Vox Packs Most Of the Fallacious Arguments Against The Reality of Race Into 3 Minutes

This is just craptastic.

   But it does provide a kind of a convenient little window into the downright delusional thinking about race that currently dominates on the far-ish left and in the parts of academia in which the left is influential. Though these arguments seem to have taken hold even in biology. Think about that. Even at least one actual, natural science seems to have become infected by this stuff.  In America, anyway, though not so much elsewhere I'm told.

   Philosophy is often thought to be useless, but it isn't; any halfway decent philosopher with even a little understanding of the philosophy of biology should be able to explain what's wrong with the arguments for race antirealism / race nominalism.  Philosophy is often thought to be useless but it isn't...but, well, actually it is, because philosophers seem to be cowed like everybody else, and none seem to be stepping forward to do their damn job. A fair number of philosophers have even fallen for these arguments, apparently...  Except they probably haven't really.  Not in the sense that the arguments actually convinced them. The arguments are so patently fallacious that I doubt they could convince anyone with even a little bit of the right kind of training. These arguments are so bad that the acceptance of their conclusion almost has to be driven by politics. There is simply no doubt about the link between race nominalism and PC / SJW politics. There is a kind of unspoken imperative on the left: though shalt not believe that race is a natural kind. (This makes it particularly humorous that we get a version of the left's standard-issue potted pseudo-history of the idea of race to start things off in the video. Giving a little history of the alleged evolution of an idea is, of course, often intended to discredit the idea.) When you've got terrible arguments combined with political zeal/pressure/unspoken threats, the best hypothesis is often that it is one of the latter, rather than the former, that explains the fact that so many passably intelligent people are accepting the relevant conclusion.

   Anyway, I'm trying to spend less time explaining why people on the internet are wrong...but I might not be able to resist the urge in this case. Not that I think it's really necessary. I mean just listen to those arguments.

   

   Seriously. These arguments--these patently fallacious, bad-undergraduate-paper-level arguments, are actually being held up as serious reasons for accepting a conclusion that, when you come right down to it, demands that people deny the clear evidence of their own eyes. And the postpostmodern left is so influential that it's actually working.

   If this does not creep the hell out of you, then...well...uh...look, it just sure as hell had better be creeping the hell out of you. It's like invasion of the body snatchers...except...with...uh...minds or whatever...