RA Fisher rises again?

I do have to do some class work while I’m trapped in the land of lawyers and banks — I’ve got essays being submitted today that I’ll have to grade this evening, and I’m prepping lectures for when I get back. The next couple of weeks are nothing but Darwin, Darwin, Darwin, and after that I’ll be discussing the eclipse of Darwin, the new consensus, and, ugh, eugenics. I was reminded of this excellent essay by Eric Michael Johnson, “Ronald Fisher Is Not Being ‘Cancelled’, But His Eugenic Advocacy Should Have Consequences”, which my students will eventually be reading. I re-read it myself this morning, and was reminded of the contretemps that flared up when Cambridge University chose to remove a stained glass window honoring RA Fisher, and the usual suspects rushed to defend him.

This decision was soon condemned as part of the latest trend in “cancel culture” that followed in the wake of the #MeToo movement toppling other powerful men. According to Fisher’s former student, and current Cambridge Professor of Biometry, A.W.F. Edwards, “a panicking Cambridge institution obliterated the memory of one of its most famous sons” and “joined the cacophony of the echo chamber ‘eugenics and race, eugenics and race.’” University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne blamed the decision on “the spread of wokeness” and argued that you can still honor the good a historical figure accomplished if it outweighed the bad. “Contrary to the statements of those who have canceled Fisher, though, he wasn’t a racist eugenist, although he did think that there were behavioral and intelligence differences between human groups.” Finally, economist and former Reagan Administration official, Paul Craig Roberts, condemned Cambridge University for caving to “ignorant BLM thugs” and declared that we are now “witnessing the surrender of Western Civilization to barbarians.”

I love that he wasn’t a racist eugenist, he just thought that poor people’s genes were the cause of their poverty, as if that made his ideas OK. He just thought that there were behavioral and intelligence differences between human groups! What groups was he talking about?

We do have a 1954 letter from Fisher that clears that right up.

My dear Gates,
Thanks for your letter, It is always good to hear from you. I shall try to answer your quention.
i I agree with you entirely that Penrose and Haldane are both defindtely hostile to eugenics, the last move being to change the name of what used to be called The Annals of Eugenics.
In my opinion, by far the most important work in human heredity is that done by Race, Kourant, and their associates at the Lister Institution, for this shows clearly,what many of us have suspected – the vast number of differences in gene frequency existing between different human races.
I am sorry that there should be propaganda in favour of miscegenation in North America, for I am sure that it can do nothing but harm. Is it beyond human endeavour to give and Justly to administer equal rights to all citizens without fooling ourselves that these are equivalent items.

He’s talking specifically about races, and thinks miscegenation will do harm. If he were alive today, he’d be favoring Project 2025 and looking forward to the Republicans striking down Loving v. Virginia.

I’ve added this essay to my students’ reading list. We’ll probably get to it sometime in November, and I hope it sparks some vigorous discussion.

Was he intentionally lying, or was he just stupid? It’s hard to tell

I am continuously astonished by how bad Republicans can be. It’s not just that I disagree with their policies, but that they themselves paint their policies in such a ludicrously stupid manner. Take, for example, this incident at a candidate forum in Idaho.

They discuss discrimination in Idaho. The Republican, Dan Foreman, claims there isn’t any. I’ve gotten used to Republican denial, so that doesn’t shock me.

2. The Democratic candidate, a native American woman, politely “highlighted our weak hate crime laws and mentioned the presence of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho as undeniable evidence of this reality.” Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, we all knew there was a gradient of bigotry that ascended from the coast to the potato brains of Idaho (partly to avoid confronting the reality of racism in Seattle), so this was already making Foreman look foolish.

3. The Republican then tells the Nez Perce woman to “go back where you came from.” Unbelievable. It’s like a bad joke on a bottom-of-the-barrel sitcom.

Trish Carter-Goodheart has written about the incident.

Last night, I entered what should have been a respectful and constructive public candidate forum. Instead, I was met with hateful, racist remarks from State Senator Dan Foreman, who screamed at me to “go back where you came from.” The question on the floor was about a state bill addressing discrimination. One of the candidates responded, claiming that “discrimination doesn’t exist in Idaho.” When it was my turn to speak, I calmly pointed out that just because someone hasn’t personally experienced discrimination doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Racism and discrimination are real issues here in Idaho, as anyone familiar with our state’s history knows. I highlighted our weak hate crime laws and mentioned the presence of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho as undeniable evidence of this reality. That’s when Sen. Foreman lost all control. His words to me: “I’m so sick and tired of this liberal b*lish*t! Why don’t you go back to where you came from?!” I stayed. I stayed because I wanted to show our community that I can, and will, handle difficult, unpleasant situations. After the forum, several members of the crowd came up to me and offered their support, apologizing for Sen. Foreman’s behavior. But it’s not the people in the crowd who need to apologize. I need to thank the women who stood with me against this hate: Representative Lori McCann, Kathy Dawes, and Moscow City Councilwoman Julia Parker. You had my back when it mattered, and I appreciate your strength and solidarity. What happened last night was a reminder of why this election matters. I am a proud member of the Nez Perce tribe, fighting to represent the land my family has lived on for generations. People like Dan Foreman do not represent our diverse community, and I will continue to stand against the hatred and racism they spread. Our state deserves better. Our community deserves better. We deserve better.

The last time I was in Idaho, my talk was attended by a bunch of people from Doug Wilson’s church (but not Wilson himself). Doug Wilson was an Idaho preacher who got a boost in popularity because Christopher Hitchens toured with him for a while, something I don’t forgive Hitchens for. Doug Wilson co-wrote a notorious pamphlet titled Southern Slavery, where he said

Slavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence, the excerpts read in part. There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. …

Slave life was to them [slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care.

But oh no, racism and discrimination don’t exist in Idaho.

Only a fool would be fooled by Jared Taylor

Jared Taylor is a notorious racist and extremist, recognized as a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Only an extremely naive person could read any of his articles, which are generally pleasantly written and express less obvious hate than an extremely patronizing condescension. For example, did you know that he actually likes black people? Sure does. He says so.

Like some other writers for this website, I have a reputation for writing rude things about blacks. I have written rude things about whites, Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims, but being rude about blacks is one of our era’s unforgivable sins. Of course, what I write about blacks is true, but as Mark Twain pointed out, nothing astonishes people more than to tell them the truth. Deep down, everyone knows the truth about blacks, but a vital requirement for respectability is to pretend you don’t.

The fact is, there are things to like about blacks—and I like them. They mostly have to do with lack of inhibition, a kind of cheerful spontaneity you don’t often find in whites. I have a half-Asian friend—a connoisseur of stereotypes—who thinks blacks and whites differ in that respect even more than they do in average IQ. As he puts it, whites act like Asians who have had a few drinks and blacks act like whites who have had a few drinks.

That’s enough. You can read the rest of his article, where he mentions how they complimented his hat and speak an interesting dialect and are so trusting and child-like if you want, but you’ll recognize the game — he thinks that diminishing people into shallow stereotypes is flattering them.

I trust that readers here are not idiots and wouldn’t for an instant regard Jared Taylor’s condescension as anything but demeaning. Which means, obviously, that Amy Wax is not a reader here. Amy Wax is a professor at UPenn who has been regularly making racist comments to her students, insulting the Asian and Black students at her university, who have been lobbying for years to see her fired. She is such a dumb bigot that she invited Jared Taylor to speak to her classes…for some unfathomable purpose. Was she looking for training in treating her minority students more repulsively?

She has already applied that talent for condescension to Asian students, in addition to black students.

I confess I find Asian support for these [liberal] policies mystifying, as I fail to see how they are in Asians’ interest. We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, mindless social engineering, etc.

Just like Jared Taylor, she’s a master at deploying stereotypes like backhanded compliments.

She hasn’t been fired yet, but she has been slapped down a bit.

Wax — who has called into question the academic ability of Black students, invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to her classroom, and said the country would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration — will be suspended for one year at half pay with benefits intact. She also will face a public reprimand issued by university leadership, the loss of her named chair and summer pay, and a requirement to note in her public appearances that she is not speaking for or as a member of the Penn Carey Law school or Penn.

But she will not be fired or lose her tenure.

It’s good to have tenure, isn’t it? You can even survive a blistering attack like this one, from the administration.

Wax’s conduct, according to [former U President] Magill’s letter, “included a history of sweeping, blithe, and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status.” She also, according to the letter, breached “the requirement that student grades be kept private by publicly speaking about the grades of law students by race and continuing to do so even after cautioned by the dean that it was a violation of University policy.”

Wax also, both in and out of the classroom, repeatedly and in public made “discriminatory and disparaging statements targeted at specific racial, ethnic, and other groups with which many students identify,” the letter said.

For that, her punishment is half-pay for a year and a loss of summer salary — I bet her half-pay is more than my full pay, and I don’t get summer salary, either, and unlike Awful Amy, I can’t make it up through my connections to the Hoover Institute, or by hitting the lucrative right-wing lecture circuit.

Just wait, she’s going to be declared a martyr by the “free speech” poltroons. Not bad for someone unable to recognize how vile Jared Taylor is.

The grill is blue, therefore the racism is true

Creationist logic is soaking into the general discourse, I’m sorry to say. As we’ve all heard, Donald Trump declared that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, and some people have been desperately trying to validate that. Among their ranks we have Chris Rufo, the professional racist, destroyer of universities, and flailing idiot trained in the heart of the Discovery Institute, who attempts to mimic skeptical reasoning in a post titled…

The Cat Eaters of Ohio
The establishment media called it a racist myth, but is it?

Yes. Yes it is.

He’s going to get to the bottom of this story.

So, is there any truth to the charge? We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals that, yes, in fact, some migrants in Ohio appear to have been “eating the cats,” though not exactly in the manner that Trump described.

“Not exactly” is doing a lot of work here. To translate, he’s saying “not even close to what Trump described,” which he interprets as reasonable doubt that any rebuttals are valid.

Our investigation begins in a run-down neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, the closest major city to Springfield, about a half-hour’s drive away. We identified a social media post, dated August 25, 2023, with a short video depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbeque. “Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood,” reads the text, referring to Parkwood Drive. The video then pans down to two live cats walking across the grass in front of a run-down fence, with a voice on the video warning: “There go a cat right there. His ass better get missin’, man. Look like his homies on the grill!”

I watched the video. It’s true, there are live cats on camera, and there is a barbecue grill, and there is something unidentifiable cooking on the grill, and there is a man vocally accusing them of grilling cats. That’s it. One ambiguous video yanked off of TikTok. That’s Rufo’s evidence.

He does go a significant step further, and he or someone he’s associated with contacted the creator of the video, and even visited the neighborhood to ask questions. It’s a significant effort, but all he’s going to get out of it is a lot of irrelevant details. As any creationist knows, piling on random detail is an adequate substitute for actually confirming a hypothesis.

We spoke with the author of the video, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed its time, location, and authenticity. He told us that he was picking up his son last summer, when he noticed the unusual situation. “It was some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” he said. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill.”

Point of order: there has been no evidence presented that it was a cat on the grill. Having the initial accuser repeat the accusation adds nothing.

We then identified the home by matching it to the visuals in the video and cross-referencing them with the eyewitness. When we knocked on the door of the first unit, a family answered, telling us they were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that all of the surrounding units were occupied by other African migrants.

So, not a Haitian. Telling us the country of origin of the accused does not in any way confirm that they were eating cats — we keep drifting further and further away from the initial claim — but it does contradict the story we were told.

But hey, people from Africa, people from a Caribbean island, they’re all the same. They’re black. Is Rufo trying to establish that yes, it sure is a racist myth?

One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. “Her dad was going to find meat,” she said. “Her dad was going, holding a knife.” The current residents also showed us a blue grill of the same make and model as in the video, which the former neighbors had abandoned after they moved out. There were at least ten cats wandering around the complex and another resident complained that they were breeding on the property.

At this point, we’ve lost the plot. Now we’ve got the testimony of someone in the neighborhood saying that she had a neighbor, not necessarily the same person as the one accused in the video, was from Africa. In Rufo’s mind, this is a connection sufficient to establish guilt, and he had a knife, and he was reputed to have hunted for meat in the neighborhood.

Somebody had a blue grill, the same color as the grill in the video, therefore they must have been cooking cats.

There are many cats wandering about, further evidence. I’m going to have to confess: there are many feral and pet cats living in my neighborhood. I’m going to be in big trouble if ever I’m accused of cat-eating, because they’ll be able to point to a random cat strolling by and announce “A-ha! Opportunity! Therefore, guilty!”

Rufo imagines himself a reasonable man, so he offers a reasonable interpretation.

To be clear: this single incident does not confirm every particularity of Trump’s statement. The town is Dayton, not Springfield; cats alone were on the grill, not cats and dogs. But it does break the general narrative peddled by the establishment media and its “fact checkers,” who insisted that this has never happened, and that any suggestion otherwise is somehow an expression of racism.

It does not confirm any particularity of Trump’s statement. It’s a different city and a different nationality. Notice how he now segues from a video of something indefinite on a grill to a definitive statement that “cats alone were on the grill,” something that has not been established by this investigation. The question he should be asking is — what was Trump’s source for this garbled, ugly claim? I know, he’s just going to say it was people on television, but what ought to be engaging Rufo is not whether there is some thin, tenuous thread of circumstance that can be attached post-hoc to Trump’s claim, but what was the actual basis for the claim?

Also, the fact checkers never insisted that this has never happened. Every account I’ve read points out that there was an isolated instance of a mentally ill person eating a cat, so right away there’s an awareness that it’s entirely possible that there have been individual cases of such incidents. The expression of racism arises from the fact that Rufo and Trump and a whole wing of conservatives are flatly accusing an entire group of people of reprehensible behavior on the basis of the flimsiest evidence. It arises from the fact that Rufo can blithely equate Congolese with Haitian.

It takes only a single exception, however, to falsify a hypothesis, and the logical next step, for any honest broker, is to ask if it is happening more often, and elsewhere. It is not implausible. Many developing nations, including the Congo and Haiti, have traditions of animal sacrifice or consumption of what Americans would consider household pets. And if this occurred in Dayton, where the migrant population is relatively small, it could be going on down the road in Springfield, where it is relatively much larger.

Keep in mind that the hypothesis that Rufo is falsifying is the idea that no one has ever eaten a cat, which is both trivially false and a hypothesis that no one has proposed. An honest broker would not suggest that this is the premise in contention; the concern is that it has become a Republican talking point that an entire large community of immigrants is habitually preying on household pets in Ohio.

This is simply not true.

You also cannot extrapolate from one poorly documented possible case in Dayton to conclude that it must be happening on a larger scale in Springfield. You also don’t get to plop down the claim that pet-eating is endemic in Congo and Haiti without a source and without evidence, trusting only in the assumed racist bias that of course, black people everywhere engage in behaviors that good, civilized white people deplore.

Rufo has managed to confirm only that a) he’s racist as fuck, and b) has no grasp of elementary logic. It’s about what I’d expect from a creationist fool and professional hatemonger. How can we doubt that Haitians are eating your cats if he has photographic evidence that blue barbecue grills exist?

No racists down here in Texas, no sir

It’s all a lie by the Democrat party. The “True Texas Project” is a wholesome organization that just loves white Christians.

An influential grassroots group with close ties to Texas Republican lawmakers is hosting a conference next month that encourages its attendees to embrace Christian nationalism and resist a Democratic campaign “to rid the earth of the white race.”
Billed as the 15th anniversary celebration for True Texas Project, a far-right activist group that got its start as a North Texas tea party organization, the agenda claims there is a “war on white America,” and elevates theories that white Americans are being intentionally replaced through immigration — a common belief among far-right extremists, including many mass shooters.

I, for one, had no idea that one of the planks of the Democratic agenda was “to rid the earth of the white race.” The “True Texas” agenda is crystal clear, at least: they hate and fear the great replacement theory, cultural Marxism, multiculturalism, and love Zionism, the American Church, etc., etc., etc.

They have high-quality speakers, like Kyle Rittenhouse.

I know, I could stop right there. You already know how worthwhile this event will be.

They’re also bringing in Louie Gohmert…this isn’t helping, is it?

OK, they also include Paul Gottfried, who has the virtue of being someone most people have never heard of.

Few people have been more instrumental in that push than Gottfried, a former humanities professor who has written dozens of books on political history. Gottfried is credited with coining the term “Alt-Right,” which describes a movement of far-right reactionaries, white nationalists and race scientists that sought to intellectualize their fringe views. Led by Spencer, the neo-Nazi who was mentored by Gottfried, the Alt-Right was crucial in mainstreaming extreme views in right-wing circles, but flamed out after its members played key roles in 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where tiki-torch wielding neo-Nazis and fascists marched before killing one counterprotester and maiming countless others.

Gottfried is also the founder of the H.L. Mencken Club, which holds an annual conference that has included some of the world’s most prominent extremists, including Jared Taylor, a eugenicist who claims it is unnatural for white people to live alongside non-whites; and Peter Brimelow, whose group VDARE has been crucial to spreading white nationalist writings and propaganda.

Their claim that they aren’t racist is not very persuasive when they’ve got ties to Taylor and Brimelow and Spencer.

These people aren’t fooling anyone.

Blood quantum is back, baby

First of all…Mike Lindell has a TV station? He’s got something called “Lindell-TV,” anyway, which seems to be nothing but a streaming channel on an off-brand service. The costs for a kook to get online and make noise just gets lower and lower.

Anyway, one of the babblers on that network wants Kamala Harris to take a DNA test.

A host on Mike Lindell’s television network called on Vice President Kamala Harris to take a DNA test to prove a demonic spirit wasn’t prompting her to say she was Black.

During his daily “Let’s Talk About It” program on Lindell TV, host Will Johnson defended former President Donald Trump’s claim that Harris had only recently “happened to turn Black.”

What does demon DNA look like? How would we tell?

But Johnson suggested Thursday that Harris was lying about her race and should take a DNA test.

“How about we get Kamala Harris to do a DNA test like him and like Elizabeth Warren?” Johnson said. “Then we’ll put it to rest. She comes back, and she’s a little bit more Black than Elizabeth Warren is Indian, then we’ll, OK, go, she can be Black half the time.”

“Why not do that?” he asked. “And then they say we are the weird ones — we’re the weird ones because we don’t want to go along with the insanity.”

Elizabeth Warren was negligibly Indian, and most importantly, did not have any cultural connection to any tribe. Harris has a father who is black, so she’s roughly half black genetically, but what matters more is that she grew up with black and Indian heritage. You don’t get to tell her what her background is. She’s black and Indian. That the Republicans are diving into this weird obsession with inventing criteria for people’s cultural and genetic heritage is creepy.

Mr Johnson is the insane weird guy who wants to quantify how “black” a person is allowed to be. It doesn’t make any sense — if 23andme comes back and says she is 43.5% black, how does one “be” black 43.5% of the time?

I’ve had 23andme analyze my DNA, and this is what it tells me.

I guess I’m 2/3 Scandinavian. What does that mean for my allowed behavior? So two of my 3 meals per day should be matpakke, herring, or kjøttkaker, and the other meal should be pasties, bangers and mash, or mushy peas? Since I’m an atheist, I’m probably fractionally demonic, so my snacks should probably be demonic.

This is what we mean by calling these bozos “weird” — they have this twisted idea that people must conform to the stereotypes rattling around in their heads.

Crap. Now Elizabeth Vrba has died.

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History is Indelible

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