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Diversity doesn't work.

In any form -- ethnic, religious, racial, class, caste, even wide disparities in intelligence -- it promotes alienation, distrust, lack of unity and self-hatred among a population. It destroys that nation.

Wherever it has been tried, it has failed and left behind unstable third-world countries. Even in "white" nations like the Balkans, Northern Ireland and Russia, diversity has been nothing more than a destructive bother.

The reason we have diversity is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which was designed to switch the USA from a majority-European-descended population to a majority third world population, because minorities vote against the perceived majority and thus will always vote for Democrats. Many even credit that change with getting Barack Obama elected.

I don't see the point in revisiting the black crime figures. They're there in the FBI's uniform crime reports, produced by a government that for 60 years has tried as hard as possible to be as non-racist as possible. I think the figures are accurate. They reveal that although blacks commit much more crime per capita, and Mexicans are halfway between whites and blacks on the crime per capita scale, most victims of a criminal of a certain race are also of that race (the defining statistic is white male rape of black women, which is virtually nonexistent). The race and IQ statistics are probably also good science, given that they are consistent with international estimates. There is no reason to suppose any of this is wrong, but I find it unnecessary.

Racism is what happens when diversity happens. We all want to live with people like ourselves. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam found that diversity destroys trust and makes paranoid communities. This does not affect liberals, who are concerned primarily with fairness by institutions to individuals. But conservatives, who value social order (per the research of Jonathan Haidt) find it disturbing.

In fact, many of the healthiest countries are almost entirely mono-racial -- Finland and Japan come to mind.

For background information, read the Race FAQ. Then check out the biological basis of race. This gives you a background in understanding race that isn't tainted by either racism or diversity, both of which are dead ends if you ask me.

Advocates call the law a necessary control on hate speech in an age where the Internet makes the spread of messages easier and faster. Opponents say it's censorship and has no place in a free society.

Not only are we divided on whether it should be legal, we are divided on what it should be.

Is it hate speech to call other races subhumans, but legal to note in a scientific paper that there IQ differences between races, moral evolutionary differences, or even that statistically, crime is not distributed evenly between all groups?

Half of scientists say race doesn't exist, the others keep quiet.

The bigger issue here is what we're obscuring the pursuit of truth with all sorts of social pretense. Let's look at the facts and keep emotion (true hate speech) and censorship out of the debate.

Most people have no idea what race is or how to talk about it. Here's a sampling of common sense:

The Race FAQ

In any topic, it's best to listen to those who have studied it in a disciplined way, and ignore the wailing of the Crowd.

http://www.goodrumj.com/RFaqHTML.html

The Race FAQ is a good place to start.

I found this link after a previous article, on how European ethnicities can be determined by genetics, caused a hilarious flame war.

Made up, that is, that the original post was "racist," probably because he's afraid of something in it.

The original post (that I made) was about the ethnic differences between European groups. I'm not sure how he went off on this jeremiad about race, but it wasn't a logical conclusion. It was a fearful, reactionary, dramatic one, and I think he's in error.

My intent was never to talk about "race," a term which badly needs a definition for us to even discuss it. I find it more sensible to discuss ethnicities because those we can reasonably define. Does race mean, in the ancient meaning, any group that evolved in a fixed area, for example "Lydians" to the ancient Greeks? Or do we mean the four "root races" which are Euripids, Africans, Asians and the indigenous people of Australia? Guanxi wants to talk about race; I posted an article about European ethnicities and only discussed ethnicities.

The more I think about it, the more it's ludicrous and insane that anyone took his response seriously. He did not read the Huntington book, nor did he read Cavalli-Sforza. What kind of internet drama is that? The only reason people put up with him is that he pulled out the modern equivalent of blasphemy, which is the debate over race, in which you can apparently call someone a "racist" and everyone else panics and mods him down, for fear that they'll be called racists next.

It must be a variant of Godwin's law.

For the sake of ending this, I have found several sources on race for those who want to debate it -- I do not.

* The Race FAQ, specifically "Isnâ(TM)t there actually more genetic distance between populations within the traditional human races than between the major races themselves?"

* The New York Times had a story on how dangerous uninformed discussion about race can be:

At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/us/11dna.html

Read the full thing, Guanxi, before you call them "racists."

* There's also a lively discussion on race, genetics and culture in various blog posts at Gene Expression blog.

Again, it was not my intent to come here to debate race, but to discuss the differences between European ethnicities, which is something I find interesting. I also find the coming clash between ethnicities and nation-states, as concepts for the basis of the legitimacy of government, to be interesting.

Listen to reason, and ignore hateful, bigoted people like guanxi who want to stifle any discussion on this issue out of fear. You wouldn't put up with censorship from your government, and you wouldn't put up with it from the RIAA or Comcast, so don't do it to yourselves out of fear of saying the "wrong" thing.

You said that with no evidence whatsoever. In the other thread, another poster refuted that claim.

perhaps you missed this.

the other poster's "refutation" consists of calling me names. if this is what passes for scientific inquiry on slashdot, then be my guest...

You then started going on about semantics.

Yes, a technical argument about genetic differences is totally bogus. I'm sorry.

Summary In popular articles that play down the genetical differences among human populations, it is often stated that about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups. It has therefore been proposed that the division of Homo sapiens into these groups is not justified by the genetic data. This conclusion, due to R.C. Lewontin in 1972, is unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors. The underlying logic, which was discussed in the early years of the last century, is here discussed using a simple genetical example. BioEssays 25:798-801, 2003. 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This is par for the course really.

The reality is there is a lot of inbreeding among most populations -- so much so that the bugaboo of "geographic race", which is supposed to be nothing more than folk taxonomy or folksonomy, is actually one of the strongest predictors of genetic makeup medical researchers can use without going to the level of an actual DNA assay. A lot of this brain noise can be traced back to a little academic slight of hand committed by Richard Lewontin when he published a peer-reviewed paper circa 1970 that studied the population structure of certain genes. He then went on to write a book which did not pass peer review but which got a lot of publicity for the claim that "there is more variation within than between races" -- an idiom that is now part of the catechism of liberal arts academia.

Well, unfortunately, this was an appealing fallacy, as shown by one of the grand old men of population genetics, AWF Edwards in Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy published under the peer-reviewed Bioessays about 30 years after Lewontin's non-peer-reviewed popular science book posing as academic debunking of popular prejudice. Why so long before such a peer-reviewed debunking? Well, this is the clever part -- Lewontin never bothered to publish his little catechism in any peer reviewed paper so there was never any basis for answering it within academia. Edwards actually had to depart somewhat from academic convention in addressing a popular misconception posing as academic wisdom that had influenced the government and culture profoundly for an entire generation!

"Scientists could customize the system to target any protein on the surface of a cell" Target the protiens on a group of humans, Kurdish, Jewish, Korean, whatever. Many groups of humans have some genes that are particular to their genetic heritage. Target those geenes to make something worse, instant selective genocide.

Yeah, there is one small problem with that though - There is more genetic diversity within racial/ethnic groups than between racial/ethnic groups. (see articles here, or here). So developing a weapon to target racial/ethnic groups (which are probably better conceived of as social constructs; doesn't make them any less "real" though) based on genetics would be very difficult.