I'd almost forgotten that so many liberals are either morons or liars

http://www.iSteve.com/05JanB.htm#nancy.hopkins

Four years of conservatives contorting themselves to rationalize cheering on George W. Bush's mistakes had shaken my opinion of my fellow conservatives so much that I'd started to forget the low intellectual and moral standards of liberals. But this absurd Larry Summers brouhaha over gender differences among top math, science, and engineering professors is bringing it all back. The Washington Post headlines Harvard Chief's Comments Assailed on the second day of the controversy, while the NYT says No Break in the Storm Over Harvard President's Words. Liberal child-blogger Matthew Yglesias conclusively proves that not all males are good at logic with his meanderings here and here, but the comments he elicits from his liberal readers are even stupider or more mendacious.

Obviously, the only reason women aren't as productive scientists as men on average is because of extremely subtle discrimination, discrimination so subtle that the only evidence for it is that women on average aren't as productive.

Gosh, it's a good thing no male scientist ever had to put up with insensitive remarks or they never would have accomplished anything at all. Look at Austrian physicist Gernot Zippe, who invented the centrifuge used in modern nuclear weapons construction while a prisoner of war in Soviet Siberia. Sure, Stalin's boys had him locked up in the Gulag at the time, but at least nobody was insensitive toward him. No academic institution would give the young Einstein a job, so his spirit was crushed working at the patent office 100 years ago, which is why he never amounted to anything.

In reality, these cries of discrimination at MIT and Harvard are a scam to line the pockets of interested parties.

MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins walked out of Summers' speech, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up." Now, that's the scientific attitude for you! What a role model for young women considering becoming scientists!

Hopkins has a long history of financial conflicts of interest at MIT. Wendy McElroy reported in 2001:

"The [MIT] Committee was established to investigate complaints of sex discrimination that were levelled by Hopkins herself. Yet she became the Chair, heading an investigation into her own complaints. As a result of her findings, Hopkins received -- among other benefits -- a 20 percent raise in salary, an endowed chair and increased research funds. Indeed, most of the Committee consisted of women who benefited substantially from the 'guilty' verdict. The only evidence of sex discrimination produced was the fact that there are more men than women in the faculty of the School for Science."

Patti Hausman debunked Hopkins' report here and Judith Kleinfeld did it here.

At the Harvard / MIT Professor level of intellectual talent, men vastly outnumber women in mathematics, science, and engineering. For example, before the SAT's scoring was dumbed down in 1995, males were 24 times more likely to get a perfect score on the SAT-Math test. Small differences in the mean on two bell curves translate into big differences at the extreme right edge of the bell curves, which is where Harvard and MIT professor come from.

So, in this decade, MIT got to keep Nancy Hopkins but lost Steven Pinker to Harvard. Which college do you think came out ahead?

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com