I've changed my mind: I want to be a racist now. I just want to get the story straight: now Blacks are inferior because they are genetically disadvantaged. I just thought it was their lousy culture, you know single moms and rap music. No, that's not it anymore. I just want to be up to date and current.

And that crack baby thing, that's it because of in-utero contact with cocaine, that's out now right?

Cool. So I'm down with the IQ gene thing. So what's with their lousy culture and why they all smoke crack? Is that because they are so dumb or did they stop smoking crack and get married but they're still stupid? I just want to know so I have it straight, because it seems to change every couple of years.

Well, one thing stays the same: it's always the Blacks on the bottom. For awhile there I was getting ready to hate Arabs just because of 9/11, but since they haven't done that again, I guess their off the hook and the Blacks are back.

One thing though: I also hate Jews. Can someone fill me in on how that fits in these days? I know they're smart now but maybe they have a greedy gene or something? Did they smoke something else, like free base or something?

Thanks for your help. I have trouble keeping up with all the changes!

Between 9/11 and illegal immigration, it was looking good for Blacks for awhile there.

Maybe if Latinos get together and plot some sort of terrorist attack, Blacks could move out of the "most likely to be denigrated" category once and for all.

Paging Hugo Chavez . . .

Dear willep,

Re: One thing though: I also hate Jews.

Thank you for sharing. Since I am a Jew, now the air is cleared and we can talk.

I don't know enough about you to hate you. Sorry. Your angst is justified. We want everyone to have beautiful lives. But that's not what happens.

There are no inferior people--there are people who have different strength. And instead of fitting round pegs into a square holes, we should focus on matching the shapes of pegs and holes.

As far as being a racist now--maybe it's too late to change. Just be yourself and volunteer your time and money for private causes.

Satire escapes the feeble mind

Satire? Oh wait, that means I was wrong. I see, I think, can't hate both Jew and Arabs and Blacks. It's like, pick one group, dude, is that it? Both of three things doesn't work either. Okay, I've decided: I hate Blacks because their dumb for now until we change it back to Arabs. Wait -- I got it -- how about dumb Jews, can I throw that in as like a hobby? Like the satire one, can I do him up? Or did I shoot my wad with the Blacks? Just checking.

Thanks for posting this, by the way.

First, if I were a dedicated racist, and wanted to influence social policy, I would be doing precisely what Rushton and Jared Taylor are doing right now. One of the problems with a discussion of this sort is related to the manner in which the problem is framed. Another has to do with the manner in which attitudes are changed in the aggregate. Though we typically portray attitudes on an issue such as racial equality as a unidimensional scale (probably a normal, or bimodal, distribution on a single dimension), in reality it is a multidimensional construct, and related to more molecular factors such as xenophobia, rapidity of cognitive closure (think of this as rapidity with which one rushes to a judgment), prior exposure to (or lack of) inoculating information or experience, etc.

The relevance of the pioneer fund is that they are providing monetary support to research projects who conform to their desired framing of the issue. By framing the issue as one of innate, quantitative group differences, they encourage people to "fill in the blanks" left by the unacknowledged ambiguity of their data with spackle of a particular sort - that associated with "race" and hierarchy. Then they extend the frame to issues related to character, but it is all built on a foundation of sand.

One of the things they are attempting to do is insert perception of threat, or competition. What this encourages is a regression down the calculus upon which people make moral or ethical decisions. It is consistent with a more general attempt made by conservatives in this country to instill the perception of scarcity and environmental threat. When one examines the success of irrational arguments in the public domain over the course of this presidency, perhaps you can begin to grasp the nefarious effectiveness of such a strategy.

In the end, the racists would like this to become an issue of tribes. It is not an issue of tribes - we are all one tribe. And anyone attempting to tell you otherwise has their eye on someone else's resources, and is attempting to elicit your collusion in obtaining it.

Look around you - we live in a time of unparalleled prosperity. What is this all about?

Nothing good.

I'd like to invite you to learn something from your self-observation - something about the relationship between the framing of a problem, and your subsequent analysis of the relevant considerations. Read the Lakoff link. Then do a little reading about (or thinking about, if you know this stuff) cognitive dissonance and heuristic biases.

That should be more than enough to inoculate you against the type of racism being pandered by those researchers, by racists on this board, and less directly, by William Saletan - just one more educated person who should know better, but chooses, for whatever reason, not to.

Wow! that was really convincing. You, like, put all this in context and shit. Cool, man. Only, I still want to be on the right page: Blacks are just dumb, born that way, nothing they can do about it, right? Because crack baby or single mothers and rap music, they could fix that. But if they just dumb, that's it for them. No wonder they lazy too. Why go to work if you can't understand what you're supposed to do? Hey, wait, that's kind of smart. Oh shit. How come some of these right wing think tanks don't look for a lazy gene? I think they have a lazy gene too. Crack, lazy, dumb. How come so many are doing alright then? Lucky? I think we should go back to lazy for now and leave stupid for later.

Framing is huge. It dictates the activation of related concepts, and has a profound impact on your thinking. One of the things that differentiates intelligent people from not-so-intelligent people is the breadth of conceptual activation. What the current racist racialist proponents of this research would like to do is selective reinforce certain conceptual channels.

From a cognitive perspective, this process is related to the manner in which someone deals with ambiguity or ambivalence. It is difficult to argue that the data is ambiguous (though it is), because people who are either disposed to concrete thinking, or those for whom certain channels have already been dug deep, are predisposed to dismiss this argument outright.

Unfortunately, that's a hellacious lot of people - a hellacious lot of people who have already arrived at their conclusions, and are relatively immune to even persuasive arguments to the contrary.

[And for the umpteenth time, thanks loads, Will]

I wonder if satire is tested for in IQ tests? Women and minorities are satire rich they'd go off scale.

Then again they ignore satire because it is a powerful weapon against the untruthful amongst us.