The disgraced conservative broadcaster is doing his own thing, basically vlogging to find a way to bloviate some more. I’ll say this for him — he knows his audience. His first show is…amazingly racist.
I guess black people just kinda disappeared in the 80s and 90s.
Mike the Mad Biologist has an interesting twist on the race & IQ argument.
NAEP math scores have been used as proxies for IQ. If we look at the NAEP 8th grade math data for 2011, when we compare students with college educated parents who aren’t poor, there is a about a twenty point gap in scores for any given socioeconomic group between black and white students (where a ten point difference roughly corresponds to one grade level). We know conclusively, based on studies in marginal journals edited by racists, that this racial difference is largely genetic (and we have controlled for a deleterious environment by excluding poor students and poorly educated parents). For instance, in Massachusetts, white students (with college educated parents who aren’t poor) have an average score of 312, while black students have a score of 291 (p less than 10-6). Meanwhile, Alabama whites score 293, with no significance difference compared to black students in Massachusetts (p = 0.49). The gap between Massachusetts whites and Massachusetts blacks is the same as the gap between Massachusetts and Alabama whites.
Ergo, Alabama whites are also genetically inferior untermenschen whom we should not waste our time trying to educate. Look, I’m just bravely telling it like it is. If it doesn’t fit for your conservative preconceptions, that’s too bad. We have to heroically follow the data where they lead us. And when you look at other states, it’s clear: ‘heartland’ whites are genetically inferior to Massachusetts (and Maryland) whites, and we need to fundamentally rethink our social policies accordingly.
I live in the heartland, and although I was born in the west, I have to admit that my mother was born here in Minnesota, making me a kind of half-breed Heartlander. I may have superior genetics to the Minnesotans around me, but I graciously deign to acknowledge my inferiority to the pure-bred Coastal race, which means you now have to accept the thesis is truer, because why would I admit to something that affects me?
Look, it’s got math in it. It’s got to be right.
UMM is also bringing in good speakers with intelligent perspectives. Next week, we’re going to be graced with a visit from Adrienne Keene. If you can only make it to Morris one time, skip the jerk coming next month, and instead make the trip on Monday, 2 April to join us at 7:30pm in Imholte 109. It’s part of the Native American-Serving Nontribal Institutions program grant for the Morris Native American Student Success (NASS) Project.
It’s also free, but worth far, far more.
Jordan Peterson is quick to deflect accusations of bigotry by standing tall, throwing his shoulders back, and declaring that he was made a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe, and he’s also quick to complain if anyone questions it.
You say "Peterson claims that he has been inducted into “the coastal Pacific Kwakwaka’wakw tribe” Just what do you mean by "claims" you peddler of nasty, underhanded innuendo, you dealer in lies and halftruths? https://t.co/ZLfe3Eg9Jn
— Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) March 20, 2018
Unfortunately for him, though, all those protestations motivated Robert Jago to actually investigate them.
What first drew my attention to Peterson’s ties to the Kwakwaka’wakw, however, was the way he seemed to be exploiting that “friendship.” He appeared to be deploying it as a talisman to ward off any social consequences for helping spread racial stereotypes about Indigenous people. It was a defence rooted in identity politics—his language was okay, because he is, after all, an “Indian” through his connection to Charles Joseph. Yet Peterson himself, in a Youtube video, called that “whole group-identity thing” a “pathology” and “reprehensible.”
So he did the obvious thing: he asked the Kwakwaka’wakw people if Peterson was a member of the tribe. Whoops, he’s not. Everyone agrees he’s not. He’s been formally recognized as a good friend of one family, which is nice, but that’s it.
Peterson’s Twitter outburst against what he called Mishra’s “lies and halftruths” has ignited a heated debate within the Kwakwaka’wakw people. The debate isn’t about whether or not Peterson is truly a member of the tribe. I spoke to community members, and each confirmed that the naming ceremony that Peterson took part in does not grant him membership. Instead, there is concern about the harm caused by the way he has boasted of and exaggerated his Kwakwaka’wakw connections. Juli Holloway, a Kwakwaka’wakw community member whose family is in the process of arranging for a similar adoption ceremony for a non-Native friend, describes how she sees the problem: “It’s the lack of humility that bothers me the most, I guess. It should not be a badge of honour. It’s for within the community, not for without.”
#NotYourShield, Dr Peterson.
Peterson has posted a “rebuttal“, only it’s not, not at all. He posts a lot of photos of his naming ceremony, which no one disputes happened, and tells of his long friendship with a Kwakwaka’wakw artist, which no one has denied, but it doesn’t address at all the accusation that he has misrepresented the purpose of the ceremony. He does declare that Jago is “chock full of underhanded allegations” and was “a muckraker with an agenda and not to be trusted”. I guess that settles that.
A couple of chuckleheaded incompetent cops go running through a residential neighborhood, with their guns out.
Will they be fired for that recklessness? They should be. They won’t.
They were acting on a complaint that someone was breaking windows. Is that a death penalty offense? Were people in danger? No. So why did they need guns? Will they even be disciplined for that? No.
They see a black man standing in a yard. He runs from the two strangers, who did not announce that they were cops — all he knows is they are two chuckleheads with guns. Is running from guys with guns, even if he knew they were cops, a crime deserving of death? No. Will the cops suffer any consequences for terrorizing a neighborhood? No.
The asshole cops shoot an innocent man twenty times, because they think the white iPhone he holds is a gun. They murder him, because they think lethal force is an appropriate response to a property crime, to a man trying to avoid trouble, to a black man with a phone.
Will there be justice for Stephan Clark? Hell no.
Do not ever forget. The police are running amuck in this country, and are not ever, under any circumstances, to be trusted.
Crap. I think I blinked and missed it all. What should I do with my last day of freedom, aside from polishing up my preparations for class tomorrow and writing a couple of exams?
I do have to think about proposing something for OrbitCon on 13-15 April. You knew about this, right? An online conference about social justice? You can participate if you have something to say — just submit a proposal.
That’s also the week after the Secular Social Justice conference in Washington DC. I’ll be there, spectatin’ and learning. April is shaping up to be a good month for humanists.
But today…I should probably check my office and make sure there is no surprise grading lurking there. I thought I’d chased it all away, but you can never be sure — it’s sneaky and keeps leaping out at me when I don’t expect it.
In case you’ve been wondering how Sam Harris and Matt Dillahunty dealt with the absence of their compadre, Lawrence Krauss, at their talk last week, we have a partial recording. They spent 15 minutes explaining that they weren’t going to talk about it, and saying how important the #metoo movement is while doing their damnedest to imply that we have to watch out because bitches lie.
I’ve been sitting on it for a while because when Harris babbles out that bullshit about how people are equating Weinstein and Ansari in “literally the same sentence” my brain became congested with boiling blood and rendered me unable to act. Fortunately, Thomas Smith says exactly what I think of the whole shambles. Go listen to that.
You will not be shocked to learn that Alex Jones is an asshole in the workplace, too.
Rob Jacobson, a former video editor who worked for the site for 13 years, alleges his co-workers and managers called him “The Jewish Individual” and “The Resident Jew,” and that Jones regularly humiliated and belittled him. As the Mail reports, “The abuse got so bad that one member of staff photo shopped Jacobson’s face on to the image of an Orthodox Jew under the words ‘THE JEWISH INDIVIDUAL DEMANDS YOUR HOT TOPICS’ and printed it out for all to see.” Jacobson, who was eventually fired, is planning to sue Jones for discrimination, harassment, and unfair dismissal, in addition to his EEOC complaint.
Meanwhile, Ashley Beckford, a former production assistant for InfoWars‘s parent company, Free Speech Systems, alleges Jones “often spent his time shirtless, and endlessly leering…at female employees and guests,” which created a “disgusting, hostile environment” that openly encouraged his staff to make inappropriate comments towards women. According to the EEOC statement from Beckford, who is African American, Jones made unwanted sexual advances and allegedly groped her while commenting, “Who wouldn’t want to have a black wife?”
Now if only we could also sue capitalism for setting up a system where a man needs a job that requires him to be humiliated for 13 years.
I would have thought these were all obvious points, but ContraPoints presents them well and succinctly. And of course, there are a heck of a lot of people who don’t get it.
