Thank God someone slapped Paul Joseph Watson

Rhetorically, of course. The man is an ignoramus. He actually objected to a BBC video that illustrated the Roman empire as a vast polyglot melange of varying ethnicities, because, as all good alt-right Nazis know, Romans were all white British aristocrats.

One of his buddies even mocked the idea that there could have been black legionaries — black people have always been slaves, not realizing that this is only a trope that evolved with modern colonialism.

You know, we have these nifty DNA technologies that allow us to examine remains from Roman Britain and learn all kinds of things about the colonizers. They weren’t all Kenneth Branagh clones — the early residents of Roman London were mostly immigrants from all over the empire. Even without DNA analysis, we have written historical records that testify to the diversity imported into the island.

But all you have to do is enjoy Mike Stuchbery’s evidence filled smackdown. Totally righteous.

Another lesson the Nazis might want to learn is that despite the flood of foreigners almost 2000 years ago and despite the measurable infusion of non-white, non-Briton blood, the region did what usually happens with an influx of diversity — the resident population absorbed it and survived just fine, eventually becoming the pasty white Englanders we all know and love. We are all children of mongrels, our blood is spiced up with diversity, and it does us no harm.

Can we stop fighting the Civil War?

The team behind Game of Thrones is now proposing a new show: an alternate reality series in which the South won the Civil War and perpetuated legal slavery into the present day. It might be a good show, if it can consistently show that slavery is an unforgivable evil and uses this alternate history to highlight real injustices. But do you trust them to make a socially conscious, critical analysis of contemporary America? I don’t. The people who made Game of Thrones have learned that sensational violence and sex sells. I predict many opportunities to show attractive naked black women on the auction block or serving white men while topless.

It also falls into the category of playing devil’s advocate, or “just asking questions”, playing rhetorical games with matters that affect people’s lives. That is inappropriate. To have two white guys propose this thought exercise is troubling.

But mostly, we have a dreadful track record on dealing with the Civil War’s legacy in movies. Go read that link; we’re subjected to the most awful romantic schlock about the Confederacy, which was apparently full of rugged, noble individuals who were fighting for their way of life and dealing with the aftermath of loss with dignified grace.

People still think Gone With the Wind was a great movie. I doubt that it was; I’ve tried to watch it multiple times at the urging of friends, and have never lasted more than 15 minutes before I’ve left the room.

Die, yuppie scum

I reread David Brook’s horrible column, How we are ruining America, now that the red hot scales of rage over my eyes have cooled a bit, and realized it wasn’t quite as bad as I thought. It’s still oblivious and stupid, but the real issue is who he is talking about when he says “we”. Who is “we”?

It’s got a photo of a college grad up top, and he keeps talking about the “educated class”, but he seems to have confused that with the “upper middle class”, which is what he’s really talking about. I am a member of the “educated class” — you can’t get much more imbedded in that group than a professor at a liberal arts college — but his descriptions of those people look nothing like my experience.

I come out of a working class background. My colleagues come from a range of backgrounds. My students are similarly diverse; sure, there are some who come in with a free ride from their parents and drive fancy cars (and that’s fine), but others are scraping by on financial aid and are working long hours outside of the classroom to keep afloat. Universities are generally not elitist, but especially at the community college and state college levels are all about reaching all strata of society.

They can be a path to upward mobility — you generally will make more money with a college degree than without — but they’re more of a way to do what you want with your life. You do not become a sociologist to get rich. You do not become a college professor because you dream of owning a yacht someday.

That’s the lie behind his column, the part where he’s detached from reality. He uses “educated class” and “wealthy” interchangeably, and he just doesn’t get it. Extremely over-educated Ph.D.s with science degrees are more likely to be scruffy and dressed in jeans and hang out at the brew pub than to demand incessant frou-frou dining experiences (although we’re also likely to be more open to novelty, and aren’t averse to trying anything).

Nothing in his column speaks to the experience of educated Americans. It’s all about the bubble the rich live in.

The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It’s not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it’s the cultural codes.

Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.

It begins to sink in: the “we” who are ruining American is not the students who better themselves with an education — it’s pampered spoiled rich people who have more money than they deserve. The “we” is you, David Brooks. You are ruining America, along with all the other undeservedly wealthy people who contribute nothing to our culture. They’ve managed to substitute greed and a superficial desire for the trappings of the rich for real knowledge and a more human awareness.

The real targets of his complaints are people represented by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, product of a private girls’ school education, but a college dropout — someone who isn’t really well-educated, but has been groomed to fit into the parasitic class so well populated with people like David Brooks, who get well-paid columns in the NY Times while not being particularly bright or insightful or even interesting.

His column reads much better if you interpret it as a confession that he deserves to be lined up against the wall in the Revolution.

A damn good critique of Charles Murray’s awful oeuvre

When many of us criticize Charles Murray, we tend to focus on his unwarranted extrapolations from correlations; it’s easy to get caught up in the details and point out esoteric statistical flaws that take an advanced degree to be able to understand, and are even more challenging to explain. It’s also easy for the other side to trot out “experts” who are good at burying you in yet more statistical bafflegab to muddy the waters. Nathan J. Robinson makes a 180° turnabout to explain why Charles Murray is odious, and maybe goes a little too far to pardon the bad science, but does refocus our attention on the real problem, that his argument is fundamentally a racist argument, built on racist assumptions, and it can’t be reformed by more clever statistics.

Robinson drills right down to the core of Murray’s book, and highlights what we should find far more offensive than an abuse of abstract statistical calculations. He distills The Bell Curve down to these three premises.

  1. Black people tend to be dumber than white people, which is probably partly why white people tend to have more money than black people. This is likely to be partly because of genetics, a question that would be valid and useful to investigate.
  2. Black cultural achievements are almost negligible. Western peoples have a superior tendency toward creating “objectively” more “excellent” art and music. Differences in cultural excellence across groups might also have biological roots.
  3. We should return to the conception of equality held by the Founding Fathers, who thought black people were subhumans. A situation in which white people are politically and economically dominant over black people is natural and acceptable.

He backs up these summaries with quotes from Murray and Herrnstein, too, and criticizes critics.

Murray’s opponents occasionally trip up, by arguing against the reality of the difference in test scores rather than against Murray’s formulation of the concept of intelligence. The dubious aspect of The Bell Curve‘s intelligence framework is not that it argues there are ethnic differences in IQ scores, which plenty of sociologists acknowledge. It is that Murray and Herrnstein use IQ, an arbitrary test of a particular set of abilities (arbitrary in the sense that there is no reason why a person’s IQ should matter any more than their eye color, not in the sense that it is uncorrelated with economic outcomes) as a measure of whether someone is smart or dumb in the ordinary language sense. It isn’t, though: the number of high-IQ idiots in our society is staggering. Now, Murray and Herrnstein say that “intelligence” is “just a noun, not an accolade,” generally using the phrase “cognitive ability” in the book as a synonym for “intelligent” or “smart.” But because they say explicitly (1) that “IQ,” “intelligent,” and “smart” mean the same thing, (2) that “smart” can be contrasted with “dumb,” and (3) the ethnic difference in IQ scores means an ethnic difference in intelligence/smartness, it is hard to see how the book can be seen as arguing anything other than that black people tend to be dumber than white people, and Murray and Herrnstein should not have been surprised that their “black people are dumb” book landed them in hot water. (“We didn’t sat ‘dumb’! We just said dumber! And only on average! And through most of the book we said ‘lacking cognitive ability’ rather than ‘dumb’!”)

I have to admit, I’m guilty. When one of these wankers pops up to triumphantly announce that these test scores show that black people are inferior, I tend to reflexively focus on the interpretation of test scores and the overloaded concept of IQ and the unwarranted expansion of a number to dismiss people, when maybe, if I were more the target of such claims, I would be more likely to take offense at the part where he’s saying these human beings are ‘lacking in cognitive ability’, or whatever other euphemism they’re using today.

The problem isn’t that Murray got the math wrong (although bad assumptions make for bad math). The problem is that he abuses math to justify prior racist beliefs, exaggerating minor variations in measurements of arbitrary population groups to warrant bigotry against certain subsets. That ought to be the heart of our objection, that he attaches strong value judgments to numbers he has fished out of a great pool of complexity.

In part, too, the objection ought to be because somehow, his numbers tend to conveniently support existing racist biases in our society. But he consistently twists the interpretations to prop up ideas that would have been welcomed in the antebellum South.

We should be clear on why the Murray-Herrnstein argument was both morally offensive and poor social science. If they had stuck to what is ostensibly the core claim of the book, that IQ (whatever it is) is strongly correlated with one’s economic status, there would have been nothing objectionable about their work. In fact, it would even have been (as Murray himself has pointed out) totally consistent with a left-wing worldview. “IQ predicts economic outcomes” just means “some particular set of mental abilities happen to be well-adapted for doing the things that make you successful in contemporary U.S. capitalist society.” Testing for IQ is no different from testing whether someone can play the guitar or do 1000 jumping jacks or lick their elbow. And “the people who can do those certain valued things are forming a narrow elite at the expense of the underclass” is a conclusion left-wing people would be happy to entertain. After all, it’s no different than saying “people who have the good fortune to be skilled at finance are making a lot of money and thereby exacerbating inequality.” Noam Chomsky goes further and suggests that if we actually managed to determine the traits that predicted success under capitalism, more relevant than “intelligence” would probably be “some combination of greed, cynicism, obsequiousness and subordination, lack of curiosity and independence of mind, self-serving disregard for others, and who knows what else.”

I also learned something new. I read The Bell Curve years ago when it first came out, and it did effectively turn me away from ever wanting to hear another word from Charles Murray. But he has written other books! He also wrote Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, which Robinson turns to to further reveal Murray’s implicit bigotry.

Human Accomplishment is one of the most absurd works of “social science” ever produced. If you want evidence proving Murray a “pseudoscientist,” it is Human Accomplishment rather than The Bell Curve that you should turn to. In it, he attempts to prove using statistics which cultures are objectively the most “excellent” and “accomplished,” demonstrating mathematically the inherent superiority of Western thought throughout the arts and sciences.

Oh god. I can tell what’s coming. Pages and pages of cherry-picking, oodles of selection bias that Murray will use to complain of cultural trends when all his elaborate statistics do is take the measure of the slant of his own brain. Pseudoscientists do this all the time; another example would be Ray Kurzweil, who has done a survey of history in which he selects which bits he wants to plot to support his claim of accelerating technological progress leading to his much-desired Singularity. Murray does the same thing to “prove” his prior assumption that black people “lack cognitive ability”.

How does he do this? By counting “significant” people. (First rule of pseudoscientists: turn your biases into numbers. That way, if anyone disagrees, you can accuse them of being anti-math.)

Murray purports to show that Europeans have produced the most “significant” people in literature, philosophy, art, music, and the sciences, and then posits some theories as to what makes cultures able to produce better versus worse things. The problem that immediately arises, of course, is that there is no actual objective way of determining a person’s “significance.” In order to provide such an “objective” measure, Murray uses (I am not kidding you) the frequency of people’s appearances in encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries. In this way, he says, he has shown their “eminence,” therefore objectively shown their accomplishments in their respective fields. And by then showing which cultures they came from, he can rank each culture by its cultural and scientific worth.

Then it just gets hilariously bad. Murray decides to enumerate accomplishment in music, of all things, by first dismissing everything produced since 1950 (the last half century has failed to produce “an abundance of timeless work”, don’t you know), and then, in his list of great musical accomplishment, does not include any black composers, except Duke Ellington. Robinson provides a brutal takedown.

Before 1950, black people had invented gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, samba, meringue, ragtime, zydeco, mento, calypso, and bomba. During the early 20th century, in the United States alone, the following composers and players were active: Ma Rainey, W.C. Handy, Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mahalia Jackson, J. Rosamond Johnson, Ella Fitzgerald, John Lee Hooker, Coleman Hawkins, Leadbelly, Earl Hines, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Roy Brown, Wynonie Harris, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Son House, Dinah Washington, Thelonious Monk, Muddy Waters, Art Blakey, Sarah Vaughan, Memphis Slim, Skip James, Louis Jordan, Ruth Brown, Big Jay McNeely, Paul Gayten, and Professor Longhair. (This list is partial.) When we talk about black American music of the early 20th century, we are talking about one of the most astonishing periods of cultural accomplishment in the history of civilization. We are talking about an unparalleled record of invention, the creation of some of the most transcendently moving and original artistic material that has yet emerged from the human mind. The significance of this achievement cannot be overstated. What’s more, it occurred without state sponsorship or the patronage of elites. In fact, it arose organically under conditions of brutal Jim Crow segregation and discrimination, in which black people had access to almost no mainstream institutions or material resources.

Jesus. This ought to be the approach we always take to Charles Murray: not that his calculations and statistics are a bit iffy, but that he can take a look at the music of the 20th century and somehow argue that contributions by the black community were inferior and not even worth mentioning. His biases are screamingly loud.

Unfortunately, while I suffered through The Bell Curve, this is so outrageously stupid that I’m not at all tempted to read Human Accomplishment, and I’m a guy who reads creationist literature to expose its flaws. Murray is more repulsive than even Kent Hovind (Hovind should not take that as an accolade, since that’s an awfully low bar.)

Title: The Triggering of a Snowflake

Irish anti-SJW, anti-feminist wanker visits California, and is horrified by a portent of the future…a portrait by Dave Cullen.

That’s a masterpiece. It tells us everything we need to know about the subject of the photograph. The confusion: he doesn’t understand a simple sign for a handicapped-accessible, family restroom with no gender restrictions. The willful misinterpretation: using a wheelchair is not a gender. The narcissism: a photo of his uncomprehending face with a deeply stupid caption is supposed to be insightful, or amusing, or revealing. It is, Mr Cullen, it is…just not how you probably intended it to be.

This is the kind of self-impressed turd who rails against “identity politics” and is then sardonically dismayed by a room that says it doesn’t matter, no matter how old you are, what kind of genitals you have, or whether your mobility is limited, you can enter that room and pee. Just get it done and move on. It’s not as if the room has a big “NO ASSHOLES” sign on it, Mr Anti-Immigrant Fascist.

The sad story of Laci Green

Emphasis on sad. I’ve been a fan of her work for years and years, and quite abruptly she has completely flipped from an ally and supporter of social justice to someone who is more concerned about defending harassers. It’s a terrifying reversal: how can somebody so completely change their perspective, and worse, how can they switch from a white hat to a black hat? Katelyn Burns has a very good summary, it’s especially useful because there are a lot of obscure alt-right YouTubers I’d never heard of before explained and defined.

How did she switch sides? It’s a familiar story to anyone who knows anything about religious cults. She got love-bombed. It was especially effective against someone who has a long history of empathy and willingness to listen to anyone.

In a series of videos, Green revealed that her shift was a result of “red pilling,” the term for a twisted Matrix-inspired recruitment process coined by men’s rights advocates, pick-up artists, and the “alt right.” The process involves a recruiter who attempts to position white supremacists as oppressed truth tellers while spinning phony racial and gender science as “free speech” that’s being trampled on by feminists and the political left.

I also learned something about YouTube.

Lindsay Amer, a queer YouTuber who has experienced response videos firsthand, explains:

“You see these anti-feminist YouTubers who gain hundreds of thousands of followers in under a year. I think there’s a lot of money in anti-feminism. The content is really easy to make and it doesn’t have to be high quality. Someone can just turn on a camera and rant and say something controversial and know that it’s going to get a ton of views. I see people who recut my videos with their bullying commentary added.”

Troublingly, up until recently, such videos were not only supported by YouTube, but incentivized. Because response videos are so easy to make, it was easy for reactionary YouTubers to churn out a lot of content, which YouTube then prioritized in an algorithm that favored prolific output, high view counts, and abundant comments — even if those comments were toxic. Gaming the very closely held secret of the YouTube algorithm became a de facto path to internet stardom, and the format was perfect for response-video creators. Even after changes to their algorithm in December of last year, YouTube has continued to discourage vloggers from preventing harassment — according to Amer, when users disable comments and the sidebar for other suggested videos, their content is less likely to be promoted by the algorithm, and their view counts plummet.

I had no idea. A couple of years ago, I shut down comments to my YouTube channel because I was seeing the opposite of love-bombing — I was constantly getting hate-bombed. The comments became useless because the swarms of anti-feminist trolls would barrel in and rage about feminists and throw in buckets of incoherent abuse no matter what the topic was…and there were multitudes of downvotes that would automatically appear within minutes of an hour-long video. Not only is there a simple-minded formula for gaining avid followers, but those same simple-minded, avid followers become a tool you can use to suppress other critical points of view.

YouTube is broken. It’s still broken. I don’t think Google is incentivized to fix it, either, and it’s become a reactionary breeding ground for assholes who don’t need to provide substantive discussion to become popular — they just need to repetitively echo the same hatreds over and over, reaffirming the prejudices of the lowest common denominator. As Anita Sarkeesian accurately said,

“You make your name on YouTube by making these dumbass videos that just say the same shit over and over again. I hate to give you attention because you’re a garbage human, whatever dude.”

Evergreen and bad allies

I keep getting asked to explain my position on the mess at Evergreen College. I’ve abstained so far because I roll my eyes at both sides. But OK, here goes…and here’s the background.

A bit of background: The “Day of Absence” is an Evergreen tradition that stretches back to the 1970s. As Mr. Weinstein explained on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, “in previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus — a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning.” This year, the script was flipped: “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave campus for the day’s activities,” reported the student newspaper on the change. The decision was made after students of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”

Mr. Weinstein thought this was wrong. The biology professor said as much in a letter to Rashida Love, the school’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles,” he wrote, “and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.” The first instance, he argued, “is a forceful call to consciousness.” The second “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.” In other words, what purported to be a request for white students and professors to leave campus was something more than that. It was an act of moral bullying — to stay on campus as a white person would mean to be tarred as a racist.

Stop telling me that Weinstein is a wonderful progressive leftist. He talks the talk, but he doesn’t walk the walk. What I see here is a situation where, for decades, students and faculty of color have borne the burden of demonstrating their significance while everyone gives ’em a thumbs up and cheers and waves little equality flags. This time, the supporters were asked to do a little more, that they take on the effort for one day of actually demonstrating their support in a more concrete way, and Weinstein refused to do that.

His basic message was that he was a shitty ally. He wasn’t willing to do one thing that his minority colleagues had been doing for years.

His letter made it worse. He tried to claim the moral high ground, that his refusal was a principled stand against bullying. Nonsense. It was a statement that you people might have an interest in fighting racism, but he had no interest in making any small accommodation to join in that battle. He was the personification of the passive white middle class that allows racism to persist, and I can understand how people would be outraged at hearing that bullshit from a person who had presented himself as supportive.

But the protesters went too far after that. You don’t get to demand someone be fired for being a shitty ally — there are people who are much, much worse working on college campuses. Protest, yes; scorn the guy, yes; take him off your list of friendly, supportive faculty for sure. But nope, it’s not a firing offense. It is also not grounds for threatening violence, or even worse, threatening violence to his students.

I’ve thought about what I would do in Weinstein’s position, and it would be an easy decision: I would have joined in the protest, and announced it to my classes for that day. Professors do have responsibilities, though, which might have made me hesitate, and I’d have had to do some calculations to figure out what to do to accommodate the students and keep the class on track, and it would have involved extra work on my part, but this is something for which there is precedent and almost certainly a procedure at Evergreen.

I occasionally have to miss class. I missed three days this past year to give a talk in China, and conferences and invited lectures happen all the time for almost every faculty member. The policy here is that I have to give written notice to my administrative head, including my plan to cover the coursework for the students. That typically involves asking another faculty member to give a guest lecture (I’ve reciprocated for my colleagues), or a description of readings or other assigned work for students to do in my absence.

Doing that is routine and trivial. I have to do it several times a year (if these turned into frequent extended absences, of course, I’d have some ‘splainin’ to do and would be getting dressed down by the administration and my peers), and I’m sure Weinstein has been in similar situations himself. If we’re willing to do that for a science meeting, I have to wonder why Weinstein couldn’t do it to support students of color for a day. Priorities, I guess.

So, shitty ally exposed. Do protest and make your opinions of the guy known. Do not, however, demand his head on a platter and harass his students. I’m more on the side of protesters, but a few of them crossed a line I can’t support.

P.S. I have a fondness for Evergreen, and when I was looking for teaching positions it was high on my list. I even got to the point of having a phone interview with their biology committee about 18 years ago, but didn’t make the final cut — I was coming from the traditional Big State College and didn’t have the kind of interdisciplinary/small classroom experience they wanted (they said, or maybe I just sucked). I was disappointed, but finding a job at a small liberal arts college right after that made up for it.

At least she’s safe from second-hand smoke

Suddenly, all these videos of the Philando Castile shooting are being released after the murder cop got acquitted. This latest one is heartbreaking: it’s video of Castile’s fiancé, handcuffed (WHY? What did she do wrong, besides sit next to an innocent man getting violently slaughtered by a cop?), while her daughter tries to deal with the situation.

Mom, please stop cussing and screaming ’cause I don’t want you to get shooted.

In the earlier video, I noticed how both adults in the car reflexively used “sir” in just about every sentence to the asshole cop — I don’t think they wanted to get shooted either. Our police departments are relying on fear to cow the population, and it shows.