Brian Leiter reports on a shiny new neo-Nazi blog site…for academic philosophers. Although who knows? Most of the contributors are using pseudonyms (actually, it looks like all are hiding their identities), so no one knows what kind of unqualified riff-raff are posting there. Although judging by the excerpts Leiter has posted, they are mostly awful neo-Nazi scum. Like this.
Now, if there really are racial differences in intelligence, personality, temperament, and so forth—and there is overwhelming evidence that there are such differences between the races—and these differences contribute to (or give a flavor to, or determine, etc.) the sort of civilization that a race will create, then it is not implausible at all to suggest that Western civilization—by which we mean European civilization—can only be fully and genuinely carried on by people of European biological stock (just as, say, Jewish civilization can only be genuinely or fully carried on by people of Jewish stock). Other races that have some biological similarity to people of European stock may carry European civilization forward to some extent—we could say not genuinely (as do, for example, the Japanese, to some extent, in their appreciation of classical music). But the differences between the race groups will inevitably result in differences in the way that European civilization can be carried out, just as we would expect Europeans (that is, people of European biological stock) to be able to carry on with Japanese civilization in a limited manner but never genuinely.
That could have come straight from Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and the actual author would probably consider that a compliment.
But they can’t all be that bad, can they? Yup. I looked for myself. Here’s one arguing against affirmative action, with a lovely header image straight from the racist image collection of the alt-right.
…if we have any worries about ‘systemic’ bias and unfairness, it seems hard to deny that the massive over-representation of Jews tends to create a ‘chilly climate’ for people whose interests conflict with theirs, that Jews may tend to be a little nepotistic or even hostile to non-Jewish groups, and that this may tend to operate in the form of ‘systemic’ and often implicit bias against others. At least, if we accept the arguments along these lines meant to support claims of ‘systemic’ bias or oppression in support of generic white hegemony, similar and equally compelling arguments hold with respect to Jewish hegemony.
Thus, in deciding who to hire, the committee should always prefer any other kind of candidate over the Jew. If you’re stuck with a short list of straight white males—a bunch of SMWASPs, for example—and just one Jewish guy you should either cancel the search or, if that’s not feasible, you should throw the Jewish guy’s application in the trash without even looking at it. Maybe there should be a freeze on all hiring of Jews, or Jewish men, at least, for the next 30 years. That would open up a lot of positions for other kinds of people, even if we kept on discriminating against non-Jewish straight white males. In fact, depending on some number-crunching we have yet to do, we might well find that discrimination against the non-Jewish whites was not warranted, or that it should be much less intense than it currently is. Anyway, at the very least we should always strongly prefer the non-Jewish straight white male over the Jewish one in those regrettable cases where those are the only two options available to us.
I think someone is a wee bit obsessed with The Jews.
I wonder if they also think it would be perfectly legit to throw the application of the neo-Nazi with the bad philosophy in the trash without even looking at it? We do want to be consistent, after all.
Indiana Jones was a terrible archaeologist, but a great Nazi puncher. We need more Nazi punchers.
and there is overwhelming evidence that there are such differences between the races
This stuff isn’t any better than the classical eugenics badness I was posting here It’s generally full of cause/effect botch and confirmation bias. Go figure.
I will say, though, not being a fan of the social sciences, the eugenicists and nazis really have shit the social sciences hot tub – and the social scientists haven’t done a very good job filtering it out.
PS – once again nazis fail to understand that, under their own world-view, jews are the “master race” and they should be doing whatever they can to cross-breed with them, to improve their gene-lines.
Apparently being fucking ignorant is a nazi trait – but it’s not hereditary.
I’m reading The History of White People. That first quote could have come straight out of the 1850s. The 18fucking50s. Ralph Waldo Emerson could have written it, complete with the reference to “stocks.” Except that then the primary focus would have been not on “European” civilization but “Saxon” racial temperament, which was contrasted with that of the Irish or “Celts” who were racially unsuited to self-government or prosperity.
If. This thesis is undone at the second word.
Synchronicity; I was reading this story earlier, in Australia’s national broadcaster: Classifying humans into races the biggest mistake in history of science.
Yeah, of course Mr. “I’ve got everything figgered out” Super-Programmer has a dim view of the soft sciences… (As RationalWiki would put it, a textbook case of crank magnetism.)
PZ, it was a grave mistake giving that guy his own blog. Thunderfoot-level bad. After all, who in his right mind calls for the assassination of Obama?!?
http://i.imgur.com/vhMqeG9.png
If the incessant “b-but America!” whataboutery hasn’t clued readers in yet, this should on the topic whether you should read anything by Ranum.
(Also, good job being a proper little crony and never publishing my comment, Mr. Caine Super-Pacifist.)
Yeah, I’m totally sure nobody has ever crunched the numbers and found anything about non-jewish white dudes.
applehead #7
You seem to be trying to make several points.
I didn’t get any of them.
I am elderly and sometimes have trouble grasping nuances.
Try again?
Yes, affirmative action is absolutely discrimination against straight white men. That explains why they’re so underrepresented in academia and business, and overrepresented in prison: we’ve taken to hating them.
Okay, I’m going to skip all the moral and justice issues involved b/c everyone else is up to the task of taking them down on that. I just want to mock them for bad sentence logic. Some people think predicate logic is harder, because it’s exacting. But really, sentence logic is supposed to be held to the same standards – each sentence is supposed to be either true or false – while forming logical statements readable to professional philosophers into fully formed, grammatically correct natural sentences that can be understood by the wider community as well.
You have to be able to spell these things out in predicate logic first, before you even attempt to use the messy language of everyday communication to translate your proof (or conditional proof, if you’re relying on premises whose truth value is not yet known) into a widely accessible argument.
But can these Nazis do that? Can they even craft an argument that’s valid, that would work if they took it to another universe where their bullshit premises happened to be true?
Nope:
No. Just no, you fucking idiots. While it is true that if 1, 2 & 3 are each and all true, then, in the most watered down of possible meanings, “it is not implausible … to suggest” anything. If your argument is correct, it’s not implausible to suggest popsicles are nummy. If your argument is correct, it’s not implausible to suggest that DC Comics has assembled a better total oeuvre than Marvel Comics.
Assembling a couple true premises does nothing to an unrelated premise “implausible”. But wait! the Nazis might say. The conclusion is related to the premises.
No it’s not. Even if we accept your premises, the closest you get to anything that related to 4 at all is
But #4 is asserting that
“Can be carried on” is not the same as “will create”.
I can’t build a car. I can drive one.
Fucking Nazis.
CD
Well, I think it’s a nice bit of circular reasoning as well: If Western civilisation is the thing created by people of European stock*, then only people of European stock can create western civilisation.
*I really want a clear definition of that European stock thing. Like, where exactly does the line go and how much intermingling is allowed? One drop?
Nazi philosophy is easy! Just add a lot of ifs!
Now if Nazis weren’t such hideous people, and if they knew some basic human decency and some basics of philosophy, and if they weren’t pulling all this nonsense out of their a**es, then it would not be unreasonable to assume they may be able to some day produce something worth reading.
Quite fun really.
You hear less pretentious versions of this broken thinking in the streets.
People think we live in a museum and Western civilization hasn’t turned totally upside down almost every generation in the last 150 years. We don’t have Western civilization anymore, we have industrial civilization. Everything we do and like and think has been mixed and stirred a hundred times by technology and high-speed migration.
Put on your powdered wig and jam on your harpsichord by candlelight, in the stink of your yearly-washed armpits.
I first became aware of those Jewish stereotype images quite by accident. I was trying to find a cute picture of a cheerful medieval trader to help illustrate some slides I was putting together, for a lesson teaching eleven year olds about the growth of medieval London. I typed the quite innocuous phrase “happy merchant” into google images and… well, I was knee-deep in racism before I knew what was going on.
To be fair, medieval London was absolutely awash with anti-Jewish feeling. I thought it best to find something else though…
It is very revealing how people lump together cultures and civilisations to make themselves look better. Personally I find this whole notion of “Western” civilisation utterly useless as a general taxonomic category, and one will note that it is a term used primarily by people in the United States. It functions to make Americans feel that they’re part of the programme that gave us the highs of European civilisation. In Europe the right-wingers prefer to talk of European civilisation, which, of course, allows Germans and Swedes to feel that they’re the heirs to Greece and Rome.
The terms “Graeco-Roman civilisation” and “Judaeo-Christian” civilisation are also popular, even though they lump together quite different cultures and values. It is just as plausible to talk of Phoeniciano-Graeco-Roman civilisation, or Judaeo-Christiano-Islamic civilisation, but there have been strong cultural movements to dissociate the contributions of the suspiciously middle-eastern Phoenicians from the European Greeks and Romans, and the suspiciously Arabic Muslims from the, again, largely European Jews and Christians. We don’t talk of “Mediterranean Civilisation” much, but perhaps we should do so more. The Egyptians are almost always excluded from these kinds of lumpings for some reason – perhaps because the traditional European response to them for millennnia has been to exoticise and endow with foreign mystique. Yet if Roman-controlled Greece in the first centuries AD can be considered Graeco-Roman, why don’t we habitually call Ptolemaic Egypt Graeco-Egyptian? Perhaps because we privilege Greek culture as proud and rational and dismiss Egyptian culture as mystical nonsense?
And from the other side of the world, the Japanese would be quite surprised to find themselves lumped in with the Chinese as “Eastern” civilisation, and the differences between China and India are even deeper and more profound.
So close to a realization! Yes, any group that feels they are a common tribe will behave in tribal ways. That definitely does include Jews! But also Japanese, Chinese, French, Italians, thousands of ethnic denominations in Africa, and do on.
In modern society we’ve been finding strength in expanding our tribes, so we can talk of “whites” as if that were a thing that made sense.
Anyone who thinks “races” are biologically real should first be required to tell us what “races” of human they think currently exist, and how they identify them. Any actual examination of human genetic diversity would sink their “race=temperament=culture” argument pretty much instantly.
Doesn’t the stupidity of Nazis provide a concise and cogent negation of their contention they are racially superior?
applehead @ 7:
You are not owed space on my blog. I warned you early on that I don’t tolerate trolls or assholes much. By the way, that’s Ms. Caine Super-Pacifist.
I expect the author of that little screed is perfectly okay with the nepotism minded Trump. I wonder if the Jewish son-in-law and daughter are cool too.
slight, minor, derail.
re “race”.
Ancestry.com advertisements on boobtube seem to be nudging “race” as pure fantasy, with testimonials. A random patron starts, “I always prided myself as a (True, [not said]) Scotsman, kilts, bagpipes the entire array. Then did my DNA analysis, and discovered I’m ~50% German!, So now it’s lederhosen et all. *big smile*”
Others show pie charts of ancestry, one showing large chunk African, plus another European, etc.
maybe baby steps, little nudges away from “race” shit. Still, better than silent acceptance.
In defense of the benighted 1850s, it was common to hear politicians speak of “stocks” of people through at least World War I– there are several quotes from Winston Churchill outright calling for the mass sterilization of inferior “stocks” of Britons.
And let’s be clear, a lot of Americans never stopped talking about people as livestock, they just found euphemisms. This also applies to certain “liberal” tropes like “Idiocracy,” which is as crass a eugenic argument as anything the early 20th Century cooked up.
Yeah I have mixed feelings about Idiocracy.
If you take out the eugenics/classist backstory, it’s a pretty wicked parody of our actual world here and now. In a world of idiots 500 years from now, Fox News reigns bigger than ever.
Churchill is known for being racist, so no surprise there.
Ah Heidegger would be proud. Not a Godwin. He was literally a Nazi. Fucking Nazis.
The first one looks like something neo-Nazis might dabble in. How do you conclude that the second is anything other than effective satire on AA/PC/SJW run amok?
Speaking of scum, and intellectually dishonest leftist scum at that, why do you seem to assign so much credibility to Brian Leiter?
The Ultimate Philosopher (heh):
Informative question, redolent as it is of the genetic fallacy.