Except maybe the French

Watson has given an apology for his remarks about blacks:

Nobel laureate biologist Jim Watson apologized "unreservedly" Thursday for stating that black people were not as intelligent as whites, saying he was "mortified" by the comments attributed to him.

"I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said," Watson said during an appearance at the Royal Society in London.

"I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways that they have."

"To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief," he said.

Well, actually, that sounds like a non-pology more than an apology. Consider that earlier he said that we assume "that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really." So first he says that "all the testing" tells us that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites; and now he's "apologizing" by saying that there's no scientific basis to believe that they're genetically inferior. But there's no scientific basis for quantifying one's genes, so of course there's no scientific basis for saying that one person, or group of people, are "genetically inferior" to another.
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Although "Franken/Stein" is a stitch

Well, good for Franken:

Liberal Al Franken is good enough and smart enough to win some of conservative Ben Stein's money — and doggone it, Stein likes him.

Stein, an actor, writer and economist, has contributed $2,000 to Franken's Minnesota Senate campaign. The two men have known each other for about 30 years.

"I'm struck by what an incredibly capable, hard-working guy he is," Stein told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Thursday. "He's a very smart liberal, he's a thoroughgoing patriot, and I would feel better with him in the Senate."

While I'm glad that he's helping out Al Franken, Stein is still an idiot.
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Today's zombie racist

John Derbyshire:

Incidentally, while hobnobbing with those Midwesterners at Storm Lake, Iowa -- their surnames mostly taken from the Stockholm, Oslo, and Berlin phone books -- I heard a couple of times the remark that in this little corner of rural Iowa, the student body in the schools is half Hispanic.

...

Say what you like, that is truly an invasion. Why on earth are we letting this happen?

And later, in response to someone saying that this demographic may be the result of legal immigration, he wrote "Legal or illegal, this is asking for trouble."

But hey, at least Derbyshire is in good company.
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Elementary Watson

One thing that I have learned over time is that smart people can believe very dumb things, and it does not make them any less smart.

Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and Father of American Psychiatry, believed that blackness was a form of leprosy.

Louis Agassiz, a Harvard scientist and well-renowned biologist, believed that interracial relationships were completely loveless.

Our American presidents... well, let's just say they had some interesting beliefs themselves.

And otherwise intelligent people the world over can convince themselves that the existence an invisible wish-granting fairy in the sky is an eminently reasonable position.

Thus I'm going to have to disagree with Greg Laden; I do not think that James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the shape of DNA, is a moron. Flat wrong, almost certainly, but not necessarily a moron.

"What brought that up?" some of you may be wondering. Well, some racist sentiments of Watson's were published in the Independent the other day:

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

...Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

What "tests" he means are unknown, especially since tests for the past several decades have shown exactly the opposite--once you eliminate other factors such as diet, socioeconomic status, and other things, the "intelligence gap" between the races shrinks. Furthermore, the existence of racism and discrimination against one group at all tends to worsen a person's performance, as Jane Elliott has demonstrated. And the idea that blacks are less intelligent itself has been shown to hinder their performance on intelligence tests. Joe Feagin writes in Racist America (pp. 192-93):

Recent sociopsychological research has examined the impact of racist stereotypes on the performance of students. In pioneering studies by Claude Steele and his associates, black and white students were given skill tests similar to the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). When this examination was presented to black students as a test of their "intellectual ability," they did less well on the tests than white students of comparative ability. However, when the test was presented to the black students without the suggestion that it was a type of intelligence testing, they performed at a level similar to that of the white students.

And really, what are we to think when the only concrete piece of "evidence" Watson provides (at least so far) is the anecdotal evidence of people who work with black employees? Sure, those people may not think that blacks are very smart; that doesn't make it true. There are any number of reasons why the people questioned might say that--not least of which is the racist belief that blacks are dumb, and evidence be damned.

And of course Watson tries to make his position (as do trolls Caledonian and Francis Crunk in the comments at Pharyngula) sound plausible by suggesting that different races could have taken different evolutionary paths and there's no reason to believe that they all evolved the same way. Which in itself might be reasonable; there are differences between the races. But why should their brains have varied? Unless Watson believes like Edward Eggleston, that Africa was so verdant that one didn't need to think to survive? After all, it's not like there's any hardship in Africa, no sir.

And besides, it's hard to take Watson seriously when his supposedly scientific, neutral hypotheses line match up so exactly with the racist sentiments spewed by Americans for hundreds of years:

He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos... .

As Azkyroth at Pharyngula commented,

...we argue against the claim that human variation takes the form of nice neat little bundles of traits that are distributed in a fashion more or less corresponding to societal definitions of race, and whose contents more or less correspond to Western racial prejudices particularly as regards intelligence and temperament... .

Thanks to PZ for alerting me to this.

[Edit] And Greg Laden now has a bit more, shredding some of the "science" by others that also purportedly "proves" blacks have a lower I.Q.
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We're so great at winning hearts and minds

What have we been saying for years? Invading their countries and blowing the shit out of them just makes them hate us:

At a Baghdad jail for prisoners who have attacked U.S. forces, everyone — to a man — says it was the U.S. occupation of Iraq that drove them to violence. And they are not alone. Across the Middle East and South Asia, the same story can be heard in Internet cafes, mosques, safe houses and prisons.

"The U.S. says this war is part of the global war on terrorism," Saedi Farhan, an Iraqi engineer who took part in an attack on U.S. forces, said in a weekend interview with NBC News. "But people here say that the war has increased fanaticism and brought terrorism to Iraq."

Interviews with Farhan and other radicals reveal that many young men were torn when it came time to choose sides. Even though they fight alongside al-Qaida, they insist that — contrary to what U.S. officials say — they do not support al-Qaida. Many, in fact, say they hate al-Qaida.

But they hate the United States more.

"An aggressor occupied my country, destroyed it and made millions [of] refugees. It is an honor to fight this," said Hamid Ali, the owner of a construction company who also admitted attacking U.S. troops.

At a government rehabilitation center in Saudi Arabia, many radicals say they now reject the al-Qaida philosophy. But at the same time, they admit that the U.S. occupation of Iraq drove many of them to join the movement and that it still drives their hatred of America. Some, in fact, were arrested for trafficking in Internet videos about Iraq designed specifically to motivate and recruit for al-Qaida.

Which is simply common sense to anyone who has the ability to realize that not everyone sees Americans as heaven-sent paragons of virtue. In fact, it's pretty much the right-wing whackos of our own country who think that, and they can't fathom that anyone else doesn't. It's truly mind-boggling.

And speaking of mind-boggling, let's check out the administration's response:

President Bush's homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, remains unconvinced. The picture is a distortion, she suggests, maintaining that the war is simply a convenient rallying cry for jihadists sworn to destroying the West.

If it were not al-Qaida, it would be "something else," Townsend said, citing a steady stream of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests before the invasion of Iraq.

Which, of course, completely sidesteps the established fact that all of the people who have attacked U.S. forces in Iraq by their own admission aren't "jihadists sworn to destroying the West", and attacked our forces because we invaded their country. It is true that there are people out there who even before the Iraq war wanted to hurt us, but does Townsend think that we only started pissing off the rest of the world in March 2003? The Iraq war is only the latest addition to a long list of grievances they have against the United States.
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Prostitutes aren't people, after all.

Well, this is despicable:

[Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Teresa Carr Deni] dropped all the sexual assault and assault charges against Dominique Gindraw, even though he stood accused of forcing a prostitute to have sex with him and three other men.

At gunpoint.

But Deni didn't let Gindraw entirely off the hook. Because he didn't pay her what he'd agreed to pay her for sex, and since she was in the business of providing sex for money, Deni let stand a charge of theft of services.

Deni told me she based her decision on the fact that the prostitute consented to have sex with the defendant.

"She consented and she didn't get paid . . . I thought it was a robbery."

The prostitute, a 20-year-old single mother, agreed to $150 for an hour of oral and vaginal sex on Sept. 20, according to assistant district attorney Rich DeSipio. The arrangements were made through her posting on Craigslist.

She met the defendant, Dominique Gindraw, 19, at what she thought was his house, but which turned out to be an abandoned property in North Philadelphia.

He asked if she'd have sex with his friend, too, and she agreed for another $100.

The friend showed up without money, the gun was pulled and more men arrived.

Got that? Because she agreed to have sex with Gindraw and his friend for a set price, and because that price wasn't paid and Gindraw drew a gun and forced the complainant to have sex with not only him and his friend, but also with two other guys, that's not rape, that's robbery. Because it's the same as stealing your neighbor's cable.

This alone isn't enough to get a sense of the enormity of this judge's scorn for the victim--Deni also declared that this case "minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped." Truly horrific.

[Edit] A small update here.
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Although it's understandable that you can't understand atheists, what with all the foam frothing out of our mouths

Sometimes, anger is the only rational response.
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Soon as it's done once, suddenly it's everywhere

I wasn't aware of this:

Remember how white students at Jena High placed nooses in a tree last year to communicate antipathy toward their African-American classmates? Now it's happening all over.

A noose is left for a black workman at a construction site in the Chicago area. In Queens, a woman brandishes a noose to threaten her black neighbors. A noose is left on the door of a black professor at Columbia University. And that's just last week. Go back a little further and you have similar incidents at the University of Maryland in College Park, at a police department on Long Island, on a Coast Guard cutter, in a bus maintenance garage in Pittsburgh.

Mark Potok, the director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center told USA Today, "For a dozen incidents to come to the public's attention is a lot. I don't generally see noose incidents in a typical month. We might hear about a handful in a year."

Huh. That's pretty horrible.
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"Yes, it's the Apocalypse all right. I always thought I'd have a hand in it."

Or so says Glenn Beck.

BECK: Let me ask you one of the most -- you were on, I don't know, four or five days ago on the show for a quick segment, and you had mentioned that America's not in the Bible in the End Days.

HAGEE: Yes.

BECK: It doesn't play a significant role. E-mail went crazy on this. Why is America not in the Bible? Then it can't be the End Times. How could we possibly not play a role in the End Days?

A fair question, really. I certainly can't foresee the world coming to an end without America doing its share.

Via Atrios via LG&M.
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"This issue should be left to the branch of government least likely to let it go through!"

After all the right-wing talking points about how gay marriage should be left to the legislature and not decided by "judicial activists" (read: judges whose rulings we don't like), I'm amused by Schwarzenegger's take. Well, amused and infuriated. California's legislature passed a bill that would legalize gay marriage, so naturally he'd be all over that, wouldn't he?

Well, yeah. But not in the right way:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed another gay marriage bill Friday, saying voters and the state Supreme Court, not lawmakers, should decide the issue.

'Cause Republicans have always placed their trust in the impartial courts to decide on gay marriage, right?

Schwarzenegger said in his veto message that Californians "should not be discriminated against based upon their sexual orientation." He said he supports state laws that give domestic partners many of the rights and responsibilities of marriage.

Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, a gay rights group, said the veto was "hypocrisy at its worst."

"We find it shocking for the governor to say he opposes discrimination based on sexual orientation and then veto a bill that would have ended discrimination based on sexual orientation," Kors said.

What he said.
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