Race and politics
evolvingthoughts | October 30, 2007
From J. B. S. Haldane's 1932 The Causes of Evolution:
... I must ... discuss a fallacy which is, I think, latent in most Darwinian arguments, and which has been responsible for a good deal of poisonous nonsense which has been written on ethics in Darwin's name, especially in Germany before the [first world] war and in America and England since. The fallacy is that natural selection will always make an organism fitter in its struggle for the environment. This is clearly true when we consider members of a rare and scattered species. It is only engaged in competing with other species, and in…
evolvingthoughts | October 15, 2007
They are now toadies of the Exclusive Brethren, who fund campaign advertisements for the Liberal Party.
Add to this Cardinal George Pell's support, Catholic minister Tony Abbott's attempts to control who can use RU486 on an individual basis (i.e., never), Peter Costello's links with Hillsong, the Assemblies of God megachurch and organisation that founded Family First... it's starting to look very much like the Conservatives are becoming the Christian Right of the United States. What with the demonisation of Muslims, gays, and Africans and all...
Hey, guys, in case you haven't noticed,…
evolvingthoughts | October 9, 2007
It seems that almost nobody can mention Jews without making an inadvertent or deliberate ass of themselves. Most recently, Richard Dawkins put his foot in it in this Guardian article. He said:
When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.
Now, I know what he's trying to say here…
evolvingthoughts | September 27, 2007
There's been a lot of media spin and unthinking objections to the visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the US. He was called the "modern Hitler", for example. This strikes me as both unthinking and dangerous. Ahmadinejad is his own kind of threat and problem, and comparisons to past dangerous individuals don't resolve or enlighten anything. As Time Magazine clearly noted, he has no power over the things that he is being demonised for, and is incompetent and hated internally for the things he does.
But it seems to me there is a wider issue here than the internecine politics of an…
evolvingthoughts | July 30, 2007
Sorry to bother you all with internal Australian politics, but this has to be discussed. Now the minister for immigration is saying that the Australian Federal Police intercepted a chat room conversation in which Haneef was told to leave Australia by (they say) his cousins before his knowledge of the bombing plot was uncovered.
Kevin Andrews also says that critics are soft on terrorism. And here's the nub of the matter. We aren't soft on terrorism - that is a (excuse my French) fucking stupid thing to say. Does Andrews really believe we critics want a bombing in Sydney? We aren't soft on…
evolvingthoughts | July 27, 2007
A short note - it looks like Haneef has been cleared of all charges and the political pressure on his arrest and detention has been criticised by civil rights lawyers. Good news, but I really hope further action is taken against the AFP and the politicians. Keep an eye open to see if he is still deported by the immigration minister's draconian act of revoking his visa.
evolvingthoughts | July 19, 2007
In yet further evidence that due process is a bulwark against the arrogance and incompetence, not to say potential police statery, of intelligence agencies, it turns out that the core piece of evidence against Dr Haneef, the Indian doctor being detained by the Australian government against the law, is wrong.
The prosecutor alleged that Haneef's SIM card was found among the wreckage of the bombed out car in Glasgow. It turns out that it was intact, in one of two mobile phones, in Liverpool, held by his cousin Sabeel Ahmed. Ahmed is not charged with anything other than not informing the…
evolvingthoughts | July 18, 2007
An Indian doctor working in Queensland, where I live, whose cousin was involved in the failed bombing plot in the UK, was detained apparently because he lent his prepaid SIM card to the cousin.
He was held without charge or bail for 13 days, under a magistrate's orders, which is barely acceptable. But the Australian Federal Police leaked information to the media that incriminated him. Then he was brought before a magistrate, who allowed him bail. Got that? The legal system worked to assess his alleged crime and the evidence offered to support the charge, and a magistrate decided the charge…
evolvingthoughts | June 21, 2007
I'm putting this up because I will use it to discuss the history of species definitions in a forthcoming talk. It's very interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is the species nominalism, and another that Lewes argues from evidence for biparental inheritance some years before Mendel, and against eugenics, despite his evident racism, and well before Galton.
Footnotes follow their paragraph, and have been slightly retagged for clarity.
Published anonymously by George Henry Lewes, (1856). “Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human.” Westminster Review 66 (July): 135-162. Parts of…
evolvingthoughts | June 20, 2007
A very thoughtful and interesting, dare I say almost philosophical, discussion of the Manichaean nature of the Bush Administration is in the present Salon here. A quote:
The power to order people detained and imprisoned based solely on accusation is one of the most extraordinary and tyrannical powers any political leader can hold. One of the core rights established against the British king by the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century was that the king could not order subjects imprisoned except upon a finding of guilt arrived at in accordance with legal process. The Military Commissions Act…
evolvingthoughts | May 20, 2007
Why did Edith Rodriguez die unattended by medical staff in an ER? Was it because she was obese? Or Hispanic? Or because the US health system, and in particular this hospital, is so stretched that triage is by rapid prejudice rather than medical criteria?
As a subsidiary question, how is it that people could ignore a screaming woman on the floor?
evolvingthoughts | April 14, 2007
Hank Fox at Unscrewing the Inscrutable has posted an Atheist Declaration of Rights. With two minor changes I reprint it below the fold.
Nonreligious Declaration of Rights
1. Freedom from Fear and Hate:
In every part of a secular society, the nonreligious have the right to live free of fear for their personal safety, their homes, pets and possessions. The nonreligious have the right to be safe from public hate speech and vilification.
2. Freedom of Speech:
The nonreligious have the right to freely speak of atheism in public, or to publicly display characteristic messages or symbols, without…
evolvingthoughts | April 10, 2007
SYDNEY broadcaster Alan Jones' comments before the 2005 Cronulla riots were likely to have encouraged brutality and vilified people of Lebanese and Middle Eastern background, Australia's broadcasting regulator says.
Source
evolvingthoughts | April 10, 2007
This is Australian parochial politics - pass by if you have no interest.
The PM, the minister for Immigration, and the minister for Foreign Affairs, the leader of the Opposition and various other pollies have called for the mufti of Australia, Sheik al Hilali, to leave Australia.
Look, the man's a weed, a slug and a racist, and probably supports the use of terrorist violence. But exiling people from their home nation - and he is now an Australian resident if not a citizen - is not the Australian way. It is not democratic, and it is not the act of the leaders of a free country. Start by…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2007
The Cafeteria is Closed has a very nice little discussion of whether Nietzsche was properly the foundation of German nationalism and anti-Semitism, answering, with documentary support, no to each claim. Given the recent slurs on evolutionary theory as the foundation for Nazism and the holocaust, it's a good point to make.
But is Nietzsche even a "Darwinist" (a term only the Discovery Institute, or as we like to call it, DIsco, seems to use these days, as it has no real meaning)? He certainly accepted that evolution occurred, and he managed to avoid some of the sillier philosophical claims…
evolvingthoughts | October 1, 2006A French philosopher, and his family, have been threatened with death by Islamists for his criticising Islam as a religion of violence and hate, according to Agence France Presse. Details below the fold.
TEACHER WHO ATTACKED ISLAM: "ALONE AND ABANDONED," RECEIVING DEATH THREATS, UNDER POLICE PROTECTION
Published in: Agence France PresseSeptember 29, 2006
PARIS, Sept 29, 2006 (AFP) - French anti-terrorism authorities Friday opened an inquiry into death threats against a philosophy teacher who has been forced into hiding over a newspaper column attacking Islam, legal officials said.
Robert…
evolvingthoughts | September 2, 2006The claim often made is that Darwin is the sine qua non of the eugenics that the Nazis used to justify their genocide.What I aim to do today is show that while it is true (and widely accepted) that Darwinism was used by eugenicists to justify the "scientific" nature of their project, particularly in America, in point of fact the eugenics program was based on the idea that evolution wasn't preserving the "fit" in modern society, and needed the assistance of public policy.
Moreover, many of the opponents of eugenics were themselves evolutionists (a term that just means here a specialist in…
evolvingthoughts | August 29, 2006Well, we have established that the subhuman thesis is not of Darwinian origins, and made a start on showing that the eugenics thesis isn't either (more to come later), but while we're all waiting, Daily Kos has an interesting article by a former history teacher on the Christian attitude to Jews, going back Chrystostom, Augustine and Gregory I, between the 4th and 6th centuries CE.
Of course, he also quotes the execrable writings of Luther, which I mentioned, and the behaviour of the First Crusade in 1096 in which 10,000 Jews were murdered for religious reasons.There were also an indeterminate…
evolvingthoughts | August 28, 2006I won't comment on the execrable link made by that execrable TV show. Some things aren't worth the effort. But those whose minds aren't made up may still have a sneaking suspicion that somehow evolutionary theory was responsible for some part of the Holocaust. After all, that sneaking suspicion is what the unDiscovery Institute wants to implant.
So, what's the real story?
There are several ways in which evolution might have made it possible for the sort of racial eugenics that rationalised (not motivated - the German tradition of anti-Semitism goes back as far as Luther, and to the middle…
evolvingthoughts | June 10, 2006
When I was sixteen, I was rebelling against whatever society had got by getting stoned, generally screwing up, and eventually getting thrown out of high school six months before I graduated. Laurie Pycroft on the other hand, decided enough was enough with the Animal Liberation Front's terrorism activities, and began blogging about it, leading to the foundation of, wait for it, a pro-science movement defending the use of animal experimentation.
Seed Magazine has a short item about Laurie that got me interested, so a short Google later, I discovered that not only did he set off a…