Today I have some lengthy comments about a disturbing phenomena in the reality-based community:

Reality-based community is a popular term among liberal political commentators in the United States. In the fall of 2004, the phrase “proud member of the reality-based community,” was first used to suggest the commentator’s opinions are based more on observation than faith, assumption, or ideology and that others who disagree are unrealistic. The term has been defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from [their] judicious study of discernible reality.” Some commentators have gone as far as to suggest that there is an overarching conflict in society between the reality-based community and the “faith-based community” as a whole. It can be seen as an example of political framing.

In my previous post I noted a particularly egregious example of naked anti-Whitism that occurred in prime time on national cable television. I looked for and easily found several “reality-based” web sites that also considered this event notable. They also saw it as an opportunity to vent some anti-White hate. In the days afterward I went over to comment.

The title of the Drum post was David Gergen Speaks Truth – Denounce Racist Vote. Karoli, the blogger there, is a woman who is convinced of three things: racism is bad, Whites whose vote is affected by race are racists, and non-whites who behave likewise are not. This is anti-Whitism, of course, and several visitors besides myself tried to talk some sense into her. Throughout the exchange she was civil but unmoved. In the end she acknowledged that she didn’t have a problem with black votes being based on race, and cited historic White oppression of blacks as the reason. She then closed the thread.

I have two points I would have posted in response. First, I reject this race-based guilt. What happened in generations past between other people is not my fault nor my responsibility to set right. I care more about injustices taking place in the here and now. Second, it is absurd to expect that any people should not speak or vote or act in what they perceive to be their best interests, nor that they band together by whatever criteria they choose, whether genetic (eg. by race) or memetic (eg. by ideology).

Since coming to this understanding of race and politics I do not begrudge non-whites for planning and acting cohesively to further the interests of their groups, and thereby themselves. I consider the fact that they do so perfectly normal human behavior with a precedent that stretches back to the beginnings of history and probably beyond.

What is indefensible from this racial-political point of view is that a particular group, my group, should be singled out and held to a different standard. This is exactly what the “frame” known as anti-racism does to Whites.

Anti-racism is based on the idea that “racism” is bad. “Racism”, however, means different things to different people. Here’s what Sam Francis had to say about the origins of the word racism.

I believe these roots of the word racism are unknown to most. It is also generally not considered polite to point out that prior to the 1930s the notion that the human species was divided along racial lines was not controversial. Throughout history races most often lived separately (which is how they developed in the first place) and this was considered a good thing because often when races came together there was strife. I believe people back then recognized significant differences between the races, and they attributed the strife to these differences.

Today the thinking has changed radically. It is now generally considered wrong and hateful to speak of race in such terms. If you do so then you are considered to be the cause of racial strife. We must disown or bury any such things great men of the past may have said. See here how the text of the Immigration Act of 1790 is piled under pages of superfluous information about Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus, and a summary of the entire history of immigration. All the way at the end is the actual text, which begins:

Act of March 26, 1790 (1 Stat 103-104) (Excerpts) That any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof. . .

Such thoughts, even in historic documents, even when expressed without malice, are today considered “racism”. Someone who thinks such thoughts is called a “racist” – a stereotype that implies they are psychologically infirm, intellectually deficient, intolerantly bigoted, and prone to violence. The word racist is almost always intended and taken as a slur, and it is very often used deliberately, to put it in the terms of the reality-based community, as a means of dehumanizing anyone so smeared.

As destructive as they know the label is, some apply it with great abandon. Anti-racists who wouldn’t dream of calling someone lazy or weak or a whore (that might hurt their self-esteem!) will, just like that, call someone a racist. Nobody wants to be called a racist. We all realize how poorly racists are treated. And yet so many anti-racists are on hair trigger, ready to use the word on anyone they think is saying or thinking incorrectly.

It would be bad enough if this pathologizing of speech and thought were codified and applied equally to all who spoke in certain ways about race. But it isn’t. Whites and non-whites are subject to different sets of constantly changing unwritten rules. Over time it is becoming ever more acceptable for non-whites to criticize Whites, and ever less acceptable for Whites to criticize non-whites. Many anti-racists today unabashedly defend the idea that only Whites can be racists. In fact the anti-racism “frame” now includes the view that Whites are inherently racist. That’s why when racial friction or differences arise Whites are the ones who so often get the blame.

The anti-racist frame-builders give their White blame mechanisms different names. One of them is called institutional racism:

Institutional racism (or structural racism or systemic racism) refers to a form of racism which occurs specifically in institutions such as public bodies, corporations, and universities. The term was coined by black nationalist, pan-Africanist and honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party, Stokely Carmichael.

It seems anti-racists do not think pan-Africanism or black nationalism are racist. Yet these ideologies are overtly concerned with the benefit of a particular race, certainly more overtly than any public body, corporation, or university I’m aware of. Except maybe Howard University and McDonalds. Can an anti-racist please point me to a “white university”, or special corporate websites celebrating Whites?

Another such mechanism is called symbolic racism:

Symbolic racism means believing that African American poverty and other problems are largely the result of lack of ambition and effort, rather than white racism and discrimination. Who holds symbolically racist beliefs? A relatively large portion of white voters in general and white working-class voters in particular. . .

So? CNN pundits and liberal bloggers think White poverty and other problems are largely the result of ignorance. They think Whites, or “rednecks” according to David Gergen, don’t vote for Obama because they’re “under-educated”. Alan Abramowitz says White voters are “symbolic racists” because they think more highly of blacks than media pundits like himself think of Whites. After all, the polls show Whites blame black problems on lack of ambition and effort. Ignorance was probably considered too rude to either provide in the poll or select. Could Abramowitz supply the results of black polling? I’m curious what blacks believe causes White success. Do they think it’s racism? Given the constant White = racist barrage from the media doesn’t everybody think that?

I’d like to take the opportunity here to point out how odd it is that mainstream writers like Abramowitz make a point of capitalizing words like Latino, Asian, Jew, or African American, but never white. After all, it’s just a skin color, right? Perhaps you noticed I do the opposite. Now you know why.

This survey of anti-racist anti-Whitism could go on for quite a while, but I’ll stop here with White privilege:

White privilege is a sociological concept which describes advantages enjoyed by white persons beyond what is commonly experienced by the non-white people in those same social spaces (nation, community, workplace, etc.). It differs from racism or prejudice in that a person benefiting from white privilege does not necessarily hold racist beliefs or prejudices themselves. Often, the person benefiting is unaware of his or her privilege.

Here we see some naked “framing” – the deliberate construction of a concept that makes no effort to hide the anti-White agenda. The idea here is that even Whites who do nothing overt that might conceivably be called racism are still racists if they socialize primarily with Whites. If this is a priviledge then it is a common privilege easily found amongst any race. To single out and demonize Whites for such behaviour is not “fighting racism”. It is a racially motivated attack against Whites.

At a blog called WhitePrivilege, whose slogan is “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”, there is a five-year-old exchange between the blogger and a pro-White using the pseudonym Rurik. Rurik does a wonderful job trying to reason with the anti-White blogger, who for his part appears willfully blind to his anti-Whitism. The exchange contains many of the classic arguments on both sides. At the end a self-righteous jew appears, but not to say “hey, as a jew, I know a bit about defamation, and what this White fellow says is right, you are defaming Whites, it’s dangerous and you should stop it”. Instead he says:

To “Rurik” (who refrains from using his name for fear of being spotted by anyone as a racist and anti-Semite),

The more I read the back-and-forth banter between you and Mr. Clark, the more horrified I am with the idea of people like you exist in my country, doing frightening things such as voting or breeding.

In other words this proud jew favors race-based disenfranchisement and sterilization – for Whites! Following this, presumably to justify his anti-White sentiments (just like Karoli) follow dozens of lines of kvetching about past persecution of jews and blacks.

If race is a social construct as the anti-racists say, then how is it that my Whiteness, and that alone, makes me responsible for enslaving blacks, genociding indians, and gassing jews? If we take anti-racists at their word then clearly they are constructing these responsibilities.

Hopefully I’ve made a convincing case that many anti-racists are not at all concerned about stopping injustices that one race may inflict on another. More than anything else they seem intent on race-based payback against Whites. The common premise behind all of their poisonous ideas is that Whites are the source of all problems, past and present. Their intent is quite literally genocidal.

If on the other hand after reading all this what you think really motivates me is a secret desire to genocide all non-whites, or even some of them, then I want you to know, that I know, that it is because you are anti-White. You are a racist, and you should promptly go and do to yourself what you so often and openly wish upon racists.

I’ve rambled on far too long already, but I did want to say some things about Pandagon.

The CNN-related post I originally cited, Clinton wins Kentucky, race chasm proven again, was already stale by the time I went over to comment and I ended up picking a fight in another post.

The Kentucky post contained some real anti-racist gems that are worth commenting on in light of what I’ve said above. Citing another liberal blogger’s idea that he calls the Race Chasm:

It is in the chasm where Clinton has consistently defeated Obama. These are geographically diverse states from Ohio to Oklahoma to Massachusetts where racial politics is very much a part of the political culture, but where the black vote is too small to offset a white vote racially motivated by the Clinton campaign’s coded messages and tactics.

The black vote is not presumed to be racially motivated, but the White vote is. White candidates communicate in coded messages (the reality-based community calls them “dog whistles”), but black candidates presumably do not.

The blogger, a black woman, then writes:

I wonder if an intelligent discussion can now be had about the reality of prejudice versus affinity voting. When the MSM continually frames this chasm as a problem for Obama — it is a problem for all of us as a society. To have a whole demo of voters so poisoned by their own racism to vote for someone white simply to avoid casting a ballot for a person of color is sad. To then be willing to stay home in November or worse, vote for John McCain, who clearly doesn’t represent working class interests, is tragic.

Needless to say that’s the polar opposite of what I’ve called affinity voting — blacks voting for Obama in large numbers. Many are voting for him because he represents ideals and policies they agree with; that he’s the first credible, positive black candidate for president is a huge historical bonus.

Is it possible to have an intelligent conversation with someone who says my race voting 70-30 is “prejudice” and her race voting 90-10 is “affinity”? What would we talk about, reparations for slavery?

Here again is the anti-White premise of anti-racists laid bare. I have an alternate explanation for the CNN pundits and Pandagon. I say Whites are affinity voting and blacks are prejudiced. Working class Whites are especially wise and discerning compared to fat and lazy wealthy Whites, at least when it comes to voting their best interests. The working class was obviously paying close attention to Rev. Wright and the “bitter” flaps. They know that Black Liberation Theology is not good for Whites. Blacks, on the other hand, generally don’t care what a White candidate says or does if there’s a black candidate to vote for. Obama should reject those racist votes.

There. How’s that? Can I get a seat on CNN?

I wish I had commented on that post at the time but as it happened I found a more recent post, an equally fat target titled Defending science: What works and what’s already working. The exchange was lively.

The blogger, Amanda Marcotte, proposed that the “avid defenders of the importance of accepting reality” in the “reality-based community” should reject “the right wing frame” and defend science from the “lies trotted out about “Intelligent Design”” and “that Stephen Jay Gould is the model for how to do this”. She concluded by saying “”Intelligent Design” is an attack on science”. (Her emphasis.)

I began by ridiculing this combination of ideas. I pointed out the incompatibility between framing and reality, that Gould was a human genetic difference denier, that E.O. Wilson or James Watson are better model defenders of science, that ID was not useless or even harmful but instead spurs scientists to do more science where there are gaps. I also asserted that the perception of the ID challenge as an attack is an natural case of projection by cultural marxists. Scientists, and intellects in general, consider defending their ideas routine.

The response was slow in coming. Seventeen posts later Ellid finally piped up to tell me he didn’t like E.O. Wilson because “his sociobiology theories are little more than a convenient excuse to justify sexism and racism on the grounds of genetic determinism”. Never mind all that world’s leading authority on ant stuff. Ellid also didn’t like Watson because he “denigrated and belittled the work of Rosalyn Yalow”. It was the only halfway-intelligent response I got.

Soon after that the goon squad, who I quickly recognized as “the resident Goulds”, started telling me: you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re a white nationalist, a racist wingnut, etc. Rather than addressing my points, which though irreverently posed were directly on topic, these troglodytes made some of the dumbest leaps of logic I’ve ever seen. The tactics I have seen, many times, and they have nothing to do with how ideas are defended. The exchange really doesn’t classify as an argument or even two-way communication. It was more like a constant stream of verbal abuse, most of it directed at me.

I recognized several recurring themes. One was:

It’s not that I don’t like white people in general, it’s that I don’t like white people like you. I realize that you’re way too self-absorbed to understand the difference, but there you go.

Most of the goons made sure to emphasize how “white” they were before saying similarly nasty things. I think I understand this all very well. When you say things like this it means you like deracinated white people, and you hate race-conscious Whites. It is anti-White anti-racism. A jew who hates jews is called a self-hating jew. A white who hates Whites is called an anti-racist.

Another theme was typified by:

Tanstaafl, one small criticism. You’re racism isn’t quite blatant enough. In the future, you should just go ahead an advocate killing everyone not just like you. You know, like your German friends did.

The ironic thing about this, and it was echoed more than once in various forms, is that the assumption seems to be that me, an anonymous small time blogger, might be construed as advocating genocide, and that this threat was considered serious enough to treat me as if they thought I should be killed because I wasn’t just like them.

One especially tolerant liberal hinted at this desire by quoting Frank Zappa:

If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they’ll murder you in your sleep.

I made the case above, and I have said it before on this blog, that what drives me to write and think as I do is my concern that Whites are threatened with extermination. This threat comes in large part from the virulent anti-White rhetoric of anti-racists. They are the ones whose poisonous ideas are taught in universities, printed in books and newspapers, and tossed off without a thought on the pages of popular liberal blogs that pretend to be moral authorities.

I’ll end here with a quote from Science and ideology by Edward O. Wilson. I tried posting this at Pandagon several times but it never went through. Too bad. I suspect none of those gibbering Gould-lovers will come here to see how a real scientist defends science.

The future, if we are to have one, is increasingly to be in the hands of the scientifically literate, those who at least know what it is all about. There can be no multicultural solution to the genetics of cystic fibrosis; the ozone hole cannot be deconstructed; there is nothing whatsoever relativistic or culturally contextual about the dopamine transporter molecules whose blockage by cocaine gives a rush of euphoria, the kind that leads the constructivist to doubt the objectivity of science.

. . .

Which brings me to anti-science. I know less about postmodernism than most of you here, but let me give you my impression of how it relates to science. Postmodernist critics present a Disney World representation of science, a fantasy of what science is, and how scientists work, and why they work, a distortion embellished variously by obsolete theories of psychoanalysis and the battle cries of political ideology. Within the academy, it seems to me that postmodernism and the divisive forms of multiculturalism are substantially a revolt of the proletariat, wherein second-rate scholarship is parlayed into tenured professorships and book contracts–not by quality, not by originality, but by claims of entitlement of race, gender, and moralistic ideologies. But as I will show in a moment, some of it runs deeper, to turn the minds of even a few otherwise respected scientists.

. . .

The sociobiology episode was one of the most conspicuous in the history of political correctness in academic life in the dark time before the expression, p.c., was coined and before the National Association of Scholars or any other form of organized resistance arose to blunt its excesses.

. . .

The radical activists, however, went ballistic on this issue. Shortly after the publication of Sociobiology, Richard Lewontin organized fifteen scientists, teachers, and students in the Boston area as the Sociobiology Study Group, which then affiliated with Science for the People. The latter, larger aggregate of radical activists was begun in the 1960s to expose the misdeeds of scientists and technologists, including especially thinking considered to be politically dangerous. It was and remains nation wide, although greatly attenuated in its tone and influence.

What was correct political thinking? That has been made clear by Lewontin during the debate and afterward. “There is nothing in Marx, Lenin, or Mao,” he wrote with his fellow Marxist Richard Levins, “that is or can be in contradiction with a particular set of phenomena in the objective world.” True science, in other words, must be defined intrinsically to be forever separate from political thought. Ideology can then be constructed as a mental process insulated from science.

In formulating sociobiology, I wanted to move evolutionary biology into every potentially congenial subject, including human behavior and even political behavior, roughshod if need be and as quickly as possible. Lewontin obviously did not.

. . .

Now I can come to the essence of the radical science movement. As loopy as it all may seem today, and especially after the collapse of world socialism, the argument has to be taken seriously, since it has been accepted to varying degrees by a few influential scientists, including Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levins, and Ruth Hubbard, who are highly regarded in the public eye as scientists, even as they continue to promote a Marxian view.

Here then is the argument in its raw form: only an anti-reductionist, non-bourgeois science can help humanity attain the highest goal, which is a socialist world. In the 1984 book Not in Our Genes, Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin, all worthies of radical science philosophy, explained their purpose as follows:

We share a commitment to the prospect of the creation of a more socially just–a socialist–society. And we recognize that a critical science is an integral part of the struggle to create that society, just as we also believe that the social function of much of today’s science is to hinder the creation of that society by acting to preserve the interests of the dominant class, gender, and race. This belief–in the possibility of a critical and liberatory science–is why we have each in our separate ways and to varying degrees been involved in the development of what has become known over the 1970s and 1980s, in the United States and Britain, as the radical science movement.

Read the whole thing. Wilson’s plain English and guilelessness is a refreshing contrast to the turd-flingers that rule the roost at Pandagon.

Lewontin, Gould, and their marxist fellow travelers were more interested in promoting their “frame” than in promoting science. Their agenda, just as it is for the “reality-based community”, is not based on the non-existence or non-importance of class, gender, and race – it is based on a hyper-awareness and presumed hyper-importance of these “social constructs”. Moreover, they call for explicit attack on what they perceive to be the “dominant” class, gender, or race.

The reality is that “reality-based community” are today’s budding totalitarians and the “dominant” Anglo-Saxon, male, Whites are their neo-jews. Why? Because they hate us. (For hating them, for hating them, … as Owl said before his head exploded.)

That last paragraph refers to the retribution mindset most anti-racists seem locked in. They have trouble imagining a world where people simply live and let live. In fact Owl, one of the “resident Goulds”, thought he had reached a deep truth when he wrote:

In this view, anti-racism really is anti-Whitism, because they think racism is right.

Actually, in my view anti-racism is really anti-Whitism because it is. I’ve provided argument and evidence to support this assertion, and it matters not one bit who or what I am.

(The image is taken from an ad banner at Pandagon. It reflects their nihilism perfectly.)