I haven’t said anything about the recent events, and like others I will miss his writing at NR, but am I the only person wondering if the has affected his judgment?
22 thoughts on “Derbyshire”
Comments are closed.
I haven’t said anything about the recent events, and like others I will miss his writing at NR, but am I the only person wondering if the has affected his judgment?
Comments are closed.
Was the piece that got him fired all that much worse than stuff he’s been writing for years?
I would think that it would be obvious that if it wasn’t, he wouldn’t have been fired.
You don’t think NR’s judgement might have changed over time? They used to defend white supremacy (“The central question that emerges … is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”), but I don’t think they’d publish such an editorial today. They described MLK Jr. as “a man whose career was built on leisure,” but presumably wouldn’t do that again. Maybe Derbyshire didn’t get the memo.
Wow, you are quoting from an article published in 1957
Which part of “a man whose career is built on leisure” is the racist part? Would it have been racist to use the same phrase to describe Milton Bradley?
Ah, the man that defended mass murderers has returned!
So the Lysenko Creationists managed to get the Derb fired. And yet, they have the magical power to turn Hispanics and Cherokee Indians into Uber White Neo-Nazis, but then Jim has always had a love for jackbooted types.
Follow the links in the first paragraph of this piece:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/how-john-derbyshire-perceived-racial-attitudes-at-national-review/255598/
None of those links have any relevance to what Derb did.
And as Victor Davis Hanson notes, she is simply lying about what he wrote.
Rand,
It appears you’re mixing up the Atlantic piece I linked to with another one which you and Victor Davis Hanson read. (The one I linked to was written by Conor Friederdorf, while the one you’re referring to was written by Elspeth Reeve.)
The first paragraph of Friederdorf’s piece has a set of links which lead to articles written by Derbyshire and interviews he has given, all in the last decade, and well before his current health crisis.
Further confusing the matter just a tiny bit: one of the links in Friederdorf’s piece does indeed link to an article that Elspeth Reeve wrote, but Frieerdorf did not link to the same article that Hanson is criticizing – he linked to a different one.
If one wants to answer Jim’s question, I think it is best to just review Derbyshire’s own past comments, interviews, and best of all, complete articles on the subject, and skip over Hanson vs Reeve. So, never mind all the words, I think readers should just follow the links until they get to Derbyshire himself.
Unfortunately, we haven’t heard from Derb on whether his piece was meant as a satirical and pointed counterpart to black version of “the talk,” but his piece was over the top and unnecessarily harsh, but perhaps that was the point.
I also think he unjustly conflated IQ with lower-class urban criminality that stems largely from cultural and environmental factors. There’s certainly a statistical correlation, but I question whether the causation is direct, and would point out that crowds made up of people with high IQ’s aren’t necessarily safe, either. (It’s wise to avoid crowds made up of large numbers of drunken frat boys after an NCAA tournament win, and it has nothing to do with IQ.)
Aside from that, I think some of the venom aimed at Derbyshire is misplaced, because what people are really upset about is the unjust realities he pointed out. We all wish that most of what he said wasn’t so, but it is, and that’s deeply unsettling.
“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. Though race related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with and given our nation’s history this is in some ways understandable. And yet, if we are to make progress in this area we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.“
— Attorney General Eric Holder, February 18, 2009
Oh well, guess not. Maybe next generation…
Derb did do an interview after the poop hit the propeller, it’s at Gawker:
http://gawker.com/5900452/i-may-give-up-writing-and-work-as-a-butler-interview-with-john-derbyshire
“I may give up writing and work as a butler.” LOL 😛
I too had wondered if his recent health problems had affected his outlook.
I see stuff more racist than the piece that got the guy fired coming from minority groups and liberals everyday.
FFS a new word was coined, “white hispanic”, just a few weeks ago to collectively blame white people.
Well, hispanic is a crazy, inconsistent term anyway. Depending on which department of the US government you go by, Spaniards (from Spain) aren’t hispanic, they’re European. If they move to Equador they’d certainly become hispanic, but it’s not clear if they could become hispanic by moving to Italy.
Brazilians are classified as hispanic by some government agencies but not others, as they don’t speak Spanish, but do speak a language that sounds like Spanish spoken by a deaf person.
And somehow the term hispanic probably encompasses Scots-English people from Belize, just because it’s located in Central America, even though the official language of Belize is English.
Other terms also fail. For example, how come Jessica Alba is a Latina (she vehemently denies it) while Cameron Diaz isn’t?
Which probably explains a recent poll that was going around saying hispanics would rather be refered to their country of origin and not lumped into some big group that isn’t representative of their heritage.
Well, after last month’s brouhaha, it’s pretty obvious why Latinos don’t want to be downgraded to “white.”
When I was a teenager, I never thought of Iberian-Americans as non-white.
If Hispanics are now white, does that mean I’m no longer a racist for opposing illegal immigration?
Rhetorical question, I know.
“white hispanic” isn’t a new term, it’s just new to the public.
According to the 2010 Census there were 50,477,594 hispanic persons of whom 26,735,713 are white, 1,243,471 black, 685,150 native american, 209,128 are asian, 58,437 pacific islander, 18,503,103 other, and 3,042,592 more than race.
The US Census has been classifying race as distinct from hispanic since at least 1980. I make no comment on if this is a useful or meaningful way to classify persons, and would probably guess that most of the 18 million who checked race other did so since the option race hispanic was not available to them.
Sometimes I agreed with him; sometimes I didn’t. He was the first writer I read to summarize our current president, even before the election, as “a Red Diaper Baby,” a characterization which subsequent exposure to “Il Dufe” has tend to confirm. Even at his wrongest (if that’s a word) he certainly was The Voice of Reason iompared to . . . well, certainly compared to “Jim” and “Bob-1.” In the country of the blind, etc., etc.