I write letters to the editor of local newspapers I read. Usually something I read upsets me enough I have to respond.
I wrote in response to an article related to the Judge Roy Moore 10 Commandments legal case. Moore, former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court forced his religious beliefs on the citizens of his state by erecting a stone slab with the Holy Bible’s 10 Commandments engraved on it. At the time Moore had been ordered by a Federal Court to remove the Decalogue. Many conservative politicians, like State Rep. Mike Gilb (R-Findlay) fell over themselves to propose and vote on resolutions in support of Moore and the posting of the Decalogue in public buildings like courthouses.
In case you lived in a cave the past couple of weeks, some major civil disobedience has been going on in the city of San Francisco.
It seems the Mayor wants to marry gay couples even though there is a state law against marriage of same-sex couples. For the past couple of weeks, the city has been issuing marriage licenses and performing civil ceremonies for all gay couples who want one. Hundreds have lined up at city hall for the chance to thumb their noses at what they believe is an unjust law.
Civil disobedience is a time honored way to bring attention to unjust laws and actions. US history is full of risk takers. And it is a risk because while the attention is generated, the people who openly defy the law do get punished. Sometimes the law is then changed but that happens after many are put in jail and fined.
Hearing the complaints from the political and religious conservatives, one would think the Earth was about to imploded because of the Mayor’s action.
One such shrill outrage comes from the founder of the American Family Association, Donald E. Wildmon, who through his Onemilliondads.com project sent the following e-mail on 2/19:
Anarchy is breaking loose across America
I know. The headline seems extreme. But the question isn’t if it is extreme, but is it true?
In San Francisco, the mayor has disobeyed the law and issued “marriage” licenses to homosexual couples. In Massachusetts, the state Supreme Court has ordered another branch of government “the Legislature” to pass a law making homosexual “marriage” legal.
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has said he has no problem with breaking the law and is willing to issue “marriage” licenses to homosexuals. Who will be the next official willing to break the law?
It is time to contact your U.S. Representative and two U.S. Senators demanding that they act on this issue. Anarchy cannot and must not be allowed.
All have defied laws on the books prohibiting homosexual “marriages.” They have shown a total disregard for the law. They have refused to allow the people (that’s you) a voice or a vote on this issue. They consider themselves above the law.
Within weeks there will be lawsuits across the nation to force individual states (and you) to recognize these illegal “marriages.”
Unfortunately the same AFA group that is outraged that the city of San Francisco is breaking the law, saw nothing wrong when Judge Roy Moore defied a federal court order to remove a 10 Commandments monument he had placed in the lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court building.
Of course Conservatives also can be hypocrites when it comes to politics.
The Republican party and their apologists drone on about how President Bush’s dubious military service record is not important to his present duties. They say that “the American people” want to move on.
That type of response was missing when the President was Bill Clinton. They harped on how Clinton “dodged the draft” by going to Oxford in the UK. They complained he got special treatment. It is hypocritical of them now to ask people to ignore Bush’s special treatment especially because one of the leading Democratic candidates running for the office has a more distinguished service record. 3 purple hearts always beats flight training in the Champagne unit of the Texas National Guard.
Then there is the whole Iraq mess.
President Bush is ignoring calls to answer for his dubious reasons for invading Iraq. Republicans drone on about how Saddam was removed from power and that is far more important than how we did it.
Really?
Well they weren’t so forgiving when President Clinton bombed Sudan and Afghanistan and when the GOP tried to impeach him for lying about adultery.
President Clinton was the most investigated President in recent memory and now when Bush is in trouble for a worse infraction, lying to the public about why we had to invade Iraq in 2003, they want to deflect the needed investigation until after the elections.
How convenient.
Only 9 months left until there is a chance to clean house……
This essay was the result of a discussion I was having on an e-mail list in which I participate called Human_ism back, in 2000.
The person I was debating about The Bell Curve accused me of not reading the book as we debated the merits of it.
I had not read the book. I came to my views about it from articles I read about the book. So, to take that argument away from my opponent, I bought the book (ugh) and read it (My eyes! My eyes).
The conclusions I write in this essay are my own, after reading the book. I thought I had published this on my website but found out, when the discussion came up again recently, that I had not.
I have revised it a bit because some of my phrasing seemed a bit klunky but overall this is the final draft of the essay. — dlb
The Bell Curve: Science or Political Statement?
An essay by Doug Berger
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*Note* To save me some typing I used some abbreviations. TBC = The Bell Curve, H&M= Herrnstein and Murray (the authors), con/lib = conservative/libertarian
The Bell Curve is a controversial book that salted the wound between the “haves and have nots” and those that have and want to help the have nots. H&M have been called a lot of names from racist to bigot and their book has been trashed and supported by many well known scientists in the world.
That is what happens when a political statement is passed off as science. H&M basically showed the trends in IQ between classes of people, asserted that a large “underclass” will emerge, and offer “suggestions” to help deal with a lot of poor dumb people.
Is TBC racist? Are H&M racist? Are TBC implications as profound as Chester Finn said in “Commentary”. Hopefully H&M words in TBC can shed some light on those issues.
I should say now that I won’t be dealing with the nuts and bolts of the science in the book. There has been plenty of debate about that issue by people well versed in those fields [read the side note at the end of this essay]. This little essay will deal with what H&M says in the book as result of the science they present. TBC is really a conservative/libertarian political statement and an old one at that.
The book is long any contains a lot of statistics, graphs, and results. On the whole, for the intended audience, this is just filler. Based on a skim of the book, the words they use and the conclusions they draw, the intended audience seems to be white conservatives who have been fighting government social programs for 30 years for various reasons.
In the preface, one gets a sense of the initial bias H&M has going into the book. They say: “…They propose solutions founded on better education, on more and better jobs, on specific social interventions. But they ignore an underlying element that has shaped the changes: human intelligence….”
The inference for the reader is that the solutions proposed by “They” (social scientists, journalists, and liberal politicians) haven’t solved the problems of poverty and the underclass. One would seem to think that the problem can’t be solved due to dumb poor people who can’t be changed.
On page 64 H&M state the economic efficiency in business between high IQ and low IQ workers:
“Our main point has nothing to do with deciding how large the loss is or how large the gain would be if intelligence test could be freely used for hiring. Rather, it is simply that intelligence itself is importantly related to job performance. Laws can make the economy less efficient by forbidding employers to use intelligence tests, but laws cannot make intelligence unimportant.”
This is the primary premiss in the book. Intelligence is important to humans.
Then H&M spend a bulk of the book presenting evidence that low IQ is the majority of the nation’s ills and it is there where they get into trouble. It starts with how they present the argument. They start by only focusing on whites as an introduction then repeat their arguments using “ethnic groups”. H&M call the section “The National Context” and include evidence of the IQ differences between whites, blacks, and asians. Basically the reader is left with the conclusion that lower IQ is at the root of all our social ills like poverty and blacks have lower IQ than whites and asians have slightly higher IQs than whites. The dots that the reader then connects is that blacks are at the root of the social ills. They would have been more effective and less racist if they had kept their argument to ‘lower IQ is the root of social ills’ rather than bringing in the old worn ethnic differences – that blacks are lower than whites and asians are slightly above whites in IQ. They present a clever basis to justify arguments against government social intervention.
In the final sections of the book H&M examine some current solutions for poverty and how since the programs don’t match the IQ of the people it is intended to help, most don’t work. They also make a complaint about the “gifted minority” who they see as being left out. This is yet another con/lib argument made about education. It seems to con/libs gifted children are almost all white.
I did spot a glaring contradiction in H&M’s argument.
On page 54, H&M said adoption of children into better homes doesn’t improve the job status of those children in the future.
But in Chapter 17, they claim that preschool and Head Start programs don’t raise IQ. They claim that the only thing that seems to work, to the tune of a 6 point rise, is adoption of the child from a “bad” family environment to a “good” one.
In Chapter 18 they make an argument that since education can’t raise IQ, the government should support parental choice through vouchers, tax credits, or within the public schools. They also suggest that some funds that go to the disadvantaged should go to programs for the gifted instead. They make the claim that until the later half of the 20th century, educating the gifted was the chief purposes of education. They argue that education has been dumbed down for those with lower IQ and that puts our future in danger.
This is just a silly assertion on their part. The purpose of education, since our modern educational system began was to be able to make all students, regardless of ability or class status, productive citizens. An educated populous benefits the nation as a whole.
Restricting education to the gifted only, as H&M suggest, ignores the entire history of education in this country.
H&M then use the next couple of chapters to argue against Affirmative Action in education and the work place. They perpetrate the myth that some minorities accepted or hired due to Affirmative Action are not qualified for the school or job. They make that argument since they believe that IQ makes one qualified – not any education or training. They feel that poor dumb people are “naturally” unqualified.
In Chapter 21, H&M talk about the future problems that they think will happen if public policy is not changed in the way they suggest in the previous chapters. This basicially fans the flames of fear about poor dumb people multipling unchecked until they take over the world (or rather that is the sense I got from the chapter). Not only will we have scores of poor dumb people but we will have spent our precious tax money on those lost causes.
They saved Chapter 22 for more “suggestions” to deal with the “problems” outlined in the book and Chapter 21.
They suggest:
A wide range of social functions should be restored to the neighborhoods when possible and otherwise to the municipality.
Making it easier to make a living (less government rules)
Making it easier to live a virtuous life : Crime should be black and white. Marriage should be be restored to it is unique legal status.
Replace welfare payments with an alternative such as the earned income credit.
The government should stop subsidizing births to anyone, rich or poor.
The US should consider accepting immigrants based more on high cognitive ability (IQ).
H&M conclude TBC with a restatement of the con/lib argument that the government should deal with the “small” segment of the population (low IQ) who account for the “large” proportion of the social problems they outlined in the book, but the govt. should leave the rest of us alone.
Conclusion:
TBC is a political statement on public policy that has been heard from the con/lib camp for sometime. H&M talk about returning to local control, less regulations, get tougher on crime, protecting marriage, school choice, ending welfare, changing affirmative action, and restricting immigration. They base their conclusion on the problems that are rooted at those with low IQ, something they argue can’t be changed.
The inferences the reader makes in the IQ discussions are racist on the face no matter what H&M state explicitly. The audience of the book is white conservatives who all ready agree with their conclusions. The “evidence” then justifies their agenda. H&M could have made the same arguments without even dealing with genetics or race, but they did.
H&M don’t offer solutions for low IQ only to state that it is the root of all our problems and it can’t be changed. Since they also show that blacks make up the large portion of low IQ what is a reader to conclude? Murray states in the afterword that he didn’t think that race was a big deal in the book. Why then even mention it?
I am also bothered at the amount of space devoted to IQ when their conclusions and suggestions had nothing to do with IQ.
Is TBC racist? Yes, in that it goes into the IQ/race argument for no apparent reason especially when one of their concerns toward the end of the book was a rise in a white underclass.
Are H&M racists? In a general sense yes since they blame all current social ills on poor dumb people and the added racial argument just makes it more clear they are.
Are the implications of TBC profound? No. They just repeat what they themselves say is known but not talked about and their policy suggestions have been heard before.
Basically I think TBC is just another version of “Darwin’s Black Box” that tries and cloaks a political agenda in science. It tries to use science to prove its conclusions.
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[Side Note: I am not a science person. There has been some heated debate among the science community about the validity of H&M studies. This fact is true. The Bell Curve was never peer reviewed. That is it wasn’t published in any science journals where accepted science come from.
H&M found a publisher and sold it straight to the public much like the scientists supporting the Intelligent Designer idea of Creationism.
Here is one example of a rebuttal of H&M’s research. More can be found at the link at the end of the example — dlb
“The remaining studies cited by Lynn, and accepted as valid by Herrnstein and Murray, tell us little about African intelligence but do tell us something about Lynn’s scholarship. One of the 11 entries in Lynn’s table of the intelligence of “pure Negroids” indicates that 1,011 Zambians who were given the Progressive Matrices had a lamentably low average IQ of 75. The source for this quantitative claim is given as “Pons 1974; Crawford-Nutt 1976.”
A. L. Pons did test 1,011 Zambian copper miners, whose average number of correct responses was 34. Pons reported on this work orally; his data were summarized in tabular form in a paper by D. H. Crawford-Nutt. Lynn took the Pons data from Crawford-Nutt’s paper and converted the number of correct responses into a bogus average “IQ” of 75. Lynn chose to ignore the substance of Crawford-Nutt’s paper, which reported that 228 black high school students in Soweto scored an average of 45 correct responses on the Matrices–HIGHER than the mean of 44 achieved by the same-age white sample on whom the test’s norms had been established and well above the mean of Owen’s coloured pupils.”
The Hancock Republican Party held a “Meet the Candidates” event during their First Friday Luncheon Club on February 6th.
The guests were the nine candidates running for the two open slots on the Hancock County Commissioners. As the headline read in the Findlay Courier, “Candidate views similar”.
It really isn’t important to name the candidates here since they were so interchangeable. But that’s what happens when a party dominates the local scene. Instead of new ideas and wanting to get enthusiastic, you get BLAH.
The participants were given two minutes to introduce themselves and then one minute to answer a series of questions posed from the audience.
Some the questions were:
If they would meet new Findlay Mayor Tony Iriti’s pledge to nurture cooperation between the city and the county, and how they would do it.
If they would put the quarter-percent sales tax increase, used to fund the county’s criminal justice system, back on the ballot if necessary or if they would simply impose it.
How they would attract well-paying jobs to the county.
But like true modern politicians none of them really answered the questions.
One candidate, during the intro part of the event, even told people to read his bio in a pamphlet his campaign had printed up.
On the question about how they would attract well-paying jobs to the county, no one mentioned a specific plan. They only mentioned working closely with the Chamber of Commerce.
“Well, duh….” comes to mind.
On the issue of the recent sales tax hike to fund the sheriff’s office, some said they would wait and see if it needs to be renewed while a couple pledged to put it on the ballot if needed.
Left unanswered, like how to bring more jobs to the county (which by the way the county really doesn’t need what with consistently having one of the lowest unemployment rates in the state), the participants also didn’t answer questions not asked, like how would they improve the county. What would they do about the lack of affordable housing? How would they protect farmland from the annexation fever of the city of Findlay? What are their feelings about the recent efforts to zone various township land? What are their views on the need for strong environmental regulations?
The meet and greet reminded me of interviewing 16 year olds for a fast food job and each one saying they are “people person”. Each are just as qualified but none stand out from the crowd.
YAWN….
Originally posted on the blog “Hancock County Politics Unfiltered”
Most Americans will remember that famous line uttered by sportscaster Al Michaels as he called the final seconds in the 1980 Olymic Hockey tournament semi-finals pitting the US team versus the powerful Soviet team. The US had won 4-3 and the next day beat Finland to win its first Gold medal in hockey since 1960.
A major motion picture called “Miracle” debuts on February 6th which tells the story of the 1980 team and its coach Herb Brooks who did the impossible.
You just had to either be there or have seen it on the tube to understand how incredible the 1980 US Hockey victory over the Soviets was.
The USSR had not lost the Gold medal since 1960 when the US team won it in Squaw Valley and the Soviets had won 21 straight Olympic games before that night.
While the US team was made up of college players (amateurs) the Soviet team was made up of the best players in the USSR who all happened to be in the military. Their job was to play hockey so they were really professionals paid under the table so they could be passed off as amateurs.
The US team hadn’t been in contention for a hockey medal since 1960 and they were seeded 7th in the 1980 tournament out of 12 teams.
The US team jelled during the tournament and as they won games the momentum built so when the Soviet match came up people were stoked. Millions watched the game on the tube. Most were hopeful the US would win but no one really thought they could. The Soviets were too tough and too professional for the gang of college kids.
The US team got lucky in the match as the Soviets dominated play through out. The US winning goal came with 10 minutes left and they had to hang on to win. That is why it was a miracle and the best US Olympic victory in history.
The victory made people forget for a time the funk we were in with the Cold War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the hostages in Iran, the haunting memories of Vietnam, and the terrible economy.
Every time they show those scenes of the final seconds ticking off, the gloves and sticks flying into the air, and Al Michaels now famous statement, I can’t help but be transported back to that cold February night in 1980 when I saw one of the greatest sports drama played out live on television. It made me a hockey fan to this day.
