Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

This blog will pay for itself.

American History and Black History Cannot Be Separated

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

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Long Read Scroll: “Liking Jazz Is Not Enough”

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NERDFIGHT!

Yes, of interest only to specialists or fellow OCD sufferers: Blog favorite Ta-Nehisi Coates applauding Jeet Heer (who just took a job with the “new” TNR) bashing favorite blog-target Andrew Sullivan.

I’d forgotten (I did hate-read the original “Bell Curve” issue, which caused me to cancel my subscription for the first or second time) that all the TNR writers who were not Andrew Sullivan or Marty Perez had strong disagreements with that article.

You may now resume your regularly scheduled Balloon Juice.

Reader Interactions

160Comments

  4. 4.

    lamh36

    Please delete the comment in moderation. Thanks.

    Gonna try again.

    Evening peeps.

    Been hearing alot about the “Selma” movie this week. I was always gonna see Selma, but I also had the Angelina Jolie movie “Unbroken” on my ‘biopic” list. Of the two though, I’ve had at least 3 or 4 people I trust to review movies who have told me that Unbroken is “uneven” and not as good as the hype. Selma on the other hand, I’ve been told is STELLAR. In fact I was told to bring tissue because it’s uplifting, yet bitterswet.

    On Rotten Tomatoes, it has 43 critic reviews so far, has a 100% rating among critics and 95% among audiences who have seen it. Wow!

    Here’s a new clip from the movie.

    Selma New Trailer

    I ain’t gonna lie, when the lil girls says at the beginning of this clip “Uncle Marty!” with such joy, I get a little misty!

  5. 5.

    satby

    Just had a gift exchange with one set of neighbors, ready for some last minute baking for the other two sets that I will finish tomorrow because tonight we had wine and now I’m sleepy.
    And Christmas in Connecticut will be streaming on Amazon Prime on the Roku.
    Life is good! Maybe I need one more glass of wine with some pumpkin cake to energize me.

  6. 6.

    Roger Moore

    I was especially pissed at Sullivan’s bullshit about welfare reform being an honest, if misguided, attempt to help blacks. It seems like it’s the epitome of the problem of having a lily-white, mostly Jewish staff. They could get away with telling themselves that they were honestly trying to help only because they were so out of touch. If they had actually had some blacks on staff, or even regularly talked to blacks about their ideas, they might have seen how vicious and destructive their ideas were.

  10. 10.

    Trentrunner

    Every time Sully uses the “I’m just asking questions” defense for The Bell Curve horseshit, I wish someone would ask him:

    “Hey, Andrew, can we devote an entire issue of a prestigious political ideas magazine to the question of gay men’s pedophilia? Not everyone agrees how serious the problem of gay men raping children is, so let’s have a number of views aired, shall we?”

    And, lest we forget, Sullivan advertised for (and had) unsafe sex while he was HIV positive.

    He really a piece of work. And, as Atrios has pointed out, Sully acts all even-handed and contrite now about publishing racist horseshit, but in a month after this flare-up blows over, Sully will be blithely bragging about being the “first” to publish the “brave” debate on whether black people are stupid.

    He’s a bad, bad person.

  11. 11.

    Roger Moore

    @dedc79:
    Anything that narrows the background of a group makes it more susceptible to that kind of mistake. Being dominated by white men makes them pretty narrow, but being dominated by white Jewish men narrows it that much more. It’s probably just as bad that they were predominantly white Ivy League men.

  12. 12.

    Iowa Old Lady

    I saw the previews for Selma. It looked outstanding.

    How funny that Hannity’s colleagues think he’s the worst. Sometimes I convince myself his on-air persona is an act, but maybe he really is that dumb and nasty.

  14. 14.

    Schlemazel

    @lamh36:
    I thought the trailer for “Unbroken” looked like it was going to try too hard, the whole story was done in 3 minutes of trailer.

    OTOH the minister that confirmed me marched at Selma a few months before beginning the classes. He told us stories about his experiences and I am very interested in seeing that film.

  15. 15.

    Schlemazel

    @Trentrunner:

    He’s a bad, bad person.

    That should be the motto of his blog, it should be the title of his columns it should be tattooed on his forehead and his ass and it should be on his headstone. It is the only constant for the little prick, he is a bad, bad person.

  16. 16.

    different-church-lady

    So apparently this “Storify” thing is a way of taking a technology that’s completely unsuited for long-form communication and converting it into long-form communication, because people have become too idiotically trendy to simply use the technology we already had that was better suited for long-form communication?

  17. 17.

    Hal

    I was working in a bookstore (RIP Mediaplay) when the Bell Curve came out. We had a huge stack of those doorstops on an end cap in anticipation of all the controversy surrounding the book. What was infuriating to my then barely 20 year old self was the constant commenting by certain numbers of white people that being told you were genetically inferior to every other race of people was not in fact 1.racist 2. anything to feel offended by because 3. everyone falls short on the intelligence scale to Asian people. So no biggie!

  18. 18.

    Mandalay

    Whoa!…Sullivan is upping the ante, defending The Bell Curve, and going after TNC:

    So much of TNC’s rhetoric against this book is not actually about the book at all. He is debating imaginary arguments in his head because he refuses to debate the actual ones in the data. What, to paraphrase Freddie, is he afraid of?

    America’s finest living writer vs. a vacuous, pompous peacock desperate for mouse clicks.

  20. 20.

    PaulW

    The Horde is all atwitter – in a way, not every member of the OTAN is on Twitter itself – about the bashing. Dammit Ta-Nehisi we need another Open Thread this holiday season!, the Horde awaits!

  21. 21.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Trentrunner: to be fair, the sully sex ad specified his status. Some of my poz friends do the same thing with other poz guys. Not gonna make your hiv any worse. There’s a community out there.

    Otherwise though yeah sully is a twit. But that one always makes me a little uncomfortable when it’s brought up as a criticism.

  22. 22.

    different-church-lady

    @Hal:

    “Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”

    “Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

    “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

    “Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we ——”

    “Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

    F. Scott Fitzgerald, 90 years ago, proving nothing ever really changes…

  23. 23.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    @lamh36:

    “Selma” has already been nominated for several awards (including a few Golden Globes) so that seems like the one to see. The film’s director is the first black woman to be nominated for a GG as a director.

    Another really good MLK movie is Clark Johnson’s “Boycott,” which he directed for HBO. It has a stellar cast and an interesting faux-documentary look. Erik Todd Dellums (who had a great arc on “Homicide”) steals the movie as Bayard Rustin. Highly recommended for stay-at-homes since it should be available to stream on Netflix and/or Amazon.

  24. 24.

    Mandalay

    @different-church-lady:

    this “Storify” thing is a way of taking a technology that’s completely unsuited for long-form communication and converting it into long-form communication

    Pretty much, and its death can’t come soon enough for me.

    Or perhaps we should jump on the bandwagon and start creating a separate post for each sentence every time we comment.

  25. 25.

    different-church-lady

    @Baud: It’s in Coates’ tweet. Jeet uses Storify to string together a 38 tweet rebuttal of Sullivan’s reply to Coates. Talk about taking the long way…

  26. 26.

    gogol's wife

    @Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):

    Is that Clark Johnson the guy who was a regular on Homicide? (I can never keep straight the people named Clark.) If so, he’s a great actor.

    ETA: Apparently it’s him, although he’s aged. Haven’t we all.

  28. 28.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Somewhere there MUST be a 16 ton weight that can accidentally fall on Andrew Sullivan.

    It needs to be found, and the scenario triggered into action.

  29. 29.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    @different-church-lady:

    I can’t link from iPad, but I have an interesting book called “Evil Sisters” that details a lot of the “scientific” racism and sexism that’s in classic early 20th century literature, including Hemingway, Faulkner, and Conrad. Since that “science” has now been disproven, those parts of the books are usually taught as being symbolic, but the author shows that they’re actually based on the pop science of the day.

    The book kind of falls apart towards the end when he tries to link everything to the Holocaust, but it’s interesting up until that part. He has a lot of examples that he’s able to match up with newspaper and magazine articles of the time.

  30. 30.

    Trentrunner

    @Mandalay: What a magnificent racist misogynist asshole he is.

    He is a blight.

    And since he’s known to read the comments here, let me ask you, Andrew:

    Why not give a whole week’s worth of The Dish to the longrunning debate on whether gay men are predisposed to rape children?

    I mean, it’s certainly an idea that’s “in the air,” as they say, and there’s plenty of (completely horseshit) research on the question.

    And we’re just following the data and arguments to see where they lead, in the best spirit of open inquiry.

    Right, Andrew? So, how about it? Where are all you deep, Oakeshottian treatises on gay men as pedophiles?

    (And after that, you can do a week on whether women are too emotional to be president. There’s measurable data from endocrinologists on that one, so do get on it.)

  31. 31.

    Steve from Antioch

    I really do not get TNC. Sometimes he is one of the most brilliant and original thinkers out there. His thing in the Atlantic yesterday (http://www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates/) was truly thoughtful and original:

    To challenge the police is to challenge the American people, and the problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that we are majoritarian pigs. When the police are brutalized by people, we are outraged because we are brutalized. By the same turn, when the police brutalize people, we are forgiving because ultimately we are really just forgiving ourselves.

    But then today he tweets about the Bell Curve kerfluffle:

    Life is short. And there are much more pressing–and actually interesting–questions than “Are you less human than me?”

    It really takes some major effort to distort the thesis of the Bell Curve into “Are you less human than me.” Worse than dumb, its’ just bad faith.

    ———

    Every time Sully uses the “I’m just asking questions” defense for The Bell Curve horseshit, I wish someone would ask him:

    “Hey, Andrew, can we devote an entire issue of a prestigious political ideas magazine to the question of gay men’s pedophilia? Not everyone agrees how serious the problem of gay men raping children is, so let’s have a number of views aired, shall we?”

    I can’t speak for Sullivan, but I would have no problem at all with a magazine devoting an issue to that topic, provided they did it the same way as TNR did the Bell Curve where the dissenting voices were given considerably more space. After the bigoted idiots advanced the argument that gay men raping children is a serious problem, the non-idiots could then carefully dismantle the argument and the idiocy would be well documented for everyone to see.

    The reason why the Bell Curve causes such controversy is because it’s assertions are not so easily rejected.

  35. 35.

    different-church-lady

    @Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): Sadly, too many great artists still swim in the tainted waters of their times. Fitzgerald (in Gatsby) and Steinbeck are notable exceptions.

    Just so there’s no confusion for those who haven’t read the novel: in the passage I’ve quoted from Gatsby, it’s clear that we’re to be disgusted by Tom Buchannan’s racism. What struck me when I first read it all those years after it was written was how familiar Tom’s rant sounded to modern ears.

  37. 37.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Selma, The Imitation Game, and Unbroken are all movies I’m eager to see. Despite all the recent hype, though, I haven’t the vaguest interest in seeing The Interview. I never heard of Seth Rogen until the hacking story broke, I don’t like what I’ve heard since then, and I see no compelling reason to change that status.

  38. 38.

    lamh36

    @Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): the movie looks good. From some readings it also seems the movie does NOT shy away from the subject of King’s infedility. He doesn’t put him on a pedestal, but through scenes with King and wife Corretta, Duvernay tries to show the human side to the man (one such scene i’m hearing about alot involves those taped recording Hoover sent to Corretta King of MLK with another woman. A move by Hoover, BTW, that if not directly ordered by LBJ, was sanctioned when he “allowed” Hoover to do what he could to “distract” King from his plans vis a vis Voting Rights Act).

    @Schlemazel:
    The director I think as smart because unlike Jolie, she chose to focus on the Selma marches, rather than trying to do a true “biopic” of the whole life of MLK (which to my mind there is STILL nothing better than Paul Winfield’s portrayal of King for the TV movie). Jolie on the other hand chose to try to do a complete biopic from life to present and from reviews I’ve read, it was too extraordinary of a life to delegate to just under 3 hrs.

  40. 40.

    different-church-lady

    @different-church-lady:

    Fitzgerald (in Gatsby) and Steinbeck are notable exceptions.

    Now that I think about it, Fitzgerald had an utterly unsympathetic, unironic Jewish caricature in “Gatsby”, so no pass for him either.

  41. 41.

    eemom

    There is a certain beauty to a post about Andrew Sullivan, a few of the comments on which so far suggest the potential seedlings of a TBogg unit, upon this Christmas Eve-Eve….kind of the BJ equivalent of gathering ’round the fire whilst a gentle snowfall begins…..

  49. 49.

    Baud

    Bradley Stone, the Iraq War veteran suspected of killing his ex-wife and five of her relatives in a rampage last week, killed himself with poison as police hunted for him in rural Pennsylvania, officials revealed Tuesday.

  50. 50.

    jl

    @Mandalay:

    ” Whoa!…Sullivan is upping the ante, defending The Bell Curve, and going after TNC: ”

    Sad. From what I have seen, most people who are impressed with the Bell,Curve are innumerate (that would include Sullivan), or are not familiar with the econometric statistical methods. The Bell Curve is a conceptual, methodological and statistical mess.

    But, don’t take my word for it. Link below is a review of the book by Charles Manski and the late Arthur Goldberger. Good to read even if you don’t know much statistics, since they do a good job of laying out the conceptual messes of the book. I hate to impugn motives, but their (edit: Bell Curve’s) literature review (and resulting assumptions they used for their statistics) was quite skimpy, selective and biased, suspiciously so

    Review Article: The Bell Curve by
    Herrnstein and Murray”

    By ARTHURS. GOLDBERGER and CHARLES F. MANSKI

    https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=http://www.academicroom.com/sites/default/files/book_review/231/Arthur+S.+Goldberger,+The+Bell+Curve+by+Herrnstein+and+Murray.pdf

    I think that link is available to public without pay or other BS.

    Edit: the Goldberger Manski is a much more informative review than Heckman’s. I think Heckman got so angry half way through his review he just started yelling at the book. Which is understandable, but not helpful to readers. Goldberger and Manski show admirable patience and self-control.

  51. 51.

    Redshift

    @Steve from Antioch:

    It really takes some major effort to distort the thesis of the Bell Curve into “Are you less human than me.” Worse than dumb, its’ just bad faith.

    Seriously? Intelligence is pretty much universally regarded as the thing that makes us human, and you think for a book that purports to “prove” that one “race” is inherently less intelligent, it is a “major effort to distort” to characterize that as “are you less human than me?”

    Even leaving aside the extremely sordid history of what that “lesser intelligence” argument has been used to justify, no, it’s not a stretch to see this as an attempt to justify more of the same.

    The reason why the Bell Curve causes such controversy is because it’s assertions are not so easily rejected.

    No, the reason it causes controversy is because it’s an appalling “assertion,” eagerly lapped up by those who are perennially looking for “facts” to support their prejudices. Its thesis is fairly easily refuted for anyone who takes evidence more seriously than “assertions.”

  52. 52.

    Baud

    FBI agents arrested a Colorado man who posted online threats advocating the killing of police officers after investigators received a tip-off about one of the messages from Google, prosecutors said on Tuesday.

    Jeremiah M. Perez, 33, was detained without incident at his home in Colorado Springs on Monday and faces up to five years in federal prison if convicted, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado said in a statement.

  53. 53.

    Redshift

    @SatanicPanic:

    Watch me.

    The Bell Curve is stupid and anyone who buys that crap is an idiot.

    See? Easy.

    Nice assertion. Apparently some people find that sort of thing convincing, as long as it’s stated firmly enough.

  54. 54.

    NotMax

    Oy.

    Sullivan and TNR thread? Could. Not. Care. Less.

    As a certain Mr. E. Scrooge once said, “I’ll retire to Bedlam.”

  57. 57.

    Hal

    @Steve from Antioch:

    The reason why the Bell Curve causes such controversy is because it’s assertions are not so easily rejected.

    It’s controversial because it’s racist dogma attempting to shape American social policy regarding welfare, after school programs, affirmative action etc. There are numerous, numerous articles that completely debunk The Bell Curve “science.” To expect Coates to continuously entertain the question of whether black people are inferior, and that is the ultimate assertion of The Bell Curve, is asking someone to question how valuable their very existence is to this world.

  58. 58.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @efgoldman:

    I mentioned on Facebook my unfamiliarity with Mr. Rogen and his oeuvre. Promptly, I heard from four or five friends from the old Lord Peter Wimsey/Dorothy L. Sayers discussion groups all saying they had also never heard of Seth Rogen. We are all feeling quite smug and elitist about being out of the pop-cultural loop.

  59. 59.

    Baud

    An aerial search for the embalmed body of a woman whose head was recovered this month along a lonely rural road was due to begin on Tuesday, police in western Pennsylvania said.

    Police in the borough of Economy, 22 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, said they were exploring a number of theories as to how the head wound up on the roadside, including the possibility of a grave robbery or that the body was intercepted on its journey from a funeral home to a cemetery.

  61. 61.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    @Redshift:

    At this point, I feel that “The Bell Curve” has been debunked so many times that there’s no point in even debating its claims. That’s like saying we have to present scientific proof that the Earth is round every time a flat-earther pops up. It’s not an assertion to say, “The Earth is not flat, you stupid git.”

    IMO, anyway.

  63. 63.

    jl

    @Steve from Antioch:

    ” The reason why the Bell Curve causes such controversy is because it’s assertions are not so easily rejected. ”

    The literature review that they use to set up the assumptions for their analysis is very incomplete selective, and biased.
    They don’t understand the concept or statistics of the measure of heredity they use as a basis for half their analysis (and this leads to some awkward conceptual and statistical inconsistencies in the latter half of the book).
    They confuse within group and between group variation, and they confuse both with what they want their measure of heredity to do (but cannot do because they misuse it).
    They don’t report enough of their measure of socio-economic status well enough to know whether it is worth anything or does what it supposed to do in their statistical analysis.
    They bungle their analysis of the relative roles of socio-economic status versus IQ in determining success. The are vaguely aware of this problem, but use the wrong technique (standardized coefficients) which they think solves the problem but does not. In fact using it makes the problems in their analysis worse.
    They seem to have no clue about about the relationship between statistical correlation and causal models in determining which causal model is most consistent with their statistics.
    They misstate the results of large scale early education intervention studies, and that problem is not prophetic since the book’s conclusions about them look more and more wrong every year that goes by.

    These problems are all nicely summarized in the Goldberger Manski review linked to above. The book is a methodological mess.
    I also think it is important to discuss, since I think it should be clear that too many whites hold attitudes that are partly shaped by credibility given to the Bell Curve, an unreliable book full of botched concepts and statistics.

  64. 64.

    Steve from Antioch

    @Redshift:

    Seriously? Intelligence is pretty much universally regarded as the thing that makes us human, and you think for a book that purports to “prove” that one “race” is inherently less intelligent, it is a “major effort to distort” to characterize that as “are you less human than me?”

    Yes, completely serious. I reject the idea that there are degrees of being human.

    Even leaving aside the extremely sordid history of what that “lesser intelligence” argument has been used to justify, no, it’s not a stretch to see this as an attempt to justify more of the same.

    There’s the rub. Much of the anger about the Bell Curve is directed towards theoretical things that might happen if the premises are true.

    In any event, it’s interesting that the past 20 years has certainly seen increasing stratification (and concentration of wealth) among fewer and fewer people, many of whom would fall into the “cognitive elite” categories described by the Bell Curve. There’s no question in my mind that changes in tax policy, trade agreements, and globalization have been the primary drivers of that, not heritable intelligence but it does underline the question of what we, as a society, need to do about this stratification. If you operate under the premise that – hey everybody has equal abilities and its just luck that some get rich and other’s don’t, you get a different set of answers.

    If you look at the Bell Curve’s thesis as more diagnostic than prescriptive,
    But even there, I think the anticipatory critics miss the boat.

    The reason why the Bell Curve causes such controversy is because it’s assertions are not so easily rejected.

    No, the reason it causes controversy is because it’s an appalling “assertion,” eagerly lapped up by those who are perennially looking for “facts” to support their prejudices. Its thesis is fairly easily refuted for anyone who takes evidence more seriously than “assertions.”

  66. 66.

    Steve from Antioch

    @jl: Like I said, the ideas are not easily rejected. That doesn’t mean that the ideas are “right.”

    Indeed, there is very little about the Goldberger analysis that is “easy.”

  67. 67.

    mai naem mobile

    Lawrence Odonnell just said George HW Bush is in the hospital because he was short of breath. After that last hospitalization where the emails from the sister were hacked, I have to wonder how long HW’s going to hold up. The last few times I’ve seen him on the teevee he seems fragile.

    As far as Sully can’t stand him. Another Oxbridge accented condescending pompous prick. But,hey, ask me what I really think of him.

  68. 68.

    Mike E

    @Redshift: Mismeasure is Gould’s thesis, the main tenet of his writing career where he embraces the inherent subjectivity of any scientist’s pursuit of “objective” fact…the image of a researcher stuffing pumpkin seeds into a Caucasian skull to prove superiority is an act being repeated over and over today.

    I regret Gould’s absence in a world hellbent on repeating mistakes of a seemingly less enlightened past. We really can’t get out of our own way.

  69. 69.

    jl

    @Steve from Antioch: Have you tried to read the whole thing? You don’t need to know any statistics at all to understand a lot of the criticisms in the review.

    Also I think part of the problem of ‘hard to refute’ is that people like James Heckman, Arthur Goldberger and Charles Manski were never asked to write popular reviews for magazines like the TNR.

    It’s nice that the TNR staff staged a revolt, and insisted on rebuttals to go along with the excerpt, but except for Michael Kinsley to some extent, none of them could address the methods or statistics very well. Of course, getting a review for layman written by methods and subject matter experts was the editor’s job. And I believe that was Sullivan’s job, which he didn’t do.

  70. 70.

    Steve from Antioch

    @Hal: No, its fine for Coats to just ignore this or just say any of the things you said. Instead he just made a silly claim – he might as well have said “There are plenty of better things to do other than you to line me and my family up against a wall for execution.”

    His move was purely a rhetorical maneuver. You’ll notice that he has since lined up further tweets and links to rebut Sullivan. So it isn’t that he is just refusing to engage in a pointless battle – its that he is trying to position himself to better lob insults.

    That said – I am not the anti TNC. I thought Sullivan’s first piece rebutting TNC’s column was very sloppy. Sullivan, just like TNC, puffed up TNC’s minor arguments so he could huff and puff and knock them down. He avoided addressing what I thought were the most damning parts of TNC’s critique – that bits about the Glass fabrication and the other fabrication (I forget the author’s name) that just happened to contains racist stereotypes that TNR’s editors seemed comfortable promoting.

    It’s also interesting there Heer Jeet’s twitter novella contains a bit about Sullivan being “hand wavey” or something. C’mon, dude, just go ahead and call the guy a faggot, why don’t cha?

    Its strange that people who are generally pretty bright and sane are just shitting all over themselves about this.

  71. 71.

    Mike in NC

    We watched the finale of “Colbert Report” and recognized Sully and Katie Couric and Dancing Dave Gregory among the guests. At least half of them were unfamiliar.

  72. 72.

    Belafon

    @Steve from Antioch:

    There’s the rub. Much of the anger about the Bell Curve is directed towards theoretical things that might happen if the premises are true.

    Actually, the anger is because people still quote it even though there has been no other evidence to back it up. It’s like claiming that cold fusion is still real based on the one paper in 1990.

  74. 74.

    Mnemosyne

    @different-church-lady:

    Hey, if you want to spend your time trying to scientifically prove to a flat-earther or a bell-curver that their “scientific” belief is flat-out wrong, have at it. Everyone has their own idea of fun. But I’m pretty sure that gouging out your own eyeballs with red-hot knitting needles will be a more productive use of your time.

  76. 76.

    jl

    @Belafon: I would say much of the anger is directed at what Murray and Herrnstein say SHOULD happen as policy, if their conclusions were true. And much of their policy advice was not really supported by their own flawed analysis (another point Goldberger and Manksi cover in the review).

    I don’t have the reference now, but I read experiences Herrnstein had with his colleagues with him when he was working on The Bell Curve. I don’t know of Herrnstein spent his whole life this way, but later on in life he became a pretty thorough going and committed racial bigot. He would corner people he thought sympathetic to his views and talk about all the informal observational research he had done on blacks and how they weren’t much good for anything in the white man’s world. If the analysis in the Bell Curve were worth anything, that might not mean much, but it isn’t so I think just maybe Herrnstein’s personal attitudes and apparently, convictions, should be considered.

  77. 77.

    Mnemosyne

    @Steve from Antioch:

    Like I said, the ideas are not easily rejected.

    The only reason the ideas are not easily rejected is because they have 400 years of racial prejudice behind them, and folk superstitions die hard.

    Once upon a time, it was “scientific fact” that a woman’s uterus would fall out if she exercised too much. There are people who still believe it today. So do we need to carefully examine the claim and make a detailed, science-based rejection of it each and every time it comes up? Or can we cut to the chase and say, “That’s stupid.”

  78. 78.

    Mnemosyne

    @PurpleGirl:

    I’ve only seen the reviews, and the main thing seems to be that the movie faithfully reproduces the musical, for both good and bad. If you love the musical, you’ll probably love the movie (and apparently Meryl Streep is terrific as the witch). If you think the musical is flawed, you’ll probably think the movie is flawed.

  79. 79.

    jl

    @Mnemosyne: There is a lot of evidence that exposure to HRC (edit: who is a woman) makes Tweety’s balls start toe detach and dissolve into puddles of goo.

    Edit: which causes poor Tweety much distress and incoherent panic.

  80. 80.

    Roger Moore

    @Redshift:

    Nice assertion. Apparently some people find that sort of thing convincing, as long as it’s stated firmly enough.

    I think it’s more important that it agree with their prejudices than that it be stated firmly.

  82. 82.

    Mike J

    @jl:

    I would say much of the anger is directed at what Murray and Herrnstein say SHOULD happen as policy, if their conclusions were true

    Isn’t it curious that people who claim a biological basis for racial superiority never suggest that the “superior” race pay more to properly take care of the “inferior” race? If the Bell Curve were correct, wouldn’t white people have a responsibility to redistribute their wealth to black people?

  83. 83.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Assuming that you aren’t asking this purely facetiously, it was economics. Literacy rates were rising, but pay rates weren’t tracking. Books were relatively expensive. Selling the story on the installment plan, and offsetting the retail price by selling advertising (Dickens was publishing in weekly and monthly magazines and newspapers) moved copy and generated more revenue than could be expected by publishing in book form.

  84. 84.

    Steve from Antioch

    @Mike J: Indeed, if reparations are appropriate because of a history of racial discrimination (as TNC seems to believe) one would think that they would be equally appropriate if the disparity is due to biological reasons.

  85. 85.

    Aimai

    @Roger Moore: sullivan is, obviously, not jewish. And it should be pretty fucking obvious that there are plenty if top flight jewish writers and intellectuals who were and are seriuosly on the left and anti racist and even anti zionist. Tnr was a very tiny slice of jewish thought.

  86. 86.

    Schlemazel

    @Mike J:
    No, really it would be better for everyone if the superior race took the inferior one in and housed and clothed them in exchange for their working their whole lives for the superior race. Us superior ones could set up great farms with an impressive manion out front befitting our stature while the lesser races we care for so benevolently could have little shacks out back.

  88. 88.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Steve from Antioch: contains a bit about Sullivan being “hand wavey” or something

    Seriously, you’ve never heard of something quantitatively or methodologically deficient being dismissed as a “hand-waving argument”? Has nothing at all to do with sexuality, it’s entirely about the lack of rigor. Stand at the board and wave your hands around instead of writing a proof.

  90. 90.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim: it’s kind of irrelevant. It’s one way of expressing information. There are a lot! If somebody wants to pay a serial tweeter, cool. If somebody wants to pay a revolutionary era pamphleteer, cool. If they don’t, still cool. It’s no onion on my belt if somebody decides to express themselves slightly differently than they used to.

    Now suppose that you had a big Twitter following but no blog. It’d make sense to use the one people read, no?

  91. 91.

    Steeplejack

    @different-church-lady:

    [. . .] Fitzgerald had an utterly unsympathetic, unironic Jewish caricature in Gatsby, so no pass for him either.

    Haven’t read it in a while, but my memory is that that character (Meyer Wolfsheim) was unsympathetic (more) because he was a gangster, not because he was Jewish. Apologies if I’m thinking of the wrong character.

  93. 93.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): I know why dickens did that. But people were conflating profit with dissemination method which I think is stupid, given that most tweeters and bloggers aren’t looking to publish. It also reeks of people being befuddled by (silly as they may seem) new IT. Remember when we all thought twitter was a stupid idea? Well now we only think serial tweets are a stupid idea.

    ETA: and I’m also happy to quote the “kids these days” quotes about how literacy is ruining society. By socrates.

  94. 94.

    mouse tolliver

    @Trentrunner:

    And, lest we forget, Sullivan advertised for (and had) unsafe sex while he was HIV positive.

    I’ll never forget. Because I remember reading about his bareback sex ad after seeing his sanctimonious finger wagging at the gay community on Politically Incorrect. Sully was doing the gay version of the Bill Cosby pound cake creampie speech before Bill Cosby started doing the pound cake speech. Pull your pants up, gay people!

  97. 97.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Is it alright if I think both are stupid ideas? Not that I think that they’re equally stupid, because using Storify makes it easier for someone like me who can’t follow who’s responding to who or what when I’m reading through Twitter fights.

  98. 98.

    Schlemazel

    @Gin & Tonic:
    Just one more thing SfA does not know; add that to the lack of scientific rigor in “The Bell Curve” and the excellent debunking of their statistics and their pseudo-science.

  100. 100.

    Mike in NC

    Sullivan should never be allowed to live down his bullshit about “the decadent left in their enclaves on the coasts”.

  101. 101.

    different-church-lady

    @Mnemosyne: As usual, my supportive comments are misunderstood as critical (which is my bad): what I was getting at is that sometimes a put-down is a much more appropriate tool for certain jobs than a scientific rebuttal.

  102. 102.

    maeve

    @different-church-lady:

    None of get a pass in life – it is not graded pass/fail

    Edited to add – I had not remembered this passage from the Great Gatsby – my high school teacher concentrated more on the green light (plus I was a bored teenager).

    “Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”
    “Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

    “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

    “Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we ——”

    “Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

    I can’t read this other then a send-up of the “scientific” idea of “race”.

  103. 103.

    Mnemosyne

    @different-church-lady:

    Ah, okay — sorry about that.

    But since I’m way behind on finishing my nephew’s hat in time for Christmas day, gouging out my eyes with these knitting needles was starting to sound like a good idea anyway. I hate seed stitch.

  105. 105.

    Steve from Antioch

    @Gin & Tonic: It’s a bit tone deaf to assert its fine because there are innocuous connotations. The homophobia theme is alive and well – just look at some of the posts in this thread re Sullivan.

    Its about like arguing that TNC was being “niggardly” and then to protest that it is a perfectly fine word and, gosh, why would anyone think anything racist was being implied?

  109. 109.

    eemom

    @Steve from Antioch:

    Its about like arguing that TNC was being “niggardly” and then to protest that it is a perfectly fine word and, gosh, why would anyone think anything racist was being implied?

    RIP, any remaining doubt that you are dumber than dirt.

  110. 110.

    maeve

    @different-church-lady:

    Yep I was quoting him (or quoting his quote) but the time limit on editing prevented me from attributing it – my bad

    I really do need to re-read Great Gatsby = read it in high school but as said we focused on other themes

  111. 111.

    Cervantes

    @Mike E:

    I regret Gould’s absence in a world hellbent on repeating mistakes of a seemingly less enlightened past.

    I miss him, too — his decency, his encyclopaedic mind, his passion — many’s the cup we shared in his basement rooms at the MCZ and quite literally did we sing Darwin’s praises together — but, to be honest, Mismeasure is an ironically flawed work in which Steve made some of the very mistakes he was criticizing others for. Excoriate The Bell Curve, by all means, but better do it without reference to Mismeasure.

  112. 112.

    Steve from Antioch

    @eemom: I’m not surprised that you are one of those people whose analytic abilities depend almost entirely on whether or not you agree with someone.

    Sod off.

  114. 114.

    Little Boots

    @Steeplejack:

    I think you’re remembering correctly, and it may be, hey jewish gangster, worse, but I don’t think it was specifically about stirring up anti semitism.

  116. 116.

    PurpleGirl

    @Mnemosyne: No, you can’t poke your eyes out. I like reading your comments here and don’t want you to hurt yourself. I agree that seed stitch is a bitch.

  117. 117.

    Mandalay

    @Steve from Antioch:

    The homophobia theme is alive and well – just look at some of the posts in this thread re Sullivan.

    And not just this thread – it regularly surfaces in threads on BJ involving Sullivan. The same thing used to occur in BJ threads involving Glenn Greenwald as well.

    No matter how irrelevant it may be to the subject under discussion, some posters here feel bound to discuss the sexuality of Sullivan and Greenwald. They are inexorably drawn to it like moths to a flame. That’s homophobia for you.

  120. 120.

    Steve from Antioch

    @Mandalay: Exactly right. And, of course, I am sure that the various homophobes hereabouts are about to trot out the “some of my best friends are gay” argument, or, better yet, the “I’m gay, so I’m not homophobic.”

  121. 121.

    different-church-lady

    @Mandalay: I’ve always considered the fact that they’re gay to be utterly irrelevant to the fact that they’re both blowhards.

    And Twitter is still stupid.

  123. 123.

    different-church-lady

    @Cervantes: Technically a perfectly cromulent word, yet a citizen of the 21st century easily avoids unnecessary trouble by eschewing it.

  124. 124.

    Steve from Antioch

    @Cervantes: No shit.

    But, I tell you what, if someone uses “niggardly” to criticize an African-American, it is a pretty safe bet that the person is either a precious, naive soul whose heart is purer than the driven show or a racist asshole.

  125. 125.

    Mnemosyne

    @Roger Moore:

    It’s not that he’s dumber than dirt; he’s trolling.

    How can you tell the difference?

    Or, to quote Vonnegut, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

  126. 126.

    Steve from Antioch

    @Cervantes: I wish I had exposure to him in the context you did. I only saw him when he guest lectured a few times and there was such a “rock star” build up that it was kind of hard to just appreciate him as a person or an academic.

  128. 128.

    Steeplejack

    @Little Boots:

    Yeah, I was going to add that the analogy today would be TV cop shows where they reference, say, Russian gangsters from Brighton Beach. It’s a shorthand descriptor for the gangsters, not a denigration of all Russians. Ditto for Fitzgerald and gangsters, often Jewish, in the 1920s.

  129. 129.

    Steve from Antioch

    @Mnemosyne:

    Hey Mnemosyne, I tell you what. Why don’t you go fuck yourself.

    On those rare occasions when you are not insulting someone, you are just talking out your ass. A couple of weeks ago you were saying that you were “gobsmacked”, yes that is the word you used that anyone was talking about examining the physical evidence at the Ferguson shooting when there were no photographs or measurements taken. After I, and a few other people provided you with the diagrams and links to dozens of pictures, you just slimed off to try and move the goal posts.

    So, please, do me a favor and put me in your Pie filter so I don’t have to listen to the stupid that comes out of your pie hole.

    Thanks.

  130. 130.

    Major Major Major Major

    I’m not saying twitter isn’t stupid. I frequently tweet about how stupid it is. But a means of mass communication is a means of mass communication.

    Let’s even further suggest that in addition to your only following being on Twitter, you want to capture the ever-shifting Twitter version of the zeitgeist to make commentary in real time, rather than spending a few days writing a masterful 6,000 word essay that will go onto your blog you don’t have.

  131. 131.

    Little Boots

    @Steeplejack:

    yup, and we all get a little precious sometimes. we don’t need to. we do not need to have terrorists be ukrainians or japanese in movies. it’s okay. we get it. a lot of terrorists are middle eastern. we do not need to play this game. it’s okay and kind of silly. and the fact that there were jewish gangsters in the twenties does not need to lead to hysterics. it’s okay. and I wish the left would get this.

  132. 132.

    Cervantes

    @different-church-lady:
    @Steve from Antioch:

    Sure, place your bets as you will — or, alternatively, avoid trouble as far as possible — and good luck to you.

    My point was simply that criticizing the use of the word “niggardly” as “racist” is ignorant. It might be convenient not to say so — but it’s true.

  135. 135.

    Mnemosyne

    @Steve from Antioch:

    Sorry, I only put people that other commenters actually like talking to into my pie filter, and I only do it as a courtesy to that person. I don’t have mclaren in my pie filter, and you won’t be there either.

    If you don’t like people pointing out that you’re deliberately acting like an ignorant git, don’t act like an ignorant git to get a rise out of people.

  136. 136.

    Mandalay

    @Major Major Major Major:

    But a means of mass communication is a means of mass communication.

    I think you have nailed it. I clutch my pearls about how awful Twitter is, but if my only access to the internet was my cell phone I would probably gain a new perspective.

  138. 138.

    Steve from Antioch

    @Cervantes: Just like looking out a group of people in the audience before you and saying “You people ….” is perfectly innocuous as well. But after Perot said that in the context he said it and after the backlash against it, anyone would have to racially tone-deaf to employ that phrase.

    I understand and agree that the word, itself, isn’t racist – but its too tainted for careful speakers to use in certain contexts.

  139. 139.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Schlemazel: SfA doesn’t WANT to know those things.

    He, like Sullivan, is so enthralled by the entire premise that the fact that the science to support it does not exist isn’t really a problem for him, or for Sullivan.

    They want to believe this crap. Whether or not it has anything to do with reality is beside the point.

  144. 144.

    Valdivia

    too funny that Fredrik de Boer is Sully’s ally in the ‘we have to debate this’ shtick. His stay here was short lived if I recall correctly.

  147. 147.

    gwangung

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    He, like Sullivan, is so enthralled by the entire premise that the fact that the science to support it does not exist isn’t really a problem for him, or for Sullivan.

    Pretty much.

    If the science and methodology is bad, then STOP DO NOT GO FURTHER. You’re just showing your bigotry.

  148. 148.

    eemom

    @Cervantes:

    My point was simply that criticizing the use of the word “niggardly” as “racist” is ignorant. It might be convenient not to say so — but it’s true.

    Spot the fuck on.

    You and I don’t agree much (though also have to admit that I hate it when people preface comments that way) — it’s not only ignorant, it’s racist in itself. Does Antioch Genius suppose that TNC doesn’t know what the word means?

  149. 149.

    Mike E

    @Cervantes:

    Excoriate The Bell Curve, by all means, but better do it without reference to Mismeasure.

    I was responding to redshift, actually, not to Bell Curve specifically. Mismeasure is flawed but still quite useful.

    I studied paleoanthropology in school and we used Wolpoff’s textbook… his graduate student who contributed to the research taught the course, an amazing experience (since he disagreed with some of the conclusions). I can only imagine what it must have been like to interact with Gould. I’d cherish that opportunity, no doubt.

  150. 150.

    toschek

    Andy probably regrets trolling for bareback butt secks more than defending Charles Murray. I’d say fuck that dude but I sure as hell don’t want to.

  152. 152.

    Darkrose

    @Mandalay: I have a lot of problems with Greenwald, but his sexual orientation isn’t one of them.

    On the other hand, I have a lot of problems with Sullivan, and his sexual orientation is very much a part of that. His whole image is built around the “we’re just like you” trope, where the only thing standing between him and claiming his full rich white cis male privilege is the fact that he likes guys. Sullivan has never displayed anything resembling empathy or solidarity to someone like me, because while I may be gay, I’m a) black, b) female, and c) not rich. He constantly spouts racist and misogynist shit because intersectionality is a foreign concept to someone who seems to think that homophobia is only an issue when it affects people who look like him because they’re the only ones who really matter, right?

  154. 154.

    Amir Khalid

    @Steeplejack:
    I saw the weird Baz Luhrmann movie where Meyer Wolfsheim was played by, of all people, Amitabh Bachchan. He may have been based on the real-life Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky. Then again, I once saw Lansky played in a movie (Warren Beatty’s Bugsy) by another actor of Indian heritage: Ben Kingsley.

  155. 155.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Cervantes: For what it’s worth, I’ve seen assholes actually do the thing he used as an analogy: intentionally use words like “niggardly” as a “what, am I bugging you? I’m not touching you” substitute for a racial slur. Real schoolyard stuff.

    As to whether it’s an appropriate analogy, I leave to the rest of you to argue about.

  156. 156.

    Aimai

    @maeve: its a real book and its not just a send up of race but of the kind of upper class white supremacist/nativist attitudes which considered everyone not anglo saxon to be non white. Everything new to be frightening.

  157. 157.

    Kylroy

    @Steve from Antioch: And here, class, we see the classic troll pivot – having had his initial point refuted, he proceeds to make tone and ad hominem attacks on the commentariat.

    Seriously, dude, if a gay man tries to say he’s being brave by “opening up discussion” on the worst (but thoroughly false) stereotypes of black people, I think it’s valid to point out to him that discussing the worst (but thoroughly false) stereotypes of gay people should be seen as equally courageous.

  158. 158.

    Kevin

    @Mandalay: The best part of that line from Sullivan is he is USING FREDRIK DEBOER AS A SERIOUS PERSON. I mean…I don’t have words….I thought the internet had collectively decided to ignore that annoying twerp.

  160. 160.

    Cervantes

    @Matt McIrvin:

    intentionally use words like “niggardly” as a “what, am I bugging you? I’m not touching you” substitute for a racial slur. Real schoolyard stuff.

    While knowing all along what the word (objectively) means? That’s pitiful.

    Still, I think the best response to such people would be to point out that the word is (objectively) innocuous. Wouldn’t that take the fun out of it for them and make them feel silly?

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