“Scientific racism” is a slur in the academy, roughly analogous to calling something “psuedoscientific” in the mainstream scientific community. Largely because there are observed differences in the results of IQ tests of different races, it is politically correct in many academic circles to refer to general intelligence under the euphemism “whatever it is that IQ tests measure.”

And, in fact, it’s solid science that performance on such tests is strongly influenced by individuals’ own perceptions of their ability. Blacks taking a test that is presented as a “laboratory exercise” outperform those taking the same test presented as an exam. In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely relates an even more intriguing experimental result. Researchers seeking to understand the effect that stereotypes have on math test performance decided to see if they could study the interaction between two conflicting stereotypes: that Asians are good at math; and that women are bad at it. They tested a large sample of Asian women, subconsciously priming a third of them to think about their womanhood (by asking questions about child birth, motherhood, etc.), another third to think about their Asian-ness (by asking questions about the language spoken at home, immigration, etc.), and leaving a final third as a control group. Perhaps not surprisingly, they found that each test group lived up to the stereotype they were primed to think about — the Asian group did better, and the woman group worse, than the control group.

As a society, we find the very idea of cognitive differences between races so vile and reprehensible that anyone making such claims does so at the risk of their academic and scientific career. The Bell Curve, a book on intelligence distribution that includes a chapter on the black-white achievement gap and suggests it cannot be explained by social factors alone, has received more refutation (and its authors, more ostracism) than any other modern, mainstream scientific text.

I’m currently reading How the Mind Works, an aptly named treatise about how evolution designed the human brain to fill the “cognitive niche” that no other species does. The author, Steven Pinker, understands that any discussion about innate human behavior, no matter how polite, raises the hackles on many of his more critical readers, and so he spends the first couple chapters of his book hammering home the point that we, as a society, need to separate the concept of what is right from what is true. He warns about the dangers of the twin logical fallacies applied to this area of research: the naturalistic fallacy (because something is natural, it must be good); and its opposite, the moralistic fallacy (because something is good, it must be natural). He notes that in the 1980s UNESCO proactively refuted any scientific study that claimed humans have an innate, evolved tendency towards violence and war, asserting that it is “scientifically inaccurate” to make such claims.

But with the genetic revolution, any ethnic differences that do exist are inevitably going to come to the forefront. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia is concerned about our ability to keep this discussion civil:

The most offensive idea in all of science for the last 40 years is the possibility that behavioral differences between racial and ethnic groups have some genetic basis. Knowing nothing but the long-term offensiveness of this idea, a betting person would have to predict that as we decode the genomes of people around the world, we’re going to find deeper differences than most scientists now expect. Expectations, after all, are not based purely on current evidence; they are biased, even if only slightly, by the gut feelings of the researchers, and those gut feelings include disgust toward racism…

The protective “wall” is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a “game changing” scientific event…

I believe that the “Bell Curve” wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this “war” will break out between 2012 and 2017.

It’s getting harder every year to profess the standard social science model of the “blank slate” embraced by Piaget and Freud (and many others). The more we learn about genetics and the brain, the more we learn that major aspects of our personalities and minds are determined at birth or earlier. For example, recent research suggests that executive function — one’s ability to control one’s thoughts and behavior — is almost entirely heritable. As time passes, the number of cognitive and behavioral traits in the “almost entirely heritable” list is guaranteed to grow, seriously challenging long-cherished beliefs about justice, merit, and agency.

Since this result is inevitable, it’s imperative that we begin, as Pinker suggests, to separate our moral disgust from our notion of scientific truth. It’s certainly proper to be passionately skeptical about results indicating inborn differences between groups of humans; but it’s not proper to rule out, a priori, the possibility that such differences could exist, as is the current fashion in the academy.

Yeah! We’re against the expansion of the federal government and fiscal irresponsibility! Seriously, we didn’t even notice that the president was of the negro persuasion until someone pointed it out to us, and then we were all “whaaa?” We’d be saying the same things about a white president — that’s why we were so overwhelmingly opposed to the Bush tax cuts and deficit spending, and the creation of the DHS, the single largest expansion of the federal government in a generation.

We wanted to show up to protest the Bush administration, too… well, about that. Jim’s grandma got real sick, and Lou there was busy with overtime at the slaughterhouse. Also, we couldn’t find any black markers or paint stirrers to make our signs. By a total coincidence, when Obama was elected we overcame these obstacles just in time to warn America about how the gubmint takeover of health care was gonna death-panel Jim’s grandma after putting her Medicare in the hands of some Washington bureaucrat.

You see, this movement is all about freedom, not racism! That’s why when Arizona passed a law to allow police officers to demand that anyone they suspected of being an illegal immigrant show their papers or face indefinite detention, we showed up in mass to protest this Nazi-like intrusion into American liberty. Actually hold on… in this case, we’re sure those government officials will not abuse their powers (we trust them), so we showed up to protest the overwhelming protests of the new law. You see, this law keeps America America-er. Any real American has nothing to fear. There’s no way that brown-skinned people are going to be targeted by this law; if they’re here legally, they’re one of us.

Approximately 45% of Whites either strongly or somewhat approve of the [Tea Party] movement. Of those, only 35% believe Blacks to be hardworking, only 45 % believe Blacks are intelligent, and only 41% think that Blacks are trustworthy. Perceptions of Latinos aren’t much different. While 54% of White Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be hardworking, only 44% think them intelligent, and even fewer, 42% of Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be trustworthy.

Ok, yeah, if you’re talking about all black, and all latinos, sure. But the ones we know personally are great, and those other ones could be great too, if only they just applied themselves and quit looking to the gubmint for a handout.

Our movement welcomes all people of color! There’s no reason to imagine things would be any different if we were all negroes ourselves.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Hey, who are you going to believe, us, or the Jew-run liberal media? Now for the last time, quit calling us racists!

I don’t know if calling a Constitutional Convention is a realistic goal, but I agree with Lessig that’s it’s probably our best shot of fixing the system.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Some choice excerpts from the transcript:

On the economics of the drug war:

The fact that these really are the excess people in America, we– our economy doesn’t need them. We don’t need ten or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones that are undereducated, that have been ill served by the inner city school system, that have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy. We pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we’re actually including them in the American ideal, but we’re not. And they’re not foolish. They get it.

On institutional progress:

You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they’re solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn’t represent anything, once they got done with them.

On why America doesn’t have the stomach to end the war on drugs:

Again, we would have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. And we don’t, as we said before, economically, we don’t need those people. The American economy doesn’t need them. So, as long as they stay in their ghettos, and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. I don’t think– since we basically have become a market-based culture and it’s what we know, and it’s what’s led us to this sad denouement, I think we’re going to follow market-based logic, right to the bitter end.

On the solution we absolutely won’t stomach:

Oh, I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it, as fast as I could, into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the equivalent of the urban CCC, if it was New Deal-type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome, where we’re basically treating our underclass. The drug war’s war on the underclass now. That’s all it is. It has no other meaning.

On the myth that the internet killed newspapers:

And all of a sudden, terra firma shifted, new technology. Who knew that the Internet was going to overwhelm us? I would buy that if I wasn’t in journalism for the years that immediately preceded the Internet because I took the third buyout from the “Baltimore Sun.” I was about reporter number 80 or 90 who left, in 1995. Long before the Internet had had its impact. I left at a time– those buyouts happened when the “Baltimore Sun” was earning 37 percent profits.

You know, we now know this because it’s in bankruptcy and the books are open. 37 percent profits. All that R&D money that was supposed to go in to make newspapers more essential, more viable, more able to explain the complexities of the world. It went to shareholders in the Tribune Company. Or the L.A. Times Mirror Company before that. And ultimately, when the Internet did hit, they had an inferior product– that was not essential enough that they could charge online for it.

I mean, the guys who are running newspapers, over the last 20 or 30 years, have to be singular in the manner in which they destroyed their own industry. It– it’s even more profound than Detroit making Chevy Vegas and Pacers and Gremlins and believing that no self-respecting American would buy a Japanese car in 1973. That– it’s analogous up to a point, except it’s not analogous in that a Nissan is a pretty good car, and a Toyota is a pretty good car. The Internet, while it’s great for commentary and froth doesn’t do very much first generation reporting at all. And it can’t sustain that. The economic model can’t sustain that kind of reporting. And to lose to that, because you didn’t– they had contempt for their own product, these people.

On the future of the American empire:

We’re not going to make it as a first rate empire. And I’m not sure that that’s a bad thing in the end. I mean, you know, empires end. And that doesn’t mean cultures end completely and it doesn’t mean that even nation states… You know, I mean, if you looked at Britain in 1952 and what was being presided over by Anthony Eden and those guys. You’d have said, “Man, you know, what’s going to be left?” But, you know, Britain’s still there. And they’ve come to terms with what they can and can’t do.

Americans are still sort of in an age of delusion, I think. And a lot of our foreign policy represents that. And a lot of our– you know, this notion that the markets were always going to go up. And that once we had invested stocks to death, we could create some new equity, out of magic. Out of nothing.

His [Obama's] economic team of free market billionaires and financial hotwires includes most of those who helped Bill Clinton sell the theory that Americans didn’t need jobs. Actual labor, if you will remember, was for Asian sweatshops and Latin maquiladoras. We, as a nation one third of whose population is functionally illiterate, were going to transmute ourselves into an information and transactional economy. Ain’t gonna sweat no mo’ no mo’ — just drink wine and sing about Jesus all day.

… the current regime’s definition of a recovery is more of the same as ever. A return of the mortgage market and credit to its former level — the level that blew us out of the water in the first place. Ah, but we’re gonna manage it better this time. There is no one-trick pony on earth equal to capitalism.

Somewhere in the smoking wreckage lie the solutions. The solutions we aren’t allowed to discuss: adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax; repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate personhood; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the military budget; full single payer health care insurance, not some “public option” that is neither fish nor fowl; taxation instead of credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory U.S. policy in the Middle East (as in, get the hell out, begin kicking the oil addiction and quit backing the spoiled murderous brat that is Israel.

Sure, it’s just a progressive’s laundry list of woes that no electable representative would ever endorse (Kucinich and Paul notwithstanding). But damned if it didn’t entice me to buy his book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. Judging from the reviews, it might just be more preaching to the choir, but we’ll see if I agree.

The idea that our economy of the last 30 years was a massive credit scam is being articulated in a growing number of places, notably James Howard Kunstler’s Long Emergency. Kunstler makes the argument that the housing boom was the only thing keeping our economy afloat as the manufacturing base moved to China and India; now it’s gone forever and those jobs aren’t coming back.

Of course, it’s easy to blame the shadowy “elite,” that one percent of the population we imagine has its foot on our throat. Don’t get me wrong — the foot and our supine posture are in no way strictly metaphorical. But they had help.

If you need me, I’ll be busy converting my wealth to beans, bullets, and bibles.

I’m not saying there isn’t reasoned conservative debate to be had on the issues of health care, runaway spending, size of government, etc. It just doesn’t seem to be out in force.

Six weeks ago, I wasn’t ready to write off the entire right wing as racists. It saddens me to say it, but today I’m forced to accept that the country these people want back is the one where a black man isn’t president. The fact that most people in the tea bagger movement, a movement most strongly characterized by inchoate, undirected rage rather than any specific doctrine, don’t even believe this of themselves is a large part of what makes it so insidious, so hard to combat directly, and so sad.

This is what tricks the unreflecting mad Libs: they don’t understand that Conservative principles are just that — principles. Principles are like natural laws: they don’t change with time. Yes, indeed, all kinds of changes spin and weave all around them. But Liberal are always looking for a new system. Well, all systems break down sooner or later. But principles never break down. They always work in any context to which they are relevant. Again, these are like natural laws. They are even like immutable spiritual laws.

I agree wholeheartedly. This inability to think in terms of values, rather than effects, is the biggest reason the right remains so inscrutable to the left. It’s why every democratic presidential candidate since Reagan has had such a hard time: the left’s inability to weave a compelling, coherent moral narrative. I often hear statements from friends on the left such as, “Don’t like abortion? Don’t get one!” I’m tired of translating this for them into what the right hears: “Don’t like murder? Don’t kill anyone!”

You see, Liberals hate that. They have no core, no center — and so, as another great poet said, “Things fall apart, The center cannot hold.” Liberals pervert the concept of being unlimited, as they pervert every concept they come across. That which is ageless and timeless means nothing to their limited minds. If it’s not new and always morphing into the next new thing, it’s no good for them.

This is obviously a false charge — the left has many guiding principles, such as civil liberties, social justice, and economic equity. Maybe it’s the fact that so few of these principles have ever been attempted in this country that leads the right to believe they aren’t held. In fact, the moralities that drive liberal and conservative values have much more in common than you might think.

So to return to conservative principles: just what are they? The site enumerates the usual hard line about immigration, Judeo-Christian tradition, military spending, and opposition to gay marriage that doesn’t even bear mentioning. Here are the principles I found interesting (emphasis theirs):

Private industry understands how and why do to (sic) things in a superior and more cost-effective way than anything the government can do, with the exception of military and law enforcement protection, emergency protection (such as local fire departments), and handling foreign affairs including immigration regulations. Therefore, private industry and private initiative must be allowed to run all affairs in this nation, including education and health care, with the exception of those few things enumerated here.

The federal government as it currently is, is a bloated joke. Conservatives must immediately begin screaming for it to be shrunk by not less than 75%.

The welfare state is to be abolished. People who are down on their luck can look to charities.

Keep in mind the sentences in bold above are not to be considered policy summaries, fed by reasoned analysis of the facts on the ground. They are, themselves, axioms in this worldview. By the site’s own assertion, these beliefs about what government is and what it can do are natural laws. They’re as unassailable as a triangle’s three-sidedness.

Is it any wonder that these people show up to town halls to shout down congressmen, rather than to engage in sober debate? There can be no debate on government-run health care. It’s not listed as one of the exceptions to the private-industry-knows-best axiom, and so it is simply inconceivable — literally, unthinkable — that it could be more effective, more equitable, more beneficial to society than private insurance. It doesn’t matter that Medicare has 3% administrative overhead, compared to 17% for private insurance. It doesn’t matter that insurance companies are obligated by law to maximize shareholder returns, which means denying care whenever possible. It doesn’t matter that “death panels” and forced euthanasia and rationed care are entirely fictional. Pointing out these objective facts to someone on the right won’t change their mind. At best, they’ll think you have been lied to. At worst, they’ll consider you part of the liberal conspiracy.

When you understand that these complex statements of policies are axiomatic to the right, it becomes easier to understand the man who yelled at his congressman during a town hall meeting to “Keep your government hands off my medicare.” It makes it easier to understand why scientists are seldom Republicans.

Only 12 percent of scientists in a poll issued last month by the Pew Research Center say they are Republican or lean toward the GOP, while fully 81 percent of scientists say they are Democrats or lean Democratic.

It’s not that scientists are smart and Republicans are dumb. It’s that, to practice science, you have allow the possibility of being wrong. You have to allow evidence to change your mind. The Republican party in its current form brooks no self-doubt, will suffer no evidence to alter their timeless, ageless principles.

Faith, as I’ve always understood it, is the belief in something despite a lack of evidence. To make sense of the current conservative mindset, you have to pervert that definition to include belief in things despite evidence to the contrary.

Our country is in dire need of evidence-based debate around federal policy, but all we get is shouting and sensation. How could it be otherwise, when one side is covering their ears so that inconvenient facts don’t cloud their world view? Now we get word that Obama is giving up on the public option, despite solid majorities in both houses of congress, in order to appease a bunch of shouting yokels who think he’s a foreign-born usurper. Obviously, this choice is infuriating to many on the left, myself included, who can’t help but feel that to allow Republicans any say in the process, when their reasoning is based on lies, distortions, and timeless, unquestionable beliefs, is a perverted, twisted definition of “bipartisan.” It’s letting bullies and demagogues have their way, despite their contributing nothing of substance to the debate. It’s a betrayal of the progressive movement that put him in office. And, despite what Senate Democrats might say, it’s a victory for the status-quo that’s funding so many of these astroturf protests, the same broken status quo that conservatives are defending as an ageless principle. And that’s really a shame.

For-profit insurance is the problem, and all reform plans considered “on the table” do nothing to address it. In fact, plans that don’t include a public option but that require universal insurance, like the one proposed by the Senate Finance Committee this week, are just a gift to the insurance industry, much like the proposed privatization of Social Security would have been a gift to investment banks. It makes cries from the extreme right about socialism even more absurd than usual.

The following PBS interview is fairly long at thirty minutes, but it lays out the problem in franker terms than you’re likely to find in the media blitz surrounding the topic.

When people ask me what my problem is, why I don’t believe in the power of change, I tell them that we elected a center-right corporatist unwilling or unable to confront big business on any meaningful issue. To be fair, this is Congress’s bill, and they’re farther to the right than he is and much, much more beholden to industry. But the fact remains that FDR didn’t talk about public-private partnerships for the public good; he talked about the federal government employing people directly, without ten levels of subcontractors, to build something that would benefit society for generations to come. If Obama wants me to believe that his is a transformative presidency, then he needs to demonstrate that he, unlike his predecessors since hated Reagan, believes in direct government action to solve society’s problems — an idea so old and out of circulation that it seems new to us.

It’s hard to call people like the lady in red members of a lunatic “fringe” when she has everyone in a town meeting cheering her on. What’s especially distressing, besides this group’s size and seeming proclivity for violence, is that there’s literally no convincing them that they’ve been sold on an absurd conspiracy theory discredited by even a cursory amount of research. The video above has been making the rounds on the intertubes and has drawn commentary from various news sources, many of whom have cited it as motivation for an expose to finally put the matter to rest. They don’t get it. The “birthers” have seen the birth certificate; they’ve seen the birth announcement in Hawaiian newspapers; they’ve seen the sworn statements by Hawaiian health officials. None of that convinces them. What will? Jon Stewart, at least, knows that sometimes an absurd situation can only be laughed at, not rationalized.

That town meeting, and the knowledge that others just like it are taking place across the country, frankly scares the bejesus out of me. The lady in red and her movement represent a threat to our democracy and domestic peace that is orders of magnitude larger than that posed by radical Islam. Their jingoistic fervor, their hallucinogenic certainty in the face of conflicting information, their willingness to scapegoat, their preternatural obsession with guns — if they aren’t a series of mass murders waiting to happen, I don’t know what is. They’re what the DHS meant by dangerous rightwing extremists (an identification that only fanned the flames and further radicalized them), and they’re alarmingly, crap-your-pants-and-move-to-Canada numerous. To call them a fringe is speciously optimistic.

At the end of the day, what really confounds me, and maybe this contributes to the raw terror I feel when watching the lady in red, is that I cannot understand their motivations. It can’t just be latent racism — can it?

Well, that was dissatisfying. For those unable to watch the video (still think Linux is so great?), Stewart and guest wring their worried hands and rehash the old idea that we need to get tough on the drug trade: lock all these guys up! You know, the War on Drugs! The plan that worked so well that 40 years later, we’re making more drug arrests than ever before! The author says she has a nine-point plan to cut off the Taliban’s funding. Well, I have a one-point plan.

Legalize heroin and send the price of poppies through the floor, just like the price of coffee, corn, wheat, and every other commodity that grows out of the ground. While you’re at it, if you want to let all non-violent heroin offenders out of California’s underfunded, overcrowded prison system too, that would be swell.

Is this notion so taboo that even a supposed liberal like Stewart dares not mention it on his program?

Prohibition has essentially no effect on the rates of addiction to various drugs. 1.3% of Americans are addicted to drugs, and that number has remained constant since we began recording it, defiantly static against a background of ever more stringent policies designed to lock up users, dealers, traffickers, and growers.

Prohibition didn’t work. That’s why we ended it. It’s not working now. That’s why we should end it. The fact that terrorists use illegal drugs for funding is a direct result of their illegal status. It’s why they’re dealing in heroin and not aspirin. If it were legal and therefore easier to get, it wouldn’t cost so much, wouldn’t be profitable to grow and smuggle into wealthy western countries.

I keep catching rumors (on the intergitch) of a new class of politically motivated youth: a whole generation of policy wonks whose number one concern is efficacy and pragmatism; an inspired group who, reared on dogma, is almost entirely non-ideological, and in fact is immediately distrustful of any perceived “spin” on an issue. Problem is, I really doubt the Taliban is going to wait for those people to come into the majority.