Michael: Re Enoch Powell — don’t have time to debate this. But – psssst — I was a teeny-weeny bit in trolling mode when I asked “What would Enoch say?”

Curiously, Enoch never wrote (or said) anything about the differential psychology dimension. Allow me to terminate this thread with:

IQ. Africa: 70 points. Japan: 110 points … same again, same again.

As Dale Amon recently said, the topic does seem somewhat done to death. But you ask for it by denying race realities.

My inner teacher tells me:

A good Eurostatistician can and will not troll. A good Eurostatistician does not try to get up other people’s noses on their private property. A good Eurostatistician does not wander off topic.

Write it out fifty times.

And six of the best on your bare bottom if you don’t toe the line!

Oooooh!! Teacher! Yummy! Yummy!

Have a nice weekend, folks.

May the road rise before, and Christ be with you and the wind behind you ….

Slan agus beannacht!

Thanks for the data. You are clearly capable of rational debate and you are obviously very well informed — and I mean it. I don’t actually read the LRB regularly, and you may well be right about its anti-Semitic trend.

Just to make it quite clear before the ‘Nazi’ smear appears again: I detest the dual morality of many of Israel’s critics, just as much as I detest the dual morality of those who blindly support that country through thick and thin. But you should have resisted the temptation to play the ‘Protocols’ card against Mearsheimer. It’s at the same level as calling Robert Fisk a ‘wannabe towel-head’ or whatever the terminology is.

I apologise for my lack of logic about your being a ‘bit rich’ — don’t know what I meant either, quite frankly. I dashed off the stuff in a hurry.

Anyway, it’s good to encounter a Samizdatarian commenter who can conduct a civilised, flame-free discussion.

Thanks. You are a rara avis.

Johnathan — I haven’t yet had time to check the Murray critique. Thanks in advance for the reference. Be nice to me the next time or I’ll never be back and then you will me miss me and you will be sorry that you said such unkind things and you will cry all your way to the confession box and you will have to say ten hail maries and ten our fathers and stop playing with your willie …,

I’m not sure why my objection to the LRB’s editorial policy makes it “at bit rich” for me to be worried about the current British onslaught on liberty. Perhaps you could explain.

As for the LRB issue: you know, I’ve really neither the time nor energy, nor knowledge to be quite frank, to go through Mearshemier and Walt’s article. Others more qualified – Alan Dershowitz for example – have done that. His conclusion: “the challenge is to find a single idea in the piece that does not already appear in hate-sites. There is no scholarship here whatsoever.”

What bothers me about the LRB’s editorial policy, and what suggests to me that it has crossed the line from anti-Zionist to fully-fledged anti-Semitism, is the quite extraordinary concentration, issue after issue, on the alleged evils of Israeli policy, and the energetic latitude in language and argument it allows (encourages?) in those writing on the issue. The energy it expends on elaborating the errors and cruelties of this single nation seems to me to be out of all proportion, and call for an explanation.

One possible, and indeed likely, explanation is, I’m afraid, they just don’t like Jews. Which delivers us back to Protocols of Zion territory.

Finally, I’m not quite sure why anyone would want to ask “What would Enoch say?” as a touchstone of their political views. I was a small boy when Enoch Powell meant anything politically, if he ever did. Was he a genuine political thinker, or a lightening rod? I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t much care. There are plenty of other political thinkers out there – and hell, if desperate you can always think for yourself! – and what’s more, are the political challenges of the day identical to those of the mid-1960s?

As a post-Christian follower of Jesus Christ

?

EG

I was considering an articulate rejoinder, but I think a large slice of simple Australian-style observation hits the mark just as well…

Mate, you’re a dickhead.

As a post-Christian follower of Jesus Christ, I forgive you.

Do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you …

You’re are bit of an embarrassment for Samizdata, aren’t you?

They must rue the day they let you loose.

Where are all the smart Samizdata guys, BTW? Brian Micklethwait, David Carr, Andy Duncan etc.?

Gone to join the white supremacist movement?

“genetics”; “anthropogenic forcing”, “Sacred Necon”; “Israel” — yep, we have got the full barking Moonbat collection of hot-button issues in one paragraph.

Eurostatistician, you are a civil servant, you say? What department do you work in? I’m dying to know.

I wish that crazy French nutter commenter would return, at least he was funny, if unintentionally.

Examples of statements I would criminalise in my utopian gated-community state:

1. The bourgeoisie should be slaughtered.
2. Black people should be enslaved.
3. Jews should be slaughtered.
4. Sharia law should be imposed on Europe.
5. All Arab women should be forcibly sterilised.

Just in case Michael is about to pop up with the Nazi smear — Samizdata’s party piece, of course.

you write that although you may not have noticed it, personal freedom in Britain and Europe is under massive attack right now.

You may be right on this, though coming from somebody who virtually declares the LRB to be a breeding ground for Jew-baiting is a bit rich. I’ve had a glance at Mearsheimer’s article and at least to me it seems that he was stating the obvious — David Duke is beside the point. David Duke also believes that the world goes round. That does not mean it is flat.

Can you find any errors in Mearsheimer’s essay? Perhaps you know more about the subject than I do and if I am mistaken I would like to be corrected.

His core claim seems to be that US foreign policy is pretty deferential to Israeli interests — and that though that may be a good thing for Israel, it is not necessarily a good thing for the rest of us. I reckon that most educated Jews would actually agree with that — they certainly do in Europe, where the ambiguity of Bush’s motives for ‘spreading democracy’
has been scrutinised carefully right across the political spectrum. I don’t wish to indulge in Israel-bashing — the Israelis are merely acting in what they deem to be their own best interests. It’s just that I don’t see why the rest of the USA should foot the bill.

What has all that got to do with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Mearsheimer isn’t subscribing to a conspiracy theory or bullshit about Jews being at the root of all evil or whatever ridiculous claims are made by malevolent anti-Semites.

You are driving me off-topic, Michael, but anyhow.

What embarrasses me is when my Jewish friends insist on apologising for Israel’s misdeeds — it’s not their fault that Israel is run by democratically elected thugs who dig themselves ever deeper into the grave by driving another people from their land — the Palestinians may be total bastards but that’s not a good reason for ethnic cleansing. Of course Hamas are maniacs and I’m not putting the Likudniks on the same level, BTW.

And yes, I do care about privacy and freedom — freedom for decent people like myself and yourself and for moderate Christians and secularists, for moderate and benign race realists and anti-racists, for supporters of the humane repatriation of undigestible third-world criminals, for libertarians, socialists, for Zionists and anti-Zionists etc. etc.

But I draw the line at Nazism, Communism, Islam and the freedom-of-speech and open-border wackos who pave the way to our own destruction.

In fact, at the risk of sounding bathetic, the question we should ask ourselves is:

What would Enoch say?

Actually, I’d be most surprised if most Samizdatans don’t keep an eye on the Guardian (it pays to know what tunes the devil it humming), but even more surprised if they were impressed by anything argued by George “Muddle-head” Monbiot.

As for the London Review of Books, if they’ve any sense they’d have just cancelled their subscription in protest over the way it devoted its first 10 pages to the Mearsheimer and Wait “Protocols of Zion” update. This piece gained rave-reviews from klansman David Duke: I suspect Samizdatans don’t want to keep company with David Duke – and neither should you.

You probably think that makes me an expert name-caller. Far less sophistsicated, I fear, than the LRB on its current form.

And yes, we probably are “stuck in a groove” about the importance of freedom. We should be too, Eurostatistician, because although you may not have noticed it, personal freedom in Britain and Europe is under massive attack right now. For the first time in human history, the technology exists for the state to track evey individual’s every action in minute detail. And they want to use it.

Do you care about your personal privacy and freedom? I think you do, Eurostatistician. If only because you choose to hide behind a non-de-blog. Who knows? Maybe having the balls to contribute under your own name might prove the first step in regaining your personal independence.

Your comments on Samizdata are fair enough – though when their editors write “if you have an article, comment, rant or smart-arse rejoinder that you would like to contribute to Samizdata.net, e-mail it to us and we might publish it suitably edited. Or not.” they are not referring to the comments section as such, but to the leading articles that set the ‘comment’ ball rolling. Obviously, they cannot accept every contribution as a leader.

Samizdata is a kind of libertarian period piece – run by intelligent people who have got stuck in a groove. It seems that they never read ‘the other side’ – either to the left or to the right. They are textbook examples of the closed mind on such issues as anthropogenic forcing, immigration policy, population genetics, and of course the Sacred Neocon Government of the Holy United States which is spreading democracy with the sword to the Arab world – and then wondering why so many people hate them, along with Israel.

A Samizdatarian will not read ‘The Guardian’ or the ‘London Review of Books’ (since as every libertarian knows these publications are master-minded by left-wing conspirators who wish to impose a quasi-communist state). A Samizdatarian will not be seen dead even with scientific publications such as ‘Science’ or ‘Nature’ (since as every libertarian knows these peer-reviewed journals engineer their findings to fit in with their left-wing ideologies). A Samizdatarian will vilify every environmentalist as a ‘tree-hugger’, every anti-immigrationist as a ‘racist’, everybody who criticises fanatical Zionism as an ‘anti-Semite’, everybody who recommends long-term birth control for Sub-Saharan Africans as an acolyte of Goebbels, everybody who even whispers that race differences in intelligence might be partly due to heredity as a NeoNazi in spe.

They are experts at name-calling and stigmatization – apparently unable to understand that political life is a continuum, that not everybody who supports ‘free’ education is a quasi-Communist and not everybody who criticizes Zionist support for open immigration (except for Israel) is a wannabe stormtrooper or Holocaust denier.

Still, they’re good fun – bigoted, but in a smart-assed way. Perhaps some day they might even read an article by George Monbiot and admit to themselves: “well, the guy has a point after all”.

Perhaps I am being uncharitable – I still see them as defenders of freedom in terms of their good intentions. It is just that many of them also defend the freedom of those who call for the destruction of our civilisation and its replacement by the Caliphate, such as the vast majority of the Muslim community. They call it ‘free speech’, I believe.

Nevertheless, since they are reasonably sophisticated Euroskeptics, they could (as I have suggested before) do some good by defending their ideas on a site where they are not simply preaching to the converted.

But they prefer the joys of the libertarian mutual admiration society, I reckon. And the last thing the Samizdatarians want to do is to refute their own misconception that the European Commission is an instantiation of intolerance on stilts. Imagine how their editors would feel if their postings were actually to be published on a Commission site whose management costs a couple of euros a day which they have to pay for themselves as taxpayers…..

Oops, sorry – as every Samizdatarian knows, Commissioner Wallstrom’s site is run by 500 overpaid underworked paper-pushers ….