Only when some is attempting to harm you is it acceptable to harm.



Yes, When someone directly threatens the public then the utilitarian argument is valid (unless the public is made up of masochists), in as far that, action may be taken against that person.

_________________
You may say I'm a dreamer.... but I'm not the only one....

You do see that those two statements are contradictory?

That's why you need principles.

Nice piece on Militant Secularism by Nick Cohen in The Spectator:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/nickcohen/76 ... ists.thtml

But oh! the comments...

Yeah, the comments. Decent article though.

I think that's a bit of a pedantic point, because the two are already so interlinked in practice and even more so in the Mail discourse to which I was referring. The Turks who have the excellent cafe I go to have white skin, and you'd probably guess they were Spanish if you saw them in the street. But because they're Muslim (not practising at all, to my knowledge) they can't be white in Mail-land. Similar with many Iranians.

Wouldn't you call Mail "Muslims get free big cars" articles racist?

Don't forget that a lot of quite serious Christians, likely to object strongly, are black. And many whites are atheists. Some of whom will agree with the Christians.

Black Christians are still blacks though, aren't they? In Mail-land. They wouldn't be the cause celebre as homophobic B&B owners that the white couple are. Lots of people would say "we treat people equally here", rather than "we're a Christian country".

Yes, articles about Muslims getting cars can certainly be grounded in racism. They may well use race and religion interchangeably but that isn't an argument for joining them in doing so.

As for the people who run the cafe, you refer to their skin tone but if they are ethnic Turks why would they want to be classed as white? Ashkenazi jews often have pale white skin (think Aberdeen in January) but give their ethnicity as 'Ashkenazi'. Persians can have the same skin tone as Arabs but good luck to you if you mix them up. Why would they want to be seen as white?

It is very important to keep race, religion and culture as discrete categories. They can overlap in many and varied ways and, as you suggest, discussion around one element can mask prejudice around another. Conflating such categories does not help counter this. Many Asian people in the UK are not Muslim, perhaps more than half. A great many privately hold very negative views towards Islam, far stronger than those encountered in your average white British citizen, often stemming from the partition of India. They are often viewed as one homogenous group on the basis of appearence by many people, a view not helped by papers like the Mail. Indeed, many even share the same ethnicity - Punjabi.

There are a small but growing number of white Muslims in the UK. The most populous Islamic state in the world is Indonesia and they are almost all native Indonsians ethnically. If we left it to the tabloids we'd have a simple 'brown skin = bomb' equation. So no, not pedantic. These things are worth keeping seperate for good reason. It is all too easy to silence a critic of relgion through branding them a racist. It happens often and I've seen it myself in various debates. But I'm glad that I can disagree with Bishop Nazir-Ali on the grounds that he wants Christian prayers in council meetings. Informed people know he is from Pakistan but it is his Christian dimension that offends, not his ethnicity. That's an easy case - he swans around in a purple frock and big pointy hat. But what if he holds the same oppressive views and pops up in traditional Islamic garb? He is still wrong. Sadly, many people don't differentiate. All Asian people are Islamic terrorists in their head. Rather than some Asian people are Muslim, and of those, a small number hold extemist views and of those an even smaller number act on them, etc.

But it was the tabloid discourse I was referring to. Race is a social construct, and a bad one, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have anti-racism. Because the social construct is so strong, not least in places like France that pretends it doesn't exist. You couldn't really argue that anti-racists are reinforcing racism, unless you're a Telegraph blogger or some particularly eccentric Marxist.

Similarly, I think the confusion of race/culture/religion and nationality (and indeed, class) is strongly established, and I have to deal with that. I don't think by reflecting it in the statement I made that I'm reinforcing it or whatever. I don't think I'm legitimising the "brown=bomber" mentality.

Of course, South Asians aren't all Muslim in Britain or South Asia. What's interesting is summed up by the old phrase "wrong type of Asian". Ezinra on another thread put up an old quote where the archetypal lunatic Asian was a Sikh, probably because they looked the funniest and they didn't wear motorbike helmets. The Danish cartoonist seemed to have Sikhs in mind too. This has changed now to Muslims who previously would have been seen as a bit scruffy but basically hardworkers who ran corner shops and wanted their kids to be doctors.

I can't quite trace the logic of the Mail spectrum I had in mind- and it would be odd if I could- but it basically has white at one end of it and Muslim at the other. And indeed that is a spectrum that mixes race and religion. And not at all consistently. Fairly recently (I guess) they've realised this and tried to put Christianity with whiteness, but it doesn't go down well at all with lots of their readers.

In part. There are also real genetic differences, as evidenced in predispositions towards certain medical conditions, or conversely, in some form of protective factor around certain conditions. Sickle cell anaemia in black communities is an obvious example, as is heart disease and diabetes amongst Asian communities. Factoring in diet and lifestyle there are still numerous health problems which are highly correlated with ethnicity. Likewise, Jewish people have a whole set of diseases specific to their communities, found in far greater proportions than the UK population as a whole. Many Muslim communities have alarmingly high rates of children born with genetic problems which can be directly linked to the intermarriage of first cousins. Is that a social construct or where cultural factors shape biology? Of course, the same mechansim that led to Jewish predisposition to specific diseases, that of encouraging Rabbis to have the biggest families, also led to an above-average IQ across communities.

These are delicate and unsettling topics which are seized upon by the far-right, who like to interpret selectively. They also tend to get glossed over by the left, with mantras about race being a social contruct. It is much more complex than that. A Gujurati can guess with a pretty high rate of accuracy who is also a Gujurati from across a street full of British Asians. It is not about shared language or culture. A Punjabi may speak at least one language in common and have exactly the same diet and religion, yet be able to tell Punjabis from Gujuratis at a glance. Is it society that makes most Gujurati men bald by the age of 30 whilst most Punjabi mean keep their hair into old age? No. Is it society that makes Nigerians powerfully built and Somalians tall and slender, in the main?


Seemed to? Based on what, exactly? I saw bunch of sterotypical Muslim guys but didn't think of Sikhism for a second.

Indeed, but what I mean is that these differences aren't really enough (in a logical world) to justify categorising people according to race, are they? That's what's meant. I don't think anyone's denying pygmies are small or anything, or that people can be very perceptive in spotting differences between people from different parts of the world. It's just that are they, in themselves, that significant except in a social sense?

I take your point about the left (though not just them) being a bit too cagy about looking at biological differences between race. Steven Pinker has made that point, as a rare example of where the left (rather than the right) have social attitudes that inhibit science.I'm actually very wary, as you are, of how good intentions can shut down debate.

I thought the chap with the bomb head dress looked like a Sikh, certainly much more than any Muslim bomber I've seen. He does look like bin Laden though, so I guess that's where it came from.

No. Both statements are consistent.



I have my central principle. Reciprocity. It works for me.

_________________
You may say I'm a dreamer.... but I'm not the only one....

Militant secularism is a laughable concept when you have state religion.

_________________
You may say I'm a dreamer.... but I'm not the only one....

Anyway:

It does seem a tad strange that the Mail are throwing weight behind a story about the Dawk's ancestral guilt, considering that the editorial and commentariat line of the rags has been vehemently opposed to any form of apology for past wrongdoing. I guess it was bad and wrong when Tony Blair was apologising for the excesses of Imperialism, the Atlantic slave trade, the stolen generation, riddling civilians in Derry and so on and so on, but now it's the right and proper thing to apologise for past misdeeds regardless.

Which brings me to a key element of Mail psychology. Guilt is not about the crime, it's about who commits it, and anyone sufficient in PLU points is never guilty.

You know how when there's a bunch of kids and one of the big bullies decides to have a go at some inoffensive kid? And he slaps him around? And how another weedy little kid runs in and gives him a slap as well because he thinks he's safe?

That.