On Jan 1, 2004, at 10:06 PM, Riad S. Wahby wrote:

"J.A. Terranson" wrote:

...

Why the BedSty student Tim?

Uhh, read more carefully. He was responding to a specific point from Tyler Durden.

...

You have some incredible moments of lucidity and insight, and occasionally, we are the lucky recipients of these fleeting events - but then, just as sure as the sun coming over the horizon every morning of every day, you slip back into the pseudo-intellectual racist crap. What's wit dat?

I don't think Tim is racist as such. He hates everyone equally. :-) But seriously, calling it racism seems wrong-headed. Racism is "I hate black people because they're black." Tim hates (some, most, all?) black people because he percieves them as benefitting unfairly from his hard work. I'm pretty sure, all other things being equal, he wouldn't hate a black person who, through his own hard work and without taking a penny from the government, turned himself into a successful, tax-paying "source." Or, at least, I'm not convinced he would hate such a person, which is to say I'm not convinced he's a racist.

I admire many negroes. Shelby Steele, who wrote "The Content of our Character," for example. And Thomas Sowell, an even more prolific author (and Stanford professor). And Niger Innes (son of the lefty Roy Innes...a lot of children of 60s liberal negroes are now libertarian or conservative, e.g., Adam Clayton Powell's son). And Clarence Thomas (who has argued forcefully that the Supremes ought to do a very thorough review of gun laws, with the hint that the right decision would be to restore the Second Amendment to first class status). And a bunch of others, including Ward Connerly, of California, who has been leading the effort to have "race" removed as the basis for _any_ government actions, including hiring quotas, special admissions requirements for negroes and Asians (at opposite ends of the test score spectrum), and so on. I don't admire the politics of Condie Rice and Colin Powell, but there is little doubt that they are accomplished, bright people. My problem is that negroes are 80% in solidarity on a bunch of disgusting, anti-liberty things: affirmative action, racial quotas, minority setasides (but not for successful minorities--they want limits on the number of Asians admitted to UC schools), welfare, increased benefits, etc. Further, they, as a whole, have a "plantation mentality": always demanding that Massa in the Big White House give them more stuff. Instead of excelling and grabbing the stuff for themselves, as Chinese and Korean and Indian people have done in America, they think setasides and quotas and special favoritism is "owed" to them. I used to not care much about what they did or thought. When I entered college in 1970 I expected to mix with a bunch of different sorts of people. What I found was that the negroes all sat at the same tables in the dining halls, that whites who sat near them were chased off, and that we non-blacks, including Asians, Indians, South Americans, whites, etc., could mix with each other, but not with the "Panthers." And they ghettoized themselves into "Black Studies," which they had "demanded" a couple of years earlier and had just gotten in 1969. In 1972 they formed various militant groups on campus. One obnoxious woman named Judy became the student association president. When she didn't like a decision, she ordered the Panthers, her enforcers, to bar the doors and not let anyone out until the decision was reversed. It was. I am not exaggerating. I included this, and the theft of ASU funds, and the henchmen, and similar leftist actions by others (including the MeCHA "Aztlanos"), in a letter to the Regents of the University of California. It was published in the school newspaper, in a full-paged spread, and I got replies from the governor of the state, Ronald Reagan. I met with the Chancellor and he agreed that the situation at the campus was deplorable, but that in the interests of keeping the peace with the negroes and Mexicans, given the time (1973), there was little they could do. He promised that his office was looking into the allegations and already knew about most of them. When I joined Intel in 1974, I saw plenty of Chinese, Indians, a handful of Koreans and Vietnamese (more later), but only one negro engineer. And he had a major chip on his shoulder. When he was let go in one of the RIFs, he claimed discrimination on the basis of his melanin levels. Meanwhile, the excuses mounted all around about how "science is sexist and gynophobic," about how the ancient Egyptians were actually black Africans and had their advanced civilization (electricity, flying cars, etc.) stolen by the "ice people" and similar such malarkey. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, a racist hustler, tried to shake down Silicon Valley corporations for payoffs to his Rainbow scam. (Meanwhile, negroes avoided science, math, engineering, technology and preferred to focus their efforts on lawsuits to get standards lowered, via "race norming." The bullshit went on and on.) I look at the 75% bastard rate (compared to about 25% for whites and about 5% for Asians in America), the black on white crime, the black on black crime, the crack hoes, the disrespect for learning....all this and I can draw only one conclusion" that though there are many fine, competent, bright negroes, on the whole it is a gutter race. Harsh phrase, but true. A race that, in America in the last 40 years, has become a race of beggars, whiners, wheedlers, chiselers, whores, crack addicts, dropouts, and unwed mothers. Charles Murray laid out a lot of the reasons in his book "Losing Ground." ("Dat be a racist book!," said his detractors.) The seminal event was the arrival on the scene of the collectivist JFK. Kennedy ordered his bunch of eastern elitists to look into the "relief" system which had provided very limited and very temporary economic assistance to folks in bad situations. For those few here old enough (I am, just barely), this used to be called "general relief," and it was mostly administered at the county level, in the states that offered it. What Kennedy's brain trust found was that "relief" was seen as an embarrassment, as a negative thing, something to avoid getting on if at all possible and to get off of just as fast as one could. Which is as it should be, of course. So Kennedy's liberals scratched their heads and came up with a new plan. "Relief" would be converted to a series of state and national programs, no longer handled locally. And the bad connotations of "relief" would be changed by the new and positive name "entitlement." Money handed out to various folks would be their "entitlement," something they were _owed_. Other related names would be "social services" and, of course, liberal mention of "children" and "nutrition." Ergo programs like WIC ("Women, Infants, and Children"). Ergo, "Head Start." Oh, and meddling in foreign countries with things like the Peace Corps (which, the feministas are slowly coming to realize, did much to break "primitives" of things like breast-feeding, while giving the baby formula industry a new world market). Kennedy got zapped for his many crimes, but the Good Ole Boy who took over turned out to be just as big a collectivist as Kennedy had been, and LBJ continued the Kennedy welfare/entitlements/handouts and called it "The Great Society." (I don't recall if Kennedy had formally named his progressive plan.) And that year was the year that negroes got to vote in all 50 states, which of course was a good thing. The part of the Civil Rights Act that dealt with voting rights was good. The Constitution applies to all people. However, most of the Civil Rights Act was terrible, for obvious reasons. Between it and new interpretations of the 14th Amendment (lawyers can quote the language), and some terrible Warren Court decisions (*), the effect was to interfere in the ability of people to choose who to do business with, who to rent to, who to associate with, all of the things which liberty means. (* The Supreme Court took a case where a negro had been denied service at a diner in the south and used a weird series of logical steps to argue that if negroes couldn't buy food at this diner then napkin and ketchup and hot dog sales might be affected, and since some of that stuff came from other states, that would be interfering in interstate trade and only Congress can regulate that, blah blah, and so racial discrimination was outlawed under the fucking Commerce Clause of the Constitution! Of course, by the same logic, if Apple decides to change suppliers of disk drives, and this means Illinois gets the business instead of Idaho, this has also changed interstate trade. But logic was not the point of what the Court was doing...they were looking for any excuse to stop "discrimination.") OK, what of discrimination itself? Good or bad? Most of us probably agree that telling a black person he cannot shop in some bookstore, told by the bookstore owner that is, is not cool, to use a technical phrase. We might call it tacky, or unethical, or just plain dumb. (And if the government tried to say blacks could not enter a bookstore, this would be both interfering with the property rights of the bookstore owner AND violating the colorblind standards of the Constitution.) But libertarians argue--and this was the natural system for 170 years--that what a property owner does with his property is, assuming he is not violating real rights (*) of others, up to him to decide, whether his decisions are uncool, stupid, unwise, etc. (* I mean real rights, as in property, personal safety, economic ownership, etc., not some "right to enter the stores I wish to enter." No more so than anyone has a "right" to be invited into someone's house, or into a club, etc.) So, during just a couple of years of the Great Society, this confluence of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the new interpretations of the 14th Amendment, and Supreme Court decisions, the ability of people and corporations to choose whom they wished to deal with, or hire, or fire, ended. "Racial discrimination" became the new word to demonize anyone or any group. When civil libertarians like Barry Goldwater said this restriction on liberty was a bad direction to move in, he was dubbed a "racist." I could write much more on this whole sorry episode. It's a sorry episode not because I have any desire to exclude negroes or women or cripples or queers or any other of the "protected groups" (added over the years), but because it erases the concept of liberty. If I can't rent to whom I choose, I have no control over my own belongings. If I can be told I must hire a certain percentage of negroes (later dubbed "tokens'), this not only interferes with freedom of association (which applies to groups and corporations, obviously) but it also has a corrosive effect on those hired and how those around them think about them. ("Token blacks" in departments of companies are often thought of as having been hired to get the EEOC stooges off the company's back.) I have the fundamental right, via ownership of my property and my freedom of association, to hire or fire based on merit, based on whim, based on astrology, whatever. It may not be wise, but it's my choice. I have the fundamental right to have only Muslims in my company, or only Jews working in my bookstore, or to have only buxom women working at my strip club. (Recall the "discrimination" suits filed over such policies, including males claiming they were discriminated against, women in wheelchairs or with mastectomies claiming they have a "right" to be hired by a strip club that doesn't want them, and so on.) The can of worms that was opened when liberty was cancelled is still with us, getting worse and worse. Feminista attorney sued a California gym for excluding women, and the courts ordered gyms to admit women....ah, but the same order did not ban women only gyms, and these are now common in California. A church which refused to hire a Satanist was ordered to do so. (This was later rescinded...apparently even the courts can't deal with the Alice in Wonderland-like situation where discrimination is banned.) This is what Shelby Steele, the black I referred to earlier, is saying in "The Content of our Character," that blacks should be judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. (He is quoting Martin Luther King, of course.) This does NOT mean that this maxim gets enforced by the government, and that discriminating on the basis of color should be illegal. He, and King (some think), is arguing that this is the "right" thing to do, but is not something government should be enforcing. Note of course that most businessmen will not turn away customers. Things in the deep south were skewed by the War of Northern Aggression, and it took time for sentiments to change. But in many cases the apartheid in the south was managed and enforced by local _governments_, with the public restrooms being "White" and "Colored." (As in South Africa, where companies like IBM wanted to hire blacks but were ordered not to by the RSA government.) Anyway, I resent deeply being told I may not associate as I wish, may not rent or sell my property as I wish, must meet certain hiring quotas or face EEOC fines, must promote based on race not character or skills, and so on. I resent deeply the whole can of worms that involves "discrimination against gays" and "handicapped-friendly" policies, and the whole enforced "niceness" bullshit (which is not actually making people nicer...just the opposite, as when I had to deal with a token we had in our department and was ordered to not do anything that might cause him to file a discrimination lawsuit against us).

I see the success the Chinese and Indians and other Asians have had in America...none of it do to quotas, to forced hiring, to the nonsense the negroes keep pulling. (I haven't talked much about Mexicans, by the way. Many Mexicans are perfectly fine...hard-working, friendly, etc. Often they are not very academically-oriented, so few are in engineering positions. And many are as bad as many of the negroes. Worse, the issue of "illegal aliens." As Tom McClintock pointed out so cogently in his debate with Schwarzenegger, et. al., the real issue is that these illegal aliens (perhaps as many as 10 million now) are CUTTING IN LINE, cutting in line ahead of those waiting patiently and legally to enter the U.S. from Russia, Romania, India, Thailand, etc. And we gave the Mexican and Latin American illegals an "amnesty" in the mid-90s: Simpson-Mozzoli, a promised one time only deal. Ah, but the cynics, including me, were right: more aliens swarmed in, looking for another amnesty. As a pure libertarian I would have no problem with truly open borders, provided there were absolutely no taxpayer-funded programs or services, and provided the piles of rotting corpses were not used as an excuse to give "services." But open immigration is not going to happen. Meanwhile, giving these illegal aliens permanent residency status would be a fucking disaster. As with the Simpson-Mazzoli illegals, once amnestied they have a strong tendency to sign up for all of the "entitlements" JFK and LBH and RMN established. Which is why my local town has a hospital that is facing insolvency, as the swarms of Mexicans use the services mandated by law and collection is nearly impossible. And the State of California is facing insolvency, as you all know. Enough about Mexicans.) So, to wrap this up, I see plenty of brown-skinned people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. doing very well without chanting about "racist discrimination" and demanding that some version of "Ebonics" be used to teach their children (just the opposite, they really WANT their children to be fluent and precise in standard English). And I see Chinese, Korean, and other Asian immigrants doing well, not bellyaching that the reason they're failing is because The Man is holding them down, that Massah has passing out enough freebies. And the black libertarians and conservatives I cited earlier share this view. They don't put it quite as bluntly as I do, that the negro in America is becoming a gutter race, but they obviously think the trends of the past 40 years are disturbing and not good for the bulk of their fellow negroes. --Tim May "According to the FBI, there's a new wrinkle in prostitution: suburban teenage girls are now selling their white asses at the mall to make money to spend at the mall. ... Now, you see, the joke here, of course, is on White America, which always felt superior to blacks, and showed that with their feet, moving out of urban areas. "White flight," they called it. Whites feared blacks. They feared if they raised their kids around blacks, the blacks would turn their daughters and prostitutes. And now, through the miracle of MTV, damned if it didn't work out that way! " --Bill Maher, "Real Time with Bill Maher," HBO, 15 August 2003

On Jan 1, 2004, at 8:20 PM, J.A. Terranson wrote:

...

Tim May wrote...

...

...

In conclusion, your Bedford-Stuy student who doesn't see the point to studying math will never be a math researcher, or a physicist, or a chemist, or anything else of that sort. So no point in trying to convince him to study his math.

Why the BedSty student Tim?

Perhaps because I was replying to "Tyler Durden," where he wrote: "I'll tell you a story. Back in the late 1980s I taught at a notorious HS in Bedford Stuyvesant. 90% of my students were black." You liberals see "racism" even when people reply to the points raised by others. --Tim May