Spreadin’ Love 492

~ Laura

Should gay teens who are being bullied in school be given a school voucher to attend another school?

Dan Drezner takes aim at Friedman who says that Asian kids are winning all the Rhodes scholarships, because they aren't wasting time texting and playing video games.

Cornbread and sausage stuffing for Thanksgiving.

Published by Laura

8 thoughts on “Spreadin’ Love 492”

  1. I think it’s a good idea to give the option of a fresh start to teens who are being bullied for any reason. I don’t know why we need to limit it to one group. Once a kid’s a target, he’s a target.

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  2. My eyes are going to roll right out of my head at Friedman. Has he looked at last’s year’s list? Has he considered what 32 winners of a scholarship could possible indicate, really? It’s a really dumb hook.
    I bet the kids who just won the scholarship and saw their names pop up like that are THRILLED.
    Also, do we know how many of these Rhodes kids with the “strange” names are children of immigrants in the first place? For all Friedman knows, half the kids on that list are third- or fourth generation Americans. You know, Asian immigration to America didn’t start in 1965.

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  3. Friedman has beclowned himself again. Here are some names he left out from his list: Megan Braun, John Scotti, Tamma Carleton, Kathleen Hansen, Sarah Swenson, Gabrielle Emmanuel, Alice Baumgartner, Daniel Lage, Caroline Barlow. And there were more, but this was a .pdf, so I had to do actual WORK to type.
    Now, as far as being ultra-smart, it is certainly plausible that someone from a group among which, for a young man during the last 2000 years, doing well on a difficult high-stakes examination resulted in getting enough to eat, a nice job, marrying the prettiest girl, and hot and cold running concubines, all leading to reproductive success – that people from a group like that would be good at taking difficult examinations. On the other hand, someone from a group where being good at that sort of thing led to encouragement to join a celibate clergy – well, it’s a miracle that folks from that group can still read (and it suggests to me that the clergy wasn’t all that celibate.)

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  5. My kid’s name is Asian and guess what? We’re AMERICANS! We live here. We pay taxes. We vote. We volunteer in school. Did I mention that we pay taxes?
    I don’t like the implication that unless your name is Brindleigh or Kaighlah or Brandon, you’re not American. Maybe in 1950 or something, but not for awhile anyway . . .

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  6. The evidence dave s. adduces leads me in another direction: that there isn’t much to eugenics. Given what we know about (i) the relatively weak heritability of intelligence (measured by IQ or any other way you choose), (ii) the weak correlation between IQ and success in life, and (iii) the weak correlation between success in life and reproductive success (think Lincoln, Shakespeare, etc.), I am highly confident that the social structures of the past 1000 years have not caused genetic differences in the intelligence of Asians and Europeans. I would further note that whatever existed in China, the caste of Brahmins was definitely not chosen based on competitive examinations.

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  7. “…the relatively weak heritability of intelligence…”
    Isn’t it 50% hereditary? Isn’t that as good as the heritability of height (although of course not as good as eye color, etc.)?
    I’m becoming more interested lately in the importance of personality type, which also seems to be very heritable. If you’re a Tiggerish, high energy, short attention span person, that’s going to shape your future as much as your intelligence, although obviously the intelligence and the personality type are going to work together in complicated ways (see Wendy’s guru Deirdre Lovecky’s book “Different Minds”).

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