HOW TO IMPROVE MAJORITY RIGHTS

We live in an era where it is a reliable source of acclaim to campaign for minority rights. I think however that there is a case for arguing that majority rights have become neglected in the process. I have a whole separate blog -- Political Correctness Watch -- where I document the favouritism that is extended to minorities of all sorts. It is of course a matter of mere logic that to extend favouritism to one group is to discriminate against other groups.

In my moderate, tolerant Anglo-Saxon way, I am not greatly disturbed by some degree of favouritism towards disadvantaged groups -- though I think that any help should be aimed at the individual with problems rather than at any group that he or she might belong to. The situation today, however, has got very much out of hand. Discrimination against some groups who are conceived of as the majority has become almost as brutal in its effects as the discrimination that was once aimed at blacks and Jews. Far from being defeated, racism of one sort has been replaced by racism of another sort.

And the target of most racism today is in fact itself a rather small minority -- straight white middle-class males. There are special favours for women, special help for the poor and all sorts of favoured treatment for sexual and racial minorities. The target for all hate, blame and discrimination are straight white middle-class males. This is enormously unjust in almost any morality and would be regarded as thoroughly obnoxious were any other group so targeted.

But again in my tolerant, balanced way I don't see that group -- one to which I belong -- as suffering greatly from most of the measures aimed against it so am inclined to write most of the discrimination off as just another one of the many follies of the world.

There is however one way in which the pervasive racism of the modern world DOES badly effect my minority group and it is also something that this time really does affect the majority -- the fact that group favouritism greatly impedes law enforcement and has led to considerable danger and suffering for many innocent and decent people. Some of the especially privileged groups -- blacks and illegal immigrants in particular -- have a very high propensity to crime and are yet allowed to rampage more or less unchecked in many instances. So I think every effort should be made towards eliminating this form of discrimination. Whether a gang is black, Latino, Asian or white should not matter a hoot. It should be cracked down on with all the force that the law can muster. And regardless of what the population of a particular neighbourhood might be, if there is a lot of crime there then there should also be a heavy police presence there. If the "zero tolerance" policies of Giuliani and Bratton drastically reduced crime in NYC, tough policing procedures can work anywhere.

There are of course many other ways in which the racism of the current era is offensive and I sympathize with the offence that many people feel in that connection but if we REALLY want to make a difference it is no good just sitting down and praying for utopia: We have to concentrate on the one most urgent problem -- crime. And only when we have got effective and non-discriminatory law-enforcement does it make sense to start pursuing less urgent goals. And it is my personal belief that once we have got effective and non-discriminatory law-enforcement, other forms of discrimination will be much weakened and other problems will be much reduced.

So how do we go about removing the handcuffs from our police and other law-enforcement officials? It will not be easy. The publicity that the Minutemen give to the silly games that go on at the U.S./Mexico border is an excellent start but ultimately the solution has to be political. And I can see no way in which what I have advocated is at odds with the claimed ideology of either of the major political parties. So people who share my concern should join whichever of the major political parties they feel most comfortable with and become single-issue campaigners within that party. There really is no other way.

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ELSEWHERE

I must confess to being enormously relieved at the rescue of the Russian submariners. They were facing an awful death from suffocation. I am so glad that sanity prevailed and Western help was immediately requested -- and, of course, given. The Brits must be cock-a-hoop.

What the envious Wal-Mart haters ignore: "Wal-Mart hasn't just sliced up the economic pie in a way that favors one group over another. Rather, it has made the total pie bigger. Consider, for example, the conclusions of the McKinsey Global Institute's study of United States labor productivity growth from 1995 to 2000. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics and an adviser on the study, noted that the most important factor in the growth of productivity was Wal-Mart. And because the study measured productivity per man hour rather than per payroll dollar, low hourly wages cannot explain the increase. Second, most of the value created by the company is actually pocketed by its customers in the form of lower prices. According to one recent academic study, when Wal-Mart enters a market, prices decrease by 8 percent in rural areas and 5 percent in urban areas. With two-thirds of Wal-Mart stores in rural areas, this means that Wal-Mart saves its consumers something like $16 billion a year. And because Wal-Mart's presence forces the store's competitors to charge lower prices as well, this $16 billion figure understates the company's real impact by at least half".

Islamic perverts: "Last Sunday, an American journalist, Steven Vincent, had an opinion piece published in The New York Times, written from Basra, in southern Iraq. He warned that the British Army was allowing the power vacuum in Basra to be filled by Shiite religious groups engaging in a campaign of religious assassinations and constraining the freedoms of women: "At the city's university, self-appointed monitors patrol the campuses, ensuring that women's attire and make-up are properly Islamic." Retribution was swift. Vincent was still in Basra and he was abducted within 48 hours. His body was found on Wednesday. To call him a casualty of a war or the victim of terrorists would be a mistake. He was murdered by perverts. "Pervert" does not remotely confer the same aura and power of "terrorist". This murder was committed in the name of religion but, at its deepest level, was another manifestation of envy, impotence and sexual repression.

Brian Micklethwait seems to be getting more and more eccentric as time goes by. I always suspected that there was a crusty old Tory underneath his libertarianism.

There is a petition on Strange Justice that desperately needs more signatures. Please read it. It is the first online petition I have ever signed.

I have just put up on a Leftists as Elitists an article that rather blows the pretensions of the Art world out of the water.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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The anti-business policies and practically all economic policies advocated by the Left are impoverishing. They waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so make the country poorer. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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