Why I am anti-anti-concept and you should be too
May 15, 2014 § 69 Comments
The concept of an “anti-concept” has come up in any number of discussions over the years (e.g. see here), most famously when a commenter at Mark Shea’s claimed that torture isn’t really a thing: it is just a meaningless anti-concept used to express the disapproval of the speaker.
The latest real thing to be cast as an anti-concept is racism: the assertion is that racism isn’t really anything at all, it is just an epithet expressing the disapproval of the person uttering it. This is supported by an appeal to etymology, as if we are supposed to accept the nominalist presupposition that the essence of something is brought into being by the coining of a term.
The basic idea seems to be that in order to defeat liberalism we have to become even more postmodern ourselves. Liberalism is good at telling lies and spreading propaganda, so we need to learn how to play the same language games that modernity plays in order to “win”.
But of course racism really is (and quite manifestly) a thing. If it weren’t a thing then propagandists wouldn’t have any reason to anchor their propaganda to it. Furthermore, anyone who cannot see racism in (say) a group of black thugs beating a white man to death while shouting “cracker” at him, or in a group of white slavers burning an “uppity nigger” alive, is a moral imbecile utterly incapable of even having a discussion about reality.
So the main reason to be anti-anti-concept is because the proposal that torture, racism, misogyny, and even homophobia are anti-concepts is false. Even a term like homophobia, which is used almost exclusively as propaganda – that is, as a building block for telling lies – refers to a real thing with an essence.
So my advice is to stop layering more bricks on the Tower of Babel in the vain hope of “winning”.
Zippy Catholic 
Indeed, the problem here is that in order to frustrate the left, they are denying that actual racism exists even when it’s not morally obligatory to do anything about it. For example, there is nothing morally obligatory about distancing oneself from individuals who use racist language or who are so prejudiced that they really are damn near bigots–but would never harm someone from another race except in self-defense. If anything, our response should be to note that acutal white racism today is such an inconsequential thing that until non-white racism is thoroughly addressed, whites should simply not give a rodent’s posterior about any manifestations of racism from whites except those that are objectively criminal in nature.
** by inconsequential, I mean in that blacks and other non-whites are rarely criminally victimized on account of race by whites. The most that can be pointed out by shrieking anti-(white) racists is some vague conspiracy to deny advancement to minorities and “institutional racism” in the legal system.
Mike T:
I might even suggest that our present society is more free for anti-white racists than in the past and is less free for some other kinds of racists. Ahem.
No, there’s actual racism against blacks that is non-criminal. While quite a lot of it tends to occur in liberal establishments, there is still a lot of, erm, apex fallacy thinking regarding how racism currently plays out for black Americans among right-liberals and conservatively oriented types.
Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren have a lot in common, for example, but a non-connected black woman who scored better than either would not have such opportunities as either dumped in her lap just for being black. Still totally the case for white guys with great scores though. Carol Mosely Braun’s very short-lived Senate career is also not well tailored to the dissident right narrative of “black-run America”, compared to, say, Sarah Palin’s fortunes after her political career imploded.
Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren have a lot in common, for example, but a non-connected black woman who scored better than either would not have such opportunities as either dumped in her lap just for being black. Still totally the case for white guys with great scores though. Carol Mosely Braun’s very short-lived Senate career is also not well tailored to the dissident right narrative of “black-run America”, compared to, say, Sarah Palin’s fortunes after her political career imploded.
Can you explain how either of these cases are non-criminal racism?
Why don’t we have a word “deskism” for someone who thinks differences between types of desk matter, and who has strong preferences in favor of some desks and against other kinds of desk?
Only whites can be racist, and all whites are racists. That is why it is not racism when a bunch of blacks beat up a white man who happens to be passing by. When they do that, they are being anti racist. When you try to give “racism” some meaning other than “Beat the daylights out of honkeys”, you are trying to push shit uphill.
It never had the meaning you are trying to give it. And it never will, because there is no need for a word with the meaning you are trying to give “racist”. It is like gays trying to force us to pretend that the word gay still has the meanings cheerful and happy, rather than filthy, disgusting, weak and depraved.
They are pushing shit uphill, but they have the power. You are pushing shit uphill and you don’t have the power.
“Racist” means what it means, and what it means is that blacks are entitled to beat the hell out of whites, and whites are not entitled to fight back.
[…] By Zippy […]
I am starting to understand the neoreactionary response to race (and no doubt other subjects) as an attempt to Game liberalism with a big “agree and amplify”.
Me, I prefer the truth.
So you’re anti-concept of the concept of anti-concept…
Cane:
I realize you almost certainly have tongue firmly planted in cheek, but I’ll give a humorless straight answer anyway.
No, the concept ‘anti-concept’ is not an anti-concept. It does mean something other than that the person saying it disapproves. It refers to a word with no meaning other than as an expression of disapproval, with a pretense to some additional meaning as a kind of propaganda ploy.
The problem with it is that it is obviously false that (e.g.) racism or torture are anti-concepts.
So I am not saying that anti-concept is, itself, an anti-concept. I’m just saying that the people who are asserting it of (e.g.) racism are telling manifest falsehoods. Probably because they are worrying about trying to “Game” liberalism rather than just sticking to the truth.
The good news is that Game apparently does frequently lead to getting screwed by its targets.
Just in case someone actually has a moment of confusion and thinks there might actually be something to jamesd127’s rant, I’ll go ahead and answer it (though it seems more than a little silly to do so):
jamesd127 writes:
Two reasons.
Racism is unjust actions toward another person or persons, specifically because of that person’s race.
First, desks are not persons, so it is impossible to act unjustly toward them. Indeed, treating subjects (persons) as if they were nothing but objects is central to what makes many immoral actions immoral.
Second, desks do not have race as an attribute, so even if we stipulated the possibility of acting unjustly toward a desk (!) it would not be possible to do so because of the desk’s race.
What are you talking about? Scores on what? Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren have connections, so they have opportunities. A white woman without connections won’t have those same opportunities. Does she get to cry “Racist!” too? Or is that a special privilege for blacks?
Huh? What is “totally the case for white guys”?
No, there’s actual racism against blacks that is non-criminal. While quite a lot of it tends to occur in liberal establishments, there is still a lot of, erm, apex fallacy thinking regarding how racism currently plays out for black Americans among right-liberals and conservatively oriented types.
And where did I suggest that whites don’t show racism of a non-criminal variety? What I said was that considering the lopsided nature of anti-racism and the toothlessness of most white racism, as compared to the extremely violent racism of many blacks and hispanics, whites ought to basically take the attitude of “until you get your #$%^ together on the ‘kill whitey’ stuff, we won’t even give a rat’s ass about you crying racism about anything less than a cross burning in your yard.”
Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren have a lot in common, for example, but a non-connected black woman who scored better than either would not have such opportunities as either dumped in her lap just for being black.
In STEM fields this not even remotely true. A black female who sticks with it is all but guaranteed to be making six figures by the time she’s 40 because employers will literally overlook incompetence in order to fill the quota, that’s how desperate they are for diversity. Those that can’t stay technical, they’ll fast track into management.
@Zippy
It was. Also just a fun illustration of the difficulty of communicating these things; especially the things that we already know; even if lies have obfuscated them; even if they are our own lies.
James, for example, doesn’t actually struggle to know what racism is, and he doesn’t actually think it’s not real. TUW knows that the naked fact that a white man has a higher statistical chance of being plucked at random (no connections) out of a large pool of high scores is because there are more white guys in that pool, but it doesn’t fit her feelings on what she would prefer to see.
Trying to steal the word racism from the Left is retarded. What it means is insufficiently attacking White privilege; and White privilege is real.
Meanwhile, I think the accepted word for rejecting people due to their race or other tribal affiliation is called tribalism.
“I am starting to understand the neoreactionary response to race (and no doubt other subjects) as an attempt to Game liberalism with a big “agree and amplify”.”
I think what they’re hoping is that moving far in the other direction on all issues they can meet in the middle with the rest of society but they eventually begin to believe what they start out merely saying for rhetorical purposes. I know, because I was like this on many things as well. However, these sort of things only alienate normal people who would otherwise agree with you.
“James, for example, doesn’t actually struggle to know what racism is, and he doesn’t actually think it’s not real.”
I think he was doing a sort of satire of real leftist beliefs in “racism”. According to a leftist, being white means you are either a racist or a closet racist and therefore whenever whites attack nonwhites(including Jews) for any reason including self-defense or criminal reasons that have nothing to do with race leftists will consider him a racist but if a non-white(not including Jews but especially referring to blacks) attacks a white for any reason even for explicitly racial ones, that is either “not racist” or even “anti-racist”.
“TUW knows that the naked fact that a white man has a higher statistical chance of being plucked at random (no connections) out of a large pool of high scores is because there are more white guys in that pool, but it doesn’t fit her feelings on what she would prefer to see.”
I think she is completely discounting the real differences between Blacks and Whites, Jews, and Asians and hoping that they can be explained away by the existence of noncriminal(or institutional) racism even in the era of AA.
[…] are trying to give it. And it never will, because there is no need for a word with the meaning Zippy is trying to give “racist”. It is like gays trying to force us to pretend that the word […]
In the Trayvon Zimmerman case, it was obvious that Trayvon attacked Zimmerman in substantial part because Zimmerman was less black than himself.
Did you call Trayvon “racist”?
Of course you did not, because beating up people and murdering people for insufficient blackness is anti racism. It just does not come naturally to use the word in any other way.
Svar:
I have the impression that James believes his own BS, and his latest post reinforces that impression. You may be right though that what starts out as a deliberately outrageous rhetorical strategy eventually gets included in the catechism.
Plenty of people called Trayvon Martin a racist, e.g. http://rare.us/story/nugent-zimmerman-verdict-vindicates-citizen-patrols-self-defense/
A small point of order: I think it would be more true to say that they believe racist oppression is attached to non-whites, than that it emanates from whites. A black cop who questions a black suspect is considered racist as well; hence the charge: “Uncle Tom”. This explains affirmative action too. It’s not enough for whites to simply lay off the racism. We must take action against the affliction that is not manifested.
I do believe both racism and sexism are nonsensical words invented by communists.
Sexism is just a modification wherein women are turned into a “race”. So naturally, it is now forbidden to claim there is any possible difference between the sexes and you just become male or female, since sexes and races are social constructs… and bla bla bla. Sociologist claptrap insanity.
Racism = Cultural Marxism in practice. Same deal with sexism. Two bad concepts to foment ethnic hostility between groups and destroy civilization itself by pitting women against men.
Bad link.
And even if it had been a good link, you did not call Trayvon Martin racist.
James:
Link works fine for me, phone and desktop. And despite your strutting and posturing the fact is that you know next to nothing about me, about what I have and have not said myself, and about what I have and have not heard others say.
You don’t figure out what a word means by struggling with it. You observe how it is actually used.
The word “racism”/”racist” has been around for eighty four years. In that time, usages that support Zippy’s supposed meaning have been extremely rare, and the only people that have used it in ways that support Zippy’s supposed meaning are poor, ignorant, powerless, low status people, whose usage is therefore best interpreted as error and solecism.
Now it works for me also. I don’t know why it did not work earlier. Some guy who portrays himself as a redneck and writes like a redneck called Martin Trayvon “racist”.
I know your class from your dialect. And people of your class do not spontaneously call Martin Trayvon racist.
Hah!
@ James
I believe we’re all mostly middle-class with a significant working class minority(also there is no real economic or social difference between the two nowadays). I have heard such people(since like hangs with like) divided into three groups on the Martin-Zimmerman matter: stupid people who say Zimmerman is racist, stupid people who realize that Trayvon Martin attacked Zimmerman because he was a typical ghetto thug who happened to attack the wrong person that day but who are still stupid for thinking that any leftist will be swayed by logic or reality, and really, really smart people who realized that a Mexican killing a Black person is not news, it’s just an average day in the city, and who just didn’t give a damn.
Unfortunately, I was the second group of idiots. Trayvon was not a racist. He was just a thug. I guess the only way Trayvon could be considered a racist would be how he is reinforcing unfortunate(but mostly true) stereotypes.
I think I favor a middle way here, if this is one. Words change meanings sometimes – for example, the English verb “to tell” used to mean to count, to enumerate (a meaning which still occurs in the related word “tally”, as well as Norwegian “telle” and Danish “tælle”) but now it means to inform, to narrate.
Therefore, while a word does have a real meaning with an essence, it does not have an eternal meaning; it has one meaning at time t_1 and may have a different meaning at time t_2.
Just as it was correct at one point to say “tell to ten” and now isn’t (one says “count to ten” instead), it now isn’t correct to abjure “racism” because the present meaning of “racist” is something along the lines of insufficiently liberal on race.
“Trayvon Martin attacked Zimmerman because he was a typical ghetto thug”
–“typical ghetto thug(s)” of Trayvon’s description are almost universally ‘racist’ by nurture/indoctrination.
Isn’t anti-anti-racism like Game? That is, if you take feminist premises and merely flip the polarity, does it really cease to be feminism?
The concept of Unjust Prejudice, aka. Bigotry, is quite real and is denied by no one. Not even Jim.
Coopting a word invented by Leftists to pathologize normalcy to describe the concept is just a bad idea.
I remember when those “Safe Zones” cropped up all over college campuses. From there we got the newly invented term “heterosexism”.
Scott:
Similar. As a result of liberalism run amok sluttiness is seen as empowering for women (and thus as a “box of tools” to help women become more equal to men); so the male equivalent of sluttiness (Game) is seen as counter-empowerment for men.
Scott:
I don’t disagree with liberals that sexism and heterosexism are real. I disagree with liberals that they are bad.
There is a difference between misogyny/misandry and sexism, just as there is a distinction between racism and stereotyping. The former implies injustice, while the latter is unavoidable.
But denying the existence of these things is a silly word game that postmodern people are attached to because of their nominalism. Folks who propose to oppose modernity by embracing its philosophical errors are as common as grass in Nebraska; but in my view that is just foolishness.
Maybe the confusion is some people think misogyny/misandry : sexism :: bigotry : racism/stereotyping. Seems some people here just have a problem with the word racism being the “bad” one while sexism is not. I’m truly not tied or opposed to any word in particular; I just wish they’d be used consistently. Of course, the problem now is that bigot is well on its way to having any real meaning wrung out of it.
I’m sorry to digress, but this reminds me of something I read from C.S. Lewis a long time ago, when I was in high school. He was mourning the death of meaning in words like “gentleman” which used to have a specific definition involving class and at Lewis’ time was beginning to simply mean “good guy”. At the time it annoyed and angered me, perhaps due to my foolish egalitarianism. But now, I can certainly understand it.
Also, let’s call a cat a cat, racism is a stupid ideology of inversion. What does exist however Zippy is what I call “ethnic hostility”. It can be for small groups of various sorts. English and French are hostile against each others and have been for oh, about as long as both ethnic groups exist. There is a mixture of envy and frustration at each other. It’s not merely hate because there is hostility. Racism simplify everything way too much.
However, remember that ethnic hostility usually goes for the groups above, not below. That is why ethnic hostility that has historically been the most common in recent centuries was against Ashkenazim, as they were a predatory superior ethnic group to European Catholics.
Colonialism correctly understand is a humanitarian, progressive, liberal idealism that believe you can raise up the rest of humanity to the same standards through education and institutions. Democratization ala USA is pretty much the same darn thing, except with “international community” institutions that pretend they speak for the World while they are solely American pet projects (ie: NATO, EU, UN, World Bank, AP, etc). We still believe we’ll turn the whole world into Greater America as European Liberals believed they would turn the world into Greater Europe in the 19th and early 20th century. We’re fools who repeat the same mistake over and over and over again.It’s like we never learn.
But just identify what ethnic hostility is and remember that ethnic hostility against lower ethnic groups is extremely rare. French and English had a war for over a hundred years and we may even say, we’re having a 1000 years war (1066-2066) that is still ongoing due to the occupation of Canada by immigrants. Are the English superior to the French? I really don’t care. I may even agree that they potentially are slightly superior in the mathematical, scientific sense, but not in the artistic/creative spirit. I mean, The Beatles are nice, but Jacques Brel make them sound like 13-year old boys trying to write poetry to impress a chick. There’s no good English songwriters, except maybe the early 20th century Ashkenazim/WASP Broadway production. Yesterdays is a good song (it’s German-Jewish), Yesterday by the Beatles is infantile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hkakz0jmew versus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNnaxGFO18o … please tell me you take the Beatles seriously, lyrically? Imagine you destroy the world with communism and sexual anarchy, love is all you need, kill kill, rape, pillage, burn Babylon burn… etc.
So now, tell me again about ethnic hostility toward Black and Brown? Who cares? The problem is mostly our extremist altruism toward them. They are Brothers in the name of Humanity. No one argues this. I just think they need to evolve in their own context and leave other groups evolve in their own context… Because yes, if Catholics are purely anti-Darwin, they will lose. I’m a Catholic and an Evolutionist. Charles Darwin refused to recognize communism as legitimate, that’s good enough for me, he was on the true path and he’s the giant in the history of the West after Newton and Da Vinci. He may have denied the existence of God on too small technicalities, but it will always remain a problem if people are anti-darwinian.
It’s not because we HATE that we believe in evolution. Lactose tolerance is not arguable with culture, education, sociology. Europeans are not from Europe, they’re from the Middle-East. Whites are not purely homo sapiens, they are partly Neandertal. Can you deny this? Of course not, we’re proving it. We’re civilized because we’re milk-drinkers, it’s as stupid as that. Evolution is not herd behavior, it’s having herds of cows. It’s harsh and I’m sorry, but it is ongoing even today.
The pygmies today are being exterminated through cannibalism. Now if you want to tell me something isn’t wrong in this picture, I beg you to call me a racist. The bushman are also slowly vanishing. But hey, thanks, it’s the African Century. There will be 4.2 billion of them by 2100 thanks to Americanism. They always would multiply until they reached famine and destroyed themselves. Now Thank God we are feeding them and bringing them all over the world. Do the devolution?
Should Africa take over the whole world except China and Japan? I guess so, but no worry, the biggest concern is Islam and their moon cult.
There… Racism! I have nothing against Africans, just stop asking me to handle them as if they were my children. They need to become adults in their own terms, in their own geography, within their context. Otherwise, bring back colonialism and we’ll tell them to stop screwing around and form monogamous exogamous nuclear families and hang people for adultery. Give that a few generations and they will reach civilization. Darwinism, it’s a bitch. It’s not the whole truth, because the truth is Catholic, but ban cousin mariage among the arab-descended people and you fix their idiocy… fix sexual promiscuity among primitives in America, Africa, Oceania and South-Asia… maybe they “evolve” a civilisation. Instead of us devolving into depravity and sexual anarchy, which is what is making them savages.
What is the secret of evolution? The Holy Roman Catholic Church, that’s what! Bring back authoritarianism, impose exogamous monogamous marriage. Punish adultery with prison and exile for prostitutes. Bang: Civilization… It’s evolution!
So stop with the superficiality about skin colors. We’re not a color-coded people. I don’t hate Blacks nor Jews. I just tell them to their face what I think about what’s wrong with all of them. Unsurprisingly, they tend not to disagree a whole lot. See, when you’re telling the truth, you don’t need violence. I do not “hate” anyone. That’s a vulgar sentiment, it’s envy, it’s a deadly sin. Usually, you hate what you wish you could have. Against Blacks, I guess the main thing to “hate” would be our deficit of sheer virility compared to them, we are not as strong and we have shorter penises than they do, they are therefore way more virile than we are. Against Jews, they are almost females, they have zero virility, but they are a whole lot smarter with words than we are. Hate hate hate! We fear that the Blacks will take all our women and we fear that Jews will try to sodomize us!
So what is racism? It’s an idiotic concept… Ethnic hostility is universal, we are born this way, everybody have ethnic solidarity. I’m French, but that is only my language. My ethnicity is Canadian. That is someone who is originally French, who use to be Roman, who use to be Gaul. See ethnies evolve! I’m not a freakin Gaul, I have no Druid. I have blue eye white skin like he did, but I’ve been ethnically cleansed by the Romans. We are a mix of Vercingétorix and Caesar… That’s French, Romans raping Gauls = France.
But Canadians are not French, we already evolved, we’re our own ethnic group. Ask anyone! It’s “science”. Canada is the main problem, because the immigrants here completely call themselves Canadians. They don’t know it’s an ethnic group. There’s over 8 million Canadians in the US, it’s an ethnic groups, they’re a quarter of New Hampshire and Vermont. So generations can pass, they remain what they are, they may cross-mix with Italians and Irish, they do mostly remain Canadians.
Now that’s the inversion and that’s why the spouter of the biggest nonsense call themselves “Canadians”. Because, you see, this is a non-identity, a counter-nationality. All humans on earth are Canadians, everyone is, except those for whom it is the ethnic group, which would be myself. Try to explain this to immigrant-Canadians, their mind is blown and they go into the usual solipcism-mode.No one however can really deny this, Canadian is an ethnic group, other people are just a citizenship-group who can be Chinese or Norwegian… who cares?
So trust me here, we’re the original Catholics in America who were not lost to interbreeding. Our Ancien Régime banned marriage with natives. This is what made us what we are. Louis XIV was our greatest politician, he really is our Father. We have a Patrie. We are Patriot.
Think beyond, do we want Quebec? Of course not, this is nonsense. We want America. All the way to the Gulf of Mexico! All the way in the Prairies and Midwest. What? We can’t do it? Why? We make families, we win, we crush all others. That can only be stopped, if we make families and reproduce, by gas chambers and concentration camps. So why is America English again?
Don’t believe the hype. We have a Castle, we’ll hold a King, we need nukes, then we retake America piece by piece since Americanism is as bad as Communism. It’s not violent, you just have a system that produce families, you win, you crush all competition, you destroy the opposition, America become New-France.
1000 Years War! We win, you lose. You win, humanity vanish. We think the barbarian invasion were a mistake, you’re the germanic tribes, we’re the romans. But Thank God for the worker bees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WZyumTkVa0
You can’t kill us all, it’s the old source from the Middle-East, we created Sanskrit, we created Latin, we’re French, we’re not Germanic.
What’s the Master Race? Not me, I’m just French. I’m Canadian. They can toss me in prison if they are unhappy. They don’t know a reactionnary if they smell the flesh of the carcass that they smoke in their concentration camps. I LOVE QUEBEC-BASHING! Just don’t open concentration camps to put me in it, Quebec-Bashing makes us stronger, we’re almost Jews. Quebec-bashing is in America what antisemitism was in Europe, it’s cool as shit.
We need to help Quebec-Bashing and finance it, then we need to finance Birthright Canada to bring back all our diaspora back to Canada… We need to cry we are being persecuted. Hahaha. We can be worst than Kikes.
We can do this right, we’re wandering Canadians. You Catholics should appreciate the irony, we’re the motherfreakin’ Catholic Church. Italy’s a mess because of invasions of the Arabs. The North are Like Us, the south is more similar to Tunisia and Libya. So why shouldn’t we take over America when All Hope Is Gone? We Come In Peace! Crush Americanism, hyper-Protestantism, didn’t you know by killing the Pope, you’d kill the King, you’d kill the Father, that you’d have nothing left but anarchy? This stuff goes extinct, we rise.
Commies are just super-Americans.
So ethnic hostility does only exist when you can’t stabilize things. We banned the Jews everywhere because they f*** up everything everywhere. They are predatory tramps. Can’t trust ’em. They’d vaporize the earth tomorrow without our supervision. I don’t say this because I’m hostile, but because I want them to follow our path, which is life, happiness and prosperity. Jews are destruction, Blacks are rape and pillage. Get real.
Marissa:
That’s what nominalism does: people think they are “winning” through a conquest of language, by usurping the power of naming things and using this (delusional) power to reshape reality according to their will.
What happens of course isn’t that reality changes to conform itself to the linguistic gambit: what happens is that we just destroy our ability to talk to each other.
Joël Cuerrier:
Your comment is long enough that I probably missed some things, so my responses may seem idiosyncratic.
You wrote:
That isn’t the American experience. We treated blacks as chattel slave niggers for the first 80 years of our country’s existence. That’s just a fact, even if it is a reverse-PC hatefact to neoreactionaries.
Now I think that “white guilt” over slavery is a load of crap, and I probably have significant common ground with you over good ethnic fences making good ethnic neighbors. I’ve described myself in the past as “race realist without the materialist baggage”.
But I’m not about to deny the reality before my lying eyes, and I’ve seen plenty enough examples of real racism (white against black, vice versa, and other permutations) in my lifetime that no ridiculous language game is going to delude me into thinking that racism doesn’t exist.
Well, we’ll probably end up disagreeing there.
I don’t dispute darwinian evolution on religious grounds, mind you; but last time I studied the molecular biology of evolution at the graduate level the “science” was atrocious, the philosophical ignorance was breathtaking, and the religious agenda was blatant.
“Think beyond, do we want Quebec? Of course not, this is nonsense. We want America. All the way to the Gulf of Mexico! ”
We already have French Canadians near the Gulf of Mexico. We call them Cajuns.
“I don’t dispute darwinian evolution on religious grounds, mind you; but last time I studied the molecular biology of evolution at the graduate level the “science” was atrocious, the philosophical ignorance was breathtaking, and the religious agenda was blatant.”
Wait, you’re a scientist? I’ve actually been looking for a Catholic biologist within this sphere to help explain how creation came about.
Svar:
I’m not a scientist. I am an entrepreneur and investor, mostly the latter these days. I have a BS in Computer Engineering, an MBA, other random bits of graduate school that I have accumulated mostly for fun, and a few decades in the nerdish/STEM version of the school of hard knocks. I decided not to get the MS in Bioinformatics/Molecular Biology both because I was busy learning how to fly airplanes and helicopters and because I didn’t think I could make it through the required ethics courses without strangling someone.
For a time I was quite interested in biology from several points of view: as an investor, as a computer nerd (since a lot of it has become computational), and as a curious curmudgeon. But it has been, oh, six or eight years since I was ‘current’.
As for “how creation came about”, as far as I have been able to determine nobody really has any idea. But because having a just-so story is better than admitting ignorance you will hear lots of just-so stories.
Thanks, Zippy. But could you tell me your objections to Darwinian evolution? I have objections to some of it even though I do respect Darwin, my main objection being how it relies too much on coincidence to explain the diversity of the species.
[…] a sin. Because it is unjust; not because it is prejudice. Not satisfied with that bet, Zippy doubles down. Zippy is an Essentialist Hammer looking for Nominalist Nails. He manages to find them everywhere. […]
Svar:
I have very little interest in getting ‘drawn into’ evolution debates again.
But the main problems I’ve found are the massive quantities of evidence against it (despite literally centuries of materialists scrabbling for such evidence because of what they think are darwinism’s religious implications) whenever it is well-defined enough to be meaningful, combined with the fact that it constantly reframes/equivocates instead of just admitting when it is ignorant or outright wrong.
“I have very little interest in getting ‘drawn into’ evolution debates again.”
Yes, I know how it can be. However, I, personally am not here to argue ideology but to get to the Truth.
“But the main problems I’ve found are the massive quantities of evidence against it (despite literally centuries of materialists scrabbling for such evidence because of what they think are darwinism’s religious implications) whenever it is well-defined enough to be meaningful, combined with the fact that it constantly reframes/equivocates instead of just admitting when it is ignorant or outright wrong.”
Okay, I see. So they tend to work backwards i.e. datamine. Yes, I see this. And yes I have noticed the reframing as well.
Thank you.
Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the race realists are right about everything, i.e. that blacks have an average IQ one standard deviation below whites. For Christians, that doesn’t matter theologically. St. Peter isn’t going to quiz us on the Summa when we appear before the pearly gates.
For liberals, this truth (assuming it is a truth) must be suppressed at all costs because it would render much of our public policy manifestly nonsensical. If race realism became popularly accepted, then the American people would elect the cryogenically frozen brain of Hitler as president. Or something.
As Zippy as said elsewhere, race realism only becomes a problem if you’re an ateleogical reductionist.
Southerners perceived themselves as looking after and caring for people who really were not capable of looking after themselves. They did not feel hostility towards black people. Rather, they viewed them as pets, as semi family.
Did you call Trayvon “racist”?
I (and my husband) supposed that Trayvon may have been a racist.
They did not feel hostility towards black people. Rather, they viewed them as pets…
LOL.
The ethics classes really are terrible. You’d think to teach ethics classes they’d find oh, priests and philosophers, not HR flacks come to tell us that the right thing to do is whatever minimizes the university’s liability. We actually had them tell us that an advisor driving his student to suicide wasn’t unethical because the professor hadn’t violated any university rules.
Elspeth:
Someone on James’s blog (in a thread ranting about how wrong I am that racism does actually exist both as an intelligible concept and as something that really occurs, despite me also pointing out its pervasive use as a propaganda anchor for liberalism) suggested that he could be a false flag leftist, pretending to be neoreactionary in order to discredit neoreaction.
I actually doubt that is the case. I think the era in which it was possible to credibly parody reality is at least five or ten years in the past by now.
“racism” in the sense you define exists in the same sense that “woodism”, (the belief that woods are different, and some of them are better than others) exists
The trouble is that such a concept is quite useless, so no one ever uses the word for that concept, In practice they instead use the word for the concept that certain groups that the Cathedral does not much like, in particular whites, need to be beaten up.
“Racism” as you define it is indeed a concept. But, since the concept is useless, the word will seldom be used in accordance with that definition.
I don’t know Zippy. He dropped that reference to “the Cathedral” right on cue.
I think the era in which it was possible to credibly parody reality is at least five or ten years in the past by now.
You’d be surprised. Within the past few months I witnessed the outing of an atheist poster who used to be a regular on Dr. Feser’s blog, my blog, and Crude’s blog, among others I believe. Apparently it was somehow discovered that for months, possibly over a year, he was posting under an alternate name as a Christian who would take other Christians to task for their “terrible” arguments, and nobody ever figured it out until he slipped up once in a thread.
This type of stuff happens, and it fools people.
Who was this atheist? What was his argumentative style and what were his implicit philosophical orientation?
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I am certainly did not evolve from anything, nor did my brother. I also got a new job last year, removing rocks and spikes from fields. But please don’t pursue or sucker punch me.
Also, don’t knock off my items, too.
===
I mean that person just a common atheist troll with an assumed Christian identity, or someone with more refined philosophical views that are more differentiated from the common atheist (such an eliminitivist, logical positivist, or hard empiricist) and could argue their positions well, or he/she are more polemicist?
Philo from the Dialogues is my favorite philosophy troll. 🙂 Would he be compared to Philo? I love the character even though I am a Catholic. He reminds me of myself in a way.
@ Latias
Philo the Jewish-Hellenic syncretist? Also, I’m glad to hear that you’ve joined the faith BR.
Svar…
You are half correct. I meant the (fictional) Philo (who was named after the Jewish-Hellenistic syncretic) whose sparring partners were Demea and Cleanthes in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The most interesting aspect of it was that Hume through the persona of Philo offered strong arguments against teleological argument without recourse to Darwinian evolution.
I think you will enjoy him somewhat, unlike the contemporary obdurate new atheists.
(You probably could perceive where my other previous allusions came from, even though you did not know what it specifically referred to since they referred to moves and game mechanics. )
___
Cheers and God bless you.
I did receive my first Communion and became Confirmed, which was such an amazing transformation. But I am still a human and many obstacles lie before me.
I actually post this about it.
[…] to recent discussions of racism (see here and here), I’ll leave you with an example of how a political reactionary can be against liberal […]
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Some of the SJW attacks lately had me thinking about this thread…
I actually think the concept of anti-concepts, while false, is not that far from reality when discussing SJW politics. Most isms, as “understood” by SJWs really are content-free words because SJW rhetoric is unmoored from objective truth. Sexism/misogyny, for example, has very little value for conveying concepts within their worldview because it doesn’t mean the objective loathing of women, but rather the opposition to whatever view of women a particular SJW has. It thus has no real fixed definition as they use it and thus cannot be said to be inherently something worth caring about.
So we have here a situation of linguistic dualism when debating SJWs. We must understand that while, say, sexism is a real thing, as used by SJWs there is no obligation to assume there is any linguistic or moral value in their accusation of it. We must adhere to a concrete definition in our internal discussions, but in inter-group communications, SJW usage should be guilty until proven innocent with respect to meaning.
Mike T:
Agreed. It is a weaponized nihlism or motte-and-bailey situation.
The problem though is that someone who concedes their nominalism/antiessentialism might as well just go home and castrate himself. If we concede that the basic conflict (e.g. w.r.t racism) is just anti-concepts raging back and forth then the postmoderns are right – there is no objective truth, just the narrative sound and fury of competing wills ungrounded in any objective truth. The struggle isn’t truth vs lies, it is just survival of the fittest meme, where “fittest meme” refers to whatever lies triumph in the great contest of wills.
Furthermore, I am old enough to have seen people treat others viciously simply because of race. Younger guys claim not to have seen it, and that no doubt reflects their personal experience. But anyone who actually sees this sort of thing with his lying eyes is never going to concede that racism is pure anti-concept; so the ‘racism is an anti-concept’ meme creates a filter that rules out any sort of metaphysical realism, that is, attachment to reality.
In practice, I think it’s very difficult for folks to retain the legitimate definition of X as Mike T suggests, without falling into the “X is an anti-concept” meme.
John C. Wright, whom I otherwise admire, seems to flirt with the latter with regards to racism because leftists have cried wolf so many times.
I doubt that Wright flirts with actually calling racism an anti-concept. Rather, I think like a lot of people on the right he’s so sick of hearing everything from small dog, to the weather patterns called “teh raciss” by leftists and their clients. At some point, it’s only natural to just laugh when the boy who cries wolf is seen being chased across a field by an actual wolf.
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