Right. And that was a mistake and retracted. And there are 100 studies that say vaccines don’t cause autism.
But these race IQ studies are just pure pay to play and they’re sneaking into the conversation - at least in scary corners of the web.
I’m not saying it didn’t do massive damage. I’m just making a point about these race IQ things which are a whole different animal.
It’s an exhibition fight not the real thing.
It’ll be a joke like when Ali “fought” Michael Dokes.
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I wouldn’t say it’s contained to the scary corners of the web. This is the culmination of a program started by the Kochs/Federalists decades ago. They’ve funded think tanks and non-profits that specialize in pushing the Koch agenda disguised as impartial research. They donate millions to “liberal” universities to start an ecology/environmental department, then push to have their coal and gas buddies head the department, or have their think tank provide “guidance” for the curriculum. They pay for a young ideologue to get a PhD, then that person gets quoted in all the Federalist-funded white papers, showing that fracking is actually great for the environment!!1! It’s insidious, well organized, and very well funded. (I’m not saying the Kochs specifically are funding fake race science, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they were. If nothing else, they’ve created the blueprint for every kind of RWNJ to gain bullshit credentials for their ideas.)
Jane Mayer writes about it some in Dark Money.
Yeah I have a theory all those Hayek-loving ACists coming out of college 15 years ago (and maybe still are - I’m just thinking about when they ruled the politics forum) are the direct result of Koch money.
Listen just to the part immediately after it’s queued up.
Man. Don’t even need to listen to the second one, and I’m not very good at spotting that sort of thing.
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I was just listening to Cat Stevens songs. Apparently I wasn’t the first to notice. From wikipedia:
Yusuf/Cat made a reference to this at a concert on his 2016 tour while playing ‘Matthew and Son’, inserting the lyrics 'I think it’s kind of funny, I think it’s kind of strange, yes I think it’s kind of funny, that this sounds the same!‘.[4]
SHATS
I don’t think the Koch’s are funding the race stuff, but people in the Koch network definitely are. The best way to understand race science is through its history. The 19th and early 20th century were full of the stuff. Jews and Indians were among the dumbest races then, now they aren’t. There’s also, of course, phrenology and the science of identifying criminals by facial structure, etc. The classic on the general subject is Stephen Gould’s Mismeasure of Man, but there’s plenty of other good stuff as well, such as Fancher’s Intelligence Men.
Race science absolutely informs the “deep story” of conservatives around the world, and very much in Europe as well as the US, but people mostly ignore it because it’s not worth their time. However, the biology makes no sense and there are plenty of academic critics who address the BS “science”. Some of the shit gets through the filter into legitimate journals on occasion, which generally results in a blowup, but my sense is that most of the interest is among non-academics in “closed” communities that mainly just talk to one another.
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Well, not exactly, but the Koch’s have tried. Here’s an essay from an academic who was formerly a recipient of Koch largess. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/leaving-conservatism-behind-blue-collar-republican-progressive
He hosts a good podcast (Know Your Enemy) and he discusses his experience and the broader context. https://know-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/behind-enemy-lines-Dbw2sW3Y
Right wingers have put a fair amount of money in academia, but it’s largely been wasted. For various reasons, particularly that it deals with ideas and arguments about what is true, academia is a very hard nut for them to crack. It is not at all easy to find decent conservatives that can cut it, which is why conservatives intellectuals are often along the lines of, well, “he graduated from Dartmouth”. I don’t envy the Federalist Society having to recruit young conservative legal minds. They are generally middling “good” students who got a few legs up. The Ivy league fosters such people more than other universities, because it has a stronger (but now fading) tradition of placing significant weight on social ties and connections.
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Elie Mystal @ElieNYC, who went to Harvard law, recently noted, absolutely correctly, that if he had shown any inclination toward conservatism he would have been groomed and fostered during his whole career for a future judgeship or other high position.
A couple of words from the right professor in the conservative pipeline is generally plenty sufficient for a federal clerkship with a conservative judge assuming somewhat above average grades.
Interesting find, but if you’re going to throw shade it needs to be at Roland Orzabal. The Jules version is a cover (and yes, it’s much better than the original).
This is the episode I was looking for. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-8-kochd-out
With the help of Jane Mayer’s essential 2016 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right , your hosts explore the world of right-wing philanthropy and the institutions—from centers at universities to think tanks in Washington, DC—it has funded. What emerges is a startling history of how a small group of incredibly rich families used novel techniques to shelter their wealth from taxation and fund a right-wing takeover of American politics.
Lenny may be the least talented dog of all time.
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We saw a mama raccoon teaching a baby how to dig through stuff in our backyard one night. They live under our cast-iron tub. My wife is not a fan of them scratching around while she’s taking a bath.
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At one point we had a lot of outside cats (we adopted a litter that was abandoned) and left cat food outside and would have raccoons visit every night to eat whatever cat food was leftover. We saw family of raccoons grow up. We could feed them by hand. If you held out a piece of cat food they would grab it with their hand/paw.
Thread is great but I think it gets misinterpreted. The implied takeaway is that YTF was simply uneducated about food and metabolism. That was only true to some degree and it’s the same narrative pushed by OOT incels in basically every thread. The same people that couldn’t handle AOC in a contest. So while the psychology of his eating behavior was fascinating, it’s really only part of the story. It wasn’t like once he figured it out he was on the fast path to a Fitness magazine cover. Dude had to battle it every day and wound up losing in the end. The other problem is that the result of the thread is too broadly applied: not everyone has the same problem as YTF.