Today's Must-Read: What He Actually Said

Mustang Bobby has a very good post at Bark Bark Woof Woof on the flap over Pete Buttigieg's oft misquoted remarks about his standing with the black community, quoting extensively from Jonathan Capehart at WaPo:

When you’re black and gay, there are times when you feel that the two identities integral to your whole self are in conflict. Actually, let me rephrase that. There are times when other folks put your two identities in conflict and you feel compelled to respond.

When I thundered against the ugly lie that homophobia among African Americans was the reason Democratic presidential contender Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., wasn’t gaining their support, I had more than a few white gay men lecture me about black people as they hurled studies at me in the worst-ever display of apples meeting oranges. Those folks were blocked. Now, I have to push back against African Americans who are ripping Buttigieg for what they see as his equating his experience being gay with that of being black.

That’s not what happened. That’s not what he said.

The WaPo piece is behind a pay wall, but Bobby has what seems to be almost all, of not all, of it. Read it.

I'm Speechless

What have we become when a policeman deserves praise for not killing a couple of black kids?

A white police officer who decided not to shoot a black child who was holding a toy BB pistol was praised on CNN on Wednesday for not killing his suspect.

CNN host Brooke Baldwin began the segment by reminding her viewers that 12-year-old Tamir Rice had been shot and killed by officers in 2014.

She contrast that with her guest, Columbus Police officer Peter Casuccio, who said he went into “dad mode” when he saw two black boys — ages 11 and 13 — playing with what looked like a real gun. Instead of using deadly force on the children, Casuccio decided to talk to them instead.

Granted, any kid should know at this point not to be playing with toy guns that look real, especially not out on the streets. Of course, anyone with two brain cells to rub together should be just a little hesitant about assuming that a 12-year-old is playing with a real gun.

I guess police shooting minority kids has become so normalized that it's remarkable when one doesn't.

Seriously?

Blatant

Looks like they're not even trying to be subtle about vote suppression any more -- at least, in Georgia:

So, someone from the Leisure Senior Center told LaTosha Brown, founder of Black Voters Matter, that the roughly 40 seniors would need to get off the bus that was about to take them to the polls. Black Voters Matter, if you haven't guessed, is a grassroots outreach program whose goal is to help Black people "expand voter engagement." Can't have that in 2018, now can we?

Apparently someone from the Senior Center said they'd received a call about a complaint either to or from (these details are fuzzy) the County Commissioner's office about the Black Voters Matter bus, and whether or not it should be allowed to transport the seniors to the polling place. Now, keep in mind, there is no law against any bus, from transporting people to the polls in Georgia. But not wanting to make trouble in the small town, they complied.

So, the bus they'd organized, for which they'd gotten permission ahead of time to bring, already boarded with senior citizens, was unloaded. Even worse, the Senior Center had their own bus they'd arranged to transport the seniors to the polls, but they cancelled that bus in the midst of everything, too. So there was no voting for these senior citizens yesterday.

The horrible part is that the people who organized the bus were so cooperative. I suspect, if I were in that situation, whoever wanted me to take the seniors off the bus would have gotten a big "F You" for their trouble.

I don't know that I really need to add anything, except to note that no one at the County Commissioner's Office seems to know anything about a complaint about Black seniors voting. They did, however, come out with a statement, which in itself is a hoot:

October 15, 2018

For Immediate Release:

Jefferson County operates a Senior Center that provides meals and entertainment to senior citizens in Jefferson County three days per week. The Jefferson County Board of Commissioners has a long standing practice of not allowing political activities during normal business hours or at County sponsored activities. These senior citizens are under the complete care and supervision of Jefferson County while they are at the Senior Center. Jefferson County Administration felt uncomfortable with allowing Senior Center patrons to leave the facility in a bus with an unknown third party. Additionally, the event in question that took place at the Jefferson County Senior Center was led by the President of the Jefferson County Democratic Party and as such was considered a political event. No seniors at the Jefferson County Senior Center were denied their right to vote. In fact, Senior Center staff routinely arrange Jefferson County Public Transit to transport senior citizens to vote. Jefferson County invites and encourages all registered voters to vote from October 15-November 2 from 8 AM to 5 PM, October 27 from 9 AM to 4 PM and on election day November 6 from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

I can't even highlight the most risible parts -- there are too many.

I guess this is what we can look forward to for this election -- except I think most places will be a little bit more subtle about it.

Maybe.

Taking the Knee: Beto O'Rourke Gets It Right

O'Rourke is running for Ted Cruz' senate seat from Texas, and he's got Cruz worried. Episodes like this are one reason why:

And in case you were wondering, yes, I support the football players and anyone else who protests the rampant murder of blacks by police. Don't forget it was Trump who shifted it to disrespect for the flag and the military -- another lie from the primary source of fake news.

I Don't Think That Means What You Think It Means

In this case, I'm talking about the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. Now, those of us who did not sleep through civics class in high school all understand that the First Amendment specifically bars the government from infringing on freedom of speech -- i.e., no government censorship allowed (within certain limits). However, the right wing is more than happy to cite "freedom of speech" in any and all circumstances, as witness this little tirade from Monica Cole of One Million Moms:

The NFL has told the nation’s largest veterans service organization, American Vets, its patriotic ad that encourages people to stand for the American flag and national anthem will not be tolerated. AMVETS had been solicited by the NFL to place an ad in the Super Bowl LII program. When the submitted advertisement included a two-word message, “#PleaseStand”, the NFL suddenly threw the penalty flag at veterans and gave the game ball to Team Censorship.

“It’s a simple, polite request that represents the sentiment of our membership, particularly those whose missing or paralyzed limbs preclude standing,” National Commander Marion Polk wrote in a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. “Freedom of speech works both ways. We respect the rights of those who choose to protest, as these rights are precisely what our members have fought – and in many cases died – for,” Polk added in the letter. “But imposing corporate censorship to deny that same right to those veterans who have secured it for us all is reprehensible and totally beyond the pale.”

I don't quite how to break it to National Commander Polk, but the NFL is not the government. It's a private organization -- you know, like the Boy Scouts, who were allowed to discriminate against gay scouts because they were a private organization.

As it happens, the NFL has a good, rational reason for not accepting the ad:

NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy told the Army Times that the advertisement program “is designed for fans to commemorate and celebrate the game, players, teams, and the Super Bowl.” McCarthy added, “It’s never been a place for advertising that could be considered by some as a political statement.”

Of course, there's the requisite whining from AmVets:

The AMVETS chief noted the irony that the NFL continues to claim that the anti-American protests by millionaire players on the field represent “free speech” even as the league denies free speech to AMVETS.

One, that's entirely up to the NFL. Two, if you want to demonstrate your "patriotism" at a football game, stand up for the national anthem.

There -- wasn't that easy?

Today's Must-Watch

I've been hearing about this and finally ran across a clip of the full speech at Balloon Juice. If you haven't heard about it, he starts off with the backstory:

"If you can't treat someone with dignity and respect--then you need to get out."-Lt. Gen. Jay B. Silveria, Superintendent @AF_Academy pic.twitter.com/njCktv5Fmp

— U.S. Air Force (@usairforce) September 28, 2017

One thing about the military: it will fight change tooth and nail, but once the policy is set, it gets internalized pronto.

Tweet du Jour: NFL Edition

Via Balloon Juice:

Patriotism isn't about making everyone stand and salute the flag.

Patriotism is about making this a country where everyone wants to.

— Jason Kander (@JasonKander) September 24, 2017

The whole "disrespecting the military" mantra is major horsepucky -- half these guys are ex-military.

Another take on the "disrespecting the flag" mantra:

Tim Eagan via GoComics.com

Both via Balloon Juice.

And the best response I've seen to all those "real "Murricans" who are stupid enough to believe anything Trump says.

In an interview with the Tennessean, NFL tight end Delanie Walker took a shot at football fans who are willfully misinterpreting protests during the national anthem, saying they don’t need to come to the games if they can’t deal with it. . . .

“First off, I’m going to say this: We’re not disrespecting the military, the men and women that serve in the Army. That’s not what it’s all about,” Walker explained. “If you look at most of the guys in here – I’ve been in the USO. I support the troops. This is not about that. It’s about equal rights, and that’s all everyone is trying to show, is that we all care about each other.”

Walker then took fans who are threatening to boycott to task, saying, “OK, bye.”

“The fans that don’t want to come to the game? I mean, OK. Bye,” he stated. “I mean, if you feel that’s something, we’re disrespecting you, don’t come to the game. You don’t have to. No one’s telling you to come to the game. It’s your freedom of choice to do that.”

Get it?

Today's Must-Read: It's Not About Jobs

Thought-provoking and fairly depressing article on why Trump won as many votes as he did:

The story we’ve told ourselves — that working-class whites flocked to Trump due to job worries or free trade or economic populism — is basically wrong, the research papers released this week suggest.

They did flock to Trump. But the reason they did so in enough numbers for Trump to win wasn’t anxiety about the economy. It was anxiety about Mexicans, Muslims and blacks.

Here’s how they put it in academese: “What stands out most, however, is the attitudes that became more strongly related to the vote in 2016: attitudes about immigration, feelings toward black people, and feelings toward Muslims,” writes George Washington University professor John Sides. He notes that the media focused on less-educated whites, but negative racial attitudes fueled by Trump were a big motivator for college-educated whites, too.

A substantial share of Trump voters “appeared to embrace a conception of American identity predicated on birthplace and especially Christian faith,” Sides found.

I have to confess that racism/ethnocentrism is something I don't understand, except on an intellectual level. Partly, it's the way I was raised: although my parents held all the biases they were raised with, they were at pains not to pass them on -- we were taught to take people as people. So, when I left my lily-white, heavily Christian small town (there were two Jewish families in town; the first African-Americans moved in the year I went away to college) and started meeting and befriending all sorts of different people, my parents welcomed my Jewish girlfriend, my Cuban best friend, and my black friends.

And partly it's because I know too much about how we came to be what we are: given that we are all descended from a small group of women who lived in East Africa about 200,000 years ago (based on evidence from mitochondrial DNA), and given that the genetic difference between human races is too small to measure (hell, the difference between us and chimpanzees is less than 2%), and given that casual miscegenation has been an ongoing phenomenon throughout human history (and even before we were writing things down: non-African humans living today carry between 2-4% Neanderthal genes), that kind of racial attitude just isn't much of a motivator with me.

But those attitudes are ingrained in American society, it seems: racial prejudice, sadly, is not something we as a people are not going to put to rest anytime soon. It's gotten to be such a sensitive subject that we don't want to talk about it, which is not going to help solve the problem.

And so we have mountebanks like Donald Trump who use those attitudes, who play on them to get the support they need to win elections. It's not just Trump: although I'm generally reluctant to deal in broad generalizations, the Republican party has staked out that territory for itself -- the "party of Lincoln" hasn't been that since 1964. They've deliberately sought out the extreme Christianists (remember the "Moral Majority" and how Reagan thought he could use them to deliver his agenda? Tail wags dog.), the unregenerate Confederate apologists, and the out-and-out racists.

And of course, there are always new scary people: in recent years, it's been gays and Latinos, and now it's Muslims and trans folk. (It's gotten pretty extreme: have you noticed how American attitudes toward Europe have changed in the past twenty years?)

Yes, there is what seems to be an almost hard-wired "us/them" component to our psychology (that's something that goes way back, to the beginnings of sociality -- sociality and fiercely defended group territories go hand in hand) but given our much-touted intelligence, we ought to be able to work past that.

Apparently not.

At any rate, read the whole thing -- it's sobering, to say the least.

Via Digby, who sums it up nicely:

This is an inconvenient story and nobody wants to hear it because economic determinism does not explain it. And if there's any true state religion in America, on all sides of the political spectrum, it's economic determinism. Money explains everything.

Except it doesn't. Humans are complicated creatures motivated by many things and money is only one of them.

It's not even the best one.

Who Could Have Predicted This?

The white supremacist right wing is insisting that Dylann Roof has nothing to do with them:

“If starting a race war is what this kid is about, he did it in the worst possible way,” said Kirk Lyons, a prominent lawyer who has defended Ku Klux Klan members, supporters of the old southern Confederacy and a notorious Holocaust denier.

“I’m a Christian,” Lyons added. “I consider the congregants of black churches my fellow Christians. These are the last people you want to hurt.”

On far-right online comment forums, avowed white nationalists and white supremacists substantially agreed, worrying that the Charleston killings might become an excuse for the government they hate to arrest them, crack down on gun ownership and suppress public displays of the Confederate flag many of them revere.

(Emphasis added.)

I suspect we can see the real reason they're distancing themselves: they certainly don't want any closer scrutiny.

While they're claiming no knowledge of who Roof was and swearing that he had no association with anyone in their movement, they're dodging the question of who's responsible for creating the environment:

Whether Dylann Roof had a serious agenda or was just a deeply disturbed individual using the language of racial hatred to justify an irrational act, it is little mystery where he derived his ideas. News reports suggest Roof told either his friends or the police he meant to incite a race war – a term frequently thrown about online in response to the civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri last year or in Baltimore in April. In the website manifesto, the author referenced the killing of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager from Florida who was shot by a neighbourhood watch leader three years ago.

A picture on Roof’s Facebook page showed him wearing a jacket with flags from apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia on the front – an association frequently made by advocates of an all-white America, or an all-white republic within its borders. The website containing the manifesto linked to his name was called The Last Rhodesian.

Where do you suppose he got the idea?

When domestic violence does break out, it reliably sparks panic in groups that skirt close to the wind in their rhetoric but do not want to be identified with acts of gratuitous violence.

Ben Jones of the Sons of Confederate Veterans – a one-time actor who appeared on the TV show Dukes of Hazzard – wasted no time denouncing the Charleston killings as “an act of purposeful evil”. He added: “We must not allow the sickness of one demented individual to become that with which the media and our ‘politically correct’ opponents define us. We are the same good-hearted people that we were last week and last year.”

Somehow, the "good-heartedness" of these groups eludes me. What is in stark relief is their moral cowardice.

Footnote: And why does this remind me of Tony Perkins' reaction to Dan Savage's comment, in the wake of a rash of suicides by gay teenagers, that Perkins went to his office every day and sat on a pile of dead queer kids? As you'll recall, Perkins' reaction was so close to hysterical as to make no difference. I smell a little bit of guilty panic here.

"Privilege"

That word is one of the most commonly mis-used words in public discourse, and happens to be one of those that immediately causes me to lose interest in what the speaker has to say. Amanda Marcotte has an excellent post on racism and privilege at Raw Story, in which she gets it exactly right:

Look, I think Chappelle-Nada’s tweet was poorly phrased. She makes a really common and irritating mistake that’s all over lefty Twitter, which is treating “privilege” like it’s a choice or a behavior, when in fact the whole idea of “privilege” was constructed by sociologists to describe automatic benefits accorded to people despite what choices they may make. She also makes the mistake of thinking that the privileges in question are inherently bad things, when in most cases, the problem isn’t that they exist but that they aren’t shared more equally. For instance, it’s a white privilege to not have to worry about being shot by the cops for minding your own business. However, the way to rectify that problem is not to start shooting random white people, but to expand this privilege until it’s a right that everyone enjoys, regardless of race.

I was once taken to task at a blog that shall remain nameless because of my "privilege" as a white, cisgender male. (Apparently, for this group, the only bases for discrimination are skin color and gender identity -- oh, and being a woman. Being gay doesn't count, unless you're a lesbian.) The owner of the blog directed me to an article by an upper-middle class white woman that would explain it all. I read the article and realized that I had nothing in common with this woman -- her experience at no point matched my own. And let me add that the point I was trying to make to these people -- that there are innumerable "reasons" to discriminate against others and the only real counter is to just take people as people -- search for the commonalities, not the differences -- was completely lost on them. (I don't follow that blog any more. They claimed to be a refuge for "survivors," but seemed to be more interested in becoming professional victims. The owner was the lone voice of sanity, but she was only one of several diarists.)

At any rate, read Marcotte's post. It's a good one.

Today's Must Read

Very interesting post at Mahablog, focused ostensibly on race and identity, but touching as well -- well, actually, based on human beings as social animals and how that context shapes who we are and who we think we are.

We are not only physically dependent on each other but psychologically dependent as well. There is all kinds of data and real-world experience showing that actual isolation is devastating to a human. Prolonged isolation from other humans literally drives us mad. Indeed, our personalities — the traits we think make us uniquely “me” — are (to the psychologist and sociologists who study these things) entirely about how we relate to other humans. If there are no other humans to relate to, personalities cannot be expressed and arguably don’t even exist.

One of my favorite exercises — describe who you are as an individual without reference to a position within some kind of social or economic network. In other words, describe who you are as an individual without reference to family, nation, profession, interests (sports? stamp collecting? messing around on the Web?) or anything that doesn’t require other people. I say it can’t be done.

This ties in to my thinking on the social contract and the bases of morality, which I've explicated ad nauseam, but to summarize: the social contract is our morality, which in turn is all about how we relate to other people, which is something those who rail on about the evils of birth control and homosexuality and the like are never going to understand, since they think of morality as a set of rules derived from the tribal taboos of a group of ancient Middle Eastern nomads that can't be broken for fear of eternal damnation, to which I can only respond, Well, you get what you pay for.

A Couple of Thoughts on Ferguson

From Digby, this observation:

Forget the shooting of an unarmed man. Let's talk about the reaction to it instead. That seems to be the M.O. of the right when it comes to dealing with Ferguson and the hideous underbelly of American racism. Elias Isquith at Salon talked a bit about this last week:

From the very beginning, before St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Robert McCulloch had uttered the first word of his defensive and dissembling speech, the fix was in. The conspiracy this time was not to protect Officer Darren Wilson from standing trial for the killing of Michael Brown, though that was certainly related. This time, the conspiracy was to organize the announcement of Wilson’s exoneration in as provocative a way as possible. The ultimate goal was to manipulate the public and the press into forgetting the real story of Ferguson — of police brutality and racial injustice — and bickering about the morality of rioting instead.

Thinking back, Digby and Isquith hit it right on the head. It's been a pattern for a while, and the sad thing is, it works: we're led to focus on the reaction and not the trigger, and not the underlying causes.* It's a long post, but worth reading -- Digby has a lot of examples going back over the past several years, detailing not only the misdirection, but the lies used to support it.

This is the sort of thing that Digby's talking about: That paragon of journalistic integrity, Rich Lowry (and if you don't know who Lowry is, yes, that was meant to be snarky) rode along with Darren Wilson earlier in the day that he shot Michael Brown, so Lowry, of course, knows exactly what happened when he was no longer there.

Thinking about this, I've come to the conclusion that labeling the press as "complicit" assigns them too much agency: they're lapdogs, nothing more. (The ones who aren't tend to be in exile or relegated to the sidelines. Think about what happened to Soledad O'Brien for giving Tony Perkins a hard time -- she's now with Al Jazeera.) It's at the point now where, if you want to know what's happening in this country, you have to go to the foreign press, because the domestic press has an agenda dictated by the powers that be, and it doesn't include honest reporting.

* Footnote: plug this post by Tom Sullivan into the mix to get an idea of those underlying causes.

Review in Brief: Shoko Hidaka's Geliebter Freund

This is not really a review -- Geliebter Freund is just my latest translation project, a typical school-boy romance, childhood friends reunited variety. It seems to bear out my reaction to my only previous experience with Hidaka -- her stories are low-key and fairly uneventful, with a lot of psychological introspection. I'm having trouble getting into this one, but I'm not sure if it's the story or the circumstances -- I was doing these as fill-in for slow periods at work, and the powers that be decided I wasn't busy enough, so progress has been kind of patchy. I think, though, that the story itself doesn't have that much grab-power -- it's been kind of hard to get into.

One thing that attracted me to this one is that I like Hidaka's drawing style. It's a nice, clean, open style that I find appealing. One thing I noticed is that she is of those mangaka who renders faces in a sort of non-racial manner -- her characters could be Asian or Western. The reason this comes to mind is that I ran across a post at another blog way back when that asked the question "Do Japanese see manga characters as Japanese?" The question left me sort of wondering "WTF?" and as I remember the essay, it made a big deal out of the way characters in manga are designed. (I'm talking about those manga that fall within what I call a "comic realism" or bishounen style, as opposed to those that tend toward chibi renderings or highly abstracted character designs -- most BL manga as opposed to something like Sgt. Frog. Since that time my experience with manga and anime has expanded just a bit, and looking at that question now, it's pretty much moot -- even within one manga or anime, you can find characters who fit comfortably into either an Asian or European "type," if you care to classify them that way. I don't. (Just watching Samurai 7 -- again -- and noticed that there are a number of characters who come close to being caricatures of the Western conception of "Asian" -- of course, there are a number of characters who are caricatures anyway.) Frankly, it's a question that would never occur to me, since it completely avoids the reality of the thing, and takes no account of the history of manga and the influences on it.

By way of a footnote, I was fairly recently directed to an essay entitled "The Invisible Knapsack" as a means of educating me in the error of my attitudes about race. (Which, as it happens, are pretty much nonexistent -- I was raised to view people as people, not as stereotypes. It stuck.) Unfortunately, while a brilliant example of liberal guilt, the writer's experiences did not match my own in any way. Nor did her assumptions. Sadly, the person who directed me did not want to hear anything about the reality of differences in human experiences -- apparently, if I'm white, I must fit into a certain set of parameters that describe my life experience and my attitudes in a way that she finds acceptable. Thus, my last run-in with the PC left. I removed that blog from my bookmarks. They have nothing to offer me.

(And before anyone lands on me, I'm fully aware of the institutionalized racism in this country, hate the idea of it, and won't tolerate it in any realm where I have the power to do anything. That's not what this is about. This is about dealing with people as people.)

It's Not Race, It's Class

Something that I've pointed out a number of times. There are several stories that converge on this point this morning. I'm just going to lay out the dots, and you can connect them.

First, Nicole Bell's post on this speech by Sen. Bernie Sanders:



Oligarchy is really the only way to describe this. The Republican platform benefits such a small percentage of Americans. And that's the way they prefer it. Social programs are democratizing and give voice to the unwashed masses, which only get in the way of the elite. That's why there's been a systematic dismantling of social programs since Reagan.

Meanwhile, the Republicans keep just a high enough percentage of authoritarian-minded voting against their best interests by preying on their worst instincts--fear of the Other, where the other is alternatively people of color, women seeking reproductive rights, gays, undocumented workers, or any other variation on a theme. The oligarchy points to these fellow-victimized groups as the ones to blame for the poor condition of your life, rather than admit that it is their policies: free trade, union-busting, corporations off-shoring, and the dismantling of social safety nets that hurt you.

And they just flat out lie to you. Other countries manage to offer systems that enable there to be a thriving middle class, social programs like universal healthcare, paid college educations, public transit, child care, and job training. But you'll never hear the truth about how well these programs work, because that might clue in the masses at just how much is kept from us.

This segues quite neatly into this post at Mahablog:

I’d also say that while the issues of racial discrimination and entrenched poverty do overlap, a lot, they aren’t exactly the same. I agree also with John that the real issue is closer to what Shirley Sherrod was saying about class v. race.

But whatever it is, it’s a real issue, and it is not at all helpful to react to discussion of the problems of white poverty with knee-jerk declarations that “This isn’t about white people; it’s about privileged white men.”

No, it’s about white poverty, and about the cultural marginalization of rural whites. I don’t think Webb addressed the topic as well as it needed to be addressed, but I know where he’s coming from, because it’s pretty close to where I came from.

I've had a taste of that myself, when I was growing up. I'm not sure, however, that the idea that "it's about privilege white men" is necessarily a knee-jerk reaction, nor that it's incorrect.

The connection, I think, is in the Andrew Breitbarts of the Republican party. Remember, the scandals that Breitbart has trumpeted have all involved, in the conventional wisdom, race. He's delilberately avoided the mention of the real issues, most tellingly brought home in the speech by Shirley Sherrod that he didn't want to report all of, when she mentioned her realization that it's not about black versus white, it's about the haves versus the have nots. It's about the deliberate employment of tactics designed to keep the electorate at each other's throats while the upper crust makes off with the loot.

Among the most vivid revelations of just how deeply ingrained this sense of privilege has become over the past couple of generations is the reaction of Wall Street to the financial crisis: it's simply that they don't understand why their failures should be penalized, because they don't see them as failures. They did what they were supposed to do: they made a lot of money for themselves, and don't understand why the people they screwed over don't see it that way. Things are supposed to run the way they want because they're rich, which by definition means they're better than the rest of us. And their minions, the politicians a pundits they've bought, will keep finding ways to be sure it stays that way.

Update: In that vein, this quote from Howie Kurtz says it all:

As for Boehner... don't take his heartless agenda-- limitless war, limitless tax breaks for the wealthy, no breaks for the middle class-- personally. His sister, Lynda Meineke, says Boehner has two brothers and two brothers-in-law back in Ohio who are out of work. He told reporters after he voted against unemployment insurance last week that three brothers had lost jobs during the recession and he wasn't sure which if any had found work. He did remember that one is named Bob Boehner though.

Race and Intelligence Again -- Farther Afield

I finally broke down an e-mailed Andrew Sullivan (although I'd rather snipe at him from the safety of my own blog) about the series of posts he's been running on Race and Intelligence -- sparked by the latest reader comments.  Since I doubt he'll publish it, here's the e-mail, with a short version of my thoughts on the whole "controversy."

Dear Andrew Sullivan:

I've been following your posts on "Race and Intelligence," and regarding the latest comments on the e-mail concerning "the genetic basis of intelligence" by the Harvard law student, I see that the controversy continues on the same -- and to my mind, quite mistaken -- terms.  It all seems to have gotten tied up in various causes celebres -- racism, freedom of speech, and the like -- and has very little to do with what she actually said.

I've not seen any comments on this flap that focus on what the real flaw in the e-mail was:  it's not that she was expressing an unpopular viewpoint, or even treading on politically incorrect territory, but that she assumed that she knew that she was talking about (as do both her supporters and critics) without, apparently, ever examining her assumptions, which I think must be a fatal flaw in someone who plans on making a career out of dissecting formal arguments.  Her question is legitimate, but sadly uninformed.  (And I suspect if she had even the most rudimentary knowledge of genetics and how it works, she wouldn't have bothered to ask the question to begin with.)

Until she has, and can express, a clear idea of what she means by "race" and by "intelligence," she, like most non-scientists who tackle this issue (which as far as I can see is a non-issue to anyone who doesn't have an agenda), should keep mum.

"Race" is a fairly fluid concept, and, while it has some use as a descriptive term for taxonomists, in larger discussions it essentially no longer has any meaning.  In ordinary parlance, it's purely a social construct.  One need only remember that in the U.S., a person with a black ancestor has routinely been considered "black," no matter the relative proportion of black to white ancestry.  (And I'm deliberately not using the word "genes" here -- the genetic difference between human races is so small as to be unmeasurable. After all, we're not very far, genetically speaking, from chimpanzees.  How far can we be from each other?)  To pose a question of genetic inheritance based on cultural definitions is to construct a fundamentally flawed question.

Talking about "intelligence" and genetics in the same breath is asking for trouble.  The genetic basis of intelligence, like the genetic basis of just about anything (especially behaviors), is a set of potentials and nothing more.  These potentials are subject to environmental influences that start when the egg is fertilized -- why does anyone think that doctors place such stress on proper nutrition for expectant mothers?  Because the womb is an environment.  The problem here is that, while our Harvard 3L is talking about the expression of intelligence (test scores, one assumes, or other measures of performance), she is casting it in terms of heritability.  We're talking about a behavior here, not eye color, and human behavior, even for those areas that are "biologically determined," is way too complex to cast in such simplistic terms.

I don't fault her for asking the question.  I'm not going to impute an agenda or ideology as a foundation here -- it's the kind of air-headed "what if?" that one finds in students, which is a good enough excuse, and to start hurling charges of racism based on something like this is, at best, revealing of a lack of clear thought in her critics.  I'm not even sure I fault her for saying it without having a clear idea of what she was talking about -- she's asking a question, and it's a student's question, but that's one way we learn.  (And yes, I'm one of those who thinks we should be allowed to ask any question that occurs to us.)  I do think, however, that the only adult response is "Back up and define your terms."  That seems to have been eclipsed by the politics of those involved.

Next teapot.

Race and Intelligence -- Again (sigh)

This one has popped up again, the result this time of an e-mail sent by a law student relating a dinner conversation.  Sullivan's commentary (or lack of it -- he passes the ball to Eugene Volokh) is the one that has the most room for dissection.

The best take on the circumstances is here.  First, the "money quote," via Sullivan:

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

For starters, this is horribly flawed and betrays a deep lack of understanding of the role of genetics in human behavior, and I think we have to take intelligence as behavior:  our idea of "intelligence" is intimately tied to the expression of it.  First misstatement:  "Some things are genetic."  Not as much as you might think, and her initial examples are correct, but the extrapolation starts going astray.  The math performance already starts to bring in factors that are, strictly speaking, not necessarily genetic.  (I can't quite fight off the idea that these sorts of arguments are framed by a world view of people as some sort of little black boxes that operate like wind-up toys -- it's simplistic in the extreme,and unfortunately, it pervades our culture.  Or maybe it's just sloppy thinking -- not that the two are mutually exclusive.)  And quite frankly, her children, whatever they may have inherited in the way of brains from their parents, are going to have the same chance of developing their genius as any other kid in that orphanage.  If the environment is not conducive, that aspect of their heritage is going to be stunted.

Can I say one thing?  The genetic basis of intelligence is a set of potentials.  That's all.  Potentials.  (It's like the search for the "gay gene."  There isn't one.  Human behaviors, including the potentials for those behaviors, is not that simple.)

OK -- we've got a good example of sloppy thinking from a law student.  She does redeem herself in the next paragraph, somewhat:

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to “explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

Somewhat, because she hasn't defined the "genetic position."  I don't think you're going to disprove it until someone can identify the genes involved in the potential for high intelligence and then do broad studies to identify the incidence of those genes in various populations.  Good luck.  At least she admits the relevance of environmental factors, but she doesn't quite manage to use that to clarify her thinking about the genetic basis -- nor does the idea of "potential" in relation to "expression" ever seem to enter her head.

On to Volokh.  (His full post is here.)  Sullivan quotes his conclusion:

[T]he very attempt to suppress the openness to the possibility that there might be racial differences will make it impossible to disprove that possibility. Even if then the scientific community loudly says, “The evidence is clear: There are no racial differences in intelligence,” that statement should no longer be credible to us. Scientific consensus is trustworthy only to the extent that it’s the result of a process in which scientists — and others — are free to espouse all rival views. To the extent that espousing some views is too dangerous, the consensus that then emerges without the expression and discussion of those views stops being reliable.

OK -- gnashing of teeth, rending of garments.  I'd expected better of Volokh, but I take it as illustrative of the degree of ignorance about the operations of science in this country.  My response to the first sentence:  how?  How does suppression of an unpopular viewpoint make it impossible to refute it?  First, I agree that it's pointless to try to suppress unpopular views.  But the correct response in this context is further inquiry.  Nevertheless, I fail to understand how suppressing an unpopular view is supposed to cause us to ignore the evidence against it.  There's a conflation here that leaves Volokh's whole argument dangling.  He's correct about the trustworthiness of scientific consensus, but he's ignoring the fact that the consensus is based on evidence -- it's not the espousal of rival views that's important, but the investigation of those views.  It's whether the views are supported by evidence that makes them credible, not whether we've allowed the expression of all viewpoints.  He's conflating two different realms of inquiry here -- call them the lab and the symposium.  The symposium is believable to the degree that its content is based on evidence, not to the degree that its content is based on controversy.

And as for the underlying issue, which is still the "genetic" basis of intelligence in different races:  "Race" as a biological concept is useful for taxonomists, but otherwise pretty much meaningless, particularly when applied to human beings.  The genetic differences between human races are so small as to be unmeasurable.  And any discussion of intelligence has to take into account not only genetic heritage but pre-birth environmental differences, differences in upbringing, self-fulfilling prophecies (which, regrettably, have been demonstrated in classroom environments), access to resources, differences in such basic things as nutrition and the attitudes and practices of parents toward learning and child-rearing in general.  When you can describe all those factors fully, you can talk to me about innate differences in intelligence in different races.

As for the larger issue, why is this still a question?  The moral and legal response has to be "so what?" but I suspect that there's more involved.  It may be something as innocent as contrarianism.  And it may not.  (I'm running headlong into the fact that those genetic differences that express themselves in skin and hair color and the like are tiny; how small must the differences be in anything as complex as intelligence?)

And if we're going to discuss questions like this, we really need to start by defining our terms.

I Hadn't Thought of This Angle

But then, I don't think like a Republican.  Very interesting article from Greg Palast that brings back the Rove years:

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote -- and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.

Captives of Sheriff Joe's prison, Maricopa County, Arizona

So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?

No, not one.


I keep forgetting that Republicans don't really like the American system -- they think elected representatives passing legislation by majority vote is totalitarian, remember.  They prefer their own brand of totalitarianism, like deciding ahead of time who gets to vote for those representatives.

No, on thinking about it it doesn't sound like conspiracy thinking.  It sounds like the way Republicans do elections.

More on Marriage

First, this racist rant from Jasmyn Cannick. This is the sort of thing that leads me to think that the government is not the only dysfunctional aspect of this society:

As I pointed out before, it is a privilege to be able to focus solely on the issue of obtaining marriage for lesbian and gay couples. A privilege that many of us aren’t afforded.

It continues to be issue number one for the gay civil rights movement because for its leaders it is the last step in achieving parity with their heterosexual counterparts who already have the six-figure income, house, vacation house, an adopted son or daughter from somewhere in Africa or some other impoverished nation, and two or more cars.

This is the kind of argument we might see coming from Maggie Gallagher or Tony Perkins, except that I doubt either of them would play the race card quite so reflexively, as Cannick hastens to do. In formal logic, it's known as a "straw man" -- you invent a position or a condition that is supposed to represent your opponent's opinion or condition but doesn't do so accurately, then demolish it. It's an automatic "FAIL."

OK -- I'm white. I'm not rich, and I don't think I've ever been what anyone would call "privileged" (although I realize that to some, "white" and "privileged" are synonyms) -- I grew up poor, worked my way through college, and have at times been financially secure, but never what you'd even call well-off. I've never owned even one car, and the only thing I've ever adopted was a cat. So I think I'm quite legitimately calling "bullshit" on this one.

Add in that the post is factually challenged: marriage is the most high-profile issue right now because it's the most controversial, thanks to the fundies and, at the risk of ruffling some PC feathers, some high-profile leaders of the black community (although I'm very happy to acknowledge the role that black churches and the black community played in Washington, D.C., in securing our rights there). (Note to Jasmyne Connick: you won't get any sympathy from this quarter when you attack people who are actually fighting for equal rights for all of us and let Bishop Harry Jackson off the hook.) But marriage is not the only issue, and anyone who says that our organizations are not working for ENDA, DADT repeal, and any other facet of this struggle you care to name, both locally and nationally, is full of it. This is even more grossly distorted than it might seem at first when you remember that it was only recently that the national organizations even acknowledged the push for marriage rights as a legitimate area of concern and tried for years to redirect those efforts toward other issues. It's taken immense pressure from independent gay activists to reorient their priorities, and now Cannick is bitching because we haven't made black lesbians the main concern.

It's also a strategically critical issue: if we can get married as easily and freely as anyone else, if our families have the same legal and social recognition, if we have equal access to what is a core element of any society, denying us other rights becomes very obviously indefensible.

And now that I've vented my temper a bit, let me point out that none of these issues are either/or for most of us, and none of our national advocacy organizations is focusing solely on any one of them -- that's just more BS. We all meet prejudice in our daily lives, even in places where we least expect it. I don't see that the attempt to co-opt the gay civil rights movement into fighting racial prejudice on a day-to-day basis is helping anyone, frankly, and, trying to be as nice about it as I possibly can, Cannick's post strikes me as terribly self-centered and childish.

Dan Savage has a much more succinct rejoinder, underscored by the first couple to get their marriage license in D.C.

If All Else Fails, Let's Try the "N" Word

I ran across this story in a post by Andrew Sullivan this morning (several posts, actually), but I think Publius has the best insight:

So here's the basic dilemma. On the one hand, there's nothing ambiguous about this. It's straight-up George Wallace-style race-baiting. It's an intentional attempt to stir racial prejudices.

Limbaugh & Friends took a random fight and immediately tried to pin it on Obama (some less directly than others). And after the police quickly backed off claims that it was racially motivated, the corrections either didn't come or were merely one-liner updates inappropriate to the gravity of the previous charges.

But even if it was racially motivated, what on earth does Obama have to do with it? The answer is nothing other race. The only goal here was to stir up racial resentment and then pin it on Obama. I'm sorry, but this is infuriating. We shouldn't be putting up with this in 2009.

And yet, not only are we putting up with it, but a significant proportion of us are eating it up. I'd say Limbaugh and Malkin, et al., should be ashamed of themselves, but if someone has no integrity, no honesty, and no morals, you can hardly expect them to feel shame.

One thing that leapt out at me, that no one else has noted in any post I've seen, is that the police chief also immediately jumped to the conclusion that the beating was racially motivated. That just points up how deepl" y the prejudices that Limbaugh and his ilk appeal to are ingrained in some people. (And frankly, "any" in that case is too many, although to be honest, it seems as though it's impossible to get rid of all racial bias -- the habit of identiying "us" and "them" is probably harfd-wired.) Of course, he's also man enough to retract it and admit his initial statement had no basis -- it was just his assumption.

This is not something you're going to see from Limbaugh, Malkin, or any of that brood. In fact, Sullivan quotes Malkin's response:

She refuses to remove or correct the post that says baldly that the attack was racial and her correction amounts to:

The police are backing off the racial motive claims. Given the explosive consequences of candor about such matters, this is not surprising.

No: one police chief said he had jumped to the wrong conclusion. But Malkin insists that the real reason was racial and the the chief is bowing to political correctness.

The problem with the right in this country (and, to be "fair and balanced" about it, it does crop up on the left as well, but seems not to be as prevalent) is that they "know" certain things, and mere facts are not going to affect their reactions at all. This is not necessarily an ideological thing, but a human personality thing. It just seems that that type of personality tends to gravitate toward a world view that relies on received wisdom -- "wisdom" in this case being the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin.

And tell me -- should we take either of those worthies as an example of white superiority?

Stick It To 'Em

A nice post from Joe Sudbay at AmericaBlog about Rush Limbaugh, racism, and the Republicans. It involves an ad being run on Spanish-language television:



It's about time the Republicans took ownership owned this sort of nastiness. Add me to the list of bloggers endorsing the campaign.

And about Sotomayor: the hearings started yesterday. They're not about Sotomayor, from all reports. They're about Republican smear tactics.

Did we really expect anything different?