06/16/2023
01:20 Sweden sees sense. (But too late?)
06:54 Doomed, doomed. (An astronomer’s wager.)
10:47 Overshooting on race and sex. (Reform becomes revolution.)
16:41 Prouds and the flag. (There’s a code.)
23:05 Waiting for SCOTUS on Affirmative Action. (Much noise, no difference.)
27:11 Dimwitted British wokesters vs. Ron Unz. (No credit for smarts.)
35:56 Squaring the college-admissions circle. (With rings.)
39:23 New Sheriff in town. (Watch out, Robin Hood.)
42:37 Minorities worst affected. (They really do say it.)
43:31 Feminizing the Founders. (Down with toxic masculinity!)
45:11 Signoff. (With 1980s ear-worm.)
01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. This is your persistently genial host John Derbyshire, podcasting this week from the lovely VDARE castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.
The actual recording studio here at the castle has been taken over by our techies in preparation for the weekend’s conference. I have been assigned a nice quiet room of my own; but this room was originally the butler’s pantry. It has a sink and some kitchen stuff, so guests drop by to get a coffee mug or something. Also it overlooks West Virginia state highway 9, so there may be occasional traffic noise. I apologize for distractions.
On to the news.
02 — Sweden sees sense … too late? The Swedish national character is an interesting study. How on earth did that race of fearless warriors, who spent the Middle Ages ravaging the coasts of the Northern Hemisphere from Newfoundland to the Black Sea, and who were militarily potent into the 18th century, how on earth did they morph into the tame, feminized, self-loathing nation of today, its borders thrown open to all the scum of the Middle East and Africa?
The word "feminized" seems to be key there. Other European countries were making jokes about it forty years ago when I was doing office work in London. You accidentally stepped on a lady’s foot in a crowded elevator. Of course you immediately apologized and the lady accepted with a smile. The next thing that would happen was, some other occupant of the elevator would say: "That’s rape in Sweden!" and everyone would laugh.
Whatever has been driving the process, the Swedes have let wokeness run amok these past few decades, especially in immigration. The results have been predictable. Two years ago the country’s National Council on Crime Prevention — which, I note without further comment, in Swedish is called "Brå" — found that Sweden ranked second among all European nations in gun crime, behind only Croatia. Bombings and grenade attacks are also normal.
As for rape in Sweden: well, it’s definitely a thing; and a 2018 report found that 99 out of 112 gang rapists had a foreign background, with "foreign" mostly meaning from Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
Once an orderly, peaceful nation, Sweden now has a reputation among nearby countries so bad that Ukrainian refugees don’t want to go there..
Well, at the peril of raising false hopes, I note that things may be changing.
June 6th was Sweden’s National Day. You may think it surprising that a nation with so little national self-regard has a National Day, but it does. On June 6th this year the Prime Minister, a chap named Ulf Kristersson, delivered a sort of State of the Nation address. It included some surprising and encouraging remarks about immigration. Samples, quotes.
Let me be clear: Massive immigration and poor integration just doesn’t work. That is why we are now changing Sweden’s migration policy and making it the strictest in the EU. …A "no" to asylum means "no" and you have to leave the country. That should be obvious, but it’s not. Equally important, a "yes" should mean that you really get involved in Swedish society.
End quotes.
I got those quotes from a report at ZeroHedge. The report closes with the following, quote:
Sweden is finally learning the lesson that diversity is in fact not a strength, but with native Swedes set to become a minority within a few decades, is it too late?
End quote.
And Mr Kristersson’s party, currently named the Moderate Party, is the latest iteration of a center-right tradition opposed to the Social Democrats who dominated and shaped 20th-century Sweden. So Kristersson’s Moderates are approximately equivalent to establishment Republicans here in the U.S.A. The Moderates are ruling now in a coalition with the more feisty and populist Sweden Democrats.
There’s a case to be made for parliamentary government in here somewhere.
03 — Doomed, doomed. Casting my eyes back across the years in my archives, I see that just twenty years ago next Tuesday, June 20th 2003, I published a review of a book by Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal. That’s not an empty title bestowed for favors to the monarch: Sir Martin is a very distinguished and accomplished scientist indeed.
The book’s American title was Our Final Hour, although it had been published in Britain as Our Final Century, and that British title is a better description of the contents.
The book offers a long list of scenarios that could prove fatal to the human race, from bioengineered plagues to the accidental annihilation of spacetime itself. The author was, and I believe still is, perfectly serious about this: humanity is not going to make it through to January 1st, 2100.
Along the way there Sir Martin writes the following, quote:
I staked one thousand dollars on a bet: "That by the year 2020 an instance of bioerror or bioterror will have killed a million people." Of course, I fervently hope to lose this bet. But I honestly do not expect to …
End quote.
It is now pretty conclusive that the COVID pandemic started with a leak from the research lab in Wuhan, China. What is not clear — and what our federal bureaucracy plainly doesn’t want made clear — is the role our own medical, and possibly military, bureaucrats played in sponsoring and encouraging the work at Wuhan.
Whatever the sponsorship, financing, and motives may have been, there is no longer much doubt that the COVID outbreak was a result of researchers' carelessness in tinkering with viruses. So does Sir Martin win his bet?
Googling for news on that, I didn’t find any. He can’t have forgotten about the bet: Steven Pinker made a big deal of it in one of his books. I guess you can quibble about the timeline. "By the year 2020"; so does that mean by January 1st that year, or December 31st? Do we have reliable worldwide death counts?
Still, all things considered, Sir Martin’s bioerror-bioterror prediction from twenty years ago looks better now than it did then. Given that it was just one of the many doom scenarios he presented, humanity’s prospects for January 1st, 2100 don’t look too great.
04 — Overshooting on race and sex. Have you had enough of Pride Month yet? Good grief!
Things got really out of hand last Saturday when the White House decorated its frontage with the LGBT flag, or the latest version thereof, flanked by, at each side, Old Glory. I guess Joe Biden taking a televised dump in Arlington National Cemetery would not have conveyed forcefully enough the contempt in which our ruling class holds ordinary, normal Americans and their values.
One of those values is of course tolerance for harmless minorities. As I keep pointing out, though, the attitude to sexual minorities that is now well-nigh compulsory, demanded of all citizens, is far beyond tolerance. To be regarded as a good citizen with healthy, sensible attitudes nowadays it is not enough to tolerate, we must praise, we must celebrate. Sexual minorities are no longer ashamed; they are proud, and we must share their pride.
Yet again we see social reform turning into social revolution spurred by unmistakably totalitarian motives. I say "yet again" because it’s the same thing that happened with race.
Black Americans suffered disadvantages, occasional humiliations, in some localities legal disabilities. Americans collectively decided that was wrong, and made honest, good-faith efforts to correct it. Black Americans became as equal as they will ever be, given innate race differences in behavior, intelligence, and personality.
There was good, sensible social reform with the best of intentions. It went into overshoot and became revolution, though; so that nowadays white people are disappearing from TV commercials and legislators with much more pressing matters to deal with are earnestly discussing reparations.
In the matter of sexual oddity there wasn’t anything like Jim Crow-level injustice. Well, there certainly wasn’t in Britain, where I grew up. Sex acts between men were illegal until I was in my twenties; but they were prosecuted only if the perps made a nuisance of themselves in public, by harassing patrons of public toilets for example. Homosexual memoirs and biographies of the time — I recommend John Lahr’s biography of Joe Orton, memorably titled Prick Up Your Ears — show a free-and-easy lifestyle.
Other kinds of sexual oddity — lesbians, cross-dressers, masochists — weren’t prosecuted at all. Everyone knew who was who, and the oddities were tolerated, although with sensible reservations about, for example, known homosexuals becoming scoutmasters.
Then came reform: repeal of anti-sodomy laws, same-sex marriage. As with race, though, we couldn’t seem to stop with reform, we had to go all the way to revolution. Now drag queens do obscene performances for schoolchildren, and parents who object are shouted down as bigots.
The colossal intellect of Professor Ibram X. Kendi has taught us that it’s not enough to not be racist, you have to be positively anti-racist. Merely not being racist is … racist. I think I have interpreted the great man’s theory correctly; although his intellect is so far above those of us mere mortals, I hesitate to claim that I have attained full understanding of his brilliant, subtle theories.
Just so with the liberators of sexual oddity. The quiet, smiling tolerance we thought we had arrived at was merely a way-station on the road to total social revolution. Just as not being racist is itself racist, so just tolerating sexual eccentrics and leaving them to sort out their own destinies — so long, of course, as they don’t make themselves a social nuisance or danger — that is homophobic.
05 — Prouds and the flag. Just a couple more points on child-sniffer Joe and those flags at the White House.
First point. One hundred years ago this week, June 14th and 15th, 1923, there was a National Flag Conference in Washington, D.C. to establish a code of proper conduct when dealing with our nation’s flag. There have been numerous adjustments to the Flag Code since then, several of them by the U.S. Congress in full legislative session.
The Flag Code as it stands today has ten main sections. Section 7 is titled: "Position and manner of display." This section makes plain, time after time, that our national flag is to be pre-eminent in all flag displays. Samples, quotes:
Subsection (c): No other flag or pennant should be placed above or, if on the same level, to the right of the flag of the United States of America (with some exceptions for church services and the United Nations) …Subsection (e): The flag of the United States of America should be at the center and at the highest point of the group when a number of flags of States or localities or pennants of societies are grouped and displayed from staffs.
Subsection (f): When flags of States, cities, or localities, or pennants of societies are flown on the same halyard with the flag of the United States, the latter should always be at the peak.
End quotes.
And so on. Mumblin' Joe President has willfully, deliberately violated all those rules. I don’t know whether any of them have the force of federal law, but if they have, there should be prosecutions.
Second point: Wednesday this week, June 14th, was Flag Day. If the president knew that, it’s hard not to think there was an element of spite in the flag display — poking a finger in the eye of normal patriotic Americans.
My parallel with Biden taking a televised dump in Arlington National Cemetary then becomes taking a televised dump in Arlington National Cemetary on Memorial Day.
Third point: If there has to be a united movement of sexual eccentrics, can’t they at least get themselves a decent name? "LGBT," with all its supplements and additions, is a linguistic monstrosity. At least when we discuss the race issue we know we're talking about the blacks.
There isn’t even consensus on what the letters stand for. Is "Q" for "queer," or for "questioning"? Ask two members of the so-called "community," you'll get two different answers. What does "Intersex" mean? Is it just the same as "bisexual," or what?
What about that plus sign you see at the end … sometimes, sometimes not. Does that mean they can go on thinking up different kinds of deviance for ever? Or will we at some point be told the listing is complete, there are no more letters to be added?
I have a suggestion. Some time in the early 20th century male homosexuals started referring to themseves, among themselves, as "gay." Forty-odd years ago, as part of the general liberating of attitudes, normal people picked this up, and homosexuals became generally known as "gay."
Not without some protests, thogh. Many non-homosexuals, especially lovers of literature and poetry, resented that a fine old English word referring to happy general merriment, had been stolen by practitioners of sodomy. Some of us are still miffed about it.
Well, the sexual eccentrics have stolen and debased another perfectly good English word. Steve Sailer has joked somewhere that a whole generation has grown up reacting, when they first hear about the movie Pride of the Yankees, with: "I didn’t know Lou Gehrig was gay!"
All right, let them have the damn word. Let’s at least put their larceny to some good use, though. I suggest we henceforth stop saying "the LGBTQIA2S++ community" and just say, "the prouds."
06 — Waiting for SCOTUS on Affirmative Action. Sometime very soon — perhaps as you are hearing or reading this — the U.S. Supreme Court will, in the last month of its judicial term, bring forth a ruling on the constitutionality of Affirmative Action in college admissions.
This ruling will be the final act in the legal drama of the group Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA) suing Harvard and the University of North Carolina for discriminating against Asian applicants in their admissions processes.
The ruling, when it comes, will generate a great deal of noise but have very little practical effect.
The evidence that college-admissions Affirmative Action is, in practice, just race favoritism, is made plain by numbers: by the discrepancies between what different races score on standardized tests and the numbers of each race granted admission to desirable colleges.
Those colleges are busily gaming their way out of trouble by the simplest method possible: They have stopped, or are stopping, the gathering of test scores. Without those test scores there are no numbers for comparison, so the admissions officers can proceed with what they like to call "holistic" admissions.
The word "holistic" here means, as anyone looking into the issue figured out long ago, "completely subjective." Without those pesky test scores as evidence for their chicanery, they'll be free to practice favoritism without the danger of lawsuits. It’s like dissolving the corpse of your murder victim in acid — a thing I strongly recommend should you ever be tempted to willful homicide. No evidence, no crime.
Notwithstanding the colleges have the situation well and truly gamed, progressives are mad as hell about the lawsuits that prompted this ruling. This includes even some foreign progressives: the editors of the far-left Guardian newspaper in London, for example.
The June 6th issue of that newspaper ran a headline reading, headline: Harvard affirmative action challenge partly based on Holocaust denier’s work.
Really? Reading down to the sixth paragraph of the piece I see this, edited quote:
The complaint … draws heavily from a 2012 article by Ron Unz, a Californian multimillionaire and former Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a controversial track record. That 2012 piece has been criticized for being riddled with errors and for espousing views verging on antisemitism.
End quote.
That needs some extended commentary. New segment.
07 — Dimwitted British wokesters on Ron Unz. Full disclosure here. I have some personal acquaintance with Ron Unz. I've been the recipient of his hospitality and generosity. Regarding my opinions about his work, I refer you to the seventh segment in my August Diary last year.
There is also a professional relationship. My full-length pieces at VDARE.com, including the ones distilled from Radio Derb transcripts, are cross-posted at Unz.com, to my occasional annoyance.
(Those occasional annoyances are no fault of Ron’s nor of the VDARE editors. It’s just that now and then I commit some gross blunder of fact or typography. I can go into the VDARE version of my post as an administrator and edit it, and I can of course correct the version going to my own archives. I have no access to Unz.com, though, so my blunder remains there to be jeered at by future generations …)
Back to the Guardian piece … although not until I have noted what dreck that newspaper is, and always has been. I can remember fifty years ago in England, me and my peers laughing at it as "the Grauniad" because of all the typos.
And just look at the diction of that article. "Screed," … "neo-Nazi," … "espousing views verging on," … "problematic," … I'd assume it was the product of a chatbot except that a chatbot could write better copy.
A hundred words in I made a bet with myself that before I got to the end I'd have seen a reference to David Duke. Sure enough, there he is: a, quote, "influential figure on the extreme right," end quote. I haven’t heard about anything David Duke has done for a decade or two. Does anyone know where he is? Or even if he’s still alive? Yet to dimwitted British wokesters he’s "an influential figure," a boogey-man whose very name sends them scurrying for protection to the Guardian.
All right, all right, what’s this 2012 Ron Unz article that has the Guardian clutching its pearls?
Dated November 28th, 2012, it is titled "The Myth of American Meritocracy." You can read it for yourself at Unz.com, or in book form in Ron’s 2022 essay collection of the same title. It is in my opinion a small masterpiece of quantitative journalism.
A key part of it is summed up in a graph Ron made, included around twenty percent of the way into the article. The graph shows along the horizontal axis the years from 1990 to 2011. The vertical axis shows the percentage of Asians enrolled for those years. There are different-colored lines for the nine most prestigious American universities, with an additional dotted line for the percentage of college-age Asians in the population.
That dotted line of course rises steadily across the years as the number of young Asians increases. Strangely, though, the percentages enrolled at eight of the nine elite universities flatlines between fourteen and eighteen percent. The exception is Caltech, which maintained a strictly meritocratic admissions process through those years. The Caltech line on the graph tracks the dotted line of available Asian youngsters. Hmmm.
The facts Ron laid out, as for instance summarized in that graph, are hard to dispute. So how does the Guardian hack dispute them?
He — and yes, it’s a he, although I'd have guessed a she from the style and content — he doesn’t dispute Ron’s facts. What he takes issue with is the passages later in the article where Ron takes a closer look at numbers of white students admitted, breaking them out by Jewish and Gentile. He finds what he calls a, quote, "quite extraordinary," end quote, over-representaion of Jews.
Sample quote:
Thus, although Asian-American high school graduates each year outnumber their Jewish classmates nearly three-to-one, American Jews are far more numerous at Harvard and throughout the Ivy League. Both groups are highly urbanized, generally affluent, and geographically concentrated within a few states, so the "diversity" factors considered above would hardly seem to apply; yet Jews seem to fare much better at the admissions office.
End quote. And this is probably where I should note that Ron is himself Jewish.
He is also by nature a relentless questioner, taking nothing at face value. And yes, that includes the most-publicized numbers for Holocaust fatalities, which Ron thinks is in the low hundreds of thousands. That, if true, is a dreadful enough statistic; but to the Guardian Ron’s estimate is "holocaust denial."
And to be perfectly fair here, there are nits you can pick with Ron’s estimates for the Jewish numbers. Published college statistics don’t break out Jews and Gentiles, so you have to do estimates based on surname. That is both tiresome — scanning lists of hundreds of names trying to pick out the Jewish ones — and seriously inaccurate.
Here’s a student named Robinson. Were his forebears rubicund ale-swilling yeoman farmers in the fields of England, or were they Rubinsteins or Rabinowitzes in the shtetls of eastern Europe?
Ron mentions that problem himself in the article, but the Guardian gives him no credit for it. Nor do they give any credit at all to Ron’s constructive suggestion for squaring the circle of college admissions. Let me try to explain that.
08 — Squaring the college-admissions circle. To square that circle, Ron uses rings. So I guess you could argue that he’s circling the circle … whatever.
The fundamental problem here is to find some middle way between meritocratic college admissions, which are unacceptable, and naked favoritism — otherwise known as "holistic" admissions, which ought to be unacceptable in a fair society.
The meritocratic option is unacceptable because of race differences in intelligence. On a strictly meritocratic admissions process, one that totally depended on results from tests of cognitive ability, the Ivy League would be forty percent East Asian, forty percent white, two percent black, and eighteen percent other — other Asian plus nonwhite Hispanics.
Americans at large wouldn’t accept that. Too much reality!
So here’s Ron’s solution. An elite college, he says, could select, say, fifteen or twenty percent of their students entirely on merit. These are the best of the best, the cream of the crop. Ron calls them the "inner ring."
The other eighty to eighty-five percent of admitted students — the "outer ring" would be drawn by random lottery from the large pool of applicants judged capable of college-level work.
Quotes from Ron:
Requiring an excellent but hardly spectacular student to take his chances on winning a spot at Harvard or Yale hardly seems unreasonable …And the result would be true diversity, rather than the dishonest and ridiculous pseudo-diversity of our existing system.
End quotes.
Well, I'll leave you to read Ron’s 2012 article for yourself. It’s well worth your time for its own sake, and essential background if you're going to be in conversations about the forthcoming Supreme Court decision.
(Footnote here: I said very unkind things about the Guardian there. Fair’s fair, though. I don’t know if this is still the case, but when I last had any reading aquaintance with the paper thirty-some years ago, it had a really good crossword puzzle.)
09 — Miscellany. And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.
If you've read a lot of my stuff you know that I come originally from the town of Northampton in the English East Midlands. Northampton is the capital of Northamptonshire, "shire" being just an old word for "county."
Northamptonshire should not be confused with Nottinghamshire, a different county, also in the East Midlands. Nottinghamshire is a couple of counties north of Northamptonshire, separated from us by Leicestershire. The capital of Nottinghamshire is, believe it or not, the city of Nottingham.
"Ah," say American-born Americans (at any rate, older ones). "Nottingham … the Sheriff of Nottingham … Robin Hood’s enemy!" Yes, that’s right.
Well, meet the current Sheriff of Nottingham. It’s a lady, name of Shuguftah Quddoos. The given name "Shuguftah" seems to be Iranian, so probably she’s a Muslim. She may also be a lesbian: I don’t know, but when I brought up her picture my gaydar went off.
Why was I looking her up? Because there was an exceptionally grisly multiple murder in Nottingham on Tuesday. A man stabbed to death three perfect strangers, took the van belonging to one of them, and ran it into some pedestrians, very seriously wounding one of them (who may have died before you hear this).
The perp was quickly apprehended. Announcing that, the Nottingham city police issues a stock photograph of some white person being handcuffed.
Only a day or two later were we allowed to know that, quote:
The triple murder suspect, who is believed to be a migrant from West Africa living in the U.K. legally for a decade, was today refusing to answer questions from police, according to sources.The 31-year-old is said to have arrived in the country as a teenager and have a history of petty drug dealing but no criminal record.
End quote.
Poor old England!
Item: It’s been a running joke for years that when anything bad happens, the headline writers for news outlets have the phrase "minorities hardest hit" set up in type, or as a one-keystroke macro.
It’s no joke. Last week I told you about the smoke from Canadian wildfires afflicting our northeastern states, messing up the air quality here.
Well, here’s the headline from Yahoo News, June 8th, headline: Why the wildfire smoke affects the health of poor people and communities of color the most.
Item: At at 700 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in downtown Washington, DC you will find the National Archives Store. There you can browse our nation’s founding documents and purchase copies of them to hang on your living-room wall.
A friend of mine did so recently. He was astonished to find that the Barry Faulkner murals of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have been modified.
These two pictures were painted in the mid-1930s by professional artist Barry Faulkner as decorations for the Capitol Rotunda. One showed 28 of the Founders, the other 25. All were male.
Well, no more of that toxic masculinity! The reproductions you buy at the National Archives Store today show lots of females — around fifteen or twenty percent of the figures portrayed. My friend bought one and showed it to me.
Whether the original paintings themselves have been similarly feminized, I am afraid to inquire.
10 — Signoff. That’s all I can offer you this week, ladies and gents. Festivities are warming up here at the castle on Friday evening, and I should go and socialize. Our conference tomorrow will be recorded, videos posted at VDARE; so not only will you hear more of me sounding off, you will see it too.
A friend who lives in Japan emailed me the other day with the message, quote: "At some point, you will have to admit that becoming a US citizen did not turn out the way you had hoped." End quote.
For the record, seeing how far and how fast the country of my birth has sunk, taking U.S. citizenship was absolutely the right choice. That’s not what I emailed back to my pal, though. What I emailed back was a link to the 1980s ear-worm I’m going to sign off with.
There will be more from Radio Derb next week.
[Music clip: Joe Dolce, "Shaddup You Face."]
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.
