Racism and hysteria in India

In India recently, there’s been a lot of media coverage given to a handful of routine muggings and assaults in Australia. As the Indian press has chosen to make each individual incident a front page news item, the situation seems particularly dramatic.

According to police, most of these incidents are not racially motivated. This is difficult to confirm or deny, as the police in Aus don’t tend to give out much information as a matter of procedure, and the media is being pretty stingy about how much information it includes in its reports.

But we can verify from scattered snippets of information, that in at least some of these cases, the attackers were not white supremacists. For instance, one of the two people who attacked Sunny Bajaj in Boronia, Victoria was reportedly of African descent. According to Indians living in Harris Park, Sydney, many of the assaults there are perpetrated by gangs of Lebanese youths. The CCTV footage of the assault on Sourabh Sharma in Melbourne is disturbing, but telling, as it clearly shows that at least two of the attackers (the only ones not wearing hoods) are brown skinned, and actually appear to be Asian.

I’m not trying to make xenophobic dog whistles, suggesting that immigrants are trouble makers. My point is merely that if these guys are racists, they’re peculiarly multicultural racists.

The other supposedly damning factoid about Australia is that between 23 May and 2 July, there were some 81 attacks against against Indian people in Australia. That sounds like a lot, unles you actually bother to examine the statistics.

According to nationmaster, the assault rate in Australia is slightly below the US, UK, Canada, and New Zealand, at around 7.45959 per 1000 per year. This works out to 156651 in total per year, which sounds about right if you look at the stats from the Australian Institute of Criminology and average it over a few years.

Australia’s modest assault rate rounds off to 62 assaults per 100 000 people, per month.

According to the wikipedia article on Indian Australians there are about 90, 000 Indian students in Australia, and at least another 400 000 people who are either Indian immigrants, or of Indian extraction. Numerically, this should equate to around 300 Indian people assaulted per month. So the real question is: why are so few Indian people assaulted in Australia?

And yet the Indian press seems content to portray this statistically insignificant trickle of muggings and assaults as a some kind of “wave” of racial crimes, and proclaim any attack against Indians in Australia, by default, to be an act of racism. But no matter, since many Indian people seem content to accept this proclamation without question.

There are some prominent exceptions to this of course. Among them is Nama Nageswara Rao, leader of Telugu Desam Party (TDP).

“During our interaction with the victims as well as other Indian students, we were told that racism was not the motive behind attacks as suspected……” Rao said. [Economic Times, India]

Another prominent dissenter is the Bollywood film star Sanjay Suri. When asked whether he or his family have ever experienced problems in Australia, his reply is:

No. My family there has never had any such problems ever. Australia has been a peaceful country and home to many ethnicities. Indians abroad predictably do well for themselves, academically and otherwise, since the systems in place allow them to prosper a lot more easily than in our country. [Times Of India]

However, if a recent survey in India is to be believed, the majority of Indians are not just swallowing the hype but lapping it up.

Perhaps that’s because it makes a good pretext for mindless, unquestioning jingoism, as exhibited by the recent hacking of an RAAF website. The beauty of rallying people against a common (and relatively powerless) enemy, is that Indians can temporarily forget their own violent religious bloodfests, their bigotry and often brutal discrimination against one another. The fact that Australians are not a particularly powerful or prominent minority group in the international community, makes it all even easier.

The preoccupation with Al Gore #1

Steve Fielding, Australian Senator, wants to talk to Al Gore one on one, and convince him that anthropogenic climate change is not real.

The evidence that Steve Fielding intends to present to the former VP of the USA is reportedly contained in this graph:

The bar on the left shows atmospheric CO2, as measured from the the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Observatory in Hawaii. The bar on the right is the global temperature anomaly, probably as measured by Britain’s Hadley Data Center.

Now Steve Fielding says that this graph shows that “global temperatures have remained steady over the last 10-15 years despite skyrocketing man made carbon emissions”.

First off, the premise of his argument, that global temperatures have remained steady, would appear to be contradicted by the very HadCRUT3 data that he cites as a source for his argument.

Secondly, I also have a graph courtesy of skepticalscience, which shows CO2/temperature correlation over a much longer period. It uses NASA’s GISTEMP instead of Britain’s HadCRUT3, however there really isn’t a great deal of difference between the two.

Anyway, when you examine the CO2/temperature correlation over a longer period, you see a much clearer and stronger correlation, like so:

At any rate, I think it’s interesting that Steve Fielding shares with most climate change sceptics, a consuming preoccupation with this former American politician. It’s as if they think that Al Gore has some sort of influence over the 82% + of scientists who trust the science of anthropogenic climate change (according to at least two extensive surveys here and here), also over the myriad of respectable scientific organisations around the world which all, without exception, endorse the findings of the IPCC. They seem to think that if they can really focus on Al Gore this will all go away.