A commenter at Overcoming Bias pointed out a website of feminist critics, but a post I found there more interesting than any linked to was this guest post from a feminist advocating women’s separatism. The biggest laugh line is probably the distinguishing between segregation and separation. It’s about which group is oppressor versus oppressed (read: what is politically correct), kind of like how the powerless supposedly cannot be racist. Regarding her dream, I don’t think it’s going to happen. As Kissinger said “There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy”. It would have a hard time sustaining itself as well (there’s a reason there aren’t any Shakers around any more). I still applaud the secessionist impulse though and hope she forms a small community, if only to serve as an example. I’ll even agree that men cause most of the problems in the world. Men are also responsible for most of the best things in the world. Is the world on net good or bad? I invite your opinions.
I have been alerted to the existence of a blog called The Institute for Pica Studies. It is dedicated to a racist, anti-semitic reddit commenter. It’s not quite the Danimal Archive, but what is? If the Uhuru Guru and Big Effer aren’t enough for you, check it out.
A member of the Attack the System group points to Deconstructing the “Human Rights” Ideology. One person speculated due to its anti-Westernism that the author, Peter Myers, is an Australian Aboriginal. It is an attack on the Enlightenment and modernism in favor of “Confucian” values. Fans of de Maistre, Sartre and Weil find some of it appealing. I’ve personally never read of them, or even heard of the last until just now. I’m at a rate now of reading about a paragraph of Franz Oppenheimer every other day now, so it could be a while until I get to them. So many distractions. UPDATE: Apparently I was introduced to the writings of Mr. Meyer through Robert Lindsay way back when, and simply forgot.
April 18, 2008 at 9:16 pm
I’ve always thought that the “powerless cannot be racist” argument was prone to criticism by way of excessive reductionism and contextual politics. Since when did “white people” become not only everyone of European ancestry, but Jewish people as well? Hitler most emphatically disagreed with the designation of the Jewish as white.
Tell a victim of “chink bashing” in Brooklyn that non-whites can’t be racist.
I read that article deconstructing Human Rights. It made me realize just how Enlightenment derived my own politics are, for all my criticisms of universalism and scientism. My hesitation to embrace Human Rights ideology and its concomitant global statism is couched on almost entirely individualist and property rights oriented themes, a rather obvious product of the Enlightenment, especially the Anglo-Saxon variety.
April 18, 2008 at 10:26 pm
I enjoyed giving that person a guest post because I think a lot of people (including feminists) underestimate the hatred that comes from some feminists. I’m glad you found it revealing.
April 18, 2008 at 10:52 pm
I don’t take the guest-poster’s opinions as representative of feminists as a whole, but I did find them interesting. Perhaps she might be interested in the Middlebury Institute? They now have a youtube channel.
Hitler was not a white nationalist. Europeans don’t think in that manner because there aren’t enough non-whites there for it to be salient. The Nazis were focused on the Germans/Nordics/Aryans. They considered Jews to be below them, as they did Slavs, but I don’t think they ever claimed they weren’t white. The Germans had no problems allying with the Japanese, the major non-white power of the war.
Vox Day is the most forthright critic of the Enlightenment I know of (perhaps John Gray as well). I don’t know if there’s any one piece by him I can point to as an example. I haven’t myself read all the way through the human rights article I linked to.
April 19, 2008 at 8:28 am
I think the most damning flaw in the ‘human rights’ position taken by so many is that they assert that those rights are universals, yet never refer to the arguments that supposedly established their universality during the Enlightenment. They take them for granted – on faith, if you will. If the arguments were actually important to their taking the position, they would spend some time on them. But they do not, and so they are not.
The real problem is that humans do not start with arguments and move to conclusions. They start with the conclusions and look for assertions that will let them produce a solid-looking argument that ‘ends’ with those conclusions.
April 19, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I agree Caledonian. This is borne by psychological research. You can get people to do wacky things with hypnotic suggestion and when you ask them why they did it they’ll come up with some ridiculous ad-hoc rationalization that makes sense to them. I think brain scans have also shown that action tends to precede thought.
April 19, 2008 at 5:27 pm
It struck me, when reading about Pope Benedict’s recent comments on human rights, that the position to which he referred was essentially nothing more than “everyone must agree that everyone has these ‘rights’ universally because WE SAY SO”. No wonder Roman Catholicism has embraced the concept so enthusiastically – it’s founded entirely upon the acceptance of authority.
The Church doesn’t particularly care for the particular and specific rights involved, it just wants to 1) reinforce the power of authority as a concept and 2) attract / maintain continued loyalty from people who ARE in favor of the idea of those rights.