So, lets talk about racism for a minute

[DJjaffacake]

no amount of Socialist

Not to completely miss the point, especially since I do agree with a lot of what you said to some degree, but morality has nothing to do with socialism, and calling someone socialist is not some kind of insult unless one knows nothing about political ideology, which does not seem to otherwise be the case with you.

 

[Zen Toombs]

You said, "I can not abide by someone who thinks another race is less intelligent." well what about another country?

Thinking another country is less intelligent is ethically wrong as well.

By the context, I assume your comment was directed at me, and in reference to my distaste for Nazi ideology. For one, said distaste is not directed at the German people, and is directed at the ideology. For two, I do not think that Nazi's were unintelligent - the opposite was often true. But their intelligence does not make them factually correct or moral, and my only claim is that their ideology is both factually incorrect and immoral.

Just a side note, The Geneva convention is only ever obeyed to the letter when it's convenient to those who are best represented on the world stage.

See: The Vietnam War, and Agent Orange Aftermath

Conceded. However, just because the Geneva Convention is only followed when it's convenient, does that mean that morality has no place in war? Does that make those massacres done by America and other massacres done by other countries okay?

 

[Zen Toombs]

Wow, you really are liberally basted in sanctimony aren't you?

Please do not make comments in an insulting tone. Let's keep this generally civil for the R&P boar... wait, why is this in Off-Topic?

Spoiler: spoilered for space

That is a basic tenant of free law and society. One gets to choose what one does, even if that is "morally incorrect". That is the entire point of law. I may choose to help, indeed I often personally often do (not Aborigines, I live in the UK but whoever I choose to assist). What you advocating and what is so unpleasant is as stautory duty to "help". You are removing people's ability to choose, you are subsituting your morality for the wider population's, subverting the State to your own ends, no matter how well meaning that is wrong. These are the actions of a totalitarian. Sure it's a "slight" advantage for a "tiny" sliver of the population now but what about next week when you decide vegitarians have had a hard time? Or people who wear red t-shirts? In the UK they are already suggesting that children from "bad schools" should be allowed in to university when they have worse grades that people from "good schools". Utterly unworkable and unfair.

Discrimination of any sort is discrimination plain and simple, no amount of Socialist "we are so moral, it's for the right reasons" nonsense will change that. You sir, in your desire to claim the moral high ground, are advocating a small and controlled form of bigotry that has the potential to grow. And you are, despite your vehemence and belief in your own rectitude, completely wrong.

I agree that people should have the freedom to choose, even if their choice is "wrong". However, your later statements are disanalogous. Unlike vegetarianism or red-shirt wearing, a person's race and class of birth are not their choice. Individuals are losing a number of opportunities and losing the ability to make choices because of those things that are not their choice. If the means are available it is the moral thing to ensure that everyone begins at least at a minimally decent level, almost all of us live in a place that has those means.

I do not propose pulling down those who are lucky enough to begin above the starting line of life.[footnote]I'd argue that there are more than a few who begin after the finish line in this analogy, but that is neither here nor there.[/footnote] However, because we have the means it is the moral thing to do to ensure that everyone at least begins at the starting line.

 

[DJjaffacake]

Words that have encouraged me to use a completely unrelated thread to discuss UK politics

It is a common misconception (at least from my point of view) on these forums that Labour are a socialist or mid left party. Since the whole New Labour business they have shifted to being more centre left than the Lib Dems i.e. liberals. I have to agree with you though that all three major political parties advocate this utter nonsense. They force candidate lists on constituencies that are all women, all black people etc. thereby completely undermining the fundamental right to choose that is democracy.

 

[SEXTON HALE]

It would be intresting to see these perks of being aboriginal revoked.
The backlash of seconary discrimination would be countered by the backlash of initial discrimination.
They might even just cancel each other out.
But rather violently as in the case of most opposite forces coming into contact with each other.

 

[Agayek]

Extremely different is questionable. What constitutes extreme?

Well I don't think an unbiased study is very possible. The kids would need to be raised in a similar environment, have a good sample, things like that.

When did "extremely different" come into the picture? I certainly never said it. I said there's likely less differences between races than there are between sexes. How'd you extrapolate extremely different from that?

Also, an unbiased study is very much possible. Go to the inner city of any large American city and you will find people of every race and creed you can imagine, all living in more or less the same conditions since birth.

The problem is that the issue is so charged that any study that looks into it is going to be tainted by something. There's simply too much social outrage to be had if it comes back and says "yes, generally whites are smarter than blacks" or whatever. Whoever actually conducts the study (assuming it says something like that) would be out of a job within a week, which is why it hasn't happened yet. It's too much of a risk for minimal gains.

 

[Agayek]

More over, there is consistent anecdotal evidence that suggests the very opposite. Some of our best and brightest scientists in a wide variety of fields are breaking new ground who all come from very different ethnic backgrounds. Maybe the problem lies less with someone's skin color and more to do with someone's financial background. It just seems way more plausible than what he suggests.

I actually agree with you on this one. Knowledge and experience are completely indifferent to genetics and have far more to do with upbringing and money.

What I was trying to get at is that the different races are fundamentally different physically. As such, their brains are almost certainly wired differently. One's not more intelligent than the other, just like a woman isn't smarter than a man, their brains simply work a little differently. I just needed to point out that outright dismissing the chance of there being differences in brain chemistry/structure between the races is idiotic at best, since nigh-everything else is different.

 

[lacktheknack]

Look at the situation in Australia.


White Australians have far greater life expectancies, higher paying jobs, (and higher employment in general), and higher incomes than the Aborigines of Australia.

Some people look at this and think it is sad. I am one of them.

But some of these people take it a step further to respond to the great disparities in Australia between Aborigines and other racial groups, (lets face it, it isn't only whites that have it better than the Aborigines), and try to give them advantages that others don't have so they can catch up, which they would theoretically do given some amount of time, (and one wouldn't expect it to be short given the hard time the Abos have had. I certain;y can't deny that.) But the thing is, the idea of affirmative action here is based on the assumption that aborigines have equal genetic drive to achieve materialistic things and intelligence to whites, Chinese, Indians, etc, and therefore won't need the support forever. I'm not sure this is the case.

I'm going to get a warning for this most likely but that's ok.

I think society should accept that some racial groups are generally better at certain things, so we shouldn't give them special advantages to achieve things in society that, even if it were made slightly easier for them, (compared to groups of people doing well), STILL would not catch up as a people. There are millions of animals on the earth and we have all evolved and are currently evolving. Is it so hard to believe that there are groups of homo erectus/humanoid beings in certain areas of this vast world who have generally significantly lower intellect than other groups of people?

http://jewamongyou.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/aboriginal-vs-slav.jpg?w=510

Guess which skull is the European's and which belongs to the Aborigine. Its not conclusive but it illustrates what I'm trying to say in the general sense.

By the way, I'm just generalizing. I'm sure there are Aborigines who are smarter than I am. Just not on average. If this still makes me a racist, which I imagine it probably does, then let it be so.

You do realize that there's more or less no connection between intelligence and brain size, right?

And that the marginal difference favored SMALL brains.

Your example is invalid.

At any rate, I blame nurture, not nature. Should an Aborigine grow up in identical conditions to a successful Caucasian, I fully believe he would have similar success.

EDIT: Balls, I should Google old knowledge before flaunting it. Still, the intelligence gained from a significantly larger brain is marginal, and the science is fairly inconclusive. So your example is still invalid.

EDIT EDIT: And your example is MOAR invalid, as JoJo pointed out.

 

[Woodsey]

http://jewamongyou.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/aboriginal-vs-slav.jpg?w=510

Even forgetting the rest of your post for a moment, I'm very dubious of that image, which for anyone-else reading is this:

(Supposedly a comparison between an aboriginal skull and a slav skull).

For a start it comes from a blog labelled as "Jew among you" and is apparently dedicated to "race realism". I did a reserve Google image search to find out where it had originally came from and among nuggets like Stormfront and some Nazi forum I found the original source from early 2009, over a year before your link was made:

http://ricercares.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/

It's in Spanish but a quick translate brings up the skulls true identity, human vs Neanderthal! You've been caught red-handed.

And so it was that my arse fell off from laughing.

Fucking classic.

snip

Are you British? The way you phrase things makes me think you're American, but most Americans couldn't give a rat's arse about British politics.

OT: Affirmative action is imperfect, I don't think it should be completely disregarded (this is not to say I think it should exist forever, or that it needs to exist forever). You can complain that having affirmative action for the past few decades is unfair, but that's countering 100s of years of far more severe affirmative action for whites (which we still benefit from).

 

[manic_depressive13]

"I do have the moral high ground", says it all. You have missed the point, I am not calling you insincere, I am saying the opposite: your unswerving belief in your own moral superiority is dangerous and should not be enshrined in law. The law is not your servant, the law is amoral and should reflect the beliefs of all society and protect all society, minority and majority equally. It is no less morally correct to say "from this point forward all people are equal" instead of "these people had a hard time in the distant past so now we must hand them an unfair advantage" but you can't even contemplate that. The law is there to protect us from my prejudice, your prejudice, all prejudice, not to bulldoze poltically correct nonsense into being. Anyway, the silliness about vegetarians, animals and meat suggests you are very young, I expect you'll grow out of it and see the world isn't just black and white, as much as I wish it was, but many shades of grey. Have a good day.

I'm sorry but what? The law isn't amoral, nor should it be. You contradicted yourself in the one sentence. "It reflects the beliefs of all society". What sort of beliefs? Oh right! Moral and ethical beliefs. Nice to see proof that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

And I must be young because I'm a vegetarian? You're the one who doesn't seem to understand that past events can have future consequences.

Good day to you too.

 

[Woodsey]

Are you British? The way you phrase things makes me think you're American, but most Americans couldn't give a rat's arse about British politics.

OT: Affirmative action is imperfect, I don't think it should be completely disregarded (this is not to say I think it should exist forever, or that it needs to exist forever). You can complain that having affirmative action for the past few decades is unfair, but that's countering 100s of years of far more severe affirmative action for whites (which we still benefit from).

I am British, English even! Too true - only we would give a monkey's about our somewhat insular politics.

I'd hope you'd notice as I put "s" in and not "z" and everything! : )

We call it "positive discrimination" here, where as you guys call it "affirmative action" but must admit both terms seem a bit scary to me! I really think State quotas based on race for anything are dangerous. Anyway, sensible arguments abound on both sides, at least in our strand of the thread! I guess that's why we vote!

I'm British too, was just wondering.

(And 'positive discrimination' and 'affirmative action' =/= quotas.)

 

[Agayek]

I'm sorry but what? The law isn't amoral, nor should it be. You contradicted yourself in the one sentence. "It reflects the beliefs of all society". What sort of beliefs? Oh right! Moral and ethical beliefs. Nice to see proof that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Not going to get into the rest of it, but he's right insofar as the law is supposed to be (emphasis here cuz it's important) amoral. It's a set of rules set forth by the society as a limitation on people so that the society can continue to function. It's not supposed to be amenable to any one person's morality or sense of justice.

Now, in practice, it's almost always a reflection of the majority moral code. If that's good or bad is not something I'm qualified to discuss, so I won't comment on it. The base idea of legal theory though is that it is "above" morality, because morality is subjective, and law simply doesn't work as a subjective system.

 

[manic_depressive13]

I'm sorry but what? The law isn't amoral, nor should it be. You contradicted yourself in the one sentence. "It reflects the beliefs of all society". What sort of beliefs? Oh right! Moral and ethical beliefs. Nice to see proof that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Not going to get into the rest of it, but he's right insofar as the law is supposed to be (emphasis here cuz it's important) amoral. It's a set of rules set forth by the society as a limitation on people so that the society can continue to function. It's not supposed to be amenable to any one person's morality or sense of justice.

Now, in practice, it's almost always a reflection of the majority moral code. If that's good or bad is not something I'm qualified to discuss, so I won't comment on it. The base idea of legal theory though is that it is "above" morality, because morality is subjective, and law simply doesn't work as a subjective system.

How can you have laws completely devoid of a moral basis? The very idea that people should not murder others people is a moral ideal. It's not a universal truth. It's just something that the majority of society deems morally reprehensible. If you were to write laws free of some subjective morality you would simply have no laws.

 

[Agayek]

How can you have laws completely devoid of a moral basis? The very idea that people should not murder others people is a moral ideal. It's not a universal truth. It's just something that the majority of society deems morally reprehensible. If you were to write laws free of some subjective morality you would simply have no laws.

No it's not. "Thou shalt not murder" is not a moral stance, in any way, shape or form (though most every moral theory has incorporated it).

What it is is a baseline that is required for a society to function. People must be able to continue to live, otherwise the society collapses and no one can get anything done. And that is the purpose of law: to protect, organize, and further the society as a whole.

Any given society has a handful of basic tenants that you will find in every culture, regardless of time period, religion or moral beliefs. In essence, this boils down to: a) do not use violence against other members of the society, b) contribute towards the future of the society, and c) defend the society from outside aggression.

These three base principles have defined the core of every legal system (even the uncodified ones used by tribal villages and the like) since the dawn of human history, and morality does not factor into any of them.

Now, as I said, in practice most legal systems become a reflection of the majority's moral views. This is the natural progression of having a majority, and I really can't comment if it's better or worse. That's rather irrelevant when it comes to jurisprudence though.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2176104

Here's a link if you want to do some reading. The main point I wanna make is on the first page though:

Positive laws do not rest upon moral laws and common notions of justice furnish no court of appeals from the decrees of the State. The average man confounds law and morality, and identifies the rules of law with the principles of abstract justice. The jurist has to separate these, to show how law differs from morality, and wherein it is independent of it.

Edit: To make it more clear, I am not disagreeing with you that laws have a moral basis. The vast majority of current laws do in fact have a moral basis in the morality of the society. What I'm trying to get at is that law and legal theory are, and should be, separate from morality. Laws are not always right, nor is the right thing always legal. One should never ascribe morality to law (or worse, derive their morality from the law).

 

[ElPatron]

Affirmative action is the worst kind of racism, because if you claim to be against it you become labeled as a racist by bleeding heart left-wingers.

 

[RoonMian]

One more time: There are no different races dividing the human race. People are not dogs or horses. And that is a scientific fact. Geneticists have determined that the genetic variations inside a certain ethnicity (white middle-europeans or natives of the Amazonas delta) are far greater than the differences between the averages of two wildly different ethnicities when compared.

And the fun part is: Anthropologists have basically known that for as long as there is anthropology since you get the same results by measuring physical features making the whole race theory a gigantic fallacy in the best of cases. In the worst it was a hoax to justify the artrocities done by (mostly) white europeans to everyone else in the last 300 years.

I don't like affirmative action. I hate its existence. But something has to be done because since while it is not a racial problem that Aboriginies in Australia have a tough standing in society (I'd really love to punch that guy who posted the two skulls) or muslim kids with a "migration background" have one in Germany it still is a problem. A social problem needing a social solution.

So you're an Australian born with black skin into a family of Abroginies. That basically means you're pretty likely to be fucked. You're chances on a higher education are a lot slimmer than if you were white. You're a lot less likely to be able to rise through social classes than other people. And that is a fact you can hardly escape from and is determined the moment you're born. At least to me that is not acceptable. It goes against any notion of social justice and human rights.

It isn't even a problem of what white people did to them in the past. It's not even about making up for something. It's not about reconciliation. It is about rectifying a tilt in society that is not compatible with our western idea of democracy and human rights.

I don't have a better solution than affirmative action for that. I would just not tie it to the colour of the skin but I don't knowthe actual statistics on that one, maybe tying it to being an Aboriginie is the most efficient way to go about it in Australia. But to those who would do away with affirmative action just like that... What would your solution look like? Just let them fall of the bandwagon? Ever seen the movie "District 9"? That shit is allegoric.

(Sorry for shoddy English, not my first language.)

 

[Agayek]

I don't have a better solution than affirmative action for that. I would just not tie it to the colour of the skin but I don't knowthe actual statistics on that one, maybe tying it to being an Aboriginie is the most efficient way to go about it in Australia. But to those who would do away with affirmative action just like that... What would your solution look like? Just let them fall of the bandwagon? Ever seen the movie "District 9"? That shit is allegoric.

My solution would be to provide (extremely well) state-funded educational systems and placement-assistance programs in the areas such people tend to live in (inner cities, et al). Then it's up to them to make use of it and better themselves, and no one is being discriminated against.

Really, this kind of issue is generally more economic than racial. The only reason is appears racial is because of the systematic oppression and racism that was exhibited by previous generations. I wouldn't restrict it to Abos any more than I would restrict it to blacks or whites. Just fund good schools and the like in the poorer areas, and it would do wonders for furthering their lot in life, without actively discriminating against anyone.

That's my take on it anyway.

PS - Your English is better than several native speakers I've met.