I keep getting told by ignorant regressives that our universities exclude radical and conservative ideas — that somehow, these institutions that value the free exchange of ideas so much that they have this thing called “tenure” to protect people who say stuff offensive to conventionality are actually dedicated to concealing the True Facts, whatever they may be, that can only be seen by Classical Liberals and Libertarians who have the clear sight.
It’s all nonsense. I’ve been to creationist talks on college campuses — it’s fairly routine, and that bullshit is about as openly counterfactual as you can get. Milo Yiannopoulos spoke at the University of Minnesota last year, and that bozo is creepy and wrong, but he got to babble in a university facility. Heck, I’ve spoken on university campuses all around the country, and you all know what a wacko I am. It takes being truly violent or hateful to get yourself booted off of a campus.
So I am not surprised that University College London hosted a eugenics conference now. In the 21st century. In one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. Even though they’re mainly reduced to preaching at churches nowadays, the Discovery Institute is still having an event at Seattle Pacific University in March. This shit is still dribbling out everywhere, and they love to borrow the respectability of a university building to dress up their turds.
But this UCL conference also exhibits another interesting phenomenon. It features a whole sewage pit full of well known racists.
A central figure in the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) is the white nationalist, extremist Richard Lynn, who has called for the “phasing out” of the “populations of incompetent cultures.” Lynn, who is President of the Ulster Institute for Social Research (UISR), spoke at the conference 2015 and 2016, along with four of the six members of the UISR’s Academic Advisory Council.
Lynn’s UISR runs the journal Mankind Quarterly, whose founders include a leading member of Mussolini’s eugenics taskforce, and whose board once boasted Nazi Joseph Mengele’s personal mentor.
Six members of the current board, including editor-in-chief Gerhard Meisenberg, spoke at both the 2015 and 2016 conferences, while a further 16 LCI speakers have written for the journal in recent years. In total, 82% of those who spoke at both 2015 and 2016 conferences are directly associated with either UISR or Mankind Quarterly.
The UISR is bankrolled by Lynn and Meisenberg’s Pioneer Fund, a Southern Poverty Law Centre-listed hate group founded by Nazi sympathisers with the purpose of promoting “racial betterment”.
Beneficiaries of the fund include a magazine devoted to a “penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question,” and Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance, whose conferences have hosted prominent far-right figures Richard Spencer (an white supremancist who gained prominence after Trump’s election), Nick Griffin (ex-leader of the British National Party), and David Duke (another white supremacist, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan).
Helmuth Nyborg, a member of the UISR Academic Advisory Council, gave a lecture at last year’s American Renaissance conference which argued that Denmark’s gene pool would suffer from immigration from the Middle East. Nyborg spoke at the LCI in both 2015 and 2016. He has written numerous articles for Mankind Quarterly as well as a book for the UISR memorializing the former head of the Pioneer Fund, white nationalist J. P. Rushton.
James Thompson, the honorary UCL academic who acts as the host of the conference, is a member of the UISR Academic Advisory Council. His political leanings are betrayed by his public Twitter account, where he follows prominent white supremacists including Richard Spencer (who follows him back), Virginia Dare, American Renaissance, Brett Stevens, the Traditional Britain Group, Charles Murray and Jared Taylor.
But that isn’t the interesting part. Those people are boringly familiar, the same mob of contemptible racist jerks who show up all the time and get far more attention than they deserve. What’s interesting is yet another example of kook magnetism. People who have vile views about the personhood of different racial groups also seem to attract people who have vile views about consent and sex. Why do these racist fronts always seem to have a few people with abominable ideas about pedophilia?
Another major organiser of the LCI is Emil Kirkegaard, who has attended all four conferences and even designed the website. Although he refers to himself as a “polymath” and Thompson describes him as a “very bright young guy”, Kirkegaard is not an academic. His highest qualification is a Bachelor’s in linguistics.
Having dropped out of his Masters degree, instead preferring to be “self-taught in various subjects”, Kirkegaard now runs OpenPsych, a platform for non-peer reviewed psychology papers, along with Davide Piffer of Mankind Quarterly. Piffer is a fellow LCI-speaker, and was praised by Richard Lynn as having done “brilliant work identifying the genes responsible for race differences in intelligence.”
Authors on OpenPsych include Kevin MacDonald, described by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as “the neo-Nazi movement’s favourite academic”, who praised Anders Breivik as a “serious political thinker with a great many insights and some good practical ideas on strategy.”
I know, any article about these kinds of conferences is just an unrelenting geyser of name dropping of awful people, and it’s hard to stop listing the appalling associations, but lets just take a look at Kirkegaard. He’s one of those anti-semitic ‘white genocide’ lunatics, but that’s not even the worst part of his character: he has a way to justify raping children. I’ll put it below the fold; you may not want to continue at this point.
By far the most disturbing of part of Kirkegaard’s internet presence, however, is a blog-post in which he justifies child rape. He states that a ‘compromise’ with paedophiles could be:
“having sex with a sleeping child without them knowing it (so, using sleeping medicine. If they dont notice it is difficult to see how they cud be harmed, even if it is rape. One must distinguish between rape becus the other was disconsenting (wanting to not have sex), and rape becus the other is not consenting, but not disconsenting either.”
He qualifies this with a note that “bodily harm” would undermine this justification, and especially “with small children since their bodily openings are not large enuf [sic] for a regular sized male penis. To avoid this one shud [sic] not penetrate.”
See? Rape is OK if you drug your victim into unconsciousness first! What a thoughtful philosophical idea. We could discuss it if you wanted, except that the diazepam & ketamine cocktail I injected you with has made you all limp and non-responsive and oh so very sexy, so there are some other things I’m going to do first. Don’t worry, I’ll be considerate and clean you up afterwards. That makes it OK.
So my question is…what does it take to get yourself booted out of a movement like this? I guess if your movement is one that is promoting the idea of marching Jews into cattle-cars there might be a very high bar of odiousness that you have to overcome, but still, you’d think there’d be an uncrossable line somewhere.
Maybe not. Maybe their commitment to free speech is so pure and perfect that they’ll allow child-rapers as well as race-hating fanatics to not just participate in, but organize their meetings.
Eeeeewwwww! There is not enough brain bleach in the world after that.
They’re not even trying to hide their ideas much, are they?
I seem to remember a post by PZed some years back in which a libertarian made basically the same argument — raping an unconscious woman is not really rape because no damage was done. It was reprehensible then. It is still reprehensible.
Wow… just, wow… I’m always floored by the willful dismissal of the agency of others, especially by rapists who have yet to be exposed. Glad i had a light breakfast.
Queue him being quoted in Skeptic Magazine and retweeted by Daniel Dennett.
It’s such a pity that we can’t choose to do unto others as they wish to do unto others.
You want to “phase out incompetent cultures”? Be my guest. You first.
Rape is OK if the victim is knocked out? How nice of you to allow people to do that to you.
For his next trick, he’s going to write about the moral virtues of slave ownership, right?
taking all the cash in the wallet of a sleeping person without them knowing it (so, use sleeping medicine). If they don’t object at that very instant than obviously they are okay with the transaction
One must distinguish between taking all the cash from someone who objects, and from someone who has been drugged and so cannot confirm their approval.
(I’m actually a bit uncomfortable with this analogy as it could be construed as equating child rape with theft.)
Since the victim did not consent to being put to sleep, or ingesting the medication in the first place the whole line of ‘argumentation’ is moot anyway.
http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=3229
Context matters… Somewhat.
In the immortal words of Carole Pope: “Birds of a feather … flock together … yes they do”
(Minor aside – somebody gave this guy a degree in linguistics?! Do you think he might try learning English before trying to write in it?)
Jesus fucking Christ. What a reprehensible piece of human garbage.
If we were going to “phase out incompetent cultures”, the white supremacists and Nazis would be on top of the list and gone by tomorrow morning.
They do have a long history and it isn’t good.
So, not discounting the child rapists, but . . . what exactly is the Jewish Question? Is it an ancient riddle of some kind?
There’s a paragraph of great interest to Brits there, though it may have passed over others:
For the saga of Young’s appointment to and resignation from a new national body “designed to encourage the growth of a competitive market that informs student choice, to intervene when the market is failing in areas such as equal access, and protect the interest of its consumers (students, government, and wider society)”, see https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/09/toby-young-resigns-office-for-students
Private Eye today had more on Young’s relationship with LCI; as well as attending (it’s invitation-only) last year, Young said LCI had been “like a meeting of Charter 77 in Vaclav Havel’s flat in Prague in the 1970s” (not online, I’m afraid).
Up until his resignation, the Tory government was backing Young as suitable for the body to control higher education in the UK. The more we find out, the more we see what an awful human being he is.
Assuming the point isn’t whooshing over my head, and that the reference in the OP’s quote is related to one or more of the historical meanings, then start with the summary from Ye Pfffft! of All Knowledge:
Given stuff like in the OP’s quotes, I rather suspect that the intended meaning in the OP’s quotes is very close to that of the nazi code.
On the “Jewish Question”, it’s also worth noting it’s widely discussed as “the JQ” (to avoid attention, I suppose) in alt-right circles today – see https://forward.com/news/356773/among-white-nationalists-catchy-new-shorthand-for-the-jewish-question/ .
blf @8
“(I’m actually a bit uncomfortable with this analogy as it could be construed as equating child rape with theft.)”
Understandable.
On the other paw, they are both deliberate violations of a person’s boundaries, justified with “but they didn’t say I couldn’t.”
The people who still favour eugenics generally base it on a cartoon version of evolution, genetics, and race. They treat them as if they were simple chemical reactions, or mixing of paint.
I woke up in the middle of a rape. Does he mean that it wouldn’t have been rape if I hadn’t woken? That somehow I wouldn’t have known in the morning that something was different, so it wouldn’t matter?
When what made that rape so much more infuriating was that it took advantage of an essential down time, so that sleeping could never again feel safe. 40 years later, it still doesn’t.
And whether I had been 3, instead of 30, doesn’t change the situation. Does he think a 3 year old girl child wouldn’t be sore the next day? That a doctor, years later, wouldn’t start asking strange questions, alerting her to the changes made back when she couldn’t remember? That her dreams wouldn’t include heavy monsters?
No damage done? Not unless you consider that the kid is actually a person.
The research polling data on Americans’ views on free speech issues that I’ve seen reveals that:
1) There is a large minority (30-40%) of the American public that would happily outlaw the right to say offensive things (the numbers fluctuate depending on what the offensive things are); and
2) Support for free speech is actually higher among college graduates, contra the notion that colleges are pumping out bunches of anti-freedom librul snowflakes.
two interesting things to think about.
1) By that logic you could rape literally anyone that you could anesthetize and it would not be criminal by his logic.
2) Considering 1 it is telling that he immediately thinks of using this in regards to children.
Remind me not to leave literally anyone alone with that guy.
Oh, like that one that invaded half the world for spices and still doesn’t fucking use any?
Acting like a decent human being.
So, if this schmuck actually believed in his “logic” – how come he’s not making money on the side? He should be renting out his drugged body at night. He claims there’s no harm, right?
Some years back there was an outspoken atheist in the U.S., a lawyer by trade, who went off the rails and got into ideological anti-semitism. When the rest of organized atheism rejected him, he joined one of the White-supremacist organizations… but then they threw him out because he had a Chinese wife and a half-Chinese daughter. He protested that that was all before he saw the Light, but they did not accept that as an excuse. So… what does it take to get yourself booted out of a movement like that? Race-mixing.
1. These aren’t conservative speakers, they’re nutjobs. Yes, freedom of speech applies to nutjobs as well. If people like you didn’t give them so much attention, they wouldn’t have such a big audience.
2. This doesn’t explain why Ben Shapiro was denied the opportunity to speak at UCLA. And when that decision was rescinded, why he was given a tiny auditorium for his speech. Nor does it explain why violent protests were held outside the venue of his speech.
3. Is Kirkegaards interesting spelling some kind of inside joke? Or does he perhaps have a mental disorder or a brain tumor?
4. As Anders Kehlet points out, you’re completely ignoring the context. Not only that, you’re also ignoring the fact that Kirkegaard flatly states that the best solution for pedophiles is physical or chemical castration.
5.
https://www.thecut.com/2017/02/salon-shouldnt-have-unpublished-its-pedophilia-article.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20151219064006/http://www.salon.com/2015/09/21/im_a_pedophile_but_not_a_monster
When Salon has a resident pedophile in their midst, is it really alright to ignore that and go after the “right-leaning” (he’s not right-leaning, he’s an anomaly that doesn’t fit on the political spectrum) guy who’s waxing philosophical? You seem to be convinced that conservatives support pedophiles, while really it’s the left that does. Conservatives are the party of stability, liberals are the party of “change”.
I am not at all surprised that Talibangelical crackpots would hold an event as Seattle Pacific University: SPU is a private Christian college controlled by “Free Methodists,” a Holiness denomination that makes the Assemblies of God look open minded and liberal. As I recall, SPU lost all funding support from Washington State a few years back, because the state was finally refusing to fund schools that violated state anti-discrimination laws. (SPU had and still has a policy that gay students will be either “counseled” — read: subjected to intense conversion therapy — or kicked out for violating the school’s Code of Conduct if they refuse “counseling.”)
So really, it is EXACTLY the kind of place that would welcome the Discovery Institute with open arms.
Azkyroth
Thank you for that. I really needed a laugh.
@27
A former Miss Arizona said Donald Trump barged into a dressing room with naked contestants during the 2001 Miss USA pageant. Four former Miss Teen USA contestants told BuzzFeed that Trump did the same thing in 1997 – with girls as young as 15.
Also
>Roy Moore
This one is easy: he would be fine with having it done to him.
On Toby Young (see @15), ‘Serious failing’: inquiry to scrutinise Toby Young’s OfS appointment:
I have no idea what when where &tc for the alleged Canadian conference(s? — there may be more than one).
@27
Are you joking?
1. These people have far more in common with mainstream conservatives than they do with anyone else. Recently, I’ve been seeing more and more of the people that you would consider real conservatives repeating the same rhetoric as the sort of racists attending this conference. These racists are actively trying to inject their ideology into mainstream conservatism. Failing to oppose people like Spencer let’s their beliefs spread unchallenged.
2. Incidents where people like Shapiro get denied a venue are the exception to the rule. Plenty of regressive assholes still get to say their piece at universities. Also, having the right to speak doesn’t mean people can’t protest your views. I’ve heard that protestors disrupted the speech, but I haven’t heard about any of the protestors physically attacking people.
3. It’s likely just lazy writing on Kierkegaard’s part.
4. Kierkegaard was framing letting pedophiles molest unconscious children as a “compromise”. I fail to see how it’s not disturbing for him to even float this idea, whether or not he thinks that some other solution is ideal. The other issue is the fucked up notion of consent he has here, where there’s apparently no harm done if the child doesn’t know what happened. Kierkegaard shouldn’t have even brought the idea up. Why are you even defending him if you think he’s a nutjob and not a conservative?
5. I skimmed the salon article. The idea seemed to be that people with pedophilic urges who are repulsed by them should be helped to fight those urges. Unlike what Kierkegaard said, I saw nothing suggesting that letting pedophiles molest children was even on the table. You’re really grasping at straws here if you think that this proves progressives are okay with child molestation.
Also, as Vicec pointed out, progressives aren’t the ones who defended an accused child molester by suggesting that it would be okay for a 30-year-old to be in a relationship with teenagers, or that it shouldn’t matter because it happened a long time ago, or that it shouldn’t matter because winning the Senate seat and imposing their ideology was more important.
Conservative Christians also seemed to be far more interested in defending Josh Duggar than they were in expressing sympathy to his victims.
Oh yeah, there was also Milo Yiannopolous defending pedophile priests, although admittedly at least some people cut ties with him after that
raven@10-
Funny, isn’t it, how white supremacists are usually some of the biggest losers you’ll ever run into?
For some reason reading the above makes me think post natal abortion would be a great idea. they can of course be consenting or dis-consenting, and penis size not an issue.
Never thought I’d live to see ANYBODY bringing out such a sick defense of pedophilia