EDITOR:
CHRIS BRAND (cbrand@cycad.com) --
THE BRITISH ACADEMIC PSYCHOLOGIST WHO DECRIED IGNORACISM, ENVIRONMENTOSTALINISM,
FEMINAZISM AND PAEDOHYSTERIA (THE MAIN INGREDIENTS OF INNOCUOUS-SOUNDING
'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS').
GUESS WHAT HAPPENED? CHRIS
BRAND'S BOOK, The g Factor,
WAS DE-PUBLISHED
by Wiley Inc. [New York] (1996) AND BRAND WAS FIRED
by Edinburgh University (1997) (and stayed fired after an internal
Appeal, 1998). Latest Press, Evening News [Edinburgh] 9 ii '99.
This newsletter for differential psychology appears on Tuesdays. See its Archives and related articles on psychology, heredity, individual liberty and William McDougall FRS. Only the McDNL gives the up-to-date answers of genes-realistic psychology to the tired social-environmentalism, multiculturalism and political correctness of egalitarian ideologues and hysterical feminists. Only the McDNL challenges the media's worship of: (London) Profs Susan Greenfield, Germaine Greer, Steve Jones and Steven Rose; and (New York) Profs Jared Diamond, Ronald Dworkin, Howard Gardner, Daniel Goleman, Stephen Jay Gould and Leon Kamin. Only the McDNL has backed Nobelist Daniel Carlton Gajdusek, multivariate psychologist Raymond Cattell (1905-1998), and social philosopher Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) as their names have given offence to today's neosocialists and kindred hysterics.
APRIL 6
THIS WEEK: THEOLOGY, MORALS & EVOLUTION
TEACHERS HORRIFIED AT PAY-BY-RESULTS PLAN
US IQ PSYCHOLOGIST BLAMED FOR "RACIST BILE"
MULTICULTURALIST AMERICOTAN BOMBING
ROUND-UP
NEOSOCIALIST
IDEALISM KILLS!
RACISM IS INNATE -- the truth dawns on Sir Fred Hoyle
KOESTLER "RAPE" VICTIM WENT BACK FOR MORE
TOP SILK HITS OUT AT HARVARD HARASSMENT
g-BASHING
GOULD versus MATERIALIST DAWKINS
TIME
FOR SOME GALTON!
BOSTON, Massachusetts, 30 iii '99 -- World-renowned author, palaeontologist, Marxist and Harvard University professor Stephen Jay Gould has concluded that religion has no argument with science. Rather, the two should be considered separate human issues. Although millions of Christians have believed God made the world in seven days, performed miracles, was incarnated and rose bodily from the dead, Professor Gould says there is no conflict between Christianity and science. "Science and religion are non-overlapping, equally important institutions," Gould said at a reading for his sixteenth book, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life at the Boston Public Library. "Science is the age of rock, and religion is the rock of ages," he quipped. {According to Gould, the only argument of true science on factual matters is with The g Factor.}
{By contrast, Britain's Sir Ludovic Kennedy just wrote a book explaining that God had either never lived or was plainly dead -- as Nietzsche had concluded in the 1860's (All in the Mind: A Farewell to God, Hodder & Stoughton, £UK19). Sir Ludovic ('Ludo') says that, as late as 1956, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, the learned Michael Ramsay, assured him that the Resurrection of Jesus was "certain historical fact." Kennedy adds: ".…There was a time in the history of the Christian church when the devil, Beelzebub or Satan, the king of evil, was as real and as forceful a figure as, for a diminishing number of people, "God" still is today." Gould's idea that there is no contest between Christianity and science shows he is running scared and needing the support even of today's remaining churchmen for his own ignoracism and illiberalism.}
More, more of Gould's mystifications later!
Everyone should be able to make his own mind up about whether St Bernadette of Lourdes saw eighteen apparitions of The Virgin Mary in 1858? -- No, this has not been the view of the Catholic Church! In a new book, it turns out that the figure seen by Bernadette Soubirous, the daughter of a Pyrenees miller, was "a tiny, smiling child of her own age -- fourteen." It took years of work by the Church to convert this apparition into the adult and reasonably maternal Virgin Mary of Catholic folklore. Bernadette herself protested all the way along the line against the Church's distortion of her story -- and was finally confined to a strict regime in a closed nunnery to effect her silence. To this day, visitors to Lourdes are not told the truth.
"For goodness sake, what is the profession coming to if I come to speak of educational improvements under this Government and it heckles me?" So implored the aggrieved UK Education Minister, blind David Blunkett, as he addressed the annual meeting of Britain's biggest teaching union in Brighton, Sussex. Labour's unwillingness to introduce fast track learning has led it inexorably to threaten 'performance-related' pay as a desperate move to increase attainment in Britain's useless state comprehensive schools. Now teachers are up in arms -- for they know (though dare not say) that children's performance is largely dependent on the g factor, over which teachers have little control (except by choosing work only in middle class areas of relatively high IQ). The National Association of Teachers has, unusually, decided to support its militants' calls for strike action if teachers are consigned to be paid by results. The NUT's leader, Doug McAvoy, says Blunkett's plan would return British schoolteachers to the woeful conditions of the early nineteenth century -- before schoolteaching was taken from church control and made into a sinecure. The jeering NUT conference voted to ballot the whole membership of teachers about going on strike. Mr Blunkett condemned the teachers' behaviour as "daft."
{McDNL says: Such is the bitterness between well-meaning twits that resultsfrom failure to read The g Factor! Why not let the children choose which lessons they wish to attend? -- And oblige schools to offer any pupil a range of difficulty levels!}
{The teachers' conference also dedicated the profession to renewed 'anti-racist' propaganda efforts.}
(cf. McDNL 30 iii '99, 'IQ PSYCHOLOGIST UNDER FIRE IN FLORIDA')
Soundbites from Florida
Miami Herald,
25 iii '99, Robert Steinback, 'Misguided flattery from a Florida
State University prof.'
"….Suppose research suggested that white people do have
a slight IQ edge over black people. The racists say this is a
reason to group all black people together -- regardless of intelligence
-- and isolate them from white people. But, assuming you believe
in forced grouping at all, wouldn't it make more sense to group
people according to intelligence? Group above-average-IQ black
people with above-average-IQ white people? You'd never hear that
from Duke or Whitney."
TALLAHASSEE, Florida, Tampa Tribune Online 30 iii '99 -- Students at FSU are demanding an investigation into how {Glayde}Whitney's research is funded and whether he grades blacks the same as whites. University leaders are grappling with the growing unrest. It has put them in the uncomfortable position of weighing academic freedom against charges of racism. Richard Mashburn, FSU's assistant vice president for student affairs, said Whitney had ``torpedoed from within'' the university's mantra that all people are welcome, regardless of race or creed. ….Looking wary and a bit dishevelled, Whitney said he regretted writing the foreword [to My Awakening], although he agrees with several parts of Duke's book. In My Awakening, Duke uses genetic science to push for the resegregation of schools -- arguing it is better to group children "in line with their natural abilities.''
Tallahassee Democrat 31 iii '99 -- After a campus rally attended by twelve students, Don Foss, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said an inquiry into Whitney's grading policies had already begun.
Tallahassee Democrat
1 iv '99 -- Correspondence:
'In
appreciation of FSU professor's view on race'
-- "I applaud
the courage of Professor Glayde Whitney in voicing his politically
incorrect stance on the matter of race. Experience, common sense
and recent research compel me to agree that the various races
are typically different in genetic makeup -- each comparatively
"superior" and "inferior" in particular elements.
(See "Why Race Matters" by Professor Michael Levin,
for research in this area.). Yours faithfully, Coral Turner,
Pineway Street."
Another US campus, also, was troubled by
the biology of IQ:
Arizona Daily Wildcat (editor@wildcat.arizona.edu)
1 iv '99.
Correspondence (replying to a column which had supported standardized
testing):
'Praise
for IQ tests in column masks racist bias.' "….[In
the 1980's,] Franz Boas demonstrated that genetic traits, like
skull size, can go through sharp changes from one generation to
the next: they are not necessarily retained across generations
(see S. Gregory & R. Sanjek, 1994, Race, New Brunswick,
Rutgers University Press, pp.5-6). In sum, there is absolutely
no scientific basis to the idea that intelligence is genetically
transmitted. Yours faithfully, Professor Joel Stillerman, Assistant
research social scientist, Latin American Area Center."
Tallahassee Democrat Online
2 iv '99, Roosevelt Wilson, journalism professor at Florida A&M
University.
'Glayde
Whitney's racist toxic waste is scary indeed.'
"….Not only does [Whitney] add to the toxic waste
site of ex-Ku Klux Klansman David Duke's autobiography, but Whitney
also dumps the racist bile on his students in a mandatory psychology
class. ….let's not forget the most immediate casualties of
Whitney's academic freedom: students who are devastated by his
teaching but cannot graduate without taking his class."
Tallahassee Democrat Online
2 iv '99, Glayde Whitney.
'Professor
responds to criticism of racial bias'
Attacking a behavior
genetic researcher through accusations of bias in grading is a
tactic that has been in play on campuses for decades. Not to be
vulnerable to such bogus charges, I have for years graded undergraduate
courses with objective tests that are machine-scored.
Interviewed in the St. Petersburg Times,
my colleague Na'im Akbar hurls the "racist" slur and
questions whether I present all sides of the debate. Amazing chutzpah!
Is a black professor who teaches Afrocentrism a racist?
More troubling is the simplistic stereotyping
by James. P. Jones (Letters, March 29). He questions whether a
professor who believes blacks "are genetically inferior"
can provide a "level playing field" in classes. The
answer has to do with the wide range of individual differences
within each race. At a selective university such as FSU, any student
who meets admission standards and passes introductory classes
is suitable for the advanced courses I teach.
Most reprehensible is Jones' snide allusion
to the anti-Semitic smear. As I have written elsewhere, individuals
of Jewish ancestry are among my best students and closest friends.
At the same time it is disquieting that the Anti-Defamation League
often seems like a hate group that smears any who deviate from
a leftist agenda.
I agree with Rabbi Daniel Lapin who suggested
that anti-liberalism is often misinterpreted as anti-Semitism.
Glayde Whitney; Charles Samuel Drive.
Tampa Tribune Online 3 iv '99. Correspondence.
This pertains to FSU Professor
Glayde Whitney's endorsement of David Duke's book, My Awakening.
Having read Duke's splendid opus, I was amazed at the degree to
which the media has successfully distorted or omitted such vital
information.
Professor Whitney should be commended
for his nonconforming intellectual integrity. Relatively few people
noticed when he wrote the foreword to Duke's book. The hysteria
was fueled by the Tribune's intentionally inflammatory, "objective''
articles. Those articles, I surmise, are calculated to punish
Whitney, to jeopardize his well-being as a result of his courage
in voicing significantly suppressed truths.
Contrary to Michael Fechter's March 21
headline story, Whitney does not contribute to the misconception
that black people are "genetically inferior.'' Not if a person
reads Whitney rather than a journalist's gloss of his ideas. Then
Duke cites decades of research regarding certain genetic advantages
of black people. Should it be fashionable to pretend that he is
inferring black superiority? Of course not. Both Duke and Whitney
are acknowledging genetic differences, nothing more, that are
causing harm to everyone due to those facts being ignored.
Whitney is a hero because he personifies
a highly unusual opposition to any racist trend. I encourage people
to familiarize themselves with the reasons for his conclusions,
to decide for themselves rather than misguided by censorial interpretations
of politically correct vigilantes.
DON HIRSCH, Gibsonton.
From Glayde Whitney to McDougall NewsLetter, 4 iv '99
It is quite a trouncing that
I have been taking in the media. In an editorial (March 24) the
Tallahassee Democrat says that hate groups carefully use
their words to demonize certain individuals. The same editorial
then goes on to damn me with demonizing terms such as hateful,
loathsome, abhorrent speech, obnoxious point of view, white-supremacist
diatribe, and more. In the Tampa Tribune (March 24) Daniel
Roth presents an even viler smear. All this for my having had
the temerity to write a foreword for David Dukes autobiography
MY AWAKENING.
There have been many times in history
when scientific research or teaching were censured, punished,
or demonized, usually for seeming to contradict some religious
or political orthodoxy. In the former Soviet Union the science
of genetics was actually outlawed, along with the use of intelligence
tests, because the results contradicted the egalitarian fallacy
that was and remains central to the ideology of Marxist socialism.
Today, here in the United States, scientists who study human genetics,
behavior and intelligence are often attacked, in print and even
physically, because their findings contradict the egalitarian
fallacy that is at the heart of modern liberalism.
For over a hundred years scientific studies
have shown that we are not all the same, and that there is a tremendous
range of individual diversity, some of it inherited. Further,
essentially all studies verify that the distribution of many traits
is not the same across the races. One of the most vexatious such
traits is measured intelligence, or IQ. The results have been
consistent since the first reliable testing early in this century,
and remain so today.
In the editorial (24 Mar.) I am misquoted
as having delivered the sound bite that blacks are bigger in bone,
smaller in brain. This phrase seems to have originated in a smear
promulgated by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). But what
are the facts? It is commonly known that blacks greater bone density
begins before birth and on average continues into old age. This
contributes to their lower incidence of osteoporosis. Even the
Tallahassee Democrat (29 March) in a feature article about
osteoporosis notes that Caucasian women are encouraged to be tested.
Studies of the distribution of brain size have been conducted
repeatedly since the 19th century: On average East Asians score
highest, European descended whites intermediate, and individuals
of sub-Saharan black African ancestry score lower. Modern studies
using MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to measure brain size find
a correlation of about .4 with IQ. This is not white supremacy
or black supremacy or Asian supremacy; it is simply the results
of scientific research. The findings for brain size and intelligence
are no more racist or supremacist than the findings on osteoporosis.
Politically, with our current one-party
system, both branches (Democrat and Republican) acquiesce to the
egalitarian fallacy. This makes David Duke attractive as the only
nationally known politician to publicly grapple with the truth.
Although I may personally disagree with many of his specific suggestions,
I heartily agree with David Duke's statement I simply believe
in equal rights for everyone in this country, and that should
include White people, and hope that all Americans would as well.
It is my view that attempting to structure
a society that flies in the face of the realities of diversity
is doomed to failure. Slavish adherence to the egalitarian fallacy
is one of the reasons that the Soviet Union is now *former*,
and is one of the reasons for the decline of civility across America.
Many aspects of our civilization suffer from this denial of reality.
Miami Herald,
5 iv '99, 'Professor's race views rack FSU -- Academic discourse
passionately debated', Tyler Bridges [Herald Staff Writer].
"….One
student group has already held a rally to denounce Whitney, and
more attacks are likely to follow. Students, with the blessing
of administrators, have scheduled a ``town hall'' meeting Tuesday
night to discuss Whitney. ….[University President] D'Alemberte
worries that the negative publicity surrounding Whitney will damage
Florida State's reputation. But university officials are quick
to note that FSU in the past five years has increased the number
of its Hispanic and black students by about 50 percent. ….William
Jones, a religious studies professor, says he believes that Whitney
might be guilty of ``racial harassment'' of minority students
and wonders why his colleagues in the psychology department have
not challenged his views previously.
….[David] Duke in 1990
and 1991 capitalized on racial divisions and economic problems
in Louisiana to capture more than half the white vote in unsuccessful
races for the U.S. Senate and governor. In attempting to become
a mainstream politician, Duke camouflaged views he had expressed
in the Klan: that Jews are bent on destroying the white race and
that whites are better suited to being doctors and lawyers while
blacks are best off playing basketball and holding construction
jobs. But with his autobiography, My Awakening, Duke is now espousing
many of the same views he had expressed in the Klan. In the book,
for example, he lays out his wish for the creation of an Aryan
Nation devoid of racial minorities and questions whether the Holocaust
happened during World War II. Duke says he sent his manuscript
to Whitney because he had seen the professor's writings in various
journals. Duke, who is running for the congressional seat vacated
by would-be speaker Bob Livingston, says of Whitney today, ``He's
a very courageous professor who calls it as he sees it.''"
Tallahassee Democrat 6 iv '99, Correspondence from Professor Na'im Akbar, Florida State University
//////
In response
to Glayde Whitney's letter to Editor, Tallahassee Democrat, April
4, 1999.
For the uninformed and misinformed: "Afrocentricity,"
as I understand it and teach it, is not an ideology. It is a perspective
or paradigm that has a threefold purpose:
(1) to rebut and counteract the centuries of white supremacist
pseudoscience that has been suspiciously preoccupied with the
"natural" intellectual inferiority of non-white people;
(2) to make knowledge relevant, applicable and pertinent to the
resolution of the real life problems of people of color, specifically,
and humanity in general and
(3) to bring to the marketplace of ideas the neglected possibility
that there are assets of mental strength, competence, human resourcefulness
and resilience that account for the persistent survival and achievement
of Black people who have been under uninterrupted siege for the
last 400 years.
Science that does not offer
me a defense against those who would have me and my children captured,
killed or contained; that does not offer some minimal resources
to advance my self and my community economically, socially, physically,
politically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually through some
means other than sacrificing my identity and unique diversity
and fails to identify my remarkable human assets and contributions
to the human race is a science that is void of relevance and is
a tool of my destruction. Having so recently in our history observed
the lynchings and killings of millions of African and Native Americans
and the German holocaust with the claims of Eugenics as its justification,
I am compelled by conscience and reason to raise serious objection
to the likes of David Duke, Adolph Hitler, Rudolf Hess and Glayde
Whitney (by his choice of association). If these realistic concerns
are racist (a characteristic that requires power of implementation
to achieve) then I am a Black man who is racist.
Na'im Akbar, 324 N.
Copeland Street, Tallahassee, FL 32304.
\\\\\\
From MACON TELEGRAPH,
1976
[THIS IS NOT A MISPRINT -- 1976, 23 YEARS AGO]
The anger over speculations that physical
and mental differences of human beings may be related to heredity
is silly and indefensible, a behavior geneticist said in Macon
Wednesday. Dr. Glayde Whitney, a professor at Florida State University,
made the comment at Mercer University in response to incidents
across the nation where speakers have been heckled, attacked or
barred from discussing controversial views about behavior genetics.
Behavior genetics is a science dealing
with the evolution of behavior and the effects of genes upon behavior.
Physical and mental differences among human beings are acknowledged
by most people, however, when it is suggested that those differences
may be related to genetics people get nervous and emotional, Whitney
said. They assume that if something is caused by genetics, then
it cant be changed, on the other side they believe that if something
is caused by early environment its easier to change. Both views
are false, Whitney said. What is true is that if we knew something
about the causes of the differences, such as the problems with
why some people are not as intelligent as others or why some people
are mentally retarded and others are not, then we would be able
to learn how to treat them.
The 36-year old professor, who has studied
behavior genetics for 10 years, said present-day controversies
surrounding the science stem from confusion, fear, and misunderstanding.
People get the issues mixed up, Whitney said. Its easy to translate
or confuse physical and psychological differences with social
issues like equality of opportunity. But the equality of an individual
is separate from biology.
History shows that social policy has frequently
followed from concepts about human differences, but the error
has been in associating biological differences with the concepts
of inferiority and superiority, said Whitney.
To see how the US campaign against Glayde Whitney's oh-so-"controversial" views is orchestrated, by Joseph Garcia, see the latter's website <http://technoraker.com>.
Blow-by-blow of the Week first;
followed by an Editorial,
'Multicultural War ooops Intervention.'
EDINBURGH 30 iii '99 -- Front-page
news in all papers was the criticism by the Scottish National
Party of Nato's attack on Serbia. Scotland's top political columnist
also condemned the bombing.
SNP leader Alex Salmond's
comparison of Edinburgh-educated Tony Blair's bombs with those
of Hitler's Luftwaffe drew blood at Westminster. Blair denounced
Salmond as "unfit to lead" and Foreign Secretary Robin
Cook, a Scot, said that, though Salmond would have made himself
"the toast of Belgrade", his statement had been "pretty
shameless" and "a long way short of what we would expect
from someone who aspires to government." (Elections loom
for the new Scottish Parliament in May, and the SNP is the major
challenger to Labour.) Britain's Defence Secretary George Robertson,
also a Scot, broke off from visiting RAF fighter pilots in Italy
to add his condemnation. He said: "To suggest that Nato is
somehow responsible for Serb atrocities is beyond belief."
In reply, Salmond said Cook was plainly "out of control"
and noted that Cook's objections in 1991 to bombing Iraq meant
that his present support for AmericOtan bombing was "tinged
with hypocrisy." SNP politicians seemed to stick by their
leader, at least agreeing with his claim that the bombing seemed
so far to have been an "unpardonable folly."
Typically of Britain's neosocialism-accepting
press, the Sun condemned the "psychopaths"
working for "evil Serb war criminal," Arkan, 46, in
"kill-for-kicks" groups to clear Kosovo; the paper criticized
"Slobba" Milosevic for downing two bottles of spirits
a day {Churchill stuck to one}; and it claimed Serbia was run
by "Slob's missus", the "Red Witch", the "grim-faced
Mira, 56", the "evil wife" of Milosevic {just who
ran the Kosovo Liberation Army was not declared -- apparently,
after years of stoking the flames of revolt among Kosovars, this
guy is in hiding with his missus}.
However, one of Scotland's
top authors and journalists agrees with McDNL. The Daily
Telegraph (which brought news from Paris and Prague of majority
condemnation of the bombings) carried a letter from Allan Massie.
After noting recent episodes in Northern Ireland, in one of which
a 13-year-old boy had been subjected to a 'punishment beating'
with a metal-studded baseball bat and 'banished' from the UK province
by paramilitaries, Scotland's leading political commentator [often
writing for Sunday Times and Independent on Sunday']
continued:
"our silly, simpering Prime Minister takes the lead in launching an aggressive and illegal war against an independent sovereign state and tells us that "barbarity alone cannot be allowed to defeat justice" -- except, one supposes, in Northern Ireland."
Mercifully, Russian Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov braved Nato missiles, flew to Belgrade, and left for Berlin to discuss with Chancellor Schroeder a plan for settling Kosovo (by then quarter-emptied of ethnic Albanians) before Turkey could intervene to help the Albanians and thus trigger war with Nato member Greece -- which itself would probably be supported by Russia. The White House had already started eviscerating the word 'victory' by re-defining it. Victory was no longer 'surrender of one's enemy'; rather, it meant that one's enemy "shows signs of agreeing in principle, without actually signing [a peace accord]." Britain was sending humanitarian aid to the Kosovars -- though why this strategy had not been tried previously remained unknown. (Nato claims to have been fully aware of Mr Milosevic's preparations for a spring offensive in Kosovo; so why humanitarian preparations were not made is a mystery.)
WASHINGTON, DC, 25 iii '99 http://www.truthinmedia.org/ ; bulletins@truthinmedia.org -- The U.S.-led military strike on Yugoslavia is an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, a potential Vietnam-style morass for American ground troops, and a dangerous expansion of the U.S. government's "perpetual war for perpetual peace" foreign policy, the Libertarian Party said today. "This is not our war," said the party's national chairman, David Bergland. "No matter how tragic the civil war in Yugoslavia is, the security of the United States is not at stake. We should not be involved in this conflict."
BELGRADE -- "Never go to war with a country whose national holiday celebrates a defeat in 1389," warned a US columnist. While Nato intensified its bombing of Serbia, some 15,000 Belgrade residents of all ages, including seventy-year olds, sang and danced at an all-day rock concert in the city's Freedom Square. Not even the sound of frequent sirens warning the citizens to head for air shelters stopped this act of open defiance to Nato's "might." Some teenagers and children could be seen wearing newly designed T-shirts bearing a black bullseye. Others just stuck bullseye signs on their clothing or heads. Underneath, the word TARGET was written in English. Others tried to help "guide" NATO bombers by carrying a huge, 30-foot long TARGET sign through the city streets. One of the bigger signs read: "Sorry, we didn't know it was invisible," mocking Nato's supposedly invisible "Stealth" F-117A bomber. Vans and lorries also carried "I'm invisible" markings.
WASHINGTON -- One of the major networks headlined its 28 iii '99 coverage of Nato's aerial bombardment of the Serbs: 'War for Peace.' {Orwell , thou shouldst be living at this hour! -- Big Brother: "War is peace"; "Freedom is slavery"; "Ignorance is strength."}
EDINBURGH 31 iii '99 -- Since drizzle
over Serbia had impeded Nato's bombers, instructed to avoid killing
civilians, the London press had little to report but the harrowing
(though uncheckable) stories of Kosovars as they arrived safely
in Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro. -- The refugees were quite
as smartly dressed as if shopping on Edinburgh's Princes Street;
and there were plenty of young men shown in press pictures, thus
disconfirming editorial texts suggesting a general round-up of
young men and a 'Great Terror' akin to the activities of Pol Pot
in Cambodia. Britain's neosocialist-sympathizing newspapers remained
anti-Serb in tone, though several broadsheets had a nice photo
of Mr Milosevic receiving Russian Prime Minister Mr Primakov
in Belgrade. Some recalled that Primakov almost managed to prevent
the 1991 'Desert Storm' Operation -- but could not in fact persuade
Iraq's Madman Insane of the elementary necessity of beginning
a withdrawal from Kuwait.
The Times thundered
rather more than on previous days: "Nato's weaker minds may
be tempted to pursue and explore [the Belgrade peace offer]….but
there is nothing to explore. ….Nato must wait for [Milosevic]
to capitulate." However, Times readers
have probably been less indoctrinated with the Third Way than
media people over the past few years: in the Times' correspondence
columns, letters were 5-1 against the bombing of Serbia.
The Glasgow Herald's
front page recorded the continuing arguments between SNP leader
Alex Salmond and HMG: today, Salmond responded to criticism of
his 'Nato Luftwaffe' broadcast by calling the Government's policy
of bombing Serbia "pathetic."
From Washington, it was heard
that President Clinton had been shocked to learn that seven ships
of the Russian Navy were heading for the Adriatic -- apparently
including the giant aircraft carrier 'Admiral Kuznetzov.' Sir
Michael Rose, a former British representative at the UN who had
doubted the efficacy of bombing, told TV viewers nation-wide that
it was "inevitable" that Western troops would be sent
to fight Serbia.
EDINBURGH 1 iv '99 (BBCR4UK
08:00). -- Reacting to three Nato soldiers being captured
on Serbia's border with Macedonia and displayed on TV from Belgrade,
UK neosocialist Defence Secretary George Robertson explained
the event was "an ominous development": the men were
only peacekeepers, "until, er, a while ago"; they had
been about to go on leave; they had "no hostile intent"
and "no warlike intentions at all"; and Serbia had sunk
to "new low depths." {April Fool ? No, Nato PR supremo
Jamie Shea likewise expressed outrage and demanded that no hair
of the camouflaged soldiers' heads should be touched. After all,
there is no war on, not in these gents' minds. -- Only a "humanitarian
intervention" that had quite accidentally resulted
in the destruction of Petrovaradin Bridge [the so-called "old
bridge" across the Danube].} The aggrieved Robertson was
cross when the BBC interviewer said some people believed Nato's
action had led to an escalation of 'ethnic cleansing.' No, said
the Minister, the ethnic cleansing had been escalating anyway.
So what contribution had Nato made? Well, said Grumpy George,
Nato's action had not been intended to deal with humanitarian
outrages -- only to prevent them…. The BBC interviewer
had to remind the petulant Defence Secretary that Britain was
a democratic country and that people were entitled to express
critical views of Britain's war policy ooops humanitarian intervention.
{Subsequently, Robertson was confined to barracks and pro-Nato
propaganda was left to Jamie Shea.} Meanwhile, divine support
for HMG's swaggering multiculturalism is weakening: the head of
the Church of Wales [the Welsh branch of the Church of
England] denounced the attack on Serbia as "unlawful"
and "a folly" and called on Prime Minister Blair to
STOP THE BOMBING. Despite UK press speculation, there is no sign
of politicians sending in Nato ground troops -- and Mr Clinton
was broadcast voicing his "worry" that if he sent in
troops he would "never get them out."
{Altogether,
the past week has been a disaster for Nato. One wonders, would
Nato generals have tried to deal with a Red Army rolling to the
Rhine by setting off fireworks in Kirghizstan? The end of the
present affair will have to see constitutional changes to immunize
Nato from neosocialism.}
Undaunted by Nato's escalating air raids, tens of thousands of people massed in downtown Belgrade today for the fourth day, singing, dancing, rocking, shouting anti-NATO slogans, and waving home-made signs, including some "Adolf Clinton" images.
WASHINGTON 1 iv '99 Daily Telegraph -- Washington Gripped by Fear of Failure -- John Bolton, a foreign policy scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, accused the American planners of incompetence. He said: "You ask them what they will do if bombing does not achieve their goals and they don't know -- they don't know!"
A little history
(http://www.truthinmedia.org/)
Sept. 21, 1914, Chancellor
of the UK Exchequer David Lloyd George, saying that Serbia was
being unfairly bullied by Austria after the murder of the latter's
Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo: "The history of Serbia
is not unblotted. Whose history in the category of nations is
unblotted? The first nation that is without sin, let her cast
a stone at Serbia. Trained in a horrible school, she won her freedom
with her tenacious valour and she has maintained it by her courage."
In 1929, the Serbs constituted
a 61% majority in Kosovo. They remained a majority all the way
up to WW II, during which many Serbs were killed or driven from
their homes by the Nazi allies -- the Kosovo and Bosnian Muslims.
After 1945, Tito's communist government of Yugoslavia passed a
law prohibiting the Serb refugees from returning to their homes
in Kosovo. Over the next five decades, hundreds of thousands of
illegal immigrants poured in from dirt-poor communist Albania.
That is how the Albanians got to be a majority in Kosovo and Serbs
were reluctant to live there.
There are now 450,000 Serb refugees from
Croatia and West Bosnia in Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb Republic),
driven out by Croats and Americans. Serbia has 1,000,000 refugees.
Many are Croats, Muslim Bosnians, Albanians who do not wish to
live under Nazi and Islamic dictatorship. That's why they fled
to Serbia. 100,000 Albanians live in Belgrade.
A McDougall US Correspondent writes: "Quite frankly, the whole thing can be summed up simply. What we're doing is the same as if the USSR bombed Washington because we would not return Texas to Mexico." {A gloomy reading of the trends of Mexican migration to Texas, but one sees the point. -- Ed.}
LONDON 1 iv '99 -- Enthusiasm at the Times for the 'intervention' in Kosovo, er, Serbia, stayed high. Only 200,000 ground troops would be needed to have a proper war and finish off Mr Milosevic, thundered the lead editorial. Apparently, "it is unthinkable that Nato should fail to stamp out the "great terror" [that Milosevic has unleashed]." Spain, too, welcomed Nato's attacks on Serbia, said the paper.
LONDON, Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/), 2 iv, filed from Belgrade by veteran reporter, Robert Fisk -- "….On the second floor of the Serbian Clinical Centre in Belgrade are victims of the Balkan war who will never be mentioned in any Nato briefing. There's a 14-year-old boy with his head crushed, lying in a coma, eyes half-closed, a fat oxygen tube down his throat. There's a middle-aged farmer hit in the head by shrapnel and expected to die within a few hours. A little further down the emergency ward is another boy -- 13 this time -- with his head swathed in bandages, moving in agony, his brain damaged and his right leg fractured by a falling building. They are Nato's victims."
LONDON (BBCR4UK 2 iv '99, 08:10)
The propaganda non-war between Nato and Serbia has ground to a
total halt today. Nato releases little information about its successes
or failures in its eight-day 'Nintendo' bombing campaign, though
it denies it has harmed or would harm civilians even by cutting
electricity supplies and thus diminishing Serbia's hospital services;
and it has no coherent account of how or where three US 'peacekeepers'
"on a reconnaissance mission" came to be captured by
Serb forces. (Nato maintains the "abducted" yet militarily
camouflaged peacekeepers should not be tried by Belgrade since
this would flout international conventions about war that Nato
so scrupulously observes…. Anyway, Nato is not having
a war….*) Serbia is equally uninformative about its policy
and operations in Kosovo -- which Nato and BBC messages routinely
describe as consisting of ceaseless "atrocities" and
"genocide" that bring tears to journalists' eyes.
Despite Kosovars sometimes
killing each other (at Calais, while hoping to bribe their way
into Britain), polls says British public support for sending ground
troops to help ethnic Albanians has increased by 19%. UK Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook says Mr Milosevic's petrol supplies for Kosovo
must surely be reduced; but the BBC reports increasing flows of
refugees across Kosovo's borders -- a rate of 6,000 per hour being
reached at one point. Serbian spokesman Milograd Popovich claims
some schools have been bombed by Nato -- one of them repeatedly
-- and that some Kosovan ethnic Albanian refugees are fleeing
to Belgrade and denouncing Nato.
The BBC is not allowed reporters
in Kosovo, but has first-hand reports from Belgrade where apparently
nothing much is happening apart from street parties. Nato makes
daily announcements of providing more bombers -- today, fourteen
more A117 Stealth aircraft; and Nato countries and Mr Bill Gates
(whose company faces break-up under US anti-trust law) are sending
other humanitarian aid. Kosovar refugees say they have been stripped
of documentation; but Serbia says many never had documentation
in the first place -- being illegal economic migrants from Albania
seeking advancement in Yugoslavia just like Hispanics in the United
States.
{A
serious hope can remain that fatalities of the past week have
been far fewer than has been implied and feared; but there is
an awful prospect that Montenegro and Macedonia may at any moment
break into civil wars and that Greece and Turkey will then wish
to make their own humanitarian interventions. Perhaps Emperor
Clinton has a master plan whereby AmericOtan will pacify the whole
area and control the whole of the European coastline from Gdansk
round to Istanbul? Yet in that case it might have been easier
to offer Nato membership to Serbia.}
* McDougall's Defence Correspondent
writes (2 iv '99a.m.): "The story is now that the captured
US troops "accidentally'' took the wrong road and went up
the wrong side of a mountain. There is clearly now no doubt, after
36 hours of Nato evasions, that the three men were actually in
Serbian territory. Since this is not a war, supposedly, the Geneva
Convention DOES NOT apply. The troops' legal status is pretty
uncertain. I expect legally the Serbs are entitled to try them
under Serbian law, maybe for espionage. They are not in the terms
of the Geneva Convention soldiers fighting in a war."
McDougall's US Correspondent writes (3 iv
'99): "Actually, I would not be surprised if it were
an accident. Those boys did not strike me as very bright, especially
when I heard the backgrounds. At least one was clearly marginal.
As for the Geneva Convention, the Yugoslavs declared they were
at war with us so, according to them, we are..."
EDINBURGH 2 iv '99 -- The anti-bombing
remarks of Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond
have possibly lost his party several points in Scottish opinion
polls. The SNP's dip in the polls may have begun prior to the
attack on Serbia; but even some of Salmond's close political colleagues
have found his criticism of Nato action hard to accept. Evidently
UK TV has been doing a fine propaganda job for neosocialism. ('Why
don't the Serbs and Macedonians have humanitarian feelings about
the Kosovars?' asked Sir Alistair Cooke in Washington. 'Because
they haven't seen the pictures,' came a clubman's reply.) On BBC's
national 'Any Questions' programme, Mr Salmond quoted figures
that there had been no increase of ethnic Albanian refugees
to Macedonia in the week before Nato's bombing started, but
then sought refuge beneath the skirts of the Pope, who had called
for a suspension of Nato's bombing over Catholic Easter. (Orthodox
Easter is ten days later this year.) Resisting more firmly the
trend to compassion for the Kosovo Liberation Army is Britain's
far-left Socialist Workers' Party, which held an anti-bombing
meeting in Edinburgh Southside's leading Irish bar, 'Drouthy Neighbours.'
{Neosocialist
Emperor 'Adolf Clinton' [as he is called in Belgrade] must be
pondering what to do in the light of White House insistence (especially
from Al Gore) at the beginning of the Nintendo onslaught that
US troops would be "kept out of harm's way."
Albania and Macedonia now fear humanitarian disasters on their
soil thanks to the influx of penniless refugees. Hopefully Mr
Milosevic will soon propose a compromise that Western politicians
and the meedja can hardly refuse -- some kind of division of Kosovo,
presumably. Yet hopefully nothing will spare the multiculturalist
politicians whose folly has brought about what Independent MP
Tim Bell (formerly BBC war correspondent) has called the "humiliation"
of Nato. }
McDougall's Defence Correspondent writes (2 iv '99p.m.): "….eventually AmericOtan will just move in ground troops "for humanitarian reasons'' having deliberately escalated the situation to make that inevitable. The strategy is breathtakingly brilliant: the more Nato/Otan makes a hash of things in the short term, the better it will be for them in the long term. Bombing Serbia into the stone age is a necessary pre-requisite for de-stabilising the region -- Serbia being the only military force locally that was capable of keeping order there. Whatever one thinks about the "New World Order'' guys, one must take the hat off to them: they are winning, and they are utterly ruthless doing it."
MOSCOW, 2 iv '99 -- Andrei Manilov, an official of the Liberal Democratic Party, told Izvesti, the Russian daily, that leading Russian financial and industrial groups are sponsoring arrangements for the dispatch of volunteers to Yugoslavia. He said more than 56,000 volunteers across the country had already signed up.
ATHENS, 2 iv '99 -- An estimated two million Greeks took part in a two-hour strike on Friday to protest against Nato's attack on Serbia.
ALBANIA, 2 iv '99 -- A Kosovo Liberation Army soldier, Shkem Dragobia, said Nato had made a pledge to his people, and broken it. "When we signed the Rambouillet agreement, we were led to believe that Nato and the US will help the Albanians. So we stopped arming and mobilizing ourselves," he said. {One story is that the KLA has for some while been funded from Germany with cash from elite 'New World Order' groups such as the Bilderburg Group. According to this account, one KLA job was to kill ethnic Albanians so as to provoke revolt and repression and thus justify the flattening of Serbia. Supposedly it was supported by SAS-type Nato troops operating under cover from Macedonia. Certainly it would help explain Nato's follies if it had found itself let down at the last moment by the unexpected collapse of the KLA.}
Daily Telegraph
[London; Conservative-supporting] 3 iv '99
Defence Editor John Keegan [a distinguished military historian]:
"It is difficult to conceive how Nato can have
got itself into a military situation as lamentable as that which
currently prevails, with no sign of how it may extricate itself."
Torygraph Leader, 'Half-measures
are not enough'
-- This leading article demanded the use of ground troops (never
mind that 200,000 were not immediately available), the setting
up of safe havens (despite how unsafe these had proved in Bosnia)
and frank support for the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Guardian [London;
Labour-supporting] 3 iv '99
Raunchy top columnist Julie Burchill, 'A War
Too Far':
"Well, hand me down that white feather, baby, and call
me 'Conshie' -- I've finally found a British military engagement
I'm violently opposed to. When it came to the conflicts against
Iraq (invading peaceful little Kuwait), or Argentina (invading
peaceful little penguins), I practically had to be restrained
from handing out white feathers to all apparently healthy men
over 16 whom I saw walking down the street. This time, I feel
like I'm behind enemy lines…."
The response of the Warsaw Pact to Nato's violation of Serbian sovereignty involved: sending perhaps seven ships in the direction of mineral-rich Kosovo to 'observe' developments; refusing to sign Start II (aimed at reducing nuclear weaponry); Mr Yeltsin commencing proceedings in Moscow to rid himself of his top justice minister, Yuri Skuratov, who had been filmed in bed with two blondes.
SAREJEVO, 3 iv '99 -- Nato Special Forces came under fire while destroying a major railroad line through Bosnia-Herzegovina.
4 iv '99 http://www.truthinmedia.org/ -- "It appears that [in cutting all Serbia's bridges across the Danube] Nato is trying to cut off Central Serbia from its northern province of Vojvodina. This has brought on speculation from one Belgrade source that, since Nati cannot mount an invasion of Kosovo, it may try to attack Serbia from the north; using its new member, Hungary, as a jump-off point. Which is the way Hitler did it, too, in 1941."
4 iv '99 Independent on Sunday [London] This paper was rather less anti-bombing than last week and its editorial settled -- as did many others -- for urging humanitarian aid. However, all the paper's columnists had grave reservations. Author A. N. Wilson urged pacifism; Oxford historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto said the war was more about saving faces than saving lives; and that grand old trooper among British parliamentary columnists, Alan Watneys ooops Watkins observed that, at Westminster, it is the politicians who have military experience (Benn, Healey, Rees-Mogg, Dalyell, Carrington) who have opposed the bombing. By contrast the leading warmongers (Blair, Cook, Robertson, Livingstone) all avoided National Service. Watkins quoted Wilde's 'Lady Bracknell': "The general is a man of peace, except in his domestic life."
5 iv '99 -- 170 people were arrested yesterday in Brussels for protesting against Nato's attack on Serbia, in a country whose constitution guarantees freedom of speech peaceful assembly. A former professor of the Catholic University of Louvain who supported the demonstration was injured by police.
5 iv '99 -- UK neosocialist Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said there would be no point Mr Milosevic offering a mutual cessation of hostilities. Nato's action -- soon to involve 2,000 more US troops somewhere -- would only stop when Kosovo was cleared of the Serbian military, said Cook (recently the target of a book by his jilted wife, Margaret, detailing his apparent alcohol abuse and willingness to do anything for power).
6 iv '99 CFMR 00:00 -- Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted bombing alone would do the job {whatever it was -- cleansing all Serbs from Kosovo?} but that, like he had always said, it would be 'a long haul' and one could not expect results all at once.
6 iv '99 Sun [largest UK tabloid, selling 8 million copies daily] -- Editorial: "The Prime Minister tells the Sun that ground troops will NOT be sent in, and we totally agree. And today we pledge: If Mr Blair changes his mind, he will NOT have the support of the Sun. ….A ground war in Yugoslavia would be MADNESS."
6 iv '99 The Labour-supportive Guardian
refrained from comment on Britain's war-making and merely
urged humanitarian aid to the 'cleansed' ethnic Albanians -- some
thousands of whom now languish in muddy fields in their own excrement
(though others are in smart British Army tents). However, all
of the Guardian's correspondents opposed the bombing: two
wrote from Belgrade; one was a secretary of a 'United Nations
Association' in Yorkshire; one thought Nato should offer to take
its nuclear weapons of 'hair trigger alert' as a gesture of good
will to Moscow; one regretted Mr Blair having a blank cheque from
Parliament; and one said Nato should be wound up.
After
almost a fortnight of Nato bombing, there are an estimated 40,000
Serbian troops and 7,000 military vehicles in Kosovo. Support
for a suspension of Nato hostilities has come from the Pope, the
Greek Orthodox Church and the Taoiseach of Éire.
The Western New World Order has not behaved as badly as some critics think in its 'humanitarian intervention' in ex-Yugoslavia.
However, a major post-1945 principle has been sacrificed which the West may soon regret. The principle is that a sovereign state should not be attacked unless it has itself made war outside its own territory. Article 2 of the U.N. Charter prohibits such force; and Nato's own charter claims it is a defensive organization. (The 1948 Genocide Convention could have been invoked to authorize state aggression -- but that requires agreement of the UN Security Council. In any case, no genocide was in progress when bombing commenced -- and no 'ethnic cleansing' compared to Pakistan's ethnic clearance of 10 million Bengalis during the latter's secessionist struggle of 1971, Croatia's expulsion of 900,000 Serbs in 1991, the Israeli post-1947 clearance of 700,000 Palestinians, and the Allies' clearance of 12 million Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945.) At very least, Nato owed it to Serbia to say more explicitly, over a period of weeks, or even months, that it backed an independent Kosovo and would cease to regard Serbia as having the right to govern Kosovo; Nato should have given the Serbs of Kosovo a chance to make their escape before the province was handed to the Kosovo Liberation Army -- as was apparently the plan; and Nato should have established that there was a definite escalation of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo prior to the onset of its bombing. Instead, Nato acted out of pique that, at the Rambouillet talks, Serbia had refused to accept Nato 'peacekeeping' troops in Kosovo to monitor a new autonomy for the unhappy province.
Making truth the first casualty of its war, pathetically seeking justification for its bombing crusade, Nato encouraged Western journalists to talk of Serbian 'genocide' in Kosovo -- thus risking evisceration of the holiest multiculturalist terminology for any 'evil' that neosocialism does not like.
Still worse than the breach of the principle that just war must be defensive, Nato ended its first week of fighting with the humiliation of death and destruction alone having resulted from its multi-billion dollar expenditures. It controlled no extra square inch of territory -- for all its pretensions to do so. Its mighty dollars (and now somewhat less mighty Eurodollars) could have instead bought useful favours from Belgrade or serious protection for the Kosovars.
To complete the picture of its folly, Nato has had no-one to thank it for its efforts -- not even a Serbian opponent of Milosevic, let alone any terrified ethnic Albanian refugee or the Kosovo Liberation leader! (Ibrahim Rugova appeared on Belgrade TV walking and talking happily with Mr Milosevic and called for an end to Nato bombing. -- Whether or not he was drugged or intimidated is not known.)
Such a result is a disaster for which neosocialist enthusiasts for multiculturalist warfare must be called to account in due course. Meantime, they owe it to the Kosovars to let them have some peace and to Western troops to let them do some peacekeeping. Neosocialism now has its first Protectorate in the south-west Kosovo valleys of Drenica and Pagarusa and a heavy responsibility for Macedonia and Montenegro, which are being destabilized by its actions.
Hopefully AmericOtan will allow Warsaw Pact monitoring of its operations -- just as Yugoslavia long allowed Nato to see Serbia's own efforts to let people of different ethnicities live together on terms. Such monitoring would be an especially good idea if AmericOtan decided to persuade Turkey to live on PC terms with its Kurds. -- The to-date fissiparous Kurds occupy an area the size of ex-Yugoslavia which supplies the water for much of the Middle East; and they might well be offered a Russian safe haven if the Turks were ever thought too unpleasant to them…. As Nato moves to create a Greater Albania it had better watch out for a hostile Greater Kurdistan -- not to mention the loss of Nato member Greece as Russia, Syria and Greece move to create a multicultural Cyprus, and the loss of US-Chinese accord if China should decide to provide a multicultural service for Taiwan. Meantime the West must hope for neoliberal respect for contracts between individuals, between states, and between states and individuals to become the agenda for a successful opposition to the impetuosity of Emperor Clinton and Augustus Blair. The right must wake up before the left wrecks Nato. -- And preferably before old-style communist multiculturalism, backed by access to Russia's nuclear deterrent and delivery systems, embarks on requiring the Filipinos, Malays and Indonesians to be nice to their Chinese minorities.
Racism is in the genes, say top British scientists. Sir Fred Hoyle
and Professor Chandra Wickramsinghe now reckon that Whites who
bred with Blacks in the Stone Age would have left few ancestors.
The problem was rickets: half-breeds
would not have been able to soak up enough Vitamin D from the
sun. So Whites who were averse to Blacks would have left more
descendants. (Notoriously, some Whites find Blacks 'smelly' --
just as some East Asians find Whites' body odours repugnant.)
Notorious for defying conventional
wisdom, the maverick pair of scientists -- famous for thinking
influenza was brought to Earth by Martians -- have published their
ideas on the Net as well as submitting them to a learned journal
(Journal of Scientific Exploration). Race-mixin'-it Blacks
could have had the same problem -- for their descendants by Whites
would have had little melanin to protect the skin against cancer.
This may be why when some Blacks see Whites they can't stop laughing.
Hoyle and Wickramsinghe say
that if racism is to be tackled the job should be attempted realistically.
{Just how realistic they are about race differences
in IQ remains unknown.}
Sir William Macluny has now provided
his excuses
for his Report (Times
2 iv '99):
'We did not dream up the phrase 'institutional racism.' The term was first used in the 1981 Scarman Report.'
{But Lord Scarman rejected it as applying to the police since he found that police procedures themselves showed no systematic bias. Macpherson, too, found no general procedural bias; yet he damned the police with the term.}
'What we observed was that there were pockets of racism in the Met.'
{So why didn't Macluny say just that?}
'We thought people would attend to our use of the sister phrase, 'unwitting racism.''
{But 'unwitting racism' is an even more awful allegation. No-one can ever defend against it -- especially if it carries no implication of general procedural bias.}
'We certainly did not wish to criminalize dinner-table discussions of race. We had seen video footage of youths in the home of one of them proudly displaying claw hammer heads and swastikas and mouthing racist remarks. This behaviour would have been illegal in the street, so we didn't see why it should necessarily be non-criminal in the home.'
{The whole point of being a lawyer is to be able to think these things through. Obviously such behaviour in the home threatens no-one. And to draw the line between it and racist joking in the home would be impossible.}
'We were perfectly aware of the need not to put an accused in 'double jeopardy.' We only wanted retrials if new evidence came to light -- as it can these days from DNA testing.'
{If the state has insufficient evidence, it should not mount a trial in the first place. The state's power is so great, and the consequences of its actions for the individual so great, that it should only have one bite at the cherry. Any lawyer should have known the time-honoured rationale for not allowing 'double jeopardy.' Sir William must have banged his head on one of his parachute jumps.}
WASHINGTON -- Affirmative Racism --
The Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional the program
that promoted blacks, Hispanic and female fire-fighters ahead
of male, non-minorities who scored higher on the promotion exams
for Dallas fire brigade.
NEW YORK (Reuters) -- New York City
police searched for clues to the execution-style murder
of a member of a popular Black hip-hop group, the Lost
Boyz. In 1997, Black rap star 'Biggie Smalls' was shot and killed
in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. The year before, Black
rapper Tupac Shakur was shot and killed in Las Vegas.
PORTLAND, Oregon (CNN) -- In the biggest
liability verdict ever against the tobacco industry, a
jury ordered Philip Morris to pay $81 million to the family of
a man who died of lung cancer after smoking Marlboros for four
decades. {The verdict is expected to
be overturned on appeal. But the mockery that is made of justice
by such antique cases brought by voluntary 'victims' cannot be
overestimated. No one by 1965 could have reasonably believed his
tobacco supplier was serving as his medical consultant.}
NEW HAVEN, Connecticut (U-WIRE) --
Lawyers for the four Orthodox Jewish students who brought a religious
discrimination case against Yale University last year have
now presented their argument in the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Second Circuit. ….In the lawsuit, the students claim
their religious tenets prohibited them from living in the co-educational
environment of Yale dormitories, in which they would be frequently
forced to encounter members of the opposite sex and to witness
the sexual behavior of others.
YALE UNIVERSITY -- Free Speech -- Stickers
reading Celebrate Gay Avarice, Celebrate Gay Lust, Celebrate Gay
Envy, Celebrate Gay Sloth, Celebrate Gay Gluttony, Celebrate Gay
Wrath, and Celebrate Gay Pride appeared all over campus during
Gay Pride Week. Gay students were in tears as they worked for
hours to remove them all.
NEW YORK, 2 iv '99 Reuters Health -- Despite
recent advances in gene transfer technology, such technology
will most likely not have an impact on human evolution, according
to a New York researcher. Sientific attempts to selectively confer
specific traits upon animals using gene transfer have "`failed,''
and any speculation that such a concept may be possible in humans
is ''scientifically unjustified,'' writes Dr. Jon W. Gordon, a
researcher at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York. His article
is published in the March 26th issue of Science.
VIRGINIA (http://www.wdn.com/cir/wnew.htm)
-- Feminazie rapohysteria -- The Center for Individual
Rights is defending Tony Morrison, a Black athlete at Virginia
Tech who was accused of raping Christy Broznkala, a White student.
Despite being cleared by a criminal grand jury and a university
judicial committee, Ms. Brzonkala, aided by various feminist organizations,
brought suit against Mr. Morrison under the federal Violence Againts
Women Act.
LONDON -- Statute of Limitations --
After eight hours deliberation by a jury, Anthony Sawoniuk, 76,
was sentenced to life imprisonment for shooting Belarussian Jews
as a keen Nazi recruit when he was age 19, in 1942. The trial
only became possible after legal changes in Britain in 1991.
LONDON (Times 2 iv '99) -- Promotion
for lawyers to 'silk' [Queen's Counsel] this year reflect craven
affirmative racism. Whereas White male applicants stood
a 12% chance of selection, males from 'minorities' had an 18%
success rate, and women were successful in 20% of cases.
EDINBURGH -- Feminazism -- A 54-year-old
Prison Officer, a father of seven, twice touched the breasts and
once touched the fully clothed bottom of a lady Prison Officer
in 1995. Wow! Has the sky fallen in? Yes! The male officer has
been suspended on full sick pay for 'stress' since 1997, he has
now been fined £1,750 by a court of law, and a disciplinary
hearing will commence at his place of work, Longriggend Remand
Centre which itself faces closure as a result of ongoing staff
tensions at the establishment. -- A high price for intolerance
of a little hanky-panky!
WOLVERHAMPTON Paedosadism Two
men of age 49 have been charged by police with conspiring to murder
children aged from 2 to 7.
LARGO, Fla. -- Race Realism -- A sobbing
Black Baptist minister, Rev. Henry Lyons, was jailed for five
years for racketeering and grand theft. Among his frauds, Lyons
stole $250,000 from the Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai B'rith
intended to rebuild Southern Black churches destroyed by fires.
COMPTON, Calif. -- Guns Realism --
A 12-year-old boy saved his shopkeeper grandmother from a beating
and armed robbery when he fatally shot one of two suspects attacking
the older woman, police said. The other assailant fled. "He
thought his grandmother's life was in danger," said Lt. Danny
Sneed, a police spokesman. The boy would not be charged. "He
was noticeably upset and distraught, but had done what he thought
he had to do and composed himself enough to give us a statement."
IQALUIT, Nunavut, Canada -- Eskimo ooops Inuit
performers danced all day at a celebration for Canada's newest
territory, Nunavut, carved from the Northwest Territories after
more than 20 years of lobbying by Inuit leaders. Multicultural
PC Canada had bitten the bullet and allowed this segregated
development but was embarrassed to find that the Eskimos planned
immediately to embark on an orgy of seal killing.
LAGOS (Reuters) -- Nigerian prostitutes threatened nude street protests at World Youth Cup soccer matches after being barred from hotels by tournament organizers.
Accused of 'rape' by his own biographer, Arthur Koestler might have recalled Oscar Wilde's reflection: "Every man has his disciples -- and it is always the Judas who writes the biography."
Certainly, David Cesarani's Arthur Koestler: A Homeless Mind (London:Heineman) is an astonishing attack on Koestler for having put his youthful Zionism behind him while becoming a less than puritanically devoted communist. Quite unable to sympathize with a passionate young man who liked sex,* scribbling, socialism** and the stage, the po-faced Prof. Cesarani deplores Koestler's tiring of rural spadework and the worship of the Hebrew language that he encountered in blessed Israel of the 1920's; and Cesarani gives Koestler little credit for his brave missions behind Nationalist lines in Spain.
However, it is the Cesarani's account of Koestler's 'rape' of Jill Craigie in 1952 that will astonish any reader familiar only with the brouhaha in the British press. Inevitably, any casual reader of newspaper accounts of another's sins assumes 'there is no smoke without fire'. But in this case it turns out that the 'rape victim', Mrs Michael Foot, having escaped from the 'violent brute' who had thrust himself upon her in her bijou Hampstead kitchen while the pair were washing up after drinks and lunch, not only declined to seek nearby police help but actually decided to rejoin her 'assailant.' Even a Harvard coven of 1990's PC feminazies would probably agree, from Craigie's story as told to Cesarani, that she had been asking for something -- trouble at least. Here is Cesarani's account in full (pp. 399-401).
//////
It was on one of these
outings [looking for a new place to live in London] that Koestler
raped Jill Craigie, the wife of his friend Michael Foot, MP. On
4 May he rang up excitedly announcing that he had decided to settle
in England and wanted to see 'an English pub.' Craigie explained
that Foot was away on a 'Brains Trust' but Koestler was insistent
and since she recalled his wonderful hospitality at Verte Rive
[the Koestlers' home near Paris] a few summers ago felt she could
not refuse. He arrived in his rented car and she gave him a 'Jill
Craigie tour of Hampstead', pointing out the homes and pubs inhabited
and frequented by local celebrities. They went to several pubs
and Koestler drank in each one, although Craigie stuck to ginger
beer. His behaviour was quite proper until he demanded that she
make him lunch at her place. Craigie objected that she had no
food at home (she had been working on a film) and countered that
a roast beef lunch would be more fitting. He would not take no
far an answer and bullied her into making him an omelette. {That
is: he 'bullied' her into leaving a pub with him, walking or driving
past Craigie's neighbours (set off only by the tiniest gardens
from Hampstead's tiny streets), and admitting him to her home
-- all while she was stone cold sober.}
After the meal Koestler helped to wash up. When the last plate
was done and Craigie set down the dish cloth he 'suddenly grasped
my hair, he pulled me down and banged my head on the floor. A
lot.'
Craigie thought he had gone
mad. They had 'the most terrible, terrible fight' as she struggled
back to full consciousness and tried to resist him. He was 'very,
very violent', but she was young and healthy and managed to work
herself free and rush out of the house. Once outside she sat on
the steps, her clothes torn, and wondered what to do. She had
no money. Her nearest friends, Jenni and Nye Bevan, were away
in Nye's constituency. Hampstead police station was nearby, but
she was scared that such a recourse would lead to awful publicity
for her and Michael. {Why?
She could have summoned the police and then declined to pursue
charges -- just as many women do.} She
would be accusing a world-famous novelist of rape; they had been
on a pub crawl and she had admitted him into her home by herself.
It did not look good. {Indeed!
A little harmless flirtation while her husband was away had become
a private date behind closed doors and then spun out of control.}
So
she waited in the hope that Koestler would calm down and emerge
on his own accord. He did not and she went back inside, expecting
to find him come to his senses. 'And so I took a chance and went
back, which was rather stupid of me. {You
can say that again!} And
it started all over again: very, very violent, mostly pulling
hair.' He even placed his hands on her throat and she feared he
would murder her. 'In the end I was overborne. I was terribly
tired and weakened. There's a limit to how much strength one has
and he was a very strong man. And that was it.'
Koestler showed no contrition
afterwards. As he left he merely gave her a side glance and said:
'I thought you always had a bit of a yen for me.' Craigie had
done nothing to give such an impression {What!
In North London of 1952 -- near what was later to be Mrs Thatcher's
constituency -- it was unheard of for women to invite drunken
men in for private lunches at all, let alone if they didn't fancy
them!}
and during their outing together he had not indicated that he
was attracted to her.
\\\\\\
No: Jill Craigie figures no further in Cesarani's text. Her eminent husband would have been well placed to pursue vengeance, whether formal or informal, on Koestler; but readers are not even told whether or when he (or anyone else) was told of the alleged date rape.
If such a grievance can be pursued with public approval by any Judas of a biographer, without even the benefactor of a man's will defending him, think of the countless terrified men in PC Britain of 1999!
(And why was Koestler not more amorous in the pub? Decorum forbids the thought that, with some girls, a man needs the drink to take effect on him….)
* Koestler was sexually initiated at age 16 with the young maid at a boarding house -- like many lads of those days. ("After the initial mishaps," recorded Koestler, comparing the relationship with his earlier masturbatory thrills, "this proved even more delightful.") Later, Cesarani records Koestler remarking without horror that Frenchmen would sometimes introduce their wives to their mistresses -- "sadistic performances", thinks Cesarani; and Koestler is also faulted by his biographer for approving of brothels as helping to keep down homosexuality (p. 66). Nor is Cesarani sympathetic to Koestler's attempt to write up Magnus Hirschfeld's famous sex clinic in Berlin, despite Koestler himself noting moralistically the paradox that cheap and easy sex in Weimar Germany had not led to greater happiness, and despite Koestler's own sexological writings of the 1930's being perfectly sound and properly attentive to the need for female orgasm. Unsurprisingly, Cesarani declines to accept Koestler's own insistence that he was searching for the perfect woman as he went from one girl to another (including teenagers): what Koestler himself called his "phantom chase after Helena" in his twenties is described by his biographer as his "lust and perpetual infidelity." Even the rigours of communism did not constrain Koestler as Cesarani would have liked: "[By 1931, at the great age of 26,] he was sleeping his way through Berlin at the rate of one girlfriend every four to six weeks." (It was fortunate that Koestler was good at sex. Though his first marriage came about in 1935 as a political affair (to give a communist partner Hungarian citizenship and thus allow her to stay in Switzerland) it was this partner, Dorothea, who later worked tirelessly and by no means unemotionally to free Koestler from prison in Seville -- a campaign which had the support of Winston Churchill MP.)
** It should not be thought that Koestler's enthusiasm for communism was pie-eyed. By 1932, commissioned to write a book about the marvels of Russia under Stalin, Koestler was complaining to his hosts in Kharkov that he saw starvation everywhere and that the newspapers' lies about it "make me sick." When his 480-page book was finished in 1933 it was not well received because of undue frivolity and insufficient praise for Stalin. Friends in Berlin of 1933 remarked that he was undergoing an agonising self-appraisal and was apprehensive of deception and disappointment. On arrival in Paris (fleeing Berlin after the Reichstag Fire) Koestler was deemed by the leading Communist organizer, Willi Münzenberg, to have too little of "the urge for subordination and anonymous usefulness" that Communism required. Koestler later admitted that he had only ever wanted to be 'an amateur communist'; but his integrity was such that, even after two months imprisoned in Seville, with Republican fellow prisoners being executed daily, he declined to say a word in favour of Franco to expedite his own release.
The History of Suicide
(Georges Minois, Johns Hopkins
University Press, £UK30) is a book with many gaps in its
history -- e.g. for Stefan Zweig and Marilyn Monroe. As
reviewer Rhoda Koenig noted (Literary Review iv '99), a
book's being published by a university press is today "no
guarantee of probity." However, it does a good job of tracing
the arguments about suicide.
Essentially,
for early Christians suicide was a good thing -- as in the case
of Jesus, who essentially condemned himself to death by declining
to take back his threat to destroy the Jerusalem Temple and his
own (usually pretty hesitant) claim to be the Jews' promised Messiah.
By the time Emperor Constantine (274-337) arrived to back Christianity,
314ADff., the remaining leaders of the Church were a much-martyred
collection of old crocks with many missing body parts; and St
Ambrose (339-397), who himself forced Emperor Theodosius the Great
to do public penance for the massacre of Thessalonica, advised
"Let us not flee death -- the Son of God did not."
Later things changed as the
mediaeval church sanctioned ownership of people. Obviously it
was a swizz if a perfectly healthy serf or other underling with
years more service in him could up and commit suicide with impunity!
Thus all the property of a 'self-murderer' became liable to seizure
by the state. However, the Renaissance saw more liberal attitudes.
Shakespeare's plays contain fifty-two suicides and John Donne
wrote the first tract urging decriminalization -- though calling
himself 'Jack' Donne just to be on the safe side.
Preparation to face death
can greatly enhance the usefulness of a person to a cause. Arthur
Koestler was actually very courageous when his moments of trial
came; but, to prepare for what was his third mission behind Nationalist
lines, he had taken a syringe and enough morphine to kill him
-- and only failed to commit suicide because there was no water
available to dilute the morphine at the moment of his arrest.
Because of its reluctance
to condemn suicide (which eventually became legalized in 1961),
Britain became known in Europe as suicide-prone, which Continentals
attributed to the weather.
Edinburgh, 26 March 1999
To: The Editor; The New Republic; 1220 19th Street, N.W.; Washington, D.C. 20036. (submissions@tnr.com)
Dear Editor,
It was interesting
to learn from Tamar Jacoby of America's new "race conscious"
forms of "pipeline" education which select Black students
and groom them for careers in maths and science ('Color blind:
the African American absence in high tech', New Republic,
29 iii 1999). And it was reassuring to understand that the charge
of "reverse racism" against such expenditures was met
by including a "sprinkling of white students" on most
of the new courses.
Even before cost-benefit analysis
of such intensively "mentored" schemes for increasing
the representation of black people in high-tech industries, a
hope is possibly dawning. Though American educators are not allowed
to mention IQ, could they now have hit on a backdoor route to
treating students -- both black and white -- according to ability?
Large-scale educational research reviewed by psychologists in
Iowa* has lately suggested that real benefits accrue to all students
if they are taught in groups that are homogeneous for general
intelligence. In particular, there are marked gains in attainment
and self-confidence to minority students (black and Hispanic)
and to girls who are so taught. And "pipelining" sounds
selective for both ability and motivation.
It is to be hoped that the
IQs of "pipelined" students are taken and that the source
of students' hoped-for vocational successes can eventually be
traced -- perhaps to such homogeneity. To restore education-according-to-ability
might give the biggest possible boost to state-educated students
of all kinds after years of egalitarian ideology condemned them
to hopelessly mixed and dumbed-down classes.
I am yours etc., Chris
Brand {author of 'The g Factor', Wiley, 1996}.
* See e.g. Personality & Individual Differences 24, 6, 899-900, 1998, 'Fast track learning comes of age.' A review of: Camilla P. BENBOW and David LUBINSKI, 1996, Intellectual Talent: Psychometric and Social Issues. Baltimore and London : The Johns Hopkins University Press. Pp xii + 428. By: Chris Brand. (The review is summarized at http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/McDNLArch4b.htm.)
BOSTON, Mass. (U-WIRE) -- Harvey Silverglate, the attorney who defended British au pair Louise Woodward against murder charges in 1997, criticized restriction of free speech on college campuses during a talk at Boston University. Silverglate, a staunch First Amendment advocate, said free speech can often be misconstrued as a personal attack when it involves frank discussion of sex, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation. "Taking action against a person or a group based on their sex, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation is not the same as speaking about it," said Silverglate, who was appearing to promote his new book, The Shadow University. Silverglate singled out Harvard University's code of conduct for criticism. The code is too vague and represents a restriction on free speech rights for students and faculty, he said.
NEW YORK -- Maternal choline intake may have a permanent effect on the development of memory and learning centers in the fetal and infant brain, according to rat research. ``For the first time, we have shown that the very structure of the brain is influenced by what mothers eat during pregnancy and that this specific nutrient, choline, appears to be critical,'' explained lead author Dr. Steven Zeisel of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The B vitamin choline plays an important role in the construction of cell membranes -- the outer sheath that keeps cells intact. The nutrient is also a precursor molecule to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and other chemical messengers in the brain. ….According to Zeisel, ''foods rich in choline include eggs, meat, peanuts and dietary supplements. Breast milk contains much more of this nutrient than many infant formulas.''
Found at a website which presents pro-Bell Curve and anti-Bell Curve views contributed to Commentary viii '95. (Other academic contributions at http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~rcl/Commentary.html are from Leon Kamin, Richard Nisbett, Charles Land and Phil Rushton; and there is a full reply to critics by Charles Murray. )
//////
….I cannot for the life of me understand why some of the
most respected scholars in the country stoop to ad hominem
attacks. It is one thing for TV talk-show host Phil Donahue to
violate elementary canons of civil discourse by accusing Mr.
Murray, without any justification, of having been proto-Nazi
in adolescence. It is quite another for Harvard scientist Stephen
Jay Gould to make only slightly more sophisticated but equally
spurious and damning allegations.
I have watched in despair
as Christina Hoff Sommers, Michael Levin, Carol Iannone, Steven
Goldberg, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Thomas Sowell, and dozens
of other first-rate scholars have been vilified for following
where evidence and logic lead. Without minimizing their suffering,
I would say that Charles Murray has been the subject of an academic
inquisition which is without parallel in recent memory. It makes
me ashamed of my profession to realize that smear tactics are
the weapons of choice in the battle over ideas for people trained
and paid to lead a "life of the mind." Truly, in the
words of Thomas Jefferson, "I weep for my country when I
reflect that God is just."
LLOYD B. LEWIS Savannah
College of Art and Design Savannah, Georgia.
\\\\\\
A popularly written account of modern debates about evolution is provided by Andrew Brown's The Darwin Wars: How Stupid Genes Became Selfish Gods (Simon & Schuster). Yes, the original modern troublemaker, E.O.Wilson, is there with his revelations of sex differences. Then came the London breakthroughs that altruism did exist -- but was selfish after all, as especially revealed in Margo Wilson's findings on violence by step-parents and David Haig's work on the battle between any pregnant mother and the foetus growing within her. Above all, Brown's book covers the Battle of the Giants between culture-devoted Stephen Jay Gould and gene-devoted Richard Dawkins -- showing that the whole argument is still about 'nature versus nurture' even though evolutionists all claim to have 'gone beyond' such arguments and decline altogether to discuss modern data on heritability of IQ. (Gould is prepared to rubbish Lombroso and Spearman, and Dawkins has said the occasional word sympathetic to eugenics {McDNL 1 ix '97}; but that's about it.) Brown's book is slightly more pro-Gould than pro-Dawkins, but that may make it a particularly usable account in the right hands. One day, the followers of Darwin and Galton will surely see eye to eye!
PS Reviewing the book for Science (7 v '99), Canadian philosopher-psychologist Michael Ruse was disappointed that Brown's book didn't contain more about the scientists'sex lives; but many readers will be glad that Brown didn't take Ruse's advice to explain the finer points of scientific technique….
The battle between relatively reductionist Dawkins and interactionist mystifier Gould has now reached the popular market as Gould's disciple, Niles Elderedge has replied (The Pattern of Evolution, Freeman £UK18) to Dawkins' Christmas book (Unweaving the Rainbow {McDNL 8 xii '99}). Essentially, Gould's view is that a lot of funny and exciting and, above all, revolutionary things might have happened in evolutionary history -- notably the emergence of rather a lot of species around 540 million years ago, and the later emergence of others rather suddenly. In contrast, Dawkins reckons that a 10,000-year period is not really a very short time for major shifts to take place, especially since animals can create their own ecosystems and will also supply each others' effective environments, thus providing further competitive stimulus for change. Neither side makes a lot of room for the arrival of self-organization or consciousness as a factor that would speed up evolution -- but, perhaps strangely (as Thomas Nagel observes), it is the left-wing Gould whose holism can seem a little more open to such influences, as also to the influence of 'society.' On his side, Dawkins is more committed as a rationalist to talking only of plausible (modellable, or even testable) influences and he regards Gould as a woolly romantic. Unfortunately, he weakens his case by his reluctance to use data showing the substantial heritability of complex -- and fully 'mysterious' -- personality traits and the g factor.
A fine defence of the Darwinian approach to morals was
recently offered by the young Oxford philosopher, Galen Strawson.
In discussion, the grand old anti-Marxist trooper, Les Kolokowski
(author of Freedom, Fame and Denial), put forward his view
that there was such a thing as evil and that, along with
good, it might exist quite regardless of the existence of God.
In reply, Strawson was happy that, on a games theory analysis,
even the most co-operative evolved systems would be bound to throw
up liars and cheats from time to time. But he didn't see anything
more sinister than that -- except that, in order to be a really
effective cheat, one might be well advised to have some genes
allowing one to deceive oneself.
And did the young philosopher
believe in God? Not much! -- "It is an insult to God to
believe in God," he memorably said. "One cannot
seriously be meant to believe that God created suffering. …Whatever
the nobility of the search for God by theologians and philosophers
in the past, today God would have most respect for agnostics and
atheists. …I probably have a religious temperament, but I
do not have the belief."
Thought for the Week:
"Good is the reality of which God is the dream. God himself
cannot exist."
Iris Murdoch.
{A McDougall Millennium Essay, analysing the 'evil' of the Hitlerzeit, is in preparation.}
'Fault-finding lecturer unfairly sacked' was the headline
in the Times (2 iv '99) for Robert Slack of the University
of North London. Accompanied by a nice picture of a smiling Dr
Slack, in a green suit and multicoloured tie, and with a shoulder
bag, the story was that Slack's right to criticize a colleague
had been vindicated.
A lecturer for eleven years,
Slack, 50, had wearied of explaining to his students the many
errors in their understanding of business finance that resulted
from their reading a book written by one of his colleagues, Humphry
Shaar. Slack reckoned he could find no less than one thousand
errors in Shaar's textbook, Finance in Organisations; and
he said so. Charged by his 1994-created 'university' with 'what
amounted to a campaign of harassment against Dr Shaar', Slack
learned the unfavourable result of one phase of the inquiry into
him and told Shaar, when he bumped into him at a tube station,
"You're going to die, sunshine." Two days later, Slack
was given a first and final written warning for his remark and
sacked.
Now, however, Slack has been
found to have been unfairly dismissed. The Employment Tribunal
that heard his case understandably felt that the 'warning' to
Slack should have pre-dated the conduct for which he was sacked.
This case will be a consolation
to race realists everywhere who get sacked without any warning
at all. Yet it will not have done Dr Slack himself much good.
For what is his compensation for unfair dismissal? A mere £UK13,000!
Yes, this sum -- the maximum
that an Employment Tribunal can award, a mere five months' salary
for a typical academic -- is Dr Slack's compensation for the loss
of his job and any resulting upheaval and indeed unemployability.
Nor has either Dr Slack or Dr Shaar had the satisfaction of any
investigation of the rights or wrongs of the original academic
allegations. What lunacy! Verily, British academics are nothing
but toilet attendants in holiday camps -- well advised to keep
their mouths shut and just smile genially at the customers and
each other!
Mormonism is the fastest
growing religion in the world. I wonder how it competes with Islam.
It offers some of the same things to men: a wife who will stay
at home and raise tons of children; plenty of missionary work
(obligatory); and a good degree of Western capitalist sensibility
(Mormons are no slouches when it comes to making lots of money
-- it's one of the reasons we were hated so early on).
Now, if we could only revive polygyny!
That way, any male can still have high evolutionary fitness; and
some of the women might be well pleased in that they don't have
to care for so many children and can devote resources to themselves
and their careers.
So desperate is well-known Canadian academic psychologist Stanley Coren to bring in cash to his luniversity that he has done a survey of which doggie-lovers get on best with which dogs (Why We Love the Dogs We Do). Yes, the empirical findings for N=6000 have riveted the press.
Yet what is the merit in these recommendations when no-one is told the strength of effect that were found, let alone any underlying theoretical rationale that could lend the findings interest and plausibility? With wives, it is well known that it is extremely hard to predict compatibility. Sometimes it seems a wife should be similar (e.g. in extraversion); sometimes it seems she should be different (in dominance); sometimes it seems she should be more 'feminine' [less psychotic, more neurotic] than her husband; and more often, despite a century of research on this important question, findings are simply a mess -- except that stable couples correlate as high as .45 in IQ and social attitudes (especially conservatism). Can dogs and dog lovers -- in what is for many of them their life's most important relationship -- be much different?…
For useful coverage of US opposition to reverse racism, affirmative action etc., see http://www.adversity.net/bigot.htm.
McDNL readers wishing to escape the antique celebrations of Holy Week may prefer a good book, Satan Wants Me (by R. Irving, Daedalus £UK15). The book comes recommended by Britain's liveliest poet, the penis-envying Fiona Pitt-Kethley (Literary Review iv '99) and contains virgins being sodomized, necrophilia and cascading orgasms -- though no paedophilia, traditionalists can rest assured. Eventually, the female Satan has a child by one of the leading characters; but, with refreshing realism, the child is a bit of a disappointment -- the father finding his Satanic boy's GCSE results decidedly average.
APRIL 13
THIS WEEK:
KOSOVO: THE 'THIRD WAY' WAR WHERE TROOPS ATTACK EVERYTHING BUT EACH OTHER
ILLIBERAL PLEAS AT FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
BIOETHICIST SPARKS CAMPUS FURY
CLINTON SEEKS HATE-SPEECH LAW EXPANSION
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION POLARIZES SOCIETY, SAYS JUDGE
1,000 TEACHERS DEVASTATED BY CHILD
ABUSE CLAIMS
EDINBURGH 12 iv '99 Breaking
news stories are of photos taken by jets of freshly dug 'mass
graves' in Kosovo and of 400,000 (CFMR) or 700,000 (Ms
Albright) previously unnoticed ethnic Albanian Kosovars being
stranded on a mountainside in frightful conditions. Daily, such
horror possibilities are added to mercifully disconfirmed stories
of '10,000 lost Kosovo refugees -- probably made hostages' and
'20 massacred ethnic Albanian teachers in one Kosovo village.'
In Belgrade, bombing continued through the Orthodox Easter holiday,
killing 9 civilians and seriously injuring 16 others on a Belgrade-to-Thessalonika
railway train, though thousands of courageous Serbs assembled
on Brankov Bridge (across the River Sava in Belgrade) to encourage
Nato restraint.
Albania has embarrassed Nato
by offering itself as a jumping-off point for ground troops; but,
whether or not because of Albania's really being one big mountain
and so militarily unsuitable, Nato has sought refuge in expert
proclamations that U.N. authorization would be needed for a land
attack on Kosovo. After twenty days of unheralded humanitarian
neo-warfare, both sides evidently take most satisfaction in the
grisly display of their own casualties on television and both
have suffered massive material losses and expense, but only the
Serbs have achieved any war objectives. Writing in Newsweek,
the UK's Augustus Blair insists on the anti-genocidal credentials
of AmericOtan's multiculturalist crusade to make embittered ethnic
enemies live together. Plainly, neosocialists have regarded the
mere possibility of future ethnic clearances as licensing a breach
of any and every contract and understanding with the West which
Mr Milosevic thought he had while turning up for drinks and chats
about Kosovo at Rambouillet. Yet Nato's high morality in not killing
many people has allowed the clearance of Kosovo which Nato professed
to abominate. Normally in war some clear objectives are formulated,
and even announced; but methods for achieving them remain secret.
Nato has done the reverse.
If Emperor Clinton can now
snatch a face-saving settlement from the jaws of defeat -- as
many Westerners agree he must (Sunday Times 11 iv '99:
'Nato Must Go For Broke'; Daily Torygraph 12 iv '99: 'Let
The Real War Begin') -- PC's next crusade will be a cheaper one:
equally contemptuous of justice and autonomy, yet with the highest
humanitarianism, it will be waged on the unreconstructed of the
West's own countries. The prospect must alarm anyone who
has had to live with the imminent threat of violent crime in humanitarian
and multicultural urban America; or with the thought police of
modern university campuses. Assuming that the military on both
sides in ex-Yugoslavia manage to attack each other for once, instead
of civilians and their 'infrastructure', the best that can be
hoped is that the whole business will end with Russia having to
be invited to join Nato in return for not backing the Serbs or
Kurds and not lending its ICBMs to the Chinese. Such a development
would give Nato a coherence it has lacked since 1989. It would
identify it with the law-governed, ex-Christian, autonomy-respecting
Northern Caucasian peoples; tone down the current Anglo-Saxon
craze for feminism (Ms Albright's picture should long serve as
a dartboard in military canteens); and prevent it doing more than
the (important) task of defending its members against aggression
-- in a world where Nato's aggressive folly in Serbia will make
every self-respecting state seek nuclear and biological weapons.
MEMORY LANE -- From the Preamble to the North Atlantic Treaty, signed Washington DC, 4 iv 1949: "The Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments."
Embarrassments to AmericOtan neosocialist crusaders in Kosovo, er, in armchairs and landrovers (crossings by Nato peacekeepers on to holy Kosovan soil having taken longer than expected) have been:
Fortunately, answers to awkward schoolchildren are in preparation:
Remember to be patient with children who are slow learners. Boys will be, er, boys -- until we re-educate them!
See also below: 'Humanitarian Neosocialism's Intervention Week 3'
From McDNL's Sports Correspondent:
"[Whatever the views of student 'anti-racist'
activists and the easily alarmed 'authorities'] I suspect that
most Florida State University alumni are very open to the idea
of genetic differences between races, since
FSU might well be America's greatest college football factory.
It has produced a long string of black superathletes like Deion
Sanders."
From a colleague of Glayde Whitney --
a letter to the Head of Glayde's Department with copies to colleagues,
saying 'enough is enough' and that free speech must be thrown
overboard by FSU:
….Whitney lauded {David}Duke's book {My
Awakening -- see McDNL review, 16 iii '99}as
an "academically excellent work of social-biological-political
history that has the potential to raise tremendous controversy
and change the very course of history." He compared Duke
to Voltaire, John The Baptist, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Isaac
Newton, Martin Luther, and Galileo Galilei, among others. Yet,
despite Whitney's fulsome paeans to this "remarkable man",
it appears to me that Whitney wishes to avoid any responsibility
for the social consequences of his actions. He wrote, "As
to the meaning he poses for the racial truth he tells, politics
is his realm, not mine." Whitney also wrote that "...I
may personally disagree with many of his [Duke's] specific suggestions,"
but gave no specifics. These mild demurrers in no way legitimize
Whitney's actions, in my view. Academic scientists occupy a position
of public trust and visibility and have a unique forum for presenting
their ideas to the public via the classroom, scientific publications,
speeches and presentations, and other avenues. With such opportunities
come high ethical and moral obligations, it seems to me. It
is not acceptable to make unjustified inflammatory, incendiary,
or racist statements and then hide behind the cloak of "academic
free speech," or to (naively or disingenuously) disclaim
any responsibility for the harmful consequences of such irresponsible
behavior, or to portray oneself as a scientific martyr.
Glayde and I have been harmonious
colleagues in this Department for almost 30 years, and it pains
me greatly to react so critically on this issue. But I find his
actions to be profoundly harmful and embarrassing to our profession,
to this university, and to this Psychology Department. (I should
note that he did not identify himself as an FSU faculty member
in the Foreword, but as a resident of Tallahassee and a former
president of the Behavioral Genetics Association.) I hope that,
as concerned scientists and citizens, we can react constructively
to this contentious issue and erase whatever negative stigma that
may otherwise be attached to our Department or the University.
Dr. Jack Brigham brigham
@psy.fsu.edu Department of Psychology. 9 iv '99.
[Published Tallahassee Democrat Online 14 iv '99, 'Endorsement
of racist writer
is irresponsible, harmful.']
Tallahassee Democrat (APBNews.com),
Correspondence, 'Affirmative
action protects minorities from prejudice':
Professor Glayde Whitney's race-based
views about intelligence only serve to support the continued need
for affirmative action. Whitney's ideas are not new; many historical
examples of his kind of ideology can be cited. Adolf Hitler used
"science" to "prove" the inferiority of Jews
and thus justified the murder of 6 million of them. Notions of
racial supremacy become dangerous when they are the basis of discriminatory
practice.
As columnist Roosevelt Wilson
has asserted, Whitney merely expressed what some whites in positions
of authority and influence already silently believe. Unfortunately,
people who share Whitney's views may not only teach at prominent
universities, but they may also be human resource officers, owners
of small businesses or members of college admissions committees.
Affirmative action protects citizens from discrimination based
on this kind of personal bias. But what do I know? I am a member
of that "smaller-brained, larger-boned" group.
Joan Murphy, Monticello
Drive, Tallahassee; 9 iv '99.
Last year, Peter Singer, an expert on 'bioethics' from Monash University, made a name while on sabbatical in the UK and then landed a job at Princeton. Singer supports euthanasia (by non-benefiting guardians, not by the state) of severely retarded infants and the grossly senile. Outrage attends him, as follows.
//////
Come September, graduate students will have the opportunity to
take Center for Human Values 528: "Questions of Life and
Death" with ethicist and philosopher Peter Singer. But with
one protest down and at least one more to go, New Jersey Right
to Life and Princeton Students Against Infanticide continue to
oppose Singer's summer arrival at Princeton University. The Mercer
County chapter of New Jersey Right to Life -- which initiated
a fall anti-Singer protest -- plans to hold a similar protest
April 17according to New Jersey Right to Life's Director of Public
and International Affairs Marie Tasy. The protest's purpose is
to "call on Princeton University to rescind the appointment
of Peter Singer," she said. "Professor Singer is a danger
to all members of the human family because he believes infants
can be killed. Obviously, he doesn't believe all human beings
are of equal worth and value."
Aside from PSAI's overall
objections to Singer's viewpoints, a statement prepared by the
group also provides a University-specific objection to his appointment.
According to the statement, Princeton's "Commitment to the
Community" forbids behavior that "demeans, intimidates,
threatens, or injures another because of his or her personal characteristics."
"The hiring of Dr. Peter Singer," the statement reads,
"is a blatant violation of Princeton University's policy
of respect for people with disabilities."
Philosophy professor Gilbert
Harman, who has used essays and book excerpts by Singer in his
classes, said he has trouble believing the protesters' real objective
is to oust Singer. "Do you think that could be somebody's
goal? That's an impossible goal. Nobody would do that. The goal
is to get attention for the right-to-life movement. Unless they're
delusional," he said. "These people want to silence
discussion on a very important issue." According to Harman,
the controversy surrounding Singer developed through a mistake.
"He's a straight analytic philosopher. He's been doing this
since 1970. He's gotten involved in this controversy through some
fluke. This stuff isn't different than what most analytical philosophers
think. It could've happened to almost anyone. . . . He has completely
ordinary views about ethics," Harman explained. "I went
to school in the 50s, and my teachers all said things [similar
to Singer's ideas]."
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Hoping to ride the momentum of headlines from Kosovo, Laramie and Jasper, President Clinton asked Congress on Tuesday to extend federal hate crime laws to include offenses based on sexual orientation, gender or disability. The United States, the Reverend Clinton said, is as vulnerable as Kosovo -- to ''old, even primitive hatreds.'' ''It's very humbling. We should remember that each of us almost wakes up every day with the scales of light and darkness in our own hearts, and we've got to keep them in proper balance." ….The President also ordered the Education Department to begin collecting data on hate crimes on college campuses. ….In 1998, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs reported a 108-percent increase in gay-bashing violence that left victims hospitalized. ….Current hate crimes law bans only race-, ethnicity- and religion-based crimes. The Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1999….makes the prosecution of hate crimes easier by deleting the stipulation that the victim is targeted for engaging in certain federally protected activities, such as serving on a jury, voting or attending public school. Clinton endorsed a partnership among AT&T, Court TV, Cable in the Classroom, the National Middle Schools Association and the Anti-Defamation League working with the Justice and Education departments to develop middle-school curricula to combat intolerance. Robert H. Knight of the Washington-based Family Research Council denounced it all as a ''homosexual agenda.'' ''We cannot allow the law to designate less protection for some people than others,'' said Knight. He called the middle-school program an attempt at ''re-educating America's children away from traditional morality under the guise of 'tolerance.''' By contrast, Benjamin Stilp, director of the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said he sees grave consequences in tolerating hate speech on campuses and looked forward to vigorous action by universities to squash free expression of opinion.
-- Once providing constructive opposition to Galton, Burt and the London School, British sociology can't even manage to oppose The Bell Curve or The g Factor and is in a collapsed state --
As McDNL goes to press, Britain's sociologists have been meeting for their annual knees-up in Glasgow. The despairing title for 'keynote' speakers is 'What is sociology for?' No breakthroughs are expected since sociology, once the bastion of the checkable but now discredited doctrine of class-ism {see PERSONALITY, BIOLOGY & SOCIETY, Section XXIII}, has been largely taken over by deconstructibabbling. Observer Laurie Taylor reckons there may be an occasional paper showing -- after controls for age, gender, class, sexual preference, sexual identity, sexual prostheses and 'butch' or 'femme' role-modelling -- that sociology is particularly unpopular with older men in north-west England who like growing turnips. More generally, however, the conference will be preoccupied with complaints about catering facilities, car parking, condom machines, inadequate bar staffing and the controversial keynote 'title.' -- Already, one provisional Althusserian paper called 'What is 'for' for?' regrets the machismic thrusting implication of such a purpose-rich query. <