This Week’s Show

Contents

• Radio Derb Podcast, 1/17/2025
• Table of Contents
• 01m53s World Logic Day
• 09m09s The Competence Collapse
• 16m00s Economist fixes Africa
• 19m35s French theater fiasco
• 22m28s A new Botany Bay?
• 26m10s How is Tété-Michel Kpomassie doing?
• 30m39s The immigration racket
• 39m28s Where is Vivek?
• 40m13s Usha, Tennyson, and me
• 41m41s Can the universe think?
• 43m04s Signoff for California

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your logically genial host John Derbyshire with news and commentary.

First, however, a little housekeeping. The website VDARE.com remains in suspense thanks to the evil machinations of New York State’s well-upholstered Attorney General. However, the parent VDARE Foundation is very much alive, and planning for the future.

The latest development there is that Peter Brimelow, who got the whole thing started 25 years ago, now has his own Substack account. You can subscribe, and I urge you to do so.

You can support the VDARE Foundation itself by mailing a check to us at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. You can support me personally by earmarking the check with my name, or by any of the alternative options spelled out on my personal website. Thank you!

End of housekeeping. Let’s see what’s in the news.

02 — World Logic Day.     Did you know — I bet you didn’t — that Tuesday this week, January 14th, was World Logic Day, as proclaimed by UNESCO in 2019?

If you did know, I hope you took the opportunity to advance the cause of logic somehow, although the event’s website isn’t very clear how.

My own contribution was to chuckle quietly while remembering my own studies in formal logic under Professor Kneebone at London University sixty years ago. I find I can, without looking, still rattle off the first four of the nineteen valid syllogisms: Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque — there you go. Those who understand, will understand. I must at some point have known the other fifteen; but sixty years is a long time and I had too much wine with my dinner this evening.

I can remember some of the more complex deductions, too. How about the destructive dilemma? Here is an example of the destructive dilemma, ahem:

If this man were wise, he would not speak irreverently of Scripture in jest; and if he were good, he would not do so in earnest; but he does it, either in jest, or earnest; therefore he is either not wise, or not good.

That comes from Archbishop Whately’s book, published 1826; so that, and the nineteen valid syllogisms, belong to traditional or classical logic, before the twentieth century came along with Gödel, Wittgenstein, Turing, and the rest to turn logic upside down, inside out, back to front, and top to bottom.

Is logic even a formal academic discipline any more? I assume some of it still gets taught, in math courses (like mine) or computer science; but are there any independent Logic Departments in our colleges and universities? I doubt it.

Logic doesn’t play much of a role in most human affairs. Let’s suppose I can choose a course of action: either do A, or B, or C. How to decide? It’s not likely that pure logic will be the determining factor. The logical impulse is too easily swamped by love and loyalty, status striving, pride and prejudice, or one of the other Deadly Sins.

The sad fact is that in the ordinary dealings of life, logic doesn’t have a firm hold on our minds: on anyone’s mind, even the mind of a logician.

There’a a nice illustration of that in the late Paul Johnson‘s 1988 book Intellectuals.

In that book P-J tossed and gored some of the big-name smarty-pants of the past two hundred years: Rousseau, Marx, Tolstoy, Sartre, and so on. Chapter Eight of the book is about the great twentieth-century logician Bertrand Russell. It closes with the paragraph I’m going to quote.

The year is 1968. Russell, aged 96, was retired from active public life but still liked to make his voice heard. He used his aristocratic title, Earl Russell, and had been awarded the Order of Merit, a high honor in British culture. Johnson, aged 40, was a seasoned journalist, editor of the leftist weekly magazine The New Statesman. Over to him. Quote:

As for logic, that too was only invoked when required. During the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Russell was persuaded to sign a letter of protest, along with a number of other writers. I had the job of negotiating its appearance in The Times. With the signatures in the customary alphabetic order, the heading on the letter would have been “From Mr Kingsley Amis and others.” I decided, and the Times Letters Editor agreed, that it might have more effect in the Communist world if it read “From Earl Russell O.M. and others.” So this was done. But Russell noticed this small deception and was angry. He telephoned to protest and eventually reached me at the printers, where I was putting the New Statesman to press. He said I had deliberately done it to give the false impression that he himself had organized the letter. I denied this, and said the sole object was to give the letter maximum impact. “After all,” I said, [inner quote] “if you agreed to sign the letter at all, you cannot complain when your name is put first — it isn’t logical.” [End inner quote.] [Inner quote] “Logical fiddlesticks!” [end inner quote] said Russell sharply, and slammed down the receiver.

End quote.

03 — The Competence Collapse.     The word “competence” has been having a good airing in public commentary outlets. Just today I see an article headed Cleaning Up the Culture of Incompetence Starts in D.C. on the Chronicles magazine website.

The author, Robin Burk, tells us that, quote: “Our country’s culture is teetering on the edge of a fatal fragility.” End quote. The root cause, he argues, is the, quote, “dysfunctional culture of the Beltway.”

I’m sure you’ve heard us say, when discussing the matter of lawfare — the kind of thing that brought down VDARE — you’ve heard us say that “the process is the punishment.” In our big federal bureaucracies, says Burk, the process is the entire point. The process — inquiries, consultations, debates, speechifying, selling failures to the media as successes, benefitting financially by cosying up to special interests — has taken over completely. It’s all process, no results. The means have consumed the ends.

Christopher Roach over at American Greatness January 14th takes a wider, more systemic approach. Headline: “LA Fires Illustrate a Nationwide Competency Crisis.” Sample quote:

A well-designed system can withstand incompetent executives, some affirmative action appointees, and even a shortfall in funding for one year. But most systems cannot withstand all of these things, year after year, which seems to be the unifying factor in Los Angeles’ current predicament.

End quote.

Towards the end of his column Roach tells us that, quote: “An important essay on complex systems and the competency crisis made the rounds last year, and it remains very relevant to what has happened in California.” End quote. He provides a link to that essay.

I didn’t know about that essay so I followed the link. The essay is from June 2023 in Palladium magazine, author Harold Robertson. Sure enough, it has the word “competence”in its title. Actual title: “Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis.”

Longish quote:

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws — most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity.

End quote.

There you have it in plain English: the thing we all know but may not say. The way to get high levels of competence is by rigorous testing and evaluation. There will, however, be disparities in outcome of those procedures, notably disparities by sex and race. If society finds that intolerable, then society must kiss competence goodbye.

04 — Economist fixes Africa.     “The thing we all know but may not say …” Yeah. Do we all know it, though? Perhaps not; not in the matter of race, anyway.

The editors of The Economist, for example, seem not to know it. In the center of last week’s issue was a twelve-page Special Report titled “The Africa Gap.” It begins by telling us that, quote:

The economic gap between Africa and the rest of the world is getting wider.

End quote.

Oh dear. What’s to be done? Well, this is The Economist and what they mainly write about is of course economics — a subject my understanding of which is rather weak, I’ll admit. Within those limitations, the magazine’s prescriptions don’t sound altogether implausible. Sample:

Everyone with a stake in Africa must think big. Countries need development bargains that allow for the emergence of large firms and productive industries.

End sample. Uh … OK, I guess. Another sample:

There is an urgent need for African policymakers and business leaders to set their own far-reaching goals for economic transformation and rally their people behind them.

End sample. Sure, sounds OK. One more sample:

There is no reason to catastrophize or give up hope. If other continents can prosper, so can Africa. It is time its leaders discovered a sense of ambition and optimism. Africa does not require saving. It needs less paternalism, complacency and corruption — and more capitalism.

End sample. Well, yay for capitalism! The other thing’s been tried out all over, and results weren’t good.

Still, I’d feel more sure that I hadn’t just wasted my time reading those twelve pages if the Economist had included some acknowledgment of results out of the human sciences this past half century: some occurrences of the term “IQ,” perhaps, or even just “human capital.”

But no: If the Economist writers do indeed know about such things, they’re keeping the knowledge to themselves. Hey, it beats getting fired and blacklisted.

05 — French theater fiasco.     For connoisseurs of irony, the French Theater Story has been a fun fest. If you don’t know it, here’s the story.

In Paris there is a theater named the Gaîté Lyrique, which translates as “Lyrical Gaiety.” It’s a Progressive establishment — “known for its radical, leftist programming,” says GB News.

December 10th the theater staged a free event titled “Reinventing the welcome for refugees in France,” with talks hosted by academics from the universities and officials from the Red Cross. Admission was, as I said, free, and progressive activists rounded up more than 250 homeless Africans from the streets of Paris to fill out the audience.

The event seems to have gone well. When it finished, though, the Africans refused to leave the theater.

Five weeks later they are still there, and their number has swollen to more than 300. The theater has had to cancel all performances, and with no income from ticket sales looks like going out of business.

The Daily Mail quotes theater management as saying that, quote: “The sanitary conditions are deteriorating day after day.” Yep, I bet they are.

Local businesses have also suffered loss of revenue. Quote from the proprietor of a local bistro:

They are ruining my business … They hang around outside my terrace, smoking joints and fighting among themselves. Not only do we no longer get theatergoers because the theater is shut but we don’t get passers-by either. They’ve being frightened away by all these young men.

End quote.

Young men, huh? Aren’t refugees usually women, kids, and old folk? Eh, just kidding.

06 — A new Botany Bay?     Greenland continues to be in the news, or at any rate a popular topic of public discussion. I’ve been reading up on the place. It’s bigger than I thought. Spot quiz: In total land area, Alaska and Hawaii included, the U.S.A. is X times the size of Greenland. What is X? Are we twenty times the size of Greenland, or thirty times, or what?

Answer: four and a half times.

To flip it round, is Greenland bigger than Texas? If so, how much bigger? Answer: Yes, Greenland’s bigger than Texas — more than three times the size.

So sure: Given all we’ve been hearing about new sea passages in the Arctic, mineral deposits, the ambitions of China and Russia, and so on, Greenland is a big and consequential place. Should we buy it? Take it by force? Have the Greenlanders vote on becoming our 51st state? Or what?

Personally I’m not keen on incorporating Greenland into our sovereignty. The population is ninety percent Eskimo, or Eskimo-European mix. It’s not likely many of our people would want to settle there. We’d basically be acquiring another humongous Indian reservation. Gregory Hood argues that case over at American Renaissance.

My guess is that Greenland would be more trouble to us than it would be worth, under any dispensation. I’ll admit, though, that the Z-man’s proposal last weekend returned an echo from my bosom.

The Z-man posted thus on X, in relation to an illegal alien from Mexico charged with kidnapping an American teenager, tweet:

Here is a good use of Greenland. Build a large penal colony there to send guys like this to live out the remainder of his days. Aliens who commit violent crimes in the United States get sent to Camp Sunshine on the island of Greenland.

It would provide jobs and revenue to the locals, who would be free to administer it as they see fit. No media would be permitted to enter the colony. Those who tried to sneak in would be confined there forever.

End tweet.

It needn’t be all negativity looking forward. Penal colonies can work out well. Australia got started as a penal colony. So: Worth considering, I think.

07 — How is Tété-Michel Kpomassie doing?     I very artfully placed those last two segments in juxtaposition so that they could beget this one.

My previous segment but one was about homeless African invaders making trouble in Paris. Most of those Africans come from nations that, before they were independent nations, comprised French West Africa.

That would include Togo, homeland of Tété-Michel Kpomassie, the guy I introduced you to last week — the author of that book An African in Greenland. See how I made such a smooth connection? Eh, there is no credit nowadays for compositional virtuosity.

Kpomassie’s book, An African in Greenland, was published in 1977 and described his travels in Greenland in the mid-1960s. The author himself was born in 1941. He wrote the book after going back to live in France.

I got a lot of emails expressing curiosity about Kpomassie’s subsequent career. Is he still alive? (If so, he’ll be 84 this year.) Did he ever go back to Greenland? Did he write any more books?

I don’t know the answers with any certainty. Wikipedia has an entry for him. It tells us that, quote:

Kpomassie currently lives in Nanterre, near Paris, France, but continues to regularly visit Greenland and his native country of Togo.

End quote.

I don’t know how up-to-date that is, though, and I nurse a lurking distrust of Wokipedia, so I went scanning around elsewhere.

My main find — it was actually found by a friend, who passed it on to me — was that Penguin Modern Classics brought out a new edition of An African in Greenland in February 2022. My friend turned up some promotional material from that time telling us that, quote from one of them:

Now approaching 81 years of age, Kpomassie is packing up his Parisian apartment and heading back to northern Greenland, where he intends to live out his gloaming.

End quote. And, confirming quote from another one, quote:

On some level, he never really left Greenland. And it is why he will move back there later this year. After a lecture tour, he plans to live out his days reading and writing in the country that won his heart more than 50 years ago. “This time,” he says, “I will not return.”

End quote.

Those quotes are from three years ago when the Penguin edition came out. Did Kpomassie in fact move to Greenland and stay there? Is he still alive? Don’t know, don’t know. I can’t find evidence of him having written any other books.

If you want to read the book you can do an online checkout for it at the Internet Archive.

Or you could just read the review at my personal website …

08 — The immigration racket.     As a veteran of VDARE.com I take a particular interest in matters of immigration. I wish I didn’t, though. The immigration news is invariably depressing.

What’s depressing is that our nation’s immigration system is a colossal racket. More precisely, it’s a lot of particular rackets piled up in an unsightly heap.

Guest-worker visas, like the notorious H-1B, are most obviously a racket. Companies can fire loyal American employees and replace them with lower-paid indentured workers from abroad.

Student visas are a racket: massively increasing revenue for our colleges by selling off higher education — a finite, precious national resource — to foreigners. We shouldn’t be selling our national resources to foreigners any more than we should sell our land to them … although we do that, too.

These frank cash rackets are obnoxious enough. Even worse are the refugee programs and the ocean of sanctimonious lies in which they float. Way out front in trying to expose those lies has been Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies. Todd — Mr Valiant-for-Truth, I think of him — has been especially hard at work these past few days.

The fruit of that work has been two good, long, well-researched articles: one posted January 14th at the Daily Wire, the other January 15th at the New York Post. I’ll give you a brief summary of each in turn, but I urge you to read them both.

The Daily Wire article is headed: “As Trump 2.0 Approaches, NGOs Continue To Fund Mass Migration With U.S. Tax Dollars.” NGOs are of course Non-Governmental Organizations, 230 of them, many with reassuringly churchy-sounding names, working together with fourteen United Nations agencies to thwart Trump’s plans for deportation and immigration restriction.

How are they going to do that? By keeping alive, keeping well-populated, the big migration trails up out of Central and South America to the U.S. border.

But won’t the new administration’s policies leave the migrants stuck there, unable to cross the border? Sure, but, quote:

The omission of straightforward references to the coming U.S. political pivot on illegal immigration suggests that the group [that is, those 230 NGOs and 14 UN agencies] likely assumes funding would be used to sustain migrants while Trump policies compel them to wait in third countries, perhaps waiting for — or even facilitating — Trump policy failure or for a future friendlier U.S. presidency.

Regardless of U.N. intent, in the meantime, a potential — even probable — consequence of this continuing level of migration trail support would be to sustain steady pressure on Trump’s border for at least the next two years, perhaps even enough to induce policy failure.

End quote.

Executive summary: The U.N. and NGOs are going to keep the long migration trail well populated, ready for a change of U.S. policy. Those on the trail will be given food, cash in debit cards, hotel rooms, healthcare, and legal advice.

Who’s going to pay for all that? We are — we, citizens of the United States. Who do you think funds those U.N. agencies? Mainly us. Just one of them, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, got 1.9 billion dollars of American taxpayers’ money in 2023.

Todd Bensman’s target in his second piece, published in the New York Post, January 15th, is TPS — Temporary Protected Status. Heading of this piece: “Biden’s final border lie: That hundreds of thousands of migrants can’t be deported.”

TPS is for aliens who can’t be deported back where they came from because the places they came from are too dangerous. A TPS order is good for eighteen months, but can be renewed. Joe Biden, in one of his last Presidential acts, granted renewals to 600,000 Venezualans who’d crossed into our country during his Presidency.

Venezuela sure is in bad shape. As Todd Bensman reports, though, quote:

Almost every one of the thousands of Venezuelans crossing Biden’s open border already lived in perfectly safe, prosperous other countries that had granted them asylum, residency, and work authorizations, or otherwise tolerated their presence off-book — such as Colombia, Ecuador and Chile.

The only reason hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living outside Venezuela left was because they realized Biden would let them into the US unchecked.

End quote.

So most of those TPS recipients came not from Venezuela but from safe third countries where they’d lived happily for years … until Biden threw open our borders and they figured they could live even more happily in the U.S.A.

That’s the immigration beat: corruption and lies, top to bottom, heavily seasoned with fake humanitarianism.

The whole filthy system needs a clean-up: a forty-year immigration moratorium would be just fine, with of course a few hundred special-case exceptions per annum.

09 — Miscellany.     And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis:  Vivek Ramaswamy seems to have disappeared. I haven’t seen him talking or tweeting for several days — not since that December 26th tweet in which he opined that the U.S.A. has to hire foreign techies because we Americans aren’t nerdy enough.

I don’t agree with Vivek about everything — I don’t agree with anyone about everything — but I believe on balance he’s a Good Thing. I’d hate to think that Nerdgate destroyed his political career.

Item:  Here’s another person of Indian descent that I have a soft spot for: Usha Vance, wife of our Vice President-elect. From all I’ve read and heard she seems to be a high-quality human being, and a very good wife indeed.

Usha — I think more properly Ushas — is the Hindu Goddess of Dawn. Put it another way, she is the old Indo-European goddess who we know through the Greeks as Eos and through the Romans as Aurora.

That has poetic resonance for me. Way back in my literary education — sometime in my late twenties — I fell in love with Tennyson’s poem Tithonus, which is addressed to Eos, the Greek Dawn Goddess. At one point I knew the whole thing by heart, all 76 lines.

My memory’s no longer what it was; but if you want to get acquainted with poor Tithonus and one of the loveliest poems in our language, there’s a reading of it on my personal website.

Item:  Finally, in last week’s podcast I gave a mention to theoretical physicist and prolific YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder.

No sooner had I done so than Sabine posted an exceptionally thought-provoking talk on the subject of whether the universe can think.

It sounds preposterous, I know. Sabine knows, too: she works through all the preposterosity. Then she comes out at the other end with some speculations based on good sound math and physics, speculations about locality, causality, and other knotty issues in quantum mechanics and relativity theory, concluding that maybe, just possibly, the universe can think.

If you like that kind of thing, Sabine’s presentation is worth ten minutes of your time. It’s definitely more timeworthy than ten minutes of Taylor Swift.

No one knows this, but the Z Man harvests the souls of the wicked. He is a dark shadow that haunts the modern world, living off despair. When you take the black pill, he is there to welcome you into the eternal torment.

10 — Signoff.     That’s it, folks, this last weekend of the Joe Biden Presidency, which has been the worst thing to happen to the U.S.A. since the death of Vaudeville. My thanks to you as always for your time, attention, and support. And just another reminder that Peter Brimelow is now on Substack for your edification and amusement.

Radio Derb, along with many, many other National Conservative commentators, has been getting good mileage by snarking at the voters of California for electing incompetent ideologues to manage the state’s affairs.

That’s all fair enough. I shall go on snarking at their folly and no doubt the other commentators will, too.

That said, there is a qualification to be noted. The folk over there have been wrong, and they’ve paid the price for it. Still, they are Americans, our fellow citizens, and the price has been a high one, with much loss and grief. We can reasonably hope that they’ve learned a lesson; and that their beautiful state, with help from the rest of us, will recover and take a more sensible path.

California is, after all, special. For those of us who grew up elsewhere — especially when the elsewhere was a foreign country and the growing up was fifty or sixty years ago — just the name “California” gives off deep romantic echoes. Here to play us out is one of those echoes.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week