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BBC and immigration

Further comments on the cover-up

20.01.2014. The BBC's refusal to air the divided views on immigration has ended up encouraging the very racism it was intended to crush, writes Allison Pearson in The Telegraph. She concludes as follows:

Given all of the above, it was no shock this week to see the British Social Attitudes Survey reveal that more than 75 per cent of British people want to see a cut in immigration. Study the small print and another startling statistic jumps out: 60 per cent of first- and second-generation settlers want a cut in the numbers. Even the immigrants are sick of immigration.

Is the Sikh businessman who explained to Nick Robinson that Brits can’t get jobs, but Eastern Europeans can, a racist? How about the lovely elderly lady in Sheffield who said that she was fed up of the recently arrived Roma. “It’s as if we’ve been overtaken – sofas dumped outside, rubbish, people urinating in the street.” Her neighbour, of Pakistani origin, was in agreement.

Goodness, it was strange to hear those voices, for so long disdained and disregarded by the BBC, being given a chance to speak. Many said they liked what immigration had contributed; most thought it had gone too far. People are inclined to overestimate the number of immigrants, said Nick Robinson. And whose fault is that? Blame cowardly politicians and the media who wouldn’t touch the subject for fear of summoning the avenging ghost of Enoch Powell.

How could this censorship of such a crucial issue have been allowed to happen? Consider the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who wrote this week that the BBC “has a duty to moderate our national conversation”. George Orwell would have loved that slippery use of “moderate”. Or “suppress”, as it’s also known. For Alibhai-Brown, and the impeccably liberal folk who run the BBC, you are free to express any view, so long as it’s the same as theirs. If you’re a lady in Sheffield who is fed up with Roma peeing in her petunias, you can shut up, you nasty old bigot.

The BBC’s job is to faithfully report life in Britain as it is experienced by all licence-payers, not as it is lived in a bien-pensant corner of north London. The failure to provide proper coverage of immigration, and to offer an outlet for mixed feelings, has ended up encouraging the very racism it was intended to crush. Treated with contempt by their self-styled moral superiors, the British people, a pretty tolerant and accommodating lot by and large, have had enough.

Why didn’t the BBC ask its licence payers for their views on mass immigration? Because we would have given the wrong answer, stupid.

Read the entire article in The Telegraph.

 

Mandela

What a lost prison manuscript reveals about the real Nelson Mandela

18.01.2014. New light is shed on the president's politics, smoothed over in 'Long Walk to Freedom', writes Rian Malan in The Spectator:

This is a story about Nelson Mandela, and it begins on Robben Island in 1974. Prisoner number 466/64 is writing up his life story, working all night and sleeping all day. Finished pages go to trusted comrades who write comments and queries in the margins. The text is then passed to one Laloo Chiba, who transcribes it in ‘microscopic’ letters on to sheets of paper which are later inserted into the binding of notebooks and carried off the island by Mac Maharaj when he is released in 1976.

Outside, the intrepid Mac turns the microscopic text into a typescript and sends it to London, where it becomes the Higgs boson of literary properties, known to exist but not seen since it passed into the hands of the South African Communist Party, or SACP, in 1977. Years pass; the mystery deepens. Mandela goes from being an obscure South African prisoner to possibly the most famous living human, subject of global adulation and a ghostwritten autobiography that sells 15 million. His cult is such that prints of his hands are sold for thousands, and yet the prison manuscript stays missing. Until last week, when Professor Stephen Ellis of the University of Leiden sent out an email saying: ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve just found in the online archive of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory.’

So yes, the lost manuscript has come back to us and, with it, a range of fascinating questions. Why was it not published earlier? Why did it surface now? And above all, what light does it shed on Mandela’s Awkward Secret, first reported by Professor Ellis in 2011?

Everyone thought Mandela was a known entity, but he turns out to have led a double life, at least for a time. By day, he was or pretended to be a moderate democrat, fighting to free his people in the name of values all humans held sacred. But by night he donned the cloak and dagger and became a leader of a fanatical sect known for its attachment to the totalitarian Soviet ideal.

When Ellis first aired this theory, it read like a Cold War thriller, but when Mandela died last month, the African National Congress and the SACP both issued statements confirming that it was true: at the time of his arrest in 1962, Nelson Mandela was a member of the SACP’s innermost central committee.

This, then, is why Ellis and I were dizzy with excitement when the prison manuscript turned up last week: here was a rich new source of virgin material to be scanned for the smoking gun, the inside and untold story of Mandela’s secret life as a communist plotter. Alas, the smoking gun was not there. But the prison manuscript does offer insights into the manner in which Mandela’s image has been manipulated over the decades.

Continue reading in The Spectator.

 

Genetics and IQ

Chinese firm will allow parents to pick their smartest embryos

Graphics from University of Oregon/BGI, via The Daily Mail.

16.01.2014. A Chinese firm claims it is getting closer to allowing parents to pick the embryo most likely to succeed. Researcher believe that 50-80% of what determines IQ could be inherited. Now a Chinese firm is mapping the genes of people who are gifted in maths in a bid to isolate the genes that make them smarter that the average person, according to The Daily Mail:

Shenzhen-based BGI is mapping the genes of math geniuses, and appealing via its web site for more to take part in the controversial study.

B.G.I., formerly called Beijing Genomics Institute, is the world’s largest genetic-research center, and already has an initial batch of 2,000 DNA samples from high-IQ subjects.

Researchers then plan to compare these against a sample from the general population - and hopefully isolate what makes them special. In theory, this knowledge could then be used to allow parents to pick 'smart embryos'.

[...]

”People believe it’s a controversial topic, especially in the West,' Bowen Zhao, head of CG, told the Wall Street Journal. ”That’s not the case in China. [...] There are going to be countries that say this is part of our national health-care service and everyone is doing it,” he told the New Yorker. “And eventually it would become unstoppable, because the countries that initially outlawed it would have to come around. How could they not?”

Read the entire story in The Daily Mail.

 

Camille Paglia

A feminist defense of masculine virtues

14.01.2014. 'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation. Thus begins an interview with Paglia in WSJ, which later continues as follows (emphasis added):

But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society's attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.

[...]

Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."

[...]

Ms. Paglia observes this phenomenon up close with her 11-year-old son, Lucien, whom she is raising with her ex-partner, Alison Maddex, an artist and public-school teacher who lives 2 miles away. She sees the tacit elevation of "female values"—such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.

By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. "This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and "can't say anything. . . . They understand the agenda."

[...]

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says.

[...]

And men aren't the only ones suffering from the decline of men. Women, particularly elite upper-middle-class women, have become "clones" condemned to "Pilates for the next 30 years," Ms. Paglia says.

[...]

A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a "revalorization" of traditional male trades—the ones that allow women's studies professors to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office (construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing).

[...]

Then there was the time she "barely got through the dinner" with a group of women's studies professors at Bennington College, where she had her first teaching job, who insisted that there is no hormonal difference between men and women. "I left before dessert."

In her view, these ideological excesses bear much of the blame for the current cultural decline. She calls out activists like Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi for pushing a version of feminism that says gender is nothing more than a social construct, and groups like the National Organization for Women for making abortion the singular women's issue.

By denying the role of nature in women's lives, she argues, leading feminists created a "denatured, antiseptic" movement that "protected their bourgeois lifestyle" and falsely promised that women could "have it all." And by impugning women who chose to forgo careers to stay at home with children, feminists turned off many who might have happily joined their ranks.

[...]

But men, and especially women, need to be honest about the role biology plays and clear-eyed about the choices they are making.

Read the entire interview at WSJ.com. Hat tip: Document.no.

 

BBC

Made a 'terrible mistake' over immigration debate

07.01.2014. The BBC's political editor admits the corporation didn't have a proper debate on immigration in the late 1990s and early 2000s, reports The Telegraph:

Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, has criticised the corporation for making a "terrible mistake" over its coverage of immigration, admitting it censored concerns amid fear they could trigger racism.

Robinson said BBC figures in charge during the late 1990s and early 2000s believed a "warts-and-all" debate over immigration would "unleash some terrible side of the British public".

He told The Sunday Times (£): "They feared having a conversation about immigration, they feared the consequence."

[...]

Robinson, whose new documentary The Truth About Immigration is due to air on Tuesday, said the BBC's audience felt it had "decided these are not acceptable views. And that was a terrible mistake."

[...]

Robinson's documentary will include new data showing the scale of concern over immigration among the British public.

Read the full story in The Telegraph.

 

Grooming of white girls

Racist-crazed UK unable to see anti-white racism even when it appeared right «under their noses»

03.01.2014. An obsession with being “colour blind” left social workers and police in Rochdale unable to see glaring evidence of sexual grooming under their noses, official inquiry finds. Read more in The Telegraph:

A “dangerous” inability to recognise the importance of race meant social workers and police missed glaring warning signs about a gang of Pakistani men grooming white girls for sex in Rochdale, an official inquiry has concluded.

An obsession with being “colour blind” meant they failed even to notice the pattern of abuse going on under their noses, it found.

Although they carefully documented a spate of young white girls from troubled backgrounds in relationships with older men from a community they rarely otherwise mixed with, no one questioned what was going on, it said.

Had they asked why so many vulnerable white girls were striking up "friendships" with older "Asian" men they would have been able to stop the abuse much earlier, a serious case review finds.

The report focusing on six of the victims at the centre of one of the biggest child protection scandals of recent times concludes that a large part of the abuse could have been predicted and prevented if basic questions had been asked.

Continue reading in The Telegraph.

 

UK witch-hunt

Councillor to have diversity training after golliwog remarks

03.01.2014. A panel has ruled that a councillor who made comments about golliwogs not being racist should have diversity training, as they said her remarks brought the council into disrepute, according to The Telegraph.

 

Europe

Is slowly strangling the life out of national democracy

02.01.2014. Decisions affecting the lives of voters are being taken by bureaucrats and unelected 'experts', writes Peter Oborne in The Telegraph.

 

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Norske og skandinaviske lesere vil kunne finne stoff på norsk her.

 

 

Book project

In 2008 I received a book-writing grant from the prestigious Freedom of Expression Foundation, Oslo, Norway. The resulting book was launched in Oslo on 6 May 2010.

 

Quotes

 

No one has the right to legislate the truth. It can only be discovered by free inquiry, and that includes investigations that may make people uncomfortable.

Steven Pinker, in a letter of 09.12.2009 (quoted e.g. here) to then Rector Laurits B. Holm-Nielsen at Aarhus University, commenting on the proceedings against Professor Helmuth Nyborg taking place in Denmark at that time

 

A people that forgets its ancestors will care little for its descendants.

G. K. Chesterton, quoted by Ricardo Duchesne in his book review Civilization: The Six Ways the West Beat the Rest, March 2012

 

Multiculturalism is an effort to destroy the uniqueness of Western nations. My book hopes to encourage Westerners to recover and affirm their exceptional historical identity.

Ricardo Duchesne, concluding his Reply to Mark Elvin (a reply to Elvin's review of Duchesne's book The Uniqueness of Western Civilization)

 

In order to really be able to belong somewhere, others have to agree that you belong there.

Noor Jdid, interviewed by Asma Chaudhry, Northernchowk, 26.07.2013

 

God gives a reward for gentleness which He will never give for harshness.

The Prophet Muhammad, quoted by Charles Le Gai Eaton in The Concept of Justice in Islam

 

Devotion to Jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer.

Mohamad al-Arefe, on MEMRI-TV, quoted in The Spectator, 27.06.2013

 

The less they know, the less they know it.

Edward Feser, commenting on the intellectual state of adherents of secularism, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (Kindle Location 208)

 

They played the Bohemian Rap City.

Steven Pinker, quoting oronyms discovered by teachers reading their student's term papers and homework assignments, The Language Instinct, page 161

 

Human evolution did not halt in the distant past but has continued to the present day. The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago differed greatly from the anatomically modern humans of 100,000 years ago, and people today have had just as long to evolve away from the ancestral population. The human genome bears many marks of recent evolution, prompted by adaptations to events such as cultural changes or new diseases. More visible evidence of recent evolution is the existence of human races. After the dispersal of the ancestral population from Africa 50,000 years ago, human evolution continued independently in each continent. The populations of the world’s major geographical regions bred for many thousand years in substantial isolation from each other and started to develop distinctive features, a genetic differentiation which is the basis for today’s races.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 9

 

If a detectable degree of local genetic differentiation has developed in Iceland in a mere 1,000 years, much greater differences are likely to have arisen among populations in the rest of the world, much of which has been settled for 40 times longer and where there have been many social and geographic impediments to the free flow of genes.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 97

 

It is often assumed that evolution works too slowly for any significant change in human nature to have occurred within the last 10,000 or even 50,000 years. But this assumption is incorrect. The development of new brain gene alleles 37,000 and 6,000 years ago, and of lactose tolerance 5,000 years ago, have already been mentioned; several other instances of recent human evolution are cited in chapter 12. There is no reason to suppose that human nature ceased to evolve at some finishing post in the distant past or to assume, as do some evolutionary psychologists, that people are struggling to function in modern societies with Stone Age minds. Genomes adapt to current circumstances or perish; the human genome is unlikely to be an exception. Human societies have progressed through several major transitions in the last 15,000 years, and it may well be that these transformations were accompanied by evolutionary as well as cultural changes. It was only after people had become less violent that they were able to abandon the nomadic life of hunting and gathering that they had followed for the last 5 million years, and began to settle down. The first settled societies appeared in the Near East some 15,000 years ago.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 178

 

Our bones are more gracile than those of our Upper Paleolithic ancestors, our personalities less aggressive, our societies more trusting and cohesive. An element of human choice, a preference for negotiation over annihilation, has perhaps been injected into the genome. And that might explain why there is an inescapable sense of progress about human evolution over the last 50,000 years: human choice has imposed a direction on the blind forces that hitherto have shaped evolution’s random walk. In parallel with human social evolution, the human physical form continued to evolve. Because the human population was dispersed across different continents, between which distance and hostility allowed little gene flow, the people on each continent followed independent evolutionary paths. It was these independent trajectories that led over the generations to the emergence of a variety of human races.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 180

 

Genetics are likely to provide ever greater detail about how individuals vary, how men and women have different interests and abilities, and how races differ.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 266

 

The belief that human evolution is essentially complete rests on the conjecture that it moves too slowly for significant changes to have occurred recently, for instance within the last 50,000 years. But the human genome, just like those of all other species, can adapt quite quickly to changes in the environment. Without this capacity, humans would long ago have lapsed into extinction. At least four types of recent evolutionary change have already become evident and many more will doubtless come to light. The recent genetic changes already discovered include defenses against disease; increases in fertility; responses to cultural changes that affect the human environment; and changes in cognitive behavior.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 268

 

The other cognitive change is one that can be inferred from the striking recent rise to prominence of versions of two brain genes. As described in chapter 5, the genes first came to light because mutated versions cause microcephaly, a condition in which people are born with an unusually small head and brain. The new version of the microcephalin gene appeared around 37,000 years ago, rapidly became more common under intense selective pressure, and is now carried by most people in Europe and East Asia. The other gene, a new version of ASPM, emerged 6,000 years ago and is now carried by 44% of Caucasians. Both genes are thought to be involved in determining the number of neurons formed in the cerebral cortex in the early embryo. The rapid spread of these two alleles indicates that the human brain has been subject to intense evolutionary pressures in the recent past and may still be evolving. These instances of recent evolutionary change are probably just the first of many that remain to be discovered. Since all occurred after the dispersal from Africa, the alleles that cause them are present to a different extent in different populations. Human diversity therefore cannot be a purely cultural phenomenon, as many social scientists sometimes seem to believe. It has a genetic component too. The component remains to be defined and quantified, but it could prove to be substantial.

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, page 271

 

No. That is a myth that some here want to create: that it's supposedly illegal or unacceptable in Norway to have different opinions on immigration.

Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, to Spiegel Online, 10.10.2011

 

Humanists believe that humanity improves along with the growth of knowledge, but the belief that the increase of knowledge goes with advances in civilization is an act of faith. They see the realization of human potential as the goal of history, when rational inquiry shows history to have no goal. They exalt nature, while insisting that humankind—an accident of nature—can overcome the natural limits that shape the lives of other animals. Plainly absurd, this nonsense gives meaning to the lives of people who believe they have left all myths behind.

John N. Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, quoted in book review by Robert W. Merry, The Fallacy of Human Freedom, The National Interest, July-August, 2013

 

Today, the dead end of western culture is no longer theoretical; it is contained as anxiety and absurdity in the everyday way of life.

Christos Yannaras, Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology (page 164)

 

Like clothes, gender fits the preformed human body and mind, even though on occasion it is a bit of a squeeze.

Frank Salter, The War against Human Nature II - Gender Studies, Quadrant Magazine, July-August 2012

 

The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.

Attritubet by some to George Orwell (disputed)

 

The European Union rejects theories which attempt to determine the existence of separate human races.

Council Directive 2000/43/EC

 

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, four-term U.S. Senator, ambassador, administration official, and academic

 

Whether or not there are [intelligence] differences between ethnic groups, is a well-researched field. However, I will not here reference the results of others, let alone speak my mind. Otherwise, I fear I would be pelted with eggs during lectures. Unfortunately, it is not possible to discuss this issue in a rational way.

Professor Detlef H. Rost, Der Spiegel, 06.05.2013 (my translation)

 

When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible. It wasn’t because we liked immigrants, but because we didn’t like Britain.

Peter Hitchens, 31.03.2013, The Daily Mail

 

Michel Foucault’s approach reduces culture to a power-game, and scholarship to a kind of refereeing in the endless ‘struggle’ between oppressed and oppressing groups. The shift of emphasis from the content of an utterance to the power that speaks through it leads to a new kind of scholarship, which by-passes entirely questions of truth and rationality, and can even reject those questions as themselves ideological. The pragmatism of the late American philosopher Richard Rorty is of similar effect. It expressly set itself against the idea of objective truth, giving a variety of arguments for thinking that truth is a negotiable thing, that what matters in the end is which side you are on. If a doctrine is useful in the struggle that liberates your group, then you are entitled to dismiss the alternatives.

Roger Scruton, The great swindle, Aeon Magazine, 17.12.2012

 

Do not believe the confessions of tortured texts.

Abdal Hakim Murad, Contentions 11/92

 

This healthy instinct to poke fun at an unbalanced piety is the same instinct that makes us laugh at a one-armed man rowing a boat. He is not failing to make an effort, but he lacks balance. The unbalanced pietist, however, may not see the joke; and herein is a deadly threat.

Abdal Hakim Murad, Commentary on the Eleventh Contentions, (#86), page 151

 

Suicide bombing is an extreme way of shooting oneself in the foot.

Abdal Hakim Murad, Contentions 4/49

 

Meanwhile, individuals such as Stephen Jay Gould, who commit outright academic fraud in support of their ideological positions, do enormous damage to the credibility of their own camp.

Ron Unz, Race, IQ, and Wealth - What the facts tell us about a taboo subjec, The American Conservative, 18 July 2012

 

When the black Messiah (Nelson Mandela) dies, we'll teach the whites. We'll commit genocide against them: I hate whites.

South African police officer Juda Dagane, quoted by IOLnews

 

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ray Bradbury

 

There is more than one way to burn a book.

Ray Bradbury

 

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

John Adams (US diplomat & politician, 1735 - 1826), 'Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,' December 1770

 

Human nature is violent and predatory and can be held in check only by three forces, the Grace of God, the fear of the gallows and the pressure of a social tradition, subtly and unconsciously operating as a brake on human instinct.

T.E. Utley (1921 - 1988)

 

[It's] another step in a long-term goal of [his]: the peaceful, nonviolent disappearance of the white race.

Tom Hayden, congratulating his son on marrying a black woman, 27.08.2007

 

We need more speech, more liberty, not less. If this law passes, I shall break it as a point of principle. A hyperlink is not an act of approval, but an act of sourcing: It says to the reader I trust you to go to the source and make an informed judgment. In denying that freedom to the citizen, the state couldn't be more explicit in its contempt for you.

Mark Steyn commenting on a proposed law in Canada, The Criminalization of the Link, 10.05.2011

 

There is no such thing, at this stage of the world’s history in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. [...] The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

John Swinton, chief editorial writer at The New York Times from 1860 to 1870 and an editorial writer for The New York Sun from 1875 to 1897

 

We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't know what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg and the EU's longest-serving head of government, quoted in The Economist, 23.09.2004

 

He is right to argue that immigration on the scale that Europe has experienced consitutues a risky experiment. He is right that we frequently talk about it in stupid and dishonest ways.

The Guardian, commenting on Christopher Caldwell's book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

 

Try to repopulate Thailand with Scots and Slovaks and see whether what results is still Thailand.

Takuan Seiyo, Gates of Vienna, 12.12.2010

 

If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.

Winston Churchill

 

A West which has not yet understood that whites, in a world become too small for its inhabitants, are now a minority and that the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, irretrievably to extinction in the century to come, if we hold fast to our present moral principles.

Jean Raspail, 1982, The Camp of the Saints

 

Those who subscribe to the opinion that there are no human races are obviously ignorant of modern biology.

Ernst Mayr (2002)

 

More quotes.

 

Our Manifesto

 

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.


Provoked or enthusiastic?

 

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.

 
Multicultural societies – respect for Muslims and Islam

 

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.

 

 
Threats against democracy and human rights

 

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.