Here’s a humorous Youtube video about Indians vs. Puritans--with something to offend everyone, including the buffalo.

More serious discussions of the Pilgrim vs Indian question can be found here and here. But no buffalo.( Embedding seems not to be working for some reason.) Near the end, you can hear the Indians saying “So we should welcome immigrants?” and “What’s the worst that could happen?” What’s not so funny, by the way, is what’s going on in the comments. Check them out.

This is from the Yale Daily News, (via John Leo)

The proposal — which would have mandated that each residential-college council appoint two students to coordinate cultural activities and diversity awareness in the college — comes on the heels of ostensibly racist and homophobic graffiti discovered on University buildings earlier this month. But CCU members said their decision to reintroduce the proposal this year was unrelated to those incidents.Yale Daily News - With reservation, YCC backs plan for diversity reps, By Samantha Broussard-Wilson, November 29, 2007

You know what “ostensibly” means in this story? It means that even a reporter for a college paper knows by now that these things are usually done by their ostensible victims. When Kerri Dunn grafitti-ed her own car at Claremont McKenna College in 2004, she did so using racist and anti-Semitic terminology that the most of the actual students had never heard in their lives.

If there are actual racist students on campus, they have nothing to gain and a lot to lose by writing on walls. Minorities, on the other hand, have a lot to gain by attacking themselves anonymously and blaming whites.

Backtracking rapidly from a brave (but brief) show of character by its human sciences correspondent William Saletan in his defense of legendary scientist James Watson, Slate has now published a “Response to ‘Liberal Creationism’” by Stephen Metcalf, who writes a column for Slate named “The Dilettante: Reading and lounging and watching.” Slate describes him as their “critic at large. He is working on a book about the 1980s.”

His article confirms my comment over the weekend that “Metcalf’s only qualification to write about this topic is that he’s named ‘Steve.’” (As this cartoon sent to me by Steve Pinker points out, a ludicrously high proportion of the people who have regularly written about genetics and behavior are named Steven or Stephen: Gould, Rose, Jones, Levitt, Olson, and so forth.)

The key questions in the controversy are:

• Was the firing of James Watson for making politically incorrect statements about African intelligence justified?
• Were Watson’s comments “utterly unsupported by scientific evidence” (to quote the head federal genetics bureaucrat, Francis Collins)?

Metcalf simply ignores the treatment of Watson.

What’s striking is not how ignorant Metcalf is, but also how hate-filled, making him the epitome of the many pundits who have weighed in with so much more rage than reason this fall.

His favorite mode is character assassination, devoting much of his “Dilettante” column to trying to smear scientists who argue that genetics plays some role in IQ gaps such as Richard Lynn, J.P. Rushton (a VDARE.COM contributor), and Arthur Jensen.

Metcalf admitted in his 2005 article on IQ in Slate, a screed against Charles Murray’s article “The Inequality Taboo,” that “Rushton and Jensen came to my attention” from reading Murray’s Commentary article. In other words, he’d never heard of Arthur Jensen, the leading figure in IQ research since 1969, until he started working on his essay for Slate!

Let me focus here on Jensen.

Metcalf sneers:

“Does it feel as though researchers like Jensen and Rushton, the so-called “race realists,” have spent their careers examining a range of competing hypotheses for the black-white IQ gap, and carefully scrutinizing the quality of the research at their disposal? Or have they been attempting, at all costs, to prove a single hypothesis—that blacks are congenitally dumber than whites?”

Having spent a month in 1998 reading Jensen’s 649-page magnum opus, The g Factor: The Science of Mental Abilities, which I would bet heavily that Metcalf has not read, I can answer Metcalf’s question:

Jensen’s career, serenely carried out despite hooting from angry fools like Metcalf, and even under threats of violence, represents the very model of the disinterested scientist.

But don’t take my word for it. Metcalf cites James Flynn as one of the two leading scientists on his side. Here’s what Flynn had to say on Sunday in an interview with the Gene Expression blog:

[GNXP] Over the decades, you’ve carried on an extensive correspondence with Arthur Jensen, the controversial and enormously influential intelligence researcher at UC Berkeley. You summarized some of your early thoughts about Jensen’s work in your 1980 book Race, IQ, and Jensen, a book that, in my opinion, sets the standard for how do discuss this controversial topic. What have you learned about Jensen over the years, and what have your interactions with him taught you about the nature of scientific research?

[Flynn] “I never suspected Arthur Jensen of racial bias. Over the years, I have found him scrupulous in terms of professional ethics. He has never denied me access to his unpublished data. His work stands as an example of what John Stuart Mill meant when he said that being challenged in a way that is “upsetting” is to be welcomed not discouraged. Before Jensen, the notion that all races were genetically equal for cognitive ability had become a dead “Sunday truth” for which we could give no good reasons. Today we are infinitely more informed about group differences. Equally important, the debates Jensen began are revolutionizing the theory of intelligence and our understanding of how genes and environment interact.”

In the Slate Fray, “Podesta” comments:

“I suspect that Saletan is another Steve Sailer brain-washee. For those not aware, Sailer, a failed journalist, is the main purveyor of racist pseudoscience on the Internet. He charms his targets to the extent they lose the common sense required to check up on him and his sources before adopting his beliefs.”

Why, yes, I do possess brain-washing powers. (And, as Podesta notes, oodles of charm.)

But why would I waste them on a moderately-compensated scribe like William Saletan when there are riper targets like, say, Saletan’s old boss or my new best friend, Carlos Slim? I don’t want to spill any beans, but let’s just say that when Forbes brings out its next ranking of the world’s richest men, there’s going be a little surprise at the top

Mickey Kaus criticizes Tim Rutten for a really stupid article saying that CNN shouldn’t have allowed immigration to take up such a big part of the debate:

Live by Pew, Die by Pew: LAT Chief Twit Tim Rutten calls the CNN-YouTube debate “corrupt” because it “chose to devote the first 35 minutes of this critical debate to a single issue — immigration”–and did it allegedly to somehow expand the audience for CNN’s Lou Dobbs.

How do we know immigration didn’t deserve this play? Rutten cites a fresh poll from “the nonpartisan and highly reliable Pew Center” showing that “just 6% of the survey’s national sample said that immigration was the most important electoral issue.”

But of course this was a Republican primary debate, and presumably focused on issues of concern to Republican primary voters. Why didn’t Rutten give his readers some Pew findings for Republicans, as opposed to all Americans? Could it be because they would show that immigration is indeed a big issue for these voters?Obama vs. Huckabee? - By Mickey Kaus - Slate Magazine

Mickey Kaus goes on to show, with statistics from the Pew Center, how important the immigration issue is to the campaign. But I knew that already, of course. Not because the immigration issue is important to me, because it’s part of my daily work, but because it was hot enough to shut down the Senate switchboard during the last Amnesty attempt.

Read Michael Barone’s column, A Watershed Moment on Immigration, [November 5, 2007] and you’ll see that while immigration was always important, it’s now becoming electorally important:

October 2007 may turn out to be the month that immigration became a key issue in presidential politics. It hasn’t been, at least in my lifetime.

The Immigration Act of 1965, which turned out to open up America to mass immigration after four decades of restrictive laws, wasn’t one of the Great Society issues Lyndon Johnson emphasized in 1964. The Immigration Act of 1986, which legalized millions of illegal immigrants but whose border and workplace provisions have never been effectively enforced, was a bipartisan measure unmentioned in the debates between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale.

There was no perceptible difference on immigration between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Both favored a comprehensive bill with legalization and guest-worker provisions. John Kerry in 2006 and 2007 voted for immigration bills along the lines supported by Bush.

All the previous immigration disasters happened with a minimum of debate–this one won’t. But imagine Tim Rutten [Email him]was right to say in his LA Times piece, [CNN: Corrupt News Network, December 1, 2007] that Americans aren’t concerned about immigration, then whose fault is that? Rutten’s fault, and Los Angeles Times’ fault as much as anyone’s.Haven’t they been pushing pro-immigrant sob stories and burying crime stories that make immigration look bad for the past ten or twenty years?

Rutten’s idea that CNN corruptly stressed immigration because they want to boost Lou Dobbs’s ratings is frankly weird, but, again, if Lou Dobbs is the only mainstream guy covering illegal immigration from the American point of view, he’s serving a seriously underserved market niche, like Steve Sailer covering IQ. Once again, it’s the LA Times, located as it is on the immigration frontline,that should be leading coverage of immigrant crime and illegal immigration’s negative effects. It’s not Dobbs’s fault if they’re not.