Libertarian Realist

Race Is a Skeletal Construct

2012-02-19T16:07:00.000-08:00

Dogmatic anti-racism (prescriptive egalitarianism) is false and destructive.

Scientists Call for End to Race Denial

http://sciencefocus.com/forum/scientists-call-for-end-to-race-denial-t530.html

Boas, Bones, and Race

http://www.rps.psu.edu/0305/boas.html

The Demographic Decline of Switzerland

2012-02-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

An American traveler's take on the natural beauty of Switzerland, the Swiss people, and the changing face of the country known for its cheese, its prosperity, and its peaceful nature.

My commentary on the video:

2012-02-01T19:01:00.000-08:00

Liberal Hypocrite Nyan Cat

2012-01-23T11:56:00.000-08:00

Happy MLK Day

2012-01-16T11:06:00.000-08:00

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Anti-Rights Leader

By Thomas Stelene

America regards Martin Luther King, Jr. as a crusader who continued the Founders' work. Americans view him as a martyr for freedom and honor him with a holiday; people from all sides of the political spectrum revere him and laymen respect him. Nobody questions King's supposed belief in liberty for all.

But how many people know what King actually believed? Evidently, very few, because King's beliefs are incompatible with America's founding principles. He states in his book Why We Can't Wait that the collectivistic cliché "no man is an island" will in the future "find its truest application in the United States."

King's "civil rights" movement caused the loss of individual freedom, not the expansion of it. This is demonstrated in King's view of private segregation as "oppression." Granted segregation was psychologically "oppressive" because it was anti-individualistic and thus caused blacks to have anxiety, resentment toward whites, and such. But in itself, private segregation does not violate anyone's political freedom. Only force and fraud can infringe freedom. Private segregation involves neither.

A restaurant owner has the right to set the terms of how his property may be used and he has the right to associate with whom he pleases. His decision to segregate or even prohibit blacks, whites, drunkards, albinos, or whoever, is his right because it is his restaurant (the soundness of his reasoning is another matter). Those people are free to go elsewhere. They are free to try to persuade him to change his mind. They are also free to boycott and peacefully demonstrate.

It is pounded into our heads that "discrimination" oppresses minorities. According to Webster's Universal Dictionary of 1936, "discriminate" means "to distinguish; to observe the difference between; to select from others." In Webster's New World Dictionary of 1974, "discrimination" has an additional meaning: "a showing of partiality or prejudice in treatment; specif., action or policies directed against the welfare of minority groups." Before the left's politics corrupted our language, there was no mention of "minorities" nor any implied evaluation that discrimination is "bad" because such politically-charged commentaries were rightly regarded as non-essential to the definition.

Collectivists hate even legitimate forms of discrimination. Discrimination means individual value judgment, so they vilify it. They want universal sameness: an end to individual thought. That is part of their basis for so-called "civil" rights.

King established "civil rights" as a solution to "discrimination." The term "civil rights" invokes the context of society, as if these are a specific category of rights. The fact is that King's "civil rights" violate real rights.

Ayn Rand defined rights as "the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life." Rights only apply to freedom of action. "Man holds these rights, not from the Collective nor for the Collective, but against the Collective -- as a barrier which the Collective cannot cross." And most importantly, a right "is that which can be exercised without anyone's permission." That means a man does not need others in the exercising of his rights; he only needs protection from them.

When a white refuses to hire or promote a black because of race, or when a white property owner practices segregation or prohibition of blacks on his property, King claimed that blacks' "civil rights" were violated. But how can these be violations of a black man's freedom to act? No man has a right to be hired. No man has a right to be promoted (unless there's a violation of a contract). No man has the right to trespass.

Anything that is called a "civil right" cannot be exercised independently. Unlike a proper right, "civil rights" require that there be others for the agent to act upon. "Civil rights" are the supposed "rights" of the Collective against man. "Civil rights" deny the right of property use and the right to freely associate, which is the denial of the right to act on one's thoughts.

Another of King's bad ideas is the notion that economic and political power are the same. Rand attributed that mistake to "evading the difference between trade and force." But what would happen to "civil rights" if employers went on strike, like the "civil right" to not be "discriminated" against in hiring? Could any "civil rights" be exercised? No, they could not even exist because they demand that other men provide something to the man exercising his "civil rights."

What if failing businessmen coalesced into a new "civil rights" movement, asserting their right to stay in business and claimed people were violating their "civil rights" by refusing to buy their products and services? After all, consumers are "discriminating" against them, thus causing them to face bankruptcy. Obviously a "civil rights" law for entrepreneurs would give them a privileged status and allow them to exploit consumers.

But that is exactly what "civil rights" are -- legal privileges to exploit others. Furthermore, "civil rights" keep the alleged beneficiaries in a state of dependence because the implication is that in order to have rights other men are needed. As Rand said, "You don't gain independence by starting on a subsidy." "Civil rights" negate independence. Genuine rights affirm independence.

King claimed "civil rights" are supposed to address the inequalities stemming from "discrimination," so that we are all equal, like the Declaration of Independence says. But "all men are created equal" is meant in a political context, not any other. It means that the people's servant, the government, must treat them as equals. Men are unequal in intellect, character, and wealth, but those inequalities should be irrelevant to proper government. "All men are created equal" does not mean that government must force men to treat or view each other as equals. That government would be a dictatorship.

"Civil rights" obfuscate rights with alleged "needs" and wants. Egalitarian collectivists like King concocted government-enforced claims on others in the form of collective "civil rights" to ostensibly guarantee equal outcomes.

Everyone has the right to pursue needs and wants, but there is no right to the automatic satisfaction of them at the expense of the rights of others. Rights pertain to individual actions, which may or may not produce the actor's desired results, depending on his ability, intelligence, etc.

King demonstrated his utter contempt for individual merit and individual rights when he demanded that blacks be given special treatment and compensation from the government. King wrote: "The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures" including racial quotas in hiring. He predicted that inevitably "a broad-based legion of the deprived, White and Negro, will coalesce and restructure an old order based too long on injustice." He called for a "Bill of Rights of the Disadvantaged" that would expand those "compensatory measures," meaning, unearned privileges, to any other groups regarded by collectivist-egalitarians as "oppressed."

Under King's morality, political freedom is impossible. Those who claim to have "civil rights" claim the legal privilege to exploit others. When these victims do not comply, the privileged scream that their "civil rights" were violated. When people lack the necessary philosophical knowledge to differentiate between genuine liberty and its opposite, they will accept the fraud of "civil rights."

13-year-old Genius

2012-01-16T00:20:00.000-08:00

Psychologists who study causes of intelligence assign a value of greater than 50% to genetics. It's easy to grasp why when focusing on child prodigies who do exceptional things at young ages. This 60 Minutes story just aired tonight:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57358845/jake-math-prodigy-proud-of-his-autism/

Being mediocre is also genetic. It's just less obvious.

Gender and Intelligence

2012-01-14T02:13:00.000-08:00

Science sheds light on why feminists aren't the brightest of the bright.

(Normal speed.)

(21% accelerated.)

Video Rejected by YouTube

2012-01-14T00:47:00.000-08:00

WTF? I uploaded a 44 min. video a week ago. Now my 18 min. video is being rejected for being "too long." It seems my channel is under attack.

Is GPS "Avoid Ghetto" App Racist?

2012-01-13T02:07:00.000-08:00

Anti-racist is a code word for anti-mind.

Angry White Male Rant on Meryl Streep Going Bonkers for Women's History

2011-12-29T18:18:00.000-08:00

The Bullshittery of Self-Esteem

2011-12-18T14:07:00.000-08:00

The self-esteem industry Nathaniel Branden helped launch fosters unrealistic assessments of self and others.

Branden wants people to believe that reading his books is key to attaining this thing called self-esteem. It's just a byproduct of one's own nature, circumstances, and choices.

Anything inconsistent with reality and the concepts derived from it through reason is invalid philosophically and unnecessary psychologically.

The responses race equalitarians give when their views on race are challenged are plainly indicative of their emotionalist and idealist psychology. If positive claim X about race makes them feel uncomfortable or conflicts with their ideal of all races being innately equal, then positive claim X is transmuted into a normative claim in their minds so that the claim and the individual making it can be denounced via a moral rationalization that is irrelevant to the claim's objective truth or falsehood.

Nazism Is Irrational

2011-12-05T01:31:00.000-08:00

Jeffersonian libertarian race realism shares nothing fundamental in common with Hitlerian fascism.

James Watson on Race and Intelligence

2011-11-29T19:53:00.000-08:00

"There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

- James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA

On Ayn Rand on Racism

2011-11-24T22:34:00.000-08:00

Ayn Rand repudiated collectivism in all forms, but she reserved her most strident and sweeping condemnation for what she regarded as collectivism applied to racial identity. She wrote, “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage…”

This oft-quoted passage from The Virtue of Selfishness is, of course, intended to be an affirmation of individualism. But, as I shall argue forthwith, Rand’s overly broad conception of racism affirms premises of political correctness that stifle independent thinking.

According to Rand, asserting that race carries moral or social (which subsumes political) significance constitutes racism. A Black Panther who advocates killing white babies is surely, then, a racist, insofar as he regards whites as morally less deserving of a right to life than blacks.

But a racist in Rand’s lexicon, as in the Orwellian lexicon of political correctness, can also be anyone who studies racial variation honestly and in full context, taking into account aspects of it that are socially significant. An evolutionary biologist who offers an explanation for the disproportionate success of sub-Saharan Africans in sprinting, based on their longer limbs and higher centers of gravity as compared to other races, risks facing the same charge as a militant Black Panther: racist. (Though for political correctness’ most militant adherents, only the scientist would be considered racist. Blacks, they say, can’t be racist, and ethnocentric blacks are automatically deemed civil rights activists.)

Racial variation in athletic ability arguably doesn’t – or shouldn’t – carry much social significance. But racial variation in intelligence – the very attribute that distinguishes the human species from all others and makes wealthy, free societies possible – surely is socially significant. A geneticist who seeks to identify markers for East Asian aptitude in mathematics, or for Europeans’ higher scores on tests of verbal ability as compared to Africans, will be branded a racist regardless of whether the findings are objectively true.

The geneticist will be condemned not for ascribing moral superiority to any one race over another, but simply for making an assertion of fact pertaining to the distribution of genes that code for intelligence. The only way a geneticist or an evolutionary biologist can be sure to avoid being the target of a “racist” epithet coming from the politically correct thought police or a strict adherent of Rand’s definition of racism is to profess a belief that cognitive capacity is distributed roughly equally among all branches of the human species, in spite of:

the fact that biogeographical branches, or races, of humanity possess characteristic, measurably distinguishable skull morphologies that affect brain size and structure;

the impossibly low probability in evolutionary theory that cognitive adaptations would be exempt from the same adaptive processes that formed variations in physical traits;

the consistency and persistency of racial IQ orderings around the world that no real-world combination of cultural, political, and economic influences has proven capable of reordering.

It’s not that the weight of the evidence augers against the premise that all races are equally equipped cognitively. It’s that there is no evidence to weigh in consideration of the equalitarian hypothesis even being plausible. Equalitarianism is pure idealism.

There isn’t a single nation, a single city, a single school district anywhere in the world where black students perform at or above white and Oriental students on average. Yes, some individual blacks do excel academically. Cognitive capacity, as with height, nose width, vocal strength, and other phenotypes, is distributed in a range that approximately takes the shape of a bell curve for both blacks and whites, respectively. The bell curves for blacks and whites overlap, so there is a fair chance that a random black person would be more intelligent than a white person selected at random. But there is virtually no chance that a large population of blacks would be endowed with mental hardware that functions on par with a large population of whites.

The average IQ score of blacks in the U.S. is slightly more than one full standard deviation lower than the average for whites. The IQ gap has held steady for as long as it has been measured – even going back to the days of segregated schools – increasing modestly in some years and decreasing modestly in others. Averages matter because they have long-term predictive power. If a black population were to completely replace a white population in a geographic area (as has nearly occurred in Detroit, for example, which went from 90% white to 90% black in the latter half of the twentieth century), the social consequences would necessarily be significant.

They would be as predictable as the consequences of lowering that population’s average IQ by one full standard deviation: more poverty, more crime, more corruption, more dysfunction, and less freedom for generations to come. From Detroit, to Rio de Janeiro, to London, every non-African city on Earth that has attempted to integrate African populations has experienced varying degrees of these very predictable consequences.

Under the regime of political correctness, welcoming more African diversity is deemed to be a moral virtue. But proffering an accurate prediction of the effects of African diversity is verboten.

Given that the United Nations projects the population of Africa will triple in this century, growing by 2.6 billion people while the developed world shrinks, citizens in countries that will be subject to massively increasing immigration pressures from Africa should know what to expect.

The equalitarian idealists expect what they’ve been expecting for decades: that which never has been and never will be. Ever since the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the idea of achieving substantive racial equality has trumped recognition of racial realities.

Leading up to the Brown decision, the neologism “racism” popped into popular discourse. The invention of the term coincides with the rise of political correctness, which renders the pursuit of truth inseparable from and subservient to ideological imperatives.

A racist in popular parlance is anyone who says anything about race that is socially unacceptable. What makes one a racist is vague, subjective, ever-changing, and ultimately ungraspable. The arbitrariness of the term means anyone can hurl an accusation of racism against anyone on virtually any grounds.

If the term ever functioned as a valid concept, Rand failed to articulate it. Instead, she conceived of racism as being anything that ties race to moral or social significance. This amounts to a mis-integrated package deal.

The reason why is illustrated by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson. The man who penned, “All men are created equal” didn’t intend to imply what modern-day egalitarians believe: that nature endowed all races with equal attributes. To the contrary, Jefferson believed that blacks were “in reason much inferior” to whites. But he regarded blacks as the equals of whites morally, as far as their basic rights as human beings were concerned.

Jefferson would have found the attempt to lump into a single concept a principle establishing moral equality with one prescribing innate equality in intelligence to be strange and unenlightened. Observations of human attributes are either accurate or inaccurate, irrespective of any notions of morality. As Jefferson urged, “Follow truth wherever it may lead.”

Does age have social significance? Does gender? One’s being eight years old versus eighteen carries social significance in terms of one’s suitability to obtain employment, to serve on a jury, to engage in sexual relations, etc. An eighteen year-old will be treated differently in social situations than an eight year-old, but not because being eighteen makes one morally superior. Similarly, being male or female carries social significance not because one gender is superior to another, but because there are important physiological differences between the two. Does recognition of such differences make one a sexist? Does recognition of age differences make one an ageist? Or does recognition of objective age, sex, and race differences make one a realist?

A conclusion that racial disparities in intelligence are explainable by racial genetics is not a normative assertion. It either corresponds with reality, or it doesn’t. Either the adaptive process over hundreds of thousands of years created unique physiological variations within geographically isolated branches of the human species that extend to their respective brain development, or it didn’t.

The truth can’t be deduced from moral proscriptions against racism, however one wishes to define it. The truth about race is that which corresponds to the reality of race. Efforts to demonize discussions of the social significance of racial lineage are tantamount to efforts from religionists of centuries gone by to prevent astronomers from informing the masses that Earth isn’t the center of the universe.

Those who hurl the charge of “racist” against those who merely identify biological origins and properties of human races are, in effect, declaring that they regard nature itself as racist. They take their idea of racial equalitarianism as a metaphysical starting point and condemn those whose grounding is in a reality that doesn’t conform to idealistic impositions.

Metaphysical realism is the foundation of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Rand made a number of normative assertions that Objectivists widely regard as non-essential to her philosophy. For example, she infamously remarked that it would be improper for a female to run for President of the United States. She also held that homosexuality was disgusting and immoral. Rand’s moral proscriptions on female political ambitions and particular sexual expressions can be rejected as being at odds with more fundamental principles she espoused and with what science now tells us.

We know, for example, that homosexuality is innate to some people’s genetic makeup. They cannot be judged morally for the sexual orientation that nature gave them.

We also know that racial differences that are more than skin deep inevitably do manifest in ways that are socially significant. Black sub-Saharan Africans aren’t immoral for carrying genes that code for relatively low general intelligence; nor are people who identify this fact of reality. Blacks aren’t heroic for carrying genes that give them superior running speed; nor are those who substitute an idea of innate racial equality for the racial variation that is metaphysically given.

Just as Ayn Rand was mistaken to morally impugn homosexuals, she was mistaken to apply a term of condemnation to those who seek the truth, wherever it leads, about the nature and social implications of racial variation. In attempting to package two disparate standards by which racism could be identified – ascription of moral or social significance – into a single concept, Rand created an anti-concept. Without an objective criterion for differentiating a racist from a non-racist, “racist” has no clear meaning other than that of a vacuous insult, which is what the term as it's popularly used, overused, and abused to no end today, functions as.

It’s time for serious advocates of reason and liberty to ditch the anti-conceptual epithets, ditch the unfounded idealism, and pitch any remaining vestiges of political correctness into the ash heap of their personal intellectual history. For too long, too many within and without Objectivist and libertarian circles have felt bound by ideology to evade the realities of race. Evasion is, as Rand herself might well have put it, the lowest, most primitive form of irrationality.

The Geezer Mafia

2011-11-13T00:14:00.000-08:00

Give us our government benefits. Or else...

Herman Cain for President?

2011-10-19T15:02:00.000-07:00

The dumbing down of the electorate -- first Bush, then Palin, now a new low...in the form of Herman Cain. The man who is presently being hailed as the GOP "frontrunner" offers uninformed, non-specific, mostly establishmentarian views. Like Obama, the charismatic Cain is riding on his supposedly inspiring story and his non-vanilla appearance and oratory skills in an era in which "vanilla" has become uncool.

Why We Laugh at White Trash

2011-10-07T00:40:00.000-07:00

There is no black trash.

The Demographic Decline of the United States

2011-09-15T01:55:00.000-07:00

White Americans are set to become a minority. The changing face of the country will have consequences that are far more than cosmetic. Recent news events, along with analysis by Steve Farron, author of The Affirmative Action Hoax, show how and why.

A Self-Hating Unamazing Atheist

2011-09-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

Parting Shot to FSAthe1st (Who Blocked Me)

2011-09-01T17:18:00.000-07:00

When I refer to genera, species, races, hills, mountains, etc. I refer to identification of observable realities. You're the one lost in an incoherent web of social constructs and other rationalizations for your ideological prescriptions which precede observations. You're a nut and would be widely regarded as such if you tried to apply your religious dogmas onto classifications of anything other than human beings.

Is Black a Culture?

2011-08-31T14:52:00.000-07:00

From where does culture come? Culture is an expression of some aspects of the nature of the people who create it. Do black cultural expressions such as mob attacks have at least some genetic precursors? I think so.

Do males exhibit more aggression than females because male behavior is cultural or innate? The options aren't mutually exclusive. What about teenagers? Are they impulsive and rebellious because of culture or something inherent in being a teenager? The law (rightly) presumes that 18-year old men can choose not to engage in crime just as absolutely as 40-year old women can. But that doesn't entail any belief that the crime rates in those groups will ever be equal. Choice is exercised within an individual's own context, and that context includes innate and environmental inputs.

Blacks everywhere, from South Africa to Britain to Brazil to the U.S., exhibit high rates of violent crime relative to other races in those same countries. Different cultures around the world don't seem to produce different results -- at least not different enough to make racial crime disparities go away.

But the strongest evidence for black crime being partly explainable by genetics are actual physiological characteristics associated with blacks. They include differences in skull shape and size which correspond to differences in brain structure, which help explain why blacks have an average IQ of about 80, compared to 100 for whites and 105 for East Asians. (Black IQs are closer to 70 in most sub-Saharan African countries, where negroid genetics are purer than in blacks in the U.S., who average around 25% white/other admixture.) Lower IQ is correlated with less rational, more impulsive behavior. Also, blacks tend to have higher testosterone levels, which correlates positively with aggressiveness.

Variation exists in the distribution of the hormones, brain size and shape, and other factors that correlate with statistical variation in crime rates among races. As Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute reports: "The face of violent crime in New York, in other words, like in every other large American city, is almost exclusively black and brown... Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009."

The premise of innate racial differences predicts the persistency and consistency of racial crime disparities across time, culture, politics, geography. The premise of innate racial equality has zero predictive value and no scientific basis. It is a pre-Darwinian notion that supposes human traits appeared suddenly from some source other than the adaptive process which gave different human populations in different parts of the world different traits, some of which pertain to cognitive abilities and behavioral tendencies. Variation in the distribution of hormones, brain size and shape, and other factors correlate with observable variation in crime rates among races and help explain incorrigibly high rates of black crime in particular.

Sweeping Statements about Race

2011-08-30T19:43:00.000-07:00

The principle of individual rights does not mean that a nation at war can't drop a bomb on an enemy nation's city unless it first judges all persons to be killed by the bomb as individually guilty. Individual rights pertain to citizens under the jurisdiction of a government. Foreign policy has to relate to nations and populations as collective entities.

Collective judgments in immigration policy are also necessary, but they are far more benign than war judgments. I don't advocate war on any Muslim countries at this time, but I do advocate restricting the flow of immigration from Muslim countries into secular countries. A nation has a legitimate interest in conducting risk assessments on sources of immigration. Nationality is a useful indicator. Race is also a useful indicator. Those nations and those populations that tend to bring terrorism, gang rape, property crime, disease, or other threats to a country ought to be given less consideration than those that tend to be healthy, peaceful, and productive.

The introduction of Somalis tends to bring down a nation's standard of living. Japanese tend to lift it up. Call this observation "racist" if you want, but the alternatives to "racism" are either: a) willful ignorance (evasion) of the very predictable adverse effects Africans and their offspring will have on a society; or b) an acceptance of moral altruism in service of the desires of any and all foreigners no matter what the costs. U.S. immigration policy is overtly altruistic, most blatantly so in the form of its refugee resettlement program specifically for Somali Muslims on the basis not of their value, but of their troubles.

At the time Ayn Rand came to the U.S., it was the nation's policy (and had been since its inception) to favor immigration from white European countries. The U.S. (and much of Europe for the matter) is too firmly in the suicidal grip of altruism to assert any such policy of unashamed self-interest today. Sweden of all places is being introduced to rampant urban hooliganism and to such horrors as assault rape (the perpetrators of which are almost exclusively non-European) courtesy of third world immigration that the Swedes feel a moral duty to accept under the reigning ideology of political correctness.

Perhaps Japan won't succumb to this evil ideology. I have been to Japan, and the thought of it being flooded with Africans frankly horrifies me. Take a good look at what happened to Detroit after it went from 90% white to 90% black. In spite of Japan's economic woes over the past two decades, there are no Detroits anywhere in Japan, no race riots, no violent flash mobs of the sort that now plague Sweden, France, Britain, Canada, and the U.S., whose African populations are on the rise.

So in sum, sweeping statements about race are very useful in judging foreign populations from the standpoint of immigration policy and in predicting the effects of immigration on nations based on the populations from which they draw.

Deconstructing "Social Constructs"

2011-08-25T14:15:00.000-07:00

Race refers to phenotypically distinct branches of the human species. The concept has sociological implications, but the concept itself refers to human biology, which is constructed genetically, not socially. It is possible for an individual to grasp the concept of race by way of his own observation of groups of individuals who possess visibly distinctive traits, so the existence of race does not require social validation, let alone social construction.

Common observable phenotypes among populations are explained by genetics, not society. But the concept of race has meaning because of the observable manifestations of genetic variations, not the percentage of genetic dissimilarity. Aren't humans 98% chimpanzee genetically? You could break down a human being to all his chemical components that might exist in a laboratory, but those chemicals wouldn't constitute a human, wouldn't distinguish a human conceptually from other existents. The chemistry of humans underlies but does not define humans.

The essence of race is phenotypical variation, not the genotypical variation that underlies it. Phenotypes per se logically can't be sociological. If you are going to call common observable phenotypes among populations such as skin color "social constructions," even though it is possible to observe them outside of a social context because they exist biologically, then you have rendered the term "social construct" meaningless insofar as all concepts would be "social constructs," including the universe itself.

So to be consistent, if I were an astronomer attempting to describe Uranus, you would have to try to undermine the information I'm giving you by telling me that Uranus and all planets are just social constructs. There is some disagreement among astronomers on whether Pluto qualifies as a planet, but there is no disagreement on whether "planet" is a valid concept that describes actual objects in space and differentiates them from other objects, such as comets and stars.

Concepts that reference existents can't be referring to things that are socially constructed. Social constructs could only refer to such things as laws, mores, customs, etc. -- things that don't actually exist in reality, only as concepts derived from social interactions. Anti-discrimination laws are social constructs, but in order for any laws against racial discrimination to be enforceable, races must be presumed to exist. Otherwise, one accused of discrimination could prove his innocence by demonstrating that: He couldn't have possibly discriminated based on race since races don't exist; and social constructs don't have any legal rights or standing to claim discrimination anyway (no "black person" or "white person" who might claim discrimination actually exists except as a social construct, he could argue).

Do you see why the distinction between purely social concepts and actual existents in reality is useful? It's a distinction the Orwellian abusers of language want to obliterate in the name of prescribing an egalitarianism for the human species that nature failed to produce.

Race Is NOT a Social Construct

2011-08-24T11:44:00.000-07:00

The Demographic Decline of Alaska

2011-08-21T13:52:00.000-07:00

A travelogue documenting the social and political construction of racial diversity, black privilege, and white marginalization in Anchorage, Alaska.

Good and Bad Ways to Invest in Gold and Silver

2011-08-19T11:45:00.000-07:00

The Structural Marxism of Anarcho-Austrians

2011-08-10T11:25:00.000-07:00

Some self-described free-market economists of the Austrian school explicitly credit Karl Marx for the analytical framework they employ. A few years ago I attended a seminar put on by the Institute for Humane Studies in which an Austrian economist openly stated that his analytical method was Marxist in nature. He substituted “state” for “bourgeoisie” and saw freedom as an institutional class struggle against the state.

Among those who profess the anarchist strain of Austrian economic thought, structural Marxism is implicit, is not inherent, in their conception of government. They anthropormorphize the abstract concept of government and attribute to government desires and motives that couldn’t actually exist apart from the individuals who make it up.

One cannot understand a particular state simply by referring to one’s own abstract definition of a state and deducing its characteristics. A state could be China or it could be Sealand. A politician could be Robert Mugabe or Ron Paul. Ideas matter. A lot of things matter.

But anarchists have no need for context. They want to smash the state – not particular states for particular reasons, but their reified concept of the state. For anarchists, particular countries or politicians or cultures or populations need not be considered. All they have to do is deduce from their definition of the state. They deduce that it is necessarily preferable for Somalia to be stateless – preferable not merely in comparison to a socialist dictatorship, but preferable in comparison to any conceivable state, including colonial states that have a better track record of producing freedom, prosperity, and order in Africa than does anarchy.

With regard to statelessness in brutish Somalia, Mises Institute scholar Robert P. Murphy writes that "however prosperous and law-abiding a society is, adding an institution of organized violence and theft [his definition of government] will only make things worse." How does he know? Because of his definition of government!

Ludwig Von mises said that economics was “the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything.” This all-encompassing conception of economics is, I think, the source of some of the dogmatism the Austrian school emanates. The idea that everything, including morality and politics, is subsumed by economics conflates economics with philosophy. Of course, values often aren’t expressed in economic terms, but in religious terms or in terms of a secular morality that may eschew the assumptions economist make about individuals being rational, utility-seeking actors.

And politics, or law, doesn’t arise through economic transactions. Law represents coercion or the threat thereof. Law is necessary to some extent to secure property rights, which in turn are a prerequisite for a free-market economy through which individuals’ preferences can manifest peacefully. Anarcho-Austrians disregard this context.

If eliminating all government, as some Austrians prescribe, could be demonstrated to be the most expeditious way of actualizing my political values in a particular country given the totality of the circumstances, then I would support anarchism – but then, only in the particular context so identified, and only as a strategy, as a mechanism for achieving what I value. I value liberty and I value its consequences. That is my ideology. I would never describe my ideology as narrowly as being anti-state, even if for strategic reasons I favored the elimination of a particular state.

Being against states or against statism doesn’t automatically make one a proponent of liberty in the same way that being against religion doesn’t automatically make one a proponent of reason.

An advocate of liberty defines the liberties he values, then seeks a means of implementing them in context. An anarchist takes the obliteration of the state as an absolute principle and leaves liberties undefined and up for grabs in what he terms a market for law.

The basic principles of liberty – which include freedom of speech and association, private property rights, etc. – are based on abstractions from human nature. Human nature does not change meaningfully from one generation to the next. So it gives us a solid foundation for making moral political claims, which is to say defining individual rights.

Implementing the morality of liberty requires taking into account context. One cannot deduce from morality or human nature or definitions or economic theory what type of political system is best suited for a particular society. To attempt to arrive at mechanisms for producing laws through simple deduction would be a dogmatic approach. Dogmatism is characteristic of all strains of structural Marxism, which substitutes a priori political and economic premises for inductive analysis of human beings and human societies.

There are contexts in which constitutional republics are relatively effective in securing liberty and contexts in which non-democratic structures are better equipped to protect property rights against an aggressive majority. There’s no one single answer for every country, every culture, every population in the world. Anarchists suppose there is. Their answer, their only answer, is to smash the state.

Anarchy, State, and Youtubia: Obliteration

2011-08-08T18:09:00.001-07:00

Anarchy, State, and Youtubia: Reality

2011-08-06T12:28:00.000-07:00

Somalification

2011-07-24T02:49:00.000-07:00

From Youtubers to scholars affiliated with the Mises institute, most anarchists I examined recently praise anarchic Somalia. To the extent that their support of anarchy in Somalia contributes to its perpetuation, they own not merely their own abstract stateless intentions but the very particular and readily visible consequences that statelessness in Somalia has wrought.

Among the consequences is the Somalification of Western countries. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled stateless Somalia to escape persecution, largely at the hands of Islamist warlords. Stateless Somalia is such a hellhole for a great many Somalis that they are fleeing to other hellholes within Africa, including neighboring Ethiopia. How desperate do you have to be to dream of a better life as an Ethiopian?

Somali asylum seekers are ending up in Britain, Norway, Sweden, Canada, and the United States by the thousands. Parts of Maine, Tennessee, and Minnesota have been Somalified. Minneapolis now has an area of town known as "Little Mogadishu."

What does it mean to get Somalified? It means being subjected to the characteristics of Somalis. They tend to have low IQs, few if any valuable skills, and often little ability to even communicate in the language of the country that takes them in. They bring culturally hostile, anti-Western worldviews, whose foundations are typically Islamic. Somali Muslims exhibit high rates of welfare dependency and high rates of crime. And it’s not just petty crime. Somali gangs are known to specialize in crimes of a sexual nature, including gang rapes and the trafficking of underage girls who have been forced into prostitution.

I would wish Somalification upon only a nation that I hated passionately. But I don’t hate and could never hate any country passionately enough to wish upon its future generations, its completely innocent babies and its yet unborn, an inheritance of the genes of Somalia.

Who could possibly be for the Somalification of the West? Only its bitterest enemeies. They include avowed enemies such as Muslims and cultural Marxists. They also include unwitting enemies such as open-borders libertarians and anarchists who cheer the Somalis for being ungovernable and support the very conditions from which many Somalis find it necessary to flee. Anarchists would presumably like to see the entire continent of Africa thrown into anarchy and the entire Western world. Africans would scatter across the globe like fire ants whose nests have been destroyed. Those may not be the consequences anarchists desire in their minds, but those are the consequences of anarchy in reality.

Now it is true that regardless of the conditions that exist outside a particular country, it is that country’s responsibility to set its own immigration policy. Western countries allow and even provide financial inducement for Somalification, at least to some extent. Many of the refugees fleeing Africa for Europe are gaining access illegally.

But the sad, inescapable truth is that Western nations have been afflicted with a suicidal ideology. It is rooted in the age-old mind-body dichotomy. Westerners have convinced themselves that nations are mere ideas, that it doesn’t matter who physically populates a country. Muslims understand the demographics is destiny. Through migration and through disproportionately high rates of fertility, Muslims are slowly fulfilling the mission given to them by the Koran: to grant Allah victory through conquest.

It is a conquest that is largely being granted to them without a fight. The West is committing suicide. When you’re dealing with a friend who is suicidal, you don’t give him access to the poison he implicitly craves. You don’t send Somalia or Libya or any other country in Africa into anarchy knowing that a mass exodus will land on Europe’s shores and that Europe will not have the willpower to resist the demographic poison presented to it.

Some libertarians, especially those in Europe, are waking up to the existential threat posed by immigration. Nobody in Europe believes that efforts at integration have been successful. Even establishment multiculturalists such as German chancellor Angela Merkel now publicly acknowledge that multiculturalism has failed. Libertarians can join the left in the deluded belief that more efforts aimed at promoting integration will lead people who hold anti-Western values to change. Or libertarians can get real and realize that what’s happening to their countries is tantamount to an invasion, which is something any true champion of freedom would be obliged to oppose.

Unfortunately, most libertarians are stuck in a 20th century mindset. Then, the sole major threat to freedom and prosperity was statism. That paradigm would still be operative if I were a North Korean. But if I am a Norwegian, being against statism is not sufficient to extricate my country from the unfree fate to which it is likely doomed by the continuation of current demographic trends. A Norway increasingly awash in the ideology of Islam and in the genetics of Africa is a Norway that increasingly ceases to be.

It is not the privatization of roads in Norway that will save its people from the bleak future predicted by demographics. Minarchist ideals require for their implementation a citizenry that values them.

Policies that aren’t ideal are sometimes necessary. War is never ideal, but circumstances sometimes dictate that a war must be waged. Right now the survival of the Norweigian people is at stake. The good news is that no blood needs to be spilled in order to win the battle for survival. If the nations of West employed the same resolve they exhibited with regard to overthrowing Saddam Hussein toward the objective of fostering sustainable demographics – increasing their birth rates and restricting the flow of immigration (and reversing it if feasible) – the West could be saved for future generations.

Anarchy will not save the west. There are anarchists who claim otherwise. Some hypothesize that private legal agencies would perform border security. But most who subscribe to the notion of market anarchism believe that any given individual’s acre of oceanfront property would absolutely be his to use, if he so desires, as a conduit for boatloads of hundreds of foreign migrants every day. They may be hostile. They may be infected with contagious diseases. All they’d need is the ability to access a single mode of transportation, and they could wreak havoc upon the country.

Yes, I know there are alternative ways in which such a situation could be handled in a nation without a state. I’m not interested in “could be’s.” Anything “could be.” Ron Paul could get elected president. I could win the lottery. To express views about what anarchy could be apart from what it is and has been – and it’s never been libertarian in nature – is to express one’s subjective intentions. One anarchist’s desire for open immigration vs. another’s for immigration controls is a debate that takes place entirely in the subjective realm. There is nothing inherent in the concept of anarchy and nothing evidenced by its limited real-world manifestations that make either view objectivity credible.

What immigration would be like in reality under statelessness would probably abhor both types of anarchists. I suspect migration would be neither open nor controlled. Migrants likely would get into a stateless society with relative ease. Some would come as predators. Some would come to work and would risk vigilantism at the hands of anti-immigrant mobs. If I speculated much further than this, I too would be entering the realm of the subjective.

Obama Voters

2011-06-30T01:17:00.000-07:00

"If you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you’re not a racist, you’ll need to vote for someone else in 2012 to prove you’re not an idiot."

All Life on Earth Should Be Destroyed (Satire)

2011-06-29T19:09:00.000-07:00

No one can say what you can't say since what can't be said can't be said unless it's said by someone who says otherwise.

It's Nothing Personal

2011-06-28T14:47:00.000-07:00

It's nothing personal. It's just that I'm exasperated with youtube anarchists and their conflation of "absence of a state" with liberty. I'm for individual rights, objective law, and the preservation of civilized populations against the onslaught of savages at the gates. I'm against the Somalification of what's left of semi-free societies, and I don't give a damn about any anarchist's good intentions projected onto anarchy contra reality. In reality, anarchy doesn't work.

Brain Police

2011-06-16T19:28:00.001-07:00

Free speech!

Baseball's Black Deity

2011-06-08T20:31:00.000-07:00

The national pastime's obsession with Jackie Robinson is a sign of the nation's irrational indulgence in political correctness.

Anarchist seriously injured by own bomb

2011-06-06T02:33:00.000-07:00

June 2, 2011

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — A suspected anarchist in Chile has been seriously injured when a bomb he allegedly carried exploded outside a bank.

Police say 22-year-old Luciano Pitronello Schuffeneger lost his eyesight and may lose both his arms. He's also suffering serious burns and is hospitalized in a drug-induced coma.

Prosecutor Hector Barros is pursuing a terrorism case against 15 anarchists charged in similar bombings.

Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/02/ap/latinamerica/main20068433.shtml#ixzz1OUFU6uef

Thoughts on Anarchism

2011-05-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

Market anarchism is an oxymoronic concept. Markets presume voluntary exchange, which presumes rules against force and fraud, which presumes a final arbiter with coercive power in a given area, which may be described as government, regardless of whether it goes by the name of "legal agency."

The free market presupposes the rule of law, not particular outcomes arising from within the market. We can't predict in any given time or place which genre of music will be popular, let alone which artist. Yet anarchists, instead of advocating the imposition of an objective rule of law, presuppose their ability to predict outcomes favorable to their ideological predispositions in an arbitrary scramble for law where not even majoritarianism, let alone voluntary consent, have been established.

Anarchism in general is a primitive concept for organizing societies. It manifests among primitive peoples inhabiting uncivilized hellholes such as Somalia and Afghanistan, not among the Swiss or the Japanese. Anarchy can be anything in theory. It is warlordism in practice. Why any intelligent, reality-grounded individual would be attracted to it is beyond me.

It's a shame that anyone with some intellectual capacity would waste it on constructing, extrapolating from, and speculating about the floating abstraction that is the libertarian version of the same false utopia Marx promised.

Washington's Illegal Affirmative Action Scam

2011-05-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

Exposed: How state bureaucrats connive to deny citizens equal rights under law.

Obama

2011-05-08T02:22:00.000-07:00

Obama has benefited from black privilege all his adult life. He didn't have to fight RACISM to become president. He cashed in on his race, which was his primary qualification. An end to RACISM in America, which today translates into favoritism toward blacks, would mean the defeat of Obama in favor of a more qualified candidate.

Homosexuality

2011-05-05T20:15:00.000-07:00

"Homosexuality is another threat the West just like immigration."

No, it isn't. There were homosexuals in ancient Greece, probably just as many as there are today. There will be about the same number (proportionally) 50, 100, 200+ years from now.

There is no growing threat from homosexuality. They don't pass on their genes. They come from heterosexual parents!

Moreover, culture and upbringing has virtually nothing to do with whether a person will turn out homosexual. It's almost entirely genetic (that's why you can often identify gay/lesbian people just from their physical appearance). Anyone who is a race realist should be a realist with regard to sexuality, too.

Sentencing Disparities in America

2011-03-07T02:34:00.000-08:00

An Elderly Man Who Conscientiously Objects to Paying U.S. Income Taxes vs. A Thug Who Is So Bereft of Purpose and Morality that He Randomly Beats and Kills a Good Samaritan on a Seattle City Street -- Who Deserves to Spend More Time Behind Bars?

Racial Divergences in Educational Achievement

2011-03-06T15:27:00.000-08:00

To Mr. Burge:

I wonder if by “racism” you he mean the Afrocentrism that is inculcated into black students by schools, textbooks, and popular culture. It shouldn’t be surprising that blacks who are taught to play the role of victim and to have an entitlement mentality tend to have bad attitudes about working hard and taking personal responsibility.

Since there is immense social pressure on blacks to be ethnocentric, those blacks who focus on math, science, literature or other “white” subjects are often marginalized. Ending Black History Month, abolishing African-American Studies programs, and encouraging blacks to study and master real subjects just as whites are would help end the racism that you believe is hampering black academic achievement, wouldn’t it?

You didn’t include any data about Asians. Does racism have anything to do with the fact that Oriental minority students tend to score even higher than whites? I doubt it. The notion of racism holding back Hispanic students is even less likely, since Hispanic isn’t even a race per se (a Hispanic can be partly, mostly, or completely white, brown, or black).

As for poverty, I’d want to see how blacks from poor families compare with blacks from middle-upper income families, how poor blacks compare with poor whites, etc. before concluding as you do that socioeconomic status is the primary determinant of academic performance. Presumably, you have examined such comparisons that isolate poverty as a factor but just didn’t have room to present your findings in your article.

I’m most curious as to how you were able to rule out innate ability as even being one among the many factors that explain why test scores diverge consistently along the same racial lines. Have you found proof that average mental capacity is 100% identical physiologically among all races of the world? Such that not even a fraction of the percentage of black underperformance, for example, could possibly be a natural outcome that is not anyone’s fault and that cannot be changed through cultural, social, philosophical, or political means?

One of My Videos Has Been Parodied

2010-07-19T16:21:00.001-07:00

The person in the following video wants to reduce race to a single feature through which racial differences manifest -- namely, skin color -- so that he can avoid focusing his mind on evidence that race also has something to do with behavioral tendencies, and specifically criminal tendencies, that break down along fairly consistent racial lines.

What this person lacks in reasoning skills he attempts to make up for with his sense of humor. I thought he succeeded fairly well in that regard. I laughed, anyway.

To My Critics

2010-07-19T01:06:00.000-07:00

Being an individualist does not require me to undertake the impossible task of trying to assess the individual character of every single person I might ever encounter in life. It's not wrong to take into account the relative probabilities entailed by some aspect of a person's identity. It's called critical thinking. To fail to engage in it over concerns of how others might perceive my conclusions would be to bury my individuality.

If you believe that race plays no role in intelligence or athleticism or anything beyond "skin pigmentation," you have either never ventured out into the world or are massively evading the realities it presents. I suggest that you read Charles Murray before concluding that libertarianism cannot accommodate a realistic perspective on racial differences.

The U.S. prison population is more than 40% black, even though blacks are only 13% of the total U.S. population. Whites are less than a third of all prisoners even though they are 66% of the population.

I accept that other factors besides race may help to explain part of the racial disparity in crime statistics. But if crime data across cultures, continents, and economies continue to all point to a correlation between race and crime for the next 1,000 years, would that be enough to open your mind to consider with seriousness what Darwin and Jefferson hypothesized generations ago based on their much more limited observations -- that race has something to do with behavior?

A Libertarian Argument Against Open Borders

2010-07-12T14:32:00.000-07:00

Occasionally, we hear the phrase “limousine liberals” used to describe the members of the liberal establishment... It would be equally appropriate,however, to describe some other people as “limousine libertarians”— those who pontificate about open borders while remaining detached from the scenes that their “idealism” generates. They would do well to reflect, in their ivory towers, on whether the freedom they profess for those who are immigrants, if it occurs at all, is to be brought about at the expense of the freedom of those who are not.

-- John Hospers, "A Libertarian Argument Against Open Borders" (http://mises.org/journals/jls/13_2/13_2_3.pdf)

Peikoff on Immigration

2010-07-09T16:05:00.001-07:00

Leonard Peikoff, the leading exponent of Ayn Rand's philosophy of
Objectivism, has come out in favor of Arizona's immigration law
(www.peikoff.com/podcasts). The citizens of that state seek to
protect themselves and their property from crime and from ethnic
and welfare spoils mandated to illegal aliens and their offspring
by federal law. Arizonans' personal and property rights in this
context take moral precedence over foreigners' rights to migrate
freely to Arizona, Peikoff concludes.

To take the side of the Obama administration in this matter would
be an immoral betrayal of citizens who have acted, within the means
available to them, to curtail the violations of their rights. To
take the side of the Obama administration in this matter would also
be tantamount to actively aiding its long-term strategy of
increasing the number of government dependents and diluting the
strength of the opposition to Big Government.

Welcome to My Blog

2010-07-09T00:56:00.001-07:00