The most reliable indicator of possessing operable conservative views is defenestration from the prescints of National Review. John Derbyshire, a recent recipient of this distinction,¹ has lamented the following aspect of traditional culture’s self-imposed limits upon its membership:

There are too many good ideas and too many smart people outside the walls. Why is this so? I don’t have a complete answer, but a big part of it is conservative hostility to science.²

Given the hostility SFEcon attracts from the right, we are of course in general agreement here. But we would refine Mr. Derbyshire's observation to one of conservatism’s retention of the essentially Scholastic scientific view that flourished in the high Middle Ages — which were of course centered in the Arab, Moslem world. We would then invite a general observation that insofar as modern sciences are populated by Semitic people (e.g.: sociology, psychology, economics) one finds much in the way of what Mr. Derbyshire has labeled as Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific phenomena:

Jews are awfully good at creating pseudosciences — elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content — and that this peculiar talent must be connected somehow with the custom, persisted in through long pre-Enlightenment centuries, of immersing young men in the study of a vast body of argumentative writing, with status in the community — and marriage options, and breeding opportunities — awarded to those who have best mastered this mass of meaningless esoterica.³

Thus if Mr. Derbyshire is sincerely interested in opening conservatism to the technically literate, he might consider rescinding the cultural veto he has yielded to the Semite’s exquisite sensibilities:

For a person like myself, a Gentile who is a very minor name in American opinion journalism, desirous of ascending to some slightly less minor status, ticking off Jews is a very, very bad career strategy.⁴

Almost the first thing you hear from old hands when you go into opinion journalism in the U.S. is, to put it in the precise form I first heard it: “Don’t f*ck with the Jews”.⁵

And in the larger culture, a Gentile conservative who riles up Jewish liberals is really asking for trouble.⁶

Mr. Derbyshire’s truckling attitude is further reflected when exercising his scientific cast of mind in propounding Derbyshire’s Law,

One thing you learn, writing for the public, is that anything whatsoever that you say about the Jews will be seen as virulently antisemitic [sic] to somebody, somewhere.⁷

From now on I am going to call everyone who disagrees with me a Jew-hater.⁸

Now, why do I bring this up? It is not to defend Italian Fascism. But it is to point out that Fascism, like Nationalism, is inherently going to bring up the internal characteristics of a people. And, uh, in Italy it brought out Italian characteristics; in Germany it brought out German characteristics. The German characteristics were a lot nastier. Um, and this is a big part of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s argument about the, sort of, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: there was an exterminationist [sic] sort of anti-Semitism in the genetic DN-, in the DNA of Germany that just didn’t exist in Italy. There was anti-Semitism in Italy, but it was usually theological anti-Semitism. It was: ‘you guys should be Christians’. It was not: ‘you guys are biological vermin that need to be destroyed’.⁹

This is why Hayek thought economic planning was so incandescently stoooooopid.¹⁰