Magical Thinking on I.Q.

Post below excerpted from John Derbyshire. See the original for links

Case in point: David Brooks's remarkably lame-brained piece in the New York Times the other day. I say "remarkably" because David is a very smart guy, and people that smart do not often sign their names to such unmitigated twaddle.

The wittiest comments on David's piece came from the Anglosphere's best living human-sciences journalist, Steve Sailer. Steve supplies the full text of the Brooks piece for good measure (with his comments at the end). Alex at the Gene Expression website conducted a point-by-point demolition of the Brooks piece, with linked bibliographical references - I counted 23. No doubt there have been other critiques around the web from people WHO ACTUALLY KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT PSYCHOMETRICS. [See e.g. here]

The Brooks piece caught my attention because I had just finished reading Michael Hart's book Understanding Human History. Hart's aim is to do for the history of our species what Lynn and Vanhanen did for economics: to bring forward intelligence - the different statistical profiles of different peoples on measures of cognitive function - as an important factor. Not the only factor, of course, but an important factor.

Different populations, descended from different small founder groups, and evolved through hundreds of generations in different homelands under different selection pressures, emerged from those homelands at the end of the Neolithic and began these historic exchanges - began to trade, fight, conquer, enslave, settle, convert. If it is the case that intelligence - the ability to comprehend and manipulate the world, including the social world (which includes the military and political worlds) - if it is the case that intelligence is differently distributed in different populations, that fact must have had great consequences for history. And if not, then obviously, not.

On the premise that it is the case, Hart works his way through history taking intelligence as one of the determinants for events. He tells the story of the earliest human migrations, paralleling the account in Nicholas Wade's fine book. He comes up with novel explanations for some puzzling facts - e.g. that successful north-to-south invasions are much more common than south-to-norths. He gives a good critique of Jared Diamond's thesis that, to put it in the smallest possible nutshell, natural selection came to a screeching halt 50,000 years ago - that the laws of biology were suspended back in the paleolithic in order that 21st-century Western liberals should not be plagued by thoughts that are unpleasant (Diamond's actual adjective is "loathsome") or unpopular.....

As interesting as all this population-genetics stuff is to us science geeks, what is just as interesting, though in a different way, is the tremendous resistance to it all on the part of non-science intellectuals like David Brooks.

IQ score either does, or does not, measure some real aspect of the human personality. Human populations who underwent the latest stages of their evolution in higher latitudes either do, or do not, have I.Q. distributions with higher means than those of lower-latitude groups. A people's I.Q. profile either is, or is not, a determinant of its economic or military success, or cultural prominence. Let's gather the data and crunch the numbers and see if we can get clear answers, shall we? (With the understanding, as always in the sciences, and most especially in the human sciences, that clear answers may not be forthcoming from the datasets we have been able to gather.)

No, say the Brookses, let's not. There was that book a dozen or so years ago, the one that created such a fuss in the political-literary magazines that I and all my friends read. Well, that's quite enough of that. Didn't those guys turn out to be some kind of racists? Euiw! Let's not think about it any more.

And so on... ending up with the highly peculiar spectacle of thoughtful, well-educated conservatives clinging fearfully to the skirts of the late Stephen Jay Gould and the extant Richard Lewontin - both declared Marxists! Anything, any place, any refuge, any companions, anything in the world but be forced to face unwelcome truths - be forced to abandon the warm comfort of wishful thinking and the smiling approval of our social peers.

Knowing that I lean to the nature side of most nature-nurture controversies, readers occasionally e-mail in with something from the newspapers offering evidence for nurturism. My stock response is: "All nurturist claims in the general press must be read with the understanding that there is terrific psychic & social pressure on any commentator or researcher who wants to keep his job and his friends to make as much as possible of any nurturist evidence, and as little as possible of any naturist evidence. You should apply an appropriate bias-correcting discount to all you read."

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. There is probably a sizable segment in any population that believes scientists should be rounded up and killed.

When the magical (I wish this to be so: Therefore it is so!) and the religious (we are all one! brotherhood of man!) and the social (this is what all good citizens believe!) come together, the mighty psychic forces unleashed can unhinge even the best minds. David Brooks's embarrassing little venture into psychometry is only the latest illustration of this melancholy truth.



Digital tantrums on YouTube

From animal rights activists to worried teachers to pro-monarchist Thais: demands for censorship on the popular video-sharing site are getting louder

YouTube, the video-sharing metropolis where anyone can upload and view film clips, and which was acquired by Google last year for a rumoured œ900million, has been called on to remove `animal cruelty clips' from its pages. As the London Times recently reported (1), viewers were aghast and distressed at several videos showing pythons killing goats and chickens, live mice being attacked by piranha fishes and a kitten being lobbed off a building, mostly to soundtracks of upbeat Eighties dance music and delighted whooping from onlookers.

This is the latest in a long line of outraged calls for aspects of YouTube to be censored. British teachers have attempted to protect children from `cyber-bullying' by restricting access to the site (2); Japanese studios requested the removal of Hentai (the more violent strain of manga) episodes on grounds of copyright infringement (3); and there are restrictions in Thailand on what kind of videos can be posted about the monarchy there (4).

I ventured on to YouTube to see the latest headline-hogging cruel material for myself. A quick search for `python goat' threw up a promising video called, well, `snake vs goat'. Cut to shaky home footage of a giant python in a big glass cage, nose to nose with an innocuous-looking whiter-than-white goat. Darting suddenly to clamp its jaws around its lunch's neck, the snake slowly coils its giant body round the goat's torso, squeezing it to death. In the background, a group of what sounds like American men commentate. The cameraman - presumably the pet's owner - happily chirps in, `Even a human being couldn't get out of that', before accurately predicting the moment the goat will start kicking. His friends start chanting: `I can't breathe, I can't breathe.'

Searching further for `animal cruelty' returned a whole subgenre of pro- and anti American pit bull terrier videos. One showed images of dogs against a hip-hop soundtrack; another informed viewers that animals were not `put on earth' to fight.

It would be interesting to ask those who call for censorship of videos of animals eating other animals what they think keeps a 10-foot python alive. Surely starving a serpent to death by refusing to let it feed, regardless of how fluffy its meals are, would be more akin to animal cruelty? Demands that videos showing animal feeding should be censored smacks of a woolly-minded refusal to acknowledge that (shock!) some animals do indeed eat others. What about advertised feeding times at zoos? Are we supposed to feel sorry for the mice now? In fact, humans both kill and eat animals regularly, but nobody (except PETA perhaps) complains about sepia-tinted footage of people tucking into their Sunday roasts. Neither did people have a problem with David Attenborough's television series Planet Earth, where he marvelled at the incisiveness of dirty prairie dogs hacking up a graceful gazelle. But then, that was the BBC.

It's not so much the depiction of goat death or dog fighting itself that provokes groans - after all, some of the most gruesome images of animals appear in the material of animal-rights campaigners. Instead, it's the fact that these videos have no obvious higher, sufficiently noble purpose that makes them unpalatable for some people. The problem is not so much the depiction of bloody animal feeding but the fact that some people might enjoy it; not the representation of a snake-strangling but the fact that some might get off on it. This fear of viewer enjoyment is based on two ideas: first, that web surfers, largely unregulated and unrestricted, get up to all sorts of perverted things; and second, that if you like watching wicked videos on YouTube then you might also be tempted to carry out in the real world what you have watched on the web. Therefore, YouTube must be censored in order to protect us from our own worst instincts, and to ensure that no one decides to buy a snake or a wild dog and set it on a poor defenceless beast.

You may not care very much whether it's possible to view snakes eating goats on YouTube. But there is more at stake here than a few weird videos. A minority of egocentric moralisers should not have the power to decide what people can or cannot post on a video-sharing networking site. YouTube is built up through user-generated content, and it is supposedly user-managed. Whether a clip does well (that is, if it comes high on search returns) depends on how many stars users award it, and all potentially irksome clips carry a warning telling viewers to go away if they're likely to be adversely affected. It's hard to imagine a more fair and polite way of sharing videos.

However, if you thought the rise of file-sharing sites was a leap in the right direction for a model of self-governance on the web, think again. Sites such as YouTube may overtly espouse the ethos of the `politics of participation', but censorious rules are built into their structures so as to ensure certain sorts of material and viewpoints don't appear. YouTube, for instance, has a blanket ban on porn. If a video generates a lot of complaints, administrators will remove it; so there is user-generated censorship on YouTube as well as user-generated content. Filters are often built into search engines on content-sharing websites, and on many sites `admins' have the final say on what appears and what doesn't.

Today, many celebrate Web 2.0's participatory ethos, only to disparage users when they don't behave in the way that is expected. The unwieldy nature of the web triggers the cautious and censorious to panic about what harm unruly browsers might be doing to themselves, or to others - or even to cats, goats and snakes.

The Google search engine's modus operandi is a `moderate' filter, which bans material that might be pornographic - or simply nude. If you search for `Nicole Kidman' on Google images with first the moderate filter and then without a filter, you will find that the first blocks Lucien Freud's painting of Kidman while the second allows it. While having the option of filtering can be useful, and the role of the `admin' is often practical, having these as the necessary conditions for browsing smacks of covert authoritarianism. And it is crude: it blocks out not only pornographic imagery but also paintings by one of Britain's most respected living artists.

The World Wide Web has the potential to be an open space for the sharing and interrogation of ideas without any of the moralising and monitoring that is so commonplace in the offline world. It could be a place for the free flow of information between equals and a source of abundant information for whoever wants it. Sadly, it has quickly become prey to the sort of gentle centralised interventionism so prevalent in British politics and society today.

Too many web-users hit `complain' rather than having a discussion and working out rules and regulations for themselves. Instead of appealing to the user community, and devising some way of reaching a collective decision about what is acceptable in people's shared spaces, the easily upset have digital tantrums and expect the bouncers of cyberspace to come running. Which means that instead of being a radically alternative space for images and information free from the confines of conventions, YouTube and other sites are falling prey to the sensitivity-driven censorship that plagues the real world.

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The 60s Left is now imposing its fantasies on us all

A lot of the loss of political sanity we see today reflects the death fears of the Boomer Left. The Baby Left was only a small percentage of the Boomer generation. But starting in the Sixties, they managed to place their indelible stamp on the media, and haven't let up since. "The Sixties" was itself a PR fantasy, whooped up by our objective media to flatter their younger audience, and to make converts for the Left. For Boomers themselves, swinging Left was a good career move: It got them noticed in the media, in colleges, in advertising, in the arts, in politics, and in the sexual meat market.

Europe had a slightly different version in the rebellious year of '68. It was all triggered by the biological clock of the post-war Baby Boom, of course, but the Left quickly took control of the generational narrative. A tiny minority of Boomers grabbed political and media power, and have exercised it with a vengeance, literally, over half a century. Today they are having majot anger control problems, precisely because their media monopoly is being threatened. The traditional American narrative is not yet stamped into extinction.

The rising Boomer Left openly conspired to conduct a "Long March through the institutions" -- to infiltrate and seize control over the American media, universities, and bureaucracies. Those institutions are stacked today with aging Lefties, enforcing Political Correctness in all its maddest manifestations. Black faces dominate Madison Avenue ads, as do white women and teenagers, while middle-aged white males are demonized and ridiculed on billboards and TV. This has a devastating effect on boys looking to their Dads to be role models, only to see Dad put down mercilessly in all the pop media. Kids are very confused as a result. But Politically Correct agit-prop satisfies the Boomer Left's need for psychic vengeance. PC is now the dominant style of our age.

When people confront their own mortality, their finiteness, they tend to project their personal fears onto the world. So we have Global Warming panic, Flesh-Eating Germs panic, Nuclear Power panic and scores of other imaginary fears. For anxious people the world is full of scary things, all because of their need to escape the prospect of personal end. The PC world is as full of superstitious phobias as the Mayan world of a thousand years ago; the Mayans controlled their fears by sacrificing children to ensure the sun would rise the next morning. We sacrifice conservatives: Newt Gingrich, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, two Attorneys General in a row.

Oddly enough, this omni-panic goes along with omni-denial, as liberal Boomers turn a blind eye to real dangers, like the looming nuclear proliferation threat coming from Ahmadi-Nejad, the Syrians and the NoKos. On any given day the Washington Post and the New York Times will fire yet another denial out to a skeptical world. What nuclear proliferation? Bush lied! Today, the French Foreign Minister is more serious about Iranian nukes than the leading Democrats running for president of the United States.

But it's not just nuclear proliferation. On the Gay Left there is denial of such immediate dangers as HIV transmission, with some men having "bug chasing" sex parties with infected carriers. Europe continues to import millions of militant Islamists into its multicultural fantasy land, and now faces demographic extinction; but the Euromedia still live in blissful ignorance. Major Euromedia like the BBC, the Guardian and Der Spiegel blame America and Israel for their own suicidal multicultural blunders; those scapegoats are making the peace-loving Muslims mad, you see. Such misdirected fears go hand-in-hand with misdirected denial and rage.

Just recently we saw yet another shameful display at the US Senate Armed Services Committee, as the Left united in publicly slandering a four-star General, a man who has seen combat on behalf of the United States, who has served us all his adult life, who literally wrote the manual on counter-insurgency, and who came back to report steady improvement in Iraq. General Petraeus drives the Left barking mad, in good part because he is so un-PC: Another middle aged white guy, super-competent, intelligent, honest, brave and modest, in uniform, telling us what we don't want to hear. Damn!

American victory in Iraq is a threat to the Left, which has always told us that "wars never solve anything." Google shows almost four million reptitions of that mantra. Fighting is said to be a universal evil, running right against the rock-hard facts that tell us that civilized -- yes, civilized -- warfare abolished slavery, established peace and freedom in half the world, liberated the oppressed, spread democratic forms of government, and created the basis for world-wide prosperity today. American military strength protects us every single day of our lives.

We forget that at our peril. No matter: The Left had to slander a victorious American commander in Iraq because he brought the unwelcome news that they were wrong --- again. They felt betrayed, giggling wildly to the sad pun of "General Betray-Us." But the American people did not feel betrayed. (Not by the General, anyway.)

The personal death fears of the Boomer Left are a key to contemporary politics. Death fear drives the lifelong quest for Hillary Clinton to be the First Woman President at any cost in personal destruction to her political enemies, the narcissistic need for John F. Kerry to see himself as his mythic hero JFK, and the grandiosity behind Al Gore's Global Prophecy of Doom, now playing to loud applause in Norway. (Where Al will no doubt receive the Nobel Peace Prize for peddling faux science to millions of dupes).

We can also see the Boomer Left's real fear in their constant need to shut out conservative voices, just like they shut out their parents' voices in the Sixties. Conservatives are too much in touch with reality. Conservatives are scary. The Left doesn't listen to conservatives as a matter of noble principle.

In the Sixties the Boomer Left discovered the answer to war and human conflict, and indeed the secret of eternal life. Then reality came along with one shocking blow after another: JFK was killed, RFK was, too, Dr. King went down, and Vietnam happened. The Left twisted all those events. You will not read in their memoirs that JFK was killed by a Communist loner, that RFK was murdered by a Palestinian militant, and that our retreat from Vietnam was followed by the biggest crashing domino in the horrific history of Communism: Pol Pot's genocide of his own people in Cambodia. None of those facts exist for the Boomer Left. They never happened.

The fear of death is a basic human obsession. It may be the basic human fear. Judging from the archeological record, modern humans arose between 40 and 70 thousand years ago, when our ancestors began to decorate graves with red ochre, buried personal weapons and jewelry with the bodies of the dead, and gave them food and servant companions for the journey. Symbolic objects arose 30-70 millenia ago, and were constantly employed to ward off the fear of dying. The symbolic undoing of death is a universal marker for Homo Sapiens Sapiens today.

The Boomer Left created its own fantasy world without death. Well, they were hardly the first. The Egyptians built their pyramids and funeral mastabas, generation after generation over three thousand years, culminating in the super-sized Great Pyramid at Giza. They were all dedicated to the immortality of whichever pharaoh died and was buried there. Ancient grave mounds can be found in Scandinavia and the Americas, as a kind of proto-pyramid. By the beginnings of intensive agriculture and settled cities, six to ten millenia ago, we find humans grasping for eternity by way of great monuments in India, South-East Asia, Sumeria (Iraq) and China.

Conservatives don't have the answer to the fear of death; it's not the sort of thing you can find settled answers to. But we respect the ways in which humans have learned to cope: By religious faith -- the constructive kind, not the suicide-murdering version -- by contributing positively to the world in any number of ways, by raising children, by passing on what wisdom we have learned. Conservatives don't believe in denial, by and large. Historically, Anglo-American conservatives have been skeptical about grandiose "solutions" to human frailties; but not closed-minded to reasoned progress. Balancing skepticism and open-mindedness is a conservative value.

The greatest flaw of the Boomer Left is to see life through plainly false ideas. Start with a false premise, and you'll end up with false conclusions. Begin with the conviction that we can turn all human conflicts into peace and love just by willing it, and you end up convinced that those who don't agree with you must be evil, or must be forced to obey. Start with the false certainty that youth is eternal, and you end up undermining responsible parenting and kids. Assume that cultures are easy to change -- and not the treasured heritage of a hundred generations -- and you end up importing millions of dangerously indoctrinated militants into your peaceful land. Or take it on faith that brain-altering drugs are harmless, and you end up with vulnerable people hooked on smack and crack, killing each other to feed their habit. Or fall for the idea that women are better than men, and you ignite a war between the sexes, and lead children astray.

The biggest error we tend to make is to confuse the Boomer Left with the Boomer Generation as a whole. The Left has managed to peddle that illusion. As usual, liberals fool themselves into believing that they are The People; But the conservative revival in the United States shows it isn't true. It's good to keep in mind that General Petraeus is also a Boomer.

Conservatives represent what Sigmund Freud called the "Reality Principle," the principle of sane adulthood. Starting in the Sixties, the Left began to deny the Reality Principle, leading to a kind of mass neurosis. Whole Leftist philosophies, like post-modernism, explicitly deny that reality is real. Terms like "Reality Principle" and "mass neurosis" have therefore lost popularity; but they capture the essence of the problem. To be sure, conservatives are vulnerable to all the usual human frailties. But to be "conservative" is a near-synonym for being grown-up. A big part of maturity is to come to terms with one's own limits -- without neurotic denial, without blaming and raging at others, and without undue fear.

General Petraeus, as a US combat leader, has come to terms with his own fear of death in a civilized and disciplined way. But last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee kept on swerving into black comedy when Democrats reminded him that people die in war. It was cringe-making, sink-through-the-floor embarassing. As a grown-up making thoughtful decisions under the most difficult circumstances, Petraeus is clearly the moral superior of all the neurotics who slandered him last week. We survive and thrive as a civilization only because of people like him. One of these days it would be nice for the grown-ups to take the culture back.

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Australia: A heavily politicized "human rights" bureaucracy

Post lifted from Leon Bertrand. See the original for links

Last week we had two separate stories on the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Commission's left-wing political bias. These stories can be found here and here. We have since found another example of bias for your enjoyment. ADCQ's Submission to the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission for consideration in its Pay Equity Inquiry in June of this year reveals that the Commission explicitly favours a Socialist industrial relations system, again breaching the Public Sector Code of Conduct. For instance, the Commission advocates that it, or the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal, should set wages in private sector workplaces:

28. The QIRC discussion paper discusses possible amendments to the ADA to permit the Commission or Tribunal to make equal remuneration orders based on comparable worth. The discussion paper speculates whether it may be possible for an equal remuneration order based on comparable worth to direct that the specified employee or class of employees be reclassified.

Of course, recent thinking on industrial relations has come to the conclusion that employers, and not Government bodies, are best able to evaluate the worth of an employee's work. This coincides with the rise of economic rationalism and the decline of soft socialism. Nevertheless, the "fresh thinking" of the ADCQ essentially advocates a new form of centralised wage-fixing, as though Tribunal members are better judges of an employee's worth. As we have already shown, Tribunal members often know very little. In fact, the H.R. Nicholls society has pointed out that:

The inevitable problem which arises in every specialist tribunal, unstated by Justice Guidice, is the composition of these tribunals. The type of people who seek appointment to antidiscrimination tribunals, and often succeed in getting appointed, are often women, homosexual, and sometimes disabled (the former head of the Victorian tribunal was a blind woman). They tend to be steeped in student revolutionary culture of the 1970s and are living specimens of an undergraduate time warp. For them, employers, large and small, are the drivers of capitalist oppression. In this time warp, white, middle-aged males harass, intimidate, fail to promote, fail to hire and terminate employees as part of a conspiracy against non-Anglo-Saxons and women. Profoundly ignorant of how markets work in a free economy, and guided by chattering-class perceptions of how and why hiring and firing occurs, they are determined to bring light to the unenlightened and to expose the evils of the market economy. These tribunes are not judges at all-but social engineers sitting on the bench-inspired by the example of Sir William Deane, Sir Anthony Mason and Sir Gerard Brennan.

Being the left wing organisation that it is, the ADCQ couldn't resist a crack at Workchoices, the Australian left's second biggest obsession after climate change, the latter being a phenomenon which has occurred since the beginning of Earth's existence:

39. If there are no legislative constraints imposed by the WRA and Queensland does have power to adopt and implement legislative models similar to those implemented in Sweden or Quebec, United Kingdom and the Netherlands, France or Switzerland, the ADCQ submits that a strong mandatory model binding all employers should be passed in Queensland. Such a legislative model is likely to be one of the most effective means to have systemic outcomes, if combined with other measures to address the underlying causes of the gender pay gap. This type of measure becomes even more necessary, given that the individualisation and decentralisation of wage bargaining, and the removal of state based equal remuneration principles under WorkChoices eliminates some of the former means of reducing the gender pay gap.

The ADCQ goes on to express its strong support for Quebec's model which requires employers to "methodically report on their compliance" with bureaucratic regulations imposed by the state, including a "pay equity process" and a need to post results of such a process. Such a model might sound appealing to some, however from an economist's point of view there are hidden costs associated with over-regulation such as this. What ADCQ are proposing is that the compliance costs of business are increased, whilst their ability to run their businesses efficiency and flexibly are undermined. In short, it's a typical soft left proposition which, if implemented, would be detrimental to the Australian economy. On top of this authoritarian approach, ADCQ even proposes the following:

46. Preferred tenderer status should be conferred by the Government on those organisations that have undertaken an approved gender pay equity audit and have taken action to achieve pay equity at all levels of their organisation. The QIRC discussion paper notes that this measure has been introduced in Switzerland. Public procurement policies are increasingly being used internationally to further social goals including equality in employment. Procurement policies can attain these objectives by requesting contractors to modify the gender, racial or ability/disability make up of their workforce, or by encouraging contactors who are female or belong to racial or ethnic minorities to partake in public tenders. The USA, South Africa and Europe are all using procurement policies to promote equality in the workplace.

Whilst ADCQ is designed to fight against discrimination, it keenly wishes to implement AA, a form of discrimination that the left promotes. Again, there are hidden costs to the economy if you force employers to hire people for reasons other than merit. But of course, just like the rest of the soft left, ADCQ seems oblivious to this. Further mandatory regulations ADCQ wish to impose on the very businesses that generate the wealth that funds ADCQ include:

* Introduce a 14 week paid maternity leave scheme (recommendation 13).

* Phase in a more comprehensive scheme consisting of:

a) At a minimum, two weeks paid paternity leave to be taken at the birth of the child; and

b) A further 38 weeks of paid paternal leave that is available to either parent (recommendation 14).

Again, this clearly shows that ADCQ believes that businesses are generally bottomless pits of money that can be asked to fund virtually anything, even if they don't receive a cent in return. The irony of course is that compulsory paid maternal leave would actually result in discrimination to women: the very thing ADCQ seeks to avoid. It is quite apparent that the world ADCQ aims for is essentially a socialist utopia, completely divorced from economic realities which make it unworkable. It's the same dreamy utopianism which made Karl Marx pen that "religion is the people's opiate", not realising that he himself was befuddled with a rather similar narcotic.

This blog has already pointed out that women encounter few disadvantages, and are increasingly rising to the top. The only evidence that ADCQ is able to produce as evidence that Anti-Discrimination laws do not redress discrimination in the field of employment are the comments of another Tribunal leftist, namely Glynn J in the NSW Pay Equity Inquiry. It seems it has never occurred to the leftists at ADCQ that there are other reasons besides discrimination that are responsible for women generally earning less than men. For instance, women often choose to be the stay at home mothers for years, before they re-enter the workforce, thereby slowing their career development. Secondly evidence also suggests that in many cases men are more ambitious than women, and this is due to higher levels of pressure and expectation being imposed on men. ADCQ happily ignores all of these considerations, deciding to instead dogmatically assume that it is the best judge of the value of one's work. It is a push for socialism, under a new, post-Marxist guise.

In a previous post on the ADCQ, we pointed out some key principles enshrined in the Public Service Code of Conduct:

The Australian Public Service:is apolitical, performing its functions in an impartial and professional manner; provides a workplace that is free from discrimination and recognises and utilises the diversity of the Australian community it serves; has the highest ethical standards; is openly accountable for its actions, within the framework of Ministerial responsibility to the Government, the Parliament and the Australian public;is responsive to the Government in providing frank, honest, comprehensive, accurate and timely advice and in implementing the Government's policies and programs; delivers services fairly, effectively, impartially and courteously to the Australian public and is sensitive to the diversity of the Australian public;

Once again, with its push for obsolete left-wing policies, ADCQ has revealed that it is not a politically impartial organisation. Rather, it is an organisation whose political orientation can best be described as soft left, and which is quite apparently out of touch with the economic and social realities of the real world.

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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