#Libertarianism, #paleoconservativism, #racism and #skepticism

I've blogged more than once in the past about how I cannot support modern organized skepticism because of the likes of Penn and Teller's libertarianism on things like global warming and climate change and (at one time) secondhand smoke, though P/T later backed off that (at least partially).

I've also blogged about leading libertarian skeptic Michael Shermer and his keeping two known racialists, Frank Miele and Vince Sarich, on the masthead of Skeptic magazine for more than a decade.

Well, I think D.J. Grothe needs to be added to the list.

And, I need to write further about this whole issue.

Yes, it's true that certain genetic differences can be used to biologically divide humans into what some people insist on calling "race."

That said, depending on WHICH genetic markers I use, I can slice and dice "race" into many different ways. If I, say, focus on certain blood proteins, rather than skin color, I can find multiple races of sub-Saharan Africans. And certainly, in things like medicine, blood proteins are more important than skin color.

Or, on malaria drugs and allergenic reactions, I can make "Semites" and "blacks" all one race.

Why intelligent people insist on claiming "race" as a biological reality, AND, insist on only the classical, ultimately RACIST (sic) idea that the only definition of race that counts is skin tones plus a couple of facial features, I have no idea.

And, yes, I'm calling that not "just" racialism, but racism. If you insist that your particular type of biological divisions of people into races is the ONLY valid one when it's clearly not, you're at least giving the appearance of not being "just" a racialist, trying to put pseudoscientific lipstick on a pig, but, vehemently wiping off anybody else's lipstick when they use a different one.

Beyond that, such ideas, beyond ignoring environmental factors, totally ignore the role of luck within environmental factors for achievement.

I have less than no idea why people who claim to be "scientific skeptics" do this. The alleged libertarianism behind this is as harmful to your (not my) "movement" as is the libertarianism of Penn and Teller on global warming. Or more.

And, if you're a libertarian, you're theoretically harming your libertarian evangelism as well as your skeptical evangelism. (Actually, the likes of Shermer and Grothe strike me as a hybrid of libertarian and elitist conservativism [or it's "degenerate" cousin, natural-born conservativism] though they'd never admit that.)

In the particular case in hand, beyond everything else, the facile assumption that I've never read Charles Murray or Nicholas Wade?

That wasn't just wrong. It was an insult.