There’s an ongoing protest at a Michigan high school, with Confederate flag waving students irate about an incident in which a black student ripped a traitor’s flag off of a white student’s truck. Now there are dozens of trucks cruising the school with their silly little flags.

I had to ask myself, “Wait a minute, Michigan is as far north as Minnesota, isn’t it? Were they a rebel state, too?” That’s rhetorical, by the way. I looked it up, even though I didn’t need to.

Michigan made a substantial contribution to the Union during the American Civil War. While the state itself was far removed from the combat theaters of the war, Michigan supplied a large number of troops and several generals, including George Armstrong Custer. When, at the beginning of the war, Michigan was asked to supply no more than four regiments, Governor Austin Blair sent seven.

Didn’t these kids learn any history in their high school?

Myers [NO RELATION] said the flag represented “a country boy thing” to him and his friends, and he told a reporter the symbol has been “part of American history” since the founding of the U.S.

“We’re flying the flag because of injustice,” Myers said. “It looks cool in the mirror,” he said.

No, apparently they did not.

I guess flying a flag representing slavery is actually “because of injustice”, just not the way they understand it.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day giving Petersonian advice to old fossils in the Republican party (“stand up straight, throw your shoulders back”). Oh, wait, no, that’s unkind to old fossils — I got to Washington DC, and somehow made a beeline for the natural history museum and had a fine afternoon looking over the exhibits. That’s better.

Today, very shortly in fact, I’m heading off to #SSJCON, which is going to be streamed live in case you couldn’t make it.

So I guess I’m going to be hanging out all day with SJWS, or, more accurately, Atheists Who Advocate More For Accomplishing Greatness With Reason And Science Than Insisting That Atheism Means Nothing Other Than Feeling Smarter Than Theists AWAMFAGWRASTIAMNOTFSTTs.

OK, I guess SJW is shorter and punchier, but I don’t know how to pronounce either one.

Stormfront is struggling! Perhaps they’ll die!

Stormfront founder and former Klansman Don Black announced on Tuesday that the white supremacist movement’s first major hate forum is temporarily restricting access to “sustaining members” — users who donate at least five dollars a month — and will be archiving and shuttering its main server on April 6 due to a “financial crisis.”

Black is well-known among white supremacists for perennially complaining about the costs of maintaining the site, which he has threatened to close before. This time, his threats appear to be real.

“I appreciate everybody’s support. But it’s that time of month again, when the big, scary bills hit,” Black wrote to current sustaining members. “Our contributions have once again totaled less than $2000, which is not enough to cover our basic server and radio bills, and this month we no longer have enough personal money to make up the difference.”

I’ll take every sign that our current hideous condition is transient that I can.

Mano has got it. Just go read that.

I’m just disgusted that anyone would still think a work written by a think-tank hack to justify the policies of the rich is more credible than the scientific literature on race.

As if we should have ever doubted it, Andrew Sullivan let his racist freak flag fly again in his column in New York magazine, which seems to be his venue of choice for exposing the tendencies he typically denied before.

Last weekend, a rather seismic op-ed appeared in the New York Times, and it was for a while one of the most popular pieces in the newspaper. It’s by David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard, who carefully advanced the case that there are genetic variations between subpopulations of humans, that these are caused, as in every other species, by natural selection, and that some of these variations are not entirely superficial and do indeed overlap with our idea of race. This argument should not be so controversial — every species is subject to these variations — and yet it is. For many on the academic and journalistic left, genetics are deemed largely irrelevant when it comes to humans. Our large brains and the societies we have constructed with them, many argue, swamp almost all genetic influences.

Humans, in this view, are the only species on Earth largely unaffected by recent (or ancient) evolution, the only species where, for example, the natural division of labor between male and female has no salience at all, the only species, in fact, where natural variations are almost entirely social constructions, subject to reinvention. We are, in this worldview, alone on the planet, born as blank slates, to be written on solely by culture. All differences between men and women are a function of this social effect; as are all differences between the races. If, in the aggregate, any differences in outcome between groups emerge, it is entirely because of oppression, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc. And it is a matter of great urgency that we use whatever power we have to combat these inequalities.

That last paragraph is jaw-dropping — apparently, he thinks he has accurately described the views of the academic left, of people like me. He has not. This is a collection of willful lies and distortions.

the only species on Earth largely unaffected by recent (or ancient) evolution: I’ve only ever heard this absurd claim from the kind of racist who accuses opponents of “cultural marxism”. It is stupidly false. No one thinks humans have somehow ‘escaped’ evolution.

the natural division of labor between male and female: He gives himself away with that magic word, “natural”. What is that natural division of labor? I’m going to guess it’s whatever the current status quo says it is.

natural variations are almost entirely social constructions: There’s that word, “natural”, again. We know there are genetic variations. They’ve been mapped and catalogued. No one denies them. How they are translated into behavior and culture are largely unknown.

We are, in this worldview, alone on the planet, born as blank slates: Oh, fuck you, Andrew Sullivan. “Blank slate” is another magic phrase from the conservative playbook. Let’s pretend that leftists deny all human nature, when what scientists actually say is that human behavior is complex and plastic and can’t be wedged into the rigid categories that conservatives would like to claim are the only “natural” behaviors.

Whenever someone tells me that anyone who disagrees with their narrow views must be a “blank slater”, all I see is a great big blinking neon sign appearing above their heads that says “WRONG”. If you rely so grossly on mischaracterizing your opponents position, you can be disregarded.

Sullivan provided further evidence for that a little farther down.

I felt a genuine relief reading the op-ed because it was so nuanced and so low-temperature; it reflects precisely my own thoughts on the subject; and it’s hard to smear a Harvard geneticist for being a white supremacist (the usual gambit).

Oh god.

1. On a matter that is life or death for some people, on a belief that has led to centuries of oppression, that allows the police to get away with murdering people because of their race, Andrew Sullivan thinks that being cool and nuanced is a virtue. There are times when a righteous anger is the only appropriate human response, and this continued casual approval of racism and sexism is one of them.

2. Yeah, we know, you like the op-ed because it reflects your own fucking racist/sexist views. That is not an endorsement.

3. Holy shit, seriously? You know that Harvard is an elitist organization that for years was at the forefront of the eugenics movement, right? Just a taste, from a Harvard zoologist:

   In Genetics and Eugenics, Castle explained that race mixing, whether in animals or humans, produced inferior offspring. He believed there were superior and inferior races, and that “racial crossing” benefited neither. “From the viewpoint of a superior race there is nothing to be gained by crossing with an inferior race,” he wrote. “From the viewpoint of the inferior race also the cross is undesirable if the two races live side by side, because each race will despise individuals of mixed race and this will lead to endless friction.”

   It’s damned easy to rightfully accuse a Harvard geneticist of white supremacy (not that I’m saying that of Reich). Since when did being a Harvard professor give you immunity to holding bad ideas?

Andrew Sullivan’s opinions on this matter are pure garbage, badly supported, and full of dishonest misrepresentations. There are qualified responses to Reich’s op-ed — they are made with respect for his actual scientific contributions while pointing out that he has bungled the interpretations of actual scientists who study the genetics of human populations. This statement, signed by a number of scientists, is a good example.

Reich frames his argument by positing a straw man in the form of a purported orthodoxy that claims that “the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.” That orthodoxy, he says, “denies the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations” and is “anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations.”

This misrepresents the many scientists and scholars who have demonstrated the scientific flaws of considering “race” a biological category. Their robust body of scholarship recognizes the existence of geographically based genetic variation in our species, but shows that such variation is not consistent with biological definitions of race. Nor does that variation map precisely onto ever changing socially defined racial groups.

Reich critically misunderstands and misrepresents concerns that are central to recent critiques of how biomedical researchers — including Reich — use categories of “race” and “population.”

No wonder Sullivan liked it. Like him, it builds an argument around straw men.

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.