Cleaning out my Philosophical Closet.

I have just gone through my bookmarks and deleted a quite popular conservative blog that I have followed for a number of years. as a matter of fact I think this was the first blog I ever began following and reading regularly. No, I'm not going to tell you which blog, this post isn't about that.

I deleted it because I finally saw (or acknowledged) it was racist. Now I'm not talking white supremacist, KKK/Black Panther, Neo-Nazi racist but the more insidious brand of racism, the kind that gets thrown into a conversation and is rarely called a spade as it were.

Its perpetrated by that sensible sounding guy that claims "I'm not talking about culture and I'm not racist." immediately after making a statement about "us letting other types of people into your country" and complaining that "they brought over their religion" and how now "it is all one big mess, because we were to nice and let them come into our country. Now they want everything and anything." While simultaneously blanking out the fact that that very desire (to live as one wishes), is what led people to populate North America in the first place.

It's the person that uses statistics, pointing out that "3.2 per cent of Spain's population was foreign-born in 1998. In 2007 it was 13.4 per cent. Europe's Muslim population has more than doubled in the past 30 years and will have doubled again by 2015. In Brussels, the top seven baby boys' names recently were Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine and Hamza." and drawing a correlation between that fact and some nebulous apocalyptic future if the trend continues.

Incidentally these kinds of statistics pop up quite a bit in the media, reported as floating abstractions which offer nothing of substance to the point being made, and are rarely if ever connected, as they should be, to the vilest form of collectivism there is.

Now I'm no ostrich. I'm not burying my head in the sand and claiming that all cultures deserve the same respect. There is no reason to respect the systemic sexism or the religious violence advocated by some extreme forms of Islam because that is someone's "culture" any more that there is a valid claim that cannibalism should be accepted because the practice was connected to tribal custom in the Amazonian jungle.

On the whole race and culture denote nothing, it is an indication of nothing about the individual as an individual. You can no more decide the beliefs of a man based on his race or culture any more than you can determine the flavour of a wine from the shape and colour of the bottle.