Tag Archives for John Derbyshire

Publius weighs in on the Derb affair

And encourages Canadians to learn from it:

For Canadians the Derb Riot is a terrifying glimpse into America’s racial polarization. Down that road we must not travel. In a small way this racial warfare already exists in Canada, though our permanent racially based underclass is aboriginal rather than black. Should it ever expand into the wider Canadian culture we would be doomed. A nation as diverse as ours would balkanize itself quickly if the type of two-tier treatment of aboriginals became the norm.

Darn straight.  We should consider ourselves lucky, we’re less polarized than our friends to the south, on such issues (and that aboriginals make up such a small minority, that they’re not a voting block with any real clout).

A Harbinger of a Post-Post-Racial Future

Ross Douthat on John Derbyshire:

If we think of racial prejudice as a more diffuse cultural phenomenon, common to almost every society and region where different ethnic groups coexist, then perhaps Derbyshire’s anti-black sentiments—which are the sentiments, not of an aging Lost Cause partisan, but of an English-born, web-savvy world traveler with a Chinese wife—are less of an anachronism and more of a harbinger of a post-post-racial future.

Derbyshire in His Own Words

Ta-Nehisis Coates quotes John Derbyshire:

I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one.

Coates seems to think this establishes something about how unsavoury a character Derbyshire is, but what it really shows is that Derbyshire is a reflective and honest person. Because anyone who claims to be entirely free of prejudice is stupid or dishonest or both.

I Thought Derbyshire was a Smart Guy, but Actually He’s a *Racist*

People are up in arms about a recent article by John Derbyshire in Taki’s Magazine. I didn’t think the article was that interesting, myself, but apparently the proper response is to think that it’s ‘racist trash,’ which seems to mean that Derbyshire had the temerity to say what everyone thinks.

This Atlantic article is extremely annoying for the author’s obtuse assumption that a real ‘intellectual’ couldn’t say or think the things Derbyshire says and thinks. She actually offers a convoluted theory about why Derbyshire has a job (it seems to boil down to: “he flatters prejudiced people’s prejudices.”)

The truth is that John Derbyshire is one of the smartest pundits out there. If for some reason you can’t see this from his writing, you can see it from his two book-length attempts to popularize number theory. They’re not popularizations in the bad sense, either. To my shame, I gave up halfway through Unknown Quantity, because it was too hard—though admittedly I’ve done shamefully little formal mathematics.

Derbyshire on Multiculturalism

About as pessimistic as you’d expect from the guy who wrote We Are Doomed.

[A century from now], nations that had the sense to remain ethnically intact and which had “Arctic” distributions of intelligence, behavior, and personality—China, Japan, Korea (presumably united by then), Finland maybe, Israel if she survives, just possibly Russia, some outlier oddities such as, perhaps, Hungary—will have steamed ahead of those who inflicted the multi-culti blight upon themselves.

The rest of us will either be dragging ourselves along wearily, towing behind us the millstones of unproductive, unassimilable, low-human-capital subpopulations left over from the Age of Multiculturalism, along with the associated frictions and rancors; or else we shall have broken up in complete ethnic disaggregation, casting off those subpopulations to fend for themselves in mini-states of their own while we join—rejoin, really—the ethno-nationalist march of mankind.