Free Republic

Beat Whitey Night, Polar Bear Hunting, The Knockout Game…it’s about time the major media began to scratch the surface of this long-occurring practice. It is, after all, merely the internet-video-driven, plainly visible tip of a much larger and deeper iceberg, which has been around for many years. We can argue endlessly about the causes of it, but the fact remains that for several decades, blacks have been statistically far more likely to do horrible violence to non-blacks than the other way around. But you’d be unlikely to know that unless you get your intelligence from somewhere other than establishment information...

There is much talk about “the talk.” “Sean O’Reilly was 16 when his mother gave him the talk that most black parents give their teenage sons,” Denisa R. Superville of the Hackensack (NJ) Record tells us. Meanwhile, down in Atlanta: “Her sons were 12 and 8 when Marlyn Tillman realized it was time for her to have the talk,” Gracie Bonds Staples writes in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Leonard Greene talks about the talk in the New York Post. Someone bylined as KJ Dell’Antonia talks about the talk in The New York Times. Darryl Owens talks about the talk in...

... The topic here is of course my Taki’s Mag column of last week, which has brought me worldwide fame, though no doubt only for the proverbial fifteen minutes. ... Was it a suicide column? Many people have surmised that I was fed up with National Review and wanted to go out with a bang. Nothing of the sort. I was comfortable at NR and honestly thought I was writing a routine column on a website that anyway never references my NR connections. The results were entirely unanticipated. Grassy knolls. Some people went berserk overanalyzing the situation. Guys: Most things...

Say this for John Derbyshire – he thinks what he thinks and doesn’t care who knows it. In fact, he’s willing to give an interview to arguably one of the most likely sites to be hostile on the internet. To that end, Derbyshire has given his first interview after being let go by National Review for writing a racially controversial article to the hipster-focused website Gawker, on the condition that they not censor any of his answers. As it turns out, that’s not a problem for them. Here are some of Derb’s most interesting observations: --------------------------------------------------- I liked working with...

<p>I didn’t agree with Derb on many things, from Ron Paul and talk radio to God and science. For his part, he reckoned I was a bit of a wimp on what he called “the Great Unmentionables.” He thought that neuroscientists and geneticists’ understanding of race trumped my touching belief in “culture.” I’m not so sure: Why is Haiti Haiti and Barbados Barbados? Why is India India and Pakistan Pakistan? Skin color and biological determinism don’t get you very far on that.</p>

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our...

... There is a talk that nonblack Americans have with their kids, too. My own kids, now 19 and 16, have had it in bits and pieces as subtopics have arisen. If I were to assemble it into a single talk, it would look something like the following. (1) Among your fellow citizens are forty million who identify as black, and whom I shall refer to as black. The cumbersome (and MLK-noncompliant) term “African-American” seems to be in decline, thank goodness. “Colored” and “Negro” are archaisms. What you must call “the ‘N’ word” is used freely among blacks but is...

Thank you, Madam Moderator. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am here this evening in the capacity of a wet blanket. I am here not to take one side or the other on the topic under debate, but to say that the topic, as written, is based on a false premise, and therefore has no satisfactory answer. I don't believe the disparities under discussion can be eliminated. Debate about whether government should play a greater or lesser role in eliminating them is therefore, in my opinion, otiose. When the organizers first emailed me to suggest I appear on the panel,...

Imagine a cheerful, observant, talkative man who, as he advances into late middle age, becomes impatient with much of the world around him and starts complaining. Yes, he’s an immigrant from Britain, but that doesn’t mean he approves of open immigration policy. Sure, he has a Chinese wife, but that doesn’t mean he favors diversity as a social goal. Certainly, he thinks America draws its strength from religion, but that doesn’t make him a believer in God. He is definitely a conservative, but much of what passes for conservatism these days fills him with dismay. Imagine further that, during a...

Derbyshire aims in this book to pour cold water on all "schemes for political improvement," both at home and abroad, to argue that our civilization is in its twilight, and to show that while there are things we could do to save the situation, we won't do any of them, because we have sunk into a collective mindset that won't let us. Hence: We are doomed. It's not a frivolous subject. Still, every sinking ship should, like the Titanic, have a band playing on deck as she goes down. He aims to bring the bad news with a light touch,...

You can’t help but admire Rush Limbaugh’s talent for publicity. His radio talk show is probably—reliable figures only go back to 1991—in its third decade as the number-one rated radio show in the country. And here he is in the news again, trading verbal punches with the president of the United States. Limbaugh remarked on Jan. 16 that to the degree that Obama’s program is one of state socialism, he hopes it will fail. (If only he had said the same about George W. Bush.) The president riposted at a session with congressional leaders a week later, telling them, “You...

Listen to John Derbyshire on immigration, the Middle East, lawnmowers, and much more. . .

Race and conservatism? Yes, that was the title of the panel discussion I’d signed up for, at the Robert A. Taft Club in Arlington, Va. I’d signed up without much thought, being of an insecure and self-deprecating nature (ask anyone), and always flattered to be invited to events at clubs and institutions with impressive-sounding names. Once I did start to think about it, mild panic set in. Race and conservatism? What on earth can one say? In order to say anything, it helps to start with a simplistic view of race, a view that regards Americans as belonging to two...

<p>Nordlinger: Senator Kerry speaks, &c.</p> <p>Q. Are you a Christian?</p> <p>A. No. I take the minimal definition of a Christian to be a person who is sure that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, or part-divine, and that the Resurrection was a real event. I don’t believe either of those things.</p>

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version April 04, 2006, 11:32 a.m. Putting the World to Rights My 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica lists 152 countries in the world. Question: How many of those countries made it from 1911 to today, nearly a century later, with their systems of government and law intact (allowing for minor constitutional adjustments like expansion of the franchise), without having suffered revolution, civil war, major dismemberment, or foreign occupation? I’ll stand open to correction here, but I make it six: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.S.A. Not even Britain qualifies, because...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version March 21, 2006, 8:27 a.m. To Hell with the “To Hell With The ‘To Hell With Them’ Hawks” Hawks Just kidding there — actually, making the point that “The ‘To Hell With Them’ Hawks” is a really clunky way of identifying a faction. It used to be said of the mathematician Camille Jordan, whose papers were famously unreadable, that if he wished to introduce four variables on the same footing, such as the average mathematician would call a, b, c, and d, Jordan would label them as a, M3’, ε2,...

Catching up on back news this past few days — I was out of the country for the first two weeks of August — I caught President Bush's endorsement of teaching Intelligent Design in public school science classes. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," President Bush told a reporter August 2, "so people can understand what the debate is all about." This is Bush at his muddle-headed worst, conferring all the authority of the presidency on the teaching of pseudoscience in science classes. Why stop with Intelligent Design (the theory that life on earth has developed by a series...

This year contains two notable scientific anniversaries. The one most widely mentioned is the centenary of Albert Einstein’s three trailblazing papers in the German scientific journal Annalen der Physik on the nature of matter, energy, and motion. Those papers opened up broad new territories for exploration by physicists. The discoveries that followed, and the technology that flowed from those discoveries, helped shape the whole 20th century. Radiation therapy and nuclear weapons, the laser and the personal computer, global positioning satellites and fiber-optic cables — all trace at least part of their lineage to Einstein’s papers. The 20th century was the...

I was to be on a panel discussion at the AAAS annual meeting in Washington DC. I mis-remembered the time, though, thinking the event was at 11 A.M., when in fact it was at noon, so I had an hour to kill. Wandering around the conference center idly, looking for something interesting, I came across a meeting hall with an easel outside saying GENDER AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN ACADEMIC SCIENCE. Thinking this might be right up my street, I peered inside. About 30 people were listening to a woman lecturer. The people had their backs to me and were clustered...

We had a print-magazine deadline this week, so I'm just coming in at the tail end of some things here, especially the odd bedfellow’s alliance of Derb and Ted Kennedy on Iraq. Derb is absolutely right that there are many places in the world that have zero effect on U.S. security. And he is right to recoil from a global crusade for American-style democracy (not that that is in the offing, despite the Second Inaugural address). But there are a couple of ways he goes wrong. 1) The Middle East matters to us strategically, and basically every American president since...