just a note

I have an emailer who I've been keeping up a more-or-less weekly email conversation with since, I think, the second month I ever wrote this blog, with occasional breaks when we really piss each other off. (He's a conservative, by the way.) This morning he sent me a request to make the anti- "scientific racial inferiority" argument myself, rather than lecture others about how to do it. And, you know, he's right.

I have made the argument many times in the past. If you use the search function you can find these versions. I do need to keep doing it. I just want to cop to the fact that I find doing it a profound challenge. Not because I don't think that the argument is correct, and not because I think I'm incapable of making it. But because race is the central political preoccupation of the American experience, and the argument is hugely important. So it takes a little time for me to muster the research and write with care. But: yes, he's right. It remains my responsibility. In the meantime, you can check this link for my thoughts on the subject from the last couple years.

Here's a sample on racial achievement gaps in standardized tests:

I wouldn't be surprised if a whole slew of factors, including poverty, exposure to lead, poor diets, parent educational background, the idiom tests are written in, neonatal health care, learning disorders, dyslexia and dyscalculia, lack of exposure to educational toys and games, low childhood reading loads, the persistence of syntactic immaturity due to parental modeling (my own academic obsession), and other environmental factors played a role. That doesn't even begin to untangle the web of what "black" means in terms of specific linear heritage, particularly since we are talking about a truly unique genetic history that has been conditioned by the rape and forced breeding programs that are common to chattel slavery. If I'm right and the origins of the racial achievement gap are revealed to be a stew of competing factors, it will make our job of closing the gap harder, but it will also hopefully blunt the words of those who ascribe vast social problems to the supposed inherent inferiority of our most oppressed group.

Update: Oh, and. I'm not a big Stephen Metcalf fan when it comes to his cultural writing. But I think that this response to William Saletan's work on race and IQ is a model for how to do it. It's unflinching, based on evidence, a close and fair reading, and devastating. 

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ah, freedom

Corey Robin writes a detailed, measured, and well-researched piece about Hayek's connection to Nietzsche, which cites, among other things, Hayek's indisputable support for the horrific and murderous despot Augusto Pinochet. In response, libertarian blogger Jason Brennan calls for a purge. What great support for intellectual freedom!

I read a lot of libertarian writing. I did my homework years ago, reading my Hayek and Friedman and Rand and Nozick. I read essentially everything Reason publishes, I keep an eye on what Cato puts out, I follow Bleeding Heart Libertarians, I read Marginal Revolution. But more than that I try to read comments and interact with libertarians on Facebook, because those places are where you find the actual heart of a party, a movement, or an ideology. I do this both because I think it's essential to engage with opinions you disagree with almost every day, and because I maintain a (perhaps foolish) belief that there's hope to be found among the type of libertarians who oppose the limitless projection of American power. Now, I fight with conservatives, liberals, libertarians, my fellow leftists, and assorted fringe groups constantly. No group is more taken to groupthink and the expression of their ideological boilerplate than libertarians. None. In fact, it's not close.

Mainstream conservatism has taken a great deal of heat for its epistemic closure, and rightly so. For reasons that escape me, libertarianism has avoided similar criticism. Yet I can identify very real currents of reformism and heterodoxy within conservatism, and I find no similar strains within libertarianism. Bleeding Heart Libertarians is supposedly such a vehicle, yet here you have one of its members meeting an intellectual challenge by calling for the author to be banished. (Libertarians have insisted that leftists consider the intellectual proximity between our intellectual fathers and brutal regimes for decades. They are apparently unwilling to be asked to do the same.) Check the comments at BHL. They are always filled with snarky dismissal and invective for anything outside of a terribly narrow band of presumed libertarian ideas. I look at the inter-libertarian squabbles between my Facebook friends, and it's remarkable how quickly apostasy is punished and how quickly libertarians move to get into lockstep with Hayek or von Mises or Rand. If someone suggests that, say, the federal free lunch program isn't a matter of creeping authoritarianism, they are swiftly dispatched. It's like clockwork.

Part of this is merely the pleasures and lack of responsibility that face an ideology that controls nothing. For all the ballyhooed irrelevance of the left, socialist governments have existed and continue to exist. Socialism is a powerful force in Europe and an ever-growing one in South America. Yet there exists no country that would prove adequate to libertarian requirements. The closet analogs are the failed states like Somalia that, my libertarian friends always insist, have nothing to teach us about what libertarianism would be like in practice. So we are left with the pleasing lack of accountability and real-world conditions that are the privilege of purely theoretical politics. What percentage of libertarians prefer to remain in such a condition is an open question.

I don't expect a single libertarian to care for the criticisms of someone like me. I do think that anyone within an ideological camp should always ask where internal criticism and reformist tendencies reside within that camp, no matter how politically or procedurally healthy. To me, an ideology that is founded on the idea of personal liberty should be a wild collection of disparate ideas and conflicting philosophies, one that is full of dramatically different ideas and convictions. What I see in libertarianism is the opposite; I see an orthodoxy. But then, you wouldn't think an ideology that is founded on personal liberty would have had such long and deep support for a man like Pinochet. For the time being, I expect libertarianism to continue to fight for only certain kinds of freedom: the freedom to sleep under bridges, the freedom to die of preventable disease, the freedom to face total economic despair, the freedom of banks to defraud their customers, the freedom of bosses to terrorize their workers....

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intellectual lineage and defeating ideas

Ta-Nehisi Coates point out that, despite the common claim that research about race and intelligence is verboten, it has a long lineage at institutions that were and are considered prestigious and mainstream. One thing that struck me was Coates invoking Karl Pearson's indefensible stance as an explicit eugenicist and racist. It's a really shameful history, one which deserves telling, and also one which should open up some uncomfortable questions about our intellectual heritage, or heritages.

Let's be clear: Karl Pearson was not a statistician and a eugenicist. He was the statistician, and a eugenicist. It's hard to name a figure who has had more impact on his or her particular field than Pearson had on statistics. It's similar to the impact of Newton on physics or Chomsky on linguistics. If you've ever used the word "correlate," you are working in Pearson's lineage. If you've taken any statistics classes, whether a freshman intro or a doctoral seminar, you've worked in frames that were developed by Karl Pearson. In a very real way, if you are a modern human who understands the world, in part, through quantitative or statistical means, you are in the lineage of Karl Pearson. From educational research to climatology to baseball to economics, Pearson's influence is everywhere.

Now the simplest thing to say in regards to that is, Wagner wrote some good tunes. It's a banal matter of human life: brilliance and morality are separate attributes, and I'm afraid that the former does not require the latter. The reality is that you cannot pursue any intellectual lineage very far before you find that the progenitors of necessary ideas held some other views that were deeply wrong and deeply morally problematic as well. Do we toss out the good along with the bad? No. We utilize the good for the good and we rebut and reject the bad. Pearson advocated for white supremacy, and now we can use his techniques to show why we should work harder to solve racial inequalities that produce injustice. Be honest about the ugly stuff while you utilize the positive stuff. That goes for Karl Pearson and for Thomas Jefferson and for Jesus and for Aristotle. You don't need to reject bad lineages entirely because you can rebut bad ideas.

When I look to the comments of that Ta-Nehisi Coates post, I feel a little despair. Because you have good, well-meaning people who appear to be working furiously to confirm the frame that the "race scientists" prefer. 

Here's a typical example, from commenter Barry_D:

The idea that certain immigrant groups have lower IQ's and that this is inherent/genetic and won't change is, as anybody should know, very old and very wrong in US history. And so far it's been dead f-ing wrong.

There are three separate claims here, that should be considered separately. That IQ is inherent or genetic is deeply controversial, and asserting it as fact simply does not bear scrutiny. To say that it won't change is to be even more wrong. To say that certain groups have scored lower on IQ tests is not wrong. It is actually a fact acknowledge as true in a broad range of scholarly disciplines by a broad collection of researchers, many of whom are political leftists, some of whom are nonwhite themselves, and almost none of whom think that these differences mean that races are inherently superior or inferior to each other.

Let's look at a different intellectual lineage, that of the APA report I cited the other day. I really want to endorse it again, because it say a lot of smart things: about how group tendencies can never be determinative of individual outcomes when statistics are involved; about how race is at once an artificial construct which we nevertheless identify socially (including the way in which people self-identify into racial categories); about outcome bias; and about the evidence that (at the time the report was published, I'm afraid it's quite old) the racial IQ gap was shrinking. All of that is interesting and important and, I think, a model for those like me who dispute the notion of scientific racial inferiority. But the report also speaks plainly and straightforwardly: the results of IQ tests across several decades, in many forms, conducted by many researchers on many groups and in many contexts, have found consistent and statistically significant difference between racial groups in IQ. That's not what I'm saying, that's what the APA's literature review is saying. It could not come as a surprise to anyone who has studied these issues for any length of time.

Once again: this is not an endorsement of the conclusions of those who call themselves race scientists. Quite the opposite. As I have said, I find that IQ is not a reasonable or useful proxy for what we casually think of as intelligence, that intelligence is a multivariate and complex phenomenon that exists along many different axes which do not scale adequately onto simply metrics, that these tests exist in a sociocultural and economic landscape which cannot be corrected for through simplistic stratification of income level.... But none of that changes the accuracy in reporting the findings.

So that lineage. The report, which was commissioned by the APA's specifically as a response to The Bell Curve and its surrounding controversy, has eleven authors. They came from Emory University, the Educational Testing Service, the University of Minnesota, Howard University, Wesleyan University, Cornell University, California State University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Texas, the University of North Florida, and Yale University. My question to the people commenting at Coates's blog is simple: are the authors racist for reporting that finding? Is the APA a racist organization? Is Howard a hothouse of racism? Is Wesleyan a fever swamp of conservatism? Remember, this was not original research. This was a literature review, one that looked at the broad swath of research on this topic. It's not an exaggeration to say that if the opinion that there are observable racial differences in IQ test results is racist, then essentially the fields of modern psychology, education, anthropology, and assorted others are racist.

All of that is precisely why the space must exist to spell out why the simplistic assertion of racial inferiority via IQ tests is wrong, to explain how much difference there is between reporting the observed scores and accepting them as dispositive evidence for the relative intelligence of individual members of difference races. It is precisely because the research is not being undertaken merely by fringe cranks that its findings must be discussed and criticized carefully.

We have no problem with this when it comes to educational statistics. Nobody mistakes the fact that Hispanic students drop out of high school at far higher rates than white students as evidence of inherent and genetic inferiority, and nobody mistakes social scientists accurately reporting that statistic as somehow being indicative of fringe views and cryptoracism. I don't know why IQ provokes such profound misunderstanding on either side.

One commenter seems to have a straightforward take. MindOverMatter writes, "Agreed. It make one wonder the kind of literature review that goes into the 'scientific research' conducted by these 'academics' (racist hacks)". I wonder if s/he is aware of how many people s/he is indicted with that comment. Others endorse Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of  Man, which has been thoroughly dismantled. Also, there's an interesting exchange between commenters John Strider, Justin van Wormer, and DoctorJay. Van Wormer says, "Is anyone making the argument that the data doesn't "say what is says?" The correlation is there. My understanding is that the discredit comes from the fact that the variables being measured are not rigorously defined and that the correlation is therefore essentially meaningless as an empirical finding." That is more or less my own position. But it is strange to see van Wormer saying that; there are many people in the comments who plainly don't think that the correlation is there, and who find merely discussing it racist. Like MindOverMatter above. The distinction is hugely important, and yet there is no indication among most of the people commenting that they are willing to consider it.

Most discouraging for me, though, is the moderator Sandy Young. She has deleted some comments and admonished others with threats of banning. Maybe those actions were perfectly correct, I don't know, what with the comments being gone. But when she says stuff like this, "This is my line - it may or may not be the party line. To steal a phrase from a writer I admire: we will not debate people's humanity. There's a whole big internet where you can do that. And you are right, I have no intention of being 'neutral' about this," she is directly contributing to the cause of race scientists. She simply could not do a better job of fulfilling all of their presumptions, could not do more to work within their frame. 

I will repeat: the biggest effort that people like Charles Murray and Richwine undertake is not to prove that black and Hispanic people are inferior. The biggest effort they undertake is to claim that liberals are incapable of defending their views on the merits, that they forbid discussion rather than win debate, and that the "PC police" squelches dissent it can't rebut. Indeed, that frame is precisely what Coates is trying to fight against. When Young says that she does not want to hear these arguments and that she cannot be neutral about it, she is saying precisely what her opponents want her to say.

Coates and his commenters have often invoked their perfectly reasonable right to not engage with arguments they don't want to. It's part of the burden of racism that people of color are constantly in a position where they are asked to represent their races, and constantly in a position where they have to either rebut racism or let it go. I cannot imagine how aggravating and annoying it is, or how tiring it must be to constantly have to make the same fucking arguments to the same fucking idiots. Coates (and The Atlantic) can have whatever commenting policy they want. Neither Coates nor Young has a responsibility to undertake the kind of rebuttal I'm calling for.

What I am saying, though, is that someone has to make that rebuttal. Because as much as I might want to side with Young in saying that there are some arguments which shouldn't have to be rebutted neutrally or dispassionately, I'm afraid those standards are so deeply ingrained in our society that to refuse to respond to the social scientific arguments for racial inferiority with social scientific rebuttal is to forfeit and hand them the appearance of victory. And whoever does make the case has to make it as strong as possible. Don't do things like reference The Mismeasure of Man, which is the lowest of low-hanging fruit, the rebuttal of which just gives ammunition to the people who are wrong on the merits.

I believe that the case for scientific racial inferiority is wrong, and I think that the only way to ensure that it doesn't spread is to argue against it, and I think that the only way to argue against it is to be willing to look at the arguments in favor of it, without fear of what you might find.

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SPORTS

Also, seriously, check out The Slurve. It's the bee's knees.

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it's a different model, I guess

I was chatting with a couple of friends last night about Paris is Burning. It struck me just how different our message about gay people and gay rights are than the one that I received as a kid. My father was a drama professor and had worked in the theater for his whole life, including for a decade in New York City's experimental and avant garde theater scene. As you can imagine, it was normal for my siblings and I me to interact with gay people in our childhood. Part of the contrast between then and now is that a lot of these people were defiantly out of the mainstream. There were a lot of gay men who would refer to straight people as breeders, dedicated drag queens, people who had a fierce rejection of traditionalist marriage and monogamy, etc. For many of these people, their sexual identity was part of a broad rejection of what they saw as the bourgeois conformity of mainstream American life.

In contrast, the message that resonates about gay people today is one of normalcy. The lesson that is delivered over and over again is that gay people are just like everyone else, that of course, everyone wants to get married and everyone wants to have babies and put up a white picket fence.... Aside from the many little ugly pathologies hidden in mainstream depictions of gay people (such as the notion that every gay man is your best frieeeeeeend), I can't find much to dispute with the insistence that everyone deserves the respect and autonomy that comes with normalcy. And it's hard to argue with the results; as much work remains to be done, the growth of marriage rights over the past decade has been frankly incredible.

Yet I can't help but think that something has been lost in changing the message to "people are the same" from "people are different." That was a message my parents delivered early and often in my life: people are different, often radically different, and they will behave in ways you wouldn't and believe things you don't, sometimes in ways you'll find uncomfortable or challenging. Get used to it and get over it. I recognize the political limitations of that model. But it had the advantage of being portable: respect for genuine difference, rather than constantly looking for ways in which everyone is the same, can make people more generous and more compassionate towards those who don't yet enjoy the blessing of the majority.

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Glenn mother fucking Greenwald

 All of Glen's many critics, please take this opportunity to shut the fuck up.

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Benghazi: the worst of both Republicans and Democrats

This Benghazi mess is enough to make you really despair.

For years now, liberals have pushed back against the "both sides do it!" trope that has always been a favorite of prominent centrists. And with good cause: mainstream liberalism is not nearly as dysfunctional as mainstream conservatism is, and the Democratic party is not nearly as sick as the Republican party is. I intend to say that in a way that is independent of my agreements and disagreement with both on the issues, but of course my judgment of where that line lies is colored by my personal biases. The problem is that "better than movement conservatism" is such a terribly low bar to climb, their is little incentive for liberals and Democrats to be anything else but a little better than terrible. American liberalism is a profound failure right now, and worse, a very proud failure. No, liberalism and conservatism are not the same, and they aren't equally bad. But they are both full of shit. And Benghazi is as good an issue as any to explore why.

Here are the facts that no one disputes: in a country where NATO and the United States chose sides in a civil war, participating directly in the removal of the old regime and in the installation of a new government with an Islamist bent, on the anniversary of September 11th, an American compound was the victim of a coordinated attack by militants that directly targeted diplomatic and CIA personnel and which killed four people, including the American ambassador.

The Republican, to the surprise of no one, has been to look for a way to use this as an excuse to attack Obama and his administration. The Democrats, to my endless disappointment and frustration, have collectively replied with, "nothing to see here." Worse, their surrogates in our political media have taken that ball and ran with it. It's the worst kind of partisanship there is, letting the other side's bogus opinions dictate your own.

To begin with: yes, of course, the Republicans are full shit. "Republicans full of shit" could accurately be printed in the newspaper every day. I have no doubt that the Republicans would be defending a McCain administration to the hilt under identical circumstances. I have no doubt that for many within the political media, the purpose of this is to find a cudgel with which to beat Democrats, Obama, and Hillary Clinton. Yes, some of the more outlandish ideas about all this are absurd. But so what? None of that means that there is nothing of importance to this story. The facts that no one disputes are in and of themselves a big deal. To deny that they are because some other people are exploiting them is useless partisanship.

That the Republicans are a unholy mess right now is not breaking news. Why that keeps being announced as though it is an answer to everything that's wrong with the Democrats is beyond me.

The most ludicrous idiocy of this is the dismissal of "conspiracy theories" about CIA involvement. It's indicative of the absolute worst instincts of contemporary liberalism: the assumption of the unseriousness of opposing views, the recourse to dismissal via epithet, and worst of all, being so credulous of our government as to support the most violent and immoral aspects of it. Conspiracy theories? Conspiring is what the CIA does! Conspiring is all the CIA ever has done. Conspiring is arguably the CIA's explicit mission. There has never been a time, since the agency was founded, when the CIA was not conspiring in a way that betrayed American laws, values, or interests. And I'm supposed to stop asking questions because you use the term conspiracy theory? Who could possibly imagine that to be an adult response? To understand the role of the CIA since its inception, and to recognize that the United States was directly, violently complicit in the establishment of the current Libyan government, means that you must recognize that the people attacked were very much involved in the pursuit of American strategic interests in that country. Anything else is self-deception.

One of the banal but little understood realities of American power is that our diplomatic corps is in many ways a branch of our intelligence service. The coziness between our diplomats and the CIA is public knowledge that the public seems not to know. When diplomats become the subject of attacks, it is important for the public to understand and engage with what our diplomatic corps actually does in the world. But we can't have that conversation when Democrats insist that there is no story.

Worse still is the manner in which this dismissal occurs. Benghazi is the perfect example of the comedic takeover of progressive politics, the way in which progressives in the media have devolved further and further into permanent smirking jokiness. During the darkness of the Bush years, a kind of grim, self-defensive humor emerged in left-of-center blogs. It was understandable, in such a bad period, for people to adopt satire as their weapon; satire is the asymmetric warfare of political argument. But it's not 2004 anymore, and whereas this levity was once a refreshing tool used sparingly, it's become the dominant idiom of online liberalism. There's a forced, joyless quality to it now, and it's such a ubiquitous part of how progressives argue now that it crowds out actual effective arguments. I check out the online presence of a lot of prominent, respected progressives and I genuinely don't know what they think they're accomplishing with their endless stream of "teehee my political opponents are such dolts!" That's not an endorsement of bogus comity or respect. I believe in going hard all the time. But you do it with substance. I'm making an endorsement of actually expressing content rather than simply announcing how snide you are to the delight of the already convinced.

OK, I'll play to my reputation: Twitter can be (can be) part of this problem, because both the format of Twitter and its culture pushes people to tell jokes instead of to do something productive. Well, look. You want to joke with your buddies, cool. Just please don't mistake it for anything else than jerking off. Really. That's all it is. Just as I have to tell the kiddos on Tumblr that you can't fight racism with animated gifs, I apparently have to tell the progressive blogosphere that no matter how many times you tweet the word "derp," it doesn't suddenly become an argument. It's just jerking off, that's all.

This situation was an awful mess in which people died. But it was also an opportunity: an opportunity to talk about the wisdom of intervention in foreign conflicts, an opportunity to reconsider our conduct in the Muslim world, an opportunity to think long and hard about all the destruction wrought by the CIA and our intelligence services, and an opportunity to make plain to Americans what our diplomatic corps really does. That opportunity has been sacrificed, and for what? For the only activity liberal Democrats seem to have any patience for anymore: being clever. Not for education, but for snark; not for fact gathering, but for joke making; not for introspection, but for giggles. What a waste.

I don't understand why liberal Democrats are so committed to joining the Republicans as they stoop lower and lower. Yes, it is easy, and it's probably fun. But it doesn't do any good for anybody.

Update: Here's a simple request: if you're a professional journalist, and the CIA says "don't pay attention to this story, there's nothing to see here," and you say "hey, there's nothing to see here," quit your job immediately. Please. Never write another word again.

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