Cingulate posted:

I don't understand this sentence. You're talking about non-western scientists who're down with Scientific Racism, and it is significant they're also down with the rest of science?

Silver2195 posted:

I think he's saying that a lot of Asian scientists with no a priori ideological reason not to believe that Asians are inherently superior to blacks still reject scientific racism.

Cingulate posted:

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Silver2195 posted:

I think this quote is far too long, but I find the bit at the end about MacDonald surprising; I thought that even people who are on-board with scientific racism generally thought Culture of Critique was a bit out there.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Back when I was still sorta young, when OJ's glove was a point of popular water-cooler conversation and the World Wide Web was just a germ in a Petri dish, that's when I spent my Saturdays at the local university library scouring databases for promising references, pulling journals from the stacks or from microfilm reels, and obsessively photocopying anything that captured my attention. At home, I maintained topic-labeled three-ring binders crammed with whatever seemed worth reading twice. Lit-crit and film-crit. Off-center political screeds. Folklore and crime studies. And a big fat one teeming with journal articles by people like Linda Gottfredson, Raymond Cattell, E.O. Wilson, David Lykken, Richard Herrnstein, and Steven Goldberg. I referred to that batch as “sociological pornography,” a term I borrowed from one particularly shrill exhibit in what then registered as a seismically contentious debate over a surprise bestseller called The Bell Curve.

When the first Web terminals were installed, I logged on, pulled up the HotBot search engine, and pecked around until, quite to my surprise, I stumbled upon a loose network of archival sites and webzines – “Upstream,” “Pinc,” and “Stalking the Wild Taboo” are the ones I recall – that provided light-speed access to the kind of material that I had been reading and collecting. So it turned out it was a brand – just like cyberpunk or Milton Bradley. I don't remember the first time I encountered the term “human biodiversity” (a better hook than “sociological pornography,” I admit), but it wasn’t long before I would be humbled to discover a nascent crop of insightful blogs devoted to “HBD” and related subjects. I suppose Steve Sailer and Razib Khan get the lion’s share of credit (or blame) for setting things in motion, but what’s sure is that HBD has since come occupy a peculiar and generally fascinating corner of online culture. Arguments and data sources that were once buried in obscure journals are now posted online by field researchers and dilettantes as a matter of course. Meanwhile, the usual coteries of PC pecksniffs pretend not to notice. Or huff on cue when they do.

At this point, there's little left to do but pick favorites and supply your fix. And for the past few years, some of the choicest cuts of HBD-flavored insight and speculation have issued from the keyboard of a statistically unlikely source: To wit, that of a chick – “HBD Chick.” Though I know her only through email correspondence, I am more than reasonably convinced – by firsthand eyewitness accounts, among other nuances – that, contrary to one tenacious strand of web lore, HBD Chick really is a female representative of the species, complete with ovaries, appropriate estrogen levels, an emoticon-dense writing style, and, I like to imagine, a menagerie of stuffed animals adorably huddled on her bedroom dresser. Of course, what makes H-Chick worth reading isn't her gender, but her bailiwick. While many HBD bloggers seem content to write almost exclusively about race and IQ and social declension, usually with politics in-frame (not that there's anything wrong with that), H-Chick plots a more distinctive – and, to my mind, more interesting – course, curating data sources and promoting theories that shed light on the little-explored relationship between family structure, altruism, culture, and human evolution. She stood out as an articulate objector when that Ron Unz article was making the rounds last year, and while she seems secure in her niche, it should be noted that she never shies away from the more manifestly controversial aspects of HBD-ology – a point that was repeatedly made clear when she agreed to chat with the Hoover Hog about the big, not-so-scary subject that she has come to know as well as she knows the Star Wars universe.

So what do Wookiees and Tusken Raiders have to teach us about human biodiversity? I guess that’s a question I forgot to ask. We did cover a lot of ground, though, and I think there’s a better than average chance you’ll learn something from this one. So wade on in, crimethinkers and naysayers. And feel free to talk back. Nothing’s off limits (though “TITS or GTFO” comments will be deleted or ignored).

THE HOOVER HOG: OK, first things first: What is "HBD," Chick? And while we're laying the foundation, I suppose I should also ask: Why does it matter?

HBD CHICK: What is HBD or human biodiversity? Good question! I recently asked the good readers of my blog to help me define HBD, ’cause it's one of those things that "I know it when I see it" but can be kind of hard to pin down. I'll quote for you a definition that another blogger, Nelson, offered, because he really hit the nail squarely on the head I think:

“HBD: The set of biological and genetic differences between (and within) groups – specifically, the study of such differences.”

I would throw in there, too, something about how these differences are the result of evolutionary processes. Also, that "groups" refers to all sorts of populations: men and women, different races, different ethnic groups – even subgroups within these larger groups, which a lot of people tend to overlook, I think. I guess I'd want to mention as well that these differences between groups are average differences and that we should always keep in mind that individuals within groups usually don't match their group's average exactly.

See? It's complicated!

HBD matters in all sorts of ways, from designing medical treatments for different populations (BiDil, for example) to thinking about immigration policies (if different populations really are innately different in various ways, what are the potential implications of mass immigration?) to helping kids get the most out of their education so that they have a solid foundation on which to build the best possible lives for themselves (in other words, we need to remember that, unlike in Lake Wobegon, all children can't be "above average").

A lot of people out there label HBDers and sociobiologists as “racists” with diabolical plots to repress some group or another. Personally, I want to help people – and I think pretty much all the other HBDers out there feel the same. There are a lot of social problems in this world that need solving, and I’m of a mind that you actually need to understand what the causes of those problems are if you want to effectively do something about them. It seems to me to be a huge mistake to ignore potential biological differences between individuals and/or groups just to be politically correct – a huge mistake that can wind up to be ultimately detrimental to the welfare of so many people.

What prompted your interest in such a troublesome topic? Was there a particular book or article – or an observation – that caught your attention? Something that piqued your curiosity or changed your mind?

Well, I think my interest in HBD has been coming on for a long time, actually. I remember as a kid having a picture book/lexicon – it was a book for preschoolers or kindergarteners – and in it were a few pages devoted to different sorts of humans – Eskimos and Indians, that sort of thing – and I was absolutely transfixed by them! Fast forward a few years and I wound up studying anthropology in college, but pretty much only the cultural side of it, although I did eventually become aware of evolutionary psychology (the Tooby & Cosmides variety) and stuff like Pinker's The Blank Slate. One sunny Saturday afternoon I got it into my head (I can't remember why) to google "genes and behavior," or something like that, and I discovered Steve Sailer and GNXP, and ... well ... that was it. I was hooked!

If you spend enough time reading and poring over graphs, it's easy to forget how this stuff is likely to be received in polite company. We now have access to so much information – psychometric and behavior-genetic research, genomic and haplotypic data, and an unprecedented wealth of statistical tools – yet it seems that this has done little to change the broader intellectual atmosphere where ideas and issues are discussed. I guess it's sort of OK to mention, say, twin research as a point of general interest, but the moment you broach the social implications that might follow, the mood changes and it's back to blank-slate decorum. And of course, scholars who stray outside the bounds of the prevailing (public) discourse are still routinely subjected to ridicule and censure. So, I guess I'm curious about a couple of things. First, how would you compare your experience chatting up HBD online versus "in real life" – or do you find the interpersonal stuff isn't worth the bother? Second, if you agree that the situation is hypocritical or paradoxical or just weird or whatever, what do you think accounts for the disconnect between public and private (or anonymous) discourse where matters of society and biology are at issue? Are things getting better for those of us who favor intellectual freedom over taboo? Are they getting worse?

Oh, I’m an inveterate coward when it comes to discussing HBD in real life! When I do discuss HBD face-to-face with others, it’s usually with another HBDer or someone who, bless their hearts, generally tolerates my eccentricities for whatever reasons. (^_^) I’ve recently become a bit braver in broaching the subject with a couple of acquaintances who are quite politically correct – I’ve been trying to introduce the subject to them gradually to see if I can make any headway in their thinking. I’ll let you know how it goes!

There is definitely a disconnect between what most people say they think about human differences and how they behave. We see this in the sorts of friends people generally have, where they choose to live, whom they marry, whom they want their daughters to marry. HBD-denial is hypocritical, but I don’t think it’s a very conscious hypocrisy coming from most people. Man is a social creature, and most people just really want to “fit in” and belong to the group – to be accepted. So whatever the prevailing majority opinion is – whether it be political correctness or tulip mania – most individuals are just going to swing in that direction. I used to find it weird, and even annoying as hell, but once you understand that that it’s simply human nature, it’s just better to get on with it. What requires more explanation, in a way, is where us contrarians come from! (~_^)

Are things getting better or worse for those who favor intellectual freedom? Depends on what day you ask me that! Sometimes I’m optimistic when I see the kind of research that’s (quietly) being done out there, or the kinds of books being published by actual scientists (The 10,000 Year Explosion, for instance), or the ever-increasing number of HBD blogs out there being added – practically weekly! – to the list of long-established ones (Jayman’s, Nelson’s, and Human Varieties are just a few examples of some of the new ones)! On the other hand, most academics are still – justifiably! – afraid of being "Watsoned" out of their careers simply for committing the crimethink that there may be biodiversity within the human species. That is not a healthy state of affairs for society at all.

The answers – and I’m sure it’ll all be much more complicated than anyone right now supposes – are coming down the pipeline, though, and they will be here sooner than those who support political correctness expect. As many of the folks reading out there are probably already aware, the Chinese are not afraid of looking into HBD (see the Beijing Genomic Institute’s Cognitive Genomics Project, for example), so the data are coming whether we like it or not!

Your web persona is sort of summed up in your tagline, "the exception that proves the rule." Why do you think the subject of biological differences in human populations is so disproportionately engaged by the y-chromosome club? This seems to be true in scholarly circles as well as in the blogosphere – and speaking of the latter, does it surprise you that "HBD" has come to represent a niche of web culture?

That there are more men than women into human biodiversity is just another example of human biodiversity in action! (~_^) I think there are a number of reasons why there are not many women HBDers out there (and probably a bunch more that I haven’t thought of).

First, human biodiversity/sociobiology has been very much focused on intelligence (IQ) – for good reason! The intelligence of individuals, and the average intelligence of a population, is extremely important with regard to success or failure in life. But intelligence studies come with an awful lot of tables and charts and mathematics – lots of technical stuff that, I think, is very off-putting to most women. (Although there are/have been more female researchers in intelligence than you might think: Linda Gottfredsen is probably the most well-known nowadays, but there are/were also women like Nancy Bayley, Sarah Broman, and Mary R. Davies. I think the interest in IQ for a lot of those women was related to children, though – their studies were connected to child development and education and so on, so that was the draw there – as opposed to pure psychometrics, I mean.)

I confess that all the psychometric technical stuff often makes my eyes glaze over! I commented to someone recently that I think that’s why the focus of my own blogging has been geared more (much more!) towards mating patterns and altruism and the nature of extended families and clans rather than IQ. I mean, who marries whom and which families fight with each other? It’s like following a big soap opera! (~_^)

Women are also, in general, much more social than men, so what I said above about people being driven to accept the majority opinion applies more to women than to men, I think. For that reason, I think you get fewer women HBDers, since these ideas are still beyond the pale right now. Finally, more men are on the far right end of the intelligence scales so again you’ll simply have more guy HBDers than chicks, especially while the focus in HBD remains on IQ which requires lots of nerdy math skills. Come to think of it, many women probably wouldn’t like to hear that there are more men on the far right end of intelligence scales (people take these things so personally!), so that’s likely to turn some of them off HBD right there.

I haven’t ever really thought about whether or not it’s odd that HBD has become a niche on the internet, but now that you mention it, it is interesting! Having said that, I’ve spent a lot of time on the internet (way too much time!), since the early days of the web really, and the entire virtual environment – up until a couple of years ago when the Facebook crowd discovered the internet (~_^) – has always been one populated by specialist, niche groups (many of which are unmentionable!), so the presence and growth of the HBD corner never struck me as very odd, really.

Do you think the "under-representation" of female voices in HBD forums – or in science generally – is a cause for concern? Would things be different if more girls traded fashion magazines for Tooby & Cosmides? Would a plurality of HBD chicks alter the tenor or substance of the conversation, or the common perception that HBD is, um, sexist and racist?

The imbalance in the number of men versus women in the HBD-o-sphere or in science is something that I lose ZERO sleep over at night. Really – it’s something that doesn’t worry or bother me in the slightest. All I wish for any discipline or profession is that the best able and most qualified persons for the job are there doing it, regardless of the ratios of men to women or whites to blacks or tall to short people or whatever.

This is something that I think the politically correct, pro-diversity (but biodiveristy-denying) crowd gets completely wrong. They seem to want a sort-of superficial, Benetton-billboard diversity in which a variety of individuals of different sexes and colors are included in … whatever … but who all wear the same clothes from Banana Republic and drink Starbucks and have iPhones and, of course, have the same politically correct ideas. What they’re missing out on in this one-size-fits-all version of diversity is that, thanks to biodiversity, individuals and groups have different strengths (and different weaknesses, too – we’re all human!) – strengths that we ought to be tapping into (in reality our society still does this to a large extent, thank goodness).

Steve Sailer (and I) wrote about a very interesting and amusing human biodiversity documentary series that came out of Norway a couple of years ago – “Brainwash.” One episode was about Scandinavia’s “gender equality paradox” – i.e., the fact that, in Scandinavia, where they have bent over backwards to ensure that the sexes have absolute equality in education and career opportunities, etc., etc., something like 90% of nurses are women and 90% of engineers are men. This is a great example of the phenomenon that – to the horror, I’m sure, of all feminists and politically correct persons everywhere – the more the environment is equalized for everybody in society, the more people’s innate interests and abilities come to the fore.

And what is wrong with that?! If we’ve got, on the one hand, a large segment of the population that is good at caring for others and likes to do that, and on the other we’ve got another large segment of the population that is good at designing bridges and likes to do that, society ought to make use of that! – to the benefit of us all. Of course keep the opportunities open so that the exceptions to the rules can do what suits them best, but don’t work against the grain of nature either. That just seems like a lot of wasted energy and resources to me.

It's funny: even though I've lived in West Virginia my entire life, I don't think I had ever thought seriously about cousin marriage until I read Steve Sailer's classic article on the subject. But this seems to be an area where you've done a lot of heavy lifting, or at least I think it's fair to say that consanguinity and related matters – familialism, nepotism, familial altruism -- account for a distinctive point of focus in your project. Can you explain, perhaps with a few clarifying examples, why family structure is an important subject, and how it ties in to human evolution?

You asked earlier if there was a single book or article that got me interested in human biodiversity, and I said that there really wasn’t, that it was more of a gradual thing; but that classic article of Steve’s – “Cousin Marriage Conundrum” – really set me off in one direction within HBD! It was that article, plus Stanley Kurtz and Parapundit’s writings on the issue, that really piqued my interest in cousin marriage (and mating patterns in general) and the effects that it can have on a society.

To sum up Steve’s article, he pointed out that, in societies with a lot of cousin marriage, like in Iraq and Afghanistan, the extended family is much more important to people than here in the West, so it’s difficult to establish and maintain things like liberal democracy and a low-corruption, low-nepotism society, since everybody is more focused on accruing benefits for their respective extended families than on what is best for the commonweal. Which got me to thinking: if those societies don’t manage democracy and are corrupt because they have cousin marriage, perhaps we in the West have democracy and aren’t so corrupt because we don’t practice cousin marriage. Which, to make a long story short, seems to be the case – at least I think I’ve accumulated an awful lot of circumstantial evidence that strongly indicates this to be the case.

The key to it all, I think, is the selection for altruistic behaviors thanks to what is known as inclusive fitness in biological circles. Evolution via natural selection means that the traits of the most “fit” individuals – i.e., those that survive the best in an environment and manage to produce the most viable offspring – will be selected for. Inclusive fitness takes that idea a step further and predicts that any individual can increase his fitness if he helps close relatives to reproduce as well, since those close relatives will share a great number of genes in common with him. This, then, is how genes for altruistic behaviors can be selected for in a population: Since those individuals having genes for altruistic behavior help their relatives to reproduce more than those who do not, their altruistic genes spread because, in addition to leaving copies of their own altruism genes behind in the next generation (in their own kids), they help to pass on additional copies of those same altruism genes possessed by their relatives.

Long-term close mating can accelerate this selection for altruism genes. Since the members of families that regularly marry cousins (or other close relatives) share a greater number of genes in common with each other than those in families that don’t inbreed, the inclusive fitness payoffs for inbred individuals are, on average, greater than for individuals who are not inbred. What you wind up with, I think, is a sort of intense evolutionary arms race of altruism genes in inbred societies. Those families that are more altruistic towards their members succeed in having the most offspring – until some new and improved altruistic behavior pops up in another extended family, which then becomes more successful because of that trait, and so on, and so on. And the numbers of these “familial altruism” genes increase more rapidly in an inbreeding society since the inclusive fitness payoffs are greater.

The flip-side of being altruistic towards your family is being un-altruistic towards non-family, which is exactly what you see in inbreeding societies. In inbred clannish or tribal societies, like those found in the Arab world or in Iraq or Afghanistan, the altruism that is directed towards family members comes at the expense of any potential altruism that may have been directed towards neighbors or other members of society. Not only that, I think that these un-altruistic behaviors can also be selected for in inbred societies. A lot of the – what seems inexplicable to us – types of violence that we see in place like Syria, where there is just an endless series of battles between clans, starts to make sense if you know that these populations have been inbreeding literally for millennia.

Most populations in the world have long histories of some form or another of cousin marriage – everyone from the Arabs to the Chinese to the Mayans to the Yanomamo and Eskimos inbreed (or have inbred up until very recently) to different degrees. One of the odd exceptions to this rule is Europeans, in particular northwest Europeans (especially the English, the Dutch, the Belgians, the northern French, the northern Italians, the Germans, the Scandinavians to a slightly lesser degree, and probably some others like the Swiss). Europeans have been outbreeding since the medieval period thanks, in large part, to the Roman Catholic Church (and some of the later Protestant churches). I think that this resulted in the selection for a whole other set of altruism genes in northwest Europeans – rather than the “familial altruism” behaviors we find in more inbred parts of the world, northwest Europeans possess (I think) a greater number of traits related to “reciprocal altruism” which have provided the foundation for things like liberal democracy and low corruption societies.

The main lesson to be drawn from all this (if any of it is correct at all!) is that it will be difficult, if not impossible, in the short-term, to transfer to other societies many of the curious and unique developments that occurred in western societies in the last five hundred to one thousand years, since those developments have depended upon the innate nature of northwest Europeans, the evolution of which was driven in part by the long history of the avoidance of cousin marriage in Europe.

It makes a lot of sense. But if inclusive fitness explains familial altruism, what explains reciprocal altruism? Is it your view that genes for fair play and extra-familial trust were individually selected, with Christendom acting as a kind of cultural accelerant? Or does that merely beg the question as to why Catholic (or catholic) ideas reached critical mass in the first place?

Ah. Well, first of all, inclusive fitness doesn’t explain only (what I’ve dubbed) “familial altruism.” Inclusive fitness simply means that, if you were to try to figure out how “fit” any individual organism was, i.e., very roughly speaking how many viable offspring that individual leaves behind in the next generation, you shouldn’t just add up the number of children that individual had, but also – since reproduction is really ultimately about genes and not organisms – any genes that the individual shared with relatives in the next generation. So, if you were to sit down to calculate how fit you are, you should add up all of your genes in your kids plus any copies of your genes in your nieces and nephews and, maybe, your cousins’ kids and so on and so forth. To paraphrase a popular bumper-sticker, he who dies with the most genes in the next generation wins!

Inclusive fitness, then, can help to explain all sorts of altruistic behaviors, not just my special case of “familial altruism.” Even in a very outbred society (like most of western Europe and most populations in the United States), it also “pays” – in terms of inclusive fitness – to be altruistic towards close family members (siblings, nieces and nephews, cousins), because you do share a good deal of genes with them. When explaining inclusive fitness, everyone likes to quote the British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane who, in response to being asked if he would sacrifice himself for a drowning brother, said no, but he would for two brothers or eight cousins. Which is the right calculation – if one wanted to break even, genetically-speaking! – since probability says we share half of our genes with siblings and one-eighth of our genes with first cousins.

What a lot of people seem to have overlooked, though (at least I haven’t seen very many people writing about this), is that once you start inbreeding, you are more related to your siblings and first cousins than someone who doesn’t inbreed. I’ve seen figures for regularly inbreeding populations in which first cousins probably (this is a probability figure) share, on average, twice as many genes with each other than individuals in an outbreeding society do with their first cousins. So this is why I figure that in inbreeding societies the “inclusive fitness payoffs” must be greater than in outbreeding societies; and this, I think, is what pushes for the rather rapid selection for “familial altruism” behaviors in inbreeding populations. But altruistic behaviors are still selected for in outbreeding populations thanks to inclusive fitness, just not so … intensively (I think!).

My working theory (which could be completely and fantastically wrong, of course!) is that, as a result of the odd circumstance of long-term outbreeding being imposed on European populations – especially northwest European populations – any selection for “familial altruism” behaviors was relaxed and greater selection for “extra-familial altruism” behaviors as you put it (I like that!) was able to happen. Over the course of the medieval period in Europe, the population was simply prohibited from marrying cousins. As a result, the degrees of relatedness between individuals in the population shifted from people being very closely related to extended family members to being much less so. Consequently, the inclusive fitness payoffs for being altruistic to extended family also decreased. People no longer shared (let’s suppose) one-quarter of their genes with their first cousins, but only one-eighth. The difference between the amount of genes they shared with their first cousins versus, say, a neighbor wasn’t so great anymore. So it might start to pay okay to be altruistic towards your neighbor, too, not just your extended family members. Traits for “extra-familial altruism” could now be selected for – and were, I think – thanks to the loosening of genetic bonds between family members in Europe.

Some people might want to view this as some sort of “group selection” favoring altruism towards the broader group rather than the family or something like that, but that is incorrect. From what I understand – and I defer to real population geneticists on this issue (which is something I really hate to do, by the way – I like to understand something myself, so one of these days I’m going to have to actually learn some population genetics!) – natural selection works on individuals and not on groups (except for in a very few special circumstances, apparently). As far as I can see, these various types of altruistic behaviors – either familial or extra-familial – are being selected for in individuals, not between groups. Depending on the circumstances (i.e., the selection pressures), either individuals who are more altruistic towards family members, or individuals who are comparatively not so altruistic towards family members, are the fittest. That’s all. It may look like some sort of behavioral pattern is being selected for across a whole group, but I think everyone needs to remember that a group is just a bunch of individuals.

The Christian Church – and secular princes and kings – imposed this practice of outbreeding on Europeans without, I think, much understanding of what the long-term consequences might be – except for Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, who were both concerned about building a “Christian society.” Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologica that “incest would prevent people widening their circle of friends” and that “when a man takes a wife from another family he is joined in special friendship with her relations; they are to him as his own” – so he (and he based his ideas on St. Augustine’s) intuited that too much close marriage would not be a good thing for building God’s Kingdom Here On Earth, so to speak. They probably didn’t understand the biological implications of their little genetic engineering project, but some of the early church theologians really did have a pretty good grasp of human nature!

I don’t think I had ever heard of the “Hajnal line” before I encountered the term in your blog. Can you explain what it is, and where it informs your thinking?

Oh, the good old Hajnal line! No, I hadn’t heard of it before last year either. In the 1960s, John Hajnal noticed a curious feature in Europe populations and that is the fact that, compared to just about everybody else in the world, northwest Europeans have this history (going back to at least the 1500s) of marrying quite late (mid-20s+) and/or not marrying at all. The line divides eastern and western Europe, but some other areas – like southern Italy and Spain, Ireland, and parts of Finland – are also “outside” the Hajnal line.

I picked up on it from an historian of medieval Europe and family history, Michael Mitterauer. In his book, Why Europe?, Mitterauer discusses at some length how the Hajnal line coincides in space with the extent of manorialism in medieval Europe, the connection being that, because young people often had to wait to take possession of a farm within the medieval manor system, they also had to wait to marry. I suspect that, over time, this led to the selection for, as they call it, “low time preference” in northwestern Europeans – or, at least, that this was the start of it in Europe. In other words, those individuals who could “restrain themselves” were eventually rewarded with reproductive success in the form of having access to a dedicated piece of farmland on a manor. These are (some of) the people who successfully reproduced in the Middle Ages (along with the aristocracy).

Interestingly, the Hajnal line seems to coincide with other curious features of northwestern European society, too, such as little or no cousin marriage. Mitterauer makes the (convincing, I think) argument that the various bans on cousin marriage across medieval Europe enabled the spread of manors eastwards across the continent out of the Frankish heartland in northeast France/Belgium, since the cousin marriage ban weakened European clans, and clans and manorialism did not go together, the manor system being based around nuclear families. Mitterauer points out the eastern limit of manorialism in Europe coincides with the Hajnal line and with the earliest and strongest bans on cousin marriage. Cousin marriage was, eventually, banned in eastern Europe (Russia, for example), but much later than in western Europe. Also, extended families seem to be more important “outside” the Hajnal line, in eastern Europe for example. Even average IQs appear to be generally higher “inside” the line than out, so I suspect that Hajnal’s discovery is much more important biologically than folks have supposed up ’til now. Population geneticists and evolutionary biologists really ought to take a very close look at it.

Most folks out there who are interested in human biodiversity and the differences we see in American society today have probably read Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, but I cannot recommend enough Mitterauer’s Why Europe? for really understanding where Europeans came from! It should really be on everyone’s shelf next to “Albion’s Seed” (or also on their Kindles). I think, taking a page out of “The 10,000 Year Explosion,” that the medieval period really shaped Europeans – even transformed them (us!) – especially northwest Europeans. And I think the population’s switch to regular outbreeding (i.e., the avoidance of cousin marriage) played a huge role in that transformation because it set the stage for a whole new range of selection pressures to act on the population. The loosening of genetic ties in medieval Europe led the population down a path towards greater individuality versus collectivity, greater feelings of universalism versus particularism, and less of an orientation towards the extended family and more of a focus on the commonweal. These are all really a very unique set of traits compared to most other human populations, and the roots of those traits are biological, and their origins not that old. At least that’s what I think!

Something I like about your project is that you never seem to push a political agenda, at least not overtly. But it’s easy to see how a bio-realistic account of human nature – like any theory of human nature, I suppose – can, and perhaps should, inform debate over public policy. Immigration is one fairly obvious area where bio-social factors might be relevant, but if you are right about the relationship between consanguinity and liberal or trust-based institutions, there would seem to be real-world implications related to foreign policy and military goals, and maybe such knowledge should influence how we view laws that restrict or prohibit intra-familial marriage or other marriage arrangements. You can address the politics of cousin marriage if you like, but I’m more interested in your thoughts on the general relationship between sociobiology and policy, or if you prefer, between “is” and “ought.” Is HBD “right” or “left,” or something else? Or is it just empiricism?

I, personally, would prefer it – and I think it would be better for everybody concerned (and that pretty much means everyone on the planet) – if the study of human biodiversity, sociobiology, was completely divorced from politics. It should just be empiricism – it should just be a science (with maybe a little history and anthropology thrown in). It really needs to be because, again, I think that if we’re ever to have a field called “applied human biodiversity” – you know, where we try to solve some of those problems in society or between societies – then we need the data first – we need the facts – we need to know what’s going on – how it works.

Sociobiology/human biodiversity should be just the same as studying beetles or butterflies. But, of course, since the subject matter is ourselves, it’s pretty much impossible for us to leave our feelings and drives completely at home. We can try, but we’ll never manage to be fully objective about ourselves. How could we be? We can’t get out of our own heads. But at least if we try to be aware of our biases and be upfront about them – well, that would go a long way in helping to make the study of human biodiversity as unbiased as possible.

I try to leave my own political opinions at home as much as I can when I think and blog about human biodiversity, because I really don’t want my own sentiments to cloud my judgment or presentation of the facts. But it’s difficult! They do slip out sometimes. Plus we all have all those cognitive biases and whatnot, so … it’s really hard work trying to be as objective as possible! And, again, none of us can be completely objective. That’s impossible.

I also can’t see why anybody would care about what my political opinions are! – except maybe to inform them on what some of my biases might be. So, for the record, I’m something of a conservative, although I’m very socially liberal (I don’t care what you do at home as long as you’re not hurting someone – against their will – although I’d prefer it if you kept it at home). My main conservative bug is immigration: I think there’s too much today, and it’s happening too fast, especially given what little we understand about human biodiversity so far and, due to that lack of understanding, that we don’t know what the ultimate consequences of all this mass immigration will be (although history does offer some clues, none of them very nice). I like Steve Sailer’s “citizenism” a lot – “Americans and their government should be biased in favor of the welfare of our current fellow citizens” – and I think I always come down on the side of Americans over potential immigrants when deciding what sort of policy I’ll support or which politician I will vote for (none of them, usually!). I’m not actually very optimistic that citizenism will catch on or be successful any time soon (human nature argues against it ever working fully), but it does match my own sentiments rather well. I also think we should quit interfering so much with the business of other nations, especially insisting that they should be democratic just like us. Other populations have very different cultures from us, not to mention different evolutionary histories. Democracy (and other elements of Western civilization) just might not fit their societies. Why should we keep insisting that they adopt our ways?

In today’s world, HBD seems to fit better with the conservative end of the political spectrum. Conservative ideas tend to hover around the notions that humans are imperfect and that there’s not much to be done about it really except to come up with some clever workarounds and then hope for the best; so in that regard HBD and conservatism go quite well together – unless you bring religious conservatives into the picture who don’t buy evolutionary theories. But I don’t think HBD must necessarily belong only to conservatives. Many socialists in the past actively promoted eugenical ideas – Margaret Sanger, for instance – so it’s not impossible for leftist, progressive individuals to also understand and accept ideas relating to human biodiversity. It’s just that today the political left is all caught up in political correctness – most of them are a bit (quite a bit!) lost at the moment – but I don’t think it has to be that way.

In my ideal world (which I realize can never exist due to the nature of humans, but I can still dream!), the sociobiologists would be sent out to gather the data, and then we’d all sit down afterwards to discuss the findings – in a civil manner – and work towards agreements on how best to apply the knowledge gained for the benefit of all. I’m sure I could do this with some leftists out there (Jayman, for instance!), but most people on the left would not be interested because currently they’re too politically correct. Most people on the right today wouldn’t manage, either, for that matter.

The subjects you write about are generally controversial in the sense that they tend to grate against politically correct sensibilities, but I thought it might be fun to pick your brain about some controversies that play out within the HBD community. You’ve already mentioned group selection, so maybe we can begin with homosexuality. It’s an interesting case, I think, because, at least in the U.S., the prevailing (politically correct) view seems to be that gay people are “born that way,” which is to say that sexual orientation is wholly or mostly a product of biology and, often implicitly, genetics. The weird part, of course, is that people who credulously hold this (strong HBD) view are very often hostile toward other bio-deterministic explanations of human behavioral differences, including differences between men and women. It’s even weirder when you consider that the behavior-genetic evidence suggests that homosexuality is significantly less heritable than, say, IQ or conscientiousness. And it’s yet a notch weirder when you add in the fact that it’s extremely difficult to come up with evolutionary scenarios that would have selected for and sustained same-sex attraction (at least between men) since common sense suggests that true “gay genes” would be quickly pruned out of the mix as carriers failed to pass those genes on through sexual reproduction. What’s your take on this curious flip-flop of popular sentiment? Do you think there are good arguments for the existence of “gay genes”? And what do you make of Gregory Cochran’s “gay germ” theory that homosexual orientation is more likely to be transmitted pathogenically?

That so many politically correct people, who otherwise would vehemently deny that there could be anything to HBD, believe that gays are “born that way” is just … fascinating! This is such a goofy phenomenon in its own right that IT deserves to be studied!

I can see why they believe it though – because some quite young kids really do seem and feel gay (or, at least, they say that they remember feeling gay – or “different” somehow) and then many of them apparently wind up being homosexual as adults (I remember a kid at school who seemed so gay, and he came out as gay as an adult) – so it might, indeed, appear to everyone as if they really were born that way.

And maybe they were! But that, of course, doesn’t mean we’re talking about genes here. Perhaps their mothers were infected by something when they were pregnant, and the fetuses, too. This could be a developmental issue – something in the developmental process thrown off by an infectious agent. Who knows?

Greg Cochran’s “gay germ” theory does make a lot of sense, though, because it is hard (impossible!) to see how sustained same-sex attraction could be selected for. And this is the other reason why I think a lot of people are quick to believe that there’s a gay gene: because they don’t understand that evolution takes place via natural selection (plus some other processes like genetic drift, etc.). Many people out there who believe themselves to be modern, secular individuals who naturally acknowledge that we got where we are today via evolution haven’t got a clue how evolution works. Most of them, I think, know it has something to do with incremental changes over time, but they miss out on the selection part. (This was something pointed out to me by a reader, Bob, namely that most people who say they “believe” in evolution don’t know how it works – and the more I thought about it and queried folks I know, the more I realized Bob had it right – so, thanks Bob!)

So I think that these two things – that some individuals really do seem gay at a very young age and that most people don’t understand how evolution works – contribute to many of them being very willing to accept the “born that way” idea. I suppose, too, that most people wouldn’t like to think that a large part of their personality – of who they are – was the result of an infectious agent. I can understand that. We humans like to think of ourselves as being 100% in control of our choices and actions, and if we’re not – well, then, at least that our choices and actions are somehow an innate part of ourselves (like a result of our genes) – not some alien force. You might have to be someone who’s really fond of biology, and awestruck by how amazing it all is, to be okay with the fact that we might be influenced from outside, too – more often than we think!

Another sub-controversy concerns the life history perspective advanced by the late J.P. Rushton to explain profound racial variation in term of an r/K selection continuum, where different population groups adopted divergent reproductive strategies (with physical and temperamental correlates) in response to different climatic and geographic pressures. What’s your take? Has Rushton been refuted? And if not, do you think his Big Idea can be useful in understanding less conspicuous differences between modern populations, such as between nations or even classes?

Well I guess I should start off by confessing that, although I’ve read quite a bit about it, I’ve never read Rushton’s Race, Evolution, and Behavior, so I’m not in a very good position to comment on it. (Personally, I find the differences between smaller-sized human populations – Europeans vs. Arabs or even north Europeans vs. south Europeans – to be more niggling, so I don’t actually pay all that close attention to the race discussions.) Having said that, I can’t see why the r/K selection – or life history – theory shouldn’t apply in some way to different human populations. It seems to be a pretty well-established theory in biology, and humans are just biological creatures, so … where exactly is the problem?

I am familiar with some of the info Rushton presented (or maybe it’s info that others have presented on the topic), and to me I think the variations in the maturation rates between the races are very persuasive – but, again, I haven’t ever read the book, so I haven’t got a clue where the data came from. (I’ve been meaning to read up on life history theory for the last half a year or so, by the way, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. There are only so many hours in the day, unfortunately!)

OK. I think it’s fair to say that one of the most polarizing figures in the HBD-o-sphere is Kevin MacDonald, whose work is mostly concerned with the evolutionary psychology of Judaism. I remember reading his book, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (long before that Cochran/Harpending/Hardy paper), and thinking that he made a fairly plausible case that Jewish identity could be understood as an evolutionary outcome. But when I got around to reading The Culture of Critique – a genuinely captivating book, whatever its merits – I came away with the impression that it was ultimately more of a polemic than a scientific treatise. Do you see value in MacDonald’s work, or is he off the reservation? More generally – and I could just as easily cite the work of Richard Lynn or Frank Salter in this context – how do you approach scholarly work that seems to be politically motivated?

Before I answer any of those questions, I’m just going to come right out and say that I admire Kevin MacDonald (and Richard Lynn and Frank Salter) very much. Anyone who stands their ground in the face of sometimes truly vitriolic political correctness deserves respect as far as I am concerned. I mean, as far as I can tell (and I haven’t read all of his books), MacDonald has compiled plenty of historical evidence in support of his theories. His theories may be wrong, or you may disagree with his theories or his approach, but he’s not making stuff up off the top of his head. (If he were, that’d be a different story.) If people object to what he has to say, they simply need to refute his evidence and/or argumentation. It’s really that simple. There’s no need for protests in his classroom or personal attacks in newspapers, etc., etc.

I don’t think MacDonald’s work is off the reservation at all – or if it is, so, too, is the work of people like Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond (and many others!). I’ve only read A People that Shall Dwell Alone and three chapters from The Culture of Critique that happen to be floating around online – the one on Boasian anthropology, the one

Silver2195 posted:

I think this quote is far too long, but I find the bit at the end about MacDonald surprising; I thought that even people who are on-board with scientific racism generally thought Culture of Critique was a bit out there.

Improbable Lobster posted:

I'm not reading this but I appreciate you posting

Silver2195 posted:

Speaking of the far right's relationship with science...

https://twitter.com/kelseyrkennedy/status/808400664535695360

The Hanns Johst reference is closer to open Nazism than I would expect even from Brietbart.

Darth Walrus posted:

Has anyone read the actual article? I wanna know how deep this rabbit-hole goes.

Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:

It's cool that these guys have decided to consciously ape the fascists, some of history's greatest losers. I anticipate this going well for them.

Cingulate posted:

Ah I was in error about what "qualms" means.

Well, I'm still not sure I get it, but depending on what "other cultures" means, I guess I'll point to, eh, Satoshi Kanazawa? As a particularly crass example.

I think Kanazawa also could be in play for "PYF DE Thinker" actually.

E: Actually, yeah.


This is from the article that got Kanazawa, a psychology prof and, to nobody's surprise, evolutionary psychologist, fired from Psychology Today. I have heard the original title was "Black Women are Ugly".
I question the motive of anyone who wants to study racial differences in intelligence, but if you actually want to study racial differences in female attractiveness, there really isn't anything to question right? (It goes without saying the man's entire back catalogue is an exercise in terrible statistics.)

Also look at that disgusting plot. Not the content, the plot itself.

Silver2195 posted:

The actual article is a fairly standard climate change denialist rant, arguing that peer-reviewed papers have sometimes been found to contain errors, that Einstein and Watson/Crick weren't peer reviewed (not sure if that's actually true), and thus believers in climate change are wrong to emphasize the importance of peer review. The headline is what's shocking (headlines, of course, often being written by different people than the actual article).

Improbable Lobster posted:

I'm not reading this but I appreciate you posting

ate all the Oreos posted:

in Asia ... scientific consensus on the topic is much more uniform than I'd expect it to be if it were secretly the pc-police or cathedral or whatever suppressing Real Actual Truth

Cingulate posted:

climate science really is a much cleaner science

Tesseraction posted:

It's not clean, that's why we have climate change!!

The Vosgian Beast posted:

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The Vosgian Beast posted:

You've feel. If indeed. But treatment.

Getting you. There you. Individualism issues. If character. There society.

If world.

Tesseraction posted:

Yeah and being fair you have the worst of it since the 5SM are officially the biggest progenitors of fake news in Europe. Kinda hard to argue with such people in good faith.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

There is absolutely nothing to be gained from your neighbors. You catch things from other people: like fecal bacteria, like liberalism, like compassion.

Cingulate posted:

What non-western scientists are you thinking of? I tried googling a bit for stuff and couldn't find anything, unsurprisingly considering I don't speak Chinese.

Cingulate posted:

I actually have plenty of bad things to say about peer review and I'm not opposed to a general call for less over-reliance on it as a gold standard, but from what I can tell, climate science really is a much cleaner science than human evolution/"biodiversity", and all of the economics and socioeconomics the entire DE is built on. The IPCC predictions from the 1990s are really good.


Another thing to keep in mind: one of the things peer review does is apply a very gentle "crank filter"; it's a general check of how well you fit with the scientific consensus. When Einstein published, the overall structure was different, the role of the "crank filter" wasn't played as much by peer review. So not being peer reviewed in 1904 means something different than not being peer reviewed in 2016. In 2016, it essentially means you're not part of the community of scientists, which is almost always, not always, but almost always, a sign you're not scientific. Gauss (I assume - for a random name) didn't undergo pre-publication peer review, but that means essentially nothing; the structure of science was completely different. However, he has - much like Einstein - undergone substantial post-publication peer review. But when they published, being peer reviewed simply meant something very different than it does today.

E: Einstein's papers underwent "peer review", just not Peer Review. They were decided upon by an expert: the journal's editor. Outsourcing a lot of the vetting to external experts become mainstream somewhere in the 60s or so. Editors still play a part in the vetting, but more people are involved now. We call this later activity "peer review"; before, stuff was also reviewed by peers, but under a different structure. Today, stuff that doesn't undergo journal peer review usually is not reviewed by peers at all.

What non-western scientists are you thinking of? I tried googling a bit for stuff and couldn't find anything, unsurprisingly considering I don't speak Chinese.

ate all the Oreos posted:

None specifically, I'm saying to my knowledge we're not currently operating under two completely different split scientific environments with half the world researching the "true" science of racism and the cucked white people researching "fake" science. I guess I could be wrong and there could be a massive hidden double-secret global science community I don't know about.

ate all the Oreos posted:

None specifically, I'm saying to my knowledge we're not currently operating under two completely different split scientific environments with half the world researching the "true" science of racism and the cucked white people researching "fake" science. I guess I could be wrong and there could be a massive hidden double-secret global science community I don't know about.

Improbable Lobster posted:

Sounds like you don't actually understand what peer review is or how it works

ate all the Oreos posted:

I mean I guess there's two different kinds of peer review here: there's "someone at the journal looked at it and thought it looked legit" and "someone else has replicated the experiment and confirmed the result."

Cingulate posted:

Funny thing, Scott wrote an interesting piece about the Soviet medical research parallel world.

But, doesn't your claim still rest on the assumption that non-Western science does not have proportionally more instances of Scientific Racism than the West? Which is an empirical question. Maybe Chinese publications are full of that stuff? I wouldn't be surprised.
Though generally speaking, psychology and neuroscience not tightly integrated into the Western system (broadly speaking - including not only Stanford, but also Japan, the NYU offshot at Abu Dhabi and the Baidu team in California) are pretty bad. This is changing, particularly with the recovery of mainland China as a scientific superpower, but it's still the state of things, for all I know.

See, the problem with this - with your way of thinking, and dealing with different opinions - is this kind of stupidity has probably contributed to your president-elect being Donald Trump.

Cingulate posted:

Funny thing, Scott wrote an interesting piece about the Soviet medical research parallel world.

Cingulate posted:

But, doesn't your claim still rest on the assumption that non-Western science does not have proportionally more instances of Scientific Racism than the West? Which is an empirical question. Maybe Chinese publications are full of that stuff? I wouldn't be surprised.
Though generally speaking, psychology and neuroscience not tightly integrated into the Western system (broadly speaking - including not only Stanford, but also Japan, the NYU offshot at Abu Dhabi and the Baidu team in California) are pretty bad. This is changing, particularly with the recovery of mainland China as a scientific superpower, but it's still the state of things, for all I know.

Cingulate posted:

Ok, actually neither of these is Peer Review. Peer Review is: some editor at the journal sends out a submitted manuscript to typically 1-3 experts who typically (with very few exceptions) do NOT work at the journal, but are (hopefully) experts on the topic, who then send back comments.
The editor then makes a decision based on these reviews.

Almost all journals use this procedure. I could go on a tangent on the exceptions, but that's not really important for the thread beyond the point that peer review is a very suboptimal and faulty procedure, and we're currently hopefully coming up with a few ways of improving on it, such as post-pub peer review.
If you have problems believing peer review is as faulty as I claim, just consider that I have been reviewing for journals for a few years now And recently, Scott did his first peer review from what I gather.

Of course you've correctly described the current situation in (human and social) science and its problems, replication crisis etc.
(When I review, I've sometimes asked the researchers to replicate a finding because it looked spurious. Yes, it's me, I'm reviewer #2.)

ate all the Oreos posted:

Yeah I was actually thinking about Soviet research and especially Soviet psychology as the only case in modern times I could think of of an actual "second science" existing that came to completely different conclusions.


Well it rests on non-Western science not coming to a second, incompatible consensus a la "sluggish schizophrenia" in the soviet union, or that non-Western science is not currently turning up a bunch of evidence for scientific racism that's being "suppressed" by the west. I will admit I don't actually have any specific evidence that this isn't the case but it sort of seems like something there'd be, I don't know, someone talking about?


Yeah I knew it involves sending it out to experts I was more glossing over it to talk about replication but I guess that's actually a separate issue completely so whatever. I would wager that the average reader of Brietbart probably doesn't know or care about this either so while I agree that peer review has a ton of problems and I personally like discussing them with y'all, in this context bringing them up in response to someone using it as an excuse to reject science kinda seems counterproductive but I guess no actual Breitbart readers are in this thread so whatever

InediblePenguin posted:

We need to reason with these people, because Trump is our President-Elect

Ichabod Sexbeast posted:

We need to show sympathy and understanding and kindness to that person, because that is almost definitely Mr. Mean-Spirited and nothing will piss him off more

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Republican Party Animal is a layered chronicle of David Cole’s short but storied public career as a “Jewish Holocaust denier” and of his equally unlikely “second life” as David Stein, when he would come to play an influential role as an event organizer and Op-Ed dynamo among the guarded ranks of Hollywood conservatives before having his heretical past exposed by a vindictive ex-girlfriend. The dual biographical narratives converge in a morally conflicted tale of downfall and personal reinvention, of intersecting identities and of consequences wrought in the whirlwind momentum of a life less ordinary.

Cole’s telling is breezy, surefooted, and entertaining throughout; he gives the impression of a natural raconteur, punctuating his episodic memoir with revealing anecdotes, ironic observations, and self-effacing humor, all while providing the kind of sympathetic yet critical discussion of Holocaust revisionism that, coming from a reputable imprint with wide distribution, is rare if not unprecedented.

“I will most likely come off as an rear end in a top hat in this book,” Cole announces at the outset. And while I suspect that will indeed be the conclusion of certain readers (including one well known magazine editor who has since threatened legal action), it isn’t mine.

No Country for Jewish Revisionists

Cole’s curious – and curiosity-driven – initiation into the intellectual quick (though never the dominant political culture) of Holocaust revisionism started off, as he tells it, “innocently enough,” in the late 80s as a capricious detour during his youthful adventures train-hopping political movements for kicks and edification. Being intrigued by IHR co-founder David McCalden’s category-defying ideological profile as “a militant atheist, an Irish nationalist, and a Holocaust revisionist,” Cole wrote to him asking for literature and information. When McCalden instead showed up at Cole’s doorstep in full-on confrontational mode (he thought Cole was “a ‘Jewish infiltrator’ trying to cozy up to him for nefarious purposes”), Cole assured him that he was sincere and there followed an apparent meeting of minds. Following this encounter, Cole read McCalden’s hand-picked literature and found it to be “[i]ncredibly amateur crap.” Yet he was left with questions. “The problem” he discerned, was that “mainstream historians would never address revisionist concerns, and the revisionists, for the most part, were sloppy and (mostly) ideologically motivated.”

Preoccupied, Cole soon went to visit McCalden, only to receive the news that the guy had died of AIDS, leaving behind a massive collection of books and private correspondence that, by default, fell into Cole’s possession. Whatever inchoate doubts or questions Cole had entertained about the standard Holocaust historiography, it seems fair to surmise that his “identity” as a non-dogmatic Holocaust revisionist crystallized in the months-long binge of immersive reading that followed. I imagine it was with some nostalgia that Cole recalls his underground education:

I rented an apartment with two stories so that I could devote one entire floor just to the books. And I read every single one of them, making notes, bookmarking pages, and indulging in what would become, in less than a decade, the lost art of reading hard-copy books without a computer in sight.

By the early to mid-90s, Cole would be riding a wave of public notoriety as an intrepid, Hollywood-bred independent researcher and documentary filmmaker making the rounds on daytime TV talk shows professing informed skepticism about the received history of the Holocaust. In those days, which I remember too well, Cole could be seen alongside IHR spokesman Mark Weber on the Montel Williams Show (where, in an ironic twist recounted in Republican Party Animal, his appearance led to the reunion of two Holocaust survivors – brothers who had lost contact after the war, each assuming the worst about the other’s fate). He appeared with CODOH founder Bradley Smith and Skeptic editor Michael Shermer on a rather tense episode of Donahue. He even went on the Morton Downey Junior Show, where he suffered the late host’s outrageous nicotine-expectorating spleen with pluck.

The first and most conspicuous thing that distinguished Cole from other Holocaust revisionists (as they were still referred to in those days, when the artifice of civility had yet to give way to the “denier” shibboleth), was, of course, the fact that he was, perhaps more than nominally, Jewish. Cole’s Jewish identity was at once a hook and a problem. On the one hand, his Jew-cred ingratiated him to many revisionists who understandably wanted, for the most part sincerely, to disassociate their work from the thick funk of anti-Semitism that surrounded it. On the other hand, the specter of a “Jewish Holocaust revisionist” rankled the guardians of orthodoxy for whom the public image of a Jewish gas chamber skeptic presented a dangerous rift in a carefully crafted Manichean narrative that had long served to marginalize and stigmatize – and across certain borders, criminalize – critical engagement with what I like to call “the other side of genocide.”

But it wasn’t all talk-show theater. Because the second, and ultimately more important, thing that set Cole apart from other revisionists was his knack for getting his hands dirty. He conducted – and documented – on-site investigations in the “Holiest of Holies” where the worst conveyor-belt atrocities were believed (“by all the best people” as Bradley would have it) to have gone down. Cole's groundbreaking guerilla Auschwitz documentary, David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper remains a case in point. Rather than simply lay contextualizing narration over the usual stock footage of marching brownshirts and bulldozed corpses, Cole did what other revisionists, a few notable exceptions notwithstanding, would not – and to be fair, could not – do; he visited ground-zero and critically examined the physical structure of what was then presented to tourists as a homicidal gas chamber in its “original state.” Cole put questions to the museum staff and even scored a groundbreaking interview with then-curator Dr. Franciszek Piper – who, at little prompting, admitted what revisionists alone had long contended – that the “gas chamber” displayed to tourists as the genuine article was in fact a postwar “reconstruction” (though of course, revisionists would more likely call it a “fake”). While other revisionists buried their noses in books (which is, of course, important), Cole took matters into his own hands. He was inquisitive. He was tenacious. He was clever. And just as important, he had the testicular brass – and the “Jew face” – to go where others feared to tread.

To Phil Donahue, Cole was “the Antichrist” (seriously, Donahue called him that, to his face!). To professional “Skeptic” Michael Shermer, he was a “meta-ideologue,” or what we might now call a high-functioning troll, who reveled in the role of the contrarian, stirring up trouble “for the hell of it.” To revisionist king-of-the-mountain Robert Faurisson, he was a dangerous upstart, a loose cannon who couldn’t be trusted to toe the line. To Irv Rubin – crucially, the late Irv Rubin – David Cole was something worse.

Cole’s history with the man whom, from the other side of eternity, he describes as the “lovable and murderous head of the Jewish Defense League” began in a violent altercation when Rubin tried to shove Cole down a section of stairs at a 1991 UCLA speaking engagement. It ended, more or less, a few years later when a threat of mortal violence changed the course of Cole’s life. The pivotal turn – or plot point, since we’re in Hollywood – came in late 1997, when, for a variety of reasons, Cole had more or less absconded from his public dalliance with revisionism. That’s when, “[f]or reasons known only to him,” Rubin took to the nascent World Wide Web to place a $25,000 bounty on Cole’s head.

Evoking the lurid prose-style of a forgotten dime-store pulp novel, Rubin’s accompanying screed described Cole as “a low-lying snake that slithers from dark place to dark place, [spreading] his venom to innocent victims.” And when Rubin fulminated that “an evil monster like this does not deserve to live on this earth,” it wasn’t mere bluster; it was an incitement. Rubin had long been suspected of (and has since been implicated in) a number of arson attacks and fire bombings directed against revisionists and revisionist organizations so there was every reason to believe that he – or more likely one of his psychotic JDL lackeys – might rise to the task. Like the leader of some torch-wielding mob in an old horror film, Rubin wanted to kill the monster, not metaphorically, but literally. And he offered cash money to anyone who would do the bloodwork or provide information to make it easier. “This world would be a happier place, indeed,” the avuncular zealot declared, “when all the Jew-baiters and Jew-haters have disappeared, especially the most vicious hater of them all, David Cole.”

But the event proved to be fateful rather than fatal. There’s been a good deal of hazy speculation over just what happened, with some people, myself included, speculating that Cole’s subsequent “recantation” (such a silly word to use in the 21st century) was ghostwritten by Rubin and signed under duress, and with others suspecting that Cole’s public declaration might have been, if not sincere, at least in line with what seemed to be his increasingly ambivalent stance toward revisionism. The truth as revealed in Cole’s book, is shaded grey.

In short, Cole took the threat seriously. He considered going to the police but rejected that option because of the unwanted publicity it would entail. In the end, he opted to simply call up his bête noir and offer up an unequivocal, notarized recantation in exchange for his life. He wrote it himself. It was bullshit, of course, but it also provided a way out. A clean break from the public existence he had entered with perhaps too much reckless disregard for what might follow.

In Republican Party Animal he is clear that “The recantation was Cole’s ‘death.’ ”

I had already left revisionism, so I figured why not “kill” Cole, especially if it saves my actual hide. Once someone like Cole recants, there’s no going back. Your credibility is shot. If you try to recant your recantation, people will always wonder, “was he lying then, or is he lying now?” I agreed to the recantation not just to get the bounty removed, but to burn all Cole bridges. I knew that the revisionists who were already getting pissed at me in 1995 would truly hate me when they read what I gave Rubin. I wanted to “kill” Cole in a way that would make it impossible for me to go back.

But David Cole didn’t die, literally or figuratively. It might be more accurate to say that he receded, only to resurface as the script demanded. It remains an open question whether Cole’s ensuing life adventure resolves in measures of liberation and redemption or in desolation and ruin. Unlike a Hollywood script, life isn’t so tidy.

Toasting Team America

As the curtain closes on the first act, Cole finds himself in a funk, “limping back to square one.” When a fashion-mad actress-girlfriend leaves him spiraling in debt, he spends some time “pining and whining” before eventually moving on to some shady but apparently lucrative Internet business ventures where he cynically leverages his by-then-encyclopedic knowledge of Holocaust history to play “both sides” for what financial gain could be had. Having for practical reasons already adopted his new identity as “David Stein,” he invents other pseudonyms – “one to sell books and videos to Holocaust studies departments around the world, and one to sell books and videos to revisionists.” And the vultures, from both sides, take the bait.

Cole’s account of what might be considered his transitional phase is tinged with moral ambivalence and, ultimately, regret. “The truth is, I can’t defend it,” he writes at one point. “The only thing I can say is that after I was forced out of the field by the death threats of the JDL and the lies of people like Shermer [more on Michael Shermer later – CS], I had to emotionally divorce myself from the subject matter…. unlike my revisionist work, which I’ll still defend, and unlike my conservative work, which I’ll still defend, I can’t defend the period in between.”

Following this episode, Cole soon walks into another bad relationship, adopts yet another name (“David Harvey,” if you’re keeping track), and pulls off another death-faking caper, this time to escape the physically abusive clutches of a woman he now refers to only as “the Beast.” Then he goes off the grid, ensconcing himself in the beach city environs of El Segundo, where he soon becomes restless. Teaming up with a fellow film editor referred to as “Fat Frank,” Cole eventually re-enters his old turf to do some shadow revisionist – or quasi-revisionist – work, shooting a still-unreleased interview with Mel Gibson’s dad (!), making a short documentary about the persecution of Ernst Zündel and Germar Rudolf, and ghostwriting an important free-speech manifesto entitled “Historians Behind Bars.”

In the course of “one thing leads to another,” Cole’s friendship with Fat Frank leads to a friendship with actor Larry Thomas, best known for his role as the “Soup Nazi” on Seinfeld, which leads to a relationship with a blonde vixen, which leads to a bout with erectile dysfunction, which leads, fatefully, to yet another bad bet romance, this time with a “six-foot-tall redhead with an amazingly big smile” named Rosie – the actress-model who would eventually play a key role in blowing David Stein’s cover. If Republican Party Animal were film noir, I guess Rosie would get billing as the femme fatale – except that by most accounts she was bad news from the start. One inescapable conclusion to be gleaned from Republican Party Animal is that David Cole has abominably bad judgment when it comes to the ladies.

While Cole’s introduction to revisionism is clearly delineated in Republican Party Animal, it is somewhat less clear how he came to identify as a “South Park conservative.” He provides a hint that the Left’s shambolic response to the end of the Cold War in 1989 might have been a germinal factor, but it is almost in passing that he mentions, in a prelude to a discussion of his involvement (working with the legendary Budd Schulberg) in the restoration of Pare Lorentz’s 1946 documentary Nuremberg, that he had “over the years” somehow found time to pen a number of conservative (mostly anti-Islamist) op-eds for the L.A. Times under yet another “revolving series of pseudonyms.”

The lack of a clear-cut conservative origin story is a point of minor frustration for me if only because during my brief correspondence with Cole in the mid-90s, I had come away with the impression that he identified as a liberal. Maybe it was his abortion rights activism, or maybe it was his outspoken atheism (which he now disavows, also without much explanation) that tripped me, but when the stories broke about l’affaire Cole-Stein, my first thought was: David Cole is a Republican?

No matter, Cole seems sincere. “I don’t mind being defined by what I’m against,” he explains, “And I’m against the left.” More insightfully, he goes on to distinguish ideology from principle:

Principle is not the same as ideology. As an example, Islamism—the set of beliefs adhered to by Muslims who want to impose their worldview on others—is an ideology. But opposition to Islamism isn’t necessarily an ideology. It can be, but not by necessity. One can oppose banning women from voting or driving on principle. You can be right, left, moderate, or totally apolitical, and still, on principle, say “that’s a bad and oppressive idea.” The fact that I dismiss ideology and ideologues doesn’t mean I don’t have principles, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t care passionately about them. And, generally speaking, the right side of the spectrum, more often than not, reflects my principles.

Fair enough, then. Cole is a conservative as a matter of principle, not as a matter of dogma. He’s more P.J. O’Rourke than Russ Kirk. More Hayek than Rand. I get it. I even sort of agree.

The same hands-on approach that had distinguished Cole’s career as a revisionist researcher would prove instrumental in guiding his meteoric rise in the demimonde of Hollywood conservatives – or “Friends of Abe” as he came to know them. So successful was he in navigating this semi-secretive social network that after proving his mettle as a party organizer in various settings he would brand his own offshoot organization, the “Republican Party Animals,” hosting liquor-doused GOP fundraisers that were attended by outspoken and semi-closeted rightwing celebrities, pundits, and proles.

Cole took careful notes along the way and while I suppose his insider’s account of so many soirees and mixers will be chum for certain political junkies, I personally would have preferred more in the way of a sketch. As it stands, Cole’s reminiscences about this period of his life seem burdened by a surfeit of anecdote – too much detail at all turns, too much dwelling on interpersonal contretemps. But while I can’t shake the sense that a measure of time and distance would have advised finer editorial discretion, the truth is I have yet to read an autobiography that doesn’t suffer from this tendency. It may be that the occasional pangs of boredom I felt in reading Cole’s play-by-play can be chalked up to selective incuriosity. I felt the same way about Jim Goad’s poo poo Magnet, and Goad is one of my favorite writers.

Telling All

The Feral House promotional copy pitches Republican Party Animal as a kind of inside-politics-inside-Hollywood tell-all. And indeed, there’s scuttlebutt on offer if that’s your fix.

On the revisionist side of the aisle, we learn, or we are reminded, that David McCalden – the guy who played a formative role in introducing Cole to revisionist theory – was a sexual as well as intellectual outlaw who gave his wife AIDS (before dying of it himself) back when a viral load meant a one-way ticket to the morgue. We learn – or we are reminded – that Robert Faurisson, was sufficiently pinpricked by Cole’s ungovernable audacity that he huffed and puffed and spread rumors that Cole was a “World Jewish Congress infiltrator.” (Cole’s grave sin, incidentally, was to break with revisionist dogma by broadcasting his opinion that the Natzweiler gas chamber in France, unlike those on display at Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau, etc., was the real deal, albeit a highly eccentric outlier in the scheme of the received mass-gassing narrative.)

Aside from such morsels, however, Cole’s recollections about his exploits among the maligned revisionist milieu are mostly reflective, evenhanded, and often fond. He gives David Irving due credit as a once-formidable narrative historian with a narcissistic penchant for self-sabotage. He expresses warm regard for CODOH-founder Bradley Smith (“we don’t agree on everything, but he’s a lifelong friend”), and his thoughts on certain egregiously persecuted revisionists (or, in some instances, “deniers”; Cole insists upon the distinction) are presented with judicious attention to the underlying free-speech travesty that somehow still eludes many outspoken civil libertarians. Ernst Zündel (whom Cole describes as a “denier,” again if you’re keeping a ledger) is a good example. Cole appraises the repeatedly imprisoned German-Canadian pamphleteer as a harmless crank who “really loves Hitler,” yet he channels Voltaire in voicing unqualified support for a man who has spent a significant part of his adult life behind bars, often in solitary confinement, for what can only be described as thoughtcrime. “I never said anything in support of his views,” Cole writes, “but I supported his right to be free from prosecution for simply writing a book, and I still do. On that subject, I’d stand with him again today.” Cole is equally resolute in his defense of Germar Rudolf (“revisionist”), a German chemist who was extradited from his legal residence in the United States to be locked up for years in a German cell, all for the “crime” of writing about blue stains on old concrete.

Turning to the celebrities and politicos on the other side of the aisle, Cole’s grievances are moderate and his gossip is less salacious than I would have expected. John Voight comes off as a harmless lush. Gary Sinese is a “mensch” with some unknown skeletons in his closet. D-listers Pat Boone and Victoria Jackson are unsurprisingly depicted as conspiracy-mongering loons. Clint Eastwood is aloof in a good way. Kelsey Grammer is aloof in a creepy way. David Horowitz is described as “a huge dick” who “reacts to a request to shake hands as most men would to a request to grab the penis of a rotting corpse.” There’s a blowjob story featuring Oliver Stone’s batshit crazy son. There’s a funny story about Michael Reagan’s war on gophers. And, yeah, it turns out that Cole’s deadbeat dad was “apparently” the doctor who served Elvis that fatal dose of Demerol. Gotta mention that.

You might think that Cole’s harshest score-settling would come in for Rosie and the Lolita-chasing neocon-cum-Disney-scripting hack with whom she tag-teamed to out David Stein as a Holocaust denier … in which case you would have another think coming. Because the dirtiest dirt in Republican Party Animal is reserved not for the people who exposed Stein as Cole (nor for Irv Rubin, the man who tried to have Cole murdered), but for an accused rapist (as Cole never tires of emphasizing, for reasons more subtle than they first appear) who has for some time served as “the media’s go-to guy for the selective skepticism of hipsters who hang out in coffee shops in Silverlake.”

Let’s warm up with a bit that made me laugh:

After Shermer contacted me, we hung out a few times. The first time I was at his house, he asked me if I’d like any coffee. I drank coffee religiously in those days (my pre-alcohol days), so I said yes. And Shermer proceeded to re-heat a pot of coffee that was stone cold, presumably brewed that morning, hours ago.

“Uh, can you maybe brew up some fresh?”

“No need, it’s just as good reheated.”

Sometimes, it’s the little things that matter as much as the big ones when you’re trying to gauge someone’s intelligence. Here was a supposed “scientist” with no concept of how fresh-brewed coffee gets worse when it gets cold.

Cole goes on to describe Skeptic editor Michael Shermer as “one of the most dishonest human beings I have ever known,” and he has the goods – specifically transcripts of recorded phone conversations – to back up his spleen. It’s little surprise that Shermer unleashed his lawyers in an unsuccessful bid to prevent Cole’s book from being published. What’s more surprising is that the man still enjoys his inflated reputation after being so thoroughly exposed as a mendacious opportunist who repeatedly betrayed and libeled Cole and who has deceitfully misrepresented his – and other revisionists’ – work at every conceivable turn. I won’t go into detail about just what dirt Cole has against “Shermy,” but I will say that his prolonged and hyper-documented animadversion is worth the cover price.

So there’s juice for those who come a-lookin’. Some of it may be petty, but some of it is well justified and even newsworthy. Still, I would politely insist that the “tell-all” aspect of Republican Party Animal ultimately amounts to a wink-sly bait-and-switch. Cole’s thematic gravamen, tucked between so much confessional digression and tittle-tattle, concerns the burden of conscience and a man’s abiding struggle to maintain a modicum of personal and intellectual integrity while inhabiting two worlds where cynicism and suspicion hold sway.

Cole’s story is thus laced with insight bearing on such threads of connective tissue that, moral equivalence be damned, unite revisionism with movement conservatism. When Cole dwelled in revisionist circles, he inveighed against Faurisson-branded “No holes, No Holocaust” rhetoric and pled for sanity against the seductive force of sundry conspiracy theories. When Cole dwelled in the world of conservative politics, he found himself in the same futile rut, taking pubic issue with Breitbart-branded trench warfare tactics and pleading for sanity against the seductive force of sundry conspiracy theories. “I’d rather gouge out my testicles,” Cole quips, “than accept the accolades of the lunatic fringe.”

Whether you find the tone colorful or off-putting will be a matter of taste, but I think Cole is especially good on this front. One of my longstanding gripes with movement revisionism (I pay less attention to movement conservatism) is that it blends too easily with rank crackpottery. The revisionist affiliation with – and tacit affinity for – various threads of wildly conspiratorial speculation may be understandable when we consider that respected World War II scholars have largely been driven away by very real threats of prosecution and ruinous public censure, but in the atmosphere that prevails under a black cloud of taboo the loudest voices tend to be the looniest. It’s an insidious catch-22 that in turn makes it only too easy for consensus-mongering guys like Michael Shermer to paint the whole project in broad strokes as a manifestation of hate-fueled paranoia. Cole puts the matter more bluntly when he notes that “[c]leaning up flaws in the historical record after a major event like a world war is not the same as claiming that all 27,000 residents of Newtown decided to fake a mass shooting.”

While I may not share Cole’s explicitly “pro-Zionist” views, it is thus without qualification that I endorse his stridently expressed contention that:

The people who think that revising the history of the Holocaust will somehow topple Israel are idiots. Israel’s existence is not based on whether or not there were gas chambers at Auschwitz in 1944. If, tomorrow, Yad Vashem declared that Auschwitz had no killing program, it would not make one drat bit of difference. Israel would be fine, because Israel’s Muslim foes don’t give a good gently caress about historical subtleties. No one in the Muslim world is studying forensic reports, thinking “if I can’t find traces of cyanide residue in the Auschwitz kremas, I’ll hate Israel and try to destroy her. But if I can find the traces, by gosh, I’ll love and support her.

We are faced with a subject so clung up with emotive gravity that Cole’s elementary defense of disinterested inquiry is difficult for people to grasp, which is why it bears repeated emphasis. There is nothing inherently hateful or even political about revisionist research. This is fundamentally true regardless of what personal motives impart to individuals who persist in such research, and it is fundamentally true regardless of what political arguments or agendas may latch to such research. While motivated ideologues can be counted on to use revisionist scholarship as a cudgel against their imagined enemies, the underlying investigative project is simply and eternally a thing apart; it is an empirical and interpretive process that, once the fog has lifted, will be judged on its relative merits and deficiencies – the same as with other “problematic” species of skeptical inquiry, such as concerning racial differences or climatology or various aspects of human sexuality. Once this much is understood, it becomes possible to distinguish the substantive core of revisionism from the cranked-up clamor that invariably surrounds it.

Being wise to this difficulty, Cole anchors his own interpersonally fraught micro-history of foibles and resentments to the project of historiography writ large. A memorable passage taps the messy truth:

…in every massive conflict between nations you see the exact same things that occur in conflicts between individuals—the same jockeying and maneuvering, the same collecting and testing of loyalties, the same measuring of risk against gain. The difference is only the scale. I used to make that point when I lectured. Never elevate or excoriate historical figures to the extent that they stop being flesh-and-blood humans. Don’t make Hitler the devil, and don’t make the Founding Fathers gods. They were still human, no matter their impact on history.

Is the task really so difficult? I’m afraid it is. Humanity is long in the weeds, and we are burdened with heavy baggage. For all his sarcasm and ventilation, Cole ends up counseling humility before the big questions. Who will notice?

Gas in the Gaps?

Given his past investment in the subject, it’s a safe bet that many readers will be interested in David Cole’s present take on Holocaust history and revisionism. Although he expresses understandable reluctance about holding court on the subject anew, the truth is that Cole is never more in his element than when he writes about history. He’s attentive to detail and he presents his theses logically in clear language that stands in welcome contrast to the palaver-laden cant of certain professional obscurantists. He would be a good teacher.

Revisionism comes up at tangential and direct turns throughout the biographical narrative – significantly in “The Idiot’s Creed,” which provides a fascinating account of Cole’s “behind the scenes” interactions with a number of prominent public figures during his revisionist days – but Cole’s present views are explicitly teased in an early chapter none-too-subtly entitled “So Just What the Hell Do I Believe, Anyway?” and are more carefully developed in a 24-page appendix that should be of special interest to traditional Holocaust historians and revisionists alike.

The unavoidable headline is that Cole stands by his early research, rejecting the standard claim that Auschwitz and many other infamous camps served as killing centers equipped with homicidal gas chambers. “Auschwitz was not an extermination camp,” he writes:

Auschwitz and Majdanek in Poland, and Dachau, Mauthausen, and the other camps in Germany and Austria, were not extermination camps. They were bad, bad places. People were killed there. Jews were killed at Majdanek by shooting, and Jews were killed at Auschwitz in 1942, most likely due to decisions made by the commandant in defiance of orders from Berlin.

In the following paragraph, Cole writes:

However, Auschwitz was not the totality of the Holocaust. Not by far. Serious revisionists (David Irving, Mark Weber, and hell, I’ll throw my own name in there) don’t dispute the very provable mass murder of Jews (by shooting) during the months following the invasion of Russia. And at a camp like Treblinka, there is a massively strong circumstantial case to be made that the Jews who were sent there were sent there to be killed. It’s circumstantial because very little remains in the way of documentation, and zero remains in the way of physical evidence. But revisionists have never produced an alternate explanation of the fate met by the Jews sent to camps like Treblinka and Sobibor, with empty trains returning. However, accepting that Treblinka was a murder camp but Auschwitz wasn’t means that the Holocaust was not as large in scale or as long in operation as the official history teaches. So taking Auschwitz out of the category of extermination camps is seen as lessening the horror of what, even shorn of Auschwitz, was still a horrific situation.

While Cole’s summary may come laced with a bit more anti-Nazi editorial invective than is typically found in the currents of dissident Holocaust scholarship, his take on the history of Auschwitz in particular pretty much distills to a grounded recitation of revisionist theory, at least insofar as he rejects the standard claim that the site was renovated to be an ever-efficient killing factory during the latter phase of the war. In his more detailed treatment, where Jean-Claude Pressac’s work figures prominently, he deftly summarizes myriad forensic and chronological problems to advance the openly revisionist conclusion that the most infamous extermination camps were nothing of the kind.

And in case anyone other than Phil Donahue still believes the propaganda about the Dachau “gas chamber,” Cole is at the ready with a sobriety check:

Eventually, by the 1970s, the Dachau museum admitted that the “gas chamber” was never used. The fact that the “phony shower heads” were created by the army prior to the visit of U.S. dignitaries in ’45 is the biggest open secret in the field. The current claim at Dachau is that the room was “decorated” with dummy shower heads, which replaced the real shower heads and thus made them useless, in order to fool the victims, and once they were inside, gas pellets were thrown in from chutes in the side wall. And the half-measure “revision,” that the chamber was “never used,” really needs to be meditated on for a moment to grasp its stupidity. We’re supposed to believe that the Nazis took a working—and very necessary—group shower room at the camp, and replaced the working shower heads with fake ones, because they wanted to fool the victims into thinking they were walking into a shower room, which they would have thought anyway if the original shower heads had simply been left intact, and then the Nazis decided not to ever use the gas chamber, but now the room was unusable as an actual shower because the real shower heads had been replaced by fake ones, fake ones that were supposedly necessary to fool victims into thinking that they were walking into a shower room which is exactly what the victims would have thought they were walking into without the fake shower heads because the room actually was a shower room which could have still been used as one in between gassings if not for the dummy heads that replaced the genuine ones.

If you want a down-and-dirty distillation of Cole’s current views, the most tightly packed summation is probably provided in the following two paragraphs:

The evidence of the mass murder of Jews was largely buried or erased by the Nazis long before the end of the war. At the war’s end, what was there to show? What was there to display? And something had to be displayed. World War II is a war with an ex post facto reason for being. The war started to keep Poland free and independent. At the end of the war, when Poland was essentially given to the USSR as a slave state (not that there was much the U.S. could have done to stop it from happening), none of the victorious powers wanted folks to start asking, “wait—sixty million people dead, the great cities of Europe burned to the ground, all to keep Poland free, and now we’re giving Poland to Stalin?”

So Hitler’s very real brutality against the Jews had to become “the reason we fought.” Except, those brutalities began in earnest two years after the war started. But why quibble? Russia had captured Auschwitz and Majdanek intact (more or less), and the U.S. had captured Dachau totally intact. So, those camps became representations of a horror for which almost no authentic physical evidence remained. At Auschwitz, an air raid shelter was “remodeled” to look like a gas chamber (as the museum’s curator admitted to me in a 1992 interview). At Majdanek, mattress delousing rooms were misrepresented as being gas chambers for humans (as the museum’s director admitted to me in 1994). And at Dachau, the U.S. Army whipped up a phony gas chamber room to give visiting senators and congressmen in 1945 a dramatic image of “why we had to fight.”

Attentive readers will note how Cole, at certain points in the above-cited excerpts, parts company with many revisionists. This is made clearest in the appendix, where, in a nuanced counterpoint to the long-rehearsed revisionist emphasis on lack of a clearly discoverable “master plan” authorizing the wholesale extermination of Europe’s Jewish population, Cole plausibly argues that there were actually a congeries of “plans” floated and hatched at various stages in the wake of the infamous (and still profoundly misunderstood) Wannsee “protocols,” with such plans being molded by shifting goals and expediencies as the Nazis pursued an overarching yet decentralized injunction to resolve the “Jewish question” one way or another with only instrumental regard for the welfare of Jewish people. Sometimes this meant the exploitation of Jewish labor. Sometimes it meant the mass transfer or “evacuation” of populations. And sometimes it meant mass killing, including by gassing.

From this vantage, Cole focuses on the question of intent, discerning clues in the sequence of contemporaneous communications and pronouncements, many culled from Joseph Goebbels’s writings, to support his conjecture that for a time – specifically from “1942 through 1943” – Jews were dispatched to genuine extermination camps, specifically “Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno,” otherwise known as the Aktion Reinhardt system, where they were lined up and shot, or, in classic Holocaust style, queued up and fed to gas chambers (albeit of the truck-rigged must-have-been-carbon-monoxide-not-diesel-exhaust variety, not the pellet-inducted Zyklon B variety) and then burned (in pits, not crematoria).

Anyway, here’s the money shot:

From 1942 through 1943, Polish Jewry was subjected to one of the most brutal campaigns of mass murder in human history. Because of the secrecy surrounding those four extermination camps, and the fact that they were ploughed under and erased from existence in 1943, it’s difficult to be precise about certain details. And we do know that some Jews were sent to those camps as a throughway to other destinations (as recounted multiple times in Gerald Reitlinger’s 1953 masterwork The Final Solution). But, more than enough circumstantial evidence exists to show that for most Jews, the train ride to those camps was one-way, and final.

Not being an historian (and not having the constitutional fortitude for serious historical research), I will leave it to revisionist scholars to engage Cole’s interpretation of the timeline, the documentary mens rea and such other circumstantial evidence that might or might not support the conclusion that the eastern camp system served for a time as a full-on gas-and-burn death factory. I’m confident they’ll have plenty to say, since this whole area seems to have assumed prominence as the focal point of revisionist (and anti-revisionist) critique over the past decade or so, as evidenced by the widely viewed video documentary, One Third of the Holocaust, by the forensic researches of Fritz Berg, and by the voluminous output of guys like Germar Rudolf, Carlo Mottagno, Thomas Kues, Jürgen Graf and others, often in rebuttal to the mud-slinging gang of anti-revisionist gadflies over at the “Holocaust Controversies” site. Cole may not have come looking for an argument, but he’ll have one if he wants it. One can only hope that the debate, if it comes, will proceed with a modicum of civility. Whether Cole’s argument is sincere or tactical (and I’m inclined to believe he is sincere), it should be received as an invitation for revisionists to clarify and supplement their mounting counterargument in a spirit of good faith.

Regardless of how it will be met among active revisionists, I am sure that Cole’s argument will seem positively baffling to the average reader who has been groomed to regard Auschwitz as synecdoche for the canonical Holocaust story. While it may be understood that Cole is correct when he points out that “Auschwitz was not the totality of the Holocaust,” ordinary readers who come to Republican Party Animal with the usual engrained preconceptions will be hard-pressed to digest his “gas in the gaps” counter-narrative. I imagine it will be a bit like being told that yes, there was a Battle of the Alamo, but it actually took place in North Dakota!

No matter where the chips fall, I do think that Cole’s “exterminationist” interpretation of the Aktion Reinhardt system is superficially plausible and therefore useful. Whether it can withstand more intensive scrutiny is a different matter. Being a dilettante at best, I can only say it’s not how I would bet. Presumably for reasons of brevity, Cole neglects to directly address the copious revisionist literature in this area, so when he states that “revisionists have never produced an alternate explanation of the fate met by the Jews sent to camps like Treblinka and Sobibor, with empty trains returning” I am left to wonder whether he has read Samuel Crowell’s carefully documented treatment of the Aktion Reinhardt camps in the Nine-Banded Books edition of The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes. For what it’s worth, the relevant discussion is framed in the seldom-read fourth part of Crowell’s book, “The Holocaust in Retrospect,” where – I’m trying to save everyone time here – the most succinct statement of an “alternate explanation” (though Crowell would probably call it an “interpretation”) is advanced in the fifth section, “Aktion Reinhardt and the Legacy of Forced Labor,” beginning at page 339. Without wading too deep into the morass, Crowell offers a contextual reading of several key documents to support the revisionist position that “Aktion Reinhardt was about wealth seizure and SS control of Polish Jews, chiefly for labor purposes: It was not about mass murder.”

While Crowell’s analysis does not – indeed cannot – exclude the possibility that these sites were at some point devoted to the crudely mechanized destruction of human beings, including by mass gassing, I think he is persuasive in his interpretation of documents that render the scenario less likely than Cole asserts. For example, the authentic Franke-Gricksch inspection report (which wasn’t discovered until 2010 and is not mentioned by Cole) explicitly discusses the eastern program as a plunder operation, makes no reference to gassing, and includes population assessments that are plainly at odds with the numbers in the “final” Korherr report (which, it should be noted, has been disavowed by Korherr himself).

Crowell’s discussion of the top secret 1944 Globocnik report to Himmler along with its addendum also provides clear support for the interpretation that the AR system was primarily devoted to wealth seizure and includes an important note about “relocated persons” being given chits as a kind of bullshit assurance that “future compensation” would be rendered for their assets “some day in Brazil or in the Far East.” If the reference to “relocated persons” meant Jews – and there is a strong contextual reason to assume so, given the geographic presumption in the wording – then this addendum is difficult to reconcile with the notion that Jews were being systematically snuffed upon arrival at the camps.

While I make no apology for assigning Crowell plenipotentiary status in this arena, I realize it may be considered bad form since I am his publisher. Let this be my disclaimer, then, if such be warranted. I may be biased, but I am convinced that the importance of Crowell’s research has not been fully appreciated, and I think that his concise but granular study of extant documents hovering around the AR camp system are relevant and need to be considered along with the forensic and testimonial issues that revisionists will likely raise in counterpoint to Cole’s argument. In any case, when you grapple with informed disagreement, it is wise to seek out what philosophers of knowledge call “epistemic peers,” if only as a safeguard against the conceit of certitude, and I think the views of Crowell and Cole can be usefully considered as a proximate peerage; they’re intelligent men evaluating the same evidentiary chain, presumably in good faith, yet reaching different conclusions.

I should mention also that it is largely due to Crowell’s better known socio-cultural study of mass gassing claims that I am inclined to view particular gassing claims from a default perspective of skepticism. World War II mass-gassing stories are so bedeviled with conflation, confabulation, and culture-bound confusion – and for delineable reasons – that it is well, in the absence of clear-cut physical evidence, to weigh sociogenic explanations against the kind of literal interpretation that holds sway in the standard historiography.

Shadows and Mirrors

In forms of storytelling low and high, we have come to recognize a narrative device. By allusion to Dostoyevsky, it may be referred to as the Doppelgänger or the “Double.” It’s also sometimes called the “Shadow,” which I like better. I’m never sure about these things. I don’t know if it’s a modern invention or one of those Jungian archetypes that Joseph Campbell used to go on about. I’m not even sure whether it’s a trope or a motif, or some other lit-crit flavor I never learned. All I know is that it comes up often enough. Think of Humbert Humbert playing his cat-and-mouse game with Clare Quilty in Lolita, or think of the drug-addled narc in Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly – itself a re-imagining of Nabokov’s The Eye – unwittingly stalking himself until the damage is done. Think of Marlow and Kurtz, or think of lycanthropic myths, or, if you’re a simpleton, stop at Jekyll and Hyde or – why not? – The Nutty Professor. Jerry Lewis version, please.

The Shadow may appear as a liberating demon like Tyler Durden in Fight Club, or as a beastly projection like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. But the underlying psychology isn’t so moveable; it always settles around the problem of the divided self, and around such conflict as arises when one mask is dislodged to reveal the secret face that haunts or entices. And, to bastardize Robert Burns, when a Shadow meets a Shadow, there must come a reckoning.

It’s tempting to read David Cole’s unexpected and possibly important memoir as a kind of real-life Shadow story. The hallmarks are there. It’s about a guy haunted and lured by the former self he had hoped to bury, and the reckoning, obligatorily foreshadowed, comes as it must.

But if that’s the template, we are just as soon confounded by questions. Who is the Shadow? Is the Shadow David Cole, the once and again infamous “Jewish Holocaust denier” who left an indelible mark on one of the most abominated intellectual movements in modern history? Or is the Shadow David Stein, the titular “Republican Party Animal” who penned influential op-eds while organizing mixers for Hollywood’s “right-wing underground”? Is the Shadow flickering in the multiplicity of lesser pseudonyms and guises the author created as a matter of camouflage or whim as he stood in two circles? Or does the Shadow dwell elsewhere, perhaps in the hearts and minds of those who cast aspersions upon the man in subterfuge?

It’s a matter of perspective, I suppose. Or of sympathy. Or maybe it’s just a false start. Cole’s story is, in any case, ultimately not so much about a self divided as it is about the burden of irrevocable choices and what cornered insight may be gained in the wake of so much preposterous tumult, when every cover is blown and there’s nowhere left to hide.

“I don’t want to be here,” Cole emphasizes at the beginning of his story. In the closing chapter, he plays on a recurrent Coen brothers theme to assert that he has “learned nothing.” I believe one of these voices. I am deeply suspicious of the other.

Cingulate posted:

Funny thing, Scott wrote an interesting piece about the Soviet medical research parallel world.

But, doesn't your claim still rest on the assumption that non-Western science does not have proportionally more instances of Scientific Racism than the West? Which is an empirical question. Maybe Chinese publications are full of that stuff? I wouldn't be surprised.
Though generally speaking, psychology and neuroscience not tightly integrated into the Western system (broadly speaking - including not only Stanford, but also Japan, the NYU offshot at Abu Dhabi and the Baidu team in California) are pretty bad. This is changing, particularly with the recovery of mainland China as a scientific superpower, but it's still the state of things, for all I know.

See, the problem with this - with your way of thinking, and dealing with different opinions - is this kind of stupidity has probably contributed to your president-elect being Donald Trump.

ate all the Oreos posted:

Well it rests on non-Western science not coming to a second, incompatible consensus a la "sluggish schizophrenia" in the soviet union, or that non-Western science is not currently turning up a bunch of evidence for scientific racism that's being "suppressed" by the west. I will admit I don't actually have any specific evidence that this isn't the case but it sort of seems like something there'd be, I don't know, someone talking about?

ate all the Oreos posted:

Yeah I knew it involves sending it out to experts I was more glossing over it to talk about replication but I guess that's actually a separate issue completely so whatever. I would wager that the average reader of Brietbart probably doesn't know or care about this either so while I agree that peer review has a ton of problems and I personally like discussing them with y'all, in this context bringing them up in response to someone using it as an excuse to reject science kinda seems counterproductive but I guess no actual Breitbart readers are in this thread so whatever

Ichabod Sexbeast posted:

We need to show sympathy and understanding and kindness to that person, because that is almost definitely Mr. Mean-Spirited and nothing will piss him off more

InediblePenguin posted:

We need to reason with these people, because Trump is our President-Elect