Daniel Koffler on Saletan and all that. Also, Eric Turkheimer on Race & IQ in general. I was going to write that it is astonishing how persistent this rubbish is. (Philippe Rushton has been on the scene for ages. And, if I remember right, a few years ago he sent out one of his little pamphlets to all the members of the American Sociological Association.) But really, it’s not astonishing at all. While racist cranks will likely always be with us, their persistent ability to get the attention of the likes of Saletan is a predictable consequence of the interaction between a part of American intellectual and political life with some key facts about American history and social structure. I haven’t seen such exquisite handwringing about the hard facts of life since the schmibertarians started justifying torture.
{ 34 comments }
Grand Moff Texan 11.21.07 at 7:36 pm
Care for a taste of just how old-fashioned they are? They group human beings into a tripartite classificatory scheme of “Caucasoids,” “Mongoloids,” and “Negroids.” It’s in the 2005 paper, and it’s roughly as credible as the Shem/Ham/Japheth theory of race.
Sweet celestial matriarch of blissful copulation, I had no idea it had already gotten so stupid. Are there any anthropologists studying William Saletan yet? What exactly is the significance of that bone in his nose?
And since when is “sexual restraint” a sign of intelligence? Sounds more like sour grapes to me. Here, hold my copy of The Miscegenator’s Guide to Subverting Civilization while I nail your girlfriend, you gartered fop.
.
Order of Magnitude 11.21.07 at 8:10 pm
“the interaction between a part of American intellectual and political life with some key facts about American history and social structure.”
Very well said, there is no doubt about the skeletons in that closet.
That story has to be pursued just as vigorously as the other side of this illiberal Janus-faced monster, specifically the interaction between a(nother) part of American intellectual and political life with collectivist totalitarian utopias and their willingness to play ‘useful idiots’ to the anti-Western group du jour?
Stuart 11.21.07 at 8:28 pm
And since when is “sexual restraint†a sign of intelligence?
I thought that wasn’t related directly to intelligence, it was just used to help explain why all the blacks needed to get lynched, or later imprisioned in disproportionate numbers.
Grand Moff Texan 11.21.07 at 8:32 pm
Which is more amusing about post #2: the argumentum ad medium fallacy, the tired old bogeyman, or the punctuation? I’m so busy trying to find an anti-western group to facilitate my totalitarian collectivist utopia I can’t tell.
.
Crystal 11.21.07 at 8:48 pm
a few years ago he sent out one of his little pamphlets to all the members of the American Sociological Association
Lucky them!
Rushton’s loving detailing of various penis sizes makes me sense “gihugic closet case here.” I heard somewhere (wish I remembered where) that Rushton would do his “research” by approaching men in shopping malls and inquiring as to the size of their penises. I find it hard to believe that he didn’t get bounced out on his ear by security.
I know this is from the department of “duh, no kidding” but this racist pseudoscience seems to grow in public noisiness just as non-whites and women are making greater strides in equality. If the Dems win (please Deity please) chances are we’ll either have a black man or a woman in the White House.
Furthermore, Maria Root, in Love’s Revolution (a book on interracial marriage) relates that white women “marry out” more than white men do. And most black/white couples are a black man with a white woman. So white women are no longer a captive marriage pool for white men…they can choose a great guy of another race…white men are feeling the competition. Sucks to be them.
Total 11.21.07 at 8:55 pm
“What exactly is the significance of that bone in his nose”
You insult people with bones in their noses.
mcd 11.21.07 at 9:24 pm
When people lament the hard facts of life, they’re generally hard for somebody else…
Order of Magnitude 11.21.07 at 9:27 pm
Grand moff:
Let me remind you that the Soviets used to call the group I was talking about ‘useful idiots’ (no need for any bogeyman). History has proven they were half-right on this.
BTW sorry for the erroneous question mark and the distress this seems to have caused you.
abb1 11.21.07 at 9:34 pm
Eh, don’t make too much of it. As Saletan himself suggested in this recent little piece that, evidently, originated the big three-part piece in question:
Cute, but true. Typical provincial moron, insecure and overconfident at the same time. That’s all there is to it, I’ve seen it a million times.
Grand Moff Texan 11.21.07 at 10:05 pm
#8: no shit. Were you planning on being useful?
I hate having to explain the joke, especially to a joke, but that was the tired old bogey man in question. Larding it up with an invocation of fairness brought it to near North Korean levels of shrill insecurity and vaporous paranoia. Who says irony is dead?
I wouldn’t call laughing at some ignorant ditto-head “distress.” Just another day online. It’s no wonder that someone who sees a “part of American intellectual and political life with collectivist totalitarian utopias and [a] willingness to play ‘useful idiots’ to the anti-Western group du jour” around every corner can barely make himself understood.
But then again, it’s not like he’s even typing his own ideas, is it?
.
Ben Alpers 11.21.07 at 10:12 pm
Let me remind you that the Soviets used to call the group I was talking about ‘useful idiots’ (no need for any bogeyman).
Actually, to the best of my knowledge, Soviets never actually used this term. Since the late 1940s, it’s frequently been attributed to Lenin in the West, but it’s apparently unknown in his published writings.
So I suppose one could say that the continuing life of the term “useful idiots” shows precisely the need for a bogeyman.
Grand Moff Texan 11.21.07 at 10:20 pm
Shhhhh! Ben, quiet! The Fred Thompson supporters don’t know that the Soviet Union has been gone for sixteen years!
.
Barry 11.21.07 at 10:56 pm
Grand Moff Texan: “And since when is “sexual restraint†a sign of intelligence?”
Stuart: “I thought that wasn’t related directly to intelligence, it was just used to help explain why all the blacks needed to get lynched, or later imprisioned in disproportionate numbers.”
That’d be the origin, but in terms of the ongoing junk scientists here: is there even one Bell Curvist or journalistic sycophant who is an actual manly man – happily married with serveral children?
The picture that pops into my head is some useless fool who secretly realizes that his Ph.D. ain’t gettin’ him any.
Grand Moff Texan 11.21.07 at 10:58 pm
The picture that pops into my head is some useless fool who secretly realizes that his Ph.D. ain’t gettin’ him any.
Should have majored in English.
.
Order of Magnitude 11.22.07 at 4:19 am
ben alpers: It does not matter whether Lenin personally used it or not. The term’s origins may be lost yet the Soviets recognized AND exploited the phenomenon. Wikipedia has a brief discussion on ‘useful idiots’ (with the caveat that it focuses on US manifestation, while European ones were/are more common). I did not understand what the term really means until I talked to some trotzkist (sp?) activists in front of a Carrefour in Paris about a decade ago. I had travelled extensively in EEurope before and after the Wall came down, yet they insisted that was a workers’ paradise.
grand moff: Your post speaks of distress.
lemuel pitkin 11.22.07 at 6:19 am
Am I correct in thinking that “order of magnitude” is the famous Troll of Sorrow?
Rich Puchalsky 11.22.07 at 7:05 am
This is what Republicans are about. Racism and torture and endless aggressive war. Saletan is a liberal Republican, which I guess means that he’s a genteel racist.
Cue whining trolls, I’m sure. Listen, whining trolls, you supported Bush. You’re going to be tied to Bush for at least the next decade. There is going to be no presumption that you could be OK despite your right-wingitude, no second chance to prove that you are personally an OK person. Which is good, because really, you aren’t. Get used to it.
abb1 11.22.07 at 7:17 am
I had travelled extensively in EEurope before and after the Wall came down, yet they insisted that was a workers’ paradise.
That’s a beautiful turn of a phrase, I must say.
Believer 11.22.07 at 8:17 am
How can these hateful fools ignore the scientific axiom that, although all measurable aspects of anatomy and physiology vary among human individuals and populations, intelligence does not? Intelligence, being of the mind, is immaterial, transcendent, and immeasurable. Infinities cannot be compared, and finite test scores are of no relevance.
Jim W 11.22.07 at 2:13 pm
Turkheimer’s essay is sophistry, in my opinion. Basically, he’s saying that, since intelligence is a complex result of genetic, developmental, environmental interactions, that its impossible in principle to identify genetic propensities in a typical set of environments. This is not true.
Koffler, on the other hand, makes some very good points. The Flynn effect, in particular, is a significant consideration.
His point about “g” is not so relevant, unless I’m missing something. Why does it matter whether what we think of as intelligence corresponds to an aggregate of independent specialized intelligences in different domains rather than a generalized intelligence? I don’t see why it should matter.
Martin G. 11.22.07 at 3:17 pm
Speaking of dodgy methods, any comments on the methodology in this poll on Cuba?
4jkb4ia 11.22.07 at 4:10 pm
I thought that this business about race and intelligence affects the idea of “superior” and “inferior” races BECAUSE Americans give too much credit to where you started. It is a truism that Americans give credit to success in school to being smart while Asians give credit to working hard. A recruiter coming to my university said that even if you have only non-work-related experience to put on your resume, everyone has achievements: put those. This relates to Ross Douthat’s post. If we had an IQ test that measured intelligence beyond the shadow of a doubt, we still would not have something that measured merit: the willingness to use the intelligence and ability to work hard for the good. If merit is defined in this way I am not sure it is measurable. But there are people who want to believe that achievement is simply a function of intelligence because they don’t believe that we can do anything to mitigate the effects of environment even when we know they are there. If we took the results of such a test seriously, we might have to take gifted education seriously. This will affect the middle class, because they cannot pretend that all their kids are above average anymore. We might ask with Charles Murray if too many people are going to college. I will wrap up by saying that an IQ test has as much potential to be used unethically as embryonic stem cell research according to some religious beliefs because if we really arranged our society by IQ we would have to think about achievement and contribution to society for people of average intelligence differently. It would be obvious if one’s status in society had been bought. However if the rich can arrange things so that the poor are left out because of low IQ, but the rich maintain power in society, this would be unethical on every level.
4jkb4ia 11.22.07 at 4:14 pm
I have a MS in Computer Science. Really, I do. I am ashamed at the incoherence of the last post.
Bruce Baugh 11.22.07 at 4:21 pm
Jim W @ 20: In practice, defenders of intelligence-justified racism treat g as a unitary thing, as discrete as the rate at which your heart pumps blood, the volume of your lungs, or your shoe size. g is the thing that makes them as white people superior to lesser breeds and as gentry superior to lower classes. Since they’re aware that some fig leaf of justification for claims of superiority is usually in order these days, it’s important to them that their chosen leaf be as objective-seeming and clear-cut as possible.
This is very different from looking at how different sets of factors that contribute in some way to intelligence affect and are affected by environment, heredity, development, and so on. I’m reminded of discussions about measuring inflation, actually. The various measures all have at least some arbitrariness in them, based on which costs they choose to include the index. What the racists are doing with g is like someone taking a particular set of goods to measure, declaring that it’s the only real measure of inflation, that this set is fundamentally all one and can’t be usefully divided, and that no other set measures a real thing in the way that their Real Inflation Number does.
Grand Moff Texan 11.22.07 at 4:57 pm
grand moff: Your post speaks of distress.
By using the word “amusing,” yes. The straw man is very distressed.
Your writing is a witness to your inferiority.
.
Bruce Baugh 11.22.07 at 5:23 pm
Grand Moff, I should take this moment to note that the last paragraph of your #1 comment reduced me to howls of laughter, and had me passing the URL around to a lot of friends. I’ve long thought that it’s important to deny the pretense of respect to some kinds of crap, but seldom seen it done so vigorously well. Thanks.
Order of Magnitude 11.22.07 at 6:00 pm
abb1: “That’s a beautiful turn of a phrase, I must say.”
Beautiful or not, therein lies the empiric proof that the marxist “ideas” you worship are nothing but crap. Common sense, alas, eludes (most) marxists, who prefer instead to think EE and the Soviet Union never happened.
lemuel pitkin: I am not.
Moff, having to live with such a rotten temperament is all the punishment you need.
abb1 11.22.07 at 6:56 pm
Dammit, what will I worship now?
Kathleen 11.22.07 at 7:04 pm
sweet o.o.m.: it makes a joke less funny to have to explain it, so, shoot.
abb1, good one.
frank 11.22.07 at 7:34 pm
this recent little piece that, evidently, originated the big three-part piece in question:
If Mr Saletan continues to stick his nose in this trough, he’ll be sure to come across something unflattering:
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/its_whats_happening_now_baby/
Order of Magnitude 11.22.07 at 7:52 pm
abb1 #28: Le néant, mon cher, le néant.
bad Jim 11.23.07 at 8:17 am
Huh. I remember learning in college that the Irish were the only group known to have limited their population growth by means of abstinence.
ajay 11.23.07 at 12:34 pm
I had travelled extensively in EEurope before and after the Wall came down, yet they insisted that was a workers’ paradise.
Good point. No region that had o.o.m. travelling “extensively” around it could possibly be considered a paradise.
harold 11.23.07 at 9:20 pm
The Wikipedia article confirms that Lenin never used the term “useful idiots” and that it first turned up 1948 in attacks on liberals by Trotskites who felt that those liberal were unwittingly supporters of Stalin and his methods.
OOM confirms this when he says he first understood the term *a decade or so ago* by Trotskyites in Paris.
Notice that neither OOM nor wikipedia can cite a written instance of its use.
The belief in liberals as “useful idiots” (i.e., dupes of a totalitarian conspiracy) and in “white supremacy” and “the races of mankind” are all useful myths in the support of a agenda that has lost sight of its goals while redoubling its fanaticism. I am speaking of the paid, professional cultural cold warriors (undercover and not) who went after liberal and New Dealers from the early fifties on, and their various Neocon offspring and hangers on and who until 9/11 found themselves threatened with unemployment.
Incidentally, someone speculated that this issue of “racial” inferiority of the darker races is being raised now in an attempt to sabotage Obama’s campaign.
Comments on this entry are closed.