Who Is IOZ?: All of these truths I am about to reveal to you . . .

Friday, November 06, 2009

All of these truths I am about to reveal to you . . .

What's even more hilarious about the mind-state, if I may modestly exaggerate, that La_Rana discovers at The Corner is that the circumlocutions are rationalized as necessity in our so-called politically correct culture. Like, if we say these racist things directly, then we will be accused of racism. But of course the authors at The Corner deny that the racist things they would otherwise say are racist. Which would make the potential accusations false. It's sort of the Conservative Bokononism: all of these racist things I am about to say to you are not racist. Anyway. In order to circumvent and head off accusations of racism, these dudes couch everything in this hilariously perambulatory language, which others read, translate, and then . . . use as a grounds to tell them that they're a bunch of racists. The Corner types then circle back, say, "Well, we never actually said [insert racist thing]," so your accusations are specious, and anywaya, even if we did say [insert racist thing], it would not be racism.

56 comments:

TGGP said...: You're not that stupid, IOZ. Islam is not a race. At worst it's religious bigotry. But since religions are all packs of lies, who gives a shit?; 11:53 AM
Anonymous said...: Were you listening to The Dude's story, Donny?; 12:09 PM
Inspector Lee said...: You're not even Jewish, man, you're fucking Polish Catholic.

Freud's two part invention: God doesn't exist and if he did, he'd be stupid.; 12:16 PM
IOZ said...: You're not that stupid, IOZ. Islam is not a race.

Ahahah. Yeah, unlike something scientific, like, uh, black.; 12:58 PM
Montag said...: i hate the 3200M run. which is a race. does that make me a racist?; 1:03 PM
Leonard said...: Are you suggesting one can convert to black? What sort of creed is there?; 1:06 PM
Anonymous said...: Sure one can convert to black.

In the past though people tended to try to convert to white.

It was called passing and it happened all the time. Pack up from your old town where you were black and move to a new town where nobody knows you. Let them all assume that you are white.; 1:11 PM
IOZ said...: This is not a guy who built the railroads.; 1:20 PM
Inspector Lee said...: What sort of creed is there?

Tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit.

Oh and Franz Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver, Iceberg Slim, Malcolm X...; 1:30 PM
TGGP said...: Yeah, unlike something scientific, like, uh, black.
Yeah, what the hell does Ernst Mayr know, he only came up with the standard scientific definition of "species".

Furthermore, even if race had no scientific validity (and I agree some aspects of the popular conception do not) it's still distinct from religion. If I spout nonsense about phlogiston it doesn't make me a flat-earther.; 1:36 PM
IOZ said...: You may wish to think about the idiomatic use and meaning of "race and racism," TGGP, and you might also read what Mayr is saying and compare it to "black" or "Asian" or what have you.

As for race being distinct from religion, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Judaism. Discuss.; 1:48 PM
zencomix said...: Let's not split hairs over racism and bigotry.Kareem Abdul Jabbar wants to kill white people and Jews.; 1:50 PM
Mr.Fundamental said...: bewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww! THROW IT BACK!; 1:51 PM
Leonard said...: The idiomatic use of "race" is
"a large group of people who resemble each other". Not "believe the same stuff".

I'm fairly sure the modern idiomatic use of "racism" is, "I am losing an argument with a conservative".; 2:09 PM
TGGP said...: There are many religions which are not universalistic/evangelistic and so restricted to a particular group of related people. There are musical styles restricted to small groups of people (that weird throat-singing stuff, for instance), disliking those styles not make one a racist. There is nothing incoherent with an ethnically Jewish person denouncing the religion of Judaism, claiming that circumcision is child abuse and mohels are perverts. That would not make them a racist, nor would denouncing Christianity. Hell, the Republican party disproportionately draws from certain ethnic groups, it doesn't mean you can be racist at Republicans.

If you lump in the caucasians of south asia with the orientals of east asia as one "asian" race, you'd be mistaken but in common usage depending on place use of "asian" as a racial term generally denotes just one or the other (not including russians east of the urals either). I mentioned the "one-drop" rule as something with no scientific basis, but it is not incorrect to call a mixed-race person "black" any more than it's wrong to call me "irish". Tiger Woods is black, and also white, and also asian, though he is unusual in acknowledging them all on an equal level. We may often associate races with ethnies (hence the claim that Obama isn't really "black", by which we mean a descendant of slaves brought to America), just as we might with religion, but islam is diverse enough even within the U.S that it would be silly to think that we use the term to refer to a particular ethnicity rather than a religion.; 2:25 PM
TGGP said...: Leonard, in believing the same stuff, don't people in a certain sense "resemble each other"? A more appropriate definition would be that it is a sub-species, a large extended family characterized by a long history of inbreeding though capable of outbreeding. In the common sense we use "race" to denote the largest such groups which do not encompass the human species, analogous perhaps to Samuel Huntington's boundary for "civilization".; 2:29 PM
Mr.Fundamental said...: oh dear. quick. someone mention Hitler and kill this thread.; 2:37 PM
Anonymous said...: First they came for the racists, and I said nothing because I was a bigot...; 2:40 PM
Anonymous said...: There's no such thing as race, man. It's just a coincidence blacks score lower on intelligence tests than whites. Because intelligence doesn't exist either, you dig?

And P.S., if a radical Muslim is known for sharing radical Muslimy views and anti-American sentiment (while employed by the Borg), and shoots a bunch of soldiers while shouting glory to Allah, it's less of a stretch to tie that action to radical Muslimishness, than it is to claim that the right (cue scary music) wants to put all Muslims in FDR-style happyfuntime camps.; 2:41 PM
IOZ said...: When I was a student in France, a fellow American student who was doing a bit of babysitting to make some extra cash said of the six- and eight-year-old girls she used to watch, "You know, the most amazing thing is, they speak French so well."; 2:47 PM
Lynyrd Skynhead said...: There's no such thing as race, man. It's just a coincidence blacks score lower on intelligence tests than whites. Because intelligence doesn't exist either, you dig?

Hey, look! Andrew Sullivan finally commented here!; 3:01 PM
TGGP said...: Anonymous, you can't deduce the existence of race from different IQ scores. If I had many pairs of twins, and for each pair placed the one with the higher score in group A and the other in group B, we can predict that A will have higher average scores than B. Yet you'd recognize that's not a racial difference. In America, northern whites have higher scores than southern whites (even if we restrict this to people of English descent), that doesn't mean we should consider them distinct races. On establishing that two groups are different races and also differ on average in some trait, it is then up to you to investigate if the latter is related to the former.; 3:07 PM
TGGP said...: To elaborate a bit, there is a substantial IQ gap between African in Africa and african-americans. The racial differences are small enough compared to that between african-americans and white americans that you'd be hard-pressed to explain the gap just with reference to race.; 3:17 PM
IOZ said...: Just to remind everyone, when America says "Muslim," it means Arab, and when it says Arab, it possibly means Persian or Pakistani or Indonesian.; 3:24 PM
Anonymous said...: Wait if there are no races, then that means that there can't be any racism!

We did it America!; 3:57 PM
Anonymous said...: "...hard-pressed to explain the gap just with reference to race."

Just with? I agree. Without reference to? Equally absurd.

Height is phenotype. If I feed child A a good American breakfast (lots o' milk), and child B gets lead paint, A will likely be taller than B. But if you notice a height difference even when A and B share the same cereal bowl, it's obvious that white liberal guilt can't explain everything away.; 4:03 PM
Enron said...: Turgidson did it better.; 5:01 PM
Anonymous said...: Yes, I can't imagine a single reason why blacks might score lower than whites on selected tests. Only a guilty liberal might suggest it has anything to do with the quality of education received by blacks in general, or with income levels and thus the corresponding quality of schools available to black children. Must just be because those niggers is stoopid!; 5:40 PM
Anonymous said...: Yes, all blacks must receive a worse education and live in lead paint homes and have parents who don't love them enough. And yes, even though I haven't looked at the studies, I am going to assume that the comparison of IQ (or other standardized test) scores did not take into account (normalize for) socio-economic background. Instead, I will make fun of Creationists and Bible-thumpers for not believing in evolution, while at the same time pretending that everyone's brain is equal.

*Insert quote from stupid fucking movie*; 6:09 PM
Enron said...: Obviously you're not a golfer.; 6:23 PM
IOZ said...: Someone's been spending a little too much time with the interactive erotic software.; 6:44 PM
Rowan said...: Has nobody really said "What the fuck does this have to do with Vietnam?"; 7:47 PM
Aaron said...: Re Jews race and religion, they kind of overlap when mores against intermarriage are enforced (from inside or outside). If non-Muslim Americans generally refused to marry Muslims abd vice-versa they would be race-like in the usual understanding of the term. Blacks in 1920s America were racelike, now they're only quasi-racelike.

Of course marriage and reproduction are two different phenomena, as you can tell from all that spam from the Human Rights Campaign (and Sally Hemings' stretch marks). So all has no bearing on Ernst Mayr or what have you. There reason there is no race is, who people fuck is a biological fact and who people say they fucked, will fuck or should fuck is something else altogether, God knows what. And he's kind of a bad communicator.

Making matters even more confusing, you know how to say "race" in Latin? Natio.; 8:36 PM
Rowan said...: I hear this "volk" is all-encompassing for things we want.; 9:19 PM
Phillip Allen said...: Aaron, in 1920's America black people could not legally marry outside their race in all or virtually all states. It can hardly be termed that they "refused" to marry non-Blacks when attempting to do so would result in legal sanction or lynching.; 9:54 PM
weaver said...: Yeah, well, Murray and Hernstein weren't racists. They were just idiots who believed America was a meritocracy.; 10:24 PM
TGGP said...: Some blacks and whites interbreed. Lions and tigers also do in captivity, and even though they produce fertile offspring they're usually considered separate species. Races interbreed, but if gene flow has been low enough (and in the past when deserts, mountains and large bodies of water were harder to get around, it was) they'll still form distinct groups. In America today, in part because of the one drop rule, most people thought of as white have no or very little black ancestry (allegedly Warren Harding was one), and blacks are a bit under a fifth white. Though black and white intermarriage gets the most attention, in the U.S these days they are less frequent than whites marrying asians or hispanics. "Hispanic" is an ethnic rather than racial category, lumping together Sammy Sosa with Vincente Fox. We could claim that "mestizo" is a valid racial term, characterized by Iberian Y-chromosomes, Amerindian mtDNA and a mix of the two for the rest. Ashkenazi Jews can be thought of as a combination of middle eastern and european peoples, but after the initial combination (presumably male migrants marrying with locals) they stayed very endogamous for many generations and so remain genetically distinct. The Uygur & Hazara are another hybrid population, that remained distinct for a long time presumably due to religious differences. South asians have been modeled as hybrids too, though it's really more like repeated incoming waves. It can be the case that enough mixing occurs that social identification relying on things like skin color (and other traits) becomes a poor predictor of ancestry, as in Brazil. Mendelian segregagation with assortative mating by appearance likely plays a role there, disrupting the correlation between genes for appearance and other genes associated with an ancestry.; 11:42 PM
Coldtype said...: "but it is not incorrect to call a mixed-race person 'black' any more than it's wrong to call me 'irish'"
-TGGP

Why then is it "incorrect" to call that same "mixed-race" person "white"?

"Some blacks and whites interbreed. Lions and tigers also do in captivity, and even though they produce fertile offspring they're usually considered separate species"-TGGP

"Blacks" and "whites" need not "interbreed" since... well they're essentially the same breed so your lion-tiger analogy doesn't work. Lions, genus name panthera but SPECIES name leo, do not naturally interbreed with tigers, species name tigris. In fact a distinctive feature of the animal kingdom is that a species can only reproduce with another member of ITS OWN SPECIES [Frankenstein experiments in captivity notwithstanding]. There are male lions with jet-black manes and others with blond manes but they're the same species.

You'll notice that there is no question of the fertility of the offspring from a union between black and white variants of human beings. In a rational world that fact alone would serve as verification that the ludicrous concept of "race" is a mere social construct with ZERO scientific validity. But then there's the rub... rational.; 2:49 AM
Aaron said...: Philip Allen, I am aware that racelike characteristics of so-called "blacks" were enforced by law (though I'm happy to have provided you with an opportunity to show that you know too!). But talk to someone's great-grandmother and find out how open "black" communities were to members who married "white" people in 1922. Oppressive laws get internalized on both ends.; 1:08 PM
TGGP said...: I don't think it's incorrect to call a mixed race person "white", I stated that Tiger Woods is white in addition to asian and black (I missed out on the native American component).

You are right that whites and blacks are closer than lions or tigers. My point was that species is a greater division than race, often even defined by the absence of interbreeding, but instances of it are still not sufficient to redefine tigers and lions as being of the same species. Race does not demand endogamy as strict as species, so some low level of it is not sufficient erase racial categories. Brazil is a case where there is enough interbreeding that could happen. In a case where race was a useless concept, cluster analysis of DNA would not be expected to match racial self-identification. But right now it does, with an error rate of 0.14 percent. As I said before, a lot of that clustering is a legacy of old geographic barriers to transportation (I would expect also a more tribal social structure inhibiting migration). Interbreeding rates are still fairly low, but over time we should expect clusters to shift toward becoming more gradual clines.; 2:39 PM
Charles F. Oxtrot said...: TGGP wins the award for most fraudulent use of "supporting facts" that don't support anything TGGP is arguing.

Nice work.; 3:43 PM
Christopher M. said...: Just to remind everyone, when America says "Muslim," it means Arab, and when it says Arab, it possibly means Persian or Pakistani or Indonesian.

Seriously, people. Generally speaking, "Muslim" in American culture is used to refer to brown people. All this playing dumb is cute and all, but it gets tiresome after a while.; 4:17 PM
Anonymous said...: And "Allah Akbar" really means "Brown power".; 4:51 PM
James said...: This is a remarkably idiotic post from IOZ. I'm extremely disappointed.

First, Islam is obviously not a race. It is a religion. Second, Islam obviously causes violence by encouraging fanaticism, killing of infidels etc. This shouldn't be a debatable point at this point. Moreover most followers of Islam are -- yes -- Arabs. Thus, there is firm grounds to criticize both Islam and Arabs in general for their violent, destructive culture (and race!).

Compare this "racist" response, which takes into account observable facts of past events, with IOZ's knee-jerk ideological reaction: if it's "racist" it must be wrong... lol the corner are all racists!

I thought better of you, IOZ.; 10:24 PM
Montag said...: The Corner types then circle back, say, "Well, we never actually said [insert racist thing]," so your accusations are specious, and anywaya, even if we did say [insert racist thing], it would not be racism.

...even if it was racism, it doesn't mean they don't have a point.; 11:00 PM
Enron said...: "Christianity obviously causes violence by encouraging fanaticism, killing of heretics etc. This shouldn't be a debatable point at this point. Moreover most followers of Christianity are -- yes -- European. Thus, there is firm grounds to criticize both Christianity and Europeans in general for their violent, destructive culture (and race!)."; 11:29 PM
Coldtype said...: Thank you Enron. Somewhere James is still trying to determine what just flew over his head.; 11:47 PM
almostinfamous said...: James sez: "Moreover most followers of Islam are -- yes -- Arabs"

Wikipedia sez: "The highest number of Muslims in the world were found in Asia-Pacific (61.9%), with only 20.1% in the Arab world, in Sub-Saharan Africa 15.3% and the rest of the population in Europe and the Americas"

EPIC googling fail!; 1:11 AM
rowan said...: A thousand years ago, were the Caliphate's best blog commentators sitting around debating whether Christianity was inherently barbaric and vile, or just some forms of Christianity or specific Christians?

After all - Ma'aara. Seriously. Find me a more "fanatical" Muslim than that shit.; 3:21 AM
kafka said...: When Cornerites hear the name Hassan, I'm guessing religion isn't the first thing that comes to their mind. And if Islam is the concern for them, it's in the same way that Judaism and Catholicism were concerns of the KKK. Burning crosses and other Christian symbolism aside, I'm guessing the finer points of theology isn't what attracted most members. But ya, religion and race are two completely different things- especially in the minds of conservatives.; 4:36 AM
TGGP said...: Do any of you really think Republicans would be as enthusiastic about Bobby Jindal if he was a Muslim rather than a Christian?; 12:50 PM
IOZ said...: Who is this James character and where have y'all been hidin' him?!; 6:46 PM
Christopher M. said...: We sent away.; 8:30 PM
Anonymous said...: You can call me Ray, or you can call me J, but donts call me Raycist !; 2:01 AM
mds said...: Yeah, what the hell does Ernst Mayr know

Fuck-all. You're welcome.

Do any of you really think Republicans would be as enthusiastic about Bobby Jindal if he was a Muslim rather than a Christian?

(1) "were a Muslim." Sheesh, even many blacks are able to master the subjunctive.

(2) As opposed to if he had converted to Judaism?

(3) For that matter, as opposed to if he had converted to United Church of Christ?

(4) Anyway, no, because he'd be slightly less likely to be a tool of a party of right-wing theocratic racists if he were a dirty Arab or Nation of Islam member, as opposed to another token minority amoral opportunist who piggybacked to further political power on the mass slaughter of poor minority voters by his chosen party.

(5) Fuck the fuckin' Yankees.; 1:06 PM
TGGP said...: Fuck-all. You're welcome.
Didn't know this place was popular with creationists.

The majority of Arab-Americans are actually Christians. They also aren't generally as brown as Jindal, so I'm not sure why you even mentioned it.

I think you actually have a good point about his religious affiliation serving as an indicator of larger political/cultural group membership. Atheists tend to view religions as sets of (false) statements about the world, because that's the way the religious themselves state it. This is particularly in the case of thoroughly Protestantized America, based on orthodoxy (as opposed to orthopraxy) and where a person switching denominations is considered a normal part of defining yourself as an individual. Islam can also be fit into this confessional paradigm, although the prohibition on conversion in some nations resembles that of a birthright religion. The trouble is that while the religious mouth belief in certain dogmas, they rarely grasp the supposed tenets of their religion correctly. Whether they know it or not, their claim to adhere to orthodox belief mostly serves as a claim of affiliation. I won't deny the other aspect though, which would deny the possibility of atheists and even non-Muslim theists from disparaging tenets of islam as distinguished from hatred of Muslims (which, like hatred of Yankees fans, is not the same thing as racism though closer to it). Racism is generally regarded as an especially pernicious form of group-antagonism because it does not allow for converts. That the GOP is on the lookout for minority converts highlights to me their prioritizing of the religious/cultural identification (theocratic, as you put it) over race. The case of Jindal I found apt because it makes the distinction between religion (affiliation cloaked in spirituality) and race apparent.; 2:34 PM

Friday, November 06, 2009

All of these truths I am about to reveal to you . . .

56 comments:

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