Excuses fit only for authoritarians

We’ve all heard about the disgraceful behavior of United Airlines and the Chicago police. I’m getting disgusted by the excuses made in the aftermath.

A few weeks ago, United made the news for kicking two girls off one of their flights because they were wearing leggings. United justified this because there were rules written down for United employees traveling on a pass, so a lot of people said that was OK, then — they were rules, after all, and rules must be obeyed.

Wait, why? Who made this rule, and for what reason? Presumably it’s because they have this corporate image that they want to enforce, so they’ve got this damn stupid rule written down by some prudish busybody — it’s certainly not for an objectively good reason, like safety — and now they insist on enforcing it, pointlessly, even if it is problematic for customers. And yet I saw people just accept the injustice because it was a rule.

Now likewise they have a rule that they can throw paying customers off the plane at the convenience of their employees and at the whim of a random number generator. People are doing the same thing! It’s a rule, therefore United has a right to abuse passengers who aren’t sufficiently obedient. Again, this is not a safety rule (if a passenger is endangering others, then yes, there should be an expectation of obedience and penalties for defying the airline), but one for the convenience of the corporation. They are permitted to act inhumanely in the service of purely capitalist gains.

And people accept that! Some, like Bill O’Reilly, even laugh at the video of the man being bloodied.

I don’t give a flying fuck if somewhere in United’s fine print they have written down that they get to club you senseless if they need your seat — it is an unjust rule because it prioritizes the convenience of an employee over the safety and health and rights of another human being. Having it written down does not make it right, it means that an immoral behavior is formally sanctioned in the corporate culture of United. That makes it worse.

Of course, there is even more heinous justifications. Would you believe journalists have rummaged in the victim’s past to find evidence of misbehavior? He was convicted of using his medical license to abuse prescription drugs in 2004. That’s bad, but not relevant — his punishment was to have his license to practice medicine suspended for ten years, a debt that has been paid. It does not mean that United, or anyone, is justified to punch him in the head any time they feel like it.

I find the callousness of big business disturbing, but find the willingness of too many Americans to condone it even more distressing.

The ideology of an “ideal” science

One of the worst fates to befall an idea is that it becomes an ideal. We argue against this when the ideal is a deity; ever notice how defenders of religion like to fall back on the argument that they’re helping people, that they inspire high sentiments, that they’ve supported arts and music, etc.? I agree with all that. My problem is when they bring in their invisible, unquestionable god as an authority (who must be addressed through the medium of his priests, of course), and suddenly we’re dealing with an idol who is, by definition, perfect, and all argument is shut down by fiat. Yeah, maybe the church is a bit exploitive, but JESUS LOVES YOU, so sit down, shut up, here’s the donation plate, and you’re going to Hell if you don’t love him back.

And by “love him back”, I mean support child-raping priests, preach the prosperity gospel, and burn that witch over there.

We are constantly asked to pretend that sordid realities don’t exist, in the name of the Lord. The servants of the church may be subject to human frailties, but keep your eyes on the perfection of the ideal, on paradise and the imagined flawless reification of the gods. It’s an old game, but it works. Humans are often quite ready to overlook overwhelmingly horrid situations if it’s done in the name of a beautiful concept — we’re used to suppressing our decency out of loyalty to a beautiful higher cause. Concentration camp guards enisted to serve the dream of Volk and Vaterland; brutal abuse of people who weren’t part of the dream were a small price to pay. Crusaders murdered and raped their way across the Holy Land in the cause of liberating Jesus’ home for Christendom. Americans vote to deregulate coal and oil extraction so they can work in dirty, dangerous jobs because Capitalism has taught them that jobs are important, and that tax breaks to plutocrats are a small price to pay to keep the dehumanizing machinery running.

And some people will allow people to suffer a lifetime of untreated syphilis in the name of the sacred Scientific Method. Some have their idealized vision of a future rational world where the variables are all flattened out, the control group cheerfully meets their fate, and the experimentals regard the electrode, the poison, the deprivation, the hallucinations, the sterilizations, the radiation burns, as a small price to pay for Progress.

Yeah, Science gets deified, too.

Science is universal, international, inclusive, nonpartisan, a-political, a-gender, a-race, & a-ideological. Don't inject identity politics.

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) March 23, 2017

None of that is true. Not one word.

Science is universal…if you are wealthy enough to get the education you need to understand it.

Science is international…except for those cases where competition is whipped up to drive investment (space race, anyone?), or we are driven to keep technology out of the hands of countries we don’t like.

Science is inclusive…except that it isn’t. It’s expensive and difficult and access is restricted.

Science is nonpartisan and apolitical…hah. Lamar Smith. Scott Pruitt. Donald Trump. How out of touch can you be?

Science is a-gender, a-race, & a-ideological…the only people I’ve ever heard claim that are the kinds of people who complain about “identity politics” with a straight face. Identitatarianism is an alt-right, racist affliction.

Shermer is now trying to defend his fantasy by claiming that I was tweeting about an ideal we should strive for. That’s nice. If we haven’t met that ideal, shouldn’t we be addressing our shortcomings? And what definition of “strive” are you using that says we ought to be silent about disparities and failings and not march to oppose them?

An ideal is not a reality, and swiftly swapping in a nonexistent ideal when confronted with real problems does not make the problems go away.

And then there’s this appalling piece of theater:

Yesterday I hosted the theoretical physicist and popular science writer Lawrence Krauss for our Science Salon series and we were asked our thoughts on the March for Science by an audience member who had been following the Twitter-Storm over my tweet. Given that Krauss has worked in academia his entire career, including being involved in the hiring process of physicists, I asked him why people seem to think that science still excludes women and minorities (and others) when, in fact, it is peopled by professors who are almost entirely liberals who fully embrace the principles of inclusion (and the laws regarding affirmative action). Are we to believe that all these liberal academics, when behind closed doors, privately believe that women and minorities can’t cut it in science and so they continue to mostly hire only white men?

Krauss was unequivocal in his response. Absolutely not. There has never been a better time to be a woman in science, he explained, elaborating that at his university, Arizona State University, not only does the student body perfectly reflect the demographics of the state of Arizona, the President of ASU has mandated that if two candidates are equally qualified for a professorship, one a man and the other a woman, the woman should be selected for the job. Full stop.

Holy crap! Two white men have declared that the problems of sexism and racism have disappeared from the academy! High five!

What? No high five? I’m sure these guys will give that demonstration a standing ovation.

It’s made exceptionally ironic because these two men have…unfortunate…histories. Shermer, as is well known, has an unsavory reputation at conferences, and even tried to sue me for exposing his behavior. Krauss seems to think there’s nothing wrong with Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy convicted sex offender; Krauss has even bizarrely used science to defend him.

“If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge,” says Krauss. “Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they’re not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.” Though colleagues have criticized him over his relationship with Epstein, Krauss insists, “I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.”

Oh god. Yes, that’s exactly the kind of person I want defending the ideals of science. It’s all right! He’s buying young women, but they’re not that young!

I have to explain that while academics are largely liberal, they are also people, and mostly white people at that, and often mostly men. People, it turns out, are flawed. We can have ideals (that word again!), but we rarely live up them, and we have to struggle to compensate by imposing policies to consciously compel us to meet those ideals. Since Krauss has been on hiring committees, he knows that there are constraints placed on his impulses — we get training from human resources on our policies — every time! I’ve been on many hiring committees, and every time we get the same rules recited at us in the same lectures. Why all the repetition? Why all the rules? Because even liberal professors can be implicitly sexist and racist, and it takes hard work to correct your biases.

These policies do work to correct historical injustices — most universities are working hard at social justice to create a fair balance of women and minorities. As Krauss points out, correctly, Arizona has seen excellent steady progress in improving representation in their student body, which is impressive for a state that elected Jan Brewer and Joe Arpaio.

But the triumphal attitude is inappropriate. It may be true that there “has never been a better time to be a woman in science”, but that does not mean the problems have gone away — it only means that in recent history the treatment of women in science has been abysmal. I suggest that Dr Krauss read Paige Brown Jarreau, or perhaps this summary of top issues for women faculty in science and engineering. He’s sufficiently liberal that he’d probably agree with all of those concerns, while simultaneously suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t be so loud about bringing them up.

I would also point out that while it’s very nice to point out the great strides that the University of Arizona is making, I also took a look at the University of Arizona Physics faculty page. It’s very impressive. 31 faculty listed.

Two of them are women. I know I’m only a biologist so maybe my math skills aren’t up to snuff, but I think that’s about 6.5%. I rather doubt that that accurately reflects the demographics of Arizona.

That is not to criticize the faculty! They may be entirely enlightened and eager to improve faculty representation, but are simply the recipients of a long history of privilege and unfair investment in education. It’s OK. I would not be at all surprised if a majority were active in bringing attention to the inequities present in science, and think we ought to be bringing these problems to the attention of the public, and funding agencies, and political entities.

Some, obviously, don’t.

By the way, I laughed aloud at that declaration from the university president that “if two candidates are equally qualified for a professorship, one a man and the other a woman, the woman should be selected for the job.” It sounds good. It’s completely cosmetic, though. There has never in the history of science been two candidates competing for a science position who are equally qualified. Never. There are so many skills involved in these occupations that people can’t possibly be equal in all things, and some of the reasons one might offer a tenure position to someone are subjective. Taking a look at the literature on implicit bias would be a good idea.

“Most people intend to be fair,” Handelsman insisted. “If you ask them, ‘When you do this evaluation, are you planning to be fair?’ they will 100 percent say yes. But most of us carry these unconscious, implicit prejudices and biases that warp our evaluation of people or the work that they do.” The biases Handelsman is referring to are most readily measured in hiring studies, where hiring managers are asked to evaluate potential candidates for a job or a promotion. With astonishing reliability, the evaluators will assign higher scores to the exact same application if the name on the application is male versus female. These studies are “absolutely canonical” in the social psychology literature, and their results have remained shockingly consistent over the past four decades despite all of the social progress that this country has made.

Most universities have initiatives to attempt to correct, or at least make us aware, of theses biases; mine certainly does, and here’s Northwestern’s list of resources for faculty hiring.

For anyone to tout an administrator’s declaration as if it definitively ends the problem is embarrassingly naïve. Or a conscious attempt to diminish a serious issue.

That’s half the story

Jim Sterling has an excellent essay on the recent exposure of certain youtubers for their ugly remarks, which has led to quite a bit of furor as they gasp in shock that anyone would call them out on this, let alone cause them a loss of income, while a muddling mob roars in support or protest. He makes the very good point that if you’re making tens of thousands, or even millions of dollars, playing games on the internet, then you must be the focus of a lot of attention, and you should be aware that people will notice you and sometimes criticize you. I can assure you that being public and opinionated does not mean you get parades of flowers and that everyone loves you.

He points out that the naiveté of these youtubers is silly, and also that trying to defend them by arguing that it’s simply because people have different views does not work — it forgets that communication is a two-way street, and if Famous Rich Youtuber gets to say offensive things as their right, then their audience also gets to express their criticisms.

“Sometimes people are gonna say things you don’t like,” explained Boogie in his video. “People are gonna have ideas and opinions that you don’t enjoy.”

This is true and it works both ways. One opinion and idea that several big YouTubers don’t enjoy right now is that YouTubers are relevant enough to make headlines and become international controversies. One opinion and idea that several big YouTubers don’t enjoy right now is that, no, you can’t share your racist beliefs and expect nobody to argue back.

The Internet has warped the idea of “free speech” to mean “speech without consequence” and that’s simply not what it is.

But one thing Sterling does not get into, at least in this essay, is that these aren’t just “words”, they’re ideas, and ideas have meanings and most importantly, can be wrong. It would be lovely to pretend that they’re just lexical strings, and Person A has emitted a string that provokes a different string from Person B, but both A and B are actively translating those strings into meaning, and may also translate them further into actions. We too often excuse those meanings by saying “it’s just their opinion,” but sometimes those opinions can be looked up in the truth table of reality, and that function returns a value of FALSE (Or NaN, or ERROR, or SYSTEM FAILURE, or CODE RED: MISSILES HAVE BEEN LAUNCHED.)

One response is to wag our fingers and announce that they’ve lost our eyeballs and our revenue — a purely personal and singular punishment by neglect. But sometimes that isn’t enough. When someone declares that they think all gingers ought to be lined up and shot, yes, you should turn away and shun them. But what if they have a mob of thousands at their back who all agree about the ginger exterminations? You’ve left the group, but there are still all the others who are working together and coordinating and praising the initial head eliminationist. You aren’t going to slow them down a bit.

Here’s another problem: sometimes, maybe, in addition to being wrong and stupid on some things, the person is brilliant on others. We don’t have a way to chop up the mosaic of attributes of a person and dispose of the nasty bits and keep the good parts. Now what?

For example, I think Dave Chappelle is an amazing comedian — talented and revolutionary. I have loved the guy’s routines in the past, and you can see that he’s intelligent and insightful.

He’s also…problematic, a word that is also problematically over-used. Here’s a story of Chapelle in a comedy club that praises his skills but also highlights his difficulties.

But the truth is that Chappelle’s set was riddled with transphobia, homophobia, and a bit about the Ray Rice incident that changed the energy in the room in a tangible way. He talked about seeing a drunk “transvestite” at a party, mocked her, and complained about having his pronouns corrected when he referred to her as “he”. He maintained that he should be able to use whatever pronouns he wanted. He called her a man in a dress. This bit was not really a joke, just a strange, awkward story, but people laughed. It was pure, absolute, unabashed transphobia, and it broke my fucking heart.

He then started talking about “the gays”, essentially saying that he doesn’t understand why they need a whole parade because everybody has freaky sex. He compared his foot fetish and the negative reactions and judgment he’s gotten from people for it to being gay. Don’t get me wrong – the personal stuff about his foot fucking was VERY funny. But comparing his sexual proclivities to the experience of gay people was also, ultimately, problematic and misguided. I was sitting there in the front row, laughing at his jokes but simultaneously confused and upset by where some of them were coming from, and why he felt the need to talk about being mugged by a man who he “knew” was gay from the way he walked. It was the most conflicted I’ve ever felt about comedy.

That was written in 2014.

Now he has a new comedy special on Netflix, and I have been strongly tempted to watch it — it’ll probably make me laugh throughout — but I’ve also heard that it is problematic in exactly the same way as that comedy set from 2½ years ago. There will be hilarious bits, and there will be parts that are just plain wrong and that hurt people. People are murdered for being gay or transgender, and since Chapelle is neither, he comes across as trivializing the pain of others. It kinda rips the humor out of the routine.

So I’m doing the minimal response. I’m choosing not to watch it. The ratings for his show will decline by a few thousandths of a percent.

But I also wonder if there isn’t something more that should be done. If Chappelle had been strongly chastised in 2014, maybe his 2017 special would be better. Maybe we’re doing harm to Chappelle by not loudly correcting him when he is so terribly wrong.

Because let’s make no bones about it, Chappelle is just as wrong and damaging about gay and transgender people as those youtubers are wrong and damaging about race. It’s also more than just insensitivity — these are views that do real harm to human beings.

Mutual harm at Middlebury

Tristero strikes exactly the right note in this letter to the professor who was injured in the protests against Charles Murray at Middlebury. There is no excusing the harm done to Professor Stanger, but there is also no excusing the harm done by Murray.

I have, in fact, read The Bell Curve, the book Charles Murray co-authored with Richard Herrnstein (who died before publication).As I recall, the book appeared to me to be little more than a spectacularly pathetic attempt to boost the low self-esteem of the authors by claiming that blacks in general had inherently lower IQs than their own ethnic groups. My heart went out to Murray and I hoped he would find a good therapist that would instill some some self-confidence in him.

But even more so, my heart went out to the people who would be surely harmed by his terrible book. I knew that The Bell Curve would be mistaken as being super-serious intellectual research (it’s got charts and things!) when it was nothing of the sort.

Here’s where you come in.

Murray is a hero to racists with pretensions to intellectuality, like college-age right-wingers. But having regular access to the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed pages (I’ve also read many of Murray’s op-eds and they’re as unserious as The Bell Curve) makes it difficult for Murray to complain that someone’s trying to suppress his freedom of speech. For that, he needs useful idiots who are prepared to invite him not to fawning right wing think tanks or Klan meetings, but to places where the people who his writings actually harm can confront him.

Make no mistake about it: the racism that Murray empowers is as inexcusable and irresponsible as the injuries you suffered. I’m extremely sorry that you were hurt, but I’m also extremely sorry that Murray was provided an excuse to claim the high road. Both are utterly disgraceful outcomes of this unfortunate set of circumstances.

I too read The Bell Curve way back when it first came out, although, thankfully, the details of that pile of shit have faded from my memory, leaving only the recollection of a sensation of disgust. Murray relies on baffling his audiences with the arcana of statistical analysis which neither he nor most of his readers understand, but which earns him the love and appreciation of racists who don’t really care how he gets to his conclusions, as long as those conclusions support their prejudices.

I’m only competent enough in those arcana to see the flaws in his arguments, but not to explain them well. For that, I recommend the invaluable Cosma Shalizi, who made the case against g:

To summarize what follows below (“shorter sloth”, as it were), the case for g rests on a statistical technique, factor analysis, which works solely on correlations between tests. Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can’t tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there are only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure. A clear example, known since 1916, shows that factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work. Heritability doesn’t distinguish these alternatives either. Exploratory factor analysis being no good at discovering causal structure, it provides no support for the reality of g.

And also argued against misinterpretations of heritability:

To summarize: Heritability is a technical measure of how much of the variance in a quantitative trait (such as IQ) is associated with genetic differences, in a population with a certain distribution of genotypes and environments. Under some very strong simplifying assumptions, quantitative geneticists use it to calculate the changes to be expected from artificial or natural selection in a statistically steady environment. It says nothing about how much the over-all level of the trait is under genetic control, and it says nothing about how much the trait can change under environmental interventions. If, despite this, one does want to find out the heritability of IQ for some human population, the fact that the simplifying assumptions I mentioned are clearly false in this case means that existing estimates are unreliable, and probably too high, maybe much too high.

Once you knock those two props out from under Murray’s claims, he flops down into a disreputable heap.

But he keeps getting invited to speak at universities. I don’t know why. Stanger claims that the protest was a result of people not reading Murray’s book, but I think the real problem is people who read Murray’s book and don’t understand what a pile of garbage it is.

Here come the apologists for Steve King

Kathleen Parker tries hard to reframe King’s remarks as an expression of reasonable concern.

King’s comment came in the form of a tweet, apparently in support of Geert Wilders, the Dutch nationalist politician hoping to become prime minister of the Netherlands following Wednesday’s election.

Both Wilders — who once called Moroccans “scum” — and King do seem cut from the same cloth. Both men are apparently concerned that immigrant encroachment is posing a danger to civilization as we know it, especially among certain recurring arrivals, including: (1) Muslims, whose faith is sometimes used by certain fanatics to justify murdering the rest of us; (2) people from a variety of nations who, importantly, do not have white skin, or, inferentially, Western values coursing through their veins.

To the Kings and Wilderses (and Trumps?), the problems are obvious and undeniable. Even to the less knee-jerk, the fast-changing demographic landscape has created at least some level of discomfort and uncertainty. Suddenly, the majority has to ponder the imponderable: Who, me, a minority?

She goes on to explain that he’s stupid and careless, but gosh, he’s not an extremist. He is literally and explicitly reciting far-right racist RaHoWa rhetoric, but he’s just being rude — we have to remember that the real problem is that our white majority is currently experiencing discomfort and uncertainty. Steve King’s were repugnantly stated, but what we need is someone who can express those sentiments more craftily.

What is needed are new voices to articulate these fundamental concerns, recognize them with respect and work toward solutions that don’t require that our neighbors be marginalized. This would seem especially compelling to those now considering what it might be like to become a minority in their “own” country.

Oh, fuck that noise.

In a few years, people of European descent will no longer be a majority in this country. That should mean nothing — demographic shifts like that happen all the time, and they don’t necessarily disrupt the political continuity of a country. The USA does not have the same demographic makeup that it did at its founding; there was a dearth of Italians and Swedes and Irish signing the Declaration of Independence, you know, and even worse, no black Americans were asked to join the revolutionary committee.

What’s making some white people uncomfortable is that they’re used to shitting on minorities, and they’re thinking that minority status equals being treated like dirt, from their own example. And they, and columnists like Parker, are trying to normalize that feeling as being perfectly normal. It isn’t. It shouldn’t be.

You don’t need someone capable of gently and wittily articulating your racist backbrain as something justifiable. You need to grow the fuck up and recognize brown and black Americans as your brothers and sisters, and slap down these racist assholes who can’t recognize this true, instead of making excuses for them.

Steve King watch

He simply doesn’t know when to shut up. He was interviewed about his previous racist comments, and guess what he babbled about? The coming Race War.

Iowa Rep. Steve King said Monday that blacks and Hispanics will be fighting each other before overtaking whites in the US population.

King, a Republican, was on the radio responding to a question about Univision anchor Jorge Ramos’ comment to Tucker Carlson on Fox News that whites would become a majority-minority demographic in America by 2044, a point Ramos used to make the argument that it is a multiracial country.

Jorge Ramos’ stock in trade is identifying and trying to drive wedges between race, King told Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson on 1040 WHO. Race and ethnicity, I should say to be more correct. When you start accentuating the differences, then you start ending up with people that are at each other’s throats. And he’s adding up Hispanics and blacks into what he predicts will be in greater number than whites in America. I will predict that Hispanics and the blacks will be fighting each other before that happens.

Because white people have always been innocent bystanders. No, sir, white Americans never tried to commit genocide, or enslave and torture black people, or or carry out wars of conquest in Latin America — that was just all those people fighting with each other.

You won’t believe his source for this prediction.

King concluded the interview by recommending that listeners read the novel, “The Camp of the Saints,” by French author Jean Raspail, a book about Europe being overcome by immigrants which has also frequently been referenced by top Trump advisers Steve Bannon. The book has been criticized as presenting a racist view of immigration.

Yep. A work of fiction, written by a racist, about a South Asian armada full of impoverished people preparing to invade Europe.

Only white Europeans like Calgues are portrayed as truly human in The Camp of the Saints. The Indian armada brings thousands of wretched creatures whose very bodies arouse disgust: Scraggy branches, brown and black … All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms. Poor brown children are spoiled fruit starting to rot, all wormy inside, or turned so you can’t see the mold.

The ship’s inhabitants are also sexual deviants who turn the voyage into a grotesque orgy. Everywhere, rivers of sperm, Raspail writes. Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers.

This is what Steve King reads in his spare time? It’s what he recommends to journalists?

If the price of homogeneity is that we all have to look like Steve King, I’m not paying

Steve King, who is definitely one of the dumbest politicians in America, put his foot in his mouth once again. He is endorsing openly racist ideas, making David Duke happy, and confirming once again that the Republican party has become the shit-hole where we dump our very worst people.

King in a tweet praised Geert Wilders, including a cartoon depicting Wilders plugging a hole in a wall that reads Western civilization.

Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies, the congressman wrote.

Actually, yes you can. In fact, you must. Our country alone contains over 300 million people, is Steve King planning to fill the nation with the fruit of his loins? Obviously not. When he says our civilization, he has a broader group of people in mind than just his immediate family. When he says somebody else’s babies, he’s explicitly making a division among the people living here to exclude a group. The question is, where is he drawing the line within our people?

I think we can all guess. And it’s understood that somebody else’s babies are quite simply the brown people who don’t look like him.

There’s a word I like: ecumene. It recognizes that there is a broader community of people living in a land, bound together by the ties of our culture, but still allowing for diversity. I don’t like people who want to shatter our ecumene.

It’s a clear message, King said on Monday. We need to get our birth rates up or Europe will be entirely transformed within a half century or a little more. And Geert Wilders knows that and that’s part of his campaign and part of his agenda.

Guess what, Steve King? Our countries are going to be transformed whether you like it or not, and whether one ethnic group or another has greater birth rates. People gripe about different generations within a population, and always have. Cultures change, always. It’s human nature. The concern is to shape those changes in positive directions. One example of that is public education, which Steve King’s party wants to destroy.

Also, our birth rates? Whose? Is Steve King a resident of the Netherlands? Perhaps he thinks he’s being inclusive. I warn you, though: allow Iowans to find commonality with the Nederlanders, and next thing you know, you’re going to have to let Belgians into the club. And if you let Belgians in, you’re going to have to recognize your affinity to the French. From there it’s a slippery slope to Iowans becoming cosmopolitan people of the world, and there goes your dream of redneck insularity.

King went on to criticize illegal immigration to the United States and immigrants who don’t assimilate into the American culture.

I’m in a state where you can buy lefse and lutefisk any day of the year, where communities celebrate Syttende Mai, where individuals proudly fly blue and yellow flags, where we tell Ole and Lena jokes. Is that OK, Steve King? I notice that you have a motley assortment of flags on your desk, including a Traitor’s Flag.

I think that it is fine to be proud of your heritage, and people should celebrate the customs of their Latin American or African or European or Asian ancestors. It’s when it becomes exclusionary, and you try to shame people for their history, or you use your history to justify oppression, that it becomes a problem.

Living in enclaves, refusing to assimilate into the American culture and civilization. Some embrace it, yes. But many are two and three generations living in enclaves that are pushing back now and resisting against the assimilation, he said.

Like, say, Minnesota? My family came over from Sweden and Norway in the early 19th century, it’s been like five generations, and they haven’t forgotten old customs. My grandparents even moved again from Minnesota to Washington state and found communities of like-minded Scandinavians to live among! Yet somehow second-generation citizens who speak English at school and still speak Spanish to their abuelita are a problem?

How much assimilation do you want?

King also emphasized his view that western civilization is a superior civilization.

I like Western civilization, too, but I think its strengths are openness and willingness to share the benefits of society with all (which, come to think of it, was also true once upon a time of Islamic civilization and Roman civilization and Chinese civilizations, or at least, those civilizations that thrived and grew).

So why does Steve King want to make changes that turn us into an inferior civilization?

I’d like to see an America that’s just so homogenous that we look a lot the same, from that perspective, he said.

Oh, jebus. I just imagined an America populated exclusively by balding, potato-nosed, pop-eyed, pale-skinned, thin-lipped stupid people, and it was horrific.

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