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"Great Books" Colleges Not Immune To Cultural Marxism
America’s college students are returning to their campuses as you read this. So, as VDARE.com’s Athena Kerry once did, I am writing to inform you of the desperate state academia is in—from the inside. Unfortunately this means that both my name, and the particular college, I attend must stay secret.
Kerry seems to have assumed that because her college was Catholic, it would not suffer greatly from the Cultural Marxism now often found in higher education. My mistake was similar. I assumed that attending a college featured in VDARE.com contributor John Zmirak's otherwise valuable book All-American Colleges: Top Schools for Conservatives, Old-Fashioned Liberals, and People of Faith would be a place where someone could agree with VDARE.com publicly.
I had followed Zmirak's advice in looking over the college's curriculum and everything seemed right. There were classes on ancient philosophy, the Bible, medieval Christian thought, Shakespeare, etc. Beyond that, there were no required classes on multi-culturalism and there was a place of worship on campus.
The blind spot: I did not have the presence of mind to consider the student body itself. My mistake may seem laughably foolish to some, and perhaps it was, but I cannot emphasize this enough: If you or your children are looking for a college, talk at length with many different students who currently attend. No matter how conservative or traditional the college's curriculum or ethos may seem, a bad student body can ruin it.
Just as a law is useless if it is not enforced, a constitution pointless if not followed, and a culture doomed to death if not respected, a college cannot be much better than its students.
Here are some instructive examples of the mindset that many students now have, even in a place that prides itself in teaching many of the "Great Books":
- In a class on International Relations, Iran came up and I noted how ironic it was that a man as deeply religious as Ruhollah Khomeini would consider the atheist USSR a "lesser Satan" compared to "Great Satan" America, where freedom of religion was respected.
At this, the class stopped as one student after another explained
Wise vs. Bodeker: A Tale of Two “Racism” Films
“Anti-racism” activist Tim Wise has just released the documentary film version of his 2011 book White Like Me, to lavish praise from academics and the Main Stream Media alike.
For example, SLATE’S Aisha Harris proclaimed Are You White? Then You Should Probably Watch This, August 16, 2013. (She’s black, by the way). And The Huffington Post’s C.C. Stinson (also black) wrote in BLACK VOICES, the Huffpo section dedicated to articles of interest to blacks:
“Mr. Wise has been an educator for many years teaching the masses about White Privilege and the psychological effects of our societal norm to ignore it…Numerous professors and subject matter experts are lined up to discuss this issue including John H. Bracey, professor and author of How Racism Harms White Americans, Imani Perry, a feminist and author of More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States and Michelle Alexander, civil rights advocate and author of The New Jim Crow..” [Links added]
[Exploring Race With Tim Wise's film White Like Me, June 21, 2013]
Yep, it’s clear that A) “racism” and “White Privilege” are very real! And B) curiously, the more highly educated one is, the more often one can spot them in one’s daily life.
Five years ago, I also released a documentary film about “racism,” A Conversation About Race. In it, I used taped interviews with a diverse group of adults to raise the question: if America does, truly, have a problem with “racism,” wouldn’t it be wise to take the time necessary to define just what “racism” is—before stripping citizens of their constitutional rights in ill-conceived schemes aimed at eradicating it? My film then demonstrated how all humans are “racist” to some degree.
A Conversation About Race also illustrated how whites today are being dishonestly portrayed by our governments and the Main Stream Media as the world’s foremost racists.
Now, the reason I’m writing this is that I’ve noticed, shall we say, a distinct difference in how those in a position to judge greeted the release of these two, very different racism films.
The release of Wise’s film was celebrated, as seen above, and its content was acknowledged by both academia and MSM as being “educational.” (Wise is often described as an “educator” although his connection with educational institutions is minimal. He seems to be a professional anti-white agitator. Perhaps “educator” is Cultural Marxist-speak for “brainwasher.”)
The release of my film was, on the other hand, unanimously ignored.
Now, I concede
How Many More Nidal Hasans in Our Ranks?
A military jury sentenced unrepentant Fort Hood jihadist Nidal Hasan to death on Wednesday.
John Derbyshire On “Uncle Tim” Wise: Cultural Marxists Can’t Do Math
A friend passed this on to me: It’s an August 25th posting by “antiracist essayist, author, and educator” Tim Wise. Nazis Can’t Do Math, chortles the heading.
My immediate reaction was: “Say what?” There were many fine Nazi mathematicians, as any reader of my book Prime Obsession could tell you. I mention two such: Oswald Teichmüller and Ludwig Bieberbach.
I note of the latter (p. 383) that: “In 1933 at Berlin University, Bieberbach was conducting spoken examinations of doctoral candidates in full Nazi uniform.”
Of Teichmüller I have the following thing to say (p. 256)—it should be of interest to anyone who likes his history to have more than one dimension, a category that probably does not include Tim Wise:
We are accustomed to think of Nazi activists as thugs, low-lifes, opportunists, and failed artists of one sort or another, which indeed most of them were. It is salutary to be reminded that they also included in their ranks some people of the highest intelligence.
But in fact Tim Wise was not talking about the NSDAP at all. He is deploying the word “Nazi” to refer to contemporary race realists in the U.S..
Wise’s tacit assumption: the Nazis thought race was real and important; therefore a person who thinks that race is real and important is a Nazi. He wants his nation to avenge itself against France, reduce the Slavic peoples to serfdom, and exterminate European Jewry. I guess.
This is schoolyard stuff. I believe, as did Marx and Lenin, that modes of production are important factors in historical development, but I am not a communist. Honestly.
That’s Uncle Tim for you, though. He is a Left ideologue of the most passionate and committed kind, who—like Marx and Lenin!—believes in deploying the lowest, vilest kind of vituperation against enemies of the Cause. Back in the days when it was possible for an intelligent person to be a communist (or a Nazi), he would have been a formidably good one.
For intelligent Wise surely is, though in a narrow and entirely verbal, lawyerly kind of way. He is a terrific debater, wonderfully fast on his feet, with his ripostes and evasions all thoroughly rehearsed and ready to hand.
Listen to him in this debate with Jared Taylor, for example. Jared is a friend of mine, a man I admire greatly, and no mean debater himself (let me tell you); but I have to give this one to Wise on points.
It’s all facile, though. Wise’s great mass of memorized facts and research results sound great on the fly, but they generally turn out to be factoids and one-offs (scientific method demands R-E-P-L-I-C-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y of results) when you have time to dig into them.
To take an example: In the debate with Jared, this snagged my attention, and stopped Jared in his tracks, at 56m10s:
Two years after, three years after [Murray and Herrnstein’s book The Bell Curve] came out, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, using the very same longitudinal database that Murray and Herrnstein had used for their research, which had demonstrated this persistent IQ gap between whites and blacks, looked at the same data and were able to take what Murray and Herrnstein didn’t mention in their book from the data, which was that when African Americans in the U.S. go to college they raise their IQ four times faster than whites who go to college and in the process close the average IQ gap between white and black in half in just four years.
Anyone who knows anything about psychometry will go “Whoa!” on hearing that. IQ just isn’t that malleable at college age.
People interested in arguing about race and IQ tend to have all read the same books, though, so I know the study Wise is talking about. It’s referred to in Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It (2010), pp.146-7, and I’d assume that Wise, like me, learned about it from there. The actual study is archived on JSTOR here, but you need a sign-on; I can’t find a full version elsewhere.
So far as I know the study has never been replicated. The blogger at Unamusement Park cites a counter-study here. There are spirited critiques of Nisbett’s book on VDARE.com: Advocacy By Omission: Richard E. Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It by the late J. Philippe Rushton, and Selling Out And How To Do It—The Case Of Richard E. Nisbett, by Steve Sailer.
Those clear, eloquent certitudes that are so effective in debate all disappear like this in a fog of ambiguity when you look them up; but that’s the debater’s art. I say again: Wise is a terrific debater.
As a blogger he’s much less impressive. Partly this is the schoolyard vituperation, which he seems unable to restrain in writing. Mainly, though, it’s that he doesn’t organize his thoughts well.
In that Nazis Can’t Do Math piece that my friend passed on, for example, Wise seems at times to be arguing against the proposition that there is “a widespread black-on-white crime spree.” At other times he is taking on those who believe that whites are “being targeted by black offenders.” The two things are not the same, but Wise wobbles from one to the other as he goes along.
No doubt there are people who believe one or other of those things (or both: they are not mutually exclusive), but they are not major themes on the race realist websites, which I am pretty well acquainted with.
By far the commonest complaint on those websites is the conspiracy of silence about black-on-white crime, as in the Knoxville Horror case, and the contradictory inflation of white-on-black crime, as in the James Byrd case. Wise has nothing to say about that.
Among those of us in the race-realist camp who write about these things, the impression is that the cover-up has intensified under the Obama administration. Wise has nothing to say about that, either.
In a previous post, for instance, Wise takes the (black) economist Walter Williams to task for noting, “as many a white nationalist has over the years” (yep) that five-sixths of single-offender interracial violent crime is black against white. He adds that Williams used Justice Department data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS):
According to the 2008 data Williams relied on (see Table 42), which is the most recent comprehensive data published by the Justice Department on violent crime victimizations . . .
Wise, in that post dated August 22nd, 2013, does not pause to tell us why Williams had to use 2008 data for interracial crime. So why did he? Because the Justice Department stopped publishing the data after 2008.
What happened in 2008 to make Justice stop publishing interracial crime statistics? Hard to figure.
(A reader of mine who actually worked in NCVS data collection told me the information about victims’ and offenders’ race is still gathered. It’s just not published.)
Also in that August 22nd post, Wise has some fun with the crime statistics. His goal here is to show that while blacks may be offending disproportionately against whites, they are not targeting them. So, he concludes, whites should stop thinking that blacks are dangerous! Uh . . .
Along the way he tells some little pork pies. “The biggest racial disproportion for violent crime, numerically—and year after year—is in the area of robbery.”
Is it? On those 2008 numbers, for example, we see 35.6 percent of 198,330 robberies are black-on-white: that’s 70,605. The corresponding number for white-on-black is 6,988. The proportion there is a tad more than ten to one.
For rape and sexual assault, on the other hand, the black-on-white number is 19, 293 (16.4 percent of 117,640). The white-on-black number is shown as 0.0 percent, which, on standard rounding methodology, means less than 0.05 percent of the 46,580 black victims, i.e. 23 or less. The proportion there is at least 839 to one.
So how does Wise figure that: “The biggest racial disproportion for violent crime, numerically . . . is in the area of robbery”? The only wriggle-out I can see there is his qualification of “numerically.” The numerical difference for robberies is 63,617 (70,605 minus 6,988); for rape/sexual assault it’s a maximum of 46,580 (46,580 minus zero). That’s a difference, though, not a disproportion. For a proportion, or a disproportion, you have to carry out a division.
Further down that August 22nd post Tim Wise, striving mightily to bend the data to his purposes, tells us about differential encounter rates.
The argument here is that blacks move among whites much more than whites move among blacks. We encounter blacks much less frequently than they encounter us, so of course we commit fewer crimes against them! If we moved among blacks more, we’d commit more crimes against them!
Er, possibly: but wouldn’t they also commit more crimes against us? And are we sure that the whites who avoid moving among blacks (why?) are just as criminally inclined as those who mingle?
In the later, August 25th post—the one headed “Nazis Can’t Do Math”—Wise tackles homicide, and comes up with a statement which is going to sound great in debate—expect to hear it a lot—but is mathematically unsurprising.
This needs a little arithmetical preamble.
Suppose a population of N persons has B blacks and W whites: B+W = N. Suppose the races commit murder at equal rates, say one in M per annum. So every year B/M murders are committed by blacks and W/M by whites.
Assuming no bias, the B/M black murders include (B/M) × (W/N) with white victims; number of murders times white proportion of the population. The W/M white murders similarly include (W/M) × (B/N) with black victims. Those two interracial numbers are the same: Both are (BW)/(MN). There are more whites to go committing murder, but there are fewer blacks to be random victims; and vice versa. It’s a wash.
Under these idealized assumptions, we’ll have the same number of black-on-white murders as white-on-black. Let’s say this number is K.
Then of America’s 42.0 million blacks, one in 42,000,000/K will be murdered by a white in any year. Of our 196.8 million whites, again on these idealized, no-bias assumptions, only around one in 196,800,000/K will be murdered by a black. Divide 196,800,000/K by 42,000,000/K, you get 4.6857 Ergo:
Any given black person in the United States is about 4.7 times more likely to be killed by a white person than any given white person is to be murdered by a black person.
Of course, those idealized assumptions—identical black/white offending rates, zero bias in choice of victims—are not the case. What is the case? If 4.7 is not the right number in that last paragraph, what is the number?
In Nazis Can’t Do Math, Tim Wise comes up with this:
Any given black person in the United States is about 2.8 times more likely to be killed by a white person than any given white person is to be murdered by a black person.
That’s the thing I expect to be hearing a lot. The 2.8 isn’t actually as impressive as the 4.7; but if you don’t know about the 4.7, it’s pretty striking.
The true number is less impressive yet, because Tim Wise has bollixed up his math again.
He’s working from this database, using 2010 data. He gets his 2.8 from dividing 277,000 by 100,000. The first of those numbers is the white population (196.8m) divided by black-on-white homicides from the database (704). The second is the black population (42.0m) divided by white-on-black homicides from the database (413), though he didn’t do a precise division, which would give final result 2.7, not 2.8.
All right: but for a real civilian (non-dysfunctional non-cop) danger figure you’d want to exclude a lot of those homicides. I’ll filter out the following: Justified homicides (felon killed by police or civilian), juvenile gang killings, gangland killings, drug-related violence.
That gets the black-on-white number down to 639, the white-on-black to 241. Wise’s 2.8 has now dwindled to 1.8. Remember, the equal-offending-rate, zero-bias assumption gives black risk 4.7 times white risk.
(And there is more to that database than meets the eye. If the only filters you apply are: Year 2010, Killer black, you do indeed get 704 white victims, as Wise did. However, if you apply filters: Year 2010, Victim white, you get 985 black killers. If you follow the math all the way through on that route, Wise’s 2.8 is ground down to 1.5. A free, signed copy of From the Dissident Right to any reader who can plausibly get it down below 1.0 by juggling filters.)
I still think Tim Wise is a first-rate debater. These attempts at number-crunching, though, left me with the definite impression that Cultural Marxists can’t do math.
Those who can, see sensationally higher crime rates for blacks, far beyond anything that can be explained away as artifacts of reporting methodology or arithmetic manipulations. The data from the 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics, noted by Walter Williams (and me), telling us that five out of six single-offender interracial crimes of violence involve a black perp and a nonblack victim, stand stark and clear against all Tim Wise’s fudging.
We patiently await the corresponding figures for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, . . .
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. His most recent book, published by VDARE.com com is FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle).His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire's writings at VDARE.com can do so here.
VDARE.com Has A Dream Too—An Immigration Moratorium! Help Us Realize It!!
By Peter Brimelow, Editor, VDARE.com
**VDARE.com has NOT changed to a pay site!! Please scroll down and read the explanation at the bottom!!!!
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You’ve probably absolutely certainly heard that today was the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.
I think it’s fair to say that at VDARE.com, we don’t quite take the standard, utterly uncritical view of the “Civil Rights Revolution” that is now an imperative career necessity throughout America’s Main Stream Media.
- We don’t think it has solved, or can solve, what the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called the “American Dilemma”—and that the attempt to pretend otherwise is a major cause of the repressive Political Correctness that now cripples public debate.
- We think it came with very real costs that are also now unmentionable—for example anti-white quotas (“Affirmative Action”), inescapable crime and the devastation of once-great American cities, Detroit being only the most notorious example.
- Above all, we think the emotional spasm of which today’s ceremonies were an echo was exploited to pass the disastrous 1965 Immigration Act—which, combined with a simultaneous collapse in immigration law enforcement, is set to reduce the historic American nation into a minority in the country that their ancestors built well within the lifetimes of children now alive.
Treason Lobby propagandists are still trying to work this trick—see Immigration reform activists seize on 'moral tone' of civil rights movement, by Carrie Dann, NBC News, Aug 27, 2013.
Fifty years after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic call for racial equality in the March on Washington, immigration reform activists are seizing on his "moral tone" in their fight for laws easing a pathway to citizenship.
“At the core, we are talking about the same thing,” says Clarissa Martinez de Castro, the director of immigration policy for Hispanic civil rights organization National Council of La Raza. “This is a conversation about the value of a person. It was the core of the conversation then, and it is the core of the conversation now.
Of course, this term “immigration reform” is just Treason Lobby-speak for the pending legislation aimed at amnestying illegal aliens—and simultaneously, unmentioned in the NBC article and in virtually all other MSM accounts, massively increasing legal immigration.
This will be a huge electoral windfall for the American Left, and a huge financial windfall for post-American plutocrats.
But, ironically on this anniversary, it will further immiserate American blacks, disproportionately lower skilled, whose continuing economic problems over the last five decades have been greatly exacerbated by job market competition from illegal and legal immigrants.
The single best thing that public policy could do for American blacks right now—and for that matter for American workers of all colors—would be to impose an immigration moratorium, a time-out with zero net immigration until the labor market tightens, unemployment falls, and wages rise.
But the option of an immigration moratorium is never even mentioned in public discourse. Instead, the political class, Liberal and “Conservative”, is trying to impose exactly the opposite on a muzzled and mugged American nation.
It’s almost as if they don’t really care about black Americans (and all American workers).
Only VDARE.com is exploring the immigration moratorium option.
That’s not unusual.
- For years, we have been the only publication pointing to the importance of the white (formerly known, until the 1965 Immigration Act, as American,) vote—which finally entered MSM debate early this year.
- We said impeachment was the only answer to Obama’s Administrative Amnesty back in 2011—and now the idea of impeaching Obama is ablaze among the grassroots and attracting repeated pre-emptive strikes from the worried Liberal MSM.
- We have been estimating immigrant displacement of American workers since 2004: the federal government began releasing hard data in 2009; a couple of Washington D.C. think tanks have recently alluded to it; soon it will enter the MSM unemployment-reporting template. A moratorium debate will—finally—follow
All of which is why I must ask you to help us (tax-deductibly!) now.
Remember, 2013 is also the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I think about Lincoln’s speech more, because I really believe that, in a humble way, we at VDARE.com are also “testing” a “proposition”—whether journalism can survive with only voluntary reader support, outside of the corporate world.
Forty years in the MSM have left me convinced that it’s the only hope for true originality—and for the cause of patriotic immigration reform, which is ultimately the cause of America.
Please help us now. All of us at VDARE.com will be most grateful.
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The Fulford File| The Ugly Side Of Open Borders—Sneering Libertarian Economists
Mass illegal immigration affects primarily low-skilled American workers, because they are the only people who can be replaced by Mexicans and Guatemalans with no education and no English skills.
Specifically, this means Americans who are born with lower than average IQ, the 50 percent who, by the laws of mathematics, score below average on tests. (It's not necessarily a racial point,
Eric Holder, Freedom Of Association, And The Forgotten Case For Restrictive Covenants
The Obama Minority Occupation Government no longer even tries to hide its contempt for the historic American nation. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is now tracking “diversity” in American neighborhoods, under the Orwellian title of “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.” [Obama Administration Using Housing Department in Effort to Diversify Neighborhoods, by Doug McKelway, Foxnews, August 8, 2013] The purpose: to enable government-sponsored “block busting” through lawsuits, presumably to be launched by Eric (“My People”) Holder's Department of Justice. The federal government is doing its best to make sure it is illegal to escape from diversity.
But this is simply the logical conclusion of a decades-long process. The federal government long ago abolished the right
Memo From Middle America | The Best Thing We Can Do For DREAMers—Send Them Home!
For the past twelve years, Americans have been hearing sob stories about the “DREAMers”—illegal aliens brought here by their parents. It all started in 2001 with the first DREAM ACT, sponsored by Senators Durbin (D-Illinois). and Hatch (R-Utah). This was followed by other efforts through the years.
No DREAM ACT has ever passed both
The Pakistani/ Indian Gang Rape “Epidemic”: Cultural or Hereditary?
The “grooming” gangs in Britain, which lure young girls in and turn them into sex slaves, were deno
Will Immigration Patriotism Make North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory A Presidential Candidate
Governors elected in the past two elections have turned out to be profoundly disappointing to immigration patriots: many who campaigned on enacting SB 1070-type laws have surreptitiously tried to u
How Oberlin Manufactured the Hate-Crime Hoax of the Year
Busted. Stone-cold busted.
Lowry On Lincoln: A Safe Whiggish Pep Talk For GOP Loyalists—Useless On The Real Issues
As the comfort and security of life in advanced societies have improved so sensationally this past half-century, the scope of topics considered respectable for public debate has narrowed, almost to