You knew he’d be just fine. After getting fired from the National Review for his ghastly racist views, he’s now been picked up by the openly racist VDARE. He’s come out now with a little post wondering about what label he should apply to his political camp. Before settling on calling his in-group the “dissident Right”, he considers this one:
Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think "White Supremacist" is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group.
Wait — he forgot to consider “The Racist Assholes” as a possibility. I think that’s the real winner.
Then he speaks the truth openly about the Republican party, or “Conservatism, Inc.” as he likes to call it. It’s one of the good things about Derbyshire: he’s so shameless that he isn’t at all hesitant about describing himself and his political pals in terms he finds copacetic, and the rest of the world finds contemptible.
I don’t mind the word “white” in either of those expressions. Conservatism, Inc. or otherwise, is a white people’s movement, a scattering of outliers notwithstanding.
Always has been, always will be. I have attended at least a hundred conservative gatherings, conferences, cruises, and jamborees: let me tell you, there ain’t too many raisins in that bun. I was in and out of the National Review offices for twelve years, and the only black person I saw there, other than when Herman Cain came calling, was Alex, the guy who runs the mail room. (Hey, Alex!)
This isn’t because conservatism is hostile to blacks and mestizos. Very much the contrary, especially in the case of Conservatism Inc. They fawn over the occasional nonwhite with a puppyish deference that fairly fogs the air with embarrassment. (Q: What do you call the one black guy at a gathering of 1,000 Republicans? A: “Mr. Chairman.”)
And why is this? It can’t be simply because conservatives are racist assholes, no…it’s got to be because minorities are parasites.
It’s just that conservative ideals like self-sufficiency and minimal dependence on government have no appeal to underperforming minorities—groups who, in the statistical generality, are short of the attributes that make for group success in a modern commercial nation.
Of what use would it be to them to embrace such ideals? They would end up even more decisively pooled at the bottom of society than they are currently.
A much better strategy for them is to ally with as many disaffected white and Asian subgroups as they can (homosexuals, feminists, dead-end labor unions), attain electoral majorities, and institute big redistributionist governments to give them make-work jobs and transfer wealth to them from successful groups.
Derbyshire has been fired from his more mainstream position, and he’s dying of cancer — he’s got nothing to lose. It’s quite bracing to see an old-school bigot open his yap and vomit forth his prejudices without the mealy-mouthed cliches all the others use so freely.
But still…he’s a racist, homophobic, bigoted asshole. I think he should even more freely embrace that label.
As I pointed out the target thread when I pointed this news, if you dig through VDARE’s archives from about a decade ago, you will find articles in which people associated with VDARE gleefully point out when The National Review held the same white supremacist position that VDARE holds.
Well, except for all those societies that HAVEN’T been white Europeans, y’know like… every other society on the face of the planet for its entire history?
Sumerians? Not white Europeans.
Egyptians? Not white Europeans.
Japanese? Not white Europeans.
Mongols? Not white Europeans.
Chinese? Not white Europeans.
And that’s just thinking about some of them, there’s probably a HUGE number more.
Satire is obsolete.
Katherine Lorraine, Chaton de la Mort
DOZENS more. There’s the Asante, in what is now Ghana. The Phonecians. The Zulu. The Aztecs and Mayans. etc etc…The number of great civilizations is huge. Most have faded away, as will “white European”.
Assyrians & Babylonians not white Europeans.
Israelites not white Europeans.
It worked so well in South Africa.
That an unjust social order is perceived as working well by those it privileges is neither surprising nor revealing.
I’m not crazy about being described as “white” although it doesn’t bother me. Pink with a little tan thrown in is more accurate.
*barf!*
@No One in Particular:
Exactly. There are probably more civilizations that weren’t white European.
No, I’m sure that no one thinks it’s hostile to be called “mestizo”.
cervantes – it ain’t satire when it’s entirely consistent with everything he’s ever said or written in his professional lifetime. I know you don’t want to think that there are people who are honestly, unironically as racist as Derbyshire, but there are.
Just pointing out again, back in the fifties and sixties, William F. Buckley would have openly agreed with what John Derbyshire was written for VDARE.
Far be it from me to tell you how to tag things, PZ, but I’d have gone with “Fuckbrained Assholes” instead of “Kooks.”
He has found a money-making niche, an attention-getting gig, just like Limbaugh and Beck and Billy Graham. What is truly sad is that these men seem to find huge audiences.
Except for slavery, segregation, multiple genocides, capitalism/corporatism against the rest of the world, colonialism, and all of the wars. Those were just a couple of minor blots on the record to him.
Die faster, bigot. Die faster.
Thewhollynone, I am not sure how much money Derbyshire is getting from this arrangement. VDARE is calling for donations for Derbyshire’s chemotherapy. Limbaugh, Beck and Graham has made millions from their occupations, they could pay for their medical care out of pocket.
One of the Ferengi rules of Acequisiton is “Don’t mistake luck for divine favor.” Derby needs to stop mistaking luck and geography for racial superiority. The european nations couldn’t advance to the east (they got in each others way and there were other empires to worry about) so they went west and found a rich new land filled with people who had no immunity to small pox. Between that and the technology developed from their constant warfare infighting was the main cause for the rise of western civilization.
Poe’s law, satire is very difficult at this point.
Funny how there’s still conservatives who freely choose to associate themselves with him.
Yikes. I can’t decide if I prefer the obvious racists or the ones who are at least cowardly enough or sufficiently shameable to keep this shit on the inside.
I guess if we didn’t have the obvious guys, it would be harder to have something to point to and say, “That thing, right there. BAD. Don’t do it.”
It’s funny how the lack of historical knowledge cuts both ways. I had a conversation the other day with someone who spoke of “thousands” of years of European imperialism. Explaining that we barely have 500 years of colonization (and only about 350 of widespread aggressively smacking down other cultures; Cortez was a man ahead of his time) was kind of strange. But it highlighted that even progressive people are blind to how much they’ve been indoctrinated with “Europe is everything–nothing else exists or ever existed!”
@15: As a good conservative, Derbyshire should have saved up the 100s of 1000s of dollars required for cancer treatment, just in case, or taken out really, really good, non-cancelable health insurance from a company that wouldn’t try to weasel out of paying once he actually sick. Since he didn’t, he’s now a parasite, and Limbaugh, Beck and Graham would be remiss in their conservative duties if they helped him out. They should in fact be using him as an object lesson in personal responsibility and urging others not to help him, either.
As a good conservative, Derbyshire should just recognize this and go somewhere to die quietly, leaving the medical resources he can’t pay for to be used by someone who can.
Hey, it’s okay! Eric S. Raymond says Derbyshire isn’t racist, and anyone who says so is just stupid. And when Derbyshire proudly called himself a “racist”, Raymond assures us Derbyshire was just being ironic. Dunno about you, but I’m totally reassured by this essaying into
scientific rarace realismhuman biodiversity.Oh come on Alverant. If those Native Americans weren’t so lazy, they’d have domesticated, um, llamas or something so they could have their own special petri dish for virulent illnesses.
That’s amazingly accurate.
Those are not conservative ideals over here. Over here, the conservatives want a strong government to, like, keep things from getting out of control.
…
Two-party system. They’re not “liberal”, so they’re automatically “conservative”.
If ever there was a statement that was begging for the full Godwin, this was it.
net-net, Derb’s an ass.
Sounds like the heavily mormon-flavored meetings of the John Birch Society in my neck of the woods.
I’m vaguely reminded of the Danish politico who insisted we ascribe our free, democratic society to Christianity. If it wasn’t for Luther, we would not have separation of church and state.
I do like, though, how she kept saying that freedom was an unintended sideeffect of the Reformation.
David Marjanović #22
I agree. Conservatism Inc is an excellent description of the economic wing of the Republicans.
What a fool. He really face-slaps so many African American, Latino American, Jewish American, Asian American conservative/Republicans in that piece–communities that Republicans have been paying lip-service to court votes for years. Wonder how THEY appreciate that kind of support.
This reminds me of one of my Neonazi “friends” on Usenet back in the late ’90s, who claimed everything was invented by white people, including things like chairs.
David Gerard #20-
It’s been my hope for a while that ESR shuts up about non-computer related political issues. He’s got some decent things to say in that area. Some reasonable stuff about gun rights too. The rest? Not so much.
He strikes me as the type of person that is very good in their chosen field, and decides that makes them an expert in everything.
“…the only black person I saw there, other than when Herman Cain came calling, was Alex, the guy who runs the mail room. (Hey, Alex!)”
We feel for you Alex, really.
Well, yeah; those other groups tended to get their societies torn down by white Europeans.
All I keep thinking about is John Stuart Mill, who riled up the sexists in his day by pointing out that you can’t claim women are inferior by looking at their current state, given that they were not afforded the same opportunities as men. One simply cannot in good faith argue that racial minorities in the West have been given a fair shake, or, similar to what Alverant noted above, that having the good fortune of being born on a continent with good harbors, mild weather, lack of tropical disease (and access to Chinese technology), gives Europeans and their descendants advantages that others are not so fortunate to have.
This is brilliant. I want him to keep speaking. I want him to try and ally himself with as many of those people who privately share his views as possible. I want him to wax lyrical on why shooting Trayvon Martin was a perfectly “right n white” thing to do until the average american goes bug eyed constantly from trying not to think like this creep.
Not quite true, although your main point is well-taken. I’ve just finished reading a study of the Crusades (God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, by Christopher Tyreman – irritatingly on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand, but packed with information). Crusading can be seen as a kind of dress rehearsal for colonialism, particularly the crusades against pagans on the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic, which got underway in the 12th century, and took the form of planting colonies, often run by military religious orders, and exploiting the natives. Unlike the better-known Crusades to the Levant, but like those in the Iberian peninsula, these resulted in a permanent extension of “Latin Christendom” – which developed into modern western Europe. Not all the Iberian wars between Christian and Muslim states were declared as crusades*, but their final chapter – the fall of Granada – happened to coincide to the year with the start of colonialism in the Americas.
On your broader point, I particularly recommend After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000 by John Darwin, and Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 by Janet L. Abu-Lughod.
*In both the Levant and Iberia, there were plenty of alliances across the religious divide.
So much for self-sufficiency, then. Fucking hypocrite.
carlie @10–I think cervantes meant that satire is redundant in this case. Derbyshire’s shit is like the creationist’s and the MRA’s–Poe’s law applies. It’s self-satire, indistinguishable from the deliberate kind.
Tim Gueguen:
“White people invented the chair” is, for some reason I can’t pinpoint, hilarious.
Some blots on the record like the genocide of six million Jewish people*, I take it? Or the long and horrifying history of slavery and colonial oppression associated with White European society? Or the obscenely brutal religiously motivated wars and pogroms that blight the history of every corner of Europe? Would those be a small selection of the insignificant blots on the record this rancid bigot is talking about?
My mother has suffered with cancer (and her treatment has proven successful thus far with no recurrances) – I remember thinking that nobody, no matter how repugnant, could possibly deserve something like that. I still hold to that position, but Derbyshire is testing my resolve in this regard…
—————————————————————-
* Apologies for Godwinning the thread.
And who is White?
Irish weren’t White until this century.
Italians weren’t White until very recently.
I just read an interesting book on how Jews became White in Europe and America, and as my Dad says “We’re lucky we can pass for White.”
“Chopstick Culture” Asians are becoming White.
Poor Caucasians are being edged out of Whiteness by the Republicans.
Some people still say Slavs aren’t White.
The original Aryans aren’t White according to the racists.
Persians, Circassians and some Arabs take two weeks in the Sun to go from Bright to White. But they’re not “White”.
What this pasty grayish pink goatfucker really means is “People just like me should have everything. Everyone else is a lazy nigger and really should be a slave.”
It was nice, if useless, of such an unpleasant, evil-minded creep like him to bait me into rooting for his cancer.
Sorry, sir, but my heart never goes there. You are, ill or not, a truly horrid and empty human being, though.
tbp1 (#19) wrote:
What are you? Some kind of communist? Why should the insurance company have to risk reduced profits just to treat someone who didn’t have the personal responsibility enough to avoid getting cancer? I mean, it’s certainly not the insurance company’s fault he got sick, so why should they have to pay out? Force them to pay out on obligations they’ve already agreed to, and you’ll be forcing them to cut staff or outsource to impoverished nations in order to meet earnings targets. And after you’ve forced them to do this, you and your merry band of godless socialist communist Nazi Muslims will just turn around and denounce them for these layoffs too, won’t you?
There is seriously no pleasing you people!
frog @ # 18: … someone who spoke of “thousands” of years of European imperialism.
Which is utterly accurate: Octavian/Augustus formally declared the Roman Empire more than two millennia ago (after the Romans had, as a nominal republic, been conquering and colonizing their neighbors for centuries), following a template set up by the Macedonians and Greeks well before then.
Of course none of the above-mentioned was doing wholly original work, but their imperial predecessors and role models, working out of the Nilotic and Mesopotamian areas, (a) couldn’t claim Europeanness and (b) taking pride in being civilized, wouldn’t have wanted such barbaric affiliations anyway.
Racist jerk is racist.
Got it.
Not just racist – openly racist. And I’m pretty sure those Greeks that invented all that democracy and wrote down all that logic and math stuff would not qualify for VDARE’s whitey white white club
and all could think of was this (true for that other thread on hoodies and slimey creationists) it has been an evil time on Pharyngula lately:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmS_hMnFNVM
and
aaaak it embedded sorry
still funny though
Carlin had the right idea years ago…’indiscriminate fucking’.
One generation devoted to this maxim will bring us half way home. The next generation will have to adhear to ‘no fucking stupid people’.
After this we can get down to the task of eliminating those whose ‘ring’ toes are longer than their big toes.
The fact that it took the National Review this long to rid itself of this crank says more about the National Review than it does about Derbyshire. Despite the noble goal of ‘indescriminate fucking’, there will always be asshats like Derbyshite.
Looney Tunes will eventually gravitate towards media outlets that allow them to be looney tunes. But they’ll eventually learn that it’s a one-way trip: once you go blackshirt, you never go back.
The clowns at FAUX Noise like Hume, Rivera, Wallace, Stossel, Varney, Dobbs and others who were once “mainstream” will never be able to get “mainstream” jobs ever again. They’ll always be viewed as extremists and bigots. Derbyshire will learn that lesson too.
Sound familiar?
From Buckley’s 1957 editorial “Why the South Must Prevail” (Source: Wikipedia, but also in a mid-90s collection of This Modern World.)
This brutish British mooncalf Derbyshire is clearly a devil, a born devil on whose nature nurture can never stick.
Probably been mentioned already, but I was honestly worried that someone had moved Derbyshire, UK somewhere else. It would make my train trip to see my dad more confusing.
Derbyshire brings to mind a quote that’s questionably attributed to Mark Twain. “I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
This unreconstructed asshat racists needs to do some reading. Or he could just watch Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel documentary
Derbyshire has cancer? Does anyone know what type? Also, he’s taking chemotherapy? Quite a lot of modern chemotherapy and adjuvant therapy (like the stuff that keeps you from throwing up continually while on chemo) was developed at least partially by non-whites, gays, women, and union members. So I guess he’s happy he’s living in a multicultural society after all. Also opiates were first developed by the Egyptians and other Middle Eastern peoples. So he can thank non-Europeans that he’s not dying in pain, puking his guts out, instead of having possibly a decent chance of surviving the cancer (depending on type) with a reasonable quality of life during treatment.
And with the deportation (or forced conversion) of all Muslims and Jews in Spain. Spain still hasn’t fully recovered from that triple disaster.
*Jaw drops*
dianne @ 54 – Derbyshire has cancer? Does anyone know what type?
Apparently, brain.
I fled a mostly-white small town for its intolerance and snootiness, rode the bus in Minneapolis for 20 years, and in summer 2010 enjoyed the graciousness and warmth of the people of Mount Rainier, Maryland, a working-class, African-American community. I rode the Metro every day and was treated like a lady. I don’t miss my hometown, but I sure as hell would live in Mount Rainier again (go visit!), and am glad to be back in Hennepin County (having moved away from my Archie Bunker-type harassing neighbors), which I’ve also missed.
Derbyshire should get his head out of his ass and visit any library, where he will see people of all ethnicities hard at work retooling themselves in this economy, searching for jobs, learning Word and Excel, learning English and Spanish, and researching how to open their own businesses. But then of course, wouldn’t public libraries be part of the “big government,” “entitlement-minded,” “dependent,” and “parasitic” what-have-you-ism that conservatives use as their crutch to avoid the real issues (and solutions), anyway?
I love when people try to claim whites/western civilization/Europe/America or whatever has come up with some great recipe for success. It’s always white people who come from The West who say it too. I don’t think it’s a recipe that people in the other, less-pasty parts of the world were so thrilled about… the recipe being two scoops of pure racism, three scoops of infectious disease, two cups of superior military technology, and a dash or 30 of not giving a damn about anyone else’s right to life, liberty, and private property.
Perhaps Derbyshire should read more humor sites. He might eventually realize that the crap he’s peddling is just that.
You know, I just want to note something about the irony of VDARE’s name — if Virginia Dare survived whatever happened to the Roanoke colony, she most likely grew up among native Americans. I’m going to go ahead and guess that would make their pointy Nazi heads explode if it could be proven.