Saturday, May 11, 2013
Racism found in rightwing; who knew?
It turns out that, in accord with leftwing suppositions, rightwing economics is all about stupid racism, ain't it?
See, for example, Jason Richwine, rightwing Harvard Nazi, forced by the light of publicity to resign from Heritage, although I have not seen that Heritage is also withdrawing his disgusting "study" of immigration.
Somebody named Berkeley Bear sums up the situation better than RtO can:
"When I first heard this story, I was sure the bombshell allegations were buried somewhere in Richwine's PhD, or were tangential to the main argument. But nope - the Abstract is a love letter to the Bell Curve, only with Messicans for African Americans. He even gives a sloppy shout out to Charles Murray in the Abstract.
"Harvard continues to prove that the easiest path to prominence in academia is to be a committed contrarian right wing dick. Because somehow it would be less than fair for the critic of Murray on his committee to torpedo the little shit for being a racist nut, instead of going along and signing off on the slanted ravings of a guy utterly unqualified to comment on psychology because they were dressed up in the right terms to satisfy academic discussion. Irony is he'd have had a lot less chance getting a degree at a 'lesser' institution, one that can't afford to keep a little subsect of reactionary and largely worthless faculty around to the help provide 'balance.'
"Never mind that all that effort is for naught, as these assholes go on to work at AEI, Heritage and all the other rightwing 'think tanks' that then attack Harvard as a commie cell."
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Leftwing economics so devoid of justification that it has to rely on the occasional miscreant to advance their agenda; who knew?
ReplyDeleteSo let me get this straight, Harry, you are agreeing with the Berkeley Bear's assessment, that is as bombastic as it is empty? (And it is very, very empty.)
ReplyDeleteNever mind completely irrelevant to economics.
Interestingly,
The final member of the committee that approved Richwine’s “racist” thesis is Christopher Jencks, the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard’s JFK School. He is a renowned left-wing academic who has taught at Harvard, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He edited the liberal New Republic magazine in the 1960s and has written several scholarly books tackling poverty, economic inequality, affirmative action, welfare reform, and yes, racial differences (The Black White Test Score Gap).
Skipper, you reinforce Bear's point. Richwine seems to have been a diversity enrollment, and he was, evidently, pushed along and given his degree without having had to defend his dissertation.
ReplyDeleteBut where does the idea that the Ivy League is all left come from? Who produced or hired D'Souza or Rogoff? Or Cruz, if it comes that?
BTW, thinking about R&R, I decided they wrote that wrectched tripe themsleves. If they had farmed it out to a grad student for their signatures, the Excel errors would probably not have occurred.
And is it not significant that Heritage was embarrassed enough to fire the messenger but seems to continue to embrace the message? (Richwine was Heritage's third strike in this regard, too.)
Harry, what you and Berkeley Bear simply do not get is that Richwine's thesis was not racist. Charging otherwise very clearly shows you have so reflexively abused the term that you don't even understand it anymore.
ReplyDeleteLet me demonstrate. The statement "minority teaching candidates have weaker scores than their white counterparts" is about a correlation between race and test scores. That is an assertion about reality that is either true or false, but it is no more racist than observing that women have higher pitched voices than men is sexist.
Here is another example: Blacks comprise 13% of the population, but commit 55% of the murders. Is that racism? Men commit 95% of murders; all available evidence suggests the reason is genetic. Is that sexism?
Similarly with Richwine. According to the data, Latin American immigrants have lower IQs than whites, and that difference persists over several generations. Those are observations that are either right or wrong about racial correlations and IQ. Also, the explanation may be right or wrong but it isn't racist, either.
The irony is almost overwhelming. You are an ardent evolutionist, but in this regard, just like ardent feminists, you are pure creationist.
And you also demonstrate the collectivist disregard for the clear meaning of words.
Richwine seems to have been a diversity enrollment ...
Seems to have been? Back that up.
... and he was, evidently, pushed along and given his degree without having had to defend his dissertation.
From my cite above: The final member of the committee that approved Richwine’s “racist” thesis is Christopher Jencks, the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard’s JFK School. He is a renowned left-wing academic ...
Note in particular the word "approved".
That's what Bear said. The likes of Richwine were pushed along without having to demonstrate fitness, sort of like it used to be (perhaps still is) with sons of old boys.
ReplyDeleteSince I do not believe in IQ I do not give a solitary damn about how it correlates. If brown immigrants perform relatively poorly on pencil-and-paper tests, something other than genetics could be at work.
Underfunded schools is a likely candidate. You may recall RtO's series of posts about South Sioux City, Nebraska, in this regard.
That Bear said it is reason enough to doubt it, particularly when the facts show otherwise.
ReplyDeleteWhether you believe in IQ -- that it doesn't exist? that there is no correlation with IQ and other things? what? -- is utterly and completely beside the point.
Which, to reiterate, is this: you and BB either don't understand the concept of racism, or falsely accused someone of it. And that is true whether IQ exists, or not.
The military administers officer qualifying tests, which primarily attempt to assess IQ, as opposed to knowledge. As it turns out, there is a very strong correlation between OQT scores and performance in pilot training. At high-ish percentiles, the failure rate is very low; however, below a certain point, failure rates go up dramatically.
So, whether you give a damn or not, it appears the concept is real, and it correlates.
If brown immigrants perform relatively poorly on pencil-and-paper tests, something other than genetics could be at work.
Absolutely, and I have no doubt other things are at work. But to presume that all races must be inherently, on average, exactly the same between the ears is akin to creationism, and it is precisely the same sort of creationism behind ideological feminism
There are numerous alternative explanations to innate mental power. Two that I find persuasive are the theory of multiple intelligences (see Howard Gardner, 'Frames of Mind' and other books); and deep cultural differences in how intelligence is applied (see Marshall Sahlins, 'How Natives Think.')
ReplyDeleteIf a test (IQ) that checks specific knowledge correlates with a task that requires specific knowledge (flying a plane), so what? That tells you exactly nothing about 'general intelligence,' a concept never demonstrated to even exist.
I know a test that every one of your pilots would flunk that Mexicans figured out all on their own: Take a large herd of wild horses that have been driven into a corral, horses that have never even seen a human. You are one man and you have to get them from A to B. Your tools are a riding horse and a pocketknife.
Discuss.
Harry, first things first. Here is what you, not BB, said:
ReplyDeleteIt turns out that, in accord with leftwing suppositions, rightwing economics is all about stupid racism, ain't it? See, for example, Jason Richwine, rightwing Harvard Nazi, forced by the light of publicity to resign from Heritage, although I have not seen that Heritage is also withdrawing his disgusting "study" of immigration.
My assertion is that manages simultaneously to be both libelous and contemptuous, or ignorant, of the whole concept of racism.
Right?
From Best of the Web today:
ReplyDeleteMoral authority entails a moral hazard: the temptation to abuse political and cultural power. Today's liberal left conceives of itself as being on the side of all that is good, right and reasonable. It caricatures the right as racist, extremist, greedy, dishonest, fanatically religious, prone to violence--and dangerous because, through the Republican Party, it has maintained parity in the political arena.
The shoe fits.
`Interesting, in light of this comment, to readthe several anguished reactions of partyliners (like Jennifer Rubin) to the Cuccinelli ticket in Virginia.
ReplyDeleteRacist, check. Extremist, check. dishonest, check. fanatically religious, check. BoW could have added, gay-hating but perhaps that comes under fanatically religious.
I confess to be ignorant of any meaningful definition of race that puts Spaniards and Englishmen in different races. I doubt there is any meaningful definition of race as regards humans, period.
It ain't libelous if it's true, and it is. Agree that i am contemptuous of racism and racists.
Racist, check. Extremist, check. dishonest, check. fanatically religious, check. BoW could have added, gay-hating but perhaps that comes under fanatically religious.
ReplyDeleteBollocks.
Not having any idea who Cuccinelli is, I did some googling. I read an article in Mother Jones, which couldn't be accused of being Fox News. By trying to make the case against him that you are, it shows how abusive the "progressives" are of the clear meaning of words.
You say he is racist. Explain, precisely, how. And then, while you are at it, explain how his argument against abortion fails.
I confess to be ignorant of any meaningful definition of race that puts Spaniards and Englishmen in different races. I doubt there is any meaningful definition of race as regards humans, period.
Without a doubt, the notion of race is very difficult to define. Yet there is no denying that humans vary genetically, and there is a correlation between genetic variation and geography.
Surely, you don't doubt that.
The vexing question is whether the undoubted variations are limited solely to appearance. Insisting a priori that the variations are purely skin deep is as good an example of a religious belief as anything the Catholics could come up with.
Researching the question, and forming hypotheses based on the available data is not racism.
Yes, racism exists. And yes, I am contemptuous of racists.
But you have given no indication whatsoever that you can use the terms correctly. Indeed, in this post you and BB have shown the exact opposite.
Variation exists. It does not mean that expression changes.
ReplyDeleteThere is more genetic variation among the inhabitants of one African village (because of its greater age) than among all the indigenes of Europe (who have been accumulating local variations for afew thousand years vs. tens or hundreds of thousands.
Yet we do not see any greater variation in capability in that village than in Europe.
Within the limits of our ability to measure (which are a considerable restraint), we don't find any difference in range (read potential) between any 2 populations.
If we find, and we do, variations in proportions (more mathematically capable people in one group than another), we expect te cause to be cultural, mostly, and phenotypical, partly; but there is no evidence whatever that it is genotypical. There is no 'race' of methematicians.
So the assertion is not a priori. The a priori assertion (well nigh universal among the early investigators, including Darwin) was that genotype trumped phenotype.
The antiracist view arose because no one could find any evidence of genotypical variation in intellectual capacity. This was clear before genomic sequencing became possible. We now understand why IQ is a bogus idea. There aren't any genes for smart.
There is more genetic variation among the inhabitants of one African village (because of its greater age) than among all the indigenes of Europe (who have been accumulating local variations for afew thousand years vs. tens or hundreds of thousands.
ReplyDeleteThat can't possibly be correct. All the indigenes of Europe have been accumulating genetic variations for exactly as long as Africans have. Further, in some quite obvious regards (hair and eyes), Europeans have much more variation than Africans.
Further, the surviving local variations of Europeans are consistent with the European environment, which is drastically different than Africa's. It is purely religious to assume that those differences would be limited solely to mere differences in appearance. "Progressive" feminists, because the, like all progressives, put everything down to culture make the same mistake: evolution stops at the neck.
If we find, and we do, variations in proportions (more mathematically capable people in one group than another), we expect te cause to be cultural, mostly, and phenotypical, partly; but there is no evidence whatever that it is genotypical. There is no 'race' of mathematicians.
This is wrong. There is no evidence that the demonstrable differences aren't heritable, either.
More importantly, there is settled evidence that there are differences in abilities between groups. Women, as a group, are less capable of mentally manipulating three dimensional objects. So, with regard to this particular mental ability, there is genotypic variation.
So there are genes for that.
Clearly, you've been reading too much Lewontin.
And you still haven't demonstrated you understand what racism is.