Month: November 2011

Islamophobe Pamela Geller freaks out because Butterball is allegedly selling "stealth halal" turkeys. Adam Serwer snarks:

Now, assuming Geller's right about Butterball turkeys being halal, you might think that in a capitalist economy, halal turkeys are a sign of meat sellers responding to market demand for food prepared a certain way. You might even be tempted to observe that Muslim Americans marking a secular, American holiday celebrating pluralism and freedom from religious persecution might be a sign of the extent to which American Muslims have assimilated into American culture. What you didn't know was that when markets respond to the demands of Muslim consumers, freedom dies. 

An 82-year-old grandma tries Pop Rocks for the first time:

A reader writes:

I know you have an iron in this particular fire, but I wonder what exactly you're so upset about. I'm going to grant you fully, for the sake of argument, that there are enduring and resilient racial differences in IQ. (I'll also admit that intellectually I would want to know why such differences exist.) But what then? Do we enact policy that makes prejudiced assumptions about differences in IQ on the basis of race, even though we know (like Jensen) that on a pairwise basis those assumptions have a very large chance of being wrong? I'm guessing your answer is an emphatic "no." And if I were a similarly inclined social scientist – one who thinks there's something "real" in IQ and that racial differences in that metric are persistent – what's the point of going down that research pathway if I know that nothing practical would ever come of it but sadness and misunderstanding?

You say "p.c. egalitarianism" strangled this field of research and that researchers have run away in a "racial panic." Really? I would challenge you, the next time you decide to dig this one up, to please discuss how this kind of research would actually help people, rather than just be a weapon of bigotry.

Two points: research is not about helping people; it's about finding out stuff. And I have long opposed the political chilling of free inquiry into any area of legitimate curiosity or research. I'm not going to stop now. Secondly, I agree that there would be very little, if any, use for this data in our society, apart from the existence of affirmative action. But when public policy holds that all racial difference in, say, college degrees, are due to racism, a truth claim has already been made. So the p.c. egalitarians have made this a public and social issue by a statement of fact they subsequently do not want to see debated or challenged using the data. That's an illiberal position, in my view.

I remain gob-smacked by the resilience of IQ differences between broad racial groups, controlling for much other data. Maybe if we understood what was going on – which particular and subtle combination of genetics, culture and generation makes this the result – we could help increase equality of opportunity. Maybe racial categories themselves have become so fluid and opaque the whole area is now moot. Maybe we should accept that differences in outcomes among racial groups have some element of irreducibility to them. Maybe the answer is to abolish racial affirmative action and replace it by class-based forms. Maybe the answer is to abolish affirmative action altogether (my preferred outcome). But all these questions depend on a thriving research culture which has been chilled by politics. That's what saddens me.

This subject is a well-worn path for the Dish – read here, here and here for but a small sample of the debate.

Jon Chait:

The Republican race now seems to be between Mitt Romney, the consummate establishmentarian, and Newt Gingrich, an hysterical blowhard. But if you watched Tuesday night’s national security debate, you’d never have guessed which was which.

Dan Drezner:

Mitt Romney:  B-  Any time you screw up your own introduction, it's going to be a bad night.  Romney wasn't horrible by any stretch, but he got pushed by Huntsman on civil-military relations and by Gingrich on immigration.  Those guys are no Rick Perry.  He did rally with a very thoughtful and considered answer on Syria, however…. in which he schooled Rick Perry.

Jonathan Tobin:

[T]he consequences for Gingrich should be swift and severe. If Perry’s heresy on immigration hurt him badly in Iowa, there’s no reason to believe an even more extreme position by Gingrich will not turn his current high hopes in the Hawkeye state to dust.

Pete Wehner:

I’ve been through enough campaigns to know that staff is paid to seize on minor matters and elevate them to heresies over first principles. That goes with the territory. But if the Republican Party has adopted a position in which Gingrich’s thoughtful and nuanced stand on immigration is viewed as disqualifying, then it will pay a price, morally and politically.

Nate Silver:

Mr. Gingrich’s answer [on immigration] will not be all that harmful to him. One reason is simply that Mr. Gingrich’s views on immigration are not all that far out of step with those of Republican voters. Although I can’t find a survey that catalogs Republican responses to Mr. Gingrich’s proposal exactly, a New York Times/CBS News poll from May 2010 on a broad range of immigration-related issues provides some evidence about an analogous proposal.

Jeffrey Goldberg:

I can't help but think that Gingrich, while hurting himself politically, may be saving his soul here. I know that this is not the metric by which political reporters judge these things, and I'm not launching into the "moral perils of horse-race coverage" lecture, but let's take a moment in these sorts of situations to acknowledge a candidate who actually makes a deeply human argument. Especially at Thanksgiving.

Jacob Heilbrunn:

[T]here are rumblings in the GOP about the extent of America's commitments abroad. For now, Huntsman and Paul are their most eloquent exponents. In contrast to Paul, however, Huntsman is anything but an isolationist. His worry is that America can no longer compete economically, particularly with China. What this debate showed, then, is that the GOP candidates are genuinely debating what the party should stand for in foreign affairs.

Robert Merry:

This is dangerous stuff. If a nation of America’s power were to stalk the globe with the kind of swagger and disregard for other nations’ interests and sovereignty that was reflected in that debate, the result would be a destabilized world. One has to wonder what kinds of crises would unfold if one of these candidates were to become president.

Matt Yglesias:

America's largest trading partners are, in order: Canada, the Eurozone, China, Mexico, Japan, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, and India. In an ideal world, a debate about foreign policy would say something about these key states. What did we get last night? Almost nothing. Five of the top ten, including our number one partner, went unmentioned and Europe only came up as a secondary consideration for a point that was really about Iran.

Jonathan Bernstein:

Several foreign policy wonks complained about the focus: Europe was entirely ignored, and there were no questions about China, and other important issues were also downplayed or ignored. I’m not sure I mind that. As long as the questions are substantive, we get to hear the candidates talk about public policy, and that seems to me to be one of the reasons to have these things. After all, the candidates are all publishing plenty of position papers on all the big issues, and there are still plenty of debates to go for all the questions to be raised.

Steve Benen:

The question, which Romney presumably heard, was about Al Shabab in Somalia, and what the U.S. might do to address this potential threat. I realize this is a relatively sophisticated question, but the former governor’s response was to attack President Obama’s patriotism. Worse, Romney continues to throw around the "apologize for America" garbage that’s plainly untrue.

David Rothkopf:

Strangely, the big winners were not actually in the room. Barack Obama was one. He won both because he looks so good next to these guys and because they showed him great deference in the degree to which they generally tip-toed around his real accomplishments. But even his triumph was transcended by the night's biggest winner: Bibi Netanyahu. Somehow, he managed to get two of the candidates — Romney and Santorum — to publicly state their first trip as president would be to Israel. And Gingrich offered to work with Israel on a conventional invasion of Iran. And these were just a couple of the highlights. 

A strikingly honest report on Bahrain's suppression of democracy is met with this response by the Bahrainian autocrats:

Bahrain's Sunni government promised "no immunity" for anyone suspected of abuses and said it would propose creating a permanent human rights watchdog commission. "All those who have broken the law or ignored lawful orders and instructions will be held accountable," said a government statement, which says the report acknowledges that the "systematic practice of mistreatment" ended shortly after martial law was repealed on June 1.

So a Middle East dictatorship has more democratic accountability for abuse of power, including torture, than the US under Obama. Indeed, war criminals were accorded star turns in the latest GOP presidential debate. This is the essence of a certain variety of American exceptionalism: because America is so inherently exceptional, it doesn't have to abide by the same rules as everyone else.

Many more here.

"Our concern is that if the conservatives stay as fragmented as they are, that Romney could win the Iowa caucuses. And if he wins the Iowa caucuses, he'll be the nominee. So I think there's an urgency to say, 'Well who is the person that could best challenge [Romney] then move on after Iowa?" – Iowa Christianist activist Bob Vander Plaats.

A reader writes:

An interesting followup to Putin's reception at the MMA fight: after the video came out, Russian media reports described the booing as directed toward the American fighter, Jeff Monson, who was defeated in the match. In response, Russians filled Monson's Facebook wall with expressions of support, and assurances of who the booing was actually aimed at. If Putin's losing support from the MMA crowd he must really be worried.

The video now has more than two million views on Youtube.

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.