Kevin Rudd and the philosophers' stones

David Burchell


IN the sodden northern winter of 1766 the Scottish essayist David Hume - surely one of the most sweet-tempered and agreeable of men - sallied across to Calais to transport the notorious Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the safety of the British Isles. Like many scholars since, Hume had a weakness for the glamorous authors of audacious theories. If shallow thinkers undershot the mark of truth, he reckoned, and abstruse theorists overshot it, the abstruse ones had at least the merit of "providing something that is new".

Poor Hume had occasion to repent his intellectual enthusiasm at his leisure. Pretty soon he discovered his guest to be the very archetype of that distinctive philosophical figure, the radical misanthrope. It was Rousseau, after all, who first combined that burning and sincere love of the people in general with a thoroughgoing detestation of all human beings in the particular; and whose vaulting hopes for some distant imagined future were matched only by his dissatisfaction with every single detail of the present. As Hume put it, Rousseau's extreme sensibility led him to experience pain far more keenly than pleasure: "He is like a man stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin." And all this grand miserableness of temper transferred itself - as in philosophers it so often does - into a perfectly formulated world philosophy of grand miserableness.

Rousseau was happy only under persecution and he was endlessly ingenious in creating it. Hume's discreet attempts at financial generosity were read by Rousseau, inevitably, as humiliations; his efforts at securing Rousseau an income were read as treachery. When Hume rescued Rousseau's letters, Rousseau accused him of steaming them open.

Soon Rousseau's grand paranoia had woven together these imaginary petty betrayals into the cloth of his own grand theory of the world, in which the torrent of modern life rushes inexorably down the course of atomisation, fragmentation, selfishness and deceit.

If, as Hume suggested, a good deal of philosophy is merely the personality of the author laid over the landscape of the world, we have more than our share of miniature Rousseaus fluttering about us today.

It's to them that we owe the fashionable philosophy - recently given a kind of royal appointment by the Prime Minister - that the entire course of contemporary economic life runs, Rousseau-like, down the path of inexorable privatisation, marketisation, individualism and selfishness.

According to this view the only possible deliverer from this melancholy fate is that great contemporary equivalent of the 18th century's enlightened monarch, our very own Frederick the Great, the nation-building state.

Of course contemporary philosophers and political theorists are no less paradoxical than their 18th-century forebears. And in the otherwise polite and civilised corridors of academe you may sometimes discover - a real shock, this - that those who most zealously put their faith into the hands of grand impersonal entities, in their theories, may happen in life to be the most fissiparous, idiosyncratic and solitary of individuals. Indeed, in some cases it's hard to resist the intuition that the two impulses may be connected: sometimes we seek to cure the wounds in our own heart by diagnosing and resolving the ills of society.

This - or at least so I like to fantasise - is perhaps how Kevin Rudd came to play Hume to our gaggle of miniature Rousseaus. It's not that the Prime Minister really, seriously, views the past three decades of our public life as a moral desert, a wilderness from which the market's invisible hand has plucked all the fruit. Perhaps it's just that beneath that precise, calculating exterior there lurks a heart that hungers for abstruse philosophy and for the mind that overreaches. (In which case, what bitter irony that Rudd's article for the journal Foreign Affairs, which offers so much serious thought, should have been summarily rejected while his half-hearted wanderings through radical political philosophy were published with such fanfare.)

And yet almost immediately, Rudd has been confronted by the paradoxes that assail this position from every side. How can it be that the leitmotif of the past 30 years of public life is a soulless economic conservatism if the main progenitors of this state of affairs just happen to be the most respected Labor prime ministers of the past half-century? How can you treat economic policy as reform when it suits you, only to redescribe it as neo-liberalism when it doesn't? How can you be the apostle of a productivity revolution and at the same time a defender of the life-world against the deadening influence of economics? How can you present the nation-building state as the new social democratic tool when the future promises fiscal austerity?

Fortunately for Rudd, rescue is perhaps nearer to hand than it was for the unfortunate Hume. Julia Gillard nowadays presents herself as the Ms Fixit of public life, but in her political youth she was regarded by her mentors as an intellectual prodigy. In the legacy wars that have arisen over Paul Kelly's The March of Patriots, it may be that his loyal deputy has provided the Prime Minister with a ready-dug escape route from his Rousseauian paradoxes.

Gillard has brought the argument back down from philosophy's celestial spheres to the dust and dirt of political ethics. The central problem of the Howard years, in her view, wasn't a surfeit of ideology but rather a dearth of intellectual honesty. In a period of rapid and wearying economic change, "old certainties are swept away, old securities reduced". Frank acceptance of this by citizens required that government offer its citizens a social contract, lessening the birth pains of the new economy. Yet all the Howard government offered citizens "was an illusion that old certainties could be retained". Labor's role, on this logic, is not to battle against the global tide but rather to reshape state services in line with the greater risks and opportunities of the new world.

There is a straight line between 1983 and the future, in other words, and it passes through us. This is not exactly visionary, but it does make sense.

Hume wasn't a romantic acolyte of market economics. (But then which serious political thinker ever was?) He did, however, accurately anticipate the moral liberation that modern economic relations might bring.

He also understood how little these relations relied on the stock of innate human goodness, the same stock in which, paradoxically, the misanthrope Rousseau purported to place so much faith. Once his scarifying encounter with the great friend of mankind was over, Hume recovered his native equanimity and returned to worldlier speculations. Who knows, perhaps our would-be philosophers might now do the same.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26067804-7583,00.html

Landmark ruling as internet race-hate fugitives locked up

TWO men have been jailed for publishing inflammatory race hate articles on the internet in a case that has been hailed as a landmark.
Simon Sheppard had argued that because his website used a server registered in the USA it was beyond the reach of English law but a judge disagreed and yesterday, after two trials, he finally sentenced Sheppard and Stephen Whittle, the author of five articles on the site.

Judge Rodney Grant told the pair at Leeds Crown Court their actions were unpleasant and very serious. He said: "I can say without any hesitation that I have rarely seen, or had to read or consider, material which was so abusive or insulting in its content towards racial groups within our own country and society."

The website featured extreme views and grotesque images of murdered Jews alongside cartoons and posters ridiculing ethnic groups, while Whittle's articles were "full of hatred".

The judge said Sheppard's counsel argued he had set up the website that way because he did not see himself as breaking British law. "I am satisfied having heard you give evidence and considered the submissions made you thought by using a server in the US you had found a way to circumvent English law."

Sheppard, 52, of Brook Street, Selby, was jailed for four years and six months on 16 charges relating to the possession, publication and distribution of material which could stir up racial hatred either on the internet or in hard copy.

He was previously convicted nine years ago at Hull Crown Court of publishing and distributing inflammatory material.

York University graduate Whittle, 42, of Avenham Lane, Preston, who was found guilty of five offences of publishing inflammatory material, was jailed for two years.

Both men were also sentenced to a further four months consecutive for breaching bail when they fled to the USA in July last year towards the close of the first trial. They spent 11 months in custody in California but failed to secure political asylum and were returned last month.

After the sentencing Adil Khan, head of diversity and community cohesion at Humberside Police, said: "This case is groundbreaking. The sentences reflect the gravity of the offences and send a very clear message there is nowhere to hide for people who do this."

Jonathan Sandiford, prosecuting, told the jury the men held extreme far right views "about people who were Jewish, black, Asian, Chinese, Indian and in reality anyone who wasn't white".

He said an investigation began in 2004 after a pamphlet Tales of the Holohoax, treating the subject as humorous, were pushed through the letterbox of a Blackpool synagogue and sent to a Jewish academic in London.

Copies of the leaflet were seized from Sheppard's then home in Market Weighton along with details of his website offering to supply it and other material through a post office box in Hull registered to him.

The website featured material including descriptions of Auschwitz as a holiday camp for Jews provided by the Nazis while articles written by Whittle described black people as "sex-crazed blood-thirsty savages".

Adrian Davies for Sheppard, who has a degree in mathematics, said he had a troubled childhood leading to a problem with authority, particularly the police. He considered his activities lawful with much of the information widely available.

Linda Turnbull for Whittle said he now appreciated his articles were "nasty and unacceptable".

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/Landmark-ruling-as-internet-racehate.5449263.jp

Jewish school broke race laws by refusing boy whose mother had converted

A leading Jewish state school broke race laws by refusing to admit a boy whose mother had converted to the religion, the Court of Appeal ruled yesterday.

JFS, formerly the Jewish Free School, is highly oversubscribed and has turned away several pupils for not meeting its criteria of Jewishness. Previous court hearings have supported its stance. Yesterday, however, the court ruled in favour of the parents of a boy named only as M.

The school, in Brent, northwest London, rejected the 12-year-old child because his mother converted to Judaism at a Progressive rather than Orthodox synagogue. M’s father is Jewish, but custom dictates that the faith line passes through the mother.

The judges said that “the requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or by conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act”.

The ruling will have widespread implications for other faith schools and puts the court on a collision course with the Office of the Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, from which the school takes its definition of which children are Jewish.

It strikes at the heart of whether being Jewish is a religious or racial question and means that such schools will now have to adopt a religious practice test.

JFS said that it was “disappointed” and would seek leave to appeal to the House of Lords — a decision supported by Sir Jonathan. “I have advised the leadership of JFS that they have my full personal support,” he said.

Other Jewish groups, however, welcomed the ruling, saying they had been marginalised and discouraged from speaking out. Rabbi Danny Rich, the chief executive of Liberal Judaism, said: “The JFS, a state comprehensive funded by taxpayers, has been exclusively following one Jewish religious authority and ignoring the rest. We object to standard-setting by just one section of the community to the detriment of the rest. The JFS will now be open to children from all types of Jewish background.”

The court ruling stated: “It appears to us clear that Jews constitute a racial group defined principally by ethnic origin and additionally by conversion and that to discriminate against a person on the ground that he either is or is not Jewish is therefore to discriminate against him on racial grounds.

“If for theological reasons a fully subscribed Christian faith school refused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit practising Christians, the child’s family were of Jewish origin, it is hard to see what answer there could be to a claim for race discrimination. The refusal of JFS to admit M was accordingly, in our judgment, less favourable treatment of him on racial grounds.”

John Halford, who represented the boy’s father, said: “It is unlawful for a child’s ethnic origins to be used as the criterion for school entry. Such a practice is even more unacceptable in the case of a comprehensive school funded by the taxpayer.”

Many other Jewish schools operate according to similar policies and will be affected by the court’s decision.

David Lightman’s daughter was also turned away by JFS because it did not accept her Jewish status, even though her mother is head of English at the school. Mr Lightman, an Orthodox Jew, said yesterday: “This is a victory for common sense and religious freedom. We are talking about two Jewish children who want an education. If the school thinks it’s worth spending millions of pounds to stop that happening, then they need to re-examine what Judaism is about.”

JFS is one of Britain’s oldest Jewish schools and is the largest Orthodox Jewish school in Europe, with 2,000 pupils. It is described by Ofsted as outstanding and is oversubscribed every academic year.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article6578332.ece

Virulent new strain of anti-Semitism rife in UK, says Chief Rabbi

Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester

Britain is in the grip of a “virulent” new strain of anti-Semitism, according to the Chief Rabbi. Sir Jonathan Sacks told The Times in an interview that in January the number of anti-Semitic incidents reached the highest level since records began.

Jews have been physically attacked, schools targeted and cemeteries desecrated.

“I was in the synagogue a few months ago when one of the members came in visibly shaken: somebody had just shouted at him, ‘It’s a pity Hitler didn’t finish the job’,” the Chief Rabbi said.

Although the new “mutation” was different from the anti-Semitism promoted by Hitler, it was dangerous because it was international, he said. “The internet means that we no longer have national cultures; we have global cultures and the new anti-Semitism is very much a phenomenon of the global culture.”

Whereas in the past, hatred was focused against Judaism as a religion or Jews as a race, the focus this time was on Jews as a nation. The rise in the number of attacks in January took place at the same time as Israel’s assault on Hamas in Gaza.

“It begins as anti-Zionism — but it is never merely anti-Zionism when it attacks synagogues or Jewish schools,” Sir Jonathan said. “In the post-Holocaust world the single greatest source of authority is human rights — therefore the new anti-Semitism is constructed in the language of human rights.”

In a new book, Future Tense, he describes a “virulent new strain of anti-Semitism”. A worrying alliance had developed between radical Islamists and anti-globalisation protesters, he said.

The UN had also fanned the flames. At the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001, he said, “Israel was accused of the five cardinal sins against human rights — racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and attempted genocide. So the old myths are recycled they are alive and well but they are done in a new kind of vocabulary.”

The media should also be more careful in coverage of the Middle East: “I do think too little of the history has been set out and people don’t really understand what’s at stake, so the Jewish community has felt quite vulnerable because of that.”

Asked whether he thought the BBC had shown anti-Israeli bias, he replied: “No comment.”

Sir Jonathan said that the mood had changed after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001. His daughter, who at the time was studying at the London School of Economics, “had gone to an anti-globalisation rally which quickly turned into a diatribe against Israel and Jews. She came home weeping and said, ‘Dad they hate us’. I never expected that to happen in the 21st century,” he said.

“There had been after the Holocaust a kind of taboo and that began to break. Within 24 hours of 9/11 people said it was ‘Mossad wot done it’.

“Then the anti-Semitism went viral and it became very worrying. There started to be synagogue desecrations, cemetery desecrations and Jews attacked on the street. We had a rabbinical student who was on the top floor of a bus in Stamford Hill quietly studying the Talmud. Somebody stabbed him many times — he was lucky to live. The guy who was convicted said, ‘Israel is persecuting us so I decided I had to persecute him’.”

Mark Gardiner, of the Community Security Trust, said that the number of attacks in January — 250 — was double the highest previous monthly total and the level had stayed well above average. Figures began to be compiled in 1984. “We have repeatedly seen a surge of anti-Semitic attacks every time there is turmoil in the Middle East,” Mr Gardiner said. “It’s a ridiculous situation that British Jews should feel vulnerable in relation to a conflict thousands of miles away.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6539415.ece

FRAUD IN CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH

An email from James H. Rust [jrust@bellsouth.net] to Benny Peiser

As a retired professor I was alarmed by your CCNET email exposing fraud in climate change research by Prof. Wang at the University of Albany. Anyone's misconduct on a campus reflects on all who teach and do research. No matter what one has for beliefs, truth can not be compromised.

Your article did not contain sufficient detail to understand the nature of the suspected fraud. By doing a Goggle search, I think the nature of the fraud was understating the Urban Heat Island effect in China from 1953-1994. This may have been used to imply that carbon dioxide was the main culprit for global warming during that period.

Fraud, mistruths are common practice by those promoting AGW. Two notable examples are doctoring global temperature data to arrive at the "Hockey Stick" that was used to claim recent atmospheric carbon dioxide increases caused global temperatures to rise and the recent attempt by NASA to prove October's global temperature rose by using September data from Russia.

It may behoove those who are trying to educate the public about AGW to publicize errors by all who speak or write about climate change. This letter was sent to the MIT Technology Review to ask them to correct a recent error.

I may add that those of us who are trying to promote sanity to the AGW controversy must never lie or exaggerate facts because our credibility will always be under the most stringent scrutiny.

From: James H. Rust
To: letters@technologyreview.com
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 5:35 PM
Subject: Energy Research at MIT

Dear Editor:

As an advocate for a sound energy policy for the United States, I enjoy reading Technology Review because it contains so many great articles on promising energy research conducted at MIT. Many articles imply a need for this research is to develop energy resources that do not use fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming(AGW). I realize a perceived threat from AGW has caused the annual release of billions of research dollars to find energy sources that do not produce carbon dioxide. Therefore, it is necessary to bow down to AGW in order to obtain research dollars.

However, I do take issue with telling untruths about global warming in order to get public support to reduce fossil fuel use. Examples of untruths are doctoring global temperature data in order to produce the "hockey stick" that suggested the past century rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide was responsible for a one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature and the October 2008 increase in global temperature by using September data from Russia. A more recent example of doctoring temperature data is underestimating the urban heat island effect in China from poor research at the University of Albany.

I am sure it was unintentional, but MIT is contributing to the untruths by a statement in its publicized "The MIT Energy Index". One of the statements is as follows: "Of the 12 years from 1995 to 2006, number that are among the warmest years on record: 11." This is clearly wrong. 1934 was probably the hottest year and the hottest 15 years since 1880 have been spaced over seven decades. So it would be prudent to simply drop this statement from The MIT Energy Index.

Regards,
James H. Rust, SM60
Professor of Nuclear Engineering(ret)

Pox Britannica: English anti-Semitism on the march

By Howard Jacobson



'England's made a Jew of me in only eight weeks," says Nathan Zuckerman on the last page of Philip Roth's The Counterlife. It is not meant to be a compliment. What makes a Jew of Zuckerman is the "strong sense of difference" the English induce in him, a "latent and pervasive" anti-Semitism, rarely rampantly expressed except for a "peculiarly immoderate, un-English-like Israel-loathing."

At the time--The Counterlife was published in England in 1987--Zuckerman's account of Anglo-Jewish relations struck an English-born Jew like me as a mite thin-skinned. It was possible that an American Jew detected what we did not, but more likely that he detected what was not there. Whatever the truth of it, a comfortable existence was better served by assuming the latter. We all had our own tales of anti-Semitism to tell--my grandmother's headstone, for example, had just been defaced with a swastika in a skinhead raid on a Jewish cemetery in Manchester--but mainly they were isolated, low-level acts of idle vandalism or reflexes of minor intolerance, more comic than alarming, and not personal, however you viewed them. Apart, that is, from the Israel-loathing, but then that wasn't--was it?--to be confused with anti-Semitism.

Twenty years on, it is difficult to imagine Nathan Zuckerman lasting eight days in England, let alone eight weeks. There is something in the air here, something you can smell, but also, in a number of cases, something more immediately affronting to Jews. It is important not to exaggerate. Most English Jews walk safely through their streets, express themselves freely, enjoy the friendship of non-Jews, and feel no less confidently a part of English life than they ever have. Organizations monitoring anti-Jewish incidents in England have reported a dramatic increase after Gaza: the daubing of slogans such as "kill the jews" on walls and bus shelters in Jewish neighborhoods, abuse of Jewish children on school playgrounds, arson attacks on synagogues, physical assaults on Jews conspicuous by their yarmulkes or shtreimels. But, while these incidents ought not to be treated blithely, they are still exceptional occurrences.

And yet, in the tone of the debate, in the spirit of the national conversation about Israel, in the slow seepage of familiar anti-Semitic calumnies into the conversation--there, it seems to me, one can find growing reason for English Jews to be concerned. Mindless acts of vandalism come and go; but what takes root in the intellectual life of a nation is harder to identify and remove. Was it anti-Semitic of the Labour politician Tam Dalyell to talk of Jewish advisers excessively influencing Tony Blair's foreign policy? Was it anti-Semitic of the Liberal Democrat Baroness Tonge to refer to the "financial grips" that the pro-Israel lobby exerts on the world? Such allusions to a pro-Israel conspiracy of influence and wealth, usually accompanied by protestations of innocence in regard to Jews themselves--"I am sick of being accused of anti-Semitism," Baroness Tonge has said, "when what I am doing is criticizing Israel"--have become the commonplaces of anti-Israel discourse in the years since Philip Roth wrote The Counterlife. And, whatever their intention, their gradual effect has been to normalize, under cover of criticism of Israel, assumptions that 50 years ago would have been exclusively the property of overt Jew-haters. The peculiarly immoderate Israel-loathing that Roth remarked upon in 1987 is now a deranged revulsion, intemperate and unconcealed, which nothing Israel itself has done could justify or explain were it ten times the barbaric apartheid state it figures as in the English imagination.

Demonstrators against Israel's operation in Gaza carried placards demanding an end to the "massacre" and the "slaughter." There was no contesting this rhetoric of wanton destruction versus helpless innocence. Hamas rockets counted for nothing, Hamas's record of endangering its own civilian population counted for nothing, Amnesty reports were cited when they incriminated Israel but ignored when they incriminated others. Whatever was not massacre was not news, nor was it germane. The distinguished British film director Ken Loach dismissed a report on the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe as designed merely to "distract attention" from Israel's military crimes. An increase in anti-Semitism is "perfectly understandable," Loach said, "because Israel feeds feelings of anti-Semitism." Scrupulously refusing the Holocaust-Gaza analogy, Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent a few weeks ago, nonetheless argued that "a Palestinian woman and her child are as worthy of life as a Jewish woman and her child on the back of a lorry in Auschwitz"--at a stroke reinstating the analogy while implying that Jews need to be reminded that not only Jewish lives are precious. And a columnist for the populist newspaper The Daily Mirror has taken this imputation of callousness a stage further, writing of the "1,314 dead Palestinians temporarily sat[ing] Tel Aviv's bloodlust."

Coincidentally, or not, a ten-minute play by Caryl Churchill--accusing Jews of the same addiction to blood-spilling--has recently enjoyed a two-week run at the Royal Court Theatre in London and three performances at Dublin's Abbey Theatre. Seven Jewish Children declares itself to be a fund-raiser for Gazans. Anyone can produce it without paying its author a fee, so long as the seats are free and there is a collection for the beleaguered population of Gaza after the performance.

Think of it as 1960s agitprop--the buckets await you in the foyer and you make your contribution or you don't--and it is no more than the persuaded speaking to the persuaded. But propaganda turns sinister when it pretends to be art. Offering insight into how Jews have got to this murderous pass--the answer is the Holocaust: we do to others what others did to us--Seven Jewish Children finishes almost before it begins in a grotesque tableau of blood-soaked triumphalism: Jews reveling in the deaths of Palestinians, laughing at dying Palestinian policemen, rejoicing in the slaughter of Palestinian babies.

Churchill has expressed surprise that anyone should accuse her of invoking the blood libel, but, even if one takes her surprise at face value, it only demonstrates how unquestioningly integral to English leftist thinking the bloodlust of the Israeli has become. Add to this Churchill's decision to have her murder-mad Israelis justify their actions in the name of "the chosen people"--as though any Jew ever yet interpreted the burden of "chosenness" as an injunction to kill--and we are back on old and terrifying territory. And this not in the brute hinterland of English life, where swastikas are drawn the wrong way round and "Jew" is not always spelled correctly, but at the highest level of English culture.

Again it is important not to exaggerate. Seven Jewish Children has not by any means received universal acclaim. Parodies of it seem to turn up on the Internet almost every day. But there is no postulate so far-fetched that it can't smuggle itself into even the best newspapers as truth. The eminent Guardian theater critic Michael Billington, for example, took Churchill's words in the spirit in which they were uttered, believing that she "shows us how Jewish children are bred to believe in the 'otherness' of Palestinians." Jewish children, note. But then it's Jewish children whom Caryl Churchill paints as brainwashed into barbarity. Without, I believe, any intention to speak ill of Jews, and innocently deaf to the odiousness of the word "bred" in this context, Billington demonstrates how easily language can sleepwalk us into bigotry.

The premise of Seven Jewish Children is a fine piece of fashionable psychobabble that understands Zionism as the collective nervous breakdown of the Jewish people; instead of learning the humanizing lesson of the Holocaust--whatever that might be, and whatever the even greater obligation on non-Jews to learn it too--Jews vent their instability on the Palestinians in imitation of what the Nazis vented on them. This is a theory that assumes what it offers to prove, namely how like Nazis Israelis have become. Furthermore, it dispossesses Jews of their own history, turning the Holocaust into a sort of retrospective retribution, Jews being made to pay the price then for what Israelis are doing now. Clearly, this exists at a more extreme end of the continuum of willed forgetting than Holocaust denial itself, its ultimate object being to break the Jew-Holocaust nexus altogether. Let us no longer deny the Holocaust, let us rather redistribute the pity. If there is a victim of the Holocaust today, it is the people of Gaza.

Given how hard it is to distinguish Jew from Israeli in all this, the mantra "It is not anti-Semitic to be critical of Israel" looks increasingly disingenuous. But there is no challenging it, not even with such eminently reasonable responses as, "That surely depends on the criticism," or "Calling into question an entire nation's right to exist is not exactly 'criticism.'" Nor is the distinction between Israeli and Jew much respected where the graffitists and the baby bullies of the schoolyard do their work. But, in the end, it is frankly immaterial how much of this is Jewhating or not. The inordinacy of English Israel-loathing--ascribing to a country the same disproportionate responsibility for the world's ills that was once ascribed to a people--is toxic enough in itself. The language of extremism has a malarious dynamic of its own, passing effortlessly from the mischievous to the unwary, and from there into the bloodstream of society. And that's what one can smell here. Infection.

http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=e3d8e9b1-8caa-4290-b566-2aff2216016e

Why men are more intelligent than women

By Satoshi Kanazawa

The answer is:  They aren’t

The orthodoxy in intelligence research for the second half of the 20th century had been that men and women had the same average intelligence, but men had greater variance in their distribution than women.  Most geniuses were men, and most imbeciles were men, they said, while most women were in the normal range.  This conclusion, however, was manufactured out of political expediency.  Not wanting to discover, or a priori denying, any sex differences in intelligence, psychometricians simply deleted from the standardized IQ tests any item on which the performance of men and women differed.

More recently, however, especially since the turn of the millennium, there have been an increasing number of studies that cast doubt on this politically correct conclusion.  Studies with large representative national samples from Spain, Denmark, and the United States, as well as meta-analyses of a large number of published studies throughout the world, all conclude that men on average are slightly but significantly more intelligent than women, by about 3-5 IQ points.  So this has now become the new (albeit tentative) consensus in intelligence research.

However, these studies do not answer the ultimate evolutionary question of why men should be more intelligent than women.  General intelligence likely evolved as a domain-specific psychological mechanism to deal with evolutionary novelty.  However, unlike populations in different geographic parts of the world, men and women within a population have always faced the same level of evolutionary novelty throughout evolutionary history, because they have always migrated together.  If general intelligence is a function of the evolutionary novelty of the environment, why then are men on average slightly more intelligent than women?

My LSE colleague, Diane J. Reyniers, and I offer one possible explanation in our article, forthcoming in the American Journal of Psychology.  Psychometricians have known since the end of the 19th century that height is positively correlated with intelligence:  Taller people on average are more intelligent than shorter people.  And men in every human population are taller than women.  So one possibility is that men are more intelligent than women, not because they are men, but because they are taller.

Our analysis of a large representative American sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health shows that this is indeed the case.  In fact, once we control for height, women are slightly but significantly more intelligent than men.  Further controlling for health, physical attractiveness, age, race, education, and earnings does not alter this conclusion.  Height has exactly the same effect on intelligence for men and women:  Each inch in height increases the IQ by about .4 point.  The partial effect of height on intelligence is more than three times as strong as the partial effect of sex.

So it is not that men are more intelligent than women, but that taller people are more intelligent than shorter people, but net of height women are more intelligent than men.  Women who are 5’10” are on average more intelligent than men who are 5’10”, and women who are 5’5” are on average more intelligent than men who are 5’5”.  But, more importantly, people who are 5’10” are significantly more intelligent than people who are 5’5”, and most people who are 5’10” are men and most people who are 5’5” are women.

This conclusion simply leads to another question:  Why are taller people more intelligent than shorter people?  I’ll address this question in my next post.

http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200901/why-men-are-more-intelligent-women

Woman attacked in Scotland ‘because she sounded English’

Police treating incident as racially motivated

A young woman who comes from England originally has been viciously assaulted in a Scottish city centre in what police are treating as a racially motivated attack.

Lucy Newman, 22, who lived in Cheltenham as a child, claims her male attacker said “Get back to England” before punching her in the face. She was left with serious injuries after the attack last Saturday in Aberdeen.

Ms Newman, who was on a night out with a female friend, said she was hit so hard that she fell, hitting the pavement and fracturing her left cheekbone. The nerves in her eye have also been damaged.

“We had just left a club and were going to catch a bus,” said Ms Newman, a beauty therapist who has lived in Scotland for about 15 years.

“We noticed these two older guys alongside us . . . we carried on walking and then heard them saying something about the English, because I’m from England and I do have a twang with some of the things I say.

“He shouted something like, ‘Get back to England’. I turned round, not even thinking that he was speaking to me. I didn’t even get a chance to look at him properly and he just punched me in the face.”

Ms Newman, whose accent sounds Scottish, added: “A few things I say sound English. But no one has ever hit me because I am English.”

Her mother, Susan, 47, a trainee funeral director, said: “I can’t believe somebody, especially a man, could do something like this to such a lovely and quiet girl. She’s tiny, about 5ft 3in (1.6m) and weighs next to nothing.”

Grampian Police are appealing for witnesses. Sergeant David Forsyth said: “Whilst this is clearly a despicable act, it is unfortunately not uncommon for racially motivated incidents to take place. Very often these incidents occur during the evenings when alcohol has been consumed.

“Where sufficient evidence exists that an incident had some racial motivation to it, those responsible will be charged with a racial offence in addition to any other matter.”

There have been other incidents of low-level anti-Englishness over the years, particularly in rural areas, but overt violence is uncommon.

In 1999 Tina Warren, who ran a museum near Pitlochry, Perthshire, claimed her time in Scotland had been made a “living hell” by anti-English racists. She alleged that she met “vicious hostility”, received verbal abuse and her signs had been smashed.

A spate of anti-English racial attacks by Scots came in June 2006, during the football World Cup. In the most shocking incident, a seven-year-old boy wearing an England shirt was punched in the head in an Edinburgh park. Hugo Clapshaw, whose father is a New Zealander and whose mother is Scottish, was attacked by a man who shouted “This is Scotland, not f****** England” before running off. In another incident, a man from Leeds who had moved to Lanarkshire had three windows broken at his home after flying the St George’s Cross.

Aberdeen, which has been the focus of the international oil industry for more than 30 years, has a slightly lower rate of racial incidences than other Scottish cities. Nevertheless, the Aberdeen Racist Incidents Partnership found that there had been a rise in reported racist incidents in primary and secondary schools in recent years.

Lewis Macdonald, the Labour MSP for Aberdeen Central, said: “This is a very disappointing incident, given Aberdeen’s strong culture of welcoming people from all over Britain and the world. It’s a very cosmopolitan city.”

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “Any assault, verbal or physical, which is borne out of prejudice is utterly abhorrent. Fortunately our police forces take racially aggravated crime very seriously and our courts are able to reflect the nature of aggravation when sentencing.”


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5512401.ece