Re:harmonized

I once heard a female professor of mathematics talk about an encounter she had with a senior colleague soon after taking her first faculty job. He told her that he didn’t think she belonged there because he knew for a fact that women weren’t good at math. Coming from a math professor, of all people, the reasoning is mind-boggling — surely he understood the basics of probability distributions. It could be true that on average women are less capable mathematicians than men and also true that this particular woman was more capable than most men, including a certain professor standing in the hall making an ass of himself at that very moment.

That’s the basic problem with believing that you’re smarter than a whole class of other people — it tends to make you stupid. That anecdote is my favorite example (and it’s just an anecdote, so take it with a grain of salt — I have no reason to doubt the woman who told it but I don’t have a lot of faith in my own memory). It’s been on my mind because of the exchanges last week between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Andrew Sullivan about race and IQ. I have a second-favorite example, too, and unlike the first one it’s documented in fantastic detail. It’s been sitting on my hard disk for a long time, part of a collection of half-written blog posts that just gets more impressive every year. I guess now’s the time, finally.

The presumed fool in this story is also a woman, and the operating assumption is that she’s a scientific ignoramus. Not because she’s a woman, of course, but because she’s a feminist, which is a much better reason. Specifically — not that it really matters, because they all think alike — it’s Amanda Marcotte, prima donna of Pandagon. Feminists hold science in contempt and don’t even believe in reality, and you don’t need to know any science to see what a scientific ignoramus a person like that is.

Her opposite number is Jeff Goldstein, the guru who for 10 gleeful years has been serving glistening gobs of Protein Wisdom from a can. Just like Newt, he sounds like a smart person is supposed to sound, only you don’t have to be dumb to think that, just easily impressed. Like David Thompson, for instance, who’s our unreliable narrator, or something.

A lot of the story is a pretty typical episode of the echo chamber follies, just with an especially united front of willful ignorance. Goldstein ratchets the pretense up with a load of his patented intellectual spam. Meanwhile, Thompson takes the knee-jerk assumptions about who’s smarter up a notch, commenting that Goldstein “probably [has] quite a few IQ points” on Marcotte. So guess which one has a clue about basic evolutionary biology? Continue reading ›

Seems like the competition for Greatest Goy Friend to Israel and the Jewish People is pretty stiff over there at Fox News. But actually those three gentlemen of fair-and-balanced land were playing their get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s just the ticket when Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League get on your case for rhetorical abuse of the Holocaust. There was a little burst of attention last week when Huckabee and Foxman tangled and then quickly kissed and made up. The three incidents together reveal some interesting patterns, though — some very lame watchdogging, first of all.

Last November, Glenn Beck mounted an all-out assault against George Soros on his Fox News show. Foxman found one of Beck’s claims, that Soros was once “a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps,” to be “completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top,” not to mention “horrific.” Beck responded by going to his files and pulling out a recent letter of apology from none other than Abe Foxman, who had written to Beck that “I know that you are a friend of the Jewish people, and a friend of Israel.” Once prompted, Foxman reiterated the sentiment, adding that “there are certain things [Beck] doesn’t understand, which have led him to make insensitive remarks.” Apparently they’re not that big a deal, though.

One of the things Beck clearly did understand is how to work the classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. Just a month earlier, after Rick Sanchez’s foolish rant about Jon Stewart and the Jewish “bigots” who control the media, Foxman wrote an editorial about the resiliency of those old stereotypes and the need for continued vigilance. He also wrote to CNN, congratulating them for firing Sanchez and urging them to disavow his anti-Semitic views more conspicuously. Beck’s theatrical effort to cast a rich Jewish businessman as an evil puppetmaster pulling the strings of government and the media was far more willful and sustained. Foxman singled out a single claim that as a Holocaust survivor he found intolerable. He had nothing to say about all the anti-Semitic dog whistling. Instead, he made sure everyone knew what a great friend to Israel Beck is. Sanchez is clearly not such a friend. [1]

And then, during the media afterparty for Beck’s “symphony of anti-Semitic dog-whistles,” Fox News boss Roger Ailes had this to say about the executives at NPR: “They are, of course, Nazis.” Knowing that Foxman would be “receiving calls” because of the way he’d shot his mouth off, Ailes sent a letter right away to the ADL chief, who took it as a “sincere and heartfelt” apology. And it seems that Ailes was indeed sincere about how some unnamed NPR execs really were “nasty, inflexible bigots,” and about how he and Fox News were the blameless victims of a couple of liberal rabbis. He may even have genuinely believed that Foxman’s discretion in calling out anti-Semites is “heroic” and that Beck’s claims about Soros were factual because the Fox News “Brainroom” checked and “found them valid.” Ailes’s complaining is definitely heartfelt, but when he gets around to the apology it’s as fleeting and insincere as can be. As I wrote a while ago, the exchange between these two is like a scene from a sitcom marriage, with Foxman as the punctilious wife and Ailes as the boorish husband — a quirky old couple happily talking past each other and hearing exactly what they each want to hear.

Last week it was Mike Huckabee’s turn after both he and Michele Bachmann invoked the Holocaust in their comments about the budget deficit (Huckabee was in Pennsylvania addressing an NRA convention). Continue reading ›

Glenn Beck’s three-part exposé about George Soros last November (last year!) energized a whole lot of critics, and not just the usual suspects from the Left — one of the smartest critiques is on reason.com, home of the hard-headed libertarian. But Beck’s incoherent sprawl tends to defeat sober criticism and reduce it to outrage. Even Michelle Goldberg’s piece, with that great line about the “symphony of anti-Semitic dog-whistles,” gets a little lost in its outrage (no doubt I’ll follow suit). As usual Jon Stewart is a standout — with Beck, satire is probably the best and most cogent criticism (there’s a follow up, too, where Stewart puts on the glasses).

With this kind of high-profile media-celebrity-driven controversy, the follow-up sideshows can be at least as meaty as the main event. The one that I like is a kind of family sitcom starring Fox News chairman Roger Ailes as Dad and Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman as Mom. It’s great comic pairing. Ailes is the tough-talking corporate bigwig — an epic bullshitter who cuts himself infinite slack when he needs to cover his ass. Foxman is the soul of propriety. Glenn Beck is their wacky step-son — he may get out of hand sometimes, but like Papa Ailes says, at heart he’s “so intelligent and basically sensitive.” And then there’s filthy rich Uncle Rupert, but he doesn’t make an appearance in this episode.

We meet Ailes at the Daily Beast, being interviewed by Howard Kurtz. Obama comes up right away, of course (“Sipping coffee from a ‘Fair & Balanced’ mug, Ailes insists that his channel lives up to the logo in its treatment of the administration”). And there’s no avoiding Rupert Murdoch, whose $1 million donations to the Republican Governors Association and the Chamber of Commerce were, Ailes acknowledges, bad public relations, but also “his right” — “I don’t think anyone can tell him what to do with his money.” Probably Ailes would acknowledge that it’s also George Soros’ right to give $1 million to Media Matters so they can dog Fox News. All we learn from Kurtz is that Ailes is “still fuming” about it. He fumes about Jon Stewart, too, in the second installment, because Stewart “hates conservatives” and “makes a living by attacking [them] and stirring up a liberal base against it.” For Ailes, it turns out, the political is a personal insult, when it comes from the other side. [1]

But we’re really here to find out about Glenn Beck, and Ailes doesn’t disappoint. For one thing, he’s got a handy excuse for Beck’s “inflammatory outbursts, such as calling Obama a racist” — “everyone who ad libs for a living makes mistakes.” Continue reading ›