do Muslims deserve human rights?

From today's big speech:

When a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America – and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot – his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team.

There is a very important, very obvious word that is missing from this paragraph. That word is "Muslim." Because the reality is that we have no "war on terror" or "war on terrorism." The reality is that Abraham Al-Awlaki was not denied his basic human rights because he opposed the United States. (And make no mistake, the right to due process and legal representation is as basic a human right as exists.) He was killed because he argued for the killing of Americans while being a Muslim in a Muslim country. No one would ever imagine sending a drone to Stockholm or to Sydney. The practice is condoned and justified because of who drones target. Likewise, no one would tolerate the decade-long internment of accused white supremacists without due process or formal charges in an off-shore prison as they slowly wasted away from hunger strike. And were Abdulrahaman Al-Awlaki blonde-haired and blue-eyed, his face would be plastered on the cover of American magazines. That's just a fact.

There has never been a time since 9/11 when this country has not been busily killing Muslims somewhere in the world. That's a fact. I am told, even by self-identified liberals, that this is because we have Muslims enemies— extremists, terrorists, Al Qaeda. The evidence that these people have is scanty, amounting to "because the government says so." We deploy ordnance and kill people in foreign countries and all we ever know personally is that they were terrorists because the military or CIA said so. That justification would never be accepted, were the victims not Muslim. It's incredible how little information we actually have about the people we kill. There is no foreign army at work, here, no formal declaration of war, no battle lines, no borders. There is only the word of the administration.

You don't have to take my word for it when I say that the line being drawn here is not against terrorist but against Muslims. Ask Tom Friedman, who said, in the most honest statement of his life, that the point of the Iraq war was to say to the Muslim world "suck on this," in revenge against 9/11. "We coulda hit Saudi Arabia!" he said, mustache quivering. "We coulda hit Pakistan! We hit Iraq because we could." I submit to you that this wasn't some crazy statement by a lunatic but a perfectly accurate summation of the majority opinion of the United States. I think Americans wanted war on Muslims and were searching for any pretense. And I think that any discussion of this endless war that does not frankly reflect that it is a war against Muslims is an act of dishonesty.

During the Bush administration, most liberals could be counted upon to oppose our aggression against the Muslim world. Though there are still many liberal allies, and I am grateful for them, I no longer can rely on the average liberal to criticize our government's incursions into the Muslim world. I can't, because they have instead decided to support the Obama administration, and the administration has dramatically expanded the scope and the scale of a secret campaign of assault in the Muslim world.

We have lived with this "war on terror" for a third of my life. And liberals: speeches do not walk the dog anymore. The time for flowery speeches is over. It's time for action. Saying "we're going to end the AUMF eventually" is not enough. Talking about closing Guantanamo is not enough. It has to actually happen. Like Anthony Romero of the ACLU says, actions are more important than words. If Obama actually closes Guantanamo, I promise I will applaud. If Obama actually reduces or ends the drone campaign, I will celebrate. But those specific policies will only be valuable if they are part of a broad attempt to end the hostilities between the United States and the Muslim world. Given that every Muslim terrorist who announces their motives says that they are based on our incursions into the Muslim world, that can only happen if we withdraw.

Am I intemperate? I am. Does this intemperance make me frequently unfair? I suppose. Am I angry? Yes, I'm angry. I'm angry about the constancy of the death of innocent people and I'm angry about those who justify and excuse those deaths. I have said things that I regret, at times, and I don't like how often I am moved to anger by this issue. But in a country that is so dead set on prosecuting an endless campaign of violence that is waged in secret and without the possibility of an informed people, if I will err, I will err on the side of opposing anti-Muslim aggression. I do believe that Obama's speech today was a step in the right direction. But he has to take the rest of the steps. And everyone who debates this issue has to understand that whether Muslims enjoy or should enjoy the full benefit of human rights is absolutely at question here. If people answer in the affirmative, and they work to affirm and support those rights, we may well make this country a more moral force in the world. If so, I am prepared to make my apologies then. 

I'm told Obama gave a speech today

And it's got the hearts of Andrew Sullivan, Chris Hayes, and other lovers of human rights allllll aflutter.

we must be ready to condemn this vicious knifing in the UK as terrorism

Friends, now is not the time to quibble about definitions. It's not the time to worry about words and their meanings. Now is not the time for leftist resistance to the plain truth that we're in a war, and in a war, we must strike and strike hard. The terrible murder in the United Kingdom of an innocent man, brutally knifed to death due to religious hatred, must not stand. We must come together to fight terrorism and avenge the senseless stabbing death of a blameless man in our closet allied nation. We must call this for what it is: terrorism.

I refer, of course, to the murder of Mohammed Saleem, a 77 75-year old British Muslim who was stabbed in the back three times by a white man as he left his mosque on May 2nd. For surely, since everyone is in agreement that the stabbing death of a completely innocent person due to religious hatred is terrorism, there can be no doubt that this instance was terrorism, correct? I'm searching the archives at all the blogs calling terrorism right now and trying to find where they talked about the murder of Mr. Saleem in similar terms. Give me a minute. I'm sure I'll find it. Any second now....

Journos of Color

Jamelle Bouie and Aminatou Sow have started a new aggregator that follows and promotes work by journalists of color. You should check it out.

liberal box checking

Liberals and progressives have far more humane and compassionate views on gay rights and gay love than conservatives do, but in my experience, they are often not more open-minded than conservatives.

A telling moment in this Wesley Morris essay on HBO's new Liberace movie, Behind the Candelabra: in one paragraph, he notes that Matt Damon's character Scott (Liberace's live-in boyfriend and employee) "insists that he's bisexual." In the next paragraph, he says that Damon and Douglas are "playing homosexuals." Perhaps the movie makes it clear that this self-definition by Scott is in fact self-delusion, I don't know. But I'm not sure how such a thing could be dramatized. If it's not, why run so roughshod over a character's self-definition? Yes: there is a tradition of gay men who are not just closeted but self-deluded. But the insistence that any man who has sexual or romantic relationships with another man must be gay is simplistic and deeply restricting of the right to sexual freedom and self-definition. (You'll note that this is never asserted when it comes to women.) Morris's piece writ large reflects on homosexuality not as a set of preferences and behaviors but as a totalizing identity. That is neither a productive way to look at a world that is full of complexity nor fair.

Consider this passage from a 2009 article by Amy Sohn on male-to-female transsexuals and men who are attracted to them:

Part of the problem is, there’s no language yet to describe men who are drawn to trannies—or, as a friend of mine puts it, “transgressives.” My own guess is that they fall into four subcategories: closeted gay men who need the T&A so they don’t freak out about the D, bisexual men who can get both needs met at the same time, porn-addicted men who need to keep crossing new boundaries to get aroused, and straight guys who nonetheless have a narcissistic attraction to the penis.

I suppose I'm glad that Sohn has reflected that sexual desires are complex and  idiosyncratic. But consider that three out of these four categories are defined as fundamentally disordered or dysfunctional: closeted men who are lying to themselves, men who are addicted to pornography, and men who are motivated by narcissism. This is flagrantly judgmental about adult, consensual sexual behavior. It's amazing how confident Sohn is in creating a taxonomy of desires that she doesn't share and can't possibly fully understand. Like most affluent Brooklynites, I'm sure Sohn thinks of herself as a modern, forward-thinking person. Yet she is so suffused in the privilege of being able to define others' sexual identities that she doesn't see the offense in reducing the boundaries of the possible, of the permissible.

It's not just that liberals define the sexual identities of others constantly. It's that they are so quick and casual in doing so. I personally have long marveled at how the same people who advocate eloquently for the equal dignity of gay love and gay relationships can be so quick to take the right of self-definition away from men who experience them. None of us have access to other people's internal feelings and emotions, and thus we are constrained in how we can assess their own orientation towards their own desires. The fair, compassionate, and liberal thing to do is to let people act as they want to, and trust in the perfect legitimacy of all adult, consensual sexual behavior.

all races being equal but all people certainly not being

This Zack Beauchamp missive on the Richwine affair has things to like and things to dislike about it. I want to focus on one thing, and in that way shift away from talking about race to talking about parentage.

Beauchamp goes hard on the notion that environment trumps everything when it comes to IQ. Indeed, he goes so hard on that attitude that most readers will likely think that there is nothing to the notion of a genetic basis for IQ. That's simply not in keeping with the large majority of the data. For example, that adopted children have IQs that correlate far more highly with their biological parents than their adoptive parents has been replicated repeatedly. (See, for example, Plomin et al. from 1997, for just one.) James Flynn, who I will remind you is deeply committed to social justice and is also the preeminent researcher in IQ, wrote in 2007, "The most radical form of environmental intervention is adoption into a privileged home. Adoptive parents often wonder why the adopted child loses ground on their natural children. If their own children inherit elite genes and the adopted child has average genes, then as parents slowly lose the ability to impose an equally enriched environment on both, the individual differences in genes begin to dominate." That Flynn piece, I think, is really excellent as a discussion of how to think through and understand the interactions between genetics and environment in IQ. It is not defeatist, and could never be called racist. But it is far more sober and clear about the relationship between genetics and IQ than Beauchamp's piece.

 Beauchamp quotes the well-known Turkheimer et al article that indicates that environment depresses genetic potential for IQ, but he doesn't point out that Turkheimer et al lends more credence, not less, to the fact that identical twins who were separated at birth and placed in unequal environments are far more alike than random strangers. Nor does he really explore what the Turkheimer article demonstrates. It's perfectly possible for environment to depress the IQ ceiling of a twin relative to his brother (I've been arguing that for years!) and for both brothers to have low IQs thanks in part to genetic lineage. Indeed, Turkheimer himself wrote in 2000, "the effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes." No one who reads Beauchamps piece without having been previously exposed to these issues would know that in fact Turkheimer has made some of the strongest arguments for the heredity of IQ. To come away from reading an article on the heredity of IQ thinking that Turkheimer is on the side of environmental causes is a big problem. The entire article lacks similar context.

Beauchamp quotes Richard Nisbett in arguing for early-life interventions as a way to improve IQ. I support early-life intervention. But Beauchamp does nothing to tell the reader what these interventions entail or what kind of resources they require. Nisbett is likely referring to studies of intensive preschool programs like that found in the famous Perry project. But Perry and similar other studies have typically suffered from small sample size and conditions that can't be replicated. What's more, actually investigating the results of that study shows that while program participants had statistically significant improvements compared to non-program participants, they still lagged far behind national medians in every tested category. Finally, Beauchamp himself quotes Nisbett in admitting that the IQ gains (which is what is at issue here) fade by adulthood.

Most egregiously, Beauchamp speaks about all of this by referring to a "new consensus," as if the notion that IQ is dominantly environmental rather than genetic is broadly shared in developmental psychology. This simply is not true. Early in his piece, Beauchamp says that he performed " dozens of interviews with subject matter experts." Well, let's be clear: he conducted dozens of interviews with subject matter experts who are inclined to be sympathetic to his preexisting commitments. I don't think that Beauchamp is being dishonest. I think he's a journalist who approached this question looking to find a particular position and found it. I'm not complaining about media bias or any such thing here, and again, in broad strokes Beauchamp and I agree on Richwine's argument for Heritage. It's okay to both perform journalism and have a particular point of view. But speaking as someone who has been reading academic journal articles and chapters on these issues for years, Beauchamp is presenting a deeply misleading portrait of current opinions on the relationship between heredity and IQ.

I have argued (again, for years) about the limitations of what IQ is and what it means in a human, social context. But it has to be said: if IQ had as little genetic basis as is suggested in that article, it would be extraordinarily out of the ordinary for measurable human attributes.

Why do I point this stuff out, when I've been making the case against the Richwine argument for the past week, and against the general race and IQ argument for years? Well, first, because I think that Beauchamp is simply presenting an inaccurate picture of the extant evidence. He is pointing to the fact that controversy exists on controversial questions and acting as if the existence of controversy is dispositive one way or another. He's cherry picking particular researchers who have particular stances (as all researchers do) and treating their opinions as necessarily dispositive. He's treating the existence of criticism in the literature as disqualifying of the papers Richwine cites, when of course criticism exists in the literature for the studies that Beauchamp himself cites. And he suggests a minimalist relationship between genetics and IQ that almost no one in developmental psychology actually believes. A reader who comes to that article without a background in these subjects will believe in a "new consensus" that doesn't exist.

But more to the point: we don't have to do this. We don't have to misrepresent the importance of genetic parentage to IQ to recognize the importance of environment. Beauchamp makes some very good points about what it means to be Hispanic and about what a race is. I myself have written four times in the last week or two about why we shouldn't listen to Jason Richwine. By misrepresenting the actual extant evidence, well-meaning people play into the hands of those who work tirelessly to establish the idea of a conspiracy to hide the truth.

Removed from the emotional grindhouse of race, why does all of this matter? It matters because our educational debates are dominated by a piety that almost everyone argues but almost no one believes: that all people are of equal ability. If you think that's an exaggeration, consider No Child Left Behind, which insists: 100% must achieve the standard, 100% compliance. Here in the real world, 100% of people will never reach the standard in anything at all. Yet this notion that our problems can all not only be improved upon but literally erased permeates education at all levels. It is the most glaring orthodoxy in our educational debates: you must never suggest that anyone will ever fail.

But here in real life, failure is always an option, and half of people will always be below average at everything, and both the data and the actual lived experience of everyone tells you that individual human beings have radically different abilities.

That's not much of a problem for me: I'm a socialist. I don't believe that human welfare should be subject to the vicissitudes of chance, which includes both environment and genetics. I don't believe in the notion that someone has to deserve material security and comfort. So I don't mind pointing out that human beings are substantially unequal in their abilities because I don't think that this should condemn anyone to a life of poverty. I've long advocated to the "scientific racist" crowd that we can conduct a really powerful experiment: raise the standard of living of black and Hispanic Americans to that of the white American middle class through the brute force of mass redistribution. Then, if their living standards start to decline after they've finally reached parity with the white middle class (which they've never enjoyed at any point in American history), we can go from there. If you think that human beings need to deserve things like housing, education, food, etc., then yes, inequality in ability might be a problem for you. But it certainly isn't for me.

you are not, actually, in control of your own life

Obama giving the commencement address at Morehouse College:

Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination....If you stay hungry, if you keep hustling, if you keep on your grind and get other folks to do the same — nobody can stop you.

Setting aside a liberal Democrat making this point, and all the attendant problems with that— the notion that you are in charge of the outcome of your life, and that all it takes is working hard and trying, is not true. Realizing it isn't true is a big part of adjusting the adult world. As time goes on and on, more and more empirical measures demonstrate it isn't true. And saying that to students like these, at this age of their lives, in this economy, at this terrible point in history for recent college grads... it's cruelty. Cruelty.

Update: Of course I don't think that the president should have said, "You guys are screwed! Give up!" What I want the president to do is, in the best liberal tradition, recognize that while hard work and dedication are important, chance and injustice are powerful, so we need to work together. I wanted him to say "You should work hard and strive for what you want, but you should also remember that the things you achieve come on the back of chances and advantages not everyone has, so you should work to help those who find themselves in harsh circumstances. And you should naturally expect, without guilt or shame, to be able to call on help from society if you find yourself in those circumstances yourself."

reminder: Academically Adrift's methodological flaws

So new research suggests that perhaps college students aren't going through college without learning anything, contrary to the public perception of Academically Adrift. I say contrary to the public perception, rather than contrary to the text, as in fact the book found that not only did the group of college students tested show statistically significant gains between their first and fourth semester (not between their first and last year, a common misrepresentation of the study) as a whole, every individual subgroup within the sample did. I suppose I can't blame the media too much for the misperception that the book showed only failure, given that the authors of the book took every opportunity to play up the idea of a failed higher education system.

Of course, it's easy to show pessimistic findings when every aspect of your methodology is bent towards that result. Richard Haswell, in a review essay from Research in the Teaching of English (PDF):

I should be clear that my final sounding of this book is not that the authors misinterpret their own findings. I believe that their findings cannot be interpreted at all. As regards the significance of their research and its methodology to the college composition profession, my conclusion is terse. If you want to cite these authors in support of the failings of undergraduate writing, don’t. If you want to cite these authors in support of the successes of undergraduate writing, don’t. Academically Adrift’s data—as generated and analyzed—cannot be relied on. 

Harsh judgment on a book published by the University of Chicago Press. But consider two research scenarios. Research Team A wants to test the null hypothesis that students do not gain in writing skills during college. What do the researchers do? Whether using a cross-sectional or longitudinal design, they make sure the earlier group of writers is equivalent to the later group. They randomly select participants rather than let them self-select. They create writing prompts that fit the kind of writing that participants are currently learning in courses. They apply measures of the writing that are transparent and interpretable. They space pretest and post-test as far apart as they can to allow participants maximum chance to show gain. They control for retest effects. They limit measures and discussion to no more than what their statistical  testing and empirical findings allow. Meanwhile Team B is testing the same hypothesis. What do they do? They create a self-selected set of participants and show little concern when more than half of the pretest group drops out of the experiment before the post-test. They choose to test that part of the four academic years when students are least likely to record gain, from the first year through the second year, ending at the well-known “sophomore slump.” They choose prompts that ask participants to write in genres they have not studied or used in their courses. They keep secret the ways that they measured and rated the student writing. They disregard possible retest effects. They run hundreds of tests of statistical significance looking for anything that will support the hypothesis of nongain and push their implications far beyond the data they thus generate. 

I am not speculating about the intentions or motives of the authors of Academically Adrift (AA). I am just noting that AA follows the methodology of Team B and not Team A.

 But, of course, that college is worthless is a conclusion that pleases many with flagrantly anti-academic biases in our media, so I doubt this new study will get much press.

the right to live in history

Andrew Sullivan: "That’s the core problem with debunking the Richwine thesis. The policy inferences are repellent to me. But the data are real."

I want to argue by analogy, here.

I've seen this blog post get passed around a few times. It's about the origins of homosexuality. The post argues that there are good reasons to doubt the straightforward genetic theory, that gay men and women possess a specific gene or genes that cause them to feel sexual and romantic attraction to members of their same sex. I possess nothing resembling the expertise to make that determination. In my own limited way, though, I'm sympathetic to questioning the purely genetic hypothesis, as it's always seemed overly simplistic, and the extremely common discordance in sexual orientation between identical twins is a major suggestion against a purely genetic cause. It's important to say: homosexuality can be physiological and unchosen and still not be genetic. Personally, I think that the perception of political necessity has caused a lot of people to assert a purely genetic cause in a way that outstrips the evidence. I understand that though "they can't help it, so let's let them have rights" may have had short-term political power, it is not a satisfying way to defend gay rights or the equal dignity and worth of gay love.

Yet when I read an argument that homosexuality is caused by a pathogen, it gives me pause. I read it with defensive skepticism. Why? Because, of course, the notion of "homosexuality as disease" is old, and has been used for a long, long time in the oppression of gay people. I read the post, and it has superficial plausibility to me. But there's no proof, yet. And when I read the comments, or find blogs that have linked to the post, my worst fears are confirmed: the commenters are repeatedly and explicitly comparing homosexuality to pedophilia, they are talking about gay sex as "wanton sex," they are using the language of deviance and disorder. The author of the blog post himself says: "Of course it’s a mental disease: a Darwinian disease, which is the only reasonable definition of disease. Curable? Who knows? Preventable? Likely." Whatever the truth of the origins of homosexuality, I want nothing to do with the people who are arguing that the origins are pathogenic.

It turns out that people who are inclined to see homosexuality as caused by a pathogen are also people who are inclined to see homosexuality as disordered, deviant, and wrong. Could any functioning human intelligence be surprised by this? And yet if I apply the kind of thinking Andrew endorses when it comes to race and IQ, I would have to ignore this connection and suspend skepticism, as though doing so is somehow in service to science.

Because this dynamic is exactly the same when it comes to race and IQ. People insist: hey, you've got to let the science be the science, you've got to look at the facts, you've got to let them make the case. And I try. I read their essays. I follow their links. I do make a good faith effort. But I do not make that effort with similar credulity or sympathy that I do when I read someone write about tweaking the Earned Income Tax credit or make an argument about alcohol licensing. Why? Because one of these arguments has been used for the perpetuation of a system of chattel slavery and racist domination. That's why. And, sure enough: whenever people pop up to tell me, "Here, check this link, read the facts," and I click and read around, and then I follow more links, inevitably, I end up at Stormfront or similar houses of explicit racism. Inevitably, the people who are arguing about inherent black and Hispanic tendency to be unintelligent are also arguing about "black aggression" or "hypersexuality" or "inherent tendency to criminality." This will apparently come as a shock to Andrew: racists love race science.

Is the correlation between belief in race science and racism 1? No. But it's a lot closer to 1 than it is to 0. Is that dispositive of the question? Of course not. If there's a racial bias towards low IQ, and if IQ is really an adequate gauge for real-world, lived intelligence, then the truth will out, just as it will if homosexuality is pathogenic. But to pretend as if people who are pushing the idea of inherent racial inferiority in IQ don't tend to be the kind of people who believe all sorts of racist things is stupid. It's moronic. It's exactly the kind of willful failure to see connections that Andrew is accusing other people of.

Take Steve Sailer. If many of the commenters who pop up here when I talk race and IQ are to be believed, Sailer is a great guy who has been wrongfully vilified by liberals. Well, setting aside the inherent moral questions of race and IQ, Sailer has also argued that Andrew's passionate style is not a part of his intellectual and moral makeup, but is a consequence of the medication Andrew is to control his HIV. Sailer has also argued that Brian Beutler was shot because he was a guilt stricken liberal who was too embarrassed to avoid the dangerous black neighborhood. (That happened in the comments at one of Matt Yglesias's blogs, and I can't find a link, so you'll have to take my word for it.) Sailer has also argued, without evidence, that Matt Yglesias's beating was a racist hate crime, black against white. This is the guy I'm suppose to see as an unfairly marginalized figure.

I am not arguing that these connections and associations prove anything. I am not arguing that we shouldn't consider these questions or these consequences. I am, however, arguing that recognizing these associations and allowing them to color how I read and interact with these arguments is not some unfortunate refusal to be appropriately scientific. It is a natural and principled way to act in a world that remains full of racism and in a country in which the cost of racial discrimination has been incalculable. What I am asking for, again, is the right to live in history. I am asking for the right to let the legacy of racism and attempts to use science as an argument for racial domination inform how I read arguments in the present. Is that really a bad thing? Is that somehow a failure of intelligence? I find it, instead, the only smart way to proceed.

When Andrew says "I don't like the policy prescriptions, but I believe in the data," he is once again acting like there is no question between the two. But it is precisely the people who want to find the ugly policy prescriptions that are most enamored of those data. We don't need to guess if Jason Richwine's opinion on the data led to policy prescriptions we find offensive! He did let his stance on the data lead to ugly policy prescriptions. Richwine wasn't criticized just because he believes that Hispanics have lower IQs. He was criticized because he believed that those lower IQs render Hispanics so undesirable that we should harshly restrict Mexican immigration into this country. That is the black letter argument in his work.

I appreciate that Andrew has, as he always does, engaged with criticism and opposing opinion on this issue. But I am frustrated by Andrew's continuing ahistorical credulity on this issue, his tendency to read the people making these arguments with the most possible charity. And he matches that with a distinct lack of charity for those resisting them, the constant invocation of liberal piety and political correctness. I would like very much for Andrew to consider whether his long history with this issue, and the attendant criticism he's received, has rendered him too ready to see those pushing the race-IQ connection as principled empiricists untouched by emotion or animus. To posit that they are sober-minded, rational minds merely pursuing the scientific truth disinterestedly while their opponents are motivated by groupthink and emotion is a pretty great way to make yourself gullible on an issue where gullibility has profoundly negative consequences.

Race is the central political question of the American experience, and racism a stain on our national character that has never wiped off, and if I and others are suspicious of arguments that elide with those of racists because of this history, then so be it. That doesn't mean I won't listen or look at the evidence. It just means that my suspicions will remain. I can live with the consequences of being too vigilant about racism far easier than I can live with the alternative.

This will have to be my last word on this, for awhile.