Instructions for Comment Registration

We are happy to announce Pragmatically Distributed is open for comment registration.

The primary objective of the comment registration system is to give regular commenters the liberty to, without moderation, interact with the site; smooth the flow of conversation; minimize the amount of time dedicated to moderation; and wave through one time comments from lurkers, or those who are new to the blog but who need to build up enough trust to be granted real-time commenting privileges.

What type of commenters will be given permission to post in real-time? Commenters whom we already know will initially be given preference. We expect the overwhelming number of those commenters with whom we are familiar to be granted un-moderated commenting privileges after their first comment.

As new readers inevitably appear, new commenters will follow. For newcomers, the odds of being granted un-moderated privileges increases as your comments increase in quality. A very strong first attempt might lead to you being given live comment permissions immediately. A good attempt may also be rewarded with real-time permissions. Regular commenters who do well but not spectacularly may be granted it if they build up a certain amount of confidence over time.

But there is no hard rule.

The ultimate decision of whether to allow a commenter to write without moderation depends on the judgement of the blog owners, therefore the quality of the discussion threads will be as much a statement about the quality of the owners as it will be of the commenters. We welcome this as we are confident in the soundness of our judgement and we anticipate our articles to be accompanied by excellent discussion threads. Anyone who today expects otherwise is invited to judge the result for themselves in the future.

The instructions to register your profile for commenting, either real-time or moderated, are as follows:

Comment on any thread where comments have not been closed and enter a screen name and email address (Until regular blogging begins on September 2nd, commenters may use this post to register themselves since this will be the only entry before then which is open to comments).

Your email address may be real or fake.

All first time comments, even those immediately given live comment permissions, will be sent to a moderation queue.

If the commenter is granted real-time privileges, they may comment without moderation on their next post as long as the same username and email is used.

The system is not case sensitive. It will recognize the username and email of an existing commenter as long as the characters and spacing are the same as before.

Please keep your original username and email written down somewhere in case you forget it. If you do have to enter a new username and/or email address, the system will treat you as a new commenter and you will have to wait for your comment to be approved in the moderation queue.

For moderated commenters, you should expect your comments will be approved in 1 day, though you may have to wait longer depending on how busy the moderators are.

Please be patient.

Moderated comments deemed inappropriate for whatever reason will not be published.

For commenters with real time privileges but who make inappropriate comments, they will usually be told to cease their behavior. If they continue on their way, the blog owners reserve the right to put the commentator’s future remarks under moderation or to ban them completely. The approach to remedy inappropriate behavior is entirely at the discretion of the owners.

General Commenting Rules:

So commenters know who they are responding to, please do not use ‘anonymous’ as a screen name. Unless the comment is exceptionally insightful, if you do so it is very likely your comment will be rejected completely. In the unlikely event that the quality of the comment is good enough to deserve approval, the commenter who made it will not be granted real-time commenting privileges, at least until they choose a different username.

It is unlikely any username similar to ‘anonymous’ (e.g.; ‘Anon’) will be approved, unless we are already familiar with someone who uses a similar screen name.

Rules Regarding Antisemitism

Antisemitism is defined by this blog as anyone obsessed with the idea Jews are an unassimilated minority which has significantly different ethnic, religious, or cultural objectives and political motives from those of other elite whites.

The position of this blog is that Jews are a highly assimilated white ethnic group that does not significantly differ in its positions or motivations from other elite whites, and that the nature of the points where there are differences are largely cosmetic.

This definition is in our view quite fair. It will cover real antisemites without covering individuals who are not do no meet this standard. Richard Nixon, for example, would not qualify under this definition because he had a negative opinion of almost everyone.

Moderated comments which meet this definition will be deleted.

Commenters with live commenting privileges will usually be given a warning to desist, with revocation of real time posting privileges or bannings retained as options usable at the discretion of the blog owners.

We are forced to take this position against antisemitism because the rationale for it is overwhelmingly derived from evidence that may been, according to researchers, falsified by Kevin MacDonald in his various works. Given the evidence MacDonald has been acting fraudulently is already rather substantial, we will not allow comments that are based on his arguments.

So that the reasoning behind our policy on antisemitism is justified as strongly as possible to newcomers who may not be convinced of the necessity of this approach, and so that we do not waste time constantly refuting points made by apologists for antisemites and the potentially bogus work of MacDonald, we outline various articles by researchers who have accumulated evidence of deception in MacDonald’s work.

Professor David Lieberman accuses MacDonald of ‘deliberate fraud’ when presenting a study MacDonald claimed showed Jews were highly authoritarian.

Lieberman points out that the study concluded Jews were tied with Anglicans and Unitarians as the least authoritarian of any measured religious group, no matter how the survey sample was filtered by the study’s authors.

Click to access lieberman.jewsRaceEmpire.pdf

Kevin MacDonald:

Altemeyer (1988, 2) defines “right-wing authoritarianism” as involving three central attributes: submission to legitimate authority; aggression toward individuals that is sanctioned by the authorities; adherence to social conventions. Clearly, individuals high on these traits would be ideal members of cohesive human group evolutionary strategies. Indeed, such attributes would define the ideal Jew in traditional societies: submissive to the kehilla authorities, strongly adherent to within – group social conventions such as the observance of Jewish religious law, and characterized by negative attitudes toward gentile society and culture seen as manifestations of an outgroup. Consistent with this formulation, high scorers on the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWA) tend to be highly religious; they tend to be the most orthodox members of their denomination; they believe in group cohesiveness, group loyalty, and identify strongly with ingroups

(Altemeyer 1994, 134; 1996, 84). Without question, traditional Jewish society and contemporary Jewish Orthodox and fundamentalist groups are highly authoritarian by any measure. Indeed, Rubenstein (1996) found that Orthodox Jews were higher on RWA than “traditional Jews,” and both of these groups were higher than secular Jews.59

Lieberman’s anlaysis of the study:

[A]re “very accepting” subjects equally authoritarian in all religions? Or do different denominations (as argued earlier) produce different levels of authoritarianism even among the strongly committed? If we examine just those subjects who answered the (0-5) “still accept” question with either a “4” or a “5” (that is, they indicated they “nearly completely” or “completely” accepted the religious beliefs taught them in childhood), who do you think were the most authoritarian of all these “true believers”? Fundamentalists (185.1) and Mennonites (185.3) among the students, Mennonites (202.1) and Fundamentalists (208.5) among the parents. The (rarer) United Church members, Anglicans, and Jews who were just as accepting of their religions scored about 25 points lower. True-believing Catholics and Lutherans lay somewhere in between. 61

So not only are Jews among the least authoritarian of religious groups, according to Altemeyer highly religious Jews are among the least authoritarian of the highly religious.

Yet in an awe-inspiring display of sheer gall (dare I say, ‘chutzpah’?), MacDonald takes information Altemeyer has collected from studies of subjects explicitly identified as “White North Americans” and applies it willy-nilly to the Jews whom Altemeyer, working from actual data rather than his own ‘suppositions,’ largely exempts from the discussion. The point is worth emphasizing: these highly ethnocentric, highly authoritarian, highly self-deceptive “people who are highly attracted to cohesive groups,” as MacDonald so guardedly puts it, whom MacDonald adduces as evidence for the self-deceptive tendencies of Jewish “hyper-collectivism,” were in fact members of MacDonald’s own ethnic group. I can think of no other way to describe this conduct than as an act of deliberate fraud.

Professor Barry Mehler accuses MacDonald of misrepresenting the history of Jews and immigration, while Lieberman accuses MacDonald of misquoting a work written by Holocaust revisionist David Irving.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_B._MacDonald#Academic_reception

For example, Dr. Barry Mehler, an educator at Ferris State University, noted that MacDonald had claimed that “…Jewish opposition to the 1921 and 1924 legislation (to limit immigration) was motivated less by a desire for higher levels of Jewish immigration than by opposition to the implicit theory that America should be dominated by individuals with northern and western European ancestry.” MacDonald based this on a dissertation entitled “American Jewry and United States immigration policy, 1881-1953” by Sheldon Morris Neuringer.[who?] Nueringer’s thesis posited that Jewish opposition in 1921 and 1924 to the anti-immigration legislation at the time was due more to it having the “taint of discrimination and anti-Semitism” as opposed to how it would limit Jewish immigration. Mehler stated “It seems to me Mr. MacDonald is misrepresenting Mr. Neuringer in this case and I posted my query hoping that a historian familiar with the literature might have a judgment on MacDonald’s use of the historical data.” [35]

[…]

In 2001, David Lieberman, a Holocaust researcher at Brandeis University, wrote a paper entitled Scholarship as an Exercise in Rhetorical Strategy: A Case Study of Kevin MacDonald’s Research Techniques, where he noted how one of MacDonald’s sources, author Jaff Schatz, objected to how MacDonald used his writings to further his premise that Jewish self-identity validates anti-Semitic sentiments and actions. “At issue, however, is not the quality of Schatz’s research, but MacDonald’s use of it, a discussion that relies less on topical expertise than on a willingness to conduct close comparative readings”, Lieberman wrote. Lieberman accused MacDonald of dishonestly made up lines from the work of British Holocaust denier David Irving. Citing Irving’s Uprising, which was published in 1981 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hungary’s failed anti-Communist revolution in 1956, MacDonald asserted in the Culture of Critique:

“The domination of the Hungarian communist Jewish bureaucracy thus appears to have had overtones of sexual and reproductive domination of gentiles in which Jewish males were able to have disproportionate sexual access to gentile females.”

Lieberman, who noted that MacDonald is not a historian, debunked those assertions, concluding, “(T)he passage offers not a shred of evidence that, as MacDonald would have it, “Jewish males enjoyed disproportionate sexual access to gentile females.”[38]

On page 199 of MacDonald’s Culture of Critique, MacDonald seems to insinuate the Frankfurt School influenced the theories of French existentialist and leftist radical professor Michel Foucault. In the actual interview, which seemingly contradicts MacDonald, Foucault states he and other French intellectuals were not aware even of the existence of the Frankfurt School until later and that Foucault himself had developed a ‘very similar’ mode of thinking before knowing of them:

http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2013/07/foucault-and-frankfurt-school.html

Now, the striking thing is that France knew absolutely nothing – or only vaguely, only very indirectly – about the current of Weberian thought. Critical Theory was hardly known in France and the Frankfurt School was practically unheard of. This, by the way, raises a minor historical problem which fascinates me and which I have not been able to resolve at all. It is common knowledge that many representatives of the Frankfurt School came to Paris in 1935, seeking refuge, and left very hastily, sickened presumably – some even said as much – but saddened anyhow not to have found more of an echo. Then came 1940, but they had already left for England and the U.S., where they were actually much better received. The understanding that might have been established between the Frankfurt School and French philosophical thought – by way of the history of science and therefore the question of the history of rationality – never occurred. And when I was a student, I can assure you that I never once heard the name of the Frankfurt School mentioned by any of my professors.

FOUCAULT: Now, obviously, if I had been familiar with the Frankfurt School, if I had been aware of it at the time, I would not have said a number of stupid things that I did say and I would have avoided many of the detours which I made while trying to pursue my own humble path – when, meanwhile, avenues had been opened up by the Frankfurt School. It is a strange case of non-penetration between two very similar types of thinking which is explained, perhaps, by that very similarity. Nothing hides the fact of a problem in common better than two similar ways of approaching it.

Anthropologist Peter Frost (who does not mention MacDonald’s work in his entry on Franz Boas) describes Franz Boas as a moderate environmentalist, this analysis contradicts how extreme was Boas’ environmentalism as has often been portrayed by MacDonald (whom, as mentioned before, is not mentioned by Frost in Frost’s article).

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-franz-boas-you-never-knew.html