#1 Too white
At the start of summer, my friend and next-door neighbor saw me shirtless in the back yard and shielded his eyes, joking that my skin was too white. All in good fun. (As it turns out, I do start out pretty white, but because of my Italian half, I end up turning a dark olive-brown if you leave me in the sun long enough.)
Later on, it occurred to me that this is a common trope—that people often say that one’s skin is too white, and that one should “get a tan.” (I shudder with horror when I think of all the people lying in cancer coffins tanning beds.)
And then it occurred to me that if you were to say that any other cohort’s skin color is not acceptable as it is, it would be considered terribly racist.
Then it occurred to me that my wife’s skin doesn’t tan at all—it just freckles, and her skin is beautiful.
Then it occurred to me that I have seen people—especially redheads—with skin like a porcelain teacup, and they too look beautiful just as they are.
Then it occurred to me that in certain third-world countries the situation is reversed, and lighter skin is deemed to be more desirable.
Then it occurred to me that I am so completely sick of being made to think and talk about race and skin color. It’s banal. It’s evil. It’s the banality of evil.
For the love of God, enough already. No one is too light or too dark or too anything. Beauty is everywhere.
#2 Academic frauds
I have recently become aware that there is a serious crisis in academic science and research. Analysis has been done and the conclusions are disturbing in the extreme. Many if not most study results are unreplicable. Departments are captured ideologically, or by corporations, or government interests, or all three at once. The bottom line, apparently, is that we cannot trust anything coming from “experts”—at least not until a claim has been throughly checked and replicated. (Though even the concept of ‘peer review’ is seriously degraded now.)
Last week, Tom Woods reported on one such case:
Last month they nailed a criminology professor here in my state, at Florida State University, for faking the data in numerous academic studies.
Eric Stewart was exposed when his graduate student, Justin Pickett, brought the faulty data to light, and in 2020 an investigation commenced.
Following the investigation, Stewart was dismissed for "extreme negligence" and "incompetence."
Before his dismissal, Stewart knew how to handle accusations like this: bring race into it, and make a reference to lynching. He said Pickett had "essentially lynched me and my academic character."
Of course.
Pickett said he realized something was wrong when the two worked on a paper investigating whether the public insisted on longer sentences for blacks and Hispanics as their share of the population grew. They didn't, it turns out, but Stewart massaged the numbers to make it look as if they did.
At least eight major studies, all of which contributed to the "systemic racism" narrative, have been formally retracted.
And yet, Stewart's colleagues believed what they wanted to believe. They didn't look closely into Stewart's work, since it said what they wanted to hear.
How else can we explain that someone like this served as vice president of the American Society of Criminology, and received the organization's "distinguished criminologist" honor?
Or that the National Institute of Justice made him a WEB DuBois fellow?
Or the millions of dollars in grant money he received?
Never accept at face value anything that comes from experts, no matter how accepted by the mainstream it is, until this gets sorted out. Chances are, that sorting process will take a generation at least. Sadly.
#3 Figments
It occurred to me the other day to wonder,
What if I am a figment of my own imagination?
Descartes believed he had proved his own existence when he said, “I think, therefore I am.”
Really, René…are you sure? What if we just think we exist?
We focus on different shades of skin at the expense of our shared humanity. Enough already!