From Comicmix via Andrew Sullivan:
"My favorite comic book superhero is Baruch Wane, otherwise known as Batman, in The Batman Chronicles. "The Berlin Batman," #11 in the series by Paul Pope, details Batman's attempts to rescue the confiscated works of persecuted Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, from Nazi Party hands.I am impressed with the unabashed uber-dorkiness of Ron Paul. Classic comic books and the Austrian school of economics. Subjects I know nothing about, except that they're dorky.
“Batman's assistant Robin writes in the memoirs, "[Mises] was an advocate of individual liberty, free speech, and free thinking... and so, should I add, the Berlin Batman." Batman, a Jew in hiding in Nazi Austria, was willing to risk his life for the sake of the promulgation of freedom, and I find this to be super-heroic."
(Oh, and I hope this sends a message to the neo-Nazis who support Ron Paul and to the people who claim that Dr. Paul is a neo-Nazi sympathizer that Dr. Paul isn't a Nazi-lover. KTHXBI.)
10 comments:
sorry, but i don't buy this as evidence that ron paul is just a big 'ole anti-racist dork anymore that i have to believe dubya is a good christian or even gives a shit about christian values just because he says his favorite philosopher is jesus christ. i do however, whole-heartedly believe that politicians pander and lie all the time.
plenty of racists nearly idolize black sports stars. they still drop the n-bomb all the time, just not in reference to the members of their favorite football and basketball teams.
this is the post i'd have written if i had time to do it before this guy did. i believe that paul is a big 'ole lying scumbag. reading his political platform is a real education in how to speak to racists without using the n-word: talk about states rights, say that the government is the cause of racism at worst, or, at best, is incapable of dealing with it because racism is a matter of the heart, blah blah blah.
translation: civil rights legislation arouses racism by forcing dominant groups to treat minority groups equally in housing, jobs and education opportunity. if the government got out of this business of protecting the civil rights of vulnerable groups of citizens, things would so much better.
um.... yeah. whatever.
by the way, you do realize that andrew sullivan is on record as a believer in the 'science' of The Bell Curve. in fact, he said, "The notion that there might be resilient ethnic differences in intelligence is not, we believe, an inherently racist belief." source here. he thinks he's oh so daring to express 'unpopular truths.'
eh the only thing i've picked up from andrew sullivan regarding the bell curve is that he opens up the possibility that race, iq and genetics may be correlated. he doesn't say that they ARE correlated - he just thinks we don't have enough evidence to make a definitive statement about the matter, and to say one way or another, without enough evidence, is wrong. and not to do research into the matter because we're afraid of what we might find is a bad reason not to do such research.
i would be against funding such research, because i can think of a million other things that geneticists should be turning their attention to, such as debilitating diseases with a strong genetic correlation (alzheimer's, parkinson's, cancer, schizophrenia, cystic fibrosis, etc.). i also think there are too many "soft" factors that come into play when it comes to race and IQ, and i don't think we will ever find any solid answers on that matter.
and of course he introduced the 'debate' when he was editor of The New Republic by devoting an entire issue to The Bell Curve. this article says it all: "Nearly all the research that Murray and Herrnstein relied on for their central claims about race and IQ was funded by the Pioneer Fund, described by the London Sunday Telegraph (3/12/89) as a 'neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far right in American politics.' The fund's mission is to promote eugenics, a philosophy that maintains that 'genetically unfit' individuals or races are a threat to society."
andrew sullivan wants to make this tripe respectable. if he were merely taking a scholarly approach to the subject and embarking on an inquiry with a dispassionate scientific interest, he certainly didn't need to elevate The Bell Curve as a reasonable entry into the subject.
racists and sexists just love to dress up their prejudices with pseudo-scientific justifications.
if andrew sullivan is, in fact, intending to push a racist agenda, which somehow puts his demographic at the top of the IQ heap, it makes no sense that he cited to this article in this post recently...
3. Whitey does not come out on top.
If you came here looking for material for your Aryan supremacy Web site, sorry. Stratifying the world by racial IQ will leave your volk in the dust. You might want to think about marrying a nice Jewish girl from Hong Kong. Or maybe reconsider that whole stratification idea.
in any event, that blurb refers to this (sorry, can't find the original, so going to wikipedia):
"Attempted world-wide compilations by Herrnstein and Murray, authors of The Bell Curve, Richard Lynn and Rushton of average IQ by race generally place Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians at the top, followed by Whites, Arabs and Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans and Australian Aboriginals."
(if the neo-nazi white supremacist pioneer fund funded the research behind the bell curve, what a deliciously ironic result... heh heh heh)
anyway, what does andrew sullivan have to gain by going there? knowing the results, if andrew sullivan truly had a white supremacist agenda, wouldn't he be the first to suppress or debunk these "findings"?
anyway, now that we've strayed from the original topic, i'm going to stray some more.
here's a book written by stephen jay gould, who was pretty much considered a rock star: the mismeasure of man. "bell curve" antidote!
andrew sullivan is not a white supremacist, but that's not the accusation i made. i made the accusation that he is a racist. while there is certainly overlap between white supremacist and racist ideology, it would be a mistake to treat the two as if they were interchangeable.
i think he doesn't necessarily subscribe to the idea that white people are supreme in intelligence, but rather than white people are more intelligent than black people, which is the claim made in The Bell Curve that made such a large number of racists cream their pants with joy.
okay, point taken. however, when someone is a racist there is an inference that such a person believes other races to be inferior for some reason or another and thus, he believes his own race to be superior.
maybe he's a "racialist"? (of course, there is no question that some people use racialism to hide their racist beliefs.)
i don't think that ron paul sees himself as pro-nazi. but i do think that he's made intentional appeals to racists.
there's no contradiction at all. plenty of southerners who were committed to jim crow fought in WW2. they did not see themselves as pro-nazi just because they wanted to keep blacks "in their place" at home.
sorry to interrupt the great andy sullivan debate...
andrew sullivan, more than anything i think, is excitable.
Post a Comment