Europeans have, on average, more neanderthal DNA than Africans. In an interview with Ezra Klein, Sam Harris said, “Had it gone another way, all of a sudden we can’t talk about Neanderthal DNA anymore.”
His point is that if Africans had more DNA, liberals like myself wouldn’t want to talk about it because it would be a concrete sign that Africans were more brutish. It’s a hilariously stupid thought to support his contention that Charles Murray is a perfectly fine person to platform on his show.
But Sam Harris is probably right. But not for the reasons he thinks.
What Would Happen If Africans Were More Neanderthal
The truth is that if Africans did have more neanderthal DNA than Europeans, it would cause a reaction. White supremacists would use the information along with the ignorant belief that Neanderthals were stupid brutes to argue that white people are superior to black people.
And thus, the discussion of neanderthals would become complicated. Because for each person who was discussing neanderthals seriously, there would be ten who were just using it to push racist bullshit.
Neanderthal DNA, IQ, Whatever
“All of a sudden we can’t talk about Neanderthal DNA anymore.” –Sam Harris
It’s like IQ. There are plenty of people who talk about it seriously and there is never a problem. No one demonstrates against James Flynn speaking on a college campus. They have a problem with Charles Murray because he isn’t actually a scientist. Instead, he’s a racist quack who uses the respectability of the pretense of science to push his own political agenda.
Sam Harris has shown himself to be open to racist IQ pseudoscience. He has also shown that he accepts the same tired stereotypes of neanderthals. So if it had turned out that Africans had more neanderthal DNA than Europeans, I have little doubt that Harris would allow racist quacks on his show to use this information to push their agenda.
And he would do this because, he’d claim, college students were trying to silence the brave neanderthal quacks. It certainly wouldn’t be because Sam Harris has some latent racism that he refuses to grapple with.
No, it would be because he’s just a brave truth-teller. It’s interesting that brave truth-tellers are almost always people pushing really old, regressive ideas. Leftist ideas somehow have a much higher activation energy when it comes to brave truth-telling.
Sam Harris Gonna Platform Bigots
The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter what neanderthal DNA says about human evolution. White supremacists would use it to make racist arguments if it helped them and ignore it if it didn’t. If it did help them make their case, liberals would rightly see the issue as a delicate one.
And Sam Harris would platform racists wanting to use it.
Merry Christmas, everyone! In the following article, I’m going to pull together some old stuff from previous posts with mostly new stuff to make a Christmas post. If you want more, go back to Christmas: Everything I Have to Say. It has so much in it that I couldn’t even manage to read it all. And I’m very fond of my own writing (this is helped by having a terrible memory).
Setting the Mood
Let’s set the mood with some Christmas music. This gets harder every year.
It used to be that it was just the explicitly Christian songs that bugged me. And they still do. There are few things that annoy me more than Christians who run around reminding people of the “reason for the season!”
There is basically nothing theologically interesting about Christmas from a Christian standpoint. The virgin birth is just something tacked on for the prols. Christians should make a big deal out of Easter and the related holidays. But they don’t. Because American Christians neither know nor care about their religion’s theology. Instead they care about cultural signaling and in- and out-group politics.
But this year I found it impossible to enjoy songs that I’ve liked in the past like “I Saw Momma Kissing Santa Claus.” So I included a few songs that you really need to stretch to include. Here’s the list:
“Blue Christmas” — Elvis Preseley
“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” — Jackson 5
“Christmas Wrapping” — The Waitresses
“This Christmas” — Donny Hathaway
“Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight)” — The Ramones
“Santa Baby” — Eartha Kitt
“Merry Christmas Baby” — Otis Redding
“There Ain’t No Sanity Clause” — The Damned
“Baby It’s Cold Outside” — Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski
“Back Door Santa” — Clarence Carter
“If We Make It Through December” — Merle Haggard
“Run Rudolph Run” — Chuck Berry
“The Weight” — The Band
“Der Hölle Rache” — Diana Damrau
“Fairytale Of New York” — The Pogues
“2000 Miles” — The Pretenders
“Santa Stole My Girlfriend” — The Maine
“We’ll Meet Again” — Vera Lynn
“Must Be Santa” — Bob Dylan
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” — Judy Garland
I’m particularly bothered by The Ramones cut because of the stupid video stuff at the beginning and end of the song. But I so love the song that I included it.
Last Year’s Christmas
Last year, I published A Very Alpha Christmas. It’s interesting because I thought I had written it in 2016 or 2017. My feelings have only gotten worse. In fact, I tried to back out of all my familial obligations. It’s not that I mind doing all the holiday stuff. But I do mind the feeling that there are those who only take.
Next year, I may well do my own horror-themed Christmas. If my family wants to come, great. I’ll serve the food I like and show the horror films that I want to watch.
But that’s not what I would hope for a family gathering. I do, however, think that Christmas shouldn’t be me cooking while the television in the other room screams sports. But note: my problem is not the sports but the fact that it isn’t the choice of the group. It’s the choice of one man. And it is the choice he makes all the time. You see, it is no more a choice for him than it is for me.
Last year I also recommend that you watch Christmas Evil. It is the film I’m featuring on Psychotronic Review, so click over there and watch it. Things have been taking off over there. It is getting a lot more love than Frankly Curious. And I’m starting to see the traffic to justify it.
Still, it’d be nice to do more on Frankly Curious. It’s hard to find the time — especially while I’m trying to save money. But I’ll do my best.
School Is In!
It’s always fun to learn stuff. If you don’t agree, you aren’t the target audience of this site. Go away!
In the past, I’ve featured lectures and interviews that were Christmas-focused. Here are a few that I find interesting.
Don’t Celebrate Christmas!
Tom Flynn believes that people shouldn’t celebrate Christmas or any similar holidays. I don’t find the argument compelling. As I’ve already noted, there isn’t much that’s religious about Christmas.
Still he makes an argument that is worth hearing. He’s interviewed by authoritarian atheist Robert M Price. These were the days before Price felt comfortable flying his authoritarian flag high. Now he takes the derision of people like me as proof that he’s right. He’s hopeless.
Rebecca Watson is one of the small number of major atheist celebrities who didn’t go on to be an authoritarian asshole. She continues to make excellent skeptic-oriented videos.
In this video, she jokes about PZ Myers. I’m not sure what that’s about. The two of them have long been allies. Both of them are good examples of how the New Atheists largely pushed away anyone who didn’t go along with its increasing political conservatism (or worse).
About a year after I turned against New Atheism, PZ Meyers wrote:
The number of people identifying as “nones” will grow in this country in coming years, because we’re on the right side of history, and because organized religion is happily in the process of destroying itself with regressive social attitudes, scandals, and their bizarre focus on other-worldly issues that don’t help people. The number of people identifying as atheists will stagnate or even shrink, because organized atheism is happily in the process of destroying itself with regressive social attitudes, scandals, and their bizarre focus on irrelevant metaphysical differences that don’t help people.
Here is Rebecca Watson’s funny Christmas lecture:
If you want to hear a more radical view of New Atheism (which I mostly agree with), read Sam Kriss’ Village Atheists, Village Idiots.
A Brief History of Christmas
I highly recommend watching Klaus for a Christmas story that is epic and filled with wonderful folkloric elements. It’s on Netflix but I’m sure eventually will be on DVD.
In the meantime, CGP Grey has this excellent video made in the style of, well, CGP Grey.
A Charlie Brown Christmas
Renegade Cut creates great videos of film analysis from a leftist perspective. This one tries to answer why Christmas makes some of us miserable.
Saving Christmas
In comparison with the above, here is another leftist YouTuber Maggie Mae Fish on Kirk Cameron’s ode to materialism Saving Christmas. The film is basically a debate between a sincere Christian who believes Christmas is too materialistic and Cameron who thinks materialism rocks.
According to the movie, Cameron is right. And why not? He does speak for the vast majority of Christians, even if they don’t like it put forward in such a coarse way. Fish tears the film and Cameron apart.
Christmas Comedy
Here is a playlist that I’ve put together with mostly comedy related to Christmas, religion, and that kind of stuff.
Merry Christmas
That’s all for me today. I’ve written an article about the “skeptic” community’s embrace of racial IQ “science” that will come out here early next week. And I’ll be doing a few things over at Psychotronic Review.
I hope you have a good Christmas. It’s hard to be too keen given that it looks like America is taking a big step toward authoritarianism. And if Trump is re-elected, I suspect it is over. The Republicans will be in a position to have minority control over the government for the foreseeable future and there won’t be much we can do about it.
When people virtue signal, who are they signaling to? At least when it comes to liberals and leftists, the people they’re signaling to are themselves. They are trying to be the kind of people they think are good.
They absolutely are not signaling to others. In fact, that would be embarrassing. And that’s part of the problem with conservatives who point out supposed virtue signaling; it accuses them of something they absolutely are not doing at the same time it does what they don’t want to be done. If a liberal is signaling to others, they aren’t being the good person they want to be.
How to Be a Good Person
The conservative view goes along with Aristotle’s notion of how to be a good person. The idea is that you should pretend to be good. You should act the way that good people act and eventually, you too will be a good person.
But people have images of themselves. And they will give up a lot to live up to that image. For example, most people become vegetarians despite the taste of meat, not because of it. We see this very clearly with conservatives too.
There is a common liberal complaint that conservatives “vote against their interests.” But that is rarely true. They often vote against their economic interests. But white people voting for policies that oppress brown people? That’s an interest. They are voting for an idea that white people are better than brown people. And need I remind everyone that the Republican Party is overwhelmingly white.
Conservative Signaling
And conservatives signal too. What do you think all that ostentatious patriotism is about? And I think that’s genuine. Just as with liberals signaling that they are tolerant and so on, conservatives are signaling to themselves that they are good people — the kind of people who love the flag and all that.
Conservatives signal other things too. One I notice a lot is signaling that they are skeptics: nobody’s fools. Unlike liberals, who supposedly let emotions get in the way of their view of the world, conservatives see things the way they are. (Not that I agree.)
Allow People to Be Who They Are
I wish conservatives would allow us on the left to have our beliefs without pathologizing them. But I know they won’t because if leftists’ acceptance of others is a sincere belief, what’s wrong with them?
So it is doubtful things will change. But the charge of “virtue signaling” is hollow. It’s just a way of claiming they don’t accept our view of the world. And we know that. So it really means they have no argument.
John Kerry has endorsed Joe Biden. I’m sure it makes perfect sense to him. But I’m equally sure that we shouldn’t follow John Kerry to catastrophe a second time.
Let’s look at this in detail. Back in 2004, Democrats nominated John Kerry as their presidential candidate. He picked John Edwards as his vice-presidential running mate. And they lost — by over 3 million votes — more than Trump lost by in 2016. Based on what we know about political science, this was not surprising.
Political Science 2004
In 2009, political scientist Lynn Vavreck published a book that looked at presidential elections, The Message Matters. In it, she argued that the country’s economic trend largely controlled the outcomes in presidential races. If the economy is improving, the political party in the White House wins; if the economy is going into recession, the party loses. This is standard political science.
What Vavreck added was that there were elections when this didn’t hold. She argued that a candidate could win the presidency against a strong economy if they could make the election about something other than the economy.
The classic example of this is Jimmy Carter in 1976. He should have lost. But he made the election about corruption and that allowed him to eke out a win by less than 2 million votes.
The Democrats had a great opportunity in 2004. People had turned against the Iraq War. If the Democrats had made the election about the war, they could have won. But they nominated two men who had voted for the war. And Kerry was especially bad when it came to justifying that vote.
The right choice was Howard Dean. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t like Howard Dean. He’s the kind of Democrat I’ve always had problems with. He’s one of the Democrats who rose in the wake of Watergate. He’s very much in favor of “good government” over ideology, which means that economically, he’s pretty conservative.
But his 2004 campaign was all about the Iraq War. And regardless of what he may have thought at the time, he wasn’t on record as being for it. Had the Democrats nominated him, it would have been Bush looking uncomfortable at the lectern, not Kerry. And Dean might have won. He certainly would have done better than Kerry did.
Political Science 2020
So here we are on the cusp of 2020 and Kerry has announced that he is supporting Joe Biden for the nomination. It’s not surprising. The two of them worked together at the top of the Obama White House. What’s more, I think the decline of Warren in the polls has caused a lot of establishment types to decide that Biden is their only choice.
But I think Biden is as electable today as Kerry was in 2004. I know: everyone claims he is the most electable candidate. But Trump is going to hammer him on his Iraq War vote, just like he did Clinton in 2016. And if you don’t think Hunter Biden is going to be the “But her emails!” of 2020, you haven’t been paying attention.
If Kerry is wrong this time too, don’t worry: the Democrats will listen to him again.
You know the Democratic saying: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on you; fool me three times, wow, you really aren’t a very nice person, you’d better not fool me a fourth time!
