Thursday, December 09, 2004

“The Smartness Cult”

After encountering the post on “free ice cream,” one incensed reader wrote to tell your Curmudgeon that...no, let’s have him say it himself, with perhaps a few asterisks to smooth out the rough spots:

You ****s on the right deserve everything we’ve been saying about you. Just reading **** like your “free ice cream” post makes me want to heave. Your opinion of yourself couldn’t get any higher if you put it on the Space Shuttle.

Where the **** do you get off with that **** about writing for people with high IQs? If IQ meant anything, you wouldn’t have voted to make that smirking Jesus freak King of the World. Maybe you should stop patting yourself on the back about your high IQ and spend some time studying how the world REALLY works: connections and clout.

Your Curmudgeon has been on the receiving end of this sort of thing before. Sometimes, it’s just an expression of the “I’m as good as you” malady C. S. Lewis described in Screwtape Proposes A Toast, which is to say: it’s just verbalized envy. But at other times—when it comes from persons of detectably high intelligence themselves—it’s a bit harder to plumb.

First, let’s spend a few words on the subject of intelligence and the measurement thereof. There is some fuzz on the concept of intelligence; people do use the word in a somewhat vague fashion. The consensus among cognitive-studies scientists is that the best interpretation of the term is the ability to reason from postulates, facts, and abstractions to accurate, usable conclusions: in other words, the ability to process information at a profit. While this is obviously not the only survival skill a man might possess, it’s equally obviously a valuable trait—the more so as human society and its supporting technologies become more complex and capable of both use and misuse.

The precise and accurate measurement of intelligence, or of intellectual potential, is even more controversial. If intelligence is about handling information, then to measure it requires that we quantify the significance of demonstrated ability to process this group of facts and theories, and justify its significance relative to that group over there. We must also cope with other questions: whether speed matters; whether some mistakes are “better” than others; whether there’s an inherent cultural matrix involved in any assessment of an individual’s intelligence, or whether it’s possible to gauge it in an entirely acultural fashion.

Your Curmudgeon is not a cognitive scientist, though he’s interested in the field and has read fairly widely in it. His sense of the state of the art is that testing methods are at an all-time high for both accuracy and precision, that they cope reasonably well with the peripheral questions of speed, ambiguity, and cultural binding, and that the measurements they produce correlate better than ever before with subsequently demonstrated proficiency at tasks in the symbolic and intellectual realms.

Yet none of this, in some sense, truly matters, for the whole subject of intelligence and intellectual metrics has been ruled taboo by the opinion-mongers of our day. As evidence, regard the storm of denunciations weathered by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray over their landmark book The Bell Curve, merely for arguing that generalized intelligence is measurable and in some degree inherited.

Test it yourself. Suggest to someone—left, right, center, it doesn’t really matter—that the ever-increasing complexity of American society is part of the reason for an enduring “underclass,” because membership in the “underclass” correlates strongly with low intelligence, and watch the fireworks. Far more often than not, your conversational partner will either reprove you for your “elitist” notions about intelligence or, at minimum, take care to insert the “standard disclaimer” that “nobody really knows what intelligence is or what intelligence tests measure.”

The really strident opponents of measurable intellect will accuse you of being a member of the Smartness Cult. That is, they’ll charge you with wanting to glorify yourself on the strength of your own intelligence, with not appreciating the value of other human strengths, and with wanting to rationalize your “contempt” for those who don’t qualify for Cult membership.

Your Curmudgeon has been accused of this. It was an appalling thing to face. Were it not for his famous self-command, it would have been far more appalling for his detractor, over whose head the Angel of Death hovered, ready to descend in a trice.

Are there very intelligent people who give themselves airs for it, and look down their noses at others less generously endowed? Of course, just as is the case with some athletes, some of the artistically gifted, and some champions of the imagination. But that speaks to an independent human failing, the sin of vanity. It has no bearing on the reality or measurability of intelligence.

But more important than any metric plucked free from its context is the question at the root of all science: whether the measure of intelligence that we call IQ can be used to predict anything. The answer appears to be yes. IQ is a very reliable predictor of success in school, in the practice of the sciences, and in certain fields of commercial endeavor. IQ is also a reliable predictor of future scores on IQ tests—another way of saying that the tests themselves produce reproducible results. This appears to be the case not only for individuals, but also for well defined populations.

These are matters your Curmudgeon’s irascible reader quoted above would do well to ponder, whether he’s inclined to do so or not. For it is universally accepted that to attack an argument without studying the factual and rational bases for that argument merely marks one as not very bright.

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Poll: Will The Sun Rise In The East Tomorrow? Yes __ No __

Today at Right Wing News, John Hawkins presents a collection of pithy statements from columnist Jonah Goldberg. Your Curmudgeon enjoyed being reminded of the ones he’d already seen, and introduced to the ones he hadn’t...but the very last one gave him pause:

“This irony is completely lost in the public debate; the more strongly held your beliefs, the less seriously the media take you. What’s ironic about this is that people of strong political or ideological views tend to know what they are talking about more than people who have no strong views at all. This is a fact confirmed by common sense. You need to know about something before you can have strong feelings on it.”

That turns out not to be the case.

Your Curmudgeon has known many persons with strong feelings about their opinions, most particularly their political opinions, who were average-to-poorly informed about the subjects of those opinions. Indeed, he’d say they outnumbered the well informed holders of passionate opinions rather heavily.

There are persons with a passion for truth and justice, to be sure. But there are persons with a passion for personal gain, for personal aggrandizement, for power over others, and for numerous other things far less noble than truth or justice. To hold a political opinion and express it passionately is neither a guarantee of knowledge on the subject nor an indication of sincerity about one’s aims.

Robert M. Pirsig made an interesting related observation in his classic Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. Crowds don’t attend large, loud demonstrations in favor of provably true propositions, or to oppose provably untrue ones. The loudest, most passionate voices are usually raised over subjects where certainty is elusive, perhaps permanently. “No one goes to a public protest meeting to shout that the sun will rise in the East tomorrow.”

This phenomenon, when accepted and understood, can have a dramatic clarifying effect on political discourse.

Near the beginning of his classic play Man And Superman, George Bernard Shaw has his protagonist exclaim, “Must the Devil have all the passions as well as all the best tunes?” No, surely not, but since passion tends to operate to the exclusion of other categories of mentation, his ability to exploit them for his purposes is superior to that of mortal man. Verbum sat sapienti.

A Lawless Entity Has Been Accused Of Being…A Lawless Entity

From Wendy McElroy’s column of today:

Last week, the BBC aired a documentary entitled “Guinea Pig Kids.”

It accused New York City’s Administration for Child Services and drug companies, such as Glaxo SmithKline (GKS), of experimenting on HIV-positive foster children with untested and dangerous anti-AIDS drugs.

Two basic accusations were leveled.

First, parents or guardians who refused to consent to the trials claim that children were removed by ACS and placed in foster families or children’s homes. Then, acting over their objections, ACS authorized the drug trials.

The second accusation: the drugs administered to children as young as three-months-old did not demonstrably extend their livespan but did inflict harm and great suffering. Children who resisted were force-fed drugs through a peg-tube inserted into their stomachs.

The charges merit both skepticism and thorough investigation. But, with ACS stonewalling, facts are hard to come by.

Let’s all hope an investigation of the most thorough sort is put under way at once. But even before such an investigation commences, your Curmudgeon is receptive to the BBC’s accusation. “Child welfare” agencies, at the state, county, and city levels, have become well known for abuses at least this monstrous.

The odd, supra-Constitutional concept of “family law” continues to ride roughshod over individuals’ rights. Most Eternity Road readers will already know that, once a “child welfare” bureaucrat or field agent has fixed his eye upon you, the burden is on you to prove your innocence of his charges, howver fantastic or unsupported by objective evidence. Worse, the “child welfare” agencies have enormous financial and occupational incentives to separate children from their parents and redistribute them to others.

No doubt many persons of unchallengeable benevolence and morals go to work for the “child welfare” agencies. But there’s just as little doubt that those determined to retain their benevolence and morals are quickly out the door. That being the case, it’s hardly difficult to believe that such an agency would collaborate with a corporate giant such as Glaxo in securing experimental subjects—subjects who cannot give informed consent and who’ve been separated from their natural protectors by the power of the State—for its drug tests.

But let’s be generous. Let’s imagine that the accusations are completely unfounded, pure fantasy. Given the culture of secrecy and immunity from the law that prevails in “child welfare” agencies nationwide, how could we ever be sure?

These anti-Constitutional monstrosities, and the specially privileged “family courts” that empower and shield them, must be stripped of their privileges and broken to heel at once.

Rampant Idiocy Dept.

From the San Mateo County Times:

REDWOOD CITY—Six more witnesses testified Tuesday in the penalty phase of convicted murderer Scott Peterson’s murder trial, with many saying he would continue to make a positive impact on their lives if his life were spared.

The purpose of criminal justice, and of all its components, such as trials and sentences of punishment, is twofold:

• To protect innocent persons from predation by others;
• To deter potential lawbreakers with the specter of punishment.

A sentence of punishment ought not to consider any factor that’s irrelevant to those purposes. Surely, had he been captured alive and brought to trial, Hitler could have produced “witnesses” to avow that he’d made, and would continue to make, “a positive impact on their lives.”

Too few persons ask themselves “Why am I doing this?” Moreover, they ask it far too seldom, and about too few things.

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Those Damned Martians: Beware, The PEST!

From the Boca Raton News:

Twenty John Kerry supporters met for their first group therapy session in South Florida Thursday, screaming epithets at President Bush as they shared their emotions with licensed mental health counselors.

The first of several free noontime therapy sessions at the American Health Association in Boca Raton was designed to treat what mental health counselors have dubbed Post Election Selection Trauma (PEST).

“If I had a cardboard cutout of President Bush, and these people wanted to throw darts at it, I would let them do it,” Robert J. Gordon, AHA executive director, told the Boca News after the session. “It’s no joke. People with PEST were traumatized by the election. If you even mention religion, their
faces turn blister-red as they shout at Bush.”

Although the meeting was closed to the press, AHA therapists obtained permission from participants to provide an anonymous transcript to the Boca Raton News.

“I’m scared,” said one man. “Democracy is at stake and nobody is rising to protest this president.”

“I want to be a patriot, but it’s impossible to be a patriot in an immoral war,” said another participant, a woman. “Bush is breaking up marriages and dividing families by keeping our troops in Iraq.”

Gordon said the participants also granted reluctant permission to open up next Thursday’s meeting to the general press. Reporters will be forbidden from taking photographs or using the real names of patients.

“The media outlets, especially Rush Limbaugh and his ilk on talk radio, scare our patients to death,” said Gordon, facilitator for the meetings.

“More than anything else, people with PEST tremble physically.” Gordon said the Kerry supporters in therapy are predominantly Jewish and older than 50. Most are registered independents and all live in Palm Beach County.

“We mostly let them vent during the first session,” Gordon said. “By the third session, we’ll be doing some meditation exercises to aid some of their symptoms. We may use visualization and some techniques designed for bipolar disease and other mental disorders. That might help them adjust to reality.”

According to AHA officials, symptoms of PEST are similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. They include nightmares, sleeplessness, hostility, listlessness, and emotional outbursts including threats to leave the country.

“There’s an overall sense of emotional helplessness and abandonment,” said Sheila Cooperman, a licensed AHA psychotherapist from Delray Beach. “In psychology, we call it ‘learned helplessness.’ After you zap a caged dog twice, he stops moving because he knows there is no place to go. That’s what happened with these Kerry voters. They’ve been zapped so many times that they’re on the verge of giving up on politics.”

Cooperman, also a practicing psychic, added, “One person today said he thinks the country is now run by fascists. Another felt personally threatened by the president’s love for big business. Many believe Bush is going to draft their grandchildren. The anxiety may not affect them every day, but it affects their energy level.”

Apologies for the long excerpt, but your Curmudgeon wanted you to get the full flavor of the thing: both the violence of the affliction and the solemnity of the response to it by persons in the mental-health field. It might not be unique in the annals of electoral politics, but if not, it’s damned close. Perhaps the phenomena of liberal self-glorification and the Therapeutic Culture had to converge before it was possible.

Even with those two currents as support, your Curmudgeon finds himself at a loss for a complete explanation. Why would anyone lower himself to such complete indignity as to claim to have been traumatized by an electoral defeat? It combines a concession of ineffectuality with an admission of self-absorption: a complete lack of self-respect. It’s the equivalent of parading about in public naked except for a sandwich board that says KICK ME.

The names of these persons—and there are many of them, perhaps thousands—cannot help but become public knowledge. That means that their families, their employers, and their friends and acquaintances will soon know about this. The damage to their familial, social, and commercial relations will be incalculable. One simply cannot admit to an emotional disorder in public and escape unscathed, even in compassion-saturated Twenty-First Century America.

Having cast about at length for enlightenment on this strange, yet compellingly repulsive subject, your Curmudgeon has at last decided to pull the nukes. Yes, that’s right: he’s called on his friend the Martian. And today, for the first time, that worthy will speak to you in his own voice.

---

Greetings, Earthlings. This is Fran’s Martian buddy Marvin. No, not that Marvin. He wasn’t even convincingly drawn. Besides, we never really went for those illudium-Q space modulators: too much mess to clean up afterwards. So you can stop worrying about an invasion, for Pete’s sake. Who’d want a high-gravity planet that was three-fourths water, anyway?

Anyway, I hear you’ve got some whining going on over your recent election. The reports that have reached us on Mars have us laughing. Do your people really take this stuff that seriously? Apparently, some of you do. That just bounces off a Martian’s psyche, you know. We don’t have elections here. Hell, we don’t even have governments. We teach our young’uns that the key to social harmony is minding your own business. When one of our folks displays a desire to meddle in the affairs of others, telling them what to do and what not to do and being a real pompous ass about it, a few of his buddies take him aside and give him a talking-to. If that doesn’t straighten him out, they shoot him. Seems a lot simpler than your system.

But hey, different strokes and all that. (Why did Sly and the Family Stone stop recording, by the way? We never heard up here.) So you’ve got this government, and an electoral process to manage transitions of power, all spelled out nice and neat in a Constitution. And the results always make some folks happy and others sad. But this PEST stuff is mind-boggling! How could a sane adult stake so much of his happiness on the result of a process he can’t control?

There are two possible answers:

• He isn’t sane;
• He isn’t an adult.

The “mental-health professionals”—shrinks, right?—trying to deal with these guys are operating from the assumption that the problem is in their sphere. That is, it derives from one of the two fundamental maladies that can afflict a mature mind: the misperception of reality, or a poorly-matched reaction to it. They could be right. Some of the PEST sufferers are just misinformed, possibly willfully, about the nature of their victorious opponents and the probable consequences of the election. Some of them are probably just over-reacting, and nothing else. But I don’t think that covers all of them.

There’s another reason a man—or a Martian—can be a miserable lump and a flaming pain in the ass to his fellows: he could have a character defect. For example, he could be dishonest; he might see nothing untoward about ripping other people off for his own benefit. Or he could be irresponsible; he might shirk his freely assumed duties to himself and his family.

Or he could be a megalomaniac: a humorless, self-righteous type who knows what’s best for everyone and resents being told to buzz off.

We have them on Mars, too. I told you before what we do with them. I know, you guys prefer other methods...but that doesn’t change the nature of the problem.

Shrinks have a really hard time with character defects. Their whole line of attack on personal problems is about aligning reality, perception, and response to make them harmonious. But dishonesty, irresponsibility, and megalomania are outside the capabilities of his toolset.

So your PESTs are likely to be untreatable by those means. Which means you’re gonna have them around for a while longer. Barring the use of, ah, informal methods like the ones we use on Mars.

Anyway, you’ve got my sympathies. And if it will help, we do have a few old illudium-Qs lying around from our wilder days. Still in good operating condition, too.

Just a thought.

[FWP: What, you’ve never heard of a redneck Martian?]

Monday, December 06, 2004

Stunning Sowell Quote Of The Day

Thomas Sowell is the most valuable thinker in America, in part because he sees—and says—things such as this:

It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.

Or the morality of one’s means, or the degree of agreement between one’s predictions and the real-world consequences of one’s policies.

Bravo, Dr. Sowell. Live forever, and never stop writing!

Lies, Damned Lies, And The Old Media

The invaluable Joel Mowbray, who has made the State Department his beat these past few years, writes today on a trend in Old Media scurrility toward the departing Secretary of State, General Colin Powell:

When Secretary of State Colin Powell stepped down earlier this month, the flood of political obituaries were packed with praise, but almost all contained obligatory paragraphs highlighting the top diplomat’s “low point”: his February 2003 speech on Iraq to the United Nations.

But no matter how much conventional media wisdom says otherwise, Powell’s presentation on the eve of the Iraq War remains as true today as it was then, which is to say almost entirely so. 

To claim, as the New York Times editorialized recently, that “Mr. Powell in fact offered half-truths, poorly analyzed intelligence and outright fantasies” is pure fiction retrofitted to match anti-war rhetoric.  Most of the case the four-star general presented was based not on shaky human sources, but telephone intercepts, satellite imagery, and not unimportantly, Saddam’s own admissions and track record.

Perhaps the most flagrant revisionism, though, occurred not in the opinion pages, but in news stories from the country’s most respected source for objective news: the Associated Press.

Near the end of its original story reporting Mr. Powell’s departure, AP scribes George Gedda and Deb Riechmann wrote: “Powell will perhaps be best remembered for that U.N. Security Council appearance on Feb. 5, 2003, during which he argued that Saddam must be removed because of its possession of weapons of mass destruction.  There is no evidence that those claims had any foundation.”

This is, as Mowbray takes pains to delineate, a barefaced, unconscionable lie.

It’s well understood at this point that the Old Media have “chosen sides”; that is, that they’ve aligned themselves with the American Left and its principal political vehicle, the Democratic Party. Virtually everyone in the country knows this now. The Old Media themselves have ceased to dispute it seriously. What remains a question of import is how the Old Media expect to wield any influence over the opinions of those not already in their preferred camp after they’ve been proved to put their political alignment and its promotion ahead of respect for the truth.

Your Curmudgeon has watched this process with a sort of horrified fascination. First it was merely “spin”: tendentious choices of phrasing and emphasis in reporting that represented itself as non-partisan and objective. Then it was the deliberate re-framing of stories that bore on matters of public policy, specifically to buttress evidence that favors the liberal agenda and omit, distort, or downplay evidence that disfavors it. With this new willingness to rewrite history—literally to ignore well-recorded, easily cross-verified facts and present versions of events directly contradictory to them—we have reached the terminal stage.

This is not journalism. It’s not even respectable when presented as opinion.

Hearken to the words of the late, great Robert A. Heinlein:

A thousand truths do not mark a man as a truth-teller, but a single lie marks him as a damned liar....Lying to other people is your business, but I tell you this: once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind.

Has it ever been any other way? Ought not the barons of the Old Media, who for decades have borne the trust of the American people, to understand something this plain and simple?

If there is an explanation, it might lie in G. Harry Stine’s observation that you can get away with anything if you move swiftly to “jigger the System” so that it won’t recognize your violation. The New Media are coming to maturity, and if they get there, will counterbalance the sins of the Old Media in their partisan crusade. But for the moment, the New Media are dependent on the Old, which maintains a web of connections to news sources around the world and can still determine which of them will be heard by whom, and in what manner, and for how long.

Perhaps the Old Media’s unarticulated strategy is to press that advantage ruthlessly until it acquires the power to silence or discredit the New. Or perhaps it’s just forgotten how to tell the unvarnished truth. Your Curmudgeon reports; you decide.

McCain The Insane

The Senator from Arizona isn’t satisfied with having traduced the First Amendment:

WASHINGTON — If Major League Baseball (search) doesn’t put its house in order over illegal use of steroids (search), members of Congress will insist on stricter drug testing, Sen. John McCain warned Sunday.

“Both sides need to sit down and get together on this issue. And we need to have at least a regimen for testing that they impose in minor leagues in baseball. I’d like to see all professional sports have the same standards as the Olympics (search) have for Olympic athletes. But it’s time to change,” McCain, R-Ariz., told “FOX News Sunday.”

The steroids of which McCain speaks are still legal. That is, they can be obtained and used legally by any American, some under prescription, some over-the-counter. If Major League Baseball seeks to discourage their use, it’s a private matter, not a subject for a legislator’s fulminations.

Your Curmudgeon is no fan of these drugs. He believes them to have unfortunate side effects, not the least of which is the distortion of appearance characteristic of East German Olympic competitors in years past. But they’re still legal. The Food and Drug Administration has known about them for a long time, and has declined to act on them. That ought to have been a clue to the clueless senator that the matter was beneath federal notice.

Moreover, professional sports, despite the money and attention that flows into them, are still a diversion, a form of entertainment. The application of federal law to entertainment is a hideous betrayal of the gravity of Congress’s responsibilities. If McCain had even the slightest regard for the proper boundary between the public and the private, he would never have orated on this subject.

Extra! Extra! Apple Falls Near Tree!

We no longer have to wonder if Senate Democrats’ obstruction of President Bush’s judicial nominees will continue:

WASHINGTON — President Bush should consult with Democrats on Supreme Court nominees to ensure a smooth path to Senate confirmation, incoming Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (search) of Nevada said Sunday.

[...snip...]

Reid has written a letter to the president about the need to work together.

In it, he says Clinton heeded Hatch’s advice to “appoint the more widely respected Judges Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer rather than more ideological choices under consideration. The Senate confirmed both nominees by wide margins.”

Now let’s step back from Senator Reid’s fantasies and look at the real world for a moment:

• It’s the president’s Constitutional duty to appoint federal judges and Justices. The Senate’s role is “advice and consent.” That does not include participation in the selection process.
• Therefore, there is no “need to work together.” Indeed, the notion that the branches of the federal government should “work together” is antithetical to the Constitutional plan.. There is a need for the Senators, including its Democratic members, to do their #$%^&*! jobs as defined in the Constitution.
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are hard-core left-liberals, and have demonstrated it repeatedly in their emissions from the bench. They are most certainly not examples of ideological moderation.

Senator Reid’s note, so conveniently publicized by his office, is no olive branch. It indicates clearly that the Democratic contingent in the Senate will continue to use all its powers to prevent any strict-constructionist nominee from receiving a full floor vote. What else could Reid have meant with his nonsense about “ideological choices”? Is the conviction that the laws of the United States, including its supreme law, the Constitution, mean what they say and should be enforced as written an ideology?

Brace yourselves, friends. We’re in for a rough session. Perhaps the elections of 2006 will bring relief, but until then at least, the Democrats’ charades will continue.

Sunday, December 05, 2004

Yeah, Yeah…

...there were no posts yesterday (Saturday, December 4). If you’d had to face the tonnage of chores your Curmudgeon undertook for the satisfactory completion of his Basement Project, you wouldn’t have written anything either.

Never fear. Your Curmudgeon will now return to his regularly scheduled blather.