So after engaging with the racialists for some time, I find myself with a few conclusions and one question. Question first:
What’s with all the whining?
So I write out twenty thousand words dealing directly with the arguments of the racialists, and I brace myself. I’m expecting some fire in return, a fight to really sharpen my fangs and claws on.
Instead what I find is whining. And lots of it. I’m apparently being ‘snarky’ and ‘unfair’ and ‘superior’ and ‘condescending’… Sure, sure. But, as I have had cause to say elsewhere, what have I written that is, y’know, wrong?
And what is with this whining? In another context, Radish jeering at libertarians as follows:
Come on, libertarians! Attack like Devil Forrest! Defend like Stonewall Jackson!
Well, why isn’t he taking his own advice? Where’s his big counterattack? Where’s the giant post sticking up for slavery and disproving me? Why is he reduced to whining and sloping off to lick his wounds in resentment?
And I wonder where even the better quality of neoreactionaries are telling me that I need to be more ‘civil’. Leaving aside the fact that I moderate my tone for no man, and I’m not exactly looking to get a foot in the door of the neoreactionary clubhouse – where does a community that accepts things like this get off complaining about civility?
And why do you need such excessive deference and kid-gloves? Aren’t you supposed to be the big bad warriors of the True Right? You’d hoot and jeer if the mainstream complained about your ‘tone’, so why get all huffy about my ‘tone’?
In Radish’s long post on feminism, he picks up on a particularly deadhead US feminist, and describes her as follows:
Utterly mindless. Ms. Waldman truly has nothing to say — nothing to think.
Not disagreeing with his assessment of the hapless Ms Waldman, but it seems that his assessment fits a little closer to home too.
Anyway, a couple of other conclusions:
There’s no real overlap between science and the politics
There’s a neat little two step being done among the racialists. They proclaim the crudest forms of racial determinism, as I outlined previously, and then when they are called on’t start complaining that this is a ‘strawman’, and then return to racial determinism as soon as they can.
I’m told that I’m not being fair for not wading through all of the archives of blogs like HBD chick etc. Well, one of the links to her stuff leads to this post where she says that culture isn’t a thing, but race is because – read it – the different emotional responses of people from different cultures have biological correlates. Well, congratulations. You have just proved that we don’t have brains, we are brains. This is news?
Or the following from The Right Stuff, re:my comment that people change deeply across time and space:
Race *is* that difference between people separated in time and space.
So the difference between North and South Koreans, between East and West Germans, or between Germans and Frenchmen is racial. Aiyayaiyai….
I’ve been more interested in the ethical and political arguments of the racialists. There’s a reason for this: if I’m interested in looking at the real science of human biological and genetic and epigenetic diversity, I go to the actual scientists. I can look at Daniels and Rushton and Devlin and Dickens etc.
HBD bloggers, bluntly, are cheerleaders who have gotten themselves confused with the people who are carrying the ball. Hence this persistent inability to understand the difference between biological, racial, hereditary, genetic and inborn. I mean take a look at this: the HBD Bibliography. If I just take a look at the “HBD general” section, I count a hundred and fourteen entries. Out of these a mere twenty two are scientific journal articles, the rest being some popular science magazines and such highly reputable sources as the Daily Mail and VDARE. I’ll tell you this gratis: you handed in a reference list like that as a biology undergraduate and you would fail.
So when HBDchick etc put out a review article in, e.g., Genome Research, I shall be delighted to look at it. In the meantime, I have too much actual science to grapple with. As I’ve said before, I have a soft spot for her, as she seems genuinely science obsessed, but her work is just no substitute for going to the source.
However, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, there is very little connection between the scientific claims of the racialists and their politics. Bluntly, even if he was right on the science, and he isn’t, it still wouldn’t support Radish’s weird and creepy defence of slavery. Nor for that matter does any of this answer any of my other points about politics and ethics. Just as a minor example, I would love to hear any response to my point that for the West to endure, it needs to forge deep alliances with its sister civilizations.
(And on the ethical side, we have a bunch of keyboard warriors who get hurt and huffy when yours truly is mean to them – this is supposed to be superior to Mandela and Nkunda?)
Let me thrown down this gauntlet: I would be ecstatic to see any challenge to the ethical and political portions of my Q & A. Why is it so hard to bring any?
Another conclusion I have is :
The mainstream is really, really not doing its job
Take, for example, Jamie Bartlett, fretting that the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ is ‘spreading fast on the net‘. If that’s true, what are you doing about it? And it can’t really be true, can it, that I’m the only chap out there arguing against racism, as Scott Alexander says? It’s a terrible indictment if it takes a grizzled old goat like me take this stuff on.
The final conclusion I have is:
The Dark Enlightenment is going nowhere
At least its racialist side isn’t. You win by making the argument over and over again, and you win through reason. As I’ve pointed out before, get all hurt and huffy, say “Oh he’s just saying that because he’s X” – and be prepared to lose.
What is likely to happen is that it will develop into an insular internet clique that circulates ideas among the likeminded. As I recall, in Archeofuturism, Guillaume Faye wrote as follows:
[The Nouvelle Droite] no longer sees itself as a powerhouse for the diffusion of energies with the ultimate aim of acquiring power, but rather as a publishing enterprise that also organises conferences but has limited ambitions. […] Those who blame others, enemies and the political climate for their own failures do not deserve to win.
I told you you that I’d read all those big, bad books you’re discovering now.
The only real and practical effect will be to produce an assembly of tame bugbears that the centre-left establishment will trot out to keep people in line. Salon, say, will be able to point to Radish, say, and say: “See! This is where being pro-capitalist & pro-Western civilization leads! Don’t bother to question us, you don’t want to end up like that do you?”
Fighting the System? Boys, you will become the System’s best servants.
