Cripple Spectator Blogger Fight!!!!

What's worse Rod Liddle's childish attention seeking or Alex Massie's pompous denunciation of Liddle? I'd say Massie is worse because whereas Liddle presents information in a deliberately provocative manner, Massie seems to actually object to knowledge per se:

the left's inclination to see people as members of a group rather than individuals is tedious and, often, less than productive. Which makes one wonder why you insist on doing likewise, lumping all blacks (and all muslims) together as though skin colour or religion reveal, determine or dictate everything.

The thing is though the prevalence of different behaviours among different groups, in this case crime, is an interesting phenomenon. Massie angriliy denounces Liddle for things Liddle didn't say, "that blackness is somehow the cause of these problems". Cultural differences among different groups doesn't imply that the origins are innate. As the great Thomas Sowell has frequently pointed out:

All explanations of differences between groups can be broken down into heredity and environment. Yet a world view of the history of cultural diversity seems, on the surface at least, to deny both. One reason for this is that we have thought of environment too narrowly-- as the immediate surrounding circumstances or differing institutional policies toward different groups. Environment in that narrow sense may explain some group differences, but the histories of many groups completely contradict that particular version of environment as an explanation. Let us take just two examples out of many which are available.

Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italian immigrants from southern Italy began arriving in the United States in large numbers at about the same time in the late nineteenth century, and their large-scale immigration also ended at the same time, when restrictive immigration laws were passed in the 1920s. The two groups arrived here in virtually the same economic condition-- namely, destitute. They often lived in the same neighborhoods, and their children attended the same schools, sitting side by side in the same classrooms. Their environments-- in the narrow sense in which the term is commonly used-- were virtually identical. Yet their social histories in the United States have been very different.
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Jews are not Italians and Italians are not Jews. Anyone familiar with their very different histories over many centuries should not be surprised. Their fate in America was not determined solely by their surrounding social conditions in America or by how they were treated by American society. They were different before they got on the boats to cross the ocean, and those differences crossed the ocean with them.

In other words cultural traits, both positive and negative, don't have to be innate in order to be powerful and able to express themselves over immediate environmental factors.

Massie seems to believe that we should not allow ourselves to be aware of group differences because he prefers "to see people as individuals." Well great but if certain negative behaviours are particularly widespread among particular groups then it is going to be difficult.

As for Liddle, as I say he is being needlessly childish, but he is writing at the Spectator website, and the Speccy hordes aren't going descend en masse to Hackney to start a race riot.