Elsewhere (267)
April 02, 2018
Douglas Murray on crime, migration and modern dishonesties:
In Germany, friends and readers describe to me how they are learning anew how to read their daily newspapers. When the news says that ‘A person was killed by another person’ for instance, and no names or other identifying characteristics are given, people guess – correctly – that the culprit is probably of migrant background. For the time-being serious crimes are still reported, but the decision has been taken that the public should not really be informed about them.
Related: “Vibrant and diverse.” And of course these items here.
Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” versus merit:
Sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal. Rejecting the primacy of diversity constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom of Washington and elite American culture. Gender and racial quotas have been the order of business for the last three decades… The result: wasted resources, the side-lining of merit, and ever more virulent and irrational identity politics. The rule of the diversity regime is that you’re required to be fanatically obsessed with race and gender until you aren’t — because at that unpredictable moment, whenever it comes, noticing race and sex becomes racist and sexist.
And Roger Kimball on being outraged by the obvious-but-unmentionable:
Professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander were roundly condemned by their university colleagues. Thirty-three of Wax’s fellow law professors at Penn signed an “Open Letter” condemning her op-ed. “We categorically reject Wax’s claims,” they thundered. What they found especially egregious was Wax and Alexander’s observation that “All cultures are not equal.” […] As William Henry argued back in the 1990s… “Every corner of the human race may have something to contribute. That does not mean that all contributions are equal… It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.” True, too true. But in a pusillanimous society terrified by its own shadow, it is one thing to know the truth, quite another to utter it in public.
And then Professor Wax mentioned other obvious things, much to the agitation of people who like to pretend.
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