In a much praised article, Chris Mooney writes in Mother Jones about "The Science of Why We Don't Believe in Science" in which he explains why Republicans hate science. To be fair, he then goes on to ask:
So is there a case study of science denial that largely occupies the political left? Yes: the claim that childhood vaccines are causing an epidemic of autism. Its most famous proponents are an environmentalist (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [29]) and numerous Hollywood celebrities (most notably Jenny McCarthy [30] and Jim Carrey). The Huffington Post gives a very large megaphone to denialists. And Seth Mnookin [31], author of the new book The Panic Virus [32], notes that if you want to find vaccine deniers, all you need to do is go hang out at Whole Foods.
Right! Autism and vaccines is the example of science denial on the left. What else is there? The hounding of James D. Watson and Larry Summers out of their jobs for politically incorrect statements about the science of intelligence pales in comparison to the actions of noted leftwing intellectuals Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey regarding autism.
Look, the people who are most worked up over the theory that vaccines cause autism are the parents of children with autism. It's not a left wing plot or the failure of leftist ideology. It's a bunch of parents with tragic problems that mainstream science hasn't done a good job of explaining. (Jenny McCarthy has an autistic child and Jim Carrey was her boyfriend for a while.) They latched on to an idea that wasn't terribly implausible at the beginning, which gave them a little hope, or at least some notion of cause and effect. It didn't turn out to be right, but that doesn't have much to do with the Left.
You can't make the same excuses, however, for the most honored commissars of political correctness, such as Stephen Rose and Morris Dees.
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150 comments:
Bruno Latour?
Anyone?
No?
OK.
There's denying a particular scientific theory, and there's denying the whole concept of science.
Why are you so interested in whether there is a genetic basis for intelligence and whether intelligence differs among various groups?
I mean, really. I'll grant you that--so what then? Is it determinative of anything at all in terms of how we should be living our lives? Would or should any public policies differ?
I'm not so sure I would come out differently on any significant policy issue whether we granted your premise or assumed the opposite were true.
How about you? Is your interest in it just glee at observing someone else be stubbornly dishonest?
And let's not forget that Lysenkoism is a quintessentially leftist phenomenon to begin with.
"I'm not so sure I would come out differently on any significant policy issue whether we granted your premise or assumed the opposite were true."
Our entire education policy - the whole thing - is premised on the opposite of this particular set of scientific facts.
Billions not enough?
Doesn't the Left, like the Right, believe that the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were bombed in 2001 because Arabs "hate us for our freedoms" or because Muslims are "extremists"?
How willfully blind must you be to overlook the obvious provocations of U.S. meddling and U.S-backed oppression in Egypt, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Bin Laden and his comrades laid it to Americans for years, in every way possible. The raids on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were clearly a tit-for-tat retalition for U.S. conduct in the Middle East.
That conclusion is based on pure science--gathering and evaluating actual empirical evidence. The Left is just as guilty of denying that truth as the Right is.
I'm not so sure I would come out differently on any significant policy issue whether we granted your premise or assumed the opposite were true.
I see.
So you'd keep blaming whites (aka "racism") for the disparities between life outcomes of whites and blacks even though science provides you with the real reasons. You'd keep punishing whites with affirmative action in the belief -- now totally discredited -- that you're only making up for the unfairness of society
You'd keep insisting, I suppose, that racial diversity is some kind of a "strength," in and of itself (so therefore keep increasing it via immigration!), despite the findings of scientific inquiry which reach opposite conclusions.
Steve:
The article is very much worth reading, but there are two ways to read it:
a. "Yay us, we're more rational than they are."
b. "Crap, I wonder what BS I'm swallowing just because I like the people pushing it."
I assume most of the readers of Mother Jones will enjoy a bit of (a), and have a good laugh at the expense of those poor, stupid Tea Partiers, but hopefully at least a few readers will manage to get to (b).
Psychometrics is one good example where there's a lot of resistance on the left to even accepting that IQ could mean anything. (And this is almost entirely based on disliking the implications of what it might mean.)
But I think an even more clear-cut case is whether there is a meaningful scientific definition to "race." I've watched otherwise intelligent people absolutely bend themselves into pretzels denying that, despite DNA tests that essentially always predict self-reported race, important differences in how doctors treat members of different races, different disease prevalances, different prevalances of lactose tolerance, etc.
Of course, the all-time champion bit of anti-science insanity is young-earth creationism, which can't be made consistent with reality short of God playing an incredibly elaborate practical joke in setting up all the evidence for pre-6000-BC life, geology, and civilizations.
Politicians routinely play into whatever nonsense will get them elected, which is why we've heard for years about how corn-based ethanol is the key to energy independence. (It's not, but Iowa can be the key to becoming president, so we'll keep hearing about it.)
"How willfully blind must you be to overlook the obvious provocations of U.S. meddling and U.S-backed oppression in Egypt, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Bin Laden and his comrades laid it to Americans for years, in every way possible. The raids on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were clearly a tit-for-tat retalition for U.S. conduct in the Middle East.
That conclusion is based on pure science--gathering and evaluating actual empirical evidence. The Left is just as guilty of denying that truth as the Right is."
What you speak of is not even fact, let alone science, a concept you do not seem to understand.
Embarrasing
"Is it determinative of anything at all in terms of how we should be living our lives? Would or should any public policies differ?"
Right now whites are blamed for NAM under-achievement. Why should this psychological browbeating, this false attribution of blame go on? Why should the impressionable, kids especially, be made to feel guilty for stuff they didn't do? And they are made to feel guilty about it now.
If affirmative action ever ends, then society would become a little more efficient - fewer incompetents at key jobs, a better match between good teachers and good students.
The end of forced busing would improve millions of lives. It would make it cheaper for many middle class people to educate their kids in a safe environment (no need for private schools), to start families. The justification for forced busing is environmentalist in nature.
There would be less skittishness about tracking at schools. Teachers tend to teach to the lowest common denominator of any classroom. Smart kids get bored, their full potential isn't being explored. Remember, the computer on which you're reading this, like many other wondrous things, is entirely a product of smart people fulfilling their potentials. The more of that, the better, right?
If respectable opinion could admit that races and ethnicities aren't interchangeable, that you can't really make a Frenchman out of a Moroccan, etc. no matter how hard you tried, then immigration policies all over the West could change. Huge implications for the future.
Who knows, maybe ideas like vasectomies for felons could become politically viable. How could that not have a positive effect on the future?
I could go on.
Racial I.Q differences have major implications for amongst others:
K-12 education ($700 billion per year),
Immigration (changing the entire demographic of the country)
Affirmative Action,
More college education for everyone as the favorite political solution to everything,
Continuing in Subsidizing adult training programs, despite evidence that they do not work,
Foreign Aid (why is Africa not growing even though we keep giving them capital to build plants?)
Crime policy (why so many blacks in prison? The left claims discrimination by police and penal system)
off the top of my head.
Does the left ever deny science? Is the Pope Catholic?
It is not just the IQ/Race issue. The whole of psychology and sociology is based on denying science. The left laugh at the creationists on the right, but they are creationist themselves. Their heads explode if you suggest, for example, that aboriginal people descended directly from hunter-gatherers are more susceptible to alcoholism because they haven't evolved any resistance to it. Eurasians have been farming and producing alcohol for thousands of years and have had a chance to evolve some resistance to alcoholism.
If you suggest anything like that to left wing people they call you an evil, crazy Nazi, and persist in believing that alcoholism is caused by residential schools and colonialism. There is not a scrap of evidence for this theory but that doesn't bother them.
There was a fair amount of BS perpetrated by the environmentalist left concerning nuclear energy in the 70s that crept back into the fore with the Fukushima crisis.
On the vaccine-autism thing, I think that while the bulk of those concerned were parents, the idea got spread through left-leaning outlets like the Huffington Post, which helped make it an movement predominantly centered on the political left.
Regarding the Autism Epidemic:
Based on the simple graph and scatterplot I drew below and a few relevant quotes below it I still think the primary cause of the Autism Epidemic is the "Back to Sleep" Campaign that started worldwide in 1987 and in the U.S. in 1992.
Graph of Autism Rates (A) and
Infant Back Sleep Rates (B)
and Vaccination Rates (V):
A=Autism Rate
B=Back Sleep Rate
V=Vaccination Rate
100%___V__V__V__V__V__V__V__V__V___V_____1.0%
_95%_____________________________________.95%
_90%_____________________________________.90%
_85%_____________________________________.85%
_80%_______________________________A_____.80%
_75%_____________________________________.75%
_70%___________________________A___B_____.70%
_65%________________________B__B_________.65%
_60%________________________A____________.60%
_55%____________________AB_______________.55%
_50%__________________AB_________________.50%
_45%_____________________________________.45%
_40%____________AB__A____________________.40%
_35%________A_______B____________________.35%
_30%______A______________________________.30%
_25%__A_____B____________________________.25%
_20%_____________________________________.20%
_15%__B___B______________________________.15%
_10%_____________________________________.10%
_05%_____________________________________.05%
0.0%_____________________________________0.0%
****1992*93*94*95*96*97*98*99*00*2001********
Scatterplot of Autism Rates and
Back Sleep Rates. The Y axis is Autism
Rate and X axis is be Back Sleep Rate.
____1.0%_____________________________________
A___.95%_____________________________________
U___.90%_____________________________________
T___.85%_____________________________________
I___.80%_______________________________X_____
S___.75%_____________________________________
M___.70%_____________________________X_______
____.65%_____________________________________
R___.60%___________________________X_________
A___.55%_________________________X___________
T___.50%_______________________X_____________
E___.45%_____________________________________
____.40%________________X_X__________________
____.35%____________X________________________
____.30%_________X___________________________
____.25%_______X_____________________________
____.20%_____________________________________
____.15%_____________________________________
____.10%_____________________________________
____.05%_____________________________________
____0.0%_____________________________________
****0.0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
__________BACK_SLEEP_RATE____________________
About this Scatterplot:
Pearson Correlation Coefficient=0.97 (MS Excel)
9.97*0.97=0.94
0.94*100=94%
94% of the Increase in Autism can be “explained”
by the increase in infant back sleep if my
hypothesis is correct.
“There are indications of a rapidly growing population of infants who show developmental abnormalities as a result of prolonged exposure to the supine position.”
Dr. Ralph Pelligra regarding the impact of the Back to Sleep Campaign
“Since the implementation of the “Back to Sleep” campaign, therapists are seeing increasing numbers of kindergarten-aged children who are unable to hold a pencil.”
Susan Syron, Pediatric Physical Therapist
“In its fundamental purpose it has been largely successful. The incidence of SIDS has been reduced dramatically. However, as many orthotists can attest, this important gain has not been without its lesser comorbidities. The one we tend to think of has been the rapid increase in the incidence of positional plagiocephaly and positional brachycephaly. However, there have been whispers and rumors of other effects.”
Phil Stevens, MEd, CPO regarding side effects of the Back to Sleep Campaign.
“A lot of us are concerned that the rate (of SIDS) isn’t decreasing significantly,
but that a lot of it is just code shifting,’
Dr. John Kattwinkel – U.S. SIDS Task Force
Scripps Howard News Service Interview
I find Mooney irritating, nonetheless I think his article is a step in the right direction. If pushed further this idea might finally open up the debate. Quasi-spiritual reverence for "science" among SWPL society is going to be the Trojan horse deployed against them in coming decades. The neopagan/Gaia-worship fault lines runs deep in that faction (just look at Barack's offshore moratorium)
Didn't a couple of very good scientists write an entire book in the 1990's called Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and it's Quarrels with Science? which detailed how numerous leftist academics had spouted off nonsense about numerous scientific fields? I guess I just imagined that in a dream, because apparently world renowned scientist Chris Mooney doesn't mention it at all, so it must never have been written.
I think that there's a fair amount of political confirmation bias and bias of focus involved in these sort of issues. With the autism issue, one of the purported mechanisms was the mercury in the thimerosal preservative in some vaccines (now discontinued) and concerns about mercury are a natural area of focus for the left, who see mercury as a problem when emitted by coal plants (and are more justified in doing so in that case).
When it comes to psychometrics, it's pretty easy to see how group differences in IQ would make the arguments of the civil rights movement more difficult and if there's ever a force that's more likely to bias the view of a political constituency toward the facts, it is when those facts make their arguments more difficult (regardless of whether it makes their stance untenable or not, and often it doesn't ).
It's a pretty natural, human response, though. We like to have a non-contradictory model of the world and we tend to oversimplify things, so when some new information comes about that contradicts other bits that are already in our worldview, we can't help but be suspicious. Put that in a political context and political groups will decide the merits of an issue along political lines because political sectors form self-enforcing world models that are at least part-right, but when an issue comes around that plays to the views of one group or another, some groups can integrate it into their world-views and competing groups often see this as a discredit to the new information.
You can see this quite clearly with global warming. Those on the Left eagerly move it into their worldview, as it follows the pattern of previous environmental issues and it also is a problem that has more of an apparent cause in wealthy, capitalist countries. They've latched onto it very quickly and have driven the policy discussion as a result, which is why responses look focus government and international cooperation.
The Right on the other hand sees this and has the opposite reaction. The Left's enamorment with the notion that carbon dioxide emissions will raise average temperatures and have dire environmental consequences induces politically oriented skepticism, awoken partially from having seen the environmental Left run after disaster scenarios before and partially because the policies coming from the Left aren't particularly inviting. It's also easy to see overreach on the issue (many on the Left equate global warming and Armageddon), which pushes many on the right to an equally maximalist position in the opposite direction.
This circus will go on forever.
If I may, whenever the topic of autism comes up, I like to point people to vitamin D.
Doctor Cannell at The Vitamin D Council has gathered some truly incredible anecdotal reports of severe autism being treated with simple vitamin D supplementation. If nothing else, it's cheap and harmless in reasonable quantities (2000IU/50lbs body weight).
I mean, really. I'll grant you that--so what then? Is it determinative of anything at all in terms of how we should be living our lives? Would or should any public policies differ?
Another clueless well-meaner, drunk on liberalism, stumbles into the back alleys of HBD-town to be clubbed over the head with reality.
Er, not complicated:
There are no differences="black failure" is whitey's fault.
There are differences="black failure" needs no external explanation.
This issue has tentacles throughout our society, every part of it is affected by these premises.
Leftists have an utterly unscientific approach to evidence regarding differences between the sexes and the races. Their denial of the science in this area has had far more damaging effects on society than the views of the creationists.
Also, I've noticed that if you try to discuss some of questions regarding Darwinian theory, leftists don't respond in a cool, scientific fashion but get as defensive and dogmatic as any religious zealot.
Steve S. said:
Right! Autism and vaccines is the example of science denial on the left. What else is there? The hounding of James D. Watson and Larry Summers out of their jobs for politically incorrect statements about the science of intelligence pales in comparison to the actions of noted leftwing intellectuals Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey regarding autism.
Steve S. does a slight injustice to Chris Mooney. Half a decade ago the Crooked Timber folk, in the midst of a prolonged tongue bath administered to Mooney after the publication of his "Republican War on Science", did publish a comment by me in which I managed to dig up a quote by Mooney making tokenistic acknowledgement of the Left's unscientific attitude to the science of human nature. On p8 he lets the ideological cat out of the epistemological bag:
Let’s be fair: those on the political left have undoubtedly abused science in the past….groups have occasionally allowed ideology to usurp fact…In fact, in politicized fights involving science, it is rare to find liberals entirely innocent of abuses.
But they are almost never as guilty as the Right...topics such as the genetic underpinnings of human behavior have often gone unstudied out of a “general left-of-center sensibility that anything having to do with genes is bad.”
My reference to Mooney's gaffe is the only one on the entire web, apart from the copy of RWOS on google books.
But give him credit for making the point, subsequently ignored or air-brushed out of history by all his camp followers. that the Left has at times been at odds with the scientific analysis of human nature.
At least I was paying attention.
Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science [Paperback]
Paul R. Gross (Author), Norman Levitt (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/Higher-Superstition-Academic-Quarrels-Science/dp/0801857074
Thomas,
Go into almost any public school other than ones in the most affluent areas to get your answer. Seriously, spend a few hours in a primary grade--I suggest the third grade; then go to a junior high, then a high school.
Oh, and ask to see the schools' test scores.
"On the vaccine-autism thing, I think that while the bulk of those concerned were parents, the idea got spread through left-leaning outlets like the Huffington Post, which helped make it an movement predominantly centered on the political left."
The reason the Lefties embraced the idea that vaccines caused autism is so that they could vilify Big Pharma and by extension, all corporations. Isn't that a Lefty thing, after all?
They have been quietly disappointed that the "poisonous vaccine" thing hasn't worked out for them.
On just about all accounts, the Left is ignoring science because they don't like what's been turning up.
Population genetics is a topic that scares them to death.
I thought austism has more to do with women have children later than vaccines.
That may just be crazy old me though.
Why are you so interested in whether there is a genetic basis for intelligence and whether intelligence differs among various groups?
It goes well beyond race and IQ.
As has been pointed out already, "the science of human nature" pretty much captures one major area of leftist denialism. For a breakdown of topics, see "The Blank Slate" by Pinker, which does a good job of covering everything except race or IQ.
Regarding IQ alone -- the social and economic correlates of IQ as well as the heritability within groups are both denied by the left.
Regarding race and IQ -- the importance or not of genetics is irrelevant. Forget genetics. The magnitude and reality of the phenotype differences are denied consistently. Examples include disparate impact policies and affirmative action.
They latched on to an idea that wasn't terribly implausible at the beginning, which gave them a little hope, or at least some notion of cause and effect. It didn't turn out to be right, but that doesn't have much to do with the Left.
C'mon Steve - don't start mouthing the petty structural nihilism of Science Paganism.
"It didn't turn out to be right"?!?
Meaning: "Subsequent large scale studies have yet to establish, over time, any sort of consistent correlation"?
Given that we have no earthly idea what causes autism [and precious little agreement as to when a "diagnosis" of autism is even appropriate in the first place], we certainly have no basis upon which to declare what might be "right" or what might be "wrong" to say about it.
Nothing these days - and I mean NOTHING AT ALL - causes me to lose respect for a person more quickly [more immediately, more instantaneously] than hearing the word "Science" pass their lips.
If I may, whenever the topic of autism comes up, I like to point people to vitamin D.
Enfamil recently introduced a new product, Enfamil Newborn "N", which increases the Vitamin D dosing over standard Enfamil.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/vaccines/
Meaning: "Subsequent large scale studies have yet to establish, over time, any sort of consistent correlation"?
Let me expound on that.
Not only is there the problem that the large-scale studies could be flukishly wrong - that the studies just happened to fall into the astronomically unlikely event of avoiding the invocation of the Strong Law of Large Numbers or the Central Limit Theorem [and that vaccines really DO cause autism] - but there is the even more pernicious problem of the infinite complexity of the human organism and the myriad possible responses of any single human to any particular stimulus: It could very well be that for some folks, vaccines DO cause forms of intellectual retardation, but that for enough other folks, vaccines cause forms of intellectual stimulation, so that, on average, a large-scale study won't find that vaccines cause any change in one direction or the other.
Which is great for you if you're "average", or on the "good" end of the bell curve of responses to the particular stimulus in question, but pretty awful [or even disastrous] if you're on the "bad" end of the response curve.
You could compare it, say, to the hypothesis that "Peanut butter in the diet would be good for malnourished children": On average, the proteins in peanut butter would do wonders for a malnurished child [and for that child's long term intellectual outcome], but for the one-in-a-bazillion child with a severe peanut allergy, peanut butter would send that child to its grave.
At best an honest researcher must say, "We failed to find any consistent correlation in large-scale, long-term studies, and so, absent any new insight into the matter, at this time we feel that it will probably prove prudent for us to invest our time and money in alternate approaches to the problem. But YMMV!".
"Leftists have an utterly unscientific approach to evidence regarding differences between the sexes and the races. Their denial of the science in this area has had far more damaging effects on society than the views of the creationists."
Indeed. The odder part isn't just that lefties equate disparity with discrimination, but that they conveniently ignore when those disparities run counter to the myths of "the oppressed minority" and "the oppressive male."
Asians and Jews are both minority groups that do dramatically better than non-Jewish whites. This is taken for granted. No need for government remediation. No need to rectify the situation with "diversity."
And while it's always noted that men are more likely to be CEOs or congressmen, and get paid more, it's ignored that women live longer, go to jail and prison less often, and are more likely to graduate from college than men.
When someone suggests that government needs to rectify racial disparity, it's extremely un-PC - even dangerous - to suggest that blacks and Hispanics are naturally dumber than men. By raising the subject of Asians and Jews you can silence them in a more politically correct manner.
Would or should any public policies differ?
Funny you should pose this question, I have just launched a blog in an attempt to answer it. I hope Steve, from whom I have drawn so much inspiration, won't mind me plugging it here.
Among the policies I plan to invite debate/proposals on are:
-affirmative action / quotas
-disparate impact
-dysgenic welfare policy (paying the least able to have kids, taxing the most able to pay for them)
-education (the dreaded 'black-white gap')
-minority contracting
-public housing / forced de-segregation
-immigration
-criminal justice
-freedom of speech (HBD speech is literally a crime in most European countries, will this come to the U.S.?)
And many more. My hope is to create a pool of realistic policy proposals for that mythical future date when Science turns to Government and says, 'Guess what, HBD is real. Public policy should reflect that.'
In the next few days I'll have some proposals up, and I invite anyone who is both a policy geek and HBD-aware to come read/contribute. The site:
Those Who Can See
Thank you for the forum, Steve. Your incisive and dogged work on HBD issues is bound to crash through the mainstream press barrier sooner or later. Speed the day.
"Does the Left ever deny science? I mean, ever?"
What about nutters from the right-wing? American Republicans from Red States are some of the dumbest people I've ever met in my life, and I have lived in many countries and interacted with a lot of people from a lot of ethnic backgrounds as well as cultural backgrounds. I mean, 65% of Americans believe that Noah's Arc was real and that Dinosaurs roamed the Earth 4,500 years ago. They also stockpile true arsenals in their homes because they believe that, if the government becomes tyrannical, they will overthrow it with their handguns against the government's tanks, missiles and jet fighters. They are also Christians who love money-making and guns, even though the founder of their religion was a Hippie who expelled the taders from the temple and said that the meek shall inherit the Earth. I mean, who can stand the retard logic of these people? Thank goodness that Americans have a Harvard-educated elite of Jews, Asian Indians and Han Chinese to run their country for them, otherwise America would be more of a shithole Turd World country than Brazil or Suriname.
As for denying difference in intelligence between races, well, the Left has a svery strong case here. Why? First, no one has ever defined what intelligence is, and even if defined, you would have to prove that IQ tests measure what you are attempting to measure in a precise and consisten manner. Consistent meaning that a score of 130 represents 30% more intelligence than a score of 100 and so forth. No one has done this, so there is no reason to assume that there are differences in intelligence between races. As for genes for intelligence, after defining what intelligence is, you need to demonstrate that X gene affects intelligence to a precise degree an quantify it eliminaying extraneous variables. This is the scientific method, which no one has ever applied to the study of intelligence. The "science" of psychometrics is a joke. Go ask any physicist or mathematician, biochemist or even physiologists, people who are used to RIGOROUS pursuit of facts with very rigorous and precise methodologies if they accept the protocols and measurements used by psychometricians in their measurement of intelligence. What a joke.
"Is your interest in it just glee at observing someone else be stubbornly dishonest?" Mr Sailer can answer for himself, but I admit that the stubborn dishonesty is part of my fascination with it, I admit. Another part comes from being impressed by the ability of modern genetics to cast some light on Prehistory, the Dark Ages and other obscure bits of the past. It's all one big tapestry.
The "political left" as a concept is bunk, stop using it. Why do Republicans like Ron Paul oppose vaccines? Why does George Soros support them?
What is this "science" you're speaking about Steve? Something you can load into your pick up at the shopping mall?
"Science" is the scientific method. That's it. The theories are not science. The products of science - a computer model, a vaccination shot, a definition of race - is not science.
That doesn't mean these products aren't useful or right but they are not science. Science is breaking out of the Earth's gravitational field and making it to the moon, not the moon.
There are lots of anti-science on the left.
1. Fear of genetically modified foods. Also, generically modified foods are harmful to honey bees.
2. Fear of irradiated meat or other foods. The intentional misuse of radioactive when they mean irrdiated.
3. Refusal to learn about toxicology and refusl to understand that that the dose is the poison. Look at how the left goes on their own creationism-like mental work to explain the harms of environmental chemicals.
4. The belief that organic foods can cure cancer.
5. That there is a difference between corn syrup versus sugar from sugar cane.
6. That electric or magnetic fields can cause cancer.
7. That cell phone cause brain cancer.
8. That every high school student can learn calculus.
9. That organic meat will be free of E.Coli.
I am sure that there are others. During the Clinton Administration, there was a push by the right to get the EPA to publish all of the raw data used to determine the risk levels of pollutants because the left was misusing the data.
Thomas - I mean, really. I'll grant you that--so what then? Is it determinative of anything at all in terms of how we should be living our lives? Would or should any public policies differ?
Only education policy, criminal justice, prison policy, immigration policy. Yep, youre right nothing important.
Yeah, but you guys still won't accept global warming.
I've never met anyone who accepts both global warming and HBD. It's kind of sad, really.
I'm reading the Bell Curve for the first time and hey, this thing was published when 1990? And the authors are predicting more and more segregation by IQ as bright people meet in college, marry and go off to their own high-g, high-income enclaves.
Aren't these the same "geeky" types that seem to have most the autistic children? I mean the ones that do have children.
CJ
Here is some science that the Left hates. Larry Auster posted it a few days ago.
A nationwide study by Princeton researchers shows that living around black folks is dangerous to white folks' health.
The full 38 page report is available online. Here is a two page executive summary.
The analysis sounds interesting. I would love to run the same research in reverse: do black folks live longer when they are surrounded by white folks?
I suspect the researchers could reverse the analysis easily. In fact, I wonder why they didn't.
Then again, it's bad enough that science shows black folks are dangerous for white folks. It would be even worse for liberals if the research shows white folks were good for black folks.
Imagine the effect of that double blow to the "white privilege" folks.
What are the big Left-Right issues and which side has science on its side on which issue?
Science for our purposes here means evidence based reasoning as opposed to faith based reasoning.
Issues: abortion, global warming, monetary policy, government spending, race relations, environmentalism, nuclear energy.
Abortion: There is damn little science in this dispute. No one argues facts in the abortion issue. They argue value preferences. But oddly there is very little difference nowadays in the positions of the Left and the Right. Both sides accept abortion under some circumstances. The argument is now over relatively minor matters. Just a generation ago religion was the major factor. Not now. Advantage: Left (slight).
Global Warming: The potency of the Global Warming issue is fundamentally emotional not scientific. The trace gas CO2 has risen with industrialization. This bare fact alarms the Left. They feel guilty. They behave badly and irrationally. Advantage: Right (substantial).
Monetary policy: This is not an area that is particularly one of science versus superstition. Both sides tend to argue rationally. Advantage: Draw.
Government spending: The thinking on both sides of this issue is not very elevated. There is a lot of sloganeering and flippancy. Both sides seem equally superstitious and/or simplistic. Advantage: Draw.
Race: This as has been noted above is a big area of science versus superstition. The Left live in a "Demon Haunted World". It needs to also be said that if Steve is right - and I believe he is - about the Sand States and the Housing Crisis, it is also the single most important domestic and international issue right now. Race equality superstition kicked off the world wide depression. Advantage:Right (Huge).
Environmentalism: Another area where the Left acts like religious fanatics. The only people who come to my door are Seventh Day Adventists and youngsters who are literally trying to save the whales. As the environment objectively gets better and better the Left gets more hysterical. Save the planet indeed! Advantage: Right (Huge).
Nuclear Energy: On this issue both sides are ludicrously irrational but the Left more so. The final figures not show about 2,000 Japanese killed by the quake, about 25,000 killed by the tsunami, and just 2 people killed by radiation. We average about 30 coal mining deaths a year - year in and year out. Solar power has the highest mortality to energy ratio of any power source. But there is little hope that facts will conquer faith and fear in America anytime soon. Advantage: Right (Substantial).
So on balance it seems to me that the left is more driven by superstition than the Right in current American politics. Maybe my choice of issues is biased. But on the issues that come to my mind this morning, they seem to clearly the Right.
The Left are more rational and scientific on the evolution versus creation issue but this isn't really much of an issue. The Scopes Monkey Trial is very old news. Even in public schools it pales in importance next to race related issues. Outside of the schools few care.
Albertosaurus
I'm motivated to make one niggling point: As I recall Dr. Watson's statements were shoddy, not emblematic of great scientific thinking about race, intelligence, and heritability (it wouldn't be mistaken as a line from an Andrew Gelman paper or a Razib Khan blog post, for example).
Hopefully Anonymous
http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com
Milford Wolpoff, proponent of multi-regional evolution, was constantly being hassled as it was claimed that his hypothesis lent itself to racism. I saw him on video once where he was given a very hostile treatment by questioners. He had to deny that his position could be used by racists and cited things like gene flow which would work to even things out. He was always on the defensive.
The later idea of everyone being descended from just one group that replaced all others has been welcomed by those who preferred the underlying message that we are all one.
Recent conclusions that groups outside of Africa carry Neandertal and Denisovan genes complicate the story and make it less neat. More info will probably come out that undermines the "we are all one" narrative. I expect the politically minded types to try to manage the spin of whatever info emerges regarding human evolution and studies of DNA.
Science doesn't take place in a vacuum; it's always buffeted around by politics.
Chris Mooney frames the question about science very conveniently for the Left. It's not what science the Left denies, but what dubious 'science' the Left routinely clings to in a secular-religious manner.
Progressives (who belong to a movement much more linear than the Right, which is made up of shifting interests over time) gave birth to a host of 'science' horrors in the 20th century, as well as a legacy of more mundane over-politicization of the sciences to achieve political goals.
No, there may not be much 'denierism' on the Left (well, accept for non-PC genetics/IQ work). Again, that's the wrong question. The story of the Left is the story of the mundane, workman-like process of science being morphed into 'Science', the holy-rolling progressive substitute for a reanimated carpenter, in which incontrovertible proof is found to validate all kinds of Lefty social theorems (until it becomes an embarrassment and is shot down the memory hole).
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1974
Gunnar Myrdal, Friedrich August von Hayek
Prize Lecture
The Pretence of Knowledge
It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the “scientistic” attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, “is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”1 I want today to begin by explaining how some of the gravest errors of recent economic policy are a direct consequence of this scientistic error.
……..
But it is by no means only in the field of economics that far-reaching claims are made on behalf of a more scientific direction of all human activities and the desirability of replacing spontaneous processes by “conscious human control”. If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve.
If we are to safeguard the reputation of science, and to prevent the arrogation of knowledge based on a superficial similarity of procedure with that of the physical sciences, much effort will have to be directed toward debunking such arrogations, some of which have by now become the vested interests of established university departments.
http://tinyurl.com/4jx93m
We've missed a big one, fellas. The Left denies the major tenet of economic science, that there's no such thing as a free lunch.
I mean, really. I'll grant you that--so what then? Is it determinative of anything at all in terms of how we should be living our lives? Would or should any public policies differ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_Impact
Anon:
If we have no way to say anything about it, why would it make sense to change vaccine formulations or schedules? In fact, what we can say is that taking mercury out if childhood vaccines had no measurable effect on autism diagnosis rates. More generally, measuring drug effectiveness and safety is one of the great triumphs of modern science--you're up against all kinds of difficulties (no two humans are alike, diseases are sometimes misdiagnosed, effects can be very small or can occur very rarely).
Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin were avowed Marxist scientists and believed science should "serve" radical politics. Steven Pinker's THE BLANK SLATE gives a wonderful account of this. (Pinker, by the way, calls himself a liberal but it does not seem to adversely affect his rational observation of and commentary on reality.)
"Why are you so interested in whether there is a genetic basis for intelligence and whether intelligence differs among various groups?"
Are you kidding no question mark.
Allocation of public and private resources; determination, implementation and maintenance of the appropriate policies in education, immigration and employment--pretty much all of our dailly life is affected by how we view differences in intelligence found among the various races.
"Is it determinative of anything at all in terms of how we should be living our lives? Would or should any public policies differ?"
Right now, we are acting on the assumption that there is no appreciable genetic basis for intelligence. Vast resources are thus allocated to closing that pesky and persistent achievement gap, helping immigrants regardless of their legal status and ensuring that all minorities and women are represented in various employment fields, as well as providing a generous social safety net.
If that assumption is wrong, all that money, time and effort is being wasted in a misguided effort to correct something that is not the unnatural fault of a racist society but the natural aspect of some groups of people.
Then there's the question of culture. I doubt that matters much to you but I'll address it briefly anyway.
I'm no expert but observation would suggest that while unintelligent people can learn, say, to read at a grade school level, do basic arithmetic sums, etc., where an intelligence gap is really evident is in the realm of abstract thought. Less intelligent people concern themselves far less with delayed gratification, future time orientation and abstract notions such as duty, responsibility and integrity. It's not that they are bad. I've met a lot of dumb but very kind-hearted people. While they can behave goodheartedly in the moment, they aren't much good at planning for their future or their children's, acting based on what the consequences of their actions will be to themselves and others or doing something that doesn't have an apparent and immediate benefit to them.
Contracts, in particular, seem to befuddle them. They don't see why a landlord should insist on the rent when s/he knows they have sh!t going on their lives right now. If they have a checking account, that means the bank will give them money if they write a check--they overlook the necessity of their depositing money in that account. If they're hired for a job, that means they have a job and should get a paycheck, whether or not they go to work or do the work assigned them. As for the social contract, forget about it. They are who they are, the government is what it is and should take care of them because it has more money than they do. The notion that their hardworking neighbors are paying the taxes that provide the government services to which they think they are entitled is literally one they can't comprehend. The government has the money, the government should provide.
You think I'm exaggerating? I could take you to my old neighborhood and show you different.
Now contrast this with intelligent people who delay parenthood until they can afford to raise children, who save and invest money, who go to their jobs even when they don't feel like it or when sh!t is going on in their lives, who abide by the social contract, etc.
That's the pesky achievement gap we have to address, not by throwing even more money at it but by recognizing certain--let's call them "trends"--in certain groups of people.
All unintelligent people, regardless of race, behave in the way I've described. Like children, they can readily assimilate concrete facts and processes but have real trouble with abstractions. The trouble is that there are higher percentages of unintelligent people found in some races than in others. And that matters very much, to all of us.
Any clearer now?
Global warming is another example. You don't have to deny that there's a scientific basis for some concern to see how some hard-left people went Full Al Gore when they saw the potential for limiting personal freedom and national sovereignty (especially that of the USA).
The people who think "fire can't melt steel" are primarily on the Left.
So is there a case study of science denial that largely occupies the political left?
What about the belief on the left that life begins at the instant of birth? I've had these science loving lefties throw such phrases as "the quickening" at me in debates on abortion. All of a sudden they're tenth century mystics.
Is suppose I shouldn't mention that the majority of the 'patients' of homeopaths and naturopaths tend to the left.
Or that the more vigorous adherents to the non-provable aspects of the 'Gaia Hypothesis' do too.
This is just a passive agressive HBD thread, isn't it?
Isn't the field of Women's Studies suffused with anti-science? Empiricism is a patriarchal concept, etc.
Most academic departments outside of econ and the hard sciences have anti-science elements within them. Even econ, unless you think "Feminist Economics" actually has very little political content to it.
The notion that a dollar of gov't expenditure will result in a GDP increase of four dollars or more mostly resides on the Left, though this gets debunked every few years.
I hate the word denial, because it is usually used in reference to holocaust denial, which is a denial of a clear historical fact and the experiences of millions. I don't think that it's right to use that word to describe someone doubting a given scientific hypothesis or theory. Reasonable people can have different predictions regarding global warming and human intelligence and none of the people deserve the label of "denialist".
The whole ideology of feminism is built upon a scientific foundation of sand. The dominant story line is that men are simply defective women with penises. This whole idea that somehow we are all biologically equal is of course complete hooey.
Do not upset the applecart.
So, a liberal has admitted that some people on the US. left are guilty of science denial.
So far, so good. Us HBD-ers would like leftists to admit more of the same. However, consider human nature. People do not like to admit that they were wrong, and it takes time for them to absorb that line of thinking. To ram down a statement amounting to "and you were wrong about x,y,z also!" is exactly the wrong thing to do -it will cause them to gag, and reject not only what you said about x,y,z, but also their budding realization that they were wrong about whatever they were about to acknowledge to themselves.
Sure, it feels good to whack it to people, but use your head and be long-term strategic about it. That includes keeping ones trap shut at the right time.
The intellectual Left was not always resolutely opposed to the scientific approach to anthropology. Virtually all the pre-war luminaries of the British Left were enthusiastic supporters of "scientific eugenics", a somewhat misleading synonym for what we now call "sociobiology". The list included: JBS Haldane, the Webbs, HG Wells, GB Shaw, Laski, Wallas, Emma Goldman, Havelock Ellis, Julian Huxley, CP Snow and JM Keynes (President of the Eugenics Society 1944-45). see Diane Paul, Eugenics and the Left (1984)
More generally, the leading scientific biologists and founders of statistical method were eugenicists to a man: Darwin (borderline), Galton, Pearson, Spearman, Fisher, Sewall-Wright. This was no accident, the scientific approach to Mendelian hereditarianism required biologists to invent or discover new methods of statistical analysis.
Most of these biologists naturally tended to subscribe to a hereditarian view of culture. For these and all their other sins they have been officially proscribed by the academic Left, Darwin excluded.
After WWII, for obvious reasons, the intelligentsia in general, and the Left in particular, did a complete about-face on eugenics. The practice of eugenics obviously got a bad press owing to the Holocaust and other racist atrocities.
But that threw out the scientific baby with the totalitarian bath-water. The Left can't hold back the tide of genetic knowledge. But it can consign itself to the Dustbin of History.
It just so happens that the last few posts at Climate Audit concern recent Mother Jones article(s).
Comments on Mother Jones
Jaeah's Investigation
(They are good summaries, but YMMV, ie. I don't know whether someone who hasn't been following the particular topics would get much out of the posts)
Unless I'm missing something, most conservatives don't exactly accept IQ and racial differences either.
J St. Whatever -- as opposed the Chinese, and the Russian, "meddling" in Islamic affairs since, well, forever? Or the complete lack of Islamic response to "medding" when the West was strong, and terrorism begat terrible responses?
Putin had it right, the weak get beaten. Nor is the Islamic world unified -- the Saudis, Iranians, and many others hate each other roundly.
If America had the will and demonstrated examples (Tehran getting plastered under Reagan in retaliation for 1979) 9/11 would never have happened. Muslims claim ANYTHING: cartoons in Denmark, some nutcase preacher, an artist in Sweden are grave offenses. Because we are weak. Better to be strong.
You're guilty of magical thinking -- if we are just "nice" they'll like us. Very feminist thinking too.
Thomas -- If genetic differences are ingrained and different population groups differ wildly in say, athletic or intellectual ability, then no amount of social engineering or coaching or teaching will make the NBA mostly White, or Electrical Engineering mostly Black and Hispanic.
Thus if America wishes to be wealthy, and have nice things and a good life, it has to decide if say, wealth is created by putting a ball through a hoop, or Electrical Engineering, and proceed to maximize the population that creates wealth (be it putting balls through hoops or making new microchips) and minimizing those that don't. Or, simply live in ever-increasing poverty.
Aren't you forgeting about all the women who would sneeringly dis "western medicine" when they were single? My sister was one of those. Haven't heard much of it since she had a kid.
Re Scopes, somebody on Facebook or somewhere pointed out that by today's definition, Bryan would be counted as a leftist.
I'd like to hear some opinions as to whether anyone actually reads Mother Jones. I live in NorCal, which would seem to be their breadbasket, and I haven't seen anyone holding a copy or perusing one on the stands since the late '80's. There has to be a story about where they get the cash to publish. Ford Foundation?
After WWII, for obvious reasons, the intelligentsia in general, and the Left in particular, did a complete about-face on eugenics. The practice of eugenics obviously got a bad press owing to the Holocaust and other racist atrocities.
The "about-face" came before WW2 and the Holocaust. It was a reaction to the anti-Semitism of the NS regime and came before any mass killings by the Nazis other than the liquidation of the SA leadership. Funny that there was no such reaction to the ideology of anti-racist Bolshevik regime that already killed many millions in the Holodomor.
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/BenderskyRev.htm
(...)
It is remarkable that the word 'Nordic' disappeared by the 1930s although the restrictionists still had racialist views of Jews and themselves (p. 245). By 1938 eugenics was "shunned in public discourse of the day." (p. 250) Whereas such ideas were commonplace in the mainstream media in the 1920s, General George van Horn Moseley's 1938 talk on eugenics and its implications for immigration policy caused a furor when it was reported in the newspapers. Moseley was charged with anti‑Semitism although he denied referring to Jews in his talk. The incident blew over, but "henceforth, the military determined to protect itself against charges of anti‑Semitism that might sully its reputation or cause it political problems .... The army projected itself as an institution that would tolerate neither racism nor anti-Semitism" (p. 252‑253).
(...)
The left is still so upset about the Scopes Monkey Trial that they believe the stage version of a portion of the trial over the full trial, while ignoring the racist portions of Hunter's Civic Biology upon which the trial was based.
"In the real world blacks represent a generally less intelligent group of humans, brought to America against their will by more intelligent groups of whites, exploited for centuries for their labor and then 'freed' and left to compete in a society that doesn't need them."
You forgot about the part where black in the United States are at present better off than blacks in Africa, whether or not those African nations were ever under European rule. I think the better quality of life, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality rates, etc., etc., etc. that blacks get just by living in American are sufficient recompense for being here. Apparently, African-Americans agree with me about the superior living conditions of the US vs. Africa. Among the many things they demand from the US government, I don't see a demand for a paid trip back to their ancestral homelands.
"In a world where blacks were equal, you wouldn't need affirmative action, just as no one is calling for affirmative action for Chinese Americans."
We don't need it anyway. Where is it written that everyone's society and well-being needs to be equalized if it's not inherently equal? I mean other than in some ridiculous left-wing screed. You're making assumptions that at least some of the rest of us do not accept.
Unless I'm missing something, most conservatives don't exactly accept IQ and racial differences either.
The part where that makes "conservatives" leftists, insofar as that's true?
"Thank goodness that Americans have a Harvard-educated elite of Jews, Asian Indians and Han Chinese to run their country for them, otherwise America would be more of a shithole Turd World country than Brazil or Suriname."
Or India. Or China. BTW, genius, Brazil is richer than the homes of those genius Asian Indians and Han Chinese. Brazil's PCI ($10,816) in real dollar terms is nearly 2.5 times larger than China's ($4,382), and over 9 times higher than India's ($1,176). And Brazil is only half white.
Many nations of Europe manage to do quite well despite having many of the types you listed, and America was well on its way before attracting many, either.
But then like attracts like, and perhaps your experiences in Red State America have been only with people with the same IQ as yourself, but who simply believe in different dumb ideas.
"Uness I'm missing something, most conservatives don't exactly accept IQ and racial differences either."
Or don't admit to it. But at least their ignorance and/or denial doesn't cause them to support dumb policies. Conservatives don't believe that the disparity between blacks and whites is caused by oppression, but by culture and behavior, and so there is therefore nothing the government can do to fix it.
"I hate the word denial, because it is usually used in reference to holocaust denial, which is a denial of a clear historical fact and the experiences of millions. I don't think that it's right to use that word to describe someone doubting a given scientific hypothesis or theory."
Right. Nobody ever used that world prior to the Holocaust, or uses it today for any other purpose.
The Holocaust: Distorting Political Discussion Since 1945.
I grow really tired of having a tragedy held over my head than neither me, nor my ancestors, nor my country did jack spittle to cause.
The autism thing is not a Right-Left issue. The pharmaceutical-government complex has defenders on the Left (e.g., Henry Waxman) and opponents on the Right (Rep. Dan Burton[who has an autistic grandson] and ex-Rep. Dave Weldon [a physician). The basic cleavage is between those who support the government bureaucracy/pharmaceutical corporation alliance and those who think it is a threat to human health. Those who support it on the Left tend to be fans of government bureaucracies and their employees (Waxman). On the Right they tend to be corporate types(e.g.,Mitch Daniels). Opponents on the Left tend to be anti-corporate (e.g., Kennedy). Those on the Right tend to be anti-government bureaucracy (Burton and Daniels)and/or parents of autistic children. The arguments tend to be about science, with the pro-government/corporate side saying their studies prove autism isn't caused by vaccines and the other side saying that the studies were done poorly because the fox was investigating the chicken coop raid and citing their own studies which show an association between autism and vaccines.
SFG said:
"I've never met anyone who accepts both global warming and HBD. It's kind of sad, really."
I think Greg Cochran accepts both. I think Steve has said things that implied that he's kind of agnostic on AGW.
I believe in HBD and am agnostic on the A part of AGW too. It's a complicated issue, I don't know it in detail, I can see incentives to cheat on both sides. Of course there are even bigger incentives for both sides to cheat on HBD, but I've read more about it, thought more about it, am more familiar with the evidence. Plus, the common sense that nature has given us is more applicable to thinking about humans than about anything else.
I'm very sure that the polar and subpolar regions of the Earth have warmed in the last few decades. Why, I don't know. Obviously, bigger swings have naturally occurred in the past. But that doesn't guarantee that this one is natural.
"Another clueless well-meaner, drunk on liberalism, stumbles into the back alleys of HBD-town"
'Back alleys', indeed. Svigor needs to get out more.
Gilbert Pinfold.
As for denying difference in intelligence between races, well, the Left has a svery strong case here. Why? First, no one has ever defined what intelligence is....
Someone at Merriam-Webster.com defined it:
the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason; also : the skilled use of reason
"he whole ideology of feminism is built upon a scientific foundation of sand. The dominant story line is that men are simply defective women with penises."
oh give it a rest already. The whole 'ideology' of 'feminism' is nothing of the sort, except among the deranged. Personally I think this "ism" took a wrong course in the west, at least as it is commonly understood, but few "feminists" seriously believed such poppycock as you claim.
Those that did were toying, so to speak, with the phallo-centric philosophy of (some) ancient Greeks (of whom Aristotle was one), and handed down through the fathersof the Church -- some of them -- that women were defective men. I mean, what's wrong with these people?
Still, even among the ancients, this philosophy was hardly universal, most people sensibly concurring that genders, like the wings of a bird, were both necessary, inversely similar and different, and not interchangable. My philosophy is that there are always some persons in any age who are so into themselves that they think others are intrinsically 'defective.'
btw, the late pr rep and investigative activist, Aaron Russo, claimed a member of the Rockefeller family who had befriended him, revealed that the family corporation had funded a movement in the 60s to get women into the workforce by any means necessary (though I think it was just an idea whose time had come), because they would provide a larger tax-base, hence more money for what we now call 'banksters.' For the powers that be, it's always about money, not social ideals, and they don't care about the fallout as long as 'they' are the winnners.
Gee, Thomas, you're thick.
Would the heliocentric theory make any difference to how we live our lives?
Our germ theory?
Yeah, science is useless. Right. It doesn't affect anything. MORALITY (religion) is all.
ESPECIALLY the kind of morality that doesn't care about truthfulness.
To answer your question, almost all public policy would be affected to some degree by a truthful understanding of human nature. If not, then why was the current paradigm put in place? Just for grins?
>After WWII, for obvious reasons, the intelligentsia in general, and the Left in particular, did a complete about-face on eugenics. The practice of eugenics obviously got a bad press owing to the Holocaust and other racist atrocities. But that threw out the scientific baby with the totalitarian bath-water.<
That about-face wasn't very scientific of them.
Perhaps some pressure was applied?
That pressure, akin to the Church's against Galileo, probably didn't come from the Right.
Anonymous at 4/24/11 3:02 AM wrote:
"Does the Left ever deny science? I mean, ever?"
What about nutters from the right-wing? American Republicans from Red States are some of the dumbest people I've ever met in my life,
You're missing Steve's point. The original Mooney article already discusses right wing "science denialism," and Steve isn't denying that right wing "science denialism" exists. The Mooney article implies that the left is much less into "science denialism" than the right, and Steve is asking whether or not Mooney is giving the left a pass.
If you want to hear about left-wing "science denialism" check out Michael Fumento's site.
Unless I'm missing something, most conservatives don't exactly accept IQ and racial differences either.
The part where that makes "conservatives" leftists, insofar as that's true?
Or maybe left/right is just not the right way to think about this kind of thing, if it requires that the vast majority of conservatives actually be considered leftists.
First, no one has ever defined what intelligence is
And yet you have no problem calling (white) Americans "dumb" and praising "elite" Jews, Asian Indians and Han Chinese who "run their country for them."
Who? whom? indeed.
But some groups are missing here. Should blacks, for example, have have their country run for them, or should they be running other people's countries as a favor?
Again, who? whom?
The practice of eugenics obviously got a bad press owing to the Holocaust and other racist atrocities.
Nah. If that made sense at face value, then "anti-racism" and the rest of socialism would've gotten a similar amount of bad press owing to the Holodomor, Red Terror, and other "anti-racist" and socialist atrocities.
"There are lots of anti-science on the left.
1. Fear of genetically modified foods. Also, generically modified foods are harmful to honey bees.
3. Refusal to learn about toxicology and refusl to understand that that the dose is the poison. Look at how the left goes on their own creationism-like mental work to explain the harms of environmental chemicals.
6. That electric or magnetic fields can cause cancer.
7. That cell phone cause brain cancer. "
Some genetically modified foods are harmful though. Note how the infusion of hormones and antibiotics into milk/meat has helped trigger an earlier age puberty in children. And there is substantial evidence that when you control for other factors, strange things like increases in cancer rates do occur in areas with higher magnetism. And where it concerns toxicology and environmental chemicals, we're on just think of the effects of hormonal birth control. While it isn't going to kill you, prohibiting oneself from undergoing the natural process of ovulation for a decade or so can cause all sorts of nasty effects that the pharmacy companies love to downplay. Not to mention the effect that these estrogens could have on the general public via the water supply.
Some of the beliefs you describe are not the sole domain of leftists. Many conservatives also believe these things. It's just healthy skepticism.
some personalities and intellecutals who could be identified as "on the left" are in total denial about a few topics in energy. now whether this is a rejection of a field of science or a field of engineering, or both, is sort of an open question, but they're clearly way out of touch nonetheless. as in, hardcore, they have no idea at all what they're talking about, physics denial, when it comes to the topic of energy.
"The whole ideology of feminism is built upon a scientific foundation of sand. The dominant story line is that men are simply defective women with penises. This whole idea that somehow we are all biologically equal is of course complete hooey."
You are a bit confused. "Men as defective women" is not the dominant story line of feminism, and it contradicts the leftist dogma of equality. Blank-slate equalitarianism between the sexes (analogous to bank-slate equalitarianism between the races) is the dominant story line of feminism and of leftism.
Yes the left and will turn a blind eye towards chauvinism amongst its favored groups (women, non-whites, NAMs, Jews, etc) but that isn't the point. The dominant line is equality - and the fact that the left isn't consistent about this alleged equality (ie, it has no problems in areas where women do better than men, blacks do better than whites, etc) is rigorously suppressed in MSM discussion for obvious reasons.
If feminists and the left in general were to assimilate the facts of natural inequality between the sexes and between the races, their entire worldview would collapse. In that case, feminists who insist that men are inferior forms of women are working against the grain of the leftist cause; they don't really fit the larger scheme. They are not the dominant line of thought but are probably tolerated because they are useful to the left for other reasons, in analogous manner to how the left tolerates racist blacks. It's about practical politics, and it is a mistake to confuse practical politics with ideology.
"Thank goodness that Americans have a Harvard-educated elite of Jews, Asian Indians and Han Chinese to run their country for them, otherwise America would be more of a shithole Turd World country than Brazil or Suriname."
America was much better when ruled by its historic WASP elite, and is much worse now, and getting worse, under your beloved Harvard educated non-white, non-WASP elite. I could tell you to go to hell, but that would be redundant since we're already getting there thanks to you and your type. "Get the hell out of my country" seems to be the more appropriate response, IMO.
"As for denying difference in intelligence between races, well, the Left has a svery strong case here. Why? First, no one has ever defined what intelligence is"
You deny the possibility or utility of defining or determining what intelligence is, yet you castigate Americans for being stupid while preening about the alleged superior intelligence of your own favored groups. This is, in a nutshell, the classic case of leftist (anti-white hate in disguise) denialism: denying the realities of HBD while at the same time and in complete contradiction to this, celebration of one's own superiority on what amounts to HBD grounds. You are irrational and self-contradictory, and yet you think yourself rational and consistent.
If only all teachers could be like those in Beyond the Blackboard then none of those troglodyte rethuglicans would deny science!
Kylie,
Great post. If anyone doubts it, let them come to my school.
Combining belief in HBD with AGW.
"Right! Autism and vaccines is the example of science denial on the left. What else is there? The hounding of James D. Watson and Larry Summers out of their jobs for politically incorrect statements about the science of intelligence pales in comparison to the actions of noted leftwing intellectuals Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey regarding autism."
PC leftism is the true source of autism, it seems.
The leftist mind thinks... 'any form of racial science or theories = closet nazism = full blown nazism = the Holocaust.'
Even so, there seems to be two kinds of science denial on the Left. The smart kind, by people who actually know better but stick to the 'noble lie', not least because many of them happen to be Jewish. Like Dr. Zaius the orangutan in PLANET OF THE APES, they think the truth--which they privately accept--is too much for the masses.
And then you have the science denial among dumb leftists who get all their info from public education, oprah, and PBS.
"Or India. Or China. BTW, genius, Brazil is richer than the homes of those genius Asian Indians and Han Chinese. Brazil's PCI ($10,816) in real dollar terms is nearly 2.5 times larger than China's ($4,382), and over 9 times higher than India's ($1,176). And Brazil is only half white.
Many nations of Europe manage to do quite well despite having many of the types you listed, and America was well on its way before attracting many, either.
But then like attracts like, and perhaps your experiences in Red State America have been only with people with the same IQ as yourself, but who simply believe in different dumb ideas."
But the difference, moron, is that India and Brazil ARE Third World countries. It is shoocking that most Brazilians and Indiians are stupid. What shocks in the U.S is that how can the people of a First World country for the most part be so dumb?
As for your IQ comment, lol,the fact that you think that "IQ" has any relevance whatsoever and that it means more than the ability to solve little puzzles tells me everything I need to know about your intelligence. You people are so childish and stupidwith this obessesion with "IQ". No one outside the U.S cares about IQ. Even the French, who invented the term, donn't use it. How does the ability to solve little puzzles mean anything? The problems we encounter in daily life, even learning how to tie your shoes, are infinitely harder and correlate more with intelligence than the ability to solve a figure sequence of know that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. IQ seems to measure your ability to recall useless information and be good at board games.
Yeah, but you guys still won't accept global warming.
I've never met anyone who accepts both global warming and HBD. It's kind of sad, really.
HBD is obvious to anyone who interacts with other humans, but who has the time to investigate AGW? What we know is that the chief proponents of the theory of AGW tell lies for a living and wish to use AGW to exercise greater power over the rest of us. They may be right about AGW, but you must forgive us if we refuse to accept the claims of people we cannot trust and if we cannot find time to investigate the matter ourselves.
What most of you don't realise is that blacks are the superior race. They are superior in most athletic sports. That is proved scientifically by the stop watch. White men can't jump, we all know that. We also know that all races are equally intelligent.No doubt about that. Everyone says so. So blacks are the superior race.
"What shocks in the U.S is that how can the people of a First World country for the most part be so dumb?"
Perhaps they aren't as dumb as you think they are and perhaps, in relative terms, the "Turd Worlders" are even dumber. HIV+ Africans rape virgins thinking it will cure them of AIDs, and other Africans believe that cannibalizing albinos will cure all sorts of ills. You meet many people like that in the red states?
"What shocks in the U.S is that how can the people of a First World country for the most part be so dumb?"
Ok then, Anonymous (and suspected troll), give us several specific examples illustrating the "stupidity" of red state America. Provide examples that don't involve oft regurgitated cliches about religion.
socialism would've gotten a similar amount of bad press owing to the Holodomor, Red Terror, and other "anti-racist" and socialist atrocities.
Do you honestly believe socialism doesn't have "bad press" in America? McCarthy? Not one but two Red Scares? A decades-long Cold War fought against it, with huge sacrifices in blood and treasure?
Some genetically modified foods are harmful though. Note how the infusion of hormones and antibiotics into milk/meat has helped trigger an earlier age puberty in children.
Are you talking about feeding livestock growth hormones, or are you talking about genetic engineering? Do you realize those aren't the same thing?
"Do you honestly believe socialism doesn't have "bad press" in America? McCarthy? Not one but two Red Scares? A decades-long Cold War fought against it, with huge sacrifices in blood and treasure?"
The first-and very brief-Red Scare was a side-effect of Wilson's disastrous campaign to "make the world safe for democracy" or whatever he was trying to do. The Second Red Scare lasted about a decade and was a natural result of the following: The Rosenberg Atom Spy Case, Alger Hiss, the 300 or so Soviet spies who had free reign in the FDR regime, the sellout(primarily the arms embargo) of Chiang by Communists and Communist-leaning liberals in the Truman Administration and something called the Korean War.
People forget that there was a "Brown Scare" between the two Red Scares:
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/mar/23/00016/
(...)
"But the public response was utterly out of proportion to any danger these groups posed. From 1938 through 1941, the media regularly presented stories suggesting that the U.S. was about to be overwhelmed by ultra-Right fifth columnists, millions strong, intimately allied with the Axis powers. (Actual numbers of serious militants were in the low thousands at most.) Reportedly, the militant Right was armed to the teeth and plotting countless domestic terror attacks—bombings in New York and Washington, assassinations and pogroms, the wrecking of trains and munitions plants. Plotters were rumored to have high-placed allies in the military, raising the specter of a putsch. The ensuing panic was orchestrated by newspapers and radio and reinforced by films, newsreels, and comic books. Historians characterize these years as the Brown Scare."
"If the more bizarre accusations sound like the common currency of the show trials in Stalin’s Russia in these very years, that is no coincidence. The main exposés of fascist conspiracy emanated from Communist Party journalists like Albert Kahn and John Spivak. (Spivak himself was an operative for the Soviet NKVD.) Charges circulated through Kahn’s newssheet The Hour before being picked up in the liberal press. The Red agenda was straightforward in that the Brown Scare allowed the Left to discredit any opponent of radical New Deal policies. Scratch the surface of any enemy of the Left, they claimed, and you would find a fascist spy, a lyncher, a storm trooper."
"Leftist scaremongering worked to the advantage of a Roosevelt White House anxious to promote U.S. intervention in the coming war. The administration supplied many of the leaks that supported the Brown Scare, through Roosevelt aides like Harold Ickes and also the FBI. In 1940, the FBI announced that it had broken what it touted as a looming coup d’état by the Christian Front that would have been accompanied by murders, bombings, and pogroms. Meanwhile, FBI mole Avedis Derounian undertook the research that would lead to his 1943 bestseller, Under Cover, published under the pseudonym of John Roy Carlson. In both cases, however, the terrorist conspiracies were much less terrifying than they initially seemed. Try as it might, the government could never connect the Christian Front plot to more than a couple of dozen activists with no access to significant weaponry. Nor did Derounian’s revelations point to any serious conspiracy, and the government glaringly failed to convict national farRight leaders on sedition charges."
(...)
All the above was a reaction to Germany remilitarizing and and passing anti-Semitic laws. No one seems to care that Stalin had already killed millions and was in the process of killing millions more.
Re the Cold War:it's odd that the
Soviet Union that beat Hitler and became a superpower was entirely a creation of the US:
http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2010/08/life-lived-well.html#comment-53643
"Incidentally, those same fascist-lovers in the American financial and industrial establishment built the entire Soviet military-industrial complex from the ground up from 1929 to 1941. The Soviet Union was able to defeat the Wehrmacht ONLY because of US technical assistance in the preceding decades. Who built the steel works at Magnitogorsk, Kuznetsk and Zaporozhe? Freyn Engineering of Chicago and Arthur McKee of Cleveland. Who designed and built 77% of Soviet oil refineries, 96% of the lubricating plants, and 91% of the cracking plants? American firms. Who designed and built the tractor factories that produced tanks at Kharkov, Stalingrad, and Chelyabinsk? Engineers from Ford and Packard. In 1944, Stalin told Averell Harriman that two-third of the large industrial enterprises in the USSR were built with American technical assistance. Those Soviet tanks that rolled into Berlin in 1945 were built in a US-designed and built factory, ran on oil produced in a US-designed and built oil plant, and were transported on a US-supplied rail system."
"The fact is that US assistance to the USSR before 1941 puts the supposed assistance to the Nazis totally in the shade. If we had supplied the Germans with the type of aid we gave the Soviets, the Swastika would be flying from the Atlantic to the Urals to this day. Strangely, the post-WW2 "War Against Communism" did a FAR better role of covering up treasonous US assistance to Stalin's criminal regime than aid to the Nazis. This is because the American political establishment was ALWAYS in bed with the Soviets, not the Nazis. The political establishment's successful efforts to distract people like you with talk of how the Rockefellers aided the Nazis would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad."
Ref: http://books.google.com/books?id=dcAgT_2uiYgC&lpg=PP1&ots=g-OYQ0S6ZD&dq=...
"IQ seems to measure your ability to recall useless information and be good at board games."
Pathetic attempt at disassociating intelligence from accomplishment requiring intellect. Usual "leftist" (the term belongs in this context, I guess) drivel. Do you need water for swimming? Are you naturally that ignorant of what IQ measures? Or is this ideological and determined ignorance? You must believe everything MSM tells you to believe. Do you work for a University?
In any case, you have some gall to be using a computer and dissing the quality that made them possible.
Solving little puzzles? You mean like inventing electricity? Blueprints? Automobiles? Air planes? Navigation? Irrigation? Frescoes? Gellato machines? Indoor baths in ancient Rome? Elevators? Escalators? Architecture? TV? Computers? How many stars there are in the galaxy? Are there inhabitable planets? That last will be important someday when we have to colonize other planets. It won't be the over-breeding stupid people who figure out where and how to go. To be fair though, the stupid people, left to their own devices, would have such a high mortality rate and low-tech capacity, that they wouldn't over-populate the world. It's the inventions of the smart that have caused the problems and the solutions. But does anybody really want to live in caves and beaver huts any more? No. They want central heating and air conditioning. You know--those inventions requiring useless intelligence.
Little puzzles like that? Yes, you're right--IQ only measures that potential capacity to solve little puzzles like that. And you do need about a 50 IQ to tie your shoes. Most people with IQs over 150 are also able to accomplish this feat.
"There are lots of anti-science on the left.
1. Fear of genetically modified foods. Also, generically modified foods are harmful to honey bees.
3. Refusal to learn about toxicology and refusl to understand that that the dose is the poison. Look at how the left goes on their own creationism-like mental work to explain the harms of environmental chemicals.
6. That electric or magnetic fields can cause cancer.
7. That cell phone cause brain cancer. "
Little story about cell phones. The 9 year old son of the CEO of Nokia in Finland was the only child in his class not allowed to have a cell phone. But the CEO did not publicize this. Only came out because the classmates talked about it to their parents.
You haven't convinced me one iota that these "leftist" concerns are invalid. Why exactly are they "leftist?" What a strange attempt to stigmatise legitimate concerns. People on this blog should be aware of those tricks.
My crystal ball tells me someone will give some snide and lying rebuttal, but I know for a fact, having had had friends who did business with them, that Monsanto forced farmers to buy their seeds that would produce crops without seeds, thus forcing the farmers to buy more seeds from Monsanto of course. Farmers who resisted could not buy seeds elsewhere, and were crushed out of operation. Monsanto was/and is, truly evil.
There are serious concerns about GMOs, they have been banned in much of Europe, or they were, and why would you not think that bees -- along with frogs, among the most sensitive to disruptions in their environment -- would not be aversely affected by plants that literally have had the seeds of life engineered out of them? Bees don't just make honey--they are on earth to pollinate from living plant to living plant.
And why would we submissively accept the assurances of multi-million dollar industries that all they are doing is fine and dandy for us. I mean WHY?!
And you've got the gall to call anyone who questions the powers-that-be some kind of anti-science "leftist?" You make no sense. Always question what scientists do, always research, never accept what MSM tells us, and never accept that doctors and scientists always know best. FCOL, doctors used to believe it made no difference washing your hands before attending a childbirth. When Ignace Semmelweise discovered the cause of puerperal fever, some doctors were so adamantly opposed to imposed hygiene they deliberately did not wash their hands and killed more people. Drove poor Semmelweiss insane. Science changes. It is not static, it is not innately altruistic, and it is not to be naively trusted, no matter the practitioners. Especially when they are working for corporations or get funding from the government. And that's just about all of them.
Questioning whether industry and government agencies (FDA anyone?) has the public's best interests at heart is not "anti-science"; it's being a responsible person who understands that industry and government agencies rarely have our best interests at heart if those interests interfere with some major industry making money or politicians getting what they want.
@Thomas
Why are you so interested in whether there is a genetic basis for intelligence and whether intelligence differs among various groups?
When public policy is determined based on a flawed theory, society ends up with bad results. In particular, disparate education outcomes are attributed to "secretly racist" attitudes in teachers, historical oppression, institutional racism etc. Then billions of tax dollars are spent and innocent people slandered trying to fix these problems. It really is a very big deal for very tangible reasons.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kirp-esteem-20110424,0,4748601.story
A 1-hour fix for the racial achievement gap?
Minority students are especially prone to the fear of failing. But that can be changed.
The researchers, psychologists Geoffrey L. Cohen and Gregory M. Walton, don't claim that their intervention is a miracle cure for the problem of 17-year-old black and Latino students whose average reading and math skills are comparable to13-year-old white students. But their experiment — one of numerous scholarly studies examining the relationship between self-esteem and achievement that have reached the same conclusion — confirms an important, if often ignored, fact: Success in school doesn't necessarily result from ceaselessly drilling students to prep them for achievement tests. "Noncognitive" factors, such as students' sense that they fit in and are capable of doing the work, profoundly affect what they learn. Whether they believe they have the brainpower and the social skills to make it in the achievement-oriented world of school can shape how well they actually do.
Chief
I don't understand Anon's complaint about Americans building "cracking plants" in the USSR before 1941. If he meant FCCs, 1941 was too early. If he meant thermal crackers, then consider WKPD:
"The thermal cracking method (also known as "Shukhov cracking process") was invented by Russian engineer Vladimir Shukhov and patented in 1891 in the Russian empire, patent no. 12926, November 27, 1891. This process was modified by the American engineer William Merriam Burton and patented as U.S. patent 1,049,667 on June 8, 1908.
In 1924, the delegation of the American "Sinckler Oil" paid a visit to Shukhov. The "Sinckler Oil" firm protested the personal right appropriated by the Rockefeller "Standard Oil" concern on the discovery of oil cracking. It indicated that Burton's patent used by the "Standard Oil" concern was the modified patent of Shukhov. Shukhov proved to the Americans that the Burton's method was just the slightly changed modification of his 1891 patents. However, an agreement between the American companies finally was made not to buy the patent from Soviet Russia."
Seems they were owed.
http://www.chequer-board.net/story/2006/3/17/123551/602
No one outside the U.S cares about IQ. Even the French, who invented the term, donn't use it.
Of course they don't. That's why the French civil service, for example, is open to anybody off the street.
Well, actually, I did hear that the civil service administers competitive exams, but I'm sure they scrupulously avoid antyhing that might measure intelligence. Same with their law and medical boards but again, I'm sure the exam avoids anything that hints at cognitive ability. And their colleges, I bet they award a degree and a bottle of wine to whoever shows up, given the famous French aversion to ranking people by intelligence.
On the websites I traffic, SWPL are more likely to be pro-vaccine based on their support for "herd immunity", and view opponents to the current vaccine regimen as dwellers of mothers basements.
"Kylie,
Great post. If anyone doubts it, let them come to my school."
Thanks. That post is the result of years of observation and trying to make sense of what I observation. I finally had to jettison the whole left-wing POV on which I had been raised to make any sense of it at all.
I should have added that the inability to think abstractly is also a real impediment to forming and adhering to a moral code. So the proliferation of unintelligent people increases not only the general disorder of society but also the outright violence and lawlessness. A person who can't think beyond his immediate needs and wants tends not to care very much about anyone else's well-being.
Last I checked, France was 1) opposed to GMO agriculture, and 2) serving much better food, to a slimmer and more culinarily happy populace, than the U.S. does. Scientific? Who cares? I'll take better eats.
The main reason to accept AGW is that people who study climate, meteorology, marine biology, ecology, biogeochemistry, etc., seem to overwhelmingly accept it. As far as I can tell, opposition to AGW is overwhelmingly ideologically based. By contrast, I've seen arguments for taking the predictions of the models with a helping of salt that seem actually driven by limits on the available information and methods.
I think psychometrics and climatology are very similar in the nature of the opposition to their main conclusions--lots of ideological argument that has approximately the validity of the average creationist rant by a scientifically illiterate preacher, and occasional genuine issues raised about the validity of their models and methods.
Yeah, but you guys still won't accept global warming.
I've never met anyone who accepts both global warming and HBD. It's kind of sad, really.
The three main problem with AGW are that first it's biggest carnival barkers are self-interested liars who are out to grab wealth and power. AGW has become something of a mindless witch burning relgion among the MSM and leftist evanganlists.
Second, history has shown that scientists have not demonstrated any predictive tools regarding long-term climate change. Recall the 1970s panic over the coming Ice Age climate scientist warned us about. It's like Intelligent Design at this point - it's not really science if you can't make accurate specific predictions that are testible (or have 100% wrong).
Finally, the biggest of the two problems is that if the AGW models are indeed accurate in that a tiny increase in atmospheric CO2 drastically raise global temperatures, there is literally nothing we can do about it.
Supposedly the world would have to reduce 90% of all CO2 output for 100years to achieve stability under these models. That is beyond any relm of possibility. I'm just happy climate scientists have flipped 180 degrees since I was a kid and are now predicting a warmer planet rather than a coler one at gas $5/gal and rising.
The analogy between HBD and AGW is this: The biggest anti-racists and AGW supporters are total hypocrites. They don't really care about black people or the environment and infact do all they can to avoid blacks or making personal sacrifices.
See Al Gore's monster mansions and private jet carbon footprints. See how indifferent leftist are to how they destroyed the black family, public education and low-skilled job opportunities in the US with their moral preening ass-backwards public policies on welfare, "discrimination" and illegal immigration.
It's all just status seeking and power grabs by the great and good. Sure, there are mindless schlubs who go without showering, eat grass and bike to work or a handful of "edgy" libs who will cautiously live in a transitional hood briefly during college. But these are just the headless dupes who mostly wise up and live lives in opposition to their purported values.
But the difference, moron, is that India and Brazil ARE Third World countries. It is shoocking that most Brazilians and Indiians are stupid. What shocks in the U.S is that how can the people of a First World country for the most part be so dumb?
As for your IQ comment, lol,the fact that you think that "IQ" has any relevance whatsoever and that it means more than the ability to solve little puzzles tells me everything I need to know about your intelligence. You people are so childish and stupidwith this obessesion with "IQ". No one outside the U.S cares about IQ. Even the French, who invented the term, donn't use it. How does the ability to solve little puzzles mean anything? The problems we encounter in daily life, even learning how to tie your shoes, are infinitely harder and correlate more with intelligence than the ability to solve a figure sequence of know that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. IQ seems to measure your ability to recall useless information and be good at board games.
Come now little man, relax. These dumb Americans obviously have some edge the others don't, being the only dumb people capable of creating a first world country. Therefore it is that mysterious property, let us call it, oh, something like "intelligence quotient", that we must cultivate instead of importing third world failures.
Why are you so interested in whether there is a genetic basis for intelligence and whether intelligence differs among various groups?
I'll add yet another point at the intersection of "Unintended Consequences Rd" and "Paved with Good Intentions Rd".
If you tell a group of people that has experienced a hugely disproportionate amount of struggles, brutality and under achievement everywhere in the world (especially in their own homeland under native leadership)and at all times (if but only relative at times) that all or most of their problems are due to "others" unfairly scheming you radicalize them to hatred, resignation and self-destruction based upon lies.
You take a bad situation and make it much worse. One can see this as some blacks seem to always justify even the most heineous acts and grossly unfair policies as simple "payback", "reparations" and "no justice, no peace".
The mechanism is similar to the propaganda that led to the holocaust. Leftist falsely villifying whites for black problems are morally equivalent to Nationalist Socialist villifying Jews.
Kylie, I'd like to quote your comment on another blog. Please contact me at rmay@mac.com and let me know how I should attribute it. Thanks.
How come IQ-denialists always use the word "stupid"?
Are they too stupid to know any other words?
Here:
blockheaded
doltish
dopey
witless
You're welcome.
Oh, and "lol," that one they use a lot. So that's 2 words. Oh, yeah, and "ignorant." That's three. I guess they have extensive vocabularies after all, in keeping with their mental immensity and overall awesomeness.
Anon, the fact you point out that feminism, racist blacks, etc. don't fit the leftist paradigm is true at first glance, till you remember that doublethink — the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously — is an essential part of the leftist paradigm.
A good way to distinguish between ideological and real AGW believers is to see if their position on nuclear power changed as the implications of AGW sunk in.
The only realistic way to address AGW is with better technology. Imposing carbon taxes (or raising the price of carbon emissions via cap and trade) will be too politically painful to actually happen. Empirically, doubling gas prices hasn't decreased our CO2 output much. But $4/gallon gas is more likely to make Obama a one term president than any amount of unsustainable deficits or pointless bombing of third world dictators. Any party or politician that makes CO2 emissions expensive enough to have a serious impact on AGW will be out of power very quickly.
Not accepting global warming based upon a scientific analysis isn't science denial. It's just coming to a different conclusion.
I'm still waiting for examples of conservatives who accept the validity of racial differences, or the importance of IQ. You think you're going to get very far talking about that kind of stuff at a Tea Party rally or other conservative get-together?
About 50% of Americans are creationists, and you can bet that they are concentrated on the right. Do you think these people are going to be into HBD? Not likely - in fact, if you've ever looked at creationist websites, you'll know that one of their big arguments is that the theory of evolution is "racist". Conservatives also generally took the side of Gould and Lewontin in the sociobiology debates of the 1970s. Conservatives are emphatically NOT interested in evolutionary views of human nature - so why does everyone keep pretending otherwise?
I don't see any evidence at all that liberals are worse than conservatives in terms of disbelieving in racial differences. And certainly liberals hold more scientific views than conservatives on a number of other points. Clearly liberals are more accepting of science than conservatives, on the whole. Is there really any disputing this?
"Kylie, I'd like to quote your comment on another blog. Please contact me at rmay@mac.com and let me know how I should attribute it. Thanks."
Thanks. But can't you just attribute it to "Kylie at iSteve's" and give a link, if that's what's done? I trust you completely--you're one of the people here I wouldn't mind meeting--but I like keeping a low profile.
And I'd rather answer you here publicly so there can be no question that I do NOT mind you quoting me, that I'm flattered, and I'm not particular about attribution.
Re creationism, it's been said many times before, but logically, only a creationist can believe in anti-HBD human equality. That's some more liberal doublethink for you.
I've seen plenty of the usual creationist sites arguing that Darwinism is racist. That argument technique is called 'losing.'
I'm still waiting for examples of conservatives who accept the validity of racial differences, or the importance of IQ. You think you're going to get very far talking about that kind of stuff at a Tea Party rally or other conservative get-together?
All you're doing is pointing out the hegemony of leftist (i.e. PC, Cultural Marxist) ideology. The "conservatives" you see on FOX News are the end product of a long period of indoctrination and intimidation. Read KMAC's Culture of Critique and/or Gottfried's Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt.
Scientists being human, there is plenty of fraud, exaggeration and manipulation of data in science, especially as it is increasingly controlled by government and corporate money. Profit and ideology are powerful corrupters of the search for truth. Scientists and the science they make should therefore by subject to the same standards of scrutiny as everyone else. Their desire to be considered a new, infallible, uncorruptible preisthood should be ignored.
All you're doing is pointing out the hegemony of leftist (i.e. PC, Cultural Marxist) ideology. The "conservatives" you see on FOX News are the end product of a long period of indoctrination and intimidation.
So are the "liberals" you see on MSNBC. So what? Why are liberals condemned for being coerced into accepting the "Culture of Critique" agenda but not conservatives?
Kylie, will do. Thanks.
Monsanto was/and is, truly evil....
And why would we submissively accept the assurances of multi-million dollar industries that all they are doing is fine and dandy for us. I mean WHY?!
A lot of folks here who consider themeselves to be on the "right" would agree with much or most of your rant. I certainly do.
"I'm still waiting for examples of conservatives who accept the validity of racial differences, or the importance of IQ. You think you're going to get very far talking about that kind of stuff at a Tea Party rally or other conservative get-together?"
What a bunch of garbage. As it's already been pointed out by Steve, anyone who talks of race realism is quickly piloried, hounded out of their job and branded with the scarlet "R" leter. Of course you won't find any major conservative players left who would be willing to talk about HDB, because the ones who spoke up were already drummed out of polite society and whomever was left learned to keep their mouths shut.
These attacks on anyone who deviates from the blank slate othodoxy are cooridinated by leftist elements in academia and the media. And they've been so successful at shuttering the arguement that you get to jump in here with a bit of hilarious sophistry about HBD denial been as prevalent on the right as the left.
Cracka, please.
I've seen this sort of thing done by the left over and over again. After squelching the principled opposition and moving the body politic towards their way of thinking by whatever obscene tactics available, they can then claim the failures of leftist policy x was everyone's idea. Yhe endless decline of California is a good example, you find leftists on every message board pleading "it's both party's fault!" every time the subject comes up.
"About 50% of Americans are creationists, and you can bet that they are concentrated on the right."
There were plenty of creationists in days gone by who understood racial differences just fine, as a matter of fact the two ideas stood side by side as accepted and uncontroversial for most of the nation's history. So your "bet" is stupid.
"I don't see any evidence at all that liberals are worse than conservatives in terms of disbelieving in racial differences."
I'll tell you what, go ahead and be an advocate for HDB at your job, at your local coffee shop, to your friends, wherever you can. Take note of who fires you, who refuses to speak with you again, who tries to kick your ass, etc.
Or failing that just take your ridiculous farce of an arguement and stuff it.
So are the "liberals" you see on MSNBC. So what? Why are liberals condemned for being coerced into accepting the "Culture of Critique" agenda but not conservatives?
I hardly think they're being "coerced" at MSNBC. But MSNBC isn't available on cable in the country where I live so I can't really pass judgment. But how's Pat doin'? Has he been called a racist and a Nazi enough to please you?
The main reason to accept AGW is that people who study climate, meteorology, marine biology, ecology, biogeochemistry, etc., seem to overwhelmingly accept it. As far as I can tell, opposition to AGW is overwhelmingly ideologically based. By contrast, I've seen arguments for taking the predictions of the models with a helping of salt that seem actually driven by limits on the available information and methods.
Really, that's your argument? A lot of the opposition to AGW comes from people in much more quantitative disciplines than those. Just off the top of my head: An Israeli theoretical astrophysicist, A Slovakian-Canadian isotope geochemist, A French geophysicist (Also a member of the French Socialist Party,) A Danish astrophysicist, A Japanese-American geophysicist, several solid-state physicists, A atomic-molecular-optical physicist at Princeton, A heavily theoretical climatologist at MIT. You think all of them are ideologically close minded loons? Or are they pointing out that the government gravy train has created a huge army of softer scientific minds with an ideological agenda
Last I checked, France was 1) opposed to GMO agriculture, and 2) serving much better food, to a slimmer and more culinarily happy populace, than the U.S. does. Scientific? Who cares? I'll take better eats.
Courses. After bread, salad, soup, and a half a bottle of wine, who has room for meat and potatoes?
They also stockpile true arsenals in their homes because they believe that, if the government becomes tyrannical, they will overthrow it with their handguns against the government's tanks, missiles and jet fighters.
I'm sure they'd be better off trying to overthrow it with rocks.
They are also Christians who love money-making and guns, even though the founder of their religion was a Hippie who expelled the taders from the temple and said that the meek shall inherit the Earth.
I know, Christians are so much less intelligent than atheists, what with their not reproducing and all. Atheists are so smart they cite Jesus' one clear example of leading gang violence to militate against avid gun-owners.
First, no one has ever defined what intelligence is, and even if defined, you would have to prove that IQ tests measure what you are attempting to measure in a precise and consisten manner.
Leftists are so smart they do hand-stands before taking a dump (see your post's previous hilarity).
When a leftist starts using words like "defined," "measure," "precise," and "consistent," ("rigorous" is the gold standard here) reach for your gun. There can be no clearer signal that he's about to bullshit you.
HBD is the perfect justification for AA from the left wing point of view, it's just that the liberals are scared to tell blacks what they really think.
Not that I mind a bit of judo and deception, but c'mon. We all know leftists already have their perfect justification.
I think Steve has said things that implied that he's kind of agnostic on AGW.
I'm pretty much agnostic on GW too. The part where I'm not agnostic is political; no, a bunch of leftist hand-waving isn't going to make me forget that leftists are working 24/7 to destroy my environment. Save the planet, kill the white males? No thanks. Your leftist planet can burn for all I care.
'Back alleys', indeed. Svigor needs to get out more.
Gilbert Pinfold.
Hey, thank you, thank you very much, I'm here all week - try the veal!
Or maybe left/right is just not the right way to think about this kind of thing, if it requires that the vast majority of conservatives actually be considered leftists.
Ya think?
highly christian, highly religious mestizos and africans seem to suddenly not exist when liberals are eager to rip into religion.
No no, black Christianity is "earthy" and "spiritual" and above all, "genuine."
The leftist mind thinks... 'any form of racial science or theories = closet nazism = full blown nazism = the Holocaust.'
I stopped believing that at "the leftist mind thinks." The bell rings, the dog's mouth waters. Thinkin's got nuthin' to do with it.
Btw, why don't they think "any form of "anti-racist"/equalitarian/blank slate science or theories = closet commie = full blown communism = the Holodomor/Red Terror"?
What we know is that the chief proponents of the theory of AGW tell lies for a living and wish to use AGW to exercise greater power over the rest of us.
^^^What he said. I'm supposed to trust these bozos and believe their hand-waving has anything whatsoever to do with my well-being, after everything else I've learned about them? It is to laff.
Ok then, Anonymous (and suspected troll), give us several specific examples illustrating the "stupidity" of red state America. Provide examples that don't involve oft regurgitated cliches about religion.
Another great point about our handstanding-before-crapping angry leftist. Leftists chalk all black "pathology" (blacks not living up to white standards) up to "environment" or "how the poor souls were raised," then turn around and without a hint of irony use inherited religious beliefs as evidence of Red Stater stupidity.
"Do you honestly believe socialism doesn't have "bad press" in America? McCarthy? Not one but two Red Scares? A decades-long Cold War fought against it, with huge sacrifices in blood and treasure?"
Do you honestly believe you've addressed my argument? Re-read it until you get it.
A good example of "progressive" political correctness run amok.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-smerconish/semengate-stuns-scientifi_b_853164.html
I'm for paternalism against encouraging reckless sexual behavior, but I doubt many naive minds will be influenced by something published in "Surgical Letters".
Hopefully Anonymous
http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com
So are the "liberals" you see on MSNBC. So what? Why are liberals condemned for being coerced into accepting the "Culture of Critique" agenda but not conservatives?
I thought they were?
The kind of 'conservatives' one sees in the MSM are merely self-propelled strawmen, there to play the ones liberals warned you about. I find I dont watch TV much anymore....
None of the above - As far as I can tell, opposition to AGW is overwhelmingly ideologically based.
Whereas, as far as I can tell, support for AGW is overwhelmingly ideologically based.
Liesel said...When public policy is determined based on a flawed theory, society ends up with bad results
I know it looks that way but I think thats just for the Outer Party members.
The Inner Party have got the policies they want. PC based liberal goodthink is just used after the fact to justify those already agreed policies.
Nothing these days - and I mean NOTHING AT ALL - causes me to lose respect for a person more quickly [more immediately, more instantaneously] than hearing the word "Science" pass their lips.
You're an aspie, eh Lucius?
Organic food, pesticides nuclear power etc. all bigger than autism claims. The science is far from what the left says.
"I'm still waiting for examples of conservatives who accept the validity of racial differences, or the importance of IQ."
liberals are in a continuous vicious trap of shouting loudly that there are no group differences in capabilities despite overwhelming evidence. conservatives rarely make such claims, generally pointing to an ideal or belief system, that society should be allowing people the means to succeed up to their potential, in whatever field they choose. crudely we could say, liberals scream for equal outcome, while conservatives are mainly just looking for everybody to have equal opportunity. it's even worse than that for many liberals though because they only start screaming about equal outcome in certain situations, and are fine with unequal outcome in others. in private i suspect most conservatives accept that various groups are definitely different in many ways, on average at least. but liberals have made it so that expressing this opinion in public is highly dangerous. so you won't find many examples of successful middle aged conservatives with lots to lose, going around explaining how they definitely do think the various human groups of the world are fairly different.
we must also be careful to specify just who were are talking about here when we're talking about "conservatives" and "liberals". it's pretty clear we're talking about european peoples, because there pretty much are no such wide ranging divisions of political thought or a huge spectrum of ideas among non-europeans. i'd guess 95% of all non-europeans on the entire planet can easily, easily be categorized as politically primitive non-thinkers on the subject who essentially practice nothing more sophisticated than identity politics. no major liberal ideas, movements, or memes are derived from anything they've thought up, likewise, they are not the progenators of any major conservative ideas, movements, or memes. the europeans are leaders and the other groups are followers. and yes, i'm talking about the highest ranking politicians in some of the biggest nations on earth. they're still just "is it good for my group?" types, and exposure to more sophisticated political thought which came from some european's brain, does nothing more than inspire them to go in a new direction to get even more stuff for "my group". high minded political ideas are simply co-opted for base "i'm gonna get mine" motives.
in the US, almost all mestizos and africans and muslims are actually conservatives, who agree with more tenets of american conservatism than they do with the kooky, ridiculous liberals. however, they are, like all non-europeans, practioners of identity politics first, all other stuff second. when they vote democrat, they are NOT voting liberal. they are voting "more stuff for us". this leads to tremendous confusion when voting happens on non-election ballot issues and referendums. liberals don't understand why non-europeans don't simply automatically vote for the liberal position in every instance. for example, mestizos and africans and muslims strongly dislike gays, even routinely assaulting them physically. liberals do not understand this, since they avoid interacting with mestizos and africans and muslims as much as possible in day to day life, while at the same time, noting that these groups reliably pull the democrat lever in general elections. they take this reliable lever pulling for democrats, as evidence that everybody is agreeing with them on all their kooky ideas, like normalizing the gay agenda, when in reality this could not be further from the truth. in the two party system, where every issue has to be compressed down into a binary choice, plenty of things which the conservative non-europeans don't agree with, fall on the side of the other people, the liberals, who want to give the non-europeans everything for free. they mostly vote for free giveaways everytime, which is more important than the other stuff. indeed, "my group" is more important than ANYTHING, an idea which europeans seems to have deliberately forgotten.
Kylie, me again. I used your words over at Ex-Army, to which I'm a frequent contributor.
You (and others here) are invited to visit and comment there. Do let me know if I can continue to quote you like that on Ex-Army. You can e-mail me at rmay@mac.com, or contact me thru my page on Facebook.
What's the point of asking whether the left or right are more inclined to deny science?
If it's just a point-scoring contest, *yawn*. Yes, I already knew both sides of the US political system would sell potassium cyanide as infant formula if they thought it would win them an election. Who cares which side is marginally more cynically reality-denying?
What's important to figure out is where our society's blind spots are, where our personal blind spots are, and learn to see and think about things that are hard to see and think about now.
“I've never met anyone who accepts both global warming and HBD.”
I do, but I don't think this qualifies as "meeting".
Steve, I would like to read you on vaccines. My uncle is a big pharma guy and when I ask him about a link he just huffed and said "no evidence. there all liars." It sounds a lil fishy how all conversation on a link is shut down (i'm 21 and have no kids) seemingly by a coalition of self-intrested bizness types and careerist media types who don't wanna be seen as cooks. I heard that there is no autism among the amish and indiegnous Brazilian tribes and that autism rates are skyrocketing (and why are so many male?). Based on what I see, it would seem its growing like mad.
I personally feel that the Left's science denialism - which includes not only IQ and biology but also economics, which is a God damn science - is worse than the stupid Right. The Stupid Right often consists of dumb people. The Ignorant Left consists of people who deliberately obfuscate reality, to themselves and others. There is a difference between being wrong and being deceitful.
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