Irascible bus-hopping expat, Fred Reed, shares some thoughts on the latest American Renaissance conference, where he was a somewhat unlikely speaker. His take on the Phil Rushton goblin sounds about right to me:
One of the speakers was Phil Rushton, of the University of Western Ontario, whose specialty is the study of racial differences in intelligence. Only among the ideologically befogged is the subject beyond the pale. The evidence for these differences would be voluminous if there weren’t so much of it. Further, measurements of intelligence are reproducible and highly correlated with success of both individuals and groups. The people who do these studies, as for example Rushton, are highly intelligent themselves and cautious in their conclusions.
It amuses me that such as Rushton are often regarded as right-wing racists, drone. They point out that Jews are intellectually superior to other whites, which is hardly a traditional right-wing view; and that East Asians are smarter than whites, also not normally regarded as a white racist idea. Look at the IQ hierarchy they find: Jews at the top, followed by, East Asians, whites, South American mestizos, American blacks, African blacks. Now compare the intellectual achievements of the groups. Kinda sorta fits, don’t it? But we can’t talk about this because (a) we wouldn’t like the results, and (b) because it takes an eighth-grade understanding of mathematics to grasp a standard deviation, which eliminates most of the population.
I still have trouble with eighth-grade math, but that didn't stop me from sharing my thoughts on the subject of intractable race differences and Bell Curve bugaboos in a series of posts (here, here, and here) that more or less launched this here Hog thing.
More interesting is Fred's take on the demographic composition of the conference attendees:
The audience was anything but homogeneous. Someone who had been to various such conventions said the crowd consisted of twenty percent Neo-Nazis and twenty percent Jews. Jews, yes; Neo-Nazis, perhaps. If the latter means people who want to exterminate this or that group, I encountered none. The closest anyone came was an overwrought dingaling who, in question and answer, denounced me as a race traitor for having married Violeta, my Mexican wife. I considered an appropriate but anatomically unorthodox repositioning of my microphone. However, the audience told him to sit down and shut up. Later a dozen people apologized for his behavior, and I met a fair number of men who had Chinese, Mexican, and Colombian wives. Race traitors all, I suppose.
Two cheers for racialist gentility.
Elsewhere, the happily hetorodox Satanist cum Androphile polemicist, Jack Malebranche, channels Anton LaVey (channeling Ragnar Redbeard) in "The Luxury of Empowerment," an undeceived meditation exposing the "epidemic confusion about the nature of power" while serving up a "pimp slap of cold, hard reality" to those who would seek safe refuge behind semantic soap bubbles. To wit:
"Empowerment" is a pathetic salve for low self-esteem, a comforting, ego-inflating illusion dreamed up by those who have little or no power but who covet a sense of vital importance. The illusion of "empowerment" is prized by the powerless and humored by those who wield real power. The illusion of "empowerment" is a luxury, like cable television, air conditioning, imported gourmet food, chemical anti-depressants, plastic surgery, the "civil rights" lawsuit or anything else which is made possible only by the extreme wealth and military might of modern industrialized nations.
Elsewhere yet, looks as though there's a new antinatalist site on the grid. It seems more targeted toward ever-impressionable young folk who might -- naturally -- contemplate breeding without having thought through the implications. Iterations being necessary, here's the entire opening salvo, more or less:
You are going to die. I’m not telling you this to depress you. It’s just a simple fact…everybody dies. Everything living dies, period. Always. And along the way, we suffer. Oh, not all the time, and not equally. But suffering is part of what life is all about, and some people suffer horribly. Disease. Accident. Starvation. Abuse. And then, sooner or later, there comes death. To all of us. Always. Of course, we all know this, right? Right.
Still, we try to ignore the facts, and there are many ways in which we do this. Little games we play with ourselves and others. We invent magical beings who tell us what to do, and who promise to protect us. We imagine fairytale places to go to after we die, so it all won’t seem so bad. Of course, these are lies, but lies invented with the best of intentions; to make us less afraid. And then, there’s the biggest, and most harmful lie of all. We have children, imagining that we somehow live on through them…a kind of fake immortality. But make no mistake; our children, each and every one of them, will suffer and die, and no one will really live on at all. The only thing that lives on is the fear, and the story…the lie.
With modern birth control methods, nobody needs to have children anymore. The world is over-populated, but I’m not going to ask you to save the world. I’m simply asking you to save a child; your child. A child who is never brought into this world will never suffer, nor do harm, nor die. An unborn child will never fear, or lose anyone close to him. But, you might ask, doesn’t an unborn child also lose out on all the good stuff life has to offer?
Close your eyes. Now, imagine a little boy or girl in your head; any color or shape you choose. Now, open your eyes, and let the image fade. Did your imagined child lose out on anything? Of course not…he or she was an imaginary being, after all, and never existed even one little bit. The same goes for an unborn child; it never misses out on anything at all. However, a real child brought into the world can be made to suffer in all the ways you can imagine, and probably many ways you’d really rather not think about. Of course, any single child’s life might turn out relatively well, though everyone suffers somewhat. But are you really willing to take the chance that your child MIGHT be one of those who suffers terribly through life? Even if you think that chance is somewhat small? It’s a dice throw, after all. Why take the risk?
Of course, many people will pressure you throughout your childbearing years to ‘have kids’. That’s because of the pretend game I mentioned before; and also, because they want your kids to work, and pay taxes, and help to support them when they get old. If fact, until very recently in history, most people had children for this exact purpose, as many still do today. Oh, and in the past, lots of people owned or worked on farms, and every child was an extra hand to help do the chores. Children as farm tools…does that sound right to you? Well, anybody who tells you to have children, so that your children can contribute to the ‘future’, is basically saying the same thing. “Have a kid! You owe us!” Does anybody else find that idea upsetting?
If you really feel a need to have a child, adopt. There are plenty of already existing kids who need good homes. The world doesn’t need any more of them. Or volunteer somewhere; there are lots of organizations where you can help kids and adults get through life a little bit easier. I’m just trying to get the point across that there is absolutely NO need to have children, besides the obviously selfish ones. And that’s another thing- don’t let people accuse YOU of being selfish for refusing to breed. There is nothing more selfish than breeding, especially considering what a child might go through. And of course, no matter how good a particular child’s life is, in the end it must die. In a very real way, to have a child is also to condemn that child to death. Now, do you really want to do that?
