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14 August 2007

Diversity is good... right?

I mean, everybody says so... hell, it's all over tv, it's a political no-brainer, it's even embedded in our kids' school curriculum...
And, now, along comes Robert Putnam, an influential social scientist from Harvard who has done the biggest study yet on diversity and its impact.

Mr. Putnam isn't all that thrilled with what he's found. He checked and cross-checked his data for years before publishing his findings. By inclination, he is liberal-minded, and he knows his work will be used by racists and nativists to prove they were right all along.
Unfortunately, unlike Al Gore and the "Global Sky is Warming" crowd... Putnam isn't willing to skew his data to arrive at some warm fuzzy-bunny conclusion.
This is awkward stuff. Mr. Putnam's work is a sharp rebuke to the brand of feel-good multiculturalism that has ruled Canada for decades - the sunny belief that says diversity is good for its own sake and that, if we all hold hands and teach our children the right lessons about celebrating difference, all will be well. Better than well, in fact.

The official version is that difference makes us stronger. We have no idea what to do if the opposite turns out to be the case.
In any case, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle at this stage of the game.

Hang on, it should be an interesting ride.

(via Daimnation)

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RELATED: "An Inconvenient Correction"

While we're on the topic of hard science...
In his enviro-propaganda flick, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore claims nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade.

That's been a common refrain for environmentalists, too, and one of the centrepieces of global warming hysteria: It's been really hot lately -- abnormally hot -- so we all need to be afraid, very afraid.

The trouble is, it's no longer true
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