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Steve Sailer #fundie vdare.com

Now, here’s a sensible suggest: that to do better at the highest levels, women need to respond to criticism more objectively. But of course, this nugget of good sense is buried under lots of feminism victimology and You Go Girlisms. Much of the appeal of feminism is that it encourages women to do what they always felt like doing anyway: take everything personally. But to succeed at the highest level, you need some objectivity, which feminism hates. Feminists see objective reality as a conspiracy out to make them feel bad about themselves.

This is a funny example of how feminism encourages women to do what they always felt like doing: interpret everything personally and subjectively. Do you really think Peter Thiel or Paul Graham would tell a man that five investors dismissing his start-up idea “doesn’t tell a [man] anything about the quality of [his] business idea” but instead is just about the investors’ peculiarities? Successful masculine thinking deals both with subjective realities and objective realities, such as that my idea might be objectively no good, or, at minimum, needs major improvements. And maybe there is something that investors don’t like about me? Can I improve that aspect of my performance? Or maybe I should get a partner who is a better front man?

The most successful men in Silicon Valley neither dismiss criticism of their proposals as merely the subjective preferences of the critics nor do they accept criticism as crushing permanent proof that they are worthless human beings who will never ever come up with a good idea. Obviously, maintaining your subjective self-confidence while being objective about your ideas is difficult to do. Most men can’t, but more men than women can, which is one reason why the high end of Silicon Valley is dominated by men.

Looking back on a lifetime of feminism dominance of the media, I can recall distant eras when certain feminists tried to be logical, but those attempts alienated other feminists. So, today, feminism is whatever any woman is upset about. It doesn’t have to be consistent with what other feminists are upset about. It doesn’t even have to be consistent with whatever other things that particular feminist is upset about. All that matters is that whoever is bitching about whatever claims the mantle of Team Women.

Steve Sailer #fundie vdare.com

While upwardly mobile Mexican-Americans marry blonde Anglos, downwardly mobile white men wed Mexicans. Now, there is no doubt plenty to be said for getting hitched to a Mexican lady. They probably tend to make better mothers, homemakers, and cooks than the leggy blonde careerists who, however, are so much more in demand in Southern California.

Federale #racist vdare.com

Over a period of years, dozens received legal permanent residence by the simple expedient of marrying an American. The fraud is common and given its frequency, not often caught by the fraud investigators and adjudicators at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Now that marriage benefits have been extended unlawfully to homosexuals, USCIS will be inundated by homosexual marriage fraud. Since they are woefully unable to cope with heterosexual marriage fraud, the situation will only get worse.

Allan Wall #racist vdare.com

War On Christmas—War On American Food—War On America?

It’s not enough that Christmas is being replaced in the name of diversity–so is American food, at least according to the Main Stream Media, which wants to lecture us on how this means the historic American nation is inevitably being replaced too.

For years, we’ve been told that salsa now outsells ketchup in the US...But a recent Associated Press Article took it a step further, reporting that several well-known American foods are now being outsold by Mexican foods.

[...]

The AP article reports that

•“Tortillas and taco kits outsell hamburgers and hot dog buns”
•“Sales of tortilla chips trump potato chips”
•Tomato-based salsa not only outsells ketchup, but outsells ketchup 2 to 1

Gloatingly, the article explains that this is part of a demographic transformation (which, it implies, is inevitable and all good people support):

As immigrant and minority populations rewrite American demographics, the nation's collective menu is reflecting this flux, as it always has—This is a rewrite of the American menu at the macro level, an evolution of whole patterns of how people eat.

And we are reminded this is all due to a particular group of people who cannot be denied:

The biggest culinary voting bloc is Hispanic.

Ah, hah! Just as in electoral politics, the MSM is trying to persuade us that Hispanics trump all.

[...]

In fact, Hispanics make up only 17 percent according to the Census. But you get the idea.

This seeming contradiction is resolved via a coded racial slur by the Tortilla Industry Association’s CEO Jim Kabbani. Kabbani [Email him] is quoted as quipping:

"Having been raised on Wonder bread, I didn't think that this could displace the sliced bread that was such an item of the American kitchen."

This evokes the pejorative “white bread” epithet often hurled at traditional mid-20th century American culture.

The article ends with a contradictory quote from Terry Soto, an Ecuadorian woman who is “president and CEO of About Marketing Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in the Hispanic market”:

"There is a larger segment of the population that wants the real thing. It's not so much the products becoming mainstream. It's about ethnic food becoming that much more of what we eat on a day-to-day basis."

The contradiction is resolved—American Hispanics are, apparently, an authentic cultural bloc who will eat their own “real” food, while “white bread” Americans haplessly follow along until they are finally replaced.

[...]

The MSM multiculturalists are engaged in a bait-and-switch. They lull Americans to sleep with romanticized images of immigration, huddled masses, Ellis Island, etc. Then Americans wake up and are told their country has been irretrievably transformed into something else. That’s why we are told we can’t have Christmas anymore. In this case, it’s culinary fashion that is being used to promote the Demographic-Change-Is-Inevitable theme.

There’s that other subtext in the Hispanic Cuisine Hype.

Old White Anglo-European America—Bland and Boring—“White Bread”

Vs.

New Hispanic Multicultural America—Spicy, Vibrant and Exciting—“Salsa”

As a descendant of Old America, I naturally dispute its being characterized as “boring.” But that’s what the diversity-mongers want us to believe.

Whatever—the historic American nation has an origin, history, and identity. Is it to be radically transformed, beyond recognition, without our permission?

Apparently so, unless we can stop it.

It’s about who’s coming to dinner—not what is served on the table.

Pat Buchanan #racist vdare.com

And as I have never heard of anyone choosing a team name to insult it, who is really lacking in tolerance and mutual respect here?

If [Oenida Chief Ray] Halbritter has a problem with the Redskins, he's got more problems than that in D.C. Among this city's great monuments is the memorial to Jefferson whose Declaration of Independence speaks of those "merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction, of all ages, sexes and conditions."

Joe Guzzardi #racist vdare.com

The goal of Puerto Rican statehood is nothing as lofty like "self determination" or "democracy". Instead, it is to leveraging Congress with as many Democrats as possible, to keep the Obama agenda grinding along and crushing whatever opposition the Republicans may mount along the way.

All this and the threat of entrenching coast-to-coast bilingualism—which has happened in Canada because of its French-speaking province of Quebec—too.

What better reasons could there be to oppose Puerto Rican statehood?

Why not let all Americans vote on this subversive proposal?

We are the ones who will pay the price.

Maybe a majority will agree with Steve Sailer: USA Libre! Throw Puerto Rico out!

John Derbyshire #racist vdare.com

It seems I’ve picked up an interest in the Civil War just as America is undergoing a revival of Abolitionist Porn. That, at any rate, is what I take this much-talked-of new movie 12 Years a Slave to be.

No, I haven’t seen the thing, but I’ve read reviews. Also I’ve seen (and reviewed) a specimen of the allied genre: Civil Rights Porn.

And I’ve no doubt there was such a thing as Abolitionist Porn. It would have been surprising if there wasn’t. Whenever there’s a deep and long-standing difference between two sets of social principles, a genre of lurid tales will come up in one camp, denigrating the other.

[...]

So I’ve no doubt that antebellum Yankees enjoyed having their flesh made to creep by stories of the dreadful goings-on in Southern plantations.

There was at least enough of this kind of thing for Southerners to poke fun at it. Here is Gone With The Wind ’s Scarlett O’Hara making business calls on occupying Yankees in Reconstruction Atlanta:

Accepting Uncle Tom’s Cabin as revelation second only to the Bible, the Yankee women all wanted to know about the bloodhounds which every Southerner kept to track down runaway slaves. And they never believed her when she told them she had only seen one bloodhound in all her life . . . They wanted to know about the dreadful branding irons which planters used to mark the faces of their slaves . . . and they evidenced what Scarlett felt was a very nasty and ill-bred interest in slave concubinage.

[Gone With the Wind, Chapter 38.]

Reading that, and knowing something of the author’s background, I thought: Well, I bet there were bloodhounds; but I also bet there were young plantation women who had seen only one.

Some googling on the Slave Narrativesconfirms the first, at any rate. The Slave Narratives are recorded reminiscences from ex-slaves, gathered by the Federal Writers’ Project in 1936-38. The speaker here was born “around 1852”:

Mars George fed an’ clo’esed well an’ was kin’ to his slaves, but once in a while one would git onruly an’ have to be punished. De worse I ever seen one whupped was a slave man dat had slipped off an’ hid out in de woods to git out of wuk. Dey chased him wid blood hounds, an’ when dey did fin’ him dey tied him to a tree, stroppin’ him ’round an’ ’round. Dey sho’ did gib him a lashin’.

[Mississippi Slave Narratives, Harriet Walker.]

As that extract illustrates, though, the Slave Narratives also remind us how remarkably often ex-slaves spoke well of their masters.

Plainly there was more to American race slavery that white masters brutalizing resentful Negroes. How much more, though? What was slavery actually like?

Trying to get to grips with this, I found it easiest to divide up the topic the way Caesar divided Gaul, into three parts:

•Slavery as a condition.
•American slave society as a way of life.
•The position of blacks in America’s first century.

Of slavery as a condition—the ownership of human beings—the first thing to be said is that any person of feeling and imagination has to think it wrong, on the Golden Rule principle. The liberty to work out your own destiny, by your own volition, is a sweet thing, as the Spartans told the Persian. I wouldn’t deprive anyone of it.

That said, some historical imagination is in order. People are born, raised, educated, and find themselves in a certain kind of society to which those around them are all accustomed. American slave society was a way of life; a settled way that most people took for granted, as most people will anywhere.

There were aspects of life resembling slavery in the communist China where I lived, 1982-3. People had no liberty to find their own employment. You were “assigned” to a “unit.” If unhappy there, it was a devil of a job to get re-assigned.

Families broken up? One of my Chinese colleagues lived alone because his wife was “assigned” to a distant province. He only saw her once a year.

The guy drank a lot.

Yet while there was much grumbling, and some scattered seething rebelliousness, most Chinese got along with the system. A lot of people were very happy with it. You didn’t have to think much, or take much responsibility. And that suits many of us just fine.

[...]

Slavery is more irksome to some than to others; and freedom can be irksome, too. Personally, I’d be a terrible slave—too ornery. I know people, though—and I’m talking about white people—who I quietly suspect would be happy in slavery.

Steve Sailer #racist vdare.com

What you won't hear, except from me, is that 'Let the good times roll' is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society. ... In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan — because, when you get down to it, [the] Japanese aren't blacks.

John Derbyshire #racist vdare.com

What generated the most shrieking and swooning from the guardians of racial orthodoxy in this cycle was this remark in my VDARE.com column:

"White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with."

On the John Locke principle, though—i.e. "I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts"—the overwhelming majority of black Americans agree with me, and always have. From very early in the Republic, free blacks not only had the opportunity to escape from white supremacy, they were encouraged to do so by abolitionists.

The gentle Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, closed out Uncle Tom's Cabin with an appeal, grounded in Christian charity, for freed blacks to be educated and trained—so that they would be better able to survive in Liberia!

Let the church of the north receive these poor sufferers in the spirit of Christ; receive them to the educating advantages of Christian republican society and schools, until they have attained to somewhat of a moral and intellectual maturity, and then assist them in their passage to those shores, where they may put in practice the lessons they have learned in America.[Concluding Remarks, Chapter 45]

Abraham Lincoln was keen to help blacks escape white supremacy, too. In August 1862 he invited a delegation of free blacks to the White House—in order to urge them to leave America.

(Lincoln's entire speech is here. I note in passing that the 150th anniversary of it is just a few weeks away. I await with keen interest the many articles that will no doubt appear in the Main Stream Media to commemorate the occasion.)

But with all this opportunity and encouragement, how many freed blacks actually chose to escape from under the iron heel of white supremacy? Most sources give 15,000-20,000—out of a Civil War-era black population of around four million. That’s less than half of one percent. Ninety-nine point five something percent preferred white supremacy. That's an even bigger proportion than voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

John Derbyshire #racist vdare.com

The enemies of conservatism are eager to supply their own nomenclature. "White Supremacist" seems to be their current favorite. It is meant maliciously, of course, to bring up images of fire-hoses, attack dogs, pick handles, and segregated lunch counters—to imply that conservatives, especially non-mainstream conservatives, are cruel people with dark thoughts.

Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think "White Supremacist" is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don't see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group.