White Nationalism Is Not Enough

As part of the process of developing what might be called a “revolutionary Right” for North America, I have endorsed both anarchism and secession. Yet anarchism is merely a theory of the state (or against the state) and secession is simply a tactic. Anarchist theory per se has little to say about what kinds of communities might exist independently of an overarching state, and no one is going to endorse secession for its own sake without some wider end in sight. I suggested in a recent interview with Dr. Tomislav Sunic that anarchism, secession, and white nationalism have something of natural triangular relationship with each other. While I do, indeed, believe this to be the case, the question remains as to whether white nationalism is an adequate intellectual or strategic paradigm for the growing alternative right. I would maintain that it is not.

This is not to say that white nationalists do not raise many perfectly reasonable and legitimate issues. Such issues include affirmative action and other forms of “reverse discrimination,” mass immigration and immigration abuse, the high rates of violent crime in minority communities, the formal or informal forms of censorship associated with “political correctness,” state interference with associational liberties, anti-white bias in hate crimes reporting, the desire for cultural self-preservation, the double standards involved with the label of “racist,” the extra-legal actions by left-wing vigilantes against those with views on race that defy liberal orthodoxy, the suppression of scientific inquiry in the name of egalitarian ideology, the influence of foreign lobbies on U.S. foreign policy, and a good number of other things. Nor should we be interested in taking seriously the liberal dogma that any sort of expression of political and racial self-interest, or ethnic pride and celebration, by whites constitutes “hate” or “racism.” One can love one’s wife or mother without hating all other women. One can have a preference for one’s own family without feuding with other families. One can favor one’s own children without abusing or mistreating other children. So the issue is not whether white nationalism violates this or that liberal taboo, but whether white nationalism “alone and unaided” is the most effective way of addressing matters such as the aforementioned.

The first order of business is the identification of the enemy, and the enemy is clearly those who are currently in control of the institutions that rule us: the state, the corporate plutocracy, the banking cartel, the mass media, academia, the legal system, and others whom our fearless editor has with great perspicacity dubbed the “sociopathocracy.” Nowadays, even an ostensibly “conservative” institution such as the military has succumbed to political correctness. White nationalists and those who share their concerns are certainly under attack by these institutions, but so are plenty of other people. Consequently, a resistance movement that defines itself exclusively, or even primarily, under the banner of race will be unnecessarily self-limiting. Far better to incorporate the issues raised by white nationalists, immigration restrictionists, and others with related concerns into a wider paradigm that packages together the issues raised by parallel movements and overlapping interests who are under attack by the same institutional authorities. There is a nearly inexhaustible list of such tendencies, including advocates for fathers’ rights, men’s rights, family sovereignty, religious liberty, the right to bear arms and act in self-defense, anti-tax, pro-life, national sovereignty, property rights, cultural preservation, quality and freedom in education, local autonomy, and many other things. Additionally, there is the growing list of economic issues generated by the ongoing dispossession and eradication of the traditional middle class courtesy of our plutocratic overlords.

The label of “white nationalism” brings with it a good deal of baggage that is not easily discarded. What do most people think of when they hear the term “white nationalism”? Do they think of Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, and Steve Sailer or do they think of the KKK, David Duke, Tom Metzger, uniform fetishists, the Aryan Nations, and The Turner Diaries? If we must choose a label, would not something along the lines of “conservative revolution” be more appropriate? Such self-identification puts us squarely in the tradition of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Junger, Schmitt, Spengler, Pareto, Mosca, Michels, Evola, De Benoist, and Faye. Such a label allows us to group together a wide assortment of issues and movements under a common banner and against a common enemy. Beyond that, we need to consider the not insignificant number of minority, mixed race, or persons from mixed families that share many of our ideological and cultural concerns, or at least sympathize with many of our issues. Is it wise to push away an Elizabeth Wright, Paul Gottfried, Norman Finkelstein, David Yeagley, Carol Swain, Michael Hart, Michael Levin, Jesse Lee Peterson, Israel Shamir, or Mayer Schiller?

“Conservative Revolution” is conceptually broad enough to accommodate an array of anti-liberal forces within a framework of respect for natural hierarchies and particular attachments to family, community, religion, tribe, ethnicity, and other primary reference groups, and in a way that is compatible with traditional conservative and libertarian skepticism of “big government” and overly centralized power. On a horizontal level, it can accommodate tendencies ranging from fervent white nationalists to religious conservatives who are indifferent to race issues per se but oppose Cultural Marxist attacks on their faith and traditions to Jews and African-Americans who oppose mass immigration from the Third World. On a vertical level, it can include scholars of Machiavelli, Burke, and Nietzsche on the high end and conspiracy-mongers or Alex Jones fans on the low end. Such a framework also opens the door to wider acceptance by a threatened middle class that is rapidly sinking into the ranks of the lower proletariat and lumpen sectors. It is those sectors that will ultimately feed the numerical ranks of our movement, and in politics there is no victory without numbers.

We Will Win

Thinkers of the Right often tend towards pessimism because, as Carl Schmitt noted, "all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil." Consequently, many on our side see a future where our civilization continues to devolve into something resembling a multicultural, feminist, pornographic, New Age rendition of totalitarianism, to be followed by complete dispossession generated by demographic overrun.  While prevailing trends may at present lend themselves to such a conclusion, there is every reason to believe this state of affairs will eventually be reversed in our favor.

Recall that the repentant Communist Whittaker Chambers told the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948: "I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side. . .but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism." Such was the perspective of many on the Right during the decades of the Cold War. But there were others, ranging from Lawrence Dennis to George Kennan to Ludwig von Mises, who begged to differ and regarded Communism as an aberration and deformation that would eventually meet its end. History proved these optimists to be correct, and forty years later it was Communism that was dead. It is likely forty years from now that the paradigm of military Keynesianism, welfare-capitalism, and what some have characterized as "Cultural Marxism" (though my preferred term for this phenomenon is "totalitarian humanism") that rules the present day West will likewise be deceased or in severe retreat.

Contemporary cultural, demographic, and generational trends in the United States indicate that the liberal coalition that emerged victorious with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 will continue to be dominant in the decades ahead. I have written about the reasons for that elsewhere. Yet this coalition will prove to be an unstable one over the long haul. The simple fact is that present day liberal ideology and liberalism's core constituent groups contain within themselves certain contradictions that will eventually prove to be fatal. There is simply no way that an agglomeration of affluent liberal whites, underclass blacks and Hispanics, affirmative action-babies, feminists, gay militants, transsexuals, Third World immigrants, atheists, Muslims, hipster youth, traditional blue collar workers, state-connected labor unions, Jewish plutocrats, environmentalists, and the left-wing of the traditional WASP elite, with each of these attempting to get their pieces of the pie distributed by the managerial-therapeutic-multicultural-welfare state, can be politically durable on an indefinite basis. The only thing that unites this coalition is hostility to traditional Western culture and a desire for more freebies courtesy of the state. While this coalition will indeed continue to become more powerful and its values more deeply entrenched in institutions in the short term, over the long term it will self-cannibalize and collapse due to its own internal contradictions and fractious nature.

American partisan cycles tend to run for thirty-five to forty years and then decline. For example, from the time of the assuming of the presidency by William McKinley until the end of the administration of Herbert Hoover, the Republicans were the dominant party in U.S. politics (with the horrid exception of Woodrow Wilson). From the election of FDR in 1932 until the end of the 1960s the Democrats were the prevailing party. From 1968 until Obama, the Republicans were once again dominant. It likely that the Democrats will continue to be the preeminent party until the middle of the century begins to approach and then be eclipsed by a new political coalition. The great wild card in all of this is that the time the present partisan cycle will be winding down will be precisely the same time the demographic transformation from a majority white nation to a collection of minorities is expected to occur. Those readers who will still be alive during those years should expect some interesting times. As political correctness becomes more deeply rooted in Western institutions, it will have fewer qualms about showing its fangs. That will be its undoing. Pablo Picasso said: "I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water." To this, Arthur Koestler replied: "I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned." As political correctness tightens its grip and demographic overrun becomes ever more imminent, I predict many a former liberal will undergo an 11^th hour awakening and come to their senses. Expect a resurrection of the ghost of Pim Fortuyn when that happens.

Communism failed because at a primary level it attempted to deny the realities of human nature. As the late, great avant-garde composer, blues/rock/jazz guitarist and iconoclast Frank Zappa once remarked, "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff." Likewise, multiculturalism will not work out in the long run because human beings are by nature tribal creatures. Feminism will implode because males and females have different biological destinies and therefore different social destinies. Egalitarianism and universalism will not survive because differentiation and otherness are endemic parts of what it means to be human. Russia and the nations of Eastern Europe survived Soviet Marxism. China survived Maoism. Western Europe and the Anglo-sphere will survive Cultural Marxism.

Jonah's Fascism

Having read Jonah Goldberg's turgid tome on the fascist danger spawned by American Progressives and Obamaites, and having listened to his rants against "big government" on Glenn Beck's therapy hour, it seems to me that his column today, against Rand Paul as an enemy of property rights, raises doubts about Jonah's "antifascist" persona. As everyone must know by now, I find Jonah's ascription of "fascist" views to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to be downright silly. But I am willing to concede his argument for the moment, namely, that those who wish to use state force to introduce their notions of social transformation are really followers of Mussolini, Heidegger, Franco, et. al., even if these dead white males, to all appearances, came from the opposite side of the political spectrum. (Actually they did. The Marxists were right on this one.)

By Jonah's standards, where do we classify someone who unconditionally endorses the social engineering mandated by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and who scolds Rand Paul for even daring to question the public accommodations and equal employment provisions of that act? According to our soi-disant antifascist, "it's certainly repugnant and bizarre for libertarians like Paul to lament the lost rights of bigots rather than to rejoice at the restored rights of integrationists."

The paragraph leading to this rhetorical crescendo notes that Paul is endorsing Jim Crow, a situation in which "the market wasn't free." Therefore state action became necessary to restore economic freedom, because "one of Jim Crow's greatest evils was its intrusion on the property rights of whites." These statements indicate the depth of cultural illiteracy that I've grown to expect from National Review, ever since the magazine was taken over by the Dark Side.

To the extent that segregation practices were state enforced, they represented an obvious encroachment on property rights. But if the state is not enforcing segregation and public institutions are to be accessible to whites and blacks, the situation that Rand Paul advocated in his controversial comments, how is this scenario an intrusion on anyone's property rights?

A new and graver intrusion comes with the Civil Rights Act itself, and particularly with Titles II and VII, which has the federal government forcing commercial and social integration on everyone. This government enforced access to equal employment rights and to accommodations is extended to "race, color, religion, sex or national origin."

It is not a red herring to ask whether the Act would allow men and women to have separate organizations with some commercial aspect or to create work situations that favor one designated group as opposed to another. Is it permissible to have a men's clubs, which conduct commerce but do not admit women, without being in violation of the Civil Rights Act? Does being licensed mean that one's establishment falls under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission? Unfortunately there is no legal way to conduct one's business without having state authorization. But as soon as one becomes licensed, as that spirited "conservative" Bill O'Reilly reminded us last night, one is properly subject to federal (and by now state) anti-discrimination agencies. (O'Reilly thinks that the Constitution requires this surveillance because it guarantees "our pursuit of happiness," a phrase that never appears in the Constitution.)

Such problems, plus affirmative action and disproportionate impact cases, came rapidly in the wake of a congressional act that supposedly vindicated our property rights. Of course I wouldn't attribute any true fascist ideas to Jonah, even though he seems to be advocating gimlet-eyed administrative control to protect us against "bigoted" hiring and accommodations choices. But I can't think of any statement on economic freedom by a fascist intellectual that seems quite as juvenile as Jonah's column. Mussolini's chief theorist Giovanni Gentile was a brilliant philosopher, who rarely produced anything quite as bad as these type smudges. In those bad old times political intellectuals were serious people who would have perceived any glaring inconsistencies in their arguments.

A final question: What did George Bush Sr., Ronald Reagan, Richard Byrd, Albert Gore Sr., Richard Russell, Barry Goldwater, and J. William Fulbright all have in common? They all opposed the Civil Rights Act, and most of them expressed the same reservation about that intrusion on property rights that Jonah goes after Rand Paul for noticing. These people were correct to express their reservations, and so was I as a graduate student at Yale in 1964, when I figured out what continues to elude Jonah. By now one has to be really thick to believe that congressional invitation to massive social engineering guaranteed our economic freedom.

The Liberalization of Libertarianism

In the aftermath of the Rand Paul civil rights controversy a surprising number of self-identified libertarians have endorsed state-restrictions on freedom of association. In essence, the argument is that historical and contextual circumstances can warrant the broadening of anti-discrimination laws to the private sector. This  is not just  a trivial exception to the general libertarian support of strong property rights but also to the view that the *withholding of a benefit* should not be treated as a harm and punished by the state. As a matter of fact, it seems to be an argument that past “crimes against humanity”  and “group rights” should trump peaceful individual choice.

Libertarians who advocate such restrictions on the freedom of association have argued that libertarianism should not be treated as an a-historical set of dogma’s. That is not an unreasonable argument but it is interesting to note that such claims are made by the same people who display a similar kind of dogmatism on the issue of open borders. It appears that dogmatism is more objectionable when it leads to politically incorrect conclusions.

Perhaps a more plausible explanation for the recent eagerness to embrace  elements of modern liberalism is that libertarianism has become too popular to concern itself with controversial views. There are now many self-identified libertarians who wake up in the morning and go to work advocating smaller government and public policy changes. Some of them even run for office. The current transformation of libertarianism is similar to what happened to classical liberalism in Europe. We are inclined to think that ideology shapes politics but we should not ignore the fact that politics shapes ideology as well. What is urgently needed is a “public choice of political ideology.”

It is also interesting to note that small government libertarians are more vulnerable to the racism charge than anarchists. I am not aware of any claims that anarchists are “racist” because they advocate abolishing all laws, which necessarily will also include laws against racial discrimination. This feature of anarchism might explain why socialist anarchism is all but dead though. After all, it is hard to imagine how a stateless society will produce radical egalitarianism across the globe.

The libertarian critics of Rand Paul are correct that libertarianism should not be conceived as a sterile rationalist ideology. If there is any chance for libertarianism to survive it should be conceived as a form of rational choice firmly rooted in empirical reality. But it does not seem that these are the changes that the reformers of libertarianism have in mind. If Ben O’ Neill’s Independent Review article “The Antidiscrimination Paradigm: Irrational, Unjust, and Tyrannical” is any indication, the practice of discrimination can be reconciled with rational individual decision making.

Plan B: Shame the Parents

Since taking your children away from you for seven hours a day to be brainwashed with multicultural propaganda hasn't yet gotten them to say the right things early enough, it's time to shame the parents. 

Anti-racists shouldn't worry too much though, for by the time they're as old as the kids in this video TV and public education have done their job.  

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A Darwinian Left

To me, it's seemed over the last half decade or so that the op-ed writers of the New York Times need to spend more time reading the science section of the same paper. In the last couple years, we've seen a piece that comes dangerously close to admitting that important genetic differences between the races exist, more than a few articles fairly summarizing the finding that IQ is highly hereditable, and even a report on evidence that non-Africans -- and non-Africans only -- have ancestors from a different species. 

Throughout this period, there's been no perceptible change in the Times's political writing. 

While it may be unfair to suggest that accepting the findings of the social sciences should make every liberal drop everything he believes in and join the Alternative Right, I think that the Left does have to rethink quite a few issues if it's not going to ignore behavioral genetics or psychometrics.  

No leftist has taken the implications of human biodiversity more seriously than philosopher Peter Singer. Depending on your perspective, he is either one of the most rigorous and consistent thinkers of the analytical tradition or the perfect example of what happens when man takes godless Utilitarian ethics to its logical conclusions. Once in a while his name shows up in headlines on conservative websites over articles and blog posts on what's wrong with the modern world.  Kathryn Jean-Lopez, for instance, argues that since he's "known to be a proponent of infanticide, perhaps nothing he says or writes should thereafter raise eyebrows" but continues that because he's a Princeton professor, contemporary writers must take his ideas seriously. 

In the philosopher's own words, Singer believes "that the life of a fetus (and even more plainly, an embryo) is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc., and that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. "

Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to to the fetus... If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee is to the nonhuman animal.  Thus while my position on the status of fetal life may be acceptable to many, the implications of this position for the status of newborn life are at odds with the virtually unchallenged assumption that the life of a newborn baby is as sacrosanct as that of an adult.

Singer's view of infanticide is a logical extension of his support for abortion rights. It's interesting that so much outrage over his philosophy comes from the Right, considering that what he's most often doing is pointing out the inconsistencies of the Left. To a Christian conservative, what's the big deal about another baby killer in a position of power if in your mind anyone who supports abortion rights is a baby killer? The fact that the logic in the passage above is impeccable is only a problem for liberals.

It took a man this honest to address the problems biorealism poses for liberalism. The year 2000 saw the publication of Singer's A Darwinian Left: Politics, evolution and cooperation. The book is no more than 70 pages, references included, but none the less it is a coherent attempt of a thinker trying to incorporate the findings on human nature, sex differences and the possibility of biological race differences into his worldview while remaining a true left-winger.  

To the author, the "most tragic irony of the past century is that the record of governments that have claimed to be Marxist shows that Marx got it wrong" on human nature. The fall of the USSR and the mainstream Left's abandonment of the goal of nationalizing the means of production mean that Western liberals need a new paradigm.  

The first question that we must ask of this project is, as Singer puts it, "Can the left swap Marx for Darwin, and still remain left?" And to arrive at an answer one must start with "what is essential to the left?" A leftist is one who cares deeply about the suffering in the universe and wants to do what he can to relieve some of it. We are told that liberals understand the principle of diminishing marginal utility. A dollar a day means much less to an American heart surgeon than it does to an Indian peasant. A caring leftist is outraged to be living in a world where the 400 richest people are monetarily worth more than the poorest two billion. Statistics like this alone are enough for the author to demand that we "work towards a more equal distribution of resources," even though he does not value equality for its one sake.  None of this -- the desire to alleviate suffering by redistribution, understanding the concept of diminishing returns -- necessitates that one take a position on human biodiversity. Therefore, there can be a Darwinian Left. 

Left gives us a short critique of the Darwinian Right before a brief history of how socialists and Marxists have fit an acceptance of natural selection into their ideologies. A few writers have made the mistake of deriving "ought" from "is."  If nature is ruthless and competitive, it doesn't make us obliged to encourage competition and ruthlessness. Another Darwinian right-wing criticism of the Left is exemplified in E.O. Wilson's statement that philosopher John Rawls hadn't thought through the "ultimate ecological or genetic consequences of the rigorous prosecution" of his conclusions. Singer believes that such statements are "to put it charitably, highly speculative." And even if it were proven that redistributionist policies helped the less intelligent and less responsible reproduce, science by itself can't tell us what traits we would like to have more or less of. 

This attempted refutation of the eugenic and anti-dysgenic conclusions of some biorealists is the weakest part of the book. Science can't tell us that being wealthy is better than being poor either, but Singer takes for granted the premise that the world's more indigent populations would suffer less if they had more wealth. It is simply illogical to then turn around and suggest that we should be morally neutral towards the cognitive characteristics that make a higher standard of living possible in the first place. Dysgenics isn't speculation either, it's happening. Whether policies traditionally associated with the Left create or perpetuate this evil isn't as easy to prove, but we can use common sense and evidence from the social sciences to see whether such is the case. 

Singer at least agrees with Wilson when the latter says that knowledge about human nature can at least make us aware of what the costs are likely to be when we seek certain political goals, especially egalitarian ones. He also hopes that evolution can help discredit pre-Darwinian ideas; the one claiming a dichotomous separation between human and nonhuman animals he sees as the cause of a great amount of evil.  

Readers might be surprised to know that Marx and Engels were somewhat enthusiastic about Darwin's Big Idea, or their interpretation of it at least. Marx believed that On the Origin of Species gave him a "natural-scientific basis for the class struggle in history." At Marx's funeral, Engels said that while Darwin taught us about the laws of organic nature, the man he was eulogizing similarly brought to light the laws of historical development. But as Singer points out, Engels revealed that he didn't understand Darwin's theory at all in his famous article "The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man," which was used by Soviet Lamarckians to show that their evolutionary theory was the true Marxist one. Whatever the founders of communism believed about the creation of man, a consistent theme in their writings was that the Darwinian laws were no longer applicable to modern humans. Modern liberals, Marxists and non-Marxists alike, continue to make the same mistake.

The very first thing that a Darwinian Left will have to give up is the "dream of perfectibility." Since the materialist theory of history is wrong, and undesirable behaviors are not caused by private property, white racism, government or any other man-made institution, they're part of who we are and thus here to stay.  Acceptance of biological facts will kill off utopianism in political life -- and not a moment too soon.

Singer divides human traits into three categories. First are those that show great variation cross culturally: food production, for example, along with religious institutions and forms of government. Then there are some things that seem to show a moderate level of deviation. Sexual relationships and some kind of racism or xenophobia fall into this category. Finally, there are human universals that show little to no variation: our social nature, concern for kin, hierarchy, and most controversially, sex differences. 

In every culture it's women who do most of the care-giving and men who tend to dominate political life and be responsible for the vast majority of violence. The author stresses that just because something is universal, doesn't mean we shouldn't work to change it, lest we fall into the "is/ought" trap once again.  On the other hand, studying human nature can help us predict what the results of our actions will be and clarify the cost-benefit analyses that are unavoidable when thinking carefully about politics or ethics.  

The science of human beings isn't all bad news for the Left.  Cooperation is as much of a part of nature as pitiless struggles for existence. A thought experiment can help us understand how we can build a more altruistic society. There are quite a few versions of prisoner's dilemma and the version of Left is as follows.  You and another person are arrested and charged with plotting against the government and interrogated separately. An officer tells you that if you both confess you get 10 years in jail each.  If one of you confesses and the other doesn't, the former is let off and the latter gets 20 years. If neither admits to the crime both are put in jail for six months and released. The investigator explains to you that no matter what happens your best bet is to confess. If your partner confesses and you do, too, you end up with only 10 years in jail instead of 20. If your partner remains silent and you cop to the crime, you walk free instead of waiting half a year for your freedom. The tragedy of the game is that if you both remained silent you'd be better off than if you both looked out for yourselves, but there's no way to coordinate cooperation, and there's no point in hoping to build trust as this is a one-time decision. 

Luckily, those are only features of this particular situation and not society at large. For a Darwinian Left, there's the hope that in communities where individuals deal with one another on a regular basis people can learn that altruism is best both for themselves and society at large.  

Singer concludes with what a Darwinian Left would and wouldn't be. It wouldn't deny the existence of human nature or claim that it is inherently good, search for utopia or assume that all socioeconomic inequalities are caused by discrimination. It would see what man has in common with other suffering creatures of the world and reject the exploitation of animals as a relic of a more philosophically primitive time.  A Darwinian Left must expect that people will work to gain status and look out for kin no matter what our social institutions look like.  Finally, it would hold on to the traditional values of the Left "by being on the side of the weak, poor and oppressed."

Many of the problems of Singer's left remain the same as those of the more traditional kind. Take for example his simplistic ideas about the distribution of resources.  A house worth five million dollars transported from Beverly Hills to a village in the Congo would lose all but a fraction of its value, as would a computer company that attempted to operate in a low-IQ nation. Since the monetary value of anything is subjective, and what gets made is subject to the desires of those who produce (or steal through the government), redistribution on a massive worldwide scale makes little sense.

Hopefully a Darwinian Left would understand that Marx didn't just get evolution and human nature fundamentally wrong but economics, too. And to accept heredity and reject the desirability of eugenics will always remain impossible for utilitarianism or consequentialism, two related philosophies that seem to square well with the inherent sense of morality of most people. Despite this, Singer is to be commended for honestly facing what science has been telling us over the past few decades and acknowledging that the philosophy of the Left needs to be revised in light of what's been established.

If only the New York Times would do the same.

Is Rand Paul a GOP Mole?

The title to this piece is a joke, of course, and I am glad that Rand Paul won the Kentucky Republican primary. I would have voted for him if I lived in the Blue Grass state. Paul's victory is also indicative of the power of the Tea Party movement, which originated with his father's 2008 presidential campaign but has taken on a life of its own. 

This said, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Rand secured victory, in part, by earning the endorsement of Sarah Palin, as well as that of RedState.com's terror warrior Eric Erickson. Maybe those two know something we don't? In his major TV spots, Rand promised not to close Gitmo, stated (albeit vaguely) that "fighting back" was the proper response to 9/11, and flashed a lot of images of Military-Industrial-Complex fighter planes soaring through the sky. Though I thought this kind of stuff was on the wane, the GWOT, "standing tall against Islam," and even Christian Zionism still remain integral parts of the identity politics of Red-State Christian white people. If he wins the general, Rand won't be riding into Washington on a wave of antiwar sentiment, and it's likely that many of his voters would feel surprised, if not betrayed, if there's a major Senate debate on attacking Iran, and Rand comes out staunchly against.    

Unfortunately, Peter Schiff, who's running for Senate in Connecticut, isn't faring as well as Rand (though interestingly, polls reveal that he'd do much better in a general election, in which he could draw on independents, than in a Republican primary.) Filled with rich SWPL liberals and blue-collar union types, Connecticut lacks a real Red State base, as well as a Ron Paul/Goldwater-ite constituency, which is mostly focused in the South West. In the face of this, Peter should be given kudos for running as exactly the man that he is -- an anti-Washington libertarian who wants to drastically shrink government, end the Federal Reserve, and promote capitalism. There are few people who run for office who actually don't want to manage and control the lives of their constituents. Peter is one.    

As many know, I think it's much more likely that the United States government will hyperinflate its currency and collapse than the Ron Paul movement and/or Tea Party will reform the GOP and reinstitute "limited government." Politics is a distraction for us, and nothing I've seen over the past year has done much to change my mind.  

Multiculti Beauty Queens

There's something going on with these pageants. For two years in a row, beauty contents, which one would think would have gone the way of vaudeville in the feminized West, have become veritable Kulturkamps in which healthy, blonde representatives of the Great White, Christian American Middle stand up to the dungeon masters of the Dark, Gay, Secular-Lifestyle-Choice Post-America. Just last year, Carrie Prejean made her opinion of "gay marriage" amply known to perhaps the most vile exponent of celeb culture, Parez Hilton. Even Miss Teen South Carolina 2007 appeared to be making a populist argument, I think, about how we shouldn't waste resources on "the Iraq" and instead bring the money home to educate "U.S. Americans." And now we have Miss Oklahoma, Elizabeth Woolard, who, despite her PC reservations about racial profiling, still declared to a Latino Hollywood type named Oscar Nuñez her approval of "states' rights" ("that's what's so wonderful about America!") -- and to the roar of the crowd.

There's, of course, something completely useless about such a culture war, and I've always found it vulgar and ridiculous when Sean Hannity & Co. embrace such people as heroes. But the phenomenon does at least prove that in the starlet incubation center of the Mid West, young Nordic women are still instilled with decent values. And I could sense that Elizabeth really meant it. 

Miss Oklahoma was runner up to our first Arab Miss USA, Rima Fakih, who hails from her state's burgeoning Muslim center of Dearborn. I can't say that such a choice surprises me -- indeed, it's a fairly typical PC move in which a somewhat Western looking girl (Rima's from Lebanon) is given the prize, and white Americans are assured that these new foreigners are all cute and not too uppity or scary.

Neocon Daniel Pipes drew cackles from the liberal commentariat when he noted "this surprising frequency of Muslims winning beauty pageants makes me suspect an odd form of affirmative action." I wasn't aware of this trend, but affirmative action and social engineering in public entertainment is nothing new, and has been in effect at least since Vanessa Willaims became the first "black Miss America" in 1984. (Williams, by the way, was a mulatto with blue eyes and not exactly a representative of the African beauty ideal.)

And Pipes might be getting at something bigger as well: The American culture industry seems to be moving away from promoting multiculti beauty queens who essentially approximate the Occidental ideal to women who are manifestly unattractive (or at least, don't conform to any European standard of beauty.) In a world in which most every other traditional value has been inverted, it was only a matter of time before what is obviously ugly is declared beautiful.

Take for instance the hijab-wearing black Muslim Miss A&T at North Carolina, Anisah Rasheed: 

Excited and jittery, Anisah Rasheed of Roanoke pondered a fashion dilemma that few beauty queens have faced before: Matching her coronation gown with her hijab. ... Rasheed, 20, was crowned Miss A&T for 2005-06 on Thursday night in a sparkling fishtail gown-with a tiara glittering over her golden hijab-during homecoming ceremonies at North Carolina A&T State University.

The Full-Bullock

Few topics generate more bipartisan consensus among elites than the need to devote more of the resources of nice white ladies to closing the Nurture Gap among the races, whether via Head Start or having teachers work endless hours at KIPP charter schools or all the way up to adoption.

From now on we shall call that ultimate option on the continuum of nurturist solutions The Full Bullock, as in, "You know, these half measures aren't accomplishing much, so to close The Gap, we may have to go ... The Full Bullock."

We are of course honoring Sandra Bullock, who won the Best Actress Oscar for playing a rich white lady who adopts a giant black youth in The Blind Side. And then, in real life, the adorable actress adopted from New Orleans a remarkably menacing-looking baby. (Thanks to WWTDD for that characterization).

From iSteve

Estrogen Empowerment

The May/July issue of Foreign Affairs has a long article on "The Global Glass Ceiling," written by women's rights activist Isobel Coleman. The author calls on international corporations to join the fight for female empowerment in the developing world. Coleman hopes to convince those trying to turn a profit in emerging markets that their future gains depend in great part on making sure women are being educated and joining the workforce.  

The article proceeds to provide evidence that this is already happening. Goldman Sachs, for example, has put forward $100 million towards educating women entrepreneurs in Third World countries. The CEO of the company declares that programs like this are a good way of "manufacturing global GNP."  Walmart is taking it upon itself to increase female literacy in countries in which it operates. If they can be convinced to rely on women-owned businesses for one percent of their supply of goods, Coleman tells us, billions would go into women's empowerment, far more than what international agencies are able to provide towards the same ends. 

One of the most proactive of the Western corporations in trying to further the goals of Third World feminism is Nike, which set up the Nike Foundation in 2004 to address gender gaps in developing counties. Thus far, the organization has spent $100 million on education, health and "leadership" programs for poor young girls. The famous shoe and apparel company has also made use of its marketing skills, creating in 2008 a video called "The Girl Effect," which, we are informed, has "gone viral."

What else is new? some paleoconservatives may ask. Years ago Samuel Francis denounced the triumph of Economic Man in a piece on the controversy over the Confederate flag in Georgia in the early 2000s. He lamented the fact that blacks were able to put monetary pressure on the state by threatening boycotts if Georgia decided that a design based on the symbol of Old Dixie belonged on the current state flag. Francis wrote elsewhere that he disagreed with neoconservatives and rightist libertarians in that he saw capitalism as a destructive enemy of tradition.

At first glance, there seems to be something to this view. After all, corporations and businessmen in general would benefit if there was a way to double their available labor supply. Under a purely free-market system, a traditionalist may argue, the interests of capitalists and feminists converge. It's little wonder that Nike, Goldman and others have become supporters of progressive causes.  

Oh ye of little faith in human nature! Such an argument underestimates the natural differences between men and women. It is based on the assumption that putting money towards educating women is bound to pay off. If one looks at the top 10 college majors that women choose, at least six are absolutely worthless when it comes to creating wealth while the most lucrative undergraduate programs are known for being disproportionately male. Because the state to a large extent funds higher education through grants and subsidized loans, the disincentives to spending four years in school not developing any marketable skills are mitigated.  

Corporations hoping to educate girls in their own self-interest will be disappointed when they find that few are suited for leadership or high-paying positions. They would then give up paying for the training of those least likely to benefit from it, assuming that the culture they're operating in is neutral towards feminism. That's not to say corporations always rationally act in their own self-interest in the way understood in classical economics. Those companies mentioned in Coleman's articles are simply hoping to receive some good publicity and/or buy into egalitarian myths themselves. Whatever the case may be, the problem is the myths themselves rather than the economic system.

As science shows that women are more suited for lower-earning fields and tend to value money less than men when they decide on a career, it may make good business sense, ignoring PR considerations, to try to train large amounts of women to be retail clerks and secretaries but not engineers and investment bankers. One of the main problems with feminism is that it pushes for government policies in the hopes that women will eventually earn more relative to men, making the sexes less attractive to one another. The free market doesn't tend to lead to such results, especially when it's not operating in a sea of poisonous ideas, which, we must admit, would still be there under a more statist system.  

Francis failed to consider that blacks are not the majority in Georgia or the United States. Nor do they have much purchasing power relative to their numbers. If this smaller and poorer population is able to flex its economic muscles and push around whites, it's certainly not capitalism's fault! Southern whites, and whites in general, are willing to vote to maintain their heritage, but seem unable to organize to use economic levers to get their way. There's no economic reason why this has to be the case.  

Traditionalists unhappy with the world tend to blame any force that has power for what has gone wrong: the education system, the media, the state or the market.  While without question all have had some negative societal effects, the last is the only one that naturally moves towards fulfilling human desires and there is no way to fulfill human desires without a consideration for human nature. The reason Bill Gates is an anti-white multiculturalist isn't because he's a capitalist; it's because he's an educated Westerner at the start of 21st century. Bad ideas are bound to be pushed upon the rest of society as long as they're held by the vast majority of our civilization's brightest individuals and thus accepted by any potential elite. Finding ourselves in such circumstances, the biggest enemy is the coercive and unaccountable force of government.  

More British Thought-Crime

In the spirit of Richard's post on Mr. Newman, the evil 74 year-old pensioner who wants to kick the crooked MPs out of his government, there is another story in the news about an innocent Brit being arrested for violating PC boundaries. The story:

Dale McAlpine was charged with causing "harassment, alarm or distress" after a homosexual police community support officer (PCSO) overheard him reciting a number of "sins" referred to in the Bible, including blasphemy, drunkenness and same sex relationships.

The 42-year-old Baptist, who has preached Christianity in Wokington, Cumbria for years, said he did not mention homosexuality while delivering a sermon from the top of a stepladder, but admitted telling a passing shopper that he believed it went against the word of God.

During the exchange, he says he quietly listed homosexuality among a number of sins referred to in 1 Corinthians, including blasphemy, fornication, adultery and drunkenness.

After the woman walked away, she was approached by a PCSO who spoke with her briefly and then walked over to Mr McAlpine and told him a complaint had been made, and that he could be arrested for using racist or homophobic language.

The street preacher said he told the PCSO: "I am not homophobic but sometimes I do say that the Bible says homosexuality is a crime against the Creator".

He claims that the PCSO then said he was homosexual and identified himself as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender liaison officer for Cumbria police. Mr McAlpine replied: "It's still a sin."

The preacher then began a 20 minute sermon, in which he says he mentioned drunkenness and adultery, but not homosexuality. Three regular uniformed police officers arrived during the address, arrested Mr McAlpine and put him in the back of a police van.

At the station, he was told to empty his pockets and his mobile telephone, belt and shoes were confiscated. Police took fingerprints, a palm print, a retina scan and a DNA swab.

He was later interviewed, charged under Sections 5 (1) and (6) of the Public Order Act and released on bail on the condition that he did not preach in public.

Mr McAlpine pleaded not guilty at a preliminary hearing on Friday at Wokingham magistrates court and is now awaiting a trial date.

The Public Order Act, which outlaws the unreasonable use of abusive language likely to cause distress, has been used to arrest religious people in a number of similar cases.

Does anyone honestly think the results of the upcoming election will make any sort of difference in regards to the treatment of these crimes?

Red, White, & Blue = Racism

British police have been able to subdue another dangerous thought criminal who was terrifying the community with his red, white, and blue signs:

A pensioner who put up a red, white and blue election poster telling voters to kick out MPs was accused of racism by police.

After being inundated by canvassing politcians, Roy Newman, 74, decided to tell other voters: ‘GET THE LOT OUT.’

But 90 minutes after he put up the homemade sign up in an upstairs room at his house, two police officers arrived and threatened with arrest.

Spelling trouble: Roy Newman with his anti-MP poster that led to an arrest threat

They said the Union Jack-coloured lettering on a white background could be considered 'racist'.

He was told there had been a single complaint and he was ordered to remove it or change it otherwise he would end up in court.

But the former Tory councillor, from North Anston, near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, said police had misunderstood his message.

He said : ‘My sign is up there because the MPs and council leadership we have in place at the moment are a load of rubbish and I want them out, nothing more.

‘The police told me that due to the fact that the words were written in red and blue and the background was white, my sign had racist connotations.

‘What a load or rubbish - it certainly wasn't my intention to come across as racist. I'm not racist.’

And the furious pensioner, chairman of his local history society and a former Samaritan, slammed police for wasting their time.

He said : ‘Three years ago vandals put a brick through my window and when I called the police all they offered me was a crime reference number.

Anarcho-Tyranny in action: the state fails miserably at the tasks it should be doing (like maintaining law and order), but then pursues with ruthless efficiency the task it should not be doing (like policing thought.) Or as Sam Francis

described

the "bizarre system of misrule": "we refuse to control real criminals (that's the anarchy) so we

control the innocent (that's the tyranny)."

Hate-Crime Envy

Don't ever parody the therapeutic welfare state. You'll just give it ideas! 

Parody Become Law
By Hans Bader
April 22, 2010

Florida is now poised to join Maryland and Maine in treating crimes targeting the homeless as “hate crimes,” with increased penalties of up to five years for assaults on a homeless person.

The idea started out in Maryland as a parody.  The legislation’s author, a socially-conservative state senator, was by his own admission “motivated by cynicism: He was offended by legislation adding sexual orientation to the list of protected categories, which includes race, religion and national origin.”  So to parody it, he proposed adding all sorts of groups like the homeless to the protected list.

But his idea unexpectedly took off, as anti-poverty groups and homeless advocates backed his legislation to add the homeless to the state’s hate crimes law.  And he came to view it as a good idea, based on what you might call “hate crimes envy”: wasn’t it only fair to add the homeless if gay people were already included, especially since homeless people were allegedly more “vulnerable,” more deserving, and had less political “clout?”   (There is a related phenomenon called “censorship envy” that results in foreign hate speech laws getting broader and broader over time, as each minority group demands its own protection against political blasphemy.)

On Debating Race

It sounds as if The History of White People, reviewed by Kevin Lamb, is more of the same PC nonsense we’re used to on race.  

Reading Lamb reminded me of how dishonest and incoherent I find the “No Such Thing as Race” (NOSTAR) arguments.  Once we notice that people look different, whether there are important inherent cognitive or behavioral differences becomes an empirical question.  Race is socially constructed?  Ok, in that case, I believe that those we happen to “socially construct” as white are on average naturally smarter and less criminal than those we “socially construct” as black.  We can look at the evidence and see whether I’m right, but there’s no way one can argue that the question is meaningless.  

Another favorite of the NOSTAR crowd is Lewontin’s Fallacy.  Richard Lewontin argued that most human variation occurs within a population.  One can read the Wikipedia article to see where he went wrong.

When arguing against HBD smart people make logical mistakes they would see right through if they were discussing any other topic. 

I’ve found that it’s relatively easy to convince people of HBD one on one and difficult to do so in front of a crowd or say on a blog.  In cases where there are three or more people in a discussion, there will always be at least one who has drunk the Kool-Aid and will right away turn the scientific questions into moral ones. If you’re in a crowded lecture hall, somebody will groan or mumble something.  Most people are unsure about their own intellects, so they’ll go along with ideas which they wouldn’t defend with their own intuitive reasoning one on one if those opinions are held by a majority in the room they happen to be sitting in. 

Another interesting thing I've found is that many race realists say that “The day is coming soon when there will be no way anybody can deny race differences.” For example, Sailer has quoted James Watson as telling the President of Harvard that within fifteen years the latter's successor would have to "handle this very hot potato" due to advances in genetics.  There have even been articles about scientists forming rapid response teams to go to the media and explain to everybody why they can still be liberals if/when there’s conclusive proof.  I disagree.  As is, there isn’t anything in the social sciences more proven than black/Eurasian differences in intelligence.  How many other questions in sociology or psychology can give you the same answer when looking at the problem from ten different angles and remain controversial?  If one day we wake up and find that genetics has made the case 100 instead of 99 percent certain I don’t think that Harvard, NBC and the NYT are going to throw their hands up and say “oh, they’ve got us now!”  They'll have to do little more than adjust a few of their lies, distortions and logical fallacies, none of which will be much more ridiculous than the ones they rely on now.  

Facecrimes

"... to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Like many other public organizations in Britain, Rotherham Borough Council approves the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report's definition of a racist incident:

A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.

The Council urges staff to report such incidents, which, according to them, include not only physical assaults and verbal abuse but also "looks" and "offensive body language." Evidently, if you work for Rotherham Borough, your inadvertent facial expressions or body postures may be enough to get you fired, provided that somebody or other perceives them as racist.

Another public body operating a strict policy on facecrime is The Crown Prosecution Service, the government department responsible for prosecuting criminal cases across England and Wales, employing around 9,000 people. The CPS web page Dignity at Work includes "facial expressions" in its "[e]xamples of harassment on the grounds of ethnicity," for which employees can be disciplined or dismissed.

If by now you are glancing nervously in the mirror for telltale signs of supremacist bigotry, let me assure you that these notions are backed up by rigorous scientific research. In a study entitled "The Subtle Transmission of Race Bias via Televised Nonverbal Behavior," psychologists at Tufts University in Massachusetts looked at facial and bodily interactions between black and white characters on TV soaps and concluded, "nonverbal race bias is a typical pattern on scripted television shows." Needless to say, they considered only white actors' behaviours. And regrettably, they offered little or no evidence of the generalizability of their findings to real-life social situations.

The prevailing academic culture at Tufts, as at most all U.S. universities, is one of heaping ignominy on majority Americans whenever possible. But it goes without saying that the researchers of "Nonverbal Behavior," being entirely objective and politically neutral, would in no way have been influenced by Tufts' rampant, all-pervasive political correctness.

Under "hate speech" legislation currently in force in many European countries, and in Canada, a person can be arrested and locked up just for saying the wrong thing. How long will it be, I wonder, before "facecrime" and "bodycrime" laws are widely enacted, enabling Western governments to further browbeat their citizens by the legal enforcement of "positive," "inclusive" physical expressions and postures in inter-racial interactions?

"Moderates"

Anybody who watches the mainstream media with a critical eye notices a  number of tropes they keep returning to again and again. One of them is their love of "moderates" or those who get "beyond partisanship." Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and Joe Lieberman are three examples of national politicians who have been hailed as centrist figures, whatever that means. In fact, the idea that the nation needs more "moderation" has been the basis of quite a few books in recent years, among them Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now, The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics, and most recently, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America. Who or what is a "Wingnut"?  According to author John Avlon¹,

It's someone on the far-right or far-left of the political spectrum.  They are the professional partisans and the unhinged activists, the hard-core haters and the paranoid conspiracy theorists.

So the problem with these Wignuts is both their tone and views.  As far as national figures go, Glenn Beck is, of course, the worst sinner, offering a regular "Comrade Update" on his show and warning of a slow descent into Communism. John McCain's nomination in 2008 was a "repudiation" of the more extreme Karl Rove(!) but the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate was divisive. The Tea Party is uncivil and represents "the birth or white identity politics," an idea that the author informs us he owes to David Frum. Other villains of the Right include Michael Savage and of course, Rush Limbaugh. 

To be a good centrist, Avlon needs a Wingnut of the Left for every one on the other side of the political spectrum. Among liberals, he targets exclusively antiwar figures such as Code Pink and Michael Moore. It was Winguts who ran the antiwar Ned Lamont against the hawkish Joe Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic primaries. Avlon doesn't include an example of anyone too liberal on social issues or illegal immigration for civilized society.

Just because he calls himself a "moderate" doesn't mean that Avlon is exactly in the middle on every issue; the former Giuliani speechwriter is "fiscally conservative and socially progressive." How convenient that all respectable non-wingnuts have similar views. If one simply didn't like partisanship, it would be easy to lionize someone who, say, was conservative on social issues but moderate on economic ones like Pat Buchanan, who's very genial to boot. Or a fiscally conservative and antiwar politician such as Ron Paul. Quite clearly, a "centrist" isn't one who takes a little here and a little from there, but one who does so in a way that puts him on the same side of the Establishment. 

Besides social liberalism, another trait that moderates must share is a belief in a strong central government. The author tells us that the modern Republican Party defends federalism and states' rights. Southerners for most of the 20th century remained hostile to the Party of Lincoln and stayed in the Democratic coalition until federal power became the force that championed integration. This is the extent of Avlon's arguments against federalism. Why couldn't a moderate be someone who wants to stick to the Constitution and allow different states to do as they please? Because on issues such as race and homosexuality, Washington is likely to be much further to the Left than the majority of the country.  

A centrist can never be too big of an interventionist either. John McCain may want to fight a nuclear war over South Ossetia, but since he's denounced Jerry Falwell, he's ok. Moderates can't let the world alone any more than they can allow American states to decide important issues for themselves. Here's another definition of a "centrist": one who believes that the center of the world must continue to be Washington, DC. 

I was once told by a conservative activist that the Supreme Court had ruled that colleges can allocate money to political groups if an equal amount is given to both conservative and liberal causes. Such an arrangement doesn't give power to any particular faction, but to those who decide where the "center" is. On most college campuses, it's somewhere between a Communist and a Democrat. Or is the center calculated based on the opinions of the general population?  In that case, 40 percent of Americans believe that homosexual relations between consenting adults should be illegal, the same percentage that favors gay marriage. Of course, you can guess which position is considered the reasonable one whenever you hear someone on TV complaining that the extremes are taking over America.

Avlon's only enemies to the left are non-interventionists, the "blame America first" crowd as he calls them. A poster at The Daily Kos said that he hated George Bush and Code Pink "staged 'die-ins,' screamed during congressional hearings, protested military recruitment stations and attempted citizen's arrests of administration officials." Why couldn't the gals do something "moderate" like start a war that killed half a million people?  Are we supposed to value the feelings of Condoleeza Rice over that many lives?

This is one of many things that bothers me about the "less partisan than thou" crowd. There is no sense of priorities. Some things are worth getting upset about. And while it's often claimed that extremism turns off the more indifferent majority, recent American history has proven the opposite. It was the murderous Black Panthers and Weathermen who made affirmative action and federally enforced feminism eventually seem like moderate positions. And the fact that we have Communists in the universities makes the once unthinkable New Deal seem conservative. Also frustrating is the intellectual vacuum that develops amongst those who eschew ideology. Avlon tells us that centrists want to "move our nation not left or right, but forward," which is the most meaningless statement on politics I think I've ever read. 

In the end, at least honest and extreme Leftists have actual arguments, no matter how much we may disagree with them. In that way they're different than the more respectable sounding conservative and centrist elites who would like to see policy based on the sensibilities and shared worldview of those they see at cocktail parties. They do little more than ask us to look at our country and civilization and not get too fussy about what they want to continue doing to it, and for that matter the world.  

______

Note:

1 -- Whether it means anything or not, Avlon's wife is Republican strategist Margaret Hoover, a granddaughter of the former president.  Here she is demanding racism be "squashed" on Bill O'Reilly. 

Smart People Playing Dumb

From The Wall Street Journal:

The social sciences are having a moment. The most prominent members of this congeries of academic disciplines—economics, psychology, sociology and political science—traditionally have been derided as the "soft sciences" by comparison with more rigorous, substantial fields like biology, chemistry and the ne plus ultra of "hard" sciences, physics. But over the past decade the study of human behavior has shaken off some of its science-lite reputation and acquired a new cachet with the general public. Even on campus, many of its practitioners have a bit more swagger than they used to—notwithstanding the failure of economists to precisely predict the current financial crisis...

Last Saturday, Harvard hosted a conference on "Hard Problems in Social Science," sponsored by the Indira Foundation, that was explicitly inspired by Hilbert's legacy. Twelve leading social scientists from a variety of fields and institutions were given 15 minutes each to present whatever hard problems they liked. The Harvard organizers did one thing that couldn't have been tried in 1900: They broadcast the meeting on the Internet and have invited the public to propose and discuss new problems, and ultimately to vote on what the hardest ones really are...

Economist Claudia Goldin proposed understanding why there is still a gap in wages between women and men, even when they are in the same professions and have equal qualifications.

Roland Fryer pointed to the gap in educational achievement between black and white children, and suggested a solution: Figure out what those charter schools that have closed the gap, or at least narrowed it, are doing right, and then distribute those techniques to the public schools. Longer hours, esprit de corps, a return to drilling—whatever it is, find it and clone it.

Listening to the speakers, I was impressed by the range of their ideas and by how much I was learning from them. But I was struck by the nearly complete lack of overlap among their proposals. Social scientists collaborate across disciplinary boundaries more than ever, but this has not necessarily produced consensus on what the biggest issues are. I started to wonder whether it can really be the case that the hardest problems in social science just happen to be those that this group of scholars, impressive as they are, has been working on for the past decade. The speakers were convincing me that their problems were difficult—if they were easy, wouldn't they have been solved already?—but they weren't saying as much about how important or fundamental they really were.

Actually, those questions could be solved by the employees at your local Taco Bell.  Women who have the same qualifications as men are still women and are thus less ambitious and whites have higher IQs than blacks.  How could anyone be impressed by these hacks?  

Nick Bostrom, a broad-minded philosopher who seemed to have secured a guest pass to this particular gathering, suggested that social science has made great progress in the past by refuting incorrect beliefs, such as the assertion that "there are no inborn differences in personality or intelligence" or "trade causes economic weakness." His first hard problem, he said, would be to discover the "biggest falsehood promulgated within the social sciences today."

Is the writer here clueless or is she speaking to us in code?  (And was Bostrom clueless or was he speaking in code?)  Figuring out the big lie answers the questions alluded to above and is a natural extension of the statement that the social sciences have proven false the proposition that “there are no inborn differences in personality or intelligence.”

I looked up Nick Bostrom and his website seems to have a lot of fascinating things about transhumanism.  This ideology is dangerously close to eugenics, the most politically incorrect thing in the world.  In fact, Bostrom understands this and addresses the inevitable question in his Transhumanist FAQ

Do Transhumanists Advocate Eugenics?

Eugenics in the narrow sense refers to the pre-WWII movement in Europe and the United States to involuntarily sterilize the “ genetically unfit” and encourage breeding of the genetically advantaged. These ideas are entirely contrary to the tolerant humanistic and scientific tenets of transhumanism. In addition to condemning the coercion involved in such policies, transhumanists strongly reject the racialist and classist assumptions on which they were based, along with the notion that eugenic improvements could be accomplished in a practically meaningful timeframe through selective human breeding.

Transhumanists uphold the principles of bodily autonomy and procreative liberty. Parents must be allowed to choose for themselves whether to reproduce, how to reproduce, and what technological methods they use in their reproduction. The use of genetic medicine or embryonic screening to increase the probability of a healthy, happy, and multiply talented child is a responsible and justifiable application of parental reproductive freedom.

Beyond this, one can argue that parents have a moral responsibility to make use of these methods, assuming they are safe and effective. Just as it would be wrong for parents to fail in their duty to procure the best available medical care for their sick child, it would be wrong not to take reasonable precautions to ensure that a child-to-be will be as healthy as possible. This, however, is a moral judgment that is best left to individual conscience rather than imposed by law. Only in extreme and unusual cases might state infringement of procreative liberty be justified. If, for example, a would-be parent wished to undertake a genetic modification that would be clearly harmful to the child or would drastically curtail its options in life, then this prospective parent should be prevented by law from doing so. This case is analogous to the state taking custody of a child in situations of gross parental neglect or child abuse.

And it goes on for another couple hundred words, explaining why transhumanists favor eugenics without calling it eugenics.  

Yes, I think he was speaking to those social scientists in code.