Header image  
Culture, politics, science, philosophy  
 

 
Thinking matters
 

Culture, politics, science, philosophy.

General manifesto ***** Immigration manifesto
The deep Crisis of the West
Permalinks

Anti-racism

Allowing evil to thrive

30.08.2014. The Rotherham abuse scandal represents a savage indictment of the local council and police. Through their spectacular incompetence, cowardice and neglect they allowed more than 1,400 vulnerable girls, some as young as 11, to be systematically abused over a period of 16 years, even though many of these victims were known to the authorities. It seems almost inexplicable that abuse on this scale could be allowed to happen. Yet in some ways the appalling saga in the South Yorkshire town was all too predictable, for it was a direct consequence of the creed of multiculturalism that holds sway across the public sector, particularly the social services. It is this enforced orthodoxy that so disastrously inhibited the Rotherham authorities from taking action against the predatory gangs of Pakistani men, and from protecting the girls, who were mainly white. Thus writes Manzoor Moghal, Chairman Of The Muslim Forum, under the heading From sex abuse gangs to jihadis, the State's fear of seeming 'racist' is letting evil thrive (emphasis added):

Failure

The ideologues of multiculturalism, clinging to their vision of harmonious diversity, might not like to face up to the reality, but without doubt the ethnicity of the abusers was a central factor in the reluctance of the State to tackle their vile activities. The report produced by Professor Alexis Jay, the distinguished former inspector of social work in Scotland, makes that unequivocally clear.

‘Almost all’ offenders were Pakistani, she writes, ‘yet some people in the council and the police wanted to play down the ethnic dimension.’

Meanwhile, frontline staff felt ‘unsure’ how to deal with the crime pattern ‘for fear of being thought racist’.

Shamefully, it is obvious from the report that the council and police put far greater emphasis on maintaining the image of successful diversity in Rotherham than on protecting children.

Professor Jay’s report states explicitly that gangs acted with impunity for 16 years because council staff not only feared accusations of racism but thought a tough approach ‘might damage community cohesion’.

Even Denis MacShane, the disgraced former Labour MP for Rotherham, who was jailed for fiddling his expenses, admitted yesterday that in his role as a constituency representative he failed to take the allegations seriously because ‘I didn’t want to rock the multicultural boat’.

Those words, along with Professor Jay’s report, show the terrible damage done by the ideology of multiculturalism which, in Rotherham, was elevated above the requirements of law enforcement and compassionate morality.

Its supporters proclaim multiculturalism as a vehicle for prosperity, vibrancy and harmony. But in truth, as we can see from the fragmentation of our urban areas, it has promoted division, separatism and distrust.

Thanks to this dogma, we no longer have a universal moral code or national identity, and the consequences can be seen all around us, whether in the rise of home-grown Islamic extremism or in the failure of too many migrant groups to learn even basic English.

The advance of multiculturalism across our civic life has been fuelled by the deepening official fixation with ‘anti-racism’.

[...]

Blighted

In the same pusillanimous manner, the police and councils have been fearful of tackling the rise of jihadism on our streets, pretending that there was no real threat to Britain.

Indeed, in one notorious case, West Midlands police urged the prosecution of Channel 4 TV producers on grounds of incitement to racial hatred, for daring to make a documentary about hate preachers in Birmingham’s mosques.

This neurosis about anti-discrimination has also blighted the State’s ability to deal with gangland violence, gun crime, muggings and knife attacks perpetrated by young black men in our inner cities, a supine posture that plumbed new depths in 2011 in the riots that engulfed London after the shooting of the alleged drug dealer Mark Duggan.

It was the police’s fear of accusations of racism, bred by years of unbalanced anti-racist indoctrination, that allowed disorder to spread so rapidly across the capital. At the same time, there was a litany of excuse-making to absolve the young criminals of responsibility for their actions.

We are told that they are suffering from deprivation, marginalisation, a macho street culture and a lack of male role models, though any attempt to address these problems often leads to yet more charges of racism.

Tolerant

The remorseless official focus on anti-racism has been further fed by the dramatic transformation of our society through mass immigration, which over the past decade has been running at more than 500,000 new arrivals every year, with many arriving from Asia and Africa.

It is no exaggeration to describe the change as an unprecedented social revolution. White British people are in the minority across entire conurbations such as London, Luton and Slough.

For all the cheering from the multiculturalists at this demographic upheaval, we have to recognise that it has not only imposed a severe burden on our civic infrastructure, reflected in overcrowded schools and overstretched hospitals, but has led to a host of other problems including the importing of dangerous diseases such as tuberculosis and rickets, formerly thought to have been eradicated from modern Britain.

As I know from my own experience, this country has been wonderfully tolerant. Few other nations could have absorbed so many newcomers without strife or political breakdown. But that tolerance is being stretched to breaking point.

Far from promoting harmony, politically correct angst about racism by the authorities is undermining the fabric of our society. And it is innocent girls like those in Rotherham who are paying the price.

Read the entire article in The Daily Mail.

See also:

 

Grooming

Yet another scandal in the UK

27.08.2014. Level of abuse uncovered by Alexis Jay appears to make this South Yorkshire town the nation's sex exploitation capital. The putrid mess that oozes from the 160 pages of Alexis Jay's report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham is so thick that one gags rather than read the words. Thus reports The Guardian in Rotherham: a putrid scandal perpetuated by a broken system. The article later continues as follows (emphasis added):

It's not as if there was a lack of evidence of a growing problem on Rotherham's streets.

Internal reports from a decade ago revealed "links between child sexual exploitation and drugs, guns and criminality".

Schools raised the alert about children being picked up "by taxis, given presents and mobile phones and taken to meet large numbers of unknown males".

What allowed these crimes to continue was not just that abused children were cowed into silence or mentally enslaved by older men, but that even when they spoke out they were met by a culture of disbelief from the authorities.

Time and time again, police and social workers appear to talk of mothers being unable to deal with children "growing up".

In one instance, a girl of 12 was groomed, raped and then trafficked. The authorities "blamed the child … for placing herself at risk".

In another case an 11-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted, then a year later found drunk in a car with a suspected abuser who had taken indecent pictures of her on his phone. She was declared to be at "no risk of sexual exploitation".

Many of the children came from poorer backgrounds and troubled homes and were in care. The suspicion is that council officials and police officers considered them part of an underclass who were not so much the victims of crime as authors of their own misfortunes.

That the local administration and police knew about the problems and chose not to prevent them clearly shows something is rotten in Rotherham.

Continue reading in The Guardian.

Breitbart reports the following (emphasis added):

Q: When is the sexual abuse of children culturally, socially and politically acceptable?

A: When it's committed with industrial efficiency by organised gangs of mainly Pakistani men in English Northern towns like Burnley, Oldham and Rotherham, of course.

But obviously you're not allowed to admit this or you might sound racist. That's why, for example, in today's BBC report into the fact that at least 1400 children were subjected to "appalling" sexual abuse in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, you have to wade 20 paragraphs in before finally you discover the ethnic identity of the perpetrators.

[...]

I doubt it, somehow. It's not as if we're talking here about sporadic instances of carefully concealed abuse which anyone could be forgiven for not having noticed. We're talking about flagrant sexual abuse on an epic scale.

[...]

The local authorities, in other words, knew exactly what was going on. Yet still they did nothing. Why?

Well we've already answered that, pretty much. It's because the kind of politically correct, left-leaning and basically rather thick people that local authorities like Rotherham Council tend to have working for them are so paralysed by modish concerns about cultural sensitivity that they have made an obscene judgement call: better to allow at least 1400 kids to be hideously abused than to be thought guilty of the far greater crimes of being thought a bit racist or accidentally offending someone.

(And this isn't an incident confined to Rotherham by the way. The same thing happened recently in Oxford, again involving men with decidedly un-Anglo-Saxon names, again over a long period of time because all the relevant authorities were scared of sounding the alarm in case they came across as racist)

Yep, these people really are that thick and warped. They've had it drilled into them - probably on courses like this one, organised by Common Purpose - that they must celebrate "diversity" at every opportunity. And if that means letting a few Pakistani men rape kids, douse them with petrol and threaten them with guns, well who are we to judge? Quite possibly it's one of those vital cultural differences that we'll be trained better to understand when we attend our next Common Purpose course with some title like Embracing The Other: Leadership Strategies For Multicultural Community Development. Till then, let's not be quick to cast the first stone, eh? After all, there may be aspects of our culture that they find equally alien and troubling. The rule of law say; respect for women; children's rights; trendy Western liberal crap like that...

Read the entire article at Breitbart.

BBC reports the following (emphasis added):

The majority of those behind the abuse were described as Asian, while the victims were young white girls.

Yet the report found that councillors failed to engage with the town's Pakistani-heritage community during the inquiry period.

Some councillors were said to have hoped the issue would "go away", thinking it was a "one-off problem".

The report said several staff members were afraid they would be labelled racist if they identified the race of the perpetrators, while others said they were instructed by their managers not to do so.

Several councillors interviewed believed highlighting the race element would "give oxygen" to racist ideas and threaten community cohesion.

Continue reading at BBC.

See also:

 

Hamas

Threatened reporters in Gaza

19.08.2014. The Foreign Press Association is protesting “in the strongest terms the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by the Hamas authorities and their representatives against visiting international journalists in Gaza over the past month." For more background on this, see:

 

IS

There is no end to their atrocities

Christian child waiting to be killed by IS (downloaded from Catholic Online).

17.08.2014 (updated 22.08.2014). Sunni tribesmen marched into desert, made to kneel and shot in the head. Tribe made deal with IS (a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL) to be left alone but agreement collapsed. Shocking close-up photos of splattered brains and severed heads released. 'Punishment for those who fight Allah and his Messenger is to crucify or cut off hands and feet'. From the article Lined up and executed, their severed heads put on display as a warning to others: Horrific new photographs of ISIS atrocities:

Up to 500 prisoners from the minority Yazidi faith are said to have been killed by ‘death squads’ of jihadi gunmen in recent days.

Some 40 Yazidi children are reported to be among the dead, after being driven from their homes by the brutal Islamist militant offensive in northern Iraq.

Chilling images of the victims have now emerged, some released by the group’s expertly managed propaganda machine.

Advancing Islamic State fighters have filmed themselves massacring prisoners, some of whom have been crucified or beheaded. Pictures show armed fighters, appearing to laugh over slumped bodies of dead civilians, who had been lined up and shot in the head and back.

‘The punishment of those who fight Allah and his Messenger and spread mischief on earth is to kill or crucify or cut off their hands and feet,’ the militant group declared.

There were also reports of children being beheaded, crucifixions and amputations. One said trapped Yazidi women were being raped while their husbands were slaughtered.

For photographic evidence and more text, see The Daily Mail.

See also:

  • The killings have begun. The world does the least it can do. Islamic State terrorists have begun their promised killing of Christians in Mosul, and they have started with the children. According to a report via CNN, a Chaldean-American businessman has said that killings have started in Mosul and children's heads are being erected on poles in a city park.
  • Our generational struggle against a poisonous ideology. Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, David Cameron warns of terrorist caliphate on the shores of the Mediterranean if Islamic State succeeds.
  • How Dissimulation about Islam is Fuelling Genocide in the Middle East. Parents are throwing their children to their deaths off the mountain rather than see them die of thirst or be taken into slavery by IS. The IS jihadis are killing the men they capture. In one recent incident 1500 men were executed in front of their wives and families. In another incident 13 Yazidi men who refused to convert to Islam had their eyes plucked out, were doused with gasoline and burned alive. When the men are killed, captured women and children are enslaved to be used for sex, deployed as human shields in battle zones, or sold to be used and abused as their new owners see fit. [...] These events ought to be sobering to the West, not least because thousands of the IS jihadis were raised and bred in the mosques of Europe, North America and Australia, not to mention the madrassas of nations such as Malaysia, Bangladesh and Indonesia. Having been formed by the theology of radical Islam in their home societies, would-be jihadis are flocking to Syria and Iraq where they seek victory or martyrdom, killing and raping as they go. Why is this so? How did the Arab Spring, hailed by so many armchair western commentators as the next best thing for the Middle East, blossom bright red into a torrent of blood? Part of the answer is that the West is in the grip of theological illiteracy. It has stubbornly refused to grasp the implications of a global Islamic revival which has been gaining steam for the best part of a century. The Islamic Movement looks back to the glory days of conquest as Islam's finest hour, and seeks to revive Islamic supremacy through jihad and sacrifice. It longs for a truly Islamic state – the caliphate reborn – and considers jihad to be the God-given means to usher it in. This worldview was promoted in compelling, visionary terms by Indian scholar Abul A'la Maududi, whose writings continue to be widely disseminated by Islamic bookshops and mosques across the West. Mark Durie.

 

Australia

Legal fights over the significance of race and ethnicity

13.08.2014. The genuine ground for recognising indigenous peoples—that doing so would establish historical truth about the country’s origins—also applies to British settlement and the original Anglo nation which gave Australia its name. Thus writes Frank Salter in his article Indigenous Recognition’s Misguided Case in Quadrant Magazine:

When I first read of the proposal to recognise indigenous Australians in the Constitution, I thought: it’s about time. Recognition is the honest and empathic thing to do. If I were of indigenous descent, knowing that my country had been colonised and my people reduced from sole occupants to a small and marginalised minority, I would want my people recognised in a form that would build their pride and gain respect from other Australians. In addition the status brought by constitutional recognition would be adaptive in the biological sense of group survival. Aborigines are related genetically to one another like first cousins compared to White Australians[1] and I know that in their position I would have fraternal feelings towards ethnic kin due to shared culture and ancestry.

Australia’s First Peoples—Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders—have a claim to recognition in the Constitution second only to Australia’s historic nation, the continent-wide community of sentiment and shared culture, memories and homeland that awakened in the second half of the nineteenth century. That nation by now includes many people of indigenous descent and the descendants of immigrants from around the world. Like all ethnic families indigenous peoples have a vital interest in continuity and status. I understand their wish to place that interest beyond the vagaries of ideological fashion. It is right and reasonable for citizens to pursue their interests when those do not conflict with vital national interests. Like many Australians I respect indigenous aspiration for recognition and fair treatment.

Then I read the recommended changes to the referendum. These are in the Report of the Expert Panel appointed by former Prime Minister Julia Gillard. The changes are unacceptable, even if placed in the Constitution’s preamble, primarily because they fail to recognise the origins of the Australian nation. The amendments would symbolically, and legally if the panel had their way, alienate the nation from its homeland. This flaw is compounded by poor arguments. Contrary to the panel’s advice, constitutional recognition will not close the gap in indigenous health, criminality and employment. The genuine ground for recognising indigenous peoples—that doing so would establish historical truth about the country’s origins—also applies to British settlement and the original Anglo nation which gave Australia its name.

The Expert Panel’s Report is a sinister document. It is biased ideologically and ethnically against the traditional Australian nation. Its analysis is flawed by the same ideological distortions and intolerance that have plagued multiculturalism since its inception. It contains psychological and legal traps which if allowed into the Constitution will be sources of endless demands, litigation and propaganda. Social cohesion would be undermined.

This essay has three parts, which will be published in this and subsequent editions. The first summarises the Report’s recommendations and their anti-national bias, the cause of which appears to be irrationality produced by the long-running series of culture wars over race and ethnicity. Two subjects afflicted by irrationality are the causes of Aboriginal disability and the meaning of nationhood.

The second part continues to discuss irrational social analysis, looking at UN influence and the race concept. The two themes intersect in Ashley Montagu, a radical anthropologist given prominence in the Report. An examination of Montagu illuminates the culture war over ethnicity.

The third and final part of this essay begins by describing how the Expert Panel was ethnically biased, despite being appointed by an avowedly multiculturalist government. I outline fair principles by which national and indigenous origins might be recognised in appropriate relation to one another in the Constitution. By failing to recognise the historic nation, the Report falls short of these principles and should be opposed.

Read the entire article in Quadrant Online. See also:

  • The Misguided Case for Indigenous Recognition in the Constitution (Part II). The Expert Panel’s irrationality is compounded by its slavish devotion to the United Nations, an organisation compromised by cultural Marxism from its early days. The Report points out that the Whitlam government ratified the UN’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (UNCERD) and that signatories are obliged to legislate accordingly. However, it does not report that in signing the Convention, the Whitlam government regretted that it could not criminalise all the acts covered by Article 4(a) of the Convention, such as expressing opinions likely to promote racial discrimination, but undertook to do so “at the first suitable moment”. Neither does the Report acknowledge the obvious threat this article poses to civil liberties. Although the panel recommended a constitutional prohibition only of government discrimination, in its discussion it implied that individual discrimination should be suppressed, again based on the UN: “The Charter of the United Nations … provides a clear foundation for the international prohibition of racial discrimination.” The Report respectfully cites several UN documents, including the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The Expert Panel sought out principles it considered authoritative—and sometimes mandatory due to treaty obligations—as guides and spurs to recognising indigenous peoples in the Constitution.
  • The Misguided Case for Indigenous Recognition (Part III).

Frank Salter is an Australian urban anthropologist and ethologist who studies organisations and society using the methods and concepts of behavioural biology.

 

Home

Permalinks to older articles

 
 

Search HonestThinking

 

Norsk stoff - Norwegian material

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

 

Ubi caritas et amor, ibi Deus est.

Old Catholic hymn (where charity and love are, there is God)

 

Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.

Mahatma Gandhi

 

People often ask me by what standards they should measure the knowledge and qualifications of someone from whom they should accept counsel on matters of Islamic law. While this is a complex matter, at a minimum such a person should have received at least twenty years of formal training in Islamic law, should be intimately knowledgeable of the local culture, and should have a balanced, humanistic view.

Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (page 108)

 

For moderates [i.e., moderate Muslims, as opposed to puritans/extremists], this would be impossible. God is moral and ethical, in the sense that God shares with human beings an objective standard for goodness, morality, and beauty. Civilizing the earth does not mean constructing buildings or paving roads. It means striving to spread on the earth the Divine attributes such as justice, mercy, compassion, goodness, and beauty. In doing so, human beings spread Divinity itself upon the earth. [...] The more the earth is permeated with justice, mercy, compassion, and beauty, the nearer the earth is to the Divine ideal.

Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (page 129-130)

 

Muslims must set an example for the rest of humanity in their diligence and persistence in seeking the perfection of Divinity. If Muslims fail in setting an example for humanity in their fidelity to justice, mercy, compassion, and beauty, then Muslims have failed God. In moderate thought, God is too great to be embodied in a code of law. The [Shari'a] law helps Muslims in the quest for Godliness, but Godliness cannot be equated to the law. The ultimate objective of the law is to achieve goodness, which includes justice, mercy, and compassion, and the technicalities of the law cannot be allowed to subvert the objectives of the law. Therefore, if the application of the law produces injustice, suffering, and misery, this means that the law is not serving its purposes. In this situation, the law is corrupting the earth instead of civilizing it. In short, if the application of the law results in injustice, suffering, or misery, then the law must be reinterpreted, suspended, or reconstructed, depending on the law in question.

Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (page 131, italics in original)

 

I must say that in my opinion the truly sad reality is that the puritan ideology of the state will only lead to considerable bloodshed without the puritans ever finding their utopia with its just despot. As some of the classical jurists used to say, justice and despotism are two opposites, and the two will never meet without one killing the other. After much suffering, the puritans are bound to wake up and realize that while they dreamed in clouds of their utopia, on this earth they only managed to create a nightmare.

Khaled M. Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (page 199-200)

 

Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life.

Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy - the moral limits of markets, page 203

 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
—that is all
Ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know.

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

 

Whoever seeks the truth is seeking God, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Edith Stein, Jewish philosopher who converted to the Roman Catholic Church and became a Discalced Carmelite nun

 

We have seen the future, and it has failed already.

James Kalb, Against Inclusiveness, page 154

 

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Winston Churchill

 

Difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations.

Anonymous

 

Based on the evidence of the past four centuries and the state of contemporary philosophy, the rational conclusion is that reason alone has failed as a means by which to discover or devise the truth about the nature of reality, morality, what human beings should care about, and how they should live. Despite high hopes for its success since the seventeenth century, modern philosophy has foundered in its central ambition. It sought universal, rationally demonstrable truth, but has produced instead an open-ended welter of preferential, ultimately arbitrary truth claims.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, page 379

 

Modern reason in its two most influential expressions is therefore a schizophrenically mixed bag: philosophy has dramatically failed, but science has spectacularly succeeded. One consequence is that the ever-expanding technological capacities afforded by scientific advances are set within an increasingly rancorous culture of moral disagreement and political contestation. If not necessarily a failure of modernity per se, this fact certainly contributes to its volatility and potential for man-made catastrophes on scales inconceivable in the preindustrial world.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, page 380

 

And perhaps some religious truth claims really are true, and maybe their rejection helps to explain both why Western history has unfolded as it has in the past half millennium and why modernity is now failing.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, page 383

 

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

 

 

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.