Yesterday fledgling HBD blogger OneSTDV posts a piece about prominent Conservative and Hereditarian (all fancy words for racialist, if not out and out racist) writer John Derbyshire, and his forays into the hallowed halls of academia. Apparently, The Derb was invited to participate on a panel discussion hosted by the Black Law Student Association at the University of Pennsylvania. You can read the whole thing here:
http://onestdv.blogspot.com/2010/04/derbyshire-at-penn-law-and-intellectual.html
The following comes from the comment thread, my exchange w/OneSTDV. Please note how he ducks and dodges my points:
OBSIDIAN: OneSTDV,
While I agree that attempts to discredit Derbyshire because he lacks credentials in the field of genetics is at best a stretch since it is not at all unusual for intellectuals to opine on matters far outside their own “comfort zonme”, I do think his basic premise is suspect, for this simple reason:
To assume the hereditarian position is to fundamentally deny the ideals enshrined in the Constitution, which is not based on blood ties or legacies, but rather the inherent worth of each individual. We are not a society built upon national averages, but rather one based upon the primacy of the individual. What people find objectionable about you and the rest of the HOBD crowd is that it attempts to use “science” as a rationale to legally discriminate against large swaths of people, based on purported “scores” and other “metrics”. Even if said metrics and scores were true and accurate, in practice you would be losing the individual in the process.
Listen One, all this stuff has been tried before, and has miserably failed. Eugenics has been thoroughly discredited. Other forms of scientific racism, such as Phrenology, likewise have been tossed on the trash heap of history. The reason why guys like you can’t be taken seriously isn’t because of some vast leftwing conspiracy – as FemX has recently noted, some of the biggest “blank slatists” are blood-red Conservatives (Thomas Sowell, anyone?)- it’s because these ideas simply don’t work in the real world. Moreover, they speak to ideology than to dispassionate scientific inquiry.
Derbyshire consistently is pessimistic in his writing, offering no solutions; he is perfectly cool with entire swaths of human populations being left out of the mainstream of American life. This seems to be your view as well, though it’s never flatly stated as such, which is your passive-aggressive wont to do. Simply put, people are turned off by all that, One. Whicvh explains why for the most part, the ONLY folks interested in the spiel you, Derb and others are peddling, are guys…like…
You.
Hmm.
The Obsidian
4/15/2010 6:48 PM
ONESTDV: Yea, Obsidian consistently presents this inane strawman that has NEVER ONCE EVER APPEARED ON AN HBD SITE.
In fact, I’ve explicitly argued against this and I’ll repeat again: I support initiatives that find LEGITIMATE diamonds in the rough, whether that be in NAM or poor white neighborhoods. I agree that doing so is an utterly important part of the American experience. In fact, this was the initial impetus beyond standardized testing, a fact that Charles Murray points to quite often as he personally benefitted from it. But no, keep pushing your strawman despite direct conflict with my actual views:
http://onestdv.blogspot.com/2009/08/is-belief-in-racial-iq-differences.html
Next strawman you present like that and I’m deleting your tripe.
4/15/2010 7:13 PM
OBSIDIAN: Then OneSTDV, why the need to push for race-based ANYTHING? I mean, Ward Connerly doesn’t do that, and was quite successful in getting Affirmative Action curtailed in California. If he was able to do this by plebicite – something which the bulk and mass of the HBD community has yet to do on *any* level (please cite ONE public policy initiative that was presented to the American public and which was accepted and endorsed by said public – for example, has The Bell Curve been able to do this?) – what is your and the rest of your ilk’s excuse? Connerly didn’t make his case on “HBD”, he made it on differing grounds.
Lemme say it again because it’s apparent you didn’t hear me the first time:
No one’s interested in stuff like eugenics, noveau phrenology and the like, One. And that includes mainstream Conservatives, like Thomas Sowell. They. Just. Aren’t. Ward Connerly has shown you the way to change things if you’re really serious about being a serious player at the table. So long as you trade in the sort of stuff Derb tried to peddle at UPenn recently, you will continue to be seen as White Boys with Sour Grapes.
“Tripe” that… 
The Obsidian
4/15/2010 7:21 PM
ONESTDV: “So long as you trade in the sort of stuff Derb tried to peddle at UPenn recently, you will continue to be seen as White Boys with Sour Grapes.”
So why do you spend probably around 12 hours a day commenting on these types of websites? Surely you have more important people to go bother.
4/15/2010 9:07 PM
*Back to Obsidian*
Now, I’ve posted the link both to One’s post and to the ensuing comments. What I’ve edited above are the direct exchanges between us. Did you notice how he evades my direct questioning of him, using people on HIS side of the fence as staunch members of the Right? Did you also notice how he tries to get out of the whole thing by attempting to discredit me, using complete non-sequiturs? Ad Hominem, anyone?
John Derbyshire is a Hereditarian. Adam Bellow, publisher of The Bell Curve and author of In Praise Of Nepotism, is a Hereditarian. OneSTDV, and damn near any other HBD blogger, are in essence, Hereditarians. Virtually ALL of them, just so happen to be Conservatives.
Yet, as I’ve noted to OneSTDV, and to which his poo-butt ass has yet to respond, there are indeed Conservatives in good standing with the Right who doesn’t seem to share these views. Thomas Sowell has gone on record to this effect, arguing that culture plays a stronger role than genetics. And Ward Connerly was actually able to get things done on his agenda without ever firing an HBD shot. To date, The Bell Curve is 16 years old. Arthur Jensen and J. Phillipe Rushton have been peddling this stuff longer than OneSTDV’s been alive. Steve Sailer and Derb have been blogging about this since back when big floppy disks were used on computers, and William Shockley was talking about eugenics back this time a century ago. Anyone out there reading this-please name ONE (pardon the pun) public policy initiative that was crafted and endorsed by HBDers that was actually accepted by the People at large in nearly a century of “scientific race realism”?
I’ll wait.
Uh-huh. That’s what I thought.
You know, for a bunch of guys who deem themselves at the top of the cognitive foodchain, they certainly don’t act very smart. Because if nothing else, the very fact that BLACK CONSERVATIVES can get further pushing their ideas than they can, ought to tell them something. But no, they keep going back to the same poisoned well over and over again.
And what makes it worse is that OneSTDV sucks royally at debate. The above exchange proves it. In fact, I have consistently noticed that his “dispassionate” facade quickly tumbles down when someone rhetorically dismantles his position-then he quickly devolves into namecalling and hysterical harangues. Yea, real ringing endorsement for the Cognitive Elite! No wonder he was rejected from Princeton.
Feel free to holla back, OneSTDV. The floor’s all yours…
Heh heh
The Obsidian
