Friday, April 13, 2018






Australia's Discrimination Commissioner assumes discrimination rather than proving it

Frank Chung comments on a race-obsessed public servant.  If discrimination can be proved that is one thing but assuming it from statistics is very different. 

Why is it different?  Because different groups have different priorities.  Indians, for instance gravitate to small businesses where income can be hidden.  There's a tradition of that in India.  So, in case you haven't noticed, we have a LOT of Indian taxi-drivers -- a mostly cash business. I was a taxi-driver myself once so I know a bit about it.  And there are Indian restaurants all over as well.

So does the over-representation of Indians in taxi-driving prove discrimination against white and East Asian taxi-drivers?  It's all a nonsense. East Asians for instance have a strong bent towards the professions.  So you won't often find bright East Asians in big business.  They are more likely to be the big businessman's doctor or medical specialist.  Is that discrimination we have to worry about?

From his name, I am assuming that Frank Chung is partly of East Asian ancestry and he clearly doesn't feel discriminated against



AUSTRALIA’S Race Discrimination Commissioner is being paid $340,000 a year by taxpayers to peddle racist pseudoscience.

In fact, Dr Tim Soutphommasane’s title could be more accurately described as “Commissioner for Racist Discrimination”, given his obsession with skin colour and apparent distaste for anyone from an “Anglo-Celtic or European background”.

Or in other words, white people.

In a risible piece of research released by the Human Rights Commission and the University of Sydney Business School on Tuesday, the good doctor lamented the fact that only eight executives in ASX 200 companies have a “non-European background”.

Similarly, of the 30 members of the Federal Ministry, there is “no one who has a non-European background” and only “one who has an indigenous background”.

Amusingly, that means Aged Care Minister Ken Wyatt — who is indigenous with part English, Irish and Indian heritage — is at once part of the problem and part of the solution, according to Dr Soutphommasane.

He goes on to rattle off similar numbers for the state and federal public service and university administrations. “All up there are 11 of the 372 CEOs and equivalents who have a non-European or indigenous background,” he said.

“A mere cricket team’s worth of diversity. These are dismal statistics for a society that prides itself on its multiculturalism. They challenge our egalitarian self-image. And they challenge our future prosperity as a nation. If we aren’t making the most of our multicultural talents, we may be squandering opportunities.”

Like a modern-day Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle, Dr Soutphommasane — magnifying glass and colour wheel in hand — has taken a meticulous taxonomic study on his voyage through corporate Australia.

“Of those who occupy 2490 of the most senior posts in Australia, 75.9 per cent have an Anglo-Celtic background, 19 per cent have a European background, 4.7 per cent have a non-European background and 0.4 per cent have an indigenous background,” he said.

“Described another way, about 95 per cent of senior leaders in Australia have an Anglo-Celtic or European background. Although those who have non-European and indigenous backgrounds make up an estimated 24 per cent of the Australian population, such backgrounds account for only 5 per cent of senior leaders.

“In a society where nearly one-quarter is estimated to have a non-European or indigenous background, the findings of our latest study challenge us to do better with our multiculturalism.”

Naturally, these findings have led Dr Soutphommasane to call for “cultural targets and quotas across the business, academic and political worlds”, according to Fairfax.

There are three pretty obvious problems with this.

Firstly, Dr Soutphommasane seems to be talking out both sides of his mouth. He says he wants “cultural targets”, but then admits his real problem is with “European and Anglo-Celtic” peoples. How similar are the cultures of Norway and Greece, or Ukraine and Portugal?

Secondly, Dr Soutphommasane does not seem to understand the meaning of “egalitarian”, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as “believing in or based on the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities”.

Equality of opportunity is not the same thing as equality of outcome. As US economist Milton Friedman said, a society that “puts equality of outcome ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom”.

“The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests,” he said.

Which leads to the third point. Proponents of race and gender quotas like Dr Soutphommasane believe equality of opportunity is impossible due to the pseudoscience of “unconscious bias” — a kind of modern-day phrenology which claims everyone is incredibly racist and sexist even if they don’t think they are.

Unconscious bias, also called implicit bias, first emerged in 1998 with the rollout of something called the implicit association test and immediately spread like wildfire through western institutions, spawning a multimillion-dollar industry of consultants who, Clockwork Orange style, reprogram the racism out of workers.

It seems to be one of Dr Soutphommasane’s most deeply held beliefs. In 2014, he blamed unconscious bias for the “bamboo ceiling”, recounting a traumatic incident in which a friend asked whether he worked “in the finance or IT section”.

“My new friend’s faux-pas was not that he had made certain assumptions about me,” he wrote. “His mistake was that he had revealed some assumptions that might have been better kept to himself.”

Unfortunately, the scientific basis of the IAT — and so the entire concept of unconscious bias and the associated obsession with mandatory quotas — has effectively collapsed.

Even the creators of the IAT, Harvard social psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji, have distanced themselves from its current usage, admitting that it does not predict “biased behaviour”.

In 2015, they wrote that the problems with the test make it “problematic to use to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination”. As The Wall Street Journal put it last year, “the politics of the IAT had leapfrogged the science behind it”.

And yet people like Dr Soutphommasane soldier on undeterred, even in the face of mounting evidence. It was Dr Soutphommasane, for example, who hailed the Victorian government’s “blind recruiting” trial in 2016, in which applicants’ resumes are de-identified of name, gender, age and location.

But hilariously, a study last year by the behavioural economics team in the Prime Minister’s department, known as the “nudge unit”, actually found blind recruiting has the opposite intended effect.

According to the study, led by Harvard professor Michael Hiscox, Australian Public Service recruiters “generally discriminated in favour of female and minority candidates”.

“We anticipated this would have a positive impact on diversity — making it more likely that female candidates and those from ethnic minorities are selected for the shortlist,” he told the ABC. “We should hit pause and be very cautious about introducing this as a way of improving diversity, as it can have the opposite effect.”

There may be many reasons for the lack of one-to-one population representation at the very highest levels of business and politics — but for the Race Discrimination Commissioner, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

For someone who is paid $340,000 a year to come up with this dross, it’s not surprising the concept of meritocracy is a foreign one. Or is that being racist?

SOURCE






Racial Disparities Don’t Simply Boil Down to Discrimination

Walter E. Williams

I don’t mind saying that this column represents a grossly understated review of “Discrimination and Disparities,” just published by my longtime friend and colleague Thomas Sowell. In less than 200 pages, Sowell lays waste to myth after myth not only in the United States but around the globe.

One of those myths is that but for the fact of discrimination, we’d all be proportionately represented in socio-economic characteristics, such as career, income, education, and incarceration. The fact of business is that there is no evidence anywhere on earth, at any time in human history, that demonstrates that but for discrimination, there would be proportionate representation in anything by race, sex, nationality, or any other human characteristic.

Sowell shows that socio-economic outcomes differ vastly among individuals, groups, and nations in ways that cannot be explained by any one factor, whether it’s genetics, discrimination, or some kind of exploitation.

A study of National Merit Scholarship finalists shows that firstborns are finalists more often than their multiple siblings combined. Data from the U.S., Germany, and Britain show that the average IQ of firstborns is higher than the average IQ of their later siblings.

Such outcomes challenge those who believe that heredity or one’s environment is the dominant factor in one’s academic performance. Moreover, the finding shows that if there is not equality among people born to the same parents and living under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected under other conditions?

In Chapter 2, Sowell provides evidence that people won’t take racial discrimination at any cost. The higher its cost, the less it will be tolerated, and vice versa.

One example is segregated seating on municipal transit in the South. Many companies were privately owned, and their decision-makers understood that they could lose profits by offending their black customers by establishing segregated seating.

Transportation companies fought against laws mandating racially segregated seating, both politically and in the courts, but lost. Companies even chose to ignore the law. Faced with heavy fines, though, they began to comply with the law.

The point is that the difference between the white transportation owners and the white politicians and segregationists was the transportation company owners had to bear the cost of alienating black riders and the politicians and segregationists didn’t.

Sowell broadens his analysis to show that regulated companies and organizations—such as public utilities and nonprofit entities, including colleges and government agencies—will be at the forefront when it’s politically popular to discriminate against blacks but also will be at the forefront when it’s politically popular to discriminate in favor of blacks. Why? Because in either case, they don’t bear the burden of forgone profits.

In Sowell’s chapter titled “The World of Numbers,” he points out what I’m going to call out-and-out dishonesty. In 2000, a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights study pointed out that 44.6 percent of black applicants were turned down for mortgages, while only 22.3 percent of whites were turned down. These and similar statistics led to charges of lending industry discrimination and demands that government do something about it.

While the loan rejection rate for whites was 22.3 percent, that for Asians and Native Hawaiians was only 12.4 percent. Those statistics didn’t see the light of day. Why? They didn’t fit the racial discrimination narrative. It would have been difficult for the race hustlers to convince the nation that lending institutions were discriminating against not only black applicants but white applicants, as well, in favor of Asian and Native Hawaiian applicants.

At several points in the book, Sowell points to the tragedies created in the pursuit of social justice. He gives the example of the Gujaratis expelled from Uganda and the Cubans fleeing Cuba. Many of the Gujaratis arrived in Britain destitute but rose again to prosperity. It’s the same story with the Cubans who came to the U.S. and prospered. By losing their most productive people, both Uganda and Cuba became economic basket cases.

The general public, educators, and politicians would benefit immensely from reading “Discrimination and Disparities,” if only to avoid being unknowingly duped.

SOURCE





'The Simpsons' Is Racist?

The long-running show responds to the charge quite humorously. But leftists don't find it funny.

The Left has progressively lost its grasp on reality, as it incessantly propagates a culture of outrage based upon its own stilted stereotype of victims and oppressors. As a result of this dogma, leftists lack both the courage and the humility to laugh at comedy. Evidently, to a leftist, life is a funeral, so how dare anyone make a joke. Indeed, looking at much of what Hollywood trots out as comedy today, it seems more like political potshots passed off as jokes designed mostly to malign Donald Trump or his supporters rather than an aim at legitimate humor. Enter America’s longest-running scripted primetime show, “The Simpsons.”

To any who have ever watched the popular cartoon, it is no secret that the show leans to the Left on many social issues. That said, the show has a long history producing genuinely creative comedy with loveably stereotyped characters. But that’s exactly what makes it funny. Recently a comedian of Indian decent did a documentary entitled “The Problem With Apu,” where he suggested that “The Simpsons” was a racist show because of its longtime character Apu, an Indian immigrant that owns a convenient store known as Kwik-E-Mart. The comedian, Hari Kondabolu, asserted, “I don’t find Apu offensive; I find him annoying and insulting.” He added, “But for me, one: It’s inaccurate. Two: It’s insulting to my parents. And three: When that’s the only depiction you have, that’s how the world sees you.”

In response to the documentary, the creators of “The Simpsons” did what they do best — they played off the criticism in their Sunday episode. Using Lisa, the character most associated with liberal and social justice causes, the writers essentially brushed off Kondabolu’s criticism by having Lisa say, “Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do?” Kondabolu responded to the episode by saying the bit was “sad.” Other leftists declared the show to be “dead.” Back here in reality, it appears that what maybe dead is the Left’s sense of humor.

SOURCE





Don't Blame Pain Pills for the Opioid Crisis

The politically correct explanation is wrong

Chris Christie, the outgoing governor of New Jersey, has repeatedly told the story of a law school classmate who died of an overdose after getting hooked on oxycodone prescribed for back pain. A recently released final report from the President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, which Christie chaired, wrongly implies that such cases are typical.

"A widely held and supportable view is that the modern opioid crisis originated within the healthcare system," the report says; the problem began with "a growing compulsion to detect and treat pain."

According to this narrative, doctors in the late 1990s began to underestimate the risk of addiction and overdose among patients prescribed narcotics for pain. Responding to advocacy on behalf of pain patients and deceptive marketing by drug companies, they supposedly began prescribing opioids left and right, leading to a surge in "iatrogenic addiction" (addiction caused by treatment) and overdose deaths.

To correct that disastrous mistake, the Christie commission says, doctors need to worry less about the suffering caused by untreated pain and more about the dangers posed by painkillers. But that conclusion is fundamentally misguided, because the commission's explanation is wrong in several crucial ways.

Opioid addiction and opioid-related deaths typically involve multi-drug users with histories of substance abuse and psychological problems, not drug-naive patients who accidentally get hooked while being treated for pain. Attempts to prevent overdoses by closing off access to legally produced narcotics make matters worse for both groups, depriving pain patients of the analgesics they need to make their lives bearable while driving nonmedical users into a black market where the drugs are more variable and therefore more dangerous.

As Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, noted in a 2016 New England Journal of Medicine article, "addiction occurs in only a small percentage of persons who are exposed to opioids—even among those with preexisting vulnerabilities." A 2010 review found that less than 1 percent of patients taking opioids for chronic pain experienced addiction. A 2012 review likewise concluded that "opioid analgesics for chronic pain conditions are not associated with a major risk for developing dependence." Volkow found that "rates of carefully diagnosed addiction have averaged less than 8% in published studies."

The risk of fatal overdose is even lower. A 2015 study that had followed pain patients treated with narcotics for up to 13 years found that one in 550 died from an opioid-related overdose, which is a risk of less than 0.2 percent. A study of opioid-related deaths in North Carolina found 478 fatalities among 2.2 million residents who were prescribed opioids in 2010, making the annual rate 0.022 percent.

The risk of addiction and overdose is not random. A 2012 study of opioid-related fatalities in Utah found that 61 percent of the decedents had used illegal drugs, 80 percent had been hospitalized for substance abuse (including abuse of alcohol and illegal drugs as well as prescription medications), 56 percent had a history of mental illness, and 45 percent had been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons other than substance abuse.

The vast majority of opioid-related deaths—more than 90 percent, according to data from New York City—involve combinations of substances. For the most part, people are not dying simply by taking too many pain pills. Even Christie's friend washed down his Percocet with vodka.

If the aim is reducing deaths from drug poisoning, there is not much logic to making prescription analgesics even harder to obtain, as the Christie commission recommends. According to a 2016 analysis of opioid-related fatalities in Massachusetts, just 8 percent of the decedents "had an opioid prescription in the same months as their deaths." Prescription opioids were the deadliest drug in just 5 percent of the cases, while 85 percent involved heroin and/or fentanyl.

The crackdown on prescription opioids already has left many patients without the medication they need to keep agony at bay, driving some to suicide. "There are many pain clinics flooded with patients who have been treated previously by their primary care physician," says Jianguo Cheng, president-elect of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, who says the refugees include patients who have responded well to opioids for years.

"If they go through with those recommendations," one such patient tells me, "I may as well drive my car off a cliff."

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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