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Taking us for mugs

The EU is slowly but surely moving away from democracy

31.07.2008. "The European Union's top court," reports the BBC, "has ruled that non-EU nationals married to EU citizens are entitled to live in their spouse's country." Read more at EU Referendum.

HonestThinking comments: This appears to be part of a systematic attempt at preventing European nations from determining their own immigration policies. This is becoming a hot issue in Denmark, where authorities are now under pressure from the EU to abandon policies that have been in place since 2001. Scandinavian readers may e.g. want to consult this article: Åpen strid mellom Danmark og EU, indicating a fight or 'war' is about to break out between Denmark and the EU.

In enemy territory

No-go zones in German cities

30.07.2008. Huge no-go zones are developing in various German cities. Read more at Gates of Vienna (translated from Die Welt).

HonestThinking comments: Over and over again I am surprised that these kinds of developments are allowed to take place in major cities all over Europe. If police, fire fighters, ambulance staff, and other representatives of state and local governments cannot safely do their jobs in certain parts of cities, we have a problem the seriousness of which can hardly be overstated. The long term result of such developments can only be disastrous. Even so, our politicians seem to have no believable plan for settings things straight. Apparently, they don't really care.

Larry Summers vindicated (again)

But study is incorrectly reported by some in the media

29.07.2008. For the past week or so the newspapers have been trumpeting a new study showing no difference in average math ability between males and females. Few people who have looked at the data thought that there were big differences in average ability but many media reports also said that the study showed no differences in high ability.

The LA Times, for example, wrote:

The study also undermined the assumption -- infamously espoused by former Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers in 2005 -- that boys are more likely than girls to be math geniuses.

Scientific American said:

So the team checked out the most gifted children. Again, no difference. From any angle, girls measured up to boys. Still, there’s a lack of women in the highest levels of professional math, engineering and physics. Some have said that’s because of an innate difference in math ability. But the new research shows that that explanation just doesn’t add up.

The Chronicle of Higher Education said:

The research team also studied if there were gender discrepancies at the highest levels of mathematical ability and how well boys and girls resolved complex problems. Again they found no significant differences.

All of these reports and many more like them are false.  In fact, consistent with many earlier studies (JSTOR), what this study found was that the ratio of male to female variance in ability was positive and significant, in other words we can expect that there will be more math geniuses and more dullards, among males than among females. 

Continue reading at Marginal Revolution (thanks to Gene Expression for the tip).

Bus arson in Oslo

Tourist bus on fire next to the new Oslo Opera House. Photo: Arnt Rikard Alvestad.

27.07.2008. “My company sends buses all over Europe, but we’ve never experienced similar conditions anywhere,” a Spanish bus driver said. “If I talked about this on Spanish TV, people would think I was in Africa.” Continue reading at Snaphanen.

UK, BNP, and McCarthyism

The Tony Blair legacy

24.07.2008. These are the concluding paragraphs of an article by A. Millar at The Brussels Journal: When Conservative MP Baroness Warsi sensibly attempted to encourage an open and honest debate on mass immigration, for example, she was denounced as “pandering” to the BNP. It did not matter that Baroness Warsi is of Southeast Asian roots, a founder member of Operation Black Vote, and a Muslim. By raising an issue of importance to the majority of British citizens (including non-White citizens) she had joined the leagues of the “fascists.” The invocation of “BNP” against Warsi was an implicit, though very clear, threat to her position. And, by extension, it was a threat to the livelihood of any dissenter to the prevailing, and increasingly stifling political ideology. This has not only created a climate of fear and resentment among the general public, it has helped to establish an anti-intellectual consumer politics, in which ill-conceived, unworkable ideas are presented to the public as pearls of wisdom.

This is a dangerous way of doing politics. Democracy, for sound reasons, is predicated on the existence of dissenting opinions, discussion, and open debate. The harassment of individuals at their employment, solely on the basis of party affiliation, private or perceived opinion can have absolutely no place in a democracy.

HonestThinking comments: Multiculturalism, at least as currently practiced in most Western countries, is incompatible with freedom, democracy, and human rights. Country after country is moving in a totalitarian direction, and it's about time we do some serious soul searching as to why this is so.

Human biodiversity

Relevant comment at Gene Expression

12.07.2008. Here's a quote from Birch Barlow at Gene Expression (italics in original, boldface added): O'Brien in 1984 spookily reminds me of Richard Lewontin and his disturbing capacity for doublethink and goodthinkfulness (i.e. willingness to swallow and propagate orthodoxy in the face of well-known facts, such as Lewontin's denying race and genetic influences on behavior in spite of his rather extensive knowledge of genetics and population genetics in particular). Lewontin strikes me as the kind of person who, if he were in power, would force people to be "re-educated" for speaking of the biological basis for human behavior, while unknown to the public, promoting the study of pharmacology, gene therapies, and genetic engineering as tools to increase his power and the power his pseudo-socialist State. In fact, the potential usefulness of biotechnology as a mind control tool is the one thing that makes me have some misgivings about it (though I am still very much in favor of the advancement of biotech).

Postcard from Zinnlandia

White people should be ashamed

12.07.2008. For white Westerners born in the last 50 years are all honorary Zinnlandians. They have grown up indoctrinated to squash their own survival impulses, to be ashamed for preferring their own people and culture, to admire the “authentic” and “noble” savage. I should not like to single out Portland, Oregon for scorn or ridicule. This type of paralyzing cowardice or suicidal stupidity exists in every American, Western European, Canadian and Australian city I have visited over the past thirty years (emphasis added). Thus writes Takuan Seiyo in a scathing article in The Brussels Journal.

HonestThinking comments: And make sure you don't miss the reference to the brief New York Post report on La Raza (the name is Spanish for 'The Race'), a hispanic interest group, described by NYP as "a radical ethnic-nationalist outfit that abuses your tax dollars and milks PC politics to undermine our sovereignty".

The following Wikipedia quote about La Raza Latina is worth noting:

Hispanic people all around the U.S. have also started using this term to identify themselves as Latinos (La Raza Latina). Nonetheless, the term and idea associated with it has been mainly adopted by the Mexican communities in the United States to express the pride in their nation.

It's interesting how all sorts of people are encouraged to be proud of who they are, provided they are not white. See also National Council of La Raza.

A tribute to Italy

Fjordman compares European nations

09.07.2008. Excerpts from an essay by Fjordman at Gates of Vienna: Dutch political elites are for the most part spineless appeasers or active collaborators, but the Belgian political elites are among the worst in the Western world. [...]

In northern Europe, I cannot give a good explanation as to why Lutheran Denmark is significantly stronger than Lutheran Norway, Finland, and Sweden, culturally speaking closely related nations. I’ve even heard suggestions that Scandinavians are “genetically weak” and thus receptive to ideological nonsense. This suggestion fails to explain why the Norse people, genetically speaking almost identical to modern Scandinavians, were not particularly known for their meekness or self-loathing during the Viking Age, and again, it fails to explain the sometimes considerable differences among the Nordic nations today. I suspect one of the causes is that Denmark has enjoyed a healthier culture of debate and tolerance for public dissent than have Norway or Finland, with Sweden being a particularly nasty example of the long-term effects of ideological indoctrination and suppression of dissent.

Although very far from being a paradise, tiny Denmark has a genuine debate about immigration that would be respectable for a much larger country. Britain is more than ten times as large, yet is currently one of the most pathetic nations of the Western world. Exactly why, I don’t know. Perhaps the Catholic Irish are more resistant than the British, but there are many reasons for this. It is possible that Britain has particularly treasonous political elites, but I do suspect that the British, the source of the first truly global lingua franca, suffer from a post-Imperial Stress Syndrome. I hope the Germans will wake up and smell the coffee; they have no obligation to surrender their country to alien and inferior cultures, but they may be too weighed down by their history to play a leading role in the European resistance just yet. [...]

Italy is by no means immune to the problems affecting everybody else in the Western world, but her odds are better than those of several other countries. Through contact with Italians, I get the impression of a country whose national heart is still beating, a people still in touch with their roots and believing that their cultural survival is desirable, which is no mean feat given the suicidal state of our civilization in this age. When observing Italy, I see sickness but also life; and where there is life, there is hope. Something tells me that the story of Italy as a vibrant heartland of European civilization still contains more chapters to be written. If we are lucky, her struggle for survival and rebirth can inspire others far beyond her borders.

What is a nation?

People related by blood

08.07.2008. Excerpts from an article by John Laughland in The Brussels Journal (emphasis added): A nation, in other words, is not a “community of values” or an impersonal social construct governed by certain laws. A nation – as the word suggests, derived as it is from the verb ‘to be born’ – is a family. A family can be a source of great love, indifference or even fratricidal conflict, just as a nation can experience cohesion, social exclusion or civil war. Nations can certainly welcome into their midst people who are not originally members of it, just as a family can expand to include in-laws. Both can and should show tolerance and friendship towards them. But at the end of the day, nations like families are bodies of people related to each other by blood.

This basic fact remains, whatever choices the individuals themselves may make. It does not absolutely determine human choice but it does influence it. The experience of second and third generation immigrants in Europe, whose parents or grandparents have chosen to come to a new country, and who have themselves chosen to remain in it, often shows the truth of this: in spite of their individual choice, people’s behaviour often remains ethnically based and culturally separate from that of the host nation, especially if they are of a different race.

Through left-liberalism, European nations have systematically destroyed the values which, as extended families, they once embodied. The admission into their midst of very large numbers of people who will never be part of the family aggravates what is already a serious problem of social dislocation. The attempt to reverse this trend by emphasising values may be a laudable one, but it can never succeed because the liberal paradigm on which it is based is wrong. It assumes that human societies are comparable to private companies and based on contract, when instead they are in fact comparable to families and based on the principles of blood relationship and paternity. That is a something which no amount of political sophistry can hide.

The atheist delusion

Very interesting essay from John Gray

07.07.2008 (updated 09.07.2008). Excerpts from an essay by John Gray in The Guardian: An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world's worst evils. As a result, there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism. A few years ago, it was difficult to persuade commercial publishers even to think of bringing out books on religion. Today, tracts against religion can be enormous money-spinners, with Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great selling in the hundreds of thousands. For the first time in generations, scientists and philosophers, high-profile novelists and journalists are debating whether religion has a future. [...]

The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

HonestThinking comments: Gray hits the nail on the head multiple times, and his essay is among the most insightful pieces of writing I have seen in a while. The current developments in Europe are such that I suspect our future options are about to boil down to the following two:

• Revitalize Christianity.
• Embrace Islam.

For the record: The fact that I recommend his article does not mean that I agree with everything Gray writes. For example, I am not convinced that talk of memetic replicators is as much 'nonsense' as Gray claims. Just because Dawkins et al go overboard in thinking that religions can be dismissed as memetic infections does not mean mental replicators do not exist . On the contrary, there is good reason to believe that the just mentioned term can be useful when properly applied to the world around us.

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HonestThinking is dedicated and committed to the art of thinking honestly. Yet honest thinking is not the same as true thinking, for it is possible to think honestly, but be mistaken. For the same reason, honest thinking is not identical with objective thinking either. Honest thinking is striving to get things right. This involves being truthful about whatever one publishes, but just as importantly, it involves an uncompromising dedication never to suppress relevant data, even when data collides with dearly held prejudices. Such an approach may sometimes cause hurtful revisions in one’s belief system. That’s what HonestThinking is all about! Read the entire manifesto.

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Please send e-mail to postmaster at honestThinking.org (replacing ' at ' with '@') if you would like to tip us about a web resource that we should link to, or if you wish to submit an article for publication here. Quality contributions are welcome from anyone.

The current European immigration and integration policy is profoundly disrespectful of both Muslims and Islam, because it is built on the tacit assumption that the Muslims will become like us. One claims to have respect for Islam and for Muslims, but one also expects Muslims to give up their orthodox faith when they come here. At the same time one is assuming that Islam will be reformed and modernized as soon as the Muslims become integrated and understand and appreciate how superior our Western culture is compared to their own. This is cultural shauvinism and arrogance indeed! The unspoken premise for this scenario is that Western socities are superior to Islam. Read more.

Human rights and democracy are under pressure. One threat comes from the Western world, in the form of lack of or dishonest thinking. There exists a peculiar Western "tolerance" which is so "tolerant" that it even tolerates totalitarian or anti-democratic ideologies. A tacit assumption underlying such an attitude is that all cultures, world views, and religions are really equally good. As a consequence of this assumption one is cut off from the possibility of critically examining the above mentioned ideologies. Read more.