What on earth are these “liberals” so terrified of, if not the truth? Instead of going on racist witch-hunts, why don’t they question what IQ means, how great the cultural and environmental impact can be (very considerable), whether such tests should guide public policy at all, or examine how “race” as a social construct does not always correlate to specific variations in human DNA.
Once again Mr. Sullivan's facile, bong-hit, dorm-room Something Something Whig Something Something Burke Conservatism blinds him to the country he continues to live in but adamantly refuses to see.-- Andrew Sullivan, May 14, 2013
Also this from the same, execrable article --
Of course not. We remain the same species, just as a poodle and a beagle are of the same species. But poodles, in general, are smarter than beagles, and beagles have a much better sense of smell. We bred those traits into them, of course, fast-forwarding evolution. But the idea that natural selection and environmental adaptation stopped among human beings the minute we emerged in the planet 200,000 years ago – and that there are no genetic markers for geographical origin or destination – is bizarre. It would be deeply strange if Homo sapiens were the only species on earth that did not adapt to different climates, diseases, landscapes, and experiences over hundreds of millennia. We see such adaptation happening very quickly in the animal kingdom. Our skin color alone – clearly a genetic adaptation to climate – is, well, right in front of one’s nose.-- which Lawyers, Guns and Money accurately points out is...
...an argument well at home within the circles of late 19th century Social Darwinism, Lamarckism, and scientific racism. I mean, Mongoloid skulls are this big and Nordic skulls are this big. It’s right in front of one’s nose!It took America's Greatest Gay Conservative Public Intellectual most of his adult life to notice that the American Conservatism is built on a pillar of hating gay people.
I wonder how many more decades of facediving into enormous piles of phrenological offal it will take before what is really going on here begins to slooooooooowly dawn on him.
Have I mentioned recently there is a Club?
Have I mentioned recently that you are not in it?
8 comments:
That's a paragraph written by someone who is trying to seem clever but really has nothing to say.
Why hasn't this guy been exiled? One thing about the president that annoys me is that he wastes time entertaining this clown. Why are liberals on tv embracing Sully? Why does he have subscribers? Are people dense enough to take him seriously? This Sullivan cat is embarrassing.
What really kills me is this guy's still talking about iq. No serious scholar talks about iq nowadays. He needs to get his klan gear and be proud of himself.
Vic78
OT: woo! New Template! :D
What a canting hypocrite. To the degree that he thinks at all, Sullivan knows which side of bigotry his bread is buttered on.
Well, at least Sully doesn't manage to have his own fan club to deploy to defend his honor, unlike other so-called liberal Big-time bloggers.
If you listen closely, you can hear a strange whirring sound. My sources at the Hadron Super Collider say that they haven't been able to determine the exact speed, but they estimate it somewhere in excess of 4,500 rpm.
It is Stephen Jay Gould turning over in his grave. Has NOBODY read "The Mismeasure of Man" this millennium? Clearly they haven't at Hahvahd, which granted Mr. Richwine his doctorate for his specious "research." Sullivan is the guy in the clown suit off to the side, hitting himself in the face with cream pies while shouting "Wooga!"
This is Sullivan's pet "contrarian" issue to boost his links and traffic.
In the vein of Saletan, Hitchens, and others (it goes back to Oscar Wilde, really), Sullivan has mastered the art of trolling his readers into extremely specific knots with odious opinions dressed up in superficially plausible arguments. Then, as columnist after columnist after blogger after blogger takes a whack at the giant Wicker Man Argument Sullivan has made, he pirouettes to the next topic, blithely ignoring any mention his previous odious opinion for weeks, if not months or years at a time, softening his writing with some more conventional opinions or some futuristic meta-think or some pictures of puppies and kitties frolicking in fields.
And people fall for this...
time...
after time...
after time...
again, giving breathless attention to an upper class twit for having such SHOCKING, just SHOCKING, opinions about decent society, gossipgossipgossip.
Andrew Sullivan does not have real opinions on well, anything. Instead, he's a privateer of his own colors, always hoisting sail and weighing anchor wherever the winds are blowing. He straddles conventional wisdom, sometimes agreeing, sometimes not, but he's always careful to offer some red meat to everyone.
Thus, Sullivan can be Catholic and gay married at the same time, because he's the authority of and for gay conservatives, who hate Hillary Clinton for no good reason yet adore Margaret Thatcher for no good reason other than pure tribalism. He's always met somebody, always knows somebody, and can gossip on any topic effortlessly, dismissing who's out and approving of who's in with a smattering of columns and links.
And he is being paid to do this. Because he publishes an appeal for bipartisanship and centrism on Monday, a guessing game on Tuesday, a paean to superficial morality on Wednesday, a worrisome graph of the economy on Thursday, a picture of a puppy on Friday, a incoherent defense of Toryism on Saturday, and some poems and artwork and links on Sunday, all stolen from Buzzfeed and Reddit, and be paid 20 dollars a month by slavish fans who just love his centrist, edgy opinions of how white people are poodles and black people are beagles, cause dog breeds are just like race.
And as soon as anyone opens there mouth to say, "Well, studies show..." or "Actually, you're wrong..." or "I'm never going to give you money, you racist sybarite" he's danced away again, offering a sad picture of a dead Syrian child juxtaposed with his next post about balloons and lollipops and buttsex.
Lit3Bolt, I think there's something to that, in that Sullivan (like many a Slate writer) does traffic in fashionable contrarianism, because he both loves the attention and believes it's proof he's an independent thinker. But I think in this case, his true, unreflective, privileged Tory bigotry is just shining through. He sincerely holds racist views, and while he'll dress them up in pseudo-intellectual claptrap to himself and others, his views are unremarkable and hardly daring in his true circle. He knows it won't play well with the broader public, because he's done this before. But I think this is a case of both/and versus either/or. He is both deliberately creating a fuss and is sincerely bigoted (even if he's deluding himself about one or both of those).
As aimai wrote over at LGM:
"When you have eliminated the improbable then all that is left is the incredibly obvious. At this point Sullivan is either the stupidest person on earth and also a racist or he is the most motivated liar on earth and also a racist. On the ol’ stupid—evil continuum he basically does a contortionist bit worthy of a circus worm ouroborus and simultaneously eats and vomits up his own tail."
A similar discussion sprang up at Alicublog over Jonah Goldberg – yes, he's opportunistically racist, and makes money off of it, but he also sincerely doesn't like black people.
(But your mileage may vary; there's ample ground and multiple ways for smacking around Sullivan, so we can differ on the precise diagnosis of his wankerdom.)
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