Very Sorry

I still haven't managed to get back to this with the regularity I would like. I will be back here soon though - promise.
However, while we are still on the subject of apologies there has been a lot of media attention of late given to the 'should we apologise for slavery' debate. I - of course - say no, 'we' should not because 'we' cannot - for one thing 'we' weren't around at the time. There are lots of places I could link to but this is I think revealing, especially as it came during the BBC's rather excessive liberal-left guilt-fest over the whole slavery business.
There is, though, a wider point - I think - and I did originally put it in a comment on this by Longrider, but it seems his comments are not working for some reason, so I reprint it here:

I've said this before about such things as 'affirmative action' and suchlike - and I think the same principle applies here - you cannot correct an old injustice by creating a new injustice.
So just as having quotas and targets for previously discriminated-against minorities creates an injustice against those not covered by those quotas and targets who apply for those positions, or whatever, 'reparations' for slavery would unjustly penalise those of us who - as you so rightly say - were not involved in it in any way, and even our ancestors at the time would have have little or no say in the continuation of the trade and would have received little or no economic benefit from it. So any form of 'reparations' paid, for example, out of our taxes would just become a new injustice - perpetrated by those 'well-meaning' fools who call for it - on people wholly innocent of the original 'crime'.

We should - of course - learn from the past and what we see as its moral failings such as slavery, the holocaust, religious wars and so much more. However, it seems wrong to me to wallow in these things or blame these things for the way things are now.

After The Hiatus

Well, now. I seem to have been away from this for a long time now.
I had just started to get some posts together to restart this blog, when Blogger became inaccessible for some unknown reason for over a week right at the start of this month. I haven't bothered with any of those posts - they are a bit old hat now.

Then, at the same time my old computer died and I had to build another one. The building was quite straightforward, what has took the time was getting all the software, my backed-up data and so on up and running on this shiny new beast.

I think I'm more or less ready now.

So, I'm starting again, here and featuring my comment on this:

Perhaps 'we' ought to consign this whole 19th Century notion of 'race' to the dustbin of history. Dividing people up for the superficial differences of skin tone and feature doesn't seem to have worked, does it?

When the left adopted ‘race’ as one of its causes, naturally it saw it as a collectivist problem with a collective solution. But, rather than wasting away – just as the state was supposed to do under communism - we find that race and race ‘differences’ become accented and entrenched through the systems set up for it like the whole race relations 'industry' we now have – just as the state apparatus became stronger and stronger under communism.

Rather than creating ‘equality’ it has ossified divisions, stereotyping people into ghettos. For example, black actors complain of only being offered the roles of pimp or drug dealer, Black writers complain of being condemned to only write of the ‘black experience’ and so on.

Why should a young black boy have all his options restricted to just ‘black role-models’ rather than from the whole of possibility that lies out there? In fact, why condemn everyone to this narrow, self-limiting, defeatist notion of the 'role-model' at all?

Beyond that, this notion of race has help to develop ‘victim’ culture where every failing can be excused as the fault of ‘the system’ which is biased against those of one particular race or another. It has become so successful at tapping liberal guilt that now others vying for power and influence such as ‘the Muslim community’ are trying to extend the victim status of race into religion.

Maybe the answer is not treating people as groups: white, black, Muslims Catholics, women, lesbians, or whatever, we should see them, treat them as individuals – not lock them in cages of created ‘identity’.

It is extracted from a longer blog post I was going to make on this subject before my recent computer/blogging problems. It is not all I want to say on the subject, see it more as a note of where my thoughts are on it at the moment than a finished peice. I've reposted it here more as a way of getting back into this blog.