Has Richard Dawkins finally dug a hole that's too deep?

I would have thought that Richard Dawkins had learned something from Sam Harris' mistakes over the past decade.  It would appear not.

Harris' continuing mistake is that he simply fails to understand what is wrong about profiling specific targeted groups of human beings, doing his best to say that he's not crossing any lines by lowballing with straw men containing “racial” or “ethnic”.  And each time he does, there is a collective slap across the globe as faces are buried into palms.  And, like that oil leak that BP couldn't put out in the Gulf of Mexico, he keeps spewing this crap out.

Instead of learning from this, Dawkins has been re-iterating the same tired old arguments as Harris that causes people to think that he's using atheism as a Trojan horse for racism.

Now, I have to say that I'm quite a fan of Dawkins.  I rather liked the Selfish Gene, and even though I had issues with certain parts of The God Delusion, I still thought it was excellent.  But what I find frustrating is that Dawkins doesn't appear to understand where the line has been crossed.

Happy Australia Day 2010

Hi folks. Yeah I haven't been blogging for while, but it's the new year and I hope that this means that things will change.

It's Australia Day 2010, and I thought I'd jot down a few things of what Australia Day means to me. Really, I do love this place. And I'm sure that everyone thinks the same about the place that they live in. But there is things that we could do to improve the place.

Some of you might be aware that it is also Republic Day in India at the moment. Happy Republic Day to you, if you're Indian and reading this.

Relations between here and India are not what they could be. And this is a real shame, because Australia and India have a lot in common and I'm not just talking about a celebrated rivalry on the cricket pitch.

For starters, we were both colonies of the British Empire. And while we're still technically a constitutional monarchy, India is a republic and has been for some time. This is pretty irrelevant - for starters, our Governor-General pretty much enjoys all the trappings of our head of state, even though she's technically only a representative of the Queen of the United Kingdom in Australia. And funnily enough, since our constitution describes the GG as our head of state, I suppose that we're pretty much a republic, for all intents and purposes anyway.

But I've digressed. India and Australia have a lot in common. But our relationship has been strained in recent years with quite a few violent incidents involving Indian students in Australia.

We have a lot of Indian students studying in Australia.

One of the things that Australia has in common with India is an independent and free media. But where the (admittedly not 'out of proportion') attacks on Indian students might have been swept under the rug here as being 'normal' - and I've seen no stats to indicate that they're anything but - the Indian media has been going berzerk.

We were quick to write this off as media hysteria. I actually wondered myself for a little while why, if there was a racial problem, why is the evidence not being provided to the police?

I still wonder about this, but I can tell you right now - we have a problem, and we need to fix it.

I saw this first hand last week on the train. I had hopped on the train at Parliament station, where I normally get on for my ride home. Settling into my seat, I was a little curious at the trio of young kids with plastic bags chroming away in broad daylight up the far end of the train. One of the three, a girl who couldn't have been much older than 14, looked at me and yelled, in a fairly aggressive tone, "Stop looking ya cunt!"

Without meaning to sound too snobby, these three were pretty much gutter trash, and from the loud conversation they were having, it was clear that they were so wasted that they'd hopped on a train on the Hurstbridge line by mistake. I didn't catch where they were headed, but they hopped out at Clifton Hill and seemed a little bit disoriented, and I don't think that it was just the inhalants.

She then proceeded to list why she disliked or liked certain non-anglo racial groups: Asians and "Lebos" (general Australian vernacular for Arabs/Middle Easterners in this context, I think) were considered OK. She even described Asians as "excellent" at one point - for anyone reading this from the UK, the term "Asian" in Australia does not include subcontinentals. But Indians and Africans (we have a lot of people of Sudanese and Somalian backgrounds on Melbourne) were considered bastards, or "...cunts the lot of them".

I haven't seen this in the past at all. I should point out that I move in fairly ordinary middle class circles where I work with all sorts of ethnicities, including Indians, and have never seen anything quite like this.

So the spectre of racism has raised its ugly head in Australia, and we don't really know what to do about it. Some would say that it's always been here: I've never seen it. I've hired people in the past to jobs based on merit and those that I've hired have come from a range of different ethnicities.

And if you think that I've been living under a rock - you could be right. The problem is, just like this instance on the train, I need to see it for myself before I'll acknowledge it. How many Australians are like me I wonder?

On thinking about it, maybe I have seen it, although I might have seen the other side of racism. "Racism" as we know it these days requires an underprivileged ethnic group to be discriminated against. Yes I know that is not what the term means, but really, this is how it is these days.

The other side of racism isn't quite so ugly, however it's not really rosy. I've chatted with many taxi owners who have told me the reasons why they prefer Indian students as taxi drivers: They're reliable.

I've also chatted with the odd convenience store owner who admits to hiring Indian students because they're more honest and hard-working than their other applicants, who are usually of Eastern European or Middle Eastern backgrounds. Anglos? Well apart from not being as honest and hard-working, apparently, Anglos don't apply for these jobs.

Anglos are too stuck-up to apply for jobs in convenience stores or as taxi drivers, which says a great deal more about Anglos in this country. This is an interesting little thing in its own right. I've seen this and it's pretty poor. I have close friends (all Anglos) who preferred to be unemployed for long periods waiting for the right job to come along rather than take a job stacking boxes or serving in convenience stores.

(I do know one Anglo ex-Taxi Driver, but he was at the upper end of Generation X and appeared to know the value of having an income flow even if it was a small one, while he awaited his dream job. And he awaited that dream job for years.)

And I've heard friends tell racist jokes. They don't mean anything by it, but it shits me beyond all measure that these friends don't understand how disrespectful this can sound. My question would be, would you say that in front of an Indian? Or a Somalian?

We are a pretty great country, I think. But we could be excellent. We just have to get off our arses and start making an effort in this regard. Here's a few things that we could could do to make Australia truly great:

1. When someone tells a racist joke, or even makes a racist slur about different ethnicities, why not ask them if they'd say that in front of someone of that ethnicity?

2. When someone refers to themselves in an "empowering" way (fuck I hate you, post-modernists) on the basis of their own race or ethnicity, ask them if they'd mind if someone from a different ethnicity did the same thing about them? A good example is African-Australians who seem to have started referring to themselves as "niggaz" - would they like it if an Anglo did it?

3. It's quite OK to have a job as a convenience store clerk. Gen Y - go out there and get a job and stop bludging off your parents.

4. Indian students have been complaining of racist treatment for some time. Why can't the police ask Indian student groups or the Indian media for evidence? Wouldn't this confirm their claims?

5. If the police have evidence, why can't they do something about it, rather than sweeping it under the carpet?

6. I don't care who you are - anyone who believes in "celebrating diversity" is usually a racist buffoon. We have manners and etiquette for a reason - it helps us to understand each other's intentions. Special pleading on the grounds of race is usually an excuse to shoehorn some kind of racist generalisation in somewhere.

7. Whilst I publicly consider generalisations of young Anglos as lazy and dishonest to be offensive, privately I sorta agree. I don't mean to be ageist, but it would help if young Anglo-Australians made more of an effort.

8. There's a reason why I haven't mentioned Aboriginal Australia in this post. Try to figure out why that might be.

9. Indian students (and Chinese, for that matter) bring a lot of money into Australia. It might not be as much as our earnings from iron ore exports to China, but think of this when you're helping one out.

10. Next time you hear anyone who was born here describe themselves as "Asian" or "a wog", politely point out to them that they were born here.

Cheers, and have a great 2010.

Funny nationalism

Earlier in the week, we had a funny thing happen at the Australian Open tennis tournament where a bunch of fans got a bit rowdy after too many drinks and had to be ejected by the police.

Normally, this wouldn't be blinked at, however, during the incident, the police had to use capsicum spray, and in a grandstand environment where people are seated closely together, quite a lot of other fans ended up getting doused.

What caught my attention, was that the fans making all the noise were predominantly Australian, were waving Greek flags and were cheering on Marcos Baghdatis who is a Cypriot, born and bred in Limassol.

I'm sure that I'm not the only person who notices that something is a little bit wrong with this, so let's put it in it's correct context for a moment.

Imagine that Justine Henin was being cheered on by a bunch of fans waving French flags. This would cause a bit of diplomatic embarrassment in France but in the current climate in Belgium could cause serious grief.

Belgium is going through one of those problem periods where some within the French-speaking part of the population - the "Walloons" - are talking about separating from the Dutch-speaking part - the Flemish.

So I thought I'd take the time to look at other potential situations to see if this behaviour should be considered appropriate:

• An Australian player of Anglo-Saxon parentage is cheered on by a bunch of Englishmen waving the cross of St George. This would be merely considered wrong.
• A US player of Irish extraction is cheered on by fans waving the tricolour of Ireland. Again, ditto.
• A Taiwanese player gets the royal treatment from fans waving Chinese flags. Approval from China. Disapproval expressed by the USA.
• A Tibetan player is greeted with fans waving Tibetan flags. Certain diplomatic incident.
• A Macedonian player of Greek extraction has fans in the crowd waving Greek flags. Certain riot, police called in.
• A Bosnian player has a bunch of fans waving Serbian flags thanks to his Serbian heritage. Riot, stadium burnt down, police call in army for back-up.

So I would think that, based on all of that, the Australian Open organisers are playing with fire in allowing this to continue.

Has anyone in the media called for this practise to be banned yet?

I wasted post number 200 on this?

Normally, I'd weigh in with my 2 cents about how the Australian Cricket Team is the least sporting bunch of arrogant idiots yet to grace the world stage, but it's all been said elsewhere, and a heck of a lot better than I could.

And after the last test match in Sydney, there have been so many issues thrown up by this one match - is it any wonder that I've just given up completely? I'm partially not surprised that India are hopping mad about this, but also partially staggered at the power that the Indian cricket authorities (BCCI) are able to wield.

Needless to say, there are kiddies growing up now who are being told by their coaches to play like these guys. Which is all well and good - the Australian cricket team are the most skilled team on the planet at the moment.

Unfortunately, as Plonka points out on his blog, cricket is not just about skill with a bat and ball. Cricket is also about playing within not only the letter of the Laws of Cricket, but also within the spirit of those laws.

Thus, when those kids say to their coach, "Even though the umpire gave me out, I didn't walk because he was wrong," we should be pointing out to them that this is not on.

But coaches and players these days use cricket at it's highest level as a barometer of what's acceptable and what is not. This is why Cricket Australia needs to show some authority by reading the riot act to its players.

So Harbhajan Singh called Andrew Symonds a "monkey". Up until a few years ago, I didn't even know that the term "monkey" was racist. Apparently, calling someone a monkey is not OK if that person is black. Symonds is supposedly a "black" man, notwithstanding the fact that his skin colour is whiter than most of the Indian cricket team.

Singh should know better after criticism of sections of the crowd at the recent matches between Australia and India in Valodara, Nagpur and Mumbai (who were calling Symonds a monkey, allegedly), although I am looking forward to the outcome of Singh's appeal, having been suspended for three matches originally.

The Australian cricket team has used sledging of opposition players to their advantage for some time. This is occasionally criticised, but the fact that it's the Aussies who are complaining is deemed in most parts of the cricketing world to be horribly hypocritical.

But the whole thing appears to be the final straw for a lot of Australian sports fans. "Enough!" they're saying.

For a good look at both sides of the debacle, please click here. The BBC has done a good job of compiling different comments.

As for me, I'm completely off cricket until I see evidence that the Australian level of sportsmanship has improved.

I see the BCCI's blackmail and threats - for that is exactly how they've behaved - to be entirely justifiable.