Cats are cuddly, and they do silly things. They're not very bright, either.

Fool am I for thinking I had a fruitful debate with KT Cat about his racist assertion that "blacks were destroying civilization at the molecular level". They do this apparently by fucking irresponsibly, which is chiefly abetted by receiving unnecessary civil rights and welfare, explains Mr. Cat. Removing these things, he postulates, would stop them from fucking like savages (see comments). He has since surfaced on another blog, combative and obstinate as ever in defending his ideas.

Mr. Cat has several mathematics degrees, so I'm sure his correlations between getting jiggy with it, race and success are clear and plain for everyone to see, quite QED, thankyouverymuch.

 I tried to explain to Mr. Cat that I wasn't interested in his math, but his conclusions. Statistics are everywhere. Correlations are everywhere. I've only got a lousy associate's degree in general studies, but I think it's a basic fact that you can't establish positive relationships based on just correlations. Hell, I can put together two correlated data points and say a whole mess of crazy shit. Here's what I'm looking for- these are "spurious relationships" wherein "correlation does not imply causation". Exactly. Thanks, Wikipedia. You can't look at high illegitimacy in the black community and their living condition and say "Eureka! One causes the other"(I think this is also known as a common cause/post hoc fallacy). There are other races to consider, and other economic strata to consider. There's location. There's history. Positing some sort of bell curve of irresponsibility based merely on sex and the effects of entitlements is like, the dumbest fucking thing I've heard all month so far, and I'm in the army(although I have to insist that entitled whites are doing just the same damage to civilization with a different sort of illegitimacy, so maybe there's some comity between KT and myself on this issue). Especially when you can't get your statistics straight. That causes a bit of a problem for the budding statistician.

It is a fact that KT Cat is not a racist. He does, however, hold some rather racist ideas. It happens. But how can KT make racist statements in a country that has no racism problem? That's another pet theory KT has. According to him, the Jena imbroglio proves that racism is nearly nonexistent, due to the fact that it happened. Allow me to explain. The newsworthiness of the story(and I'm probably getting too far into KT's head here than I am comfortable with) is proof that it is rare, and that is oh-kay for Mr. Cat. The fact that it is happening at all 140 years after slavery was abolished and nearly 35 years of integration isn't really important here. A little racism is bound to happen. What's the harm, eh? Just a few bad apples.

What's humorous to me is that KT and his buddy completely missed what caused the Jena situation in the first place. Had it not been for the excessive charges against the black youths, there probably wouldn't have been much of a stir(I admit of course there would have been a stir nonetheless). What disturbed many was that the boys were going to go to jail for exorbitantly long periods of time for attempted murder(one going to be tried as an adult at sixteen) while the white kids were going to get away being disciplined with "pranks". So, I don't think it's a big leap to say that the racism here infiltrated the judicial system, hence the protest and the spotlight.

None of this is mentioned in KT's coverage of the situation. His take kinda ignored the entire event, providing a video instead- seeming to ask "why don't all black people just act like this?". KT goes on to project overstatement of racism upon lefties ("liberals think it's everywhere"-well, he's right on that, it's just more insidious than it's ever been), and thinks that people who feel racism is alive, well, and ugly are ginning it up to own some sort of liberal article of faith/cause celebre (or maybe it's somethin' from those blacks destroying civilization?), when in fact racism in America is imaginary-the equivalent of seeing the Virgin Mary in your english muffin.

Why ANYONE would do such a thing like pretending that racism exists for any reason boggles the mind(why anyone would pretend it doesn't is equally disturbing to me). But, expect that your fixation upon victimization and your need for feelgood politics is their answer for a start, libs. Any deeper than that into the conservative mind and you are on your own.

UPDATE:I think if I had stayed in school a little longer, this reply from Robert Farley to William Saletan would be my response to KT using amateur/junk science as a shield to say racist stuff:

Saletan writes two columns purporting to demonstrate not simply that African-Americans are inherently intellectually inferior to whites, but that liberals who question this finding are anti-science. In other words, the science is so compelling that any argument against the racial inferiority hypothesis must be generated by political, rather than scientific, considerations...

I would like to think that a few good social science methodology courses would impress upon Saletan and his ilk the difficulties associated with this kind of science; the trouble operationalizing the dependent variable, the dangers of drawing inferences in the presence of bad variables, and the virtual impossibility of excluding environmental variables from the process. I'd like to think that Saletan would at least be more cautious about the kinds of claims he's making if he were familiar with some basic philosophy of science question, but I don't know that it's true.

UPDATE Part Deux: Welcome, MyDDers! This thing is metastasizing quite a bit beyond the reach of my pitiful little blogworld. Natasha of course did a far far better job than I did making clear that first causes of cultural problems are not what they seem-and they certainly aren't going to be found in prejudices left lying around by racists. Unfortunately, Mr. Cat is probably not going to be around much to further explain his position. After all, you're not statisticians like him, so what do you know?

tags: jena  racism  

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