My post on Keith Windschuttle's statements defending the White Australia policy drew an interesting response. No-one, as far I can see, was prepared to defend Windschuttle outright, but there was a sudden and startling outbreak of caution. Maybe Windschuttle had been misquoted. Maybe the interview gave a misleading picture of his book and we should all wait to read it. Maybe the term "White Australia policy" was never used officially. Maybe the dictation test was administered so as to admit educated Indians. Maybe my links were inaccurate.
All of this is very uncharacteristic of the blogosphere. The nature of blogging lends itself to summary judgements based on limited evidence, not waiting for years until all the evidence is in. You read the papers, make a judgement and (at least among the better class of bloggers) if you turn out to be wrong, you admit it with good grace. Why has the response in this case been so different ?
I think it's because of the R-word racism. There is only one real instance of political correctness in Australia today and that is that you are never, ever allowed to call anyone a racist. It's OK to say that Adolf Hitler was a racist, and that apartheid was racist, but the idea that any actual Australian could be a racist is utterly taboo. Even I can't resist the Zeitgeist on this one. In my post, I called Windschuttle "a consistent apologist for racism, happy to use racist arguments in support of his cause".
It's obvious why this taboo has emerged. Racism is an evil, bloodstained ideology and no one wants to admit association with it. Hence, almost no-one is silly enough to come out with a clear-cut statement like "white people are inherently superior to black people, and should be able to use them as they see fit".
In this respect, racism is very similar to Communism. But while few people were willing to endorse Soviet Communism openly, particularly after the purges and the exposures of Kruschchev's secret speech, there were plenty who were always willing to make excuses for the communists along the lines of "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" and so on. With his characteristic turn of phrase, Lenin called people of this type "fellow travellers" to their faces and "useful idiots" behind their backs.
Since his (still unexplained) swing from far left to far right about a decade ago, Windschuttle has consistently sought to excuse racist actions by whites (or, more precisely, British whites) by the usual range of strategies including denial of the facts, quibbling about irrelevant details, denunciation of witnesses and attacks on the victims as subhumans responsible for their own demise1. But, in politically correct Australia, that's not enough reason to call him a racist. So, I'll just call him a fellow-traveller.
1 There's an obvious model for this kind of thing in the recent historical literature, but I'll leave the identification as an exercise for readers.
In case people have forgotten Windschuttle's track record on matters of this kind let's look at a couple of examples of blatant inconsistency, invariably operating to put whites who might be accused of racism in a good light, and blacks in a bad one. In his book on Tasmania, Windschuttle denies that Aborigines resisting white occupation could be viewed as displaying humanity or compassion on the basis of claims (for which he had almost zero evidence) that they had no words for these concepts. On the other hand, in claiming that the Aborigines were responsible for their own extinction, he accuses them of prostituting their women, a concept that is meaningless in a society without money or formal concepts of trade (leaving aside the well-documented and widespread incidence of rape).
In the interview promoting his new book on White Australia, Windschuttle supports the view, often stated by apologists for the policy, that it was the product of economic incentives. By contrast, in this New Criterion piece on the history of the British Empire, Windschuttle defends the view that the British abolition of slavery was due to moral revulsion rather than economic motives. In other words, when the British (taken here to include white Australians) do the right thing, this is evidence of the moral superiority of British/Christian civilisation. When they do the wrong thing, it's a "rational and, in a number of ways, progressive, product" of economic circumstances.
If you want to confirm all this, I have a long essay here or you can search the site for chapter and verse.
Posted by jquiggin at December 5, 2004 12:52 PM | TrackBackAnd what a wordy journey it is!
Those who rely too heavily on dictionary definitions are doomed. Words are alive, and often connote far more than they are defined to mean. That's why we have so many different words, to eek out each connotation, and to differentiate. Calling military service slavery (unless done in a metaphorical tone) just gets people thinking you're odd. It's like vegetarians saying "meat is murder." May wake people up, but turns them off just as fast.
Vernon Imrich
It is interesting to consider the extent to which racism underlies and may to some extent support nationalism. I am an unashamed nationalist (of a sort of Wilsonian type), but would quibble over definitions with anyone who called me racist. Yet it seems that racism in some form tends to reveal itself when national existance is (or is thought to be) threatened. Witness Nazi Germany, post-Franco-Prussian-War France (antisemitism), Dutch South Africa, wartime UK ("the only good German is a dead one") and Australia (anti-Asianism?). Perhaps someone more familiar with the origins of national feeling and the emergence of nation-states would like to comment.
It is also interesting to remember that there are primatologists and anthropologists who would gladly see chimpanzees, Neanderthals and even Homo Erectus enrolled as in some sense "human". I have never felt attracted to such views; such an enlargement of the category "human" would render it meaningless, and possibly be insulting to chimpanzees and Neanderthals. But it reveals something about our sensitivity towards acknowledging differences. We seem to be unable to handle the idea that people (including races or even extinct species) are different from each other without at the same time running a kind of competition about which is "better". Maybe the real problem is with our understanding of what "better" means?
Posted by: gordon at December 5, 2004 01:38 PMI think it is pretty obvious that a country that supported a White Australia was dominated by racist institutions and the individuals that led those institutions. Certainly deciding which Aboriginal child would be kidnapped by the government (state and federal) based on skin colour is racist.
It is also tyrannical government. Racism and despotism in the same 70 years. Huzzah for Australian government. Australia's black armband history has been supplied by the government. The "culture wars" are a farce.
Posted by: Cameron Riley at December 5, 2004 01:44 PMIf Windschuttle is unfairly making anglos look good, and aboriginals look bad, then he is just doing the opposite of 90% of journalists who are at the other extreme. They are just as bad as he is.
Remember one prominent female historian who, when exposed fraudulently giving statistics of how many aboriginals had been killed by anglos, defended herself with this line:
"Historians make things up all the time".
Posted by: wpc at December 5, 2004 01:58 PM"As soon as I call someone a racist, everyone hates me," cries hard done by professorial economist raking in $150,000 per annum. You're a bloody professional victim, mate. And it's a bit unseemly on your wages. Here's a word we CAN use. It's the P word: Prat.
Arguing that calling people racist is "utterly taboo" in Australia today is utterly crap. You're a disgrace to academia and intellectual commentary.
Posted by: IRA at December 5, 2004 02:03 PMIRA - if you don't have anything constructive to say - why bother?
I think that one of the reasons that the word "racist" is avoided when describing Windschuttle's work is that it is too easy a label to apply. It's too straightforward for a journo or other commentator to simply dismiss the man as a racist, and doing so would realistically not serve to progress the debate any further.
The best way to approach the kind of fascist revisionism that he has produced recently is through refutation of the claims and evidence that he puts forward.
Posted by: Guy at December 5, 2004 02:53 PMI remember reading somewhere else that multiculturalism had begun to make the classical definition of a nation-state somewhat harder to pin down. It used to be that 'nations' were collections of cultures sometimes more easily defined by race and language. It also used to be quite conventional to protect these 'nations' by restrictive or nonexistent immigration policies. Were these policies racist? If so, in the absence of a true multicultural society, were these policies defensible? When did multiculturalism as we define it today first come into vogue? Was Australia a multicultural society in the 1950s? Is it permissible, even today, to attempt to preserve cultural aspects (such as race or language) through restrictive immigration practices?
I'm not an academic and I wasn't alive in the age of the 'White Australia policy', but if someone was prepared to re-examine these issues, I'm not sure I could label the process racist. (For info, I say that as someone perfectly comfortable with present multicultural policies and immigration practices).
Posted by: Just another bloke at December 5, 2004 03:48 PMJphn is right about the reluctance to accept people using the "racist" epithet. But is there a good reason for that reluctance? Isn't it all too often an easy way to dismiss someone's opinions as valueless, without actually engaging with what they say?
JQ, I look forward to more substantive rebuttals of Windschuttle (not necessarily from you) after his book is released on Monday. Until then, I at least am willing to withhold judgement.
Posted by: Alex at December 5, 2004 04:20 PMReading your other thread John, I suppose you could construe parts of my previous post as a partial defence of the 'White Australia policy'. I guess I keep thinking of the analogy of Iceland, particularly in the 1940s or 50s (less enlightened times). Would the Icelanders be justified in restricting or excluding immigration on the basis of trying to preserve their unique language, way of life and maybe even race? Is Australia's situation during the White Australia policy analogous? If so, should we feel guilty about it? If the answer is yes (which may be Windschuttle's argument - I don't know, and neither do you apparently), is that argument inherently racist? Not sure myself, but undoubtedly others know for me.
Posted by: Just another bloke at December 5, 2004 04:22 PMMy take is Windscuttle is really having a go at the holier than thou attitude of multiculturalists who would brand culturalists as racists. Certainly Australians have been culturalist in their past and the WAP was founded in protecting this culture. eg in worker's unions wanting to protect their lifestyle from 'scabs', a policy which was rooted early on in antipathy to the influx of Chinese workers in the goldfields and hung over with post-war 'wog' immigration. Ipso facto all unionists are racists and pro immigrationist bosses are all nice luvvy multiculturalists like Prof Q. Welcome to sunny Qld Kanakas and ignore those racist unionists or perhaps the NT aboriginal elder who, when a boat-load of refugees pulled up on his patch, told them they couldn't stay because they didn't have a permit. Was this elder a culturalist or a racist, by using current immigration policy in this way?
My own view is that ordinary Australians are culturalist, rather than overtly racist. Indeed they may espouse openly racist derogatory remarks at a macro cultural level but this hardly ever carries across to true racism at a micro one on one level. It is why they can support broad immigration measures to decide who comes here and yet be accommodating toward the individuals who have slipped through the net and into their local communities. All KW may really be saying, is the debate should be about the degree of practical emphasis on culturalist vs multiculturalist ideology, as racist may have outlived its usefulness as a derogatory term for both sides. Perhaps like all discriminating groups, unionists, sexists, racists, leftists, islamists, elitists, etc the good Prof Q may simply be a bit fearful of the stranger moving in on his erstwhile, comfortable patch.
Posted by: observa at December 5, 2004 05:14 PMYou omitted "rightist" from your list of discriminatory groups. Any particular reason?
Posted by: zoot at December 5, 2004 05:25 PMWrong again, JQ.
In case you haven't realised it yet, you yourself were being uncharacteristically bigoted on this subject. Now, when dealing with prejudiced people, you cannot deploy the full range of reasoned factual arguments. You have to work away at what little is left open to work on, as any direct application of "brute reason" will be rejected out of hand as "ah - another racist aplogist to be ignored" (you almost telegraphed that).
So you - or in this case we - have to approach the topic indirectly, much the way Harriet Beecher Stowe esplained the wrongs of slavery to a slaveowner not in the larger terms which he was accustomed to tuning out but in terms of what would happen to his slaves once he, the beneficent paternalist massa, was gone. Maybe some damned yankee would neglect them!
But I see you are still interpreting objections in terms od some pattern of how people get at the world, not in terms of any pattern of error of your own. You have a long way to go yet.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at December 5, 2004 05:27 PMHere is an extract from what Wikipedia has to say about the origins of the White Australia Policy
" The main rationale of the policy was to keep Australia racially pure. "I am prepared to do all that is necessary to ensure that Australia shall be free for all time from the contamination and the degrading influence of inferior races." (Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 12th Sept 1901 p.4845) The trade unions and their political party, the Labor Party, was the driving force for White Australia. Chris Watson, the leader of the Labour Party stated that "The objection I have to the mixing of these coloured people with the white people of Australia - although I admit it is to a large extent tinged with considerations of an industrial nature - lies...in the possibility and probability of racial contamination." It was widely believed that racial purity was essential for social and political stability. "The unity of Australia is nothing, if that does not imply a united race. A united race not only means that its members can intermix, intermarry and associate without degradation on either side, but implies one inspired by the same ideas..." (Alfred Deakin, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 12 September 1901, p.4807) "
And from the same article, this is what our first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton had to say:
"The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman."
Source for the above quotes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy
Barton, Deakin, Watson: these weren't fringe characters. They were all Prime Ministers at or shortly after Federation. Our national leaders, the architects of the WAP, didn't mince their words. They spoke of the need to avoid racial "contamination" and "degradation" which would result from mixing the races.
So tell us again, Mr Windschuttle, how the WAP was not based on notions on racial superiority.
Posted by: Spiros at December 5, 2004 05:28 PMWrong again, JQ.
In case you haven't realised it yet, you yourself were being uncharacteristically bigoted on this subject. Now, when dealing with prejudiced people, you cannot deploy the full range of reasoned factual arguments. You have to work away at what little is left open to work on, as any direct application of "brute reason" will be rejected out of hand as "ah - another racist apologist to be ignored" (you almost telegraphed that).
So you - or in this case we - have to approach the topic indirectly, much the way Harriet Beecher Stowe esplained the wrongs of slavery to a slaveowner not in the larger terms which he was accustomed to tuning out but in terms of what would happen to his slaves once he, the beneficent paternalist massa, was gone. Maybe some damned yankee would neglect them!
But I see you are still interpreting objections in terms of some pattern of how people get at the world, not in terms of any pattern of error of your own. You have a long way to go yet.
Oh, and I take the cries of racist suffering as so much bleeding heart over-statement if taken as a full description. Even Sharpeville pales into insignificance compared with what the blacks did to the whites in the Congo about the same time (did I mention that our family had to be rescued by Belgian paras after a three day siege with the white community in a block of flats in Luluabourg?). And the extreme of institutional racism that is continuing at the moment is in Zanzibar, against the Arabs and even more against the Parsees, at the hands of the blacks. It's perfectly understandable, but two wrongs don't make a right, and there's no occasion to turn "racism" into an anti-white tool.
Indeed, the concept of racism is unhelpful to the extent it draws attention to process at the expense of actual human harm. For instance, the other day some rednecks beat up some burglars in Queensland and that is being made out to be racism because of the coincidence that both blacks and whites were involved. Yes, racism prior to that no doubt no doubt created the situation, but the beating wasn't racist - the culprits would have done the same to anybody. Which should not be taken by members of the race industry as meaning that it didn't matter - it was still wrong.
Now if you want someone willing to give an apologia from the things done in past times, try this - but don't use your own prejudices as an excuse not to assess either this or my previous Windschuttle remarks on their merits.
Both "separate but equal" and apartheid do represent noble ideals, though quite possibly put forward by cynical realists as a stalking horse. Who could possibly object to that sort of splendid isolationism, allowing each to disregard the lifestyles of the other yet not suffer thereby? Only, it was never practical policy, at least for implementing those ideals, and many realised it even at the time. But you can't blame people being fooled for being racists, only for being fools. And the ideal is still nobler than multiculturalism, which cannot ever be worth pursuing in itself. It is at best good policy with a poor propaganda gloss, and at worst it doesn't even deliver a quiet life.
But my willingness to live and let live isn't practical, even though that is just precisely what apartheid set out to achieve. Apartheid was like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. Unfortunately the remedy consists in putting something at least as predatory and even more sneaky in charge - and that alternative was clear to the want-of-better supporters of apartheid in the '60s, and while it does not justify them, it explains them as pursuers of the lesser evil - which they genuinely were.
Now, consider this dilemma: if I had not spoken out, you, JQ, would have supposed that nobody was willing to take a stand for truth, that the other side had no part in truth. Yet, now I have, have you adjusted your view of anything I say so that forever and forever you will not take anything I say on board - the very problem with enmity to truth that I and many others hold against the whole PC movement?
If the latter, only your readers can determine, and then only for so long as you do not mark these sorts of things as "uncivilised" and worthy of censoring. But I object to people who seek to cause harm as evil, and to mindless things and processes that lead to it as bad, whether I work within the PC framework or not. I even have no problem with using the word "nigger" within an argument for deeper purposes, any more than leading lights of the '60s objected to nude scenes that served dramatic purposes.
Here I stand, I can do no other (which, I know, was subtly mocked in Peter Lorre's closing speech as the child molester in the film "M" - which highlights our very human problem in matters of conscience).
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at December 5, 2004 06:05 PMThis is a very disturbing topic that may herald most unfortunate developments in public discourse and perhaps public policy.
Racism is so multi-faceted it is worth identifying its varieties and deciding which of those varieties is germane to a discussion of polemicists like KW or polemicists who pose as historians.
some categories:
1. visceral racists who find it difficult to acknowledge the humanity of members of certain groups (there is no evidence that KW belongs to this category)
2. Scientific racists who construct rationales for unequal treatment of certain races. This attitude to race informed the Australian constitution and the Immigration Act of 1901. (KW declares that this attitude to race was justified at the time, given the world-view of dominant groups in Australian and international society.) There is nothing particularly objectionable about this statement in itself. But my objection to KW on this subject is that, given his subject is the rise and fall of official racism in Australia, it is incumbent on him to declare if and when such a policy ceased to be understandable and justifiable in his judgement. It is possible to accuse KW of counterproductive coat-trailing on this subject. As a public intellectual it is incumbent on him to make his position clear on this issue.
3. Apologists of the racism of historical actors. This is what KW is most famous for. His history of the Tasmanian Aborigines is driven by two major projects:
a. exculpation of European settlers by a critical and often tendentious assessment of the evidence of genocide. KW scored a few hits on his shoddy historian opponents, but he suffered more hits due to his disingenuousness in distinguishing and disallowing evidence. People of good will are capable of assessing the worthlessness of KW's research methods.
b. redefinition of racism. KW's declarations about the innate inferiority of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, both physical and moral, are designed by KW to serve as an omnibus exculpation of racist actions of Europeans in Tasmania. According to this view it was impossible for Europeans to be condemned as racist because Tasmanian Aborigines did not merit treatment reserved for human beings. This is an appalling view which releases the hobgoblins of racism into Australian political and social discourse.
This latter project makes KW's quoted statements on official racism under the Australian Constitution particularly worrying and worthy of debate and condemnation. It should be clear that KW's representation of Tasmanian Aborigines is very much in the mainstream of the same scientific racism that informed racist elements of the Australian Constitution.
The disturbing thing about this is that KW's comments about the racism of the Founding Fathers can now be seen to have a personal significance for KW. No longer is KW defending understandable but perhaps regrettable ideas of a pack of dead blokes with beards. Rather KW is defending his own view of the world. This is a world where it is desirable and perhaps necessary to disqualify the right of certain groups from the privilege of membership of common humanity.
And if it is OK to do this for peoples in the past, then maybe it is OK to apply the same principles to treatment of our contemporaries. (Might KW be thinking about Aborigines and Arabs?)
Posted by: Katz at December 5, 2004 06:20 PMin politically correct Australia, that's not enough reason to call him a racist. So, I'll just call him a fellow-traveller.
I think that Jack Strocchi at December 5, 2004 04:54 PM beat you to it.
That may make Windschuttle a "fellow traveller" with racists, or vice-versa.
I am not that interested in Windschuttles history and certainly oppose the reintroduction of WAP and the Aborginal caste status. What does annoy me is the hijacking of historical debates for contemporary political purposes. (I concede that conservatives do this, but I feel that progressives have been the worse offenders. Having been educated at Uni Melb in the eighties I am entitled to have some slack cut for me on this score.)
There is only one real instance of political correctness in Australia today and that is that you are never, ever allowed to call anyone a racist.
This must be one of the silliest things that Pr Q has ever said. What planet is he living on?
Does Pr Q remember the moral panic that progressive elites whipped up about racism when the Country Party made a re-appearance under the guise of Ms Hanson? I know it was way back in the late nineties, still it should not be lost in the mists of time, I think.
Does he remember the infamous outbreak of Howard-hatred that spread like wildfire amongst the progressive cultural elites after the 2001 election, which was fuelled by cries of racism against persons who supported a strict border protection and a lawful settlement program?
(The non-racist supporters of Howard can now feel morally vindicated in that many of the Tampans have been lawfully resettled in AUS without public outcry. This proves that respect for civic law, rather than an urge to wage race war, was the majority factor in this issue.)
In fact, one of the first things done in any AUS political debate about "our role in the world" is to pre-emptively take the high moral ground by calling ones adversary a racist. A check of google brings up 391,000 hits for "Australia + racist".
This attitude has always puzzled me, perhaps because I have been painfully aware of the wisdom of John 8:7. Having grown up with people from all walks of life one gets used to applying a rhetorical discount to the occasional bit of sledging.
Dr Knopfelmacher always used to say that racism is the last taboo subject, replacing sex. He meant rational analysis of race, not the use of "racism" as a swear word, which still has a pandemic potential in polite circles.
He also used to say that moral rhetoric was the last legitimate form of inter-personal aggression. Maybe thats why people get so touchy when the R-word is used.
It is hard to take all this hoo-ha about racism and apostatsy too seriously. It is important to take a stand against actual and existing racists but, pace General von Moltke, one is tempted to ask: if there is a race war on then "Where are the (neo-nazi) prisoners? Where are their field guns?".
To a post-baby boomer it looks more like the replay of a schoolyard fight that started in the fifties, continued on through uni and is now being revived in graduate school, replete with name-calling, foot-stamping and face-pulling.
I think its time to treat the Culture Wars as a kind of kabuki play that can be analyed by Weberian clinical sociology. The term "racist", like the older but cognate term "fascist", has now almost exhausted its cognitive value as a rallying cry against injustice.
It is now a political football used by progressive elites as a dominance marker to take the prestige moral ground in a social status struggle with lower-status elites. By the same token, the lower-status elites are trying to bolster their political position by taking the popular moral ground by siding with the masses and their folk histories.
On this reading, the progressive Cultral Elites are the New Establishment. Windschuttles apostasy is just a counter-revolutionary pose with him, as usual, on the militant side of the barricades.
This is all quite amusing to watch but those not invested in the debates of the seventies are entitled to be underwhelmed. Mr Howard has leap frogged ahead in this symbolic politic game. Those, like Pr Q I am sure, who are interested in practical results, rather than moral grandstanding, will welcome this development.
Hayek, in the Road to Serfdom, quotes Hume on the embarassing pedigree of ideas. The fact that "mulit-culti" boilerplate is still used with a straight face by progressives is a source of never ending amazement to me. Does the anti-Windschuttle side recall that the first modern political party to use the term
"multiculturalism" in political discourse was Konrad Heinlein's "Sudetendeutsche Partei"?
Just to rub it in a bit further: In the midst of all the (quite appropriate and welcome) celebration of Eureka Stockade Day has any one of the multitudes of progressive caught up in the nostalgia paused to consider that the subsequent Eurekans were out and out racists as well as ecological despoilers?
A Eureka like flag was carried in the 1861 incident at Lambing Flat [Young NSW] when the diggers rose against "the Chinese plague", and again in 1878 the Eureka flag was raised during the Sydney maritime strike against Chinese labour. In 1891 the shearers of Queensland flew the "flag of blue and silver stars" in their fight against poverty by an overseas induced depression, taking to arms to defend their cause.
Should we now tear down all the Southern-Crossed-spangled banners? On Pr Q's ideologic it would be hard to object to this form of politico-moral puritanism.
I suggest that political morality is relative to time and place. What exactly are we trying to prove when we say that Foundation Australians were vicious or virtuous? The founders of this country were neither angels nor devils. They were just poor forked creatures who had a go and wanted a fair go for their own kind.
History is a two-edged sword and those who wish to wield it for political purposes may find themselves run through by their own weapon.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 5, 2004 06:36 PMOn a point of information, wasn't that Haenlein, not Heinlein, in the Sudetenland? I believe the similarity caused some awkwardness for Robert A. Heinlein, the SF author to be, as he was trying to get into politics in California at around the same time.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at December 5, 2004 06:42 PMAnother question for JQ: where were you when various people were making apparently racist remarks recently in the debate about Condi Rice's suitability to be US Secretary of State?
Posted by: Alex at December 5, 2004 09:21 PMHas anyone noticed the way the picture of Windschuttle in the SMH makes him look just like Penfold from Danger Mouse?
http://www.handzik.com/IAC/images/PENFOLD.jpg
Posted by: Don at December 5, 2004 09:38 PMCongratulations Alex! I was waiting for that. We need a new version of Godwin's law to cover the 'If you didn't say P about Q, you can't say X about Y" positions like this.
"Unless JQ denounces categorically some alleged remarks by unnamed people pertaining to an irrelevant event in another country (if necessary travelling back in time to do so), he is banned from writing about an actual issue in this country". I like it.
As a matter of interest, where were you when that happened Alex? Is it a thing like the moon landing or the Kennedy assassination where you always remember what you were doing?
Hey, don't overstate my case! I didn't say that not commenting on the Condi Rice case automatically disqualifies JQ from having a go at Windschuttle. However, it is worth asking the question, because it may be that JQ is more interested in having a go at Windschuttle than at Condi Rice's tormentors because on other issues he disagrees with W, whereas he disagrees with Rice (and therefore is less concerned about criticism of her, even if apparently racist).
Posted by: Alex at December 5, 2004 10:08 PMAlex, I hadn't heard anything about attacks on Condi Rice but a Google search suggests that you are referring to a Wisconsin radio host (who has since apologised). For the record, I deplore his remarks.
With this preliminary issue out of the way, I look forward to your condemnation of Windschuttle.
Posted by: John Quiggin at December 5, 2004 10:18 PMJQ, see my earlier post on this thread (4.20 pm) and my comments on the other thread re conflating of various issues.
Posted by: Alex at December 5, 2004 10:34 PMFor the record, I am a racist. Lots of my best friends are white. In fact, now I think on it, they all are. Oh, except one - but she's really the wife's friend. I believe racism is a natural human attribute. Any decent psycho-evolutionist will tell you as much. So much for the science.
It's the politics that's interesting. For the record, I am not a racist. For mine, those who profess to be above unimportant squabbles like racism - Strocchi - are as much the problem as those - Windschuttle - who seek to provide political justifications for the overt expression of our common and innate racist impulse.
Racism, in a confined space, is a problem just like aggression and which we must combat in order to achieve the good life on this here earth. There can be no shirking of the issue. Progressives understand this. Recalcitrants just muddy the water and need to be ignored - Strocchi - or howled down - Windschuttle.
Prof JQ is, as almost always, correct to call it out loud and early.
One of the Bahnisch boys is on the money too saying that Windschuutle is a media tart and calculates this an issue to attract column inches and notoriety. However there is a reason matches are put in the high cupboard and there is a reason why playing the fool on this issue is as bad as playing for real.
Posted by: wbb at December 5, 2004 10:43 PMOh, and apart from the Wisconsin radio host, there was also this
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1285752/posts
and this
http://up2date.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/19/16733/877
and this
http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/11/19/1100838226867.html
although Mr Carlton claims irony as his defence, apparently
Posted by: Alex at December 5, 2004 10:50 PMJack Strocchi,
"Racism" and "racist" are usually terms of abuse which, as you imply, close off debate. As I hope to persuade you, that's the racists' choice.
"Racism" and "racist" are also analytical categories that allow identification of a fairly broad but also finite set of social, political and cultural ideas.
As Winthrop Jordan has shown, racism was deeply ingrained into English culture by the beginnning of the seventeenth century. He demonstrates how racism was nurtured by a particular understanding of bibilical texts that were peculiar to the English speaking world. (This is not to imply that only English were racist, just that their racism took on a particular, historically determined shape.)
The most potent form of racism, and the one most influential in the development of Australian official racism that informed the Immigration Act of 1901, and the racism that KW refers to and perhaps flirts with, is neo-Darwinian "scientific racism".
In discussing the rise, elaboration, adoption as public policy, systematisation, partial eclipse, and possible recent recrudescence of scientific racism in Australia one is compelled neither to don a black armband nor a white blindfold.
Racist ideas existed and still exist. Public figures adhered and still adhere to racist ideas: they are racists. This is a simple matter of analysis. Disagreements around the margins should not blind us to the existence of the core.
Racist ideas and policies range from genocidal to relatively gentle exclusionism. Very few racists call for the Final Solution. The Left is sometimes blind to these nuances.
A measure of the success of liberalism in our culture is the reluctance of racists to self-identify. "I'm not a racist but..." This is a relatively recent victory.
Liberals (small l) who have as a tenet of faith that all human beings share identical potential and deserve equal recognition of their human dignity feel it is a victory when racists are shame-faced about their obsessions.
If they want to be proud about them, however, then let them identify themselves and bring it on.
Posted by: Katz at December 5, 2004 11:09 PMKatz is now officially my intellectual hero. (Sorry, Rob!) Which is by way of saying "wot Katz said" except in this case, that would have sounded presumptuous.
Posted by: wbb at December 5, 2004 11:16 PMGreat post John. At times like this ... I miss the freedom of the 'sphere.
Posted by: cs at December 5, 2004 11:28 PMKatz, you write 'A measure of the success of liberalism in our culture is the reluctance of racists to self-identify. "I'm not a racist but..." This is a relatively recent victory.'
That is not a success of liberalism, unless by "liberalism" you mean a sort of newspeak opposite of the real thing. This very real victory is retrograde, consisting in the success of intimidation and suppression - not of any persuasion of people that they (we, in many cases, since in many cases I am one of these) are in the wrong.
I know damned well that the claque will go to work if I try to bring out those things that their tunnel vision lumps all together to be ignored, so by and large I go about things differently in my pursuit of and bringing out of such truth as I can find.
But "PC" is an enemy of this, so be damned to any categorisation which serves in the end not to highlight but to mark for suppression - which your formulation shows is a view you hold in practice, whether you know it or not.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at December 6, 2004 01:31 AMBack in the 1960's the historian C.D.Rowley drew a simple map to distinguish between what he called colonial and post-colonial Australia. Post-colonial Australia(the south east cities and the south west) was distinguished from the rest by racist views not being overtly expressed and by the absence of overt racist actions.
This distinction was still present in Australia in the 1980's when I was working in Cetral Australia. I vividly remember in 1981, when a group of 11 Aborginal people were poisoned by a bottle of port that had been laced with strychnine in Alice Springs. The Coroner at the inquest made the observation that the wrong case before his court was receiving the publicity at the time. The wrong case was the death of Azaria Chamberlain and the Coroner was Dennis Porrit.
In 2000, in one of the books written about the experience of the rabbit proof fence story - the author relates how a bullet was fired into a camp by a passing ute of white fellas. It was a commonplace event that hardly bore remarking from the local indigenous population. 'what can yu do?'
In 2003, the West Australian published a letter from a local complaining about the 'Aborginality' of a particular violent child sex offense. This was after the paper and the TV had made sure that the race of the offender was clear. Why did the publish the letter? and other's like it at the time? They published a letter from me a week latr pointing out that his race was 'australian' and that he was probably at least part English as well as part Aboriginal. And that blaming a minority for a heinous crime is a way of avoiding recognizing our collective responsibility and was a path that had been used by Goebbels prior to Crystalnacht.
I remember my grandparents and other people of their generation talking about 'boongs' and 'niggers' and 'wops' without any sense of guilt or economic self-interest. It was smugness and arrogance and pride that was in their voices that struck me as a youngster.
To all those apologists for white australia and the racist attitudes of this country - you are forgetting your own personal as well as your country's past. I'm 52 years old, I can still remember all these things, I was there. It is a precondition for facism, this wilful forgetting.
That is not a success of liberalism
Yes it IS a victory of liberalism. The notion that we are not governed by 'natural laws' or 'facts' or 'truths' like that of ethnicity or race is THE legacy of liberalism. If this infiltrates our daily abductions, that IS a huge victory.
Posted by: dk.dk at December 6, 2004 02:28 AM(1) Saying that racism (etc.) is the "last taboo", or even just a "taboo" label, is a bit strong - although it is deployed with a good deal of caution. I suspect this is because the 'average' person associates racism with a 'deep-seated' ATTITUDE or an EMOTION - viz. fear and/or hatred. So, calling Hanson in the 1990s a racist or Howard in the 1980s a racist was a risky move because the burden of proof, falling on the accusor, was quite large - it required a demonstration of a deep-seated psychological state, something that was not really evident in the public personas of either Hanson or Howard.
(2) I had the good fortune of reading through almost every word in the Commonwealth Hansard on the early 1900s debates about Australian immigration, and so can say that the majority of speakers on the matter saw non-Anglos as a threat first and formost to British culture. British culture was seen as superior to all others and that its purity, virtuousness, etc., would be corrupted by adding people of inferior cultural backgrounds. It was an easy rhetorical and conceptual slippery-slide from race to culture and back again: an inferior culture denoted an inferior race, and an inferior race was a threat to the purity of a superior culture (which was, of course, thereby associated with a superior race). In the heat of debate, even on one-hundred year old yellowing pages, the passion with which these beliefs were held burns brightly. On reading wave after wave of it, it is hard, nay impossible, to come to any conclusion other than the White Australia policy was borne out of a deep-seated fear of "the Inferior Other Races".
(3) As to Windschuttle's "(still unexplained) swing from far left to far right about a decade ago", apparently he attempted something of an explanation in November 1999 in Quadrant. Here is Bob Gould's mildly amusing take on the whole thing: http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Windschuttle.html The relevant part starts from the section entitled The Grapes of Wrath as a communist conspiracy.
Posted by: Ed M-S. at December 6, 2004 02:41 AMJohn, you write: "Racism is an evil, bloodstained ideology and no one wants to admit association with it."
So why do you maintain a link to Margo Kingston, who a few months ago claimed that "the fundamentalist Zionist lobby controls politics and the media in the US and Australia"? And what about this, from a guy many of your fellow leftists link to?
As you wrote a few days ago, "don’t whinge when you get lumped in with them."
Posted by: tim at December 6, 2004 03:37 AMJack, since we were both typing, simultaneously as far as I can tell, that Windschuttle is a fellow-traveller with racism, let's agree to agree on this one.
Posted by: John Quiggin at December 6, 2004 05:05 AMThe attempt to find racists I haven't condemned is getting kind of desperate here. Alex digs up a rather lame piece of humour from Mike Carlton, and Tim Blair points to a (rather half-hearted) apology about a racist remark from someone who might have been linked by someone I linked.
Tim also rehashes his Margo Kingston obsession with some OTT remarks by Margo that might be construed as anti-Semitic code, but might equally well be a clumsy reference to Christian fundamentalists and Likud supporters.
Again for the record, I found the 'jokes' linked by Alex to be tasteless and crass, and I think Margo should take care to avoid this kind of phrasing in future. If Tim can point to clear-cut anti-Semitism on her part, I'll delink her.
Given that Tim and Alex have set the bar so high, I'm waiting, still, to see their condemnation of Windscuttle.
Posted by: John Quiggin at December 6, 2004 05:23 AMWell in today's Australian we finally have access to what Windshuttle himself says rather that "filtered spun and adulterated" versions. On the face of it, to me it doesn't quite seem to be the vile diatribe that Q sketched out. Whether it is factually accurate is the question, which well have to wait for the sources to verify I'd say.
Posted by: d at December 6, 2004 06:47 AMI think a bit of perspective is need in judgment of WAP. The turn of the century came at a time when the world had experienced its largest ever mass migrations - I think something like 10% of the world emigrated 1870-1910(Higgins).
In other words the size of immigrant flows were large enough to literally change the character of the receiving nation. So when people made the choice about how to restrict immigration, they were quite literally choosing the cultural their nation would take. And 1900-1910, virtually every emigrant nation of note imposed some sort of racial restriction- so Australia was hardly the exceptional character. And race restrictions are still imposed – what about the US visa lottery – for instance.
Posted by: Giles at December 6, 2004 07:26 AMThe whole claim that "White Australia was exceptionally racist" is a straw man erected by Windschuttle, to deny the obvious fact that White Australia was racist.
What's really interesting here is the comparison with apartheid. Windschuttle and other defenders of White Australia want to maintain a sharp distinction between White Australia and apartheid. But (as he ought to remember) the people who were most prominent in comparing White Australia and apartheid in the 1960s and 1970s weren't leftist academics, they were apologists for apartheid, from Verwoerd on down.
Posted by: John Quiggin at December 6, 2004 07:38 AMP.M. Lawrence:
"But "PC" is an enemy of this, so be damned to any categorisation which serves in the end not to highlight but to mark for suppression - which your formulation shows is a view you hold in practice, whether you know it or not."
So I guess that, objectively, I'm a totalitarian. I confess this comes as something of a surprise to me. Oh well, so be it.
I bet all you non-PC closet xenophobes, monoculturalists, ethnocentrists, chiliasts and sundry teleologists out there in your survivalist bunkers now regret sticking your noses in the blogiverse because we objective totalitarians know your names and we know where you live.
Expect a midnight knock on the door and a one-way ticket to the John Stuart Mill Mung Bean Collective and Political Re-education Facility.
[For those who still need to be told, this is an attempt at irony.]
Posted by: Katz at December 6, 2004 07:43 AMFor mine, those who profess to be above unimportant squabbles like racism - Strocchi - are as much the problem as those - Windschuttle - who seek to provide political justifications for the overt expression of our common and innate racist impulse.
I dont think that racism is unimportant on the global scene. All indications are that the global political struggles are getting more ethnolgogical and theological, as the 19-20th Enlightenment ideologicial struggles peter out.
The genius of AUS's post-Menzies liberal Vital Centrism is that it has successfully contained the problem of racism through the dialectic of Whitlamite progressive racial differentiation and Howardite conservative social integration. FWIW, I put myself as a conservative-liberal, rather than a progressive-liberal, end of the Vital Centrist spectrum. The owner of this site, and most commenters, seem to be on the progressive-liberal side of Vital Centrism.
Racism, in a confined space, is a problem just like aggression and which we must combat in order to achieve the good life on this here earth. There can be no shirking of the issue. Progressives understand this. Recalcitrants just muddy the water and need to be ignored - Strocchi - or howled down - Windschuttle.
Yes! Thats the modern progressive way to learn and progress. Censor dissent and ignore unpleasant truths. Not.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 6, 2004 07:57 AMlet's agree to agree on this one.I wish I had thought of saying that first. Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 6, 2004 08:01 AM
And race restrictions are still imposed what about the US visa lottery for instance
Giles, you've committed the cardinal sin of assuming a simple isomorphism between citizenship and ethnicity. Nation, state and (imagined) biology have never been neatly packaged together, as much as extreme nationalists would like to promote the contrary.
Posted by: dk.dk at December 6, 2004 08:02 AMKatz: all human beings share identical potential
If this is what I'm required to believe to join the elite PC brigade... then I guess I'll just skip the semantic tricks and sign up as a racist. I think the idea that all humans share identical potential is patently absurd. We are not clones. Perhaps this explains why the left has no time for individualism?
However, it is difficult to question anything the left says regarding race for fear of being branded evil and immoral. For a long time I was too scared to debate such issues. I believe that this response (fear) is exactly what the PC brigade wants... which is why they are so arrogantly dimissive of immoral idiots that dare question them.
And yet, strangely, it is often people on the left who support government policy explicitly based on race (affirmative action).
Posted by: John Humphreys at December 6, 2004 08:05 AMJohn Humphreys:
Potential DOES NOT EQUAL achievement.
I thought this distinction had been made clearly enough by 1776 when Thomas Jefferson penned the notion that the nascent United States was dedicated to the principle that all people were created equal -- i.e., equally deserving of opportunities to develop their potential. Do we really need to reinevent that wheel?
There are arguments for removing the rights of individuals for a variety of reasons: crime, idiocy, insanity.
But to argue that there are classes of human beings who are inferior at their moment of conception and thereby merit discriminatory treatment is a most regrettable point of view and one that cannot be justified emperically.
Posted by: Katz at December 6, 2004 08:24 AMKatz: all human beings share identical potential
Steven Pinker has just killed this simplist meme in The Blank Slate.
Posted by: d at December 6, 2004 08:25 AMd:
Sigh.
A brief summary of Pinker's thesis goes like this:
"Pinker attacks the notion that an infant's mind is a blank slate, arguing instead that human beings have an inherited universal structure shaped by the demands made upon the species for survival, albeit with plenty of room for cultural and individual variation."
To assert (note that I am not claiming that it can be proven empiricially) that human beings are born with equal potential IS NOT the same as saying they are born as a BLANK SLATE.
In fact, note the important word in the above gloss of Pinker's thesis: UNIVERSAL. Pinker is saying that every human being has this potential, it is a confirmation (but not a proof) of the validity of liberal values.
Unless you've got something better, Game, Set and Match.
Posted by: Katz at December 6, 2004 08:41 AMI can't help but imagine a picture of Victorian feudal Lords, swilling their chardonary, squabbling over the true nature of their impoverished serfs.
I am genuinally curious to know who here has actually been a victim of racism, given that you all seem to have authority over it and know it so well. And that is not sarcasm. I would really like to have a better understanding of the positions of those who proffess to know the true nature of racism in this great country. Left and right alike - I don't care for political philiosphies here. When you're being searched by police in the street or receive road-rage racial epithets or get rolled for being the wrong colour, you don't have time to check if your assailant read Chomsky or Windshuttle.
Posted by: JC at December 6, 2004 09:03 AMA good question, JC. I haven't ever been a victim of racism. (My picture might provide some clues as to why this should be so.) But I certainly ran across plenty of it in my younger days, and have seen a revival (or rather a return to social acceptability) recently.
Posted by: John Quiggin at December 6, 2004 09:22 AMHere FTR are my correct views on everything about racism.
There is passive racism and active racism. All members of the human species who dedicate disproportionate personal resources to blood relatives and their kind are passive racists. All sub-special groups that dedicate political resources to subjugating or denigrating other sub-special groups are active racists.
By this metric, the AUS federal settlement was a weak form of active racism. We disposessed traditional land owners, colonised South Pacific islanders and chased out Chinese gold diggers.
Windschuttle, by supporting WAP, is attempting to justify this and is therefore giving aid and comfort to active racism, at least at the historiographical level. I see no evidence that Windschuttle is giving intellectual support to active racism in the sphere of contemporary political activity.
Active racism has more or less disappeared from the AUS political spectrum since the ascension of Whitlam. But before we all start scrambling for the high moral ground and deafening each other with bawls of self-congratulation I would urge commenters to pause.
Pretty much every person I know, including Pr Q, is a passive racist because they care for their kids more than other kids. The very word "kind" betrays that children (kinder), our blood issue, are micro-racial units of propagation. The Nazis were an extreme version of biological communitarians and got alot of mileage out of the slogan: 'kinder, kusche, kirsch'.
Familial groups are racist institutions since they are the building blocks of tribal, national and racial populations. A race is simply a scaled up family with a certain level of non-lethal consanguinal interbreeding. Plato knew this and preferred citizenship to kinship as the foundation of the state. So he advocated breaking up families to strenghthen the state.
Humans appear to have evolved the moral sentiment of reciprocal altruism (tit-for-tat kindness) which was advantageously selected as the biological affinities in shared genes aided propagation and prolongation of familiar sub-species. The challenge of civilised statehood is to substitute kinship for citizenship, based on sociological affinities of shared memes.
The multi-culti seperatists, who Windschuttle attacks, advocate kinship based political communities which is leads back to tribalism ie racism. They pose a much greater threat to a liberal civic culture than Windschuttle's apostatic poses.
Already AUS's hardcore multi-culturalists have been associated with covering up criminal-political drug trafficking rings(Grassby), our first jailed cabinet minister (Theophanous) and our first political assasination (Newman). Not to mention the internal corruption of our oldest political party (ALP ethnic lobby branch stacking & immigration rorts). One could go on with the various rorts and wanks associated with equity and diversity bureaucracies and over-lawyering, but it would be too tedious. Every one knows this anyway but prefers to not mention it to avoid the Tickner treatment.
Holland, which had gone done some serious multi-culti experimentation over the past generation, has proved Poppers theory that a liberal civitas cannot tolerate the intolerant. We have had a small taste of where this can go with recent disturbances by dis-integrating cults in Sydney's South West.
Where's the outrage? I await, with unbated breath, progressive-liberal repudiation of the reactionary, vicious and stupid multi-cultural seperatist philosophy.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 6, 2004 09:33 AMKatz, you are nuts. Are you really suggesting that I was born with the potential to be another Beethoven or Einstein?
Posted by: Alex at December 6, 2004 09:51 AMWorth reading Windschuttle's article in today's Australian. While he may somewhat overstate his case, he also mounts a pretty good argument that others have overstated the opposing case, by a considerably greater margin.
Posted by: Alex at December 6, 2004 10:09 AMThanks John.
It is worthy to note that this applies to white racism as much as black, or brown, or pink with purple pokadots.
You should be thankful for not ever being the subject of racism. It is not a pleasant experience. In my observation (and experience) people tend to have one of two reactions to it - they either respond violently (physical or verbal) to their assailant, or are so shocked by the unexpectadness of the assault that they curl up into a little ball or run away. This may be sudden in the street, or maybe covert in a workplace. The bottom line is that it hurts. I hope you all remember that when you form your discussion pieces, especially when you contemplate accusing your foes of being "intellectual elites". Ha!.
None of this of course detracts from one's right to form opinions on the matter. It merely gives us all a better understanding of how someone's opinions form and may lend credibility to said opinion given that this is an issue that happens to be experienced by real people on the ground and not at the comfort of one's computer (at least where it counts the most).
But don't worry John, you've got plenty of credibility to throw around. You're testimonials on the front page are evidence of that.
Posted by: JC at December 6, 2004 10:13 AMJC, I've been a victim of racism. You see, I'm white, and when I was a child in the newly independent former Belgian Congo, the Force Publique mutinied and started killing all the whites they could find, and never mind whether they were Belgian or not. The Luluabourg community was besieged in a block of flats for three days until a local Belgain paratroop colonel disobeyed orders and made a drop to save us.
That's why I take examples of racism as much less serious when they fall materially short of atrocities.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at December 6, 2004 10:32 AMJQ asked for specific experiences of racism.
I recently asked the same question of my Beijing-born girlfriend, who has lived here since 1990. She says that she's only had one experience, when an "old lady" muttered something to her at a bus stop.
For the record, she believes that Australia is likely the least racist country on earth. She says that Chinese society is far more racist.
Posted by: James L. at December 6, 2004 10:33 AMKatz... I never said potential equals achievement. I also agree that all people are equally deserving of opportunities to develop (despite your weird implication that I don't).
I never argued for removing the rights of individuals or that certain classes of humans are inferior. I never argued for discriminatory treatment.
Are you making this up as you go? You missed the bit about me eating babbies and clubbing penguins. I am also responsible for the Vietnam war, world hunger and reality TV.
As for experiencing racism... anybody who has been to asian or africa has likely experienced racism (I have plenty of times). In Australia -- not as much. Nothing that offended me... just the casual racism of my singapore friends.
Posted by: John Humphreys at December 6, 2004 10:34 AMAlex -- of course you could be Mozart! Or Thorpe. Or Michael Jordan! We all have identical potential! If you question this -- you're an evil racist. :)
btw... from most of my conversations with my asian friends in Australia -- they are far more racist to others than others are to them. We joke about it a bit. They say "I'm not racist... but indians are XYZ and you white people are ABC" :) Nobody really gets offended in those conversations because they all (including chinese, indian, malay) all simply assume that racism is normal. When I question them on it, they look at me funny as though I'm talking about an alien concept. Then they say: "typical comment from a white guy"! ;) lol
Oh, but I forgot. It's the white people that are evil. Actually white men. Heterosexual white men. Middle class heterosexual white men. I feel so ashamed.
Posted by: John Humphreys at December 6, 2004 10:43 AMI've never (to my knowledge) been a victim of racist words or acts, but as an Anglo-Celtic child and adolescent at moderately multi-ethnic schools in Melbourne, I was both a witness and a perpetrator (mainly repeating spiteful nonsense about the diets of particular ethnic groups) until I saw the error of my ways at the age of 15.
In the subsequent thirty years, in the course of taxi journeys, hitch-hiking trips, overhearing conversations in public bars, and participating in conversations with unenlightened friends of friends, I have seen and heard more of the same, and worse, such as the Sydney taxi driver who regretted that our colonist ancestors weren't more liberal with the poisoned flour. No fine distinctions between racism and culturalism there.
Jack Strocchi,
Categorisations of "out groups" are very flexible. Read L. Curtis Perry's "Apes and Angels" on English attitudes to the Irish in the nineteenth century. According to dominant English opinion, the Irish represented the polar opposite to the English to a much greater degree than almost all other groups (races)at the time.
Today there are some vestiges of these attitudes towards the Irish abroad in England, but racist attitudes, where they exist, have found other targets. I believe that the history of anti-Irish attitudes in England is a fair model for the evolution of racism in many places, including Australia.
So long as popular prejudice is not reinforced and nourished by public policy the hatred and fear of a specific group of outsiders dissipates over time.
I may be overstating the case, but it seems to me that our globalising world simply cannot accommodate pockets of xenophobia and ethnocentrism that are too blatant in the eyes of world opinion. This will be more true after the tragically misguided attempt by the United States to transform itself into the Middle Kingdom collapses under the weight of its financial and emotional costs.
Indicative of the emotional fragility of the US today is the urgency with which Bush is hosing down the panic-inducing idea that the US food supply is subject to terrorist contamination. The food and water supplies are, of course, vulnerable, but the costs of making US food safe are beyond the now enfeebled financial capacity of the US.
Posted by: Katz at December 6, 2004 10:52 AMI haven't ever been a victim of racism. but I have seen a revival (or rather a return to social acceptability) recently.
This is a qualitative anecdotal observation. The quantitative statistical observations all point the other way.
NESB immigration is higher under Howard than Keating. Asian students top the Uni scores. Ethnic exogamy is at a higher rate. Asian students and tourists arrive by the boatload. The incidence of ethnic "racial vilification" are at historic lows. Pragmatic-substantive, rather than dogmatic-symbolic, Reconciliation is now the accepted way forward.
Whats not to like?
Ms Hanson was just the rump of the Country Party. Many of her statements criticising ATSIC and ethnic lobbies rorts were unexceptional have been validated by Parliament. The racist part of her politic has been consigned to the Dustbin of History, courtesy of John Howard's artful politics.
The so-called Culture Wars are over. The Vital Centre (Howard/Latham) has won. Modern AUS, with its Big Brother/Australian Idol watching constituencies, has moved on.
Culture History Wars are now waged by a bunch of aging baby boomers (Henderson, Sheridan, Windschuttle v Manne, McIntyre, Reynolds,) raking over the radical embers of their uni salad days. My guess is that there is a institutional subtext of status-scrambling to the ideological supertext of race-debating. Windschuttle is trying to move up the academic status ladder by taking his progressive superiors down a peg or two, using whatever intellectual resources at his disposal. A glorified troll. Bor-ing.
I repeat my questions. If AUS has reverted to a racist-sympathetic polity:
Alex,
"Katz, you are nuts. Are you really suggesting that I was born with the potential to be another Beethoven or Einstein?"
Yes Alex, but better than that, you've been born with the potential to be the best Alex you can be.
Enjoy.
Posted by: Katz at December 6, 2004 10:59 AMJust returning to your original comment john
No-one, as far I can see, was prepared to defend Windschuttle outright, but there was a sudden and startling outbreak of caution. ...
All of this is very uncharacteristic of the blogosphere
I think this is a good sign. Too often in the past decade has the left, feeling in control of the majority viewpoint (especially on racial and historical issues) dismissed rather than debated the issues raised.
Of course many who do can later easily defend their positions, but just as many cant and seem to join the pack in renouncing & ignoring the arguments. Unfortunately that doesn’t deter the foolish claims as we may hope and with a right wing which maintains a persecution complex, this dismissal gives them further evidence that they aren’t getting a fair go.
That’s why they celebrate people like Windschuttle & Hanson, because they get us lefties so worked up. Its like the kid in class who when asked to answer a question on the days topic deliberately chooses a wrong answer to spite the teacher.
It’s a sign of the rights intellectual struggle that they have to cheer such extremists, but also a pox on the left as we haven’t been able to counter such foolish arguments to our political benefit.
If we are to justify our hold on the majority viewpoint on these issues then it is even more vital that we coherently & carefully analyze & discuss the claims put forward, unfortunately even the ludicrous ones.
Posted by: DrShrink at December 6, 2004 11:07 AMAre you serious, Jack? You don't know where to find a nazi or bonehead group in Australia?
Open your eyes!
Posted by: Robert at December 6, 2004 11:27 AMOne of the reasons Windschuttle has become so prominent despite his all to obvious whitewashing of Australian history is the double standards of many cultural leftists (or post-modernist ex-Marxists). While they are quick to seize on transgressions by mainstream society, both real and imagined, they generally go to great extremes to excuse the excesses of minority groups (e.g. Muslims) or label racist anyone who criticises these excesses.
Taking the piss out of Christianity is OK (as is attacking Israel at every opportunity) – eg Life of Brian, PissChrist etc but not Islam. Such double standards are not simply limited to a small number of political correct cretins but infect academia. Just look at Middle Eastern studies in the United States where senior figures (John Esposito etc) have repeatedly played down the extent of Islamic extremism in the Muslim world and, in the process, often put a positive spin on the actions of major human rights abusers such as Hassan el Turabi (Sudanese religious leader).
Posted by: Michael Burgess at December 6, 2004 12:20 PMAdmittedly I was at first under the impression that White Australia was a racist thing. But now seek forgiveness as I have learnt that indeed it was a simple matter of the workers preserving their terms of employment. An old song of the time illustrates that the concern was purely with protecting against scab labour and was in no way racist.
Should an orphan ask assistance
Would you drive him from you door
And educate a Chinkie
To import some thousands more.
Sum Sings, Tan Moons and Saw Chows
With Fuch Chongs and Ah Foys
To practice their vile debauchery
And increase the unemployed.
Every discussion of "racism" becomes one of definition. This is of course amusing because there is nothing wrong with preferrring one "race" over another. It is a natural human reaction. "Racism" is only a problem if it leads to the commission of a crime. Thus, if you kill someone because he is of another race, the fact that the killer may have illogically hated the victim because he was of a different ethnicity is irrelevant; the only crime that occurred was the murder.
The White Australia was a kind of "racism" that did not lead to any crime. It is also the case that the host nation always has the right to refuse entry to anybody it so wishes. Therefore, even if the WAP was "racist", it really doesn't matter.
Posted by: Toryhere at December 6, 2004 01:45 PMExcept that if racism were leading to murders then as a root cause it is a problem. Murder is the what and racism is the why.
The White Australia Policy may not matter to racists but it does to others.
Posted by: wbb at December 6, 2004 01:58 PMCulture History Wars are now waged by a bunch of aging baby boomers (Henderson, Sheridan, Windschuttle v Manne, McIntyre, Reynolds,) raking over the radical embers of their uni salad days. My guess is that there is a institutional subtext of status-scrambling to the ideological supertext of race-debating.
Couldn't agree more, Jack. I just wish you were also right with this comment:
The so-called Culture Wars are over.
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 6, 2004 02:14 PMtoryhere writes:
"[. . .]there is nothing wrong with preferrring one 'race' over another. It is a natural human reaction. 'Racism' is only a problem if it leads to the commission of a crime."
So if it leads to morally wrong behaviour which isn't mentioned in the criminal code, then it's OK? I think not.
Racism is about regarding person A less favourably than person B when you don't know enough about them to make any kind of judgement about the sort of individual person they are. And it's about treating them less favourably (in terms of immigration approval, employment, renting a house, approving a loan, admission to university, etc., etc.), not on the basis of anything person A has done or any attribute of person A which is relevant to a decision about these matters, but purely because they belong to a particular group of people labelled a "race". Do I need to explain what is morally wrong with this?
Posted by: Paul Norton at December 6, 2004 02:15 PMJack,
Darp is currently running a campaign to expose and get rid of the Patriotic Youth League, a white supremacist group with a moderate public front. They're most active in Newcastle and around Sydney.
These people are definitely around and if you check the PYL posts on Darp's site, you'll see that there's plenty of outrage, and a fair bit of action being mobilised.
Posted by: Swade at December 6, 2004 02:17 PM"Culture History Wars are now waged by a bunch of aging baby boomers (Henderson, Sheridan, Windschuttle v Manne, McIntyre, Reynolds,) raking over the radical embers of their uni salad days. My guess is that there is a institutional subtext of status-scrambling to the ideological supertext of race-debating."
It's possible to pathologise the explanation for every human motive and every human act, from choice of religion to choice of mobile phone plan.
So what? If we treat everyone who disagreement as evidence of mental illness, the only logical solution is to declare the whole country to be an asylum and turn over its administration to specialists who treat the criminally insane.
It may sound old-fashioned but the only way to have an intelligent conversation is to assume the sanity and good will of your interlocutor until you have very good evidence to the contrary.
Posted by: Katz at December 6, 2004 02:27 PM"Taking the piss out of Christianity is OK (as is attacking Israel at every opportunity) – eg Life of Brian..."
Having just seen Life of Brian recently for the first time in ages, I can assure you it takes the piss out of everything except Jesus Christ.
I'm also intrigued by the line of arguement that goes "You think Australia's racist? You should see how bad it is in other places" Which it is as I've seen m'self. But somehow this arguement seems so well, morally relative. After all two wrongs don't make a right, as Arthur Calwell almost said.
And what is this "culturalist" thing? Is it like Intelligent Design? Eg: "Of course I don't believe God created the earth 6000 years ago, however..."
And how did that hypen get into 'Anglo-Saxon'?
I'm with Senator Bulworth here in advocating a program of progressive racial deconstruction by gettin' yer freak on.
Posted by: Nabakov at December 6, 2004 03:12 PMWhy (for most participants here) was the WAP wrong, morally?
More generally, why (for most participants here) is it wrong for people (of any colour or race) to wish to associate with their own kind and to deny access to their society to other peoples? I ask this whether or not they regard others as inferior, sub-human, alien etc, or even superior, but do not persecute them and wish them no harm.
Now I realise this may appear to be a provocative question given the nature of this blog site but you have my word that provocation is not my intention. It is really the more general question above that I am interested in. It seems to be taken as axiomatic here that one should welcome other peoples to one's shores. Why?
Posted by: Len Dripping at December 6, 2004 04:36 PMAs one of those Australian-Born Asians that are tangentially and obliquely referred to in this interesting debate, there's no question in my mind that Windscuttle is, in his own ham-fisted way, an apologist for the racist viewpoints that begat the White Australia Policy. My father was very nearly a victim of this Policy during the early seventies - although he was a legal migrant with valuable skills (a highly experienced biochemist, now retired), he was about to be deported, even though he had already qualified for PR and Citizenship. If it hadn't been for a change in Government at that time, I have no doubt that I'd be raised in Malaysia instead of Australia.
The argument of racist bigots like Pauline Hanson is that Asians "don't assimilate". You only have to look at families like my own, or John So (the re-elected Mayor of Melbourne) to realise what a huge lie this is. If Asians are generally so inferior to Anglo-Saxon Australians, then why was one of them elected Mayor of Melbourne? Why was my father the second-in-charge of his division if he wasn't qualified enough to keep the job? It's the achievements of people like these that make such erroneous claims a complete and total lie. Asians can "assimilate" into Australia just fine, without compromising their own sense of identity or culture.
Sorry for the rant, but debates like these have been a personal obesession of mine since 1996. I can't help but get involved, even when I know I probably shouldn't.
Posted by: Spacehamster at December 6, 2004 04:39 PMIRA: $150,000? Quiggin, as I recall, has a Federation Fellowship, which carries a salary of about $240K.
Of course, bringing this fact up is both rude and irrelevant, but if you're gonna do it then you might as well be accurate about it.
Of course, for that kind of money you'd think we could get somebody better than Quiggin, who right here has managed to spend a few thousand words attacking Windschuttle's historical article without addressing, or even mentioning, any of the points therein.
Posted by: Jorge at December 6, 2004 04:42 PMAlex,
what is your point? Are you saying that you can't match Einstein or Mozart because you are part of an inferior race, and that your ancestors should therefore have been denied entry to our fair land?
Jorge, Prof Q's point, in this post at least, is made by Windschuttle's very argument: it now offends right wing PC to call the WHITE Australia policy "racist". Whether it's origins were in visceral hatred of "the other", or in protectionism, it was still a system of judging people and affording them different rights, privileges and status according to their race. QED, it was racist.
Good grief.
Posted by: Sean at December 6, 2004 05:10 PMSean, I was expressing my amazement at the statement by Katz "all human beings share identical potential".
Posted by: Alex at December 6, 2004 06:59 PM"Of course, for that kind of money you'd think we could get somebody better than Quiggin"
You're getting me for free, Jorge. If you want to see the stuff I get paid for, go here
Posted by: John Quiggin at December 6, 2004 08:09 PMOK spacehamster if you are an asian why arent you using an asian name like Won Hung Lo? By using the obviously anglo name spacehamster you are compromising my Aussie sense of identity and culture - sob!!
Posted by: rog at December 6, 2004 08:42 PMI did
Posted by: Louis Hissink at December 6, 2004 09:43 PMJC,
I personally have been a victim of racism in another country. The racism was directed at my accent which resembled that of a regional group resented by my powerful arrogant opinionated white fundamentalist boss for racist historical reasons. It happened that I was NOT a member of that regional group. A female associate of my boss told me one day " you'll never get anywhere d unless you change the way you speak".
The adverse treatment I got was very distressing and to stand up for my right required considerable courage. I did not give way to the pressures but did not handle them perfectly. My very survival was threatened though. Another friend later told me that they admired my courage in the face of this treatment.
Belmont Club , http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/, has a great Thread called Tar and Feathers that's highly relevant to this current thread
Posted by: d at December 6, 2004 10:24 PMThe changing tones of what is PC or not under is illustrated in this argument. That KW is given so much press to promote his views, where evidence is altered to suit a world view which is very forgiving of the White Australia Policy, is evidence of how racism may not be the name - but it is the game.
We may be importing people from the Horn of Africa these days but we will still expect them to do the dirty work. I remember times when people seriously discussed whether Italians and Greeks were really white people ie it was a slippery slope to let them into the country under the now disputed but very clear White Australia Policy.
There are still many derogatory terms used about Indigenous Australian. The Palm Island and Redfern riots occurred as a result of the strong perception in these Indigenous communities that actions were racist. An Aboriginal woman who dresses well and is educated and senior in rank has cried in front of me, a stranger, because of the withering looks she receives daily when she walks into shops in the city.
Keith Windschuttle is not encouraging debate but encouraging racism - he is a fellow traveller indeed - but how much easier it is to blame those without power or a voice than it is to confront the real history of oppression that saw Aboriginal people hunted in the South East of South Australia or manacled for crimes in the Flinders Ranges committed by another Aboriginal person for daring to try and protect precious water from theft by white shepherds.
Let's not examine the issue of Aboriginal People moved to "camps" far from their traditional lands which just happened to be where new white settlers wished to move.
It is debatable to say that Aboriginal women prostituted themselves rather than admit the ugly side of white men who abused power relationships by rape and then gave food to make their rape OK. Not in every situation but too often.
No KW is a racist not a fellow traveller as he is not interested in what actually happened but more interested in rewriting the history of the country and proving historians labelled "leftist" wrong. If he was interested in the truth he would have to admit that there is more to truth than the writings or omissions of the victor.
Posted by: Jill Rush at December 6, 2004 10:45 PMLen Dripping,
Your question is easy to answer. 'My kind' of person is not defined by skin colour or native language. The gentle burmese lady next door is much more my kind of person than the foul-mouthed Scottish oaf on the other side of her. Anyone who thinks that a person's true qualities can be predicted from surface characteristics is a bigot, and a racist is a subspecies of bigot. Bigots manage to find someone to despise, someone to label as 'not our kind', even when there are no differences in skin colour, language or religion. Are you a bigot, by any chance?
Posted by: James Farrell at December 6, 2004 11:09 PMMichael Burgess
You are slipping. You forgot to mention Chomsky, Pilger, acid in women's faces, and how you were sacked for questioning David Suzuki.
Posted by: James Farrell at December 6, 2004 11:15 PMAnd so what, 'd"?
Are yer gonna reveal, ta-da! that it happened while yer were an Aussie/Yank/white South African/Canuck in the UK/Europe or any comination of the above, thereby proving white folks suffer from racism too so it's not a big deal?
That doesn't prove anything except yer not half the sneaky smartarse commentator yer thought yer were.
Posted by: Nabakov at December 6, 2004 11:21 PMJill, I think where I have a problem with people throwing around charges of racism is when they focus on that, missing the point completely. You describe your friend as someone who "dresses well and is educated and senior in rank", then you go on to describe how she was upset. But that, while nothing to do with her skin colour, is also an external and superficial categorising. It is just as wrong to upset someone who is not like that. Using terms like racism allows people to slip into forgetting that hurting people is the wrong thing here, that is t would be just as wrong to hurt someone who didn't fit the description "dresses well and is educated and senior in rank".
I can see the point in using concepts like racism to analyse and to frame policies, but to make it the test of morality is a sort of idolatry, confusing means with ends. It's like all those idiot Americans who go on about terrorists killing innocents, as though it was right to kill other people (it usually isn't, though cases may differ).
It's that fundamental confusion that I object to, that makes people consider repression to be a righteous act and forget persuasion and true conversion. You should be able to imagine a John Newton come to grace without losing his fundamental self, but there are people around here who would be happy to thwart the John Newtons and consider that a moral rather than a practical victory. There is a fundamental failure of morality and compassion in people who think that is righteous, and yes, they are paving the way for any who come after and wield their own agendas with that as precedent.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at December 6, 2004 11:26 PMPredictably, Gerard Henderson has taken up the cudgels on behalf of Windschuttle - sort of.
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 6, 2004 11:56 PMOh, Katz, you might want to follow up the link on my home page to what the Constitutional Centenary Foundation did when I tried to expose certain sorts of republicans as racists by showing them for what they were. That is just precisely the sort of repression and distortion that anti-racism leads to, a direct contradiction of the claimed purposes of these pharisaical hypocrites, setting up rules for compassion while disregarding the spirit of compassion.
Do you really want to stand with them? For to mock what I have told you as objectively totalitarian is indeed - objectively - to be an enemy of truth and a servant of the lie.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at December 7, 2004 12:17 AMIn re 'Wilsonian' nationalism, Gordon is perhaps unaware that Woodrow Wilson, American Liberal Saint because of his support for the League of Nations, was the most viscious racist ever to sit in the White House. His first act as president was to fire all black federal workers (as University President he had previously kept his school all-white); his review of a movie made of a close friend's book, The Klansman (Birth of a Nation) was 'it's all true.'
Posted by: John Costello at December 7, 2004 12:32 AM"...You describe your friend as someone who "dresses well and is educated and senior in rank", then you go on to describe how she was upset. But that, while nothing to do with her skin colour,..."
Um.. Jill's comment explicitly said it had everything to do with her race/skin colour.
You don't work as a paramedic do you PM Lawrence? 'cos I'd hate to get CPR from you while suffering from a compound fracture.
"Oh, Katz, you might want to follow up the link on my home page to what the Constitutional Centenary Foundation did when I tried to expose certain sorts of republicans as racists by showing them for what they were. "
I did and...huh? It seems to be an overly detailed, longwinded and poorly laid out account of a confused procedural bitchfight amongst a fringe group of constitutional activists.
Not doubt what went down then is still fresh in your mind, but in the absence of context, or indeed relevance to this discussion, this means nothing to me, Vienna. Perhaps you could provide a quick 50 word precis explaining why it's germane to this thread.
Posted by: Nabakov at December 7, 2004 12:51 AMA couple of overtly racist employers here and here. Bring forth the condemnations!
Posted by: yobbo at December 7, 2004 02:28 AMA historical, not political, question: did any other nations on Earth have native ethnophilic - alien ethnophobic settlement/preference policies?
Was AUS the only nation on earth where the state explicitly preferred its own kind?
Or did every other nation on earth regulate its settlement/preferences on ethnic grounds?
Or were other nations less ethno-communitarian and more individually libertarian - socially egalitarian in their treatment of Others?
Morality, as proven by Evolution, is Relative, not Absolute. So if we are going to condemn the WAP in retrospect then we should know what were the prevailing standards in contemporary times and comparable places.
(Self-defensive Post Script: I support a cosmopolitan-integrative settlement policy which discriminates on the basis of the migrants cultural psychology rather than biological physiology.)
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 7, 2004 06:46 AMJack,
I'm curious. How does evolution prove that morality is relative, not absolute?
On the issue of relative vs. absolute morality, I don't think anyone here condemning KW is arguing that Australians were significantly more racist than other people at the time of the WAP, but that doesn't mean they weren't racist.
Morality may be a relative concept, but racism isn't. Either you discriminate on the basis of race or you don't. The WAP did, so it's racist.
Posted by: Fyodor at December 7, 2004 07:20 AMJack Strocchi,
Are the United States and New Zealand comparable enough?
From apparently reliable web sites:
US
1907: President Theodore Roosevelt enters into "Gentlemen's Agreement" with Japan to limit Japanese immigration to the mainland and Hawaii. (A provision allows family members induding wives of Japanese to immigrate, thus allowing the Japanese to begin families and build their community.) It also includes a ban on further Korean immigration to the United States as laborers, thus opening up farming jobs in Hawaii for Filipinos. Korean immigration virtually ends during the period of Japanese occupation (1910-45) and does not resume until the Immigration Act of 1965 is passed.
New Zealand:
"The Poll Tax was unjustly imposed on Chinese immigrants in New Zealand over a period of just over half a century from 1881 to 1944 under the Chinese Immigrants Act 1881 (payment waived 1934). The imposition of the Poll Tax was an integral pan of the history of Chinese settlement in New Zealand. It is pertinent to the history of New Zealand and its identity.
"The Poll Tax was only imposed on immigrants of Chinese ethnicity. As such the carrying out of such a policy was aimed at restricting immigrants who were Chinese from emigrating to New Zealand simply based on the fact that they were Chinese. No other ethnic group was required to overcome such a hurdle before entering New Zealand."
It seems that both of these countries followed racist immigration policies.
The United States enshrined official racism into its constitution in the administration and enumeration of African slaves and Native Americans. In New Zealand the Treaty of Waitangi compelled recognition of the property rights and authority structure of the Maori. This bi-culturalism had its most immediate result in reserved seats in the New Zealand Parliament for Maori franchise.
Neither of these countries enshrined racist provisions against intending immigrants in their Constitution. This appears to have been a uniquely Australian response. And let's notforget that it embarrassed and angered the British Government at the time. So it appears Australia was an outlier if not an actual pariah nation even in the first decade of the twentieth century.
A caveat: to identify a policy as racist is not automatically to condemn it morally. But it should be remembered that Deakin, Higgins and other members of the Australian Government in 1901 at the time of passage of the Immigration Act were a bit shame-faced about the way in which Australia expressed its racism.
Posted by: Katz at December 7, 2004 07:50 AMKatz
RE
d:
Sigh.
A brief summary of Pinker's thesis goes like this:..
It seems that I need to quote Pinker more specifically to demonstrate that THE BLANK SLATE's title is not the reason I referred to the book. The most relevant part is the chapter on The Fear of Inequality, and I quote key parts below which are more informative that Qs spin on the book.
I suspect, despite your rhetorical and dismissive "sigh" that we are substatially in agreement.
The Blank Slate – from the chapter on The Fear of Inequality
Taking all these processes into account, we get the following picture. People are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative difference& are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater ex- tent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions about our biology.
But biology does not let us off the hook entirely. Individuals are not genetically identical, and it is unlikely that the differences affect every part of the body except the brain. And though genetic differences between races and ethnic groups are much smaller than those among individuals, they are not nonexistent …
…
So COULD DISCOVERIES in biology turn out to justify racism and sexism? Ab- solutely not! The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups to which the individual belongs. Enlightened societies choose to ignore race, sex, and ethnicity in hiring, promotion, salary, school admissions, and the criminal justice system because the alternative is morally repugnant. Discriminating against people on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity would be unfair, penalizing them for traits over which they have no control. It would perpetuate the injustices of the past, in which African Americans, women, and other groups were enslaved or oppressed. It would rend society into hostile factions and could escalate into horrific persecution. But none of these arguments against discrimination depends on whether groups of people are or are not geneticallv indistinguishable.
Far from being conducive to discrimination, a conception of human nature is the reason we oppose it…
As we've opened up Pinker and the R word , why not consider Richard Dawkins too:
Richard Dawkins 2004 “The Ancestors Tale”. – Chapter containing the Grasshoppers Tale, p357 ff. On differences between races.
QUOTE
It is genuinely true that, if you measure the total variation in the human species, and then partition it into between-race component and a within –race component, the between-race component is a very small fraction of the total. Most of the variation among humans can be found within races as well as between them. Only a small admixture of extra variation distinguishes races from each other. That is all correct. What is not correct is the inference that race is therefore a meaningless concept. This point has been clearly made by the distinguished Cambridge geneticist A. W. F. Edwards in a recent paper called 'Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy'. R. C. Lewontin is an equally distinguished Cambridge (Mass.) geneticist, known for the strength of his political convictions and his weakness for dragging them into science at every possible opportunity. Lewontin's view of race has become near-universal orthodoxy in scientific circles. He wrote, in a famous paper of 1972:
It is clear that our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups, as compared to the variation within these groups, is indeed a biased perception and that, based on randomly chosen genetic differences. human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other. with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals.
This is, of course, exactly the point I accepted above, not surprisingly since what I wrote was largely based on Lewontin. But see how Lewontin goes on:
Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either. no justification can be offered for its continuance.
We can all happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value ' and is positively destructive of social and human relations. That is one reason why I object to ticking boxes in forms and why I object to positive discrimination in job selection. But that doesn't mean that race is of 'virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance'. This is Edwards's point, and he reasons as follows. However small the racial partition of the total variation may be, if such racial characteristics as there are are highly correlated with other racial character-
istics, they are by definition informative, and therefore of taxonomic significance. Informative means something quite precise. An informative statement is one that tells you something you didn't know before. The information content of a statement is measured as reduction in prior uncertainty. Reduction in prior uncertainty, in turn, is measured as a change in probabilities. This provides a way to make the information content of a message mathematically precise, but we don't need to bother with that.- If I tell you Evelyn is male, you immediately know a whole lot of things about him. Your prior uncertainty about the shape of his genitals is reduced (though not obliterated). You now know facts you didn't know before about his chromosomes, his hormones and other aspects of his biochemistry, and there is a quantitative reduction in your prior uncertainty about the depth of his voice, and the distribution of his facial hair and of his body fat and musculature.
Heil,herr windscuttle!
Jack stroppy asks naievely-where are the racists?
Come to WA jack,where we have had fire bomb attacks on chinese restaurants,some ten years ago,some a few months ago.
The same gang puts up thousands of anti asian bills on poles and bus shelters with a crude
drawing of an asian stereotype.
Come to WA jack,where our local rag the worst australian prints some horrendous letters-usually from the same people.
I remember the odium heaped on cathy freeman after winning that gold medal and daring to fly the aboriginal flag-don't ya hate uppity blacks!
I see the most hate here coming from lefties against racists... not by racists against other races.
I also see a lot of stupid arguments. The fact that there is an asia mayor of melbourne is hardly proof of the virtues or vices of asian immigration.
As for all the talk of "evil bigots"... do you arrogant bastards realise that you're condemning nearly the entire populations of asia and africa... and probably the world? Would you really have this much hatred against a racist if the racist was non-white (which most are)?
Personally, I can see little value in holding on to such hatred. But the left seem to enjoy it.
Oh, and the PYL is a small band of kids... hardly a huge racist underground movement. To hold them up as the proof of Australia's racism is to pretty much declare Australia an overwhelmingly non-racist country.
Posted by: John Humphreys at December 7, 2004 08:41 AMAs a matter of natural and social history, it is the case that organisms evolved moral codes Relative to niche-specific environments. I set aside more abstract considerations regarding the Ontology of Ethics.
I do not deny that there are human-specific moral universals (eg anti-murder, incest etc). But Life, owing to the inevitability of evolutionary mutation, cannot have a moral code with an Absolute (ie perpetuitive and pervasive) universal moral obligation.
In any case, there is something special about all morality. (Pun Intended). Lions and chimpanzees have moral codes, evolved relative to their niches, and these are definitely not identical to hominid morality.
Hominids are famous for constructing a spectrum of moral horses for different social courses. Darwin was shocked by the Wasp's behaviour, but could not bring himself to call it Absolutely immoral. She was only looking after her kids. If that is what it took to allow human survival then humans would do the same. (In fact we do anyway: anyone who has bought battery farm food for their family is as guilty as the Wasp.)
Life, as depicted by Darwin and explained by Crick/Watson, is a single lineage with local and temporal (individual and special) differentiatons. The different branches adopt or adapt different codes of niche-specific behaviour that assist in survival, sexual and social operations in different environments. The
"environment" includes everything outside the genetic nucleus.
These (moral, mores, modal) behavioural codes may be fairly described as having relative validity, depending on the state, and rate of change, in the environment. Thus, if the environment radically changes then different moral codes are required. Or the organism, and its genetic line, dies out.
These codes may be acquisitively adopted by nurtural-intutive, or cultural-intellective, learning processes. Changes within the genetic nucleus will also bring forth behavioural changes. They will be heritably adapted and become part of the organisms natural-instinctive decision making code.
I agree with Pr Q that WAP, as a matter of historical fact, was intrinsically racist. It was practiced as such, and on that basis, by Federation Australians.
Whether WAP was especially vicious or virtuous depends, as I have argued, on whether this moral code was out of line with prevailing standards amongst comparable populations. I think that it was more conservative than the generally progressive standards upheld throughout the Empire. But Britain was considerably less vulnerable than Australia to invasion etc. Who are we to judge?
What none can deny was that WAP was extremely popular amongst voters. In a democracy its the numbers that count.
It is the case that WAP was a defensive-passive form of racism. (Setting aside treatment of Native Indigenes.) It was therefore less objectionable than the offensive-aggressive form of genocidal racism practised by Nazi Germany.
This has not stopped multicultural industrialists, like Pr. Kalantzis, from likening Federation Australians to Nazi genocidal fascists. Godwins Law was made with our Wets in mind.
But Wet Revolutionaries are always coming out with nonsense like that. It is not surprising that Dry Reactionaries, like Windschuttle, are drawn to refute this folly. Thus does Wet stupidity and inanity make its own decline a dialectical inevitability.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 7, 2004 09:07 AMThe incidence of militant White racism in AUS, in WA, QLD and Newcastle, are bad and should be subject to legal and moral constraints. FWIW I support the Racial Vilification Act. But AUS White Racism is statistically insignificant in size and politically trivial in effect.
Intra-ethnic racist violence (between NESBs or against Caucasian natives) is a more significant problem, especially where it overlaps with ethnic criminal gangs. It should be noted that the greatest victims of this kind of violence are ethnic communities, esp more vulnerable women and children.
Rational discussion and lawful regulation of this is occasionaly subjected to Pee-Cee taboo. Multicultural industrialists prefer to bump up investment in their cosy little neo-tribalist racket, rather than constrain actual and existing racial offences.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 7, 2004 09:16 AMGerard Henderson correctly faults Windschuttle for his lack of empathy. I suspect that Gerry is reluctantly going into bat for his side in the culture wars here.
Speaking of going into bat, I wonder if Michael Kasprowicz is the bowler at quiggin.com now that we've hit a century in comments on this thread!
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 7, 2004 09:17 AM"I see the most hate here coming from lefties against racists... not by racists against other races."
So this thread proves that, what? More leftists than racists read Quiggin? Are you sure it is only leftists who "hate" racists?
Posted by: wbb at December 7, 2004 09:34 AMMark, Are you picking on Michael because of his unfortunate surname?
Posted by: wbb at December 7, 2004 09:35 AMStrocchi supports the Racial Vilification Act, thinks racism is a problem and agrees with just about every other reasonable point made on this thread but will continue to split hairs with anybody saying the same things that he perceives as belonging to the left. It's an obsession.
Posted by: wbb at December 7, 2004 09:38 AMJack,
I think you're confusing the instinctive behaviour of animals with the moral/immoral behaviour of humans. Can we really say that a wasp is acting morally or imorally if she is simply behaving on instinct? Where is the moral content in a behaviour if there is no choice?
There may be an argument that human morality is the product of evolutionary processes, but I'm not aware of any proof of this. The evolutionary psychology movement seems (at least to me) to lack empirical evidence and intellectual rigour at this stage to be credible.
Congrats to Prof. Q on his double century.
Posted by: Fyodor at December 7, 2004 10:13 AMMy grandfather was born in 1890. When I was a child in the 60s, he would read to us, with a great deal of emotion, from an old book of poetry about "the heathen Chinee".
In the late 70s I shared a house with a woman who had been adopted. She had a job at Telstra (Telecom then) and if she did anything slightly wrong, like being a few minutes late for work, she was derided as a 'boong' by her workmates. About five years later she found her birth mother and discovered she was aboriginal.
A few weeks ago I went to my high school reunion in Sydney's western suburbs. One of my classmates had a daughter who is at the same school. Someone asked her what the school is like nowadays. Her reply was "There are too many Asians. You hardly see any white faces".
Tip of the iceberg...
Posted by: sus at December 7, 2004 10:35 AMThe largest and best organised gangs in Australia are almost entirely anglo/celtic. They are of course the outlaw bikie gangs.
Posted by: Robert at December 7, 2004 10:52 AMKatz said:
"But to argue that there are classes of human beings who are inferior at their moment of conception and thereby merit discriminatory treatment is a most regrettable point of view and one that cannot be justified emperically."
This is the very premise under which Aboriginal Affairs policy has been based for at least the last 30 years. The empirical evidence is that it has been a policy, fiscal and human disaster of immense proportions. Worse still there are those who wish to see the policy countiued and in fact expanded.
Posted by: amortiser at December 7, 2004 11:11 AMThere is a continuum of ethical potential ranging from less moral - natural-instinctive (the mad Lorenzian minute) - through more moral - nurtural-intuitive - onto most moral - cultural-intellective (the full Kantian nine yards) - behaviours.
I acknowledge that fully instinctive behaviours are non-moral. A person must be of sound body, mind and soul - posessed of the capacity for spiritual experience (subjective consciousness), moral valence (good-will), volitional agence (free-will), intellectual cogence (sound mind) and physical potence (sound body) - to have the existential attributes required for ethical action.
The ethical continuum exists between and within organisms. There are plenty of animals - not all humans and some non-humans - that can wrestle with their consciences and use intuitive or intellective morals to override instinctive modes.
There may be an argument that human morality is the product of evolutionary processes, but I'm not aware of any proof of this. The evolutionary psychology movement seems (at least to me) to lack empirical evidence and intellectual rigour at this stage to be credible.
Evolutionary biology may or may not be convincing to Fyodor. It sometimes comes accross as a little unsypathetic towards cultural progressives (a fault that is in fairness sometims due to its more enthusiastic and polemic propagators.) Note that evolutionary theorists are bio-conservative but also techno-progressive.
But its the only intellectual game in town that at least tries to get a scientific handle on the natural history, and by implication philosophical ontology, of ethics. So the evo-psychos and socio-bios are more or less winning by default.
This google directory is the tip of the vast Evo-Psycho intellectual iceberg. Darwin, Hamilton and Axelord provide the canonical texts.
The "Blank Slate" Freudians and Marxians have bitten the dust, the "Noble Savage" po-mo pee-cee cultural theorists are beyond parody and The "Ghost in the Machine" Intelligent Designers are "not even wrong".
Ths intellectual writing is already on the wall for the genealogy of morality. And once the HGP, and related physical and physiological sci-tech projects, start to yield up their secrets it will be Game Over for the Social Constructionists and Scriptural Literalists.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 7, 2004 11:21 AM"at least the last 30 years"
Closer to the last 230 years.
It may surprise you, Amortiser, to hear that I agree with your assertion, if not your periodisation.
The first 100 years' discrimination was motivated by the desire to marginalise and dispossess
The next 80 years' discrimination was based on the hope and/or expectation that Darwinian processes would terminate the "Aboriginal problem".
The last 35 years' discrimination have been motivated by misguided idealism, crude statism, greedy careerism and outright graft and corruption.
After this sorry history there is nothing but pain every way you look.
Posted by: Katz at December 7, 2004 11:32 AMThese codes are surely different from each other in time and place ie relatively, not absolutely, valid for the occasion of action. And no less justified for that reason. Hence impossible to Absolutely condemn or condone.
Perhaps some Wasps are more moral than others from the pov of the typical Wasp in the Street. Until we achieve telepathy with Wasps it will be difficult to say what end of the continuum they experience. At a wild guess I would say that Wasps are probably robots and tending to amorality. But this is a philosophical thought, not zoological lab, experiment.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 7, 2004 11:39 AM
James Farrell,
Thank you, but despite your claim that my question was an easy one you did not answer it. All nations, races
and creeds have nice people, others who are not so nice and some who dance to either tune when the mood
takes them. At least that has been my experience. So what?
As to "a person's true qualities", these are not considered on application for immigration. And neither are they
relevant to answering my general question.
You ask if I am a bigot by any chance. It is kind of you to enquire. But it is an interesting question, definitional
niceties aside. A bigot in your terms might consider you a bigot in his, with you being against him, his views,
his values and presumably his kind. So, in turn, may I ask you if you are a bigot by any chance? I am sure you
will appreciate my concern. But when all the name calling is done the question remains: why (for most
participants here) is it wrong...?
Let me be clear. I regard the question of who is or who is not allowed to immigrate as quintessentially a
political one. In my view it is the fundamental question for a democracy - namely, who constitute the demos?
As such it should be subject to the normal democratic process. However, some 'theocrats' have attempted,
with some success, to paint it as primarily a moral question and to force their version of a moral code on
others, implicitly pushing the line that moral claims take precedence over political ones and thereby attempting
to close down what should be a free and open debate. Leaving aside the precedence issue, I wish to know what
their moral basis is. I suspect it is a sham. Can you convince me otherwise?
Posted by: Len Dripping at December 7, 2004 12:28 PMLen Dripping seems to be serious in his question. My answer would be along the lines that a
non-race discriminatory immigration policy is best politically regardless of questions of morality.
The reason is that for Australia to offer offense to certain peoples by refusing them entry would be done at great cost for very little gain. We do not have a severe problem with any particular racial group in Australia, so to fine tune our immigration policy to exclude a particular group because of some slight perceived gain in social harmony would be entirely uneconomic. The offense taken by the target nation and similarly racially constituted nations would be large. In fact we are still paying for the White Australia Policy in some corners of SE Asia. Time heals, but to mark ourselves out again as a nation that sees itself as racially separate from Asia would be a mistake. We rely on Asian workers to a huge degree. We would not have an IT industry, for example, if Asians were subtracted.
Australia has a non-race discriminatory immigration policy and the immigration department is as hard-headed as they come. They do as they do not for soft morality concerns.
If Len only wants an answer based on morality, then he should read the bible.
".. and then God created man etc."
Jack,
I'm thoroughly convinced by evolutionary biology, but I see little evidence that human morality has been influenced by evolutionary processes.
That's not to say the evidence isn't out there to be found, or that the effort isn't worthwhile, but I didn't find it in your links (thanks for which, btw).
If natural history has some insight into morality, I'm curious to examine it, but so far we seem to have produced little insight on that score. Furthermore, I don't see that "Morality, as proven by Evolution, is Relative, not Absolute."
Posted by: Fyodor at December 7, 2004 01:34 PM"OK spacehamster if you are an asian why arent you using an asian name like Won Hung Lo? By using the obviously anglo name spacehamster you are compromising my Aussie sense of identity and culture - sob!!"
Posted by rog at December 6, 2004 08:42 PM
Rog, comments like these are exactly the reason why I use an anonymous name most of the time. There are very few forums I would use my real name - it's just not worth the racial abuse or the hassle. I find that some people (particularly on unmoderated forums) treat me differently or ignore me if I use my real name. It's much easier if I use the pseudonym "Spacehamster", as it describes how I look in real life. Pardon me if I'm overreacting - I found a strong undercurrent of racism in your comment. Unless you put [sarcasm] tags I can't tell whether you're serious or not.
Posted by: Spacehamster at December 7, 2004 02:50 PM'As to "a person's true qualities", these are not considered on application for immigration.'
I didn't say they were. You implied that immigration should be based on what 'kind' of people the applicants were, whether they are of the host people's 'own kind' or 'other'. My point is that these are not useful designations.
But from your next paragraph I gather this doesn't matter, as long as the policy has majority support. I wonder if you'd be bold enough to suggest a wording for the referendum.
Posted by: James Farrell at December 7, 2004 02:56 PMI see little evidence that human morality has been influenced by evolutionary processes.
This is obviously false if one believes evolutionary biology affects human neurology. The existence of a hypertophic neo-cortex is a product of human bio-evolution. An evolved neural structure is obviously a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for intensive and extensive spiritual empathy. ie hypothalamus is the organic seat of consciousness. Lacking this we would be zombies, or perhaps sociopaths, devoid of moral sentiments.
The extraordinary human capacities for "valentive", intellective and volitive calculation and operation are also, somehow, coded into our neural structures. No other species, except dolphins perhaps, has anything like these powers. Therefore it is fair to assume these attributes are bio-heritable, which is the paradigmatic assumption of the evo-pyschos.
(Unless one is prepared to buy Jaynes theory that consciousness, and other human moral attributes, are contingent products of recent civilisation ie social, not natural, historical in origin. This does not appear to be plausible to me, given that pre-historical natives show real moral agency, albeit sometimes barbaric.)
More broadly, evolution is a general theory of world-historical change which encompasses cosmology, geology, biology, neurology and sociology. The evolution of human moral agency is, as the socio-bio and evo-psycho portmanteaus suggest, clearly embedded in the psycho-sociological, as well as biological, evolutionary process.
It is true that sociologically acquired
"memes" are not biologically heritable, like genes. The moral memes are culturally heritable, and that - operating through fundamental process of generation, conservation/variation, propagation/extinction - is all that evolutionary brachiation requires.
Clearly the evolution of the hominid neural biology is necessary to explain intra-species human cognitive universals. It is also necessary to explain inter-species cognitive differentials between humans and non-humans. Evo-psycho may also be necessary to explain intra-human species cognitive differentials between races. Plenty of suggestive physiological and psychological evidence to work on there. I urge scientific students of humanity to have a go at this evidence, without fear or favour.
Evo-psycho is, however, not sufficient to explain much of the sub-special human diversity of moral and mental behaviours, either through time or accross space. Post-Deakinite Australians and post-Whitlamite Australians are biologically familiar but morally somewhat alien, in the same geographic place. Communist Jews in Russia, Capitalist Jews in America and Nationalist Jews in Israel were all biologically familiar yet morally alien, at the same historiographic time. North West Caucasians and North East Asians are biologically alien but getting morally familiar, anwhere you go these days.
Hominid biological factors are therefore necessary, but not sufficient, to explain the natural and social evolution of human morality.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 7, 2004 03:10 PMJack 'Gobineau' Strocchi urges us to greater endevours to understand the bio basis of intra-human differences. It has in fact all been already done. Endlessly. From about 1875 until about 1935. The result was that scientific racism was found to be dry creek.
"intra-human species cognitive differentials between races" was unresearchable because we could never quite define what the hell "race" was.
Pigment, skull shape, nose, lips, hair - all were tried but each time human classification collapsed into an amorphous gooey sludge in which everybody could be assigned to any race you like depending on the criteria chosen.
Posted by: wbb at December 7, 2004 03:24 PMJack,
All you seem to be saying is that evolution produced human biology/neurology. There's little controversy in that, and it doesn't necessarily mean morality is the result of evolution. Yes, we have consciousness as a result of evolution, but we have yet to prove that evolution drives how we apply that consciousness in moral decisions.
Posted by: Fyodor at December 7, 2004 03:43 PMChrist, Jack, I'm a fan of Dawkins and Pinker myself but will you stop giving evolutionary psychology a bad name by projecting your hot air about 'pee cee' into it? It's got nothing to do with the current discussion.
Posted by: Jason Soon at December 7, 2004 03:59 PMWbb, Fyodor and Jason: Can't you see that you're butting in on a private conversation Jack is having with himself. Have some manners.
Posted by: James Farrell at December 7, 2004 04:26 PMwe have yet to prove that evolution drives how we apply that consciousness in moral decisions.
Fyodor is making a category mistake, confusing ontological with historical matters. The concept of "evolutionary drivers" is metaphysical and I do not recognise it. There is only the world system and its tendency to change or stasis through time, as desribed by the general theory of evolution.
The theory evolution, addressing the (physical) history of the World, describes all material variations through time, including those performed (or chosen) by moral agents. However the theory of evolution, by itself, must be silent on the (metaphysical) ontology of the Mind, which attempts to correlate the material to mental worlds.
The question of whether the biological or sociological evolution of the human mind is causal, or consequential, to individual moral agency is therefor vexed. At least and until a physical theory of "hard problem of consciousness" exists, which at the moment is not the case. We have an irreducibly subjective component (consciousness) to the equation, whose nature is not yet known.
I acknowledge that the fundamentally chaotic contingencies of the World condition the course of evolution and this includes the course of individual moral choice. This boils down to the old libertarian v determinist argument which involves quantum physics etc and is beyond the scope of this thread and too difficult for my head.
Any person seeking to inquire on the course of individuals moral choice through time and accross space must rely on assumptions about how the material world is organised in place and how it might change accross space. You need a theory of evolution for that. Since the human mind is a product of evolution this implies that you will get further down the explanatory track with some kind of evo-pyscho knowledge.
At a minimum this is very useful for classification. Evolution can operate at extra- or intra-agent scales. ie micro-mutations within the individual or macro-variations within the environment. Clearly, since the evolution of the world - cosmological, biological, sociological - conditions material factors it will influence moral choice. Carrots and Sticks.
This establishes that the evo-pyscho theory is necessary to explaining the distribution and direction of moral agency, encompassing material and mental aspects. I acknowledge that evo-psycho is not sufficient to fully explain moral choices, for ontological reasons given above. Also for methodological reasons, given the extreme complexity of nerurological and sociological systems.
I insist that, without knowledge of the theory of (bio-, psycho-, socio-) evolution, the historical analyst of moral agency will not get far off the intellectual launch pad. Darwin hit traditional natural and social historians of for six. You only have to look at the seismic shock Darwins work inflicted on European culture's self-understanding to see that. Of course Nietzche was faster, and got further, in figuring this out. All he got for his troubles was a bad press and then a bad head.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 7, 2004 04:39 PMJack 'Gobineau' Strocchi urges us to greater endevours to understand the bio basis of intra-human differences.
Right off wbb invokes Godwins Law. Whilst wbb is at it, why doesnt he go right for Dr. Francis "Gobineau" Collin's, jugular?
"Race still remains a proxy that has some potential value," said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health. "I would love to see that ended, but we are not there yet." Supporters of the genome project say gene-based remedies should be tailored to genetically identifiable groups, to make sure no one is denied the benefits of genetic medicine.
So wbb would rather let lots of people of colour die earlier for want of racial-gene specific medicine rather than give up some of his sacred Pee-Cee shibboleths? I wonder if Aboriginals dying in agony from their ethnic-related kidney failure will appreciate wbb's anathematic denunciations on the science of ethnic differences - for their own good I'm sure.
While we are at it, lets also supress any analysis of the natural strengths and weaknesses, both physiological and pyschological, of different human sub-specials. Even though this might help different people get a better fit in whatever niche they might find or seek. Because knowledge is useless and happiness is unworthy.
As a purported humanitarian wbb should find that ostrich-like behaviour morally obscene. But perhaps boosting the sagging values of his ideological investment in bad science has a stronger claim on his moral resources.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 7, 2004 05:09 PMJames Farrell at December 6, 2004 11:09 PM betrays his scientific philosophy:
Anyone who thinks that a person's true qualities can be predicted from surface characteristics is a bigot.
Actually this is a pretty good working definition of a statistician, always assuming one can go from quantities to qualities. I am happy enough with a world of empirical mores or lesses rather than logical either/ors. But then Hume was always complaining that inductive reasoning was just a fancy way of rationalising prejudice.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 7, 2004 06:02 PMIf the costs of offending people through a discriminatory immigration policy were real, then Malaysia and Japan would be regional "pariahs". That they are not is testament to the fact that this argument has always been bunk. Countries are not prepared to sacrifice bilateral trade relations over some quibble involving numbers of (generally) far less than 40,000 people per year.
The costs of "offending people" are minimal because we were offending the very offenders themselves. This argument is simply a cover for the Left's multicultural obsessions.
The real utilitarian argument in favour of dismantling the WAP is that Australia was gratuitously locking out some very talented prospective immigrants. Of course, the Left can't make that argument either, because the Left supported a bias towards family/humanitarian migration sources, and away from the very skilled criteria that would justify a dismantling of the WAP.
Happily, the Howard government has rejected the multicultural fantasies of the Left, and has constructed a skills-intensive immigration programme that is biased towards people who can speak English.
Posted by: Steve Edwards at December 7, 2004 07:27 PM"The real utilitarian argument in favour of dismantling the WAP is that Australia was gratuitously locking out some very talented prospective immigrants. Of course, the Left can't make that argument either, because the Left supported a bias towards family/humanitarian migration sources, and away from the very skilled criteria that would justify a dismantling of the WAP."
Somewhat mystifing choice of tense here: "utilitarian argument in favour of dismntling the WAP is' ...
Newsflash! the WAP was dismantled during the 1960s. Harold Holt (Australian Prime Minister at the time) discovered it to be grossly embarrassing while he was trying for the first time to talk to some bits of Asia (Malaysia, Japan, Philippines) and at the same time bombing another part of Asia (Vietnam) as part of an earlier Coalition of the Willing. Macro-economic theory had nothing to do with it. "Couldn't be beastly to the Little Yellow Johnnies any more, don't you know?"
So, it seems that those appalling Leftists weren't alone in their culpable failure to act on the "right" (economic) motive for dismantling the WAP.
Is the fantasy of the continuous present a common condition among anti-Leftists? If so, how long has it been a common conditiion? (Unfortunately, if it is common, the answer to the second question won't be of much use to them.)
Posted by: Katz at December 7, 2004 09:19 PMSpacehamster you prefer to use a non asian nick to seek greater attention?
(sorry to hear you look like a spacehamster, I've never actually seen one so can only imagine what they look like, do they lack gravity?)
Posted by: rog at December 7, 2004 10:11 PMSo wbb would rather let lots of people of colour die earlier for want of racial-gene specific medicine rather than give up some of his sacred Pee-Cee shibboleths? I wonder if Aboriginals dying in agony from their ethnic-related kidney failure will appreciate wbb's anathematic denunciations on the science of ethnic differences - for their own good I'm sure. - Strocchi
Trouble is - we were discussing, or at least Jack himself was, as James Farrell pointed out to my lol amusement, discussing - now how does this go - oh yes, valentive, intellective and volitive results of racially differentiated evolution. Whatever we were discussing it is a lazy dog who tries to bring in some question relating to "ethnic-related kidney failure".
No doubt Jack has half a textbook stuffed in his head about the renal system too, but even someone as matronly and doltish as myself can spot a red herring as big and as dubious as that one.
Still Jack had to throw a bit of dust in the air while he quickly runs away from the dangerous ice he was skating on when he ended up writing about the biological determinants of intra-human moral deltas.
(My Gobineau crack was no more over OTT as the off the top of the head Strocchi discursion that provoked it. But withdrawn for the sake of not jeapardising the Quiggin longest comment thread attempt.)
Posted by: wbb at December 7, 2004 10:40 PMWhat's the record for longest Quiggin comment thread?
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 7, 2004 11:19 PMBefore this week...73? But most of the comments were insults. Someone needs to design a quality-weighted measure before any awards are made.
Posted by: James Farrell at December 7, 2004 11:44 PMI don't know. But every time Jack types 'Pee-Cee', Baby Jesus cries.
Posted by: Anthony at December 7, 2004 11:44 PMAn interesting methodological challenge, James!
Interesting to go back and look at that earlier post and see the remarkable stability among commenters here - though I haven't seen Dave Ricardo around for a while.
And where's Homer? or observa?
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 7, 2004 11:52 PMobserva, if you don't get over here right now, I'll write your comment for you!
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 7, 2004 11:55 PMPerhaps all Windscuttle is really pointing out, is that we should be a bit more careful about viewing the past through the lens of conventional wisdom. A paralell with the shock, horror, how could they, retrospective moralising over asbestos use or smoking immediately comes to mind. The willingness of the PC moral tub thumpers to visit the sins of the past vis a vis asbestos use, on the current workers, management and shareholders of James Hardie is a case in point. Mike Carleton wringing his hands in anger over the diseased plight of a 52yr old roofer was typical. Yes a JH at the time could well be culpable, but so too could the roofer's many clients who absconded with cheap rooves, without paying him the true cost of his labours. Of course it's too hard for the morally righteous ambulance chasers to claim compensation from all these beneficiaries and their heirs, anymore than they could from the motor traders and repairers who legally supplied and fitted asbestos brake linings to out cars until Jan1 this year. JH wisely stopped dealing in asbestos products in 1978, but the conventional wisdom via our govts didn't, until the beginning of this year. The truth is that epidemiological risk like asbestos and smoking can sneak up on you like history can over 30 or 40 yrs. Let he who is without sin currently cast the first stone at our ancestors, bearing in mind that we now have the computing power to crunch the numbers to prevent another asbestos or smoking disaster. eg Viox problems detected over 3yrs. Interesting to ponder how the grandkids might judge my generation on global warming though.
There is another thread in Windscuttles critique of the progressive liberal left with regards bringing a sense of perspective to their holier than thou attitude to past WAP. Essentially the leftist in them believes all men are equal and if you follow their progressive liberal views you will all be enlightened like them. Here the progressive is immediately impaled on the horns of a dilemma. You see if we are all progressing happily along the path like them, then it stands to reason that some are more progressed than others. Well that's easy I hear you say. We just look for all the empirical signs of such progress and Bobs your uncle, we adopt those ways. Ah, but that might mean following the ways of a particular culture or God forbid, a particular race that espouses that culture. The answer to being hoisted on this petard is of course, that all men are equal and if they're not then they're victims. Of course the corollary is that if any men are more equal, then they are obviously oppressors and you can write them off as racists.
Hey did you catch the Dynasties show on ABC tonight? It was about the Bing Lee family. What a ripper as dad tried to fight the good fight against the slack, younger assimilationist generation.
Posted by: observa at December 8, 2004 12:12 AM
To the casual reader who might have just popped in and is wondering what the horns of a moral dilemma and progressive enlightenment is all about, just consider this. While we droll conservatives are arguing about whether phonics is better than whole language to learn to read and write blogs(and read Jack Strochi's comments), poor old ProfQ and Co are wondering whether we should be culturally opressing aboriginal kids with an oral tradition, by teaching them to read and write at all.
Posted by: observa at December 8, 2004 12:35 AMJack's problem is he wants everyone to agree with his conclusions on his own terms.
And
"...the past through the lens of conventional wisdom..."
Define "coventional wisdom" That is one of the most slippery issues since the Bible ended up with four seperate accounts of a a divinity's life and work.
Posted by: Nabakov at December 8, 2004 01:53 AMRacist encounters:
I've witnessed many from all sides. From rural whites against blacks, my palestinian friends against jews, urban blacks against whites. When I worked in the college computer science lab, there were ongoing tensions between the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students, between the Tawainese, Chinese and Malaysian students. It's all been quite fascinating and disconcerting but nothing terribly traumatic came of it that I noticed, well beside the yard brawl at the yearly international student union party in which my 60 year old mother had to coax my biker friends to pull the Palestinians and Jordanians off the Jews.
As for personal racism:
I had my jaw broken by two teenage or young adult black girls when I lived in Baltimore. Riots broke out when Martin Luther King was killed. The girls approached me, grabbed my hair at the back of my head and repeatedly banged my face into the curb. In the same incident, my sister had a large chunk or hair pulled out of her head when she ran. I was 4 years old. My sister was 6.
While I lived in Baltimore we attended public school, which had a high rate of blacks as opposed to whites. I was quite comfortable among my black peers. I was too young to know anyone cared about such things as skin color. When I moved to Tennessee and gravitated toward a few black girls who lived in my neighborhood, that was the first time I heard the term nigger lover. I was in 2nd grade at the time.
The first instance hurt me physically, the second hurt my spirit. A third instance hurt my economy and ideology.
I had just turned 18 was ready to apply for a real full time job. Our company town offered an ad for typists. I went to apply. While waiting for my typing test I learned that if I were black I only had to type 35 words per minute. But as a white woman I had to type 55 words per minute. It infuriated me at the time, as I reasoned that my friends who were black are certainly no less dextrous or intelligent than myself. I walked out of the interview.
Certainly racism can be very ugly. However, I do find in my observation it is much more acceptible to accuse depending on one's politics or ethnicity. Where I'm from, white liberals (US definition) have no problem throwing racist accusations around, nor do black race baiters. The notion that racism travels in all directions is overlooked or denied. The least objection with affirmative action is automatically deemed racist. A discussion of racism is a good thing. However, in what would seem physically impossible, the term seems to expanded and contract simultaneously. Expanding to include that which is not racist and contracting to exclude much that is.
CBK
Posted by: cbk at December 8, 2004 03:05 AM"Spacehamster you prefer to use a non asian nick to seek greater attention?
(sorry to hear you look like a spacehamster, I've never actually seen one so can only imagine what they look like, do they lack gravity?)
Posted by rog at December 7, 2004 10:11 PM"
Rog, at no time did I make this statement - you're twisting my words. It's pretty obvious now that my presence on these boards offends you - your racist comments are exactly the reason why I don't use my real name on any message boards I participate in. Life's too short to waste in petty arguments with racist individuals like yourself - I have better things to do.
It's ironic that the only person to openly declare themselves to be of Asian extraction is racially abused. And before you argue "well, you were asking for it", read my original post. I wasn't "calling attention to myself", I was simply using my family's personal experiences as an example of how successful migrant families can be. If you find this offensive in some way, that's your problem, not mine.
Posted by: Spacehamster at December 8, 2004 08:17 AMGreat comment CBK... and a shocking story from when you were 4!
Though, of course, you would only type that comment if you were an evil bigotted racist who eats babbies and clubs penguins. Shame... shame... ;)
Posted by: John Humphreys at December 8, 2004 09:51 AMWhere I'm from, white liberals (US definition) have no problem throwing racist accusations around, nor do black race baiters. The notion that racism travels in all directions is overlooked or denied.
However, in what would seem physically impossible, the term seems to expanded and contract simultaneously. Expanding to include that which is not racist and contracting to exclude much that is.
True. Progressive multiculturalists wink at intra-ethnic violence and whip up moral panics over the resurgence of the Country Party [sic]. Then they denounce race realists as racists, blissfully ignorant of the fact that the HGP (rotten racists like Watson, Collins - what scourges of humanity!) has settled this argument in favour of the realists.
The "New Left" progressive attitude towards different races has been conditioned by the need for progressive whites to feel morally superior to non-progressive whites. That is why the New Left places so much store on symbolic politics eg Sorry Day etc. Thank goodness the vast majority of pragmatic non-racist (Aus Idol watching, Big Brother voting) Australians are so over this facile and superficial approach to politics.
The "New Left" would prefer to maintain a ban on discussion of ethnic differences no matter how much pain and suffering this causes to the Aboriginal "underdog". This attitude is doubly contemptible:
Result: mass misery for Aborigines. I've spent a bit of time up the Top End and I know what I am talking about.
How pathetic is it that people (eg wbb) would rather strike moral poses to the political grandstand than actually face facts and do real good for their supposed concerns. Fred Hollows, notoriously un-Pee-Cee, is a good example of the latter attitude.
Fortunately Howard, a Centrist, is not going to fall for this nonsense. I see that he is moving to promote conditional welfare and constraints on alcohol. What a rotten racist he is!
People from different nations are different. Our lyin' eyes suspected it. Darwin theorised this. The HGP has proved it.
That does not mean that some are morally better or worse than others. It certainly does not entail subjugation, discrimination or white-washing (or black arm-banding) History.
It does imply that we take differences into account where they are relevant to promoting effective citizenship. Lets just try to track the differences between people and help those in need of help. Knowledge is Good.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 8, 2004 12:47 PMJack continues with his derailing of this post - and has turned it into a discussion about whether or not genetic variation occurs in the human family, to which no-one would ever disagree. And then claims that some here have somehow tried to cover up this scientific fact becuase it doesn't accord with our "all humans are equal" ideology.
James was right. It is a private conversation between Jack and himself. Jack's obssessive contempt for those he imagines as "new left" is such that it conjures voices in his head with whom he could argue all day.
His slipping back and forth between bio differences and cultural differences is Humpty Dumpty-esque in the extreme and impossible to engage with. You can start out decrying racist immigration policy and then be accused of denying that there exists health concerns particualr to certain social groups. It's a breathtaking but ultimately unsatisfying intercourse. Well, in this instance anyway. He is usually fun.
Posted by: wbb at December 8, 2004 02:47 PMWhat this thread deomonstrates clearly is that there is no right way to be a racist. It can happen in many ways.
I don't accept that just because it exists racism is acceptable. There are serious issues in the Aboriginal communities. However the racism faced within the wider community which mocks and derides people because of factors that are caused through genetic factors is a causative factor which can be denied - (see above posts by Jack) or can be faced.
Unfortunately those who deny the atrocities which have been perpetrated in the past will continue to deny evidence which is strong and compelling and compound the issues of despair caused by racism which affects us all.
Posted by: Jill Rush at December 8, 2004 10:16 PMwbb at December 8, 2004 02:47 PM train of serial and paralell self-contradictions was starting to careen beyond parody, but pulls back from the brink:
Jack continues with his derailing of this post - and has turned has turned it into a discussion about whether or not genetic variation occurs in the human family to which no-one would ever disagree.
First of all, who died and made wbb (?) moderator?
The subject of "genetic variation in the human family", ie racial or bio-ethnic differences, IS the topic of this thread. Its the R-word, stupid!
wbb started his slo-mo flip-flop by asserting that the science of bio-ethnicity as still bogged down at the 19th C phrenological stage classification:
"Pigment, skull shape, nose, lips, hair - all were tried but each time human classification collapsed into an amorphous gooey sludge in which everybody could be assigned to any race you like depending on the criteria chosen.
Its a relief, and a surprise, that wbb has now backtracked, or backed-off, his ridiculous(implied) denial that observed ethnic population differences are not grounded in the underlying genetics of human bio-diversity. Now wbb concedes that, yes, after all, there is "genetic variation in the human family". (Only an idiot would deny the utility of nominalist statistical classification at super-individual scales.)
Welcome to the 21 st C science of analysing and classifying individual, familial, racial and special genetic differences. It seem that Watson/Crick's micro-biological labours were not in vain.
Now all that remains for wbb's rehabilitation to the land of intellectual sanity and moral decency is to repudiate his implied slur that Watson, Wilson, Collins et al are neo-Gobineau
"racists". Or are they modern day phrenologists? (If so then SNP code strings and the halotype map make a lame grist for the race caricaturist mill.)
I think Windschuttle was wrong, and mischievous, to contrive denials of 19th C White racist violence and make apologetics for 20th C White racist policies. (But Windschuttle was dead right to refute the, oft-made Leftist, claim that AUS's 19th C govts pursued a policy of genocide.)
But I applaud Windschuttle for his polemical smack down of the multucultural race hustling and grievance industries. The multi-culti seperatists, under the guise of encouraging tolerance, institutionalise an evil policy of neo-tribalism and ethno-political racketeering that, unchecked, will lead to Balkanisation of this nation.
The Old Left policy of ethnic integration is the morally correct one. Any other settlement policy, such as nativist exclusion or multiculturalist seperatism, is a stupid and wicked scam.
I am heartily sick of listening to progressives engage in onanistic bouts of self-congratulation about the holier-than-thouness of their anti-racism. I seem to recall a certain Bronze Age prophet who warned against ostentatious displays of moral self-regard.
The prosaic suburuban reality is a lot less morally uplifting. Progressive-liberals spend alot of money keeping their kin well away from contentious ethnic polyglots. The connection between real estate prices, quality school catchment areas and Doctors Wives political progressivism is particularly revealing. Lets have diversity alright, but NIMBY! (Uber-nerd Asian students and token refugees aside.)
Rather than whipping up moral panics about a phony revival in right wing racism why dont wbb, and his ideological confrers, have the power to face unpleasant facts about progressive mischief in this area. In particular, when are progressives going to stop worrying away at the retro-nativist motes that occasionally float into conservative eyes and start yanking the proto-tribalist beam that forever juts out of the progressive eyes?
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 9, 2004 11:52 AMHowever the racism faced within the wider community which mocks and derides people because of factors that are caused through genetic factors is a causative factor, which can be denied - (see above posts by Jack) or can be faced.
I am genuinely puzzled by the scrambled syntax of this post. But I will, without wandering into deconstructionist swamps, try and make sense of it.
I did not mock or deride Aboriginals on account of their greater propensity for suffering kidney diseases. I affirmed, rather than denied, that "genetic factors is [sic] a causative factor" in these areas. I noted that it was a problem which did not fit progressives dogmatic ideology of social constructionist race denial.
Perhaps biological realism is the new kind of racism? Are Watson, Wilson Collins et al supposed to be a racist because they affirm the blatant (race-related) fact that the physiology of Aborigines makes them more prone to disease (exacerbated by a lower tolerance and a higher vulnerability for alcohol)? If so then we are all doomed.
I have never denied that Aboriginals face individual, and no doubt institutional, forms of racism. FWIW, I support the Racial Vilification Act and positive discrimination in favour of Aboriginals (this is actually legislated benevolent racism, but one is not supposed to mention this for fear of setting off Pee-Cee cognitive dissonance alarms.)
I am mocking and deriding progressives intellectual follies and political mischief alright. They always fall back on the dogma of comprehensive social constructionism which means that they are blind to the reality of human biological legacies.
The constructionist philosophy claims to be progressive, but how is social progress possible if pertinent biological facts are going to be denied? I thought anti-racists are supposed to be urge helpful policies to different races that suffer from various disadvantages, whether grounded in biological or sociological factors. It would be helpful too know the bio-related strenghs and weaknesses of different ethnic groups if we are to help disadvantaged individuals, no?
Apparently Ms Rush thinks that preening progressive moral vanity, and trying to bolster the slumping value of socio-constructionist ideological investments, is the true sign of anti-racism. This is a depressing conclusion, but it is the take home one from this thread.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 9, 2004 12:19 PMJack, when will you stop inventing bizarre and useless jargon? It makes you sound like a hopeless old crank and does nothing for your credibility.
Posted by: Robert at December 9, 2004 01:58 PMExperimenting with words. Trying to give it up but its a habit thats hard to break.
Any blog comments threads are the natural habitat of "hopeless [middle-aged] cranks".
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 9, 2004 02:55 PMJack, it's not that I have a problem with jargon per se. In fact, jargon can be useful as shorthand for complex ideas, as long as everyone participating in the discussion knows what it means. The difficulty arises when you create your own jargon. It is impossible to have a constructive discussion when one of the participants refuses to use the broadly accepted terms of the topic.
Posted by: Robert at December 9, 2004 03:09 PMJack,
The subject of this thread is racism, particularly in the context of Windschuttle's work on the WAP.
Let me short-circuit a great deal of waffle on biological and genetic research and obtain some binary answers from you on two very simple questions:
1. Is there evidence of significant, non-superficial biological differences between human ethnic groups?
2. If you answered "yes" to question 1. above, do these differences justify the WAP?
If you answered "no" to the questions above you can stop arguing with yourself, and the rest of us.
If you answered "yes" to 1., please name the supposed differences, and links to your emprirical evidence.
Posted by: Fyodor at December 9, 2004 04:11 PMI've just come in on the end of a long thread, but I have a couple of personal experiences with the WAP that may come as news to some.
Some years ago I was working in Australian Archives in Brisbane (now the National Archives) and came across some 50 shelf metres of Immigration records that turned out to be file copies of Certificates of Exemption from the Dictation Test. These documents were issued to Australian citizens whose skin was a bit dark or whose eyes were a bit slanty and who were contemplating travel overseas. They included a 5×4 photograph of the citizen. A duplicate was returned to the citizen and enabled him or her to re-enter Australia. For you see, an Australian passport was not enough to gain entry if you were non-white. I have never heard any comment about this aspect of the WAP - that it made non-white Australian citizens into second-class citizens. This still applied in the mid-1960s, regardless of the revisionist history that elevates Harold Holt to the role of the leader who abolished the WAP. I can clearly recall waiting in 1966 for some hours at the airport with my increasingly distressed parents while a family friend argued his way past immigration. He was a fourth generation Australian of Chinese ancestry and our immigration officials weren't about to let him in easily. The officials accused him of having a forged passport, among other indignities.
Posted by: Harold Thornton at December 9, 2004 04:26 PMWell, we've reached 150 comments with this one, and still getting some new and useful comments, as well as the usual back and forth. Harold Thornton is one of a number of commenters who've come in with direct personal experience, from which I've certainly learned a lot.
And unlike the other big thread I haven't had to step in and delete abusive comments - even the back and forth has been robust but civilised.
Posted by: John Quiggin at December 9, 2004 05:22 PM"- even the back and forth has been robust but civilised."
Don't you mean the online-enabled interlocutory paradigm has been retro-contentious
but remained within acceptable social constructionist parameters for discourse?
More b&f coming up I'm afraid. And this may test ppls patience. Hey, but with the 150 up we can afford a few free-flowing scoring shots, what. I could post on my own blog I suppose but one does need a grandstand to posture & preen in front of so here goes nothing. (Stage directions a guide only.)
Stage left, enter Jack Strocchi, furrowed brow, pipe dangling, shirt-tails hanging, encyclopaedia lying flung open on floor.
Sotto voce rising to mid-fury and all to tune of Ol' Man River.
The multi-culti separatists,
under the guise
of encouraging
tolerance,
institutionalise an
evil
policy of neo-tribalism
and ethno-political racketeering
that, unchecked, will lead to Balkanisation of this nation.
When are the progressives going to stop worrying away
at the retro-nativist motes
that occasionally float into
conservative eyes
and
start
yanking
the proto-tribalist beam
that
forever juts out
of the
progressive eyes?
Jack sinks into armchair and stares into mid-distance. Lights up - chorus line on stage - PC crowd pleaser as follows:
The gist of the above is that upper middle-class (ie Doctor's Wife-like) objections to the white-washing of the White Australia Policy is a hubristic latte chatter. The real problem is the damage multiculturalism and PC have done to the indigenous population and threaten to do wider society by encouraging ethnic division. This doesn't stand up. When asked to evidence the ethnic turmoil caused by multi-C, Jack will raise the Theo Theophanous case as tho his crime had something to do with multiculturalism. His name is certainly 'multi-cultural', his crime involved immigrants - but the actual story is one of fraud, decpetion and abuse of privilege and power. A story that could happen in any country and at any time. Jack will also mention something that Al Grassby did once - but it's so long ago I can't begin to summon the energy to investigate it or to believe it will have the feared effect of the Balkanisation of Australia. So we are left to imagine what things Jack really hates about proponents of multi-culturalism. And of most other progressive liberal causes.
curtain and quick drink, reseated, new set but 20 years before, Hugh Jackman playing Jack.
Jack is arguing with an ideal type. We can all recognise her. She has long hair, is slim waisted and has just appeared out of the brilliant sunshine into the front bar at the Esplanade Hotel. Slung over a brown shoulder an array of jute and silk still carries Air India baggage tags as she has just alighted from a taxi direct from Tullamarine. But it's the tika on her forehead which immediately both grates and stirs unconscious passion. Her ethereal beauty which seems to have substantiated itself from the swirling blue haze of the room is undeniable however, and we wish that we'd remembered that she was coming back today as we would have chosen to drink elsewhere. Who needs pain. She is usually 26. She has never really worked, preferring self-exploration and becoming "involved" in things. Her treachery and infidelity are proven by her solo sojourn in the East. Her lithe corporeality is as unattainably remote as Everest. These are her views, nearly all picked up since she turned 21.
N.B. All her views are caricatured as she is 26 and has not worked -
she is still in fact an adolescent. Nevertheless it is advised that these are her actual views.
(They will all dissolve over the next 14 years buried by her worries about the appropriate horses
doovers for tennis afternoons.)
Aesthetic - Men in suits are fascist, Latin men are romantic
Political - the personal, the local, the embracing
Cultural - Anglo is a living hell of repression and conformity and rape by institution and male power.
- Eastern is exotic, musical, thrilling, meaningful, communal, erotic, feminine.
So flowing from her lips and based on these views is a lot of ignorant and
contradictory waffle that can both amuse and enrage, depending upon from which angle the sunshine is
falling upon her hair.
Indians are so spiritual, she says, waving her henna stained hands.
Spotlight on Jack, still in armchair in stage corner.
I am heartily sick of listening to progressives engage in onanistic
bouts of self-congratulation about the holier-than-thouness of their anti-racism. I seem to recall a
certain Bronze Age prophet who warned against ostentatious displays of moral self-regard
Lights up main bar set:
Asian religion is so unconcerned with materialism, she frowns and relights her bidi.
Is why we are forced to export bucket loads of cash to said benighted
swamps to pay the aid-workers to jab their amoeba-ridden children, we want to fume.
It is in that conversation with that girl in 1988 that Jack's political
view of an idealised progressive left is preserved in aspic. James Farrell was in fact nearly
right when he said that Jack was arguing with himself. As was Nabakov who observed that Jack wants to
win an argument on his own terms. Jack wants to win the argument he once (hell, too many times) had
with that soft, deluded girl/woman. Tragically he will never be able to. Now he takes revenge years
later - only now his argument which was once sweet reaons itself (but Moonchild, the caste
system is an instrument of oppression the likes of which we here have never known) has transmogrified
into a bitterly cold ice hard super-rational crusade that seeks to destroy any position that
contains the slightest echo of Moonchild's idealistic cravings, hopeful ravings and deluded murumurings of
so long ago.
Encore! Encore!
Yer even closer to the mark than you know, wbb.
I'd suggest bundling up the above with a one page synopsis and sending it off the Pratt Foundation's New Australian Musical Funding project.
You could call it "My Brillant Careener".
Posted by: Nabakov at December 9, 2004 11:44 PMAs was Nabakov who observed that Jack wants to win an argument on his own terms. Jack wants to win the argument he once (hell, too many times) had with that soft, deluded girl/woman.
wbb does not know me, or progessive women, very well if he thinks that my inability to win an ideological argument with that genre was the trigger of my current polemical discontent. Even I am a little more complicated than that.
Perhaps wbb is the one dealing with ideological and sociological caricatures? More likely he is just projecting.
In any case, I recall Melbourne girls de la temp had moved on from unreconstructed fist-shaking New Leftism to the more stylish mode of studied disdain for conventional ideology, punctuated by bouts of hormone-fuelled anarchism. At least they cared.
Generally I found it was easier change girlfriends than win arguments.
PS And when will wbb come out from behind the curtain, to reveal his persona? The games no fun when the heckler is forever a phantom at the comic opera.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 10, 2004 08:37 AM
Should have been Nessum Dorma rather than Ol' Man River. Too much TV last night.
It would be honestly of no interest to anyone here if I came out. My name would mean nothing. Am strictly north of the yarra, and only ever had the slightest brush with higher learning.
Posted by: wbb at December 10, 2004 09:00 AMI look forward to the definitive history of the late 80s leftie chick from Melbourne - this thread has taken an interesting turn...
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 10, 2004 10:11 AMActually, I look forward more to Keith Windschuttle's new book on how the personality traits of the typical late 80s Melbourne leftie chick have been maliciously distorted for polemical purposes by politically correct postmodernists.
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 10, 2004 10:13 AMit's always about a woman at the end of the day, isn't it?:-)
methinks Jack's machismo protesteth too much
I wish more women would comment on blogs. It always ends in a macho pissing contest, and taking the piss is the one thing women do best.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 10, 2004 11:01 AMReally, Jack? I thought it was stuff like pregnancy, breast-feeding etc., but maybe that's just the bio-determinist intellectual baggage I'm carrying.
On the evolution of the 80s leftie chick, I believe it was Tom Wolfe who once said that young women have an unerring ability to gravitate to the points of greatest dynamism in any society. In the 1960s it was the peace movement, in the 1970s it was disco, the 1980s Wall Street and shoulder pads, in the 1990s the Green movement and now, judging from the recent Pandagate fiasco, it seems frighteningly likely that it may be the Young Libs. Shudder.
Posted by: Fyodor at December 10, 2004 11:23 AMVery difficult to believe, Fyodor, that dynamism and the Young Liberals are compatible...
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 10, 2004 11:32 AMWho'd a thunk it? Where have all the young babes gone?
It's certainly not the ALP juniors they're joining. Lots of chubby aggressive young men with more ego than intellect. Oh...wait...that's the Young Libs, too. I'm so confused by the yoof of today!
Posted by: Fyodor at December 10, 2004 01:35 PMWhen I was in student politics in the late 80s, the coolest women were in the CPA... not exactly a hotbet of dynamism either! I remember one particular night in Melbourne....
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 10, 2004 01:42 PMFor various reasons, I get to poke my nose into cutting edge R&D, and the new generation of scientists and researchers working in areas like nano and biotech, fluid dymanics, materials science, photonics, ICT, etc is very well represented by young and soigne women. These boffins are babes, and know it.(Or maybe I'm just getting older and uglier)
As one of 'em said to me at a big international conference in Melbourne recently, being a scientist these days is cool. The work is fascinating, there's lotsa travel and the possibility of big money and media attention is floating all around.
Posted by: Nabakov at December 10, 2004 02:15 PMWow, so Elizabeth Shue as the Cambridge nuclear physicist "Dr Emma Russell" (who discovers the secret of cold fusion) in that appalling travesty of a film 'The Saint' wasn't just a pipedream?
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 10, 2004 02:46 PMOr Rachel Weisz' character in "Chain Reaction".
Actually, Elizabeth Shue also played a scientist in Hollow Man [one degree of Kevin Bacon]. She must be Hollywood's scientist-hottie of choice.
Posted by: Fyodor at December 10, 2004 02:54 PMYup, Mark and Fydor. Big science pulls the babes now.
You wanna pull them, starting hanging around conferences sounding like a venture capitalist.
"You wanna see my listed fund?"
Posted by: Nabakov at December 10, 2004 03:22 PMWasn't "The Saint" appalling? And wasn't Elizabeth Shue the dumbest scientific genius ever? And where the hell is this thread going?
Posted by: John Quiggin at December 10, 2004 03:22 PMYer right John, we should get back to the topic at hand.
So which race/culture do you think produces the sexiest scientists?
Posted by: Nabakov at December 10, 2004 03:25 PMNo idea, John. But, Nabakov, that reminds me of a guy I knew at uni with a PhD in maths who went to a few state development department workshops and has taken to calling himself "CEO of a biotech startup". Saw him in a city coffee shop with a young woman (scientist?) - must be the new way to meet women in the smart state...
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 10, 2004 03:27 PMSomeone should study why long threads end in free association -
http://troppoarmadillo.ubersportingpundit.com/archives/007897.html
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 10, 2004 04:09 PMI do have some rational contributions yet to make. It's just that I've been a bit too sandbagged and under the weather over the last few days.
I have also been advised that in Aussie-speak "under the weather" means drunk, which is not what it meant where I grew up at all.
Anyhow, I hope to have a bit more energy in a day or so.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at December 10, 2004 07:36 PM"When I was in student politics in the late 80s, the coolest women were in the CPA."
Certified Practicing Accountants?
Posted by: Jason Soon at December 10, 2004 09:39 PMAnd where the hell is this thread going?
It seems to be evolving towards an indepth discussion of my personal follies and fables, a source of never-ending fascination for some of the anonymous posters to this blog.
[Nabokov, you dropped one clue to many back then and you are who I suspected you were. Dont worry, your secret is safe.]
If Pr Q were to, forgive the impertinence, get off his blog-ass and post my definitive, and monumental, reply to Fyodor's probing questions then we would be back OT.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 10, 2004 09:47 PMJason - Communist Party of Australia...
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 10, 2004 09:51 PMAwaiting the Strocchi magnum opus on "why multi-culti is a New-Left war crime by which they attack Vital Centrism using ethnic minorities as cannon fodder" with dread.
Posted by: wbb at December 10, 2004 10:01 PMI am a sci-tech groupie, at least in the pyschological sense, and part-time tech journo. So I have a personal and professional interest in the coolness of sci-tech.
Had lunch with one of the founders of AI, Pr John McCarthy, today. He is confident that human level robot intelligence will eventually evolve, although not sure whether it will be a top-down (logical) or bottom-up (neural net) thing. He says that the smartest people go into molecular biology ie decoding life.
Whilst not exactly a "babe" (he is a seventy seven year old, wheezing Bush voting geezer) he was fascintating to talk to about the profession and personalities of hi-level sch-tech. He had many stories about the glory days of sci-tech investment in the US, from 1945-65, when half of the congressman and all the executive were veterans and "very grateful for the A-bomb".
He met or worked with, many of the "monster brains" (Feynyman's term) in the fifties, von Neumann, Minsky, Nash, Simon. I always thought that the treatment of the Dr Strangelove characters was rather unfair. After all, the West prevailed in the Cold War and Communism was contained without nuclear war. At the cost of a mere $20 trillion.
Apparently von Neumann, although the inventor the electonic computer, was capable of making mistakes. Pr McC corrected him on "floating points". Taking down von Neumann would do wonder for your ego.
Ahh, those were the days when sci-techhies were really respected.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 10, 2004 10:16 PMNo chance of it being top-down. That would require human intelligence playing god. We ain't capable of it. Bottom-up, while to me still not a probability, is possible as at least it only requires us to unleash a force of nature. (Bit like we did with nuke fission.)
(If a big nuke epsiode ever wipes out half the race then the Dr Strangelove characterisation will be seen as kind and the Cold War, which was largely willed into existence by the West will be remembered as a piddling scene setter.)
Posted by: wbb at December 10, 2004 11:56 PMIf a big nuke epsiode ever wipes out half the race the Dr Strangelove characterisation will be seen as kind
THe larger, 100 megaton +, style of "big nukes" have been decommissioned by those rotten Cold Warriors - Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan - that wbb appears so eager to blame. Asteroids and other massive Near Earth Objects are the only ballistic agents with that kind of destructive power to destroy "half the race". Or does wbb blame these dumb bombs on the existence of the US's rotten Cold War M-I complex?
It is impertinent for a person with wbb's underwhelming intellectual powers to despise those caricatured by Dr Strangelove eg Fenyman, Wohrsletter, Teller, von Neumann, von Braun, Kahn, Kissinger. The crew from Los Alamos/RAND/DARPA crew may or may not have been masters of the "M-I comlex". What they were was smart (where does wbb think the phrase "rocket scientist" come from?) and on the right side of History.
Look at the score board. The Fail-Safe system they designed worked. The Bomb, the internet and the Apollo program all flowed from their efforts and enhanced the Wests strategic power.
the Cold War, which was largely willed into existence by the West will be remembered as a piddling scene setter
New Left Revisionist Rubbish. The Cold War was not "willed into the existence" by FDR or Truman. It was caused by the existence of a hostile and aggressive regime (Stalin, remember him?), with a genocidal political record and totalitarian political powers:
The Cold War was willed out "of existence" by superior social institution and sucessful political individuals in the West prevailing over inferior social insitututions and failed political individuals in the East:
The Strangeloves did their job. The US technologically progressed whilst the USSR politically imploded and the West prevailed in the Cold War. There were no martial nuclear exchanges and Jackboots stopped grinding human faces for a while.
This meant that our generation could enjoy the benefits of military-competition (gadgets) without having to endure the costs (war). Whats not to like?
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 11, 2004 05:02 AM"Nabakov, you dropped one clue to many back then and you are who I suspected you were."
Now you get it? I've been leaving a trail for you like Hansel and Gretel crumbling croissants on speed.
"THe larger, 100 megaton +, style of "big nukes" have been decommissioned..."
What makes you think their Mongos, Godzillas and Stalin's Candles are no more. They still have the know-how and plans and the technology's so much better these day.
"...Nixon and Reagan"
It's a fucking weird world where those two actually look quite sane (actually I think the real hero of the cold war was Nancy's astrologer) and forward thinking compared to the current Oval One.
"This meant that our generation could enjoy the benefits of military-competition (gadgets) without having to endure the costs (war)."
Millions and millions of people round the world over several generations, endured these costs for decades, and are only now getting their iPods and velcro-laced runners. I'm sure they're now enjoying them.
But I suspect they're also wondering if these trinkets could have come at a lower cost than napalming Great Aunty Dhem in Hue, dropping a JDAM on cousin Rojo's barbie in Panama City or lobbing a 155mm shell into brother Omar's card game in Fulljah.
And as the Russians flog off their archives to BBC researchers, German journos, American historians and Japanese ad agencies, it is becoming increasingly clear the Sov armed forces - from the tank armies equipped to fight the last war, to the ballistic subs that submerged more often than they surfaced, to the Bison and Bear bombers which painted a radar signature the size and average land speed of Orson Welles, to the Hinds knocked over by Pathans with Stingers, to their land-based rocket crews trading the launcher's tires to get even more pissed - could barely handle Hungary and Chezko (and got an atomic wedgie in Afhanistan), let alone an overwhelmingly wealthy and very heavily armed NATO just looking to rumble with its relentless update of new toys (google "Century series USAF fighters" for just how fast the US was turning out cutting edge weaponry while Kruschev and co were saluting the same 20 bombers flying around in a circle as an endless parade over Red Square.
However some people did very well out of the whole arms race/MAD/total war scenarios. Since wwb didn’t actually mention the people you claimed he caricatured, I will.
What kind of career do you think Teller, Kahn (that'd be DJ RAND Hermie K I presume, author of one of the most ludicrious documents in human history, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Clark- and now Wolfovitz, Condie, Rummy, Cheney, etc - would have without perpetual war.
Also, can you point to one geopolitical prediction or estimate this shower has ever made which has ever turned out as expected.
(I excluded Feynman and von Neumann ‘cos they would have done great in any environment - from a nightclub to a Nobel bash. They didn't need no stinkin' cold war to light them up.)
However I miss Dr Strangelove. At least he had a width and depth of vision that this current crop of Weirdquickies wouldn't recognise if it bit them on the aide.
Posted by: Nabakov at December 11, 2004 07:44 AM"Nabakov" at December 11, 2004 07:44 AM launches a free-wheeling attack against everything:
What makes you think their Mongos, Godzillas and Stalin's Candles are no more. They still have the know-how and plans and the technology's so much better these day.
The Strangelovian glory days of Doomsday Waepons, cobalt bombs and megahydrogen bombs are gone. It is just not practical to destroy the world using these weapons, the engineering requirements of scaling up the bombs are too great.
The whole trend amongst WMD service providers is towards nukes that are smaller, more accurate and customised for political clients to tailor strategy to technology. Small is beautiful, from I-Pod to B61-11 Bunker Busters.
I am more worried by micro-nukes than macro-nukes. A nuclear 911 would lead to civilisation anhilations not regime change. A plausible scenario is that jihadists will use a micro-nukes against Manhattan and Moscow, thereby tempting the USA and CIS to actively decommission their remaining Cold War arsenals over SW Asia. The oil spoils would then be available for divvying up between the Great Gamers.
The indifference registered by US constituencies to scientific reports of massive Iraqi civilian casualties is an indication of how easily this kind Carthaginian solution could go down.
Millions and millions of people round the world over several generations, endured these costs for decades, and are only now getting their iPods and velcro-laced runners. I'm sure they're now enjoying them.
The Cold War MAD strategy was developed for the Second World State conflicts between Anglo pluralist democracies and European one-party dictatorships eg Nazis/Bolshies. It was misapplied to the Third World Nation conflicts, between European empires and their former colonies, eg Viet Cong, which was won by the AK-47/RPG. (The First World Class conflicts, between capitalist free market firms and socialist command agencies, was amicably settled in favour of social democracy by old fashioned noblemen -Bismark, Keynes-Beveridge, Roosevelt - after a series of ruinous depressions.)
A strategy is not discredited when misapplied, no more than false arrests discredit the use of police forces. South Korea was a Kennanite move and certainly turned out ok.
just how fast the US was turning out cutting edge weaponry while Kruschev and co were saluting the same 20 bombers flying around in a circle as an endless parade over Red Square.
The Red Army, between 1945-65, was the supreme military apparatus of the 20th C. Any force that conquered the better part of the Eurasian landmass (defeated Wermacht) was the first to militarise space and developed a Blue Water navy is force to be reckoned with.
Communist, USSR & PRC, Red Army weapons and tactics were effective aand used right the way round the world on all continents, and scored notable successes in the SE Asia (1975) and Arabia (1973). The SAMs & MIGS sure put the wind up the USAF over Hanoi. Later generation Soviet strategic weapons, such as SS-20, were extremely threatening.
The subsequent degeneration of Soviet institutional, industrial and ideological structures (1965-85) validates the Cold War containment strategy to a T. Kennan argued for diverting ideological competition from martial to social affairs. In the long run the emptiness of Communist social promises was exposed.
What kind of career do you think Teller,...would have without perpetual war
Futures trading for the maths wizards, merchant banking for the rest. ie more money, less power.
Also, can you point to one geopolitical prediction or estimate this shower has ever made which has ever turned out as expected
Nabokov has sneakily shifted the goalposts, since he has altered his aim from the first (Kennaninte Truman Democrats) generation of Cold Warriors to the second (Nitzian Nixon Republicans) generation. I am inclined to agree that Team B threat asessments were a shower of sh*t. But Reagan was more a Kennanite than a Nitzian.
The current crew inhabiting the Pentagon, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, are more mad than MAD. I think that they took the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon rather personally. One can only imagine what their response would be to a Bigger Hit.
Fyodor at December 9, 2004 04:11 PM asks straight questions and will get straight answers:
1. Is there evidence of significant, non-superficial biological differences between human ethnic groups?
Yes. Racial, differences within the human species are real and significant. This fact is contended - and then consented? - by wbb et al, who appears to be terminally confused or contradictory on this issue.
Individual biological differences exist, are heritable and can be statistically grouped into familial, racial and special classes, depending on the degree of inter-breeding. This what the standard Darwinian evolutionary theory of population differentiations would predict. In fact Darwin put it into the title of his mag op.
Sexual selection, through the simple fact of geographical proximity, implies a significant degree of endogamy between contiguous consanguines. Given biological heritability this invariably produces biologically distinct ethnic groups.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 11, 2004 12:32 PM2. If you answered "yes" to question 1. above, do these differences justify the WAP?
No. All non-Caucasian races will have something different, and possibly better, to offer than steak and two veg. The principle of diverse comparative advantages applies to both the natural and social economies. Vive la ethnic differences!
I refuse to be drawn into the argument of whether WAP was justified at the time and place of its enactment. The time-travelling uber-moralist game has always been a favoured indoor sport, guranteeing hours of harmless fun for parlour pinks. But it is essentially frivolous.
Political policies are regulated by prevailing moral sentiments, directed towards the notional civic interest. The right state of moral codes is always relative to normal survival, sexual and social requirements that are contingent on typical circumstances of time and place. Although the right direction of morality is always Absolutely the same: towards more extensive and intensive sympathy for other persons.
The WAP became objectionable, and less defensible, onpolitic and economic grounds. This became glaringly obvious as more liberal trends developed amongst our Asian neighbours.
AUS immigration policy is now, and should continue, to discriminate on individual, not racial, grounds. A good settlement policy should be non-racist and non-seperatist ie be both ethnicly cosmopolitan and socially integrative. It should aimed at getting the best persons into the nation, whether Black, White or Brindle.
Some quantitative immigration discrimination must occur, if only to constrain overall quantities (any Greenies for a billion immigrants?).
Qualitative discrimination should be on the basis of social utility: what physiological and psychological qualities does the applicant possess that the nation needs?
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 11, 2004 01:15 PMIf you answered "no" to the questions above you can stop arguing with yourself, and the rest of us.
I do not argue with myself. I confess to writing idiosyncratically to others as a way of thinking things out for myself. This is in fact the opposite of solipsism, although admittedly eccentric.
Evolutionary theory (including pyscho-biology and socio-biology) is a vast and complicated topic which is obviously ideological dynamite. It has generated an enormous amount of nonsense from both the "Social Constructionist" Ideological Left and
"Intelligent Designer" Theological Right.
It has fallen to Darwinian Empirico-logical Centrists to to wade in, clean up the mess and cop flack from both sides for their troubles.
I have no patience with moral grandstanders or intellectual censors, although I welcome scientific and stylistic criticism.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 11, 2004 01:48 PMIf you answered "yes" to 1., please name the supposed differences, and links to your empirical evidence.
Fyodor has some cheek, telling his cyber grand-mother how to suck citational eggs. I am quite religious about sourcing arguments.
Classification of biological taxa, at the supra-individual scale, is arbitrary. They are made for pragmatic utility, not intellectual veracity. That does not preclude making them. Science consists of identifying particular individuals and then generalising their class behaviour.
The fundamental evidence for sub-special bio-diversity must be genetic. The HGP indicates that the distribution of human genetic variation can be (roughly) classified according to conventional ethnic taxonomies. The NY Times distinguished science journalist, Nicholas Wade, reports the results of the HGP in colloquial terms:
Scientists studying the DNA of 52 human groups from around the world have concluded that people belong to five principal groups corresponding to the major geographical regions of the world: Africa, Europe, Asia, Melanesia and the Americas.
The study, based on scans of the whole human genome, is the most thorough to look for patterns corresponding to major geographical regions. These regions broadly correspond with popular notions of race, the researchers said in interviews.
There are observable physiological and psychological consequences flowing from the fact that there is genetic heritability in the ethnic distribution of metabolic traits and mental abilities. These range from the extra-ordinary respirative capacities of Tibetans to the extra-ordinary cognitive facility of (rigorously in-bred) Azkhenazi Jews.
Lewontin's oft-cited claim, that there is more genetic diversity within, rather than between, races is true as far as it goes. But it was an artifice of his mode mathematical analysis and his choice of more randomly varying blood proteins for clinical analysis.
Other, bigger, guns have had a shot at measuring human genetic variation. Vincent Sarich, the discover of molecular clocking techniques, has measured variation between human populations and found them greater than that which occurs between some mammalian species:
what is the degree of racial variation with respect to morphology in humans as compared to other taxa?
..."racial morphological distances within our species are, on the average, about equal to the distances among species within other genera of mammals, as, for example, between pygmy and common chimpanzees. I am not aware of any other mammalian species where the constituent races are as strongly marked as they are in ours.
I must admit that this news rocked even me. But it is what Darwinian theory would predict of a species composed of nepotistic little tribes that had wandered, in fits and starts, right around our variegated world from the moment of Exodus.
For all I know, the End of Ideological History maybe nigh. But there are still interesing times ahead. There is a hell of a lot of intellectual confusion, and ideological obfuscation, surrounding the biological causes and social consequences of ethnic differences. This needs to be addressed PDQ for two reasons:
Summarising so far:
(1) People from the different branches of the human family tend to have distinctive characteristics, due to their having more genes in common. The differences are significant.
The first observation is uncontroversial. The second takes the debate no further, since we are not told in what sense the differences are significant. I suspect that the forest-dwellers of Central Africa are at a disadvantage when it come to winning high-jump gold medals; on the other hand, they can keep flowers in their hair better than Finns. How such differences are important from the point of view of social policy is not disclosed.
(2) The WAP may have not have been a bad idea (at least not as bad as it would be now), presumably on the precautionary principle, because it reduced the risk of ethnic conflict.
The obvious thing to say about this, whether it's true or not, is that no link is made with point (1). Even if ethnic differences point to caution in immigration policy, and even if there exist significant (in some sense) genetic differences, no reason is supplied here for concluding that the ethnic differences in question themselves have a genetic basis.
In which case, what the hell is this all about? I don't expect an answer to this point, rather another introspective soliloquy and a new batch of jargon. But it's worth pointing out that these putative answers to Fyodor's querstions are, to this point, woeful.
Posted by: James Farrell at December 11, 2004 02:13 PMJames, no idea what all this stuff about evolutionary biology etc. is about. It seems to me that Fyodor had the best, and most elegant, argument on this page when he wrote:
Morality may be a relative concept, but racism isn't. Either you discriminate on the basis of race or you don't. The WAP did, so it's racist.
Posted by: Mark Bahnisch at December 11, 2004 02:50 PMFarrell seems impatient with my statement of the relationship between positive genetic science and normative immigration policy:
The obvious thing to say about [2. possible political justifications for WAP] , whether it's true or not, is that [Strocchi makes] no link...with [1. the genetics of ethnic diversity]
The obvious thing to say about Farrell is that he has real comprehension problems with plain English, never mind jargon. To redux from Strocchi's politico-ethical book, do gene-based ethnic differences justify a race-biased policy in the "here and now" of 21st C AUS?:
No. All non-Caucasian races will have something different, and possibly better, to offer than steak and two veg. The principle of diverse comparative advantages applies to both the natural and social economies. Vive la ethnic differences!
To redux the Founding Father's 19th C AUS politico-ethical book is, as I patiently explained, a mugs game. Political morality is relative to the norms prevailing within a given jurisdiction's population BLAH X 3.
By the standards of the British Empire AUS was definitely on the conservative end of the racist spectrum, but not abnormally so - as any reader of Winston Churchill's writings will gather.
The United States, Canada and New Zealand also had racially restrictive immigration policies in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Did knowledge of ethno-genetic differences have anything to do with the WAP in the "then and there" of 19th AUS? Clearly, the original White Australia policy was sold on the basis of folk prejudice, not formal science. So the Crick-Watson genetics had nothing to do with AUS's racist politics.
Just as clearly, the majority of AUS's foundational registered voters preferred WAP at the time. The middle classes, represented by Parkes, and working classes, represented by Watson, both opposed Chinese immigration on "trade union" grounds ie they feared smarter, and cheaper competition. National economics was subservient to Racial biologics.
All one can say about the morality of all this is that it was consistent with prevailing community standards, validated by accountable democratic institutions and amenable to progressive moral sympathies. Apart from declaring myself for a race-neutral and cosmopolitan settlement policy I have scratched myself from the competition to see who is the fairest world-historical morality play critic of all.
Farrell then contorts himself into a faux ignorant pose:
The second takes the debate no further, since we are not told in what sense the differences are significant...no reason is supplied here for concluding that the ethnic differences in question themselves have a genetic basis.
Strocchi redux:
physiological and psychological consequences flowing from the fact that there is genetic heritability in the ethnic distribution of metabolic traits and mental abilities. These range from the extra-ordinary performance of Tibetans at respiration to the extra-ordinary facility of rigorously in-bred Azkhenazi Jews at cogitation.
Farrell, finding it all too much, then throws his hands up in mock despair:
what the hell is this all about? I don't expect an answer to this point, rather another introspective soliloquy and a new batch of jargon. But it's worth pointing out that these putative answers to Fyodor's querstions are, to this point, woeful.
What part of the word "extraordinary" (ie significant) does the Great Ignorer not understand? Admittedly this is not monosyllabic baby talk. But it is not idiosyncratic jargon. So it should be clear enough for even to James "I-know-nothing!" Farrell to digest.
We are now only starting to identify and explain gene instantiation and expression. So the correlation of ethno-particular genes and significantly different ethno-typical aptitudes & attributes that is implied by Darwinism has a long way to go. If Farrell bothers to follow the links he might learn something.
He might find its worth bating his breath. Since the collapse of ideological feminism the papers, and vulgar "Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus", publishing industry, are now are full of the molecular biology of gender differences. But naturally-selected genes for gender are far more likely to be subject to special conservation than the sexually-selected genes for racial differentation.
In the era of customised genetic medicine the biological reality of ethnic differences is going to be a big commercial and political issue. Ultimately every individual will have their own medicine, but on the way we shall resolve genetic identities and propensities at special, racial and familial scales. The trickle of molecular biologic analysis of the patterns of human bio-diversity is already turning into a flood.
Does our Bleeding Obviator consider matters of life and death not signficant to rate his notice. Or does Farrell propose that those scientists and clinicians currently concerned to understand and help people of colour continue to waste time and lives sifting through the "Social Constructionist" garbage that still overflows the Dustbin of Ideological History?
Perhaps we should all maintain a respectful silence whilst Farell's ideology of ignorance receives a dignified internment.
Posted by: Jack Strocchi at December 11, 2004 06:25 PMI thought I'd better clear up these old confusions of Nabakov's before I abandon this thread (it's getting ever harder for me to load the page now it's so long).
Me: '...You describe your friend as someone who "dresses well and is educated and senior in rank", then you go on to describe how she was upset. But that, while nothing to do with her skin colour,...'
Nabakov: 'Um.. Jill's comment explicitly said it had everything to do with her race/skin colour.'
Yes - which is at odds with the idea that dressing well etc. had anything to do with her grief and pain. I was pointing out that those things merely made her articulate, they didn't make her somebody especially deserving of consideration as though the more marginalised don't matter. Marginalised aborigines deserve just as much consideration, even when inarticulate. However, our consideration should not be dictated bu spurious ideas of "racism", even if our policies can conveniently make use of that. If we take racism itself as a wrong, we end up making other things seem OK because they aren't that sort of wrong - and you end up with a lot of one off changes to the US constitution (say) because they aren't
reflecting deeper systematic principle.
Me: "Oh, Katz, you might want to follow up the link on my home page to what the Constitutional Centenary Foundation did when I tried to expose certain sorts of republicans as racists by showing them for what they were."
Nabakov: 'I did and...huh? It seems to be an overly detailed, longwinded and poorly laid out account of a confused procedural bitchfight amongst a fringe group of constitutional activists.'
It looks as though you didn't bother to look at the point of principle (I probably didn't need to remind Katz of that, since he/she was addressing principles). I just used an example to illustrate the principle. It was that principle that matters here, that telling the truth and looking for it matter far more than merely categorising things according to whether they line up with your preferred categories. I confronted a bunch of reflexive PC republicans with a cognitive dissonance between republicanism and racism, and they couldn't handle it - and showed they couldn't. That shows that reflexive reaction according to association of ideas is not the way to handle the world.
But then, that's just precisely the reason you couldn't see that playing out - you only saw a familiar category, and tuned everything else out without realising that there ever was a point of principle involved.
Nabakov: 'Not doubt what went down then is still fresh in your mind, but in the absence of context, or indeed relevance to this discussion, this means nothing to me, Vienna. Perhaps you could provide a quick 50 word precis explaining why it's germane to this thread.'
No - you are on the one hand looking for brevity, which rules out deeper understanding, and on the other hand you are building in the requirement that the interplay then was relevant here (when it was the underlying principle of vicious failure of PC-dom that was being shown in a worked example).
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at December 11, 2004 07:33 PMJack, the point about Private Schultz was not that he avoided hearing what he didn't want to know (perhaps you're thinking of emus or Manuel), but that he wasn't good at keeping secrets. In this regard, you've got me nailed. If you decide to confide in someone about what happened between you and Cressida back in 1988, don't pick me.
I think that we are all firmly agreed on:
1. There are lots of genetic differences between ethinic groups, some of them extraordinary - not least Tibetan lung capacity. A knowledge of these is proving indispensible in screening for and treating diseases, not to mention designing ventolin inhalers.
2. You don't want a race-based immigration policy at the moment, but you baulk at making anachronistic moral judgements about our forefathers.
3. The architects of the WAP didn't know much about DNA.
4. All or some post-modernists are idiots (we'll give Derrida the benfit of the doubt for now).
So let's detain ourselves no further with these matters.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but you do seem to be hinting that even if ethnic discimination is not a good idea now, it might be in principle. The thing is, if you're not flirting with any such claim, or refusing to rule it out, I really don't know what any of this debate is about. Hence my intemperate 'what the hell...?', for which I apologise...it was just my Irish genes talking.
Posted by: James Farrell at December 11, 2004 08:04 PMDear Granny Jack,
Please do remember to take your medicine when you get the vapours.
Now, the "significant, non-superficial biological differences between human ethnic groups" that you've come up with are that:
a) Tibetans breathe well at high altitude [not suprising];
b) Ashkenazi jews have "extra-ordinary cognitive facility" and are "rigorously in-bred" [unreferenced, unproven and rather offensive];
c) the Kalenjin tribe of Kenya produces good cross-country runners [not surpsising to watchers of the Olympics]; and
d) different ethnic groups come in different sizes [that would explain why Samoans are, generally, bigger than Pygmies]
These may seem significant to you, but they look superficial to me. Your assertion about Ashkenzi jews might be in a separate category (being extraordinarily clever is a significant difference), but is not referenced. As pointed out by James Farrell, these difference are hardly supportive of any form of race discrimination.
Given you usually are quite rigorous in sourcing your facts, I can only conclude from this, the best that you could produce, that there simply is little difference between ethnic groups, and you've been running yourself in a circle again.
P.S. a "Darwinian theory" would not predict that humanity had emerged from the "moment of Exodus". Please don't tell me you're a Darwinian Creationist, as that would really cause me to lose my breakfast.
Posted by: Fyodor at December 17, 2004 08:09 AMA copy of the following letter has recently come into my hands. It has some relevance to our topic, so I thought I'd share it...
The Secretary
Joint Taskforce for Mutual Understanding
Sneetchville
Dear Sir,
I refer to your recent tender for a scientific assessment of the causes of social fragmentation in Sneetchville.
Our organisation already has a considerable stock of information on the Sneetch Question in the company databases. As we understand it, for some generations now, the star-bellied Sneetches have been mean to the Sneetches without stars. Examples include the failure of the former to greet the latter on the beaches, and their refusal to invite them to marshmallow roastings. It is widely appreciated that resentment on the part of non-star Sneetches, coupled with growing anxiety on the part of star-bellied Sneetches, underlies a rising incidence of star-status-related violence, especially among the younger Sneetches.
This letter explains in general terms why Strocchi Technologies is the appropriate agency to undertake the analysis you have chosen to commission.
As serious students, the Task Force members are no doubt cognisant that the difference between the two groups of Sneetches is a genetic one, and that the key to resolving your difficulties must therefore be sought at the frontiers of genetic research. Fortunately, our company is positioned firmly on that particular frontier and hence is well placed to assist you. We have, for example, recently completed a study of Twentieth Century genocides, in which we made no apology for emphasising genetic factors, such as the extraordinary knee flexion of the Turkish Kurds. Our genetic experience will also prove indispensable in ethnic profiling, since genetic traits are frequently concentrated in particular ethnic groups.
The Task Force's problem is clearly two-fold. On the one hand, no real progress is possible until you identify the precise DNA segment responsible for the production of belly stars. On the other hand, an equally urgent priority is to establish the evolutionary basis of the star phenotype, that is, the environmental conditions that favoured members of the species who carried the star allele, giving rise to the star-bellied sub-species.
I will now volunteer a word or two of caution. In your search for expert advice you will be approached by numerous agencies who claim that genetics and evolutionary theory are not relevant to your particular terms of reference. But you must understand that, unlike yourselves, the proponents of the Irrelevance of Darwin Thesis (IDT) are not serious students. These impostors reject Darwin and they reject science, partly because they are victims of a humanities education that renders them incapable of understanding these fields, but mainly because it contradicts their post-modernist, multi-cultural ideology. This ideology is itself a cloak for their political agenda, which is to instate Andrew Theophanous as Prime Minister of Australia and ban the use of English as a medium of instruction in public schools.
Even if the above objectives are not achieved, this campaign of disinformation will have other dire consequences. Most lamentably, biomedical research will be stopped in its tracks, causing the deaths of hundreds of millions who could have been saved by genetic screening and gene-based therapies. Furthermore, the anti-scientific IDT is routinely deployed to obstruct the Government's initiatives to combat terrorism. Unfortunately our organisation has already seen direct evidence of this: our ground breaking ethnic profiling techniques have just this week been rejected by the State Department, on the absurd grounds that insofar as terrorism has an ethnic dimension this is cultural rather than genetic. This example indicates the ferocious speed with which the post-modernist cancer is spreading. And again, untold millions of lives are at stake.
In the unlikely event that members of your Task Force are inclined to be seduced by the IDT, let me summarise once more the inescapable logic that refutes it: star-status discrimination occurs on the basis of a genetic difference, therefore only gene-based evolutionary science can unlock its causes.
With these initial thoughts and words of warning, I enclose full details and costing of our proposal. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours sincerely
Sylvester McJackass McBean, D.Phil (Syllogistic Logic)
Director, Ethnic Conflict Unit
Strocchi Technologies Inc.
Gran Payaso Dr, Santa Barbara, CA 93117
That should have been the final word- but I can't let it go unacknowledged. Nice one.
Posted by: wbb at December 20, 2004 11:00 PM