Is racism worse than murder?

Ayn Rand described racism as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism”. However, she wouldn’t and neither would most people with any measure of morality would describe a verbal expression of racism as being worse than murdering another.

A radical comedy today might parody modern “anti-racism” to a ridiculous absurdity, defending people from claims of racism over defending people from murder. 

Reality is not funny though.

British journalist Ed West wrote a few weeks ago on his Substack an article called “Moloch must be Fed”. 

He recalls the following instances…

Salman Abedi 

 “One evening in May 2017 a security guard in Manchester was alerted to something that didn’t look right: a man of Middle Eastern appearance with a rucksack was seen by a member of the public approaching a pop concert filled with teenage girls. The man looked ‘dodgy’, in the words of the 18-year-old guard, who later recalled his moment of agonising: ‘I felt unsure about what to do. It’s very difficult to define a terrorist. For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male. I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race. Concerned that he would be accused of racism, the young man went with his doubts and let the British-born Libyan Salman Abedi walk on. The rucksack was packed with homemade explosives, mixed with nuts and bolts to maximise the suffering they would inflict on human flesh, and fifteen minutes later Abedi pressed the detonator, killing 22 people, ten of them under 20 and the youngest aged just eight.”

Valdo Calocane

“had attacked his flatmate on one occasion, and assaulted strangers on others. He was clearly very dangerous, and while mental health professionals had been ‘leaning towards’ sectioning him, he was released after they ‘considered the research evidence that shows over-representation of young black males in detention’. Calocane went on to butcher three people in broad daylight, including two 19-year-old students from the same university”

Axel Rudakubana

“At the Acorns School in Ormskirk, headteacher Joanne Hodson said she felt a ‘visceral sense of dread.”.. about him, as he “had been caught bringing a knife into class in his previous school, and when Hodson asked him why, had replied coldly: ‘to use it’. When she raised the risk posed by the dread-inducing young male, mental health workers accused her of ‘racially stereotyping’ him as ‘a black boy with a knife’.”

Rudakubana went on to murder three girls, aged nine, seven and six at a dance workshop for girls aged six to eleven in Southport.

The story about Henry Nowak is giving cause for concern among many in the UK about the priorities of policing. The criminal justice system’s first priority should be to protect the public from violence.  The Daily Telegraph has published the sentencing notes for Nowak's murderer and the background to the case.

Nowak called out to Vikrum Digwa, and asked if he was a “bad man”, and filmed Digwa on his phone. Digwa, a Sikh, alleges his turban was knocked off by Nowak.  Digwa stabbed Nowak four times and his face was slashed.  One of the stabbings proved fatal. Digwa and his brother filmed Nowak escaping, scaling a fence before landing on a car and falling to the ground, where he bled to death. By then the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary had arrived. Digwa’s father was helping keep Nowak upright, but Digwa had told the police that Nowak had racially abused him. 

The teenager is then heard shouting in a hoarse voice “I’ve been stabbed, I can’t breathe, call an ambulance”.

Officers can then be heard asking Digwa for his version of events, before dragging Henry across the gravel while saying: “Let’s get you out of there, shall we?”

When the university student again told them he had been stabbed, the officer responded: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Henry is then placed in handcuffs while repeatedly telling officers: “I can’t breathe.”

With the teenager in handcuffs, a female officer asks Henry, “where do you think you’ve been stabbed?” before saying to her colleague, “we have to check, don’t we”.

The near-three-minute footage ends with the arresting officer asking for Henry’s name, before reading him his rights.

At this point, the female officer seems to realise his deteriorating condition and calls an ambulance, noting that “his pupils aren’t even reacting”.

Nowak bled to death in handcuffs, because police were more concerned about Digwa’s claim of racism, than Nowak actually having been stabbed. 

Nowak calling “I can’t breathe” has shades of another event we all know, although there are multiple differences in the contexts, the primary point remained – the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary prioritised “anti-racism” over a murder.

Of course, the police were, in fact racist. It prioritised the feelings of one man who was hardly scratched over another bleeding to death, because of racism.

Many on the left in particular wonder why politicians they deem “far right” are getting popular appeal. I can’t imagine how blind they might be when these instances are happening, time and time again. The people who want to protect others, like the security guard, the teacher and most police, mean to do well.  They are undermined by a philosophy, which is advanced by academia, accepted by much of the media, absorbed by gateway professional associations and implemented by “professionals” and it is all facilitated by politicians.  

It’s a repeat story that could be a parody of a lunatic political philosophy if put into practice, if it weren’t a parody and hadn’t been put into practice. It is the application of today’s melding of various post-modernist philosophical movements into politics and into law and social/cultural practice. It combines Constructivism (which posits that there is no such thing as “objective truth” but rather reality is constructed by people as part of social processes, interests and beliefs), Structuralism (which posits that human behaviour can be understood through structures and systems within which they operate, rather than the specific behaviour itself and Critical Theory (which posits that injustice exists in current power structures which exist primarily to benefit and sustain those with power, who are deemed to be members of groups that created or succeed the most in those structures).

As with most philosophical movements, there is some truth in all of them in different contexts. However, the culmination of all of this applied consistently is that identical behaviour by two separate people is interpreted differently according to each person’s background and deemed level of privilege or disadvantage within the “system” they are living. Critical theory has little time for Common Law justice systems which treat individuals as free agents (unless proven otherwise) who, if they act to infringe upon the basic rights of other free agents, should be subject to judgment and punishment according to what they did and the harm they caused.  For example, while there may be mitigating circumstances in specific situations (e.g. self-defence), murder is murder. 

Objectivists, rationalists, classical liberals and other modernists regard racism as a pre-modernist view of humanity. The idea that human beings should be judged based on their inherited characteristics rather than their behaviour, is a legacy of pre-modernity. Race or ethnicity is not determinative of unjust behaviour, and especially not determinative of justifying injustice against that person. Awareness of this grew enormously in the aftermath of World War Two, the Holocaust, the legacy of Japanese militarism and subsequently decolonisation of much of the world, and the Civil Rights movement in the USA have made people aware of the need to treat people as they are, not for what they are.

In almost all societies deliberately killing another person, especially a child, is seen as the most morally depraved and injust act that can be committed. Yet in the UK today, there is a growing number of incidents whereby people, when judging whether to act to protect others from murder, have chosen to act based on another concern – is my action going to be seen as racist?

I'm reluctant to grant any politicians in the UK a shade of belief in their ability to confront this philosophical cancer.  Keir Starmer or those willing to replace him in the Labour Party have no remote interest in confronting this - for they are the ones who have facilitated this ideology. The Liberal Democrats and the Islamist adjacent Greens are even worse. Nigel Farage is an opportunist, and in calling for a "cold rage" he is showing his irresponsibility, and the emptiness of his thinking.  However, it is unsurprising he has popularity when for so long the Conservatives held no principle other than to retain power (when they were in power for a wasted 14 years). 

There is a chance, just a chance, that Conservative leader and Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch, could, if only because she is the only party leader who can confront the issue of racism with a background that befuddles the "anti-racist" racists.  She has said:

What Nigel Farage is doing is reinforcing the difference. I have said that we need to find what we have in common, not what separates us. I don’t want to hear about Black Lives Matter. I don’t want to hear about White Lives Matter. We all matter.

“Enough of this nonsense, where we keep separating everybody and splitting people into different groups. We are descending into tribalism. I do not want that. It is why I say that we should be a multiracial country, not a multicultural country. Let’s have one shared culture, British culture. How the police treat everyone should not matter, depending on the colour of their skin, and we shouldn’t pretend that racism is something that only happens to ethnic minorities, it happens to everybody, black or white"

I hope it is not too little, too late, to avoid the anger and violence which comes from people who think, not only is there a fundamental problem with the philosophy behind how so much of the state and the institutions of power function, but who think it is all fundamentally antagonistic to them, their family and their community - and are willing to burn the whole lot down, by handing power to those who literally have no coherent answers.

UPDATE: Spiked's Brendon O'Neill puts it perfectly following the publication of the bodycam footage of Nowak's death:

For me, the most chilling thing in the bodycam footage of Henry Nowak’s last moments of life is the cops’ cruel presumption that he is lying. As he writhes in terror and agony and cries out ‘I’ve been stabbed!’, a voice in the background – presumably that of the lowlife who murdered him, Vickrum Digwa – says: ‘He hasn’t been stabbed.’ 

A female officer responds. ‘I know’, she says. ‘But we have to check, don’t we?’

I know. It is delivered with dry, bureaucratic indifference. Henry is heard moaning, begging, ‘I can’t breathe’, yet here is a representative of the state seeming to agree with his knife-wielding tormentor that he is making it up. That cold, cavalier utterance – I know – will have cemented dying Henry’s great dread: that the police were taking the side of his killer rather than him....

...  Try to take in the Kafkaesque moral madness on display here. They learn the lessons of a black man killed while saying ‘I can’t breathe’, only to see their own cops horribly mistreat a white boy who said ‘I can’t breathe’. The very ‘anti-racism’ they imbibed in response to an African-American man dying with a cop’s knee on his neck leads to a situation where their officers drag and cuff a dying white kid. It is undeniable now: the state’s overcompensation for past acts of racism has unleashed new horrors. It is now official ‘anti-racism’ that nurtures injustice, unequal treatment and barbaric state behaviour. It is now ‘anti-racism’ that dehumanises the citizenry, dividing us into ‘the oppressed’ and ‘the oppressors’, and gifting or denying us moral worth accordingly. The horror on that driveway was more than a police screw-up – it was the metaphorical boot of wokeness on the neck of a young man, and a whole nation.

Our political class is in for the mother of all awakenings if it fails to recognise the anger this case has caused. Keir Starmer’s belated statement on the Nowak horror was horrendously perfunctory, yapping on about the ‘cycle of tragedy’ caused by ‘knife crime’. All the knee-bending passion he felt after George Floyd’s death seems to have evaporated into the cursory, fleeting angst of the impassive lawyer. Millions are clocking this. That he doesn’t know that is a tragedy – for him.

Pay Equity is a fundamentally flawed concept

No rational person would argue that people should be paid differently because of characteristics that have no bearing on their capability and willingness to undertake a particular job.  It's rational to be "sex-blind" so to speak, because most employers want employees with the requisite skills, experience, capability and willingness to work, as well as trustworthiness, to do the job.  There are a few exceptions to the rule that men and women should, everything else being equal, be paid similarly, for example, historically the porn industry pays women a lot more, although their "working lives" may be shorter than men. Does that mean that bureaucrats should investigate and seek to correct this? 

Leaving aside that distraction, given RNZ - like most taxpayer funded broadcasters across the world - just swallows the philosophy of "pay equity" as fact, because its unconscious bias is in favour of critical constructivism (which is a more sophisticated way of describing what is commonly called "woke"), I thought it was worth reading its sources for supporting the view that "pay equity" is a problem that needs a complex bureaucratic solution to fix.

As to be expected, RNZ found plenty of "howls of outrage" and of course nothing beats the now much more famous Andrea Vance, who is now one of the country's best known and paid vulgarians. Those who are outraged undoubtedly think that there is some great injustice being perpetrated which can be fixed by the state either making taxpayers or making employers take money away from elsewhere to make pay "fairer". 

RNZ looked to an article by Hayden Donnell on the Spinoff (Donnell is an RNZ reporter) and an article in The Conversation written by three academics (two of whom are sociologists and one in HR management).

Both demonstrate the fundamental flaws in the argument about pay equity. They assert that it is possible to fairly and reasonable assess different jobs based on "comparable levels of skill and training" and "similar amounts of responsibility" which should therefore mean that those jobs should be paid similarly.  

Donnell said:

Though it’s been highlighted in government comms, the librarians’ claim didn’t just look at fisheries officers. It also compared their pay and conditions to property surveyors, teacher aides, customs officers, corrections officers, parking compliance officers, and administration staff. That analysis was carried out using a government-issued assessment tool Te Orowaru, which provides a lengthy set of criteria to help claimants compare work responsibilities in seemingly disparate fields.

Think a bit more about that. A tool, accepted by the public sector, seeks to analyse bureaucratically how jobs ought to be compared with one another.  It is central planning par excellence which appears to have nothing to do with what is always a key factor in pay in the private sector (you know, the part of the economy that actually generates wealth the part of which is taken for the public sector to tell it what to do) - demand.

In the private sector, employers generally pay whatever it takes to attract employees and retain them. The employer works out how much net income the employee will generate, through sales, productivity or savings in administration, and pays accordingly.  Employers will pay what they need to get the people they want.  That's an assessment of a number of factors, but most of all it is around productivity, competence and trustworthiness.  Levels of skill and training may inform that but aren't decisive. Level of responsibility is a factor, but by far the most important point is whether the persons wanted might not stay in the job, which is a matter for them.  Jobs that involve unconventional hours, working away from home,  uncomfortable situations of all kinds, will require more pay.  Most private employers are small, so are not price setters (unlike the state which, given it has the power of coercion to force people to pay for it, is a price setter), and while some private sector employees are unionised, ultimately the decision to hire and pay is a matter for those who take the risk with setting up businesses in the first place. 

The pay equity problem is that academics, bureaucrats and leftwing politicians treat the issue as something fundamentally flawed in capitalism, that employers, including government departments, have paid women historically less than men.  The Conversation article claims:

pay equity seeks to make visible and fix the deep, structural inequalities that have historically seen women’s work undervalued compared to men’s work. It’s about ensuring jobs that are different but of equal value are paid similarly, as a way to achieve gender equality.

Equal value to whom? Two people in exactly similar jobs with different employers may be paid differently because of factors that the academics and bureaucrats (let alone the politicians who create legal mandates for this) have little visibility of. The person in the lower paid job may prefer the employer, who may be more flexible around working hours, and may have colleagues who are more enjoyable to work with, and there may be many other "soft" factors that no bureaucrat could identify.  Anything from location of employment, to management style, to the working environment.  The diversity (a word commonly used but ignored in the case of capitalism) of conditions is almost infinite, but none of this analysis takes this into account.

Is it unfair if someone in a job they chose is paid less than someone else in another job they chose? 

The academics claim "Pay equity is about addressing both the objective and subjective elements contributing to that gap".  Really? How can they possibly know what those are? 

The cost to taxpayers (undoubtedly seen as predominantly men) is dismissed as being "high" but "bearable" apparently (not that taxpayers have any choice), but it is the last statement of that article which is revealing about how bereft of serious critical thinking there is in talk about "pay equity":

Finally, focusing exclusively on reducing fiscal cost risks other costs rising instead. Women who are paid less than they should be will struggle to put food on the table, pay back student loans, get onto the property ladder, contribute to Kiwisaver and afford their retirement.

Without pay equity, in other words, there is less economic activity in general.

Where do these people think the money comes from to raise a small number of womens' pay? It isn't from a magic money tree, it comes from other people who engage in economic activity. The people who do pay for food, pay their student loans, buy property and save for their retirement. Most the talk of pay equity is about transfers from taxpayers to people paid by the state, and as with all talks of collectivised pay it bears zero relationship to the actual performance and productivity of those being paid. 

It goes further than this, because the advocates of pay equity have lobbied for pay "transparency" requiring employers to publish what they pay their employees (employee privacy is apparently not important).  Why not also lobby for the value of all contracts in the private sector to be transparent, why not tell everyone what everyone is paid for everything? The idea that consenting adults might want their business with other consenting adults around money to be private is an anathema to wannabe central planners who see opposition to their cause as being "resistance to changing or challenging the status quo, benefiting already privileged and advantaged groups", as if it is all a zero sum game.  Hints of Marxism of the bourgeoisie vs. the proletariat.  Anyone opposing Marxism is automatically defending the bourgeoisie.

As with so many theories in the space of post-modernist critical theory, extraordinarily complicated analysis is surprising reductive and overly simplistic.  The complexity of a modern economy of millions of actors, making many millions of decisions, based on endlessly diverse factors is beyond the capability of the best intentioned bureaucrats, academics and politicians to understand.  The simplistic reductive fallacy and the conceit (Hayek's Fatal Conceit highlighted this issue) to think that officials can decide what people should be paid, rather that it being about what it takes to attract the right people to a job in particular circumstances, is the fundamental error.

There may be pay equity issues across many different characteristics that, on the face of it, look unfair.  Do short people get paid less? Do overweight people get paid less? Do relatively good looking people get paid more and get more job interviews? Do blondes, especially blonde women get neglected for promotions due to stereotypes? All of this may be true, and there are bound to be more cases. For fairness should the state collect data on all of these factors and engage in complex bureaucratic processes to ensure people of "oppressed" characteristics are paid equally?

Politicians on the left are particularly attracted to the power and capacity of the state to "fix" things. The problem is, as the Soviet Union and the significant list of examples that followed have proven, it is impossible to centrally plan an economy and society in a way that is remotely as productive or indeed fair as a relatively free, open, market economy of people largely left to co-operate, compete and work.

Most people think their work is "undervalued" and want more pay. Most people who own businesses think their products and services are undervalued and want more pay. The path to more people being paid more is not through generating complex regulatory frameworks, managed by public servants, designed by management consultants. It's by enabling people to innovate, to create, produce, hire people to support this, and to let people trade.

Central planning and control of pay might give an illusion of fairness, but when the reason salaries are low is because NZ's GDP per capita is amongst the lowest in the OECD, so that employers can't afford to pay what is paid in Australia, the United States, Europe or Singapore, then it's a delusion.

Remember Cultural Safety in nursing education?

This widely viewed Australian spoof about education isn't far from the mark:

This Ph.D thesis from Massey called "A Maori model of Primary Health Care Nursing" exemplifies this nonsense.  Take this gem:

Unfortunately, much of the present literature on which we rely to develop nursing curriculum, practice and health policies is presented, not only from a pakeha perspective but also with a strong
biomedical focus. This has proved to be of little use to Maori.

Post-modernist identity politics denies that modern medicine is of" little use" to people from a pre-modern culture.  Now I agree that being sensitive to the customs and beliefs of patients is entirely a sensible part of nursing, but this is simply treating people as individuals and customising providing services in ways that optimises their experience.  However, to treat medical science as being secondary or even almost dismiss it altogether is complete nonsense.

The insanity of not judging people's actions and capabilities as individuals, but as categorised groups, and the insanity of the denial of reality and objectivity are exactly what this little video identifies.  It's about time it was laughed at and challenged, because the philosophy and values behind it are not only irrational, but fundamentally corrosive to individual rights and freedoms to the point where, as in my previous post, those applying it become not only appeasers of fascism, but apply fascist techniques to their approach to any form of challenge.

The single biggest philosophical threat to our freedoms is not Islamism itself, nor a new generation of Marxism-Statism, but the entire edifice of post-modernist relativism and structuralism - for it is that which is hindering the policies and practices needed to confront the fascists from all sides.

So how far away from how things are is this?