To Julian.

Point one. You claim that you do not blame racism for WW2, it just ENABLED it. Are you suggesting that loyalty to one's own people is a human folly that causes war? Isn't loyalty to ones own universally considered a civic virtue? And isn't it a cultural universal that a lack of loyalty to ones own is frowned upon in every community?

Point two. You are suggesting that racism is not subject to reality. If racism is not subject to reality, then it should be easily countered by reasoned argument. But your side is insisting that the subject not be discussed at all, and that anyone who opens his mouth with a contrary view is "offending" a minority and they should be subject to legal sanction. Intelligent people believe that the insistence that a subject never be discussed is proof that it is intellectually bankrupt. How is it that you consider yourself intelligent, when you are supporting the tactics of the Holy Roman Church of 1600 which insisted that Earth was the centre of the universe, and that anyone who opposed that should be shown the instruments of torture to shut them up?

Point three&four

The racist "blame the white guy" explanation for minority dysfunction is the only argument of the so called "anti racists" which they use add infinitum. Can you think of any others to explain away minority dysfunction?

Point 5

You want to abolish all racial and religious laws and replace them with "group libel" which essentially means the same thing. Some civil libertarian you are. That will mean that no group of people can be criticised for any reason, and I suppose that means Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen, and One Nation supporters? I guess not. As we have seen recently with the inaction by government paid human rights activists regarding Nicola Roxon's attempt to muzzle free speech, the socialist civil libertarians can be relied upon to look the other way whenever some group they don't like gets "libelled". It will only be their preferred minorities who will be beyond criticism. And that is racism.

Lego is riding the Gish gallop in ever contracting circles, repeatedly replacing what's in front of him with something he can rebut. That can go on for ever.

#1: Proposition: War is enabled by bad guys using racism (solidarity on basis of race) to cow a populace into rallying to the bad guys' cause. Thus massive rallies of Germans Sieg heiled their way into supporting scum on behalf of their race, thereby converting themselves into scum. Result: War.
#1 Gish diversion: Essentially, racism (i.e. loyalty to "one's own") is widely valued. (So?)

#2: Proposition (not substantiated in this post): In contrast to science, racism is ducking reality.
#2 Gish diversion: Prove it.
[There's a massive literature describing research doing this - an example is Edwin Black's comprehensive testimony available in Amazon Kindle $17.36) and referenced in my post. Gish's horse would never be caught up with in OLO posts].

The rest: A plethora of rewrites and assumptions about what "your side" is supposed to be proposing and none of which I have proposed. Codswallop about socialists (socialism is about creation, use and distribution of wealth, unrelated to the subject at hand but a great diversion worth whole herds of Gish gallopers).

One proposal he did touch on (by supplying a rewrite designed to be easily rebutted) was the proposition to apply libel law rather than criminalise "vilification". They are far from the same. To prove a libel the complainant must prove the utterance both damaging and untrue. Showing an utterance to be true kerzonks a libel case (unless it's Britain, the complainant is McDonald's and the judiciary is bent). In 18C of the Crimespeak Act truth is not a defence.

LEGO,

Your 19th century ideas of race have long been debunked. “Race” is now known to be (if anything) a cultural phenomenon, not a genetic one. Since mapping the human genome, we can now know that the physical features we often associate with races make up a mere 0.02% of our DNA - and none of these can be tied to intelligence. Approximately 85% of genetic variation occurs between individuals within the same community. Only 5-10% of genetic variation comes from people of different continents. Genetic mutation and the proportion of junk material in the human genome make it impossible to use a genetic marker to identify a group as a “race”.

“Ethnicity” has now largely taken the place of “race” as a concept, but even it has majority problems due to the fluidity of the concept.

<<The racist "blame the white guy" explanation for minority dysfunction is the only argument of the so called "anti racists" which they use add infinitum. Can you think of any others to explain away minority dysfunction?>>

The "blame the white guy" explanation would only be racist if the factors that were proposed to be at fault were presumed to be traits intrinsic to white people. Of course, no-one actually thinks this. No studies suggest this. This is just you being precious so that you can point the finger at those who know better and say, “See? You’re just as bigoted as I am!”

You claim to have logically arrived at your racial theories. The problem, however, is that you arrived at them based on a false premise that you have imagined: one in which you attribute a racism to others that isn’t there. It’s not about whites versus other “races”, it’s about the marginalisation of minorities. The same principal applies regardless of which “race” holds which position. We see this phenomenon in parts of the world that don’t even have white people.

Continued…

…Continued

I like how you skim over these points, too, by proffering the fact that the explanation is used “ad infinitum” is, in itself, a reason to think that it is wrong. There are hundreds of research studies that support marginalisation (and socioeconomic factors) as being the biggest influences of minority “dysfunction”, and precisely zero that counter them.

The best defence that you and your ilk can muster as a counterargument to this fact, is to appeal to some grand Leftwing conspiracy while conveniently ignoring the fact that - like any other scientist - social scientists thrive on disproving each other: it makes a name for them. Others will mention them and reference their work as evidence for theirs even if only posthumously. People are selfish creatures and to suggest that EVERY social scientist sacrifices their chance at fame for some socialist grand plan is to demonstrate a serious disconnect from reality.

AJ Taylor: Thanks for taking over. I didn't know whose patience would run out first - mine or Graham Young's.

I do beg to differ on marginalisation of minorities. I think it looks as if the dysfunction contributes to the marginalisation as well as the margialisation contributing to the dysfunction. A sure-fire way for a group to become or stay marginalised is to reject education, dodge or disrupt school, brawl over trivialities and and drink themselves stupid, as happens within groups of many different ethnicities and mixtures of ethnicities. This view is coloured by a philosophy that ascribes a lot of responsibility to the individual and doesn't believe it can be shunted donk donk donkety donk back to Adam.

If race does not exist, Mr Phillips, then descriptive terms like aborigine, Pacific Islander, Scandinavian and Hispanic would be meaningless. The words "genocide" and "affirmative action' would be meaningless because "there is only one race, the human race." What we constantly get from "anti racists" is that the concept of race exists whenever they can get some mileage out of it, and it does not exist when it is convenient for them to deny it.

There may be 0.02% difference in genomes between humans, but there is about 2% difference between humans and chimpanzees, so a bit of difference is important. Would you be able to tell me the percentage of difference between a Pit Bull dog and a Labrador? It is probably less than 0.02% difference but I would prefer to let my kids play with a Labrador rather than a damned Pit Bull.

Adolph Hitler is considered a racist because of many racist ideas. One of them was to blame all of the misfortunes of the German people on the Jews. "Anti racists" do exactly what Hitler did by always blaming white people for the dysfunctions of blacks. Yes, that is racism.

As for "marginalisation", that is just another "blame the white guy" argument. The theory goes, that because the uncaring white people don't give two hoots about blacks, then black dysfunction must therefore be the fault of whites. But the people who peddle this nonsense fail to mention that in the USA alone, between 2001 and 2003, blacks were 39 times more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than the reverse. Just which race is the more "uncaring" and the more racist?

As for "science", I first read the scientific works "A Mind to Crime" followed by "The Bell Curve". I followed them up by reading the "anti racist" book by Paul Breggin called "The War on Children" where he openly bragged about how he and the NAACP had successfully lobbied the US congress to withdraw funding from any geneticist who dared to suggest a genetic link between crime, race, and intelligence.