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Re: Is Bob Only Exaggerating?
Bob Whitaker (bwhit@conterra.com)
Tue, 28 Jan 1997 10:55:55 -0500
smaceach@polar.bowdoin.edu wrote:
>
> <frank@clark.net> wrote:
> >
> > It is the last decade I really do want to find out about. The voices of
> > the educational establishment in Rushton's support were not very loud.
>
> They don't like him. They think he does bad science. But the CAUT was in
> on it, IIRC, and there was a significant number of letters in support of
> his tenure.
Academic freedom is for those you like. That's called Political
Correctness.
It's a funny thing: 1) anybody who disagrees with PC is always just
doing bad scientific work and 2) everything you happen to want to be
true is good science.
Your credibility is zero.
>
> > Steven Jay Gould sign anything on Rushton's behalf?
>
> No idea.
>
> > Why not show *positive* evidence FOR racial equality.
> > These nose holder believe in it. Where's their evidence.
>
> Ummm, what sort do you want? Cultural? I've been trying to provide
> that from my own work in African archaeology? Genetics? See the
> stuff posted here about sub-speciation in humans? Intelligence? Look
> at all the critiques of IQ work and the variety of axes along which
> IQ has been shown to vary. Besides, if you want to establish something as
> important as differential intelligence or cultural potential among
> human populations -- then you're making huge political and scientific
> claims, and the person claiming that such differences exist must take
> up the onus of proving them. And from what I've seen of late-20th
> century 'racial science', it's in a sad state.
>
> > I wrote to some Holocaust Revisionists about this, and they did turn up a
> > small group of Gulag Deniers or at least claimants that the atrocities are
> > "greatly exaggerated."
>
> It wouldn't surprise me that it exists; the Net has room for every variety
> of nonsense that I can imagine. But I see no such equivalent to the
> variety of Holocaust revisionists on here -- we have no alt.revisionism.gulag
> group that I knwo of.
>
> > and large still are successful, as there is no *book* I can buy that
> > answers the Holocaust Revisionists point-by-point, though I can buy books
> > refuting Velikovsy and the Creationists.
>
> That may be the case, although I think that there's such an overwhelming
> mass of data on works on the Holocaust that such a book would be
> unnecessary. Refuting such claims (usually sets of claims) is usually
> unrewarding; they are mishmashes of old, discredited data, and the people
> making them aren't amenable to convincing in any case. I find it interesting
> that evidentiary claims for both the racists and the revisionists on these
> newsgroups have the same characteristics as claims by creationists,
> Velikovskyites, von Danikenites and so on -- they rely on a very few
> discrete sources, they cross-reference to an unbelievable extent, they
> use old data and they regard critics as representatives of various
> conspiracies against them. Playing with them gets dull fast; last year
> an article from a 1911 Encyclopedia Brtiannica on race was resurrected as
> proof that racism had a scientific basis -- and to respond to that you
> have to basically reinvent 20th-century anthropology for the edification
> of the reader.
>
> Scott
> ____________________
>
> Scott MacEachern
> Department of Sociology and Anthropology
> Bowdoin College
> Brunswick, ME 04011
>
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