Race and Racism
gregladen | April 27, 2010Republicans Scuttle Climate Change, Immigration Reform, and Their Own Credibility.
I can't wait until the Hispanic vote totally abandons the Republican party. Because they are certainly working on that.
(Note the Phillipe Rushton/Bell Curve, Psychometrics link)
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gregladen | April 24, 2010In their own words ...
They call themselves Teabaggers, but really, they are nothing other than Republicans. Out of the box, run of the mill, nothing special Republicans.
You might think that these conversations are cherry picked, a rare set of unusual views held by a small number of the people at this rally.
I spent hours on the telephone last election speaking to randomly chosen voters in a high-SES Republican district in Minnesota. A minority of people with whom I spoke were pretty serious Democrats supporting the Democratic slate. The rest of the people with whom I spoke with…
gregladen | April 1, 2010Subtitle: Republican Annoyed by Uppity Blacks with Phones
Watch and listen, and marvel at it. Marvel at the attitude of the caller, which I'm sure is fairly widespread. Marvel as well at the way the host handles the call. For which he should be fired instantly.
There was another way to handle this, of course. Let's see what Jon Stewart would have done:
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gregladen | February 24, 2010A half century of struggle has resulted in more than a little change, which we hope is still ongoing.
I was moderately disturbed to see, while watching a brand new documentary on human evolution, credit for the "discovery" of a particular fossil given to a man who had not in fact discovered the fossil. What was interesting about this mis-attribution is that a DIFFERENT guy who is also not the discoverer usually gets the credit. So, my first thought was "What were these two arguing about that led to this outcome, where the more powerful person got the credit?" and my second thought was "…
gregladen | February 21, 2010Skaters performing in "Black Face" in 2010?
Here, I'm mainly responding to commentary I heard run prior to this appalling performance... you know, the back story on the athletes.
This is not hard. The word "aboriginal" means native. The Mohawk Indians are aboriginal to parts of New York State. The word "aborigine" is a noun that refers to a person who is aboriginal. The Mohawk Indians are the aborigines of a certain region of New York State. The word "Aborigine" means a native of Australia. An aboriginal person of Australia or Tasmania is an Aborigine. Things that have to do with…
gregladen | January 22, 2010Southern white racists in the US think of themselves as a repressed minority. Which, probably, they should be.
Note the use of the word "fundamental" in this context.
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I wonder what the backstory on the "strike" is!?
gregladen | January 9, 2010Nevada Democratic Senator and Senate Leader Harry Reid apparently stepped in it:
The US Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, has apologised for private comments he made about Barack Obama before the 2008 presidential election.
He is quoted in a new book as saying Mr Obama could win since he was a "light-skinned" African-American "with no Negro dialect", unless he wanted one.
The Democrat said he now regretted "using such a poor choice of words" and apologised to any Americans offended.
President Obama quickly accepted the apology and said "the book is closed".
source
Technically, Reid was…
gregladen | January 9, 2010Some people say yes, some people say no. Either way, Glen Beck is a Racist Moron.
First, watch this:
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(I love the fact that Rachel appreciates "Get Smart" .... but I digress)
Then watch this....
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(The book referred to here is: Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics)
What do you think should be done about the issue off who gets counted where in relation to prisons? That is a very interesting question. Given that so many…
gregladen | January 7, 2010Philipe Rushton, in his book Race, Evolution and Behavior, reports average brain size for the three races. The following is the graph from Rusthton's book:
I put this post here for reference in a couple of conversations. The data are bogus and any conclusions that might be drawn from it are equally bogus.
gregladen | January 1, 2010Well, yes. But the question raises some interesting points.
Does a person endorse near slavery, horrific working conditions, the purchase of moral "indulgences" by the privileged, and the manipulation of the population with religious woo-woo when appreciating the architecture of a medieval European cathedral? Because that bad stuff is what happened to make that cathedral exist. If you visit the Sistine Chapel or Notre Dame in Paris you endorse all that is connected to the creation of these edifices. You might as well have personally carried out the inquisition! Especially if you pay to…
gregladen | December 31, 2009HP asked me to look at a couple of posts discussing Avatar. I did.
SEK at Lawyers, Guns and Money writes of Avitar:
...the film is racist. Its fundamental narrative logic is racist: it transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists)
This is true but there are redeeming qualities worth noting. For example, in the end .... the…
gregladen | December 29, 2009This is Chart 1 from Race, Evolutoin and Behavior by J. Philippe Rushton, originally published in the Unabridged Edition of same.
gregladen | December 28, 2009Many people assume human brains vary genetically and genetic variation maps to races. But the races are not real and genetic variation can't explain brain differences. Because, dear reader, brains don't work that way.
Let's look just at the brain part of this problem.
There are between 50 and 100 billion neurons in the human brain, and every one is connected to a minimum of one other neuron to produce about 100 trillion connections. So when we are thinking about how the brain is wired up, we have to explain how so many connections can be specified to make the brain work.
There are…
gregladen | December 22, 2009This post started out as a comment that would have gone here (but would have done just as well here). But it became sufficiently long and possibly interesting that I figured it would make a good, if somewhat rough, blog post.
The presumption being examined here is that humans are divisible into different groups (races would be one term for those groups) that are genetically distinct from one another in a way that causes those groups to have group level differences in average intelligence, as measured by IQ. More exactly, this post is about the sequence of arguments that are usually made when…
gregladen | November 30, 2009"Get her drunk then get her done."
So reads one of the decals on the F-150 pickup truck parked in my new neighbor's driveway. Of all the objectionable aphorisms on that particular truck, that's the mildest one. I wonder what my daughter will think of that when she notices it some time over the next few days, which she surely will.
There is a mud fight going on over at Ed Brayton's blog regarding his use of the word "shrew" in reference to Sarah Palin. The Kliqueons (rhymes with "Klingons") have called Ed out for being sexist. He says they should lay off and it is not OK to call him a…
gregladen | October 20, 2009Continuing on with our theme of anti-Obama wackaloonery, including the inherent racism involved in that, there is not additional evidence that there are indeed more death threats against our President than usual.
From the Boston Globe:
The unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service, according to government officials and reports, raising new questions about the 144-year-old agency's overall mission.
This is leading some to consider the possibility that the…
gregladen | October 19, 2009Hispanic children diagnosed with brain tumors get high-quality treatment at hospitals that specialize in neurosurgery far less often than other children with the same condition, potentially compromising their immediate prognosis and long-term survival, according to research from Johns Hopkins published in October's Pediatrics.
More than a decade after the Institute of Medicine's landmark report Crossing the Quality Chasm, the Hopkins investigators say their findings detect persistent gaps in access to specialized care among certain patients, raising questions about how far across the chasm we…
gregladen | October 19, 2009He makes the argument that what he does is legal. It probably is. But he is still a dickwad.
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Being mixed race = being drunk or being on drugs. Oh, and Bobby Jindal proves himself a moron once again.
gregladen | October 13, 2009So, I said some things that got my friend DuWayne Brayton mad, and this caused him to write two blog posts (here and here), and now with a little time to spare I'm giving this the attention it deserves.
I'm going to let DuWayne and you, dear reader, piece together most the threads that connect what he said and what I said and what he said and what I said. If you want. I highly recommend that you give it a skip. I have not been directly addressing DuWayne's questions, and his comments have little to do with anything I've said (sorry, but true). Given what DuWayne has said about what I…