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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.