THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

MANTRA THINKING 2: GET OUT OF THE STREAM OF NONSENSE | 2012-05-15

The respectable conservative mantra has always been "It's not about race."

John Derbyshire was just fired by National Review because, among other things, he warned whites against going to a place which is almost all black. He did not make on single statement in that article that could be factually disagreed with by anybody who read it.

It was a set of banned truths.

For example, people often slip into saying that police are not allowed to "profile." Then you watch a TV program the hero of which is a Police Profiler.

Racial profiling is outlawed, but not because it is not based on facts. A black person is six to twenty times as likely to have committed a crime than a white person.

This is the important point: The police are required to ignore that. Border patrols are required to insist that a person who is blond and has no accent is just as likely to be an illegal Mexican immigrant in El Paso as a brown person who speaks only Spanish.

This is for REAL, gang!

What is also for real is that any respectable conservative who repeats what I just said is fired.

Any respectable conservative who asks to for a definition of the word "racist" that he has just been called will be looking for a new job in this depression economy.

The same is true for any law enforcement officer.

Meanwhile, who mentions any of this?

Your Obedient Servant and no one else.

If commenters would stop worrying about how complicated Mantra Thinking is, they could concentrate on reading articles like this and learning that Mantra Thinking is ridding your mind of all the standard blocks. That is extremely difficult, but it is NOT complicated.

When someone says "racist," point out that what he means is that IN HIS OPINION something is racist.

This changes the dialogue. He is now demanding laws to punish, not Racism, but ANYTHING HE CHOOSES TO CALL racism. But nobody, I mean NOBODY but me, and now the White Rabbit, can be trusted to say that.

I just had an article about how the media get away with short statements in the midst of articles which are dead wrong, fatally wrong, but anyone outside of Bob and Company will talk about the whole article and try to put that totally false statement "in the context" of the article.

We are always seeing professional conservatives say, "It's not a matter of race." According to present wage-earning respectable conservatives, nothing is a matter of race.

Especially race.

SHARI IN GC | 2008-08-02

"cultures are self-sustaining when the races that gave rise to them are subtracted, which is like thinking lungs continue breathing after the person whose chest they're in dies." A great quote from someone calling himself Fred Scrooby.

-- Shari

YOUR GUN HELPS ME | 2002-08-17

A relative of mine was very anti-gun. She lives in an upscale area.

Of course it is a very anti-gun community. Wealthy communities in South Carolina tend to associate weapon-owning with the peasants.

I have worked in a prison. Prisoners know areas where there might be guns the way a farmer knows what the weather forecast is. They discuss where the guns are the way a stock trader talks about market trends.

So criminals knew about the lack of guns in my relative's community.

So one night a couple of thugs came right in my relative's front door -- the way they do in gunless Britain. They beat my relative and her husband up and took what they wanted.

She has a gun now.

My relative probably got attacked at least in part because it was well known that her community was gunless. People in that community bragged that they were too classy to have a gun ("like the trailer trash" being the implication).

I want to live in an area that is known less for its trendy attitudes and more for bristling with deadly weapons.

IRAQ AND VIETNAM: A MAN WITH A MEMORY TAKES A LOOK | 2004-04-10

"With Washington's tacit approval, on November 1, 1963, Diem (the President of South Vietnam) and his brother were captured and later killed. Three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated on the streets of Dallas."

by Professor Robert K. Brigham, Vassar College

http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/

There is no such thing as "tacit approval" of cold-blooded murder. This is especially true of the Chief Executive of the United States, whose job is to enforce the laws. If you know a murder is about to be committed and you condone it, you are a murderer.

So President Kennedy ordered the assassination of the Chief Executive of South Vietnam exactly three weeks before he himself was assassinated.

This sounds like some kind of expose of a conspiracy. It's not. It is a matter of public record.

The reason this sounds like the exposure of a conspiracy is because history that liberals and respectable conservatives agree to forget is usually wildly outrageous. That's why they agree to forget it.

Diem, not to mince words, was dictator of South Vietnam. In 1963 he was defeating the Communists with relatively little American help. But a bunch of Buddhists didn't like him and they burned themselves alive in the streets in protest. This upset the New York Times, which had front page pictures of the burning monks.

To a Man With A Memory, the situation in Iraq is a replay of Vietnam in 1963. Diem was successfully resisting the Communists, but liberals didn't approve of him.

In 1963, as in Iraq today, it was just a matter of time before we could pull out of the South Vietnam ruled by Diem.

Then the liberals decided Diem was a bad man and we killed him. You know the rest.