Andrew Sullivan has an interesting post up in which he semi-apologizes for the Bell Curve and argues that it is important to argue about Israel even if it brings out anti-Semitism just as it was important to discuss racial differences even if it brought out racism. I don’t think it’s a good comparison, but I respect Sullivan for re-visiting the Bell Curve debacle and for standing up to the reverse Jew-baiting, or whatever the phrase is for what Jeff Goldberg, Leon Wieseltier, and others do.
The problems with the discussion around the Bell Curve are, for example: (1) it’s not that surprising that doing well on standardized tests correlates with some measure of success in a society where people are judged by their ability to take standardized test, (2) the correlation coefficients weren’t that high, and (3) race is an artificial construct. I think all three are reasonable arguments against promoting the book. The reason for the popularity of the book, of course, is that scientifically illiterate establishment media types got off on that they were some kind of Churchillian he-men for touching such a taboo topic. Stephen Metcalf nails it:
Imagine that the labels “morally courageous” and “intellectually honest” didn’t refer to inner personal qualities but instead were prizes in a language game. The goal of the game is to be awarded the labels “morally courageous” and “intellectually honest.” To win the prize, you must obey the rules: Never parrot conventional wisdom, and whenever possible, cast yourself as the victim of a speech-suppressing enemy. Any avid consumer of American newspapers and periodicals, especially over the last dozen or so years, will recognize the language game immediately: It’s called “punditry.”
In a way, it’s wrong to single out the popularity of the Bell Curve here. William Saletan’s ignorant flirtation with white supremacism is much worse. And it’s not just this topic of course: Megan McArdle’s brand of bogus analysis is applauded because it seems edgy and gutsy, somehow.
To the extent that debate of Israel brings out anti-Semitism, it’s because Jeff Golberg et al. make it about anti-Semitism. I’ve never heard anyone go from discussing Israel to suggesting that certain portions of our population be forced to live on reservations (as the Bell Curve suggests be done with low IQers). There’s no similarity at all.
EDIT: What I said about that Bell Curve and “reservations” comes from Malcolm Gladwell and may be inaccurate. Okay, here is more precision on what is stated in the book (from Wiki, I do not have an electronic copy of the book):
Moreover, they fear that increasing welfare will create a “custodial state” in “a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation’s population.” They also predict increasing totalitarianism: “It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its heritage of individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives, once it is accepted that a significant part of the population must be made permanent wards of the states”.
Corner Stone
That is neither a semi-apology nor a valid rationale.
Davis X. Machina
The fact that Metcalf describes Slate to a ‘t’ in that quote, and it’s running in Slate, I will take as my daily proof that there is a God, He is good, and wants us to be happy.
HumboldtBlue
So Andy pats himself on the back and rehashes the old line “I’m not a pig-ignorant racist who believes the color of one’s skin determines their non-existent intelligence quotient” I’m just putting out my argument and if it wins or fails doesn’t matter.
Fuck Sullivan, the little bitch made no apology for his role in pushing that shit-full book onto a public in which racism is not only ingrained but is actively taught and encouraged.
He came about as close to apologizing as Palin comes to making sense, so stop trying to apologize for him.
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
Yes, it’s not an apology at all. It’s “I had no fucking clue that a theory that black people are less intelligent than white people would be embraced by racists and interpreted as racism” and it’s utter horseshit.
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
TNC’s vacation means he has a convenient excuse for ignoring that and McFuckwit’s argument that affirmative action is unnecessary because oh who gives a flying fuck.
Derelict
Megan McArdle’s brand of bogus analysis is applauded because it seems edgy and gutsy, somehow
But it IS edgy and gutsy. There are very, very few people willing to subject themselves to the level of public riducule and humilation over and over and over again the way McMegan and the Doughy Pantload do.
NonyNony
I don’t think that what McArdle does can be called “analysis” even if you include the word “bogus” in front of it. I’d call it class-war propaganda or, if you want to be generous, perhaps post-facto rationalizations. But “bogus analysis” doesn’t even begin to get to the level of mendacity it takes to vomit up one of her know-nothing drivels about economics.
Amanda in the South Bay
Arrgh, The Bell Curve shows Sullivan at his worse-his pseudo agonizing over an issue which he already knows what position in the end he’s gonna take on it, but he has to go through such a public, scathing pseudo agony over it just to show that, well, I don’t really know.
In many ways Sully is the worst of the “pox on both sides/both sides have valid points” that pundits always bring up, cause he brings such serious, serious agony when he tries to think through something.
Svensker
Seriously? Holy shit.
mikey
My experience with REAL anti-semites mostly indicates that they don’t give a shit about Israel, and they tend to hate arabs as much as they hate jews. They are mostly concerned about Jews in America and their imagined agenda and manipulation of government and business.
You’re right that it’s the Goldbergs and Foxmans and AIPACers of the world that have long decided that anything short of unconditional support for anything that any elected government of the state of Israel chooses to do, and/or any support or sympathy for the Palestinians was de facto evidence of anti-semitism.
As the world begins to figure out that the policies of the current Israeli leadership are the worst possible choices for the long term health and survival of Israel as a free jewish democracy these positions, thankfully, will become increasingly untenable. A brutal apartheid regime that is routinely boycotted and shunned will not serve the interests of the Israeli population nor their leadership….
mikey
daveNYC
It doesn’t count as analysis if half the numbers are made up, and the other half are the result of incorrect math.
And there’s a world of difference between debating about someone’s actions (Israel), vs. debating over the intrinsic nature of a group of people (The Bell Curve).
Svensker
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Yes. Also, ultimately he’s always right, even if only because he was wrong for the right reasons and in a purely disinterested holy and righteous kind of way, unlike the people who were right for the wrong reasons and therefore not nearly as great as person as Sully.
Ash Can
I guess she’s applauded for sticking her neck out. What the people who are clapping apparently overlook is that this neck extension results in her head being wedged more firmly up her ass.
DanF
@HumboldtBlue: He came about as close to apologizing as Palin comes to making sense
Now that’s funny.
kommrade reproductive vigor
I tried to read it, but this Goldbergian Faaaaart in the second damn sentence chased me out of there:
I must have missed the meeting where that rule was passed.
Utter creep.
Davis X. Machina
Not when there’s demonstrably so little on the end of it….
Mark S.
It does? Not being trollish, just never heard that before.
HumboldtBlue
@Mark S.: Yes, Mark, it does argue for that position. It argues that those deemd to have lower IQs should be weeded from the general population. No word yet if that means the entire teabagging nation.
Howlin Wolfe
@mikey: Same with the “conservative” movement ideology. The adherents of that load of tripe think that anyone who doesn’t believe the same thing they do is anti-American (viz. Michele Bachmann) and not a reel Murcan. Likudnikism is to Israel what the Republican party is to the US.
joe from Lowell
That was not even a semi-apology. There would need to be some acknowledgment that there was something wrong with the Bell Curve’s argument, or something wrong with giving it credibility, and Sully’s post contains neither.
BTW, Charles Murray, the totally non-racist co-author of The Bell Curve, wrote an op-ed in the NYT shortly after Katrina – as in, when people were still trying to reach safety – in which he quotes a bunch of since-debunked garbage stories about rapes and murders and looting, and then declares that “the animals have been let out of the zoo.”
Scum bag. That guy should be pelted with rotten vegetables when he goes out in public.
Davis X. Machina
I am reminded of my daughter, who, in the 7th grade, was taken aside by a group of baby goths, incipient indie chicks, embryo riot grrls, and other assorted square pegs, and told, basically, that she was letting down the side by being non-conformist in the wrong way.
Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned In Middle School.
Napoleon
Huh? This is one of these things liberals like to throw into conversation but it is simply not true, but is PC run amuck that just drives me crazy. Different groups of people (i.e. races) have clearly different groups of physical characteristics, right down to earwax and the construct of their hair follicles.
(Just to be clear before I am flamed, I don’t think the differences give any particular group some kind of material advantage on a global scale, and I don’t think that the package of characteristics of any particular group arise from some kind of overarching connection between the characteristics, so much as they may be randomly associated with each other in the sense that they arise from different causes or historical accidents, but all the same they tend to come associated with the same group of people. By the way if you are going to flame me go ahead because I am about to leave work and go to the pool and likely will never see it.)
(PS – the Bell Curve was stinking peice of trash and Sullivan and others ought to be ashamed pimping it)
Howlin Wolfe
@Davis X. Machina:
Makes it easier to insert into her rectum.
Midnight Marauder
No. No, he does not do this. At all. In any way, shape, or form. Let’s take a look at some of the actual words Andrew Sullivan has actually said about The Bell Curve:
That’s August 26, 2005. Let’s go to October 20, 2007:
So what, exactly, is this apology that you speak of?
What the fuck are you on today, DougJ?
Ann B. Nonymous
DougJ, you have a very forgiving nature if you think that’s a semi-apology. He doesn’t regret doing it, and he doesn’t think that it was wrong–if anything, he thinks it was worthwhile even if it mainstreamed bad and stupid science in the service of racism because “it was a debate worth outing rather than stigmatizing”.
Meaning he wanted to establish a false equivalence between the two sides. That’s what he set out to do, and that’s what happened. Because Sullivan can’t understand that science is a matter of disproof, not an Oxford Union debate.
Everything else–the recrudescence of genetic theories of racism, the idiocy, the zombie lies–isn’t his fault, or at least he thinks so.
I could make a crude analogy between the vector and the disease, but I think Sullivan has suffered enough on that front.
Brachiator
Problem here is that it’s not just that racism is “brought out.” For a great many Americans, race is part of the intellectual and social substrate. About every 25 years, a book or study appears that attempts to explain black difference, whether intellectually, physically or socially.
Rarely is there anything that neutrally examines human variation. The assumption is always that white Americans, usually male, are the norm, and black folk an anomaly that has to be accounted for, but typically in areas that Americans care about. So, to racists (and even some non-racists), the number of blacks in basketball tells somebody something about … something, while the fairly even dispersion of players in global sports like soccer or even cricket, well, who knows.
With respect to Sullivan, anything that he writes about the topic has to take into account his utter inability to grasp scientific arguments. He inevitably has to translate science into theological and philosophical categories. This, unfortunately, made him an easy mark for the foolishness of The Bell Curve.
In a related way, for too many Americans, anti-semitism is also part of the permanent background. This makes it easy for some to brand opponents an anti-semite simply because they oppose an argument that relates to Israel, international relations, etc. On the other hand, with dreary regularity some pundit or commenter inevitably comes up with some crap that inevitably accuses Jews of being uppity, often with some indirect reference to that Chosen thing.
lou
Speaking of Lord Saletan, he’s at it again.
Stooleo
If only that were true. The teabaggers would be non existent and half of our elected officials, would be other smarter people.
kommrade reproductive vigor
I’d have to know you very well before I let you check my follicles.
BTD
DougJ, if your goal was to get me to post a comment condemning Sullivan, well, here it is, what all the other commenters said.
tim
Time to finally buy my own copy of The Bell Curve.
ANY book that I’m told NOT TO READ NO MATTER WHAT GODDAM YOU by so many self righteous, frustrated book burners is a must-have as far as I’m concerned.
Words and ideas or the degree to which they are aired are NEVER the problem, you fools.
BTD
@tim:
Next stop for you – The Protocols of the Elder of Zion.
Silver
Yeah, I see nothing in there that even remotely resembles any sort of apology.
It’s more a of defiant, “Fuck you!” actually…
HumboldtBlue
No one told you not to read the book Tim, and for you it won’t matter one damn whit anyway, you’re a clueless fucknozzle to begin with. So read on dipshit, read on. But, to make it interesting, you’ll also have to read and be able to cogently expound upon the “Mismeasure of Man,” until then, have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.
Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions
@BTD:
Followed by Mein Kampf and Liberal Fascism. Hope you have some time on your hands, tim!
joe from Lowell
Wow, tim, I’m going to have to go back through the thread and read the comments that are critical of The Bell Curve.
Any statements that I’m told NOT TO READ must be really, really important, especially when I’m warned off by book-burners like you.
(Wow, that really was fun. Now, somebody say that they have to go and read tim’s comment, because any comment they’ve been told NOT TO READ by a book-burner like me must be really great. Let’s see how long we can keep this going).
Tosser.
Corner Stone
@tim: tim, you have been absolutely en fuego the last couple days.
I applaud your effort.
joe from Lowell
@Napoleon:
It’s undoubtedly true that there are genetic differences across populations. The problem is that these differences do not group themselves neatly into the category we call “race,” nor match up with the taxonomy necessary to talk about race being meaningful.
The boundaries are entirely artificial, useless in allowing us to categorize individual people into one or another race. The idea that the human population can be broken down into these races, as opposed to the graduated variations of genetic diversity, is socially constructed.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@tim: Whatever you do, DON’T buy a few copies of my book: tim blows a goat.
arguingwithsignposts
I’m surprised no matako_chan in this thread.
Sarcastro
Gee, I’d read the comments and the book but I can’t because I’m black and, obviously, illijerate.
Adam C
@Napoleon:
‘Race’ is an artificial construct because the genetic difference between African tribes is greater than the difference between ‘whites’ and ‘Asians’. Any kind of line you draw is arbitrary, and the differences between individuals are far bigger than any ‘racial’ distinction.
And it’s a social construct or Obama wouldn’t be considered ‘black’.
Svensker
@tim:
I’d suggest you try Star Guests by William Dudley, a white supremacist’s guide to the aliens among us. Yessiree, that would Show Us that You Won’t Be Cowed by Book Burners!
Crusty Dem
Sullivan’s semi-apology? Only if you consider “I’m sorry you’re all such assholes” an apology..
@Napoleon:
What Adam C said. It’s all about genetics and black vs white doesn’t get you nearly as far as you might think.
tim
@BTD:
Probably SHOULD read that one too. Then I’ll know exactly what people are talking about. God forbid I would, you know, find out for myself.
dms
“The reason for the popularity of the book, of course, is that scientifically illiterate establishment media types got off on that they were some kind of Churchillian he-men for touching such a taboo topic.”
As did Sullivan. And you’re applauding him?
tim
@HumboldtBlue:
EXACTLY the kind of mindset to which I was referring.
tim
@Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions:
Can you explain to me, without gratuitous insults, why it would be a bad idea to read these things if I really want to know what it is that’s being discussed? Why take someone else’s word for it. And if it is all such douchebaggery, then that will be obvious. What are you so afraid of?
Josh
Dougj, I love your work here, but this
is way too optimistic. Antisemites from Roald Dahl on down have gotten legitimate aversion to Israeli policy all mixed up with antisemitism. Heck, Eric Alterman a few years ago tried to prove that Alex Cockburn was an antisemite by demonstrating that he had antisemitic fans; Lee Smith (not the novelist) did the same thing a week or so back (and suffered some serious poetic justice: if attracting antisemitic commenters makes a blogger or journalist an antisemite himself, the number of remarks about “vile Jews” in Smith’s own comments is a pretty serious indictment). Antisemites will get ammunition anywhere they can find it: that doesn’t prove Goldberg right, nor should it discourage critics of Israel; but it’s hard to ignore.
Mnemosyne
@Napoleon:
So do cats. Are we now going to claim that different breeds of cats are different “races” and Siamese cats are somehow superior to Russian Blues because of the color of their fur and the size of their ears?
The problem is that, historically, people have used the word “race” as though it were a homonym for “species,” which it clearly isn’t. IIRC, any two human beings are more closely related to one another genetically than any two domestic cats, even if the cats appear identical to the naked eye and the humans include a blonde, blue-eyed woman from Sweden and a black-haired, brown-eyed man from Africa.
tim
@Svensker:
I hadn’t noticed that book being discussed with great hysteria at BJ or elsewhere on the internet. Why don’t you tell me your take on it and I’ll decide…
esme
I’m not on the side of Murray and Herrnstein (the book was extremely sloppy and poorly argued), but the idea that they said we should sequester low IQers was misattributed to them by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. Gladwell later issued a correction.
Crusty Dem
@tim:
Also, you should never read the complete works of L Ron Hubbard.
Mayur
@joe from Lowell:
FTFY.
Mark S.
@tim:
Fine, go read em. Really, nobody’s stopping you.
Brachiator
@tim:
Nobody, anywhere in this thread, said that you (or anyone else) shouldn’t read any of these books.
If anything, people were mocking the vehemence with with you pursue a phony argument based on your own mis-perceptions.
joe from Lowell
No, Mayur, nice, soft, rotten vegetables.
Scorn, not harm. We are not fascists.
Mnemosyne
@tim:
It’s a bad idea for you because you seem to be the kind of weak-minded person who would read Mein Kampf and think, “You know, I really think this guy is on to something here when he talks about how the Jews are rodents who need to be wiped out.”
For a reasonably intelligent person, it’s not a bad idea to read those kind of books since they will understand the history behind them and realize why it’s a “bad” book (ie it led to the murder of 12 million people, 6 million of them Jews).
KXB
In a well-written piece, we see the appearance of this tiresome trope:
“(3) race is an artificial construct”
No, it’s not. How we deal with racial differences is open to debate, but noticing that people are different is not. It’s why my white doctor tells my skinny Indian ass that despite being healthy is most respects – not overweight, exercise regularly – I am at higher risk for clogged arteries simply due to being Indian.
brat
150 years ago when I was a doc student, we had to read and then deconstruct The Bell Curve. What struck me the most was the use of prior research. Check the reference list and you should see a few citations in German from the mid1930s.
Curious, no?
For some reason, I don’t think Sullivan ever bothered to read the references.
maus
@Svensker:
People who are right for the wrong reasons and never grasp why can not ever be trusted or counted upon.
@tim:
I know Jersey Shore is a piece of shit, but I don’t watch it because I’m afraid of it. I know Stormfront is a horrible webforum, but I’m not afraid of “the truth” when I refuse to visit every single thread. If a piece of media/content is utterly worthless, one doesn’t have to “know their enemy” to feel content.
If we gained control over space-time and had enough time to read everything, and had omnipresence enough to fact-check every single citation, study, anecdote, or reference, this would be different.
But, an unreliable source is untrustworthy, and sometimes reading certain ones CAN be more harmful than good when analyzing reality outside their ideological framework.
bozack
I’d add (1)(a): it’s not clear just what those tests measure. People love to talk about IQ, but Dutch conscripts scored 30 points higher on the same test in 1982 vs. 1952.
IQ measures societal output along with individual capacity.
Mnemosyne
@joe from Lowell:
IIRC, the epicanthic fold of the eyelids that’s considered to be the hallmark of “Asianness” is also found in several places in Africa. A recent genetic study of Aborigines in Australia discovered that, despite the strong superficial physical resemblances, they’re actually descended from other Pacific Islanders and did not get directly to Australia from Africa as had been theorized by looking at their physical characteristics. Etc.
It’s interesting to me that the more we study “race,” the more we find that there’s a heck of a lot more overlap in the supposed hallmarks than we ever realized.
PIGL
@tim: this is completely idiotic. Persistent lies and propaganda are dangerous.
Mnemosyne
@KXB:
That’s a population difference, not a racial difference. The reason it’s not a racial difference is that your white doctor and you are the same race.
It’s true — you’re as Caucasian as my Irish/Italian/German self is, even though there’s a difference in our skintones. It’s just that your ancestors stopped off in India and mine said, “Nah, it’s just not fucking cold enough for me here” and kept going into Europe.
Svensker
@tim:
The point is, obviously, that some books are just too silly or dumb to bother reading. Doesn’t mean anyone’s stopping you from reading them, but if you don’t want to take other people’s advice, go ahead and waste your time on utter crap. Anything by Tom Friedman would be a start. And the book I mentioned, which was written in the 50s by a pro-Hitler American who thought that he was visited by aliens/spirits who showed him how to exist on another plane — presumably one where there were no Jews.
Honestly, do you bang your head against walls because you enjoy it or you just trying to knock a little sense into yourself?
Elijah
Semi-apologizes? What post did you read?
Brachiator
@KXB:
Indian is a race?
I was looking at the Saletan piece in Slate and wanted to bang my head on the desk from the jump. Consider the title:
Apparently, there is not a white-Indian performance gap, or at least not one that anybody cares about.
The point here is not that race is a taboo subject, but that people who write about race, especially Americans, do so with a mind-numbing stupidity.
joe from Lowell
@KXB:
The concept of race goes beyond noticing that people are different. It involves choosing certain differences, and ignoring others, in order to categorize people into four arbitrary categories.
For example, “Indian” – assuming you’re talking about being from India – is not a race. Why not? Well, once upon a time, it was – as were “Jewish” and even “Irish.”
Racial categories are arbitrary.
maus
@tim: Nobody’s suggesting it be banned/burned, you tool. And you’re not any more or less likely to read it than you ever were, you just drunkenly stumbled across this site from Freep or somewhere else and had to vent about how LIBERALS are the TRUE RACISTS because we’re intolerant about intolerance or whatever shit you’re spouting today.
Fill your head with trash all you want, but don’t expect interest and excitement when you come back here to tell us all you’ve learned from the “surprisingly reasonable” bell curve.
Napoleon
@joe from Lowell:
I disagree with the first part, in so far as boundaries are any more “artificial” then a zillion others drawn by humans on a bunch of different matters that no one doubts are valid. Are there graduated variations? Yes. Race is what would be called in other animals a subspecies. They can reproduce with each other, but have a completely or largely distinct population. But because we are all the Human Race genes mix.
You could take the Romper Room (“I see Jimmy and Suzie and Frank . . . “) view of humans or recognize that they clearly clump into groups, even if there is overlap or incorporation of others into other groups.
People do it all the time, and frankly this is one of these things if you are a liberal, and say what DougJ said in a room of most people, they are, rightfully, going to thing you are a fuzzy headed knucklehead.
And you do nothing but discredit everything else that comes out of your mouth if you happen to say “race is a social construct.”
DBrown
@Mnemosyne: WT hey? 12 million? Just the Russians lost over 20 million! The estimates are 60 million due to hitler BUT China is excluded (often) and they claim 20 – 40 million (starting in the 1930’s); so, the grand total could have reached 100 million.
Maybe your figure of 12 million dead is for something else that I missed?
Napoleon
@Mnemosyne:
As I said above for Humans we call it race, in every other animal scientist call it sub-species.
El Tiburon
Reading Balloon Juice in reverse order can be interesting.
Tim was getting absolutely butt-slammed, so I was very eager to finally get to his original post that started the shit storm. Meh, not so much there really. Kind of like a poorly made version of Memento.
Also. DougJ has gotten knocked around pretty good as well. The consensus seems to be he is hopped on hillbilly heroin.
Stillwater
I applaud Tim for an act of genius in this thread: he criticized a commonly held view as being closed-minded, and the ensuing Revenge of the Offended made his point for him. Well done, my man.
FlipYrWhig
@Napoleon:
But isn’t that the whole point? That boundaries are always artificial, making it interesting to discuss how they happened to get drawn?
Mnemosyne
@Napoleon:
I’m afraid you have no idea what you’re talking about. Race is distinct from the concept of subspecies. As I said, Siamese cats and Russian Blue cats look very different than one another, but they are not considered “subspecies” of felis sylvestris. They’re all the same cat. A chihuahua and a Newfoundland are not considered separate subspecies of dogs, either. They’re all canis familiaris, just different breeds. Race is to humans as breed is to dogs and cats. A subspecies is something else entirely.
You really should look these terms up before you decide to use them.
Mnemosyne
@Napoleon:
No, in every other animal scientists call it “breed.” A subspecies is something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.
Look it up, please, before you embarrass yourself further. Breed/race and subspecies are not the same thing scientifically. At all.
Mnemosyne
@Stillwater:
Yep, nothing more genius than defending your right to think Mein Kampf is a great book worthy of being read by everyone. You sure got us there.
DougJ
@tim:
I have read excerpts of it, though not the whole thing.
Adam C
@Napoleon:
I also think of “nobility” as a social construct, but if you like, you can argue that it’s a subspecies and call me a fuzzy headed knucklehead.
How many subspecies of human are there, then? Since most people “rightfully” know what they are, I want to be in the club. Hopefully there’s a biological division you can point to and not just skin colour.
DougJ
@Josh:
I should have qualified this with “in the United States”. I am aware of a great deal of anti-Israeli sentiment in Europe which seems (to me) anti-Semitic. I do not see much of it here. Not none, but not much.
joe from Lowell
No, race is not what would be called in other animals a subspecies. Race is a social construct. The collections of human populations into races is arbitrary, and the more we learn about genetics, the more we realize that the groupings are nonsensical, based on superficial perceptions unsupported by the genes.
There is greater genetic diversity about sub-populations within sub-Saharan Africa than there is between European people and Asians, yet the former are lumped together into a single race, while the latter are split into two races. It is as if St. Bernards, Corgis, and German Shepherds were lumped into one subspecies, while black and yellow labs were counted as two.
You, apparently, don’t actually know very much about human genetic diversity and populations, and yet you decided to adopt a haughty tone with those of us who do, based on nothing more than your feelings. I don’t really care about your appeal to the mob, either. I realize that most people buy into these categorizations – that’s what “socially constructed” means.
DougJ
@KXB:
That’s not race.
Mnemosyne
@DBrown:
It’s basically the figure for everyone who died in a concentration or death camp at the hands of the Nazis and includes Rom (Gypsies), homosexuals, political prisoners, and other assorted “undesirables.” The 6 million figure you hear most commonly is only for the Jews who died in the Holocaust.
I believe the figure also includes the 200,000+ disabled people who were murdered in institutions across Germany in Action T-4, but I could be wrong about that. Jews were the largest single victim group, but they weren’t the only targets by any stretch of the imagination.
Stillwater
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t think it’s great book – the arguments could have been a little tighter, and sometimes the sentence and paragraph structure is awkward. Maybe that’s due to loose editing, or poor translation. So, no, not a great book. But certainly a book worth reading.
Mike Furlan
@Napoleon:
Define “black”.
DBrown
@Napoleon: Sub-species because two cats differ in type? Are you for real? A St. Bernard is a sub-species of dog’s? You are so beyond knowing what you are talking about as to make Palin look smart … wait a second, no one can be that stupid … you are just getting us to pull your chain – no one who writes here believes such $hit; that is funny and you had your joke.
joe from Lowell
I read Mein Kampf. OK, I got about 2/3 of the way through and gave up.
What a mind-bogglingly boring p.o.s. that was. You’d think it would at least be interesting, in a look-into-the-mind-of-evil sort of way. Like an Ayn Rand book.
But, no, it’s just dreary, boring blather. It’s like listening to an anti-semitic insurance salesman tell you about his dreams and childhood for six straight hours. Talk about the banality of evil.
Napoleon
@Mnemosyne:
I never said the cats you discussed were a subspecies.
The human groups that form large subgroups have lived in relative isolation from each other, some more then others, over that last, what, 10k to 100k years?
As to breeds of animals they are basically human “inventions” not the result of geographic isolation.
All that aside, anytime anyone spouts that race is a social construct 99.9% of the people that hear you say that are going to think you are the biggest idiot they ever met.
DBrown
@Mnemosyne: Thanks for the info- but I can to follow the logic that all those deaths are just part of the murder of all people in the war and prefer to quote the full figure so people understand how unbelievably terrible that war was and what hitler did (lets not forget uncle joe and how he helped murder a few million of those Russians, too.)
FlipYrWhig
@joe from Lowell: I have a feeling that “social construct” sounds to some of the naysayers on the thread the way “theory” sounds to evolution skeptics: it must be a fancy way of saying “just a guess” or “all made up.”
That’s not what the phrase means to me, at least. It’s legit to say “Sex is a social construct” (let alone “gender”) and still accept that there are such things as men and women, defined and grouped by a set of consensus views about the crucial differences that emerged in both obvious and non-obvious ways — hence, “socially constructed.”
Napoleon
@DBrown:
I never said that about the cats you fucking idiot. Read what I said.
I was actually thinking in terms of birds.
http://avibase.bsc-eoc.org/
ciotog
If we’re going by hair color, I’m blonde.
If we’re going by skin color, I’m pasty.
But if we’re going by blood type, I’m Asian–I have a bloodtype that is rare in Europe but the most common in Asia.
That we divide people up by hair and skin color is biologically arbitrary. It is only socially meaningful.
Generally, our racial categories describe historical conflicts or historical oppression. That’s why my students, circa 2010, are often surprised to hear that Arabs are considered Caucasian.
joe from Lowell
The human groups that you define as “forming large subgroups” have less diversity between them than different populations within the category known as “black.”
You can appeal to the mob all you want, this isn’t a matter of opinion.
Race is a socially-constructed phenomenon. The fact that the definitions keep changing should be the tip off.
Mike Furlan
@KXB:
OK, define “Indian.”
joe from Lowell
Seriously, am I supposed to pretend not to know the things I’ve learned about human genetic diversity and the arbitrary nature of race because of peer pressure?
The funniest part is, it’s supposed to be those of us who dispute the conventional narrative about race who are shutting down thought through social opprobrium.
Napoleon
@Mike Furlan:
Black is what some people call a color, but which is a total lack of light.
It is sometimes also used in the US to refer to the largely west African origin peoples here as a result of the slave trade.
If you want to talk about Africans there are actually several distinct populations, more closely related to each other then other populations, but more diverse then any other because they are the most ancient population. But they still have distinct sub populations with distinct characteristics, however you describe them.
FlipYrWhig
@Napoleon:
I’m not an anthropologist, but it sounds to me that you’re talking about “peoples” or “tribes” rather than races.
Mnemosyne
@Napoleon:
There is no such thing as a human subspecies. It doesn’t exist. It’s something you pulled out of your ass because it sounded all science-y and now you’re desperately trying to backpedal. Humans are humans are humans, the same way dogs are dogs are dogs.
And it’s funny that I’m at least trying to compare mammals to mammals while you’re trying to compare one particular kind of mammal to birds instead and insist that humans have more in common with birds than they do with their fellow mammals.
Mike Furlan
@Napoleon:
So if stupid people say you are stupid, you should change you opinion, lest you be thought stupid?
FlipYrWhig
@joe from Lowell:
And, furthermore, there are A LOT of socially-constructed phenomena. Practically all of them! Which is why calling race socially constructed is both meaningful and yet at the same time kinda obvious.
Mnemosyne
@joe from Lowell:
It’s the same way that racist or sexist jokes are the height of edgy modern humor and certainly not throwbacks to an earlier time that sound like something Henny Youngman could have spouted because shut up, that’s why.
Mike Furlan
@Napoleon:
So Barack Obama isn’t “black” then, because his father was from east Africa, and he didn’t decend from slaves?
FlipYrWhig
@Mike Furlan: Or, if Obama isn’t “really” black, why does Fox News keep running all these stories about how he’s intent on favoring black people over white?
Napoleon
@joe from Lowell:
Which is why different “races” tend to have different ear wax and hair structure, seriously different mortality rates to different thing and etc, etc.
But you go ahead an not pretend.
Off to dinner for me.
Napoleon
@Mike Furlan:
Did you read what I said?
Maybe you are unaware of what largely means?
FlipYrWhig
@Napoleon: Well, OK, I mean, women tend to have vaginas, but that doesn’t mean that sex isn’t a social construct.
Napoleon
@Mike Furlan:
PS you moron, a bunch of “African Americans” political leaders in the Chicago region actually ran Oboma down when he was running for his state senate seat as not being black (or black enough) because of his east African heritage.
Mnemosyne
@Napoleon:
And this makes them different than dogs and cats who have different body structure, hair types, hair color … how again?
You’re really wedded to this outdated notion of “race” that is absolutely not scientifically supported by current research. At all. This is why most scientists talk about “human populations” rather than “race” — it’s no longer a useful term to discuss much of anything.
Mike Furlan
@Napoleon:
What ear wax should the president have before we can consider him “Black?”
How do you characterize “hair stucture?”
I don’t remember reading about any of this in the ‘Bell Curve.”
Was there an “Afro-Sheen and IQ” appendix?
Mike Furlan
@Napoleon:
So it’s West and East Africans?
Why didn’t you say so?
What about South Africans?
FlipYrWhig
@Napoleon: That’s proof that blackness is a “social construct”: black leaders challenged Obama not for his pigment or nose or hair not being “black enough” but for his _background_ not being “black enough,” especially because of his detachment from the experience of slavery, deracination, and diaspora. Or, in other words, to qualify as “black enough” was a matter of history and struggle.
Mnemosyne
@Mike Furlan:
Don’t even bring North Africans into it, because that’ll make the poor guy’s head explode.
Mike Furlan
@Napoleon:
Oh good, that helps a lot.
So we need to check with Chicago Politicians to decide who is black and who isn’t.
I don’t think Murray and Herrnstein did that, another methodological flaw in their book.
Mike Furlan
@Mnemosyne:
I see your North Africa and raise you a Madagascar.
There is no limit in this game.
Stillwater
@FlipYrWhig: And, furthermore, there are A LOT of socially-constructed phenomena. Practically all of them!
Yes, this is true, but some sciences are interested in identifying and explaining phenomena which aren’t socially constructed. (I know the post-modernists will roll their eyes at my suggesting this.) Physic’s project is to identify fundamental mind- and culture-independent properties of the world. For example, gold isn’t simply a yellow metal used as currency by certain cultures in bad economic times, it’s characterized by its atomic number. Something without that atomic number (according to the scientific definition) cannot be gold. In a certain sense, this identification of ‘gold’ with a particular atomic number can be viewed as socially constructed. But that is a mis-characterization: all knowledge emerges from and is contained within a cultural context, but it does’nt follow from this that all knowledge is socially constructed.
So, getting back to race and the semantics of that word, genetics and organismic biology are disciplines that, wrt race, try to identify culture-neutral properties of what we call ‘races’ and thereby give that word a scientific meaning. But the project – the area of inquiry – requires at least some prior understanding of what constitutes a racial group. Usually this is determined by skin color. Trivially, then, science cold merely identify the gene responsible for vagaries in pigments among groups of humans, call that the racial difference between the groups, and write a QED at the bottom of the paper. But this is a bit question begging, as well as unsatisfying: racialists want there to be substantive psychological differences between so-called races that exist at the level of the genetic code.
Wait! I don’t know wtf I’m talking about. What was the question?
matoko_chan
1. The “Bell Curve theory” is a hypothesis that statistical representation of IQ measurements in a population conforms to the shape-of-a-bell, ie a Gaussian or Normal distribution.
2. There are measurable, significant between-group differences in racial IQ and g, and indeed, between socio-religious demes like Ashkenazai jews and the general population.
3. Because pig-ignorant and evil people exploit this information for their own ends is not a reason to stop scientific research or deny scientific data.
4. Within the next decade we will see analysis proving a significant measurable gap in between-group IQ and g between liberal and conservative affiliation, for four reasons; evo bio and evo psych ( the savannah principle), game theory and skill leveling, memetic evolution and evo theory of culture, and advances in fMRI technology.
So, will liberals use this body of research to act towards conservatives like conservatives act towards blacks?
Mike Furlan
@matoko_chan:
How does this “group” thing work?
Is it like the Smothers Brothers song:
“I can see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.”
“I see by your outfit you are a cowboy too.”
“We see by our outfits that we are both cowboys.
If you get an outfit, you can be a cowboy too.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_Laredo_(song)
Stillwater
Moderation, Doug? Really? Was it that offensive?
Mnemosyne
@matoko_chan:
Not that I didn’t already know you were a pseudoscience-believing idiot but … evo-psych? Really? The “science” that proved that all men everywhere in the whole world are naturally rapists because they did a survey of police reports from a single American city?
mclaren
Point 2) is crucial. The correlation coefficients are complete crap. They’re down in the mud. 0.37 or below. That’s garbage.
There’s a point 4) everyone should be aware of. Charles Murray isn’t a population geneticist. Murray has no scientific expertise at all. Charles Murray is a political “scientist.” His gibberings about population genetics carry all the weight of Tunch’s meows about calculus.
jl
I think the Bell Curve is poor and biased research. I got a bad impression from the start when I took a copy to a local university with a good psychology library and spent an afternoon going through the book’s literature review and comparing it to other literature reviews and bibliographies and articles. After a few hourse, it was obvious the book’s literature review was both very incomplete and very biased.
The book’s statistical analysis is bad. The authors’ do not understand the measure of heritability that they use, they do not understand how to interpret analysis of variance or correlations. Their use of logistic regression results to do simulations in the last half of the book mixes up the effect of estimated regression parameters and the distributions of population characteristics.
The speculative extrapolations that constitute the policy recommendations of the book are very speculative, and built on the authors’ misunderstanding of statistics.
A number of very distinguished psychologists and biological scientist types endorsed the book, but I have to wonder whether they really read the whole thing. Maybe they just felt that any book said that a substantial part of measured intelligence is heritable (which seems to be true) had to be supported, even of big chunks of the book were a mess from every viewpoint.
I would not rely on that book for any reliable information about the real world, or the people in it.
Stillwater
Repost of moderated comment w/ some additions:
And, furthermore, there are A LOT of socially-constructed phenomena. Practically all of them!
Yes, this is true, but some sciences are interested in identifying and explaining phenomena which aren’t socially constructed. (I know the post-modernists will roll their eyes at my suggesting this.) Physic’s project is to identify fundamental mind- and culture-independent properties of the world. For example, gold isn’t simply a yellow metal used as currency by certain cultures during hard times, it’s characterized by its atomic number. Something without that atomic number (according to the scientific definition) cannot be gold. In a certain sense, this identification of ‘gold’ with a particular atomic number can be viewed as socially constructed. But that is a mis-characterization: all knowledge emerges from and is contained within a cultural context, but it does’nt follow from this that all knowledge is socially constructed.
So, getting back to race and the semantics of that word, genetics and organismic biology are disciplines that, wrt race, try to identify culture-independent properties of what we call ‘races’ and thereby give that word a scientific meaning. But the project – the area of inquiry – requires at least some prior understanding of what constitutes a racial group. Usually this is determined by surface properties, like skin color. Trivially, then, science cold merely identify the gene responsible for vagaries in pigments among groups of humans, call that the racial difference between the groups, and write a QED at the bottom of the paper. But this is a bit question begging, as well as unsatisfying: racialists want there to be substantive psychological and physiological differences between so-called races that exist at the level of the genetic code. Furthermore, science could determine such a thing is the case. But the tricky thing for the scientist, it seems to me, is to establish a correlation between a) a ‘racial group’ trivially determined by surface properties and b) certain underlying genetic differences which cause (or are correlated with) non-trivial properties like character or IQ which is based on c) a methodology entirely free from culture-dependent concepts and testing methods.
I think that is hard to do.
matoko_chan
@Mnemosyne: there is a biological basis for all behavior.
my mantra.
;)
Mike Furlan
@matoko_chan:
Show me the genetics.
We can’t even decide if the president is “Black” or not.
joe from Lowell
Because there are genetic difference among different populations – a point which, a smarter version of you might have noticed, not a single one of your detractors has questioned.
Of course, you have to use phrases like “tend to” because the racial categories you have quite clearly spent a great deal of time poring over – ear wax? You read Stever Sailer’s web site, don’t you? – don’t match up very well with the genetic patterns. There are populations that have quite disparate genotypes that are considered to be in the same race, and other populations that have similar genotypes which are considered different races.
There is no reliable pattern to which genes put who into what race. Which genetic differences are considered racial and which are not is a post-facto justification for a system of categorization that has only a loose connection to genetics.
Still waiting for you to rebut the point that different populations within the black race have more genetic differences than exist between white and Asiatic people.
matoko_chan
@Mike Furlan: it seems you are obsessed with a 20th century16 year-old book written by a political scientist and a freudian psychologist.
i think you should move on.
there is a whole lot going on in the science of intelligence here in the 21st century….for example….neuroscience and fMRI of IQ and g.
joe from Lowell
@Napoleon:
The bolded part is pure, unadulterated bullshit. We all remember why some black political leaders questioned whether Obama was “black enough” – because his father was an immigrant, he wasn’t descended from slaves, and he wasn’t raised in a black family.
Isn’t it interesting that Napoleon has invented this notion of a racial distinction between east and west Africans, and also invented a episode where black leaders in Chicago were talking about it? He literally dreamed up a racial explanation for a social/historical/political phenomenon.
joe from Lowell
@Stillwater:
No, they’re not. That most certainly not is what biologists and geneticists do.
In fact, biologists and geneticists tell us that genetic theories of race are meaningless, and describe biological differences in quite different language. They most certainly do not take the concept of race as a scientifically-established concept and seek to explain it. It is the biologists and geneticists who have done the most to make it clear that the racial categories we use aren’t based on scientific criteria.
Kiril
Oh God.
This is what “race is a social construct” means.
Did you ever watch “Saved By The Bell?”
Zack was the epitome of an all-American Californian boy. A white guy.
Genetically, he is half Dutch (European), and half Indonesian (Asian). But racially, he is white. Socially, he is treated as if he were white, one of the whitest people in America, even.
(In fact, I bet some of you are checking wikipedia right now because your minds = blown.)
joe from Lowell
@matoko_chan:
Since you’ve acknowledged that these differences can be seen between social, religious, and ideological groups – in other words, that different groups can score differently on these tests for reasons having nothing to do with genes, but with social causes – why should we not assume that the difference which is correlated with racial self-identification is also based on social, not genetic, causes?
It’s not as if there aren’t massive social, economic, political, and material differences that correlate with race in this country, and it’s not as though we haven’t long realized that these difference influence scores on standardized tests.
Mnemosyne
@matoko_chan:
So you’re one of those people who believes that interactions with other people have absolutely no effect on how a person behaves because it’s all biologically-based?
joe from Lowell
No, the Bell Curve’s theory is that the distribution of IQ across the population is caused largely by genetics, and that the relevant genetic difference correlate closely with race.
gwangung
Particularly given the phenomena of “stereotype threat.”
matoko_chan
@Mnemosyne: nah. SBH and SNT are two of my very favorite things. Evo theory of games is praps my all time fav. and games are played with other humans. There are four basic paths of inheritance; genetic, epigenetic, symbolic and behavioral.
@joe from Lowell:
Nope. I did not. A deme is a breeding population. learn to read.
matoko_chan
@Mnemosyne: I think you are really asking if i believe in total genetic determinism or total biological determinism..there is a lot of determinism, but it is not total.
I actually believe in free will, because of random effects on the border of the quantum and classical worlds.
Brachiator
@Napoleon:
Sorry. You are wrong. Scientists argue about the Linnaean taxonomy system because it does not adequately take into account subsequent discoveries in archaeology, biology, genetics, etc.
But even here, all humans are the same species. There is some recent debate over whether Neanderthals are a subspecies of homo sapiens. The current issue of Scientific American touches on this in a very interesting, non-technical article.
Human populations are not particularly distinct. Clothing, markings, tattoos, jewelry and language are often used to denote difference because even most humans don’t regularly see skin color, hair or other physical characteristics as significant enough.
Hob
Matoko_chan does not disappoint. While criticizing others for focusing too much on The Bell Curve rather than all the alleged cool new science she’s privy to, she keeps referring in nearly every sentence to “IQ and g”. The concept of “g” goes back 80 years to Charles Spearman and is the idol around which the Bell Curve crap was built – Murray & Herrnstein added little of their own except to pile in more and more misleading correlations to “g”. But “g” is just an aggregate of scores from various psychometric tests; if tests are highly correlated with g it simply means they’re consistent with each other. The aforementioned goofballs made the unfounded logical leap that if you could correlate enough things with this derived number, it must therefore have a physical basis.
Stephen Gould demolished this fallacy nicely in The Mismeasure of Man (a book which m_c will now dismiss haughtily, but will give no intelligible reason for doing so). Now m_c would like you to believe “g” now means somethingnew and more valid, but it’s not so; it’s the same old shit. It just sounds cooler and more jargon-y to say “IQ and g” instead of just “IQ”, and that’s all that matters to some people.
Anyone who’s seen much of m_c here already knows that she just likes jargon and never makes any sense, but I thought it was worth mentioning what this bit is about, since it does come up niw and then whenever someone wants to push the Bell Curve type stuff again without admitting what it is.
THE
@matoko_chan:
The freewill thing we need to discuss seriously somewhere else sometime. I think you are wrong that Q indeterminacy equates to free will.
Besides, quantum laws are MORE deterministic than classical laws. This is because classical laws admit chaotic solutions whereas QM time evolution is always unitary and time reversal invariant.
The easiest way to see the deterministic implications of this is in the MWI of QM.
Every possible outcome occurs somewhere in the branching multiverse. So how is there free will? – When another “you” makes a different decision in another universe?
You decide to turn left, another matoko_chan elsewhere on another branch turns right. Always.
matoko_chan
@THE: interesting.
but you assume Many Worlds. Im more of an Omnium grrl myself, but always open to delicious argument.
Convince meh.
The Penrose view, of course, is that you can always jump out of the system by utilizing trans-Turing noncomputable cognitive primitives, implemented by quantum-gravity state transitions in the entangled microtubules.
Praps Cole will give us a thread in which we may discuss teh free will, Q indeterminacy, and quantum game theory?
Like….what do you think the interface between the quantum and classical worlds looks like? is it a gradient?
THE
@matoko_chan:
“Convince meh”
Easy.
If I asked you for a date in this universe, somewhere my dreams would come true.
How can love conquer all unless MWI is true?
Hob
Oh yeah, also – not just to pile onto m_c, but because this is a really common misunderstanding – her attempt to summarize “the Bell Curve theory” just shows that she has no understanding of what a normal distribution means. The fact (not hypothesis) that you can graph IQ statistics and get a bell curve is not at all surprising, and does not imply anything at all about heredity. That is simply the shape you get from any measurement that’s influenced by a large number of independent factors – the more factors, the more likely that the curve will look like that. By contrast, if you convert eye color to a single number (say, highest spectral line) and graph it in a population, you won’t get anything bell-like, you’ll get several big spikes, because eye color is controlled by very few genes, some are strongly dominant, and not all values are physically possible. Similarly, if you look at personal wealth – which has many contributing factors but is clearly strongly heritable, and self-reinforcing – you’ll see a skewed distribution, not the bell shape you’d get if people’s fortunes rose and fell with equal randomness.
So inasmuch as the actual bell curve means anything, it’s virtually the opposite of what Murray & Herrnstein & matoko_chan believe: rather than a clear signal from an innate “g”, you’re measuring a noisy aggregate of all kinds of things.
matoko_chan
It would sure be a lot more entertaining than listening to these people gripe endlessly and pointlessly about Murray’s old book.
THE
@matoko_chan:
I believe the Tao emerges from the multiverse, as a result of exploring all the universes. And finding the one that leads to God.
Stillwater
@joe from Lowell: They most certainly do not take the concept of race as a scientifically-established concept and seek to explain it.
Which is why I said, ‘wrt’ in the prior post. If there is to be a scientific meaning of the word ‘race’, it will (by definition) be culture-neutral, hence, culture-dependent methods and concepts must be precluded from the methodology.
matoko_chan
@Hob: meh. the bell curve is a particular shape of one distribution. it is not a uniform distribution, or a Poisson distribution for example. IQ is a measure of intelligence and a composite variable. g is a measure of brain efficiency.
IQ and g are the psychometric tools we use…do you have something else?
You guys are essentially saying, we don’t like “rulers” and we don’t think “rulers” are accurate at measuring, so we wont measure anything anymore. good luck with that.
;)
matoko_chan
look…..you people hate Murray’s book..okfine.
so take him down.
compile all his errors into a post and put it on Cole’s sidebar. find sample size errors, metric errors, flaws in his statistical analysis, w/e.
purge yourselves.
then you can move on.
;)
meanwhile science has moved on without you.
Hob
@matoko_chan: I guess I shouldn’t expect you to give up your obnoxious habit of summarizing absolutely everyone who disagrees with you as “you guys” and claiming that what they’re all really saying is something laughably extreme. You’re clearly not interested in actually persuading anyone of anything. And if you’re a “science girl” as you frequently claim, then I’m Marie of Romania; I know quite a few competent scientists of all genders, and even the weirdest and crankiest of them is capable of writing a more coherent argument than you’ve ever produced here, without mangling every single technical term they attempt to use– and also capable of admitting error, something I have literally never seen you do. (However, I’ll believe you if you say you’re a computer scientist.)
So I’m just going to put you back on the pie filter for my mental health, and let you get back to your little games. But I think you may have reached a high-water mark here– it’s going to be hard for you to come up with anything dumber than your statement that “The ‘Bell Curve theory’ is a hypothesis that statistical representation of IQ measurements in a population conforms to the shape-of-a-bell, ie a Gaussian or Normal distribution”. You’ve managed to show not only that you don’t know the significance (or lack thereof) of a normal distribution, but that you can’t even accurately summarize the dumb point that Murray & Herrnstein so badly made. And you know why everyone keeps going on about them? Because modern right-wingers are constantly referring to them and using the same arguments as they did, and so are you, no matter how many times you hand-wave about “new research”.
tim
@Mnemosyne:
Your need for sneering, personal insults is something you should take up with a shrink.
tim
@maus:
OMG, you fucking stupid twit, I have come here at least twice a day almost every day…for YEARS. Unlike BJ ass lickers like you, however, I like to think for myself and believe it’s best to always be skeptical of groupthink, especially if said thinkers lay down their thoughts with more venom and anger and hatred and self righteousness than Glenn Beck.
So…since freaks like you have been telling people for years how The Bell Curve is the spawn of Satan and we must not read it because THE SUBJECT IS JUST TOO COMPLICATED FOR OUR SIMPLE MINDS TO PROPERLY PROCESS, you bet your ass I think it might be a good idea to actually read the source material.
People like you, who find it necessary to pile on the bile, usually have a very weak argument, otherwise why all the viciousness, a reliable sign of FEAR. What are you afraid of?
Mnemosyne
@tim:
Here’s the thing, sweetheart:
The ideas in Mein Kampf led directly to 12 million people being murdered. Why, exactly, are we not supposed to mention that fact and pretend that books never contain harmful ideas that probably shouldn’t have wide exposure? Should everyone read Mein Kampf and decide for themselves if Jews really are parasites who should be wiped off the face of the earth?
Mnemosyne
@tim:
Actually, the subject of The Bell Curve is very simple: black people are stupider than white people. It tries to dress it up in pretty pictures and graphs, but that’s what the book says.
There. I’ve just saved you the trouble of reading it. You’re welcome.
tim
@DougJ: @DougJ:
DougJ, thank you for a coherent and relevant reply. I appreciate it.
alicia-logic
@Hob:
Heh heh. I see what you did there.
Mark S.
@tim:
Then go fucking read it you goddamn jackass. Seriously, no one is fucking stopping you. The book’s been out for eighteen goddamn years or something; you could probably find it for $2 on Amazon.
I have the feeling you’ve never actually read a book in your life.
LibertarianAtheist
“My experience with REAL anti-semites mostly indicates that they don’t give a shit about Israel, and they tend to hate arabs as much as they hate jews.”
That’s dead wrong. Your “experience with REAL anti-semites” is obviously nill if that’s what you believe they’re actually like. Most of them believe that 9/11 was a plot by the Mossad to cause the United States to go to war with Muslim and particularly Arab nations to serve the interests of Israel, and that the Arabs are getting screwed just as much if not more than Americans, and that all the “Saudi oil lobby” conspiracy theories are basically just a Zionist plot to plant alternative conspiracy theories in the media to distract people and scapegoat somebody else for the wars that aren’t in America’s interests. It’s just that they tend to care a lot more about what happens to white Americans than arabs. They also believe that Israel is basically a parasite leeching off the United States and that the Jewish Zionists in the media are loyal to Israel and not the United States and that’s why we’re so fucked right now with regards to our Middle East policy; everything is done in Israel’s interest rather than ours. In short, they give a lot more shit about Israel than just about anybody else does except for fairly hardcore Zionists themselves, and they most certainly like arabs a helluva lot better than Jews, and unless you have an absolutely awe-inspiring ability to stick your thumbs in your ears and dance around singing “la la la la” when somebody says something you don’t like like the folks at National Review and the Weekly Standard, you’ll realize that not all of that is entirely bunk and in fact our nation would actually be in a helluva lot better position that it is right now if more people were allowed to say such things in the media without being summarily dismissed. While there’s a lot of craziness and lunacy there it’s generally a lot less harmful than the kind of craziness and lunacy that asserts that Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda and so forth, and the people who made those kinds of crazy assertions that have caused untold human misery and have been a disaster for our nation in so many ways are still treated as Serious and Respectable by the MSM.
matoko_chan
@Hob: shorter Hob: im a bio-luddite too and all my arguments are adhom and anecdote.
i just don’t see the percentage in hatin’ on a 16 year old book.
but you go right ahead.
good luck with that.
:)
scav
But the classics (including stupidity) never go out of style.
And winkys are a classic in jr. high.
matoko_chan
@scav: shorter scav: get off our lawn!
Marcus
In reply to LibertarianAtheist
How do you fight the zionist media without coming accross as an anti semite? The overrepresentation of zionism in media and government in the US is off the charts.
The US is more zionist then Isreal itself.
How to seperate the Christain zionists from the Jew zionists will be key in the future.
matoko_chan
@THE: all metaverses lead to the Real.
ya-haqq!
tim
@Mark S.:
Seriously, why are you so angry and hateful? Your spittle-spraying hysteria is more evidence that you aren’t sure of the ground on which you stand. What are you afraid of?
scav
@matoko_chan: No, shorter scav was throwing peanuts at cage.
You wield logic like a gerbil wields a scimitar and think a winky appeal to “science!” is a +infinity cloak of invulnerability. Files may be well-formed XML and may even pass some of the validation parsers but they still may contain nothing but rubbish in the real world, and the same goes for science. Eat your peanut. You can stay on the lawn if it makes you feel smarter and fattens your self-identification as a brave paradigm changer. oo
vanya
Are we now going to claim that different breeds of cats are different “races” and Siamese cats are somehow superior to Russian Blues because of the color of their fur and the size of their ears?
People talk about the different personalities, temperaments intelligence of cat breeds all the time. People also believe you can breed cats, dogs, horses, etc. to produce certain desirable characteristics. Yet we are supposed to believe that somehow humans are immune to the same laws of biology.
THE
@matoko_chan:
There is a significant difference in your cosmology whether the Real occurs at the beginning or the end of time.
I believe in a final cause.
Also The Real is a potential in Nature not outside/above it.
That makes me a monist and a pagan.
Adam C
@tim:
This was your first comment on this thread:
(all of which is wrong, btw)
Now you’re complaining that the people who respond are “angry and hateful”? Ballsy.
matoko_chan
@scav: lawl, pardon meh.
i’ll leave you old people to your manic ravings about a 16 year old book and take my uncrushable and uncrittable science armor elsewhere.
:)
tim
@Adam C:
TOUCHE
My apologies.
LibertarianAtheist
“How do you fight the zionist media without coming accross as an anti semite?”
The way it currently works is that the burden of proof is on the accused to prove they’re not an anti-semite; no matter how valid or true it is what you’re saying, you have to prove that you’re not an anti-semite first in order to be taken seriously by the MSM. That’s not the way it works with any other charge of bigotry, especially that of racism. In fact, it’s almost worst to be accused of playing the race card than to be accused of actually being a racist these days, although this whole Shirley Sherrod incident may finally turn that around. In contrast, if you say obviously true things like the Iraq war was a war for the interests of Israel and that the reason we keep having “terrorist” attacks on our soil is because of our government’s unconditional support for Israel due to the Israel Lobby, you’ll be accused of anti-semitism in virtually no time, and unlike any other charge of bigotry out there, it’s usually enough to destroy your career unless you have tenure somewhere. Imagine if William Saletan that because Ashkenazi Jews have a higher intelligence on average than the general population, that’s why they own most of the media outlets in our country, are overrepresented in the financial industry, have a tremendous amount of money, are incredibly effective at running PR campaigns, and therefore have a tremendous amount of influence over our government and that this was demonstrably bad for the United States, especially with regards for our foreign policy. Somehow, I don’t think Jacob Weisberg would have taken too kindly too that.
“How to seperate the Christain zionists from the Jew zionists will be key in the future.”
This will only further the double-standard described above, which Zionist Jews like Eliot Cohen will perversely be able to play to their advantage by stoking up resentment among evangelical Christians towards people like Walt and Mearsheimer even though they’re the ones responsible for creating it. The only way to win this battle is to fight this double standard and hold charges of “anti-semitism” to the same standard as charges of “racism” and “homophobia” are. By the way, saying that Ashkenazi Jews are generally more intelligent than the general population makes a helluva lot more sense than saying thinks about “blacks” and “whites”, since the Ashkenazi Jews are in fact a population with shared genes whereas the latter two terms refer to groups distinguished much more by history, politics, and culture than pretty much anything else.
Hob
@matoko_chan: Fuck you and your disingenuous smilies.
I know it’s beyond useless for me to respond to you now or ever again, but just for the record: maybe you think calling people “bio-Luddites” is all in good fun, but it’s an insult that I take pretty fucking personally. I spent a good chunk of my adult life working as an RN specializing in oncology and HIV care. Science for me is not just something cool to argue about, but a means of saving people’s lives. You have no goddamn business calling everyone here anti-science because they don’t buy your line on this one thing. Doing so makes you an asshole, no matter how many cute little :)’s and meh’s you sprinkle on top. People who get angry at you for that reason are getting angry not because they hate science, but because you are an asshole.
I have no idea what you think you’re doing with this bullshit, but based on your repeatedly demonstrated ignorance of every scientific topic you’ve hyper-confidently held forth about here– not to mention your bizarre lolcatesque writing style, and your habit of changing the subject whenever you get out of your depth (I made a very simple point about standard distributions, which could be reduced to “look up ‘central limit theorem'” if you knew what that was, and you answered with a non sequitur about Poisson distributions)– if you ever claim (as you’ve sort of coyly implied many times) that you’re a professional scientist of any kind or were trained as such, I’m fairly sure you are lying. You’ve certainly given no one here any reason to believe you.
That’s not ad hominem, by the way– one more thing you got wrong. Ad hominem would be “what you say must be bullshit because you’re a weirdo,” whereas I’m saying that you’re a weirdo because everything you say is demonstrably bullshit.
matoko_chan
@Hob: wow you are quite angry.
My point about the shape of distributions is that a uniform distribution is shaped like a block, and a Poisson has a vaguely humped distribution that is skewed to the side, and that the normal distribution is bell shaped. sampling a population for a measurable variable could result in a different shape, based on skewness, curtosis, and std.
im a semi-professional student, and you are a person arguing on the internet. ;)
yes? we are both persons arguing on the internet.
And to me, anyone that refuses to acknowledge the biological basis of behavior or refuses to admit that there is a measurable hereditary component of intelligence, or that believes in ensoulment of diploid oocytes is a bioluddite. …and those are only a few examples…i have many more…
Don’t take it personal.