Monthly Archives: August 2014

Scottish Independence?

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Next month, the Scots are going to vote on whether they remain in the UK. Americans have an image of Scotland as a combination of Groundskeeper Willy, Braveheart and Rob Roy, maybe playing golf in the rain. It is the image of rugged, independent men not yielding to anyone. The truth is nothing of the sort. The Scots are mostly broke men on the dole. Like the rest of the UK, they are a generation ahead of America in their march over the cliff. Voting for independence, therefore, seems like a clever joke.

By way of example, look at this story from the BBC.

The Scottish government has defended its controversial plan for a named guardian for every child in Scotland.

Speaking to the BBC, Children’s Minister Aileen Campbell said the policy would be rolled out across the country as planned in 2016.

She said it would help families in need and save taxpayers’ money.

Conservative MSP Gavin Brown said the policy would create a “giant bureaucracy” that would not help those most in need.

MSPs approved the Children and Young People Scotland Bill, which includes legislation to create a “named person” for every child in the country, in February.

The policy is already in place in a number of areas, including the Highlands, Edinburgh and Ayrshire, but is not due to be extended to the rest of Scotland until 2016.

The Scottish government has said the legislation would stop vulnerable children slipping through the net and give families a point of contact should they need assistance.

Earlier this month, ministers announced £40m in funding for 500 new health visitor posts to meet the demands of the policy, which will cover children from birth to the age of 18.

Midwives and senior teachers could also be named guardians, depending on the age of the child.

In case it is not clear, they are planning to assign a government minder to each child at birth.

Religious groups have raised concerns around the diminishing role of parents and the Christian Institute is preparing to mount a judicial review against the move.

The group has asked the Scottish government not to implement the “named person” element of the bill until the outcome of the legal action is known.

Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday Politics Scotland programme, Ms Campbell said the policy was supported by many organisations and would go ahead as planned since there was “no good reason” to delay.

She added: “This is about embedding good practice. We’ve seen [from pilots] that this reduces bureaucracy and allows professionals to intervene where families most at need require additional support. We’ve seen a reduction in inappropriate referrals to reporters – it saves money.

“The cost to the public purse of not doing these things is that problems escalate into crisis and that’s something we want to avoid. This supports parents and responds to what parents have told us they want.”

She said nothing in the legislation affected parents’ rights.

If you are wondering about those Christians, about 55% of Scots identify as Christian and about 40% claim to be irreligious or have no religion at all. The young are hardly religious and only 8% of the population attends weekly services. Those Christian groups have as much influence as Rastafarian groups.

Not that it matters. The Scots, like people all over the Occident, are throwing in the towel on civilization. The Scottish fertility rate is 1.7. More Scots die every year than are born and uncontrolled immigration will soon swamp the country in hostile foreigners. If you dig through the official figures, a country of 5 million is bringing in 250,000 foreigners each year. It is the foreign population having the babies. Simple math says the Scots are going the way of the dodo.

War on White People

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Steve Sailer often makes the point that the Democrat coalition is held together by a transcendent hatred of white males. Women, blacks, Hispanics and the six gay guys who bother to vote have one thing in common and that is they think the pale penis people need to be taught a lesson. Specifically:

Another aspect to consider is the inherent fractiousness of the Democrats’ Coalition of the Fringes: the lesbian-feminists are mad at the suddenly all-important she-males, the Muslims are mad at the Jews over the Middle East, the Asians are mad at the Hispanics over U. of California quotas, the NAMs are mad at the SWPLs for gentrifying them out to the sticks, Hollywood is worried that soon they’ll have to release statistics about their lack of diversity just like Silicon Valley has had too, and so forth and so on.

How can this coalition be kept together? Simple. By getting all the Fringes to unite in hating straight cis-gendered Christian old white uncool men (add as many qualifying adjectives as needed).

The question is whether it can hold together. Charles Murray thinks it will blow apart and the result will be a tribal culture of some sort. What that is, exactly, is debatable. This story from The Hill tells me it is coming at us quickly.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) on Monday accused Democrats of engaging in a “war on whites” in the current immigration debate.

On conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show, Brooks dismissed the idea that the more conservative GOP bloc’s position on immigration is hurting his own party.

“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else,” he said during the interview. “It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true.”

A sitting Congressman talking like this is a big deal. It has been decades since anyone in the political class has been willing to say anything about race outside of the old chestnuts approved by our cultural masters.

On “Fox News Sunday,” National Journal’s editorial director, Ron Fournier, suggested the Hispanic community is becoming increasingly disenchanted with Republicans.

“This party, your party, cannot be the party of the future beyond November if you’re seen as the party of white people,” said Fournier, whom Ingraham described as being part of the “lame-stream media.”

I keep wondering if these experts are crazy, stupid or just pathological. Hispanics are not a big part of the vote. They tend not to vote in general and they have never voted in big numbers for Republicans. As a practical matter, the GOP is wise to limit the influx of Hispanics. That’s good politics and smart politics. Yet, experts keep yapping about the need for Republicans to chase Hispanic votes.

Brooks said recent polls indicate every demographic group agrees that the rule of law should be enforced and border security must be improved.

“It doesn’t make any difference if you’re a white American, a black American, a Hispanic-American, an Asian-American or if you’re a woman or a man. Every single demographic group is hurt by falling wages and lost jobs,” Brooks said.

All of the polling also shows that Hispanics are not fond of illegal immigration and favor cutting back on legal immigration. They suffer from none of the madness that has gripped the political class. They know what mass immigration means for them and they are not enthusiastic about recreating Tijuana in their new homeland.

“Democrats, they have to demagogue on this and try and turn it into a racial issue, which is an emotional issue, rather than a thoughtful issue,” he added. “If it becomes a thoughtful issue, then we win and we win big. And they lose and they lose big. ”

Brooks accused Democrats of playing a “political game” and Ingraham said they’re “playing the race card.”

This is the first time I think I’ve heard a GOP official take this approach. I have never understood why the GOP tries to do battle with the Left on their terms. Immigration should be as exciting as zoning issues. How many do we want and how do we process them? That’s it. But, it strikes me as being way too late in the day for any of it to matter. The future is going to be very unpleasant.

Data Driven Liberalism

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The term “data journalism” as it is mostly just a marketing scheme. It is just a way to decorate popular fads with the veneer of science. The Left has always wrapped itself in the cloak of science, believing it works like garlic on a vampire. In their case it is intended to ward off Christians and “right-wing extremists.” Vox, 538, Grantland, The Upshot and others have glommed onto all of this and recast generic, boiler plate Progressive dogma as “data journalism.”

Ezra Klein is the worst example. He started out in life as a doctrinaire lefty and has now dressed himself up as a technocratic nerd boy. Ezra Klein went to school for political science and maybe took statistics for liberal arts majors, but otherwise could not count his balls twice and come up with the same number. But, the act sells to the intended audience, largely the same people who watch Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. These are people who want to hear the old time religion.

Anyway, this was posted on MR and you see a couple of gags these guys like to play on their audience. The first is the false dichotomy.

In a July 19 New York Times column, conservative economist Tyler Cowen scolded the egalitarian left for not recognizing that on a global basis inequality has been falling thanks to growth in China and other Asian countries even as it’s risen inside almost all rich countries. In a followup dialogue with Eduardo Porter on whether inequality is really a big problem, Cowen returned to the point that “the biggest inequalities are those across borders” so a laxer attitude toward immigration “should be the number one priority for anyone concerned about income inequality.”

Meanwhile, late Friday night House Republicans passed a bill to strip about 580,000 immigrants of their work permits while President Obama ponders executive action to reduce the pace of deportations and conservative columnist Ross Douthat preemptively slams the illegality of the as-yet-unknown measure.

Which is to say that while Cowen’s point about the global picture is both interesting and correct, his political stance is backwards. It’s not fans of Capital in the 21st Century who are pushing nationalism as an alternative to plutocracy, but its detractors. And though the recent politics in the US Congress have been driven by the somewhat odd sequence of events around the arrival of unaccompanied minors from Central America, the underlying pattern runs much deeper than that.

Yglesias imagines a world of only two options, either have inequality or utopia. We either have xenophobic isolationism or borderless one-worldism. There’s never a third option or gradations between the two poles. The hive minded are obsessed with the boundaries between their team and the other team, which is defined as those not on their team. That leads them to see the world in absolutes, black and white.

In the United Kingdom where the transient political factors are entirely different, the ruling Conservative Party runs on a platform of Capping Welfare and Reducing Immigration. Inside the United States, a major debate has taken place inside GOP circles as to what to do after consecutive Republican Party losses in presidential elections. An initially popular idea, especially in business circles, was that the GOP should moderate its stance on immigration and seek Latino votes. This was, of course, countered by the party’s most retrograde elements — the Michele Bachmanns and the Steve Kings. But more importantly, the pro-immigration impulse was also opposed by the most forward-thinking elements in American conservative politics. Douthat, David Frum, Reihan Salam, and other “reform conservatives” have positioned themselves as leading opponents of a compromise with the White House on immigration.

This bifurcated view of the world leads to another error. That is the belief that all issues are moral. Immigration, for example, should be a public policy issue like zoning bills or utility rates. The people, through their representatives, express their preferred polices and those are made law. As opinions change and new experiences raise new objections, the laws change.

Immigration is not a moral dilemma. It is a debate about how many people from foreign lands we would like to permit into our lands. As citizens everywhere, it is our right to set these limits for whatever reason we like. These choices will turn up in the political math of the parties. For a guy who pitches himself as a statistics maven, he sure seems to struggle understanding the simple political calculus. Foreigners vote for Democrats so Republicans will want fewer foreigners.

The hive minded can never accept that. They lose track of where their identity ends and the issue begins. Rejecting their preferred solution is a personal affront, the equivalent of telling them their kids are ugly. It is why they are so emotional and angry. You can’t be in a mass movement without being outraged.

It is this reformicon ideological tendency, not mainstream liberalism, that has embraced egalitarian nationalism.

And the cause of its rise is not left-wing worries about inequality, but the failure of traditional supply-side economics. Reagan-era conservatives could be for welfare state rollback and broadly pro-immigration because they promised a rising tide that would lift all boats. Now that we’re decades into an era of wage stagnation, those kind of easy promises ring hollow. So for Cameron and the reformicons, a tilt against immigrants is the new answer. On this view, the big problem with trickle-down economics is that the bucket is too leaky. Let the rich get richer, but prevent them from hiring maids from Latin America, and soon enough wages for native-born maids will rise.

The moral math whereby this policy becomes more attractive than the win/win/win alternative of broadly freer movement of people paired with progressive taxation and more provision of public services has always escaped me somewhat. It appears to involve putting a negative value on the interests of foreign-born people. But it is a real movement. But it’s a movement on the right of politics in the United States and other English-speaking countries. Progressives, rightly, see no need to chose between equality and cosmopolitanism.

Finally, this is why Yglesias is an intellect. Tired old ideas about progressive taxation, the metastasizing welfare state and free lunch economics pretty much have no audience outside the hive. That’s been true for three decades now. Instead, the Left clutches at its skirts and bellows about the moral defects of their adversaries. Ezra Klein’s brand of data journalism is nothing more than yelling “those other guys are bad because science” over and over so no one notices he has nothing much to offer.

The Poor Door

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Maybe landlords will label the doors “Gamma”, “Delta” or “Epsilon” and give the tenants different keys based on their social standing. Perhaps they will just make them scale a fence or navigate through obstacles to get into the building. This story is not all that clear on the details, but the “poor door” is coming to a reservation near you.

New York City has approved a developer’s Dickensian plan to include a “poor door” in a luxury apartment complex in the Upper West Side.

The prospect of a separate entrance for lower-income residents has been circulating for some time, but as the New York Postreported today, plans by company Extell Development to put a separate entrance for affordable housing tenants, who make 60 percent or less of median income, in the 33-story condo have been given the green light. The property will have 219 units, including 55 affordable units overlooking the street. Those renting and buying the apartments at the market-rate will have waterfront views.

The entrance is part of the Inclusionary Housing Program application, under which developers can build larger projects if they also provide low-income housing, either on- or off-site.

The mock outrage by the snooty writer is tiresome. Liberals have been self-segregating for years. They have driven most of the NAM population out of San Francisco. They are doing the same in DC, where blacks are no longer a majority. Similarly, gentrification in NYC is intended to drive away the NAM population so young professionals like Lucy Westcott can live in trendy urban neighborhoods.

Beyond that, it is just the natural evolution of the servant’s entrance. Before we got all of these egalitarian ideas in our heads, it was simply understood that the rich did not want to mix it up with the poor. Big houses had a separate entrance for the cooks, nannies, gardeners and other staff. For live-in staff, there were quarters on the edge of the property or maybe above the carriage house or garage. No one thought it strange or mean, especially not the servants. The poor have always known their place.

The approval of the entrance at 40 Riverside has prompted outrage, with many on social media calling it nothing more than an updated version of segregation. ThinkProgress’ report notes that issues affecting low-income tenants in luxury buildings — which include not being allowed to use perks like the gym or pools — usually fall on people of color.

Brooklyn Magazine points out that it’s “not an unusual scheme” to include affordable housing units in fancy buildings that will remain, for most people, mere real estate fantasies. But New York Magazine reminds us that the entrance will serve the purpose of  “[sparing] all the residents from the terrible awkwardness of regularly encountering people whose lifestyles differ from theirs, or something.”

The only people outraged are the credentialed urban lefties who think it is grossly unfair that they don’t get to live like the over-class. That’s the dirty little secret of the meritocracy. The truly poor now live on welfare. The dwindling working class is supplemented by indirect welfare payments like public schools, free health insurance and so forth. The urban middle lass is now the servant class to the rich. Young Lucy Westcott, is merely a servant for the rich people signing her paychecks.

That’s why the people most outraged by inequality are the urban credentialed lefties of the managerial class. They were told all along they were special little snowflakes and destined to rule the world. Now they find out that the rich are nothing like them and they will never be in that class. Instead, they will be the modern equivalent of footmen, chauffeurs and coat holders to the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. They don’t like it one bit, so we get these tantrums.

From the Mailbag

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The comment feature of this WordPress template is not the best. I chose this template because it is plain and easy to navigate. I hate overly complex sites with loads of web scripting. National Review and the Daily Caller are horrible to navigate because of the ridiculous scripts they have running, all intended to jam ads in your face. I went for simple and that means the commenting space is limited.

Readers have made some points I’d like to address so I figured a post addressing some of the comments would be worthwhile. Here are a few:

fodderwing writes:

There’s a big dif between having one’s questions answered and having them answered satisfactorily. That Fred is still asking is not necessarily evidence that he has ignored the “libraries full of books,” but may only be telling us that the books give unsatisfactory answers.

Satisfactorily to whom? It seems that millions of people have had no trouble finding the answers Fred says are elusive. John Derbyshire has addressed all of his points hundreds of times. Further, these answers are more than satisfactory to the people interested in evolutionary biology. They are, in many cases, axiomatic.

fodderwing continues:

I have my own unanswered questions about evolution, but the real lazy wusses in my view are the ones who get defensive when I ask. After reading Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box I thought it best to let him ask the hard questions, I would stick with the easy ones. I have read many answers to his “black box” concept, absolutely none of which seemed sincere or for that matter particularly well thought out. As for my easy questions, those are the ones that really frustrate people as the usual responses can probably best be summued up as “why can’t you just believe, man, like the rest of the smarter set? There is such overwhelming evidence, so many libraries full of books … “

If someone keeps asking you to explain why water is wet and ice is cold, you will begin to think that they are uncommonly stupid, have an agenda, or are passive-aggressively challenging your aptitude. If it is the first case, there’s only so many ways to explain something. Once you have exhausted them all, you give up. The world needs ditch diggers and hod carriers too.

If it is the other two, then you are dealing with a dishonest person. In both cases they are concealing their agenda, which is to sow doubt in your mind about your knowledge of the subject. This form of argumentation is common with the anti-science crowd, which makes it a campaign to spread ignorance. It is why the response from science these days when asked these sorts of questions is this.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it again. I have no quarrel with creationists or intelligent design people. These beliefs are not science, but the world will not spin off its axis of people believe that stuff. We get enough oogily-boogily from the Left and their war on science and reason. Christians would be wise to not follow their lead.

Bones writes:

Whatever else Fred is or isn’t, he isn’t a phoney. He’s always been upfront about his life. Fred comes from a mildly prominent Virginia family, but he was born in the coal mining town of Crumpler, West Virginia and spent a lot of his youth in rural West Virgina and Northern Alabama. He has a high regard for the people in the parts of Appalachia where he grew up. The ‘down home’ writing style he sometimes adopts is simply a literary device, used by people such as Joel Chandler Harris and many others.

Fred has an excellent command of the English language. He is making writing mistakes these days because he was hit in the face with shrapnel in Vietnam and his eyesight has deteriorated. He is now blind in one eye as the result of his latest eye surgery.

You may not like Fred or the stuff he writes. He may or may not know what he’s writing about. But ‘phoney’ is no more than name-calling

It is name-calling and I’m proud of my ability to use nouns. Without name calling, we would still be riding those big things in that place or whatever. I think Fred is a big phony and I have no qualms about saying it. At least you know where I stand.

I could be all wrong on that. Maybe his act is harmless and sincere. We all don a mask in public and maybe that’s just how Allah made him. I don’t know and I can’t know. All I can go on is what I see and my own sense of these things.

james wilson writes:

There are several factors. Jews, especially the ones you are describing, have no great affection for the country (I am increasingly sympathetic to that state of being). That being so they always have an exit strategy and a tradition of using it, so they continue to indulge their opinions–which are life itself to them–without restraint. And if the block is busted, well, they’ll once again be the first to sell. This strategy has worked well for them in recent times except for that miscalculation of 1933-45. But Montaigne wrote that even opinion is of force enough to make itself be espoused at the expense of life. No one contributes more to opinion than Jews, with less regard for the consequences.

A couple of points here. Steve Sailer points out frequently that Jews dominate certain industries and are wildly over represented in the millionaire and billionaire clubs. The thing is, Jews dominate transactional industries like the entertainment business, retail and the law. You don’t see a lot of Jews in construction, agriculture, mining or manufacturing. These are industries that require planning and investment to mitigate events currently over the horizon.

Is that cultural? Maybe. The old line was that Christians did not let Jews own property so they had no choice but to go into banking and commerce. That was always nonsense. Jews in Europe left the farm for the village 2,000 years ago. It is more likely the result of being a distinct minority that has often needed an exit strategy. Loading up the furniture and money is a lot easier than packing up the cattle or the fame land.

The other point is the Jewish relationship with the state. This has often been the justification for persecuting Jews. They were accused of dual loyalties, with loyalty to the tribe overriding all else. If you look at the world today, that seems like a shrewd position. Being an American citizen carries little value. Abroad it is a burden and home it is becoming a liability. We treat illegal alien invaders better than our own poor.

The Jews seem to have it right. Governments and countries come and go. Why sacrifice for a concept that has so little utility? America may have been a special place long ago, but today it is just a slab of land with a bunch of people living in it. It’s every tribe for himself, so to speak, whether we like it or not. Only a fool clings to his patriotism these days.

Deck writes:

The second law of thermodynamics puts the lie to evolution. Evolution is atheistic dogma dressed up as science, nothing more. Psalm 14:1 “The fool says in his heart, There is no God.” The vituperation coming out of Pisco shows Fred hit a nerve. Read, In The Beginning by Walt Brown.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems always evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, a state with maximum entropy. Put another way, the natural process is for the complex to decay into the simple. The final result is complete randomness.

This is a popular misappropriation of physical science to biological science. This line of argument has been addressed many times in many places. Here’s one I found just by entering “second law of thermodynamics” in a search engine. The fact that it remains popular with creationists underscores my point about Fred Reed. There’s no amount of facts and reasoning that will ever satisfy the creationist. Therefore, why would I or anyone else bother trying?

Boobies

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According to this story in the Guardian, French women are not going topless at the beach anymore. How one measures this is unsaid, but the young researchers sent off to the beach to count bare boobies probably enjoyed their work.

Is topless sunbathing over? It certainly is in France, according to French Elle, if the coverline on its new summer issue is to be believed: “La Fin Du Topless Sur La Plage?” – which translates, verbatim, to “Is this the end of toplessness on the beach?”

According to the magazine the answer is “yes”, and the reasons are threefold. First, an increased concern over health and the dangers of skin cancer; second, the “pornified” perception of topless women (indeed Elle suggests the death of the monokini – ie swimming briefs – was linked to the idea that topless women are seen as “loose”); and third, the rise of breast-affiliated activism – chiefly Femen, who use their naked breasts as a means of attracting attention to various causes, and Free the Nipple, a recent campaign that encourages women to go topless to end the stigma surrounding female bodies. “Topless sunbathing was seen by women as a new freedom in St Tropez in the 1960s,” says Elle. And now that they’re covering up? It’s a “worrying sign of a regression in the place of women”.

The skin cancer excuse makes some sense. Maybe people are doing less sunbathing than in the past. Too much time in the sun, especially just lying around, tends to make the skin look old. In our youth obsessed culture, that’s not good.  Alternatively, the women may be lying. In the age of feminism, not offending the homely girls is the most important thing, so maybe the homely girls are now opposed to this.

The “pornified” angle is interesting. The West is becoming more uptight regarding fun stuff like sex and looking at naked ladies. Drugs, boozing, sex, eating, smoking and jokes about minorities have been ruled off-limits to some degree. The sort of women going to St Tropez probably think it is horrible to look like a girl now. Of course, in a world with unlimited porn at your fingertips, women showing their lady parts off in public is no longer much of a statement.

The last one is the puzzler. What in the world is “femen”? It turns out to be naked protesting. This line from the Wikipedia entry is amusing:

The organisation describes itself as “fighting patriarchy in its three manifestations – sexual exploitation of women, dictatorship and religion”[12] and has stated that its goal is “sextremism serving to protect women’s rights”

This is what passes for feminism these days. They call it Third Wave Feminism. Again, from Wikipedia:

Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge or avoid what it deems the second wave’s essentialist definitions of femininity, which often assumed a universal female identity that over-emphasized the experiences of upper-middle-class white women. The shift from second wave feminism came about with many of the legal and institutional rights that were extended to women. In addition to these institutional gains, third-wave feminists believed there needed to be further changes in stereotypes, media portrayals, and language to define women. Third-wave ideology focuses on a more post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality.[3] In “Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism,” Joan W. Scott describes how language has been used as a way to understand the world, however, “post-structuralists insist that words and texts have no fixed or intrinsic meanings, that there is no transparent or self-evident relationship between them and either ideas or things, no basic or ultimate correspondence between language and the world”[4] Thus, while language has been used to create binaries (such as male/female), post-structuralists see these binaries as artificial constructs created to maintain the power of dominant groups.

Got that?

The simpler definition is we have upper-middle class white women at universities with way too much time on their hands. No one takes their courses or cares about what they have to say, so they make a nuisance of themselves chasing the white eunuchs around the faculty lounge, calling them racists.

One last bit from the story:

Alice Pfeiffer, a 29-year-old Anglo-French journalist (who, incidentally does sunbathe topless in Biarritz, Guéthary, Monaco and surfing resort Hossegor), thinks the decline is inextricably linked to social media: “Young women in their 20s do it less because they are aware that … you can end up topless on your own Facebook wall.”

Pfeiffer blames “pop-porn culture – Miley Cyrus to American Apparel, ie aggressive naked imagery of young girls” – for the shift in perception of going topless.

It is one of the great ironies of the technological revolution. The old line about having 57 channels, yet nothing good is on TV. All of this technology that was supposed to free us from our chains is doing the opposite. Whip off your top on vacation and you end up getting fired because your boss saw your boobies on Facebook. With cameras everywhere, ready to publicize your moment of indiscretion, everyone has to stop having fun and no one gets to see boobies on the beach.

Fred On Nothing

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There’s an old tradition in the writing business for the writer to declare his interests before stating a strong opinion on a subject. The reason is to let the reader know in advance of the writer’s bias. So, before I get started, I want to state upfront that I have never liked Fred Reed. I mean his writing, not the man, who I have never met. The main reason is I don’t like acts or contrived styles. It makes me think the writer is up to something that is not in the reader’s best interests.

In the case of Fred Reed, his corn pone act is a synthetic attempt to play on the vulnerability of his target audience. His is not a unique act. Lots of middle and late middle aged men adopt this style. It is a passive-aggressive way to avoid being challenged on the assertions. In his case, it is an attempt to signal to a particular audience that he is one of them, without actually having to be one of them. It is intended to deceive and that’s something I find unappealing.

That said, his latest posted on The Unz Review is very disappointing. By that I mean I’m surprised it was posted there at all. The Unz Review is one of the few places willing to post heterodox opinions on complicated and controversial issues. Steve Sailer is an obvious example. Razib Khan is another. Fred Reed’s clumsy and somewhat incoherent column covering very old objections to evolutionary theory from the flat earth perspective seems wildly out of place.

In fact, it looks like troll bait. Ron Unz is a gazillionaire so it is not like he needs the traffic to sell ad space. Maybe he has a soft spot for Fred Reed or is throwing the guy a bone out of pity. The narcotic of minor celebrity can hook even autistic millionaires, so maybe that is the reason Unz host Reed. Putting that aside, what really bugs me about this is the dishonesty of it. Take a look at the introductory paragraphs.

Over the years I have occasionally expressed doubts over the tenets of evolutionism which, perhaps wrongly, has seemed to me a sort of political correctness of science, or maybe a metaphysics somewhat related to science. As a consequence I have been severely reprimanded. The editor of a site devoted to genetic expression furiously began deleting any mention of me from his readers. Others, to include Mr. John Derbyshire of Taki’s Magazine, have expressed disdain, though disdaining to explain just why.

In all of this, my inability to get straight answers that do not shift has frustrated me. I decided to address my questions to an expert in the field, preferably one who loathed me and thus might produce his best arguments so as to stick it to me. To this end I have settled on Mr. Derbyshire.

He has the several advantages of being highly intelligent, an excellent writer, ardent of all things evolutionary and genetic, and well versed in them. I would profit by his instruction in things in which I am only an amateur—should he be so inclined. (He may well have other things to do.) To this end, I submit a few questions which have strained my admittedly paltry understanding for some time. They are not new questions, but could use answers. I agree in advance to accept his answers (if any be given) as canonical.

I’ll address the bold portion in order. Fred Reed is a fairly well known crank on the topic of evolution. I’m not a regular reader, but I have seen him referenced as a creationist  many times in other places. It is a hobby horse for him. Put “fred reed creationism” in a search engine and I get 6,900,000 results. Granted, most will just have “creationism” in them, but the point remains. This is his thing.

The “crank” label derives from the first bolded sentence. There are libraries full of books with all the “straight answers that do not shift.” What he lacks the courage to say or the honesty to admit, is he does not understand or accept the science. Instead, he disingenuously shifts the burden for his ignorance from his shoulders onto others, as if his ignorance is the default position.

The second bold section is an outright lie that he surely knows is a lie. He knows John Derbyshire well enough to know his body of work. John has been writing about these topics for a couple of decades, at least. Not only has he written about these topics directly, eh as written about many other who have written extensively on the topic of human evolution. In other words, Fred is either a moron or a liar.

John spent years debating these guys about intelligent design, young earth creationism and Darwin. If Fred Reed has yet to “profit from John’s instruction” by this point, he never will. Again, this is just an oleaginous attempt to present himself as something other than an crank looking for an argument. I’ll also note that again he places the burden to educate him on others. Therefore, if he continues to clutch at his superstitions, it is the fault of others.

The last bold section is an outright lie wrapped in a falsehood. His questions have all been answered thousands of times by thousands of people. He has rejected all of those attempts so there is no reason to believe this one last try by his chosen bogeyman will do the trick. In other words, he does not come to the topic in good faith, but he demands others stop that they are doping and try one more time to educate the ignoramus on a topic about which he refuses to learn anything.

He knows all of this, but he lacks the honestly and integrity to simply say he prefers his own voodoo. I can respect people who prefer their religious explanations for the natural world, as long as they are honest about it. I disagree with them, but if they are sincere and honest about the why and the what, I have no quarrel with them. There is some chance they are right, so there is no benefit in trying to force them to see things the way I see them. That’s not Fred Reed. He’s just a liar.

The rest of the very poorly written piece is a recitation of the same old complaints from the creationist crowd. Done up in the phony-baloney corn-pone style Fred has cultivated over the years makes for painful reading. The only worthwhile take away is he seems to have the boohoos over Derb saying something mean about him. In addition to being a ridiculous phony, Fred Reed is a pussy, it seems.