Thursday, January 3, 2019

PseudoScience and the Real Roots of White Supremacy as Doctrine and Practice in the World Today

All,

What is and has always been the fundamental cause of the heinous doctrine and practice of white supremacy and its savagely criminal defense and justification of slavery, genocide, colonization, and mass murder generally in the so-called "modern world" since the 15th century?

The blatantly obvious answer as always can be found in the following article below of course and the continued relentless assertion, support, and rationalization of PSEUDO SCIENCE or what is better known and clearly understood as LIES. The BIG LIE in the so-called "scientific world" is precisely what moral and intellectual cretins like Joseph Goebbels and Dr. James Watson and their many colleagues have always shared in common with their millions of acolytes and fellow LIARS who continue their murderous legacy today. Stay tuned because as fascism continues to spread exponetially across this society and the rest of the globe these white supremacist assertions and the endless articles and the ongoing flood of high profile reports and investigative journalism about them will become even more apparent than they already are...

Kofi 


James Watson Won’t Stop Talking About Race

The Nobel-winning biologist has drawn global criticism with unfounded pronouncements on genetics, race and intelligence. He still thinks he’s right, a new documentary finds.

by Amy Harmon
January 1, 2019
New York Times

 
"Decoding Watson," a new film about Dr. James D. Watson explores the gulf between his scientific brilliance and his views on race.CreditCreditMark Mannucci/Room 608 Inc.

It has been more than a decade since James D. Watson, a founder of modern genetics, landed in a kind of professional exile by suggesting that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than whites.

In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really.”
Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

Dr. Watson’s comments reverberated around the world, and he was forced to retire from his job as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, although he retains an office there.

He apologized publicly and “unreservedly,’’ and in later interviews he sometimes suggested that he had been playing the provocateur — his trademark role — or had not understood that his comments would be made public.

Ever since, Dr. Watson, 90, has been largely absent from the public eye. His speaking invitations evaporated. In 2014, he became the first living Nobelist to sell his medal, citing a depleted income from having been designated a “nonperson.’’

But his remarks have lingered. They have been invoked to support white supremacist views, and scientists routinely excoriate Dr. Watson when his name surfaces on social media.

Eric Lander, the director of the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, elicited an outcry last spring with a toast he made to Dr. Watson’s involvement in the early days of the Human Genome Project. Dr. Lander quickly apologized.
“I reject his views as despicable,” Dr. Lander wrote to Broad scientists. “They have no place in science, which must welcome everyone. I was wrong to toast, and I’m sorry.’’

And yet, offered the chance recently to recast a tarnished legacy, Dr. Watson has chosen to reaffirm it, this time on camera. In a new documentary, “American Masters: Decoding Watson,’’ to be broadcast on P.B.S. on Wednesday night, he is asked whether his views about the relationship between race and intelligence have changed.

“No,’’ Dr. Watson said. “Not at all. I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature. But I haven’t seen any knowledge. And there’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on I.Q. tests. I would say the difference is, it’s genetic.’’
Dr. Watson adds that he takes no pleasure in “the difference between blacks and whites’’ and wishes it didn’t exist. “It’s awful, just like it’s awful for schizophrenics,’’ he says. (His son Rufus was diagnosed in his teens with schizophrenia.) Dr. Watson continues: “If the difference exists, we have to ask ourselves, how can we try and make it better?”

Dr. Watson’s remarks may well ignite another firestorm of criticism. At the very least, they will pose a challenge for historians when they take the measure of the man: How should such fundamentally unsound views be weighed against his extraordinary scientific contributions?
In response to questions from The Times, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.”

Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate’’ statement would be based.

“It is disappointing that someone who made such groundbreaking contributions to science,’’ Dr. Collins added, “is perpetuating such scientifically unsupported and hurtful beliefs.’’

PHOTO: Dr. Watson, right, and the co-discoverer of the double-helix, Francis Crick, in 1953.CreditA. Barrington Brown, Gonville and Caius College/Science Photo Library
Image

PHOTO:  Dr. Watson, right, and the co-discoverer of the double-helix, Francis Crick, in 1953.CreditA. Barrington Brown, Gonville and Caius College/Science Photo Library

PHOTO: Dr. Watson is unable to respond, according to family members. He made his latest remarks last June, during the last of six interviews with Mark Mannucci, the film’s producer and director.

But in October Dr. Watson was hospitalized following a car accident, and he has not been able to leave medical care.

Some scientists said that Dr. Watson’s recent remarks are noteworthy less because they are his than because they signify misconceptions that may be on the rise, even among scientists, as ingrained racial biases collide with powerful advances in genetics that are enabling researchers to better explore the genetic underpinnings of behavior and cognition.

“It’s not an old story of an old guy with old views,’’ said Andrea Morris, the director of career development at Rockefeller University, who served as a scientific consultant for the film. Dr. Morris said that, as an African-American scientist, “I would like to think that he has the minority view on who can do science and what a scientist should look like. But to me, it feels very current.’’

David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard, has argued that new techniques for studying DNA show that some human populations were geographically separated for long enough that they plausibly could have evolved average genetic differences in cognition and behavior.

But in his recent book, “Who We Are and How We Got Here,’’ he explicitly repudiates Dr. Watson’s presumption that such differences would “correspond to longstanding popular stereotypes’’ as “essentially guaranteed to be wrong.’’

Even Robert Plomin, a prominent behavioral geneticist who argues that nature decisively trumps nurture when it comes to individuals, rejects speculation about average racial differences.

“There are powerful methods for studying the genetic and environmental origins of individual differences, but not for studying the causes of average differences between groups,” Dr. Plomin writes in an afterword to be published this spring in the paperback edition of his book, “Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are.”

Whether Dr. Watson was aware of any of this science is unclear. In the film, he appears to have grown increasingly isolated. He mentions missing Francis Crick, his collaborator in the race to decipher the structure of DNA.

“We liked each other,’’ Dr. Watson says of Dr. Crick. “I couldn’t get enough of him.’’

As history now knows, the duo was able to solve the puzzle in 1953, with their hallmark models of cardboard and metal only with the help of another scientist, Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray photograph of the DNA molecule was shown to Dr. Watson without her permission.

The tools of molecular biology unlocked by their discovery have since been used to trace humanity’s prehistory, devise lifesaving therapies, and develop Crispr, a gene-editing technology that was used recently, and unethically, to alter the DNA of twin human embryos.

And Dr. Watson became perhaps the most influential biologist of the second half of the 20th century. His textbook, “Molecular Biology of the Gene,’’ helped define the new field. First in a laboratory at Harvard and then at Cold Spring Harbor, he trained a new generation of molecular biologists and used his star power to champion such projects as the first sequencing of the human genome.
“You knew when you heard him that you were at the start of a revolution in understanding,’’ Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied with Dr. Watson in the 1960s, says in “Decoding Watson.’’

“You felt as if you were part of this tiny group of people who had seen the light.’’

Mr. Mannucci, the director and producer, was drawn to his subject by a certain similarity to “the King Lear story’,’ he said — “that this man was at the height of his powers and, through his own character flaws, was brought down.” The film highlights Dr. Watson’s penchant for provocation, exemplified by his candid 1968 memoir, “The Double Helix,” of the race to decipher DNA’s structure.
In later years, even before his 2007 comments, Dr. Watson began making offensive statements about groups of people, suggesting, among other things, that exposure to sunlight in equatorial regions increases sexual urges and that fat people are less ambitious than others.
“He was a semiprofessional loose cannon,’’ said Nathaniel Comfort, a science historian at Johns Hopkins University. “We become prisoners of our own personas.” In the film, Dr. Comfort also suggests that Dr. Watson’s views on race are the result of the genetic filter he applies to the world: “There’s a risk to thinking about genes all the time.”

But Mary-Claire King, a leading geneticist at the University of Washington who knows Dr. Watson well and is not in the film, suggested that the racially homogeneous culture of science also played a role in shaping Dr. Watson’s misconceptions.

“If he knew African-Americans as colleagues at all levels, his present view would be impossible to sustain,’’ Dr. King said.

If that is the case, it may not bode well for combating prejudice in biomedical research, where African-Americans represent just 1.5 percent of grant applications to the N.I.H. Biases in hiring by medical school science departments are well documented.

“It’s easy to say, ‘I’m not Watson,’’’ said Kenneth Gibbs, a researcher at the N.I.H. who studies racial disparities in science. “But one should really be asking himself or herself, ‘What am I doing to ensure our campus environments are supporting scientists from backgrounds that are not there?’’’
“Decoding Watson’’ marks the first time Dr. Watson and his wife, Liz, have spoken publicly at length about finding out that Rufus, their older son, has schizophrenia. Rufus and his brother, Duncan, also appear in the film, but Mr. Mannucci said that other people close to Dr. Watson declined to participate.
In interviews with The Times, some said they believed that Dr. Watson was ill served by speaking publicly at this point in his life.
Still, Mr. Mannucci said that he had asked Dr. Watson about race and intelligence several times over the course of making the film in order to ascertain his real views. “I didn’t want to feel that it was a product of age or having caught him in a moment, trying to get a rise out of someone,’’ he said.

In the film, Dr. Watson sometimes seems to be grasping for explanations for his own views on race and intelligence. He mentions that he is a “product of the Roosevelt era,’’ and that he has always believed genes are important.

“To the extent that I’ve hurt people,’’ he said, “of course I regret it.”


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Amy Harmon is a national correspondent, covering the intersection of science and society. She has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for her series “The DNA Age”, and as part of a team for the series “How Race Is Lived in America.”
@amy_harmon • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 31, 2018, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: For James Watson, the Price Was Exile. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper

Wednesday, January 2, 2019

Arundhati Roy on Fiction in the Face of Rising Fascism

https://truthout.org/video/arundhati-roy-on-fiction-in-the-face-of-rising-fascism/

Interview 
Politics & Elections  

Arundhati Roy on Fiction in the Face of Rising Fascism
by Laura Flanders
December 31, 2018
Truthout


VIDEO: https://youtu.be/opeXClLEdcs


ARUNDHATI ROY
(b. November 24, 1961)

“How to tell a shattered story by slowly becoming everybody. No, by slowly becoming everything.” That’s the line that stuck with me from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the latest book by one of our favorite guests, Arundhati Roy. Roy’s strength as a writer — and what she does that so many of us struggle to do — is weave many stories into one fabric, without diluting the integrity of those stories. I’ve spoken to her often about her writing on capitalism, nationalism, solidarity and resistance. In this conversation we’ll talk about all those things again, and visit her new novel against the backdrop of anti-Muslim violence and landmark changes for queer people in her home country of India.

Laura Flanders: You dedicate your book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to the unconsoled, and I believe that we are unconsoled in this moment. But I do worry that we in the United States, as you’ve alluded, become inured, become maybe muddied in our seeing, in our thinking, because there’s so much coming at us at all times. Insofar as you have a take on what’s happening here, where do you think we are? And then obviously I want you to talk about home and where India is, because India we barely see at all.

The thing is, people spend so much time mocking Trump or waiting for him to be impeached. And the danger with that kind of obsession with a single person is that you don’t see the system that produced him. You don’t see that, obviously, there was something about those eight years of Obama’s presidency that created Trump and if we just keep obsessing about this one person without seeing what would happen … what would happen if he wasn’t there tomorrow and Mike Pence came? Would it be better? You know? The kind of havoc that has been created in the world when I think about it now, between Europe and America increasingly, the simple truth is that these economies can only function by selling the weapons that they manufacture. Weapons which you cannot even imagine that the human mind can conceive of and they are doing the selling and we’re doing the buying.
To keep that economy going, you need a world at war, or almost at war, or just about to go to war, whatever it is. Forget the past, but just look at it from 9/11 onwards. How many countries have been destroyed? Europe is now in chaos also because of the refugees and so on. But what is creating it? How is it possible to continuously believe that you can destabilize country after country after country and anything good is going to come of it?

Is India destabilizing or stabilizing in a scary way?

India, it’s hard to say. This year’s going to be very important here.

How so?

Because the elections are coming next May and we’ve had a situation where somehow, since 1925, the goal of the Hindu nationalists was achieved in 2014 when Modi came to power with this absolute majority. In a way I was grateful for the absolute majority because there wasn’t anyone else to blame. There isn’t anyone else to blame for the chaos that has been unleashed. But what is very worrying is that, again, I keep saying you have to look and we have to find ways of keeping up our understanding of what’s going on. Two years ago Modi appeared on TV at 10 o’clock at night and announced that 80 percent of Indian currency was illegal from the next morning. That was like taking a baseball bat and breaking every single citizen’s spine.

They called it “demonetization.”

That’s right. We don’t even have a word in any Indian language for it. But then when you do that, regardless of the economic implications, what you’re doing is you’re sending a message saying, “I can control you at all points, every single one of you.” Now there’s another huge thing which they are trying to bring into legislation called the Aadhaar card where every citizen’s private information, biometrics, all of it is going to be put on a unique identity card. Now, as you know, these databases are being hacked. People’s private information is being bought and sold. Information is gold now. That is a form of surveillance and control that is there forever. Once they’ve got it there, you can’t undo it.

So, these are things which are impossible to wrap your head around. You have the whole new media now. For example, I’m not even talking about Facebook, I’m not even talking about Twitter. I’m talking about a messaging service called WhatsApp, which is very, very big in India. And at one point all of us used to use it because it’s encrypted and the information [is] not available to the authorities. But now you have these kind of WhatsApp farms where fake news, fake videos, and videos that are meant to create communal conflagration are deliberately being sent around. So you have a situation where the only way now that Modi is going to win the election again, is to create massive communal strife between Hindus and Muslims, and so on. Or what they call a limited war with Pakistan, as you know, both are now nuclear neighbors. But the systematic sort of administering of hatred, a manifesto of hatred, is the basis of these people.

We wonder about that here in the US, too. Once that hatred has been unleashed, is the individual required, if Modi doesn’t get elected or doesn’t get an absolute majority in 2019…? Is that the end of it? I mean, there was an eight-year-old girl kidnapped, raped, and murdered, Asifa Bano, recently. We can talk about who did it, et cetera, but what killed her? How do you reel that back?

The thing is that there are so many different kinds of rape, right? You might have a group of … [rapists who kill] a child, but do they then have huge processions [of] people supporting them? Do they have demands that they be released or that the investigation doesn’t continue or that the investigation is handed over to people whom the majority community “trust”?

As happened in this case.

Yes, as happened in this case, but it keeps happening. I mean, there was another person who was arrested for raping, a sort of god man. There were massive protests in his favor. There’s another god man called Asaram Bapu. He was convicted of rape. There had to be security alerts in three states because it was now a question of people supporting him. You see? It’s not just that one community rapes and the other doesn’t. It isn’t that. I’m talking about the public support that comes out. And then there’s sort of [a] ritualistic, almost satanic element to it. It isn’t just rape and kill, but there’s something so terrible about it that you wonder, what is it? What is it? And you read it. I mean she’s one child, but it’s happening all over now. And sometimes I wonder, is this something that requires the sacrifice of the most beautiful thing, which is a little girl? Is there something more to it than just carnal lust and brutality?

Is there? How do you see it?

I don’t know. Because we are living in this world of feudalism and all kinds of strange beliefs. I don’t know. I mean, I really don’t know. I don’t know how to think about it. None of us know. We are all unable to understand how things have come to this.

Except you are able to talk about it because this entire book is you talking about it.

True. It’s me thinking about it, mourning about it, and then finding how much beauty still does exist in the saddest places. How much strength and power still exists. I have in the last 20 years spent time in what people would consider to be the darkest and most hopeless places, but they have not been dark and hopeless. There are people struggling against it, fighting against it, speaking against it. And I don’t mean in a shallow sort of sloganeering way, but as a way of life. As a deep, dense understanding with poetry and music. Each of these things has such a deep history. The poets that ordinary people in the book recite, love, and whose shrines they go to, to lay flowers. You look at the power of that. People don’t forget their poets, however much violence is done.

Is that what brought you back to fiction?

What brought me back to fiction was just that I had become, as I keep saying, like a sedimentary rock. I have these layers and layers of looking at things. In non-fiction, I have argued, I’ve fought, I’ve driven myself, and other people, crazy. But the complexity of it — the humor, the love, the maverick-ness, the poetry — all of that was accumulating too. I’ve been writing it for 10 years. I was not interested in writing just about one particular class. Just this whole ocean of languages, beliefs, religions, intimacies and anarchies. The fact is that we are facing majoritarianism, which is actually bordering on fascism — not European fascism, our own variety of it. Yet India is a land of minorities. A land whose people are divided formally into castes, religions and ethnicities. People look at India and think it’s … archaic, but society lives in a grid. This book is about people who somehow are off grid and through that off grid-ness, you shine the light on the grid and you look at it, wonder about it.

Maybe we put our hope in the wrong places. Are we wrong to put our hope in democracy, elections?

Well, right now at this point in time, I am not one, though I have been one of those people who has all this time said how little difference there is between the various political parties. But today in India, we are facing a situation where if the BJP comes back in 2019, I don’t think there’s going to be anything left of what we thought of. With all its flaws, it’s not that you’ll be voting for a friend, but just for the enemy that you want to have. So I don’t think we can afford to leave any spaces unchallenged and unfought, including the elections. But if all of us think that by defeating Modi or by impeaching Trump things are going to be OK, we got to have some extra iodine every night.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND INTERVIEW SUBJECT: 

Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the biggest-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes. She has written seventeen critically acclaimed books.

Bibliography: Arundhati Roy

Fiction:

The God of Small Things. Flamingo, 1997. ISBN 0-00-655068-1
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Hamish Hamilton, 2017. ISBN 0-24-130397-4

Non-fiction:

The End of Imagination. Kottayam: D.C. Books, 1998. ISBN 81-7130-867-8
The Cost of Living. Flamingo, 1999. ISBN 0-375-75614-0
The Greater Common Good. Bombay: India Book Distributor, 1999. ISBN 81-7310-121-3
The Algebra of Infinite Justice. Flamingo, 2002. ISBN 0-00-714949-2
Power Politics. Cambridge: South End Press, 2002. ISBN 0-89608-668-2
War Talk. Cambridge: South End Press, 2003. ISBN 0-89608-724-7
An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire. Consortium, 2004. ISBN 0-89608-727-1
Public Power in the Age of Empire. New York: Seven Stories Press. 2004. ISBN 9781583226827.
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. Interviews by David Barsamian. Cambridge: South End Press, 2004. ISBN 0-89608-710-7
The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. New Delhi: Penguin, 2008. ISBN 978-0-670-08207-0
Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. New Delhi: Penguin, 2010. ISBN 978-0-670-08379-4
Broken Republic: Three Essays. New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton, 2011. ISBN 978-0-670-08569-9
Walking with the Comrades. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011. ISBN 978-0-670-08553-8
Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Verso, 2011. ISBN 1-844-67735-4
The Hanging of Afzal Guru and the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament. New Delhi: Penguin. 2013. ISBN 978-0143420750.
Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014. ISBN 978-1-60846-385-5[94]
Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations (with John Cusack). Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. ISBN 978-1-608-46717-4
The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017. ISBN 978-1-608-46797-6

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:

Best-selling author and broadcaster, Laura Flanders interviews forward thinking people from the worlds of politics, business, culture and social movements on her internationally syndicated TV program, 'The Laura Flanders Show.' It airs weekly on KCET/LinkTV, FreeSpeech TV, and in English and Spanish in teleSUR. Flanders is also a contributing writer to The Nation and YES! Magazine ('Commonomics') and a regular guest on MSNBC. She is the author of six books, including The New York Times best-seller, BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical Species (Verso, 2004) and Blue GRIT: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians (Penguin Press, 2007). 'The Laura Flanders Show' first aired on Air America Radio from 2004 to 2008. Follow her on Twitter: @GRITlaura.