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You mean Reichwine?
*rimshot*
The legacy of the Southern Strategy (click for background) is alive and well.
The riscible consternation of the Republican rank and file, with the predictably clueless "why don't they just love us for who we are?" speculation continues, with Pat Buchanan's seeming endorsement of a new Southern Strategy aimed at Latinos(click for op-ed). His main intent may be a bit arguable, but when you are already pegged generally as having racist tendencies, one might want to be a tad more cir spect, although I suspect he thinks he is doing that.
Dogwhistle racism aside, a much more obvious scandal has rocked the conservative Heritage foundation.
Quick summary:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democ...ation-and-iq-0
The right is, as always, playing the victim card. "political correctness witch hunt" bla bla bla. For them it is yet another case where valid science is subordinated to a political ideology. That is where any hint of introspection or admission of the possibility of racism bounces off the armor of the rights impervious information bubble.
Again, the economist:
Science should go where the evidence leads, no matter how uncomfortable that ultimate conclusion is. The topic itself is a falsifiable hypothesis, something to be tested and found valid or not valid, based on the available evidence.Following a useful summary of Mr Richwine's thesis, Robert VerBruggen of National Review makes a plea for letting science, rather than social opprobrium, settle scientific questions:
The Left’s labeling of Richwine’s argument as “racist” is especially dangerous. In modern America it is axiomatic that “racism,” whatever it is, is wrong — and this is a good thing. It therefore is a mistake to define racism to include falsifiable hypotheses in addition to racial hatred. If Richwine’s view is racist, what are we to do if it turns out to be correct?
It's easy to sympathise with Mr VerBruggen's gist. If scientists are to ferret out even uncomfortable truths, they cannot be made to feel that they will be punished for it. Yet racism has always been predicated on falsifiable hypotheses about racial inferiority. No one has defined racism to include the assumption of hereditary racial inequality; that's simply an assumption racists tend to have. If Mr Richwine's view "turns out to be correct", what we are to do is to acknowledge that the racists were right all along—that racism has, to some extent, a valid scientific basis.
Here are the bits that won't break through the right's information bubble:
1. The science was ultimately, bad.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/author/...20W.%20Drezner (link is who he is) ....... http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/pos...rding_richwine (source link for his comments)
2. The much more damning question remains, i.e. "why pick that particular topic out of all the ones he could have chosen?"
Now, taken in either context Mr. Richwine might have some plausible cover as a legitimate scholar, "just asking questions". Either being the discredited policy paper he wrote for the Heritage foundation, or his ty doctoral thesis.
But wait, there's more.
Richwine was a guest columnist at what can be charitably called a "white nationalist" website.
http://alternativeright.com/
Don't take my word for it, paruse yourself. A bit more background: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/h...174301703.html
"We're not racist, but...."
SMH.
You mean Reichwine?
*rimshot*
Nixon's Southern (Repugs recruit racist Dems after VRA, etc in 1960s) Strategy? liberal fantasy, never existed.
Took me a second.... I didn't seet the BA DUM TISH... and you had me looking up the spelling.
I get it, now.
This guy, Richwine, who I've never heard of (until today), speaks for all conservatives, tbh.
he was hired by VRWC propaganda mill Heritage that published his garbage, so your attempt to isolate him as non-representative outlier fails, as usual.
I hate to have to revert back to the old days of saying intelligent things, but...
Richwine's hypothesis in his dissertation of Hispanic genetic inferiority can be disproven. If it were true, we would expect to see US-born mestizo and indio Hispanics with IQ's similar to those of immigrants. However, this is not the case. The most recent study showed that the average IQ of those US-born is 97. A trend of similar studies dating back decades shows a rise from a baseline of 85 beginning in the early 1970's. The trendline follows a proportional response curve, which when extrapolated, would predict that U.S.-born mestizo/indio Hispanics will have an average IQ of 100 by 2020. This looks like a classic case of the Flynn effect.
Furthermore, I would hypothesize that given the social stratification among U.S. Anglos (see Charles Murray's work), and the absence of analogous stratification among Hispanics, that blue-collar Hispanics are on average more intelligent than blue-collar Anglos, that they would be expected to outcompete blue-collar Anglos in the workplace on the basis of merit, and that this dynamic is the true cause of rancor among these Anglos.
Yes, that one.
If you study geographical crime "hotspots" both in major urban and suburban areas by race and ethnicity, you will find no statistically significant increase in crime as a function of % Hispanic in a census tract. Crime hotspots are either predominantly black or predominantly lower-class Anglo. Mostly they are predominantly black.
The studies to date that claim a genetic basis for group intelligence differences suffer from the flaw that they assume any differences that persist after controlling for known environmental factors must be genetic. This assumption is easy to disprove -- what about unknown environmental factors? For the known factors, how do you know your correlations are right? What if you are assuming y:x when in reality y:x^2?
In order to verify a genetic basis, the study would have to be based in genetics, i.e. figure out which genes are tied to greater intelligence and determine whether they are distributed differently between groups. Of course that study will never occur in the United States because of the political implications if it were to demonstrate that blacks are genetically inferior. Therefore, the study will occur in China.
My hypothesis also explains the growing political divide between more- and less-educated Anglos, and why a Republican Party dependent on the votes of less-intelligent Anglos can't give up its habits of anti-intellectualism and racism.
I have another hypothesis too: the social sciences are complete bull , and any competent STEM professional dabbling in his spare time would be able to run rings around a social scientist PhD from Harvard.
The Long, Sordid History of the American Right and Racism
Racism has been a consistent thread weaving through the American Right from the early days when Anti-Federalists battled against the U.S. Cons ution to the present when hysterical Tea Partiers denounce the first African-American president. Other factors have come and gone for the Right, but racism has always been there
Though definitions of Right and Left are never precise, the Left has generally been defined, in the American context, by government actions – mostly the federal government responding to popular movements and representing the collective will of the American people – seeking to improve the lot of common citizens and to reduce social injustice.
The Right has been defined by opposition to such government activism. Since the Founding, the Right has decried government interference with the “free market” and intrusion upon “traditions,” like slavery and segregation, as “tyranny” or “socialism.”
This argument goes back to 1787 and opposition to the Cons ution’s centralizing of government power in the hands of federal authorities. In Virginia, for instance, the Anti-Federalists feared that a strong federal government eventually would outlaw slavery in the Southern states.
Ironically, this argument was raised by two of the most famous voices for “liberty,” Patrick Henry and George Mason. Those two Virginians spearheaded the Anti-Federalist cause at the state’s ratifying convention in June 1788, urging rejection of the Cons ution because, they argued, it would lead to slavery’s demise.
The irony of Henry and Mason scaring fellow Virginians about the Cons ution’s threat to slavery is that the two men have gone down in popular U.S. history as great espousers of freedom. Before the Revolution, Henry was quoted as declaring, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Mason is hailed as a leading force behind the Bill of Rights. However, their notion of “liberty” and “rights” was always selective. Henry and Mason worried about protecting the “freedom” of plantation owners to possess other human beings as property.
etc
http://www.alternet.org/civil-libert...ght-and-racism
Haven't looked into it myself, but thanks for the analysis.
As noted in the OP, it would seem that the science underpinning his work is a bit... less than stellar, to put it mildly.
The left has its horrible science and groupthink to be sure, but the main take-away I got from this is that there would appear to be some good reason to be wary of an underlying tone of racism in much of what passes for right-wing dogma.
... or maybe Korea, which has some headstart on China when it comes to publishing in western-style peer review.
must
not
let
thread
fade
-RG
There is no genetic basis for race. As such any genetic study of race is unfounded.
It's akin to studying the engine performance of cars categorized by shade of headlamp.
This gets back to epistemology and how we use categories to understand things. If you are going to categorize things for study then you better be damn sure that the categories are relevant.
It's why soft sciences like psychology really never get anywhere in their analysis. They're still mired in ty categories like id, ego, and superego.
Boundaries between categories are often fuzzy and subjective. That doesn't mean the categories themselves are baseless.
There is no genetic basis for race. That is the very definition of baseless.
There is a statistically significant correlation between racial self-identification and haplogroup.
I'm sure there is a correlation between running lights and engine type too.
You are unable to come up with an objective standard. Instead you use self selection as the criteria. That's even worse than using skin pigmentation.
The Southern Strategy, as a political strategy was hugely successful for the GOP in it's day. But live by the ideological sword, die by the ideological sword.
Interesting. Remember in the mid 2000s when that Harvard president got in trouble over this same stuff? He was asked why there aren't more women in the STEM fields. He said that one of the reasons was because while men and women have basically the same average IQ, the distributions aren't the same; women are tighter around the mean. So, there are more high IQ and low IQ men. The reaction to that was the same as to this today, and he resigned a few months later.
Could it be possible that there are differences in IQ distribution between Hispanics and Anglos, at least today, for some reason?
Also remember that even James Watson had to retire over a statement about intelligence in Africa, and he discovered the structure of DNA.
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