Progressives are the “would-be” ruling Tribe who will protect the smaller tribes against each other.

    Of course, the big difference is that the Progressives (while “white”) tell the smaller tribes that they will protect the smaller tribes from the “evil” white tribe. [Sad Smile]

    Still you got to wonder, “what would happen if all of the non-Progressives Whites disappeared, leaving the Progressives as the only Whites around?”

    Would the smaller tribes turn on the white Progressives? [Very Big Evil Grin]

    1. …who will protect the smaller tribes against each other.

      Their method in a nutshell.

    2. Progressives are natural imperialists.

      Multiculturalism, and “tolerance” as they teach it are a natural outgrowth of their philosophy. If you regard human culture and organizations as separate, quasi-living organisms, with their own goals and desires, the current set of circumstances with regards to what these people are trying to do to this, our shared nation-idea, may be regarded as an infectious organism attacking our shared public “spaces”, trying to set conditions inimical to our way of life, yet perfectly conducive to that progressive organism attaining and maintaining power.

      Look around you, and ask yourself this: How much of what is going on in our shared public spaces can be visualized as a set of clashing organisms? Consider the propaganda and cant, taught in our schools today, and ask yourself how much they resemble what happens when a virus re-wires a cell to produce more virii, instead of performing its natural function? Substitute public behavior for protein production, and you start to see a glimmer of what I’m getting at.

      There’s biology at the individual level, and then there is also a meta-biology, if you will, where we interact as members of groups. No man is an island, and no set of an individual’s genes acts alone. Whether or not you like it, you are a part of a collective whole, in your family, in your village, in your community. Whatever part your genes play in who you are as a person, they will interact with other individual sets of genes, other individual organisms. How well those sets interact plays a huge role in your survival, and how successful you are as a member of that group.

      Ever been a part of an organization, where no matter what you do as an individual or try to change, things stay the same? Anyone who’s been in a military organization will recognize what I’m talking about–I’ve been in units where the “way things were” didn’t change a whit between widely separated periods of time, and even some changes in space. During the intervening periods, the entire set of individual participants in that organization would have changed, and yet not a damn essential trait of that organization would have. I’ve worked with some highly competent people in other places, and encountered them in those particular units, and they’d taken on all the dysfunctional traits of those organizations, despite their best intentions and desires.

      I swear to God, a couple of them were so uniquely dysfunctional that if you’d handed me a set of operations orders produced by them, ones that had been sanitized by removing all identifying markers, I’d have been able to identify what unit they belonged to simply by noting what parts of the operations order were poorly done, underemphasized, or just plain ignored…

      I’m told that civilian organizations are have similar traits and foibles. Haven’t really exposed myself to them, having developed a severe distaste for bureaucracy due to military service, but I’ve had conversations with friends where we’re comparing notes, and we’ll wind up recognizing things that our widely disparate experiences have in common.

      I think we could posit a collective gestalt sort of thing, one that has quite a few similarities with individual organisms and people. This “thing”, whatever it is, is a useful tool for visualizing the current cultural situation, in that we could place our educational institutions as being akin to bone marrow cells that have been co-opted by an invading organism, and re-wired to produce more of the invading organism’s cells than our own.

      When you look at this, and examine the way they are attempting to rewire our culture, you begin to get a glimpse of the task ahead of Sarah’s like-minded fellows in the meme dispersal and propagation industry. The inimical influence of the progressive ilk needs to be steadily fought, questioned and refuted at every turn. I fear we who might consider ourselves federated with Sarah’s cause have one hell of a lot of work ahead of us. There’s an entire entertainment/media/educational structure that has been taken over and used against the culture we all consider ourselves a part of, and we have a massive fight on our hands just to regain the ground we once occupied in the public commons.

    3. Yup, the Ottoman Empire is a pretty good historical example. They also had the “millet” system under which every such “tribal group” as you call them had a degree of internal autonomy — for example, on matters of personal status (membership/marriage/divorce…).
      I shudder at the thought of multi-culti ending in the same way as the Ottoman Empire — with massive bloodshed during its final collapse…

  14. The progressive / SJW left is essentially stuck in a worldview that has not been accurate for decades, and it’s at the root of multiculturalism and privilege theory.

    Centuries ago, your culture was defined by where you lived, probably down to the village, as you didn’t have a choice in religion / entertainment / food / etc. There was likely one religious building, which everyone attended. Music was what the locals knew how to play, and food was whatever could be made from what grew locally.

    These days, we can pick almost whatever religion we like and find an accessible place of worship and we have access to food and entertainment from the entire world.

    My relatives are generally not true Odds, though most have a few Oddish tendencies. When I go to a convention of Odds, I likely have more in common with some of the other people at the convention than I do my own relatives, regardless of what village in some far off part of the world their ancestors came from.

    Progressives are fixated on tribalism as drawn from a 19th or even 16th century perspective, and they fail to see that we’ve moved past that tribalism. It’s why they see racism (and race) everywhere.

    1. Progressves are stuck in a 19th Century worldview because the 19th Century was that last tome their Socialist Faith was not shown to be clearly psychoticly insane by even a passimg knowledge of history. So, they deny that anything after, say, 1917, is real.

      1. It’s not that they’re stuck in the 19th Century: It is, instead, that they are trying to recreate it in the modern era, with themselves cast in the role as slavemasters…

        This is why LBJ phrased what he said about the Democratic Party and American blacks the way he did; it’s indicative of a mindset geared towards attaining and maintaining power over the individual. There’s a continuous thread from 18th Century aristocratic culture through to the modern day; the Revolution only suppressed it. Were we to refight that war today, you can easily see what political party would side itself with the King and Crown, calling themselves Loyalists to the status quo.

  15. My favorite bit of lefty-loony thought is this:

    If I go to a foreign country, whether to work or for tourism, and I expect them to speak English, I am racist. I need to learn how to interact with them, respect them and not offend them.

    Which is fair.

    If, however, a person from that country comes to the United States of America, whether to work or for tourism and I expect them to speak English…

    I am a racist.

    I need to “accommodate” them. Give them due to their culture, not comment if I am offended (indeed, I should not BE offended at all) and probably supply any paperwork or notices in THEIR language.

    Always hated being told this bit of damned-if-you-do…

    1. Remember that in the eyes of the Progressive, only white men have any agency. Everyone else are merely automata who respond to the actions and statements of white men. Just like the actions of children and pets are the responsibility of their parents or owners, the actions of minorities rest upon us.

      Just one more reason Progs are vile.

        1. Nonsense. Hitler was forthright and explicit in his racism, and partly in consequence he rapidly created a vast alliance dedicated to expunging him and all his works (except, maybe, that cute little car).

          The Proggies? They are devious and dissembling in their racism. In consequence they have ALREADY killed more people of the races they despise than Hitler managed to murder. The Nazis top out at, what, 11 million? The DDT ban alone causes 1 to 2 million deaths a year, and has been going on for (depending on how you want to define it) 30 to 40 years. How many deaths have been caused by their fetish for “renewable energy” and the attendant rise in energy costs? How many deaths by starvation, malnutrition, and disease have been caused by their anti-GMO fetish? How many deaths could ave been avoided if they had not supported “Fashionably” revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers, the Shining Path, Hamas?

          When will we finally grow sick of the stench of death that surrounds them, and bury them and their poisonous faith?

          1. Progressives are tribalists, and membership in the tribe in question is signified by aligning with the Progressive cause. Murderous dictators and vile racists can throw out Progressive platitudes and be accepted.

            If you’re not an actual Progressive, hating the same things the Progressives hate is cause enough for them to ally with you.

          2. Well, he was forthright and explicit up to the putsch. After it, he really toned it down (one Jewish woman went to a Nazi rally and came back disgruntled), and only gradually and deceptively brought it back once in power.

            1. They’re all an expression of a certain class of control-freak aristocrat wannabes. Whether you’re talking about the aristos of 18th Century France and the UK, or the self-selected class of people who found Goebbel’s SS congenial, it’s the same sort of people with the same sort of idea: They know best, and it is for us to obey. They have a will to power, and a distinct inability to leave the rest of the world alone.

              There’s an alarming amount of congruency between the essential nature of the self-made Nazi and our modern set of progressives.

              And, considering what I know of the Nazi tendency towards nature-worship, I’m starting to make some value judgments about our own environmentalists.

              1. “And, considering what I know of the Nazi tendency towards nature-worship, I’m starting to make some value judgments about our own environmentalists.”

                Starting too? Starting too? You’re just STARTING too?!!

  16. It happens EVERY TIME that Islam gets the upper hand or the numbers

    I can’t remember who it’s commonly attributed to– IIRC, it’s a possibly false quote anyways– but here’s a summation:
    When we are weak, we demand tolerance, because that is in keeping with your values; when we are strong, we offer you no tolerance, because that is in keeping with our values.

  17. “All cultures are equally valid.”

    “So, since slavery was part of the culture of the Antebellum South, does that make slavery valid?”

    “All non-white cultures are equally valid, racist.”

    “So what about white cultures?”

    “Obviously inferior. Slavery! War! Patriarchy!”

    “So one set of cultures defined by skin color is inferior to other cultures?”

    “Yes.”

    “And I’m the racist?”

    “Yes, because Privilege.”

    1. We would do well to remember that slavery has also been, and even continues to be to this day, a non-white value, for certain cultures…

      But pointing that out would be racist, of course…

  18. A while ago at a history meeting I was tap-dancing through the minefield when an employee of my publisher made a comment about the stupid European Islamophobes protesting immigration. I took a mental deep breath and ventured to explain that if you read the German-language news and information, *tap, tap, slide, tap* the protesters were concerned about the implementation of certain aspects of outside culture, such as honor killings and domestic abuse, being explained away by national authorities, and that they (the protesters) believed that some practices from outside Europe are not compatible with individual rights and freedoms.*tappata tappata slide tap* I don’t know if I convinced her, but she got really thoughtful and allowed that she could understand people getting upset about the police ignoring/excusing domestic violence.

  20. So *that* is where my broom went…

    Just don’t like the cats chew on it, I don’t think I got all the cinnamon rinsed off yet. (Fiance startled me while in the kitchen.) :p

        1. Let’s chalk it up to the eclipse/Passover/Easter/surgery recovery/exhaustion.

          Is your fiance going to recover anytime soon? 🙂

  21. I would observe that the description of hopeless primitives in your lead includes mention of two of the most significant discoveries to elevate humanity from the role of beast to that of intelligent being. Those being control of fire and the ability to create and use edged tools. Without those we would certainly have remained nothing more than clever animals.
    True, early use of fire likely came from natural occurrence, but the smarter apes learned to preserve such windfalls, feed them, and eventually create them on their own. And too, some animals use naturally occurring tools, but none have ever elevated that use beyond a bit aid in harvesting raw foodstuffs.
    I recall an experiment several years ago. An anthropologist stepped naked onto the African veldt to see what it would take to survive. First few days were bleak, nothing but roots and bugs. Then he found some bit of rock he could chip into a sharp edge. That one implement allowed him to create all the other tools he needed to hunt and defend himself.
    I do totally agree with your premise, just think you didn’t go back quite far enough in your starting point.

  22. I was once asked if I was proud or ashamed of my German heritage. My what now? I replied that if you dropped me on a random street in Germany, I’d be as lost as the next tourist. I’m from Ohio, dude!

    I think (one branch of) my ancestors arrived in America before there was a Germany. If you took a genetic inventory, I’ve got Prussian, Polish, Italian, and Mohawk, among other things lurking in there. If human culture is supposed to be genetically determined, then what am I supposed to be doing? The possible juxtapositions are amusing. (Passionately, yet OCD meticulously perfecting my mechanical heart-extractor? Note to self…)

    More to the point: What I want to be doing is getting mankind off this rock. Where exactly are you supposed to find rocket genes? I must have gotten them from the drawer left of the radioactive spiders. The whole idea is ridiculous.

    Another encounter though, among people who share far more of my American assumptions: One of my detachment officers at a blood drive stopped by and said “Hey! I didn’t know they took Vulcan blood!”
    “Well, I didn’t know they still had Kryptonite needles!” There – those are “my people”.

    1. Most of our German ancestors got here because the princes were mean, Bismarck was mean, the ancestral farmland was insufficiently existent or productive, our ancestral religion was ornery, or our ancestors were personally ornery.

      1. My understanding is that Germans got their start here when the
        Landgrave Frederick II funded the depleted treasury of the nation by renting out 19,000 soldiers in complete military formations to Great Britain to fight in North America during the American Revolutionary War, 1776-1783; most were conscripted, with their pay going to the Landgrave.
        (per Wiki)

        Having little or no personal interest in the battles they were ordered to fight, a fair number of them took off for the American hinterlands where they found congenial neighbors and began to begat.

        Perhaps I have been misinformed.

        1. There were a fair number of German settlers in the 13 Colonies before the Revolution. Actually, there was serious argumentation at the birth of the Republic as to whether the official language of the US should be English, German, or both. Since there were a lot of younger sons who weren’t inheriting the family farm, or who would cause the family farm to be chopped up too small, a lot of Germans immigrated to the 13 Colonies. You also got some skilled tradesmen that way.

          The religious settlers early on were mostly Protestants who’d been living in Catholic areas or Catholics from Protestant areas. The Anabaptists and German Quakers first settled in Pennsylvania in 1683, which beat the Hessians by quite a bit. New York got a lot of Germans as well as Dutch, too.

          A lot of little German kingdoms and princedoms were running a draft or sending out armies as mercenaries in the 1700’s, although Hesse was the worst by far. (They drafted people who weren’t even from Hesse. They drafted traveling monks!) This did cause a lot of problems, so a lot of people tried to get their kids out ahead of the draft, or encouraged the kids to feel free to desert while overseas. So yeah, a lot of Hessians never went back.

          There’s a lot of German frontier history all over the US, and I freely admit that I don’t know it very well. But it started early, and the immigration never really slowed down that far. I remember as a kid that my mom’s beauty shop always had copies in German of that Spiegel magazine.

          1. if I remember my history class correct (been a long time ago), when congress voted on which was to be our official language, English won by one vote.

          2. The folks who founded my wife’s home town all came over from Twist on the same ship. Landed at New Orleans, and made their way to Missouri. There were enough of them to avoid problems with inbreeding, but people from her hometown have a certain look to them. Elsewhere it was mentioned that the cooperative people left Germany, and I think there must be a little truth to that, given the character of the town.

          3. German is the largest ethnicity in the US, although I doubt these figures:

            2000 Rank Ancestry group Number 2011 Rank Ancestry group Number
            1. German 42,841,569 1. German 49,206,934
            2. Irish 30,524,799 2. African American 41,284,752
            3. African American 24,903,412 3. Irish 35,523,082
            4. English 24,509,692 4. Mexican 31,789,483
            5. American1 20,188,305 5. English 26,923,091
            6. Mexican 18,382,291 6. American 19,911,467
            7. Italian 15,638,348 7. Italian 17,558,598

            Read more: Ancestry of U.S. Population by Rank http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762137.html#ixzz3WRTHWWnq

            I just don’t believe a nearly 2/3 % increase in the African-American population in a decade.

            Nor is it consistent with this 2009 US Census chart showing German ancestry in over 50 million:
            census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0052[DOT]pdf

            Of course, one can have, for example, German, Irish and African-American ancestors and be counted in all three categories; I’ve no idea how the Census Bureau assigns individuals. For one thing, the sub-Saharan African contingent seems extremely low. The figures in this 2000 Census chart seem consistent with the InfoPlease report, however, so YMMV?
            census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/pdf/9_Ancestry[DOT]pdf

            Interesting points in this Voice of America article: blogs[DOT]voanews[DOT]com/all-about-america/2014/12/19/people-of-german-ancestry-dominate-us-melting-pot/

            Of course, it is worth remembering that at the time of America’s founding there a) was no Germany as we think of it now, German unification not being ratified until 1871 and b) England was in may ways a German nation, from its Saxon blood to its Hanoverian King …

            The Wee, Wee German Lairdie

            Wha the de’il hae we gotten for a king,
            But a wee, wee German Lairdie:
            When we gaed ower to bring him hame,
            He was delvin’ in his kailyardie.
            He was sheughing kail, and laying leeks,
            Without the hose, an’ but the breeks,
            An’ up his beggar duds lie cleeks.
            This wee, wee German Lairdie.

            An’ he’s clappit doun in our gudeman’s chair,
            The wee, wee German lairdie;
            An’ he’s brocht fouth o’ his foreign trash,
            An’ dibbled them in his yairdie.
            He’s pu’d the rose o’ English loons,
            An’ broken the harp o’ Irish clowns,
            But our Scotch thistle will jag his thumbs,
            This wee, wee German lairdie.

            Come up amang our Hieland. Hills,
            Thou wee, wee German lairdie,
            An’ see the Stuart’s lang kail thrive,
            They hae dibbled in our kail-yairdie.
            An’ if a stock ye daur to pu’,
            Or haud the yokin’ o’ a plough,
            We’ll break your sceptre owre your mou,’
            Ye feckless German lairdie.

            Auld Scotland, thou’rt ower cauld a hole,
            For nursin’ siccan vermin;
            But the very dogs in England’s court,
            They bark an’ howl in German.
            Then keep thy dibble in thy ain hand,
            Thy spade but an’ thy yairdie;
            For wha the deil now claims your land,
            But a wee, wee German lairdie ?

            Meaning of unusual words:
            wha the deil=who the devil
            lairdie=a petty landowner
            gaed ower=went over
            fouth=plenty
            delvin in his kail yardie=digging in his cabbage patch
            laying leeks=planting vegetables
            breeks=trousers
            beggar duds he cleeks=pulls up his beggar rags
            clappit doun=clapped down
            brocht fouth=brought plenty
            loons=dishonest rascals
            lang kail=long cabbage
            daur to pu’=dare to pull
            haud=hold
            mou=mouth
            ower cauld a hole=too cold a place
            rampantscotland[DOT]com/songs/blsongs_lairdie.htm

            Tune to follow in separate post.

            1. As performed by Old Blind Dogs:

              Versions are also available by folks with names like Ewan MacColl and Alastair McDonald, suggesting the heirs of the Stewarts know how to hold a grudge.

    1. Shiny turtles, spinning in the sunshine, stacked down as far as the eye can see….

      1. How far is that? Because when I tried googling it, I got told the distance to where the curvature of the earth makes it impossible to see further. Not quite what I was looking for.

        2. It would depend on how tall the turtle is, and the height of your eyes above the ground. In the real world, smog is probably the limiting factor, not curvature.

          1. No, seriously, we can see stars millions of light-years away. But there’s no detail there. We can see the crescent of Venus on a clear night. So a little detail there. So what’s the limit?
            If I’m standing my character on my space station looking out the viewing port: how far can she see? There’s gotta be a formula, anybody got it?

            2. Diffraction limited resolution of your telescope. If you have a telescope with aperture diameter D, then the angular resolution is 1.22*wavelength/D where the wavelength is the wavelength of light you are looking at.

              You’re right: Distant stars are not resolved by our eyes. Our best telescopes can barely do the job for the closer ones. You can pick up the existence of an object (usually a very luminous one) without being able to resolve it, but you wouldn’t be able to see any details.

              1. I’m pretty sure that’s in radians, btw sin(theta) ~= theta ~= 1.22 lambda/D

  26. Reblogged this on Things I Discuss With My Cats and commented:
    Much my thoughts when it was oh so gently explained to me that it was okay for blacks to call each other n****r, but highly offensive and racsist for me to use the term, “Because it’s their culture and you can’t appropriate that.”

  27. The insanity (or maliciousness) of ‘multi-culturalism’ is that we now have the multi-scolds who are sniffing out “cultural appropriation” and beating their breasts, rending their clothes over the racist imperialism of hosting fund-raisers serving Mexican food or wearing a kimono while white. Can people of pallor wear dreads? Do rap? Play R&B?

    Note that all hysterics over cultural appropriation are one-sided. No one calls it ‘cultural appropriation’ when a “minority” decides to play Mozart or sing Opera or wear cowboy boots.

    “Race” is a myth – a social construct, as it were. We are all humans and those traits we call “race” are more phenotypes of large genetically-connected groups. And the mixing of dna through migration and/or invasion further erodes any claim to “pure races”.

    So that’s the kind of insulting thing about “write about your culture” essays. It assumes that a kids’ family has one “race” line it has adhered to OR it makes them have to pick one line out of many and promote it as “theirs”.

    My twin grandsons, 12 y/o, have 1 first gen Italian grandfather, 1 2nd gen Irish grandfather, 1 Mexican-American grandmother and 1 mutt grandma (me). They are tall, brown, dark brown hair & denim blue eyes. Exactly what piece of the family are they to write about and ignore the rest?

    I love genealogy, because I enjoy the stories of families and their migration & traditions & how those traditions have been handed down and/or changed over the years. My own story includes having family sold out of debtor’s prison in England, brought to America in 1697 and sold to work on a Virginian plantation.

    But that still doesn’t define “me”.

    1. I show it as clear, but I’m on Firefox with Intego as my security, and logged in to WordPress. Wouldn’t surprise me, though. Apparently the Sturm und Drang is massive.

    2. A site doesn’t have to be actually hacked for small-minded vicious little blackguards to report to security sites as such to keep people away.

      It has not been hacked, but that is a fairly standard tactic to try to chill free speech. I’m disappointed, but not particularly surprised it happened this fast.

      2. Their standard has long been “Free speech only for responsible speakers.”

        If there is one thing they absolutely hate with a white hot passion, it is haters.

        1. their are people in this world who do not love their fellow human beings, and I hate people like that.
          Nation Brother Week…………………Tom Lehrer
          everyone sing now

    3. Maybe not hacked. I haven’t seen the malware warning for MadGeniusClub, but I’ve seen sites that the special snowflakes don’t like get censored by erroneous warnings of malware many times before.

      1. “La tolérance, il y a des maisons pour ça!” (Tolerance? There are houses for that!) as the French ultramontan-Catholic writer Paul Claudel put it. These SJWs (Socialist Jesuit Wannabes) would be surprised what examples they are emulating. Perhaps they will publish an “Index of Forbidden Books” with a 5-point rating scale next…

  29. Or to be a bit clearer:

    if gender is fluid and socially determined, why not culture?

    2. Because taking that attitude toward culture doesn’t grant license to schtupp anything.

      Besides, gender is a social (i.e., cultural) construct. Culture, OTOH, is fixed in the DNA.

      1. Sorry, apparently the /sarcasm html tagging wasn’t enabled in these comments and didn’t show up.

  30. “This is how they’ve convinced themselves the people who want the Hugos to be the award of the majority of fandom again are about pushing women out. (Funny way to do it when Brad’s slate contained about half women.) ”

    Having only half the slate women IS pushing women out. Their slate carries considerably over half women.

  32. “[P]lease, don’t tell me … gay people REALLY want to be thrown from buildings”

    I dunno — used to be plenty threw themselves from buildings, so maybe this is one of those jobs Americans Australians just won’t do anymore.

  33. It is racist to assume all Muslims are of one race, one culture, one volk. I am confident that Reclaim Our Ausses welcomes many Arab Christians & Zoroastrians, just as I am sure that many Persian Muslims don’t particularly care to be lumped in with those !@#& Arabs.

  34. “Trying to get an immigrant to learn a new language/integrate in the culture he immigrated to is aggression, since you’re supposed to keep your culture, because it’s part of your race. To want you to change is racist.”

    Au contraire — insisting you are forever tied to an ancestral culture is racist. Denying you the freedom to identify with any group with which you are sympathetic or with which you identify (perhaps because of family legend or having high cheekbones superficial cosmetic resemblance is a form of oppressive microaggressive forced identification.

    I guess they would require groups such as Mexican-AmericansAustralians to conform to the cultural stereotypes selected for them by the Social Justice Aware, taking extended afternoon naps. Would African-AmericansAustralians have to shuffle when they walk and eat fried chicken, moon pies and watermelon?

  35. If my genetic heritage is slaughter and oppression, than stopping me from putting it into practice is discriminatory. If the rest of the world cannot be anything other than victims, than sparing them the sword is a violation of nature.

  36. There’s a lot of what is being said here that I agree with, but only to a degree. Where I differ is that I think there actually is something to what the gentleman known as “VD” in Sarah’s posts has been saying. He has articulated a lot of what I’ve observed over the years, and has taken up philosophical positions I find it difficult to argue with, no matter how hard parts of me want to.

    The thing is this: From observation, I find I have to ascribe a certain amount of “who we are”, as individual people, to something that has to be heritable. I see behavioral markers in my own family that can only have been passed on by something heritable, because the people I see with those markers never met in person, being separated by death. When you see like mannerisms, between members of different generations, who never met, what the hell else can it be?

    Likewise, you see members of other families with similar multi-generational behavioral markers. There has to be something there, something heritable, passed on “in the blood”, when a child raised completely away from the inimical influence of his or her parent’s malformed lives goes down the same damn path. Likewise, the kid whose success is completely consonant with their dam’s or sire’s bloodline has risen above the background of how they were raised. We don’t like to admit it, but there has to be a very large part of who we are that comes from our genes or cell lines.

    What percentage is nature vs. nurture, I have no idea, but the longer I live, and the more observations I accumulate, the larger percentage there is that I ascribe to nature.

    Having made that observation, the next inference I am forced to make, confirmed again by observation, is that there are entire gene lines whose behaviors and life patterns possess a wide swathe of similarity. How those traits may be expressed, and what effect that has on the trajectory of an individual’s life may differ, but they do have a marked similarity to other member of that gene line, no matter how hard other individuals may try to sway the direction followed by that individual.

    From this follows the further observation and inference that a collection of gene lines forms a group that influences the traits possessed by the larger organism that is the community that that set of gene lines participates in, and on and on, until we’re finally considering what we’d call culture and/or national traits. At a racial level, where these critical “personality/culture traits” are integrated in with physical appearances and other issues, we also start to see some congruencies develop. It’s not nice to stereotype based on how someone looks, but you can damn sure do it on how they behave. Whether it’s an inner-city gang-banger, or some Scots hill bandit of the 16th Century, there are strong behavioral similarities between the two, just as there are strong behavioral similarities between a Roman patrician of the Republic and the noblesse oblige of the British aristo of the 18th Century.

    If you accept that some component of behavior is, indeed, heritable…?

    What follows from that, except an ability to predict, to some degree or another, behavior based on ancestral conduct? A gene line that has never successfully participated in any sort of cooperative effort we might label “civilized” has a strong track record suggestive of an inability to adapt to our own highly cooperative society. Thus, selecting Somalis as immigrants is probably not going to work out, in the long run, while recruiting potential citizens from Africans who have a long track record of membership in successful civilized culture like the Ghanans will likely produce success. It’s not the skin color we should use as markers, it’s the behavioral history.

    When you look at the differences between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish ethnic groups within Israel, some marked differences become quite clear. The Ashkenazi who were isolated into European ghettoes have clearly had their heritable behavior traits winnowed out for success in a modern civilized society; not so much the Sephardic community, particularly those who came from Ethiopia.

    Earlier, someone mentioned the idea that because they had German ancestry, they might perhaps be considered potential genocidal militarists. What I would posit, instead, is that the flight of their ancestors towards the Americas might, instead, indicate that the more cooperative and “civilized” traits of those ancestors were driven out of the German gene pool on the Continent, and due to that, there were no dampers on the Continental German behavior. In other words, those who would have perhaps been dissenters and activists against Wilhelm II and his mindless militarism in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries were not there to act as such, because they’d already either been driven out or self-selected to abandon the militaristic Prussian culture that was attempting to take over the German culture.

    We can also observe that the two-fold trauma and extreme selection of WWI and WWII eliminated a lot of the personality types and traits that made for collective militarism and warlike behavior. As a German of that era once observed to me, the majority of the “true believers” extinguished themselves on the Eastern Front, leaving the modern Germany to be created from the “effeminate bloodlines of the etappenschweine“, or “rear area swine””.

    I’ve made a study of violence throughout my life, if only because of a need to suppress a tendency I have toward it, myself.

    An interesting set of facts to observe is that the rate of individual interpersonal violence prevalent in Great Britain of the 16th and 17th Centuries was quite high; on a level we tend to associate today with “primitive Latin cultures” like we find today in Central America.

    A good friend of mine was a Special Forces trainer in El Salvador and the Philippines during the 1980s, and he observed this first-hand. Comparing notes with him was educational, because the amount of violence he reported as being common in both countries was mind-boggling, at least in the areas he was in. He mostly worked with the rural campesinos in El Salvador, and down south in the Moro areas of the PI. Routinely, he and the men he worked with would have to deal with the aftermath of “your average Friday night out”, in that the men they were training would get involved in casual violence to a degree we haven’t seen in white America since the days of the Scots-Irish settlement of the Appalachians. Typically, two or three men in the towns they were working near would wind up hacked to death by the weapon of choice, a machete or a bolo. The level and rate of violence was shocking, to the SF guys, but if you were to compare it to historical levels here in the US during the 16th and 17th Centuries, it wasn’t that much higher. Just substitute the dirk for a bolo…

    Now, we look at our society today, and you can clearly see something has changed. What, though? Did the widespread use of capital punishment and transportation weed the traits that led to poor impulse control and violence from UK society, and our own culture here in the US? I would say that is a distinct possibility, as well as the chance that the amount of conflict leading up to that era as the English consolidated their hold on the UK led to the expression of a set of behavioral genes that produced a high rate of violence for several generations.

    On the other hand–If you read the history of the area of the UK that is known as the “border marches” between Scotland and England, you find that the region was not noted for violence, nor were the people living there in possession of a reputation for violence, thievery, and general bloody-mindedness. After the dislocations of the period preceding the ascension of the Stewarts to the English throne, they damn sure did, however. The Borders were notorious for violence, treachery, and general disrespect for authority, something that hadn’t been true before the English started trying to conquer Scotland. It took at least two centuries for the status quo to return, and that was probably helped a great deal by the mass transportation of the more recalcitrant Borderers to the US and points elsewhere.

    Gene studies, however, show that the people living in that region today were the people living there during the “troubles”, and were also the same people living there peacefully before certain long-legged English kings started stirring up trouble. How to explain that? Are there gene sites related to personality and behavior that are modified by the environment and experience, leading to a situation of endemic violence in the surrounding culture and nation?

    We’ve got a lot to learn in this area, I think. Not to mention, a clear need to start thinking about these things in rational terms. I may not be able to predict an individual’s behavior, but I can damn sure make some reliable inferences from the background behavioral/cultural matrix that individual comes from. This is an unfortunate set of facts that the average “right thinking” progressive will deny until their dying day, I’m afraid.

    1. Some “devil’s advocate” remarks on topics I’m familiar with (note that I do not reject at least some effect of “winnowing” out of hand):
      (a) Thomas Sowell points to the commonality between old-school “redneck culture” (itself a carry-over from frontier regions in Great Britain) and a certain type of “gangsta hood” culture. He himself uses the term “black rednecks” and argues the phenomenon arose in imitation of what blacks in the antebellum South saw from their white “betters”.
      (b1) Ethiopian Jews are not “Sephardic” at all but in all probability descend from a mass conversion about 1,500 years ago. (Their own lore claims they descend from the Queen of Sheba and her entourage, who are said to have converted after meeting King Solomon. The Chief Rabbinate of Israel declared them to be the Lost Tribe of Dan.) My guess is that any people that was dropped from the Middle Ages straight into the 20th Century would have a hard time coping.
      (b2) The definition of a Sephardic Jew is one whose ancestors hailed from the Iberian peninsula (sepharad=Spain in Hebrew). In fact, as our beloved hostess surely knows very well, many Portuguese alive today have nontrivial Sephardic ancestry (from “anusim”/Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism). After the Spanish Expulson of 1492 (and its echo in Portugal some years later) they spread to various countries in the Mediterranean basin: North Africa, Greece, Turkey.
      Because of similarities in synagogue ritual and customs between Sephardim and Edot HaMizrach (“communities of the East”) the intellectually lazy tendency arose to lump them all together into one “Sephardic” pigeonhole — even though Iraqi and Iranian Jews were never even near Spain (both communities go back to the Babylonian Exile), and Yemenite Jews actually have their own separate traditions. If one wants a dichotomy at all, “Yehudei artzot ha-Islam” (Jews from the lands of Islam) vs. “Yehudei artzot ha-Natzrut” (Jews from Christian Lands) would do a better job of covering all but a few smaller communities (Ethiopians, Indian Jews,…).
      (b3) And now to your central point: there were Sephardic Jews that after the expulsion ended up in to-be-Protestant places like Holland or England — as crypto-Jewish traders at first, later openly. One dear colleague of mine descends from such “Portuguese Jews of Holland”. Guess what? Sephardic as they may be in religious custom, they are as Westernized culturally as any Ashkenazi Jew.
      Moreover: when the French closed up shop in North Africa, about half the Jewish community came to Israel, the other half went to France. The children and grandchildren of the “French branch” are now immigrating to Israel (often joining their cousins there). Guess what? Again, details of religious customs and preferred foods aside, these new immigrants are culturally quite Westernized and do well economically here — despite being of the same stock as their “underclass’ cousins. And yes, when I meet a French Jewish academic nowadays, the last name is as likely to be something like Cohen-Tannoudji or Mendés as, say, Goldman.

      1. I’ve read Sowell, and agree with him, to a degree. He does need to make a note that the violence levels are very similar between parent cultures and locations in Africa, however. I don’t think it’s entirely a case of imitating white culture, although that may comfort him on dark nights when he watches the reports from Rwanda massacres. And, it doesn’t answer the question of what changed in the Scots-Irish redneck culture, either. Was it due to the trauma of the Enclosures, and it took however many generations in the New World before the personality/behavior genes regained equilibrium?

        Regarding the population groups of Jews, I did use some shorthand simplification, there. I’m aware of the confusion caused by the labels, but for the purpose I’m using them for, they work better than the convoluted description “Jews who were forced into urban ghettos” vs. “Jews who were not forced into that sort of life”.

        The fact remains, though, that there are clear signs of there having been some sort of winnowing process upon whatever “Z” factor that influences behavior and culture. The college and testing results in Israel between the two groups make it really (and, unpleasantly) apparent that the descendents of European Jews are far better at the academic game than the rest of them. Take a look at which set of Israelis has all the Nobel prizes…

        And, it’s not a value judgment to note any of this, in my opinion. It merely indicates that some people have better adapted to the game we call civilization. Say we get hit by an asteroid tomorrow, and the whole edifice comes down overnight. Who is going to be more likely to survive, in that situation, at least in the short term? Would it be the segment of the population that’s highly cooperative and oh-so-civilized, or the neo-barbarians we’re breeding in the inner cities? I don’t know, but I do know that there are environments that the civilized are not optimized to survive in. Recognition of this is not racism; it’s rationalism.

      2. ” In fact, as our beloved hostess surely knows very well, many Portuguese alive today have nontrivial Sephardic ancestry”
        From both sides of my family, thank you. Though I got all the lore and stories from dad’s mom. I THINK I’m technically ethnically Jewish (Which gives older son much in the way of conflicts of conscience and depending on whom he marries he might end up deciding on the faith of his ancestors.)
        All of this of course is by family lore/things I was taught that turned out NOT to be Catholicism/words mom uses that turn out to be Ladino and not her personal dictionary as dad is fond of accusing; family occupations and history (for instance, a minor tell is that all of our women knew how to read, since ever.)
        Anyway — yeah. I know what that is. And Mendes is in the ancestry.
        For the record at one time “portuguese” in france meant “Jewish” and also for the record as far as I can tell grandma’s family went back and forth converting and deconverting as they went until they returned to Portugal and just became odd Catholics.
        Pending testing of course I can make no guarantees on my ancestresses fidelity.
        OTOH the tendency to pneumonia that is the far less serious cousin of Tai Sachs (sp?) and originating in the same obsessive cousin marriages, is with us. Mom has the defective gene to the point that she now has emphysema from continuous pneumonia, I get pneumonia at the drop of a hat and more interesting, considering that it’s a highly recessive gene, my two built-like-a-brick-shithouse sons catch pneumonia like delicate flowers. Then again Dan’s oldest recorded ancestor in London dealt in silks and luxury goods. My father’s family was, at one time, in spices. I think… well… let’s say our family has a lot of shared genetic characteristics. We keep joking we’ll take the test and someone will say “Did you know you have a cousin living nearby? In fact, in the same address?” Which goes to show. Not sure what it goes to show, but it’s soemthing.

        1. On the question of nature over nurture, the NY Post today serves up this item:

          One summer afternoon six years ago, Jennifer Teege was killing time in her local library in Hamburg, Germany, when she came across a striking title: “I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I?”

          She pulled the book from the shelf. On the cover was a photo of a weary-looking woman, and there, too, was the subtitle: “The Life Story of Monika Goeth, Daughter of the Concentration Camp Commandant from ‘Schindler’s List.’ ”

          Teege couldn’t believe it. Monika was her mother.

          At 38, Teege, half-black, was just discovering an improbable truth: Her grandfather was a Nazi.

          “The very moment when I found the book, it was as if, from within, that I realized something exceptional was happening,” Teege tells The Post. “I was very, very silent. It was like giving birth: You go into yourself, and the outer world disappears.”

          What happened after, Teege can’t quite remember. She knows she checked the book out, knows she called her husband to get her, knows she asked him to pick up their two children, but the details are lost to her. She hadn’t even fully absorbed the meaning of the book — that her grandfather was Amon Goeth, “the butcher of Plaszow,” his atrocities immortalized by Steven Spielberg.

          “My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past” is Teege’s attempt to understand her ancestry and herself. First published in Europe in 2013, the book will be released here next week.
          http://nypost.com/2015/04/05/my-grandfather-was-the-nazi-from-schindlers-list/

    2. “when you see like mannerisms, between different generations, who never met”
      1gen(man) has son, son learns his mannerisms from father(say waving his left hand while talking). son(2gen) has son, son learns his mannerisms from his father. son(3gen) has son, learns his left hand waving from his father… and so on, and on, and on.
      later generations may not have met the firsthand waver, but still has his mannerisms. learned behavior, not genes. junior male looks up to senior male, imitates him, becomes senior male, junior male imitates him.
      this does not happen 100% of the time, but it does happen, quite often.
      this does not take in account peer pressure, mentors, other senior males, related or not. that is a different discussion.
      this is not a comment on culture, different discussion.

      1. The stuff I’m talking about are things that have skipped entire generations in the family. My middle brother, for example: He has the same exact sense of humor and even moves like my maternal grandfather did. Looks nothing like the man, but when you know what to look for, in terms of behavior, they’re damn near twins. Of the four of us, he’s the only one. Distant relatives who’ve met him have made the same observation, saying that if they’d never been told he was his grandson, they would have still known.

        I know a Korean – American woman who is nothing at all like her adoptive family; none of them could math their way out of a paper bag. She’s a multi-degree math powerhouse who has made her life based on that fact. She managed to trace her birth family. Turns out her grandfather is a professor of mathematics at a prestigious Seoul university, and her mother was a daughter who’d gotten pregnant by another student in college, a man from a low social position. She had been put up for adoption here in the US in order to hide the shame of it all…

        From these and a bunch of other cases where the behavior can not be explained by the handwave of mimicry, I have to conclude that there is something going on here that has to be heritable, however that might work. All that so-called “junk DNA” may play a role, or there might be something going on at the cellular level along with it. I don’t know what it is, but I see the clear evidence for it all around me, and it can’t be entirely due to mimicry and imitation, not when there isn’t any way for that to have taken place.

        1. my great uncle was adopted when an infant (Great Gran died of TB, Great Grandpa though he was turning the months old baby over temporarily until some family member was available to help with an infant). 50 some years later he found us, his family, and he is exactly like his brothers (artistic, musical, politically and mannerisms). He was raised an only child with little or no relatives and mostly on the other side of the continent, yet Grandma said he was so much like her brothers even if he had plastic surgery she’d know he was family.

  37. Pingback: News of the Week (April 5th, 2015) | The Political Hat

  38. It came to me, as I was waking up this morning, that one of the peculiarities of the Multiculturalists is that they don’t appear to actually BELIEVE in different cultures. I keep running into instances of them dismissing a cultural difference with an air of “They can’t possibly believe THAT, that’s just silly.” They do it with abortion; the Pro-Life people can’t possibly believe that a fetus is human, that’s just silly. They must be plotting to control women’s bodies.

    They do it to non-white cultures too. It’s like they simply can’t wrap their minds around the idea that the Islamic culture executes gays. They can’t grasp that the Chinese culture accepts forced abortion. They don’t get that the Japanese balance of power between the sexes is so different that 99% of their treasured Feminism simply doesn’t apply.

    They believe that all cultures are equally valid because they are, at core, provincials who cannot conceive of a culture significantly different from their own. Therefore all cultures are equal because under a thin veneer of cute ethnic costumes, somewhat exotic foodstuffs (but nothing shocking), and quaint folk dances they are, in the solid biscuit heads of the multiculturalists, the same.

    1. “They believe that all cultures are equally valid because they are, at core, provincials who cannot conceive of a culture significantly different from their own. Therefore all cultures are equal because under a thin veneer of cute ethnic costumes, somewhat exotic foodstuffs (but nothing shocking), and quaint folk dances they are, in the solid biscuit heads of the multiculturalists, the same.”

      This is because they (or people they’ve known) have stayed in 5-Star hotels around the globe — London, Paris, Berlin, Geneva, Oslo, Moscow, Istanbul, Cairo, Delhi, Beijing, Tokyo, Mexico City, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Buenos Aires — and found them to be remarkably similar, as you note. It’s a small world, after all.

      You did leave out the most significant aspect of their invalid premises: they are nowhere near so smart as they think they are.

    2. IOW: CAESAR (recovering his self-possession): Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

      1. One of the best Plays Shaw wrote, and a pretty decent film too. Better even than MAJOR BARBARA, which I love for the impish rascality of Shaw writing a play involving the Salvation Army, in which the most moral character is an arms dealer.

  39. I’ve read a lot of the Qur’an. Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult of death and evil. It says over and over and over to kill, maim, lie to and abuse all “disbelievers”. That’s not a religion. It’s not “extremists” that kill gays, beat their wives and perform female genital mutilation (FGM, for those not in the know — Islam cuts the clitoris off young girls because, “Only whores need a clitoris”.) It’s mainstream muslims.

    They do these things secretly, behind the scenes, while presenting a friendly face to the world saying, “We’re the religion of peace, truuust us…” Research “Taqiyya”, read some of the Qur’an yourselves. Don’t be misled.

    NO MOSQUES ANYWHERE. It’s time to end islam. It’s not a religion.

    1. Oh, but it IS a religion. Religions that DON’T call for the wholesale slaughter of unbelievers are, historically, somewhat rare. This is masked by the runaway cultural success of Christianity and Buddhism. Our sanitized myths from the various Pagan religions tend to pass over that most Pagan Gods had the morals of mink and the ethics of a rabid shark on crack.

      One of my pet peeves with the Liberal Intellectual Radical Progressives (LIRPs) is the way they discount the extraordinary beneficial influence of Christianity, and especially Protestantism. First cultures to decide slavery was morally repugnant and spawn anti-slavery movements made up substantially of potential slaveowners? Protestant. First cultures to make any sustained effort to respect the property of poor people? Protestant. First cultures to hold that the King is under the law, not over it? Hebrew, then – after a long gap – Protestant.

      The LIRPs dislike Protestantism because, deep down, they think that the rules amd rights they are used to (and want to deny to everyone else) are Natural Law, not a Cultural construct growing out of Protestantism. So,they only see the way a belief in a higher Power opposes their Grand Designs, and ot the way it protets them from the barbarians.

      1. “First cultures to hold that the King is under the law, not over it? Hebrew, then – after a long gap – Protestant.”

        (Waggles hand) Magna Carta was centuries before the Reformation. But your broader point stands.
        Or, to put it another way: if you explained the actual position of women in various societies to feminists, they would want to live in the following religiously influenced cultures, in order: Protestant Christianity, Catholic Christianity, Judaism, Orthodox Christianity, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism.

        1. Well, it does…just under very specific circumstances and for very specific reasons in a very specific place.
          Unlike Islam, which seems to be more general.

  40. According to multiculturalists, the dominant culture in a society can learn a great deal from minority cultures. If this is true, than surely the converse is true, that minorities can learn from the majority. Unless, of course, the multiculturalists are assuming that minorities are too stupid to learn from others.

  41. On the subject of Multiculturalists “not knowing anything about other cultures”, S. M. Stirling had a fictional one in his _Island In The Sea Of Time_.

    She wanted to “save” the Olmecs from her fellow “up-timers”.

    Unfortunately, the Olmecs she wanted to save weren’t the Olmecs that actually existed.

    She became the “guest of honor” of an Olmec ceremony and really didn’t enjoy it.

    Before that happened she was so confused about what the Olmecs were doing while her non-Multiculturalist companion was afraid that she knew what the Olmecs were up to.

    Fortunately, the non-Multiculturalist (who had been kidnapped by the Multiculturalists) was rescued. [Smile]

    1. Yeah, and her claim to having been “silenced” because no one agreed with her….

  42. I’ll have to dig up the article (as I was the one who linked it to Sarah and a few others) but if my sleepy, hurting head recalls, one of the organizers for the Reclaim Australia side was herself a Muslim (insert the shrieking of the feminazi vileprogs here) who outright stated that not all of the Muslims in Australia practice/believe in the more extreme tenets of their religion. Unsaid: ‘that is why we like it here- because we won’t be murdered as apostate for refusing to carry out everything.’

    It’s been simmering for a while and the whole thing doesn’t surprise me. The argument in question has been popping up ever since the Greens and the (more) Left over here were forcing the issue with regards to illegal immigration, refugees and the ability of the above to assimilate enough to be law abiding. What surprised me was how quickly the argument boiled to the surface.

    I flat out think the anti-racists are useful idiots in this case because religion is not a race (and some observed that most of the people on the anti-racist side look to be the sort who would be very pro-Sharia, thus who benefit the most with the whips and scolds of virulent multiculturalism of the non-melting pot variety…)

  43. So my cultural identity is forever fixed by my German Scot blood but my gender is free to choose? Race and culture immutable. Gender plastic and malleable. So I get to decide whether I want to wear kilts or skirts!

  44. Fascinating. It still doesn’t explain why there are so many neo-nazis hanging around Reclaim Australia, or why they seem to hate blackfellas so much.

    I mean, in such a small crowd, the beswastikaed types really stick out. http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/

    1. Oh, hi. I knew you’d come, oh, trolly one. So, did you read the actual post, or are you here to scat and run. Note what I said in the post “I don’t know anything about it and am going on their SELF REPORTED goal.”
      And btw, even if all that were true, ever heard of fringe groups associating with other groups? What about biased media? Or do you think the Tea Party is white supremacist?
      In any case, once more, you’re not arguing against my blog post. You’re arguing against racists in your head.

      1. Thanks, but I’m not Slackbastard, and I read the article. I just recently discovered him after following a link from a photo in the Daily Stormer encouraging neo-nazis to come to these events.

        The Tea Party is a sort of nebulous movement, lacking leaders or national candidates. It’s got a few racists hanging around, but it hasn’t picked up any of their arguments as it’s policy. Actually, I’ve voted Tea party a number of times locally.

        So, your argument is that you know nothing about it, only their self-reported goals? And, on that basis, you’re denying the possibility that they might be a neo-nazi group, even a little? Meanwhile, it must be the biased media. You mention the ‘halal tax’. It’s fascinating to see a common neo-nazi attack on Jews (see ‘kosher tax’) being recycled for use against other immigrants.

        So, um…. why are they using a recycled antisemitic argument? Or don’t you know about that?

          2. I’m glad you had friends to read my post to you, but it’s wrong to rely on ants. You should learn to read yourself. What will you do if there’s a tornado and your ants blow away?

            I suppose you could sing “The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind”.

            1. If that’s the best you’ve got there Sparky, then you really picked the wrong place to try and stir up crap.

              You’re going to be up way past your bed time.

                  1. Can’t have been dropped on their heads — their heads are all securely ensconced in well padded protective locales to ensure any incoming information is sufficiently digested and filtered.

                2. They heard there were Sad Puppies, and wanted to cheer us by providing chew toys!

                  Fortunately, Fluffy hasn’t heard of that yet. They seldom are dragon-sized chew toys.

              2. The best I’ve got? It’s already more than is required. Like swatting ants with a flamethrower.

                1. Son, I dumped more intelligence toilet with my morning constitutional.

                  After all, you’re the moron who equates Islam as a race. I’m sure the black and white Muslims in my community will be thrilled to know they’re actually all part of the same race.

                  1. Please feel free to point out where i equated Islam to a race. You can cut and paste, right?

                    1. Oh, I love this argument. The “I didn’t explicitly say it, so it totally doesn’t count”.

                      Don’t worry. When you make it to the third grade, you’ll learn new ones.

                    2. So your argument is that you can make up things I didn’t say, and then attack me for saying them? That’s…. entertaining. Please point out where I implied it, then.

                  2. The fact that racists dislike Muslims, doesn’t make Islam a race. Comprehension, man, comprehension! Can’t neo-nazis be racist AND anti-Islam? Antisemitism just goes without saying.

                    1. Disliking Muslims doesn’t make on racist. It makes you an intolerant douche, sure, but not racist.

                      When people like you equate the two, it’s a big neon sign showing that your only two brain cells are arguing again.

                    3. Here, for your cut and pasting pleasure:

                      “It still doesn’t explain why there are so many neo-nazis hanging around Reclaim Australia, or why they seem to hate blackfellas so much.”

                    4. OK, I wasn’t going to just make him look himself, but since turdnugget there probably would play “full potato” and pretend he didn’t see it, you have performed a public service.

        2. The “kosher tax” is nonexistant. The “halal tax” is a reference to the jizyah:

          Under Islamic law, jizya or jizyah (Arabic: جزية‎ ǧizyah IPA: [dʒizja]; Ottoman Turkish: cizye) is a per capita tax levied on a section of an Islamic state’s non-Muslim subjects, who meet certain criteria. The tax is and was to be levied on able-bodied adult males of military age (but with specific exemptions). From the point of view of the Muslim rulers, jizya was a material proof of the non-Muslims’ acceptance of subjection to the state and its laws. In return, non-Muslim subjects are permitted to practice their faith, to enjoy a measure of communal autonomy, to be entitled to the Muslim state’s protection from outside aggression, and to be exempted from military service and from the zakat tax levied upon Muslim citizens.
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizya

          So, in essence, you’ve inverted the circumstances, used a false accusation to attempt invalidation of a true one.

          Or don’t you know about that?

              1. Because you’re discussing something that isn’t in the post. Because you have the reading comprehension of an otter. Or your trolling for “quotable quotes.”

                    1. …aaand I just noticed the troll had “otter” in his psuedonym. I need to post when I’m not distracted by work. O_o;;

            1. And yet, you continue to miss the point which is that Islam isn’t a race, no more than Catholicism or Protestantism is a race.
              And you continue failing in your attempts to highjack the thread and “reveal” how racist we all are — possibly because you don’t know the racial composition of this blog’s readers.
              Geesh,guys, I’m sorry. The quality of concern trolls is epically bad this season.

            2. 1.) There is no indication of linkage between this site and Reclaim Australia, thus you’ve failed to support your assertion against RA.

              2.) See: Niven’s Law re: fuggheads

              3.) The “halal tax” actually does have a basis in fact, understandably creating confusion about its derivations.

              4.) Even stipulating Reclaim Australia is racist (surely that is a problem for Australians, not Americans?) that still fails to address the point it was illustrating, which is (as Sarah has noted) Islam ain’t no race. Thus we are left with the astounding idea that racists might be fuggheads enough to conflate race and religion — which does not constitute a reason for us to commit the same error.

              That’s four strikes against you; take a walk.

              1. 1) There are any number of articles on the ‘Halal tax’ to be found on the internet. They are all essentially the same, and can be compared directly to antisemitic arguments against the ‘kosher tax’. And, I got the link from RA.

                2) Sometimes an organization has an unreasonable number of them; then they are no longer a minority. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever described the Ku Klux Klan as being an organization for auto mechanics, even though I’m sure they have a minority of members who are.

                3) the ‘Halal tax’ has a basis in fact, just like the ‘Kosher tax does’. Your conflating the Halal tax with Jizaya doesn’t make it so. Halal tax and Kosher tax arguments are identical. If you like, I’ll offer you some sources on the subject.

                4) So, by your argument, Germany’s Nazi Party wasn’t racist, because Jews aren’t a race. And no, you cannot invoke Godwin, because we’re already talking about nazis. It’s possible for a group to be both racist and antimuslim. Read up on what RA thinks of aborigines, and it becomes apparent that they’re both. Similarly, an antiracist organization may also be against other forms of discrimination. See the Anti-Defimation League for an example.

                I’m four for four, and you’re still conflating Jiziya with the Halal tax.

                1. 1.) So far as evidence provided you pulled the link from between your buttocks. Facts not in evidence cannot be argued. Appeal denied.

                  2.) You’ve begged the question; asserting that RA contains an overwhelming number of racists does not constitute evidence. Appeal denied.

                  3.) Halal tax is conceptually related to jizyah as a tax levied upon unbelievers. Kosher tax has no basis in any Judaic precept and is constructed from whole cloth. Appeal denied.

                  4.) Jews are a race. We are also a religion. Appeal denied.

                  Your four whiffs is producing an unfortunate stench.

                    2. How else you do explain my brother, the Jewish Daoist?

                      Your being a Jew gives your opinion no more weight than mine.

                      As for you citation:
                      “This site is created, written and maintained by Tracey Rich. I do not claim to be a rabbi or an expert on Judaism; I’m just a traditional, observant Jew who has put in a lot of research.”
                      http://www.jewfaq.org/author.htm

                      Just one Jew’s opinions, IOW. Perhaps it’s escaped your attention but there is no Pope of the Jews with authority to declare what we is or isn’t. Certainly when Israel brought in the Ethiopians their Jewishness was decided by genetic evidence.

                  1. And not all ethnic Jews practice Judaism. Though we’d still all hang together in the eyes of the (mostly left) anti-semites, even those like me whose ancestry is not wholly proven. NOT like Islam. Not like any other religion.

                    1. No, actually. You have to be born a Druze, for instance, and also a Hindu. Some other religions have that rule, and many are more stern about it; discouragement is different than forbidding a convert.

                  2. Some Jews even practice Christianity, and many recognize no deity at all. I’ve a brother who is (last we discussed) a practicing Daoist and yet is still considered (and thinks of himself as) a Jew.

                    1. Yes I should have pointed out the corollary that not only are not all of those who practice Judaism Jewish, but not all Jews practice Judaism. Silly me, I assumed the preponderance of the Israeli elections on the National News and all those pundits claiming Bibi would never get reelected because he was too religious and most Israelis are secular Jews would have made that point for me. Then again, Rosen couldn’t find a point with a pencil sharpener.

                    1. Sorry, but as your “proof” points out the Supreme court ruled that you ARE a race, and just for your information RES is a member of that race.

                    2. We’re a “people”, a “nation”, a “community”, and a couple of other words that don’t have direct translations in English—and all those words have different definitions and different boundaries.

                      So no, strictly speaking we’re not a “race” as the word is most narrowly defined. But the broad sense of “ethnic group” gets you 90% there, about as good as any other word does.

        3. I don’t know who the hell are slackbastards. I don’t know about this movement. Why don’t you read the post. I EXPLICITLY say I know nothing about this movement, I don’t live in Australia. I just thought that calling anti-Muslim movements racism was calling a kitten puppy.
          THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE DAMN POST, and that’s why you’re either a troll or dim.

                1. Sigh. Like a hooker at a Democrat Presidential Convention, no mouse can watch every hole at once.

          2. Presumably, not every anti-Islam movement is racist. On the other hand, some are explicitly so. And, you admitted you were ignorant about the Australian movement, so I educated you. So, I am neither a troll, nor dim. Surely you didn’t plan on staying EXPLICITLY ignorant?

            1. Well, since she doesn’t reside in Australia and, so far as any of us know, has no plans to reside in Australia, who gives a damn? Especially since it had no bearing on the overall point.

              1. See, Sparky doesn’t know how to read logically, so he just goes of trigger-words. I put in a quote from Reclaim Australia, so he’s going to “educate” me.
                This is not a good time to bait me.

                1. It’s really sad that now I’m longing for the greater intellectual stimulation I’d get from a tree stump compared to this semi-sentient cacti.

                  1. Wow, the sucking up never ceases, does it. I swear, the slurping noises are deafening. Tch, fanbois.

                    1. Once again, you show that any understanding pf the English language escapes you.

                      That’s OK though. Most elementary schools have people who will help you with that. Just let your mommy and daddy know you need the help.

                      Now go away like a good little chew toy while the grown ups continue to talk.

                2. Just for that, I’m nominating Taral Wayne for a Hugo again. He’s got eleven more nominations than you, and a WorldCON GOH.

                  1. Given that Taral Wayne’s been running around fandom since the early ’70s, whereas Sarah Hoyt has been writing since the early 2000s–I can’t imagine why that would be.
                    Nope, can’t imagine. It must be because he’s more awesome than she is–as opposed to, y’know, having a longer time to develop a fanbase, especially among WorldCon goers.
                    I mean, dude, check your comparison points.

            2. This still has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with the post. The post was not about Reclaim Australia and I am all out of fucks to give about Australian politics.
              What do you call someone who comes insisting on a point not in the post and having only a marginal jumping-off-point to do with the post?
              We call it a troll. Or stupid. You choose, sparky.

    2. 1) “Niven’s Law: No cause is so noble that it won’t attract fuggheads.”

      2) The neoNazis may be a phenomenon similar to what the TEA Parties experienced in their early days: Proglodyte activists so sure that the TEA Party was a haven for racists that they dressed up and turned out to play the part at TEA Party rallies.

      1. There is also the fact that if you scream long and hard enough that they are all a bunch of race haters, well the race haters might just believe you and show up to support them.

        Funny thing, our US left in general, and the Obama campaigns and administration in particular, have embraced the race haters like the Black Panthers that have shown up to support them. While at the same time screaming to the heavens that the other side is racist.

        Now I don’t know about Reclaim Australia, but the US right has been unwilling to do that, and yet they are the ones painted as racist.

        1. I agree Rosen’s comments are pointless or, rather perhaps, a point in the wrong direction.

          Likely the result of coming here not to discuss Reclaim Australia but to bury them. And surely, Rosen is an honorable man* …

          *The term “man” is used here in its archaic sense of an adult person capable of reason and should not be construed as gender specific or an assertion that Rosen has any of the characteristics commonly associated with manliness.

            1. A touch, a veritable touch! i am wounded, pierced to the quick!! Alas, alack, i perish forthwith.

              Well, perhaps not. In fact, the brilliance of your riposte, your insightful deployment of witty rebuttal and thunderous argument leave me quite untouched.

              While I am certain your fellow playpen mates find your insults tres chic, you might do well to abandon your crudely swung bludgeon for a rapier. A demonstration of the art form follows:

              Cyrano:Young man, I am afraid your speech was a trifle short. You could have said at least one hundred other things, varying the tone of your words. Let me give you some examples.

              In an aggressive tone: “Sir, if I had a nose like that, I would amputate it!”

              Friendly: “When you drink from a cup your nose must get wet. Why don’t you drink from a bowl?”

              Descriptive: “Tis a rock! A peak! A cape! No, it’s a peninsula!”

              Curious: “What is that large container for? To hold your pens and ink?”

              Gracious: “How kind you are. You love the little birds so much you have given them a perch to roost upon.”

              Truculent: “When you light your pipe and puff smoke from your nose the neighbors must think the chimney’s afire.”

              Considerate: “Be careful when you bow your head or you might lose your balance and fall over.”

              Thoughtful: “Place an umbrella over your nose to keep its color from fading in the sun.”

              Arcane: “Sir, only the beast that Aristophanes calls the hippocampelephantocamelos could have had such a solid lump of flesh and bone below its forehead.”

              Cavalier: “A hook to hang your hat upon.”

              Emphatic: “No breeze, O majestic nose, can give thee cold – save when the north winds blow.”

              Dramatic: “When it bleeds, it must be like the Red Sea.”

              Admiring: “What a fine sign for a perfume shop!”

              Lyrical: “Is that a conch shell? And are you Triton risen from the ocean?”

              Naïve: “Is that monument open to the public?”

              Rustic: “That don’t look like a nose. It’s either a big cucumber or a little watermelon.”

              Military: “The enemy is charging! Aim your cannon!”

              Practical: “A nose like that has one advantage: it keeps your feet dry in the rain.”

              There, sir, now you have an inkling of what you might have said, had you been a witty man of letters. Unfortunately, you’re totally witless and a man of very few letters: only four that spell the word “fool.” But even if you had the skill to invent such remarks, you would not have been able to entertain me with them. You would have uttered no more than a quarter of such a jest, the first syllable of the first word, for such jesting is a privilege I only grant myself.

                2. “Slurp“? Your insults lack wit, lack style, lack verve, lack creativity, lack originality. The greater insult is that you proffer such feebleness apparently unconscious of their feebleness. I suppose it is a blessing that on the internet no-one can smell you fart as I sense no sign of higher aspirations in your mockery.

                  1. It seems that “Slurp, slurp” is otter for “Damn, I’ve been bested yet again by people who have IQs greater mine, the only one recorded in negative numbers in all of history.”

              1. Usually, they’re cute when they think they’re winning. This one can’t sack up and say he screwed up, but doesn’t have the decency to run away like the petulant child he is.

                Yeah, Sarah, the troll crop really is lacking this year. Maybe next year will be better.

                1. Well, the year’s barely 1/3 through. There will be time for more to really show their game.

                  Though likely not.

                  1. Yeah, but if this is the best we’re getting thus far? I’m just not optimistic.

                    But hey, who knows, maybe it’ll really pick up over the next eight months and we’ll really see something spectacular.

                    I mean, other than the spectacular failure Rosen’s trolling efforts have been thus far.

                    1. To paraphrase Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Otter is worse than a troll; he’s a bore.

    3. By his own standard, why should I trust him?
      He hangs out with Marxist-Leninists, and has no problem with them.
      Their hammers and sickles tend to be used on kneecaps and throats more than iron and grain.

  45. One thing I’ve noticed in the last few years is that the notion of ‘cultural relativism’ being left in the dust. That shouldn’t be a bad thing in itself, but cultural relativisms’ “No culture is superior, just different” has been replaced by “All cultures are superior to western culture”.

    Colonization is evil and culture erasure is wrong, except when it happens to European cultures. Doublethink is everywhere.

  46. Fiddle Faddle. Racism is a misnomer. What most refer to as racism, is in fact tribalism. And as I keep sayin…tribalism has been around since our ape ancestors crawled down outta dem trees. Even crap based on melatonin content is tribalism. Unless it’s rooted deep enough in which case it’s speciesism. I now await the cries of outrage, indignation, and laughs of disdain from the hanky stomping take a punk to lunch bunch that come round here to insult the host.

    1. Way to ignore the posters point. It doesn’t matter how you choose to call it, it’s indoctrination to children based on irrational beliefs.

      And it’s specific to the US, meaning, it doesn’t exist in other places.

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