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Robert V

Fairfax, Virginia, UNITED STATES


Joined December 7th 2006

Number of Posts:
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Checking in

January 13th 2008 15:25
Hi all --

Really busy; just moved to NYC. Hopefully I'll resume posting soon.

Robert
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Someone call Carlos Mencia and Borat

October 3rd 2007 22:16
...because the former once did a gag where the "Miss Afghanistan" contestants were covered from head to toe. Now Megan McArdle notes:

the winner of Miss Arab World is veiled.


Is nice!
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Wanna be a professor? Then shut up.

October 3rd 2007 22:14
Cathy Young seems right on Norman Finkelstein, a professor and ideologue -- with no publication record -- who was denied tenure. But this passage baffles me:

Somewhat similar issues are raised by a tenure case at Iowa State University, where astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez was ept_id=554432&rfi=6">denied tenure last month despite a stellar teaching and publication record. Gonzalez is a fellow at the Discovery Institute, which supports "intelligent design," and the co-author of the 2004 book, Privileged Planet, which champions this theory. While the university claimed that the rejection of Gonzalez was based on his inability to raise research grant money, some of his colleagues have admitted that their vote against him was based his advocacy of "intelligent design."

Writing in The Weekly Standard, David Klinghoffer has decried the decision as a blow to academic freedom, claiming that Gonzalez is being punished for "the expression—outside the classroom—of an inconvenient personal belief."

Yet Gonzalez is not being penalized for expressing his personal belief in, say, the resurrection of Christ as a miracle outside the laws of nature. His advocacy of "intelligent design" amounts to promotion of ideologically motivated junk science. Even if he does not bring this advocacy into the classroom, a science department can be rightfully concerned about its reputation being used to lend credence to an anti-science crusade.

How could any reasonable person think this is OK? His job is astronomy, and he's great at it. If he were using his university title for something not only factually wrong but morally repugnant -- say, KKK recruiting -- there would be a point. But advocating an unpopular theory on his own time? That doesn't just hurt academic freedom; it dangles professorships in front of people, telling them to shut up permanently if they hold the wrong beliefs. And by the way, I thought Intelligent Design was just another religion-inspired form of creationism. Remember, Cathy Young? So how is advocating Intelligent Design any different from advocating a belief in "the resurrection of Christ as a miracle outside the laws of nature"? Presumably, if God resurrected Christ, it's also possible he created the world and guided its evolution, no? How is either belief more scientific or "anti-science" than the other?
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Record labels now obsolete! Oh wait, no.

October 2nd 2007 22:38
Everyone is making big deal of Radiohead's decision to release the new album itself. Problem is, the main functions of a label are to fund, record and promote artists. Radiohead members have plenty of money, can hire their own recording staff and are big enough that they don't need the marketing. What exactly does this prove?

Additionally, they're putting the record up for download for "whatever you want to pay." Again, terrific if millions of people will get it, and presumably some will donate. Radiohead will recoup its costs. But this does nothing to change the fact that less and less money is going into the music industry -- because of downloading -- so the industry can't invest much in high-risk, inventive new bands


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The Hispanic poverty rate fell

October 2nd 2007 22:35
...from 30 to 20 percent in the last decade or so. Great, except (A) it's still above the national average, so more immigration means a rising poverty rate and (B) here's how they did it:

Consider the Hispanic success in obtaining skilled, blue-collar jobs, as measured by the census category for precision production, craft and repair occupations. From 1994 to 2006, as the total number of these jobs grew, the percentage held by whites fell from 79 percent to 65 percent. The percentage held by blacks remained constant at about 8 percent, and the percentage held by Hispanics more than doubled, rising to 25 percent from 11 percent. As whites left these relatively well-paid jobs, Hispanics rather than blacks moved into them.

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Jena and black incarceration

October 2nd 2007 22:31
Heather Mac Donald responds to Orlando Patterson, who actually wrote a piece pretty similar to her recent one. With the Jena 6 case as a jumping-off point, she argued that activists were using racism allegations to hide the fact of black crime.

Her new point


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Does racism cause infant mortality?

September 30th 2007 18:31
Apparently a growing number of researchers are saying so, even alleging it partly explains the severe black-white mortality gap. To a certain degree they're right -- some infant deaths are stress-related, racism causes stress, and blacks face more racism than whites.

John Lott needed little more than a Google search to prove it's not that big a cause, though. He cites one report
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Sex news roundup!

September 28th 2007 01:19
Some people have made a lot of noise about Durex's new sex partners survey. Worldwide, on average, it found straight men have had 13 partners, straight women seven, gay men 108 and gay women 11. Problem number one is that it was conducted via online interviews, and even in the most developed countries, Internet access and use varies significantly by demographic.

Two, as various math-types have pointed out before, it's not possible for straight men and straight women to have a different average number of partners (save for whatever small effects bisexuals, the fact there are slightly more women than men in the world, partners dying, etc., have). Every time two people have sex who haven't had sex with each other before, each adds one to their total partners, so the gender balance stays the same. I would suggest both women and men are lying -- women underestimating, men overestimating -- and the true number is around 10


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IQ, race and prediction

September 28th 2007 01:13
I'm a little skeptical of this J. Philippe Rushton VDARE piece.

One of the common points made about standardized testing is that tests predict life outcomes for blacks as well as they do for whites. A white person and a black person with the same SAT or IQ will do about the same in school and life, and if anything the black person will do a little worse -- if IQ tests were biased against blacks, they would underpredict black achievement, and blacks would do better than their scores predicted


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Stupid, lazy college kids these days...

September 26th 2007 21:59
Lisa Fabrizio weighs in on the college debate with this. She's right that kids misbehave in college more than they should, and even that some folks encourage going to college for no particular reason. It's quite arguable that too many people are pursuing degrees these days.

But this is wrong


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Recent Comments

Comment by Robert V
on Why discrimination isn't incriminating

September 17th 2007 23:48
Actually, they aren't two different words, or two different concepts. To discriminate is to perceive and act on differences between options. Both of these are examples.

You're right, of course, that one can discriminate for good as well as bad reasons. The whole point is that "discrimination" used to automatically evoke good decisionmaking. Now it calls up thoughts of knee-jerk, racist reactions. Discrimination as a concept has suffered because some people misuse it and others define it too narrowly.

Comment by Robert V
on No Smoking in your own home??? Unbelievable!

June 23rd 2007 18:43
No one is more pro-smoking rights and anti-big government than I am, but I disagree with you here. It's not the government doing this; it's the homeowners' association, which the couple voluntarily joined.

The idea behind an HOA is that they place stricter limits upon personal behavior than does the government. For example, in a given city you might have a right to keep a bunch of broken-down cars on your front lawn, not cut your grass and let the paint on your house peel. No one wants to live next to someone like that, so they join HOAs -- they agree to live by the rules, and in return they get neighbors who live by the rules.

Sorry, but if you don't like the rules, leave. You have the right to do as you please in your own home, but when you join an HOA you sign some of those rights away.

What's more, a lot of people smoke, so the market will create a place for them if this becomes common. Some HOAs will write smokers rights into their rules -- that way, they can get smokers to rent.

Comment by Robert V
on what blog software is orble?

April 14th 2007 20:59
I'm having the same problem. How do you get an Orble blog on Digg?

Comment by Robert V
on Traffic shootings: The exception that proves the rule

March 21st 2007 01:34
Yes, for protection. There is good evidence that allowing concealed weapons actually reduced crime (see Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime"), and at the very least, it does not increase crime (see the National Academies of Science report).

Comment by Robert V
on More on HPV

March 1st 2007 04:18
That's an interesting difference, but only in terms of government subsidy.

There is no resistance to the vaccine itself -- the government Food and Drug Administration approved it, and to my knowledge no one is trying to discourage its use by people at risk for HPV.

The question is whether the government should pay to vaccinate people for a disease that's (A) rare and (B) communicable only by sexual contact. In that regard Americans are skeptical, especially when it comes to giving an STD drug that lasts 5 years to 12-year-olds, as the current legislation proposes.

Comment by Robert V
on On mandatory HPV vaccinations

February 28th 2007 02:48
I'm not sure this addresses the core controversy -- no one is saying the vaccine shouldn't exist, or that women who are sexually active shouldn't take it. (No one reasonable, anyway.) They're questioning the wisdom of mandating universal STD vaccination in 12-year-olds.

So to answer your question, if the vaccine didn't involve condoning adolescent sexual behavior to some degree, no, it wouldn't be so controversial!

This post in particular, though, involves the cost. If we're talking about government intervention (and we are), you can do a lot more good than to spend money on preventing a rare cancer. So it's not a matter of whether vaccinating pre-teens is right or wrong; it's a question of whether it's efficient.

Comment by Robert V
on Note to the SF Chronicle on pronoun use

February 1st 2007 16:30
prying1,

Thanks so much for reading, and for the comment. I don't read my own writing out loud, but I know plenty of writers who do.

Besides catching spelling problems and missing words, it reveals bad writing. When you can't put a group of words together verbally, or if you can't say a whole sentence without taking a breath, it's re-write time.

Comment by Robert V
on Amazon ad program promotes David Duke, David Irving

January 27th 2007 19:12
On censorship: There is a difference between government suppression and a private company choosing not to carry and/or promote deeply immoral and offensive viewpoints like yours.

On rape as genocide: Rape is rape. It is a crime against an individual, not a race. Under your criteria the bigger problem is depositing semen in the "wrong" place, not forcing sex (the first gets death, the second imprisonment). I don't think any rape victim of any race would agree.

And even if we accept your bizarre value judgment that interracial breeding is wrong somehow (if anything, empirically, it diversifies the gene pool and makes rare diseases rarer -- and there's a body of work that indicates humans consider interracial people more attractive), wouldn't the individual's intense anguish overcome the minor net genetic "problem" in severity?

I'm fine with the death penalty for rape, albeit with a higher burden of proof than currently required*, but only if applied equally.

*Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, without using visual IDs from people who didn't know the defendant beforehand. Many wrongful convictions come about when a victim positively identifies the wrong person -- this is convincing to a jury but often incorrect, especially across racial lines.

Comment by Robert V
on Amazon ad program promotes David Duke, David Irving

January 27th 2007 13:49
I dunno, try the speech where he denied gas chambers existed at Auschwitz (very cute, with the words "publishes" and "books"). I don't think Austria should have thrown him in jail for it, but that's certainly hateful.

On his books, by the way:

"[Civil trial lawyer] Evans spent two years examining Irving's work, and presented evidence of Irving's misrepresentations, including that Irving had knowingly used forged documents as a source."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial#David_Irving_and_the_Lipstadt_Affair

In "Hitler's War," he claims Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust.

In his (somewhat) defense, he says he no longer denies the Holocaust, and that the Nazis did murder millions of Jews.

Do you honestly believe his books sell, at this point, purely on their historical merits, whatever those may be?

Comment by Robert V
on My rise to international fame

January 26th 2007 17:53
Bhumika,

Thanks for the comment. Not sure there's a trick to it -- it's just a matter of publishing as much as you can and seeing where the stuff ends up. You'd be surprised how posts and stories trickle over into different parts of the Web.