I am quite laid back about cultural and race issues. I don't discriminate on race, I hate some people, like others and get along with most. I do not regard race as such to be important. That is not to say that I am blind to it or never pay attention to it.
I have in the past taken people on to work for me. I never discriminated on race. If the people needed the money the right amount (enough to work, not enough to steal the money they were handling for me) and could do the job I took them on. I have regretted decisions but I have never found a reason to us race as a criteria. Attitude and aptitude is what mattered, race, sex and age were not important.
Trying to imagine that you can ignore the race of the person you are dealing with is absurd, and irrational. We must always use whatever information we have to help us make the right decision. The crucial thing is to not over-weight the information. If the only thing you know to differentiate between two people is their race then you cannot make an employment decision between them. You must know more or you will be prejudiced, you will have prejudged the situation. Ideally employment decisions should be taken blind to race, but this is not really practical. Race is simply not relevant to the vast majority of jobs.
There are different types of racist so I dislike them for different reasons:-
1] Ignorant racists. They hate and fear what they don't understand. I do not respect such people. It is not difficult in my country to learn a little more about other people, to watch them and listen to them in their daily lives. When you watch people you find that they are are more similar than different.
2] Studied racists. These are people who go out of their way to be racists, they gather information and rumours and refine their hatred. They do so because they like being racists. There is a certain rebel cool in being a racist just as there is in being an anarchist and an atheist. I despise people who choose their beliefs like clothes, to make an effect.
3] Scientific Racists. These are the equivalent of the creation scientists. They are the worst kind. Racism is bad enough but to do it with the gloss of science just makes me so angry. I think that the conventional anti-racist approach plays into their hands by joining them in twisting science.
Are the races equally intelligent?
This page has caused a bit of controversy among the visitors. Leading to some people saying that I believe that the races are not equal in intelligence. What I actually believe is that the races need not be equal in intelligence. It really doesn't matter whether or not all human groups have precisely the same average intelligence levels and nobody needs to lie, hide the evidence or make personal attacks on anybody who shows an interest in the subject.
The decision to treat everybody equally is based on ethics, not scientific research. There may well be new scientific research, it's unlikely there will ever be substantial changes in ethics.
The politically correct lobby try to deny any scientific claim that shows a difference between the races. They suppress science. Science isn't truth, but nothing else has a better claim. The PC lobby deny inconvenient findings regardless of whether or not they are factually based.
I do not believe either that the races are equal or that are not equal as an article of faith. In this I am running against the liberal tide. Too many otherwise thoroughly objective people try to maintain the idea that the races are equal and that to question the point is to be a racist. I object to that. I maintain my right to question any assertion.
The bare facts and the unbiased science proves that race is a minor issue. There are real differences between people but these differences do not coincide with the divisions into races which the layman understands. To a large degree races as the layman understands the issue simply do not exist at all. However there are differences between human groups which are genetic. These differences are measurable and they are more than skin deep. The facts of science support the view that racial differences are real but trivial. If you want to select a candidate for a job on the basis of intelligence then the best way to do it is to put the candidates through an appropriate test, not to select on the basis of race, however you manage to define that term. I am willing to believe that there may be a real, statistically significant difference between the aggregate IQ scores of different races but that is a very poor way to select an individual. Some liberally indoctrinated people will now be holding up their hands in horror because I can accept the idea that one race may be smarter than another. Well let them.
Please note that there is a world of difference between being willing to believe something and willing it to be true. I am not a believer about races, I am open minded and willing to accept evidence. Are you?
It is inconceivable to me that two groups of people separated by 60,000 years or so of evolution will be different in faces, blood groups and skin colour but absolutely identical in everything else. There must be differences, but equally I expect them to be trivial. To survive in Europe, Africa, America or Australia required similar linguistic and tool handling skill, similar levels of intelligence. I would expect tests to show that racial groups had overlapping scores in tests of various aspects of intelligence, not identical grouping, some small variation in aggregate scores to the point that would make discrimination on either “positive” or “negative” grounds thoroughly wrong. I have not done intensive research on the issue but all the data I have seen confirms my view. On average Europeans do better than blacks but worse than Jews and Asians in IQ tests performed in America. How significant is that? Not very. It is almost certainly affected by test bias to a large degree but that can never be eliminated. It is much less significant than the physical, linguistic and emotional differences between the sexes but we still think that it is right to allow either sex to enter the vast majority of occupations. Individual differences are massively more important than group differences. There is more variation within each group than between the groups, more by many orders of magnitude.
Positive discrimination is just as wrong as negative discrimination. You cannot tell if a candidate for a particular job or place on a course is good or not on the basis of their race. But in the aggregate there may well be differences between the groups. Just as if you took a thousand 20 year old men and a thousand 20 year old women and asked them to run a mile in the fastest possible time only a total moron would expect the first thousand to cross the line to be 500 men and 500 women or 1000 men and no women. A sensible expectation would be that the first thousand would be predominantly men but many good women would be in that group too. The difference between this and the case of college entry would just be a matter of degree (no pun intended). The smarter students would be the smarter students. On aggregate some groups would do very slightly less well, they would show themselves to be less promising material. But race would not decide who was the best candidate only an appropriate test could do that. Equality cannot be legitimately imposed on an unequal group in the name of fairness. True equality in this case is equality of opportunity. The aim of education is to educate those that can benefit from it.
I am very confident that greater racial equality in higher education is best achieved by opening up real opportunities for all students on the basis of aptitude alone. If you want to see more black graduates then spend money on young children's education in the earliest years. When young black children go to school already reading they cannot then be written off as unteachable. When children are taught they learn, they are programmed to learn whether they want to or not. When young black children are in school and learning teachers will enjoy teaching them. That momentum once started cannot be stopped. Children love to learn, teachers love to teach children who love to learn. You just have to start the process.
It is no surprise to me that Jewish Americans beat most other whites in IQ tests. Jewish culture values learning and family life. I expect it is this that the IQ tests are picking up. When IQ tests are grouped by class rather than race the differences are even starker. IQ tests do not measure underlying inherent or potential intelligence, they can only measure certain aptitudes that have been realized. The neatly dressed little Korean child goes to school encouraged and fully primed to learn, and so she learns. The little urban black boy is not encouraged to learn and has no positive role models to encourage him. The black man in the ghetto is living a life of promiscuity and no social responsibility, it is inevitable that his children will be black because of genetics, it is inevitable that his children will be disadvantaged because of their environment. That cycle of deprivation cannot be broken by sending delinquent blacks to college in place of better motivated and qualified white students, it can only be tackled at the root of the problem.
If all children are given a good start then all children will learn. If there is any place for positive discrimination it is here, in targeting the help on children who would otherwise have a severe struggle to learn. Once that process has begun then everything must be selected for by ability alone. This gives all children a chance to shine. Middle class children do not need special treatment to help them learn, they have the encouragement at home and they can achieve their potential. There is little evidence that hothousing children makes them better and boosts their intelligence above the normal, but there is evidence that providing good early years education helps remove the brakes to development that some children would otherwise experience. In my own family my cousins, nephews and nieces are all state educated and they all have performed according to their underlying ability, not to how much money was spent on them or to how much their parents pushed them. All were educated with the brakes off. There was equality of opportunity but inequality of achievement, which is the way it should be for all.
It would be convenient for the PC lobby to believe that the only differences between races were the facial details, skin colour and hair types that they try to ignore or pretend they do not notice. Even better they would prefer races not to exist at all and they are very happy to find that the traditional divisions of humanity do not stand up well to modern scientific analysis. Once they have heard that much they slam the laboratory door shut before they get to hear that there are real differences in human groups, just because the lines are fuzzy and don't fall in the same places as they did in nineteenth century text books it does not follow that there are no divisions within humanity worthy of any consideration.
Claiming that the different classifications used in the racial analysis of IQ tests do not match real measurable biological differences in clines does nothing to make either the differences in the scores or the perceived categories go away. The claim that fish swim better than moths is not thoroughly disproved by showing that the data on fish was contaminated with a few measurements of dolphins and some of the moths were actually drab coloured butterflies. The debunking of the categories does not prove that moths and fish swim equally well and anybody who thinks otherwise is an unscientific hater of moths who doesn't deserve to be allowed into any town with a university.
It would be convenient for the white supremacists to believe that racial differences were enormous and could never be put to one side. White supremacists want to believe that the current economic dominance of people with white genes is both inevitable and desirable.
The truth is not as convenient as either side would like.
Why did the blacks end up as slaves, the native American and Australian people suffered genocide and the white man came to control much of the world's resources? Is there a biological explanation?
Yes there is. And it has nothing to do with race. The people of western Europe and their colonies are the inheritors of thousands of years of progress. Asia and Europe together form a super-continent that yielded the majority of the world's crops and domestic animals. The area that is traditionally known as the fertile crescent was the cradle of civilization and agriculture. The people of neighbouring lands soon learned from each other and the technology of wheat, barley, horses, pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, bronze and iron spread east and west along the same latitudes to a huge proportion of the population of the planet.
The Americas, Australia and Africa all lacked easily domesticable plants and animals. They also had smaller sized areas with fewer peoples in contact, when contact across wide areas was possible the problems of latitude made exchange of crops less likely. What Australian products have been domesticated? Macadamia nuts and Eucalyptus trees for timber. Australia had no large grained cereals suitable for agriculture.
To put it briefly the deck was stacked in favour of great civilizations emerging on the great continent, with its rich tapestry of cultures all in some slight contact with each other, such contact much easier because Asia and Europe had huge tracts of land on the same latitude, which could grow similar types of crops. Both Africa and the Americas are significantly narrower and so have a smaller prospect of civilizations growing up together on the same latitudes and sharing (or copying or stealing) their agricultural technology.
Civilization is a self catalysing process. Those societies that grow have the best chances of growing some more. The processes that began with the earliest harvests in the Tigris valley are still rumbling on to give the advantages to the children of California.
Systematic Racial Discrimination is Nonsensical
There are statistically significant differences between people of different heights. [Correlation coefficients of the effect observed in these studies are typically about 0.2, meaning that variation in height explains about 4% of the variation in IQ - Wikipedia, Height and Intelligence] People who are taller than average are smarter than those who are shorter than average and this can be demonstrated with IQ tests. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that universities offer places to people on the basis of how tall they are. It would be just as ridiculous to discriminate, in either positive or negative ways, between people based upon their race or cline. The best measure of the ability to benefit from education is a well constructed entrance examination system not a tape measure or a DNA reading.
The Multicultural society
Politicians and the media are constantly telling the British people that they live in a multicultural society. However, I strain my brain to remember a single person ever setting out to create one.
The multicultural society just happened. Nobody planned it. Nobody wanted it. And yet now it is a sacred cow. "We all live in a multicultural society you know..." It is a cliché like "don't you know there's a war on?"
England has been invaded by foreigners for the first time since 1066. The most amazing thing is how little has been said and done about it. Nobody ever decided that allowing in blacks from the Caribbean and "Asians" from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh was a good idea as the start of long term settlement. Initially they were encouraged to help with a labour shortage and later they kept coming even when the welcome had evaporated. The immigration and race issue is enormously sensitive in British politics, talking about it in anything other than platitudes is very dangerous for any politician. Fortunately I do not have to worry about that. I can safely speak the truth and my opinions and take the consequences. I have no political career to worry about. I also do not need to worry about the law and censure because my views are not liable to cause too many riots.
There is a very real fear in many parts of urban Britain about the race problem, as they define it. Many lower working class areas are becoming ghettos for obviously foreign people. The new people are different. They are a different colour. They act differently and they have different standards. This inevitably causes unease, which can easily be magnified into fear and hate.
In the USA there is the N word. Nigger. In Britain there is the P word, paki. Many "British Asians" are from Pakistan. Pakistan means pure state, so presumably paki means pure. Paki is a term used as an insult and also more generally as a colloquial term. In my own experience I would say paki is used 90% descriptive and 10% abusive. The problem is that paki is a better word than any more PC label. It defines the concept better and more succinctly than "British Asian", Muslim, Asian or even Pakistani. In the USA there is an obvious replacement for the N word that is both shorter and less offensive, black, and for the PC lobby there is the inelegant phrase African-American which will, no doubt, be replaced in another ten years with something with even more syllables.
I suppose paki is one of a series of words on a continuum from the purely descriptive to the purely insulting. It is on the insulting side of Brit, Yank, Gypsy and Jew but on the descriptive side of nigger. On a level with 'spic perhaps but more excusable, 'spic is an offensive corruption of an accurate and neutral description, Pakistani may be neutral but it is quite likely to be inaccurate.
I have no problems with Asian people myself. I deal with them in the shop and before that I have visited their homes as employer and salesman. I can make reasonable generalizations about them that some people would call prejudices. They are not. I take people as I find them. They have a different attitude to haggling over prices that can make business very difficult. It is hard for me to do business with them, many of my colleagues selling kitchens would lie, making out that the original price was higher in order to make a deal at a fair price and still give them the satisfaction of driving a hard bargain. I cannot work that way. In their homes I would always ask if they wanted me to take off my shoes and I would be more careful than usual about using swear words. I would always be mindful of their religion and try not to cause offence, but I would not hesitate to talk about "Christmas time" and I would not pretend that I didn't follow football or cricket for fear of revealing that I actually support the England team.
The cricket issue is a thorny one. Take a man from Surrey and put him in Adelaide and before the decade is out he will shout for Australia. The English team has few black or Asian followers, despite having black and Asian players. Second generation immigrants still follow Pakistan and the West Indies. This upsets the English, and I think with good reason. In the USA this problem does not arise. The immigrant supports the USA team right from the first day. There is something of a barrier in England.
Why do the English exclude the immigrants? I am not sure. There may be something in the duality of English as a national and racial identity. Nobody is ever encouraged to call themselves "Black English" it is seen as a contradiction. Black British is fine, but not Black English. Now is the time to address this, as the English are in a position to reassert their own identity as the false flag of Britishness is removed by Scottish, Welsh and Irish devolution. The English should stand up and say we are a nation, not a racial grouping. A nation with a small n. The English problem is enormous and is bubbling away at the moment as no politicians feel the need, or have the courage, to address it. English is a dirty word, tainted with racism. Children in Primary Schools no longer have English as a subject in school, they study literacy. This makes me very angry. I do not want to be made to feel ashamed of my culture and heritage, to apologize all the time for being English.
It makes me very angry to see people with English accents who live in England suddenly proclaiming that they are Scottish because one Grandfather was delayed on a train for five minutes in Glasgow. The speed with which these people drop English as an identity is breathtaking.
I am also constantly annoyed by the portrayal of the English in the American
media. There are dozens of films in which the hero speaks with a soft
American accent, the pleasant little dwarf people talk with Irish accents
and the evil race talk with English upper class accents. It is not simply
that English trained actors are better at being villains, there is more
to it than this. Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves is a classic. All
the bit parts are English with no coherence about regional accent, all
the top parts are American except one, the supreme nasty villain, Alan
Rickman acts the rest off the screen. So what? It's a bloody ENGLISH story!
This is just as offensive to me as seeing blacked up actors in westerns
and Minstrell shows.
And
all too often the villain in a film is played by an English actor with
an English accent and no explanation is given to the audience, like in Last
Action Hero, the Charles Dance character was a fantastic villain but
what was he doing in California? It is shorthand to the audience, English
Accent=villain. (But what about 101 Dalmatians? American villain
in a largely English cast set in England but with American wildlife...
Oh shut up I'm on a roll)
Titanic was another example of English bashing. Look at those nasty English drowning all those nice Irishmen... They made a big point of saying that the Titanic was built in Ireland but neglected to say that it was built in Belfast by Harland and Wolff, no Irish Catholics came within half a mile of it. The implication was that these nice Irishmen (Catholics, naturally) were drowned by the Imperialist English despite building the ship for them.
Celtic pride in their cultural heritage is a wonderful thing apparently. In total contrast to Anglo-Saxon arrogance.
I'm not a nationalist or a racist. I just get fed up with watching everybody else in the world getting on with pride in their heritage while I feel deliberately excluded. English history is a story of shame it seems.
Where are the English-Americans? Invisible, or at least silent. I have e mailed a few of my distant cousins in the USA and what is the response? Do they want to know? Not the slightest bit of interest. It is as if they want their history to start in mid Atlantic.
Do you know who the patron saint of England is? What day is the English National day? Do you know any city outside England that celebrates it? Chicago and New York go crazy for St Patrick. Nobody even notices the English national day. (Today, 23rd of April).
How do you know you are in England? Deliberately bump into somebody in the street. If they apologize to you then you must be in England.
I'm English, sorry.
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