Bret Stephens, last seen passive aggressively picking a fight by calling someone who is Jewish an anti-Semite and, like someone named Karen, demanding to see that person’s manager (contacting the provost of the university of the professor who called him out on his stupidity), has written something VERY STUPID again! This is what we call a day ending in day.
It isn’t just that Stephens professionally lived down to his overprivileged mediocrity again, it’s that by doing so he both reinforced an anti-Semitic stereotype and did so by citing really bad research conducted by highly credentialed non subject matter experts that promotes racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. Joshua Benton does the debunking for us:
Bret Stephens cites a Henry Harpending paper in his "Jewish genius" column https://t.co/LQpug2ouKx
Here's an @nytopinion piece from *just last year* noting Henry Harpending was a white supremacist nut about this stuff https://t.co/0b5mBCwP0c pic.twitter.com/k3wY0I8EG6
— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) December 28, 2019
Cochran describes homosexuality as brain damage — but, hey, only "limited and focused" brain damage.
He says his theory is the only theory that "makes good evolutionary sense" that has ever been proposed. pic.twitter.com/1Qf1F5sQW3
— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) December 28, 2019
If you're wondering what in Cochran's educational background prepares him to speculate on Jewish IQs and gay viruses, the answer's "not much."
He has a PhD — in physics. He works in optics. But hey, "in recent years he has become interested in modern biology." pic.twitter.com/B54Slq7i0f
— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) December 28, 2019
Finally, just because I had the tab open, old man Harpending said women have one-night stands with Chads so they can get more shoes, because SCIENCE https://t.co/UyEKlg7aB7 pic.twitter.com/iRPUJajiKb
— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) December 28, 2019
I know I keep writing this here, and, I’m sure, I’m going to have to keep writing it, but Jews are not a distinct ethno-national group. Jews belong to a distinct primary religion that minimizes, and has minimized for almost 2,000 years as a survival strategy, conversion. As a result, Jews as a minority religious group, have a very distinct religious culture. And this religious culture also has several very distinct sub-cultures. One thing that the religious culture and sub-cultures of Jews and Judaism places an emphasis on is education and study. For the most devout this is first and foremost the study of Torah – Jewish Law as delineated in the 613 commandments in the Five Books of Moses/Pentateuch. For less devout Jews, this emphasis on education and study can be far more varied, which is why you will see Jewish Americans over represented in a number of fields like academia, law, and medicine. All fields and disciplines that require significant study and education.
Jewish Americans are overrepresented in these areas not because of any genetic differences. Other than among a small subset of Jews, specifically those who can document descent from the priestly religious caste known as kohanim (priests), there aren’t any real genetic differences between Jews who come from Europe (Ashkenazi Jews) and other Europeans, Jews who trace their descent from the Iberian Peninsula* (Sephardi Jews), Middle Eastern/Arab Jews (Mizrahi) Jews, Southeast Asian Jews, and Asian Jews from other Europeans, Spanish and Portuguese people, other Middle Easterners and Arabs, and other Southeast Asians, and Asians. There are three exceptions. All Jews share some genetic markers in common with Middle Eastern and southeast Mediterranean populations such as the Palestinians**, other Levantines like the Druze***, and Cypriots****. Given that the religion originated among a tribal people in the Levant, this makes perfect sense. The second is among the Ethiopian Jews, known in Ethiopia as Falasha and among themselves as the Beta Israel have some unique genetic markers most likely tied to the communities ultimate origins outside of Ethiopia followed by over a millennia worth of intermarriage with the local population. The third is among Jews of European descent whose ancestors, as a result of periods of forced isolation in shtetls and ghettos resulting from anti-Semitism, developed a propensity to the genetic disorder known as Tay-Sachs.
That’s it. Jews, like Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Taoists, Jains – religions that all have specific cultures and sub-cultures, as well as agnostics, and atheists, which also have specific cultures and sub-cultures, aren’t any smarter or any dumber than anyone else. And the same goes when comparing across the religion that is Judaism to the ethno-nationalities of parts of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Central, Southeast, and East Asia, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. There are smart Jews, there are stupid Jews, there are average Jews, there are good Jews, there are bad Jews, there are socially aware and responsible Jews and there are Jews who are racists and bigots and homophobes. Just as there are within every other religion. Whether they are primary religions like Judaism and Hinduism or secondary religions like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.
It’s pretty obvious what type of person, let alone Jew, Brett Stephens is.
Open thread.
(I apologize if I managed to leave your religion of choice off my list above.)
* There are some theories that the Palestinians are the descendants of some of the Judaeans who did not go into exile after the destruction of the 2nd Temple by the Romans. Rather they stayed in Roman occupied and administered Philistia (Palestine) and, over time, became Christian as the Roman Empire became Christian. Then, with the rise of Islam, the majority of them became Muslim. This would make perfect sense given what we know about the patterns of religious conversations in the Levant, Asia Minor, the trans-Caucuses, and southern and southeastern Europe with the spread of Christianity and then Islam through these regions.
** Given that there is very little publicly known, let alone documented, about the Druze and their religion as they keep their ritual life hidden from non-Druze and will often claim to not be Druze at all when dealing with other Druze, but Israeli, Palestinian, Lebanese, Jewish, Christian, and/or Muslim – it is not surprising that there would be some common heritage within the Levant. I know two Druze, or, rather, two people I think are Druze, but I can’t prove it and I’m not going to pester them about it.
*** There is speculation, based on historical records, that at least one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, the Tribe of Dan, was actually a Greek speaking sea faring people originally known as the Danutu. This tribe was absorbed into the Israelite kinship and cultic community. Interestingly, the Beta Israel of Ethiopia claim partial descent from the Tribe of Dan.
Adam L Silverman
I’m going to walk the dogs.
Tom Levenson
Thanks for this, Adam.
Bret Stephens’ column was both fractally wrong and fractally racist. He needs to go, of course, but what has depressed me most about this episode is the news that James Bennet, the op-ed editor for the Times who hired Stephens and has vigorously defended ole’ BedBug’s serial failures of thought, fact, reason, and respect for English prose, is a leading candidate to be the next Gray Lady top editor.
Feh.
Cheryl Rofer
@Tom Levenson: That makes sense, given that Dean Baquet currently occupies that spot.
Baud
You obviously haven’t met my mother-in-law. #rimshot
dmsilev
That tends to be a bad sign generally. See, for instance, the late career of William Shockley, who somehow became convinced that his Nobel prize for co-inventing the transistor qualified him to expound on the benefits of eugenics.
Stuart Levine
Adam, you said above: “Jews belong to a distinct primary religion that minimizes, and has minimized for almost 2,000 years as a survival strategy, conversation.” Do you mean “conversion”? From the portion of the paragraph that follows that statement, I believe that “conversion” is what you meant.
JanieM
Adam — when you’re back from walking the dogs, can you explain what you mean by this? Maybe I’m especially dim tonight, but it seems to contradict the whole idea of emphasis on education and study (which go hand in hand with conversation, in my experience), above all study of the Torah, which — or so my impression goes — consists of a 2000-year conversation in its own right. (I’m not Jewish, but some of my best friends etc.)
Baud
@JanieM:
I think that’s supposed to be conversion.
zhena gogolia
@Baud:
Ha, I knew somebody was going to catch that.
Could this finally be what brings Bret Stephens down? (I keep typing that sentence with respect to DJT and it never seems to happen.)
Tom Levenson
@JanieM: I’m guessing that was supposed to be “conversion.”
But Adam will confirm or deny.
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: Thanks for catching that. I’ve corrected it.
Now off to walk the dogs.
JanieM
@Baud: Ahhhh. That makes so much more sense. Thanks! Then again, I know three converts to Judaism, so maybe that’s why I didn’t read past the typo, or auto-“correct,” or whatever it was.
Tom Levenson
@zhena gogolia: I doubt it.
There’s a fair amount of institutional capital invested in both Bret’s contrarianism and James Bennet’s brilliance, so he can’t afford to confess publicly that there ain’t no there there.
Adam L Silverman
@Stuart Levine: Yep, mind wanted to write conversion, fingers defaulted to conversation and I didn’t catch it in the quick copy edit.
Thanks! It’s corrected now.
Adam L Silverman
@JanieM: I meant conversion. Brain went one way, fingers another.
Adam L Silverman
@zhena gogolia: No, because the NY Times official arbiter of anti-Semitism is Stephens wingwoman Bari Weiss. Who is also not a bedbug, just a mediocre overprivileged asshole too.
Duane
It just never stops with these overrated creeps. Yesterday it was Ben Domenech, now Stephens. What a couple of clueless twits. I want another timeline.
Adam L Silverman
And before anyone says, yes I misspelled his name. And yes I’ve now corrected it. Regardless, he’s still a mediocre overprivileged asshole.
Gravenstone
Saw Stephens’ name trending and wondered what his latest stupidity was. Living down to his reputation, yet again.
Anne Laurie
@Tom Levenson:
For you, a tweet from a (professed) Jew:
Hotep, Explained.
N.B. Doubthat and the execrable Goody Bruenig are both converts to Catholism, because their natal churches weren’t “traditional” enough to suit them. There’s a reason behind the old saying More Catholic than the Pope…
(Next step, these days, would be moving to the Greek / Traditional Orthodox church, like that nutball pundit who keeps yapping about the ‘Benedictine option’. But I suspect Mr. Bruenig is just a little queasy about letting his tradwife publicly slide that far right; it would imperil his own credentials as a True Leftist rosebro.)
jl
Actually, I think one of the better columns by the NYT’s conservative columnist quota. Some people might say that is very faint praise. Anyway, full of factual and historical howlers, and some nuggets of truth that are twisted into servants of harmful stereotypes and prejudices.
Thanks to some commenters above who pointed out some of the toxic stuff Stephen’s considers reliable sources.
debbie
“A women’s best strategy”? Can we not start screening out people who can’t keep their singulars and plurals straight?
prufrock
The minute someone starts prattling on about IQ, I feel compelled to say that reducing something as multi-dimensional as human intelligence to a single number is something a profoundly stupid person would do.
jl
Thanks for reading Stephen’s muddle so I don’t have to. Though, actually, I was curious about how many factual howlers it contains, so I did anyway. Quite a few.
Adam makes a good point about why Judaism doesn’t proselytize. They had to drop that angle because of persecution by majority and more powerful communities. And the perceived insularity due to necessity was twisted into one of the favorite antisemitic slurs.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman:
“But she’s so hot and adorable! Don’t hate on her just because she’s young & cute & has a six-figure gig representing The Young Feminists in the paper of record!” — every other response to comments that Bari Weiss might not be the perfect representative for either feminists or Democrats.
Baud
@prufrock:
+1
Baud
@Anne Laurie: How hot?
Viva BrisVegas
Now that Brett Stephens is marking out particular populations as superior examples of humanity, I think we should just give a thought to another such group.
The British. Obviously they have produced more than their fair share of brilliant physicists (Einstein was in awe of James Clerk Maxwell), engineers (Brunel, say no more), artists (Turner), actors (Geilgud among many), scientists (take your pick, mine is Faraday), industry (Stephenson) and the occasional doctor (Fleming, Jenner).
All this goes to prove that the British are better than the rest of us and we should genuflect in their general direction at every opportunity. Soccer hooligans notwithstanding.
Amir Khalid
@Tom Levenson:
Bear in mind, promotion to EinC at a newspaper is a reward not for service to journalism, but for service to the paper (however the paper chooses to define that service).
J R in WV
Really interesting detail about the Druse religion, and a striking similarity to the SW Native American Hopi culture. In the beginning of study of the various religions / cultures in the SouthWest, the Hopi were relatively outgoing and willing to discuss their beliefs with Anglo Scientists.
Then, one day, that all changed. They became totally unwilling to discuss any aspect of their beliefs, their historical record, anything whatsoever regarding the history, the culture, the religious beliefs, everything, with anyone at all.
Similarly, around the time of one of the big World’s Fair gatherings, Navajo elders were convinced to travel to the giant festival, where Native Americans from the Arctic to Central America were able to come in contact for the first time.
Turned out that Navajo language was very compatible with the language of Athabascan tribes from Canada. One day after this became evident, the Navajo elders were gone. Returned to their home land on a late night train, never to meet or discuss their historical traditions regarding the Athabascan culture with anyone. Some postulated that the Navajo left Canada, and went to the least Canada-like area of North America thinking that their other tribal relatives would be least likely to ever find them in the South Western desert where they settled.
I don’t know much about the Druse, but the tiny amount you provide seems to relate their culture in some ways to the Hopi and Navajo peoples of the Southwest. The Hopi and Navajo cultures are in the same physical area, currently the Hopi Nation is within the Navajo Nation, but they are not friendly, and do not discuss their mutual hostility with others, so far as i know.
And the Hopi don’t talk about their culture and religious beliefs with anyone, any more. Other than selling carved fetish objects to the tourists, that is. Money talks. Sounds like the Druse, won’t talk to anyone about their beliefs. Smart, when talking about religion can get you killed.
Jim Parish
@Viva BrisVegas: I’ve seen that claim made specifically about the Scots.
J R in WV
And I see this on the previous thread, from well known commenter Mary G:
Sounds like Bret is over the top, out of control, raging in his own community. Not good for his reputation, perhaps!?
WaterGirl
@jl: Please check your email for a message from me, thanks.
Amir Khalid
@Jim Parish:
A Scotsman once mentioned to me his surprise that so many of the Malaysian engineers he’d met had gone to Scottish universities. My reply: “When the English were ruling this country, it did not escape our notice whom they put in charge of building it.”
raven
@Baud: The google reveals not very.
NotMax
“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”
– Thomas Jefferson
@prufrock
Indeed.
“Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.”
– Aldous Huxley
Barbara
The evident goal of the piece was to equate anti-zionism with anti-Semitism. Stephens has also written grotesque, bigoted pieces attacking immigrants, and then lionizing them in comparison to white working class Trump supporters. Why he had to resort to eugenics to explain what seems to me to be a phenomenon with an obvious cultural explanation is just inexplicable.
NotMax
@NotMax
Ragga-fragga FYWP capriciously inserts that extra blank line between the quotations and the attributions. No such blank line placement in the comment as typed.
TomatoQueen
@Viva BrisVegas: If this means I have to genuflect to Boris Johnson or Frank Lampard, I ain’t doing it.
Anne Laurie
@Baud: She’s not my type, but then, at least 40% of ‘hotness’ lies in meeting a particular standard for the viewer. And the group against which Weis’ hotness is measured — NYT female columnists, or VIP columnists in general — is not, shall we say, a rich sample of female pulchritude…
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: I honestly I don’t find her physically attractive at all. And I find her intellectually disgusting. Her making herself the focus of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting because she happened to be home in the Pittsburgh burbs for the weekend visiting her family so she forced her way on TV to speak for her community, in which she no longer lives, and is likely not actually representative of, was as disgusting in its own way as Ron Dermer trying to turn it into an Israeli thing. The best thing that could happen to these Jews without Mercy is to have the herem imposed upon them.
Amir Khalid
@TomatoQueen:
If you prefer, you may genuflect to Stevie G, who is doing a fantastic job managing Glasgow Rangers.
Adam L Silverman
@J R in WV: The Dine (Navajo) are of the same descent as the Athabascans. It isn’t just language. Remember, Navajo, which is not a term of endearment, is the name given to them by other tribes in the area. While they may have absorbed some of the traditions and cultures of the inhabitants of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon and Canyon de Chelle, they are not their actual descendants and, Native American wise, are relative late comers to the four corners area.
Anne Laurie
@Amir Khalid: Heck, the ‘brilliant Scottish engineer’ is such a stereotype that Gene Rodenberry used it for his Star Trek pilot.
I’ve seen it claimed that the original Scots-going-into-engineering happened because good Scottish Protestants were cautious about getting too chummy with the high-church Anglicans who ran 19th century British universities. We’re seeing a related issue here in the States — ‘religious’ universities like Oral Roberts or Falwall’s Liberty U still produce engineering majors who can get jobs outside the right-wing veal pens, so there’s an excess of Mormons and Evangelicals among young engineers, compared to more ‘squishy’ majors.
raven
@Anne Laurie: I would take her to a dog fight if she was the defending champ!
Adam L Silverman
@J R in WV:
I’m putting that up top as an update.Schroff deleted the tweet.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman: But compared to Maureen Dowd, or Peggy Noonan, or even Megan McArgleBargle… Weis is, at least, younger & non-haggard. Like I said: Small group, low standards.
I mentioned it in the first place because that’s the go-to defense against any online criticism of Weis: Not You’re wrong about her beliefs, but You’re only jealous that she’s young & cute. Which is, of course, a very *traditional* defense — but not a good one.
Amir Khalid
@prufrock:
IQ tests must measure something consistently; every one I’ve taken gave me about the same score. But I once asked a professional psychologist what that something was, and he couldn’t tell me.
khead
@zhena gogolia:
No. No, it won’t. This has been SATSQ. FTNYFT edition.
Adam L Silverman
@Barbara: And don’t forget his columns about Arab intellectual inferiority.
debbie
@Barbara:
He seems confused. If he’s bad-mouthing Trumpists, why is he supporting Trump’s position with this anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism conflation?
schrodingers_cat
This morning I said that what is happening in Uttar Pradesh, India reminds me of Nazi Germany on Twitter and was accused by a Sangh sympathizer that I was trivializing what Jewish people went through by making the comparison.
What do you think?
joel hanes
@Anne Laurie:
But [Bari Weiss is] so hot and adorable!
Not seeing it.
Amir Khalid
@schrodingers_cat:
I don’t think you are trivialising anything with that comparison.
Anne Laurie
IQ tests as we know them, IIRC, were ‘invented’ to weed through potential Army recruits called up from the general population. The testees who did well on those tests possessed a certain standard of English/American literacy, and had enough educational experience to follow instructions about checking boxes, analogies, etc. Those ‘high IQ’ candidates could be shuttled into (high status) tasks requiring English literacy and basic understanding of ‘schoolwork’; ‘low IQ’ candidates, whether they were actually stupid or just uneducated/non-native English speakers/rebellious, were still good enough for cannon fodder.
But sorting out the “best” candidates for advanced education, high-skilled jobs, et al by IQ score was all too attractive to the eugenicists taking a new interest in government-based public education, so…
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: Because that’s the Bibi Netanyahu and Likud position. And Stephens and Weiss are both aligned with Bibi and Likud.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: What is happening in Uttar Pradesh is all too similar. And I’ve been planning on posting about it. I’ll try do it tomorrow because it is important that we don’t let it evade our attention.
joel hanes
@Amir Khalid:
Like the perl 4 programming language, IQ is mostly defined circularly.
perl 4 comprised whatever syntax the perl interpreter accepted
IQ may be defined as that quantity measured by IQ tests.
raven
There are a lot of people here who know a whole lot more than me about everything but I know good looking women, believe me.
khead
@Anne Laurie:
She’s no Sippy Cupp.
Jay
So who had “Bret Stevens writes a column off a Nazi study published by what used to be Eugenics Today” on their FTFNYT Bingo Card?
Anne Laurie
@schrodingers_cat: I think a lot of Jewish professionals have become defensive about Holucaust comparisons, because those comparisons have been thrown around so ridiculously, for every perceived slight (saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Xmas) by Trump and Trump supporters.
In turn, this has allowed genuine would-be mass murder sympathizers — people who support slaughtering their political or ‘ethnic’ enemies just for being ‘not our kind’ — to accuse every protestor against ethnic / social cleansing as ‘trying to steal the Shoah mantel’, as though that were a real argument against protesting Chinese oppression of the Uighers, or Modi’s openly stated plans for a Hindu-only India.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie: Never again either means never again for anyone that is threatened with genocide, ethnocide, and/or religiocide or it doesn’t.
Anne Laurie
@khead: That’s why S.E. Cupp has a TV gig, and Weis has a print column.
schrodingers_cat
@Anne Laurie: UP police have openly targeted Muslims, destroyed their homes, charged them fines for destruction of public property.
This is the tweet I was answering.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman: I’m with you. But I think you can see how the worst actors are using the (quite reasonable) defensiveness of some Jewish commentors as a cover for their own vicious filth.
Jay
CaseyL
The dumpster fire that is the NYT editorial page has been a dumpster fire for so long, in so many ways, that I have to wonder what the PTB there are thinking.
It’s possible the NYT has simply confused “controversy” with “clickbait” – or, rather, doesn’t care and just likes to be the center of attention: Wow! Look at all the people Brett pissed off this time!
I just don’t see what being a carnival barker has to do with journalism.
… that’s assuming the NYT actually gives a shit about journalism, which I admit assumes facts not in evidence.
debbie
@Adam L Silverman:
Yeah, that part I get, just not his bad-mouthing Trump supporters.
JanieM
@Amir Khalid:
They measure how good you are at taking IQ tests. ;-)
Or, what @joel hanes said
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
It’s a whole new ballgame.
raven
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: Georgia fans are not happy.
prufrock
Jay
Villago Delenda Est
If one is a fundigelical “Christian”, there are plenty of reasons to question one’s intelligence. Because the origin of this sect is the American Civil War, and the defense of the indefensible.
JaySinWA
@Adam L Silverman:
I understand that their contribution to mathematics was literally 0. ?
khead
@raven:
UGA fans should be more upset over that OU blowout.
Gin & Tonic
Open thread – so I’m looking at a quick trip to Vienna in February, possibly leaving out of the NY area. I can get a round-trip on Austrian Airlines for ~1150. I’ve also been looking at alternatives, like going to London and catching a Euro discounter to hop to Vienna. One of the cheapest flights to LHR is on Austrian Airlines. About $420. But it’s a one-stop flight, not non-stop. It stops in Vienna. It’s the same fucking flight. If I take it to Vienna it’s over $1100. If I stay on that plane and continue on to London it’s over $700 cheaper.
No, you can’t legally book it to London and just hop off in Vienna. They’ll invalidate the return leg.
debbie
@Anne Laurie:
I don’t know how it was up in Boston, but there was absolute outrage in NYC whenever anyone used the “H” word in reference to the genocide in Rawanda. Some said no one could use that word; others thought they could, providing they didn’t capitalize the “H.” At one point, someone suggested (in a NYT article) that the word be trademarked so no one else could use it.
Ohio Mom
@Shrodinger’s Cat: The specifics of what is happening in India may be a different set than those of the Nazis (do I remember something about bribes in your comment earlier today which I tried to respond to but new site technical difficulties) but a Holocaust is a Holocaust in my book.
i had an Aha! Moment as a youngster, many years ago, watching the movie The Killing Fields. The camera pans over a Cambodian valley filled with human bones, and I gasped in recognition that “They had a Holocaust too.”
I saw that my people’s tragedy was not unique, and I’ve been irritated by those who insist it is ever since.
We don’t seem to be hearing a lot about what is going on India, and I suppose there is a sad argument that this is similar to the Nazi-led Holocaust, which also did not get much attention in the American press.
Barbara
@JaySinWA: Good 1 (and 2 and 3 and 4 . . . )!
Stephens has a marked propensity to make broad categorizations along tribal lines and draw social policy conclusions based on the various stereotypes he finds embodied in groups. Although I find David Brooks to be infuriating, he doesn’t do that.
Amir Khalid
@JanieM:
@prufrock:
Yeah, I’ve heard that too.
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: He’s a NeverTrumper because he can’t tolerate the tone and behavior of the President and his supporters. Not because he doesn’t agree with them ideologically.
Gin & Tonic
@Ohio Mom: Or the Ukrainian Holodomor, which not only got nearly zero attention in the Western press, it was actively covered up by – drumroll, please – the Moscow correspondent of the NYT.
Adam L Silverman
@JaySinWA: I watched a brilliant PBS documentary on the Golden Age of Spain the other night.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: Have you considered asking Rudy if you can just deadhead on his chartered flight to go see Firtash?//
Gin & Tonic
@Adam L Silverman: The thought has crossed my mind. I could be useful to Rudy.
Lapassionara
@JaySinWA: Good one!
raven
@khead: Nah, we look a lot better than we did in light of that. We were never going to the playoff without winning the SEC but we sure played them tougher than OU.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: And then you can be useful to someone in an Austrian, Ukrainian, and/or American prison depending on how the whole thing shakes out.
JaySinWA
I expect the flight terms would be akin to the old “Grass, cash, or ass, nobody rides for free” hitch hiker motto
ETA
@Gin & Tonic: I see you have already worked that out.
cokane
thanks for the summary Adam, learned alot. Pretty execrable but not surprising from Stephens. I don’t get why it matters so much whether some accomplishments come disproportionately from people of a certain community? I never understood this weird score keeping. Especially since it can never be rigorous anyways, it’s going to be cluttered with a recency bias.
Still, I think his previous attempts to bully people via their employers because they dared to mock him or criticize him is the far more serious offense. I still have no idea why the NYT continues to employ him after he’s been caught doing that multiple times.
James E Powell
@CaseyL:
I think it really is something like that. Newspapers are less and less important every year. I wonder what their finances are like.
Mary G
@schrodingers_cat: This is normal for right wingers and Bret Stephens, too. efg’em.
Amir Khalid
@Ohio Mom:
Every people wants to take pride in being special and unique. Its achievements are beyond any other people’s, its cuisine is the tastiest, its culture the most cultured, its suffering the most tragic, and so on. Some of us rise above this petty tribalism; some of us are in denial that other peoples can suffer, or have suffered, as greatly as their own people.
Mary G
@Ohio Mom: India has cut off Kashmir from the internet and isn’t letting journalists in to cover it. So some of it is that. Still, SC has published more information that any paper I read.
kindness
Something’s happened to the publisher of the NY Times. It isn’t just Editor Dean Baquet, it’s the Sulzbergers. How it furthers them I don’t get. I just don’t.
Villago Delenda Est
@JaySinWA: ISWYDT
Ohio Mom
IQ tests have evolved, and they are very reliable, in that whatever you score as healthy adult on one test, you will score on another (within a margin of error), even over time (IQ tests are not accurate in young children, and brain trauma at any age can decrease IQ).
They are closely correlated with academic achievement; public schools use them to sort students (e.g., to identify gifted students for specialized instruction) and to help identify learning disabilities (a disrepancy between an IQ score and school achievement can be a sign of dyslexia and similar conditions).
All that said, IQ is a very narrow measure. There are other sorts of intelligence that IQ tests do not measure, and which are extremely important, especially so-called “emotional intelligence” and social skills.
Think of the stereotypical MENSA member, scoring an IQ in the genius range but an awkward navigator of everyday human interaction. Or conversely, that not-as-smart-as-you coworker who has finessed his way higher up the corporate ladder.
TL/dr: IQ is a real thing but it isn’t the only thing.
Jay
Villago Delenda Est
@Adam L Silverman: “They’re saying the quiet parts out loud with an air-raid siren!”
Anne Laurie
He doesn’t speak Ukrainian, and he’s really credulous. Just think of the stuff you could convince him was true!
(Speaking of Rudy: new post up top on that very subject.)
debbie
@Jay:
Jesus. From before Trudeau was even elected?
Anne Laurie
@Jay: Been there, mocked that, Friday morning.
Adam L Silverman
@Villago Delenda Est: Yep. And that scares those like Stephens who likes his fascism of the crypto variety.
Kay
How anyone can still purchase that newspaper after their barrage of lies on Iraq and their relentless (and continuing) promotion of Donald Fucking Trump is beyond me.
The op ed page is the least of their problems. At least that’s labeled as opinion.
It’s a newspaper by and for the rich and powerful. That’s what they value.
Ksmiami
@Viva BrisVegas: um hate to be the arbiter of bad news but Brexit alone is exhibit a of British stupidity and intransigence
JaySinWA
Obama lent him his time machine.
Bill Arnold
I mainly found Bret’s piece meandering and boring and pointless.
Re the “Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence” paper, it’s long (so just skimmed it) but it is a falsifiable hypothesis; has it been tested? (A large number of papers cite it; didn’t crawl through them all.)
Another, (shorter) more recent paper by two of them (the “interesting” ones mentioned in the top pose); they’re still at it: Assortative mating, class, and caste (2015)
Where they open with a hypothetical “Amish Quotient” as an example, then dive into general assortative mating. (Which is pretty close to eugenics.)
The transhumanists say “fuck that shit” and look short-term for ways to be smarter with the brains that they have, by trying to boost all the things that might be correlated with GI/GFI. Training, nootropics, etc.
The taboos against this stuff are not global; the Chinese in particular may indulge for nationalistic reasons. (Germline genetic editing, probably.)
karensky
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks for your incisive analysis. I learned some new and important things.
Anne Laurie
Adam L Silverman
@karensky: You are quite welcome, thanks for the kind words.
Yutsano
@schrodingers_cat: I responded. I was not kind.
Another Scott
Love the Spy vs Spy graphic on the flyout buttons. Perfect!
Cheers,
Scott.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: That’s what we went with for Silverman on Security. Watergirl was kind enough to turn it into a medallion for me so I could use it as the image on my email, text messages, and as the dedicated image for posts that don’t otherwise have an image for when the post is auto-tweeted by Cole’s feed.
westyny
Bret Stephens is a putz. Bari Weiss isn’t as remotely hot as Michele Goldberg (love that bob).
Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ
@Amir Khalid: my own IQ scores have varied widely. I have very little faith in them.
@J R in WV: Native Americans from a variety of tribes have told me the reason they stopped sharing their religion with outsiders is because it was used in ways that were disrespectful and often erroneous. Obvious examples include….white scholars printing their myths and legends and profiting from them without permission….scholars misinterpreting their stories and drawing meanings and connections to other tribes where there was no connection or if there was, the connection was offensive (which the white people either didn’t know about or care)….use of their rituals in profit making enterprises (hear about the millionaire who had people die in his sweat lodge?)….just so many examples….
Brachiator
@Ksmiami:
Yeh, Brexit Alone was pretty bad. Maybe Brexit Alone 2 will be funnier. Especially if the Canadians excise the Trump cameo.
bjacques
Thread’s probably dead, but…
In Amsterdam, it was Sephardic Jews who arrived, from Spain, Portugal and the Spanish Netherlands (i.e. Antwerp), a few centuries before the Ashkenazim, who they considered country cousins. Near my workplace, there’s even graffiti here with Baruch Spinoza’s signature, whatever that proves.
Bret Stephens can bite a fart.
AnonPhenom
@prufrock:
These days ‘everybody knows’ that the number for human intelligence is to be found on a person’s bank statement.
schrodingers_cat
@Yutsano: Thanks that was good.
WTF
Einstein himself admitted he didn’t have a very high IQ. Some suggest it was about 160. But he attributed his success to “interminable curiosity.” Einstein himself had no idea it was due to a brain structured quite unlike a “normal human brain.” I’m sure Stephens and the two pseudo-scientists he cites have less than ordinary brains. Happy Holidays Adam et al. Happy New Year, we hope.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/11/why-einstein-was-genius
GrueBleen
@WTF:
It’s probably worth remembering that Einstein was NOT awarded a Nobble Prize for relativity, but only for some smart earlier work on black-body radiation. Anyway, David Hilbert is probably nearly as much creditable for relativity as Albert (and he published his more comprehensive relativity paper 5 days before Einstein).
And that Rosalind Franklin, bless her heart and mind, was never awarded a Nobble Prize at all, despite having done all the necessary work to allow Crick (I refuse to credit Watson) to determine the structure of DNA (refer to Photograph 51).
And that makes me wonder: are Ashkenazi women as “disproportionately” represented in Nobble lists – and other public recognitions – as Ashkenazi men ? And if not, what does that tell us about IQs, eugenics, and Nobble Prizes ?
GrueBleen
@Anne Laurie:
Actually, AL, Alfred Binet invented the original IQ test to help him in his job as a French school inspector: he wanted a quick and reliable way to determine in a bunch of French schoolkids that he did not personally know, who were (i) proceeding very well and barely needing any teaching at all (ii) proceeding well along traditional teaching lines or (iii) falling behind and basically in academic failure territory.
Mainly so that he could get something done to provide better support for the (iii)s.
And by “intelligence” he meant something akin to “millitary intelligence” – ie what the kids knew, not some “inherent quality”.
Besides, IQ was conceived as a mental age to chronological age ratio, so unless it is continually adjusted, it gets smaller every year.