Shorter Deep Thought: November 22, 2006
Posted by Evil Bender in bigotry, language and lit, wingnuts.trackback
He writes: “I visited a number of quiver full sites online. You can see many of them for yourself and a search can find you more. I searched pretty carefully and I found that these sites have quite a bit in common; they tend to advocate large families (no surprise), they love kids (no surprise), and they don’t talk about race. At all.”
From Deep Thought’s blog. Unfortunately for him, not talking about race doesn’t keep one from being a racist. If you read the post, you’ll notice he later mentions talk of a “subtext” of race suicide, which he rejects. But his “evidence” is that the quiverfull movement <I>says</I> they aren’t racist, but the left, who points out that the lilly-white complexions of the movement’s “big guns” and their big-families-as-advancing-a-religious-and-cultural-worldview, is in fact projecting it’s values upon the right.
Memo to the right: not mentioning race or claiming not to be racist doesn’t make it so. Lots of White Supremicists do the same thing. But trying to advance your worldview by convincing those who share it to have as many kids as possible is at very least ethnocentric in the extreme, especially when that worldview is an odd mix of Christianity, manifest destiny, and patriarchy. Okay, maybe that mix is exactly what I would expect from American Christians.
But as Amanda originally pointed out (in claims which of course Deep Thought chooses to ignore), the quiverfulls may not be explicitly advancing a supremacist agenda, but their rhetoric is unmistakable.
nstead of explicitly describing the process as breeding an army to wipe out other people, it’s just implicit in the rhetoric. Digby sent me this interview with Mark Steyn in Right Wing News and you see the hallmarks of intellectualizing this nonsense. Instead of explicitly pointing to white Americans and saying we need to breed more, the “Europeans” are invoked and you an guess that Steyn means the Germans more than the Turks here. However, Steyn openly sympathizes with European neo-Nazi movements, which is a backdoor way of avoiding endorsing the skinheads and the KKK here.
Meanwhile, Deep Thought is going off the deep end, suggesting that Planned Parenthood’s evil plan to let poor and oppressed groups make thier own choices about reproduction is somehow racist. So, white people having lots of kids to advance their worldview = not racist, but people of color having choices about their reproduction = racist.
Fucking brilliant analysis that is.
He even goes so far as to suggest that many reproductive rights advocates goal of working to eliminate the underclass is itself racist, apparently not being able to conceptualize that working for a world where people have economic options is the exact opposite of trying to get into a who-can-most-populate the planet game. The goal of outbreeding others is nothing else than to give you social and economic advantage over them.* If that was the agenda of the left, not the right, you’d see the left pushing rich folk or at least leftists to have more kids. But you don’t see that: if the left pushes hardest for choices for the poor, it is because the poor traditionally have the fewest choices. Just like back when abortion was illegal. Rich folk could get access to abortions much more easily than the poor, in the same way they can get access to most anything–by using their money.
ll these facts reveal why Feminists must denigrate women who want large families. For if they were to admit the possibility of merit in large families, they must examine the consequences of their own attitudes and actions. Such an examination would reveal that, regardless of their stated motives, the end results of Feminists’ advocacy for ‘family planning’ are indistinguishable from the hopes and dreams of the ‘racial hygienists’ of the late 1800’s.
And it’s the wingnut special. What leftists really want is genocide. You heard it from Deep Thought first. When we unveil how our agenda of wanting to stop killing Muslims for no reason, stop building walls to keep brown people out, stop urging white people to outbreed them, and let women make their own choices about their own bodies is secretly a plan to kill everyone who’s different from us–when we reveal that, I say, Deep Thought will be completely justified.
*I’m not suggesting that everyone who wants a large family is overtly–or even implicitly–racists. But the rhetoric and the target audience of the movement as a whole is distinctly racist, sexist, and warped. Big families are troubling in a country that’s consuming its resources as fast as we are, but that doesn’t make people who have big families bad people. Those who encourage it on obviously bigoted grounds, though, are of course bad people, and deserve to be derided.
Deep Thought challenged you to provide evidence that these people were racist or genocidal in your “We’ll breed ‘em out” posting:
Unfortunately for you you’ve committed the logical fallacy called
argumentum ad ignorantiam : “Argumentum ad ignorantiam means ‘argument from ignorance.’ The fallacy occurs when it’s argued that something must be true, simply because it hasn’t been proved false. Or, equivalently, when it is argued that something must be false because it hasn’t been proved true”
EB,
You’ve made more rrors, as well. The core point that I made in my post, and on Pandagon, is this – if you count vague associations as “evidence of racism” there is much, much more evidence that Planned Parenthood is racist than there is for the quiverfuill movement. A reporter claims that there is much talk of ‘European populations decline’ and an undercurrent of ‘race suicide’. Unfortunately, the quiverfull sites that *do* discuss population decline do so for Europe AND Asia AND South America.
So much for ‘crypto-racism’, huh?
Amanda’s attempts to paint Steyn as a racist depend upon his prediction that racist groups will take advantage of declining birth rates as *advocating* for those groups. Very, very poor argumentation on her part – and I note you don’t quote *Steyn*, you quote Amanda’s mischaracterization.
You also missed my point about Planned Parenthood. The goals of its founders (who were Left-wing eugenicists concerned that the ‘unfit’ [i.e., minorities, Catholics, and the poor] would outbreed the ‘fit’ [i.e., White secular Socialists]) were to eliminate minorities and the poor. Regardless of the motivations of the current members of Planned Parenthood, the racist goals of the founders is being met. If you want to point to the multi-ethnic Christian groups that advocate large families as racist, you must also examine the origins and results of Planned PArenthood. After all, the *cough* “genocidal” full quiver folks advocate that everyone have more kids, while Planned Parenthood wants fewer people. Look up ‘genocide’ and get back to me.
Oops. SOrry for the spelling, I am using a laptop keyboard!
I’m praying that you will have a wonderful thankgiving with your friends, sir. Please drive safely.
-Magen
I, for one, am eternally grateful to Josephnadir for being so conscientious about providing us the Latin for the logical fallacies. I anticipate that it will come in handy the next time I’m at a dinner party with Caligula and the conversation turns to logical fallacies. Because I’ll know the Latin and everything. Thanks, Joe!
Hey, Evil Bender, here is a much better “Shorter Deep Thought”
“Some feminist blogs claim that quiverfulls are racist, but can’t show any evidence. If the vague connection of one former Holocaust revisionist is ‘evidence’ of being “racist” then, well, these facts mean that Planned Parenthood is racist, too”
Get it, now?
Isn’t there something, I don’t know, inherently racist in trying to outbreed the other races? The statement itself implies that the races are at odds, that they should not mix (hence the different by nature or culture and therefore bad argument) and that the only way to resolve this is to out number them. Which leads to the assumption that one race deserves to ‘win’ by outnumbering the others, even if it is just because you want it to survive, versus trying to outnumber people with ‘dirty’ blood or habits.
Since racism is the assertion that one race deserves primacy, I’m pretty sure it’s racism by definition to try and racially outbreed. Sure, I can see wanting to hang out with people who are like you, which everyone does, but there’s a difference in looking for people you like or who are like you, and trying to make sure no one else gets into your group or gets the same resources you do, which is bascially what happens when you try to outnumber someone. Of course, this all assumes that resources are infinite. Resources are bestowed (usually) by numbers and/or types (population or racial make-up. Let’s not even try to pretend those two don’t mke a difference.)
And it is utterly possible to acknowledge someone else’s race without being a racist/starting a competition.
Definitions aside, Planned Parenthood waits for people to walk into a clinic, barring the advertisements that every organization has, as opposed to ambushing them in a public place with an assload of kids. Locally, the adoption/pro-life people advertise in the local newspaper, the college newspaper, the local radio stations, including the ’secular’ ones, billboards and on television; I believe that they are getting equal or better recognition, though they, unlike the local Planned Parenthood, hide their name. I’ve always known which party Planned Parenthood associated with, and their name is always very plain on their advertisements. The local Right-to-Life people, I haven’t been able to be as sure of. (If anyone should know how to find them, it’d be me. My mother headed the local Right-to-Life chapter when I was growing up. I couldn’t watch horror movies, but by ten I’d already seen so many bloody, aborted fetuses that when I finally did watch a horror movie, it was kinda funny.) In fact, there’s nothing like driving down the street at three o’ clock in the afternoon and getting a big eyeful of aborted fetus parts at a protest, on one of the main roads through town. People drive around with their kids that time of day. And they don’t get a choice about their kids getting an eyeful.
Way to go, Right-to-Lifers. Way to reach people.
At least population declines, due to Planned Parenthood, putting less strain on resource (and yes, I don’t think the resources avaliable to us for the support of the population are infinite.)
And let’s not even talk about the effects of bearing that mnay children on a woman’s uterus.
Mouthybitch,
That’s interesting – so…. find me a quiverfull site that mentions race. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Note: Amanda or someone else calling them racist doesn’t count.
Also: A reporter making unsubstantiated claims also doesn’t count