Year: 2005

A useful round-up of hysterical far left responses to any legitimate discussion of intelligence and group differences. Far left activist Atrios calls me “a bigot or a fool” in his post. No, Mr Black. Just interested in the truth. He also says that my claim to have published an extract from the Bell Curve before anyone else is untrue. He’s wrong. TNR ran the only advance piece by Murray on the subject. And the cover-date for TNR is always a couple of weeks ahead of the actual published date (it keeps its shelf-life on news-stands), which may account for Atrios’ error. The magazine was certainly not alone in covering the controversy. But we pioneered it. I have the scars to show for it.

MORE ON PENGUINS: An emailer with another tale of gay parenting:

A good friend of mine worked on “Rock Island” at the Baltimore Zoo for several years after college. Rock Island is the home of the zoo’s colony of African (Black-footed) penguins. If memory serves, African penguins mate for life rather than seasonally — which included the for-life pair of Bob and Dave. Apparently some of the (heterosexual) mating pairs weren’t terribly adept at caring for their eggs or young, so when these particular pairs would produce an egg the zoo staff would snatch if from their nest, replace it with a fake, and put the real egg in Bob and Dave’s nest because they were very good at caring for an egg. My friend used to say that when Bob and Dave would come back to their nest and find an egg there they’d look at each other in a puzzled way as if to say, “Hmmm… one of us must’ve had an egg.” Then they’d go about the normal business of caring for it as though it were theirs.

That, of course, is roughly what many gay couples now do in human societies, when children, abandoned or mistreated by their heterosexual parents, manage to find foster or adopted homes with gay families. And that care for children is precisely what some on the religious right want to prevent. I don’t get it.

Well, it doesn’t look to me like an impasse. It looks to me like an inevitable moment of truth in a democratic process. The one minority group that is bound to lose the most from a new, devolved constitution – the Sunni elite – is resisting the complete rearrangement of Iraq’s polity on democratic lines. Sure, it would have been much better if legit Sunni leaders had signed onto a solid deal. But they didn’t, and now their recalcitrance will be put to a vote. Yes: a vote. What we have here is a remarkable demonstration of a modern Arab and Muslim country working through its own political arrangements in a pre-ordained constitutional process. That itself is something of an achievement. It reveals that although the U.S. is obviously heavily present as a force for ultimate order, the Iraqis themselves are figuring out how to run their country again. This takes time, as president Bush is right to point out, and patience. And it is also a demonstration of the kind of transformation we are aiming for in the Middle East: where people take responsibility for their own polities in a democratic fashion. I don’t think the Bush team could have waved a magic wand and made all this difficult bargaining any easier or simpler, and from all that I can tell, they have been doing the best they can. It doesn’t seem that obvious to me either that the failure to get the Sunnis to sign off means a more intense insurgency. The violence is being propelled by forces who want no deal at all – and some kind of deal might have emboldened them still further. The job of the U.S. is to do a far better job of providing security. David Brooks’ suggestion seems like a no-brainer. John McCain’s support for more troops makes sense as well. No real progress will be made militarily without removing Rumsfeld, however. He remains the most intransigent defender of failed policies. He should go; the Iraq process should continue; the goal of reshaping the Muslim Middle East remains our best security aginst future terror. If you’re interested, I make a more detailed case for cautious optimism here.
UPDATE: Juan Cole counters my cautious optimism.

BIG GOVERNMENT CONSERVATISM: The Bush people spend like paleo-liberals; they borrow like paleo-liberals; and they regulate like paleo-liberals. The only thing they don’t do is tax like paleo-liberals. But that will come. This president has made the permanent increase of taxation in this country an inevitability.

A must-read from Charles Murray. One of my proudest moments in journalism was publishing an expanded extract of a chapter from “The Bell Curve” in the New Republic before anyone else dared touch it. I published it along with multiple critiques (hey, I believed magazines were supposed to open rather than close debates) – but the book held up, and still holds up as one of the most insightful and careful of the last decade. The fact of human inequality and the subtle and complex differences between various manifestations of being human – gay, straight, male, female, black, Asian – is a subject worth exploring, period. Liberalism’s commitment to political and moral equality for all citizens and human beings is not and should not be threatened by empirical research into human difference and varied inequality. And the fact that so many liberals are determined instead to prevent and stigmatize free research and debate on this subject is evidence … well, that they have ceased to be liberals in the classic sense. I’m still proud to claim that label – classical liberal. And I’m proud of those with the courage to speak truth to power, as Murray and Herrnstein so painstakingly did. Pity Summers hasn’t been able to match their courage. But recalling the tidal wave of intolerance, scorn and ignorance that hit me at the time, I understand why.

A reader reminds me of another excellent resource on ubiquitous homosexuality among animal species: “Biological Exuberance,” by Bruce Baghemil. 450 separate species show evidence of homosexuality. What was God thinking of?

“For what it is worth, when my son was born, I said no to circumcision. The doctor could offer no benefit beyond aesthetics. As my wife said at the time, ‘He’s perfect as he is, why would I do that to him?’ Making him ‘look like dad’ – my friends’ justification every time – seemed about as dumb a reason as anyone could present. (I also have many scars and healed broken bones; does he need those ‘badges of dad’s life’ as well?)
If it were routine in this nation to cut up newborn baby girls’ bodies for aesthetic reasons, … well, I can stop right there; there is no way we would still be cutting baby girls’ bodies for aesthetic reasons right after birth. People making (still essentially unsupported) arguments about how ‘it doesn’t hurt later enjoyment of intimate relations’ and ‘there might be health benefits’ would be properly shouted down by university faculty, social activists, government agencies, leftist groups of every variety, and an army of hysterical (an etymologically dangerous word in this hypo but useful) female ‘survivors’ of the procedure.
But boys? ‘Pull out the knife and get to work, doc! Swab a little numbing agent on there … if you think it is necessary.'”

It is interesting, I think, that this would be a non-issue for baby girls for entirely defensible feminist reasons. No, I’m not talking about female genital mutilation, which is far more drastic and barbaric than male genital mutilation. But any sort of involuntary prettifying of baby girls for purely aesthetic or cultural reasons would be protested and banned. More evidence that there actually is a growing bias against boys in our culture. And it starts at birth.

They’ve even contaminated the paper cups in Saudi Arabia.

MEANWHILE: As Iraq’s careening journey toward some sort of attempt at democracy continues, Russia and China get chummier and chummier. Funny how al Jazeera noticed, innit?

A DIVORCE AMENDMENT? The theocons are not dumb enough to introduce one, but some are honest enough to concede it’s a much bigger problem for marriage than gays’ committing to each other.

The D.C. Examiner asked a bunch of us to recommend some books for the president to read on vacation. My pick? Winston Churchill’s “The River War.” More suggestions here.

Greg Djerejian makes the case against.

That’s the date for Massachusetts’ legislature to decide whether to continue with the state constitutional amendment process to convert civil marriages between gay couples into civil unions. After a year in which gay families have strengthened, straight families have seen no change, and everyone wants to move on, the chances of the amendment going forward have dimmed somewhat.

Mark Kleiman removes what’s left of Cole’s credibility.