Dangerous Ideas, Dangerous Men

Something which seems to rapidly becoming lost in the recurring arguments for and against Dawkins and rational/scientific rationalism is that this is probably an evolutionary adaptation of what has come before (indeed check our William Shockley, who went from crucial scientific innovation, to popular speaking, to racism: some fairly strong parallels there). The living legacy of scientific racism has never truly been discarded or buried, either in practice or in thinking:

Here Charles Murray, one of the most influential standard-bearers of the Right's campaigns against the post-1960s developments in regards to race and the family, echoes more or less everything the Left has said about 'The White Working Class Community.' Our current elites are too distant and too disconnected to understand 'our decline', and the rest of the populace is too lost without guidance, solved in Murray's view by having the wealthy elite re-instruct us in the grand old ways of the pre-60s. What Murray and the left believe in unison is that the decline of the white working class is a problem of genetics and the passage of time. In 1984 Murray's Losing Ground would advocate reconstruction of welfare in the US; in 1996 the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act

attacked those groups Murray and his ilk felt were the cause of the country's decline: mothers and African Americans. Murray has experience in managing what he might call unruly populations: for a time Murray worked in Thailand on behalf of the US government carrying out counterinsurgency studies.

One of Murray's coups and a once ubiquitous for a time in US discussions was the publishing with Richard Herrnstein of The Bell Curve in 1994. Bravely the authors declared they could not ignore the wealth of IQ data which they had accumulated suggesting that America must face the facts: compared to whites, black people were possibly genetically less intelligent. Never-mind the distorted route by which intelligence testing came to find itself perfectly situated at he heart of American scientific racism, how it at the very best should be considered pseudo-scientific, or how it has been one of the most valuable footsoldiers in maintaining hierarchies. The genetic inheritance of intelligence is an area well-worth sniffing around because you never know who'll turn up. Putting their names to 1994's Wall Street Journal article “Mainstream Science on Intelligence” endorsing the views of the Bell Curve were respected intelligence researchers such as Raymond B. Cattell, Thomas J. Bouchard, Hans B. Eysenck, and Robert Plomin: these are not obscure backroom people but (Cattell and Eysenck especially) you will have encountered their ideas in some works training or seminar. Steven Pinker, to whom the world has already been pacified by liberal capitalism with the exception of some unruly outposts, approved this missive.

A figure who hasn't enjoyed a resurgence in popularity along with science pron nerd favourite Carl Sagan but is from the same era is the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Gould wasn't a prolific skeptic-buster, eager to throw himself into the industry that developed in the wake of Sagan and now has its avatars in Dawkins and co. In some of his last work Gould seemed to find a much better course in the friction between science and religion than his contemporaries preach. What Gould did in books such as The Mismeasure of Man was apply skepticism to ruling doctrines within science and psychology, and came away with what added up to the collusion and deception on a mass scale by eugenicists to forge the data to support their theories. Gould faced criticism for being ideologically driven in the face of the blistering destruction he delivered to the academic racists; usually, when the ideological biases of something are brought up (as Gould himself honestly does in the work) it is to distract from the fact that the entire body surrounding it is being driven by an opposing ideology.

To The Home Which Everybody Owns

Between 1697 and 1807, 2,108 known ships left Bristol to make the trip to Africa and onwards across the Atlantic with slaves. An average of twenty slaving voyages set sail a year. Approximately 500,000 slaves were brought into slavery by these ships, representing one-fifth of the British slave trade during this time. Profits from the slave trade ranged from 50% to 100% during the early 18th century. Bristol was already a comparatively wealthy city prior to this trade; as one of the three points of the slave triangle (the others being Africa and the West Indies), the city prospered. This triangle was called the Triangular Trade. The Triangular Trade involved delivering, as well receiving, goods from each stop the ship took.

Darkness  

The Bristol underground scene was characterised by a sparseness and darkness. Bands like Portishead and Massive Attack are known for using sparse instrumentation - a prominent bass line, vocals with what are usually melancholic lyrics and sometimes other effects commonly associated with hip-hop, such as samples and scratching. (...) Separately to this, some writers have talked of an undercurrent of darkness within the city due to its history.

Racial tensions within the City 

An article in 2008 in The Telegraph stated that: "Racial matters have always carried a historical resonance in Bristol, a city made affluent on the profits of tobacco and slave-trading. Street names such as Blackboy Hill and Whiteladies Road remain as reminders." However, the popular belief that both Whiteladies Road and the Blackboy Hill had connections with the slave trade is untrue: both names appear to be derived from pubs.

(...) 

There has often been a slight undercurrent of tension both in the politics and creatively with artists and musicians in the merger of black and white culture. During the 1950s the Bristol Evening Post carried what many today would consider openly racist articles, warning of the dangers of black bus drivers.

Two Swords Technique

Much of the discussion in the international media tends to view the worsening economic situation in Japan as the outcome of national policies and national historical developments, in isolation from the rest of the world economy. In fact the Japanese crisis is intimately bound up with tendencies in the global financial system stretching back to the stockmarket collapse in October 1987. 

When Wall Street crashed, the immediate response of central bankers and finance ministers around the world, in particularly the newly installed chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan, was that they were not going to make the same mistake as their predecessors in 1929. Consequently, they pursued a policy of credit expansion in order to boost stock markets and avert an immediate recession. 

This policy had the most far-reaching consequences in Japan. The growth in international liquidity saw the creation of a giant financial bubble. The Tokyo stock market escalated to unprecedented heights (at its peak the Nikkei Index reached over 39,000 compared to its level of around 17,000 today) while real estate prices were so high it was calculated that the land under the Imperial Palace was worth more than all of California.

Why, the homeless are left on their own with out help from the government or the public at large. Few are those that volunteer to help those in need and organize soup kitchens for them or closing. We have about 20 NGO working with the Homeless and the unemployed here in Tokyo and surrounding areas, trying to provide meals and shelters. Those NGO's receive about 90 per cent of their revenue in form of donations from abroad. The aid given by the NGO's is often undermined by the “Guardian Angels”, a paramilitary group of sorts, that is closed in combat pants, boots and military like beret. They are patrolling the streets to keep order and cleanliness on behalf of the "good" citizens and businesses that support them. Those “Guardians” give the NGO’s much grief at times, for they do not want to see those NGO's setting up in their part of town to help the homeless. Ironically, the NGO’s best ally against the "Guardians" are the Yakuza’s also known as gokudō (極道), they do provide a social function along their better know other activities. Of course one does try to stay away from the Yakuza, still every now and then they are the only thing that stands between being able to help the homeless or being hindered by the "Guardians" to do so. 

Alarmed at the prospect of the last Japanese pensioner switching out the lights, probably sometime in the 22nd century, the government – made up mostly of older males -- has swung into action, with sometimes comical results. In a gaffe-strewn foray into the marriage and fertility debate, Welfare Minister Yanagisawa Hakuo recently said Japan had a “fixed number” of “baby-making machines” aged 15-50 and recommended “healthy” youngsters should have at least two children. The political message – that women and not government policies are responsible for the lack of babies – infuriated opposition Social Democratic Party leader Fukushima Mizuho and many others. “Yanagisawa’s remarks were tantamount to telling women to give birth for the nation,” said Fukushima. “The [ruling] Liberal Democratic Party is to blame for this problem itself for not creating the environment where women want to have children.”

Where once everyone seemed to be treated more or less the same, merchants and marketers are focusing on the affluent. And it is paying off even during Japan's prolonged recession. Mercedes-Benz luxury cars are selling at a brisk pace while overall car sales have slumped. Private banking services offered to the wealthy are also proliferating.

"For years, everyone's pay increased as they got older," said Shoji Hiraide, general manager of Mitsukoshi's flagship department store branch in central Tokyo, which has begun a campaign to woo the wealthy. "It made everyone think that we are all in the middle class."But lifetime employment is crumbling and salaries are based more on merit and performance," he said. "In seven or eight years, Japanese society will look much more like Western society, with gaps between rich and poor that can be clearly seen."

"I see a serious problem," says lawmaker Takuya Tasso of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan. "Japanese society is dividing into winners and losers, rich people and poor people. The middle class is being destroyed." The trend is troubling in a country where just about everyone considers themselves middle class and where no one is supposed to get left behind. 

"There is an expression in Japanese, ichioku-sohchu-ryu, which literally means, '100 million completely middle class' (or) more naturally, 'a nation of middle-class people," says Shigeru Miyagawa, a professor of Japanese at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Newspapers are now asking, 'What happened to ichioku-sohchu-ryu?' "

His Card Was Posted Late (3)

Continued from here and here. But by no means concluded with the above...