Taki's Mag

Get in line, all ye racists—they have a pill for you now.

Last week, several supposedly respectable websites erupted in a blinding sunshower of bigot-hating joy at a recent Oxford University study involving a common blood-pressure pill called Propranolol. Headlines said the study proves the pill “reduces in-built racism,” “Makes People Less Racist,” and even has the spiritual potential to “open hearts and minds.”

As a friend of mine asked, “What’s next: an enema that cures homophobia?”

The study, “Propranolol reduces implicit negative racial bias,” was recently published in Psychopharmacology, and all the Tribbles on the Starship Equality are purring with glee at the idea that science has FINALLY found a pill to cure the evil racist scourge. Online comments sounded happy little bugles at the advent of a Brave New Progressive World in which Propranolol replaces Soma:

This pill should be mandatory for all right-wing Republicans, tea bags, KKK, people who hate the immigrants and want them deported, etc. What a much better world this would be.

Let’s put Propanolol in the water supply and stamp out the ugliness of Republicanism forever.

Stop being so paranoid, and take a chill pill. So what if the white race are wiped out.

There’s already a pill to cure racists, it contains cyanide :)

Why, that last comment there might be the gosh-darned cutest use of a smiley emoticon in the service of literally exterminating one’s ideological enemies that I’ve ever seen!

Ironically, Propranolol was developed by a Scottish scientist whose surname was Black. The pill appears to target brain areas that regulate fear, making that lion who’s stealthily creeping toward you seem like a furry little pussycat.

The recent Oxford study regarding the pill’s ability to reduce “racism”—a social construct which to this day no one has been able to define to my satisfaction—was based on an unforgivably tiny sample of 36 participants, only 18 of whom received the Propranolol while the other 18 took placebos. Displaying what perhaps is egregious explicit racial and gender bias, researchers selected only white males as their guinea pigs.

In summarizing her study’s results, lead author Sylvia Terbeck said something that resonated with me emotionally:

Implicit racial bias can occur even in people with a sincere belief in equality.

Hey, I think that’s happened to me, too. Even though I sincerely wanted to believe people are equal, something inside me told me that they aren’t. So now there’s a pill for that? I simply pop a pill in my mouth, and everything’s eraced?

The researchers noted that the pill had no effect on “explicit” racism, a presumably measurable object they measured by giving the participants a questionnaire regarding how “warm” one feels toward ethnic groups and left/right politics in general. Researchers conceded that the “dominance of political norms of equality and tolerance in Western democracies limits the overt expression of prejudice”—in other words, publicly expressing “racist” views threatens the prevailing political power structure and is almost universally considered a thought crime.

The study’s observed differences were all in the mystically mossy realm of “implicit” racism, which supposedly measures one’s subconscious bigotry by making you play a rapid-fire online game.

High-paid anti-racist witch hunters get blisters on their feet walking coast to coast trying to find evidence of discrimination and overt racial hatred these days. Yet despite the lack of visible barriers, they note—accurately—that not everyone in society is performing equally. So they insist that such “disparate impact” is caused by fundamental unfairness rather than something as screamingly obvious as disparate ability.

So rather than wasting their time waiting for that next Alabama lynching that never seems to come, they’ve decided to look inside you. They’re peeking inside your heart, even though you didn’t ask. It doesn’t matter that your behavior causes zero literal harm to other races; they’re going to find a way to prove you’re a racist, anyway.

And if you resist, well, that’s all the proof they need.

The yardstick these “scientists” wield to measure the evil that lurks within your heart is known as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), brought to you by our friends at Harvard, home to such eminently Caucasian-friendly personages as Noel Ignatiev and Derrick Bell.

You can take the test online. You’re instructed to plow through it as fast as possible—this will tap into your “subconscious” mind. You use your left and right fingers to make selections while white and black faces along with positive and negative words (e.g., “Happy,” “Sad,” “Glorious,” “Awful”) flash before your eyes. They’ll switch the “good” and “evil” words back and forth between the “European American” and “African American” sides, and your reaction time supposedly measures how rapidly you associate good and evil words with each side. The assumption is that if you quickly associate evil words with the black side, you’re prejudiced against them rather than, oh, the former victim of an armed robbery at the hands of five black assailants.

I took the test five times without chemically altering myself for the duration. Twice the results said I favored whites, twice they said I favored blacks, and once it said I’m neutral. If I’d decided to, say, pop a black-market Quaalude halfway through the testing and waited until it kicked in, the results could have been even more skewed and I may have wound up simultaneously loving and hating everyone. And this is the “science” they’re using.

But even making the shaky assumption that the tests are accurate, some studies using the IAT yielded results that may not please progressive researchers’ fluffy golden ears. One of them concluded that whites were more color-blind—i.e., less “racist”—than blacks and Latinos. Another showed that physicians who scored as more “biased” in the IAT tests actually tended to discriminate less in practice than supposedly non-biased ones. One study’s results suggested that in day-to-day life, blacks preferred to interact with whites whom the IAT had categorized as “highly racially biased” than with whites who weren’t. Another study claimed the IAT is fundamentally flawed because its results seemed to be based more on simple cognitive inertia at speeding through all those flashing faces and words.

In short: This recent Oxford study is worthless.

What deserves further study is a fairly recent leftist trend to eagerly dive into the murky waters of the Eugenics Ocean provided that the “science” can somehow prove that they are biologically different than their thought-villain nemeses on the right. After rolling their eyes, holding their noses, and chanting “la-la-la-la” at any studies that appeared to establish innate racial differences, they are now wrapping their slender pink tentacles around any study—no matter how dubious its methodology—that suggests leftist egalitarians are almost a different race than their ideological enemies. After decades of claiming they’d eternally discredited what they called “scientific racism,” they are launching forward with a new academic discipline I’ll call “scientific anti-racism.” Or maybe “totalitarian liberal eugenics.” Or maybe I’m still working on its name.

Leftists shrieked like happy hamsters at a recent Canadian (of course) study linking “prejudice” and “right-wing” ideology to “lower cognitive ability.” They also squealed like shiny baby piglets at another recent study that purported to show that liberals and conservatives (whatever that means) have different brain structures.

And though they claim to celebrate the rainbow of differences that Goddess has bequeathed us, somehow they find room in their wide-open minds to cheer for the day when we breed all of those differences into extinction. Neither will these diversicrats tolerate any true diversity of thought—they’re lurching toward Soviet-style political psychiatry by suggesting that ideological disagreement on racial matters is a mental disorder requiring medication.

Sound paranoid? I’m sure they’re working on a pill for that.

Sanity is in many ways a social construct, one that varies widely from society to society. In a pragmatic sense I’ll admit it’s crazy to go against the crowd, however abjectly deluded and brainwashed that crowd may be. If you run with them, they’ll stomp right over you like wild buffalo.

Despite the soul-blotting excesses of Soviet and Maoist totalitarianism, many neo-Marxists still appear to believe that the control freaks and power psychos are confined to the right.

How about we work on a pill that cures extreme partisan psychosis?

Or one that cures stupidity? Lotta that going around.

I haven’t dabbled in science since that seventh-grade project I did with the snails, but it’s obvious to me that “social science” is anything but a science. This new anti-racism snake oil they’re peddling is an unholy amalgamation of soft eugenics and punitive psychiatry. The Two Joes—Mengele and Stalin—are shaking hands inside a tiny little heart pill. Pop it in your mouth and smile.

 

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