I really don’t see a reason for us making a linguistic distinction between “low-brow bigotry” and “high-brow bigotry”, which is essentially what this is in practice.
When my uncle drunkenly complains about how “those stupid immigrants are everywhere and they ain’t even speaking our language” - it’s racism; but when a guy with a university degree writes a treatsie about how immigrants will take over and that’s a problem because his bayesian priors say they’re statistically less intelligent - then it’s suddenly “race pseudoscience”. No, both of them are the same breed of racist, the only difference is the latter had enough money to attend Yale.
The whole concept of “race science” is an attempt to smuggle long-discredited ideas from the skull measurement people back into respectable discourse, and it should be opposed as such. Calling it pseudoscience is better, but it’s even better to just call it straight-up racism.
Or: Nazis don’t even deserve the respect we give to cold fusion cranks, free energy grifters, and homeopaths. Their projects and arguments are even less worth acknowledging.
Exactly, like the whole point of their schtick is that they want to legitimise plain old racism as something more sophisticated, so I don’t see a reason to entertain them as such.
I really don’t see a reason for us making a linguistic distinction between “low-brow bigotry” and “high-brow bigotry”, which is essentially what this is in practice.
When my uncle drunkenly complains about how “those stupid immigrants are everywhere and they ain’t even speaking our language” - it’s racism; but when a guy with a university degree writes a treatsie about how immigrants will take over and that’s a problem because his bayesian priors say they’re statistically less intelligent - then it’s suddenly “race pseudoscience”. No, both of them are the same breed of racist, the only difference is the latter had enough money to attend Yale.
The whole concept of “race science” is an attempt to smuggle long-discredited ideas from the skull measurement people back into respectable discourse, and it should be opposed as such. Calling it pseudoscience is better, but it’s even better to just call it straight-up racism.
Or: Nazis don’t even deserve the respect we give to cold fusion cranks, free energy grifters, and homeopaths. Their projects and arguments are even less worth acknowledging.
Exactly, like the whole point of their schtick is that they want to legitimise plain old racism as something more sophisticated, so I don’t see a reason to entertain them as such.