And Cabbages, and Kings - Latest Comments

Re: Immigration and social justice: a reply to Nicholas Soames

niemzo — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 11:13:46 -0000

Well said.

Re: Suspects in criminal investigations should have a right to privacy

consultant — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:37:27 -0000

"On reputation, I am even less sympathetic. I'm highly skeptical of the
right to a reputation. If a newspaper publishes scurrilous rumours
about me, and a reader believes them, then it's not just the newspaper,
but also the reader him/herself who's responsible. After all, if the
reader had simply asked "where is the evidence?", and checked their
newspaper, they would have found none. The problem is a lack of
critical thinking, not simply lies and rubbish from the paper. And
anyway, do any of us even deserve a good reputation? If you want to
think bad thoughts about me, go ahead. Why should I be able to call on
the government to influence your opinion of me?"

Um... I'm not sure you've really thought this through...
If a person is arrested as a suspect in a crime, especially a serious one, and the media writes stories about the arrest and possibly speculates about the suspect, these articles end up all over the web. If you google such a person's name later on, I'm guessing practically all, if not all, articles would state that the person is a suspect in the crime. There would likely not be any articles saying that the person was cleared of charges, certainly not many, and not as prominent search results.

Imagine yourself as an employer, doing a quick internet search to check out a potential employee. Upon seeing the search results identifying your potential employee as a crime suspect, you would more than likely move onto the next applicant. Even if you noticed that some of the articles stated the person was cleared of charges, most people would feel safer skipping the applicant and moving onto the next one. You wouldn't want to be hiring people who are suspicious enough to be suspected of crimes.

The same applies of course for any other searches. Searching stuff about a girl/guy you're interested in for example.

I'm not sure exactly why you think innocent people don't have the right to a reputation. If you were applying for a job at my company and the top search engine results for your name connected you to a crime, I certainly wouldn't hire you. You'd be out of competition for just about every job that requires even moderate background checking.

Re: In defence of travellers’ sites

Giveusabreak — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 04:17:44 -0000

I think you are all missing the point here, they are not travellers they have constructed permanent homes without planning permission and without consideration to others. They do not pay tax on monies earned which is why they can afford lavish cars, lavish caravans and lavish wedding and other ceremonies. It is not always the case that they are filthy and itinerant because a lot are not. But, If they want to live peacefully in the areas they comandere by illegal means, they need to accept that if they do not live by the rules and play by the rules as us non travellers have to then perhaps the perception of gypsies will never change. Most of these so called landowners human rights activists support have property in Ireland also bought with un-taxed income so who is more persecuted? Those of us who struggle to earn to pay our taxes and dues or those who decide they can do as they please and to hell with authority.

Re: “Draw Muhammad Day” is a stupid and destructive stunt

David_Neale — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 09:49:53 -0000

Er... no. http://www.straightdope.com...

Re: A philosophical critique of libertarianism

Trevor — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 16:44:00 -0000

Great post. Pretty much mirrors my own thoughts over the last few years. I want to thank the Tea Party, the Koch brothers, and Ron Paul for showing me how insane libertarianism looks in reality.

Re: “Draw Muhammad Day” is a stupid and destructive stunt

polic — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 16:34:14 -0000

Islam is the worst and most idiotic religion in the world today!
… and it’s always been!
Mohammedans burnt one of the greatest treasures of the world, the library of Alexandria. The library
was the greatest in the ancient world. The fire continued for almost six months, the library was so big. It
took six months for it to be burnt down completely. And the man who burnt it was a Mohammedan,
Calipha. His logic is the logic of the first type of religion. He came with a Koran in one hand and with a
burning torch in the other, and he asked the librarian, “I have a simple question. In this big library, millions
of books are there….”
Those books contained all that humanity had learned up to that time, and it was really more than we
know now. That library contained every information about Lemuria, Atlantis, and all the scriptures of
Atlantis, the continent that disappeared into the Atlantic. It was the ancient-most library, a great preserve.
Had it still been, humanity would have been totally different — because we are rediscovering many things
which had already been discovered.
This Calipha said, “If this library contains only that which is contained in the Koran, then it is not
needed; it is superfluous. If it contains more than is contained in the Koran, then it is wrong. Then it has to
be destroyed immediately. Either way it has to be destroyed. If it contains the same as the Koran, then it is
superfluous. Why manage such a big library unnecessarily? The Koran is enough. And if you say that it
contains many more things than the Koran, then those things are bound to be wrong, because the Koran is
THE truth.”
Holding the Koran in one hand, he started the fire with the other hand — in the name of the Koran.
Mohammed must have cried and wept that day in heaven, because in his name, the library was being burnt.

Re: The War on Drugs has failed: we need an alternative

David_Neale — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 07:46:31 -0000

Update: I've now edited the last couple of paragraphs to make my position clearer.

Re: The War on Drugs has failed: we need an alternative

David_Neale — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 04:07:28 -0000

I agree - and that's why I would certainly decriminalize all drugs. (I'll amend the post to make that clearer.) Drug addiction should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal issue, and no one should be imprisoned for drug use.

But there's a distinction between legalization and decriminalization, and room for discussion about the specific solution that should be adopted for each drug. For cannabis, I support full legalization, and think it should be sold legally, taxed and regulated, just as alcohol now is. For "hard" drugs like heroin, an approach of decriminalization (along with safe injection sites like Vancouver's InSite) might be the best option. In any case, all drugs should certainly be decriminalized.

Re: The War on Drugs has failed: we need an alternative

Franklin Percival — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 19:39:52 -0000

I like the line you are taking, David, but why legalise only cannabis? I have never met an addict reliant on any substance who did not suffer with severe underlying issues. If you look at Transform's 'Blueprint', you'll see that it recommends a tapering approach. The money saved on policing/imprisonment could be devoted to assisting people in need of real help. The last time I tried to have somebody admitted under a Section, couple of weeks ago, they were told that because there was alcohol on their breath they could not be admitted, despite an emergency admission for stomach pumping the year before????

Re: Stop the war on benefit claimants

suirauqa — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:03:59 -0000

Thank you for writing this. I hope this brings about more awareness of the damage to the society these shady organizations like Atos are doing. Thank you also for linking to my blog. Unfortunately, my friend - the blogger - is still in dire straits, as a direct consequence of egregious inequities committed by Atos with - what seems like - impunity.

Re: The church and homophobia: reflections of a disappointed ex-Christian

David_Neale — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 05:19:34 -0000

Well, that was a very long time ago, when I was still a conservative. I've since become a liberal, as will be apparent from my other posts.

But yes, I did go to that conference back in 2008 - and while I don't recall raising the subject specifically, the nasty homophobic attitudes I found among American conservatives were one of the factors in my drift away from conservatism.

(Another was the racism in the conservative movement; I'm very much supportive of immigration and immigrants' rights, and I'm disgusted by the white-supremacist attitudes and the demonization of undocumented immigrants that one encounters on the conservative right. Not just in the US; in Britain we have racist right-wing newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, which whip up hatred against immigrants and spread myths about immigration.)

Re: The church and homophobia: reflections of a disappointed ex-Christian

Bachalon — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 16:24:23 -0000

Hello. How are you? You may not remember me, but we first interacted on pharyngula back in the day over just this issue. I had asked you, when you were scheduled to attend a conference of young conservatives here in America, to ask them about homophobia which was an issue you were puzzled about.

Did you do that? I sort of ran into a few years of crap and wasn't able to keep in touch, but I'd be interested to know if 1) you were able to attend, and 2) if you asked those questions (and if so, what answers you got and how that affected you).

Re: The church and homophobia: reflections of a disappointed ex-Christian

Guest — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 15:23:09 -0000

In that case, I see this differently. I don't just see it as a marriage equality, but also as an unjustifiable restriction against religious groups who are willing to perform same-sex marriages. Not only should those who wish to perform same-sex marriages be allowed to do so, but same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

For me, being told I couldn't marry would be pretty close to being told I couldn't live as I'd wish to live, which is far too close to being told I couldn't be happy.

What does the change actually provide? It doesn't really effect anyone in a negative way. All it does is make a group of people happy. I don't see why that decision shouldn't be taken as soon as possible.

Re: The church and homophobia: reflections of a disappointed ex-Christian

David_Neale — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 15:16:23 -0000

However, I would be strongly against any place of worship being forced
to carry out a marriage that such an institution was against.

I agree - and I don't think anyone is proposing that they should. It should be up to each religious denomination to decide for themselves whether they want to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies.

Seeing as the church is against marriage equality, that would mean
(pretty much) all that really changes is that a 'civil partnership' is
named 'marriage'. Or is that not so?

Not quite, no. At the moment, places of worship can't perform civil partnership ceremonies, even if they want to. And civil partnership ceremonies aren't allowed to have any religious content. There are some religious groups - Quakers, Unitarians and some liberal Jewish sects - who believe in same-sex marriage and want to be able to perform same-sex weddings, but, under the current law, are banned from doing so. There's no reason why this should remain so.

In any case, the word "marriage" is important in itself. In our society, marriage represents a public celebration of a couple's love and commitment to one another. "Civil partnership" doesn't quite mean the same thing. There's no good reason why same-sex couples should have to use a different term; it relegates them symbolically to an inferior status, as though their love and commitment were worth less than that of straight couples. You're obviously right that many couples in civil partnerships do refer to themselves as "married" despite the technical legal terminology - so why not simply update the law to reflect this social reality? Their relationship should be recognized by law as a marriage, and there should be no distinction in law between opposite-sex and same-sex couples, for any purpose.

Civil partnerships were an important advance. But it's time to go one step further and make the definition of marriage fully gender-neutral.

Re: The church and homophobia: reflections of a disappointed ex-Christian

Guest — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 10:51:56 -0000

I am for marriage equality. However, I would be strongly against any place of worship being forced to carry out a marriage that such an institution was against.

Seeing as the church is against marriage equality, that would mean (pretty much) all that really changes is that a 'civil partnership' is named 'marriage'. Or is that not so?

What's the difference? If two people - any people - get a civil partnership, what actually prevents them being known as married?

If I were in a 'civil partnership', I certainly would never refer to it as such. It's a marriage. Why does it matter what it's 'technically' known as? I've literally never met a single person in a civial partnership that refers to their spouse as their 'civil partner'.

Re: In which John Sentamu loses my respect

David_Neale — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 16:29:03 -0000

So what in real terms must the white establishment do now to level the
playing field? Have they been doing all the right things but just need a
few more decades for them to take effect? Or are there further
measures that need to be taken and, if so, what?

They've been doing very little. The few token measures that have been taken to combat racism don't even come close to redressing the harm caused by centuries of oppression.

More funding for anti-poverty programmes? More affirmative action
legislation? More and more stringent legislation against racist acts?
Against the expression of racist attitudes? A House Committee on
Un-Enlightened Opinions ("Are you now, or have you ever been, a racist?")?
(That last was flippant but not entirely facetious – if racial
prejudice is such a pervasive and toxic influence in society, why not?)

Respectively: yes, yes, possibly, no, and no. (Racism is pernicious, but giving the state the power to silence the expression of "dangerous" opinions is equally so.) But there's no shortage of other measures which can be taken to combat the systematic anti-African-American racist bias that still exists in schools, workplaces, the criminal justice system, and virtually all social institutions in the US.

This has been studied empirically. It is not a mystery. Racism exists, it permeates society, and there are things which can be done to challenge it.

Derbyshire is certainly a racist (and is happy to call himself such) in
one quite specific sense – he believes different ethnic groups exhibit
differences in mental abilities, which he puts down to natural
selection. Well, for the life of me I cannot comprehend why you of all
people should find this sort of 'racism' abhorrent. You wouldn't
dispute that subgroups of the human species exhibit distinctive physical
characteristics (height, skin colour, eyelid structure, hair texture
etc) – nobody would dispute that because it's manifest. And presumably
you would say this is a result of natural selection. So why
should natural selection not also produce different mental attributes?

But this particular claim has long since been thoroughly debunked. "Race" is a social construct, not an objective fact of biology, and there is no evidence of differences in mental abilities between racial or ethnic groups. (I'm hoping you have enough sense not to trot out that tired old canard about IQ test scores.)

If human mental abilities have for some reason remained immune from the
process of natural selection, then Derbyshire is wrong. But to be
ill-informed and to have failed to keep abreast of the latest research
doesn't mean one is a hate-filled bigot.

But this particular myth is not only false, but pernicious: it is pernicious because it has a stigmatizing and stereotype-reinforcing effect. Derbyshire knows this, and quite happily uses his crank hypotheses about mental differences between races to promote an anti-ethnic-minority and anti-immigrant political agenda.

Of course believing falsehoods is not in itself always a reason for moral disapprobation. But continuing to believe and spread thoroughly debunked falsehoods, in the teeth of the evidence, is something that usually justifies criticism (see: creationists and AGW deniers); and doubly-so when the falsehood in question has the effect of stigmatizing members of already-oppressed groups.

Arguably he is doing more harm. A religious homophobe in Uganda
or Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia is part of a pre-existing dominant culture
of conservative religious homophobia. If he comes to Britain, he is introducing
an element of religious homophobia into an environment where
religious homophobia is not part of the pre-existing dominant culture of
liberal tolerance. Native homophobia, religious or otherwise,
certainly exists but it is frowned upon and marginalised, it dare not
speak its name. Introduce enough homophobic immigrants and the balance
might shift – over time, homophobia might become socially acceptable
(again). You don't have to believe that the wellbeing of a British
homosexual is inherently more important than the wellbeing of a Ugandan
or Zimbabwean or Saudi Arabian homosexual to regard that as undesirable.
It's not about the relative moral worth of individuals, it's about
stopping a toxic cultural meme increasing the amount of suffering in the
world by spreading.

That sounds plausible in itself, but doesn't seem to be happening in practice; if anything, modern multicultural Britain is growing less homophobic, not more. I'm not willing to throw undocumented immigrants, asylum-seekers and those in immigration detention under the bus because of fear of some hypothetical future cultural change which doesn't, in fact, seem to be happening.

iii.) If the criminal is an illegal immigrant. In this case,
ethnicity is tangentially rather than directly relevant. As with our
hypothetical homophobic African clergyman, the point is simply that an
offence has been committed in this country that would not have been
committed in this country had the immigrant not been in this country.

But that's only relevant if you think an offence committed in Britain is worse than an offence committed somewhere else. After all, deporting a violent criminal from one part of the Earth's surface to another isn't likely to make them less violent; it just means that their crimes will likely take place in a different location and against different victims. Your argument only holds water if you think that it would be an improvement for a given violent criminal to be committing crimes overseas rather than in Britain.

In any case, the point is that, by yelling "ILLEGAL MIGRANT COMMITS CRIME!!!!" the press is, in practice, contributing to the stigma against undocumented immigrants, creating a false association between undocumented status and criminality. And the result is that all undocumented people will end up being punished for the actions of a few. Look, for instance, at what happened in Massachusetts this year - after a fatal car accident caused by a drunk driver who happened to be undocumented, the reaction of legislators was to introduce a nasty anti-immigrant bill which penalizes all undocumented people in the state. In reality, the vast majority of undocumented people do not commit crimes.

Let's say that the UK and US asylum systems are inherently unjust and
regularly exclude genuinely needy cases. I'm happy to join you in
deploring such injustice.

But you're evidently not interested in exploring the reasons for said injustice. This injustice comes broadly in two forms. Firstly, there are people who ought legally to be entitled to asylum, but are denied it; a whole host of factors affect this. Say you're an asylum-seeker who's just arrived in Britain; you're suffering from post-traumatic stress as a result of being tortured in your home country, you don't speak English well (or at all), and you have no experience of the British legal system. You're banned from working, and expected to live on £35 per week income support; and with the shutdown of several legal aid providers, you may well have no legal representation. Everything depends on whether, at your asylum interview, the adjudicator decides that your account of what happened to you is credible. If you're unlucky (because of a bad day or a biased adjudicator), you can find yourself in detention and facing removal to somewhere where your life is at risk.

Secondly, there are people who don't fit within the legal criteria for asylum at all - for instance, because they are fleeing poverty rather than persecution, or because the persecution they've suffered doesn't fit within one of the five grounds in the Refugee Convention - but will nonetheless suffer horribly if they are forced to return to their home countries. You seem to be willing to pay lip-service to "deploring" the first form of injustice (though I notice you don't advocate any measures to address it), but seem willing to accept the second.

In fact, there appears to be a paradox here. If the UK's
asylum/immigration controls are as ferociously stringent as you claim,
why are so many "undocumented" criminal individuals and gangs operating
in the UK? Why haven't all the drug-dealers and rapists been
ruthlessly excluded along with the persecuted lesbians ... ?

I've never claimed that the UKBA rounds up, detains and deports every single undocumented person present in the country. I've never even claimed that the UK's immigration enforcement system is particularly efficient. (And that of the US is even less so.) But a system doesn't have to be efficient to be cruel. No oppressive law has ever been enforced with universal effectiveness, but that doesn't mean that those against whom it is enforced don't suffer. (To draw an analogy with another oppressive law that targeted a marginalized group: the British state didn't succeed in arresting and jailing every gay man in Britain before 1967, but that doesn't diminish the suffering of those it did arrest and jail, like Alan Turing.)

Some 25,000 men, women and children are put into immigration detention in Britain every year, in hellish conditions. Most have committed no crime of any kind, and are simply being held pending removal. A minority are convicted offenders who are transferred to immigration detention after completing their prison sentences (meaning that they are effectively punished twice): but often, their "crimes" were themselves immigration offences, such as illegal reentry or using a false passport, committed out of sheer necessity in order to survive. (Like Ms Embaye, an Eritrean rape survivor who, on arrival in Britain, was prosecuted and jailed for failing to bring a passport to her asylum interview.) Many of the people suffering in immigration detention are survivors of torture, rape and other horrific experiences in their home countries. Often, they languish in detention for months or years before they are removed.

In any case, the only evidence you've offered for the alleged prevalence of this phenomenon of undocumented "criminal gangs" is a scaremongering Telegraph article. I don't doubt that there are undocumented migrants who commit crimes - but the point is that most don't, and it is unjust to punish the whole group for the actions of a few.

Do you think Hamid Safi, aged 22, should be deported back to Afghanistan after he's served his sentence?

No. Why should he be punished twice, when a British national who committed the same crime would be punished only once? A British national convicted of the same crime would serve his sentence (which should undoubtedly be a long one, given the danger he poses to the public) and would then be released under supervision. Why should a foreign national who has completed his prison sentence be punished a second time over by the immigration laws - by the extreme sanction of deporting him to an extremely dangerous country - merely because he happens to be foreign and not British?

Re: The government’s “reforms” to family migration penalize people for being poor

David_Neale — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 16:30:44 -0000

Well, there have been successful challenges in the past, by way of judicial review in the High Court, to changes in the Immigration Rules. See, for instance, http://newmigrant.wordpress... So there's always the possibility that the changes might be successfully challenged in court.

Aside from that, the best thing we can do is campaign: raise public awareness of the harm caused by these changes to the Immigration Rules and their disproportionate impact on the poor and ethnic minorities, and put pressure on the government to abandon its plans.

Re: The government’s “reforms” to family migration penalize people for being poor

elbe — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 16:37:40 -0000

How can these laws be challenged? They deliberately target poor disadvantaged groups who are unable to pay for legal aid to fight their corner. As someone affected by these legislative changes (a low earning woman who will be denied the right to marry my partner because of these racist and classist alterations) I would genuinely like to know what options people in this situation have.

Re: In which John Sentamu loses my respect

Xoanon — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:08:43 -0000

Here's a representative sampling:
No, it's not. It's a collection of individual media reports you've gathered. That's not what "representative sampling" means.

I apologise for my careless use of words. I wasn't using "representative sampling" as a piece of technical statistical terminology; I merely meant the events described were representative of the phenomenon to which I was referring. I certainly didn't mean to imply that the phenomenon was typical of the majority of black Americans.

So yes, it's a collection of individual media reports, which nonetheless illustrate a real phenomenon. That phenomenon – one conspicuous enough to capture the attention of a wide spectrum of the commentariat from the extreme right to the extreme left – is mob attacks by blacks on non-blacks. If you can point to an equal number of incidents involving mob attacks by blacks on blacks and by whites on non-whites and whites alike, I'll concede ethnicity is irrelevant in this case.

Here we go again.

A couple of decades of half-hearted, piecemeal government action does not magically cancel out the cumulative impact of centuries of racial segregation, white supremacist oppression, and the continuing exploitation and marginalization of African-Americans.

So what in real terms must the white establishment do now to level the playing field? Have they been doing all the right things but just need a few more decades for them to take effect? Or are there further measures that need to be taken and, if so, what? More funding for anti-poverty programmes? More affirmative action legislation? More and more stringent legislation against racist acts? Against the expression of racist attitudes? A House Committee on Un-Enlightened Opinions ("Are you now, or have you ever been, a racist?")? (That last was flippant but not entirely facetious – if racial prejudice is such a pervasive and toxic influence in society, why not?)

Do you seriously think that life is as easy for a low-income African-American kid growing up in inner-city Baltimore, and attending the local sink school, as it is for a rich white kid from the suburbs who attends private schools? Do you really think the two of them have an equal prospect of success in life?

Probably not. The question is, is that African-American kid's unfortunate situation solely or even largely a result of the malevolent 'legacy of racist oppression'? I would point again to the Jewish counter-example. The Jewish people have laboured under institutional disprivilege and popular hostility as least as great as that endured by blacks and for a hell of a lot longer. At times that hostility has flared into acts of violence as grievous as anything suffered by blacks. And for more than a century it has been typically expressed in the form of racist ideology. Yet despite it all, the Jews have prospered within and exerted a profound influence on Gentile culture out of all proportion to their numbers, regardless of whether one regards that influence with admiration or harbours reservations about it. Like the blacks they have not forgotten their ill-treatment and are quick to remind Gentiles of it. Like the blacks they demand recognition and reparation. What they don't do is loot businesses or assault passers-by. A fanatical white nationalist hates the blacks but he fears the Jews – precisely because he recognises that, whatever else they might be, they are not dysfunctional.

I hasten to add that I would be extremely hesitant to explain all this solely in terms of "inherent racial qualities" that differentiate blacks and Jews. But the Jewish counter-example also makes me hesitant to attribute black dysfunction solely to a 'legacy of racist oppression'. (Perhaps part of the problem is that the Civil Rights Movement came at a time of revolutionary social change (still ongoing) when the legitimacy of every Western institution was called into question. As a result the blacks, already torn from their native African cultural roots, were denied the chance to integrate into a stable dominant culture because that culture was in the process of self-immolation. They were thus left doubly alienated.)

It has to be said, you're reaching the limits of my tolerance with this Derbyshire-esque racist claptrap.

I'm glad your tolerance has limits but "Derbyshire-esque racist" is unjust. Unjust to me because I'm not a racist. I only quoted Derbyshire because I think he's probably right in predicting the unravelling of the liberal consensus on race in America – I certainly don't believe race is morally determinant or that one race is ontologically superior to another. It also seems unjust to Derbyshire himself, because I'm not sure he believes that either. Derbyshire is certainly a racist (and is happy to call himself such) in one quite specific sense – he believes different ethnic groups exhibit differences in mental abilities, which he puts down to natural selection. Well, for the life of me I cannot comprehend why you of all people should find this sort of 'racism' abhorrent. You wouldn't dispute that subgroups of the human species exhibit distinctive physical characteristics (height, skin colour, eyelid structure, hair texture etc) – nobody would dispute that because it's manifest. And presumably you would say this is a result of natural selection. So why should natural selection not also produce different mental attributes? It seems highly implausible that it wouldn't, particularly given that – according to atheistic materialists such as yourself – the dichotomy between 'physical' and 'mental' is entirely spurious. Everything is physical. Personality is brain activity. Aren't brains subject to natural selection?

Derbyshire calls himself an empiricist and claims empirical evidence supports his claim that different ethnic groups exhibit different mental characteristics. Is he right? I have no idea. Maybe subsequent research has thoroughly debunked this sort of stuff. I don't know and don't really care one way or the other. If human mental abilities have for some reason remained immune from the process of natural selection, then Derbyshire is wrong. But to be ill-informed and to have failed to keep abreast of the latest research doesn't mean one is a hate-filled bigot. As a thought experiment, imagine solid scientific evidence emerged showing that different ethnic groups did exhibit different mental traits. How would you, David Neale, react? You would have to accept the point of view currently being espoused by Derbyshire, however reluctant you might be to do so. David Neale would have to become a 'racist' in the sense that John Derbyshire is a racist. But there would be absolutely no basis for calling you a racist to express moral disapproval because your racism would neither stem from nor lead to hatred. It would stem from your honest understanding of the scientific facts and it would, I have no doubt, have no effect on your beliefs about the moral worth of human beings.

I wonder, though, how you feel about this, particularly in light of the tendency for non-European Christians to be far more conservative on certain issues than many lukewarm European Christians ...
It doesn't worry me in the slightest. Because I don't view Britain as inherently more important than the rest of the world, I don't see any reason why I should wish to exclude people from Britain on the ground that I personally dislike their views. A homophobic religious fundamentalist (of whatever religious persuasion) is not doing any more harm in Britain than he or she would be doing elsewhere.

Arguably he is doing more harm. A religious homophobe in Uganda or Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia is part of a pre-existing dominant culture of conservative religious homophobia. If he comes to Britain, he is introducing an element of religious homophobia into an environment where religious homophobia is not part of the pre-existing dominant culture of liberal tolerance. Native homophobia, religious or otherwise, certainly exists but it is frowned upon and marginalised, it dare not speak its name. Introduce enough homophobic immigrants and the balance might shift – over time, homophobia might become socially acceptable (again). You don't have to believe that the wellbeing of a British homosexual is inherently more important than the wellbeing of a Ugandan or Zimbabwean or Saudi Arabian homosexual to regard that as undesirable. It's not about the relative moral worth of individuals, it's about stopping a toxic cultural meme increasing the amount of suffering in the world by spreading.

To give you an illustrative example, Sofia Campos-Guardado ... Brenda Namigadde ... a Ugandan woman ... 18 year old Aziz Hussini ...

Obviously I don't know if the illustrative examples you give are a "representative sampling" or merely "a collection of individual media reports you've gathered". : / But let's take them at face value and say you're right. Let's say that the UK and US asylum systems are inherently unjust and regularly exclude genuinely needy cases. I'm happy to join you in deploring such injustice. But not every 'asylum-seeker' is a genuinely needy case. Hamid Safi, who recently got sent down for his role in the Rochdale white sex slavery ring, was a failed Afghan asylum-seeker. Hardly "good, kind and hardworking, people who just want the same rights that everyone else around them enjoys". So the problem remains of how to keep predators like Hamid Safi out. In fact, there appears to be a paradox here. If the UK's asylum/immigration controls are as ferociously stringent as you claim, why are so many "undocumented" criminal individuals and gangs operating in the UK? Why haven't all the drug-dealers and rapists been ruthlessly excluded along with the persecuted lesbians ... ?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...

And asylum is wholly unavailable to those migrants who are fleeing not violent persecution, but poverty - those you dismiss as merely "seeking a better life". Yet extreme poverty can be no less a horror than violence. In reality, any of us would migrate, legally or not, if it were the only way to feed our families - as it is for a great many people.

But no country has the capacity to offer shelter to all the wretched of the Earth. Beyond some point the cultural and economic strain will become unendurable, leading to a weakening of social cohesion and a likely violent backlash. Which is not in anyone's best interests.

That article is an illustrative example everything I loathe about the Daily Mail. In reporting a violent crime, the journalist harps on and on and on and on about the fact that the two criminals happened also to be undocumented immigrants, in a deliberate effort to whip up xenophobic fervour against undocumented people in general. When a white native-born British person commits a violent crime - something which happens often enough - do the right-wing press use this as an excuse for demonizing and vilifying all white British people? No. So why is the national origin or immigration status of the people involved suddenly relevant when they happen to be foreign?

I can think of three reasons why a criminal's ethnicity might be relevant:

i.) If the crime is racially aggravated – eg the Somali ladies who screamed "kill the white slag" while kicking their victim in the head.
ii.) If the type of crime is disproportionately committed by a particular ethnic group. Thus it is legitimate to point out that the girl-grooming gangs in UK cities are Muslims; but it is racist to say, as one UK newspaper recently did, that "most paedophiles in the UK are white".
iii.) If the criminal is an illegal immigrant. In this case, ethnicity is tangentially rather than directly relevant. As with our hypothetical homophobic African clergyman, the point is simply that an offence has been committed in this country that would not have been committed in this country had the immigrant not been in this country.

Here we go again.

The UK Border Agency wants to deport him to Afghanistan. AFGHANISTAN. They really think it’s morally acceptable to forcibly remove an 18-year-old kid to one of the poorest and most dangerous countries in the world.
And why? Because, by the accident of birth, he was born on one part of the Earth’s surface rather than another, and has an Afghan passport rather than a British one. This is the cruelty and horror of immigration control.

Do you think Hamid Safi, aged 22, should be deported back to Afghanistan after he's served his sentence?

The state should treat a foreign national it judges to be "a threat" in exactly the same way it would treat a British national it judges to be "a threat". There is no justification for treating the two differently. A person does not magically become a greater threat, nor do his or her interests become less morally important, because of the location of his or her birth or the colour of his or her passport.

And all the little Oysters stood
And waited in a row.

Re: In which John Sentamu loses my respect

David_Neale — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 12:25:46 -0000

Yet another victim of immigration controls.

On Monday 5 March, the UK Border Agency arrested 18 year old Aziz
Hussini on his wedding day, bursting into the Registry Office and
dragging him away. Waiting to walk down the aisle was Gemma, his
distraught fiancée. She is a British citizen. She did not know what
was happening until two Border Agency officials in their stab proof
vests came out to tell her that her wedding could not happen because
they had detained Aziz...

The Home Office originally tried to remove Aziz on a mass deportation
charter flight on 12 March. This flight was cancelled due the security situation
in Kabul, but now UKBA believes it is now safe to send a young teenager
back there. They must be the only people in the world to think
Afghanistan is safe. Or maybe they just don't care? ...

Since Aziz arrived in the UK in 2009, the situation
in Kabul and Afghanistan generally is deteriorating and has worsened.
There is a war on, and children and young people are particularly at
risk. The situation for refugees, returned asylum seekers and internally
displaced people is dire.

The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR says
it has realized in recent months that for the past decade, it has
followed a misguided strategy in dealing with the nearly five million
refugees – almost a quarter of the population – it has helped return to
Afghanistan since 2002.

The Afghan government, dogged by corruption, lack of
capacity and continued conflict, has been incapable of providing for
returnees. Nearly 60 percent of communities surveyed in a recent study
by UNHCR and the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation said returnees
lived in worse conditions than local communities.

Amnesty International reported just last month
that the Afghan government and aid agencies cannot provide even basic
food and shelter for people fleeing the increasing violence in
Afghanistan. Half a million people are living in "desperate conditions"
and struggle to survive in slum-like camps, with little access to water,
food, decent shelter, healthcare or education.

The report says that in Kabul alone, 35,000 people
are "living in freezing, cramped conditions and on the brink of
starvation, while the Afghan government is not only looking the other
way but even preventing help from reaching them.”...

Aziz's application for protection was submitted,
when he was a child. A lone child, recently arrived after a traumatic
journey to a bewildering new culture. Like many children seeking
sanctuary, his application was dismissed and he was granted permission
to stay until he reached 18 years old. And, again in common with so many
in his situation, his appeal at 18 was rejected because the Immigration
Tribunal found his statements to be inconsistent, and thus his evidence
not credible. The evidence of a scared, confused vulnerable child was
"not credible" because couldn't name the plant or animal used to make
dye for the rugs he wove as a child labourer aged 8, and because he
didn't apply for asylum in France.

The UK Border Agency wants to deport him to Afghanistan. AFGHANISTAN.
They really think it’s morally acceptable to forcibly remove an
18-year-old kid to one of the poorest and most dangerous countries in
the world.

And why? Because, by the accident of birth, he was born on one
part of the Earth’s surface rather than another, and has an Afghan
passport rather than a British one. This is the cruelty and horror of
immigration control.

Re: In which John Sentamu loses my respect

David_Neale — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 12:24:51 -0000

Another horrifying example of the human cost of immigration controls - this one from the UK.

In N (FC) v Secretary of State for the Home Department, a Ugandan woman was suffering from severe HIV/AIDS, and was facing removal to Uganda. The evidence showed that, if forcibly removed to Uganda, she would probably be unable to obtain the medications she needed to keep herself alive, and would therefore die from the disease. She claimed that removal to Uganda would breach her rights under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights - but she lost her case, the House of Lords holding that the circumstances were not exceptional enough for Article 3 to be infringed.

The British state was willing, effectively, to sentence a woman to death by expelling her from its territory - for no other reason than that, by the accident of fate, she was Ugandan and not British. If you think that limiting migration is more important than saving a woman's life, then your priorities are seriously screwed up.

Re: In which John Sentamu loses my respect

David_Neale — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 08:48:19 -0000

Here's a representative sampling:

No, it's not. It's a collection of individual media reports you've gathered. That's not what "representative sampling" means.

Yet if the links I provided above are anything to go by, black
dysfunction seems to be getting worse despite decades of positive
discrimination legislation, anti-racist education and funding for
community programmes. What else and how long is it going to take before
the playing field is level and full integration occurs?

A couple of decades of half-hearted, piecemeal government action does not magically cancel out the cumulative impact of centuries of racial segregation, white supremacist oppression, and the continuing exploitation and marginalization of African-Americans. I haven't read it, so can't recommend it directly, but I gather that Massey and Denton's "American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Black Underclass" is a good book on this topic. As is Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness."

Do you seriously think that life is as easy for a low-income African-American kid growing up in inner-city Baltimore, and attending the local sink school, as it is for a rich white kid from the suburbs who attends private schools? Do you really think the two of them have an equal prospect of success in life? I don't think you're that deluded.

It has to be said, you're reaching the limits of my tolerance with this Derbyshire-esque racist claptrap.

I wonder, though, how you feel about this, particularly in light
of the tendency for non-European Christians to be far more conservative
on certain issues than many lukewarm European Christians ...

It doesn't worry me in the slightest. Because I don't view Britain as inherently more important than the rest of the world, I don't see any reason why I should wish to exclude people from Britain on the ground that I personally dislike their views. A homophobic religious fundamentalist (of whatever religious persuasion) is not doing any more harm in Britain than he or she would be doing elsewhere.

I didn't say Britain should stop taking in asylum-seekers. I said mass immigration
by non-Britons into Britain had undermined Britain's social fabric and
continues to do so. You're eliding the differences between mass
migration and individuals seeking asylum, between those fleeing the
threat of death and those seeking a "better life".

Well, I'm glad to hear you're not opposed to taking in asylum-seekers. But it is not sufficient. For one thing, the existence of rigid immigration controls makes it very difficult for bona fide asylum-seekers to escape their countries and claim asylum in the first place; it's not at all easy for a "visa national" (someone who requires advance entry clearance to enter the UK) to make it to England without a visa. Many people who should be able to claim asylum can't do so because they can't get past the first step of actually escaping their home countries.

And claiming asylum successfully is very difficult. Someone claiming asylum has to prove that, "owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, [he] is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country." (The definition is very similar in the US and the UK, being derived directly from the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees.)

This is a very restrictive definition, and plenty of people who have suffered or will suffer serious harm in their home countries nonetheless fall outside the limited criteria for asylum. To give you an illustrative example, Sofia Campos-Guardado was repeatedly raped by an armed gang and forced to watch as her family was hacked to death with machetes; the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decided that she did not qualify for asylum in the United States, because her persecutors had not been motivated by her political opinion but by that of her family. This kind of legalistic hairsplitting happens all the time, and people are deported to face horrific abuse because they do not meet the strict criteria for asylum.

Aside from the narrowness of the legal definition, asylum claimants face a very heavy burden. Someone wishing to claim asylum in the UK has to convince a UK Border Agency adjudicator that he or she meets the statutory criteria for asylum. The burden lies on the claimant to substantiate his or her claim. Bear in mind that we're talking about people who may speak little English, who are not legally allowed to work while their claims are pending and so have few resources, and who may be suffering from PTSD and other aftereffects of persecution. Given that documentary evidence is not usually available, the case often turns on the adjudicator's subjective assessment of the "credibility" of the claimant's account. (Again, this is similar in the US, where the decision is made in the first instance by a USCIS Asylum Officer or by an Immigration Judge. But the situation in the US is even worse, since the US, unlike the UK, has no legal aid for asylum-seekers, and most are unrepresented by counsel and have to face the process alone.) Plenty of people who ought to receive asylum do not. It's not long since the UKBA nearly deported Brenda Namigadde, a lesbian, to Uganda; if you know anything at all about the situation for LGBT people in Uganda, I shouldn't have to explain the problem with this.

And asylum is wholly unavailable to those migrants who are fleeing not violent persecution, but poverty - those you dismiss as merely "seeking a better life". Yet extreme poverty can be no less a horror than violence. In reality, any of us would migrate, legally or not, if it were the only way to feed our families - as it is for a great many people. I wish you'd show a little human compassion for the people who cross borders without documentation.

The reason the public can muster little sympathy for immigrants is, in
part, because there's been too many real lives ruined by incidents like this. Sob stories by illegal immigrants cut little ice while things like that are going on. Sorry.

That article is an illustrative example everything I loathe about the Daily Mail. In reporting a violent crime, the journalist harps on and on and on and on about the fact that the two criminals happened also to be undocumented immigrants, in a deliberate effort to whip up xenophobic fervour against undocumented people in general. When a white native-born British person commits a violent crime - something which happens often enough - do the right-wing press use this as an excuse for demonizing and vilifying all white British people? No. So why is the national origin or immigration status of the people involved suddenly relevant when they happen to be foreign?

I have worked with, and stood at protests alongside, undocumented people - men, women and children, people who were good, kind and hardworking, people who just want the same rights that everyone else around them enjoys. Undocumented people do not deserve to be stigmatized and vilified as though their very existence were a problem. They do not deserve to be slandered by the right-wing press.

And how can you call the experiences of the women of Yarl's Wood a "sob story"? Conditions in that privately-run detention centre were so appalling that a number of women, many of them victims of rape and torture in their home countries, went on hunger strike to protest the abuse they were suffering. And children, too, were held there in conditions which shocked a High Court judge.

In your borderless world, would a government have the right to exclude or remove individuals it judges to be a threat?

The state should treat a foreign national it judges to be "a threat" in exactly the same way it would treat a British national it judges to be "a threat". There is no justification for treating the two differently. A person does not magically become a greater threat, nor do his or her interests become less morally important, because of the location of his or her birth or the colour of his or her passport.

Re: In which John Sentamu loses my respect

Xoanon — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 18:08:23 -0000

Because of the
legacy of past institutionalized racist oppression, and the continuing effects
of present racism.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: In which John Sentamu loses my respect

Xoanon — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 21:26:21 -0000

The downside of that happy ending is the tsunami of black-on-white violence of recent years (much of it racially motivated); the increasing grassroots white awareness of, and willingness to speak about, this phenomenon; and the consequent contempt for the MSM's deafening silence on this issue in favour of the official manufactured cult of Trayvianity.
This is an absurd claim. Do you have any evidence for it, besides right-wing scaremongering?

I'm not so much thinking of the numberless cases of black-on-white violence in America as the specific recent phenomenon of beatings and lootings by large black mobs. Here's a representative sampling:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010...

http://www.yourblackworld.c...

http://www.delcotimes.com/a...|met:300|cat:0|order:1

http://articles.philly.com/...

http://www.todaystmj4.com/n...

http://www.jsonline.com/new...

http://www.chicagotribune.c...

http://chicago.cbslocal.com...

http://www.suntimes.com/580...

http://peoriachronicle.com/...

http://voices.yahoo.com/bea...

http://www.ajc.com/news/atl...

http://crimeblog.dallasnews...

http://hamptonroads.com.nyu...

http://dailycaller.com/2012...

http://www.winnipegsun.com/...

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Indignant mainstream conservative perspective on the phenomenon:

http://www.americanthinker....

Less mainstream conservative perspective:

http://www.johnderbyshire.c...

Even less mainstream conservative perspectives:

http://www.alternativeright...

Handwringing mainstream liberal perspective:

http://blogs.the-american-i...

SPLC perspective:

http://www.splcenter.org/bl...

Hard left perspective:

http://uhurunews.com/story?...

[quoting Derbyshire:] Here we are, we're 50 years later, and we've still got these tremendous disparities in crime rates, educational attainment, and so on.
Because of the legacy of past institutionalized racist oppression, and the continuing effects of present racism. This cartoon comes to mind. These disparities do not exist in a vacuum, and they are not the result of a level playing field.

Yet if the links I provided above are anything to go by, black dysfunction seems to be getting worse despite decades of positive discrimination legislation, anti-racist education and funding for community programmes. What else and how long is it going to take before the playing field is level and full integration occurs?

One also wonders why we don't see such disparities among the descendants of Asian and Jewish immigrants, who were not exactly garlanded with privilege in white society.

Basically, the cartoon assumes success is the result of privilege without considering that privilege might be the result of success.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

If you really believe in family values, you ought to be the first to oppose laws which lead, quite often, to parents being forcibly separated from their children; if you really believe that human life is sacred, you ought to be the first to oppose deporting people to countries where they face death. ... I'm bemused that you can reconcile your anti-immigrant stance with your Catholic beliefs.

As a Catholic I also believe in the moral duty of the state to preserve the common good and the moral right of citizens to demand the state fulfill that duty.

If your fear is specifically of Islam and Islamic culture, rather than being rooted in general xenophobia, why are you not supportive of
immigrants' rights with regard to Christianimmigrants from Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, of whom there are plenty in both Britain and America?

I would certainly be more supportive of Christian non-European immigrants than non-Christian non-European immigrants. I might even be more supportive of Christian non-European immigrants than non-Christian European immigrants, at least if their Christianity was the real deal. I wonder, though, how you feel about this, particularly in light of the tendency for non-European Christians to be far more conservative on certain issues than many lukewarm European Christians ... (True story: A few months ago I was having a quiet fag break in town when I was approached by a black gentleman who looked to be in his early 50s. He addressed me in a soft West Indian accent: "Excuse me, sir, you look like a man of learning ..." It transpired he was researching a book about the city and wondered if I knew the whereabouts of a particular street. We got chatting and when he learned I worked for a newspaper he said the only paper he read was the Mail because it "stirred things up" and was "politically incorrect". To my amusement, he went on to opine that there were too many immigrants coming into the country, "especially Muslims". When I asked if he thought there was a particular problem with Islam, he declared: "The only thing I like about the Islamic religion is that they execute you if you insult the Prophet. Christians should stop being weak and afraid to kill people!" Somewhat taken aback, I mumbled something about the Western media ignoring Muslim persecution of Christians in Africa; he nodded, adding: "And don't forget the persecution of Christians here – Henry and Elizabeth turned this country into killing fields but you never hear about that at school on on the television!" The gentleman proceeded to give his assessment of modern morals ("Sodom"), Tony Blair ("Lucifer") and Pope Benedict ("He knows the truth but nobody listens to him"), by which time I had to reluctantly return to work. As we parted, he pressed into my hand a typewritten poem about Britain's urgent need to abandon its godless ways and return to the one true Faith. He can stay.)

Would getting rid of exclusionary immigration laws magically fix all the world's problems overnight? No. And no one claims that it would. What it would do is free irregular migrants from the violence, stigma and marginalization they currently face, and give them a chance to live peacefully with their families and to build lives in the countries they have chosen as their homes. That's important.

It would only "free irregular migrants from the violence, stigma and marginalization they currently face" if that stigma etc was solely the result of official exclusion. If, as I tend to believe, it's the result of popular resentment at insufficient official exclusion, then such a relaxation of immigration laws would only add fuel to the fire.

I'm not sure people get to "choose their homes".

It's undoubtedly reasonable to say that the British state has less moral responsibility for the wellbeing of a Somali national in Somalia than for that of a British national in Britain, because a state's responsibility for people's wellbeing must be proportionate to its actual control over their lives. ... But it doesn't follow that the British state has less responsibility for the wellbeing of a Somali national in Britain than for that of a British national in Britain. When both are equally within its territory and under its control, your argument no longer holds

I largely agree – which is why I said the British authorities would have a moral responsibility to see justice done if a Somali national were murdered on British soil. (I say "largely" because I can't rid myself of the nativist sense that a peculiar reciprocal piety should exist between oneself and the culture that formed one.)

And it certainly doesn't follow that the British state is justified in jailing said Somali national at Campsfield House or Yarl's Wood, and forcibly returning her to Somalia against her will, in order to protect some perceived national interest of British people.

What else is the state for if not to protect the people's interests? If a foreign national is judged to be a threat to that interest, the state is perfectly justified in taking steps to remove the threat.

In your borderless world, would a government have the right to exclude or remove individuals it judges to be a threat?

You think the British state should protect your hypothetical Somali national against being murdered on British soil (with which I agree, obviously); yet you're happy for the British state to lock her up and deport her to Somalia against her will, where she may well face death or inhuman treatment, merely because she happens to be Somali and not British.

No, I'm happy for the British state to lock her up and deport her to Somalia against her will if she's a direct threat or if she abuses compassionate hospitality by lying about her circumstances to illicitly gain the benefits of living here.

The reason the public can muster little sympathy for immigrants is, in part, because they don't know the truth; those members of the public who get their news from Fox News or the Daily Express, say, tend to internalize pernicious myths about immigrants and immigration. Most people on both sides of the Atlantic are woefully unaware of the real consequences of immigration laws, or the real lives of the people involved.

The reason the public can muster little sympathy for immigrants is, in part, because there's been too many real lives ruined by incidents like this. Sob stories by illegal immigrants cut little ice while things like that are going on. Sorry.

And you surely have to recognize that if Britain stopped taking in asylum-seekers, the result would be more people being deported to places where they would be murdered, tortured, or both.

I didn't say Britain should stop taking in asylum-seekers. I said mass immigration by non-Britons into Britain had undermined Britain's social fabric and continues to do so. You're eliding the differences between mass migration and individuals seeking asylum, between those fleeing the threat of death and those seeking a "better life". I think a wealthy country does have a moral obligation to offer shelter to strangers in dire straits; I also think it has the moral right to refuse shelter if it judges those dire straits to be non-existent or well-deserved.

And at the moment, while capital has virtually unlimited mobility, labour does not. Businesses can move wherever they wish and trade wherever they wish; but workers are tied to the places of their birth, and are labelled "illegals" and faced with harsh sanctions if they cross a border without permission in order to make a living. The solution to this is not to make businesses less free to move, which would be a backward step, but to make workers more free to move.

So your ideal would be hordes of workers roaming freely across the world chasing the highest wages offered by employers roaming freely across the world in search of the cheapest labour? How could any stable civil society endure under those conditions?

Re: In which John Sentamu loses my respect

Xoanon — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 21:19:40 -0000

Some more empirical evidence for you:

Empirical evidence of what, though? I don't dispute the fact of unequal sentencing, I just question the conclusions you draw from it. As I said earlier in this thread: "As for disparities between sentencing for black and white criminals who have committed similar offences, again you can't just assume it's all down to racism. One would need to know all sorts of variables before one drew that conclusion, for example whether the criminals in question were first-time or repeat offenders, whether the offence was committed in conjunction with other more serious offences, whether or not they showed remorse etc."

If we scan that Guardian article, we glean the following information:-

1.) There is an apparent discrepancy in sentencing between blacks and whites for similar offences.
2.) Some people say this is because the criminal justice system is institutionally racist.
3.) Some people say it's because of other factors which make such unequal sentences legitimate in their specific contents.
4.) Er ...
5.) That's it.

It's to the Grauniad's credit that it acknowledges the existence of 3.) ("... greater propensity for black young people not to plead guilty ... more serious offences in particular categories ... longer criminal histories ...").