Chinks I

I got called a Chink today. The last time I remember being called a Chink, I was an 8 year-old in a fading blue one-piece swimsuit at the Boys ‘n Girls Club in Mt. Kisco, NY. In the shallow end. I don’t remember what I did to raise the hackles of Bully, a short blond chubby boy whose name’s been redacted by my neurons. All I remember is that I was dazed and confused when I first heard the word. I looked into his eyes and saw derision - I knew not of what or why - and a lonely, boiling soup of mysterious inadequacy rose in my belly. I wasn’t angry at Bully. I just didn’t understand why he was angry with me. In an effort to understand what had just happened, I told my swimming instructor what he’d called me. I knew it was bad. Perhaps her intervention would reveal what it meant. Denise (sister to Dennis, also a swimming instructor - thank you, neurons) told me to ignore him or said something equally dismissive. I swam back into line on my back (this I remember too), trying to align my body with the rafters through puddly tears and swallowing gobs of phlegm. Maybe I felt anger then. Maybe I briefly flipped onto my stomach to catch my breath and hold in the soup that had turned into boiling bitterness. I remember it now. I can feel the same, helpless, indignant outrage or I can hold it at bay. That’s why I didn’t tell Jin that we’d been called Chinks today, in the bible-belt, by a convertible-driving Catholic School boy: me in my skirt suit with briefcase in tow (saving the poor) and she, a new J.D. with intolerance only for American fast food. I choose to feel nothing.

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Scandinatheists? Maybe not so much

Ah, those blessed Scandinavians. Reputedly cool, calm, collected, rather good race drivers and, it would seem, not really that concerned about gods one way or the other. During my time observing and participating in discussions about religion and its public role over the last few years, Scandinavia has often been held up as a bastion of faithless virtue, a shining beacon of godless goodness, a prime example of what can be accomplished on a transnational scale without referring to scripture but merely concentrating on what works for the populace. Atheist/secularist/humanist commentators often to point to Scandinavian social successes (for example low unemployment, high standards of living, functioning democracies, effective public health care & education) as evidence against the claims of many religious people that if we in the West abandoned our "Judeo-Christian" values or kept our church & state separate, our nations would all fall, unrestricted by fears of celestial surveillance, into a grimy, black crevass of murder, pillage and hedonism (one could argue that the US in the last eight years has fallen into an economic & diplomatic hole of a similar depth, led by a very religious man who was happy to pander to very religious people for his entire reign, but that's a whole other article). According to a recent New York Times article by Peter Steinfel on a study by Californian sociologist Phil Zuckerman (here), it seems that far from there being only two sides to the god coin, the Scandinavians, almost characteristically, have ended up on a third side. And here it is: They don't care.

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Richard Nisbett: Intelligence mostly varies due to the environment, not genes

The dominant hereditarian view of intelligence holds that intelligence is mostly fixed by the genes. Richard Nisbett has dismantled the evidence on which the hereditarian theory is based. In his new book, Intelligence and How to Get It, Nesbitt argues that the twin studies on which the hereditarian view is based are deeply flawed. The main problem is that the adoptive homes in which those separated twins often find themselves are uniformly enriched learning environments. Nisbett's book was reviewed by Jim Holt of the NYT Book Review:

Nisbett bridles at the hereditarian claim that I.Q. is 75 to 85 percent heritable; the real figure, he thinks, is less than 50 percent. Estimates come from comparing the I.Q.’s of blood relatives — identical twins, fraternal twins, siblings — growing up in different adoptive families. But there is a snare here. As Nisbett observes, “adoptive families, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are all alike.” Not only are they more affluent than average, they also tend to give children lots of cognitive stimulation. Thus data from them yield erroneously high estimates of I.Q. heritability. (Think: if we all grew up in exactly the same environment, I.Q. differences would appear to be 100 percent genetic.) This underscores an important point: there is no fixed value for heritability. The notion makes sense only relative to a population. Heritability of I.Q. is higher for upper-class families than for lower-class families, because lower-class families provide a wider range of cognitive environments, from terrible to pretty good.

What does Nisbett's book have to say about race and intelligence? That the differences among the "races" are not genetic. Evidence in point: The "racial" IQ gap has been shrinking. "Over the last 30 years, the measured I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped from 15 points to 9.5 points."

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At It Again

Oh please, is there no respite from this sort of thing? Over on Pharyngula is this little bit on the Vatican's newest attempt to recruit an ideal priesthood, this time free of gays. Now, the Catholic Church has done screening for centuries. They actually work hard to dissuade people from attempting to be priests because they know how difficult the various vows are to keep. I don't doubt for a minute that some of this screening is responsible, in kind of an unfortunate "unintended consequences" way, with the number of child sexual abuse cases that seem rampant more in the Catholic Church than in any other. You screen for people who have "normal" sexual proclivities and eliminate the ones who probably won't be able to maintain celibacy, you end up with (probably) a higher percentage of those who exhibit a lower than average normal sex drive (however you decide to define that), but may have a higher, shall we say, alternative proclivity... Anyway, that's just my opinion. But apparently the Vatican has decided there's something to looking at alternative sexualities as a deal breaker, but for goodness sake the question still needs to be asked, just what is it they find so offensive and, we assume, dangerous about gays? By and large, the Catholic Church, for all its faults, possesses one of the more sophisticated philosophical approaches to life in all its manifestations among the various sects. As a philosophy teacher of mine said once, "they seem to have a handle on what life is all about." Despite the very public embarrassments that emerge from the high profile conservative and reactionary elements within it, the Catholic Church probably has the healthiest worldview of the lot. (I was a Lutheran in my childhood and believe me, in the matter of guilt the Catholics have nothing on Lutherans.) But they have been electing popes who seem bent on turning the clock back to a more intolerant and altogether less sophisticated age, as if the burden of dealing with humanity in its manifold variation is just too much for them. They pine for the days when priests could lay down the law and the parish would snap to. They do not want to deal with humanity in the abstract because it means abandoning certain absolutes---or the concrete---in lieu of a more gestalt understanding. It would be hard work. And they have an image problem. I mean, if you're going to let people be people, then what's the point of joining an elite group when there are no restrictions of the concept of what encompasses human? But really...this is just embarrassing.

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JREF Censored on YouTube via DMCA

YouTube has suspended the James Randi Education Foundation channel, The FriendlySkeptic. JREF hopes to get it back soon. From the video information:

To complain to YouTube follow this link Scroll to the very bottom and click on "new issue" Select "suspended account" from the options and express your opinion. Download the video above from MediaFire The DMCA is a wonderful 1990's Act of Congress that lets printer manufacturers file a copyright to block third party ink refills in the name of protecting children from pornography. Clause after clause of this act are getting struck down by the Supremes, but still it limps along frustrating mostly legitimate users who run into it. Anyway, DCMA forces YouTube to suspend an account if anyone makes a claim that something uploaded violates a copyright held by another. Then, after cautious investigation, the account may be reinstated. Technically the filer of a false claim is liable to criminal charges. But this has apparently never been executed. The closest case I know of was Thunderf00t vs. VenomfangX, where a Creationist made a false claim of infringement on the author of the "Why People Laugh At Creationists" series. Meanwhile another prominent bastion of proper skepticism has been banned from YouTube.

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