August 15, 2004
NOTE: PLEASE say if you DON'T want your name and/or email address published when sending VDARE email.
Alan Keyes, Abortion, and Mass Immigration
From: [Name Withheld]
With stunning speed, the remarkable Gene Expression's Indian-American "Godless Capitalist" responded to my VDARE.COM letter the day it was posted (is he unemployed due to h1b immigration?). He offered one of most astute appreciations of the VDARE strategy I can ever remember seeing:
"While it's no secret that we've been quite critical of VDare in the past (see here, here, here on the Hmong, here on Rubinstein, [sic] and here)...I do think that VDare fills an important role today.
"Increasingly, I believe that the demagoguery of La Raza, Tamar Jacoby, and company has to be met with equally ferocious populist opposition from the other side. Despite leftist alarmism, I see little sign of this boiling over into overt violence (for one thing, felons seem to be much more common on the other side.)…
"With this proviso, I think VDare is useful in that it opens up the space for more moderate organizations, like FAIR, NumbersUSA, and CIS. They've railed against this triangulation strategy in the past, but the fact is that triangulation works to inject ideas into the debate…In plenty of publications (such as this one and this one), VDare is cited as the bad cop to CIS or FAIR or NumbersUSA's good cop. What many people don't understand is that if VDare wasn't present, CIS would be demonized as the bad cop."
[Links in original].
Mark Krikorian, you have been noted!
In a subsequent post, GC bemoaned the repression of public discussion about population group-differences in intelligence in the years since the publication of The Bell Curve:
"Sarcasm aside, the point is this: the Bell Curve, the Blank Slate, and related topics were at the center of scientific and political discourse not so long ago. As I've documented here, many of today's most influential pundits (Barone, Novak, Goldberg, Ledeen, Wilson, etc.) came out publicly in favor of the Bell Curve…You would never know that from their pronunciations today, but the whole hubbub was only a decade ago - 1994. Unfortunately, the media—even the rightist media—has been beaten back thoroughly by the vitriolic counterattack on the Bell Curve. Nary a whisper is spoken about the importance of human nature, and the implications for both research and policy are vast…But the public understanding has not kept pace with the science. Sadly, the 23-year-old opus of a paleontologist is waved as a talisman against research techniques that weren't even invented in 1981. One wonders what Stephen J Gould would have made of genome-aided QTL mapping of IQ-linked loci, or MRI-based voxel-IQ correlations, or multiple strains of genetically engineered intelligent mice"
Sadly, GC found it necessary to begin this essay by saying:
"First, on an administrative note: the tone on the comments board has been getting out of hand. I don't know if it's the recent VDare link or what have you, but the comments section has taken up much more of my time than it should have. From now on, I'm going to be banning and deleting without apology until decorum is restored."
I hope he is wrong about my fellow VDARE.COM readers!
[VDARE.COM comment: So do we! Godless Capitalist is quite something, finding time recently to cast aspersions on the potential of his region of origin. In response to several queries, we are adding "Gene Expression" to our VDARE.com links page—even if Godless doesn't like us.]
