Now I’m craving a milkshake

I don’t even particularly care for milkshakes, but Heather Antos posted this selfie.

I didn’t know anything about her, but I’ve since learned that she’s an editor at Marvel comics, and that mobs of manbabies hate her for that photo. And the fact that a fair number of editors at Marvel seem to be women.

It’s strange. They hate it when women aspire to STEM jobs, and they hate it when women are English and communications majors and get jobs appropriate to their qualifications — and all of those jobs are out of their league. But don’t worry, manbabies, the male executive class at Marvel also don’t like diversity, and blame it for declining sales…because overpriced comic books, bizarre story lines, and Nazi Captain America would never hurt their appeal.

It’s interesting how anything, even drinking a milkshake, can be a seditious act when your opposition is a swarm of not-very-bright snowflakes. It’s also amusing that they’re raging about an innocuous photo, while the Nazis-drink-milk fad elicited nothing but a bemused what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you from the SJWs.

The Regnery connection

Regnery Publishing has been on my radar for a long, long time. They’re the go-to publishing house for far-right-wing cranks everywhere: Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, every angry loon who mainlines AM talk radio, or babbles on AM talk radio, can turn to Regnery to take the fevered hash festering in their brains and turn it into ink on paper. I’ve been tracking their poison for so long because another collection of kooks using their services are the creationists. The Discovery Institute loves them some Regnery. Wells’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design was published with them, as was Icons of Evolution. If you want to lie about science, history, or politics, Regnery will publish it.

But they have another connection. William H. Regnery II has been using the money from his publishing house to promote open racism.

By 1999, Regnery had come to believe that the only future for white people in North America was a reconfigured continent with a white-only homeland carved out of the former United States. He began consorting with Ku Klux Klan apologists, Holocaust deniers, eugenics boosters, and immigration foes. He set up two white nationalist nonprofits and steered money into them. He published fringe-right journals and books. Through his family’s famed conservative publishing house, Regnery had been on a first-name basis with the cream of the Republican establishment. But by 2006, his public views on race left him ostracized from the GOP.

Isn’t that cute? Remember the GOP back in 2006? Odious and dumb, but hey, at least then they repudiated outright, open association with naked racism, even if we all knew they were associated with it quietly, behind the scenes. They ostracized Regnery, at least.

But then, the very next sentence:

Now, he’s back. Working behind the scenes, the retired Chicago business executive has played an important role in making his ultra-right views a part of America’s political conversation in the era of Trump. In what he has described as his crowning political achievement, Regnery discovered Richard Spencer, the mediagenic agitator who invented the term “alt-right.” In 2011, Regnery made him the frontman for his white nationalist think tank, the National Policy Institute, providing Spencer the platform to launch the alt-right movement.

William! Don’t sell yourself short! Richard “Punchable” Spencer is not your only accomplishment: thanks to Regnery Publishing’s contributions to propaganda, Republicans hate education and Republicans hate science, you’ve got a buffoon in the White House, and congress is a nest of vermin. You have burned so very very brightly, William. You’ve done extraordinary things. Revel in your time. Don’t think about what comes next.

But until they are defeated, the Regnerys of the world will continue to promote hateful nonsense.

The white race may go from master of the universe to an anthropological curiosity, he warned the audience. Later he remarked, Whites are unique in welcoming racial aliens into their midst.

Delusional white people will continue to think in terms of master and slave, as they always have. Human beings, however, will continue to meld in all their diversity in complex patterns of descent, as they always have, because all those “racial aliens” are just people.

The problem is all those master race assholes who cannot welcome the fellow human beings in their midst.

The mysteries of the newspaper business

There’s a bit of an upset going on over at the BBC — salaries were revealed, and it was discovered that only 1 of the top 10 highest paid news presenters was a woman. This is evidence of unfair compensation and bias within the organization, which is awful enough…but then one Kevin Myers (no relation, I swear) threw gasoline — excuse me, petrol — on the smoldering fires of resentment with a remarkable op-ed in the Sunday Times. It has to be seen to be believed, but unfortunately it was quickly yanked. But not quickly enough.

The row over the gender pay gap within the BBC is the final proof — though none was needed — that the organization is both utterly unreal and irredeemably corrupt.

It’s a baffling beginning, but as you dig a little deeper, it will dawn on you that he’s not calling the BBC corrupt because they have discriminatory salary practices, oh no. He’s calling the BBC corrupt because people are allowed to complain about discriminatory salary practices.

Equally unreal has been the tiresome monotone consensus of the commentariat, all wailing and shrieking as one about how hard done by are the women of the BBC.

I tried finding the wailing and shrieking, but the commentariat are all British. As an American, my standards of what constitutes wailing and shrieking are significantly more elevated.

But as you sink deeper into the muck, it gets wilder and nastier. Much nastier. Anti-semitically nasty.

I note that two of the best-paid women presenters in the BBC – Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, with whose, no doubt, sterling work I am tragically unacquainted – are Jewish. Good for them. Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity. I wonder, who are their agents?”

Oh. Jews are grasping and greedy, which is how those two women came to be better paid.

How did this get past the editors? Do they have editors? If they do, are they all bigots who failed to notice the racism here?

They are also misogynists, because this bit also swooshed right over their heads.

Only one woman is among the top 10 best-paid BBC presenters. Now, why is this? Is it because men are more charismatic performers? Because they work harder? Because they are more driven? Possibly a bit of each. The human resources department — what used to be called “personnel” until people came to be considered as a metaoblising, respiring form of mineral ore — will probably tell you that men usually work harder, get sick less frequently and seldom get pregnant.

It’s also not as if this was a surprise. It turns out this Kevin Myers jerk has a reputation.

Myers has form for causing offence, writing in 2009 a piece for the Belfast Telegraph titled “There was no holocaust” and in 2008 a column for the Irish Independent headlined “Africa is giving nothing to anyone – apart from AIDS”.

So how does he continue to get published? Shouldn’t the editors all have great big signs on their desks, saying “BURN ALL SUBMISSIONS FROM KEVIN MYERS”?

If there are any editors, that is. Or maybe Rupert Murdoch (it’s his paper, naturally) loves his work and has given him carte blanche.

Why are you still reading Skeptic magazine?

It’s trash. There’s no clearer indicator of where Shermer’s vanity magazine’s focus lies than this, A Review of Milo Yiannopoulos’s new book Dangerous by George Michael, which manages to go on and on and tell us very little about the book, but does regurgitate a massive bolus of alt-right talking points. The author seems to have very little interest in what Yiannopoulos actually says, or how he says it, but mainly wants to repeat every tired cliche of the alt-right/mens rights movement.

Like this:

It is Milo’s strident critique of this form of feminism that has gained him the most opprobrium. Although Milo does not characterize himself as part of men’s rights activism, arguably, he has emerged as the movement’s most noted spokesman. His track record displays a clear affinity for the movement. For example, he played a leading role in the 2014 “gamergate” controversy when he supported the online harassment campaign against women who decried the violence and misogyny in video games. Reminiscent of Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, Milo cites numerous indices—including disparities in life expectancy, sentencing, education, and health care—to illustrate that women have made substantial gains over the past several decades. In fact, according to these measures, women are arguably more privileged than men in America today. As Milo demonstrates, studies have found that the wage gap shrinks to nonexistence when relevant, non-sexist factors are taken into account, such as chosen career paths, chosen work hours, and chosen career discontinuity. As a group, women prefer to study people-oriented disciplines like psychology, sociology, and social work, which on average are less remuneratively rewarding than STEM fields. In medicine, females physicians are more likely to specialize in fields like pediatrics, which pay less than some other fields that male doctors gravitate toward, such as elective surgery.

Oh jebus. Not this crap again.

You cannot ignore the fact that the remuneration given for ‘women’s work’ is entirely socially constructed as well — why should sociology pay less than, say, biology? I can tell you which has more immediate impact on people’s lives, and sorry to say, it isn’t the field I’ve chosen for myself. Why should pediatrics pay less than working as a surgeon? Does one require that much more training? Is taking care of children’s health less important than cosmetic surgery? As usual, these bozos ignore the value-dependencies of the options.

I’ll also point out that one of the tactics I’ve often seen used to disparage my chosen field is that the percentage of women seeking occupations in biology is rising…therefore, biology must be less rigorous and scientific than fields that exclude women. It’s a wonderfully circular argument.

Of course, this ‘review’ cites all the usual crap: Christina Hoff Sommers, there is no such thing as rape culture, except that when there is it comes from Islam, the police are the greatest defenders of the black community, and of course, political correctness, identity politics, and cultural Marxism. It’s a totally mindless recitation of the nonsense you get on Reddit and in YouTube comments. Yes, “women have made substantial gains” — there is a steady improvement in equality since the days they were not allowed to own property or vote. It does not mean that there aren’t still serious inequalities left, and it doesn’t help that people like Yiannopoulos and Michael are desperate to end progress, all while labeling it “regressive”.

Just unsubscribe already.

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.