An off-base criticism

There is a critical article about me at the Randian website Rational Passion that readers may find of interest. The blogger and his commenters are under the impression that they have refuted and dispensed with my arguments on race and the racism charge, when they have done nothing of the kind. I had corrected Siri Carpenter’s misunderstanding of Jesse Jackson’s famous comment about being afraid of black youth, and I gave the correct meaning of Jackson’s statement, which was that black youth are more dangerous than white youth, not (as Carpenter imagined) that Jackson felt guilty for thinking that black youth are more dangerous than white youth. In the best libertarian/liberal manner, the blogger at Rational Passion piously castigates me for not understanding that black youth “are individuals and must be judged as such”! But it was Jackson who was making the racial generalization, not I. The issue in my blog entry on Carpenter’s article was the correct understanding of Jackson’s statement. So the writer at RP has misconstrued me, as badly as Siri Carpenter misconstrued Jackson. Are there any liberals/libertarians under 40 who can read?

There’s more in the RP discussion about what a dangerous, racist, “insane” influence I am, and I may post something further on it.

- end of initial entry -

John Hagan writes:

Talk of race seems to make cowards of everyone in this day and age. One need only look at the Randian website that is discussing you currently to see this phenomenon. The IQ debate is, and has been settled for a long time, yet you would think by reading the Randians that this information was somehow explosive, and needed justification. The ultimate rationalists can’t even debate IQ in a rational way without sinking into character smears, and denial.

LA replies:

Worth repeating:

“The ultimate rationalists can’t even debate IQ in a rational way without sinking into character smears, and denial.”

And why is this? Because their ideological right-liberalism, meaning their belief in the absolute equal freedom of all individuals abstracted from any larger natural or social categories such a culture, religion, nation, and race, trumps their devotion to “objective” reason, meaning the attempt to understand the world as it is. Thus we have the amazing spectacle of Randians siding with leftists (!) in labeling as “racist” people who make any reasonable generalization about human broups, such as believing that lower black performance has something to do with lower black abilities.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 11, 2008 08:34 PM | Send