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January 13th 2008 15:25
Robert V
Fairfax, Virginia, UNITED STATES
Joined December 7th 2006
Number of Posts:
329
Number of Comments:
27
Karma:
2
Recent Posts Someone call Carlos Mencia and BoratOctober 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!
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:
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?
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
The Hispanic poverty rate fellOctober 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.
Jena and black incarcerationOctober 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
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
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
IQ, race and predictionSeptember 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
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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Comments (3)
Comment by Robert V
on Why discrimination isn't incriminating
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.