Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico, said recently that “The fence is very unpopular on the border in Texas and New Mexico, in Chihuahua…So one of the most significant and constructive acts the U.S. Congress should take is to get rid of it.” (Richardson Speaks Against Border Fence by Jennifer Talhelm, The Washington Post 12/6/06)

Richardson wants Congress to reverse the legislation authorizing the fence. Apparently it “gets in the way” of “relations” between the U.S. and Mexico.

Wait…I thought that was the whole point.

A reader comments, in response to Malcolm Gladwell expressing the elite conventional wisdom, “To call someone a [n*****] is not as a bad as arguing that black people have lower intelligence than whites:”

I’ve wondered many times why social scientists always define racism as the belief in innate racial differences. Even when I was a liberal, I used to think things like, “Racism is supposed to be about hatred. Ordinary people constantly talk about how hating others is so terrible, but when it comes to scholarship, the topic is always framed in terms of nature versus nurture. What about the situation where a guy loves blacks, but thinks they are naturally faster sprinters than others. We want to get worked up about this guy? We want to call him a racist?”

Now, I wonder if there is something else going on. One thing I do know about social scientists (since I am one) is that, as the disciplines have gotten more specialized, they know nothing about biology. Perhaps they have feared that if the connection between biology and behavior were allowed to be studied, the day would arrive when they would look like phrenologists. By delegitimizing the field, they could always be looked to as the experts. Their reputations and jobs would thus be preserved. I don’t know if I’m right, but something smells fishy to me. Or maybe defining racism in terms of nature-nurture is simply designed to provide more direct arguments for affirmative action programs.

Pauline Hanson, former leader of Australia’s immigration restrictionist One Nation party, which R.J. Stove has covered for VDARE.com in articles here and here, is announcing her return to politics, and getting a lot of (negative) news coverage as a result. Most of the coverage seems to have to do with the fact that she told people that immigration from Africa would necessarily include a number of people with AIDS.

Hanson a ‘bloodsucker’: Brown The Age, December 7, 2006,

Australian Greens leader Bob Brown says Pauline Hanson is a “bloodsucker” and has attacked her suggestion that Africans are bringing AIDS into Australia.

Brown says that Hanson’s comments are worse for Australia than anything immigrants have done:

“The amazing thing about Pauline is that she is a far greater cost to this country in terms of wrecking our international reputation than any immigrant would ever be,” he told reporters today.

“She really is a bloodsucker on Australia in terms of the way in which she divides the country and makes us look an uglier country right round the world.”

So Pauline Hanson is worse that the Lebanese rapists, worse than the Cronulla rioters, worse than terrorist Mamdouh Habib,
worse than the organized criminals who introduced Bekaa Valley Heroin, worse than the “Men Of No Appearance” who commit armed robberies in Sydney? (Actually, they’re of “Middle Eastern” appearance, but this never makes the Sydney papers.)

That’s a lot of harm done to Australia’s international reputation just by one woman saying that there’s AIDS in Africa and it doesn’t need to be imported to Sydney.