Consulo Verus Parilitas or Crazy "Racist" Rant

So Gore won the prize, so did Arafat. Big deal. I maintain that the Peace Prize is Nobel's black sheep. And all the positive attention to Al Gore is "echad bapeh echad balev " (saying one thing and thinking another) and that is the game of the day. No one can mean what they say because no one can say what they mean for fear of censure. Fear of being censured, in fact, by people who share the sentiment but are afraid to admit to it publicly. So everyone praises Gore's efforts and that absolves them from efforts of their own, which is good because Gore's claims are indeed "inconvenient". Whether they are an "inconvenient truth" or not is a different story. A British Judge found at least ten significant errors in Gore's "Oscar winning" film, which, he ruled, make the film propaganda and unfit as educational material for use in British schools

And the noose thing at Columbia--who said that the noose was hung as a racial insult? Everyone jumps to say it was racially motivated, and there is a suddenly a righteous uproar from the APA about subconscious prejudice. If America wants to recover from racism, we have to stop considering it. The emphasis cannot be on "making the black equal to the white", but rather on treating all people well regardless of their skin color. But that is not what the progeny of the former civil rights movement wants. Today they don't want equal treatment, they want to be lauded for their differences.

Another important point is this: I have a dream, said Dr. King, that my four little children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. What Dr. King hadn't considered was the way many African Americans today fill their character with their skin color. If Ms. Constantine wouldn't insist on being "a black professor at Columbia" and just concentrate on being a "Columbia psychology professor", she wouldn't need to become alarmed at seeing some rope at her door. She wouldn't garner the type of distaste that she does. Additionally, her copious writings on the differences between black and whites in America make her surprise at unequal treatment and her insistence that this has to do with skin color a joke. If she were white and wrote those things, she would provoke the same reaction.

There is apparently a biased writer at the NY Sun dedicated to provoking interracial misunderstanding, Sarah Garland (I hope you are reading this) who continually throws Jena, Louisiana and the nooses under the "white tree" into her articles without explaining the story and mentioning the six black students who mauled a white boy there. What is more painful: the sight of an empty noose hanging from a tree or the fright and pain of being outnumbered six to one in a dark alley and feeling the merciless blows of hate pounding into your gut? (And if your answer has to do with psychological trauma, you need more help than I thought.)

How can we hope to destroy racism if racist reminders are continually thrown in our faces? If we try to treat all people well and African Americans nevertheless use the accusation of white racism as a weapon to gain ascendancy? How can we hope for equality if white applicants are turned away from universities because a quota of blacks must be filled?

When I go to the doctor, I don't care if the doctor's skin is black or white. I just want to see a qualified physician. However, if I know that a white doctor needed an MCAT score of 30 and a black doctor (because of affirmative action admissions policies) needed an MCAT of only 26 to get in to medical school, and black residents can't be worked too hard in their training lest they complain about being mistreated because of their race, what you end up with is a breed of doctors who are on average less qualified than the overall average standard for what is expected from a doctor. Now, if I were to say I prefer a white doctor am I racist--or simply responding to realistic quality concerns? How can we equate equality with a double standard? ( p.s. My doctor is African American and she is an excellent physician.)

Pundits claim black youth are disadvantaged because they live in poor, crime-ridden communities and therefore need programs to boost them up and make them equal. Then they come from the other end and accuse white people of racism when they oppose government residential integration programs such as subsidized housing for African Americans in historically white communities. Here again, people have no problem if an African American family on a similar socioeconomic strata to them would move in to the house next door. It is not a race issue. But when the government wants to take a poor family from a bad neighborhood and install them into subsidized housing where they will be living in a place they could not normally afford and jealously watching their wealthier neighbors, where they will not fit into the social culture of the community, where they will be different in a thousand ways unrelated to the color of their skin but very related to the content of their character, and people oppose, this is not an example of racism.

US genetics bill

news @ nature.com - US genetics bill blocked again - One-man lobby halts antidiscrimination law.

Legislators rush into action without understanding the issues in another example of preemptive lawmaking. Every company wants to hire the most suitable candidates. They use resumes, interviews, questionnaires, tests, and contact with previous employers as surrogates for the information they seek: Is this person my best candidate? If there is a genetic marker that will provide this information as accurately or more accurately than current methods, is it fair to make companies continue to go the roundabout and inefficient route to picking employees? To answer no is to promote either gross inefficiency and waste on the part of companies using imperfect selection practices or an obscurely random style of welfare that has companies taking on a percentage of unequipped employees because it couldn't use an appropriate filter system.

Do I advocate racially biased hiring practices, then? No, of course not. What has one thing to do with the other? Why is the epithet of "racial discrimination" flung at anyone who believes that the genotype of a human being contributes to his or her phenotype in a way not radically dissimilar to the way the genotype of say, a rat, contributes to its phenotype?

Many school districts use parental income or location as surrogates for race. Banned from overt racial discrimination against Caucasians by law, they give preferential admissions treatment to people from "black neighborhoods" (who often belong to a certain race - can you guess which?). This is just one example of how surrogate measures are obscenely concocted to circumvent anti-discrimination protocols. It is also an example of what any company has to do when hiring: It can't measure competence directly - there is no "employee competence scale" - so it uses surrogate measures. Ultimately, efficient companies will find the most competent employees. So assuming that genetic screening could become a practical tool in employee selection (an unlikely possibility in the near future), this proposed bill will dictate either inefficient selection procedures or lead to not hiring the most suited employees.

Affirmative Action in Hyperdrive

It's just a hunch, but I think Hollywood's got affirmative action in hyperdrive. Remind me to do a formal study of the amount of media portrayal of minorities and ethnicities sometime. But it's not just movies. Companies like to showcase their African American employees. (Is "African American" still PC?) Prestigious scholarships will always prominently feature a poster-boy Black or Asian winner. In contrast, my flatmates were arguing the merits of social Darwinism the other day. Weird world. Weird that we are capable of thinking "weird world".