Spelke in the New Yorker

There's a great article about Elizabeth Spelke and her work ("The Baby Lab") in this week's New Yorker. Unfortunately it isn't available at the online New Yorker site, so go buy a copy of the September 4 2006 Education Issue.

I first heard of Spelke through her debate with Steven Pinker. I had no idea she was such a big deal in the world of psychology and even Pinker knows it - at least he did five years ago:

Spelke's ideas have been enormously influential among academics. "Nowadays every psychology student is taught that James and Piaget were wrong, "the cognitive scientist and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in Time five years ago. "From their earliest months, in fact, children interpret the world as a real and predictable place... This new understanding is largely the legacy of Harvard psychologist Elixabeth Spelk." Karen Wynn, an infant-cognition researcher at Yale, told me, "Spelke has done more to shape our understanding of how the human mind initially grasps the world than anyone else." In 2000, when the Association for Psychological Science gave her its William James Fellow Award, the citation noted that Spelke had "developed techniques of studying infants' beliefs that are far more probative than might have been imagined only a short time ago," and that her work had begun "to answer the perennial philosophical questions about the origins of human knowledge about space, objects, motion, unity, persistence, identity, and number."

Although I knew about Spelke-Pinker debate I didn't know this:

Spelke had been one of Summers's fiercest critics, calling his remarks "wrong, point for point." And she lambasted him for ignoring a more obvious explanation for the disparity of achievement: "the impediments to women's progress posed by long-standing patters of prejudice, unwelcoming environments, and unequal resources."

This observation, by the article's author Margaret Talbot, is certainly accurate, but I'd say an understatement:

The field of evolutionary psychology is prone to a cheerful - sometimes gleeful - fatalism about sex differences. (Older men ditching their aging wives for nubile misstresses? Men are genetically programmed to spread their DNA! Women more inclined toward gardening than particle physics? Blame it on our hunter-gatherer ancestors!)

Later in the article, the author gets in this excellent gibe at Pinker:

Men across cultures (Pinker) noted, constituted the more risk-taking and competitive sex - though why risk-taking and competitiveness were more adaptive attributes for, say, aspiring mathemeticians than for aspiring sociologists wasn't exactly clear.

Then Talbot gives this amusing description of the Spelke-Pinker debate:

After Pinker and Spelke had given their talks, they sat at a table onstage, and listened to each other with interrupting. But when Pinker spoke, Spelke wore one of those smiles which suggest a certain effort - and when she spoke she used her large hands to make sweeping gestures, as if she were dismissing one silly notion after another. When Pinker started talking about how "the most subjective fields in academia - the social sciences, the humanities, the helping professions" had the greatest representation of women because the jibed with "what gave women satisfaction in life," Spelke looked as though she'd had enough. "I think it's a really interesting possibility that the forces that were active in our evolutionary past have led men and women to evolved somewhate differing concerns," she began. "But to jump from that possibility to the present, and draw conclusions about what people's motives will be for pursuing one or another career is way too big a stretch." The career choices people pursue now, she concluded acidly, were "radically different from anything that anybody faced back in the Pleistocene."

Pinker was suggesting that, because of both sexual selection and parental-investment issues, women are selected to be more nurturing and men more competitive. Suppose that this were true, Spelke said, in the final words of the debate. What sort of motivation made a better scientist? Was it "competitive motives like those J. D. Watson described in 'The Double Helix' to get the structure of DNA before Lunus Pauling did?* Or nurturant motives of the kind that Doug Melton" - the Harvard developmental biologist = "described recently to explain why he's going into stem-cell research: to find a cure for juvenile diabetes, which his children suffer from? I think it's anything but clear how motives from our past translate into modern contexts. We would need to do the experiment, getting rid of discrimination and social pressures, in order to find out."

But while Spelke's reputation will hopefully be enhanced by this article, it also gives Steven Pinker a way to dismiss Spelke. For although Pinker will give respectful interviews to the racists and hard-core right-wingers at Gene Expression (NOTE - the link now redirects to Khan's Discover Magazine blog, but I found the Pinker interview via the Wayback Machine. Enjoy - also if Khan has that removed, I downloaded a copy - just ask me for it) he dismissed evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould's critiques this way: "The criticisms of Stephen Jay Gould have been extensively addressed in my writings and others, and I believe they stem more from his political ideology than from the empirical literature."

You see, Gould was a leftist. Only right-wingers can hold opinions that don't pollute their empirical arguments, apparently according to Steven Pinker.

And Spelke is also left of the gang at Gene Expression. Spelke is

A committed liberal who talks indignantly about race and gender discrimination

.

Maybe the best part of the article though is this:

It was a civil occasion, certainly, but (the Spelke-Pinker debate) was lively enough that the Harvard Crimson couldn't quite resist calling the exchange a "showdown of the sexes."

I think Steven Pinker does deserve the fate of going down in history as a scientific Bobby Riggs.

* And of course Watson was helped immensely by the work of British researcher Rosalind Franklin who died of cancer at 37 before she could receive a Nobel Prize for her work.)

More blogging frivolity

You can watch excerpts of Eddie Izzard performances here.

I passed Eddie Izzard on the street before I knew who he was. I was headed for my Wednesday NYCPlaywrights meeting, which used to be on Christopher Street. So I'm walking through Greenwich Village, and coming towards me was what I took to be a striking, but very butch looking female real estate agent. I guess real estate agent because "she" was quite made-up but sharp looking, even "executive" and self-possessed. Only as we passed by did I suddenly think - "oh, it's a guy." Of course this was Greenwich Village, so don't ask me why it took another whole block to think "oh wait - it's probably a professional transvestite."

It was Eddie Izzard, executive transvestite. I later learned that during that time he was performing in A DAY IN THE DEATH OF JOE EGG on Broadway and living in Greenwich Village.

A month or so later I caught Izzard's Dressed to Kill on HBO and I said HEY! I've seen that guy!

Izzard's been around for ages, so I don't know how it took me so long to catch on to him, but I'm glad I finally did. He's incredibly hip - he doesn't just like to dress as a woman, he wants to be a woman, but he's straight, and doesn't want to get a sex change. Plus he's cute and funny as hell and into things like the European Union and the environment, and he's just coolness personified. More guys should be like Eddie Izzard.

my newest iPod playlist

Trip down memory lane...

Discovering Japan by Graham Parker - amaaazing guitar, clever lyrics and kickass climax.

Genius of Love by Tom Tom Club. The Club was a brief spin-off of Talking Heads, fronted by drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth. So catchy and funky. "That's one time I'm glad I'm not a man." Watch the video here.

Losing My Religion by R.E.M. - smokey middle period R.E.M. with strings, nice clap-laden finish.

Hitsville U.K. by the Clash - infectious late-period Clash, rare female backing vocals. Righteous glockenspiel. Even more radio-friendly than Rock the Casbah.

We're the Replacements by They Might Be Giants. Better than anything by the actual band The Replacements in my considered opinion (IMCO) - nice complement to TMBG's "Famous Polka"

Lust for Life by Iggy Pop - still kicking ass in spite of being pimped out recently to a travel commercial. For some reason Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines never played the line "Well I am just a modern guy - of course I've had it in the ear before."

Can't Do a Thing to Stop Me by Chris Isaak, from his surf-bum Romeo phase. Big haunting sound - Chris is very emotional. And damn was he fine.

Call of the Wighat by The Cramps - obscure greatness from the semi-obscure The Cramps. "I can still hear momma calling, 'Junior get home - what's got into you? What's that on your dome?'"hear brief excerpt

I Don't Like Mondays by Boomtown Rats - one of the best songs ever in the "immortalizing the psychotic words of a teenage girl with mass-murdering impulses" category. Great piano.

What's the Frequency Kenneth? by R.E.M. - one of the best songs ever in the "immortalizing the enigmatic words of a middle-aged crazy man" category. Believed by some to be the soundtrack of the mystical Great Irony Divide.

Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? by Culture Club - I've had the Violent Femmes version for years, and figured it was time to hear the original, from back before Boy George was a theatre guy with wax on his head. Really cute chime accents.

Punkrock Girl by The Dead Milkmen. Favorite 80s-90s Philly band. Fun bad guitar solo, fun lyrics like "we got into a car away we started rolling I said how much you pay for this she said 'nothing man, it's stolen'"

I Touch Myself by the Divinyls - early 90s celebration of sisters doin it for themselves - sing-along refrain - every body now! "I don't want anybody else, when I think about you I touch myself!"

Pretty in Pink by the Psychedelic Furs - a punk's punk band in spite of the connection with the Molly Ringwald movie. Cool synthesizery drone tone floating under the hook.

The Blue Dress by Depeche Mode - the original electronic torch song. Not usually my cup of tea, but I heard this on college radio back in the 90s and it stuck in my brain. Plus, it's just fun to say "depeche mode." Scary Blue Meanie sounds at the end. hear excerpt

The Strange Case of Edward Einhorn

Read all about Edward Einhorn here.

Coming soon...

Edward Einhorn registered an unauthorized derivative copyright on my play TAM LIN, claiming that directors have a right to create copyrights based on their directing an author's work. And on the basis of that copyright registration, he sued me, claiming I violated his copyright when I produced my own play in 2005 - even though I directed that production myself, with a new set and revised script. The upshot of the strange case of Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions was that the Court compelled Einhorn to cancel this registration.

Thanks to the lawsuit, Mergatroyd Productions can't afford to put TAM LIN on this year, except as a reading.

Mergatroyd Productions paid each actor in the 2005 production a thousand dollars, which, although not quite Actors Equity rates, is fairly high for an off-off Broadway non-Equity show. Thanks to Edward Einhorn, actors who would have had paying work with TAM LIN in 2006 will not have it. Not that Edward Einhorn is concerned about paying actors. In an email to me, which Einhorn himself offered as one of his lawsuit exhibits, he explained his philosophy about paying theater tech people and designers and especially directors, more than actors: "actors get the glory of having being on stage, which is why they are usually happy to work for free."

When we were negotiating with Einhorn over his fee for directing TAM LIN in 2004, he asked for more money than we initially offered for a director. When we said we couldn't afford to increase the budget for the director, he suggested that we pay all the actors less than we originally planned, and pass the savings onto himself.

Not a single actor to whom I've mentioned these things has failed to express disgust with Edward Einhorn.

I'm it!

aeonsomnia of Evil Li-brul Overlord >:D has tagged me in the book meme. Here goes:

1. One book that changed your life?

Black Like Me - the first work of non-fiction written for adults that I ever read, it convinced me that sexual intercourse wasn't just a tall tale invented by Catholic school boys trying to be really gross.

2. One book you have read more than once?

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - most recently as I was creating an audio book from it.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

SAS Survival Guide: How to Survive Anywhere, on Land or at Sea

4. One book that made you laugh?

Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and other observations the index alone made me laugh.


5. One book that made you cry?

The Return of the King I thought Shelob really got Frodo that time. I felt terrible for Sam.

6. One book you wish had been written?

"How to Escape from a Desert Island Containing Only One Book"


7. One book you wish had never had been written?

"Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" - oh wait, turns out it was a hoax.


8. One book you are currently reading?

Tom Sawyer, Detective just to complete Twain's Tom/Huck stories. But lordy, there is a reason why you never hear much about that one or Tom Sawyer Abroad.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

Everything by Niles Eldredge - I'm hoping to interview him sometime in the next few months and I want to be prepared.


OKAY, now I tag my best blog friend Ann Bartow of Sivacracy and Feminist Law Professors and Katha Pollitt (even though she doesn't blog too often.)

All about Revolver

The greatest album cover ever.

There's a very cool thing online now, Abracadabra! vol 1, A free e-book telling the story of the Beatles 1966 album Revolver.

You have to love George Harrison. Even though he was indisputably not as talented as Lennon and McCartney (the same can be said of the vast majority of humanity) he had a way of demystifying the Beatles, and bringing things down to earth. I should collect all my favorite droll Harrison observations, and include this new one from the Revolver book:

Lennon was cut off not only from his social life, but also from the studio which was the band's collective home, and the one place where he could really express his frustration. It actually took Lennon a full hour to drive from Abbey Road Studios to Weybridge, whereas McCartney could walk to the studio in his slippers. Lennon began to feel insecure. At the same time, and almost without trying, McCartney was usurping Lennon's dominant position in the group, and his place in the public imagination as "the clever Beatle" - "he and Paul got into a bit of one-upmanship over who knew the most about everything" at this time, recalls Harrison.

I learned about this book in a recent issue of Rolling Stone. The issue also has a piece about Kurt Vonnegut, who said one of the best things ever about the Beatles: "I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.'"

It's a miracle

This guy has shown that even The Lockhorns can be made hysterically funny with a wry meta-comics commentary.

Via Wolcott

Louis Menand on The Blank Slate

Since I'm on a Wacky Evolutionary Psychology tear, it occurs to me that I should post a link to Louis Menand's sublime evisceration of The Blank Slate published in the New Yorker a few years ago.

Pinker doesn't care much for art, though. When he does care for something—cognitive science, for example—he is all in favor of training people to do it, even though, as he admits, many of the methods and assumptions of modern science are counter-intuitive. The fact that innate mathematical ability is still in the Stone Age distresses him; he has fewer problems with Stone Age sex drives. He objects to using education "to instill desirable attitudes toward the environment, gender, sexuality, and ethnic diversity"; but he insists that "the obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education." He thinks that we should be teaching economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics, even if we have to stop teaching literature and the classics. It's O.K. to rewire people's "natural" sense of a just price or the movement of a subatomic particle, in other words, but it's a waste of time to tinker with their untutored notions of gender difference.

Having it both ways is an irritating feature of "The Blank Slate." Pinker can write, in refutation of the scarecrow theory of violent behavior, "The sad fact is that despite the repeated assurances that 'we know the conditions that breed violence,' we barely have a clue," and then, a few pages later, "It is not surprising, then, that when African American teenagers are taken out of underclass neighborhoods they are no more violent or delinquent than white teenagers." Well, that should give us one clue. He sums the matter up: "With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution." This is just another way of saying that it is in human nature to socialize and to be socialized, which is, pragmatically, exactly the view of the "intellectuals."

The insistence on deprecating the efficacy of socialization leads Pinker into absurdities that he handles with a blitheness that would be charming if his self-assurance were not so overdeveloped. He argues, for example, that democracy, the rule of law, and women's reproductive freedom are all products of evolution. The Founding Fathers understood that the ideas of power sharing and individual rights are grounded in human nature. And he quotes, with approval, the claim of two evolutionary psychologists that the "evolutionary calculus" explains why women evolved "to exert control over their own sexuality, over the terms of their relationships, and over the choice of which men are to be the fathers of their children." Now, democracy, individual rights, and women's sexual autonomy are concepts almost nowhere to be found, even in the West, before the eighteenth century. Either human beings spent ten thousand years denying their own nature by slavishly obeying the whims of the rich and powerful, cheerfully burning heretics at the stake, and arranging their daughters' marriages (which would imply a pretty effective system of socialization), or modern liberal society is largely a social construction. Which hypothesis seems more plausible?

Amazing changing comments at Gene Expression

Gene Expression is a full-blown racist site - and Steven Pinker gladly lends his name to it. Based on a few hours of studying the contents, the most seriously misogynistic of the regular contributors is a critter named TangoMan, and the most hardcore racist is called razib.

Of course neither of them will admit to being misognyist and racist. In their minds, they are intrepid scientists, searching for data to prove their hypothesis that women and non-whites (especially blacks) are inferior in a world full of politically correct nazis out to thwart the TRUTH. As razib explains it:

I believe different groups probably have different aptitudes (not moral inferiority or superiority)-and the axiom of equality-that all groups have the exact same tendencies as our common evolutionary heritage, could cause serious problems when applied to public policy"

As for TangoMan, he likes to let his racist and sexist freak flag fly over at Pandagon until I chase him back to the GNXP asylum. I couldn't believe he actually linked to the post himself from gnxp.com. You know you're in for a stimulating intellectual exercise when the author's opening shot is to make a deal out of a typo.

But since they are so typically craven about admitting their true, right-wing beliefs, I wasn't at all surprised with what occured tonight.

I saw this post on the home page of Gene Expression:

-----------
Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Hot, smart brown girls

Sometimes you notice patterns that don't fully crystallize consciously until some precipitating event really "wakes you up" to the reality. I was riding the metro home tonight and across from me was a girl who was engrossed in Kafka on the Shore -- apparently a high-brow fiction book, not like The Da Vinci Code or something (I don't keep up to date on fiction) -- and who got off at the extremely affluent Friendship Heights neighborhood. So you get the rough idea of her IQ. Unusually for someone that smart & well-to-do, at least in my experience, she was smoking hot. She looked South Asian, maybe Persian. Then it clicked on a conscious level: for those of you who are say, aged 18-40 -- have you ever noticed how many hot, smart brown girls there are in your age group?


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Read full post....
posted by agnostic | 8:00 PM | Comments (1) |
------------

I didn't read the full post, but went directly to the comments. There I found a most amazingly racist comment from razib. So I responded - I found it hard to believe he was serious, and didn't want to assume he was. What happened next convinced me that he was. Now I've seen what pussilanimous little cowards these racists were in action on their own site and on Pandagon so I expected them to screw with my comment, or delete it completely. So I copied the comment thread after I left my comment. See it here.

A couple of hours later, this is what it looked like.

The original post now included this transparent excuse: [Originally posted by agnostic, reposted by Razib since blogger mystifies his assoliphic self]

I love the fact that Steven Pinker hobnobs with these creeps.

UPDATE: this web site has some interesting info on razib

so does this one

And in case there is any doubt exactly what Razib means about social policy and certain groups, here is what he wrote in another blogger's comments:

right now, we assume that ALL GROUPS HAVE EQUAL APTITUDES. the result is that liberals devise new social programs to “uplift” groups to express their potentional. conservatives excoriate underclass social structures and cultures and encourage their own rival social engineering programs (vouchers, enterprise zones, privating public housing). if some aptitudes were genetic on average between groups, then we have an even harder task: identify the points in the genome that effect “g”-general intelligence, and figure out ways to manipulate these segments of the genome (gene therapy).

You see, razib does want to help "groups" with their "aptitude" problem. He doesn't want to help them with social programs, because the problem isn't discrimination or lack of opportunity for the "group" - they are suffering from bad genetics and need gene therapy.

I can't believe some newspaper or magazine hasn't focused on Steven Pinker's support for such raging racists.

In addition to Steven Pinker, Razib Khan pals around with David Horowitz, John Derbyshire giving him Randy Thornhill-type advice on rape, and his pal Steve Sailer is a regular contributor to Gene Expression, as in this comment thread in which they all desperately try to find a comfortable explanation for why it appears that black and white intelligences as measured by IQ tests are converging. He writes for American Conservative Magazine. Razib also does book reviews for Science & Spirit. Here he argues American liberalism is about fleeing reason. Truly amazing - the person who argues that a certain "group" needs gene therapy to increase its intelligence level says this:

over the past few years I have had the recurrent experience of being first thought of as a member of an ethno-national group (after physical inspection of my appearance) and so resulting in a barrage of questions about South Indian Hindu temples, vegetarianism and the like, and when I respond that this is inappropriate, most people have the decency to be embarrassed, but several have simply stated to me plainly that I should know what my true culture is. The implication is that my true culture is encoded in my DNA, in my blood, in my ancestry. There is where the flight from reason will always lead.

Talk about a complete lack of self-awareness.

Steven Pinker at Gene Expression

Normally I think of Evolutionary Psychology as having two main strains. The "liberal" strain that sees only female academic/social underachievement as due primarly to genetic causes, and the "conservative" strain that sees both female AND non-white academic/social underachievement as primarily due to genetics.

I had assumed that Steven Pinker was in the liberal camp, since, as the blatantly racist American Renaissance web site notes in its mostly positive review of Pinker's Blank Slate:

Prof. Pinker is firm and clear about the “inherent” or “innate” characteristics and behavior of human beings—human nature—that exist before anyone has a chance to scribble on the blank slate. Not only aggression and sexual differences but also intelligence he acknowledges to be in large part genetically grounded, but on the Big Taboo—race—he is vague and even contradictory.

He endorses the environmentalist theories of the origins of civilization of Jared Diamond and Thomas Sowell as opposed to racial ones, and tells us that “My own view … is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference—the black-white IQ gap in the United States—the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation.” Yet, six pages later, he tells us that “… there is now ample evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be linked to features of the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glucose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of the variations in life outcomes such as income and social status.” Combined with the different scores of blacks and whites on IQ tests, of course, this implies that the “most discussed racial difference” has a significantly genetic and not an environmentalist explanation.

Prof. Pinker also tries to evade the implications of racial differences by emphasizing the universal meaning of human nature.

“Discarding the Blank Slate has thrown far more light on the psychological unity of humankind than on any differences,” and, further:

“People are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions about our biology.”

So imagine my surprise when Pinker turns up in the less blatant but nevertheless thoroughly racist Gene Expression

UPDATE - that link redirects to Khan's current science blog via Discover Magazine now. But I found it again at the Wayback Machine. Enjoy.

If Khan has it removed from the Wayback Machine, I have a downloaded copy - just ask for it.

The beginning of the interview dwelt on the things that Pinker has in common with the Gene Expression crowd - with Pinker characterizing his political opponents in the standard Evolutionary Psychology way:
"Thanks to tenure, the people who can't tolerate biological insight into human affairs are still around in the universities."

I started to wonder when/how they would bring up the race issue. I had the answer when I got to question 8:


(8) I want to go back to "empirical hypotheses ... too dangerous to study." This was the topic of the Edge Annual Question. Your own offering was the possibility that the kind of research that we have just discussed may uncover a genetic and evolutionary basis for population differences in mental abilities, personality, and other psychological traits. What are your projections for the trajectory of this idea? Will it be put to the decisive test sooner rather than later? If the hereditarian view is vindicated to any extent, what disruptions and realignments of the intellectual and political landscape do you foresee?


"population differences" is the term of choice at Gene Expression for "the intellectual superiority of whites" and Pinker got that. He answers carefully, while including the obligatory "politically correct" slur:

I suspect that we'll see more studies of this kind, unless they are beaten back by politically correct opposition (as seems to be happening to Bruce Lahn's work on possible recent selection on genes governing brain size). Whether group differences will be found is an empirical question that will differ according to the trait and group comparison. If innate differences are found and acknowledged (two big if's), the effects would include questioning the assumption that all groupwide social differences (e.g., in crime, poverty, and health) are caused by discrimination or a rigged economic system. It would be an enormous challenge to the unspoken consensus of mainstream left-of-center politics during the past fifty years--though also an enormous danger to societal fairness if the claimed difference turns out to be a false alarm. And true or false, a claim of racial differences would also embolden racist kooks and unsavory political movements. (Of course, if the research decisively shows no group differences, that would take the wind out of their sails, a positive development.) Either way, it's dangerous territory, and the moral issues in exploring it are complex.

It's striking how full of conservative jargon and liberal bashing Pinker's comments often are, yet he claimed in an email to me that Stephen Jay Gould's ideas about evolutionary psychology are dismissable due to Gould's politics:

The criticisms of Stephen Jay Gould have been extensively addressed in my writings and others, and I believe they stem more from his political ideology than from the empirical literature.

The implication is that Pinker is above politics and all about pure science. Of course the motley crew at Gene Expression makes the same claim, although "feminist" is a dirty word throughout the site, and they never miss a chance to tout studies that they believe prove that non-whites are genetically less intelligent or more violent than whites.

I think the connection between the far right and the Evolutionary Psychologists needs to be monitored carefully. They have too much to offer each other - "scientific" respectablity for the right and lots of funding for the EvPsych project of, as Marvin Harris called it "biologizing inequality."

UPDATE: It seems that Pinker and blatant racist Steve Sailer are good pals, and even back in 2002 Sailer is pleased that Pinker is making progress on the racism front:

Reading The Blank Slate is particularly enjoyable to me because Pinker and I are so much on the same wavelength. We even have similar expansive concepts of evidence, relying not just on refereed journals but also on Tom Wolfe, Dave Barry, and the great Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

Further, Pinker is an enthusiastic subscriber to my iSteve mailing list. And arguments that I've made over the years pop up throughout The Blank Slate.

For example, according to Pinker, his section on IQ on pp. 149-150 embellishes upon various of my articles. My VDARE series on how to help the left half of the bell curve was apparently a particularly fruitful source. Here's an excerpt from The Blank Slate with links to my supporting articles:

“I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another. Nor can citizens or policymakers ignore the concept, regardless of their politics. People who say that IQ is meaningless will quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murderer with an IQ of 64, removing lead paint that lowers a child's IQ by five points, or the Presidential qualifications of George W. Bush.”

Several readers have complained that while The Blank Slate is excellent on sex and individual differences, it wimps out on racial differences. My response: "Thank God." Pinker is not only a major scientist, while I'm merely a journalist, but he's also much more articulate. If he had written a book about race, there would be nothing for me to say.

Further, it's important to realize how far Pinker has come over the years. He started out completely under the spell of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, the founders of evolutionary psychology, which has succeeded on politically-correct campuses by stripping from Edward O. Wilson's discipline of sociobiology its emphasis on explaining human differences.

Adapting Minds preview

You can get a good preview of Adapting Minds here.

Adapting Minds hits a nerve

A few months ago I blogged about Adapting Minds by David Buller. I see that the book has hit a nerve with the Evolutionary Psychologists.

Cultivating a persona of fairness and impartiality, David Buller has written a critique of theory and results from evolutionary psychology. To those unfamiliar with the primary literature, some of his claims may seem plausible. That has not, however, been the reaction of those who know this literature intimately.

Over the next few months, we will be developing on this website a collective response to Buller. It will be collective because we think each scientist should respond to the research that he or she knows best. We will try to provide links to primary sources, so that interested readers can see for themselves what the literature says.

I will be tracking the EvPsych response to Buller's book, which is one of the most damaging to the Evolutionary Psychology cause that I have yet seen. I will also try to find a response from Buller - or contact him myself and ask him about his reaction.

Number 3!

An Inconvenient Truth is now the third highest-grossing documentary of all time, having just passed Bowling for Columbine.

Fun with John and Clarence

I'm reading Strange Justice - the Selling of Clarence Thomas by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. I'm doing research for a possible play about the period based on this book, David Brock's Blinded by the Right and a few others.

There are some fascinating bits in the book, like this one:

Thomas liked to taunt another member of the office, who was prim and painfully shy, by making outrageous, gross, and at times off-color remarks. "Clarence was loud and boisterous, kind of the office clown. He couldn't help himself but to needle the guy - he just liked to get under his skin," Rothschild recalled in an interview.

The target of Thomas's taunting was John C. Ashcroft.

Another:

Terrel H. Bell, who was secretary of education at the time, recalled in his memoirs being "shocked at the sick humor and racist cliches" voiced by some Reagan appointees, who, for instance, referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as "Martin Lucifer Coon," called Arabs "sand niggers," and described Title IX, which prohibits sexual discrimination, as "the lesbians' bill of rights."

Giving the doctor a head start

Watch the clip in Quicktime .mov format

At the time this was taped, a doctor at an abortion clinic had recently been murdered. This anti-abortion protestor liked to joke about giving doctors a head start before shooting them.

Unfortunately I blabbed too much in this clip, but you can see her laughing about her joke when I sarcastically said that I loved it.

How to be a Hooters "Girl"

Female employees are required to sign a statement that they "acknowledge and affirm" the following:

1. my job duties require I wear the designated Hooters Girl uniform.
   
2. my job duties require that I interact with and entertain the customers.
   
3. the Hooters concept is based on female sex appeal and the work environment is one in which joking and sexual innuendo based on female sex appeal is commonplace.
   
4. I do not find my job duties, uniform requirements, or work environment to be offensive, intimidating, hostile, or unwelcome.
   

No need to worry about sexual harrassment when you work for Hooters - you've signed a statement saying you don't mind it.

More at Smoking Gun

Catholic Church sued over another pedophile

This time a murderous pedophile.

Remember, all female Catholics out there - this is how the Catholic Church deals with the priest shortage - because it feels that no woman, no matter how holy she is, is as worthy of the priesthood as the lowest pedophile gun nut murdering fanatic.

And BTW - their ideal woman is someone who can get pregnant without having sex.

via Pharyngula

Now I know that the Democrats in Connecticut did the right thing

If I didn't think so before, I would now, thanks to Dick Cheney:

...Vice President Dick Cheney, who went so far as to suggest that the ouster of Mr. Lieberman might embolden Al Qaeda terrorists.

“It’s an unfortunate development, I think, from the standpoint of the Democratic Party, to see a man like Lieberman pushed aside because of his willingness to support an aggressive posture in terms of our national security strategy,’’ Mr. Cheney said in a telephone interview with news agency reporters.

Any friend of Cheney's is not a friend of Dems and must be thrown out on his ass.

I'll miss Jon Stewart's Droopy Dog impressions of Lieberman though...

The official Beatles canon

soundscapes.info

anti-Gore astroturf

Brought to you by Exxon Mobile.

In an email exchange with The Wall Street Journal, Toutsmith didn’t answer when asked who he was or why he made the video, which has just over 59,000 views on YouTube. However, computer routing information contained in an email sent from Toutsmith’s Yahoo account indicate it didn’t come from an amateur working out of his basement.

Instead, the email originated from a computer registered to DCI Group, a Washington, D.C., public relations and lobbying firm whose clients include oil company Exxon Mobil Corp.

A DCI Group spokesman declines to say whether or not DCI made the anti-Gore penguin video, or to explain why Toutsmith appeared to be sending email from DCI’s computers.

Because for big corporations, making billions of dollars is not enough. They must squeeze every last cent out of the world before sending it straight to hell.

Do human beings run Exxon Mobile? Do they have children? Grandchildren? Do they give a damn if their future will be screwed thanks to Exxon Mobile?

Pandagon -> Crooks and Liars

Borat strikes again

Borat in the Heartland - what a great combination!

No one knows for sure who he was, that Middle Eastern man in an American flag shirt and a cowboy hat who was supposed to sing the national anthem at a rodeo Friday night in the Salem Civic Center.

But he sure shook up this town before leaving in a hurry.

Introduced as Boraq Sagdiyev from Kazakhstan, he was said to be an immigrant touring America. A film crew was with him, doing some sort of documentary. And he wanted to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" to show his appreciation, the announcer told the crowd.

Speaking in broken English, the mysterious man first told the decidedly pro-American crowd - it was a rodeo, of all things, in Salem, of all places - that he supported the war on terrorism.

"I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards," he said, according to Brett Sharp of Star Country WSLC, who was also on stage that night as a media sponsor of the rodeo.

An uneasy murmur ran through the crowd.

I actually prefer Bruno though, like the time he went to "the gayest part of America - Alabama!"

watch Sacha Baron Cohen as Bruno

Trapeze school

I watched my daughter take lessons on the flying trapeze at the Trapeze School on the West Side Highway in Manhattan yesterday.
Watch a video of one of her lessons here.

The Hunting of the President

I finally got to see the movie The Hunting of the President. I had read the book a few years ago, and forgot some of it, so it was just riveting to be reminded of the horrors of the "Arkansas Project" and the total complicity of the mainstream media, especially CNN in trying to pump up the Whitewater non-story and an adulterous blowjob into an impeachable offense.

I had forgotten about the horrible expriences that Susan McDougal had to go through for refusing to lie for evil Ken Starr and his evil crew. When McDougal refused to cut a deal with them, and went to jail instead, they made sure to make her experience as miserable as possible.

McDougal talks about it in this interview at Buzzflash.

Bush keeps pushing the authoritarian envelope

Yahoo News:

According to the draft, the military would be allowed to detain all "enemy combatants" until hostilities cease. The bill defines enemy combatants as anyone "engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners who has committed an act that violates the law of war and this statute."

Legal experts said Friday that such language is dangerously broad and could authorize the military to detain indefinitely U.S. citizens who had only tenuous ties to terror networks like al Qaeda.

"That's the big question ... the definition of who can be detained," said Martin Lederman, a law professor at Georgetown University who posted a copy of the bill to a Web blog.

Scott L. Silliman, a retired Air Force Judge Advocate, said the broad definition of enemy combatants is alarming because a U.S. citizen loosely suspected of terror ties would lose access to a civilian court — and all the rights that come with it. Administration officials have said they want to establish a secret court to try enemy combatants that factor in realities of the battlefield and would protect classified information.

The Administration is slowly inching its way towards a government that can detain any citizen at any time for any reason without the right to a fair trial. And all the people that support Bush are aiding and abetting his goal of an authoritarian state.

People like those recently mentioned by Paul Krugman

Meanwhile, apparatchiks in the media spread disinformation. It’s hard to imagine what the world looks like to the large number of Americans who get their news by watching Fox and listening to Rush Limbaugh, but I get a pretty good sense from my mailbag.

Many of my correspondents are living in a world in which the economy is better than it ever was under Bill Clinton, newly released documents show that Saddam really was in cahoots with Osama, and the discovery of some decayed 1980’s-vintage chemical munitions vindicates everything the administration said about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. (Hyping of the munitions find may partly explain why public belief that Saddam had W.M.D. has made a comeback.)

Some of my correspondents have even picked up on claims, mostly disseminated on right-wing blogs, that the Bush administration actually did a heck of a job after Katrina.

And what about the perceptions of those who get their news from sources that aren’t de facto branches of the Republican National Committee?

The climate of media intimidation that prevailed for several years after 9/11, which made news organizations very cautious about reporting facts that put the administration in a bad light, has abated. But it’s not entirely gone. Just a few months ago major news organizations were under fierce attack from the right over their supposed failure to report the “good news” from Iraq — and my sense is that this attack did lead to a temporary softening of news coverage, until the extent of the carnage became undeniable. And the conventions of he-said-she-said reporting, under which lies and truth get equal billing, continue to work in the administration’s favor.

Whatever the reason, the fact is that the Bush administration continues to be remarkably successful at rewriting history. For example, Mr. Bush has repeatedly suggested that the United States had to invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn’t let U.N. inspectors in. His most recent statement to that effect was only a few weeks ago. And he gets away with it. If there have been reports by major news organizations pointing out that that’s not at all what happened, I’ve missed them.

It’s all very Orwellian, of course. But when Orwell wrote of “a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past,” he was thinking of totalitarian states. Who would have imagined that history would prove so easy to rewrite in a democratic nation with a free press?

And meanwhile, Chris Matthews lavishly praises crazy fascist crackpot Ann Coulter.

The New Yorker on Wikipedia

There's a good article about Wikipedia in this week's New Yorker. Favorite part:

Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket, complete with an elaborate hierarchy of users and policies about policies. Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viegas, two researchers at I.B.M. who have studied the site using computerized visual models called "history flows," found that the talk pages and "meta pages" - those dealing with coordination and administration - have experienced the greatest growth. Whereas articles once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site's content, as of last October they represented seventy per cent. As Wattenberg put it, "People are talking about governance, not working on content." Wales is ambivalent about the rules and procedures but believes that they are necessary. "Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting," he told me.

For all its protocol, Wikipedia's bureaucracy doesn't necessarily favor truth. In March, 2005, William Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey, in Cambridge, was briefly a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had contributed. After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse effect, the case went int arbitration. "User William M. Connolley strongly pushes his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own," his accuser charged in a written deposition. "His views on climate science ar singular and narrow." A decision from the arbitration committee was three months in coming, after which Connolley was placed on a humiliating one-revert-a-day parole. The punishment was later revoked, and Connolley is now an admin, with two thousand pages on his watchlist - a feature that enables users to compile a list of entries and to be notified when changes are made to them. He says that Wikipedia’s entry on global warming may be the best page on the subject anywhere on the Web. Nevertheless, Wales admits that in this case the system failed. It can still seem as though the user who spends the most time on the site - who yells the loudest - wins

Connolley believes that Wikipedia "gives no privilege to those who know what they're talking about," a view that is echoed by many academics and former contributors, including Larry Sanger, who argues that too many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly confident of their own opinions. He left Wikipedia in March, 2002, after Wales ran out of money to support the site during the dot-com bust. Sanger concluded that he had become a symbol of authority in an anti-authoritarian community. "Wikipedia has gone from a nearly perfect anarchy to an anarchy with gang rule," he told me. (Sanger is now the director of collaborative projects at the online foundation Digital Universe, where he is helping to develop a Web-based encyclopedia, a hybrid between a wiki and a traditional reference work. He promises that it will have "the lowest error rate in history.") Even Eric Raymond, the open-source pioneer whose work inspired Wales, argues that "'disaster' is not too strong a word" for Wikipedia. In his view, the site is "infested with moonbats." (Think hobgoblins of little minds, varsity division.) He has found his corrections to entries on science fiction dismantled by users who evidently felt that he was trespassing on their terrain. "The more you look at what some of the Wikipedia contributors have done, the better Britannica looks," Raymond said. He believes that the open-source model is simply inapplicable to an encyclopedia. For software, there is an objective standard: either it works or it doesn't. There is no such test for truth.

The territoriality of Wikipedians is a huge problem. And to be an insider, you have to have lots of time on your hands to participate in Wikipedia editing.

Of course territoriality isn't limited to Wikipedia. It pops up all the time in human groupings. There's a seemingly desperate need to distinguish insiders from outsiders. This even happens, absurdly on Internet discussion boards where your identity can be completely hidden and the rewards of being an insider are almost nil - it's not like a country club where you get access to the best golf times and tennis courts and business networking through your insider status.

The best part of observing group dynamics on Internet discussions is that the insider/outsider games are played in black and white print, and you can easily watch and analyze it, and track it through time.

Shakespeare exhibit

The Yale Center for British Art currently has an exhibition of paintings and documents associated with William Shakespeare and his times. It's a good show, and the museum is free, so it's well worth the trip to New Haven.

Warriors! Come out to play-ay!

The Warriors Subway Scavenger Hunt

Teams can sign up in groups of nine delegates. All participants are requested to be in full "colors", just as gang members are in the film. Cyrus will be there to kick off the rally and give your team instructions. The team that arrives at the screening location first with all aspects of the scavenger hunt completed wins.

Grand Prize: Nine leather "Warriors" vests, and an August 3rd brunch with the cast and crew of The Warriors!

Carnival of the Liberals

I made it into Carnival of the Liberals #17

I emailed this article to Steven Pinker

Dismissing ‘Sexist Opinions’ About Women’s Place in Science is about Ben A. Barres, a female-to-male transsexual who has experienced the science world from both sides now, and has some strong opinions about the claim, made by Lawrence Summers, heartily supported by Steven Pinker, that discrimination against women is less important than evolutionarily-endowed female incompetence and female disinterest in math and science.

I don't expect to get a response from Pinker, but I imagine his response will be that Barres was a man trapped in a woman's body all along and that's why he is good at math and science.

Of course Barres doesn't make his claims based purely on his personal experience.

Interesting excerpt from the article:

Q. Why do some people attribute differences in professional achievement to innate ability?

A. One of the reasons is the belief by highly successful people that they are successful because of their own innate abilities. I think as a professor at Stanford I am lucky to be here. But I think Larry Summers thinks he is successful because of his innate inner stuff.

Q. What about the idea that men and women differ in ways that give men an advantage in science?

A. People are still arguing over whether there are cognitive differences between men and women. If they exist, it’s not clear they are innate, and if they are innate, it’s not clear they are relevant. They are subtle, and they may even benefit women.

But when you tell people about the studies documenting bias, if they are prejudiced, they just discount the evidence.

Q. How does this bias manifest itself?

A. It is very much harder for women to be successful, to get jobs, to get grants, especially big grants. And then, and this is a huge part of the problem, they don’t get the resources they need to be successful. Right now, what’s fundamentally missing and absolutely vital is that women get better child care support. This is such an obvious no-brainer. If you just do this with a small amount of resources, you could explode the number of women scientists.

And Elizabeth Spelke debated Pinker on the issue a year ago, and smited evolutionary psychology just-so stories about female incompetence with the mighty power of data.

I love David Brock

David Brock does such good work with his Media Matters for America organization. But don't overlook his excellent autobiography Blinded by the Right - The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative.

When he was a conservative, Brock wrote a book called The Real Anita Hill which smeared Anita Hill and portrayed her as "a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty." When Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson's book Strange Justice came out in response to the Brock book, Brock and conservative friends went to work:

...Ricky (Silberman, vice chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commision and close friend of Clarence Thomas) and I sprang into action to discredit the Mayer and Abramson book. At mid-morning, we met at the Capitol Hill offices of Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, the most powerful right-wing lobby behind the Thomas nomination... Rick was joined by Barbara Ledeen, a neo-conservative operative who was the executive director of the Independent Women's Forum, the antifeminist group Ricky had formed, in part with Scaife money, from Women for Judge Thomas...

Like the Hiss-Chambers case, the Thomas-Hill case lent itself to endless hairsplitting over the true meaning of obscure factoids. I knew the ins and outs of the case better than anyone, and I knew how to twist and turn them to our advantage. I had done this previously, in my book, in the service of a sincerely held belief. Now, I wasn't sure why I was doing it. I was just doing it. As Barbara Ledeen took notes on a legal pad, I played the role I was expected to play. Donning my defense lawyer hat, I dissected the Mayer and Abramson excerpt, methodically turning back each new damaging allegation they raised and patching up the sizable holes they had shot in Thomas's defense.

The three of us then collaborated on a radio script for Rush Limbaugh's show at noon... We would use Rush to crush Mayer and Abramson, defend Justice Thomas, and protect Republican prospects in the impending election that would bring Newt Gingrich to power. We faxed off the script. Tuning in to his show, I listened as Limbaugh read from the fax virtually verbatim. The war was on! Hearing Rush blast those feminazis gave me a jolt of adrenaline. I was back on message. Forget that hysterical Ricky Silberman, I told myself. I'd show her, too, by going out and proving that Mayer and Abramson were frauds and liars. Consumed by a kind of mania, as if my entire worldview and indeed my self-conception depended on the outcome, I was now on a mission to sink Strange Justice.

Working harder than I ever had, I set about re-reporting the book for a review for the Spectator... My work on the Spectator review inevitably caused me to reinterview sources I had relied on in writing my book. One of them was Armstrong Williams, who had been on Thomas's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission staff at the time Anita Hill also worked for him in the early 1980s... In my book, I relied heavily on Williams's recollections to discredit the testimony of Hill and another ex-employee of Thomas's, Angela Wright, who also claimed that Thomas had behaved inappropriately toward her. Williams had supplied me with a particularly evocative anecdote that I used to show Thomas - in contrast to Anita Hill's portrait - as prudish in sexual matters. According to Williams, Thomas had once compelled him to dispose of a copy of Playboy Williams had been toting, telling his aide the magazine was "trash." I had interviewed Williams in his Dupont Circle office and on the telephone several times, and we had kept in touch since the book's publication, though we hadn't spoken at any length since I had come out as gay in the Washington Post eight months before. Williams invited me to discuss Strange Justice over dinner at a Tex-Mex place on the Hill, then asked me back to his apartment for a drink.

Sitting on an overstuffed sofa not far from me, Williams had something else besides Strange Justice on his mind. As he began to pepper me with graphic questions about whether I was dominant or submissive in bed, I shuffled uncomfortably in my seat, looked away, and tried to change the subject. Williams, who was unmarried, countered with increasingly lewd banter until I quickly brought the conversation to a close, thanked him for his time, got up, and walked out. Was Williams baiting me like an antigay bigot? Was he coming on to me? I had no way of knowing for sure, but either way, I had to conclude that he was a poor character witness for Clarence Thomas... I grew agitated as I glimpsed some uncomfortable truths about who these conservatives really were, and what they really represented...

The biggest problem raised by the Strange Justice authors for the Thomas camp was the testimony of yet another woman, Kaye Savage, who had not been heard from during the first round of hearings. Savage made the claim... that she had seen Playboy pinups papered along the walls of Thomas's apartment in the early 1980s, when she and Thomas had been friends and Anita Hill was working for Thomas...

...Mark (Paoletta) phoned me back. He said he had posed my question about how to discredit Savage to (Clarence) Thomas, who knew I was at work on a review of the Mayer and Abramson book. Mark told me that Thomas had, in fact, some derogatory information on his former friend Savage; he passed it along to Mark so that Mark could give it to me. Quoting Thomas directly, Mark told me of unverified, embarrassing personal information about Savage that Thomas claimed had been raised against her in a sealed court record of a divorce and child custody battle more than a decade ago. Thomas also told Mark where Savage worked after Mark related that I was eager to hunt her down as soon as possible. Surely skirting the bounds of judicial propriety to intimidate and smear yet another witness against him, Thomas was playing dirty, and so was I.

...I grilled Savage, a mild-mannered, middle-aged African American civil servant, with the menacing threat of a personal exposure hanging in the background. I then told her that she could either cooperate with me and give me what I needed to discredit Strange Justice, or I would have to discredit her as a witness by disclosing whatever personal information I had about her, just as I had blackened the reputation of all the other women who had come forward with damaging information about Thomas. In the face of this threat, Savage refused to recant her accusations. I continued to press for anything I could get her to say to blunt the impact of her accusation. We agreed that Savage would give me a written statement in which she would say the Strange Justice authors had distorted and sensationalized her quotes. When I got back to my office at the Spectator, Savage faxed me a statement, but it was too weak to be of any use: the Strange Justice account would still stand. I called Savage at her office and insisted on some changes that would allow me to cast at least some doubt on the way Mayer and Abramson had quoted her. After a struggle on the phone in which I renewed my threats, Savage made some handwritten changes to the document and faxed it to me again... I knew Savage had given me enought to work with so that I could use the statement in my review to make it appear as though she had recanted the story, which in fact she had not.

...I next set out to blow away the Mayer and Abramson story that Thomas had been a frequent customer of an X-rated video store near Dupont Circle, called Graffiti, where in the early 1980s he was alleged to have rented X-rated videos of the type that Hill claimed he had discussed with her in graphic terms. In the hearings, Thomas had pointedly refused to answer questions about his personal use of pornography other than to categorically deny that he had ever talked about porn with Hill. The Graffitti story was another theretofore unknown piece of evidence for Hill's case, and it was a powerful counterpoint to the prudish image of Thomas presented by supporters like Armstrong Williams and repeated by me in The Real Anita Hill. Now that Mark had opened up a channel directly to Thomas, I asked him to find out for me whether Thomas had owned the video equipment needed to view movies at home in the early 1980s. Such equipment was not then as commonly used as it was in the mid-1990s, and I figured if I could assert in the review that Thomas had no way of watching the movies, the matter would be settled definitively.

Mark came back with a straightforward answer: Thomas not only had the video equipment in his apartment, but he also habitually rented pornographic movies from Graffiti during the years that Anita Hill worked for him, just as Mayer and Abramson reported. Here was the proof that the Senate investigators and reporters had been searching for during the hearings. Mark, of course, was still a true believer in Thomas's innocence. He couldn't see the porn rentals as at all significant. To Mark, Hill was still a liar despite suggestions to the contrary. But I had some distance from Thomas and I was troubled by the damaging report. It made Hill's entire story much more plausible. I can still remember exactly where I was sitting when Mark let me in on what had to have been one of the most closely guarded secrets within the Thomas camp, a secret, no doubt, that had been kept for three years among Thomas's most trusted advisers.

It was at this moment that Brock finally admitted to himself just how low he had fallen to be part of the hard-right crowd:

...I was no better than the Arkansas Project brigade after all. The strange lies were mine. All the attacks, the hateful rhetoric, the dark alliances and strange conspiracies, an eye for an eye, nuts and sluts, defending Pinochet, throwing grenades, carpet-bombing the White House, Bob Bork, Bob Tyrrell, Bob Dornan, Bob Bartley, Bob Barr - it all led right here: I lost my soul.

Brock has been working on getting his soul back ever since, and running Media Matters is part of that project.

This is important stuff. But one of the most memorable parts of the book has to be this portrait of Laura Ingraham:

I hadn't known of Laura's antigay past at Dartmouth, where along with her then-boyfriend Dinesh D'Souza, she had participated in the infamous outing of gay students, who were branded "sodomites," until I cringed as I read about her Dartmouth Review exploits in a 1995 profile in Vanity Fair. To make matters worse, I was quoted in the piece saying that Laura was unreservedly accepting of homosexuality, which in my presence she always had seemed to be. On more than one occasion, I had taken her barhopping along the gay strip in Washington, where she seemed to have a blast. Inevitably though, as we drownded ourselves in more and more alcohol, the evening would take a ghastly turn. One night, after downing several cocktails and snorting an unidentifiable white powder an acquaintance had given me - which turned out to be the cat tranquilizer Ketamine - I was sick in the bathroom for several hours trying to get my bearings as Laura, in a drunken stupor, crawled through the packed two-story dance club on her hands and knees looking for me. Her purse had been locked in my car trunk, causing her to call a friend in the wee hours of the morning to rescue her. In the meantime, she had managed to leave me a series of violent messages, threatening to "break every window in my house" if I didn't return the keys immediately.

David Brock is a regular guest (usually Wednesdays) on the Al Franken Show.

How did I become a Republican?

I don't know what's going on. I've gotten two voicemails from some New York congressman saying that he wants to recognize me as some kind of Republican pioneer - I ignored them figuring it must have been a mistake. Then I just got a Grassroots Survey from Dennis Hastert commissioned by the National Republican Congressional Committee.

I've checked my financial records and don't see any signs of identity theft where somebody donated money to the Republicans in my name. I certainly never deliberately gave Republicans money. Is this some rightwinger's joke? Did somebody donate in my name with their own money as a prank?

Oh well, I'll fill out the survey and send it back. Although I imagine my answers are going to skew the results.

Sale at K-Mart

Bob, my pal and clinic defense partner loved this joke so much, you can hear both sides complaining about it in this video clip.

My husband sucks, but he can't help it - nature made him that way

What is it with women who write for the NYTimes? Poor Daphne Merkin can't find a daddy, Maureen Dowd blames feminism for dating woes - although claims she herself has a great social life - then Amy Sutherland writes an article about what a jerk her husband Scott is When she objected to some stuff he did "he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever." In other words, no bitch was going to tell Scott what to do.

Sutherland's answer to her husband's deep-seated hostility and aggression was to try to train him to behave reasonably and with consideration using animal-training techniques.

Sutherland didn't come out and say her husband couldn't be expected to treat her wishes with consideration due to the fact, detected by evolutionary psychologists, that men are just like that, but she used the language of evolutionary psychology, explaining that:

The exotic animal known as Scott is a loner, but an alpha male. So hierarchy matters, but being in a group doesn't so much

.


Maybe Judith Warner noticed that Sutherland's article has been the Times's first or second most-emailed article for about two weeks now, and wanted a piece of that action, which is why she wrote an article confessing that her husband treats her with contempt:

On Sunday night, though, as I read The Times’s laid-back-boys-on-campus piece — while simultaneously giving a bath, putting away laundry and writing a week’s worth of columns in my head — the colorful image of sarong-clad men and women suddenly lodged itself inside my mind. It seemed to have some kind of great significance; column potential. So I raced to share it with Max, who was having a little lie-down on the couch, having done some very tiring driving earlier in the day.

As I began to talk, his fingers reflexively felt for the TV remote, trying — and I really don’t think this was conscious — to turn me either down or off. When this proved fruitless, he resorted to words: “interesting,” first, then “work on that” and, finally (TV volume rising now) “Sounds great — get to it!”

Warner's husband wants to make sure she knows that no matter how big a hoity-toity famous writer for the NYTimes she is, he's more interested in watching TV than hearing about her work. No bitch is going to take up HIS TV time.

Warner doesn't claim that scientists have found a biological reason for why her husband is such a creep, but she expects they WILL find it soon:

The pattern of selective male laziness and female frenzy that begins among young men and women in college persists long after graduation. Someday soon, I am sure, an evolutionary biologist will teach us how all this is hard-wired — and why it is worthwhile.

Of course Warner immediately assumes that the cause is biological, not social. Notice that Warner doesn't attribute her husband's attitude to their relationship. No, it turns out that her husband, as a man, is naturally "lazy" while she, being female, is of course in a female frenzy. This is not about Judith and Max, it's about the supposed essential natures of men and women, and Judith's and Max's personalities happen to be a perfect match for these alleged universal male/female traits.

Both Warner and Sutherland seem to believe that their marriages are just swell. They sound like awful relationships to me, even though Sutherland, at least, tries to present alpha Scott as having traits that make up for his incredible screw-you attitude. After all, he does do an hysterical rendition of a northern Vermont accent. How many men even know there is a "northern Vermont accent?" That's gotta outweigh all kinds of obnoxious, risky, selfish behavior.

When organizations like The National Marriage Project wring their hands and search for reasons for why women are increasingly uninterested in marriage, they have no further to look than the NYTimes. If intelligent, accomplished women are fed shit by their husbands and call it chocolate eclairs, what the hell's the point? Who needs to spend time with someone in your off hours who responds to your request to pick up stinking clothes by picking them up LESS, as alpha Scott does; or who makes no secret of the fact that he'd rather watch TV than listen to his accomplished wife talk about her interesting ideas, as lazy Max does? And I'm sure that the Judith/Max household can afford Tivo, so there's NO excuse for that behavior.

Judith, Amy, please: sooner or later, even evolutionary psychology will no longer be sufficient to keep you from realizing that the person who swore in public to love and honor you now treats you like a buzzing gnat or insubordinate household help. Sooner or later your resentment and self-respect are going to assert themselves and you'll be forced to admit that you and he aren't really gender archetypes acting in a script authored by natural selection after all. Someday, maybe, even your power to get back at your husband by portraying him as a jerk to an audience of millions will not suffice.

Permanent link

Plame & Wilson sue Cheney

Ex-C.I.A. Officer Sues Cheney and Others Over Leak

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, accused Cheney, Rove and I. Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby of participating in a ''whispering campaign'' to reveal Plame's CIA identity and punish Wilson for criticizing the Bush administration's motives in Iraq.
...
The lawsuit accuses Cheney, Libby, Rove and 10 unnamed administration officials or political operatives of putting the Wilsons and their children's lives at risk by exposing Plame.

OH Yeeeeahhh! It's Watergate time for the Bush crime syndicate!

Expect the Bush Admin to attack the judiciary more than ever now.

Kafkaesque

My dealings with the Copyright Office to date:

===========================

submitted via the Copyright Office's web form 7/6/2006:

Why doesn't the Copyright Office ask for proof of authorization for derivative works? Someone registered a derivative copyright on my play, TAM LIN, without my authorization and then used it as the basis for a very expensive lawsuit against me for violating this unauthorized copyright when I produced the original work.

I noticed that the derivative work copyright registration form doesn't even ask for the name of the author of the original work, much less proof of authorization.

Why doesn't the Copyright Office do a better job of protecting authors of original work from unauthorized derivative work copyright registration?

Nancy McClernan



-------------------------------------------
From: Copyright Information [mailto:copyinfo@loc.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 8:53 AM
To: nancy@
Subject: Re: derivative copyright

Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work. The owner is generally the author or someone who has obtained rights from the author. Anyone interested in a work who does not know the owner of copyright may search the records of the Copyright Office. Or, the Office will conduct a search at a fee of $75* per hour. For further information, request Circular 22, "How to Investigate the Copyright Status of a Work."

Among its other functions, the Copyright Office serves as an office of record, a place where claims to copyright are registered when the claimant has complied with the requirements of the copyright law.
We are glad to furnish information about the provisions of the copyright law and the procedures for making registration, to explain the operations and practices of the Copyright Office, and to report of facts found in the public records of the Office.
However, the Regulations of the Copyright Office (Code of Federal Regulations, Title 37, chapter II) prohibit employees from giving specific legal advice on the rights of persons, whether in connection with particular uses of copyrighted works, cases of alleged domestic or foreign copyright infringement, contracts between authors and publishers, or other matters of a similar nature.

Many requests for assistance require professional legal advice, frequently that of a copyright attorney. Your local bar association may be able to recommend a copyright attorney.



**************IMPORTANT NOTE**************
As of July 1, 2006, most filing fees are $45 per application.
For other fees, please see:
http://www.copyright.gov/reports/fees2006.html


**********************************
Copyright Office
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave SE
Washington DC 20559
(202) 707-3000
www.copyright.gov
**********************************


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From: Nancy
Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2006 3:05 PM
To: 'Copyright Information'
Subject: RE: derivative copyright

You did not answer my question. I wasn't asking for legal advice, or for an explanation of copyright laws.

I thought my question was pretty easy to understand, but maybe not, so let me rephrase.

WHY doesn't the Copyright Office's derivative work copyright registration form ASK for proof of authorization?

Please answer that question, or explain why you can't answer that question.

That has nothing to do with legal advice and everything to do with the practices of the Copyright Office.

I've already BEEN through courts, and forced, at GREAT EXPENSE, the registrant of the unauthorized copyright to cancel his ill-gotten registration. The case was Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions tried on April 24 - 26, 2006 by Judge Lawrence Kaplan in the US Southern District Court in Manhattan and my attorney sent you all the materials needed to support the cancellation. Why hasn't the cancellation of registration PA-1-254-494 gone through yet? I still see it listed in your database.

But the point is I never should have had to do it. Every single copyright owner can find themselves in the same position as I - if they are lucky enough to afford the court costs - because of the failure of the US Copyright Office to protect their rights.

The Copyright Office's statement: "Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work." is absolutely meaningless because the Copyright Office does exactly NOTHING to enforce it. There should be mechanisms to prevent the easy defrauding of the Copyright Office, and penalties for those who do defraud the Copyright Office.

The current situation is intolerable and has got to stop.

So please answer the question about the failure of the current derivative copyright registration form to demand proof of authorization of the owner of the original copyright.

Nancy McClernan

#4!

I blogged a couple of weeks ago that An Inconvenient Truth was the 7th-highest grossing documentary of all time. Well it recently surpassed Madonna to become number 4.


Here are the current rankings:

1 Fahrenheit 9/11 $119,194,771
2 March of the Penguins $77,437,223
3 Bowling for Columbine $21,576,018
4 An Inconvenient Truth $15,039,000


The #1 grossing documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 is going to be tough to beat, but Bowling for Columbine better watch its back. Michael Moore take note.

Why would a feminist wear high heels?

The typical stick-heeled high heeled shoes that the fashion industry insists that women wear are pointless and idiotic. I could maybe see wearing them if your partner has some kind of sexual kink involving such shoes - and then only if you're pretty sure you won't be walking around much in them - but other than that, what's the point?

In her annoying, typically light-weight review of Katha Pollitt's latest book Virginity or Death! Ana Marie Cox, aka Wonkette, complains that mean old Katha is too strident because she expresses distate for such shoes. Cox says:

But there’s a world of difference between choosing to wear heels that require foot-soaking and choosing to cut your toe to fit your shoe.

But the difference is degree, not kind.

Other then some kind of iron-clad traditionalist aesthetic that causes you to be utterly incapable of shaking the idea that mincing around on your tip-toes is the pinnacle of beauty, or being a slave to the fashion industry, what possible reason is there for any woman, much less any feminist to wear stick-heeled tippy tap shoes for walking around in? It makes NO SENSE AT ALL.

So Pollitt objects to high heels and Cox calls her strident. Anybody who doubts Cox's fundamental anti-feminist position should think about that for a moment. "Strident" is an absolute cliche of anti-feminist rhetoric. And to use it in reference to a reasonable and relatively low-keyed writer like Pollitt (who once suggested I tone down my rhetoric when I cc'd her on an email) is simply Cox's way of upholding the grand anti-feminist tradition of characterizing ALL feminists as "strident."

Einhorn's nonsense

I see that Edward Einhorn has written his own piece about the case of Einhorn v Mergatroyd Productions, and predictably, it's full of bullshit.

To begin with the first paragraph:

Recently, I was involved in a drawn out and highly publicized dispute between myself and Mergatroyd Productions over my direction of a stage play entitled Tam Lin. The dispute centered around the concept of a director's copyright. Mergatroyd had fired me the day before the opening of the play and then used, I contended, the blocking and choreography I had created for the play without paying me for my work. Judge Kaplan's final decision avoided the question of copyright, awarding me money for the implied contract we had instead—that I would be paid, and that Mergatroyd Productions would be able to use my work. This made the copyright question moot.

The judge actually agreed with Mergatroyd Productions. We never said we wouldn't pay Edward Einhorn - we told him, both in person and via email that we would pay him. The issue was that Edward Einhorn wanted the full $1000 that we originally offered. But since we had to fire him for the good of our show, and since he then tried to sabotage the production through an email to the cast and crew, we felt he didn't deserve the full amount.

And JUDGE KAPLAN AGREED WITH US - awarding Einhorn $800 - LESS than what Einhorn demanded. Actually he tried to extort $2000 out of us, by serving us a cease and desist letter from David Einhorn, his brother. Eight hundred dollars was very close to what we were prepared to pay Einhorn, had he deigned to negotiate with us instead of pulling his bullshit copyright scheme, in the words of Judge Kaplan "aided and abetted by" his brother. So this incredibly expensive lawsuit was really over a couple of hundred dollars, David Einhorn's lack of professional ethics, and Edward Einhorn's gigantic ego.

And of course the argument for a director's copyright is flawed from start to finish. I'm currently working on an article about the Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions lawsuit, complete with transcripts from the trial for the Dramatists Guild's newsletter. Then I'll be posting an expanded version here, with additional gory details like the Village Voice's article about the trouble that playwright Richard Foreman had with Edward Einhorn (scroll down to "Disobeying the Foreman.") In private correspondence, Foreman told me that he always thought Einhorn made a mess of his (Forman's) plays, which is why he told Einhorn on a Manhattan street corner one day that he'd prefer that Einhorn never direct his plays again. Unfortunately, I didn't know about Foreman's experience with Einhorn until after we hired Einhorn, and Einhorn proceeded to make a mess of my play.

Einhorn agreed to cancel his ill-gotten derivative copyright on my play TAM LIN, although I see that it's still listed in the Copyright Office's database. I recently wrote to the Copyright Office asking them why they are so lackidaisical about confirming whether or not an author of an original work has authorized a derivative work. I will report their response (or non-response if it comes to that) here.

It was on the basis of his fraudulent derivative copyright registration that Einhorn sued me for producing my own work. If the Copyright Office had been doing its job, Einhorn would never have been allowed to register his bullshit "blocking and choreography" script.

Einhorn admitted on the stand that the copyright registration was a scheme he and his brother devised to extort money from Mergatroyd Productions (wait until you read the transcript.) But the Copyright Office's weakness will be there for unscrupulous attorneys like David Einhorn to exploit until people speak up.

More once the article is complete...

Hang on Stevens

A message to the liberal-moderate members of the Supreme Court via the Al Franken Show blog.

Performed by Mike Ruekberg and 2 Tickets 2 Paradise, with lyrics by Ben Wikler.

Now if only I can get a copy of the Paul Krugman theme song.

Has This Country Gone Completely Insane?

The rightwingers must be chortling for joy over this incident:

"You can’t be in here protesting," officer Adkins said, pointing to my Veterans For Peace shirt.

"Well, I’m not protesting, I’m having a cup of coffee," I returned, thinking that logic would convince Adkins to go back to his earlier duties of guarding against serious terrorists.

Flipping his badge open, he said, "No, not with that shirt. You’re protesting and you have to go."

Beginning to get his drift, I said firmly, "Not before I finish my coffee."

He insisted that I leave, but still not quite believing my ears, I tried one more approach to reason. "Hey, listen. I’m a veteran. This is a V.A. facility. I’m sitting here not talking to anybody, having a cup of coffee. I’m not protesting and you can’t kick me out."

"You’ll either go or we’ll arrest you," Adkins threatened.

"Well, you’ll just have to arrest me," I said, wondering what strange land I was now living in.

You know the rest. Handcuffed, led away to the facility’s security office past people with surprised looks on their faces, read my rights, searched, and written up.

via Ann Bartow at Sivacracy

NEWSFLASH: Ann Coulter has no ethics

Wolcott links to a NYPost article pointing out that Ann Coulter is a massive plagiarist. Wolcott takes Jonathan Alter and others to task for appearing on TV with Coulter and he's so right:

Confronted with a serial plagiarist, commentators often attempt a jackknife dive into the murky motives of the offender, trying to untangle the nagging compulsions that made the copycat risk his or her career by taking a heaping helping of other people's work. (Thomas Mallon's Stolen Words is probably the definitive book on the psychodynamics of plagiarism.) In Coulter's case, no dive is necessary, no onion-peeling of motives required. She is so devoid of character and psychology that any investigation would be superfluous. She's swiping other people's work not because she's trying to slip something past us but because she's sloppy, lazy, and arrogant. She just doesn't give a fuck. She's learned that the rules of journalism and public discourse don't apply to her, having cheerfully violated them so many times before only to be rewarded with the cover of Time, countless cable-news appearances, and bestselling success.

Who are the twisted freaks in the media who keep promoting Coulter's career? She IS a freakshow. Al Franken finally wised up and stopped appearing with her because she's just a bag of bluster and hate, with virtually no substance. And WHO are the creatures who like her? It's scary to think that they're out there running loose, disguised as human beings.

Is the NYTimes on an anti-feminist crusade?

Smirkette Cox (left) would like to replace Smurfette Dowd as the lone female in the New York Times Op Ed hive colony.

It seems like you can't read the NYTimes anymore without discovering yet another article attacking feminists. Whether it's the shameless Smurfette Maureen Dowd pushing anti-feminist stereotypes, to David Brooks giving women typically idiotic advice like have children young and start your career at 40, to the relentless promotion of evolutionary psychology aimed at keeping women in their proper place through "science" from John Tierney and Daphne Merkin, the Times appears to be a serious feminist hater.

From Pandagon comes news of yet another attack on feminism, in the guise of a book review by the smirking Ana Marie Cox, formerly known as Wonkette. She should be called Smirkette now. It's utterly appalling that they would give a review of Katha Pollitt's latest book, Virginity or Death! to a second-rate gossip columnist like Cox.

I'm convinced that Cox is trying to position herself as a replacement for Dowd in the "woman columnist" slot in the Times' Op-Ed section by becoming a clone of Dowd - shallow, obsessed with being popular with the kewl kidz, and a feminist basher while freely enjoying the fruits of the hard work of feminists. Of course Cox has always been shallow and obsessed with popularity, so it's a cinch for her to fill Dowd's pointy-toed, 4-inch heel tippy tap shoes.

It's significant that Cox would bash Katha Pollitt - Pollitt should be the replacement for Dowd in the "woman columnist" slot. She's a better thinker AND writer than either Cox or Dowd, and if the Times insists on limiting female op-ed voices to a single representative, it should pick someone who isn't an embarassment to womankind.