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Q: But imagine if you were an African or an African American intellectual. And it’s ten years from now. And you pick up The New York Times… (Hits Table) and some geneticist says, A, that intelligence is genetic, and B, the difference is measured on standardized tests. Between black people and white people, is traceable to a genetic basis. What would you, as a black intellectual, do, do you think?
Here is the problem: the message our beloved Cathedral has been implanting in all the young smart kids at Harvard and Yale and Stanford, the cream of the crop, the top 1%, not to mention the readers of the New York Times who are the top 10%, is not “we don’t know.”
Oh, no. The message is “we do know. And they are equal. In fact, we are so sure they’re equal that if you even start to hint that you might disagree, we will do everything we can to destroy your life, and we will feel good about it. Because your opinions are evil and you are, too.” ...
Thus what we call hate speech is merely a 20th-century name for the age-old crime of blasphemy. ...
So it is almost impossible for me to answer Professor Gates’s question. Asking what a “black intellectual” should do after A and B are demonstrated is like asking what a professor of Marxist–Leninist studies should do after the fall of the Soviet Union. I don’t know, dude. What else are you good at?
Where does this idea that, if NPR is wrong, Fox News must be right, come from? They can’t both be right, because they contradict each other. But couldn’t they both be wrong? I don’t mean slightly wrong, I don’t mean each is half right and each is half wrong, I don’t mean the truth is somewhere between them, I mean neither of them has any consistent relationship to reality.
But many people will think exactly this: if you stop being a progressive, you have to become a conservative.
From 2008. I think this is the first post of Mencius Moldbug, who wrote blog posts for about 10 years.
Lots of interesting insights.