Your comment got eaten up by my spam filter for some reason so I never got to respond to it. I have some ideas about blacks, genetics and the IQ issue and plan to post on it sometime soon. I do think it’s something people should discuss openly and honestly, but in this current climate where everyone is afraid to discuss things that may hurt another person’s feelings it’s not easy.

Tschafer – I used to think being a black conservative was the gutsiest thing you could do too, but now I think it’s being anti Dark Knight.

J5 – I totally get the double life thing.

Usually Lurking – Blacks are much more socially conservative than white liberals, even though they always vote Democrat. The problem is, even though they are socially conservative, they are also very economically into quasi-socialist policies. This is the stumbling block that keeps many of them from voting conservative. Reducing the welfare state, getting rid of affirmative action and hiring quotas and diversity initiatives or minority set-asides, they have mental blocks with understanding how many of these things, although it seems counterintuitive, actually hurt blacks more than help them.

B and B – You know what’s even stranger? After a few days they seem to have all come back! I don’t know, was that a one-day boycott or something? Did they plan to leave for good but just couldn’t stay away from my awesomeness? Who knows?

JY – I actually get a lot of first time visitors who don’t agree with me, but they tend to email me more than comment. The problem is they usually end up saying stuff like “At first I disagreed with you but by the end of the piece I could see where you were coming from.” The Dark Knight post was fun because people really came out of the woodwork to attack that one, lots of new first-time commenters. I enjoyed that comments section.

One of the more interesting black intellectuals to come up recently is Roland Fryer at Harvard. He actually had this to say on the genetics controversy:

”I want to have an honest discussion about race in a time and a place where I don’t think we can. Blacks and whites are both to blame. As soon as you say something like, ‘Well, could the black-white test-score gap be genetics?’ everybody gets tensed up. But why shouldn’t that be on the table?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03.....wanted=all

We need to have this openly investigated and discussed.

Thursdays last blog post..Publication

This isn’t just “killing” Blacks, but everyone. As far as I can tell, anyone that can (basically, anyone that isn’t a White, Heterosexual Male) is trying to be a part of the victim class. And this causes one huge problem, there is only so much sympathy to go around. So, you get inflation.

Gay men, Fat Women (just check out BfdBlog.com. Trust me, they view themselves as victims), Hispanics, Artists…everyone is a victim.

Chris Rock once said in an interview that African Americans were once the most sympathized race (say, in the late 60′s, 70′s and part of the 80′s) but that, that was mostly gone now.

And he is right, very few people, Blacks included, sympathize when they see some fatherless family living in the ghetto.

I personally think that over the next few generations will care less and less about the “victims” and start being more openly selfish in our politics. Less need for euphemisms like “family values” or “safety nets” and more calls for “strict policing” and “more quotas”. Personally, I think that will be a good thing. The sooner that we are honest with one another, the sooner we can do something about it.

Anyway, great post.

oh, one last thing. At least according to a recent Atlantic Monthly article, there are a lot more conservative Blacks than you might think. At least the ones attending the “secret” Bill Cosby lectures are.

(1) thank you for recognizing the MASSIVE differences between sweden and suomi (i don’t like to call it “finland”, because, irony of ironies, that’s its swedish name).
in the finnish language, the word for “swede” is basically equivalent to “homo”; on the other hand, those dastardly ex-soviets to the east are regarded as all colors and sizes of other bad stuff, but never gay.

(1a) actually, the suomalaiset (native finns) are pretty much universally thought not to be descended from vikings, or from any other anglo-saxon people for that matter. they are thought to be descended from other finno-ugric peoples (think hungarians and estonians) who migrated northward into the peninsula.

(2) i admittedly ignored the dark knight post, partly because of my severe attention deficit (sorry, what was that again?), but mostly because i just don’t watch movies.
butbutbut – a 25% casualty rate? that’s harsh.
must … stick … to … topic … of … blog.

(3) sowell et al should co-opt al gore’s buzzword of “inconvenient truth” for their own writing, to which it is much, much more apropos.

(4) Tschafer above is absolutely correct.
as you know, i am also a social conservative (and an extremely unlikely defender of high culture), a fact that tends to erect huge walls of isolation between me and the milieu in which i live and work – to the point where i have at least two completely distinct lives, one in which i share ethnic, childhood, and family connections with others, and the other, completely disjoint one in which i share intellectual connections and indulge my more, ahem, highbrow tastes.
and almost certainly never shall the twain meet.

(4a) wow, shit, that was all one sentence. just as you can’t seem to write short posts, i can’t seem to write short sentences.

(5) enjoy your trip buddy.

In other news, I was recently converted by:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com

Couldn’t tell you how surprised I was by that, but moving from libertarian to conservative was a relatively small jump.