Monday, February 17, 2020

UK 
Andrew Sabisky: Controversial Boris Johnson aide who suggested black people were mentally inferior resigns

No 10 initially declined opportunity to distance PM from remarks of adviser, recruited by Dominic Cummings


Lizzy Buchan Political Correspondent @LizzyBuchan

A controversial Downing Street aide who suggested black people were mentally inferior has resigned from his post.

Andrew Sabisky announced he was quitting his role as a contractor for No 10 following a major backlash over his past comments on eugenics, race and the enforced uptake of contraception.

Boris Johnson stood by Mr Sabisky initially in the face of widespread condemnation, with the prime minister’s official spokesman refusing to answer dozens of questions about the appointment.

The 27-year-old is understood to have been hired as part of Dominic Cummings‘ drive to recruit ”misfits and weirdos” to help shake up government.

In a post on Twitter, he said: “The media hysteria about my old stuff online is mad but I wanted to help HMG not be a distraction.
Watch more
New comments on ‘racial intelligence’ fuel row over Johnson aide

“Accordingly I’ve decided to resign as a contractor.

“I hope No10 hires more ppl [sic] w/ good geopolitical forecasting track records and that media learn to stop selective quoting.

“I know this will disappoint a lot of ppl [sic] but I signed up to do real work, not be in the middle of a giant character assassination: if I can’t do the work properly there’s no point, and I have a lot of other things to do w/ [sic] my life.”

His departure comes after the prime minister faced intense pressure to sack Mr Sabisky over historic comments, where he:

- Called for the young to undergo compulsory contraception to prevent the creation of “a permanent underclass”

- Disparagingly compared women’s sport to the Paralympics

- Suggested that black people were more likely than whites to be “close to mental retardation”

As the row deepened, Sky News found further comments under Mr Sabisky’s name in 2014, which suggested there could be “genetic reasons” for differences between the races in intelligence and suggested this could be taken into account in immigration policy.

The post said: “There are excellent reasons to think the very real racial differences in intelligence are significantly – even mostly – genetic in origin, though the degree is of course a very serious subject of scholarly debate.”

His appointment triggered public criticism from several Tory backbenchers as well as private disquiet among MPs.

Tory MP William Wragg said his presence was a “poor reflection on the government”, saying: “‘Weirdos’ and ‘misfits’ are all very well, but please can they not gratuitously cause offence.”


In a thinly-veiled jibe at Mr Cummings, he added: “I cannot be the only one uncomfortable with recent No 10 trends.”
Watch more
Adviser who slammed women’s sport hired after Cummings’ ‘weirdos’ call

Former Tory minister Caroline Nokes, chairwoman of the Commons Women and Equalities Committee, said: “I don’t know him from a bar of soap, but don’t think we’d get on ... Must be no place in government for the views he’s expressed.”

Labour party chairman Ian Lavery welcomed his resignation but said the prime minister had questions to answer on the appointment and whether he agreed with Sabisky’s ”vile views”.

He said: “It’s right that Andrew Sabisky is no longer working in government. He should never have been appointed in the first place.

“After No 10 publicly stood by him today, Boris Johnson has serious questions to answer about how this appointment was made and whether he agrees with his vile views.”

Downing Street did not comment on Monday night but earlier, a No 10 spokesman said: “I’m not going to be commenting on individual appointments.”

The spokesman added: “The prime minister’s views on a range of subjects are well publicised and documented.”


A special adviser who really was a ‘weirdo’ too far

The appointment of a man who professes to believe in eugenics is raising eyebrows, writes Sean O’Grady – but he’s far from the first ‘irregular’ to offer a prime minister advice

@_seanogrady Tuesday 18 February 2020 00:00

Andrew Sabisky has caused controversy for his comments about eugenics and forced contraception


 ( BBC )

One thing we ought to remember at the outset when examining what we may come to know as the Andrew Sabisky affair, who abruptly resigned last night, and the Svengali personality of Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s special adviser: some of this is really nothing new. For more than a century, ever since the days of David Lloyd George, prime ministers, in particular, have called on the formal or informal, and the paid or unpaid services of any number of “irregulars”. They are people which might fit the description of “misfits and weirdos”, a sort of small auxiliary force offering different voices and views. Rarely have they been viewed with anything less than suspicion by the permanent civil service. Some “advisers”, stretching the point, happened to be the spouses of premiers, those with strong views of their own and whose influential pillow talk perhaps had some impact on the life of nation; Denis Thatcher, Cherie Booth, and maybe Carrie Symonds, might be such.

There have always been some weirdos and misfits with odd opinions around No 10; prime ministers attract them, and some prime ministers are attracted to them.

Let us pluck one example. If Johnson styles himself on his hero Winston Churchill, then we have a ready, albeit imprecise, precedent for Cummings/Sabisky in one of Churchill’s wartime confidants and his official scientific adviser; Frederick, or Freddy Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell. “Churchill’s professor” he was called, among many less complimentary sobriquets for this unusually well-connected Oxford academic physics. I can’t do better than the dry assessment of his Wikipedia entry: “A brilliant but arrogant intellectual, who quarrelled sharply with many respected advisers. His contribution to Allied victory lay chiefly in logistics. He was particularly adept at converting data into clear charts to promote a strategy. But despite his credentials, his judgment about technology was often flawed. He tried to block the development of radar in favour of infra-red beams. He discounted the first reports of the enemy’s “V” weapons programme. He pressed the case for the strategic area bombing of cities on a false premise about the impact of such bombing on civilian morale.” Apparently, Lindemann “held the working class, homosexuals, and blacks in contempt and supported sterilisation of the mentally incompetent”. Familiar ring, there. 



SEE MY PREVIOUS POSThttps://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/02/boris-johnson-told-to-sack-adviser-who.htmlWHICH INCLUDES INFO ON OSWALD MOSLEY AND BUF, BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS

I warned about the spreading influence of eugenics – yet an advocate was able to work at Downing Street

Such language has no right being anywhere near the government – and needs to be condemned by Boris Johnson and his team

Louise Raw @LouiseRaw Author

There was more chance of the preserved corpse of philosopher Jeremy Bentham leaving its cupboard of its own volition than the dean of UCL coming out of his nearby office.

It was January 2018 and I’d joined protesters from the university’s BME Students’ Network. Their issue was neatly summarised on placards proclaiming “F*** Eugenics”. It had just been revealed that UCL had hosted, inadvertently, four “Conferences on Intelligence”.

Speakers had included blogger Emil Kirkegaard, who has advocated the rape of sleeping children by paedophiles as a way to relieve “urges” (he later said he did not support the legalisation of paedophilia but advocated “frank discussion of paedophilia-related issues”), and Richard Lynn, who has a long-term association with Mankind Quarterly, a journal that has been criticised for support eugenics .

The conferences had been booked, as external events, by UCL lecturer Dr James Thompson, and held in secret, until Toby Young – who has previously written about “progressive eugenics” – attended one and been told not to write about it, wrote about it.

UCL is home to the archive of the man who coined the term “Eugenics”, Frances Galton. Galton believed Black people were “naturally” lazy and “savage”, and hoped that “inferior” white people would die of poverty before reproducing, also suggesting “good” specimens be compelled to marry one another.

The latest outcry is about Andrew Sabisky, who was thought to have been contracted by Downing Street under Boris Johnson’s aide Dominic Cummings, apparently to work on special projects.

He announced he was quitting his role on Monday following a major backlash over his past comments.

In 2014, Sabisky, suggested on Cummings’s blog that the law could be used to mandate contraception to prevent “unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass”.

On the same site Sabisky argued it was unclear if FGM was really “a serious risk to young girls...of certain minority group origins”. He has suggested African-Americans are “less intelligent” than white people, and compared women’s sports to the Paralympics (meaning this as an insult to both).

Sabisky is also listed as a speaker at the second Conference on Intelligence in 2015, on ‘The efficacy of early childhood interventions in improving cognitive outcomes’.

What sort of “childhood interventions” he might approve became clear the next year, when he was interviewed by Schools Week on the benefits of the drug modafinil being given to schoolchildren. Modafinil decreases the need for sleep and seems to improve brain function – although there is a risk of getting Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a life-threatening skin condition. “The benefits of giving everyone modafinil once a week are probably worth a dead kid once a year” Sabisky said.

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Transcript shows PM's spokesperson refuse to answer on eugenics views

Schools’ Week described Sabisky as a “polymath’, describing him as a ‘livewire on the education conference scene’, and let him expound his views at length: “Eugenics are about selecting ‘for’ good things...Intelligence is largely inherited and it correlates with better outcomes: physical health, income, lower mental illness. There is no downside to having IQ except short-sightedness.”

Sabisky asked the female interviewer whether she wouldn’t chose to become pregnant with an embryo selected to be the “smartest”, with “less propensity towards schizophrenia or depression”. School Week suggested he was “needling long-held ideas in education that many are too squeamish to address”.

You think all this might be enough for the government to issue a strong response, along the lines of Unite Against Fascism’s Weyman Bennett who told the Morning Star that the language of eugenics “has no place in government.”

“These people give a nod and a wink to the politics and ideology that led to the Holocaust,” he added, with 75 years between the enforced end of the genocidal eugenics programme of the Nazis seemingly not enough to end the conversation for good. Geneticist Adam Rutherfood tweeted that “Sabisky and indeed Cummings look bewitched by science without doing the legwork”. It is hard to argue.

Watch more
No 10 refuses to say if PM thinks black people are mentally inferior

However, Downing Street appeared happy to say little. Johnson’s official spokesman refused to comment on Sabisky (and whether he held an official role), his controversial views, or whether the prime minister agreed with them. Others have not been so staid. Shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett and Labour MP David Lammy were among those calling for Sabisky to be sacked.

The spokesman said the “prime minister’s views are well publicised and well documented” but could not point to a single example. The spokesman is also said to have declined whether Johnson’s views on the issue were reflected in a magazine article in which the prime minister referred to black people as “picaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”. That article had resurfaced during last year’s general election campaign.

That silence over those questions before he quit should tell us all we need to know.

Dr Louise Raw is a historian, broadcaster, author of ‘Striking a Light’ (Bloomsbury) on the 1888 Matchwomen’s Strike, and organiser of the annual London Matchwomen’s Festival


Eugenics only ‘works’ for delusional white men who think they’re superior – no surprise it’s infiltrated No 10, then


Andrew Sabisky’s comments have drawn forth the same old dreary people. The ones who like to think they are not afraid to speak the truth, when what they’re actually not afraid of is speaking complete, well, rubbish

Tom Peck @tompeck
14 hours ago

Years from now, when they ask us, “were the signs there?” it is disappointing that it probably won’t even be worth bothering to recall that, well, I write a daily column on politics and Boris Johnson’s new government was only on its second working day when the national conversation turned to the subject of eugenics.

We are, naturally, in this place, because the first of Dominic Cummings“misfits and weirdos” appears to have entered No 10, a 27-year-old man named Andrew Sabisky. Sabisky’s misfit and weirdo status is confirmed by various comments made online, which include arguing for enforced long-term contraception for all teenagers, to prevent what he calls a “permanent underclass”. In other words, to prevent the wrong’uns from breeding.

We also learn of his fierce interest in how higher numbers of black Americans than white suffer from “intellectual disability”, and are “close to mental retardation”.

Then there’s some stuff about how “women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s”.

So, a lot to unpack there. For a touch of added spice, it can’t be ignored that the first comment, regarding enforced mass, temporary sterilisation, was made in 2014, as a comment on the blog of one Cummings, so it’s nice to see a little flash of nepotism to go with the eugenics.

Cummings has a longstanding interest in genetics and education, an interest that was made public shortly before David Cameron moved Michael Gove on from the Department for Education, for no greater reason than he and Cummings had made almost all of the nation’s teachers united in their hatred of them, which had potential consequences for such mundanities as having to win elections.

Seven years ago, in a lengthy blog post (is there any other kind?), Cummings sought to impress upon the nation that “genetics outweighs teaching” in education, and outlined several ideas that were very rapidly debunked by people who had actually had any education in the subject in question.

The first thing to say about eugenics is the same first thing you can say about almost anything, and it’s this: Cummings doesn’t know anything about it.

Genetics and eugenics are one of the many disciplines that drops into the “self-taught” box on the Cummings curriculum vitae, right next to maths, which he likes to claim he has brought himself up to postgraduate level. To which the only response is, yes dear. Course you did. And when I was 15, I could occasionally be heard telling people I was “grade 8 standard” at the violin, though the certificates in the folder in the drawer at home still come to a mysterious halt at five.

Which is why, in 2013, when he began attracting the attention of the then very young but already entirely objectionable Sabisky, Cummings pieced together such remarkable thoughts as how it would be entirely possible to segregate, from the age of 13, the most intelligent 2 per cent of the population, and “give this 2 per cent a specialist education, including deep problem-solving skills in maths and physics”.

Of course, we can only wonder whether Cummings himself would have qualified for such an education, and whether it might have been of a higher quality than his own, self-taught one, and thus prevented him reaching such absurd, comprehensively debunked conclusions. Tragically, such a thing never happened, and so we just have to make do with a very enthusiastic amateur at the controls of a machine he doesn’t even remotely understand, and hiring straightforwardly objectionable people like Sabisky to turn his deranged dreams into the rest of our’s nightmares.

Naturally, Sabisky’s comments, on the biological superiorities and inferiorities between the races, have drawn forth the same old dreary arguments and dreary people. The ones who like to think they are not afraid to speak the truth, when what they’re actually not afraid of is speaking complete, well, bollocks.

We must again entertain the contribution of Richard Dawkins, who took it upon himself to offer this searing insight over the weekend:

“It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs and roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.”

Read more
How eugenics is becoming a mainstream issue again

To which we must begin our discussions with the word, “work”.

Eugenics doesn’t work FOR cows or horses or pigs or dogs or roses. It works ON them. It works FOR the humans, who own them, control them, dominate them and enslave them for their own ends.

Which is why there is such righteously fierce resistance to even the tiniest sniff of a suggestion that it can be made to “work for humans”. Because, well, we’ve been here before, and it didn’t end well.

And however firmly you wish to believe that you’re just being brave enough to tell the truth, it categorically is not the case that eugenics would “work” for humans. It wouldn’t. It can’t. It’s a straightforward affront to everything humanity is. And that’s before we even get on to the unavoidably obvious fact that, well, it’s always the white guys who are brave enough to say it “works”, isn’t it? It’s never the black scientists who are brave enough to say that, it would “work” to selectively breed various types of people out of existence. How odd.

It’s all very simple. It isn’t a “well actually”. It isn’t a “nobody wants to hear this but”. It’s a straightforward no, no, no, no, no. And anyone who doesn’t have the brain to work that out is a very, very long way short of having anything to offer any government of a supposedly civilised country.

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