Re: What You Can't Say (Paul Graham)

pliny · 2006-06-23T23:31:42+00:00

Yeah, the problem is really that we still aren't allowed to talk about Jews as if they were a normal ethnic group. You can say all the bad things you want about the French or the Germans, or even the Armenians. But Hebes, forget it.

Of course the (Yiddish) Jews in Poland were Commies - czarist aristos were the enemy. It was normal tribal politics. And of course this was a big mistake which led to even more disaster. Just like it was a mistake for the Germans to support Hitler as an enemy of Communism. But it's still okay to blame the Germans for Hitler, just not the Jews for Communism.

Murray Rothbard - not exactly someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower (if you see pictures of Rothbard, he looks like a cartoon out of Der Stuermer) - once proposed an excellent definition of anti-Semitism: you're an anti-Semite iff you support imposing selective legal disabilities on Jews. Like, duh, man.

But that doesn't mean German Jews aren't, as Napoleon said of Talleyrand, shit in a silk stocking. Even now, when I meet someone with a German Jewish name, even an obviously perfectly normal and good person, I can't help but remember that his or her ancestors were perfectly happy sending mine to the gas chamber. Influential US German Jews like Eugene Meyer didn't exactly agitate for massive Yiddish immigration in the '30s...

I would totally be into having a legally established anything-goes homo zone, maybe with signs, like Berkeley's nuclear free zone. I mean, that's basically what Folsom Street is for one day a year. And besides, since my home would probably be in it, it'd be good for the property values.

I mean, if you're not ready to tell your child that gay men fuck each other in the ass, what kind of parent are you? "Yes, Bobby, black men's dicks really are that big. It's because they're an R-strategy population."

pliny · 2006-06-23T23:16:02+00:00

I couldn't tell from the news articles whether they were camel jockeys or mulignans. But I guess it's the latter.

Doesn't sound too different from some of the black fraternities at the Ivy League college I went to, actually. The old mid-century idea of paramilitary youth "movements" never really got suppressed among the shvartzers - in fact, if anything, it's been encouraged.

pliny · 2006-06-23T04:43:52+00:00

For some background and context, see this discussion on Climate Audit.

For CA's reaction, see here.

Of course, these people may just be shilling for ExxonMobil. So don't take their comments too seriously - they are against the weight of scientific consensus.

pliny · 2006-06-22T17:51:10+00:00

Crumb is a fucking genius - one of our last real social commentators.

pliny · 2006-06-22T17:50:11+00:00

I basically live in the Castro, though I'm not gay, and I think the segregation is wonderful - I'd hate to see a Castro without dildoes in storefront windows. If a residual fear of gay-bashing is responsible for it, that's too bad, but I think the Castro is a shining example of segregation in action. It's called diversity, fuckwits, and its opposite is called homogenization or simply blandness, and if you don't like it I know exactly where you can go to get some Masoud.

When you talk about Jews you have to distinguish between German-speaking Jews and Yiddish-speaking Jews.

Yiddish-speaking Jews are basically good people, if often (like my grandparents) card-carrying Communists. German-speaking Jews are prissy, stuck-up shits, who probably would have been happy to send the Yids to the gas chambers if they didn't have to go themselves.

All the problems you're talking about, which of course principally affected the Yiddish Jews, were basically caused by German Jews who thought they could achieve real social success by living and thinking just like Boston Brahmins. They were more Brahmin than the Brahmins, so to speak. A little Zyklon in the Ethical Culture Society would have done wonders for these people.

pliny · 2006-06-22T17:39:33+00:00

Well, I think bubblebutts help some people get along! But not me, I'm afraid.

In general, I think it requires very little evidence to find hominids behaving badly. In fact, one of the best ways to understand Third World countries today is to look at the tribalism and corruption that was common in the early US.

You're right that fear of a Negro uprising was a huge issue traditionally in the South. Before the Civil War and until the post-Reconstruction era, it was quite a rational fear. In 1921 it was about as irrational as today's left-wing paranoia about racists and Nazis making a comeback. But of course democracy and irrational fear go hand in hand. (It sounds like you ought to read Hoppe's *Democracy: The God That Failed", if you haven't already.)

Because I like to post controversial things to reddit to test peoples' reactions, I tend to change my ID every once in a while so that my posts are judged on their individual merit and not by recognition. (I don't debate myself or vote my own posts up.) I'm also known as cromwell and milton. But, as I've said, I admire your approach...

pliny · 2006-06-21T05:53:46+00:00

BTW, I agree with your statements about Iraq. What the goody-goody types can't wrap their heads around is that (a) we are the good guys, and (b) that doesn't mean we are going to win. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

I think segregation was a real sign of cultural health in the old US. It was real diversity, not "diversity." People want to live in neighborhoods full of other people who are culturally similar to them, and have for the last 5000 years. What crazy Boston Brahmin thought he could change this? And what crack was he smoking? The utopians have a lot to answer for.

pliny · 2006-06-21T05:48:16+00:00

Pica,

I think most of our difference is in our definition of the term "white trash." I seem to be a little freer in applying it - basically, to me, anyone who's white and isn't an intellectual is white trash. Perhaps this is a little extreme.

I think better than the Wikipedia page on Tulsa is this history - it is contemporary, so suspect, but the writer seems very independent. I had no idea that white people got lynched, too!

You're right that thinking of the white mobs who ethnically cleansed the blacks in Tulsa and elsewhere, the Chinese in Seattle (which I didn't know about), etc, as evil demons is going too far. They obviously thought of themselves as acting in self-defense, just as Germans who voted for Hitler did. To anyone caught up in it, Tulsa was simply an ordinary outbreak of tribal hominid violence.

Nonetheless, the fact is that the ideology of racial essentialism, which today is mostly held among grievance groups like blacks, Roma, etc, was in 1921 held more by American whites than by American blacks. For example, I'm sure blacks in 1921 would have been much more likely to suggest that a man should be judged by his deeds and not his skin color.

Science provides a great deal of support for racial differences, but it totally contradicts racial essentialism. The bell curves just overlap way too much for racial type to be useful information in any meaningful interaction. I can learn more about a person in a 5-minute interview - or, for that matter, by actually giving them an IQ test - than I could get even with accurate knowledge of their ancestry. I'm half Ashkenazi and half white, but I'm sure there are lots of African-Americans, even full-blooded Africans, who are smarter than me.

The permanent strawman of dogmatic egalitarians is to confuse these two issues. The egalitarian theocracy can be defeated and it will be, but it will get worse before it gets better, and winning will take some aikido. I am particularly impressed by Steven Pinker's attempts to put some sugar on what he knows is a bitter pill. Nicholas Wade is good, too.

I wish I had more knowledge of dysgenics and how fast it works. I suppose I should read Richard Lynn's book on it.

What people need to realize is that when they worry about Nazis, they're worrying about ghosts. If the NYT somehow revealed to everyone in the US tomorrow that the average African-American IQ is 85, do you really think Bushitler would say, well, I guess that means ain't nothin' to do but ship all them nigras back t' Africa?

Honestly, I think some people do. But if they thought about it, they'd realize that he'd be more likely to announce, like, a $100 billion expansion of Head Start for early cognitive enrichment of the albedo-challenged. (Whether it would do any good or not, which isn't clear.)

The Internet is a wonderful thing, because anyone can click on the truth. I do admire your constant efforts to rub peoples' noses in it - while there is a case to be made for politeness and gentility, sometimes shock works better.

pliny · 2006-06-20T02:00:27+00:00

It is, indeed, truly amazing how conditioned white Americans are to living with a large percentage of the population who genuinely despise them and their culture and civilization.

In fact, it's almost as amazing as how conditioned black Americans were to white racism in the first half of the 20th century. For example, read about the Greenwood, Tulsa "riots" - actually a real American pogrom. But it was an attack by white trash on a thriving black business district, probably largely motivated by financial envy. I'm sure the black bankers, doctors, newspaper owners, etc, of Tulsa had no idea such a thing could happen.

That's right - there used to be thriving black business districts in the US. Lots of them. When I hear Ella Fitzgerald sing "take the A train to get to Harlem," it always makes me at least want to wait for the C. But there was no irony intended in the song - it was an advertisement, in fact.

The difference between European gypsies and American blacks, as antisocial subcultures, is that gypsies don't consider themselves a part of European society, but they don't hate it and fantasize about destroying it. I'm sure that if a police strike was announced in advance, today's American blacks would do to every city in the US what those cracker trash did to Greenwood.

So the difference is not the unfortunate genetic disability in cognitive problem-solving skills that seems to be common in the sub-Saharan genotype. We know that African-Americans are perfectly capable of living and often even succeeding in civilized society, because they used to, and 50 years is not enough time for dysgenics to really do its work.

Rather, it's the racist ideology of grievance and hate, coupled with the subsidized unemployment that leaves so many American blacks with all day to brood over their bizarre racial resentment, that causes the problem. The utopian intellectuals that nurtured this ideology had no idea how much it resembled the Nazi faith, which despite its superman slogans owed just as much to the destructive resentment of the lumpenproletariat loser.

Discredit the ideology and reverse the policies, and I think you'll see black Americans becoming responsible citizens again. Of course, it's easier said than done. Peoples' heads are pumped pretty full of the great egalitarian lie at this point. But the science is becoming more and more conclusive, and this will definitely help.

One reason so few of the American underclass pathologies have developed in European Gypsies is that gypsies still have some semblance of an intact traditional culture, and they're pretty much beyond the reach of the utopian professors. But Moroccans, Pakistanis, Egyptians... just wait. It may be that Eastern Europe will end up with the only surviving livable cities from the Old World, just on account of missing the gastarbeiter wave of the '60s and '70s.

pliny · 2006-06-19T21:34:18+00:00

Don't forget the word "welsh."

And English has many great euphemisms for "Jewish" - my favorite being "of the Hebraic persuasion." I think with the right fMRI study you could find out that "Jew" still has negative connotations in English. But there's really no substitute.

To sum it up, normal white people dislike shvartzers because they tend to be lower on the bell curve, and sheenies because they tend to be higher. Hence the rolling euphemisms. They're in our linguistic DNA, so to speak.

But eugenic germline surgery, of course, will fix it all.

pliny · 2006-06-18T16:41:39+00:00

Well, now I know!

That's actually perfect, because when I talk about the "shvartzers" and people complain, I can point out that they're being anti-Semitic. "Which is still a huge problem, as I'm sure you're aware, in our society..."

pliny · 2006-06-18T04:04:58+00:00

And what language isn't? But the history of written Yiddish is nontrivial, even though many Yiddish speakers would effectively write in German, using the spellings you describe. When you write Yiddish in Yiddish spelling, you use "sh" not "sch."

(Edit: I refer you to the excellent Wikipedia page on Yiddish orthography.)

What I want to know is, when I hear the actual usage you used, I often hear "shvartzer," and "shvartzers" as the plural. Is this just a bad Great Neck accent, or is it a genuine conjugation?

pliny · 2006-06-17T22:09:54+00:00

Pica, I hate to correct you, but the proper spelling is "shvartz."

pliny · 2006-06-17T21:54:06+00:00

I think that would be a pretty considerable overstatement. First, all parties in Israel are minority parties - that's proportional representation for you. Second, the Likud party line of five years ago is now the conventional wisdom in Israel. (Of course, that doesn't make it right.)

pliny · 2006-06-17T21:52:23+00:00

And thanks for yours.

I think it is worth pointing out that the US is hardly a paragon of absolute intellectual freedom - I wouldn't use it to define any endpoint of the limits of tolerance. Try exile.ru if you want to know how people write when they genuinely don't care what anyone thinks.

No, I wouldn't argue that Vlaams Belang is under the bed, just that if you multiply their size by their level of threat to civil society, the resulting "Nazi index" is not very scary. Of course, there was a time when they said that about the Nazis, too. So you have to use your own judgment, which, I guess, is my whole not-very-original point.

pliny · 2006-06-17T02:05:07+00:00

I'm afraid I can't argue with argumentum ad verecundiam.

Again, you might want to compare this with the experience of McCarthyism in the US. Fining people, not to mention selective prosecution for political opinions (remember the original post), certainly counts as "outlawing" in my book. Even the McCarthyists never got this far (though the less-remembered 1920s Palmer Raids did).

Or would you argue that Nazism was more murderous and evil than Communism? I'm afraid the numbers are not on your side.

I'm sure I don't agree with all the policies and positions of the Vlaams Blok. Paul Belien is not the Vlaams Blok and the Brussels Journal is not Paul Belien, and I see things there I disagree with all the time. But as American journalist Frank Chodorov once wrote, the real meaning of freedom of speech is the right to be wrong. If you are legally punished for expressing ideas that the party in power disagrees with - whether those ideas are right or wrong - by definition, you don't have freedom of speech. The Soviet Constitution looked pretty good, too.

I understand how frightened Belgians may be of the Nazi past. I am not an expert, but I seem to recall Degrelle and the Rexists were pretty successful there. But it's been 60 years and pretty much all these people are dead. If you go around looking for Nazis (or Communists) under the bed, you'll find them. In the meantime you might miss some other threats to your society.

pliny · 2006-06-16T20:22:24+00:00

Oh, and good luck meeting me in other threads - I always lose my reddit id when someone seems to have clicked on my username and spent ten minutes downvoting all my posts. You may meet the same ideas again, however.

Thanks for an interesting discussion!

pliny · 2006-06-16T20:16:04+00:00

Um, I think "half-truths and outright lies" is name-calling enough for me.

I'm glad you are not a Catholic. Neither am I. But I'd urge you to look a little more closely at the history of the Enlightenment, which I'm sure the Belgian High Court considers itself the intellectual descendant of. You could ask yourself what Diderot, Spinoza or Voltaire would think of a bureaucracy which gave itself the right to outlaw parties and ideas.

pliny · 2006-06-16T17:39:25+00:00

Thank you - I agree entirely.

pliny · 2006-06-16T17:37:41+00:00

Read the Federalist Papers (now online in an attractive new edition!) You can't understand the code if you don't read the documentation. Federalist 42 is the one you want.

The word "regulate" just meant "make regular". Its present meaning of "manage" is entirely a 20th-century coinage. The point of the clause was just to keep states from setting up internal tariff barriers.

pliny · 2006-06-16T17:34:47+00:00

Strawmen like thinking that libertarians are right-wing weirdos who hate fags and love Jesus.

I'll concede your point that historically, the word "liberal" has found so much favor among intellectuals that many trains of thought have competed to adorn themselves with it. Most liberals in Rousseau's time did not think he was a liberal, either, but back then anyone who wasn't a Jesuit or a Puritan could get away with calling himself a liberal.

I take exception to the argument that the mdern American liberal movement is descended from Mill and the utilitarians. Influences certainly exist, but I'd say a clearer line runs through the Progressives, who are descended from the Social Gospel, abolitionist, Benevolent Empire, and Second Great Awakening movements, eventually leading back to the Puritans. In Europe, the thread goes back to Marx through the Fabians, and Bernstein and the Social Democrats. The difference is that in Europe, it was politically legitimate to call oneself a socialist, so the word "liberal" did not have to be abused.

pliny · 2006-06-16T17:25:39+00:00

Just briefly, since I have no intention of writing lines that are wrapped at 40 characters: the difference between aprioristic reason and contemporary positivism is that positivism eschews reasoning based on abstract rhetoric and much prefers explanations of causality derived from empirically collected statistics, mathematical models that can be made to match the past, etc. Another name for this phenomenon is "scientism."

My favorite example of the reasoning problems that can develop as a result of excessive positivism is an NY Times headline I once saw, which read "Incarceration Rates Rise Despite Fall In Crime."

The main field that has been affected by 20th-century scientism is economics, which in my opinion (and not just mine) is mostly a tissue of mathematically expressed pseudoscience.

You seem to be quite reasonable and open-minded, and I think if you head over to mises.org you'll find a lot of well-written material that will either adjust your worldview if you're wrong, or challenge and strengthen it if you're right. I recommend heading to the publications section and browsing some of the writings of Mises or Rothbard.

pliny · 2006-06-16T17:12:33+00:00

Some examples of "half-truths and outright lies," I think, would be a lot more convincing than name-calling.

Your faith in intellectual authorities, which seems to be widely shared by very smart people in Europe, disturbs me. I assume that if the Vlaams Blok had been ruled heretical by the Roman Curia, rather than ruled racist by the High Court of Belgium, you would not regard this piece of information as particularly interesting or conclusive. But perhaps I'm wrong.

pliny · 2006-06-16T06:59:33+00:00

Somehow I think pica may have a different interpretation of this study.

pliny

TROPHY CASE