Destroying America From Within

It is horribly racist to make ethnicity/race the marker of evil.  When large percentages of black or hispanic people hold faulty beliefs and/or engage in bad behaviors that does not make the blackness or hispanic heritage the cause of the bad beliefs and/or behaviors. 

No way this should have to be explained on an Objectivist forum!

Cultural decline is a product of evil philosophy and ignorance.  Bad ideas get into legislation, art, popular beliefs and drive the culture into decline.  The raised standard that we all need, America and every other nation, is that of understanding and respecting individualism, rationalism, and individual rights.

There is a contradiction and foolishness implied in imagining that a nation could have the will to strip people of their citizenship and expel them, for going on welfare, for example, but not have the intelligence or will to do away with tax-funded welfare. The enemies of America are those who willingly take money from honest, productive citizens for welfare (or for any purpose other then the defense of individual rights).

There are no shortcuts to the saving of the good parts of Western civilization.  No shortcuts at all.  Citizens of our nation have to understand individualism and rationalism and individual rights and have the will to demand nothing less in the public sphere.  A people get the government (and culture) they deserve - in that sense.

Kyrel,  you wrote:

I consider the Objectivist community to be profoundly evasive on issues related to race. This includes Rand, Branden....

I knew and worked with Branden for decades and I've read most of what Rand wrote.  NOWHERE do I find damning of whites or appeasing of blacks and Hispanics.  If you can't provide a specific reference or quote, then that claim is not controversial - it is slanderous and simply absurd.

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To what extent should blacks and Hispanics -- as a race or ethnicity or collective -- be identified and damned for their bad behavior?

Individuals have behavior.  A race doesn't engage in behavior.  I'm having a hard time understanding how you can't grasp that.  You are damning people because of their skin color.  That's racist.  Justice and morality demand that position be condemned and abandoned.  Judge individuals for behavior (as individuals) and judge ideas (regardless of who holds them).
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However important it is to judge every individual as an individual, it also seems important to note group differences or categories of people. Today we seem to call them "social identity groups". Please consider: Pit bulls today have different behaviors than golden retrievers, despite both being of the same species. I think it's important to consider their respective and richly divergent natures and nurtures. So too with whites, blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, Indians, Jews, etc.

You can ONLY judge individuals as individuals, because we only make moral judgments based upon what is chosen and only individuals can choose.  Groups, races, ethnicities... they don't.  They are categories.  Pit bulls, golden retrievers are dogs.  They aren't humans and don't exercise human volition and they would never be judged by a morality built upon the standard of man's life.  Are you saying that blacks don't exercise volition?  Are you saying they are outside of a philosophy built on the standard of man's life?  You mention nature and nurture but not choice. 
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Thomas Sowell, for example, is black.  If we condemn blacks as you indicate we should, then should he be condemned?  Are you suggesting that all blacks have their citizenship revoked and that they be expelled?  You can't go from statistics about a group that is defined by racial or ethnic markers and then go to actions to be taken against individuals because they are in that group. 

Nearly every single mass murder in American history is a white male, therefore, Kyrel Zantonavitch, because he is a white male, should be tried for murder.  Nonsense!
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Evading a seminal and controversial issue is not the Objectivist way. Not in the best sense, certainly. And pretending a vast social problem doesn't exist, won't solve it or make it go away. 

That is completely true.  But assigning totally wrong causal understanding of those social problems won't help and might make things much worse.  And giving more life to racism is going to accelerate cultural decline, endanger individual rights, and abandon the heart of individualism.

I think the good groups or categories of the world should be praised and the bad ones condemned. The criteria for such a judgment should be justice and truth alone. There is much about blacks and Hispanics in America which is simply not discussed. Or else discussed in an exceptionally incompetent and illegitimate manner. I seek to remedy that.

Can you list some of the good groups?

For the record: I'm the least racist and bigoted person on the planet. I'm morally superior to every last one of you on this subject. None of you are even a member of my species! I may make factual, conceptual, or analytical errors. After all, I'm all alone here -- and as intellectually ambitious as ever. But my honesty, courage, and integrity is greater than any of your ten finest heroes combined. 

"For the record"? 

In your mind you are not racist, but your statements prove otherwise.  You decided to tell us that you are morally superior to everyone else on this subject.  That's wierd! You think you are different species?  Really!  And you decide to announce that you are greater than the finest heros combined - bizarre! 

I think your mind is a very strange place.  I think you verge on delusional.

Kyrel is not a racist in Rand’s sense of the word, what I call a judgmental racist – one who attributes a moral characteristic to an individual man based on his race.

For example, you’ve led a very limited life if you haven’t met a few decent blacks.  To judge those individuals as dishonest, for example, would be wrong, and racist.

But one can reject such racism and still observe past and current statistical correlations.  Non-whites in the mass are now and have been bad news.  Brother are they and have they.

Now I would go further, and in past discussions Kyrel has disagreed with this.  There is another attitude towards the races which I call a kind of racism because Leftists are going to call me a racist anyway:  “preference racism.”  This does apply to every individual in a race. There is nothing wrong with preference racism, with you feeling more comfortable around men of your own race. (Not  every individual is a preference racist, although I do think it is natural.  The "every individual" applies looking outwards.)

Another part of what Kyrel has written really strikes home:

Rand ... and the other Objectivists in the ’60s and ’70s stared directly into the face of horrific black racism as practiced by Martin Luther King, Malcolm (“The white man is the devil.”) X, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the Black Panthers, etc. – while essentially not breathing a word about it. The situation demanded a lion’s roar of outrage; they barely emitted a mouse's peep. This is evasion. It’s dishonesty, cowardice, and lack of integrity. As a matter of fact – the situation is exactly the same today. The Objectivist leaders continue to stay silent.

(Edited by Mark Hunter on 4/04, 2:16pm)

(Edited by Mark Hunter on 4/04, 2:17pm)

Mark and Kyrel can play word games till the cows come home, but it doesn't change the fact that they are making moral judgments based upon skin color.  Personally, I think that their posts should be sent to dissent.... at least those posts pushing racist views. 

I would hate to see RoR smeared with that kind of crap.

Mark is pretending not to know the difference between an individual with black skin and set of statistics that refer to a large number of people with black skin. 

In Mark's foolish example I would not drive that cab into the neighborhood because it is  high crime area.  I know of areas that are high crime areas that are mostly black, others that are mostly hispanic, and yet others that are mostly white.  It is the crime I want to avoid.  Not a skin color or race. 

And I know that a neighborhood being predominately black does not guarantee high crime.  I know this first hand from when I visited all of LA County's neighberhoods while I worked for their child protective agency.

Mark believed that it is a high crime area because it is predominetly black.  For him, black skin is the marker that means crime.  I've been in predominately black neighborhoods that had very low crime rates.

Crime is a action and lots of similar actions of that kind in an area means lot of people in that area believe in being criminals.  Beliefs, thought, ideas.... those are what precede actions - like criminal actions.  We already know that there are very deficient subcultures filled with harmful memes in many of our inner-cites - subcultures that look upon drug dealers,pimps,gangsters as heros.

Anyone going through Mark's posts will see that attacks on Objectivist organizations, individuals and racism predominate.  He should be moderated to the Dissent area.

To repeat, we’re not talking about skin we’re talking about race.

Steve is mistaken if he thinks anything I’ve written confuses the difference between attributes of individuals and statistics about a group of individuals.

I’ll restate my position briefly in different words.  The individual characters (moralities) of individual members of a racial group differ from one another.  Though at any time there is an average or typical character, given an individual his character might differ from the average typical.

Thinking that a given individual must possess the average or typical character of his group is what Rand calls racism.  

I too call it racism, but racism of a particular kind, which I call “judgmental racism,” to distinguish it from what Leftists call racism, period, and I call “preference racism.”

Let me explain.  It is a plain and honest fact that most people – most as in practically all – are more comfortable around people like themselves, especially people of the same race as themselves.  This is human nature, and human nature is not evil.  To call these people – to repeat almost everyone – evil because of their preference is the faux Objectivist version of Original Sin.  These faux Objectivists would makeover man, extirpate racial preference from his evil nature, just as the Soviets would root out the selfish in man to create the New Soviet Man who happily gives up the fruit of his labor to the community.

Why insist on using the word racism  in “preference racism” even though it is not racism in Rand’s sense?  Because Leftists constantly bait and switch between the forms judgmental and preference.  Leftists are self-righteous about judgmental racism and it might sound good but then they will accuse you of racism for preference racism.  (I think even Ayn Rand was confused about the distinction.)  Like “selfishness” and “anti-semitism,” turn the trick back on your opponent and use words the way he uses them.

About statistics, there is nothing statistical about “preference racism.” Speaking from the white point of view, you might prefer not to associate with any black, you might insist on marrying only a white, etc.

You can work with and tolerate an individual black, but after all one does not tolerate what one likes wholeheartedly.

About my cab driver example, which I don’t think is silly though I tried to make it amusing, the point is that higher crime is statistically correlated with black neighborhoods.  Everyone knows this and except for the pathologically altruistic in self-defense acts accordingly.  Though a correlation doesn’t make it a sure thing, in the absence of further data you would do well to proceed with caution.   If he has nothing else to go on even someone who is not a judgmental racist will and must judge based on statistics (valid stereotypes if you will).

All this seems very obvious to me.  It shouldn’t be uncontroversial, but these days it sure is.

I didn’t say that the average character of blacks was lower than the average character of whites.  For one thing character is neither measured on a linear scale nor is it additive, there is no “average character.”  That said, today at least blacks are typically in some respects bad news:  this group has a far higher stranger violent crime rate than whites, for example.  There are individual decent blacks despite this fact.

IQ is not a moral attribute but it is correlated with moral attributes.  If anyone thinks the average IQ of blacks equals that of whites he is delusional.  However some individual blacks have a higher IQ than the average for whites.

I won’t respond to the name-calling.

Three assertions relevant to judgmental racism, from my last post, numbered for easy future reference:

1.  Blacks have a far higher stranger violent crime rate than whites.
2.  Decent blacks exist.
3.  The average IQ of blacks as a group is less than that of whites as a group.
4.   Blacks exist who have a higher IQ than the average of whites as a group.

... That’s four assertions you moron!

Froggy please stay out of my ROR posts.  Four assertions from my last post.  

Can Steve tell us which of these assertions might be said to dissent from objective reality?  No, he cannot, because they are all demonstrably true.  

Can Steve tell us how any of these assertions insults anyone in the RoR forums?

Perhaps what Steve really feels is that within Objectivism it is somehow forbidden to utter these truths.  The question is, why?  Why is it forbidden?

One practical consequence of not acknowledging the – I’ll speak loosely to save words – average intellectual inferiority of blacks compared with whites is that if they are in fact as smart as whites then their average failure in society compared to whites must be due to society and whites, not to themselves.  Therefore they are right to feel resentment at that society and whites.  Like a Leftist Steve ladles self-righteous hatred into the less intelligent blacks.

About preference racism:  Can Steve tell us why a white who prefers to, even insists on, marrying only a white is evil or is dissenting from Objectivism or is abnormal in some way?