nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

Oh great. Psychology Today is making the same mistake.

Last week, a blog post about race and appearance by Satoshi Kanazawa was published–and promptly removed–from this site. We deeply apologize for the pain and offense that this post caused. Psychology Today‘s mission is to inform the public, not to provide a platform for inflammatory and offensive material. Psychology Today does not tolerate racism or prejudice of any sort. The post was not approved by Psychology Today, but we take full responsibility for its publication on our site. We have taken measures to ensure that such an incident does not occur again. Again, we are deeply sorry for the hurt that this post caused.

Notice how they claim that the reason the post was pulled, along with the rest of Kanazawa’s blog, is the “pain and offense” caused by Kanazawa’s “racism”. I’d expect radical feminists and other people on that end of the political spectrum to come out against science, but now a science site is doing that? 

I agree with Dennis Mangan here: “One can agree with the editor that Kanazawa’s post was “inflammatory and offensive”, but as for the “racism” charge, the post was either true or false, right or wrong, or some combination.”

Science does not care about how “inflammatory and offensive” it is. All that science can legitimately concern itself with is its scientific accuracy; that is, whether things are “true or false, right or wrong, or some combination”. Throw in anything else, and it becomes not science, but propaganda.

In fact, contrary to Psychology Today’s apparent belief that informing the public and “provid[ing] a platform for inflammatory and offensive material” can be mutually exclusive, real science will inevitably offend; it is well established that people believe things that are not true, and become offended when evidence is presented that runs counter to their beliefs. It should not be surprising to anyone outside the left that the left is as guilty of this as the religious right. But the left (in its opposition to the religious right) claims to support science, despite the fact that that science offends many on the religious right. They can’t have it both ways.

Satoshi Kanazawa is the latest casualty in the war against science.

His now-infamous post on race and attractiveness stirred the modern-day Tommaso Caccinis of the leftist blogosphere to condemn him as a blasphemous racist, and even attempt to get him fired from his position at the London School of Economics. His science was admittedly questionable at best, since the data that he used (which, keep in mind, was generated by a widely respected study with significant government backing) turned out to be subjective enough to open the door for legitimate criticism, and there is definitely room for legitimate criticism here; I am not convinced that his study says what he thinks it says, or even that it says anything at all. But that criticism was hardly brought up, and it was eventually lost in the flood of blasphemy charges from pitchfork-waving culturists.

The authors of the article pointing out the problems with the Add Health data, not satisfied by merely criticizing the data like actual scientists, went on in the same article to blast Kanazawa for coming to conclusions that did not still hold true once half the data got thrown out the window, because obviously it is impossible for people to be reasonably considered sexually attractive before the age of 18 (never mind that many countries, and even many states in the US, set the age of consent lower than that), and therefore it is “inappropriate” to point out that existing data is compatible with Kanazawa’s conclusion and incompatible with the absurd culturist response that everyone in America, even in black-dominated areas such as the one that I currently live in (where, interestingly, even the worst of the black supremacists tend to limit their sexual activity to white women), has been brainwashed into supporting a standard of beauty more useful to the evil, culture-controlling Je… um, whites. Of course, thinly veiled accusations of pedophilia are not a valid argument for throwing out half of the data, and statistics is enough of an art that analyses from authors who throw out such absurd ad hominems are questionable. (I’d run the numbers myself, but my statistics class was taught by a miserable alcoholic who spent most of the semester talking about his drinking habits, so I am decidedly unqualified for such analysis.)

What do we have here? A scientist used data from a seemingly credible source to come to a certain conclusion, and it turned out that that source might not deserve the reputation it enjoys. One could even legitimately go so far as to call the study pseudoscience, and given the overreaching claims and use of obfuscatory buzzwords in the article, it is clear, at least to me, that it is at best another example of the absurdity of science journalism. This would be the limit of the controversy over that article in a world that had any sort of respect for science, but, since the dominant ideology of the Western world relies on the belief, different only in degree than that of the creationists that adherents of that ideology so love to mock, that the processes of evolution ceased to operate on the human brain as soon as Homo sapiens first set foot on Earth, we do not live in such a world.

So, of course, the controversy broke completely free of the constraints of rationality, and culturist bloggers took up arms against not Kanazawa’s methods, but his results. Jezebel, a crypto-feminist spinoff of an online tabloid, spewed forth a Two Minutes Hate that simply called Kanazawa an “awful”, “crappy” racist who hid his racism behind meaningless bar graphs. Crooks and Liars dismissed “Zantoshi” Kanazawa’s conclusion out of hand with the unsupported culturist non-argument that beauty is entirely subjective. Pam’s House Blend, a self-proclaimed “Online Magazine in the Reality-Based Community” (shades of “Fair and Balanced”?), claimed, in an ironic yet predictable denial of reality, that races are too diverse for statements about racial trends to be valid. The Guardian, in what may be the first use of Reductio ad Hitlerum in the mainstream media (if that anti-science Pravda of radical New Left trash can even be considered mainstream), compared Kanazawa to peddlers of Aryan pseudoscience, and then claimed that Kanazawa’s article was morally objectionable because it “insulted and denigrated women of African descent all over the world, insinuating that some inevitable genetic development forces them to the lowest rung of his imaginary rigid scale of ‘attractiveness’”, as if science should be suppressed if it has the possibility of hurting anyone’s self-esteem. (One can imagine a similar objection to Darwin; does it not hurt the self-esteem of humans everywhere to learn that they are not God’s special snowflakes, but instead the descendants of apes?) And so on.

If this were an isolated incident, or if the criticism focused on his scientific failings and not his un-PC results, it would be effectively irrelevant; Kanazawa is a sensationalist, and I doubt many people would care if his bombast cost him his career. But this is not isolated; considering the particular objections that were raised to his article (note the title of the post announcing the petition to get him fired: “Fire Racist, Sexist Satoshi Kanazawa”), he is the latest victim of a pattern of culturist opposition to science that has claimed the careers of many other scientists of far more merit, including Lawrence Summers, who lost his position as president of Harvard after drawing fire for a conjecture that there might possibly be a biologically caused nonzero difference in scientific aptitude between the sexes, and Nobel laureate James Watson, who lost his job for pointing out the established fact that the average IQ of Africa is lower than the average IQ of the US. And in cases such as these, the ends do not justify the means; attacking even the worst hack for ideologically motivated reasons may bring about a desirable immediate result, but that result comes at the cost of strengthening the ideology behind it.

History has seen this pattern many times before. The culturist insistence that science be subordinated to its essentially faith-based beliefs differentiates itself only in rhetoric and ideology from the Soviet attacks on geneticists as “fly-lovers and people-haters” and puppets of the bourgeoisie and the Catholic charges of heresy against heliocentrism. Instead of defending their beliefs in the arena of rational debate, they attempt to shut down all opposition, regardless of its accuracy. And, judging by the fact that Kanazawa’s career is currently threatened not by his possibly unscientific methods, but by his politically incorrect results, it looks like they’re getting away with it.

Is there any doubt that culturism is currently the dominant ideology of the Western world?