Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, even more shame on me.

In fact, it's all my fault. It's never your fault, because I fooled you before.

That, as Bruce Thorton's argues in this interesting and informative article, is the double standard that applies to the West when historical grievances are aired. Thorton's basic point is that, while the grievances of Islam against the West are real, they are outweighed (or are, at least, no worse) than the grievances of the West against Islam.

If history is to provide the foundation of grievance, however, then all of history is on the table, and that history must be factually accurate and judged by consistent standards. If, for example, the enslavement of Africans is an evil for which the West must take responsibility, then all slavery everywhere must be condemned equally. But when do we ever hear about Islamic slavery? In the three-century long heyday of Western slavery, some 10 million slaves crossed the Atlantic. Yet in the 14-century-long existence of Islamic slavery––still going on today in Africa in places such as Sudan––an equal number of black Africans were enslaved by Muslims. ... Don’t forget that included in the toll of those enslaved by Muslims were millions of Europeans taken in raids and sold for the harems, armies, and galleys of Muslim emirs, sultans, and caliphs.

So too with the presumed sins of “colonialism” and “imperialism.” The modern European presence in the Muslim Middle East lasted for less than two centuries. Yet Muslims occupied Spain for over seven centuries, and the Muslim occupation of the Balkans for half a millennium didn’t finally end until World War I. And vast regions of the Middle East––north Africa, Egypt, Turkey, the Holy Land––that were not Muslim but Christian homelands, are still “occupied” by the descendents of imperialistic, colonizing Muslim Arabs and Turks who came as alien invaders and conquered those territories.

Yet we rarely hear Westerners acknowledging those grievances, and we never hear Muslims apologizing for them. Hence, Thorton's point about the systematically applied double standard against the West.

Check the article out. It's well worth reading.

James Delingpole is my hero

His latest column, on the apoplexy and hyperventilating by so many BNP (British National Party) critics upon the BNP's winning two seats in the EU government, is pure genius: insightful, timely, biting, and witty.

In yesterday's Twittersphere the talk was of little else [beside's the BNP's victory] and the subtexts of every Tweet could be loosely translated thus: "See what a caring, lovely, non-racist person I am?","Do you know just how many black people are close personal friends of mine? An awful lot, let me tell you"; "I have a West Indian supermarket near me. It sells all sorts of marvellous ethnic things: smelly dried fish, ackee fruit. The proprietor is a delightful fellow and we always have a jolly chat. Did I mention he's black? Well he is and it doesn't affect our relationship one bit" ...

The people who voted BNP are on the front line of this debate. They don't have the luxury of being able to nip in and out of a cornucopia of simply marvellous ethnic food shops, and thrillingly directional Grime Bhangra clubs and delightful arthouse cinemas selling wholemeal samosas and showing seasons of Iranian cinema, before retreating to their lovely safe white enclaves. It's on their doorstep, all the time, and there's no escape: for the white working classes (of the North and North East especially) multiculturalism has been a disaster.

"For the white working classes ... multiculturalism has been a disaster." I don't think you can put it any more clearly or succinctly than that.

I want to be able to write that clearly and effectively. That's great writing.

Questions about science under Obama.

I don't know how I missed this. I'm not usually a fan of Derbyshire, but he asks some very pertinent questions.

Most people still think of human-science controversies in terms of nature/nurture. As a matter of real scientific dispute, that is all long gone. ... The dust of battle has pretty much settled now, in science departments if not in the popular press, and nature is the clear victor. ...

The younger generation of human-sciences enthusiasts trend conservative/libertarian, and Obama has them worried. For a glimpse of the kind of discussions that their fears generate, read through the recent thread on Gene Expression here. ...

About 45 percent of the way down that thread are two gems. First, population geneticist Henry Harpending posts a creepy invitation he got from the National Human Genome Research Institute (yes, that’s a “.gov” you see there in their web address), who are “planning a workshop to explore the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) raised by research on natural selection in humans.” The impetus for this meeting, they say, is “a growing need for more thoughtful deliberation by genomic researchers, ELSI researchers, science writers and science editors regarding the societal issues raised by natural selection research.” Get the picture? ...

A couple of items further on, science blogger Jason Malloy posts the transcript of an NPR discussion about The Bell Curve from October 1994, featuring “civil rights lawyer and writer” Barack Obama, who “lives in Chicago.” What did our young civil-rights lawyer and writer think of Herrnstein and Murray’s pop-psychometrics masterpiece? He no like.

Mr. Murray isn’t interested in prevention. He’s interested in pushing a very particular policy agenda, specifically, the elimination of affirmative action and welfare programs aimed at the poor. With one finger out to the political wind, Mr. Murray has apparently decided that white America is ready for a return to good old-fashioned racism so long as it’s artfully packaged …

We are about to find out whether our traditional devotion to free speech and free enquiry can survive real, incontrovertible results from the human sciences; and in particular, ... whether that devotion can survive under ... an administration much more interested in shoring up the soft totalitarianism of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” than in permitting the discovery of true facts about human nature.

My favorite part was the quote from a population science researcher who said, "The Democrats are really more anti-Darwinian than the fundamentalist Christians who deny the origin of species," because of the Dems' general unwillingness to even discuss the question of inherent population differences. Check out the whole article.

File this under "Man Bites Dog"

A major newspaper has run an intelligent, well written article that's highly critical of Hispanic immigration.

Lawrence Harrison, a self-described "lifelong Democrat ... [and] early and avid supporter of Obama", lays out a clear, persuasive case for why America needs to dramatically reduce the number of Latino immigrants it takes in.

The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. ... American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.

The healthcare cost of the illegal workforce is especially burdensome, and is subsidized by taxpayers. ... This translates into reduced services, particularly for lower-income citizens.

He also adds this gem, which I found particularly fascinating. Speaking about Latinos generally persistent failure to assimilate in America, Harrison points to the indulgence so many in the US have given to exclusively Spanish speakers. "Language," he says, "is the conduit of culture."

Consider: There is no word in Spanish for "compromise" (compromiso means "commitment") nor for "accountability," a problem that is compounded by a verb structure that converts "I dropped (broke, forgot) something" into "it got dropped" ("broken," "forgotten").

These characteristics of the Spanish language are often reflected in the behavior of Hispanic people. (My wife is pursuing her Masters in teaching ESL. Her classes are full of examples of the ways in which a language not only reflects characteristics of a culture, but also helps shape the thoughts and behaviors of the members of that culture.)

Harrison concludes with a clear call for necessary and tough-minded changes to US immigration policy.

[We] should confront the challenges by enforcing immigration laws on employment to help end illegal immigration. We should calibrate legal immigration annually to (1) the needs of the economy ... and (2) past performance of immigrant groups with respect to acculturation.

We must declare our national language to be English and discourage the proliferation of Spanish- language media. We should limit citizenship by birth to the offspring of citizens. And we should provide immigrants with easy-to-access educational services that facilitate acculturation, including English language, citizenship, and American values.

Great, great stuff. Check out the whole article.

Clear thinking about the foundations of culture

A conversation over at View from the Right that gets right to the heart of cultural foundations, and what it means to live as an immigrant in another culture.

Here are some choice excerpts:

At bottom, all societies are institutions whereby people come together and agree--voluntarily--to be bound by certain laws and customs. This is true of Europeans in Americans, villages in China, tribes in Africa, English in Australia, etc. ...

All societies choose how to govern themselves, and it is entirely proper that those choices will reflect the preferences of those that established the society in the first place. In America, that is the Anglo Saxon, Protestant, Northern European culture. " ... The existing population built the society, wrote its laws, established its customs, and in many cases they (or their ancestors) fought and died in its wars. Who else has any right to decide how that society should be governed?

I firmly believe that people have a right to govern themselves as they see fit--and, to expect others who join their society to consent to be governed by their rules, no questions asked. ... Certainly anyone ... who comes here--for whatever reason--should be bound by our culture. That it is not to say America is only for White Europeans. But it is to say that America is only for people who are willing--without question or complaint--to live under laws written by White Europeans.

Having lived 2 years as an immigrant, I fully understand and accept this line of reasoning. My wife and I lived in South Korea for two years. Yes, there was a lot of English around, but most stuff was still written in Korean -- which we had to learn how to read and speak (since most folks spoke only rudimentary English). We had to learn a host of new customs and social niceties, since much of what passes for polite in the US often comes off as frosty or downright rude in Korea.

We were constantly conscious of being strangers in a strange land -- a land that welcomed us to work there, to be sure, but not our home. Korea as a country is of and for the Koreans. And that's okay. I loved my time there, but I couldn't live there long-term. I'm an American. And that's okay, too. We had friends who couldn't or didn't understand what it means to be an alien: it means just what Obama said: "To play on another man's court, by another man's rules." He seemed to believe that that's a bad thing. I disagree.

Obama: the Trojan Horse

Well, he's a Trojan Horse for people who lack (or at least failed to use) the critical thinking skills to seriously analyze the man's actual record. He's a Trojan Horse for people who checked their brains at the Democratic door, got caught up in the vapidly meaningless rhetoric of "hope", and believed -- in the face of crystal clear proof to the contrary -- that Obama would lead us to a post-partisan, post-race-centered future. For these people, Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court is increasingly a cause for concern.

For rational, clear-thinking people, Sotomayor's nomination isn't at all surprising. She is one record as effectively saying that whites make worse judges than nonwhites. She explicitly refuses to believe in judicial impartiality as a goal. She is steeped in identity-politics. She is a true believer, a radical.

She's someone who's so blinded by her antipathy for The (White) Man that she voted for a farcical decision invalidating a civil service test explicitly because no blacks passed it. She's like a Bizarro Jim Crow -- favoring any law or policy that helps nonwhites because it helps nonwhites. It's a sign of how cowed and brainwashed white Americans are that they express no real outrage about -- or, incomprehensibly, openly support -- the opinions of anti-white, Leftist radicals like Sotomayor.

(And please don't say that I've never met this woman. I haven't. But she's a judge, not a regular citizen like me. She may be a very sweet and good person, and I might very well genuinely enjoy her company. But if I am to evaluate her as a judge, I must evaluate her on her decisions and her stated motivations -- and those I find exceedingly wanting. In fact, I find them exceedingly harmful, especially given her role as a judge.)

This -- for everyone who didn't (or refused to) pay attention to Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright, his work with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, his extreme Leftist voting records in the IL state senate and the US Senate -- represents who Obama is at his core. He's a radical Leftist. In the words of Jack Ross, "These are the facts, and they are indisputable."

Oh, he's certainly all about his own political success as well. This is why he's made a habit of throwing friends and allies under the bus, or stepping all over them on his way to the top (sort of like an anti-W.). But his vaguely centrists zigs and zags don't in any way preclude steps of a more radical sort in keeping with his Leftist values, as Sotomayor's nomination proves.

The lesson for all you viewers at home is this: as much as he practicably can, Obama will remake America in the image of Bill Ayers' twisted Marxist fantasies. For those who think otherwise, I strongly suggest you read the beginning of the The Aeneid. It will refresh their memories concerning what happens to people who accept Trojan Horses.

Jobs Americans Will Do

More confirmation -- if any was necessary for people with common sense and an IQ over 70 -- that the whole Jobs American's Won't Do movement (which advocated for amnesty for illegal immigrants on the grounds that they do all the jobs that [small "n"] native Americans refuse to do) was a bunch of nonsense.