It is true that race should not be ignored in medicine, and that science has been hijacked by radical egalitarianism both for political reasons and to raise money, but something must be kept in mind. Race as commonly understood — as purely biological and geographically distinct groups — IS a myth. Humans cannot be divided into such groups. Humans can be divided into breeding populations, and these do have a large and important biological component in addition to a large and important cultural component.

“Day” and “night” are a myth. There is no distinct dividing line; indeed a goodly portion of every twenty-four hours is spent in those in-betweenish dawny and dusky times, which proves the fact that “day” and “night” are a myth. There are warmish lightish times, and coolish darkish times, but this business of pretending that there is a legitimate clear concept of “day” versus “night” has been debunked.

Yes, just because things exist along a spectrum doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. But I never said that race doesn’t exist, did I?

white guy writes: “Race as commonly understood — as purely biological and geographically distinct groups — IS a myth.”

But then white guy replies to Matt: “But I never said that race doesn’t exist, did I?”

white guy is engaging in double talk. He sounds like a recent graduate of one of our finer universities, who has been taught that every assertion is ok to make as long as you feel like making it.

Mr. Auster, please read my comments more carefully before you start insulting me. The key phrase is “as commonly understood”. There is a difference between saying that the concept of race that most people have in mind — which seems to be equivalent to sub-species — is inaccurate, and saying that humanity is one big happy multi-culti family.

I posted this comment not to disagree with Mr. Kalb, but to add upon what he said, in the hopes that intelligent comments would follow. Instead, I was immediately greeted with adolescent mocking reminiscent of the frat houses at our so-called “finer universities”. By the way, I didn’t go to school in the USA.

white guy did exactly what I accused him of doing: he engaged in double talk. He set up two definitions of race, the first of which is rather obscure and technical and which could only used in medicine, and which he feels is legitimate; and the second of which is the common notion of physically distinct subsets of the human species, which he feels is an illusion. When Matt showed the illogic of denying the existence of different categories such as distinct races merely on the basis that at the margins of different categories they tend to merge (as day merges with night, or as a puppy born from a Labrador retriever and a German shepherd will be a combination of the two breeds), it was very clear that Matt was asserting the reality of race in the sense in which race is commonly understood. white guy then came back and claimed he had not denied the reality of race. But since Matt was clearly speaking in terms of the common definition of race, white guy’s riposte that he hadn’t denied the reality of race was double talk.

White guy used the following phraseology:

“Race as commonly understood — as purely biological and geographically distinct groups — IS a myth.”

My initial reply was intended to respond to the concept of “purely […] distinct groups”. It is possible that white guy meant “purely” to modify “biological” rather than “distinct”; but in any case the concept of race presented as “commonly understood” doesn’t resemble any common understanding of race familiar to me. A “purely biological” concept of any human characteristic at all is a myth, and no doubt there are plenty of rationalists out there who believe in such things. That strikes me as a problem with rationalist mythmaking in general rather than having anything specific to do with race though.

Now we’re getting somewhere. My original concerns have been addressed, thank you.

To Mr. Auster:
Yes, I misspoke. Apologies. I still feel that my technical definition is more accurate, despite its abuses in propaganda.

To Matt:
Yes, “purely” modifies biological. I do think (based upon discussions I’ve had with relatively educated people about the subject) that most people think of race as completely or at least primarily about biology, although I may simply be underestimating the sophistication of the majority opinion.

white guy’s apology is accepted. I nevertheless demur from his characterization of the common understanding of race—the very thing that the whole world means when they talk about “race”—as “propaganda.”

I also wonder what Matt means when he says: “A ‘purely biological’ concept of any human characteristic at all [including race] is a myth.” Race, of course, is a biological concept, relating to physical differences between discernibly different groups of people.

“Race, of course, is a biological concept, relating to physical differences between discernibly different groups of people.”

Indeed, as a matter of ordinary language. When someone says “purely biological” though that often implies a metaphysically materialist explanation; so the discussion becomes philosophically technical rather than one of ordinary language. Saying “purely biological” is (or can be) like saying “First, lets accept a materialist metaphysic. ‘Race’ then is a matter of purely material biology”. I’ve had enough discussions with strong materialists to recognize the ploy of metaphysically assuming the conclusion before discussion even begins, and I don’t think that occurred here, but my sense is that white guy may have been responding as if he thought it had.

At this point I am assuming that white guy’s objection was to a perceived implication of materialism rather than anything specific to race as a concept. (I am not asserting whether or not his interpretation was warranted or whatever, I am just attempting to get at what he actually meant).

are mulattos of different percentages all separate races?

Is twilight night, or is it day?

it’s twilight

Then you have your answer, Grasshopper.

Auster:
I was characterizing my “technical” concept of race, NOT the common understanding, as being abused by (leftist) propaganda. In addition, I didn’t say it WAS propaganda, just that it has been abused as such.

Two things:
1.) I also want to make clear to Mr. Auster that I didn’t intentionally engage in “double talk”. It was the result of sloppiness on my part. When I said that I had never denied the existence of race in my response to Matt, what I should have said was that I did not deny the possiblity of grouping humans on any basis, which I never did at any point.

2.) Define race. What role does culture play, if any, in racial differences?

I thought white guy had already apologized for the apparent, if unintentional, doubletalk, and I had accepted the apology, and we had moved on.

As to white guy’s question, that’s too large to go into now in any detail, but for a quick answer I’ll paraphrase Jim Kalb’s great statement on this subject which I’ve often quoted: Culture, the shared understandings and habits of a people, is based on, though not identical with, ethnicity, which in turn means the long life of a people in common. And since ethnicity means the long life of a people in common, ethnicity is based on, though it is not identical with, race.

“Are mulattos of different percentages all separate races?” — abby

Abby, are you saying you can detect no “group differences” between, say, a group of typical Chinese people, a group of typical Negroes, a group of typical Maya Indians from the Yucatan, a group of typical Eskimos, and a group of typical Polynesians from Tahiti?

If that is what you are saying, then there cannot be any doubt but that you are motivated not by frankness and truth but by politics or pseudo-moralism. The reason simply is that no sane person could be so blind as you would have to be. You are inventing sophistries because sophistries make you feel better.

People don’t come to sites like VFR, Abby, in order to kaffeeklatsch with the girls or hear what they can hear every day from Katie Couric and Phil Donahue. They come in order to slake their thirst for truth, a goal which they approach very seriously. Their brains and hearts have been parched too long for lack of it and they want finally to taste some — finally to get the cool refreshingness of it into their minds and souls — humble, frank, simple truth — not the latest college-campus doubletalk feelgood sophistries which the super-hip X-, Y-, or Z-Studies Department has managed to cook up in order to postpone yet another few years the day when intellectual and moral cowards must face facts.

When people who have managed to crawl in from the PC desert which surrounds them to a life-giving, soul-restoring truth-oasis open their lips for that long-awaited cool sip, Abby, please do not stuff their throats with yet more sand.

They get enough sand from every nook and cranny of the mainstream and establishment media and frankly they’re tired of it.

Here’s how I would answer the question:
The concept of race as a biological category is scientifically imprecise, whereas population genetics has a much higher utility for detailed analysis of human physical variation. Instead, I would propose that race is a cultural category based on physical traits that are seen as significant for whatever reason. This is not to say that the concept of race is totally useless in common discourse (but nevertheless still imprecise), and it certainly does not mean that everyone is the same.

The reason I say this is because I fear that most people tend to think race as a biological (and only biological) category, thus leaving them susceptible to ridiculous claims (based on a simplified corruption of population genetics) that race doesn’t exist. Am I stating the obvious, or are my fears justified?

Also, please don’t mention Katie Couric, I’ll have nightmares.

White guy, one of the problems is, of course, that there is an interface between this whole question on the one hand, and white-hot politics on the other. Race and many other things, like rocks, trees, water, electrons, and pulsars, for example, may be ill-defined at our present scientific stage. Some of us (myself included) feel that where race is concerned, the fact that one side of the political debate did not see fit to await greater scientific precision before acting, totally absolves the other side of the obligation to await greater scientific precision — nay, not only absolves it, but morally *requires* it not to wait.

Let’s put everything back the way it was in 1965 before the Ted Kennedy-Emanuel Celler Immigration Holocaust bill was rammed through on the basis of brazen lies, and then I’ll agree to await better scientific precision before strongly taking sides on some of these questions. After everything is scientifically figured out to everyone’s satisfaction, let the people decide if they want to be ethno-culturally erased or not.

Otherwise, don’t stand in the way of people trying to defend something they think is important — their ethno-cultural patrimony — against grave and irreversible harm due to meddling which is AT BEST irresponsible, and at worst coldly calculated in advance.

Those who have joined this battle on one side are racing as fast as they can to get things irreversibly their way so there will be no turning back, and are doing this without any regard to any perceived need to await greater or more precise scientific justification. Why should those who’ve joined the battle on the other side believe, then, that they are required to await, and indeed even have the luxury of awaiting, the most rigorous scientific definitions and proofs before voicing their concerns?

Last time I checked, what was sauce for the goose was still sauce for the gander … no?

Let me hasten to add the most important part: not only is there absolutely NO scientific evidence invalidating the side of this battle which I and likeminded people support, but the preponderance of currently available scientific evidence actually, if anything, invalidates the ohter side and totally vindicates the one I’m on.

Unadorned has it nailed — this supposed epistemic ambiguity may or may not be the case, but is in any case irrelevant. I still rather suspect that white guy has spent a lot of time haggling with materialists and is concerned more about vulnerability to antimaterialist arguments in general than anything specific to race. Too much time spent among Internet libertarians will do that to you. (Either that or he is trying to stir up uncertainty where none objectively exists; but I’m inclined to the more charitable interpretation). Regulars at VFR already know that materialism is prepubescent self-refuting tripe, though.

gee unadorned,
you’re pretty good at guessing what people think from the three sentences i’ve written on this blog

so let me ask another question hopeing to get another funny response. since you and your vfr buddies are so hip on separting people and sending the riffraff off to distant lands away from you if they’re good little wasps, do the mulattos stay or go? is the 1% rule fine with you? same question for immigration

“Regulars at VFR already know that materialism is prepubescent self-refuting tripe” yup,this makes a whole lot of sense considering the vfr biology=culture materialism

btw, my last post left out a word, it should read

so let me ask another question hopeing to get another funny response. since you and your vfr buddies are so hip on separting people and sending the riffraff off to distant lands away from you if they’re not good little wasps, do the mulattos stay or go? is the 1% rule fine with you? same question for immigration

Unadorned: Although I think pulsars are well-defined, thanks for the good point about the political issues involved.

Matt: Too much time around geneticists, biologists and biological anthropologists, actually. Your basic point about being concerned with the vulnerability of anti-materialist arguments seems to be correct, though.

abby writes:
“yup,this makes a whole lot of sense considering the vfr biology=culture materialism”

The notion that race is thought of as _purely_ biological was introduced into this discussion by “white guy”. As far as I know this is the first time white guy has ever posted at VFR, and in any case his post appeared to be intended to worry about the understanding rather than to advocate it. It is true that race is specifically the physical manifestation of a whole complex of things that include shared history and culture, but stipulating that much is hardly materialist. If Abby has some philosophical argument about what race is and isn’t, and its connectedness or disconnectedness to other things, it would increase the likelihood of someone engaging her in a reasoned discussion if she did more than write a single sarcastic sentence.

“so let me ask another question hoping to get another funny response. since you and your vfr buddies are so hip on separating people and sending the riffraff off to distant lands away from you if they’re not good little wasps, do the mulattos stay or go? is the 1-drop rule fine with you? same question for immigration.” — Abby

I’m white but not a WASP. I didn’t get to personally know what WASPs were like until my early 30s when I came home from Europe and lived in New Hampshire, meeting lots of them for the first time. (Everybody in the part of NYC I grew up in was either Jewish or Catholic-white-ethnic such as Irish [tons of those], Italian [tons], Polish [tons], etc., and every white person where I lived in Europe was Catholic — no Protestants at all in over ten years there, and scarcely the tiniest handful of Jews.)

The one-drop rule, on the basis of which individuals having even very minimal Negro ancestry used to be subjected to the same discrimination Negroes faced, and also on the (imagined) basis of which some Negro thinkers of today claim Mediterranean historical personages like Hannibal, St. Augustine, Jesus Christ, Socrates, and Julius Cæsar were Negroes, isn’t relevant to my position concerning the right of self-preservation of ethno-cultural groups who wish to defend themselves against being demographically erased by their own (or other) élites for reasons of crass economic or political gain, against their collective popular will.

Riffraff? Principled people judge each individual solely on his own merits without regard to his race, religion, or ethnicity, and would never consider a person’s race a reason to view him as riffraff.

Abby writes: “So let me ask another question hoping to get another funny response. since you and your vfr buddies are so hip on separating people and sending the riffraff off to distant lands away from you if they’re not good little WASPs, do the mulattos stay or go? Is the 1% rule fine with you? Same question for immigration.”

I don’t see how Abby in good faith can believe that wanting to restrict the membership of any society—whether it’s a club, a group of friends, an organization, a military unit, a religious college, a political party, a church, or a nation—to people who can reasonably be expected to fit into that society and not change it into something else, means that those who are not welcome to join are regarded as riffraff. By Abby’s standards, any organization that has a distinct character and purpose, and rules for membership that reflect that character and purpose, is immoral, because that organization presumptively regards non-members as a lesser breed. No civilization and no human freedom (since freedom of association is a primary freedom) would be possible if Abby’s assumptions were comprehensively enforced. Of course, modern society IS increasingly attempting to enforce Abby’s assumptions, and thus leading us to a totalitarian world. That’s what must be opposed.

No one has said anything at VFR about, e.g., expelling mulattos. We have, however, talked a great deal about the mass presence of Muslims in this country whose very beliefs and culture are not only antithetical to our own, but mortally dangerous to us. Personally I believe it was an act of suicidal irresponsibility to allow that mass immigration from Muslim countries, and I would welcome anything within the bounds of morality that would slow, stop, and ultimately reverse the flow. Does that mean I regard Muslims as riffraff? No. It means I regard them—when they are present in numbers sufficient to have an impact on our society—as incompatible with our culture, our laws and freedoms, our identity, our very survival as a people.

Does Abby have a problem with that?

I notice that at another current thread, http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001211.html#4345, Abby made a wrong-headed assumption about something I had said, I tried to correct the misunderstanding and asked her if I had made things clearer, and she did not reply. So I may well be wasting my breath in this thread as well, as least as far as Abby is concerned.

Here’s an interesting article that’s related to this thread from Frontpage by Robert Locke (I assume it’s okay to put a link to it here):
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=983

The point I was trying to make in my original post (however clumsily) was that any grouping of humans into groups based on physical characteristics (commonly called race) is superficial, not profound (a point also made in the above article). Apparently I was stating the obvious and wasting everybody’s time.

“any grouping of humans into groups based on physical characteristics (commonly called race) is superficial, not profound” — white guy

Nowadays there is much grouping of races by genetic characteristics, a burgeoning field. Not just races are being studied this way, but also component ethnicities within races. (Remember the recent interest in the so-called “Cohen gene” found among whites of Jewish ethnicity?)

As regards the “superficialness” of “any grouping of humans based on physical characteristics (commonly called race),” Steve Sailer has commented that Carleton Coon, a professor of physical anthropology prominent some decades ago, published a magnum opus in the 60s classifying race on purely physical criteria (all that were available back then) which arrived at essentially the same groupings as does the latest genetic research of Prof. Cavalli-Sforza, who is more or less the “top name” working in this field today.

Although not a myth, there seems a high probability that race will become meaningless and therefore render the issue at hand trivial. It sometimes seems to me that before the 22nd century, there is a high probability that genetic engineering (aka recombinant DNA technology or gene splicing) will result in the predicted “brave new world” where race is meaningless. Unless there are impenetrable technical stops, I sometimes see people demanding and receiving, for their children, Einstein’s genius, Michael Jordan’s athletic ability, David’s reputed handsomeness or Nicole Kidman’s obvious beauty, and Ronald Reagan’s wit and good nature. The touching film Gattaca painted such a world.

“The touching film Gattaca painted such a world.” — P Murgos

There were 1930s-vintage films (Flash-Gordon-type science-fiction ones) that predicted the 1960s would see people flying around in space at will, in their own personal rocket ships, as easily as one might go for a jaunt in the family car.  The 60s have come and gone, and I don’t recall seeing commuter rocket ships.  

I remember, as a little schoolboy, hearing it solemnly explained with absolute certainty (late 1950s or early 1960s) how all highways in the future would be constructed with heating systems underneath the asphalt to automatically melt snow and ice, doing away with any need for snowplows, sand, and salt.  Anybody seen one?   

It was confidently predicted that by the 1980s we’d all live in high-rises and ride to work on electromagnetically-levitated high-speed monorails in immaculately clean, safe cities.

The Kubrik movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” depicted the best experts’ prediction in 1970 as to what life in this country was surely going to be like by the year 2001: casual manned trips back and forth to the moon; manned voyages to the outer planets; speaking, thinking computers with the intelligence of “HAL”; etc.  A little wide of the mark? 

They’ve been predicting commercial nuclear fusion was just around the corner since the 1950s and have been claiming to be literally on the brink since the late 1960s, repeating the literally “on-the-brink” claim every half-decade since, without exception.  In the year 2003, commercial controlled fusion is nowhere in sight. 

Where is the long-predicted cure for multiple sclerosis (and for so many other diseases, all solemnly predicted as being close)?

Where is the elimination of poverty that was predicted would result from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs?

What about things it was predicted WOULDN’T happen? We were confidently assured that passage of the 1965 Immigration bill wouldn’t lead to precisely the disaster it has led to.

When I was an undergraduate, Communism was considered by most intellectuals to be one hundred percent secure and the wave of the future. A dozen and a half years later it suddenly without warning vanished so quickly that prominent thinkers like Christopher Hitchens, Alexander Cockburn, and Noam Chomsky still don’t quite realize it or know what to make of it, but remain holed up like irrational Jap soldiers still refusing to come out of the jungle years after the defeat of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Speaking of which, what happened to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere?

What happened to the Thousand Year Reich, which writer Stefan Zweig was so convinced was the unstoppable wave of the future that he and his wife committed suicide out of despair in Rio de Janeiro I think it was, around 1940. A little hasty, Stefan?

What happened to that guy in the 1960s, played up by it seemed every college philosophy department in the country, who solemnly proclaimed God to be dead? Have we all been worshipping a corpse?

Nikita Krushchev said communism would bury the capitalist west. Look who got buried.

Francis Fukuyama said History came to an end in 1989. (I guess History, still chugging along as ever, never got around to reading his book?)

I mean, one could go on and on with this stuff.
 
In an e-mail some months ago a blogger on a well-known Web site told me that concerns about incompatible immigration, demography, and culture would all be obviated as we got closer to the day, “only twenty years hence,” when genetic engineering was going to change every infant of every race and ethnicity into a genetically-engineered designer baby — whites and blacks would finally be proportionally represented in both the NBA and the 1600-scorers on the SAT.

What that blogger predicted will, in my opinion, be damned *lucky* if even the beginnings of it come to pass in a hundred and fifty years — and even THAT sounds wildly optimistic.

Number one, I’ll believe it when I see it. (Many of the same prognosticators are predicting computers will overthrow people and take over entirely, within 30 to 50 years.) Number two, if indeed people are going to start designing their own babies, replacing God’s role, then sites like VFR will be needed more than ever, to serve as guides to what constitute, in Matt’s terms, the good, the true, and the beautiful.

If these predictions are true, then, it looks like VFR has arrived on the scene just in the nick of time!

l.auster,

nations aren’t social clubs. i also don’t see what’s so great about white trash that you have to only pick on the black trash. how i see it, trash is trash whether its an empty milk carton or a dried up box of brown sugar.

the problem seems to be the welfare state, pornography, and all the other gross stuff around, not the people who get sucked into it.

reform the system, and the rest of the problem will take care of its self.

If you’re not talking about expelling, than what do you mean when you talk about separation if the blacks don’t accept white culture?

unadorned,

since you mean by while culture something other than wasp, please tell me what white culture in america is.

the vfr croud spends a lot of energy talking about how dumb blacks are and how low iq causes crime,and how blacks can’t vote in a democracy because they can’t think for themselves, so please explain why dumb criminals who can’t think but only follow aren’t riffraff. i am pleased to read that you don’t want to divide people up by black and white, but judge each person individually.

> The claim that race is a myth because of the overall genetic similarity of human beings was transparently silly

One of the proponents of this view, Kenneth Kidd at Yale, is a hypocrite. He was also involved in the human genome diversity project studying small indigenous populations. Those indigenous peoples were afraid of having their genetic material stolen for profit by scientists like Kidd. Kidd denied this.

At the same time, Kidd was trying to steal the work of his colleagues in the form of a computer program written for genetics for a foreign collaboration.

Abby asks, “since you mean by white culture something other than wasp, please tell me what white culture in america is.”

In this kind of discussion I’m not talking about “culture.” I’m talking about the particular characteristics of the overall everyday U.S. quality of life. Whatever that particular everyday quality of life is (and of course, “culture” is a part of it but culture is a whole other subject), if it ain’t broke don’t fix it by changing the people who are the substrate of it through foolhardy tampering. The people who are the substrate of it have traditionally consisited of various proportions of different races and ethnicities including American Negroes and other non-white groups together with white Euro Christian ones which have been the majority.

The voting in the current VFR poll supports the conclusion that some people probably feel a society’s ordinary everyday characteristics may unavoidably change in certain ways depending on which race predominates in that society’s make-up, the reason being that some of these characteristics are to a greater or lesser degree influenced by the genes. That’s my view. (I don’t mean just IQ here, but other characteristics as well, which I think are partly inborn.)

One of the many reasons it’s not “racist” to think this is that to want those characteristics not to change is not to denigrate any other group. Another reason it’s not racist is that the moral implications of this view — my version of this view, at any rate — favor the protection of all societies against suffering the effacement of their traditional societal characteristics through actual large-scale ethno-cultural physical displacement and replacement of one entire group, religion, race, or ethnic group with another, imposed from the top down by hostile, alienated, greedy, or soulless élites. If people vote to undergo such a transformation that’s one thing. Needless to say, they didn’t in this country. The 1965 bill was passed on the basis of lies and should be rescinded now that it is clear it is not working at all as promised.

Abby writes, “the vfr crowd spends a lot of energy talking about how dumb blacks are and how low iq causes crime, and how blacks can’t vote in a democracy because they can’t think for themselves, so please explain why dumb criminals who can’t think but only follow aren’t riffraff.”

“The VFR crowd” don’t all have the same opinions. As Matt once explained to me, when no liberal is in the room for the majority of them to aim at, their gun barrels are all likely to be pointing at each other. I disagree with much of what F. Salzer writes, for example. He’s just as much a part of the VFR forum as you are or I am, Abby.

Whatever IQ is (as everyone knows, what it is is hotly disputed), it is no longer possible to deny that it can and does vary from race to race, and that somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of it is inherited in the genes so can’t be altered by Democrat-Party-type social programs (meaning, in turn, that when such programs fail, people of the “Dem-Party persuasion” can’t keep blaming “racism” for that failure).

I *personally* think (I’m not in any way speaking for “the VFR crowd,” here or elsewhere) that lower average IQ is not the only factor that causes a higher black violent street-crime rate. I think there are other inborn factors including yet-to-be-elucidated inborn hormonal ones, inborn neurophysiological ones related to those inborn hormonal ones, and possibly other kinds of inborn ones as well, *in addition to* the sort of purely non-inborn environmental ones which the left thinks explain the whole picture, which I too believe are an important factor. (I agree with you that Dem-style welfare is not the right way to undo this last sort of factor.)

I *personally* don’t favor the franchise being withheld on the basis of race or sex, the main reason being that people who can’t vote have no way of defending their rights and interests (as ineffectual a way as voting is of doing it, they won’t even have that). Whites can’t be depended on to defend Negro rights and interests at the polling place; neither can men be to completely defend women’s. But this subject needs study, because I also favor the right to self-preservation of ethno-cultural groups and this whole topic has a bearing on that right.

“please explain why dumb criminals who can’t think but only follow aren’t riffraff.”

Not being white doesn’t make someone a dumb criminal (I think this was what you were accusing me of believing — I could be wrong). White and non-white dumb criminals ARE, for the most part, riffraff. Smart white-collar ones (of whatever race) are, for the most part, riffraff too. Bill Clinton, Ivan Bosky, and Rodney King are all equally riffraff.

abby is right! Clearly 2 million Third World immigrants a year is not enough for this country. What were we thinking? How about 20 million Third World immigrants every year? Would that satisfy the abby’s of the world? I know! Let’s have annual Third World immigration to the West with no upper limit! There, that would surely do. Throw all caution to the wind. Take no heed or concern over assimilation or swamping the culture. Whew! Glad that’s been resolved.

Not to be tedious with this subject, but I wish to make something clear as an afterthought. When I wrote in my March 2nd post (responding to Abby) that I didn’t favor taking away the right of Negro-Americans to vote, I said so in such a “matter-of-fact” way — as if reasonable people might favor that — that it might have sounded as if I had come close to that position at some point or thought it was a tenable position that I just didn’t happen to favor.

I don’t think that’s a reasonable position whatsoever but it didn’t sound like it in my post. I expressed my opposition to it “matter-of-factly” because in my mind I was replying as simply as I could to Abby’s false statement, “the vfr crowd spends a lot of energy talking about … how blacks can’t vote in a democracy … [etc.].” I was “matter-of-factly” denying her assertion more than I was making a statement of my position on such a thing.

I don’t recall ever seeing anyone on VFR express opposition to the franchise for Negro-Americans, or for any other ethnic, racial, or religious group. In one thread, I myself called into question the wisdom of extending the franchise to women in general, adding that though I saw problems with women having the vote, I didn’t favor their disenfranchment.

I notice that at another current thread, http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001211.html#4345, l.w. made a wrong-headed assumption about something I had said, I tried to correct the misunderstanding and asked him if I had made things clearer, and he did not reply. So I may well be wasting my breath in this thread as well, as least as far as l.w. is concerned.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on February 28, 2003 01:43 AM and reposted with some small changes.