September 10, 2003
BLOG NOTES
• Tex gnaws on his Richard Neville chew-toy.
• Gordon King’s daughter writes a better animal story than does Bill Clinton.
• Every day in Gitmo is a McHappy Day, writes the Gweilo.
• Ken Layne alerts us to a new Los Lobos CD, featuring the planet’s most majestic chicken.
• Eye on the Left looks at Howard Dean’s crazy Balkanised understanding of the US.
• And tubagooba believes Australian blogdom seethes with racial hatred:
Until I started blogging, I was never exposed to the extreme racist right ... if the blogosphere is representative, then that means that there are more people in Australia thinking uglier things than I ever would have imagined. I find that scary.
My perception is that the blogosphere, as a whole, leans further to the right than Australian society, as a whole.
Name names, 'gooba! Who are these extreme racist rightwing bloggers?
Posted by Tim Blair at September 10, 2003 03:05 PMMy sentiments exactly Tim. Get up from behind your couch and names names Tugga.
Posted by: Tony.T at September 10, 2003 at 03:11 PMdon't worry, tim - it's probably not you. if it were, he probably would have named you.
just like he did here http://www.tubagooba.com/archives.tubagooba.com/2003_08.html: in the piece 'spinville'... remember this?
Tubagooba wins the prize for Worst Blog Design Ever.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at September 10, 2003 at 03:43 PMWho is this tugga sissy? If he has a problem with free speech, and it sounds as if he does, then he's nothing but meat on the blogosphere.
Posted by: Harry at September 10, 2003 at 03:55 PMIt's probably me, because I'm Australian and I hold right-wing viewpoints. Oh, and I have a blog.
Posted by: Marty at September 10, 2003 at 04:01 PMhey andrea, Tubagooba at least has a better colour-scheme than a recent black-backgrounded incarnation of your blog.
Posted by: adam at September 10, 2003 at 04:22 PMWhich "black-backgrounded" scheme would that be, adam? My site hasn't had a black background for months. Maybe you need to get your eyes checked, or buy a new monitor, or maybe you just need to pull your head out of your ass. It's got to be dark in there; I think by now you should have figured out that the sun doesn't shine out of that part of your anatomy.
In any case, I wasn't criticizing the tubergoober's color scheme, which is inoffensive, but his awful broken code, both the html and the css. All his entries are a-hreffed, his entry margins have no padding, and so on and so forth. He looks like a candidate for the latest incarnation of Webpagesthatsuck.com.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at September 10, 2003 at 04:45 PMYeah, take that, Andrea, and I mean, take that for your recent colour-scheme! Ha! Yeah! Yeah!
Posted by: Dylan at September 10, 2003 at 04:47 PMHuh?
I guess I'll go to black now. If it keeps you lot away.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at September 10, 2003 at 04:51 PMHey -- then I can call my blog a "blog of color!" Wouldn't want to be racist. It gets tuba players upset, or so I've heard.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at September 10, 2003 at 04:52 PMOut of interest, Andrea, what browser are you using? I'll happily accept all insults as to my web design, since I don't claim to be anything other than a bumbling amateur. At least my colours are "inoffensive" ...
Also, what do you mean by "hreffed" and "entry margins"?
Posted by: Dan at September 10, 2003 at 05:29 PMThe Bulletin has the worst, slowest website with a typeface for every subject, an osbure faux-academic index thing and more colours than the rainbow.
Posted by: pooh at September 10, 2003 at 05:49 PMNot only is the design lousy - boring layout, unreadable font - but the text is tacky as well. I mean: "Racism is a lovely chameleon" !!!Sounds like a lyric from some pretentious '70s song.
Posted by: Rob (No.1) at September 10, 2003 at 06:35 PMRob (No. 1): Well, since that line wasn't written by me, there's not much I can do about it, unless you'd like me to sensor cliches from my comment boxes.
Posted by: Dan at September 10, 2003 at 06:58 PMI think Australian society is further to the right than where Dan thinks it is but left of where blogdom is. I also think that blogdom is nearer to the mean than Dan is.
I have not been to any nasty right sites, that's either because I don't want to go to them, or, I have been to nasty sites (in Dan's eyes) but failed to realise it because I am nasty right.
So Dan, naming names really would help. Is this a nasty right site for example? I would call this site boisterous right.
Posted by: James Hamilton at September 10, 2003 at 08:19 PMDan: in your main page, half your entries are all one link. "A href" -- text from the html link tag. I made up "hreffed" out of that. Something is broken in your code. I'm using Mozilla, by the way.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at September 10, 2003 at 08:45 PMAndrea: thanks. I was aware that there were some nasty results in non-IE browsers ... looks like its time I bit the bullet and sorted it out. I've taken a learn-as-you-go approach, and the first thing I've learned is not to underestimate the grim reality of cross-browser incompatibility.
Posted by: Dan at September 10, 2003 at 09:14 PMJames: I've posted a response which might make things a little clearer. I wouldn't necessarily describe this site as "nasty right" in the sense of John Ray's site. There is at least one aspect of it that I've described as nasty, but that doesn't mean that it would be enough in itself to bother me. I was speaking more from general impressions, rather than seeking to bash any particular site.
Posted by: Dan at September 10, 2003 at 09:19 PMAndrea: Yikes! You were right, there was some major bad shit going down. Easy enough to understand, now that I've installed it and had a look, why it didn't work in Mozilla. Not easy to understand why it did work (more or less) in IE. Anyway, I think I've fixed the worst of the problems, hopefully enough to keep me off websitesthatsuck.
Posted by: Dan at September 10, 2003 at 10:11 PM" among people I know nobody was for the war" Mary McGrory
"there are more people in Australia thinking uglier things than I ever would have imagined" Dan
Posted by: Gary at September 10, 2003 at 10:21 PMGary:
"I don't know how Nixon got elected, nobody I know voted for him" - Pauline Kael (as I recall)
Posted by: Ken Summers at September 11, 2003 at 01:16 AMUh, Dan: Maybe I didn't read enough of John Ray's site, but I found nothing hateful about that particular post. It discussed the heritability of intelligence, not particular levels of intelligence among different racial groups (which, I suspect, even the most hardcore determinist would not consider immune from environmental influence).
I happen to agree with Gould mostly on the issue, though he seemed to be particularly obsessed with it. Actually, I don't even believe that "IQ" can be well-defined, much less measured - one can only measure what has been learned and perhaps the speed of learning, not the potential for learning, which is what most people mean by IQ.
Again, based only on that particular post, and the few right around it, I think the worst you can speculate about Ray is that he is possibly in the William Shockley camp - believing that blacks are less intelligent and therefore in need of special help:
it of course remains true that worrying about the genetic potential of blacks does nothing to help them. People surely do not need to be misled about blacks before they will support programs that really do help blacks to cope better with the world in which they live. Finding such programs is the real challenge.
Which, when you think about it, seems to be the unspoken assumption of Affirmative Action supporters. [Yes, this is a cheap shot, but well-deserved, in my view] Posted by: Ken Summers at September 11, 2003 at 01:36 AM
Maybe Dan was concerned about this post.
I'd like to see some public discussion about genetic and cultural issues, without having people running around screaming "racist".
Posted by: Evil Pundit at September 11, 2003 at 03:14 AMKen:
John Ray is a little obscure in his reasoning, but if you look closely (and try to follow through his argument), you find that he's not just saying that black people tend to have lower IQ's (which, for what it's worth, is true, but doesn't mean very much for the reasons that you've mentioned). What he's saying is that it's the heritability of IQ that has caused their social disadvantage. In other words, they're genetically predisposed to be dumb.
Posted by: Dan at September 11, 2003 at 09:38 AMYes, it even comes through in that extract that you quoted:
worrying about the genetic potential of blacks does nothing to help them. People surely do not need to be misled about blacks before they will support programs that really do help blacks to cope better with the world in which they live.
Worrying about the genetic potential for a high IQ, not the IQ level itself. People being "misled about blacks" means being misled into believing that they're as capable of a high IQ as the rest of us.
Posted by: Dan at September 11, 2003 at 09:41 AMDan, I still think you're digging to find it, but it can go either way. My other statement still applies: at worst, he seems to think blacks need special help, and that strikes me as very similar to the arguments justifying affirmative action programs.
Quite frankly, it has always seemed to me that the modern (not classic) "liberal" view is more racist than the "racist right". Liberals are afraid that blacks are incapable of succeeding alone, so they need special help. The Klan is afraid they are fully capable of succeeding, and need to be kept down to prevent it.
Posted by: Ken Summers at September 11, 2003 at 01:18 PMKen: "at worst, he seems to think blacks need special help"
You can believe that without believing that the reasons are genetic. And I don't think you have to dig that hard.
Posted by: Dan at September 12, 2003 at 01:46 AM