Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utcsstat.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsstat!laura From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP Newsgroups: net.flame Subject: a reply to a reply made by Larry Welsch Message-ID: <677@utcsstat.UUCP> Date: Wed, 15-Jun-83 22:19:46 EDT Article-I.D.: utcsstat.677 Posted: Wed Jun 15 22:19:46 1983 Date-Received: Thu, 16-Jun-83 06:52:32 EDT Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada Lines: 256 I believe Larry Welsch misunderstood me in a few places. I would like to clear some of this up. I think that IQ tests and Indians deserve their own flames, so I will get back to them later in other messages and only touch on them briefly here -- unless I get carried away and vent my spleen whole-heartedly.I did not mean to single you out, Larry, in the response as if you were the only person guilty of making what I believe are sweeping and largely inaccurate generalisations. I see many Canadians and many Americans making these. I am sorry if you took my mention of God personally; to my mind it does not matter whether you believe in God. I did not intend to explain *why* you hold a belief which I find false -- I do not know you and could hardly be prepared to say. what you said in your first article was: A number of people raise the point that affirmative action may result in "quotas." This is true. So what? Given the assumption that intelligence does not recognise race then it is reasonable to expect that within a given job category the races would have roughly (within 2 standard deviations) the same proportions as in the population. I included this quote in my prior article so that one could refer to what I was discussing. This is the statement which I find is an over-generalisation. The stuff about God and such was meant as a hypothesis on why some people (not necessarily you, Larry) think this way. Empirically, I know that some people mean this quote when they say "all men are equal". I also know that when my mother (who has stopped using the phrase all men are equal) used it she meant "all men are created by God, and endowed by Him with an immortal soul which man cannot take away. In consequence, each person is "equal" before God, in that they each have an opportunity, through the living of their lives, to go to heaven which is what we all are here for anyway." For Christians, a soul can be a convient "currency" of the intrinsic value of human beings. Clearly, non-believers in souls are going to have to come to their own conclusions reguarding human life through a different path. It is not necessary to believe in a soul to believe that human beings are valuable. It is upsetting to get halfway through a discussion/argument and discover that you can never make any headway because you have erroneously assumed that the person you are arguing with has been using the same definitions as you have. The whole foundation of the argument has gone away, and you are left saying "but I thought you meant... but I dont believe that..." If we are going to discuss the "equality of humanity" then we had better define what we mean by this. For the record, my definition of the value of humanity is not dependent on the existence of souls. Some of the characteristics I value are compassion, rationality, personal integrity, honesty, and a desire to do what is right. Intelligence is required for a lot of this, in that if you are too stupid to tell the difference between right and wrong you can never be fully human. Obviously this is a personal opinion. But back to Larry. First lets talk about equality. I said that " intelligence does not recognise race then ...". (I presume you mean the rest of the quote I mentioned before which originated with the original article.) From this I conclude that by equality you mean that intelligence is equally distributed between the races, and that therefore all races are equal. For you, intelligence is very important in determining the worth of an individual. If I am wrong in this conclusion, then I MUST find out more about your way of measuring the value of human beings. You can announce this publicly over the net, as I did, or you can mail it to me privately, but if my idea that your value of human races and human beings is based on intelligence is wrong, then we may be arguing like 2 trains that pass each other in the dark. you also say that: I believe that intelligence is uniform across the races and I am prepared to argue that issue. I also believe it is possible that I am wrong, but I haven't seen any convincing evidence. Nor does Ms.(sic) Creighton present any convincing evidence. If anybody on the net does have convincing evidence that this is not true then please share it with us. I have been an intelligence study case since I was born. I was born 12 weeks premature and believed to be mentally retarded. Later it was shown that on the contrary, I was very bright. There are interesting anomalies in my intelligence as measured by standard tests, and I have been studied since birth, so researchers tend to use me as a "known quantity". I am going to post another article in net.something about this, but this is not relevant to the present question. NOWHERE HAVE I EVER SAID THAT ANY RACE IS INFERIOR TO ANY OTHER WITH RESPECT TO INTELLIGENCE. EVER. THIS IS NOT TRUE AND I DONT BELIEVE IT AND I WILL PRODUCE STATISTICS TO BACK MYSELF UP ON THIS TO ANYONE WHO DISAGREES. Let us move on. Larry, I never claimed that you personally believed that every person is identical. I *do* know some silly people who state this belief publicly, though, so empirically they do exist. I am glad that you did not use that chain of reasoning, but I was not accusing you of using it. What I was saying is that there are some people who ARE using it, and that cannot be truthfully denied. Now we get to the good stuff -- what I was complaining about. I see that I have probably been misunderstood again. Lets move on to the question of culture and occupation based on cultural traditions. I concede that a goal of affirmative action is to change the culture of the US such that people do not base decisions, such as hiring, firing, etc. on race or sex. It is currently part of the culture in the US to base such decisions on race or sex. All the sub-cultures that make up US culture will have to change. The decision to effect this change was not made by majority vote, but rather by a slow and painful process that started in England before the US revolution of 1776 and is related to a belief that people should be treated as individuals. There is no "One US Culture." If your culture is the same as the archtypical true American, as seen on t.v., movies and books, then that is *your* culture. But Californians arent the same as folks from North Carolina, and Seattle is different from both of these. If you believe that all people should be treated as individuals, then you are going to have to accept that there are going to be lots of cultures. Statements like "it is currently part of the US culture to base such decisions on race or sex" is a sweeping generalisation. Is it part of every "sub-culture" that you mention? Does *every* race discriminate? What is a "sub-culture" -- a culture that is connected to a minority of Americans, or is it in an inferior culture? (I am not accusing you of this, Larry, I am merely curious about the language you chose to use. When I am speaking of different races I talk about different cultures. This may mean nothing.) Is there no difference between the sort of discrimination that goes on in Oregon and in Texas? Is it really one amorphous whole? Do Blacks discriminate as much as Whites as do Chinese? If there is to be only one US culture then what is going to happen to immigrants who want to be a part of their culture which is not the same as the "typical American family from the Midwest"? What about Black and Chinese and Vietnamese Americans? Are they going to have to and change their culture? Why dont we all adopt one of their cultures? Do you see what I mean about being unfair? Now we move on again. Your statements on the Indian question are naive. I do not believe that you know the state of events. I do not demand that you know about the Indian policies of a foreign country, but you make Indian Affairs look like a government study committee, when in fact Indian Affairs is responsible for Treaty Indians from the day they are born to the day that they die, or leave the reservation. They are a government agency like the Department of Defense, or the Department of Agriculture. They arent a short term thing that was done once, and they do not exist to investigate matters between the Indians and the police. Most people in Indian affairs have never been on a reservation in their lives, according to one survey. Most are sincere people whose policies make you think that they dont know their ass from a hole in the ground. They are uninformed and often ambitious and you can get some of them to confess that their one great aim in their working life is to get transferred out of Indian Affairs and into another government Department where the pay is better and the advancement possibilities more rapid. I will go into this in more detail in another article. What it is necessary to know is that Indians dont want to be members of the police. It has more to do with the fact that a lot of Indians want to shoot the lot of motherf*ckers than any individual event. The Indians dont want to be part of a group that they hate. They hate individual policemen, and the idea of policemen as a whole in many cases. Some Indians hate every White. Some hate almost every White. You get policemen and IA jokes on reservations like you get ethnic jokes elsewhere. If only the solution was as simple as you state. Lest I paint the Indians too clean, it is true that a lot of Northern crime is perpetrated by Indians. Freight trains that are parked overnight near a Reservation have had their entire contents stripped. Some Indians go into town and break windows and generally abuse the Whites there. There is more than a century of hatred on both sides. What is more, the Indians do not want to be fully integrated with White Society. This is the official Indian Affairs stated policy for Indians (which is why Indians educated on IA money become hairdressers and auto-mechanics -- IA seems to only give higher education money if you will use it to acquire a skill that is perfectly useless on the Reservation so that you will be forced to leave it if you want to practise your trade). but on to other things: Finally I agree that races are not identical. But who is to judge that one race is "better than" or "more equal" than another. Culture is a different matter. I am a member of the culture of the US and I see much that should be changed and I am going to support those changes. Racial and sexual discrimination is a part of US culture whose elimination I look forward to. Remember -- you cannot be a member of the culture of the US. You can only be a member of *a* culture of the US. I did not say that some cultures are better in absolute terms than others. I did not say that any race is better than others. It is possible to be different without being "better" or "worse". What does "more equal" mean besides being a quote from Orwell? Racial and sexual discrimination is a lousy thing. But changing the multiple cultures of the US into one amorphous whole is another lousy thing, even if it could be done. I am not saying that it is a good idea to prevent anyone from taking any job for which he is qualified and capable. I am saying that it is as bad an idea to *force* people to take jobs which they do not want as to prevent them from having those that they do. And I am saying that intelligence is not the only factor in determining which jobs people will find attractive. Life would be very boring if we were forced to all adopt one uniform culture, and I think that forcing people to adopt another culture is a horrible form of discrimination. It is possible to try to eliminate discrimination without snuffing out cultures wholesale. To take another example with which you should be more familiar than the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs: If tomorrow morning somebody says that the unix community in Toronto is discriminatory against women because there is only one female unix hack at the University of Toronto then they are lying through their teeth. Any woman who wants to become a unix hack in Toronto can start reading the manuals like the rest of us unix hacks did. There is nothing stopping them but their own decision to do something else with their lives. They have the right to do this. Your statistical racial distribution figures do not take into account the natural inclination of certain groups to want to do certain jobs and not do others. Even in a world where there was no discrimination at all the proportion of a race in a given career does not necessarily have to correspond to the proportion of that race in the population as a whole. Have i made myself clearer this time? Laura ps I was referred to as "Ms Creighton" by Larry Welsch in his article. I am not violently opposed to this, but I would rather not be referred to as "Ms". This form of title is used by people who do not like the term "Miss" or "Mrs" as it implies that the marital status of a woman is significant, which can be related to thinking of people as property of their fathers or husbands. This is all right so far as it goes, but I wonder about the title "Mr". Clearly "Dr" and "Professor" and "Judge" (or "Your Honour" or "The Right Honourable") denote something, but what is "Mr"?? "Mr" is the term which everyone else gets (unless you are a woman). Clearly "Mr" had significance when free men were "Mr"s and slaves were not, but do we need this useless clutter now? I say we dont, so I address mail to "Larry Welsch" not "Mr. Larry Welsch". For the same reason, I would prefer to be just "Laura Creighton" or "Laura" with no title at all.