Er, correction: Charles Murray didn't take funding directly from the Pioneer Fund, he actually just cited thirteen* different authors funded by them. Still far too close to make anyone not deeply suspicious.

We had that tiff a while back where you chided me for being like Tucker Carlson for downplaying the Trump-Russia stuff. Or maybe that's not exactly right, but yeah. In that vein, don't repeat storylines of the like of Campus Reform, The Daily Wire, or Breitbart, it makes you sound too much like a sympathizer of white nationalism, when there really is an attempt of pernicious white nationalism to check the Overton window on college campuses. This effort to mainstream racism is far worse than what college protestors do.

https://newrepublic.com/article/73773/neo-nazis

Oh, this is an interesting article.





But then we get to the core of Rushton's actual research:



Who would have thought that it was actually the legacy of Nazi-supporting race science that would bolster penis size/masculinity bull****? It's nearly a parody of itself.

So going back to the original NY Mag article you linked: the author was Andrew Sullivan, the same author who has repeatedly defended Charles Murray and his thesis about genetics and intelligence. So yeah, I'm not sure why you linked it, but I think you need to question just why far-right extremism, like serious extremism, and anti-PC college hysteria seem to go so hand-in-hand. Really, think about it.

Also Andrew Sullivan: "I should add up-front that I am friends with ... Murray".

So yeah.

I guess it already is more mainstream than I suspected.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/jeb-bush-touts-charles-murrays-work



http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/paul-ryan-still-struggling-poverty



Hmm.

I always took Charles Murray to be a well enough respected academic who happened to take a lot of heat for social implications of his research. I have no idea what his motivations are, but I assume there is a good chance they are genuine.

On the other hand, I have at most a mild interest on the topic of genetics and intelligence, so I never really did enough reading to find out.

I generally buy the idea that race is mostly a social construct, and that genetics shouldn't be the hot button topic that it tends to be. I understand that there have been racists in the past who have used statistical averages to make sweeping generalizations about entire groups of people, and I think society remembers this enough to treat the topic with general distaste and hesitation.

On the other hand, there are very well meaning people who explicitly studied race and intelligence, with the express goal of helping people among populations who might be at a disadvantage. For example, Arthur Jensen took a ton of heat for writing his paper How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?, but if I am to remember correctly, has largely been vindicated in recent years, despite the controversy. And generally speaking, Arthur Jensen's reputation as a scientist is pretty much impeccable.

.

Hold on, I'm going to break that up into different posts so that post isn't so damn long.

Alright, but I disagree with your definition of American exceptionalism. I never said that America was unique (in some kind of transcendental way), and that's certainly not what I'm arguing. There are varieties of the American exceptionalism argument, and most of them are ideas about how America ought to (or can't help but) relate to other countries. For instance, there's the idea that, by being an exemplary democracy, America can provide a model to be imitated by other nations ("a shining city on a hill"). There's also the idea that America is a steward, not only of its own democracy, but of the very possibility of democracy anywhere on earth. Or there's the Wilsonian idea that all the world's citizens have an inherent desire to be free (as Americans define freedom), and America has an obligation to guide other nations towards freedom through an interventionist foreign policy. American exceptionalism generally coincides with the idea that the American revolution is of universal, global significance, and that America has a unique cosmic mission to advance the progress of history by spreading freedom, either domestically (as in the case of manifest destiny) or abroad (as in the case of the Cold War, or the Freedom agenda). Those ideas have very little to do with anything I'm talking about.

The American constitution unites various aspects of English and French enlightenment thought (you still have to tell me why you thought Sullivan saying that was so controversial) and creatively synthesized them to create something new. It is an incremental development in the history of Western political thought that draws from other national traditions, yet it is nonetheless a foundational document of American intellectual history -- that is, it is the foundation of a distinctively American political tradition. The idea that there is a distinctively American tradition of legal and political thought, and that that tradition is liberal in character, however, does not constitute an assertion of American exceptionalism. It's different, but not sui generis. Many countries have their own intellectual traditions.

Heh. But that's the whole point! The point of free speech is that it doesn't matter how abhorrent or unpopular someone's view is. He should be able to speak despite the fact his views are abhorrent. I mean, I know you know this... I just had to point out that the idea that you could justify the behaviors of the protestors by pointing out that "Charles Murray is like, really a racist" flies in the face of why people criticized the protesters in the first place (including left-of-center commentators like Jonathan Chait or Peter Beinart). I don't think anyone doubts that the campus protesters at Middlebury sincerely think that Murray is racist.

Look, I'm not feeding anything. I think this accusation that I am betrays a difference in how we approach things. You seem to think that guilt by association is a fair way of undermining people who's ideas you disagree with. (For instance, arguing that Peterson is suspect because of what people say in YouTube comments to a video he's in?) That's fine, I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't do that. But I don't find that line of reasoning very persuasive. I'm more interested in hearing people out and seeing how convincing I find their ideas (or, how unconvincing I find them) than in smearing them. Some of the things you've cited from Charles Murray's book are absolutely ridiculous and it's obvious that more than few of his ideas are bad ideas; I'm certainly not saying they're beyond reproach, nor am I defending them. But I also am not interested in using quotes taken out of context to to defame Murray, as if the goal is to prove that he's a bad person, because, as long as he's a bad person, he (at best) doesn't deserve to be listened to or (at worst) is worthy of abuse. ("If Charles Murray gets yelled at by students, he deserves it.")

Drawing a set of connections that goes Andrew Sullivan -> Charles Murray -> Alt-right/far-right extremism, therefore, Andrew Sullivan is alt-right, is disingenuous, even wrong. Again, it's guilt by association. Sullivan is a center-right conservative who offered a critique of "campus politics" (again, using his language) from a liberal perspective, arguing that much about that form of politics is illiberal. He's not a far-right extremist. It's more than a little hyperbolic to associate him with the alt-right, and more than a little unfair.

What? No! Criticizing campus protestors for de-platforming and calling them illiberal isn't what makes Breitbart bad. Breitbart (and publications like it) is bad because it spreads disinformation and incites racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and islamophobia. The idea that a publication is bad because it frequently publishes bad articles, and therefore anything it argues is bad, and therefore any person who makes arguments that are even remotely similar to any argument its ever published is also bad, is... bad...

...reasoning.

I mean, again: Peter Beinart and Jonathan Chait have criticized the protestors at Middlebury for being illiberal and for affronting free speech. Are they alt-right too?!

And...



Not to mention, you're kind of proving Andrew Sullivan's point that anything disagreeable is dismissed as white nationalism/white supremacy.

Both can be true.

Just want to clarify, the reason why I'm saying this is because Reid is associating things that (to my mind) have nothing to do with/have remote connections to white supremacy with white supremacy. There are some things that obviously deserve to be labeled as white supremacist, but one should be judicious about making that accusation. Sullivan certainly wasn't arguing that there's no such thing as white supremacy or white nationalism. He was arguing that it's all to often used in order to shame people who don't actually hold extremist views.

And, to be clear, I'm not trying to shut down the debate here. Anyone can disagree with me about this. I'm not claiming that it's settled debate. In fact, I think that one of the reasons why our political disputes are so caustic is because people enter discussions assuming that that the topic at hand is already settled, and that everyone already believes what they happen to believe, when, in fact, that's not true.

Not at all. I'm claiming Peterson's views and arguments feed into a straight of extreme right-wing thought, and he's been reminded of this by people constantly, that his rhetoric on transpeople for instance feeds into these people, and that he might want to tone it down, or at least directly address such people as toxic and dismiss their influence.

As far as I'm aware, Jordan Peterson refuses to denounce them, or to stop promoting doxxing, or to do anything.



Charles Murray has made a career out of feigning innocence. He doesn't do or say anything crassly racist, it's that he does these long, academic-seeming works that just so happen to draw from a huge legacy of racist, eugenicist research and comes to a conclusion that's racist and eugenicist. Even if we take the highly unlikely assumption that he doesn't know exactly what he's doing, then the end result is he's still filtered back eugenicist ideas into the mainstream, and continues to advocate that position after much criticism. So at best he's unwittingly eugenicist who's refused to properly address the topic. Which is the best case scenario for him, not a very good one and one that should make us at least highly distrustful of him.

In his book he cites thirteen authors of The Mankind Quarterly. From some of these authors he cites 20+ individual publications in that journal. This means, either he owns a sizable backlog of pro-eugenics research, or he knows someone who owns a sizable backlog of pro-eugenics research. In either case, this means he either personally sought out or was personally influenced be people who think this sort of stuff is acceptable. As I mentioned above, even if we take the approach that he really is innocent and naive, and that for some reason, he never learned about Nazism or about the true intent behind The Mankind Quarterly, then at the very least he was influenced by the ideas, because his solution to the overbreeding problem is to literally get rid of welfare to cull the hordes of bad-gene stupid people (which, coincidentally by his research, are mostly black), i.e., to commit eugenics against American black people.

Many people focus only on the "research" part of The Bell Curve and ignore the part where he advocates this. Not sure why. In any case, as above "at best" he's still basically a ****head.

He has repeatedly denounced them! Repeatedly! Look, I'm not defending him and I agree that there's something fishy about how he deflects criticism sometimes. But the idea that he's responsible for his fan base is a little preposterous. It's a little like blaming anime cartoonists for the fact that the alt-right folk love anime.



Maybe? The arguments that I've seen him make are actually quite egalitarian. His argument isn't that because some have lower IQs they deserve to be cast as some subordinate slave class. Rather, he says that because we have a society where people with higher IQs generally do better in our society and enjoy a greater share of the economic rewards, we need to reform so that those with lower IQs are able to be better off than they currently are. That is, society needs to correct for the inherent inequality of intelligence and elevate those who are less intelligent.

Whoa, hold up now, did I say that about Andrew Sullivan? I don't think he consciously is a far-right extremist. But I think he, like many other people, have gotten into this "easy" form of attacking people who are easy targets for outrage porn, and instead of doing the responsible, hard work of an ethical journalist, reports on the flavor of the day topics beating up on easy targets to score "lol" points with readers.

The thing that I'm saying is actually bad is, this sort of stupid, lazy reporting works to serve the interests of people who are promoting evil, pernicious ideas. Especially a hard thing to do when you're friends with the guy.

As well as ending affirmative action so we stop embarassing the dumb-dumb blacks who aren't smart enough to be doctors.

You realize how condescending that is, right?

I don't give him responsibility for their existence, but he has responsibility for the times he's doxxed his own colleagues and students and led to them being harassed. For which he hasn't apologized, AFAIK.

Which overall isn't that bad. I don't think JP is nearly as bad as a person like Charles Murray. And I'm glad he has denounced these people.

Mmmmm. It's debatable. I don't know what pointing out Sullivan and Murray were friends was supposed to do (and saying "So yeah.") if not to undermine Sullivan by virtue of his association with Murray.

Your use of the word "consciously" here doesn't do much to persuade me that that wasn't what you meant.



Really? Do you read him often? He's not a reporter, and your take is pretty distant from my take, but... yeah, we can disagree.

A lot of people on the right and the left believe that affirmative action is a regressive policy. Find me a quote where he talks about dumb-dumb blacks not being smart enough to be doctors.

Obviously I'm being facetious. But you skirted the point. Which is that is that one of the central goals of the book is to advocate reform and equality.

Murray in his own words about his book: http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/video/charles-murray/?start=2891&end=4048

Probably wouldn't hurt to read it and not have an understanding of its content that's entirely mediated through second hand reports lol

Probably wouldn't hurt to read it only read apologia and not have an understanding of its content that's entirely mediated through second hand reports uncritical lol

To be clear, I was talking about myself when a wrote that. You've clearly read more about this than I have. I've watched that video I posted and read the wikipedia article. Everything he says in that interview could be one big lie for all I know.

Part of spreading the disinformation that incite racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and islamophobia are beating down the people speaking against disinformation on these topics. Breitbart has every interest in making college protestors seem like unreasonable children, because it allows people to gloss over the fact that the students have an actual goddamn point and are protesting often with good reason.



I don't think so, no. But the line doesn't end there with Andrew Sullivan. He also used the term "Cultural Marxist". Did you watch the video I linked?

What you said earlier was "Cultural Marxist just refers to some French intellectuals". Right, well wrong because they're German, but it does just refer to some intellectuals. Why does it refer to them? Well, the people who first drew the lines connecting "Cultural Marxist" thinkers to things conservatives don't like were very much interested in the fact these same people were all Jewish, and that their Jewish nature was leading them to want to subvert white culture and people and destroy our society.

That's why I make the comparison to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Because the original use of "Cultural Marxism" is literally neo-Nazi bull****. Granted, it's been separated a bit from that usage.

But you need to think: Andrew Sullivan is friends with Charles Murray, has apologized for him, and is now using terms invented by neo-Nazis to invent a Jewish plot. At best, he's effectively normalizing and bringing mainstream far-right views. He's normalizing this ****.

Ideas aren't disembodied, replaceable cogs. People come up with these thoughts for teleological ends, they want to arrive somewhere with them. The ideas Andrew Sullivan repeats are ones with very toxic, serious origins. That should absolutely be understood and addressed.



Or maybe there's real reason to be making those claims.



I don't accuse Sullivan of being a conscious white supremacist. I'm just pointing out that really toxic ideas can work their way into mainstream intellectual culture without people knowing or understanding what the ideas exist for and what their purpose is. Honest journalists should do more research, should really look back at these things more deeply before latching on, if a journalist forwards and uses ideas which are repeatedly sourced from really ****ty places, you need to ask yourself why that's happening, why that journalist keeps doing that, and why they're unaware of how bad the ideas are.

It sounds like you resent the fact that people haven't dug as deeply as you have to discovor the true intentions of people who apparently have spent far too much time engrossed in research that reveals their immorality.

Deapite their attempt to appear otherwise, journalists are in fact NOT academic researchers. An academic can continue to hit the stacks in a perpetual cycle if it means clarifying some nuance before ever opening their mouth. A journalist, on the other hand, only needs do enough research to break a story.

What you seem to be asking is that journalists effectively live up to their own false pretense of being academic researchers, or simply requiring that they align themselves ideologically with your own academic research. The first possiblity is clearly not going to work, and the second would violate the integrity of the journalist as a neutral investigator, which in my mind is even worse. In large part, with the advent of the internet and also media deregulation, it seems the second such possibility has largely come to pass. But then we have people such as yourself, who are left unsatisfied until every single so-called journalist aligns with your particular academic conclusions. Whereas, from my point of view, even the most racist person ought to be given a fair interview (if we are still talking about actual journalism here and not theater).

Even the most racist person who happens to have done quality research on a morally controversial topic might introduce an argument that is worth distilling and separating from the person. However condescending it may sound to say that larger chunks of a population belonging to this or that race ought to be content to live in a lower caste, it wouldn't necessarily be disingenuous ipso facto to argue this point, were it not for a body of historical and institutional forces that overpower any difference in genetics. But I don't think we can just dismiss it out of hand, in particular because the intellectual rebuttal about the relative importance of genetics versus everything else may actually be the one opportunity we have to change the mind of a racist but genuine person's mind. For example, in 2016, Millennial Woes had an hour long debate with Sargon of Akkad, which culminated in Woes being forced to admit that he subscribed to a number of highly questionable logical leaps purely based on gut instinct. This probably did more to disway fence sitting observers than any kind of moral condemnation ever could have.

I suppose you think it's dangerous to even allow them to propose the notion in a public forum, though. After all, people might believe them! They could be 'right', but I doubt there isn't a potentially stronger counter argument from the left to advocate for universal solidarity across races that doesn't reduce to (however appropriate) character assassination. That said, if the person advocated for views we deem morally abhorrent is DDOSing us by simply repeating themself in a way that can't be addressed in a timely and rational way, I agree they are simply spreading hate. I haven't heard Murray speak, but I would be surprised if we had to discourage him from doing so like we ought to with people who are not academics and are purely looking to stoke people, like Milo Yianopolis.

To me, I think it should be relatively uncontroversial to propose cognition differences by race or culture. There are startling physiological differences in humans depending on how their ancestors chose to live, not just where they lived or what they looked like. Just as our metabolisms vary based on our ancestors’ lifestyles, our cognition should too: hunting would demand a different kind of thought and perception than nomadic pastoralism and sedentary agriculturalism. Some of these differences might even be better suited to modern capitalist life, which should rightly be a judgment against the latter rather than against the holder of the former.

Where you cross the line is when you use these traits to impose a partial ordering on the races. Or when you assume race is, by itself, a sufficient predictor of cognitive difference. This is the kind of thinking that needs to be eradicated. Unfortunately in doing so, a lot of people seem determined to eradicate the former thinking too.

Anyway, I have no idea what’s going on in the above debate and no patience to learn about it further. Whether an academic is a white supremacist or a vestige of eugenics doesn’t mean his research is necessarily wrong, but it would mean his conclusions probably are.

I haven't once accused any journalist of immorality. It sure seems you have a hardon with the accusations of resentfulness.



I haven't discussed his methods in finding the IQ disparity, only brought up another study on lead poisoning which seems to be a better causal explanation than genetics. I haven't much disputed the science, though I did call it pseudoscience, because I'm frankly doubtful he did the study with any conclusion in mind that wasn't "black people are inferior".

On the contrary, Charles Murray's been influential in policy making, both in the Reagan years and the Clinton years. Bill Clinton hailed Murray's research and was probably influential on the 1996 welfare cuts.

I didn't. It's an hour long and I don't have time for that. I watched enough of it to get an idea, and saw that it was a right-wing conspiracy theory, and thought there was likely little I could gain from watching it.



Woah tiger. I said no such thing, good sir. I made a cursory reference to the French and postmodernism, because Jean-Francois Lyotard was an important theoretician of postmodernism (in his book, the Postmodern Condition). But I didn't make a reference to the French and cultural Marxism.



Sure, but here's what I think your big problem is. You need to disassociate this Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory that your fixated on from the school of thought which the term describes. It may be true that there is this McCarthyite right-wing conspiracy theory that says the "PC" school of thought that is dominant in the academy at the moment is a Jewish conspiracy to infiltrate America or blah blah blah whatever. Fine, that conspiracy exists. But that doesn't mean that anyone who criticizes the ideas associated with that school of thought-- even if they use the term Cultural Marxists -- buys into that conspiracy theory, nor even are they propagating it. And I can assure you of that, because I've read my share of critiques of "campus politics" and I was never once under the impression that it was a Jewish conspiracy.

It strikes me that what is useful is to actually find a term to describe what these ideas are. I think the best term isn't "PC", or "Cultural Marxism", or "campus politics", or "identity politics". All of those terms are either derogatory or inaccurate in some other way. I think the best name for it, really, is the "New Left". The problem with that term is that it's associated specifically with the 60s, but most of the developments of the intellectual tradition (e.g., Judith Butler) still originate in the thought of the New Left.

There are elements of this thinking that are familiar: taking, for instance, the post-colonial critique of Franz Fanon and applying it to American imperialism (which occurred within the context of the Vietnam war), or Marcuse's emphasis on sexuality as the ultimate vehicle for the liberation of the self (which influenced both the sexual revolution of the 60s and inspired LGBTQ activism) and his diminishment of class-based politics (which contributed to taking class conflict out of leftist politics, and is a reason why neoliberalism and identity politics sometimes go hand in hand), or Derrida or Levinas' concern about the "violence" inherent in language, or Foucault's ideas about the way that knowledge serves power (an idea which ultimately gave rise to several academic disciplines such as gender studies or queer studies and various other forms of identity-based academic disciplines). I agree, that ideas pass through people without them being aware of their origin. Many of the slogans and the political jargon that's employed unreflectively by undergraduates these days (and by myself when I was an undergraduate) ultimately comes from these thinkers (who, by the way, aren't all German, or Jewish, for that matter).

To identify the sources of these ideas is not conspiratorial. It's just history. And the ideas are just ideas. A person isn't a white supremacist -- conscious or otherwise -- just because they happen to disagree with them. To identify these texts as the sources of the ideologies that dominant campus politics is no different from pointing out that the American founding fathers read Locke, or that Lenin read Marx. And the idea that criticizing these ideas is inherently antisemitic, or implicitly antisemitic, or propagates antisemitic ideas, is just plain silly.



Heh, what conclusion will I arrive at at the end of this thinking? Again, it seems like you're trying to make a case that Sullivan is bad because he's friends with Murray (or, in other words, guilt by association).

Again, he's not mainstreaming or normalizing far-right views. The ideological background of his piece is liberalism, and he's criticizing the radical left primarily insofar as they're failing to be liberal.

Also, it's pretty clear that political terminology changes all the time takes on completely distinct meanings. For a completely obvious example, look no further than fake news, which, as you'll recall, began as a term to describe fabricated articles written by Macedonians, and then started to be used by Trump to dismiss and delegitimize real news sites.



There it is, the word "conscious", again, conspicuously...

No, I'm making the case that he hasn't properly evaluated the status of Murray due to his friendship. I'm not making a claim about Sullivan's morality, nor do I really have an opinion.

How can you say that you're not making a claim about Sullivan's morality after you've repeatedly called him an "unconscious" white supremacist?

And how could you possibly know that his friendship with Murray has made him incapable of reading his book without bias?

I didn't repeatedly call him an "unconscious" white supremacist, I said he's not a conscious white supremacist. You're the one insisting that I'm calling him a white supremacist. He might be white supremacist, he might not be, I don't have the time or the inclination to read that far into his writing, because it's not worth my time.

I don't "know" in a strict sense, it's just a hunch.

As far as that post: what you're saying about the influence of postmodern thinkers is b.s.

They simply aren't as influential as you're making them sound.

Well I agree that that is simple.

Neither did I, but that didn't stop me from posting about it. :downs: Sorry if I misrepresented your ideas Reid.

Is this whole discussion about whether or not we should trust Andrew Sullivan? It seems pretty long-winded if that was the only intent.

I already don't really trust him because he's a libertarian. If you think he's racist it might just be a by-product of the drop in his effective IQ that holding that ideology entails (especially concerning the capitalism and partial order thing that Jon`C mentioned, which I especially agree with).