ELSEWHERE

Val of Val-e-diction writes in response to my post on multiculturalism and the varieties of racism: "Your good post reminded me of my years working in Trinidad and Tobago. Multicultis believe that only whites can be racists, but I would like them to visit T&T. After their independence from Britain in 1964, the then mostly-black T&T was ruled by the marxist Eric Williams, with the consequent statism that is still rampant today. Over the years years before independence, many Indians were brought in to serve as indentured workers and their descendents later formed an ever growing minority, mostly successful in industry and commerce because they were mostly blocked from government jobs (monopolized by blacks). Today the country is divided approximately 48% blacks and 48% Indians plus several other minorities. The point is that one has to live there to get to know the open and huge racism of blacks towards Indians. And that's not all. Trinidadians dislike and consider Latin Americans somehow inferior -- especially Venezuelans, their closest neighbors on the subcontinent -- because the others just look and talk foreign (maybe also because Trinidadians are islanders and not people from terra firma). In the end it's just a fact that you prefer people whom you think are "like you," whether is by race, ethnicity, pigmentation, appearance, language, ideology, etc.”

I noted recently the Leftist fuss about GWB and Tony Blair praying together. A reader comments: "If sex in private between consenting adults is ok, why isn't prayer?"

A kind reader has translated the French email that I posted recently. Apparently it says that official French secularism is compatible with religious tolerance and that France should therefore not bar Muslim women from wearing their Muslim headgear. I would send them all back to Algeria, headgear and all, myself.

Matthew Cowie has emailed me this link to the Norwegian press (in English). Apparently the Norwegian minister for immigration wants Muslims in Norway to integrate more into Norwegian society. The multicultis worldwide will probably be frothing at the mouth over that! No doubt the good minister will be a "Nazi" in two seconds flat.

My latest academic upload (see here or here) looks at whether or not working class people are more conservative on social issues than others. It is widely asserted that they are. Those who know their old TV series will know of Archie Bunker and Alf Garnet as the stereotypical working-class conservatives. In my data, however, it has always turned out that there is nothing much in the theory. There ARE heaps of workers who are conservative on social issues but there are more or less equally large numbers who are not conservative on social issues. This article did not however examine how the workers stack up on racial issues. One interesting finding, though, was that the workers were more distrustful of expertise as a qualification for being in government. It was people who saw themselves as being more upper-class who agreed with statements like "This country would be best run by men who have had a university education". Given the low quality of most intellectuals, I am pretty glad of the workers' skepticism in that regard.

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