You think you know performative wokeness? Get a load of this story.

A month ago I described (based on a column of John McWhorter) a remarkable act of performative wokeness at the University of Wisconsin at Madison: the removal of a 42-ton glacial boulder from a prominent position on campus because one time, in 1925, the local newspaper gave it a racist name, “n—-rhead.” It was called that only once, but this ancient transgression was sufficient to anger up the Wisconsin students and administration sufficiently that they hired a big truck to haul the landmark away.  The removal, of course, accomplished nothing to alleviate racism.

Nor does the latest shenanigan at U. Wisconsin (UW), this time involving Fredric March (1897-1975), a very famous American actor of the 1930s and 1940s. He won two Best Actor Oscars, for  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and one of my favorite films, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and two Best Actor Tony Awards.  An active anti-racist, and alum of the University of Wisconsin, March’s fame prompted the University to name a theater arts center at UW-Oskhosh in his name (see photo below).

Then they found the TRANSGRESSION, described in the story below from the Racine Journal Times (and at greater length here at brightlightsfilm.com). NAACP stands for The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the most distinguished organizations in America battling racism.

The story: In 2017 the University Chancellor commissioned a report on the activities of the Ku Klux Klan on campus, and found that there was an “interfraternity society” with that name, though it had no connection to the real Klan. Nor did the KKK fraternity have any connection to white racism or terrorism. (More information below.)

As the brightlights link above reports, the UW-Madison fraternity was an import from the University of Illinois. The name might have been stupid, but there was nothing Klan-like about the honorary fraternity:

Illinois’s honorary Ku Klux Klan (labeled for shorthand in this article as HKKK to distinguish it from the actual Second Klan/Invisible Empire, labeled IE) visited Madison in mid-1919 and jump-started the first year of a UW chapter for the 1919-1920 academic session; every known constitution, charter, or document connected to the HKKK at either campus calls only for each individual fraternity to elect its most outstanding junior to the HKKK and for the interfraternity organization to be influential in campus affairs and social life – there is not a single word or idea related to the IE or that group’s bigotries; not only is there no evidence of an entry requirement based on one’s racial views, HKKK members had no agency in even becoming members – your academic/extracurricular performance alone conferred membership as a surprise honor to the inductee; no ties between the HKKK and the IE have ever been found; the HKKK carried that name at the UW for just three or four years; official HKKK photos those years in UW publications are devoid of anyone in blackface and of any IE symbols, sentiments, clothing, or paraphernalia – showing, instead, members in suits and neckties, formal wear, casual attire, and team uniforms or sporting cartoonish top hats and pushing baby carriages for an initiation ritual.

Sadly, March was in the honorary group for one of those three years. After he left UW, he embarked on a lifelong legacy of antiracism and defending the civil rights of African-Americans. From brightlights:

By Easter Day 1939, Fredric March (born Racine, Wisconsin, 1897) had already won his first Oscar and was a dozen years into a 48-year marriage to a woman who in the 1920s was already recognized as one of the most politically progressive actresses in the American theater – Florence Eldridge. Three years earlier, March himself – with fellow activists Dorothy Parker, Oscar Hammerstein, Fritz Lang, and a few others – had been one of the principal founders of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. But heading into this particular Easter Sunday, the Marches were showing in the biggest way yet just how much they put principles above any risk to their box office, a recurring bit of behavior they surpassed many times over in the decades to come.

In that spring of ’39, when heavenly-gifted opera singer Marian Anderson, an African American, was barred by the racist policies of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) from performing in Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall, Charles Hamilton Houston – the NAACP’s first legal counsel and Thurgood Marshall’s most influential mentor – initiated with other African American leaders a broad-based letter-writing campaign condemning the DAR for its actions, and Fredric March, a well-known compatriot on civil rights issues, was one of the first letter-writers they enlisted. And when these same leaders in blindingly short order organized a now beyond-historic Marian Anderson Easter concert at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, the Marches’ names appeared on the event’s official printed program as two of the sponsors, and the husband-and-wife team made sure to take the day off from The American Way – a hit Broadway play denouncing Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism in which they were co-starring – to fly from New York to Washington in time to let Anderson’s glorious voice wash over them.

The second link describes much more anti-racism of March, including raising money for Dr. King’s activities, chastising JFK for moving too slowly on civil rights, and so on. He was closely associated with the NAACP.

A life of anti-racism and liberalism. Shouldn’t that count more than belonging to a fraternity bearing the KKK name but having nothing at all to do with the real KKK or its philosophy?

You know the answer: NO.  In 2018, a student-run council of the University voted 8-2 to remove March’s name from the Fredric March Play Circle: the auditorium named in his honor. By that time March was dead, so he didn’t live to see himself dishonored.

In fact, the honor should remain, for his life was surely a net plus for both antiracism and artistry, and the name of the theater is not celebrating any racism, much less the stupidly-named fraternity. And now, as the headline above notes, the NAACP, along with many people, both black and white, have asked UW to reconsider restoring March’s name. From the newspaper:

Three years after a UW-Madison group stripped the name of a prominent alumnus from a theater in the Wisconsin Union over a past association with a student group that shared a name with the Ku Klux Klan, the NAACP and others are calling for a course correction.

The national headquarters for the civil rights organization, along with two dozen scholars, actors and activists, sent a letter last week urging for the return of award-winning actor Fredric March’s name to a “place of honor” on campus.

The letter-signers say the legacy of March, a Racine native, has been marred because of the name removal, which they described as “guided solely by social-media rumor and grievously fact-free, mistaken conclusions.”

. . .Some examples in March’s history that the NAACP letter cites as indicative of his values: When he supported the singer Marian Anderson, who was banned from performing at Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall in 1939 because she was Black; when he participated in a secret strategy session with Martin Luther King Jr.; when he delivered a keynote address on the 10th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling; and how he spent the bulk of his career seeking roles in “socially conscious” films.

“We remain confused as to why, on both Wisconsin campuses, the avalanche of readily accessible primary- and secondary-source materials detailing Mr. March’s loud, concerted and enduring lifetime commitment to fighting racism and anti-Semitism was never pursued, discovered, consulted, heard or made public — and why neither UW-Madison nor UW-Oshkosh has moved to correct this clear and unconscionable rejection of conspicuously demonstrable historic truth and academic rigor,” the NAACP letter signers wrote.

Just under half of the letter-signers are people of color, including Clarence B. Jones, an adviser and speechwriter for King; Oscar-winner Louis Gossett Jr.; and Bernard LaFayette Jr., a Freedom Rider and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Indeed. There is absolutely no evidence of March’s racism apart from the name of the honorary fraternity, and he spent his life fighting for social justice.  So will the University reconsider? After all, they have a new request from the NAACP!

Nope. In fact, Chancellor Rebecca Blank wrote an “explanatory” letter in the New York Times about the removal of the rock and the de-naming of March’s auditorium.  It’s not convincing; the Woke never back down.

From Chancellor Blank re Fredric March (my emphasis):

In 2018, the university removed the name of Fredric March, the actor and an alumnus, from a student performance space at the request of students, and after months of discussion about the subject among our student leaders. It did so after the terrible events of Charlottesville and historical research showing incontrovertibly that March was a member of a campus group called the Ku Klux Klan, though the group was not affiliated in any way with the national Knights of the K.K.K.

While it is good that March went on to become a fighter for civil rights and equality, the fact remains that while a student here he aligned himself with a student group that echoed the K.K.K. name.

There are some things in our country’s history that are so toxic that you can never erase the stain, let alone merit a named space in our student union. Membership in a group with a name like that of the K.K.K. is one of them.

In other words, March is PERMANENTLY TOXIC. Note it’s not the Ku Klux Klan theater, but the Fredric March Play Circle.

Tell me, then, what does the removal of March’s name from the auditorium accomplish to reduce racism and bigotry?

Oh, and about that rock whose name was mentioned only once in 1925, the good Chancellor wrote:

A rock that was associated with a vile racial slur in the 1920s was also removed from our main campus, at the request of the Wisconsin Black Student Union and other groups. We came to this conclusion after more than a year of consultation and discussion, sparked by the death of George Floyd.

The death of George Floyd, a reprehensible murder, has still not been connected to police racism, but never mind that. When the NAACP asks for “reparations” for March, and Chancellor Blank, a white woman, says she knows better than the NAACP which “toxic stains of racism” can never be removed, we know we’ve gone down the rabbit hole. And so the madness goes on. Just once I’d like to see the Woke say, “Oops, we made a mistake! We’ll restore the name.” But they admit of no mistakes, even in a case as ridiculous as this one.

h/t: Greg

Greetings on Thursday, September 23, 2021: National Pancake Day.  Have some today!

Sadly, today I return to Chicago after a swell visit with friends. I will commune with my ducks as the days dwindle down to the time of departure. I will be traveling much of the day, so this may be the only post you see.

It’s also National American Great Pot Pie Day, National Snack Stick Day (jerky, string cheese, etc.), Celebrate Bisexuality Day, National Checkers Day, and International Day of Sign Languages.

News of the Day:

*Yesterday the FDA approved booster shots in the U.S., and today they’ll ponder exactly who gets them.

On Wednesday evening, the Food and Drug Administration authorized booster shots of the vaccine for people over 65 who received their second at least six months earlier. The agency also approved boosters for adult Pfizer-BioNTech recipients who are at high risk of severe Covid-19, or who are at risk of serious complications because of exposure to the virus in their jobs.

The first bit is easy (and I’m qualified) but they have to decide who, exactly, is a risk because of risk of complications or risk on the jobs. And what about those who got the Moderna shots? With my doctor’s okay, I’m going to get the booster, and I will NOT take Ivermectin (see below).

*The trial of Elizabeth Holmes is in its third week (she must have some lawyers’ bill!), and yesterday former Secretary of State Jim Mattis testified that he invested $85,000 in the organization but became puzzled:

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis testified Wednesday in the criminal trial of Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes that he and other board members were blindsided to learn in 2015 that the company hadn’t been conducting all of its blood tests using its proprietary technology.

“There just came a point where I didn’t know what to believe about Theranos anymore,” the retired four-star general said.

*The first 28 minutes Sam Harris’s latest podcast, “Ask me anything,” can be heard for free here.  Reader Tom, who sent me the link, told me this:

Only 28 minutes in length, with Harris directly addressing [Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying’s] recent shenanigans about 10 minutes into the podcast after an interesting intro.

It actually starts at 10:32 and goes on to the end of the segment, with Sam very critical about the duo’s “lack of quality control about the information they’re putting forward” about the advantages of ivermectin and especially the problems with Covid vaccine.” He also raises several issues with their claims about the supposed ineffectiveness and dangers of vaccines.

*Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 681,341, an increase of 2,075 deaths over yesterday’s figure. Remember when 200,000 deaths was an unthinkable figure? We may get to four times that number before this is over. The reported world death toll is now 4,734,397, an increase of about 10,200 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on September 23 was accidentally listed in yesterday’s Hili dialogue (I don’t screw up like that very often), so go here to see what happened on September 23. The rest of the information on births and deaths below is new:

Notables born on this day include:

• 1215 – Kublai Khan, Mongolian emperor (d. 1294)

The man who decreed the stately pleasure dome. Reread the great eponymous poem fragment by Coleridge here.

• 1865 – Suzanne Valadon, French model and painter (d. 1938)

Valadon (photo below) is now more famous as a model (she modeled for, among others  Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec) but was a noted painter in her own right. She was also the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo.

First, her photo (avec chat):

• 1889 – Walter Lippmann, American journalist and publisher, co-founded The New Republic (d. 1974)
• 1899 – Louise Nevelson, American sculptor (d. 1988)

Here’s one of Nevelson’s paintings, “Mrs. N’s Palace”:

• 1915 – Clifford Shull, American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2001)
• 1920 – Mickey Rooney, American actor, singer, director, and producer (d. 2014)

Rooney was married eight times, including to the world’s most beautiful woman, Ava Gardner:

• 1930 – Ray Charles, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and actor (d. 2004)

Here’s Ray singing the Leon Russell composition, “Song for You” in 1997:

• 1949 – Bruce Springsteen, American singer-songwriter and guitarist

Those who croaked on September 23 include:

• 1241 – Snorri Sturluson, Icelandic historian, poet, and politician (b. 1178)
• 1889 – Wilkie Collins, English novelist, short story writer, and playwright (b. 1824)
• 1939 – Sigmund Freud, Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist (b. 1856)

Here’s Freud’s famous couch, which I saw when I visited the Freud Museum (his house) in London; he took the couch with him when he moved to England in 1938. It looks quite comfortable! (He was, of course, a fraud.)

• 1973 – Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet and diplomat, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1904)
• 1987 – Bob Fosse, American actor, dancer, choreographer, and director (b. 1927)

Here are some miscellaneous clips of Fosse dancing, including on on “The Dobie Gillis Show”! The commentary is by Gwen Verdon, who danced in many of his shows and was also married to him.

• 2013 – Ruth Patrick, American botanist and immunologist (b. 1907)
• 2014 – Irven DeVore, American anthropologist and biologist (b. 1934)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a goal. When I  asked Malgorzata who Hili was pursuing, she said this:

“Hili, knowing what’s happening in Poland and around the world, concluded that forces of darkness intensified their attacks and it’s time to fight them. I’m not sure how she intends to do it.”

A: What are you doing?

Hili: I’m going into battle with the forces of darkness.

Ja: Co robisz?

Hili: Idę walczyć z siłami ciemności.

From Lenora via Cole & Marmalade: Dances With Cats

A post from Facebook:

And from Not Another Science Cat Page:

Titania goes after Justin again:

If you can pronounce the word “straight” but you struggle with “LGBTQQIP2SAA+”, you really need to address your deep-seated homophobia.pic.twitter.com/LpVP9tW56T

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) September 22, 2021

From Masih, showing how odious some Iranian men are about the obligatory hijab. Watch the video:

We call on Iranian women to participate in #MyCameraIsMyWeapon campaign against gender apartheid, abuse & harassment. Although the regime criminalised it for Iranian women to send us videos, Iranian women are bravely resisting. See this one & be her voice pic.twitter.com/wOxoFFMqMR

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) September 22, 2021

From Barry; sound up for this great example of sexual selection:

Of all the gloriously weird things that have come from sexual selection, the male greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is one of the best.

Check out how he bounces his yellow, inflatable sacs! And that ✨starburst✨ tail! Baby got back!

pic.twitter.com/HQbQ8xnxIi

— Char Adams, PhD MPH MA (@_cdadams_) September 14, 2021

From Ginger K.: Has anybody ever thought of this question before? Well, here’s the answer, guaranteed to make you the life of the party.

This is the longest way in the world on foot without the need to cross the ocean or any other significant barrier, it runs from Cape Town (South Africa) to Magadan (Russia). There is no need for planes or boats as there are bridges. pic.twitter.com/Xz3CC0OFhP

— Black Hole (@konstructivizm) September 18, 2021

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

23 September 1925 | Czech Jewish woman Hana Herzogová was born in Miroslav.

She was deported to #Auschwitz from #Theresienstadt ghetto on 6 September 1943. She did not survive. pic.twitter.com/yg7zAfplpT

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) September 23, 2021

Tweets from Matthew. Only professional animal photographers have this worry. Walter Chandoha was the master.

Trying to get cats to cooperate with photos really hasn't changed much. 1933. https://t.co/DPfbtwaW3B pic.twitter.com/emKPOoD6EO

— Molly Hodgdon (@Manglewood) September 22, 2021

Schopenhauer got reamed out by his mother:

This letter to Schopenhauer from his mother is one for the ages. (ht @AndyPutnam) pic.twitter.com/jSIt7K1ESm

— Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz) September 22, 2021

Another issue I hadn’t thought of. Matthew says, “Can’t help thinking the person taking the film should have stayed further away, but no harm done.”

What happens if a flying fox gets grounded? How does it get back into the air?

Well, this one did this 👇🏼 https://t.co/VYZ63GZuWk

— Give Bats A Break (@GiveBatsABreak) September 21, 2021

One of the big hot-button issues at the intersection of science and politics is the degree to which human behavioral traits, particularly IQ, are based on genes. To be more specific, the one question that can meaningfully answered about genes and IQ is this one: “What proportion of the variation among individuals in a population for any human trait (not just IQ, but also propensity to smoke, risk-taking, neuroticism, etc.) is based on variation among those individual’s genes?“  The figure showing that degree of genetic determination of variation in a population is called the heritability of the trait, symbolized by  h², and ranges from 0% (or 0.0), meaning that none of the variation you see in the trait is based on variation in genes (it’s due to environmental factors) up to 100%, or 1, meaning that all the variation we see in the trait is due to variation among individuals in their genomes.

I don’t want to go back again and explain heritability, what it means, and the difficulties with measuring and interpreting it, because I did that in a recent post, and if you want to know more, you might want to read that one first.

That earlier post also summarizes a new practice of finding an individual’s “polygenic score” (PGS) for a trait by correlating the variation in many DNA markers in an individual with that individual’s trait of interest, usually as an adult. This gives you a way to suss out suggestive information about an individual’s future behavior when it’s just born, for you can sequence the DNA of a newborn and. combining that with previous data on the PGS correlation with, say, educational attainment (degree of school completed) to get an idea of how far that individual will go in school. This is of course not absolutely predictive, of course, and has only one possible useful consequence that I can think of—more about that later—but it’s also a way to locate genes that influence variation in a trait. (We now know of 1271 regions in the genome that are correlated with educational attainment; each of these, of course, can have only a tiny influence on variation in a population.) Right now, the correlation between the “polygenic score” of an individual and his/her educational attainment is about 14% (it varies between 12% and 18% in the study below).

The use of PGS values in studying human behavior was the subject of the New Yorker’s recent profile of behavioral geneticist Kathryn Harden, which is a very good piece.

These PGS correlations are much lower than the traditional heritabilities that measure the contribution of the genome as a whole—via correlation between the performance of relatives with known relatedness)—with heritabilities of human traits, which, as I noted in the previous post, often range between 25% and 70%. The heritability of IQ in the American white population, which (for reasons that are debated) increases with age, ranges from 40% to 75% for adults, but I’ll use a conservative general estimate of 50% or 0.5. That means that about half of the variation in IQ in the white population is due to variation among individuals in their genes. While everyone is interested in IQ because, in good American fashion, it’s substantially correlated with conventional measures of “success”, remember that there are lots of interesting traits whose genetic variation we’d like to know about—my previous post listed about 30.

Today’s paper, which you might be able to access by clicking on the screenshot below (or get the pdf here), is a new study of the heritability of IQ that uses adoption instead of the “twin studies” described in my previous post. Twin studies have small samples because they estimate heritability of IQ using either identical or fraternal twins reared apart or together, and the “apart” number is quite small. I’ll describe the adoption method below:

I’ll try to briefly summarize a complicated paper.

The principle is that if genes play a big role in variation of IQ, then if you take a child from its parent and have it brought up by an unrelated family, the IQ of the child, when it grows up, should correlate very closely with its biological parents and not very much with that of its adoptive parents. If, on the other hand, the correlation with the adoptive parents is quite high and with the biological parents low, we can guess that variation in the environment plays a much bigger role than variation in genes in IQ: in other words, the heritability is low. (This assumes that environmental factors that affect IQ are uncorrelated between biological and adoptive families, an assumption that was validated in this study.)

And these adoption studies exist. This one, in fact, was quite large. The researchers had access to 486 families who had given up a child for adoption or taken in one. 95% of the parents were of non-Hispanic white Caucasian ancestry, but 21% of the adopted kids were white, 66% Asian (probably inter-country adoptions), and 13% were of other ethnicities. This somewhat weakens the measurement of IQ as a statistic within a population, but it turns out that there was no difference in heritability whether you used the white or the Asian children.

The mean age of the adopted children was 4.7 months (oldest was 2 years old), assuring that there’s not much cultural influence on their intelligence before they’re adopted out. When older, these children, along with as many adoptive and biological parents who would assent, were given IQ tests. The adopted children were IQ tested at both 15 and around 32 years of age. The children’s IQ’s were then matched (when data from both parents existed) with the “midparent value” (average of mom and dad’s IQs, separated by “biological” or “adoptive” families), or with only one parent if that was all that was available.

The upshot is what you’d expect with a high heritability of IQ: the IQs of children at either 15 or in their 30s was much more highly correlated with the IQs of their biological parents than with their adoptive parents. Below are the charts showing the correlations with biological parents (left) and adoptive parents (right). Actually, they use “g” as the term for IQ, and they also have these data for a number of different sub-tests, which you can find in the paper.  The red lines are the regressions of offspring on parents at age 15, the blue lines for the 30-ish followup IQ tests. (Each dot is presumably one family.) The correlation of adults with their biological families (not the regression slope) is 0.42, a highly significant value, while with the adoptive parents it’s 0.10—close to zero but probably still significant (they don’t say), meaning there may be a slight rearing effect: the IQ of your adoptive parents could slightly affect the adoptive child.

Now the figures given are the correlations, not the slopes of the midparent-offspring regression lines, which are the heritabilities—what we want to know. The authors have calculated that heritability, but in a slightly more complicated way, and I give it below for adult data, along with its equivalent for environmental effects: the proportion of variation in IQ due to variation in an adopted child’s rearing environment. Here are the figures (“CI” is the confidence interval).

Heritability of IQ was estimated to be 0.42 [95% CI 0.21, 0.64]

Proportion of variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects of parental IQs was estimated at .01 [95% CI 0.00, 0.02]

The heritability is close to the 50% figure I’ve taken to be a conservative value for IQ, and it’s still substantial: 42% of the variation in the population (although there are really more than one populations conflated here), is due to variation in genes.  The 95% confidence interval for IQ heritability is 21% to 64%, so the chances are 95% that the true value of heritability lies within that range. Ergo, IQ is pretty damn heritable.

In contrast, the proportion of variation due to parental environment (adoptive parents) is estimated atjust 1%, with a 95% confidence interval of 0% to 2%.  There seems to be a very small effect of rearing environment on IQ compared to genes.

Why do we want to know this? I’m running out of gas, as this paper was complicated, so I’ll devote a very short post to that either today or tomorrow.

h/t: Luana

The elimination of the meritocracy in schools is proceeding quickly, with abandonment of standardized testing, grades, and now, in a New York City proposal, class rankings and honor rolls as well.  Although a frequent excuse is that, during the pandemic, it’s unfair to hold people to “normal” academic standards, my prediction is that these changes will be permanent. That’s because the pandemic suspension is somewhat of a ruse, masquerading what’s envisioned as permanent change.

Everyone knows that the real reason for such changes—and the ones under consideration in this post are essentially post-pandemic—is that a meritocracy disadvantages some minority students because, on average, they don’t perform as well as Asian or white ones. And if people’s success depends on their performance in a ranking system, then there will be “inequity” in the Kendian sense: people will not be represented in achievements, or positions that require achievement, according to their proportion in the general population. According to Ibram Kendi, this kind of inequity is prima facie evidence of ongoing racism.

I doubt that’s true most of the time, but it may well be evidence of past racism. Regardless, it must be fixed, because even without current “structural” racism, many members of minorities don’t start at the same place as others. In other words, they lack equal opportunity from the outset, and inequities result from that combined with cultural differences that may devalue achievement.

Do we fix inequities by dismantling meritocracy in schools (or other areas)? Well, affirmative action does that a bit, but to me that’s justified as a form of reparations—a way of leveling the playing field. But you can practice affirmative action not by a wholesale dismantling of standards (e.g. eliminating SATs or grades), but by enriching your pool of students or job hires with people who are all qualified, but are more weighted with minorities.

This is a tricky balancing act, and it requires admitting that adhering strictly to a meritocracy will cause inequities, and admitting that yes, conventional measures of “merit” will fall. There’s also a problem of fairness. While the treatment of minorities in the past (and, for some, in the present) was unfair, there’s also unfairness in denying high achievers the rewards of their work. Finally, it requires admitting that in positions where quality is crucial, an average lowering of standards could be injurious (surgery, for example).

To me, the answer lies in realizing that nobody is really “responsible” for their failure or success: these things are determined by factors beyond people’s control. So while merit should be rewarded and failure punished as external stimuli to change behavior, this should be supplemented by a meaningful attempt to make up for inequalities of the past. My solution is, as I said, to see affirmative action as a form of reparations, but to be very careful how to exercise it, and, most important, to realize that the ultimate solution is not an indefinite continuation of affirmative action, but the creation of fundamental societal change that, by giving everyone equal opportunities from the outset, will make such reparations obsolete. That will take, as I say repeatedly, a lot of time and money, and it’s a lot easier to think that you’re fixing the problem by taking down statues or eliminating standardized tests.

Now the article below is from the New York Post, but checking other places seems to confirm that what it reports is accurate. I haven’t been able to find the official school guidelines.

Click to read.

The plan: Get rid of honor rolls and class rankings.

The reason: Several are given in the article (indented):

The city Department of Education wants schools to rethink honor rolls and class rankings because they’re “detrimental” to some kids, according to a new grading guidance.

“Recognizing student excellence via honor rolls and class rank can be detrimental to learners who find it more difficult  to reach academic success, often for reasons beyond their control,” the document states.

The DOE wants schools to widen recognitions to include “contributions to the school or wider community, and demonstrations of social justice and integrity.”

. . . “Grades are not only a reflection of student performance but can be self-fulfilling prophecies,” the document states. “Influencing future student performance either directly through their psychological impact or indirectly through instructional decisions, placement in courses, and guidance in post secondary options.”

I don’t think that honor rolls and class ranks are detrimental to those who don’t perform well. They might cause envy, but is there really a psychological route that will improve your performance if you do badly but are not told about it?  Don’t you need to know where you stand? In what sense is knowing you’ve performed poorly a “self-fulfilling prophecy”? As for “institutional decisions” not relying on ranking, that route leads to complete abandonment of rewarding achievement. And if achievement is not rewarded, nor failure “punished,” then there is no incentive to achieve.

John McWhorter had addressed a version of this, whereby low-performing students wash out of schools—not because of self-fulfilling prophecies, but with the realization that they’re just not cut out for a particular curriculum. His selection is to send lower-tier students to lower-tier schools, where they can get an education without washing out.

Now the new rules also say that other measures of student success such as behavior, attendance, and participation “should not affect grades.”  I disagree in part. To me, attendance is a sign of being serious about achieving, as is behavior. Participation not so much, for that depends on how much of an extrovert you are.

We all understand what’s happening here, but it becomes clearer in this sentence:

Staffers should “minimize the effects of bias and eliminate practices that penalize students who have been marginalized based on their race, culture, language and/or ability.”

If you count lower achievement as an “effect of bias”—past bias—then yes, this diktat tells us to get rid of ranking. But if you’re talking about accusations of present bias, it’s not so clear.

In the end, I wonder if the above rationale applies to the increasing criticisms I hear from the “progressive Left” about capitalism. If you listen to some of these people, you get the impression that they’d like to return to the Soviet era of collective farms! For capitalism, like schools, rewards achievement and merit, but does so with money rather than rankings. While I believe in the injection of socialism even into the most capitalistic societies like ours—it’s a way of giving a social cushion to the disadvantaged with programs like Medicare, unemployment benefits, and Social Security—you will never hear me say that we need to get rid of capitalism. That has been disastrous whenever it’s been tried, and even the most socialistic Western nations, like those in Scandinavia, are largely capitalistic.

But this is just a thought.

Clapton has let me down for the third time (see also here and here). NME, a news, music, and entertainment site, has an article about a new Eric Clapton song, “This Has Gotta Stop”. It’s not rocket science to see that this is a protest against lockdowns, if not masks and vaccinations.

I quote the website:

The veteran rocker has been publicly vocal about his opposition to lockdown restrictions and vaccinations in recent months and last December he teamed up with fellow sceptic Van Morrison for the track ‘Stand and Deliver’, one of many anti-lockdown songs Morrison recorded and which were met with significant backlash.

Now, Clapton has shared ‘This Has Gotta Stop’, a new song on which he appears to air his frustrations with the measures in place to help curb the spread of COVID-19 while criticising the vaccine.

“I can’t take this B.S. any longer/ It’s gone far enough/ You wanna claim my soul, you’ll have to come and break down this door,” Clapton sings on the track.

Appearing to touch on his “disastrous” reaction to the vaccine – which he detailed in May after receiving the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine – he continues: “I knew that something was going on wrong/ When you started laying down the law/ I can’t move my hands/ I break out in sweat.”

The track comes with with a video that features illustrations of an evil puppeteer, hypnotised people, and protesters displaying signs that say “Liberty” and “Stop”. You can watch it below.

He doesn’t do politics very well, at least in song. What ever happened to the guy who wrote “Layla” or performed “Promises”? It all goes to show that you can be brilliant about music and a moron about public health.