RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/01/25/how-real-is-systemic

John Staddon is a James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Biology, Emeritus, at Duke University.

Racist attitudes of whites towards blacks have long become socially unacceptable in America, although the reverse, racism of a minority directed at the white majority, is still tolerated or even encouraged. However, statistical racial disparities persist. African Americans, as a population, continue to suffer income, crime and incarceration rate, health, housing and family-structure deficits by comparison with the white population.

These disparities cannot easily be attributed to racist behavior by whites. The disparities have either increased or remained the same while individual racist behavior has declined. What then is the cause of these disparities? There are two possibilities: causes within individuals, what I have elsewhere called endogenous causes; or external, exogenous causes.

Endogenous Causes of Black-White Disparities

Endogenous causes were in fact the first ones to be studied, with unfortunate results. Bigots stigmatized the entire “black race” as inferior because of lower average scores on, for example, IQ tests. Blacks’ under-performance in terms of status, health, incomes, etc. was then comfortably attributed to their alleged built-in inadequacy.

The usual presumption was that IQ is fixed at birth, that it is the most important factor in life success and that it cannot be altered by later experience. None of these is true; although the fixity-of-IQ view seemed to be supported by several studies showing relatively high (statistical) heritability for IQ. But heritable is not the same as fixed: high statistical heritability for a behavioral trait does not imply that it is fixed at birth and independent of the rearing environment. Language is the most obvious counter-example. It is a learned behavior that also has high heritability. Language is 100 percent learned and 100 percent heritable—kids learn the language of their parents.

The only reason we know that language is not a sort of instinct is the “natural experiments” provided by adoption. Despite the high heritability of language, adopted infants learn the language of their adoptive, not biological, parents. It follows that high heritability does not mean genetic determinism. Statistical heritability depends on rearing environment as well as genetics.

What kind of experiment would be needed to prove that intelligence, which is also (statistically) heritable, is in fact genetically determined? What would it take to show that there are irreducible average-IQ differences between races: that no matter how rich the environment, blacks and whites would still have differing average IQ, leaving genes as the only cause? Only a very elaborate, unethical, and in practice un-doable, experiment could do it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/social-justice-rhetoric-all-purpose-excuse-democrats/For a new generation of Democrats, what the phrase denotes is indistinguishable from retribution.

‘No other Congress has ever looked like this,” declared a CNN dispatch on the makeup of the 116th Congress. With such a diverse group of new legislators, that’s undoubtedly true. More importantly, though, no Congress has ever thought like this. As a new generation of Democrats assumes power, they’re bringing their ideas about what constitutes “social justice” with them.

It is particularly instructive to examine how this class of legislators defines social justice. When Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) took the oath of office, for example, she initially planned on doing so on Thomas Jefferson’s 1734 translation of the Qur’an. But the Palestinian-American legislator reserved the right to use her own copy of the Qur’an. “Why uplift someone else?” she told the Detroit Free Press. “It’s starting a new era in social justice.” Why “uplift” Thomas Jefferson, indeed?

This self-referential attitude is a feature of the modern social-justice movement, and it helps to explain why it is so focused on engineering oppressive reversals of fortune.

Before coming to Congress, Tlaib told The Intercept that she is a proud supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to stigmatize activities that legitimize the state of Israel. To her, BDS brings attention to “issues like the racism and the international human-rights violations by Israel right now.” Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) shares Tlaib’s proclivities. “I have always had a very social-justice-bent approach to everything that I do in my life,” Omar told ABC News.

On their way into federal office, these two lawmakers brought Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour along with them. Sarsour was on hand in the Capitol on their first day in office, even though she was at the center of an anti-Semitism scandal not two months ago — a scandal rooted in the social-justice movement’s obsession with crafting racial and demographic pecking orders.

https://quillette.com/2019/01/24/the-dangers-of

In 1993, then-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan published an essay entitled “Defining Deviancy Down,” in which he argued that understanding the shift towards more permissive attitudes regarding crime and violence is crucial to their reduction. Specifically, he asserted that the redefinition of norms around deviant behavior (or “defining deviancy down”) had collectively shaped society in unintended ways, resulting in a desensitization to what might have once been considered shocking. By way of illustration, Moynihan referenced the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago—the notorious gangland execution of seven men committed during the prohibition era. He reminded his readers that those killings had elicited universal public outrage, and then contrasted that reaction with a contemporary example: “On the morning after the close of the [1992] Democratic National Convention in New York City in July,” he wrote, a headline reported “3 Slain in Bronx Apartment, but a Baby is Saved…A mother’s last act was to hide her little girl under the bed.” These were also execution-style killings, but they were greeted with only a barely discernible nod of dismay. In the six decades between 1929 and 1992, a transformation had occurred in the levels of violence and criminal behavior that the public seemed willing to accept.

The idea of defining deviancy down has attracted renewed attention from commentators in the Trump era. In recent years, Moynihan’s analysis has been used to understand how Trump’s impact on the culture has increased the acceptability of previously taboo language, attitudes, and behaviors. In November 2015, Jonathan Capehart wrote an article for the Washington Post entitled “How Trump is ‘defining deviancy down’ in presidential politics.” Capehart argued that, “As the 2016 Republican presidential contest drags on, [Moynihan’s] diagnosis fit politics in general and the campaign of Donald Trump in particular. Just when you thought the Big Apple billionaire couldn’t sink any lower, he does. He gleefully dances through the nativist, racist, misogynistic slop as if he were Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain. And to make matters worse, Trump is rewarded for it.” In a similar vein, Albert Hunt wrote an op-ed for Bloomberg in May 2017 entitled, “The Age of Trump is ‘Defining Deviancy Down’: When the president seems inept or corrupt, we shrug. If he ever fumbles through adequately, he is praised.”

https://www.steynonline.com/9148/the-drumbeat-of-the-mob

Guest-hosting for Rush on Friday, I mentioned the strange need of the right to virtue-signal to their detractors – as in the stampede of Congressional Republicans to distance themselves from their colleague Steve King over an infelicitous interview with The New York Times. Democrats never do this; Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam declare that the Jews are pushing defective marijuana on black men in order to turn them gay – which would appear to be a prima facie slur on at least four Democrat constituencies: blacks, gays, Jews and potheads. Yet Clinton, Obama et al speak not a word against Calypso Louie.

There was another conservative virtue-signaling stampede over the weekend. A short video from the Lincoln Memorial went “viral” (notwithstanding its ubiquity, I’m keeping the word in scare-quotes because, like any other virus, this one should be contained): it purported to show a group of Catholic schoolboys in MAGA hats harassing an elderly Native American drummer. The lads were instantly identified as students from Covington Catholic High School, which I’d never heard of but is clearly the kind of tony white-privilege joint where they book Brett Kavanaugh to spike the punch at the gang-rape prom. So naturally social media instantly convicted them and moved on to the usual doxing and death threats. The school itself leapt to dissociate itself from its own pupils and threatened to expel them.

Midst the present fevers, my advice and practice is that, when the media are in lockstep on a particular “narrative”, proceed with caution and, if you must join the great thundering herd of independent minds, tag along at the tail end out of sight. A genuinely conservative temperament should be wary of crying “Me too!” and scampering after the media-Democrat-cultMarx bandwagon – if only because, regardless of the wrongs and rights, no true conservative should assist in furthering the nano-second due process of trial by social media, through which whole lives are destroyed by the reflex twitching drive-thru jury of Twitter. “Sentence first – verdict afterwards,” said Alice’s Queen. Hang him high – and we’ll figure out later what, if anything, he’s guilty of. That’s about as deeply unconservative a proposition as one could find. The cure is worse than whatever disease (racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia) it claims to be healing.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/21/the-art

Prior to the Women’s March this year, controversy arose over its leaders’ relationships with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Meghan McCain pressed Tamika Mallory on “The View” last week, insinuating latent anti-Semitism because of this relationship with Farrakhan.

McCain held Mallory’s feet to the fire, pressing that she condemn Farrakhan for likening Jews to termites that promote homosexuality. She did not disavow. The conversation basically went like this:

Mallory: We did not make those remarks.

McCain: But you’re associating with a man who does publicly.

Mallory: What I will say to you is that I don’t agree with many of Minister Farrakhan’s statements.

McCain: Do you condemn them?

Mallory: I don’t agree.

McCain: But you won’t condemn it.

Mallory: No, to be very clear, it’s not my language. It’s not how I speak, it’s not how I organize . . . I should never be judged through the lens of a man.

Many conservatives on Twitter continue to take shots at the Women’s March for its leaders’ entanglements. But as it stands now, they haven’t suffered much. News coverage for the march was generally positive as usual. No one lost their livelihood over the claims, and it is entirely likely that the march will go on uninhibited again next year.

The March for Life, on the other hand, usually doesn’t make headlines. This year, video footage of an interaction between Covington Catholic High School students (in D.C. as part of a broad pro-life Catholic contingent) and a Native American drummer (there for the first-ever D.C. Indigenous People’s March) set the internet aflame, drawing harsh attention to the pro-life march for reasons unrelated to the movement itself.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/20/should-the

Since the media would doubtless answer that loaded question, “It depends on the president,” let us imagine the following scenario.

Return to 2008, when candidate Barack Obama had served only about three years in the U.S. Senate, his sum total of foreign policy experience. And he was running against the overseas old-hand, decorated veteran, and national icon John McCain—a bipartisan favorite in Washington, D.C.

During the campaign, unfounded rumors had swirled about the rookie Obama that he might ease sanctions on Iran, distance the United States from Israel, and alienate the moderate Arab regimes, such as the Gulf monarchies and Egypt.

Stories also abounded that the Los Angeles Times had suppressed the release of a supposedly explosive “Khalidi tape,” in which Obama purportedly thanked the radical Rashid Khalidi for schooling him on the Middle East and correcting his earlier biases and blind spots, while praising the Palestinian activist for his support for armed resistance against Israel.

Even more gossip circulated that photos existed of a smiling Barack Obama with Louis Farrakhan, the Black Muslim extremist and radical pro-Gaddafi patron, who in the past had praised Adolf Hitler and reminded the Jews again about the finality of being sent to the ovens. (A photo of a smiling Obama and Farrakhan did emerge, but mysteriously only after President Obama left office).

Imagine that all these tales in 2008 might have supposedly “worried” Bush lame-duck and pro-McCain U.S. intelligence officials, who informally met to discuss possible ways of gleaning more information about this still mostly unknown but scary Obama candidacy.

As of January 1, 2019, “…..residents of New York City can change their birth certificates to legally indicate they believe they are not the male or female they were born. They can also legally declare they are neither male nor female, with a simple X.”

I scoured the internet for education and illumination on a national issue that is altering perceptions as well as vocabulary, pronouns, and the laws. Who are zey? What do them want?

Eureka! In Australia, the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education (CEEHE) and a team of feminist scholars in the Faculty of Education and Arts at the University of Newcastle sponsored a conference on gender, post truth and pedagogy. December 9-12.

https://www.geaconf2018.com.au/QuickEventWebsitePortal/geaconf2018/eventinfo/Agenda

Here are some pithy excerpts:

The first speaker Prof Raewyn Connell of the University of Sydney spoke of “Truth, Power and Pedagogy.”

“Feminist critique of the mainstream curriculum remains essential. Yet we need to look critically at the global politics of our knowledge about gender, which itself has an imperial history and is challenged by decolonization campaigns. Claims for the universality of knowledge, which provide some resistance to post-truth politics, are subject to familiar feminist critiques, yet cannot be replaced by claims of epistemic privilege. We need, in current conditions, a feminist model of truthful practice as a basis for knowledge and curriculum. I hope to illustrate what this means for teachers’ working lives as well as in theory. “

Dr Melissa Wolfe who is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University explained in her brilliant peroration: “Generative knowledges: thinking the liminal within gender and education research.”

“Education assemblages, as emergent collectivities entangled with gender and sexuality, continue to be active and productive of binary relations that reiterate inequity. Liminal threshold concepts abound within the field of gender and education research. In this symposium, we propose a focus on the concept of the liminal beyond thresholds. We understand the liminal, without before and after, as an ambiguous state of simultaneous flux – of being affected and affecting, within the co-constitution that is relational becoming.”

Dr. Jacqueline Ullman a Senior Lecturer at Western Sydney University spoke of “Gender & sexuality diverse teachers & the interplay & impact of socio-cultural discourses on individual lives”

“Despite increased socio-cultural visibility of gender and sexuality-diversity alongside national discourses of tolerance, acceptance and homonormativity, gender and sexuality-diversity remains marginal across the education sector – often experienced by educators as individual identity work with significant affective outcomes. “

Ms. Briony Lipton Academic at Australian National University opined in “Care-full Academics: shifting temporalities and recognisabilities of care-work in the academy.”

“What are the personal meditations that take place when feminist academics resist and re-work ideas of care-work to negotiate how we are able to occupy academic spaces? How can care-work act as feminist resistance in queer responses to competitive career trajectories which shape academic belonging?”

I could go on and on about how much I learned from the learned about the critical thinking on binary dystopian notions, but it is time to watch another soap opera on TV where she and he do it in various permutations which are biologically sound.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/01-02/how-the-left-turned-free-speech-into-hate-speech/

Postmodernist theory, with its emphasis on subjectivity and relativism, became the mechanism—more by happenstance than good planning—by which Marxism’s anti-bourgeois hostility reconciled itself with the anti-bourgeois sentiment of bohemianism. From there it was a short step to PC gags and censorship.

The Sixties Revolution has gone the way of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and every other left-wing revolution that comes to mind. The radicalism of yesteryear somehow turned into PC orthodoxy or what we might call Correctism. Another revolution that was meant to be about emancipation has become humanity’s nightmare. The heirs to the 1960s Free Speech Movement have taken it upon themselves to play the role—as Google Inc put it—of “the Good Censor”.

Why did fashionable libertarians give up on libertarianism? When did the ideological successors to the do-what-you-want-to-do-be-what-you-want-to-be movement stop defending free speech in order to prosecute hate speech? The late Timothy Leary, were his mortal remains not spinning in the stratosphere, would be turning in his grave. To make sense of it all we must, as Chairman Mao would counsel us, seek the contradictions within the revolution itself.If the Sixties Revolution had an accepted theme it was freedom, and the Beatles might have encapsulated that more than anyone. They employed to great effect the anarchic, truth-telling style of the Marx Brothers in their 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night. The Beatles were irreverent and amusing enough on screen to be applauded by the youth magazine of the Communist Party of the United States for their “refreshing, light-hearted contempt for the society that made them what they are”. Leary might have said it best when he bestowed upon the Fab Four the ultimate 1960s accolade: “I declare that the Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.”

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/jordan-peterson-the-sacred-and-the-therapeutic/

What makes Jordan Peterson so popular? There are scores of popular pundits who attack political correctness, many with more aplomb than the professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. The estimable Mark Steyn comes to mind, or Heather Mac Donald, or Dennis Prager, among many others. I’ve attempted my own diagnosis of the PC disease, as existential dread and as a witch hunt in response to the tragic failure of too many black Americans.

Dr. Peterson, though, is the people’s choice as champion against PC madness for the time being.

A full 80% of Americans think that political correctness is a problem in their country, according to polling data, and a reaction against the excesses of the new Savonarolas has been gathering for some time. But why choose Dr. Peterson as the poster-boy for this reaction?

I believe that his enormous and sudden popularity stems from his use of the language of therapy to attack the symptoms of a therapeutic society. His 2018 bestseller Twelve Rules for Life is a self-help book, not a work of politics, philosophy, or cultural criticism.
The Best Quotes from Jordan Peterson’s ’12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos’

Therein, I think, lies Dr. Peterson’s great appeal. The four-fifths of Americans who think that PC has gone too far do not want to undo the great cultural transformation of the past half-century, which has placed self-esteem at the center of human concerns at the expense of traditional virtues. We no longer wish to do what is good and upright in the eyes of God; who does this God think He is, sitting in judgment over us? We want to be our own little gods and make ourselves into whatever we would like to be.