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So when I voice an opinion it's vacuous moral posturing, but when you do it's a pearl of wisdom? You made judgments regarding my character yesterday, but it's different when it's you, right?

I have no interest in debating anything with you, Soren. I've seen the way you operate. More often than not, you avoid the topic under discussion, but pick a sentence out for ridicule. It's impossible to have any kind of productive discussion with people like you and I don't find you interesting enough to waste my time trying.

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I don't 'have' to do anything. You latched on to the tail end of the debate there. I've explained why I find racism abhorrent. Making the same explanations every time I expressed an opinion would be redundant.

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I didn't see Freediver's comment so I don't know the context in which he made it.

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I just told you exactly what I think of your debating style and why.

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I think it should be noted that this forum seems to be extremely lax with regards to allowing people to express their views freely and really can't be used as an example of why the consequences of openly discussing what I talk about cannot be serious. I've been banned from many forums before being ten times as respectful as I am here (not that I would consider being banned from a messageboard serious).

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The answer to this question is clearly dependent upon one's surroundings. Losing one's job comes to mind; I have read an extensive number of antecdotes of individuals doing things completely unrelated to their profession but ending up with their faces on camera or something unfortunate and being shown the door the next day. This is undoubtably more pronounced in the public sector than the private, where presumably contractual allegiance to diversity is an unconditional requirement of one's employment. I wouldn't doubt this really; for instance, in the U.S army, performance assessments consist in part of probing concerning what one thinks of diversity and affirmative action in the services. I don't know how different things are here, but whatever is on the books I am sure you would be buggered if you even came close to speaking about what people like Soren, Sprint, etc talk about here.

In academia, the situation is even more extreme. Academia is a domain of government first and foremost, but is also the brainstorming grounds where the ideas of society are generated for popular consumption. The mild-mannered, peace-loving and extremely eminent Arthur R. Jensen -- perhaps the most seminal and significant psychometrician of all time -- found himself (and probably still does) so cruelly harassed by students at Berkeley university that for a time had to be assigned several bodyguards to escort him around campus. This was after he found the words "Jensen will perish" scrawled above the door of his office. Arthur Jensen is only one example of academics who speak of race ending up at in the crosshairs of those who declare themselves the tolerant ones; death threats, disruption of their classes, attempted physical attacks, you name it. All very serious if you ask me. When those who are supposed to possess the most accepting and scrutinizing of minds are capable of savagery of this nature we know as a society that we are crossing, or perhaps have crossed, the threshold into barbarism.

Politics, even personal relationships I am sure are affected daily by zealous causeheads of this nature. Relationships are bought and sold more than ever before on the basis of what we believe, but because this region is a domain for the enlightened in a way that no other such 'buying and selling' is no doubt more frequent and more severe.

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Disagree. Well, not entirely.

Criticising another culture is prfectly alright and should not be regarded as racist, just as criticising one's own is not racist. Culture is the product of intentional human behaviour and so we are all qualified to criticise all cultures if we are to treat their members are our equal - rather than infantile creatures who do not share our own ability to take responsibility for our actions and customs  (whether we are right or wrong in our judgement of other cultures is another question).

Race, being completely beyond human agency, is is a different matter. It may well be that a  majority of a race adheres to an inferior culture but the individuals of that race must be given the chance to leave or go beyond their culture and individually, adopt a better culture, either ntirely or in parts that are inferior. V.S. Naipaul is my example for this.

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The problem is that many simply do not. Many of the things we talk about here are simply taken for granted here -- honesty, obligations, responsibility -- but are conspiciously absent from many regions of the world. These can be tricky verbal concepts of a particularly abstract nature, and the capacity for generating abstractions from the environment around you depends not only upon that environment but the individual that engages with it.

The problem, Soren, is you do try to treat a large majority of the world as if it is simply is not infantile. This is not the case. This human race is filled to the brim, overwhelmingly, with those of particularly simplistic, seemingly undeveloped and child-like minds concerned primarily with shallow instant-gratification -- those who are filled with a naive, playful sense of wonder at the mindnumbingly prosaic. You cannot disentangle a culture from predilections such as these, because that culture is ultimately dictated by them; a culture is kept in check by the biological constraints of the people that create it. Being surrounded by the culture of another indeed can uplift and transform a population to some extent, but it is ultimately impermanent and can never truly be fully imparted. And when those others leave and with it their controlling influence.. well, you end up with Detroit.

My apologies for misinterpreting your own views, Soren.

I do agree with you that there are in some cases some individuals of different races who indeed do possess a genuine admiration for both Western civilization and the Caucasians that developed it. In the grand scheme of things, however, they are rare and far between, which you yourself acknowledge. Theoretically, acceptance of a prospective immigrant on this basis should not be that dangerous for either the further existence of Western culture or White people themselves, because non-whites like this frankly barely exist thus under such a scheme migration would be reduced to a near undetectable trickle rather than the inundation that we are accustomed now.

There are still problems however that may arise even if we do opt to the course of allowing only these minorities, which I myself am wary of. There is also the matter of who we are physically, even more important, say, to the national aesthetic as the architectual designs we use to construct the components of our settlements. Though a tiny number of non-whites would likely not endanger this very much.

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Do you read Theodore Dalrymple, by any chance?

aikmann4 wrote on Feb 21^st, 2010 at 5:10pm:


Who doesn't??  Of course! And Roger Scruton.

I'll explain it to you, Soren.

I find racial prejudice abhorrent because I don't think it's fair to discriminate against anybody because of race, sexual orientation or anything else that has nothing to do with whether or not they can be a productive member of our society.

Prejudice, especially based on such superficial things as these is dangerous and unproductive.


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I agree with all of these except the last one. Once citizenship is given, the person should become an Australian with the same rights and responsibilities as the rest of us. What could be done about citizens that were born in other countries who start families here? Would you throw them all out or separate them? Neither seems very fair to the innocent parties involved.