Is throwing slurs such as “creepy” and “kooky” supposed to be an honorable form of argument?
There are only two honorable forms of argument — disputing facts and logic. Most women are not cut out for such disputation. Most men aren’t either.
Relating to her piece below, I read last week this bit of commonsense: “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.”
I wonder if Cathy Young ever read this Newsweek piece about Sabrina Erdely’s destructive anti-Christian journalism: “CATHOLIC GUILT? THE LYING, SCHEMING ALTAR BOY BEHIND A LURID RAPE CASE”
It is as normal, natural and understandable for Jews to have an anti-Christian bias as it is normal, natural and understandable for Christians to have an anti-Jewish bent. Both traditions are filled with hatred toward the other. How could they not?
Cathy Young writes: My Federalist article taking on the Allum Bokhari/Milo Yiannopoulos defense of the “alternative right” at Breitbart.com (developed from my earlier post here at Allthink) has drawn some responses along predictable lines: Cathy Young is a Jew (true), a “Marxist” ex-Soviet immigrant (here’s a tip: people who emigrated from the Soviet Union generally did so because they didn’t like Marxism), a militant feminist (quick, someone tell Amanda Marcotte!), and a well-paid shill for the Koch brothers (yes, I get that from leftists too; FYI, my position as a research fellow at the Cato Institute is unpaid, and my annual income is below the average for writers and journalists).
Amidst all this drollery, a couple of responses warrant a reply: a string of tweets by a user who goes by “Pale Primate” purporting to be a detailed rebuttal of my piece, and a blogpost by one Luke Ford.
First, both of them point out a genuine error: I referred to VDARE as Steve Sailer’s site when, in fact, it’s Peter Brimelow’s site. This came from a misreading of a line in the Breitbart article which referred to “nodes like Steve Sailer’s blog, VDARE and American Renaissance.” I should have checked the information better. The Federalist has now made a correction at my quest.
…I don’t think our only options are denialism or VDARE-style “racialism” that constantly stresses the ethnic, racial or religious identity of perpetrators and always presuming it relevant to the crime. Incidentally, if a “social justice” website decided to highlight violent crimes by white people in order to counteract racial stereotypes, and started covering such crimes in the same way that VDARE covers crime by blacks, Latinos and Muslims, I would consider that racist and repulsive.
“Pale Primate” accuses me of “tone policing” – a phrase that comes, by the way, straight from the lexicon of “social justice warriors,” who insist that “people of color” and women who want to talk about racism or sexism should never be criticized for expressing their frustration in such phrases as “white people suck” or “kill all men.”
Yes, I think tone matters. I believe that when we discuss differences between population groups, we should be careful not to do it in a way that dehumanizes people or demeans them on the basis of identity, imputes collective guilt, or justifies relegating a group to inferior status (especially a group with a very real history of oppression and dehumanization). If that’s “tone policing,” guilty as charged. I call it basic human decency. (And yes, I’m well aware that progressives sometimes pretend that the “SJW” version of political correctness is nothing more than basic and civility toward women and minorities. As we all know, that’s nonsense. But just because the SocJus crowd uses decency as a shield doesn’t make decency a bad thing.)
By the way, when I said that the tone at VDARE “reeks of hostility and contempt toward the presumed losers in the ‘biodiversity’ lottery,” I didn’t mean criminals, as “Pale Primate” suggests. I meant mainly blacks and Hispanics.
And then we get to the Jews.
“Pale Primate” tries to exonerate retired psychology professor Kevin MacDonald of the charge of anti-Semitism, claiming that MacDonald is merely interested in “document[ing] Jewish intellectual and political movements.” Since the alt-rightists apparently appreciate bluntness, I’ll be blunt: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. I invite anyone to read MacDonald’s articles for themselves and to peruse his website, The Occidental Observer (dedicated to “white identity, interests, and culture”), where some 40 of the 136 topic tags refer to Jews – from “Israel Lobby” and “Holocaust Industry” to “Jewish aggressiveness,” “Jewish influence,” “Jewish wealth,” “Jews as a hostile elite,” and “Historical anti-Jewish writings.”
“Pale Primate” also defends MacDonald’s view that “Jews played a major role in destroying Russia via Bolshevism,” since “Jews were a massively disproportionate share of upper level positions in every commissariat” in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s, including the secret police. Well, let’s see. This 1920 photo of the presidium of the 9th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) has 13 people identified by name. Two (Mikhail Lashevich and Lev Kamenev) are Jews. Obviously, 15% is disproportionate given that Jews made up only 2% of Russia’s population at the time. But that hardly equals “Jewish-dominated.” As for the secret police, according to Yuri Slezkine, the author cited by “Pale Primate,” 4.3 percent of Cheka (secret police) commissars and 8 to 9 percent of senior officials in 1918-1920 were Jewish. The real overrepresented minority in the Cheka were Latvians, who made up less than 0.1% of Russia’s population at the time but over 50% of Cheka commissars and senior officials. In 1922, the “collegium” of the Cheka’s successor, the GPU, was made up of eight people, two of whom were Jews, one Latvian, one Ukrainian, and four (including its head, Felix Dzerzhinsky) were ethnic Poles.
Let’s hear about how the Poles and the Latvians destroyed Russia, shall we?
But never mind MacDonald on the subject of the Jews. Here’s Steve Sailer (at VDARE and on his own blog), reviewing the Amy Chua/Jeb Rubenfeld book on successful minorities in America. After quoting their assertion that members of these groups tend to be afflicted with insecurity and “to instill it in their children,” Sailer adds: “Or in the case of the wealthiest, most powerful group, they use their influence over the media to instill it in their children and to depress, demoralize, and divide other groups` children.”
That link? It leads to an article about a book commemorating the Holocaust.
I really don’t think any further comment is needed.
(I do appreciate “Pale Primate’s” tweets, which led me to do a bit more digging and find this gem.)
Luke Ford’s blogpost, which speculates on whether or not I’m a “neocon,” contains a tidbit that led me to another interesting discovery. As an aside, Ford takes a jab at me for having written two Reason.com columns on the University of Virginia/Rolling Stone rape hoax “without mentioning Steve [Sailer] or Richard Bradley”: “Hard to say if she is just lazy or ignores the work of writers she doesn’t like.” Actually, both of those columns were reprints from RealClearPolitics.com; earlier, I had written two other RCP columns on the subject which did mention Bradley, a blogger and former magazine editor, and credit him for being first to raise questions about the credibility of the alleged fraternity gang rape victim, Jackie.
I’m not really sure why I should have credited Steve Sailer, who posted about the case on his Unz Review blog and then wrote about it for Taki Magazine but added nothing original. (In the magazine piece, Sailer claims that his November 29 blogpost drew attention to Bradley’s post, which had languished unnoticed since November 24. Reason‘s Robby Soave wrote about it on December 1. I don’t know if he was tipped off to Bradley’s post by Sailer or one of Sailer’s readers, but I can say that Robby and I were among several journalists privately discussing the problems with the Rolling Stone story by November 25.)
However! Ford’s mention of Sailer’s commentary on the UVA story reminded me of something I had forgotten: the Sailer acolytes in Bradley’s blog comments who tried to argue that Rolling Stone author Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s piece about rape culture at UVA, centered around Jackie’s story, had something to do with Erdely being Jewish. Apparently, she had some kind of Jewish agenda to destroy UVA because it’s too white, Christian, pretty and conservative, or something. (When another commenter pointed out that many of the journalists who helped debunk the hoax were also Jewish, the conspiracy nuts were undeterred: Of course the Jews will do that when their mischief is caught out!)
Okay, so these are just random commenters. But a December 3, 2014 post at VDARE by one of their prolific bloggers, Eugene Gant, highlighting Sailer’s Taki Magazine article, referred to Erdely as “militantly Jewish” (linking to an article about a Jewish day camp that briefly referenced Erdely as one of the parents) and “a hit thing for the Christophobic left” (because she had previously written a story, also of dubious veracity, about a boy’s sexual abuse by priests). The Occidental Observer ran a longer piece depicting the rape-hoax story as “ethnic warfare” born from Erdely’s “anti-White animus” (in the Alt-Right taxonomy, Jews are, of course, not “white”) and noting that some of her staunchest defenders were “Jewish female journalists.” Oh, and Luke Ford did a blogpost that referred to Erdely as an “proud Jew and anti-white fabulist” (with a headline calling her a “left-wing Jew with a history of Christian-bashing).
As for Sailer? Well, he didn’t exactly peddle this slimy nuttery himself, but he sure did pander to it. Check out this April 7, 2015 Sailer blogpost at VDARE titled “Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Kristallnacht on Campus.” Its actual subject is the theme of broken glass in Erdely’s story (such as the glass table shattering during Jackie’s alleged rape) and actual broken glass at the fraternity named in the rape allegations, which was attacked by vandals throwing bottles and bricks through the windows in December 2014, shortly after the story’s publication.
If it weren’t for the obsession with Erdely’s Jewishness in certain quarters, I would have assumed that “Kristallnacht” was just a fancy metaphor. But was it actually a not-so-subtle reversal of an infamous attack on Jews in which a “militant Jew” becomes the perpetrator inflicting a Kristallnacht on gentiles? You decide.
I suppose “Pale Primate” will tell me that I’m not actually disputing any of this, just “tone policing.” Right-o. I’m also not in the habit of disputing the arguments of people who think rape is a male conspiracy to keep women in their place.
“Pale Primate” thinks my attack on the Alt-Right was “poorly researched.” Well, it’s better researched now, and the Alt-Right looks like an even more odious collection of kooky bigots.
Some people who are cautiously sympathetic to the Alt-Right because they believe large-scale immigration endangers America’s cultural values keep trying to prove otherwise. For instance, the other night on Twitter, user Steven Falco offered this partial defense:
https://twitter.com/nunzioni/status/721509127164465152
“Pale Primate,” who is an alt-right moderate, did agree, arguing that the real issue is bringing in “people that don’t fit well into Western societies.”
But here are the other two responses Falco got:
https://twitter.com/marylovefreedom/status/721510004138840064
https://twitter.com/skiguru/status/721511128342347776
Incidentally, I do think that large-scale immigration of people who find Western cultural norms alien and don’t want to assimilate poses real problems. I absolutely agree that we need to confront those issues. But the Alt-Right is not helping such a discussion; on the contrary, it’s making it easier to dismiss all such concerns as racist.
COMMENTS POSTED:
* Well at least you admitted you’re not disputing anything. You still don’t explain why it’s wrong for whites to play the game as it is played by everyone else. You just appeal to a morality that no other side agrees to.
* People on the alt-right are already intimately familiar with the the gene based heritability for traits including intelligence, time preference (your ability to delay gratification and plan for the future), and the big 5 personality traits. We don’t try to dismiss or weasel around such things because the evidence for them is damning.
That’s why for us, respectability doesn’t matter. We’re not here for respectability. The right wing has tried that for decades while the left aggressively took cultural control. Maybe its time to reevaluate the whole “let’s try our hardest to seem even handed in the face of people who think men in dresses should be allowed to go into women’s bathrooms” idea.
* CY: I’m a Zionist. I also applaud the fact that 25% of Israeli citizens are not Jewish and strongly oppose moves to clamp down on immigration by non-Jews. Actually, Israeli law and German law are very similar in that both give automatic citizenship to immigrants from the dominant ethnic group.
Also: nice job of boosting the SJW claim that political correctness is simply about treating minorities with respect and decency. Honestly, the idea that you can break the left’s near-monopoly on culture by spouting racist and anti-Semitic crap because it defies PC is mind-bogglingly dumb. All it will do is push decent people into the arms of the left and give cover to actual bigots.
* So, if Jews can have a homeland where they can write their own rules for admission, what exactly is the problem with WNs?
Define “respect” and “decency” (and “bigotry,” while we’re on the topic.) Remember, those terms are defined by the left as, basically, “anything I don’t like,” and they have their yuge propaganda machine to signal-boost every bit of outrage they can gin up over the most ridiculous garbage. You’re playing into their hands by saying “[x] is unacceptable,” while ignoring the fact that narrative control means that the left gets to define [x]. Since they can move the goalposts whenever/wherever they like, the ultimate result of your concession of the frame has been to give them a plug number that they use to concern-troll you into condemning any right-winger that rustles their jimmies. It’s impressive, the level of pwned-ness that you’ve managed to achieve: you’re their useful idiot, and think you’re clever for being so.
Your clever maneuver of ceding the frame to them has accomplished/will accomplish… what, exactly? What have decades of “respectable” (HA!) conservative/libertarian line-toeing and hand-wringing produced in terms of tangible policy results? And, frankly, why should anyone have any interest in the opinions of thoroughly pwned chronic failures?
* “Bigotry” has no fixed meaning, and is constantly redefined on the fly to suit the political whims of the left. You can say that it oughtn’t be so, and I would agree, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is. You, and I, and everyone on not toeing the line with The Current Year will always be defined as a “bigot,” because that’s what’s in the interest of the people controlling the definitions. Playing the “bigotry” game is a trap by design. The alt-right’s plan to escape it is to break out of the trap by rejecting the premise. Do you have a better strategy?
2) Here we agree: America is not an ethnostate. Of course, WNs agree with us too: that’s why they want a white American ethnostate, and are trying to get one (either by reorganizing the existing state or breaking it up.) Yes, it’s all very LARPy, but that’s beside the point; here an ethnostate is goal, not the existing regime.
3) You may not be interested in sociopolitical gas warfare, but sociopolitical gas warfare is interested in you, and me, and all of us. I don’t like these tactics, but I can’t deny their proven effectiveness. So if we’re trapped in a race to the bottom (signs point to “yes,”) the correct move isn’t to tut-tut about how races to the bottom suck and we shouldn’t be trapped in one- both of those statements are true, but irrelevant to the situation at hand. So if you’re going to claim that I’m like an SJW in that I believe that “cultural appropriation” is a thing, you’re wrong. If you’re going to claim that I’m like an SJW in that I believe in using effective tactics that do work instead of idealized tactics that “should” work but don’t, I’ll own that one in a heartbeat.
* CY: I checked out at “Semitic mutterings.” Good Lord, you people are a bunch of creeps. (Oh, and by the way… the so-called “racial” component of being Jewish is an ethnicity, not a race. “Whiteness” is not an ethnicity. And Israel recognizes black Ethiopian Jews as Jewish.
