Thursday, May 02, 2013

Move Over, Little Debbie

Of course, some prefer to drink Virginia Dare.
I don't normally think about the racist web site VDARE.com but I couldn't help it today when I read the NYTimes news report that they've been excavating the site of the "Lost Colony" and apparently evidence of cannibalism was dug up:
Archaeologists excavating a trash pit at the Jamestown colony site in Virginia have found the first physical evidence of cannibalism among the desperate population, corroborating written accounts left behind by witnesses. Cut marks on the skull and skeleton of a 14-year-old girl show that her flesh and brain were removed, presumably to be eaten by the starving colonists during the harsh winter of 1609.
Oh no! They ate Virginia Dare!

Virginia Dare is VDARE.COM's ideal of white racial purity. As it says on their about page:
Today, Virginia Dare seems to be vanishing from American education too. But she was a fixture for earlier generations. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt felt free to give a speech commemorating the 350th anniversary of her birth. At one point, I planned to pay homage by bestowing her name on the heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in Alien Nation, about the flight of the last white family in Los Angeles. It seemed . . . symmetrical.
I was dissuaded.
 
But multiculturalists will be happy to know that there is always the possibility that the colonists survived, merging with the local Indians. There are fables that Virginia Dare as a young woman got involved in a love triangle with a warrior and an angry medicine man, who transformed her into a white doe. And there have been serious suggestions that The Lost Colony is the answer to the historical problem of the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, an English-speaking group of unclear origin. 
(Anthropologists call such groups "tri-racial isolates." Significant of the times, and perhaps of federal subsidies, the Lumbees seem recently to have been emphasizing their claim to pure Indian status. For example, click here...  For more on the white doe legend, click here...) 
Actually, anthropologists and historians reject that "serious suggestion." But let us continue...
So Virginia Dare could be symbolic of the coming racial nirvana that immigration enthusiasts are forced to start fantasizing about when you compel them to look at the statistical consequences of current policy.
Or perhaps not. The actress Heather Locklear (Melrose Place, etc.) is claimed as a prominent Lumbee. But if, through some miracle of genetic recombination, Virginia Dare is reborn in Ms. Locklear’s beautiful face, John White might well have recognized her.
Well I guess the VDARE crew can rest easier now - this new evidence seems to indicate that rather than merging with the local Indians as the "multiculturalists" (the word has about the same meaning for VDARErs as "Satan" has for fundamentalist Christians) so fervently wish for, instead THEY ATE EACH OTHER!

Naturally the VDARE crew are huge fans of The Bell Curve, which they characterize as truthful and brave. They love to imagine themselves as defenders of dispassionate science in the face of political correctness. That's a constant refrain of Steven Pinker, who is so oppressed by political correctness that he and his ideological soulmates get to complain about it and expound on the glories of accepting the scientific truth of white male intellectual superiority (in so many words) in virtually every media outlet.

Naturally the VDARE crew love Steven Pinker - and Pinker's chosen defender Razib Khan.

Wikipedia has an entry on VDARE which includes this section - it gives you some idea of exactly where they are coming from - in spite of Steve Sailer's defense of interracial marriage.
Hurricane Katrina and IQ Steve Sailer argued on VDARE following Hurricane Katrina that the lower average IQ of African-Americans found in intelligence research correlates with "poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups resulting in the need for stricter moral guidance from society." He said that looting after the 1995 Kobe earthquake was minimal because "when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks."[16] 
John Podhoretz called Sailer's comments racist.[17] Sailer responded that his accusers admitted a correlation between low IQ and poor judgment by supporting the Supreme Court's 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision "that, in effect, banned the death penalty for killers with IQs under 70."[18] John Derbyshire defended Sailer, citing large variance in incarceration rates by race and birth rates for unmarried women by race.[19]
John Derbyshire is infamous as being too racist even for the National Review.

It should be noted that Derbyshire is married to a Chinese woman, so Sailer would hardly come out against interracial marriage in general and insult his VDARE colleague. It could be argued that Sailer and Derbyshire aren't so much generalized racists as haters of African Americans.

While I was watching Obama's superlative White House Correspondents' performances I remembered that Al Franken had been a guest comedian twice during Clinton's administrations and got off a nice shot at Charles Murray, one of the authors of The Bell Curve:
...also here tonight is Charles Murray, who I understand has been hard at work on a sequel to the Bell Curve entitled "Jazz, the Music Created by Morons."
Others prefer a chaw of Virginia Dare.
UPDATE: I was amazed a couple of years ago when I saw right-wing racist Razib Khan used by Steven Pinker as a defense against an unfavorable book review in the New Yorker- but apparently Pinker used Steve Sailer(!) as a defense against Malcolm Gladwell's objections to Pinker's critique of his book:
That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published the Journal of Productivity Analysis,  analyze forty years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance—in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs—they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top ten positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.” 
 I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl. 
Poor Steven Pinker - he's a wealthy, respected and famous author who suffers the slings and arrows of "political correctness" - which appears to consist entirely of the rare occasions when someone points out that he considers bona fide racists to be important colleagues and allies of his.

Steven Pinker is rapidly becoming a right-wing laughing stock, right up there with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. And the late Christopher Hitchens - and I'm not sorry he's dead, that misogynist Bush-supporting fuckhead.

It appears to me that far from suffering from left-wing political correctness, Pinker is the beneficiary of the most powerful form of political correctness of all - the taboo against seriously considering arguments against celebrity intellectuals.

Although fortunately the New Yorker has broken that taboo, at least in the case of Pinker.