Barrel Strength

The recent suit at one of the too many human rights commissions by a Turkish-Canadian woman complained that, as a racialized ethical vegan, she was the victim of discrimination, and that she was part of a racialized minority. What pray tell, is a “racialized” person?

You will hear more about racialized persons, because the word acts like a dumptruck, transporting a host of grievance-mongering from one site of public discourse to another, without the bother of thought. Sort of like the German High Command sending Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, to get the bacillus out of Geneva and into the prostrate body of Tsarist Russia, where it could really do some damage. (I digress)

Wikipedia says:

Racialization refers to processes of the discursive production of racial identities. It signifies the extension of dehumanizing and racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group. Put simply, a group of people is seen as a “race”, when it was not before.

This led me to the fascinating entry by the University of Guelph on the subject, Understanding Racialization:

In the past, race was defined as a natural or biological division of the human species based on physical distinctions including skin colour and other bodily features. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white. It was used to establish a classification of peoples. Some of the greatest atrocities in human history have been associated with notions of racial superiority.

There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them. It is now recognized that notions of race are primarily centered on social processes that seek to construct differences among groups with the effect of marginalizing some in society.

While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society. The process of social construction of race is termed racialization.

I would say that these three paragraphs contain the essence of the leftist falsehoods that dominate public discourse.

Read the following and inform yourselves:

1. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white.

False. All people at all times have been conscious of racial differences, and “race” did not emerge in post-16th century Europeas an intellectual construct any more than height or weight did. Race, ethnicity, tribehood: each and all have been observed facts of life since before conscious thought, just as rabbits differ from hares, or both from deer. The intellectuals of Enlightenent Europe may have systematized the classifications, but they systematized classifications of everything: taxonomy and species collecting was the fashion of the time, viz. Linnaeus and the modern biological classification system.

The 4,000 year old pictographs of ancient Egypt show Africans and caucasians as recognizable races. The Romans pondered the origin of races as they looked upon the red-haired Scythians and the Negroid Nubians, and considered the origin of races as related to available sunlight in their native lands.

2. There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification.

False. Humans have evolved. (Darwin is apparently a new idea in some quarters). They are evolving still, at an accelerating rate. Races emerged as Africans left the African continent and colonized the rest of the world in a process starting about 50,000 years ago, settling areas where neanderthals had been before them.

• The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, by Spencer Wells
• Race: The Reality of Human Differences, by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele
• Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, by Nicholas Wade
• The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending
• Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, by Philippe Rushton

Racial differences are real, genetic, unfolding in time, and evidenced by both organic processes and statistically-validated behavioral differences. I noted that the list of books above range in political acceptability from The Journey of Man, which has a PBS television series attached to it, to Philippe Rushton’s, which you can only get from non-Amazon booksellers. But they all say the same thing in different ways.

All humans who left Africa in ancient times are the products of adaptation to new environments, and various genetic compromizes have occurred over time to allow us to live in Asia, Polynesia, Europe, and the Americas.

3. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them.

False. Stephen Jay Gould’s Marxist beliefs led him to to emphasize the commonlaity of our species-hood over the fuzzy distinctions of race. He has been debunked elsewhere. See readings above, but more particularly, see Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, for the more general attack on Gould’s bioogical ideas.

4. While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society

“The social construction of race”. Of all the untruths taught in universities, perhaps none is more pernicious for the long-term than the denial of the biological. It has the effect of placing racial tolerance on the false premise that there are no races. Since there are no races, in this view, race is a social construct. Hence “racialized ethical vegans” can become a race – a category of people able to suffer “racialization.” You do not have to be a race to suffer discrimination. People will and do discriminate about anything, frequently for the benefit of human society. (e.g. the fridge is filthy- clean it. Pick up your mess. Get a job. Change the oil in your car) Trillions of discriminations keep civilization working.

Understand this: tolerance has no meaning or moral worth if there are not real differences to be tolerated. Toleration is a political bargain to make society livable without the need for an established religion.

Everybody (except me of course) is professing shock and dismay at the deliberate ignoring of the little Chinese girl, hurt and lying in the road.

You do not have to read a book on Chinese culture to realize that, apart from family, the Chinese have no extended civic relations to each other.

Nor are they, in the main, Christians, so there is no cultural commadment to love and care for one another.

They are a highly atomized society, the result of centuries of arbitrary state power crushing or preventing civic voluntary associations. Read Francis Fukuyama’s Trust, and all will be explained.

So this behaviour is not new, it is old, and it is very Chinese.

People really need to link two and two to get four. They need to link what they see of first-generation Chinese immigrants to what the Chinese people are like. In short, to act on the truth of stereotypes.

I once sat in the back of a taxi driven by a Caribbean black man through Toronto’s Chinatown. A car driven by a Chinese driver pulled out suddenly and without looking into traffic, nearly causing an accident. Broaching the subject of racial or cultural differences with a black man might have been indelicate, but I went ahead anyway.

“You see that? What an idiot”

“I see that all the time, man.”

“Uh, do you notice that Chinese drivers are really bad?”

“Terrible. Worst drivers in Toronto!”

So it is not just us white people who find first generation Chinese to be almost totally oblivious to their surroundings. They are oblivious, and it is my observation that they have been trained from birth not to notice what goes on around them. There is no assumption of community with their surroundings in China, why should we expect them to assume community responsibility here? The cultural assumptions it takes to produce western societies go very deep, and these have to be inculcated from birth.

This is yet aother instance of the untruth of multiculturalism. Ignoring babies lying in traffic is their culture, and always has been.

They are not going to learn any different unless we tell them that these are the values of this society and exemplify them in our own behaviour.

There are a number of interesting US blogs dealing with racial issues frankly. As even this blog cannot deal with them as freely as they can in the US, nor as freely as I would like, I refer you to them for an occasional bout of uncensored information about the continuing race war in the United States conducted by black people against everyone else, and the policies and pathologies which legitimize these actions. The squeamish need not bother; your prejudices will be offended. Those inclined to a sympathetic point of view should beware that too much reading of this kind of site will get your blood pressure up in legitimate wrath.

Nicholas Stix, Uncensored

Stuff Black People Don’t Like

Sex fascinates me, as an observer, as a practitioner, and as a parent and grandparent. As I am sure it fascinates you. How can something so amazing as sex have anything to do with reproduction?

There was once a comedy skit of two guys talking about women and sex, with shopping carts loaded with diapers in the aisles of Costco, with floor to ceiling boxes of diapers surrounding them. It slowly dawns on us that sexual activity leads to something quite different from the ecstatic communion of sexual bliss. It leads to little copies of yourself who strangely differ from you and your mate, wondering about the world, demanding lunch and entertainment. It also frequently leads to marriage, and eventually, depending on your choice of mate, divorce and custody arrangements.

As to the amazing and by no means obvious relationship of sex to reproduction I am not alone in wondering.

Sex at Dawn joins the growing ranks of books on human nature, as seen through an evolutionary perspective. It is subtitled “How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern relationships”. It covers some of the same ground as Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn and Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind, albeit from different perspectives.
Anthropologists and biologists are asking how it is that man has come to dominate the planet, and what critical differences distinguish man from the other four great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and gibbons.

We have gone in the space of a several hundred thousand years from chipping rocks on the African plains to colonizing every available part of the planet. How this has occurred is, in effect, the Question. What mechanisms, what processes, could have caused to domesticate and transform ourselves in such a brief timespan as 150,000 years?

Apparently it has to do with sex. Our sex lives are essential to our rapid evolution. Many people are repelled by that answer, but according to Darwin, there are only two ways of doing it: natural selection and sexual selection.

As Geoffrey Miller puts, only sexual selection is directed, rapid and intelligent enough to have produced us, because natural selection, in the Darwinian sense, is too slow and random to have moved us up the food chain from dimwitted rock shapers of 400,000 years ago to people able to play Bach and appreciate it. That means women have selected men to be as they are: capable of violence but good around the kids, able to bring home the bacon, and faithful enough to be tolerated. And women have been selected by men to be as they are: good with kids, able to forage for themselves and the family, handy, beautiful (no facial hair please), and smart enough to appreciate our jokes.
This is a depressing conclusion for those who imagine the perfectibility of man is only held up by the existence of bad social structures (economic and religious arrangements). It is of no consequence to those who believe that man – in whatever condition he then was – received revelation as to how he should behave.

Sex includes better brains, which offer more entertainment value, bigger dicks and more beautiful chicks, and cleverer, more emotionally engaged men and women loving one another. I could have written that differently, but that is the main conclusion of Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind. We have conquered the planet by being smarter, which has entailed and caused us to be more sexy, to be more rapidly reproductive, and to share the burdens of reproduction better as between men and women.

We are each the result of sexual selection. Men have been selected by women, and women by men, and what you experienced in your mate selection days is what everyone has gone through. And, by and large, despite the fact that less than one percent of our sexual activity is aimed at reproduction, we have populated the planet with ourselves quite effectively.

This brings us to the controversy dealt with in Sex at Dawn. How much were we ever intended to be sexually faithful?

This issue bedevils our understanding of ourselves. The time before agriculture spreads backwards from 10,000 years ago into the mists of time. It is in this time that anatomically modern humans emerged, probably about 50,000 to 30,000 years ago. This long period is a sort of blank slate onto which writers project their theories of how we got be so smart and well adapted.

Did the family unit mean that much then? Did we pair-bond for longer than a few years, in order to raise children? Was the family the engine of human survival? Was evolution accelerated by sexual exclusivity, however short term, which is implied in the idea of family?

Or, to the contrary, did people just boink and move on? Did the hunter-gatherer pack or tribe enforce any kind of sexual exclusivity in the days before we had more property than we could carry on our backs? Did men choose sexual exclusivity for some relevant period of time as they supported their mates in breeding? In the absence of accumulation of property, did we have something to defend that made patrilineal relationships a sensible social institution? Did we grow up as a species knowing who our fathers were, and did they and their brothers teach us how to hunt? Or was dad just one of the guys who fucked mother on occasion, and also taught us how to catch fish and shape a spearpoint?
This is the context in which books like Sex at Dawn are written.

Sex at Dawn is engaging in an argument about the family and the pair-bond which lies at the core of it. Essentially it is stating that the human being was not meant for sexual fidelity and it is time we recognized that fact.

The argument goes like this.
1) The behavior of the human species since the invention of agriculture is of no relevance. Since we began to accumulate property (beyond what we could carry on our backs and pack-animals) only with the advent of settled existence, and that only with agriculture, the history of the last 10,000 years reveals nothing of our true nature. It is a distortion caused by property. Property enforces the need to assure ourselves of the fatherhood of our children, and therefore the sexual exclusivity of our pair-bonds.

2) If you want to know about how we behaved sexually before agriculture, compare the human body to those of the other 4 great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and gibbons. The evidence, in the form of penis size and shape, external testicles, female ovulation – whether hidden or evident, shows that we are designed to be sexually promiscuous. The existence in humans of “sperm competition” means that we were and are promiscuous, and that males have fucked women in group situations forever. Sexual exclusivity is a fantasy, a lie we keep telling ourselves.

3) As we pass out of the agricultural epoch, sexual arrangements are starting to leave behind the mould imposed by the property-obsessed homo economicus of the previous era.
As the authors state, “despite centuries of religious and scientific propaganda, the basic illusions underpinning the supposed “naturalness” of the conventional nuclear family are clearly exhausted…we need to seek peace with the truths of human sexuality. Maybe this means improvising new familial configurations” (p.310)

That, in essence is the book. I have rendered it as logically as I could, and spared you the ranting tone and the irrelevant asides on the religious suppression of human sexuality.

To which I respond:

1) The whole thing is an argument against the concept of marital fidelity over the course of a lifetime, fair enough. But who is arguing for marital fidelity over the course of a lifetime? The anthropologists argue merely that the human pair-bond was an engine of our reproductive success, in the raising of children and the transmission of culture to them. So it is pointless to argue about the pair-bond with people who are not saying it was ever wholly exclusive or meant for life.

2) That leaves institutional religion. The Christian Church and Islam have both praised the institution of faithful marriage and repressed sexuality in the interests of family stability. If you had responsibility for the human species in your hands, over the course of centuries, would you argue for anything less? Would your religion make explicit allowance for group sex and seasonal orgies? Point me the way to one such and I might join. But I doubt it would last for centuries, as the sexually repressive ones have.

3) As to improvising new familial configurations, what do you think has been going on for the last fifty years? As soon as we could escape the bonds of one man or woman for life, we have done so. Though the results are not entirely in yet, there is little ground for total confidence that sexual liberation is possible where children are involved. I am not ready to join David Warren in wholly condemning the modern era, but the importance of the family to the welfare of children is a non-negotiable truth, and free-form boinking will always take second place to the requirements of child-rearing. Child-rearing is the twenty to twenty five year mortgage. And if marriage fails, it is always a tragedy, even if leads to better outcomes eventually for the couple engaged in it. How it affects the children is the crucial test, and we do not yet have confidence to say it carries no cost to them. It is a price they pay for their parents’ inability to love one another for a lifetime.

4) Societies are in competition. The improvising of familial configurations in which we have been engaged for fifty years is a novelty. There is no reason to believe the society which engages in it will always prevail against those which suppress sexuality in favour of everyone doing their duty, and out-breeding the pleasure-seeking improvisers of family configurations.

So the advocates of the pair-bond may, with Baronness Thatcher, say that the facts of life are conservative, even if humans were, are and remain a randy bunch of adulterers, group-sex devotees, and polymorphously perverse libertines.

David Starkey is the British historian who had negative things to say about whites adopting Jamaican black culture that got him into trouble with the bien-pensant elite this past week. For hs reaction to these events go to:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8711621/UK-riots-Its-not-about-criminality-and-cuts-its-about-culture…-and-this-is-only-the-beginning.html

His main offence was to mention Enoch Powell’s prescient  ”Rivers of blood” speech.

“Unfortunately, the speech and still more the reaction to it, are also central to any proper understanding of our present discontents. For Powell’s views were popular at the time and the London dockers marched in his support. The reaction of the liberal elites in both the Labour and Tory parties, who had just driven Powell into the wilderness, was unanimous: the white working class could never be trusted on race again. The result was a systematic attack over several decades: on their perceived xenophobic patriotism, on symbols like the flag of St George, even – and increasingly – on the very idea of England itself.”