That’s one ugly alphabet

Pamela Gay is struggling with the problem of silence. She was once the target of an attempted sexual assault by Famous Person A, and fear and worry have kept her and other people quiet. You can read the full story, but what struck me is how convoluted and awkward it sounds because throughout, she can’t name names: It’s person A, person B, person Y, etc. — I kept getting lost. But just the fact that there is this climate of intimidation, that she’s worried about being open and straightforward and just telling her story, says a lot about the situation.

People who identify as skeptics and scientists want to suppress the open discussion of a real situation. Doesn’t that disappoint you?

(via Ophelia. See also fellow astronomer Nicole Gugliucci’s comments.)

Mega-facepalm

I am disappointed. Jaclyn Glenn makes an incoherent rant.

Her point: it’s terrible for feminists to take an issue like this [the Elliot Rodger murders] and try to twist it around, and tells everyone to look at the problems for what they are. It’s not misogyny, she says, it’s because Rodger was mentally ill. And then she reads a paragraph from is manifesto that is melodramatic, self-aggrandizing, and totally over-the-top, and announces that it proves that he is mentally ill.

The standards for psychiatric diagnoses have really gone to the dogs, haven’t they?

So a guy writes a 140-page raving rant about how women owe him sex, how he hates them, and how he wants to lock them up in a concentration camp and starve them to death, and it’s not misogyny — it’s just random insanity, completely unconnected to the culture around him. OK. So much for looking at problems for what they are.

She should have stopped there — it would have been just stupid and wrong, but she had to get in one more bit of self-defense of her views that completely contradicted what she just said.

There’s an obvious counter-example: what about people who commit acts of terrorism in the name of god, or mutilate themselves or their children, or immerse themselves in absurd life-styles because their holy book says they must? Are they insane, too?

No, no, says Ms Glenn. People do evil things because of religion, not because they’re insane. Rodger killed people because he was insane, not because of the influence of a misogynistic culture that he joined and that flooded him with constant messages of contempt for women. But when religion floods people with constant messages of extreme lunacy, it must be held accountable. Ideological indoctrination only influences you when it’s something Jaclyn Glenn doesn’t like.

I think she noticed the conflict in her position, though, because she quickly starts making excuses, saying there are big differences between religion and patriarchy: there’s not a rule code-book for men that says they are superior to women, she says. No, there’s not a single specific book — it’s just the whole default attitude. It’s an atmosphere of media bias. It’s a world that says, from the minute they are born, children must conform to gender stereotypes.

But we can now safely ignore everything Jaclyn Glenn says, because she also flings in a bizarre anecdote about how she was raised with a mother who freaked out over bugs, and she blames her upbringing on her phobia about insects. She shouldn’t be blaming her mad fears on her upbringing or her culture — she’s just taking this issue and twisting it around to avoid the unavoidable conclusion: fear of insects is a mental illness. How dare she blame her mother when the answer is so much simpler: there’s something wrong with her brain.

The one good thing about this attitude is that we now get to diagnose everyone with wild, stupid ideas as “mentally ill”. Is there enough room in American asylums to lock up Donald Trump, Cliven Bundy, the Wall Street Journal editorial staff, the entire Catholic hierarchy, those screaming pro-lifers lined up outside Planned Parenthood, and all the Tea Party membership? ‘Cause them folks is obviously crazy.

I’m a little worried, though, that it’s also beginning to look like we’re going to have to lock up a lot of the voices of the atheism movement on the same grounds.

That’s some mistake

Boys will be boys, I guess. Here’s a comment in the Indian press reflecting that statement.

Last month, the head of Uttar Pradesh’s governing party told an election rally that the party was opposed to the law calling for gang rapists to be executed. "Boys will be boys," Mulayam Singh Yadav said. "They make mistakes."

The mistake: two young girls, 14 and 15 years old, were abducted from their farm, gang-raped, strangled, and their bodies hung from a tree.

I’m against the death penalty, but if that’s how boys are expected to behave, I’m all for walling them up once they hit puberty and not letting them out until they renounce all violence.

Not racist at all

Learn from a Nobelist in economics: all you have to do to not be a racist is prefix all your racist comments with the claim that you have no racial prejudices, like Friedrich Hayek.

Robert Chitester: Going back to the question I asked you about people you dislike or can’t deal with, can you make any additional comments in that regard, in terms of the characteristics of people that trouble you?

Hayek: I don’t have many strong dislikes. I admit that as a teacher—I have no racial prejudices in general—but there were certain types, and conspicuous among them the Near Eastern populations, which I still dislike because they are fundamentally dishonest. And I must say dishonesty is a thing I intensely dislike. It was a type which, in my childhood in Austria, was described as “Levantine”, typical of the people of the eastern Mediterranean. But I encountered it later, and I have a profound dislike for the typical Indian students at the London School of Economics, which I admit are all one type—Bengali moneylender sons. They are to me a detestable type, I admit, but not with any racial feeling. I have found a little of the same amongst the Egyptians—basically a lack of honesty in them.

Bengalis and Egyptians are all liars, but he says that without any racism whatsoever. And of course, he was born in fin de siecle Austria, an environment completely free of the kind of bigotry that might explode into some kind of nationalistic nightmare.

(via Free-Market Orientalism)

At least some people are having the conversation

It’s under the hashtag #YesAllWomen, and it’s largely women doing the talking. Laci Green is also explaining the importance of this issue.

When she was describing all the ways our culture shapes how men are supposed to regard women, I suddenly recalled all those times playing video games when women would join the group, and the orders would ring out: “make me a sandwich.” A joke. But think about what that joke says about our expectations of women’s roles. There’s a long stretch from “make me a sandwich” to gunning down random strangers because women wouldn’t have sex with you, but they’re both on the same continuum.

By the way, this should settle all those claims that he was mentally ill and Aspergers: a comment from a friend of the Elliot family.

Astaire said Elliot had not been diagnosed with Asperger’s but the family suspected he was on the spectrum, and had been in therapy for years. He said he knew of no other mental illnesses, but Elliot truly had no friends, as he said in his videos and writings.

TESTS WARP YOUR BRAIN

That will be the new mantra of students — giving tests has a secret agenda to brainwash you. Charles Van Zant, Republican wackadoodle from Florida, thinks standardized tests will turn children gay. This is all in response to the commission of a company to administer tests statewide.

These people that will now receive $220 million from the state of Florida, unless this is stopped, will promote double mindedness in state education, and attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can. I’m sorry to report that to you. … I really hate to bring you that news, but you need to know.

He doesn’t know the half of it. I’m not gay, so my tests only inculcate atheism in all of my poor victims students. If I try harder, maybe I can get all of the students who take biology here to emerge as gay socialist godless abortionists, just by asking them questions about mitochondria or recombination or Sonic Hedgehog.

But the esteemed legislator does ask everyone to look at the website for the testing company, AIR, so I did. I’m not much of a fan of standardized testing — I think we lose sight of the individual when we develop a single instrument to measure — but a lot of what they say does makes sense, and I couldn’t find anything about their magic gayness-inducing tests. I did see stuff about standards of care for “many LGBT people [who] face harassment, violence, stigma, rejection, and discrimination in their families, schools, employment, and social settings”, or improving the well-being of LGBT youth or ending LGBT youth homelessness. I don’t see what there is to oppose in that, unless you think that LGBT kids should be treated violently, not be healthy, or not have a home.

We also have AIR’s official statement on the issue.

AIR’s Health and Social Development program develops knowledge and understanding about LGBT youth that takes account of their experiences and needs. AIR also enhances opportunities for the healthy development, well-being, and safety of LGBT children, youth, and their families by providing workforce training and technical assistance to service providers across systems addressing behavioral health, child welfare, education, juvenile justice, and homelessness.

Those all sound like desirable things. I guess it’s only if you’re a Republican that caring about children without reservations about their sexual orientation is considered wicked.

The anthropologists really are buzzing

I’ve been getting lots of email and twitter remarks from the HBD mafia — they don’t seem to realize that I don’t have any respect for a gang of pseudonymous incompetents, and that they’re in a clique of self-deluded racist twits. You want to see real tribalism in action, there’s a group that demonstrates it beautifully, driven by one primitive tribal distinction, race, to constantly affirm to each other that they are right to reinforce their prejudices.

I’d rather read what real anthropologists — you know, professionals who have wrestled with and studied this specific problem deeply — have to say. Like Holly Dunsworth. She’s not very impressed with the HBD ideologues either.

That’s problem number one with HBD: It’s obviously first and foremost about tribalism and politics and pushing their beliefs, not about an honest scientific seeking of the truth.

And that’s problem number two with HBD: It can’t be about scientific truth as it claims to be because… There is no truth when it comes to whether biological race is real. It’s real. It’s not real. Choose one or both or neither. And your choice is going to depend on your own mind and as well as your social, historical, cultural, and societal context. And, that’s the reality of race. 

So that’s just one of the reasons why race is considered by many to be primarily a "social construct," rather than nature’s biological construct.

Many of us are thinking about these issues all the time because we’re anthropologists and human biologists and educators. But many of us are thinking about these issues even more intensely right now because of the slight disturbance in the Force brought on by Nicholas Wade’s new book and the HBD fandom that has ensued.

Although I do have reservations about the following statement.

In fact, I can think of no positive outcome of deciding that biological race is real… except for the opportunity for folks who are seeking such an opportunity to talk openly about their personal biases and the differential value they place on one group of humans over another, or to perpetuate stereotypes, or to act on their racism without backlash.

Beyond the chance to have freedom of derogatory expression, can you think of an actual positive outcome if a consensus of scientists decided that biological races are real? 

I’m not talking about anyone making a decision about whether mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, reproductive isolation, natural selection, epigenetics, microbes, viruses, environmental influences,… have influenced human evolution and variation over time and space.** We already know that. Human biology (the way we look, the diseases we get and don’t get, etc…) varies geographically and in some patterned ways, depending on the trait. That’s fact.

I’m talking about deciding that biological race is real, in other words, that race is real beyond being "just" a human construct. Could anything beneficial come of such a declaration?

I think the problem with determining whether biological race is real isn’t whether it’s beneficial or not — it should be whether it is true or not. And I’m satisfied that that has already been answered well. It’s not. A “race” is a mish-mash of categories that does not correspond at all well to any kind of clade. The concept emphasizes superficial differences as markers for significant cultural and personal differences, and fails.

But I can think of reasons knowledge about those patterned differences between people could be beneficial, because sociological race is real. These racial distinctions that people make have caused great injustices over time — in fact, some of the greatest atrocities ever. The American Indian genocide, the Jewish Holocaust, centuries of black slavery…you will not make them disappear by pointing out the biological unity of the human species, and I think you would do great harm by trying to pretend that those weren’t acts targeting racial groups, and denying people recognition of their history. You need to know the truth to even begin to compensate for injustice, and to be aware so that those injustices are not repeated. If we should not ignore the sociology of race because the truth helps us do better, I couldn’t argue against the idea of a hypothetical biological pattern of variation called “race” because revealing a truth would make us worse.

I’d argue against it because it isn’t true. That’s enough for me.

I would not want to be Nicholas Wade right now

Two more meaty reviews of his li’l book of racism: One by Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist who debated Wade, and the other by Jennifer Raff, yet another anthropologist with expertise in genetics.

I’ve focused a lot of this review on numerous technical details because I think that it’s very important that non-geneticists understand the degree to which Wade is distorting the results of recent research on genome-wide human variation. I won’t speculate whether this distortion is deliberate or a result of simple ignorance about genetics, but it is serious. There is a great deal more in this book that also needs to be critiqued, such as Wade’s assertion that the genetic differences between human groups determine behavioral differences, resurrecting the specter of “national character” and “racial temperaments”. But as I’ve shown here, Wade’s book is all pseudoscientific rubbish because he can’t justify his first and primary point: his claim that the human racial groups we recognize today culturally are scientifically meaningful, discrete biological divisions of humans. This claim provides a direct basis for the whole second half of the book where he makes those “speculative” arguments about national character. In other words, the entire book is a house of cards.

Although the scientists are all laughing at him, at least he’ll have the praise of David Duke and John Derbyshire as consolation.

He’s not a racist!

It’s another review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance.

Nicholas Wade is not a racist. In his new book, A Troublesome Inheritance, the former science writer for the New York Times states this explicitly. “It is not automatically racist to consider racial categories as a possible explanatory factor.” He then explains why white people are better because of their genes. In fairness, Wade does not say Caucasians are better per se, merely better adapted (because of their genes) to the modern economic institutions that Western society has created, and which now dominate the world’s economy and culture. In contrast, Africans are better adapted to hot-headed tribalism while East Asians are better adapted to authoritarian political structures. “Looking at the three principal races, one can see that each has followed a different evolutionary path as it adapted to its local circumstances.” It’s not prejudice; it’s science.

In addition to going over some of the sloppy science and devious distortions, the review links to other negative reviews of the book, too, but I appreciate its even handedness — it also cites at some length the positive reviews.

“Wade says in this book many of the things I’ve been saying for the last 40 years of my life,” said David Duke, the white nationalist politician and former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, on his radio program on May 12, 2014. “The ideas for which I’ve been relentlessly villified are now becoming part of the mainstream because of the irrepressible movement of science and genetics.” Duke devoted his “blockbuster” show to a discussion of A Troublesome Inheritance and celebrated how Wade bravely took on the “Jewish Supremacists” and their “blatant hypocrisy over race and DNA.” There have also been multiple lively discussions about the book at Stormfront.org, the online forum Duke created and one of the most visited white supremacist websites on the net with about 40,000 unique users each day.

Over at The American Renaissance, which the Anti-Defamation League identifies as a white supremacist online journal, dozens of articles have been published about the book over the past two months. “People who understand race are clearly rooting for this book,” wrote Jared Taylor, founder and editor of the publication. Other white power advocates see the book’s arrival as a call to battle. John Derbyshire, a self-described white supremacist and former columnist for the National Review, wrote triumphantly, “Wade’s calm, brave assault on the enemy’s lines will likely be repulsed, but not without enemy losses, making the next assault more likely to break through.”

See? Glowing reviews! Doesn’t that just compel you to rush out and buy the book?