Guns Realism
By Liz Lightfoot in: Daily Telegraph 22 v '00 (not online)
A BAN on toy guns in nurseries is being relaxed as new research suggests that they reduce aggression. Far from encouraging violence, they lead to more imaginative and calmer play, says Penny Holland, of the University of North London, a lecturer in childhood studies.
Over the past two decades guns have been removed from nurseries and playgroups for fear of turning small boys into potential killers. After the shootings at Hungerford and Dunblane, shops such as Hamleys and The Early Learning Centre introduced weapons bans and parents were advised not to allow their children to use them at home. But Miss Holland said that they had been reintroduced at a number of nurseries and others were thinking of following suit. She said she was surprised by the behaviour of children in nurseries that now allowed them.
When the ban was lifted at Konstam nursery in Camden, north London, for example, the level of aggression dropped. Allowing the use of toy guns in a controlled environment provided "an imaginative doorway through which boys' play was enriched", she said. After an initial enthusiasm, the children's interest in weapons, war and super-hero play declined, leading to a more relaxed environment.
"Having given these boys permission to pursue their initial interests, the world of the imagination has become their oyster and they are diving for pearls," Miss Holland said….
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WHY THE BRIGHT DON'T BREED
A top American anthropologist (annoyed by being referred to Richard Lynn's Dysgenics) inquires:
If IQ is genetic, how come dumb people have more children hence spreading their lousy genes while the sage sexless intelligentsia allow their precious genetic information to wanly die out?
Reply:
My own favourite hypothesis would be that lower-IQ people fail to master birth control technology, as is explained in The Bell Curve. Partly, lower-IQ girls are more religious. They believe in their own virtue and think they will not have sex, so don't take the Pill or use other realistic methods of contraception. Then comes the inevitable party, and the girl is available for the proverbial third peach brandy.
No doubt there are other contributions -- from lower-IQ men who cannot manage oral, intercrural and kindred forms of sex. Fortunately, there are signs of eugenic abortion spreading further down the social scale, as US criminologists reported in recent years (See here and here.)
As to the non-breeding of the higher-IQ in the West, my best guess is that marriage has been made seriously unattractive to men because divorce arrangements are so unfair -- typically stripping the man of substantial assets and invariably breaking up his relationship with his children. Therefore, I favour a greater diversity of marital contracts, enabling men to make marriages on fairer terms and enabling successful men to be polygamous -- as already happens de facto in Hollywood, where people can afford for their lawyers to draw up pre-marital contracts. It seems to me remarkable that in 'a free society' we accept individual choice everywhere *accept* in state education, state health care and marriage.
Also helping explain the apparently imminent racial wipe-out of Whites, no-one realized the truth of the feminist proposition that many girls have no great drive to have babies. Instead, powerful maternal drive makes it appearance only after a woman has become well and truly pregnant. This late appearance of 'maternos' [cf. eros, thanatos] has enabled the success of birth control, as previously the development of a late age of marriage. But it means that some kind of religion will once more have to step in to regulate breeding -- this time to ensure that any breeding occurs at all. Alas, at present, it looks as if the state will play daddy -- a role it has already assumed in the financial affairs of single parent mothers. I incline to regard almost any such state interference as likely to be markedly inferior to arrangements that individuals would contract for themselves in free market conditions.
Note also that the decline in procreation by the high-IQ would have occurred even if IQ were *not* genetic.
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Friday, May 30, 2003
ORWELLIAN GERMANY
This letter to Germany was written by the late Prof. Glayde Whitney several years ago:
Dear Professor Xxxx
It is with regret that I must withdraw from presenting a Keynote Address entitled “Our Inquisition Today” to the main Plenary Session of the 12th International Conference on Xxxxxxxxxx, [31July-5 August 2000] meeting in Germany that is to deal with the topic of Threats to Freedom of Expression. This is because of the Threats to Freedom of Expression that are encased in law in today’s Germany.
At another conference held just a few days ago, there was an up-to-date presentation concerning the draconian thought-crime laws to which both the citizens of Germany and visitors to Germany are subjected. Special branches of the state police exist which specialize in the enforcement of laws against thought-crimes and speech-crimes. This totalitarian-state, indeed Orwellian, situation is as good an example of “Our Inquisition Today” as could have been exemplified in my planned address.
Literally many hundreds of German citizens have been arrested, charged, jailed, fined, exiled, and/or lost their positions for straightforward scholarly statements concerning various areas of investigation. Some historians and social philosophers have been affected, as also have scientists close to my own area of specialization.
For example, I have an Associated Press clipping that reports the suspension of a demographer in Germany. Her sin was to say that the investigation of possible race differences in intelligence was a legitimate field of study. The clipping reports that Jewish organizations in Germany called for her dismissal.
This is relevant to my attendance at the conference in Germany because, not only do I advocate that studies of racial differences in intelligence and other traits are important, but I have myself published such studies in refereed scientific journals and in other media.
It is not only German citizens that have fallen to the current inquisition. It is also the case that Foreign Nationals have been arrested and incarcerated upon visiting Germany. One example is an Australian citizen arrested and held for months under “administrative custody” during 1999. He was eventually tried for the crime of having published material on a website he operated in Australia. The German judge for the case refused to sentence a foreign national for operating a website in a foreign country. However, the Australian was found guilty for sending letters into Germany.
Similar cases [writings in foreign countries combined with shipment of written material into Germany] have already lead to the incarceration of American nationals by German courts.
In my own case, I have already been criticized and threatened by groups such as the Jewish Defense League for writings in various journals and books. It is also the case that I have mailed copies of such writings to colleagues residing inside Germany. Thus with the already existing precedents, it seems prudent to not visit Germany since I have no interest in experiencing the inside of a German prison.
There have been quite a few times across recent decades when scholarly and scientific individuals and groups have pressured or boycotted various regions because of human rights violations. The refusal to hold meetings in certain states and the hullabaloo against the USSR for suppression of scientists come readily to mind. I suggest that rather than holding meetings in Germany, all persons of conscience should boycott Germany until the citizens of that country are relieved of the oppressive thought crime laws to which they are being subjected by their ruling elites.
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Thursday, May 29, 2003
REALISM ABOUT AFRICA>
A report by the World Bank says many African countries are worse off now than they were at independence in the 1960s. The bank says the total combined income of 48 countries in Africa is little more than that of Belgium. The World Bank report, called Can Africa Claim The Twenty-first Century?, says major structural changes are needed if Africa is to catch up with the rest of the world.
Even just to maintain current levels of poverty, African economies will have to grow by 5% because of rapidly growing populations. But, the report claims Africa has "enormous untapped potential and hidden growth reserves", if it can mobilise its human resources and improve its political systems.
In the last 40 years, average incomes per person in Africa have stagnated while they have grown in most of the rest of the world. Africa now accounts for only 1% of the total world economic output and 2% of world trade. On average, African countries have economies smaller than a town of 60,000 people in a rich country. And infrastructure is far less developed as well. With only 10m telephone lines, half of them in South Africa, there is little chance of most Africans gaining access to the internet. Africa has fewer roads than Poland, only 16% of which are paved, and only one in five households has access to electricity. Two-thirds of rural Africans lack adequate water supplies, while three quarters lack adequate sanitation.
The World Bank also points out that Africa is under-utilising its human capital, particularly its women. The average schooling for African women has increased by only 1.2 years in the last 40 years, the lowest gain anywhere in the world. Instead, women typically work longer hours than men, collecting water and firewood, and lack access to credit, land, or educational resources.
Africa's human resources are also being decimated by disease, with Aids infection rates reaching 25% in Zimbabwe and Botswana. And decades of civil war and conflict, which have affected at least 20 of sub-Saharan Africa's 48 countries, have increased poverty and violence. The political system, even where there are elections, is generally based on a winner-take-all system that is not sufficiently inclusive of Africa's diverse ethnic groups. "Political changes .. would do much to empower people and communities and help energise the development process," the report says….
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Sex Differences: BOYS SHOW SPATIAL MASTERY
Ten students from across the country gathered as finalists in the National Geography Bee on a Washington stage some time ago, standing alongside "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebek and waving at their parents beaming in the audience. Only one could name two of the three largest sections of Denmark (Jutland, Sjaelland and Fyn). But all shared one notable trait, the same shared by all but two finalists in the 12-year history of the contest. And the answer is? They were all boys.
For a decade, educators have bemoaned that a large percentage of Americans cannot locate their own country on a map, much less point the way to Irkutsk. Geography slipped off school curriculums, derided as too dependent on rote learning, as educators blended it into broader social studies classes. Students who learned it tended to do so at home or on their own time. But the efforts to emphasize the importance of the subject over the last few years have highlighted a new problem. With students left to their own devices, a geography gender gap has become evident, so wide that with five million students participating in the bee, about 77 percent of the school winners are boys….
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
UNIVERSITY “ELITISM” IN THE U.K.
As the UK row about 'elitism' developed in recent years, many predictable attitudes went on display.
UK Chancellor Gordon Brown had begun it all by saying it was an "absolute disgrace" that state-school pupil Laura Spence had not won a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, when she had subsequently been chosen by Harvard: the Chancellor himself was a state-school product who had had to be content with a place at Edinburgh LUniversity and now finds the job slot he covets occupied by privately educated Oxford graduate Tony Blair.
Oxford University replied by leaking details of Laura Spence's selection interview, showing plainly that staff had made generous allowances for Miss Spence's lack of confidence; and the Vice-Chancellor, Colin Lucas, said the main problem of class discrimination was that working class/ disadvanteged students simply failed to apply to go to Oxford (because they have a largely outdated stereotype of the university as snobbish).
The left-wing Guardian gleefully editorialized, using figures from research by the Sutton Trust (director Peter Lampl) to show that, on the basis of A Level results, 14% of children from the bottom half of the social hierarchy should go to university, instead of the current 10%. The Guardian did not mention that A Levels – never an exacting test even in the 1960's, when good students took S Levels – have been turned largely into tests of rote memory so as to achieve more passes by girls (who swot harder and loathe exams that have 'surprise' questions). Any university that used only A Levels to decide entry would end with many zombies – as does Edinburgh LUniversity in contrast to Oxbridge.
The begging-bowling Times Higher naturally concluded that everything would be all right if only the government gave the unversities and university students more money. (Currently, having effectively nationalized the universities over the past 30 years, the inclination of government educationists is to starve the system of funds – as a punishment for elitism – and spend the money on the old age pensioners who have lately been voting with their feet against Labour.
But amidst the predictability, two interesting facts emerged. (a) The three universities having the worst records for admitting A-Level-qualified lower class students are Durham, St Andrews and, of course, the LUniversity of Edinburgh. (b) The Sutton Trust is working on the question of what differentiator should be used to supplement A Levels and apparently backs a US-style Scholastic Aptitude Test – well known to be largely a measure of the g factor.
Will IQ soon make a come-back? Or – like Mr Blair over the issue of 'fast track learning', will Mr Brown manage to stuff back in the the bottle the genie he has let loose?
Robin Clarke, of Birmingham, England (r.clarke@zazz.org.uk), wrote to the Guardian:
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
As the UK row about 'elitism' developed in recent years, many predictable attitudes went on display.
UK Chancellor Gordon Brown had begun it all by saying it was an "absolute disgrace" that state-school pupil Laura Spence had not won a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, when she had subsequently been chosen by Harvard: the Chancellor himself was a state-school product who had had to be content with a place at Edinburgh LUniversity and now finds the job slot he covets occupied by privately educated Oxford graduate Tony Blair.
Oxford University replied by leaking details of Laura Spence's selection interview, showing plainly that staff had made generous allowances for Miss Spence's lack of confidence; and the Vice-Chancellor, Colin Lucas, said the main problem of class discrimination was that working class/ disadvanteged students simply failed to apply to go to Oxford (because they have a largely outdated stereotype of the university as snobbish).
The left-wing Guardian gleefully editorialized, using figures from research by the Sutton Trust (director Peter Lampl) to show that, on the basis of A Level results, 14% of children from the bottom half of the social hierarchy should go to university, instead of the current 10%. The Guardian did not mention that A Levels – never an exacting test even in the 1960's, when good students took S Levels – have been turned largely into tests of rote memory so as to achieve more passes by girls (who swot harder and loathe exams that have 'surprise' questions). Any university that used only A Levels to decide entry would end with many zombies – as does Edinburgh LUniversity in contrast to Oxbridge.
The begging-bowling Times Higher naturally concluded that everything would be all right if only the government gave the unversities and university students more money. (Currently, having effectively nationalized the universities over the past 30 years, the inclination of government educationists is to starve the system of funds – as a punishment for elitism – and spend the money on the old age pensioners who have lately been voting with their feet against Labour.
But amidst the predictability, two interesting facts emerged. (a) The three universities having the worst records for admitting A-Level-qualified lower class students are Durham, St Andrews and, of course, the LUniversity of Edinburgh. (b) The Sutton Trust is working on the question of what differentiator should be used to supplement A Levels and apparently backs a US-style Scholastic Aptitude Test – well known to be largely a measure of the g factor.
Will IQ soon make a come-back? Or – like Mr Blair over the issue of 'fast track learning', will Mr Brown manage to stuff back in the the bottle the genie he has let loose?
Robin Clarke, of Birmingham, England (r.clarke@zazz.org.uk), wrote to the Guardian:
As a graduate of the same university as Bill Gates, Richard Branson, the Beatles, Beethoven, Polly Toynbee, Michael Faraday, Isaac Newton, etc., etc., etc, may I offer some alternative observations on the subject [of Oxbridge admissions]?
Firstly, there is a massive degree of disjunction between real-world outstanding achievements and the very crude rankings produced by the formal pseudo-education system of today. Secondly, and following from the above, GCSE / A-level grades are severely flawed as criteria of intellectual excellence. Newton and Einstein were rated as mediocrities by their universities. But if they or Darwin were to apply to Oxbridge today they would not even be accepted and would be quickly chucked out if they were in. The reason is that in contemporary "universities", intellectual "excellence" is rigidly and exclusively defined in terms of hyperactive reading, writing and memorising to order, to the exclusion of the ponderous reflective thinking characteristic of the true genius.
Professor DK Simonton rightly wonders whether there are "a few homeless people who are today's versions of the great geniuses of old" (See here). The head of psychology at one of the "best" UK universities (Birmingham) wrote to me that "Notwithstanding your published theories", failing exams due to illness ruled me out forever from consideration alongside school-leavers. And as the most world-famous expert on autism (Bernard Rimland) said to me: "Why do you want to associate with those rigid, narrow people in universities?" In my documented experience, levels of corruption and contempt for truth among academics are such that most are not fit to educate themselves, let alone vulnerable school-leavers.
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
FREEDOM and RESPONSIBILITY and LIBERTY and JUSTICE
Further to 'equality' and 'community', 'liberty' and 'justice' are two key political ideals towards which people and nations strive. What liberty and justice precisely involve have long been matters for debate. Notoriously, politicians of all colours claim to be in favour of liberty; but it soon turns out that they disagree amongst themselves as to whether to make people free, first of all, from the pressures of foreign enemies, from home-grown moralists, or from local or national tax-men. Justice, likewise, is widely valued -- even (and perhaps especially) by young children. Yet, as an adult political aspiration, is it to be the justice of 'getting what one deserves', of 'giving others their due', or the 'social justice' of being ascribed rights that carry no notable attendant duties?
Beneath such uncertainties, however, the relevant psychological issues are perhaps quite easy to see. Liberty and justice are the social forms and practices in which personal freedom and personal responsibility find their expression and precisification. A society that values and provides liberty and justice will be one that assumes that its citizens are by-and-large -- if perhaps with some welfare help from society -- free and responsible. By contrast, if people are considered little more free or responsible for their behaviour than are animals, then a nation's political life can resemble nothing more than the affairs of a committee of zoo-keepers. (To provide opportunities and kind treatment to animals is not to assume they are free or responsible: to show liberality to a tortoise is not to assume that the animal could ever be properly 'punished' for 'misdeeds'.)
Unlike the problem of whether to believe in and pursue human equality and fraternity, the problem of whether to acquiesce in most people being treated as free and responsible -- thus enabling societies to advance the causes of liberty and justice-has not been central to differential psychology. Yet probably it should be.
As yet, the theoretical arguments of moral and jurisprudential philosophers have provided no compelling and simple answer to the question of whether we all are, as human beings, free and thus potentially accountable for our actions. Outright avoidance of the question of how human freedom is possible has typified academic psychology this century-as was first remarked by Wlliam McDougall (e.g. 1934, Religion and the Life Sciences). Yet everyday law and practice in human societies must, of necessity, provide some kind of answer. This practical answer is to impute legal responsibility (mens rea) quite widely-chiefly absolving from it just one main group of people: for no civilised society today holds young children or mentally handicapped adults fully responsible (i.e. imprisonable or executable) under its criminal code. It is as if countries today basically allow that a low Mental Age (whether qua low chronological age or qua low IQ) must prevent a person's being severely punished as a criminal (or even tried on a capital charge in a court of law); and, on top of this, mens rea is also suspended in the case of the rarer endogenous infringements of rationality that occur in madness, epilepsy or unusually grave neurotic disability.
What these practices acknowledge is that the attribution of distinctly human freedom is dependent on our attributing to a person at least sufficient intelligence (operative at the time of the alleged crime) to appreciate both common-or-garden reality and the relevant social conventions. As was decided in the case of England's most famous paranoid schizophrenic, M'Naghten, in 1837, criminal guilt requires the convict 'to have known what he was doing, and to have known that it was wrong'. [In addition, conviction on a serious charge will usually require that the person was not a 'non-insane automaton' (in the grip of epileptic seizure) or acting under extreme duress, provocation or overwhelming impulse (e.g. sexual jealousy). However, people are exonerated in these ways only very seldom-and virtually never, in Britain, under the formula of crime passionnelle.]
In the light of such a common-sense understanding of freedom and responsibility, it is no wonder that Britain's leading jockey over many years, having amassed a multi-million pound fortune with the help of tax evasion (and supposed miserliness), pleaded quite unsuccessfully at his trial that he had a low IQ as a result of brain-damage from excessive dieting and frequent falls from horses. Nor should it be a surprise that the multiple murderer, the Yorkshire Ripper, was convicted, despite much psychiatric testimony at his trial to his insanity (supposedly a form of paranoid schizophrenia-about which experts themselves remained agreed for years afterwards): the jury at the Ripper trial was doubtless as impressed as was the general public by the Ripper's skilful evasion of detection over many months during which he continued to murder prostitutes and other women. Reasonable intelligence is apparently held to be a necessary and a largely sufficient condition of mens rea. It is virtually as simple as that.
Of course, such practices may be all wrong. Perhaps, in some way, a high-IQ person is just as 100% 'determined' as is the most insane 'automaton'? Indeed, this may seem positively likely when we consider the substantial contributions of genetic factors (and perhaps of yet-to-be-discovered environmental factors) to our natures....; and when we think of the wonders that twenty-first-century science will surely have in store.
However, human abilities, needs, temperaments, personalities, attitudes, interests, principles and sensibilities are not the same as 'actions'. Our actions flow, by all means, partly from such relatively enduring features of ourselves; yet 'action' (as distinct from reflexive movements and certain chemically induced moods) requires also the moment-to-moment input of our appreciation of immediate reality and convention, and of feedback on our response-so-far, and thus of our conscious intelligence. Our genes do not set up specific 'actions' -- though they may well set up the degree of intellectual guidance of our moment-by-moment choices. The fact that people of unremarkable intelligence can talk the language of freedom-sensing that they are free in some matters, yet less free in others (e.g. as to how they would react to suffocation, their spouse's adultery, or their child being sexually abused)-is itself enough to establish a workaday concept of freedom that no theoretical determinist can undermine.
If adequate functioning intelligence is necessary and virtually sufficient to be deemed free, perhaps people are not really free unless they are endowed with yet other resources? - Notably with money: for the rich clearly have more options than the poor. Sometimes this point is phrased in Sir Isaiah Berlin's terms (1958, Two Concepts of Liberty): that, in a law-governed country, we may all enjoy many 'negative' freedoms (e.g. from our neighbours' covetousness); but that some of us may currently enjoy more 'positive' freedoms (e.g. to own a yacht). Yet, distinguishable as such two types of freedom are, perhaps neither is the real McCoy.
Our freedom, in a psychological sense, is not that of being provided with options, rights or privileges, but of our sensing, within whatever constraints of tyranny or anarchy, that there are indeed options that we have or that we can or must create. No matter what options a slave may actually have, if his master's tyranny prevents him even conceiving of escape we surely withdraw blame for his actions at his master's behest-though, here again, we are likely to take such a slave's intelligence into account in deciding whether he could reasonably have been expected to do anything other than obey orders.
Whether psychologists and social scientists have really wanted to expand attributions of freedom and responsibility-or to strive to create the human conditions in which such attributions become eminently reasonable-is a moot point. Like other social scientists, psychologists (notoriously, the behaviourist leader, B.F.Skinner) have sometimes seemed to relish the creation of well-run holiday camps over which they would preside, manipulating the reinforcement schedules or the supply of social workers so as to optimize and equalize people's scores on some hedonic calculus-all the while reducing the intelligent choices that campers will need to make.
Yet such ideas now belong to the ancient history of behaviourist and environmentalist enthusiasm that denied both the importance of biologically-based individuality and the continuing need in human societies for people whose intelligence will not only contrive sixth-generation computers and hermeneutic text-analysis but will also cry out to be recognized as free and responsible beyond the dreams of utopian planners. Such a cry is not for any pseudo-freedom to behave randomly-'undetermined' by individual personality. Rather, it is for the exercise of intelligence that allows behaviour-though it is guided and even partly 'caused' by personality -- to be a rational reaction instead of being an automatized and robotic response. It is a cry that cannot be answered by the well-meaning provision of the cosy 'situations' and sheltered environments that utopians might envisage. Moreover, such freedom not only admits of personal responsibility, but positively demands it: for few worthwhile freedoms would remain in a world in which constraint and the taking of responsibility were not generally expected. The Quotes thus include consideration of the interdependence of freedom and responsibility; and of the possible role of the State in giving expression to both of them by its own support for intelligence, liberty and criminal justice.
More here
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Further to 'equality' and 'community', 'liberty' and 'justice' are two key political ideals towards which people and nations strive. What liberty and justice precisely involve have long been matters for debate. Notoriously, politicians of all colours claim to be in favour of liberty; but it soon turns out that they disagree amongst themselves as to whether to make people free, first of all, from the pressures of foreign enemies, from home-grown moralists, or from local or national tax-men. Justice, likewise, is widely valued -- even (and perhaps especially) by young children. Yet, as an adult political aspiration, is it to be the justice of 'getting what one deserves', of 'giving others their due', or the 'social justice' of being ascribed rights that carry no notable attendant duties?
Beneath such uncertainties, however, the relevant psychological issues are perhaps quite easy to see. Liberty and justice are the social forms and practices in which personal freedom and personal responsibility find their expression and precisification. A society that values and provides liberty and justice will be one that assumes that its citizens are by-and-large -- if perhaps with some welfare help from society -- free and responsible. By contrast, if people are considered little more free or responsible for their behaviour than are animals, then a nation's political life can resemble nothing more than the affairs of a committee of zoo-keepers. (To provide opportunities and kind treatment to animals is not to assume they are free or responsible: to show liberality to a tortoise is not to assume that the animal could ever be properly 'punished' for 'misdeeds'.)
Unlike the problem of whether to believe in and pursue human equality and fraternity, the problem of whether to acquiesce in most people being treated as free and responsible -- thus enabling societies to advance the causes of liberty and justice-has not been central to differential psychology. Yet probably it should be.
As yet, the theoretical arguments of moral and jurisprudential philosophers have provided no compelling and simple answer to the question of whether we all are, as human beings, free and thus potentially accountable for our actions. Outright avoidance of the question of how human freedom is possible has typified academic psychology this century-as was first remarked by Wlliam McDougall (e.g. 1934, Religion and the Life Sciences). Yet everyday law and practice in human societies must, of necessity, provide some kind of answer. This practical answer is to impute legal responsibility (mens rea) quite widely-chiefly absolving from it just one main group of people: for no civilised society today holds young children or mentally handicapped adults fully responsible (i.e. imprisonable or executable) under its criminal code. It is as if countries today basically allow that a low Mental Age (whether qua low chronological age or qua low IQ) must prevent a person's being severely punished as a criminal (or even tried on a capital charge in a court of law); and, on top of this, mens rea is also suspended in the case of the rarer endogenous infringements of rationality that occur in madness, epilepsy or unusually grave neurotic disability.
What these practices acknowledge is that the attribution of distinctly human freedom is dependent on our attributing to a person at least sufficient intelligence (operative at the time of the alleged crime) to appreciate both common-or-garden reality and the relevant social conventions. As was decided in the case of England's most famous paranoid schizophrenic, M'Naghten, in 1837, criminal guilt requires the convict 'to have known what he was doing, and to have known that it was wrong'. [In addition, conviction on a serious charge will usually require that the person was not a 'non-insane automaton' (in the grip of epileptic seizure) or acting under extreme duress, provocation or overwhelming impulse (e.g. sexual jealousy). However, people are exonerated in these ways only very seldom-and virtually never, in Britain, under the formula of crime passionnelle.]
In the light of such a common-sense understanding of freedom and responsibility, it is no wonder that Britain's leading jockey over many years, having amassed a multi-million pound fortune with the help of tax evasion (and supposed miserliness), pleaded quite unsuccessfully at his trial that he had a low IQ as a result of brain-damage from excessive dieting and frequent falls from horses. Nor should it be a surprise that the multiple murderer, the Yorkshire Ripper, was convicted, despite much psychiatric testimony at his trial to his insanity (supposedly a form of paranoid schizophrenia-about which experts themselves remained agreed for years afterwards): the jury at the Ripper trial was doubtless as impressed as was the general public by the Ripper's skilful evasion of detection over many months during which he continued to murder prostitutes and other women. Reasonable intelligence is apparently held to be a necessary and a largely sufficient condition of mens rea. It is virtually as simple as that.
Of course, such practices may be all wrong. Perhaps, in some way, a high-IQ person is just as 100% 'determined' as is the most insane 'automaton'? Indeed, this may seem positively likely when we consider the substantial contributions of genetic factors (and perhaps of yet-to-be-discovered environmental factors) to our natures....; and when we think of the wonders that twenty-first-century science will surely have in store.
However, human abilities, needs, temperaments, personalities, attitudes, interests, principles and sensibilities are not the same as 'actions'. Our actions flow, by all means, partly from such relatively enduring features of ourselves; yet 'action' (as distinct from reflexive movements and certain chemically induced moods) requires also the moment-to-moment input of our appreciation of immediate reality and convention, and of feedback on our response-so-far, and thus of our conscious intelligence. Our genes do not set up specific 'actions' -- though they may well set up the degree of intellectual guidance of our moment-by-moment choices. The fact that people of unremarkable intelligence can talk the language of freedom-sensing that they are free in some matters, yet less free in others (e.g. as to how they would react to suffocation, their spouse's adultery, or their child being sexually abused)-is itself enough to establish a workaday concept of freedom that no theoretical determinist can undermine.
If adequate functioning intelligence is necessary and virtually sufficient to be deemed free, perhaps people are not really free unless they are endowed with yet other resources? - Notably with money: for the rich clearly have more options than the poor. Sometimes this point is phrased in Sir Isaiah Berlin's terms (1958, Two Concepts of Liberty): that, in a law-governed country, we may all enjoy many 'negative' freedoms (e.g. from our neighbours' covetousness); but that some of us may currently enjoy more 'positive' freedoms (e.g. to own a yacht). Yet, distinguishable as such two types of freedom are, perhaps neither is the real McCoy.
Our freedom, in a psychological sense, is not that of being provided with options, rights or privileges, but of our sensing, within whatever constraints of tyranny or anarchy, that there are indeed options that we have or that we can or must create. No matter what options a slave may actually have, if his master's tyranny prevents him even conceiving of escape we surely withdraw blame for his actions at his master's behest-though, here again, we are likely to take such a slave's intelligence into account in deciding whether he could reasonably have been expected to do anything other than obey orders.
Whether psychologists and social scientists have really wanted to expand attributions of freedom and responsibility-or to strive to create the human conditions in which such attributions become eminently reasonable-is a moot point. Like other social scientists, psychologists (notoriously, the behaviourist leader, B.F.Skinner) have sometimes seemed to relish the creation of well-run holiday camps over which they would preside, manipulating the reinforcement schedules or the supply of social workers so as to optimize and equalize people's scores on some hedonic calculus-all the while reducing the intelligent choices that campers will need to make.
Yet such ideas now belong to the ancient history of behaviourist and environmentalist enthusiasm that denied both the importance of biologically-based individuality and the continuing need in human societies for people whose intelligence will not only contrive sixth-generation computers and hermeneutic text-analysis but will also cry out to be recognized as free and responsible beyond the dreams of utopian planners. Such a cry is not for any pseudo-freedom to behave randomly-'undetermined' by individual personality. Rather, it is for the exercise of intelligence that allows behaviour-though it is guided and even partly 'caused' by personality -- to be a rational reaction instead of being an automatized and robotic response. It is a cry that cannot be answered by the well-meaning provision of the cosy 'situations' and sheltered environments that utopians might envisage. Moreover, such freedom not only admits of personal responsibility, but positively demands it: for few worthwhile freedoms would remain in a world in which constraint and the taking of responsibility were not generally expected. The Quotes thus include consideration of the interdependence of freedom and responsibility; and of the possible role of the State in giving expression to both of them by its own support for intelligence, liberty and criminal justice.
More here
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Monday, May 26, 2003
EQUALITY AND COMMUNITY
Questions about equality are unavoidable in the study of psychology today; and differential psychology has long provided a singular meeting point for them. The chief types of question are as follows.
1. Are people actually equal, i.e. similar, in most of the important ways that psychologists can identify? (Answering 'Yes' to this question clears a path to final equalization of how people are to be treated; but 'Yes' conventionally requires that one dispute if one cannot ignore the continuity and probably the biological basis of personality features and individual differences.)
2. Should people be 'equalized' or treated as equal in various ways whether with regard to opportunities or outcomes?
In their legal and political rights?
In expenditure on them by the State e.g. educationally?
In their eligibility for various kinds of employment?
In their final, 'outcome' levels of 'status' i.e. of power,
prestige, income and wealth?
(With regard to each of these 'should' questions, two types of consideration require attention: 'Would it be a good (or at least unremarkable) idea in principle?' and 'Would there be unacceptable side-effects in practice?' Protagonists of equality prefer to concentrate on the first question, while opponents prefer to debate the second -- for answering 'No' to the 'good idea?' question seems superficially rather drastic. One notable complication for the egalitarian, however, is that answering 'Yes' to some of the 'good idea?' questions may seem to require giving a 'No' to others. If people are given equal rights in law and politics, for example, will they or their children not eventually come to differ in status, unless their original rights are watered down? Some people will use their rights and opportunities precisely to elicit different (superior, as they will hope) educational treatments for themselves or their children; and many people would see little point in having 'equal rights' or 'equal opportunities' if no differences in final outcome were allowed.)
3. Can people be effectively equalized whether by eugenics, by Head Start programmes, or by a Marxist 'vanguard elite' that imposes similarity of treatment for a generation or two on the bulk of its subject population?
(In this matter, the answer 'Yes' might seem empirically dubious pending advances in technique. Human individual differences have persisted despite many attempts to stamp them out, including the mass murder of Jews, homosexuals, intellectuals, the bourgeoisie and successful peasant farmers in several countries in the twentieth century. More prosaically, the authorities of pre-1990 Poland and East Germany were shocked to find continuing correlations between a father's occupation and his children's school success after a whole generation of equalization in housing and access to education; and they sometimes suppressed such embarrassing findings and silenced the researchers. Yet something may always turn up-perhaps involving vitamin supplementation, reduction of food additives, genetic engineering or religious revival.)
In fact, to their great credit, few ordinary subscribers to the value of 'equality' have ever thought their position through. Their immediate concern to champion selected underdogs-once 'the working class' but now more likely Blacks, homosexuals, women or the handicapped-is kindly. As such, it seems to prevent its champions asking whether, once some 'revolution' or other significant breakthrough makes all Orwell's animals at 'Animal Farm' 'equal', some animals will nevertheless remain 'more equal than others'.
Will the up-graded underdogs be content to stop short at achieving mere equality? Who dares even to contemplate the scenario? The inclination of many egalitarians if they thought about it would presumably be to stop short in their endeavours just when manual workers (or perhaps today's 'underclass') have caught up with the bourgeoisie, when Blacks have caught up with Whites, and when all people have old-style IQs and similar socio-economic potentials of somewhere around 100. At that point fraternity and 'community' would at last be possible; and, for the period beyond that happy day, could we of l'ancien régime be reasonably expected to prognosticate what social arrangements would be envisaged subsequently by such perfected souls?
Thus is debonair egalitarianism combined with the practical, short-term humanitarianism of helping the underdog. The operation looks pretty similar to that of noblesse oblige which long gave the noble providers of welfare a claim on the public purse. Here we come to the pork-barrel politics of the matter. In a democratic country, at least, history teaches that there will always be some cash for the person who proposes to tax everyone just a little so as to make quite a lot of apparent progress towards reducing some pressing problem of human need. (Such were the social-environmentalistic assumptions of the post-1945 years that the mere spending of money-on the salaries of welfare staff-was invariably assumed to be therapeutic.) To date, the supply of needs to be met has proved inexhaustible, as has also the supply of personnel who would like to draw State salaries to undertake the required welfare endeavours. Moreover, to date, few social programmes are funded on the basis that the State monies will be delivered only when the social problem is actually solved. (Nor is welfare endeavour funded by once-and-for-all investments: top-up sums can always be arranged.) This failure of nation-states to fund welfare endeavours in a practical way itself partly reflects egalitarian idealism: for, with such promiscuous financing, the quest for equality can continue under the cover of being a welfare effort until the nation-state that succours it falls prey to history under the weight of its own self-imposed guilt and payments of welfare Danegeld.
In such a climate, where any human superiority is denigrated as 'elitist', and where substantial State funds flow towards 'helping' the disadvantaged, it is natural for intelligent people to talk down their own achievements, for leaders to pretend to be followers, and for psychologists to be chary of mentioning enduring features of the human condition for fear of seeming to lack utopian piety.
'Equality' and 'community' often seem to require each other if either ambition is to achieve substantial expression. It is not only that welfare provides a way of achieving egalitarian ends by stealth. On sociobiological grounds, welfare -- like other forms of altruism -- will be more likely within a gene-sharing community, and thus (as also for other reasons, perhaps) more likely when people believe themselves not altogether dissimilar from people whose current ill fortune they feel moved to rectify. In its turn, such altruism will presumably stimulate that non-genetic, 'reciprocal altruism', affection and deference that will further strengthen the bonds of community. To be able to live accepting others as equals who respond to one's community's calls for order and reciprocal altruism is no mean achievement of political endeavour; and to combine the more attractive features of egalitarian socialism and fraternal nationalism is a popular aspiration.
More here
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Questions about equality are unavoidable in the study of psychology today; and differential psychology has long provided a singular meeting point for them. The chief types of question are as follows.
1. Are people actually equal, i.e. similar, in most of the important ways that psychologists can identify? (Answering 'Yes' to this question clears a path to final equalization of how people are to be treated; but 'Yes' conventionally requires that one dispute if one cannot ignore the continuity and probably the biological basis of personality features and individual differences.)
2. Should people be 'equalized' or treated as equal in various ways whether with regard to opportunities or outcomes?
In their legal and political rights?
In expenditure on them by the State e.g. educationally?
In their eligibility for various kinds of employment?
In their final, 'outcome' levels of 'status' i.e. of power,
prestige, income and wealth?
(With regard to each of these 'should' questions, two types of consideration require attention: 'Would it be a good (or at least unremarkable) idea in principle?' and 'Would there be unacceptable side-effects in practice?' Protagonists of equality prefer to concentrate on the first question, while opponents prefer to debate the second -- for answering 'No' to the 'good idea?' question seems superficially rather drastic. One notable complication for the egalitarian, however, is that answering 'Yes' to some of the 'good idea?' questions may seem to require giving a 'No' to others. If people are given equal rights in law and politics, for example, will they or their children not eventually come to differ in status, unless their original rights are watered down? Some people will use their rights and opportunities precisely to elicit different (superior, as they will hope) educational treatments for themselves or their children; and many people would see little point in having 'equal rights' or 'equal opportunities' if no differences in final outcome were allowed.)
3. Can people be effectively equalized whether by eugenics, by Head Start programmes, or by a Marxist 'vanguard elite' that imposes similarity of treatment for a generation or two on the bulk of its subject population?
(In this matter, the answer 'Yes' might seem empirically dubious pending advances in technique. Human individual differences have persisted despite many attempts to stamp them out, including the mass murder of Jews, homosexuals, intellectuals, the bourgeoisie and successful peasant farmers in several countries in the twentieth century. More prosaically, the authorities of pre-1990 Poland and East Germany were shocked to find continuing correlations between a father's occupation and his children's school success after a whole generation of equalization in housing and access to education; and they sometimes suppressed such embarrassing findings and silenced the researchers. Yet something may always turn up-perhaps involving vitamin supplementation, reduction of food additives, genetic engineering or religious revival.)
In fact, to their great credit, few ordinary subscribers to the value of 'equality' have ever thought their position through. Their immediate concern to champion selected underdogs-once 'the working class' but now more likely Blacks, homosexuals, women or the handicapped-is kindly. As such, it seems to prevent its champions asking whether, once some 'revolution' or other significant breakthrough makes all Orwell's animals at 'Animal Farm' 'equal', some animals will nevertheless remain 'more equal than others'.
Will the up-graded underdogs be content to stop short at achieving mere equality? Who dares even to contemplate the scenario? The inclination of many egalitarians if they thought about it would presumably be to stop short in their endeavours just when manual workers (or perhaps today's 'underclass') have caught up with the bourgeoisie, when Blacks have caught up with Whites, and when all people have old-style IQs and similar socio-economic potentials of somewhere around 100. At that point fraternity and 'community' would at last be possible; and, for the period beyond that happy day, could we of l'ancien régime be reasonably expected to prognosticate what social arrangements would be envisaged subsequently by such perfected souls?
Thus is debonair egalitarianism combined with the practical, short-term humanitarianism of helping the underdog. The operation looks pretty similar to that of noblesse oblige which long gave the noble providers of welfare a claim on the public purse. Here we come to the pork-barrel politics of the matter. In a democratic country, at least, history teaches that there will always be some cash for the person who proposes to tax everyone just a little so as to make quite a lot of apparent progress towards reducing some pressing problem of human need. (Such were the social-environmentalistic assumptions of the post-1945 years that the mere spending of money-on the salaries of welfare staff-was invariably assumed to be therapeutic.) To date, the supply of needs to be met has proved inexhaustible, as has also the supply of personnel who would like to draw State salaries to undertake the required welfare endeavours. Moreover, to date, few social programmes are funded on the basis that the State monies will be delivered only when the social problem is actually solved. (Nor is welfare endeavour funded by once-and-for-all investments: top-up sums can always be arranged.) This failure of nation-states to fund welfare endeavours in a practical way itself partly reflects egalitarian idealism: for, with such promiscuous financing, the quest for equality can continue under the cover of being a welfare effort until the nation-state that succours it falls prey to history under the weight of its own self-imposed guilt and payments of welfare Danegeld.
In such a climate, where any human superiority is denigrated as 'elitist', and where substantial State funds flow towards 'helping' the disadvantaged, it is natural for intelligent people to talk down their own achievements, for leaders to pretend to be followers, and for psychologists to be chary of mentioning enduring features of the human condition for fear of seeming to lack utopian piety.
'Equality' and 'community' often seem to require each other if either ambition is to achieve substantial expression. It is not only that welfare provides a way of achieving egalitarian ends by stealth. On sociobiological grounds, welfare -- like other forms of altruism -- will be more likely within a gene-sharing community, and thus (as also for other reasons, perhaps) more likely when people believe themselves not altogether dissimilar from people whose current ill fortune they feel moved to rectify. In its turn, such altruism will presumably stimulate that non-genetic, 'reciprocal altruism', affection and deference that will further strengthen the bonds of community. To be able to live accepting others as equals who respond to one's community's calls for order and reciprocal altruism is no mean achievement of political endeavour; and to combine the more attractive features of egalitarian socialism and fraternal nationalism is a popular aspiration.
More here
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Sunday, May 25, 2003
BLACK FOLK FIGHT EACH OTHER OVER SCHOOL FAILURE
Alarmed at the poor school results of children from even the most affluent Black homes, Black parents of prosperous Shaker Heights, Cleveland, had some research done by top Black anthropologist John Ogbu (Berkeley), starting 1997. Imagine the horror of many of them when Ogbu reached his conclusion: the poor results could not be blamed on any kind of White racism but rather reflected deep-seated cultural problems of the Black community! Soon Black experts too were at each other’s throats.
{Perhaps it would even have been easier to take a little peak at IQ and at possibilities of introducing a little track choice….}
---------------------
NATIONALIST GAINS
In elections in Belgium, the far-right Vlaams Blok party increased its parliamentary seats by 20% (from 15 to 18). In Britain, at a delayed council election in Walsall, West Midlands, the British National Party came in second behind the Conservatives, and the BNP’s 26% of the poll was a new high.
----------------------
REAL RACISM = BLACK RACISM
The Times reported that Congolese pygmies were pleading with the United Nations "to set up an international tribunal to put government and rebel fighters . . . on trial for acts of cannibalism against their people." The Times noted that other Congolese "regard [pygmies] as 'subhuman,' and believe that their flesh can confer magical powers." Some 600,000 pygmies live in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo, but there was clear evidence that at least twelve had been eaten by Blacks (i.e. Negroids, or Congoloids) and there were scores more unconfirmed reports of cannibalism. Blacks especially prefer the heart, lungs and livers of pygmies for eating; but they also like to cut of pygmy sexual organs for use as good luck charms.
---------------------------
RACE & IQ WARS SUMMARIZED
An up-to-date account of the London School’s battles with ignoracist PeeCee was provided by journalist Sean Thomas in the Spectator (24 v). Fairly supportive of the Jensenist Heresy, the article did indeed – as it claimed – ‘break a taboo’: it is seldom that any kind of race realism gets more than an indirectly favourable mention in the Speccie (except from columnist Taki).
Nevertheless, Thomas felt obliged to end his article on an ‘optimistic note’ by backing James Flynn’s idea that the worldwide secular IQ-test-score rise of the twentieth century will one day somehow be extended to close the White-Black IQ gap. Evidently Thomas had not troubled to read either The g Factor or my Diary (October, 2002). However, he did make kind references to the ‘clever psychometrician’ Philippe Rushton, to the ‘wrongly ignored’ Richard Lynn’ and to the ‘noted psychologist’ Chris Brand, so at least some of his readers in country vicarages will feel encouraged to rectify his omissions.
{Indeed, Thomas’ article immediately elicited a rare email from the famously defrocked ‘Knicker Vicar’ of TgF NewsLetter and general tabloid fame (1997). Excerpt:
I am happy to say that KV continues in fine fettle, having married his swish mistress last year and started showing an interest in Carpocratianism….}
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Alarmed at the poor school results of children from even the most affluent Black homes, Black parents of prosperous Shaker Heights, Cleveland, had some research done by top Black anthropologist John Ogbu (Berkeley), starting 1997. Imagine the horror of many of them when Ogbu reached his conclusion: the poor results could not be blamed on any kind of White racism but rather reflected deep-seated cultural problems of the Black community! Soon Black experts too were at each other’s throats.
{Perhaps it would even have been easier to take a little peak at IQ and at possibilities of introducing a little track choice….}
---------------------
NATIONALIST GAINS
In elections in Belgium, the far-right Vlaams Blok party increased its parliamentary seats by 20% (from 15 to 18). In Britain, at a delayed council election in Walsall, West Midlands, the British National Party came in second behind the Conservatives, and the BNP’s 26% of the poll was a new high.
----------------------
REAL RACISM = BLACK RACISM
The Times reported that Congolese pygmies were pleading with the United Nations "to set up an international tribunal to put government and rebel fighters . . . on trial for acts of cannibalism against their people." The Times noted that other Congolese "regard [pygmies] as 'subhuman,' and believe that their flesh can confer magical powers." Some 600,000 pygmies live in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo, but there was clear evidence that at least twelve had been eaten by Blacks (i.e. Negroids, or Congoloids) and there were scores more unconfirmed reports of cannibalism. Blacks especially prefer the heart, lungs and livers of pygmies for eating; but they also like to cut of pygmy sexual organs for use as good luck charms.
---------------------------
RACE & IQ WARS SUMMARIZED
An up-to-date account of the London School’s battles with ignoracist PeeCee was provided by journalist Sean Thomas in the Spectator (24 v). Fairly supportive of the Jensenist Heresy, the article did indeed – as it claimed – ‘break a taboo’: it is seldom that any kind of race realism gets more than an indirectly favourable mention in the Speccie (except from columnist Taki).
Nevertheless, Thomas felt obliged to end his article on an ‘optimistic note’ by backing James Flynn’s idea that the worldwide secular IQ-test-score rise of the twentieth century will one day somehow be extended to close the White-Black IQ gap. Evidently Thomas had not troubled to read either The g Factor or my Diary (October, 2002). However, he did make kind references to the ‘clever psychometrician’ Philippe Rushton, to the ‘wrongly ignored’ Richard Lynn’ and to the ‘noted psychologist’ Chris Brand, so at least some of his readers in country vicarages will feel encouraged to rectify his omissions.
{Indeed, Thomas’ article immediately elicited a rare email from the famously defrocked ‘Knicker Vicar’ of TgF NewsLetter and general tabloid fame (1997). Excerpt:
I was taking the Girls, Kate'n'Emily, to the seaside at rural King's Lynn together with my pal the Reverend Roger Holmes. Roger would later serve as Chaplain to The g Factor NewsLetter and achieve tabloid fame as the disgraced 'Knicker Vicar' of 'Unholy Helmsley' who had become the passionate lover of his own churchwarden's wife. (Eventually the churchwarden conspired with the News of the World to video Roger, in a moment of intimacy after a Paris holiday, holding aloft the knickers of his splendidly bright and leggy mistress and gleefully proclaiming 'I'm the knicker vicar'....)
I am happy to say that KV continues in fine fettle, having married his swish mistress last year and started showing an interest in Carpocratianism….}
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Saturday, May 24, 2003
LEFT AND RIGHT TO FIGHT BLAIR ON EUROPE
Socionationalism came an important step nearer in the UK as thirty Labour left-wing MPs joined in the chorus demanding a referendum on the new Euroconstitution that was being sung by much of the Conservative Party, by the Daily Telegraph, Times, Sun, Daily Mail and Evening Standard [London] and – in fairness – even by some Euroenthusiasts who did not want to be upstaged as undemocratic.
By contrast, neoimperialist NuLabour remained determined to sweet-talk Euroland and to push through the proposed new constitution without consulting British people about the resulting loss of sovereignty – not least over asylum swindling (which Rev. Blair claimed to have reduced by 30% in six months).
(The Government knew there was little chance of its winning such a referendum given widespread public and media disillusionment with Euroland.)
Underlining the new threats to British sovereignty, the Sun discovered (21 v) that Euroland bosses are planning to put the UK’s crack armed divisions, the Special Air Service and the Special Boats Service, under Euroland control.
{Coupled with Labour’s own efforts to destroy Parliament, Christian traditions, the teaching of British history, school dress codes, the right to self-defence, the no-double-jeopardy rule of jurisprudence, and free speech in the universities, the new threats might just succeed in forging a new party involving a dynamic compromise between nationalist and socialist aspirations. And if socionationalism could manage to drop peecee multiculturalism, leaving such piety to the neoconservative globalizers, it would probably have a reasonable chance of success.
So what central flagship programme could they agree on? Why not on the state-funded neofamily? – That’s to say: on substantial public spending (pleasing socialists) but strictly channelled via families (pleasing most nationalists), not via such treacherous service providers as the present schools and universities. [For more, see this Diary and McDougall NewsLetters, passim.]}
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Friday, May 23, 2003
LEFTIES URGED TO ACCEPT EUGENICS
Readers of Britain’s top magazine for pinkoes, the London Review of Books, were surely startled to read they should take on board ‘biogenetic engineering’ (presumably including eugenics) (22 v). It was a Slovenian philosopher, at the University of Ljubljana, who had seen the light.
Apparently top Europinko Jürgen Habermas had been arguing that, if genes do control character, sex, intelligence etc., we should – like good peecee folk on the topic of race – JUST NOT TAWK ABARDIT. It was by lying to ourselves that the human soul could be preserved, opined Habermas. If genes, proteins and hormones turn people into males rather than females, “we should act as if this were not the case”, said this flower of German idealism, constructivism and postmodernism.
But to embed the lies of antiracialunacy and environmentoStalinism into one’s philosophizing is not the way in realist Ljubljana, a capital now free for thirteen years from Communist tyranny. “We should take the objectivism of the human genome fully on board,” said philosopher Slavov Zizek as he extended to LRB readers “welcome to the prospect of biogenetic intervention.”
But wasn’t there a danger that scientists -- notoriously disrespectful of souls and spirits -- would make a mess of bioengineering? “OK,” said Zizek, “have the treatments carried out by Catholics.”
------------------------------
JEWS FOR ENOCH!
It was not just trade unionists, Brummies, dockers, Ulstermen and academic race realists who supported the UK’s Enoch Powell, it turned out. A fine article in the Jewish World Review, (16 ii 1998), was titled ‘Enoch Powell spoke the truth on immigration.’
{Not that Enoch exactly opposed coloured immigration – or even dullard immigration; but his was the first great voice to warn that integration was necessary and that multiculturalism would not work. For this ‘sin’ against antiracialunacy, he became the first victim of PeeCee – Occidental Quarterly, Fall 2001.}
----------------------------
PAEDOHYSTERIA CAN’T KEEP KEEN BLACK WEENAGERS DOWN
Searching a youthful Black burglar’s, police in New Jersey found a video of the 18-year-old having sex with Black girls of 13 and 14 who wanted membership of his gang. The applicants had been given the option of being ‘beat down’ or getting ‘sexed in’ and had enthusiastically chosen the second alternative.
One in five of American children now have sexual intercourse before the age of 15, effectively (under present legislation) criminalizing their partners for life and exposing them to a lifelong possibility of being blackmailed.
{Given the high level of sexual risk-taking found in many politicians growing up in far more sexually restrictive days (e.g. Palmerston, Asquith, Lloyd George, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Clinton, Major), the West is increasingly likely to be led by people living in fear that someone will come forward to accuse them of paedophilia in their younger days.}
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Readers of Britain’s top magazine for pinkoes, the London Review of Books, were surely startled to read they should take on board ‘biogenetic engineering’ (presumably including eugenics) (22 v). It was a Slovenian philosopher, at the University of Ljubljana, who had seen the light.
Apparently top Europinko Jürgen Habermas had been arguing that, if genes do control character, sex, intelligence etc., we should – like good peecee folk on the topic of race – JUST NOT TAWK ABARDIT. It was by lying to ourselves that the human soul could be preserved, opined Habermas. If genes, proteins and hormones turn people into males rather than females, “we should act as if this were not the case”, said this flower of German idealism, constructivism and postmodernism.
But to embed the lies of antiracialunacy and environmentoStalinism into one’s philosophizing is not the way in realist Ljubljana, a capital now free for thirteen years from Communist tyranny. “We should take the objectivism of the human genome fully on board,” said philosopher Slavov Zizek as he extended to LRB readers “welcome to the prospect of biogenetic intervention.”
But wasn’t there a danger that scientists -- notoriously disrespectful of souls and spirits -- would make a mess of bioengineering? “OK,” said Zizek, “have the treatments carried out by Catholics.”
------------------------------
JEWS FOR ENOCH!
It was not just trade unionists, Brummies, dockers, Ulstermen and academic race realists who supported the UK’s Enoch Powell, it turned out. A fine article in the Jewish World Review, (16 ii 1998), was titled ‘Enoch Powell spoke the truth on immigration.’
{Not that Enoch exactly opposed coloured immigration – or even dullard immigration; but his was the first great voice to warn that integration was necessary and that multiculturalism would not work. For this ‘sin’ against antiracialunacy, he became the first victim of PeeCee – Occidental Quarterly, Fall 2001.}
----------------------------
PAEDOHYSTERIA CAN’T KEEP KEEN BLACK WEENAGERS DOWN
Searching a youthful Black burglar’s, police in New Jersey found a video of the 18-year-old having sex with Black girls of 13 and 14 who wanted membership of his gang. The applicants had been given the option of being ‘beat down’ or getting ‘sexed in’ and had enthusiastically chosen the second alternative.
One in five of American children now have sexual intercourse before the age of 15, effectively (under present legislation) criminalizing their partners for life and exposing them to a lifelong possibility of being blackmailed.
{Given the high level of sexual risk-taking found in many politicians growing up in far more sexually restrictive days (e.g. Palmerston, Asquith, Lloyd George, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Clinton, Major), the West is increasingly likely to be led by people living in fear that someone will come forward to accuse them of paedophilia in their younger days.}
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Thursday, May 22, 2003
SOCIAL CLASS: alias SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS
In recent years, social scientists have grown chary of offering 'explanations' of social phenomena. When so many social-scientific theories, prophecies and recipes failed in the past, 'explanation' has seemed too precise an aspiration . Instead, social scientists have increasingly inclined to refer merely to people's own 'understandings' of the social world; to their own 'perceptions'; to their 'communication of meaning'; to their 'symbolic interactions'; to their 'identities'-often 'self-constructed'; and to their '(false) consciousness'.
Purveyors of such mixtures of common sense and post-modern sociology therefore decry attempts to trace human psychological differences to age, gender, or race. Just as suspect as such disagreeable group differences are biologically-based dimensions of difference (such as g) that might be offered by a differential psychologist as causal stand-ins.
Yet in fact, lurking not far behind this intellectual smoke-screen is the best-known simplificatory variable of the whole lot: social class -- or 'socio-economic status' (SES) for the faint-hearted. It is this 130-year-old variable, first popularized by Marx and Engels, that will still be summoned up by sociologists if it is insisted that they distinguish themselves from experts in literature, or when they wish to rouse an audience to revolutionary fervour. In particular, SES is commonly held by sociology's less-postmodernized sympathizers to be capable of most of the explanatory work to which IQ is usually assigned by the London School of differential psychology. Indeed, most labourers in sociology and allied trades would frankly hold the SES of one's parents during one's youth to be the important causal factor influencing one's measured IQ itself, as well as influencing one's finally achieved, adult levels of educational attainment, occupational status and affluence. Social class is the one real group difference that is allowed by sociologists to social science.
How to resolve arguments about the causal importance of parental SES has never been particularly obvious. For example, high-SES foster parents tend additionally to have above-average IQ's: so the 'rich' environment that they provide for their children will consist partly of intellectual stimulation and support that derive less from the father's professional occupation and income and more from the sheer intelligence of his wife and himself.
Matters are further complicated for the researcher by the fact that -- just as many psychologists are edgy about g -- some sociologists will not commit themselves to any particular measure of SES. However great their faith in the existence of a hated over-class and a cheated under-class that awaits their leadership to the barricades, 'non-positivist' sociologists can be as reluctant to measure SES as those political conservatives who abjure the socially divisive 'class' concept as helpful only to revolutionaries.
Lately, important new evidence became available from a natural experiment in France-collected by a team that was appalled to find that the English-speaking world had not itself managed to put down the abominable heresies of Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen. Involving separated pairs of half-siblings in homes that were very different in SES, the study found surprisingly modest effects of class-of-rearing on the children's later IQ's (and especially on fluid g as measured by non-verbal tests).
Again, modern evidence from both the USA and Ireland (both North and South) is that the SES of parents quite simply shows only a slight correlation (around r = .22) with the educational attainments of children by their early twenties.
Yet it must be doubted whether the West will witness 'the end of class-ism' as quickly as some hereditarian and libertarian thinkers have envisaged (Biology & Society 4, pp. 104-109). The collapse of Eastern-European Communism in ignominy may have sounded the death-knell for the idea that human life is mainly structured by SES and that political endeavour must aim to eliminate class differences; but sociologists normally have a soft spot for Thomas Kuhn's view that discredited ideas can enjoy a long half-life within tenured bureaucracies.
More here.
------------------------------------
Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
-----------------------------------
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
KEEPING THE PC BRIGADE HAPPY
The commitment of President Bush and his neoconservatives to upholding peecee feminazism was demonstrated as a bill was passed in the US Senate giving $15 billion providing for programmes in Africa "reducing sexual violence and coercion, including child marriage, widow inheritance and polygamy."
Such illiberal religiosity on the part of the neoimperialist Bushites showed that they had reached the same dynamic compromise made by Britain’s Tony Blair between free-market capitalism and gender feminism. Instead of replacing peecee piety with neofamily neoliberal realism – channelling health, education and welfare funding through well-constituted English-speaking families – the neocons remained unimaginatively content with the grisly compromise with fat old lesbians that they had made.
{It remained to be seen whether a new socio-nationalist opposition could be formed in either the USA or the UK without the encumbrance of the lies of multiculturalists, feminists and whingers in general. Certainly in Britain, Rev. Blair was being told that the trade unions were getting restive – and it was the unions who once provided the backbone support for nationalist Enoch Powell.}
------------------------------------------
MEANWHILE
Superbabe Brigitte Bardot (see here) attracted predictable accusations of ‘racism’ with a mild remark that “I am against the Islamisation of France” (Daily Telegraph, 15 v).
Defying PeeCee, a top British cop (Chris Fox), the leader of Britain’s Police Federation, bravely announced that the present tidal wave of asylum seeking is not abating (contrary to protestations from Mr Blair) and that it is evidently responsible for much crime, and for clogging up health and education services in many areas. (Daily Telegraph, 19 v): “Immigrants bring increased crime, says police chief”.
Having failed to institute statutes of limitations on prosecution, the West found itself facing litigation initiated by an Irish lawyer in New York aiming to recoup £250 million from the ‘victims of apartheid’ in South Africa. The litigation targets investors (especially banks) and firms that allegedly helped maintain apartheid practices. The move was not being encouraged by South Africa itself and originated entirely from the usual merchants of White guilt.
The U.S. Supreme Court slapped down a peecee school which had banned its pupils from displaying the Confederate flag and redneck jokes on their tee-shirts.
As the US Supreme Court debated the merits of campus ‘diversity’ at the University of Michigan, it transpired that this Loony Uni was being singularly secretive about the data which it purported to justify its affirmative racism. Using the Freedom of Information Act, a Wall Street Journal reporter, Chetly Zarko (16 v), unearthed 1994 material, only to find it said Michigan's racial preference programs actually "stigmatized" African-Americans and "increasingly polarized" the campus; that "self-segregation" was common; that "diversity of skin color" is not equivalent to "diversity of ideas" (financial disparities were more telling); and that diversity "quite simply . . . does not, in itself, lead to a more informed, educated population."
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Some history.
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The commitment of President Bush and his neoconservatives to upholding peecee feminazism was demonstrated as a bill was passed in the US Senate giving $15 billion providing for programmes in Africa "reducing sexual violence and coercion, including child marriage, widow inheritance and polygamy."
Such illiberal religiosity on the part of the neoimperialist Bushites showed that they had reached the same dynamic compromise made by Britain’s Tony Blair between free-market capitalism and gender feminism. Instead of replacing peecee piety with neofamily neoliberal realism – channelling health, education and welfare funding through well-constituted English-speaking families – the neocons remained unimaginatively content with the grisly compromise with fat old lesbians that they had made.
{It remained to be seen whether a new socio-nationalist opposition could be formed in either the USA or the UK without the encumbrance of the lies of multiculturalists, feminists and whingers in general. Certainly in Britain, Rev. Blair was being told that the trade unions were getting restive – and it was the unions who once provided the backbone support for nationalist Enoch Powell.}
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MEANWHILE
Superbabe Brigitte Bardot (see here) attracted predictable accusations of ‘racism’ with a mild remark that “I am against the Islamisation of France” (Daily Telegraph, 15 v).
Defying PeeCee, a top British cop (Chris Fox), the leader of Britain’s Police Federation, bravely announced that the present tidal wave of asylum seeking is not abating (contrary to protestations from Mr Blair) and that it is evidently responsible for much crime, and for clogging up health and education services in many areas. (Daily Telegraph, 19 v): “Immigrants bring increased crime, says police chief”.
Having failed to institute statutes of limitations on prosecution, the West found itself facing litigation initiated by an Irish lawyer in New York aiming to recoup £250 million from the ‘victims of apartheid’ in South Africa. The litigation targets investors (especially banks) and firms that allegedly helped maintain apartheid practices. The move was not being encouraged by South Africa itself and originated entirely from the usual merchants of White guilt.
The U.S. Supreme Court slapped down a peecee school which had banned its pupils from displaying the Confederate flag and redneck jokes on their tee-shirts.
As the US Supreme Court debated the merits of campus ‘diversity’ at the University of Michigan, it transpired that this Loony Uni was being singularly secretive about the data which it purported to justify its affirmative racism. Using the Freedom of Information Act, a Wall Street Journal reporter, Chetly Zarko (16 v), unearthed 1994 material, only to find it said Michigan's racial preference programs actually "stigmatized" African-Americans and "increasingly polarized" the campus; that "self-segregation" was common; that "diversity of skin color" is not equivalent to "diversity of ideas" (financial disparities were more telling); and that diversity "quite simply . . . does not, in itself, lead to a more informed, educated population."
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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Tuesday, May 20, 2003
OPPORTUNISTIC RAPE ALLEGATIONS
The accusation that right-wing ex-MP Neil Hamilton and his wife jointly raped a trainee college lecturer in Grimsby, Nadine Milroy-Sloan, was rejected when an Old Bailey jury found Milroy-Sloan guilty of perverting the course of justice. With the help of the top London professional publicist, Max Clifford, gold-digger Milroy- Sloan had been given £50,000 by a Sunday newspaper for her ‘story’ – which she now admits could have been a case of mistaken identity.
The prosecution invited the jury to believe Milroy-Sloan had a personality disorder; and the jury was told she had four previous convictions (one for fighting, but none of a sexual nature). The judge said he would pass a custodial sentence.
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Even this slight satisfaction was unlikely to be experienced by Edinburgh TV presenter and playboy John Leslie, 37. Police decided not to proceed with charges that he had raped three women in London TV studios (and horrified 26 others by his lewd advances), but his reputation will remain badly damaged unless he can sue Channel V (where his name was mentioned ‘accidentally’ in a programme discussing a rape allegation by blonde bombshell TV announcer Ulrika Jonsson – who, to her apparent credit, steadfastly refused to name Leslie).
Thankfully Leslie’s current girlfriend, the delightful and diminutive Abby Titmuss, 28, stood by the gigantic (positively Handelian) Leslie throughout his nine-month ordeal.
Leslie claimed he taught Catherine Zeta-Jones everything she knows about sex, and joked that Michael Douglas ‘owes him one.’ The remaining question was whether Ulrike Jonsson had declined to name Leslie not out of decency but because she had never in fact been ‘raped’ by him except in some loose-gartered feminist sense. Perhaps her fame and some alcohol had led her to think she could get away with such an accusation on TV in feminazie days.
According to the Sun (17 v), millionaire Leslie was determined to take High Court action against Channel V, with Ulrike as the star witness, and believes he can prove that Ulrike was a satisfied girl who went on maintaining a good relationship with him long after her alleged rape took place.
{Whether about rape, paedophilia or child abuse, it is too easy for damaging but insubstantial allegations to be made by people who have all to gain and little to lose. It is high time for celebrity men to fight back against the femishrews who have created this dangerous situation in which most men can be brought down to suit the convenience of their political or other enemies. What is needed is something like a War Against Whingeing (WAW) – targeting and providing help against allegations which are merely probabilistic, involve misdeeds resulting in no objective harm, were not made timeously, or concern events of more than five years ago.}
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Some history.
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Monday, May 19, 2003
SEX DIFFERENCES
While behaviourism held sway in psychology, sex differences were ignored -- like most other biological influences that contribute to human nature and human variety. According to classical behaviourism, people's 'histories of reinforcement' were all that was needed to explain their psychological differences. Thus no special study of sex differences was required. With the publication of Eleanor Maccoby's The Development of Sex Differences in 1966, this neglect ended; but disagreement would persist as to the malleability of the differences.
The 1970s witnessed attempts to link sex differences in cognition and psychopathology to hemispheres, handedness, hormones and much else (e.g. Flor-Henry, 1983, The Cerebral Basis of Psychopathology). However, through the 1980's there was less confidence in neuropsychological stories and more development of the various competing strands of modern 'feminist' thought. Today it has still to be considered that some sex differences are of social origin, even if a 'patriarchal' social structure itself emerges as a likely development in most imaginable sociobiological circumstances.
The are five broad (but inter-linked) questions which give rise to argument in psychology and social science.
1. How do people acquire their sex-assignation as male or female?
2. How do people come by their sexual orientation of desire?
3. How do people come to differ in masculinity vs femininity of interests and personal style?
{In recent years it has been fashionable to view all such sex differences in personality and in 'what sex you feel you are' as matters of 'gender identity' (see below, c. p.70, P.J.Burke,). Yet this terminology would seem to beg the question of whether 'identity' is the issue. - Is an interest in flower-arranging actually an identity-assertion, or might it just be an interest tout court? Anyhow, in extending the term 'gender' to people from its natural use in linguistics to classify nouns, the terminology of 'gender' is strangely coy about using the word 'sex'.}
4. How and why do people arrive at their sexual opinionation concerning such matters as 'the opposite sex', 'the battle of the sexes', and the social, political and religious arrangements that should be made if the sexes are to live and procreate harmoniously?
5. Who is right about about the sexual prospects in the modern West? For example: will the sexes live increasingly disharmoniously? - Is the nuclear family finished? Will women support themselves and their children chiefly from some mixture of their own careers and state benefits? Could male labour and reproductive capacity be suffering steadily reducing demand? And what could males be expected to do with their time if their chief involvements with children were by means of the taxation system and the requirements of the divorce courts?
The more familiar feminist package of arguments contests the importance of sex differences; and attributes such differences as really must be admitted (in 'spatial abilities', 'aggression', 'dominance', 'criminality', 'tough-mindedness', 'analyticity', attentional styles, emotionality, logical reasoning, genius, sexual perversion, promiscuity, stark insensitivity, or whatever) to the influence of the local social environment. This little-real-difference package holds out the future prospect of reductions in such differences as are found; and enthusiasts for Women's Liberation may accordingly assert that there are no inherent obstacles to women occupying positions of industrial, political and religious leadership in the same proportions as do men.
A second, equally 'liberated' point of view has proved increasingly popular with feminists. This big-real-difference package of arguments actually stresses the male's physical potency and borderline-inhumanity as a biological aggressor who is conspicuously responsible for rape, child abuse, war and ethnic cleansing. This view is that the aboriginal qualities of the male must tend to disqualify him from Western civilisation; and it might be added that the modern technologies of nuclear deterrence, women police and judges, semi-automatic weapons and in vitro fertilization have anyhow rendered largely obsolete the traditional male's special capacity for hand-to-hand combat and allied forms of coercion.
Feminist respect for biological and evolutionary factors may even go beyond postulating 'big differences'. It may taken a step further to embrace a third view, that there must be differences between the sexes -- even if the male does not strictly need to be aggressive or sex-crazed. According to this package (e.g. Ruth Bleier, 1984, Science and Gender ) feminists accept what is a fairly plausible evolutionary tale to account for male over-representation in social leadership.
The story begins with human bipedalism: this enabled carrying and thus hunting over considerable distances. Once hunting for food took the human male away from the home base for longer periods, men's uncertainty about the paternity of women's children was simply bound to make them invent forms of 'patriarchy'; for patriarchy invariably serves to control female sexuality and to reduce the chance of men being cuckolded or made to support women's children by other men. Until recent times, it was only via some kind of sexual indoctrination and policing (usually provided by religion) that men could know in which children they should invest time, effort, cash and affection: female sexual fidelity was quite simply the cornerstone of male investment in children. (If, under other social arrangements, men were to have serious uncertainty as to which children were their own, the sociobiological expectation would be that they would reduce their efforts to improve the quality and life-chances of any particular children and concentrate on having in quantity children for whom others-viz. women or the state-are left to provide the bulk of the welfare.)
An advantage of the 'innate patriarchy' package is that it seems to explain three time-honoured puzzles:
(i) why male jealousy tends particularly to concern female sexuality (whereas female anxieties about their partners seem more often to concern how the man spends his time and money-e.g. Buss, 1991, Ann.Rev.Psychol.);
(ii) why so many cultures seem to operate the often-derided 'double standard' of sexual morality; and
(iii) why the world's longer-running religions and polities have been organized by men.
{Of course, the twentieth century -- with the Pill, easy abortion, AIDS, the welfare state, incubator-mix-ups, genetic figerprinting and genetic engineering -- poses quite new problems (and opportunities) requiring quite new responses by both sexes. Yet the male 'offer' [as it might be called] of either 'assured paternity of females' children' or 'disinvestment' seems likely to stand-at least until some 'marvel' of implant surgery makes it possible for men to bear their own children.}
These three psychological theses of feminism, in their very diversity, explain some of the problems of the Women's Movement today. Do women naturally constitute a cohesive force that could achieve political unity in support of traditional family values and in opposition to crime, warfare and sexual promiscuity? Or will women's natural affection, ready sympathy and need for security (in pregnancy and beyond) achieve fulfilment more naturally in the championing of the job-creative and benefit-providing welfare state sector of modern economies? Are women well advised to compete with men in engineering, architecture, computing, politics and the priesthood? Or is there simply no proper objective for women but to slough off discredited stereotypes and shibboleths -- as they certainly have in the West in recent years?
The psychological understanding of sex differences will bear on all these as-yet-undecided questions. To answer at least the last of them affirmatively may seem easy enough in its tolerant individualism. Yet an unvarnished approval of 'de-stereotyping' will not satisfy politically conscious feminists who urge precisely that women should indeed assert their distinct interests as a natural biosocial group. Nor will it satisfy biological realists: a young woman who plans her future life merely in response to own current stereotype-free 'gender identity' will arguably be neglecting the ennobling maternal energies and sensitivities that would come on stream for her at the birth of her first child.
More here.
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Some history.
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Sunday, May 18, 2003
CONFUSED TORIES
Tory leader Iain Duncan Cough just didn’t seem to realize that, as top politics professor John Gray put it, “The Prime Minister is now a fully-fledged neoconservative” (New Statesman, 19 v) and that if the Tories couldn’t link up with him (hopefully agreeing on the neofamily as a replacement for PeeCee in matters of morals), they would need to go down the socio-nationalist route – explaining to Labour’s left-wing that its own only hope of power would be to introduce a stiffening ingredient of nationalism and opposition to mass dullard immigration.
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MORE ZIMBABWE LUNACY
The lunatic government of Black Zimbabwe (mean IQ 66 according to Richard Lynn & Tatu [genius name!] Vanhanen, IQ and the Wealth of Nations) decided to alienate even its last good British friends by throwing out the longstanding correspondent of the Guardian newspaper (Daily Telegraph, 17 v, ‘Defiant journalist kicked out by Mugabe’).
As American citizen Andrew Meldrum, 51, was deported amidst commotion at Harare airport, he shouted as six Black police goons wrestled with him, “This is not the action of a legitimate government.” {Strong words from a representative of the Grauniad! What a pity that newspaper ignored the protestations of the McDougall NewsLetter and the Times about Mugabe as early as November, 1997!}
More excerpts:
He shouted to the media, many of whom were personal friends: "This is not the action of a legitimate government. It is afraid of a free press. It is afraid of independent and critical reporting." Infuriated police grabbed him around the neck, pulled at his jacket and eventually overpowered him and pushed him into a back passenger seat of their saloon.
Mr Meldrum is the latest in a long line of journalists targeted by President Robert Mugabe. The work permit of The Daily Telegraph's David Blair was withdrawn two years ago, that of the BBC's Joseph Winter at about the same time, and others back to the 1980s. More than 60 media workers have been arrested in the past year, according to the Media Institute of Southern Africa.
Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor, said: "The authorities have been persecuting Andrew for 12 months and their clear determination to deport him can only be interpreted as a concerted effort to stifle any free press."
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, described Zimbabwe's action as "petty and vindictive".
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Some history.
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Saturday, May 17, 2003
WHITES ARE GUILTY WHEN BLACKS FAIL!
An education experiment by one of Tony's Cronies, half-Black Trevor Phillips, failed when a Black boy, Ryan Bell, 15, sent to Britain's oldest and ultra-top-notch Catholic school, Downside - paid for by Philips' TV company, Pepper Productions - was thrown out after an orgy of petty derelictions culminating in a drinking bout (Sunday Telegraph, 11 v). Excerpt:
Ryan attended Downside, Britain's oldest Roman Catholic school, for almost two years. He seemed to adapt well. He made friends, excelled at rugby and showed a talent for Latin and biology. The experiment, however, began to turn sour when he was suspended twice for spraying graffiti and for stealing a classmate's phone, although this was described by the school as a prank. Last week, Ryan was expelled after a Sunday afternoon drinking binge with five fellow pupils which resulted in his hospitalisation
So did Phillips decide to abandon such foolish experimentation? No way! Instead, from his lofty position as Chairman of the government-oiled Campaign for Racial Equality, he announced he would campaign to name, shame and sue schools where Black children did not do as well as Whites! Excerpt:
The CRE and the Office for Standards in Education are drawing up guidelines for inspectors to judge schools on their race records. Mr Phillips said he would be zealous in enforcing them. "I'm talking about naming and shaming schools and that's only going to be the beginning," he said. "People used to say the most dangerous thing in the world was a nigger with a gun. Well, a black man with the power of law and the ability to put schools in the High Court is a pretty dangerous thing."
{The ghost of Lysenko - who wrecked Soviet agriculture with his Lamarckist ideas - must be looking on amiably as British teachers prepare to desert schools containing any but the brightest Black children, and local authorities draw up plans for racial segregation.}
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TONY BLAIR AND POLITICAL COMPROMISE
A political analyst working for the Times noted the merits of 'dynamic compromise' (long held by me to provide the backbone of any major political party -- THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POLITICS, SOCIAL ATTITUDES AND POLITICAL EXTREMISM). Said Daniel Finkelstein (13 v):
"Tony Blair realized early in his leadership that voters have complex, sometimes contradictory views. He attempts to represent them by bringing together ideas that - at least in political rhetoric - have usually been kept apart: tough crime policies and an anti-poverty strategy, for example."
But while Mr Blair had moved on to the even greater dynamic combination of hedonistic free-enterprise global capitalism with the new religion of PeeCee, the world waited in vain for UK Conservatives to put intelligent nationalism together with an expansion of trade training and state investment in small business ventures by young people. Instead, UK Conservatives promised only to abolish Labour's planned top-up university fees - a fine left-wing idea (to be funded by cutting university expansion) but -- not giving the needed boost to recruitment of plumbers and electricians -- unlikely to be seen as fulfilling even the latest boring Conservative slogan of 'a fair deal for everyone.'
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Some history.
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Friday, May 16, 2003
TATU
Defying paedohysteria at the BBC and Kidscape about paedophilic pop, a packed house of Cambridge undergraduates heard with rapt attention and applause a lecture detailing with stunning visual aids the Russian teen girls, feisty brunette Julia and soulful redhead Lena, whose pop act, under the name t.a.T.u. [tatu is Russian for tattoo], had them kissing in the rain in revealing drenched shirts and singing as they bathed nude in the bath. Previously the chicas had themselves filmed outside Tate Modern art gallery, London, surrounded by hundreds of teen fans dressed in school uniforms and knee-high socks, previously having been moved on by police when they tried to film opposite the Houses of Parliament. Two UK gigs had been cancelled, supposedly for lack of interest but actually after it had been rumoured that the girls (and perhaps some fans as young as 14) would undress in public as well as engaging in their sexy hugging and kissing -- orgies have reputedly occurred at some of their performances.
{The girls reputedly began their career as underage lesbian lovers. Now, at 17 and 18, they are topping charts all round the world and are about to take on paedohysterical USA. They claim to have sex with each other three times a day and that this is better than the sex they also have with men.
In April, Julia was snapped having an intimate dinner with a Russian male popstar who claimed she was part of a threesome with himself and another man. The gossip has been that Julia and Lena are not really lesbians but actually prefer boys -- especially boys in their 50 and 60s!
Another option for them is even to promote a clean and normal image hence calling themselves by the initials of the pious US organization Teens Against Tobacco use. Perhaps in order to maintain an air of mystery, interviews with Julia and Lena are never allowed by their Svengali-esque manager and psychologist Ivan Shapovalov (who has also been called the Lou Pearlman of Russia. Shapovalov once admitted that Tatu are what he called an "underage sex project" designed to appeal to men in search of underage entertainment. Typical lyric as the girls crotch-thrustingly canoodle: Show me Love, Show me Love, give me all that I want / Show me Love, Show me Love, till I'm screaming for more. -- more}.
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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Defying paedohysteria at the BBC and Kidscape about paedophilic pop, a packed house of Cambridge undergraduates heard with rapt attention and applause a lecture detailing with stunning visual aids the Russian teen girls, feisty brunette Julia and soulful redhead Lena, whose pop act, under the name t.a.T.u. [tatu is Russian for tattoo], had them kissing in the rain in revealing drenched shirts and singing as they bathed nude in the bath. Previously the chicas had themselves filmed outside Tate Modern art gallery, London, surrounded by hundreds of teen fans dressed in school uniforms and knee-high socks, previously having been moved on by police when they tried to film opposite the Houses of Parliament. Two UK gigs had been cancelled, supposedly for lack of interest but actually after it had been rumoured that the girls (and perhaps some fans as young as 14) would undress in public as well as engaging in their sexy hugging and kissing -- orgies have reputedly occurred at some of their performances.
{The girls reputedly began their career as underage lesbian lovers. Now, at 17 and 18, they are topping charts all round the world and are about to take on paedohysterical USA. They claim to have sex with each other three times a day and that this is better than the sex they also have with men.
In April, Julia was snapped having an intimate dinner with a Russian male popstar who claimed she was part of a threesome with himself and another man. The gossip has been that Julia and Lena are not really lesbians but actually prefer boys -- especially boys in their 50 and 60s!
Another option for them is even to promote a clean and normal image hence calling themselves by the initials of the pious US organization Teens Against Tobacco use. Perhaps in order to maintain an air of mystery, interviews with Julia and Lena are never allowed by their Svengali-esque manager and psychologist Ivan Shapovalov (who has also been called the Lou Pearlman of Russia. Shapovalov once admitted that Tatu are what he called an "underage sex project" designed to appeal to men in search of underage entertainment. Typical lyric as the girls crotch-thrustingly canoodle: Show me Love, Show me Love, give me all that I want / Show me Love, Show me Love, till I'm screaming for more. -- more}.
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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Thursday, May 15, 2003
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF AGEING
Though the differences between the young and the old border on being matters of both banality and delicacy, they have a particular interest. Differences between people in sex, class and race have all proved relatively contentious even in recent times; by contrast, little is heard today of 'the generation gap.' How age differences are handled may thus provide a model of how to treat other, less obvious and still more sensitive differences between major, visible human groups.
Three considerations help keep temperatures down as age differences are discussed.
(1) Age differences are pretty clearly dimensional, and not absolute; and they are not all 'negative'. There are few 'black-and-white' differences, for all that some proportion of the problems of the elderly obviously arise from particular devastating afflictions like Alzheimer's disease. Health, vigour, looks and intelligence are admittedly at their peak (in the average person) in youth; and ageing sees a decline which, though barely perceptible at first, is marked after 55. However, compensation is normally thought to be provided by increased caution, wisdom, moral rectitude, good-naturedness and by deep and fulfilling experiences of prolonged affectionate relationships with family and friends.
(2) Equally agreeably, temptations to 'label' and criticise people of another age group are held in check by: (a) the sympathy that the elderly sometimes have for the young-through recall of their own youth and realization that grandchildren are their only way to continued genetic investment; (b) the elderly often needing the support of the young (especially in social security contributions); (c) young people recognizing that they, too, will one day be old in their turn.
(3) Modern advanced economies mediate between the young and the old: they provide funds and welfare personnel intended to cope both with the youthful problems of ignorance, crime, promiscuity and illegitimacy and with the needs of the elderly for home helps, sheltered accommodation and spare part surgery.
In these congenial circumstances, it should be relatively easy to be 'objective' about the major psychological differences that distinguish the old from the young-even about the gf level of the typical 80-year-old adult, which approximates that of a normal 8-year-old child.
Yet many psychologists have been reluctant to admit such 'realities' without much qualification. Psychometricians have blamed apparent age differences on possible 'cohort effects' between generations-arguing that today's sixty-year-olds grew up without the welfare state and modern agriculture, whereas today's thirty-year-olds enjoyed, from the cradle, welfare and a good diet that will still be serving them well by the time when they, too, reach sixty.
Experimental psychologists, on the other hand are more accepting of the evidence that age-declines are indeed seen in cohort and longitudinal studies. Yet they see age differences partly as artefacts of coarse psychometric testing procedures; and partly as resulting from specific quirks and maladaptive strategies on the part of the elderly that might remain untriggered if only tasks were re-designed and the elderly re-trained by experimentalists.
Rather in contrast with such speculations, the 1980's witnessed the arrival on the scene of measures of speed-of-intake (for simple perceptual information) that make it hard to attribute age-declines to problems of decision-making, strategy-organization, lack of interest, or unfamiliarity with the psychological laboratory. Piagetian measures, too, showed the elderly to be at just as marked a disadvantage as they are on traditional mental tests.
None of this means that society should not ascribe special rights to the elderly and the middle-aged-even the right to continued employment. Yet- as when other groups are considered for privileged treatment- the adage should be recalled that 'Rights without duties are not worth having'. If the middle-aged and the elderly are to be shown 'positive discrimination' (perhaps starting with employers not being allowed to advertise specifically for employees from younger age groups), what are their special duties? Human societies may perhaps have to be admitted as incapable of a realistic handling of human abilities that treats everyone-of whatever age, sex, class-of-origin or race-quite simply by exactly similar standards, as individuals. However, if rights and privileges are to be accorded to particular groups, beneficiaries themselves would probably feel more secure if the positive discrimination in their favour were premissed on something more than charitable whimsy.
Most naturally, the elderly would play a special role in the nurture and education of young children. Yet this is hardly possible on any scale when 'teachers' in state schools require a sympathy with youth 'culture' and black belts in judo; and when even progress in the English language (with which the elderly are best equipped to assist) is not used as a basis for promoting children to more advanced classes. So far, the problem of increasingly large proportions of elerly people has been addressed by the empty rhetoric of similitarian wishful thinking. Unless there is increasing realism about the contribution that the elderly can make to the economy and society, the elderly may find the young increasingly keen to relieve them of their expensive welfare rights and benefits-at first by some kind of purchase, but eventually by robbery (already a familiar tower-block sport).
More here
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Some history.
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Wednesday, May 14, 2003
DIVERSITY AT WORK
The diversity-loving and affirmatively active New York Times had egg all over its face when it found it had to fire Black ‘investigative reporter’ Jayson Blair after he had been discovered to have partly made up or plagiarized scores of stories he had contributed to the paper. In fact, senior management at the paper had known of the problem for several years but had continued to retain and promote Blair so as to maintain the paper’s multicultural image. Grimly, NYTwit readers were told that:
“Blair, 27, misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states, when often he was far away, in New York. He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not. And he used these techniques to write falsely about emotionally charged moments in recent history, from the deadly sniper attacks in suburban Washington to the anguish of families grieving for loved ones killed in Iraq.”
Evidently, Blair was helped not only by affirmative racism but by it being so easy to see what lefty, White-guilt-ridden NYTwit readers wanted to hear.
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Some history.
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Tuesday, May 13, 2003
WELSH RACISM OK?
Discriminating against people without ‘local’ connections, the Housing Department of rural Gwynned, north Wales, turned out to have banned for three years the sale of an ex-council house which had come into private hands (Sunday Telegraph, 11 v).
Faced with accusations of racism (against English would-be purchasers and settlers), the Council claimed it was acting within its powers under the 1985 Housing Act.
(Last month, Sir Iain Noble was hoisted by the media and peecee politicos for saying he wanted Skye to limit immigration from the mainland so as remain a primarily Gaelic island).
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PHOTOS NOW INCORRECT
The editor of the Daily Californian bravely stood up to fifty hysterical Berkeley campus students wailing that the paper had published “racist” pictures – a photo of a Black footballer arrested for fighting and a cartoon of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il. Excerpt:
In the past two days we've received a large response to two items The Daily Californian has published recently: an editorial cartoon depicting North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il and a news story on a Cal football player's arrest.
More than 50 students met with two editors and myself yesterday, angry about yesterday's story, "Cal Football Player Arrested in Assault," a story about how Cal football player Michael Gray was arrested following a fight outside a fraternity involving as many as 50 people over the weekend.
Students were upset about a number of issues with the story. Publishing Gray's photograph drew attention to the fact that an African American was connected with an assault, which the students said perpetuated a negative, stereotypical image of African Americans.
The editor, Rong-Gong Lin II, had the advantage of being Asian and thus did not suffer from the sickening White guilt with which the left has infected public life in the West .
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Some history.
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Monday, May 12, 2003
MORE ON THE U.K. UNIVERSITY RANKINGS
Edinburgh University’s position in research assessments was a pretty dismal 17th, along with the University of Essex; and its rank for teaching quality was a terrible 27th – behind all the main Scottish universities (St Andrews 4th, Glasgow 10th, Stirling 13th and Aberdeen 20th). (For two hundred years, Edinburgh was among the top six universities in the UK, retaining that position in government figures till 1997.)
Nor did Edinburgh do much good by way of putting its students into occupations where a degree was necessary: on this yardstick, Edinburgh came only a disastrous 34th. Edinburgh’s overall ranking of 14th was achieved with the help of getting credit for its high research income, 6th in the UK; but it will not hang on to the big bucks once its awful record of the past six years comes to be realized.
Unsurprisingly for Britain’s most shockably peecee university, Edinburgh achieved the highest rankings in the gruesome triad of Sociology, Social Work and Social Policy. Any other top marks? Yes, the Loony Uni came top for Veterinary Medicine. So what do these four subject areas have in common? Pretty Plainly, E.L.U. aims to thrive on compassion for dumb animals – and on the state monies readily available from NuLabour to those who parade such concern. (By contrast, HM Government’s new Education Minister announced he would like to stop funding Mediaeval History – presumably fearing anything that might reveal that England was never a very multicultural society (even banning the Jews for 400 mediaeval years).)
E.LU.’s censorious Psychology Department did even worse than the LUni as a whole, ranking at only 25th in overall quality despite having students whose entry results (A Levels etc.) were exceeded only by those of students entering Oxford. Thus Edinburgh Psychology is now the weakest link in its new administrative/academic linkage with Linguistics (9th) and Philosophy (22nd).
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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Sunday, May 11, 2003
U.K. UNIVERSITY RANKINGS
May 2003 might have brought the tiniest moment of consolation to the LUniversity of Edinburgh in that it came 14th in the Times’ assessment of overall UK quality. However, that ranking still placed the LUni behind Loughborough and was anyhow due principally to Edinburgh dishing out First and Upper Second Class degrees at a rate that placed its students as the 5th best in Britain. By contrast, the LUni’s position in research assessments was a pretty dismal 17th=, along with the University of Essex. (For two hundred years, Edinburgh was among the top six universities in the UK.) E.LU.’s censorious Psychology Department did even worse than the LUni as a whole, ranking at only 25th in overall quality despite having students whose entry results (A Levels etc.) were exceeded only by those of students entering Oxford. (The Times ratings were even more sensible than normal this year, placing Oxford at No. 1, ahead of Cambridge for the second year in succession.)
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A REVIEW OF: Intelligence, Race and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen. (Boulder, CO : Westview. Pp. xi + 236. ISBN 0-8133-4008-X) by Frank Miele.
Excerpts from the full review published in Heredity 90, 5, 346-7 (May, 2003):
In 1969, Arthur Jensen (today Emeritus Professor at Berkeley) began his career of martyrdom with his Harvard Educational Review article saying that educability, IQ and race were probably genetically linked. Through the ensuing 33 years of the West's tenured intellectuals suppressing the 'Jensenist Heresy', IQ became unmentionable in the media (except when excusing some poor wretch in America from capital punishment); and race, too, became unmentionable except when asserting that it was 'meaningless as a scientific concept'. Books by hereditarian psychologists, including Jensen himself, became unpublishable, except by mail order houses. Meanwhile, Britain's New Labour governments of 1997-2002 sensibly adopted the Jensenist idea of providing specialized academies for gifted children yet gave no word of thanks to the vilified scholar.
Scrupulously aiming to avoid controversy, the man who first so sensationally attracted it now disdains any interesting propositions about the human condition. Jensen even says he does not feel "inclined or properly qualified" to think through the political implications of his work.
Miele's e-mailed conversations with Jensen provide a polite trot around familiar psychogenetic territory – or several trots, because Miele feels obliged to introduce each conversation by summarizing it, and then repeating himself in his direct questions; and Jensen – himself no stranger to repetition – then rehearses the arguments once more, but without the precise quantification for which he is rightly famous. Certainly, Miele attempts a little fast bowling. But how can you really bowl fast and catch someone off their guard in e-mail? Sadly, this whole exercise is misconceived. Fans of the mighty Jensen should tell students to read instead his own fine popularization of his ideas in Straight Talk About Mental Tests – though students will have to use libraries because the book is out of print thanks to Jensen, with his high scholarship, having failed to orchestrate opposition to domination of social science and the media by believers in 'the blank slate.'
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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Saturday, May 10, 2003
HEREDITY COP-OUT
Top scientist James Watson produced a new eulogy for DNA, the complex molecule of inheritance which plays a central role in shaping our destiny (DNA: the Secret of Life). IQ is heritable OK; but heritability is very complex etc., etc. What about race? Here, as with Steven Pinker, Watson’s nerve failed him entirely and he wrote merely: “The idea of measurable variation in average intelligence among ethnic groups is not one, I admit, I want to live with.”
Likewise, psychologist Steve Pinker himself once more copped out of fully fledged hereditarianism when interviewed by BBC 2 TV (7 v). Asked about human racial differences, Pinker admitted he had pulled material from his book The Blank Slate, and said ‘If there are any racial differences, they are probably environmental.’ (Pinker’s book will be reviewed in Heredity in June.)
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KIDDIEPORN
As another UK pop star was given a police caution for downloading kiddieporn, a substantial article appeared in the Laissez-Faire Electronic Times deploring paedohysteria and saying the size of the kiddieporn industry was grossly over-rated by femnists and leftists so as to argue for the appointment of more social workers and thought police. In particular, by changing the definition of a ‘child’ to below 18, by ceasing to demand that ‘pornographic’ pictures be obscene, and by criminalizing mere possession (rather than sale or purchase), the USA of the 1990s allowed its own moral panic to spin out of any reasonable control.
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MEANWHILE ....
A UK parliamentary committee gave a stern warning to the NuLabour government that asylum seeking, which had increased 26-fold in the previous twenty years, “could overwhelm the country” (Times, 8 v). The Home Office Select Affairs Committee particularly pointed to recent electoral victories in Burnley by the British National Party and said a continuation of mass asylum seeking could spark “social unrest.” In Burnley itself, the Times reported that the BNP had dropped their skinhead image for the wearing of Burberry hats; and that there was widespread disaffection at privileged treatment of Muslim immigrants and at their pressures for concessions regarding school meals and uniform.
Leftists and peaceniks were at last advised by a top columnist of the left-of-centre and anti-Crusade Independent (7 v) that America, Australia and Britain had done a good job in Iraq: ‘Rejoice, rejoice – there has been an explosion of democracy in Iraq’, Johann Hari.
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Comments? Email Chris Brand.
Some history.
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