Category Archives: race

privilege, my foot

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A Mother’s White Privilege

To admit white privilege is to admit a stake, however small, in ongoing injustice. It’s to see a world different than your previous perception. Acknowledging that your own group enjoys social and economic benefits of systemic racism is frightening and uncomfortable.

She lists a bunch of ugly things that are unlikely to happen to her sons, as well as some offensive things not said to her by the ignorant, thanks to their blondness.

What’s missing from the piece is any description of “benefits” — any reason to believe that we as Whites would be any worse off if, for example, the Blue Gang were to stop abusing Blacks.

Not being murdered by cops is not a “privilege”. Nobody ever said, “Let’s organize and arm a gang of bullies so that they can spend their days not murdering our kind of people.” Absence of SWAT raids is the state of nature, not an artificial benefit.

a guilt-trip down memory lane

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When I lived in Oakland, I was twice approached after sunset by a panhandler who announced, “I’m black but I’m not a mugger!” Both times I flinched and, of course, felt guilty.

It now occurs to me belatedly that, if young adult males are the most violent subset of naked apes, it’s not irrational to be wary of a solitary nocturnal specimen, regardless of his albedo.

So he had a cute racket.

the trouble with victimless crime

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I like Bruce Fein‘s language:

The nation’s experiment with Prohibition underscores the limits of the law without moral consensus. The Prohibition Amendment was ratified as a type of homage that vice pays to virtue. Popular morality never celebrated abstinence. . . . Prohibition laws died in adolescence for lack of moral sustenance.

Immigration restrictions are even more problematic than their Prohibition counterparts. While alcohol consumption was not generally condemned, it was likewise not popularly acclaimed as a virtue. In contrast, the conduct and character of illegal aliens elicit accolades by at least half the population. . . .

this and that

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I’m sneezing up a storm today, and the good old allergy pill hasn’t helped. I do hope it’s not the same virus that afflicted my housemate for two weeks last month.

Who is the center of the movie universe? Kevin Bacon is not even in the top thousand. Rod Steiger has the lowest total path length. But would the result be different if actors were weighted by some measure of prominence (e.g. number of credits)?

It’s annoying to find a crank on our side. Rex Curry has for some time been documenting the sordid history of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, and bully for him; but lately he’s gone a bit nuts in his efforts to demonstrate that the Nazi swastika stands for Socialism, frequently citing sources that, like this, show the word Sieg or Sieg-rune (symbol of victory, appropriate to any flavor of statism) but not Sozialismus; and here he reads a scribbled Adolf as another S-rune (standing for Sozialist, since no other German word begins with S) despite the wiggly remnants of the original letters and the cross-stroke of the f. Rex, a few pieces of unambiguous evidence – which are probably somewhere in among the chaff – would be far more effective than this farrago.

I lived in Los Angeles for three years without ever knowing how to get to the Hollywood Sign. And speaking of views from on high, every time I fly to Chicago (come to think of it, the last time was quite a few years ago) I look for Fermilab, but I’ve never spotted a buffalo.

Aaron Krowne should stick to mathematics rather than writing absurdities like this:

The H1-B program has allowed companies hiring software engineers to pay less for more engineers by running to the government for help.

As if there were no migration in a state of nature! It would be more accurate to say that the Immigration Acts (in which you’ll find the H-1B program) allow skilled natives to get paid more by running to the government to restrict supply. This incidentally reduces the wages of similar workers in other countries, giving foreign employers a price advantage (to the extent that their products are able to enter the market).