true that. it’s like a werhmacht officer after the war. you have a decent standard of living but have to work in an office somewhere.
It’s easier to be a black sheep than an Uncle Tom.
Tea Party Racism?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1CLPhz0DHM
i’m asian and libertarian. before i found ron paul i was, sadly, a conservative warmongerer.
as far as race is concerned, I agree. as far as sex is concerned, I have a feeling inclinations towards liberty (and away from centralized violence) will be held mostly by men.
the most baffling thing I’ve seen is how homosexuals shy away from individualism or libertarianism and cling to democracy. one would expect them to realize that mob rule dictating individuals’ private lives is a bad thing. but I suppose giving up hope in the power to coerce people into acceptance is difficult.
Same with me, Jonan. Though I’m half and I find many who think I’m either asian or white -reminds me of sancho and the wine tasting from don quixote.
I too was an imperialist.
PS: how do we quote?
OF COURSE IQ in Africa is lower than in developped countries, simply because there’s no school in there ! Intelligence and logic depend on your education, social conditions etc.
If you’re starving, in a small village in Africa, you’ve never been to school and you believe that trees have soul because the local shaman told you so, you don’t have an alphabet nor numbers, the only thing your tribe know is how to build a house from dirt and to make arrows with stones, your IQ will be lower than the one of people in Europe or the USA, where 99% of people go to school until they’re 15…
And to answer the OP, I think Libertarian movements don’t have much black/yellow or women activists/followers for social reasons. Any poor - intellectualy and financialy - minorities, even white men, who don’t know anybody who’s interested in politics or philosophy, are raised in a family where nobody read, nobody is cultivated, everybody stopped school at 14, where the parents teach their children bad values (such as “national security is very important, we have to tax the richest to live a better life”) and I could go on and on to describe this kind of family, tend no to be libertarians simply because they don’t know what it is and have no interests in politics/economics/philosophy(/litterature/anything intellectual).
Of course this doesn’t mean if you’re a black woman born in a poor suburds you MUST be like that. But if you’re never teached to think, to be open minded, to be interested in intellectual stuff when you’re a kid, there’s very low chances that when you’re an adult (or a teenager) you start all of a sudden to think “Hey, politics is cool, I’m gonna read Mises.org !”
And there’s also the fact that people tend to imitate people they look like I guess. Women imitate other women. And it’s abnormal in our societies to be a girl who is interested in politics and economics, women are taught not to do politics but rather stay at home and clean the house. And it’s abnormal in very poor (and well, not very… bright) milieu to be interested in books, they think it’s very weird to even read books, because that’s something too difficult/boring/useless. So for one that come from that kind of milieu (damn what is the english word for milieu ?), it’s hard to just say “fuck them all I’m going to do “intellectual” stuff anyway !”…
This may sounds “democrat” or “marxist” (lol), but that’s the way I think it works 
And again that doesn’t mean that someone badly raised by his parents and his entourage can’t become a libertarian, it just mean we have to find a way to REACH these guys (and girls :)) and make them discover austrian way of thinking before it’s too late - ie. before they’re grown adult, when they’re younger it’s easier to convince people to think correclty than when they’re grown idiots
EDIT : Someone else said "Anarchocapitalism is correlated with intelligence. Well I think it’s true, you can’t be a true anarchocapitalist (which means having read books about it and spent some times thinking about it etc.) without being intelligent. But that’s true for any other political movement, I think you can’t be a marxist without being “intelligent”, even if you use your intelligence in a bad way (almost every major marxist figures, if not all, were intellectuals). But where does intelligence come from ? It comes from education you get from your parents, from school, from your parent’s friends, from your own friends, from the movies you’ve watched, the books you’ve read, etc.
take any kid and put him in an impoverished single-parent home in a neighborhood and culture that equates academic motivation to betraying a race and you’ll be greatly increasing the chances of a lower IQ (not that IQ is a great test for intelligence).
I imagine genetics will set a parameter for your intelligence. your upbringing will determine where you fall within that parameter.
^You should read the article. Its not written by some crackpot racists. It is very thurough, and considers virtually all possible objections.
For instance, no educational program has ever been able to bridge the IQ gap between whites and blacks by over 1/3rd. Socioeconomic status is also accounted for.
Everyone’s ready to admit that blacks make disproportionately good athletes, so why can’t blacks be disproportionately bad at something else? Is it because the equality argument only gets used when it helps minorities? I don’t see many people clamoring for gender equality in our prisons…
or perhaps figuring out the reasons for an increased presence of minorities in prisons and such isn’t very difficult and does not require too much intellectual time. despite the differences held concerning the more esoteric lines of Austrian, libertarian, and Anarcho-capitalist thought…I would think just about all of us would quickly be able to point to the war on drugs, municipal zoning laws, johnson’s great society, public education, etc. as the culprit and realize the solution.
never have I seen so many just-so theories in one place (and I studied psychology).
"^You should read the article. Its not written by some crackpot racists. It is very thurough, and considers virtually all possible objections.
For instance, no educational program has ever been able to bridge the IQ gap between whites and blacks by over 1/3rd. Socioeconomic status is also accounted for.
Everyone’s ready to admit that blacks make disproportionately good athletes, so why can’t blacks be disproportionately bad at something else? Is it because the equality argument only gets used when it helps minorities? I don’t see many people clamoring for gender equality in our prisons…"
I suspect part of the reason might be so vehemently rejected is that people see it as something racist interventionists and imperialists will jump onto in order to promote and justify all kinds of violence and eugeneics against “minorities”(I always find it strange to use the word considering “whites” by far are the minority in this world). I don’t believe this to be a motivating factor for Hoppe or anyone else on this forum, though I must admit I have some anxieties about this myself, being brown skinned; it’s kind of strange being told it’s a scientific fact that you’re dumber, even statistically speaking… No doubt such things may increase as the people in the UK continue to scapegoat immigrants for all the problems they and their elected representatives are causing themselves.
Also, I do have some doubts as other posters mentioned as to whether other variables are ot being taken into account. As Misesians we all acknowledge we can’t produce certainties about the results of human conduct in the world entirely deterministically, equally we cannot interpret surveyed data on something as complex as intelligence(which is somehow reduced to an objective number) et ceteris paribus, and with as much certainty as various other “harder” parts of modern science.
On top of this, do you think such studies could also justify racial polylogism. E.g. arguments along the lines of “those blacks are so dumb! They don’t even understand property rights, bla bla”, and hence a rationale for treating them like animals etc.
Maybe black are better at athletism because they have to run 50km a day to reach school ?
I remember an ethiopian olympic champion being interviewed and saying that when he was a kid, he only wanted to go to school. But his school was very far, so he had to run. He did it until his 16 and then ran away from civil war with his family. He ended up doing athletics seriously and was ultra-good at it because he trained all his life.
And in France (where I live), there are a lot of good soocer players who are sons of african/arabs immigrants. They’re good at it because as they’re kids, they play football all day long in their suburbs ! (so it’s cultural, not genetical)
Quote by Simon Lote: :I was giving my two cents on the actual thread question of why libertarians are just a (small) bunch of white guys? The short answer is that because it appeals to their interests and nobody elses."
This isn’t an answer of any type at all. Its just the answer that you like. You seem to have quite a lot of trouble around the concept of non-whites accepting libertarian ideas- dismissing people who exist like me as “a few token non-whites”. Drop the ego trip man.
For fun, a bit more amateur anthropology(ignoring the bull**** on affirmative action):
Not that I find arbitrary classification of colder to tropical climes, as being “tougher” evolutionary environments requiring greater ingenuity by Hoppe and others as being any more compelling.
Quote bySnowflake: “Everyone’s ready to admit that blacks make disproportionately good athletes, so why can’t blacks be disproportionately bad at something else?”
Lol because even that is nonsense. I love it when people say “oh these black people are just naturally good at basketball they’re just born that way”. Oh yeah it has NOTHING to do with the fact that most black kids growing up in inner cities are PLAYING basketball every single day, running, jumping, and sweating hard. Maybe if you do that enough your body gets a bit athletic? Yes, just take away all that hard work that was put into it- and classify it as a “gift”. Game, set, and match we’re done.
Clinging to these ideas that a certain type of people are better than others at something…what’s the point? To say that its better to hire a group of white guys to perform a task than to hire a group of black guys and ignore the actual abilities of the individuals in those groups? Because its fun to make generalizations? Because individual effort that doesn’t match up with some stats can be more easily ignored and thrown in the category of “anomalies that happen once in a hundred years?” . I don’t get it.
Edit: lol oops didn’t see how some people above kinda already addressed the same points i made. . I aPoLoGiZe 4 mY lOw IQ
I agree that we’ll have to actually figure out how the human mind works before we have an answer to this question, but the wikipedia article really does consider virtually every possible objection and variable. I was surprised how complete the studies are.
One interesting thing is that people who’s genomes are mixed between races have, average between the averages of the pure races’. This would seem to account for sociological factors, since we all know that if you’re half black, you’re “black”. See Obama.
Considering that we find it abhorrent to say that braindead or retarded people can be treated like animals, I think there’s enough emotional push to at least treat these people as ends in themselves, even if we have to violate their libertarian rights (force them to eat, etc). Even if a group of people were too stupid to conceptualize property rights, it would only validate doing the bare minimum to defend yourself from them. You wouldn’t actually be able to go out and enslave them like animals.
Speaking of animals, I would like to see less animal slavery. If we ever develop a device that allows the thoughts of animals to be translated into english, there would probably be a lot of debate about animal vs human rights, even if a dog can only say “that hurts”.
The market will bear out whether you are right or not, don’t pretend you have the answer. If someones hiring practice is hiring all blacks and they outcompete someone who hiring practice is hiring all whites, guess what, that is the only proof that matters. I purposely reversed what most people would say because I can tell you sensative about it.
I think you are also reversing proximate cause with absolute cause. So black kids play basketball more as youths than whites and this could be a theory about why the trend exists in the nba. Ok lets grant that. Why do more black kids play basketball?
“So black kids play basketball more as youths than whites and this could be a theory about why the trend exists in the nba. Ok lets grant that. Why do more black kids play basketball?”
Because they’re black and it’s written in their DNA that they do !
More seriously, that’s because it’s something cultural, just as much as “why girls wear skirts ?”. Well because other girls do so and they’re taught to do it. When they watch TV, look at adverts, or look at womens in the street, they inconsciously learn how to “be a woman”, how to look like a woman.
Same thing for blacks kids who play basketball. They play it because a lot of black people do so, because they’re taught to do it etc… it works with a lot of things, playing jazz for exemple, or heavy metal. I, don’t know any black guy who like metal. But black american playing jazz ? Well, look at lists of the best jazz album of all time : almost every jazz musician is black
Oh and by the way, in the middle ages, a lot of jews were bankers and a huge part (I think the majority of them) of bankers were jew. Is that because they’re born greedy, that it’s written in their DNA that they want money ? No, that’s because banking was considered a bad thing by western societies, and since jews were already considered “evil”, they either became bankers or starve to death basically, because nobody wanted them to have another job. And it continued until now : sons of bankers became bankers etc…