The Logic Off Topic list

Kool, I begin to see where you're coming from...

> The general principles I was referring to were things like 'be kind to your
> neighbour' which it's good to think about from time to time in order to
> find out if you're actually doing it. When not enough people treat their
> neighbour Muslims or neighbour Jews or neighbour 'Wily Oriental Gentlemen'
> with a sufficient degree of humanity, then we have a major social problem
> which can only be addressed by each individual person lifting up the nose
> from the mire and examining their own actions a bit. Plus ... passing a few
> laws about discrimination in the work place and in public places doesn't go
> amiss either. That's what I was referring to.

Fine. 100% agreement from moi.

>> great stuff for journalists and politicians to
>> make a fine hash of and get everyone confused.
> As above, not what I was referring to ... except that sometimes passing a
> few laws and banging a few heads is a pretty good way to go about things.

Agreed, Though getting laws into practice in people's lives can be a wholly
different game - as in our currently rather silly drugs laws. It takes
individuals to be aware of issues and to be seen to be aware of issues by
other individuals.
 
> And ... sometimes a newly passed law gets some
> publicity so that people can understand that everyone is deadly serious
> about this and they'd better shape up smartish or there'll be some jail
> time for them. People like Steven Lawrence still getting killed, though. Or
> ... would you rather we rolled the clocks back and repealed all them laws
> that make sure that when I go round your neighbour's flat to check it out
> cause I'm thinking of renting it and he doesn't feel like renting it out to
> a Wily Oriental Gentleman he can just do so and face no consequences? Would
> that be preferable?

Never said or implied any such thing.  I was talking about the welter of
stuff generated in the modern world by the media, pollsters, thinktanks,
commercial companies on all kinds of issues sometimes far from the life and
death things you're addressing there, followed by a Channel 4 documentary
which glibly says 'something must be done'.

What I'm saying is that there is so much information thrown at people that
we suffocate under it and lose track of the important things. It is also
presented to us in a way which generally encourages people to feel helpless
and demand that someone else do something. If you actually examine the
journalism or the TV reporting they can often use the same presentation
techniques whether it's deaths of black people in police custody, problems
in the mortgage industry or double-booking at Spanish holiday resorts.
Sometimes it has to be someone else doing something, in the case of
regulating the rail industry for example, or obviously in the case of
Stephen Lawrence getting the police and judicial system to address their
severe shortcomings and actually protect and support citizens of all
backgrounds, creeds, racial origin etc. But there are many issues out there
which cannot simply be addressed by yet another new regulatory authority
or voluntary or mandatory code of practice. They need individuals to take
responsibility.

Sometimes lines are hard to draw. Here's an example in miniature off the top
of my head about individual and group action. I'm a member of the Music
Producers Guild here in the UK and a member of the Education Committee as a
former lecturer in Music Tech. We had a number of emails come in from bands
from various parts of the world looking to publicise themselves and maybe
find a sympathetic producer, with links to websites in the emails, which
were forwarded to members as soon as received. I clicked on one
Florida-based rock band link just out of curiosity to find that they used an
awful lot of neo-Nazi imagery. I therefore emailed the MPG office to say
what had been forwarded and to point out that :

1) emails with links like this might put us two mouse clicks away from the
Aryan Nations or somebody equally nasty and stupid. Who knows where some
nervous legislator might take that? Might get us into some sort of trouble
with politicians not understanding the nature of the Internet.

2) Much more importantly this material was bound to be offensive to ethnic
minority (and other) members of the MPG and other people in the music
business.

3) We could do with recruiting more ethnic minority members and ought to be
positively seeking them out and making them feel welcome and secure in the
MPG.

 This caused much more of a storm than I had anticipated, with some people
getting into quite a nervous frame of mind and others angrily saying it was
getting into politics and areas of free speech which we shouldn't mess with
as not part of our brief. It ended up with a general disclaimer being put on
any forwarded emails saying that MPG did not take responsibility for the
contents. I haven't had any forwarded emails for a while anyhow.

In this case I felt quite 'legislative' in one sense, in that I felt that we
should make more of a statement of intent on these issues and also that we
should as a group make more of a specific attempt to reach black and ethnic
minority engineers and producers (though we have some strong active members
in these 'categories'. I didn't want anybody (in fact there wasn't anybody)
to have to laboriously plod through and censor all the emails and links,
which is taking the 'legislative' approach too far; nor did I want bands and
artists not to be able to use this way of reaching people. I would rather
that we were upfront about being inclusive and hope that would help to bring
the right people to us and keep the wrong people away. We could have all the
mission statements you like in bold print and it still wouldn't make any
difference if individuals acted in racist ways to other individuals. That's
their responsibility. But I do favour making the statement as a way of
keeping the issue in front of individuals. Does that make my POV any
clearer? I see limits in the ability of the group to make any difference
here, but to me there is a group responsibility as well as an individual
responsibility.

Time to give this keyboard a rest...

Tony T