Geoff's Blog

I bumped into a particularly annoying, fifty-something Scottish-Canadian liberal idiot for the first time at a bar just north of the University of Toronto in December of 2008.

To tell the story backwards, while eating an early veggie-burger dinner on a different afternoon early in the new year, I was forced to listen for a good three-quarters of an hour to the same liberal moron, in the same near-empty bar, spouting off about politics. One of the things he brought up then, as I was trying not to listen, was that it bugged him when hockey players tried to say that the only thing you needed in order to succeed in basketball was to be tall, not to be an athlete as such.

Why on earth would that bother him? You need to read the subtext: It bugged him when uneducated whites didn’t give credit to blacks for everything they’ve accomplished.

So, on the earlier evening in December, the same Ayers-wanna-be (he was affiliated with the U of T in some way, to the point of having to listen to dissertations) told me a story about being in a bar back in Scotland. Three teenage girls from England were sitting at a table there, as tourists, and one of the “real men” got it into his head, presumably after consuming some amount of scotch, to berate them for everything England had ever done wrong to Scotland, to the verge of physically assaulting the defenseless girls.

So, to his credit, the Ayers-guy went over and intervened.

My response was basically: What kind of a pathetic dumbfuck needs to threaten teenage girls, to feel like a man? So the academic mentioned something (probably) about the history of England and Scotland; and then I said, “Yeah, but those girls had nothing to do with that! They weren’t even born when that happened!”

I’ve puzzled off-and-on since then about his noncommital response to that obvious point. But now it finally clicked: In his liberal-academic worldview, in principle, the Angry Scot was right to hold those English girls responsible for the actions of distant ancestors they never even knew. The A.S. may have gone overboard in threatening violence on them, but that didn’t negate the underlying identity politics.

Identity politics is political action to advance the interests of members of a group whose members perceive themselves to be oppressed by virtue of a shared and marginalized identity (such as race, ethnicity, religion [which can, in principle, include Christianity], gender, and sexual orientation). This method of running politics is often associated with Mass hypnose and/or Victim complex.

Of course, in the present case, since this liberal academic was a true (white male) Scotsman, he failed to realize that the gender of the girls should have trumped their nationality, and thus have provided them “preferred victim” status against a white male aggressor. He was also surely on “Scotland’s side” against ‘er Majesty’s England, with that further skewing his perspective on the “guilt” of those girls and their ancestors in the history of his country. That, of course, is the problem with seeing the world through “patriarchal, racist, white male eyes.” But at least he’s trying….

Now, when even fat people have recently cottoned on to the idea that identity politics is the quickest way toward getting perks and faux respect for your in-group, it’s obvious that such politics are not the exclusive province of the Left. And I think it’s equally obvious that “Christian” is a political identity too, which can and does bring unfair/discriminatory treatment onto its adherents; and that such voluntary religious identification is at least as strong for the people who self-identify in that way, as skin color or sexual orientation or ability/disabilities are for other groups.

The difference is just that Christians used to be able to carry the vote without explicitly considering themselves to be an identity-group, with a shared system of beliefs: They were just the status quo, and could get what they wanted by the power of economy and democracy rather than by whining. But now, although everyone else can claim identity in some persecuted in-group, white males (and especially non-obese, white, heterosexual Christian males) would just be mocked and shouted down mercilessly if they tried the same thing … even though they/we are the one group which is truly discriminated against, in Affirmative Action (cf. Ricci, the NY Senate), etc.

When you hear Christians talking about a “War on Christmas” (whether they have a valid point or not in that regard) it’s obvious that they’d like to be able to claim the same “persecuted minority” identity-group status as the red, yellow, brown, black, gay, female, fat, retarded and disabled people can … it’s just that no one outside of their own group will take them seriously if they try to do that.

Of course, there’s also a greater emphasis on personal responsibility among conservatives than among liberals, which would work against identity politics on the political Right just as the greater conservative tendency for conformity (and consequent in-grouping) works in favor of it. Yet Christianity started off two thousand years ago as a genuinely persecuted radical group, and is now a sometimes-persecuted (cf. Stephen Boissoin) conservative group. And if it would work for Christians to say, today, “You have to respect our beliefs [including our dogma-sanctioned homophobia and sexism] or we’ll have you charged with hatecrimes,” the bulk of them would surely do it, with no regard at all for free speech. Why? Simply because that approach works so well toward getting what you want, if only you can get away with it. (Muslims are incredibly conservative, by any measure; yet they’ve led the hatespeech charges in Canada. So, if you think that conservatives are less likely to indulge in identity politics … oy, think again. Conservative Christians aren’t allowed to play that game, but conservatives from all other religions are allowed to, and have ample reason to want to disallow others from blaspheming their respective faiths, by any means necessary.)

The social rewards for responsibility, by contrast, are increasingly meager, to the point where, in general, only people who can’t qualify for “persecuted victim group” status (e.g., straight white males) would still place any value at all on it. As every growing child knows, if you can get what you want by complaining and blaming others, why would you accept responsibility and work for it instead? Why would you do it the hard way?

Note further how that dynamic, by inadvertently hobbling the character and work ethic of our women/minorities and inculcating in them a culture of entitlement, actually increases the differential in character and competence between straight white males, and the rest of the world. So, in any situation where we’re not being discriminated against by “hire a minority/immigrant” laws—e.g., in owning one’s own small business or consultancy, and keeping it small enough that you’re not subject to governmental regulations with regard to hiring brown and black people who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing—us straight male whiteys will actually do even better, relative to those around us, than we would if they were being educated/trained properly. Unless, you know, they start taxing us based on skin color, with higher rates for whites; or killing off the white farmers in North America, to give the land back to the “real” North Americans we “stole” it from….

Conversely, the more our educational system gets dumbed down so that even the blacks and wetbacks can “succeed” in it; and the more incompetent minorities and Native Americans are hired for jobs they don’t have the brains or the work ethic to do, to make things “fair”; and the more we import middling East Indians and stereotypically hard-working but uncreative Asians who “cannot think independently or creatively, and cannot solve practical problems”—the two Chinese database administrators I’ve worked with were both utterly hopeless, even aside from the language barrier—the greater the value of legitimately skilled professionals will be (especially in I.T.), for being able to kick ass in solving difficult technical problems, and building stuff that actually works.

Because at the end of the day, you can’t smoothtalk or legislate or whinge your way through science and engineering: All you can do is invest the time, energy and brainpower until the theories mesh with reality, and the technology works the way it’s supposed to. And:

The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.

Five Antonio Salieris won’t produce Mozart’s Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years….

The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time.

So, good luck with hitting those “high notes,” my pretty “persecuted minorities.” You’re gonna need it….

See also: Original Identity Politics, Christian Identity Politics, Atheist Identity Politics