#TopTen | No. 6: Friends don’t let friends listen to Stefan Molyneux

 

Last year I wrote and posted 801 posts. This was the sixth most popular: an exposé of a retarded YouTube opportunist with an oft-unlikely following …

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Friends Don’t Let Friends Listen to Stefan Molyneux

ONE OF THE LEAST attractive phenomena in more than a decade of unattractive things is the re-emergence into what passes for polite society of eugenics and explicit white supremacy. Even in places and from people I once thought I knew. (If you’re wondering, then I probably do mean you.) With these people, the only right thing to do is to take the advice above.

Trump is partly to blame. “By launching his campaign on a ‘Mexican immigrants are rapists’’ platform,” Donald Trump flushed these things back up from the sewers and made them safe to talk about again. Turns out that dressing up economic protectionism, white supremacism and tribalism as a defence of western civilisation has flushed out many things once deservedly dead and buried, and many things even in friends (now former friends) you hadn’t realised existed.

But he’s only partly to blame for what was probably already latent, and then encouraged in some folk by the phony equation that being politically incorrect also means being noxious;  the non-thinking that says that if “they” are against it, then “we” must be for it – and anyone else is a “cuck.”  (And never mind even what “it” might be.)  What this unthinking reaction has produced is the non-idea saying the appropriate response to “their” racism is to go hard out on your own.

With some, the racism genuine (and genuinely unwelcome). With others like Stefan Molyneux, it’s more like a career move. Who’s Stephan Molyneux? He’s one of the other reasons you’re seeing more and more of this stuff around. Molyneux is a dickhead with a following that, for some reason, some of you here keep recommending.

For the record, Molyneux makes videos of himself talking. Talking interminably, most often about himself. Hardly riveting. For many years he talked about anarchy, seeking to become a big fish in this small pond. Then, seeing a gap in the much bigger phony guru market, he began telling his young followers to abandon their parents and instead devote their lives, their honour and their sacred fortunes to his cause. Which was his wallet.

His arse very publicly handed to him by a woman known as J. Ravin/“TruShibes,” he hunkered down to re-emerge as a promoter of white supremacy who, I Iament, has become unaccountably influential even with people I formerly knew and/or admired.

Strange are the things people turn to when they think that the world is on fire. Stranger still how they think eugenics and white supremacy would help extinguish and not fan it.

A fellow called Stuart Hayashi has researched Molyneux’s rantings, should you have any doubt these two vile causes are what the wanker promotes, and if you’re wondering why you’re seeing this stuff or Molyneux’s name around the traps so much I can heartily recommend reading the results of Stuart’s recent research. Hayashi identifies two premises the toerag promotes that are rarely expounded together (a strategy of deniability, you see), but when combined form the argument, such as it is:

Premise One: Your genes, as associated with your race, are the main determinant of IQ. That is, your race causes you to have a particular IQ number….
Premise Two: Your IQ number is the main factor determining whether you are economically productive or criminally violent.

From those unprepossessing ingredients Molyneux makes a very unedifying stew: We should therefore deduce, at his behest, that a person’s race is what determines whether they are economically productive or criminally violent, therefore [sic] policies should be adopted to bar the many non-white “low-IQ races” from immigrating, from breeding, and from generally being around in polite company.

These days, in the company “Moly” keeps, this no longer called out-and-out eugenics, or even white supremacy – although that’s precisely what it is. Instead it’s given euphemisms like “race realism” or “human biodeversity,” which is they way you may have heard it promoted on websites and fora in which you once participated – or from people with whom you were once friends.  And while Molyneux is just a vector for this disease, not the main source, he’s been unaccountably influential.

ONE THING RELIED UPON by these later-day apostles of eugenics is an ignorance about the basic distinction between race and culture, about which the great Thomas Sowell has written so widely and so well. Culture, explains Sowell, should be understood as “the working machinery of everyday life” and like any machinery should be open to criticism and improvement. Some cultures are more productive than others, some less; this is true, but as Sowell points out repeatedly, race itself is irrelevant. It’s culture that’s all important.

One of the eugenicists’ main aims however is to collapse this distinction between race and culture, insisting instead that only race is relevant – that the two are deterministically entwined, with IQ being the measure of superiority.

Yes, it truly is this facile. As Robert Tracinski points out, these are people who understand Western civilisation “not as a set of ideas, but as some kind of symbol of their racial identity.”

Hayashi briefly counters this odious nonsense, noting the very basic fact for example that even if you were to accept IQ as any measure of anything (about which there are huge problems) the causal arrow goes from  wealth to performing well in IQ tests, not the other way around.

He then plunges into a veritable long-drop full of excreta that Molyneux has spewed out on this topic since his dramatic rebirth, leading him to the conclusion he broadcasts almost daily, that “because skills and abilities have not been distributed evenly by Mother Nature among various ethnicities,” the only cure to the impending collapse of western countries is closed borders and racial separatism.

It is from him and the likes of him that this sort of stuff comes from.

It’s like a prepper’s version of a national policy.

Why is this important? Because like all variants of tribalism, it is deadly nonsense; yet I know the bile is unaccountably influential because I keep seeing it spewed out in places and around people I once frequented. And friends don’t let friends believe this stuff.

But if they do, there’s a very simple message for you, and it appears at the very top of this post.

Please take it literally.

Intellectual hygiene demands it.

MORE READING:

• “I take Stefan Molyneux to task for his promoting white supremacism. And I quote him to prove that, yes, that is what he is promoting.”
  Quotations from Stefan Molyneux Showing His Promotion of Eugenics, Pseudoscientific Racism, and Bigotry Against Blacks – Stuart Hayashi, STU-TOPIA
• “The fetid end of the political spectrum is rising up to support statism in the name of protecting IQ – on the basis, say the fetid-swamp warriors, that the “low IQs” will only destroy the culture and are too dumb to deserve freedom anyway. Vile enough, but does their chosen proxy even merit serious consideration? No.”
  The Intellectual Conceit of IQ Ideology – Jeffrey Tucker, NOT PC
• “It's not pretty, and it's sad that this person has any influence at all. In summary, and as a TL;DR: the left is bad, so things the left thinks are wrong by definition and opposition to the left is good by definition. [and more: “…the genius of the Trump campaign has been to convince people they’re defying the elites when they live down to the elites’ worst expectations of them.”]”
  The winner of the summarise-Stefan-Molyneux competition – NOT PC
• “Robert Tracinski ably explains the fetid sewer of support flushed out by Donald Trump – people who understand Western civilisation not as a set of ideas, but as some kind of symbol of their racial identity. They’re calling themselves alt-right; he’s identified them simply as The Other Left. Or even more simply: Yes, The Alt-Right Are Just a Bunch of Racists…”
  “White Sheets and Red Golf Caps” – NOT PC

NB: From now on, I shall be taking this post’s conclusion as my policy on commenting here at NOT PC. The principle of free speech does not demand that I supply eugenicists with a microphone. If you insist on promoting ordure with mine, then fuck off and get your own.

 

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Tomorrow, I post last year’s fifth-most popular post here at EnZed’'’s fourth-most read political blog asking … are we really the world’s most prosperous place?