And if it is here already, it doesn't hurt for it to appear again.
So do I. Here’s an excellent article regarding this absurdity (no affiliation to the blog)
What did Derbyshire say? I can’t find the essay about which NR had such a “hissy fit” Any help would be appreciated!
They didn’t fire Taki, who PUBLISHED the offending screed in his webzine!??
Talk about double standards.
Steyn is usually right on. I do agree. We don’t all share the exact same feelings on every topic, but to react like NR did b/c a few people got their panties in a twist is just that reactionary, and certainly not liberal in thought or action. (I don’t mean liberal/leftist, but liberal as in seeing more than one side and appreciating a dissenting view). Both sides are getting less liberal int hat sense. Since the Clinton admin, things have gotten exponentially more bitter, partisan, corrupt, and deceitful. This cannot go on. The fuse is way too short, as our president surely knows and is trying to trigger an assault, a reactionary action from our side so he has reason to declare martial law. It is being ramped up daily.
Styne good again.
You don’t understand!
Anyone who says anything effective on the conservative side MUST be eliminated!
I no longer call myself “pro-life” because even pro-lifers have proven themselves to be anything but pro-life.
It's this sort of appeasing-the-unappeasable that led them to cut ties with Ann Coulter after she referred to the widows of certain 9/11 victims as "harpies" after they appeared on the cover of some magazine and voiced truther-style opinions in the accompanying article.
Which in turn led to Ann referring to National Review as a bunch of girlie-men.
If it wasn't for Rob Long, Mark Steyn and a couple of others, I would probably cancel my subscription to NR.
I actually don’t care for Derbyshire, and didn’t care for the article in question. I do like Steyn, and the only reason I ever click to National Review is to read Steyn when he’s there.
Steyn is right about one thing. If National Review eliminates everyone who has anything interesting to say, like Derb, like Coulter, at some point there is no particular reason to read them at all. I actually stopped reading them years ago after they pulled the plug on Coulter. I obviously don’t agree with everything she has to say, but she is, like Steyn, always worth the price of admission. Almost no one else at NR these days aside from Steyn catches my attention at all.
Note the line mentioning race versus culture. This is not a race problem, but a cultural problem. The problem is the black-urban-gangsta sub-culture and cultural identity, not race or racial identity.
Eric Holder said whites were too cowardly to have an honest discussion about race. I haven’t heard his comment, if any, on the sacking of Derbyshire.
Last year, a black robbery suspect was killed by police in my town. He repeatedly refused orders to get out of a car, then made a sudden move. Black eyewitnesses agreed with police accounts of what happened. An investigation resulted in a finding of justifiable homicide. The incident resulted in black leaders and others publicly sharing their experiences being treated rudely by police. It seemed a visceral thing for them.
The leaders and the white mayor agreed to have a multiracial honest conversation about race. Two weeks ago there were color photos in the
paper of smiling participants in the talks, oops, and their “facilitators.”
Come to find out, the U.S. Department of Justice got involved in the community brouhaha, and provided the facilitators. I’ll find out the local Interfaith Council representative’s take on the talks at a meeting tomorrow.
So writes John Derbyshire. I gather he has been expelled from NR. The reason is not exactly clear to me....
However, it was just such stuff as exemplified in the above italics that on occasion rendered Derbyshire utterly unappealing to me on the pages of NR. So often I could find myself in sympathy with his views; and then he'd pop out with a statement like the above....
Very off-putting. To say the least.
It seems that Derbyshire has succumbed to "the spirit of the age," characterized by (among other things) the common expectation that science alone has all the answers.
Which in the end would seem to lead to a reduction of everything that exists to the statements and techniques of science. But since science to very large degree is about rendering reality into terms of abstract language — thereby giving us a "once-remove" description of Reality itself — on what basis should we expect science to be "exhaustive" in its descriptions? If its method requires it to dispense with all things immaterial and/or spiritual, does this mean that all things immaterial and/or spiritual instantly disappear from the real a/k/a natural world?
For Derbyshire, I gather, there seemingly are no "upstream variables." The world exhausts itself in chemistry, mechanics, physics and nothing more.... In the end, we humans are effectively only highly sophisticated machines, "robots"....
And I gather that is the defining difference between the worldview of a John Derbyshire, and the worldview of a Mark Steyn....
Myself, I tend to be found in Mark Steyn's camp....
JMHO FWIW
Thank you ever so much for posting this thought-provoking article, reaganaut1!
This was such an excellent post by Steyn, that all I can really think to say about it is: totally excellent.
Steyn is so articulate he actually leaves blabbermouth me speechless. It’s very weird, it’s like he says it all and then there is nothing else to say!
His dig about Taki being on the Masthead is PRICELESS! I wonder how long that will last? But Taki must be funding them, no?
I don’t know why he associates with those wimps at NR. Oh well, as Dr. Johnson said, “A man is a fool who writes for anything but money.”
I'm surprised and disappointed that "Taki" is on the masthead of NR, though.
To quote Tom West on Plato's Apology of Socrates:
Telling the truth is hard, for in order to do so, one must know what the truth is. The Apology of Socrates show that Socrates, more than anyone else in Athens, devotes his life to the task of seeking through conversation the truth about all things. Such an effort demands a rigorous and constant application of the mind and a renunciation of conventional pursuits. This is what Socrates calls philosophizing. . . . And since he insists upon speaking out publicly before the young men of the city, he will be perceived a a corruptor of the young. As if to show that it cannot after all be done, Socrates will half-heartedly try to bring together subtle truth and beautiful persuasion in his speech. His inevitable failure leads directly to condemnation and the death sentence.
And to quote Pope Benedict:
When one looks at the history of the dogma of the Trinity as it is reflected in a present-day manual of theology, it looks like a graveyard of heresies, whose emblems theology still carries around with it like the trophies from battles fought and won. But such a view does not represent a proper understanding of the matter, for all the attempted solutions that in the course of a long struggle were finally thrown out as dead ends and, hence, heresies are not just mere gravestones to the vanity of human endeavor, monuments that confirm how often thinking has come to grief and at which we can now look back in retrospective - and, in the last analysis, fruitless - curiosity. On the contrary, every heresy is at the same time the cipher for an abiding truth, a cipher we must now preserve with other simultaneously valid statements, separated from which it produces a false impression. In other words, all these statements are not so much gravestones as the bricks of a cathedral, which are, of course, only useful when they do not remain alone but are inserted into something bigger, just as even the positively accepted formulas are valid only if they are at the same time aware of their own inadequacy.
I don’t like Derbyshire after reading some of his past comments about the Irish, of which I have heritage, which sounded racist. I think a lot of his NRO articles were somewhat silly. But it wouldn’t have mattered if he had omitted the IQ thing. Just mentioning the fact that crime among young Black males is almost out of control and a national disgrace is enough to get anyone censored.
And if it is here already, it doesn't hurt for it to appear again.
Mark Steyn is so lucid and sane it’s startling sometimes.
I didn’t think too highly of Derb’s piece- and I disagree with him on a regular basis- but he has brought up topics in ways that have made me THINK and question myself and I value that. I’ll miss him.
I don’t know exactly what the best course was for NR in this case- but the knee-jerk panic on display in the timing and tone of Derb’s firing is useful. I stopped respecting them over there several years ago- around the time they endorsed Romney..and it’s been downhill since then for me.
Maybe this would have been an opportunity for that “dialogue on race” we’re always being told we need.
Has anyone been able to intelligently counter John Derbyshire’s statements? Or has he been burned at the stake because his “tone” was inappropriate?
p.s. Thank you, Mr Steyn.