“White” is a Way of Life

There is a story under the above heading by Sangeeta Kalsi, who is a lady of Indian origins

https://medium.com/fourth-wave/white-is-not-a-color-3a639be326e7

The article is too long-winded for me to reporoduce but her claim is in essence simple. She claims that brown perople like her are treated suspicously and as inferior by whites in the Western world. They are discriminated against because of their skin color and other differences.

She also says, however, that they can come to be treated as whites with a suntan if they behave similarly to whites.

From my observations, that is true. So skin color is not the key factor in how they are treated. It is how they behave. And that is her basic point. She gives Nikki Haley as a brown person who came to be treated as white by behaving as one. Haley was a governor of South Carolina as well as making a strong bid for the GOP presidential nomination -- so that is a good example

What Ms Kalsi seems unaware of is that she has described a basic human process that affects us all, not only Indians. We all judge others by how they behave towards us and we all get on best with people who are similar to us. It is often noted in assortatative mating, where men and women who form relationships with one-another tend to have a lot of background factors in common.

There is actually a large literature in psychology on impression formation and stereotyping and its universal conclusion is that our judgment of others changes as we get to know them. When we first get to see a person we judge him/her according to the physical characteristics that we see. And the initial reaction will be a standoffish one but that can rapidly modify as we get to know more about the person. If a person speaks in our accent and uses our slang, an easy and accepting relationship will normally result. Such a person will seem "like us" and the barriers between us will just be normal interpersonal ones.

I have summarized some of the findings of the academic psychology literature below:

http://jonjayray.com/scots.html

http://jonjayray.com/stereo.html

So Ms Kalsi would be wise to stop "kicking against the pricks, as St Paul advises us, and accept that what she is seeing is just basic humanity

JR

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‘Christian Nationalism’: Scaremongering Left’s Newest Red Herring

Hollywood director Rob Reiner’s new documentary “God & Country,” released in theaters last weekend, warns Americans of an impending “Christian nationalist” takeover of the country.

The Associated Press declared Saturday, “Many believe the Founders wanted a Christian America. Some want the government to declare one now.” On Tuesday, Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybyla warned in Politico, “Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration.”

Such manufactures represent “a coordinated effort” to stoke fear before the 2024 elections, declared Family Research Council Action President Jody Hice, guest host of “Washington Watch” on Wednesday. Their purpose is not just “to rally the Left but, probably even more so … to intimidate and silence Christians who embrace a biblical worldview,” he said.

The purpose of Reiner’s yellow journalism is more concerning than its aim. The Left’s “definition of Christian nationalism … tends to be a coat that is cut to fit whatever it needs to fit at any given time,” Regent University professor A.J. Nolte said on “Washington Watch.” As with donkeys and tails, it gets harder to pin the scare on the elephant after you’ve been blindfolded and spun in circles.

Some leftist definitions of “Christian nationalism” have little in common with Christianity. Take Reiner’s perspective, “The idea is that America was a born as a white Christian nation, and these people are virulent about returning to that, and they’ll do it at any means necessary, including … violence. And we saw this happen on January 6th.”

Most Christians would have difficulty recognizing themselves in this description. For starters, Christianity knows no ethnic barriers (Revelation 7:9); Christians are commanded to submit to the government (Romans 13:1); and violence disqualifies a man from Christian leadership (1 Timothy 3:3).

Reiner’s definition wasn’t particularly concerned with scriptural accuracy, as the entire documentary really served as a “Trojan horse for progressive ideology,” wrote Southern Seminary professor Andrew Walker. His documentary painted institutions as disparate as The Heritage Foundation, Turning Point USA, and Hillsdale College with the same broad brush, even though the first two aren’t sectarian, and the third isn’t political.

Reiner “gives the game away when he talks about ‘white’ Christian nationalism,” Nolte noted, a mistaken “conflation of white ethnic nationalism with Christian nationalism.”

Some leftist definitions simply equate “Christian nationalism” with social conservatism. Nolte described a book titled “‘Taking America Back for God,’ by two scholars named Perry and Whitehead.” In the book, “They took six questions, which are generally good questions if you’re trying to measure social conservatism” and used them as “measures for Christian nationalism.” These measures included support for prayer in schools, opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, and an acknowledgment of Christian principles in America’s founding.

“So, what you often find is that Christian nationalism is basically just … social conservatism, sort of relabeled,” Nolte concluded.

This definition becomes increasingly unrealistic as left-wing extremism puts more and more Americans on the “Right” side of social and cultural policy disputes, particularly where transgender ideology is at play. The coalition opposed to pornographic books in school libraries, for instance, includes not just Christians, but also Jews such as Ben Shapiro, Muslims like the parents in Dearborn, Michigan, or Montgomery County, Maryland, and agnostics like Jordan Peterson.

The term “Christian nationalism” approaches meaninglessness when used to describe people who are not Christians and might not even be nationalists.

Some leftist definitions of “Christian nationalism” combine biblical positions with non-biblical ones. Thus, Przybyla (co-author of the Politico piece mentioned above) stated Tuesday, “We’re talking about here not just isolationism, immigration. We’re talking about ending same-sex marriage, abortion, reducing access to contraceptives, but also surrogacy, no-fault divorce, sex education in public schools.”

But not so fast! Those are “two separate issue sets,” Nolte pointed out. Opposition to immigration and an isolationist foreign policy are the preferred policies of a populist segment of the contemporary American Right, but they shouldn’t be lumped together with what Nolte called “family-oriented, social conservative policies.”

Even if both sets of positions are found on the political Right, they are espoused by “two separate groups of social conservatives,” Nolte explained. Again quoting Perry and Whitehead, Nolte said, “Among regular church attenders, they actually found less hostility toward those of different racial groups, toward immigrants … but there was more opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion,” while “among those who were socially conservative, but did not attend church, what they found was the exact opposite.”

At the risk of committing an overgeneralization, one might say there was an inverse relationship between the depth of a person’s Christian walk and their espousal of “nationalist policies.” Does that sound like “Christian nationalism”?

Some leftist definitions of “Christian nationalism” simply mean that it’s bad for Christians to be involved in politics. For instance, “They’re all after Speaker Mike Johnson for his Christian faith,” said Hice. “He’s a Christian statesman who is certainly influenced and guided by his faith,” but “that’s no different from the liberal Left being guided by their secular, or whatever, worldview that they embrace.”

“This really galls the Left, [that] Mike Johnson has the unmitigated temerity to be a fairly conventional Southern Baptist,” Nolte agreed, with a touch of sarcasm. “Yes, he’s quite conservative on family issues. … But, as a conventional Baptist, he also stands [with] an over 200-year tradition of Baptists supporting religious liberty.” (Make that nearly 400 years in America since Baptist minister Roger Williams founded the colony of Rhode Island as a haven for freedom of conscience.)

The point is, “If somebody is truly committed to religious liberty, you never have to worry about them imposing Christianity,” Nolte argued. “They want to protect your freedom to believe or not believe as you choose.”

Yet no leftist definitions of “Christian nationalism” acknowledge its presence on the political Left. Follow along, if you will, with this thought experiment Nolte set forth:

Imagine a situation in which a Republican president goes to a church—a church that has been prominently associated with Republican politics in the past—on a federal holiday, and gives a speech where he talks about how New Testament principles ought to be the basis of our politics here in America. Would the media label that as Christian nationalism, do you think?

Over Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend in 2023, President Joe Biden spoke from that man’s onetime pulpit in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, declaring that certain passages of the New Testament described “the essence of the American promise” and inspired his vision to “redeem the soul of America.” Yet, according to the propagandists now loudly decrying Christian nationalism, “that, somehow, was not considered Christian nationalism,” Nolte observed.

So, when defining the term, “it kind of depends on who is using the New Testament and whether the media outlets in question like the use to which the New Testament is being put,” he said.

Nolte suggested the entire project was political. His dissertation had examined how secularists in Turkey, France, and other countries have used “extreme fear language” about “religious reactionaries” to “mobilize constituencies that supported … secularism.” He warned that this strategy backfired in Turkey, where it “generally pushed most of the Islamic believers in Turkey more toward radicalism.”

Nolte argued leftists in America have made a “deliberate attempt” to craft a similar narrative. In particular, he pointed to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a tailor-made scarytale “that’s going to appeal particularly to secular educated women who do not attend church and are not familiar with Christian belief.” Nolte criticized the way it twisted Scripture to depict a “misogynistic, theocratic society” that has nothing in common with the policy goals of socially conservative Christians in America.

Ultimately, fearmongering about the slur “Christian nationalism” says far more about those who wield it than those they aim to describe. In the “Red Scares” of the 1920s to 1950s, allegations that there was a communist under every rock, tree, bush, government desk, and movie script did little to inform the American public about which people really were communists. But they did inform Americans that the accusers were anti-communists. Similarly, accusations of “Christian nationalism” don’t inform Americans about which politicians, if any, wish to establish a theocracy; but they do help Americans understand that the people making the accusations are anti-Christian and anti-nationalist.

One final accusation lobbed against Christianity came from University of California at Riverside professor Reza Aslan, a Christian apostate. “The biggest sin, if you will, of Christian nationalism, is that it sees pluralism as a weakness, and not what it is: the foundation of what it means to be American,” Aslan insisted.

The irony in this inverted statement is so thick you could ice it and slice it. Not only did Aslan overlook the Christian origins of American pluralism, but he also missed the fact that American Christians are still pleading for a pluralistic society, “that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Timothy 2:2).

It is totalitarian leftists who seek to de-pluralize American public life by banishing Christians from the public square—and scaremongering about “Christian nationalism” is simply their latest attempt to do so.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/23/leftists-propagandize-christian-nationalist-scare/

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What Is DACODAI?

The Defense Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion (DACODAI) was formed in 2022. The committee’s website says it is to “examine and provide recommendations to improve racial/ethnic diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunity within the DoD [Department of Defense], with a primary focus on military personnel.”

Sounds innocuous. However, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology promotes a radical, un-American belief system. DEI promotes extreme ideas like America is a racist nation, that racism and white supremacy are widespread today, and that whites are oppressors and minorities are oppressed. The committee itself is not diverse. However, the need for DACODAI is questionable, as the DOD’s 2022 demographics report shows the military is extremely diverse, at or above national demographics for race and ethnicity. DACODAI’s own data publicized in December 2023 shows rates on all types of discrimination complaints are tiny fractions of a percent. Examples of military adoption of DEI:

$114.7M in FY2024 for military DEI, a substantial increase from 2023.

In ongoing litigations against USMA and USNA, both admitted to using admissions practices that consider race and ethnicity. Specific practices of one or both include (1) reserving vacancies for racial “diversity” applicants, (2) using candidate composite score (only a small fraction of which is standardized test score) thresholds that differ by race when making admission decisions, and (3) using out of order of merit selection to achieve racial diversity. Better-qualified white and Asian applicants, some having much higher candidate composite scores, are not selected to make room for lower-scoring “diversity” applicants. These practices unarguably violate constitutional equal protection of the law, deny equal opportunity to hundreds of higher-scoring but non-selected applicants, demean minorities who gain admission based on merit, and, combined with other poor policy choices, lower standards for about 10%-20% of the entering class. These practices have been concealed from Congress and the American people for decades. The result: Warfighters are not always getting the best-qualified leaders.

DOD websites and recruiting emphasize DEI. DEI training is continuous and ubiquitous.

In 2022, the chief of staff of the Air Force set a goal of no more than 67.5% white pilots. Currently, 90%+ of AF pilots are white.

2023 Navy selection board guidance overtly allows the use of race in selections.

Based on their personal experience or those of their children, thousands of current and former military members objected to DEI’s dilution of merit. These voices represent thousands of years of service. They are the voices of experience, and they warn that the path we are on now leads to disunity, division, lower morale, recruiting and retention problems, and, eventually, failure. These testimonies are at STARRS. Meanwhile, zero data shows diversity improves performance, lethality, or readiness.

Col (Ret.) Bill Prince, U.S. Army Special Forces with 11 combat deployments, quotes the USMA’s Chief Data Officer, Col. Paul F. Evangelista ‘96, in commenting on attempts to measure the effectiveness of DEI, “We don’t have the data.”

BG (Ret.) Ernie Audino, U.S. Army, nails the issue precisely, saying: “If generals are right, i.e. that racial diversity in our officer corps is a 'national security imperative,’ then the services would at least track racial percentages in their mandatory assessments of unit combat readiness, but they don’t. Racial diversity is not included and never has been.”

CDR (Ret.) Phil Keuhlen, USN, is a former commanding officer of a nuclear-powered attack submarine. His analysis of Task Force 1 Navy’s claimed diversity benefits shows the Navy misrepresented source applicability, extended conclusions beyond the data, and ignored source conclusions that gains were due to factors that degrade military effectiveness. His detailed analysis is at RealClearDefense.

Col (Ret.) Bing West, USMC, is one of the most decorated combat veterans in our nation’s history. His article, “The Military’s Perilous Experiment,” ought to give our military leaders pause in their headlong pursuit of diversity. He writes: “Inside the military, however, another criterion has taken central booking: diversity. The focus has shifted toward emphasizing gender and racial equality, particularly in leadership positions. Diversity has replaced lethality as the lodestone for the military. … As a Marine veteran, I find this disconcerting. From boot training on, Marines are taught to put aside diversity, not to emphasize it.” The article can be found at the Hoover Institution.

DACODAI met in DC on December 14-15, 2023, and invited public comment. The input submitted by multiple public interest organizations was ignored. This behavior by DACODAI is most disconcerting. To ensure DACODAI will have various ideas, STARRS collaborated with leaders of Calvert Group, Veterans for Fairness and Merit, Flag Officers 4 America, the MacArthur Society, and Take Charge Minnesota in producing recorded, public testimony about DEI’s adverse impacts on the military. This powerful public testimony is available at the STARRS website. It deserves DACODAI’s attention and substantive response. Warfighters know it needs both.

DACODAI will meet again in early May. Americans interested in preserving our military’s unity, cohesion, and readiness to defend us against our enemies are urged to tell them what they think about DEI in our military.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/104506

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Kudos To Mr. Nuzzo for Taking on the Feminist Status Quo

It is refreshing to find Mr. Nuzzo, a lone warrior willing to call out the feminist claptrap throughout the academic world.

There’s a four-year gap in life expectancy in Australia between men and women. So how come our peak science funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), in 2022 allocated over six times more funding to research on women’s health compared to men’s?

This glaring bias in research funding attracted the critical gaze of a Perth-based academic with a keen interest in men’s health.

James Nuzzo is an exercise scientist, currently affiliated with Edith Cowan University, who has been busily churning out academic articles on topics like exercise neurophysiology and physical fitness testing.

But he’s become increasingly concerned to see his discipline infiltrated by gender ideologues whining about women missing out while totally ignoring the health outcomes of boys and men.

He’s calling out their bias and poor scholarship in a hard-hitting series of blogs on Substack (The Nuzzo Files) and podcasts.

For instance, Mr. Nuzzo points out that we hear constant allegations about the widespread exclusion of women in clinical trials.

In America, complaints about the neglect of women in health research led, in 1990, to the Office for Research on Women’s Health being established within the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Since then, annual reports from the Office reveal that women constitute 55-60 percent of all participants in NIH-funded clinical trials each year. Thirty years later, the Office is flourishing, pouring out funding for women-only projects.
Similarly, Australian governments are falling over each other to prove their commitment to improving health outcomes for women and girls—and the NHMRC funding simply reflects that consistent anti-male bias.

This is simply one more example of the feminist claptrap now seeping throughout our academic world.

I hear regularly from principled researchers grinding their teeth at this blatant ideology and poor scholarship. Most don’t dare put their head above the parapet.

It is refreshing to find Mr. Nuzzo, a lone warrior willing to call it out, despite being well aware he is likely to implode his academic career in the process.

Another Small Victory In the Bag

Mr. Nuzzo’s most recent public skirmish in this territory involved an article in Sports Medicine written by mainly female exercise physiology students from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) claiming that “gender-based violence is a blind spot for sports and exercise medical professionals.”

The UNSW scholars devoted their entire article presenting women as the only victims of interpersonal violence (IPV)—the single mention of men referred to their “socially determined privilege,” an alleged cause of violence against women.

No mention of young male victims of abuse by coaches or fellow athletes, of which there have been plenty, nor of lesbian perpetrators of abuse (lesbians top the chart of rates of IPV). And not one word about the decades of research showing men and women are victims of IPV at roughly equal rates.

Mr. Nuzzo set out to put them straight, seeking to get the true facts published in a response letter in Sports Medicine. And he succeeded, but only after nearly a year of back and forth with the journal. It helped that he combined forces with Deborah Powney, the University of Central Lancashire psychologist doing work on male victims of coercive control, and John Barry, from the Centre for Male Psychology in London.

Sports Medicine took the unusual step of submitting the letter to peer review, but the three reviewers all concurred with the critique by Nuzzo and his co-authors. Ultimately the letter was published—one small victory for proper scientific inquiry.

Their published comment proved it was the UNSW academics who had the blind spot, by providing a summary of some of the best research showing equal gender rates of IPV victimization, which also applied in sports environments.

Storm in a teacup, you might conclude. Perhaps. But it is a telling example of how the feminist take-over of our universities is playing out.

The Next Generation

We now have increasing numbers of radical young female academics and students, probably indoctrinated back in their school days, all keen on displaying their feminist credentials in their so-called scholarship.

Increasingly, they are forcing this sludge into diverse disciplines, right across all academia.

Worryingly, these are the teachers of the next generation, intent on convincing young women they are set for a life of persecution, abuse and discrimination.

They are teaching our future bureaucrats who’ll be setting key policies, the future lawyers, judges, social workers, and the politicians who will be deciding where the dollars are spent.

Their goals are transparent and the process is unfolding before our very eyes.

Kudos for James Nuzzo for having the courage to take them on, in published articles, blogs and podcasts. It’s infuriating to read his research and discover how much we’ve been hoodwinked.

The Big Two Globalist Agencies

Another of Mr. Nuzzo’s published articles concerned bias against men’s issues in the U.N. and WHO. He conducted a content analysis showing consistent promotion of women’s issues whilst men are ignored. The U.N.’s sustainable development goal on “gender equality” is exclusive to females.

The organisation observes nine International Days for women’s issues/achievements and one day for men. They operate 69 Twitter accounts dedicated to women’s issues and none for men. And so it goes on.

DAVIA (the Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance) has launched a petition that calls on groups to “suspend their funding of the United Nations until all U.N. agencies fulfill their pledge to respect the ‘dignity and worth’ of all persons and assure the ‘equal rights of men and women.’” That’s a worthy goal.

It’s also a pleasant change to find someone looking for the good in men.

Mr. Nuzzo recently wrote a blog on Men: The Martyrs of Medicine. He’d unearthed a 1929 medical journal article listing the names of male doctors and researchers who died as a result of acquiring the disease they were studying or medical technology they were developing.

Brave men who gave their lives trying to save others from yellow fever, typhus, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases.

It was quite a story and a welcome change to see the risk-taking, now so often labelled as ’toxic,' being promoted as valuable, even inspiring.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/kudos-to-mr-nuzzo-for-taking-on-the-feminist-status-quo-5594636

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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