Anti-DEI is another word for racism and sexism

You’re sitting there trying to argue that reality isn’t what you see right there in front of your face: nah, that wasn’t a Hitler salute, nah, Trump is not a fascist, nah, opposing DEI isn’t racist, but then eventually something is going to pop up that shows you’re totally wrong and are living in denial. On that last item, there are many people arguing that getting rid of DEI will simply open the door for a meritocracy, it will get rid of all those idle wastrels who are coasting on their victimhood and are demanding special privileges.

And then…whoops. The mask slips.

The Air Force has removed training courses with videos of its storied Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs — the female World War II pilots who were vital in ferrying warplanes for the military — to comply with the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

The videos were shown to Air Force troops as part of DEI courses they took during basic military training.

In a statement, the Air Force confirmed the courses with those videos had been removed and said it “will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the Executive Orders issued by the President, ensuring that they are carried out with utmost professionalism, efficiency and in alignment with national security objectives.”

Look at these pilots from WWII.

Apparently, they weren’t brave or skilled or self-sacrificing, and their history can be discarded. You can tell because they’re black, obviously DEI hires.

Same with those women who were ferrying bombers across the Atlantic to serve in Europe.

The Air Force was wrong to resist their willingness to serve their country 80+ years ago, and they continue their shame today.

The journal Intelligence really needs to change its name

That’s a journal I would never trust — after all, they were responsible for publishing Richard Lynn’s hacky paper on the IQ of nations. Now here’s another example of a terrible racist paper from it. It’s an evolutionary psychology paper by Kanazawa, a terrible combination that ought not to ever pass peer review.

On the basis of his theory of the evolution of intelligence (Kanazawa, 2004), Kanazawa (2008) proposed that, during their evolutionary travels away from the relatively stable and hence predictable environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA; i.e., the African savanna of the late Pleistocene), the ancestors of Eurasians encountered evolutionarily novel environments that selected for higher intelligence. Therefore, Kanazawa (2008) predicted higher average IQ scores in countries located farther away from the EEA. Kanazawa (2008) tested this hypothesis against data gathered by Lynn and Vanhanen (2006), who estimated so-called “national IQ-scores,” i.e., the average IQ of the inhabitants of nations in terms of western norms. Kanazawa (2008) found a significant negative correlation between countries’ national IQs and their distance from three geographic locations in and around sub-Saharan Africa.

This is from a paper analyzing the problems of peer review, using Kanazawa’s paper as a case study. That evo-psych paper flew through peer review, with reviewers missing a number of deep problems.

We point to a number of indisputable issues that should have precluded publication of the paper as constituted at the time of review. First, Kanazawa’s (2008) computations of geographic distance used Pythagoras’ theorem and so the paper assumed that the earth is flat (Gelade, 2008). Second, these computations imply that ancestors of indigenous populations of, say, South America traveled direct routes across the Atlantic rather than via Eurasia and the Bering Strait. This assumption contradicts the received view on evolutionary population genetics and the main theme of the book (Oppenheimer, 2004) that was cited by Kanazawa (2008) in support of the Out-of-Africa theory. Third, the study is based on the assumption that the IQ of current-day Australians, North Americans, and South Americans is representative of that of the genetically unrelated indigenous populations that inhabited these continents 10,000 years ago (Wicherts et al., 2010b). In related work by others who share Kanazawa’s (2008) views on the nature of race differences in IQ, the latter issue was dealt with by excluding countries with predominantly non-indigenous populations (Templer and Arikawa, 2006). Thus, although Wicherts et al. (2010b) raised additional issues that may the topic of debate (see below), these three problems are beyond dispute.

I am amused that Kanazawa’s methodology assumed that the Earth is flat and that all peoples ignored geographical obstacles, like mountains and oceans, to make a beeline to their modern location. I am horrified that anyone would use Lynn’s deeply racist and wrong paper to make any estimates of a population’s intelligence. I reject the whole notion of IQ as a useful measure of intelligence in the first place.

The authors propose some changes towards a more open peer review process, which sound good to me. My simpler solution is to simply throw out the whole goddamn journal of Intelligence, along with anyone who publishes in it.

Speaking of flat earth follies, I see that YouTube is in a tizzy because someone is doing something called “The Final Experiment” — a group of people are flying to Antarctica to witness the fact that there is a period where the sun never sets, which ought to be impossible if Antarctica is actually a ring of land surrounding the whole planet. It’s ridiculous. No, flat earthers will find a new excuse and will not be persuaded by a “final” experiment — it’s not as if they reached their beliefs by experiment and reason in the first place, or as if all the other evidence that the earth is roughly spherical were insufficient.

Can you imagine someone proposing a “final experiment” to “prove” that life on earth evolved? I can’t. I know the idiots who are creationists far too well to think that.

Good riddance, Richard Lynn

The table to the right is a list of the bottom 10 nations for IQ, as reported by Richard Lynn in 2002. Should we really believe that the people of Ghana have an average IQ of 58? It’s a ridiculous claim. It’s not possible to assess an entire nation in that way, it implies that most people there lack the brains to tie their shoes, and further, he argues that the entire population of the continent of Africa were cretins. Does that sound credible to anyone? Well, maybe to hardcore racists who somehow let that shoddy work pass peer review and get published in the journal Intelligence.

I do notice that Lynn revisited that work in 2010, and suddenly Ghana’s average IQ score shot up to 71. Remarkable progress for 8 years. Shouldn’t that alone have called the hereditarian premise into question?

Well, finally, a major publisher is proposing to re-evaluate all of Richard Lynn’s work, which is something. The publisher is Elsevier, so I don’t expect much from them, though.

A leading academic publisher is reviewing its decision to publish research papers by the late British professor Richard Lynn, an influential figure in the discredited field of “race science” who argued western civilisation was threatened by genetically inferior ethnic groups.

Elsevier provides access to more than 100 papers by Lynn, including several iterations of his “national IQ” dataset, which purports to show wide variations in IQ between different countries but which has been criticised by mainstream scientists for serious flaws in its methodology.

The database, a cornerstone of scientific racism ideology that was first published in 2002, is being used in online propaganda by a new generation of well-funded “race science” activists, whose activities were uncovered in a recent investigation by the Guardian and the anti-racism group Hope Not Hate.

Yeah, it’s about time…although his flaws and fallacies have been well known for decades.

Critics say Lynn relied upon samples that were unrepresentative or too small to be meaningful. According to Sear, Angola’s national IQ was based on 19 people from a malaria study, while the Eritrean average IQ was derived from tests of children in orphanages.

The 2010 iteration of the dataset asserted an average national IQ of 60 for Malawi, 64 for Mozambique and 69 for Nigeria – all below the typical threshold for intellectual disability. “It is wholly implausible that an entire world region should, on average, be on the verge of intellectual impairment,” wrote Sear in a critique of the 2019 edition.

That semi-secretive “race science” organization is the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) (racists have been busy ruining the reputation of a perfectly good word, diversity, by tying it to fundamentally anti-diversity goals), which is led by the odious Emil Kirkegaard and was, at least formerly, funded by a Seattle tech bro named Andrew Cornu. It’s nothing but good times for these hateful wackaloons, thanks to a recent election, and who have been capitalizing on the unwarranted academic reputation of their hero, Lynn.

Trump, who has promised mass deportations should he win a second term as US president, told an interviewer last month: “We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” In June Steve Sailer, credited with rebranding scientific racism as “human biodiversity”, was given a platform by the former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson on his podcast.

They are now labeling mass deportations as “re-migration.”

It’s about time his work was publicly repudiated. In fact, it’s about time his corpse was dug up and kicked into the nearest sewage ditch, although that’s pointless now — it should have been done while he was still alive (he died in 2023).

“White” is not a synonym for “elite”

They’re called “segregation academies,” private schools set up to siphon off state education money to support discriminatory policies. If you live in an area with many black students, somebody will create a school with enrollment that excludes the kinds of people you don’t like, often to make sure only white students get in, or students with particular religious beliefs, and then it’s a double-win: they get to take in state money through voucher programs, and they get to charge their ignorant, bigoted parents excessive fees. It’s an “elite” school, after all. Pay up!

ProPublica examined the effects of these voucher programs on a set of private academies in North Carolina. These schools have a specific purpose, and it’s exactly the purpose that has inflamed the electorate in recent years: isolationism, racism, and ignorance.

Back when segregation academies opened, some white leaders proudly declared their goal of preserving segregation. Others shrouded their racist motivations. Some white parents complained about federal government overreach and what they deemed social agendas and indoctrination in public schools. Even as violent backlash against integration erupted across the region, many white parents framed their decisions as quests for quality education, morality and Christian education, newspaper coverage and school advertisements from the time show.

They’re sucking up a tremendous amount of state education funds. You know that if a local creepy throwback of an academy in a region is getting millions of dollars, that money is coming out of a pool of cash earmarked for general education…and that means the public schools, which are free to the public, get less. And it’s a scam.

Opportunity Scholarships don’t always live up to their name for Black children. Private schools don’t have to admit all comers. Nor do they have to provide busing or free meals. Due to income disparities, Black parents also are less likely to be able to afford the difference between a voucher that pays at most $7,468 a year and an annual tuition bill that can top $10,000 or even $20,000.

So your choices are to send your child to a public school that doesn’t charge tuition, or accept a $5000 voucher to send them to a private school that demands that you pay them an additional $10,000. The private school isn’t necessarily better, but it does provide the helpful service of preventing your child from rubbing elbows with brown children, and may offer the bonus of teaching them more Sunday School-style Jesus.

This is how the Republicans aim to destroy education. They’re going to offer more and more “alternatives” that don’t improve anything, but do pander to the biases of their voters, and that have the advantage of also wrecking public schools. Even if they are building good schools (they probably aren’t), they’re making sure that the non-Republican electorate has fewer opportunities, is less qualified for higher education and upscale work, and are effectively poisoning the minds of the citizenry.

They’ve got at least four more years of running rampant and wrecking institutions. Perhaps some of you figure you can weather a few years and rebuild to come roaring back with progressive values, but you know who can’t handle four more years of ruined education? Kids. Childhood is short, the educational curriculum has year-by-year goals and standards, and if you tear out that foundation, there’s nothing to build on later.

I still recall my 3rd grade year, when I had a couple of weeks of school lost to acute appendicitis, and I came back to discover that I’d missed out on some basic stuff that my peers had already mostly mastered (was it fractions? I recall being bewildered by numerators and denominators for a while). I had to struggle to catch up, and it wasn’t fun — but I was motivated by being already academically inclined, so I had to do the work. Imagine if I missed a year, or two years, though. I probably would have just given up.

An even better example of institutional failure: in general, our current public school system does a poor job of educating students in math, and that has a ripple effect on our colleges. In Europe, most universities offer a complete degree program in three years; here in the USA, it’s usually four years. A lot of that difference is because so many students are ready for calculus when they enroll; some high school programs barely teach algebra. Seriously. I advise so many students who want to get a science degree, and their first year is spent teaching them remedial algebra so that they can do basic stoichiometry in their first chemistry class, or understand elementary concepts in biochemistry for their first biology class.

And Republicans think it more important that no brown people pollute their high school dance, that they don’t get exposed to evilution, or that their history classes don’t mention slavery, or that they learn the highest moral value is to attend church on Sunday? Those are omissions from their education that we will pay for at the college level and beyond.

Who is that jackwad?

Trump had a rally in Madison Square Garden this weekend and it was reminiscent of a Nazi rally. They brought on a ‘comedian’ who made a ‘joke’. I don’t know if you know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.

Ocasio-Cortez said it all in the clip above: this is what the Republican party is, a clique of elitist thugs who willingly insult entire ethnicities because they believe that they, by virtue of their whiteness, are truly superior. The Trump campaign is scrambling to distance themselves from this alienation of part of the electorate, but you know this is what the think, deep down. Notice that the audience laughed at the ‘joke’.

Walz was characteristically pithy: Hinchcliffe is a jackwad.

Hinchcliffe has responded!

Oh. It was just a joke. It was taken out of context. Where have I heard those excuses before?

The administrators have my paycheck, but the students have my respect

University of Minnesota took over the administration building yesterday.

The protest didn’t last long. The police charged in and have arrested 11 students and alumni. It’s the principle, though: they were protesting the university’s investment in Israel and our country’s bomb-making industries. It’s not as if the Democrats are working for peace, and you know the Republicans love them some civilian casualties, so it’s good that someone is raising a ruckus and declaring that genocide is not a good business decision.

One of the organizers, Juliet Murphy, had a few words for the administration.

“And I think we’re kind of calling it out at this point and saying, ‘You have always taught us that we should stand up for what we believe in, we should be the motivators for change, but yet, when it no longer benefits you, it doesn’t seem like you really want to continue having those conversations. It doesn’t seem like you really care about listening to your diverse student body,’” Murphy said.

The administration had a counter: you will be silent, you will be orderly, or you shall be ejected from the campus.

The University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents voted in August to reject student calls for divestment from Israel — and to block most future student divestment campaigns.

The university also rolled out guidelines this summer stating demonstrations must be limited to 100 people and end by 10 p.m., and that they cannot use tents nor remain in buildings after scheduled closing hours, among other rules. Violation can result in immediate interim suspension, arrest and being barred from campus.

The smug, comfortable assholes on the Board of Regents really don’t get it: the whole point of a protest is to make the other side uncomfortable. Rejecting disagreement from a position of power does not resolve the point of contention, but only makes the opposition angrier and more determined.

Free Palestine. End the genocide. Divest now. Those are simple, clear ideas that won’t be answered by arresting people.

RA Fisher rises again?

I do have to do some class work while I’m trapped in the land of lawyers and banks — I’ve got essays being submitted today that I’ll have to grade this evening, and I’m prepping lectures for when I get back. The next couple of weeks are nothing but Darwin, Darwin, Darwin, and after that I’ll be discussing the eclipse of Darwin, the new consensus, and, ugh, eugenics. I was reminded of this excellent essay by Eric Michael Johnson, “Ronald Fisher Is Not Being ‘Cancelled’, But His Eugenic Advocacy Should Have Consequences”, which my students will eventually be reading. I re-read it myself this morning, and was reminded of the contretemps that flared up when Cambridge University chose to remove a stained glass window honoring RA Fisher, and the usual suspects rushed to defend him.

This decision was soon condemned as part of the latest trend in “cancel culture” that followed in the wake of the #MeToo movement toppling other powerful men. According to Fisher’s former student, and current Cambridge Professor of Biometry, A.W.F. Edwards, “a panicking Cambridge institution obliterated the memory of one of its most famous sons” and “joined the cacophony of the echo chamber ‘eugenics and race, eugenics and race.’” University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne blamed the decision on “the spread of wokeness” and argued that you can still honor the good a historical figure accomplished if it outweighed the bad. “Contrary to the statements of those who have canceled Fisher, though, he wasn’t a racist eugenist, although he did think that there were behavioral and intelligence differences between human groups.” Finally, economist and former Reagan Administration official, Paul Craig Roberts, condemned Cambridge University for caving to “ignorant BLM thugs” and declared that we are now “witnessing the surrender of Western Civilization to barbarians.”

I love that he wasn’t a racist eugenist, he just thought that poor people’s genes were the cause of their poverty, as if that made his ideas OK. He just thought that there were behavioral and intelligence differences between human groups! What groups was he talking about?

We do have a 1954 letter from Fisher that clears that right up.

My dear Gates,
Thanks for your letter, It is always good to hear from you. I shall try to answer your quention.
i I agree with you entirely that Penrose and Haldane are both defindtely hostile to eugenics, the last move being to change the name of what used to be called The Annals of Eugenics.
In my opinion, by far the most important work in human heredity is that done by Race, Kourant, and their associates at the Lister Institution, for this shows clearly,what many of us have suspected – the vast number of differences in gene frequency existing between different human races.
I am sorry that there should be propaganda in favour of miscegenation in North America, for I am sure that it can do nothing but harm. Is it beyond human endeavour to give and Justly to administer equal rights to all citizens without fooling ourselves that these are equivalent items.

He’s talking specifically about races, and thinks miscegenation will do harm. If he were alive today, he’d be favoring Project 2025 and looking forward to the Republicans striking down Loving v. Virginia.

I’ve added this essay to my students’ reading list. We’ll probably get to it sometime in November, and I hope it sparks some vigorous discussion.

Straight up Nazi shit

Trump is letting it all hang out. His recent comments are all about eugenics and race and heritable criminality.

When you look at the things that she proposes, Trump, speaking of Vice President Harris, told far-right pundit Hugh Hewitt Monday morning, they’re so far off she has no clue. How about allowing people to come to an open border? 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them, murdered far more than one person, and they are now happily living in the United States you know now, a murderer.

I believe this. It’s in their genes, and we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now, Trump alleged.

None of that is true. The 13,000 convicted criminals are the sum total of all immigrants over the last 40 years; immigrants convicted of a serious crime aren’t happily living in the US, they are in jail or living as felons; immigrants have a lower rate of criminality than life-long US residents; and it has absolutely nothing to do with “genes.” Trump has no idea what genes are, he just wants to blame the ancestry or race of all immigrants somehow, as if they’re carrying some heritable taint.

Don’t berate me with technical details about what constitutes a literal Nazi, he’s a fucking Nazi in spirit and deed.

Racists think they’re being sneaky

Offhand, I know about a dozen interracial couples — some of them are in my family. Republican Senator Mike Braun thinks it would be fine to dissolve their marriages.

In a media call on Tuesday, U.S Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind) said that the U.S. Supreme Court was wrong to legalize interracial marriage in a ruling that stretches back to Loving v. Virginia in 1967.

According to Braun, the decision should not have been made by the country’s highest court and instead been left to individual states. Even though some states had made interracial marriage illegal prior to the Supreme Court ruling.

They’ve discovered this handy circumlocution. They aren’t going to come right out and say that interracial marriage is wrong…oh no, they’re just going to say that we ought to permit states (that is, Republican lawmakers in some states) the right to destroy marriages, if they want. They’re playing the same game with abortion.

Come on, no one is fooled. Braun is a closet racist who has found a not-so-cunning way to signal to other racists that he’s on their side.

Was he intentionally lying, or was he just stupid? It’s hard to tell

I am continuously astonished by how bad Republicans can be. It’s not just that I disagree with their policies, but that they themselves paint their policies in such a ludicrously stupid manner. Take, for example, this incident at a candidate forum in Idaho.

  1. They discuss discrimination in Idaho. The Republican, Dan Foreman, claims there isn’t any. I’ve gotten used to Republican denial, so that doesn’t shock me.

2. The Democratic candidate, a native American woman, politely “highlighted our weak hate crime laws and mentioned the presence of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho as undeniable evidence of this reality.” Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, we all knew there was a gradient of bigotry that ascended from the coast to the potato brains of Idaho (partly to avoid confronting the reality of racism in Seattle), so this was already making Foreman look foolish.

3. The Republican then tells the Nez Perce woman to “go back where you came from.” Unbelievable. It’s like a bad joke on a bottom-of-the-barrel sitcom.

Trish Carter-Goodheart has written about the incident.

Last night, I entered what should have been a respectful and constructive public candidate forum. Instead, I was met with hateful, racist remarks from State Senator Dan Foreman, who screamed at me to “go back where you came from.” The question on the floor was about a state bill addressing discrimination. One of the candidates responded, claiming that “discrimination doesn’t exist in Idaho.” When it was my turn to speak, I calmly pointed out that just because someone hasn’t personally experienced discrimination doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Racism and discrimination are real issues here in Idaho, as anyone familiar with our state’s history knows. I highlighted our weak hate crime laws and mentioned the presence of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho as undeniable evidence of this reality. That’s when Sen. Foreman lost all control. His words to me: “I’m so sick and tired of this liberal b*lish*t! Why don’t you go back to where you came from?!” I stayed. I stayed because I wanted to show our community that I can, and will, handle difficult, unpleasant situations. After the forum, several members of the crowd came up to me and offered their support, apologizing for Sen. Foreman’s behavior. But it’s not the people in the crowd who need to apologize. I need to thank the women who stood with me against this hate: Representative Lori McCann, Kathy Dawes, and Moscow City Councilwoman Julia Parker. You had my back when it mattered, and I appreciate your strength and solidarity. What happened last night was a reminder of why this election matters. I am a proud member of the Nez Perce tribe, fighting to represent the land my family has lived on for generations. People like Dan Foreman do not represent our diverse community, and I will continue to stand against the hatred and racism they spread. Our state deserves better. Our community deserves better. We deserve better.

The last time I was in Idaho, my talk was attended by a bunch of people from Doug Wilson’s church (but not Wilson himself). Doug Wilson was an Idaho preacher who got a boost in popularity because Christopher Hitchens toured with him for a while, something I don’t forgive Hitchens for. Doug Wilson co-wrote a notorious pamphlet titled Southern Slavery, where he said

Slavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence, the excerpts read in part. There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. …

Slave life was to them [slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care.

But oh no, racism and discrimination don’t exist in Idaho.